All you'll do is make us, in the public eye, look like we believe in breaking the law.
Well, it's true, isn't it? It is against the law to swap songs after all, and we all do it anyway. I think it's fairly obvious that we do believe in breaking the law. The question is whether the law is right or not. Unfortunately that question can't be settled in a court case.
I'm not suggesting that they prelink the libraries inside the packages, I would just be happy if they distributed binaries which could be prelinked by users who wanted to install the prelink package. The debian prelink package is easy to use, and optional. Just apt-get install prelink, and then run prelink -a to prelink all your binaries. I'm not sure, but it might even register a cron job to automatically prelink stuff regularly. If you're running tripwire or something like that you don't have to install the prelinker.
This is simply not true. Here's the truth straight from the source: glibc NEWS file. It says you need "additional tools" to take advantage of prelinking, and the "prelink" program is that additional tool. I have also heard other people say that prelinking is not necessary anymore, but they were wrong. Prelinking my KDE binaries on Debian unstable resulted in a noticable startup performance increase. I hope this misinformation doesn't cause people to discount prelinking as a possible performance booster.
FYI, prelinking KDE is not easy. On Debian the QT package has OpenGL support compiled in. The OpenGL library is not prelinkable because it is not PIC (Position Independent Code). Since all KDE applications are linked to QT and thus to OpenGL indirectly, this also means that all of KDE isn't prelinkable. I don't know of any KDE app that actually uses QT's OpenGL support, so I don't know why it is compiled in. To prelink KDE I had to compile my own version of QT without OpenGL support. This works to allow prelinking, but using a a version of QT compiled with different options makes QT's style plugins not work and has other disadvantages. There are two real solutions:
Compile OpenGL as PIC - I don't know why it isn't already.
Compile QT without OpenGL support, and provide separate packages for people who need OpenGL support.
I've sent emails to the debian-kde list about prelinking the Debian KDE packages, but the maintainers didn't seem interested. Hopefully they will eventually see the light and start working toward prelinking KDE.
The guy's "explanation" of consciousness, though, is total junk. He thinks he knows what consciousness is, and why computers can't have it (but quantum computers can). He never explains why quantum computers could have it though (it's in the "implementation," he says). He talks about it as if philosophers had solved the problem of consciousness decades ago and stupid scientists and engineers just can't realize the fact. He trots out the same old tired justifications based on the fact that computers are deterministic, dressed up in some new language. Give me a break! The question of whether computers can be conscious has not been answered, and may never be answered. I don't even think a suitable definition of the term has been found and agreed upon. And if a person ever does answer the question for real, I can guarantee it won't be a philosopher. Most likely it will be the computer scientist who programs the first conscious computer.
Sickle cell anemia isn't a racial characteristic because people don't recognize it as such. If they did it would be. The characteristics which determine race are chosen by people. That's my opinion of course. Some people apparently believed that race would turn out to be a fundamental, large, easily detected difference in the genome. The article incorrectly says that the low number of genes proves that wrong. In the next sentence they give the real reason: there is data that disproves that directly.
So I guess what they're really saying is "there aren't large segments of the population with big hunks of genome that are different, thus obviously marking them as belonging to a race," not "racial characteristics such as dark skin aren't determined by your genes." I guess from my point of view it doesn't matter how much of the genome is devoted to racial characteristics, but for a racist it might "justify" his views in some sense if the people he didn't like had a substantially different genome than him.
That argument is silly too. To me, a genetic basis for race is the genetic variations that cause the traits widely recognized as belonging to a certain race. Therefore it is obvious that there is a genetic basis for race, no matter how small a percentage of the genome it takes up. What is their idea of a genetic basis for race? Would half the genome be enough? Why would that be necessary?
"Better" is a subjective word. I'm not here to argue the philosophy of "better" with you. IMHO philosophy is a mostly pointless exercise in intellectual masturbation. Philosophers who would be disturbed by the fact that humans don't have more genes than animals obviously do have some standard of "better" or "worse" in mind, so my argument would make sense to them. Feel free to ignore it.
That's not what the article was saying. The article was saying that since we have too few genes to determine race, race isn't genetically determined. Obviously they have a different idea of what it means for race to be genetically determined than you. I'm not sure what that idea is, but it seems silly to me. It is not at all obvious that 40,000 genes is too few to describe anything.
To me, race is a word to describe the differing physical characteristics of people whose ancestors evolved in different areas. The fact that some people are a mixture of races is not problematic, it is just a fact. Race is totally arbitrary, determined only by the observation that some groups of people tend to have traits that other groups don't. It is silly to attatch any other sort of meaning to the word.
Re:I thought so.
on
Genome Surprise
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, I was astonished at the stupid claims being made in the article based on this percieved lack of genes.
The small number of genes is significant [because it means] we're not hard-wired
It means no such thing! It could just mean that fewer genes are necessary to hard-wire us. Nobody really knows how much effect particular genes have on us, so saying that 140,000 would be enough but 40,000 isn't enough is just spewing hot air.
The low number of genes means humans have as few as 300 more genes than a mouse and only twice the genes of the fruit fly. "A lot of people will find that philosophically disturbing," says theoretical biologist Jean-Michel Claverie
I don't see why they should. More genes == more superiority? Who made up that rule? How about "better genes == more superiority"?
The low number of genes [means] that there is no genetic basis for race.
Totally not true. Of course race has a genetic basis. It is inherited, after all. Black people have black children. It just means that the number of genes necessary to determine race is smaller than we thought.
...how have we become so much more complex than other creatures, whilst having relatively few extra genes.
I don't think it's any mystery. We're NOT "so much more complex!" The only part of us that is more complex is our brains. And animals have brains too, some of which are quite sophisticated by any measure of complexity.
Looks like people are having a field day speculating about what this low number could mean. I think it just means that we were wrong before, and we still don't have a clue about how big an effect single genes can really have on an organism.
nbsp stands for non-breaking space. Its main purpose is as a space that doesn't allow the adjacent words to be wrapped to different lines. So if you have two words that shouldn't be separated onto two lines when word-wrapping might do that otherwise, you use a nbsp. I guess Google doesn't want their phrases broken up by word wrapping on small screens (PDAs perhaps).
Have you ever used "View Source" on the google homepage?
To shave bytes, they have used one-letter variable names and removed almost every nonessential space and newline. Take a look sometime, it's impressive (and confusing).
This is STILL the wrong suit for them to be filing. They are not going after these people because they are sharing files, they are going after them for running network search services. Services that have legitimate uses and do not host or provide any copyrighted content. The RIAA STILL doesn't get it. They should be going after the students on the network who were sharing the mp3s from their computers. The search service doesn't allow copyright infringement, it's the people sharing. The files are easily accessible without any search service. Unfortunately, I'm sure the judge won't get it either. These guys are going to get raped by the justice system.
um, it's much easier and more secure to use an.htaccess file. Put a file named ".htaccess" in the directory with restricted stuff. In that file put this:
Order Deny,Allow Deny from All Allow from.studentsubnet.mycollege.edu Allow from.computerlabs.mycollege.edu
Much easier, more flexible, and it protects all files and subdirectories, not just individual php scripts. You might have to enable.htaccess files in your Apache config file. You are using Apache, aren't you?
Apparently you've discovered that the EMU10k1 driver from the 2.4 series also has this ability. Some cards have the ability to mix up to 8 streams, I've heard. If you keep opening up more mpg123s eventually you will hit a wall. The mixing was new to me since my sound card driver (ESS something-or-other) didn't have this capability in 2.4. The new ALSA driver for my card in 2.5 does. Also it doesn't have the annoying bug where every time XMMS switched songs, it swapped the left and right channels:-) The old ESS driver really wasn't very good.
An audio mixer is hardly rocket science. It's actually a very simple thing. It just demands very low latency and very high efficiency, which the kernel can easily provide, while user-space servers have a little more trouble. There is a humongous difference between putting the X server in the kernel and putting an audio mixer in the kernel.
Putting media services in the X protocol would probably be a good idea, but it is orthogonal to a kernel mode audio mixer. Some programs will always want to access the hardware more directly, and the server itself still needs to access the hardware. The kernel API will still be used, it needs to work well.
No, the driver for my card is just getting that feature. In fact, the Windows driver doesn't even have it (but Windows has a kernel mode mixer so programs can still play sounds at the same time, the CPU does the mixing). Other Linux drivers have had it for some time, I understand. And I'm talking about 2 PCM streams here, as in two programs playing sounds at the same time. It has always been able to mix the microphone, line in, MIDI, CD, and other channels of course.
I have also been using 2.5 on my desktop. I got it at first to test out the supposed desktop performance improvements, but I haven't really noticed any improvement. What I have noticed is the increase in quality of the sound drivers. The new drivers for my card can suddenly mix 2 channels together in hardware, allowing me to run XMMS or mplayer and still hear my Gaim sounds in the background or visit a Flash site, without running a retarded sound server, or having programs choke and die because they can't open/dev/dsp. If only ALSA would implement a kernel-mode audio mixer so everyone could have as many channels mixed together as they wanted. We could get rid of this rediculous proliferation of bloated, incompatible "media servers" that use complicated IPC schemes to achieve basically the same result less efficiently. Here's hoping.
XFT also shares fonts between applications. XFT just doesn't share fonts between X servers. Your separate mozilla processes running locally on your linux box would share all their fonts. If you had two remote x displays running two copies of mozilla from your linux box, then both copies would have to rasterize and send their fonts to the remote servers. However, I don't see how this is that much of a disadvantage. In STSF's case, both X servers would still have to recieve the fonts over the network, they would just come from your linux box's STSF server. The only savings would be in the rasterizing process. However, since XFT uses a server-side cache, rasterizing will only have to be done once per server per font, no matter how many clients use the font. Since usually a small number of fonts are actually used in day-to-day usage of a terminal, the probability of a cache hit is high, and rasterizing will only need to be done rarely.
STSF can also share fonts between X servers that happen to be running on the same machine, unlike XFT. To me this seems like they are really reaching to find a disadvantage to XFT. It is pretty rare for more than one or two X servers to be running on the same machine. It never happens on any system I've ever used, and it doesn't make any difference to the Linux desktop market. The only situation where this would make a difference is the situation where you have a huge box with like 10 video cards, and 10 connected keyboards and mice, all running separate X servers that different people are using simultaneously. I have never heard of anything like this but I suppose it would be possible. In this case XFT's memory usage would be 10 times the memory usage of STSF. But who cares? That is totally the wrong way to use X anyway! X's philosophy is that multiple displays should be behind a network connection, not local. X should be used with multiple thin clients and a few fat servers, not one giant monolithic machine.
Your summary is wrong. They don't replace Freetype, in fact they USE it to rasterize all their fonts. They replace XFT, and can replace fontconfig too. They can also use fontconfig if necessary. Their claims of a speed increase seem bogus to me. In one paragraph they claim 30%, in another they claim 200%. 30% not spectacular, and will probably disappear as XFT/Render continue to improve, and I doubt the 200% figure is correct. In fact they seem to state in the PDF that the XFT approach has the potential to be faster since it uses fewer round-trips, and the only reason STSF is faster now is that it has been heavily optimized. Client side fonts are not a hack and have many advantages. Fontconfig also isn't tied into X so ghostscript could use it as well. It sounds to me like Sun is creating a big monolithic API that is more complex than what people actually want to use in reality, while XFT is listening to exactly what application developers want and implementing it. I don't like the idea of implementing yet another server. More servers = more stuff to go wrong. Font servers are the way of the past. Also, I don't like the idea of creating another specialized X extension, when Render works just fine and is more general.
Fontconfig is the solution you are looking for. Fontconfig is a new, standard system for programs to access fonts (for both X and printing). As soon as applications are updated to use it, problems with different applications finding different fonts will go away permanently.
Jokes about slashdotting the matrix trailers are getting reeeealy old, because it doesn't happen. Every time a new animatrix story is posted someone jokes about slashdotting it, but the trailers are always available at speeds of above 500KB/sec even right after the story is posted, when it is still the first story on Slashdot's front page. Believe it or not, there are sites out there with more bandwidth than Slashdot, and AOL-Time-Warner sites are a prime example.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's true, isn't it? It is against the law to swap songs after all, and we all do it anyway. I think it's fairly obvious that we do believe in breaking the law. The question is whether the law is right or not. Unfortunately that question can't be settled in a court case.
I'm not suggesting that they prelink the libraries inside the packages, I would just be happy if they distributed binaries which could be prelinked by users who wanted to install the prelink package. The debian prelink package is easy to use, and optional. Just apt-get install prelink, and then run prelink -a to prelink all your binaries. I'm not sure, but it might even register a cron job to automatically prelink stuff regularly. If you're running tripwire or something like that you don't have to install the prelinker.
FYI, prelinking KDE is not easy. On Debian the QT package has OpenGL support compiled in. The OpenGL library is not prelinkable because it is not PIC (Position Independent Code). Since all KDE applications are linked to QT and thus to OpenGL indirectly, this also means that all of KDE isn't prelinkable. I don't know of any KDE app that actually uses QT's OpenGL support, so I don't know why it is compiled in. To prelink KDE I had to compile my own version of QT without OpenGL support. This works to allow prelinking, but using a a version of QT compiled with different options makes QT's style plugins not work and has other disadvantages. There are two real solutions:
- Compile OpenGL as PIC - I don't know why it isn't already.
- Compile QT without OpenGL support, and provide separate packages for people who need OpenGL support.
I've sent emails to the debian-kde list about prelinking the Debian KDE packages, but the maintainers didn't seem interested. Hopefully they will eventually see the light and start working toward prelinking KDE.The guy's "explanation" of consciousness, though, is total junk. He thinks he knows what consciousness is, and why computers can't have it (but quantum computers can). He never explains why quantum computers could have it though (it's in the "implementation," he says). He talks about it as if philosophers had solved the problem of consciousness decades ago and stupid scientists and engineers just can't realize the fact. He trots out the same old tired justifications based on the fact that computers are deterministic, dressed up in some new language. Give me a break! The question of whether computers can be conscious has not been answered, and may never be answered. I don't even think a suitable definition of the term has been found and agreed upon. And if a person ever does answer the question for real, I can guarantee it won't be a philosopher. Most likely it will be the computer scientist who programs the first conscious computer.
Not at all! Slashdot had this story on the front page almost 14 hours ago too! They just thought it was so important that you needed to see it again.
Sickle cell anemia isn't a racial characteristic because people don't recognize it as such. If they did it would be. The characteristics which determine race are chosen by people. That's my opinion of course. Some people apparently believed that race would turn out to be a fundamental, large, easily detected difference in the genome. The article incorrectly says that the low number of genes proves that wrong. In the next sentence they give the real reason: there is data that disproves that directly.
So I guess what they're really saying is "there aren't large segments of the population with big hunks of genome that are different, thus obviously marking them as belonging to a race," not "racial characteristics such as dark skin aren't determined by your genes." I guess from my point of view it doesn't matter how much of the genome is devoted to racial characteristics, but for a racist it might "justify" his views in some sense if the people he didn't like had a substantially different genome than him.
That argument is silly too. To me, a genetic basis for race is the genetic variations that cause the traits widely recognized as belonging to a certain race. Therefore it is obvious that there is a genetic basis for race, no matter how small a percentage of the genome it takes up. What is their idea of a genetic basis for race? Would half the genome be enough? Why would that be necessary?
"Better" is a subjective word. I'm not here to argue the philosophy of "better" with you. IMHO philosophy is a mostly pointless exercise in intellectual masturbation. Philosophers who would be disturbed by the fact that humans don't have more genes than animals obviously do have some standard of "better" or "worse" in mind, so my argument would make sense to them. Feel free to ignore it.
To me, race is a word to describe the differing physical characteristics of people whose ancestors evolved in different areas. The fact that some people are a mixture of races is not problematic, it is just a fact. Race is totally arbitrary, determined only by the observation that some groups of people tend to have traits that other groups don't. It is silly to attatch any other sort of meaning to the word.
The small number of genes is significant [because it means] we're not hard-wired
It means no such thing! It could just mean that fewer genes are necessary to hard-wire us. Nobody really knows how much effect particular genes have on us, so saying that 140,000 would be enough but 40,000 isn't enough is just spewing hot air.
The low number of genes means humans have as few as 300 more genes than a mouse and only twice the genes of the fruit fly. "A lot of people will find that philosophically disturbing," says theoretical biologist Jean-Michel Claverie
I don't see why they should. More genes == more superiority? Who made up that rule? How about "better genes == more superiority"?
The low number of genes [means] that there is no genetic basis for race.
Totally not true. Of course race has a genetic basis. It is inherited, after all. Black people have black children. It just means that the number of genes necessary to determine race is smaller than we thought.
I don't think it's any mystery. We're NOT "so much more complex!" The only part of us that is more complex is our brains. And animals have brains too, some of which are quite sophisticated by any measure of complexity.
Looks like people are having a field day speculating about what this low number could mean. I think it just means that we were wrong before, and we still don't have a clue about how big an effect single genes can really have on an organism.
Until you download the keygen with integrated key changer.
What? You didn't know there was a working Windows XP keygen/key changer floating around out there? Consider yourself informed.
nbsp stands for non-breaking space. Its main purpose is as a space that doesn't allow the adjacent words to be wrapped to different lines. So if you have two words that shouldn't be separated onto two lines when word-wrapping might do that otherwise, you use a nbsp. I guess Google doesn't want their phrases broken up by word wrapping on small screens (PDAs perhaps).
Have you ever used "View Source" on the google homepage? To shave bytes, they have used one-letter variable names and removed almost every nonessential space and newline. Take a look sometime, it's impressive (and confusing).
This is STILL the wrong suit for them to be filing. They are not going after these people because they are sharing files, they are going after them for running network search services. Services that have legitimate uses and do not host or provide any copyrighted content. The RIAA STILL doesn't get it. They should be going after the students on the network who were sharing the mp3s from their computers. The search service doesn't allow copyright infringement, it's the people sharing. The files are easily accessible without any search service. Unfortunately, I'm sure the judge won't get it either. These guys are going to get raped by the justice system.
Much easier, more flexible, and it protects all files and subdirectories, not just individual php scripts. You might have to enable
Apparently you've discovered that the EMU10k1 driver from the 2.4 series also has this ability. Some cards have the ability to mix up to 8 streams, I've heard. If you keep opening up more mpg123s eventually you will hit a wall. The mixing was new to me since my sound card driver (ESS something-or-other) didn't have this capability in 2.4. The new ALSA driver for my card in 2.5 does. Also it doesn't have the annoying bug where every time XMMS switched songs, it swapped the left and right channels :-) The old ESS driver really wasn't very good.
Putting media services in the X protocol would probably be a good idea, but it is orthogonal to a kernel mode audio mixer. Some programs will always want to access the hardware more directly, and the server itself still needs to access the hardware. The kernel API will still be used, it needs to work well.
No, the driver for my card is just getting that feature. In fact, the Windows driver doesn't even have it (but Windows has a kernel mode mixer so programs can still play sounds at the same time, the CPU does the mixing). Other Linux drivers have had it for some time, I understand. And I'm talking about 2 PCM streams here, as in two programs playing sounds at the same time. It has always been able to mix the microphone, line in, MIDI, CD, and other channels of course.
I have also been using 2.5 on my desktop. I got it at first to test out the supposed desktop performance improvements, but I haven't really noticed any improvement. What I have noticed is the increase in quality of the sound drivers. The new drivers for my card can suddenly mix 2 channels together in hardware, allowing me to run XMMS or mplayer and still hear my Gaim sounds in the background or visit a Flash site, without running a retarded sound server, or having programs choke and die because they can't open /dev/dsp. If only ALSA would implement a kernel-mode audio mixer so everyone could have as many channels mixed together as they wanted. We could get rid of this rediculous proliferation of bloated, incompatible "media servers" that use complicated IPC schemes to achieve basically the same result less efficiently. Here's hoping.
STSF can also share fonts between X servers that happen to be running on the same machine, unlike XFT. To me this seems like they are really reaching to find a disadvantage to XFT. It is pretty rare for more than one or two X servers to be running on the same machine. It never happens on any system I've ever used, and it doesn't make any difference to the Linux desktop market. The only situation where this would make a difference is the situation where you have a huge box with like 10 video cards, and 10 connected keyboards and mice, all running separate X servers that different people are using simultaneously. I have never heard of anything like this but I suppose it would be possible. In this case XFT's memory usage would be 10 times the memory usage of STSF. But who cares? That is totally the wrong way to use X anyway! X's philosophy is that multiple displays should be behind a network connection, not local. X should be used with multiple thin clients and a few fat servers, not one giant monolithic machine.
Your summary is wrong. They don't replace Freetype, in fact they USE it to rasterize all their fonts. They replace XFT, and can replace fontconfig too. They can also use fontconfig if necessary. Their claims of a speed increase seem bogus to me. In one paragraph they claim 30%, in another they claim 200%. 30% not spectacular, and will probably disappear as XFT/Render continue to improve, and I doubt the 200% figure is correct. In fact they seem to state in the PDF that the XFT approach has the potential to be faster since it uses fewer round-trips, and the only reason STSF is faster now is that it has been heavily optimized. Client side fonts are not a hack and have many advantages. Fontconfig also isn't tied into X so ghostscript could use it as well. It sounds to me like Sun is creating a big monolithic API that is more complex than what people actually want to use in reality, while XFT is listening to exactly what application developers want and implementing it. I don't like the idea of implementing yet another server. More servers = more stuff to go wrong. Font servers are the way of the past. Also, I don't like the idea of creating another specialized X extension, when Render works just fine and is more general.
Fontconfig is the solution you are looking for. Fontconfig is a new, standard system for programs to access fonts (for both X and printing). As soon as applications are updated to use it, problems with different applications finding different fonts will go away permanently.
I wish more Slashdot editors took the time to make comments.
Jokes about slashdotting the matrix trailers are getting reeeealy old, because it doesn't happen. Every time a new animatrix story is posted someone jokes about slashdotting it, but the trailers are always available at speeds of above 500KB/sec even right after the story is posted, when it is still the first story on Slashdot's front page. Believe it or not, there are sites out there with more bandwidth than Slashdot, and AOL-Time-Warner sites are a prime example.