Google doesn't seem to have had a problem with Google Earth. Nero burning rom works fine. None of the various proprietary games for Linux has any problem. Adobe Acrobat Reader works. Realplayer works great.
Sure - the developer who builds the package has to have a basic understanding of the platform. They may even end up having to spend some time researching the problem. But - if you're willing to go to the effort to port to a new platform a couple hours of study shouldn't bother you.
Realplayer is a perfect example of building and packaging a proprietary application for Linux. They built using Gtk for maximum compatibility, and they initially released in.rpm and.tar.gz. They then allowed free redistribution, so all the major distributions repackaged the program and distributed the packages in their non-free repositories at no cost to Real Networks.
There is just as much a standard GUI layer on Unix/Linux systems as there is on Mac. That standard is Gtk. There is a second, alternative standard that's appropriate under certain circumstances - Qt - but Mac OS X has two standards as well: Carbon and Cocoa.
Gtk has been available on every major Unix/Linux system for about the same amount of time that Window XP/.NET and Mac OS X have been around. The LGPL license isn't a relevant constraint on programming.
As for "a standard GUI layer", sorry. X has been the standard GUI layer for Linux/Unix systems for longer than 32 bit PCs have been available and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Complaining about it is no more useful or relevant to application programmers than saying that Mac OS X or Windows are using the wrong display layer.
That really depends on how cheap fabrication gear is.
If you could "design" a car out of open source CAD files, and then send the resulting file down to the local mechanic for component fabrication on a $100,000 fabricator (maybe it carves the pieces out of metal with a laser, whatever) - then building your own car would turn into a similarly complex project to building a nice RC car kit.
The real problem is that actually having a new engine design built is damn expensive - fabrication requires a bunch of experts and a machine shop.
It did. The hardware doesn't any more. Not to mention, you overlooked where the hardware CAN work but simply doesn't because, as is becoming oddly typical, release schedules is getting more and more important than good software.
So now it's on the "Unsupported Hardware" list. It's worth mentioning that hardware became unsupported - that sucks - but a software review should still be done on supported hardware.
AMD's release will be first, so they'll be in the lead for a little while - in exactly the same way that Intel's Core 2 Duo release came before Barcelona.
In the mid 90's, Intel stuff was pretty obviously better. Then AMD was pretty obviously better for a while. Now it's really interesting - they're basicly neck and neck with each pulling ahead with new releases and then falling behind again.
That's why we're constantly hearing about the performance advantages of Penryn. If anything, AMD has been a bit quieter than Intel. Compare the references on the Wikipedia pages for Barcelona and Penryn if you want evidence.
This really isn't a big deal. You couldn't upgrade an AMD processor across sockets anyway because of the onboard memory controller, and you probably wouldn't want to anyway - if the new processor is so fast that there isn't a similar one available for your socket type, the old components on your existing motherboard would just slow it down.
an extremely high risk of corrupting your entire file system in the event of power outage
I've never heard of an ext2 file system not surviving a power failure. Sure, it has to be fdisked. Sure, sometimes a file or even a directory is corrupted (in the latter case stuff shows up in "lost+found"), but the file system as a whole is usually fine.
AMD is still winning on processor performance/price in the mid range desktop ($100-$200 for a processor), low end laptop (less than $600 for the machine), and very high end server segments (4+ sockets). That's more of the market than they currently have market share, so all they're really losing right now is the PR battle.
After enough number of iterations trying to optimize a software program to do everything very well compared to the base "naive" solution, you end up with an OS that does everything poorly.
That's blatantly false. Sure, there are tradeoffs. There are also cases where a better algorithm is an outright win 100% of the time.
Pebble bed reactors are a horrible idea, because there's no way to recycle the spent fuel or to breed new fuel. If we used all the world's easily accessible Uranium reserves in pebble bed reactors, in about 50 years we'd be left with: A shitload of horrifically radioactive pebbles that are a nightmare to reprocess, many many tons of depleted uranium and no way to breed it into fuel without artificial neutron sources.
On the other hand, if we use modern fast breeding reactors there's the same zero risk of "china syndrome", and the fuel lasts for 10,000 years instead of 50. Oh, and the results include almost no waste that will stay dangerously radioactive for more than a couple hundred years.
What? Are you complaining about the *gasp* pounds of spent nuclear fuel that are produced by a modern reactor? The stuff that could power the entire planet for thousands of years if we recycled it properly?
A nuclear power future where energy is "too cheap to meter" is not sustainable, and the end of that period will make the petroleum driven crucifiction of the middle east look tame by comparison.
With proper recycling, nuclear fission can sustain the planet's current energy usage (including stuff like gas in cars) for 10,000 years using our current reserves of Uranium. If we add in Thorium reserves, it's more like 50,000 years. I'm sure we can develop fusion or extremely effective renewables in that time.
Luckily there's still Thorium. Even if we waste all of the U235 like idiots, we can still use Thorium to breed U233, and then use U233 to breed the U238 into Pu239 & Pu240. We just have to carefully hold on to our "Depleted Uranium".
these things will be problems for longer than all of our known history. I once read a guide from some DOE project: how to warn people of the dangers of Yucca Mountain 20,000 years in the future.
This is a serious problem with the current nuclear fuel policies. If we just built recycling reactors, we could use up all the high level radiocative materials and be left with stuff that stays dangerous for only a couple hundred years.
Modern recycling reactor designs do not produce nuclear fuel in a form conducive to building nuclear weapons. If a softball size lump of U238+Pu239+Pu240+Random Actinides goes missing, it's no national security problem - the people who stole it will die from radiation poisoning and it'll take building a full scale nuclear reprocessing facility to separate the bomb material.
It'll be really tragic if we end up chemically contaminating the plutonium before we stored it in a manner that prevents reprocessing in order to "prevent proliferation". Schemes like that have been suggested, and - if widely implemented - could destroy something like 90% of our easily accessible energy sources.
This isn't a war, because Congress has declared war against no country. If we were at war (a declared war, against a country) POW camps might be necessary. Since we aren't at war, they aren't, because assault and murder are crimes everywhere - if these people committed those crimes they should be tried in the appropriate jurisdiction.
And the "War on Terror" is not an acceptable excuse to abandon the basic principle of respecting human rights. Maybe Guantanamo Bay is technically legal. Maybe it violates some treaty or other. That's a question for lawyers and diplomats - I don't even care about the answer.
As a rational human being, I can see that a policy of holding prisoners until the end of an endless war is a blatant human rights violation. As an American Citizen, I consider that to be unacceptable. If these people are really guilty of something so bad that they need to be imprisoned it shouldn't be that hard to convince a judge. If a judge can't be convinced, then continuing to hold them is utterly indefensible ethically.
Impressive. You're an utter bastard, but the tactics would actually accomplish something. Here's what you're missing: The only goals of the Iraq war are to increase oil prices and profit DOD contractors. (At least, if you assume that to be true you won't find any inconsistencies.)
Bullshit. Free or not has nothing to do with it. If the government is providing some service, that service should contribute to the public good. Censorship is absolutely not a public good.
Slashdot Mirror
So... what relevant (desktop targeted) distribution of Linux - or even BSD or Solaris - doesn't include Gtk by default?
Google doesn't seem to have had a problem with Google Earth. Nero burning rom works fine. None of the various proprietary games for Linux has any problem. Adobe Acrobat Reader works. Realplayer works great.
Sure - the developer who builds the package has to have a basic understanding of the platform. They may even end up having to spend some time researching the problem. But - if you're willing to go to the effort to port to a new platform a couple hours of study shouldn't bother you.
Realplayer is a perfect example of building and packaging a proprietary application for Linux. They built using Gtk for maximum compatibility, and they initially released in .rpm and .tar.gz. They then allowed free redistribution, so all the major distributions repackaged the program and distributed the packages in their non-free repositories at no cost to Real Networks.
There is just as much a standard GUI layer on Unix/Linux systems as there is on Mac. That standard is Gtk. There is a second, alternative standard that's appropriate under certain circumstances - Qt - but Mac OS X has two standards as well: Carbon and Cocoa.
Gtk has been available on every major Unix/Linux system for about the same amount of time that Window XP/.NET and Mac OS X have been around. The LGPL license isn't a relevant constraint on programming.
As for "a standard GUI layer", sorry. X has been the standard GUI layer for Linux/Unix systems for longer than 32 bit PCs have been available and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Complaining about it is no more useful or relevant to application programmers than saying that Mac OS X or Windows are using the wrong display layer.
That really depends on how cheap fabrication gear is.
If you could "design" a car out of open source CAD files, and then send the resulting file down to the local mechanic for component fabrication on a $100,000 fabricator (maybe it carves the pieces out of metal with a laser, whatever) - then building your own car would turn into a similarly complex project to building a nice RC car kit.
The real problem is that actually having a new engine design built is damn expensive - fabrication requires a bunch of experts and a machine shop.
In a real regime change, the creeping plague of bureaucracy is reset.
So now it's on the "Unsupported Hardware" list. It's worth mentioning that hardware became unsupported - that sucks - but a software review should still be done on supported hardware.
AMD's release will be first, so they'll be in the lead for a little while - in exactly the same way that Intel's Core 2 Duo release came before Barcelona.
In the mid 90's, Intel stuff was pretty obviously better. Then AMD was pretty obviously better for a while. Now it's really interesting - they're basicly neck and neck with each pulling ahead with new releases and then falling behind again.
Wait... what?
That's why we're constantly hearing about the performance advantages of Penryn. If anything, AMD has been a bit quieter than Intel. Compare the references on the Wikipedia pages for Barcelona and Penryn if you want evidence.
This really isn't a big deal. You couldn't upgrade an AMD processor across sockets anyway because of the onboard memory controller, and you probably wouldn't want to anyway - if the new processor is so fast that there isn't a similar one available for your socket type, the old components on your existing motherboard would just slow it down.
I've never heard of an ext2 file system not surviving a power failure. Sure, it has to be fdisked. Sure, sometimes a file or even a directory is corrupted (in the latter case stuff shows up in "lost+found"), but the file system as a whole is usually fine.
AMD is still winning on processor performance/price in the mid range desktop ($100-$200 for a processor), low end laptop (less than $600 for the machine), and very high end server segments (4+ sockets). That's more of the market than they currently have market share, so all they're really losing right now is the PR battle.
It is unacceptable for the government to provide a censored service. Either they should provide uncensored internet access or no internet access.
That's blatantly false. Sure, there are tradeoffs. There are also cases where a better algorithm is an outright win 100% of the time.
Being ignored by anti-nuke activists who say that they must be being "paid off by industry" to come to that conclusion.
Pebble bed reactors are a horrible idea, because there's no way to recycle the spent fuel or to breed new fuel. If we used all the world's easily accessible Uranium reserves in pebble bed reactors, in about 50 years we'd be left with: A shitload of horrifically radioactive pebbles that are a nightmare to reprocess, many many tons of depleted uranium and no way to breed it into fuel without artificial neutron sources.
On the other hand, if we use modern fast breeding reactors there's the same zero risk of "china syndrome", and the fuel lasts for 10,000 years instead of 50. Oh, and the results include almost no waste that will stay dangerously radioactive for more than a couple hundred years.
What? Are you complaining about the *gasp* pounds of spent nuclear fuel that are produced by a modern reactor? The stuff that could power the entire planet for thousands of years if we recycled it properly?
With proper recycling, nuclear fission can sustain the planet's current energy usage (including stuff like gas in cars) for 10,000 years using our current reserves of Uranium. If we add in Thorium reserves, it's more like 50,000 years. I'm sure we can develop fusion or extremely effective renewables in that time.
Luckily there's still Thorium. Even if we waste all of the U235 like idiots, we can still use Thorium to breed U233, and then use U233 to breed the U238 into Pu239 & Pu240. We just have to carefully hold on to our "Depleted Uranium".
This is a serious problem with the current nuclear fuel policies. If we just built recycling reactors, we could use up all the high level radiocative materials and be left with stuff that stays dangerous for only a couple hundred years.
Modern recycling reactor designs do not produce nuclear fuel in a form conducive to building nuclear weapons. If a softball size lump of U238+Pu239+Pu240+Random Actinides goes missing, it's no national security problem - the people who stole it will die from radiation poisoning and it'll take building a full scale nuclear reprocessing facility to separate the bomb material.
It'll be really tragic if we end up chemically contaminating the plutonium before we stored it in a manner that prevents reprocessing in order to "prevent proliferation". Schemes like that have been suggested, and - if widely implemented - could destroy something like 90% of our easily accessible energy sources.
This isn't a war, because Congress has declared war against no country. If we were at war (a declared war, against a country) POW camps might be necessary. Since we aren't at war, they aren't, because assault and murder are crimes everywhere - if these people committed those crimes they should be tried in the appropriate jurisdiction.
And the "War on Terror" is not an acceptable excuse to abandon the basic principle of respecting human rights. Maybe Guantanamo Bay is technically legal. Maybe it violates some treaty or other. That's a question for lawyers and diplomats - I don't even care about the answer.
As a rational human being, I can see that a policy of holding prisoners until the end of an endless war is a blatant human rights violation. As an American Citizen, I consider that to be unacceptable. If these people are really guilty of something so bad that they need to be imprisoned it shouldn't be that hard to convince a judge. If a judge can't be convinced, then continuing to hold them is utterly indefensible ethically.
Impressive. You're an utter bastard, but the tactics would actually accomplish something. Here's what you're missing: The only goals of the Iraq war are to increase oil prices and profit DOD contractors. (At least, if you assume that to be true you won't find any inconsistencies.)
Bullshit. Free or not has nothing to do with it. If the government is providing some service, that service should contribute to the public good. Censorship is absolutely not a public good.