Yes, but this is exactly how crap started with Iraq. A little false bit of info here and there, snowballs into a huge lie. Iran, like many other nations, talk trash, but whether or not they actually do anything to back it up is another thing.
Furthermore, we do the same trash talking as everybody else, with "Axis of Evil" and other name calling, as well as calling for the destruction of various governments. It just seems like the same old propaganda to me. Demonize the other nation, make up a bunch of lies about them, call them names, etc... then invade.
The biggest problem would be Israel trying to bomb, unprovoked, various parts of Iran. Then the Iranians would feel justified in retaliating with a direct attack on Israel.
Desktop mouse acceleration under X is really bad compared to Windows. On Linux, acceleration is a sort of step function based on a threshold and a scaling factor, while on Windows, acceleration is a smooth exponential-like function... which tends to give a far smoother mousing experience.
But it is true that they are stockpiling WMDs and occupying Palestinian land. What about the UN resolutions on those topics? It is far too easy to claim anti-semitism and basically give Israel immunity from all UN resolutions.
I agree that FGM needs to be condemned, but then there should also be UN resolutions against male circumcision of babies that involves sucking the blood from a freshly circumcised baby's penis. Here is a picture on a not so good site (notice the domain name). I too thought that claims of this practice were anti-semitic bullshit... until I read all of the reputable news reports, CNN. Hell circumcising males using a medical instrament as opposed to a rabbi's mouth should also be prohibited, unless there is an urgent medical reason for doing so (none of that "it helps keep it clean crap", we don't cut our ears off do we) or the person is an adult and consents.
Well, from what I have seen, KDE's file manager is far more viable than Gnome's, hands down. A graphical file manager is a core aspect of a good desktop environment. The other thing that I am interested in on KDE would be good Gecko (i.e. Mozilla/Firefox's rendering engine) integration. Do they have that yet?
KDE has had this feature for years now! Somebody needs to write up a complete critical comparison of the two desktops. I think allot of people would be surprised.
In Fedora Core 3, the Gnome desktop still doesn't properly work. You have to manually refresh to get new or changed files to be properly displayed on the desktop or in the file browser. I think there is something wrong with Gnome's file alteration moniter, but it has been broken for a long time now. It is getting VERY annoying. Yes, I have many other people have formally reported the bug.
Another big gripe of mine is how you can get the Gnome file browser to crash by checking the properties of a large file, say a 7GB DVD ISO image. Sure fire crash each time. Not sure if it has been reported, but then again, reporting doesn't seem to get the bugs fixed.
Maybe I will switch to KDE, but that would require me to switch to a KDE friendly distro. Any suggestions?
It is simply not true that Java's memory and thread handling is the same on all platforms. Some platforms implement different scheduling algorithms and last time I checked, some don't even implement true preemptive scheduling. Hence if a thread doesn't explicitly sleep or yield, then all other threads get starved! How is that for portability? On one platform your program would work, on another it won't even redraw the GUI.
Then there are the garbage handling platform differences. Let me ask you this, if the programmer cannot depend on an object's finalizer being called, then why include a finalizer at all? In addition, extremely important things must often be accomplished in a finalizer. So again, another significant example of platform differences. Even better, an object can save itself from being collected in its finalizer, and if it does so, then the Java standard guarantees that the finalizer will never be called again. Yup, a finalizer will never be called more than once, but it might not be called at all. Great standard behavior. Not standard where it counts and standard where it hurts.
Java guarentees that your program calculates the same result on every platform? Then why is thread scheduling platform and even JVM dependent? Why is garbage collection platform and even JVM dependent? If you are supposed to write code that doesn't depend on thread or garbage handling differences, then the same can be said for languages like C or Fortran, where you are not supposed to write code that depends on endian or floating point differences and hence C and Fortran are also cross platform.
The truth is that Java simply doesn't take advantage of platform specific optimizations, while other languages do. This is a drawback to Java in its current state. Nothing is stopping somebody from writing a better Java compiler... but then I could have said that back in 1995 too.
Fundamental hardware/OS bootstrap problem? Why can C compilers be written in C? Or Lisp compilers in Lisp, etc? They don't need special C-CPUs or Lisp-CPUs to accomplish that. All that is required is for somebody to write a real Java compiler that compiles to native code. The problem is that there has yet to be written a viable Java compiler.
Which is exactly the problem. Java, C, C++ and the like are typically used for interactive applications such as desktop applications, web servers, etc. It is not acceptable for a program to pause for an extended period of time so that it can mark and sweep garbage.
Java and its die-hard fanboys are incapable of admitting the faults or drawbacks of the language and platform that is Java. They tend to cherry pick benchmarks showing Java outperform C or C++ applications. But these are definitely NOT real world benchmarks. They are contrived!
In languages like C and C++ the programmer has more control over memory allocation and can therefore prevent objects from being allocated on the heap. In addition, the fact that these languages are typically statically compiled makes it possible for them to be optimized to move heap allocated objects to the stack. Java simply doesn't allow for this because it is typically compiled to bytecode for JVMs, which at best do some minimal optimizations during runtime.
I remember seeing a 3D first person shooter video game written in Java. Funny that it needed so much RAM and such a fast CPU to put out graphics that an 8MB DOS PC with a 100mhz pentium could do with a comparable game written in C.
Fact and fiction. Real applications and contrived benchmarks.
Thank god you do not design programming languages. The truth is that runtime array bounds checking introduces very little performance penalties, yet has huge benefits in terms of safety, security, and reliability of software systems. Most security holes are due to buffer overflow attacks, something prevented by array bounds checking.
There are many other things that Java or.NET do that introduce HUGE performance penalties, but array bounds checking is not one of them. Automatic garbage collection is probably the biggest performance penalty. Trying to claim that lacking certain runtime safety checks only causes a "slight bump in risk" is just plain incorrect. It is more like a huge increase in risk! Go read any security news site and pay attention to the cause of the security holes.
Just assume for a second that every piece of Microsoft's code was written in a language with mandatory runtime array bounds checking. Nobody with modern computer hardware would notice any performance difference. However, all of those buffer overflow exploits could no longer be used to root a system, run arbitrary code, etc. Sure they could still be used for denial of service attacks because the runtime would raise an exception once it noticed an array was indexing outside of its boundaries... but then DoS vunerabilities are not nearly as bad as a remote hole.
That is one reason why Microsoft is moving towards runtime safe languages. They want a more reliable software system. C and C++ are kept for backwards compatibility and popularity.
Repest us less? What the hell? Wait a second, do you consider all Muslims to be terrorists too?
The majority of the USA did not vote for Bush in 2000, and the majority of the country did not vote for Bush in 2004. Do the math and divide total Bush votes in 2004 by total US population. You are supposed to be smarter than us, right? So drop your attitude now that you know that most people did not vote for him. Yes roughly half of the people that voted, voted for him, but then roughly half of the people that voted, voted against him.
You made a mighty big generalization of hundreds of millions of people based on a minority's voting tendencies? Thanks for the generalization Einstein! It isn't very easy to be someone that is against the administration in the USA, when you have people like you outside the USA that throws us all in the same bag.
So consider yourself to be part of the problem, up there with those who label all Muslims as terrorists. You sound like you actually believed to Bush's "either with us or against us" speech and decided to be against hundreds of millions of people. Do you also believe Osama's speeches too?
The average user doens't install their own OS. We can therefore assume that Fedora is installed and configured already. Would installing a codec on Windows start with traveling to the nearest computer store to buy a copy of Windows XP?
Ok, I want to watch Xvid and Divx movies that I download from the internet. On Windows how do I install a media player and codecs so that I can play these movies? Here is how I do it on Fedora from the commandline:
apt-get install mplayer
However, assuming you are scared of a commandline, you could instead use a GUI. Here is how I do it on Fedora using the GUI package manager Synaptic. First I run Synaptic. I am prompted for the administrator password. I type that in. Then I click on the search button, and in the dialog window that pops up I type in "movie player" into the search box and I select the "Description and Name" option in the "search in:" pulldown. I click search. Then I select a desired movie player, such as mplayer, and mark it for installation. Then I click the "apply" button.
Synaptic via apt-get automatically searches for all required libraries, codecs, and executables. It automatically downloads all of them and installs them. Once it is done I can find an entry in my "start menu" under the "Sound and Video", which runs the movie player.
So there you go, every click and button press to the last detail. Any idiot could do that. It cannot get any easier than that. On Windows, however, getting a media player and codecs properly installed is a risky job that requires lots of web searching, downloading of dubious Zip and Exe files, etc. Then you just better hope that none of those codecs and codec packs conflict with eachother... and let me tell you that it happens quite often.
Opps, I replied too early. Compare this in your favorite graphical browser to the text-only browser eLinks' rendition of Google News. Then take a look at Google news using Lynx. See the difference? I thought so.
eLinks is a far better text based browser compared to Lynx. eLinks actually tries to recreate a better layout of the web page, tables, forms, etc, while Lynx is basically just the same as telnetting into the web server port with all of the HTML tags ripped away. eLinks also supports SSL, colored text, and mouse input, so that you can actually use it to browse the web and even do a little shopping on Ebay or Amazon.
In fact, I don't think that anybody in their right mind actually still uses Lynx. Once Links hit the net, nobody ever looked back. Eventually Links gave way to improved version such as eLinks. I guess many people used Lynx many years ago, and then never used a text based browser again, so they don't know any better?
eLinks is lightweight, small, but a joy to use whether you are using a commandline only system or a graphical system. Give it a try, and you can bet that you will find it useful.
EVO is a great game, but you have to ask yourself, is it an RPG, platformer, action adventure, or what? Maybe all of the above? I wish that game had a proper modern version made of it.
While I always prefer the real thing to emulation, we emulation of any game console that I have come across tends to be inaccurate, incomplete, and buggy compared to the real thing... emulation is in no way illegal or wrong. If there was something wrong with it, you can bet Nintendo would have sued more emulator authors, and Sony would have won all of their anti-emulator suits.
If emulation was illegal, then your "IBM compatible" PC would also be illegal. Dell, Compaq, etc... would all never have existed and we would all be running expensive $5000 Macs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but this is exactly how crap started with Iraq. A little false bit of info here and there, snowballs into a huge lie. Iran, like many other nations, talk trash, but whether or not they actually do anything to back it up is another thing.
Furthermore, we do the same trash talking as everybody else, with "Axis of Evil" and other name calling, as well as calling for the destruction of various governments. It just seems like the same old propaganda to me. Demonize the other nation, make up a bunch of lies about them, call them names, etc... then invade.
The biggest problem would be Israel trying to bomb, unprovoked, various parts of Iran. Then the Iranians would feel justified in retaliating with a direct attack on Israel.
Desktop mouse acceleration under X is really bad compared to Windows. On Linux, acceleration is a sort of step function based on a threshold and a scaling factor, while on Windows, acceleration is a smooth exponential-like function... which tends to give a far smoother mousing experience.
I have allot of fun playing Quakeworld, which was opensourced by Id Software several years ago. Does that mean that Id Software ripped off themselves?
Can you provide a link to a reputable source for your claim that Iran has officially stated that they will nuke Israel, once they get nukes?
An Arab once told me that 1+1=2. Therefore arithmetic is false.
But it is true that they are stockpiling WMDs and occupying Palestinian land. What about the UN resolutions on those topics? It is far too easy to claim anti-semitism and basically give Israel immunity from all UN resolutions.
I agree that FGM needs to be condemned, but then there should also be UN resolutions against male circumcision of babies that involves sucking the blood from a freshly circumcised baby's penis. Here is a picture on a not so good site (notice the domain name). I too thought that claims of this practice were anti-semitic bullshit... until I read all of the reputable news reports, CNN. Hell circumcising males using a medical instrament as opposed to a rabbi's mouth should also be prohibited, unless there is an urgent medical reason for doing so (none of that "it helps keep it clean crap", we don't cut our ears off do we) or the person is an adult and consents.
XArchon
Well, from what I have seen, KDE's file manager is far more viable than Gnome's, hands down. A graphical file manager is a core aspect of a good desktop environment. The other thing that I am interested in on KDE would be good Gecko (i.e. Mozilla/Firefox's rendering engine) integration. Do they have that yet?
Hmmm, I want a KDE friendly distro that supports apt for RPM or is Debian based. BTW, how KDE friendly is Debian itself?
The problem is that the garbage collection methods used by Java are over 25 years old!
Yeah, but if you dont concentrate of advertising new features and bug fixes, you won't be keeping anybody in the Gnome camp!
KDE has had this feature for years now! Somebody needs to write up a complete critical comparison of the two desktops. I think allot of people would be surprised.
In Fedora Core 3, the Gnome desktop still doesn't properly work. You have to manually refresh to get new or changed files to be properly displayed on the desktop or in the file browser. I think there is something wrong with Gnome's file alteration moniter, but it has been broken for a long time now. It is getting VERY annoying. Yes, I have many other people have formally reported the bug.
Another big gripe of mine is how you can get the Gnome file browser to crash by checking the properties of a large file, say a 7GB DVD ISO image. Sure fire crash each time. Not sure if it has been reported, but then again, reporting doesn't seem to get the bugs fixed.
Maybe I will switch to KDE, but that would require me to switch to a KDE friendly distro. Any suggestions?
It is simply not true that Java's memory and thread handling is the same on all platforms. Some platforms implement different scheduling algorithms and last time I checked, some don't even implement true preemptive scheduling. Hence if a thread doesn't explicitly sleep or yield, then all other threads get starved! How is that for portability? On one platform your program would work, on another it won't even redraw the GUI.
Then there are the garbage handling platform differences. Let me ask you this, if the programmer cannot depend on an object's finalizer being called, then why include a finalizer at all? In addition, extremely important things must often be accomplished in a finalizer. So again, another significant example of platform differences. Even better, an object can save itself from being collected in its finalizer, and if it does so, then the Java standard guarantees that the finalizer will never be called again. Yup, a finalizer will never be called more than once, but it might not be called at all. Great standard behavior. Not standard where it counts and standard where it hurts.
Java guarentees that your program calculates the same result on every platform? Then why is thread scheduling platform and even JVM dependent? Why is garbage collection platform and even JVM dependent? If you are supposed to write code that doesn't depend on thread or garbage handling differences, then the same can be said for languages like C or Fortran, where you are not supposed to write code that depends on endian or floating point differences and hence C and Fortran are also cross platform.
The truth is that Java simply doesn't take advantage of platform specific optimizations, while other languages do. This is a drawback to Java in its current state. Nothing is stopping somebody from writing a better Java compiler... but then I could have said that back in 1995 too.
Fundamental hardware/OS bootstrap problem? Why can C compilers be written in C? Or Lisp compilers in Lisp, etc? They don't need special C-CPUs or Lisp-CPUs to accomplish that. All that is required is for somebody to write a real Java compiler that compiles to native code. The problem is that there has yet to be written a viable Java compiler.
Which is exactly the problem. Java, C, C++ and the like are typically used for interactive applications such as desktop applications, web servers, etc. It is not acceptable for a program to pause for an extended period of time so that it can mark and sweep garbage.
Java and its die-hard fanboys are incapable of admitting the faults or drawbacks of the language and platform that is Java. They tend to cherry pick benchmarks showing Java outperform C or C++ applications. But these are definitely NOT real world benchmarks. They are contrived!
In languages like C and C++ the programmer has more control over memory allocation and can therefore prevent objects from being allocated on the heap. In addition, the fact that these languages are typically statically compiled makes it possible for them to be optimized to move heap allocated objects to the stack. Java simply doesn't allow for this because it is typically compiled to bytecode for JVMs, which at best do some minimal optimizations during runtime.
I remember seeing a 3D first person shooter video game written in Java. Funny that it needed so much RAM and such a fast CPU to put out graphics that an 8MB DOS PC with a 100mhz pentium could do with a comparable game written in C.
Fact and fiction. Real applications and contrived benchmarks.
Thank god you do not design programming languages. The truth is that runtime array bounds checking introduces very little performance penalties, yet has huge benefits in terms of safety, security, and reliability of software systems. Most security holes are due to buffer overflow attacks, something prevented by array bounds checking.
.NET do that introduce HUGE performance penalties, but array bounds checking is not one of them. Automatic garbage collection is probably the biggest performance penalty. Trying to claim that lacking certain runtime safety checks only causes a "slight bump in risk" is just plain incorrect. It is more like a huge increase in risk! Go read any security news site and pay attention to the cause of the security holes.
There are many other things that Java or
Just assume for a second that every piece of Microsoft's code was written in a language with mandatory runtime array bounds checking. Nobody with modern computer hardware would notice any performance difference. However, all of those buffer overflow exploits could no longer be used to root a system, run arbitrary code, etc. Sure they could still be used for denial of service attacks because the runtime would raise an exception once it noticed an array was indexing outside of its boundaries... but then DoS vunerabilities are not nearly as bad as a remote hole.
That is one reason why Microsoft is moving towards runtime safe languages. They want a more reliable software system. C and C++ are kept for backwards compatibility and popularity.
Repest us less? What the hell? Wait a second, do you consider all Muslims to be terrorists too?
The majority of the USA did not vote for Bush in 2000, and the majority of the country did not vote for Bush in 2004. Do the math and divide total Bush votes in 2004 by total US population. You are supposed to be smarter than us, right? So drop your attitude now that you know that most people did not vote for him. Yes roughly half of the people that voted, voted for him, but then roughly half of the people that voted, voted against him.
You made a mighty big generalization of hundreds of millions of people based on a minority's voting tendencies? Thanks for the generalization Einstein! It isn't very easy to be someone that is against the administration in the USA, when you have people like you outside the USA that throws us all in the same bag.
So consider yourself to be part of the problem, up there with those who label all Muslims as terrorists. You sound like you actually believed to Bush's "either with us or against us" speech and decided to be against hundreds of millions of people. Do you also believe Osama's speeches too?
The average user doens't install their own OS. We can therefore assume that Fedora is installed and configured already. Would installing a codec on Windows start with traveling to the nearest computer store to buy a copy of Windows XP?
Ok, I want to watch Xvid and Divx movies that I download from the internet. On Windows how do I install a media player and codecs so that I can play these movies? Here is how I do it on Fedora from the commandline:
apt-get install mplayer
However, assuming you are scared of a commandline, you could instead use a GUI. Here is how I do it on Fedora using the GUI package manager Synaptic. First I run Synaptic. I am prompted for the administrator password. I type that in. Then I click on the search button, and in the dialog window that pops up I type in "movie player" into the search box and I select the "Description and Name" option in the "search in:" pulldown. I click search. Then I select a desired movie player, such as mplayer, and mark it for installation. Then I click the "apply" button.
Synaptic via apt-get automatically searches for all required libraries, codecs, and executables. It automatically downloads all of them and installs them. Once it is done I can find an entry in my "start menu" under the "Sound and Video", which runs the movie player.
So there you go, every click and button press to the last detail. Any idiot could do that. It cannot get any easier than that. On Windows, however, getting a media player and codecs properly installed is a risky job that requires lots of web searching, downloading of dubious Zip and Exe files, etc. Then you just better hope that none of those codecs and codec packs conflict with eachother... and let me tell you that it happens quite often.
Opps, I replied too early. Compare this in your favorite graphical browser to the text-only browser eLinks' rendition of Google News. Then take a look at Google news using Lynx. See the difference? I thought so.
eLinks is a far better text based browser compared to Lynx. eLinks actually tries to recreate a better layout of the web page, tables, forms, etc, while Lynx is basically just the same as telnetting into the web server port with all of the HTML tags ripped away. eLinks also supports SSL, colored text, and mouse input, so that you can actually use it to browse the web and even do a little shopping on Ebay or Amazon.
In fact, I don't think that anybody in their right mind actually still uses Lynx. Once Links hit the net, nobody ever looked back. Eventually Links gave way to improved version such as eLinks. I guess many people used Lynx many years ago, and then never used a text based browser again, so they don't know any better?
eLinks is lightweight, small, but a joy to use whether you are using a commandline only system or a graphical system. Give it a try, and you can bet that you will find it useful.
EVO is a great game, but you have to ask yourself, is it an RPG, platformer, action adventure, or what? Maybe all of the above? I wish that game had a proper modern version made of it.
While I always prefer the real thing to emulation, we emulation of any game console that I have come across tends to be inaccurate, incomplete, and buggy compared to the real thing... emulation is in no way illegal or wrong. If there was something wrong with it, you can bet Nintendo would have sued more emulator authors, and Sony would have won all of their anti-emulator suits.
If emulation was illegal, then your "IBM compatible" PC would also be illegal. Dell, Compaq, etc... would all never have existed and we would all be running expensive $5000 Macs.