Every anti-competitive trick used by M$ is also used by Apple.
I don't want to defend Apple too much, I don't like a lot of their business practices, but are they really as bad as MS?
For example, MS threatened OEMs and stopped them from pre-installing Netscape Navigator (this was way back when it sucked less than IE) on the machines they shipped. Have Apple ever done anything as bad as that?
One question though - why exactly would I face out a machine with an unpatched OS (the "article" doesn't even mention the version), any OS?
Because that's the version of Windows that (just about, I think, for now) Microsoft still sell. If you buy a copy of XP it really is unpatched. You need to either download the patches from a secure machine and slipstream them on to your own install disc, or you need to make sure you're behind a good firewall before you plug your fresh machine into the net and do an update.
When you download a Linux ISO, it already has all (or most) of the latest patches applied. In effect, they slipstream them on for you. If you but a CD ina shop, it will typically not be more than 6 to 12 months old, since that's the cycle time of most distros, and will not have so many patches to apply.
Of course XP SP2 is pretty old now. I wonder if Vista SP1 would get broken in to? Probably not.
Here's Newsweek talking about its own coverage of the issue, and quoting William Connolley (whose website you linked above):
The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today.
I worked on the software for a colour-calibrated 20k x 20k pixel scan back (400 mpixels) in 1995.
A 400 mpixel scan took about 40 minutes, I think. It was so long we had to have extra corrections in the image assembly stage for the sag in the easel over that time.
GLib has what you're asking for and is available everywhere under the LGPL. You write to the GLib API, which is mostly sane, and your code will run natively on *nix and win. I believe they even support AIX.
Hmm, strange, I'm using Ubuntu and I've not had any crashes with it. I also have flashblock, user agent, stylish and firebug installed, and a couple of others.
toolkit.storage.synchronous stops the constant sqlite sync-ing I guess? I've not noticed that being a problem for me, perhaps the ubuntu ff3 has that turned on anyway.
The payment was for loss of earnings, it was not compensation for the loss of liberty. He would have earned 200k in the time he was jailed, but in that period he would also have had to pay living expenses (food, house, video games, internet), so that cost was deducted from his payment.
(of course I think this is retarded, but that's the logic they used)
Oh sure, I'm just saying that you need more than a million for high dynamic range media (ie. media with a bigger range than you get from reflective materials).
CIELAB colour space codes colours as L (lightness) with a 0 - 100 range, and a/b (red-green / yellow-blue) each with about a +/- 100 range for physically realizeable colours. A pair of colours which are just distinguishable are a unit apart, so we can distinguish very roughly 100 * 100 * 100 colours, or a million.
However those are surface reflectances under a single illuminant. In a natural scene, your eye is adapting constantly as you look around. Your iris changes size, your retina changes sensitivity, and so on. The range of lightnesses in a natural scene is up to about 10 billion to 1 if you compare direct sunlight to deep shadow. You can distinguish a million colours at each of these points of adaptation.
If you want a display that can show a full range of dark colours and a full range of light colours, you need more than a million to 1.
The current gimp 2.4 behaves a little differently:
Now, the Gimp actually has three windows, The document window, the tool browser and the layers palate (actually it can have more than that, but that's the default). Now, let's suppose that I've finished reading slashdot, and I want to carry on editing my image, so I click on the taskbar button named "image.xcf". The image I was working on is maximized, but where are my editing tools? oh, they're still minimised. Back down to the taskbar, click on the GIMP button. OK, so I select the tool I want, but wait, I'm on the wrong layer. OK, back down to the taskbar, click on the Layers,Channels button, up pops the layer selector.
gimp2.4 just has two windows: the main tool window and the document window. You can break the tool window out info a set of separate windows if you like, or you can make a couple of tool windows each showing a different set of tools. Each open document gets a window too.
There's a preference for always-on-top which you can set for the image and/or the tool window if you like. It doesn't link iconise/uniconise of the image and toolbox windows though.
The development GIMP has some prototype stuff in for no-image-windows:
Sure, I used to use X11 on a Sun 3 with 4MB of RAM. X11 was designed in the mid 1980s when computers were really rubbish. X11 will run on cell phones now, as I'm sure you know.
That's a nice idea -- everyone loves showing off:)
Mine is VIPS, an image processing system with a spreadsheet-like GUI targetting large images (images bigger than RAM) and multicore (it has a fancy automatic threading system).
Unless you have a specialized workload (heavy number crunching, kernel compilation, etc) there's going to simply be no point having more parallelism.
You can get very good parallelism with media apps like photoshop, audio or video encode/decode, things like that. Regular desktop apps aren't going to often go to the trouble, but I can see a future when most media libraries are heavily threaded. My spare time project (a GPL image processing library) gets about a 27x speedup on a 32-cpu machine, at least on some benchmarks.
It'll maybe be a bit like current console development: middleware authors will get their hands dirty with the hardware, and that knowledge will be packaged up and sold to app developers.
vim certainly has those features, I'm sure emacs does somewhere too.
A vim feature I really missed in VS (though I've not used it since VS6, maybe they have it now) is tag stacks. vim keeps a stack of your jump-to-declaration actions (one keystroke) and you can undo the jumps (another keystroke). It's great for navigating around projects and you can always be sure you can get back to wherever it was you started browsing from.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
Don't you just need to move the \figure{} when you add an earlier reference? I'm probably missing something.
LaTeX always positions figures (soon) after the \figure{} appears in your input file.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to defend Apple too much, I don't like a lot of their business practices, but are they really as bad as MS?
For example, MS threatened OEMs and stopped them from pre-installing Netscape Navigator (this was way back when it sucked less than IE) on the machines they shipped. Have Apple ever done anything as bad as that?
Yes, that would pretty much invalidate their findings if true. I looked through the German article but couldn't see the information there either.
Because that's the version of Windows that (just about, I think, for now) Microsoft still sell. If you buy a copy of XP it really is unpatched. You need to either download the patches from a secure machine and slipstream them on to your own install disc, or you need to make sure you're behind a good firewall before you plug your fresh machine into the net and do an update.
When you download a Linux ISO, it already has all (or most) of the latest patches applied. In effect, they slipstream them on for you. If you but a CD ina shop, it will typically not be more than 6 to 12 months old, since that's the cycle time of most distros, and will not have so many patches to apply.
Of course XP SP2 is pretty old now. I wonder if Vista SP1 would get broken in to? Probably not.
You can read about the history of the 1970s global cooling scare on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Here's Newsweek talking about its own coverage of the issue, and quoting William Connolley (whose website you linked above):
From http://www.newsweek.com/id/72481
And finally here's Connolley himself:
From http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
I worked on the software for a colour-calibrated 20k x 20k pixel scan back (400 mpixels) in 1995.
A 400 mpixel scan took about 40 minutes, I think. It was so long we had to have extra corrections in the image assembly stage for the sag in the easel over that time.
Pics plus details are here:
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/km/projs/marc/marcamera.html
GLib has what you're asking for and is available everywhere under the LGPL. You write to the GLib API, which is mostly sane, and your code will run natively on *nix and win. I believe they even support AIX.
For example, see
http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/stable/glib-String-Utility-Functions.html
1.2bn people in 1850, according to the wiki
No they weren't, or not in the way you think anyway. This claim is debunked in every "top 10 climate change myths" article, for example:
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11643
Here's a PDF of the original, together with the replies, as submitted to the trial.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf
toolkit.storage.synchronous stops the constant sqlite sync-ing I guess? I've not noticed that being a problem for me, perhaps the ubuntu ff3 has that turned on anyway.
Adblock plus works fine with ff3.
The payment was for loss of earnings, it was not compensation for the loss of liberty. He would have earned 200k in the time he was jailed, but in that period he would also have had to pay living expenses (food, house, video games, internet), so that cost was deducted from his payment.
(of course I think this is retarded, but that's the logic they used)
Oh sure, I'm just saying that you need more than a million for high dynamic range media (ie. media with a bigger range than you get from reflective materials).
That's not quite right.
CIELAB colour space codes colours as L (lightness) with a 0 - 100 range, and a/b (red-green / yellow-blue) each with about a +/- 100 range for physically realizeable colours. A pair of colours which are just distinguishable are a unit apart, so we can distinguish very roughly 100 * 100 * 100 colours, or a million.
However those are surface reflectances under a single illuminant. In a natural scene, your eye is adapting constantly as you look around. Your iris changes size, your retina changes sensitivity, and so on. The range of lightnesses in a natural scene is up to about 10 billion to 1 if you compare direct sunlight to deep shadow. You can distinguish a million colours at each of these points of adaptation.
If you want a display that can show a full range of dark colours and a full range of light colours, you need more than a million to 1.
I don't have ads on my tech news site ... because they are now so intrusive and annoying.
gimp2.4 just has two windows: the main tool window and the document window. You can break the tool window out info a set of separate windows if you like, or you can make a couple of tool windows each showing a different set of tools. Each open document gets a window too.
There's a preference for always-on-top which you can set for the image and/or the tool window if you like. It doesn't link iconise/uniconise of the image and toolbox windows though.
The development GIMP has some prototype stuff in for no-image-windows:
http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/No_image_open_specification
(Things have changed quite a bit since that page was written, I understand the current code is rather different)
This will make the tool window into a true floating window and should enable the linked iconise/uninconise effect.
Sure, I used to use X11 on a Sun 3 with 4MB of RAM. X11 was designed in the mid 1980s when computers were really rubbish. X11 will run on cell phones now, as I'm sure you know.
Mine is VIPS, an image processing system with a spreadsheet-like GUI targetting large images (images bigger than RAM) and multicore (it has a fancy automatic threading system).
I was wrong, apologies. Mod down (if anyone is reading this).
You're thinking of Tiger, I think. Leopard is fully 64-bit. http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/64bit.html
Most linuxes come with a 64-bit firefox as the default, I know ubuntu does. Flash doesn't work though, so I actually use the 32-bit build.
You can get very good parallelism with media apps like photoshop, audio or video encode/decode, things like that. Regular desktop apps aren't going to often go to the trouble, but I can see a future when most media libraries are heavily threaded. My spare time project (a GPL image processing library) gets about a 27x speedup on a 32-cpu machine, at least on some benchmarks.
It'll maybe be a bit like current console development: middleware authors will get their hands dirty with the hardware, and that knowledge will be packaged up and sold to app developers.
That changed with the new threading system in 2.6. A threaded process appears as a single entry in top.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_POSIX_Thread_Library
A vim feature I really missed in VS (though I've not used it since VS6, maybe they have it now) is tag stacks. vim keeps a stack of your jump-to-declaration actions (one keystroke) and you can undo the jumps (another keystroke). It's great for navigating around projects and you can always be sure you can get back to wherever it was you started browsing from.
LaTeX always positions figures (soon) after the \figure{} appears in your input file.