Mozilla is IIRC normally dual-licensed so I relicense it to myself under the GPL before using. Anyway, on Sun, they have reason to want linux to die (their unix business) and have done one really evil thing I'm still feeling the consequences of (the horrible java license). So they are going to have to do a lot before I trust them. Opening up big expensive software is a huge step and a way just about anyone can gain my trust, but it is lessened if they insist on using some weird (i.e. I haven't seen it before) license for what they release. I wonder why none of the existing licenses will do, and think that it's probably because they want to do something which benefits themselves at the expense of the rest of them. If it's OSI-approved that's good enough for me, I don't mind even having to do a full reverse grant on derivatives, but if they are using an unusual license they are probably doing something shady (bad), correcting a flaw that doesn't exist (incompetent), correcting a flaw that they haven't pointed out to the fsf/other license writers (not really participating in the community), correcting a flaw that the fsf/other license writers refuses to admit exists (good, but unlikely), or just being different for the sake of it (not really participating in the community). So they get less trust from me than if they'd used the GPL.
No scrollwheel support. If I'm reading ebooks that means long periods of doing nothing but scrolling down, and for that being able to scroll with my wheel is a must.
I was under the impression international treaties trumped the constitution.
I have been repeatedly reassured by americans that this is not the case. They are only allowed to sign treaties that don't violate the constitution.
The grandparent has a point. Why is the USA government forbidding people from saying "fuck" on television? What business is it of theirs? What is the benefit to society?
From my point of view (I'm just a lowly, non-free European), it looks like a bunch of do-gooders imposing their morals on the rest of the country. That doesn't sound very free to me.
That's why this won't pass. Or if it does, it will get repealed.
Yeah, probably. With luck they'll eventually realise that blanket blocking of a filetype is a bad thing. That said, it may make sense to block archives the scanner can't read, if it is able to scan inside zipfiles and plainly-attached files.
I think you would always have the first penalty to the extent that it would annoy many users. I'm a gentoo user and I just run my upgrades in the background, but I've known lots of people who say the compilation time is unacceptable. And I don't think that designing from the ground up for compile from source would speed it up that much, because optimizing is hard, plain and simple. When computers have got fast enough that the time to compile the whole OS is, say, about half an hour, then such an approach will work, and it's a good approach. But for the moment I think most users will be using precompiled things, so unfortunately all the self-optimizing gunk makes sense on the whole. Maybe we could start moving to it being optional.
Agree with you 100% on the cache-miss and similar though. That's why itanium was good - less of the cpu trying to optimize its own code before running it.
I think the problem is the average user needs optimization but isn't willing to take the time to optimize their programs. Thus programs have to pretend to have been fully compiled while optimising themselves behind the scenes. So source as a standard distribution method would make sense. But it needs to be optimised on install rather than at run-time, and it needs to be fast enough that users won't complain. If you think that removing the gunk and having an OS based around from-source would let you compile in timescales similar to installing a binary package, then you're right and let's start working on it, but I don't think processors are quite fast enough yet.
No "even" there. *Of course* professionals don't need it. But the number of slashdotters who can't even avoid apostrophes on every plural, yet alone getting it's and its right, suggests there are a lot of people who could do with a grammar checker.
I think the removal of ide-scsi goes against that though. Don't get me wrong, I like linux and am very glad I have a good free kernel to use. But that was a mistake, plain and simple, with no real justification, and from what I read seems to have been done by executive order from Linus. And it's a real problem for me; it's keeping me from moving to 2.6 (although the instability is such that I wouldn't want to move anyway yet). I'm hoping some distribution's people will keep maintaining 2.4 and adding features (IIRC red hat is doing this, and gentoo where I get my sources from seems to be doing it at the moment), or the kernel.org people keep doing this, because if not I will have to find myself another OS. Or try and maintain my kernel myself.
With 2.6 and the "keep development in the main tree" decision, I think he's lost that balance. The 2.6 tree is effectively now in a state of permanent beta, with any stable releases happening purely by luck. If this model continues, 2.6 will not be useable for production systems until the next branch is released. I don't like being this out of date, but I will have to be, because stability matters. The old model, with 2.4 for those who needed stability and 2.5 in parallel for those who needed bleeding-edge features, worked well enough. It should have carried on with 2.6.
I think it has been marketing and reputation and sheer number of programmers rather than design. A badly designed kernel with lots of people working on it can, at least in the short term, work better than a better designed kernel with less programmers. That said, if Cox is going to start a fork, I volunteer to work on it. I'm a reasonable C programmer and would like a better designed kernel. I doubt I'm the only one.
IME there have been a number of bad decisions made with 2.6. It's less stable for me, and fails to support my CD burner properly for no good reason. And it's obvious to anyone who looks at the subsystem and filesystem architecture that it wasn't designed as well as it could have been. Frankly it doesn't look like it was designed at all, simply aggregated as people coded to get bus or filesystem x to work.
Yes, everyone makes mistakes. I don't think Cox is denying that he does. The point is that Linus has too little oversight for those rare occasions when he does make a mistake. If he makes a mistake, there is no-one to overrule him. Which leaves us relying on him not making mistakes, which is not a good position to be in.
The challenge is being able to be read the adress by using an ordinary webcam, with no need to carefully line up the piece. No, it's not as good as solving an arbitrary puzzle, but it's still pretty good.
Sort of. IME my productivity in any OS is directly proportional to how configurable it is. The more I can make it "mine" the more productive I will be. If I'm on a locked-down box where I can't change things, no matter what OS it's running, my productivity goes way down. My vote goes to linux, but really, anything I can configure is fine, and if it's running KDE then it's perfect.
Because they at least, at the bottom of things, have a constitution that says they are. And nothing ever trumps the constitution, ultimately.
Mostly I'm glad for living this side of the pond, but I am a subject of a bunch of unelected foreigners who used religious hatred to strongarm the country into giving them control of it. I have, ultimately, no rights other than what they deign to grant me. There are many things wrong with America, but at the basis of it they are a free people, whose government rules only by their sufferance and not the other way round. There aren't so many people (The US is by no means the only such country, but I doubt they are in the majority) who can say that.
Nope. Money is backed by reserves, the value of all the money in circulation is equal to the value in the gold reserves of the issuing party. If the government has 100 tonnes of gold in reserve, and 300000000 dollars in circulation, each dollar is worth 1/3 of a gram of gold. If you then go and print 100000000 counterfeit dollars, my dollars are now only worth 1/4 of a gram of gold because there is still only 100 tonnes of gold in the reserves. There's nothing like that going on with music.
If you delay the compilation to startup, you get a delay when launching. Processors are getting faster to the stage where it might be irrelevant, but it isn't to me on my hardware - any jit type system is really noticeable. As for the dedicated hardware aspect, ime generic processors always overtake dedicated hardware you buy pretty quickly. That's why the advice to people setting up raid5 or number crunching or so on which is meant to be used for a long time is always to do it in software, because software is flexible and gets updated. Your PII ran faster thanks to its on-die optimisers, but modern compilers could probably do a better job without them by now. And I think the upgrade cycle is getting longer, so the advantage of flexibility will really start to tell.
I'm not defending my grammatical excellence, I'm just complaining that the apostrophe was used in a way that is ungrammatical to the extent that it made it hard to read
I've just checked the auction house story - even though there were independents, the fact that between them they controlled 90% of the market was enough - they were charged under anti-trust legislation. So if the five main labels were colluding on prices, then there could easily be an anti-trust suit.
They should use the theme that's default in XFCE4. It looks much cleaner (the gnome themes all seem to have too much colour in them) and still has good performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla is IIRC normally dual-licensed so I relicense it to myself under the GPL before using. Anyway, on Sun, they have reason to want linux to die (their unix business) and have done one really evil thing I'm still feeling the consequences of (the horrible java license). So they are going to have to do a lot before I trust them. Opening up big expensive software is a huge step and a way just about anyone can gain my trust, but it is lessened if they insist on using some weird (i.e. I haven't seen it before) license for what they release. I wonder why none of the existing licenses will do, and think that it's probably because they want to do something which benefits themselves at the expense of the rest of them. If it's OSI-approved that's good enough for me, I don't mind even having to do a full reverse grant on derivatives, but if they are using an unusual license they are probably doing something shady (bad), correcting a flaw that doesn't exist (incompetent), correcting a flaw that they haven't pointed out to the fsf/other license writers (not really participating in the community), correcting a flaw that the fsf/other license writers refuses to admit exists (good, but unlikely), or just being different for the sake of it (not really participating in the community). So they get less trust from me than if they'd used the GPL.
No scrollwheel support. If I'm reading ebooks that means long periods of doing nothing but scrolling down, and for that being able to scroll with my wheel is a must.
But what about us poor slackware users? Pat may be a miracle-worker but he can't be expected to maintain an entire kernel by himself.
I have been repeatedly reassured by americans that this is not the case. They are only allowed to sign treaties that don't violate the constitution.
The grandparent has a point. Why is the USA government forbidding people from saying "fuck" on television? What business is it of theirs? What is the benefit to society?
From my point of view (I'm just a lowly, non-free European), it looks like a bunch of do-gooders imposing their morals on the rest of the country. That doesn't sound very free to me.
That's why this won't pass. Or if it does, it will get repealed.
Yeah, probably. With luck they'll eventually realise that blanket blocking of a filetype is a bad thing. That said, it may make sense to block archives the scanner can't read, if it is able to scan inside zipfiles and plainly-attached files.
Agree with you 100% on the cache-miss and similar though. That's why itanium was good - less of the cpu trying to optimize its own code before running it.
I think the problem is the average user needs optimization but isn't willing to take the time to optimize their programs. Thus programs have to pretend to have been fully compiled while optimising themselves behind the scenes. So source as a standard distribution method would make sense. But it needs to be optimised on install rather than at run-time, and it needs to be fast enough that users won't complain. If you think that removing the gunk and having an OS based around from-source would let you compile in timescales similar to installing a binary package, then you're right and let's start working on it, but I don't think processors are quite fast enough yet.
No "even" there. *Of course* professionals don't need it. But the number of slashdotters who can't even avoid apostrophes on every plural, yet alone getting it's and its right, suggests there are a lot of people who could do with a grammar checker.
I'd imagine it's because of using native widgets
I think the removal of ide-scsi goes against that though. Don't get me wrong, I like linux and am very glad I have a good free kernel to use. But that was a mistake, plain and simple, with no real justification, and from what I read seems to have been done by executive order from Linus. And it's a real problem for me; it's keeping me from moving to 2.6 (although the instability is such that I wouldn't want to move anyway yet). I'm hoping some distribution's people will keep maintaining 2.4 and adding features (IIRC red hat is doing this, and gentoo where I get my sources from seems to be doing it at the moment), or the kernel.org people keep doing this, because if not I will have to find myself another OS. Or try and maintain my kernel myself.
With 2.6 and the "keep development in the main tree" decision, I think he's lost that balance. The 2.6 tree is effectively now in a state of permanent beta, with any stable releases happening purely by luck. If this model continues, 2.6 will not be useable for production systems until the next branch is released. I don't like being this out of date, but I will have to be, because stability matters. The old model, with 2.4 for those who needed stability and 2.5 in parallel for those who needed bleeding-edge features, worked well enough. It should have carried on with 2.6.
I think it has been marketing and reputation and sheer number of programmers rather than design. A badly designed kernel with lots of people working on it can, at least in the short term, work better than a better designed kernel with less programmers. That said, if Cox is going to start a fork, I volunteer to work on it. I'm a reasonable C programmer and would like a better designed kernel. I doubt I'm the only one.
Yes, everyone makes mistakes. I don't think Cox is denying that he does. The point is that Linus has too little oversight for those rare occasions when he does make a mistake. If he makes a mistake, there is no-one to overrule him. Which leaves us relying on him not making mistakes, which is not a good position to be in.
Is this unionfs like the ovlfs that has been used in SLAX for ages? And if so why not just port ovlfs to kernel 2.6?
The challenge is being able to be read the adress by using an ordinary webcam, with no need to carefully line up the piece. No, it's not as good as solving an arbitrary puzzle, but it's still pretty good.
The lesson is to code in Python :)
Sort of. IME my productivity in any OS is directly proportional to how configurable it is. The more I can make it "mine" the more productive I will be. If I'm on a locked-down box where I can't change things, no matter what OS it's running, my productivity goes way down. My vote goes to linux, but really, anything I can configure is fine, and if it's running KDE then it's perfect.
I'm not surprised. I was the same until I discovered Arachne.
Mostly I'm glad for living this side of the pond, but I am a subject of a bunch of unelected foreigners who used religious hatred to strongarm the country into giving them control of it. I have, ultimately, no rights other than what they deign to grant me. There are many things wrong with America, but at the basis of it they are a free people, whose government rules only by their sufferance and not the other way round. There aren't so many people (The US is by no means the only such country, but I doubt they are in the majority) who can say that.
Better than another dupe, no?
Nope. Money is backed by reserves, the value of all the money in circulation is equal to the value in the gold reserves of the issuing party. If the government has 100 tonnes of gold in reserve, and 300000000 dollars in circulation, each dollar is worth 1/3 of a gram of gold. If you then go and print 100000000 counterfeit dollars, my dollars are now only worth 1/4 of a gram of gold because there is still only 100 tonnes of gold in the reserves. There's nothing like that going on with music.
If you delay the compilation to startup, you get a delay when launching. Processors are getting faster to the stage where it might be irrelevant, but it isn't to me on my hardware - any jit type system is really noticeable. As for the dedicated hardware aspect, ime generic processors always overtake dedicated hardware you buy pretty quickly. That's why the advice to people setting up raid5 or number crunching or so on which is meant to be used for a long time is always to do it in software, because software is flexible and gets updated. Your PII ran faster thanks to its on-die optimisers, but modern compilers could probably do a better job without them by now. And I think the upgrade cycle is getting longer, so the advantage of flexibility will really start to tell.
I'm not defending my grammatical excellence, I'm just complaining that the apostrophe was used in a way that is ungrammatical to the extent that it made it hard to read
Not if they're following their remit, as far as I've read.
I've just checked the auction house story - even though there were independents, the fact that between them they controlled 90% of the market was enough - they were charged under anti-trust legislation. So if the five main labels were colluding on prices, then there could easily be an anti-trust suit.
They should use the theme that's default in XFCE4. It looks much cleaner (the gnome themes all seem to have too much colour in them) and still has good performance.