I'm from Holland as well, and I can't access lindows.com anymore; there's a notice that `users in these countries need to click here', a link to www.lindows.com/killchoice which is a redirect to lin---s.com.
I do not think it is a good idea to go to the moon and to Mars anywhere in the next 15 years or so. Seriously, I don't think the US or any other countries are ready for it. Why don't we develop reliable space vehicles first and then think about what we may realistically expect to do with them? Currently, ground- or space-based astronomy and unmanned space flight will give us much more value for the money. Bush's announcement that the US will go to the moon and Mars is IMHO (apart from being an election year appeal to the Americans' national sentiment) a little over-ambitious, to say the least.
If you mean the recent rumours on/. that XFree86 and X.org (= the X Consortium) had merged: as several posters then pointed out, those rumours were simply false.
There was also a SimpleText (well, actually Speech Manager) voice that would sing the words to some well-known tune by Beethoven (I think, can't remember exactly what song or composer). I also remember reading that the computer voice in the song `Fitter, Happier' by Radiohead was done by the same guy who inspired the `Fred' voice in SimpleText.
Hmm, I don't really recognise the slowness you're talking about... but that might be because on my own computer I don't tend to use `heavy' apps because the computer itself is just too slow, and the newer computers at my university run only Linux so I can't compare. I agree with you that resizing and moving windows shouldn't cause the X server to flood other programs with expose events; I don't know whether and how X buffers window contents internally, so I have no clue if this is just a bad implementation or a flaw in the design of X.
X's system for local display is already pretty fast (no need to use the network facilities); specialising for faster local display would probably mean a loss of flexibility. IMO, the single greatest strength of X is the almost complete transparency of running applications remotely; there is no need for application writers to write one interface for local and another one for remote display, and no need for users to get used to remote applications that are `different' from local applications. I use X's remote display quite often (much more often than I'd expected when I first started using it) and I must say the speed is very tolerable, even a not-extremely-fast network (several tens of kB/s) when SSH compression is enabled.
Savannah is not just for GNU developers; anyone can base their free software project there. It's just that Savannah itself is the official website for many GNU packages.
The ancient Greek philosophers discovered that there are exactly five regular polyhedra: the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron, with 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20 faces, respectively. However, they kept the existence of the dodecahedron hidden from the general public, because they perceived it as some divine shape that only the scientists/philosophers (the same thing in those times) ought to know about.
Now that, according to the research mentioned in the article, the universe actually seems to have this shape, this strikes me as an interesting coincidence. (I don't know whether the Greeks themselves actually thought the cosmos was dodecahedron-shaped, though.)
A couple of years ago, I was trying to write my own little stack-oriented language. I had written an interpreter for it in Turbo Pascal 3.0, an extremely old Pascal compiler. There was some kind of problem with the program, and when I was trying to find the cause, I discovered that just declaring a new variable (without ever using it) solved the problem...
I don't think it's easy to apply all their optimisations to gcc. The IBM compiler is of course very ppc-specific, while gcc is cross-platform. Perhaps IBM's optimisations don't really fit into gcc's scheme.
By the way, the performance improvements in the paper look very impressive.
I grepped for `RCU' in the Linux source (2.6.0-test3), and one particularly `suspected' file is kernel/rcupdate.c, written in 2001 by an IBM employee and copyrighted by IBM. The copyright notice also says it is based on previous work by another IBM employee. There are 45 files in total containing `RCU'. (Haven't tried `rcu', `NUMA', or `numa' yet.)
What if there were more open-source packages that seemingly contain commercial material, so that they give up trying to keep track of these DMCA violations? Same principle as with an Emacs package (I believe it's called spooky) that inserts words like terrorist', 'bomb', and 'secret' in e-mail headers to 'slashdot' a reported NSA server checking all e-mails for illegal activities.
Be careful what you wish for though - look at the ~28x size increase of the binary though. Now imagine that for all the graphical applications on your system (not to mention the hassles with security updates, as witnessed when problems were found with zlib).
Yes, and not only that: if you have multiple programs using the same toolkit, the OS can't keep one copy of it in the disk cache and use it for each application, which results in either longer startup times (reading from disk) or more memory taken up. If you have only one program that uses a particular library, it is better to link statically, as this saves some time in the dynamic linker.
The book will make a good appearance on any bookshelf next to the UNIX-HATERS HANDBOOK!
"Are you fed up with frequent fastboots, ineffective NFS, lousy libraries, creeping C++, broken X-Windows, monsterous Motif, mumbling manual entries, mutilated Makefiles, slimey sendmail, and satanic shell scripts? Come and vent polemic with other victims of Unix, and learn that you are not alone: your problems with Unix are not your fault!"
From the article: The open source license is not open, because you cannot take it and ever use it in a job-creating activity.
Bill Gates's definition of `open' is at least, ahem, interesting... I wonder what the concept of being `open' has to do with the possibility of being used in enterprises. I assume this should be translated as "I hate this `open' software thing because I can't take it and put it into my closed-source project to make a profit from it."
Furthermore, how exactly can are companies like Red Hat exist if open source software can't coexist with job-creating activities?
No, we don't know how the universe will end (as far as I know). The density in the universe is extremely close to the critical density, and it is not known whether we live in an open or a closed universe (expanding forever or finally going to recollapse).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm from Holland as well, and I can't access lindows.com anymore; there's a notice that `users in these countries need to click here', a link to www.lindows.com/killchoice which is a redirect to lin---s.com.
I do not think it is a good idea to go to the moon and to Mars anywhere in the next 15 years or so. Seriously, I don't think the US or any other countries are ready for it. Why don't we develop reliable space vehicles first and then think about what we may realistically expect to do with them? Currently, ground- or space-based astronomy and unmanned space flight will give us much more value for the money. Bush's announcement that the US will go to the moon and Mars is IMHO (apart from being an election year appeal to the Americans' national sentiment) a little over-ambitious, to say the least.
If you mean the recent rumours on /. that XFree86 and X.org (= the X Consortium) had merged: as several posters then pointed out, those rumours were simply false.
There was also a SimpleText (well, actually Speech Manager) voice that would sing the words to some well-known tune by Beethoven (I think, can't remember exactly what song or composer). I also remember reading that the computer voice in the song `Fitter, Happier' by Radiohead was done by the same guy who inspired the `Fred' voice in SimpleText.
Hmm, I don't really recognise the slowness you're talking about... but that might be because on my own computer I don't tend to use `heavy' apps because the computer itself is just too slow, and the newer computers at my university run only Linux so I can't compare. I agree with you that resizing and moving windows shouldn't cause the X server to flood other programs with expose events; I don't know whether and how X buffers window contents internally, so I have no clue if this is just a bad implementation or a flaw in the design of X.
X's system for local display is already pretty fast (no need to use the network facilities); specialising for faster local display would probably mean a loss of flexibility. IMO, the single greatest strength of X is the almost complete transparency of running applications remotely; there is no need for application writers to write one interface for local and another one for remote display, and no need for users to get used to remote applications that are `different' from local applications. I use X's remote display quite often (much more often than I'd expected when I first started using it) and I must say the speed is very tolerable, even a not-extremely-fast network (several tens of kB/s) when SSH compression is enabled.
I'd like to see more countries do this. Hopefully it'll help convince businesses and people that Microsoft isn't the only choice.
On first reading, I thought it said 'Time Travel on Earth, Again'...
Those `upgraded' boxes... we know that of course they run NetBSD, but do they run Linux?
Savannah is not just for GNU developers; anyone can base their free software project there. It's just that Savannah itself is the official website for many GNU packages.
Now that, according to the research mentioned in the article, the universe actually seems to have this shape, this strikes me as an interesting coincidence. (I don't know whether the Greeks themselves actually thought the cosmos was dodecahedron-shaped, though.)
A couple of years ago, I was trying to write my own little stack-oriented language. I had written an interpreter for it in Turbo Pascal 3.0, an extremely old Pascal compiler. There was some kind of problem with the program, and when I was trying to find the cause, I discovered that just declaring a new variable (without ever using it) solved the problem...
That would be "in abstracto"...
To start with, let's give each of those ID chips a number! Oh wait... now there are no numbers left for all my other stuff!
By the way, the performance improvements in the paper look very impressive.
So what's the next revolution? A web server written in Brainf**k?
I grepped for `RCU' in the Linux source (2.6.0-test3), and one particularly `suspected' file is kernel/rcupdate.c, written in 2001 by an IBM employee and copyrighted by IBM. The copyright notice also says it is based on previous work by another IBM employee. There are 45 files in total containing `RCU'. (Haven't tried `rcu', `NUMA', or `numa' yet.)
What if there were more open-source packages that seemingly contain commercial material, so that they give up trying to keep track of these DMCA violations? Same principle as with an Emacs package (I believe it's called spooky) that inserts words like terrorist', 'bomb', and 'secret' in e-mail headers to 'slashdot' a reported NSA server checking all e-mails for illegal activities.
Yes, and not only that: if you have multiple programs using the same toolkit, the OS can't keep one copy of it in the disk cache and use it for each application, which results in either longer startup times (reading from disk) or more memory taken up. If you have only one program that uses a particular library, it is better to link statically, as this saves some time in the dynamic linker.
Has SCO already taken the opportunity to claim this new version as yet another illegal *x derivative?
Press OK to terminate universe.
Press Cancel to debug.
[ ] Send bug report.
"Are you fed up with frequent fastboots, ineffective NFS, lousy libraries, creeping C++, broken X-Windows, monsterous Motif, mumbling manual entries, mutilated Makefiles, slimey sendmail, and satanic shell scripts? Come and vent polemic with other victims of Unix, and learn that you are not alone: your problems with Unix are not your fault!"
(By the way, I'm not a Unix hater.)
Bill Gates's definition of `open' is at least, ahem, interesting... I wonder what the concept of being `open' has to do with the possibility of being used in enterprises. I assume this should be translated as "I hate this `open' software thing because I can't take it and put it into my closed-source project to make a profit from it."
Furthermore, how exactly can are companies like Red Hat exist if open source software can't coexist with job-creating activities?
No, we don't know how the universe will end (as far as I know). The density in the universe is extremely close to the critical density, and it is not known whether we live in an open or a closed universe (expanding forever or finally going to recollapse).
Why not make some good strong coffee and fill your cartridge with that? It's black, it's liquid... voila!