Yet another Linux desktop environment? We'll have what, GNOME, KDE, HomeBase, and (if it ever gets finished) Enlightenment DR17, and who knows how many others?
High quality scientific plotting packages dump to Postscript because the output is intended to be printed -- it's for use in reports and journal articles.
However, what we're talking about is the web. You can embed a PNG image in a webpage. You cannot embed a PostScript image in a webpage. In fact, the only vector graphics format I know of that can be embedded in webpages with any chance of your audience being able to view it is Flash, and it's targetted primarily at vector animations, not static images.
Everything at kuro5hin is indeed donated -- bandwidth (and colocation) is provided by voxel.net, which is why they have that big banner on the top/right of the main page. The hardware is provided by Promicro, who have a banner right below the voxel.net one. Prior to this arrangement, bandwidth/colocation was donated by vHosting (in return for an ad in the same place), with the main server donated by Compaq (without any advertising in return).
As for rusty's job, I don't know. I was under the impression that he quit his job voluntarily, as he no longer wished to live in the San Francisco area (he's since moved to a small island in Maine). At the very least he's not actively looking for a job (evidenced by the fact that he actively moved away from the tech job market to an island in Maine).
The only problem I have is that he did at one point claim that kuro5hin was a community site, with its most important asset being the people who provided its content (the users). So it sits a bit ill to then have him charging the very same people -- they should be the ones getting paid, not him. Sure, coding additions to scoop is nice, but it's not the most important thing kuro5hin needs -- the most important thing is new stories. So I'd support paying the story authors before I'd support paying the coders.
I have no problem with the textads. It's just the subscriptions I have a problem with.
And beyond that, it's very good at displaying text and vector drawings, because the large solid-color areas that such drawings tend to have compress very well.
Sure, it's not the ideal format to store a vector graphic in for future editing, but for display it's perfectly fine.
That using.ps for an image on the web is just dumb. There are already several standard formats for images on the web, PNG being one of the better ones.
Hell, I'm currently running Mozilla on Debian and it can't even display the.ps (I have to download it and open it in ghostview, which is annoying).
What they actually said was 100% accurate -- that the new processors run at a higher clock speed. This might mislead people who don't realize that clock speed and processing speed are not identical, but I don't think that's Intel's fault. Take for example cars -- you regularly hear car manufacturers talk about a car with "260 hp" and advertise on that basis. Now anyone who knows anything about cars will understand that a car with 260 hp is not necessarily twice as fast (either in top speed or acceleration) than a car with 130 hp. But your average person who doesn't know anything about cars might be mislead into thinking that. But I don't see anyone suing car manufacturers.
you could call it a bug in 2.95
on
GCC 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
But 2.95 is the one that didn't give the Linux kernel any problems. 2.95 allowed some long-obsolete constructs that are illegal under the ANSI standard. Allowing them impedes optimization, because it does not allow GCC to assume that what the guarantees is actually true. GCC3 decided to do away with this, and follow the standard as closely as possible. As a result, old buggy code (like the Linux kernel) no longer compiles. Some code will still compile under -O0 because even though GCC assumes things that the code doesn't, it doesn't actually take advantage of those assumptions to optimize things away. Only when it does do the bugs in the user code show up.
As an example, some code used to do things like write to a float* and then read it back as a long* (since on 32-bit systems, both are 32-bit values). This used to work, but under the current C and C++ standards is undefined. If the compiler does no optimization (-O0), you might get lucky and the code might still work, because you'll be physically reading and writing to the same memory address with same-sized pointers. But if you allow the compiler to optimize, it'll take advantage of the fact that when you write a float*, you can only legally read it back as a float*, and then your code breaks.
I think that's your problem right there. To do anything really interesting in academia you need a PhD. The guys with a BS are going to be working in labs running PCR reactions, while the guys with PhDs (after a bit of experience) are going to have their own lab where they'll be coming up with the experiments you're carrying out and writing papers about the results (and attending conferences and such).
Now that might not sound interesting either (especially if you hate writing papers and attending conferences), but it's what's usually thought of as "academia" -- the non-PhD guys who just work in the labs are just "employees" or "staff" rather than "faculty", and as such end up with the more crappy jobs (usually).
[Note: I have no idea what industrial labs are like; I'm only referring to academic labs here.]
I think Bruce's point is that if something like OO is finished (along with easier installation and configuration for Linux), and that results in lots of people (especially companies) switching to a Free/Open platform, we'll be in a lot stronger position to deal with those threats, since we'll have more powerful friends. It might be harder to do that if Free/OSS culture remains just a fairly small minority culture, while everyone important/influential uses WinXP/MSOffice and doesn't really care what we have to think.
While Sun's licensing of Java might have set it back initially, the GCC people are reimplementing it as a Free compiler (that can compile both to native code and to Java bytecode), so Java's licensing should no longer be an issue.
For more information see the GCJ page (GCJ -- the GNU Compiler for Java -- is the name of the Java compiler component of GCC -- the GNU Compiler Collection).
Winamp 2.61:
* In accordance with Microsoft's license agreement, we no longer allow you to use DSP plug-ins or alternate output plug-ins when playing WMA files.
So you'd have to find a version older than 2.61 for that trick to work.
Usually it's user bugs. For example, the problems with building the Linux kernel under gcc3 were due to bugs in the Linux kernel -- it built fine under gcc2.95 because gcc2.95 was nicer about allowing illegal constructs (at the expense of some optimization opportunities). GCC3 much more closely follows the exact specification, which allows for more optimization (since it can take advantage of certain things guaranteed by the standard) but also exposes many more code bugs. If you compile under -O0, you won't expose as many of your bugs.
--r3mix has been proven to be far inferior to --alt-preset standard under nearly all types of music by double-blind testing both by the folks at hydrogenaudio.org and ff123.net. It used to be a pretty good preset, but there's no reason to use it anymore. Part of the reason is that --r3mix is just a preset for a bunch of command-line switches, whereas --alt-preset has code-level tweaks to optimize things like joint-stereo handling.
Ogg is inherently a better-designed format than MP3 (MP3 has a few major flaws, first among them the lack of an independent scalefactor for frequencies over 16 kHz), so all other things equal Ogg would sound better at the same bitrate (or equal at lower bitrates). But all other things aren't equal -- MP3 has a very highly tuned encoder in LAME, when used with the --alt-preset command line options ("lame --alt-preset standard file.wav file.mp3" is the command-line most people should use, and ends up with files averaging in the 190-200 kbps range). The Ogg encoder hasn't been nearly as well tuned, and most listening tests seem to indicate that to match --alt-preset standard's quality, you need to use -q6 with Ogg, which averages around 192 kbps -- the same bitrate as with MP3. So your Ogg files will sound about the same at the same bitrate as your (well-encoded) MP3 files.
Ogg does have a few other advantages, including its ReplayGain support and its lack of patents. And since the format itself is inherently better, it should beat MP3's quality eventually (though it may take a while, as most Ogg development is currently focused on low-bitrate encoding for streaming, not high-quality encoding for archival).
I like the GPL very much -- if I were to write something major, I'd license it under the GPL myself. But in this case, I believe the BSD license would be more appropriate. If the government is developing something (using taxpayer money), whatever it develops should be freely usable by anyone, including both open source developers and developers of proprietary software. Enforcing an "open-source only" sort of thing by using a license like the GPL doesn't really seem appropriate when we're talking about publically-funded projects.
What matters to the typical "I don't care how it works I just want it to work" consumer? Easy. They want it to work.
This is what I see as the biggest problem. I use Debian GNU/Linux almost exclusively, but it's often still a bit frustrating. If I get a new piece of hardware and boot into Windows, Win2k will auto-detect it and configure it. The worst-case scenario is having to stick in the CD-ROM that came with the hardware to load the driver, if Win2k doesn't have the driver built-in.
Meanwhile in Linux, I stick in the hardware, boot into Linux, and -- surprise -- Linux never noticed. Getting it to work is usually not too bad these days -- since Debian comes with most modules you'd ever want pre-compiled, just "modprobe [modulename]" and then add it to/etc/modules -- it still requires googling to find out what module you need, since the hardware isn't auto-detected (who would've thought "tulip" is the name of my LinkSys network card driver, and that "emu10k1" is the name of my SoundBlaster Live soundcard driver?). And that's the best-case scenario. Something like an nVidia driver is a bit more annoying, since you have to download the binary module and then compile the kernel interface.
And that's not even starting on things like printing, which are easy as hell in Windows, and nearly impossible to do in a consistent way in UNIX.
I played around with it for a few months, but simply couldn't think of a reason to justify actually keeping it around. Sure, it was pretty easy to mess around with, but it didn't do anything either. Its interface seemed pretty clunky (compared to both Win98 and to XFree86+Enlightenment), and there weren't really many useful programs (a few minimally-featured AIM and IRC clients, a web browser, etc., but nothing better than or even equivalent to Win/UNIX counterparts). I ended up finally deleting the partition when I ran low on hard drive space, because it just wasn't useful to have.
As he also said "OOP is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California," you becoming proficient in OOP after starting with BASIC is unlikely to convince him that his assessment of people who start with BASIC was wrong. =]
Most CS (and by this I mean the academic field "computer science", not the engineering field "programming") is really just a subset of applied mathematics.
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Yet another Linux desktop environment? We'll have what, GNOME, KDE, HomeBase, and (if it ever gets finished) Enlightenment DR17, and who knows how many others?
Much easier (and less dangerous) to install and remove than the old clip-on type. Nearly all motherboards accept them.
High quality scientific plotting packages dump to Postscript because the output is intended to be printed -- it's for use in reports and journal articles.
However, what we're talking about is the web. You can embed a PNG image in a webpage. You cannot embed a PostScript image in a webpage. In fact, the only vector graphics format I know of that can be embedded in webpages with any chance of your audience being able to view it is Flash, and it's targetted primarily at vector animations, not static images.
Everything at kuro5hin is indeed donated -- bandwidth (and colocation) is provided by voxel.net, which is why they have that big banner on the top/right of the main page. The hardware is provided by Promicro, who have a banner right below the voxel.net one. Prior to this arrangement, bandwidth/colocation was donated by vHosting (in return for an ad in the same place), with the main server donated by Compaq (without any advertising in return).
As for rusty's job, I don't know. I was under the impression that he quit his job voluntarily, as he no longer wished to live in the San Francisco area (he's since moved to a small island in Maine). At the very least he's not actively looking for a job (evidenced by the fact that he actively moved away from the tech job market to an island in Maine).
The only problem I have is that he did at one point claim that kuro5hin was a community site, with its most important asset being the people who provided its content (the users). So it sits a bit ill to then have him charging the very same people -- they should be the ones getting paid, not him. Sure, coding additions to scoop is nice, but it's not the most important thing kuro5hin needs -- the most important thing is new stories. So I'd support paying the story authors before I'd support paying the coders.
I have no problem with the textads. It's just the subscriptions I have a problem with.
They already moved from MySQL to Postgre a while ago, and now are moving from Postgre to IBM's DB2.
And beyond that, it's very good at displaying text and vector drawings, because the large solid-color areas that such drawings tend to have compress very well.
Sure, it's not the ideal format to store a vector graphic in for future editing, but for display it's perfectly fine.
Unless your distribution happens to install GhostView by default, which mine doesn't.
That using .ps for an image on the web is just dumb. There are already several standard formats for images on the web, PNG being one of the better ones.
.ps (I have to download it and open it in ghostview, which is annoying).
Hell, I'm currently running Mozilla on Debian and it can't even display the
What they actually said was 100% accurate -- that the new processors run at a higher clock speed. This might mislead people who don't realize that clock speed and processing speed are not identical, but I don't think that's Intel's fault. Take for example cars -- you regularly hear car manufacturers talk about a car with "260 hp" and advertise on that basis. Now anyone who knows anything about cars will understand that a car with 260 hp is not necessarily twice as fast (either in top speed or acceleration) than a car with 130 hp. But your average person who doesn't know anything about cars might be mislead into thinking that. But I don't see anyone suing car manufacturers.
But 2.95 is the one that didn't give the Linux kernel any problems. 2.95 allowed some long-obsolete constructs that are illegal under the ANSI standard. Allowing them impedes optimization, because it does not allow GCC to assume that what the guarantees is actually true. GCC3 decided to do away with this, and follow the standard as closely as possible. As a result, old buggy code (like the Linux kernel) no longer compiles. Some code will still compile under -O0 because even though GCC assumes things that the code doesn't, it doesn't actually take advantage of those assumptions to optimize things away. Only when it does do the bugs in the user code show up.
As an example, some code used to do things like write to a float* and then read it back as a long* (since on 32-bit systems, both are 32-bit values). This used to work, but under the current C and C++ standards is undefined. If the compiler does no optimization (-O0), you might get lucky and the code might still work, because you'll be physically reading and writing to the same memory address with same-sized pointers. But if you allow the compiler to optimize, it'll take advantage of the fact that when you write a float*, you can only legally read it back as a float*, and then your code breaks.
As a molecular biologist (with a BS)
I think that's your problem right there. To do anything really interesting in academia you need a PhD. The guys with a BS are going to be working in labs running PCR reactions, while the guys with PhDs (after a bit of experience) are going to have their own lab where they'll be coming up with the experiments you're carrying out and writing papers about the results (and attending conferences and such).
Now that might not sound interesting either (especially if you hate writing papers and attending conferences), but it's what's usually thought of as "academia" -- the non-PhD guys who just work in the labs are just "employees" or "staff" rather than "faculty", and as such end up with the more crappy jobs (usually).
[Note: I have no idea what industrial labs are like; I'm only referring to academic labs here.]
I think Bruce's point is that if something like OO is finished (along with easier installation and configuration for Linux), and that results in lots of people (especially companies) switching to a Free/Open platform, we'll be in a lot stronger position to deal with those threats, since we'll have more powerful friends. It might be harder to do that if Free/OSS culture remains just a fairly small minority culture, while everyone important/influential uses WinXP/MSOffice and doesn't really care what we have to think.
While Sun's licensing of Java might have set it back initially, the GCC people are reimplementing it as a Free compiler (that can compile both to native code and to Java bytecode), so Java's licensing should no longer be an issue.
For more information see the GCJ page (GCJ -- the GNU Compiler for Java -- is the name of the Java compiler component of GCC -- the GNU Compiler Collection).
From the Winamp changelog:
Winamp 2.61:
* In accordance with Microsoft's license agreement, we no longer allow you to use DSP plug-ins or alternate output plug-ins when playing WMA files.
So you'd have to find a version older than 2.61 for that trick to work.
Not yet anyway...
Usually it's user bugs. For example, the problems with building the Linux kernel under gcc3 were due to bugs in the Linux kernel -- it built fine under gcc2.95 because gcc2.95 was nicer about allowing illegal constructs (at the expense of some optimization opportunities). GCC3 much more closely follows the exact specification, which allows for more optimization (since it can take advantage of certain things guaranteed by the standard) but also exposes many more code bugs. If you compile under -O0, you won't expose as many of your bugs.
--r3mix has been proven to be far inferior to --alt-preset standard under nearly all types of music by double-blind testing both by the folks at hydrogenaudio.org and ff123.net. It used to be a pretty good preset, but there's no reason to use it anymore. Part of the reason is that --r3mix is just a preset for a bunch of command-line switches, whereas --alt-preset has code-level tweaks to optimize things like joint-stereo handling.
That's exactly what he said he ended up with as a solution, using the mod_rewrite module.
Ogg is inherently a better-designed format than MP3 (MP3 has a few major flaws, first among them the lack of an independent scalefactor for frequencies over 16 kHz), so all other things equal Ogg would sound better at the same bitrate (or equal at lower bitrates). But all other things aren't equal -- MP3 has a very highly tuned encoder in LAME, when used with the --alt-preset command line options ("lame --alt-preset standard file.wav file.mp3" is the command-line most people should use, and ends up with files averaging in the 190-200 kbps range). The Ogg encoder hasn't been nearly as well tuned, and most listening tests seem to indicate that to match --alt-preset standard's quality, you need to use -q6 with Ogg, which averages around 192 kbps -- the same bitrate as with MP3. So your Ogg files will sound about the same at the same bitrate as your (well-encoded) MP3 files.
Ogg does have a few other advantages, including its ReplayGain support and its lack of patents. And since the format itself is inherently better, it should beat MP3's quality eventually (though it may take a while, as most Ogg development is currently focused on low-bitrate encoding for streaming, not high-quality encoding for archival).
I like the GPL very much -- if I were to write something major, I'd license it under the GPL myself. But in this case, I believe the BSD license would be more appropriate. If the government is developing something (using taxpayer money), whatever it develops should be freely usable by anyone, including both open source developers and developers of proprietary software. Enforcing an "open-source only" sort of thing by using a license like the GPL doesn't really seem appropriate when we're talking about publically-funded projects.
This is what I see as the biggest problem. I use Debian GNU/Linux almost exclusively, but it's often still a bit frustrating. If I get a new piece of hardware and boot into Windows, Win2k will auto-detect it and configure it. The worst-case scenario is having to stick in the CD-ROM that came with the hardware to load the driver, if Win2k doesn't have the driver built-in.
Meanwhile in Linux, I stick in the hardware, boot into Linux, and -- surprise -- Linux never noticed. Getting it to work is usually not too bad these days -- since Debian comes with most modules you'd ever want pre-compiled, just "modprobe [modulename]" and then add it to
And that's not even starting on things like printing, which are easy as hell in Windows, and nearly impossible to do in a consistent way in UNIX.
I played around with it for a few months, but simply couldn't think of a reason to justify actually keeping it around. Sure, it was pretty easy to mess around with, but it didn't do anything either. Its interface seemed pretty clunky (compared to both Win98 and to XFree86+Enlightenment), and there weren't really many useful programs (a few minimally-featured AIM and IRC clients, a web browser, etc., but nothing better than or even equivalent to Win/UNIX counterparts). I ended up finally deleting the partition when I ran low on hard drive space, because it just wasn't useful to have.
As he also said "OOP is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California," you becoming proficient in OOP after starting with BASIC is unlikely to convince him that his assessment of people who start with BASIC was wrong. =]
Most CS (and by this I mean the academic field "computer science", not the engineering field "programming") is really just a subset of applied mathematics.