(This message may be seen as inflammatory, but I assure you that it is just my opinion and not particularly anybody else---I don't speak for the projects on which I participate).
Hi.
I am not a developer of VLC, but I am part of the LAME team (that MP3 encoder that a good amount of people use). I see similar problems regarding LAME as those described by the VLC team: lack of continuous power and resources.
Some users just magically think that "oh, this program won't exist anymore, so let's use this other one". The sad thing here is that they are shortsighted in the fact that they, by doing nothing (just receiving the programs), are not giving the incentive for the projects.
What about if the proposed alternative dies a few days from now? The amount of alternatives is finite.
Not only that, but the major players out there all share the same codebase: there are "incestuous" (in a good sene of the word) relations with VLC, xine, and mplayer: the all use, to some extent or another (well, in some cases, to the full extent) some common libraries: ffmpeg, libmp3lame, theora, vorbis, dirac, x264 and so on.
Usually, also, the players also send some feedback to the people writing the libraries and, without them, the libraries would not be as good as they are. And the feedback that developers provide is, not infrequently, in form of patches, or constructive suggestions. Some users, like the one above, just cares less and, honestly, where would you just "grab the extra codec" if they all, come, essentially, from the first place?
If you didn't know, perhaps it is a good reminder to put here that people from the VLC project developed the nice libdvdcss library, which benefited xine and mplayer, while people in the other projects have directly or indirectly benefited the others.
I would not like to have the "Linux desktop" mainstream with a "community" with a person that doesn't want a community. For people that are more altruistic (and that show it, instead of just playing in slashdot all day), I am open to a more open talk.
[Gee, from what I wrote the above, it seems like if I only saw Linux---I actually value the other Unix-like operating systems as much].
I guess that what I meant to say here is: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code. Don't wish the death of what you may proudly use and not even know".
And don't forget, whenever you get a bad manufacturer support, to inform other users, when we can't use our computers the way we like, especially for those that care a lot about Free Software.
Having a site like http://vendors.bluwiki.com/ bookmarked is a good start to help spread the word about such manufacturers.
This way, other people can be aware of the issues that might happen before they acquire something from said manufacturers.
First of all, I am not a user of *BSD, although I do appreciate their goals. I am a Debian user and have been one for quite some time now.
One fact to appreciate about Debian is that it is loosing its ties to the Linux kernel and becoming more and more general, now including even BSD efforts (like the kfreebsd5 port).
So, even though I am a Debian user, I have this secret appreciation for all the work that the BSD people have done and continue to do and I am downloading the OpenBSD release from the torrent site listed in the parent post (that is http://openbsd.somedomain.net/).
We all know that these smaller projects don't have big companies supporting them financially and one thing that other people could do to help visibility (and, in the long term, more users, and, perhaps, even commercial support) is to promote OpenBSD.
This starts with being kind on their servers and helping with the serving of the release for others, keeping your torrent clients open and serving others. Please, do help others "free" their machines with Free Software.
I'm doing my small share helping others to "get their foot wet" with the support for the torrent.
Ok, you are probably a troll and I should not be replying to you, but I can't really stand such misguided words being moderated highly.
First of all, you seem to regard Ubuntu like the successor of Debian. Well, let me tell you something: Ubuntu bases their releases on a mix of packages, including Debian's sid. I guess that the Ubuntu people know better about their design decisions than what you seem to show in front of many here.
which is exactly why organizations like this should not really plan for the long term. Open source projects are notorious for forking, and open source users are fickle. Debian was the rock star of the Linux world 5 years ago, but now they seem like a shadow of their former self and on the decline in the face of newer distributions like Ubuntu.
Well, so many points here to comment. First of all is being a "rock star" something good, that everybody should strive to be? I think not. Every operating system and every distribution of such operating systems has a niche and, as long as there are users interested in it, it serves a purpose.
Would you tell me that the BSD projects are worthless, just because they are not that popular as Linux? And what about other Linux distributions that aren't as well spread as, say, RedHat/Fedora? Are they worthless?
I can tell you that the work that Debian does regarding porting the software (and, similarly, other BSD projects like NetBSD) is quite welcome and has already been the source of bug discoveries, because not everybody has a 32 bit system, not everybody has a little-endian system, not all platforms have signed chars etc. It seems that you are either naïve or talking without knowing the subject at hand (well, that's supposed to be the case for a troll).
I don't know anyone who uses vanilla Debian anymore;
Just before you don't see something that means that it doesn't exist? Don't forget to tell that to your doctor the next time you have an infection. And speaking of vanilla Debian, yes, I use it on all my systems. I'm not that amazed by such high number of derivative distributions, because I don't have computers with much horsepower (unfortunately, the fastest computer to which I have access is a Duron 600MHz, with 256MB of RAM -- I am not in the U.S. (I live in Brazil) and it seems that people have gotten bad habits of programming by writing software with many and many layers of abstractions, to the point where we need a supercomputer (by the standards of 10 years ago) to produce the same texts that we once did.
I always try to write software in a resource economical way and that's what I teach my students to do (of course, without premature optimization -- I teach algorithms).
BTW, I have an OldWorld PowerMac 9500/180MP that I inherited from my uncle and it has 64MB of RAM. I recently received as a gift a G3 upgrade card and it is now back in a productive order (well, taking into consideration that its HD is slow and that it has limited memory).
But if it were not for, say, Debian, I would not be able to use this computer with Linux, because very few distributions support OldWorld macs. And I think that I can help debugging and developing software so that the world is a better place. And, actually, testing your software on many platforms is a good way to see if your programs are indeed well-written.
Oh, BTW, I would love to receive RAM for this mac that I mentioned, if you are going to throw away the memory. I would put it to some good use and teach some friends to use Linux (and, honestly, once you install a distribution, almost everything seems similar, even across many platforms -- so, I don't really understand the so hot comments about using one or another distribution, because it is "better"
the package system is cumbersome if adding packages from anyone but Debian and their software is s
Now, it seems that (finally) developers are looking at resources that our programs use.
Unfortunately, for many in developing countries (like me, here in Brazil) having a computer filled with RAM and with the fastest processor available on the market isn't an option.
For instance, my desktop has a Duron 600MHz with 256MB of RAM. That's the fastest computer to which I have access here and it is some years old, but still working fine.
I can't say how happy I am with this bounty for optimization of memory.
In Computer Science we always have this concern with both time and space complexity and it seems that if Free Software developers start caring about good data structures and good algorithms (and avoid layers and layers and layers of abstraction over and over), we can actually use our computers more efficiently.
Again, this is especially important for those who have to use computers of two or three generations ago.
A welcome movement indeed.
P.S.: If you have never felt the need for less memory comsumption, then you won't probably understand how important this project is and probably this post makes little sense to you.
One of the most obvious uses for having tasks like this is to understand better the problems and to develop better algorithms.
In Computational Complexity's terms, we like to design "efficient" algorithms.
One of the criteria used to say if an algorithm is efficient or not is to measure the time it takes to execute in terms of the size of its input.
We are usually concerned with designing faster algorithms (especially when we have to deal with huge inputs --- that's one of the things that people have in mind when they say "scalability) and if we have algorithms that help expose details of the problem being solved, it will only help us to design faster algorithms.
And these techniques may, with some adaptation, be used for solving other problems, not only the problem in question.
I hope that this helps you understand why some people are always concerned with developing good algorithms and also testing them in practice.
If you are interested in knowing more about the design of algorithms, please don't hesitate to ask.
It has a huge amount of both peers and seeds and that just shows how large is the "slashdot effect" and how it can be used inteligently for the benefit of the community.
Fortunately, there are people like you who still see the light and understand that Computer Science is not really about getting the fastest computer you can afford, but about making an efficient use of the computational resources that are available and, depending on the case, these computational resources are quite limited.
The resources that that I cited above can be anything, but the main ones that are of interest are time, space or communication resources.
To paraphrase S. S. Skiena: an efficient algorithm running in a slow machine can always beat a bad algorithm running in a fast machine.
Unfortunately, many people insist on ignoring good software design (and I'm not talking about maintainability here only) when they think of computer science.
This piece of software is absolutely necessary for typing in Portuguese (especially here in Brazil, where a common US keyboard layout is quite common, and the population is used to the US layout with dead-keys -- dating from the time of typewriters).
Please, do let Apple know that you need this keyboard layout.
I sent them my feedback about this quite a while ago (I think that I can post here the mail if I find it), but more people letting them know would promptly make them aware of its importance.
I'm posting this right after coming from the elections.
Like Marcelo said (hi there -- send me an e-mail so we can get in touch) this is not the first electronic election that we had (I live in São Paulo, the biggest state of Brazil).
The past election (which was also automatized in the very same way) went quite smoothly, but we had few electing positions ("prefeitos" e "vereadores").
This year, the situation was quite different. Each person had to vote for 6 positions and while the system used was exactly the same from a users' perspective, people (especially the simpler, with lower education or older people, not used to electronic devices) had problems and used more time than expected.
While in the past election it took me about 5 minutes to stand in line, today it took me about 1h15min.
I did see an old lady getting confused in the voting booth and having to "be helped" slightly for she to finish her vote.
The thing that I could observe in practice in this real life situation is that most people do have difficulties trying to deal with electronic devices. All this despite a huge informational campaign and having a so called "intuitive" interface.
This left me with the clear impression that the barriers for a large scale adoption of automation are not technological but anthropological.
Anyway, I guess that this election can be regarded as a huge success given the low failure rates that we had. And, in the end, everything seems to have gone well.
The timing of this article seems impecable, since I am myself trying to learn about Bayesian Statistics.
I am a Computer Science student studying Computational Biology (more specifically, Sequence Alignments) and while I have a bit of background on Classical Statistics, I was (and still am) completely ignorant about Bayesian Statistics.
It is only now that I'm trying to learn about Hidden Markov Models and its applications to Sequence Alignment that Ifinally decided to learn the basic hypothesis about Bayesian Statistics and how it differs from the hypothesis made by the Classical Statistics.
During my searches for finding introductory material on Bayesian Statistics, I found this course page which has some nice introductory notes, including Bayesian Statistics.
I hope that other people find this resource as useful as I did.
Well, seeing that you are running OS X exclusively, I'd like to ask you if you don't see any difference in performance when you compare Linux and OS X. I surely do with my iBook 2, but that's perhaps because I am using a G3-based machine.
Just for reference, here are some links describing problems that I have with MacOS X and/or the iBook:
The last two articles aren't written by me, of course, but by D.J. Bernstein, who has a deep understanding of various architectures.
Anyway, I would appreciate any help regarding the problems listed above, especially those addressed in the first link.
How to work efficiently with MacOS X?
on
KDE Ported to Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have some moderation points that I was going to dedicate to this discussion, but I think that it would be better if I posted instead of moderated.
Let me ask this honestly: how can someone work in an organized fashion with the MacOS X style of managing windows?
I am an experienced Unix system administrator, but a complete newbie with Macs (in fact, I just bought my first macintosh 4 months ago, an iBook 600MHz, combo, 12") and feel completely lost trying to work with MacOS X.
I don't care for eyecandy and animated icons as much as I care for a functional environment, but the fact managing windows with MacOS X is much messier than with standard Unix window managers, where you can separate your desktops for different tasks. In my case, I usually have my first virtual desktop for an xterm and e-mail, my second for browsing the web and my third and fourth for other tasks various tasks.
On the other hand, when I am typing some important text in LaTeX, I usually reserve the first desktop for some command line hacking (say, with perl), the second virtual desktop for Emacs and the third for seeing the output of my text with xdvi (I usually use Windowmaker as my window manager, both under Solaris and under Linux).
I feel that this separation of tasks keeps me organized and makes me quite productive since I can quickly move between different aspects of my work, but how can I keep everything organized with MacOS X with just one desktop and with applications with more than one window (say, Appleworks)?
I also appreciate that I can do all that under Windowmaker with intelligently set key-bindings and having to use the mouse quite few.
So, this is an honest question: how are you guys productive with MacOS X? Is there any way to keep various applications organized?
I already tried Space for MacOS X and, honestly, its capabilities are nowhere near, say, windowmaker in terms of functionality.
So, when people say that MacOS X's user interface is so good, I can only think that they work in a different fashion than I do or that they are exploring features that I don't know about.
Also, today I tried installing Fink and was amazed at first, but after only two or three hours of using it, the fact that XDarwin is much slower than XFree86 under Linux (on the same notebook) makes me also suspect that I may not be using the programs correctly. I can't believe how slow it is. I would not even dare to run KDE on MacOS X (the topic of this story).
So, when people say that MacOS X's user interface is so good, I can only think that they work in a different fashion than I do or that they are exploring features that I don't know about.
I agree completely. I have fear of using my POP3 account anytime I use my notebook, wandering through networks (where I have to) whose (local) security I know nothing about.
And what makes the matters worse is that setting up a secured version of POP3/IMAP is exceedingly easy with the use of SSL wrappers like stunnel or sslwrap.
So, this once again convinces me that the problem with security is not technological, but educational and/or philosophical.
I think that if you're using any recent Debian
distribution (like testing), then compiling MPlaying
from sources (including getting the dependencies
right) is quite easy, since the MPlayer developers include
a debian directory containing scripts for generating
a Debian package.
To compile MPlayer from sources (and as a result, generate a binary package suitable for your system), just grab the sources, unpack them, get into the root directory of MPlayer and issue:
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot
You'll have to have debmake and fakeroot installed,
as well as anything needed to make MPlayer (which is not much). Some (all?) of the packages needed for the build process may be listed in the debian/control file (I don't remember).
The only problem so far that I've had with Mplayer is that it doesn't compile on a PowerPC computer that I have here (due to its usage of x86 Assembly).
The same comments about compiling MPlayer from source in a Debian system also apply to compiling Lame from source.
While this argument is old and what matters is the number of cycles an instruction takes to be executed (together with the length of the pipeline of the CPU etc), I think one would actually have to finish his homework instead of just assuming that a PowerPC can actually perform a high number of instructions executed per clock cycle.
I was recently exposed to an old PowerPC machine (a PowerMac 9500/180MP), liked it a lot (despite it being slow) and thought about buying a new Mac for me (perhaps an iBook?). But since they are not even comparable in price to other architectures here in Brazil, I decided to learn more about it to see if the applications were making good use of the processor and if compiler support (read: GCC) were mature (which is important for me, since I am a grad Computer Science student).
Well, it seems that that's not the case. While Apple may have a good GCC for Darwin (whose patches are supposed to be incorportated upstream in GCC in the future), some posts from debian-powerpc and other places in the Web suggest that as a development platform (especially for intensive calculations), it may not be as good as a cheap, underpriced PC platform.
Despite his opinions having a great weight on my decisions, I'm already convinced that the Apple products are reasonably good (and I've already played a tiny bit with their OS X, which has the coolness factor).
On the other hand, while the competition is so much cheaper (a strong point), with higher performance and better support, I'm still evaluating if purchasing, say, an iBook would be a good move (read: I'm still undecided), especially in the light of Dan Bernstein's revelations.
LaTeX is more of a display language, to define exactly how some text should look.
Sorry. That's not correct. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. LaTeX is not a language for editing the appearance of a document. It is deliberately a language for the writer to worry on the contents of its document.
I took the trouble and grabbed my copy of "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System", written by the author of LaTeX, Leslie Lamport. On pages 6 and 7, he writes:
Since LaTeX can't understand your prose, you must explicitly indicate the logical structure by typing special commands. The primary function of almost all the LaTeX commands that you type should be to describe the logical structure of your document.
As you are writing your document, you should be concerned with its logical structure, not its visual appearance.
(I emphasized the part in the above quote).
[]s, Roger...
Re:Still closed drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 1
This is something that I wrote to the debian-user mailing list a while ago:
On Nov 03 2000, wulfie wrote:
> I'll second the anti-Nvidia driver lobby.
I'm planning on buying a new computer soon (a Duron) and one
of the things that was hardest to understand was which video
card to get.
It seems that there is an hiatus between el-cheapo, older PCI
cards and the super-hyper-duper-hi-end cards with 3D
acceleration with all bells-and-whistles. There's nothing in
between for someone like me that wants to buy a cheaper one
and that only cares for 2D performance (I don't play games and
I don't use 3D applications).
Since there were no options (or since the manufacturers don't
want to see that part of the market), I started looking for
cards that would provide a not so bad performance and not
hogging my future system performance, while having a
reasonable price.
In all reviews that I've studied, the NVIDIA cards seem to be
the winners of performance, but the fact that they don't have
a receptive attitude towards the community means that they
don't want people like me as their customers.
This is what made me choose a Matrox G400 for my new system
(together with the recommendation of a close friend that said
the G400 was running quite fast in his system).
I do think that this is a great idea and also a way of giving back to the community. After all, people took their time to write good operating systems for the good of the community.
Some people, who don't write programs, can indeed help the other members of the community by alternative ways. One of such ways is writing documentation. Another one is helping friends with. And another one, much less common inded, is to share one's resources to other members of the community so that the community can use these resources for its enlightening and common "growth".
This would be the situation in an advanced community, where people would have the responsibility and know what they should and what they shouldn't do with respect to other members.
It is quite sad that some people are messing kaworu's system.
Perhaps some people are not yet prepared for living in community.
Indeed. I rarely post here to Slashdot, but I think that people should give more credit where credit is Due.
I'm an avid Debian GNU/Linux user (and I do intend to be a Debian Developer if I can in the near future), but I can't help but recognize all the good things that SuSE Linux has been paying kernel hackers for.
They seem to be incredibly commited to the Free Software movement, yet they get very little credit.
Indeed, people wouldn't have support for many high-end devices and methods if it were not for the support that SuSE is putting into Linux. I won't mention all them, but there are some of the things that I remember:
Many people need those things (which shows the relevance of the support) and I'm sure that there are many other projects with which SuSE may be involved. Congratulations!
Slashdot Mirror
(This message may be seen as inflammatory, but I assure you that it is just my opinion and not particularly anybody else---I don't speak for the projects on which I participate).
Hi.
I am not a developer of VLC, but I am part of the LAME team (that MP3 encoder that a good amount of people use). I see similar problems regarding LAME as those described by the VLC team: lack of continuous power and resources.
Some users just magically think that "oh, this program won't exist anymore, so let's use this other one". The sad thing here is that they are shortsighted in the fact that they, by doing nothing (just receiving the programs), are not giving the incentive for the projects.
What about if the proposed alternative dies a few days from now? The amount of alternatives is finite.
Not only that, but the major players out there all share the same codebase: there are "incestuous" (in a good sene of the word) relations with VLC, xine, and mplayer: the all use, to some extent or another (well, in some cases, to the full extent) some common libraries: ffmpeg, libmp3lame, theora, vorbis, dirac, x264 and so on.
Usually, also, the players also send some feedback to the people writing the libraries and, without them, the libraries would not be as good as they are. And the feedback that developers provide is, not infrequently, in form of patches, or constructive suggestions. Some users, like the one above, just cares less and, honestly, where would you just "grab the extra codec" if they all, come, essentially, from the first place?
If you didn't know, perhaps it is a good reminder to put here that people from the VLC project developed the nice libdvdcss library, which benefited xine and mplayer, while people in the other projects have directly or indirectly benefited the others.
I would not like to have the "Linux desktop" mainstream with a "community" with a person that doesn't want a community. For people that are more altruistic (and that show it, instead of just playing in slashdot all day), I am open to a more open talk.
[Gee, from what I wrote the above, it seems like if I only saw Linux---I actually value the other Unix-like operating systems as much].
I guess that what I meant to say here is: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code. Don't wish the death of what you may proudly use and not even know".
Regards, Rogério Brito.
And don't forget, whenever you get a bad manufacturer support, to inform other users, when we can't use our computers the way we like, especially for those that care a lot about Free Software.
Having a site like http://vendors.bluwiki.com/ bookmarked is a good start to help spread the word about such manufacturers.
This way, other people can be aware of the issues that might happen before they acquire something from said manufacturers.
Regards, Rogério Brito.
First of all, I am not a user of *BSD, although I do appreciate their goals. I am a Debian user and have been one for quite some time now.
One fact to appreciate about Debian is that it is loosing its ties to the Linux kernel and becoming more and more general, now including even BSD efforts (like the kfreebsd5 port).
So, even though I am a Debian user, I have this secret appreciation for all the work that the BSD people have done and continue to do and I am downloading the OpenBSD release from the torrent site listed in the parent post (that is http://openbsd.somedomain.net/).
We all know that these smaller projects don't have big companies supporting them financially and one thing that other people could do to help visibility (and, in the long term, more users, and, perhaps, even commercial support) is to promote OpenBSD.
This starts with being kind on their servers and helping with the serving of the release for others, keeping your torrent clients open and serving others. Please, do help others "free" their machines with Free Software.
I'm doing my small share helping others to "get their foot wet" with the support for the torrent.
Regards, Rogério Brito.
Ok, you are probably a troll and I should not be replying to you, but I can't really stand such misguided words being moderated highly.
First of all, you seem to regard Ubuntu like the successor of Debian. Well, let me tell you something: Ubuntu bases their releases on a mix of packages, including Debian's sid. I guess that the Ubuntu people know better about their design decisions than what you seem to show in front of many here.
Well, so many points here to comment. First of all is being a "rock star" something good, that everybody should strive to be? I think not. Every operating system and every distribution of such operating systems has a niche and, as long as there are users interested in it, it serves a purpose.
Would you tell me that the BSD projects are worthless, just because they are not that popular as Linux? And what about other Linux distributions that aren't as well spread as, say, RedHat/Fedora? Are they worthless?
I can tell you that the work that Debian does regarding porting the software (and, similarly, other BSD projects like NetBSD) is quite welcome and has already been the source of bug discoveries, because not everybody has a 32 bit system, not everybody has a little-endian system, not all platforms have signed chars etc. It seems that you are either naïve or talking without knowing the subject at hand (well, that's supposed to be the case for a troll).
Just before you don't see something that means that it doesn't exist? Don't forget to tell that to your doctor the next time you have an infection. And speaking of vanilla Debian, yes, I use it on all my systems. I'm not that amazed by such high number of derivative distributions, because I don't have computers with much horsepower (unfortunately, the fastest computer to which I have access is a Duron 600MHz, with 256MB of RAM -- I am not in the U.S. (I live in Brazil) and it seems that people have gotten bad habits of programming by writing software with many and many layers of abstractions, to the point where we need a supercomputer (by the standards of 10 years ago) to produce the same texts that we once did.
I always try to write software in a resource economical way and that's what I teach my students to do (of course, without premature optimization -- I teach algorithms).
BTW, I have an OldWorld PowerMac 9500/180MP that I inherited from my uncle and it has 64MB of RAM. I recently received as a gift a G3 upgrade card and it is now back in a productive order (well, taking into consideration that its HD is slow and that it has limited memory).
But if it were not for, say, Debian, I would not be able to use this computer with Linux, because very few distributions support OldWorld macs. And I think that I can help debugging and developing software so that the world is a better place. And, actually, testing your software on many platforms is a good way to see if your programs are indeed well-written.
Oh, BTW, I would love to receive RAM for this mac that I mentioned, if you are going to throw away the memory. I would put it to some good use and teach some friends to use Linux (and, honestly, once you install a distribution, almost everything seems similar, even across many platforms -- so, I don't really understand the so hot comments about using one or another distribution, because it is "better"
Now, it seems that (finally) developers are looking at resources that our programs use.
Unfortunately, for many in developing countries (like me, here in Brazil) having a computer filled with RAM and with the fastest processor available on the market isn't an option.
For instance, my desktop has a Duron 600MHz with 256MB of RAM. That's the fastest computer to which I have access here and it is some years old, but still working fine.
I can't say how happy I am with this bounty for optimization of memory.
In Computer Science we always have this concern with both time and space complexity and it seems that if Free Software developers start caring about good data structures and good algorithms (and avoid layers and layers and layers of abstraction over and over), we can actually use our computers more efficiently.
Again, this is especially important for those who have to use computers of two or three generations ago.
A welcome movement indeed.
P.S.: If you have never felt the need for less memory comsumption, then you won't probably understand how important this project is and probably this post makes little sense to you.
One of the most obvious uses for having tasks like this is to understand better the problems and to develop better algorithms.
In Computational Complexity's terms, we like to design "efficient" algorithms.
One of the criteria used to say if an algorithm is efficient or not is to measure the time it takes to execute in terms of the size of its input.
We are usually concerned with designing faster algorithms (especially when we have to deal with huge inputs --- that's one of the things that people have in mind when they say "scalability) and if we have algorithms that help expose details of the problem being solved, it will only help us to design faster algorithms.
And these techniques may, with some adaptation, be used for solving other problems, not only the problem in question.
I hope that this helps you understand why some people are always concerned with developing good algorithms and also testing them in practice.
If you are interested in knowing more about the design of algorithms, please don't hesitate to ask.
Thank you very much for this torrent.
It has a huge amount of both peers and seeds and that just shows how large is the "slashdot effect" and how it can be used inteligently for the benefit of the community.
Thanks again, Rogério.
Thank you very much for writing that.
Fortunately, there are people like you who still see the light and understand that Computer Science is not really about getting the fastest computer you can afford, but about making an efficient use of the computational resources that are available and, depending on the case, these computational resources are quite limited.
The resources that that I cited above can be anything, but the main ones that are of interest are time, space or communication resources.
To paraphrase S. S. Skiena: an efficient algorithm running in a slow machine can always beat a bad algorithm running in a fast machine.
Unfortunately, many people insist on ignoring good software design (and I'm not talking about maintainability here only) when they think of computer science.
The add-on layout for US International can be found at http://www.brockerhoff.net/usi/.
This piece of software is absolutely necessary for typing in Portuguese (especially here in Brazil, where a common US keyboard layout is quite common, and the population is used to the US layout with dead-keys -- dating from the time of typewriters).
Please, do let Apple know that you need this keyboard layout.
I sent them my feedback about this quite a while ago (I think that I can post here the mail if I find it), but more people letting them know would promptly make them aware of its importance.
Like Marcelo said (hi there -- send me an e-mail so we can get in touch) this is not the first electronic election that we had (I live in São Paulo, the biggest state of Brazil).
The past election (which was also automatized in the very same way) went quite smoothly, but we had few electing positions ("prefeitos" e "vereadores").
This year, the situation was quite different. Each person had to vote for 6 positions and while the system used was exactly the same from a users' perspective, people (especially the simpler, with lower education or older people, not used to electronic devices) had problems and used more time than expected.
While in the past election it took me about 5 minutes to stand in line, today it took me about 1h15min.
I did see an old lady getting confused in the voting booth and having to "be helped" slightly for she to finish her vote.
The thing that I could observe in practice in this real life situation is that most people do have difficulties trying to deal with electronic devices. All this despite a huge informational campaign and having a so called "intuitive" interface.
This left me with the clear impression that the barriers for a large scale adoption of automation are not technological but anthropological.
Anyway, I guess that this election can be regarded as a huge success given the low failure rates that we had. And, in the end, everything seems to have gone well.
The timing of this article seems impecable, since I am myself trying to learn about Bayesian Statistics.
I am a Computer Science student studying Computational Biology (more specifically, Sequence Alignments) and while I have a bit of background on Classical Statistics, I was (and still am) completely ignorant about Bayesian Statistics.
It is only now that I'm trying to learn about Hidden Markov Models and its applications to Sequence Alignment that Ifinally decided to learn the basic hypothesis about Bayesian Statistics and how it differs from the hypothesis made by the Classical Statistics.
During my searches for finding introductory material on Bayesian Statistics, I found this course page which has some nice introductory notes, including Bayesian Statistics.
I hope that other people find this resource as useful as I did.
Well, seeing that you are running OS X exclusively, I'd like to ask you if you don't see any difference in performance when you compare Linux and OS X. I surely do with my iBook 2, but that's perhaps because I am using a G3-based machine.
7 384 n -powerpc-200206/msg00106.html n -powerpc-200205/msg00146.html
Just for reference, here are some links describing problems that I have with MacOS X and/or the iBook:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33385&cid=360
http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2002/debia
http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2002/debia
href="http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ppc.html
http://cr.yp.to/hardware/advice.html
The last two articles aren't written by me, of course, but by D.J. Bernstein, who has a deep understanding of various architectures.
Anyway, I would appreciate any help regarding the problems listed above, especially those addressed in the first link.
I have some moderation points that I was going to dedicate to this discussion, but I think that it would be better if I posted instead of moderated.
Let me ask this honestly: how can someone work in an organized fashion with the MacOS X style of managing windows?
I am an experienced Unix system administrator, but a complete newbie with Macs (in fact, I just bought my first macintosh 4 months ago, an iBook 600MHz, combo, 12") and feel completely lost trying to work with MacOS X.
I don't care for eyecandy and animated icons as much as I care for a functional environment, but the fact managing windows with MacOS X is much messier than with standard Unix window managers, where you can separate your desktops for different tasks. In my case, I usually have my first virtual desktop for an xterm and e-mail, my second for browsing the web and my third and fourth for other tasks various tasks.
On the other hand, when I am typing some important text in LaTeX, I usually reserve the first desktop for some command line hacking (say, with perl), the second virtual desktop for Emacs and the third for seeing the output of my text with xdvi (I usually use Windowmaker as my window manager, both under Solaris and under Linux).
I feel that this separation of tasks keeps me organized and makes me quite productive since I can quickly move between different aspects of my work, but how can I keep everything organized with MacOS X with just one desktop and with applications with more than one window (say, Appleworks)?
I also appreciate that I can do all that under Windowmaker with intelligently set key-bindings and having to use the mouse quite few.
So, this is an honest question: how are you guys productive with MacOS X? Is there any way to keep various applications organized?
I already tried Space for MacOS X and, honestly, its capabilities are nowhere near, say, windowmaker in terms of functionality.
So, when people say that MacOS X's user interface is so good, I can only think that they work in a different fashion than I do or that they are exploring features that I don't know about.
Also, today I tried installing Fink and was amazed at first, but after only two or three hours of using it, the fact that XDarwin is much slower than XFree86 under Linux (on the same notebook) makes me also suspect that I may not be using the programs correctly. I can't believe how slow it is. I would not even dare to run KDE on MacOS X (the topic of this story).
So, when people say that MacOS X's user interface is so good, I can only think that they work in a different fashion than I do or that they are exploring features that I don't know about.
Any comments are desperately appreciated.
I agree completely. I have fear of using my POP3 account anytime I use my notebook, wandering through networks (where I have to) whose (local) security I know nothing about.
And what makes the matters worse is that setting up a secured version of POP3/IMAP is exceedingly easy with the use of SSL wrappers like stunnel or sslwrap.
So, this once again convinces me that the problem with security is not technological, but educational and/or philosophical.
I think that if you're using any recent Debian distribution (like testing), then compiling MPlaying from sources (including getting the dependencies right) is quite easy, since the MPlayer developers include a debian directory containing scripts for generating a Debian package.
To compile MPlayer from sources (and as a result, generate a binary package suitable for your system), just grab the sources, unpack them, get into the root directory of MPlayer and issue:
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot
You'll have to have debmake and fakeroot installed, as well as anything needed to make MPlayer (which is not much). Some (all?) of the packages needed for the build process may be listed in the debian/control file (I don't remember).
The only problem so far that I've had with Mplayer is that it doesn't compile on a PowerPC computer that I have here (due to its usage of x86 Assembly).
The same comments about compiling MPlayer from source in a Debian system also apply to compiling Lame from source.
While this argument is old and what matters is the number of cycles an instruction takes to be executed (together with the length of the pipeline of the CPU etc), I think one would actually have to finish his homework instead of just assuming that a PowerPC can actually perform a high number of instructions executed per clock cycle.
I was recently exposed to an old PowerPC machine (a PowerMac 9500/180MP), liked it a lot (despite it being slow) and thought about buying a new Mac for me (perhaps an iBook?). But since they are not even comparable in price to other architectures here in Brazil, I decided to learn more about it to see if the applications were making good use of the processor and if compiler support (read: GCC) were mature (which is important for me, since I am a grad Computer Science student).
Well, it seems that that's not the case. While Apple may have a good GCC for Darwin (whose patches are supposed to be incorportated upstream in GCC in the future), some posts from debian-powerpc and other places in the Web suggest that as a development platform (especially for intensive calculations), it may not be as good as a cheap, underpriced PC platform.
Of special weight for me is the opinion of Dan Bernstein, whose opinions I always respect a lot, given his background. In particular an article about G4s and an advice about purchasing computers.
Despite his opinions having a great weight on my decisions, I'm already convinced that the Apple products are reasonably good (and I've already played a tiny bit with their OS X, which has the coolness factor).
On the other hand, while the competition is so much cheaper (a strong point), with higher performance and better support, I'm still evaluating if purchasing, say, an iBook would be a good move (read: I'm still undecided), especially in the light of Dan Bernstein's revelations.
Sorry. That's not correct. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. LaTeX is not a language for editing the appearance of a document. It is deliberately a language for the writer to worry on the contents of its document.
I took the trouble and grabbed my copy of "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System", written by the author of LaTeX, Leslie Lamport. On pages 6 and 7, he writes:
(I emphasized the part in the above quote).
[]s, Roger...
This is something that I wrote to the debian-user mailing list a while ago:
On Nov 03 2000, wulfie wrote:
> I'll second the anti-Nvidia driver lobby.
I'm planning on buying a new computer soon (a Duron) and one
of the things that was hardest to understand was which video
card to get.
It seems that there is an hiatus between el-cheapo, older PCI
cards and the super-hyper-duper-hi-end cards with 3D
acceleration with all bells-and-whistles. There's nothing in
between for someone like me that wants to buy a cheaper one
and that only cares for 2D performance (I don't play games and
I don't use 3D applications).
Since there were no options (or since the manufacturers don't
want to see that part of the market), I started looking for
cards that would provide a not so bad performance and not
hogging my future system performance, while having a
reasonable price.
In all reviews that I've studied, the NVIDIA cards seem to be
the winners of performance, but the fact that they don't have
a receptive attitude towards the community means that they
don't want people like me as their customers.
This is what made me choose a Matrox G400 for my new system
(together with the recommendation of a close friend that said
the G400 was running quite fast in his system).
I do think that this is a great idea and also a way of giving back to the community. After all, people took their time to write good operating systems for the good of the community.
Some people, who don't write programs, can indeed help the other members of the community by alternative ways. One of such ways is writing documentation. Another one is helping friends with. And another one, much less common inded, is to share one's resources to other members of the community so that the community can use these resources for its enlightening and common "growth".
This would be the situation in an advanced community, where people would have the responsibility and know what they should and what they shouldn't do with respect to other members.
It is quite sad that some people are messing kaworu's system.
Perhaps some people are not yet prepared for living in community.
Indeed. I rarely post here to Slashdot, but I think that people should give more credit where credit is Due.
I'm an avid Debian GNU/Linux user (and I do intend to be a Debian Developer if I can in the near future), but I can't help but recognize all the good things that SuSE Linux has been paying kernel hackers for.
They seem to be incredibly commited to the Free Software movement, yet they get very little credit.
Indeed, people wouldn't have support for many high-end devices and methods if it were not for the support that SuSE is putting into Linux. I won't mention all them, but there are some of the things that I remember:
Many people need those things (which shows the relevance of the support) and I'm sure that there are many other projects with which SuSE may be involved. Congratulations!
Roger...