What responsible OS vendor would switch to a compiler they didn't have the source to? Possible trojans, a whole new set of bugs that they can't fix, and no control over whether improvements will be made or bugs will continue to be fixed upstream. For a slight speed increase - it's not a tradeoff most would make, for good reason.
Your "natural rights" fundamentalism makes me barf. The Weimar consitution did grant Nazis the right to do whatever they wanted. Look what happened.
They should have followed the Russian Czar's approach and outlawed them. That saved Russia from the Communists.
What else would have happened? Between the humilating defeat in WWI, the massive war debts, and the Great Depresssion, Germany was going to hell in a handbasket no matter what the Weimar constitution said. Had you silenced the Nazis and the Communists, Germany probably would have either gone down in bloody civil war or ignored that part of the constitution. You silence the Nazis, the Communists take over - Heil Stalin. There were no pretty solutions there.
Please ask the victims of the Nazis what they think about your "rights."
You mean like the guy who lived through the Holocaust and went around to synagouges tring to explain to them why the Nazis should be allowed to march in Skokie?
mine is that it still doesn't work 1/100 as well as an actual book. I find my focus and retention from reading off a monitor is not the same as a book. This an opinion thing though, so no more can really be said.
I've read several books off a monitor, and never had a problem. I would guess it's an acquired trait.
And it's via these and similar ebook methods that ebook readers for blind people will no doubt be available.
Ah, but these methods provide plain text to the external world, which is a big no-no in the proprietary ebook universe. If I'm not mistaken, all output of a ebook program is rendered directly to the screen.
The best possible format for blind readers is something like HTML or plain text that isn't inherantly bound to the features and limitations of the visual world. But they aren't going to do that, are they?
Can you give me some example of how ebooks today are engineered at a fundamental level so as not to allow eventual blind access via methods that you and I both pointed out?
They're encrypted and attached to a proprietary, visual-only reader, for one . . .
There is something about have a physical copy in your hands, but online books are nice too, especially in searching. That physical copy needs an external source of light and needs physical effort to go to the next page, similar to the online book. They also get bent and damaged very easy.
It's nice to a history that can't be wiped out by fire or rain, too. Besides engraving the world's literature in huge stone and steel monuments, redundancy's seems to be the best solution. It's easy to make thousands of electronic copies; much more expensive is it to make thousands of paper copies. Project Gutenberg has probably made more electronic copies of many of its books than there were existing physical copies.
For one, I think books will be around forever. There are still some serious issues to deal with, that I don't think will all be resolved within our lifetime
Books will be around forever - people still carve messages into stone, too. But ebooks are feasible today - I've read several books off my computer. I don't see why the few remaining materials technology problems aren't going to be solved, and something cheaper and more searchable should overtake a lot of the non-decorative uses for paper books.
And as for your comment about blind people being condemned to illiteracy, that is just so hysterical it's not even funny.
Why? It's a logical result of what happens if the blind are prevented from reading.
How do you think blind people use computers today??
Are you implying that the blind can't use computers? One of the college system administrators is blind. If you have a GUI, you override the standard GUI display function to send it to a text to speech converter. If you use console, you just send the screen to a text to speech converter as appropriate.
the overall demand for ebooks is so tiny that the blind market would be so miniscule as to matter not at all. There are a lot of other issues to resolve with ebooks before worrying about special cases like this.
Good engineering demands that you don't put stuff like this off until the end when all you can provide is a hack. Design it right the first time, so the blind and the Chinese and the Hindi and all the other "special cases" can be handled cleanly.
I don't really understand how it can be all right without penalties, but unconstitutional in the "Flag Protection Act".
Because you have to have standing to sue to have something found unconstitutional. Police aren't going to waste their time running around trying to enforce laws without punishment, and judges would probably throw out any such case brought to them as being moot and a waste of the court's time. Since no one's being arrested for it, no one has standing to sue, and the Supreme Court doesn't get an opportunity to rule it unconsititional.
Sorry but Linus Does Not Scale is a false statement. Who could say that (s)he could do better than Linus does.
But that's the point! It's not that Linus doesn't scale and that someone should replace him, but that humans don't scale, and we need a new system that doesn't the pressure on the top.
Should a message include the word "From " at the start of the line it is quoted while in the mbox only. When it is displayed it is removed [..]
Unix mailers that use mbox may munge the message while it is stored but they do not have a problem with displaying the message.
As JWZ said, From and >From are stored the same in the mbox, so there's no way of fixing it. And no matter how many times you say it ain't so - I've seen many, many mail messages in mutt with >From instead of From in the message. Unix mailers have a problem displaying From in a message, and this comes from first hand experiance with up-to-date (Debian unstable) versions of mutt.
Blue Mountain basically singlehandedly killed any hope of consumers getting any form of automatic junk-mail killing without hand-crafting it *themselves*. Thanks Blue Mountain! You made my internet experience so much shittier.
So Blue Mountain should have quietly gone out of buisness because of Microsoft's incompentence? Microsoft was asked to remove Blue Mountain from the mail filter. Microsoft said they weren't going to fix it. Only then did Blue Mountain sue them. If Microsoft wanted a junk mail filter, they should have been willing to take responsiblity of taking care of it and removing stuff from the filter than shouldn't have been there.
Why does it make your internet experiance so much shitter? Are you too stupid to set up your own mail filter? Read the manual, and if Outlook Express won't let you do it, well, you chose the mail program.
His only valid complaint is that apparently Outlook has a bug regarding lines that begin with "begin". Wow, a mail client has a bug.
If mutt had a bug like this, they wouldn't tell me "just don't do that" - they would fix it. If stuff like this started happening to Mutt, people would ask "why don't they just fix it?" or "why do you use such a lame mail client that they've never fixed that bug?". It's the fault of Outlook's vendors that this continues to exist.
Failing that, we can only hope that Red Hat et. al. will use the Intel compiler to make all their future RPMs.
I wouldn't hope that. Red Hat employs several of the main GCC hackers.
As a side note, Debian will never employ a non-free compiler in compiling its packages. So Red Hat and Debian probably won't switch over, leaving it for Caldera and SUSE and the other non-free distributers to use the Intel compiler if they so want.
Looks like we can't even have IEEE compliance, we can only favor it.
The difference between that and GCC is that GCC has the "favor IEEE" on by default. All the gory details are in the GCC mail archives, but GCC is no wonder of IEEE conformance, either.
Instead of being dissapointed, you should talk about it on GCC mailing lists [gnu.org] or even submit a patch.
The problem is that in the case of GCC and any other project led by RMS, things are not that easy.
Like what? You're going to spend the time to understand a complex program and write some intricate patch, and you can't take time to sign your name to a form and send it in?
In the case of GCC, I think a fork might be very beneficial to fuel development.
Why? They had a fork, called EGCS. It became the new GCC, and everyone's happy. Do you really think there's that many would-be compiler writers who are too lazy to send in the paper work?
And I'll be real interested to see if it will actually compile the kernel!
It would surprise the heck out of me if it does. A compiler practically has to be bug-compatible with the version of GCC Linux used to build his kernel to build it correctly. The kernel uses a lot of gcc-specific code, including undocumented properties.
The first copy of the first volume of the Art of Computer Programming was released back in the 1950's, and the second volume was first released in the 1960's. So, yeah, Knuth's ancient.
Or is this just another geek trophy to have, print, wave around over coffee, and ultimately collect dust on shelves full of other useless time-wasting trinkets?
Yes. Sometimes isn't that what makes life worth living? Not the huge major successes, but just something that temporarily brings a smile to your lips and exclamation to your voice? The things that may not shake the world, but are still cool in their own way?
Whats wrong with having a directfb or berlin alternative which unlike Xrender, do the stuff you talk about RIGHT NOW.
They do? That's news to me. So far, Berlin is a technology demo that runs one (1) practical tool, a Jabber client. It's designed in such a way that it's hard to port GTK or QT to it. At best, Berlin will be useable replacement by the time XRender is done. The framebuffer is a framebuffer, not a windowing system. Berlin and X can use the framebuffer, but it's not a windowing system, and it doesn't support all the stuff a windowing system needs (say, fonts for example.)
Why can't the xfree86 guys just add anti-alising to the existing font rendering code?
Because the current font rendering code hands the program a set of black and white bitmaps; it has no way to pass grayscale or alpha data to the program.
These arguments get me *so* pissed off. People are dying in other parts of the world because they can't get enough rice, and *we're* worried about a luxury we somehow view as an inalienable right.
Should we be worried about feeding ourselves? About shelter? There's basically zero chance, barring massive US-wide catasrophe, that I will be without food and shelter for an extended period of time in the forseeable future. Most Slashdotites are in the same boat - unless they got extremely unlucky, stupid or lazy, they aren't going to be without shelter or food. So why worry about it?
Anticopy TVs degrade our way of life, or so we believe. So we react negatively to it. Sane people don't worry about situations that have almost no chance of occuring - i.e loss of food and water - so we don't. What's so hard to understand?
The real unfair part is that Deep Blue could use its opening book, while Kasparov couldn't. Considering that Kasparov lost the final game by playing a known losing opening move, this literally was the differnece.
If the player has to use only memory for openings, so should the computer.
Huh? What's the computer equivelent of a human's memory? If it's RAM/ROM, why should it make any difference why it should load it from hard disk or RAM/ROM - it's a difference of cash thrown at the problem.
Kasparov had no excuse for the final game. From what I understand, had he played that game against a human grandmaster, the human would have savaged him as well. Grandmasters don't mess up the opening game, at least not if they want to stay grandmasters. He was rattled - but that's the way grandmasters lose to other humans, too.
Because Linux runs on ix86, include very old machines. To handle that variety of hardware, much of it buggy, incompatible, or backwardly compatible to point of absurdity (the Pentium IV, partially backwardly compatible with the Intel 4004 of 30 years ago, is a fine example of this) is very difficult, and in the general sense impossible to autoconfigure.
As others have pointed out, 10,000 years at 3.8 cm per year is only 380 meters. Out of over 250 thousand kilometers, that's not much change.
The gravitational effects of the moon on the Earth are fairly minor. Losing the moon would kill the tides, and creatures that depend on them, but that's about it.
The standard explanation for coal in cold areas and seashells way above sea level is continental drift and tectonic action. No moon gravity explanation necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
What responsible OS vendor would switch to a compiler they didn't have the source to? Possible trojans, a whole new set of bugs that they can't fix, and no control over whether improvements will be made or bugs will continue to be fixed upstream. For a slight speed increase - it's not a tradeoff most would make, for good reason.
Your "natural rights" fundamentalism makes me barf. The Weimar consitution did grant Nazis the right to do whatever they wanted. Look what happened.
They should have followed the Russian Czar's approach and outlawed them. That saved Russia from the Communists.
What else would have happened? Between the humilating defeat in WWI, the massive war debts, and the Great Depresssion, Germany was going to hell in a handbasket no matter what the Weimar constitution said. Had you silenced the Nazis and the Communists, Germany probably would have either gone down in bloody civil war or ignored that part of the constitution. You silence the Nazis, the Communists take over - Heil Stalin. There were no pretty solutions there.
Please ask the victims of the Nazis what they think about your "rights."
You mean like the guy who lived through the Holocaust and went around to synagouges tring to explain to them why the Nazis should be allowed to march in Skokie?
So whose to stop them from making a proprietary, braille reader.
As you pointed out, why should they? Blind people are small demographic; where's the profit in it?
mine is that it still doesn't work 1/100 as well as an actual book. I find my focus and retention from reading off a monitor is not the same as a book. This an opinion thing though, so no more can really be said.
I've read several books off a monitor, and never had a problem. I would guess it's an acquired trait.
And it's via these and similar ebook methods that ebook readers for blind people will no doubt be available.
Ah, but these methods provide plain text to the external world, which is a big no-no in the proprietary ebook universe. If I'm not mistaken, all output of a ebook program is rendered directly to the screen.
The best possible format for blind readers is something like HTML or plain text that isn't inherantly bound to the features and limitations of the visual world. But they aren't going to do that, are they?
Can you give me some example of how ebooks today are engineered at a fundamental level so as not to allow eventual blind access via methods that you and I both pointed out?
They're encrypted and attached to a proprietary, visual-only reader, for one . . .
There is something about have a physical copy in your hands, but online books are nice too, especially in searching. That physical copy needs an external source of light and needs physical effort to go to the next page, similar to the online book. They also get bent and damaged very easy.
It's nice to a history that can't be wiped out by fire or rain, too. Besides engraving the world's literature in huge stone and steel monuments, redundancy's seems to be the best solution. It's easy to make thousands of electronic copies; much more expensive is it to make thousands of paper copies. Project Gutenberg has probably made more electronic copies of many of its books than there were existing physical copies.
For one, I think books will be around forever. There are still some serious issues to deal with, that I don't think will all be resolved within our lifetime
Books will be around forever - people still carve messages into stone, too. But ebooks are feasible today - I've read several books off my computer. I don't see why the few remaining materials technology problems aren't going to be solved, and something cheaper and more searchable should overtake a lot of the non-decorative uses for paper books.
And as for your comment about blind people being condemned to illiteracy, that is just so hysterical it's not even funny.
Why? It's a logical result of what happens if the blind are prevented from reading.
How do you think blind people use computers today??
Are you implying that the blind can't use computers? One of the college system administrators is blind. If you have a GUI, you override the standard GUI display function to send it to a text to speech converter. If you use console, you just send the screen to a text to speech converter as appropriate.
the overall demand for ebooks is so tiny that the blind market would be so miniscule as to matter not at all. There are a lot of other issues to resolve with ebooks before worrying about special cases like this.
Good engineering demands that you don't put stuff like this off until the end when all you can provide is a hack. Design it right the first time, so the blind and the Chinese and the Hindi and all the other "special cases" can be handled cleanly.
I don't really understand how it can be all right without penalties, but unconstitutional in the "Flag Protection Act".
Because you have to have standing to sue to have something found unconstitutional. Police aren't going to waste their time running around trying to enforce laws without punishment, and judges would probably throw out any such case brought to them as being moot and a waste of the court's time. Since no one's being arrested for it, no one has standing to sue, and the Supreme Court doesn't get an opportunity to rule it unconsititional.
Sorry but Linus Does Not Scale is a false statement. Who could say that (s)he could do better than Linus does.
But that's the point! It's not that Linus doesn't scale and that someone should replace him, but that humans don't scale, and we need a new system that doesn't the pressure on the top.
Should a message include the word "From " at the start of the line it is quoted while in the mbox only. When it is displayed it is removed [..]
Unix mailers that use mbox may munge the message while it is stored but they do not have a problem with displaying the message.
As JWZ said, From and >From are stored the same in the mbox, so there's no way of fixing it. And no matter how many times you say it ain't so - I've seen many, many mail messages in mutt with >From instead of From in the message. Unix mailers have a problem displaying From in a message, and this comes from first hand experiance with up-to-date (Debian unstable) versions of mutt.
Blue Mountain basically singlehandedly killed any hope of consumers getting any form of automatic junk-mail killing without hand-crafting it *themselves*. Thanks Blue Mountain! You made my internet experience so much shittier.
So Blue Mountain should have quietly gone out of buisness because of Microsoft's incompentence? Microsoft was asked to remove Blue Mountain from the mail filter. Microsoft said they weren't going to fix it. Only then did Blue Mountain sue them. If Microsoft wanted a junk mail filter, they should have been willing to take responsiblity of taking care of it and removing stuff from the filter than shouldn't have been there.
Why does it make your internet experiance so much shitter? Are you too stupid to set up your own mail filter? Read the manual, and if Outlook Express won't let you do it, well, you chose the mail program.
His only valid complaint is that apparently Outlook has a bug regarding lines that begin with "begin". Wow, a mail client has a bug.
If mutt had a bug like this, they wouldn't tell me "just don't do that" - they would fix it. If stuff like this started happening to Mutt, people would ask "why don't they just fix it?" or "why do you use such a lame mail client that they've never fixed that bug?". It's the fault of Outlook's vendors that this continues to exist.
Why can't you put binaries in the public domain? I see no reason you can't renounce your claim to copyright on a program binary.
Failing that, we can only hope that Red Hat et. al. will use the Intel compiler to make all their future RPMs.
I wouldn't hope that. Red Hat employs several of the main GCC hackers.
As a side note, Debian will never employ a non-free compiler in compiling its packages. So Red Hat and Debian probably won't switch over, leaving it for Caldera and SUSE and the other non-free distributers to use the Intel compiler if they so want.
Looks like we can't even have IEEE compliance, we can only favor it.
The difference between that and GCC is that GCC has the "favor IEEE" on by default. All the gory details are in the GCC mail archives, but GCC is no wonder of IEEE conformance, either.
Instead of being dissapointed, you should talk about it on GCC mailing lists [gnu.org] or even submit a patch.
The problem is that in the case of GCC and any other project led by RMS, things are not that easy.
Like what? You're going to spend the time to understand a complex program and write some intricate patch, and you can't take time to sign your name to a form and send it in?
In the case of GCC, I think a fork might be very beneficial to fuel development.
Why? They had a fork, called EGCS. It became the new GCC, and everyone's happy. Do you really think there's that many would-be compiler writers who are too lazy to send in the paper work?
And I'll be real interested to see if it will actually compile the kernel!
It would surprise the heck out of me if it does. A compiler practically has to be bug-compatible with the version of GCC Linux used to build his kernel to build it correctly. The kernel uses a lot of gcc-specific code, including undocumented properties.
Hang on, just how old is Knuth anyway?
The first copy of the first volume of the Art of Computer Programming was released back in the 1950's, and the second volume was first released in the 1960's. So, yeah, Knuth's ancient.
Sometimes reading the change log is like trying to read Etruscan: Pango? What does pango mean?
Pango is the part of Gnome that lets you read Etruscan!
Pango is a library that lets you display scripts, no matter how complex they are, including the much demanded Arabic and Indic scripts.
Or is this just another geek trophy to have, print, wave around over coffee, and ultimately collect dust on shelves full of other useless time-wasting trinkets?
Yes. Sometimes isn't that what makes life worth living? Not the huge major successes, but just something that temporarily brings a smile to your lips and exclamation to your voice? The things that may not shake the world, but are still cool in their own way?
Whats wrong with having a directfb or berlin alternative which unlike Xrender, do the stuff you talk about RIGHT NOW.
They do? That's news to me. So far, Berlin is a technology demo that runs one (1) practical tool, a Jabber client. It's designed in such a way that it's hard to port GTK or QT to it. At best, Berlin will be useable replacement by the time XRender is done. The framebuffer is a framebuffer, not a windowing system. Berlin and X can use the framebuffer, but it's not a windowing system, and it doesn't support all the stuff a windowing system needs (say, fonts for example.)
So, no, they can't replace X RIGHT NOW.
Why can't the xfree86 guys just add anti-alising to the existing font rendering code?
Because the current font rendering code hands the program a set of black and white bitmaps; it has no way to pass grayscale or alpha data to the program.
These arguments get me *so* pissed off. People are dying in other parts of the world because they can't get enough rice, and *we're* worried about a luxury we somehow view as an inalienable right.
Should we be worried about feeding ourselves? About shelter? There's basically zero chance, barring massive US-wide catasrophe, that I will be without food and shelter for an extended period of time in the forseeable future. Most Slashdotites are in the same boat - unless they got extremely unlucky, stupid or lazy, they aren't going to be without shelter or food. So why worry about it?
Anticopy TVs degrade our way of life, or so we believe. So we react negatively to it. Sane people don't worry about situations that have almost no chance of occuring - i.e loss of food and water - so we don't. What's so hard to understand?
The real unfair part is that Deep Blue could use its opening book, while Kasparov couldn't. Considering that Kasparov lost the final game by playing a known losing opening move, this literally was the differnece.
If the player has to use only memory for openings, so should the computer.
Huh? What's the computer equivelent of a human's memory? If it's RAM/ROM, why should it make any difference why it should load it from hard disk or RAM/ROM - it's a difference of cash thrown at the problem.
Kasparov had no excuse for the final game. From what I understand, had he played that game against a human grandmaster, the human would have savaged him as well. Grandmasters don't mess up the opening game, at least not if they want to stay grandmasters. He was rattled - but that's the way grandmasters lose to other humans, too.
Because Linux runs on ix86, include very old machines. To handle that variety of hardware, much of it buggy, incompatible, or backwardly compatible to point of absurdity (the Pentium IV, partially backwardly compatible with the Intel 4004 of 30 years ago, is a fine example of this) is very difficult, and in the general sense impossible to autoconfigure.
As others have pointed out, 10,000 years at 3.8 cm per year is only 380 meters. Out of over 250 thousand kilometers, that's not much change.
The gravitational effects of the moon on the Earth are fairly minor. Losing the moon would kill the tides, and creatures that depend on them, but that's about it.
The standard explanation for coal in cold areas and seashells way above sea level is continental drift and tectonic action. No moon gravity explanation necessary.