If the EU would follow the Australian example (which is not unthinkable), I doubt that the MPAA would just forget about zone 2...
That would almost limit DVD sales to North America alone.
But Softupdates has the same benefit
on
Benchmark Madness
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· Score: 3
At lower cost (complexity). Using a plain old filesystem such as BSD's FFS, but it could be added to ext2fs too. Alas Linux developers once more thought they had to reinvent the wheel instead.
Softupdates can guartantee consistency in case of crashes, thus providing save yet asynchronous-like performance (i.e. optimal performance).
Details are explained on the website of the author, Kirk McKusick. Also you can find a link there which leads to an interesting (technical) comparison of logging (aka journalling) versus softupdates.
I wish someone would port softupdates to linux (ext2fs). Or better yet, make BSD's FFS+softupdates a native Linux filesystem. It would surely outperform the other currently available filesystems. At least on my computer, when I benchmark FreeBSD+FFS+softupdates against Linux+ext2fs/reiserfs (on the same hardware, disk, disklocation) FFS+softupdates consistently wins hands down. I don't think this is because of FreeBSD's kernel, but rather because of softupdates (and FFS with it's large blocksize combined with smaller fragments to avoid too much slack).
why do you even need X any more let alone motiff!
on
The Superior Motif?
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· Score: 4
Please, not again one of those anti-X rants. Some people only seem things to exist that they understand. X is too complex? It must die. The whole world should adapt to what your limited mind can grasp?
As long as there is nothing that replaces the network transparence of X, it is not going to be replaced! Even the Linux-PDA from agenda computing decided to put X in that tiny machine. Once you have made a TCP/IP connection via PPP from your Linux desktop, you can remotely display the agenda's X-window apps on your host computer, which is very cool and useful. Sending the whole screen bitmaps (a la laplink type of software for Windows) would be way too slow and would not take advantage of larger display size and resolution of your desktop. X-window does such things transparently.
I'm convinced that X-window will even be in embedded devices. There is no need for embedded Qt.
Are you serious: no resource editing for GTK or Qt
on
The Superior Motif?
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· Score: 3
Ouch. I have never really looked into GTK or Qt yet (I develop mainly server based software), the only GUI toolkits I know are Motif and Athena (both Xt based).
Athena is small, clean but ugly. It was only an example widget set to show how to use Xt. Xt's structure, with its resources describing every aspect from the GUI is very powerful. There are even add-ons that let you create your widget hierarchy (i.e. GUI structure) using some small external text file (a much much more productive way than using a WYSIWYG GUI builder).
Motif, one of the real-world widget sets on top of Xt, is horrible, as others have said in this discussion. It also walks over some basic Xt do's and dont's. In that respect, Suns OLIT (the open look widget set built upon Xt) was much nicer in every respect. Alas SUN lost the UNIX interface wars due to political reasons (only).
I hoped Qt and GTK would become the new standard unix GUI toolkit (one of them, at least) but I must say that I am very dissapointed if even "old stuff" such as editres are not there.
What is P2P? It just means any connected node (called host) on the Internet can connect another one, without one system explicitly meant to be a server only, and the other one a client.
What is so special about that, why all the fuzz? Even the notion of defending P2P makes me sick and is absurd. The Internet is built on (mostly) the TCP protoco, which allows for any node to connect to any other node directly. The Internet *is* P2P and has been so from the beginning.
It is normal to telnet from machine A to machine B, and then telnet back from B to A. It is normal to act both as an ftp client and server, in fact before the web became popular, in the old days, almost any connected node to the Internet acted both as client and as server.
Why is this "evidence" needed? People trying to forbid P2P are trying to forbid Internet, or at least trying to fundamentally change its netowork protocol (which is impossible).
Only ISP's could block incoming connections, thus making "P2P" (how I hate that word, describing something that has been around for ages as if it were something new) impossible. Not many of them do (luckily), only having no fixed IP address makes acting as a server a bit more complicated, but things like dyndns get around that.
One might imagine a future where anyone with a dynamic IP address (hard to trace) is prohibited by the state to have incoming connections. That is a nightmare but I don't think such a draconic law is very probably, and it would be very hard to enforce too.
Linux is on top there too, at $347. The rest is way cheaper at $161 (second place) till $267. This tells me that either the hardware from SGI is too expensive, or Linux isn't using the available hardware efficiently.
Just look here (only german, italian and french, the three official languages). As others have said, this is a normality, and it is absurd that the government would not make all laws available.
While the EU is not as "mad" as the USA yet, it is heading in the same direction. I think that all entities that become too large and powerful get corrupt (power corrupts). Therefore I oppose the EU (I'm an EU citizen who fled to one of the last remaining "free" spots).
Reading the article, I get an image of parent that are very proud of their child. While pride to a certain extent is good, too much proud leads to high ambitions for your children, and for too high expectations.
The result: stress. The fact (if this is true) that he was trying to hide some lower grades fits in very well. I have seen children become phychologically broken because of too high ambitions/expectations from their parents (all meant well of course, but still). When I read his father : "I worked so hard to bring up good children in a good school district." and his mother: "Rita eagerly displays a pile of medals, ribbons and trophies showcasing their son's many talents." I can't help but suspect that this might be such a case.
Then, after the "disgrace" of being suspended from school might have been unbearable to him to face his parents (most children would just talk to their parents).
This, like all other "interpretations", is just guesswork. But I don't think it is good to be so quick to blame only the school; this could and should also be a lesson for parents. Don't push your children, be very careful with too high expectations. Children need time to just play, just waste time, must not always be on to accomplish something. And they must know that it is allowed to fail (sometimes) and that getting lower grades is no disgrace (as long as your not performing way below your capacities for years in a row).
As a child the school offered me several times to skip one or two classes. Instead I did not (my parents opposed), so I lost some time. I played a lot of stupid games, 100% inproductive time. I didn't have very high ambitions. So what? I did what I liked, I could be relaxed and in the end it all doesn't make a difference. Yes, I might have finished university 1 or 2 years earlier, I might have gathered somewhat more capital at this point in time. Would I have been a more happy person? Surely not.
I shake my head when I read stories like this, or read elsewhere about parents having such high expectations for their children. I know that mostly it is good intentions (not always, some parents use their children to get social recognition or pride for themselves, alas) but they don't realise how much harm they do.
Their inappropriate (or not?) use of the DMCA is only good. When more and more of such ridiculous "effects" of the DMCA appear (as we've all known in advance) the lawmakers might see the light and realize how foolish/evil the DMCA is.
They always said that he who does nothing illegal has nothing to fear from the DMCA, but now you can see that this is not true.
Re:A note from the Free Software Foundation:
on
AtheOS Interview
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· Score: 1
Not everywhere the GPL is used, but everwhere GNU software is used (this is not the same).
Re:This benchmark was not that useful
on
Kernel Benchmarks
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· Score: 3
Another thing making this benchmark useless is that it only tests Linux performance under no-load conditions (i.e. the benchmark is the only thing that runs), it doesn't tell anything about scaleability and keeping up performance under heavy load.
And that is exactly the point that Linux is often criticized for, compared to competitors (Solaris, FreeBSD): it may perform well under no- or light-load conditions, but it doesn't scale well. It would have been interesting to check whether this criticism is still valid for the 2.4 kernels.
This is pretty useless. It compares different machines, and vastly out-of-date versions (of FreeBSD, at least). Tonight I'll run a test of current Linux and FreeBSD on the same hardware (both vmware virtual machines running on the same physical box) and post some results.
Hmm, I thought Switzerland was expensive, but apparently not always. A CD-R costs about $45 here. Probably it is because of higher VAT and that nasty special copy-tax on recording media?
Btw gas is expensive here, though not as extreme as in the rest of Europe (DFL 2.05 per liter).
Indeed this is good: I hope that companies using MSFT products have to bleed and pay as much as possible. They must be punished for their "sin", and companies using less MSFT products will be more competitive.
With Internet becoming more important in our daily lives, it is a utopia (or maybe a nightmare) thinking that you can just leave it without any regulation.
I agree that most new laws, related to Internet and Information Technology in general, are bad and are the product of ignorant und bribed politicians. But declaring the Internet to a kind of law-free zone is another extreme that is no good either. We don't want a society without laws, since it would be an anarchy and disintegrate, or some monopoly/corporations would take over. With the Internet becoming more and more a part of normal society, it needs laws too.
In a utopia, the world can exist without laws, and everyone will keep sensible rules by themselves. The real world, alas, is different.
We can only hope that the current generation of politicians, who did not grow up with IT and therefore makes stupid decisions, is replaced by a younger generation soon, before stupid laws being implemented right now have done too much damage. In the meantime we must fight and lobby to contain the damage being done.
FreeBSD has had ACL's for ages. They aren't used much though, since managing ACL's is a nightmare, typically something for control freaks one finds in corporate environments.
The only thing that has changed now is that the FreeBSD ACL's are used by Samba, so that the ACL's that Windows security uses can be provided via a Samba server running on FreeBSD.
This might satisfy those people who want to replace their NT fileservers with UNIX/Samba fileservers, but who absolutely demand ACL's.
Two years ago I used SunPRO with STL, and I didn't found any deviation from the standard. Everything worked as expected (unlike g++, which was useless for C++ back then).
Windows' video driver architecture offers developers a standard mechanism for enabling Macrovision; no such standard exists for Linux. Frechette's group worked with InterVideo to develop an interface that allows LinDVD to enable Macrovision's copy protection when it's needed. Pratchette considers IBM's work a start, not a standard, instead hoping that "perhaps the Linux community will define a standard interface for this, possibly taking advantage of some of the work that we did."
Yes, that is a good idea. Let the Linux community put such a function in the kernel. Then producers of closed-source apps for Linux shall use the kernel function to enable macrovision, and not put any built-in protection in their DVD Player.
We can disable the protection in the kernel, since we have the source. We cannot disable such protection in closed-source apps. So lets hope indeed that the Linux kernel shall contain such a function soon:).
Not at all: They offer it for download to not enrage the Linux community, but rather they would like you to buy the CD's instead. If the mirrors are overloaded, chances for people rushing out to the store to buy a set increase.
Using yacc you can make some grammar yourself that is very easy to parse, and that produces a very fast and efficient parser too.
Anyone could have written a spec/grammar for some application domain and implemented a parser in lex/yacc very easily. I don't see the big step forward that XML is, except that you don't need to write the yacc grammar anymore. Instead you have to write the DTD and use XSL to transform the input, or use an XML parser to get some internal tree representation of your input (which is possible with yacc-tools too).
Then the question is: is a yacc grammar so much more difficult to write as a DTD? I can't tell for sure since I'm quite experienced with yacc and not with DTD, but I doubt it.
The advertisers are the thieves
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 1
I'd rather reverse his logic altogether: While talking about stealing, the real ones stealing are the advertisers. Without being asked, I "have to" waste my time with useless information, and the worst thing is that in the end I pay for the advertisements myself!
How do you think advertising is funded? In the end from the profit of the company, thus the shareholder and the consumer who buys the product pays. They pay for something that is necessary because of competition (the competitor advertises too, creating an advertising "arms race") but that essentially is a waste of time and money; advertisement doesn't produce anything useful, it doesn't add value or information (at least by far not as much as an objective product review).
Pay-TV is a better alternative. No more waste of time, no more expensive advertisement budgets thus the products can be cheaper, the dividents can be bigger and the salaries of people doing something useful too. The extra money that is not wasted, people can spend directly to subscribe to quality television without advertisements.
Actually advertising is like communism: You don't get your own choice, but instead you have to pay an advertisement tax on all products you buy, and in return you get something you didn't ask for (ads that waste your time and don't offer valuable objective information, but try to brainwash you instead). Socialist/communist regimes always put a very heavy emphasis on brainwashing the people and constant propaganda, and advertising is no different.
Indeed, they just updated the price on the link I gave from $206 to $104 per 256MB. Maybe there was an error. Anyway, this makes the P4 even more unattractive from a price/performance POV.
With all services having to be free up till now, users are bombarded with ever more intrusive ads, biased (bought) information and trash. Because so many internet users expect everything for free, a quality provider offering good information for a (small) fee could not survive.
As so many free services get into trouble now, I think chances for offering quality services for a fee get better, which might benefit all who value their time and thus are prepared to pay a little for a better signal/noise ratio.
Dejanews is a good example: It was good, but not economically viable. Because of the "everything must be free" mentality, it was not yet relaunched as a for-pay service. Soon it might, and I would gladly pay a reasonable fee for the invaluable resource that a good usenet archive is. (groups.google.com is no good, is incomparable to the good old dejanews).
Subscriptions are cumbersome however, because when there are so many service to use you would have so many subscriptions to keep track of (and to cancel in time). What I would like is a system where I could subscribe to some services that I use heavily, and to pay-per-view for some that I would use only occasionally (like buying a separate newspaper as opposed to taking a daily subscription). However, until a single worldwide system for micropayments is established, this seems impossible.
Which can do IPv6, uses a normal/etc/inetd.conf file, and has integrated/etc/hosts.allow and/etc/hosts.reject handling (i.e. the tcpwrappers were integrated into inetd).
I think it is very serious to neglect compatability with the rest of the UNIX world so much, and throw it away that lightly. Yes the features of xinetd are nice, but it could have been done better (more compatible).
Linux only got popular because of UNIX, and a lot of current intererest and funding for Linux development comes from companies with UNIX software and platforms (such as IBM with AIX). If Linux no longer is recognizable as a UNIX variant it will hurt both the UNIX world and Linux. It already has become the most "strange" variant.
Slashdot Mirror
If the EU would follow the Australian example (which is not unthinkable), I doubt that the MPAA would just forget about zone 2...
That would almost limit DVD sales to North America alone.
Softupdates can guartantee consistency in case of crashes, thus providing save yet asynchronous-like performance (i.e. optimal performance).
Details are explained on the website of the author, Kirk McKusick. Also you can find a link there which leads to an interesting (technical) comparison of logging (aka journalling) versus softupdates.
I wish someone would port softupdates to linux (ext2fs). Or better yet, make BSD's FFS+softupdates a native Linux filesystem. It would surely outperform the other currently available filesystems. At least on my computer, when I benchmark FreeBSD+FFS+softupdates against Linux+ext2fs/reiserfs (on the same hardware, disk, disklocation) FFS+softupdates consistently wins hands down. I don't think this is because of FreeBSD's kernel, but rather because of softupdates (and FFS with it's large blocksize combined with smaller fragments to avoid too much slack).
As long as there is nothing that replaces the network transparence of X, it is not going to be replaced! Even the Linux-PDA from agenda computing decided to put X in that tiny machine. Once you have made a TCP/IP connection via PPP from your Linux desktop, you can remotely display the agenda's X-window apps on your host computer, which is very cool and useful. Sending the whole screen bitmaps (a la laplink type of software for Windows) would be way too slow and would not take advantage of larger display size and resolution of your desktop. X-window does such things transparently.
I'm convinced that X-window will even be in embedded devices. There is no need for embedded Qt.
Athena is small, clean but ugly. It was only an example widget set to show how to use Xt. Xt's structure, with its resources describing every aspect from the GUI is very powerful. There are even add-ons that let you create your widget hierarchy (i.e. GUI structure) using some small external text file (a much much more productive way than using a WYSIWYG GUI builder).
Motif, one of the real-world widget sets on top of Xt, is horrible, as others have said in this discussion. It also walks over some basic Xt do's and dont's. In that respect, Suns OLIT (the open look widget set built upon Xt) was much nicer in every respect. Alas SUN lost the UNIX interface wars due to political reasons (only).
I hoped Qt and GTK would become the new standard unix GUI toolkit (one of them, at least) but I must say that I am very dissapointed if even "old stuff" such as editres are not there.
What is so special about that, why all the fuzz? Even the notion of defending P2P makes me sick and is absurd. The Internet is built on (mostly) the TCP protoco, which allows for any node to connect to any other node directly. The Internet *is* P2P and has been so from the beginning.
It is normal to telnet from machine A to machine B, and then telnet back from B to A. It is normal to act both as an ftp client and server, in fact before the web became popular, in the old days, almost any connected node to the Internet acted both as client and as server.
Why is this "evidence" needed? People trying to forbid P2P are trying to forbid Internet, or at least trying to fundamentally change its netowork protocol (which is impossible).
Only ISP's could block incoming connections, thus making "P2P" (how I hate that word, describing something that has been around for ages as if it were something new) impossible. Not many of them do (luckily), only having no fixed IP address makes acting as a server a bit more complicated, but things like dyndns get around that.
One might imagine a future where anyone with a dynamic IP address (hard to trace) is prohibited by the state to have incoming connections. That is a nightmare but I don't think such a draconic law is very probably, and it would be very hard to enforce too.
Porn of 17 year olds are not legal in Amsterdam. Why do you think that? Minimum age is 18.
Linux is on top there too, at $347. The rest is way cheaper at $161 (second place) till $267. This tells me that either the hardware from SGI is too expensive, or Linux isn't using the available hardware efficiently.
While the EU is not as "mad" as the USA yet, it is heading in the same direction. I think that all entities that become too large and powerful get corrupt (power corrupts). Therefore I oppose the EU (I'm an EU citizen who fled to one of the last remaining "free" spots).
The result: stress. The fact (if this is true) that he was trying to hide some lower grades fits in very well. I have seen children become phychologically broken because of too high ambitions/expectations from their parents (all meant well of course, but still). When I read his father : "I worked so hard to bring up good children in a good school district." and his mother: "Rita eagerly displays a pile of medals, ribbons and trophies showcasing their son's many talents." I can't help but suspect that this might be such a case.
Then, after the "disgrace" of being suspended from school might have been unbearable to him to face his parents (most children would just talk to their parents).
This, like all other "interpretations", is just guesswork. But I don't think it is good to be so quick to blame only the school; this could and should also be a lesson for parents. Don't push your children, be very careful with too high expectations. Children need time to just play, just waste time, must not always be on to accomplish something. And they must know that it is allowed to fail (sometimes) and that getting lower grades is no disgrace (as long as your not performing way below your capacities for years in a row).
As a child the school offered me several times to skip one or two classes. Instead I did not (my parents opposed), so I lost some time. I played a lot of stupid games, 100% inproductive time. I didn't have very high ambitions. So what? I did what I liked, I could be relaxed and in the end it all doesn't make a difference. Yes, I might have finished university 1 or 2 years earlier, I might have gathered somewhat more capital at this point in time. Would I have been a more happy person? Surely not.
I shake my head when I read stories like this, or read elsewhere about parents having such high expectations for their children. I know that mostly it is good intentions (not always, some parents use their children to get social recognition or pride for themselves, alas) but they don't realise how much harm they do.
They always said that he who does nothing illegal has nothing to fear from the DMCA, but now you can see that this is not true.
Not everywhere the GPL is used, but everwhere GNU software is used (this is not the same).
And that is exactly the point that Linux is often criticized for, compared to competitors (Solaris, FreeBSD): it may perform well under no- or light-load conditions, but it doesn't scale well. It would have been interesting to check whether this criticism is still valid for the 2.4 kernels.
This is pretty useless. It compares different machines, and vastly out-of-date versions (of FreeBSD, at least). Tonight I'll run a test of current Linux and FreeBSD on the same hardware (both vmware virtual machines running on the same physical box) and post some results.
Btw gas is expensive here, though not as extreme as in the rest of Europe (DFL 2.05 per liter).
Indeed this is good: I hope that companies using MSFT products have to bleed and pay as much as possible. They must be punished for their "sin", and companies using less MSFT products will be more competitive.
In a utopia, the world can exist without laws, and everyone will keep sensible rules by themselves. The real world, alas, is different.
We can only hope that the current generation of politicians, who did not grow up with IT and therefore makes stupid decisions, is replaced by a younger generation soon, before stupid laws being implemented right now have done too much damage. In the meantime we must fight and lobby to contain the damage being done.
The only thing that has changed now is that the FreeBSD ACL's are used by Samba, so that the ACL's that Windows security uses can be provided via a Samba server running on FreeBSD.
This might satisfy those people who want to replace their NT fileservers with UNIX/Samba fileservers, but who absolutely demand ACL's.
Two years ago I used SunPRO with STL, and I didn't found any deviation from the standard. Everything worked as expected (unlike g++, which was useless for C++ back then).
We can disable the protection in the kernel, since we have the source. We cannot disable such protection in closed-source apps. So lets hope indeed that the Linux kernel shall contain such a function soon :).
Not at all: They offer it for download to not enrage the Linux community, but rather they would like you to buy the CD's instead. If the mirrors are overloaded, chances for people rushing out to the store to buy a set increase.
Anyone could have written a spec/grammar for some application domain and implemented a parser in lex/yacc very easily. I don't see the big step forward that XML is, except that you don't need to write the yacc grammar anymore. Instead you have to write the DTD and use XSL to transform the input, or use an XML parser to get some internal tree representation of your input (which is possible with yacc-tools too).
Then the question is: is a yacc grammar so much more difficult to write as a DTD? I can't tell for sure since I'm quite experienced with yacc and not with DTD, but I doubt it.
How do you think advertising is funded? In the end from the profit of the company, thus the shareholder and the consumer who buys the product pays. They pay for something that is necessary because of competition (the competitor advertises too, creating an advertising "arms race") but that essentially is a waste of time and money; advertisement doesn't produce anything useful, it doesn't add value or information (at least by far not as much as an objective product review).
Pay-TV is a better alternative. No more waste of time, no more expensive advertisement budgets thus the products can be cheaper, the dividents can be bigger and the salaries of people doing something useful too. The extra money that is not wasted, people can spend directly to subscribe to quality television without advertisements.
Actually advertising is like communism: You don't get your own choice, but instead you have to pay an advertisement tax on all products you buy, and in return you get something you didn't ask for (ads that waste your time and don't offer valuable objective information, but try to brainwash you instead). Socialist/communist regimes always put a very heavy emphasis on brainwashing the people and constant propaganda, and advertising is no different.
Indeed, they just updated the price on the link I gave from $206 to $104 per 256MB. Maybe there was an error. Anyway, this makes the P4 even more unattractive from a price/performance POV.
As so many free services get into trouble now, I think chances for offering quality services for a fee get better, which might benefit all who value their time and thus are prepared to pay a little for a better signal/noise ratio.
Dejanews is a good example: It was good, but not economically viable. Because of the "everything must be free" mentality, it was not yet relaunched as a for-pay service. Soon it might, and I would gladly pay a reasonable fee for the invaluable resource that a good usenet archive is. (groups.google.com is no good, is incomparable to the good old dejanews).
Subscriptions are cumbersome however, because when there are so many service to use you would have so many subscriptions to keep track of (and to cancel in time). What I would like is a system where I could subscribe to some services that I use heavily, and to pay-per-view for some that I would use only occasionally (like buying a separate newspaper as opposed to taking a daily subscription). However, until a single worldwide system for micropayments is established, this seems impossible.
I think it is very serious to neglect compatability with the rest of the UNIX world so much, and throw it away that lightly. Yes the features of xinetd are nice, but it could have been done better (more compatible).
Linux only got popular because of UNIX, and a lot of current intererest and funding for Linux development comes from companies with UNIX software and platforms (such as IBM with AIX). If Linux no longer is recognizable as a UNIX variant it will hurt both the UNIX world and Linux. It already has become the most "strange" variant.