Linux users don't need to defrag drives for the most part. The ext2 filesystem supports fragmentation prevention, so as long as you keep your drive less than about 95% full, you don't have to worry much about fragmented files. Any fragments will likely be huge, so they are not a problem.
message popped up saying "This drive needs to be reformatted." She clicked yes, and BAM, all of her un-backed-up files were gone.
What programmer in his right mind would do this? It does not really make things much easier to use, and often causes accidental data loss such as this. I've even seen similar issues on Linux installs--Ubuntu has a warning sticker about the default being to wipe out the hard drive. A friend accedently wiped out his second hard drive with a red hat install and his network drivers were on the second drive, no floppy, he had to go out and buy a cd burner (they weren't the cheap things they are today). I suppose it gave him an excuse to his wife for buying new hardware.;-)
Just seems like another stupid thing people have been brainwashed into thinking it is "easy" to use, but in reality it is not.
I worked in a video duplication warehouse for a while. I remember one time we were labeling some promotional video or other, and one of the other workers told me they wouldn't make it through shipping or somesuch. He rubbed the label and sure enough it came off. I don't know why he didn't show the big boss (maybe complaining caused problem for him before?), and I think I mentioned it, but they were sent anyway. Well, they all came back with the labels fallen off.
Incidents like these make packagers paranoid. I'm sure it is the same with spagetti as videos. Kind of sucks for the end user, but receiving spoiled/stale food because the packaging came undone would suck too...
Lets face facts here, I'm paying for the convenience of the packaging (which includes the DVD itself AND the case), not the movie itself, which is available for free (minus ISP costs) online
I hate to tell you this, but you can get the packaging for free too. Just go down to the store you buy it and slip it in your pocket, walk outside. Just don't get caught, and it is free! (minus costs for gas)
The fact is that Microsoft should be big enough player to dictate to the RIAA how things are going to be rather than the other way around.
I have a conspiracy theory for y'all:
MS wants things like DRM. Not only does it perfectly fit their goal of incompatibility with alternative products, but if any monopoly and fair trade laws get in the way, they can blame the entertainment companies. In addition, after DRM has been embeded for a while, they can add "features" such as censorship and pay MS for copies of all your files--even ones you create yourself.
They can do anything they want because abnormalities will appear to possibly be a system glitch, all evidence will be locked away and/or disappear quickly, and WTF can the authorities do if all their computers are dependant on MS software anyway?
DRM is the ultimate fascist profit center, and MS loves the idea. Also note: they already have a sucessful product prototype for DRM: the Xbox. It's DRM failed because they foolishly used TEA for hashing and it turned out insecure enough to allow someone to install linux on the xbox, but overall it was sucessfull.
That's sad. That's really sad. It's a stock response.
Yes, it is really sad that some people write total crap posts that don't deserve anything more than a stock response.
BTW, many open source projects have two branches. A stable and developer. If you are using the stable branch, you will only get bug fixes and minor feature improvements, not highly experimental untested development code.
So they are your slave? It is not their job. Most open source developers are volunteers. Maybe if you were paying the develper to write code for the project, you'd have an arguement, but it sounds to me like you are not. You just want them to be your slave because they publish a useful program for free.
I suppose if you were homeless and went to a soup kitchen, you would demand they hand feed you and wipe your ass after you use their bathroom too.
What are you talking about? I was saying the amount of continuous memory access required for supplying the CRT with data it needs are huge. It has nothing to do with a GPU, but the chip reading from the framebuffer and creating the analog signals going out to the VGA connector. I suppose you could engineer the RAM to have dual output ports (the one for CPU/GPU and another for the framebuffer), but this would seem like a specialized task and make general purpose ram more expensive (and incompatible with systems which didn't use this scheme). Why not make this specialized change to a small portion of ram? Even 4096x3072 at 24bpp is 36MB of ram. Small compared to the 1GB or more which is standard on computers today.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I just think dedicated framebuffer RAM should not be eliminated. As for the GPU having freely available programming specs and/or being a separate entity to the graphics card, I'm all for it.
Last time I checked, the project leader of the Linux kernel was Linus Torvalds. Last time I checked, he was living in the US. Therefore he is subject to US laws. Did he move or what?
People in other countries could fully fork it, but it seems the mainline kernel is run by quite a few people living in the US--I seem to remember a few other big leaders in the project are in US too.
It is not the general idea of the functionallity of the code which is protected, but a specific method. A claim stating a general idea is too broad and not valid for patents. Yes, some do manage to slip through, but the patent office is not supposed to approve those.
For example if you wanted to calculate position from time an acceleration, you could do it more than one way. Say the equation derived from calculus was patented and your program used it. You could just change it so it did v+=a; x+=v; each frame instead or perhaps find something more innovative. You would get the same (or similar) results, but your program would not be violating the patent.
In many cases, there are many solutions to the same problem. You may get different results or be optimized for different things. You don't always have to use the same solution to get where you want to go.
What are you saying??? Fake lice are quite painful. I had them as a child and I would cry myself to sleep every night. Eventually I was hospitalized and they had to aputate my head.
I used to live in a state where they would try to shut down all the bars they could. The bars they couldn't shut down, they would send in undercover police to try and trick the barkeep into serving nonmembers of the bar's "club" (all bars were required to be private clubs) and they would also harrass the patrons. Needless to say, most of the people who went to the bars were hardened criminals and the barkeeps were leery of anyone new.
I wonder what they would've done if every bar had a computer database of every customer. Then again, the state probably already had access to that information. I think being a private club the information was already collected, though if in computer form I suppose they could more easily keep track and finger "drunkkard bums" for harassment purposes...
I would like to point out eliminating dedicated video ram is a bad idea. I remember my atari 130XE would be somewhere around 30% faster when you disabled video because the cpu and video shared the same ram. A chip driving anything like a CRT will require constant access to memory. If you share ram with the cpu, then you will slow your computer down, especially if you like high resolutions and refresh rates. According to my calculations, 1600x1200 @ 100Hz with 24 bpp needs 576 MB/sec. Up the res to 3200x2400 and you need 2.3 GB/sec. I don't use resolutions this high, but from what I've seen, plenty of people do. Even with today's faster ram, it would be a siginificant drain.
Actually, the picture of the Vaio VGC-LS1 doesn't look much different than my Atari 130XE did (except no flat screen), and the Dell XPS M2010 doesn't look much different than my Atari ST. (except is black, the keyboard and cpu box are separated on the Dell, and also the ST had no flat screen) The hack graphic designers who made these probably thought they were making something original, but they only rehased old designs. The transparent cases seem new, but they are only exciting if you've never seen a circuit board before.
I think this is just a way to separate superfical people from their money. If you are going to pay for looks, at least the computers should look like something interesting. Why not a statue? Just put them into really big lawn gnomes or naked women or kittens or something.
The plain box shape just looks the same anyway. So what if you put it in colored plastic. Looks cool for about 10 minutes then you have seen it all. You may as well just colour the box wooden so it blends in with your furniture.
PC (aka personal computer) is a generic term coined by pre-Mac Apple. I don't think people started calling the IBM compatible computers PCs until around the '90s or so. (even as a generic term) Maybe we should call them "IDE/PCI computers using Intel's crappy instruction set "--IPCUICIS for short.;-)
Unfortunately, this being the internet, anyone can claim they are a lawyer or quantum physicist or ultra sexy porn star. Since there is generally no way to verify this, everything is in doubt. I don't know if this was the case in this thread, but lots of trolls have created a cyincal attitude on slashdot in perticular. It also has bred an air of hostility.
However, for all you know any given user could also be a lawyer, judge, or "president for life" of some small country posing as a regular person....or just not bothering to tell anyone who he/she really is. You never know.
Okay, so they changed it. I'm sorry for posting. Though I don't think translating like that is a good idea, but then MS is full of bad ideas. I remember trying my first CGI script. I made the mistake of using notepad. I found out the hard way MS adds some unprintable mystery character to the start of the file.
I used voids because I didn't want to waste time writing extra crap. The argv and return crap where not necessary. I olny put in the voids because I knew some compilers would complain if I didn't. Programmers have been doing this since the beginning of time.
Yeah, so I forgot the include. I was using an unfamiliar environment for code. I tested it quickly (in Linux) and my compiler didn't complain. So sue me.
The casts are not redundant. I am used to compilers which complain if you don't cast properly. (even with printf) If you wanted to take out redundancy, the appropriate lines should be char *c="\n"; for(;*c;c++)...
I didn't indent becuase it sucks to get indentation right with html. C isn't python anyway. The compiler doesn't check indentation. It would be a waste of time. If you have trouble reading it, maybe you should go back to CS class. Maybe you should attach your style guide if you think everyone should follow it. Most people will ignore it since you aren't their employer.
I was going on old information. I haven't programmed on MS OSes for a while, and much of that was in assembly. I already admitted that but you didn't seem to know either.
Not specifying str as a const works fine in the real world everywhere I've seen. You may lose the address of the original string if you change the value, but if you do that, you probably didn't want it anymore. If a compiler complains about that, it is being purely pedantic.
Apparently you aren't perfect either professor, because you missed the fact I forgot a space where it prints. If there were two or more characters in the string, they would've print out 1310 instead of 13 10.
So you are saying the two bytes are magically shrunk into one? C isn't some high level language where the data is an abstraction. When you read a char array, you are really reading bytes in memory. The only case where such translation might happen would be a FILE* stream opened in text mode, but that would happen somewhere between the file read and putting it into the program's buffer.
As for MS Windows, I haven't programmed on that OS, but I don't think they do this now. I know back in the DOS and Win3.1 days, it was indeed two bytes. I doubt they just up and changed it unless they wanted to conform to some standard and used either a cr or lf. (Standard MS? Pffft, yeah right) But I'm sure they don't bother to translate the two chars into one. I'm just not sure if it was 13 and 10.
Unless you are using some funky compiler I've never heard of. If one exists, I don't want to have anything to do with it. Such nightmare with binary data compatiblity...
Easy way to solve this. Try an experiment in Windows:
This is a big problem, and I think it is because many toolkits don't have generic functions. They require a developer to specify pixel locations, font sizes, or similarly low level things.
A toolkit should ask for generic information and format it in the proper way for a given OS. You should not be indicating toolbars, menus and widgets. You should only need to specify what functions are made available and the name, icon, etc associated with them, the toolkit should put these into menus, toolbars, or whatever a user would expect. For dialogs, you should only need to specify the names of fields / questions and what is expected as the answer (a number, string, file, yes/no, etc) and what fields relate to the others. The toolkit should decide how the dialog is rendered. In fact many of these things are very common and should be included inside the toolkit. Yes all of them have file dialog boxes, but why not go a step further and integrate it into the menu? Just have a function which specifies a callback for say "open file" or "save file" and when activated the toolkit places the options in the appropriate places--the menu, toolbar, Alt-S hotkey, Ctrl-X/Ctrl-S seqence, on a disk widget for a 3d environment, wherever.
Generalizing things in this way would allow programs to be made which work on text screens, 2d GUIs, 3d GUIs, braille/text to speech systems, audio only voice recognition/text to speech, web interfaces, and many more. All without special consideration or modifying the program. Yes, programs which require graphics (such as photo editing) would not work on a text screen, but the toolkit could just raise an error in that case or display ascii art if that is the user's preference. End application programmers should not have control of those things anyway.
I believe it is a cr and lf (13,10). I think the other poster was pointing out some programmers just hard code an end of line by their systems ascii value, even though any given system may use a cr, lf or cr and lf together. The example was a bit bad, but that sort of thing does happen. It could be as simple as in an if or switch/case statement putting a 10 instead of '\n'.
In reality, one should be adaptive when writing code. For writing, obviously \n should be used, but when reading it is best to check for all types. Make it work with cr or lf alone, but also make sure a cr/lf pair doesn't create two end of lines. In fact, having support for a cr/lf pair is important because many printers require both (at least they did), and IIRC, email / usenet messages use them as well.
There are also many system constants, and some programmers use the numerical value on their system. Their programs don't work on a different system which uses different values. Though systems having different values is bad anyway, because it breaks binary compatibility, so standard values should be used by system designers when possible.
Of course there are plenty of other assumtions which will break portability. The problem is, if a given programmer doesn't understand portability issues, they will make those assumptions and their code won't work for other systems.
Maybe not, but there is a huge amount of people who are brainwased into thinking RIAA pop music is the only good music. Same with hollywood movies. If Apple loses them, they will also lose quite a few customers (and potential customers).
the point is to get a critical mass of the technically competent users and the enthusiasts to leave Windows (mostly, if not fully) for Linux.
Why does it matter if they go to Linux? I think it would be as helpful (if not more so) if they just went over to any system which runs on open standards. OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, or some new kid on the block, it doesn't matter. When developers realize they can write applications and they will compile to all those platforms, possibly being able to create binaries which work on most, if not all (assuming they are running compatible processor archs), then you won't have to worry if the new OS will run your programs, because the developer would have a binary avaliable for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux users don't need to defrag drives for the most part. The ext2 filesystem supports fragmentation prevention, so as long as you keep your drive less than about 95% full, you don't have to worry much about fragmented files. Any fragments will likely be huge, so they are not a problem.
What programmer in his right mind would do this? It does not really make things much easier to use, and often causes accidental data loss such as this. I've even seen similar issues on Linux installs--Ubuntu has a warning sticker about the default being to wipe out the hard drive. A friend accedently wiped out his second hard drive with a red hat install and his network drivers were on the second drive, no floppy, he had to go out and buy a cd burner (they weren't the cheap things they are today). I suppose it gave him an excuse to his wife for buying new hardware. ;-)
Just seems like another stupid thing people have been brainwashed into thinking it is "easy" to use, but in reality it is not.
It does get stale. I've had stale spaghetti before. It also falls out. Exposure to the elements / tainted water and dirt can create rotten spagetti.
I worked in a video duplication warehouse for a while. I remember one time we were labeling some promotional video or other, and one of the other workers told me they wouldn't make it through shipping or somesuch. He rubbed the label and sure enough it came off. I don't know why he didn't show the big boss (maybe complaining caused problem for him before?), and I think I mentioned it, but they were sent anyway. Well, they all came back with the labels fallen off.
Incidents like these make packagers paranoid. I'm sure it is the same with spagetti as videos. Kind of sucks for the end user, but receiving spoiled /stale food because the packaging came undone would suck too...
I hate to tell you this, but you can get the packaging for free too. Just go down to the store you buy it and slip it in your pocket, walk outside. Just don't get caught, and it is free! (minus costs for gas)
I have a conspiracy theory for y'all:
MS wants things like DRM. Not only does it perfectly fit their goal of incompatibility with alternative products, but if any monopoly and fair trade laws get in the way, they can blame the entertainment companies. In addition, after DRM has been embeded for a while, they can add "features" such as censorship and pay MS for copies of all your files--even ones you create yourself.
They can do anything they want because abnormalities will appear to possibly be a system glitch, all evidence will be locked away and/or disappear quickly, and WTF can the authorities do if all their computers are dependant on MS software anyway?
DRM is the ultimate fascist profit center, and MS loves the idea. Also note: they already have a sucessful product prototype for DRM: the Xbox. It's DRM failed because they foolishly used TEA for hashing and it turned out insecure enough to allow someone to install linux on the xbox, but overall it was sucessfull.
Yes, it is really sad that some people write total crap posts that don't deserve anything more than a stock response.
BTW, many open source projects have two branches. A stable and developer. If you are using the stable branch, you will only get bug fixes and minor feature improvements, not highly experimental untested development code.
So they are your slave? It is not their job. Most open source developers are volunteers. Maybe if you were paying the develper to write code for the project, you'd have an arguement, but it sounds to me like you are not. You just want them to be your slave because they publish a useful program for free.
I suppose if you were homeless and went to a soup kitchen, you would demand they hand feed you and wipe your ass after you use their bathroom too.
Exactly. Though if it were a statue, I'd have it on display. May even be a good idea to do with a router or home server.
What are you talking about? I was saying the amount of continuous memory access required for supplying the CRT with data it needs are huge. It has nothing to do with a GPU, but the chip reading from the framebuffer and creating the analog signals going out to the VGA connector. I suppose you could engineer the RAM to have dual output ports (the one for CPU/GPU and another for the framebuffer), but this would seem like a specialized task and make general purpose ram more expensive (and incompatible with systems which didn't use this scheme). Why not make this specialized change to a small portion of ram? Even 4096x3072 at 24bpp is 36MB of ram. Small compared to the 1GB or more which is standard on computers today.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I just think dedicated framebuffer RAM should not be eliminated. As for the GPU having freely available programming specs and/or being a separate entity to the graphics card, I'm all for it.
Yes, and all the copies by other companies were called "IBM compatible."
Last time I checked, the project leader of the Linux kernel was Linus Torvalds. Last time I checked, he was living in the US. Therefore he is subject to US laws. Did he move or what?
People in other countries could fully fork it, but it seems the mainline kernel is run by quite a few people living in the US--I seem to remember a few other big leaders in the project are in US too.
It is not the general idea of the functionallity of the code which is protected, but a specific method. A claim stating a general idea is too broad and not valid for patents. Yes, some do manage to slip through, but the patent office is not supposed to approve those.
For example if you wanted to calculate position from time an acceleration, you could do it more than one way. Say the equation derived from calculus was patented and your program used it. You could just change it so it did v+=a; x+=v; each frame instead or perhaps find something more innovative. You would get the same (or similar) results, but your program would not be violating the patent.
In many cases, there are many solutions to the same problem. You may get different results or be optimized for different things. You don't always have to use the same solution to get where you want to go.
What are you saying??? Fake lice are quite painful. I had them as a child and I would cry myself to sleep every night. Eventually I was hospitalized and they had to aputate my head.
Don't make fake lice. Think of the children!!!
I used to live in a state where they would try to shut down all the bars they could. The bars they couldn't shut down, they would send in undercover police to try and trick the barkeep into serving nonmembers of the bar's "club" (all bars were required to be private clubs) and they would also harrass the patrons. Needless to say, most of the people who went to the bars were hardened criminals and the barkeeps were leery of anyone new.
I wonder what they would've done if every bar had a computer database of every customer. Then again, the state probably already had access to that information. I think being a private club the information was already collected, though if in computer form I suppose they could more easily keep track and finger "drunkkard bums" for harassment purposes...
I would like to point out eliminating dedicated video ram is a bad idea. I remember my atari 130XE would be somewhere around 30% faster when you disabled video because the cpu and video shared the same ram. A chip driving anything like a CRT will require constant access to memory. If you share ram with the cpu, then you will slow your computer down, especially if you like high resolutions and refresh rates. According to my calculations, 1600x1200 @ 100Hz with 24 bpp needs 576 MB/sec. Up the res to 3200x2400 and you need 2.3 GB/sec. I don't use resolutions this high, but from what I've seen, plenty of people do. Even with today's faster ram, it would be a siginificant drain.
Actually, the picture of the Vaio VGC-LS1 doesn't look much different than my Atari 130XE did (except no flat screen), and the Dell XPS M2010 doesn't look much different than my Atari ST. (except is black, the keyboard and cpu box are separated on the Dell, and also the ST had no flat screen) The hack graphic designers who made these probably thought they were making something original, but they only rehased old designs. The transparent cases seem new, but they are only exciting if you've never seen a circuit board before.
I think this is just a way to separate superfical people from their money. If you are going to pay for looks, at least the computers should look like something interesting. Why not a statue? Just put them into really big lawn gnomes or naked women or kittens or something.
The plain box shape just looks the same anyway. So what if you put it in colored plastic. Looks cool for about 10 minutes then you have seen it all. You may as well just colour the box wooden so it blends in with your furniture.
PC (aka personal computer) is a generic term coined by pre-Mac Apple. I don't think people started calling the IBM compatible computers PCs until around the '90s or so. (even as a generic term) Maybe we should call them "IDE/PCI computers using Intel's crappy instruction set "--IPCUICIS for short. ;-)
Unfortunately, this being the internet, anyone can claim they are a lawyer or quantum physicist or ultra sexy porn star. Since there is generally no way to verify this, everything is in doubt. I don't know if this was the case in this thread, but lots of trolls have created a cyincal attitude on slashdot in perticular. It also has bred an air of hostility.
However, for all you know any given user could also be a lawyer, judge, or "president for life" of some small country posing as a regular person. ...or just not bothering to tell anyone who he/she really is. You never know.
Okay, so they changed it. I'm sorry for posting. Though I don't think translating like that is a good idea, but then MS is full of bad ideas. I remember trying my first CGI script. I made the mistake of using notepad. I found out the hard way MS adds some unprintable mystery character to the start of the file.
So you are saying the two bytes are magically shrunk into one? C isn't some high level language where the data is an abstraction. When you read a char array, you are really reading bytes in memory. The only case where such translation might happen would be a FILE* stream opened in text mode, but that would happen somewhere between the file read and putting it into the program's buffer.
As for MS Windows, I haven't programmed on that OS, but I don't think they do this now. I know back in the DOS and Win3.1 days, it was indeed two bytes. I doubt they just up and changed it unless they wanted to conform to some standard and used either a cr or lf. (Standard MS? Pffft, yeah right) But I'm sure they don't bother to translate the two chars into one. I'm just not sure if it was 13 and 10.
Unless you are using some funky compiler I've never heard of. If one exists, I don't want to have anything to do with it. Such nightmare with binary data compatiblity...
Easy way to solve this. Try an experiment in Windows:
void main(void) {
char *c,*str="\n";
for(c=str; *c!=(char)0; c++)
printf("%i",(int)*c);
printf("\n");
return;
}
This is a big problem, and I think it is because many toolkits don't have generic functions. They require a developer to specify pixel locations, font sizes, or similarly low level things.
A toolkit should ask for generic information and format it in the proper way for a given OS. You should not be indicating toolbars, menus and widgets. You should only need to specify what functions are made available and the name, icon, etc associated with them, the toolkit should put these into menus, toolbars, or whatever a user would expect. For dialogs, you should only need to specify the names of fields / questions and what is expected as the answer (a number, string, file, yes/no, etc) and what fields relate to the others. The toolkit should decide how the dialog is rendered. In fact many of these things are very common and should be included inside the toolkit. Yes all of them have file dialog boxes, but why not go a step further and integrate it into the menu? Just have a function which specifies a callback for say "open file" or "save file" and when activated the toolkit places the options in the appropriate places--the menu, toolbar, Alt-S hotkey, Ctrl-X/Ctrl-S seqence, on a disk widget for a 3d environment, wherever.
Generalizing things in this way would allow programs to be made which work on text screens, 2d GUIs, 3d GUIs, braille/text to speech systems, audio only voice recognition/text to speech, web interfaces, and many more. All without special consideration or modifying the program. Yes, programs which require graphics (such as photo editing) would not work on a text screen, but the toolkit could just raise an error in that case or display ascii art if that is the user's preference. End application programmers should not have control of those things anyway.
I believe it is a cr and lf (13,10). I think the other poster was pointing out some programmers just hard code an end of line by their systems ascii value, even though any given system may use a cr, lf or cr and lf together. The example was a bit bad, but that sort of thing does happen. It could be as simple as in an if or switch/case statement putting a 10 instead of '\n'.
In reality, one should be adaptive when writing code. For writing, obviously \n should be used, but when reading it is best to check for all types. Make it work with cr or lf alone, but also make sure a cr/lf pair doesn't create two end of lines. In fact, having support for a cr/lf pair is important because many printers require both (at least they did), and IIRC, email / usenet messages use them as well.
There are also many system constants, and some programmers use the numerical value on their system. Their programs don't work on a different system which uses different values. Though systems having different values is bad anyway, because it breaks binary compatibility, so standard values should be used by system designers when possible.
Of course there are plenty of other assumtions which will break portability. The problem is, if a given programmer doesn't understand portability issues, they will make those assumptions and their code won't work for other systems.
Maybe not, but there is a huge amount of people who are brainwased into thinking RIAA pop music is the only good music. Same with hollywood movies. If Apple loses them, they will also lose quite a few customers (and potential customers).
Why does it matter if they go to Linux? I think it would be as helpful (if not more so) if they just went over to any system which runs on open standards. OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, or some new kid on the block, it doesn't matter. When developers realize they can write applications and they will compile to all those platforms, possibly being able to create binaries which work on most, if not all (assuming they are running compatible processor archs), then you won't have to worry if the new OS will run your programs, because the developer would have a binary avaliable for you.