Not every user cares what is in their kernel, much the same was as Windows users don't.
True, but this is short-sighted. The binary drivers WILL give problems in the long run for the users. (Microsoft knows this, windows is unstable with unstable drivers, therefore they emphasize a lot on signing of the drivers by Microsoft!)
It remembers me of the feauture bloat of win95-win200 path. The users wanted these feautures (being able to do all kind of things) and didn't care about the security impact. Microsoft listened to this and now they are paying for their short-term strategy. About half of the home PC's are infected with spyware, zombies, viri, spam bots etc. and this is something the users DO not want.
It is a bit naive to blame the users 100% for this, Microsoft has told them everything would be easy and this is the result. (They are fixing the problems fast I think).
*n[iu]x developers cared more about security (were the zealots back then) and kept their OS secure. Know this pays off. Hopefully we will again be the zealots and take the path that works best in the long run.
Despite the somewhat suggestive text from 'outanowhere' the truth is different I guess. Philips does not want to support linux, by providing a kernel driver for their device. That is their choice. This is and stays the main problem.
Now, someone ported a binary driver to linux. Very nice from this guy, but in the long run this will hurt linux (AND linux users). Manufacturers are just weighing what's the penalty and the profit for bringing out a driver (binary or source), no driver or support somenone who writes a driver (binary or source). Now, if the use of binary drivers is discouraged, there will be more source drivers becoming available (but less drivers, some manufacturers are not willing to open their source). However in the long run (and linux marketshare will help) manufacturers have to support linux. The more other manufacturers have open source drivers, the less trouble they have doing the same.
Of course you can say all things about manufacturers 'not being able to open' (nvidia binary drivers cannot be opened, because of rules, etc.), but that is just not true. Nvidia has no advantage of opening their secrets (yes, their competitors will take advantage of this) and therefore they are not doing it (they lose perhaps a handfull of users). A perfect business decision in the light of most linux users using a binary driver. However if ATI IS providing (this is an example) the source, Nvidia has to look different to the situation, especially if, say 20% of the users uses ATI because of this and if ATI is also 'giving up' their secrets.
All this is just negotiation in the end and we should not give up already and accept binary drivers. That is just like a salesman selling televisions for 1 dollar, because that is bidded first.
No, i am not obsessed, just differently minded (and not native, sorry for my language).
Not all coders write database apps. (Yep, databases are slow, this kind of optimisation is not so useful).
But there are a lot of us who write 'scientific' codes. For example for modeling fluids, calculating acoustics, analyzing space-images, etc. etc. This kind of programs typically take days to run, so every speed does matter!
And there is realtime code. For example for coding audio. Even changing an underlying transform to a slightly different program can make ogg work on our ipod for example.
But to come back on the scientific apps: physicists are often not such good programmers, being able to use Java would be nice, if it was just as fast as the C++ code.
QC relies on the ability to emit photons, and to known probability distribution of those photon emissions. The problem is, there is no hardware out there than can emit one and only one photon 100% of the time. I wouldn't be suprised if it turns out to be totally impossible to build hardware that does. (Like building hardware to perfectly measure a particle's position and speed is impossible.)
This is total nonsense. Are you a cryptographer afraid to loose your job, with no physical background? Then please read the article before you respond.
I agree that the text and title posted to Slashdot is kind of misleading. All this QC does is making a channel on which eavesdropping impossible, without detection. Point. And it is.
This has actually nothing to do with crypto (you can breathe again, your salary is safe), it can be used as a nice method for key exchange in a crypto -solution. The solution in total can be hacked (do something nasty on the sending or receiving end, but the transmission cannot be listened to undetected.
The photoshop interface sucks. Even Microsoft dismisses MDI nowadays.
Yep, I know the interface on the Mac is somewhat better (read more: like the gimp).
Anyway it just a preference for what you personally prefer more. I prefer the gimp, if you are used to work with photoshop, you prefer photoshop. No problem.
Now, can you go back bitching about CYMK (I hope the complaining works, it would be nice to have in the gimp).
Doing layout is rather easy with latex... In general if you re-use your design, f.e. develop something template based, like a montly magazine) latex is a perfect way to go (that is if you are a nerd implementing a designer's layout, latex seems too difficult for brain-dead designers). And it is very easilt coupled with dynamic data sources (multi-channeling etc.).
But if you want to layout something only once, it is often faster too use a program meant for that, like Adobe Pagemaker/Indesign, Quark etc.. Latex takes too much time to get everyting on the proper place for this kind of work.
And no Microsoft Word is also NOT meant for this. Use Microsoft Publisher if you insist of using a Microsoft program for layout (yup, I know it is childish and sucks, but I would rather use Publisher than Word for this kind of work).
Ever written a large documents with lots of (multi-line) equations in it? It is very frustating. The equation editor (afer having installed, it is not default:-() crashes much too often and if it doesn't Word will crash itself. If it doesn't crash, everything will constantly be re-formatted over different pages.
Besides, it costs a lot of time to enter a function (latex takes longer in the begin, but shorter if you are used to it). And replacing small parts in all equations in your document is a lot easier with latex...
Oh and I know it is a human error, not a MS Word error, but why do almost all documents done with the equation editor seem to have equations in different sizes... That looks amazingly ugly. Is it so difficult not to resize your equation?
Lyx is rather good. However, since almost all comments at this moment seem to point in Lyx' direction I want to give a bit of counterargument.
Lyx is not very easy to use in conjunction with plain source editting. It uses its own tags and seems to handle some things slightly different than you would do yourself. In this sense you can compare it to Dreamweaver for HTML. When only using dreamweaver it is sort of OK, but if you want hybrid editing and use more advanced things (only style sheet layout for example), the WYSIWYG becomes more and more frustating as it edits your carefully crafted source.
Espacially if you use a lot of custom commands and advanced positioning system, lyx is NOT the way to go. I use rather advanced and hacked sty files for letters, advanced reports and PDF-presentations and lyx cannot deal with these files properly.
So stuck with lyx only if your needs are not to advanced and you have no interest in editting the source by yourself.
On a side note, the best way to learn latex is read the sty and cls files, which often come bundled with your tex distribution. I learned a lot from them (also how NOT to do it..). For example the Seminar files and examples contain a lot of interesting material.
This, again, is beyond the basics, but they are to easy... (\begin{bla} \end{bla} is al you need, where bla is section, enumerate etc. (all logical keywords, only the manual is needed)).
Re:Directly against Java?
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 1, Informative
# So I can write large scale enterpise software in QT? Of course, C++ is enterprise ready. No problem. # So I can write applets in QT(?)? Compile to ActiveX or something. Anyway java-applets suck anyway and are used less and less (fortunately). # So QT'll run in smartcards? Yes, no problem. Only a C++ compiler is needed and exists in most cases.
I really don't understand the parent post. Is it flamebait or something?? I bite then, even as someone who prefers GTK... The poster really has no clue or do I not understand the post?
Putty's authors advise you too use a 3rd party app for transparency (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/transparency.html).
Adding a bitmap will bloat the binary too much, according to them. But forks of putty which do this, exist. (only they are most of the time outdated).
I am still waiting for the Tab support, nowadays my desktop at work is full of putty windows, what is a bit annoying. (Screen doesn't work good in Cygwin..).
Open source development is different then proprietary. Bitching about QA does not apply.
Users and developers do this typically. Most distro's have teams, like a dedicated security team.
The testers are also important: If I find a problem with lynx (as you describe, a missing dependency) I just file it at bugs.debian.org. I run Experimental (not QA'd version of the distro), so it can be fixed before it is moved to Stable (via Testing).
There are a LOT of possible dependencies in a full blown distro, I do not know any commercial software package of this scale. (One reason is that if you bring out one software package, you try to decrease the number of problematic dependencies, something which is difficult for a distribution).
Only other system which I know which has these problems at a large scale is MS Windows (and guess what happens if a QA'd servicepack is released...).
So we are doing fine, I think, as long as you help report this kind of problems?
Although the code of Xvid of xvid is GPL, XviD is still an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec. That means that the patent holders of MPEG-4 can still demand a fee for its use.
In my experience if you load the file in an array and using only array functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php), without using loops!!, parsing a 10 MB file and do something useful with it takes about 20-30 sec.
No need to install QT on a gnome only desktop-system. (or even no gnome, but fluxbox, xfce etc.).
Widgets behave the same in all your applications, no need remember if it was a GTK or QT app.
No kidding, try "make xconfig" and "make gconfig" on a linux kernel (2.6.x). The xconfig just doesn't make sense to me as a GTK-user, and I can totally understand that a QT (KDE) user finds the gconfig version annoying.
It's just a question of disallowing many different toolkits on the same desktop.
Which we will do by introducing a new toolkit. Very smart indeed...
We better tell all the KDE and Gnome developers they have to stop development on their software and suggest to them to start over?
GPL software is in a lot of cases not usable in commercial projects (according to the pointy haired bosses).
BSD-licensed software is (again according to the PHB), usable. So more BSD-licensed software means less commercial (=salary) development left.
For example BSD-licensed TCP/IP code can be copied in Windows, while TCP/IP code under the GPL can not be copied in Windows. So if the TCP/IP is only available in GPL-variant, it is often choosen to be rewritten if it is in BSDL variant, it will be copied.
The tax program runs fine in Wine (only the select fields must be navigated with the keyboard). No, that is not a good alternative, but just pointing it out to help you;-).
I have used the rivafb with kernel 2.5.6x. Unfortunately I forgot the details (and slashdot doesn't remember enough of my comments), but I did some kernel-src hacks for it.
The trick was (not 100% sure), that although the documentation didn't say so, you had to use the unified interface/configuration for framebuffer drivers. Good luck!
Use Testing for the desktop. It is new enough (typical a new Gnome release costs about two weeks or so), but I don't believe it breaks (see also Bruce Perens comment in this thread who uses unstable for 10 years). Perhaps you shouldn't force packages that are kept back for a reason?
Infrequency of adding packages? Usual there are reasons for this and Fedora will have the same infrequency in future. Only thing which is a bit Debian specific is the withdrawing of License related problems.
I consider Fedora not really a good server distribution. It is hobby in the sense that is has relatively new packages and no strict security update team (Redhat doesn't do this and the "hobbyists" have a difficult task with fast moving package updates).
So it may be fine for the desktop, just like say Debian unstable, but for a server Debian stable (or Redhat 7.3 patched by Progeny or Redhat AS or Suse etc.) are really better for this purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Not every user cares what is in their kernel, much the same was as Windows users don't.
True, but this is short-sighted. The binary drivers WILL give problems in the long run for the users. (Microsoft knows this, windows is unstable with unstable drivers, therefore they emphasize a lot on signing of the drivers by Microsoft!)
It remembers me of the feauture bloat of win95-win200 path. The users wanted these feautures (being able to do all kind of things) and didn't care about the security impact. Microsoft listened to this and now they are paying for their short-term strategy. About half of the home PC's are infected with spyware, zombies, viri, spam bots etc. and this is something the users DO not want.
It is a bit naive to blame the users 100% for this, Microsoft has told them everything would be easy and this is the result. (They are fixing the problems fast I think).
*n[iu]x developers cared more about security (were the zealots back then) and kept their OS secure. Know this pays off. Hopefully we will again be the zealots and take the path that works best in the long run.
Despite the somewhat suggestive text from 'outanowhere' the truth is different I guess. Philips does not want to support linux, by providing a kernel driver for their device. That is their choice. This is and stays the main problem.
Now, someone ported a binary driver to linux. Very nice from this guy, but in the long run this will hurt linux (AND linux users). Manufacturers are just weighing what's the penalty and the profit for bringing out a driver (binary or source), no driver or support somenone who writes a driver (binary or source). Now, if the use of binary drivers is discouraged, there will be more source drivers becoming available (but less drivers, some manufacturers are not willing to open their source). However in the long run (and linux marketshare will help) manufacturers have to support linux. The more other manufacturers have open source drivers, the less trouble they have doing the same.
Of course you can say all things about manufacturers 'not being able to open' (nvidia binary drivers cannot be opened, because of rules, etc.), but that is just not true. Nvidia has no advantage of opening their secrets (yes, their competitors will take advantage of this) and therefore they are not doing it (they lose perhaps a handfull of users). A perfect business decision in the light of most linux users using a binary driver. However if ATI IS providing (this is an example) the source, Nvidia has to look different to the situation, especially if, say 20% of the users uses ATI because of this and if ATI is also 'giving up' their secrets.
All this is just negotiation in the end and we should not give up already and accept binary drivers. That is just like a salesman selling televisions for 1 dollar, because that is bidded first.
No, i am not obsessed, just differently minded (and not native, sorry for my language).
Not all coders write database apps. (Yep, databases are slow, this kind of optimisation is not so useful).
But there are a lot of us who write 'scientific' codes. For example for modeling fluids, calculating acoustics, analyzing space-images, etc. etc. This kind of programs typically take days to run, so every speed does matter!
And there is realtime code. For example for coding audio. Even changing an underlying transform to a slightly different program can make ogg work on our ipod for example.
But to come back on the scientific apps: physicists are often not such good programmers, being able to use Java would be nice, if it was just as fast as the C++ code.
The freebsd 5.x branch has SMP, the 4.x branch lacks SMP. However the 5.x branch is not yet stable.
Linux is definately more advanced for large machines and the gap is growing wider.
However for a small firewall server OpenBSD suits just fine. For a large database server, OpenBSD may not be the proper tool for the job.
Yep, Microsoft is really unable to make a living out of Windows and Office....
Get real.
QC relies on the ability to emit photons, and to known probability distribution of those photon emissions. The problem is, there is no hardware out there than can emit one and only one photon 100% of the time. I wouldn't be suprised if it turns out to be totally impossible to build hardware that does. (Like building hardware to perfectly measure a particle's position and speed is impossible.)
This is total nonsense. Are you a cryptographer afraid to loose your job, with no physical background? Then please read the article before you respond.
I agree that the text and title posted to Slashdot is kind of misleading. All this QC does is making a channel on which eavesdropping impossible, without detection. Point. And it is.
This has actually nothing to do with crypto (you can breathe again, your salary is safe), it can be used as a nice method for key exchange in a crypto -solution. The solution in total can be hacked (do something nasty on the sending or receiving end, but the transmission cannot be listened to undetected.
The photoshop interface sucks. Even Microsoft dismisses MDI nowadays.
Yep, I know the interface on the Mac is somewhat better (read more: like the gimp).
Anyway it just a preference for what you personally prefer more. I prefer the gimp, if you are used to work with photoshop, you prefer photoshop. No problem.
Now, can you go back bitching about CYMK (I hope the complaining works, it would be nice to have in the gimp).
Indeed - since I do not yet(!) know vi the first command I enter on every Mandrake install (I choose mdk for friends' systems) is
# urpmi joe
Sources unreachable at this moment, please point your sources list to another mirror..... Now what?
Doing layout is rather easy with latex... In general if you re-use your design, f.e. develop something template based, like a montly magazine) latex is a perfect way to go (that is if you are a nerd implementing a designer's layout, latex seems too difficult for brain-dead designers). And it is very easilt coupled with dynamic data sources (multi-channeling etc.).
But if you want to layout something only once, it is often faster too use a program meant for that, like Adobe Pagemaker/Indesign, Quark etc.. Latex takes too much time to get everyting on the proper place for this kind of work.
And no Microsoft Word is also NOT meant for this. Use Microsoft Publisher if you insist of using a Microsoft program for layout (yup, I know it is childish and sucks, but I would rather use Publisher than Word for this kind of work).
Ever written a large documents with lots of (multi-line) equations in it? It is very frustating. The equation editor (afer having installed, it is not default :-() crashes much too often and if it doesn't Word will crash itself. If it doesn't crash, everything will constantly be re-formatted over different pages.
Besides, it costs a lot of time to enter a function (latex takes longer in the begin, but shorter if you are used to it). And replacing small parts in all equations in your document is a lot easier with latex...
Oh and I know it is a human error, not a MS Word error, but why do almost all documents done with the equation editor seem to have equations in different sizes... That looks amazingly ugly. Is it so difficult not to resize your equation?
Lyx is rather good. However, since almost all comments at this moment seem to point in Lyx' direction I want to give a bit of counterargument.
Lyx is not very easy to use in conjunction with plain source editting. It uses its own tags and seems to handle some things slightly different than you would do yourself. In this sense you can compare it to Dreamweaver for HTML. When only using dreamweaver it is sort of OK, but if you want hybrid editing and use more advanced things (only style sheet layout for example), the WYSIWYG becomes more and more frustating as it edits your carefully crafted source.
Espacially if you use a lot of custom commands and advanced positioning system, lyx is NOT the way to go. I use rather advanced and hacked sty files for letters, advanced reports and PDF-presentations and lyx cannot deal with these files properly.
So stuck with lyx only if your needs are not to advanced and you have no interest in editting the source by yourself.
On a side note, the best way to learn latex is read the sty and cls files, which often come bundled with your tex distribution. I learned a lot from them (also how NOT to do it..). For example the Seminar files and examples contain a lot of interesting material.
This, again, is beyond the basics, but they are to easy... (\begin{bla} \end{bla} is al you need, where bla is section, enumerate etc. (all logical keywords, only the manual is needed)).
# So I can write large scale enterpise software in QT?
Of course, C++ is enterprise ready. No problem.
# So I can write applets in QT(?)?
Compile to ActiveX or something. Anyway java-applets suck anyway and are used less and less (fortunately).
# So QT'll run in smartcards?
Yes, no problem. Only a C++ compiler is needed and exists in most cases.
I really don't understand the parent post. Is it flamebait or something?? I bite then, even as someone who prefers GTK... The poster really has no clue or do I not understand the post?
Use CVS (or similar) on your homedir. With automount you can automate the behaviour.
It is nice that as a nerd, you have been doing the stuff that is now 'cool' in proprietary software land for ten years, with some small shell scripts.
Putty's authors advise you too use a 3rd party app for transparency (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty /wishlist/transparency.html).
Adding a bitmap will bloat the binary too much, according to them. But forks of putty which do this, exist. (only they are most of the time outdated).
I am still waiting for the Tab support, nowadays my desktop at work is full of putty windows, what is a bit annoying. (Screen doesn't work good in Cygwin..).
Open source development is different then proprietary. Bitching about QA does not apply.
Users and developers do this typically. Most distro's have teams, like a dedicated security team.
The testers are also important: If I find a problem with lynx (as you describe, a missing dependency) I just file it at bugs.debian.org. I run Experimental (not QA'd version of the distro), so it can be fixed before it is moved to Stable (via Testing).
There are a LOT of possible dependencies in a full blown distro, I do not know any commercial software package of this scale. (One reason is that if you bring out one software package, you try to decrease the number of problematic dependencies, something which is difficult for a distribution).
Only other system which I know which has these problems at a large scale is MS Windows (and guess what happens if a QA'd servicepack is released...).
So we are doing fine, I think, as long as you help report this kind of problems?
Although the code of Xvid of xvid is GPL, XviD is still an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec. That means that the patent holders of MPEG-4 can still demand a fee for its use.
Theora doesn't have such limitations.
In my experience if you load the file in an array and using only array functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php), without using loops!!, parsing a 10 MB file and do something useful with it takes about 20-30 sec.
But yes, C is faster.
No need to install QT on a gnome only desktop-system. (or even no gnome, but fluxbox, xfce etc.).
Widgets behave the same in all your applications, no need remember if it was a GTK or QT app.
No kidding, try "make xconfig" and "make gconfig" on a linux kernel (2.6.x). The xconfig just doesn't make sense to me as a GTK-user, and I can totally understand that a QT (KDE) user finds the gconfig version annoying.
It's just a question of disallowing many different toolkits on the same desktop. Which we will do by introducing a new toolkit. Very smart indeed... We better tell all the KDE and Gnome developers they have to stop development on their software and suggest to them to start over?
I think gvim users will also like that behaviour..
This makes no sense to me.
GPL software is in a lot of cases not usable in commercial projects (according to the pointy haired bosses).
BSD-licensed software is (again according to the PHB), usable. So more BSD-licensed software means less commercial (=salary) development left.
For example BSD-licensed TCP/IP code can be copied in Windows, while TCP/IP code under the GPL can not be copied in Windows. So if the TCP/IP is only available in GPL-variant, it is often choosen to be rewritten if it is in BSDL variant, it will be copied.
The tax program runs fine in Wine (only the select fields must be navigated with the keyboard). No, that is not a good alternative, but just pointing it out to help you ;-).
I have used the rivafb with kernel 2.5.6x. Unfortunately I forgot the details (and slashdot doesn't remember enough of my comments), but I did some kernel-src hacks for it.
The trick was (not 100% sure), that although the documentation didn't say so, you had to use the unified interface/configuration for framebuffer drivers. Good luck!
Use Testing for the desktop. It is new enough (typical a new Gnome release costs about two weeks or so), but I don't believe it breaks (see also Bruce Perens comment in this thread who uses unstable for 10 years). Perhaps you shouldn't force packages that are kept back for a reason?
Infrequency of adding packages? Usual there are reasons for this and Fedora will have the same infrequency in future. Only thing which is a bit Debian specific is the withdrawing of License related problems.
Sid is more for developers and adventurers.
I consider Fedora not really a good server distribution. It is hobby in the sense that is has relatively new packages and no strict security update team (Redhat doesn't do this and the "hobbyists" have a difficult task with fast moving package updates).
So it may be fine for the desktop, just like say Debian unstable, but for a server Debian stable (or Redhat 7.3 patched by Progeny or Redhat AS or Suse etc.) are really better for this purpose.