Right, but it depends on what type of chip IBM is going to produce. I expect many other chips are still being produced at.25 microns. So while the article was at best worded poorly, it may be an indication of the market IBM is planning on competing in.
If they were to change the digital standard to allow for additional codecs now, it might take years to hash out the patent licensing. Also, the older the codec, the sooner the patents expire. MPEG2 has been around for a while now. And if they're really taking advantage of new codecs, they'll need to not only add support for them, but also add support for different divisions of the spectrum so as to use the saved bandwidth for something else.
Not to mention those few digital tuners already out there and those chipsets already in development...
While it would be nice to take advantage of all the latest technology, at some point you have to say it's good enough and go with it.
Didn't Arthur C. Clarke describe something like this in "The City and the Stars?" It's been a long time since I read it, but I believe that they had a transportation system that was essentially a wide moving sidewalk; the closer to the middle you moved, the faster it went.
One point to watch for would be the first EULA that prohibits publishing performance benchmarks. This is now fairly common for high-end software, and is one of the more evil provisions out there.
I wrote another script along the same lines. Yours is probably better, as I presume it checks the last-used timestamp on each file in the package. Mine just checked what was currently running (based on/proc), including libraries. It then checked the dependencies and gave a list of RPMs that you are running, RPMs that aren't running but are required, and RPMs that are candidates to uninstall.
The reports of the tcl script running a long time aren't surprising. Mine is a csh script, and it, too, will sit there for a long time before giving a result, and I don't think mine is doing as much work.
Red Hat: 3.2 is in Rawhide
on
GCC 3.1.1 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Well, 3.2 hasn't been released yet, but that hasn't stopped Red Hat from including it in their Rawhide release.
gcc-3.2-0.1.i386.rpm
I assume it's a pre-release, and they intend to move to a full release before Rawhide becomes 8.0. That should be a relatively safe bet for them, considering not only their unique position in regards to gcc, but also that the GCC web page cites an expected release date for 3.2 as being 2002-07-2x.
Saying something is impossible always sends up a red flag for me. Sometimes poeple say this because the problem is NP-complete, but they miss the idea of using aproximation algorithms that provide a solution that is good enough. In this case, you point out a valid technical problem, but then assume that there is no solution. In fact, there is a very simple solution for this sort of problem. Think of IP Masquarade, and then apply the concept to this situation--write a X11 proxy that changes the window IDs.
This is a great idea. It would be wonderful if X were designed to allow applications to dynamically change their display setting, or even talk to more than one X server at once.
In most cases, it would simply be a matter of hacking the X library to allow you to close the connection to the server and open a new one (presumably to a different server). There might be some issues with having your resources suddenly change (you know, the stuff in places like ~/.Xdefaults). There might be a lot of issues of font support being different on the other server. There might be issues of assumptions that the server knows what windows you already have open. And it doesn't let you display on two servers at once.
With the current architecture of X, probably the best solution is a vnc-like virtual X server. This would be what your applications talk to, and it would open connections to zero or more real X servers. (No reason to require a real X server all the time, is there?) This is very similar to VNC, except that it's done on a per-window basis and talks X protocol to the real display server. Now we just need someone to write it.
The JPEG consortium may have formed in 1985, but the.jpg file format didn't come along until 1991, and that was based on considerations of a bunch of compression schemes considered in 1987, after the patent was filed.
Check out the FORG financial data. You'll see that their market cap is over $100 million, and it will go up if the manage to force royalty payments from the patent. I don't see any way that it would work out to be cheaper to buy the company than to pay the royalties.
On a related note, I believe that the LZW compression patent expires on 20 June 2003. Some quick Google research indicates that while JPEG only goes back to 1991 as a standard, the methods used date back to at least June 1987.
So even if there do turn out to be some legitimate patents, they only have a few years to pester us.
Red Hat switched to gcc 3 in their rawhide release some time ago. They switched back to 2.96 before releasing 7.3, but shortly after that was out the door, it was back to 3.1. They now have a beta release based on rawhide from a few weeks ago.
So it looks like Red Hat almost released 8.0 instead of 7.3 with gcc 3, but decided to wait a release to be sure everything was stable.
When technology exceeds what is needed for current tasks, new tasks will arise. We can't necessarily say what those tasks will be (if we could, we would start up companies to develop those products), but we can see some recent examples. When hard drive capacities shot up in the past few years, first MP3 collections took off, then TiVo and ReplayTV arose.
My mail gets processed by qmail, and it seems to automatically add X-Envelope-To: header lines, so you can see what address received the message.
Your mail server has to know who it is supposed to be delivering the mail to, and in most cases this is made available to mail filters in one form or another. Of course, if you're filtering it on the client side after it's been delivered to your mail box, you may be out of luck. (I've always been of the opinion that filtering should be on the server side, for this and other reasons, but people make do with what they can get.)
For heavy Internet users, having your own domain is wonderful. I do the same thing you describe. I'm hosted at pair.com (no affiliation other than as a customer), and for about $6/month, they host my personal web pages and let me put arbitrary filters on any incoming email address. I've killed off a few that have gotten spam from web sites releasing the address. I've killed off a few that I used when posting to mailing lists that are archived on the web.
But mostly, I've found I just don't get much spam because I protect my email address. For example, when placing my email address on my web page, I use JavaScript to encode it, so a web robot that doesn't parse the script won't see the address. I've never received spam at an address protected that way.
Four or five years ago, I did some ray tracing based on a LEGO castle I had built. I used Netshade (a version of Rayshade) with a library for the bricks that someone had created.
Doing a quick Google search, I see that there are now libraries for Povray, as well, now.
Does anyone have experience with doing this? I'm thinking it would be cool to make a movie of some knights marching through my castle, or a train running around.
The Earth is about 24,000 miles around, and he's about 8,000 miles short of that. Obviously, as you said, if he had gone on a 15-minute 1-mile trip around the South Pole, nobody would have considered it a round-the-world trip. At what point does it count?
Sure, he set a record for the longest distance solo flight, I'll give him that.
Yup, I just updated from CVS and rebuilt, and it still doesn't play. In fact, now the audio is skipping, whereas it sounded fine when I was using the rpm packages. Oh well. At least Yatta still plays fine.:)
I think it depends on the context. In general, people here are pro-Apple for a number of reasons:
1) Anything that competes with Microsoft is good. 2) With OS X, you have a real Unix system. 3) Did I mention that it's not a Windows company?
On the other hand, they get their share of flak because:
1) They're not going out and GPLing lots of code. 2) They buy software companies and then shut down the non-Mac versions to lock customers in. 3) Apple has close ties to Disney (mostly via Pixar), and Disney brings with it all sorts of baggage (MPAA and such). 4) Apple sold its soul to the devil (that deal with Microsoft a few years ago). 5) Apple has never supported Quicktime/Sorensen for Linux, and though they've pointed fingers as Sorensen, we all believe that with a little pressure from Apple, it would happen.
So expect a mixed opinion of Apple here on/., depending on who's posting and the context.
Or perhaps the aliens sent life-creating probes to thousands or even millions of star systems.
Imagine if we found that life is unique to Earth, but there are tons of planets out there capable of supporting life. Now we build a probe that will go to one such system. This probe determines what planet in the system has the best chance of supporting life, and it goes into orbit around it. Over time, it launches capsules with increasingly more complex life forms. This is done in conjunction with monitoring of the planet's atmosphere to encourage Earth-like development. We mass-produce said probes, and launch one to each of our neighboring star systems, expanding our definition of "neighboring" as we continue to produce the probes.
Now when we get around to colonizing the stars, we have planets ready for us.
Or if Apple wants to be really clever, they could install three buttons, but have single piece of plastic over them. People like us could then replace the big button with three separate buttons and adjust the driver to distinguish between them.
I've never seen a three-button mouse on an x86 laptop. If someone made one, be it Apple, IBM, or Dell, they would find a burst of popularity from the Unix crowd.
The difference is that with a laptop, you don't want to have to take extra accessories with you. I have no problem replacing the mouse on a desktop, but it's rather tricky to swap out the built-in mouse on a laptop.
At least if you have two buttons, you can emulate 3 buttons and click both buttons to get the middle button. That's not optimal, and you have problems with misclicks when doing that, but you can't even do that with only one button.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but it depends on what type of chip IBM is going to produce. I expect many other chips are still being produced at .25 microns. So while the article was at best worded poorly, it may be an indication of the market IBM is planning on competing in.
If they were to change the digital standard to allow for additional codecs now, it might take years to hash out the patent licensing. Also, the older the codec, the sooner the patents expire. MPEG2 has been around for a while now. And if they're really taking advantage of new codecs, they'll need to not only add support for them, but also add support for different divisions of the spectrum so as to use the saved bandwidth for something else.
Not to mention those few digital tuners already out there and those chipsets already in development...
While it would be nice to take advantage of all the latest technology, at some point you have to say it's good enough and go with it.
Didn't Arthur C. Clarke describe something like this in "The City and the Stars?" It's been a long time since I read it, but I believe that they had a transportation system that was essentially a wide moving sidewalk; the closer to the middle you moved, the faster it went.
One point to watch for would be the first EULA that prohibits publishing performance benchmarks. This is now fairly common for high-end software, and is one of the more evil provisions out there.
I wrote another script along the same lines. Yours is probably better, as I presume it checks the last-used timestamp on each file in the package. Mine just checked what was currently running (based on /proc), including libraries. It then checked the dependencies and gave a list of RPMs that you are running, RPMs that aren't running but are required, and RPMs that are candidates to uninstall.
The reports of the tcl script running a long time aren't surprising. Mine is a csh script, and it, too, will sit there for a long time before giving a result, and I don't think mine is doing as much work.
Well, 3.2 hasn't been released yet, but that hasn't stopped Red Hat from including it in their Rawhide release.
gcc-3.2-0.1.i386.rpm
I assume it's a pre-release, and they intend to move to a full release before Rawhide becomes 8.0. That should be a relatively safe bet for them, considering not only their unique position in regards to gcc, but also that the GCC web page cites an expected release date for 3.2 as being 2002-07-2x.
Yup, what you describe is, I believe, exactly what Xinerama does.
I don't think it allows you to move windows between arbitrary X displays, but it's a step in the right direction.
Perhaps someone more familiar with Xinerama could say something intelligent about it?
Saying something is impossible always sends up a red flag for me. Sometimes poeple say this because the problem is NP-complete, but they miss the idea of using aproximation algorithms that provide a solution that is good enough. In this case, you point out a valid technical problem, but then assume that there is no solution. In fact, there is a very simple solution for this sort of problem. Think of IP Masquarade, and then apply the concept to this situation--write a X11 proxy that changes the window IDs.
This is a great idea. It would be wonderful if X were designed to allow applications to dynamically change their display setting, or even talk to more than one X server at once.
In most cases, it would simply be a matter of hacking the X library to allow you to close the connection to the server and open a new one (presumably to a different server). There might be some issues with having your resources suddenly change (you know, the stuff in places like ~/.Xdefaults). There might be a lot of issues of font support being different on the other server. There might be issues of assumptions that the server knows what windows you already have open. And it doesn't let you display on two servers at once.
With the current architecture of X, probably the best solution is a vnc-like virtual X server. This would be what your applications talk to, and it would open connections to zero or more real X servers. (No reason to require a real X server all the time, is there?) This is very similar to VNC, except that it's done on a per-window basis and talks X protocol to the real display server. Now we just need someone to write it.
The JPEG consortium may have formed in 1985, but the .jpg file format didn't come along until 1991, and that was based on considerations of a bunch of compression schemes considered in 1987, after the patent was filed.
Check out the FORG financial data. You'll see that their market cap is over $100 million, and it will go up if the manage to force royalty payments from the patent. I don't see any way that it would work out to be cheaper to buy the company than to pay the royalties.
On a related note, I believe that the LZW compression patent expires on 20 June 2003. Some quick Google research indicates that while JPEG only goes back to 1991 as a standard, the methods used date back to at least June 1987.
So even if there do turn out to be some legitimate patents, they only have a few years to pester us.
Red Hat switched to gcc 3 in their rawhide release some time ago. They switched back to 2.96 before releasing 7.3, but shortly after that was out the door, it was back to 3.1. They now have a beta release based on rawhide from a few weeks ago.
So it looks like Red Hat almost released 8.0 instead of 7.3 with gcc 3, but decided to wait a release to be sure everything was stable.
So they're getting close.
When technology exceeds what is needed for current tasks, new tasks will arise. We can't necessarily say what those tasks will be (if we could, we would start up companies to develop those products), but we can see some recent examples. When hard drive capacities shot up in the past few years, first MP3 collections took off, then TiVo and ReplayTV arose.
(I guess I've been trolled. Oh well.)
My mail gets processed by qmail, and it seems to automatically add X-Envelope-To: header lines, so you can see what address received the message.
Your mail server has to know who it is supposed to be delivering the mail to, and in most cases this is made available to mail filters in one form or another. Of course, if you're filtering it on the client side after it's been delivered to your mail box, you may be out of luck. (I've always been of the opinion that filtering should be on the server side, for this and other reasons, but people make do with what they can get.)
For heavy Internet users, having your own domain is wonderful. I do the same thing you describe. I'm hosted at pair.com (no affiliation other than as a customer), and for about $6/month, they host my personal web pages and let me put arbitrary filters on any incoming email address. I've killed off a few that have gotten spam from web sites releasing the address. I've killed off a few that I used when posting to mailing lists that are archived on the web.
But mostly, I've found I just don't get much spam because I protect my email address. For example, when placing my email address on my web page, I use JavaScript to encode it, so a web robot that doesn't parse the script won't see the address. I've never received spam at an address protected that way.
Four or five years ago, I did some ray tracing based on a LEGO castle I had built. I used Netshade (a version of Rayshade) with a library for the bricks that someone had created.
Doing a quick Google search, I see that there are now libraries for Povray, as well, now.
Does anyone have experience with doing this? I'm thinking it would be cool to make a movie of some knights marching through my castle, or a train running around.
The Earth is about 24,000 miles around, and he's about 8,000 miles short of that. Obviously, as you said, if he had gone on a 15-minute 1-mile trip around the South Pole, nobody would have considered it a round-the-world trip. At what point does it count?
Sure, he set a record for the longest distance solo flight, I'll give him that.
Have you ran into any legal issues with your rocketry? Have the government had any significant impact (pro or con)?
Yup, I just updated from CVS and rebuilt, and it still doesn't play. In fact, now the audio is skipping, whereas it sounded fine when I was using the rpm packages. Oh well. At least Yatta still plays fine. :)
I think it depends on the context. In general, people here are pro-Apple for a number of reasons:
/., depending on who's posting and the context.
1) Anything that competes with Microsoft is good.
2) With OS X, you have a real Unix system.
3) Did I mention that it's not a Windows company?
On the other hand, they get their share of flak because:
1) They're not going out and GPLing lots of code.
2) They buy software companies and then shut down the non-Mac versions to lock customers in.
3) Apple has close ties to Disney (mostly via Pixar), and Disney brings with it all sorts of baggage (MPAA and such).
4) Apple sold its soul to the devil (that deal with Microsoft a few years ago).
5) Apple has never supported Quicktime/Sorensen for Linux, and though they've pointed fingers as Sorensen, we all believe that with a little pressure from Apple, it would happen.
So expect a mixed opinion of Apple here on
I just downloaded it, and mplayer plays the audio just fine, but I'm not getting the video. Is there a working Linux codec?
Or perhaps the aliens sent life-creating probes to thousands or even millions of star systems.
Imagine if we found that life is unique to Earth, but there are tons of planets out there capable of supporting life. Now we build a probe that will go to one such system. This probe determines what planet in the system has the best chance of supporting life, and it goes into orbit around it. Over time, it launches capsules with increasingly more complex life forms. This is done in conjunction with monitoring of the planet's atmosphere to encourage Earth-like development. We mass-produce said probes, and launch one to each of our neighboring star systems, expanding our definition of "neighboring" as we continue to produce the probes.
Now when we get around to colonizing the stars, we have planets ready for us.
Or if Apple wants to be really clever, they could install three buttons, but have single piece of plastic over them. People like us could then replace the big button with three separate buttons and adjust the driver to distinguish between them.
I've never seen a three-button mouse on an x86 laptop. If someone made one, be it Apple, IBM, or Dell, they would find a burst of popularity from the Unix crowd.
The difference is that with a laptop, you don't want to have to take extra accessories with you. I have no problem replacing the mouse on a desktop, but it's rather tricky to swap out the built-in mouse on a laptop.
At least if you have two buttons, you can emulate 3 buttons and click both buttons to get the middle button. That's not optimal, and you have problems with misclicks when doing that, but you can't even do that with only one button.