Your suggestion contains too much white space. I believe you'll also want: the letters ell, ess, bee; stylized protraits of Linus, RMS, and ESR; a stained glass representation of a holy gnome (St-George) slaying the evil KDE (dragon) while a naked Bill Gates runs away, looking back in horror.
This would have to be an animated gif, of course.
However, given that only Linux tools are permitted, I shall go out on a limb and predict the winning entry will be "LSB" rendered in an obscure font, filtered through a few random kung fu gimp filters executed in a random order and impossible to recreate because the winner was too busy exploring an artistic theme to remember what he was doing.
Of course, the fabulously funded LSB could always solicit professional designs from professional designers but that would cut too deeply into their stock value. Besides, didnt RedHat already give a lucky few of their open source friends some stock!? I mean, how much longer are they going to have to pay to distribute this Linux crap? Wasnt Open Source supposed to be Free (of expenses and labor?)
There already is an LSB (Debian) and it already has a logo (a lame swirly thing.) Everything else is just commercial marketing fluff and intent.
You dont have have to agree, in which case you can revel in the irony that the gnu poster boy - Linux - is a cesspool of competing commercial insterests which serve no one but individual distributions.
Debian is as close to FreeBSD (in intent, not necessarily quality) as Linux is ever going to get. This LSB is wasted effort.
Neither apache, sendmail, bind or inn are GPL'ed. In fact, no reference implementation of any server implementing a common internet protocol is GPL'ed. The internet is safe.
I would like to know where all those whining enviornmentalists agaist nuclear power are now... IN THE DARK!!
Not necessarily a bad place to be. One of the results of the famous New York City blackout of a few decades ago was the ludicrous hike in that city's birth rate 9 months later:-)
Course, we're talking about San Francisco, here, which is a completely different basket of fruit.
Amusing, Ballmers: Hey, 2.4 is out, that could be a threat against W2K. Is there anything W2K could do better/faster than Linux 2.2, despite crashing?
You are giving Linux way too much credit here. Any Unix and certainly W2K can do anything Linux can do at least as well as Linux can do it. Just replace "despite crashing" with "despite being expensive" and you have a credible point. Otherwise, get real; a program loader, scheduler, etc circa 1970 isnt a threat to anyone, technologically.
Mozilla already renders 4.01 perfectly. Actually, it renders xhtml perfectly, as far as I can see. It also has superlative support for css - superior to IE, even.
Pages rendered by IE and mozilla look almost identical, Mozilla has a slight edge in that it's css support covers things like borders for input tags and other arcana.
Quite simply, both konqueror and opera blow - just blow - by comparison. No competition at all.
Its not a hovercraft, its a bellows powered skateboard / scooter cross. You very gently rock up and down, and it moves foreward. As it moves, inertia takes over quite a bit of the load so you barely have to rock at all if the surface is flat.
That's right, you fart around.
Dont ask me how I know, enough people have been whacked, already.
Its not only BSD developers, its developers _period_. If you were to count the number of c++ files in the entire ports system, you'd come to the conclusion that c++ is a fringe language.
For open source projects, at least, C is king. The C++ language could disappear tomorrow and I wouldnt be any wiser for it because there isnt a single program running on my installation of Linux or FreeBSD that uses it.
Of course, you kde and qt users will have slightly different mileage.
bash-2.04$ find/usr/src/linux-2.2.16 -follow -type f -name "*.[ch]" -exec grep -il fuck {} \;
/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/block/cmd640.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/sunhme.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/esp.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h
/usr/src/linux/drivers/video/tgafb.c
/usr/src/linux/fs/binfmt_aout.c
/usr/src/linux/lib/vsprintf.c
bash-2.04$ mail -s "is it too late to submit my 2.4 wish list?"
LESS INSANITY MORE PROFANITY, YOU FUCKING PUSSIES!
^d
Then there's people like me who implicitly trust all sites but find it incredibly annoying to read text that insists on moving beneath my eyes or coming onto my mouse. Wtf? How stupid does a web 'designer' have to be to ignore the lessons taught by centuries of typographic experience and convention?
LEFT TO RIGHT, UP TO DOWN, FLAT - NOT SHADOWS, NO 3D - SERIF FONT. OH, AND DO TRY TO HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY.
Write that down on a piece of paper and nail it to your dense foreheads. If I want flash, I'll smoke some weed, open a box of fruit loops and sit in front of the cartoon channel for a couple of hours.
I don't figure if US people on/. will ever understand the point.
Listen up, doofus. It shouldnt be illegal to understand your "point," or how you "feel" or what the fuck ever. Yahoo has is not in business to rue over loss in French families any more than it is in business to whitewash considerable French sympathy for Nazis and nazism before, during and after WWII.
By making it illegal to purchase these items, you are effectively telling people what and how to think, what memories they should have and how they should remember them. After all, these things are considered harmful for what they _mean_, not because they are physically dangerous. (Unpasteurized dairy products are dangerous but I dont see the French gov't passing pasturization laws.)
To be blunt, I would be ashamed of your law if I were you. It's only fair, reasonable people are ashamed of Yahoo for caving in.
No, you lunix idiot. It has nothing to do with the relative merits of the code. If it did, Linux would be the perennial last choice on every professional's list. It has everything to do with the license. The GPL forces the initial code and all its derivatives to remain open. This effectively makes it impossible for a private company to take the NSA code, make unknown modifications to it and sell it as their own. If you stop to think for a moment, you would quickly understand why the NSA cant have that happen.
Because the BSD license would not prevent me from taking their modifications and making them my own.
I can do that with the GPL too, but I'd have to show show the NSA (well, anyone) any changes I make to the code.
Understandably, the NSA doesnt want to see their code modified for nefarious purposes. Under the GPL you would (1) have to disclose the source and (2) find assasins parked outside your window.
I prefer the BSD license over the GPL but every license has its application and the GPL is ideal for this particular example.
Excuse me? Are you suggesting Windows has something to learn from Linux regarding documentation? Are you trying to be funny or just out on a day pass?
$ man 3 basename
No entry for basename in section 3 of the manual.
$ grep basename/usr/include/libgen.h
extern char *__xpg_basename (char *__path) __THROW;
#define basename __xpg_basename
I cant tell you often this happens with Linux. Whatever misguided opinion of VC++ you may have, VC++ docs are COMPLETE.
But all I would ask is that you not cry out against what is easily one of the greatest resources our population has access to today. The Internet and computing technology will continue to grow by leaps and bounds, and I want my children (if and when i have them) to be given the very best technology - without censorship or half-assed exposure to it - for the very beginning of their ability to learn.
I never said anyone should be shut off from the internet. I said kids are better served learning from traditional media. Their brains develops better when exercised by traditional media. That's a fact. It is very hard to learn from a flickering screen and it is very hard to concentrate the young mind in the presence of a torrent of raw information and misinformation that characterizes the world wide information dirt road.
My world has no use for schools beyond their ability to turn out thinking little people, equipped to handle whatever life throws at them whether it's a slashdot troll or a fermat's last theorem. Adjust according to ability, obviously.
Since there are only so many school hours spent learning, clearly it is better to spend those hours not learning at the receiving end of a web browser. If you accept the original hypothesis that a web browser is inferior to a book, you must accept this conclusion. If you dont accept the original hypothesis, then you should at least buttress your arguement with research to the contrary. There isnt any, so start cracking those child psych books you never read.
Learning to use the internet for its own sake, which is where everyone in this thread seems to be mired, is another matter, entirely. If your kid needs to go to school to do that, your kid will be _particularly_ well served by books, if you get my drift.
In conclusion, you're all true idiots for not stopping a moment to consider the potential adverse effects the internet may have on your childrens' ability to learn. Nothing comes free.
What a moronic assumption. Maybe you have never read a web page with the same care you read the page of a book, but I have.
I think otherwise. I think you have demonstrated very poor reading comprehension
Though in any event, why you think that the linear structure of a book engages more grey matter than a tree-like structure of a web site is inherently more stimulating is beyond me.
Well that's a good reason to ignore the evidence, I guess. (And do show me the parse tree for _that_ sentence.)
Listen, I will try one last time to explain what you have not understood so far. We (well, I guess not *we*) are talking about learning, about young kids in schools learning to learn. In the process of digesting a hyperlinked document for information, you are teaching your brain a method of learning above and beyond the facts on that page. You are learning how to think, you are learning a way of organizing knowledge. The current research indicates that learning from hyperlinks is the worst way possible. Debate that all you want -- but not with me.
As you go through life, you either use your brain, or you lose your brain. If you concentrate on learning your facts from hyperlinked documents, to the exclusion of books, you will get dumber. You'll still pick up the same damn facts, duh, but you will have deteriorating skills in presenting those facts to me. You will also have lessening powers to retain those facts. Debate that all you want -- but not with me.
But people will say anything (in caps no less) and try to pull it off as scientific fact.
You just proved my point in every conceivable way possible. The you also got modded so highly is simply additional evidence to the claim that kids today are dumber than kids yesterday.
I have no idea what caused your reply but I can assure you that nothing I wrote had the least thing to do with parenting or heavy metal or big business, government and revolutions.
Please explain to me what parenting has to do with the hypothesis that being strung around on a chain of hyperlinks is an inferior way to learn.
Correct. Nothing.
Like most public places, the people that are noisiest are usually the most illiterate, idiotic and moronic of the bunch. Slashdot is just an extension of that. If you read at -1 you would assume that nobody seems to be able to read beyond a comprehension level of the average kindegartener.
I have some experience teaching night school students at a univeristy level. Please believe me when I tell you that fully 95% of you are completely incapable of expressing even marginally complex ideas in words, troll or no.
The simple fact of the matter is that kids today are dumber than kids of yesterday and the Internet aint helping. There is a growing body of research that is quickly establishing that the only thing computers can teach you is computers. Everything else is better learnt from the pages of a book.
Do you know what a book is? A book has a begining, a middle and an end. It is a narrative. In a book we read things like "The reason Madonna was able to abstract centuries of Indian culture into an insipid dance number can be seen traced, according to Professor Jare Gyonne, to the inability of her audience to recognize culture beyond the label on an item of clothing. Gyonne writes,..." whatever it is that Gyonne wrote.
We dont see things like "Madonna is quite the artsy tartsy - click here to see nude photos of her. Click here to read Gyonnes critique." Because we dont see that in books, we are incapable of spending 1 second bookmarking Gyonnes critique (never to be visited again - so many links, so little time) and 2 fucking hours looking at some soft core shit that may or may not be useful to us next time we're invited on Jeopardy or invited to be interviewed on MTV.
Get it? No. Ok, listen up: take 2 identical twins. One spends a lifetime on the internet, the other in a library. The first twin will be a moron with a future as a slashdot moderator.
Research indicates that, um, and then, like, we saw the results in a book, but, you know, yesterday they said, on tv - or maybe it was the radio - oh my god, you sux0r you troll! I cant belive like I'm giving you the benefit of an answer. 42.
--
Re:My Initial experiences - posted from .6
on
Mozilla .6 Released
·
· Score: 1
Rendering is fast, faster than even IE. What is slow is initial startup time and the time it takes to launch a new windows.
There's two simple fixes for this:
(1) Download one of the many mozilla based browsers which work with your native widget set. (Galeon and skipstone are the two that I know of.)
(2) What I do is keep two windows at all times. Whenever I see a link a like, I drag it into the 2nd window instead of right mouse->open in new window.
Actually, there's 3 fixes. The third is to read linearly instead of jumping all over the place. You know, read with your eyes instead of your mouse? But I suspect this is expecting too much from two generations of people weaned on mtv and video games.
There are two contexts in which fork() is used in a *n?x environment: when the system call is immediately followed by transfer of control to another executable (that is, as a very expensive way to execute CreateProcess())
So what? You cant type fast enough or have enough different program names to type for this to be an issue. The incidence of new programs is an incidence measured in slow plodding human time.
or as a way to spawn a separate handler for an event (that is, as a very expensive way of calling CreateThread()). In neither case is fork() itself a useful or efficient system call.
Maybe. Depends on how fast threads can be created[*]. They are much more complicated beasts to manage if you are a kernel than straight processes are.
Personally, I find most software doesnt need threads and that introducing threads raises program complexity and bugs. Threads are a *difficult* abstraction.
[*] I'm sure someone will trot out the oft repeated "linux process creation is faster than NT thread creation" line. I dont know if its true, and I dont really care. The incidence of process (thread) *creation* in real world apps as opposed to benchmarks is just so low as to render difference in creation times completely irrelevant. Given a choice, I'll take the simplicity of fork() any day.
Threads are definitely useful in a multi cpu context and they are definitely useful when you want more than one task to run in parallel without the overhead of ipc between processes but talk of creation times is a red herring.
Maybe its because _you_ havent learned to program C properly? Ever think of that? No, you were to busy being a l33t lemming.
There has never been a demonstrated advantage to using C++ over C. Quite the contrary, actually. C++ has been shown to increase complexity everywhere except in very large projects (assuming a uniform level of C++ expertise amongst the project authors which is a blue sky assumption indeed.) C++ is nice if you're given a library of bullet proof, fully debugged modules to link against but its a bitch to work with when you have to fix bugs without access to hidden object definitions.
My personal C++ pet peeve is tracing byzantine object hierarchies in code that will never be reused and which could have easily have been replaced by a tidy little.h file of #defines, structs and/* explanations */.
I have nothing against object oriented methodologies or languages but C++ is an abortion of a programming language that never passes up an opportunity to get in the programmer's way. To quote the inventor of the term object oriented, Alan Kay, "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
Mozilla is, in a way, a very succesful open source project, which attracted lots of really talented outside contributors. And indeed, a lot of attention is being paid to reducing bloat at the moment.
Unfortunately, a number of design decisions were errrr less than optimal. The XUL user interface language seems to have a big impact on performance. And leaving aside whether one likes the UI or not, the fact that it behaves different than other apps on any given platform also leaves a lot to be desired
Ok, once and for all: If you want to fix all of the above AND have a wickedly fast, standards compliant
browser with a tiny memory footprint, smooth scrolling, etc, etc- ie, if you want IE for gnome - do the following:
(5) add the following to your.bash_profile: MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla ; export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME
You now have 2 browsers: mozilla in/usr/lib/mozilla/ and galeon in/usr/bin/galeon. Use galeon and never look back. Not only do you get gecko which is certainly the one thing mozilla did right., you get superior bookmark management, lovely themeable gtk+ and last but not least, you get a reason to install the only internet app that matters, the mutt email client.
(Whatever you do, dont rewrite mutt as a gtk app that hooks into libgtkembedmoz.so to render html email. That's what microsoft does.)
Processes _also_ share memory except for (a) the insignificant amount consumed by a process slot; (b) copy on write data pages before they've been written, if they ever get written,.
This is why you can have hundreds of apache processes (news readers, whatever) on a busy server without ever breaking a sweat or touching swap. Now, most large programs allocate a huge chunk of memory that they will manipulate for themselves in lieu of malloc(). That doesnt mean they're going to use (more accuately, write to) all the pages in that chunk! It does mean top will report those pages but so what, that isnt a measure of actual memory consumption.
I'm not even considering pages swapped to disk which is a further "optimization" when you have 100 browser windows, all of them having seen active use over a 24 hour period but only 2 of them currently not minimized as icons.
Modern VMs are a wonderful thing - stop being so stingy with imaginary memory.Open as many mozilla windows as you need, you wont be any wiser for it.
(If memory request sizes matter to your os, your os is broken and or has some other serious issue that will probably require an immediate reboot.)
This review is bogus. If you're running Linux, download a recent build (follow the notes link at mozillazine.org) and ket rid of Netscape 4.7. Mozilla renders pages almost as well as IE. I make heavy use of css on my site and all its pages render exactly alike on IE, Mozilla for Windows, Netscape 6 for Windows, and mozilla for Unix/XFree.
(There's marginal differences with fonts across platforms but Mozilla on unix does a lot better with fonts than Netscape 4.7, that's for fscking certain. You cant specify font size in pt measure with Netscape 4.7 under XFree and not have the font look like it was rendered by an Apple II.)
Slashdot Mirror
This would have to be an animated gif, of course.
However, given that only Linux tools are permitted, I shall go out on a limb and predict the winning entry will be "LSB" rendered in an obscure font, filtered through a few random kung fu gimp filters executed in a random order and impossible to recreate because the winner was too busy exploring an artistic theme to remember what he was doing.
Of course, the fabulously funded LSB could always solicit professional designs from professional designers but that would cut too deeply into their stock value. Besides, didnt RedHat already give a lucky few of their open source friends some stock!? I mean, how much longer are they going to have to pay to distribute this Linux crap? Wasnt Open Source supposed to be Free (of expenses and labor?)
--
You dont have have to agree, in which case you can revel in the irony that the gnu poster boy - Linux - is a cesspool of competing commercial insterests which serve no one but individual distributions.
Debian is as close to FreeBSD (in intent, not necessarily quality) as Linux is ever going to get. This LSB is wasted effort.
Fuck em.
--
--
I would like to know where all those whining enviornmentalists agaist nuclear power are now... IN THE DARK!!
Not necessarily a bad place to be. One of the results of the famous New York City blackout of a few decades ago was the ludicrous hike in that city's birth rate 9 months later
Course, we're talking about San Francisco, here, which is a completely different basket of fruit.
--
Amusing, Ballmers: Hey, 2.4 is out, that could be a threat against W2K. Is there anything W2K could do better/faster than Linux 2.2, despite crashing?
You are giving Linux way too much credit here. Any Unix and certainly W2K can do anything Linux can do at least as well as Linux can do it. Just replace "despite crashing" with "despite being expensive" and you have a credible point. Otherwise, get real; a program loader, scheduler, etc circa 1970 isnt a threat to anyone, technologically.
--
Pages rendered by IE and mozilla look almost identical, Mozilla has a slight edge in that it's css support covers things like borders for input tags and other arcana.
Quite simply, both konqueror and opera blow - just blow - by comparison. No competition at all.
--
That's right, you fart around.
Dont ask me how I know, enough people have been whacked, already.
--
For open source projects, at least, C is king. The C++ language could disappear tomorrow and I wouldnt be any wiser for it because there isnt a single program running on my installation of Linux or FreeBSD that uses it.
Of course, you kde and qt users will have slightly different mileage.
--
bash-2.04$ find
/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/block/cmd640.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/sunhme.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/esp.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h
/usr/src/linux/drivers/video/tgafb.c
/usr/src/linux/fs/binfmt_aout.c
/usr/src/linux/lib/vsprintf.c
bash-2.04$ mail -s "is it too late to submit my 2.4 wish list?"
LESS INSANITY MORE PROFANITY, YOU FUCKING PUSSIES!
^d
--
LEFT TO RIGHT, UP TO DOWN, FLAT - NOT SHADOWS, NO 3D - SERIF FONT. OH, AND DO TRY TO HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY.
Write that down on a piece of paper and nail it to your dense foreheads. If I want flash, I'll smoke some weed, open a box of fruit loops and sit in front of the cartoon channel for a couple of hours.
--
Listen up, doofus. It shouldnt be illegal to understand your "point," or how you "feel" or what the fuck ever. Yahoo has is not in business to rue over loss in French families any more than it is in business to whitewash considerable French sympathy for Nazis and nazism before, during and after WWII.
By making it illegal to purchase these items, you are effectively telling people what and how to think, what memories they should have and how they should remember them. After all, these things are considered harmful for what they _mean_, not because they are physically dangerous. (Unpasteurized dairy products are dangerous but I dont see the French gov't passing pasturization laws.)
To be blunt, I would be ashamed of your law if I were you. It's only fair, reasonable people are ashamed of Yahoo for caving in.
--
--
I can do that with the GPL too, but I'd have to show show the NSA (well, anyone) any changes I make to the code.
Understandably, the NSA doesnt want to see their code modified for nefarious purposes. Under the GPL you would (1) have to disclose the source and (2) find assasins parked outside your window.
I prefer the BSD license over the GPL but every license has its application and the GPL is ideal for this particular example.
--
$ man 3 basename
No entry for basename in section 3 of the manual.
$ grep basename
extern char *__xpg_basename (char *__path) __THROW;
#define basename __xpg_basename
I cant tell you often this happens with Linux. Whatever misguided opinion of VC++ you may have, VC++ docs are COMPLETE.
--
But all I would ask is that you not cry out against what is easily one of the greatest resources our population has access to today. The Internet and computing technology will continue to grow by leaps and bounds, and I want my children (if and when i have them) to be given the very best technology - without censorship or half-assed exposure to it - for the very beginning of their ability to learn.
I never said anyone should be shut off from the internet. I said kids are better served learning from traditional media. Their brains develops better when exercised by traditional media. That's a fact. It is very hard to learn from a flickering screen and it is very hard to concentrate the young mind in the presence of a torrent of raw information and misinformation that characterizes the world wide information dirt road.
My world has no use for schools beyond their ability to turn out thinking little people, equipped to handle whatever life throws at them whether it's a slashdot troll or a fermat's last theorem. Adjust according to ability, obviously.
Since there are only so many school hours spent learning, clearly it is better to spend those hours not learning at the receiving end of a web browser. If you accept the original hypothesis that a web browser is inferior to a book, you must accept this conclusion. If you dont accept the original hypothesis, then you should at least buttress your arguement with research to the contrary. There isnt any, so start cracking those child psych books you never read.
Learning to use the internet for its own sake, which is where everyone in this thread seems to be mired, is another matter, entirely. If your kid needs to go to school to do that, your kid will be _particularly_ well served by books, if you get my drift.
In conclusion, you're all true idiots for not stopping a moment to consider the potential adverse effects the internet may have on your childrens' ability to learn. Nothing comes free.
--
I think otherwise. I think you have demonstrated very poor reading comprehension
Though in any event, why you think that the linear structure of a book engages more grey matter than a tree-like structure of a web site is inherently more stimulating is beyond me.
Well that's a good reason to ignore the evidence, I guess. (And do show me the parse tree for _that_ sentence.)
Listen, I will try one last time to explain what you have not understood so far. We (well, I guess not *we*) are talking about learning, about young kids in schools learning to learn. In the process of digesting a hyperlinked document for information, you are teaching your brain a method of learning above and beyond the facts on that page. You are learning how to think, you are learning a way of organizing knowledge. The current research indicates that learning from hyperlinks is the worst way possible. Debate that all you want -- but not with me.
As you go through life, you either use your brain, or you lose your brain. If you concentrate on learning your facts from hyperlinked documents, to the exclusion of books, you will get dumber. You'll still pick up the same damn facts, duh, but you will have deteriorating skills in presenting those facts to me. You will also have lessening powers to retain those facts. Debate that all you want -- but not with me.
But people will say anything (in caps no less) and try to pull it off as scientific fact.
WHATEVER YOU SAY.
--
I have no idea what caused your reply but I can assure you that nothing I wrote had the least thing to do with parenting or heavy metal or big business, government and revolutions.
Please explain to me what parenting has to do with the hypothesis that being strung around on a chain of hyperlinks is an inferior way to learn.
Correct. Nothing.
Like most public places, the people that are noisiest are usually the most illiterate, idiotic and moronic of the bunch. Slashdot is just an extension of that. If you read at -1 you would assume that nobody seems to be able to read beyond a comprehension level of the average kindegartener.
I have some experience teaching night school students at a univeristy level. Please believe me when I tell you that fully 95% of you are completely incapable of expressing even marginally complex ideas in words, troll or no.
The simple fact of the matter is that kids today are dumber than kids of yesterday and the Internet aint helping. There is a growing body of research that is quickly establishing that the only thing computers can teach you is computers. Everything else is better learnt from the pages of a book.
Do you know what a book is? A book has a begining, a middle and an end. It is a narrative. In a book we read things like "The reason Madonna was able to abstract centuries of Indian culture into an insipid dance number can be seen traced, according to Professor Jare Gyonne, to the inability of her audience to recognize culture beyond the label on an item of clothing. Gyonne writes,
We dont see things like "Madonna is quite the artsy tartsy - click here to see nude photos of her. Click here to read Gyonnes critique." Because we dont see that in books, we are incapable of spending 1 second bookmarking Gyonnes critique (never to be visited again - so many links, so little time) and 2 fucking hours looking at some soft core shit that may or may not be useful to us next time we're invited on Jeopardy or invited to be interviewed on MTV.
Get it? No. Ok, listen up: take 2 identical twins. One spends a lifetime on the internet, the other in a library. The first twin will be a moron with a future as a slashdot moderator.
--
Research indicates that, um, and then, like, we saw the results in a book, but, you know, yesterday they said, on tv - or maybe it was the radio - oh my god, you sux0r you troll! I cant belive like I'm giving you the benefit of an answer. 42.
--
There's two simple fixes for this:
(1) Download one of the many mozilla based browsers which work with your native widget set. (Galeon and skipstone are the two that I know of.)
(2) What I do is keep two windows at all times. Whenever I see a link a like, I drag it into the 2nd window instead of right mouse->open in new window.
Actually, there's 3 fixes. The third is to read linearly instead of jumping all over the place. You know, read with your eyes instead of your mouse? But I suspect this is expecting too much from two generations of people weaned on mtv and video games.
--
There are two contexts in which fork() is used in a *n?x environment: when the system call is immediately followed by transfer of control to another executable (that is, as a very expensive way to execute CreateProcess())
So what? You cant type fast enough or have enough different program names to type for this to be an issue. The incidence of new programs is an incidence measured in slow plodding human time.
or as a way to spawn a separate handler for an event (that is, as a very expensive way of calling CreateThread()). In neither case is fork() itself a useful or efficient system call.
Maybe. Depends on how fast threads can be created[*]. They are much more complicated beasts to manage if you are a kernel than straight processes are.
Personally, I find most software doesnt need threads and that introducing threads raises program complexity and bugs. Threads are a *difficult* abstraction.
[*] I'm sure someone will trot out the oft repeated "linux process creation is faster than NT thread creation" line. I dont know if its true, and I dont really care. The incidence of process (thread) *creation* in real world apps as opposed to benchmarks is just so low as to render difference in creation times completely irrelevant. Given a choice, I'll take the simplicity of fork() any day.
Threads are definitely useful in a multi cpu context and they are definitely useful when you want more than one task to run in parallel without the overhead of ipc between processes but talk of creation times is a red herring.
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There has never been a demonstrated advantage to using C++ over C. Quite the contrary, actually. C++ has been shown to increase complexity everywhere except in very large projects (assuming a uniform level of C++ expertise amongst the project authors which is a blue sky assumption indeed.) C++ is nice if you're given a library of bullet proof, fully debugged modules to link against but its a bitch to work with when you have to fix bugs without access to hidden object definitions.
My personal C++ pet peeve is tracing byzantine object hierarchies in code that will never be reused and which could have easily have been replaced by a tidy little
I have nothing against object oriented methodologies or languages but C++ is an abortion of a programming language that never passes up an opportunity to get in the programmer's way. To quote the inventor of the term object oriented, Alan Kay, "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
You may also find this critique of c++ interesting reading.
I may be wrong. It may come down to a matter of preference, in which case your superior c++ doesnt reflect poorly on c++, just poorly on you.
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Mozilla is, in a way, a very succesful open source project, which attracted lots of really talented outside contributors. And indeed, a lot of attention is being paid to reducing bloat at the moment.
Unfortunately, a number of design decisions were errrr less than optimal. The XUL user interface language seems to have a big impact on performance. And leaving aside whether one likes the UI or not, the fact that it behaves different than other apps on any given platform also leaves a lot to be desired
Ok, once and for all: If you want to fix all of the above AND have a wickedly fast, standards compliant
browser with a tiny memory footprint, smooth scrolling, etc, etc- ie, if you want IE for gnome - do the following:
(1) Download build 2000-11-27 (the best linux build so far) from http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/software/RH7/RP
(2) rpm -vvi what you downloaded in step (1)
(3) Goto http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ and download the latest galeon. Its a small download.
(4) rpm -vvi what you downloaded in (3)
(5) add the following to your
You now have 2 browsers: mozilla in
(Whatever you do, dont rewrite mutt as a gtk app that hooks into libgtkembedmoz.so to render html email. That's what microsoft does.)
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# man foo
No manual entry for foo
#info foo
This (the Directory node) gives a menu of major topics
(but no foo)
#cd
No such file or directory
#cd
#ls
README.txt
#cat README.txt
Documentation for foo is available at http://www.foo.com/doc/
Then there's things like
#apropos bar
bar: nothing appropriate
man bar
(man page for bar appears)
Argh.
Really, you dont see that shit on any BSD.
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Almost no program under windows creates processes except for the shell that launches programs in the first place. There is no fork() in windows, see?
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This is why you can have hundreds of apache processes (news readers, whatever) on a busy server without ever breaking a sweat or touching swap. Now, most large programs allocate a huge chunk of memory that they will manipulate for themselves in lieu of malloc(). That doesnt mean they're going to use (more accuately, write to) all the pages in that chunk! It does mean top will report those pages but so what, that isnt a measure of actual memory consumption.
I'm not even considering pages swapped to disk which is a further "optimization" when you have 100 browser windows, all of them having seen active use over a 24 hour period but only 2 of them currently not minimized as icons.
Modern VMs are a wonderful thing - stop being so stingy with imaginary memory.Open as many mozilla windows as you need, you wont be any wiser for it.
(If memory request sizes matter to your os, your os is broken and or has some other serious issue that will probably require an immediate reboot.)
This review is bogus. If you're running Linux, download a recent build (follow the notes link at mozillazine.org) and ket rid of Netscape 4.7. Mozilla renders pages almost as well as IE. I make heavy use of css on my site and all its pages render exactly alike on IE, Mozilla for Windows, Netscape 6 for Windows, and mozilla for Unix/XFree.
(There's marginal differences with fonts across platforms but Mozilla on unix does a lot better with fonts than Netscape 4.7, that's for fscking certain. You cant specify font size in pt measure with Netscape 4.7 under XFree and not have the font look like it was rendered by an Apple II.)
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