That's incorrect. You are free to read over the code, see how it works, and write your own implementation under whatever license you like, so long as your own implementation isn't a direct or almost-direct copy.
>Not another, but the same that has been >advocating copyleft here and elsewhere for years.
Well, I'm glad at least that you're wasting your time posting here rather than doing anything that would actually really further adoption of the GPL. The less we see of that license, the better.
Opera's renderer may or may not be faster than Gecko, but Opera's UI is most certainly faster than Mozilla's. For my home connection, which is cable-speed only in theory, my preferred browsing mode is to fire up a bunch of links to load in the background. This is far more speedily achieved under Opera than it is under Mozilla.
how is criticising Ogle because it only plays physical DVDs, when it's stated purpose is simply to play physical DVDs, valuable feedback?
If you re-read the review you'll find that that wasn't a criticism, it was a caution. 'Ogle is quite good, provided you only want to play physical DVDs'. 'Swimming pools are fun, provided you don't mind getting wet'.
>Because, one, it's only an opinion that it's dead code.
No it isn't. If if is not called at all and there is no way to call it, then it is dead. An example would be a function in the kernel sources that doesn't get called by any other kernel function and isn't exported.
>The file dialog is the exception that proves the
>rule, and a new one is definately going in for
>GTK2.4, that's guaranteed. It's harder for GTK
> because unlike KDE/Qt GTK is actually widely used
> outside of the desktop project.
Your above comment doesn't make sense. GTK is widely used outside of GNOME, just as Qt is widely used outside of KDE. This wide use hasn't prevented Qt from getting a lovely file dialog.
>where there's a native control, wxWindows uses >it.
>Except where it decides not to, like the file >dialog, which isn't anything like the GTK+ >version.
I take your point, but come on:) this can only be a good thing. The GTK file selector is an abomination.
1) Creating a directory resets the files listing to the top for no reason.
2) You cannot remove a directory at all.
3) Even when you are allowed to highlight multiple files, highlighting multiple files and then clicking "delete" only removes the first one. No indication that this is the case is given, and after the files are removed the files listing is reset to the top of the list again.
Silly things like resetting the files listing because you're too lazy to work out where the listing should be positioned after a bunch of files that were currently in the view window were deleted have a dramatic effect on usability and "polish". As far as I'm concerned this is one area where the WzWindows people made a very good decision.
wxWindows is great, but a long way away from matching Qt or even GTK in terms of API flexibility. For reasonably simple applications, it's a great choice. For anything more complicated, I would recommend Qt.
I would also have to question how much Qt you have used, because Qt also does what you claim "NO ONE in the GUI toolkit business has thought of" - ie, programs written for Qt compile to produce native Windows widgets on Windows, native Mac widgets on Mac, and their own widgets under X.
>a C++ API like KDE is a PITA to bind to other >languages, both OO and other.
From my experience, PyQt, a Python binding to Qt, makes much more sense from an OO programming perspective (and is thus far easier to do Cool Things with) than PyGTK. This is nothing to do with the work of the primary PyGTK author - he's done a fantastic job. The underlying toolkit is just so much more of a mess.
The fact that PyQt maps almost directly to the Qt C++ API and therefore is excellently documented by Trolltech is also a major plus.
> Those whom the God's would destroy, > they first make proud
For a start, it's "they first make mad". And secondly - it's nice to see that even ancient Greeks misuse the apostrophe (though as another poster linked, it's from Longfellow, not Seneca).
Quick lesson: "God's". That's the apostrophe of posession there. That means you're talking about the "would destroy" which belongs to God, which doesn't make sense. In this case it's very easy. We're talking about more than one God. The plural of God is Gods. Nothing more to it than that.
I'm amazed on how you can readily classify that chip as inferior... Seen the design of the chip? Guess not, maybe it is the Made in China writing that made you derive this conclusion.
Perhaps it was because the chip is more than an order of magnitude slower than the state of the art.
It's not a matter of "you can't run binary modules," it's a matter of "you can't create a derivative work from GPL'd software and distribute it sans-source."
... except that no distribution of the derivative work takes place. What's getting distributed is the binary-only module (with no GPL components), and a kernel (with source). I think, despite the opinions of the most hardened zealots, it would be very difficult to win a lawsuit given the above scenario.
A simple grep through the sources is inadequate to determine if the string copying is insecure or not. Chances are, most of those copies work with strings of a known length.
I started with Elm, moved on to Pine. Since then, I have used xfmail, TKRat, Kmail, Sylpheed, Evolution, and mutt. Now I'm back to Pine.
Basically, xfmail was adequate but ugly, TKRat was slow, KMail, Sylpheed and Evolution are promising but full of bugs, and mutt doesn't offer enough to me to be a compelling change - though I'm sure if I checked it out recently (I last looked at it two years ago) I'd have to re-think that statement.
I tried Sylpheed and Evolution quite early on in their development. Perhaps they've improved. However, I value simplicity and speed in my interface over features, and frankly Pine does most of what I want.
I use Maildir, and courier-imap. Every so often I check out a bunch of new mail readers, and I've found that using IMAP to arbitrate access to my mail is the best way to ensure it stays consistent (short of fiddling about with dummy Maildirs, of course).
I do not use Pico to edit my emails. I use joe on the console, and nedit in a GUI.
> Not entirely. I used to maintain PINE for
> Debian quite some time ago.
Ah, I was wondering what the maintainer thought about the whole situation.:-)
I'm maintaining Pine for a programming society at my university, and I encountered a fair bit of resistance of the "It's not Free enough" variety. While people may certainly choose to believe this, my reading of license indicated to me that it was permissible to do what I was doing - ie, compile it from source, perhaps even make local changes, as long as I changed the version number. I often wondered why the Debian Pine installer - which downloads the source, applies patches, compiles and makes a local.deb - disappeared. It's nice - I guess - to know that the reason is as I suspected: ideological, rather than due to any legitimate legal concerns.
Guess it depends on which ideas you're calling "registry".
What I'd like, under Linux, is a standard way of storing configuration information. Even Windows 3.11 had this. In addition, I'd like a standard way of determining where application configuration is stored: standard locations, standard filenames, etc. To the point where I could pick an arbitrary application, such as Mozilla, and run a single command to back-up both systemwide configuration and all user configurations.
This isn't like the Windows registry, but it does provide a lot of the benefits - standardised, OS-wide format, ability to easily locate all system configuration files - without the disadvantages (single big easily-damaged file).
> I don't understand why people keep attributing > motives and emotions to an organization like the > FSF.
Well, I can't speak for others, but the reason that *I* do the above is because almost everything that I've read that's come out of the FSF has been written by RMS or Bradley Khun. It's pretty easy to attribute motives and emotion to an organisation when almost the entirety of that organisation's dogma comes out of the mouths of two people.
> Ever wonder why some things just "feel" right? In > my mind, that's God. Instinct. That's God.
So whenver someone skids into a turn and instinctively slams on the brakes and slides and hits and tree and dies, is that God fucking up?:-)
Your argument that instinct is is God ignores the fact that instinct is often wrong. Perhaps instinct is often wrong because humans are fallible. If so, what compelling reason is there to include God in the equation? There isn't one.
>So what about all the stories? Eh. All of them >can be explained. Paul was a temporal lobe >epileptic - but what exactly generates the >visions that a TLE seizure causes? Ah. And >that's the kicker.
Well, that's fairly easy to explain. The random firings of a bunch of out-of-control neurons. Sort of the same way that if you poke yourself in the eye hard enough, you'll see spots, but on a much grander scale. In fact, if I put a large enough current through your brain, I could induce epilepsy in you, too. I'm fairly certain you won't attribute that to God.
> It's kinda like Deep Thought in Hitchhiker's Guide > - 42's a perfectly valid answer, and Deep > Thought wasn't responsible for the fact that the > people who asked the question didn't understand > it.
Ah, there's the problem with your philsophy - you don't understand Douglas Adams. No, the reason people didn't understand "42" was because it was wrong. The Golgafrinchans crash-landed on Earth and ruined the experiment. Ford Prefect describes it as a "cock-up" to Arthur. Re-read the books.:-) Douglas Adams was, of course, an avowed atheist, but don't let that stop you from using his books to explain your theology.
Regarding free will: you claim that you will never believe me if I told you that I was controlling everything you did. That is fine, but you are once again falling back to faith. If I suggested that your every thought was a clever illusion designed to make you *believe* you have free will, then your decision that you do, in fact, possess free will is a decision based on faith. You cannot *prove* you have free will. That's where science-based attempts to explain religious concepts always fall down. You have *no* empirical evidence, ever. If you did have evidence for your viewpoint, your beliefs would be a science, not a religion.
http://lardcave.net/codestack for info. Python, pygame, and a GPS. The maps are bitmapped, but look nice anyway. If you're interested, email me and I'll let you know when it's done.:-)
>Part of the whole scientific process is to weed >through seeming contradictions to find the truth. >That's the whole point. If you can find the >contradictions, you can understand them, and >resolve them.
Dude, the Bible is full of blatant contradictions, some of them more serious than others. That's why Christians are so fond of the Elephant argument, which, to paraphrase, basically says that what looks like a contradiction to our limited minds actually isn't from God's point of view.
The trouble is that the elephant argument isn't a scientific explanation. It's a faith-based explanation. If you have to use the elephant argument to explain a seeming contradiction, you are following the path of faith, not the path of science.
Redarding the Many-Worlds Interpretation of the universe, you have re-explained it, but have failed to demonstrate why it is a more scientifically compelling explanation of free will than, say "There is no free will", or "We are brains in a vat with God telling us what to do." It merely is an alternative belief. There is no scientific evidence for or against the MWI, and so people belive in it because it "sounds right" - which is simply a leap of faith.
>"Why did God make us so stupid?" You're all >missing the point. God didn't do any of that - he >created the Universe. The form you currently > have followed from that creation.
Actually, the Bible states that God explicitly created us in His image. I didn't ask you why God let Grandpa die, I asked you why he didn't do a better job creating us - and your answer to that is "You don't know what's possible and what's not". Well, of course I don't - I'm a human. But to God, nothing should be impossible. Check out Luke 1:37, for example:
"For with God nothing is ever impossible, and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment."
Your statement above pretty much contradicts Luke 1:37. Note that what you are doing here is using the "Elephant argument" in discussion about the "Elephant argument", ie, you are basically arguing a tautology. Here's the overview. I explained why I didn't like the Elephant Argument - because it implied there was a nasty God who could have made us any way he wanted, but chose to make us stupid. You respond by saying "Yes, but how can you possibly know God? You're human!"
This is exactly the argument that I'm trying to attack. I am claiming that your premise - that God is unknowable - is false, and it can be proved to be false using Christian doctrine. You are claiming that the premise that God is unknowable is true, and your reason for believe it is true is because God is unknowable.
Slashdot Mirror
That's incorrect. You are free to read over the code, see how it works, and write your own implementation under whatever license you like, so long as your own implementation isn't a direct or almost-direct copy.
>Not another, but the same that has been
>advocating copyleft here and elsewhere for years.
Well, I'm glad at least that you're wasting your time posting here rather than doing anything that would actually really further adoption of the GPL. The less we see of that license, the better.
Opera's renderer may or may not be faster than Gecko, but Opera's UI is most certainly faster than Mozilla's. For my home connection, which is cable-speed only in theory, my preferred browsing mode is to fire up a bunch of links to load in the background. This is far more speedily achieved under Opera than it is under Mozilla.
>Take a look at these assholes in iraq
>celebrating this tragedy at Reuters
>What f'ing assholes.
I agree. What callous, insensitive, opportunistic people to take cheap advantage of a tragedy to stir up anger.
Oh, you weren't talking about Reuters? Then I have nothing to say.
how is criticising Ogle because it only plays physical DVDs, when it's stated purpose is simply to play physical DVDs, valuable feedback?
If you re-read the review you'll find that that wasn't a criticism, it was a caution. 'Ogle is quite good, provided you only want to play physical DVDs'. 'Swimming pools are fun, provided you don't mind getting wet'.
I compiled mplayer for myself and it can now play any video format (except quicktime)
Mine does Quicktime Sorensen, too.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/~alex/codecs/qt-howto.txt
>Because, one, it's only an opinion that it's dead code.
No it isn't. If if is not called at all and there is no way to call it, then it is dead. An example would be a function in the kernel sources that doesn't get called by any other kernel function and isn't exported.
>The file dialog is the exception that proves the
>rule, and a new one is definately going in for
>GTK2.4, that's guaranteed. It's harder for GTK
> because unlike KDE/Qt GTK is actually widely used
> outside of the desktop project.
Your above comment doesn't make sense. GTK is widely used outside of GNOME, just as Qt is widely used outside of KDE. This wide use hasn't prevented Qt from getting a lovely file dialog.
>where there's a native control, wxWindows uses >it.
:) this can only be a good thing. The GTK file selector is an abomination.
>Except where it decides not to, like the file
>dialog, which isn't anything like the GTK+
>version.
I take your point, but come on
1) Creating a directory resets the files listing to the top for no reason.
2) You cannot remove a directory at all.
3) Even when you are allowed to highlight multiple files, highlighting multiple files and then clicking "delete" only removes the first one. No indication that this is the case is given, and after the files are removed the files listing is reset to the top of the list again.
Silly things like resetting the files listing because you're too lazy to work out where the listing should be positioned after a bunch of files that were currently in the view window were deleted have a dramatic effect on usability and "polish". As far as I'm concerned this is one area where the WzWindows people made a very good decision.
wxWindows is great, but a long way away from matching Qt or even GTK in terms of API flexibility. For reasonably simple applications, it's a great choice. For anything more complicated, I would recommend Qt.
I would also have to question how much Qt you have used, because Qt also does what you claim "NO ONE in the GUI toolkit business has thought of" - ie, programs written for Qt compile to produce native Windows widgets on Windows, native Mac widgets on Mac, and their own widgets under X.
>a C++ API like KDE is a PITA to bind to other
>languages, both OO and other.
From my experience, PyQt, a Python binding to Qt, makes much more sense from an OO programming perspective (and is thus far easier to do Cool Things with) than PyGTK. This is nothing to do with the work of the primary PyGTK author - he's done a fantastic job. The underlying toolkit is just so much more of a mess.
The fact that PyQt maps almost directly to the Qt C++ API and therefore is excellently documented by Trolltech is also a major plus.
> Those whom the God's would destroy,
> they first make proud
For a start, it's "they first make mad". And secondly - it's nice to see that even ancient Greeks misuse the apostrophe (though as another poster linked, it's from Longfellow, not Seneca).
Quick lesson: "God's". That's the apostrophe of posession there. That means you're talking about the "would destroy" which belongs to God, which doesn't make sense. In this case it's very easy. We're talking about more than one God. The plural of God is Gods. Nothing more to it than that.
I'm amazed on how you can readily classify that chip as inferior... Seen the design of the chip? Guess not, maybe it is the Made in China writing that made you derive this conclusion.
Perhaps it was because the chip is more than an order of magnitude slower than the state of the art.
It's not a matter of "you can't run binary modules," it's a matter of "you can't create a derivative work from GPL'd software and distribute it sans-source."
... except that no distribution of the derivative work takes place. What's getting distributed is the binary-only module (with no GPL components), and a kernel (with source). I think, despite the opinions of the most hardened zealots, it would be very difficult to win a lawsuit given the above scenario.
strcpy is not insecure if used properly.
Basically, xfmail was adequate but ugly, TKRat was slow, KMail, Sylpheed and Evolution are promising but full of bugs, and mutt doesn't offer enough to me to be a compelling change - though I'm sure if I checked it out recently (I last looked at it two years ago) I'd have to re-think that statement.
I tried Sylpheed and Evolution quite early on in their development. Perhaps they've improved. However, I value simplicity and speed in my interface over features, and frankly Pine does most of what I want.
I use Maildir, and courier-imap. Every so often I check out a bunch of new mail readers, and I've found that using IMAP to arbitrate access to my mail is the best way to ensure it stays consistent (short of fiddling about with dummy Maildirs, of course).
I do not use Pico to edit my emails. I use joe on the console, and nedit in a GUI.
I'm pretty happy with the set-up.
> Debian quite some time ago.
Ah, I was wondering what the maintainer thought about the whole situation. :-)
I'm maintaining Pine for a programming society at my university, and I encountered a fair bit of resistance of the "It's not Free enough" variety. While people may certainly choose to believe this, my reading of license indicated to me that it was permissible to do what I was doing - ie, compile it from source, perhaps even make local changes, as long as I changed the version number. I often wondered why the Debian Pine installer - which downloads the source, applies patches, compiles and makes a local .deb - disappeared. It's nice - I guess - to know that the reason is as I suspected: ideological, rather than due to any legitimate legal concerns.
Bought one, did the mod, it was very easy, and it looks fantastic. Highly recommended. :)
If you don't have any soldering experience, practise first. Oh, and I didn't bother to install the dimmer.
Guess it depends on which ideas you're calling "registry".
What I'd like, under Linux, is a standard way of storing configuration information. Even Windows 3.11 had this. In addition, I'd like a standard way of determining where application configuration is stored: standard locations, standard filenames, etc. To the point where I could pick an arbitrary application, such as Mozilla, and run a single command to back-up both systemwide configuration and all user configurations.
This isn't like the Windows registry, but it does provide a lot of the benefits - standardised, OS-wide format, ability to easily locate all system configuration files - without the disadvantages (single big easily-damaged file).
> I don't understand why people keep attributing
> motives and emotions to an organization like the
> FSF.
Well, I can't speak for others, but the reason that *I* do the above is because almost everything that I've read that's come out of the FSF has been written by RMS or Bradley Khun. It's pretty easy to attribute motives and emotion to an organisation when almost the entirety of that organisation's dogma comes out of the mouths of two people.
Lucky We Live In A Free Country Like America!
:-)
See What Happens When Citizens Give Up Their Guns?
This Would Never Happen If Australia Had A First Amendment Like The US!
Just wanted to get those out of the way. Carry on.
> Ever wonder why some things just "feel" right? In
:-)
> my mind, that's God. Instinct. That's God.
So whenver someone skids into a turn and instinctively slams on the brakes and slides and hits and tree and dies, is that God fucking up?
Your argument that instinct is is God ignores the fact that instinct is often wrong. Perhaps instinct is often wrong because humans are fallible. If so, what compelling reason is there to include God in the equation? There isn't one.
>So what about all the stories? Eh. All of them
>can be explained. Paul was a temporal lobe
>epileptic - but what exactly generates the
>visions that a TLE seizure causes? Ah. And
>that's the kicker.
Well, that's fairly easy to explain. The random firings of a bunch of out-of-control neurons. Sort of the same way that if you poke yourself in the eye hard enough, you'll see spots, but on a much grander scale. In fact, if I put a large enough current through your brain, I could induce epilepsy in you, too. I'm fairly certain you won't attribute that to God.
> It's kinda like Deep Thought in Hitchhiker's Guide
:-) Douglas Adams was, of course, an avowed atheist, but don't let that stop you from using his books to explain your theology.
> - 42's a perfectly valid answer, and Deep
> Thought wasn't responsible for the fact that the
> people who asked the question didn't understand
> it.
Ah, there's the problem with your philsophy - you don't understand Douglas Adams. No, the reason people didn't understand "42" was because it was wrong. The Golgafrinchans crash-landed on Earth and ruined the experiment. Ford Prefect describes it as a "cock-up" to Arthur. Re-read the books.
Regarding free will: you claim that you will never believe me if I told you that I was controlling everything you did. That is fine, but you are once again falling back to faith. If I suggested that your every thought was a clever illusion designed to make you *believe* you have free will, then your decision that you do, in fact, possess free will is a decision based on faith. You cannot *prove* you have free will. That's where science-based attempts to explain religious concepts always fall down. You have *no* empirical evidence, ever. If you did have evidence for your viewpoint, your beliefs would be a science, not a religion.
http://lardcave.net/codestack for info. Python, pygame, and a GPS. The maps are bitmapped, but look nice anyway. If you're interested, email me and I'll let you know when it's done. :-)
>Part of the whole scientific process is to weed
>through seeming contradictions to find the truth.
>That's the whole point. If you can find the
>contradictions, you can understand them, and
>resolve them.
Dude, the Bible is full of blatant contradictions, some of them more serious than others. That's why Christians are so fond of the Elephant argument, which, to paraphrase, basically says that what looks like a contradiction to our limited minds actually isn't from God's point of view.
The trouble is that the elephant argument isn't a scientific explanation. It's a faith-based explanation. If you have to use the elephant argument to explain a seeming contradiction, you are following the path of faith, not the path of science.
Redarding the Many-Worlds Interpretation of the universe, you have re-explained it, but have failed to demonstrate why it is a more scientifically compelling explanation of free will than, say "There is no free will", or "We are brains in a vat with God telling us what to do." It merely is an alternative belief. There is no scientific evidence for or against the MWI, and so people belive in it because it "sounds right" - which is simply a leap of faith.
>"Why did God make us so stupid?" You're all
>missing the point. God didn't do any of that - he
>created the Universe. The form you currently
> have followed from that creation.
Actually, the Bible states that God explicitly created us in His image. I didn't ask you why God let Grandpa die, I asked you why he didn't do a better job creating us - and your answer to that is "You don't know what's possible and what's not". Well, of course I don't - I'm a human. But to God, nothing should be impossible. Check out Luke 1:37, for example:
"For with God nothing is ever impossible, and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment."
Your statement above pretty much contradicts Luke 1:37. Note that what you are doing here is using the "Elephant argument" in discussion about the "Elephant argument", ie, you are basically arguing a tautology. Here's the overview. I explained why I didn't like the Elephant Argument - because it implied there was a nasty God who could have made us any way he wanted, but chose to make us stupid. You respond by saying "Yes, but how can you possibly know God? You're human!"
This is exactly the argument that I'm trying to attack. I am claiming that your premise - that God is unknowable - is false, and it can be proved to be false using Christian doctrine. You are claiming that the premise that God is unknowable is true, and your reason for believe it is true is because God is unknowable.