DirectFB is just a bare bones framebuffer system with surfaces. You could build something like Windows XP on top of it or maybe an X server.
With XFree86, you have both the X server and graphics layer merged as one program. This is an artifact of Unix systems not having their own video drivers so XFree86 would supply them (unfortunately requiring root access, XFree86 is setuid as you know). This is not the case anymore with Linux, and an X server could be made that is easily separated from the graphics layer. This is a much cleaner design and is more secure. In fact, you can already do it (see XDirectFB and also XFree86's fbdev driver), but these solutions are lacking at the moment.
Interesting, I had no idea people were rendering 3D remotely for realtime display:)
Even so, I think that OpenGL still does not need a tie to something so complex as an X server, as polygons have nothing to do with TCP/IP. In the case of Linux, there could be an OpenGL driver capable of rendering to video surfaces (DirectFB full/windowed) or to system memory for sending over the network. Assuming you're using an X server that rides on top of DirectFB, all the bases are covered, right?
Good point, though I think that's where DirectFB comes in. The OpenGL driver would need to be written against DirectFB, which supports the primitives needed for both full screen and window rendering ('surfaces', I'm guessing).
I don't blame the authors of existing drivers for choosing XFree86, as there is no real alternative at the moment. Even though DirectFB is near-complete, it just isn't popular enough and does not integrate well with X enough for people to bother.
Qt is only GPLd when running on X, the code to make it work on the framebuffer isn't under the GPL afaik.
Just to correct you, Qt/Embedded is available as GPL. Not that this helps the parent poster at all, though. If I wanted to use Qt in an X replacement, I would probably port from Qt/X11, since it is closer to home.
The Free editions of Qt are pure GPL. Their website hints that you should buy a license for internal development, but this is not a requirement. I think it is just a case of the marketing guys being confused (maybe even over the difference between closed vs commercial). The issue has come up on the qt-interest mailinglist before, with the end result always being that a license is not needed for GPL development, and the Trolls have never responded otherwise.
Of course, it is encouraged that you support Trolltech if you are benefitting from their library. It's not every day that a company gives you their entire flagship product as open source. Plus their support is usually pretty good:)
Why do people keep suggesting X is replaced? I'm not sure what sort of problems they have had, but it seems evident that they don't understand the nature of those problems and just blame X.
The problem is not X, but rather XFree86. XF86 is monolithic, and contains its own drivers. I realize this is mainly because *nixes don't have their own video, but Linux does. For years I've had problems with mixing Framebuffer Consoles and X, simply because they both fight over the same video. In a better designed system, Linux would provide the video and X would ride on top of it.
There is nothing wrong with the Linux Framebuffer except for lack of decent drivers. The DirectFB intends to solve this, but at this point XFree86 totally beats out DirectFB in driver support. Why does Unreal Tournament 2003 require XFree86? Because it needs OpenGL. Why the hell does OpenGL, something you're never going to use remotely, require XFree86? Because everyone uses X!
And that's where things have gone stupid. NVidia's drivers are for XFree86. Other closed-source vendor video drivers are for XFree86. This is a problem guys. What if we want to use the video drivers for something other than XFree86? Oops, you can't. We need to separate the hardware and X protocol layers from XFree86. This would lead to better compatibility and stability, and give ease to future expansion. At least on Linux systems, XFree86 should not be trying to roll its own drivers.
If you don't think we need to clean this up, consider that nearly every Linux crash is always due to XFree86. And please, don't tell me how you shelled in from your other box to kill XFree86, you may as well reboot if it comes to that.
So you are right, people wrongfully blame X when they should really be blaming XFree86. Before flaming me, please note that I am not against the X protocol, but the idea of an X server having its own drivers. Even so, I think using X for local applications is a bit redundant.
Which brings me to my next argument, which is about replacing X as a fundamental application layer. IMO, it should be possible to have locally running apps that access the video directly without having to go through some weird pile of extensions. 99.99% of the time, I am running apps locally. For me, and nearly all Linux users out there, "remote" should be the exception, not the rule.
The trouble, of course, is that there is a lot more to X than just a framebuffer. Try DirectFB sometime and you will realize this quickly. X has some very important things, like Window Managers, Input methods, hinting (for things like docklets), keyboard/mouse grabbing, etc. We'd need good replacements for all of these, along with X compatibility for it all. This is not trivial.
Qtopia (nor Qt/Embedded) is not the answer to the desktop. It is a really cool system, but is pretty much limited to the scope of PDAs. What we really need is a Qt/DirectFB (there is already such a port of gtk). This is just one step of many, though.
You'd think a movie about video games would avoid insulting its game-playing audience with such stupidity. Not only is it dumb that she would know what the whistle does, how does the kid playing the game find it in the first place? Early copy of Nintendo Power??
"Who was this movie intended for? No one above the age of reason will be able to abide it. Of those below that age, the studio may have targeted kids who are Nintendo fans. But here the problem is that the movie doesn't have much Nintendo in it, and some of that is wrong (when it's announced, for example, that the third level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been reached, the movie screen clearly shows the first level). "The Wizard" is finally just a cynical exploitation film with a lot of commercial plugs in it, and it is so insanely overwritten and ineptly directed that it will disappoint just about everybody and serve them right for going in the first place."
I want something small, lightweigat, something that isnt going to die on me, can do basic jobs and whatnot. IF I WANT LAPTOP FUNCTIONALITY, I'LL BUY A LAPTOP. I just need a basic name/address/phone/email catalog and time organizer.
To each his own. I use my Zaurus for network access (email, shell, IM, web) and MP3s, not for organization. For my needs, this is often much more convenient than dragging a laptop around. Having a tiny keyboard is better than nothing, and makes email / IM bearable.
I used to have a Psion Revo, which was a pretty cool device. I only had two problems with it: 1) It didn't have a whole lot of software (in contrast, the Zaurus had more software for it the day it was released). 2) No bluetooth option (the only port on the whole device was infrared).
With the Zaurus, I have everything I ever wanted. Sure, a color screen is probably overkill (though it is nice for the web) and the battery life could be better, but it does the functions I want. Also, notice I said nothing about Linux.
If I know my history correctly, KDE was started as a free and better alternative to Sun's proprietary CDE in 1995. It was based on the then non-free Qt toolkit, though I believe Qt was "more free" than the alternatives of the time (such as Motif, of which CDE was based).
GNOME was started a year later by GNU as a counter-project to KDE, since many free-software purists were unsatisfied with KDE's dependence on a non-free toolkit. As no truly free toolkit existed at the time, the GNU project had to make their own. Thus, gtk was born, based on the work from GIMP. Gtk and GNOME then evolved into the desktop that it is today. In 2000, Trolltech released Qt as GPL, thus both KDE and GNOME are free software by today's standards.
I'm positive KDE came first, you can check the books. I'm not quite so sure about gtk, but it was my understanding that it didn't exist until the GNOME project started. Otherwise, wouldn't KDE have choosen gtk?
"Linux, an operating system begun in 1991 in order to provide a free alternative to commercial UNIX systems, is the most prominent example. The second-most so is undoubtedly GNOME, a free graphical-user interface (GUI) for UNIX-compatible systems begun in 1996 to compete with the partly privately-owned K-Desktop Environment (KDE)."
Is GNOME really a bigger project than KDE? I always thought it was the other way around. Technical merits and flames aside, KDE got a year's head start and a toolkit on a platter, so it would be rather pathetic if it were behind GNOME. Can anyone confirm this?
This 'cgi shell' trick is not new. If you have cgi access, then you pretty much have system access. I don't even see the point of providers restricting shell access. Between that and cgi, there's no difference in power, only in convenience.
I once had the opposite problem. About 10 years ago, my ISP gave shell accounts and a web folder, but did not offer cgi. Again, why bother? I got around it rather easily by running my own http server on a non-standard port from my shell account. Then if I wanted to link to a cgi from my web page, I just had to include the ":port" in the URL.
It is interesting you bring up the idea of a "soul", because my argument depends on the fact that there isn't one (or at least, that there isn't some unique entity associated with both copies).
Under my scenario, you are right, both copies are exactly the same. However, you should still care about the copy that you currently are. This is why I brought up the possibility of meeting your 'clone'. You would still care about your own survival. The 'clone' might be exactly the same as you in all ways, but it is a separate physical entity with no binding to you.
The implicit point in your argument is that the death of one of the copies matters. My question to that point is: To whom? Me-before-the-teleportation doesn't care - I will live on in the copy.
This is not a matter of who is the "real you" necessarily. You are the "original you" right now, and you will not be gaining any further memories once you are destroyed. Under the assumption that there is no spiritual connection between the "original you" and the "copy of you", these would be two separate entities with exact physical properties. If you somehow got in a fight with your identical clone, you would still care about who survives.
Of course, the rest of the world only needs one copy of you. We need you to finish your job and pay your taxes, we could care less which is the more original copy, just so long as you are around like you always were.
So yes, you will live on from my perspective, but the "original copy", that is, the copy you should care about, would be gone.
I had a long discussion about teleportation with some friends, and this is what we came up with..
If you are destroyed and then replicated, you are effectively dead. Consider if you could meet your replicate before being destroyed. He would say to you: "Ok, I don't need you anymore, so I destroy you now." Is that good for you? Maybe it is good for him, but certainly not good for the real you.
However, the copy of you would be good for me and everyone else. To us, you are the same person. You will fulfill your life's duties and make great works. However, you won't be around to witeness it.
So basically we concluded that teleporting an object by replication/destruction would be helpful to everyone except the object in question. Feel free to teleport burritos and things, but teleporting yourself would not be doing you a favor.
The only solution I can think of would be to come up with a teleportation method that does not involve destruction. If we ever want to be bouncing around the Universe like in Star Trek, we're going to need to be able to travel the speed of light or use weird things like wormholes to get anywhere. Physically transferring object data from point A to point B is just too time consuming. You'll die of old age by the time you reach Neptune.
Re:Is KDE trying to be Windows?
on
KDE 3.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I say, "catch up before moving ahead." Users expect X to be in a good desktop, and KDE would be best implementing X before moving onto Y and Z. In some ways, KDE is up to Windows XP (video previews in the file manager), but in others it is not even at Windows 95 yet (easy folder sharing). Of course, sometimes it is beyond everything (kio_fish).
As far as copying goes, KDE (and most open source software) make no qualms about copying. They just take what they feel is best in all cases. Often, Windows does things a nice way so they copy. You don't reach the top by avoiding good ideas.
However, I do sometimes feel the way you do, in that there is not enough innovation (but I can justify it, by saying KDE is still in the "catch up" phase). Even so, what kinds of things would you prefer added to KDE? What kinds of innovations do you speak of?
One thing I hate about 'vncviewer' for X is that it does not buffer the graphics.. ie, if I minimize / restore the window then it has to redownload everything again. Interestingly, the vncviewer.exe for Windows _does_ buffer the graphics, which is nice as I can leave the program minimized while it downloads a large desktop. Perhaps I missed an option in the X version.
Better yet, does the KDE viewer buffer the graphics? Btw, whatever happened to Keystone?
After using Qt for a couple of years, for both open source and commercial software, I can say it does the job admirably. It is easy to pick up, and using it is fun:)
Qt is not necessarily only for GUI. There are lots of convenience classes available to make your life easier doing cross-platform work: Text/Unicode handling, image, containers, networking, database, XML, etc. Many of these classes are highly optimized. I use Qt even when I'm writing a console app.
Though I have not used Java, I am told the API is very similar in style (to Swing?). The upside to Qt is that it is compiled and uses C++, so it is fast and you can mix and match system code. A common myth about cross-platform software is that you must cater to the lowest common denominator, which is absolutely not true with Qt.
Even if you are doing development for a single platform, you may still want to use Qt. It is generally easier to use than whatever is native (though I have heard very good things about Cocoa/ObjC), and it secures you that 'out' in case you want to port later.
For some examples of cross-platform projects using Qt, see Opera and Psi.
When I spend a good thirty minutes of my valuable time crafting a detailed answer to a user's question about some aspect of an application I've written that, if they'd read the docs, they could have figured out themselves, only to find that this user's email server considers me a spammer until I prove otherwise, I usually just say "fuck it" and go do something more productive.
I'm surprised at your perception of confirm requests. When I first set up TMDA, I scanned every undelivered mail for nearly 6 months to ensure that no one was getting pissed off at the confirmation request. I did have some cases where people never got the bounce email (due to technical reasons, which I hope to have solved), but not once did I run into someone who refused to confirm because they were insulted. If a person spends time writing an email, they should not refuse to confirm, otherwise their email would go to waste. It is not like they have to rewrite the email or anything. Just hit Reply and then Send. Done. If their email is not important enough for two more clicks, then I don't need it.
Of course, if a user emails you and then your reply is bounced, that is just the user being stupid/rude. If TMDA is properly used, outgoing mails should always be repliable without confirmation.
Interestingly, this is the 11th most active Slashdot story ever. It was only recently bumped off of the top 10 hall of fame, because of the US/MiddleEast events lately.
I haven't played a recent console game in awhile, but the last one that blew me away was Metal Gear Solid for the playstation. The quality of the game at the time was astounding, and put nearly all other playstation games to shame. I never owned a playstation, but I borrowed it from a friend just to play that game. It was much like when Final Fantasy 7 was released, which was the only reason my brother bought a playstation. Simply amazing!
Hoping you have played MGS and/or FF7 when they were first released, would you consider your initial reaction to Metriod Prime to be similar? If it is really that good, then maybe I should seek out a GameCube for the same reason.:)
Interestingly, I also bought a DreamCast for only one game: Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Granted, that game is not nearly as cool as any of these other games we are talking about (I mean, come on, it is a fighting game), but it sure is addictive. Considering the arcade scene is pretty competitive down here in Orange County, I've probably spent more hours on MvC2 than any other game ever...
Since a few people are posting about anti-spam methods, I thought I'd go over my idea to counter spam. Currently I am not actually using this procedure, I have just been pondering it for awhile.
First off, the core of this system relies on whitelist-confirmation. This means that first time senders are given an auto-response email which must be "confirmed" in order for their message to deliver. Once they have done this, they are whitelisted, and all email from them passes through. TMDA is what I use for this job. I leave my email address "unarmored", because no spam can get through. When I check my mail in KMail, there is no spam.
However, all is not perfect. After many many months of using TMDA, I still find myself sifting through the "pending" folder on my mail server, which keeps hold of all the mails from unconfirmed senders. I generally do this every couple of weeks, and there are often at least one or two legitimate emails that were never confirmed. There are many possible reasons: 1) they thought the confirmation request was spam, so they deleted it (either manually or through an anti-spam filter). 2) they don't like the idea of having to do a stupid confirm (although no one has actually brought this up to me yet). 3) Maybe they use a reply-to or something weird that trips up TMDA (perhaps fixable or not..)
Anyway, the point is that legit emails aren't 100% getting through. The next consideration then, is to use a word-filter (and who knows, maybe TMDA does this too), to see if legit mails can be detected by their content. Maybe this could be done using a bayesian (sp?) filter, as recently discussed here, or perhaps SpamAssassin. Emails detected as legit would be delivered directly, and the sender would be auto-whitelisted. Ambiguous emails would go through the usual whitelist-confirmation procedure. This way, the word-filter never actually throws email away. It gives the sender a second chance, by sending it through the whitelist system.
This, I think, would solve the problem completely for me, as all of the legit mails that wind up unconfirmed would very much pass the legitimacy test (they mention a software project of mine, or something else very obvious). If this were in place, I could send my pending bin to/dev/null. Ahh, a life of no spam!
Not necessarily. I visited Merriam-Webster to check on this, and "receiving financial return" is just one of the many definitions of a professional.
I believe there was a related debate on a recent Slashdot poll involving programming, where two of the options were "Professional" and "Open Source". This was a poor choice of words, since the two are not mutually exclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
DirectFB is just a bare bones framebuffer system with surfaces. You could build something like Windows XP on top of it or maybe an X server.
With XFree86, you have both the X server and graphics layer merged as one program. This is an artifact of Unix systems not having their own video drivers so XFree86 would supply them (unfortunately requiring root access, XFree86 is setuid as you know). This is not the case anymore with Linux, and an X server could be made that is easily separated from the graphics layer. This is a much cleaner design and is more secure. In fact, you can already do it (see XDirectFB and also XFree86's fbdev driver), but these solutions are lacking at the moment.
Interesting, I had no idea people were rendering 3D remotely for realtime display :)
Even so, I think that OpenGL still does not need a tie to something so complex as an X server, as polygons have nothing to do with TCP/IP. In the case of Linux, there could be an OpenGL driver capable of rendering to video surfaces (DirectFB full/windowed) or to system memory for sending over the network. Assuming you're using an X server that rides on top of DirectFB, all the bases are covered, right?
For some good examples of crossplatform apps that use Qt, see Opera and Psi. I'm the author of the latter (yes, shameless plug).
Good point, though I think that's where DirectFB comes in. The OpenGL driver would need to be written against DirectFB, which supports the primitives needed for both full screen and window rendering ('surfaces', I'm guessing).
I don't blame the authors of existing drivers for choosing XFree86, as there is no real alternative at the moment. Even though DirectFB is near-complete, it just isn't popular enough and does not integrate well with X enough for people to bother.
Qt is only GPLd when running on X, the code to make it work on the framebuffer isn't under the GPL afaik.
Just to correct you, Qt/Embedded is available as GPL. Not that this helps the parent poster at all, though. If I wanted to use Qt in an X replacement, I would probably port from Qt/X11, since it is closer to home.
The Free editions of Qt are pure GPL. Their website hints that you should buy a license for internal development, but this is not a requirement. I think it is just a case of the marketing guys being confused (maybe even over the difference between closed vs commercial). The issue has come up on the qt-interest mailinglist before, with the end result always being that a license is not needed for GPL development, and the Trolls have never responded otherwise.
:)
Of course, it is encouraged that you support Trolltech if you are benefitting from their library. It's not every day that a company gives you their entire flagship product as open source. Plus their support is usually pretty good
Why do people keep suggesting X is replaced? I'm not sure what sort of problems they have had, but it seems evident that they don't understand the nature of those problems and just blame X.
The problem is not X, but rather XFree86. XF86 is monolithic, and contains its own drivers. I realize this is mainly because *nixes don't have their own video, but Linux does. For years I've had problems with mixing Framebuffer Consoles and X, simply because they both fight over the same video. In a better designed system, Linux would provide the video and X would ride on top of it.
There is nothing wrong with the Linux Framebuffer except for lack of decent drivers. The DirectFB intends to solve this, but at this point XFree86 totally beats out DirectFB in driver support. Why does Unreal Tournament 2003 require XFree86? Because it needs OpenGL. Why the hell does OpenGL, something you're never going to use remotely, require XFree86? Because everyone uses X!
And that's where things have gone stupid. NVidia's drivers are for XFree86. Other closed-source vendor video drivers are for XFree86. This is a problem guys. What if we want to use the video drivers for something other than XFree86? Oops, you can't. We need to separate the hardware and X protocol layers from XFree86. This would lead to better compatibility and stability, and give ease to future expansion. At least on Linux systems, XFree86 should not be trying to roll its own drivers.
If you don't think we need to clean this up, consider that nearly every Linux crash is always due to XFree86. And please, don't tell me how you shelled in from your other box to kill XFree86, you may as well reboot if it comes to that.
So you are right, people wrongfully blame X when they should really be blaming XFree86. Before flaming me, please note that I am not against the X protocol, but the idea of an X server having its own drivers. Even so, I think using X for local applications is a bit redundant.
Which brings me to my next argument, which is about replacing X as a fundamental application layer. IMO, it should be possible to have locally running apps that access the video directly without having to go through some weird pile of extensions. 99.99% of the time, I am running apps locally. For me, and nearly all Linux users out there, "remote" should be the exception, not the rule.
The trouble, of course, is that there is a lot more to X than just a framebuffer. Try DirectFB sometime and you will realize this quickly. X has some very important things, like Window Managers, Input methods, hinting (for things like docklets), keyboard/mouse grabbing, etc. We'd need good replacements for all of these, along with X compatibility for it all. This is not trivial.
Qtopia (nor Qt/Embedded) is not the answer to the desktop. It is a really cool system, but is pretty much limited to the scope of PDAs. What we really need is a Qt/DirectFB (there is already such a port of gtk). This is just one step of many, though.
You'd think a movie about video games would avoid insulting its game-playing audience with such stupidity. Not only is it dumb that she would know what the whistle does, how does the kid playing the game find it in the first place? Early copy of Nintendo Power??
From Roger Ebert's review:
"Who was this movie intended for? No one above the age of reason will be able to abide it. Of those below that age, the studio may have targeted kids who are Nintendo fans. But here the problem is that the movie doesn't have much Nintendo in it, and some of that is wrong (when it's announced, for example, that the third level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been reached, the movie screen clearly shows the first level). "The Wizard" is finally just a cynical exploitation film with a lot of commercial plugs in it, and it is so insanely overwritten and ineptly directed that it will disappoint just about everybody and serve them right for going in the first place."
I want something small, lightweigat, something that isnt going to die on me, can do basic jobs and whatnot. IF I WANT LAPTOP FUNCTIONALITY, I'LL BUY A LAPTOP. I just need a basic name/address/phone/email catalog and time organizer.
To each his own. I use my Zaurus for network access (email, shell, IM, web) and MP3s, not for organization. For my needs, this is often much more convenient than dragging a laptop around. Having a tiny keyboard is better than nothing, and makes email / IM bearable.
I used to have a Psion Revo, which was a pretty cool device. I only had two problems with it: 1) It didn't have a whole lot of software (in contrast, the Zaurus had more software for it the day it was released). 2) No bluetooth option (the only port on the whole device was infrared).
With the Zaurus, I have everything I ever wanted. Sure, a color screen is probably overkill (though it is nice for the web) and the battery life could be better, but it does the functions I want. Also, notice I said nothing about Linux.
If I know my history correctly, KDE was started as a free and better alternative to Sun's proprietary CDE in 1995. It was based on the then non-free Qt toolkit, though I believe Qt was "more free" than the alternatives of the time (such as Motif, of which CDE was based).
GNOME was started a year later by GNU as a counter-project to KDE, since many free-software purists were unsatisfied with KDE's dependence on a non-free toolkit. As no truly free toolkit existed at the time, the GNU project had to make their own. Thus, gtk was born, based on the work from GIMP. Gtk and GNOME then evolved into the desktop that it is today. In 2000, Trolltech released Qt as GPL, thus both KDE and GNOME are free software by today's standards.
I'm positive KDE came first, you can check the books. I'm not quite so sure about gtk, but it was my understanding that it didn't exist until the GNOME project started. Otherwise, wouldn't KDE have choosen gtk?
In the lament:
"Linux, an operating system begun in 1991 in order to provide a free alternative to commercial UNIX systems, is the most prominent example. The second-most so is undoubtedly GNOME, a free graphical-user interface (GUI) for UNIX-compatible systems begun in 1996 to compete with the partly privately-owned K-Desktop Environment (KDE)."
Is GNOME really a bigger project than KDE? I always thought it was the other way around. Technical merits and flames aside, KDE got a year's head start and a toolkit on a platter, so it would be rather pathetic if it were behind GNOME. Can anyone confirm this?
Anti-SPAM SPAM
This 'cgi shell' trick is not new. If you have cgi access, then you pretty much have system access. I don't even see the point of providers restricting shell access. Between that and cgi, there's no difference in power, only in convenience.
I once had the opposite problem. About 10 years ago, my ISP gave shell accounts and a web folder, but did not offer cgi. Again, why bother? I got around it rather easily by running my own http server on a non-standard port from my shell account. Then if I wanted to link to a cgi from my web page, I just had to include the ":port" in the URL.
It is interesting you bring up the idea of a "soul", because my argument depends on the fact that there isn't one (or at least, that there isn't some unique entity associated with both copies).
Under my scenario, you are right, both copies are exactly the same. However, you should still care about the copy that you currently are. This is why I brought up the possibility of meeting your 'clone'. You would still care about your own survival. The 'clone' might be exactly the same as you in all ways, but it is a separate physical entity with no binding to you.
The implicit point in your argument is that the death of one of the copies matters. My question to that point is: To whom? Me-before-the-teleportation doesn't care - I will live on in the copy.
This is not a matter of who is the "real you" necessarily. You are the "original you" right now, and you will not be gaining any further memories once you are destroyed. Under the assumption that there is no spiritual connection between the "original you" and the "copy of you", these would be two separate entities with exact physical properties. If you somehow got in a fight with your identical clone, you would still care about who survives.
Of course, the rest of the world only needs one copy of you. We need you to finish your job and pay your taxes, we could care less which is the more original copy, just so long as you are around like you always were.
So yes, you will live on from my perspective, but the "original copy", that is, the copy you should care about, would be gone.
I had a long discussion about teleportation with some friends, and this is what we came up with..
If you are destroyed and then replicated, you are effectively dead. Consider if you could meet your replicate before being destroyed. He would say to you: "Ok, I don't need you anymore, so I destroy you now." Is that good for you? Maybe it is good for him, but certainly not good for the real you.
However, the copy of you would be good for me and everyone else. To us, you are the same person. You will fulfill your life's duties and make great works. However, you won't be around to witeness it.
So basically we concluded that teleporting an object by replication/destruction would be helpful to everyone except the object in question. Feel free to teleport burritos and things, but teleporting yourself would not be doing you a favor.
The only solution I can think of would be to come up with a teleportation method that does not involve destruction. If we ever want to be bouncing around the Universe like in Star Trek, we're going to need to be able to travel the speed of light or use weird things like wormholes to get anywhere. Physically transferring object data from point A to point B is just too time consuming. You'll die of old age by the time you reach Neptune.
I say, "catch up before moving ahead." Users expect X to be in a good desktop, and KDE would be best implementing X before moving onto Y and Z. In some ways, KDE is up to Windows XP (video previews in the file manager), but in others it is not even at Windows 95 yet (easy folder sharing). Of course, sometimes it is beyond everything (kio_fish).
As far as copying goes, KDE (and most open source software) make no qualms about copying. They just take what they feel is best in all cases. Often, Windows does things a nice way so they copy. You don't reach the top by avoiding good ideas.
However, I do sometimes feel the way you do, in that there is not enough innovation (but I can justify it, by saying KDE is still in the "catch up" phase). Even so, what kinds of things would you prefer added to KDE? What kinds of innovations do you speak of?
One thing I hate about 'vncviewer' for X is that it does not buffer the graphics.. ie, if I minimize / restore the window then it has to redownload everything again. Interestingly, the vncviewer.exe for Windows _does_ buffer the graphics, which is nice as I can leave the program minimized while it downloads a large desktop. Perhaps I missed an option in the X version.
Better yet, does the KDE viewer buffer the graphics? Btw, whatever happened to Keystone?
After using Qt for a couple of years, for both open source and commercial software, I can say it does the job admirably. It is easy to pick up, and using it is fun :)
Qt is not necessarily only for GUI. There are lots of convenience classes available to make your life easier doing cross-platform work: Text/Unicode handling, image, containers, networking, database, XML, etc. Many of these classes are highly optimized. I use Qt even when I'm writing a console app.
Though I have not used Java, I am told the API is very similar in style (to Swing?). The upside to Qt is that it is compiled and uses C++, so it is fast and you can mix and match system code. A common myth about cross-platform software is that you must cater to the lowest common denominator, which is absolutely not true with Qt.
Even if you are doing development for a single platform, you may still want to use Qt. It is generally easier to use than whatever is native (though I have heard very good things about Cocoa/ObjC), and it secures you that 'out' in case you want to port later.
For some examples of cross-platform projects using Qt, see Opera and Psi.
When I spend a good thirty minutes of my valuable time crafting a detailed answer to a user's question about some aspect of an application I've written that, if they'd read the docs, they could have figured out themselves, only to find that this user's email server considers me a spammer until I prove otherwise, I usually just say "fuck it" and go do something more productive.
I'm surprised at your perception of confirm requests. When I first set up TMDA, I scanned every undelivered mail for nearly 6 months to ensure that no one was getting pissed off at the confirmation request. I did have some cases where people never got the bounce email (due to technical reasons, which I hope to have solved), but not once did I run into someone who refused to confirm because they were insulted. If a person spends time writing an email, they should not refuse to confirm, otherwise their email would go to waste. It is not like they have to rewrite the email or anything. Just hit Reply and then Send. Done. If their email is not important enough for two more clicks, then I don't need it.
Of course, if a user emails you and then your reply is bounced, that is just the user being stupid/rude. If TMDA is properly used, outgoing mails should always be repliable without confirmation.
a large number of files from various SourceForge web sites seem to have been deleted
:(
I noticed this too. It seems part of the Psi forum was deleted.
Anyone have any insight as to why this may have happened??
You mean like this ?
Interestingly, this is the 11th most active Slashdot story ever. It was only recently bumped off of the top 10 hall of fame, because of the US/MiddleEast events lately.
I haven't played a recent console game in awhile, but the last one that blew me away was Metal Gear Solid for the playstation. The quality of the game at the time was astounding, and put nearly all other playstation games to shame. I never owned a playstation, but I borrowed it from a friend just to play that game. It was much like when Final Fantasy 7 was released, which was the only reason my brother bought a playstation. Simply amazing!
:)
...
Hoping you have played MGS and/or FF7 when they were first released, would you consider your initial reaction to Metriod Prime to be similar? If it is really that good, then maybe I should seek out a GameCube for the same reason.
Interestingly, I also bought a DreamCast for only one game: Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Granted, that game is not nearly as cool as any of these other games we are talking about (I mean, come on, it is a fighting game), but it sure is addictive. Considering the arcade scene is pretty competitive down here in Orange County, I've probably spent more hours on MvC2 than any other game ever
Anyone else buy a console for just one game?
Since a few people are posting about anti-spam methods, I thought I'd go over my idea to counter spam. Currently I am not actually using this procedure, I have just been pondering it for awhile.
/dev/null. Ahh, a life of no spam!
First off, the core of this system relies on whitelist-confirmation. This means that first time senders are given an auto-response email which must be "confirmed" in order for their message to deliver. Once they have done this, they are whitelisted, and all email from them passes through. TMDA is what I use for this job. I leave my email address "unarmored", because no spam can get through. When I check my mail in KMail, there is no spam.
However, all is not perfect. After many many months of using TMDA, I still find myself sifting through the "pending" folder on my mail server, which keeps hold of all the mails from unconfirmed senders. I generally do this every couple of weeks, and there are often at least one or two legitimate emails that were never confirmed. There are many possible reasons: 1) they thought the confirmation request was spam, so they deleted it (either manually or through an anti-spam filter). 2) they don't like the idea of having to do a stupid confirm (although no one has actually brought this up to me yet). 3) Maybe they use a reply-to or something weird that trips up TMDA (perhaps fixable or not..)
Anyway, the point is that legit emails aren't 100% getting through. The next consideration then, is to use a word-filter (and who knows, maybe TMDA does this too), to see if legit mails can be detected by their content. Maybe this could be done using a bayesian (sp?) filter, as recently discussed here, or perhaps SpamAssassin. Emails detected as legit would be delivered directly, and the sender would be auto-whitelisted. Ambiguous emails would go through the usual whitelist-confirmation procedure. This way, the word-filter never actually throws email away. It gives the sender a second chance, by sending it through the whitelist system.
This, I think, would solve the problem completely for me, as all of the legit mails that wind up unconfirmed would very much pass the legitimacy test (they mention a software project of mine, or something else very obvious). If this were in place, I could send my pending bin to
Not necessarily. I visited Merriam-Webster to check on this, and "receiving financial return" is just one of the many definitions of a professional.
I believe there was a related debate on a recent Slashdot poll involving programming, where two of the options were "Professional" and "Open Source". This was a poor choice of words, since the two are not mutually exclusive.