I thought about that, but since you can't write a Perl prog in one second, I figured if that's what he'd meant then he would've chosen times that made more sense. Maybe not.:-)
The parent's point was that if Perl takes a second, then perfectly-optimized C cannot take more than a second, because the Perl interpreter is written in C. That said, it's a fairly moot point, because you could probably have written 500 Perl programs in the time it takes to optimize that one C prog.
Huh? When you write a Perl program, it's run by an interpreter, which is written in C. Your argument would make sense if assembly was an interpreted language, which it's not (Bochs, VPC, and JVMs excepted).
The point is that retrofitting these voting machines with printers (which is not as simple as just hooking one up - these aren't standard PCs IIRC, so the hardware and software would have to be redone and then recertified) couldn't be done by this November. Therefore, the machines couldn't be used in this election and blind people still wouldn't have a secret ballot.
That said, I agree with you - the validity of everyone's votes is much more important than the secrecy of a small minority. Disabled people have survived on paper ballots for the past 200+ years, they can do it a little longer.
Third parties won't be in a position to take the vote from anyone if people don't start consistently voting for them.
Third parties in a presidential election will never be viable given the current plurality/electoral college system. If you want to work towards getting a sane voting system (runoff, instant-runoff, whatever), then I'm all for it - I'd vote for Nader in an instant if I knew that if he didn't make a good showing, my vote could still count for Kerry. As it is, a vote for Nader is only justifiable if you're in Texas, California, or another guarenteed-outcome state.
All those Democrats whining about how much damage Nader did really need to consider that he wouldn't have been standing if the Democrat party really represented the people that voted for him.
The Democratic Party can't perfectly represent everyone. If they had pandered to the small group that voted Nader, they would probably have lost at least that many votes to Bush on the other end. As it is, the Nader voters got us a president considerably more distasteful, from their point of view, than Gore would have been.
The main reason to install GTK2 is that GTK1 sucks. It's ugly, inaccessable, harder to use, and more difficult to program for. Admittedly, it's a bit slower, but unless you're on a P1 you shouldn't notice a difference. It's because of GTK2 that Mozilla on Linux has the excellent text rendering that it does. It's because of GTK2 that apps such as Abiword, Gnumeric, and Evolution can look as good and work as well as they do. I don't know of any programmers who are sticking to GTK1, and very few users.
most users _want_ their desktop to do more.
People want their _apps_ to do more.
Most people don't distinguish between the apps and the desktop. People think of the computer as an appliance which does various tasks, not as an app on top of a desktop on top of a WM on top of a windowing system on top of a C lib on top of a kernel. The GNOME and KDE teams are trying to improve the overall user experience.
This bullshit where GNOME is adding P2P and blogging, and KDE thinks it has to have 20,000 sidebar buttons and configuration panels on everything is completely ridiculous and unnecessary. All that stuff is supposed to be taken care of by the app writers.
It is being taken care of by the app writers. Who do you think wrote the p2p and blogging apps? They didn't just pop out of thin air. You sound as if you think it's a bad thing that such apps are available.
Nope. MFC apps use different widgets from VB apps, which use different widgets from Delphi apps. And MS Office implements a whole new widget set that's different every version (See Office 2003 for an especially ugly example of this).
/.ers don'tlike calling copyright infringement "theft" in either case. The main difference, which probably leads to the use of the term "theft" here but not in piracy articles, is that this involves hacking and unauthorized access to a computer system, as well as the actual leak. Copying songs isn't criminal (IANAL, but IIRC copyright is a civil matter), but this most certainly is. That doesn't justify talking about it as "theft", though.
The problem being that Bluetooth has nowhere the required bandwidth. Even power-hungry 802.11b is barely able to stream uncompressed CD-quality audio (and compression would kill battery life and make the headset bulky).
If this was possible with current tech, Apple would have jumped on it a long time ago.
99% of Windows Firefox users don't see this bug. You don't have to edit a config file to fix it. It occurs in a prerelease version.
I don't see what your problem is. Released IE is much buggier than even Firefox 0.5 or 0.6 was.
Re:Perfect application
on
OpenGL in PHP
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· Score: 1
RTFA. This has nothing to do with the web. This is just a wrapper around a.dll that allows PHP programs to access the video card and use OpenGL on the local machine. It's Windows-only and the API probably sucks.
Python and Perl also have (much more mature) OpenGL support. I doubt they would fit your needs either (OpenGL is for real-time local graphics, not networked visualization), but they'd almost certainly be better than this hack.
Re:Using the right tool for the job
on
OpenGL in PHP
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· Score: 2, Informative
GTK can embed an OpenGL display, so yes, you can use 3D in GTK apps. That wasn't, however, the parent's point. The point was that PHP was designed for server-side scripting and is therefore not the right tool for any GUI job.
I meant it as "yes, it is a coincidence", which is true. But I guess you could see it the other way - "yes, there is a connection". Funny that I get modded to +5 for an ambiguous one-word comment .:-)
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I thought about that, but since you can't write a Perl prog in one second, I figured if that's what he'd meant then he would've chosen times that made more sense. Maybe not. :-)
The parent's point was that if Perl takes a second, then perfectly-optimized C cannot take more than a second, because the Perl interpreter is written in C. That said, it's a fairly moot point, because you could probably have written 500 Perl programs in the time it takes to optimize that one C prog.
Huh? When you write a Perl program, it's run by an interpreter, which is written in C. Your argument would make sense if assembly was an interpreted language, which it's not (Bochs, VPC, and JVMs excepted).
Not an expert here by any means, but it's my impression that the Linux kernel has had a lot more work put into embedded use than any of the BSDs.
While I can think of a number of other reasons not to buy an iPod, it can run Linux.
That said, I agree with you - the validity of everyone's votes is much more important than the secrecy of a small minority. Disabled people have survived on paper ballots for the past 200+ years, they can do it a little longer.
Third parties in a presidential election will never be viable given the current plurality/electoral college system. If you want to work towards getting a sane voting system (runoff, instant-runoff, whatever), then I'm all for it - I'd vote for Nader in an instant if I knew that if he didn't make a good showing, my vote could still count for Kerry. As it is, a vote for Nader is only justifiable if you're in Texas, California, or another guarenteed-outcome state.
All those Democrats whining about how much damage Nader did really need to consider that he wouldn't have been standing if the Democrat party really represented the people that voted for him.
The Democratic Party can't perfectly represent everyone. If they had pandered to the small group that voted Nader, they would probably have lost at least that many votes to Bush on the other end. As it is, the Nader voters got us a president considerably more distasteful, from their point of view, than Gore would have been.
There is also a minority that can see and can't read normal writing. How do they vote?
The main reason to install GTK2 is that GTK1 sucks. It's ugly, inaccessable, harder to use, and more difficult to program for. Admittedly, it's a bit slower, but unless you're on a P1 you shouldn't notice a difference. It's because of GTK2 that Mozilla on Linux has the excellent text rendering that it does. It's because of GTK2 that apps such as Abiword, Gnumeric, and Evolution can look as good and work as well as they do. I don't know of any programmers who are sticking to GTK1, and very few users.
Most people don't distinguish between the apps and the desktop. People think of the computer as an appliance which does various tasks, not as an app on top of a desktop on top of a WM on top of a windowing system on top of a C lib on top of a kernel. The GNOME and KDE teams are trying to improve the overall user experience.
This bullshit where GNOME is adding P2P and blogging, and KDE thinks it has to have 20,000 sidebar buttons and configuration panels on everything is completely ridiculous and unnecessary. All that stuff is supposed to be taken care of by the app writers.
It is being taken care of by the app writers. Who do you think wrote the p2p and blogging apps? They didn't just pop out of thin air. You sound as if you think it's a bad thing that such apps are available.
The point was that XP does have pretty apps, AA, and all that, and is still faster than KDE/GNOME.
Nope. MFC apps use different widgets from VB apps, which use different widgets from Delphi apps. And MS Office implements a whole new widget set that's different every version (See Office 2003 for an especially ugly example of this).
OO.o is not written in Java.
/.ers don't like calling copyright infringement "theft" in either case. The main difference, which probably leads to the use of the term "theft" here but not in piracy articles, is that this involves hacking and unauthorized access to a computer system, as well as the actual leak. Copying songs isn't criminal (IANAL, but IIRC copyright is a civil matter), but this most certainly is. That doesn't justify talking about it as "theft", though.
If this was possible with current tech, Apple would have jumped on it a long time ago.
IE is built on the Mosiac code. So, technically speaking, the parent is correct.
I don't see what your problem is. Released IE is much buggier than even Firefox 0.5 or 0.6 was.
Python and Perl also have (much more mature) OpenGL support. I doubt they would fit your needs either (OpenGL is for real-time local graphics, not networked visualization), but they'd almost certainly be better than this hack.
GTK can embed an OpenGL display, so yes, you can use 3D in GTK apps. That wasn't, however, the parent's point. The point was that PHP was designed for server-side scripting and is therefore not the right tool for any GUI job.
A viola is (debatably) a musical instrument. "Voila" is the word you're looking for.
Or if you're building your own machine.
Although that would be pretty fucking cool.
RTF.
Not Janet Jackson's.
I meant it as "yes, it is a coincidence", which is true. But I guess you could see it the other way - "yes, there is a connection". Funny that I get modded to +5 for an ambiguous one-word comment . :-)