You can consider almost anything that's hard and unique to the doer an "art form". It doesn't justify doing it, though. Asian languages are not well suited to the computer age. If you want to interoperate on a global level and you're Asian, you learn a language that uses Roman letters...currently, English.
Saying that higher teacher's salaries are not sufficient to produce better teachers may well be true...however, higher teacher's salaries may well be necessary to produce better teachers.
Well...that's a difficult question. First, Justin may have the ability to make official Nullsoft releases, unless AOL specifically forbid this when they purchased Nullsoft. If he's authorized to act as an agent of the company...then the company did the release. Second of all, while it's conventional for software developers to sign with a company saying that (at least) stuff written on company time is owned by the *company*, IIRC Justin was a founding member of Nullsoft. There may not have been any such contract when he joined up. Third, while he definitely *used* it on company time, nobody has made any statement to the effect that he *wrote* it on company time. If he did this at home, it may mean that he owns the code.
You *do* realize that there is a difference between child molesters and producers of child porn?
And that a 17 year old in a video "intended to incite lust" falls under US child porn laws?
I tend to think that a lot of laws designed to mold people into embracing certain moral values are fairly broken. I'm not sure that legalizing prostitution is a good idea...but I'm quite sure that making it illegal on moral grounds is a bad idea. The same goes for child porn. Show actual damage to society, folks...not just touchy-feely "well, that doesn't seem *right*" claims.
If the Javascript specification allows these things, well then the spec is broken and it's right for the browser to ignore it and do (by default) what the _user_ is most likely to want.
No, the spec allows the browser to do these or not. Hence, the spec is not broken.:-)
For the first half of your post your argument comes down to "If you only ever use the vendor supplied packages you'll be fine". Now excuse me for scoffing but that is a poor way to tackle the problems that are inherent with X.
*I* do not have any problem using non-vendor supplied packages. You asked for ease-of-use, and I'm pointing out that it is quite present and available. Joe User, who uses Office, Outlook, and IE on his computer, is well served by vendor distributions. There are far more apps available on a single CD alone of RH than the typical user will ever use.
If a technically advanced user wants to run out and compile his own software, he's quite free to do so, though he's not going to have the same level of QA that RH grants their packages. I've never run into problems getting xft-capable software in any of the packages I've compiled, though I suppose it's certainly possible that you've run into problems. I'm not trying to download packages compiled on another system, but not by my vendor and against a completely different library set. I can't imagine that that's a particularly common scenerio.
* Qt -- okay. If you're using KDE, you have those libraries as well. * GTK1 -- not sure why you use GTK instead of a Qt equiv, but okay. * Mozilla with XUL -- no different than Windows. * OpenOffice.org -- yes, this has its own, but MS Office traditionally has *its* own as well. My sister uses MS Office XP and owns Windows 2k. Office uses an entirely different widget set from Windows.
I even sometimes have to use applications such as PFA Edit to deal with some fonts, so thats another widget set all of its own, too.
Haven't used PFA Edit in a long time, but I'll believe you.
Oh, and Adobe Acrobat Reader uses some sort of Xt style toolkit.
As an aside, use xpdf. The Linux Acrobat implementation has memory leaks galore.
I never said Windows was better in this regard; it isn't. Linux certainly shouldn't use Windows poor design as an excuse to implement its own poor solutions, either. Thats a cop out if ever I saw one.
Calling X "bad" when everything else is equally "bad" is, I'd say, meaningless.
Look, I'm with you that X isn't perfect. I wish that Moz didn't have to use XUL, and that OpenOffice was gtk-based. But I still think it's the best thing out there.
If Berlin or something really fixed all these issues *and* didn't cause any loss of functionality, then sure, I could see using it instead.
What does that have to do with anything? I'm honestly confused.
Holding the position of power in a family is one of the two elements of a patriarchy.
Did i say the US was a patriachy? Did i say any country/society in particular was a patriarchy? Perhaps the fact that you assumed i was speaking of the US reveals something in and of itself?;)
The fact that most Slashdotters are from the US, and when someone makes a comment about society, the default assumption is US society, the same as "lira" having traditionally assumed to mean "Italian lira".
I said "dock", not clock. There are definitely lighter weight programs than gkrellm.
X-Windows is difficult to configure through the Unix text files.
Which is why modern distros provide a Joe User GUI-based method of configuring X...most of which essentially consists of the same thing Windows does, hitting OK and letting the screen flash a few times.
The API is kludgy and bloated and disorganized.
Really? Have you programmed with xlib? I have. Xlib is ugly -- it's designed to support every kind of hardware under the sun -- and perhaps difficult to use, but not kludgy or bloated or disorganized.
X-Windows is a beast designed by committee.
I hate to break it to you, but no one person sat down and simply designed Windows.
Also the committee members were insane.
Now *there* you may well have some merit.
The networking system is arcane.
There is no networking system in X.
Windows or the Mac have fading Windows and widgets
This is true.
and a standard guideline for how the Window system should look.
This is a feature. It lets X age gracefully. The Mac's already thrown out guidelines once or twice since its creation. MS just ignores their guidelines. If programmers were constrained to a standard written when X was produced, they'd still be using Athena from X's early days, which is about as old looking as things get. There are desktop environments with standardized UIs -- GNOME and KDE both have human interface guidelines, and I believe GNUStep does as well.
Windows has a much better integrated help system
Uh, huh. The built in Windows documentation is the next thing to useless. You ever try to *find* something useful with Windows Help files shipped with Windows? XFree's man pages have *much* more useful information
and DirectX and 3d support is built into the Windows kernel.
DirectX happens to be a Windows standard, so that's hardly surprising -- X has libraries of its own. And XFree86 has 3d support.
Haven't played Civ, so I can't rebut anything there.
You're correct that there are more games for Windows, but that's hardly a technical flaw. OpenGL was designed on UNIX, not Windows.
As someone else pointed out, these are device mappings. Address space is allocated, but no physical memory. The perl script in the tarball that I posted a few comments up does a neat breakdown.
Like multithreading (finally better response times)
Multithreading would not help -- you'd have to constantly lock the screen bits, and you'd just add the overhead of threading.
XFree86 has excellent response times in the 4.x series. If you're running a slow window manager on it, you may be throwing away cycles in the WM. I use sawfish on a P2-266, and it's quite snappy -- edge flips are essentially instantaneous. You can do what MS does and renice X to have high priority if you want it to take precedence over other apps on the system that may be using CPU time. XFree *can* cache window contents in the manner you describe -- it's just generally faster to redraw them, given that storing their contents uses a good chunk of memory. Add Option "BackingStore" to the screen section of XFree86Config, and it'll kick this on.
Win95 + an app works but kind of sucks with 16MB of RAM, just like XFree86+kernel+an app.
Yes, if you're running a copy of Slackware from '98, you'll be lacking features. The same goes for Windows users using Win 98. Grab a current Linux distro like RH 9.
and if you have configured FontConfig
Not necessary to do any manual configuration on Mandrake or RH, as far as I know. If your distro ships fontconfig, it should also handle including a config file.
and if you have a toolkit which uses FontConfig and xft or you have used the LD_PRELOAD trick to force the latest version of Freetype to be used.
Except for a few apps that still don't have a stable release using gtk2 (like gimp), most packages in a RH release have been migrated over. The only things that I look at on a regular basis that aren't antialiased are dillo and rxvt, both of which are not packaged with RH -- and the packaged alternatives *do* do antialiasing. Oh, and the xmms prefs dialog is still gtk1, though I don't see it much.
Dunno about Qt/KDE (I don't use 'em), though I suspect, given the all-in-one integrated approach the KDE people like, that current KDE apps are all using the same version of Qt.
If your application uses a toolkit other than GTK2 or Qt3.0 then you're shit out of luck, unless you can recompile the entire application against the latest Freetype2. The applications that can't be recompiled or relinked or don't use Freetype2 continue to use Type1 or worse, scaled bitmap fonts.
Why would you ever be doing recompiling? The distro vendor does all the compiling and linking for you.
don't use Freetype2 continue to use Type1 or worse, scaled bitmap fonts
Or truetype...the scaled bitmap claim is really bogus. Yes, if you have bitmap-only fonts and you're demanding a font size that doesn't exist, you get ugly scaling -- the same happens for Windows and Mac OS.
X handles fonts in the same way as a one handed man juggles. He can keep a few balls in the air at once but ends up dropping more than he can throw. Eventually it all ends up on the floor in a mess.
I don't have any idea what claim you're trying to make here. It certainly isn't on the number of fonts that X can use at once.
While the intentions may be noble, there are multiple problems with any environment that uses different widget sets. The problems with AA fonts is one of them.
It takes a bit to fully transition over. Windows had all kinds of cosmetic bugs with third-party programs when it was moved to do antialiasing.
A huge increase in memory overhead is another (A typical X session will have at least three different widget sets in use.
What are these three widget sets?
At the moment, I'm running a copy of dillo (which is hardly a commonly-used app), so I have gtk1 loaded. I'm using gaim, which is gtk2. I'm using gkrellm, which uses gtk2, and sawfish and its pager, which is using gtk2. The only other app with a widget set running is povray, which is using xlib (same as all the others, beneath their widget library).
I certainly don't use Athena-based apps on a regular basis.
Each require their own libraries loaded into memory, each library has its dependencies etc.)
While true, most of the dependencies are had by the widget sets in common (gtk1 and gtk2 depend on glib and glib2...and the rest of gtk1's dependencies are xlib and glibc, which are dependencies of gtk2 as well.) Furthermore, with lazy loading and paging support in VM, code that doesn't get used isn't getting loaded. It's hardly the amount shown in top. There *is* a little bit of memory being used, I'll grant that. When Linux sucks as much with 128MB of memory as Windows XP does, then I'll start to worry.
Then we have pure problems of HCI; different widget sets look different and confuse people. Even if you skin the widget sets to look the same (Bluecurve) they still behave diferently and confuse the users.
Well, then we get into what's "wrong". Morally wrong? You may have an entirely different set of moral. To some people in the world, a woman showing anything but her eyes is morally wrong. Those people feel that women walking around with their heads and faces uncovered are just as immoral as you view the porn actresses to be.
In general, I don't really see the problem with porn actresses. As a matter of fact, I find military tours of service much more upsetting, since it is *illegal* to leave if you find that things aren't quite what you were expecting. Heck, you can be *shot* for that.
Any visit to a magazine shop should convince anybody that women are portrayed mainly as sex objects whose only tasks in life are to keep an eye on their weight and how to find their blue prince.
Men do not have to suffer such humiliation.
And men are portrayed as insensitive and expected to be breadwinners. Big deal. If you think that pop culture media is humiliating to people, I have to disagree. Pop culture shows computer programmers to be antisocial geeks. So?
If porno gaming is your thing, fine, but many females are uncomfortable knowing that strong industries like the gaming one can't come with better ideas but the stereotyping of women as sexual animals.
The gaming industry does not determine the psyche anywhere near as much as the psyche determines the gaming industry. Guys like looking at attractive girls, and will tend to throw down money more readily for a product if they have the opportunity to do so. Sorry. It's biological.
Slashdot Mirror
You can consider almost anything that's hard and unique to the doer an "art form". It doesn't justify doing it, though. Asian languages are not well suited to the computer age. If you want to interoperate on a global level and you're Asian, you learn a language that uses Roman letters...currently, English.
Saying that higher teacher's salaries are not sufficient to produce better teachers may well be true...however, higher teacher's salaries may well be necessary to produce better teachers.
Well...that's a difficult question. First, Justin may have the ability to make official Nullsoft releases, unless AOL specifically forbid this when they purchased Nullsoft. If he's authorized to act as an agent of the company...then the company did the release. Second of all, while it's conventional for software developers to sign with a company saying that (at least) stuff written on company time is owned by the *company*, IIRC Justin was a founding member of Nullsoft. There may not have been any such contract when he joined up. Third, while he definitely *used* it on company time, nobody has made any statement to the effect that he *wrote* it on company time. If he did this at home, it may mean that he owns the code.
Specifically quick-and-dirty Windows *GUI* apps, kind of like Hypercard was for the Mac.
The question is, if you're going to write a single app and throw it away, why are you wasting time on a GUI at *all*?
That *would* be true except for the fact that using Linux provides a long term cost advantage to the research community as a whole.
...in order to stop the game from crashing completely...
The article submitter has seen games crash *partially*?
I don't care if data is used against you...as long as you are able to use the data *for* you as well.
Thank you for avoiding yet another knee-jerk response.
You *do* realize that there is a difference between child molesters and producers of child porn?
And that a 17 year old in a video "intended to incite lust" falls under US child porn laws?
I tend to think that a lot of laws designed to mold people into embracing certain moral values are fairly broken. I'm not sure that legalizing prostitution is a good idea...but I'm quite sure that making it illegal on moral grounds is a bad idea. The same goes for child porn. Show actual damage to society, folks...not just touchy-feely "well, that doesn't seem *right*" claims.
Yeah -- child porn wastes less bandwidth.
The problem is that while Moz is a good web browser, there are *much* better mail clients and newsreaders for the platforms Moz runs on.
I'd rather use the best of breed for each thing.
You know, it's a good bet that you and the parent poster have different settings for your different browsers, which is the critical factor here.
If the Javascript specification allows these things, well then the spec is broken and it's right for the browser to ignore it and do (by default) what the _user_ is most likely to want.
:-)
:-)
No, the spec allows the browser to do these or not. Hence, the spec is not broken.
Try popping up a new window in, say, elinks.
Try the Red Hat ISOs and see what you think. Debian has traditionally been a bit less than friendly when it comes to automatically setting things up.
For the first half of your post your argument comes down to "If you only ever use the vendor supplied packages you'll be fine". Now excuse me for scoffing but that is a poor way to tackle the problems that are inherent with X.
*I* do not have any problem using non-vendor supplied packages. You asked for ease-of-use, and I'm pointing out that it is quite present and available. Joe User, who uses Office, Outlook, and IE on his computer, is well served by vendor distributions. There are far more apps available on a single CD alone of RH than the typical user will ever use.
If a technically advanced user wants to run out and compile his own software, he's quite free to do so, though he's not going to have the same level of QA that RH grants their packages. I've never run into problems getting xft-capable software in any of the packages I've compiled, though I suppose it's certainly possible that you've run into problems. I'm not trying to download packages compiled on another system, but not by my vendor and against a completely different library set. I can't imagine that that's a particularly common scenerio.
* Qt -- okay. If you're using KDE, you have those libraries as well.
* GTK1 -- not sure why you use GTK instead of a Qt equiv, but okay.
* Mozilla with XUL -- no different than Windows.
* OpenOffice.org -- yes, this has its own, but MS Office traditionally has *its* own as well. My sister uses MS Office XP and owns Windows 2k. Office uses an entirely
different widget set from Windows.
I even sometimes have to use applications such as PFA Edit to deal with some fonts, so thats another widget set all of its own, too.
Haven't used PFA Edit in a long time, but I'll believe you.
Oh, and Adobe Acrobat Reader uses some sort of Xt style toolkit.
As an aside, use xpdf. The Linux Acrobat implementation has memory leaks galore.
I never said Windows was better in this regard; it isn't. Linux certainly shouldn't use Windows poor design as an excuse to implement its own poor solutions, either. Thats a cop out if ever I saw one.
Calling X "bad" when everything else is equally "bad" is, I'd say, meaningless.
Look, I'm with you that X isn't perfect. I wish that Moz didn't have to use XUL, and that OpenOffice was gtk-based. But I still think it's the best thing out there.
If Berlin or something really fixed all these issues *and* didn't cause any loss of functionality, then sure, I could see using it instead.
From WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]:
patriarchy
n : a form of social organization in which a male is the family
head and title is traced through the male line [syn: {patriarchate}
Because we no longer generally use the concept of "head of the household" in the United States.
Try this page.
Hmm. I never really thought about it that way. Interesting.
What does that have to do with anything? I'm honestly confused.
;)
Holding the position of power in a family is one of the two elements of a patriarchy.
Did i say the US was a patriachy? Did i say any country/society in particular was a patriarchy? Perhaps the fact that you assumed i was speaking of the US reveals something in and of itself?
The fact that most Slashdotters are from the US, and when someone makes a comment about society, the default assumption is US society, the same as "lira" having traditionally assumed to mean "Italian lira".
It has a poor clipboard copy system.
I *like* having two clipboards, actually.
It takes several megabytes to run the clock.
I said "dock", not clock. There are definitely lighter weight programs than gkrellm.
X-Windows is difficult to configure through the Unix text files.
Which is why modern distros provide a Joe User GUI-based method of configuring X...most of which essentially consists of the same thing Windows does, hitting OK and letting the screen flash a few times.
The API is kludgy and bloated and disorganized.
Really? Have you programmed with xlib? I have. Xlib is ugly -- it's designed to support every kind of hardware under the sun -- and perhaps difficult to use, but not kludgy or bloated or disorganized.
X-Windows is a beast designed by committee.
I hate to break it to you, but no one person sat down and simply designed Windows.
Also the committee members were insane.
Now *there* you may well have some merit.
The networking system is arcane.
There is no networking system in X.
Windows or the Mac have fading Windows and widgets
This is true.
and a standard guideline for how the Window system should look.
This is a feature. It lets X age gracefully. The Mac's already thrown out guidelines once or twice since its creation. MS just ignores their guidelines. If programmers were constrained to a standard written when X was produced, they'd still be using Athena from X's early days, which is about as old looking as things get. There are desktop environments with standardized UIs -- GNOME and KDE both have human interface guidelines, and I believe GNUStep does as well.
Windows has a much better integrated help system
Uh, huh. The built in Windows documentation is the next thing to useless. You ever try to *find* something useful with Windows Help files shipped with Windows? XFree's man pages have *much* more useful information
and DirectX and 3d support is built into the Windows kernel.
DirectX happens to be a Windows standard, so that's hardly surprising -- X has libraries of its own. And XFree86 has 3d support.
Haven't played Civ, so I can't rebut anything there.
You're correct that there are more games for Windows, but that's hardly a technical flaw. OpenGL was designed on UNIX, not Windows.
As someone else pointed out, these are device mappings. Address space is allocated, but no physical memory. The perl script in the tarball that I posted a few comments up does a neat breakdown.
Like multithreading (finally better response times)
Multithreading would not help -- you'd have to constantly lock the screen bits, and you'd just add the overhead of threading.
XFree86 has excellent response times in the 4.x series. If you're running a slow window manager on it, you may be throwing away cycles in the WM. I use sawfish on a P2-266, and it's quite snappy -- edge flips are essentially instantaneous. You can do what MS does and renice X to have high priority if you want it to take precedence over other apps on the system that may be using CPU time. XFree *can* cache window contents in the manner you describe -- it's just generally faster to redraw them, given that storing their contents uses a good chunk of memory. Add Option "BackingStore" to the screen section of XFree86Config, and it'll kick this on.
Win95 + an app works but kind of sucks with 16MB of RAM, just like XFree86+kernel+an app.
Sure. If you have the latest versions of X,
Yes, if you're running a copy of Slackware from '98, you'll be lacking features. The same goes for Windows users using Win 98. Grab a current Linux distro like RH 9.
and if you have configured FontConfig
Not necessary to do any manual configuration on Mandrake or RH, as far as I know. If your distro ships fontconfig, it should also handle including a config file.
and if you have a toolkit which uses FontConfig and xft or you have used the LD_PRELOAD trick to force the latest version of Freetype to be used.
Except for a few apps that still don't have a stable release using gtk2 (like gimp), most packages in a RH release have been migrated over. The only things that I look at on a regular basis that aren't antialiased are dillo and rxvt, both of which are not packaged with RH -- and the packaged alternatives *do* do antialiasing. Oh, and the xmms prefs dialog is still gtk1, though I don't see it much.
Dunno about Qt/KDE (I don't use 'em), though I suspect, given the all-in-one integrated approach the KDE people like, that current KDE apps are all using the same version of Qt.
If your application uses a toolkit other than GTK2 or Qt3.0 then you're shit out of luck, unless you can recompile the entire application against the latest Freetype2. The applications that can't be recompiled or relinked or don't use Freetype2 continue to use Type1 or worse, scaled bitmap fonts.
Why would you ever be doing recompiling? The distro vendor does all the compiling and linking for you.
don't use Freetype2 continue to use Type1 or worse, scaled bitmap fonts
Or truetype...the scaled bitmap claim is really bogus. Yes, if you have bitmap-only fonts and you're demanding a font size that doesn't exist, you get ugly scaling -- the same happens for Windows and Mac OS.
X handles fonts in the same way as a one handed man juggles. He can keep a few balls in the air at once but ends up dropping more than he can throw. Eventually it all ends up on the floor in a mess.
I don't have any idea what claim you're trying to make here. It certainly isn't on the number of fonts that X can use at once.
While the intentions may be noble, there are multiple problems with any environment that uses different widget sets. The problems with AA fonts is one of them.
It takes a bit to fully transition over. Windows had all kinds of cosmetic bugs with third-party programs when it was moved to do antialiasing.
A huge increase in memory overhead is another (A typical X session will have at least three different widget sets in use.
What are these three widget sets?
At the moment, I'm running a copy of dillo (which is hardly a commonly-used app), so I have gtk1 loaded. I'm using gaim, which is gtk2. I'm using gkrellm, which uses gtk2, and sawfish and its pager, which is using gtk2. The only other app with a widget set running is povray, which is using xlib (same as all the others, beneath their widget library).
I certainly don't use Athena-based apps on a regular basis.
Each require their own libraries loaded into memory, each library has its dependencies etc.)
While true, most of the dependencies are had by the widget sets in common (gtk1 and gtk2 depend on glib and glib2...and the rest of gtk1's dependencies are xlib and glibc, which are dependencies of gtk2 as well.) Furthermore, with lazy loading and paging support in VM, code that doesn't get used isn't getting loaded. It's hardly the amount shown in top. There *is* a little bit of memory being used, I'll grant that. When Linux sucks as much with 128MB of memory as Windows XP does, then I'll start to worry.
Then we have pure problems of HCI; different widget sets look different and confuse people. Even if you skin the widget sets to look the same (Bluecurve) they still behave diferently and confuse the users.
Well, then we get into what's "wrong". Morally wrong? You may have an entirely different set of moral. To some people in the world, a woman showing anything but her eyes is morally wrong. Those people feel that women walking around with their heads and faces uncovered are just as immoral as you view the porn actresses to be.
In general, I don't really see the problem with porn actresses. As a matter of fact, I find military tours of service much more upsetting, since it is *illegal* to leave if you find that things aren't quite what you were expecting. Heck, you can be *shot* for that.
The Longest Journey didn't treat women as sex objects...and sure enough, The Longest Journey also was not a commercial success.
When a larger chunk of the game-playing demographic is not teenage males, there will be more products aimed at other niches.
Any visit to a magazine shop should convince anybody that women are portrayed mainly as sex objects whose only tasks in life are to keep an eye on their weight and how to find their blue prince.
Men do not have to suffer such humiliation.
And men are portrayed as insensitive and expected to be breadwinners. Big deal. If you think that pop culture media is humiliating to people, I have to disagree. Pop culture shows computer programmers to be antisocial geeks. So?
If porno gaming is your thing, fine, but many females are uncomfortable knowing that strong industries like the gaming one can't come with better ideas but the stereotyping of women as sexual animals.
The gaming industry does not determine the psyche anywhere near as much as the psyche determines the gaming industry. Guys like looking at attractive girls, and will tend to throw down money more readily for a product if they have the opportunity to do so. Sorry. It's biological.