A Oct 2 article in the New York Times about e-Traction included a countering opinion:
But plenty of technological and economic hurdles must be overcome before such motors gain widespread use in transportation. "It is the future," said James Worden, founder and chief executive of Solectria, a company in Woburn, Mass., that has produced drivetrains for more than 100 hybrid electric buses. "Whether it is 10 years out, 20 years out or 30 years out."
Yet Mr. Worden of Solectria said that one drawback in the bus design was that the electronics in the motor were in direct contact with the road, not protected like the rest of the bus is by shock absorbers. If the tire hits a bump, he said, "it beats the living daylights out of any motor or electronics."
From a more detailed writeup on Kuro5hin from last year:
Yet another Hollywood travesty. I know a lot of folks out there must be Asimov fans, so I thought you might want to know, a film called "I, Robot" is being made. But according to the news, it's NOT the Ellison treatment, and it's not the Asimov story, even adapted. The studio just bought the rights to the name.
The film, then called "Hardwired", apparently started out as yet another ho-hum robots-trying-to-take-over-the-world film. No big deal there. One more piece of screenplay-by-committee out of Hollywood isn't news.
In the last year, though, someone at Fox came up with a really great marketing idea. Buy the rights to just the name from a famous work of classic science fiction, use that, then make a series of crappy robots-try-to-take-over-the-world movies, but they would almost be guaranteed money-makers because fans would be expecting something good (to wit, the story attached to that title for the last few decades).
As other people have pointed out,
Ellison's screenplay of the real I, Robot is worth reading. There's a free chapter at twbookmark.
Linus' analysis spawned a masterful trolling Subject header on the Yahoo message board for scox:
Linus caught - confessing to be ashamed. Nevermind that Linus' shameful confession wasn't copying code, but rather that his Linux 0.01 implementation of ctype wasn't threadsafe. Such beautiful spin. Darl would be proud.:)
I'm not going to debate the relative merits of Qt to Gtk+, but I do want to correct some misconceptions you have about Gtk+.
When you write in Gtk+, you can get an application that runs on all the platforms you listed. My gtk+ newsreader Pan runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.
The window manager is orthogonal to the topic of what's important from the software maker's point of view: ICCCM compliance is the only feature any application writer cares about. No application requires a specific WM. To do so would needlessly limit their audience.
Likewise, you're misinformed about Mono: nobody is telling anyone that they have to port anything to Mono. C# is just another language that Gnome supports. Never in the 4+ years I've worked on Pan has anyone mentioned porting Pan to C#.
gtk doesn't lack
documentation. In fact the documentation team has made leaps and bounds over the last year.
If you prefer RAD tools, Anjuta
and
Glade
are available.
Discussing Qt as a `modern C++ based toolkit' and disparaging Gtk+ as lacking a `modern API' is just language bias (and ignores moc's pre-STL cruftiness). If you want to use gtk+ in an OO language,
manylanguagebindingsareavailable.
Again, this isn't to take anything away from Qt -- its tools are pretty good, and its documentation is excellent. However, Gtk+ is very good too.
Interesting example, given that the makers of the Terminator movie found themselves sued by Harlan Ellison for making a story that resembles a plot where robots take over the world.
Cameron finally wound up paying Ellison $144,000 and adding Ellison to the credits.
Harlan Ellison, notorious and prolific author, critic, reviewer, screenwriter and revenge artist is probably the last guy in the world you want to piss off. No, I mean, really. This is the guy who mailed a dead gopher to New American Library when they refused to release copyright on his books after they breached their contract by binding cigarette ads into them. One wonders, then, what was going through James Cameron's head when he casually quipped on-set that he got the idea for Terminator "by ripping off a couple old Outer Limits episodes." Specifically, Soldier and Demon With a Glass Hand, both written by Ellison (others have pointed out marked similarities with still more Ellison stories, including A Boy and His Dog and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream). Ellison called Cameron on this, and Cameron denied it, and Ellison responded with both a lawsuit and a series of full-page ads in Variety that lambasted Cameron as a plagiarist. Eventually, Cameron settled for a reported $72,000, and Ellison's name was appended to the credits in the home-video edition. But Cameron still hadn't learned his lesson! In 1991, a new video-release of Terminator dropped Ellison's credit, prompting yet another lawsuit and yet another $72,000. To this day, mentions of Ellison's name reportedly throw Cameron into a white-hot rage.
This is definitely true. I'm the lead on the newsreader Pan, which the original author wrote as "Pimp-Ass Newsreader". There were people, both in Gnome and in two big Linux distros, that wanted to keep Pan at arm's length until we changed Pan's acronym from "Pimp-Ass Newsreader" with "Pan's A Newsreader".
As a side note, naming rule #2 should be:
Pick a greppable name.
When I grep Usenet for mentions of Pan, I have to filter out a lot of false positives because the word "Pan" is so common.
The Gnome/GTK+ libraries are LGPLed for exactly this reason.
Amusingly, last June, Nick Petreley used Gtk+ and GNOME's licensing as a rationale to explain why it was GNOME, not KDE, that would win the desktop war:
On the other hand, he's also taken the exact opposite position by saying that Qt is what will make KDE beat gtk+/Gnome:
What I'm really betting on is the Trolltech (www.trolltech.com) GUI programming toolkit, Qt, upon which KDE is based. (Gnome is based upon GTK, aka the Gimp Toolkit).
Really, I was going to comment on Petreley's article, but while Googling I found he's already done a much better job than I could, from this article he wrote for the red herring in 1997:
News as a source of reliable trade information has gone to hell. Once focused on objective reporting of the facts, much of the media is now convinced that what you really want is news analysis. Unfortunately, news analysis is turning out to be nothing more than a reporter's opinion.
Why would somebody pay $69 a month for an ad on maps.searchking.com, a PageRank 7 site? Because they think they know how Google works: If you get a link from an important site, your own site becomes more important. You don't pay the $69 for the clicks you might get from all the visitors to maps.searchking.com -- you pay it to get a higher rank in Google.
In an interview, Massa didn't come right out and say he is trying to sell higher rankings in Google. "I'm just saying that sites with high page rank have a huge perception of value, and if you want to pay more for that I'm not going to talk you out of it," he said. "When they put it on the toolbar and made it public, they must have known it's going to become a currency."
[snip]
Sullivan, of Search Engine Watch, says that Massa's is the first program he's seen that has been so "brazen about selling page rank" -- and he doesn't think it's going to work, especially since Google knows about the program.
As [google] has become celebrated for taking users directly to the information they want, though, a question has emerged in the minds of internet entrepreneurs who are no longer the recipients of millions of easy dollars: could it be manipulated for much-needed profit? One of Google's advantages has always been its refusal to sell placements in its rankings to the highest bidder, but the PageRank system, some argue, has its loopholes. Because Google measures how many pages link to a site, what if you set up thousands of web pages solely for the purpose of linking to one commercial site?
Some have accused Bob Massa, proprietor of a "search optimisation" service called Searchking, of doing just that. "All I want is for webmasters with small sites to get rewarded fairly," he says. "This is a chance to see that those guys get visitors and put up good content. Google wants good content. I can't see any problem."
According to
their PR release,
SearchKing's been around since 1997 and is
located in Oklahoma City.
I've been yahooing/altavista-ing/metacrawling/googling
(in that order, chronologically) since 1997,
and lived in Oklahoma City since then, and
I've never heard of these people before
now.
I suspect they've got a lot of work ahead of
them to prove devaluation.:)
An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or
argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the
author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically,
this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character
of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made
(or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the
claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim
or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type
of argument has the following form:
Person A makes claim X.
Person B makes an attack on person A.
Therefore A's claim is false.
The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the
character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases)
have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the
quality of the argument being made).
Disclosure: I'm a Gnome programmer who likes both Gnome and KDE.
Andreas Pour's response
just says that he's not going to speak to DEP because he's not fond of the things that DEP has written.
His response
to the Kompany's Shawn Gordon
dismisses everything as, "a non-issue and just part of some
mud-slinging campaign."
"ad hominem" simply means attacking the person making the argument,
rather than the argument, itself. IMO this is what Andreas is doing,
which is a shame because the argument itself needs answering, namely:
The KDE League's web site was down, it hadn't filed its Deleware
paperwork as an organization, and it hasn't made any press releases
since its launch in 2000. If the KDE League is still in business,
what is it doing other than collecting quarterly $500 or $2,500
checks from its ten members?
There's no doubt that Andreas is the person who should answer this
question: he's the chairman of the KDE League, he's listed in the
KDE Promotion FAQ as the KDE League's point of contact, and, for
crying out loud, a reverse lookup on the phone number
in kdeleague.org's
whois address gives Andreas' phone number in an
apartment complex.
Which brings my two questions:
If the KDE League is really just Andreas,
is he just pocketing these members' checks, or is it being
fed back to KDE Developers?
If there really are other members, why on
Earth are they letting him destroy the
League's credibility this way?
The only reason I can think of for the KDE League to not answer
is if it's done nothing since its inception.
The only reason I can think of for other League
members to stay quiet is that either there
aren't any, or that they know the jig is up
and would rather let Andreas take the heat.
On a Pentium 450 running Limbo, I can start up Pan 0.12.91 with valgrind --num-callers=16 --leak-check=yes --leak-resolution=med in one minute, nine seconds. On an otherwise-idle Sparc Ultra 10 running Solaris 7, it takes Pan built with "purify -chain-length=7 -cache-dir=/tmp -always-use-cache-dir=yes" more than 15 minutes to start up, with the CPU pegged at 100% the entire time.
If there's a secret "Don't Run Slow" switch to Purify, let me know what it is.
I've been using Valgrind on Pan,
which is multithreaded, and it works fine. Maybe given more time I'll find features that I miss from Purify, but for now I'm very happy.
Things I like better in Valgrind:
Valgrind works on Linux.
Valgrind doesn't require instrumenting each object file and library at build time. (This is a biggie)
Valgrind's run-time options are more flexible.
Valgrind works with both gcc 2 and 3.
Valgrind seems to run faster than Purify. (Different hardware and OSes, so this is a guess.)
Valgrind doesn't have a Motif GUI.;)
Valgrind doesn't have an insane, broken license manager.
Valgrind's technical support is better.
(Yes, I've dealt with both.)
The mention of Seville in the release title is a reference to the upcoming GUADEC (Gnome Users and Developers European Conference) in Seville, Spain on April 4-6.
Jeremy's right, but it's too late now.
on
Usenet Encoding: yEnc
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm one of the authors of the
Pan newsreader and agree with Jeremy's analysis of yEnc. yEnc repeats many of uu's mistakes, so
news clients have to search text/plain messages
for =ybegin and =yend blocks instead of looking
in the headers.
But yEnc's bandwidth savings are real, which is a huge win for alt.binaries users.
yEnc has been the most-requested feature for Pan over the last month. (0.11.2.90
supports it.) IMO yEnc is the format to use for multiparts right now.
Hopefully yEnc will motivate others to come up with a mime-friendly alternative encoding for Usenet.
yEnc Considered Harmful is another yEnc opposition page that suggests mzip compression, but I haven't seen any public discussion of it yet.
If/when such a replacment comes along, Pan will support it too and add an are-you-sure dialog for yEnc postings.
Slashdot Mirror
As other people have pointed out, Ellison's screenplay of the real I, Robot is worth reading. There's a free chapter at twbookmark.
Linus' analysis spawned a masterful trolling Subject header on the Yahoo message board for scox: Linus caught - confessing to be ashamed. Nevermind that Linus' shameful confession wasn't copying code, but rather that his Linux 0.01 implementation of ctype wasn't threadsafe. Such beautiful spin. Darl would be proud. :)
Again, this isn't to take anything away from Qt -- its tools are pretty good, and its documentation is excellent. However, Gtk+ is very good too.
so, you can print vidcaps using dvi2ps?
Cameron finally wound up paying Ellison $144,000 and adding Ellison to the credits.
From Sci-Fi Wars:
As a side note, naming rule #2 should be:
When I grep Usenet for mentions of Pan, I have to filter out a lot of false positives because the word "Pan" is so common.No, thanks.
Amusingly, last June, Nick Petreley used Gtk+ and GNOME's licensing as a rationale to explain why it was GNOME, not KDE, that would win the desktop war:
On the other hand, he's also taken the exact opposite position by saying that Qt is what will make KDE beat gtk+/Gnome:
Really, I was going to comment on Petreley's article, but while Googling I found he's already done a much better job than I could, from this article he wrote for the red herring in 1997:
From Salon's Aug 2002 article Meet Mr. Anti-Google:
From this Sept 5 2002 story Engine Trouble in the Guardian:
I've been yahooing/altavista-ing/metacrawling/googling (in that order, chronologically) since 1997, and lived in Oklahoma City since then, and I've never heard of these people before now.
I suspect they've got a lot of work ahead of them to prove devaluation. :)
From nizcor.org's list of fallacies:
Andreas Pour's response just says that he's not going to speak to DEP because he's not fond of the things that DEP has written.
His response to the Kompany's Shawn Gordon dismisses everything as, "a non-issue and just part of some mud-slinging campaign."
"ad hominem" simply means attacking the person making the argument, rather than the argument, itself. IMO this is what Andreas is doing, which is a shame because the argument itself needs answering, namely:
There's no doubt that Andreas is the person who should answer this question: he's the chairman of the KDE League, he's listed in the KDE Promotion FAQ as the KDE League's point of contact, and, for crying out loud, a reverse lookup on the phone number in kdeleague.org's whois address gives Andreas' phone number in an apartment complex.
Which brings my two questions:
The only reason I can think of for the KDE League to not answer is if it's done nothing since its inception.
The only reason I can think of for other League members to stay quiet is that either there aren't any, or that they know the jig is up and would rather let Andreas take the heat.
If there's a secret "Don't Run Slow" switch to Purify, let me know what it is.
(18:14:38)(~/src/valgrind-1.0.0): grep open vg_scheduler.c
(18:14:45)(~/src/valgrind-1.0.0): grep 11 vg_scheduler.c
02111-1307, USA.
(18:14:52)(~/src/valgrind-1.0.0):
Things I like better in Valgrind:
Things I like better in Purify:
omit unnecessary words!
Back in late 1998 lwn ran a status report of GNU Rope by Nat:
The mention of Seville in the release title is a reference to the upcoming GUADEC (Gnome Users and Developers European Conference) in Seville, Spain on April 4-6.
But yEnc's bandwidth savings are real, which is a huge win for alt.binaries users. yEnc has been the most-requested feature for Pan over the last month. (0.11.2.90 supports it.) IMO yEnc is the format to use for multiparts right now.
Hopefully yEnc will motivate others to come up with a mime-friendly alternative encoding for Usenet. yEnc Considered Harmful is another yEnc opposition page that suggests mzip compression, but I haven't seen any public discussion of it yet.
If/when such a replacment comes along, Pan will support it too and add an are-you-sure dialog for yEnc postings.