Perhaps, but cops can already track mobile phones. All the same arguments apply. "But any criminal can steal or buy a new phone" blah blah.
Yeah, that's true, they can, but the fact remains that quite a few criminals have been caught by tracing mobile phones. Is this abused? Perhaps. If it is, it has yet to come to light.
Like most things, you have to weigh it, balance it. Is the benefit derived from more criminals behind bars, worth the cost of potential/actual abuse. You shouldn't write something off just because it gives certain people more information.
Compared to the UK situation, where 2 of the 5 analogue broadcast channels are part of the tax-funded BBC?
It's not exactly a tax. The government has no control over how it's spent for one thing, and changing it is very hard.
Keep this in mind: For years, the UK had just three different TV companies - the largest one state-owned
The BBC is not state owned. I don't know why people think this. The government have no control over it, short of a somewhat mythical (and in the Dyke era almost certainly dead) old-boys network.
Rather, the BBC is controlled by its Director General, and there is a controlling board too. Major changes, like launching new channels, have to get the approval of the media/culture secretary iirc.
So, the state acts as a check/balance. It cannot influence journalistic integrity however.
I think you missed the point. The point, simply put, was that the US is who crippled the UN - the concept of it saintly choosing to circumvent the process this once is wrong, it has been systematically destroying the implements of world diplomacy.
Historically, China has taken the position that you are either Chinese, or you are not civilized and do not deserve to live.
China keeps itself to itself. What it thinks is of little concern to me. The US on the other hand, will happily pre-emptively declare war against anybody who they deem to be terrorists. This does not make me feel safe. After all, what use is the possession of brute force if you are not prepared to be brutal?
Hmm. Do you have any idea the damage that the US has done to the UN? It has, over a period of years, systematically destroyed and dismantled a large number of international institutions, for instance the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
The UN attempted to dig up dirt on Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector.
It has ignored, violated and stonewalled so many agreements in fact, that US negiotiators are now being deliberately excluded and lied to by international diplomats to prevent them screwing up the rest of the world even more.
The United Nations is a failed, disgraced, and corrupt organization. It is far better to be in violation of politically motivated UN resolutions than to kow-tow to countries that would see millions of people die if it meant that the United States lost a debate.
Feels good doesn't it? Makes you feel less guilty about the whole thing. I can understand that. Nonetheless, the vast majority of international agreements, treaties and resolutions the US have violated have been on economic or environmental subjects, nothing to do with waging war against enemy states.
If you see the US as a rebel with a cause, saving poor old Iraq and annoying the fusty old men at the UN along the way, then you're utterly deluded.
The UN has done tremendous good, and would have continued to do so, had that not conflicted with the goals of the US becoming more powerful and richer. As it is, Bush has effectively told the rest of the world that they'll bend down and like it - you have no idea how many enemies that has made his administration. It may have irrevocably damaged Americas international standing, permenantly.
The fact is that I feel far less threatened by China than America. It's sad, but it's the truth.
The goal of a corporation is to make profit for its shareholders. A corporation, by its very definition, cannot be morally wrong or right, any more than a table or a house or a crate can be.
What? So all you have to do to abstain yourself of morality is get together with a bunch of like minded souls and form a corporation?
That doesn't fly - some govts are creating new crimes, corporate crimes, committed by groups, because it's such a problem.
It's got a lot of those small features that make Apple stuff so damned cool.
What, you mean like native widgets? Go read Hyatts tech blog to find out why these are such a huge PITA, and why using the Aqua widgets especially causes layout breakages (the aqua widgets cannot scale which breaks websites designed for Windows, which has a more flexible widget toolkit).
top/Reload use the same button, depending on whether or not the page is loaded. Why didn't anyone else think of this?
They did, years ago, and it sucks so was abandoned. It has poor usability - buttons that magically change function without very strong and predictable cirumstances in which they do so, are Wrong(tm). As others have pointed out, it means they change at just the wrong moment and you get the wrong function. It also doesn't help muscle memory. In a way I'm surprised Apple let this one through, and in another way I'm not - MacOS X is full of basic usability mistakes that show how much the company has changed from the old days.
The bookmark manager is so sweet it's been known to make grown men cry. So cool that the Camino guys are working on copying it.
That tells us nothing.
Three meg or so download. Remember when Opera could claim this?
Opera also does a lot more than plain old Safari does.
Spell-checking in textareas. No tpyos in this post!
If a user is running an app and he/she has just regular user priveldges then even a virus can not do damage.
No, apps and viruses can still damage your personal data, normally far more of a concern.
Everything in Unix is a text file so nothing gets corrupt unless its a hardware problem or a user did something dumb as root. Even the hardware is just text files in/dev.
What? If by "everything" you mean configuration files then yes, however UNIX developers pay the price in terms of implementation complexity. Writing a parser for yet another config file format is way harder than simply reading and writing a few keys.
See GConf for how to do the registry in a sane fashion.
The files in/dev are special files, they certainly aren't text. You read and write streams of bytes with them like any other type of file.
Hmm, did you consider using GTKmm? It feels similarish to Qt, but without the moc/qmake stuff, ie it uses the standard GNU toolchain. The Windows version is actually pretty respectable, the only real issue being that for some reason it won't repaint while windows are dragged over it, which looks a bit ugly. It integrates with the XP theme engine though.
I mean, it sounds like a lot of pain in order to use Qt, really. OTOH there are lots of apps ported to Windows using GTK. YMMV.
Good question. I've been thinking about it lately.
I think so, yes. If you look at whos working on Mozilla lately, it becomes clear that quite a lot of the former Mozilla employees have moved on to other jobs/lives but still hack on Moz. I don't know the numbers, but looking at blogs, email addresses and so on makes it look like the Mozilla hacking community is pretty spread out these days.
I'm not sure how much that applies to the innards of Gecko though.
Now that would be awesome. Safari is by far the best looking and fastest browser I use.
Well, KHTML is OK. But feature wise, it does not compare to Gecko.
However the release of Safari for windows is probably just a huge pipe dream.
Right, it's not going to happen. What would Apple gain from it? They can't charge, Safari simply is not that good. Up against well established competition - why bother?
Safari is one of the few browsers that uses native OS widgets for rendering pages
Hmm, it seems to me that Firebird on Linux looks like it uses native widgets, even if it doesn't. And Ephy/Galeon also use native widgets.
So safari is based around the Aqua interface and rendered in OpenGL
Ah, nope. No OpenGL involved in rendering. Aqua is rendered in user space, into client side pixmaps that are then exposed to the display server via shared memory. They are then uploaded to the video card and composited there. Compositing is just the process of gluing (sub)windows together, which is why reflow still takes ages.
In essense it is 100% glued to OS X
Well, it's no different from any other OS X app, ie it's built on top of a proprietary platform so obviously lockin is tremendously high. But they've been happy to port QuickTime and in future apparently iTunes to Windows. So it's not impossible.
Even if they did port it to windows, you wouldn't see the same type of speed or beauty in the browser simply because Windows widgets are clunky, ugly and slow.
Uh, what? The Windows widget set is insanely fast, especially compared to Aqua. As somebody who has spent some time working on the Wine implementations, that gives me a chance to compare the MS implementations and our own side by side, and that really rams home how much work is put into them. I mean, really, your bias is showing through here. The Aqua widget set is pretty primitive in comparison.... show me an equivalent to the XP list view control, with all its features, that operates at the same speed when it has 10,000 items, then maybe I'll believe you.
Hmm? I was talking about Neuros, not Apple. I'm not buying an iPod anytime soon! Don't fret brother, look at my sig - I want to see free and open platforms to succeed and win out over closed ones, including MacOS. More than want, I am helping make sure it's possible.
NPTL breakage (thanks glibc!) means you have to run X using LD_ASSUME_KERNEL if you are using the nVidia drivers. If you don't, you'll have wierd problems, like errors about the static TLS memory size being too small. Here's how to make it work.
1) Install the game.
2) DO NOT hit start, there is a bug in the installer, which will run the game as root if you run it from the installer. D'oh.
3) Once installed, hit ctrl-alt-f1 to get to a console. You can get back to the desktop at any point by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7.
4) Log in as root, at the text terminal
5) Now enter the following commands exactly as shown:
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
X -ac:1
6) You will be looking at any empty screen. Press ctrl-alt-f7 to go back to your desktop. Now enter these commands:
export DISPLAY=:1
xterm &
metacity &
Now press ctrl-alt-f8 to go back to your dedicated gaming display:) Running, run "et" in the xterm that has appeared. The game should now start reasonably quickly, and let you set up a profile.
You can use ctrl-alt-f7/f8 to switch between game and desktop at any point.
Good luck, and have fun!
Re:lot of interest?
on
Neuros Review
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"drawing a lot of interest"? From who?
Me? I have a brand new 80gig disk and an urge to fill it. Unlike most, I didn't rip all my CDs ages ago, because I didn't have the room. Now I do. So I'm going to have lots of Oggs soon, because that is the default under Linux.
Most of the world hasn't even heard of Ogg Vorbis, people.
Most of the world don't buy MP3 players, natch. Considering the huge amount of support DI are getting from Xiph, it becomes a simple numbers game. How hard is it to support Linux and Ogg? How much will we get in return for it?
There are quite a lot of Linux users around now, big enough that it can make a difference for a small company.
Though a free software FPS would be great, I don't think it'd be especially vital to have one (in the same sense that having a free OS is important), nor do I think the open source volunteer/services model works well for them.
The main thing with games is that they tend to be one offs. You take an engine, add artwork, music, gameplay, AIs, multiplayer servers etc - and then that's it. The upgrades are small. The improvements that can be made without disrupting the other playeres are minimal.
I wish I wasn't feeling so lazy, maybe I could articulate it better. But I don't think the incremental patch model would apply well to games. I'm not going to have any hangups about paying for them, nor playing them, regardless of how open the source is.
Perhaps the perception that Macs are generally too slow for high end games these days, and nobody wants to play them on a laptop?
Dunno. Also Jon Carmack likes Linux and has done some open source development himself. Plus as pointed out above, porting to Linux isn't as hard as you get to keep all your custom optimizations etc.
Conspiracy theory is one thing; claims supported by factual evidence is another entirely, and this particular case falls directly under that aegis.
Not for Microsoft it doesn't. The fact that they paid SCO some money at this time is entirely circumstantial, nothing has been shown factually or otherwise.
We're not in court. Common-sense has a place here, and motives can be divined. What possible motive do you see as a counterpoint for MS' involvement with SCO at this time?
Divining motives based on what you want to believe is silly. It becomes a pissing match, the word of Perens against that of Microsoft. They claim it was decided on beforehand. Maybe so, maybe no. But we can't really give a convincing argument otherwise, other than "how convenient", so the matter should be left alone.
Even if this was a good bargin I would reject if becuase it is from Real.
As opposed to Apple, whos QuickTime for Windows product won't even do fullscreen and the installer for which doesn't just hijack your file settings, it hijacks the whole damn machine with a huge pointless window that will not disappear until the installer has finished. Oh yes, and because it downloads stuff as needed, it takes ages to finish. Installing QuickTime on a modem certainly used to be something you did while eating dinner, because it effectively meant surrendering the machine for a while. For some reason they managed to break alt-tab switching during this process as well.
I'd also note that QuickTime constantly harrasses you to pay for it.
So, I take it you'd boycott iTMS as well, on the same grounds?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's true, they can, but the fact remains that quite a few criminals have been caught by tracing mobile phones. Is this abused? Perhaps. If it is, it has yet to come to light.
Like most things, you have to weigh it, balance it. Is the benefit derived from more criminals behind bars, worth the cost of potential/actual abuse. You shouldn't write something off just because it gives certain people more information.
It's not exactly a tax. The government has no control over how it's spent for one thing, and changing it is very hard.
Keep this in mind: For years, the UK had just three different TV companies - the largest one state-owned
The BBC is not state owned. I don't know why people think this. The government have no control over it, short of a somewhat mythical (and in the Dyke era almost certainly dead) old-boys network.
Rather, the BBC is controlled by its Director General, and there is a controlling board too. Major changes, like launching new channels, have to get the approval of the media/culture secretary iirc.
So, the state acts as a check/balance. It cannot influence journalistic integrity however.
Historically, China has taken the position that you are either Chinese, or you are not civilized and do not deserve to live.
China keeps itself to itself. What it thinks is of little concern to me. The US on the other hand, will happily pre-emptively declare war against anybody who they deem to be terrorists. This does not make me feel safe. After all, what use is the possession of brute force if you are not prepared to be brutal?
The UN attempted to dig up dirt on Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector.
It has ignored, violated and stonewalled so many agreements in fact, that US negiotiators are now being deliberately excluded and lied to by international diplomats to prevent them screwing up the rest of the world even more.
While Bush was scaremongering the world about Iraqs (seemingly theoretical) chemical weapons supply, he was simultaneously authorizing the use of tear gas by US forces.
This kind of thing goes on and on.
Feels good doesn't it? Makes you feel less guilty about the whole thing. I can understand that. Nonetheless, the vast majority of international agreements, treaties and resolutions the US have violated have been on economic or environmental subjects, nothing to do with waging war against enemy states.
If you see the US as a rebel with a cause, saving poor old Iraq and annoying the fusty old men at the UN along the way, then you're utterly deluded.
The UN has done tremendous good, and would have continued to do so, had that not conflicted with the goals of the US becoming more powerful and richer. As it is, Bush has effectively told the rest of the world that they'll bend down and like it - you have no idea how many enemies that has made his administration. It may have irrevocably damaged Americas international standing, permenantly.
The fact is that I feel far less threatened by China than America. It's sad, but it's the truth.
Quite possibly, but none of those things has anything to do with the speed of the widget sets, rather the speed of Explorer, prempt kernels etc
What? So all you have to do to abstain yourself of morality is get together with a bunch of like minded souls and form a corporation?
That doesn't fly - some govts are creating new crimes, corporate crimes, committed by groups, because it's such a problem.
What, you mean like native widgets? Go read Hyatts tech blog to find out why these are such a huge PITA, and why using the Aqua widgets especially causes layout breakages (the aqua widgets cannot scale which breaks websites designed for Windows, which has a more flexible widget toolkit).
top/Reload use the same button, depending on whether or not the page is loaded. Why didn't anyone else think of this?
They did, years ago, and it sucks so was abandoned. It has poor usability - buttons that magically change function without very strong and predictable cirumstances in which they do so, are Wrong(tm). As others have pointed out, it means they change at just the wrong moment and you get the wrong function. It also doesn't help muscle memory. In a way I'm surprised Apple let this one through, and in another way I'm not - MacOS X is full of basic usability mistakes that show how much the company has changed from the old days.
The bookmark manager is so sweet it's been known to make grown men cry. So cool that the Camino guys are working on copying it.
That tells us nothing.
Three meg or so download. Remember when Opera could claim this?
Opera also does a lot more than plain old Safari does.
Spell-checking in textareas. No tpyos in this post!
I really, really hope that was a joke :p
No, apps and viruses can still damage your personal data, normally far more of a concern.
Everything in Unix is a text file so nothing gets corrupt unless its a hardware problem or a user did something dumb as root. Even the hardware is just text files in /dev.
What? If by "everything" you mean configuration files then yes, however UNIX developers pay the price in terms of implementation complexity. Writing a parser for yet another config file format is way harder than simply reading and writing a few keys.
See GConf for how to do the registry in a sane fashion.
The files in /dev are special files, they certainly aren't text. You read and write streams of bytes with them like any other type of file.
I mean, it sounds like a lot of pain in order to use Qt, really. OTOH there are lots of apps ported to Windows using GTK. YMMV.
I think so, yes. If you look at whos working on Mozilla lately, it becomes clear that quite a lot of the former Mozilla employees have moved on to other jobs/lives but still hack on Moz. I don't know the numbers, but looking at blogs, email addresses and so on makes it look like the Mozilla hacking community is pretty spread out these days.
I'm not sure how much that applies to the innards of Gecko though.
Well, KHTML is OK. But feature wise, it does not compare to Gecko.
However the release of Safari for windows is probably just a huge pipe dream.
Right, it's not going to happen. What would Apple gain from it? They can't charge, Safari simply is not that good. Up against well established competition - why bother?
Safari is one of the few browsers that uses native OS widgets for rendering pages
Hmm, it seems to me that Firebird on Linux looks like it uses native widgets, even if it doesn't. And Ephy/Galeon also use native widgets.
So safari is based around the Aqua interface and rendered in OpenGL
Ah, nope. No OpenGL involved in rendering. Aqua is rendered in user space, into client side pixmaps that are then exposed to the display server via shared memory. They are then uploaded to the video card and composited there. Compositing is just the process of gluing (sub)windows together, which is why reflow still takes ages.
In essense it is 100% glued to OS X
Well, it's no different from any other OS X app, ie it's built on top of a proprietary platform so obviously lockin is tremendously high. But they've been happy to port QuickTime and in future apparently iTunes to Windows. So it's not impossible.
Even if they did port it to windows, you wouldn't see the same type of speed or beauty in the browser simply because Windows widgets are clunky, ugly and slow.
Uh, what? The Windows widget set is insanely fast, especially compared to Aqua. As somebody who has spent some time working on the Wine implementations, that gives me a chance to compare the MS implementations and our own side by side, and that really rams home how much work is put into them. I mean, really, your bias is showing through here. The Aqua widget set is pretty primitive in comparison.... show me an equivalent to the XP list view control, with all its features, that operates at the same speed when it has 10,000 items, then maybe I'll believe you.
Anyway. I have little doubt that one day Mozilla/Gecko based browsers will rule, if only because running IE on Linux is a total PITA.
Hmm? I was talking about Neuros, not Apple. I'm not buying an iPod anytime soon! Don't fret brother, look at my sig - I want to see free and open platforms to succeed and win out over closed ones, including MacOS. More than want, I am helping make sure it's possible.
Yawn. I was expecting a comment like that from somebody. "Never" is a very long time. We'll see.
NPTL breakage (thanks glibc!) means you have to run X using LD_ASSUME_KERNEL if you are using the nVidia drivers. If you don't, you'll have wierd problems, like errors about the static TLS memory size being too small. Here's how to make it work.
1) Install the game.
2) DO NOT hit start, there is a bug in the installer, which will run the game as root if you run it from the installer. D'oh.
3) Once installed, hit ctrl-alt-f1 to get to a console. You can get back to the desktop at any point by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7.
4) Log in as root, at the text terminal
5) Now enter the following commands exactly as shown:
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 :1
X -ac
6) You will be looking at any empty screen. Press ctrl-alt-f7 to go back to your desktop. Now enter these commands:
export DISPLAY=:1
xterm & metacity &
Now press ctrl-alt-f8 to go back to your dedicated gaming display :) Running, run "et" in the xterm that has appeared. The game should now start reasonably quickly, and let you set up a profile.
You can use ctrl-alt-f7/f8 to switch between game and desktop at any point.
Good luck, and have fun!
Me? I have a brand new 80gig disk and an urge to fill it. Unlike most, I didn't rip all my CDs ages ago, because I didn't have the room. Now I do. So I'm going to have lots of Oggs soon, because that is the default under Linux.
Most of the world hasn't even heard of Ogg Vorbis, people.
Most of the world don't buy MP3 players, natch. Considering the huge amount of support DI are getting from Xiph, it becomes a simple numbers game. How hard is it to support Linux and Ogg? How much will we get in return for it?
There are quite a lot of Linux users around now, big enough that it can make a difference for a small company.
I think the Linux software is being written by the Ogg guys, it's not ready yet though.
Well, let's wait and see. I think it's being coded up by Monty of Vorbis fame, so it should be a quality piece of code.
USB 2.0 would be a nice addition too but even on that I will make accomodation.
The review said it supported USB 2?
The main thing with games is that they tend to be one offs. You take an engine, add artwork, music, gameplay, AIs, multiplayer servers etc - and then that's it. The upgrades are small. The improvements that can be made without disrupting the other playeres are minimal.
I wish I wasn't feeling so lazy, maybe I could articulate it better. But I don't think the incremental patch model would apply well to games. I'm not going to have any hangups about paying for them, nor playing them, regardless of how open the source is.
Dunno. Also Jon Carmack likes Linux and has done some open source development himself. Plus as pointed out above, porting to Linux isn't as hard as you get to keep all your custom optimizations etc.
ie, in your eyes they are guilty until proven innocent. Great.
Not for Microsoft it doesn't. The fact that they paid SCO some money at this time is entirely circumstantial, nothing has been shown factually or otherwise.
We're not in court. Common-sense has a place here, and motives can be divined. What possible motive do you see as a counterpoint for MS' involvement with SCO at this time?
Divining motives based on what you want to believe is silly. It becomes a pissing match, the word of Perens against that of Microsoft. They claim it was decided on beforehand. Maybe so, maybe no. But we can't really give a convincing argument otherwise, other than "how convenient", so the matter should be left alone.
What makes you think you lose the ability to play the music when you stop subscribing? Where does it say that, I must have missed it.
As opposed to Apple, whos QuickTime for Windows product won't even do fullscreen and the installer for which doesn't just hijack your file settings, it hijacks the whole damn machine with a huge pointless window that will not disappear until the installer has finished. Oh yes, and because it downloads stuff as needed, it takes ages to finish. Installing QuickTime on a modem certainly used to be something you did while eating dinner, because it effectively meant surrendering the machine for a while. For some reason they managed to break alt-tab switching during this process as well.
I'd also note that QuickTime constantly harrasses you to pay for it.
So, I take it you'd boycott iTMS as well, on the same grounds?
2) Actually allocate the addresses in a way that has some semblance of fairness to it.
Of the two, I'm not sure which is easier. Sad really, isn't it?