Very offtopic, but worth knowing. Although I usually prefer a network share via samba or NFS. The ancient Unixian in me wants everything to be "just a file"!
You think "single-user computer" means "only one computer per user"? You're obviously too young to remember the timesharing era, when a CPU was something you had to share. That doesn't excuse your sloppy parsing though.
Technologically, an X terminal is just a computer that runs a X server, and nothing else. Was there ever a time when such a system was drastically cheaper than commodity computers? Without a good price advantage, X terminals didn't make economic sense. I can only think of one other excuse for them: the assumption that applications would always be run on a shared system. I suspect a lot of IS people would be a lot happier if that were true -- it would save them always having to fix systems screwed up by too-clever users.
Re:Terminate the Terminal
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 1
For you maybe. I've worked in some very heterogenous environments where X was indispensible. I'd like to see more use of X. For example, I think it would be great if I could redirect the Tivo GUI to my desktop.
Well, if your environment is really heterogenous, then X isn't much use. Even if Tivo is implemented using X (it doesn't look like it, but I don't actually know), they're never going to tolerate that level of hacking. And of course, X is useless unless the system you're accessing is X aware, which lets out that mildly popular OS from Redmond. If you absolutely need to access a remote GUI application, first, there's probably a better way, and second, if there isn't "thin clients" (which are actually highres dumb terminals, but I digress) are a much more general solution.
X is a network based system because it is an advancement over the hardwired graphics systems that preceded it.
My caffeine and ritalin levels must be too low -- I can't understand that sentence at all.
[time-sharing]Whaddya call the whole Internet?
If you'd followed the link in my post, you'd know the difference between time-sharing and the multitasking servers that you access over the internet.
don't see any need to dump X except for when space is at an absolute premium.
It's not just space. X windows is terribly complicated, cludgy, and unreliable. Switching to a simpler GUI technology would drastically improve the strength of desktop Linux and Unix.
I think that's kind of backwards. I don't know much about Tom Tykwer, but the "what if" style of RLR suggests a certain video game or RPG derivation.
Terminate the Terminal
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Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, there is the odd moment when it's a nuisance to not be able to run a remote X application. Like when you want to log into another system and run GVIM. But yeah, you're right, it's not worth keeping X around just for those rare circumstances, all of which have another solution.
It's worth remembering why X is a network-based system in the first place. The X server software we use now was originally meant to run only on a dedicated terminal. Some of these were actually manufactured (I think there might even be some still in production) but X Terminals were never cheap enough to compete with single-user computers for most applications. I suspect that the X architects just took it as a given that most computing would always be done on time-sharing systems. Hey, don't snear at them. That was about the time that Intel almost went under...
We seem to have different definitions of "reliable". And a web developer isn't going to buy yours. If you can't promise them that a technology will give the intended result most of the time (and remember, IE accounts for 95% of all web users), to them it isn't "reliable". Maybe you don't think it's fair that GIF counts as more reliable just because it attempts to do less. But "fair" isn't a factor here.
OK, I had heard that 3G phones would be power hungry all by themselves, but perhaps that was wrong.
If GSM networks are maxed out, does it really make sense to expand capacity using technology that requires more bandwidth? That is the big problem I have with 3G: there's only so much radio spectrum. Wireless streaming and multicasting may be ultrakewl, but I just don't see how millions of cell users can use this kind of application all at once.
The bit rate you report for GPRS is about what's claimed by providers in the U.S. But it's my understanding that this is less than half the theoretical limit for the technology. The best technology in the world can't squeeze blood out of a turnip.
A certain popular browser doesn't handle a lot of transparent PNGs correctly. (Can you guess which one?) Erik Arvidsson has a clever workaround, but I have to question whether kludging ones web pages that way is a good idea.
Another issue I have with PNG is that some software seems to generate illegal images. I volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders and every once in a while Mozilla chokes on a page image that's an illegal PNG file. The really irritating thing is that Mozilla is actually able to read the image itself, but if it's allowed to download the very end of the file it says, "This is an illegal PNG! I can't let you look at it anymore!" I have to download the page image and read it with a less intolerant image browser. A pain.
As if that weren't enough, IIS doesn't ship with a metadata entry for PNG. Which, predicably enough, doesn't matter to IE, but screws up more compliant browsers.
Of course, none of the problems are the fault of the PNG people, who have created some very sexy technology. But until PNG images can be displayed reliably, it makes no sense to insist that everybody should migrate away from GIFs.
There's also the little detail that the notorious LZW patent has expired. That removes one of the big motivations for creating the PNG standard in the first place. Yeah, GIFs don't have as many cool features, but they're still adequate for most people's needs.
I'm reminded of the way they used to advertise those cheap cartridge tapes. They never listed their formatted capacity, only their theoretical maximum compressed capacity. That's just the sort of thing that makes consumer cynical!
Due to my Sprint PCS experience, I have a terrible prejudice against any technology based on CDMA. And all the fun people in GSM-only countries have had with things like SMS prejudices me against any cell technology that doesn't aim to be universal. I guess I'm just immature.
I'm getting less and less interested in this 3G boondogle. All that hassle and expense to access a network that's only 3 times faster than GPRS? And who is going to buy a phone that's only good for 24 hours of standby?
You could argue that the phone's other shortcomings (can't handle Bluetooth without an adapter; no spare battery slot in the charger) are just mistakes on this one project. But I think it says a lot about how totally screwed up the whole 3G thing is.
Reviewer forgot to mention heat. Device that sucks up power that fast must get pretty hot.
I agree. SVG lovers place too much emphasis on interactivity. Maybe someday SVG will challenge JavaScript, but right now that's less important than the fact that graphic support in current web browsers is screwed. Right now, most web graphics uses some kind bitmap. There's either lossless or lossy compression, but there's still too many bits, even if you have a fast connection. Nor do web sites like paying for the extra bandwith. SVG deals with this problem very neatly.
(No, I didn't forget PNG. It has some technical and ideological advantages, but browser support is still, well, incomplete.)
So what's wrong with SVG plugins? They don't exploit the full power of SVG. It's not just a graphics format, it's an XML application. In other words, it's a markup language, just like HTML. A good XML-aware browser (something both IE and Mozilla pretend to be) shouldn't isolate SVG from the rest of the document.
Consider the gif-filled Slashdot page you're looking at right now. They have gotten rid of a lot of bitmaps (though the left hand clickbar looks slightly less cool as a result). But they still use some weird little bitmaps, plus a lot of weird tables and font kludges that are hard to maintain and tend to be browser dependent.
There's a simple fix: put SVG support in the browser (it is a W3C invention after all) and allow indiscriminate embedding of XHTML and SVG in each other. (Not to mention any other XML applications the browser happens to support.) The Mozilla people know this, but still consider SVG support experimental and non-standard. This has been the status quo for quite some time, and given AOL's abandonment of Gecko, is not likely to change.
Maybe if Mozilla had concentrated on basic technological improvements like this and less on eye-candy and silly features... well, AOL, would probably still have screwed them over. But I might feel bad about it.
KHTML looks to be the new leader in open-source web browsers. And their does seem to be a lot of interest in using the engine to render SVG. Alas, the KDE people still think of SVG as something you embed in something else.
Thank you -- that was an instructive link. However:
It boggles my mind that Slashchick managed to become a "web developer" without discovering how the default character set is specified in IE. (View/Encoding).
sC seems to think that IE is doing something non-compliant when it assumes a character set. I dont see anything like that in the html spec. It simply says that every document should have a character set specified somehow. But what is a browser supposed to do when it's not?
UTF-8 and 8859-1 (aka ISO Latin1) are not the same thing. They both use ASCII for the first 127 characters, but after that, forget it. 8859-1 is fixed-width, UTF-8 is variable-width. If Slashdot is sending out UTF-8, then the headers it is using are incorrect.
Actually, you didn't make any mistakes with your input, and I shouldn't have implied that you did.
This all comes down to a simple misunderstanding: people use "ASCII" and "text" interchangably. Nine times out of 10, when you hear somebody talking about ASCII, they're really talking about Latin1. Usually, this mistake doesn't really matter. But this time it did: The guy who was defending Gutenberg's use of "ASCII" managed to imply that Gutenberg uses an American character set. Which was why you flamed him -- and justifiably so. But in fact the core people at Gutenberg and DP do use Latin1 (I was wrong when I claimed they were ignorant about it). The problem is simply that not everybody involved with Gutenberg knows that ASCII and Latin1 are different character sets.
As for things like bold face, Greek characters, etc.: Gutenberg has conventions for representing these. But they're not very carefully thought out, and really should be replaced by something more consistent and mistake proof. But Gutenberg seems to be dominated by ML-haters. (In particular, they don't want to change from TeX to ML for representing equations.) Probably not going to change.
The only problem with your post was something that wasn't your fault: the slash code is likely to screw up any Latin1 character that isn't also an ASCII character.
Actually, everybody seems ignorant of character set issues. I myself had some misconceptions about how HTML does 8-bit characters before I got into this argument and was forced to do some reading. And let's not even talk about the misunderstandings connected with Unicode!
Either the editors should watch out for 8-bit characters, or the Slash code should accept the entire Latin1 character set. The headers say that Slashdot does 8-bit characters, but this is a lie. And translating them to question marks is one of the more benign things it does with them.
Every vendor of an MS Office alternative has set of documents that convert easily and "prove" that interoperability is not an problem. But converting a few samples proves nothing, even if the samples are "typical". In the real world, you can't interoperate unless you have a foolproof filter that's general. And people refuse to see how difficult that is. It'd basically require a breakthrough in AI!
I'd like to see OpenOffice succeed, I really would. It's got so much about it that's cool. I'm particularly anxious to try the DocBook support in the latest version. But can we call an end to tilting at this interoperability windmill? It just wastes a lot of effort on complicated filters and macro languages that are never as compatible as they claim. So lots of developers pour their valuable time into something that can't be done, and OpenOffice develops a reputation for BS. Not good!
I think reviews like this are not so much uncritical as inept. If Eater was out to con us into buying books, he'd write the ignorant BS you see in press releases and on dust jackets. Instead, he tried to endorse a book he likes, but was unable to explain why he liked it.
OK, not everybody's cut out to be a book reviewer. But what are the Slashdot editors for if not to filter out content-free submissions? They seem less and less concerned with doing this.
Can you please spare us "reviews" that are just a list of chapter summaries? Yes, we need to know what the book covers, but a very short list of topics is actually more informative. A technical book review should cover not just what the book explains, but how it explains, and why the reviewer thinks this is good or bad.
OK, forgive me. But that does seem an ill-considered strategy. I mean, what about your other students? Given your relationship, a much better strategy would be to take her aside and say, "Your feelings for me are very flattering" (not "I find them flattering" which would be much harder to say with a straight face) "but I'm (in a relationship|gay|concerned about the ethics of dating a student|dealing with a nasty rash in an intimate place)".
Anyway, that's the problem with humor: it's damned subjective. So how are we to judge posts that are meant to be funny? Never mind the ones that are unintentionally funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Very offtopic, but worth knowing. Although I usually prefer a network share via samba or NFS. The ancient Unixian in me wants everything to be "just a file"!
Technologically, an X terminal is just a computer that runs a X server, and nothing else. Was there ever a time when such a system was drastically cheaper than commodity computers? Without a good price advantage, X terminals didn't make economic sense. I can only think of one other excuse for them: the assumption that applications would always be run on a shared system. I suspect a lot of IS people would be a lot happier if that were true -- it would save them always having to fix systems screwed up by too-clever users.
It's worth remembering why X is a network-based system in the first place. The X server software we use now was originally meant to run only on a dedicated terminal. Some of these were actually manufactured (I think there might even be some still in production) but X Terminals were never cheap enough to compete with single-user computers for most applications. I suspect that the X architects just took it as a given that most computing would always be done on time-sharing systems. Hey, don't snear at them. That was about the time that Intel almost went under...
The only reason it looks cool: a software-driven watch face. Not something I'd pay that much money for!
Somebody realized that "digital software" is a tautology.
We seem to have different definitions of "reliable". And a web developer isn't going to buy yours. If you can't promise them that a technology will give the intended result most of the time (and remember, IE accounts for 95% of all web users), to them it isn't "reliable". Maybe you don't think it's fair that GIF counts as more reliable just because it attempts to do less. But "fair" isn't a factor here.
If GSM networks are maxed out, does it really make sense to expand capacity using technology that requires more bandwidth? That is the big problem I have with 3G: there's only so much radio spectrum. Wireless streaming and multicasting may be ultrakewl, but I just don't see how millions of cell users can use this kind of application all at once.
The bit rate you report for GPRS is about what's claimed by providers in the U.S. But it's my understanding that this is less than half the theoretical limit for the technology. The best technology in the world can't squeeze blood out of a turnip.
Or you could just ignore them. Not every lame post deserves to be debunked.
Another issue I have with PNG is that some software seems to generate illegal images. I volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders and every once in a while Mozilla chokes on a page image that's an illegal PNG file. The really irritating thing is that Mozilla is actually able to read the image itself, but if it's allowed to download the very end of the file it says, "This is an illegal PNG! I can't let you look at it anymore!" I have to download the page image and read it with a less intolerant image browser. A pain.
As if that weren't enough, IIS doesn't ship with a metadata entry for PNG. Which, predicably enough, doesn't matter to IE, but screws up more compliant browsers.
Of course, none of the problems are the fault of the PNG people, who have created some very sexy technology. But until PNG images can be displayed reliably, it makes no sense to insist that everybody should migrate away from GIFs.
There's also the little detail that the notorious LZW patent has expired. That removes one of the big motivations for creating the PNG standard in the first place. Yeah, GIFs don't have as many cool features, but they're still adequate for most people's needs.
Due to my Sprint PCS experience, I have a terrible prejudice against any technology based on CDMA. And all the fun people in GSM-only countries have had with things like SMS prejudices me against any cell technology that doesn't aim to be universal. I guess I'm just immature.
You could argue that the phone's other shortcomings (can't handle Bluetooth without an adapter; no spare battery slot in the charger) are just mistakes on this one project. But I think it says a lot about how totally screwed up the whole 3G thing is.
Reviewer forgot to mention heat. Device that sucks up power that fast must get pretty hot.
Perhaps you should consider getting a life? I know, it's a lot of work. But in the end, you'll have more fun.
I hadn't seen that online encyclopedia before. Has to be the nicest one that doesn't require a subscription fee.
(No, I didn't forget PNG. It has some technical and ideological advantages, but browser support is still, well, incomplete.)
So what's wrong with SVG plugins? They don't exploit the full power of SVG. It's not just a graphics format, it's an XML application. In other words, it's a markup language, just like HTML. A good XML-aware browser (something both IE and Mozilla pretend to be) shouldn't isolate SVG from the rest of the document.
Consider the gif-filled Slashdot page you're looking at right now. They have gotten rid of a lot of bitmaps (though the left hand clickbar looks slightly less cool as a result). But they still use some weird little bitmaps, plus a lot of weird tables and font kludges that are hard to maintain and tend to be browser dependent.
There's a simple fix: put SVG support in the browser (it is a W3C invention after all) and allow indiscriminate embedding of XHTML and SVG in each other. (Not to mention any other XML applications the browser happens to support.) The Mozilla people know this, but still consider SVG support experimental and non-standard. This has been the status quo for quite some time, and given AOL's abandonment of Gecko, is not likely to change.
Maybe if Mozilla had concentrated on basic technological improvements like this and less on eye-candy and silly features... well, AOL, would probably still have screwed them over. But I might feel bad about it.
KHTML looks to be the new leader in open-source web browsers. And their does seem to be a lot of interest in using the engine to render SVG. Alas, the KDE people still think of SVG as something you embed in something else.
Yeah, B-L did one important thing right: he invented a simple model for sharing information.
This all comes down to a simple misunderstanding: people use "ASCII" and "text" interchangably. Nine times out of 10, when you hear somebody talking about ASCII, they're really talking about Latin1. Usually, this mistake doesn't really matter. But this time it did: The guy who was defending Gutenberg's use of "ASCII" managed to imply that Gutenberg uses an American character set. Which was why you flamed him -- and justifiably so. But in fact the core people at Gutenberg and DP do use Latin1 (I was wrong when I claimed they were ignorant about it). The problem is simply that not everybody involved with Gutenberg knows that ASCII and Latin1 are different character sets.
As for things like bold face, Greek characters, etc.: Gutenberg has conventions for representing these. But they're not very carefully thought out, and really should be replaced by something more consistent and mistake proof. But Gutenberg seems to be dominated by ML-haters. (In particular, they don't want to change from TeX to ML for representing equations.) Probably not going to change.
The only problem with your post was something that wasn't your fault: the slash code is likely to screw up any Latin1 character that isn't also an ASCII character.
Actually, everybody seems ignorant of character set issues. I myself had some misconceptions about how HTML does 8-bit characters before I got into this argument and was forced to do some reading. And let's not even talk about the misunderstandings connected with Unicode!
I'd like to see OpenOffice succeed, I really would. It's got so much about it that's cool. I'm particularly anxious to try the DocBook support in the latest version. But can we call an end to tilting at this interoperability windmill? It just wastes a lot of effort on complicated filters and macro languages that are never as compatible as they claim. So lots of developers pour their valuable time into something that can't be done, and OpenOffice develops a reputation for BS. Not good!
OK, not everybody's cut out to be a book reviewer. But what are the Slashdot editors for if not to filter out content-free submissions? They seem less and less concerned with doing this.
Can you please spare us "reviews" that are just a list of chapter summaries? Yes, we need to know what the book covers, but a very short list of topics is actually more informative. A technical book review should cover not just what the book explains, but how it explains, and why the reviewer thinks this is good or bad.
Anyway, that's the problem with humor: it's damned subjective. So how are we to judge posts that are meant to be funny? Never mind the ones that are unintentionally funny.