Note that the reason why those repair mechanisms aren't turned on all the time is because that would waste energy, i.e., food. Throughout evolution, starvation has been a problem, so organisms have become quite efficient.
If you live in a stable or slowly-changing environment year round, then the level at which the repair mechanisms are active is probably well-adapted to your environment. But if you are an office worker and take a one week vacation in the mountains or at the beach, your repair mechanisms are turned off yet you will receive a high dose of UV (or other radiation).
In the long term, we will probably be able to turn on those repair mechanisms constantly using drugs (which might perhaps help you keep some weight off as well). Until then, however, limiting exposure to UV, radiation, and toxins is probably still the best policy.
It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate.
There are many possible reasons for this; maybe Colorado just has a better public health system or healthier lifestyles.
One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.
Even if Radon did protect you against cancer in low doses, the right thing to do would be to get it out of homes and then give it to people it in well-controlled doses.
It is quite ironic that people like you often call themselves "conservatives", but then want to subject the US population to historically unprecedented exposures to largely unstudied chemicals and radiation. The conservative thing is to avoid exposing people to new chemicals and radioactivity until we know for certain that it's safe.
This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data.
You are right: this isn't news. The only news is that ignorant politicians with a corporatist agenda use such obscure scientific tidbits out of context to argue that pollution is harmless.
Re:Remote logins over very slow modem lines: use N
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I was a mlview-dxpc supporter and now I use NX, that has superseded the old project (http://www.nomachine.com).
DXPC is a simple, open source proxy that works just about everywhere, and works pretty well. NX may be a pretty nice commercial product, but in what way does it "supersede" NX?
CLI and text-mode interfaces are independent concepts.
There have been a number of graphical CLI interfaces in the past. That is, you type commands, get results back, and occasionally use the mouse to select something. It's a graphical user interface, it's just completely different from the "menus and mouse" stuff you are thinking off. People use CLIs, either of the text mode or of the graphical variety, because they are by far the most effective way of interacting with computers for anything complex: database searches, distributed systems administration, symbolic math, numerical math, software testing, simulations, etc.
People use ASCII or text-mode interfaces for bandwidth reasons or because they have lots of text-only hardware installed. Text terminals may be "obsolete", but they are cheap, very reliable, and very widely deployed. Many text mode interfaces are mouse based and, except for the somewhat clunky looking appearance, work just like interfaces on bitmapped displays.
Re:Semi-Off-topic question
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Look on the web for Movix or Knoppix; they allow you to boot Linux from CD without installing it on your hard disk. Both come with Mplayer. Movix is designed to let you remove the boot CD and play a DVD, while Knoppix at least would let you look at MPEG clips that you download. (No, I don't know for certain that Mplayer on either distribution comes with aalib, but there is a good chance.)
Re:Not useful without developers testing it
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GTK+ TTY Port
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· Score: 1
real GTK apps often abuse GTK to get around window manager incompatibilities, resize and widget placement restrictions, etc.
Your application shouldn't try making any assumptions about global window placement: they are likely going to be wrong in many environments.
If you need fine control over where things end up in your UI and you need multiple independently movable windows, use an MDI interface, don't fiddle around with the placement or size of top-level windows.
Doing this right is harder than the kinds of hacks you are using, but it's important.
If there really is some top-level functionality you need, abstract the functionality, implement it as a toolkit component, in conformance with X11 window management guidelines, and contribute it to Gtk. That way, ports of the toolkit will do the right thing and your application will work better on other platforms.
This is exactly why the Windows GTK port sucks in real life
Yes, but the problem isn't with Gtk or the Windows port, the problem is with developers like you.
Windows, unfortunately, encourages application-based top-level window management. It's one of the misfeatures of the Windows GUI.
Yes. "Creative", when it came to computers, used to refer to new applications, new concepts, and new algorithms. But as your own comment suggests, "creative" nowadays pretty much means "has flashy graphics".
"To clarify, the individuals reviewing the code had been involved with MIT labs in the past, but are not currently at MIT.
Translation: one of the individuals' brother in law was a part-time undergraduate at MIT before dropping out.
Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we cannot specifically name the individuals."
Translation: their expert said "as long as I don't have to defend this opinion in court or to the press and as long as you guarantee that you won't leak my name, sure, I'll take your consulting money and you can put out whatever you like in your press release".
the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"
What this means is that Apple is roughly keeping up in the CPU race: they just shipped a new CPU. You expect newly shipping CPUs to have an edge. But since it's only moderately faster than the currently shipping P4 or Opteron systems and only in certain situations, it means they are really just keeping up, not leaping ahead.
Given the higher price of G5 systems, bang for the buck still goes to the x86-based systems.
You're confusing "strongly typed" with "statically typed". Strong vs. weak typing is whether the language allows you to perform type-unsafe operations accidentally. Static vs. dynamic typing is whether the language performs its type checks at compile time or at runtime. All four combinations are possible.
Python is a strongly typed, dynamically typed language. That means that you can do:
x = 3; x = "q"
but something like
"q" / 3
gives you a type error.
Old-style Perl and K&R C are weakly typed because they fail to detect many kinds of type errors.
The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested (and gotten used to) UNIX hier,
My thinking exactly--where are the punch cards?:-)
BeOS is exactly the OS everyone needs right now, a kind of Linux with a really good GUI strapped on top. Beautiful FS and networking and a SINGLE package system.
Plan9 is a research project. Plan9 actually has some nifty ideas in it.
BeOS, on the other hand, is an object-oriented commercial operating system--well executed, but neither the file system nor the GUI are anything new.
Which one is the right choice for you really depends on your needs.
It probably wouldn't be hard to port the "links" browser (http://links.browser.org/). It's a text mode browser that renders most pages well. There is also a graphical extension for "links" that runs on raw framebuffers and X11 and is probably easy to port as well.
And while I don't know the cryptogtaphy involved, I assume it's a proven system (after all, this is the USPS), as least on paper, if not in implementation.
If the cryptography doesn't hold up to running on Linux, it's hopeless. In fact, their best bet would be to make the core library open source and let other people write GUIs for it. The security should only be in the cryptographic keys, not the software.
Reverse engineering software is much more common on Windows because it has to be; on Linux, people rarely have to bother.
Its interesting that it says "not renewing" in regards to the MS office licenses..
That's the standard term. What else are they supposed to say?
does that mean that until they decide to go with open source alternatives (or not), that they will be illegally using the software?
No. Existing licenses don't expire prematurely just because someone publicly announces that they won't be renewing.
I think it's pretty clear what they are saying: they aren't going to give Microsoft any more money, and they intend to be using an open source before the issue comes up.
Systems research is a big part of computer science. user interfaces, file systems, metadata, servers, toolkits, etc. You can bet it makes a huge difference when students learn on a platform that (a) is basically 20 year old technology and (b) has Microsoft making all the decisions for them.
It was irrelevant, I wasnt learning computers, or even how to program in C, I was learning concepts.
Well, it was irrelevant to you because you have basically assimilated the view that systems research doesn't matter. In different words, you got deprived of a large chunk of your CS education, and you don't even know what you missed.
mDNS and all that stuff matters because it's a standard and lets different applications written by different people find each other. But that's not the issue for an intranet P2P client. If you just want a bunch of things you write to find each other, you can just use multicast directly--it's simpler, works everywhere, and depends on no oddball libraries from anybody.
I think Java clearly does not meet the legal bar for being a good platform for open source development.
Hey, it's open source--you can just fix it. Oh, wait, development is run by Troll Tech. Well, you are a paying customers are you not? You don't even get a response from the company for your $$$?
Many people have come to Linux because they want to get off the upgrade treadmill that commercial companies are subjecting them to. Commercial companies have all sorts of incentives for breaking backwards compatibility, like being able to sell new licenses.
Of course, the dual-license for Qt means that Troll Tech has most of the same incentives: they need to come out with new and "improved" versions in order to make their paying customers happy. And that's perhaps why dual-licensed software is not such a good idea for open source development after all.
Because, when all is said and done, there is really little that is innovative in any of Gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, FLTK, etc. They just are making different tradeoffs for different markets. And if any of them need a significant and incompatible API overhaul, it's probably because their developers were learning on the job. OO GUI toolkits have been around since the 1970's, and there really isn't a lot of new stuff to figure out about them.
For example, I've heard that the NT kernel is actually quite good
The NT kernel reminds me of the Ford Edsel: people rave about all the technically good things it supposedly does, but ultimately, it's not really a car most people would drive by choice.
Simplicity of design and interfaces and cheap, low-tech solutions have their own value. Linux is more like the Japanese budget cars of yore: good, reliable transportation, while NT seems more like some US car company's technical pipe dream that just isn't coming together quite right. You can figure out yourself which one is likely to be better and more affordable transportation.
I for my own after 10 years of open source and Linux am up to search for alternatives. A commercial OS may be better (better documentation, professional development, you can make a few bucks with your work, no pain, stable ABI and API and much more).
Many of the people who are using open source are using it just for those reasons. In real life, APIs and ABIs to commercial software change rapidly because they are driven by marketing and business interests, documentation is costly and written for morons, you can't even look at the source when you are stuck, and you end up paying so much money for the privilege of using it that you won't be making any money on it.
And commercial software has the unpleasant habit of simply disappearing from the market at the most inconvenient times or having its price skyrocket unexpectedly. Remember DEC? They're gone and a lot of their software. Remember NeXT? Absorbed by Apple, and all you can get is the OS X variant; hope you didn't bet on their PC version. Remember Taligent? NeWS? Smalltalk? Microsoft Java? OS/2? Amiga? Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, and gone.
GNU/GPL, FSF, prayer RMS they all should go to hell they are all paralyzed.
The FSF does something about software they hold the copyright to. For the Linux kernel, the kernel copyright holders need to do something. Give it a few more months--these things take time.
People stealing open source code and embedd it in closed source programs and nothing can be done against it.
Yes, that's kind of annoying, but it isn't a threat to open source software. And sooner or later, those companies tend to get into trouble anyway.
You can screw up security on any system, Windows, Linux, Solaris, whatever.
The difference between Windows and Linux is that on Linux, you actually have a chance of getting it right if you know what you are doing. In part, that is because you can really get rid of pretty much every network service and piece of software on a Linux system except for what you actually want to run. In part, that is because you can actually look at the source to figure out how something works.
(Imagine that, though: a computer that would glow different colors based on how much of its processing power was being used. When it turned red, you'd know that a crash was imminent.)
Wow, here you see the model of computers that the man of the street has: the higher you rev the CPU engine, the more likely it is to fail. No wonder people can't figure out the connection between bad software and system crashes.
We're talking about "what interface looks most like Windows?" fvwm, KDE, Gnome & all the others _don't look most like Windows_
Gnome and KDE can look as much like Windows as you like, to the point that even on the default settings, they fool many non-experts. It has gotten to the point where arguably the visual differences between versions of Windows are greater than between Gnome and the latest version of Windows.
but this one _looks almost exactly like Windows_. That's the important part.
Gnome and KDE look sufficiently like Windows to have that part covered. But Gnome and KDE each have one thing that MatHatter can't have: consistent behavior. And if something matters to non-experts, that is it.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that the reason why those repair mechanisms aren't turned on all the time is because that would waste energy, i.e., food. Throughout evolution, starvation has been a problem, so organisms have become quite efficient.
If you live in a stable or slowly-changing environment year round, then the level at which the repair mechanisms are active is probably well-adapted to your environment. But if you are an office worker and take a one week vacation in the mountains or at the beach, your repair mechanisms are turned off yet you will receive a high dose of UV (or other radiation).
In the long term, we will probably be able to turn on those repair mechanisms constantly using drugs (which might perhaps help you keep some weight off as well). Until then, however, limiting exposure to UV, radiation, and toxins is probably still the best policy.
It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate.
There are many possible reasons for this; maybe Colorado just has a better public health system or healthier lifestyles.
One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.
Even if Radon did protect you against cancer in low doses, the right thing to do would be to get it out of homes and then give it to people it in well-controlled doses.
It is quite ironic that people like you often call themselves "conservatives", but then want to subject the US population to historically unprecedented exposures to largely unstudied chemicals and radiation. The conservative thing is to avoid exposing people to new chemicals and radioactivity until we know for certain that it's safe.
This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data.
You are right: this isn't news. The only news is that ignorant politicians with a corporatist agenda use such obscure scientific tidbits out of context to argue that pollution is harmless.
I was a mlview-dxpc supporter and now I use NX, that has superseded the old project (http://www.nomachine.com).
DXPC is a simple, open source proxy that works just about everywhere, and works pretty well. NX may be a pretty nice commercial product, but in what way does it "supersede" NX?
CLI and text-mode interfaces are independent concepts.
There have been a number of graphical CLI interfaces in the past. That is, you type commands, get results back, and occasionally use the mouse to select something. It's a graphical user interface, it's just completely different from the "menus and mouse" stuff you are thinking off. People use CLIs, either of the text mode or of the graphical variety, because they are by far the most effective way of interacting with computers for anything complex: database searches, distributed systems administration, symbolic math, numerical math, software testing, simulations, etc.
People use ASCII or text-mode interfaces for bandwidth reasons or because they have lots of text-only hardware installed. Text terminals may be "obsolete", but they are cheap, very reliable, and very widely deployed. Many text mode interfaces are mouse based and, except for the somewhat clunky looking appearance, work just like interfaces on bitmapped displays.
Look on the web for Movix or Knoppix; they allow you to boot Linux from CD without installing it on your hard disk. Both come with Mplayer. Movix is designed to let you remove the boot CD and play a DVD, while Knoppix at least would let you look at MPEG clips that you download. (No, I don't know for certain that Mplayer on either distribution comes with aalib, but there is a good chance.)
real GTK apps often abuse GTK to get around window manager incompatibilities, resize and widget placement restrictions, etc.
Your application shouldn't try making any assumptions about global window placement: they are likely going to be wrong in many environments.
If you need fine control over where things end up in your UI and you need multiple independently movable windows, use an MDI interface, don't fiddle around with the placement or size of top-level windows.
Doing this right is harder than the kinds of hacks you are using, but it's important.
If there really is some top-level functionality you need, abstract the functionality, implement it as a toolkit component, in conformance with X11 window management guidelines, and contribute it to Gtk. That way, ports of the toolkit will do the right thing and your application will work better on other platforms.
This is exactly why the Windows GTK port sucks in real life
Yes, but the problem isn't with Gtk or the Windows port, the problem is with developers like you.
Windows, unfortunately, encourages application-based top-level window management. It's one of the misfeatures of the Windows GUI.
Yes. "Creative", when it came to computers, used to refer to new applications, new concepts, and new algorithms. But as your own comment suggests, "creative" nowadays pretty much means "has flashy graphics".
"To clarify, the individuals reviewing the code had been involved with MIT labs in the past, but are not currently at MIT.
Translation: one of the individuals' brother in law was a part-time undergraduate at MIT before dropping out.
Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we cannot specifically name the individuals."
Translation: their expert said "as long as I don't have to defend this opinion in court or to the press and as long as you guarantee that you won't leak my name, sure, I'll take your consulting money and you can put out whatever you like in your press release".
the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"
What this means is that Apple is roughly keeping up in the CPU race: they just shipped a new CPU. You expect newly shipping CPUs to have an edge. But since it's only moderately faster than the currently shipping P4 or Opteron systems and only in certain situations, it means they are really just keeping up, not leaping ahead.
Given the higher price of G5 systems, bang for the buck still goes to the x86-based systems.
Python is a strongly typed, dynamically typed language. That means that you can do:but something likegives you a type error.
Old-style Perl and K&R C are weakly typed because they fail to detect many kinds of type errors.
The directory system is a departure from the tried and tested (and gotten used to) UNIX hier,
:-)
My thinking exactly--where are the punch cards?
BeOS is exactly the OS everyone needs right now, a kind of Linux with a really good GUI strapped on top. Beautiful FS and networking and a SINGLE package system.
Plan9 is a research project. Plan9 actually has some nifty ideas in it.
BeOS, on the other hand, is an object-oriented commercial operating system--well executed, but neither the file system nor the GUI are anything new.
Which one is the right choice for you really depends on your needs.
It probably wouldn't be hard to port the "links" browser (http://links.browser.org/). It's a text mode browser that renders most pages well. There is also a graphical extension for "links" that runs on raw framebuffers and X11 and is probably easy to port as well.
And while I don't know the cryptogtaphy involved, I assume it's a proven system (after all, this is the USPS), as least on paper, if not in implementation.
If the cryptography doesn't hold up to running on Linux, it's hopeless. In fact, their best bet would be to make the core library open source and let other people write GUIs for it. The security should only be in the cryptographic keys, not the software.
Reverse engineering software is much more common on Windows because it has to be; on Linux, people rarely have to bother.
Its interesting that it says "not renewing" in regards to the MS office licenses..
That's the standard term. What else are they supposed to say?
does that mean that until they decide to go with open source alternatives (or not), that they will be illegally using the software?
No. Existing licenses don't expire prematurely just because someone publicly announces that they won't be renewing.
I think it's pretty clear what they are saying: they aren't going to give Microsoft any more money, and they intend to be using an open source before the issue comes up.
Systems research is a big part of computer science. user interfaces, file systems, metadata, servers, toolkits, etc. You can bet it makes a huge difference when students learn on a platform that (a) is basically 20 year old technology and (b) has Microsoft making all the decisions for them.
It was irrelevant, I wasnt learning computers, or even how to program in C, I was learning concepts.
Well, it was irrelevant to you because you have basically assimilated the view that systems research doesn't matter. In different words, you got deprived of a large chunk of your CS education, and you don't even know what you missed.
mDNS and all that stuff matters because it's a standard and lets different applications written by different people find each other. But that's not the issue for an intranet P2P client. If you just want a bunch of things you write to find each other, you can just use multicast directly--it's simpler, works everywhere, and depends on no oddball libraries from anybody.
I think Java clearly does not meet the legal bar for being a good platform for open source development.
Hey, it's open source--you can just fix it. Oh, wait, development is run by Troll Tech. Well, you are a paying customers are you not? You don't even get a response from the company for your $$$?
Many people have come to Linux because they want to get off the upgrade treadmill that commercial companies are subjecting them to. Commercial companies have all sorts of incentives for breaking backwards compatibility, like being able to sell new licenses.
Of course, the dual-license for Qt means that Troll Tech has most of the same incentives: they need to come out with new and "improved" versions in order to make their paying customers happy. And that's perhaps why dual-licensed software is not such a good idea for open source development after all.
Because, when all is said and done, there is really little that is innovative in any of Gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, FLTK, etc. They just are making different tradeoffs for different markets. And if any of them need a significant and incompatible API overhaul, it's probably because their developers were learning on the job. OO GUI toolkits have been around since the 1970's, and there really isn't a lot of new stuff to figure out about them.
For example, I've heard that the NT kernel is actually quite good
The NT kernel reminds me of the Ford Edsel: people rave about all the technically good things it supposedly does, but ultimately, it's not really a car most people would drive by choice.
Simplicity of design and interfaces and cheap, low-tech solutions have their own value. Linux is more like the Japanese budget cars of yore: good, reliable transportation, while NT seems more like some US car company's technical pipe dream that just isn't coming together quite right. You can figure out yourself which one is likely to be better and more affordable transportation.
I for my own after 10 years of open source and Linux am up to search for alternatives. A commercial OS may be better (better documentation, professional development, you can make a few bucks with your work, no pain, stable ABI and API and much more).
Many of the people who are using open source are using it just for those reasons. In real life, APIs and ABIs to commercial software change rapidly because they are driven by marketing and business interests, documentation is costly and written for morons, you can't even look at the source when you are stuck, and you end up paying so much money for the privilege of using it that you won't be making any money on it.
And commercial software has the unpleasant habit of simply disappearing from the market at the most inconvenient times or having its price skyrocket unexpectedly. Remember DEC? They're gone and a lot of their software. Remember NeXT? Absorbed by Apple, and all you can get is the OS X variant; hope you didn't bet on their PC version. Remember Taligent? NeWS? Smalltalk? Microsoft Java? OS/2? Amiga? Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, and gone.
GNU/GPL, FSF, prayer RMS they all should go to hell they are all paralyzed.
The FSF does something about software they hold the copyright to. For the Linux kernel, the kernel copyright holders need to do something. Give it a few more months--these things take time.
People stealing open source code and embedd it in closed source programs and nothing can be done against it.
Yes, that's kind of annoying, but it isn't a threat to open source software. And sooner or later, those companies tend to get into trouble anyway.
You can add a file for swapping. Look at the manual pages for "mkswap" and "swapon".
You can screw up security on any system, Windows, Linux, Solaris, whatever.
The difference between Windows and Linux is that on Linux, you actually have a chance of getting it right if you know what you are doing. In part, that is because you can really get rid of pretty much every network service and piece of software on a Linux system except for what you actually want to run. In part, that is because you can actually look at the source to figure out how something works.
You can copy DVDs just fine without DeCSS. DeCSS is there for decoding DVDs so that they can be displayed.
(Imagine that, though: a computer that would glow different colors based on how much of its processing power was being used. When it turned red, you'd know that a crash was imminent.)
Wow, here you see the model of computers that the man of the street has: the higher you rev the CPU engine, the more likely it is to fail. No wonder people can't figure out the connection between bad software and system crashes.
We're talking about "what interface looks most like Windows?" fvwm, KDE, Gnome & all the others _don't look most like Windows_
Gnome and KDE can look as much like Windows as you like, to the point that even on the default settings, they fool many non-experts. It has gotten to the point where arguably the visual differences between versions of Windows are greater than between Gnome and the latest version of Windows.
but this one _looks almost exactly like Windows_. That's the important part.
Gnome and KDE look sufficiently like Windows to have that part covered. But Gnome and KDE each have one thing that MatHatter can't have: consistent behavior. And if something matters to non-experts, that is it.