> These guys will go through the GPL like an
> elephant through rice-paper.
Not a chance. If the GPL was vulnerable it would have been taken down years ago. It has not be tested in court precisely because no-one's lawyers believe it is vulnerable.
> They will want, and try to make, one,
> standardised, non-MS, copy-regulated, platform
> for their content and that is why they want
> Linux - because they can't have Windows.
If they wanted a platform they could twist to their evil desires, they would probably just use FreeBSD. No pesky GPL to worry about. If they don't plan to respect the GPL, then why the heck would they bother with Linux? Your assertion that they want to control the Linux brand is ridiculous. The Linux brand is completely worthless to them; the users they care about will either have never heard of Linux or won't care about it.
> But in Mordor, Sam wears the Ring. Sometimes he
> wants to be invisible, and so he is. But at least
> once he instead uses the Ring to intimidate an
> orc, who sees him as some great Captain. At the
> time, that's what Sam needed done, and so that's
> what it does.
The intimidation effect happens when Sam is not wearing the ring. Every time a hobbit wears the ring, he turns invisible whether he wants to or not.
Because New Line has to get the DVD out ASAP so that anyone who didn't catch FELLOWSHIP in the theatres can get up to speed before TWO TOWERS comes out.
You are correct. The scene was filmed but edited out. If you watch the trailers carefully, one of them shows the scene. Similarly, there are a lot of publicity shots floating around of Galadriel in her swan-boat, which we never see in this cut of the movie.
So, ROLL ON THE DIRECTOR'S CUT! 4 hours? Sounds good to me!
He answered directly, concisely, and precisely to every question. What more could you ask for? Are you so used to evasion and dissembling that anything else is intolerably shocking?
If I was submitting code this is exactly the sort of response that I'd most appreciate.
> It's a known bug that mozilla sucks when viewing
> dhtml.
That's a bit of an overstatement. Tons of complex DHTML works fine. Some of the major remaining DHTML bugs are being fixed (e.g., "Cannot modify contents of dynamically created IFRAME" was just fixed). We'll slowly but surely track down the rest.
Believe it or not, Mozilla is faster than IE for some DOM operations. Of course you don't see bugzilla reports about those:-).
Go to the W3C Web site and ingest the HTML4 and CSS2 specifications. Throw in all the I18N requirements (Bidi, charsets, etc) (Opera doesn't do them BTW). Throw in all the image formats and plugin support. Now throw in hacks to make a million differently broken pages work reasonably. NOW, in case you think you're done, make sure your engine is fully incremental so everything updates smoothly when stuff takes a while to load, or when you resize the window, or when the document modifies itself in arbitrary ways using the DOM (Opera doesn't handle the latter). Now make it all robust and fast for when some fool writes a page with 100 IFRAMEs, or 1000 combo boxes, or 10000 paragraphs all nested inside each other. And make sure you have ZERO buffer overruns or your users are toast.
Java does not rely on a "run time stack" for its type checking, whatever that means. Java does plenty of checks at compile time (and load time, if you're using dynamic loading/linking).
Java, like Cyclone, Vault and every other language you'd ever want to use (and many you wouldn't), relies on a combination of static and dynamic checks to ensure safety. Cyclone does move more checks over to the static side than Java does, so it might get higher performance. But no compiler, and certainly not Cyclone's, will be able to eliminate all dynamic checks (for array bounds and null pointers, for example). Vault moves even more over than Cyclone.
There is a spectrum that describes the amount of dynamic checks that have to be performed for safe execution of a language. It looks a bit like this:
Vault... ML... Cyclone... Java... Perl... Scheme
(C and C++ aren't on there because they don't have any concept of "safe execution":-).)
Eclipse *can* work with your programs that way. OTI is reproducing all the VAJ functionality in Eclipse, and more. It's just stored as regular source files underneath, that's all.
You couldn't be more wrong. When Eclipse 2.0 is released to the public under the open source license ("Real Soon Now"), it will include a lot of brand new code that has never before appeared in any IBM product.
Eclipse avoids one of the worst problems for Java client code, by using native GUI widgets instead of Swing.
> It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did
> Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java.
I should mention that unlike Visual Age for Java, with Eclipse you can use a variety of JVMs. In particular you can debug code running in any JVM that supports the Java debugging interfaces.
Eclipse is an IDE framework written in Java. It is very extensible; all support for editors, compilers, debuggers, and other tools, etc is provided as plugins.
Although it's written in Java, it can be used to develop programs written in other languages; there are already proof-of-concept plugins for C (using gcc) and make.
It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java. These people have a lot of experience building IDEs.
Currently you can download the basic framework and a set of plugins that let you edit, compile and debug Java applications --- a pretty decent Java IDE. (The very-context-sensitive code-completion is pretty nice. It also has a great feature where it compiles the code every time you save and puts unobtrusive error icons at every line with an error --- an excellent way to keep your source error-free as you go, without getting in your face.) You get the source but currently not under a true open source license. The OTI people promise that they will be moving to a true open source license soon.
This is a big initiative within IBM. The WebSphere Workbench product is already based on Eclipse. Lots of people within IBM, including IBM Research, and several other companies are building new development tools as Eclipse plugins.
One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT, which is designed to expose a single cross-platform API but is reimplemented using native widgets on each platform. You can download versions for Win32 and Motif but in the newsgroups some OTI people said that they're working on a Gtk port.
> AMD is trying to do in hard and in real time
> what a software (let's say a compiler:)) can do
> much more easily in a very long time.
NO. It is very hard for a compiler to accurately predict what will happen at run time (for example, which loads will hit in the cache and which will miss). It is much easier for the CPU to collect, predict and use this information at run time.
IA64 pushers talk all the time about how smart the compiler "can" be, but they don't actually have any such smart compiler. That is why their performance sucks.
Furthermore compilers are not going to get much smarter in the near future; just because the technology is needed does not mean it will suddenly appear. Compiler researchers aren't stupid and they haven't been sitting on their hands for the last forty years.
> And a CPU can't see more than a few operations
> ahead whereas the compiler can see the WHOLE
> code.
... until the program makes a call into a shared library that was compiled by someone else.
> Just recompile all your software : to run old
> stuff, use old hardware.
Uh huh. So every single time a new chip comes out, Microsoft et al are going to release new compiled versions of all their software. I don't think so.
No doubt it would be quite risky for AOL to replace IE with Gecko. They might lose customers.
But if they go through with it, they'd certainly force lots of Web sites to become more standards-compliant. So other makers of standards-compliant browsers would benefit hugely, with no risk to themselves. This would be a very good thing.
Personally I suspect AOL is just testing the waters, and won't go with Gecko until it is very much better than IE.
Slashdot Mirror
> These guys will go through the GPL like an
> elephant through rice-paper.
Not a chance. If the GPL was vulnerable it would have been taken down years ago. It has not be tested in court precisely because no-one's lawyers believe it is vulnerable.
> They will want, and try to make, one,
> standardised, non-MS, copy-regulated, platform
> for their content and that is why they want
> Linux - because they can't have Windows.
If they wanted a platform they could twist to their evil desires, they would probably just use FreeBSD. No pesky GPL to worry about. If they don't plan to respect the GPL, then why the heck would they bother with Linux? Your assertion that they want to control the Linux brand is ridiculous. The Linux brand is completely worthless to them; the users they care about will either have never heard of Linux or won't care about it.
> In many ways they are much more powerful than
> Microsoft has ever been.
In what ways?
Do they have a monopoly on anything?
Have they demonstrated the desire and ability to gain monopoly power in more and more areas?
Do they have anywhere near the financial strength of Microsoft?
Have they demonstrated a pathological fear and hatred of open source software?
The answers are no, no, no and no. AOLTW is much less powerful and much less dangerous than Microsoft.
> And in the end, AOL management managed to drive
> out much of Netscape's talent. Their attrition
> rate skyrocketed
This was *well* under way before AOL bought them. Turnover has since stabilized.
Mozilla development was a huge mess from well before AOL bought them. Again, the situation has become a lot better since AOL bought them.
Don't blame Netscape's woes on AOL. They were totally screwed up before AOL arrived on the scene.
> But in Mordor, Sam wears the Ring. Sometimes he
> wants to be invisible, and so he is. But at least
> once he instead uses the Ring to intimidate an
> orc, who sees him as some great Captain. At the
> time, that's what Sam needed done, and so that's
> what it does.
The intimidation effect happens when Sam is not wearing the ring. Every time a hobbit wears the ring, he turns invisible whether he wants to or not.
Because New Line has to get the DVD out ASAP so that anyone who didn't catch FELLOWSHIP in the theatres can get up to speed before TWO TOWERS comes out.
The giving of the gifts scene in Lothlorien, plus the part where Gimli falls for Galadriel, were both filmed. Hopefully they'll be on the DVD.
You are correct. The scene was filmed but edited out. If you watch the trailers carefully, one of them shows the scene. Similarly, there are a lot of publicity shots floating around of Galadriel in her swan-boat, which we never see in this cut of the movie.
So, ROLL ON THE DIRECTOR'S CUT! 4 hours? Sounds good to me!
He answered directly, concisely, and precisely to every question. What more could you ask for? Are you so used to evasion and dissembling that anything else is intolerably shocking?
If I was submitting code this is exactly the sort of response that I'd most appreciate.
> It's a known bug that mozilla sucks when viewing
:-).
> dhtml.
That's a bit of an overstatement. Tons of complex DHTML works fine. Some of the major remaining DHTML bugs are being fixed (e.g., "Cannot modify contents of dynamically created IFRAME" was just fixed). We'll slowly but surely track down the rest.
Believe it or not, Mozilla is faster than IE for some DOM operations. Of course you don't see bugzilla reports about those
Google for the "Mozilla user agent toolbar"
> Rendering HTML is not rocket science
Oh yes it is.
Go to the W3C Web site and ingest the HTML4 and CSS2 specifications. Throw in all the I18N requirements (Bidi, charsets, etc) (Opera doesn't do them BTW). Throw in all the image formats and plugin support. Now throw in hacks to make a million differently broken pages work reasonably. NOW, in case you think you're done, make sure your engine is fully incremental so everything updates smoothly when stuff takes a while to load, or when you resize the window, or when the document modifies itself in arbitrary ways using the DOM (Opera doesn't handle the latter). Now make it all robust and fast for when some fool writes a page with 100 IFRAMEs, or 1000 combo boxes, or 10000 paragraphs all nested inside each other. And make sure you have ZERO buffer overruns or your users are toast.
Sounds easy, huh?
You are wrong.
... ML ... Cyclone ... Java ... Perl ... Scheme
:-).)
Java does not rely on a "run time stack" for its type checking, whatever that means. Java does plenty of checks at compile time (and load time, if you're using dynamic loading/linking).
Java, like Cyclone, Vault and every other language you'd ever want to use (and many you wouldn't), relies on a combination of static and dynamic checks to ensure safety. Cyclone does move more checks over to the static side than Java does, so it might get higher performance. But no compiler, and certainly not Cyclone's, will be able to eliminate all dynamic checks (for array bounds and null pointers, for example). Vault moves even more over than Cyclone.
There is a spectrum that describes the amount of dynamic checks that have to be performed for safe execution of a language. It looks a bit like this:
Vault
(C and C++ aren't on there because they don't have any concept of "safe execution"
Eclipse *can* work with your programs that way. OTI is reproducing all the VAJ functionality in Eclipse, and more. It's just stored as regular source files underneath, that's all.
No, Eclipse is file based. They learned the lesson. Woohoo!
You couldn't be more wrong. When Eclipse 2.0 is released to the public under the open source license ("Real Soon Now"), it will include a lot of brand new code that has never before appeared in any IBM product.
Eclipse avoids one of the worst problems for Java client code, by using native GUI widgets instead of Swing.
If you're already happy with Netbeans, then obviously you shouldn't switch.
One major difference is Swing vs SWT. A lot of people want support for native widgets. For example, on Windows, SWT supports ActiveX controls.
There may be significant internal technical differences, but I don't know enough about either system to say.
> It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did
> Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java.
I should mention that unlike Visual Age for Java, with Eclipse you can use a variety of JVMs. In particular you can debug code running in any JVM that supports the Java debugging interfaces.
Eclipse is an IDE framework written in Java. It is very extensible; all support for editors, compilers, debuggers, and other tools, etc is provided as plugins.
Although it's written in Java, it can be used to develop programs written in other languages; there are already proof-of-concept plugins for C (using gcc) and make.
It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java. These people have a lot of experience building IDEs.
Currently you can download the basic framework and a set of plugins that let you edit, compile and debug Java applications --- a pretty decent Java IDE. (The very-context-sensitive code-completion is pretty nice. It also has a great feature where it compiles the code every time you save and puts unobtrusive error icons at every line with an error --- an excellent way to keep your source error-free as you go, without getting in your face.) You get the source but currently not under a true open source license. The OTI people promise that they will be moving to a true open source license soon.
This is a big initiative within IBM. The WebSphere Workbench product is already based on Eclipse. Lots of people within IBM, including IBM Research, and several other companies are building new development tools as Eclipse plugins.
One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT, which is designed to expose a single cross-platform API but is reimplemented using native widgets on each platform. You can download versions for Win32 and Motif but in the newsgroups some OTI people said that they're working on a Gtk port.
More information at http://www.eclipse.org.
You are completely wrong. MSN is part of Microsoft Corporation.
> AMD is trying to do in hard and in real time
> what a software (let's say a compiler:)) can do
> much more easily in a very long time.
NO. It is very hard for a compiler to accurately predict what will happen at run time (for example, which loads will hit in the cache and which will miss). It is much easier for the CPU to collect, predict and use this information at run time.
IA64 pushers talk all the time about how smart the compiler "can" be, but they don't actually have any such smart compiler. That is why their performance sucks.
Furthermore compilers are not going to get much smarter in the near future; just because the technology is needed does not mean it will suddenly appear. Compiler researchers aren't stupid and they haven't been sitting on their hands for the last forty years.
> And a CPU can't see more than a few operations
> ahead whereas the compiler can see the WHOLE
> code.
... until the program makes a call into a shared library that was compiled by someone else.
> Just recompile all your software : to run old
> stuff, use old hardware.
Uh huh. So every single time a new chip comes out, Microsoft et al are going to release new compiled versions of all their software. I don't think so.
> keep the simple instructions and emulate the
> rest (such as those used to handle BCD
> arithmetic, hardly used today)
In fact, in Hammer's 64-bit mode, the BCD instructions (and some others) are not supported.
> the drawbacks are evident: higher complexity,
> power dissipation, etc.
Check out the heat dissipation on Itanium! One guy I know has a box that puts out 120W per CPU.
A simpler architecture is a nice thing, but experience seems to have shown that it doesn't matter that much in practice.
> Itanium can run un-modified x86
Slower than a 150MHz Pentium, yeah.
No doubt it would be quite risky for AOL to replace IE with Gecko. They might lose customers.
But if they go through with it, they'd certainly force lots of Web sites to become more standards-compliant. So other makers of standards-compliant browsers would benefit hugely, with no risk to themselves. This would be a very good thing.
Personally I suspect AOL is just testing the waters, and won't go with Gecko until it is very much better than IE.
Opera doesn't even support the DOM as well as Konqueror --- let alone Mozilla or IE.
(Hint: Support for the DOM read-only methods is EASY. Support for the read-write methods is HARD.)
Netscape 6.x releases based on Mozilla include a spell checker.