Seriously, I have a hard time figuring out why so many people bash Qt. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
It was written in Norway, where they eat fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, and fish for dinner also. No good red-blooded American would have anything to do with such a fishy product. (Seriously) it's just ordinary American xenophobia.
PS no, I'm not American... but then I understand irony and like Qt.
CLI == Command Line Interface | Command Line Interpreter
wtf is wrong with these people, reusing existing acronyms?
Didn't you know there was a world shortage of acronyms? Microsoft, that caring, environmentally-aware corporation, are seeking to preserve the rapidly depleting population of unused acronyms by recycling redundent ones.
After all, no-one uses a Command Line Interface any more, do they?
I dont understand the fuss over Konq at all; it may be more conformant than Netscape 4 but considerably less conformant than Mozilla or MSIE. This is not my opinion. Konqueror has less support for the gamut of css1, css2
For heaven's sake, haven't you been reading? Konqi has been ahead of both Mozilla and IE on it's CSS2 rendering for about 18 months; Mozilla and IE are only now catching up. Don't believe me? Look at my home page. Note where the navigation panel is. Note what happens when you scroll. Konqi's got it right since version 2.0. Opera got it right in version 6, a year later. Mozilla got it right in 0.9.6, eighteen months later. Microsoft IE has got it right in the last six months - early versions of IE 6 get it wrong. That's simple, demonstrable fact.
Maybe that's because you're coding your web page using features that Konqueror supports well?
In a sense, clearly I am; but I didn't set out to. I'm not a member of the Konqi team, and I use many different browsers (currently have twelve on this machine, and use Konqi, Mozilla, Dillo, Opera and Lynx regularly). The point I was making is just that the Konqi team have been ahead of everyone else in their CSS2 implementation.
It doesn't really matter *whose* fault it is that things do not display properly on web page X with browser Y. What matters is that it doesn't work, but it's fine with browser Z.
I have to disagree with you. It matters critically whose fault it is. For example, Microsoft Front Page generates invalid HTML which IE just happens to be able to render; similarly, Office 2000 generates invalid XML which IE just happens to be able to parse, If the Mozilla or Konqi team alter their browser to cope with Microsoft's deliberate mistakes, Microsoft will just start making different deliberate mistakes. It's really important that we put the blame where it belongs - which is chiefly with unprofessional and incompetent 'Web designers' who don't care about the quality of the code they produce provided it works with their Microsoft browser.
We cannot defeat monopolies if we play their games.
One area where IE simply trashes Netscape and Mozilla is rendering huge tables. I'm talking about the 1 meg of text variety. Has anyone tried putting the various browers through the paces on this kind of test?
If you've got 1 meg of text in a table, you've solved the wrong problem. That's more than a full-length novel.
Having been (in the last year) through Konqueror, Galleon, Netscape (4.whatever), and Mozilla on a Mandrake box, I've found that Mozilla's the only one that consistantly displays pages correctly. The other 3 I found would often screw up font sizes and leave side bars unreadable.
Yes, but, seriously, how many of those pages were valid, standards conformant code? For a long time Konqueror was the only browser which displayed all the features of my home page (which is valid code) correctly. Now Mozilla has caught up, and I believe (though I haven't checked myself) later IE6's can display it too. But while Konqi has some deficiencies in its ECMAScript, it's HTML/CSS rendering are highly standards-conformant
It's not the Konqi team's fault if 90% of the commercial 'Web designers' out there are blithering incompetents who could not write valid code to save their lives.
It actually doesn't matter whether global warming is real or not; and it doesn't matter whether we're causing it or not.
If it is real, then the potential costs are so high (most major cities, for example, grew up around ports and are only a few metres above sea level), and the time it takes to turn the juggernaut around is so long, that we need to be taking urgent avoiding action now while we continue to urgently assess the reality of the risk.
If it turns out that global warming is happening but that the major causes are natural, then we're still better off if we've done everything we can to stop making things worse.
If it turns out that global warming isn't happening and it was all a panic about nithing, then we'll still have more efficient transportation, better insulated houses, and a cleaner planet with greater fossil fuel reserves to pass on to our children.
But if the United States carries on the way it's going and it turns out that that global warming is real, then the voters of Florida, Mississippi, and Texas aren't going to cheer too loudly for the President and the generation which lost 20% of the land area of the continental United States, and turned another 20% into desert.
Re:Breakout suggestion:
on
Animate Your LILO
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Linux would reach the tops of the Netcraft uptime chart in no time!
For values of 'no time' slightly greater than three years...
What really happened with Alpha Centauri?
on
A Loki Timeline
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the things which clearly didn't help Loki was the Alpha Centauri launch problem, and even now I'd really like to know what happened. The Beta was out in May 2000, and it was full-featured, stable and good. On the 28th June 2000 they announced it was ready for duplication, and I ordered my copy from Amazon. In December 2000 Amazon cancelled the order saying they couldn't get it. In April 2001 it finally came out, and I bought my copy... and it's still far and away the game I play most often.
But for nine months - nine months - poor Sam Lantinga was hanging out on the Loki newsgroups explaining that there was a problem about the artwork for the packaging.... and when the game eventually arrived, it came without the collateral that the PC version had, just a bare CD in a DVD-style wallet.
So what really happened? Were Firaxis messing Loki around? Were Electronic Arts messing Loki around? Had Loki just not got the cash flow to print the boxes? (I can't believe this - there must have been enough pre-orders. There was a lot of interest). Judging by the quality of the beta and the demo, I see no reason at all to believe that the game was not finished in June 2000.
Well, that's it, I suppose. Masses of Respect to Scott and to Sam and to all the troops. It was a brave effort; I'm really sorry it didn't fly.
Nominet has, IMO, very sharp practises. If you "buy" a domain in the UK (domain.co.uk) via an ISP, Nominet maintains a "tag" linking your domain to the "provding" ISP, until another ISP takes it over.
Oh, for heaven's sake!
Anyone can be a Nominet tag holder. I'm a tag holder myself. You don't have to be an ISP. You don't have to run your own DNS. If you want complete control over your domain, just register your own tag.
Re:Worse than running something as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
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· Score: 2
The make install step can do something nasty without telling you (how many people fully read & understand the Makefiles in the above scenario?)
This may seem obvious, but in case it hasn't occured to someone:
yourself$ make
make the program
yourself$ make -n install
Show exactly what make install will do, without doing any of it; read the output carefully and make sure you approve
yourself$ su -c 'make install'
This way you get to check through what a 'make install' is going to do without exposing yourself to risk. Might be even better still to have a special user identity (not your usual login) under which you build untrusted software, but I haven't got that paranoid yet.
The posts I don't want to read are the anonymous coward posts - if people can't be bothered to use an identity, I can't be bothered to read them. Guess which user identity you uniquely can't set as 'foe'?
Fix it, someone.
If open source can't provide people with a viewer that can render one of the world's most widely used formats, then there is something seriously wrong with the blind faith that the open source
PDF is a proprietary format. Everytime an Open Source viewer appears which can render all of current generation PDF, Adobe can (and will) move the goalposts again. There are perfectly good open standards (e.g. HTML) for representing online forms, and there are perfectly good Open Source viewers for those formats.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 2
The thing is that the stone isn't even a Philosopher's stone. Philosopher's stone turns any common metal to gold. The Harry Potter stone gives you immortality.
Medieval alchemists theories about the nature of matter predicted that the Philosopher's Stone could transmute any substance into any other substance and produce the elixir of life (and that it would have several other interesting properties to, including the ability to cure all diseases).
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 2
The Philosopher's Stone was an object sought by alchemists thoughout the middle ages. It was thought to give eternal life, and to be able to transmute substances (including turn lead into gold).
Don't they teach any history of science in US schools? (not sarcastic, genuinely interested)
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 2
I read the first two books (I refuse to buy the third and fourth in hardback)
Then you're missing out. So far each successive book in the sequence has been more ambitious than it predecessor, and so far (for my money) each has been better. We don't have children so we can't even pretend we're buying them for the children. We buy them for us - and we are eagerly anticipating the next.
We're also booked to go and see the film next week - something we don't often do.
Just one thing puzzles me: why have they retitled the film 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone' in the States? Don't Merkin children know what a Philosopher's Stone is?
However, having to pay for them takes the purpose out of any free operating system. I'd just assume use windows for those programs
You just don't get it, do you?
How many times do people have to repeat 'free as in speach, not free as in beer' before you get it? I've no objection to paying for software. I'm a programmer. I make my living through other people paying me for my work, it would be completely hypocritical to refuse to pay other people for their work.
The issue is not whether it costs, but whether we can use it freely. And if we can't use it freely, is the cost in freedom worth the return?
I don't have Windows on my box. I don't want Windows on my box. I would, occasionally, like to be able to view QuickTime movies, but I can live without. Am I prepared to pay eighteen dollars to see them? Perhaps. But if there was an open source alternative, I'd be more prepared to pay the originators for it - because it's worth more.
While they definitely did have overlapping windows, at least some systems which ran on these machines had strange restrictions as to output and stacking order.
Sorry, I was there, I used 'em, I programmed 'em. Remember these were the machines for which the BITBLTer was developed. Certainly every window was stored as a bitmap, but that bitmap could be anywhere, and you could write to it anywhere. It most emphatically did not have to be on top of the stack or even visible. There were no operations which you can perform on a modern WIMP that you could not perform on an 1108 in 1984. No restrictions at all. None.
Actually, I believe that Xerox did NOT have overlapping windows, it only appeared to.
Then you believe wrong.
I personally used Xerox 1108 ('Dandelion') and 1186 ('Daybreak') machines from 1984 until 1988. They definitely, without question or possibility of doubt, had multiple overlapping windows, and, indeed, all the features of a modern WIMP environment. Xerox Stars, Dolphins, Dorados, Dandetigers and a number of other Xerox machines (including the Smalltalk ones whose model designations I've forgotten) had multiple overlapping windows at least as far back as 1978. It's probable (but I don't know this for a fact because I never saw one) that the Alto also had multiple overlapping windows, at least in it's Smalltalk mode.
Remember that the Xerox movable overlapping windows paradigm appeared at a time when tiled and framed paradigms were widespread (Symbolics, TI Explorer, a whole range of other systems) and quickly became universal because it worked better. It still does.
Sure, there are issues in navigating the stack of windows, particularly if you use desktops as cluttered as I tend to; sure, less sophisticated computer users may find these navigation problems difficult. But focus, visibility, prominence and accessibility are in the hands of the user, and that's where they belong
Well they probably hardly know or care about Konqueror. From what I've read the page specifically blocks Opera and Mozilla...
It also blocks Konqi. The UA String I'm currently sending is 'Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Debian GNU/Linux 2.2.19)'. Childish, I know, but it works and it amuses me.
My second note is that the content of msn.com (both the upgrade page and the real page) is now written in XHTML (a version of HTML that conforms to XML specifications). My guess is that this is Microsoft's justification for forcing people to "upgrade" to IE6... they want their users to be using an XHTML-compliant browser.
XHTML has been very carefully designed to be backwards compatible. Very, very few browsers will have any difficulty with it, even the oldest.
Software patenting is not rife. It isn't even legal in over 98% of the countries in the world. It's vanishingly rare. The main place it is legal is (not coincidentally) the most lawyer-ridden country on the planet.
Frankly the rest of the world does not want the United States exporting it's beurocratic idiocies to us - we have enough of our own. This is your mess. Clean it up.
Slashdot Mirror
I see Draeker was an IP lawyer. My prejudice against the breed is only comfirmed.
It was written in Norway, where they eat fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, and fish for dinner also. No good red-blooded American would have anything to do with such a fishy product. (Seriously) it's just ordinary American xenophobia.
PS no, I'm not American... but then I understand irony and like Qt.
Didn't you know there was a world shortage of acronyms? Microsoft, that caring, environmentally-aware corporation, are seeking to preserve the rapidly depleting population of unused acronyms by recycling redundent ones.
After all, no-one uses a Command Line Interface any more, do they?
For heaven's sake, haven't you been reading? Konqi has been ahead of both Mozilla and IE on it's CSS2 rendering for about 18 months; Mozilla and IE are only now catching up. Don't believe me? Look at my home page. Note where the navigation panel is. Note what happens when you scroll. Konqi's got it right since version 2.0. Opera got it right in version 6, a year later. Mozilla got it right in 0.9.6, eighteen months later. Microsoft IE has got it right in the last six months - early versions of IE 6 get it wrong. That's simple, demonstrable fact.
In a sense, clearly I am; but I didn't set out to. I'm not a member of the Konqi team, and I use many different browsers (currently have twelve on this machine, and use Konqi, Mozilla, Dillo, Opera and Lynx regularly). The point I was making is just that the Konqi team have been ahead of everyone else in their CSS2 implementation.
I have to disagree with you. It matters critically whose fault it is. For example, Microsoft Front Page generates invalid HTML which IE just happens to be able to render; similarly, Office 2000 generates invalid XML which IE just happens to be able to parse, If the Mozilla or Konqi team alter their browser to cope with Microsoft's deliberate mistakes, Microsoft will just start making different deliberate mistakes. It's really important that we put the blame where it belongs - which is chiefly with unprofessional and incompetent 'Web designers' who don't care about the quality of the code they produce provided it works with their Microsoft browser.
We cannot defeat monopolies if we play their games.
If you've got 1 meg of text in a table, you've solved the wrong problem. That's more than a full-length novel.
Yes, but, seriously, how many of those pages were valid, standards conformant code? For a long time Konqueror was the only browser which displayed all the features of my home page (which is valid code) correctly. Now Mozilla has caught up, and I believe (though I haven't checked myself) later IE6's can display it too. But while Konqi has some deficiencies in its ECMAScript, it's HTML/CSS rendering are highly standards-conformant
It's not the Konqi team's fault if 90% of the commercial 'Web designers' out there are blithering incompetents who could not write valid code to save their lives.
If it is real, then the potential costs are so high (most major cities, for example, grew up around ports and are only a few metres above sea level), and the time it takes to turn the juggernaut around is so long, that we need to be taking urgent avoiding action now while we continue to urgently assess the reality of the risk.
If it turns out that global warming is happening but that the major causes are natural, then we're still better off if we've done everything we can to stop making things worse.
If it turns out that global warming isn't happening and it was all a panic about nithing, then we'll still have more efficient transportation, better insulated houses, and a cleaner planet with greater fossil fuel reserves to pass on to our children.
But if the United States carries on the way it's going and it turns out that that global warming is real, then the voters of Florida, Mississippi, and Texas aren't going to cheer too loudly for the President and the generation which lost 20% of the land area of the continental United States, and turned another 20% into desert.
For values of 'no time' slightly greater than three years...
But for nine months - nine months - poor Sam Lantinga was hanging out on the Loki newsgroups explaining that there was a problem about the artwork for the packaging.... and when the game eventually arrived, it came without the collateral that the PC version had, just a bare CD in a DVD-style wallet.
So what really happened? Were Firaxis messing Loki around? Were Electronic Arts messing Loki around? Had Loki just not got the cash flow to print the boxes? (I can't believe this - there must have been enough pre-orders. There was a lot of interest). Judging by the quality of the beta and the demo, I see no reason at all to believe that the game was not finished in June 2000.
Well, that's it, I suppose. Masses of Respect to Scott and to Sam and to all the troops. It was a brave effort; I'm really sorry it didn't fly.
Oh, for heaven's sake!
Anyone can be a Nominet tag holder. I'm a tag holder myself. You don't have to be an ISP. You don't have to run your own DNS. If you want complete control over your domain, just register your own tag.
This may seem obvious, but in case it hasn't occured to someone:
yourself$ makemake the program
yourself$ make -n installShow exactly what make install will do, without doing any of it; read the output carefully and make sure you approve
yourself$ su -c 'make install'This way you get to check through what a 'make install' is going to do without exposing yourself to risk. Might be even better still to have a special user identity (not your usual login) under which you build untrusted software, but I haven't got that paranoid yet.
The posts I don't want to read are the anonymous coward posts - if people can't be bothered to use an identity, I can't be bothered to read them. Guess which user identity you uniquely can't set as 'foe'? Fix it, someone.
PDF is a proprietary format. Everytime an Open Source viewer appears which can render all of current generation PDF, Adobe can (and will) move the goalposts again. There are perfectly good open standards (e.g. HTML) for representing online forms, and there are perfectly good Open Source viewers for those formats.
Medieval alchemists theories about the nature of matter predicted that the Philosopher's Stone could transmute any substance into any other substance and produce the elixir of life (and that it would have several other interesting properties to, including the ability to cure all diseases).
Don't they teach any history of science in US schools? (not sarcastic, genuinely interested)
Then you're missing out. So far each successive book in the sequence has been more ambitious than it predecessor, and so far (for my money) each has been better. We don't have children so we can't even pretend we're buying them for the children. We buy them for us - and we are eagerly anticipating the next.
We're also booked to go and see the film next week - something we don't often do.
Just one thing puzzles me: why have they retitled the film 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone' in the States? Don't Merkin children know what a Philosopher's Stone is?
You just don't get it, do you?
How many times do people have to repeat 'free as in speach, not free as in beer' before you get it? I've no objection to paying for software. I'm a programmer. I make my living through other people paying me for my work, it would be completely hypocritical to refuse to pay other people for their work.
The issue is not whether it costs, but whether we can use it freely. And if we can't use it freely, is the cost in freedom worth the return?
I don't have Windows on my box. I don't want Windows on my box. I would, occasionally, like to be able to view QuickTime movies, but I can live without. Am I prepared to pay eighteen dollars to see them? Perhaps. But if there was an open source alternative, I'd be more prepared to pay the originators for it - because it's worth more.
Sorry, I was there, I used 'em, I programmed 'em. Remember these were the machines for which the BITBLTer was developed. Certainly every window was stored as a bitmap, but that bitmap could be anywhere, and you could write to it anywhere. It most emphatically did not have to be on top of the stack or even visible. There were no operations which you can perform on a modern WIMP that you could not perform on an 1108 in 1984. No restrictions at all. None.
Then you believe wrong.
I personally used Xerox 1108 ('Dandelion') and 1186 ('Daybreak') machines from 1984 until 1988. They definitely, without question or possibility of doubt, had multiple overlapping windows, and, indeed, all the features of a modern WIMP environment. Xerox Stars, Dolphins, Dorados, Dandetigers and a number of other Xerox machines (including the Smalltalk ones whose model designations I've forgotten) had multiple overlapping windows at least as far back as 1978. It's probable (but I don't know this for a fact because I never saw one) that the Alto also had multiple overlapping windows, at least in it's Smalltalk mode.
Remember that the Xerox movable overlapping windows paradigm appeared at a time when tiled and framed paradigms were widespread (Symbolics, TI Explorer, a whole range of other systems) and quickly became universal because it worked better. It still does.
Sure, there are issues in navigating the stack of windows, particularly if you use desktops as cluttered as I tend to; sure, less sophisticated computer users may find these navigation problems difficult. But focus, visibility, prominence and accessibility are in the hands of the user, and that's where they belong
It also blocks Konqi. The UA String I'm currently sending is 'Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Debian GNU/Linux 2.2.19)'. Childish, I know, but it works and it amuses me.
XHTML has been very carefully designed to be backwards compatible. Very, very few browsers will have any difficulty with it, even the oldest.
Software patenting is not rife. It isn't even legal in over 98% of the countries in the world. It's vanishingly rare. The main place it is legal is (not coincidentally) the most lawyer-ridden country on the planet.
Frankly the rest of the world does not want the United States exporting it's beurocratic idiocies to us - we have enough of our own. This is your mess. Clean it up.