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User: peppepz

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  1. Re:Fanboy Glee on Java 8 Officially Released · · Score: 1

    I think that in that case the JRE will try to install the toolbar the next time it auto-updates.

  2. Re:Mexico City tried this... on Paris Bans Half of All Cars On the Road · · Score: 4, Informative

    This measure is not experimental, it has been used in Europe since the 80s. People won't buy another car to bypass the restriction because owning a car is very expensive (insurance, taxes, ...) and if you can afford that then probably you could as well pay the fines for ignoring the law. Less environment-friendly vehicles often can't enter the city centres at all, because there it's common to put restriction on car access depending on their "euro rating".

  3. Re:Translated on Shuttleworth Wants To Get Rid of Proprietary Firmware · · Score: 2

    Everybody runs into problems with ACPI. I've never seen it work properly, on any OS, on any machine that I've owned.

  4. Users' rights? on As the Web Turns 25, Sir Tim Berners-Lee Calls For A Web Magna Carta · · Score: 1
    Sir, by accepting to partition the Web into a subset for the customers of Google, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft and another subset for everyone else, you have lost any credibility to my eyes when you're talking about my rights online.

    Government surveillance? The technology you have supported can be the best means to bring more surveillance to the web - for instance, by allowing you to view certain subsets of the web only if you're using a proprietary browser with spyware built-in.

  5. Re:Do Canonical? on Google To Replace GTK+ With Its Own Aura In Chrome · · Score: 1

    The emacs vs vim flamewar is about which one is the best (that is vim, of course), not about the legitimacy to exist of either. I've never heard anybody suggest that people should stop developing vim and contribute to emacs instead.

  6. Re:Someone please explain on Google To Replace GTK+ With Its Own Aura In Chrome · · Score: 2

    When we're running apps, we inevitably end up with using at least one QT app, at least one GTK app and probably in future at least one Aura app. These libraries have a huge level of duplication (e.g. each one will have a completely separately implemented file dialog). Add to this that each library will be used in several incompatible versions and you end up with serious bloat.

    That's true, but how much can that bloat amount to? 20 MB? 100 MB? It won't be much relevant for today's standards. Code duplication is what happens regularly in the closed source world, where applications ship with a private version of all the libraries they use, and not only for the UI - with few people complaining.

    Ive gotten the impression that the GTK3 folks werent terribly interested in hearing other people's thoughts.

    This sounds like a serious problem; do we have any proper evidence?

    https://mail.gnome.org/archive... - don't know if things have changed in the last two years.

  7. Re:I'm with Google... on Google To Replace GTK+ With Its Own Aura In Chrome · · Score: 5, Informative

    GTK+ 3 is LGPLv2, not GPLv3; it is not developed by the FSF, and never has been. And the GPLv3 is arguably more friendly for businesses than the GPLv2, with its explicit patent provisions, the lack of the termination provision, and the explicit system libraries exception.

  8. Re:Just for a browser? on Google To Replace GTK+ With Its Own Aura In Chrome · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because GTK2 is bit-rotting and GTK3 is bound to GNOME.

  9. Do Canonical? on Google To Replace GTK+ With Its Own Aura In Chrome · · Score: 5, Insightful
    By saying that, do "the Free Software Community" mean making Linux accessible to many users that wouldn't have dreamt of using it before? Being the first ones to provide a distribution that you can actually recommend to a computer illiterate?

    And then again, why should anyone have a say on what toolkit Google decide to use for their own browser? Did "the Free Software Community" have anything to say when it was slang vs ncurses, emacs vs vim, gtk vs qt, gnome vs kde? No, because exploring alternate solutions is good for the whole community in the long run. Please stop this poisonous attitude of finding "enemies of the people" among people who dare write free software.

  10. Today's standards on Metadata and the Intrusive State · · Score: 2

    http://www.google.com/dashboar... draws a much more accurate depiction of every espect of my life, and it's just one piece of paper away from the government. Today the stasi espions would be unemployed.

  11. Re:Not a subsidy? on NASA Admits It Gave Jet Fuel Discounts To Google Execs' Company · · Score: 2

    They got the subsidized fuel price, by mistake, even for private flights unrelated to NASA.

  12. Re:Not a subsidy? on NASA Admits It Gave Jet Fuel Discounts To Google Execs' Company · · Score: 2
    In fact, arguably it's not NASA that got ripped. It's the federal government that lost money, between $3.3 million and $5.3 million according to TFA, in taxes that would be collected from that fuel, had Google execs bought it like everyone else does.

    Basically what is happening here is poor people paying to let the richest people on Earth fly they own private jets. But the company that is benefiting from that is only in personal union with Google, so "don't be evil" doesn't apply here. IANAL.

  13. Google itself is creepy... on Google Tells Glass Users Not To Be 'Creepy Or Rude' · · Score: 1

    ...with its obsession for spying every personal detail of every individual of the world with every possible means and gathering the collected data into their archives forever. The only difference between Google glass and all the other products of Google is that glass makes the espionage physically evident.

  14. The use for the EU on EU Parliament Rejects Asylum For Snowden · · Score: 2
    The EU is losing the support of the masses even in the most euro-enthusiastic countries. As an institution in its whole, people feel that the EU is inexorable when it's time to demand new taxes, dismantle the welfare state, or regulate the length of cucumbers, but then is completely unhelpful, and sometimes harmful, when it's time to solve the problems of the citizens (migration, transportation, environment, defense, foreign policy...) instead of the problems of the banks. Each member state pursues exclusively its own interest with no vision watsoever of the long-term good of the whole continent.

    As an EU supporter, I'm afraid that at the next european elections we'll see a triumph of every kind of populism / demagogy / nationalism, left-wing and right-wing, and the people who get elected will work exclusively to suppress the EU from the inside. And I have few arguments against them left. The EU can't carry on by having only the support of the "elite" who can understand the advantages of the common market. They need to conquer back the trust of regular people, or they will disappear.

  15. Re:There is one hugely successful visual programmi on Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Writing Text-Based Code? · · Score: 1

    In ladder, even basic logic structures such as a finite-state machine are hard to express, and harder to read. I still have to understand the reason for the success of ladder. It's hard to write, it's hard to read, it's hard to maintain, even the program "text" is impractical to handle (think about cut and paste).

  16. Google Docs open source? on UK Government May Switch from MS Office to Open Source · · Score: 1

    Has Google Docs been open sourced now? Can it be hosted on a private server, so that the UK government needn't share every single document of them - and therefore their citizen's most private data - with the NSA?

  17. Re:Hmm on UK Government May Switch from MS Office to Open Source · · Score: 1

    even Microsoft changes its file formats and breaks compatibility occasionally.

    To make an example, once Microsoft broke a Word (2000 IIRC) VBA application of mine because a service pack, not even a version upgrade, changed the indexing of tables' elements from being zero-based to being one-based. I was shocked to see that they care so little about compatibility.

  18. Re:Lincense wars in... on FSF's Richard Stallman Calls LLVM a 'Terrible Setback' · · Score: 1

    Clang error output includes full static analysis,

    The compiler is one thing, the static analyzer is another. The error messages of the two compilers are comparable. I've already admitted that GCC is not as suitable for tooling as LLVM is.

    "Hip" seems to be your biased way to say modern.

    Of course every judgement of value I make is biased, it reflects my opinion. I do my best to avoid objectively false statements, and I like to be corrected when that happens.

    And no, small differences in executable speed is not the primary concern of most compiler users.

    See that everybody's biased? You say "small difference", others could use different terms when the objective data is "up to 39%". As for the fact that compiler users don't care about speed, you should ask the end users of the binaries about that, rather than the users of the compiler itself. Personally, if ease of development was my primary concern, I'd code everything in Java. GCC even supports it ;-) .

    Not so much. This very story is about ESR questioning why GPL GCC deliberately prevents non-GPL software from linking with it. Thus handicapping GCC for developers of IDEs and other tools. And the answer from RMS, that he refuses to compromise, and thus GCCs restrictions remain.

    This very story is about ESR not being aware that GCC does have a plugin system and a license exception allowing it to link with GPL-compatible software (such as BSD) for that purpose. The reasons why this interface does not find much use is technical, not political: GCC internals are (1) not modular and (2) do not expose stable programming interfaces. These facts would not change even if GCC was relicensed overnight to the BSD license or the WTF license.

  19. Re:Lincense wars in... on FSF's Richard Stallman Calls LLVM a 'Terrible Setback' · · Score: 4, Informative
    Error messages are only slightly better in clang, because GCC has improved since version 4.2, and now even clang developers themselves explain that clang is better in caret positioning and colouring, which I wouldn't call being a generation ahead. See what the GCC wiki says about that.

    Clang is slightly faster than GCC, when compiling at the same optimization level.

    Clang is written in C++ and modular, and as result of this, it is more embeddable in third party projects and it can target multiple platforms with a single executable. Work is being done in GCC to address this but I'm talking about released code here.

    But when we consider less "hip" features, GCC makes faster code (which is usually the foremost interest of a compiler's user). And GCC supports more target platforms. And GCC supports more language features (FORTRAN, OpenMP, VLAIS).

    A GCC developer's benchmark about GCC's vs clang's speed of compilation and of the resulting code.

  20. Re:Lincense wars in... on FSF's Richard Stallman Calls LLVM a 'Terrible Setback' · · Score: 1

    Currently, GCC is superior than LLVM, not the other way around. Also, it was ESR who appeared into GCC's technical mailing list making political lectures, not RMS.

  21. The real blasphemy... on In Greece, 10 Months In Prison For "Blasphemous" Facebook Page · · Score: 2
    ...is stating that God should make an ill child live or die depending on whether he has done some blessed ritual with some kind of special water in a particular place. It's believing that God would cede a portion of his powers to some particular monk or priestess and have him or her administer them in his stead. It's believing that one can buy salvation in bottles or pullman tickets.

    The truth is that not even the various Churches believe in many of those supernatural gurus or miraculous places. But they can't deny them, because people like to believe in them and they can't afford losing more faithful; because locals earn a lot from religious tourism and the Churches get their share of that money; and possibly because advocating for rationality in religion-based matters for them would be like throwing stones in the proverbial glass house.

  22. Re:Violation of ECHR on In Greece, 10 Months In Prison For "Blasphemous" Facebook Page · · Score: 1
    Non-mediterranean countries mustn't be faring too well if a racist comment with no connection whatsoever to reality gets modded up to +5.

    Try tweeting about bombs in the UK, promoting nazism in Germany, communism in Poland, "making homosexual propaganda" in Russia, and see the freedom of expression you enjoy in the mythical North.

    Which is not to say that censorship is acceptable or that people who'd like to be ruled by "golden dawn" are sane, it's just that being "mediterranean" is not one of their problems.

  23. A university that teaches you things that you can't learn.

    Reality can be more funny than Soviet Russia jokes.

  24. The Windows Update cpu usage bug on Microsoft Extends Updates For Windows XP Security Products Until July 2015 · · Score: 1

    Have they fixed the incredible Windows Update bug that kills the usability of Windows XP machines when connected to the Internet, because svchost.exe starts eating 100% of the CPU for hours, even on powerful machines? That rendered any Windows XP machine that I've seen almost unusable, even though Microsoft is supposedly still supporting them.

  25. Re:A field of Two on Orbital Becomes Second Private Firm To Send Cargo Craft To ISS · · Score: 1

    Again, SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launched them into space for less than NASA spent to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the Atlantic Ocean.

    I think that it's not fair if you don't say that SpaceX did what they did by using NASA's research (which has huge costs that get written under NASA's budget but not SpaceX's) and with NASA's money (that is, it's the government and only the government that enabled them to reach their achievements).