- You have 10 vacation days a year (in Europe more like 30)
- You can't drink until you're 21. (in Europe that's usually 16)
- Don't get me started on weed
- Your country is almost completely owned/run by corporations. (in Europe by governments/comittees. I think corporations are a little worse.)
- You have hideous medical care except if you have money in USA. (much less an issue in Europe)
- Situation for minorities is less than optimal in the USA. (in Europe too, but nowhere near as bad as in the USA. Depends on country though.)
- Living standards are comparable between USA/Eur., but if you're poor, you are much better off in Eur.
- Movies come out in USA 9 months earlier. But most hollywood movies suck anyway.
- USA has a ridiculous legal system. And patent system. Most european countries are not that modern, but their systems are nowhere near as perverted as the ones the USA have.
- Every bloody park you walk into in the USA has a plaque with a long list of do's and dont's. In Europe you don't have that. You're expected to use your common sense.
- Authorities are very strict and used to ordering people around in the USA. From the police to busdrivers to clerks at offices to even bartenders. And americans obey them too. In europe this is usually very different.
I could go on for hours, but all things considered you are probably much better off being born in Europe. If you come here you will earn much less though, about 2 or 3 times. But then life is 2 or 3 times cheaper than in the USA. -------------------------------------------- ------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
NONONONO! It can't be over, because I have bet with my girl that it will not be over one year after the american election. At stake is a dinner in a very good restaurant. (Over meaning that both parties finally agree on who has won) -------------------------------------------- ------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
> 5.Old maps show almost the exact shape of antarctica. But antarctica is covered with ice and we only know the shape of antarctica because of radar and other hi-tech stuff. So how did they do that?
electromagnetic waves such as radar do not propagate in water or ice more than a few mm, depending on wavelength used of course.
The shape of antarctica was surely not found using radar. They used seismic imaging. ---------------------------------------- ----------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
> but I'll be darned if I know what happened in 1933...please fill me in
Helloo?
Nazi party came to power in Germany. ---------------------------------------- ----------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
This is what I always have said is needed for XFree. They need to be much more open than in the past to get more bugs fixed etc. etc. On the other hand, some card-vendors won't give specifications to program their cards unless one signs a non-disclosure agreement. I hope to see accelerated development now. Time will tell if I was right. ------------------------------------------ -------------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
One such idea could be the 'zoomable user interface'. Actuallly another desktop analogue, but it's not a desktop but a 3D space in front of you. Icons hang suspended in space, you can zoom into windows, or flip them away etc. It also uses the idea of presenting not too complex visual clues for your data. For instance, a filetree can be extremely complex, but there is a simple structure in it. So it zoomable user interface presents a simple tree, but if you zoom in on the branches, you see more complex structures. I don't know if the idea has been implemented. But it is something new, and worthy. Of course there are other ideas like MsBob, where you walk around in an office analogue, or the indigo machine from SGI, where you also walk around, but much nicer. I just do not think user interfaces that look like a 3D game are productive, though. A good user interface should visualize complex things, like filesystems or networks, or the devices/drivers/kernel of your system, in an as simple as possible way, without omitting essential information. This naturally leads to zooming and nested structures. Real AI in your interface would also be very nice, but an SF dream for now, I think. (at least my brother says so, who studies AI) --------------------------------------------- ----------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
...with a slot to put game modules in. I don't see what is so special about that. I bet that there will be game-module cards for regular PCs where you can put your Xbox modules in within a couple of months after launch of the Xbox. ------------------------------------------------ -------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
With napster, the tail of the music is always cut off. Usually there is a minute or so missing at the end, more often half of it. This is of course because people's downloads are broken off halfway through, and you get proliferation of broken-off songs that way. The songs can only ever get shorter. Another thing is that the quality is usually very low, either because of the particular encoder, or because of a low bitrate. Or because of a semi-broken cdrom-player it was copied off. All in all I certainly don't agree with Lars about that Napster provides studio-quality perfect digital copies of their music. Napster is no match at all for the original cd's. There has to be a better system; with quality checks at the recording, encoding and download stages. With download you have CRC/MD5 checks of course, but if I am going to pay for music I download over the Internet, I'm going to demand quality ensurance in return. That is one way that copyright holders could still earn money on in the future. Also having licensing info encoded in the recording, free like GPL, or for pay, or public domain or whatever, I want to be able to know what license I have with a digital music file (or movie or whatever). -------------------------------------- ------------------ UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Look at this: Why is mozilla/netscape so huge? And are those really 4 processes, or are those 4 threads sharing the same memory? All the same, I think mozilla has a huge memory footprint. Compare with the netscape process I'm also running... PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 1707 roland 2 0 57860 52M 45204 R 0 2.5 28.0 5:53 vmware 1781 roland 14 2 39232 38M 11076 R N 0 22.9 20.3 7:34./mozilla-bin 1783 roland 2 2 39232 38M 11076 S N 0 0.0 20.3 0:00./mozilla-bin 1784 roland 2 2 39232 38M 11076 S N 0 0.0 20.3 0:00./mozilla-bin 1785 roland 2 2 39232 38M 11076 S N 0 0.0 20.3 0:00./mozilla-bin 30294 root 1 0 38076 37M 3708 R 0 15.0 19.7 15:43/etc/X11/X -auth/var/gdm/:0.xauth:0 1449 roland 0 0 25204 24M 3708 S 0 0.5 13.0 12:33 netscape 7253 roland 20 19 14024 13M 368 R N 0 53.6 7.2 13573m./setiathome -graphics 1709 roland -19 -19 12436 8556 172 S 1710 roland -19 -19 12416 8488 156 S 1708 roland -19 -19 12344 8340 80 S 0 0.0 4.3 0:00 vmware ------------------------------------------ -------------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
>> - gravity is a very weak force, the only reason its so 'strong' here is that big ball of mud below our feet. Achieving an effect as large as 2% of the weight of that disc is quite a feat if done by 'gravitation effects' it's by far more probable to stem from electromagnetic effects, especially in an experiment with rotating superconductors.
You did not read right. The claim was that anything ABOVE the disk lost 2% weight, not the disk itself. Furthermore: the idea is not so crazy. If there is a unified grand theory, and gravity, electroweak, weak and strong nuclear forces can be traced back to any fundamental force, that means there is some connection between gravity and electromagnetism. If there isn't such a connection, there cannot be a GUT. So, looking into more exotic an less understood stuff like effects of superconductivity might bring surprises like Podkletnovs experiments. Now it would be wonderful if using some setup with superconductors, spinning or otherwise, could supress inertia, or mass, or gravity or whatever. Since the reason there IS gravity, and mass, is not understood (it just IS) and why objects are in one place and not suddenly somewhere else. And nobody really knows what exactly IS movement, and kinetic energy, and what really happens with matter if it moves and its kinetic energy is transformed in another kind of energy. Is a particle of matter really some kind of knot in the topology of time and space? Since particle have mass, do they have a Schwarzschild radius, and do they have some kind of quantum black hole inside? Are they constantly tunneling through their own quantum black hole maybe: a topological entity of some kind? I work at a theoretical physics dept. not as a physicist but as a sysadmin and astronomy student, but I never, with all the math and physics have learned, heard a single answer to those questions, not even to the one of WHY THINGS CAN MOVE... It really is mind-boggling if you start thinking about it.
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ISDN support: How well does it work now? With SuSE+YaST, setting up isdn, so that any normal user can start/stop/dial it is a piece of cake. With RedHat 6.1, it was just a kludgy script clearly added as an afterthought. Good ISDN support is almost a reason for me to go back to SuSE. Except that I hate their idea of a single giant config file, with their SuSEConfig scripts sourcing that. That is just a bad design; a config system should not get confused if you edit the files in/etc by hand, and on the other hand, a config system should not be designed that you cannot use the hand-edit method anymore. It should also tell you which files it is going to edit and why, and which daemons it is going to start/stop and why. Linuxconf comes close to that idea, but is so buggy for me to be almost completely useless; COAS, the Caldera system, is nice but can do only very few things. YaST from SuSE does it quite well; until you configure something by hand: then it is goodbye YaST forever for that function. Debian and Slackware don't have such systems...maybe just as well, because nobody seems to have got it right anyway.
So the only distro with a decent config system for ISDN is SuSE, of which I hate the design, but love the functionality.
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They might have bloodsamples of everyone already, so what the fuss? People don't generally enjoy digging up corpses all the time. Never after a good breakfast.It will pass over. ------------------------------------------------ -------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
DosEMU plays DOOM, DESCENT and other very well, and has played it for years. Don't try this in NT though, their dos emulator doesn't come anywhere near the quality of DosEMU. It's a shame that DOS is almost not used anymore... ------------------------------------------------ -------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Ok, the best thing would be if people could decide themselves what can view. The main problem seems to be parents worrying about their children though. You are not addressing that problem. No matter if these parents are overprotective or not, there is a strong demand for filtering. This void is now clearly being filled by the wrong people, with a commercial interest: selling their filtering software. I agree that not having such software would be best, but it already exists, so lets make a better freeware alternative, with non-commercial intentions.
I just don't agree that a fair categorisation would not be possible. Very difficult maybe, but not impossible.
The Saving private Ryan example for instance: - it contains terrible violence, necessary because the movie is about the horror of war. That is a cool observation, and it is enough to let parents decide if this is something their children should see. - of course it also is a beautiful work of art, in its own way. (at least up until the very end, with the old Ryan coming into view again, and the sentimental music, the prowd American flag waving etc. that makes turn away in disgust and say: "see, typical American movie.") and it can't be compared to something like for instance RAMBOIII, or predator. But THAT would be a value judgement.
The same goes for sex on the net: You can't make a judgement for someone what is porno but you can decide if there is sex to be seen. if it is commercial (selling sex), or meant to be art or medical maybe, or just amateurs swapping homemade pictures. A parent could then on their own moral believes decide what their children should see. Maybe a 'yes' for sexual education, but a 'no' for commercial sex.
That is why I would opt for a system where at least ten different people, from very different locations would have to vote for something to be dubbed say 'commercial sex', among other characteristics a site might have, before it is actually categorised thus. ------------------------------------------------ -------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Only for 18 months, but it was long enough. I must say I'm very disappointed in them:-( Although I cannot say I actually ever believed that they make very good software, there are a lot of nice people working there. But in the end they are just another American Windows software company, that is, a shark among sharks.
There seems to be a culture clash between the freedom loving, online cyberculture and the older forces of commerce and traditional government. This has been predicted long ago, and anyone could have guessed that the sense of freedom of the Internet would collide head-on with 'old world' ideas and institutions sooner or later.
I think that we need to be strategic in choosing what can be defended and what we can't. Open and free software needs to be defended, free speech, free criticism, nobody can argue about that. On the other hand: porn, violence, crackers, warez etc shouldn't be. Nobody argues about that too.
But there is a large and vague middle ground where things are not so clear. I see people foray too far into that vague space and see them try to defend ground that is disputable at least, and setting up their defence (or attack) there. In this case, the censor-software breaking, you say 'see this software sucks, see that censorship does not work, it shouldn't exist'. That is very true, and I don't think that you can't block 'bad things' succesfully in the end with this kind of software. But try to understand the confusion and fear, that comes with the Internet. Suddenly, the whole world enters your house, your family. A lot of people are not going to be able to sort the good from the bad, at least in the beginning. They cannot cope with it. Most people are just followers, lost without rules or guidelines. So this censorware is bad, but who comes to the rescue of the worried parents then? Should they just not have Internet at all then? Or are they just being overprotective?
The Open Source idea of 'having a million eyeballs looking at the bugs' could help a lot here. The problem with filters of course, is that they can never catch everything, and always catch what they shouldn't. But a million worried parents, rating webpages into categories, that could actually work. You would need a clever rating system, and just rate a site for what it actually is: educational, commercial, obvious porn, sites about sex but not porn, etc etc. Categories without a moral value judgement, just cleanly categorize it. And of course with a voting system, so that at least say 10 people put some site in the same category, before it actually stays there. Have search engines seek out sites that change, with a crc check, and set up a system where some parent would get a list of a 100 sites, and categorize them, in a distributed system, and then has done his/her service to the community. Then you have a more or less fair categorization of the Internet, and a parent could then choose a package of things that his children can or cannot see. No porn, no violence, but maybe a yes for sites about coming out for homosexuality. I see that this might be abused by a government to 1984 its citizens. But a governement could do that anyway, though. China does it now. You could try to categorize only universally bad things (blatant violence, _commercial_ porno, the Ku Klux Klan (did you know their site runs on Linux, by the way? www.kukluxklan.org), and mark the rest as 'mostly harmless'. I don't know. I just think that something along those lines needs to be done, because nobody with any sense is adressing the fears of the fledgling millions of new Internet users right now. We could even give this community provided lists to Symantec. That would be quite a shock to them. ------------------------------------------------ -------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Yes. What I have said before in the XFree 4.0 pre discussion: Netscape displays only empty pages for me. Sometimes a banner will show up, but no text. I don;t think it is a Java problem, I think it is motif. The KDE browser does work for me. All the previous X 4.0 pre;s had the same problem. I guess nobody in the X team ever runs Netscape, or it would have been fixed by now. I have reported this bug several times, but they never answer their email, except for an automated respons. Too bloody closed they are.
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That's it. Now Grit is going to send Urgje after you. And if the little guy is mad, he's dangerous. He doesn't come out much. ------------------------------------------- ------------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Internet is fast enough. You just don't have garanteed bandwith. I think in IP version 6 this is solved. You can claim an amount of bandwith with that. 3 KB/s should be enough for telephone. -------------------------------------- ------------------ UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Caldera has been very good in giving stuff to the linux community. They gave the COAS admin system, their distribution and graphical install system is free too. I don't see why they would change their mind over Lineo. Ok, so they changed their mind over OpenDOS. Hmm. But that was their, right, they bought it.
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>I'm willing to bet that in reality, it is what you have done to X. >Linux/X/gnome/enlightenment hasn't crashed on me once. Ever. Since I installed it this August. Not Once.
In real live I am a sysadmin at a physics department for Linux/Solaris. I think I know what I talk about. You speak only for yourself, and how well things work on only your box. I have a network full of RedHat 6.0 + updates, almost all users using Enlightenment + Gnome + Netscape 4.61. Almost all crashes I have seen are caused either by X (50%) or Netscape crashing taking Gnome or Enlightenment down, thereby closing the X-session. The Windows machines around here do not crash. People do not play games around here. Linux crashes quite often, using only things like netscape, ghostview, what people use doing physics. I wish it were otherwise too, but it is not.
> And putting video routines into the kernel will improve this stability?
Into the kernel go: only mode-setting, memory-management and an interface to the hardware pipelines for rendering. Of course NOT the X server routines doing the drawing and the like. Having the bare resource handling in the kernel has the enormous advantage of not having to have duplicate driver effort for X, SVGAlib, SVGATextMode, etc. These would simply be loadable modules. Userspace libraries like libGGI use ioctls to set a mode. Not to do acceleration and drawing. You don't need to, and that would be kernel-bloat yes. You can use memory mapping to interface the kernel provides. The problem is, that most cards are made in such a way that save registers , those that can be written to without crashing your videocard, thereby needing to reset your machine, cannot cleanly be separated from unsave registers. In that case you need a kernel space mechanism that makes sure only sane data goes into the accelaration pipelines.
You can still bring X in such a state so that you can do nothing to switch to a console and bring back your machine to live. Ok, if you have a network, but most people do not have that. Input handling should be outside the X server, the X server should only receive events. A similacrum of raw keypresses if it wants to, but things like ctrl-alt-f1 should be caught by the kernel first, and all things like virtual consoles, X-servers, SVGAlib, etc. should receive events from either the kernel or a mediator daemon.
>Are you on the GGI or Be development team or something?
No, but I follow them closely, and am sympathetic to their ideas. The linux community generally has the wrong impression of what they try to achieve.
I think Xfree 4.0 will suck less, a lot less maybe, but I'll have to see. Up until now for instance, it was very hard to get snapshots compiled, netscape would not display anything but empty grey screens, and the X team never answers request to get on their mailinglist, or to bugreports. They are just incommunicado. The GGI people are very nice, and do answer questions. They have achieved a lot, considering their numbers.
Ah well, who am I trying to convince anyway. ------------------------------------------------ -------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Are you on drugs? You can get professional help, you know... ----------------------------------------- --------------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
I think all of the former X servers from XFree86 were kind of trash. Having one server with many loadable drivers is something they should have done from the beginning. So, it is a step in the right direction. I will try it.
BUT: * It still consumes enormous amounts or RAM, between 28-48 MB on my machine.
*I would call it slow when compared to other windowing systems like win32, or the system that BeOS has.
* It still doesn't have real transparency, don't come with things like Eterm, because that is not real transparency.
* It does not have anti-aliased fonts.
* It is not multithreaded, and that would, IF implemented right, make a difference in overal responsiveness and speed. Even on single-processor machines. (Look at BeOS)
* It does it's own input device handling, what should have been done by the linux kernel. Now virtual consoles, X, SVGA etc. all have to do their own handling. This is absurd, it should be done by the kernel, maybe in combination with a userspace console daemon that passes events to programs like the X server, but not by the X server itself. OK, this is more a problem of linux in general, and they have to work with the current system. The same goes for video-drivers, mode-setting and the like. That should be done by the kernel too. Not accelaration and drawing, only the memory handling. Any user can just write values to the videocard memory and 3D pipelines that crash most systems. This should be protected by the kernel, and it isn't. I regret to say that currently the standard RedHat combination: XFree86 with enlightenment, gnome and netscape crashes more often than windows 95 does. Let alone 98. Ok, so you linux itself doesn't crash, but the graphical system does, and people still loose all their work.
* XFree86 is almost completely incommunicado if you try to reach them for help, or for bugreports. They only ever send me their standard "we got your message" email. I tries several times to get on their mailinglist, so I could follow their progress, but they just will not even answer my application. They are too damn closed.
The only way I see that Linux is going to get a better graphical system, is when they open up, or if their tree is forked off by another group.
What I would like: I would like to see a GGI based system, with an X server running on top, that implements all the missing features from XFree86. It would require a lot of people porting drivers from XFree86 to KGI, and a group porting XFree86 4.0 to libGGI, fixing bugs in it, cut out all the accumulated slack, implement alpha channels (that is not in the X specifications), add antialiasing, make it multithreading. Decrease the memory foot- print. And last but not least, be very open to the community.
X on GGI is the only way I see that shows real promise for multimedia on Linux.
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Aperture Synthesis Radio Astronomy works by letting signals from many different receivers interfere. Each distance between two given receivers gives a data point of the auto-correlation function of that signal. The rotation of the Earth provides the second dimension. This then gives the auto-correlation function of the signal from the sky. The Wiener-Kinchine theorem says that the Fourier Transform of this function is the intensity distribution of sources in the sky. In other words, you make an indirect photograph using radio radiation, in the course of 12 or 24 hours. It is manifestly evident that maximizing the number of distinct distances between receivers minimizes the number of receivers needed, which are of course very expensive. Now what is the use of astronomy? I counter this with: What is the use of a Picasso? What is the use for mankind of literature, the arts etc. Nothing really, but nobody questions spending money on music, movies etc. Governments spends ~$1,- per year per person of taxmoney for astronomy, how much do you spend on beer? Or CD's ? Or clothes? Or your car? The amount of money spent on horoscopes is probably twice as much per person than what is spent on the serious stuff: astronomy. Besides, if astronomers had cared to patent any of their inventions, done doing astronomy, but put to use for all of mankind (geostationary commsats, navigation, even radiative transfer equations used in quality control in milk factories), and asked a license fee of a mere 0,001 fraction of the profits that is made by their inventions; then government would be begging the astronomers for money instead of vice versa. That is the use of all this. ------------------------------------------------ -------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Aperture Synthesis Radio Astronomy works by letting signals from many different receivers interfere. Each distance between two given receivers gives a data point of the auto-correlation function of that signal. The rotation of the Earth provides the second dimension. This then gives the auto-correlation function of the signal from the sky. The Wiener-Kinchine theorem says that the Fourier Transform of this function is the intensity distribution of sources in the sky. In other words, you make an indirect photograph using radio radiation, in the course of 12 or 24 hours. It is manifestly evident that maximizing the number of distinct distances between receivers minimizes the number of receivers needed, which are of course very expensive. Now what is the use of astronomy? I counter this with: What is the use of a Picasso? What is the use for mankind of literature, the arts etc. Nothing really, but nobody questions spending money on music, movies etc. Governments spends ~$1,- per year per person of taxmoney for astronomy, how much do you spend on beer? Or CD's ? Or clothes? Or your car? The amount of money spent on horoscopes is probably twice as much per person than what is spent on the serious stuff: astronomy. Besides, if astronomers had cared to patent any of their inventions, done doing astronomy, but put to use for all of mankind (geostationary commsats, navigation, even radiative transfer equations used in quality control in milk factories), and asked a license fee of a mere 0,001 fraction of the profits that is made by their inventions; then government would be begging the astronomers for money instead of vice versa. That is the use of all this. ------------------------------------------- ------------- UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see.
- ------------
- You have 10 vacation days a year (in Europe more like 30)
- You can't drink until you're 21. (in Europe that's usually 16)
- Don't get me started on weed
- Your country is almost completely owned/run by corporations. (in Europe by governments/comittees. I think corporations are a little worse.)
- You have hideous medical care except if you have money in USA. (much less an issue in Europe)
- Situation for minorities is less than optimal in the USA. (in Europe too, but nowhere near as bad as in the USA. Depends on country though.)
- Living standards are comparable between USA/Eur., but if you're poor, you are much better off in Eur.
- Movies come out in USA 9 months earlier. But most hollywood movies suck anyway.
- USA has a ridiculous legal system. And patent system. Most european countries are not that modern, but their systems are nowhere near as perverted as the ones the USA have.
- Every bloody park you walk into in the USA has a plaque with a long list of do's and dont's. In Europe you don't have that. You're expected to use your common sense.
- Authorities are very strict and used to ordering people around in the USA. From the police to busdrivers to clerks at offices to even bartenders. And americans obey them too. In europe this is usually very different.
I could go on for hours, but all things considered you are probably much better off being born in Europe. If you come here you will earn much less though, about 2 or 3 times. But then life is 2 or 3 times cheaper than in the USA.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
NONONONO! It can't be over, because I have bet with my girl that it will not be over one year after the american election. At stake is a dinner in a very good restaurant. (Over meaning that both parties finally agree on who has won)- ------------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
> 5.Old maps show almost the exact shape of antarctica. But antarctica is covered with ice and we only know the shape of antarctica because of radar and other hi-tech stuff. So how did they do that?
- ----------------
electromagnetic waves such as radar do not propagate in water or ice more than a few mm, depending on wavelength used of course.
The shape of antarctica was surely not found using radar. They used seismic imaging.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
> but I'll be darned if I know what happened in 1933...please fill me in Helloo? Nazi party came to power in Germany.- ----------------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Only if your karma is in projective space...- --------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
This is what I always have said is needed for XFree. They need to be much more open than in the past to get more bugs fixed etc. etc. On the other hand, some card-vendors won't give specifications to program their cards unless one signs a non-disclosure agreement. I hope to see accelerated development now. Time will tell if I was right.- --------------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
One such idea could be the 'zoomable user interface'. Actuallly another desktop analogue, but it's not a desktop but a 3D space in front of you. Icons hang suspended in space, you can zoom into windows, or flip them away etc. It also uses the idea of presenting not too complex visual clues for your data. For instance, a filetree can be extremely complex, but there is a simple structure in it. So it zoomable user interface presents a simple tree, but if you zoom in on the branches, you see more complex structures.- -----------
I don't know if the idea has been implemented. But it is something new, and worthy.
Of course there are other ideas like MsBob, where you walk around in an office analogue, or the indigo machine from SGI, where you also walk around, but much nicer. I just do not think user interfaces that look like a 3D game are productive, though.
A good user interface should visualize complex things, like filesystems or networks, or the devices/drivers/kernel of your system, in an as simple as possible way, without omitting essential information. This naturally leads to zooming and nested structures.
Real AI in your interface would also be very nice, but an SF dream for now, I think. (at least my brother says so, who studies AI)
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
...with a slot to put game modules in. I don't see what is so special about that. I bet that there will be game-module cards for regular PCs where you can put your Xbox modules in within a couple of months after launch of the Xbox.- --------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
With napster, the tail of the music is always cut off. Usually there is a minute or so missing at the end, more often half of it. This is of course because people's downloads are broken off halfway through, and you get proliferation of broken-off songs that way. The songs can only ever get shorter. Another thing is that the quality is usually very low, either because of the particular encoder, or because of a low bitrate. Or because of a semi-broken cdrom-player it was copied off. All in all I certainly don't agree with Lars about that Napster provides studio-quality perfect digital copies of their music. Napster is no match at all for the original cd's.- ------------------
There has to be a better system; with quality checks at the recording, encoding and download stages. With download you have CRC/MD5 checks of course, but if I am going to pay for music I download over the Internet, I'm going to demand quality ensurance in return. That is one way that copyright holders could still earn money on in the future. Also having licensing info encoded in the recording, free like GPL, or for pay, or public domain or whatever, I want to be able to know what license I have with a digital music file (or movie or whatever).
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Look at this: Why is mozilla/netscape so huge? And are those ./mozilla-bin ./mozilla-bin ./mozilla-bin ./mozilla-bin /etc/X11/X -auth /var/gdm/:0.xauth :0 ./setiathome -graphics - --------------
really 4 processes, or are those 4 threads sharing the same
memory? All the same, I think mozilla has a huge memory
footprint. Compare with the netscape process I'm also running...
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
1707 roland 2 0 57860 52M 45204 R 0 2.5 28.0 5:53 vmware
1781 roland 14 2 39232 38M 11076 R N 0 22.9 20.3 7:34
1783 roland 2 2 39232 38M 11076 S N 0 0.0 20.3 0:00
1784 roland 2 2 39232 38M 11076 S N 0 0.0 20.3 0:00
1785 roland 2 2 39232 38M 11076 S N 0 0.0 20.3 0:00
30294 root 1 0 38076 37M 3708 R 0 15.0 19.7 15:43
1449 roland 0 0 25204 24M 3708 S 0 0.5 13.0 12:33 netscape
7253 roland 20 19 14024 13M 368 R N 0 53.6 7.2 13573m
1709 roland -19 -19 12436 8556 172 S 1710 roland -19 -19 12416 8488 156 S 1708 roland -19 -19 12344 8340 80 S 0 0.0 4.3 0:00 vmware
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
>> - gravity is a very weak force, the only reason its so 'strong' here is that big ball of mud below our feet. Achieving an effect as large as 2% of the weight of that disc is quite a feat if done by 'gravitation effects' it's by far more probable to stem from electromagnetic effects, especially in an experiment with rotating superconductors.
- --------
You did not read right. The claim was that anything ABOVE the disk lost 2% weight, not the disk itself.
Furthermore: the idea is not so crazy. If there is a unified grand theory, and gravity, electroweak, weak and strong nuclear forces can be traced back to any fundamental force, that means there is some connection between gravity and electromagnetism. If there isn't such a connection, there cannot be a GUT.
So, looking into more exotic an less understood stuff like effects of superconductivity might bring surprises like Podkletnovs experiments.
Now it would be wonderful if using some setup with superconductors, spinning or otherwise, could supress inertia, or mass, or gravity or whatever.
Since the reason there IS gravity, and mass, is not understood (it just IS) and why objects are in one place and not suddenly somewhere else. And nobody really knows what exactly IS movement, and kinetic energy, and what really happens with matter if it moves and its kinetic energy is transformed in another kind of energy. Is a particle of matter really some kind of knot in the topology of time and space? Since particle have mass, do they have a Schwarzschild radius, and do they have some kind of quantum black hole inside? Are they constantly tunneling through their own quantum black hole maybe: a topological entity of some kind?
I work at a theoretical physics dept. not as a physicist but as a sysadmin and astronomy student, but I never, with all the math and physics have learned, heard a single answer to those questions, not even to the one of WHY THINGS CAN MOVE...
It really is mind-boggling if you start thinking about it.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
ISDN support: /etc by hand, and on the other hand, a config system should not be designed that you cannot use the hand-edit method anymore. It should also tell you which files it is going to edit and why, and which daemons it is going to start/stop and why. Linuxconf comes close to that idea, but is so buggy for me to be almost completely useless; COAS, the Caldera system, is nice but can do only very few things. YaST from SuSE does it quite well; until you configure something by hand: then it is goodbye YaST forever for that function. Debian and Slackware don't have such systems...maybe just as well, because nobody seems to have got it right anyway.
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How well does it work now?
With SuSE+YaST, setting up isdn, so that any normal user can start/stop/dial it is a piece of cake. With RedHat 6.1, it was just a kludgy script clearly added as an afterthought.
Good ISDN support is almost a reason for me to go back to SuSE. Except that I hate their idea of a single giant config file, with their SuSEConfig scripts sourcing that.
That is just a bad design; a config system should not get confused if you edit the files in
So the only distro with a decent config system for ISDN is SuSE, of which I hate the design, but love the functionality.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
They might have bloodsamples of everyone already, so what the fuss? People don't generally enjoy digging up corpses all the time. Never after a good breakfast.It will pass over.- --------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
DosEMU plays DOOM, DESCENT and other very well, and has played it for years. Don't try this in NT though, their dos emulator doesn't come anywhere near the quality of DosEMU. It's a shame that DOS is almost not used anymore...- --------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Ok, the best thing would be if people could decide themselves what can view.
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The main problem seems to be parents worrying about their children though. You are not addressing that problem. No matter if these parents are overprotective or not, there is a strong demand for filtering. This void is now clearly being filled by the wrong people, with a commercial interest: selling their filtering software.
I agree that not having such software would be best, but it already exists, so lets make a better freeware alternative, with non-commercial intentions.
I just don't agree that a fair categorisation would not be possible. Very difficult maybe, but not impossible.
The Saving private Ryan example for instance:
- it contains terrible violence, necessary
because the movie is about the horror of war.
That is a cool observation, and it is enough to
let parents decide if this is something their
children should see.
- of course it also is a beautiful work of art,
in its own way. (at least up until the very end, with
the old Ryan coming into view again, and the sentimental
music, the prowd American flag waving etc. that makes
turn away in disgust and say: "see, typical American
movie.") and it can't be compared to something
like for instance RAMBOIII, or predator.
But THAT would be a value judgement.
The same goes for sex on the net:
You can't make a judgement for someone what is porno
but you can decide if there is sex to be seen.
if it is commercial (selling sex), or meant to be art
or medical maybe, or just amateurs swapping homemade pictures.
A parent could then on their own moral believes decide
what their children should see. Maybe a 'yes' for sexual
education, but a 'no' for commercial sex.
That is why I would opt for a system where at least
ten different people, from very different locations
would have to vote for something to be dubbed say 'commercial sex',
among other characteristics a site might have, before it is
actually categorised thus.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Only for 18 months, but it was long enough. I must say I'm very disappointed in them :-(
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Although I cannot say I actually ever believed that they make very good software, there are a lot of nice people working there. But in the end they are just another American Windows software company, that is, a shark among sharks.
There seems to be a culture clash between the freedom loving, online cyberculture and the older forces of commerce and traditional government. This has been predicted long ago, and anyone could have guessed that the sense of freedom of the Internet would collide head-on with 'old world' ideas and institutions sooner or later.
I think that we need to be strategic in choosing what can be defended and what we can't. Open and free software needs to be defended, free speech, free criticism, nobody can argue about that. On the other hand: porn, violence, crackers, warez etc shouldn't be. Nobody argues about that too.
But there is a large and vague middle ground where things are not so clear. I see people foray too far into that vague space and see them try to defend ground that is disputable at least, and setting up their defence (or attack) there.
In this case, the censor-software breaking, you say 'see this software sucks, see that censorship does not work, it shouldn't exist'. That is very true, and I don't think that you can't block 'bad things' succesfully in the end with this kind of software. But try to understand the confusion and fear, that comes with the Internet. Suddenly, the whole world enters your house, your family. A lot of people are not going to be able to sort the good from the bad, at least in the beginning. They cannot cope with it. Most people are just followers, lost without rules or guidelines. So this censorware is bad, but who comes to the rescue of the worried parents then? Should they just not have Internet at all then? Or are they just being overprotective?
The Open Source idea of 'having a million eyeballs looking at the bugs' could help a lot here. The problem with filters of course, is that they can never catch everything, and always catch what they shouldn't. But a million worried parents, rating webpages into categories, that could actually work. You would need a clever rating system, and just rate a site for what it actually is: educational, commercial, obvious porn, sites about sex but not porn, etc etc. Categories without a moral value judgement, just cleanly categorize it. And of course with a voting system, so that at least say 10 people put some site in the same category, before it actually stays there. Have search engines seek out sites that change, with a crc check, and set up a system where some parent would get a list of a 100 sites, and categorize them, in a distributed system, and then has done his/her service to the community.
Then you have a more or less fair categorization of the Internet, and a parent could then choose a package of things that his children can or cannot see. No porn, no violence, but maybe a yes for sites about coming out for homosexuality.
I see that this might be abused by a government to 1984 its citizens. But a governement could do that anyway, though. China does it now.
You could try to categorize only universally bad things (blatant violence, _commercial_ porno, the Ku Klux Klan (did you know their site runs on Linux, by the way? www.kukluxklan.org), and mark the rest as 'mostly harmless'. I don't know.
I just think that something along those lines needs to be done, because nobody with any sense is adressing the fears of the fledgling millions of new Internet users right now. We could even give this community provided lists to Symantec. That would be quite a shock to them.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Yes. What I have said before in the XFree 4.0 pre
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discussion: Netscape displays only empty pages for me.
Sometimes a banner will show up, but no text. I don;t
think it is a Java problem, I think it is motif. The
KDE browser does work for me. All the previous X 4.0 pre;s
had the same problem. I guess nobody in the X team ever runs
Netscape, or it would have been fixed by now. I have
reported this bug several times, but they never answer
their email, except for an automated respons. Too bloody
closed they are.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
That's it. Now Grit is going to send Urgje after- -------------
you. And if the little guy is mad, he's dangerous.
He doesn't come out much.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Internet is fast enough. You just don't have- ------------------
garanteed bandwith. I think in IP version 6 this
is solved. You can claim an amount of bandwith
with that. 3 KB/s should be enough for telephone.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Caldera has been very good in giving stuff to the linux
- --------
community. They gave the COAS admin system, their distribution
and graphical install system is free too. I don't see why they
would change their mind over Lineo. Ok, so they changed their
mind over OpenDOS. Hmm. But that was their, right, they
bought it.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
> Okay. So you feel that X is unstable.
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Yes.
>I'm willing to bet that in reality, it is what
you have done to X. >Linux/X/gnome/enlightenment hasn't crashed on me
once. Ever. Since I installed it this August. Not Once.
In real live I am a sysadmin at a physics
department for Linux/Solaris. I think I know what
I talk about. You speak only for yourself,
and how well things work on only your box. I have a
network full of RedHat 6.0 + updates, almost all users using
Enlightenment + Gnome + Netscape 4.61.
Almost all crashes I have seen are caused either
by X (50%) or Netscape crashing taking Gnome or Enlightenment down, thereby
closing the X-session.
The Windows machines around here do not crash.
People do not play games around here. Linux
crashes quite often, using only things like
netscape, ghostview, what people use doing
physics. I wish it were otherwise too, but it is
not.
> And putting video routines into the kernel will
improve this stability?
Into the kernel go: only mode-setting,
memory-management and an interface to the hardware pipelines for rendering.
Of course NOT the X server routines doing the
drawing and the like.
Having the bare resource handling in the kernel
has the enormous advantage of not having to have
duplicate driver effort for X,
SVGAlib, SVGATextMode, etc.
These would simply be loadable modules.
Userspace libraries like libGGI use ioctls to set a mode.
Not to do acceleration and drawing. You don't need
to, and that would be kernel-bloat yes.
You can use memory mapping to interface the kernel
provides. The problem is, that most cards are
made in such a way that save registers
, those that can be written to without crashing
your videocard, thereby needing to reset your machine,
cannot cleanly be separated from unsave registers.
In that case you need a kernel space mechanism that
makes sure only sane data goes into the accelaration pipelines.
You can still bring X in such a state so
that you can do nothing to switch to a console
and bring back your machine to
live. Ok, if you have a network,
but most people do not have that.
Input handling should be outside the X
server, the X server should only
receive events. A similacrum of raw
keypresses if it wants to, but things like
ctrl-alt-f1 should be caught by the kernel first,
and all things like virtual consoles,
X-servers, SVGAlib, etc. should receive events
from either the kernel or a mediator daemon.
>Are you on the GGI or Be development team or something?
No, but I follow them closely, and am sympathetic
to their ideas. The linux community generally has the
wrong impression of what they try to achieve.
I think Xfree 4.0 will suck less, a lot
less maybe, but I'll have to see.
Up until now for instance, it was very hard to get
snapshots compiled, netscape would not
display anything but empty grey screens, and
the X team never answers request to get on
their mailinglist, or to bugreports.
They are just incommunicado. The GGI people are very nice,
and do answer questions. They have achieved a lot, considering
their numbers.
Ah well, who am I trying to convince anyway.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Are you on drugs? You can get professional help, you know...- ---------------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
I think all of the former X servers from XFree86 were kind of trash. Having one server with many
- --------
loadable drivers is something they should have
done from the beginning.
So, it is a step in the right direction.
I will try it.
BUT:
* It still consumes enormous amounts or RAM,
between 28-48 MB on my machine.
*I would call it slow when compared to other
windowing systems like win32, or the system that
BeOS has.
* It still doesn't have real transparency, don't
come with things like Eterm, because that is not
real transparency.
* It does not have anti-aliased fonts.
* It is not multithreaded, and that would, IF
implemented right, make a difference in overal
responsiveness and speed. Even on single-processor
machines. (Look at BeOS)
* It does it's own input device handling, what
should have been done by the linux kernel. Now
virtual consoles, X, SVGA etc. all have to do
their own handling. This is absurd, it should be
done by the kernel, maybe in combination with a
userspace console daemon that passes events to
programs like the X server, but not by the
X server itself. OK, this is more a problem of
linux in general, and they have to work with the
current system.
The same goes for video-drivers, mode-setting and
the like. That should be done by the kernel too.
Not accelaration and drawing, only the memory
handling. Any user can just write values to the
videocard memory and 3D pipelines that crash most
systems. This should be protected by the kernel,
and it isn't.
I regret to say that currently the standard RedHat
combination: XFree86 with enlightenment, gnome and
netscape crashes more often than windows 95 does.
Let alone 98.
Ok, so you linux itself doesn't crash, but the
graphical system does, and people still loose all
their work.
* XFree86 is almost completely incommunicado if
you try to reach them for help, or for bugreports.
They only ever send me their standard "we got your
message" email.
I tries several times to get on their mailinglist,
so I could follow their progress, but they just
will not even answer my application.
They are too damn closed.
The only way I see that Linux is going to get a
better graphical system, is when they open up,
or if their tree is forked off by another group.
What I would like:
I would like to see a GGI based system, with an
X server running on top, that implements all the
missing features from XFree86.
It would require a lot of people porting drivers
from XFree86 to KGI, and a group porting XFree86
4.0 to libGGI, fixing bugs in it, cut out all the
accumulated slack, implement alpha channels (that
is not in the X specifications), add antialiasing,
make it multithreading. Decrease the memory foot-
print. And last but not least, be very open to the
community.
X on GGI is the only way I see that shows real
promise for multimedia on Linux.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Aperture Synthesis Radio Astronomy works by letting signals from many different receivers interfere. Each distance between two given receivers gives a data point of the auto-correlation function of that signal. The rotation of the Earth provides the second dimension. This then gives the auto-correlation function of the signal from the sky. The Wiener-Kinchine theorem says that the Fourier Transform of this function is the intensity distribution of sources in the sky. In other words, you make an indirect photograph using radio radiation, in the course of 12 or 24 hours. It is manifestly evident that maximizing the number of distinct distances between receivers minimizes the number of receivers needed, which are of course very expensive. Now what is the use of astronomy? I counter this with: What is the use of a Picasso? What is the use for mankind of literature, the arts etc. Nothing really, but nobody questions spending money on music, movies etc. Governments spends ~$1,- per year per person of taxmoney for astronomy, how much do you spend on beer? Or CD's ? Or clothes? Or your car? The amount of money spent on horoscopes is probably twice as much per person than what is spent on the serious stuff: astronomy. Besides, if astronomers had cared to patent any of their inventions, done doing astronomy, but put to use for all of mankind (geostationary commsats, navigation, even radiative transfer equations used in quality control in milk factories), and asked a license fee of a mere 0,001 fraction of the profits that is made by their inventions; then government would be begging the astronomers for money instead of vice versa. That is the use of all this.- --------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Aperture Synthesis Radio Astronomy works by letting signals from many different receivers interfere. Each distance between two given receivers gives a data point of the auto-correlation function of that signal. The rotation of the Earth provides the second dimension. This then gives the auto-correlation function of the signal from the sky. The Wiener-Kinchine theorem says that the Fourier Transform of this function is the intensity distribution of sources in the sky. In other words, you make an indirect photograph using radio radiation, in the course of 12 or 24 hours. It is manifestly evident that maximizing the number of distinct distances between receivers minimizes the number of receivers needed, which are of course very expensive. Now what is the use of astronomy? I counter this with: What is the use of a Picasso? What is the use for mankind of literature, the arts etc. Nothing really, but nobody questions spending money on music, movies etc. Governments spends ~$1,- per year per person of taxmoney for astronomy, how much do you spend on beer? Or CD's ? Or clothes? Or your car? The amount of money spent on horoscopes is probably twice as much per person than what is spent on the serious stuff: astronomy. Besides, if astronomers had cared to patent any of their inventions, done doing astronomy, but put to use for all of mankind (geostationary commsats, navigation, even radiative transfer equations used in quality control in milk factories), and asked a license fee of a mere 0,001 fraction of the profits that is made by their inventions; then government would be begging the astronomers for money instead of vice versa. That is the use of all this.- -------------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...