Well, the GIF file format includes LZW compression. AFAIK, you can't have a GIF without LZW. The specific form of GIF would be the only form of GIF... That's why people use PNG and not GIF 2.0 or something.
The problem is that he's an idiot. Look at point nr. 9 for instance - "I tried 3 text editors, they didn't have it, so no common editors have it". That's nice, but KEdit does, for instance. It took me about 2 seconds to find after I read that.
Another point is the web browser non-issue: "However, Mozilla is not integrated with any desktop environment, making tasks such as printing, accessing the file open or save dialogs, and cut-n-paste unpleasant". What's so difficult with File->Open...? And in what way does it differ from how other programs do cut-n-paste? To me it pretty much just sounds like he had to put mozilla down but couldnt figure out any good arguments. The fact is that it's not integrated into a DE on windows either, but that doesnt stop me from printing, opening or saving files, and cut-n-paste works just like any other win program.
Now I'm not saying that the manual was clear about that simple thing - but I've read this particular piece of information so many times it's silly. Manuals need to get better yes, but let's discuss that as one of the "Top 10" bad things instead then.
I'm not worried about securing data - if I would need to do that at some time I'd surely go buy that and many other books, read up on the web, news, etc. What I am worried about however, is how well others (e.g. M$) is securing my data. And for some reason I don't think they read the book.
Uhm, no... that'd be copyright law that prevents me from doing that. You mean it's perfectly legal for me to copy a book and distribute it, because there wasn't any plastic wrap with a note going "If you break this plastic, you agree that...".
Nope. That's against the law. Copyright law. Which has nothing at all to do with licenses. These EULAs are something the software sector more or less "made up", and really have nothing to do with the law. If I buy something, I buy it. If i rent/lease something - I do so according to a leasing agreement or such detailed at the point of lease, not when I got home and opened the box.
'cause if you're proactively downloading a EULA remover, you're not exactly using the software legally
I'll go for that if you show me the peice of law text saying "You may not use software unless you first accept any agreement thrown in your face" or similar. Until then I will continue to beleive I have a right under copyright laws to use the software I bought. There's so much talk about the "Fair" part of "Fair use". Well here's about the "use" part.
How could you be liable for something you never accepted? What about if somebody else installs a program on my computer with an EULA that says that Evil. Inc has the right to confiscate any computer equipment that runs this software? That's a bit like holding me liable for a contract you wrote while in my apartment. Or how about if Windows came pre-installed on my computer? Or what about if I bought the computer used with all the programs installed already?
Let's take it from another angle: You buy an ice cream. When you open the wrap cover, you find a small agreement saying "in order to eat this ice cream, you must agree to also stand on your head and make a sound like a horny lion, ten times, in a public place". So what do you do, sign it or return the ice cream? No, because tossing it into the nearest waste basket would make your afternoon a nice walk in the park enjoying your ice cream - since just because somebody tries to force you into "agreeing" to something before using a product doesnt mean it's illegal for you to use it without agreeing.
A side note: That'd be "truth" you're looking for.
This falls. What if I got Windows pre-installed? What if i edited the installer in my l33t h3x-editor and changed "I agree" into "Fuckyou", then I never clicked I agree, and thus never agreed, right? What if i got my brother to install it for me or left it up overnight and one of my cats stepped on the "i accept" shortcut keyboard button? Really how could I be held to another contract that my brother signed? Because he happened to be in my apartment or sitting in front of my computer?
Consider the following scenario:
at a public event, a computer is left on for people to view a web page. I come to the computer and find some way to run a program. I run an installer (maybe that I wrote myself), that displays an EULA saying "You must donate the equipment running this software to Evil. inc". I click "I agree" happily, finish the install and then leave.
Does that make the owner of the computer bound by that license? I sure would hope not.
... and as we all know, MS Word is an entirely unreadable format. Come on... openoffice does a fine job at readin Word files, for instance - they're not perfect filters, but for reading a document you don't need the layout to be 100% perfect do you?
To ask for the Parliament to refit their computers to use a different word processor because somebody doesn't like MS is simply weird. Like it or not (I don't), MS Word is the de facto standard word processor out there... and I strongly doubt that the Parliament uses Word just to "show those MS bashers" or out of love for MS. It just happens to be the best word processor available.
Tools like javadoc, or maybe better in your case doxygen can really help when it comes to commenting code... the idea is pretty much that you place a documentation comment before each function, or class, and so on, which usually makes the entire thing much easier. Having done that, I've found that only a few more non-obvious parts have to be commented within the actual functions.
Uhm. How often does the average user empty their "trash can", or even their "deleted" email folder? I don't think they had to go through alot of effort to get that email, really...
Maybe it's about hardware and luck as well. I have a directory structure right now sitting on my disk that is infinitely deep, and thus cant be deleted in any way... e2fsck doesnt handle it and it cant be unlinked either. So there it's been for a year or so now...
I also have lost some data, but that is starting to look like a hardware issue now. Maybe e2fs is just less tolerant than some other file systems out there to "small" hardware failures.
Actaully I was wrong about the 2.84, it's 3*ln(7)/ln(8) = 2.80 (7 from 8 not 8 from 9!).
Strassen's IIRC.
Indeed theres a ~2.3 theoretical method (Winograd), but the scaling constant is huge, and for most purposes the algorithm is of no use for anything short of unimaginable.
Not only for most purposes... for all purposes. In order for this algorithm to be useful, n has to be larger than the amount of atoms in the universe...
Of course this flies straight in the face of accepted wisdom that it's better to have an app do a few things well than to have it do many things poorly.
Oh yes, like Mozilla? Or Office? Or let's even say GCC (which now is GNU Compiler Collection, not GNU C Compiler, because it does so fscking much different stuff noone really knows anymore I'm sure). Just because people repeat it endlessly doesn't make it "wisdom" (though maybe it becomes "accepted"). Wanna talk emacs? vim? Just about the only good app I can think about that kept this motto is Windows Notepad.
Fact is, people using computers today WANT bloated suites of does-everything-apps. M$ Office is popular just because it provides everyone with that little obscure feature that they'd been looking for (but everyone wants a *different* feature).
Now, when it comes to BF or DF programming, alot of programming methodologies (UP, X-treme Programming) recommend programming wide and shallow, and in an iterative way. This actually has nothing to do with the feature set of the app, just of the order in which things are implemented.
For the GPL'ed work they're including, they have to leave it non-obfuscated
Why? If I take, say, KWord... and I obfuscate the shit outta it... isn't that a derivate work? Never heard of the part of the GPL that said you couldn't alter the code, that'd make it all kinda pointless.
It seems that the correct point of view is that Islam is "another truth!"
As much as it must come as a shock to you, Islam IS "another truth". In fact, Islam is just as much a truth as christianity. If you have a problem with that, then you are perfectly welcome to block all islamic web sites at home, but if you're trying to argue that islamic web sites should be blocked at schools because islam isn't "another truth" then you're truly a moron. In the true spirit of "innocent until proven guilty" I will assume you're just confused.
I realize that there is a slippery slope here, but why can't we allow each school to decide for themselves what their immediate needs are?
Because then some would decide like one swedish religious school did before being hit by the government; they decided for themselves that their immediate need was to teach children that cancer was due to lack of faith.
Either filter everything or filter equally from all perspectives... the internet is unique in that it contains so much opinion-stuff that's fluffed up to look like facts. Teaching children to sift through this data and decide for themselves what to trust would be enormously much more valuable than teaching them the only sites on the 'net that works is www.microsoft.com and www.myreligionofchoice.com.
If this DOESN'T hold up then China could pass whatever law they want and sue you for whatever (because one of your emails passed a chinese server for instance). Don't beleive it? I wouldn't beleive that you can't say "This product is dangerous to use, and here's why" in The Land Of The Free [tm]. And that, as you'd say, is absurd!
Re:Maybe those with hope in YellowTab will wake up
on
Be Throws in the Towel
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· Score: 2
The way I see it, if you really like the BeOS, head over to the Open-Source Be like projects like openbeos [sourceforge.net] and pledge your support with money or code.
Well this is also a problem... immediately when it became apparent that Be was in big trouble, there opened at least three different open source Be clone-projects. Now at best we'll get a bunch of uncompleted Be-clones and maybe one or two usable systems. At worst we'll get a whole lot of Be-clones, each one with it's own quirks and problems, and developers for Be will have to code around quirks right and left to make anything work on all the Be-like systems. To make things worse, at least BlueOS have already started thinking about extending the API, so that in the end nothing will be compatible with anything, but everything will be "almost" compatible.
Detrermining which host if the fastest so the majority of the file is downloaded from them would be a bit more tricky though. You'd have to have a test download file, or calculate who is the fastest after the file has started downloading.
No, I don't think that should be needed... Just start from the beginning of the file from one host. Download a few blocks and see how fast it goes, and then calculate where to start the second download from the speed and number of hosts available.
Actually I'm quite surprised it hasn't been done already...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the GIF file format includes LZW compression. AFAIK, you can't have a GIF without LZW. The specific form of GIF would be the only form of GIF... That's why people use PNG and not GIF 2.0 or something.
KEdit.
Another point is the web browser non-issue: "However, Mozilla is not integrated with any desktop environment, making tasks such as printing, accessing the file open or save dialogs, and cut-n-paste unpleasant". What's so difficult with File->Open...? And in what way does it differ from how other programs do cut-n-paste? To me it pretty much just sounds like he had to put mozilla down but couldnt figure out any good arguments. The fact is that it's not integrated into a DE on windows either, but that doesnt stop me from printing, opening or saving files, and cut-n-paste works just like any other win program.
Now I'm not saying that the manual was clear about that simple thing - but I've read this particular piece of information so many times it's silly. Manuals need to get better yes, but let's discuss that as one of the "Top 10" bad things instead then.
I'm not worried about securing data - if I would need to do that at some time I'd surely go buy that and many other books, read up on the web, news, etc. What I am worried about however, is how well others (e.g. M$) is securing my data. And for some reason I don't think they read the book.
Uhm, no... that'd be copyright law that prevents me from doing that. You mean it's perfectly legal for me to copy a book and distribute it, because there wasn't any plastic wrap with a note going "If you break this plastic, you agree that...".
Nope. That's against the law. Copyright law. Which has nothing at all to do with licenses. These EULAs are something the software sector more or less "made up", and really have nothing to do with the law. If I buy something, I buy it. If i rent/lease something - I do so according to a leasing agreement or such detailed at the point of lease, not when I got home and opened the box.
Funny how you not answered my question.
I'll go for that if you show me the peice of law text saying "You may not use software unless you first accept any agreement thrown in your face" or similar. Until then I will continue to beleive I have a right under copyright laws to use the software I bought. There's so much talk about the "Fair" part of "Fair use". Well here's about the "use" part.
Let's take it from another angle: You buy an ice cream. When you open the wrap cover, you find a small agreement saying "in order to eat this ice cream, you must agree to also stand on your head and make a sound like a horny lion, ten times, in a public place". So what do you do, sign it or return the ice cream? No, because tossing it into the nearest waste basket would make your afternoon a nice walk in the park enjoying your ice cream - since just because somebody tries to force you into "agreeing" to something before using a product doesnt mean it's illegal for you to use it without agreeing.
A side note: That'd be "truth" you're looking for.
Consider the following scenario:
at a public event, a computer is left on for people to view a web page. I come to the computer and find some way to run a program. I run an installer (maybe that I wrote myself), that displays an EULA saying "You must donate the equipment running this software to Evil. inc". I click "I agree" happily, finish the install and then leave.
Does that make the owner of the computer bound by that license? I sure would hope not.
It's a bit funny that people are so quick to complain that they don't even try - or is it the old hate for MS that's showing through?
To ask for the Parliament to refit their computers to use a different word processor because somebody doesn't like MS is simply weird. Like it or not (I don't), MS Word is the de facto standard word processor out there... and I strongly doubt that the Parliament uses Word just to "show those MS bashers" or out of love for MS. It just happens to be the best word processor available.
Tools like javadoc, or maybe better in your case doxygen can really help when it comes to commenting code... the idea is pretty much that you place a documentation comment before each function, or class, and so on, which usually makes the entire thing much easier. Having done that, I've found that only a few more non-obvious parts have to be commented within the actual functions.
Uhm. How often does the average user empty their "trash can", or even their "deleted" email folder? I don't think they had to go through alot of effort to get that email, really...
I also have lost some data, but that is starting to look like a hardware issue now. Maybe e2fs is just less tolerant than some other file systems out there to "small" hardware failures.
Indeed theres a ~2.3 theoretical method (Winograd), but the scaling constant is huge, and for most purposes the algorithm is of no use for anything short of unimaginable.
Not only for most purposes... for all purposes. In order for this algorithm to be useful, n has to be larger than the amount of atoms in the universe...
Oh yes, like Mozilla? Or Office? Or let's even say GCC (which now is GNU Compiler Collection, not GNU C Compiler, because it does so fscking much different stuff noone really knows anymore I'm sure). Just because people repeat it endlessly doesn't make it "wisdom" (though maybe it becomes "accepted"). Wanna talk emacs? vim? Just about the only good app I can think about that kept this motto is Windows Notepad.
Fact is, people using computers today WANT bloated suites of does-everything-apps. M$ Office is popular just because it provides everyone with that little obscure feature that they'd been looking for (but everyone wants a *different* feature).
Now, when it comes to BF or DF programming, alot of programming methodologies (UP, X-treme Programming) recommend programming wide and shallow, and in an iterative way. This actually has nothing to do with the feature set of the app, just of the order in which things are implemented.
Digital Digital Nervous System?
Why? If I take, say, KWord... and I obfuscate the shit outta it... isn't that a derivate work? Never heard of the part of the GPL that said you couldn't alter the code, that'd make it all kinda pointless.
As much as it must come as a shock to you, Islam IS "another truth". In fact, Islam is just as much a truth as christianity. If you have a problem with that, then you are perfectly welcome to block all islamic web sites at home, but if you're trying to argue that islamic web sites should be blocked at schools because islam isn't "another truth" then you're truly a moron. In the true spirit of "innocent until proven guilty" I will assume you're just confused.
Because then some would decide like one swedish religious school did before being hit by the government; they decided for themselves that their immediate need was to teach children that cancer was due to lack of faith.
Either filter everything or filter equally from all perspectives... the internet is unique in that it contains so much opinion-stuff that's fluffed up to look like facts. Teaching children to sift through this data and decide for themselves what to trust would be enormously much more valuable than teaching them the only sites on the 'net that works is www.microsoft.com and www.myreligionofchoice.com.
If this DOESN'T hold up then China could pass whatever law they want and sue you for whatever (because one of your emails passed a chinese server for instance). Don't beleive it? I wouldn't beleive that you can't say "This product is dangerous to use, and here's why" in The Land Of The Free [tm]. And that, as you'd say, is absurd!
Well this is also a problem... immediately when it became apparent that Be was in big trouble, there opened at least three different open source Be clone-projects. Now at best we'll get a bunch of uncompleted Be-clones and maybe one or two usable systems. At worst we'll get a whole lot of Be-clones, each one with it's own quirks and problems, and developers for Be will have to code around quirks right and left to make anything work on all the Be-like systems. To make things worse, at least BlueOS have already started thinking about extending the API, so that in the end nothing will be compatible with anything, but everything will be "almost" compatible.
Will be interesting to see what happens though. I would say it all depends on what palm does.
No, I don't think that should be needed... Just start from the beginning of the file from one host. Download a few blocks and see how fast it goes, and then calculate where to start the second download from the speed and number of hosts available.
Actually I'm quite surprised it hasn't been done already...