An have you considered that I and millions of other do not give a flying fuck what you or JWZ use?
Have you considered that not everything on the Internet is put there for your benefit?
Have you considered that CmdrTaco posted this article against jwz's express wishes?
Have you considered that reading comments three deep at score 2 on topics that supposedly don't interest you is somewhat unusual?
Like libraries, right? They are government funded, but they filter. Actually, they are required to filter. It's not just an option, it's a requirement.
It's a condition of optional federal funding, and they're required to provide full access to any adult on request.
Using a curses-based menu to select packages I wanted was an incredible drag.
Wow, I had forgotten that dselect even existed. The Fink base install includes apt-get and another command-line utility, fink. FinkCommander is an Aqua GUI.
I think the reason why Mail.app looks so different is proably because it is one of the truly cross platform mail apps. I remember reading somewhere that Mail.app is one of the few applications that can compile cleanly and with all functionality intact on both OS X and Linux running GNUStep. If that were the case, it might explain the different GUI, as they may have had to make some comprimises to make the application truly cross platform.
Apple Mail isn't open-source, and Mail 2 uses more custom widgetry and Apple-proprietary frameworks than the previous version. GNUMail is a mailer for GNUStep and Mac OS X consciously patterned after Apple Mail 1.x.
Civilization the computer game has absolutely nothing to do with Civilization the board game, except for the name.
Aside from the tech tree, economic elements, and whatever else Meier might have had in mind when he cited it as an influence, maybe. I was actually thinking of Empire, which is a computer game, not a board game--that'll teach me to post before breakfast.
This does not include computer programs or other software as such. It means inventions that make a technical contribution and that are truly novel.
Translation: 'You can't patent software, you patent doing things with software. Totally different.'
The Commission's intention in making its proposal was to avoid the patenting of pure software and make a clear distinction between the European Union and the United States.
And that distinction is what, exactly? (Regarding "pure software", see above.)
Nothing that is not patentable now will be made patentable by the directive.
One currently can apply for and receive a software patent from the EPO; getting it enforced in a national court is another matter. Regardless of which side one takes or how one twists the defintion of "patentable", there is no dispute that the CII directive will make enforceable quite a lot which isn't now.
While C++ can be used for system level programming, it can be ( and has been ) used highly successfully for application level development. OBJC is NOT application level developer friendly.
There are some things that C++ does better than ObjC and vice-versa. Neither is especially friendly by modern standards; both are usable and useful despite this.
...there isn't an objective-c compiler ( other than the free "Portable Object Compiler" available on "thefreecountry.com" ) for any other OS other than OS X...
ObjC has been in mainline GCC since 1992.
...it didn't get a commercial push by any non-Apple company.
Apple had nothing to do with ObjC before it acquired NeXT in 1996.
There's even installation instructions to get it up and running! Now if you bozos would stop slashdotting the damn thing into the next century, I might be able to try it out!
The site is fine. The installation scripts are allegedly offline pending legal clearance, the stageball is 404, and there's no 'tinynt-logger' in portage, so good luck with those instructions. On a technical note, development of GeNToo could hardly avoid producing Portage on Interix on full Windows (Genterix?)--with less effort, more immediate software, less potential controversy, and no legal risk, it would have been a logical milestone--but it doesn't seem to exist.
Neither BSD nor Linux are "built for" one kind of package or the other; individual distributions are built around specific package managers. Yes, Portage was inspired by FreeBSD ports; if that makes Gentoo Linux a BSD, its kernel makes it Minix.
Mac OS X has a BSD core, but it isn't generally used like a BSD.
A BSD, like anything else, is used however people use it. FreeBSD 5 isn't exactly 1BSD itself, and the developers consider Mac OS X part of the family.
By default Portage does not update dependencies unless necessary (as specified by the dependent ebuild), emerge is run with -D/--deep, or (IIRC) the old version has been removed from the Portage tree and is no longer supported. Packages can be forced with -O/--nodeps and pinned with/etc/portage/package.mask; as I'm sure you discovered, changes made to/usr/portage/ are obliterated during the next sync. With the exception of/etc/portage/package.mask, which was added early last year, it's been this way since early days. I'm trying to figure out a time when this stuff wasn't documented, wouldn't have been answered in five minutes on the forums or mailing lists, and yet was recent enough that you could expect your experience to be relevant, but I can't come up with anything.
So, if we have Greek Omicron, Latin O, and Cyrillic O, all of which look exactly the same, could we not create a master character set, containing one instance of every character, and just have the specific character sets be pointers to the relevant entries in the master list? Yeah, I know, that's a big project to change everybody's character sets, but wouldn't it fix this problem?
Just because two (or three, or twenty) characters can look alike doesn't mean that they always will or should. If we could identify all possible homographs, we could perform reasonable checks at the application level without changing Unicode.
Debatable solution to a different problem
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The problem is that UTF-8 isn't powerful enough. It's able to render all our letters, but it can't carry localizable intent, and it's that inability to report intent which is leading us to the multilingual scams which are now occurring on the 'net.
IDN homograph attacks involve multiple scripts, not multiple languages. Restricting each IDN to a single script (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) or a commonly used set of scripts (e.g., kanji + hiragana + katakana + romaji) would be simple and effective, and it looks like the Unicode Consortium is going to recommend that at least for the short term. Your Multicode would add complexity (How do you distinguish the German 'Kindergarten' from the English?) without actually solving the homograph problem (Is Azeri 'a' Latin or Cyrillic?).
They're called homographs with good reason
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that's a very reasonable way of doing it, but i wonder if maybe making the location bar a different colour as FireFox does for secure sites might be a better - in the sense of more obvious - solution.
Some people think it's important that Yandex be able to register xn--ndex-k8d without being spoofed at xn--ndx-sdd1k (with Cyrillic Ye in place of the Latin E).
it's kind of funny, though, how it is essentially our (as in the mostly-north-american-and-western-european readership of slashdot)'s lack of familiarity with the writing systems of the rest of the world that are getting us into this particular pickle.
One need not know hanzi from Hebrew to identify both as Not Latin, but even a native Greek can't be sure whether a given circle is Greek Omicron, Latin O, Cyrillic O, or something else entirely.
wxWidgets is great, but cross-platform Nirvana it isn't. There are various aspects that aren't or can't be translated automatically: menu layout, keyboard equivalents, widget placement. A wxToolBar on Mac OS is a row of shiny Aqua buttons, not an HIToolBar. It can rearrange an Apply/OK/Cancel cluster, but that doesn't help when the HIG say preference changes should be immediate. I'm glad to have wxWidgets in my toolchest, but for many apps modular code and native frontends will offer a better user experience.
Well, you got a karma point out of that post, so I guess it wasn't totally a waste of time. The deceptive commercials are the entire problem. The new policy could have been advertised as 'keep it for a week, buy it if you like it', and the only reason it wasn't is that it isn't as sexy as 'the end of late fees'. (Speaking of which, Marketing must have missed the memo about 'extended viewing'.)
To write code for Linux (which is necessary) requires that it be under the GPL. This means you must distribute source with your device, or contribute it to the main project and let them do it. Either is a lot of work.
Sticking a source directory on the same CD as the binaries and documentation is a lot of work? Noting in the documentation that the project contains GPL software and that the source is available at your web site is a lot of work?
If the resulting functionality is the same (and it will be if you're worth your weight in waffles as an engineer), which would you choose, a GPL product or a BSD product?
As an engineer, I'd want to give out my source code so users can tailor the software to their own purposes, so the GPL obligations are no skin off my back. (As a businessman, I know that I'll sell more devices that way; with 99.9% of the code already out there, any engineer worth his waffles could trivially replicate my software.) I'd choose whichever would be easier to modify to my purposes and maintain.
Politics and idealism have to stop somewhere. I respect the GPL's effort to keep things open and ultimately relieve the world of reverse engineering and such unecessary difficulties, but its stance on keeping things publicly available and advertised are way too generalized.
The only 'advertisement' the GPL requires is an intact copyright notice (just like BSD) and an offer of source. As for 'idealism', it's funny how people who wouldn't bat an eye at a programmer demanding money for his work cry foul when he offers to take payment in code.
Twice now I've picked up hosting plans for myself or others that claim they come with RHEL (aka, a subscription to redhat's network of up2date servers, and redhat software). In these two cases when I actually run up2date I've noticed they are picking up packages from centOS.
Call me cynical, but I don't think they were confused; I think they figured they could make more money by lying about their services.
I don't understand how "shove it up your ass" (said by Starbuck in the finale, if I'm not mistaken) exactly fits the "clean" attitude of the series.
'Frak' is an homage to the original series, and while 'ass' may not be polite language, it's milder than some other words.
Also, when you use that frack word exactly as you would the real one, and you use it a lot, is there a real benefit to the young American audience?
I don't know why some people find 'frak' or 'frell' or 'gosh darn it to heck' more acceptable than other words with the same intent, but the writers and producers don't set the standards. Besides, as distinctive touches go, I'll take 'frak' over octagonal form-feed paper.
Windows XP lacks many useful features from the command line. For instance, tools like find, grep, the many features in ls, symlinks ("shortcuts" aren't nearly as versatile), and many others have no Windows equivalents.... Does Microsoft have any plans to modernize the command-line support in Windows?
A number of command-line utilities were introduced or improved in WXP and WS2003, and Longhorn will have a novel shell called Monad/MSH. NTFS supports hard links and 'junctions' akin to directory symlinks. Cygwin and Windows Services for Unix both offer Unixoid environments for Windows, including tools like find, grep, the many features of ls, and usable shells; they also provide file symlinks, but only within their respective environments.
The.doc file format is documented on MSDN[1], and is just as open as PDF.
Documentation for the Word 97/2000/2002 binary file format, the version everyone has had to deal with for the past several years is available under under license to "bona fide governmental entity customers... for certain internal, non-commercial uses", "qualified Microsoft customers... for use in the development of internal-use software solutions... and to complement Microsoft Office", and "qualified software developers... for use in the development of commercial software products and solutions... and to complement Microsoft Office" (emphases mine). The Office 2003 XML formats require a patent license.
Adobe implies that it has some kind of copyright control over implementations of the PDF specification and conditions its permission on "reasonable efforts" to enforce authorial restrictions. (This doesn't seem to conform to US case law about interoperability, but calling that bluff could be expensive.) Still, it's substantially less restrictive than what Microsoft currently offers; if the output of any version of MS Word is fully and freely documented, it's at least two completely incompatible formats and nearly a decade behind.
The.doc format is intented for editable documents, and stores various metadata along with the content. PDF is not and doesn't.
Of course, you know as well as I do that many MS Office users, Microsoft included, use the Word 97/2000/2002 format to publish documents better suited to something like PDF, and that there are other open formats suitable for editing.
Basically, the Germans have a copyright system that's roughly comparable to what we have in the US. But there's a way to exempt certain entities that are supposed to serve the public. That's why the German national library (which is comparable to the Library of Congress in that it's sort of a national archive) can crack DRM'd audio, video or eBooks whenever the hell they feel like it.
I don't see how requiring a library to employ a staff of cryptographers (and soon electrical engineers) to preserve a fraction of the works it otherwise could (to say nothing of the works that could be preserved by others) serves the public interest.
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Yes, an unsourced claim on Wikipedia must be accurate, no matter how little sense it makes.
By default Portage does not update dependencies unless necessary (as specified by the dependent ebuild), emerge is run with -D/--deep, or (IIRC) the old version has been removed from the Portage tree and is no longer supported. Packages can be forced with -O/--nodeps and pinned with /etc/portage/package.mask; as I'm sure you discovered, changes made to /usr/portage/ are obliterated during the next sync. With the exception of /etc/portage/package.mask, which was added early last year, it's been this way since early days. I'm trying to figure out a time when this stuff wasn't documented, wouldn't have been answered in five minutes on the forums or mailing lists, and yet was recent enough that you could expect your experience to be relevant, but I can't come up with anything.
wxWidgets is great, but cross-platform Nirvana it isn't. There are various aspects that aren't or can't be translated automatically: menu layout, keyboard equivalents, widget placement. A wxToolBar on Mac OS is a row of shiny Aqua buttons, not an HIToolBar. It can rearrange an Apply/OK/Cancel cluster, but that doesn't help when the HIG say preference changes should be immediate. I'm glad to have wxWidgets in my toolchest, but for many apps modular code and native frontends will offer a better user experience.
Adobe implies that it has some kind of copyright control over implementations of the PDF specification and conditions its permission on "reasonable efforts" to enforce authorial restrictions. (This doesn't seem to conform to US case law about interoperability, but calling that bluff could be expensive.) Still, it's substantially less restrictive than what Microsoft currently offers; if the output of any version of MS Word is fully and freely documented, it's at least two completely incompatible formats and nearly a decade behind.
Of course, you know as well as I do that many MS Office users, Microsoft included, use the Word 97/2000/2002 format to publish documents better suited to something like PDF, and that there are other open formats suitable for editing.