How on Earth could Euclid's algorithm be the most important CS algorithm? I'll be the first to say Euclid's algorithm is really cool (and I believe I did actually, two days ago on an unrelated matter), but how useful is it?
If we ignore for the moment the fact it isn't really CS at all, when was the last time you needed a GCD? Maybe I'm mathematically naive, but I can't think of one single use of a GCD. I'm sure there are plenty, but are there any outside of maths, physics, engineering, etc? Is there a general use of GCDs, like there is for say crypto or graphs?
Does a GCD have a use in writing an operating system, or a programming language? When was the last time you saw a gcd function provided to a programmer in a standard library?
I think we can safely say that Microsoft's strategy outlined in the Halloween document's is coming into full effect.
Now it's no secret that Miguel and Nat met while Miguel was interviewing for a job at Microsoft (http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2001-01/l w-01-vcontrol_5.html).
What we never got told was that Miguel was selected as the perfect candidate for a new brainwashing experiment from Microsoft research. (C'mon, it's obvious that all that research money wasn't going on _software_ research.)
Miguel was implanted as a Microsoft sleeper agent in a large free software project. He doesn't even realise that's what he is.
So basically, the idea seems to be that he will subconsciously subvert GNOME towards Microsoft standards. Then, once this is complete, Microsoft will reveal its secret submarine patents on the standard and destroy GNOME through litigation.
We must not let this happen.
Re:This should be obvious but ...
on
Mozilla Bug Week
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· Score: 2
If you don't like the Slashdot editorial decisions, don't read it.
People work on what they want to work on. I don't see you working on Mozilla's "pressing matters", so if someone else wants to not either, I don't see how you can complain.
Lots of people (particularly Netscape people) are already working on Mozilla's "pressing matters", and they are making huge strides.
And as others have pointed out, this isn't even an official mozilla.org project.
This is a continuation of the milestones. Version numbers make it obvious what version 1 is, and also allows you to release 1.0.6 after 1.2 or whatever as a "stability" release. You can't do that with just one number.
0.6/N6 was branched based on code that was pre-M18, so 0.6 was missing stuff that was in M18.
0.7 is the first numbered release based on the main line from M18 onwards, and we'll see numbered releases from hereon in.
I expect we'll see 0.8/N6.5b1, 0.9/N6.5b2, etc from hereon in.
Apparently Nautilus could call Mozilla because it used inter-process communication, which is basically a "loophole" in the GPL. But it really isn't one you can close in my opinion, since the same mechanism can be used for local and remote communication
I like to think that there are three stages of internet usage.
Firstly, it's all new, and you go looking everywhere, spend hours on it, etc. This lasts a few weeks.
Then, you've basically seen it all. There's nothing to do anymore. The Net might be better now than when I learnt about it, but it's still got a long way to be perfect.
In the third stage you gradually learn about sites you can regularly read like Slashdot. Eventually you may even get to the stage you have to ignore sites because you don't have the time for them all. You know you're in this stage if you have over 500 bookmarks.
This guy is probably still in the second stage. He doesn't know what would interest him online. Most people are probably unable to get out of this stage, because it's too hard to find what interests them, but eventually the internet will mature to a stage where they will easily do so.
Of course, there's still the matter of shopping online, which anyone would have a problem with. If I had to do it that way, I'd certainly make sure I stocked up beforehand. =)
I don't know that it's necessarily possible to get a "universal language", but an algorithms repository with a set of translators to other languages would be cool, to the extent it can be made to work.
That being said, there is at least one project to create a language and editor that use "structured data" like he describes, which I founded, see "http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra". I'm not going to claim it will be a universal language though!
If you have any specific complaints then file them at "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/".
Be wary that Mozilla supports the real DOM (from the W3C) and not the Microsoft one or the Netscape one, and that won't change unless someone contributes it.
> For the longest time, I've heard that > Mozilla is (as in, yes, currently, right now) > fully 4.0/CSS1/whatever else compliant.
Err, no. Mozilla aims at full compliance with the CSS1 subset of CSS2 (ie all CSS1, but with CSS2 interpretations (CSS2 is not entirely backward compatible with CSS1) ). Any CSS2 it supports is a bonus (largely due to the fact it's required for styling the UI).
There are various bugs in the CSS implementation in NGLayout, and they are being worked on. The point is that there are many less bugs than other layout engines.
> (b) Clearly, adding more developers screws > things up..that explains why my kernel crashes > every few minutes..er..wait..
There's a distinct difference between developers on the one hand, and testers/bug finders on the other. The latter is what makes free software so good, and is less subject to communication overheads with other people that cause software to slow down.
Also, adding more developers to a project is not necessarily bad long-term, especially if they are rather independent of each other, but they can certainly delay a project in the short term, while they learn.
The statement was not necessarily asking for more development. Bug finders and testers are not subject to Moore's law, and Mozilla probably needs them more now than developers.
I said "in practice". I don't really care if you want to quibble over the true definition when all of the "communist" nations I know of are dictatorships.
Schools vary widely from location to location, and person to person. The fact that I don't know the original definition of Communism as per the original writers show that I, like just about everyone else, has holes in their knowledge. That's life.
OK, some people don't seem to understand. Communism has nothing to do with Linux.
Linux is about cooperation and sharing.
Communism is a form of government based on the ideas of _socialism_. If Linux is close to anything, it is socialism. Communism, to my knowledge, is about a "ruling party", with a socialist property system. Communism is dictatorship, at least in practice. A democratic socialism is entirely possible.
Cooperation and sharing are good things, no matter how communist governments choose to pervert the concepts.
In this case, the sharing is not enforced, and so, so far, it works! And further, if you don't like the dictatorship, start your own country! Those are the fatal flaws in the socialism analogy.
Now, China's government obviously has some sort of belief in sharing. So do I, and I hope most of you.
I believe most people would prefer socialism, if it could be shown to work. It was a great idea. But so far, it's failed.
Free software has been shown to work. Maybe it will fail too eventually. Let's hope not.
While I don't know what structural aspects differ between HTML 1 and 4, I'd imagine there is some useful stuff. HTML 4 without the style should be quite an adequate solution.
I personally think it would be quite cool if I could set up a stylesheet that displayed messages as I wanted, but that's hard to do in ASCII email because elements are differentiated by characters than can easily be interpreted as content.
For the record, I've never sent a HTML mail. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
Standards progress. HTML mail should be the new standard. It's very simple.
What is holding up HTML mail are (1) the original styling problems I mentioned, (2) people still using recalcitrant mailers that don't support it yet ( possibly because of (1) ) and (3) the lack of any way to do content negotiation on email accounts and newsgroups.
Seriously, if you want to only support HTML 1 for web pages, GIFs for images and ASCII for email, that's your choice, but you're not going to stop progress.
Those are not acceptable alternatives. Those things can and are misinterpreted by mail agents and possibly people. One thing being added to Mozilla by an independent developer at the moment is plain-text styling. It's hard, because you can err in either direction.
I should have the ability as to how I want my mail agent to display bullets. I should have the ability to say how I want quoting to look. I should have the ability to show how I want emphasis to look. ASCII gives you none of those, because it does not separate content from style. The fact that it has been the standard does not mean we should stick with it. With good mailer support like I mentioned upwards, HTML mail is a superior solution.
These days, I would consider a mailer that doesn't support HTML mail unfinished. It doesn't have to be flashy and display it like the author wants. It's better to display it like I want! But it at least needs to know how to display it.
HTML mail is an extremely good idea. The idea that ASCII is adequate for email is ridiculous.
Strict HTML consists of things like block quoting, lists, hyperlinks, emphasis, etc. which are all as useful in Mail as they are in web pages.
The problem is that HTML is polluted with presentational rubbish like bold and background colours that allows people to make things unreadable.
So what is needed is a sensible mail client that supports HTML mail and supports ignoring all presentational markup (and only uses a user-side stylesheet).
As for scripting, I can't really see anything wrong with it (dynamic HTML etc.), but I think you really have to set the default to prompt the user.
Hmm, I smell a Mozilla enhancement request coming on...
Slashdot Mirror
How on Earth could Euclid's algorithm be the most important CS algorithm? I'll be the first to say Euclid's algorithm is really cool (and I believe I did actually, two days ago on an unrelated matter), but how useful is it?
If we ignore for the moment the fact it isn't really CS at all, when was the last time you needed a GCD? Maybe I'm mathematically naive, but I can't think of one single use of a GCD. I'm sure there are plenty, but are there any outside of maths, physics, engineering, etc? Is there a general use of GCDs, like there is for say crypto or graphs?
Does a GCD have a use in writing an operating system, or a programming language? When was the last time you saw a gcd function provided to a programmer in a standard library?
I think we can safely say that Microsoft's strategy outlined in the Halloween document's is coming into full effect.
l w-01-vcontrol_5.html).
Now it's no secret that Miguel and Nat met while Miguel was interviewing for a job at Microsoft (http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2001-01/
What we never got told was that Miguel was selected as the perfect candidate for a new brainwashing experiment from Microsoft research. (C'mon, it's obvious that all that research money wasn't going on _software_ research.)
Miguel was implanted as a Microsoft sleeper agent in a large free software project. He doesn't even realise that's what he is.
So basically, the idea seems to be that he will subconsciously subvert GNOME towards Microsoft standards. Then, once this is complete, Microsoft will reveal its secret submarine patents on the standard and destroy GNOME through litigation.
We must not let this happen.
If you don't like the Slashdot editorial decisions, don't read it.
Unlike you, most Slashdotters care.
And for something constructive for a change, I'll tell you how you can contribute to Bugzilla.
The project's home page is "http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/". Most of the developers hang out on the IRC channel.
People work on what they want to work on. I don't see you working on Mozilla's "pressing matters", so if someone else wants to not either, I don't see how you can complain.
Lots of people (particularly Netscape people) are already working on Mozilla's "pressing matters", and they are making huge strides.
And as others have pointed out, this isn't even an official mozilla.org project.
This is a continuation of the milestones. Version numbers make it obvious what version 1 is, and also allows you to release 1.0.6 after 1.2 or whatever as a "stability" release. You can't do that with just one number. 0.6/N6 was branched based on code that was pre-M18, so 0.6 was missing stuff that was in M18. 0.7 is the first numbered release based on the main line from M18 onwards, and we'll see numbered releases from hereon in. I expect we'll see 0.8/N6.5b1, 0.9/N6.5b2, etc from hereon in.
Netscape branched from the Mozilla trunk halfway between M17 and the soon to be released M18. It doesn't correspond to any Moz milestone.
Apparently Nautilus could call Mozilla because it used inter-process communication, which is basically a "loophole" in the GPL. But it really isn't one you can close in my opinion, since the same mechanism can be used for local and remote communication
The perception of the Mozilla project of the average slashdot poster is really quite irrelevant.
Mozilla goes on regardless, and it will succeed regardless.
I like to think that there are three stages of internet usage.
Firstly, it's all new, and you go looking everywhere, spend hours on it, etc. This lasts a few weeks.
Then, you've basically seen it all. There's nothing to do anymore. The Net might be better now than when I learnt about it, but it's still got a long way to be perfect.
In the third stage you gradually learn about sites you can regularly read like Slashdot. Eventually you may even get to the stage you have to ignore sites because you don't have the time for them all. You know you're in this stage if you have over 500 bookmarks.
This guy is probably still in the second stage. He doesn't know what would interest him online. Most people are probably unable to get out of this stage, because it's too hard to find what interests them, but eventually the internet will mature to a stage where they will easily do so.
Of course, there's still the matter of shopping online, which anyone would have a problem with. If I had to do it that way, I'd certainly make sure I stocked up beforehand. =)
I don't know that it's necessarily possible to get a "universal language", but an algorithms repository with a set of translators to other languages would be cool, to the extent it can be made to work.
That being said, there is at least one project to create a language and editor that use "structured data" like he describes, which I founded, see "http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra". I'm not going to claim it will be a universal language though!
Is your DOM code WC3 DOM compliant? If not, it won't work in Mozilla, because Mozilla is standards compliant.
.
If it isn't, see "http://sites.netscape.net/ekrock/standards.html"
If it is, file a bug at "http://bugzila.mozilla.org/".
If you have any specific complaints then file them at "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/".
Be wary that Mozilla supports the real DOM (from the W3C) and not the Microsoft one or the Netscape one, and that won't change unless someone contributes it.
> For the longest time, I've heard that
> Mozilla is (as in, yes, currently, right now)
> fully 4.0/CSS1/whatever else compliant.
Err, no. Mozilla aims at full compliance with the CSS1 subset of CSS2 (ie all CSS1, but with CSS2 interpretations (CSS2 is not entirely backward compatible with CSS1) ). Any CSS2 it supports is a bonus (largely due to the fact it's required for styling the UI).
There are various bugs in the CSS implementation in NGLayout, and they are being worked on. The point is that there are many less bugs than other layout engines.
That would defeat the purpose. Debugging code is there for debugging, and output from it helps to fix bugs.
> (b) Clearly, adding more developers screws
> things up..that explains why my kernel crashes
> every few minutes..er..wait..
There's a distinct difference between developers on the one hand, and testers/bug finders on the other. The latter is what makes free software so good, and is less subject to communication overheads with other people that cause software to slow down.
Also, adding more developers to a project is not necessarily bad long-term, especially if they are rather independent of each other, but they can certainly delay a project in the short term, while they learn.
Well, almost. Specifically, I have a patent on the missionary and reverse missionary positions in a participant's own abode.
I also have a patent pending on the doggie position and well as six other popular positions.
This means, if you want to have sex, you'll either need to obtain a license from me, work out some obscure new position or do it outdoors.
D'oh! Not Moore's law, of course, but you know what I mean!
The statement was not necessarily asking for more development. Bug finders and testers are not subject to Moore's law, and Mozilla probably needs them more now than developers.
I said "in practice". I don't really care if you want to quibble over the true definition when all of the "communist" nations I know of are dictatorships.
Schools vary widely from location to location, and person to person. The fact that I don't know the original definition of Communism as per the original writers show that I, like just about everyone else, has holes in their knowledge. That's life.
OK, some people don't seem to understand. Communism has nothing to do with Linux.
Linux is about cooperation and sharing.
Communism is a form of government based on the ideas of _socialism_. If Linux is close to anything, it is socialism. Communism, to my knowledge, is about a "ruling party", with a socialist property system. Communism is dictatorship, at least in practice. A democratic socialism is entirely possible.
Cooperation and sharing are good things, no matter how communist governments choose to pervert the concepts.
In this case, the sharing is not enforced, and so, so far, it works! And further, if you don't like the dictatorship, start your own country! Those are the fatal flaws in the socialism analogy.
Now, China's government obviously has some sort of belief in sharing. So do I, and I hope most of you.
I believe most people would prefer socialism, if it could be shown to work. It was a great idea. But so far, it's failed.
Free software has been shown to work. Maybe it will fail too eventually. Let's hope not.
While I don't know what structural aspects differ between HTML 1 and 4, I'd imagine there is some useful stuff. HTML 4 without the style should be quite an adequate solution.
I personally think it would be quite cool if I could set up a stylesheet that displayed messages as I wanted, but that's hard to do in ASCII email because elements are differentiated by characters than can easily be interpreted as content.
For the record, I've never sent a HTML mail. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
Standards progress. HTML mail should be the new standard. It's very simple.
What is holding up HTML mail are (1) the original styling problems I mentioned, (2) people still using recalcitrant mailers that don't support it yet ( possibly because of (1) ) and (3) the lack of any way to do content negotiation on email accounts and newsgroups.
Seriously, if you want to only support HTML 1 for web pages, GIFs for images and ASCII for email, that's your choice, but you're not going to stop progress.
Those are not acceptable alternatives. Those things can and are misinterpreted by mail agents and possibly people. One thing being added to Mozilla by an independent developer at the moment is plain-text styling. It's hard, because you can err in either direction.
I should have the ability as to how I want my mail agent to display bullets. I should have the ability to say how I want quoting to look. I should have the ability to show how I want emphasis to look. ASCII gives you none of those, because it does not separate content from style.
The fact that it has been the standard does not mean we should stick with it. With good mailer support like I mentioned upwards, HTML mail is a superior solution.
These days, I would consider a mailer that doesn't support HTML mail unfinished. It doesn't have to be flashy and display it like the author wants. It's better to display it like I want! But it at least needs to know how to display it.
HTML mail is an extremely good idea. The idea that ASCII is adequate for email is ridiculous.
...
Strict HTML consists of things like block quoting, lists, hyperlinks, emphasis, etc. which are all as useful in Mail as they are in web pages.
The problem is that HTML is polluted with presentational rubbish like bold and background colours that allows people to make things unreadable.
So what is needed is a sensible mail client that supports HTML mail and supports ignoring all presentational markup (and only uses a user-side stylesheet).
As for scripting, I can't really see anything wrong with it (dynamic HTML etc.), but I think you really have to set the default to prompt the user.
Hmm, I smell a Mozilla enhancement request coming on