Other than protocol bloat, no. That was the original idea behind Cairo: provide a high-level API that people could use on X11 now, and then implement primitives for supporting Cairo on the server side, with a protocol extension for transferring them, when Cairo's API was a bit more stable (which it is now). Unfortunately, Cairo is LGPL, so if you wanted to move it into the server you'd need to reimplement it under the X11 license.
At 13.3mm, it's 50% thicker than the iPad, and I also question your price slightly - from Acer's web site it's £427, which is about $700, and that's with £100 off the RRP, so the price you quote is half the price Acer quotes, and a lot more than the iPad. Staples' web site refuses to give me a price without entering a US Zip code, so I can't tell if it's really that price.
So, 50% thicker, and the UK price is over 50% more than the iPad, although the display does seem nicer. If I had a use for such a device, I'd be quite tempted, but it's the kind of thing I'd buy, use for a few days, and then never touch again.
NeWS and Display PostScript were very similar, but there were some differences. NeWS encouraged you to write entire view objects in PostScript. This was a bitch to maintain, but it was great for remote display. With NeWS, you clicked on a button and it ran a PostScript program showing the button in the pressed state and sent a message to the remote machine saying the button had been pressed. With DPS and X11, you click on a button, and it sends a 'mouse click at coordinates x, y' message to the remote server. The remote machine then sends back drawing commands to produce a pressed button. Over a slow link, this means that NeWS buttons respond immediately, while X11 / DPS buttons respond after 100+ms. The closest thing we have now is the web. The canvas tag and JavaScript basically provide a modern version of NeWS.
DPS was a bit different, and Apple ditched the programmability entirely when they moved to the PDF rendering model in Quartz. This means that the interface is simpler - you no longer need an interpreter in the display server - and the addition of all of the compositing stuff meant that you could do much better raster displays.
Given that PDF is actually quite a dense format already, I'd be tempted to simply define the wire protocol for drawing as encapsulated PDF objects. This would let you store any sequence of drawing commands (e.g. a button shape, a text glyph composed of bezier curves, or an image) on the display server trivially and then redraw it at the current position with just a single command. It would be really easy to implement this with the canvas tag, so you could have a simple display server implemented in a web browser using WebSocket for remote display anywhere, and a proper native version for local and remote display.
How many users? Very few. How many potential buyers? A lot. If you go into a shop and pick up two tablets, you're a lot more likely to buy one that's 20% thinner. If you only pick up the thicker one, you probably won't think it's too thick.
Well, you can move things into the X server, but currently X doesn't support anything like the functionality that cairo needs. There is no X command for drawing a bezier path. There isn't even an X primitive for drawing an antialiased line. That's why people use things like Cairo.
Now, ideally, I'd like something a bit more like Apple's display server, where PDF-like commands are streamed directly to the display server, which can then do the 2D rendering and compositing. One of the first things I'd do if I were implementing X12 is ditch all of the existing X11 drawing commands and add most of the PDF 1.4 operators - in fact, the set that the HTML 5 canvas tag exposes to JavaScript would do very nicely.
Really? I'm pretty comfortably off, but I'm not deluded enough to believe that this is entirely due to my own endeavours. I am, admittedly, pretty awesome, but I also had a lot of advantages throughout my life. I'm classed as a liberal, because I'd like everyone to have the same opportunities that I had, because I think that would produce a society that I'd like to live in. Is that greed, or greed and envy?
According to their policy you will be throttled for 5 hours, down to 35% of your normal speed, if you upload more than 6000MB between 3-8PM on any given day. So, if max out your upload for two hours and forty minutes, during that 5 hour window, then you will be throttled.
Care to give some examples? And when you say 'better hardware', remember that physical dimensions are one of the most important aspects of the hardware to a typical user, while CPU power is significantly less important. So, your mission (should you choose to accept it) name one Android tablet that:
Is 8.8 mm or less deep.
Has a 1024x768 display.
Has a 10 hour battery life.
Retails for under $499.
Last time I checked, there were no Android tablets that even met the first requirement, and the ones that matched the second two failed the third. I don't really see the point of this kind of device, so I've not looked very closely, but I have read comments from Samsung about how difficult it was to compete with Apple because they could get the components significantly cheaper due to their large volumes (purchasing volumes, that is, not the girth of their users).
My mother only has 1Mb/s, and it's far better than dial-up. Downloading stuff is a bit painful - you actually have to wait or 10MB downloads to arrive - but for normal web browsing and email it's perfectly adequate. The main time I notice the difference is on iPlayer - her connection isn't quite fast enough to stream video. 1.5Mb/s would be. Anyone who thinks that a connection that's fast enough to stream SD video is unbearably slow has been living a very pampered existence.
X is far from perfect (and I say this as someone who's written a compositing WM). There is a huge amount of the X11 protocol that no one actually uses anymore. Font rendering, for example, has to be done on the client or you get different sets of fonts for remote X11 (yuck!). For fast text rendering, you use the XRENDER extension, and store glyphs in the server then composite them. That takes care of text, but what about line drawings? X has basic drawing primitives, but most apps use something like Cairo to give a PostScript / PDF style drawing API, and Cairo doesn't use any of the X drawing primitives. It just draws everything into a pixmap and then sends it to the X server. This means that most of what people are actually using X for is getting a window that they can composite pixmaps into. And X sucks at that. The input model is also pretty horrible (take a look at how click-to-focus is implemented some time, it will make your brain hurt).
The problem with Wayland is that it doesn't seem much better. It's thinner, which is nice, but that's about it. It's also Linux-only (while X.org runs on all *NIX systems, plus Windows), and it is released under a less permissive license than X.org.
It's astonishing the doublethink required to support an entitlement mentality like yours, posting on Slashdot and enjoying all of the benefits of being born into a comfortable position in a modern society, and decrying freeloaders who don't have the same advantages as you.
If they can afford $10/day for cigarettes, then they can afford a lot of things. The poverty line in the USA is $10,890 for an individual. Someone spending $3,560/year on a luxury item is not poor by any standard measure.
Quick sort is a lot more complicated to implement than, say, bubble sort.
Actually, it really isn't. Quick sort can be implemented in 3-4 lines of code in a functional language, or about 20 in an imperative language. It's a spectacularly simple algorithm to implement. I've used it as an example of an algorithm to try to parallelise in a couple of talks because you can fit it on a slide without it becoming too small for people at the back to read. Bubble sort is about as complicated, if not slightly more so.
The same is true in a lot of other cases. Slow algorithms are not intrinsically simpler than fast ones. If anything, the converse is true because a fast algorithm is doing less work.
The lines themselves should be public, which the government leases to private business to provide internet service
Why does the government have to be involved at all? Why not let individuals own the last-mile infrastructure. When you buy a house, you also buy the connection from the cabinet to your house. Take it a step further, and also buy a share in a cooperative that owns the connection between the cabinet and the exchange. Transit providers then compete to offer service to the neighbourhood.
Well, as IPv4 addresses become scarce, having a load of customers on IPv6 with NAT64 to access v4 sites may be cheaper. Rolling this out for the people too poor to switch to an alternative service first makes sense from a business standpoint.
As a "gentleman" was someone who did not have to work for a living
Not true. The term has had a lot of meanings over the centuries, but the common use in the late 1800s and for the last century was related to behaviour, not to income. This usage goes back to about 1400, although other uses (e.g. implying nobility by birth or the ownership of land) were common until about the time of the industrial revolution. Most gentlemen who did have to work would have been members of the professions (as opposed to the trades - a profession largely being defined as a job suitable for a gentleman) and would have included teachers, doctors, and lawyers, for example.
When you do get around to it - drop me a mail (my username in the commit logs @gna.org should work). I'd be happy to help, and we may even have some Fedora packages by then...
SETI is perfectly scientific. You have a hypothesis ("There is intelligent life in the universe trying to communicate with us."), and conduct an experiment to test it.
So, if SETI is scientific, what outcome of the experiment would falsify their hypothesis? It is equally scientific to hypothesise that God exists and is watching us and test it by the experiment of staring at the sky and trying to spot him.
A real scientific theory makes predictions that can either be supported or contradicted by experiment. SETI makes no falsifiable predictions, and is therefore faith, not science.
It's not just a question of blasting EM everywhere, it also has to be the kind of low frequency EM that will be distinguishable from noise at stellar distances. If there were another Earth-like civilisation around Alpha Centauri, at the same level of development, then we probably wouldn't spot them with SETI.
I expect the Fedora maintainer will probably do something sensible with this; why do you declare this authoritatively to be not the case? Upstream also seems to be in a half-baked state.
Based on past experience with the Fedora, Gentoo, and Ubuntu bug trackers. People file bugs there, and then we never hear about them. Then someone posts to the mailing list saying that a problem has been known for two years and asking why we haven't fixed it. Answer: because it wasn't known to us. Filing a bug report on a distribution's bug tracker is like posting it on your blog. Someone who can fix it may stumble across it, but generally they won't. It's okay for really big projects, because RedHat / Canonical probably employs someone who has commit access to these and can fix the bug or refer it to the correct person, but for anything else it's a complete waste of your time.
Okay, I've only 2.8 of LLVM/Clang, and libobjc-4.6.0-10.fc15.x86_64
Interesting. GCC 4.6 was released after LLVM 2.8, yet you get packages for GCC not Clang. I guess the fact that RedHat employs a few GCC contributors may have something to do with that. I don't think I'd stick with an operating system where they restrict your access to new software for political reasons, but to each his own.
I'll move on. I'll write my own solution in Perl when I need it.
Good luck. If you stick to simple markup in the chapters as I suggested, it's pretty easy to do. Most of the complexity of EtoileText is from the fact that the framework is designed for writing semantic document editors, not just converting TeX. The LaTeX to HTML conversion was just a simple test program that filled a need I had.
SSL certificates aren't intended to ensure that you're running a legitimate business. How could they?
Actually, that is the aim of the expensive ones that allow the browser to display the business name in the address bar. Before issuing them, the CA is supposed to do a detailed check on the business. In practice, I wouldn't be surprised if the only check is actually a cheque.
Your argument is like telling someone that an umbrella is useless, because it will dissolve in the event that acid rain reaches a certain pH. It's technically accurate, but that doesn't make it any less stupid.
So? Share value is only important if you are compensating your employees with stock options or if you are intending to raise capital by selling shares. If you post a loss and people sell their shares, then management can buy them cheaply (as long as they don't get too close to insider trading), and then sell them later when their paper losses are off the books and they're back into making a profit.
That said, the $16bn figure is from RIAA numbers, not from SEC filings, which tell a very different story.
Because encrypted connections are private, and the public spectrum is... public. It's also a shared resource. Using encryption in public spectrum is like deciding to have a party in the town square and employing people at all of the entrances to only let in people that you like. You're taking a public space and restricting access to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than protocol bloat, no. That was the original idea behind Cairo: provide a high-level API that people could use on X11 now, and then implement primitives for supporting Cairo on the server side, with a protocol extension for transferring them, when Cairo's API was a bit more stable (which it is now). Unfortunately, Cairo is LGPL, so if you wanted to move it into the server you'd need to reimplement it under the X11 license.
At 13.3mm, it's 50% thicker than the iPad, and I also question your price slightly - from Acer's web site it's £427, which is about $700, and that's with £100 off the RRP, so the price you quote is half the price Acer quotes, and a lot more than the iPad. Staples' web site refuses to give me a price without entering a US Zip code, so I can't tell if it's really that price.
So, 50% thicker, and the UK price is over 50% more than the iPad, although the display does seem nicer. If I had a use for such a device, I'd be quite tempted, but it's the kind of thing I'd buy, use for a few days, and then never touch again.
NeWS and Display PostScript were very similar, but there were some differences. NeWS encouraged you to write entire view objects in PostScript. This was a bitch to maintain, but it was great for remote display. With NeWS, you clicked on a button and it ran a PostScript program showing the button in the pressed state and sent a message to the remote machine saying the button had been pressed. With DPS and X11, you click on a button, and it sends a 'mouse click at coordinates x, y' message to the remote server. The remote machine then sends back drawing commands to produce a pressed button. Over a slow link, this means that NeWS buttons respond immediately, while X11 / DPS buttons respond after 100+ms. The closest thing we have now is the web. The canvas tag and JavaScript basically provide a modern version of NeWS.
DPS was a bit different, and Apple ditched the programmability entirely when they moved to the PDF rendering model in Quartz. This means that the interface is simpler - you no longer need an interpreter in the display server - and the addition of all of the compositing stuff meant that you could do much better raster displays.
Given that PDF is actually quite a dense format already, I'd be tempted to simply define the wire protocol for drawing as encapsulated PDF objects. This would let you store any sequence of drawing commands (e.g. a button shape, a text glyph composed of bezier curves, or an image) on the display server trivially and then redraw it at the current position with just a single command. It would be really easy to implement this with the canvas tag, so you could have a simple display server implemented in a web browser using WebSocket for remote display anywhere, and a proper native version for local and remote display.
How many users? Very few. How many potential buyers? A lot. If you go into a shop and pick up two tablets, you're a lot more likely to buy one that's 20% thinner. If you only pick up the thicker one, you probably won't think it's too thick.
Well, you can move things into the X server, but currently X doesn't support anything like the functionality that cairo needs. There is no X command for drawing a bezier path. There isn't even an X primitive for drawing an antialiased line. That's why people use things like Cairo.
Now, ideally, I'd like something a bit more like Apple's display server, where PDF-like commands are streamed directly to the display server, which can then do the 2D rendering and compositing. One of the first things I'd do if I were implementing X12 is ditch all of the existing X11 drawing commands and add most of the PDF 1.4 operators - in fact, the set that the HTML 5 canvas tag exposes to JavaScript would do very nicely.
Really? I'm pretty comfortably off, but I'm not deluded enough to believe that this is entirely due to my own endeavours. I am, admittedly, pretty awesome, but I also had a lot of advantages throughout my life. I'm classed as a liberal, because I'd like everyone to have the same opportunities that I had, because I think that would produce a society that I'd like to live in. Is that greed, or greed and envy?
According to their policy you will be throttled for 5 hours, down to 35% of your normal speed, if you upload more than 6000MB between 3-8PM on any given day. So, if max out your upload for two hours and forty minutes, during that 5 hour window, then you will be throttled.
Care to give some examples? And when you say 'better hardware', remember that physical dimensions are one of the most important aspects of the hardware to a typical user, while CPU power is significantly less important. So, your mission (should you choose to accept it) name one Android tablet that:
Last time I checked, there were no Android tablets that even met the first requirement, and the ones that matched the second two failed the third. I don't really see the point of this kind of device, so I've not looked very closely, but I have read comments from Samsung about how difficult it was to compete with Apple because they could get the components significantly cheaper due to their large volumes (purchasing volumes, that is, not the girth of their users).
My mother only has 1Mb/s, and it's far better than dial-up. Downloading stuff is a bit painful - you actually have to wait or 10MB downloads to arrive - but for normal web browsing and email it's perfectly adequate. The main time I notice the difference is on iPlayer - her connection isn't quite fast enough to stream video. 1.5Mb/s would be. Anyone who thinks that a connection that's fast enough to stream SD video is unbearably slow has been living a very pampered existence.
X is far from perfect (and I say this as someone who's written a compositing WM). There is a huge amount of the X11 protocol that no one actually uses anymore. Font rendering, for example, has to be done on the client or you get different sets of fonts for remote X11 (yuck!). For fast text rendering, you use the XRENDER extension, and store glyphs in the server then composite them. That takes care of text, but what about line drawings? X has basic drawing primitives, but most apps use something like Cairo to give a PostScript / PDF style drawing API, and Cairo doesn't use any of the X drawing primitives. It just draws everything into a pixmap and then sends it to the X server. This means that most of what people are actually using X for is getting a window that they can composite pixmaps into. And X sucks at that. The input model is also pretty horrible (take a look at how click-to-focus is implemented some time, it will make your brain hurt).
The problem with Wayland is that it doesn't seem much better. It's thinner, which is nice, but that's about it. It's also Linux-only (while X.org runs on all *NIX systems, plus Windows), and it is released under a less permissive license than X.org.
It's astonishing the doublethink required to support an entitlement mentality like yours, posting on Slashdot and enjoying all of the benefits of being born into a comfortable position in a modern society, and decrying freeloaders who don't have the same advantages as you.
If they can afford $10/day for cigarettes, then they can afford a lot of things. The poverty line in the USA is $10,890 for an individual. Someone spending $3,560/year on a luxury item is not poor by any standard measure.
Quick sort is a lot more complicated to implement than, say, bubble sort.
Actually, it really isn't. Quick sort can be implemented in 3-4 lines of code in a functional language, or about 20 in an imperative language. It's a spectacularly simple algorithm to implement. I've used it as an example of an algorithm to try to parallelise in a couple of talks because you can fit it on a slide without it becoming too small for people at the back to read. Bubble sort is about as complicated, if not slightly more so.
The same is true in a lot of other cases. Slow algorithms are not intrinsically simpler than fast ones. If anything, the converse is true because a fast algorithm is doing less work.
The lines themselves should be public, which the government leases to private business to provide internet service
Why does the government have to be involved at all? Why not let individuals own the last-mile infrastructure. When you buy a house, you also buy the connection from the cabinet to your house. Take it a step further, and also buy a share in a cooperative that owns the connection between the cabinet and the exchange. Transit providers then compete to offer service to the neighbourhood.
Well, as IPv4 addresses become scarce, having a load of customers on IPv6 with NAT64 to access v4 sites may be cheaper. Rolling this out for the people too poor to switch to an alternative service first makes sense from a business standpoint.
As a "gentleman" was someone who did not have to work for a living
Not true. The term has had a lot of meanings over the centuries, but the common use in the late 1800s and for the last century was related to behaviour, not to income. This usage goes back to about 1400, although other uses (e.g. implying nobility by birth or the ownership of land) were common until about the time of the industrial revolution. Most gentlemen who did have to work would have been members of the professions (as opposed to the trades - a profession largely being defined as a job suitable for a gentleman) and would have included teachers, doctors, and lawyers, for example.
When you do get around to it - drop me a mail (my username in the commit logs @gna.org should work). I'd be happy to help, and we may even have some Fedora packages by then...
SETI is perfectly scientific. You have a hypothesis ("There is intelligent life in the universe trying to communicate with us."), and conduct an experiment to test it.
So, if SETI is scientific, what outcome of the experiment would falsify their hypothesis? It is equally scientific to hypothesise that God exists and is watching us and test it by the experiment of staring at the sky and trying to spot him.
A real scientific theory makes predictions that can either be supported or contradicted by experiment. SETI makes no falsifiable predictions, and is therefore faith, not science.
It's not just a question of blasting EM everywhere, it also has to be the kind of low frequency EM that will be distinguishable from noise at stellar distances. If there were another Earth-like civilisation around Alpha Centauri, at the same level of development, then we probably wouldn't spot them with SETI.
Same here. Little bit of dust was on my screen in just the right place. I was very disappointed when I moved the browser window and it became Allen.
I expect the Fedora maintainer will probably do something sensible with this; why do you declare this authoritatively to be not the case? Upstream also seems to be in a half-baked state.
Based on past experience with the Fedora, Gentoo, and Ubuntu bug trackers. People file bugs there, and then we never hear about them. Then someone posts to the mailing list saying that a problem has been known for two years and asking why we haven't fixed it. Answer: because it wasn't known to us. Filing a bug report on a distribution's bug tracker is like posting it on your blog. Someone who can fix it may stumble across it, but generally they won't. It's okay for really big projects, because RedHat / Canonical probably employs someone who has commit access to these and can fix the bug or refer it to the correct person, but for anything else it's a complete waste of your time.
Okay, I've only 2.8 of LLVM/Clang, and libobjc-4.6.0-10.fc15.x86_64
Interesting. GCC 4.6 was released after LLVM 2.8, yet you get packages for GCC not Clang. I guess the fact that RedHat employs a few GCC contributors may have something to do with that. I don't think I'd stick with an operating system where they restrict your access to new software for political reasons, but to each his own.
I'll move on. I'll write my own solution in Perl when I need it.
Good luck. If you stick to simple markup in the chapters as I suggested, it's pretty easy to do. Most of the complexity of EtoileText is from the fact that the framework is designed for writing semantic document editors, not just converting TeX. The LaTeX to HTML conversion was just a simple test program that filled a need I had.
SSL certificates aren't intended to ensure that you're running a legitimate business. How could they?
Actually, that is the aim of the expensive ones that allow the browser to display the business name in the address bar. Before issuing them, the CA is supposed to do a detailed check on the business. In practice, I wouldn't be surprised if the only check is actually a cheque.
Your argument is like telling someone that an umbrella is useless, because it will dissolve in the event that acid rain reaches a certain pH. It's technically accurate, but that doesn't make it any less stupid.
So? Share value is only important if you are compensating your employees with stock options or if you are intending to raise capital by selling shares. If you post a loss and people sell their shares, then management can buy them cheaply (as long as they don't get too close to insider trading), and then sell them later when their paper losses are off the books and they're back into making a profit.
That said, the $16bn figure is from RIAA numbers, not from SEC filings, which tell a very different story.
Because encrypted connections are private, and the public spectrum is... public. It's also a shared resource. Using encryption in public spectrum is like deciding to have a party in the town square and employing people at all of the entrances to only let in people that you like. You're taking a public space and restricting access to it.