God damn it will you PLEASE learn the difference between "looses" and "loses"? You really must be a moron if you can't remember such a simple distinction.
Typos happen. You must really be a moron if you assume every time you see one that the author doesn't know the difference between the two words.
Blatant sub-kiddie-script level hacking by the Chinese government (possibly the best funded cyber-warfare division on the planet) against the Falun Gong being "exposed" by a web site created by the Falun Gong? I wonder why my Spidey-Sense is tingling?
It's good that it's tingling, but I have to say, you don't seriously think the Chinese government is any less incompetent than other governments, do you? I fully expect "the best funded [whatever] of [any world government]" to always look rather primitive and poorly implemented compared to anything I could whip up in five minutes with what I have lying around the house. I have the benefit of not being a committee, after all...
Earth quakes on the east coast are pretty rare. Also, no one with internet access lives in Colorado.
Are you implying there are people without internet access there? It was my understanding that, aside from towns on the western banks of the Mississippi River and cities on the Pacific coast, no one lives in the western half of the US aside from cacti, tumbleweed, some wild horses, and a couple of mountain lions.
In the 3+ billion years life has been on Earth I would guess that life from Earth could have gotten to Mars even if it has lower probability than other locales.
So if we find life on Mars, or some moon of a gas giant, do we assume it got their from Earth or not?
Depending on when the migration took place, that might be a trivially easy question to answer. A strange life based on chemical processes entirely unrelated to anything on Earth today may leave us questioning, but RNA or DNA-based microorganisms with identifiable gene-sequences from strains that evolved on Earth with a clear fossil record would leave no question at all. So the answer to you question is, it depends on what we find...
Send a note with it, will you? I hate the thought of bringing up a whole planet of lifeforms just so they can bang their heads and kill one another over the confusion of where they came from and why.;)
Alas, all evidence suggests that lifeforms will bang their heads and kill one another in any case. What they may or may not be confused about only provides convenient excuses for doing and/or justifying what they wanted to do anyway...
Life doesn't need nutrients if the life-process can be shut down entirely, then restarted when conditions are favorable, and this is the case for many microorganisms. The waterbear may still need some energy, but it's much larger than what we're talking about here, also much more complex, and way more fragile/less hardy than many microorganisms.
Hate to throw a wet blanket on this whole thing, but... the Sun has not gotten cooler. Hydrogen burning stars (and the Sun is still in that stage) get hotter as they get older, burning their remaining hydrogen at an ever increasing rate as they age. The Sun gets about 10% brighter every billion years. What you'd want to do to stay in the habitable zone is migrate outwards.
The latest evidence has fossil life appearing on Earth so soon after the LHB that it is implausible it evolved here.
Interesting. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what the scientists discussing the latest evidence said on the interview I heard. Latest evidence has fossil life appearing on Earth so soon after the LHB that it seems implausible that it takes life very long to evolve, given the right conditions. Lacking evidence that it takes life much longer to get going than it did, and further that some more hospitable place for it to evolve existed, and further still that it then managed to get transplanted from there to here, it seems highly implausible that it evolved elsewhere, in some even less hospitable environment compared to the relative paradise that is Earth, even in its early days.
But that assumes that Firefox doesn't break the API the extension uses.
No, it doesn't assume that at all. What it assumes is that it's better to write your software and hope it doesn't break in a future version than to write your software in such a way that you guarantee it breaks in a future version (by causing it to fail for no other reason than that you added a version check).
Not that funny, really. If your contention is that it's actually a different piece of software and not Firefox, it should no more be expected to work right than Microsoft's Windows update in determining what software on their site will be compatible with my version of Fedora/Wine. It's not their software and not their problem, and a user is being deliberately obtuse if they're expecting the site to even correctly identify what third-party weirdness they're running.
the add-on developer should maintain the add-on and update its max-version
You're saying that any person who writes software is automatically required to provide lifetime support of said software?
No. Are you saying Mozilla is automatically required to provide lifetime support for someone else's software? I'm sure you're not saying that, either, what people are doing here is trying very hard to exclude the third, actual true option: users who want to run software that was given to them for free a long time ago but no one today wants to support are not automatically entitled to support. The users want desperately to blame someone, but neither the original developer nor Mozilla are to blame. They got what they paid for, and if they really really want to keep using it, they need to actually pay someone to fix it, or fix it themselves.
No, he's correct. Actually read the article you're linking to. Or reread the post you said was wrong. You've gotten confused somewhere, although since you said nothing more than "wrong" and posted a link, it's hard to determine just where exactly you've gotten confused.
It's actually *ok* to say, "Our knowledge and theories are incomplete. Once we get more data we can fill in the gaps."
What's not okay is to just throw up your hands and say, "our theories are incomplete, so let's not even try to fill in the gaps". If you are to attempt to figure out what's really going on, rather than give up and become an astrologer instead, you need to start coming up with theories, then test them. Dark matter, alternate gravitational theories, etc. When your current theories don't fit the existing data, more data isn't going to help at all until you start coming up with alternate theories -- then the more data can choose between the alternatives. Existing data does NOT fit a universe with no dark matter and gravity working the way we think it does. So, we have theories of involving dark matter, and theories (like this one) of gravity doing funky-weirdness. And that's okay. We'll work it out eventually. What's not okay is insisting we don't even try to come up with new theories when the old ones clearly don't fit the data at all (as a universe with no dark matter currently doesn't).
The old arguments about desktops and application superiority aren't going to matter if all the other platforms have moved on.
Headline/conclusion:
Old Arguments May Cost Linux the Desktop
Make up your mind. If everyone moves to the cloud as their new platform, as noted, it simply won't matter, but that doesn't cost Linux anything, it just makes the local platform irrelevant. That happens regardless of whether people are arguing about desktop apps or not. The article gives no compelling reason why such arguments are actually harmful, or cost Linux anything, just points out how they become irrelevant. The author seems to want to argue both ways -- that someone the platform has to remain relevant when people move on to the new platform... to what end, I don't know, since the point seems to be people are inevitably move to the cloud, and the author mistakenly portrays that as "other platforms moving on" rather than "other platforms being moved away from as well in favor of the new, cloud platform".
Unfortunately, both the 50" TV and 27" screen are 1920x1080, both of which only have a hair more resolution than my 20.1" desktop monitor.
This is, unfortunately, less vertical resolution than I've been accustomed to for the last decade (both my six year old LCD monitor and the previous CRT ran at 1600x1200). I used to get a new monitor every few years for about the same cost as the previous one but with an upgraded resolution. It's now going on a decade since my last upgrade, and I will either have to downgrade, or pay significantly more just to break even. I really don't want to downgrade to 1080...:(
Strange I had a Sparcstation 1 in the late 80's which had much less horsepower than a mid-90's pentium and not only did X11 start fast, I could compile X11, run X11, read netnews all at the same time no problems. Me thinks you're memory has more than just bit rot
I think you might be suffering from the "megahertz myth". As and old SPARCstation user myself, I know you're quite right that my old IPC could run X11 just fine. That didn't alter the fact that a modern Pentium a few years later groaned under the stress of trying to do what my old SPARC did. The IPC was a much lower megahertz machine, I'll grant, but it didn't seem to have "much less horsepower" than the Pentium I picked up half a decade later.
We might be comparing apples and oranges, though. Part of the problem might have been a mature and well implemented X server running under SunOS vs. a fresh open-source X running under Linux back in the day when Slackware was king. It's not exactly the same software, as well as not the same computers being compared. All I know for sure is X11 and many graphical apps ran much faster on my IPC than on mid-90's Pentium.
So instead of fixing any perceived deficiencies in X, the plan is to rewrite from scratch?
No. Since most of what X does it irrelevant, the plan is to not rewrite it at all, and write a tool that does the job wanted rather than trying to bolt the functionality onto the tool that mostly does other stuff.
You may not believe me, but PC gamers are ham fisted and have no fine motor control with their thumbs.
All generalizations are false, but some are so obviously so you'd have to be a moron to even entertain them. Who would honestly be stupid enough to think everyone who games on a PC has the same motor skills, talents, quirks, dexterity with particular digits (e.g. "their thumbs"), or anything like that? That's beyond mistaken, that's knuckle-dragging stupid...
Challenge: come up with the equivalent for pascal-style strings in a way that doesn't compile into at least twice as much code.
In fact, aside from strlen, are there any string functions that aren't made at least twice complex by using P-style instead of C-style strings? Most of strlib.c can be implemented as one-liners, assuming C-style strings.
Actually the tradeoff may not have been rational. The storage bytes saved may have been offset by the extra code bytes necessary for handling unknown length strings.
Not really, no. Having written basic library code for both, it usually requires more code to handle Pascal-style (length+data) strings than C-style (data+null) strings. You save quite a bit of code ("quite a bit" being relative, but I've had to squeeze code into 208 bytes of RAM before) by using the C-style strings most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
God damn it will you PLEASE learn the difference between "looses" and "loses"? You really must be a moron if you can't remember such a simple distinction.
Typos happen. You must really be a moron if you assume every time you see one that the author doesn't know the difference between the two words.
Blatant sub-kiddie-script level hacking by the Chinese government (possibly the best funded cyber-warfare division on the planet) against the Falun Gong being "exposed" by a web site created by the Falun Gong? I wonder why my Spidey-Sense is tingling?
It's good that it's tingling, but I have to say, you don't seriously think the Chinese government is any less incompetent than other governments, do you? I fully expect "the best funded [whatever] of [any world government]" to always look rather primitive and poorly implemented compared to anything I could whip up in five minutes with what I have lying around the house. I have the benefit of not being a committee, after all...
Earth quakes on the east coast are pretty rare. Also, no one with internet access lives in Colorado.
Are you implying there are people without internet access there? It was my understanding that, aside from towns on the western banks of the Mississippi River and cities on the Pacific coast, no one lives in the western half of the US aside from cacti, tumbleweed, some wild horses, and a couple of mountain lions.
Yea, just wait a couple days. You will have plenty to report. -Love Midwest.
so i herd u lik tornados :p
In the 3+ billion years life has been on Earth I would guess that life from Earth could have gotten to Mars even if it has lower probability than other locales.
So if we find life on Mars, or some moon of a gas giant, do we assume it got their from Earth or not?
Depending on when the migration took place, that might be a trivially easy question to answer. A strange life based on chemical processes entirely unrelated to anything on Earth today may leave us questioning, but RNA or DNA-based microorganisms with identifiable gene-sequences from strains that evolved on Earth with a clear fossil record would leave no question at all. So the answer to you question is, it depends on what we find...
Send a note with it, will you? I hate the thought of bringing up a whole planet of lifeforms just so they can bang their heads and kill one another over the confusion of where they came from and why. ;)
Alas, all evidence suggests that lifeforms will bang their heads and kill one another in any case. What they may or may not be confused about only provides convenient excuses for doing and/or justifying what they wanted to do anyway...
Life doesn't need nutrients if the life-process can be shut down entirely, then restarted when conditions are favorable, and this is the case for many microorganisms. The waterbear may still need some energy, but it's much larger than what we're talking about here, also much more complex, and way more fragile/less hardy than many microorganisms.
Hate to throw a wet blanket on this whole thing, but... the Sun has not gotten cooler. Hydrogen burning stars (and the Sun is still in that stage) get hotter as they get older, burning their remaining hydrogen at an ever increasing rate as they age. The Sun gets about 10% brighter every billion years. What you'd want to do to stay in the habitable zone is migrate outwards.
The latest evidence has fossil life appearing on Earth so soon after the LHB that it is implausible it evolved here.
Interesting. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what the scientists discussing the latest evidence said on the interview I heard. Latest evidence has fossil life appearing on Earth so soon after the LHB that it seems implausible that it takes life very long to evolve, given the right conditions. Lacking evidence that it takes life much longer to get going than it did, and further that some more hospitable place for it to evolve existed, and further still that it then managed to get transplanted from there to here, it seems highly implausible that it evolved elsewhere, in some even less hospitable environment compared to the relative paradise that is Earth, even in its early days.
But that assumes that Firefox doesn't break the API the extension uses.
No, it doesn't assume that at all. What it assumes is that it's better to write your software and hope it doesn't break in a future version than to write your software in such a way that you guarantee it breaks in a future version (by causing it to fail for no other reason than that you added a version check).
Not that funny, really. If your contention is that it's actually a different piece of software and not Firefox, it should no more be expected to work right than Microsoft's Windows update in determining what software on their site will be compatible with my version of Fedora/Wine. It's not their software and not their problem, and a user is being deliberately obtuse if they're expecting the site to even correctly identify what third-party weirdness they're running.
the add-on developer should maintain the add-on and update its max-version
You're saying that any person who writes software is automatically required to provide lifetime support of said software?
No. Are you saying Mozilla is automatically required to provide lifetime support for someone else's software? I'm sure you're not saying that, either, what people are doing here is trying very hard to exclude the third, actual true option: users who want to run software that was given to them for free a long time ago but no one today wants to support are not automatically entitled to support. The users want desperately to blame someone, but neither the original developer nor Mozilla are to blame. They got what they paid for, and if they really really want to keep using it, they need to actually pay someone to fix it, or fix it themselves.
Sure, it's the responsibility of the developers of the addons to fix the problems created by Mozilla.
It's not, but it is their responsibility to fix the problems they created themselves, which was the issue here.
Wrong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking
No, he's correct. Actually read the article you're linking to. Or reread the post you said was wrong. You've gotten confused somewhere, although since you said nothing more than "wrong" and posted a link, it's hard to determine just where exactly you've gotten confused.
It's actually *ok* to say, "Our knowledge and theories are incomplete. Once we get more data we can fill in the gaps."
What's not okay is to just throw up your hands and say, "our theories are incomplete, so let's not even try to fill in the gaps". If you are to attempt to figure out what's really going on, rather than give up and become an astrologer instead, you need to start coming up with theories, then test them. Dark matter, alternate gravitational theories, etc. When your current theories don't fit the existing data, more data isn't going to help at all until you start coming up with alternate theories -- then the more data can choose between the alternatives. Existing data does NOT fit a universe with no dark matter and gravity working the way we think it does. So, we have theories of involving dark matter, and theories (like this one) of gravity doing funky-weirdness. And that's okay. We'll work it out eventually. What's not okay is insisting we don't even try to come up with new theories when the old ones clearly don't fit the data at all (as a universe with no dark matter currently doesn't).
TFA:
The old arguments about desktops and application superiority aren't going to matter if all the other platforms have moved on.
Headline/conclusion:
Old Arguments May Cost Linux the Desktop
Make up your mind. If everyone moves to the cloud as their new platform, as noted, it simply won't matter, but that doesn't cost Linux anything, it just makes the local platform irrelevant. That happens regardless of whether people are arguing about desktop apps or not. The article gives no compelling reason why such arguments are actually harmful, or cost Linux anything, just points out how they become irrelevant. The author seems to want to argue both ways -- that someone the platform has to remain relevant when people move on to the new platform... to what end, I don't know, since the point seems to be people are inevitably move to the cloud, and the author mistakenly portrays that as "other platforms moving on" rather than "other platforms being moved away from as well in favor of the new, cloud platform".
Golum steals the show again... ;)
Why must it always be mankind that is responsible, even for the rise of the apes? This is ridiculously homocentric.
If you watched the originals and didn't get the message that it's all mankind's fault, you seriously missed the point...
Well, of course it is. It's "reality TV" after all...
Unfortunately, both the 50" TV and 27" screen are 1920x1080, both of which only have a hair more resolution than my 20.1" desktop monitor.
This is, unfortunately, less vertical resolution than I've been accustomed to for the last decade (both my six year old LCD monitor and the previous CRT ran at 1600x1200). I used to get a new monitor every few years for about the same cost as the previous one but with an upgraded resolution. It's now going on a decade since my last upgrade, and I will either have to downgrade, or pay significantly more just to break even. I really don't want to downgrade to 1080... :(
Strange I had a Sparcstation 1 in the late 80's which had much less horsepower than a mid-90's pentium and not only did X11 start fast, I could compile X11, run X11, read netnews all at the same time no problems. Me thinks you're memory has more than just bit rot
I think you might be suffering from the "megahertz myth". As and old SPARCstation user myself, I know you're quite right that my old IPC could run X11 just fine. That didn't alter the fact that a modern Pentium a few years later groaned under the stress of trying to do what my old SPARC did. The IPC was a much lower megahertz machine, I'll grant, but it didn't seem to have "much less horsepower" than the Pentium I picked up half a decade later.
We might be comparing apples and oranges, though. Part of the problem might have been a mature and well implemented X server running under SunOS vs. a fresh open-source X running under Linux back in the day when Slackware was king. It's not exactly the same software, as well as not the same computers being compared. All I know for sure is X11 and many graphical apps ran much faster on my IPC than on mid-90's Pentium.
So instead of fixing any perceived deficiencies in X, the plan is to rewrite from scratch?
No. Since most of what X does it irrelevant, the plan is to not rewrite it at all, and write a tool that does the job wanted rather than trying to bolt the functionality onto the tool that mostly does other stuff.
You may not believe me, but PC gamers are ham fisted and have no fine motor control with their thumbs.
All generalizations are false, but some are so obviously so you'd have to be a moron to even entertain them. Who would honestly be stupid enough to think everyone who games on a PC has the same motor skills, talents, quirks, dexterity with particular digits (e.g. "their thumbs"), or anything like that? That's beyond mistaken, that's knuckle-dragging stupid...
What are the common cases you are thinking of where C-style strings are faster?
strcpy(char *d, char *s)
{
while ( *d++ = *s++ );
}
Challenge: come up with the equivalent for pascal-style strings in a way that doesn't compile into at least twice as much code.
In fact, aside from strlen, are there any string functions that aren't made at least twice complex by using P-style instead of C-style strings? Most of strlib.c can be implemented as one-liners, assuming C-style strings.
Actually the tradeoff may not have been rational. The storage bytes saved may have been offset by the extra code bytes necessary for handling unknown length strings.
Not really, no. Having written basic library code for both, it usually requires more code to handle Pascal-style (length+data) strings than C-style (data+null) strings. You save quite a bit of code ("quite a bit" being relative, but I've had to squeeze code into 208 bytes of RAM before) by using the C-style strings most of the time.