Almost any shortcoming in X11 can be fended off by saying "That's not an X11 problem, it's outside the scope of the design". That's not a valid defense
Oh, you really seem to not understand the X11 system. It does provide a very extensive clipboard mechanism, but, as it happened before with GTK and KDE reinventing the wheel instead of starting off Xt (thus guaranteeing that much later, when users start screaming about compatibility, they'll have to patch-up these gigantic systems to provide that), programmers thought they're much smarter than the guys who designed X11 and felt the urge to reinvent the clipboard.
B.t.w., it's not enough to pass on objects from application to application, unless both applications are fully aware of the type of information the object contains. You need some sort of OLE mechanism, and that is what really prevents you from copying and pasting between any two applications.
Actually, the issue at hand is not whether the Cygwin port is important or not, but the royal jerkiness of the XFree86 core developers.
I did read the thread and still cannot believe what a**holes people like David Dawes and Thomas Dickey truly are. Inflated egos and the infatuated attitude of "mine is bigger than yours" are totally unwarranted when looking at what the original poster really asked.
If this is the attitude of the core developers, then really XFree86 is in trouble in the long run.
You're right (sort of - only 100k$ are insured). But where is the compensation money coming from? Federal budget made up from your taxes? Why should everyone have to support through taxes the certain increase in insurance claims just because idiots think it's a good thing to run Windows to dispense money?
I'm wondering why you have to show how lowbred you are? What kind of suburban language is that?
Beside this, it shows you have no idea how a medical school graduate becomes a doctor (hint: there are extra steps that are COMMON for US graduates and foreign ones - google for the acronym ECFMG).
I happen to know several foreign school graduates who completed Residency Programs from Universities in Chicago and Houston, and yes, they performed well enough to speedily get a GC and open their practice.
Serban P.S. it's really sad you have to be both rude and ignorant in the same time
Get your facts straight. There are A LOT of H1B foreign doctors in residency programs. Once the residency is up, guess what happens to them... most of them get PR status as quickly as you can spell "elate"
MS Word may be a usable tool for many things, but it's not at all for anything related to technical writing.
MS Word is a major PITA when one is inane enough to try to write e.g. a DataSheet with it. Yes, you can do it, but sometimes the formatting goes crazy, the pictures start having a life of their own, the overall typesetting quality is abysimal and, no matter how you massage the document, the end result looks like crap.
My understanding of how the thing works is that the dropplet is moved by mechanical forces.
The Lexmark and HP method is using small built-in heaters next to the ink cavities; electric pulses in the resistors overheat the ink, ejecting it with high speed towards the paper.
The Epson way is to use the piezoresistive effect, turned to its head: the ink cavities carved in a monocrystalline head are changing shape based on an electrical field applied to the crystal, thus pushing out the ink.
Hmmmm, the whole thread talks about the INK-JET technology, not the laser/LED one. There is no toner (i.e. ultrafinely ground plastic particles) in the inkjet; the closest one can get to particles in ink is the coloidal pigment found in some longer-lasting inks.
So, the delivery mechanism is hardly more than a parallel plate capacitor is a false statement. The inkjet uses small nozzles that spit ink.
Did you actually use Thunderbird? Because it's a fine piece of software that didn't fail on me since I started using it exclusively on my Win2k station (currently the 20030616 version). I agree it's been only 6-8 weeks or so, but it behaves substantially better than the email client from Netscape/Mozilla.
Don't look at the "pre-alpha" status, the thing does its job just fine on huge bodies of email (400MB+).
At work I have Outlook always running with the excellent bayesian FREE filter Spammunition www.upserve.com. I also do check the mailbox from home over a dial-up connection.
If I wouldn't use Spammunition, then I would spend a lot of time downloading spam messages; as it is right now, I get just the ham (several messages instead of many).
Actually the LiIon and LiPolymer batteries casually achieve 98% storage efficiency. That's why a 68W battery, charging at 4Amps, is quite lukewarm. If the charging process would be so inefficient, the battery would be hot as hell itself.
Modems use ~3khz of bandwidth to get >48kbps. HF channels have more than twice that bandwidth available, and if you are using a digital front end there's no reason at all you can't use more than channel at the very same time. Use two VHF channels (say, on the also-unregulated 49mhz band) and it's not at all unreasonable to expect >200kbps - on a packetized multichannel service with no line-of-sight issues.
I think you're wrong. According to the Shannon equation, the maximum channel capacity depends on two things: bandwith and signal-to-noise ratio:
C = BW * log2(1 + S/N).
The major difference between the wire connection and a radio channel is S/N ratio. Yes, you can get 48kbps on the phone line because the S/N ratio is high.
In the radio channel case, the S/N ratio is always much worse, so your fancy modulation techniques cannot code so many bits per symbol, so it's practically impossible to achieve 200kbps on a 9kHz bandwidth.
The cell phones of today use low levels of TX power on a very narrow frequency range, with extensive filtering of unwanted sidebands and harmonics.
It's not obvious that the transmission radiation will affect equipment using shielded wires. What is the chance aviation equipment uses GSM bands for communication?
I read (in an article related to 9/11) that the real reason cell phones are prohibited is that, during take-off and landing, an active phone flies at a high speed over several cells at once and gives about the same signal strength to more than two simultaneously. This affects substatially the cells' operation, resulting even in temporary black-outs of the cells involved; thus the FAA regulation has been asked for by the telecom companies.
Anyway, it's stupid to try to use the cell phone during the flight; most likely you'll not get a signal as the plane flies at 33000feet, slightly above the range of the cell tower.
I'm sorry, I couldn't find a definitive reference to it. So, please accept my apologies for sounding so certain about it when, in fact, it seems I was wrong.
I still do believe that this version is more sarcastical and actually illustrates better the huge difference between these two personalities.
Easy. These didn't have to engage the planet as the current crop of Mars missions will.
Read the article, one of the biggest concerns is the fact that these new missions shoot straight for the planet's surface, without passing through the very helpful orbit stage first.
The missions to Jupiter etc. did not try to land the spacecraft, did they?
I support both the war and the brave men and women who execute it...
You keep talking about the brave men and women. Where do you see the bravery? The US troops are fitted with such high-tech weapons that iraqi armed with AK47s have no chance in hell to match.
What's so brave in being able to squish the enemy without effort and risk?
If there's someone brave (albeit more like crazy and figthing for the wrong cause), it's the poor iraqi teenager clinging to his rifle and waiting to be blown away by the US Army mighty self-guided weapons.
Well, if you're really into this, why not change the first name to the truly "original" Stefan? It seems that most of americans I met were able to correctly spell my son's name (Stefan). Stephan is somehow an unfortunate mix between Stefan and Stephen.
... I have had the opportunity to work with several H1-B visa holders (approximately 40 total, there was a project in which the development team was approximately 90% H1-B's).
For the most part, these foreigners technical skill is below average, in many cases, they are plain incompetent. Maybe one or two have been average, and only 2 I might consider "brilliant"
Probably that's the case in the software industry, where it's quite hard to assess one's deep professional skills.
A great number of H1B visas are not for software people, but for technology-related skilled ones. I am an IC designer and I came to US on a H1B visa; let me tell you this: in the particular field where I'm working, there are almost no US-born engineers below 40.
Who do you think designs most of the circuits in Silicon Valley? Europeans, Asians and Indians do, not USians. For the semiconductor industry to thrive in US, there has to be a way to continuously grab fresh, young and skilled workers trained abroad as the education institutions do not provide anymore enough homebrew talent in the field.
My theory is quality is getting better. Cars definatly last longer now than they used to. At any given price point you will get a better quality product than you did 10 years ago in almost any product.
Not really. Ten years ago you could buy superb (as in 18bit true D/A and matched phase shift between channels, not the 1bit/sigma-delta crapola you can have today) CD players with 200$. Try this today.
About cars, well, they improved mostly because of personal safety awareness and safety regulation. Wait for the moment when the safety policies will be reverted; the Ford Pinto factor is always there, just lift off the regulation and it will resurface.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you really seem to not understand the X11 system. It does provide a very extensive clipboard mechanism, but, as it happened before with GTK and KDE reinventing the wheel instead of starting off Xt (thus guaranteeing that much later, when users start screaming about compatibility, they'll have to patch-up these gigantic systems to provide that), programmers thought they're much smarter than the guys who designed X11 and felt the urge to reinvent the clipboard.
B.t.w., it's not enough to pass on objects from application to application, unless both applications are fully aware of the type of information the object contains. You need some sort of OLE mechanism, and that is what really prevents you from copying and pasting between any two applications.
Serban
Actually, the issue at hand is not whether the Cygwin port is important or not, but the royal jerkiness of the XFree86 core developers.
I did read the thread and still cannot believe what a**holes people like David Dawes and Thomas Dickey truly are. Inflated egos and the infatuated attitude of "mine is bigger than yours" are totally unwarranted when looking at what the original poster really asked.
If this is the attitude of the core developers, then really XFree86 is in trouble in the long run.
Serban
While we're here, are there public domain tools that take for instance a bitmap and convert it to GDS or CIF?
I'd really like to put things like that on my circuits, but it's painful to draw them by hand in the layout editor du jour.
Serban
You're right (sort of - only 100k$ are insured). But where is the compensation money coming from? Federal budget made up from your taxes? Why should everyone have to support through taxes the certain increase in insurance claims just because idiots think it's a good thing to run Windows to dispense money?
Serban
I'm wondering why you have to show how lowbred you are? What kind of suburban language is that?
Beside this, it shows you have no idea how a medical school graduate becomes a doctor (hint: there are extra steps that are COMMON for US graduates and foreign ones - google for the acronym ECFMG).
I happen to know several foreign school graduates who completed Residency Programs from Universities in Chicago and Houston, and yes, they performed well enough to speedily get a GC and open their practice.
Serban
P.S. it's really sad you have to be both rude and ignorant in the same time
Get your facts straight. There are A LOT of H1B foreign doctors in residency programs. Once the residency is up, guess what happens to them... most of them get PR status as quickly as you can spell "elate"
Serban
Nah, the real thing is to dump tea you didn't buy.
No, you're mistaken. The lawsuit is the only bussiness SCO has right now.
Now go back in your cave and try to grow a brain.
MS Word may be a usable tool for many things, but it's not at all for anything related to technical writing.
MS Word is a major PITA when one is inane enough to try to write e.g. a DataSheet with it. Yes, you can do it, but sometimes the formatting goes crazy, the pictures start having a life of their own, the overall typesetting quality is abysimal and, no matter how you massage the document, the end result looks like crap.
Serban
My understanding of how the thing works is that the dropplet is moved by mechanical forces.
The Lexmark and HP method is using small built-in heaters next to the ink cavities; electric pulses in the resistors overheat the ink, ejecting it with high speed towards the paper.
The Epson way is to use the piezoresistive effect, turned to its head: the ink cavities carved in a monocrystalline head are changing shape based on an electrical field applied to the crystal, thus pushing out the ink.
Am I wrong?
Serban
So, the delivery mechanism is hardly more than a parallel plate capacitor is a false statement. The inkjet uses small nozzles that spit ink.
Serban
Did you actually use Thunderbird? Because it's a fine piece of software that didn't fail on me since I started using it exclusively on my Win2k station (currently the 20030616 version). I agree it's been only 6-8 weeks or so, but it behaves substantially better than the email client from Netscape/Mozilla.
Don't look at the "pre-alpha" status, the thing does its job just fine on huge bodies of email (400MB+).
Serban
At work I have Outlook always running with the excellent bayesian FREE filter Spammunition www.upserve.com. I also do check the mailbox from home over a dial-up connection.
If I wouldn't use Spammunition, then I would spend a lot of time downloading spam messages; as it is right now, I get just the ham (several messages instead of many).
Serban
Actually the LiIon and LiPolymer batteries casually achieve 98% storage efficiency. That's why a 68W battery, charging at 4Amps, is quite lukewarm. If the charging process would be so inefficient, the battery would be hot as hell itself.
Serban
I think you're wrong. According to the Shannon equation, the maximum channel capacity depends on two things: bandwith and signal-to-noise ratio:
C = BW * log2(1 + S/N).
The major difference between the wire connection and a radio channel is S/N ratio. Yes, you can get 48kbps on the phone line because the S/N ratio is high.
In the radio channel case, the S/N ratio is always much worse, so your fancy modulation techniques cannot code so many bits per symbol, so it's practically impossible to achieve 200kbps on a 9kHz bandwidth.
Serban
Really?
The cell phones of today use low levels of TX power on a very narrow frequency range, with extensive filtering of unwanted sidebands and harmonics.
It's not obvious that the transmission radiation will affect equipment using shielded wires. What is the chance aviation equipment uses GSM bands for communication?
I read (in an article related to 9/11) that the real reason cell phones are prohibited is that, during take-off and landing, an active phone flies at a high speed over several cells at once and gives about the same signal strength to more than two simultaneously. This affects substatially the cells' operation, resulting even in temporary black-outs of the cells involved; thus the FAA regulation has been asked for by the telecom companies.
Anyway, it's stupid to try to use the cell phone during the flight; most likely you'll not get a signal as the plane flies at 33000feet, slightly above the range of the cell tower.
Serban
I'm sorry, I couldn't find a definitive reference to it. So, please accept my apologies for sounding so certain about it when, in fact, it seems I was wrong.
I still do believe that this version is more sarcastical and actually illustrates better the huge difference between these two personalities.
Serban
Easy. These didn't have to engage the planet as the current crop of Mars missions will.
Read the article, one of the biggest concerns is the fact that these new missions shoot straight for the planet's surface, without passing through the very helpful orbit stage first.
The missions to Jupiter etc. did not try to land the spacecraft, did they?
Serban
It's a pity to misquote such a beautiful saying.
Nicola Tesla actually said (as a reply to Edison's babble "genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration"):
"If Mr. Edison would think a little more, he would sweat less"
Serban
I believe that most widgets are made from simple geometric figures and not only from plain pixmaps.
Serban
You keep talking about the brave men and women. Where do you see the bravery? The US troops are fitted with such high-tech weapons that iraqi armed with AK47s have no chance in hell to match.
What's so brave in being able to squish the enemy without effort and risk?
If there's someone brave (albeit more like crazy and figthing for the wrong cause), it's the poor iraqi teenager clinging to his rifle and waiting to be blown away by the US Army mighty self-guided weapons.
Well, if you're really into this, why not change the first name to the truly "original" Stefan? It seems that most of americans I met were able to correctly spell my son's name (Stefan). Stephan is somehow an unfortunate mix between Stefan and Stephen.
Serban
Probably that's the case in the software industry, where it's quite hard to assess one's deep professional skills.
A great number of H1B visas are not for software people, but for technology-related skilled ones. I am an IC designer and I came to US on a H1B visa; let me tell you this: in the particular field where I'm working, there are almost no US-born engineers below 40.
Who do you think designs most of the circuits in Silicon Valley? Europeans, Asians and Indians do, not USians. For the semiconductor industry to thrive in US, there has to be a way to continuously grab fresh, young and skilled workers trained abroad as the education institutions do not provide anymore enough homebrew talent in the field.
Serban
Not really. Ten years ago you could buy superb (as in 18bit true D/A and matched phase shift between channels, not the 1bit/sigma-delta crapola you can have today) CD players with 200$. Try this today.
About cars, well, they improved mostly because of personal safety awareness and safety regulation. Wait for the moment when the safety policies will be reverted; the Ford Pinto factor is always there, just lift off the regulation and it will resurface.
Serban
Arghhh! Where are my moderator points when I need them? Please somebody mod up the parent!