Britain - Surveillance society (*cough* Echelon *cough*)
Are you seriously suggesting that no brits are criticizing this?
EU - Fines US companies for breaking EU law (oh noes)
Technically, it was EU departments of an US company that got fined. EU cannot fine a US company. And why should a company be exempt from laws just because their mother firm resides in another country?
I'm British BTW, and getting tired of all the rhetoric and hypocrisy
I'd suggest that there's plenty of ordinary (as in "non administrators and non developers") users who use LaTeX and would marvel at discovering how easy it is to craft a simple makefile to automate building PDFs, for example, or how "make install" can be used to upload their hobby website to a webserver.
Heh. Writing a Makefile for latex->pdf is anything but easy. I rather think it is impossible to do correctly in pure Makefiles, though I suppose it could be done with some support scripts.
Sarcasm aside you should reread Bjørn Lomborgs work. Many of the conclusions and some base estimates are colored by his political convictions, but the rest of the stuff besides global warming is pretty neutral and well researched.
He rather lost credibility with me when he wrote off a windmill in 10 years, while totally ignoring maintenance *and* maintenance of his the coal plant. Not that I mind coal plants that much, but if you cannot be objective even to the level of including the same costs on both side of the balance, you are not a scientist. Sorry.
This was well before the global warming thing really took off, so I haven't read anything from him about that. So he might have learned how to use a calculator later on, I admit. But do double check his numbers.
A nuclear power plant generates about 1000 times as much power as this thing and costs only about 10 times as much (although some built in the 1970s cost only about twice as much).
Where did you get the numbers for the windmill? I was unable to find them.
I am all for nuclear (and wind! let's spread out! In different directions!) Anyway, as far as I can tell, the cost of a nuclear plant is very different from a windmill (flotilla, I suppose in this case).
Costs includes construction, fuel, security, maintenance and deconstruction. Of these, it seems likely that nuclear has lower construction and maintenance cost, while windmills (rather obviously) wins in fuel, security and probably deconstruction cost (I suppose they could simply be emptied and sunk, reusing whatever parts are reusable.).
Does anyone know a sensible comparison of these cost? I tried to read one of Bjorn Lomborg's, once, and I nearly fell of the chair laughing. Now there is a man who cannot use a calculator.
I agree. The radio pretty much fills my need for everyday, background music. I have about 30 songs on my phone (yes, legally), to help me in the cases where I need to drown out noise (mostly train or office). The last piece of music I acquired was a birthday gift, and I am born in December:)
So I spend my money on other things, mostly food, wife, and the occasional gadget or hobby item.
t deceptive. Again, the software selection of Linux is very limited. Most commercial games have no Linux port. Some might work with Wine, but with severe problems. There are some free games, but they aren't that great. If you love games, Linux is a very bad choice.
I do love games, but I am 34 now. I can't keep up with playing just the *good* games on linux in the time I have for playing. If I did want more games, I think a console would be a better choice in any case. Or try wine.
Of course, I might want to play games with my friends, but it seems only a very few friends are into games in any case, and none in the games I like. So for me, that is irrelevant.
PS: The only windows game I really miss, Severance: Blade of Darkness, doesn't work in windows anymore either:/
DRM is not digital rights management in this case, its Direct Rendering Model or something to that effect. Its about video rendering performance not IP.
It is confusing, I know, but this version includes both Digital Restrictions/Rights Management support (under the name of IMA) and something call DRM, which in this case is a video driver support thing. So IMA is what is often abbreviated DRM, and DRM is an abbreviation for support for -- among other things --- flickerless terminal switching.
Yes, I'd agree that the god hypothesis is completely unsupported, but how is the no-god hypothesis supported either?
Well, in my opinion I don't have to. In my mind, I just have to prove that any given god (pick one) cannot exist. And they all, invariable, makes certain testable claims, typically miracles. As any miracle hypothesis always ends up disproven, you can conclude that gods non-existence from that.
But it all depends on what you *mean* with proof. Facts about the physical world can never be proven any more than you could prove that the next beer can you drop will actually fall to the floor instead of hanging in thin air. Yet, since I rather like beer, I would rather not drop the can.
You can pull out things like Occam's Razor in defense of the no-god hypothesis, but you can't definitively *prove* that there is no god.
I could, and that would work too, but I don't really need to.
Any possible proof you come up with can be met with the (annoying but reasonable in this context) rebuttal of "it's that way because God is omnipotent and wants it that way."
Omnipotence is, fortunately, logically impossible (making the stone too heavy for them to lift, e.g.). So any god that claims omnipotence has automatically disproven itself. Yes, I am a mathematician, I can't help it.
I haven't actually read The God Delusion, but I've picked up a copy and will hopefully get to it soon. I don't expect it to change my view on the ability to disprove god, but who knows...
Personally, I find Dawkins best when talking about evolution, and there are some excellent and interesting passages about that. God's (as he defines God) reasonble-sure-non-existence is like 5-minutes worth of thought.
I never understood why people find this debate so interesting at all. Atheism is the only reasonable intelligent choice if you have to choose, like "a-alfism", "a-dragon-ism", "a-moby-dick-ism" and so on and on and on. Being agnostic simply means that you are ready to revise and of those opinions if contrary evidence should turn up. Being atheistic simply means banking on the ---by far --- more likely scenario. People agree about this for any "a-***" except for some weird reason deism/theism. Apparently, many people have this delusion that there is someone watching them all the time.
Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion.
Agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
Heh, atheism sure sounds like a religion sometimes, given how fervently some atheists push their belief that there is no god. Some seem almost as bad as evangelical Christians.
I have heard of such atheist, but never met any. As long as that is the case, I'd rather defer judgment.
Agnosticism is merely logic at play. Anyone who isn't an agnostic is deluded. Claiming to know with certainty that there isn't a god is just as unscientific as claiming that there is a god (Richard Dawkins' beliefs notwithstanding).
I think even Richard would claim that the God hypothesis is simply completely unsupported. He tends to use a colorful language involving alfs and so on, but I think that is the essence.
Qt also uses WebKit (they're on of the major contributors). Chrome uses their own fork, of course. Chrome is mostly open source, and the linux port is failry recent, so the license doesn't seem like the issue.
Nice to know Qt contributes to WebKit.. they have some excellent coders there. I cringed last time I saw some of Google's code.
As they explained multiple times, they choose GTK because that's what the team doing the Linux "port" is familiar with. However their architecture allows to easily use different toolkits and they are willing to accept patches to support Qt or whatever else. They just don't have the resources necessary to support more than one toolkit.
For laughing out loud. Just like SWT supports any toolkit, I presume. What they did was to shove an abstract API mirroring the one of the windows toolkits. Of course, you can make that work on any toolkit, but it is not always going to be easy, nor a perfect match. And who needs another browser? Chrome offers very little new, being essentially Yet Another Konqueror Fork. (Maybe we can just label them all YAKF:o) )
But I merely replied because of the stupidness spouted about C++ re Qt.
Meh, everything is a trade-off. Qt is way easier than Gtk and has a huge API for doing all sorts of cross-platform stuff. Plus it's truly cross-platform whereas Gtk is pretty crappy on anything other that systems running X Windows.
The trade-off is that Qt is C++ and Gtk is C.
Well, considering that Chrome is based on freaking fork of KHTML (Webkit), both of which are written in --- you guessed it --- C++, interfacing to C++ is hardly an issue. Chrome is most likely written in C++ --- or at least, this is indicated by Wikipedia. A more likely reason was that when Google started on their (closed-sourced?) browser, Qt was still only available for money or GPL, and they preferred the cheaper GTK option.
I would think he is either a troll or stupid because he makes decisions about software not based on suitability but on whether or not they contain some arbitrary computer language.
It does help startup time quite a bit (well, it did for me) to disable Java though. I haven't noticed anything missing.
Normally I agree with the language thing, but the JVM is so horrible that I, too, actively avoid anything written in Java. Does anyone know what it is doing during startup? Or why it cannot just use the system's memory allocation system, instead of allocating huge blocks?
I've been waiting for 10 years...
well,..... almost that long....
for the kdevelop, qt designer, and/or monodevelop
to give me an "environment" like VS.
I want to VISUALLY make a FORM, add a few widgets:
buttons, text box etc, and be able to CLICK
on it to add/edit code just like VS. IOW,
I seem to remember you can do exactly that in Qt designer? Personally, I prefer just designing the widget with actions, and then write the action in a full IDE, but I think it is possible. Of course, with the integration in KDEvelop4 you can do both, I guess.
I want to easily toggle between the FORM widget
and the code, and have class/function/variable
information readily handy. IS this too much to
ask after years and years of the developers
adding heavy duty functionality and ignoring
simple user friendliness ?
Until then, I use a CLI on linux just for
testing code pieces and won't do any major
piece of software.
I fail to see how KDevelop4 doesn't deliver that today. I admit I do very little GUI programming, except web, but the little I've done seems to work fine.
Yeah, let's hope. But actually, the debugger is one of the parts that holding Kdevelop4 up. Now personally, I love the command line interface in gdb, so I'm not bothered.
If you read GP's link, he's referring more to the fact that Emacs runs on a full LISP interpreter, so you can make key-bindings to any Turing-complete operation you can think of, with plenty of hooks available back into the text-editing capabilities. I haven't seen a graphical text editor that powerful yet.
I did read it. And reading it again, I still do not see this. But, at least for KDevelop, you can write plugins in (I believe) either QtScript or C++ that can do anything you like. I believe Eclipse works in the same way.
But I *do* second the recommendation of Qt Creator, despite that loss. For me, having the integrated API reference is a lifesaver, and the UI designer is really slick too. Also some textual things are just plain impressive (I'll get autocomplete suggestions for things that aren't even part of Qt or my project, just because of a header include line!)
Yeah, same with KDevelop. Really wonderful, and saves a lot of time. Same with rename functionality and so on.
Can you only move around in your text with arrow keys, page up/down and home/end? That's a deal breaker for me. I've given VS some flak for that at http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1245985&cid=28106773 but it applies to most editors except emacs and vi.
I believe both IDEs have a vi-mode, and KDevelop makes it possible to extensively reconfigure the keyboard bindings, so I would think yes. Personally, I think it makes sense to use the arrow keys, and compared to playing the piano, moving your hand a few cm to the arrow keys hardly matter.
> The other is Qt Software's offer Qt creator which is also getting a good deal of praise.
It seems to have some modicum of 'vi' support too, though I've not tried it (yet).
And so does KDevelop. My colleague uses that, and he doesn't complain too much.
Kdevelop4 is the most promising one, I think, but it is not 100% stable yet. And the refactoring tools are still being written (though at least a few a actually working pretty nice now, including renaming).
Two options that have not come up yet. KDevelop 4 is shaping up really good, but I do not think it is actually working on win32/64 yet. The other is Qt Software's offer Qt creator which is also getting a good deal of praise. The latter is probably extra good if you use Qt... and if you don't, I would recommend at least looking at it, since it is a very nice LGPL library.
If you can't install Linux using a live cd Graphical Installer then you really shouldn't even be on slashdot lol.
Well. Sometimes. Normally, OS installs goes without a hitch (either flavor), but I've had both windows and linux installs fail horribly.
My favorite failed windows was a machine (I still have it) which had a very obscure SATA disk (well, intel, standard chipset from ASUS;) ) that windows could not grog out of the box. That was ok, because I had a CD with the driver. Unfortunately, windows could only install from a CD, not read a driver CD... or something like that. I asked a windows friend about how to do it, and he lost me about the slipstreaming process. I did try, but in the end, I just gave up. Yeah, so windows wasn't so important for me.
Linux failed for me once because the CD drive (and old IDE affair) couldn't be read during the 2nd stage because the SATA controller driver lied and said it could control the IDE CD. The IDE driver worked, but was loaded later and politely let the SATA driver do it's thing. And yes, there was a boot parameter to fix it, but.. I just bought a SATA CD-drive. The old one was slow as molasses anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Britain - Surveillance society (*cough* Echelon *cough*)
Are you seriously suggesting that no brits are criticizing this?
EU - Fines US companies for breaking EU law (oh noes)
Technically, it was EU departments of an US company that got fined. EU cannot fine a US company. And why should a company be exempt from laws just because their mother firm resides in another country?
I'm British BTW, and getting tired of all the rhetoric and hypocrisy
Heh.
I'd suggest that there's plenty of ordinary (as in "non administrators and non developers") users who use LaTeX and would marvel at discovering how easy it is to craft a simple makefile to automate building PDFs, for example, or how "make install" can be used to upload their hobby website to a webserver.
Heh. Writing a Makefile for latex->pdf is anything but easy. I rather think it is impossible to do correctly in pure Makefiles, though I suppose it could be done with some support scripts.
Sarcasm aside you should reread Bjørn Lomborgs work. Many of the conclusions and some base estimates are colored by his political convictions, but the rest of the stuff besides global warming is pretty neutral and well researched.
He rather lost credibility with me when he wrote off a windmill in 10 years, while totally ignoring maintenance *and* maintenance of his the coal plant. Not that I mind coal plants that much, but if you cannot be objective even to the level of including the same costs on both side of the balance, you are not a scientist. Sorry.
This was well before the global warming thing really took off, so I haven't read anything from him about that. So he might have learned how to use a calculator later on, I admit. But do double check his numbers.
A nuclear power plant generates about 1000 times as much power as this thing and costs only about 10 times as much (although some built in the 1970s cost only about twice as much).
Where did you get the numbers for the windmill? I was unable to find them.
I am all for nuclear (and wind! let's spread out! In different directions!) Anyway, as far as I can tell, the cost of a nuclear plant is very different from a windmill (flotilla, I suppose in this case).
Costs includes construction, fuel, security, maintenance and deconstruction. Of these, it seems likely that nuclear has lower construction and maintenance cost, while windmills (rather obviously) wins in fuel, security and probably deconstruction cost (I suppose they could simply be emptied and sunk, reusing whatever parts are reusable.).
Does anyone know a sensible comparison of these cost? I tried to read one of Bjorn Lomborg's, once, and I nearly fell of the chair laughing. Now there is a man who cannot use a calculator.
I agree. The radio pretty much fills my need for everyday, background music. I have about 30 songs on my phone (yes, legally), to help me in the cases where I need to drown out noise (mostly train or office). The last piece of music I acquired was a birthday gift, and I am born in December :)
So I spend my money on other things, mostly food, wife, and the occasional gadget or hobby item.
t deceptive. Again, the software selection of Linux is very limited. Most commercial games have no Linux port. Some might work with Wine, but with severe problems. There are some free games, but they aren't that great. If you love games, Linux is a very bad choice.
I do love games, but I am 34 now. I can't keep up with playing just the *good* games on linux in the time I have for playing. If I did want more games, I think a console would be a better choice in any case. Or try wine.
Of course, I might want to play games with my friends, but it seems only a very few friends are into games in any case, and none in the games I like. So for me, that is irrelevant.
PS: The only windows game I really miss, Severance: Blade of Darkness, doesn't work in windows anymore either :/
DRM is not digital rights management in this case, its Direct Rendering Model or something to that effect. Its about video rendering performance not IP.
It is confusing, I know, but this version includes both Digital Restrictions/Rights Management support (under the name of IMA) and something call DRM, which in this case is a video driver support thing. So IMA is what is often abbreviated DRM, and DRM is an abbreviation for support for -- among other things --- flickerless terminal switching.
Yes, I'd agree that the god hypothesis is completely unsupported, but how is the no-god hypothesis supported either?
Well, in my opinion I don't have to. In my mind, I just have to prove that any given god (pick one) cannot exist. And they all, invariable, makes certain testable claims, typically miracles. As any miracle hypothesis always ends up disproven, you can conclude that gods non-existence from that.
But it all depends on what you *mean* with proof. Facts about the physical world can never be proven any more than you could prove that the next beer can you drop will actually fall to the floor instead of hanging in thin air. Yet, since I rather like beer, I would rather not drop the can.
You can pull out things like Occam's Razor in defense of the no-god hypothesis, but you can't definitively *prove* that there is no god.
I could, and that would work too, but I don't really need to.
Any possible proof you come up with can be met with the (annoying but reasonable in this context) rebuttal of "it's that way because God is omnipotent and wants it that way."
Omnipotence is, fortunately, logically impossible (making the stone too heavy for them to lift, e.g.). So any god that claims omnipotence has automatically disproven itself. Yes, I am a mathematician, I can't help it.
I haven't actually read The God Delusion, but I've picked up a copy and will hopefully get to it soon. I don't expect it to change my view on the ability to disprove god, but who knows...
Personally, I find Dawkins best when talking about evolution, and there are some excellent and interesting passages about that. God's (as he defines God) reasonble-sure-non-existence is like 5-minutes worth of thought.
I never understood why people find this debate so interesting at all. Atheism is the only reasonable intelligent choice if you have to choose, like "a-alfism", "a-dragon-ism", "a-moby-dick-ism" and so on and on and on. Being agnostic simply means that you are ready to revise and of those opinions if contrary evidence should turn up. Being atheistic simply means banking on the ---by far --- more likely scenario. People agree about this for any "a-***" except for some weird reason deism/theism. Apparently, many people have this delusion that there is someone watching them all the time.
Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion. Agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
Heh, atheism sure sounds like a religion sometimes, given how fervently some atheists push their belief that there is no god. Some seem almost as bad as evangelical Christians.
I have heard of such atheist, but never met any. As long as that is the case, I'd rather defer judgment.
Agnosticism is merely logic at play. Anyone who isn't an agnostic is deluded. Claiming to know with certainty that there isn't a god is just as unscientific as claiming that there is a god (Richard Dawkins' beliefs notwithstanding).
I think even Richard would claim that the God hypothesis is simply completely unsupported. He tends to use a colorful language involving alfs and so on, but I think that is the essence.
(Full disclosure: I'm an agnostic atheist.)
As am I. Which entitles me to mock both :P
In what way is this better than GNUPlot?
Well, it has a decent license, for one thing.
The KDE project is approaching commit 1 million :) I wonder if they will get there before converting to git, though,.
FYI - Agnosticism is the lack of presumptuousness.
Same thing, really :P
.. I am actually happy that Microsoft dominates the market over Apple. Microsoft is bad enough, but Apple is a control-freak of a company :/
Of course, when the year of linux-on-the-desktop-comes, it will all be better. Right?
Qt also uses WebKit (they're on of the major contributors). Chrome uses their own fork, of course. Chrome is mostly open source, and the linux port is failry recent, so the license doesn't seem like the issue.
Nice to know Qt contributes to WebKit.. they have some excellent coders there. I cringed last time I saw some of Google's code.
As they explained multiple times, they choose GTK because that's what the team doing the Linux "port" is familiar with. However their architecture allows to easily use different toolkits and they are willing to accept patches to support Qt or whatever else. They just don't have the resources necessary to support more than one toolkit.
For laughing out loud. Just like SWT supports any toolkit, I presume. What they did was to shove an abstract API mirroring the one of the windows toolkits. Of course, you can make that work on any toolkit, but it is not always going to be easy, nor a perfect match. And who needs another browser? Chrome offers very little new, being essentially Yet Another Konqueror Fork. (Maybe we can just label them all YAKF :o) )
But I merely replied because of the stupidness spouted about C++ re Qt.
Meh, everything is a trade-off. Qt is way easier than Gtk and has a huge API for doing all sorts of cross-platform stuff. Plus it's truly cross-platform whereas Gtk is pretty crappy on anything other that systems running X Windows.
The trade-off is that Qt is C++ and Gtk is C.
Well, considering that Chrome is based on freaking fork of KHTML (Webkit), both of which are written in --- you guessed it --- C++, interfacing to C++ is hardly an issue. Chrome is most likely written in C++ --- or at least, this is indicated by Wikipedia. A more likely reason was that when Google started on their (closed-sourced?) browser, Qt was still only available for money or GPL, and they preferred the cheaper GTK option.
IÍ'd say QT/Webkit is the best bet currently. That will give you XML tools and a decent SVG view(er).
I would think he is either a troll or stupid because he makes decisions about software not based on suitability but on whether or not they contain some arbitrary computer language.
It does help startup time quite a bit (well, it did for me) to disable Java though. I haven't noticed anything missing. Normally I agree with the language thing, but the JVM is so horrible that I, too, actively avoid anything written in Java. Does anyone know what it is doing during startup? Or why it cannot just use the system's memory allocation system, instead of allocating huge blocks?
I've been waiting for 10 years... well,..... almost that long ....
for the kdevelop, qt designer, and/or monodevelop to give me an "environment" like VS.
I want to VISUALLY make a FORM, add a few widgets: buttons, text box etc, and be able to CLICK on it to add/edit code just like VS. IOW,
I seem to remember you can do exactly that in Qt designer? Personally, I prefer just designing the widget with actions, and then write the action in a full IDE, but I think it is possible. Of course, with the integration in KDEvelop4 you can do both, I guess.
I want to easily toggle between the FORM widget and the code, and have class/function/variable information readily handy. IS this too much to ask after years and years of the developers adding heavy duty functionality and ignoring simple user friendliness ?
Until then, I use a CLI on linux just for testing code pieces and won't do any major piece of software.
I fail to see how KDevelop4 doesn't deliver that today. I admit I do very little GUI programming, except web, but the little I've done seems to work fine.
Yeah, let's hope. But actually, the debugger is one of the parts that holding Kdevelop4 up. Now personally, I love the command line interface in gdb, so I'm not bothered.
If you read GP's link, he's referring more to the fact that Emacs runs on a full LISP interpreter, so you can make key-bindings to any Turing-complete operation you can think of, with plenty of hooks available back into the text-editing capabilities. I haven't seen a graphical text editor that powerful yet.
I did read it. And reading it again, I still do not see this. But, at least for KDevelop, you can write plugins in (I believe) either QtScript or C++ that can do anything you like. I believe Eclipse works in the same way.
But I *do* second the recommendation of Qt Creator, despite that loss. For me, having the integrated API reference is a lifesaver, and the UI designer is really slick too. Also some textual things are just plain impressive (I'll get autocomplete suggestions for things that aren't even part of Qt or my project, just because of a header include line!)
Yeah, same with KDevelop. Really wonderful, and saves a lot of time. Same with rename functionality and so on.
Can you only move around in your text with arrow keys, page up/down and home/end? That's a deal breaker for me. I've given VS some flak for that at http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1245985&cid=28106773 but it applies to most editors except emacs and vi.
I believe both IDEs have a vi-mode, and KDevelop makes it possible to extensively reconfigure the keyboard bindings, so I would think yes. Personally, I think it makes sense to use the arrow keys, and compared to playing the piano, moving your hand a few cm to the arrow keys hardly matter.
> The other is Qt Software's offer Qt creator which is also getting a good deal of praise.
It seems to have some modicum of 'vi' support too, though I've not tried it (yet).
And so does KDevelop. My colleague uses that, and he doesn't complain too much.
Kdevelop4 is the most promising one, I think, but it is not 100% stable yet. And the refactoring tools are still being written (though at least a few a actually working pretty nice now, including renaming).
Two options that have not come up yet. KDevelop 4 is shaping up really good, but I do not think it is actually working on win32/64 yet. The other is Qt Software's offer Qt creator which is also getting a good deal of praise. The latter is probably extra good if you use Qt... and if you don't, I would recommend at least looking at it, since it is a very nice LGPL library.
If you can't install Linux using a live cd Graphical Installer then you really shouldn't even be on slashdot lol.
Well. Sometimes. Normally, OS installs goes without a hitch (either flavor), but I've had both windows and linux installs fail horribly.
My favorite failed windows was a machine (I still have it) which had a very obscure SATA disk (well, intel, standard chipset from ASUS ;) ) that windows could not grog out of the box. That was ok, because I had a CD with the driver. Unfortunately, windows could only install from a CD, not read a driver CD... or something like that. I asked a windows friend about how to do it, and he lost me about the slipstreaming process. I did try, but in the end, I just gave up. Yeah, so windows wasn't so important for me.
Linux failed for me once because the CD drive (and old IDE affair) couldn't be read during the 2nd stage because the SATA controller driver lied and said it could control the IDE CD. The IDE driver worked, but was loaded later and politely let the SATA driver do it's thing. And yes, there was a boot parameter to fix it, but.. I just bought a SATA CD-drive. The old one was slow as molasses anyway.