I love so many that it's hard to choose. I like when Bart gets a fake driver's license and goes on a road trip, and the whole Krusty Gets Kancelled episode is great, but the best is Homer The Heritic, where Homer stays home while the rest go to church. He makes himself his patented, space age, out-of-this-world Moon Waffles, dances in his underwear, wins a radio contest, and watches football.
Bart: Hey where's Homer? Marge: Your father is...resting. Bart: "Resting" hung over? "Resting" got fired? Help me out here.
Homer: No offense Apu, but when they were handing out religions, you musta been out taking a whizz.
Homer: Hey Ganesha, want a peanut? Apu: Please do not offer my god a peanut.
But the software needs to be many times as deep as it is today in terms of a personality. It needs to be more like a real person, with many ways to present the same subject, backtracking intelligently, even to the far past, following a student through years of education. The programs should tell lots of jokes as well, and play occasional games too.
Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.
It is true that Mozilla is complicated. The checked out CVS source is huge at 128M and requires knowledge of things like COM that most unix hackers don't know. But the reason that Mozilla has failed to attract a large number of contributors is because up until M12, as pointed out by jwz (writing about the old code base, but the argument still stands), the browser hasn't been usable. And very few people have the resources and will to work on software when they can't see the benefits of their work. If M12 is as stable on unix as people are saying, I think that situation will change fast and you'll see many bugs fixed and features added (ad nauseum) Real Soon Now.
Very cool. To commemorate their very successful IPO, VA has announced that they will build a limited edition system on par with their StartX ZP workstation called the Dutch Tulip ZP. In the release, VA says that the main difference will be that the limited edition DT ZP will be priced about thirty times what it's worth.
Maybe I can get VA to send me a test machine for a while? Cool stuff.
I think the dividing line is code that provides some kind of functionality. I've been following the development of the Cygnus Java native compiler GCJ which has to deal with this issue. Since Cygnus expects to licence GCJ out to companies doing embedded development, they need to maintain full copyright of the code. So they have to decide about what amount or kind of code gives the contributer copyright privileges. That has only happened once so far that I know of, and that person introduced new functionality to GCJ. All other bug fixes they've accepted, sometimes many lines of code, haven't required signing any papers giving Cygnus copyright to that code. Which leads me to believe that it's only code that provides an implementation of an abstract concept as the magic line. But IANAL of course.
So incremental reflow is the way it draws part of a page at a time, right?
I think the basic reason for incremental reflow is to enable a user on a slow connection to read the text without waiting for all the images to load.
Before the switch to the Gecko rendering engine, using the old Mozilla code, incremental reflow was actually introduced in a project called Mariner. It worked very well too, but they shortly thereafter switched to the Gecko engine and Mariner was shelved.
Once incremental flow gets to the stability that Mariner was in, I think that it will be a definite plus. But for now, my builds exhibit the same problems you've mentioned. Slashdot, and many other pages, load excruciatingly slow and don't let me scroll the page until loading is finished. But on the plus side, it doesn't crash either, which is improvement over older builds.
From a recent/. poll, over twenty percent of/. users use communicator for their mail client. Now what do you think that is for the less knowledgable browsing public?
HTML to Text/PostScript Translation?
I convert to text all the time, and conversion to PS is nice when there are many embedded images and you would rather not fetch them all with wget.
Embeddable Web Browser?
If you mean the GTK+ mozilla widget, it's small and useful and was contributed code.
Anybody out there ever tried it? I haven't, it doesn't appear to be on a par with GCC, but the point is that it/does/ exist.
Here is what John Carmack posted to the lcc-request mailing list about LCC
"I had seen a reference to LCC in comp.compilers, so I thought I would check it out.... Wow. An 11k line ansi compiler. I am impressed. The documentation and example code was clearly structured, and I got everything generating proper code in about three days. A couple more days of bug chasing and optimizing, and I have a damn good tool. This has saved me SO much time (it was fun, too). If the authors are at all into PC games, they can have a couple free copies with my compliments!"
That was back in 1994, and this more recently from his.plan file
The tools necessary for building mods will all be freely available: a modified version of LCC and a new program called q3asm. LCC is a wonderful project -- a cross platform, cross compiling ANSI C compiler done in under 20K lines of code. Anyone interested in compilers should pick up a copy of "A retargetable C compiler: design and implementation" by Fraser and Hanson.
I've got the book. It's expensive at $70, but I think it's worth it if you want to understand how real compilers work as opposed to the toy compilers most classes and books use to teach compiler theory. It's only weakness is that it only explains the theory necessary to understand the code. But there are other books for that.
I've hear this same mantra every time Debian and it's slow release schedule is mentioned. I'll admit that as a new Debian user (after three years of running Red Hat), I'm unfamiliar with a lot of aspects of how Debian development works. But if Potato IS that stable, then release it. For most people with dial-up connections apt-get dist-upgrade is not feasible. It also assumes that you already have an older version of Debian installed. If you want people to try out Debian, don't force them to install an old distribution and then replace all those packages over a 56K modem.
A greater problem I see is that Debian users, especially those with Potato already installed, will argue ad nauseum that nothing is wrong--"Just install Potato!" they say. Instead, they should be looking harder to solutions to the problem.
Allow me to explain whay the Fed should stay out of MS's business practices
What do you fear that the Fed will screw up? I think that it's important to first realize that Microsoft is the darling of the U.S.'s "new" economy. Although it's possible to imagine many ways that the Govt could irreperably harm Microsoft, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that our elected officials would let that happen. There isn't very great support from either the left or the right for action against Microsoft.
Whatever the punishment though, I also believe that Microsoft will come out of whatever action is taken stronger within a few years (Much to a Linux users dismay perhaps). There is a lot of talent at MS. Yet despite Microsoft's claims, they don't innovate much when compared to companies of comparable size (think 3M or Sun). If they are forced to compete by innovation and the quality of their products, we could see some amazing stuff.
I chose the GPL because it says: "This program is provided, open source, as a gift to the community, I wish you to be able to contribute to this source, to improve it, and I wish that others who choose to make use of the collaborative efforts of myself and the contributers would give the same gift in return"
When you are talking about the GPL, a license, the devil is in the details. You say and I wish (the second instance, not the first) but your license says and I insist. Remove would at the end there too.
"The circulation through the Internet of the illegal and inappropriate software is against the stream of copyright protection."
Check out Fravia's page on the legality of reverse engineering. In the US, this is the case sited
Sega v. Accolade, decided by the Ninth Circuit in 1992, makes clear that, in certain instances, the unauthorized disassembly of a computer program's object code in order to derive source code is not a copyright infringement. The Ninth Circuit applied the 'fair use' balancing test to determine that Accolade's use of reverse engineering techniques to produce an 'intermediate copy' of Sega's source code did not constitute copyright infringement. Accolade never distributed the intermediate copy commercially, but instead used it only to extract unprotectable ideas Ñ a sequence of bytes which act as a software key Ñ from Sega's game program. This key was then incorporated into Accolade's games, enabling them to 'unlock' and run on Sega's game platforms. The court cautioned, however, that disassembly involves the making of a literal copy of a program, and it is permissible only when necessary to extract the unprotectable ideas. It is unclear how far this fair use right extends.
Sounds almost exactly like what the DVD crackers did.
Yup, I agree. And MINIX offers an interesting parallel to Linux. Andrew Tanenbaum wrote a book called Operating Sytems, Design and Implementation that actually included the source to MINIX. So both Linux and MINIX released their source code.
The difference were the licences. Linus didn't even have one, while MINIX only let you distribute a few copies of the source code (which you could buy on floppies for $80 or type in from the book) and only for educational purposes.
A more interesting question I think, would have been What difference, if any, would Linux have had with a BSD-like licence, or even no license at all?
It's not Kasparov against the collective intelligence of the world. It's Kasparov against the average intelligence of the participating players.
Even without the help of grandmasters, I don't think it's true that you can just average the IQ of all players. The best example I know of is parimutuel betting at horse races.
The favorite in any given horse race wins one third of the time, which might not sound too impressive. But less than half of all racegoers even buy a racing form, without which it's impossible to judge a horses chances. Yet, the betters' choice is often a very insightful pick, and is often completely at odds with picks from the newspaper and tip sheets. In many years of handicapping races, I've found that if the favorite seems illogical, it's best to take a second look, or prepare to lose money.
Somehow he claims that the right to implement compatible applications (i.e. to reverse engineer an API in the case of Java) is the "right to fork" granted by the SCSL.
Right. So releasing the code does you no good at all. In fact, you could consider it a trap. He says that
thus you can clone the java APIs, provided you pass compatibility, i.e., you clone them all and you respect patents and copyrights.
In other words, don't look at the code and make sure to pay Sun for the privilege of testing against their compatiblity tests. Otherwise, look at the code, and you can't contribute to projects like Kaffe for fear of copyright infringement.
Has anyone used native compiled Java (i.e. machine code - no JVM) to develop Linux/Win/Mac cross platform programs? Any problems using Swing, threads and sockets? What compiler did you use on each platform? Any compiler incompatability issues? Am I right in thinking that gjc only supports Linux of these there platforms?
The Cygnus java compiler is actually called GCJ and compiles on all Unix variants, at least if you're using GCC. It has support for native threads and user threads and a full java.net implementation. Actually, the only thing missing is AWT and Swing.
Judging by your examples of focusing (studying for exams or reading a text book), it may be that Carmack is discussing a different kind of focus.
I think you mean the ability to be intense (clear and imaginative) for long periods of time. I would guess that he means the ability to follow through over long periods of time, including the drudge work.
If I'm right, what you describe is too painful to do for months on end. Meanwhile, his is just saying you have to limit your curiosities in the near future to those that contribute to the project.
A better example would have been Einstein working on his General Theory of Relativity. What did that take him, three years? That's an extreme example, but he had to spend nearly every day, all day, trying to solve that one problem.
Likewise, JC has to spend a year or so working on developing a game. And although there are many aspects--networking, 3D graphics, drivers--that he must work on, it's is similar enough to get boring real quick. But even debugging requires a level of ingenuity to do right, so it's a little more demanding than just not doing anything else
I guess what I'm saying that there are two kinds of focus--you're right--but that they are intertwined and inseperable too.
Focus is extremely important. Being able to maintain focus for the length of a project gets harder and harder as schedules grow longer, but it is critical to doing great work. (Side note - every time "focus" is mentioned now, I think of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky", currently my favorite SF novel)
I agree with JC that focus is extremely important. But it also doesn't seem to be an acquired thing. People seem to have it or they don't.
I personally have never been able to maintain focus for long periods of time. Short is easy. I can study hard for finals and learn a lot in a short period of time, or read a textbook cover to cover, but a year seems impossible and a month is stretching it. And I don't know if it's possible to change.
The frustrating thing is that it's not a physical act that you can will yourself to do. I can push myself to run another mile, or swim another lap. But maintaining focus means being able to think clearly and imaginatively and all that (see, I'm already losing focus;-).
Perhaps focus is like IQ, and can be improved upon but not conquered, although I certainly hope not.
I assume there are some basic sound tools available, but I would be surprised if they are equal to the best windows or mac tools. That is probably the most approachable sector to work on improving.
I know diddly about sound, but I'm curious which are the best windows or mac tools that JC refers to? A quick search of freshmeat brought up tons of sound related stuff (too much--wish you could order by number of downloads), but ecasound looks impressive for the Linux side, although I'm sure it's missing a lot.
Certainly, hacking on a sound tools sounds a lot easier than creating a Maya clone.
Re:Don't blame Mozilla for Linux's shortcomings.
on
Mozilla M10 Released
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· Score: 1
Where did I say you were at fault for the glibc bug? What I said was that NECKO broke NSPR threads, and that rewriting netlib was a poor idea since it worked and wasn't a source of bugs. If rewriting netlib is such a great move and will save so much developer time, then why did you wait so long to do it?
Mozilla still doesn't work on systems that don't use glibc2.1 libraries. That means Debian 2.1, Slackware, Redhat 5.2, and many other popular distributions can't try out Mozilla milestones. It has been this way for two months. There is a link to the initial discovery of this bug on M10's release-notes page. Follow that link and READ that thread carefully, all twenty messages, and you'll discover just why the Mozilla project is screwed up.
I think this problem with glibc illustrates perfectly why Mozilla development is so slow. Because despite being behind schedule, they decided to rewrite the netlib library. That was the only C code really left in Mozilla besides NSPR, and it worked, but they decided to rewrite it anyway in C++. When they landed the new networking library, called NECKO, they also broke NSPR threads. NSPR threads are what allow the current generation of netscape browsers to appear to do things simulataneously, like hitting STOP when a page loads. Normally, having a bug in glibc would mean that non-glibc2.1 systems could still try out Mozilla milestones and submit bugs by building a version using NSPR threads. But because of NECKO, they can't.
So a project already hurting for outside developers loses more, the already distant release date is pushed further back, and Mozilla developers create even more work for themselves.
I wan't to help Mozilla succeed, I wan't to even write code (I'd like to see a dumb-tty version of mozilla). Shit, I'm even learning a language I dislike to do so. But they're making it awful tough to remain cheery and optimistic.
Anderson will be the new Shelly Stringfield (ER quitter), and Ducovny will be the new David Caruso (NYPD Blue quitter). Neither of these two had any success after they quit, and their careers are for all intensive purposes, dead
I think there's reason for a little more optimism. Gillian is the less experienced of the two as far as movies go, but I think she shows good promise. Despite being paired against a miscast Jon Stewart, she was real good in Playing by Heart, although I'll admit that she gets totally upstaged in that one by Angelina Jolie who is awesome. She had a small part in the recent The Mighty too, and despite only minutes of screen time she shines in a role completely opposite her stoic X-Files character. My only worry is that Hollywood isn't very kind to actresses over 30--she's 31. Duchovny was already a veteran actor before the X-Files, so I don't need to argue about his future. I'm not as big a fan of him as I am of Gillian (gee, wonder why?), but so long as she's around, he'll at least have the X-Files movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Best Simpsons-Cape Fear parody
I love so many that it's hard to choose. I like when Bart gets a fake driver's license and goes on a road trip, and the whole Krusty Gets Kancelled episode is great, but the best is Homer The Heritic, where Homer stays home while the rest go to church. He makes himself his patented, space age, out-of-this-world Moon Waffles, dances in his underwear, wins a radio contest, and watches football.
Bart: Hey where's Homer? Marge: Your father is...resting. Bart: "Resting" hung over? "Resting" got fired? Help me out here.
Homer: No offense Apu, but when they were handing out religions, you musta been out taking a whizz.
Homer: Hey Ganesha, want a peanut? Apu: Please do not offer my god a peanut.
Very cool. To commemorate their very successful IPO, VA has announced that they will build a limited edition system on par with their StartX ZP workstation called the Dutch Tulip ZP. In the release, VA says that the main difference will be that the limited edition DT ZP will be priced about thirty times what it's worth.
Maybe I can get VA to send me a test machine for a while? Cool stuff.
I think the dividing line is code that provides some kind of functionality. I've been following the development of the Cygnus Java native compiler GCJ which has to deal with this issue. Since Cygnus expects to licence GCJ out to companies doing embedded development, they need to maintain full copyright of the code. So they have to decide about what amount or kind of code gives the contributer copyright privileges. That has only happened once so far that I know of, and that person introduced new functionality to GCJ. All other bug fixes they've accepted, sometimes many lines of code, haven't required signing any papers giving Cygnus copyright to that code. Which leads me to believe that it's only code that provides an implementation of an abstract concept as the magic line. But IANAL of course.
I think the basic reason for incremental reflow is to enable a user on a slow connection to read the text without waiting for all the images to load.
Before the switch to the Gecko rendering engine, using the old Mozilla code, incremental reflow was actually introduced in a project called Mariner. It worked very well too, but they shortly thereafter switched to the Gecko engine and Mariner was shelved.
Once incremental flow gets to the stability that Mariner was in, I think that it will be a definite plus. But for now, my builds exhibit the same problems you've mentioned. Slashdot, and many other pages, load excruciatingly slow and don't let me scroll the page until loading is finished. But on the plus side, it doesn't crash either, which is improvement over older builds.
E-mail/news?
From a recent /. poll, over twenty percent of /. users use communicator for their mail client. Now what do you think that is for the less knowledgable browsing public?
HTML to Text/PostScript Translation?
I convert to text all the time, and conversion to PS is nice when there are many embedded images and you would rather not fetch them all with wget.
Embeddable Web Browser?
If you mean the GTK+ mozilla widget, it's small and useful and was contributed code.
A greater problem I see is that Debian users, especially those with Potato already installed, will argue ad nauseum that nothing is wrong--"Just install Potato!" they say. Instead, they should be looking harder to solutions to the problem.
Whatever the punishment though, I also believe that Microsoft will come out of whatever action is taken stronger within a few years (Much to a Linux users dismay perhaps). There is a lot of talent at MS. Yet despite Microsoft's claims, they don't innovate much when compared to companies of comparable size (think 3M or Sun). If they are forced to compete by innovation and the quality of their products, we could see some amazing stuff.
The difference were the licences. Linus didn't even have one, while MINIX only let you distribute a few copies of the source code (which you could buy on floppies for $80 or type in from the book) and only for educational purposes.
A more interesting question I think, would have been What difference, if any, would Linux have had with a BSD-like licence, or even no license at all?
The favorite in any given horse race wins one third of the time, which might not sound too impressive. But less than half of all racegoers even buy a racing form, without which it's impossible to judge a horses chances. Yet, the betters' choice is often a very insightful pick, and is often completely at odds with picks from the newspaper and tip sheets. In many years of handicapping races, I've found that if the favorite seems illogical, it's best to take a second look, or prepare to lose money.
Has Japhar been given up for dead then?
A better example would have been Einstein working on his General Theory of Relativity. What did that take him, three years? That's an extreme example, but he had to spend nearly every day, all day, trying to solve that one problem.
Likewise, JC has to spend a year or so working on developing a game. And although there are many aspects--networking, 3D graphics, drivers--that he must work on, it's is similar enough to get boring real quick. But even debugging requires a level of ingenuity to do right, so it's a little more demanding than just not doing anything else
I guess what I'm saying that there are two kinds of focus--you're right--but that they are intertwined and inseperable too.
I personally have never been able to maintain focus for long periods of time. Short is easy. I can study hard for finals and learn a lot in a short period of time, or read a textbook cover to cover, but a year seems impossible and a month is stretching it. And I don't know if it's possible to change.
The frustrating thing is that it's not a physical act that you can will yourself to do. I can push myself to run another mile, or swim another lap. But maintaining focus means being able to think clearly and imaginatively and all that (see, I'm already losing focus ;-).
Perhaps focus is like IQ, and can be improved upon but not conquered, although I certainly hope not.
Certainly, hacking on a sound tools sounds a lot easier than creating a Maya clone.
Where did I say you were at fault for the glibc bug? What I said was that NECKO broke NSPR threads, and that rewriting netlib was a poor idea since it worked and wasn't a source of bugs. If rewriting netlib is such a great move and will save so much developer time, then why did you wait so long to do it?
Mozilla still doesn't work on systems that don't use glibc2.1 libraries. That means Debian 2.1, Slackware, Redhat 5.2, and many other popular distributions can't try out Mozilla milestones. It has been this way for two months. There is a link to the initial discovery of this bug on M10's release-notes page. Follow that link and READ that thread carefully, all twenty messages, and you'll discover just why the Mozilla project is screwed up.
I think this problem with glibc illustrates perfectly why Mozilla development is so slow. Because despite being behind schedule, they decided to rewrite the netlib library. That was the only C code really left in Mozilla besides NSPR, and it worked, but they decided to rewrite it anyway in C++. When they landed the new networking library, called NECKO, they also broke NSPR threads. NSPR threads are what allow the current generation of netscape browsers to appear to do things simulataneously, like hitting STOP when a page loads. Normally, having a bug in glibc would mean that non-glibc2.1 systems could still try out Mozilla milestones and submit bugs by building a version using NSPR threads. But because of NECKO, they can't.
So a project already hurting for outside developers loses more, the already distant release date is pushed further back, and Mozilla developers create even more work for themselves.
I wan't to help Mozilla succeed, I wan't to even write code (I'd like to see a dumb-tty version of mozilla). Shit, I'm even learning a language I dislike to do so. But they're making it awful tough to remain cheery and optimistic.
Gillian's movies. Not sure how I screwed that one up.