Your statements echo my thoughts on the topic perfectly. I really wish someone official would address this issue. Why would I care if there is a watermark on my downloaded music? It's not like I didn't know it was copyrighted by the band or the label already. So now they can prove that it's theirs?!? There was no contention of that fact.
/* Try writing 'GNU' without using an acronym. Go ahead. Try it. I dare ya. */
while (1) "Not Unix";
It's easy to convert simple recursion to an iterative loop. I sometimes wonder why they chose G over any other letter. Probably so they could choose an obvious animal mascot.
You're trolling with the 60 hour week. Any more than 40, and you should start asking questions (of yourself or of management). And you didn't mention exercise (unless sex counts).
What will the official legal stance be on users modifying the console for their own purposes? Will there be a shrink wrap license forbidding modification?
It's easy to imagine that these might make affordable low end workstations with users never playing (or paying for) a game for them.
But I thought that the humble readme was the universal standard.
That was my thought too. Problem is that's really simple and obvious. We need something complicated. It should probably use XML and go through a standards comittee to get it right.
I know that if I were involved in this sort of case, I'd want as much publicity as possible... this is scary.
...which is exactly why gag orders are necessary. Guess what? Trials are meant to be tried in court, not in the media. Or have you forgotten about what happened in a certain case involving Orenthal J. Simpson?
It's frightening me that you feel this way. Is this a troll? The media had OJ pinned as guilty. Most people believe that he is guilty. The jury made their decision to the contrary despite all the publicity the case got. Your example doesn't support your argument.
Now the interesting question. Did the gag order forbid these people from getting in contact with someone who might come to their aid? If not being allowed to make a press release kept the ACLU from getting interested, I'd say there is a pretty serious problem.
Ever wonder why that is? Its because the recording industry could care less about art. They want a product that sells. So what we have is that 95% of all radio stations are owned by a handful of media companies. We have Britney Spears and boy bands, entirely conceived and executed by middle-aged recording execs.
That's right, all you teenage music fans. Your generations music is really the product of some fat, bald old fart sitting behind a desk. Thats why your generation has no Led Zeppelin, no Who, no Rush. No great songs that you'll still be listening to in 30 years. Now, what're you going to do about it?
I read at a higher moderation level, so I only saw an excerpt from your message. It seemed pretty antagonistic, but after reading the whole thing I guess it seems more reasonable.
I do have some counter points though. You named great gands from the 70's, but you can find good stuff after that if you think about. The Police, Clash, and Talking Heads come to mind from the early 80's. That's just main streem stuff. I'm sure someone hipper than I am can name lots of smaller bands that were really inspired. Late 80's was a bad spot I admit, but no more so than 70's disco. Then you get some brilliant albums from Nine Inch Nails, Nirvanna, Pearl Jam, and others. (Unfortunately, it was just 1 or 2 albums from those guys and not every album had the same quality.)
I think what really happens is that music gets really good for a bit. We all suck it up and enjoy it's profoundness. After a while it's time for a break and back to bubble gum we go. Just another pendulum with about a 10 year period.
Amazingly, good music does still get through to the mainstream despite the fact that recording companies find it easier to deal with silly little acts they built from scratch. (The I put you up, and I can put you back down too method of control.)
The link says the article expired. (What's that about? Not enough disk space to keep an article?) Bummer. After the Napster gag (brilliant in my mind), I would have liked to read this. They've gained new respect in my eyes.
Now the kicker: why shouldn't they have this info? It says it's taken in the manual. It says so on the site. Call up customer service and ask, they won't deny that they get it. One thing they do claim is that it's totally anonymous (true) and if you still don't want it, you can tell them to turn it off and it's done (also true, there's a setting in the box for it).
What, you haven't heard of caller ID? Your phone number is even more useful than a serial number for a unit that you might have paid for with cash. Nothing forces it to be anonymous in the description you've given. (Of course you could block caller ID but most people don't...)
I agree with your sentiment about understanding something before bashing it (I'm not bashing), but there's more to it than just the code in the box. TiVo the company may or may not be trust worthy.
Now, The other stuff - like the 'strongarm tactics' and the like - that's utter crap. believe me when I say I know half this company personally. I'm sick of companies getting bad press for normal business operations.
Fine be sick of it. That's your right, but it's everyone else's right to be sick of it when businesses have normal business operations of using strong arm tactics. Sometimes businesses do the wrong thing, and sometimes people should get angry.
Suing someone who infringes upon a patent of yours is normal.
Yep you're right. It is normal, and it's normally wrong. Most patents are complete crap and shouldn't have been issued. Most companies that sue for infringement are just betting that their legal team is tougher than the defendants. I suspect strongly that this is the case with these patents.
It works like this: The patent office is unqualified (technically) to judge the incredible amount of submissions (most of which will never be enforced or challenged) that they get. To deal with this, they rubber stamp any patent that meets the formatting specifications. Their assumption is that if the patent becomes interesting (enforced or challenged) then the courts will resolve the issue. All of this is ok so far (not great, but ok). It's like lazy evaluation. Let the courts deal with the patents that matter.
The problem is that in the courts it's not a fair fight. The judge is told to presume the patent is valid (the people at the patent office claim it is). The side with the weaker case will usually go for a jury trial so that they can throw out the jurors who have any advanced education (potentially capable of understanding a technology that took years of college to understand for the people who created it). With no one left in the room capable of understanding the technology (the judge studied law not engineering), the side with the most money wins. By the time it goes through an appeal (several years later) the technology is obsolete. None of this has any relation to the merits of the patent in question. Can you tell I'm bitter?
Sure 3DFX did the same thing a couple years ago. They should be held to the same standards. Companies (and people) should be judged according to their recent actions. If 3DFX did that tomorrow the Slashdot Collective/Community would be rightfully annoyed then too. Companies change a lot, and if they behaved well for the last year or so, then older actions can slowly be forgiven.
Did I just get trolled?
As for the closed source driver business. NVIDEA can do whatever they want (as long they don't violate somebody else's license) with their drivers. If they choose to keep them closed that's fine. More power to them. I'll just buy something else.
No offence but isn't this pretty much the same as this article, which is still on the home page at the time of writing, which includes an update on a ZdNet article about the PIII recall.
Of course it is. But now that C|Net has said it, it must be true. Tom's hardware has little credibility. (That was sarcasm...)
Actually, there is a real difference. Tom's and HardOCP reported the problem. C|Net reported that Intel acknowledges the problem. I guess that's new news.
I am not being sarcastic when I say this would great news if the patent were issued. We all know the patent system is deeply flawed, as is our current conception of intellectual property. What better way to change the system by issuing patents so idiotic and encompassing that every large multinational company in the world will have its legal teams working to break the patent, or better yet, to lobby to have the entire system changed and overhauled.
Not very likely. Large companies would only fight just enough to free themselves of any headaches. They certainly wouldn't make any efforts for real reform. If they did that, then how would they abuse the system?
The goal is to get a patent that is broad and sweeping enough that you can use it as a threat without getting one that is so broad that it generates a lot of attention.
Out of curiosity, when was the last time you saw a patent that you think was truly novel over the prior art?
I would imagine in places where security is an issue, the government should be looking at BSD first. Not to diss Linux, but OpenBSD is reknowned for it's "security by default" out of the box. If anything, I would think the government would err on the side of security (so their government hire doesn't get the bleeding edge driver or graphics utility, boohoo).
Can you just imagines the news?
Reuters: This just in - The US government has decide to standardize it's military computers on an open source operating system developed mostly in Canada. Interestingly enough, "OpenBSD" as they like to call it is based on the work of some computer scientists from the University of California at Berkeley a couple decades ago. Apparently everything the US has to offer pales in comparision when it comes to the security of OpenBSD. An admiral that wished to remains anonymous said, "It's about time those canookies and hippies did something to watch our ass. After all, we've been watching theirs for all these years."
You fail to realize that that's as inevitable as death in most organizations.
...And as pleasant a thought.
Win2K is a fine gaming platform. Multiprocessor support and DirectX for games that don't run in an OpenGL mode. It has no other good uses. There is a better alternative for every other task you might want to do with a computer.
Take your hypothesis to the limit. Is it really the case that the smog problem in LA (or any other big city) would go away if there were (in the extreme) _no_ diesel emmisions? It's my (uneducated) guess the problem would still be there even if diesel and pre-1990 cars were gone completely.
I'm speaking out of my ass though. I'm a computer dork, not a chemist or environmental scientist or whatever. I want to see hydrogen burning engines. Water vapor is a fine exhaust from my point of view. I'm sure that's impractical for some reason I don't understand though.
... people are forgetting that gasoline and diesel engines are far cleaner today then they were 30 years ago...
I guess you haven't been to L.A. lately. All those late model Mercedes with the cleaner burning engines are making for a very yellow/brown sky regardless of how bad it was in 1970. They may be cleaner, but they aren't clean enough.
You're correct about my not presenting or supporting my arguments very well. That happens when I rant.
<BR><BR>
Let me phrase it this way: Gnome looks like an attempt to copy COM with just enough differences so that people who know COM will have to look up the new names. <B>IUnknown::</B> with <B>QueryInterface()</B>, <B>AddRef()</B> and <B>Release()</B> changes to <B>Unknown::</B> with <B>query_interface()</B>, <B>ref()</B>, and <B>unref()</B>.
<BR><BR>
The use of Factories and Monikers also (very) closely resembles the COM way of doing things. I'm sure some OO guy out there will say that these are standard design patterns and that I should go back to school before I criticize them. To that I respond, I know COM and have implemented a number of sophisticated objects with and without the use of wizards etc... I also know that COM makes for fragile bloated applications.
<BR><BR>
I guess my point is that Gnome is clearly copying something that sucks. Sure COM is useful for rapid application development, and it does promote easy code reuse. It also promotes creating bloated and fragile applications.
<BR><BR>
Maybe since it's open source and can be fixed by anybody it'll be ok, but I think it's just going to bring some of the worst qualities of Win32 to Unix.
<BR><BR><BR>
By the way, Visual C++ is a fine compiler. I think they took a step backward when they went from 4.2 to 5.0, but 4.2 and 6.0 generate pretty damned good code. They've always had problems with compliance to standards, but that's Microsoft for you. (g++ has implemented a few extensions as well.)
<BR><BR>
Miguel brings up "Samba, Apache, NFSD, innd, sendmail, in.named, ftpd and ssh" as example of programs that have little or no code reuse outside of libc. He mentions Internet Explorer as a great example of an application that has reusable components.
Which applications are stable and efficient, and which one is a bloated beast?
COM is terrible, and he wants to bring it to Unix. Welcome to the world of fragile applications and bloatware.
There are very few applications that benefit from the app inside an app model (Excel sheets inside your your Word app). Few enough that those can be special cases. Why do you want to load a brand new DLL (shared object library) everytime a button shows on a form.
He mentions that a common criticism of IE is that it is bloated and unstable. Then he promptly ignores those criticisms and tells you how it's great that IE is made of a bunch of separate components. Sounds like the first propaganda chapter of all those ATL/COM/DCOM/COM+/MFC COM books. It's still bloated and unstable. Being separate components didn't solve that problem.
Most applications know in advance exactly what components they need. Why not propose/enforce a standard static library interface for GUI kits?
Ugh.
COM optimizes programmer time. VisualBasic and Delphi are very good at rapid prototyping. Arguing in favor of what's best for the average end user shouldn't really take this into account. You've saved yourself some time developing the app, but when some other app comes in and trashes your widget.so library with a newer version you've just hosed the user.
Oh well, at least I can avoid installing Gnome under Unix. I don't even have that choice with COM under Windows.
Well, you know how dumb the average person is, right? By definition, half the people out there are even dumber than that.
Nahh. That's not really true. Imagine you had 99 people with a 100 IQ, and 1 person with a 150 IQ. In this case 99% are dumber than average.
Now, by definition 50% of the people are smarter than the "median" person right? But out of 6 billion people, I really don't know how to go about figuring which one is the median. How am I going to judge the rest in comparison to some person I probably haven't even met?
Well let's see if I can get somewhat back on topic:
As for Mozilla, I'd like to see a cross platform Galleon (Gecko Only) project. Take what's good and leave what doesn't need to be in there out, and have it work on all the platforms (for instance other than just Gnome).
Interesting stuff. Energy density of gasoline is ~43 Megajoules/kg, and hydrogen is ~139 Megajoules/kg. That's over 3 times. I wonder though why we can't have compressed hydrogen as our fuel (Compressed all the way to a liquid)? I realize there are probably concerns about danger during a car accident (lets ignore the Hindenburg for now), but how much volume does a kg of each take? Even if the liquid hydrogen takes up 3 times more space than gasoline, it's a break even right?
Having hydrogen as your fuel source would be great because your fumes would be water vapor. All of a sudden LA becomes humid instead of smoggy:-) Nice.
Please respond to this as I'm really curious. I've asked plenty of the chem major types I know, but they never seem to have this information. You're the first person who sounds knowledgeable about the topic.
What I'm curious about is why the OS has to get in the way of performance for an application. Why does this thing need to be in the kernel to get this kind of performance? Is it system call overhead, or context-switch times? Is the general purpose network stack slower than what you can do in kernel land? I doubt it is something as silly as getting a high enough priority.
It seems to me that the OS should not get in the way of performance, and that if it does then there is room for improvement.
Re:now I know you all probably read linuxsux.com..
on
Grosse Pointe Quickies
·
· Score: 1
LEAVE SOME FsCKING ROOM BETWEEN YOU AND THE GUY IN FRONT OF YOU.
That's fine and dandy for freeway traffic, but the problem I face day to day is traffic at lots of stop lights. Then you want the exact opposite: Slowly start to accelerate when you see the car two or three cars in front of you. It kills me when some ass in front of you pulls away slowly at a stop light because they know they can make it. What about everyone behind you?
Slashdot Mirror
Your statements echo my thoughts on the topic perfectly. I really wish someone official would address this issue. Why would I care if there is a watermark on my downloaded music? It's not like I didn't know it was copyrighted by the band or the label already. So now they can prove that it's theirs?!? There was no contention of that fact.
Completely off-topic:
/* Try writing 'GNU' without using an acronym. Go ahead. Try it. I dare ya. */
while (1) "Not Unix";
It's easy to convert simple recursion to an iterative loop. I sometimes wonder why they chose G over any other letter. Probably so they could choose an obvious animal mascot.
You're trolling with the 60 hour week. Any more than 40, and you should start asking questions (of yourself or of management). And you didn't mention exercise (unless sex counts).
What will the official legal stance be on users modifying the console for their own purposes? Will there be a shrink wrap license forbidding modification?
It's easy to imagine that these might make affordable low end workstations with users never playing (or paying for) a game for them.
But I thought that the humble readme was the universal standard.
That was my thought too. Problem is that's really simple and obvious. We need something complicated. It should probably use XML and go through a standards comittee to get it right.
It's frightening me that you feel this way. Is this a troll? The media had OJ pinned as guilty. Most people believe that he is guilty. The jury made their decision to the contrary despite all the publicity the case got. Your example doesn't support your argument.
Now the interesting question. Did the gag order forbid these people from getting in contact with someone who might come to their aid? If not being allowed to make a press release kept the ACLU from getting interested, I'd say there is a pretty serious problem.
I'm buying more guns while I still can.
Ever wonder why that is? Its because the recording industry could care less about art. They want a product that sells. So what we have is that 95% of all radio stations are owned by a handful of media companies. We have Britney Spears and boy bands, entirely conceived and executed by middle-aged recording execs.
That's right, all you teenage music fans. Your generations music is really the product of some fat, bald old fart sitting behind a desk. Thats why your generation has no Led Zeppelin, no Who, no Rush. No great songs that you'll still be listening to in 30 years. Now, what're you going to do about it?
I read at a higher moderation level, so I only saw an excerpt from your message. It seemed pretty antagonistic, but after reading the whole thing I guess it seems more reasonable.
I do have some counter points though. You named great gands from the 70's, but you can find good stuff after that if you think about. The Police, Clash, and Talking Heads come to mind from the early 80's. That's just main streem stuff. I'm sure someone hipper than I am can name lots of smaller bands that were really inspired. Late 80's was a bad spot I admit, but no more so than 70's disco. Then you get some brilliant albums from Nine Inch Nails, Nirvanna, Pearl Jam, and others. (Unfortunately, it was just 1 or 2 albums from those guys and not every album had the same quality.)
I think what really happens is that music gets really good for a bit. We all suck it up and enjoy it's profoundness. After a while it's time for a break and back to bubble gum we go. Just another pendulum with about a 10 year period.
Amazingly, good music does still get through to the mainstream despite the fact that recording companies find it easier to deal with silly little acts they built from scratch. (The I put you up, and I can put you back down too method of control.)
The link says the article expired. (What's that about? Not enough disk space to keep an article?) Bummer. After the Napster gag (brilliant in my mind), I would have liked to read this. They've gained new respect in my eyes.
Now the kicker: why shouldn't they have this info? It says it's taken in the manual. It says so on the site. Call up customer service and ask, they won't deny that they get it. One thing they do claim is that it's totally anonymous (true) and if you still don't want it, you can tell them to turn it off and it's done (also true, there's a setting in the box for it).
What, you haven't heard of caller ID? Your phone number is even more useful than a serial number for a unit that you might have paid for with cash. Nothing forces it to be anonymous in the description you've given. (Of course you could block caller ID but most people don't...)
I agree with your sentiment about understanding something before bashing it (I'm not bashing), but there's more to it than just the code in the box. TiVo the company may or may not be trust worthy.
Now, The other stuff - like the 'strongarm tactics' and the like - that's utter crap. believe me when I say I know half this company personally. I'm sick of companies getting bad press for normal business operations.
Fine be sick of it. That's your right, but it's everyone else's right to be sick of it when businesses have normal business operations of using strong arm tactics. Sometimes businesses do the wrong thing, and sometimes people should get angry.
Suing someone who infringes upon a patent of yours is normal. Yep you're right. It is normal, and it's normally wrong. Most patents are complete crap and shouldn't have been issued. Most companies that sue for infringement are just betting that their legal team is tougher than the defendants. I suspect strongly that this is the case with these patents.
It works like this: The patent office is unqualified (technically) to judge the incredible amount of submissions (most of which will never be enforced or challenged) that they get. To deal with this, they rubber stamp any patent that meets the formatting specifications. Their assumption is that if the patent becomes interesting (enforced or challenged) then the courts will resolve the issue. All of this is ok so far (not great, but ok). It's like lazy evaluation. Let the courts deal with the patents that matter.
The problem is that in the courts it's not a fair fight. The judge is told to presume the patent is valid (the people at the patent office claim it is). The side with the weaker case will usually go for a jury trial so that they can throw out the jurors who have any advanced education (potentially capable of understanding a technology that took years of college to understand for the people who created it). With no one left in the room capable of understanding the technology (the judge studied law not engineering), the side with the most money wins. By the time it goes through an appeal (several years later) the technology is obsolete. None of this has any relation to the merits of the patent in question. Can you tell I'm bitter?
Sure 3DFX did the same thing a couple years ago. They should be held to the same standards. Companies (and people) should be judged according to their recent actions. If 3DFX did that tomorrow the Slashdot Collective/Community would be rightfully annoyed then too. Companies change a lot, and if they behaved well for the last year or so, then older actions can slowly be forgiven.
Did I just get trolled?
As for the closed source driver business. NVIDEA can do whatever they want (as long they don't violate somebody else's license) with their drivers. If they choose to keep them closed that's fine. More power to them. I'll just buy something else.
No offence but isn't this pretty much the same as this article, which is still on the home page at the time of writing, which includes an update on a ZdNet article about the PIII recall.
Of course it is. But now that C|Net has said it, it must be true. Tom's hardware has little credibility. (That was sarcasm...)
Actually, there is a real difference. Tom's and HardOCP reported the problem. C|Net reported that Intel acknowledges the problem. I guess that's new news.
I am not being sarcastic when I say this would great news if the patent were issued. We all know the patent system is deeply flawed, as is our current conception of intellectual property. What better way to change the system by issuing patents so idiotic and encompassing that every large multinational company in the world will have its legal teams working to break the patent, or better yet, to lobby to have the entire system changed and overhauled.
Not very likely. Large companies would only fight just enough to free themselves of any headaches. They certainly wouldn't make any efforts for real reform. If they did that, then how would they abuse the system?
The goal is to get a patent that is broad and sweeping enough that you can use it as a threat without getting one that is so broad that it generates a lot of attention.
Out of curiosity, when was the last time you saw a patent that you think was truly novel over the prior art?
Nah, it's too late by then. They're the media -- they know what you're thinking...
... I wonder what my big national concern will be as the election draws nearer ...
Of course they know what you're thinking. They induced you to think it. They probably had it in their business plan months ago.
I would imagine in places where security is an issue, the government should be looking at BSD first. Not to diss Linux, but OpenBSD is reknowned for it's "security by default" out of the box. If anything, I would think the government would err on the side of security (so their government hire doesn't get the bleeding edge driver or graphics utility, boohoo).
Can you just imagines the news?
Reuters: This just in - The US government has decide to standardize it's military computers on an open source operating system developed mostly in Canada. Interestingly enough, "OpenBSD" as they like to call it is based on the work of some computer scientists from the University of California at Berkeley a couple decades ago. Apparently everything the US has to offer pales in comparision when it comes to the security of OpenBSD. An admiral that wished to remains anonymous said, "It's about time those canookies and hippies did something to watch our ass. After all, we've been watching theirs for all these years."
Yeah win9x is GREAT for adressing that half gig of RAM.
So use WinNT 4 with a late service pack. How is Win2K better?
You fail to realize that that's as inevitable as death in most organizations.
...And as pleasant a thought.
Win2K is a fine gaming platform. Multiprocessor support and DirectX for games that don't run in an OpenGL mode. It has no other good uses. There is a better alternative for every other task you might want to do with a computer.
Take your hypothesis to the limit. Is it really the case that the smog problem in LA (or any other big city) would go away if there were (in the extreme) _no_ diesel emmisions? It's my (uneducated) guess the problem would still be there even if diesel and pre-1990 cars were gone completely.
I'm speaking out of my ass though. I'm a computer dork, not a chemist or environmental scientist or whatever. I want to see hydrogen burning engines. Water vapor is a fine exhaust from my point of view. I'm sure that's impractical for some reason I don't understand though.
... people are forgetting that gasoline and diesel engines are far cleaner today then they were 30 years ago ...
I guess you haven't been to L.A. lately. All those late model Mercedes with the cleaner burning engines are making for a very yellow/brown sky regardless of how bad it was in 1970. They may be cleaner, but they aren't clean enough.
You're correct about my not presenting or supporting my arguments very well. That happens when I rant.
<BR><BR>
Let me phrase it this way: Gnome looks like an attempt to copy COM with just enough differences so that people who know COM will have to look up the new names. <B>IUnknown::</B> with <B>QueryInterface()</B>, <B>AddRef()</B> and <B>Release()</B> changes to <B>Unknown::</B> with <B>query_interface()</B>, <B>ref()</B>, and <B>unref()</B>.
<BR><BR>
The use of Factories and Monikers also (very) closely resembles the COM way of doing things. I'm sure some OO guy out there will say that these are standard design patterns and that I should go back to school before I criticize them. To that I respond, I know COM and have implemented a number of sophisticated objects with and without the use of wizards etc... I also know that COM makes for fragile bloated applications.
<BR><BR>
I guess my point is that Gnome is clearly copying something that sucks. Sure COM is useful for rapid application development, and it does promote easy code reuse. It also promotes creating bloated and fragile applications.
<BR><BR>
Maybe since it's open source and can be fixed by anybody it'll be ok, but I think it's just going to bring some of the worst qualities of Win32 to Unix.
<BR><BR><BR>
By the way, Visual C++ is a fine compiler. I think they took a step backward when they went from 4.2 to 5.0, but 4.2 and 6.0 generate pretty damned good code. They've always had problems with compliance to standards, but that's Microsoft for you. (g++ has implemented a few extensions as well.)
<BR><BR>
More stuff just crossed my mind:
Miguel brings up "Samba, Apache, NFSD, innd, sendmail, in.named, ftpd and ssh" as example of programs that have little or no code reuse outside of libc. He mentions Internet Explorer as a great example of an application that has reusable components.
Which applications are stable and efficient, and which one is a bloated beast?
Ugh. Big big Ugh.
COM is terrible, and he wants to bring it to Unix. Welcome to the world of fragile applications and bloatware.
There are very few applications that benefit from the app inside an app model (Excel sheets inside your your Word app). Few enough that those can be special cases. Why do you want to load a brand new DLL (shared object library) everytime a button shows on a form.
He mentions that a common criticism of IE is that it is bloated and unstable. Then he promptly ignores those criticisms and tells you how it's great that IE is made of a bunch of separate components. Sounds like the first propaganda chapter of all those ATL/COM/DCOM/COM+/MFC COM books. It's still bloated and unstable. Being separate components didn't solve that problem.
Most applications know in advance exactly what components they need. Why not propose/enforce a standard static library interface for GUI kits?
Ugh.
COM optimizes programmer time. VisualBasic and Delphi are very good at rapid prototyping. Arguing in favor of what's best for the average end user shouldn't really take this into account. You've saved yourself some time developing the app, but when some other app comes in and trashes your widget.so library with a newer version you've just hosed the user.
Oh well, at least I can avoid installing Gnome under Unix. I don't even have that choice with COM under Windows.
Well, you know how dumb the average person is, right? By definition, half the people out there are even dumber than that.
Nahh. That's not really true. Imagine you had 99 people with a 100 IQ, and 1 person with a 150 IQ. In this case 99% are dumber than average.
Now, by definition 50% of the people are smarter than the "median" person right? But out of 6 billion people, I really don't know how to go about figuring which one is the median. How am I going to judge the rest in comparison to some person I probably haven't even met?
Well let's see if I can get somewhat back on topic:
As for Mozilla, I'd like to see a cross platform Galleon (Gecko Only) project. Take what's good and leave what doesn't need to be in there out, and have it work on all the platforms (for instance other than just Gnome).
Interesting stuff. Energy density of gasoline is ~43 Megajoules/kg, and hydrogen is ~139 Megajoules/kg. That's over 3 times. I wonder though why we can't have compressed hydrogen as our fuel (Compressed all the way to a liquid)? I realize there are probably concerns about danger during a car accident (lets ignore the Hindenburg for now), but how much volume does a kg of each take? Even if the liquid hydrogen takes up 3 times more space than gasoline, it's a break even right?
Having hydrogen as your fuel source would be great because your fumes would be water vapor. All of a sudden LA becomes humid instead of smoggy
Please respond to this as I'm really curious. I've asked plenty of the chem major types I know, but they never seem to have this information. You're the first person who sounds knowledgeable about the topic.
What I'm curious about is why the OS has to get in the way of performance for an application. Why does this thing need to be in the kernel to get this kind of performance? Is it system call overhead, or context-switch times? Is the general purpose network stack slower than what you can do in kernel land? I doubt it is something as silly as getting a high enough priority.
It seems to me that the OS should not get in the way of performance, and that if it does then there is room for improvement.
LEAVE SOME FsCKING ROOM BETWEEN YOU AND THE GUY IN FRONT OF YOU.
That's fine and dandy for freeway traffic, but the problem I face day to day is traffic at lots of stop lights. Then you want the exact opposite: Slowly start to accelerate when you see the car two or three cars in front of you. It kills me when some ass in front of you pulls away slowly at a stop light because they know they can make it. What about everyone behind you?