DevFS: Linus mandated its inclusion. End of story. Also, it is a simple filesystem, like Ext2, and doesn't tickle problems with the VFS.
shmfs: don't know history of this one, but it is a simple filesystem; prob. doesn't hit the VFS limitations.
ramfs/cramfs: simple filesystems, look like Ext2. Actually support fewer features than does Ext2.
Reiser: Linus said that ResierFS would not be included in 2.4. It also has to do a lot of work around shortcomings of the VFS, for which Viro has been unhelpful. Fat chance it'll be included when working against that. It's irrelevant that Reiser makes his living off of his FS, although stupid of him to make that argument.
The whole "ReiserFS thing" is not a red herring. Regardless of how "together" Hans gets his act, fact remains that his ideas and patches are being ignored. And he's bringing up real problems. HFS has to resort to some of the same silly kludges as he does. This problem has been popularized by Reiser, but isn't just Reiser's problem.
SurfsUp said 2.5 was going to focus on fixing the VFS. I hope so. A generic, stackable filesystem interface would be a good thing.
One current problem with the VFS is that it makes it impossible to use some filesystem drivers as modules. Essentially, if the filesystem isn't Ext2, or cannot be made to look like Ext2 to the VFS, it cannot operate well if at all as a loadable module, because it has to patch the VFS.
The buffer cache does its job pretty well as long as you're not doing something like journalling. As soon as you start journalling you run into questions about exactly what gets flushed to disk when and you expose areas in the buffer cache that were simply never designed with this in mind. What to do about them is an open question, and an interesting question. Look for this to be a main development center in 2.5
Well, that would be good news. Cleaning up the VFS in 2.5 would be a welcome development, seeing as more and more parts of the kernel are depending on the vfs (shared mem, devfs, proc, disk filesystems... etc).
Take, for example, read_inode(). This function takes, as part of its single argument, a union of info for current filesystems. Filesystems not featured in this union must use the generic ip pointer. Now, the right way to do it is to make all filesystems use the generic pointer, rather than include fs-specific data in the vfs.
I think if the vfs were more generic, then things like journaling would be less of an issue. The vfs should provide interfaces for filesystems without implementing any filesystem itself. As it is, it's a virtualized Ext2, as you said.
Having a single person in charge of the VFS is not the problem. On the contrary, a bottleneck for patches to that very important system is a good thing, to ensure consistency. The problem is, that *Viro* is the bottleneck. He is unwilling to generalize the VFS rather than simply support Ext2/3. There's no point in having a vfs if it's not generalized enough to work with other filesystems.
Wouldn't a nice, generic, stackable filesystem interface be a GOOD thing?
Al Viro is, interestingly, not the only one working on VFS code, not the only one documenting it, not the only one putting out patches and advocating changes, but it's only his stuff that makes it in.
Al Viro is in charge of the VFS. To go straight to Linus is to circumvent Viro. If Linus accepts a patch that Viro would not, then Viro would be in the position of maintaining it. Which he wouldn't like. He'd probably resent it.
People have already sat down and coded better solutions and attempted to advocate them. So far, it has not worked.
You're a driver hacker, you say. For the sake of argument, let's asuume the networking interfaces in Linux heavily favored 3Com ethernet cards. So all other cards had to look like 3Com cards to work with the interface. And that the person in charge of the nic driver interface refused to change it to make it more generalized and useful to competing NICs. Even though you have written better code, advocated changes to existing code to make it more flexible, etc.
You'd probably start by telling people that the current system is broken, right? Trying to create pressure from outside the kernel development community, because applying pressure from inside is not working. Hardly "whining." Thanks for the flip insult, though.
Patching the VFS is a solution, but not a good one. It means your filesystem is much harder to maintain, and that it can never be included in the kernel distro.
Most people use what's there when they run "make menuconfig", if they even compile their own kernels. The vast majority of Linux users would not compile their own kernel, but just use whatever RedHat/SuSE, etc. provide. Meaning a kernel component distributed as a patch will not be adopted, unless a distro adopts is as a standard non-standard part (like the TurboLinux clustering, and Reiser in SuSE).
If a filesystem could be loaded as a module -- meaning it wouldn't need to patch the VFS -- then people could still use it easily, even with stock kernels. Just download the TGZ, RPM, DEB or whatever and install it. Because a patch is required, most people will not use it.
Viro still holds a firm grip on the VFS, and refuses to make it stackable. Worse than that, the VFS has specific ext2 functionality built into it. It's a "virtual filesystem" as long as you can make your filesystem look and work like ext2.
Now there's a harebrained idea to add "generic" journaling functionality to the VFS. I assume this is so that when ext3 is finally ready, the VFS will support it well, and all other filesystems will have to then look like ext3.
Take a look at the enormous hacks the HFS and ReiserFS have had to make to work around Alexander Viro and his Virtual Ext2 Filesystem.
Microsoft make it nearly impossible to write new filesystems for Windows NT, because they want everyone to use NTFS. Viro's doing the same thing. So why is it tolerated in an open-source OS?
The reason 2.4 has no journaling filesystem is that there are roadblocks in place to keep it that way. Ext3 will be the first journaling filesystem in Linux. Not because it will be the first journaling filesystem, or the best, but because it will be the one properly supported by the VFS ("Viro File System").
The Reiser-Viro flame wars aside, the filesystem cartel is doing serious damage to Linux. Linux should have a generic, capable, stackable VFS that isn't tied to a specific filesystem, and doesn't provide special support for preferred filesystems.
Adding to the problem is that the VFS is very poorly documented. Changes are made without any foreshadowing. The best documentation available is the source code for the Ext2 filesystem. And that is sad.
Maybe Linus will intercede to provide a better VFS. Maybe the Stark Fist of Removal will pay Viro a visit.
This post is not meant as a flame. The VFS is a serious issue. Linux could have had a journaling filesystem by now.
A friend of mine, after learning to use Visual C++, stopped calling it "C++" and started calling it "The Microsoft Language" or "TML" for short. He said that TML bore little resemblance to actual C++, what with COM and all, and was more accurately described as TML.
Can't wait to hear his take on d-flat.
Re:Things I'd like to see done to the TIVO
on
Hacking The Tivo
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· Score: 2
And, to act as your cable-modem gateway and be usable as an mp3 player.
Add a dvd drive.
Viola! The all-in-one unit everyone would have a use for.
I find that Linux is more consistent that Windows. Unix has a philosophy -- everything is a file. It's not followed 100% (as in Plan9), but it's pretty widespread. Windows has no philosophy; it feels like a mash of unrelated ways of doing things.
Also, with Linux (any open-source, really), I can find out what the bugs are. I've been programming with imagemagick recently and ran across a situation where the headers didn't match the documentation. I just lookined in the.c file at the implementation of the function in question, and my questions were answered.
If he's good at Windows programming, though, good for him. It's not easy to be a *good* Windows programmer. And he probably makes good money at it.
At least PDF is a fully documented file format that anyone can make, without paying royalties to Adobe; PDF doesn't have "macro viruses" and doesn't need system fonts; it has several free multiplatform readers; and it preserves document layout. However, it's not a word processing format, so it's not a panaecea. It's difficult to impossible to edit.
Yes. It's Microsoft's Component Object Model. A formalized descendant of Object Linking and Embedding, which was originally a method of making compond documents with Word and Excel.
.DOC is an OLE Structured Storage format which can store data streams meant for other programs, like Visio. Those programs also do not have open formats.
The practice of passing around Word documents in Email because "everyone must be able to read them, right?" is a problem. If someone sends you a document in their favorite proprietary format, you should send them back a document in your favorite proprietary format. Maybe them people will start to understand the need for open, well-documented formats.
I usually insert visio diagrams in my word documents, and i certainly don't expect to be able to edit those diagrams when i open it up at university with staroffice.
All you have to do is implement large portions of Windows, COM and Windows Apps to make it work. It uses OLE Structured Storage. OLE (COM/ActiveX) is a Windows thing. To make OLE Structured Storage work on other OSes, you have to make COM available, and use it to read and write the doc. Microsoft did this for the Macintosh, for example.
So, to properly read and write.doc files, you either have to:
1) run Windows and Word 2) run MacOS and Word 3) port COM to anither OS and write a Word-alike
Yummy. Anyone written COM for Linux lately? TummyX's "it's open, it's open, stop whining" aside,.DOC is not open because the technology it depends on is not open. I'm sure the fellow who wrote a Word viewer in his C programming course did it on Windows, where COM and other Windows APIs are available. If he did it on Unix or BeOS or something, he should speak up.
Open file formats are important for interoperability and choice. Non-open ones are important for limiting choice and maintaining control. Knowledge shared is power lost, as Aleister Crowley said.
We've about finished a tool that will do PDF to XML conversions, and back again. It also sports a native API to allow t he creation of documents from scratch. It allows embedding of truetype fonts. It runs on Linux and Windows NT.
It'll be out in the next week or so; check Freshmeat.
The idea behind it is, create a nice layou template in the tool of your choice -- Illustrator, for example. Save as PDF. Convert to XML. Add your markup to it -- extra text, etc., convert back to PDF. Done!
Release 1.5 will include a "template" feature, whereby you can use pages from existing PDFs as templates directly; something along these lines (pseudocode):
Does this type of tool sound interesting to anyone?
On a related note, we plan to offer it as both open source and a commercial product. For instance, the ActiveX interface would be commercial. You could negotiate a commercial license. And you can use it under something like the Alladin license (a la ghostscript, pdflib, etc). Any advice on open source + commercial? I have to justify my department's budget.
It scans to "Image + Text" PDFs. This represents each page as an image, but includes the OCRed text for searching purposes. It's the best for legal and archival documents, because it's a true reproduction. Completely OCRed text is often inaccurate in terms of both content and presentation.
I was going to use Acrobat Capture, until Adobe ("The Microsoft of the Graphics World") started charging a penny and a half per page. Suddenly, the job went from costing $800 (old Capture pricing) to $25000 (new capture pricing). I even called the Product Manager at Adobe for Capture and asked her why they made such a bold, stupid move. She said that Capture was now a "server product", which justified the price increase. I asked her if she expected anyone to use capture rather than the $80 Textbridge Pro which did the same thing, and she said yes. "You're on the wrong drugs," I said.
To make TextBridge even sweeter, it turned out to be scriptable. I can hand textbridge specialized configuration files for each job. This allowed me to use Perl to automate the conversion of several tens of thousands of TIFF images into multipage, searchable PDFs. Yay, Textbridge!
Apparently, though, Adobe had some words with Xerox (ScanSoft), because Version 9 does not include PDF support. Wankers.
If you can find a copy of Textbridge Pro 8.0 (I think it's the "'97" release), it'll do the trick!
Example: Requiring porn sites to use ".xxx" or ".porn" or some such would allow a quick way to prevent children from seeing porn sites; much better than the "net nanny" crap.
You are wrong with this, and I have code to prove it. Most vendors make their own kernel patches and thus have slight incompatibilities. SUSE, Redhat, and others. This is a topic of much controversy lately.
Well, then THAT SUCKS!!!! I've never have a problem using random modules on the e.g., 2.2.14-5 Redhat kernels. I don't know what the "-5" part entails. Do you? Of course, I usually download and rebuild my own kernel eventually.
If a driver works on one linux, it works on any linux. They all use the same kernel -- that's what makes it *linux* and not the Hurd or something.
Caldera 2.3 has two really nice installation features; one, it lets you play video games while it installs. Two, once it's done installing, you don't have to reboot; just pop out the CD and go install on the next machine. Whee! Kinda cool. Witness The Awesome Power of Chroot().
Hmmm... I have a compaq presario with the same symptom -- battery "charges" then goes dead in 10 seconds to 10 minutes. Think it might also be a dc/dc converter problem?
And the license contains this gem (Section 6, "termination", section 1):
The licenses and rights granted under this Agreement shall terminate automatically if (i) You fail to comply with all of the terms and conditions herein; or (ii) You initiate or participate in any intellectual property action against Original Contributor and/or another Contributor.
... in other words, if you sue someone who has contributed to Plan 9, you lose your right to use Plan 9! That's beautiful! Rob Pike, Doug Blewett, Stu Feldman, Chris Fraser, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Phil Winterbottom are programming gods!
The license appears to be a modified BSD-type license. The system design is fantstic. If we all used Plan 9, we could stop fooling around with PVM, Mosix, etc. and have Real Distributed Computing. It's windowing system, ½, is only a 90k binary on the 68020 processor. Much less bloat than X! And there's NO MOTIF on Plan 9! An added bonus! (rimshot)
From http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/do c/8½/8½.html Here is a complete program that runs under 8½. It prints the string "hello world" wherever the left mouse button is depressed, and exits when the right mouse button is depressed. It also prints the string in the center of its window, and maintains that string when the window is resized.
The complete loaded binary is a little over 26K bytes on a 68020.
The only thing X can do in 26 bytes is dump core.
A web application server built using Plan 9 should be uber-scalable! Too much load? Add more CPU servers. Need more file storage? Add more file servers. I'm ordering a CD!
Re:The Environment is a Property-Rights Issue
on
Natural Capitalism
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· Score: 2
> Thus we arrive at an impass.
impasse
Dweeb.
Geez. Calm down. Take some prozac or whatever they prescribed for you.:)
Been there, done that, and sent the t-shirt back because it was made by slave labor.
.. evidence you seek only to smear capitalism, not understand it. Capitalism and slavery are incompatible -- mutually exclusive, actually.
Everyone has the right to the necessities to live. This means health care, education, food, a place to live, public transportation, and anything in the future that might become essential to a practical life.
No man has a right to something someone else must provide. When people have a right to the product of your labor, you are a slave to them. You probably think that altruism is a good thing -- but altruism simply means being a sucker. It means turning off your judgement and not living foryour own sake, but for anyone who wants something from you. Baa-aa-aa. Baa-aa-aa.
Government is currently the best tool for achieving these goals.
Because it can use force to achieve them. Or die trying, as has been the case over the last century. Government is "the best tool" in the same way that a pistol if the best tool for a mugger -- because the tool is used to force people to behave the way you think they should. People don't usually deliver themselves willingly into slavery to each other, or to anyone else. As Mao said, power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
Your world view, if it as like the typical libertarian view, is a very selfish and mostly social-darwinian one. It more than likely involves a view of the Government as an oppressive entity, instead of a democratic means of expressing the will of the people.
Both, actually. When it is used to express "the will of the people" to oppress other people, then it is oppressive. When it keeps people from harming each other -- from perpetrating force or fraud on one another -- it is a liberator, not an oppressor. A government is required to capitalism to work, simply to remove force and fraud from people's transactions (to the extent possible).
Rather than require people to negate their own existance "for others" -- whichever and whoever others -- I believe that people should guard their own values first. For instance, I place a higher value on the lives of my children than the life of any random stranger. Therefore I would not hesitate to protect my children before anyone else. If God asked me to sacrifice my children, I would tell him to get bent, because I value them most of all. I am selfish.
No doubt you often complain about the Government, but don't actively attempt to make it reflect your views. Or perhaps your views are socially unacceptable, and you simply realize that a large percentage of the people won't agree with clubbing baby seals, because you can make a buck at it.
... ignorant slander and stereotyping. You probably hobble good dancers, punish successful inventors and wet your bed. As much as I club baby seals, anyway.
I don't think anyone should swing that fist in the first place. But if someone does, you'll be damned if you'll see me sitting back and going "oh well, things are bad out there, but they'll get better if only more people are swinging their fists."
No one, except the government. If it's for the benefit of society (an ill-defined group term with no real referent), you'll let fists be swung. I.e., force employed to achieve your goals. You're not actually a pacifist. You're more than happy to use other people -- the government -- to forcibly achieve your goals. You just won't get your hands dirty yourself. That is cowardice. Don't eat meat if you're unwilling to kill it yourself.
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DevFS: Linus mandated its inclusion. End of story. Also, it is a simple filesystem, like Ext2, and doesn't tickle problems with the VFS.
shmfs: don't know history of this one, but it is a simple filesystem; prob. doesn't hit the VFS limitations.
ramfs/cramfs: simple filesystems, look like Ext2. Actually support fewer features than does Ext2.
Reiser: Linus said that ResierFS would not be included in 2.4. It also has to do a lot of work around shortcomings of the VFS, for which Viro has been unhelpful. Fat chance it'll be included when working against that. It's irrelevant that Reiser makes his living off of his FS, although stupid of him to make that argument.
The whole "ReiserFS thing" is not a red herring. Regardless of how "together" Hans gets his act, fact remains that his ideas and patches are being ignored. And he's bringing up real problems. HFS has to resort to some of the same silly kludges as he does. This problem has been popularized by Reiser, but isn't just Reiser's problem.
SurfsUp said 2.5 was going to focus on fixing the VFS. I hope so. A generic, stackable filesystem interface would be a good thing.
One current problem with the VFS is that it makes it impossible to use some filesystem drivers as modules. Essentially, if the filesystem isn't Ext2, or cannot be made to look like Ext2 to the VFS, it cannot operate well if at all as a loadable module, because it has to patch the VFS.
Well, that would be good news. Cleaning up the VFS in 2.5 would be a welcome development, seeing as more and more parts of the kernel are depending on the vfs (shared mem, devfs, proc, disk filesystems... etc).
Take, for example, read_inode(). This function takes, as part of its single argument, a union of info for current filesystems. Filesystems not featured in this union must use the generic ip pointer. Now, the right way to do it is to make all filesystems use the generic pointer, rather than include fs-specific data in the vfs.
I think if the vfs were more generic, then things like journaling would be less of an issue. The vfs should provide interfaces for filesystems without implementing any filesystem itself. As it is, it's a virtualized Ext2, as you said.
I look forward to 2.5!
Having a single person in charge of the VFS is not the problem. On the contrary, a bottleneck for patches to that very important system is a good thing, to ensure consistency. The problem is, that *Viro* is the bottleneck. He is unwilling to generalize the VFS rather than simply support Ext2/3. There's no point in having a vfs if it's not generalized enough to work with other filesystems.
Wouldn't a nice, generic, stackable filesystem interface be a GOOD thing?
Al Viro is, interestingly, not the only one working on VFS code, not the only one documenting it, not the only one putting out patches and advocating changes, but it's only his stuff that makes it in.
Al Viro is in charge of the VFS. To go straight to Linus is to circumvent Viro. If Linus accepts a patch that Viro would not, then Viro would be in the position of maintaining it. Which he wouldn't like. He'd probably resent it.
People have already sat down and coded better solutions and attempted to advocate them. So far, it has not worked.
You're a driver hacker, you say. For the sake of argument, let's asuume the networking interfaces in Linux heavily favored 3Com ethernet cards. So all other cards had to look like 3Com cards to work with the interface. And that the person in charge of the nic driver interface refused to change it to make it more generalized and useful to competing NICs. Even though you have written better code, advocated changes to existing code to make it more flexible, etc.
You'd probably start by telling people that the current system is broken, right? Trying to create pressure from outside the kernel development community, because applying pressure from inside is not working. Hardly "whining." Thanks for the flip insult, though.
Patching the VFS is a solution, but not a good one. It means your filesystem is much harder to maintain, and that it can never be included in the kernel distro.
Most people use what's there when they run "make menuconfig", if they even compile their own kernels. The vast majority of Linux users would not compile their own kernel, but just use whatever RedHat/SuSE, etc. provide. Meaning a kernel component distributed as a patch will not be adopted, unless a distro adopts is as a standard non-standard part (like the TurboLinux clustering, and Reiser in SuSE).
If a filesystem could be loaded as a module -- meaning it wouldn't need to patch the VFS -- then people could still use it easily, even with stock kernels. Just download the TGZ, RPM, DEB or whatever and install it. Because a patch is required, most people will not use it.
Thus the lock-in.
Viro still holds a firm grip on the VFS, and refuses to make it stackable. Worse than that, the VFS has specific ext2 functionality built into it. It's a "virtual filesystem" as long as you can make your filesystem look and work like ext2.
Now there's a harebrained idea to add "generic" journaling functionality to the VFS. I assume this is so that when ext3 is finally ready, the VFS will support it well, and all other filesystems will have to then look like ext3.
Take a look at the enormous hacks the HFS and ReiserFS have had to make to work around Alexander Viro and his Virtual Ext2 Filesystem.
Microsoft make it nearly impossible to write new filesystems for Windows NT, because they want everyone to use NTFS. Viro's doing the same thing. So why is it tolerated in an open-source OS?
The reason 2.4 has no journaling filesystem is that there are roadblocks in place to keep it that way. Ext3 will be the first journaling filesystem in Linux. Not because it will be the first journaling filesystem, or the best, but because it will be the one properly supported by the VFS ("Viro File System").
The Reiser-Viro flame wars aside, the filesystem cartel is doing serious damage to Linux. Linux should have a generic, capable, stackable VFS that isn't tied to a specific filesystem, and doesn't provide special support for preferred filesystems.
Adding to the problem is that the VFS is very poorly documented. Changes are made without any foreshadowing. The best documentation available is the source code for the Ext2 filesystem. And that is sad.
Maybe Linus will intercede to provide a better VFS. Maybe the Stark Fist of Removal will pay Viro a visit.
This post is not meant as a flame. The VFS is a serious issue. Linux could have had a journaling filesystem by now.
Assuming SourceForge is ever accessible. Have they been under DoS attacks recently, or what?
A friend of mine, after learning to use Visual C++, stopped calling it "C++" and started calling it "The Microsoft Language" or "TML" for short. He said that TML bore little resemblance to actual C++, what with COM and all, and was more accurately described as TML.
Can't wait to hear his take on d-flat.
And, to act as your cable-modem gateway and be usable as an mp3 player.
Add a dvd drive.
Viola! The all-in-one unit everyone would have a use for.
Is there any relationship between Inferno and Plan9?
I find that Linux is more consistent that Windows. Unix has a philosophy -- everything is a file. It's not followed 100% (as in Plan9), but it's pretty widespread. Windows has no philosophy; it feels like a mash of unrelated ways of doing things.
.c file at the implementation of the function in question, and my questions were answered.
Also, with Linux (any open-source, really), I can find out what the bugs are. I've been programming with imagemagick recently and ran across a situation where the headers didn't match the documentation. I just lookined in the
If he's good at Windows programming, though, good for him. It's not easy to be a *good* Windows programmer. And he probably makes good money at it.
At least PDF is a fully documented file format that anyone can make, without paying royalties to Adobe; PDF doesn't have "macro viruses" and doesn't need system fonts; it has several free multiplatform readers; and it preserves document layout. However, it's not a word processing format, so it's not a panaecea. It's difficult to impossible to edit.
Yes. It's Microsoft's Component Object Model. A formalized descendant of Object Linking and Embedding, which was originally a method of making compond documents with Word and Excel.
.DOC is an OLE Structured Storage format which can store data streams meant for other programs, like Visio. Those programs also do not have open formats.
The practice of passing around Word documents in Email because "everyone must be able to read them, right?" is a problem. If someone sends you a document in their favorite proprietary format, you should send them back a document in your favorite proprietary format. Maybe them people will start to understand the need for open, well-documented formats.
And isn't that a tragedy.
All you have to do is implement large portions of Windows, COM and Windows Apps to make it work. It uses OLE Structured Storage. OLE (COM/ActiveX) is a Windows thing. To make OLE Structured Storage work on other OSes, you have to make COM available, and use it to read and write the doc. Microsoft did this for the Macintosh, for example.
.doc files, you either have to:
.DOC is not open because the technology it depends on is not open. I'm sure the fellow who wrote a Word viewer in his C programming course did it on Windows, where COM and other Windows APIs are available.
So, to properly read and write
1) run Windows and Word
2) run MacOS and Word
3) port COM to anither OS and write a Word-alike
Yummy. Anyone written COM for Linux lately? TummyX's "it's open, it's open, stop whining" aside,
If he did it on Unix or BeOS or something, he should speak up.
Open file formats are important for interoperability and choice. Non-open ones are important for limiting choice and maintaining control. Knowledge shared is power lost, as Aleister Crowley said.
We've about finished a tool that will do PDF to XML conversions, and back again. It also sports a native API to allow t he creation of documents from scratch. It allows embedding of truetype fonts. It runs on Linux and Windows NT.
It'll be out in the next week or so; check Freshmeat.
The idea behind it is, create a nice layou template in the tool of your choice -- Illustrator, for example. Save as PDF. Convert to XML. Add your markup to it -- extra text, etc., convert back to PDF. Done!
Release 1.5 will include a "template" feature, whereby you can use pages from existing PDFs as templates directly; something along these lines (pseudocode):
p = new pdf();
t = new pdftemplate("foo.pdf");
p.newpage("8.5","11");
p.include_from_template(t.page(1));
p.drawstring("Hi!");
p.write("bar.pdf");
Does this type of tool sound interesting to anyone?
On a related note, we plan to offer it as both open source and a commercial product. For instance, the ActiveX interface would be commercial. You could negotiate a commercial license. And you can use it under something like the Alladin license (a la ghostscript, pdflib, etc). Any advice on open source + commercial? I have to justify my department's budget.
It scans to "Image + Text" PDFs. This represents each page as an image, but includes the OCRed text for searching purposes. It's the best for legal and archival documents, because it's a true reproduction. Completely OCRed text is often inaccurate in terms of both content and presentation.
I was going to use Acrobat Capture, until Adobe ("The Microsoft of the Graphics World") started charging a penny and a half per page. Suddenly, the job went from costing $800 (old Capture pricing) to $25000 (new capture pricing). I even called the Product Manager at Adobe for Capture and asked her why they made such a bold, stupid move. She said that Capture was now a "server product", which justified the price increase. I asked her if she expected anyone to use capture rather than the $80 Textbridge Pro which did the same thing, and she said yes. "You're on the wrong drugs," I said.
To make TextBridge even sweeter, it turned out to be scriptable. I can hand textbridge specialized configuration files for each job. This allowed me to use Perl to automate the conversion of several tens of thousands of TIFF images into multipage, searchable PDFs. Yay, Textbridge!
Apparently, though, Adobe had some words with Xerox (ScanSoft), because Version 9 does not include PDF support. Wankers.
If you can find a copy of Textbridge Pro 8.0 (I think it's the "'97" release), it'll do the trick!
Example:
Requiring porn sites to use ".xxx" or ".porn" or some such would allow a quick way to prevent children from seeing porn sites; much better than the "net nanny" crap.
If a driver works on one linux, it works on any linux. They all use the same kernel -- that's what makes it *linux* and not the Hurd or something.
Caldera 2.3 has two really nice installation features; one, it lets you play video games while it installs. Two, once it's done installing, you don't have to reboot; just pop out the CD and go install on the next machine. Whee! Kinda cool. Witness The Awesome Power of Chroot().
Hmmm... I have a compaq presario with the same symptom -- battery "charges" then goes dead in 10 seconds to 10 minutes. Think it might also be a dc/dc converter problem?
Actually, they named it "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" to annoy the marketing department.
... in other words, if you sue someone who has contributed to Plan 9, you lose your right to use Plan 9! That's beautiful! Rob Pike, Doug Blewett, Stu Feldman, Chris Fraser, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Phil Winterbottom are programming gods!
The license appears to be a modified BSD-type license. The system design is fantstic. If we all used Plan 9, we could stop fooling around with PVM, Mosix, etc. and have Real Distributed Computing. It's windowing system, ½, is only a 90k binary on the 68020 processor. Much less bloat than X! And there's NO MOTIF on Plan 9! An added bonus! (rimshot)
/* clear */
/* initialize graphics library */ /* initialize event library */
/* wait for release of button */
From http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/do c/8½/8½.html
Here is a complete program that runs under 8½. It prints the string "hello world" wherever the left mouse button is depressed, and exits when the right mouse button is depressed. It also prints the string in the center of its window, and maintains that string when the window is resized.
#include
#include
#include
void
ereshaped(Rectangle r)
{
Point p;
screen.r = r;
bitblt(&screen, screen.r.min, &screen, r, Zero);
p.x = screen.r.min.x + Dx(screen.r)/2;
p.y = screen.r.min.y + Dy(screen.r)/2;
p = sub(p, div(strsize(font, "hello world"), 2));
string(&screen, p, font, "hello world", S);
}
main(void)
{
Mouse m;
binit(0, 0, 0);
einit(Emouse);
ereshaped(screen.r);
for(;;){
m = emouse();
if(m.buttons & RIGHTB)
break;
if(m.buttons & LEFTB){
string(&screen, m.xy, font, "hello world", S);
do; while(emouse().buttons & LEFTB);
}
}
}
The complete loaded binary is a little over 26K bytes on a 68020.
The only thing X can do in 26 bytes is dump core.
A web application server built using Plan 9 should be uber-scalable! Too much load? Add more CPU servers. Need more file storage? Add more file servers. I'm ordering a CD!
Geez. Calm down. Take some prozac or whatever they prescribed for you.
Rather than require people to negate their own existance "for others" -- whichever and whoever others -- I believe that people should guard their own values first. For instance, I place a higher value on the lives of my children than the life of any random stranger. Therefore I would not hesitate to protect my children before anyone else. If God asked me to sacrifice my children, I would tell him to get bent, because I value them most of all. I am selfish.