X was made to be very small, clean, and extensible? What are you talking about? There was a time, actually a very long time in the 1980s and 1990s during which X regularly brought $20,000 HP and Sun workstations to their knees, whereas boxes that cost half as much could run Display Postscript and NeWS (two of X's technologically superior competitors) just fine. The only reason people talk about how "snappy" X is today is because the computers they run it on are so fast now that they can't tell how poorly designed it is. Granted, Aqua and Luna or whatever aren't really any faster, but I'm not talking just about performance, I'm talking about simplification of development and ease of use. X is the ball and chain around the neck of open-source GUI software developers. There were actually joking rumors in the 1980s that X was a Soviet plot to set western computer science back 20 years. It would be less effort to finally dump X's mangled, decaying body into the nearest dumpster and to start all over again on drivers than it would be to keep this rotting carcass living, its stench scaring away all the GPU makers who were even considering writing drivers for it.
X is so UNextensible that whenever anybody wants to "extend" it, all the apps that anyone wants to take advantage of that extensibility need to be updated. Now I'm not a huge Mac fan, but when OS X first came out, the fonts in Carbon apps weren't anti-aliased. Somebody wrote a tiny little app to update them all with no recompiles. Blammo, antialiased fonts in all Carbon apps. That's extensibility. Then look at Quartz Extreme. One day you've got a plain old 2D desktop, the next day all your windows are polygons and your GUI is running in OpenGL, with no software recompiles (except for Quartz itself). Now say what you will about Apple, but that is foresight, that is planning for the future and that is intelligent design. Look at XRender in comparison. Look at xft, not what it's designed to do but how it needs to be implemented. It's like a nightmare. Look at ICCCM, it's like a gunshot to the head of simple design and basically all common sense - thank god there are layers above it now (which in a good windowing system shouldn't be necessary) and nobody has to write directly to it anymore. Look at Xlib. Jesus.
Kill X and replace it with something simple, clean, extensible and lightweight. (All characteristics which X is not.) Then put a transparent X server on top of it for backwards compatibility. X is such a dinosaur, trying to extend it with all these modern features is like ricing up a Honda Civic.
People aren't going to keep their receipts, they're going to toss them, or misplace them, and even if they don't, it's not like every single one of them is going to come back to the polling place with their receipt.
A pledge drive on libertarian Slashdot?? Haha. "Stupid kids, if you want a stuffed animal, go out and earn one. I make 80K/year as a Unix admin, so obviously earning enough to support a decent living with plenty of stuffed animals is totally possible. You have NO RIGHT to take MY PROPERTY that I EARNED to buy YOUR SELF a stuffed animal with it."
Post anything supporting OSS, get modded up. Post the truth, get modded down. Yeah, Oracle performs better than MySQL... is ANYBODY going to deny this? Is this really a big secret? Obviously Mr. AC touched a sensitive spot, otherwise his post would have been modded funny.
"COMPAT_DARWIN?" Was "Darwin Compatibility" something or other too ungeeky and accessible and English? If so then why not go full tilt and call it __CMPT_xxDKHSKH_DRWNXOJSOJ or something?
I really hope E-voting becomes a trustworthy standard. With the right people, this could become a reality. It would enable us to move democracy into a new era, where the public could vote on each policy.
Proposition X: Eliminate all taxes.
66% for, 34% against
Proposition Y: Build a new below-ground mass transit system, 50 new homeless shelters, 300 miles of new highway, and a free gold watch for every voter.
89% for, 11% against
No. But you can save it, maybe, then go to the other app, load it, maybe, well you would be able to if the app were compiled with the right image support plugins, you kept the source code right? OK, just do./configure --with-blah-blah this time, then make, then make install, then try it. A much better system IMO, because this way, *I* have control over MY computer and it only does what *I* tell it to because *I* am its master!
My first response to the article was "WTF?" but I decided to do something more productive than that. Perhaps you might find this more accessible to you as well:
The Sun today unleashed what appears to be the third most powerful flare in recorded history, a storm of charged particles that could hit Earth mid-day Wednesday with more effect than any since 1989, when an entire Canadian province had its power knocked out.
Depending on the storm's magnetic orientation, it could set off a dramatic display of colorful northern lights well into mid-latitudes of the United States and Europe.
Meanwhile, satellite operators and power grid managers are preparing to endure a potentially damaging event. And astronauts aboard the International Space Station have taken cover from heavier radiation sent out by the flare. They are not expected to be in any serious danger.
Kicked up at 6 a.m. EST (1100 UT) today, the major solar outburst comes on the heels of four other flares late last week and over the weekend. All were considered fairly severe, but the latest eruption makes the others seem like solar sneezes.
Today's blast is classified as an X17, where X denotes a major flare and larger numbers are stronger. That compares to two flare-ups over the weekend that were rated less than X2.
"The flare today may be the third strongest X-flare on record," said Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for the SOHO spacecraft, which first spotted the event.
A slightly stronger flare on April 2, 2001 was not pointed at Earth. Today's storm is headed directly at us and could generate fantastic colorful lights in the atmosphere, known as aurora. The storm associated with the flare is called a coronal mass ejection, an expanding bubble of charged particles that race outward.
I have no idea why this was modded as flamebait, because it's absolutely true. Vnu? It's probably a recursive acronym for Vnu's Not Useful, especially considering that it appears to be built on Mozilla Composer, which is the best program in the world at taking perfectly logical, efficient HTML and adding loads of useless text garbage to it, increasing its byte size by 3x.
Most assholes I've met have been very smart. Most retards I've met have been very nice. You are one of the rare exceptions to both of these observations.
Theoretically the same cars that are going to have this device installed are going to also have a computerized traction control system, which is smart enough to know when the wheel is spinning out.
The money collected from tickets does not go directly into the budget of the police department. It goes into the general fund of whatever the level of government is to which you pay the fine.
I hate it when people hide behind the "write it yourself" fallacy when others criticize OSS. "OSS is better." Well it's not better if I have to write it myself, is it!
Slashdot Mirror
X was made to be very small, clean, and extensible? What are you talking about? There was a time, actually a very long time in the 1980s and 1990s during which X regularly brought $20,000 HP and Sun workstations to their knees, whereas boxes that cost half as much could run Display Postscript and NeWS (two of X's technologically superior competitors) just fine. The only reason people talk about how "snappy" X is today is because the computers they run it on are so fast now that they can't tell how poorly designed it is. Granted, Aqua and Luna or whatever aren't really any faster, but I'm not talking just about performance, I'm talking about simplification of development and ease of use. X is the ball and chain around the neck of open-source GUI software developers. There were actually joking rumors in the 1980s that X was a Soviet plot to set western computer science back 20 years. It would be less effort to finally dump X's mangled, decaying body into the nearest dumpster and to start all over again on drivers than it would be to keep this rotting carcass living, its stench scaring away all the GPU makers who were even considering writing drivers for it.
X is so UNextensible that whenever anybody wants to "extend" it, all the apps that anyone wants to take advantage of that extensibility need to be updated. Now I'm not a huge Mac fan, but when OS X first came out, the fonts in Carbon apps weren't anti-aliased. Somebody wrote a tiny little app to update them all with no recompiles. Blammo, antialiased fonts in all Carbon apps. That's extensibility. Then look at Quartz Extreme. One day you've got a plain old 2D desktop, the next day all your windows are polygons and your GUI is running in OpenGL, with no software recompiles (except for Quartz itself). Now say what you will about Apple, but that is foresight, that is planning for the future and that is intelligent design. Look at XRender in comparison. Look at xft, not what it's designed to do but how it needs to be implemented. It's like a nightmare. Look at ICCCM, it's like a gunshot to the head of simple design and basically all common sense - thank god there are layers above it now (which in a good windowing system shouldn't be necessary) and nobody has to write directly to it anymore. Look at Xlib. Jesus.
Kill X and replace it with something simple, clean, extensible and lightweight. (All characteristics which X is not.) Then put a transparent X server on top of it for backwards compatibility. X is such a dinosaur, trying to extend it with all these modern features is like ricing up a Honda Civic.
People aren't going to keep their receipts, they're going to toss them, or misplace them, and even if they don't, it's not like every single one of them is going to come back to the polling place with their receipt.
Come on. Take a good look at Snuffalopogus and just TRY to tell me he is not a deliberate mockery of the Republican elephant mascot.
A pledge drive on libertarian Slashdot?? Haha. "Stupid kids, if you want a stuffed animal, go out and earn one. I make 80K/year as a Unix admin, so obviously earning enough to support a decent living with plenty of stuffed animals is totally possible. You have NO RIGHT to take MY PROPERTY that I EARNED to buy YOUR SELF a stuffed animal with it."
Post anything supporting OSS, get modded up. Post the truth, get modded down. Yeah, Oracle performs better than MySQL... is ANYBODY going to deny this? Is this really a big secret? Obviously Mr. AC touched a sensitive spot, otherwise his post would have been modded funny.
"COMPAT_DARWIN?" Was "Darwin Compatibility" something or other too ungeeky and accessible and English? If so then why not go full tilt and call it __CMPT_xxDKHSKH_DRWNXOJSOJ or something?
Proposition Z: Give dolo666 the biggest wedgie he's had in his entire life.
100% for, 0% against
Proposition X: Eliminate all taxes.
66% for, 34% against
Proposition Y: Build a new below-ground mass transit system, 50 new homeless shelters, 300 miles of new highway, and a free gold watch for every voter.
89% for, 11% against
There will always be another sequel.
What??? Don't you read ESR?!? He says OSS is better. You just don't "get it."
No. But you can save it, maybe, then go to the other app, load it, maybe, well you would be able to if the app were compiled with the right image support plugins, you kept the source code right? OK, just do ./configure --with-blah-blah this time, then make, then make install, then try it. A much better system IMO, because this way, *I* have control over MY computer and it only does what *I* tell it to because *I* am its master!
more
I have no idea why this was modded as flamebait, because it's absolutely true. Vnu? It's probably a recursive acronym for Vnu's Not Useful, especially considering that it appears to be built on Mozilla Composer, which is the best program in the world at taking perfectly logical, efficient HTML and adding loads of useless text garbage to it, increasing its byte size by 3x.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, were rejoicing in the streets and handing out free candy to children.
"They" were? All of them, right? What you see on TV is all there is to know, right? Talk about racists......
Reeee-taaaard!
Most assholes I've met have been very smart. Most retards I've met have been very nice. You are one of the rare exceptions to both of these observations.
I do?
Yeah, hopefully someday Apple will release enough of their specs to allow Linux to run on Macs.
Microsoft destroys CD-ROM (hypothetically): More proof that M$ is an evil moneygrubbing capitalist pig corporation.
Linux destroys CD-ROM: It's the CD-ROM's fault.
Your speedometer is off by 5mph? Hmm... Solution: Don't buy American cars.
Theoretically the same cars that are going to have this device installed are going to also have a computerized traction control system, which is smart enough to know when the wheel is spinning out.
The money collected from tickets does not go directly into the budget of the police department. It goes into the general fund of whatever the level of government is to which you pay the fine.
1984! 1984!
I hate it when people hide behind the "write it yourself" fallacy when others criticize OSS. "OSS is better." Well it's not better if I have to write it myself, is it!