A compiler never gets bored or tired, so yea writing clean code is smart. Let the compiler do the optimizations and overall you'll probably see it do a better job then you ever could. A compiler might not see everything you might (i.e. !ptr and (ptr ==NULL) being equal, this is just an example, thats probably not a true statement), but the compiler will also spot things you never would. On average it will always beat you out. Of course if you really need speed then start profiling your code, optimizing code as much as you can where its needed most in conjunction with the compiler optimizations will help greatly. Regards, Steve
Why hate java? For web applications you can't get much more scalable then java. I'm a java/python/C++/C/perl hacker and they all have benefits. The right tool for the right job. Java has to be doing something right, afterall how many corporations don't rely heavily upon it? Developing for java is actually a pleasure since amazing IDE's like Eclipse and NetBeans have been released. Theses IDE's have extensive support for everything from desktop programs with gui builders, web applications with integration to tomcat, to mobile device developement with cell phone emulators and the works. Hell, java can even be used for OS developement (jNode ) once you get the assembly stub out of the way. With today's VMs I often find java is faster or on par with C++. It really is a nice language. Regards, Steve
I believe federal money can go to stem cell research. It just can't go to stem cell research where the cells come from lab grown embryos that are then killed and harvested. At least that's my understanding. Regardless, there is so much private money floating around in stem cell labs that government money, while helpful, wouldn't make as much of an impact as people would think. Regards, Steve
Re:This version doesnt fix some new type of popups
on
Firefox 1.0.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, but whose problem is it? Refusing to use a superior and free product just because it doesn't have mass market is stupid and linux would still be no where if everyone thought like that. They should either use both formats, or tell windows and mac users instructions for playing OGG. Its a better sounding format anyway. Don't support mp3's and software patents just becuase its easy to do. Let people know that its not okay and make a difference. Real Player supports ogg (at least on linux it does, so I'd assume the windows version does too), most people have Real Player. It's people that conform into whatever is accepted at the time that stifle change. Regards, Steve
It doesn't matter... the company that is responsible for Fedora's development is in the US and is still held legally liable for holding US copyright law. Do you really think that if I'm based in the US and selling something to Europe, that I can violate US patent law? It works both ways as well iirc, if you sell something to us then you must respect our patents. Fedora is one of the few distros that includes only fully free software, and they stick to their guns on it. Its actually really nice running fedora and knowing that everything on there is patent free... its liberating, if you will. Of course some companies may claim otherwise with the occasional law suit...*cough* SCO *cough*.
Anyway... I've got two questions for you. Why would you fork Fedora when you can just plop this into/etc/ then do "yum install xmms-mp3". There your problem is solved, its not really worth a new distro to do that. My second question for you is why would you want to support a format that is patented at all( doesn't matter where). The idea is to help people realize that software patents are not acceptable and won't be tolerated. Give OGG a shot, honestly it sounds much better bit for bit (well thats obvious considering it uses more modern algorithms) and takes up less space. I only buy OGG compatible music players and right now I'm really happy with everything. I'm not sure if you use Fedora but, for more info on it FedoraFAQ is a really good resource. Take care Regards, Steve
Some countries like to remain a little more dignified. Rioting and protesting get old once you get over the age of 17. They achieve nothing and make you look like a fool. Sure they break out every now and then, but peaceful protests are just as effective and are taken more serious. Peaceful protests also don't make you look as foolish. Regardless, there are better ways to make points then to protest in any form (protesting is kind of like stomping your feet as a child). But on to the topic at hand... Diebold first of all didn't control anywhere near every machine, in fact it was a relatively small percentage. I personally think that they shouldn't have been used at all, but honestly to crack the machine you typically had to do things that you could only get away with in the privacy of your home (due to either the time it takes or some other factor). There could have been a better method, but its not an easy task to redeploy thousands of voting machines.
I didn't mean to insult the project if thats how you took it. Its just that honestly Enlightenment is a pain to use and install from a user perspective. Even your CVS is a mess... it should be as easy as pulling down CVS, autogen.sh, configure and make all to build everything. The developers apparently have no problem using Enlightenment, but they've probably never seen an average user interact with it for a period of time. It sure has lots of nice eye candy, but that does noone anygood if its unusable. The nice thing with Fedora getting involved is that they've been a major force in human interface guidelines for gnome and they seem to consistently push out nice, easy-to-use interfaces. With Seth and Havoc in the effort, linux can finally have all the special effects of enlightenment with the usability of Gnome. On technical merits alone though, enlightenment is pretty impressive. Regards, Steve
Wow this is a deep thread. Nice thoughts, well worded and put together. Just want to point out one misconception that you seem to keep reiterating. Fedora comes with up2date, a program that sits in your taskbar and lights up when updates are available. You click it, and it downloads and installs them for you. I am just stating this so that if this thread is ever referenced that people don't think that inorder to get updates you have to go download them from fedora's site. Everything is handled automagically for you, you just click okay. That goes for security and just regular application updates as well. Fedora really is a nice distro, I understand why people might stay away from it if they don't like Red Hat(I personally do like Red Hat, I find it hard to hate a company that has done so much for the community), but I can't think of a single reason not to use the distro based on technial merit. It really is a nicely built OS, with all kinds of nice advanced features (most notably SELinux) Okay I'll stop ranting now. Regards, Steve
My laptop has an i810, if your using a 2.6.10.x series kernel then yes the current driver is broken, but 2.6.9 and prior is fine. It's being worked on. I've been using Fedora since the very first test release of FC1, so nearly 1.5 to 2 years and this is the first time any issue like this has happened that I can remember (at least to me), maybe I'm just lucky:) Anyway, I believe by default up2date doesnt grab new kernels, so if you set it up to grab new kernels and your running 2.6.10.x then that is probably your issue. Otherwise it might be a sound daemon issue, bugzilla is your friend though if you get a chance to report it and the folks in #Fedora are very nice. Regards, Steve
iDownload's front page claims that they are spyware free. To put things in perpective, spyware is like farting, the first person to deny it usually did it. If you read further down their list, it says "Certified Virus Free". Have you ever seen software have to claim its virus free? And where exactly do you get this certification, and who certifies it? I want to see the certificate. Its their software dammit, of course its virus free (assuming they were a legit company), just like all commercial software from respectable companies should be. Regards, Steve
No offense to Rasterman, and I'm sure there are plenty of different ways to go about implementing features such as these, but my experience with enlightenment's "enhanced" features has been less then impressive. The effects usually look professional, but they run slow and inefficiently (my video card does suck though... but renders most 3d games like Enemy Territory fine). Enlightenment is all good and well until you try to use it for long periods of time. Seth and Havoc's architecture seems more scalable and consolidated from a programmers point of view. The one thing is though, enlightenment is already out there, exisits,and works. However, enlightenment is way too layered and has a million different little components... I just personally think it could all be implemented better. So lets hope that they all work together and come out with something absolutely amazing. Regards, Steve
I believe moving most of X's computations into the video card's hardware will make it snappier while extending it's capabilities at the same time. I try to regularly follow what Havoc and Seth are up to (which is always something interesting) and this is my understanding of one of the big reasons for hardware acceleration. Regardless of hardware acceleration though, lots of work is going on to make X snappier. It's come a long way like you said. On a slighlty different note, here is another project being worked on at Red Hat, it seems really cool, and really needed if you ever expect to find linux a common desktop in businesses and schools: Sabayon. Regards, Steve
Have you listened to much of the music recently? It's not art, its every poor chap that learns how to play a guitar signing their lives away to some large record company to make mediocre music that is then "forced" down consumers throats by mass marketing campaigns. Last time I checked, Van Gogh did not have a huge corporation dumping millions into advertising and promoting his art. Van Gogh's work spoke for itself, and any music worth a grain of salt will also speak for itself. Most of the stuff you buy on iTunes or the many other Mp3 sites is not art, its fabricated sounds produced by doing studies on current trends and what is appealing to people. Its not inspired, most things are done with calculations now on how successful a certain beat is likely to be. Its purely a profitable business, treating it like manure is certainly fine. If your looking for music that is inspired and that should not be compared to manure, support your local artists playing at the local bars, clubs, and halls. Regards, Steve
But if the bank already has her password and the bank can't read whatever she sends them, why would she send them her password encrypted? It does them no good. She should just contact the bank, most likely giving them only her public key, and then the bank already knows the password and format of the envelope as well as the number to sum to. They can then create an "envelope" and sign it with her key. Although the whole system is stupid in that it presumes that the key was somehow transmitted securely to the bank beforehand and it does nothing to address that issue. There are already plenty of secure algorithms with verification if both parties share a secret. This guy's method is not only insecure, but just plain stupid and addresses no concerns in the crypto community. I can't believe he teaches students. Regards, Steve
First of all, if you can securely communicate with the server at some point (which is required for this to work - the bank needs your hash already) then you can simply use one time pads with rotating keys from that point forth... much more secure. Second of all, I don't know if his analogy to envelopes was just vague or if it really did accurately describe the protocol. If it did describe it accurately then what exactly stops me from standing in between the alice and her bank. Alice hands me her signed envelope, I hand it to the bank, the bank hands me the envelope with the magic numbers that sum to 0, I hand it back to alice. It doesn't matter if I ever knew what was in the envelope, Alice only knows that the authenticated envelope came from my hands. She now believes that I'm the bank. Another possibility is that perhaps by choosing numbers deliberately you could increase the probability that any summation will equal zero (or some predefined number), although I haven't verified that, its just one more thing to think about. I do believe this man just committed academic suicide if that paper is the only he has going. Regards, Steve
Fedora comes with gcj (gcc java compiler) and that compiles most swt and gnome applications jsut fine. Also there are a few very good open source JVMs, the first one off the top of my head is Blackdown, which I use to develop java3d on linux. I have yet to see blackdown not do something that Sun's can. Regards, Steve
If I have a phone with a contact you want on it, I'll just let you hold my phone while you hold yours and then you give it right back. It'd take less then a second for us to sync contacts without plugging in a single thing. This could be done while walking down the street, and another aspect of it is that its more secure then using blue tooth or other wireless transmission that tends to not be encrypted. The potential for this is pretty amazing. Another one I can think of off the top of my head is if you wear something like a watch or chain that sends a constantly shifting key through your body (similar to the rsa little devices), then simply by touching something you could verify you were the holder of a credit card or other miscellaneous forms of authorization. It'd be like a digital fingerprint. If your groceries are tagged with rfid, have a scanner find the cost of everything in your cart, then you simply touch a little piece of metal or something to pay for it. The whole process could take less then a second. Another possible use is to place sensors on steering wheels... This could reshape how we interact with the world. Now if only they can find a way for the body to retain that information for short (or long) periods of time. We'd be walking harddrives, so much for a 40 gb ipod...just touch the headphones to your skin somewhere. Regards, Steve
Personally I think this is ridiculous. It's your responsibility to guard your information, not the government's. If they can impose restrictions like this then all it shows it that they have way too much say in your daily affairs. Honestly, you can keep laws like this away from. And don't even mention the patriot act, at least that is restricted to government agencies, this canadian law affects every canadian. It's just dumb to think you can control the internet. Whether the Canadians realize it or not, this is an intrusion on their privacy. Regards, Steve
Yea, they are trying to solve the repos problem by preparing "Fedora Extras". For now though, FedoraFAQ is pretty useful if you ever need it. I personally just use the FedoraFAQ yum.conf that they provide, however I do agree the situation could be made easier to handle. Although, debian has the same issue, except imho, way worse. Alot more repositories to point at and its controlled by a lot more people that aren't always in communication. Running testing or unstable tended to break my machines about once a month. Not so bad that the OS needed to be reinstalled or the machine even rebooted, but bad enough that it took up enough of my time to start phasing them all out with fedora. Thats just my persepctive. Take care. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
A compiler never gets bored or tired, so yea writing clean code is smart. Let the compiler do the optimizations and overall you'll probably see it do a better job then you ever could. A compiler might not see everything you might (i.e. !ptr and (ptr ==NULL) being equal, this is just an example, thats probably not a true statement), but the compiler will also spot things you never would. On average it will always beat you out. Of course if you really need speed then start profiling your code, optimizing code as much as you can where its needed most in conjunction with the compiler optimizations will help greatly.
Regards,
Steve
Why hate java? For web applications you can't get much more scalable then java. I'm a java/python/C++/C/perl hacker and they all have benefits. The right tool for the right job. Java has to be doing something right, afterall how many corporations don't rely heavily upon it? Developing for java is actually a pleasure since amazing IDE's like Eclipse and NetBeans have been released. Theses IDE's have extensive support for everything from desktop programs with gui builders, web applications with integration to tomcat, to mobile device developement with cell phone emulators and the works. Hell, java can even be used for OS developement (jNode ) once you get the assembly stub out of the way. With today's VMs I often find java is faster or on par with C++. It really is a nice language.
Regards,
Steve
I must say, you rock! Honestly, you are awesome and keep up the good work:)
Regards,
Steve
I believe federal money can go to stem cell research. It just can't go to stem cell research where the cells come from lab grown embryos that are then killed and harvested. At least that's my understanding. Regardless, there is so much private money floating around in stem cell labs that government money, while helpful, wouldn't make as much of an impact as people would think.
Regards,
Steve
It blocks fine in 1.0 and 1.0.1.
Regards,
steve
"But mp3 is patent-constricted..."
Yes, but whose problem is it? Refusing to use a superior and free product just because it doesn't have mass market is stupid and linux would still be no where if everyone thought like that. They should either use both formats, or tell windows and mac users instructions for playing OGG. Its a better sounding format anyway. Don't support mp3's and software patents just becuase its easy to do. Let people know that its not okay and make a difference. Real Player supports ogg (at least on linux it does, so I'd assume the windows version does too), most people have Real Player. It's people that conform into whatever is accepted at the time that stifle change.
Regards,
Steve
It doesn't matter... the company that is responsible for Fedora's development is in the US and is still held legally liable for holding US copyright law. Do you really think that if I'm based in the US and selling something to Europe, that I can violate US patent law? It works both ways as well iirc, if you sell something to us then you must respect our patents. Fedora is one of the few distros that includes only fully free software, and they stick to their guns on it. Its actually really nice running fedora and knowing that everything on there is patent free... its liberating, if you will. Of course some companies may claim otherwise with the occasional law suit ...*cough* SCO *cough*.
/etc/ then do "yum install xmms-mp3". There your problem is solved, its not really worth a new distro to do that. My second question for you is why would you want to support a format that is patented at all( doesn't matter where). The idea is to help people realize that software patents are not acceptable and won't be tolerated. Give OGG a shot, honestly it sounds much better bit for bit (well thats obvious considering it uses more modern algorithms) and takes up less space. I only buy OGG compatible music players and right now I'm really happy with everything. I'm not sure if you use Fedora but, for more info on it FedoraFAQ is a really good resource. Take care
Anyway... I've got two questions for you. Why would you fork Fedora when you can just plop this into
Regards,
Steve
Some countries like to remain a little more dignified. Rioting and protesting get old once you get over the age of 17. They achieve nothing and make you look like a fool. Sure they break out every now and then, but peaceful protests are just as effective and are taken more serious. Peaceful protests also don't make you look as foolish. Regardless, there are better ways to make points then to protest in any form (protesting is kind of like stomping your feet as a child). But on to the topic at hand... Diebold first of all didn't control anywhere near every machine, in fact it was a relatively small percentage. I personally think that they shouldn't have been used at all, but honestly to crack the machine you typically had to do things that you could only get away with in the privacy of your home (due to either the time it takes or some other factor). There could have been a better method, but its not an easy task to redeploy thousands of voting machines.
Heh sure, anytime.
Regards,
Steve
Check cookd@byu.net for your gmail invite.
Regards,
Steve
Don't worry, windows isn't the only one. I just reinstalled linux and while reading the agreement it turns out I owe some 3rd party $699.
I didn't mean to insult the project if thats how you took it. Its just that honestly Enlightenment is a pain to use and install from a user perspective. Even your CVS is a mess... it should be as easy as pulling down CVS, autogen.sh, configure and make all to build everything. The developers apparently have no problem using Enlightenment, but they've probably never seen an average user interact with it for a period of time. It sure has lots of nice eye candy, but that does noone anygood if its unusable. The nice thing with Fedora getting involved is that they've been a major force in human interface guidelines for gnome and they seem to consistently push out nice, easy-to-use interfaces. With Seth and Havoc in the effort, linux can finally have all the special effects of enlightenment with the usability of Gnome. On technical merits alone though, enlightenment is pretty impressive.
Regards,
Steve
Wow this is a deep thread. Nice thoughts, well worded and put together. Just want to point out one misconception that you seem to keep reiterating. Fedora comes with up2date, a program that sits in your taskbar and lights up when updates are available. You click it, and it downloads and installs them for you. I am just stating this so that if this thread is ever referenced that people don't think that inorder to get updates you have to go download them from fedora's site. Everything is handled automagically for you, you just click okay. That goes for security and just regular application updates as well. Fedora really is a nice distro, I understand why people might stay away from it if they don't like Red Hat(I personally do like Red Hat, I find it hard to hate a company that has done so much for the community), but I can't think of a single reason not to use the distro based on technial merit. It really is a nicely built OS, with all kinds of nice advanced features (most notably SELinux) Okay I'll stop ranting now.
Regards,
Steve
My laptop has an i810, if your using a 2.6.10.x series kernel then yes the current driver is broken, but 2.6.9 and prior is fine. It's being worked on. I've been using Fedora since the very first test release of FC1, so nearly 1.5 to 2 years and this is the first time any issue like this has happened that I can remember (at least to me), maybe I'm just lucky:) Anyway, I believe by default up2date doesnt grab new kernels, so if you set it up to grab new kernels and your running 2.6.10.x then that is probably your issue. Otherwise it might be a sound daemon issue, bugzilla is your friend though if you get a chance to report it and the folks in #Fedora are very nice.
Regards,
Steve
Here ya go.
Regards,
Steve
iDownload's front page claims that they are spyware free. To put things in perpective, spyware is like farting, the first person to deny it usually did it. If you read further down their list, it says "Certified Virus Free". Have you ever seen software have to claim its virus free? And where exactly do you get this certification, and who certifies it? I want to see the certificate. Its their software dammit, of course its virus free (assuming they were a legit company), just like all commercial software from respectable companies should be.
Regards,
Steve
No offense to Rasterman, and I'm sure there are plenty of different ways to go about implementing features such as these, but my experience with enlightenment's "enhanced" features has been less then impressive. The effects usually look professional, but they run slow and inefficiently (my video card does suck though... but renders most 3d games like Enemy Territory fine). Enlightenment is all good and well until you try to use it for long periods of time. Seth and Havoc's architecture seems more scalable and consolidated from a programmers point of view. The one thing is though, enlightenment is already out there, exisits,and works. However, enlightenment is way too layered and has a million different little components... I just personally think it could all be implemented better. So lets hope that they all work together and come out with something absolutely amazing.
Regards,
Steve
I believe moving most of X's computations into the video card's hardware will make it snappier while extending it's capabilities at the same time. I try to regularly follow what Havoc and Seth are up to (which is always something interesting) and this is my understanding of one of the big reasons for hardware acceleration. Regardless of hardware acceleration though, lots of work is going on to make X snappier. It's come a long way like you said. On a slighlty different note, here is another project being worked on at Red Hat, it seems really cool, and really needed if you ever expect to find linux a common desktop in businesses and schools: Sabayon.
Regards,
Steve
Have you listened to much of the music recently? It's not art, its every poor chap that learns how to play a guitar signing their lives away to some large record company to make mediocre music that is then "forced" down consumers throats by mass marketing campaigns. Last time I checked, Van Gogh did not have a huge corporation dumping millions into advertising and promoting his art. Van Gogh's work spoke for itself, and any music worth a grain of salt will also speak for itself. Most of the stuff you buy on iTunes or the many other Mp3 sites is not art, its fabricated sounds produced by doing studies on current trends and what is appealing to people. Its not inspired, most things are done with calculations now on how successful a certain beat is likely to be. Its purely a profitable business, treating it like manure is certainly fine. If your looking for music that is inspired and that should not be compared to manure, support your local artists playing at the local bars, clubs, and halls.
Regards,
Steve
But if the bank already has her password and the bank can't read whatever she sends them, why would she send them her password encrypted? It does them no good. She should just contact the bank, most likely giving them only her public key, and then the bank already knows the password and format of the envelope as well as the number to sum to. They can then create an "envelope" and sign it with her key. Although the whole system is stupid in that it presumes that the key was somehow transmitted securely to the bank beforehand and it does nothing to address that issue. There are already plenty of secure algorithms with verification if both parties share a secret. This guy's method is not only insecure, but just plain stupid and addresses no concerns in the crypto community. I can't believe he teaches students.
Regards,
Steve
First of all, if you can securely communicate with the server at some point (which is required for this to work - the bank needs your hash already) then you can simply use one time pads with rotating keys from that point forth... much more secure. Second of all, I don't know if his analogy to envelopes was just vague or if it really did accurately describe the protocol. If it did describe it accurately then what exactly stops me from standing in between the alice and her bank. Alice hands me her signed envelope, I hand it to the bank, the bank hands me the envelope with the magic numbers that sum to 0, I hand it back to alice. It doesn't matter if I ever knew what was in the envelope, Alice only knows that the authenticated envelope came from my hands. She now believes that I'm the bank. Another possibility is that perhaps by choosing numbers deliberately you could increase the probability that any summation will equal zero (or some predefined number), although I haven't verified that, its just one more thing to think about. I do believe this man just committed academic suicide if that paper is the only he has going.
Regards,
Steve
Fedora comes with gcj (gcc java compiler) and that compiles most swt and gnome applications jsut fine. Also there are a few very good open source JVMs, the first one off the top of my head is Blackdown, which I use to develop java3d on linux. I have yet to see blackdown not do something that Sun's can.
Regards,
Steve
If I have a phone with a contact you want on it, I'll just let you hold my phone while you hold yours and then you give it right back. It'd take less then a second for us to sync contacts without plugging in a single thing. This could be done while walking down the street, and another aspect of it is that its more secure then using blue tooth or other wireless transmission that tends to not be encrypted. The potential for this is pretty amazing. Another one I can think of off the top of my head is if you wear something like a watch or chain that sends a constantly shifting key through your body (similar to the rsa little devices), then simply by touching something you could verify you were the holder of a credit card or other miscellaneous forms of authorization. It'd be like a digital fingerprint. If your groceries are tagged with rfid, have a scanner find the cost of everything in your cart, then you simply touch a little piece of metal or something to pay for it. The whole process could take less then a second. Another possible use is to place sensors on steering wheels... This could reshape how we interact with the world. Now if only they can find a way for the body to retain that information for short (or long) periods of time. We'd be walking harddrives, so much for a 40 gb ipod...just touch the headphones to your skin somewhere.
Regards,
Steve
Personally I think this is ridiculous. It's your responsibility to guard your information, not the government's. If they can impose restrictions like this then all it shows it that they have way too much say in your daily affairs. Honestly, you can keep laws like this away from. And don't even mention the patriot act, at least that is restricted to government agencies, this canadian law affects every canadian. It's just dumb to think you can control the internet. Whether the Canadians realize it or not, this is an intrusion on their privacy.
Regards,
Steve
Yea, they are trying to solve the repos problem by preparing "Fedora Extras". For now though, FedoraFAQ is pretty useful if you ever need it. I personally just use the FedoraFAQ yum.conf that they provide, however I do agree the situation could be made easier to handle. Although, debian has the same issue, except imho, way worse. Alot more repositories to point at and its controlled by a lot more people that aren't always in communication. Running testing or unstable tended to break my machines about once a month. Not so bad that the OS needed to be reinstalled or the machine even rebooted, but bad enough that it took up enough of my time to start phasing them all out with fedora. Thats just my persepctive. Take care.
Regards,
Steve