Not exactly. Nielson had a positional advantage but decided to force a draw anyway by sacrificing material to obtain a draw by repetition. Your version sounds more romantic, but is not accurate:-)
For a moment I thought you were talking about the recent explosion in Trojan Horses coming from Siberia (ok so its not exactly a trojan and its Russia not Siberia but what the hell;^)
India is more left leaning on the "Free software" vs. "open source" question than the US. One reason is definitely the colonial past.
Communism is not a bad word here. In fact there are a couple of states which have had communist governments for much of their existence. Naturally this contributes to linux's popularity. Now don't get me wrong, all I'm saying is that the idea of sharing appeals to communists.
Our president is a cool guy. As someone already pointed out, the president is not a political figure in India. But Kalam is a respected person and gives a lot of speeches and many people listen to him etc.
Linux usage in India is definitely rather high. The obvious reason is that there are more programmers ==> more nerds etc. But its far from the only reason. Even though unauthorized copying (I won't use the p-word) is very prevalent, those buying a branded PC will still have to pay for Windows. This is a big factor in the cost conscious Indian market. So in the last 8 months, the number of OEMs pre-loading linux has exploded. Today half the PC ads I see in the paper are MS-free! I can also feel the change at the grassroots level -- neighbors, tech support etc.
Hmm... does amnesty international regularly make "-1, troll" statements in order to further its causes? I know that PETA does. Certain environmental organizations also come to mind. Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism as religion" is highly recommended reading.
Seriously, GNOME needs more work going into bonobo. IMHO its the only area where it lags behind KDE. That's the reason why you hear Abiword and gnumeric a lot more than kword and kspread, but you hear of koffice but not of gnome-office.
Loose coupling is not necessarily a bad idea though. For example gnome apps start quickly when you're in KDE but not vice versa.
While I have nothing against your being a C fan (its certainly way simpler to learn than C++), IMHO one of the advantages of Gtk+/Gnome is the availability of bindings in a large number of languages (python, perl, C#, ruby, C++ etc). Efficiency is not crucial in desktop apps, and so using a higher level language can lead to big gains in programmer productivity. (I have personal experience with this. I wrote gretools in a week, and that included learning python along the way.)
Linux was always known as the speedy, svelte and lighweight OS
You mean on the server. Which it still is. The *nix DEs never had much of a reputation for speed (except maybe wmaker and other niche WMs). Please don't confuse the two. I remember KDE 1.x being very slow on the hardware of the day. Today's KDE and GNOME are certainly way faster on today's hardware.
The GNOME people have always been bold in trying out new strategies. After the gnome2 drive to simplify the UI and move away from featuritis it has come a long way. There are some exciting developments like dashboard, gstreamer and desktop integration bounty hunt. Watch out for 2.6!
Indeed. It is a reflection on the attitudes of our society that "eccentric", literally "off center", when referring to a person, is a derogatory term. If you deviate from the average, there's something "wrong" with you.
Cencorship and monitoring are standard fare in India and the only reason it isn't much more widespread is that the population is huge and the government isn't tech savvy enough to do anything 1984-ish.
My guess is google filters out hits from bots when they calculate what the ad sponsors owe them. Of course the bot could change its User-Agent to MSIE or whatever, but it should still be possible to run a simple script to detect a large number of searches from a single IP for the same query and ban such IPs. With all the google bombing, google whacking, link spamming, blog spamming etc. going on, its hard to imagine that they wouldn't have run into this already.
A related tidbit: apparently the top bid at overture.com is $50 for the search "mesothelioma lawyer". At that rate they had better have some way to filter out bots otherwise a competitor could do some serious damage.
This happens in X because the WM and the rest of the app are different processes. So when you drag there's a lot of context switching going on.
The solution is for the kernel to have a smaller timeslice or give more priority to IO bound processes etc. I believe these things are getting fixed in linux 2.6, though I haven't tried it myself yet.
It's not a question of intuitiveness. It's a matter of people having gotten used to the (braindead and ugly) Windows way of doing things.
Ahh, unix-style elitist snobbery at its finest.
I suppose data loss is also intuitive to you?
I grew up on X. I put up with its way of doing things, because I didn't know there was an alternative. Now that KDE and Gnome and have matured and do things the right way, I realize how vastly superior it is. Never used Windows much.
So there.
If you really think such beauties as applications auto-selecting some text when you give them focus making you lose your previous selection constitute the more intuitive way, then I don't think anything I say will have much effect.
Like the ability to reconfigure X on the fly. Right-click on desktop -> properties -> change desktop resolution. Why can't it be that simple? Well, a prerequisite to making it that simple is for X to be reconfigurable on the fly without having to quit out of X, run some "configurator" program, and then restart X and hope it works. If the hooks in X to dynamically reconfigure are there, it is likely that such hooks would be supported by at least KDE / GNOME and possibly others.
HAHAHAHAHA
BWAHAHAHAHHA
Pardon me, I find flamers funny. Especially ignorant flamers. Here on my Fedora box, I do "Start menu->Preferences->Screen resolution", exactly what the parent wanted to do. And it works perfectly.
Dude, get something else to bitch about. This one was fixed long back.
There are lots of "X sucks" flamethrowing morons around who have been told a million times that (for example) network transparency doesn't have overhead when both client and server are on the local machine.
But the parent's complaint, IMHO, shows one of the genuine weak points of the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy of X.
The gist is this: the X designers were faced with the choice of whether selecting text would copy it to a buffer or would merely mark it as selected. All window systems which were designed with a human user in mind would have found it a no-brainer -- copy the text to an internal buffer, since that's what the user intuitively expects.
Not X.
X merely marks the text as selected. That's because it avoids unnecessary network transfer in case the application is running remotely. The second reason is that it enables "content-type negotiation", between the copying and pasting programs. One of the consequences is that if you select text and close that program then that data is gone! This is unexpected data loss, as bad (to Joe Enduser) as your os randomly deleting files on disk.
Note: I'm not saying X made the wrong choice, just that the choices it made aren't very suitable for normal desktop use.
The second consequence of this is that programs (in practice, widget toolkits) that implement copy-paste must all need to agree on a common protocol/format etc. to make things work. And of course, we all know how good open source developers are at doing that. (Its not their fault, just a consequence of the fact that its made of various indepedent projects and not one company).
So that's why nothing can happen right in the desktop linux world without freedesktop.org. Its the standards effort that sits on top of all these disparate pieces and tries to bring some sanity to the whole situation. And I would say it has been going extremely well. Keep it up guys!
Everyone say a little thanks to Keith Packard, please.
This is not a religious argument; I'm not advocating that python is the one language you should use or anything like that. In fact, not having an "ideology" is one of python's major strengths.
If you're asking "why python", ESR has said it better than I ever could.
I'm yet another of those who experienced extremely small turnaround times for python programs. It took me a week, working part time (I estimate about 30 hours) totally, to release 1.0 of gretools, starting from scratch. I had not written a single line of python code before that, mind you.
Why python is great:
Its not a religion. It doesn't force its style of thinking on you. Functional programming, excellent string manipulation tools, classes, inheritance, exceptions, polymorphism, operating system integration, they're all available. This is python's biggest advantage. Whichever background you're coming from, you can very quickly become effective at python.
Incredibly compact code. This is largely a consequence of the previous point. Apart from that it is dynamically typed, and has lots of other cool features. Like doing away with braces for delimiting blocks. People who know nothing about the language flame it for using indentation, but I have never found it confusing, and it makes the code smaller far more readable.
A user-friendly programming language! You aren't going to believe this until you've actually programmed in python. Its got this amazing property that if you can express a thought in constant space mentally, then you can code it in a constant number of lines, most of the time in a single line. In other words, the abstractions of the programming language match the "natural" abstractions of programmers very closely. After just a couple of days I got so used to this that I began to "predict" language features intuitively. At one point I just knew there had to be a language construct for something I was trying to do, and found that it was the reduce function.
Simple syntax. Python manages to have all these features while retaining a very simple syntax, perhaps even simpler than C. This is a big plus, because it gets out of the way and Does What You Mean.
Convinced? Get started now!
Good thing with apache
on
Apache Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There are lots of examples of open source programs which are very complex and powerful and have a steep learning curve, forcing users to read lots of documentation before being able to do anything useful with them (random examples: mutt, mplayer, vi/emacs, sendmail). That's not the case with apache. A n00b who just wants to serve a few simple static pages can simply copy the files to www or public_html directory and they're done. You need to deal with the complexity only if you want to. I guess that's one of the reasons why its so popular.
Looks like detection of steganographic content might be a significantly easier problem than decoding it. The reason is that normal compressed images don't have redundancy -- i.e, the image file size is no larger than it needs to be for the quality (information content) that it has. But embedding a message introduces redundancy, by an amount proportional to the capacity of the stego system. This can be detected, the programmer only needs to have a good grasp of the image format, domain transformation techniques etc.
But I had a this little idea. Suppose we "pollute" normal images with random data with say 1% redundancy. What I mean is, whenever you create an image you take some random data and steganographically embed it in the image. Write a gimp plugin or something so that the process is transparent and automatic. Your file only becomes 1% bigger, so its no big deal. Not everyone needs to do this, just sufficiently many people so that the vast majority of the positives of stego detection systems are going to be false positives. As long as the message is encrypted before embedding, it is provably impossible to tell a genuine stego image from a false positive, assuming that the underlying encryption isn't broken. So you get a secure stegosystem with 1% efficiency "for free".
[dons tinfoil hat]
We'd all better soon start doing something like this, given where governments are going.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly. Nielson had a positional advantage but decided to force a draw anyway by sacrificing material to obtain a draw by repetition. Your version sounds more romantic, but is not accurate :-)
What's the world coming to??!!
Its a joke, relax :-)
For a moment I thought you were talking about the recent explosion in Trojan Horses coming from Siberia (ok so its not exactly a trojan and its Russia not Siberia but what the hell ;^)
Communism is not a bad word here. In fact there are a couple of states which have had communist governments for much of their existence. Naturally this contributes to linux's popularity. Now don't get me wrong, all I'm saying is that the idea of sharing appeals to communists.
Our president is a cool guy. As someone already pointed out, the president is not a political figure in India. But Kalam is a respected person and gives a lot of speeches and many people listen to him etc.
Linux usage in India is definitely rather high. The obvious reason is that there are more programmers ==> more nerds etc. But its far from the only reason. Even though unauthorized copying (I won't use the p-word) is very prevalent, those buying a branded PC will still have to pay for Windows. This is a big factor in the cost conscious Indian market. So in the last 8 months, the number of OEMs pre-loading linux has exploded. Today half the PC ads I see in the paper are MS-free! I can also feel the change at the grassroots level -- neighbors, tech support etc.
The future looks bright.
Hmm... does amnesty international regularly make "-1, troll" statements in order to further its causes? I know that PETA does. Certain environmental organizations also come to mind. Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism as religion" is highly recommended reading.
Components, Components, Components!! ("Universal coupling").
Seriously, GNOME needs more work going into bonobo. IMHO its the only area where it lags behind KDE. That's the reason why you hear Abiword and gnumeric a lot more than kword and kspread, but you hear of koffice but not of gnome-office.
Loose coupling is not necessarily a bad idea though. For example gnome apps start quickly when you're in KDE but not vice versa.
While I have nothing against your being a C fan (its certainly way simpler to learn than C++), IMHO one of the advantages of Gtk+/Gnome is the availability of bindings in a large number of languages (python, perl, C#, ruby, C++ etc). Efficiency is not crucial in desktop apps, and so using a higher level language can lead to big gains in programmer productivity. (I have personal experience with this. I wrote gretools in a week, and that included learning python along the way.)
You mean on the server. Which it still is. The *nix DEs never had much of a reputation for speed (except maybe wmaker and other niche WMs). Please don't confuse the two. I remember KDE 1.x being very slow on the hardware of the day. Today's KDE and GNOME are certainly way faster on today's hardware.
The GNOME people have always been bold in trying out new strategies. After the gnome2 drive to simplify the UI and move away from featuritis it has come a long way. There are some exciting developments like dashboard, gstreamer and desktop integration bounty hunt. Watch out for 2.6!
Pigeons were used instead of email in India until 2002.
Avian carriers are used commercially even today to deliver digital photographs.
Indeed. It is a reflection on the attitudes of our society that "eccentric", literally "off center", when referring to a person, is a derogatory term. If you deviate from the average, there's something "wrong" with you.
I can access in.groups.yahoo.com but not groups.yahoo.com.
Cencorship and monitoring are standard fare in India and the only reason it isn't much more widespread is that the population is huge and the government isn't tech savvy enough to do anything 1984-ish.
can't figure out why no one has posted anything yet...
A related tidbit: apparently the top bid at overture.com is $50 for the search "mesothelioma lawyer". At that rate they had better have some way to filter out bots otherwise a competitor could do some serious damage.
Anyway the current development will probably diminish the importance of having something like xouvert.
The solution is for the kernel to have a smaller timeslice or give more priority to IO bound processes etc. I believe these things are getting fixed in linux 2.6, though I haven't tried it myself yet.
Ahh, unix-style elitist snobbery at its finest.
I suppose data loss is also intuitive to you?
I grew up on X. I put up with its way of doing things, because I didn't know there was an alternative. Now that KDE and Gnome and have matured and do things the right way, I realize how vastly superior it is. Never used Windows much.
So there.
If you really think such beauties as applications auto-selecting some text when you give them focus making you lose your previous selection constitute the more intuitive way, then I don't think anything I say will have much effect.
HAHAHAHAHA
BWAHAHAHAHHA
Pardon me, I find flamers funny. Especially ignorant flamers. Here on my Fedora box, I do "Start menu->Preferences->Screen resolution", exactly what the parent wanted to do. And it works perfectly.
Dude, get something else to bitch about. This one was fixed long back.
There are lots of "X sucks" flamethrowing morons around who have been told a million times that (for example) network transparency doesn't have overhead when both client and server are on the local machine.
But the parent's complaint, IMHO, shows one of the genuine weak points of the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy of X.
The gist is this: the X designers were faced with the choice of whether selecting text would copy it to a buffer or would merely mark it as selected. All window systems which were designed with a human user in mind would have found it a no-brainer -- copy the text to an internal buffer, since that's what the user intuitively expects.
Not X.
X merely marks the text as selected. That's because it avoids unnecessary network transfer in case the application is running remotely. The second reason is that it enables "content-type negotiation", between the copying and pasting programs. One of the consequences is that if you select text and close that program then that data is gone! This is unexpected data loss, as bad (to Joe Enduser) as your os randomly deleting files on disk.
Note: I'm not saying X made the wrong choice, just that the choices it made aren't very suitable for normal desktop use.
The second consequence of this is that programs (in practice, widget toolkits) that implement copy-paste must all need to agree on a common protocol/format etc. to make things work. And of course, we all know how good open source developers are at doing that. (Its not their fault, just a consequence of the fact that its made of various indepedent projects and not one company).
So that's why nothing can happen right in the desktop linux world without freedesktop.org. Its the standards effort that sits on top of all these disparate pieces and tries to bring some sanity to the whole situation. And I would say it has been going extremely well. Keep it up guys!
Everyone say a little thanks to Keith Packard, please.
This is not a religious argument; I'm not advocating that python is the one language you should use or anything like that. In fact, not having an "ideology" is one of python's major strengths.
If you're asking "why python", ESR has said it better than I ever could.
I'm yet another of those who experienced extremely small turnaround times for python programs. It took me a week, working part time (I estimate about 30 hours) totally, to release 1.0 of gretools, starting from scratch. I had not written a single line of python code before that, mind you.
Why python is great:
Its not a religion. It doesn't force its style of thinking on you. Functional programming, excellent string manipulation tools, classes, inheritance, exceptions, polymorphism, operating system integration, they're all available. This is python's biggest advantage. Whichever background you're coming from, you can very quickly become effective at python.
Incredibly compact code. This is largely a consequence of the previous point. Apart from that it is dynamically typed, and has lots of other cool features. Like doing away with braces for delimiting blocks. People who know nothing about the language flame it for using indentation, but I have never found it confusing, and it makes the code smaller far more readable.
A user-friendly programming language! You aren't going to believe this until you've actually programmed in python. Its got this amazing property that if you can express a thought in constant space mentally, then you can code it in a constant number of lines, most of the time in a single line. In other words, the abstractions of the programming language match the "natural" abstractions of programmers very closely. After just a couple of days I got so used to this that I began to "predict" language features intuitively. At one point I just knew there had to be a language construct for something I was trying to do, and found that it was the reduce function.
Simple syntax. Python manages to have all these features while retaining a very simple syntax, perhaps even simpler than C. This is a big plus, because it gets out of the way and Does What You Mean.
Convinced? Get started now!
There are lots of examples of open source programs which are very complex and powerful and have a steep learning curve, forcing users to read lots of documentation before being able to do anything useful with them (random examples: mutt, mplayer, vi/emacs, sendmail). That's not the case with apache. A n00b who just wants to serve a few simple static pages can simply copy the files to www or public_html directory and they're done. You need to deal with the complexity only if you want to. I guess that's one of the reasons why its so popular.
Like most /.ers I'm a big fan of the hitchhiker's guide. I even made a funny splash screen for a program I'm writing parodying the guide. Enjoy :^)
SCO is not complying with the GPL ;^)
But I had a this little idea. Suppose we "pollute" normal images with random data with say 1% redundancy. What I mean is, whenever you create an image you take some random data and steganographically embed it in the image. Write a gimp plugin or something so that the process is transparent and automatic. Your file only becomes 1% bigger, so its no big deal. Not everyone needs to do this, just sufficiently many people so that the vast majority of the positives of stego detection systems are going to be false positives. As long as the message is encrypted before embedding, it is provably impossible to tell a genuine stego image from a false positive, assuming that the underlying encryption isn't broken. So you get a secure stegosystem with 1% efficiency "for free".
[dons tinfoil hat]
We'd all better soon start doing something like this, given where governments are going.