If bin Laden or whoever is 'a big crypto user', then how would it help to restrict the availability of encryption to US citizens? Isn't it just a little too late?
I think I got confused between Carbon and Cocoa. What I meant was, take the Mac OS X interface which resembles NextStep, whatever it's called, and remap its calls to GnuStep.
I don't think C versus ObjC is an issue because this would be a relinking / binary thing, like Wine. Assuming you have a decent PowerPC CPU core emulation. Of course, a 'libcocoa' project to give 95% source compatibility would also be useful.
That's part of what I meant - you should be required to disclose *pending* patents, not just those already issued. In fact, it would probably be a good thing if all patent applications were out in the open from when they're filed, as part of the patent bargain.
Software patents are notoriously bad, and for software the best answer is just not to grant patent monopolies at all (they should be restricted to physical objects, not abstract ideas). But in areas where the patent system is considered to be economically useful but still has problems with submarines, having some kind of mandatory disclosure would help the system work better. That's what I was referring to; the patents on hardware held by Rambus and the like.
The whole point of the patent system is openness. You only get a patent monopoly in exchange for full disclosure. So it should be easy (in principle) to find out what patents cover something you are working on. But in practice the sheer volume of patents out there is too large.
I think that a legally binding 'patent challenge' might be the answer. You should be able to send a letter to Rambus or whoever saying 'I am developing the following... please disclose whether you have any patents or patent applications which cover this area'. The company receiving the letter then has to disclose what they have patented. If they lie or keep quiet, they lose the right to sue you later on. Obviously you couldn't do this for internal R&D, but for standards bodies (where the process is open anyway) this could be a useful tool to reduce threats from submarine patents. The only question is whether it places an unreasonable burden on the patentholding company.
So will we see an equivalent of Wine which runs Mac OS X applications by remapping Carbon API calls to GnuStep? (I guess the answer to that one is 'if someone writes it'.)
If the passengers on those planes had been armed and able to defend themselves, the disaster would never have happened.
April fools becoming real?
on
Parrot: For Real
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· Score: 5, Informative
I believe there was an April Fool's joke many years ago about a 16-bit version of the ARM processor called THUMB. But then only a relatively short time later ARM Ltd announced they were indeed working on a 16-bit frontend to the ARM (basically a new instruction decoder), and now the 'Thumb instruction decoder' is a standard part of many ARM family CPUs.
How many other things started out as an April Fool's day joke and then actually got implemented?
If the user wants to screw up his browser so it no longer complies with the Javascript / ECMAScript standards, then that's his problem not yours. You don't need to worry about extra work writing sites to work with browsers where obnoxious Javascript features are disabled.
People can just use the non-Javascript version of the site (turn JS off altogether) if for some reason your code relies on opening new windows or other lame tricks.
We really need a browser that lets you *selectively* disable Javascript. I think the default setting should be to have JS turned on, but with a few particularly obnoxious features (popping up new windows, adding hooks to the scrollbar or mouse movement) turned off. You should be able to adjust these preferences on a site-by-site basis.
The real hardcore GPL advocates are charicterized and led by Richard Stallman, the man who created the GPL and the leader of the (misdirected and nearly useless, IMHO) GNU project.
Is this a troll? Have you not heard of bash, gcc, glibc, fileutils,...?
He has said lately, personally or through the GNU project, I forget which, that shared libraries should use the GPL now, instead of the LGPL, because companies that write non-open-source binaries should not be allowed to link against open-source libraries.
This seems to me like a good example. I don't see any practical gain in doing this,
The FSF's document Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism explains that it is for practical, as well as ideological reasons. RMS has explicitly said that if there is more practical gain from putting a library under the LGPL, you should do that instead. A GPLed library might encourage people to make their own software GPLed in order to use it, increasing the amount of useful free software out there; but an LGPLed library will get wider use and thus faster development of the library itself. Which of these is more important depends on how important the library is and whether alternatives are easily available.
Who are these 'GPL zealots' who claim that anything non-GPL is bad? I have never seen one. If they do exist, you should be able to point out lots of messages on discussion forurms like, oh, I don't know, Slashdot. But I haven't seen one - just strawman arguments about how these mythical 'GPL zealots' are threatening Linux, undermining the community, and so on.
Okay, so what are the best tools to use? I know Mozilla has an SVG plugin for _displaying_ vector graphics, but which drawing programs have good support for saving and loading in this format?
Because if Intel released it's compilers as open source, anyone (read: AMD) could look at Intel's optimizations and use that to make their chips better.
They can do that already by purchasing a copy and looking at the machine code it generates. The necessary tweaks to generate fast-running code for a particular processor are not kept secret; on the contrary, they need to be as publicized as possible to increase the amount of software that runs well on that processor.
(At least, that's how it damn well should be, and Intel wouldn't do themselves any favours by having 'secret optimizations'.)
Many high-level languages compile into C code, which is then compiled with gcc or whatever. Do any use Forth instead? I understand Forth is a stack-based language: doesn't that present problems when compiling for CPUs that mostly work using registers?
Something Slashdot readers may not realize is that this was also the guy who gave Intel its name. In 'A for Andromeda', Intel was the name of a shadowy Swiss business organization attempting to control the alien-designed supercomputer built by the government.
This obviously assumes that Intel the semiconductor manufacturer took its name from this source. The TV series came out in 1961 and the book before then.
It would be nice if more of the raw keystroke-handling work could be handled at the client end. So instead of ssh sending raw keystrokes across the network, it could read a whole line (and allow you to do line editing locally) and send that when you press Enter. If the remote application wants to read from the terminal in raw mode, then ssh could do that, but for normal command-line use a line at a time is fine. It's not vulnerable to analysing the time between keystrokes, and on a high-latency line it would be a helluva lot faster.
This would require some cooperation from programs like the shell - instead of Bash putting the terminal into raw mode and doing its own line editing, it would need persuading that the line editing would be done somewhere else and would send a whole line at a time.
BTW - anyone else see the text at the end of the article saying 'to link to this article, please use the following URL?'.
Hopefully this will help illustrate why half-arsed attempts by ISPs to provide 'content' to their subscribers are to be avoided. It might have looked like a good idea a couple of years ago when the advertising market was buoyant and share prices were based on - well, who knows, but having some trite 'portal' probably helped to boost them further.
But if even specialist content companies like Salon - whose only purpose is to provide content and make money from adverts - find it hard to survive, what's the point in service providers wasting resources on that too?
An ISP provides a certain level of service, for which you pay a fixed monthly subscription - which isn't subject to the whims of the advertising market. What's wrong with sticking to a tried and tested formula?
(Okay, so this is AOL, and they feel they have to do *something* to exploit those users who don't change their browser home page... but I still wish they wouldn't bother.)
If I had bothered to read the article before posting, I'd have seen that 'Vivisimo' (bad name, guys. bad name) does some metasearch stuff. But not across all the other search engines mentioned.
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If bin Laden or whoever is 'a big crypto user', then how would it help to restrict the availability of encryption to US citizens? Isn't it just a little too late?
I think I got confused between Carbon and Cocoa. What I meant was, take the Mac OS X interface which resembles NextStep, whatever it's called, and remap its calls to GnuStep.
I don't think C versus ObjC is an issue because this would be a relinking / binary thing, like Wine. Assuming you have a decent PowerPC CPU core emulation. Of course, a 'libcocoa' project to give 95% source compatibility would also be useful.
That's part of what I meant - you should be required to disclose *pending* patents, not just those already issued. In fact, it would probably be a good thing if all patent applications were out in the open from when they're filed, as part of the patent bargain.
Software patents are notoriously bad, and for software the best answer is just not to grant patent monopolies at all (they should be restricted to physical objects, not abstract ideas). But in areas where the patent system is considered to be economically useful but still has problems with submarines, having some kind of mandatory disclosure would help the system work better. That's what I was referring to; the patents on hardware held by Rambus and the like.
The whole point of the patent system is openness. You only get a patent monopoly in exchange for full disclosure. So it should be easy (in principle) to find out what patents cover something you are working on. But in practice the sheer volume of patents out there is too large.
I think that a legally binding 'patent challenge' might be the answer. You should be able to send a letter to Rambus or whoever saying 'I am developing the following... please disclose whether you have any patents or patent applications which cover this area'. The company receiving the letter then has to disclose what they have patented. If they lie or keep quiet, they lose the right to sue you later on. Obviously you couldn't do this for internal R&D, but for standards bodies (where the process is open anyway) this could be a useful tool to reduce threats from submarine patents. The only question is whether it places an unreasonable burden on the patentholding company.
So will we see an equivalent of Wine which runs Mac OS X applications by remapping Carbon API calls to GnuStep? (I guess the answer to that one is 'if someone writes it'.)
Is this the first sighting of a space dredger?
If the passengers on those planes had been armed and able to defend themselves, the disaster would never have happened.
I believe there was an April Fool's joke many years ago about a 16-bit version of the ARM processor called THUMB. But then only a relatively short time later ARM Ltd announced they were indeed working on a 16-bit frontend to the ARM (basically a new instruction decoder), and now the 'Thumb instruction decoder' is a standard part of many ARM family CPUs.
How many other things started out as an April Fool's day joke and then actually got implemented?
Or better, the source package: ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/mandrake -devel/cooker/SRPMS/bcast-2000c-5mdk.src.rpm
If the user wants to screw up his browser so it no longer complies with the Javascript / ECMAScript standards, then that's his problem not yours. You don't need to worry about extra work writing sites to work with browsers where obnoxious Javascript features are disabled.
People can just use the non-Javascript version of the site (turn JS off altogether) if for some reason your code relies on opening new windows or other lame tricks.
We really need a browser that lets you *selectively* disable Javascript. I think the default setting should be to have JS turned on, but with a few particularly obnoxious features (popping up new windows, adding hooks to the scrollbar or mouse movement) turned off. You should be able to adjust these preferences on a site-by-site basis.
Is this a troll? Have you not heard of bash, gcc, glibc, fileutils, ...?
The FSF's document Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism explains that it is for practical, as well as ideological reasons. RMS has explicitly said that if there is more practical gain from putting a library under the LGPL, you should do that instead. A GPLed library might encourage people to make their own software GPLed in order to use it, increasing the amount of useful free software out there; but an LGPLed library will get wider use and thus faster development of the library itself. Which of these is more important depends on how important the library is and whether alternatives are easily available.
Who are these 'GPL zealots' who claim that anything non-GPL is bad? I have never seen one. If they do exist, you should be able to point out lots of messages on discussion forurms like, oh, I don't know, Slashdot. But I haven't seen one - just strawman arguments about how these mythical 'GPL zealots' are threatening Linux, undermining the community, and so on.
Okay, so what are the best tools to use? I know Mozilla has an SVG plugin for _displaying_ vector graphics, but which drawing programs have good support for saving and loading in this format?
Why did they have to do an 'exclusive interview'? Couldn't they just do a normal one?
They can do that already by purchasing a copy and looking at the machine code it generates. The necessary tweaks to generate fast-running code for a particular processor are not kept secret; on the contrary, they need to be as publicized as possible to increase the amount of software that runs well on that processor.
(At least, that's how it damn well should be, and Intel wouldn't do themselves any favours by having 'secret optimizations'.)
WTF? There's a guy called 'Ridiculator' whose sole purpose is to correct the spelling of 'ridiculous'? Only on Slashdot...
Many high-level languages compile into C code, which is then compiled with gcc or whatever. Do any use Forth instead? I understand Forth is a stack-based language: doesn't that present problems when compiling for CPUs that mostly work using registers?
Something Slashdot readers may not realize is that this was also the guy who gave Intel its name. In 'A for Andromeda', Intel was the name of a shadowy Swiss business organization attempting to control the alien-designed supercomputer built by the government.
This obviously assumes that Intel the semiconductor manufacturer took its name from this source. The TV series came out in 1961 and the book before then.
It would be nice if more of the raw keystroke-handling work could be handled at the client end. So instead of ssh sending raw keystrokes across the network, it could read a whole line (and allow you to do line editing locally) and send that when you press Enter. If the remote application wants to read from the terminal in raw mode, then ssh could do that, but for normal command-line use a line at a time is fine. It's not vulnerable to analysing the time between keystrokes, and on a high-latency line it would be a helluva lot faster.
This would require some cooperation from programs like the shell - instead of Bash putting the terminal into raw mode and doing its own line editing, it would need persuading that the line editing would be done somewhere else and would send a whole line at a time.
BTW - anyone else see the text at the end of the article saying 'to link to this article, please use the following URL?'.
Hopefully this will help illustrate why half-arsed attempts by ISPs to provide 'content' to their subscribers are to be avoided. It might have looked like a good idea a couple of years ago when the advertising market was buoyant and share prices were based on - well, who knows, but having some trite 'portal' probably helped to boost them further.
But if even specialist content companies like Salon - whose only purpose is to provide content and make money from adverts - find it hard to survive, what's the point in service providers wasting resources on that too?
An ISP provides a certain level of service, for which you pay a fixed monthly subscription - which isn't subject to the whims of the advertising market. What's wrong with sticking to a tried and tested formula?
(Okay, so this is AOL, and they feel they have to do *something* to exploit those users who don't change their browser home page... but I still wish they wouldn't bother.)
Why don't they just render it in wireframe and get 100fps? With hidden line removal it would still be entirely watchable.
If I had bothered to read the article before posting, I'd have seen that 'Vivisimo' (bad name, guys. bad name) does some metasearch stuff. But not across all the other search engines mentioned.
Is there a decent meta-search tool that can run a query through all (or most) of these and collect together the results?
Maybe not on the web (where it might get threatened) but at least a command-line tool or CGI script.