I think it was written by a windows user who never built a gentoo system from scratch and therefore doesn't understand the (not so) subtle differences between the terms "kernel," "operating system," "windowing system," and "desktop environment." The idea probably has some potential, but calling a bunch of AJAX apps an OS is just silly, especially on slashdot.
This comment makes a good point about how data formats and editors manage semantics, presentation, and accessibility. As an earlier comment said, accessibility functions don't belong in the file format itself. However, the "openness" of a format has nothing to do with how easy it is to write accessible applications based on it. File formats (and editing techniques) that concentrate more on structure and semantics rather than only presentation are better suited to accessibility. But even if the format is well designed, uneducated users and WYSIWYG interfaces make it difficult to write documents correctly. Modern HTML and LaTeX (to an extent) make it easier but the user is always the biggest factor.
Postscript is an open standard, and a very powerful language, but almost useless for editing or alternate display methods. PS documents are made of low level graphics instructions that are well suited to printers and on screen display, but not text-to-speech. Printers don't have to handle semantic information, so the language doesn't need any way to represent it.
HTML has had a particularly ugly history of going back and forth between emphasizing (in the specification but more importantly in popular use) semantic and presentation markup. In the early days, before graphical web browsers, there was no underlining, images, or yellow 24 point Comic Sans. Web pages were made of headings, emphasized passages, citations, lists and so on. Then in the mid 90s, when everyone had Netscape and a color monitor, authors started experimenting with adding more interesting presentation markup. Unfortunately, the language lacked an easy way to balance semantics and presentation, so web pages stopped telling you what they meant and only what they looked like. CSS solved a lot of the problems (or rather gave people the tools to solve them) but many took the easy way out and used old-style markup or a mix of CSS and table/font/etc elements, so the Internet is riddled with horribly inaccessible websites (not to say that there aren't people who know what they're doing and who will refuse to publish a site that doesn't pass W3C's markup/stylesheet validators).
It's not like governments started mandating ODF and then everyone started crying because they can't use MS Office anymore. People are tired of Offices's expensive licenses and lock-in, so they're switching to ODF, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Microsoft is making half-assed lie after half-assed lie about "opening" their own format or promising to support ODF so they can still hold on to the market. This plugin will likely have little actual support from Microsoft, relying on the open source community to finish it. MS Office will probably never be "ODF-compliant" to the degree that other apps have already been for years, simply because they don't want it to be.
BTW, OpenOffice and StarOffice are two related but distinct things which have coexisted for some time, not two different names for the same product at different times (since Sun aquired it).
With that attitude it won't have any effect! But seriously, as long as the sheep don't care about DRM, the DRM will stay. But wait... why would they even need DRM in that case? So the fringe does have an effect, but that effect is harmful to most consumers.
There's a set of tutorials at http://sial.org/howto/openssl/ for things like making certificates, signing requests, and setting up a CA using OpenSSL. It has a makefile script to automate certificate signing.
Any chance we'll see laptops being sold with cards based on these chips already installed any time soon? Didn't think so. So we either have to rip out the card and spend an extra $50 on a different one (do they still have those idiotic BIOS whitelists?) or live with ndiswrapper and only 70% of the card's functionality.
I don't think anyone, either a patent troll or a legitimate inventor, should be allowed to just make an infringer "stop" selling a product. It doesn't benefit anyone. It hurts the infringing company by taking away revenue, and it hurts consumers by making a product unavailable. If the court decides that the patent is in fact being infringed upon, the infringer will usually continue selling their product after making a licensing agreement with the patent holder. If the case is thrown out, they've lost many months of business for no reason. If someone files a lawsuit based on a controversial patent that they might not even win, just to disrupt another company's business, they should be forced to slow down and wait until their case is proven before messing with someone's business.
No, slashdot needs an overhaul. Happy Birthday is copyrighted, Wal-Mart is trying to trademark the smiley face, and now you mentioned patents for no reason. Those are three different things.
For how many people is this really an option? Does anyone still sell 9250s? I'm sure someone does, but they must be harder to find because no one wants them anymore. As for wireless cards, these are mostly in laptops which come with a MiniPCI card that's either Broadcom or Intel-based (not that they tell you exactly what it is; "Windows drivers exist" is good enough for everyone but the bitter linux users). So, you want to buy one with a Prism or Ralink chipset, how easy is this? The chipset maker doesn't directly sell any cards, nor do they tell you who does, and Newegg's search features only let you search by everything but chipset. I've looked at this a little, and you can usually only find cards from obscure manufacturers and/or higher prices. And what do you do once you buy the new card and find out that your OEM has implemented a retarded BIOS whitelist that doesn't include any open source-friendly cards?
What exactly is your point? You seem to be living on some mythical planet where every computer runs OS X, and/or developers are always willing to spend time and money that they don't have maintaining completely separate code bases for different platforms, and it's easy to port existing applictions to a totally new framework. In reality, it's much easier to port 5 or 100 libraries so that the thousands of existing applications can be ported with minimal effort. Applications WILL use libraries other than the ones packaged with the OS, and OS X needs an efficient way to handle this, just like Linux package managers have.
I call bullshit on your entire last paragraph. You're citing outdated examples, and also just making up stuff. On my gentoo system, I've upgraded GTK+ about a dozen times from 2.4 to 2.8 and NEVER had an existing application break. "XMMS requires that you install libraries that are several major revisions out of date." Sure, it's a dead project. The only reason not to use BMP or rhythmbox or anything else is if you want to point out that XMMS requires old libraries. The JPEG and PNG libraries haven't changed much in years, so there's no reason to keep multiple versions installed. Your only valid example might be the XML parsers, although I only have 2 versions of libxml and 1 of expat, and don't know of any others.
We've heard from some folks who run Writely running on Linux, but don't support it because there have been too many problems with it.
Writely FAQ (Emphasis added). Looks like they'll fit in just right at Google.
Re:SuperFetch? Great for the end-users, crap for d
on
Why Vista Won't Suck
·
· Score: 1
After reading the 3 sentences the article devoted to it, I still don't know much about SuperFetch, most importantly, whay exactly does it do and wouldn't it *destroy* as flash drive? It looks like it just uses the flash memory for extra swap space. First, the article claims that reading from flash memory is faster than a hard drive. I don't know what he has clogging up his IDE bus, but I've always found that flash memory is at best 4-5 times slower than a hard disk. Second, writing to a flash memory device too much will wear out the memory, unlike a memory. Oh and by the way, that video card is busy rendering your GUI widgets, because that's much more important than having more usable memory.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was written by a windows user who never built a gentoo system from scratch and therefore doesn't understand the (not so) subtle differences between the terms "kernel," "operating system," "windowing system," and "desktop environment." The idea probably has some potential, but calling a bunch of AJAX apps an OS is just silly, especially on slashdot.
This comment makes a good point about how data formats and editors manage semantics, presentation, and accessibility. As an earlier comment said, accessibility functions don't belong in the file format itself. However, the "openness" of a format has nothing to do with how easy it is to write accessible applications based on it. File formats (and editing techniques) that concentrate more on structure and semantics rather than only presentation are better suited to accessibility. But even if the format is well designed, uneducated users and WYSIWYG interfaces make it difficult to write documents correctly. Modern HTML and LaTeX (to an extent) make it easier but the user is always the biggest factor.
Postscript is an open standard, and a very powerful language, but almost useless for editing or alternate display methods. PS documents are made of low level graphics instructions that are well suited to printers and on screen display, but not text-to-speech. Printers don't have to handle semantic information, so the language doesn't need any way to represent it.
HTML has had a particularly ugly history of going back and forth between emphasizing (in the specification but more importantly in popular use) semantic and presentation markup. In the early days, before graphical web browsers, there was no underlining, images, or yellow 24 point Comic Sans. Web pages were made of headings, emphasized passages, citations, lists and so on. Then in the mid 90s, when everyone had Netscape and a color monitor, authors started experimenting with adding more interesting presentation markup. Unfortunately, the language lacked an easy way to balance semantics and presentation, so web pages stopped telling you what they meant and only what they looked like. CSS solved a lot of the problems (or rather gave people the tools to solve them) but many took the easy way out and used old-style markup or a mix of CSS and table/font/etc elements, so the Internet is riddled with horribly inaccessible websites (not to say that there aren't people who know what they're doing and who will refuse to publish a site that doesn't pass W3C's markup/stylesheet validators).
It's not like governments started mandating ODF and then everyone started crying because they can't use MS Office anymore. People are tired of Offices's expensive licenses and lock-in, so they're switching to ODF, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Microsoft is making half-assed lie after half-assed lie about "opening" their own format or promising to support ODF so they can still hold on to the market. This plugin will likely have little actual support from Microsoft, relying on the open source community to finish it. MS Office will probably never be "ODF-compliant" to the degree that other apps have already been for years, simply because they don't want it to be.
BTW, OpenOffice and StarOffice are two related but distinct things which have coexisted for some time, not two different names for the same product at different times (since Sun aquired it).
I stopped taking you seriously when you said that Skype is a stupid download and implied Flash is not.
With that attitude it won't have any effect! But seriously, as long as the sheep don't care about DRM, the DRM will stay. But wait... why would they even need DRM in that case? So the fringe does have an effect, but that effect is harmful to most consumers.
There's a set of tutorials at http://sial.org/howto/openssl/ for things like making certificates, signing requests, and setting up a CA using OpenSSL. It has a makefile script to automate certificate signing.
Any chance we'll see laptops being sold with cards based on these chips already installed any time soon? Didn't think so. So we either have to rip out the card and spend an extra $50 on a different one (do they still have those idiotic BIOS whitelists?) or live with ndiswrapper and only 70% of the card's functionality.
I don't think anyone, either a patent troll or a legitimate inventor, should be allowed to just make an infringer "stop" selling a product. It doesn't benefit anyone. It hurts the infringing company by taking away revenue, and it hurts consumers by making a product unavailable. If the court decides that the patent is in fact being infringed upon, the infringer will usually continue selling their product after making a licensing agreement with the patent holder. If the case is thrown out, they've lost many months of business for no reason. If someone files a lawsuit based on a controversial patent that they might not even win, just to disrupt another company's business, they should be forced to slow down and wait until their case is proven before messing with someone's business.
"With Linux, you really don't have to worry about..."
If he's not planning on breaking the law in the future, the government has no reason to demand his DNA.
No, slashdot needs an overhaul. Happy Birthday is copyrighted, Wal-Mart is trying to trademark the smiley face, and now you mentioned patents for no reason. Those are three different things.
#if sizeof(uint8) == 1
#else
/* sizeof(uint8) != 1 */
#endif
maybe... i'm not sure if the problem is that the preprocessor only understands == and not !=, or if it's something different
For how many people is this really an option? Does anyone still sell 9250s? I'm sure someone does, but they must be harder to find because no one wants them anymore. As for wireless cards, these are mostly in laptops which come with a MiniPCI card that's either Broadcom or Intel-based (not that they tell you exactly what it is; "Windows drivers exist" is good enough for everyone but the bitter linux users). So, you want to buy one with a Prism or Ralink chipset, how easy is this? The chipset maker doesn't directly sell any cards, nor do they tell you who does, and Newegg's search features only let you search by everything but chipset. I've looked at this a little, and you can usually only find cards from obscure manufacturers and/or higher prices. And what do you do once you buy the new card and find out that your OEM has implemented a retarded BIOS whitelist that doesn't include any open source-friendly cards?
It's to download lists of revoked HDCP keys and report your movie watching habits to the movie studios, of course.
Mirosoft borrowed a lot of the network code for Windows from BSD. Everybody knows this.
Even worse, you won't be able to completely comprehend the amount of force because you haven't seen American cars...
grep -i search texts/*
What exactly is your point? You seem to be living on some mythical planet where every computer runs OS X, and/or developers are always willing to spend time and money that they don't have maintaining completely separate code bases for different platforms, and it's easy to port existing applictions to a totally new framework. In reality, it's much easier to port 5 or 100 libraries so that the thousands of existing applications can be ported with minimal effort. Applications WILL use libraries other than the ones packaged with the OS, and OS X needs an efficient way to handle this, just like Linux package managers have.
I call bullshit on your entire last paragraph. You're citing outdated examples, and also just making up stuff. On my gentoo system, I've upgraded GTK+ about a dozen times from 2.4 to 2.8 and NEVER had an existing application break. "XMMS requires that you install libraries that are several major revisions out of date." Sure, it's a dead project. The only reason not to use BMP or rhythmbox or anything else is if you want to point out that XMMS requires old libraries. The JPEG and PNG libraries haven't changed much in years, so there's no reason to keep multiple versions installed. Your only valid example might be the XML parsers, although I only have 2 versions of libxml and 1 of expat, and don't know of any others.
So you're saying all your backup are belong to Amanda?
Well I own 127.0.0.1
"last transmittion from final transmission" You deserve a -1 Redundant just for that subject line...
And that's just the top of their "Midrange" line...
But then again, IIAIE (I Am An Indie Musician)...
How does that acronym work? But then again, IANAEM (I Am Not An English Major)...
Writely FAQ (Emphasis added). Looks like they'll fit in just right at Google.
After reading the 3 sentences the article devoted to it, I still don't know much about SuperFetch, most importantly, whay exactly does it do and wouldn't it *destroy* as flash drive? It looks like it just uses the flash memory for extra swap space. First, the article claims that reading from flash memory is faster than a hard drive. I don't know what he has clogging up his IDE bus, but I've always found that flash memory is at best 4-5 times slower than a hard disk. Second, writing to a flash memory device too much will wear out the memory, unlike a memory. Oh and by the way, that video card is busy rendering your GUI widgets, because that's much more important than having more usable memory.