Hey, has anyone tried the Windows version of Skype under Crossover? Skype for Linux sucks - it is ancient and is missing certain features. I use Skype daily for my work, under both Linux and Windows, and I'd love to get the Windows version running under Linux. Does anyone know? I checked the Crossover database, and it's not there.
Re:Is LISP really the most productive programming
on
Ten Geek Business Myths
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I did a lot of Lisp back in school. I've never used it in real life, though. Here's the thing: most programming algorithms boil down to performing some operation over a list of objects. Languages that facilitate this process while alleviating you of housekeeping tend to be very productive. But if the syntax is too unconventional, no one will use it. So you need a language with built-in lists, easy iteration and mappable functions, and a conventional syntax that is easy to learn. Also, it should have lots of good libraries and be "correct" in a certain academic way, so there are no surprises and everything is explicit.
Agreed. So what is a technical expert to do? Let's say I am a good computer programmer, I have a few ideas, but no real way of knowing what precisely it is a customer would want. Clearly, I need to hook up with someone with expert domain knowledge in some field with a real problem to solve. How does one meet such a person? What I need to find is some forum where such people hang out, want to start a business to deal with this domain-specific problem they know and understand well, and need to find one or more technical people to go into development with - not as employees, but partners. Does such a forum exist?
"MySpace had it's 15 seconds, and IMO is heading out the door."
Why on earth would you say that? Do you have any stats to back that up? Everything I've seen shows the site's growth accelerating. It's become more or less the official area for numerous bands, for example.
Cringely's article this week has a section on the Zune, and why it's actually not competing with the iPod.
Actually, internationally Clinton is regarded as possibly the finest American president of modern times. Of course, this means nothing to the American right, for whom Europeans/Canadians/etc. are only a step up from al Qaeda.
The applicaton obviously has to be KParts-aware. Kopete, the KDE IM client, uses the spellchecker, I believe. So does Konqueror when you're filling out web forms, etc.
So, to answer your question, no. KParts only work with KDE apps, not any random app you might install. That's reasonable, since you wouldn't expect OS X services to work with, say, Mac OS 9. That said, no Linux desktop will give you the same rich experience you find on OS X.
In KDE they are called KParts, and any KDE application can load and use them. For example, spellchecking is used by many apps via a KPart, including the khtml component, which is itself a KPart - so KParts can even use other KParts.
They invade my air space with poisonous chemicals. If the damage was purely restricted to them, then I doubt people would care as much. Anti-smoking laws are more for the safety and comfort of non-smokers, not smokers, who have the right to smoke in non-public places. In short, your opinion is senseless and thankfully does not at all reflect public policy.
Climate change is not about local weather prediction.
'In common parlance the notions "weather" and "climate" are loosely defined1. The "weather", as we experience it, is the fluctuating state of the atmosphere around us, characterised by the temperature, wind, precipitation, clouds and other weather elements. This weather is the result of rapidly developing and decaying weather systems such as mid-latitude low and high pressure systems with their associated frontal zones, showers and tropical cyclones. Weather has only limited predictability. Mesoscale convective systems are predictable over a period of hours only; synoptic scale cyclones may be predictable over a period of several days to a week. Beyond a week or two individual weather systems are unpredictable. "Climate" refers to the average weather in terms of the mean and its variability over a certain time-span and a certain area. Classical climatology provides a classification and description of the various climate regimes found on Earth. Climate varies from place to place, depending on latitude, distance to the sea, vegetation, presence or absence of mountains or other geographical factors. Climate varies also in time; from season to season, year to year, decade to decade or on much longer time-scales, such as the Ice Ages. Statistically significant variations of the mean state of the climate or of its variability, typically persisting for decades or longer, are referred to as "climate change".'
"This would severely reduce the traffic between the clients and the server, and thus the number of switches of any kind."
Sure, I guess so, but a switch is a switch. You could implement the same strategy in kernel space and save even more time.
I use FreeNX for my remote desktop stuff, but I've never seen those libraries used on a local machine as a replacement for the standard X libraries when doing local work. Regardless, it would be nice to see these next-generation X libraries implement some round-trip reducing schemes. As long as the desktop as a whole becomes "fast enough", which means a whole lot faster than it is now, and stable, then that's great.
1. The client/server architecture of X uses sockets. In the case of Linux, domain sockets are implemented as shared memory, same as in NT 3.51 and earlier. But it's still a kernel function to manage that stuff.
2. Context switching between applications or whatever and the X server. Context switching is handled in the kernel. A userspace switch is probably a good order of magnitude slower than a kernel switch. X generates a lot of round-trip traffic, though I guess that depends on toolkit implementers as much as anything else.
And probably a lot more things that an actual expert on this stuff could talk about. Basically, any X drawing event could be a context switch, and since X has a lot of events (which is why it sucks over slow links, and Microsoft's RDC doesn't), that's a lot of switching. I seem to recall reading a paper ages ago about how to minimise X events, like certain caching strategies, but I don't know if these are used by toolkits or not.
It's because X lives in userspace. If you were around in the WinNT 3.51 days, there used to be a userspace process (csrss.exe) that implemented the Windows window manager and the GDI (graphics output, basically). For NT 4.0, the window manager and GDI were moved into a portion of kernel space called the Executive, where they remain to this day. That's why Windows is so silky smooth when it comes to moving and resizing windows and overall graphical responsiveness - no userspace graphical process can compare to the priority granted to a kernel process.
Of course, this comes at the price of reduced stability. Although using a Linux desktop is noticeably slower, at least if X crashes the basic stuff stays up and running, for what it's worth.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have in the parent post the Stupidest Comment of the Year. Yes, the only thing compressed disks contain is music, so MS intentionally corrupts them to satisfy the whims of the music oligarchy.
No, that's exactly where it gets handled. Using Linux as an example, different filesystems, compressed or not, are kernel modules accessed via the VFS. cramfs is a (rather lame) compressed filesystem built right into the kernel. Same with squashfs. Linux also has strong encryption (the CryptoApi) built right into the kernel for use with encrypted file systems.
Also, you may remember the file corruption bug from an older version of the 2.6 kernel - was it 2.6.10? It was much worse than this one from MS, which only affects compressed files on Windows 2000 SP4.
Wasn't it the case that the Edain (whose remnants later settled on Numenor) were simply the first men created, and it was only after they attacked the Valar that men's lifespans decreased (that is, man "fell")? I don't recall the Edain being specially graced somehow, only that they were the first men.
MythTV is a PVR, not some simple media player. It allows you to record TV programs and watch them later, like a Tivo. Or does your "modern OS" have this ability built in?
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Hey, has anyone tried the Windows version of Skype under Crossover? Skype for Linux sucks - it is ancient and is missing certain features. I use Skype daily for my work, under both Linux and Windows, and I'd love to get the Windows version running under Linux. Does anyone know? I checked the Crossover database, and it's not there.
I did a lot of Lisp back in school. I've never used it in real life, though. Here's the thing: most programming algorithms boil down to performing some operation over a list of objects. Languages that facilitate this process while alleviating you of housekeeping tend to be very productive. But if the syntax is too unconventional, no one will use it. So you need a language with built-in lists, easy iteration and mappable functions, and a conventional syntax that is easy to learn. Also, it should have lots of good libraries and be "correct" in a certain academic way, so there are no surprises and everything is explicit.
In other words, learn Python.
Agreed. So what is a technical expert to do? Let's say I am a good computer programmer, I have a few ideas, but no real way of knowing what precisely it is a customer would want. Clearly, I need to hook up with someone with expert domain knowledge in some field with a real problem to solve. How does one meet such a person? What I need to find is some forum where such people hang out, want to start a business to deal with this domain-specific problem they know and understand well, and need to find one or more technical people to go into development with - not as employees, but partners. Does such a forum exist?
"MySpace had it's 15 seconds, and IMO is heading out the door."
Why on earth would you say that? Do you have any stats to back that up? Everything I've seen shows the site's growth accelerating. It's become more or less the official area for numerous bands, for example.
Cringely's article this week has a section on the Zune, and why it's actually not competing with the iPod.
So it's not really an analogy then, more of a statement of fact.
Actually, internationally Clinton is regarded as possibly the finest American president of modern times. Of course, this means nothing to the American right, for whom Europeans/Canadians/etc. are only a step up from al Qaeda.
Yes, like there have been vast architectural changes in the last 3 years. I would lay huge money that it's still a poor performer.
Why get so worked up about it? It's just software, a tool. Do you get really intense over which brand of 3/8 inch wrench you use?
Nope, he's right. This tells the sad story of OpenBsd very well. http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
I meant I'm happy that more people don't think like he does, that's all. And it's not rhetoric - smoking is invasive. Don't be an idiot.
The applicaton obviously has to be KParts-aware. Kopete, the KDE IM client, uses the spellchecker, I believe. So does Konqueror when you're filling out web forms, etc.
So, to answer your question, no. KParts only work with KDE apps, not any random app you might install. That's reasonable, since you wouldn't expect OS X services to work with, say, Mac OS 9. That said, no Linux desktop will give you the same rich experience you find on OS X.
In KDE they are called KParts, and any KDE application can load and use them. For example, spellchecking is used by many apps via a KPart, including the khtml component, which is itself a KPart - so KParts can even use other KParts.
They invade my air space with poisonous chemicals. If the damage was purely restricted to them, then I doubt people would care as much. Anti-smoking laws are more for the safety and comfort of non-smokers, not smokers, who have the right to smoke in non-public places. In short, your opinion is senseless and thankfully does not at all reflect public policy.
Climate change is not about weather prediction. Get a clue before spouting off.
4 &cid=16140144
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19697
Climate change is not about local weather prediction.
m
'In common parlance the notions "weather" and "climate" are loosely defined1. The "weather", as we experience it, is the fluctuating state of the atmosphere around us, characterised by the temperature, wind, precipitation, clouds and other weather elements. This weather is the result of rapidly developing and decaying weather systems such as mid-latitude low and high pressure systems with their associated frontal zones, showers and tropical cyclones. Weather has only limited predictability. Mesoscale convective systems are predictable over a period of hours only; synoptic scale cyclones may be predictable over a period of several days to a week. Beyond a week or two individual weather systems are unpredictable. "Climate" refers to the average weather in terms of the mean and its variability over a certain time-span and a certain area. Classical climatology provides a classification and description of the various climate regimes found on Earth. Climate varies from place to place, depending on latitude, distance to the sea, vegetation, presence or absence of mountains or other geographical factors. Climate varies also in time; from season to season, year to year, decade to decade or on much longer time-scales, such as the Ice Ages. Statistically significant variations of the mean state of the climate or of its variability, typically persisting for decades or longer, are referred to as "climate change".'
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.ht
Javascript has no virtual machine. It is not Java. The two languages are unrelated.
"This would severely reduce the traffic between the clients and the server, and thus the number of switches of any kind."
Sure, I guess so, but a switch is a switch. You could implement the same strategy in kernel space and save even more time.
I use FreeNX for my remote desktop stuff, but I've never seen those libraries used on a local machine as a replacement for the standard X libraries when doing local work. Regardless, it would be nice to see these next-generation X libraries implement some round-trip reducing schemes. As long as the desktop as a whole becomes "fast enough", which means a whole lot faster than it is now, and stable, then that's great.
1. The client/server architecture of X uses sockets. In the case of Linux, domain sockets are implemented as shared memory, same as in NT 3.51 and earlier. But it's still a kernel function to manage that stuff.
2. Context switching between applications or whatever and the X server. Context switching is handled in the kernel. A userspace switch is probably a good order of magnitude slower than a kernel switch. X generates a lot of round-trip traffic, though I guess that depends on toolkit implementers as much as anything else.
And probably a lot more things that an actual expert on this stuff could talk about. Basically, any X drawing event could be a context switch, and since X has a lot of events (which is why it sucks over slow links, and Microsoft's RDC doesn't), that's a lot of switching. I seem to recall reading a paper ages ago about how to minimise X events, like certain caching strategies, but I don't know if these are used by toolkits or not.
It's because X lives in userspace. If you were around in the WinNT 3.51 days, there used to be a userspace process (csrss.exe) that implemented the Windows window manager and the GDI (graphics output, basically). For NT 4.0, the window manager and GDI were moved into a portion of kernel space called the Executive, where they remain to this day. That's why Windows is so silky smooth when it comes to moving and resizing windows and overall graphical responsiveness - no userspace graphical process can compare to the priority granted to a kernel process.
Of course, this comes at the price of reduced stability. Although using a Linux desktop is noticeably slower, at least if X crashes the basic stuff stays up and running, for what it's worth.
Oops, guess I was wrong. Apologies.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have in the parent post the Stupidest Comment of the Year. Yes, the only thing compressed disks contain is music, so MS intentionally corrupts them to satisfy the whims of the music oligarchy.
How old are you?
"the same kind of programmer that lets buffers overflow."
You mean the authors of sendmail? Or maybe you were referring to the various Linux kernel root exploits? Oh wait, you meant the authors of PHP.
No, that's exactly where it gets handled. Using Linux as an example, different filesystems, compressed or not, are kernel modules accessed via the VFS. cramfs is a (rather lame) compressed filesystem built right into the kernel. Same with squashfs. Linux also has strong encryption (the CryptoApi) built right into the kernel for use with encrypted file systems.
Also, you may remember the file corruption bug from an older version of the 2.6 kernel - was it 2.6.10? It was much worse than this one from MS, which only affects compressed files on Windows 2000 SP4.
Wasn't it the case that the Edain (whose remnants later settled on Numenor) were simply the first men created, and it was only after they attacked the Valar that men's lifespans decreased (that is, man "fell")? I don't recall the Edain being specially graced somehow, only that they were the first men.
How does that description preclude it from being a PVR? Try reading the article next time, or at least understand what's being discussed.
MythTV is a PVR, not some simple media player. It allows you to record TV programs and watch them later, like a Tivo. Or does your "modern OS" have this ability built in?