Re:Dump X for chrissakes.
on
Linux Sin Demo
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· Score: 2
The real problem is not X.
X is well-designed, well-functioning, excellent technology. In fact, it is very well capable of handling games like this.
Why doesn't it, you ask? The main problem is that no one actually uses the technology that's there. How often do you see 3D games using GLX or PEX? You're not supposed to draw all the damn pixels manually! That's what GLX and PEX are for... if people did that, 3D over X would be fast and responsive. How often do you see programs using XIE? If programs like Netscape and GIMP used XIE, they would run much, much faster. The list goes on.
The other problem is that XFree86 has been notoriously faulty and unfriendly, and people attribute this to X. This is not X at all, but one implementation of X.
As far as toolkit standards, GUESS WHAT THERE IS A TOOLKIT STANDARD. It's called Motif, and it's actually very good technology--but again, most people who knock it really don't know the full extent of what it can do, and don't know how to use most of its technology. Motif is far better IMO than Qt and Gtk, and it is actually the standard GUI for UNIX and VMS. Furthermore, THERE IS A STANDARD DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT. CDE is also an excellent technology with the ability to do really impressive things--the distributed object model of ToolTalk, the Information Manager, the help system, the spartan interface--it's really the best there is, and it's also the standard for UNIX and VMS.
The problem is not X. The problem is that people don't educate themselves as to what X, Motif, and CDE can really do. Trust me, if people did, 99.99% of programs would work hugely better and faster. There would be no problem with games if people actually USED GLX and/or PEX for their 3D rather than this DRI bullshit. X is really, really good technology.
ARM (Advanced Risc Machines) was developed by the company of the same name in the UK. StrongARM was codeveloped by DEC and ARM, and when Intel bought part of DEC they got it.
Yes, I'm aware of that--that's why I said "near 100%". It's obvious that because of this, if we last long enough, we will eventually have to start going outside for small amounts of stuff. However it's going to be a long, long time before that becomes a problem.
This seems like the natural evolution of astronomy
on
Creating The UniServer
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· Score: 1
After all, astronomy is really just the gathering of lots and lots and lots of images and the analysis of those images. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier actually. This allows for distributed analysis of all the images gathered at all the observatories, theoretically--imagine the power behind that. If other scientific fields could follow suit our progress would be accelerated greatly.
The scientific community has always been one large, co-operative effort. This is only a technological enhancement of that. Granted, capitalism has contributed its fair share to science. But if science were based mainly in capitalism, we'd be in trouble--for one thing, how do you make money off astronomy?
Scientists are already and have been for a long time working together, standing hand in hand. Maybe it seems Utopian from a selfish viewpoint but it's very natural to scientists.
Asteroid mining is just sweeping it under the rug
on
On Asteroid Mining
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· Score: 2
Come on, most of us are programmers here--wouldn't it be more elegant, clean, efficient, if we could just work out a way to achieve near 100% renewability of resources we use here on Earth, and then use that nearly indefinitely?
It seems to me mining asteroids is just going to another place to deplete more resources because it's become difficult to do so here. The more we spread ourselves out, spatially and in effort, the harder it becomes to control the results of our behaviour.
I realise the human race might be extinct by the time all the asteroids in the asteroid belt have run out. But it still seems to me it will take massive amounts of resources just to get the stuff, and in the end we will be talking about really valuable materials, similar to diamonds today, that will only end up being put in rich peoples' jewelry. Just like the jewelry industry today, poor people will be put in dangerous situations by large, amoral corporations to dig out pockets of "space-diamonds" to be put in the jewelry of rich people who couldn't care less. It doesn't seem like a venture that would really help humanity.
To me, there is a natural attractiveness to the idea of a clean, renewable, well-functioning Earth instead of just expanding the mess we have now elsewhere. Wouldn't it be cool if we didn't have to worry about resource usage or where to get resources because we'd worked out all our problems right here? Wouldn't it be nice if we had no pollution, no garbage, no shortages, not because we went elsewhere with a big scheme that will probably only benefit the rich, but because we worked together and found technologies here on Earth that helped us sustain it indefinitely?
LizardTech had a booth at Seybold this year, and let me tell you this technology is very, very impressive. They demonstrated extremely high-res files at various zoom points--and explained that the files were very small. This thing also worked lightning fast. Except for a just-visible delay, zooming happens almost instantly. Another thing: I'm fairly sure it was doing raster, not vector. In any case, it was obvious it went way beyond PNG.
This is great, it's the kind of stuff they should be doing--reverse-engineering the brain can lead to innumerable advances, everything from artificial limbs that can feel and work just like real ones to artificial eyes, to even completely interfering with the spinal cord protocol to produce a truly immersive virtual reality.
The thing I don't understand about it is, why is it taking so long? I know that the brain and the nervous system are extraordinarily complex, and that they are analog rather than digital to further complicate things, but we are able to reverse-engineer things like Soviet submarines and other-companies'-microchips relatively quickly and fairly often. These are pretty complex and they don't come with design documents. Why isn't there a larger effort to actually document things like "the optic nerve protocol" or "the spinal cord protocol"? The benefits to having such specifications for the human nervous system would be unimaginable.
Of course, there are a lot of complications involved as well--as soon as you begin to manipulate the nervous system you can begin to manipulate reality. When we (or the state) can change what people see and hear directly, things begin to get real sticky, real fast.
The thing that scares me is that it is inevitable--the nervous system is bound to be cracked someday. What happens when it does? What is going to protect us from sinister uses of the technology? Will the benefits outweigh the risks?
It's great to have a programme to start recycling old computer parts. But what I'd really like to see is new computers and computer parts made at least partially from recycled goods. Everything from CD-ROMs to chips--is this plausible or even possible? Is there anyone doing this now?
Personally, I am stuck with Netscape 4.7 and probably will be for a very long time. Why? Because I don't want a browser that looks like the 6 o'clock news! I like the way things used to be, when people used UNIX and in particular Motif. Yes, I'm a Motif fan, because I like things to get to the point, get the job done, and be as austere, professional, and efficient as possible. I can't stand the way Linux has turned the formerly respectable UNIX world--a world in which rock solid big iron runs satellites and life-critical medical equipment--into a world where UNIX companies are adopting desktops that make college students drool because of their k3wl graphical effects. It's sickening.
If development had been focused on top quality, professionalism, and usability, rather than translucent windows and pictures of naked women, we would by this time have a browser entirely based on Motif and using ToolTalk for all its media translation services. We'd be living in an Open Systems (but not necessarily open source) world with truly usable software, not shit like Mozilla.
I want to be able to actually USE my software, I don't care if it "looks cool"!
And no, this is not a troll, I'm tired of getting moderated down as a troll because I don't like the dumbass trendy look of things like GTK and Qt.
So you're saying the British government is employing force in giving away free medical care? And they took stuff from the people when they were running a socialised train system, and lots of other socialised things?
The reality is that most of the money going into social programmes comes from the people who don't really miss money much--the rich people. 5% of Bill Gates' paycheck won't bother Bill Gates much but it will feed a huge amount of hungry people.
You go watch those people die of starvation and then you tell me about how Bill Gates has a right to that extra 5% of his money.
While what you're saying about the absence of government is true, it's irrelevant. The fact is, everyone lives under a government, everyone lives in societies with rules. If the government says "Nothing is property" then your attempts to stop people taking "your" stuff will be in vain. You can talk all you want about a theoretical world with no governments, but it doesn't have any relevance to fact.
Physical property is based on the same exact concept that copyrights and patents are. Physical property is intended to produce a capitalist economy.
Do you really think that one coal baron could personally enforce his "ownership" of millions of tonnes of coal?
Property is a fundamental tenet of capitalism, whether physical or intellectual, because without property capitalism would not function. Capitalism is about the exchange of property and currency. Take property out of the equation and you are dealing with something entirely different. That is why the government makes intellectual property laws. The fact that physical property laws have been around longer doesn't make them any different.
Since when does socialism give more power to the government? Socialism is about obligating the government to give more to the people, not the other way around.
Free software licenses FORCE people to share. If you had, say, a BSD-licensed program you would have the option of sharing it all you want! With a GPL program, you are FORCED to share it.
The reality is that physical property IS arbitrary. One example of physical property that is in a sense "artificially scarce" is land. You might say, "How can you own a river, when all the water comes from rain that falls in the mountains? You might as well be able to own the rain!" or "How can you own these crops, when anyone can grow crops?" or "How can you claim ownership to this coal, it has been here millions of years?"
There are lots of ways to justify depriving people of property. Property does not exist as a "natural" thing, it exists because the government says it does. All I am saying is that physical property is just as arbitrary as intellectual property. They have the same value.
If you burned crops to make them more valuable, you would be reducing availability--only a small group of people would be able to have the food even if it were free because you're destroying a lot of it. When you increase the value of software by making it "property", you are not depriving anyone of anything. You are simply introducing a social construct that says "Hey, you can own the intangible stuff you create" and that doesn't destroy anything. What it does do is give people the CHOICE of whether they want to share, rather than FORCING them to share. THAT is the difference here.
Does this mean if a system administrator modifies a program that is frequently used on his system he should be required to give away the new source to all the users on his system?
The reason I compared Socialism and Communism is that in Socialism, things are given away with no strings attached, and in Communism, things are given away but you are also not allowed to claim ownership of them. When you release software as GPL, you are saying "no one may ever own this, it's community property". No one forced you to release it as GPL, but you are forcing anyone who chooses to use it to give up their property rights. In Socialism, or with the BSD license, you just say "You can have this, you can do anything you want with it, because it is your right". In Communism, or with the GPL, you say "You can't have this, you can't do what you want with it, you can only do what WE say with it, because it is owned by the Community" (Whether "WE" is the Communist Party or the FSF)
What Communism recognises is that the only reason physical "property" is property at all is because the State enforces theft laws--so Communism says "property is wrong" and no one can have property. In the same way that you people say "intellectual property is wrong". There is nothing more arbitrary about intellectual property than regular physical property. It's all an artificial social construct. The only difference is it's easier for you to justify getting rid of IP laws because people are more emotionally tied to their physical property (although of course the creators of IP like authors and musicians are probably far more tied to their intellectual property than their physical property).
The reality is that people only own what the State recognises as property. Whether that is objects, ideas, music, or green slimy goop, is irrelevant. They're ALL arbitrary. The idea of eliminating property constructs is undeniably Communist--because it's about things belonging to the Community. GPL'd code belongs to the Community, not to any single person. Richard Stallman wants things like music, code, etc to belong to the Community. That is the definition of Communism. I'm not saying it's bad because it's Communist, I'm just stating the fact that it is a Communist principle.
While GPL may not be completely communist, communism is to socialism as GPL is to BSD. The difference between communism and socialism is that in communism, people are forced to give everything away--EVERYTHING is "community property" and the concept of ownership is forbidden, while in socialism, people still own property, but the government gives some things away and people choose to give things away, and work in co-operatives--but they're not forced to.
The BSD license is a perfectly socialist license--it says "Here, we're going to give this away, indiscriminately, do with it as you will". The GPL, on the other hand, attempts to control people by forcing them to give stuff away. Anyone who does not see the parallel between the GPL and communism is ignorant. I'm not drawing this parallel because communism is a dirty word--I don't think it should be a dirty word and I don't think it's as terrible as people make it out to be. I'm drawing this parallel because people keep denying this simple fact. GPL is clearly very, very communist--the notions of no property, community ownership, and being forced to give it away all say "Marx".
The ONLY reason Stallman denies it's communist is that he knows communism is a dirty word and he will be harangued in the US for saying it. He doesn't want to be associated with a group that, in the eyes of the American populous, is on the same level as the Nazis. Of course they are not on the same level of the Nazis, but US propaganda says they are. If Stallman were honest and really willing to stand up for his beliefs he would not make this stupid denial and he would admit the obvious truth. All you have to do is look at the license, forget all else--it's communist.
Does this mean that if you want to run a Linux web server you have to provide all the source code for the operating system and web server on your site? Because really, you are using GPL'd code to run a "web service".
Slashdot Mirror
X is well-designed, well-functioning, excellent technology. In fact, it is very well capable of handling games like this.
Why doesn't it, you ask? The main problem is that no one actually uses the technology that's there. How often do you see 3D games using GLX or PEX? You're not supposed to draw all the damn pixels manually! That's what GLX and PEX are for... if people did that, 3D over X would be fast and responsive. How often do you see programs using XIE? If programs like Netscape and GIMP used XIE, they would run much, much faster. The list goes on.
The other problem is that XFree86 has been notoriously faulty and unfriendly, and people attribute this to X. This is not X at all, but one implementation of X.
As far as toolkit standards, GUESS WHAT THERE IS A TOOLKIT STANDARD. It's called Motif, and it's actually very good technology--but again, most people who knock it really don't know the full extent of what it can do, and don't know how to use most of its technology. Motif is far better IMO than Qt and Gtk, and it is actually the standard GUI for UNIX and VMS. Furthermore, THERE IS A STANDARD DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT. CDE is also an excellent technology with the ability to do really impressive things--the distributed object model of ToolTalk, the Information Manager, the help system, the spartan interface--it's really the best there is, and it's also the standard for UNIX and VMS.
The problem is not X. The problem is that people don't educate themselves as to what X, Motif, and CDE can really do. Trust me, if people did, 99.99% of programs would work hugely better and faster. There would be no problem with games if people actually USED GLX and/or PEX for their 3D rather than this DRI bullshit. X is really, really good technology.
Although on second thought, the "hack" aspect may have to do with using the Furby's I/O stuff (speaker, infrared, etc)
ARM (Advanced Risc Machines) was developed by the company of the same name in the UK. StrongARM was codeveloped by DEC and ARM, and when Intel bought part of DEC they got it.
Yes, I'm aware of that--that's why I said "near 100%". It's obvious that because of this, if we last long enough, we will eventually have to start going outside for small amounts of stuff. However it's going to be a long, long time before that becomes a problem.
After all, astronomy is really just the gathering of lots and lots and lots of images and the analysis of those images. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier actually. This allows for distributed analysis of all the images gathered at all the observatories, theoretically--imagine the power behind that. If other scientific fields could follow suit our progress would be accelerated greatly.
Scientists are already and have been for a long time working together, standing hand in hand. Maybe it seems Utopian from a selfish viewpoint but it's very natural to scientists.
It seems to me mining asteroids is just going to another place to deplete more resources because it's become difficult to do so here. The more we spread ourselves out, spatially and in effort, the harder it becomes to control the results of our behaviour.
I realise the human race might be extinct by the time all the asteroids in the asteroid belt have run out. But it still seems to me it will take massive amounts of resources just to get the stuff, and in the end we will be talking about really valuable materials, similar to diamonds today, that will only end up being put in rich peoples' jewelry. Just like the jewelry industry today, poor people will be put in dangerous situations by large, amoral corporations to dig out pockets of "space-diamonds" to be put in the jewelry of rich people who couldn't care less. It doesn't seem like a venture that would really help humanity.
To me, there is a natural attractiveness to the idea of a clean, renewable, well-functioning Earth instead of just expanding the mess we have now elsewhere. Wouldn't it be cool if we didn't have to worry about resource usage or where to get resources because we'd worked out all our problems right here? Wouldn't it be nice if we had no pollution, no garbage, no shortages, not because we went elsewhere with a big scheme that will probably only benefit the rich, but because we worked together and found technologies here on Earth that helped us sustain it indefinitely?
Just my two cents...
LizardTech had a booth at Seybold this year, and let me tell you this technology is very, very impressive. They demonstrated extremely high-res files at various zoom points--and explained that the files were very small. This thing also worked lightning fast. Except for a just-visible delay, zooming happens almost instantly. Another thing: I'm fairly sure it was doing raster, not vector. In any case, it was obvious it went way beyond PNG.
You seem to have misspelled "Yuri Gregarin".
The thing I don't understand about it is, why is it taking so long? I know that the brain and the nervous system are extraordinarily complex, and that they are analog rather than digital to further complicate things, but we are able to reverse-engineer things like Soviet submarines and other-companies'-microchips relatively quickly and fairly often. These are pretty complex and they don't come with design documents. Why isn't there a larger effort to actually document things like "the optic nerve protocol" or "the spinal cord protocol"? The benefits to having such specifications for the human nervous system would be unimaginable.
Of course, there are a lot of complications involved as well--as soon as you begin to manipulate the nervous system you can begin to manipulate reality. When we (or the state) can change what people see and hear directly, things begin to get real sticky, real fast.
The thing that scares me is that it is inevitable--the nervous system is bound to be cracked someday. What happens when it does? What is going to protect us from sinister uses of the technology? Will the benefits outweigh the risks?
It's great to have a programme to start recycling old computer parts. But what I'd really like to see is new computers and computer parts made at least partially from recycled goods. Everything from CD-ROMs to chips--is this plausible or even possible? Is there anyone doing this now?
If development had been focused on top quality, professionalism, and usability, rather than translucent windows and pictures of naked women, we would by this time have a browser entirely based on Motif and using ToolTalk for all its media translation services. We'd be living in an Open Systems (but not necessarily open source) world with truly usable software, not shit like Mozilla.
I want to be able to actually USE my software, I don't care if it "looks cool"!
And no, this is not a troll, I'm tired of getting moderated down as a troll because I don't like the dumbass trendy look of things like GTK and Qt.
The correct way of writing it according to The Open Group's Trademark Usage Guide is actually "UNIX systems".
Why do I get the feeling this is "stable" as in: "Finally, my house of cards is stable!"
The reality is that most of the money going into social programmes comes from the people who don't really miss money much--the rich people. 5% of Bill Gates' paycheck won't bother Bill Gates much but it will feed a huge amount of hungry people.
You go watch those people die of starvation and then you tell me about how Bill Gates has a right to that extra 5% of his money.
Physical property is based on the same exact concept that copyrights and patents are. Physical property is intended to produce a capitalist economy.
Do you really think that one coal baron could personally enforce his "ownership" of millions of tonnes of coal?
Property is a fundamental tenet of capitalism, whether physical or intellectual, because without property capitalism would not function. Capitalism is about the exchange of property and currency. Take property out of the equation and you are dealing with something entirely different. That is why the government makes intellectual property laws. The fact that physical property laws have been around longer doesn't make them any different.
Since when does socialism give more power to the government? Socialism is about obligating the government to give more to the people, not the other way around.
The reality is that physical property IS arbitrary. One example of physical property that is in a sense "artificially scarce" is land. You might say, "How can you own a river, when all the water comes from rain that falls in the mountains? You might as well be able to own the rain!" or "How can you own these crops, when anyone can grow crops?" or "How can you claim ownership to this coal, it has been here millions of years?"
There are lots of ways to justify depriving people of property. Property does not exist as a "natural" thing, it exists because the government says it does. All I am saying is that physical property is just as arbitrary as intellectual property. They have the same value.
If you burned crops to make them more valuable, you would be reducing availability--only a small group of people would be able to have the food even if it were free because you're destroying a lot of it. When you increase the value of software by making it "property", you are not depriving anyone of anything. You are simply introducing a social construct that says "Hey, you can own the intangible stuff you create" and that doesn't destroy anything. What it does do is give people the CHOICE of whether they want to share, rather than FORCING them to share. THAT is the difference here.
Does this mean if a system administrator modifies a program that is frequently used on his system he should be required to give away the new source to all the users on his system?
The reason I compared Socialism and Communism is that in Socialism, things are given away with no strings attached, and in Communism, things are given away but you are also not allowed to claim ownership of them. When you release software as GPL, you are saying "no one may ever own this, it's community property". No one forced you to release it as GPL, but you are forcing anyone who chooses to use it to give up their property rights. In Socialism, or with the BSD license, you just say "You can have this, you can do anything you want with it, because it is your right". In Communism, or with the GPL, you say "You can't have this, you can't do what you want with it, you can only do what WE say with it, because it is owned by the Community" (Whether "WE" is the Communist Party or the FSF)
I said it was Communist, not Communism. One of the basic principles of Communism is community ownership, and that's what this is.
The reality is that people only own what the State recognises as property. Whether that is objects, ideas, music, or green slimy goop, is irrelevant. They're ALL arbitrary. The idea of eliminating property constructs is undeniably Communist--because it's about things belonging to the Community. GPL'd code belongs to the Community, not to any single person. Richard Stallman wants things like music, code, etc to belong to the Community. That is the definition of Communism. I'm not saying it's bad because it's Communist, I'm just stating the fact that it is a Communist principle.
The BSD license is a perfectly socialist license--it says "Here, we're going to give this away, indiscriminately, do with it as you will". The GPL, on the other hand, attempts to control people by forcing them to give stuff away. Anyone who does not see the parallel between the GPL and communism is ignorant. I'm not drawing this parallel because communism is a dirty word--I don't think it should be a dirty word and I don't think it's as terrible as people make it out to be. I'm drawing this parallel because people keep denying this simple fact. GPL is clearly very, very communist--the notions of no property, community ownership, and being forced to give it away all say "Marx".
The ONLY reason Stallman denies it's communist is that he knows communism is a dirty word and he will be harangued in the US for saying it. He doesn't want to be associated with a group that, in the eyes of the American populous, is on the same level as the Nazis. Of course they are not on the same level of the Nazis, but US propaganda says they are. If Stallman were honest and really willing to stand up for his beliefs he would not make this stupid denial and he would admit the obvious truth. All you have to do is look at the license, forget all else--it's communist.
This just gets sicker and sicker...
Are we to assume that this means IBM has finally given up EBCDIC?