Absolutely. People who don't need it everyday are people who only use one computer (eg, home users with only one machine) or people who never realized how easy it is to run a program on another machine and display it on your desktop. Remove this ability, and you remove a huge reason for using unix/linux on the desktop in the first place.
"Better at lower bitrates" means for a given bitrate with mp3, you can get better quality at a lower bitrate with ogg. If you want a higher bitrate, go ahead, it will sound still better, but after a point you can no longer distinguish it from CD-quality audio (with ogg on my audio system, 128 kb/s is already indistinguishable from a CD to me; mp3 at that bitrate sucks, I need to go up to 256 kb/s to get acceptable quality.)
If it's the last 3 years, it's probably GWB alone. I know in my case that's what it is. Not a single alleged anti-American I've met is anti-Clinton.
The anti-americanism charge is just a convenient curtain to filter out / ignore real criticism. Just as criticizing Ariel Sharon can be instantly dismissed (in the US, anyway) as anti-semitism.
That's an atrocious argument, but I assume you were serious because I know many Americans make it seriously (the "I don't want to see negative stories about my country" bit).
The BBC, to take just the best known example, is often critical of the UK. It is still the most respected channel there and, indeed, all over the world. It is highly respected in India (my country) though it is often critical of India. And it's widely viewed too.
True, the BBC is taxpayer-funded and doesn't need to worry too much about ratings. But the same is true of private channels everywhere outside the US, too.
I can understand an American living abroad, in a country ignorant of his culture, not wanting to see negative stories about the US. But an American living in America? If so, I'd say not "God bless America" but "God help America."
There have been procmail-based autoresponders that essentially do this for ages. You maintain a whitelist, people who are not on it need to reply to an email and then get added to your whitelist.
- Separate the frame buffer from the window system. Graphics drivers would be "mini" drivers that abstract the hardware just enough and no more.
With the modularization of hardware drivers in XFree86 4.x, this is much less of an issue. You can drop in your own hardware driver into a stock XFree86 (in fact, a binary hardware driver written for linux will often work on FreeBSD, it's that good). What more are you looking for?
- It's obvious audio must be integral. Integrate it.
Why is that obvious? I, for one, don't see it at all. XFree86 sends stuff to your video card and your monitor, the audio drivers send stuff to your sound card and your speakers.
- TrueType won. Get over it. Integrate it. Anti-alias it out of the box. Provide a simple means to cope with font substitution just like Microsoft does. End of font problems.
Wake up. TrueType is supported; it's easy to anti-alias (not everyone wants antialiasing, even windows doesn't do it out of the box); and XFree86 actually ships with some TTF fonts (luxi mono/sans/serif, which look lousy in my opinion, but that's not their fault -- they're not font developers, they take what people donate them).
- Create a standard window manager. All others accept the consequences of being weird. Life is short.
XFree86 does ship with a WM -- twm. Like it? I didn't think so. So they should replace it with something like, sawfish? Metacity? KWin? WindowMaker? You have all those options already, why ask XFree86 to add another useless option?
What we possibly need is a standard specification that allows one to replace one compliant window manager by another.
- Base the programmatic interface of the whole thing (API) on something worthwhile. Trolltech's QT would be a good place to start. Sharp did it and it works fine. Plus there is an entire suite of application software already written to it. Gnome would be fine too, I don't care.
Again, if you like Qt, use Qt. If you like Gnome, use Gnome.
What's the point of XFree86 making those decisions for you?
It's all about choice -- in fact it's good that Qt and GTK+ are abstracted (especially Qt), since they can be ported readily to other platforms like MacOS and Windows, which means your applications can be ported quickly too.
i hate nafta, all the manfacturing jobs are leaving america, the it job are starting to flock over now, so what am i left to do? flip some burgers, i do not thing so.
Presumably you're an American, so how about learning the English language, for a start?
It's weird that most non-Americans posting on slashdot have far better spelling and grammar than Americans. Maybe they're not just better computer programmers, they're better educated in an overall sense?
Sounds a bit like this idea (of Dan Bernstein, of qmail fame/notoriety).
The catch of course is that it's no good your using it if nobody else does. However, if some such system does get a minimal support base today, I predict it will quickly become quite popular. By around 2007 spammers will make normal email almost unusable, unless something drastic is done before that.
is the rearrangement of the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons, so that "Cancel" is now on the left and "OK" is on the right, in contrast to GNOME 1.x, KDE (all versions) and Windows. Whose bright idea was this? Perhaps someone who's used to answering questions like "Do you want to do this, no or yes"?
This is my single biggest peeve with GNOME 2.x, which is otherwise looking very nice. Well, if they're cohosting their Human Interface Guide with the KDE folks, hopefully someone will get a clue (the clue being: stay compatible with the rest of the world).
If the GNOME folks ever built a car, very likely they'd put the brake to the right of the accelerator, because that's the way it "should be" for some theoretical reason of their own.
I've read some hella good flames and wars on the linux kernel dev list, I never recall someone being invited not to take part though. Al Viro is especially good and reading your code and then telling you exactly how incompentent your are.
Apples, oranges.
Matt Dillon is not banned from any mailing lists. He's only been removed as a "committer". In linux there's only one "committer", Linus himself. Others send patches, to the mailing list or to their pet maintainer upstream. Matt can still do both with FreeBSD, or simply use the send-pr command. What he can't do now is make changes directly to the source tree.
True, but for purposes of determining this, who's the author? Linux 2.4.20, for instance - who wrote it? When did they do it?
I'm not sure of the answer to that -- ie whether the expiration depends on the lifetime of the author or only on the date of creation, for works such as linux. But clearly, the copyright to 2.4.20 will expire *sometime*, but the current version (if it still exists then) will still be protected by copyright. If you can find files in the kernel source which are unchanged for more than 75 years or whatever, those files would be out of copyright. It's all rather hypothetical, clearly unmodified software that old will be totally useless except perhaps for historians.
The copyright is the same. The difference is the licence.
When the copyright expires, the licence will be irrelevant. The work will be in the public domain.
In other words, the GPL uses copyright to enforce itself: that is, it allows you to share the software under certain conditions, but if you aren't willing to abide by those conditions, under copyright law you can't share the code at all. When the copyright is gone, the teeth are gone.
In that story, FreeBSD release engineer Bruce A. Mah comments:
This wouldn't be such a big deal except we had a very similar situation in 4.5 with someone posting a bogus release announcement to Slashdot (and having it slip past the editors). I really hope there isn't a third time.
Well, here's hoping there isn't a fourth, Bruce....
So it's quantum mechanics which needs to be changed, not relativity -- as physicists realized in the 1920s.
Quantum field theory is, but that's not finshed
True enough, but for all practical purposes (ie, to any level of experimental confirmation today or in the foreseeable future) it is finished. The standard model explains pretty much everything we know. The problem is some mathematical uglinesses and arbitrary parameters.
perhaps submitters could either take the trouble to write things in their own words, or save space on slashdot and simply link to the word-for-word-identical
original news item. Or at the very least, credit the source.
As I recall NetBSD had full USB support a year before linux did. FreeBSD probably wasn't close behind either.
True enough, unfortunately USB support on FreeBSD is still pretty flaky (not sure about NetBSD). I know, I use FreeBSD (for other reasons).
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 2
There are a couple of other good answers to your question already. About photons, it's best to keep that out in this discussion: basically, there are two different, separate corrections to classical Newtonian mechanics: relativity, and quantum mechanics. It turns out that classical electromagnetic theory is already correct with respect to relativity. quantum electrodynamics is the quantum version of it, but it is needed only in the limit of small photon numbers: that is, when the intensity of light is very low, or when interactions with single electrons (or other subatomic charged particles) are important. If we're thinking about radio waves, optical telescopes, etc, we don't need to worry about single photons at all. But to understand how atoms emit light, or the photoelectric effect, or how CCDs work, we do need to use quantum mechanics.
Even in quantum mechanics, photons aren't the same "sort" of particles as electrons. You can put any number of photons in the same "state", thereby approximating a classical wave. You can put no more than one electron in the same state (two if you ignore spin), so you can never have anything like a classical wave of electrons.
About your other questions: yes, the field does lose its strength as it moves out (except for special cases like a laser). Light is a rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field. We call it transverse because the electric and magnetic fields point perpendicular to the direction of motion (and also perpendicular to each other). All this comes out of Maxwell's equations, and is discussed in elementary texts like Resnick and Halliday. Not possible to give a detailed answer on slashdot, I'm afraid.
Re:gravity effects are instantaneous
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Wrong. Newtonian gravity suggests effects should be instantaneous, that's why Einstein knew it was wrong and came up with the general theory of relativity, which is the best theory of gravity we have today (and unlike special relativity which was built on the work of others, GR was Einstein's own, nobody else was even thinking along those lines.)
As for magnetism, that travels at the speed of light -- that has been known since Maxwell's time. Basically, that's what electromagnetic radiation is: a changing magnetic field causes a changing electric field, which causes a changing magnetic field,.... The paradox was that Maxwell's equations give you a constant for the speed of light, without reference to the velocity of the observer, so people assumed that they are valid only in the rest frame of a mythical "ether". Einstein showed that Maxwell's equations are correct for all observers, and it is Newton's/Galileo's ideas which are wrong.
Incidentally, just like electromagnetic radiation, GR implies that gravity waves should exist too.
Slashdot Mirror
Every day.
Absolutely. People who don't need it everyday are people who only use one computer (eg, home users with only one machine) or people who never realized how easy it is to run a program on another machine and display it on your desktop. Remove this ability, and you remove a huge reason for using unix/linux on the desktop in the first place.
"Better at lower bitrates" means for a given bitrate with mp3, you can get better quality at a lower bitrate with ogg. If you want a higher bitrate, go ahead, it will sound still better, but after a point you can no longer distinguish it from CD-quality audio (with ogg on my audio system, 128 kb/s is already indistinguishable from a CD to me; mp3 at that bitrate sucks, I need to go up to 256 kb/s to get acceptable quality.)
The anti-americanism charge is just a convenient curtain to filter out / ignore real criticism. Just as criticizing Ariel Sharon can be instantly dismissed (in the US, anyway) as anti-semitism.
The BBC, to take just the best known example, is often critical of the UK. It is still the most respected channel there and, indeed, all over the world. It is highly respected in India (my country) though it is often critical of India. And it's widely viewed too.
True, the BBC is taxpayer-funded and doesn't need to worry too much about ratings. But the same is true of private channels everywhere outside the US, too.
I can understand an American living abroad, in a country ignorant of his culture, not wanting to see negative stories about the US. But an American living in America? If so, I'd say not "God bless America" but "God help America."
Al-Jazeera is based in Qatar. I haven't heard of any bombings there.
There have been procmail-based autoresponders that essentially do this for ages. You maintain a whitelist, people who are not on it need to reply to an email and then get added to your whitelist.
With the modularization of hardware drivers in XFree86 4.x, this is much less of an issue. You can drop in your own hardware driver into a stock XFree86 (in fact, a binary hardware driver written for linux will often work on FreeBSD, it's that good). What more are you looking for?
- It's obvious audio must be integral. Integrate it.
Why is that obvious? I, for one, don't see it at all. XFree86 sends stuff to your video card and your monitor, the audio drivers send stuff to your sound card and your speakers.
- TrueType won. Get over it. Integrate it. Anti-alias it out of the box. Provide a simple means to cope with font substitution just like Microsoft does. End of font problems.
Wake up. TrueType is supported; it's easy to anti-alias (not everyone wants antialiasing, even windows doesn't do it out of the box); and XFree86 actually ships with some TTF fonts (luxi mono/sans/serif, which look lousy in my opinion, but that's not their fault -- they're not font developers, they take what people donate them).
- Create a standard window manager. All others accept the consequences of being weird. Life is short.
XFree86 does ship with a WM -- twm. Like it? I didn't think so. So they should replace it with something like, sawfish? Metacity? KWin? WindowMaker? You have all those options already, why ask XFree86 to add another useless option? What we possibly need is a standard specification that allows one to replace one compliant window manager by another.
- Base the programmatic interface of the whole thing (API) on something worthwhile. Trolltech's QT would be a good place to start. Sharp did it and it works fine. Plus there is an entire suite of application software already written to it. Gnome would be fine too, I don't care.
Again, if you like Qt, use Qt. If you like Gnome, use Gnome. What's the point of XFree86 making those decisions for you? It's all about choice -- in fact it's good that Qt and GTK+ are abstracted (especially Qt), since they can be ported readily to other platforms like MacOS and Windows, which means your applications can be ported quickly too.
Presumably you're an American, so how about learning the English language, for a start?
It's weird that most non-Americans posting on slashdot have far better spelling and grammar than Americans. Maybe they're not just better computer programmers, they're better educated in an overall sense?
Very highly. (Well, the link in my post above contains the full text, so you can at least get a flavour from the first page.)
I'm sure it's available in Portuguese and other languages, but of course it's worth reading in the original if you're comfortable with it.
Eh? Haven't you heard of Three men in a boat ?
Many linux drones use GPL as a synonym for "open source". But I don't think Scilab's licence would even pass the OSI's definition of "open source."
The catch of course is that it's no good your using it if nobody else does. However, if some such system does get a minimal support base today, I predict it will quickly become quite popular. By around 2007 spammers will make normal email almost unusable, unless something drastic is done before that.
This is my single biggest peeve with GNOME 2.x, which is otherwise looking very nice. Well, if they're cohosting their Human Interface Guide with the KDE folks, hopefully someone will get a clue (the clue being: stay compatible with the rest of the world).
If the GNOME folks ever built a car, very likely they'd put the brake to the right of the accelerator, because that's the way it "should be" for some theoretical reason of their own.
That's exactly what it is. He can continue to submit changes, just not commit them himself.
Apples, oranges.
Matt Dillon is not banned from any mailing lists. He's only been removed as a "committer". In linux there's only one "committer", Linus himself. Others send patches, to the mailing list or to their pet maintainer upstream. Matt can still do both with FreeBSD, or simply use the send-pr command. What he can't do now is make changes directly to the source tree.
I'm not sure of the answer to that -- ie whether the expiration depends on the lifetime of the author or only on the date of creation, for works such as linux. But clearly, the copyright to 2.4.20 will expire *sometime*, but the current version (if it still exists then) will still be protected by copyright. If you can find files in the kernel source which are unchanged for more than 75 years or whatever, those files would be out of copyright. It's all rather hypothetical, clearly unmodified software that old will be totally useless except perhaps for historians.
When the copyright expires, the licence will be irrelevant. The work will be in the public domain.
In other words, the GPL uses copyright to enforce itself: that is, it allows you to share the software under certain conditions, but if you aren't willing to abide by those conditions, under copyright law you can't share the code at all. When the copyright is gone, the teeth are gone.
How consistent is that with supporting open source, I wonder. Perhaps something's changed since?
This wouldn't be such a big deal except we had a very similar situation in 4.5 with someone posting a bogus release announcement to Slashdot (and having it slip past the editors). I really hope there isn't a third time.
Well, here's hoping there isn't a fourth, Bruce....
So it's quantum mechanics which needs to be changed, not relativity -- as physicists realized in the 1920s.
Quantum field theory is, but that's not finshed
True enough, but for all practical purposes (ie, to any level of experimental confirmation today or in the foreseeable future) it is finished. The standard model explains pretty much everything we know. The problem is some mathematical uglinesses and arbitrary parameters.
perhaps submitters could either take the trouble to write things in their own words, or save space on slashdot and simply link to the word-for-word-identical original news item. Or at the very least, credit the source.
Yes, that's the best way to win friends and invite users of other systems to BSD -- by insulting them.
True enough, unfortunately USB support on FreeBSD is still pretty flaky (not sure about NetBSD). I know, I use FreeBSD (for other reasons).
Even in quantum mechanics, photons aren't the same "sort" of particles as electrons. You can put any number of photons in the same "state", thereby approximating a classical wave. You can put no more than one electron in the same state (two if you ignore spin), so you can never have anything like a classical wave of electrons.
About your other questions: yes, the field does lose its strength as it moves out (except for special cases like a laser). Light is a rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field. We call it transverse because the electric and magnetic fields point perpendicular to the direction of motion (and also perpendicular to each other). All this comes out of Maxwell's equations, and is discussed in elementary texts like Resnick and Halliday. Not possible to give a detailed answer on slashdot, I'm afraid.
As for magnetism, that travels at the speed of light -- that has been known since Maxwell's time. Basically, that's what electromagnetic radiation is: a changing magnetic field causes a changing electric field, which causes a changing magnetic field, .... The paradox was that Maxwell's equations give you a constant for the speed of light, without reference to the velocity of the observer, so people assumed that they are valid only in the rest frame of a mythical "ether". Einstein showed that Maxwell's equations are correct for all observers, and it is Newton's/Galileo's ideas which are wrong.
Incidentally, just like electromagnetic radiation, GR implies that gravity waves should exist too.