Publishers might claim anything, and you can always find a court that will agree with pretty much any piece of junk you want to put out. But QT is not an operating system, any more than it's a CPU (an OS always includes a kernel, in every definition and example I've ever seen.) And GNU/Linux plus foo does not make foo a part of the operating system, any more than GNU/Linux plus a i386 makes the i386 part of the operating system.
It's possible you could argue that QT was part of SuSE and some other Linux operating systems, but that still doesn't give you the right to distribute binaries linked against QT for Solaris, as that's clearly not part of the OS.
It's a fairly common quote; a member of American Atheists asked George Bush, sr. a question about the rights of atheists before his election, and that was his response.
"However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable."
There's a big difference between QT/OSX and the standard C library of a system in terms of GPL compatibility.
What can Microsoft do? They can't afford to give MS Office away. MS Office isn't standing still because they don't care (in all fairness, they've done amazing stuff on the Unicode/multilingualization side recently), but because MS Office 97 does everything most people could want. Once you've caught up to MS Office, where are they going to go? Add an AI to write your papers?
> rest of the world suspect we are a brainwashed cult
Every set of radically new ideas makes the rest of the world worry, and every set of radically new ideas comes with its own set of redefinitions of old worlds.
> most Slashdot readers are openly hostile toward non-Linux Free Software operating systems
I haven't seen that on the boards, besides the fact that any means you would have of judging that would be wildly unscientific and inaccurate.
Let us not forget that these will be distributed in the land of conformity and social obligation
That's a pretty piece of ethnocentricity you're peddling there.... are you just reenforcing comfortable US-A-OK stereotypes?
How is that ethnocentric or "US-A-OK"? He didn't say they were bad, or the US was good - he didn't assume his culture was better than others, or that all cultures behaved the way his did.
If you want to claim that that was an inaccurate portyal of Japanese culture, then say so, but that's entirely different from calling it "ethnocentric" or "US-A-OK".
The difference between 640x480 and 1600x1200 is noticable to pretty much everyone. The difference between MP3 and CD isn't. You're comparing apples and oranges.
We get fuel efficiency when there's a market for it. If the hit car of the 90's was the Geo Metro (50+ MPG), then we would have fuel efficent cars. Since the hit car of the 90's was the SUV, no one's bothering to try and build fuel efficent cars for the American economy. The Edsel is what people needed.
What makes you blame the manufacturer for fuel efficency, anyway? It takes a certain number of joules to accelerate this many tons of mass this fast. That's physics, and only so much can be done before you're running up against that limit. The fuel efficent cars do so partially by reducing mass, compromising one feature for another.
> You can't do anything about a DoS. You can stop this by killing Gnutella/whatever.
That's the same as saying you can stop a DoS by killing your internet connection.
Re:5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete
on
No GNOME For Solaris 9
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
(1) When has the basic design of QT changed last? Not recently, and for good reason; no one was to try and code to a rapidly changing library. Both GNOME and KDE run on a system whose basic design was fixed by the early 80's. Does that make Unix bad?
(2) The browser components are largely a wash.
(3) GTK+ 2.0 is going to be out with GNOME 2.0, just like antialiasing is out with QT 3.0, about the same time frame.
(5) RMS doesn't care about HURD. The HURD developers care about the HURD, and that's why the HURD continues to be developed, not for some political point. KDE has reimplemented a ton of stuff, because they liked their way better. That's the choice of a free-software developer.
But in a lot of ways, it's not like Torvalds and Linux. The first messages about Linux were "I've been hacking on this, and somebody wanted to see it, so here it is. It probably won't compile." I've not read an early ambitious post about Linux; Torvalds never claimed it was going to be a big thing until it was a big thing.
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 2
(1) They don't may not have to worry about writing an operating system, but they had to worry about portability, and they couldn't just change the operating system when they needed to.
(2) Comparing the upper levels of Windows to KDE is entirely fair. Sure, Open Source has different engineers working on the lower levels, but so does Microsoft.
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 2
How much sense does it make that they randomly grabbed two letters for a product name? If it doesn't stand for New Technology, then the next plausible answer is that it is VMS incremented, analogous to the IBM -> Hal change.
It's non-computer geeks who get viruses. Why should the average person have to be paranoid about everything they do while connected to the net? It takes a great deal of knowledge to know what you need to be paranoid about and what you don't. Almost all of us download programs from unknown sites and run them; the intuition on what's safe and not there is hard to develop, and doesn't always save you. (Heck, even store bought programs from big names have been known to contain viruses.)
Don't blame stupid people for viruses; the average person won't and shouldn't have to know enough to block every virus. Blame the people who made systems where virus writing is simple and fruitful.
Successful in what way? It didn't provide for freedom for the people; it didn't keep them prosperous. There were good reasons behind the American, Russian and French revolutions.
One main reason for monarchy during the middle ages, is because it's an efficent system for low-technology, large area govenments. We now have the ability to educate the populace, and to give that populace easy means to communicate with representives, meaning that monarchy is now a less efficent system than a representive democracy.
> they can't accept that fact that their system isn't working.
I think Churchill is the one who said that Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented, except for all the other ones. Does it work perfectly? No way. But all the other known systems have been tried; Marxism, dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, anarchies, and they're all mostly worse than democracy, which has kept Americans and Western Europeans mostly free and mostly prosperous for over a century.
The normal meaning of ASCII compatible is an ASCII stream converted into that encoding doesn't change, with occasionally the further restriction being added that bytes in the range 00-7F are equal to ASCII characters (i.e. are not parts of multibyte characters.)
In this sense, UTF-8 is ASCII compatible. UTF-7, on the other hand, munges certain ASCII characters, and uses bytes in the range 00-7F to stand for non-ASCII characters. If you have to deal with a 7 bit channel, UTF-7 may be the way to go, but otherwise you want to avoid it.
Emacs also has the advantage that you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the virus in plain text. Even the most computer ignorant people will know something's wrong when the bottom of the document is filled with computer code.
> Picture this - a graphics card that has a pure hardware implementation of XFree86 4.1, Gnome 2, and (just for the hell of it) KDE 2.2 as well.
Okay, in the year 2025, someone comes out with a multi-trillion transitor chip dedicated to emulating 25 year old software, slower than any contemporanous chip. (25 years is probably optimistic for coding this in "pure" hardware.) I'm sure eveyone will be thrilled.
Do you understand the difference between CISC and RISC? The whole point of RISC is that dumping more and more stuff on the hardware isn't always the way to spend things up. RISC does a few things fast. Modern CISC chips, like the Pentium, are largely a CISC to RISC interpreter with a RISC core.
Yes. Considering that its deficencies have been involved in many of the security holes, and other languages allow you to work quicker and more securely, I'd definetly switch to using something else for most cases.
> But it's a basic tool. Not testing your code is much worse than using string functions.
Testing is important, but it takes much less time to turn out a mostly bugfree code and fix bugs from there, then to start from buggy code and fix bugs from there. Do it right the first time, and you don't have to fix it.
> This is like banning hammers just because people have been known to hit their thumbs with them.
This is like banning unguarded circular saws just because people have been known to slice off their thumbs with them. Guess what? Circular saws come with guards. If a tool is really dangerous, and can be made safer through simple solutions, then we use those solutions to make it safer.
Strings are a source of problems for a lot of programs, including well-known programs that have very experianced programmers working on them. Unit testing will never catch all bugs. Many languages - Ada/Java/C++/Perl - have string types that won't cause buffer overflows - ever. Using an unsafe tool when you have a safe tool at hand that will do the job about as easily is just stupid, whether or not you think you're good enough to keep yourself safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Publishers might claim anything, and you can always find a court that will agree with pretty much any piece of junk you want to put out. But QT is not an operating system, any more than it's a CPU (an OS always includes a kernel, in every definition and example I've ever seen.) And GNU/Linux plus foo does not make foo a part of the operating system, any more than GNU/Linux plus a i386 makes the i386 part of the operating system.
It's possible you could argue that QT was part of SuSE and some other Linux operating systems, but that still doesn't give you the right to distribute binaries linked against QT for Solaris, as that's clearly not part of the OS.
It's a fairly common quote; a member of American Atheists asked George Bush, sr. a question about the rights of atheists before his election, and that was his response.
Not that I trust GB, jr. any more . . .
Russia has the same copyright laws as anywhere else, so TrollTech can sue you there for violating the license just as easy as the US or EU.
Read the fine license!!! The GPL says
"However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable."
There's a big difference between QT/OSX and the standard C library of a system in terms of GPL compatibility.
Or from Quicktime to wav to ogg.
Words are the tools of any communicator. If you want to communicate well, use them correctly and precisely. Semantics matter.
What can Microsoft do? They can't afford to give MS Office away. MS Office isn't standing still because they don't care (in all fairness, they've done amazing stuff on the Unicode/multilingualization side recently), but because MS Office 97 does everything most people could want. Once you've caught up to MS Office, where are they going to go? Add an AI to write your papers?
> rest of the world suspect we are a brainwashed cult
Every set of radically new ideas makes the rest of the world worry, and every set of radically new ideas comes with its own set of redefinitions of old worlds.
> most Slashdot readers are openly hostile toward non-Linux Free Software operating systems
I haven't seen that on the boards, besides the fact that any means you would have of judging that would be wildly unscientific and inaccurate.
That's a pretty piece of ethnocentricity you're peddling there.
How is that ethnocentric or "US-A-OK"? He didn't say they were bad, or the US was good - he didn't assume his culture was better than others, or that all cultures behaved the way his did.
If you want to claim that that was an inaccurate portyal of Japanese culture, then say so, but that's entirely different from calling it "ethnocentric" or "US-A-OK".
The difference between 640x480 and 1600x1200 is noticable to pretty much everyone. The difference between MP3 and CD isn't. You're comparing apples and oranges.
We get fuel efficiency when there's a market for it. If the hit car of the 90's was the Geo Metro (50+ MPG), then we would have fuel efficent cars. Since the hit car of the 90's was the SUV, no one's bothering to try and build fuel efficent cars for the American economy. The Edsel is what people needed.
What makes you blame the manufacturer for fuel efficency, anyway? It takes a certain number of joules to accelerate this many tons of mass this fast. That's physics, and only so much can be done before you're running up against that limit. The fuel efficent cars do so partially by reducing mass, compromising one feature for another.
> You can't do anything about a DoS. You can stop this by killing Gnutella/whatever.
That's the same as saying you can stop a DoS by killing your internet connection.
(1) When has the basic design of QT changed last? Not recently, and for good reason; no one was to try and code to a rapidly changing library. Both GNOME and KDE run on a system whose basic design was fixed by the early 80's. Does that make Unix bad?
(2) The browser components are largely a wash.
(3) GTK+ 2.0 is going to be out with GNOME 2.0, just like antialiasing is out with QT 3.0, about the same time frame.
(5) RMS doesn't care about HURD. The HURD developers care about the HURD, and that's why the HURD continues to be developed, not for some political point. KDE has reimplemented a ton of stuff, because they liked their way better. That's the choice of a free-software developer.
But in a lot of ways, it's not like Torvalds and Linux. The first messages about Linux were "I've been hacking on this, and somebody wanted to see it, so here it is. It probably won't compile." I've not read an early ambitious post about Linux; Torvalds never claimed it was going to be a big thing until it was a big thing.
(1) They don't may not have to worry about writing an operating system, but they had to worry about portability, and they couldn't just change the operating system when they needed to.
(2) Comparing the upper levels of Windows to KDE is entirely fair. Sure, Open Source has different engineers working on the lower levels, but so does Microsoft.
How much sense does it make that they randomly grabbed two letters for a product name? If it doesn't stand for New Technology, then the next plausible answer is that it is VMS incremented, analogous to the IBM -> Hal change.
It's non-computer geeks who get viruses. Why should the average person have to be paranoid about everything they do while connected to the net? It takes a great deal of knowledge to know what you need to be paranoid about and what you don't. Almost all of us download programs from unknown sites and run them; the intuition on what's safe and not there is hard to develop, and doesn't always save you. (Heck, even store bought programs from big names have been known to contain viruses.)
Don't blame stupid people for viruses; the average person won't and shouldn't have to know enough to block every virus. Blame the people who made systems where virus writing is simple and fruitful.
Successful in what way? It didn't provide for freedom for the people; it didn't keep them prosperous. There were good reasons behind the American, Russian and French revolutions.
One main reason for monarchy during the middle ages, is because it's an efficent system for low-technology, large area govenments. We now have the ability to educate the populace, and to give that populace easy means to communicate with representives, meaning that monarchy is now a less efficent system than a representive democracy.
> they can't accept that fact that their system isn't working.
I think Churchill is the one who said that Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented, except for all the other ones. Does it work perfectly? No way. But all the other known systems have been tried; Marxism, dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, anarchies, and they're all mostly worse than democracy, which has kept Americans and Western Europeans mostly free and mostly prosperous for over a century.
The normal meaning of ASCII compatible is an ASCII stream converted into that encoding doesn't change, with occasionally the further restriction being added that bytes in the range 00-7F are equal to ASCII characters (i.e. are not parts of multibyte characters.)
In this sense, UTF-8 is ASCII compatible. UTF-7, on the other hand, munges certain ASCII characters, and uses bytes in the range 00-7F to stand for non-ASCII characters. If you have to deal with a 7 bit channel, UTF-7 may be the way to go, but otherwise you want to avoid it.
Please explain how this would work. If you store 0 .. 255 in one byte, how do you indicate a multibyte sequence.
Emacs also has the advantage that you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the virus in plain text. Even the most computer ignorant people will know something's wrong when the bottom of the document is filled with computer code.
> Picture this - a graphics card that has a pure hardware implementation of XFree86 4.1, Gnome 2, and (just for the hell of it) KDE 2.2 as well.
Okay, in the year 2025, someone comes out with a multi-trillion transitor chip dedicated to emulating 25 year old software, slower than any contemporanous chip. (25 years is probably optimistic for coding this in "pure" hardware.) I'm sure eveyone will be thrilled.
Do you understand the difference between CISC and RISC? The whole point of RISC is that dumping more and more stuff on the hardware isn't always the way to spend things up. RISC does a few things fast. Modern CISC chips, like the Pentium, are largely a CISC to RISC interpreter with a RISC core.
> Is your solution then to abandon C?
Yes. Considering that its deficencies have been involved in many of the security holes, and other languages allow you to work quicker and more securely, I'd definetly switch to using something else for most cases.
> But it's a basic tool. Not testing your code is much worse than using string functions.
Testing is important, but it takes much less time to turn out a mostly bugfree code and fix bugs from there, then to start from buggy code and fix bugs from there. Do it right the first time, and you don't have to fix it.
> This is like banning hammers just because people have been known to hit their thumbs with them.
This is like banning unguarded circular saws just because people have been known to slice off their thumbs with them. Guess what? Circular saws come with guards. If a tool is really dangerous, and can be made safer through simple solutions, then we use those solutions to make it safer.
Strings are a source of problems for a lot of programs, including well-known programs that have very experianced programmers working on them. Unit testing will never catch all bugs. Many languages - Ada/Java/C++/Perl - have string types that won't cause buffer overflows - ever. Using an unsafe tool when you have a safe tool at hand that will do the job about as easily is just stupid, whether or not you think you're good enough to keep yourself safe.