I'm sure you have a bank account, so why don't you take your change there instead of dropping it in the Coinstar machine and letting them rape you? I know it's "only" 8.5% (at least in my area), but with a decent amount of change that can really add up, and most banks will count change free for account holders in my experience.
He did throw a chair but not at a presentation. The chair thing was over an employee defecting to Google. Such gems as, "Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy", and, "I am going to fucking kill Google", came out of it as well.
You are wrong. One's Slashdot UID is the sole determiner of technical proficiency, age, penis size, and validity of opinion, .
For example, I have mastered HTML and gaining proficiency in Visual Basic 6. I am 12 years old and my penis is large enough not to be considered a micropenis by only a few millimeters. Of course, at my level of Slashdot inexperience, my words should be taken with a grain of salt.
A person like Xtifr however, he received a blowjob for Ada Lovelace and can speak machine code in to a processor and hear the results coming out of the other end. He is older than most trees, and has the Unix beard to prove it. If he ever manages to get his elderly penis erect, we have solved our space elevator problem. Every word he speaks is handed down to Moses on stone tablets and entered in to Slashdot with care.
Well said. By the time someone starts getting up to between 500mg and a gram they will feel so shitty they won't want to consume any more. It's not like cocaine or speed where there's actually euphoria driving the urge to dose forwards. Sure someone with heart problems will be in trouble with a high dose, just as a diabetic would be if he spent a whole day binging on Little Debbies. Maybe pure sugar should only be available to licensed labs.
The person above who said snorting a line of caffeine the size of an average line of cocaine would kill you obviously needs to either get himself a better coke dealer, or stop commenting on things they know nothing about other than what they've seen in movies. A non tolerant healthy person with some good coke would get good and high off a 50mg line, about half the 100 mg of caffeine that is found in a cup of coffee. I can't imagine the bioavailability of caffeine snorted would be so much higher than taking it orally that it would feel any different. If that same person snorted the entire gram in one go he could very likely end up in the hospital or worse, whereas a gram of caffeine would probably have him on the couch feeling like shit with an elevated heart rate, wishing he never did that shit, but would otherwise be just fine.
You're right, and this is an area that I wish developers would pay a lot more attention too. It seems a lot of projects figure that the user will reboot or close the program eventually, so no point in chasing down memory leaks unless they are particularly egregious. I understand that memory management is hard and all of the usual excuses, but it doesn't fly in server software, and it shouldn't on the desktop either. Fortunately, none of the programs I commonly run leak a ton of memory, and it sucks for people who have to depend on software that does, because that shouldn't be the case and it really is a solved problem these days.
My suggestion for you would be to check out Lazarus and Free Pascal. Lazarus is a cross platform and open source clone of Borland's (or whoever the hell own the company now) Delphi. Free Pascal is the compiler it uses, and it is pretty damn close to source compatible with Delphi, and also provides compatibility modes for other Pascal dialects as well, including it's own Object Pascal mode which fixes some of the stupid design decisions in the Delphi version of Object Pascal. The compiler itself has very speedy compilation times compared to C++ compilers, and generates decently quick code as well. The compiler itself is very mature and well maintained, and it gaining new features all the time. Lazarus is the IDE, which provides you with a RAD environment to quickly piece together the UI, and it is packed with all kinds of awesome features. The LCL, it's supporting library, wraps all of these functions up in a way that makes it very easy to deploy cross platform applications. It covers OSX, Linux (GTK+ and Qt), and Windows. The Free Pascal compiler can compile code for many more platforms, and has in fact supported some even before GCC. If you stick with the LCL, just about everything is covered between platforms and it uses the native components of the platform it is compiled for. It has a very healthy community, with plenty of bindings for all different kinds of libraries. It also provides a good method for creating custom components and reusing them, allowing you to install them in to the IDE and drag and drop them in the form designer just like you would with a standard button or text box. I've never done any stuff with 3-d graphics, but there's all kinds of OpenGL stuff available, and anything you can do in the native widgetsets you can do with Lazarus. The issue with Lazarus is that the IDE is still beta, and there still are a few bugs here and there, but they are fixed pretty quick, and there aren't any major show stoppers. The big issue is that it uses GDB for debugging (there is a native Object Pascal debugger in the works, but it won't be finished anytime soon), which is really aimed towards C based languages, so debugging isn't always smooth. Most of the basic tasks, like setting breakpoints and stepping through a program/function work fine, but there are a few issues with the differences between Pascal datatypes and C datatypes that can make things confusing.
The reason I recommend this tool is because even though it doesn't have a massive ecosystem like C++, it is coherent and works very well between platforms. The Object Pascal language is very easy to learn, it's powerful, and well designed. While not as fast as C or C++, is you look at the alioth debian language shootout page, it is pretty quick compared to other languages. It provides access to all of the familiar C library functions, and includes all kinds of stuff in the language for compatibility with the C language. It's not the old Pascal from the Turbo Pascal days that people like to bash, almost all of the complaints I hear about the language itself were taken care of a decade ago. The only issue I can really think of is that the language can be a bit verbose compared to C, but compared to Java it's pretty succinct.
Part of the solution to this problem would be for operating systems to be smarter about caching entire programs in memory. The Linux way of doing things is very efficient, but it works because of the Free Software ecosystem where there is usually a standard library for a given task. This makes it very easy to cache things in memory and make for very small binaries for the actual programs. Even on GNOME, after you load one KDE program, the next one you open will probably boot very vast because all of the libraries are already there in memory. On Windows, everyone has their own proprietary libraries, and even if two programs are using the same shared library, the chances of them both using the same version are slim. The average computer has more RAM than most users will ever need, and modern operating systems already do a ton of caching, but the need to be smart about it and applications need to be able to influence and interact with it. Back in day, if you had an IDE running and a browser open with documentation and all of a sudden your boss came over and said he needed some report on his desk by the end of the day, you'd need to close a few programs before opening Word because otherwise you'd start hitting the swap and everything would run slow as hell. So users got in to the habit of closing programs when they were done with them, which isn't really necessary these days. Some people have figured this out, and leave their frequently used programs open, and they never have to deal with loading times and splash screens. For those who haven't the operating system should do this for them. Say Windows determines Photoshop is a frequently used program, after it's loaded for the first time, if the user closes it, the entire program should stay resident in memory unless that space is needed by something else. So if Photoshop is loaded again, it should be able to know if it's already in memory, and skip all of the splash screen garbage and just get down to business. It should be able to communicate with Windows, and let it know if there are images that are edited frequently so it can store those in memory too. This is similar to the way things are done today with speed loaders and programs running in the system tray, but it could be a lot smarter and more efficient in the way things are done.
My biggest pet peeve in this area is programs that show splash screen for absolutely no reason, they just set a timer and you get an irritating reminder of what the software is called every time you load it. Everyone knows what the program they are running is called, and they probably know what company made it too. Some of them show developer credits or something like that, an nobody gives a damn, they probably never get read even though the user is forced to stare at them every time the program starts. I can just see a PHB suggesting it, "all of the other big programs have one, it will make our software look much more professional".
Chances are if the open source community choose to rewrite this they probably wouldn't choose another locked in proprietary language to do it. One way to ensure failure for a FOSS project is to use a language that people would have to pay to use. Kind of silly to have to pay hundreds of dollars to be able to develop free software for no pay. Also, far more developers are skilled with a language like C++ than Delphi these days. I have nothing against Delphi or the Object Pascal language, hell there's even a pretty decent open source implementation in FPC / Lazarus, but it is almost never the right tool if you want to grow an open source project.
Sure you don't see images, Flash, and most scripts don't work (although I find most web forms are still functional). If most of your Internet use is based around the consumption of text something like Lynx is a good way to remove all of the other distractions. I like using a modern browser and enjoy a rich multimedia experience online but for someone who just wants raw information on a subject and couldn't care less about the other stuff Lynx is a great tool. I even use a console based browser from time to time when I'm working in text mode and I need to reasearch something I need info on. I'm willing to be Lynx works far better on the modern Internet than something like IE 4 would simply because it doesn't even try to render all the multimedia crap, it just ignores it.
He never said he was "marketing" it, he just said making it available for download. Now I guess just making a link and possibly a thumbnail could be considered a form of advertising, but virtue of the fact that the link shows the availibility of the product, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. IANAL, and I don't claim to be extremely knowledgable in intellectual property law, but I was under the impression a trademark protected words, phrases, or symbols that represented a company. That would protect a company like Pepsi from me putting a cola product on the market with the same or similar name and making a profit off their image or reputation. So if I made a movie and used Mickey Mouse or the name Walt Disney on the package without permission, I would be infringing on Walt Disney's trademarks. Now if a Walt Disney film, say "Steamboat Willie", fell in to the public domain and was someone released it online, I don't think that would be a violatation of Walt Disney's trademarks. It's still Walt Disney's product, regardless of whether or not they still hold they copyright, I am not misrepresenting something using their trademarks.
As far as the rights of a company to stop someone from using something the hold the trademark to, I have no idea. If I write a movie review on Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie" and I have an image of Mickey Mouse, do they have the legal standing to compel me to remove the words and images they hold the trademarks too? Why do most commercials in the US refer to their competitor as "the other leading brand" and use look-a-like packaging instead of just stating the brandname? Their not misrepresenting their trademarks, real Bounty towels are real Bounty towels, even if Viva is 50% more absorbant. What are the rules as far as using a companies trademark to simply refer to the product? I'm don't know much more about the legalities other than what I stated above, hopefully someone with more knowledge on the subject can chime in.
I've been dealing with this bullshit at the moment due to not having insurance. The generic version of Subutex would cost me like $40, where I just picked up my brand name Suboxone prescription for $260 plus a $150 fee for the doctors appointment and drug screen. The bullshit part about it is the naloxone in Suboxone is completely pointless, even if the drug is injected. Buprenorphine's binding affinity is higher than naloxone so no matter what you do with a suboxone pill that naloxone isn't going to touch a receptor. Even if it did, naloxone has so much shorter a duration than buprenorphine it would be ineffective anyway, even in heroin overdoses naloxone often has to be re-administered to prevent the patient from slipping back in to OD. Buprenorphine is the drug that blocks the other opiates, buprenorphine is the drug that will rip another full agonist off the receptor and cause precipitated withdrawal. In fact Reckitt Benckiser tried to hold up the approval of the Roxane generic saying that it contained talc fillers which would make the drug far more dangerous to insufflate or inject than their suboxone or subutex which contains cornstarch fillers.[1]
The problem here is that the administration of drugs should be between a doctor and a pharmacist, not a doctor and a drug company. Many doctors are unbelievably ignorant about the effects of drugs, and who can blame them with as many as there are these days and the complexity of the human body, and a drug company is not exactly a patients best advocate. Doctors should work out a diagnosis and then if medication is indicated they should work this out with a pharmacist. Instead it is usually worked out by paging through colorful brochures and choosing between vacation destinations with the drug reps. The suboxone situation is actually analogous to vendor lock-in in the software world, and patents have the same effects on medicine as they do on software. Reckitt Benckiser did a very good job of making sure their brand would be the ONLY one used, and their pamphlets on suboxone are actually kind of fun to pick apart and look for half truths and straight up fiction.
Methadone is a great drug for chronic pain, but it's greatest strength is also it's greatest danger; the long duration of action. Standard methadone dosing for a chronic pain patient is lower doses a couple times a day, but if someone is not familiar with the drug is really easy to take a couple extra doses thinking it's not working when it really just takes a couple hours to kick in. A lot of times a shorter acting opiate like hydromorphone or oxycodone is prescribed as well to help out with that issue, which also adds quite a bit of danger. I don't have facts to back up my suspicious, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say a lot of the deaths are happening not to the pain patients or addicts receiving the methadone, but to the people it is being diverted to. A lot of people who use drugs recreationally aren't very clued up on what they're taking (just about every opiate in the world is either percocet or vicodin to these people), and methadone is a very easy drug to either dose too much thinking its not working or end up re-dosing or mixing other depressants later in the day when the high has started to fade (rather, the person has become acclimated to it) but the levels are still high in the body.
The question is, what can we do about this? I honestly don't know. Many people in need of strong narcotic pain medication while doctors are forced to be overly conservative to save their own asses while at the same time people are getting introduced to the drugs far to early thanks to what I would consider over prescribing of weak narcotic opiates for simple injuries or dental procedures. Throw in some states where the laws are much more lax with pain clinics that advertise like bars in the back of the newspaper and people walk in with hundreds in cash and out with an opiate, a benzo, and a stimulant right next door to the annexed cash only pharmacy and you have a huge mess with narcotic drugs in America, and I'm sure things are similar elsewhere in the world as well. As a former addict who has been on a methadone program, and currently is on suboxone, I think I speak for both pain patients and people trying to get off opiods that the people who divert their medications are scum and are fucking things up for everyone. I can honestly say with a straight face that I believe in drug legalisation, and by that I don't mean a "Legalize It Man!" hippie. I mean across the board rights to but what you want in to your own body, but in this current situation with people being so uneducated and ignorant, the people selling their scripts to anyone on the street might as well be handing out loaded handguns. Just recently here in Wisconsin we had some wonderfully sensationalized stories about a few local teens who died with massive amounts of benzos and alcohol in their systems along with suboxone in their systems, and all of the blame was placed on suboxone and soon after calls to ban suboxone and concerned parents asking why doctors are handing out drugs to addicts filled the 10 o'clock news. Even worse, the more this stuff happens the more doctors will clamp down and the harder it will be for legitimate pain patients, a lot of whom are lucky to get just enough to lay in bed comfortably enough to get a couple hours of sleep, to get their medication.
It's just a massively fucked up situation, since man discovered the poppy it's made a mess of everything in its path. If there is a god, he is a cruel soul for putting the very chemicals that make us feel our best in to a plant, and then letting his people become convinced that it is somehow a sin for us to take it.
Yeah, I didn't really think about dragging in to another workspace, I haven't had to do that yet with Gnome 3. I really do hope that some sort of "Places" functionality is moved in to Gnome Shell instead of having to explicitly launch Nautilus to navigate the file system. I'm imagining just another menu option in addition to "Windows" and "Applications" that would allow you to navigate files, and then drag and drop them in to applications open on the workspaces on the right side of the screen. That would probably go a long way towards solving at least on of your problems with opening up images with the new workspace setup. I think I saw an extension on the new site that will allow a places menu on the top panel, that might be useful to you. So far I've found the new extension system to be a pain in the ass and a lot of the available extensions to be either horribly broken, or damn near featureless.
I wonder how many people hate Gnome 3, without having tried it, for no other reason than the fact that it is a change from what they're used to. Now I can totally understand that, most people on a site like Slashdot use their computer for work, there is no reason for one to mess up his long developed work flow for the new shiny. Gnome 3 is quite different and it will require quite a few adjustments to get comfortable in the new environment. I recently moved from Ubuntu 10.04 to Fedora 16 after my system ended up fucked after months of maintaining a pretty much custom compiled system because I was too stubborn to make the move away from the environment I was so accustomed too, but I still wanted to take advantage of all of the improvements in the compilers and libraries. I was apprehensive at first, but I learned to adapt pretty quick, and after a week or two there really isn't any impact on my productivity using Gnome 3, and there are some great benefits. There are also some issues, but the shell is still young and I'm sure some of them will be addressed as it matures. On the good side, losing the bottom panel gives me a bit more screen real estate, which I can use all I can on a laptop with a widescreen. I always had to have that around in Gnome 2, even though all of my window/workspace switching was done by keybindings, having it taken away turned out to be a good thing. I like the way Gnome 3's workspaces function, how it just generates a new one when I need it, which is real nice for me because when I'm developing I tend to have everything I need full screen on workspaces, and it always seemed that I would end up needing one more workspace than I had when I was using Gnome 2 and I would either have to go and create a new one, or switch between multiple windows on a single workspace, which does slow me down a bit. On the bad end, it does require quite a bit more mouse movement if that is how you navigate through your desktop environment, and I'd imagine for a lot of people that's how they do it. I usually navigate via keybindings, so things work pretty much the same as Gnome 2 in that respect. I've noticed an issue with Gnome 3 where I have to enter some key combos twice to get them to work, like the shell is eating the first one before using it for what I want, and that is kind of irritating. I wish the run dialogue would also function like a sort of search dialogue like I've seen in pictures of Unity, in fact I think Gnome 2's run dialogue was better because at least it would bring up a list of options. It's fine when I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a pain in the ass trying to run a new application and running a bunch of combinations and spellings trying to get it just right with no suggestions. I also find the configuration options of the desktop to be lacking, like many others, and find it silly that I have to install a bunch of extra applications and extensions just to change some basic things like entries in the Applications menus or applets in the top panel.
My point with all of this is, I understand why there is so much hate for Gnome 3 and Unity, they're taking away the environment you're used and forcing you to change how you work. Whether you stick with Gnome, or you move to something else, you have no choice. Gnome 2 will succumb to bitrot sooner or later, and then it's gone. It's not the type of application that you'll just be able to install and run like it's 5 years ago in 2017 and have everything work just like you remembered it. I just wish people would give it a solid chance before they knocked it, at least give it a fair assessment. In a way, a lot of geeks are kind of like Gnome, they'll stick with the one thing they're used to come hell or high water. The world's changing though, Windows 95 is quite limited for the type of tasks we do today, and if you don't move forward you die, that's just how things go. If you're still writing 16 bit real mode because you're more comfortable with segment addressing and don't want to deal with all of that hipster protected
Of course they decide to give it a name that doesn't even look like a word. I can't think of a singled popular search engine that doesn't have a catchy name. How do these free software developers expect the word to get around about their software when nobody can pronounce it and probably won't even remember what it was called? Especially a peer to peer search engine which I would imagine depends even more on a decent amount of people actually using it than a regular search engine.
How the the cost of Windows for OEM's being offset by the money they make from packaging in trialware make Windows free? If a company decides not to load their computer up with crapware, then they will pass on the $15 cost of Windows to the customer. Saying Windows is "free as in beer" to OEMs is misleading, it costs $15 but that cost is offset by the revenue of the trialware. I would much rather pay an extra $15 than have to go through all of the trouble of uninstalling all of the shit that comes packed on a new computer, so I think it would be safe to say that OEM version of Windows are only free if you don't value your time.
I hope all of these departments are more competent than the Milwaukee Police department which has been trying to move their radio communications over to OpenSky. They intended to make the switch to a digital system to prevent the problems they were having with their traditional system like interference (with the added benefit of the public not being able to listen in) and the new system ended up having even larger problems with dead spots and just plain not working, putting the officers and firefighters lives in even more risk. The system has completely failed and been off-line for quite a bit up here, and has caused a lot of controversy and problems for government officials as they sunk a ton of money in to this piece of shit. I just hope all of these other departments who are planning on implementing digital systems and/or encryption have a lot better luck than we have over here in Milwaukee.
Actually during the creation of NT Microsoft licensed a network stack from Spyder Systems, which was based on the BSD TCP/IP stack. Microsoft replaced this with it's own stack for NT 3.5, which was the second version, and I believe that was the one that went in to Windows 95. Some small userland utilities persisted after the stack was replaced, and who knows how much BSD code Microsofts own network stack contains even to this day seeing as we can't review Microsoft's source. Not that it really matters, as the BSD license doesn't require them to release the source, just to provide credit to the original developers, and I know these were present in some of the utilities at least up to XP, and I'm sure if the included any BSD code in their current network stack they would have the attribution hidden somewhere in fine unreadable print.
When I write C, I put my splats next to the variable name too, it's just how I've always done it. . I think the Pascal way is the best where a pointer would be declared like this: p: ^integer;. This is very clear in my mind, as it reads "p is a pointer to an integer. int* p or int *p, they both read backwards to me, I just put it next to the variable name because that's where it's going to be when I dereference the pointer, so I might as well be consistent in my declarations as well.
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I'm sure you have a bank account, so why don't you take your change there instead of dropping it in the Coinstar machine and letting them rape you? I know it's "only" 8.5% (at least in my area), but with a decent amount of change that can really add up, and most banks will count change free for account holders in my experience.
He did throw a chair but not at a presentation. The chair thing was over an employee defecting to Google. Such gems as, "Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy", and, "I am going to fucking kill Google", came out of it as well.
What is this like some kind of AA for nerds? Alcoholics Anonymous Cowards? The first step is admitting you have a problem... on Slashdot!
You are wrong. One's Slashdot UID is the sole determiner of technical proficiency, age, penis size, and validity of opinion, .
For example, I have mastered HTML and gaining proficiency in Visual Basic 6. I am 12 years old and my penis is large enough not to be considered a micropenis by only a few millimeters. Of course, at my level of Slashdot inexperience, my words should be taken with a grain of salt.
A person like Xtifr however, he received a blowjob for Ada Lovelace and can speak machine code in to a processor and hear the results coming out of the other end. He is older than most trees, and has the Unix beard to prove it. If he ever manages to get his elderly penis erect, we have solved our space elevator problem. Every word he speaks is handed down to Moses on stone tablets and entered in to Slashdot with care.
Far better than stuffing it in your vagina and/or asshole.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/11/14/vodka-tampon-teens_n_1092594.html
Note: Probably not true, but I could see more than a few people trying it after the media hype.
http://www.snopes.com/risque/kinky/vodka.asp
Some people even tried Jenkem for real after it hit the airwaves.
Well said. By the time someone starts getting up to between 500mg and a gram they will feel so shitty they won't want to consume any more. It's not like cocaine or speed where there's actually euphoria driving the urge to dose forwards. Sure someone with heart problems will be in trouble with a high dose, just as a diabetic would be if he spent a whole day binging on Little Debbies. Maybe pure sugar should only be available to licensed labs.
The person above who said snorting a line of caffeine the size of an average line of cocaine would kill you obviously needs to either get himself a better coke dealer, or stop commenting on things they know nothing about other than what they've seen in movies. A non tolerant healthy person with some good coke would get good and high off a 50mg line, about half the 100 mg of caffeine that is found in a cup of coffee. I can't imagine the bioavailability of caffeine snorted would be so much higher than taking it orally that it would feel any different. If that same person snorted the entire gram in one go he could very likely end up in the hospital or worse, whereas a gram of caffeine would probably have him on the couch feeling like shit with an elevated heart rate, wishing he never did that shit, but would otherwise be just fine.
You're right, and this is an area that I wish developers would pay a lot more attention too. It seems a lot of projects figure that the user will reboot or close the program eventually, so no point in chasing down memory leaks unless they are particularly egregious. I understand that memory management is hard and all of the usual excuses, but it doesn't fly in server software, and it shouldn't on the desktop either. Fortunately, none of the programs I commonly run leak a ton of memory, and it sucks for people who have to depend on software that does, because that shouldn't be the case and it really is a solved problem these days.
My suggestion for you would be to check out Lazarus and Free Pascal. Lazarus is a cross platform and open source clone of Borland's (or whoever the hell own the company now) Delphi. Free Pascal is the compiler it uses, and it is pretty damn close to source compatible with Delphi, and also provides compatibility modes for other Pascal dialects as well, including it's own Object Pascal mode which fixes some of the stupid design decisions in the Delphi version of Object Pascal. The compiler itself has very speedy compilation times compared to C++ compilers, and generates decently quick code as well. The compiler itself is very mature and well maintained, and it gaining new features all the time. Lazarus is the IDE, which provides you with a RAD environment to quickly piece together the UI, and it is packed with all kinds of awesome features. The LCL, it's supporting library, wraps all of these functions up in a way that makes it very easy to deploy cross platform applications. It covers OSX, Linux (GTK+ and Qt), and Windows. The Free Pascal compiler can compile code for many more platforms, and has in fact supported some even before GCC. If you stick with the LCL, just about everything is covered between platforms and it uses the native components of the platform it is compiled for. It has a very healthy community, with plenty of bindings for all different kinds of libraries. It also provides a good method for creating custom components and reusing them, allowing you to install them in to the IDE and drag and drop them in the form designer just like you would with a standard button or text box. I've never done any stuff with 3-d graphics, but there's all kinds of OpenGL stuff available, and anything you can do in the native widgetsets you can do with Lazarus. The issue with Lazarus is that the IDE is still beta, and there still are a few bugs here and there, but they are fixed pretty quick, and there aren't any major show stoppers. The big issue is that it uses GDB for debugging (there is a native Object Pascal debugger in the works, but it won't be finished anytime soon), which is really aimed towards C based languages, so debugging isn't always smooth. Most of the basic tasks, like setting breakpoints and stepping through a program/function work fine, but there are a few issues with the differences between Pascal datatypes and C datatypes that can make things confusing.
The reason I recommend this tool is because even though it doesn't have a massive ecosystem like C++, it is coherent and works very well between platforms. The Object Pascal language is very easy to learn, it's powerful, and well designed. While not as fast as C or C++, is you look at the alioth debian language shootout page, it is pretty quick compared to other languages. It provides access to all of the familiar C library functions, and includes all kinds of stuff in the language for compatibility with the C language. It's not the old Pascal from the Turbo Pascal days that people like to bash, almost all of the complaints I hear about the language itself were taken care of a decade ago. The only issue I can really think of is that the language can be a bit verbose compared to C, but compared to Java it's pretty succinct.
Part of the solution to this problem would be for operating systems to be smarter about caching entire programs in memory. The Linux way of doing things is very efficient, but it works because of the Free Software ecosystem where there is usually a standard library for a given task. This makes it very easy to cache things in memory and make for very small binaries for the actual programs. Even on GNOME, after you load one KDE program, the next one you open will probably boot very vast because all of the libraries are already there in memory. On Windows, everyone has their own proprietary libraries, and even if two programs are using the same shared library, the chances of them both using the same version are slim. The average computer has more RAM than most users will ever need, and modern operating systems already do a ton of caching, but the need to be smart about it and applications need to be able to influence and interact with it. Back in day, if you had an IDE running and a browser open with documentation and all of a sudden your boss came over and said he needed some report on his desk by the end of the day, you'd need to close a few programs before opening Word because otherwise you'd start hitting the swap and everything would run slow as hell. So users got in to the habit of closing programs when they were done with them, which isn't really necessary these days. Some people have figured this out, and leave their frequently used programs open, and they never have to deal with loading times and splash screens. For those who haven't the operating system should do this for them. Say Windows determines Photoshop is a frequently used program, after it's loaded for the first time, if the user closes it, the entire program should stay resident in memory unless that space is needed by something else. So if Photoshop is loaded again, it should be able to know if it's already in memory, and skip all of the splash screen garbage and just get down to business. It should be able to communicate with Windows, and let it know if there are images that are edited frequently so it can store those in memory too. This is similar to the way things are done today with speed loaders and programs running in the system tray, but it could be a lot smarter and more efficient in the way things are done.
My biggest pet peeve in this area is programs that show splash screen for absolutely no reason, they just set a timer and you get an irritating reminder of what the software is called every time you load it. Everyone knows what the program they are running is called, and they probably know what company made it too. Some of them show developer credits or something like that, an nobody gives a damn, they probably never get read even though the user is forced to stare at them every time the program starts. I can just see a PHB suggesting it, "all of the other big programs have one, it will make our software look much more professional".
Chances are if the open source community choose to rewrite this they probably wouldn't choose another locked in proprietary language to do it. One way to ensure failure for a FOSS project is to use a language that people would have to pay to use. Kind of silly to have to pay hundreds of dollars to be able to develop free software for no pay. Also, far more developers are skilled with a language like C++ than Delphi these days. I have nothing against Delphi or the Object Pascal language, hell there's even a pretty decent open source implementation in FPC / Lazarus, but it is almost never the right tool if you want to grow an open source project.
Sure you don't see images, Flash, and most scripts don't work (although I find most web forms are still functional). If most of your Internet use is based around the consumption of text something like Lynx is a good way to remove all of the other distractions. I like using a modern browser and enjoy a rich multimedia experience online but for someone who just wants raw information on a subject and couldn't care less about the other stuff Lynx is a great tool. I even use a console based browser from time to time when I'm working in text mode and I need to reasearch something I need info on. I'm willing to be Lynx works far better on the modern Internet than something like IE 4 would simply because it doesn't even try to render all the multimedia crap, it just ignores it.
Posting to undo moderation failure.
He never said he was "marketing" it, he just said making it available for download. Now I guess just making a link and possibly a thumbnail could be considered a form of advertising, but virtue of the fact that the link shows the availibility of the product, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. IANAL, and I don't claim to be extremely knowledgable in intellectual property law, but I was under the impression a trademark protected words, phrases, or symbols that represented a company. That would protect a company like Pepsi from me putting a cola product on the market with the same or similar name and making a profit off their image or reputation. So if I made a movie and used Mickey Mouse or the name Walt Disney on the package without permission, I would be infringing on Walt Disney's trademarks. Now if a Walt Disney film, say "Steamboat Willie", fell in to the public domain and was someone released it online, I don't think that would be a violatation of Walt Disney's trademarks. It's still Walt Disney's product, regardless of whether or not they still hold they copyright, I am not misrepresenting something using their trademarks.
As far as the rights of a company to stop someone from using something the hold the trademark to, I have no idea. If I write a movie review on Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie" and I have an image of Mickey Mouse, do they have the legal standing to compel me to remove the words and images they hold the trademarks too? Why do most commercials in the US refer to their competitor as "the other leading brand" and use look-a-like packaging instead of just stating the brandname? Their not misrepresenting their trademarks, real Bounty towels are real Bounty towels, even if Viva is 50% more absorbant. What are the rules as far as using a companies trademark to simply refer to the product? I'm don't know much more about the legalities other than what I stated above, hopefully someone with more knowledge on the subject can chime in.
I've been dealing with this bullshit at the moment due to not having insurance. The generic version of Subutex would cost me like $40, where I just picked up my brand name Suboxone prescription for $260 plus a $150 fee for the doctors appointment and drug screen. The bullshit part about it is the naloxone in Suboxone is completely pointless, even if the drug is injected. Buprenorphine's binding affinity is higher than naloxone so no matter what you do with a suboxone pill that naloxone isn't going to touch a receptor. Even if it did, naloxone has so much shorter a duration than buprenorphine it would be ineffective anyway, even in heroin overdoses naloxone often has to be re-administered to prevent the patient from slipping back in to OD. Buprenorphine is the drug that blocks the other opiates, buprenorphine is the drug that will rip another full agonist off the receptor and cause precipitated withdrawal. In fact Reckitt Benckiser tried to hold up the approval of the Roxane generic saying that it contained talc fillers which would make the drug far more dangerous to insufflate or inject than their suboxone or subutex which contains cornstarch fillers.[1]
The problem here is that the administration of drugs should be between a doctor and a pharmacist, not a doctor and a drug company. Many doctors are unbelievably ignorant about the effects of drugs, and who can blame them with as many as there are these days and the complexity of the human body, and a drug company is not exactly a patients best advocate. Doctors should work out a diagnosis and then if medication is indicated they should work this out with a pharmacist. Instead it is usually worked out by paging through colorful brochures and choosing between vacation destinations with the drug reps. The suboxone situation is actually analogous to vendor lock-in in the software world, and patents have the same effects on medicine as they do on software. Reckitt Benckiser did a very good job of making sure their brand would be the ONLY one used, and their pamphlets on suboxone are actually kind of fun to pick apart and look for half truths and straight up fiction.
[1]http://www.naabt.org/tl/FDA-Kramer-petition.pdf
Methadone is a great drug for chronic pain, but it's greatest strength is also it's greatest danger; the long duration of action. Standard methadone dosing for a chronic pain patient is lower doses a couple times a day, but if someone is not familiar with the drug is really easy to take a couple extra doses thinking it's not working when it really just takes a couple hours to kick in. A lot of times a shorter acting opiate like hydromorphone or oxycodone is prescribed as well to help out with that issue, which also adds quite a bit of danger. I don't have facts to back up my suspicious, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say a lot of the deaths are happening not to the pain patients or addicts receiving the methadone, but to the people it is being diverted to. A lot of people who use drugs recreationally aren't very clued up on what they're taking (just about every opiate in the world is either percocet or vicodin to these people), and methadone is a very easy drug to either dose too much thinking its not working or end up re-dosing or mixing other depressants later in the day when the high has started to fade (rather, the person has become acclimated to it) but the levels are still high in the body.
The question is, what can we do about this? I honestly don't know. Many people in need of strong narcotic pain medication while doctors are forced to be overly conservative to save their own asses while at the same time people are getting introduced to the drugs far to early thanks to what I would consider over prescribing of weak narcotic opiates for simple injuries or dental procedures. Throw in some states where the laws are much more lax with pain clinics that advertise like bars in the back of the newspaper and people walk in with hundreds in cash and out with an opiate, a benzo, and a stimulant right next door to the annexed cash only pharmacy and you have a huge mess with narcotic drugs in America, and I'm sure things are similar elsewhere in the world as well. As a former addict who has been on a methadone program, and currently is on suboxone, I think I speak for both pain patients and people trying to get off opiods that the people who divert their medications are scum and are fucking things up for everyone. I can honestly say with a straight face that I believe in drug legalisation, and by that I don't mean a "Legalize It Man!" hippie. I mean across the board rights to but what you want in to your own body, but in this current situation with people being so uneducated and ignorant, the people selling their scripts to anyone on the street might as well be handing out loaded handguns. Just recently here in Wisconsin we had some wonderfully sensationalized stories about a few local teens who died with massive amounts of benzos and alcohol in their systems along with suboxone in their systems, and all of the blame was placed on suboxone and soon after calls to ban suboxone and concerned parents asking why doctors are handing out drugs to addicts filled the 10 o'clock news. Even worse, the more this stuff happens the more doctors will clamp down and the harder it will be for legitimate pain patients, a lot of whom are lucky to get just enough to lay in bed comfortably enough to get a couple hours of sleep, to get their medication.
It's just a massively fucked up situation, since man discovered the poppy it's made a mess of everything in its path. If there is a god, he is a cruel soul for putting the very chemicals that make us feel our best in to a plant, and then letting his people become convinced that it is somehow a sin for us to take it.
Yeah, I didn't really think about dragging in to another workspace, I haven't had to do that yet with Gnome 3. I really do hope that some sort of "Places" functionality is moved in to Gnome Shell instead of having to explicitly launch Nautilus to navigate the file system. I'm imagining just another menu option in addition to "Windows" and "Applications" that would allow you to navigate files, and then drag and drop them in to applications open on the workspaces on the right side of the screen. That would probably go a long way towards solving at least on of your problems with opening up images with the new workspace setup. I think I saw an extension on the new site that will allow a places menu on the top panel, that might be useful to you. So far I've found the new extension system to be a pain in the ass and a lot of the available extensions to be either horribly broken, or damn near featureless.
I wonder how many people hate Gnome 3, without having tried it, for no other reason than the fact that it is a change from what they're used to. Now I can totally understand that, most people on a site like Slashdot use their computer for work, there is no reason for one to mess up his long developed work flow for the new shiny. Gnome 3 is quite different and it will require quite a few adjustments to get comfortable in the new environment. I recently moved from Ubuntu 10.04 to Fedora 16 after my system ended up fucked after months of maintaining a pretty much custom compiled system because I was too stubborn to make the move away from the environment I was so accustomed too, but I still wanted to take advantage of all of the improvements in the compilers and libraries. I was apprehensive at first, but I learned to adapt pretty quick, and after a week or two there really isn't any impact on my productivity using Gnome 3, and there are some great benefits. There are also some issues, but the shell is still young and I'm sure some of them will be addressed as it matures. On the good side, losing the bottom panel gives me a bit more screen real estate, which I can use all I can on a laptop with a widescreen. I always had to have that around in Gnome 2, even though all of my window/workspace switching was done by keybindings, having it taken away turned out to be a good thing. I like the way Gnome 3's workspaces function, how it just generates a new one when I need it, which is real nice for me because when I'm developing I tend to have everything I need full screen on workspaces, and it always seemed that I would end up needing one more workspace than I had when I was using Gnome 2 and I would either have to go and create a new one, or switch between multiple windows on a single workspace, which does slow me down a bit. On the bad end, it does require quite a bit more mouse movement if that is how you navigate through your desktop environment, and I'd imagine for a lot of people that's how they do it. I usually navigate via keybindings, so things work pretty much the same as Gnome 2 in that respect. I've noticed an issue with Gnome 3 where I have to enter some key combos twice to get them to work, like the shell is eating the first one before using it for what I want, and that is kind of irritating. I wish the run dialogue would also function like a sort of search dialogue like I've seen in pictures of Unity, in fact I think Gnome 2's run dialogue was better because at least it would bring up a list of options. It's fine when I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a pain in the ass trying to run a new application and running a bunch of combinations and spellings trying to get it just right with no suggestions. I also find the configuration options of the desktop to be lacking, like many others, and find it silly that I have to install a bunch of extra applications and extensions just to change some basic things like entries in the Applications menus or applets in the top panel.
My point with all of this is, I understand why there is so much hate for Gnome 3 and Unity, they're taking away the environment you're used and forcing you to change how you work. Whether you stick with Gnome, or you move to something else, you have no choice. Gnome 2 will succumb to bitrot sooner or later, and then it's gone. It's not the type of application that you'll just be able to install and run like it's 5 years ago in 2017 and have everything work just like you remembered it. I just wish people would give it a solid chance before they knocked it, at least give it a fair assessment. In a way, a lot of geeks are kind of like Gnome, they'll stick with the one thing they're used to come hell or high water. The world's changing though, Windows 95 is quite limited for the type of tasks we do today, and if you don't move forward you die, that's just how things go. If you're still writing 16 bit real mode because you're more comfortable with segment addressing and don't want to deal with all of that hipster protected
Of course they decide to give it a name that doesn't even look like a word. I can't think of a singled popular search engine that doesn't have a catchy name. How do these free software developers expect the word to get around about their software when nobody can pronounce it and probably won't even remember what it was called? Especially a peer to peer search engine which I would imagine depends even more on a decent amount of people actually using it than a regular search engine.
How the the cost of Windows for OEM's being offset by the money they make from packaging in trialware make Windows free? If a company decides not to load their computer up with crapware, then they will pass on the $15 cost of Windows to the customer. Saying Windows is "free as in beer" to OEMs is misleading, it costs $15 but that cost is offset by the revenue of the trialware. I would much rather pay an extra $15 than have to go through all of the trouble of uninstalling all of the shit that comes packed on a new computer, so I think it would be safe to say that OEM version of Windows are only free if you don't value your time.
I hope all of these departments are more competent than the Milwaukee Police department which has been trying to move their radio communications over to OpenSky. They intended to make the switch to a digital system to prevent the problems they were having with their traditional system like interference (with the added benefit of the public not being able to listen in) and the new system ended up having even larger problems with dead spots and just plain not working, putting the officers and firefighters lives in even more risk. The system has completely failed and been off-line for quite a bit up here, and has caused a lot of controversy and problems for government officials as they sunk a ton of money in to this piece of shit. I just hope all of these other departments who are planning on implementing digital systems and/or encryption have a lot better luck than we have over here in Milwaukee.
Posting to cancel wrong moderation.
You liar! I can't find the swimming pool anywhere in Solaris, BSD, or Linux!
Actually during the creation of NT Microsoft licensed a network stack from Spyder Systems, which was based on the BSD TCP/IP stack. Microsoft replaced this with it's own stack for NT 3.5, which was the second version, and I believe that was the one that went in to Windows 95. Some small userland utilities persisted after the stack was replaced, and who knows how much BSD code Microsofts own network stack contains even to this day seeing as we can't review Microsoft's source. Not that it really matters, as the BSD license doesn't require them to release the source, just to provide credit to the original developers, and I know these were present in some of the utilities at least up to XP, and I'm sure if the included any BSD code in their current network stack they would have the attribution hidden somewhere in fine unreadable print.
When I write C, I put my splats next to the variable name too, it's just how I've always done it. . I think the Pascal way is the best where a pointer would be declared like this: p: ^integer;. This is very clear in my mind, as it reads "p is a pointer to an integer. int* p or int *p, they both read backwards to me, I just put it next to the variable name because that's where it's going to be when I dereference the pointer, so I might as well be consistent in my declarations as well.
How did Hitler get a drivers license with all of the drugs he was doing?