Linux could be complete crap but if when a person bought a "computer" and turned it on, it ran Linux, Linux would be the #1 operating system.
The reason OSX is becoming popular is because now a significant fraction of "computers" (the ones from Apple that the cool people buy) happen to run OSX by default. This is despite the fact that 90% of the boxed software you can get at best buy will not work on it, and that it is perfectly possible to wipe the machine and install Windows to get this software to work. Thus showing that the "joe user can't run their software" argument is bullshit.
The number of people running something other than what was on the machine when they bought it is miniscule and it has nothing to do with quality or amount of software (except that amount of software is CAUSED by amount of machines, not vice-versa).
You must mean the *Windows* logo. Microsoft has no logo except the word "Microsoft" in a particular font. At least not today. Maybe they should use the 1983 O that looked a bit like the AT&T death star!
Re:Is the GIL removed from the interpreter
on
Python 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 2
It is not the memory saving that is important for generators. It is the time. Allocating memory for a list, adding a reference to every item to that list and thus incrementing reference counts on every item, and later decrementing all those references and freeing the list, all take a LOT of time. This can be incredibly wasteful, especially if the loop finds the object of interest very soon and quits before even examining all the remaining items.
Nobody would pay for an ISP that charges for your Skype, WoW, MSN and League of Legends packets separately.
My god it appears the opponents of NN are completely clueless, or quite willing to lie.
The ISP won't charge you for using Skype/WoW/MSN. They will charge Skype, Wow, MSN. You are claiming the end users will see "oh to get Skype I pay the ISP $N". That is not what is going to happen. What they will see is "Skype does not work anymore, so I have to use Comcast's normal phone service. But Comcast is just so nice, in this letter they are offering the first month free to apologize for being unable to get Skype to agree with their quite reasonable and competitive network access fee!"
There is an argument that the regulation is going to be excessively complex and filled with loopholes and granting favors to companies against the stated purpose. This is by far the only convincing argument against NN I have seen
Blatent lying about what it is trying to do or prevent is not the way to argue about it, however.
Unfortunately, the kind of user that downloads 500GB very month are a minority.
This is not for those users. Under Net Neutrality those users will pay more (since charges will have to be per-byte in order for ISPs to be able to make a profit and not suffer the tragedy of the commons).
Of course lying and trying to make it sound like Net Neutrality is wanted by EEEVIL pirates!!!! is always a good way to make a bogus argument.
Although everybody keeps saying that it will display "MyPhoto.jpg.exe" as "MyPhoto.jpg" and thus mislead people, while I certainly admit it is quite likely, I am confused why the MS defenders don't point out that it should not confuse people because a real "MyPhoto.jpg" would display as "MyPhoto" and thus be different than the bogus file.
Can somebody explain this?
If in fact it deletes the entire ".jpg.exe" it would explain confusion, but then it means MS is using different rules in different parts of the code (ie it uses only the ".exe" rather than ".jpg.exe" to figure out what to do) which I think is far stupider than I believe even they would have done in the dark ages of 1990 or whenever they started this...
Also I find it pretty amazing that they manage to extract exactly the same sample text from the page as Google did. This is particularly amazing when the destination page no longer contains that text.
Gee, maybe they indexed it when the destination page *did* contain the text? Did that ever occur to you?
Yes they may have visited the page and remembered the text before they found the google association link.
More mysterious to me is why they manage to select the same text and put ellipsis in at exactly the same points as Google does.
You are saying the the Bing toolbar sucessfully recognizes this government search page as a search and realizes which field is the search term? And recognized which click the user did subsequently as the actual link to the searched item, rather than ads, next page, new search, etc? And their AI was designed to figure this out without somebody at Bing ever looking at this page? And those writers did not design this algorithm to specifically recognize Google's search pages?
Also I find it pretty amazing that they manage to extract exactly the same sample text from the page as Google did. This is particularly amazing when the destination page no longer contains that text.
It appears from the samples that they are copying the "sample text" from Google's results, rather than visiting the page and extracting their own sample. Also they appear to remember the actual term even if the "cached" link is clicked. Both of these are showing active interpretation of the google result page, rather than just "what the user clicked on".
There was an Arthur C Clarke short story like that. It was done quicker, basically the board of directors meets and some presenter has to spend a good deal of time explaining the word "carnivores" because most everybody forgot that their favorite foods are actually simulations of dead animals.
Then he says their scientists have finally figured out what animal the competitor's very successful product is. And they say "well we explained the word 'carnivore', but now we have to explain a new word: 'cannibal'"
I posted stuff in this discussion a few hours ago, and now it doesn't show up? Let's see if it works this time.
This is a test reply. Please ignore.
It sure took a LONG time for this box to open.
Now I am going to quote the parent: Seems to work.
I hit "Options" and it took a LONG TIME!!!! And when I closed it it scrolled this page up to the top, and I just wasted a lot of time relocating this comment.
Microsoft's FIRST version of ODF conversion, written by their programmers as a plugin for Office, did produce spreadsheets that interoperated with OOo. This is pretty obvious because OOo copied the Excel expression language and thus they did not have to alter the expressions at all to make them work with it.
Later management stepped in and instructed the programmers to locate some way to weasal around the ODF standard and make a file that technically adhered to the standard but failed to load in anything so that it insured that ODF could not be used for interoperability with Office.
They decided that because ODF did not specifically specify the expression format (instead relying on the implication "use what works on Excel and Open Office") they could convolve the expressions into something that nobody else could read, and ignore any expressions written the obvious way. This is like saying that because the C language standard does not specify that the sine of an angle is taken by a function called "sin(x)" (that is specified by libm and there are C implementations that lack it), they can make a "standard C" that uses postfix + and - because "expressions are not standardized".
They also used the fact that OO interpreted the string "1" in a spreadsheet cell differently than Koffice did (OO actually was the buggy one because it was disagreeing with Excel) as "proof" that the only way to obey the standard was to write something that neither program could read. This was done by spewing tons of meaningless jargon that impressed the PHBs. The people who wrote that crap are probably the most vile scum in software, far more evil than any of Microsoft's management.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems?
The normal excuse is that all other methods of making a VFS are Linux-specific (such as using FUSE). But you certainly could at least offer a FUSE solution on Linux and a library-only one on other systems. Also the only main alternative is BSD and it has methods for this, too.
However I think the real reason is that they already started writing it that way and don't want to do the work of splitting it away from their other libraries.
Linux would be MUCH better if any program using open() could open anything the KDE or Gnome desktop can.
As I understand it, Microsoft, Firefox, and Chrome are all refusing to allow the HTML5 tag to launch plugins. They have amazingly convoluted and bogus excuses for this, though it is pretty obvious that the reason is that it would make it easy for users to work around all their politics and run the codecs they don't like.
Because all the parties are interpreting this tag but refusing to understand any values other than the ones they want. So Chrome will not crash when given video in H264, it will just ignore it.
Disinterested parties such as Opera will just give the codec name to video libraries on the system where it is possible for the user to add new missing ones. But Microsoft, Firefox, and (I think) Chromium are all refusing to do this. They all give really bogus excuses about stability (this is especially silly from Microsoft, where the video library is their own product!) but the real reason is to make sure the codecs they don't want do not work.
Some features like "auto" will probably get extensively used quickly. I agree that other features such as the lambdas will not get used by a large subset of programmers for decades.
Sadly the C++0x committee is still dedicated to making sure UTF-8 does not work. As far as I can tell the underlying reason for the sabotage is that there is this feeling that it is politically incorrect because it gives English the "better" short encodings.
What is needed is for \uNNNN and \UNNNNNNNN to produce the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode characters in string constants, while \NNN and \xNN still produce single bytes (even if the result is not a legal UTF-8 encoding). This would be entirely upwardly compatible with current C and C++ code. Also any unicode characters in a string constant should be turned into the UTF-8 encoding.
Currently you are forced to make "u" wide-character strings if you actually want Unicode characters in any usable way in your source code. This seems to be purposely designed to make use of UTF-8 as painful as possible, so they can continue to smugly think they are somehow promoting world equality and interoperability (when what they are really doing is encouraging the use of ASCII-only and making things worse than when ISO-8859-1 was the standard).
The Linux drivers reuse code from the Windows drivers (easily seen by locating identical bugs in both the Linux and Windows drivers). I suspect most of the interesting speed-related parts are shared. So there is a lot more than the "Linux team" working on the driver.
If you think strlen should return the number of "characters" in Unicode then you are the one that is full of shit.
I assume this is returning the length of the UTF-8 encoding, which is an actually useful value.
Only beginner programmers think "characters" are important. Eventually they will learn, but only after making boneheaded screwups like you just did. Your sort of thinking is why I18N is not working after 20 years of trying.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. It is very simple:
Linux could be complete crap but if when a person bought a "computer" and turned it on, it ran Linux, Linux would be the #1 operating system.
The reason OSX is becoming popular is because now a significant fraction of "computers" (the ones from Apple that the cool people buy) happen to run OSX by default. This is despite the fact that 90% of the boxed software you can get at best buy will not work on it, and that it is perfectly possible to wipe the machine and install Windows to get this software to work. Thus showing that the "joe user can't run their software" argument is bullshit.
The number of people running something other than what was on the machine when they bought it is miniscule and it has nothing to do with quality or amount of software (except that amount of software is CAUSED by amount of machines, not vice-versa).
You must mean the *Windows* logo.
Microsoft has no logo except the word "Microsoft" in a particular font. At least not today. Maybe they should use the 1983 O that looked a bit like the AT&T death star!
It is not the memory saving that is important for generators. It is the time. Allocating memory for a list, adding a reference to every item to that list and thus incrementing reference counts on every item, and later decrementing all those references and freeing the list, all take a LOT of time. This can be incredibly wasteful, especially if the loop finds the object of interest very soon and quits before even examining all the remaining items.
This is a huge deal and Python does get it right.
Why is Slashdot double-spacing all the lines in some posts, such as this one?
Nobody would pay for an ISP that charges for your Skype, WoW, MSN and League of Legends packets separately.
My god it appears the opponents of NN are completely clueless, or quite willing to lie.
The ISP won't charge you for using Skype/WoW/MSN. They will charge Skype, Wow, MSN. You are claiming the end users will see "oh to get Skype I pay the ISP $N". That is not what is going to happen. What they will see is "Skype does not work anymore, so I have to use Comcast's normal phone service. But Comcast is just so nice, in this letter they are offering the first month free to apologize for being unable to get Skype to agree with their quite reasonable and competitive network access fee!"
There is an argument that the regulation is going to be excessively complex and filled with loopholes and granting favors to companies against the stated purpose. This is by far the only convincing argument against NN I have seen
Blatent lying about what it is trying to do or prevent is not the way to argue about it, however.
Unfortunately, the kind of user that downloads 500GB very month are a minority.
This is not for those users. Under Net Neutrality those users will pay more (since charges will have to be per-byte in order for ISPs to be able to make a profit and not suffer the tragedy of the commons).
Of course lying and trying to make it sound like Net Neutrality is wanted by EEEVIL pirates!!!! is always a good way to make a bogus argument.
Or it could provide a web page that is automatically opened in the browser.
Microsoft would never allow that however, as it would make it trivial for the disks to work in other operating systems. Can't have that, can we?
Although everybody keeps saying that it will display "MyPhoto.jpg.exe" as "MyPhoto.jpg" and thus mislead people, while I certainly admit it is quite likely, I am confused why the MS defenders don't point out that it should not confuse people because a real "MyPhoto.jpg" would display as "MyPhoto" and thus be different than the bogus file.
Can somebody explain this?
If in fact it deletes the entire ".jpg.exe" it would explain confusion, but then it means MS is using different rules in different parts of the code (ie it uses only the ".exe" rather than ".jpg.exe" to figure out what to do) which I think is far stupider than I believe even they would have done in the dark ages of 1990 or whenever they started this...
Also I find it pretty amazing that they manage to extract exactly the same sample text from the page as Google did. This is particularly amazing when the destination page no longer contains that text.
Gee, maybe they indexed it when the destination page *did* contain the text? Did that ever occur to you?
Yes they may have visited the page and remembered the text before they found the google association link.
More mysterious to me is why they manage to select the same text and put ellipsis in at exactly the same points as Google does.
You are saying the the Bing toolbar sucessfully recognizes this government search page as a search and realizes which field is the search term? And recognized which click the user did subsequently as the actual link to the searched item, rather than ads, next page, new search, etc? And their AI was designed to figure this out without somebody at Bing ever looking at this page? And those writers did not design this algorithm to specifically recognize Google's search pages?
Also I find it pretty amazing that they manage to extract exactly the same sample text from the page as Google did. This is particularly amazing when the destination page no longer contains that text.
It appears from the samples that they are copying the "sample text" from Google's results, rather than visiting the page and extracting their own sample. Also they appear to remember the actual term even if the "cached" link is clicked. Both of these are showing active interpretation of the google result page, rather than just "what the user clicked on".
There was an Arthur C Clarke short story like that. It was done quicker, basically the board of directors meets and some presenter has to spend a good deal of time explaining the word "carnivores" because most everybody forgot that their favorite foods are actually simulations of dead animals.
Then he says their scientists have finally figured out what animal the competitor's very successful product is. And they say "well we explained the word 'carnivore', but now we have to explain a new word: 'cannibal'"
The end.
The problem is that "how many atoms is a mol" is defined in terms of the kilogram.
One of the solutions proposed is to exactly figure out how many atoms are needed to weigh 1kg*atomic weight, thus defining the mol.
I posted stuff in this discussion a few hours ago, and now it doesn't show up? Let's see if it works this time.
This is a test reply. Please ignore.
It sure took a LONG time for this box to open.
Now I am going to quote the parent: Seems to work.
I hit "Options" and it took a LONG TIME!!!! And when I closed it it scrolled this page up to the top, and I just wasted a lot of time relocating this comment.
Now I am going to hit preview. See you!
Alt shows the *accelerators*, not the shortcuts.
Accelerators only work when the menu is displayed. Shortcuts work all the time.
This is incorrect.
Microsoft's FIRST version of ODF conversion, written by their programmers as a plugin for Office, did produce spreadsheets that interoperated with OOo. This is pretty obvious because OOo copied the Excel expression language and thus they did not have to alter the expressions at all to make them work with it.
Later management stepped in and instructed the programmers to locate some way to weasal around the ODF standard and make a file that technically adhered to the standard but failed to load in anything so that it insured that ODF could not be used for interoperability with Office.
They decided that because ODF did not specifically specify the expression format (instead relying on the implication "use what works on Excel and Open Office") they could convolve the expressions into something that nobody else could read, and ignore any expressions written the obvious way. This is like saying that because the C language standard does not specify that the sine of an angle is taken by a function called "sin(x)" (that is specified by libm and there are C implementations that lack it), they can make a "standard C" that uses postfix + and - because "expressions are not standardized".
They also used the fact that OO interpreted the string "1" in a spreadsheet cell differently than Koffice did (OO actually was the buggy one because it was disagreeing with Excel) as "proof" that the only way to obey the standard was to write something that neither program could read. This was done by spewing tons of meaningless jargon that impressed the PHBs. The people who wrote that crap are probably the most vile scum in software, far more evil than any of Microsoft's management.
perl -e "print length('£')"
2
Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems?
The normal excuse is that all other methods of making a VFS are Linux-specific (such as using FUSE). But you certainly could at least offer a FUSE solution on Linux and a library-only one on other systems. Also the only main alternative is BSD and it has methods for this, too.
However I think the real reason is that they already started writing it that way and don't want to do the work of splitting it away from their other libraries.
Linux would be MUCH better if any program using open() could open anything the KDE or Gnome desktop can.
As I understand it, Microsoft, Firefox, and Chrome are all refusing to allow the HTML5 tag to launch plugins. They have amazingly convoluted and bogus excuses for this, though it is pretty obvious that the reason is that it would make it easy for users to work around all their politics and run the codecs they don't like.
Because all the parties are interpreting this tag but refusing to understand any values other than the ones they want. So Chrome will not crash when given video in H264, it will just ignore it.
Disinterested parties such as Opera will just give the codec name to video libraries on the system where it is possible for the user to add new missing ones. But Microsoft, Firefox, and (I think) Chromium are all refusing to do this. They all give really bogus excuses about stability (this is especially silly from Microsoft, where the video library is their own product!) but the real reason is to make sure the codecs they don't want do not work.
So what part of "you have to give your code away if you use ours" isn't telling you what to do with your own code?
Perhaps this is a troll, but the answer is imbedded in your own question. I put it in bold if you are too blind to see it.
Some features like "auto" will probably get extensively used quickly. I agree that other features such as the lambdas will not get used by a large subset of programmers for decades.
Sadly the C++0x committee is still dedicated to making sure UTF-8 does not work. As far as I can tell the underlying reason for the sabotage is that there is this feeling that it is politically incorrect because it gives English the "better" short encodings.
What is needed is for \uNNNN and \UNNNNNNNN to produce the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode characters in string constants, while \NNN and \xNN still produce single bytes (even if the result is not a legal UTF-8 encoding). This would be entirely upwardly compatible with current C and C++ code. Also any unicode characters in a string constant should be turned into the UTF-8 encoding.
Currently you are forced to make "u" wide-character strings if you actually want Unicode characters in any usable way in your source code. This seems to be purposely designed to make use of UTF-8 as painful as possible, so they can continue to smugly think they are somehow promoting world equality and interoperability (when what they are really doing is encouraging the use of ASCII-only and making things worse than when ISO-8859-1 was the standard).
The Linux drivers reuse code from the Windows drivers (easily seen by locating identical bugs in both the Linux and Windows drivers). I suspect most of the interesting speed-related parts are shared. So there is a lot more than the "Linux team" working on the driver.
If you think strlen should return the number of "characters" in Unicode then you are the one that is full of shit.
I assume this is returning the length of the UTF-8 encoding, which is an actually useful value.
Only beginner programmers think "characters" are important. Eventually they will learn, but only after making boneheaded screwups like you just did. Your sort of thinking is why I18N is not working after 20 years of trying.