Low-friction wheels don't work very well, as is evidenced by the difficulty in driving on ice, wet roads, that annoying metal grating on some bridges, etc. In fact, one of the reasons wheels work as well as they do is that the edge in contact with the ground is not moving (relative to the ground) and as such, can apply a force relative to its (higher) coefficient of static friction, rather than the lower coefficient of kinetic friction.
While it may not help in the confusion, what you're seeing with the escape-open-paren vs. not is the difference between Basic and Extended regular expressions in POSIX parlance. Or, to quote the GNU grep man page:
In basic regular expressions the metacharacters ?, +, {, |, (, and ) lose their special meaning; instead use the backslashed versions \?, \+, \{, \|, \(, and \).
ahh yes, DNS domains . .. well, it's not just Windows that does that it is, in fact, part of address resolution that the first thing that gets checked is.. and then . You can get around it by manually adding the '.' to the end of the domain. Try http://www.cnn.com./ and watch it go to the correct place. (Assuming cnn.com. doesn't redirect you to to cnn.com, which would be looked up according to the usual rules)
This is true, in theory. However,.NET WebForms use IE-only javascript (among other things) meaning that webpages created that way will not run on Mozilla or other browsers. It's a known problem with a number of Knowledge Base article about it. If you roll your own forms/pages/javascript in combination with.NET for server-side CGI only, you will have as much cross-browser compatibility you code in yourself.
They "got around" this by taking a shot of the root window and bluring. But I don't know what "strange effects" you're talking about. In general, the technique works well, but deffinately falls under the "hack" category. The *real* solution would be to use XRender, but well, that's a-whole-nother ball of wax that I don't want to get into.
in my experience (and based on my readings of people who know more about such things than I) lbx is of little to no help in just about any situation. Read Keith Packard's "An LBX Post-Mortem" if you want more detailed description of why LBX fails to do what LBX set out to do.
Re:Is the X Consortium relevant anymore?
on
A Sound Server For X
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
XFree86 is the "Official" X.Org references implementation, if that answers your question.
And XPrint is pretty successful, if you count non-Linux platforms (where XFree86's Xprt XPrint server is horribly broken)
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
on
A Sound Server For X
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If XMMS is using that much, then it is seriously broken. Admittedly, X *can* use a lot of bandwidth, but the onus for this is almost entirely on the application (toolkit) developer. Gtk+ and QT used to be really bad at this, but have since improved dramatically. Even so, there are a lot of variables to consider and using a light-weight theme in your respective toolkit can make a large impact on network performance.
When I work from home, I do so *entirely* out of an ssh-forwarded X connection, including, but not limited to, multiple XEmacs sessions, terminals and occasionally a remote Mozilla. The *only* problems I have encountered involved XEmacs doing silly things with the cut-buffer and pausing momentarily.
I am, admittedly, not an expert on the X11 wire protocol, but from what I have read from those who are, it is not inherently bandwidth heavy, but any protocol can be abused.
Additionally, sound is surprisingly light on a LAN. Doing some tests with K12LTSP esd integration Eric Harrison discovered that streaming audio frequently takes up less bandwidth than moving a window in "opaque" mode (contents continually updated)
Re:What's wrong with the old ones?
on
A Sound Server For X
·
· Score: 5, Informative
esound sucks, I mean, really
network transparent sound (ala X)
tightly coupled video and audio (check out their page for the latency requirements)
cooperates with the X server: can send audio data over a number of different transports, including CORE X
I could go on, but I can summarize with: MAS is a much, much better solution than those you mentioned for X applications. To top it all off, I'm pretty sure it doesn't require X, and can be used for console apps as well. (mpg321, etc.)
Have you considered using the mozilla security libs? I know they are cross platform for one and I'm pretty sure you can just use them without linking to the entire beast. (Evolution uses NSS for S/MIME, SSL and TLS)
Yes, actually, as of 1.1 and 1.0.1 most of these are fixed. Even the Register article makes mention of the fact that only one of these bugs affects any "current release" of Mozilla, any branch.
regardless of the fact that there's already a calendaring standard called iCal. Wouldn't it be great if some opensource calendaring program decided to call themselves iCal?
Well, if you want details, here are details found in of the US Code Title 17: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/
Chapter 10 is probably the most important as it relates to this matter as it conatains this lovely paragraph: No copyright infringement lawsuit may be brought based on consumers' noncommercial use of digital or analog recording devices to copy prerecorded music. No copyright lawsuit may be based on the manufacture, importation, distribution, or sale of digital or analog recording devices or media.
I'd say that this pretty accurately sums up the "yes, I can make a copy for my own private non-commercial use" argument. However, there are specific "archival" copy permissions for Computer Programs that do not apply to any other type of copyrighted work. So, in slimy recording industry exec speak: The <i>archival</i> exemption doesn't apply in the case of CDs, but there are other parts that do and grant nearly identical consumer protection.
He talks about the "Resize and Rotate" extension (not yet implemented) to help with a number of issues that have plagued X for a while, including resizing of the actual resolution (rather than the way a resolution change is currently handled) and has some thoughts on how this extension could help with migrating X clients between multiple servers.
well, you are, in part, mistaken. SSH is a proprietary product from SSH.com (I don't know what the exact company name is ATM) and while it is an outstanding technology (well, v2 of the protocol is, v1 . . . not so much) it was not "adopted" by the open movement. SSH (the company) has had the protocol ratified as a standard, and OpenSSH is an implementation of that standard (well, Internet-Draft at the moment) and SSH.com "tolerates" OpenSSH only in that it has no alternative as it initially submitted SSH to the IETF. So if they want it to be a standard, they can't inhibit other implementations of said standard. This is also the reason they lost (and horribly, I might add) their battle over the "SSH" trademark. SSH is the name of a standard protocol (at their own doing) so the company lost the right to use it exclusively.
Yup, but they did the exact opposite: threatened cash-starved schools with an audit and a 30-day deadline (I'm certain this was reported on Slashdot). Due to some horrible press they have since largely recanted (and it seems there was some internal "rearranging" shortly afterwards as well).
oops, forgot to add in my last reply about 3)Metacity does a better job of this than Sawfish and there is a FAQ about Anti-Aliased text, but the short of it is create a.gnomerc file in your home directory, make it executable and add "export GDK_USE_XFT=1" to the top of it. That's it.
1) sonofa! I've been running GNOME2 snapshots for so long I can't remember exactly how I got this to work; I've been running Metacity almost as long as GNOME2 (some of the earlier snapshots basically refused to run anything other than Sawfish). One way you can change the window manager is with gconf-editor under "/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager" change "current" (and probably "default") to point to whatever WM you want to use, log out and log back in.
2) I miss ASClock too. I'm sure someone will do some kind of porting eventually, until then I'll just have to suffer (I don't miss it enough to write it myself).
3) Haven't used sawfish in a long while, can't help here.
Re:Differences appear minor
on
Gnome 2.0 RC1
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Wow, do I have to disagree about the development standpoint here. Sure the dependencies can be a pain, but that's where the beauty and flexibility of autoconf/automake and pkg-config make life easy again. The additional modularity granted by separating different functions into their own libraries far outweighs the additional overhead of a lot of dependencies. Having watched GNOME and KDE development closely since before the 1.0 KDE and 0.3.0 very unstable "technology preview" GNOME I can say the essential difference between the two projects is that KDE is focused on "doing it now" and GNOME cares more about "doing it right" than they do about timelines. And it shows. KDE has caused me nothing but problems, and, from a systems administration standpoint, is a real PITA. GNOME, on the other hand, has continually tried to integrate and play nice with existing standards and conventions, which means that, among other things, configuration files are in/etc and everything else is where it is "supposed" to be.
And while you may prefer C++ to C (and for good reason too), the decision to use plain old C for GTK2 was, IMHO, a good one. In so doing you enable the maximum flexibility and, when done right (as GTK2 is, for the most part) makes writing language bindings (almost) trivial. I can't say for QT, but GTK/Glib 2 allow for complete run-time introspection of types, parameters, etc. in a very clean manner. By doing the base object-system in C with a clean API, it allows binding authors and programmers in general, a way to write to the underlying library in a way that fits in naturally with the language they are using to write it. Rather than using moc hacks or other ugliness, you get clean, standard, C (which may be, IYHO, ugly, but it is standard C, which most compilers support at this point in history -- excluding C99 -- which cannot be said for either C++ or the C++ derivitive used by Qt/KDE). Say what you will about C the language, but using it to implement the object system was a good idea, the additional complexity involved in coding for it is minimal and a the code, in large part, for creating a GObject subclass is largely boilerplate anyway which can be scripted or wrapped by something like 'gob' Everytime I've looked at Qt/KDE development I've been struck with just how . . . unwieldy and inflexsible it is.
The differences in attitude ("let's do it now and invent some new, quasi-documented, way of doing it" vs. "is there a standard way to do this and how should we do it RIGHT") are behind most of the differences in toolkit and, more importantly, time line. GTK2 took a long time to get out, because a lot of thought and planning when into it. Whether this was actually the case with KDE2/3 as well or not, I can't tell, but it certainly doesn't look like or feel like it.
1. Seems to support the W3C HTML Standard, of which "AbsMiddle" is NOT a part. Mozilla has no reason to support this attribute. And while I don't know what the hell it does, the align attribute has been deprecated since HTML 4.0 anyway and CSS should be used instead.
2. Again, the problem is not with mozilla, but with web designers and (surprise, surprise) IE not supporting the standard. Mozilla also doesn't support NS4.x proprietary layers either. Why? because they were non-standard and very broken, just like IE style layers, who'd a thunk it?
these are the only real issues I can find with your complaints. Fix your pages, then, and only then, can you complain about the browser not working.
If you use Gnome, Nautilus has been able to do this for ages, you must simply change the View to "View as Icons" or "View as List" rather than "View as Webpage" and it will work.
As much as I don't have to use Windows at all these days, I haven't used LiteStep in a while, but when I did, it made Windows tolerable, multiple desktops, a dock, among other things, made the Windows desktop much more usable. The only drawback was the awkwardness of editing configuration files in Windows; why I didn't download Emacs or Vim for Windows and save myself the aggravation of Notepad, I can't remember...
Slashdot Mirror
Low-friction wheels don't work very well, as is evidenced by the difficulty in driving on ice, wet roads, that annoying metal grating on some bridges, etc. In fact, one of the reasons wheels work as well as they do is that the edge in contact with the ground is not moving (relative to the ground) and as such, can apply a force relative to its (higher) coefficient of static friction, rather than the lower coefficient of kinetic friction.
While it may not help in the confusion, what you're seeing with the escape-open-paren vs. not is the difference between Basic and Extended regular expressions in POSIX parlance. Or, to quote the GNU grep man page:
In basic regular expressions the metacharacters ?, +, {, |, (, and ) lose their special meaning; instead use the backslashed versions \?, \+, \{, \|, \(, and \).
ahh yes, DNS domains . . . .. and then . You can get around it by manually adding the '.' to the end of the domain. Try http://www.cnn.com./ and watch it go to the correct place. (Assuming cnn.com. doesn't redirect you to to cnn.com, which would be looked up according to the usual rules)
well, it's not just Windows that does that it is, in fact, part of address resolution that the first thing that gets checked is
This is true, in theory. However, .NET WebForms use IE-only javascript (among other things) meaning that webpages created that way will not run on Mozilla or other browsers. It's a known problem with a number of Knowledge Base article about it. If you roll your own forms/pages/javascript in combination with .NET for server-side CGI only, you will have as much cross-browser compatibility you code in yourself.
They "got around" this by taking a shot of the root window and bluring. But I don't know what "strange effects" you're talking about. In general, the technique works well, but deffinately falls under the "hack" category. The *real* solution would be to use XRender, but well, that's a-whole-nother ball of wax that I don't want to get into.
in my experience (and based on my readings of people who know more about such things than I) lbx is of little to no help in just about any situation. Read Keith Packard's "An LBX Post-Mortem" if you want more detailed description of why LBX fails to do what LBX set out to do.
XFree86 is the "Official" X.Org references implementation, if that answers your question.
And XPrint is pretty successful, if you count non-Linux platforms (where XFree86's Xprt XPrint server is horribly broken)
If XMMS is using that much, then it is seriously broken. Admittedly, X *can* use a lot of bandwidth, but the onus for this is almost entirely on the application (toolkit) developer. Gtk+ and QT used to be really bad at this, but have since improved dramatically. Even so, there are a lot of variables to consider and using a light-weight theme in your respective toolkit can make a large impact on network performance.
When I work from home, I do so *entirely* out of an ssh-forwarded X connection, including, but not limited to, multiple XEmacs sessions, terminals and occasionally a remote Mozilla. The *only* problems I have encountered involved XEmacs doing silly things with the cut-buffer and pausing momentarily.
I am, admittedly, not an expert on the X11 wire protocol, but from what I have read from those who are, it is not inherently bandwidth heavy, but any protocol can be abused.
Additionally, sound is surprisingly light on a LAN. Doing some tests with K12LTSP esd integration Eric Harrison discovered that streaming audio frequently takes up less bandwidth than moving a window in "opaque" mode (contents continually updated)
can send audio data over a number of different transports, including CORE X
I could go on, but I can summarize with: MAS is a much, much better solution than those you mentioned for X applications. To top it all off, I'm pretty sure it doesn't require X, and can be used for console apps as well. (mpg321, etc.)
Only one game that matters anyway:
Grand Theft Auto Vice City
More than happy playing it in DTS mode.
Then again, I'm sure it would have 5.1 on the XBox if, well, it existed for the XBox.
When Microsoft comes up with a clever marketing gimmick to retire the XBox due to escalating losses, will it become the ex-XBox?
Further.net, free, LEGAL music trading using a Java P2P client and carrying only legal live recordings of your (or at least MY) favorite bands.
Have you considered using the mozilla security libs? I know they are cross platform for one and I'm pretty sure you can just use them without linking to the entire beast. (Evolution uses NSS for S/MIME, SSL and TLS)
Yes, actually, as of 1.1 and 1.0.1 most of these are fixed. Even the Register article makes mention of the fact that only one of these bugs affects any "current release" of Mozilla, any branch.
regardless of the fact that there's already a calendaring standard called iCal.
Wouldn't it be great if some opensource calendaring program decided to call themselves iCal?
yeah, I really want see how many people can vote using:
/usr/bin/vote -h /usr/bin/vote {-c |-b }
/usr/bin/vote -c President "not George Bush"
$
usage:
$
Well, if you want details, here are details found in of the US Code Title 17:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/
Chapter 10 is probably the most important as it relates to this matter as it conatains this lovely paragraph:
No copyright infringement lawsuit may be brought based on consumers' noncommercial use of digital or analog recording devices to copy prerecorded music. No copyright lawsuit may be based on the manufacture, importation, distribution, or sale of digital or analog recording devices or media.
I'd say that this pretty accurately sums up the "yes, I can make a copy for my own private non-commercial use" argument. However, there are specific "archival" copy permissions for Computer Programs that do not apply to any other type of copyrighted work. So, in slimy recording industry exec speak: The <i>archival</i> exemption doesn't apply in the case of CDs, but there are other parts that do and grant nearly identical consumer protection.
http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/talks/randr/randr/
He talks about the "Resize and Rotate" extension (not yet implemented) to help with a number of issues that have plagued X for a while, including resizing of the actual resolution (rather than the way a resolution change is currently handled) and has some thoughts on how this extension could help with migrating X clients between multiple servers.
well, you are, in part, mistaken. SSH is a proprietary product from SSH.com (I don't know what the exact company name is ATM) and while it is an outstanding technology (well, v2 of the protocol is, v1 . . . not so much) it was not "adopted" by the open movement. SSH (the company) has had the protocol ratified as a standard, and OpenSSH is an implementation of that standard (well, Internet-Draft at the moment) and SSH.com "tolerates" OpenSSH only in that it has no alternative as it initially submitted SSH to the IETF. So if they want it to be a standard, they can't inhibit other implementations of said standard. This is also the reason they lost (and horribly, I might add) their battle over the "SSH" trademark. SSH is the name of a standard protocol (at their own doing) so the company lost the right to use it exclusively.
Yup, but they did the exact opposite: threatened cash-starved schools with an audit and a 30-day deadline (I'm certain this was reported on Slashdot). Due to some horrible press they have since largely recanted (and it seems there was some internal "rearranging" shortly afterwards as well).
oops, forgot to add in my last reply about 3)Metacity does a better job of this than Sawfish and there is a FAQ about Anti-Aliased text, but the short of it is create a .gnomerc file in your home directory, make it executable and add "export GDK_USE_XFT=1" to the top of it. That's it.
Bloody 2 minute slashdot timeout . . .
1) sonofa! I've been running GNOME2 snapshots for so long I can't remember exactly how I got this to work; I've been running Metacity almost as long as GNOME2 (some of the earlier snapshots basically refused to run anything other than Sawfish). One way you can change the window manager is with gconf-editor under "/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager" change
"current" (and probably "default") to point to whatever WM you want to use, log out and log back in.
2) I miss ASClock too. I'm sure someone will do some kind of porting eventually, until then I'll just have to suffer (I don't miss it enough to write it myself).
3) Haven't used sawfish in a long while, can't help here.
Wow, do I have to disagree about the development standpoint here. Sure the dependencies can be a pain, but that's where the beauty and flexibility of autoconf/automake and pkg-config make life easy again. The additional modularity granted by separating different functions into their own libraries far outweighs the additional overhead of a lot of dependencies. Having watched GNOME and KDE development closely since before the 1.0 KDE and 0.3.0 very unstable "technology preview" GNOME I can say the essential difference between the two projects is that KDE is focused on "doing it now" and GNOME cares more about "doing it right" than they do about timelines. And it shows. KDE has caused me nothing but problems, and, from a systems administration standpoint, is a real PITA. GNOME, on the other hand, has continually tried to integrate and play nice with existing standards and conventions, which means that, among other things, configuration files are in /etc and everything else is where it is "supposed" to be.
And while you may prefer C++ to C (and for good reason too), the decision to use plain old C for GTK2 was, IMHO, a good one. In so doing you enable the maximum flexibility and, when done right (as GTK2 is, for the most part) makes writing language bindings (almost) trivial. I can't say for QT, but GTK/Glib 2 allow for complete run-time introspection of types, parameters, etc. in a very clean manner. By doing the base object-system in C with a clean API, it allows binding authors and programmers in general, a way to write to the underlying library in a way that fits in naturally with the language they are using to write it. Rather than using moc hacks or other ugliness, you get clean, standard, C (which may be, IYHO, ugly, but it is standard C, which most compilers support at this point in history -- excluding C99 -- which cannot be said for either C++ or the C++ derivitive used by Qt/KDE). Say what you will about C the language, but using it to implement the object system was a good idea, the additional complexity involved in coding for it is minimal and a the code, in large part, for creating a GObject subclass is largely boilerplate anyway which can be scripted or wrapped by something like 'gob'
Everytime I've looked at Qt/KDE development I've been struck with just how . . . unwieldy and inflexsible it is.
The differences in attitude ("let's do it now and invent some new, quasi-documented, way of doing it" vs. "is there a standard way to do this and how should we do it RIGHT") are behind most of the differences in toolkit and, more importantly, time line. GTK2 took a long time to get out, because a lot of thought and planning when into it. Whether this was actually the case with KDE2/3 as well or not, I can't tell, but it certainly doesn't look like or feel like it.
--Shahms
1. Seems to support the W3C HTML Standard, of which "AbsMiddle" is NOT a part. Mozilla has no reason to support this attribute. And while I don't know what the hell it does, the align attribute has been deprecated since HTML 4.0 anyway and CSS should be used instead.
2. Again, the problem is not with mozilla, but with web designers and (surprise, surprise) IE not supporting the standard. Mozilla also doesn't support NS4.x proprietary layers either. Why? because they were non-standard and very broken, just like IE style layers, who'd a thunk it?
these are the only real issues I can find with your complaints. Fix your pages, then, and only then, can you complain about the browser not working.
If you use Gnome, Nautilus has been able to do this for ages, you must simply change the View to "View as Icons" or "View as List" rather than "View as Webpage" and it will work.
As much as I don't have to use Windows at all these days, I haven't used LiteStep in a while, but when I did, it made Windows tolerable, multiple desktops, a dock, among other things, made the Windows desktop much more usable. The only drawback was the awkwardness of editing configuration files in Windows; why I didn't download Emacs or Vim for Windows and save myself the aggravation of Notepad, I can't remember...
--Shahms