Weighing in could make a difference? (yeah, right)
on
The GNOME Roadmap
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· Score: 1
1. Scratch the plans to add everything under the sun to the desktop, and focus on reducing the footprint (heh) instead.
2. Stop the user-hostility effort (disguised as a usability effort). Gnome 1.2 was way more usable than 2.x is. Spatial nautilus is a typical Gnome 2.x disaster (see also several "features" of the new filechooser and just about everything about Metacity): "abstract principles we dreamed up (and artificial usability tests, on occasion) tell us that, contrary to what the vast majority of real users may say, this is the way to go; since we're so much smarter than our users that we always know what's right for them and they don't, the ability to change this behavior should be well-hidden or nonexistent."
Bunk. DjVu has an open-source implementation and well-documented specs. It will thus be readable no matter what happens to LizardTech. Similarly, the main reason PDF can be counted on to be readable in the distant future is not its installed user base (that changes quickly enough to be fairly well negated as an advantage over the 10-20 year timespan you suggest), but rather that it is an open format.
DjVu is probably the best format for the poster's needs. I had a university class where nothing was ever handed out to students in hard copy and documents were instead posted on the web;.doc was used for the kind of documents PDF is good for, while PDF was used for scanned-in (but not OCR'd) articles and so forth. This was a nightmare; the PDFs were absolutely huge, and just scrolling through them would bring a >1ghz computer to its knees. It would even have been better to use uncompressed TIFFs.
At least one of the mods marked this as Funny (rather than Interesting), which I hope was the intention of the author. Creative windows drivers are just fine downloaded off the net w/o the original cd, and Creative hosted (and I think was primarily responsible for) the emu10k1 (SBLive, Audigy/Audigy2) opensource driver project (one of the few counterexamples to the overstatement in ALL CAPS).
Benefits? What benefits? Except for GigE (who uses GigE anyway?) and high resolution video-in (do you have a need for real-time DV editing? didn't think so), almost nothing (on the desktop anyway, which is the primary PCI Express market) has any use for the increased bandwidth of PCI Express. PCI-X is an entirely different beast (PCI-X is almost the same as PCI but goes to 64bit 66mhz instead of regular PCI's 32bit 33mhz and is seen in servers and G5 Macs; PCI Express is the entirely different bus being pushed by Intel and is not backwards compatible by any stretch of the imagination).
Of course I remember the ISA-PCI transition. There were many more compelling reasons to switch to PCI, and the transition still took a very long time.
DDR2 won't last long enough for it to go through the technology revisions to become mainstream. It won't clock much higher than DDR either, largely due to power and heat issues. DDR3 is already on the market for use in things such as video cards and it runs quite a bit cooler at the same clocks than DDR2.
Prescott, PCI Express, and DDR2 are supposed to motivate people to move to BTX. Prescott is an absolute failure, while PCI Express and DDR2 don't show any real improvement over their predecessors. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel has quite a bit of trouble moving people to BTX; ATX will last a while yet.
The native instruction set isn't well-suited to host an operating system (see also Linus's take, it's too much of a moving target (TM changes it all the time and keeps the frontends stable; without this flexibility they would be entirely lost), and compiling for the native instruction set would eliminate all the benefits of code morphing (the dynamic optimizations, etc). Efficeon has a lot of potential; here's hoping Transmeta can get bugs sorted out and become competitive.
TMI was nothing like Chernobyl. Going to the dentist for an x-ray gives you more dangerous radiation than just about anybody got from TMI. Nobody died because of TMI.
Other people have explained what the errors are in saying a Ptolmaic system or Brahe's system is "mathematically equivalent." I'll just add a few things- first, the real breakthrough in celestial mechanics was not the idea of Copernicus that planets revolve around the sun- some people had thought that for a long time- but rather Kepler's theory that the planetary orbits are ellipses. Nobody had taken heliocentrists seriously before Kepler, since a heliocentric model with circular planetary orbits actually conflicted with observation to a much greater extent than did the Ptolemaic system.
In general, the background of the scientific revolution from Copernicus to Newton was the opposite of what it is often taken to be- a revival of observation and experimentation. The Scholastic system, being based on Aristotelianism, put plenty of emphasis on observation. One of the major catalysts for this scientific revolution was rather the appearance of translations of Plato and a subsequent move to attempt to rise above the particulars of the world to the Forms. I think it was Galileo who wrote to one of his associates that he admired and labored to emulate the resolution of men like Copernicus who could, ignoring the input of their senses, contradict these senses in describing how things OUGHT to behave according to ideal laws.
One thing about the trouble astronomers had with the Catholic Church which is often ignored is that it was a real surprise. For almost a millenium before the Counter-Reformation, the Church was, on the whole, the greatest advocate of learning the world has ever known, though this advocacy had perhaps been on the decline for some time. The picture of a pre-Reformation Church working constantly to supress knowledge and free thought comes from the same sources of misinforming tradition which bring you the 2nd-grade Columbus Day elementary school assembly skits where a kid playing Columbus explains to his astounded peers that he thinks the world is round. (Very few people had believed the world was flat for quite some time, and the reason Columbus ventured west when nobody else would was because his calculations of the circumference of the world were way off; the Greeks had been very nearly right, and nobody had thought to try sailing west because crossing an ocean the width of the Atlantic, Pacific, and North America combined, without any places to stop, would have been far too risky to attempt at least until the advent of steam power.)
I'm just curious- why would one want to use 2.0 over 2.2? I understand the reasons one might want to use a kernel from before the 2.4 series on lower end or embedded devices (I installed a 2.2 kernel on a 486 laptop not all that long ago)- but I've been under the impression that 2.2 offered a lot of gains over 2.0 without being noticeably "heavier". For what things is the 2.0 kernel series more suitable than 2.2, and why?
Dictionaries are descriptive, not normative. It makes no sense to say something is "acceptable according to the dictionary". It's either common enough in regular usage to merit mention in the dictionary or not. Use of the normative "it should be said/spelled like this" is meant to improve clarity and reduce the possibility of miscommunication, for which purpose "nuc-u-lar" is probably not how one should pronounce it.
The native ntfs driver supports writing only if the write operation wouldn't disturb any of the metadata- that is, you can't create or delete any files but you can safely overwrite a file if you don't change its size. This is more useful than it sounds at first- you can use a loopback file on the ntfs partition for anything you want.
Look- everybody knows Real's mass market players have been horrible for quite some time. However, whenever anybody mentions Helix on/., any rational discussion is drowned out by a horde of people who haven't looked into Helix at all but want to get in their "R3AL I5 T3H 5UX0RZ!" me-too comment. Helix looks like a really solid effort, and the linux player is rather nice. Hopefully management will let them release a Windows port of the helix player as they intend to do.
Remember, the doctrine of transubstantiation depends on the distinction between "substance" and "accident" in Aristotelian/Scholastic philosophy. The accidents are all the properties which inhere in the substance (the Ur-stuff); we would normally expect something which has all the properties of bread to be bread substantially but in literal transubstantiation the accidents of bread are retained while the substance is changed to that of the flesh of Christ. So presumably "carb-ness" is an accident and thus retained in the wafer after transubstantiation.
I have a lot of respect for Catholics (More and Erasmus beat Luther and Calvin any day BTW), but I fail to see why anyone would maintain the doctrine of literal transubstantiation, which is primarily founded not on the Bible (which in the case of "Take, eat; this is my flesh" cries out for a less literal interpretation as much as in any parable) but on a merely human philosophical framework long out of fashion.
I consistently hear HP, Samsung, and Brother recommended for personal lasers. I don't have any experience with HP or Samsung personal lasers, but I have a Brother HL-1440 which has worked very well for me (though I do sometimes wish I'd gotten the next model up with postscript emulation, or maybe even a model with auto duplex).
Though consistency of interface is important in creating a distribution which is targeted at end-users, this does not have to come with the baggage which is associated with the current two leading DEs. A desktop should be simple, light, and operate well with anything which follows a set of standards; the standards, rather than the fact that all the applications are part of the same monolithic heavyweight project, should be the source of consistency. Most commercial companies would, I think, prefer a desktop which is development environment-agnostic over one which makes the choice for them, be the chosen environment lgpl'd or no.
You only have to give source to the people who you distribute your software to. Since Xandros only distributes their software to paying customers, they only need to distribute the source to paying customers. Of course, said customers can exercize their GPL right to make copies of the source and give that to others.
Not an action game, and not going to fit 7, but...
on
Multiplayer Linux Games
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Gnocatan, the Gnome 2 settlers of catan clone, is a lot of fun.
If someone has absolutely nothing worthwhile to say, it's worth telling him not to speak, at the very least as a service to him- helping get him to do better things with his time. The GFDL comment was just because I happened to see you defending Stallman and co regarding it on lwn once; I didn't read through everything you said in that discussion because I didn't have an vomit bag handy, and thus did not notice you denouncing the GFDL. I have no argument with the GPL and the way it utilizes copyright law (though I would maintain such usage doesn't qualify as regular but rather as exemption from regular restrictions by systematic copyright licensing)- though I would say the LGPL is generally better- but rather with inconsiderate, self-righteous, dictatorial, and uninformed GNU zealotry. As to your "practical" arguments, if you break the law every time you're given a chance to do so, you deserve to be in prison; and while some tasks would benefit from the transparency of GCC, for a very large number- probably the majority- of cases when people are compiling for Intel processors the Intel compiler's benefits would vastly outweigh any such considerations. In other words, "best tool for the job" rather than "whatever is preached from the GNU/Pulpit this week".
coriordan, please stop trying to convert the unwashed masses here at slashdot and lwn. Anybody who is at either site is well aware of GNU and their "philosophical" positions and has heard these regurgitated arguments before, and if we aren't members of the GNU/Cult it's because we've examined their positions and found Stallman and Co. to be frothing-at-the-mouth crazy. Your naive, ignorant, and overconfident opinions aren't the gospel you take them to be. Your sermons at LWN expounding the GPL and the GFDL to the non-believers are downright ludicrous (especially since you don't understand the actual natures of the licenses and software development models you discuss).
So intel releases a compiler. So you don't approve of its being protected by regular copyright law. Then a) refrain from buying it and b) sit down and shut up.
For those who have real interest in the compiler instead of fantasized complaints, Intel offers zero-cost downloads of both the c/c++ and fortran compilers for noncommercial use.
The ntfs driver's read support isn't really "experimental" these days, it's quite reliable. However, it can only write to an existing file, and only if it's not changing the length. (This sounds like it would be useless, but a loopback file could be created under Windows and then used from Linux for pretty much any purpose- I'm not sure but I think you can even use it to share files from Linux with windows if you use the FileDisk loopback driver under Windows.) The reason is that NTFS does a lot of weird stuff with metadata, so while it's not very hard to glean from all that metadata where files are on the disk, it's hard to get all the metadata right when writing. Writing to an existing file without changing the length, however, doesn't require any change to the metadata.
Yessir, we should all be going to the liberal conspiracy theorists for the *AWFUL TRUTH* instead of, for instance, watching or reading the transcript of the interview where Al Gore claims he created the internet-- because we all know, thanks to Franken, that the transcript was faked and the televised interview the fabrication of hundreds of republican cg artists, voiceprint analysts, and other right-wing sensationalists! These right-wing conspiracies are all over the place these days! I'm sure glad I get my information from Franken and the One True Party!
The trouble is that nvidia hasn't updated their rpm packages' install scripts in ages and instead uses a loki-setup inspired installer which tries to get rid of any files which conflict with it. This results in it breaking a couple of installed rpms and still not managing to keep up with new files distros provide which still override the nvidia drivers. However, all is not lost: people are allowed to repackage the nvidia drivers and distribute the packages, so you can get rpms from either ATrpms or (better) http://www2.educ.umu.se/~peter/nvidia/.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Scratch the plans to add everything under the sun to the desktop, and focus on reducing the footprint (heh) instead.
2. Stop the user-hostility effort (disguised as a usability effort). Gnome 1.2 was way more usable than 2.x is. Spatial nautilus is a typical Gnome 2.x disaster (see also several "features" of the new filechooser and just about everything about Metacity): "abstract principles we dreamed up (and artificial usability tests, on occasion) tell us that, contrary to what the vast majority of real users may say, this is the way to go; since we're so much smarter than our users that we always know what's right for them and they don't, the ability to change this behavior should be well-hidden or nonexistent."
Bunk. DjVu has an open-source implementation and well-documented specs. It will thus be readable no matter what happens to LizardTech. Similarly, the main reason PDF can be counted on to be readable in the distant future is not its installed user base (that changes quickly enough to be fairly well negated as an advantage over the 10-20 year timespan you suggest), but rather that it is an open format.
.doc was used for the kind of documents PDF is good for, while PDF was used for scanned-in (but not OCR'd) articles and so forth. This was a nightmare; the PDFs were absolutely huge, and just scrolling through them would bring a >1ghz computer to its knees. It would even have been better to use uncompressed TIFFs.
DjVu is probably the best format for the poster's needs. I had a university class where nothing was ever handed out to students in hard copy and documents were instead posted on the web;
From almost a month ago: "A Step Closer To The Optimum Solar Cell" is also about Walukiewicz and company's research.
At least one of the mods marked this as Funny (rather than Interesting), which I hope was the intention of the author. Creative windows drivers are just fine downloaded off the net w/o the original cd, and Creative hosted (and I think was primarily responsible for) the emu10k1 (SBLive, Audigy/Audigy2) opensource driver project (one of the few counterexamples to the overstatement in ALL CAPS).
Don't forget one of the many other ways pigeons contribute to information transfer... Google's PigeonRank.
Benefits? What benefits? Except for GigE (who uses GigE anyway?) and high resolution video-in (do you have a need for real-time DV editing? didn't think so), almost nothing (on the desktop anyway, which is the primary PCI Express market) has any use for the increased bandwidth of PCI Express. PCI-X is an entirely different beast (PCI-X is almost the same as PCI but goes to 64bit 66mhz instead of regular PCI's 32bit 33mhz and is seen in servers and G5 Macs; PCI Express is the entirely different bus being pushed by Intel and is not backwards compatible by any stretch of the imagination).
Of course I remember the ISA-PCI transition. There were many more compelling reasons to switch to PCI, and the transition still took a very long time.
DDR2 won't last long enough for it to go through the technology revisions to become mainstream. It won't clock much higher than DDR either, largely due to power and heat issues. DDR3 is already on the market for use in things such as video cards and it runs quite a bit cooler at the same clocks than DDR2.
Prescott, PCI Express, and DDR2 are supposed to motivate people to move to BTX. Prescott is an absolute failure, while PCI Express and DDR2 don't show any real improvement over their predecessors. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel has quite a bit of trouble moving people to BTX; ATX will last a while yet.
The native instruction set isn't well-suited to host an operating system (see also Linus's take, it's too much of a moving target (TM changes it all the time and keeps the frontends stable; without this flexibility they would be entirely lost), and compiling for the native instruction set would eliminate all the benefits of code morphing (the dynamic optimizations, etc). Efficeon has a lot of potential; here's hoping Transmeta can get bugs sorted out and become competitive.
TMI was nothing like Chernobyl. Going to the dentist for an x-ray gives you more dangerous radiation than just about anybody got from TMI. Nobody died because of TMI.
Now if sharp would just release a C7xx-like Zaurus for the US market... (yes, I'm aware of the translation hacks, no, I'm not interested in those)
Other people have explained what the errors are in saying a Ptolmaic system or Brahe's system is "mathematically equivalent." I'll just add a few things- first, the real breakthrough in celestial mechanics was not the idea of Copernicus that planets revolve around the sun- some people had thought that for a long time- but rather Kepler's theory that the planetary orbits are ellipses. Nobody had taken heliocentrists seriously before Kepler, since a heliocentric model with circular planetary orbits actually conflicted with observation to a much greater extent than did the Ptolemaic system.
In general, the background of the scientific revolution from Copernicus to Newton was the opposite of what it is often taken to be- a revival of observation and experimentation. The Scholastic system, being based on Aristotelianism, put plenty of emphasis on observation. One of the major catalysts for this scientific revolution was rather the appearance of translations of Plato and a subsequent move to attempt to rise above the particulars of the world to the Forms. I think it was Galileo who wrote to one of his associates that he admired and labored to emulate the resolution of men like Copernicus who could, ignoring the input of their senses, contradict these senses in describing how things OUGHT to behave according to ideal laws.
One thing about the trouble astronomers had with the Catholic Church which is often ignored is that it was a real surprise. For almost a millenium before the Counter-Reformation, the Church was, on the whole, the greatest advocate of learning the world has ever known, though this advocacy had perhaps been on the decline for some time. The picture of a pre-Reformation Church working constantly to supress knowledge and free thought comes from the same sources of misinforming tradition which bring you the 2nd-grade Columbus Day elementary school assembly skits where a kid playing Columbus explains to his astounded peers that he thinks the world is round. (Very few people had believed the world was flat for quite some time, and the reason Columbus ventured west when nobody else would was because his calculations of the circumference of the world were way off; the Greeks had been very nearly right, and nobody had thought to try sailing west because crossing an ocean the width of the Atlantic, Pacific, and North America combined, without any places to stop, would have been far too risky to attempt at least until the advent of steam power.)
I'm just curious- why would one want to use 2.0 over 2.2? I understand the reasons one might want to use a kernel from before the 2.4 series on lower end or embedded devices (I installed a 2.2 kernel on a 486 laptop not all that long ago)- but I've been under the impression that 2.2 offered a lot of gains over 2.0 without being noticeably "heavier". For what things is the 2.0 kernel series more suitable than 2.2, and why?
Dictionaries are descriptive, not normative. It makes no sense to say something is "acceptable according to the dictionary". It's either common enough in regular usage to merit mention in the dictionary or not. Use of the normative "it should be said/spelled like this" is meant to improve clarity and reduce the possibility of miscommunication, for which purpose "nuc-u-lar" is probably not how one should pronounce it.
The native ntfs driver supports writing only if the write operation wouldn't disturb any of the metadata- that is, you can't create or delete any files but you can safely overwrite a file if you don't change its size. This is more useful than it sounds at first- you can use a loopback file on the ntfs partition for anything you want.
Look- everybody knows Real's mass market players have been horrible for quite some time. However, whenever anybody mentions Helix on /., any rational discussion is drowned out by a horde of people who haven't looked into Helix at all but want to get in their "R3AL I5 T3H 5UX0RZ!" me-too comment. Helix looks like a really solid effort, and the linux player is rather nice. Hopefully management will let them release a Windows port of the helix player as they intend to do.
Remember, the doctrine of transubstantiation depends on the distinction between "substance" and "accident" in Aristotelian/Scholastic philosophy. The accidents are all the properties which inhere in the substance (the Ur-stuff); we would normally expect something which has all the properties of bread to be bread substantially but in literal transubstantiation the accidents of bread are retained while the substance is changed to that of the flesh of Christ. So presumably "carb-ness" is an accident and thus retained in the wafer after transubstantiation.
I have a lot of respect for Catholics (More and Erasmus beat Luther and Calvin any day BTW), but I fail to see why anyone would maintain the doctrine of literal transubstantiation, which is primarily founded not on the Bible (which in the case of "Take, eat; this is my flesh" cries out for a less literal interpretation as much as in any parable) but on a merely human philosophical framework long out of fashion.
I consistently hear HP, Samsung, and Brother recommended for personal lasers. I don't have any experience with HP or Samsung personal lasers, but I have a Brother HL-1440 which has worked very well for me (though I do sometimes wish I'd gotten the next model up with postscript emulation, or maybe even a model with auto duplex).
Though consistency of interface is important in creating a distribution which is targeted at end-users, this does not have to come with the baggage which is associated with the current two leading DEs. A desktop should be simple, light, and operate well with anything which follows a set of standards; the standards, rather than the fact that all the applications are part of the same monolithic heavyweight project, should be the source of consistency. Most commercial companies would, I think, prefer a desktop which is development environment-agnostic over one which makes the choice for them, be the chosen environment lgpl'd or no.
You only have to give source to the people who you distribute your software to. Since Xandros only distributes their software to paying customers, they only need to distribute the source to paying customers. Of course, said customers can exercize their GPL right to make copies of the source and give that to others.
Gnocatan, the Gnome 2 settlers of catan clone, is a lot of fun.
If someone has absolutely nothing worthwhile to say, it's worth telling him not to speak, at the very least as a service to him- helping get him to do better things with his time. The GFDL comment was just because I happened to see you defending Stallman and co regarding it on lwn once; I didn't read through everything you said in that discussion because I didn't have an vomit bag handy, and thus did not notice you denouncing the GFDL. I have no argument with the GPL and the way it utilizes copyright law (though I would maintain such usage doesn't qualify as regular but rather as exemption from regular restrictions by systematic copyright licensing)- though I would say the LGPL is generally better- but rather with inconsiderate, self-righteous, dictatorial, and uninformed GNU zealotry. As to your "practical" arguments, if you break the law every time you're given a chance to do so, you deserve to be in prison; and while some tasks would benefit from the transparency of GCC, for a very large number- probably the majority- of cases when people are compiling for Intel processors the Intel compiler's benefits would vastly outweigh any such considerations. In other words, "best tool for the job" rather than "whatever is preached from the GNU/Pulpit this week".
coriordan, please stop trying to convert the unwashed masses here at slashdot and lwn. Anybody who is at either site is well aware of GNU and their "philosophical" positions and has heard these regurgitated arguments before, and if we aren't members of the GNU/Cult it's because we've examined their positions and found Stallman and Co. to be frothing-at-the-mouth crazy. Your naive, ignorant, and overconfident opinions aren't the gospel you take them to be. Your sermons at LWN expounding the GPL and the GFDL to the non-believers are downright ludicrous (especially since you don't understand the actual natures of the licenses and software development models you discuss).
So intel releases a compiler. So you don't approve of its being protected by regular copyright law. Then a) refrain from buying it and b) sit down and shut up.
For those who have real interest in the compiler instead of fantasized complaints, Intel offers zero-cost downloads of both the c/c++ and fortran compilers for noncommercial use.
The ntfs driver's read support isn't really "experimental" these days, it's quite reliable. However, it can only write to an existing file, and only if it's not changing the length. (This sounds like it would be useless, but a loopback file could be created under Windows and then used from Linux for pretty much any purpose- I'm not sure but I think you can even use it to share files from Linux with windows if you use the FileDisk loopback driver under Windows.) The reason is that NTFS does a lot of weird stuff with metadata, so while it's not very hard to glean from all that metadata where files are on the disk, it's hard to get all the metadata right when writing. Writing to an existing file without changing the length, however, doesn't require any change to the metadata.
Yessir, we should all be going to the liberal conspiracy theorists for the *AWFUL TRUTH* instead of, for instance, watching or reading the transcript of the interview where Al Gore claims he created the internet-- because we all know, thanks to Franken, that the transcript was faked and the televised interview the fabrication of hundreds of republican cg artists, voiceprint analysts, and other right-wing sensationalists! These right-wing conspiracies are all over the place these days! I'm sure glad I get my information from Franken and the One True Party!
The trouble is that nvidia hasn't updated their rpm packages' install scripts in ages and instead uses a loki-setup inspired installer which tries to get rid of any files which conflict with it. This results in it breaking a couple of installed rpms and still not managing to keep up with new files distros provide which still override the nvidia drivers. However, all is not lost: people are allowed to repackage the nvidia drivers and distribute the packages, so you can get rpms from either ATrpms or (better) http://www2.educ.umu.se/~peter/nvidia/.