64K colors is 16 bit color. The most common format is 565, but 555 (15bit) exists too. That gives you 5 bits for red, 6 or 5 for green and 5 for blue. This means that if you want to draw a gradient of pure green on the screen there are only 64 (or 32) shades of it. In the worst case to draw a full screen gradient you'd have 5 pixels with the same color. This also means that if you have a grayscale image there are only 32 shades of pure gray.
Huh? KDE is just one project, although a really big one.
The kernel developers aren't going to turn it into a Windows clone. If you don't like KDE just use something else. I think that'll get us the best of both worlds. Those who migrate from Windows will find a similar environment. Those who like the command line will get the command line. If it becomes similar to OS X, then almost everybody should be happy with it.
Exactly. And since people don't see the need for a law, why the hell does there have to be a law? If most people want to download copyrighted music for free it simply should become legal.
How do you define "alive"? In Asimov's books robots were definitely alive. They could think, interact with their environment, and even evolve and reproduce because they were smart enough to operate a factory.
If you understand "alive" as "carbon-based" then I'm pretty sure any robot has plenty carbon in it, although I'm not sure we can dismiss the existence of alternative life forms
Depends on the person, I guess. I for example don't trust at all these choices they make for us. It's like TV, what you get on slashdot is filtered information. On K5 you can see absolutely everything that's been suggested, see people's opinion on it, and save a private copy if it's dumped and you like it.
What stories are crap on K5, btw? I find most of them interesting.
Uhh... how is that better than stories that are nothing more than ads and the crap posted by Jon Katz? At least on K5 stuff gets posted because people want it to be there.
I'm a Russian, live in Spain and understand English pretty well. Forcing me to watch content in Spanish you aren't going to match my culture, neither my preferences. I prefer watching the original version. If it's in English then I want English subtitles too, otherwise it does't matter.
Most importantly, I don't want ANYBODY to decide what should I watch. It's not your damn business if I want to watch it in japanese, okay?
Uhh... that wouldn't have helped you. Encrypted messages are only for the selected people, and having somebody's public key doesn't help you at all to decrypt it.
I can't wait for when MS, RIAA and MPAA appear on the cover of Wired:-D
Re:Somewhat different point of view.
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Cool, but in that case it would be even more logical for them to know Linux stuff. Linux isn't that different from other UNIXes. If it's like cygwin then it probably implements things like system calls, so those people still should know about it, and questions about what Linux concepts exist in Unix Services are even more logical.
Somewhat different point of view.
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I think that if you're going to compete with somebody and try to prove your tech is better you should at least know what are you competing against!
Almost every Linux geek, excepting maybe the ones who only used other UNIX systems will be gladly rant for hours about the horrors of the WinAPI, MFC, the huge limitations of VB or the way it works. I think MS should have sent somebody who knew well both technologies and was able to answer serious questions. For example, if I came to the MS booth and asked if Windows had a mmap(2) equivalent and got a blank stare then I definitely wouldn't get a good impression.
What's the point of sending a bunch of people if they don't know enough about Linux to be able to say "See, this is why our system is better and it's worth spending money on it!"?
I suspect that this is true only in part. It's much more easy to ignore backwards compability and force upgrades as an additional advantage than try to make it backwards compatible. I've heard that the MS Word format is already pretty horrible, and I doubt it'd be any better if anybody tried to extend it while keeping compability
I didn't claim that it solved the problem. But it does help a lot, when well used. Of course sometimes older programs won't be able to read the newer format correctly, but they almost certainly should be able to read at least something. A one byte change in a binary format can make the file completely unreadable.
For example, I wrote a tiny POP3 client that was designed to store mail on a floppy. The format is approximately this: 4 bytes magic number 4 bytes header length compressed table of 4 byte message lengths compressed messages compressed table of 4 byte message lengths 4 bytes header length 4 bytes magic number
As you see, the format is symmetric, to avoid data loss if the header becomes corrupt. Due to this design it's absolutely impossible to add anything to the end of the file, and since lengths are used instead of offsets it's not possible to add any new data between the length table and the compressed messages either.
It's very compact, and can easily store 1000 messages on a floppy. However it's inefficent, requiring to decompress a message to read its subject. There's no way of adding an uncompressed message subject without breaking compability. With XML the length table would have looked like this: <message length=1024/>
With this system a bit more space would be spent, but adding a subject line would have been trivial without breaking compability. With a well written program and reasonably well designed format it would have been very easy to make sure that even the 1.0 version could still read the messages written by a 5.0 version made two years later.
Why? XML is really cool. MS Word always has a format incompatible with the previous version. Why? Because designing a binary format that is extensible and flexible is not something you can do on a weekend. With XML this becomes easier.
Suppose you want to define the font. In version 1.0 you have <font name="Arial" bold="true">. Now, in version 2.0 you come up with a cool formatting effect. It's a bit stupid but let's say you want font with a gradient. Now your new tag looks like <font name="Arial" bold="true" gradient="BlueGradient">. The old version of your app can simply ignore the new information and still load the document correctly.
Using a binary format, all that goes to hell when you realize that you need to store more data in a field and change it from a char to an int type, making the format unreadable by the previous version. And of course no company will be happy having to accept a format like what Word uses. What if they want to add a new feature that can't be expressed in.doc? When done well, XML should allow having a base everybody can read and still add features unique to your program.
Still doesn't work. CPU use goes to 100% for a few seconds, memory usage grows to 200MB, then I get lots of beeps and IE crashes. Everything continues normally.
Very pretty, I could use it as a screen saver. It opened a few windows with animations, then they disappeared and I got http://www.absurd.org/a.html
This is the third URL of this kind I try and none of them managed to even noticeably slow my Duron 850/768MB down. Memory usage didn't even go higher than 170MB.
The install itself isn't half as bad as the security updates. Seriously, what does a Win2K user do after installing? You have to connect a unpatched system to the net,and spend several hours installing patches and rebooting while hoping nobody will hack your system meanwhile.
Well, how about running a somewhat popular server? My 128K upstream isn't enough for a lot of stuff. Just one ADSL client like mine would max it out because my downstream is 256K. Try working in a SSH session.
I also run a Freenet node, and it's starting to use quite a bit of bandwidth.
Of course. I hate when the phone interrupts me in the worst possible moment, and that's why I wouldn't call somebody who I don't personally know unless I had no other way of talking to him/her. Besides I would be really worred. What if I call you, get your timezone wrong and wake you up at 3AM?
However, email, instant messengers, IRC all are non-intrusive. With the first two I can leave you a message and know that you will answer if you want.
Slashdot Mirror
64K colors is 16 bit color. The most common format is 565, but 555 (15bit) exists too. That gives you 5 bits for red, 6 or 5 for green and 5 for blue. This means that if you want to draw a gradient of pure green on the screen there are only 64 (or 32) shades of it. In the worst case to draw a full screen gradient you'd have 5 pixels with the same color. This also means that if you have a grayscale image there are only 32 shades of pure gray.
So no, 64K is still not enough.
Huh? KDE is just one project, although a really big one.
The kernel developers aren't going to turn it into a Windows clone. If you don't like KDE just use something else. I think that'll get us the best of both worlds. Those who migrate from Windows will find a similar environment. Those who like the command line will get the command line. If it becomes similar to OS X, then almost everybody should be happy with it.
Exactly. And since people don't see the need for a law, why the hell does there have to be a law? If most people want to download copyrighted music for free it simply should become legal.
How do you define "alive"? In Asimov's books robots were definitely alive. They could think, interact with their environment, and even evolve and reproduce because they were smart enough to operate a factory.
If you understand "alive" as "carbon-based" then I'm pretty sure any robot has plenty carbon in it, although I'm not sure we can dismiss the existence of alternative life forms
Sorry for being offtopic, but do you really expect me to read that? I'm not going to bother even though it's 5 Informative right now.
It does have an integer decoder. It's just not free. But nothing is stopping you from writing your own or including a floating point processor.
Depends on the person, I guess. I for example don't trust at all these choices they make for us. It's like TV, what you get on slashdot is filtered information. On K5 you can see absolutely everything that's been suggested, see people's opinion on it, and save a private copy if it's dumped and you like it.
What stories are crap on K5, btw? I find most of them interesting.
Uhh... how is that better than stories that are nothing more than ads and the crap posted by Jon Katz? At least on K5 stuff gets posted because people want it to be there.
I'm a Russian, live in Spain and understand English pretty well. Forcing me to watch content in Spanish you aren't going to match my culture, neither my preferences. I prefer watching the original version. If it's in English then I want English subtitles too, otherwise it does't matter.
Most importantly, I don't want ANYBODY to decide what should I watch. It's not your damn business if I want to watch it in japanese, okay?
Uhh... that wouldn't have helped you. Encrypted messages are only for the selected people, and having somebody's public key doesn't help you at all to decrypt it.
I can't wait for when MS, RIAA and MPAA appear on the cover of Wired :-D
Cool, but in that case it would be even more logical for them to know Linux stuff. Linux isn't that different from other UNIXes. If it's like cygwin then it probably implements things like system calls, so those people still should know about it, and questions about what Linux concepts exist in Unix Services are even more logical.
I think that if you're going to compete with somebody and try to prove your tech is better you should at least know what are you competing against!
Almost every Linux geek, excepting maybe the ones who only used other UNIX systems will be gladly rant for hours about the horrors of the WinAPI, MFC, the huge limitations of VB or the way it works. I think MS should have sent somebody who knew well both technologies and was able to answer serious questions. For example, if I came to the MS booth and asked if Windows had a mmap(2) equivalent and got a blank stare then I definitely wouldn't get a good impression.
What's the point of sending a bunch of people if they don't know enough about Linux to be able to say "See, this is why our system is better and it's worth spending money on it!"?
I suspect that this is true only in part. It's much more easy to ignore backwards compability and force upgrades as an additional advantage than try to make it backwards compatible. I've heard that the MS Word format is already pretty horrible, and I doubt it'd be any better if anybody tried to extend it while keeping compability
I'm really glad to see you're one of the few people who have principles and will follow them.
I didn't claim that it solved the problem. But it does help a lot, when well used. Of course sometimes older programs won't be able to read the newer format correctly, but they almost certainly should be able to read at least something. A one byte change in a binary format can make the file completely unreadable.
For example, I wrote a tiny POP3 client that was designed to store mail on a floppy. The format is approximately this:
4 bytes magic number
4 bytes header length
compressed table of 4 byte message lengths
compressed messages
compressed table of 4 byte message lengths
4 bytes header length
4 bytes magic number
As you see, the format is symmetric, to avoid data loss if the header becomes corrupt. Due to this design it's absolutely impossible to add anything to the end of the file, and since lengths are used instead of offsets it's not possible to add any new data between the length table and the compressed messages either.
It's very compact, and can easily store 1000 messages on a floppy. However it's inefficent, requiring to decompress a message to read its subject. There's no way of adding an uncompressed message subject without breaking compability. With XML the length table would have looked like this:
<message length=1024/>
With this system a bit more space would be spent, but adding a subject line would have been trivial without breaking compability. With a well written program and reasonably well designed format it would have been very easy to make sure that even the 1.0 version could still read the messages written by a 5.0 version made two years later.
Why? XML is really cool. MS Word always has a format incompatible with the previous version. Why? Because designing a binary format that is extensible and flexible is not something you can do on a weekend. With XML this becomes easier.
.doc? When done well, XML should allow having a base everybody can read and still add features unique to your program.
Suppose you want to define the font. In version 1.0 you have <font name="Arial" bold="true">. Now, in version 2.0 you come up with a cool formatting effect. It's a bit stupid but let's say you want font with a gradient. Now your new tag looks like <font name="Arial" bold="true" gradient="BlueGradient">. The old version of your app can simply ignore the new information and still load the document correctly.
Using a binary format, all that goes to hell when you realize that you need to store more data in a field and change it from a char to an int type, making the format unreadable by the previous version. And of course no company will be happy having to accept a format like what Word uses. What if they want to add a new feature that can't be expressed in
Still doesn't work. CPU use goes to 100% for a few seconds, memory usage grows to 200MB, then I get lots of beeps and IE crashes. Everything continues normally.
Very pretty, I could use it as a screen saver. It opened a few windows with animations, then they disappeared and I got http://www.absurd.org/a.html
This is the third URL of this kind I try and none of them managed to even noticeably slow my Duron 850/768MB down. Memory usage didn't even go higher than 170MB.
The install itself isn't half as bad as the security updates. Seriously, what does a Win2K user do after installing? You have to connect a unpatched system to the net,and spend several hours installing patches and rebooting while hoping nobody will hack your system meanwhile.
Hmm, maybe Microsoft now pays people to post here?
Is a logging company paying you to post in forums?
Well, how about running a somewhat popular server? My 128K upstream isn't enough for a lot of stuff. Just one ADSL client like mine would max it out because my downstream is 256K. Try working in a SSH session.
I also run a Freenet node, and it's starting to use quite a bit of bandwidth.
Well, written with Emacs it wouldn't be very pretty, unless you have LaTeX. Then it should look better than what you can do with Office.
However, email, instant messengers, IRC all are non-intrusive. With the first two I can leave you a message and know that you will answer if you want.