For PDF output, there's FOP. Again, you'll need a JVM.
For structured graphics, I recommend SVG. However, I'm not sure what tools are good for generating it. And I'm not sure if FOP can handle it.
FOP can include SVG, via the Apache Batik renderer. I find FOP a bit lacking however, especially font handling seems to be a problem. Free alternatives include PassiveTeX (built upon TeX as the name suggests, so quite good-looking output, but a pig to install and lacking lots of formatting objects) and xmlroff (Sun sponsored, built on Gtk2's Pango renderer, still in its infancy).
Basically, XSL FO rendering with free software isn't where it should be. One could of course use a proprietary renderer, but they tend to be pricey, and not everybody wants to go that way. Personally, I have decided to stay with the DSSSL toolchain (i.e. Jade) for PDF output for a while, but using XSLT for HTML. Jade works with XML documents just as well as with SGML, but of course, this is a maintenance nightmare.
"Generally" in this context seems to only include US law. I often wondered about that - in Germany (where I live, and where copyright works a whole lot differently anyway), a retroactive change of law would clearly be inconstitutional. Is this really different in the US, or was that just some clever trick?
I have no idea what you are trying to say, but this is slashdot, so I'll reply anyway:
Microsoft, cooperating with SCO, built the first Unix to run on Intel-compatible processors, called Xenix. That was before Windows. So I doubt that lack of Unix knowledge is a major reason for any of MS's mistakes.
Compared to other systems of that time, the Unix security model was (and basically still is) piss-poor. And the implementations in the 80s were buggy as hell. It's just that Unix is way better than all the alternatives today (and there is only one non-Unix system left for most intents and purposes), and a huge amount of post-fact bugfixing and workarounds, that make it look good. In other words, it is true that Unix-like systems tend to be the most secure today, but that in itself is a tragedy.
As far as I can see, the ACLs in FreeBSD/UFS2 (following the POSIX.1e proposal) just know the traditional read-write-execute/search permissions, only with more fine-grained possibilities to assign these rights to users and groups. However, the FreeBSD implementation seems to be flexible enough to support additional flags - in fact, the acl(3) manpage explicitly mentions nonportable functions for Netware style ACLs (and some others, like NTFS). I have no idea how to actually use that, however.
Except that white blood cells don't usually cause lots of damage themselves. Even a "white-hat" worm causes lots of traffic and can thus bring down networks and make innocent people pay for lots of wasted bandwidth.
Or you could just build your 5.x world without the WITH_DYNAMICROOT option.
Not that Dragonfly doesn't look interesting, but, erm, I guess I'll give it some time to mature before I consider it for any critical system. My next update will definitely be to FBSD 5-STABLE.
Actually, a simple division between church and state has worked quite well for most of europe in the last centuries. You americans might want to try it sometimes. You don't have to adopt to any specific ideology, just don't make one more official than the others.
Additionally, recently Debian has decided that the GNU Free Documentation License isn't free enough for them, and that therefore many GNU manuals have to go to non-free. If this isn't a huge holier-than-thou contest, I don't know. Some people really need to get out more.
Linux will get no where in the desktop space without a UNIFIED and powerful marketing powerhouse.
I can't see anything wrong with having lots of non-unified marketing powerhouses. If IBM, Sun, Red Hat, SuSE, Siemens and Oracle all tell people that Linux is the way to go individually, probably each one focusing on slightly different reasons, I think it sounds a lot more objective than if all you hear comes from the Linux Marketing Labs, Inc.
From my experience, managers critically depend on solitaire, at least that's the one app they always have open when I get a peek at their desktops. For secretaries, games might be less critical, as long as the platform provides them with animated wallpapers, mouse cursors, and a means to play animations with drunken singing reindeers they got as an email attachment from people they don't know around christmas. How else would they get any work done?
I disagree because of Linux kernel's binary loading. ELF is standard enough, but all other systems that use ELF still have their own implementations and there is no native binary compatibility... FreeBSD can emulate but that's pretty much all I know of.
Actually, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX and UnixWare also have Linux binary compatibiliy, at least on some platforms. The BSDs also have some more compatibility layers, usually at least for the "native" Unix on a given platform. There may be other Unixes that have something similar, in fact I believe that Linux might the only Unix-like OS that hasn't (dunno about Darwin/OS X and some of the more obscure ones).
So, while it may happen that the Linux ABI may serve as some kind of general compatibility layer, there's no reason for Linux itself to be around, actually. And of course, if Linux would somehow happen to become unpopular, maybe portable programming would become a little more fashionable again - after all, if you know what you are doing, porting your code to another POSIX platform can be nearly as easy as configure; make; make install - works fine for commercial applications, too.
Replacing relatively expensive Solaris desktops with desktops running a linux-based Mad Hatter desktop on Sun-branded x86 hardware might be even more straightforward than switching to Red Hat or SuSE, since people running Solaris obviously already have business contact with Sun and are likely to have some Sparc servers in the basement. Most managers like it if they only have to deal with one supplier.
So it might not be that bad for Sun, after all. At the end of the day, the chances for them to be considered for corporate desktop installations is clearly improved.
I think it's a save prediction that in 2008, the state of the Hurd will be "production ready in about half a year". But still, you are right, this isn't about Linux, it's about Gnome and KDE, whatever OS they are running on.
Actually, "we" haven't been able to create a free competitor to Photoshop or Office either. There still is no free professional quality graphics program, and OpenOffice.org exists just because Sun bought a proprietary product and decided to relicense it.
Python comes with a module that will give you the parse tree of any expression as nested Python lists, similar to what READ does in Lisp. I don't know if it can actually turn a modified tree back to executable code, but I can tell you, once you have looked at such a parse tree, you don't want to modify Python parse trees anymore.
Java's adding a *lot* of features that Dylan has had since its inception, such as keyword arguments
Java is adding keyword arguments? Any pointers for that? How does it work with its style of method overloading?
Gywdion Dylan can produce code that's as fast as code written in C
Doesn't Gwydion actually produce C code behind your back and feeds it to GCC? And given how long that takes, one would expect that code to be fairly optimized...;-)
so, the whole point is that Lisp is not a programming language but a kind of language definition language? Just a raw parse tree, and Build Your Own Syntax. See why I say it's difficult? You haven't ANYTHING done for you in advance.
Oh, come on. Common Lisp has about 1000 defined symbols (i.e. variables, functions, macros, classes...). It includes an extremely powerful exception system, highly flexible OOP, and all the mundane stuff like lots of standard datatypes, control structures, IO, pretty printing etc. People frequently bash it because it's too big.
You don't have to do any kind of language design when you do Lisp programming. You can get a long way with just using plain function definitions. Yet you can easily define new syntaxes, control structures and stuff.
never got to understand why Lisp programmers think of the macro system as the primary and more exclusive power of the language, now I start to see it. But how do to learn to create those domain-specific languages? It is so far away from conventional academic lectures, that one needs to forget almost everything to start thinking that way!
Back when I was the proud owner of a Commodore C 128, I used to think similar things about useless stuff like GOSUB. Why can't we just stay with the more familiar GOTO that everyone understands?
Get over it. Learning new tools is usefull, but it's work. Get a good book on Lisp macros, and dive in.
And I'm not convinced that that syntaxlessness is indispensable. [...] I would prefer to have some syntactic sugar
You are not alone. And, given that you can actually define a new syntax, many people tried to come up with alternatives to raw s-expressions. And indeed succeeded. However, none of these alternatives ever got too popular (the most successfull attempt might by the Dylan language, which started with s-expressions, but dropped them). People could have used alternative syntaxes, but the vast majority chose not to.
At least the 1.1 betas have an option to save as "flat xml". The format is basically the same as the zipped one, but uncompressed and in a single file (binary files like embedded images seem to be base64 encoded).
In principle there is no problem using that with any version management system, CVS, RCS, Subversion etc should work fine with it. You'll be more happy to have an XML-aware diff at least, though - my simple test doc ended up with all content in a single long line.
The OOo file format it just a bunch of zipped XML files, you can easily look for yourself. Deleted text is not in it, as it seems. Unless you turned on version tracking, of course.
It does, however, save things like when the document was last printed, how often it has been edited and by whom, etc. unless you tell it otherwise. It's easy to get rid of the data (there is a huge "Delete" button in the properties dialog), but not many people will be aware of it.
So, basically, if you don't know what you are doing, you could give out more information than you want to with you OOo files.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, XSL FO rendering with free software isn't where it should be. One could of course use a proprietary renderer, but they tend to be pricey, and not everybody wants to go that way. Personally, I have decided to stay with the DSSSL toolchain (i.e. Jade) for PDF output for a while, but using XSLT for HTML. Jade works with XML documents just as well as with SGML, but of course, this is a maintenance nightmare.
"Generally" in this context seems to only include US law. I often wondered about that - in Germany (where I live, and where copyright works a whole lot differently anyway), a retroactive change of law would clearly be inconstitutional. Is this really different in the US, or was that just some clever trick?
Actually, I am a type 1 diabetic. I wouldn't call that "usual", though. If we could now go on and discuss computer worms, please...
As far as I can see, the ACLs in FreeBSD/UFS2 (following the POSIX.1e proposal) just know the traditional read-write-execute/search permissions, only with more fine-grained possibilities to assign these rights to users and groups. However, the FreeBSD implementation seems to be flexible enough to support additional flags - in fact, the acl(3) manpage explicitly mentions nonportable functions for Netware style ACLs (and some others, like NTFS). I have no idea how to actually use that, however.
Except that white blood cells don't usually cause lots of damage themselves. Even a "white-hat" worm causes lots of traffic and can thus bring down networks and make innocent people pay for lots of wasted bandwidth.
Not that Dragonfly doesn't look interesting, but, erm, I guess I'll give it some time to mature before I consider it for any critical system. My next update will definitely be to FBSD 5-STABLE.
Mostly because very, very few people think that this is a good idea.
Actually, a simple division between church and state has worked quite well for most of europe in the last centuries. You americans might want to try it sometimes. You don't have to adopt to any specific ideology, just don't make one more official than the others.
A huge factor that you do not consider might be that a lot of people find his definition of "free" highly questionable.
Additionally, recently Debian has decided that the GNU Free Documentation License isn't free enough for them, and that therefore many GNU manuals have to go to non-free. If this isn't a huge holier-than-thou contest, I don't know. Some people really need to get out more.
Ever heard of firewalls?
From my experience, managers critically depend on solitaire, at least that's the one app they always have open when I get a peek at their desktops. For secretaries, games might be less critical, as long as the platform provides them with animated wallpapers, mouse cursors, and a means to play animations with drunken singing reindeers they got as an email attachment from people they don't know around christmas. How else would they get any work done?
So, while it may happen that the Linux ABI may serve as some kind of general compatibility layer, there's no reason for Linux itself to be around, actually. And of course, if Linux would somehow happen to become unpopular, maybe portable programming would become a little more fashionable again - after all, if you know what you are doing, porting your code to another POSIX platform can be nearly as easy as configure; make; make install - works fine for commercial applications, too.
So it might not be that bad for Sun, after all. At the end of the day, the chances for them to be considered for corporate desktop installations is clearly improved.
I think it's a save prediction that in 2008, the state of the Hurd will be "production ready in about half a year". But still, you are right, this isn't about Linux, it's about Gnome and KDE, whatever OS they are running on.
Actually, "we" haven't been able to create a free competitor to Photoshop or Office either. There still is no free professional quality graphics program, and OpenOffice.org exists just because Sun bought a proprietary product and decided to relicense it.
You don't have to do any kind of language design when you do Lisp programming. You can get a long way with just using plain function definitions. Yet you can easily define new syntaxes, control structures and stuff.
Back when I was the proud owner of a Commodore C 128, I used to think similar things about useless stuff like GOSUB. Why can't we just stay with the more familiar GOTO that everyone understands?Get over it. Learning new tools is usefull, but it's work. Get a good book on Lisp macros, and dive in.
You are not alone. And, given that you can actually define a new syntax, many people tried to come up with alternatives to raw s-expressions. And indeed succeeded. However, none of these alternatives ever got too popular (the most successfull attempt might by the Dylan language, which started with s-expressions, but dropped them). People could have used alternative syntaxes, but the vast majority chose not to.In principle there is no problem using that with any version management system, CVS, RCS, Subversion etc should work fine with it. You'll be more happy to have an XML-aware diff at least, though - my simple test doc ended up with all content in a single long line.
It does, however, save things like when the document was last printed, how often it has been edited and by whom, etc. unless you tell it otherwise. It's easy to get rid of the data (there is a huge "Delete" button in the properties dialog), but not many people will be aware of it.
So, basically, if you don't know what you are doing, you could give out more information than you want to with you OOo files.