Debian could also switch to Kmeleon as it's less memory hungry.
They can't "switch" to anything, they already ship lots of browsers. Debian uses GNOME by default, so Epiphany might well be installed by default anyway and not Firefox (haven't done a fresh install for a while). If that's the case, then this just makes it a bit harder for users to specifically find Firefox (probably an apt-cache search will still find it, but the package would be called "iceweweasel" instead).
Debian and Mozilla really need to cut out this nonsense. The more they bicker, the more they fall behind projects like Konqueror and FreeBSD.
Hahaha... that anyone could seriously assert this is amazing. In no way does the discussion of marketing folks and license purists stop other people from doing their normal development work. Do you seriously think the apt maintainer (for example) falls behind due to the Firefox maintainer having to rename the package? Of course not. The same applies to Mozilla too. They're not formal companies, just amorphous mobs of people where everyone individually decides to work on the things they want to work on.
it can actually co-exist with "32-bit" stuff on the same kernel, and the same userland (no, you do NOT need to chroot it)
Yes, I admit this is technically true, and the magic simply works by having a different dynamic linker for 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. However the thing is that I already have a 64-bit browser in/usr/bin (yes, using x86-64 would be faster than x86 for that), so I don't want to have a second browser just for running things like Flash, irrespective of whether it's chrooted. As it is there are hassles like making different profiles in Firefox for the 64-bit and 32-bit versions to use so they don't clobber each other, which means bookmarks, preferences, history etc. aren't shared. I could automate copying these back and forth in a messy way, but it sure isn't better than simply having a single 64-bit browser that can run Flash.
x86_64 added a lot of things beyond 64-bit'ness that probably improves performance, but I wonder how much of that (i.e. like extra registers), if any of it, you could even use in 32-bit code.
Sounds like you agree that amd64 is different to other architectures like sparc, in that most programs perform as well or better in 64-bit mode, not just ones with needs for large data etc. Perhaps then it makes sense to reverse the bias compared to sparc - all programs on x86-64 should probably be 64-bit unless there are significant benefits to making a particular app 32-bit.
I've thought about the idea of using extra registers in 32-bit mode.... but the resulting binary wouldn't run on an ordinary x86 anymore since it would address registers that don't exist. And once you're incompatible, you have a new architecture. Which we could then call x86-64... bringing us back to where we started;)
Why does anyone need a 64-bit version anyhow? Will it need to use more than 4 Gb RAM?
This gets asked over and over. No, we don't expect a performance increase. But right now you cannot use the 32-bit Flash plugin in a 64-bit browser (well there does exist a hacky solution, but in the general case it doesn't work). Instead I have to keep a 32-bit chroot around to run things like Flash, some codecs and OpenOffice. Too many people say "but it won't run any faster", but that isn't the point. I just don't want to keep a chroot for measly Flash, any more than I would want to be running 32 bit grep or cat from coreutils. Not because a 64-bit version would be faster, but simply for consistency with the rest of the 64-bit programs on my machine. For all those people who have trouble with the concept, when you see people asking for amd64 binaries, don't think "64-bit wouldn't help", think of it as binaries for another architecture, like arm or ppc.
Since the C++ codebase is so inaccessible to all but a small group of developers (due to its overwhelming complexity and lack of clarity), they had to come up with their JavaScript/XUL extension doodad.
Um, you know that the XUL/Javascript is what much of the browser UI/functionality itself is written in, right? In the end, anything which requires C++ as opposed to "webbish" syntax like XUL and Javascript is going to be less tractable to the majority of users. This applies to both Gecko's code and to Konqueror's, and would have a non-trivial part in accounting for the vast decific of Konqueror extensions compared to Firefox. Of course, popularity on Windows accounts for a major part of it as well, but even if Konqueror had been on Windows and beaten Firefox to it, requiring C++ would have limited how many extensions got written.
So, would labelling hybrids enhance that freedom? By your own admission, virtually everything we eat is a hybrid. Ergo, the additional information provided by labelling everything we eat as a hybrid is nil. You, I, and everyone else who cares about the issue already knows everything there is to know.
I think this is where your argument falls flat. What if I want to know what breed specifically I'm eating; is this cut of meat from an Angus, Hereford, Charolais or Brahman? Isn't this information necessary for me to make an informed choice? Hybrid information isn't nil, because choice is more than just choice between GM beef and non-GM beef. Say for argument's sake that all beef had asbestos added, and was so labelled. Wouldn't that cause you to make the informed choice not to eat beef at all? You can't dismiss labelling of hybrids because not everyone knows that all beef is hybrids, just as not everyone knows that some food is GM.
Now, I'm not saying I think GM labelling is necessarily unreasonable. The point is that you are differentiating GM material from breed and many other factors - like feed, origin, housing practices etc. - which could conceivably be labelled but aren't required to be. Fair enough if you wish to draw the distinction, but I think you should explain why GM is genuinely required by consumers for an informed choice, but the others aren't.
PS. Hopefully you can reply without shouting. If you need emphasis then just use italics as is normal in English...
Yeah, anything hosted on a virtual host is worthless. Where is the rolly-eye emoticon when you need it?
I don't think the parent is really arguing this per se, I suspect that they simply feel it's impossible in the long run to separate garbage content from real content on virtual hosts. He has a vaguely interesting idea but it's obviously not practical.
Ignoring 64Bit helps a lot to write portable code. For 99.999% of all Apps out there 64Bit is irrelevant, anyways.
I suspect what you're saying is that there is no particular need for 64-bit in most apps, which I agree with. But the point here is that the program should work correctly, which means code that makes assumptions like pointers and ints being the same size needs to be fixed. The point is that amd64 is making 64-bit platforms relevant to more users, not that everyone thinks most apps will be gee-whiz faster as a result.
As a side note, some programs may realise minor performance gains on amd64 from having more general purpose registers available. This is, of course, technically nothing to do with it being 64-bit but does mean that there is a potential benefit even if you never need more than 4GB of addressable memory.
I agree with the basic premise - you can't give unlimited power to other people just because you happen not to be doing a crime today. After all, you don't know exactly how these powers will be used in practice, nor do you know what laws may be passed in future, which you may strongly disagree with and thus ignore in a civil disobedience kind of way.
You cannot trust the lives of you or your family to *ANYBODY* you have not met. *EVER*. For *ANY* reason, regardless of their title or position or certifications.
This, however, seems a bit over the top. I'm trusting my life every day - to the policemen, to the designers and builders of my car, to the other drivers around me, to the people who built the office I work in, the lifts, the maintenance people. Simply by living in a modern social setting you're implicitly trusting thousands of people every day.
Say the test involves some sort of danger or discomfort. What sort of people would/rationally/ undertake such experiences?
Replace "the test" with "war". Yet people rationally do military service. In these experiments, most people would feel that there is a greater good being achieved which they are willing to sacrifice for. Not saying that everyone would or should be willing to do it, but I don't think it's irrational to be willing to.
Of course, people can easily be coerced or misled (making rational decisions due to threats or incorrect beliefs), so that can be important. I only thought I'd comment on the rationality part.
I think Slashdot is informal, and therefore typos don't matter that much. Obviously a good number of readers disagree.
I would like to echo an earlier post. Seeing as the target audience is people who are reasonably smart and informed - interested in science, technology and politics - why aren't you targeting their intelligence by cleaning up typos/errors in the summaries? By not cleaning it up, you actually reduce the feeling that the shared readership is a smart informed "news for nerds" community, and dissipate the group solidarity.
I get your point that you want this to be an informal kind of site - and it is, in the article discussions which range from the serious to the zany. The <i>discussion</i> is where everyone is really gathering, not the frontpage. The frontpage is basically just a menu asking users which discussion they want to join. I fail to see how a Slashdot with cleaned up summaries and the same sprawling casual discussion posts will lose its current informal tone. People will still write the same way (typos, limited preview) in posts regardless of the summary. As for the casualness of the front page, if I submit a summary saying, "kernel 2.6.100 makes me as happy as a chiken laying an egg", the correction of "chiken" to "chicken" will not take away the individual way in which I (and other submitters) have expressed ourselves. The front page right now mentions submitters called CmdrTaco, bigenchilada and KoshClassic - somehow I don't think the/. front page would really feel too different if you cleaned submitter text up:)
That's a fair question. To me the difference is that gcc and glibc/libstdc++ are shipped with distros like Debian. You're right in that nothing stops people making their own Java implementation - it's just that the Java library is enormous so it's a a huge job.
Some people who are against the opening of Java worry that it will produce a thousand slightly incompatible forks, but I think we can do the same comparison with gcc - it hasn't happened there, so I don't think it's likely. It's in everyone's interests for Java to remain compatible.
It's partly in Sun's interests to make Java more desirable for programmers working on Linux. Right now there's a move by people to start writing more graphical apps in things like Python (using pygtk) or C# (using Mono/Gtk#). People are deterred from using Java partly because it's not shipped with distros, even though there are Java bindings for GTK/GNOME.
If this continues then Java will get marginalised, and perhaps miss any chance it had to catch programmers who want a more productive language. So I think it's in Sun's interests to make it easily shippable by distros. By making it automatically available, they'll promote Java's mindshare among all those thousands of open source programmers (as opposed to corporate shops developing apps using Tomcat or struts or whatever they use now).
As far as I can tell, inotify was added to the kernel for the explicit purpose of allowing something like this to be created.
It was a replacement for dnotify, which sucked in other ways. Being able to do Beagle/Spotlight behaviour is one of the aims, yes, but dnotify had enough problems that it was worth replacing even without this aim. You want daemons like fam to be able to watch for changes on hot-mounted filesystems (like usb drives), but without preventing them being unmounted - inotify solves both these problems.
Come on, Ubuntu is based on snapshots of Debian unstable. Debian testing isn't particularly buggy compared to other distros. The main downside for a user's point of view is that it's a moving target that constantly changes. The upside from a user's point of view is probably also that it's a moving target that constantly updates...
Firewire has a great many advantages in design, most of which I'm not qualified to describe, but one important thing to many of us is that Firewire drives are bootable on any Mac with a Firewire port.
I hope you don't mean that's an advantage in design. Most modern PCs can boot off a USB device, but this doesn't mean that USB is superior in design to FireWire either.
Those are reasons why I like it. I don't demand that YOU do. But why do so many people around here WANT it to die?
Because it's not as if ST: Enterprise is somehow totally independent of other Trek series, like how Six Feet Under is obviously independent of Desperate Housewives.
I personally thought Enterprise was poor from the get-go, though I haven't watched any of the latest season here in.au. But I see no problem with the fact some people think Trek in general is better off without Enterprise.
I back lisaparratt's comment. Eyecandy is appreciated on almost any embedded device with output on a display. That doesn't mean that FPUs will be available on the hardware. We're working with such a device right now.
Well GTK2 is slower than GTK1. Doing double buffering is potentially slower, you're doing twice the writes. The idea is that it looks better, not that double buffering is faster.
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 1
next Debian stable Sarge won't be available until next September
Woah there nelly.. where are you reading that? I expect sarge to release early next year, probably January but possibly February.
Oh, so it's taboo to link to another person's site without their permission?
I think he just means posting/. stories, not links in general. Obviously linking in general is fine, but it could be a nice courtesy to request permission before slashdotting someone's site.
Um, isn't that basically in the article? In fact, when you read about darcs this caveat is described everywhere - the manual, webpages comparing OSS version control systems, posts I've seen about darcs on LWN, here on/. etc... A good investigation would have tipped you off to this fact before you started.
Um, I don't know what you're referring to, CVS ignores symlinks in checkouts. Maybe you meant symlinks literally in the repository itself, but I'm struggling to see a scenario where that is important and symlinks would simply be a workaround to the real problem.
MindStalker says that he has told many Chinese folks what the real situation in Tibet is. Despite knowing the facts, the Chinese still support Beijing's policy of occupation and suppression in Tibet.
OK, let's swap the situation around. A Chinese person tells you that the real reason the USA gives aid to Mexico is because they do military research there and keep many underground missile bases in the Mexican desert. Naturally, because you're being told this by a foreigner, who reads their own media about your country, you believe them wholeheartedly. Right?
I apologise for the example, if you are not an American. But I think it's ridiculous to insist that someone in another country believe what others say is happening in their country, as if it's morally bankrupt not to do so. Not saying they can't or shouldn't believe what someone told them about Tibet, but you simply have to put yourself in that position, as I have suggested above - would you believe everything a foreigner told you about your government? I bet you'd do exactly what the Chinese person has done - nothing.
Personally, *my* wish in life is that eventually, all "software companies" are abolished; programmers will either work for hardware companies customizing their OS/driver platforms, or they will work as consultants, customizing existing open source software to the business, with the end product from both of these endevours going back to the public.
Realistically, such consultants will band together to form companies, which can afford more advertising, have more resources, and can tackle larger projects than a single person could. These companies would then hire other programmers so that they have still more resources.
Such a company (acting as a consultancy) would pretty much match the definition of "software company". That said, I assume what you really meant was the end of companies selling proprietary software intended for off-the-shelf use.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you agree that amd64 is different to other architectures like sparc, in that most programs perform as well or better in 64-bit mode, not just ones with needs for large data etc. Perhaps then it makes sense to reverse the bias compared to sparc - all programs on x86-64 should probably be 64-bit unless there are significant benefits to making a particular app 32-bit.
I've thought about the idea of using extra registers in 32-bit mode.... but the resulting binary wouldn't run on an ordinary x86 anymore since it would address registers that don't exist. And once you're incompatible, you have a new architecture. Which we could then call x86-64... bringing us back to where we started
Um, you know that the XUL/Javascript is what much of the browser UI/functionality itself is written in, right? In the end, anything which requires C++ as opposed to "webbish" syntax like XUL and Javascript is going to be less tractable to the majority of users. This applies to both Gecko's code and to Konqueror's, and would have a non-trivial part in accounting for the vast decific of Konqueror extensions compared to Firefox. Of course, popularity on Windows accounts for a major part of it as well, but even if Konqueror had been on Windows and beaten Firefox to it, requiring C++ would have limited how many extensions got written.
I think this is where your argument falls flat. What if I want to know what breed specifically I'm eating; is this cut of meat from an Angus, Hereford, Charolais or Brahman? Isn't this information necessary for me to make an informed choice? Hybrid information isn't nil, because choice is more than just choice between GM beef and non-GM beef. Say for argument's sake that all beef had asbestos added, and was so labelled. Wouldn't that cause you to make the informed choice not to eat beef at all? You can't dismiss labelling of hybrids because not everyone knows that all beef is hybrids, just as not everyone knows that some food is GM.
Now, I'm not saying I think GM labelling is necessarily unreasonable. The point is that you are differentiating GM material from breed and many other factors - like feed, origin, housing practices etc. - which could conceivably be labelled but aren't required to be. Fair enough if you wish to draw the distinction, but I think you should explain why GM is genuinely required by consumers for an informed choice, but the others aren't.
PS. Hopefully you can reply without shouting. If you need emphasis then just use italics as is normal in English...
I don't think the parent is really arguing this per se, I suspect that they simply feel it's impossible in the long run to separate garbage content from real content on virtual hosts. He has a vaguely interesting idea but it's obviously not practical.
Ignoring 64Bit helps a lot to write portable code. For 99.999% of all Apps out there 64Bit is irrelevant, anyways.
I suspect what you're saying is that there is no particular need for 64-bit in most apps, which I agree with. But the point here is that the program should work correctly, which means code that makes assumptions like pointers and ints being the same size needs to be fixed. The point is that amd64 is making 64-bit platforms relevant to more users, not that everyone thinks most apps will be gee-whiz faster as a result.
As a side note, some programs may realise minor performance gains on amd64 from having more general purpose registers available. This is, of course, technically nothing to do with it being 64-bit but does mean that there is a potential benefit even if you never need more than 4GB of addressable memory.
I agree with the basic premise - you can't give unlimited power to other people just because you happen not to be doing a crime today. After all, you don't know exactly how these powers will be used in practice, nor do you know what laws may be passed in future, which you may strongly disagree with and thus ignore in a civil disobedience kind of way.
You cannot trust the lives of you or your family to *ANYBODY* you have not met. *EVER*. For *ANY* reason, regardless of their title or position or certifications.
This, however, seems a bit over the top. I'm trusting my life every day - to the policemen, to the designers and builders of my car, to the other drivers around me, to the people who built the office I work in, the lifts, the maintenance people. Simply by living in a modern social setting you're implicitly trusting thousands of people every day.
Say the test involves some sort of danger or discomfort. What sort of people would /rationally/ undertake such experiences?
Replace "the test" with "war". Yet people rationally do military service. In these experiments, most people would feel that there is a greater good being achieved which they are willing to sacrifice for. Not saying that everyone would or should be willing to do it, but I don't think it's irrational to be willing to.
Of course, people can easily be coerced or misled (making rational decisions due to threats or incorrect beliefs), so that can be important. I only thought I'd comment on the rationality part.
I think Slashdot is informal, and therefore typos don't matter that much. Obviously a good number of readers disagree.
/. front page would really feel too different if you cleaned submitter text up :)
I would like to echo an earlier post. Seeing as the target audience is people who are reasonably smart and informed - interested in science, technology and politics - why aren't you targeting their intelligence by cleaning up typos/errors in the summaries? By not cleaning it up, you actually reduce the feeling that the shared readership is a smart informed "news for nerds" community, and dissipate the group solidarity.
I get your point that you want this to be an informal kind of site - and it is, in the article discussions which range from the serious to the zany. The <i>discussion</i> is where everyone is really gathering, not the frontpage. The frontpage is basically just a menu asking users which discussion they want to join. I fail to see how a Slashdot with cleaned up summaries and the same sprawling casual discussion posts will lose its current informal tone. People will still write the same way (typos, limited preview) in posts regardless of the summary. As for the casualness of the front page, if I submit a summary saying, "kernel 2.6.100 makes me as happy as a chiken laying an egg", the correction of "chiken" to "chicken" will not take away the individual way in which I (and other submitters) have expressed ourselves. The front page right now mentions submitters called CmdrTaco, bigenchilada and KoshClassic - somehow I don't think the
In my opinion, I think the author of this book is a quack...
He's not a quack, I had him as my algebra lecturer in first-year university.
How is the Java situation any different at all?
That's a fair question. To me the difference is that gcc and glibc/libstdc++ are shipped with distros like Debian. You're right in that nothing stops people making their own Java implementation - it's just that the Java library is enormous so it's a a huge job.
Some people who are against the opening of Java worry that it will produce a thousand slightly incompatible forks, but I think we can do the same comparison with gcc - it hasn't happened there, so I don't think it's likely. It's in everyone's interests for Java to remain compatible.
It's partly in Sun's interests to make Java more desirable for programmers working on Linux. Right now there's a move by people to start writing more graphical apps in things like Python (using pygtk) or C# (using Mono/Gtk#). People are deterred from using Java partly because it's not shipped with distros, even though there are Java bindings for GTK/GNOME.
If this continues then Java will get marginalised, and perhaps miss any chance it had to catch programmers who want a more productive language. So I think it's in Sun's interests to make it easily shippable by distros. By making it automatically available, they'll promote Java's mindshare among all those thousands of open source programmers (as opposed to corporate shops developing apps using Tomcat or struts or whatever they use now).
As far as I can tell, inotify was added to the kernel for the explicit purpose of allowing something like this to be created.
It was a replacement for dnotify, which sucked in other ways. Being able to do Beagle/Spotlight behaviour is one of the aims, yes, but dnotify had enough problems that it was worth replacing even without this aim. You want daemons like fam to be able to watch for changes on hot-mounted filesystems (like usb drives), but without preventing them being unmounted - inotify solves both these problems.
Come on, Ubuntu is based on snapshots of Debian unstable. Debian testing isn't particularly buggy compared to other distros. The main downside for a user's point of view is that it's a moving target that constantly changes. The upside from a user's point of view is probably also that it's a moving target that constantly updates...
Firewire has a great many advantages in design, most of which I'm not qualified to describe, but one important thing to many of us is that Firewire drives are bootable on any Mac with a Firewire port.
I hope you don't mean that's an advantage in design. Most modern PCs can boot off a USB device, but this doesn't mean that USB is superior in design to FireWire either.
Those are reasons why I like it. I don't demand that YOU do. But why do so many people around here WANT it to die?
.au. But I see no problem with the fact some people think Trek in general is better off without Enterprise.
Because it's not as if ST: Enterprise is somehow totally independent of other Trek series, like how Six Feet Under is obviously independent of Desperate Housewives.
I personally thought Enterprise was poor from the get-go, though I haven't watched any of the latest season here in
I back lisaparratt's comment. Eyecandy is appreciated on almost any embedded device with output on a display. That doesn't mean that FPUs will be available on the hardware. We're working with such a device right now.
Well GTK2 is slower than GTK1. Doing double buffering is potentially slower, you're doing twice the writes. The idea is that it looks better, not that double buffering is faster.
next Debian stable Sarge won't be available until next September
Woah there nelly.. where are you reading that? I expect sarge to release early next year, probably January but possibly February.
Oh, so it's taboo to link to another person's site without their permission?
/. stories, not links in general. Obviously linking in general is fine, but it could be a nice courtesy to request permission before slashdotting someone's site.
I think he just means posting
> Our conclusion: darcs is not scalable.
/. etc... A good investigation would have tipped you off to this fact before you started.
Um, isn't that basically in the article? In fact, when you read about darcs this caveat is described everywhere - the manual, webpages comparing OSS version control systems, posts I've seen about darcs on LWN, here on
> When you need symlinks in the repository.
Um, I don't know what you're referring to, CVS ignores symlinks in checkouts. Maybe you meant symlinks literally in the repository itself, but I'm struggling to see a scenario where that is important and symlinks would simply be a workaround to the real problem.
MindStalker says that he has told many Chinese folks what the real situation in Tibet is. Despite knowing the facts, the Chinese still support Beijing's policy of occupation and suppression in Tibet.
OK, let's swap the situation around. A Chinese person tells you that the real reason the USA gives aid to Mexico is because they do military research there and keep many underground missile bases in the Mexican desert. Naturally, because you're being told this by a foreigner, who reads their own media about your country, you believe them wholeheartedly. Right?
I apologise for the example, if you are not an American. But I think it's ridiculous to insist that someone in another country believe what others say is happening in their country, as if it's morally bankrupt not to do so. Not saying they can't or shouldn't believe what someone told them about Tibet, but you simply have to put yourself in that position, as I have suggested above - would you believe everything a foreigner told you about your government? I bet you'd do exactly what the Chinese person has done - nothing.
Personally, *my* wish in life is that eventually, all "software companies" are abolished; programmers will either work for hardware companies customizing their OS/driver platforms, or they will work as consultants, customizing existing open source software to the business, with the end product from both of these endevours going back to the public.
Realistically, such consultants will band together to form companies, which can afford more advertising, have more resources, and can tackle larger projects than a single person could. These companies would then hire other programmers so that they have still more resources.
Such a company (acting as a consultancy) would pretty much match the definition of "software company". That said, I assume what you really meant was the end of companies selling proprietary software intended for off-the-shelf use.