I've been using my binary NVIDIA drivers for years, on a number of different platforms, and only with the earliest releases did I have X server crashes.
x.org - Formerly the X Consortium, an organization of X-using businesses, like the OpenGL ARB. They are responsible for changes to the spec.
X Windows - Shorthand for X Window System --- refers to the whole thing, servers, libs etc.
freedesktop.org - A new organization dedicated to making standards for the *NIX desktop. For example, they have specified a common MIME framework, common menu format, common window manager specification, etc. Many of these, (ex. the window manager specification) have already been adopted. They are also an umbrella project for other projects for improving the X desktop. For example, D-BUS which is the new messaging system developed for KDE and GNOME, is a freedesktop.org project. Keith Packard and others are also developing a new X server under the freedesktop.org umbrella. This new X server already supports complete-back buffering of windows (each window gets its own buffer, like OS X, to make moving windows smooth and free of redraw) and window compositing (for transparency, shadows, other effects). They are also restructuring the driver API to support OpenGL independent of X, so the X server can sit on top of OpenGL and use it to accelerate drawing. At the same time, they are also introducing new extensions (Xfixes, XDamage, etc) to allow applications to access the extended features for the new server, as well as working on existing extensions (XRender) to improve their implementation (add acceleration via OpenGL, for example).
D-BUS wasn't something the GNOME people thought up. The freedesktop.org people modeled it after DCOP, but made it independent of KDE's framework so the GNOME people could use it. The plans for D-BUS in KDE seem uncertain. Some developers want to just ditch D-COP entirely and use D-BUS, since D-BUS is similar. Others want to bridge D-COP and D-BUS, and retain D-COP for intra-KDE communication, and use D-BUS for inter-desktop communication.
Lambdas are just an aesthetics/keystrokes issue. ---:: jaw drops:::: gets on knees::
I bow down to your ignorance, oh mighty King of the Cluless!
Seriously, though, please research lambdas. They don't just save typing. They are *everything*. All of computation can be described just with lambdas of a single parameter. Everything else is just syntax suger. If you ease one restriction of the lambda calculus (no side-effects), lambdas can do procedural code, functional code, and even object-oriented programming. That's why I said iterators, enumerators, etc, are not necessary in C# 2.0, because it has proper lambdas. All of thsoe can be implemented very easily on top of lambdas.
and start focusing on really useful subjects - like formal verification --- You can do formal verification in Lisp. Look up ACL2 (first link in Google search for that term). I'd still say that Haskell or Clean are a bit better for such purposes, but mainly because they are designed from the beginning to be comfortable to program without side-effects, while Lisp was not.
and strong typing (which go very well together). --- C'mon. You're making this too easy. Lisp has a strong type system. All type errors are caught, unless you disable type-checking in your compiler. Maybe you mean *static* typing instead?
That's probably because the only people who think Lisp Is The Answer to Everything are a little bit insane. --- Um, wasn't that my point? Its the "Lisp is the Answer to Everything" people that make it harder for normal people to push Lisp to areas where it would be really useful.
A quote from his site: "It is incredibly frustrating watching all this happen... I can't even say the word Lisp without cementing my reputation as a crazy lunatic who thinks Lisp is the Answer to Everything"
I feel his pain. I was introduced to Lisp not too long ago, and within a short time, a Lisp-derived language (Dylan) became my favorite. I also found that many of the features I loved from Python were very Lisp-y in nature. Now, I see Java and C# either neglecting all the knowledge garnered from the Lisp-family of languages, or reinventing it --- badly. The features in C# 2.0 have either been in Lisp for decades (lambdas, closures) or are not necessary in Lisp (iterators, enumerators --- which, btw, are theoretically not necessary in C# 2.0 either because of lambdas and closures!) This new "Xen" (or X#) language Microsoft Research is pushing takes a great idea (extending the language to fit the problem domain) that has been a part of Lisp for decades, and chops it off at the knees. Instead of having proper macros, so you can extend the language to fit *your* problem domain, they hack support for a single problem domain (back-end business programming) into the language itself!
That said, the Lisp community is to blame as well. Part of the reason people stop listening the moment somebody says Lisp is that the Lisp community is *so* rabid and *so* unyielding. Especially some high-profile members who are highly respected within the community despite the fact that they are completely obnoxious and lack any human sense of manners.
Your parsing of the original posters comment makes no sense. So what if it used to be part of India at one time, it is not part of India now. Is Texas interchangable with Mexico because they once used to be a part of the same country?
and ready to work for half of the $28/hr the average RN makes in my area (Toledo OH). --- Well sucks for the RNs in your area. Welcome to the free market!
He may not have a good grasp of English. --- In my experience, most Americans don't have a good grasp of English. What's your point? And how much of a grasp of English do you need to be a plumber?
That's hardly the case. There is a great tradition of people doing things for the benefit of mankind in their freetime. John Locke, for example, didn't really have an occupation as such --- he was a student of the church, but never became a cleric, he studied (and practiced, for awhile) medicine, but never got a medical degree, etc. His main profession seemed to have been being a friend of Lord Shaftesbury, which gave him an influential position and little real work to occupy him, save his writing.
Certainly not. I think there is a lot of great proprietory software out there. And CORBA is quite open, it has an open spec and many open implementations. It still sucks.
On SPARC, there are no 64-bit-only optimizations. The only reason to use 64-bit math is either if you need 64-bit integers, or use 64-bit pointers. Since none of the benchmarks can use either (the MySQL benchmark could, but the machine only had 256MB of RAM).
Also, our econimic system - for those of you who don't know - is commonly known as Capitolism. --- Its even *more* commonly known as capitalism. Beyond that, the United States preaches capitalism, but does not practice it. If it did, we would not have so many protectionist laws fouling up our legal books. A Republican president, someone who in theory believes in allowing the free market to do its work, recently passed (and later had to retract) a tarrif on steel! That goes against the recommendations of a majority of economists. They continue to favor subsidizing farmers, because although subsidies are uncapitalistic, they secure crucial votes in the Midwest.
Such is the nature of a capitolist economy that the government, in order to function effectively, must operate as a business. --- Actually, capitalist economic theory says nothing about government functioning as a business.
They offer services - courts, police, etc. - and we pay for those services with our taxes. --- The situation is nothing like that. Transactions between (competitive) businesses and the people are efficient. Transactions between the government and the people are closer to transactions between people and a monopoly --- they are inefficient in that they create a deadweight loss. FYI: "Efficient" has a very specific definition in economic theory, so do not look at the word in the traditional "government is inefficient" sense but in terms of the precise economic definition.
They are known by a variety of names and methods - Communists, Socialists, some Democrats (Not all, just the worst, like this Dean guy) --- I propose a corollary to Godwin's rule. The first person to compare liberalism with communism in general automatically loses. Substantiate your arguments, don't use peoples' irrational reaction to communism as a crutch for fuzzy thinking. Plus, capitalism, as an economic theory, is somewhat orthogonal to socialism, as a social theory. Modern capitalism specifies how markets should be organized. It acknowledges the existence of a government that must tax its citizens, because a limited number of goods, such as defense and a clean environment, are produced in inefficient numbers in a purely free-market system. Capitalism says nothing about how government should spend the money that the free market creates. Indeed, most economists agree that the distribution of income in the United States today is far too inequitable, which suggest a policy favoring greater redistribution.
and in general, idiots. --- Like people who cannot spell "capitalism" and don't even understand the economic system they espouse?
we will all end up where...France, and Australia will be before long. --- You mean in a country that makes a reasonable compromise between absolute economic performance and reasonable social services? Your arguments against socialism would be more compelling if the healthcare system in the United States, and social services in general, was not so horridly unsatisfactory.
Now, I believe in equality, but in [a]ctual equality, which is that everyone has the same chance to succeed --- In the United States, everyone does not have the same chance to succeed. One's odds of succeeding go up exponentially with the amount of money one's parents have. Let's use some actual capitalistic theory here. Production is a function of the amount of capital you have. The function is exponential, which means that the more capital you start with, the faster you can grow your capital. This suggests that if two people start with unequal amounts of capital (ie: rich parents vs poor parents), and are given an equal chance to succeed, then not only will this gap remain, but grow exponentially larger. This precisely describes what is happening in the world today --- both the rich and the poor are getting richer, but the gap between them is growing. You make the mistake of assuming that people start out at the same level. They do not. If you have two equally good runners, and give one of them
That's not an entirely accurate standing, because Clarck and Kerry have had the pages up since the 16th of January, and Dean and Edwards have had them up since the 22nd.
And Bush isn't accepting donations yet, so it doesn't matter.
KParts is rather specialized for its use within KDE. If you want an alternative to CORBA, I'd strongly consider ZeroC's ICE. It was designed by a group of people to be both more powerful than, and much simpler than CORBA. Especially, read their comparison between CORBA and ICE, and how ICE addresses the weaknesses of CORBA.
KParts doesn't just provide in-place editing of documents, but generic, pluggable, reusable components. KMail, for example, uses components for HTML display and mail editing. KatePart is used as a text-editing component throughout the system. Ease of use goes up when code reuse goes up, and the different components in the system behave the same way, because they are the same component. For advanced users, it also enables easy customization and replacement of components like KatePart with (say) KVimPart.
Konqueror is has UI issues for reasons unrelated to KParts. It doesn't change the UI very much when switching from web-browsing to file-management. It could be done within the existing framework (indeed, its a simple matter to customize it so it does behave that way), it just isn't.
The use of Bonobo in all of these apps is pretty limited. Abiword will embed Gnumeric sheets. Nautilus will embed a few viewer types. I can't really see where Bonobo is used in Evolution, but I'll take your word for it. In KDE, KParts is used almost everywhere, and the apps that use it use it much more extensively than the apps that use Bonobo. For example, GNOME has two different HTML viewers. One is Gecko (Epiphany) and the other is GTKHTML (based on KHTML and used in Nautilus and Yelp). Heck, none of the apps that embed HTML viewing even use Gecko or GTKHTML as bonobo component! In KDE, there is just a single KHTML KPart, used by any app that needs to display HTML.
I'm not saying that the HIG doesn't do more than simple pixel-pushing and physical layout. I actually think it has a lot of good ideas (ex. the imperative verb bit) that KDE needs to emulate. My point is that a subset of the HIG (the pixel-pushing and physical layout) is handled automatically by the KDE framework, rather than burdening developers with doing it manually.
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I've been using my binary NVIDIA drivers for years, on a number of different platforms, and only with the earliest releases did I have X server crashes.
X11 - The protocol spoken by modern X servers.
x.org - Formerly the X Consortium, an organization of X-using businesses, like the OpenGL ARB. They are responsible for changes to the spec.
X Windows - Shorthand for X Window System --- refers to the whole thing, servers, libs etc.
freedesktop.org - A new organization dedicated to making standards for the *NIX desktop. For example, they have specified a common MIME framework, common menu format, common window manager specification, etc. Many of these, (ex. the window manager specification) have already been adopted. They are also an umbrella project for other projects for improving the X desktop. For example, D-BUS which is the new messaging system developed for KDE and GNOME, is a freedesktop.org project. Keith Packard and others are also developing a new X server under the freedesktop.org umbrella. This new X server already supports complete-back buffering of windows (each window gets its own buffer, like OS X, to make moving windows smooth and free of redraw) and window compositing (for transparency, shadows, other effects). They are also restructuring the driver API to support OpenGL independent of X, so the X server can sit on top of OpenGL and use it to accelerate drawing. At the same time, they are also introducing new extensions (Xfixes, XDamage, etc) to allow applications to access the extended features for the new server, as well as working on existing extensions (XRender) to improve their implementation (add acceleration via OpenGL, for example).
The XServer got rewritten from scratch*. The xlibs are an evolution of the XFree86.org code.
*> Well, not really. The FD.O X server is based on Keith Packard's KDrive (AKA TinyX) server, which is a vastly restructured and rewritten XFree86.
KDE already ships with a glib dependency. aRts used it...
Everyone. Right now, there are two ways to communicate with X-server.
XCB - A new, low-level binding designed for big toolkits like Qt/GTK+ that can handle their own caching, buffering, etc.
XLib - An older, higher-level binding originally released with X.
Currently, almost all apps still use Xlib, as do all toolkits.
D-BUS wasn't something the GNOME people thought up. The freedesktop.org people modeled it after DCOP, but made it independent of KDE's framework so the GNOME people could use it. The plans for D-BUS in KDE seem uncertain. Some developers want to just ditch D-COP entirely and use D-BUS, since D-BUS is similar. Others want to bridge D-COP and D-BUS, and retain D-COP for intra-KDE communication, and use D-BUS for inter-desktop communication.
Lambdas are just an aesthetics/keystrokes issue. :: jaw drops :: :: gets on knees ::
---
I bow down to your ignorance, oh mighty King of the Cluless!
Seriously, though, please research lambdas. They don't just save typing. They are *everything*. All of computation can be described just with lambdas of a single parameter. Everything else is just syntax suger. If you ease one restriction of the lambda calculus (no side-effects), lambdas can do procedural code, functional code, and even object-oriented programming. That's why I said iterators, enumerators, etc, are not necessary in C# 2.0, because it has proper lambdas. All of thsoe can be implemented very easily on top of lambdas.
and start focusing on really useful subjects - like formal verification
---
You can do formal verification in Lisp. Look up ACL2 (first link in Google search for that term). I'd still say that Haskell or Clean are a bit better for such purposes, but mainly because they are designed from the beginning to be comfortable to program without side-effects, while Lisp was not.
and strong typing (which go very well together).
---
C'mon. You're making this too easy. Lisp has a strong type system. All type errors are caught, unless you disable type-checking in your compiler. Maybe you mean *static* typing instead?
That's probably because the only people who think Lisp Is The Answer to Everything are a little bit insane.
---
Um, wasn't that my point? Its the "Lisp is the Answer to Everything" people that make it harder for normal people to push Lisp to areas where it would be really useful.
Hey, I didn't start it! The thread was about Lisp already :)
PS> That 'sdr' in sdrlabs couldn't possibly have something to do with software-defined radios, could it?
This is a bit OT, but I need to rant:
A quote from his site: "It is incredibly frustrating watching all this happen... I can't even say the word Lisp without cementing my reputation as a crazy lunatic who thinks Lisp is the Answer to Everything"
I feel his pain. I was introduced to Lisp not too long ago, and within a short time, a Lisp-derived language (Dylan) became my favorite. I also found that many of the features I loved from Python were very Lisp-y in nature. Now, I see Java and C# either neglecting all the knowledge garnered from the Lisp-family of languages, or reinventing it --- badly. The features in C# 2.0 have either been in Lisp for decades (lambdas, closures) or are not necessary in Lisp (iterators, enumerators --- which, btw, are theoretically not necessary in C# 2.0 either because of lambdas and closures!) This new "Xen" (or X#) language Microsoft Research is pushing takes a great idea (extending the language to fit the problem domain) that has been a part of Lisp for decades, and chops it off at the knees. Instead of having proper macros, so you can extend the language to fit *your* problem domain, they hack support for a single problem domain (back-end business programming) into the language itself!
That said, the Lisp community is to blame as well. Part of the reason people stop listening the moment somebody says Lisp is that the Lisp community is *so* rabid and *so* unyielding. Especially some high-profile members who are highly respected within the community despite the fact that they are completely obnoxious and lack any human sense of manners.
Your parsing of the original posters comment makes no sense. So what if it used to be part of India at one time, it is not part of India now. Is Texas interchangable with Mexico because they once used to be a part of the same country?
and ready to work for half of the $28/hr the average RN makes in my area (Toledo OH).
---
Well sucks for the RNs in your area. Welcome to the free market!
He may not have a good grasp of English.
---
In my experience, most Americans don't have a good grasp of English. What's your point? And how much of a grasp of English do you need to be a plumber?
Please don't spread FUD.
Employment Visas are granted to those with an employment letter from an Indian company.
That's hardly the case. There is a great tradition of people doing things for the benefit of mankind in their freetime. John Locke, for example, didn't really have an occupation as such --- he was a student of the church, but never became a cleric, he studied (and practiced, for awhile) medicine, but never got a medical degree, etc. His main profession seemed to have been being a friend of Lord Shaftesbury, which gave him an influential position and little real work to occupy him, save his writing.
If the compiler sucks, then it would suck equally for 32-bit and 64-bit binaries! They use the same code generator!
Certainly not. I think there is a lot of great proprietory software out there. And CORBA is quite open, it has an open spec and many open implementations. It still sucks.
On SPARC, there are no 64-bit-only optimizations. The only reason to use 64-bit math is either if you need 64-bit integers, or use 64-bit pointers. Since none of the benchmarks can use either (the MySQL benchmark could, but the machine only had 256MB of RAM).
GCC uses the same code generator for both Sparc32 and Sparc64.
Because he used the same compiler, in 32-bit and 64-bit mode???
Also, our econimic system - for those of you who don't know - is commonly known as Capitolism.
---
Its even *more* commonly known as capitalism. Beyond that, the United States preaches capitalism, but does not practice it. If it did, we would not have so many protectionist laws fouling up our legal books. A Republican president, someone who in theory believes in allowing the free market to do its work, recently passed (and later had to retract) a tarrif on steel! That goes against the recommendations of a majority of economists. They continue to favor subsidizing farmers, because although subsidies are uncapitalistic, they secure crucial votes in the Midwest.
Such is the nature of a capitolist economy that the government, in order to function effectively, must operate as a business.
---
Actually, capitalist economic theory says nothing about government functioning as a business.
They offer services - courts, police, etc. - and we pay for those services with our taxes.
---
The situation is nothing like that. Transactions between (competitive) businesses and the people are efficient. Transactions between the government and the people are closer to transactions between people and a monopoly --- they are inefficient in that they create a deadweight loss. FYI: "Efficient" has a very specific definition in economic theory, so do not look at the word in the traditional "government is inefficient" sense but in terms of the precise economic definition.
They are known by a variety of names and methods - Communists, Socialists, some Democrats (Not all, just the worst, like this Dean guy)
---
I propose a corollary to Godwin's rule. The first person to compare liberalism with communism in general automatically loses. Substantiate your arguments, don't use peoples' irrational reaction to communism as a crutch for fuzzy thinking. Plus, capitalism, as an economic theory, is somewhat orthogonal to socialism, as a social theory. Modern capitalism specifies how markets should be organized. It acknowledges the existence of a government that must tax its citizens, because a limited number of goods, such as defense and a clean environment, are produced in inefficient numbers in a purely free-market system. Capitalism says nothing about how government should spend the money that the free market creates. Indeed, most economists agree that the distribution of income in the United States today is far too inequitable, which suggest a policy favoring greater redistribution.
and in general, idiots.
---
Like people who cannot spell "capitalism" and don't even understand the economic system they espouse?
we will all end up where...France, and Australia will be before long.
---
You mean in a country that makes a reasonable compromise between absolute economic performance and reasonable social services? Your arguments against socialism would be more compelling if the healthcare system in the United States, and social services in general, was not so horridly unsatisfactory.
Now, I believe in equality, but in [a]ctual equality, which is that everyone has the same chance to succeed
---
In the United States, everyone does not have the same chance to succeed. One's odds of succeeding go up exponentially with the amount of money one's parents have. Let's use some actual capitalistic theory here. Production is a function of the amount of capital you have. The function is exponential, which means that the more capital you start with, the faster you can grow your capital. This suggests that if two people start with unequal amounts of capital (ie: rich parents vs poor parents), and are given an equal chance to succeed, then not only will this gap remain, but grow exponentially larger. This precisely describes what is happening in the world today --- both the rich and the poor are getting richer, but the gap between them is growing. You make the mistake of assuming that people start out at the same level. They do not. If you have two equally good runners, and give one of them
The US is getting involved in the international prostitution racket? Nifty...
Oh, you mean capital 'b'!
That's not an entirely accurate standing, because Clarck and Kerry have had the pages up since the 16th of January, and Dean and Edwards have had them up since the 22nd.
And Bush isn't accepting donations yet, so it doesn't matter.
KParts is rather specialized for its use within KDE. If you want an alternative to CORBA, I'd strongly consider ZeroC's ICE. It was designed by a group of people to be both more powerful than, and much simpler than CORBA. Especially, read their comparison between CORBA and ICE, and how ICE addresses the weaknesses of CORBA.
KParts doesn't just provide in-place editing of documents, but generic, pluggable, reusable components. KMail, for example, uses components for HTML display and mail editing. KatePart is used as a text-editing component throughout the system. Ease of use goes up when code reuse goes up, and the different components in the system behave the same way, because they are the same component. For advanced users, it also enables easy customization and replacement of components like KatePart with (say) KVimPart.
Konqueror is has UI issues for reasons unrelated to KParts. It doesn't change the UI very much when switching from web-browsing to file-management. It could be done within the existing framework (indeed, its a simple matter to customize it so it does behave that way), it just isn't.
The use of Bonobo in all of these apps is pretty limited. Abiword will embed Gnumeric sheets. Nautilus will embed a few viewer types. I can't really see where Bonobo is used in Evolution, but I'll take your word for it. In KDE, KParts is used almost everywhere, and the apps that use it use it much more extensively than the apps that use Bonobo. For example, GNOME has two different HTML viewers. One is Gecko (Epiphany) and the other is GTKHTML (based on KHTML and used in Nautilus and Yelp). Heck, none of the apps that embed HTML viewing even use Gecko or GTKHTML as bonobo component! In KDE, there is just a single KHTML KPart, used by any app that needs to display HTML.
I'm not saying that the HIG doesn't do more than simple pixel-pushing and physical layout. I actually think it has a lot of good ideas (ex. the imperative verb bit) that KDE needs to emulate. My point is that a subset of the HIG (the pixel-pushing and physical layout) is handled automatically by the KDE framework, rather than burdening developers with doing it manually.