Last I heard (which is a long time ago), the plan was to use pure Xlib. Mozilla already uses its own XUL widgets for almost everything.
People who prefer Gtk over XUL should probably use Galeon instead of Mozilla.
You can't use native widgets in a standard browser
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 2
because the style sheets have parameters that are not supported by the native widget sets. So if you want to support all of the standard, you have to write your own widget set.
What Mozilla does with XUL is use that widget set for all of the browser, not just the web pages.
As far as I can see, almost all the effort towards a new C++ standard is on the the library side. C++ has an excellent container library (STL), an ok library for serial i/o (iostream), but lacks libraries for networking, threads, file system, etc.
A bit of language cleanup is done, like getting rid of implicit int. However the major problem with regard to context sensitivity, the declaration syntax, is inherited from C and would be hard to remove.
It is not my impression that -ffast-math is a question of precision, is is a question of what the compiler guarentees. It may very well lead to higher precision, for example by skipping precion losing intermediate steps. However, if the code was written with ieee in mind, these steps may very well be necessary for a correct result.
If the code isn't written with IEEE math in mind (and I suspect the vast majority of floating point code is written by people who not completely sure of the difference of real numbers and floating point numbers), then why not use -ffast-math?
MM is primarily a C++ front-end guy (when not being a release manager), and the interesting aspects of ICC is mostly in the i32 backend, so ICC is unlikely to be that interesting once MM has time.
I believe ICC use a version of the generic Edison C++ front-end (most good C++ compilers do), which MM is most likely already familiar with.
I have no opinion on the legal issue, but from a curtesy point of view, I believe there should have been a large visible link to the official site near the top of the page. It really does look like an official site.
He is a bit of a formalist, and from a formal point of view (for formal reasoning such a correctness proofs), OO is a disaster. You can reason about the state after a call to a virtual function.
OO is damned practical though, mostly because it is so easy to design for. Classes and methods can directly reflect entities in the user sphere. Which is why C++ is such a lovely language, you can use OO for the application area oriented part of the design, and generic programming (stl)as a lower level toolbox for the computer science oriented part of the program (containers and algoritms) which should not concern the user.
In one-paradigm language, the design will often either be too far away from the user, or too far away from the computer.
I have maintained a number of google celebrity lists, where celebrities
in various categories are ranked based on the number of page hits by
google.
While the numbers clearly aren't totally random, they are very fragile
indeed. Some people have had a change of two orders of magnitude,
within a week. And in these cases, there have usually been no real
world events that could explain such a change. I guess the google
page hits numbers depend as much on the internal google structure, as
on the number of actual pages on the web.
So I doubt google page hits statistics is a useful research tool.
Nonetheless, it can be fun. Here are some google hall of fame lists:
It might be good for the sales force to have (slightly) different products for different markets. That way, you don't have to explain the business customers why they have to pay a different price for the same product than the educational customers.
I guess for most users, it would make more sense to name the distribution after which version of Gnome or KDE that is bundled.
From a technical point of view, the most important single package is probably glibc, as that is what most other packages talk to.
If they should name it for my convenience, they should call it Debian 21. It will be the first stable Debian featuring Emacs 21, which is my primary interface to the system.
The people who worked at Cygnus claims it has been profitable in all the many years (since 80'-something) it existed as a seperate firm. Cygnus was for many year the main contributors (and often official maintainers) of the GNU development tools.
That is a lot longer than most other commercial software companies.
Hopefully, the Chinese government will take the kind of firm action against spammers, that other governments hesitate on for misunderstood humanitarian reasons ("humanitarian" concerns should not apply to non-humans, such as spammers).
And feel free to moderate me down as flamebait, but I have seen to many virtual communities be destroyed because of spam for this to be anything but a heart-felt opinion.
but please blame the spammers, and the lazy admins who don't stop them, not their victims.
Spam basically makes email useless, it is certainly not the near real-time media it used to be. Blacklisting can make email almost useable again. Of course, it is nowhere near as useful as before the spammers took over, but at least the signal no longer totally drowns in the noice.
Unless something effective is done to spam at the political level, we probably soon have to either give up email entirely, or switch to whitelists. With whitelists, only people in your address book can send mail to you directly. Other people may be able to come through after various kinds of verification. This will cut of many once useful features of email, but at least some core functionality will survive.
Please do not blame the people who try to make email survive in spite of the spam onslaught. Without these people, email would die.
I develop software for a living, and get a nice living out of it. Like almost all of the other people developing software for a living, the people who pay me doesn't consider the software for a product. They pay me to develop software that solves problems they have in their otherwise not-software related businesses. They therefore have absolutely no problem with me putting it to ftp under an open source license, which I therefore do.
People reading/. tend to be students, whose experience with software is shrink-wrap products. They therefore conclude that is how most software is produced. Which leads to totally bogus conclusions like that productization is necessary for programmers to be paid.
When you leave school, you will discover (thos of you who become programmers), that very few of you or your fellow students get work for writing the kind of shrink-wrap you know. Most of you will write software for in-house use. A lot of you will not be allowed to disclose the software at all under any license, but that is another issue.
Producing more and more food in an environmentally healthy way is basic requirement due to the population growth.
This is completely ortogonal to the question of solving the social and political problems that provent a fair distribution of the produced food and keep the population growth going.
Even if we do solve these problems in the best case we should expect the population to top in one or two generations at 15 to 20 billion people, due to the age distribition of the world population, and cultural resistance to change.
We need to fight at both fronts to get through this situation without mass starvation worse than everything seen on this planet before combined.
We need the technical means to increase production that much without destroying the environment in the process, and we need the social, economical and political changes that ensure this technoclogy is employed as well as ensure the population growth does eventually top in acceptable ways.
Believing we can get through with either technical or social changes alone is dangerously naive.
> Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances, > not the solution for them.
Right. Ignore that just about anyone with any kind of economic background will disagree, they are probably brainwashed or belong to some interbational conspiracy. And also ignore that every country that have practiced economic isolationism (like Albania or North Korea) have ended up being by far the poorest countries in their region.
> Creating a wealthy elite in third world > countries will just raise local prices even > further out of the reach of the poor,
Right. Just ignore who *creates* the local goods, and sell them to the new middle class... or rather "wealthy elite" as you prefer to call these programmers who just a moment ago wos "poor oppressed sweatshop workers".
> adding to the problems caused by local goods > being sold at global (i.e. western) prices.
Right. Of course, those who actually study global economics say the problem is the opposite, that the global prices are made artificially lower than the western prices, by trade protection and heavy subsidicing western farmers. Which, had it been true, would mean that third world farmers, who get no subsidicing, get paid a lot less than they would in a free market.
> Using cheap overseas labor will just exacerbate > the problem by increasing ocrporate profits at > home thereby increasing wealth here and leading > to even higher global prices.
It all sound so logical when you explian it. Lower production costs lead to higher consumer prices. This gives me an idea: How about we doubled, nay, trippled all our salaries? In that case, profit would disappear or become negative, and consumer good would be free!
Ah, I like your sort of economy so much better than the conventionel sort.
> Also purely from a selfish POV, I don't want to > see my salary capped because some shortsighted > manager is trying to increase his bonus by > reducing costs by exporting jobs overseas.
Right. We would not want any manager to increase his bonus by reducing costs. What's next? We have already established that reduced costs leads to higher prices. And what's next? Managers increasing their bonus by improving quality? We don't want that to happen, do we. In the end we might end up with increased prductivity, and if world history has taught us anything, it is that wealth is inversely propertional with productivity. Back when we were hunters and gathers, everyone had their personal jet and lives on private palaces on Fisher island (thus the name). Every time we have invented something to do our work easier, we have become materially poorer.
The USD isn't particularily stable, not seen from here at least. In the last few years, it has fluctated between 5 DKK and 9 DKK, unlike the EUR, which is stable at 8 DKK. Of course, this is because the DKK is bound within a narrow margin to the EUR. My point is that stability depend on your point of view.
The workplace is obviously a better environment than any of the alternatives given to the people who work there, so a project like this can only improve the working conditions for Indian programmers. This, of course, should not be an excuse for first world consumers (in this case Sun) not to insist on some reasonable standard for the working conditions, but keep in mind that it a priori is an improvement.
The Gnome project should only accept quality code, this doesn't depend on whether the code is from Sun programmers in Ireland or outsources in India.
Their motivations should not matter, just the license and code quality. Any commitment to a postulated OSS ideal is beside the point. I'm sure Sun does this for purely selfish reasons.
It is true that once at the level of first world countries, cheap labour will be found elsewhere. Former third world countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan now has to rely on their skill and highly developed infrastructure to compete with other first world countries. As this continues, eventually, we may run out of third world countries to provide cheap labour. I consider this a feature, not a bug.
US is probably the nation in the world that is most self-reliant, so to say that it "depend on sub-serviant nations" is stretching it. While restricting free trade always has a cost, US could survive economic isolation better than anyone else, and certainly a lot better than the so-called "sub-serviant" nations. In the US, prices would rise, unemployment would rise (irionically, since the pro-isolation pinheads can't think beyond "they steal our jobs", to the many more jobs created by an improved economy), but the economy would survive on a lower level. In much of the rest of the world, the economies would collapse, as most other nations are much more dependend on trade than the US.
Slashdot Mirror
People who prefer Gtk over XUL should probably use Galeon instead of Mozilla.
because the style sheets have parameters that are not supported by the native widget sets. So if you want to support all of the standard, you have to write your own widget set.
What Mozilla does with XUL is use that widget set for all of the browser, not just the web pages.
As far as I can see, almost all the effort towards a new C++ standard is on the the library side. C++ has an excellent container library (STL), an ok library for serial i/o (iostream), but lacks libraries for networking, threads, file system, etc.
A bit of language cleanup is done, like getting rid of implicit int. However the major problem with regard to context sensitivity, the declaration syntax, is inherited from C and would be hard to remove.
It is not my impression that -ffast-math is a question of precision, is is a question of what the compiler guarentees. It may very well lead to higher precision, for example by skipping precion losing intermediate steps. However, if the code was written with ieee in mind, these steps may very well be necessary for a correct result.
If the code isn't written with IEEE math in mind (and I suspect the vast majority of floating point code is written by people who not completely sure of the difference of real numbers and floating point numbers), then why not use -ffast-math?
alpha% cd ftp/emacs/lisp
alpha% grep Raymond ChangeLog.? ChangeLog | wc
83 418 5653
alpha% grep Stallman ChangeLog.? ChangeLog | wc
3315 13888 217454
MM is primarily a C++ front-end guy (when not being a release manager), and the interesting aspects of ICC is mostly in the i32 backend, so ICC is unlikely to be that interesting once MM has time.
I believe ICC use a version of the generic Edison C++ front-end (most good C++ compilers do), which MM is most likely already familiar with.
There is a small disclaimer at the bottom.
I have no opinion on the legal issue, but from a curtesy point of view, I believe there should have been a large visible link to the official site near the top of the page. It really does look like an official site.
He is a bit of a formalist, and from a formal point of view (for formal reasoning such a correctness proofs), OO is a disaster. You can reason about the state after a call to a virtual function.
OO is damned practical though, mostly because it is so easy to design for. Classes and methods can directly reflect entities in the user sphere. Which is why C++ is such a lovely language, you can use OO for the application area oriented part of the design, and generic programming (stl)as a lower level toolbox for the computer science oriented part of the program (containers and algoritms) which should not concern the user.
In one-paradigm language, the design will often either be too far away from the user, or too far away from the computer.
While the numbers clearly aren't totally random, they are very fragile indeed. Some people have had a change of two orders of magnitude, within a week. And in these cases, there have usually been no real world events that could explain such a change. I guess the google page hits numbers depend as much on the internal google structure, as on the number of actual pages on the web.
So I doubt google page hits statistics is a useful research tool. Nonetheless, it can be fun. Here are some google hall of fame lists:
- A list of the most famous Danes according
to google.
- A list of free software
celebrities according to google.
- A list of Emacs contributors sorted
according to google hits.
- A list of sequential artists sorted
according to google hits.
- A list of OS (Kernel) Mindshare sorted
according to google hits.
PS: Mail me to suggest new entries to the lists.I really hope noone excpect to use exactly the same computer _model_ when they leave school.
Job interview:
You write you have experience from school with Dell, was it their Optiplex line?
Yes, the Optiplex GX.
That old stuff? Too bad, we use Optiplex GXpro here, so your experience is worthless. But thanks for considering us. Bye.
It might be good for the sales force to have (slightly) different products for different markets. That way, you don't have to explain the business customers why they have to pay a different price for the same product than the educational customers.
I'm already tired of explaining to enquiring non-nerds that my nerd-friends are Emacs developers, not iMac's developers.
I guess the problem just got worse.
NOW, yes. But music sales were increasing up to the exact point where Napster was shut down as a useful service. Then it began falling.
I guess for most users, it would make more sense to name the distribution after which version of Gnome or KDE that is bundled.
From a technical point of view, the most important single package is probably glibc, as that is what most other packages talk to.
If they should name it for my convenience, they should call it Debian 21. It will be the first stable Debian featuring Emacs 21, which is my primary interface to the system.
I have had no problems getting "annotated" employment contracts accepted. They didn't even negotiate the issue.
The people who worked at Cygnus claims it has been profitable in all the many years (since 80'-something) it existed as a seperate firm. Cygnus was for many year the main contributors (and often official maintainers) of the GNU development tools.
That is a lot longer than most other commercial software companies.
Same for Islam.
Hopefully, the Chinese government will take the kind of firm action against spammers, that other governments hesitate on for misunderstood humanitarian reasons ("humanitarian" concerns should not apply to non-humans, such as spammers).
And feel free to moderate me down as flamebait, but I have seen to many virtual communities be destroyed because of spam for this to be anything but a heart-felt opinion.
but please blame the spammers, and the lazy admins who don't stop them, not their victims.
Spam basically makes email useless, it is certainly not the near real-time media it used to be. Blacklisting can make email almost useable again. Of course, it is nowhere near as useful as before the spammers took over, but at least the signal no longer totally drowns in the noice.
Unless something effective is done to spam at the political level, we probably soon have to either give up email entirely, or switch to whitelists. With whitelists, only people in your address book can send mail to you directly. Other people may be able to come through after various kinds of verification. This will cut of many once useful features of email, but at least some core functionality will survive.
Please do not blame the people who try to make email survive in spite of the spam onslaught. Without these people, email would die.
I develop software for a living, and get a nice living out of it. Like almost all of the other people developing software for a living, the people who pay me doesn't consider the software for a product. They pay me to develop software that solves problems they have in their otherwise not-software related businesses. They therefore have absolutely no problem with me putting it to ftp under an open source license, which I therefore do.
/. tend to be students, whose experience with software is shrink-wrap products. They therefore conclude that is how most software is produced. Which leads to totally bogus conclusions like that productization is necessary for programmers to be paid.
People reading
When you leave school, you will discover (thos of you who become programmers), that very few of you or your fellow students get work for writing the kind of shrink-wrap you know. Most of you will write software for in-house use. A lot of you will not be allowed to disclose the software at all under any license, but that is another issue.
It is scary what get marked as "insightful" here.
Producing more and more food in an environmentally healthy way is basic requirement due to the population growth.
This is completely ortogonal to the question of solving the social and political problems that provent a fair distribution of the produced food and keep the population growth going.
Even if we do solve these problems in the best case we should expect the population to top in one or two generations at 15 to 20 billion people, due to the age distribition of the world population, and cultural resistance to change.
We need to fight at both fronts to get through this situation without mass starvation worse than everything seen on this planet before combined.
We need the technical means to increase production that much without destroying the environment in the process, and we need the social, economical and political changes that ensure this technoclogy is employed as well as ensure the population growth does eventually top in acceptable ways.
Believing we can get through with either technical or social changes alone is dangerously naive.
> Global trade is the CAUSE of wealth imbalances,
> not the solution for them.
Right. Ignore that just about anyone with any kind of economic background will disagree, they are probably brainwashed or belong to some interbational conspiracy. And also ignore that every country that have practiced economic isolationism (like Albania or North Korea) have ended up being by far the poorest countries in their region.
> Creating a wealthy elite in third world
> countries will just raise local prices even
> further out of the reach of the poor,
Right. Just ignore who *creates* the local goods, and sell them to the new middle class... or rather "wealthy elite" as you prefer to call these programmers who just a moment ago wos "poor oppressed sweatshop workers".
> adding to the problems caused by local goods
> being sold at global (i.e. western) prices.
Right. Of course, those who actually study global economics say the problem is the opposite, that the global prices are made artificially lower than the western prices, by trade protection and heavy subsidicing western farmers. Which, had it been true, would mean that third world farmers, who get no subsidicing, get paid a lot less than they would in a free market.
> Using cheap overseas labor will just exacerbate
> the problem by increasing ocrporate profits at
> home thereby increasing wealth here and leading
> to even higher global prices.
It all sound so logical when you explian it. Lower production costs lead to higher consumer prices. This gives me an idea: How about we doubled, nay, trippled all our salaries? In that case, profit would disappear or become negative, and consumer good would be free!
Ah, I like your sort of economy so much better than the conventionel sort.
> Also purely from a selfish POV, I don't want to
> see my salary capped because some shortsighted
> manager is trying to increase his bonus by
> reducing costs by exporting jobs overseas.
Right. We would not want any manager to increase his bonus by reducing costs. What's next? We have already established that reduced costs leads to higher prices. And what's next? Managers increasing their bonus by improving quality? We don't want that to happen, do we. In the end we might end up with increased prductivity, and if world history has taught us anything, it is that wealth is inversely propertional with productivity. Back when we were hunters and gathers, everyone had their personal jet and lives on private palaces on Fisher island (thus the name). Every time we have invented something to do our work easier, we have become materially poorer.
The USD isn't particularily stable, not seen from here at least. In the last few years, it has fluctated between 5 DKK and 9 DKK, unlike the EUR, which is stable at 8 DKK. Of course, this is because the DKK is bound within a narrow margin to the EUR. My point is that stability depend on your point of view.
The workplace is obviously a better environment than any of the alternatives given to the people who work there, so a project like this can only improve the working conditions for Indian programmers. This, of course, should not be an excuse for first world consumers (in this case Sun) not to insist on some reasonable standard for the working conditions, but keep in mind that it a priori is an improvement.
The Gnome project should only accept quality code, this doesn't depend on whether the code is from Sun programmers in Ireland or outsources in India.
Their motivations should not matter, just the license and code quality. Any commitment to a postulated OSS ideal is beside the point. I'm sure Sun does this for purely selfish reasons.
It is true that once at the level of first world countries, cheap labour will be found elsewhere. Former third world countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan now has to rely on their skill and highly developed infrastructure to compete with other first world countries. As this continues, eventually, we may run out of third world countries to provide cheap labour. I consider this a feature, not a bug.
US is probably the nation in the world that is most self-reliant, so to say that it "depend on sub-serviant nations" is stretching it. While restricting free trade always has a cost, US could survive economic isolation better than anyone else, and certainly a lot better than the so-called "sub-serviant" nations. In the US, prices would rise, unemployment would rise (irionically, since the pro-isolation pinheads can't think beyond "they steal our jobs", to the many more jobs created by an improved economy), but the economy would survive on a lower level. In much of the rest of the world, the economies would collapse, as most other nations are much more dependend on trade than the US.