I've made all those changes-- but in Windows, it seems that the choice lies between a interface that is mildly useful for programming, and an ugly/cumbersome one. The Ars technica article suggests that this is a false tradeoff.
The author mentions that in CoreServices, two different Finders appear.
Checking my/System/Library/CoreServices with terminal.app, I can see that one is simple called "Finder", the other is called "Finder.app". Changing my Finder view to "table" I can see that one is a "Application"; the other, a "Classic Application." So there are ways to differentiate the files-- though neither is quite elegant. The extensions are probably necessary for Nextstep compatibility.
In Windows 95 & and successors, the GUI hides the extensions, and as the author points out, this can cause serious problems with vbs viruses. But what was left unmentioned is that it also is hard on programmers. If you can't tell the difference at a glance between "myclass.h" and "myclass.cpp", it really cramps your coding style...
Microsoft also hides files that end in ".dll"-- which is a pain if you program libaries. This is somewhat more defensible, but not by much.
Truth be told, although certain aspects of the Type/Creator code were far more elegant than enaything Windows 9X ever developed (Note to Adobe-- grabbing the.ps extension for Distiller is just plain rude), the immutability of the Creator/Type codes, save for ResEdit, is someaht inconvenient. I remember writing Applescript applications to change these codes en mass. Not exactly user friendly.
"Information wants to free" is a statement about censorship and secrets, not an invitation to end copyright.
If Alice tells Bertram a secret, Bertram may feel compelled to reveal that secret to Charlie.
Let us say that the secret is a stock tip. Alice and Bertram stand to make a lot of money, if they keep the "secret" to themselves. On the other hand, if the secret contains a bit of "juicy gossip", Bertram might be compelled to reveal it to Charlie, and so on.
Thus, the information content of the secret determines how fast (or how slowly) it propagates across society. In that sense, the secret can be said to have deisres and needs,ala "The Selfish Gene" (RDawkins), even though the secret does not have a "intelligence" of its own...
Unless legal/economic consequences to information transfer are embedded within that secret, the secret will propagate across society. To a certain extent, copyright embodies some of those consequences.
To a certain extent, this is true. MS supplies libraries that handle the really high level stuff, like loading texture maps from external files. With OpenGL, you may have to do this by hand-- although programming a.tga or.rgb texture loading is pretty simple-- just a few hours spent with the "Encyclopedia of Graphics Formats" and good code desgin can produce a good reusable library...
On the other hand, this technique may not appeal to the programmer who uses "/*insert custom code here*/" type libaries (MFC, etc).
GLUT handles lot of stuff, although extending the UI can be painful.
My fault-- according to this article Jeff Oldham is converting most of the old illustrations into MetaPost. Anyway, the technical challenges involved in "compiling from source" (so to speak) TAOCP are probably enormous.
text? Text? You want ascii text? My God, you are a heretic. Here's an author who essentially took a multi year sabattical to write a absolutely beautiful type system--TeX-- and here you are, asking if there's a text version...
Well, I suppose that technically you could be asking for TeX source-- but then you'd be missing the elaborate postscript drawings that pepper the piece. (Since TeX is for the most part error free, MikTex should not cause any typographical errors..., but you never know.)
Ahh-- the joys of ASCII text. The PG "small text license" is interesting-- either distribute the PG provided text with no alterations, honor various refund provisions and pay 20% royalties to PG, or distribute the text with no mention of "Project Gutenberg"...
I'd like to see more etexts distributed as LaTeX files, although support might be a nightmare. Instant conversion, on demand, to text, HTML, PS, (or PDF, if you can stomach it.)
This is not a MSNBC story. It's a CNET authored story-- the original of which is here. It is inaccurate and short sighted to continue to give credit to a Microsoft owned network, but even more so in this particular case, where a conflict of interest might reasonably be suspected.
Searching on www.abe-books.com, I found several paperbacks for $2... Of course these are likely to be reading copies, but remember folks, an ebook has no collectible value.
Note that not not all versions of ac3dec are compatible with one another. The alsa version has an option that let's you send the data over spdif to a reciever-- it bypasses most of the CPU intensive functions. ac3dec-alsa also supports downmixing to 4 or 6 speakers.
gcc 2.96x isnt even an official release. gcc-3.0 is. gcc-3.01 will follow in August. Why RedHat continues to support "gcc-2.96x" is beyond me.
Here is a list of gcc-3.0 improvements over gcc-2.95.3. As for myself, I really appreciate the libstdc++-3.0 support.
I am less than enthusiatic about the
New warnings for C code that may have undefined semantics because of violations of sequence point rules in the C standard (such as a = a++;, a[n] = b[n++]; and a[i++] = i;), included in -Wall.
Re:Hardware key=dongle+dongle+dongle+dongle+dongle
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 2
Aren't dongle's vulnerable to theft? A USB dongle is, by its very nature, small and external... Plus, the extra expense might just bite in to MS's precious profit margins.
It's not too difficult to imagine a MS Passport account linked to a USB based card reader, though.
Recording CDs in the anlog domain is no job for a computer. I had a great deal of trouble with analog noise until I ripped the analogue cable from my CD and soundcard, and replaced it with a digital cable. Now, I use an external DAC.
DAE provides a staic free copy-- the best possible staringpoint for a Vorbis or MP3 encoder.
The SP/DIF in on most soundcards converts the audio data from 48.0 to 44.1 kHz. The quality of this conversion varies. I've heard that the SBLive conversion algorithms are fairly crude
If the Chinese government wanted to promote Linux as an economical alternative to Windows, they picked the wrong operating system. A closed source OS might have allowed surveilance and protected against improper use of cryptography. Free software allows individuals to discover such additions and remove them.
Only the stupid and the woefully uninformed could possibly argue that the Communist Party does not serve the people - especially when 63 million of those people are members!
Assumming that there are as many as 63 million members of the party, that number constitute only 5.25 percent of the Chinese population. That's an elite.
Political participation in the US, while quite low, is probably quite a bit higher than 5.25 percent.
One of the problems associated with having too many laws is that it leads to selective enforcement.
To take a rather extreme example-- in totalitarian societies, everyday life almost always neccesitates breaking the law-- and thus, if the government disagrees with a person's political actions or thoughts, it can arrest and imprison that person for the comission of that neccesitated crime.
The ACLU has often alleged that vehicular violations are used as a pretext for harrassing certain ethnic groups.
More paronoid folks have alleged that sellective enforcement of certain drig laws has led to widespread dienfranchisement.
An excerpt:
I tried AOL Time Warner's competing "You've Got Lackeys" a few years ago, but found its virtual agents a bunch of weenies. Not their fault. Microsoft wrote code into Internet Windows that tripped them up when they attempted Web chores. No wonder nine out of 10 professionals today subscribe to Microsoft agents.
Slashdot Mirror
I've made all those changes-- but in Windows, it seems that the choice lies between a interface that is mildly useful for programming, and an ugly/cumbersome one. The Ars technica article suggests that this is a false tradeoff.
The author mentions that in CoreServices, two different Finders appear. /System/Library/CoreServices with terminal.app, I can see that one is simple called "Finder", the other is called "Finder.app". Changing my Finder view to "table" I can see that one is a "Application"; the other, a "Classic Application." So there are ways to differentiate the files-- though neither is quite elegant. The extensions are probably necessary for Nextstep compatibility.
.ps extension for Distiller is just plain rude), the immutability of the Creator/Type codes, save for ResEdit, is someaht inconvenient. I remember writing Applescript applications to change these codes en mass. Not exactly user friendly.
Checking my
In Windows 95 & and successors, the GUI hides the extensions, and as the author points out, this can cause serious problems with vbs viruses. But what was left unmentioned is that it also is hard on programmers. If you can't tell the difference at a glance between "myclass.h" and "myclass.cpp", it really cramps your coding style...
Microsoft also hides files that end in ".dll"-- which is a pain if you program libaries. This is somewhat more defensible, but not by much.
Truth be told, although certain aspects of the Type/Creator code were far more elegant than enaything Windows 9X ever developed (Note to Adobe-- grabbing the
Contents of limited source release (requiring signed licence agreement): regexp libarary (including grep), awk, and AIM perfomance benchmarks.
...
Contents of GNU libraries: autotools, bash, binutils, C library, chess, emacs, gcc
http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html
What's so great about AT&T unix, anyway?
"Information wants to free" is a statement about censorship and secrets, not an invitation to end copyright.
If Alice tells Bertram a secret, Bertram may feel compelled to reveal that secret to Charlie.
Let us say that the secret is a stock tip. Alice and Bertram stand to make a lot of money, if they keep the "secret" to themselves. On the other hand, if the secret contains a bit of "juicy gossip", Bertram might be compelled to reveal it to Charlie, and so on.
Thus, the information content of the secret determines how fast (or how slowly) it propagates across society. In that sense, the secret can be said to have deisres and needs,ala "The Selfish Gene" (RDawkins), even though the secret does not have a "intelligence" of its own...
Unless legal/economic consequences to information transfer are embedded within that secret, the secret will propagate across society. To a certain extent, copyright embodies some of those consequences.
To a certain extent, this is true. MS supplies libraries that handle the really high level stuff, like loading texture maps from external files. With OpenGL, you may have to do this by hand-- although programming a .tga or .rgb texture loading is pretty simple-- just a few hours spent with the "Encyclopedia of Graphics Formats" and good code desgin can produce a good reusable library...
On the other hand, this technique may not appeal to the programmer who uses "/*insert custom code here*/" type libaries (MFC, etc).
GLUT handles lot of stuff, although extending the UI can be painful.
My fault-- according to this article Jeff Oldham is converting most of the old illustrations into MetaPost. Anyway, the technical challenges involved in "compiling from source" (so to speak) TAOCP are probably enormous.
text? Text? You want ascii text? My God, you are a heretic. Here's an author who essentially took a multi year sabattical to write a absolutely beautiful type system--TeX-- and here you are, asking if there's a text version...
Well, I suppose that technically you could be asking for TeX source-- but then you'd be missing the elaborate postscript drawings that pepper the piece. (Since TeX is for the most part error free, MikTex should not cause any typographical errors..., but you never know.)
Ahh-- the joys of ASCII text. The PG "small text license" is interesting-- either distribute the PG provided text with no alterations, honor various refund provisions and pay 20% royalties to PG, or distribute the text with no mention of "Project Gutenberg"...
I'd like to see more etexts distributed as LaTeX files, although support might be a nightmare. Instant conversion, on demand, to text, HTML, PS, (or PDF, if you can stomach it.)
This is not a MSNBC story. It's a CNET authored story-- the original of which is here. It is inaccurate and short sighted to continue to give credit to a Microsoft owned network, but even more so in this particular case, where a conflict of interest might reasonably be suspected.
Searching on www.abe-books.com, I found several paperbacks for $2... Of course these are likely to be reading copies, but remember folks, an ebook has no collectible value.
Note that not not all versions of ac3dec are compatible with one another. The alsa version has an option that let's you send the data over spdif to a reciever-- it bypasses most of the CPU intensive functions. ac3dec-alsa also supports downmixing to 4 or 6 speakers.
Any word on whether streaming AC3 over IEC958 is covered by their patents?
Here is a list of gcc-3.0 improvements over gcc-2.95.3. As for myself, I really appreciate the libstdc++-3.0 support.
I am less than enthusiatic about the
New warnings for C code that may have undefined semantics because of violations of sequence point rules in the C standard (such as a = a++;, a[n] = b[n++]; and a[i++] = i;), included in -Wall.
OMS/LiVid code, in particular, trips this up.
Aren't dongle's vulnerable to theft? A USB dongle is, by its very nature, small and external... Plus, the extra expense might just bite in to MS's precious profit margins.
It's not too difficult to imagine a MS Passport account linked to a USB based card reader, though.
I'm still getting
"Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks"
spam in my mailbox...
GTK+ lets you define a UI using libxml. Perhaps that's a start?
It isn't encrypted with CSS. It's based on a elliptic curve type algorithm, considerably more difficult to "crack" than CSS.
Recording CDs in the anlog domain is no job for a computer. I had a great deal of trouble with analog noise until I ripped the analogue cable from my CD and soundcard, and replaced it with a digital cable. Now, I use an external DAC.
DAE provides a staic free copy-- the best possible staringpoint for a Vorbis or MP3 encoder.
should be from 44.1 KHz (CD) to 48 KHz (AC-97 native frequency), not the other way around
The SP/DIF in on most soundcards converts the audio data from 48.0 to 44.1 kHz. The quality of this conversion varies. I've heard that the SBLive conversion algorithms are fairly crude
If the Chinese government wanted to promote Linux as an economical alternative to Windows, they picked the wrong operating system. A closed source OS might have allowed surveilance and protected against improper use of cryptography. Free software allows individuals to discover such additions and remove them.
Only the stupid and the woefully uninformed could possibly argue that the Communist Party does not serve the people - especially when 63 million of those people are members!
Assumming that there are as many as 63 million members of the party, that number constitute only 5.25 percent of the Chinese population. That's an elite.
Political participation in the US, while quite low, is probably quite a bit higher than 5.25 percent.
One of the problems associated with having too many laws is that it leads to selective enforcement.
To take a rather extreme example-- in totalitarian societies, everyday life almost always neccesitates breaking the law-- and thus, if the government disagrees with a person's political actions or thoughts, it can arrest and imprison that person for the comission of that neccesitated crime.
The ACLU has often alleged that vehicular violations are used as a pretext for harrassing certain ethnic groups.
More paronoid folks have alleged that sellective enforcement of certain drig laws has led to widespread dienfranchisement.
An excerpt: I tried AOL Time Warner's competing "You've Got Lackeys" a few years ago, but found its virtual agents a bunch of weenies. Not their fault. Microsoft wrote code into Internet Windows that tripped them up when they attempted Web chores. No wonder nine out of 10 professionals today subscribe to Microsoft agents.
The Supreme Court's slip opinions in New York Times v Tasini are available in pdf format