There is no other windowing environment that is as well standardized and portable as X11.
Which doesn't magically make the XRender extension or the XUtf8* functions appear in every X11 server in the world.
Insufficient for what?
For one thing, I understand the X11 text rendering functions were written by someone who didn't fully understand the problems of writing non-English text to the screen. They work great for pasting glyphs left to right; that is, for English and German and Japanese. But they have no provision for handling combining characters (needed for Thai), or right to left text (needed for Hebrew), or context-dependent glyphs (needed for Hindi). (Arabic needs all three.) Since GTK+ and Qt plan on supporting those languages, they must write their own text displaying functions.
lot of people are still writing apps for Windows. For example, go to hotfiles.com and search for "word processor". Quite a few choices. For Linux, you've got...AbiWord, Maxwell, WordPerfect, StarOffice/OpenOffice.
Your link doesn't work for me; apparently it detects I running Linux and gives me the ZDNet Linux download page.
You forgot about Ted, and KWord. More importantly, writing a new word processor is pointless. What you need is one word processor that does everything in everyone's language; in Windows, Word is basically the only word-processor that gets used, with exception of a few historical niches for WordPerfect.
If you read the recent article on why slashdot users use windows, the people complaining about application support were (a) claiming that Gimp (e.g.) wasn't as good as Photoshop, (b) using expensive proprietary programs that have very limited markets, or (c) game players. I don't remember anyone saying they couldn't find a word processor.
By making the server modular, you can use FLTK for handhelds and GTK+ for desktops, and all apps will obey that decision.
But you've got to make feature sets of FLTK and GTK+ compatible. And once you've added all the features of GTK to FLTK, so a program can use GTreeWidget (e.g.) on a FLTK, will FLTK really be that much smaller than GTK+? If you don't, couldn't you just chop those functions out of GTK+ to get a toolkit comparable in size to FLTK?
The main problem with Apple's and Microsoft's HI manuals is that they still don't give you a way to say, "here is what my program does; present it to the user in the local style."
That's part of the point. They don't want someone to have to play with a system for an hour or two to get it working right for them; they want them to just sit down and be able to use it. For the 1% of people who could and would tweak their user interface to enhance their experience, there's the 4% who will spend more time messing around then doing anything producive, and the 95% who will never touch anything. It's just not a win for them.
Gtk+ [...] duplicate a lot of the functionality already provided by the X11 server, and they try to emulate behavior that would be more naturally provided differently under X11. What makes things worse is that those cross-platform toolkits are usually optimized for Windows and ported to X11 as an afterthought.
GTK+ was written natively for X11, and ported to Windows as an afterthought. Any redundant or emulated functionality is probably because the X11 functionality is unportable between X implementations, or because it's insufficent.
If little piss-ant countries like us in Scandinavia can have National IDs without problems, why shouldn't the big and glorious nation of USA be able to handle it?
Yes, and if a bubble-sort works on my twelve records, why shouldn't it work on my hundred thousand integers!
First place, the Scandinavian countries are much more homogenous than the US. Secondly, they're smaller; at 20 million people, you can meet with and talk to a person who works with the head-honcho. In the US, you don't get a chance to chat with a senator unless you're already pretty powerful. Thirdly, the Scandinavian countries aren't filled with paraniod people and run by paraniod people.
Ruby Ridge; Waco; the Oklahoma City Bombing; the trial of the leaders of the Black Panther party; Saco and Vancetti. If you give me equivelent events in Scandinavian history, I might have some indication that they are parellel situations.
A cult is a degrogatory term, used towards small religions the speaker doesn't like.
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/cults ec t/concult.htm would define it as "CULT: a deviant religious organization with novel beliefs and practices."
Both of which are about the same thing as "Cult: (n) a small, unpopular religion."
A case which does not substantiate that the flaw had anything to do with the nature of "closed source" software
With in a few months of the code being open sourced, the back door was found. It stayed in closed source code for six years. Whether or not Borland could have done things to find it is irrelevant - they didn't and I bet many other vendors work the same way.
WarGames was one of the most accurate theatrical portrayals of hacking ever.
I'm not sure whethor to mod this +5 Funny or -1 Clueless. I really hope you were joking.
Why? He didn't fly through a 3d-cyberspace, nor did he jump through 5 layers of military-grade security in a couple minutes. He didn't have access to anything and everything controlled by computer.
He snagged the password to the teacher's computer off a Post-it note, and dug up information on the programmer of WOPR to take guesses at what the password might be, both of which are real hacking tools. He used hardware that existed and that he could realistically own. He wardialed, a habit of real hackers. I can't think of any other movie that comes close.
There are minor plot-neccessary exaggerations -- no, WOPR wouldn't have an outside line to it, and yes, the cops would have been at the door long before he got in -- but they don't mar the fact that it was fundamentally right.
It was a parenthetical comment, and followed by a real-life case. As far as I can tell, WarGames was one of the most accurate theatrical portrayals of hacking ever.
The reality is I don't have time to find these trojans, so I expect a company to do it internally.
How do you know the programmers aren't the one's who put the trojan there? There's a number of trojans, especially backdoors, put there by the programmer. (Remember WarGames?) IIRC, Borland Database had a backdoor added in '95 that was revealed when it was open sourced in 2000.
That's also pretty typical of your average RedHat user.
But they were care. If they were sold BSD, and someone pointed it out to them, they would be pissed off. Linux is part of RedHat's brand identity. BSD is not part of MacOS's; it's just a part that happens to be there to the end user.
Irrelevant - Mac OS X is still a *BSD and should be counted as such.
Not when we're talking about user acceptance; they aren't accepting a *BSD; they're accepting a new version of MacOS. Apple could rip out the BSD underpinnings and replace them with Linux or pretty much any other modern Unix and the vast majority of the users wouldn't notice or care.
the hunting behavior of the velociraptor can be divined from the fossil record
Why not?
We have fossils of velocirapots, so we know their mass, natural weaponery, and their dental structure. Given an incrediably well preserved fossil, we can even get a look at what muscles were used most (by attachment marks on the bone.)
We have hatcheries - which means we know how many would congregate at hatching time, which is some insight into their social structure.
We know what type of species were possible prey in that area, and given teeth and claw marks (or even teeth and claws broken off) on prey, we can know what species were prey.
Given all that, and what we know about how modern predators hunt, I don't think the hunting behavior is really that much of an extrapolation.
How do the Christian fundies explain away the Neanderthals?
They were simply humans with rickets and/or arthritis. In all honesty, Neanderthals aren't an interesting arguing case, since they are clearly human for most uses of that word. The interesting cases are the ones in the middle, where one creationists points out that it's obviously human and another points out that it's obviously an ape.
First you have to understand that the main design goal of glibc is code bloat. (I'm not kidding,
But you've got to be kidding. It is a simply absurd statement. I don't think you understand the situtation, because to understand the situation you would have to know what the real design goals of glibc are and how they affected the library.
static hello-world.c is >100KB)
Okay, and how big is dynamically linked hello-world.c? There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some on reducing program size, but I would think Emacs and OpenOffice and Mozilla - the many megabyte executables - would be much more interesting than 100KB.
most of which is never used by most programs (e.g. locales).
How do you measure that? Every program that's not a server needs to be using locales; returning localized messages and sorting information the way the user would expect it are two big things.
The degree of bloat in glibc is simply obscene, and on top of that there is the backwards-incompatibility problem.
What exactly is an obscene amount of bloat? I have QT, GTK, 3 KDE libs and 2 Mozilla libs loaded into memory, each of which is larger than glibc. Why should I worry about the 8th largest library open on my system?
The uclibc people understand that they were trading speed and standards-complance for size, and know that it's not a good tradeoff for everyone. Do you really understand what tradeoffs were made in glibc, well enough to make a better library?
The reason why there's the backward compatibility problem is two-fold; first, people keep trying to link directly to glibc's internals, and not changing those would be a pain, and second, you want to make major improvements, but changing the libc major number is a flag day, so they try to support old stuff while making major changes, with some success and some failure.
The question that remains is whether the full glibc API can be implemented without creating another bloated monster. (there is no real alternative, since glibc's API has been enshrined in the LSB already...)
There is no real alternative, because most of glibc's API comes from POSIX and Single Unix Standard (SUS), or from traditional BSD functions.
Glibc is optimized for speed and standards compliance. It's also what Gnome and KDE and everything else on Linux is tested with, and has vastly more testers. I had 128 MB of RAM on this box when I bought it four years ago, and it wasn't top of the line. What's a half of MB of memory, especially as it cost me less than $50 to upgrade it to 384 MB?
I just ran memstat on my box. I'm running a konsole, and mozilla and emacs. Glibc is pretty far down on the list of memory wasters. Mozilla takes up 22 MB; xfs 15 MB; QT 5 MB; Emacs 3 MB; bbkeys 5 MB (I smell a memory leak); libkio 2 MB; 1.2 MB for each of libgtk and libkdecore. Deep down in this list is glibc, taking up just over 1 MB. If you're going to be running Gnome and/or KDE, glibc is not your memory waster.
In the US, look at the dates of what they wrote. Most of Cantor and Hilbert are in the public domain, while Goedel and Turing are still under copyright. Unfortunately, math has always been penalty copy to typeset; the closest thing Project Gutenberg has to a real historical math text is Maxwell's On the Dynamics of a Top.
The already mentioned spelling modernization, for instance, is an example of a tangible modification to the Shakespeare texts over which Houghton-Mifflin can legitimately claim copyright.
Sure. But an edition of Hemmingway, where massive changes are neither needed or expected, is slightly different.
markup is a Bad Thing and that ASCII is the One True Format and they aren't even going to think about switching to anything else, ever.
ASCII is the One True Format. It's been constant since 196x, unlike the world of alternatives. Since PG has been around since the early '70s, they tend to stay with what works. It's annoying when I try to read a book in PG, and the volunteer preserved the French characters, in DOS, so it doesn't display right anymore on almost anyone's computer.
Most books don't have a huge collection of markup - maybe a few italics. The underscore convention for italics, used by most people now, can be automatically converted. The uppercase can't, but it's not that hard to put in the elbowgrease to fix it.
They have copies of some stuff, that can't be handled well in ASCII, in other formats; HTML is popular, with TeX for those math works. But neither is universal; an ASCII version is still provided where feasible because it is universal.
In other words, a work which is public domain is free for all to copy in any way they wish, including copyrighting a copy for themselves.
That's not true. You can use it for a basis of your own copyrighted work, but you can't claim a copyright on something without adding significant creative value.
From http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html
Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.
Trademarks are not just "legal formalities that only exists because of lawyers and idiots".
I never said they were. I said the Linux trademark is.
all intellectual property law is baseless and corrupt, but those people simply don't know what they're talking about
You're amazingly arrogant, aren't you? It seems like anyone who holds an opinion you disagree with are idiots and fools.
If you want to ignore Torvalds's own explicit instructions, that's fine too, but don't argue that he doesn't care whether you do.
I will so argue, if I so believe my argument is correct. My opinion is that you put legal significance to a causal statement made by some one who had no intent of it having legal significance. Again, your arrogance is overwhelming to presume to tell others what arguments to make and not to make.
Ask anyone who has studied the First Folio of Shakespeare about the importance of spelling.
Okay, now ask the high-school student who read Shakespeare in high-school if it would have been more fun to have got weird spelling in addition to weird vocabulary and grammar.
I understand the importance of stuff like that to the linguist, (the last thing I skimmed while scanning in was The Roman Pronounciation of Latin where they dissect how Latin was spoken by the writings) but my primary audience is not the linguist. I'm sure there's information to be gained from the italics and hypenation I'm not transcribing either. Fortunately for the linguist, it was released in a facsimile edition in '83 that shouldn't be too hard to get a hold of; alternately, Project Gutenberg has taken to storing the images, and these will get filed away with them for those interested.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no other windowing environment that is as well standardized and portable as X11.
Which doesn't magically make the XRender extension or the XUtf8* functions appear in every X11 server in the world.
Insufficient for what?
For one thing, I understand the X11 text rendering functions were written by someone who didn't fully understand the problems of writing non-English text to the screen. They work great for pasting glyphs left to right; that is, for English and German and Japanese. But they have no provision for handling combining characters (needed for Thai), or right to left text (needed for Hebrew), or context-dependent glyphs (needed for Hindi). (Arabic needs all three.) Since GTK+ and Qt plan on supporting those languages, they must write their own text displaying functions.
lot of people are still writing apps for Windows. For example, go to hotfiles.com and search for "word processor". Quite a few choices. For Linux, you've got...AbiWord, Maxwell, WordPerfect, StarOffice/OpenOffice.
Your link doesn't work for me; apparently it detects I running Linux and gives me the ZDNet Linux download page.
You forgot about Ted, and KWord. More importantly, writing a new word processor is pointless. What you need is one word processor that does everything in everyone's language; in Windows, Word is basically the only word-processor that gets used, with exception of a few historical niches for WordPerfect.
If you read the recent article on why slashdot users use windows, the people complaining about application support were (a) claiming that Gimp (e.g.) wasn't as good as Photoshop, (b) using expensive proprietary programs that have very limited markets, or (c) game players. I don't remember anyone saying they couldn't find a word processor.
By making the server modular, you can use FLTK for handhelds and GTK+ for desktops, and all apps will obey that decision.
But you've got to make feature sets of FLTK and GTK+ compatible. And once you've added all the features of GTK to FLTK, so a program can use GTreeWidget (e.g.) on a FLTK, will FLTK really be that much smaller than GTK+? If you don't, couldn't you just chop those functions out of GTK+ to get a toolkit comparable in size to FLTK?
The main problem with Apple's and Microsoft's HI manuals is that they still don't give you a way to say, "here is what my program does; present it to the user in the local style."
That's part of the point. They don't want someone to have to play with a system for an hour or two to get it working right for them; they want them to just sit down and be able to use it. For the 1% of people who could and would tweak their user interface to enhance their experience, there's the 4% who will spend more time messing around then doing anything producive, and the 95% who will never touch anything. It's just not a win for them.
GTK+ was written natively for X11, and ported to Windows as an afterthought. Any redundant or emulated functionality is probably because the X11 functionality is unportable between X implementations, or because it's insufficent.
If little piss-ant countries like us in Scandinavia can have National IDs without problems, why shouldn't the big and glorious nation of USA be able to handle it?
Yes, and if a bubble-sort works on my twelve records, why shouldn't it work on my hundred thousand integers!
First place, the Scandinavian countries are much more homogenous than the US. Secondly, they're smaller; at 20 million people, you can meet with and talk to a person who works with the head-honcho. In the US, you don't get a chance to chat with a senator unless you're already pretty powerful. Thirdly, the Scandinavian countries aren't filled with paraniod people and run by paraniod people.
Ruby Ridge; Waco; the Oklahoma City Bombing; the trial of the leaders of the Black Panther party; Saco and Vancetti. If you give me equivelent events in Scandinavian history, I might have some indication that they are parellel situations.
I suggest you read up on what a cult is,
s ec t/concult.htm
A cult is a degrogatory term, used towards small religions the speaker doesn't like.
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/cult
would define it as "CULT: a deviant religious organization with novel beliefs and practices."
Both of which are about the same thing as "Cult: (n) a small, unpopular religion."
A case which does not substantiate that the flaw had anything to do with the nature of "closed source" software
With in a few months of the code being open sourced, the back door was found. It stayed in closed source code for six years. Whether or not Borland could have done things to find it is irrelevant - they didn't and I bet many other vendors work the same way.
it was a rumour.
I guess it's easier to accuse me of spreading rumors then to enter "Borland database backdoor" into google and get stuff like a ZDNet article detailing the history of the bug or the CERT vulnerability note.
WarGames was one of the most accurate theatrical portrayals of hacking ever.
I'm not sure whethor to mod this +5 Funny or -1 Clueless. I really hope you were joking.
Why? He didn't fly through a 3d-cyberspace, nor did he jump through 5 layers of military-grade security in a couple minutes. He didn't have access to anything and everything controlled by computer.
He snagged the password to the teacher's computer off a Post-it note, and dug up information on the programmer of WOPR to take guesses at what the password might be, both of which are real hacking tools. He used hardware that existed and that he could realistically own. He wardialed, a habit of real hackers. I can't think of any other movie that comes close.
There are minor plot-neccessary exaggerations -- no, WOPR wouldn't have an outside line to it, and yes, the cops would have been at the door long before he got in -- but they don't mar the fact that it was fundamentally right.
I own that _MOVIE_ (case in point).
It was a parenthetical comment, and followed by a real-life case. As far as I can tell, WarGames was one of the most accurate theatrical portrayals of hacking ever.
The reality is I don't have time to find these trojans, so I expect a company to do it internally.
How do you know the programmers aren't the one's who put the trojan there? There's a number of trojans, especially backdoors, put there by the programmer. (Remember WarGames?) IIRC, Borland Database had a backdoor added in '95 that was revealed when it was open sourced in 2000.
That's also pretty typical of your average RedHat user.
But they were care. If they were sold BSD, and someone pointed it out to them, they would be pissed off. Linux is part of RedHat's brand identity. BSD is not part of MacOS's; it's just a part that happens to be there to the end user.
Irrelevant - Mac OS X is still a *BSD and should be counted as such.
Not when we're talking about user acceptance; they aren't accepting a *BSD; they're accepting a new version of MacOS. Apple could rip out the BSD underpinnings and replace them with Linux or pretty much any other modern Unix and the vast majority of the users wouldn't notice or care.
the hunting behavior of the velociraptor can be divined from the fossil record
Why not?
We have fossils of velocirapots, so we know their mass, natural weaponery, and their dental structure. Given an incrediably well preserved fossil, we can even get a look at what muscles were used most (by attachment marks on the bone.)
We have hatcheries - which means we know how many would congregate at hatching time, which is some insight into their social structure.
We know what type of species were possible prey in that area, and given teeth and claw marks (or even teeth and claws broken off) on prey, we can know what species were prey.
Given all that, and what we know about how modern predators hunt, I don't think the hunting behavior is really that much of an extrapolation.
How do the Christian fundies explain away the Neanderthals?
They were simply humans with rickets and/or arthritis. In all honesty, Neanderthals aren't an interesting arguing case, since they are clearly human for most uses of that word. The interesting cases are the ones in the middle, where one creationists points out that it's obviously human and another points out that it's obviously an ape.
I am afraid I do not udnerstand - how can static linking reduce a program's size?
I'm sorry; it wasn't very clear. I meant to say
There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some reasons to worry about on reducing program size[...]
Can you give some examples?
The two things that come to mind are jdk1.1 and libtricks, a library to change things by wrapping libc.
First you have to understand that the main design goal of glibc is code bloat. (I'm not kidding,
But you've got to be kidding. It is a simply absurd statement. I don't think you understand the situtation, because to understand the situation you would have to know what the real design goals of glibc are and how they affected the library.
static hello-world.c is >100KB)
Okay, and how big is dynamically linked hello-world.c? There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some on reducing program size, but I would think Emacs and OpenOffice and Mozilla - the many megabyte executables - would be much more interesting than 100KB.
most of which is never used by most programs (e.g. locales).
How do you measure that? Every program that's not a server needs to be using locales; returning localized messages and sorting information the way the user would expect it are two big things.
The degree of bloat in glibc is simply obscene, and on top of that there is the backwards-incompatibility problem.
What exactly is an obscene amount of bloat? I have QT, GTK, 3 KDE libs and 2 Mozilla libs loaded into memory, each of which is larger than glibc. Why should I worry about the 8th largest library open on my system?
The uclibc people understand that they were trading speed and standards-complance for size, and know that it's not a good tradeoff for everyone. Do you really understand what tradeoffs were made in glibc, well enough to make a better library?
The reason why there's the backward compatibility problem is two-fold; first, people keep trying to link directly to glibc's internals, and not changing those would be a pain, and second, you want to make major improvements, but changing the libc major number is a flag day, so they try to support old stuff while making major changes, with some success and some failure.
The question that remains is whether the full glibc API can be implemented without creating another bloated monster. (there is no real alternative, since glibc's API has been enshrined in the LSB already...)
There is no real alternative, because most of glibc's API comes from POSIX and Single Unix Standard (SUS), or from traditional BSD functions.
Why can't Busybox be used for regular, 24/7 server use?
Because it provides minimal versions of all tools that are sometimes much slower than the normal ones?
So why wouldn't I want to use them?
Glibc is optimized for speed and standards compliance. It's also what Gnome and KDE and everything else on Linux is tested with, and has vastly more testers. I had 128 MB of RAM on this box when I bought it four years ago, and it wasn't top of the line. What's a half of MB of memory, especially as it cost me less than $50 to upgrade it to 384 MB?
I just ran memstat on my box. I'm running a konsole, and mozilla and emacs. Glibc is pretty far down on the list of memory wasters. Mozilla takes up 22 MB; xfs 15 MB; QT 5 MB; Emacs 3 MB; bbkeys 5 MB (I smell a memory leak); libkio 2 MB; 1.2 MB for each of libgtk and libkdecore. Deep down in this list is glibc, taking up just over 1 MB. If you're going to be running Gnome and/or KDE, glibc is not your memory waster.
Are these copyrighted?
In the US, look at the dates of what they wrote. Most of Cantor and Hilbert are in the public domain, while Goedel and Turing are still under copyright. Unfortunately, math has always been penalty copy to typeset; the closest thing Project Gutenberg has to a real historical math text is Maxwell's On the Dynamics of a Top.
The already mentioned spelling modernization, for instance, is an example of a tangible modification to the Shakespeare texts over which Houghton-Mifflin can legitimately claim copyright.
Sure. But an edition of Hemmingway, where massive changes are neither needed or expected, is slightly different.
markup is a Bad Thing and that ASCII is the One True Format and they aren't even going to think about switching to anything else, ever.
ASCII is the One True Format. It's been constant since 196x, unlike the world of alternatives. Since PG has been around since the early '70s, they tend to stay with what works. It's annoying when I try to read a book in PG, and the volunteer preserved the French characters, in DOS, so it doesn't display right anymore on almost anyone's computer.
Most books don't have a huge collection of markup - maybe a few italics. The underscore convention for italics, used by most people now, can be automatically converted. The uppercase can't, but it's not that hard to put in the elbowgrease to fix it.
They have copies of some stuff, that can't be handled well in ASCII, in other formats; HTML is popular, with TeX for those math works. But neither is universal; an ASCII version is still provided where feasible because it is universal.
In other words, a work which is public domain is free for all to copy in any way they wish, including copyrighting a copy for themselves.
That's not true. You can use it for a basis of your own copyrighted work, but you can't claim a copyright on something without adding significant creative value.
From http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html
Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.
Trademarks are not just "legal formalities that only exists because of lawyers and idiots".
I never said they were. I said the Linux trademark is.
all intellectual property law is baseless and corrupt, but those people simply don't know what they're talking about
You're amazingly arrogant, aren't you? It seems like anyone who holds an opinion you disagree with are idiots and fools.
If you want to ignore Torvalds's own explicit instructions, that's fine too, but don't argue that he doesn't care whether you do.
I will so argue, if I so believe my argument is correct. My opinion is that you put legal significance to a causal statement made by some one who had no intent of it having legal significance. Again, your arrogance is overwhelming to presume to tell others what arguments to make and not to make.
Ask anyone who has studied the First Folio of Shakespeare about the importance of spelling.
Okay, now ask the high-school student who read Shakespeare in high-school if it would have been more fun to have got weird spelling in addition to weird vocabulary and grammar.
I understand the importance of stuff like that to the linguist, (the last thing I skimmed while scanning in was The Roman Pronounciation of Latin where they dissect how Latin was spoken by the writings) but my primary audience is not the linguist. I'm sure there's information to be gained from the italics and hypenation I'm not transcribing either. Fortunately for the linguist, it was released in a facsimile edition in '83 that shouldn't be too hard to get a hold of; alternately, Project Gutenberg has taken to storing the images, and these will get filed away with them for those interested.