Yeah, after seeing that other poster's point about reading a pdf and using his browser at the same time, your idea unfortunately doesn't seem as good as it did originally, at least as the default.
It would be a good option though, for people that generally only use one window at a time.
While I understand your frustration at stuff like this not simply working out of the box, you're comparing apples and oranges here.
Developer time is not a arbitrarily transferable. The skillset required to extend the X protocol and the one required to fix broken distributions are completely different. The folks that work well on one are probably rather unlikely to work well on the other. There may be some overlap but my guess is that it's insignificant.
So while it may frustrate you that people are working on stuff that you're not interested in instead of what you are interested in, understand that you can't simply shift developers around like that, even if you were the guy that gets to decide what is most important and what gets done. Because people have different talents and interests.
Now, regarding your xterm problem, it seems to me that the issue here is with the way keystrokes are interpreted by X, specifically, XKB. Unfortunately, XKB is used by people to extend their keyboard mappings, instead of using it what it was designed for: mapping the structure of your keyboard to its keymap. Technically, input of any sort ought to be handled by an intelligent XIM, with as little as possible being done on the XKB level.
Unfortunately, XIM is complex and XKB, while also complex, is less so. As a result, people who use a character set very similar to the one found on their keyboard don't use XIM for anything, and depend instead on XKB to provide them with the extra character combinations they need. There is unfortunately overlap between what XKB and XIM can do, and there's no set standard on who should do what.
Therefore, different apps do different stuff. It makes sense when you think about it, that GAIM and other GTK apps should ignore Shift+Alt+foo when typing -- Alt and Shift+Alt are common hotkey modifiers. So actually, on the desktop, xterm is simply behaving differently.
The question you should ask yourself is, should xterm's "feature" be considered normal? Does extending it to the rest of the desktop even make sense? Or should you install an XIM and use it instead (which will work in all XIM aware X apps, which is, well, nearly all of them?)
Essentially, you're complaining about a feature of xterm being present only in xterm. As it happens, in this particular case, it seems as though this comes from a lack of standards re: what should be handled by XIM and what should be handled by XKB. I'll admit that we need one of those.
But otherwise, does the fact that app X has a feature that no other apps have mean that all those other apps have bugs? Especially when app X's feature wouldn't fit into their paradigm?
Oooo, that sounds sexy. And it's probably possible now. Although, with focus follows mouse, it might result in a lot of drawing as you move the mouse around, which might suck.
Subpixel rendering of fonts with the XRender extension and freetype look great on my laptop. This gripe has been essentially moot since, I dunno, about 2 years ago.
Primarily because with Apple, its user base is mostly designers and the like, who put a great deal of value on how the system looks and less on its technical merits.
Lately, with Linux's growing popularity, we've had a lot of converts that don't know how to use the system without GNOME or KDE, and they think much more like Windows and Mac users do. They are always pushing for more of these sorts of "eye candy" features. Not that we don't have more experienced users who appreciate it too or anything.
But there are still a large number of Linux enthusiasts that got on board back when Linux wasn't pretty, and they didn't care then and they don't care now. Most of them are probably neutral when it comes to the addition of these sorts of eye-candy features, but some of them remember using Linux on a P90 and getting just as much work done then as they do now, and wonder what the point of all the additional bloat is.
I personally think most of these people are hysterical raisins, if only because it is still relatively easy to run Linux on a P90 if you're willing to be picky about what you install.
But, I'm glad they're around, because they keep us honest. The anti-bloat folks make a fuss when devs go overboard; they ensure that we can continue to run Linux on old hardware, which is important -- even if it means forgoing the latest GNOME/KDE thing and running a lite window manager instead (I use PWM, for example).
If you're unable to type international characters in the same way in both xterm and gaim/other gtk apps, your system is broken.
Personally, I use SCIM and it works fine in all my apps. Before that, I used XCIN, and it worked fine in all my apps too. I daresay that any competently written XIM server ought to be able to do the same.
The other gripes, however, are worthwhile. I don't have any interest in drop shadows or translucency either, but then I always liked Xaw, too. The truth is that eye candy attracts users, and users attract businesses, and businesses bring hardware support. If you've been using Linux for a reasonably long time, you should see how this has already happened.
So in that respect, it probably isn't a bad thing.
I'll take you at your word; I don't use Windows and never have, so I wouldn't know.
However, I just went and looked at the screenshots and I noticed that the large fonts are large for exactly the reasons I mentioned: because there are chinese characters on most of those desktops. Chinese characters, if displayed too small, become illegible.
Speaking of Chinese Characters, I will agree that some of the fonts on there are ugly -- this is a problem with freely available CJK fonts in general. Many of them look ok, but provide too few characters and so pango ends up mixing and matching fonts, which always looks like crap.
On my system, I tend to use the fonts that come with Windows/Mac, depending on where I am (for example, in my office, all the other machines are Windows, so I use their fonts). I agree that we need better free CJK fonts. But it's a big, relatively difficult job.
Disable the relevant extensions. This may mean compiling your own X server, or using a distribution that focuses on minimality.
No compliant X program can assume that any extension to the X protocol is present in the server without checking it first. If the composite extension etc are not there, bume, no drop shadows/translucency, whatever.
The development at X.org is only at the protocol level; they've added extensions that make translucency and drop-shadows possible without evil, CPU/network intensive hacks.
If it doesn't look right, it's only because the WM/toolkit programmers didn't think about it enough. But the actual X.org extensions are very, very flexible. Don't worry; this is just a showcase of what can be done, but it's not all that can be done.
Remember, X.org is producing the X server, which is the lowest level of the X window system -- all it is is an implementation of the X11 protocol. Everything you actually see is drawn by other processes, like the Window manager, individual apps, etc, etc. The X server by itself isn't usable and provides no UI whatsoever.
Technically multiuser. In practice, it's rather less than multiuser, but I didn't want to just say "it's not multiuser" without a caveat because otherwise I'd just get 20 responses from Windows fans telling me how wrong I am etc etc.
Since I don't use Windows (and in fact never have, at least not on my home/work machines), I don't know to what extent it is or isn't multi-user. I know it has profile support and that you can login/logoff as other people. I used to use VMS and that was definitely multiuser, and I've heard rumors that NT is a dumbed down VMS.
But essentially in my gut I agree with you, I was just covering my ass.
Like everything else on the Linux desktop, font size is configurable (and in GNOME at least, usually depends somewhat on your theme.)
The freetype font rendered works very well at small font sizes, as well. I very much doubt most people would agree that "10pt" is normal sized; 12pt tends to be the default on most desktops on most OSs. You are free to change this on most of them. Personally, I prefer larger fonts, but that's especially because I read a lot of non-latin text and some glyphs are just rather larger and more complex than roman ones (anything CJK, for example).
Personally, I prefer FreeType's rendering and AA to even MacOS's, but I recognize that this might simply be because I'm used to FT's AA algo.
It definitely looks better than Windows. Heck, there was no AA in Windows 2000 at least. I'm not sure about XP because I've never used it, but the font situation on Linux at the moment is so much better than most Windows installations out there. My coworkers, who all run Win2k, are always commenting how nice the fonts on my system look.
I will definitely agree, though, that a few years ago Linux was utter shit when it came to fonts and that Windows beat the pants off of us. But we've got our shit together now.
Giving window managers direct access to video memory is rather stupid, considering that one of X's primary features is network transparency.
I know you're trolling, but it's rather important to recognize that X is a protocol, nothing more, and nothing less. How fast or slow it is depends on the implementation; some are clearly better than others.
Comparing X to direct video access is rather like comparing ssh to the linux console. The latter will always be faster because there is no network bottleneck, but you can't use it to connect to your machine remotely.
Furthermore, there are extensions which practically do give an application direct access to the hardware, or at least, as direct as one can safely manage. But what's the point, if all you're doing is drawing widgets? I could understand it for games or playing DVDs, where speed is important and you'd be stupid to play it over the network anyway, but for a window manager?
If you want to use a single user, non-network aware system, then by all means, use Windows*. In the meantime, we should keep working on improving our X implementation in areas like optimizing for local connections. There are lots of shortcuts that haven't been implemented and I'm sure there are lots that haven't even been thought of yet.
Anyone that has had to administer machines remotely appreciates the network transparency of X. It's the only window system that has this feature. Let's not throw it out because some trolls don't understand its value.
*Yes, I know Windows is now multi-user. But it wasn't designed that way, and it shows.
Except the exchange rate is like 10 million togrogs to the USD... ok, I'm exaggerating. But you sort of have to wonder whether printing them is profitable; paper costs money, you know.
I hate to be able to recognize it written down, but it's actually the lyrics to the original song at the end of Star Wars Ep 6. You know, before George rereleased it and changed it.
I take solace in the fact that I'm less of a dork than the GP, though.
Global warming is a myth is putting it a bit strongly. We know that the earth undergoes and climate change on a regular basis, and has done so (and more extremely) in the past.
Global warming is theorized, but at this point cannot be measured, because so far the world hasn't warmed up/cooled down enough for anyone to state conclusively that we are outside the norms for our planet's natural climate change.
In other words, evidence supporting global warming as a theory is inconclusive, but this does not make it a myth. A myth implies that it isn't true. Science at this point cannot confirm or deny this, because explaining current climate change as due to global warming is no more scientifically plausible than saying that the world's climate is simply changing in the same way it has always changed.
So, that's the science. But beyond science, we have logic. I'll use an analogy. Suppose you have a lake, and over its history, for reasons not entirely clear, the amount of urea in the lake has seemed to shift cyclically, and there are a lot of theories about why this is.
Now, recently, the people in the township adjacent to the lake have taken to dumping their urine into the lake. People have noticed that the urea content of the lake is increasing. The lake is big, though, so actually, the increase of urea in the lake isn't significant enough that we are able to scientifically show that this is because of the urine being dumped into the lake. Scientists point out that the amount of urea in the lake has been higher and fluctuated more wildly in the past.
That's all well and good, but it is ignoring something obvious here: They are dumping urine into the lake.
See, the argument about global warming is whether our current climate change is caused by us or not. It might not be. Despite what zealots in either camp say, there is no conclusive evidence at this point, because the world's climate simply hasn't changed enough for us to be sure that we're out of the norm. Statistics, standard deviation, and all that, you know? It isn't significant yet.
But -- and this is the important point -- the world is really, really, big, and it will require a lot of pollution and fuckedupness to screw the earth to the point where it is scientifically demonstrable that, without any doubt, we are the ones causing the problem. By then, it will be too late to easily reverse the damage.
So the point is, we know we're doing stuff that's bad for the environment. We have reason to believe that if we dump enough crap into the atmosphere, we'll develop a greenhouse effect. We are dumping that kind of stuff into the atmosphere right now, just like the township in my example was dumping urine. We know that if do this enough, we will eventually have a greenhouse effect, we simply don't know how much is required. Perhaps we will never be able to dump enough to produce a net change in global weather dynamics.
But I'd rather be safe than sorry. Let's just use nuclear power.
Except there aren't any of these. You can certainly burn hydrogen and harness the energy, but hydrogen itself costs energy to make -- and be made it must, because its incredibly low mass means that it essentially floats out of our atmosphere. And it is liquid at such an incredibly low temperature that unless you live on pluto, you'll never find it in that form.
Since all H2 must be produced, we're stuck using elecrolysis to seperate it from the oxygen in water. This works but costs energy.
Hydrogen-based engines are glorified batteries. They store energy well (although the small size of H2 combined with its boyancy means that there's essentially no way to hold it forever, all tanks leak, so you even get the "dies even if you don't use it" behaviour of batteries).
Don't ever believe the FUD about hydrogen being our new renewable energy source. We may someday have "electric" cars using hydrogen based fuel cells as batteries, but the hydrogen in those fuel cells will still need to be produced by some conventional means. Due to nuclearphobia in the US, this will probably be coal or oil. Large plants are more efficient than the small engine in your car, so there will be a net save of energy compared to the status quo -- but the US will continue to be the world's largest user of fossil fuels, because we can't shake our dependance on them.
It's no coincidence that an oil-baron like W. is in favor of hydrogen. Not that it isn't a worthwhile technology to develop, but I'd rather our powerplants be nuclear than based on oil.
In basic organic chemistry, you learn the following reaction:
Any Hydrocarbon + Sufficient Heat = n H20 + m CO2... for appropriate values of n and m. In practice, there are usually larger hydrocarbon byproducts, but you'll notice something: there is no H2 in this equation. Hydrogen far prefers eletronegative oxygen to another hydrogen atom when it starts to think about bonding. It's an interatomic relationship, really. Snicker.
Anyway, the point is, the most efficient means we currently have of producing hydrogen is via electrolysis. This is reasonably efficient and the price you pay for producing hydrogen is only slightly greater than the gain you get from burning it, which effectively exactly reverses the reaction.
If you want hydrogen, you must produce it. This costs energy. There is no way around this; there are no exergonic hydrogen producing reactions with abundently available constituents. If you want hydrogen, water is the cheapest place to get it, and it's still expensive.
Of course, the reactor design employed by the Chinese uses helium, which is not an abundant resource, and ironically is mostly found (iirc) in little bubbles in fossil fuels. So that doesn't really help them much in terms of fossil fuel dependence.
While this sort of feel good about our country not profiling people stuff is all well and good, the submitter was making a pragmatic rather than ideal point.
The truth is, if you are scruffy looking, not white, dressed in drag, or in some other way deviant from the norm, police are more likely to harrass you. Often, they do so simply because you look deviant, rather than because there is any enforcable law being broken.
While I appreciate your point, try to appreciate the submitter's: what he's saying is, because AKMA is supposedly very wholesome looking, the cop's motivation in telling him to use the library's wifi inside the library only could not possibly have been because he was a "hacker type". In other words, this wasn't simple harrassment. It was "for real".
We all hate the fact that people get harrassed unfairly, but they do. The submitter is recognizing this, not advocating it. If he had said, "I got asked to move on, and I was Arab and wearing a turban", we would naturally be outraged by the cop's mistreatment of an arab man, rather than by him being told to move on, because we would assume, understanding our rights, that the only motivation the cop could possibly have had for asking the turbaned man to move on was the fact that he was wearing a turban.
The point here is that this isn't simple harassment: it's an erosion of our rights. I think I've beaten this point to death already, I hope you understand it now.
I think you're trolling about the whole UNIX GUIs are hard bit. The rest of your post makes good points though.
First off, when an individual FOSS developer sits down to write a GUI app, he doesn't fight about KDE/GNOME, packaging, or anything else. He decides which he will use based on his own preferences and requirements. If he uses GNOME or is writing the app for someone that uses GNOME, he will use that; ditto for KDE. Packaging is probably dictated by the OS he develops on initially; he can assume (rightfully) that people who want to run his developed-on-Debian app on their Redhat or SUSE systems will contribute makefiles and build scripts to make rpms while he maintains his debian/ directory. Sure, it seems complex, but in FOSS, this is how it works, and this is why you end up with an app that runs on every POSIX platform under the sun, translated into every language immaginable, etc.
Now, in a company setting, he doesn't make those decisions, his managers do, and those decisions are generally arbitrarily based on stuff managers care about. The packaging will be tied to the system in question. Again, no arguing. I realize Windows people are frustrated by the amount of choice on UNIX systems, but managers are used to making choices: they point and say "that one". They might have a meeting about it, but in the end, it doesn't matter.
The truth is, developing GUI apps on anything but (maybe) a Mac is generally a pain in the ass. GUIs are hard to do, in general. If you get right down to it, no one likes GUIs.
If you work in IT, you'll probably realize that lots of managers want web-based solutions. There are lots of reasons. First off, there's the RAD angle -- GUIs are a pain to develop well, and usually we don't need overly complex GUIs for DB entry anyway. Whereas developing a good GUI can take months to years, a good web-based app can take half as long or less to develop/debug/launch.
Furthermore, there's the write-once-run-anywhere angle. While this was pretty much a pipe dream for Java, web-based apps that do all their computation server-side make this a reality. So anyone with a browser (that is, anyone with a computer, ie, everyone in your company, probably) has instant access to the relevant web apps. No installation, no calling IT down for the admin privs required to do the install, etc, etc. And with web-based apps, the designers using Macs, the office drones using Windows and the server guys using UNIX workstations all have access if they need it.
The web spells accessibility.
I've been doing DB-related dev since the dBase days, and it's been a while since my employer has wanted an in-house solution that isn't intranet based.
Quoth the poster: Well for starters he's not charging for the distribution of it, it is a later charge for using the code.
I must admit, I have no idea what you're talking about here. A later charge for using the code? What? If you clarify what you mean, I'll respond.
And then you said: Although he's probably breaking the openssl licensing, and infact breaking the gpl licensing for the unix version anyway by distributing something which links to openssl in the first place.
OpenSSL is under an Apache style license, not the GPL. There is essentially no way to violate this license, unless you fork the code and call it OpenSSL, which he isn't doing. Apache style licenses are pretty close to BSD/MIT/XORG style licenses.
Look, I'm not saying what he's doing is right from a moral perspective, just that he may be within his rights from a legal one.
Oh, sure, that's what they want to do. But I hope I'm not alone in saying, "Fuck 'em." I will continue to do what I want with the things I buy, and I will use my skills to break any boneheaded and ineffectual security measures they use to prevent me from doing so. And once I have done so, I will tell others how.
Yes, and others will do the same. And while the MPAA and RIAA bitch and moan, we hackers will have contests seeing who can write the encryption breaking algorithm most efficiently, in the least amount of space, etc, etc.
Because if they can program my processor to play my DVD when they want me to be able to, then I can program my processor to play my DVD when I want to. It's as simple as that -- either the machine has the capability or it doesn't. Anyone with a cursory understanding of cryptography knows that there's no way to encrypt content if it needs to be viewable by an untrusted viewer.
And I am not trustworthy. I will not help them support their ridiculous business model of "long term rentals", as you so pointedly put, parent. If I buy something, it belongs to me. If I want to put it in another format or copy it or whatever, that's my damn business.
And here's a big Fuck You to the DMCA, just for good measure. Just because some know-nothing-about-technology, rich-off-of-other-people's-hard-work fuckwads paid our "elected" representatives the big bucks to pass ridiculous anti-freedom laws doesn't mean I'm not going to make a point to disobey.
Some laws are meant to be broken. And I intend to break them. Repeatedly. (Yes DMCA, I'm talking to you.)
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Yeah, after seeing that other poster's point about reading a pdf and using his browser at the same time, your idea unfortunately doesn't seem as good as it did originally, at least as the default.
It would be a good option though, for people that generally only use one window at a time.
While I understand your frustration at stuff like this not simply working out of the box, you're comparing apples and oranges here.
Developer time is not a arbitrarily transferable. The skillset required to extend the X protocol and the one required to fix broken distributions are completely different. The folks that work well on one are probably rather unlikely to work well on the other. There may be some overlap but my guess is that it's insignificant.
So while it may frustrate you that people are working on stuff that you're not interested in instead of what you are interested in, understand that you can't simply shift developers around like that, even if you were the guy that gets to decide what is most important and what gets done. Because people have different talents and interests.
Now, regarding your xterm problem, it seems to me that the issue here is with the way keystrokes are interpreted by X, specifically, XKB. Unfortunately, XKB is used by people to extend their keyboard mappings, instead of using it what it was designed for: mapping the structure of your keyboard to its keymap. Technically, input of any sort ought to be handled by an intelligent XIM, with as little as possible being done on the XKB level.
Unfortunately, XIM is complex and XKB, while also complex, is less so. As a result, people who use a character set very similar to the one found on their keyboard don't use XIM for anything, and depend instead on XKB to provide them with the extra character combinations they need. There is unfortunately overlap between what XKB and XIM can do, and there's no set standard on who should do what.
Therefore, different apps do different stuff. It makes sense when you think about it, that GAIM and other GTK apps should ignore Shift+Alt+foo when typing -- Alt and Shift+Alt are common hotkey modifiers. So actually, on the desktop, xterm is simply behaving differently.
The question you should ask yourself is, should xterm's "feature" be considered normal? Does extending it to the rest of the desktop even make sense? Or should you install an XIM and use it instead (which will work in all XIM aware X apps, which is, well, nearly all of them?)
Essentially, you're complaining about a feature of xterm being present only in xterm. As it happens, in this particular case, it seems as though this comes from a lack of standards re: what should be handled by XIM and what should be handled by XKB. I'll admit that we need one of those.
But otherwise, does the fact that app X has a feature that no other apps have mean that all those other apps have bugs? Especially when app X's feature wouldn't fit into their paradigm?
Oooo, that sounds sexy. And it's probably possible now. Although, with focus follows mouse, it might result in a lot of drawing as you move the mouse around, which might suck.
Subpixel rendering of fonts with the XRender extension and freetype look great on my laptop. This gripe has been essentially moot since, I dunno, about 2 years ago.
Primarily because with Apple, its user base is mostly designers and the like, who put a great deal of value on how the system looks and less on its technical merits.
Lately, with Linux's growing popularity, we've had a lot of converts that don't know how to use the system without GNOME or KDE, and they think much more like Windows and Mac users do. They are always pushing for more of these sorts of "eye candy" features. Not that we don't have more experienced users who appreciate it too or anything.
But there are still a large number of Linux enthusiasts that got on board back when Linux wasn't pretty, and they didn't care then and they don't care now. Most of them are probably neutral when it comes to the addition of these sorts of eye-candy features, but some of them remember using Linux on a P90 and getting just as much work done then as they do now, and wonder what the point of all the additional bloat is.
I personally think most of these people are hysterical raisins, if only because it is still relatively easy to run Linux on a P90 if you're willing to be picky about what you install.
But, I'm glad they're around, because they keep us honest. The anti-bloat folks make a fuss when devs go overboard; they ensure that we can continue to run Linux on old hardware, which is important -- even if it means forgoing the latest GNOME/KDE thing and running a lite window manager instead (I use PWM, for example).
If you're unable to type international characters in the same way in both xterm and gaim/other gtk apps, your system is broken.
Personally, I use SCIM and it works fine in all my apps. Before that, I used XCIN, and it worked fine in all my apps too. I daresay that any competently written XIM server ought to be able to do the same.
The other gripes, however, are worthwhile. I don't have any interest in drop shadows or translucency either, but then I always liked Xaw, too. The truth is that eye candy attracts users, and users attract businesses, and businesses bring hardware support. If you've been using Linux for a reasonably long time, you should see how this has already happened.
So in that respect, it probably isn't a bad thing.
I'll take you at your word; I don't use Windows and never have, so I wouldn't know.
However, I just went and looked at the screenshots and I noticed that the large fonts are large for exactly the reasons I mentioned: because there are chinese characters on most of those desktops. Chinese characters, if displayed too small, become illegible.
Speaking of Chinese Characters, I will agree that some of the fonts on there are ugly -- this is a problem with freely available CJK fonts in general. Many of them look ok, but provide too few characters and so pango ends up mixing and matching fonts, which always looks like crap.
On my system, I tend to use the fonts that come with Windows/Mac, depending on where I am (for example, in my office, all the other machines are Windows, so I use their fonts). I agree that we need better free CJK fonts. But it's a big, relatively difficult job.
Disable the relevant extensions. This may mean compiling your own X server, or using a distribution that focuses on minimality.
No compliant X program can assume that any extension to the X protocol is present in the server without checking it first. If the composite extension etc are not there, bume, no drop shadows/translucency, whatever.
The development at X.org is only at the protocol level; they've added extensions that make translucency and drop-shadows possible without evil, CPU/network intensive hacks.
If it doesn't look right, it's only because the WM/toolkit programmers didn't think about it enough. But the actual X.org extensions are very, very flexible. Don't worry; this is just a showcase of what can be done, but it's not all that can be done.
Remember, X.org is producing the X server, which is the lowest level of the X window system -- all it is is an implementation of the X11 protocol. Everything you actually see is drawn by other processes, like the Window manager, individual apps, etc, etc. The X server by itself isn't usable and provides no UI whatsoever.
Technically multiuser. In practice, it's rather less than multiuser, but I didn't want to just say "it's not multiuser" without a caveat because otherwise I'd just get 20 responses from Windows fans telling me how wrong I am etc etc. Since I don't use Windows (and in fact never have, at least not on my home/work machines), I don't know to what extent it is or isn't multi-user. I know it has profile support and that you can login/logoff as other people. I used to use VMS and that was definitely multiuser, and I've heard rumors that NT is a dumbed down VMS. But essentially in my gut I agree with you, I was just covering my ass.
Like everything else on the Linux desktop, font size is configurable (and in GNOME at least, usually depends somewhat on your theme.)
The freetype font rendered works very well at small font sizes, as well. I very much doubt most people would agree that "10pt" is normal sized; 12pt tends to be the default on most desktops on most OSs. You are free to change this on most of them. Personally, I prefer larger fonts, but that's especially because I read a lot of non-latin text and some glyphs are just rather larger and more complex than roman ones (anything CJK, for example).
Personally, I prefer FreeType's rendering and AA to even MacOS's, but I recognize that this might simply be because I'm used to FT's AA algo.
It definitely looks better than Windows. Heck, there was no AA in Windows 2000 at least. I'm not sure about XP because I've never used it, but the font situation on Linux at the moment is so much better than most Windows installations out there. My coworkers, who all run Win2k, are always commenting how nice the fonts on my system look.
I will definitely agree, though, that a few years ago Linux was utter shit when it came to fonts and that Windows beat the pants off of us. But we've got our shit together now.
Giving window managers direct access to video memory is rather stupid, considering that one of X's primary features is network transparency.
I know you're trolling, but it's rather important to recognize that X is a protocol, nothing more, and nothing less. How fast or slow it is depends on the implementation; some are clearly better than others.
Comparing X to direct video access is rather like comparing ssh to the linux console. The latter will always be faster because there is no network bottleneck, but you can't use it to connect to your machine remotely.
Furthermore, there are extensions which practically do give an application direct access to the hardware, or at least, as direct as one can safely manage. But what's the point, if all you're doing is drawing widgets? I could understand it for games or playing DVDs, where speed is important and you'd be stupid to play it over the network anyway, but for a window manager?
If you want to use a single user, non-network aware system, then by all means, use Windows*. In the meantime, we should keep working on improving our X implementation in areas like optimizing for local connections. There are lots of shortcuts that haven't been implemented and I'm sure there are lots that haven't even been thought of yet.
Anyone that has had to administer machines remotely appreciates the network transparency of X. It's the only window system that has this feature. Let's not throw it out because some trolls don't understand its value.
*Yes, I know Windows is now multi-user. But it wasn't designed that way, and it shows.
Except the exchange rate is like 10 million togrogs to the USD... ok, I'm exaggerating. But you sort of have to wonder whether printing them is profitable; paper costs money, you know.
I was just thinking that too. He must be a Windows user. Only they use that ridiculous character for anything other than escaping.
Now that does make sense.
I hate to be able to recognize it written down, but it's actually the lyrics to the original song at the end of Star Wars Ep 6. You know, before George rereleased it and changed it.
I take solace in the fact that I'm less of a dork than the GP, though.
Global warming is a myth is putting it a bit strongly. We know that the earth undergoes and climate change on a regular basis, and has done so (and more extremely) in the past.
Global warming is theorized, but at this point cannot be measured, because so far the world hasn't warmed up/cooled down enough for anyone to state conclusively that we are outside the norms for our planet's natural climate change.
In other words, evidence supporting global warming as a theory is inconclusive, but this does not make it a myth. A myth implies that it isn't true. Science at this point cannot confirm or deny this, because explaining current climate change as due to global warming is no more scientifically plausible than saying that the world's climate is simply changing in the same way it has always changed.
So, that's the science. But beyond science, we have logic. I'll use an analogy. Suppose you have a lake, and over its history, for reasons not entirely clear, the amount of urea in the lake has seemed to shift cyclically, and there are a lot of theories about why this is.
Now, recently, the people in the township adjacent to the lake have taken to dumping their urine into the lake. People have noticed that the urea content of the lake is increasing. The lake is big, though, so actually, the increase of urea in the lake isn't significant enough that we are able to scientifically show that this is because of the urine being dumped into the lake. Scientists point out that the amount of urea in the lake has been higher and fluctuated more wildly in the past.
That's all well and good, but it is ignoring something obvious here: They are dumping urine into the lake.
See, the argument about global warming is whether our current climate change is caused by us or not. It might not be. Despite what zealots in either camp say, there is no conclusive evidence at this point, because the world's climate simply hasn't changed enough for us to be sure that we're out of the norm. Statistics, standard deviation, and all that, you know? It isn't significant yet.
But -- and this is the important point -- the world is really, really, big, and it will require a lot of pollution and fuckedupness to screw the earth to the point where it is scientifically demonstrable that, without any doubt, we are the ones causing the problem. By then, it will be too late to easily reverse the damage.
So the point is, we know we're doing stuff that's bad for the environment. We have reason to believe that if we dump enough crap into the atmosphere, we'll develop a greenhouse effect. We are dumping that kind of stuff into the atmosphere right now, just like the township in my example was dumping urine. We know that if do this enough, we will eventually have a greenhouse effect, we simply don't know how much is required. Perhaps we will never be able to dump enough to produce a net change in global weather dynamics.
But I'd rather be safe than sorry. Let's just use nuclear power.
Except there aren't any of these. You can certainly burn hydrogen and harness the energy, but hydrogen itself costs energy to make -- and be made it must, because its incredibly low mass means that it essentially floats out of our atmosphere. And it is liquid at such an incredibly low temperature that unless you live on pluto, you'll never find it in that form.
Since all H2 must be produced, we're stuck using elecrolysis to seperate it from the oxygen in water. This works but costs energy.
Hydrogen-based engines are glorified batteries. They store energy well (although the small size of H2 combined with its boyancy means that there's essentially no way to hold it forever, all tanks leak, so you even get the "dies even if you don't use it" behaviour of batteries).
Don't ever believe the FUD about hydrogen being our new renewable energy source. We may someday have "electric" cars using hydrogen based fuel cells as batteries, but the hydrogen in those fuel cells will still need to be produced by some conventional means. Due to nuclearphobia in the US, this will probably be coal or oil. Large plants are more efficient than the small engine in your car, so there will be a net save of energy compared to the status quo -- but the US will continue to be the world's largest user of fossil fuels, because we can't shake our dependance on them.
It's no coincidence that an oil-baron like W. is in favor of hydrogen. Not that it isn't a worthwhile technology to develop, but I'd rather our powerplants be nuclear than based on oil.
In basic organic chemistry, you learn the following reaction:
... for appropriate values of n and m. In practice, there are usually larger hydrocarbon byproducts, but you'll notice something: there is no H2 in this equation. Hydrogen far prefers eletronegative oxygen to another hydrogen atom when it starts to think about bonding. It's an interatomic relationship, really. Snicker.
Any Hydrocarbon + Sufficient Heat = n H20 + m CO2
Anyway, the point is, the most efficient means we currently have of producing hydrogen is via electrolysis. This is reasonably efficient and the price you pay for producing hydrogen is only slightly greater than the gain you get from burning it, which effectively exactly reverses the reaction.
If you want hydrogen, you must produce it. This costs energy. There is no way around this; there are no exergonic hydrogen producing reactions with abundently available constituents. If you want hydrogen, water is the cheapest place to get it, and it's still expensive.
Of course, the reactor design employed by the Chinese uses helium, which is not an abundant resource, and ironically is mostly found (iirc) in little bubbles in fossil fuels. So that doesn't really help them much in terms of fossil fuel dependence.
Of course, they may find a better coolant.
While this sort of feel good about our country not profiling people stuff is all well and good, the submitter was making a pragmatic rather than ideal point.
The truth is, if you are scruffy looking, not white, dressed in drag, or in some other way deviant from the norm, police are more likely to harrass you. Often, they do so simply because you look deviant, rather than because there is any enforcable law being broken.
While I appreciate your point, try to appreciate the submitter's: what he's saying is, because AKMA is supposedly very wholesome looking, the cop's motivation in telling him to use the library's wifi inside the library only could not possibly have been because he was a "hacker type". In other words, this wasn't simple harrassment. It was "for real".
We all hate the fact that people get harrassed unfairly, but they do. The submitter is recognizing this, not advocating it. If he had said, "I got asked to move on, and I was Arab and wearing a turban", we would naturally be outraged by the cop's mistreatment of an arab man, rather than by him being told to move on, because we would assume, understanding our rights, that the only motivation the cop could possibly have had for asking the turbaned man to move on was the fact that he was wearing a turban.
The point here is that this isn't simple harassment: it's an erosion of our rights. I think I've beaten this point to death already, I hope you understand it now.
I think you're trolling about the whole UNIX GUIs are hard bit. The rest of your post makes good points though.
First off, when an individual FOSS developer sits down to write a GUI app, he doesn't fight about KDE/GNOME, packaging, or anything else. He decides which he will use based on his own preferences and requirements. If he uses GNOME or is writing the app for someone that uses GNOME, he will use that; ditto for KDE. Packaging is probably dictated by the OS he develops on initially; he can assume (rightfully) that people who want to run his developed-on-Debian app on their Redhat or SUSE systems will contribute makefiles and build scripts to make rpms while he maintains his debian/ directory. Sure, it seems complex, but in FOSS, this is how it works, and this is why you end up with an app that runs on every POSIX platform under the sun, translated into every language immaginable, etc.
Now, in a company setting, he doesn't make those decisions, his managers do, and those decisions are generally arbitrarily based on stuff managers care about. The packaging will be tied to the system in question. Again, no arguing. I realize Windows people are frustrated by the amount of choice on UNIX systems, but managers are used to making choices: they point and say "that one". They might have a meeting about it, but in the end, it doesn't matter.
The truth is, developing GUI apps on anything but (maybe) a Mac is generally a pain in the ass. GUIs are hard to do, in general. If you get right down to it, no one likes GUIs.
If you work in IT, you'll probably realize that lots of managers want web-based solutions. There are lots of reasons. First off, there's the RAD angle -- GUIs are a pain to develop well, and usually we don't need overly complex GUIs for DB entry anyway. Whereas developing a good GUI can take months to years, a good web-based app can take half as long or less to develop/debug/launch.
Furthermore, there's the write-once-run-anywhere angle. While this was pretty much a pipe dream for Java, web-based apps that do all their computation server-side make this a reality. So anyone with a browser (that is, anyone with a computer, ie, everyone in your company, probably) has instant access to the relevant web apps. No installation, no calling IT down for the admin privs required to do the install, etc, etc. And with web-based apps, the designers using Macs, the office drones using Windows and the server guys using UNIX workstations all have access if they need it.
The web spells accessibility.
I've been doing DB-related dev since the dBase days, and it's been a while since my employer has wanted an in-house solution that isn't intranet based.
What about Avarice?
Hi.
Quoth the poster:
Well for starters he's not charging for the distribution of it, it is a later charge for using the code.
I must admit, I have no idea what you're talking about here. A later charge for using the code? What? If you clarify what you mean, I'll respond.
And then you said:
Although he's probably breaking the openssl licensing, and infact breaking the gpl licensing for the unix version anyway by distributing something which links to openssl in the first place.
OpenSSL is under an Apache style license, not the GPL. There is essentially no way to violate this license, unless you fork the code and call it OpenSSL, which he isn't doing. Apache style licenses are pretty close to BSD/MIT/XORG style licenses.
Look, I'm not saying what he's doing is right from a moral perspective, just that he may be within his rights from a legal one.
In most C-like languages, the syntax of a for loop is actually
for(<initial statements>;<condition>;<iterator>)
Just letting you know.
Oh, sure, that's what they want to do. But I hope I'm not alone in saying, "Fuck 'em." I will continue to do what I want with the things I buy, and I will use my skills to break any boneheaded and ineffectual security measures they use to prevent me from doing so. And once I have done so, I will tell others how.
Yes, and others will do the same. And while the MPAA and RIAA bitch and moan, we hackers will have contests seeing who can write the encryption breaking algorithm most efficiently, in the least amount of space, etc, etc.
Because if they can program my processor to play my DVD when they want me to be able to, then I can program my processor to play my DVD when I want to. It's as simple as that -- either the machine has the capability or it doesn't. Anyone with a cursory understanding of cryptography knows that there's no way to encrypt content if it needs to be viewable by an untrusted viewer.
And I am not trustworthy. I will not help them support their ridiculous business model of "long term rentals", as you so pointedly put, parent. If I buy something, it belongs to me. If I want to put it in another format or copy it or whatever, that's my damn business.
And here's a big Fuck You to the DMCA, just for good measure. Just because some know-nothing-about-technology, rich-off-of-other-people's-hard-work fuckwads paid our "elected" representatives the big bucks to pass ridiculous anti-freedom laws doesn't mean I'm not going to make a point to disobey.
Some laws are meant to be broken. And I intend to break them. Repeatedly. (Yes DMCA, I'm talking to you.)