While X11 is staying alive on the Desktop, it has no place on PDAs - X11 is simply overkill for them (I know, there are X servers for PDAs, but they're < alpha quality).
A 200MHz ARM with 64Mbytes of RAM is many times as powerful as the workstations that X11 was originally developed for. In fact, even a few years ago, a 200MHz RISC machine was considered a high-end machine. Arguments that such a handheld is so limited that it needs a special window system are just laughable. The small screen on these devices actually means that any window system needs even fewer resources than a desktop.
Furthermore, the self-proclaimed "embedded" windowing systems for handhelds often do worse than X11. X servers running on the Agenda or Zaurus take 1.3Mbytes of memory. This is a fraction of what, for example, Qt/Embedded takes. Furthermore, applications written for X11 using an embedded or lightweight X11 toolkit also tend to be a fraction of the size of those written in Qt/Embedded. Drawing speed of the X11-based solution is usually faster as well in my experience.
There are certainly release-quality X servers available for Linux handhelds--why shouldn't they be? They are simply using the mature dumb frame buffer code from the desktop version, requiring almost no changes. On my Zaurus, on the other hand, I have already experienced GUI deadlocks a number of times that weren't fixable without rebooting the handheld--not really surprising for a toolkit that is so tightly integrated with the display system and also is comparatively new.
There is no technical reason whatsoever to develop new "embedded" window systems for today's PDAs.
You just let gravity drop your fingers on the surface.
When you put your fingers down on a surface, it is not gravity that "drops them down". You can easily see that by putting your hand up against a surface from below as if you were typing. If you relax, your fingers don't get pulled backwards by gravity, they still return to rest against the surface. What makes them return is the tension in the muscles, tendons, and ligaments.
Imagine drumming your fingers on a tabletop VERY LIGHTLY, so they barely touch. That's all it takes.
Of course, that's "all it takes". I'm just saying that you are mistaken if you think that that's a good way to design a keyboard.
Most people use three or four times the actual spring force to depress mechanical keys, just to make sure the key gets activated each time!
Nope, that's not the reason. Rather, people want to type at a certain speed, and for that, the need a certain amount of force, acceleration, and speed. Havin a "zero force" keyboard makes about as much sense as having a "zero acceleration" race car.
Real keyboards have built-in springs and dampers carefully optimized to cushion the inevitable forces and accelerations occurring during typing. Maybe they can be emulated with a carefully designed flat surface, but certainly not if the designers think that "zero force" is an achievable or desirable design goal.
It's also quite nice not having to move my hands at all to switch from typing to mousing. Even without gestures, this features is very helpful, especially if you type with your keyboard on your lap.
You get the same with an IBM Trackpoint keyboard, and the IBM keyboard have really nice tactile feedback.
(Note that the pointing stick on Toshiba and some other keyboards works nowhere near as well--IBM really put a lot of work into Trackpoint.)
Most movements involve the opposition of two muscles--the position of the limb is determined by the balance of forces between them. Furthermore, up to a certain point, the faster and the more precisely you want to move, the more force you need.
If you work against a mechanical resistance, one of the two muscles actually has to do less work because the necessary opposition is alredy being supplied by the mechanism. Mechanical resistance also provides tactile feedback.
If there is no resistance, you have to provide it yourself. And if you tap away on a hard surface, it's even worse: the force gets delivered all in one strike, as opposed to gradually, as it is with well-designed keyboard. Touch pads, for all their sleek design, are probably the worst among the common mouse replacements.
For all these reasons, keyboard, pianos, buttons, and other devices have a certain degree of resistance deliberately designed into them. I suspect that a zero-force input device will not help with RSI and may actually aggravate it. But whatever effect it may have for RSI, I doubt a zero-force input device is going to be comfortable and efficient.
I don't give a damn about whether the X11 apps I'm using are "well written" (whatever that may be); I have X11 software that works and that fulfills a useful function. A Linux PDA isn't a piece of jewellery to me or an objet d'art. When I buy a Linux PDA, I do so because there is Linux or UNIX software that I want to be able to run on it with a minimum of hassle or porting. You know: scientific software, data acquisition software, data analysis software, etc. Useful stuff.
If I can't run arbitrary Linux GUI software on it, I might as well get a PocketPC or Palm--I can choose from a much wider range of hardware, and porting to those platforms is about as much work as porting to Qt.
entire Window Manager concept introduced by X11 is a complete failure
Some failure: it has been around for 20 years, is used more widely than Macintosh, beat several commercial window systems in the market, can run in less than 1Mbyte of memory, and is used in anything from embedded applications to high-end visualization systems.
A 400MHz XScale running on a 640x480 device is plenty for running X11 and regular X11 applications very well. It would make excellent sense to switch from Qt/Embedded to Qt/X11 now so that people can run regular software on the device without rewriting the complete GUI in Qt.
However, the reason it's automatically accepted is because VeriSign is suppose to verify the identity of the business. This is why they require a Duns and Bradstreet # (It's a business credit identifier). [...] Other than that, cost of this service isn't going to drop very dramatically without losing its verification services.
That would be a fine argument if they actually do any significant verification. My impression is that they don't.
I think it's foolish to rely on VeriSign or anybody else to guarantee that the company on the other end is who they claim they are. And you don't need that anyway--you don't get that protection for mail order either, and, besides, lots of people can get your credit card number without all the hassle of setting up a web site.
What matters ultimately is the money trail: not VeriSign, but MasterCard, needs to know where your money went and get it back for you. That's their responsibility as credit card companies.
Dithering, color quantization, and palette choice have been known and in use for decades, and back then, desktop computers were less powerful than phones are today. Kodak is a late-comer to the area. I don't see anything particularly new or "enabling" in what the Kodak folks are writing about.
You are right: Microsoft shouldn't be losing money on it, since the WalMart PC already offers better specs for the same amount of money. Even if they were losing money on it, there is little point in giving Microsoft good marketing numbers. Given their cash reserves, they could easily give the Xbox away to millions of people if it didn't erode trust in the platform--what they want is actual purchases.
For $200 you can get a PC with Linux pre-installed: 800MHz, CD-ROM, 10G disk, 128M. If you want to run Xbox games, get an Xbox, but for everything else, a real PC is probably cheaper and better.
I don't see this as a big deal. It's easy to create a little "active cable" that has all the intelligence necessary for, say, a digital camera to talk to all the devices it might want to talk to. And by putting the intelligence into the cable, I can upgrade it without having to get a new camera. In particular, if my camera doesn't work with my printer because of some quirk or new feature in my printer, I can just buy a new cable.
Or, if you do want to put the intelligence into the devices, you could create a device-to-device networking cable, analogous to the host-to-host networking cables, allowing any device to talk to any other without any changes to its hardware (the software, of course, would need to be upgraded).
I have never seen this as a big advantage of Firewire and actually think the feature would be best left out of any standard. It's more important to get standard profiles for things like serial ports and other devices so that people can figure out how to build gadgets that do connect them.
Which is it? Customizability--good or bad?
on
No More Mac Tweaking?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Whereas Apple pioneered the completely customizable system, they are now headed in the other direction, trying to close most APIs that deal with the interface,"
This sounds like making lemonade out of lemons. The Macintosh was "completely customizable" because it was a real-mode operating system. People could hack into its data structures from user programs whether Apple wanted them to or not. To bring at least some order to the madness, Apple added some APIs.
For Apple, opening up the APIs that "control the placement, function and look of windows and menus" was a necessity. It wasn't something they "pioneered" either: X11 had those APIs designed into it from the ground up. That's why, for better or for worse, you can use dozens of toolkits seamlessly on the same screen, pick your window manager and lots of accessories on X11 as you like.
For years, one of the big attractions of the Mac was the ability to customize the operating system. Users could completely overhaul the machine's interface, sometimes to the point where it was entirely idiosyncratic.
Mac evangelists can't have it both ways. Either they like end-user customization or they don't.
Out of the box, X11 desktops like Gnome, KDE, or Motif are as consistent as Macintosh, but X11 allows extensive end-user customization, it allows applications written with completely different toolkits to work together, and that's designed in, easy to use, and open.
But that's not Apple's philosophy: Apple wants to bring a standard, simple user experience to the Macintosh, and having people "tweak" the UI interferes with that. That's another possible point in the GUI design space, and there is nothing wrong with that philosophy.
But you can't have a GUI that offers both the possibility of, and support for, tweaking and simultaneously doesn't offer it. Apple has made the valid choice of trying to prohibit tweaking in OS X. That will appeal to many schools, universities, and IT managers. But it will also not appeal to many other users.
Ultimately, Mac zealots have to learn the painful lesson that engineering and design consists of tradeoffs: it's impossible for a single product to be the best at everything. A company can design products that are bad at everything, but here is no "best personal computer", "best user interface", or "best operating system".
If you wear contact lenses, there is a small chance you may permanently screw up your eyesight due to a scratched and/or infected cornea.
The safest choice is wearing glasses--actually safer than having "perfect eyesight" since glasses give you constant UV and physical protection. If you occasionally wear disposable contacts, your risk of infection is still negligible and you get the convenience of contacts when needed.
What's the problem? If anything, glasses protect your eyes: you get a constant UV filter and fewer things get in your eyes. There are prescription lenses for just about every sport imaginable. When fashion is an issue, you can get disposable contact lenses that take a few seconds to put in and take out. And you'll need glasses anyway once you are in your 40's.
Yeah, it's emotionally kind of appealing to be "independent" of a piece of metal and plastic, but rationally, there is very little reason to. I wouldn't risk my eyesight on a procedure with no known long-term safety record.
If you don't want to focus nearby when looking at a monitor, just ask your optometrist about "computer glasses". They are glasses that allow you to perform close work while being focussed further away and they do help with eye strain.
Beyond that, if you are nearsighted and don't suffer from stress-related vision problems, there is no way to "improve" your eyesight through eye exercises; eyes just aren't built that way. Most likely, the "improvements" you are seeing are the onset of presbyopia. Moving monitors further and further away is a common way of dealing with it. Most people get reading glasses when they reach the limits of their desk--it's more convenient. And, no, there is nothing to be done about presbyopia--everybody gets it sooner or later. Some people are just more willing to tolerate inconveniences for vanity--that's the only reason you don't see everybody over 50 running around with reading glasses.
Linux and BSD both represent the "monolithic design" approach to kernels. And that approach is running into trouble, at least on Linux.
For example, on Linux, there are very few drivers that are shipped separately from the kernel. Lots of hardware can only be used if you pull over the kernel source tree, patch it, recompile it, and install it. That makes it unusable for many potential users and applications. Even for people who know how to do that, it's a big pain. Similarly, there are many things people would like to do with networking, file systems, and other kernel functions that are just hard to do in Linux.
I don't know whether the Hurd addresses any of these issues. But there is definitely a need for more kinds of free kernels. We shouldn't be locked into a single approach to free kernels.
I really applaud the spirit in which MIT is releasing this. But I also wonder whether it's good for education and science in the long run.
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress. A diversity of approaches to problems results from a diversity of different experiences. That oddball approach some professor is teaching at a small university may just be the basis for the next important breakthrough, or at least make the school's graduates fill some important niche in science and engineering not as well filled by others.
It's like languages, cultures, genetics, and ecology: we really do lose something important when global communications carry a few dominant paradigms (or organisms) everywhere. Monocultures of the mind may be more risky and costly than monocultures of plants.
"it's a simple legal principle" under which law system?
Under the US system of laws.
The fact is that if the PRC or Russia or most any other country were a larger share of global production and the US were a smaller one, the net global emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases would go up as the US is a very clean producer.
But they aren't because they are producing and consuming less. Overproduction and overconsumption are just as much of a problem as inefficient manufacturing and energy use when it comes to pollution and greenhouse gasses.
And, as most people already learn in kindergarden, "Johnny does it too" is not a good excuse for behaving badly yourself.
The real problem is that the US tax system does not properly account for the externalities associated with energy consumption: if fossil fuels were several times as expensive as they are, the US would become more efficient.
Going after the cleanest producer
Who is going after anybody? I'm not saying that anybody should "go after" the US preemptively to stop greenhouse gas emissions.
All I'm saying is that if destructive climate change due to greenhouse gasses occurs, then the US will have the largest share of responsibility because the US has emitted the largest amount of those pollutants.
People need to keep that in mind when deciding whether to vote for people who proclaim that greenhouse gasses are not a problem. Are the benefits we derive from cheap energy worth even a small chance of causing the deaths of billions and facing trillions of dollars in liability?
I also think that the right's rhetoric of "responsibility" is smoke and mirrors. They talk about "responsibility" when it comes to welfare mothers, but don't often apply the principle to their political constituencies, or the US as a whole relative to the international community.
Your video games can be as boring as Hollywood's latest special-effect laden, star powered blockbuster. Thanks, but please keep the geeks.
it's a bloody pain and keeping software back
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It has taken 20 years to get even the mediocre dynamic optimization that Java offers, and it works only because the Java language is fairly inconvenient and restrictive. Smalltalk and Lisp attemp dynamic optimization, but they fail miserably where it counts: numerical code; for that you have to drop back into a mess of type declarations and unportable hints to the compiler.
Itanium is a step backwards for software. It make the tradeoff of giving you somewhat better performance for a few languages and benchmarks, with complex compilers, while being even harder and more problematic for anything that deviates from the canonical benchmarks. That locks new kinds of software even more into a straightjacket than it already has been.
If Intel sees dynamic compilation as the solution to the complexity of Itanium, they should do the same thing Transmeta does: define a simpler instruction set for compilers to target and make the dynamic compilation and optimization software effectively part of the chip.
The Indian subcontinent BREATHES OUT as much CO2 as the US produces from burning of fossil fuels.
I think if you do the numbers, you'll find that that isn't true. In any case, it is completely irrelevant to global warming: people don't eat fossils, they eat carbon recently removed from the atmosphere. And each human being actually holds a few kilograms of carbon, carbon that isn't in the atmosphere.
And soot is a greater factor in atmospheric greenhouse effects than CO2,
And, again, it's irrelevant to global warming. Soot, while harmful in many ways, disappears quickly from the atmosphere. If anything, it gives us a safety cushion--something we can reduce with emergency measures over a few years. CO2 hangs around much, much longer.
So lets ALL cut out the "Save the world" singing, eh?
I have a better suggestion: use your head. Besides, don't you think the world is worth saving?
Don't we have bigger law enforcement issues than to protect management types who don't want to be inconvenienced by passwords or cables from hackers? It seems to me that if companies want to put money into wireless networking, they should pay for the necessary security infrastructure themselves.
For physical crime, you simply cannot protect yourself easily: there is no low-cost, convenient technology to protect yourself from a bullet or a fist.
But you have complete and easy control over most kinds of cyber crimes: if anything, you save money by going with the safer solution.
In different words, it looks to me like our tax dollars are making up for software deficiencies created by companies that rush products to market and by companies that install technology without understanding it.
Some countries will lose, others will win *whenever* the climate changes.
Climate is not like a thermostat. Over thousands of years, maybe Siberia will become a tropical paradise, but in the short term everybody loses when the climate changes: flooding, ecological devastation, etc.
what you're really advocating or are you just an anti-american taking cheap shots?
I didn't take any "anti american cheap shots". As I pointed out, if Bush is right, there is nothing to worry about. But if Bush is wrong and greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for climate change, the it's a simple legal principle that the US, being the largest contributor, ends up with a huge net liability for the damage (other nations also will have net liabilities, of course).
It's an established legal principle that if you wrong someone else, you pay in proportion to how much you contributed to it. Other countries can breed like rabbits, but if they don't produce as many greenhouse gas emissions as us, then their share of the responsibility is lower. Therefore, if the predictions of the article come true and greenhouse gasses cause an ice-age, the US would be legally liable for trilions of dollars in damages under the legal standards of the US itself. That's a simple fact. Other countries would be liable as well, of course, but since the US is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses and probably one of the less affected countries, its net liability would still be huge.
The question is what are we going to do about it? You just like to stick your head in the sand and find childish excuses. Bush says there is no problem at all. I think it makes sense to reduce our emissions voluntarily. Even if we can sleaze our way out of the responsibility by waving our revolvers, it is still our moral responsibility to avoid these outcomes or pay up for them.
Slashdot Mirror
A 200MHz ARM with 64Mbytes of RAM is many times as powerful as the workstations that X11 was originally developed for. In fact, even a few years ago, a 200MHz RISC machine was considered a high-end machine. Arguments that such a handheld is so limited that it needs a special window system are just laughable. The small screen on these devices actually means that any window system needs even fewer resources than a desktop.
Furthermore, the self-proclaimed "embedded" windowing systems for handhelds often do worse than X11. X servers running on the Agenda or Zaurus take 1.3Mbytes of memory. This is a fraction of what, for example, Qt/Embedded takes. Furthermore, applications written for X11 using an embedded or lightweight X11 toolkit also tend to be a fraction of the size of those written in Qt/Embedded. Drawing speed of the X11-based solution is usually faster as well in my experience.
There are certainly release-quality X servers available for Linux handhelds--why shouldn't they be? They are simply using the mature dumb frame buffer code from the desktop version, requiring almost no changes. On my Zaurus, on the other hand, I have already experienced GUI deadlocks a number of times that weren't fixable without rebooting the handheld--not really surprising for a toolkit that is so tightly integrated with the display system and also is comparatively new.
There is no technical reason whatsoever to develop new "embedded" window systems for today's PDAs.
When you put your fingers down on a surface, it is not gravity that "drops them down". You can easily see that by putting your hand up against a surface from below as if you were typing. If you relax, your fingers don't get pulled backwards by gravity, they still return to rest against the surface. What makes them return is the tension in the muscles, tendons, and ligaments.
Imagine drumming your fingers on a tabletop VERY LIGHTLY, so they barely touch. That's all it takes.
Of course, that's "all it takes". I'm just saying that you are mistaken if you think that that's a good way to design a keyboard.
Most people use three or four times the actual spring force to depress mechanical keys, just to make sure the key gets activated each time!
Nope, that's not the reason. Rather, people want to type at a certain speed, and for that, the need a certain amount of force, acceleration, and speed. Havin a "zero force" keyboard makes about as much sense as having a "zero acceleration" race car.
Real keyboards have built-in springs and dampers carefully optimized to cushion the inevitable forces and accelerations occurring during typing. Maybe they can be emulated with a carefully designed flat surface, but certainly not if the designers think that "zero force" is an achievable or desirable design goal.
You get the same with an IBM Trackpoint keyboard, and the IBM keyboard have really nice tactile feedback.
(Note that the pointing stick on Toshiba and some other keyboards works nowhere near as well--IBM really put a lot of work into Trackpoint.)
If you work against a mechanical resistance, one of the two muscles actually has to do less work because the necessary opposition is alredy being supplied by the mechanism. Mechanical resistance also provides tactile feedback.
If there is no resistance, you have to provide it yourself. And if you tap away on a hard surface, it's even worse: the force gets delivered all in one strike, as opposed to gradually, as it is with well-designed keyboard. Touch pads, for all their sleek design, are probably the worst among the common mouse replacements.
For all these reasons, keyboard, pianos, buttons, and other devices have a certain degree of resistance deliberately designed into them. I suspect that a zero-force input device will not help with RSI and may actually aggravate it. But whatever effect it may have for RSI, I doubt a zero-force input device is going to be comfortable and efficient.
I don't give a damn about whether the X11 apps I'm using are "well written" (whatever that may be); I have X11 software that works and that fulfills a useful function. A Linux PDA isn't a piece of jewellery to me or an objet d'art. When I buy a Linux PDA, I do so because there is Linux or UNIX software that I want to be able to run on it with a minimum of hassle or porting. You know: scientific software, data acquisition software, data analysis software, etc. Useful stuff.
If I can't run arbitrary Linux GUI software on it, I might as well get a PocketPC or Palm--I can choose from a much wider range of hardware, and porting to those platforms is about as much work as porting to Qt.
entire Window Manager concept introduced by X11 is a complete failure
Some failure: it has been around for 20 years, is used more widely than Macintosh, beat several commercial window systems in the market, can run in less than 1Mbyte of memory, and is used in anything from embedded applications to high-end visualization systems.
A 400MHz XScale running on a 640x480 device is plenty for running X11 and regular X11 applications very well. It would make excellent sense to switch from Qt/Embedded to Qt/X11 now so that people can run regular software on the device without rewriting the complete GUI in Qt.
I believe the Trident/Media Pro has TV out.
That would be a fine argument if they actually do any significant verification. My impression is that they don't.
I think it's foolish to rely on VeriSign or anybody else to guarantee that the company on the other end is who they claim they are. And you don't need that anyway--you don't get that protection for mail order either, and, besides, lots of people can get your credit card number without all the hassle of setting up a web site.
What matters ultimately is the money trail: not VeriSign, but MasterCard, needs to know where your money went and get it back for you. That's their responsibility as credit card companies.
Dithering, color quantization, and palette choice have been known and in use for decades, and back then, desktop computers were less powerful than phones are today. Kodak is a late-comer to the area. I don't see anything particularly new or "enabling" in what the Kodak folks are writing about.
You are right: Microsoft shouldn't be losing money on it, since the WalMart PC already offers better specs for the same amount of money. Even if they were losing money on it, there is little point in giving Microsoft good marketing numbers. Given their cash reserves, they could easily give the Xbox away to millions of people if it didn't erode trust in the platform--what they want is actual purchases.
For $200 you can get a PC with Linux pre-installed: 800MHz, CD-ROM, 10G disk, 128M. If you want to run Xbox games, get an Xbox, but for everything else, a real PC is probably cheaper and better.
Or, if you do want to put the intelligence into the devices, you could create a device-to-device networking cable, analogous to the host-to-host networking cables, allowing any device to talk to any other without any changes to its hardware (the software, of course, would need to be upgraded).
I have never seen this as a big advantage of Firewire and actually think the feature would be best left out of any standard. It's more important to get standard profiles for things like serial ports and other devices so that people can figure out how to build gadgets that do connect them.
This sounds like making lemonade out of lemons. The Macintosh was "completely customizable" because it was a real-mode operating system. People could hack into its data structures from user programs whether Apple wanted them to or not. To bring at least some order to the madness, Apple added some APIs.
For Apple, opening up the APIs that "control the placement, function and look of windows and menus" was a necessity. It wasn't something they "pioneered" either: X11 had those APIs designed into it from the ground up. That's why, for better or for worse, you can use dozens of toolkits seamlessly on the same screen, pick your window manager and lots of accessories on X11 as you like.
For years, one of the big attractions of the Mac was the ability to customize the operating system. Users could completely overhaul the machine's interface, sometimes to the point where it was entirely idiosyncratic.
Mac evangelists can't have it both ways. Either they like end-user customization or they don't.
Out of the box, X11 desktops like Gnome, KDE, or Motif are as consistent as Macintosh, but X11 allows extensive end-user customization, it allows applications written with completely different toolkits to work together, and that's designed in, easy to use, and open.
But that's not Apple's philosophy: Apple wants to bring a standard, simple user experience to the Macintosh, and having people "tweak" the UI interferes with that. That's another possible point in the GUI design space, and there is nothing wrong with that philosophy.
But you can't have a GUI that offers both the possibility of, and support for, tweaking and simultaneously doesn't offer it. Apple has made the valid choice of trying to prohibit tweaking in OS X. That will appeal to many schools, universities, and IT managers. But it will also not appeal to many other users.
Ultimately, Mac zealots have to learn the painful lesson that engineering and design consists of tradeoffs: it's impossible for a single product to be the best at everything. A company can design products that are bad at everything, but here is no "best personal computer", "best user interface", or "best operating system".
The safest choice is wearing glasses--actually safer than having "perfect eyesight" since glasses give you constant UV and physical protection. If you occasionally wear disposable contacts, your risk of infection is still negligible and you get the convenience of contacts when needed.
Yeah, it's emotionally kind of appealing to be "independent" of a piece of metal and plastic, but rationally, there is very little reason to. I wouldn't risk my eyesight on a procedure with no known long-term safety record.
Beyond that, if you are nearsighted and don't suffer from stress-related vision problems, there is no way to "improve" your eyesight through eye exercises; eyes just aren't built that way. Most likely, the "improvements" you are seeing are the onset of presbyopia. Moving monitors further and further away is a common way of dealing with it. Most people get reading glasses when they reach the limits of their desk--it's more convenient. And, no, there is nothing to be done about presbyopia--everybody gets it sooner or later. Some people are just more willing to tolerate inconveniences for vanity--that's the only reason you don't see everybody over 50 running around with reading glasses.
For example, on Linux, there are very few drivers that are shipped separately from the kernel. Lots of hardware can only be used if you pull over the kernel source tree, patch it, recompile it, and install it. That makes it unusable for many potential users and applications. Even for people who know how to do that, it's a big pain. Similarly, there are many things people would like to do with networking, file systems, and other kernel functions that are just hard to do in Linux.
I don't know whether the Hurd addresses any of these issues. But there is definitely a need for more kinds of free kernels. We shouldn't be locked into a single approach to free kernels.
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress. A diversity of approaches to problems results from a diversity of different experiences. That oddball approach some professor is teaching at a small university may just be the basis for the next important breakthrough, or at least make the school's graduates fill some important niche in science and engineering not as well filled by others.
It's like languages, cultures, genetics, and ecology: we really do lose something important when global communications carry a few dominant paradigms (or organisms) everywhere. Monocultures of the mind may be more risky and costly than monocultures of plants.
Under the US system of laws.
The fact is that if the PRC or Russia or most any other country were a larger share of global production and the US were a smaller one, the net global emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases would go up as the US is a very clean producer.
But they aren't because they are producing and consuming less. Overproduction and overconsumption are just as much of a problem as inefficient manufacturing and energy use when it comes to pollution and greenhouse gasses.
And, as most people already learn in kindergarden, "Johnny does it too" is not a good excuse for behaving badly yourself.
The real problem is that the US tax system does not properly account for the externalities associated with energy consumption: if fossil fuels were several times as expensive as they are, the US would become more efficient.
Going after the cleanest producer
Who is going after anybody? I'm not saying that anybody should "go after" the US preemptively to stop greenhouse gas emissions.
All I'm saying is that if destructive climate change due to greenhouse gasses occurs, then the US will have the largest share of responsibility because the US has emitted the largest amount of those pollutants.
People need to keep that in mind when deciding whether to vote for people who proclaim that greenhouse gasses are not a problem. Are the benefits we derive from cheap energy worth even a small chance of causing the deaths of billions and facing trillions of dollars in liability?
I also think that the right's rhetoric of "responsibility" is smoke and mirrors. They talk about "responsibility" when it comes to welfare mothers, but don't often apply the principle to their political constituencies, or the US as a whole relative to the international community.
Your video games can be as boring as Hollywood's latest special-effect laden, star powered blockbuster. Thanks, but please keep the geeks.
Itanium is a step backwards for software. It make the tradeoff of giving you somewhat better performance for a few languages and benchmarks, with complex compilers, while being even harder and more problematic for anything that deviates from the canonical benchmarks. That locks new kinds of software even more into a straightjacket than it already has been.
If Intel sees dynamic compilation as the solution to the complexity of Itanium, they should do the same thing Transmeta does: define a simpler instruction set for compilers to target and make the dynamic compilation and optimization software effectively part of the chip.
I think if you do the numbers, you'll find that that isn't true. In any case, it is completely irrelevant to global warming: people don't eat fossils, they eat carbon recently removed from the atmosphere. And each human being actually holds a few kilograms of carbon, carbon that isn't in the atmosphere.
And soot is a greater factor in atmospheric greenhouse effects than CO2,
No, it isn't; it may be the second-leading cause.
And, again, it's irrelevant to global warming. Soot, while harmful in many ways, disappears quickly from the atmosphere. If anything, it gives us a safety cushion--something we can reduce with emergency measures over a few years. CO2 hangs around much, much longer.
So lets ALL cut out the "Save the world" singing, eh?
I have a better suggestion: use your head. Besides, don't you think the world is worth saving?
For physical crime, you simply cannot protect yourself easily: there is no low-cost, convenient technology to protect yourself from a bullet or a fist.
But you have complete and easy control over most kinds of cyber crimes: if anything, you save money by going with the safer solution.
In different words, it looks to me like our tax dollars are making up for software deficiencies created by companies that rush products to market and by companies that install technology without understanding it.
Climate is not like a thermostat. Over thousands of years, maybe Siberia will become a tropical paradise, but in the short term everybody loses when the climate changes: flooding, ecological devastation, etc.
what you're really advocating or are you just an anti-american taking cheap shots?
I didn't take any "anti american cheap shots". As I pointed out, if Bush is right, there is nothing to worry about. But if Bush is wrong and greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for climate change, the it's a simple legal principle that the US, being the largest contributor, ends up with a huge net liability for the damage (other nations also will have net liabilities, of course).
The question is what are we going to do about it? You just like to stick your head in the sand and find childish excuses. Bush says there is no problem at all. I think it makes sense to reduce our emissions voluntarily. Even if we can sleaze our way out of the responsibility by waving our revolvers, it is still our moral responsibility to avoid these outcomes or pay up for them.