You end up with an awful and awkward looking experience just for this "feature" which actually isnt all that important.
Just as sub pixel AA aka cleartype you love so much, rinse the m$ propaganda off and reconsider. This stuff really gives you headaches: the sides of a font have different tints, everything looks like your monitor blew a fuse and no pro graphic will ever have this crap interfere with the color calibration system. Need better edges? Buy a 1600x1200 monitor and stop whining; the fonts are ant like? Increase size; the GUI is screwed Redmond hardcoded the widget sizes? I pity you. BTW, OsX is all about vector based formats from the truetype fonts - oh, but your rest of the computing world doesn't use them - to svg resizable icons and widgets (where the difference between pathetic winblast theming progs and the original really shines)
I hate to be hard but... are you shure you're a nerd?
But you don't expect people to buy an old school skoda when even the current ones are franchised WW Golf just one generation behind, don't you? I'm a Linux zealot but I drool for OsX and even consider raping the wallet for it so I consider myself unbiased. I don't expect people chew on X only because it can do remote display when even the gurus don't use it and stick to VNC or ssh. I myself was happy to tears when XFree 4.0 was released: goodbye damn Modelines and enough late too! Competition is good and I wish Fresco success, just as much as I do for amd vs intel, or us and apple against m$. I wanna live to see photoshop on qt and if this project will help somehow I praise it (don't mind the Free/Non Free stuff for now, when the big commercial desktop sw will start knoking @ our door I'll beleive we will have won)
Dispersive media spread impulses. The longer the line, worse the spread, longer the t delta to prevent taking a 1 for a 0 (intersymbolic interference). Coax, waveguides, bifilar couples are dispersive and carry low-freq em waves setting a nasty lower bound on bitrate. Optical WG are the same but max out well within the THz range (serial!) + you can color code signal (multiplex)
Actually I'm losing my sleep after a TiBook. Hell, OsX literally stole my heart and I don't care if my laptop will run a winamp plugin @ 3E+4 fps rather than 60 fps. It's like those high-school ruler shootouts... it does the job ok? Fine get along and cut me some slack; on the other hand here in Europe these macs have an insane price and that's the only thing keeping from getting my wallet raped... for now, I'm not shure how long will I resist;-)
Afterthought: Apple has the best visual experience I've ever seen... just look @ the fonts (of course that damn patent!), can wingraze even think of topping it?
your vision is crystal clear, if it hasn't been strangled yet il will, if it already has there's no chance it can pick up. Man, I hope you haven't painted your house windows in stupid RGBY colors! Oh, go to your fav store and let M$ screw you, after all it's your wallet that's getting raped... wait, it's fools like you that got BeOS killed (never mind the last mismanagments, it's like those last contractions when a living being passes away) or that keep M$ fat living off those viral vectors like OutOfLuck or Office... next thing, we'll lose control on multimedia formats thanks to those million fools using MediaPlayer. Heh, guess that DE-COMMODITIZING strategy moved up the stack-layer... in Italy we say: "La madre dei fessi è sempre incinta" Good night (ahhh, once in a life it's fun to drop a flamebait)
Not to mention the exponential rise in cell phone consumption among the younger folks. When you're spending 60/month on phone bills you just don't dish out 25 for a so-so CD just for the couple of radio singles pumped up your head in the past solid week; it's just disposable income readdressing. In the '80 people would go mad for Madonna or Jackson but today's lifestyle require different expenses. Ever tried to make a sat-night without a gsm handy? File sharing reinforces craving because it requires some activity from the consumer, something like those cd listening posts scattered across music stores (only, the latter simply pump the latest shit-hit). It's funny, the corps are crushing the best of their milk cows: the obsessed willing to spend hours looking for the right sound rather than concede a distracted look. When was the last time you bought a CD "as seen on TV... even on Oprah!"? Usually, I go nagging the DJ when I hear something cool;-)
I see too many issues for commercial mass production:
1. Product timelife too long: consumer market requires frequent product renewal. Excessively long lasting products saturate and stifle market growth.
2. Waste disposal: one of the most expensive and not yet completely accounted for voice in economic balances. The security requirements on such waste would impose prohibitive costs on it (I guess).
3. Accidental environmental release:no one wants to get this stuff implanted in their lungs! So how can accidental/intentional product destruction be dealt with? Say a 1 Kg battery is destroyed in a fire, can we secure the radioactive plume? (guess what... no!) Depleted U was said to be safe yet there are cases of blood tumor amongst mil operators and civilians exposed to the waste developed malformations (Iraq).
I don't think/hope this material will ever get mainstream. In certain scientific apps like sat it can be a good solution (or even an alternative: solar panels degrade quickly because of micrometeor collisions and ion implantation) or efficient deep space probes.
I'm perfecly aware of WWII and of the spirit that made nazifascism rampant in Europe; it actually has much to do with "popolo guerrirero" (warmongering nation) and "credere! obbedire! combattere!" (beleive! obey! fight!). That is exactly what we tried to get rid of: the Cult of deadly force; and it's the reason us europeans get way embarassed when we have to, as a community, resort to it; it's a deeply entrenched dislike.
May I remind you that the average gun you carry in your pocket isn't of much help if your goverment sends some marine troopers to waste you. On the other hand it works extremely well in escalating how much force can the police excercise on course of duty. Carabinieri (military police corps) in Italy carry small machine guns and pistols but seldom even think of using them because the perception of potential offence from the suspect is low (except in those areas where criminal activity is very high). I can't even recall a shootout among police and lone/group criminal. On the other hand, if a dictator is to come to power, resistance groups can acquire arsenals when needed and use them appropriately while I don't think it's anyway helful to maintain a latent war state amongs civilians.
Perhaps, given the paranoia level americans came to exhibit in the past decades it would be a wise step to cool off somehow and remove the cause of a great deal of direct threat fears you, as a whole, are prey of.
Here we go again, whenever someone drops the last bit of sanity off it's head and goes for some killing you folks start flaming on the opportunity of regulating firearms or defending the constitutional right to be minutemen ready to save your homeland... right. Us europeans have extremely stiff regulations and practically nobody except professionals (security personnel etc...) and sport-hunters are allowed to carry one (and in these cases under very restrictive conditions). Occasionally some tragedy strikes here too but the frequency is orders of magnitude lower. The fact is that if you only have your hands or a knife to offend, it's more difficult to make a kill compared to squeeze a trigger. Here, a saturday night gone bad mostly lands you in hospital... for you guys, odds favour the obituary;-(
If someone wants me to imagine the pleasure of being beaten of knifed to death rather than wasting the aggressor with a phat s-auto I'll do; but please imagine just how cool it is to be shot dead for a car/watch/bad stare.
Well, it's always the same story and may I say you don't have historic perspective? Back in the old days Linux developers maintained blacklists of HW vendors and products that didn't have published APIs, documentation, etc... Just as commercial sw vendors don't port exes to Linux, so many hw makers didn't give a damn about drivers (or documentation to let someone else do the dirty job). All the drivers you get in a linux tarball are reversed engineered, extracted out of poor documentation and on the field "oh, this kernel panic reveals an insane undocumented register interface to this hw; this patch will cure the problem". Just like samba worked itself out of the irky rpc, smb, domain architecture of M$ (and don't forget that for Win2000 domains we are out in the cold because of undocumented fundamental proprietary extensions) so linux managed to support your stinky RAID card.
Sometimes this process reveals nasty details like the fact that the thing doesn't implement the job in hw but in sw at the driver level (hello, Promise anyone?) or that the company signed NDAs to technology they should expose if documentation had to be written (because they never considered publishing anything but binary drivers, they never designed the product to consider anything in between public).
All this is a consequence of the WiIntel strategy: do it SW (OS locking), our HW will do the job making shure you waste those MHz (CPU sales); and of those companies that bought into it.
Today I see changes: HP makes PS printers (more expensive of course but not too much and after all I'm not asking my ailing Celeron 300A to rasterize a PDF in 1200 dpi) that are PnP with Linux (thanks to OsX of course! It's a UNIX, it has some conventions to respect that are the same all across the family). Matrox and Nvidia hand LibGL.so and kernel interfaces to their HW. Perhaps in a future release, they'll design their HW to wrap up their IP behing open interfaces (I think this is Nvidia's point in their graphic compiler).
The HW and SW we have today were built under the Wintel monoculture when no alternative was available. Linux managed to survive and proved that it's not a platform to scorn; this created an alternative to define an interoperability design. Next, hw and sw will rethink their products in a new perspective that will play nicely with anything you want (say AtheOS); we'll get programming interfaces in pdf from corporate websites, just like that 15 year old pin-printer that carries the whole bunch of ASCII codes and graphic mode instructions in the back of it's manual.
When that will happen, M$ is gouig to have a great deal of competition... even more that what it gets today.;-)
Hey there, I'm italian. Over here we're overwhelmed with rethoric speeches and enthusiastic interviews on Bush's next round; and all US news we get is either filtered by Berlusconi's media or is FOX:-( I'm curious to know Powell's position on this policy. Being an ex soldier he keeps an astonishingly low profile and this makes me think he doesn't fully agree with the warmongering of his boss. Does he think the executive isn't taking the right decisions but rather breeding more resentment against the american people (actually the whole western world)?
Here's my 2c (very IMHO): The US helped us out of misery in the aftermath of WWII. Your leaders had fresh memory of the fall of the Weimar Republic to the nazi and of the conditions that determined it (national humiliation and economic disaster for imperial Germany as it lost WWI). This produced more that 50 years of peace, prosperity and peace (... some might argue, but...) Two weeks ago Bush zeroed the UN's Forum for developing countries and environment preservation (water, food, developement, fair trade); today he's preparinng your country for another expedition (and plastic bag count). Short to exterminating a couple of countries worth of extremists there's nothing a military solution can do. The US generals that helped us out of the fascist folly knew perfectly well how to turn Europe in a collaborative ally. It's not comforting to see a soldier that played the game first hand thoroughly avoid trumpeting the pentagon propaganda but stand by the civilians. It's like insisting on a stupid haircut against the barber's suggestion...
I'm not shure what the fin does practically but I would guess it strangles the channel laterally; there isn't much capacitance on that side don't you think so? I think it also helps spreading the E field more evenly to avoid breakdown on voltage swings. This supposing the channel width is that of the gate.
Well, well, this comes to me as a surprise. Isn't CRC press the same company that screwed Eric Weisstein over his online math resource (a must, although I find it a bit too sinthetic sometimes)
There must be powerful 'tectonic drift' stresses in those corporate offices;-) but at least we know there are some 'good guys' trying to play fair and confronting the rapacious faction.
Sorry folks for this karma whoring but... Recently I've surfed the M$dev zones just out of curiosity so maybe my ad cookies got tainted but this stinks! It's an article on Linux+osX and I get a stinkin' 24 blinkin' bits M$ ad right up my face... so next time/. posts a new kernel release we'll get M$ ads encouraging users to dl' the latest DRM patch;-)
What do you think makes an 'AIDS virus' different from the other kind? M$ clearinghouse issued a CRL entry for it;-) Actually I think the Sandia editor used this term to make it easier for people that don't understand it's ethiology (did I spell it correctly?) Boh, hope this molecule doesn't kill the target cells too. I mean come on, there are people out there that beleive in creationism...
Ha, ha very funny indeed! So basically you're saying that's OK for a company to stick with a crumbling IT infrastructure just because they mistakenly omitted to acquire the source to the custom apps they deployed 10 years before? So now that the joke who wrote them flew away to Cuba you're stuck, eh? That's strange, you seem to imply that the Elitist IT Moron is about to get fired while I think the ones about to flip burgers are the asses that cooked up this crap in the first place. Know what? I'd answer that the 0.85 pre-beta apps could be sublicensed to develop them in-house or pay a local/big sw firm to polish up the job and sell you the source (or @ least agree to source disclosure agreements in case of business termination, etc...)
Remember ELITIST M$ GROUPIE, never surrended knowledge of your business to anyone or you balls will roll, sooner or later! And that includes how the bits that live in your ws work.
Re:Um... not really a big deal...
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KDE Gets The Hat
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Please, I just had an exam on this stuff and it raped my brain! Please have pity of me as I have nightmares of forward and reverse propagating solutions capturing and grilling me on the dielectrig grating of a DFB.
So folks, here it goes: a european engineer called Hannes Alfvén came up some time ago with this very lean theory that cleans up quite a bunch of esoterical paradoxes now commonly accepted ("...it HAS to be true...") He starts observing that electromagnetic forces are far stronger than gravity and removes the assumption that they don't take part in the cosmological interaction. Think about it, whenever we talk about cosmos we are considering only mass and gravity; so what about plasmas and ionized gas flows? Are they relevant only in neon lamps? Absolutely not, the Sun blows a huge amount of it on our very planet producing effects like the ionosphere, auroras, power grid failures and radio black-outs. What happens when we account for such current densities within galaxies and in intergalactic space? Ion flows generate EM interactions, current pinching (think about the definition of the Ampere), tranform kinetic energy in potential and shuttles it where the circuits close like in galaxy cores. Simulations of such free space EM-plasma interaction are stunningly similar to galaxy formations. Furthermore, cosmological dishomogeneities arise naturally from these forces without having to assume that some seconds after the BB foam bubbles of matter imprinted them before an even more improbable inflation. This cosmology is based on (or better, it also accounts for) Maxwell's equations, it doesn't pretend to reverse engineer God's bootstrap using sacerdotal elucubrations on unrepeatable experimental conditions. All you need to change is the scaling factor in your equations and the magnitudes comfortably extraced from your lab equipment match the data from astronomical observation. It's not all-encompassing, but hey, it's a theory well entrenched in the scientific method: think-experiment-rethink-experiment-... no metaphysical, no mystical truths to believe and most importantly no ultimate ones to sell. BTW, the chap in question isn't a crackpot scientist, actually he's a Nobel laureate. Have a look at it on google: plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén or check out ISBN 0-671-71100-8
This morning I took the subway here in Rome and on the billboards usually covered by lightly dressed models (some Santas are sooo cute in Hot Pants;-) ) I saw a Patrol publicity. Yep, us italians hysterize quite easily so some egghead must have thought: "Let's put a private guard in every sub station!" The big, bad, marine style beef prettily dressed up in a somewhat fascist uniform + basque, smiling at best as a pissed off rottweiler. Of course none of these idiots could do anything if some loon decides to have afternoon tea with his god but the idea is that this should and does, clear the panic from the avg citizen.
So it dawned on me that most of the people are so bloody scared of what's around them that they are willing to give up whatever they have just to _feel_ safe. So many behaviours and recent political chioces are plainly driven by fear... we are just crying for Daddy! So here he comes, he'll take care of everything, he'll defend us from the bad guys, he'll make us prosper... all we have to do is keep quiet when he's hard at work and do as we're told, no discussions.
This subcutaneous chip is not just the Si-era (probaby bluetooth) version of the nazi serial tattoo... you see, those dicks, and us italians too, had a fundamentally aggressive ideology. All we have here is the middle class rat attitude at it's greatest... the proudly ignorant haunted by the 'Hic sunt dragones' that lie beyond his fog-of-war. Our problem is just the immense ignorance our society is breeding: Haider, Berlusconi, Bossi, Patrols, [favreligion] fundamentalism, uright conservatism. Where has the 'Global Village' of the 80's gone... washed away with the yuppies?
Or in english: peers don't fight among themselves. @ least that's what McAfee thinks they are: some big, respected corp. that's part of some really cool club. So if you're not part of it well, sh*t on you: BO2k the most complete remote administration kit was deemed a haker kid worm ("...industrial espionage...") but FBI's script kiddie stuff no. Well don't worry folks... the world is full of brilliant black hats eager to get their pockets lined of green just to make shure your criminalia laptop is secure. BTW... Totò Riina, the most ferocious Mafia leader of the past decade (he ordered multiple terrorist bombings in Rome, Florence and killed two of the most active investigators Falcone and Borsellino) is an ignorant thug... I doubt he can even use a cellular phone!
Re:UNIX 'tradition' is part of what hold Linux bac
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Mandrake 8.1 Released
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scripting to CISCO routers... that's exacly the kind of stuff a newbie does. If you admin a net, you know your tools, if you use a workstation better not have IIS up & running (GET...default.ida anyone)
Ugh, a little pointless headline I must agree.
OTOH, just to keep up the geek pride (ugh, I'm trying to sound as much appropriate as possible... I don't want to make a 'funny' port whatsoever.) I understand Manhattan comunications are down and severely crippled as many telecom equipment used to sit atop the towers. Go ahead donate blood but once home fire up your cable and plug your wavelan card to a broadcast antenna out of a window
perhaps they are about to implement a cool new graphics acceleration gizmo AKA sw drivers (a la winmodem and on the same line as shared system memory that so many clueless laptop users think it's cool 'cause they never heard about it before)
Who knows, on a friggin' GHz machine the avg mail/word/exel drone won't see the difference unless
an open interface spec gives trident away;)
Distinguishing filetype based on extension is what many of us are used to. So a.h file is a header and a.c is code. How can one tell them apart if there's no extension? Well... modified ls would do the job. Even changning from one type to the other wouldn't be a problem: 'chtype file1 HTML' If you get used to the idea that extensions don't belong to the name you could easily 'vi index.html' to create a file 'index' (just name) with associated filetype HTML in some other database.
'ls *.c' becomes 'ls -T x-csrc'
Actually it all boils down to ditching the idea of a FS as nodes/leafs. Way cool would be that a make install on an app would mean simply changing it's type from plain object code to systemwide executable without even moving it from it's physical location on the hd. It's a tremendous change... I can't even think of all the consequences. One though would be fenomenal:
how do I distinguish filetypes if they don't have extensions? I open the file, read the magic ID in it's header, compare to/etc/magic (or/usr/share/magic), and close. Very expensive, but just 'SELECT type FROM utonto WHERE name=p0rn' is quite faster right? Installing new kernels would just require recording it's inode on the kernel-type table. LILO just parses it and present the list of available ones. Libraries? Just the same and it actually isn't conceptually different from moving the bits from one place to the other in the filesystem.
Creating/dev/*? Oh well, just a matter of adding entries to the db. Publishing a page on apache simply means adding it to the apache-table (and this is what we conceptually do when we copy the file in/var/www/html) Folders and files are just an implementation of database storing that was familiar to people used to filing cabinets. It's just A way to
do it and perhaps there are more efficient ones. Rumors say M$ is going that way, BeOS did it long ago and for UNIX the switch wouldn't be traumatic (if you had code to map user files to a fictious ~/ or systemwide-lib table to/lib)
If it ain't broke don't fix it: true. The filing cabinet is a metaphorical interpretation to data storage that produced the current filesystem architecture; it works but we could grow out of it and move to a object-relational dB system that could provide enhancements to data sharing (NFS anyone?) and access control.
Slashdot Mirror
You end up with an awful and awkward looking experience just for this "feature" which actually isnt all that important.
Just as sub pixel AA aka cleartype you love so much, rinse the m$ propaganda off and reconsider. This stuff really gives you headaches: the sides of a font have different tints, everything looks like your monitor blew a fuse and no pro graphic will ever have this crap interfere with the color calibration system. Need better edges? Buy a 1600x1200 monitor and stop whining; the fonts are ant like? Increase size; the GUI is screwed Redmond hardcoded the widget sizes? I pity you. BTW, OsX is all about vector based formats from the truetype fonts - oh, but your rest of the computing world doesn't use them - to svg resizable icons and widgets (where the difference between pathetic winblast theming progs and the original really shines)
I hate to be hard but... are you shure you're a nerd?
But you don't expect people to buy an old school skoda when even the current ones are franchised WW Golf just one generation behind, don't you?
I'm a Linux zealot but I drool for OsX and even consider raping the wallet for it so I consider myself unbiased.
I don't expect people chew on X only because it can do remote display when even the gurus don't use it and stick to VNC or ssh. I myself was happy to tears when XFree 4.0 was released: goodbye damn Modelines and enough late too!
Competition is good and I wish Fresco success, just as much as I do for amd vs intel, or us and apple against m$.
I wanna live to see photoshop on qt and if this project will help somehow I praise it (don't mind the Free/Non Free stuff for now, when the big commercial desktop sw will start knoking @ our door I'll beleive we will have won)
Dispersive media spread impulses. The longer the line, worse the spread, longer the t delta to prevent taking a 1 for a 0 (intersymbolic interference). Coax, waveguides, bifilar couples are dispersive and carry low-freq em waves setting a nasty lower bound on bitrate. Optical WG are the same but max out well within the THz range (serial!) + you can color code signal (multiplex)
Ciao
Actually I'm losing my sleep after a TiBook. Hell, OsX literally stole my heart and I don't care if my laptop will run a winamp plugin @ 3E+4 fps rather than 60 fps. It's like those high-school ruler shootouts... it does the job ok? Fine get along and cut me some slack; on the other hand here in Europe these macs have an insane price and that's the only thing keeping from getting my wallet raped... for now, I'm not shure how long will I resist ;-)
Afterthought: Apple has the best visual experience I've ever seen... just look @ the fonts (of course that damn patent!), can wingraze even think of topping it?
your vision is crystal clear, if it hasn't been strangled yet il will, if it already has there's no chance it can pick up. Man, I hope you haven't painted your house windows in stupid RGBY colors! Oh, go to your fav store and let M$ screw you, after all it's your wallet that's getting raped... wait, it's fools like you that got BeOS killed (never mind the last mismanagments, it's like those last contractions when a living being passes away) or that keep M$ fat living off those viral vectors like OutOfLuck or Office... next thing, we'll lose control on multimedia formats thanks to those million fools using MediaPlayer. Heh, guess that DE-COMMODITIZING strategy moved up the stack-layer... in Italy we say: "La madre dei fessi è sempre incinta" Good night (ahhh, once in a life it's fun to drop a flamebait)
Not to mention the exponential rise in cell phone consumption among the younger folks. When you're spending 60 /month on phone bills you just don't dish out 25 for a so-so CD just for the couple of radio singles pumped up your head in the past solid week; it's just disposable income readdressing. In the '80 people would go mad for Madonna or Jackson but today's lifestyle require different expenses. Ever tried to make a sat-night without a gsm handy? ;-)
File sharing reinforces craving because it requires some activity from the consumer, something like those cd listening posts scattered across music stores (only, the latter simply pump the latest shit-hit). It's funny, the corps are crushing the best of their milk cows: the obsessed willing to spend hours looking for the right sound rather than concede a distracted look. When was the last time you bought a CD "as seen on TV... even on Oprah!"? Usually, I go nagging the DJ when I hear something cool
I see too many issues for commercial mass production:
1. Product timelife too long: consumer market requires frequent product renewal. Excessively long lasting products saturate and stifle market growth.
2. Waste disposal: one of the most expensive and not yet completely accounted for voice in economic balances. The security requirements on such waste would impose prohibitive costs on it (I guess).
3. Accidental environmental release:no one wants to get this stuff implanted in their lungs! So how can accidental/intentional product destruction be dealt with? Say a 1 Kg battery is destroyed in a fire, can we secure the radioactive plume? (guess what... no!) Depleted U was said to be safe yet there are cases of blood tumor amongst mil operators and civilians exposed to the waste developed malformations (Iraq).
I don't think/hope this material will ever get mainstream. In certain scientific apps like sat it can be a good solution (or even an alternative: solar panels degrade quickly because of micrometeor collisions and ion implantation) or efficient deep space probes.
I'm perfecly aware of WWII and of the spirit that made nazifascism rampant in Europe; it actually has much to do with "popolo guerrirero" (warmongering nation) and "credere! obbedire! combattere!" (beleive! obey! fight!). That is exactly what we tried to get rid of: the Cult of deadly force; and it's the reason us europeans get way embarassed when we have to, as a community, resort to it; it's a deeply entrenched dislike.
May I remind you that the average gun you carry in your pocket isn't of much help if your goverment sends some marine troopers to waste you. On the other hand it works extremely well in escalating how much force can the police excercise on course of duty. Carabinieri (military police corps) in Italy carry small machine guns and pistols but seldom even think of using them because the perception of potential offence from the suspect is low (except in those areas where criminal activity is very high). I can't even recall a shootout among police and lone/group criminal. On the other hand, if a dictator is to come to power, resistance groups can acquire arsenals when needed and use them appropriately while I don't think it's anyway helful to maintain a latent war state amongs civilians.
Perhaps, given the paranoia level americans came to exhibit in the past decades it would be a wise step to cool off somehow and remove the cause of a great deal of direct threat fears you, as a whole, are prey of.
Here we go again, whenever someone drops the last bit of sanity off it's head and goes for some killing you folks start flaming on the opportunity of regulating firearms or defending the constitutional right to be minutemen ready to save your homeland... right. Us europeans have extremely stiff regulations and practically nobody except professionals (security personnel etc...) and sport-hunters are allowed to carry one (and in these cases under very restrictive conditions). Occasionally some tragedy strikes here too but the frequency is orders of magnitude lower. The fact is that if you only have your hands or a knife to offend, it's more difficult to make a kill compared to squeeze a trigger. Here, a saturday night gone bad mostly lands you in hospital... for you guys, odds favour the obituary ;-(
If someone wants me to imagine the pleasure of being beaten of knifed to death rather than wasting the aggressor with a phat s-auto I'll do; but please imagine just how cool it is to be shot dead for a car/watch/bad stare.
Well, it's always the same story and may I say you don't have historic perspective? Back in the old days Linux developers maintained blacklists of HW vendors and products that didn't have published APIs, documentation, etc...
;-)
Just as commercial sw vendors don't port exes to Linux, so many hw makers didn't give a damn about drivers (or documentation to let someone else do the dirty job).
All the drivers you get in a linux tarball are reversed engineered, extracted out of poor documentation and on the field "oh, this kernel panic reveals an insane undocumented register interface to this hw; this patch will cure the problem".
Just like samba worked itself out of the irky rpc, smb, domain architecture of M$ (and don't forget that for Win2000 domains we are out in the cold because of undocumented fundamental proprietary extensions) so linux managed to support your stinky RAID card.
Sometimes this process reveals nasty details like the fact that the thing doesn't implement the job in hw but in sw at the driver level (hello, Promise anyone?) or that the company signed NDAs to technology they should expose if documentation had to be written (because they never considered publishing anything but binary drivers, they never designed the product to consider anything in between public).
All this is a consequence of the WiIntel strategy: do it SW (OS locking), our HW will do the job making shure you waste those MHz (CPU sales); and of those companies that bought into it.
Today I see changes: HP makes PS printers (more expensive of course but not too much and after all I'm not asking my ailing Celeron 300A to rasterize a PDF in 1200 dpi) that are PnP with Linux (thanks to OsX of course! It's a UNIX, it has some conventions to respect that are the same all across the family). Matrox and Nvidia hand LibGL.so and kernel interfaces to their HW. Perhaps in a future release, they'll design their HW to wrap up their IP behing open interfaces (I think this is Nvidia's point in their graphic compiler).
The HW and SW we have today were built under the Wintel monoculture when no alternative was available. Linux managed to survive and proved that it's not a platform to scorn; this created an alternative to define an interoperability design. Next, hw and sw will rethink their products in a new perspective that will play nicely with anything you want (say AtheOS); we'll get programming interfaces in pdf from corporate websites, just like that 15 year old pin-printer that carries the whole bunch of ASCII codes and graphic mode instructions in the back of it's manual.
When that will happen, M$ is gouig to have a great deal of competition... even more that what it gets today.
Hey there, I'm italian. Over here we're overwhelmed with rethoric speeches and enthusiastic interviews on Bush's next round; and all US news we get is either filtered by Berlusconi's media or is FOX :-(
I'm curious to know Powell's position on this policy. Being an ex soldier he keeps an astonishingly low profile and this makes me think he doesn't fully agree with the warmongering of his boss. Does he think the executive isn't taking the right decisions but rather breeding more resentment against the american people (actually the whole western world)?
Here's my 2c (very IMHO):
The US helped us out of misery in the aftermath of WWII. Your leaders had fresh memory of the fall of the Weimar Republic to the nazi and of the conditions that determined it (national humiliation and economic disaster for imperial Germany as it lost WWI). This produced more that 50 years of peace, prosperity and peace (... some might argue, but...) Two weeks ago Bush zeroed the UN's Forum for developing countries and environment preservation (water, food, developement, fair trade); today he's preparinng your country for another expedition (and plastic bag count).
Short to exterminating a couple of countries worth of extremists there's nothing a military solution can do. The US generals that helped us out of the fascist folly knew perfectly well how to turn Europe in a collaborative ally.
It's not comforting to see a soldier that played the game first hand thoroughly avoid trumpeting the pentagon propaganda but stand by the civilians. It's like insisting on a stupid haircut against the barber's suggestion...
I'm not shure what the fin does practically but I would guess it strangles the channel laterally; there isn't much capacitance on that side don't you think so? I think it also helps spreading the E field more evenly to avoid breakdown on voltage swings. This supposing the channel width is that of the gate.
Well, well, this comes to me as a surprise. Isn't CRC press the same company that screwed Eric Weisstein over his online math resource (a must, although I find it a bit too sinthetic sometimes)
;-) but at least we know there are some 'good guys' trying to play fair and confronting the rapacious faction.
There must be powerful 'tectonic drift' stresses in those corporate offices
Ciao,
Edo
Sorry folks for this karma whoring but... /. posts a new kernel release we'll get M$ ads encouraging users to dl' the latest DRM patch ;-)
/. put a muzzle to your adservers
Recently I've surfed the M$dev zones just out of curiosity so maybe my ad cookies got tainted but this stinks! It's an article on Linux+osX and I get a stinkin' 24 blinkin' bits M$ ad right up my face... so next time
Please
If anyone wants I can email a snapshot...
What do you think makes an 'AIDS virus' different from the other kind? M$ clearinghouse issued a CRL entry for it ;-)
Actually I think the Sandia editor used this term to make it easier for people that don't understand it's ethiology (did I spell it correctly?) Boh, hope this molecule doesn't kill the target cells too. I mean come on, there are people out there that beleive in creationism...
Ciao
Ha, ha very funny indeed! So basically you're saying that's OK for a company to stick with a crumbling IT infrastructure just because they mistakenly omitted to acquire the source to the custom apps they deployed 10 years before? So now that the joke who wrote them flew away to Cuba you're stuck, eh? That's strange, you seem to imply that the Elitist IT Moron is about to get fired while I think the ones about to flip burgers are the asses that cooked up this crap in the first place.
Know what? I'd answer that the 0.85 pre-beta apps could be sublicensed to develop them in-house or pay a local/big sw firm to polish up the job and sell you the source (or @ least agree to source disclosure agreements in case of business termination, etc...)
Remember ELITIST M$ GROUPIE, never surrended knowledge of your business to anyone or you balls will roll, sooner or later! And that includes how the bits that live in your ws work.
What a lousy troll...
Please, I just had an exam on this stuff and it raped my brain! Please have pity of me as I have nightmares of forward and reverse propagating solutions capturing and grilling me on the dielectrig grating of a DFB.
I need a break,
Edo
So folks, here it goes: a european engineer called Hannes Alfvén came up some time ago with this very lean theory that cleans up quite a bunch of esoterical paradoxes now commonly accepted ("...it HAS to be true...")
He starts observing that electromagnetic forces are far stronger than gravity and removes the assumption that they don't take part in the cosmological interaction.
Think about it, whenever we talk about cosmos we are considering only mass and gravity; so what about plasmas and ionized gas flows? Are they relevant only in neon lamps? Absolutely not, the Sun blows a huge amount of it on our very planet producing effects like the ionosphere, auroras, power grid failures and radio black-outs.
What happens when we account for such current densities within galaxies and in intergalactic space? Ion flows generate EM interactions, current pinching (think about the definition of the Ampere), tranform kinetic energy in potential and shuttles it where the circuits close like in galaxy cores.
Simulations of such free space EM-plasma interaction are stunningly similar to galaxy formations.
Furthermore, cosmological dishomogeneities arise naturally from these forces without having to assume that some seconds after the BB foam bubbles of matter imprinted them before an even more improbable inflation.
This cosmology is based on (or better, it also accounts for) Maxwell's equations, it doesn't pretend to reverse engineer God's bootstrap using sacerdotal elucubrations on unrepeatable experimental conditions. All you need to change is the scaling factor in your equations and the magnitudes comfortably extraced from your lab equipment match the data from astronomical observation.
It's not all-encompassing, but hey, it's a theory well entrenched in the scientific method: think-experiment-rethink-experiment-... no metaphysical, no mystical truths to believe and most importantly no ultimate ones to sell.
BTW, the chap in question isn't a crackpot scientist, actually he's a Nobel laureate.
Have a look at it on google: plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén or check out
ISBN 0-671-71100-8
Ciao,
Edo
This morning I took the subway here in Rome and on the billboards usually covered by lightly dressed models (some Santas are sooo cute in Hot Pants ;-) ) I saw a Patrol publicity. Yep, us italians hysterize quite easily so some egghead must have thought: "Let's put a private guard in every sub station!" The big, bad, marine style beef prettily dressed up in a somewhat fascist uniform + basque, smiling at best as a pissed off rottweiler. Of course none of these idiots could do anything if some loon decides to have afternoon tea with his god but the idea is that this should and does, clear the panic from the avg citizen.
So it dawned on me that most of the people are so bloody scared of what's around them that they are willing to give up whatever they have just to _feel_ safe. So many behaviours and recent political chioces are plainly driven by fear... we are just crying for Daddy! So here he comes, he'll take care of everything, he'll defend us from the bad guys, he'll make us prosper... all we have to do is keep quiet when he's hard at work and do as we're told, no discussions.
This subcutaneous chip is not just the Si-era (probaby bluetooth) version of the nazi serial tattoo... you see, those dicks, and us italians too, had a fundamentally aggressive ideology. All we have here is the middle class rat attitude at it's greatest... the proudly ignorant haunted by the 'Hic sunt dragones' that lie beyond his fog-of-war. Our problem is just the immense ignorance our society is breeding: Haider, Berlusconi, Bossi, Patrols, [favreligion] fundamentalism, uright conservatism. Where has the 'Global Village' of the 80's gone... washed away with the yuppies?
Merry XMas,
Eddy
Or in english: peers don't fight among themselves. @ least that's what McAfee thinks they are: some big, respected corp. that's part of some really cool club. So if you're not part of it well, sh*t on you: BO2k the most complete remote administration kit was deemed a haker kid worm ("...industrial espionage...") but FBI's script kiddie stuff no. Well don't worry folks... the world is full of brilliant black hats eager to get their pockets lined of green just to make shure your criminalia laptop is secure. BTW... Totò Riina, the most ferocious Mafia leader of the past decade (he ordered multiple terrorist bombings in Rome, Florence and killed two of the most active investigators Falcone and Borsellino) is an ignorant thug... I doubt he can even use a cellular phone!
scripting to CISCO routers... that's exacly the kind of stuff a newbie does. If you admin a net, you know your tools, if you use a workstation better not have IIS up & running (GET ...default.ida anyone)
Ugh, a little pointless headline I must agree.
OTOH, just to keep up the geek pride (ugh, I'm trying to sound as much appropriate as possible... I don't want to make a 'funny' port whatsoever.) I understand Manhattan comunications are down and severely crippled as many telecom equipment used to sit atop the towers. Go ahead donate blood but once home fire up your cable and plug your wavelan card to a broadcast antenna out of a window
Google search on wlan
Other folks should offer their laptops to people trying to contact relatives (no video/audio streams: spare the bandwidth!)
perhaps they are about to implement a cool new graphics acceleration gizmo AKA sw drivers (a la winmodem and on the same line as shared system memory that so many clueless laptop users think it's cool 'cause they never heard about it before) ;)
Who knows, on a friggin' GHz machine the avg mail/word/exel drone won't see the difference unless
an open interface spec gives trident away
Distinguishing filetype based on extension is what many of us are used to. So a .h file is a header and a .c is code. How can one tell them apart if there's no extension? Well... modified ls would do the job. Even changning from one type to the other wouldn't be a problem: 'chtype file1 HTML' If you get used to the idea that extensions don't belong to the name you could easily 'vi index.html' to create a file 'index' (just name) with associated filetype HTML in some other database.
/etc/magic (or /usr/share/magic), and close. Very expensive, but just 'SELECT type FROM utonto WHERE name=p0rn' is quite faster right? Installing new kernels would just require recording it's inode on the kernel-type table. LILO just parses it and present the list of available ones. Libraries? Just the same and it actually isn't conceptually different from moving the bits from one place to the other in the filesystem.
/dev/*? Oh well, just a matter of adding entries to the db. Publishing a page on apache simply means adding it to the apache-table (and this is what we conceptually do when we copy the file in /var/www/html) Folders and files are just an implementation of database storing that was familiar to people used to filing cabinets. It's just A way to
/lib)
'ls *.c' becomes 'ls -T x-csrc'
Actually it all boils down to ditching the idea of a FS as nodes/leafs. Way cool would be that a make install on an app would mean simply changing it's type from plain object code to systemwide executable without even moving it from it's physical location on the hd. It's a tremendous change... I can't even think of all the consequences. One though would be fenomenal:
how do I distinguish filetypes if they don't have extensions? I open the file, read the magic ID in it's header, compare to
Creating
do it and perhaps there are more efficient ones. Rumors say M$ is going that way, BeOS did it long ago and for UNIX the switch wouldn't be traumatic (if you had code to map user files to a fictious ~/ or systemwide-lib table to
If it ain't broke don't fix it: true. The filing cabinet is a metaphorical interpretation to data storage that produced the current filesystem architecture; it works but we could grow out of it and move to a object-relational dB system that could provide enhancements to data sharing (NFS anyone?) and access control.