That's one of the reasons OS X has to sit there for ages "optimizing" your system after you install anything. It is running the pre-linker on everything. Otherwise your system runs like shit, like the first original OS X release which didn't do any pre-linking. Something they would not have to do if they did not use so much run-time crap. This issue is caused by a combination of Objective-C, poor use of C++, and poor design.
No, it's ALL about their choice of base platform. The Mach-O dynamic linker and binary format is unbearably primitive, and ridiculously slow in handling fixups -- it has dick to do with the language.
Forget what you've heard about how great it is...Mach sucks.
(Incidentally, would it be particularly hard to implement all the low-level GNUstep widgets by peering them off GTK or Qt widgets instead? Seeing as they've already done the work, it would make sense to take the shortcut...)
It wouldn't be difficult, it would be impossible.:)
The OpenStep imaging model uses the window as a canvas that you paint on. This means that when you see a button on a window, there is "probably" a NSButton object that drew that button on the window. It's not like Motif or GTK+, where each widget is a child window only concerned with drawing stuff on itself; instead, when a GUI control needs to draw for some reason, it takes the rectangle it has within the window and makes calls to the drawing functions.
Because of this, "views" as they are called, can be rotated, rescaled, have custom looks, etc. It also means you can have irregularly-shaped controls, and the controls themselves will really BE irregular in shape instead of a rectangle that just looks different. You get it basically "for free" because of how the display system works.
What a theme like Camaelon does is change how the GUI controls draw themselves. It works because Objective-C lets you replace code in, or add features to, classes you didn't write -- even if you don't have the source code!
By "compatibility with OS X" what they really mean is binary compatibility. In theory, you ought to be able to take an app running on OS X and run it on GNUStep unmodified, and without recompiling -- at least on GNUStep/PPC.
You're smoking crack on that one.
In order to do that, all of the GNUstep classes would have to have exactly the same in-memory layout, encoding methods, and so on, as their Cocoa counterparts. It's complete nonsense to ever expect that OS X binaries will work using the GNUstep libraries.
In addition, Linux systems use a different Objective-C runtime library (GNU's, which was created because NeXT refused to release the code to theirs "back in the day"), with completely different low-level functions.
(TurboPascal <> Pascal) AND (ObjectPascal <> Pascal)
Turbo Pascal and ObjectPascal are indeed fairly nice languages. They are not Pascal (as created by Niklaus Wirth), though, which is largely a useless language for doing any kind of real programming.
That's what Brian Kernighan wrote about. There were lots of Pascals out there, extended in ways that made the language more like the language the programmers writing the compilers were used to.
So some of them looked a little like FORTRAN, some like COBOL, some like ALGOL even (Imagine a Pascal-like syntax for call-by-name. The mind reels). Each one of these systems were reasonable development systems, but not one of them was Pascal, and they were all different. No useful program was portable between them, because to do something useful you had to go past what was possible in the language proper.
As created, Pascal is a toy language useful only for teaching.
5 cents per disk? At $20 a copy you need 1 lost sale for every 400.
It's worse than that. That's a 5 a disk that Warner Home Video has to pay -- and they don't get anywhere near the retail price for a sale.
Between distributors and retail stores, WHV receive about two thirds of the sale price, most of which has to pay for royalties (to Warner Bros [Time Warner companies are separate -- they have to pay each other for everything], to the actors, and so on), the production involved in encoding and mastering the DVD, and many other people.
Perhaps some enterprising programmer will take the Quake 3 engine and make it more easily configurable?
You bet your ass. Over at QuakeForge, we've already got a tree for it up and running. Look for more stability, among other things, to come from this.
Oh, we'll be porting code from our own source to the Quake II codebase, and vice versa -- so some really neat things will be happening because of this. Thanks, John!
Not true. A long time ago, in what I personally consider to be one of the turning points in U.S. society, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have all the rights of "natural persons".
It wasn't the Supremes, it was a district court judge.
The idea of a flexible "cable" hanging from space neglects the change in kinetic energy that has to be imparted to the elevator "car" as it goes up, and removed as it goes down.
No, it doesn't. You think there is only going to be one of these cars? The cable would need to be thousands of kilometres long anyway, there's no reason for there not to be multiple cars in transit simultaneously. I believe the NASA plan calls for six.
Also, a rigid cable would snap rather easily the first time a stiff wind came along, since lateral stresses are magnified along the cable's length -- much like a completely-rigid building will collapse when hit by an earthquake. Better is to attach small station-keeping sections of the cable with thrusters attached, controlled by computer.
Third, if you attach the cable to the ground, you again have a disaster because the cable will snap or tear out of the ground if you have even a tiny mistake causing the cable to rise from the ground.
Kim Stanley Robinson had the coolest, most detailed space elevator in his Red, Green, Blue Mars series. Some of the details:
They moved one of Mars' moons to geostationary orbit and built the cable down from the moon to the surface.
Actually, they grabbed a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid and settled it into the areosynchronous orbit it would be in when it became the space station Clarke.
SPOILER! Phobos was blown up by Nadia after being boobytrapped by Arkady, and Sax sent Deimos off into space to keep the UNTA from building a new base on it.
The cable rotated (like a jumprope) so it would pass AROUND the other moon as it came near the elevator.
Not exactly. They induced wobbles into the cable to make it avoid Deimos when it came by.
But if it was bombed towards the middle, then half would rain down on the earth and the GEO station would just stay there.
No, if the middle were bombed, the bottom half would fall and the Geo station would fall away from the Earth at significant velocity, because the tremendous mass of the cable acts as a counterweight.
The whole cable is in geosynchronous orbit, even the part "attached" to (actually floating a few centimeters above) the Earth. The heavier the cable/station combination gets, the further away the end of the cable needs to be....so if you build the thing using a good-sized station on the other end (which you want to do, because this is where your space launches have to take place), that cable has to be LONG.
A space elevator would be good for doing things like colonizing Mars or lifting payloads -- because it cuts the cost of a space launch to something like a hundred dollars a pound.
There's a downside, though...if you build a space elevator, terrorism becomes a distinct possibility...once you've connected the elevator's collar, you're committed. If the space station on the other end (which balances out the elevator, which is itself not quite touching the ground) gets destroyed, you wind up with something like what happened in Kim Stanley Robinson's book Red Mars...a whip, longer than the planet is in circumference, wrapping around the equator. On Robinson's Mars, the damage wasn't severe in most areas...but on Earth, it would be catastrophic. Worldwide tidal waves, earthquakes everywhere the cable lands, and that cable's moving FAST. Once it gets hypersonic, it's like dropping a series of nuclear weapons every few meters all the way around the world.
The same holds true in this case; installing services - like sendmail - that have blatantly stupid default settings and open up a box to potential abuses, just because "everyone knows" that you need to change the default configuration to prevent it, isn't an answer. The systems should install locked down tighter than a miser's wallet, and require a user to gain knowledge in order to expose new capabilities.
Debian's sendmail package does not ship in a condition like you suggest. Hell, it doesn't even ship as the default MTA. Exim has been the default MTA since before 2.1 shipped (previously, the default was smail). You only get sendmail if you ask for it, and even then it isn't in an insecure condition.
Likewise, the inetd package's post-install script asks you if you want the "offending" lines commented out for you, recommending "yes", and defaulting to "yes".
Commenting out those lines aren't security measures, either...there have been no discovered security flaws in chargen and friends, and there's not really any reason to think there are any in their code...it's an anti-DOS measure, to keep people from being able to make you flood yourself off the net.
It's fairly easy to separate helium 3 from the Uranus atmosphere, too. It's cold there, so it doesn't take much refrigeration to liquefy the hydrogen, leaving pure helium.
Even in Uranian orbit, Hydrogen is damn hard to liquify just by refrigeration -- you need high pressure too.
Helium liquifies before hydrogen does, since it's heavier. So you refrigerate/compress to liquify the He-4, dump it back into the Uranian atmosphere. Refrigerate more to liquify the He-3, dump the hydrogen gas, and boom...liquid He-3.
I, too, worry about the ramifications of large scale modifications of planets and their satellites, but in this case as the helium 3 is only within the first few meters of the lunar surface, so the only real concern that I have with mining the moon for helium 3 is the actual process used to do so; i.e. what kind of byproducts are left over from refining the soil for its helium 3?
Here's the beauty of the thing: The waste products of He-3 refinement are:
As was said in the article, we just need to mine a small portion of the lunar surface, enough to power our society for the next few thousand years, and give us a stepping stone to the gas giants...where we'll be able to get virtually all the He3 we'll ever need.
Actually, the reason why the Apple computers use Motorola chips at all is because when Wozniak and Jobs were building the Apple I prototype, they couldn't afford the more expensive, but generaly conciderd superior, Intel chip, the 8080. At the time when the Apple I was built, Woz worked for HP, which, through a deal with Motorola, offered 6800s to employees on discount. (even without the discount, the 6800 was much cheaper than a 8080)
You got the right answer, but your details were wrong.
Actually, The Apple I and the II family (except for the IIgs) did not use the 6800 (superior in nearly every way to the 8080, by the way). They used the Western Design Center (not to be confused with Western Digital Corp.) 6502, which was designed for things like washing machines. The 6502 was about a tenth of the 8080's price tag and not much worse. The 6800, on the other hand, was about the same price, maybe a little less.
The 68000 was picked for the Mac because it was a better hunk of silicon, not because of prior history with Motorola.
I suspect that 99% of the naysayers out there are just reacting to the Scientology aspect of the whole deal. Come on; the book contain not a single word referencing Scientology or its (bizarre) doctrines, and I don't think the movie will either. To all the anti-scienos: When's the last time you didn't go to a Tom Cruise movie just because he as a Scientologist?
Umm, are you sure you actually read the book? It's fundamentally Scientologist; remember how the Psychlos got started? Why were they so nasty?
Psychlos, Catrists = Psychiatrists. In Hubbard's Scientologist world, psychiatrists are nothing more than drug pushers out to enslave the world and turn everyone into drug-addicted depraved lunatics...and only Scientology (Johnnie Goodboy Tyler) can save us.
If that were what he was doing, we would have no problem...but that's NOT what he's doing. It's a total snowjob.
The first thing he did was release "QuakeWorld 2.51", without source and in violation of id Software's trademarks ("QuakeWorld" is a registered trademark), and with a trivial change to the protocol. We had a QuakeForge client connecting to and playing on his servers within hours.
After complaints that there was no source, the release was pulled from the Web page so that they would not have to provide source, never mind that he is still responsible for providing source for 2.51 for another 3 years.
2.52 was released with source, so we breathed a collective sigh of relief...until we noticed the 2.53 release.
QuakeLives 2.53 was released _only_ as a patch to the 2.52 binary distribution ZIP file. The patch was actually larger than the 2.52 zipfile itself! All so that he wouldn't have to release the source (he claimed that since he wasn't patching the source, he didn't have to).
With the 2.54 beta, he decided to start forging alliances...with Ambush of MegaTF, who was given a binary distribution of QL with the information that he could redistribute at will...until someone came asking for source, at which point Slade began to claim that Ambush was redistributing illegally, even to the point of claiming he was warezing it.
And that brings us up to today...and this is the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
As a member of the QuakeForge project, I'm almost glad to see this on slashdot, though I'm also saddened to see that it has had to go this far. We (QuakeForge, and the other groups like QuakeWorld Forever) have been struggling to get the word out of what "Slade" has been pulling for the past month.
QuakeLives in general, and Slade in particular, have been trying to violate the intent and letter of the GPL any way they can. It's a great insult to work diligently on improving the Quake source, doing all our damn-good merge work, only to see somebody try to do an end-run around the community process by keeping their source secret and making alliances to ensure that their secret source version becomes the de facto standard.
What vindictive licensing? It's the GPL, which is strangely enough perfect for games.
The great part of this situation is that you can create your own game, and sell it. The code is not what's valuable from a game point of view, it's the data files -- and those belong to YOU if you created them. Charge fifty bucks a CD, no problem...you just have to give people the source to the engine. Big deal, the engine is not the game -- it's just the interpreter that runs the game.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's ALL about their choice of base platform. The Mach-O dynamic linker and binary format is unbearably primitive, and ridiculously slow in handling fixups -- it has dick to do with the language.
Forget what you've heard about how great it is...Mach sucks.
It wouldn't be difficult, it would be impossible. :)
The OpenStep imaging model uses the window as a canvas that you paint on. This means that when you see a button on a window, there is "probably" a NSButton object that drew that button on the window. It's not like Motif or GTK+, where each widget is a child window only concerned with drawing stuff on itself; instead, when a GUI control needs to draw for some reason, it takes the rectangle it has within the window and makes calls to the drawing functions.
Because of this, "views" as they are called, can be rotated, rescaled, have custom looks, etc. It also means you can have irregularly-shaped controls, and the controls themselves will really BE irregular in shape instead of a rectangle that just looks different. You get it basically "for free" because of how the display system works.
What a theme like Camaelon does is change how the GUI controls draw themselves. It works because Objective-C lets you replace code in, or add features to, classes you didn't write -- even if you don't have the source code!
You're smoking crack on that one.
In order to do that, all of the GNUstep classes would have to have exactly the same in-memory layout, encoding methods, and so on, as their Cocoa counterparts. It's complete nonsense to ever expect that OS X binaries will work using the GNUstep libraries.
In addition, Linux systems use a different Objective-C runtime library (GNU's, which was created because NeXT refused to release the code to theirs "back in the day"), with completely different low-level functions.
No, it's about source code portability.
(TurboPascal <> Pascal) AND (ObjectPascal <> Pascal)
Turbo Pascal and ObjectPascal are indeed fairly nice languages. They are not Pascal (as created by Niklaus Wirth), though, which is largely a useless language for doing any kind of real programming.
That's what Brian Kernighan wrote about. There were lots of Pascals out there, extended in ways that made the language more like the language the programmers writing the compilers were used to.
So some of them looked a little like FORTRAN, some like COBOL, some like ALGOL even (Imagine a Pascal-like syntax for call-by-name. The mind reels). Each one of these systems were reasonable development systems, but not one of them was Pascal, and they were all different. No useful program was portable between them, because to do something useful you had to go past what was possible in the language proper.
As created, Pascal is a toy language useful only for teaching.
It's worse than that. That's a 5 a disk that Warner Home Video has to pay -- and they don't get anywhere near the retail price for a sale.
Between distributors and retail stores, WHV receive about two thirds of the sale price, most of which has to pay for royalties (to Warner Bros [Time Warner companies are separate -- they have to pay each other for everything], to the actors, and so on), the production involved in encoding and mastering the DVD, and many other people.
A nickel a disc is even bigger than it seems.
You bet your ass. Over at QuakeForge, we've already got a tree for it up and running. Look for more stability, among other things, to come from this.
Oh, we'll be porting code from our own source to the Quake II codebase, and vice versa -- so some really neat things will be happening because of this. Thanks, John!
Heh. I find it rather ironic that a Lord Byron quote was found at a "Christian Bumper Stickers" page, considering his reported lifestyle.
"Mad, bad, and dangerous to know", anyone?
The Marianas Trench is 11 kilometers deep, not 11,000.
No, it doesn't. You think there is only going to be one of these cars? The cable would need to be thousands of kilometres long anyway, there's no reason for there not to be multiple cars in transit simultaneously. I believe the NASA plan calls for six.
Also, a rigid cable would snap rather easily the first time a stiff wind came along, since lateral stresses are magnified along the cable's length -- much like a completely-rigid building will collapse when hit by an earthquake. Better is to attach small station-keeping sections of the cable with thrusters attached, controlled by computer.
Third, if you attach the cable to the ground, you again have a disaster because the cable will snap or tear out of the ground if you have even a tiny mistake causing the cable to rise from the ground.
Actually, they grabbed a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid and settled it into the areosynchronous orbit it would be in when it became the space station Clarke.
SPOILER! Phobos was blown up by Nadia after being boobytrapped by Arkady, and Sax sent Deimos off into space to keep the UNTA from building a new base on it.
Not exactly. They induced wobbles into the cable to make it avoid Deimos when it came by.
No, if the middle were bombed, the bottom half would fall and the Geo station would fall away from the Earth at significant velocity, because the tremendous mass of the cable acts as a counterweight.
The whole cable is in geosynchronous orbit, even the part "attached" to (actually floating a few centimeters above) the Earth. The heavier the cable/station combination gets, the further away the end of the cable needs to be....so if you build the thing using a good-sized station on the other end (which you want to do, because this is where your space launches have to take place), that cable has to be LONG.
A space elevator would be good for doing things like colonizing Mars or lifting payloads -- because it cuts the cost of a space launch to something like a hundred dollars a pound.
There's a downside, though...if you build a space elevator, terrorism becomes a distinct possibility...once you've connected the elevator's collar, you're committed. If the space station on the other end (which balances out the elevator, which is itself not quite touching the ground) gets destroyed, you wind up with something like what happened in Kim Stanley Robinson's book Red Mars...a whip, longer than the planet is in circumference, wrapping around the equator. On Robinson's Mars, the damage wasn't severe in most areas...but on Earth, it would be catastrophic. Worldwide tidal waves, earthquakes everywhere the cable lands, and that cable's moving FAST. Once it gets hypersonic, it's like dropping a series of nuclear weapons every few meters all the way around the world.
Cool stuff, but dangerous.
Debian's sendmail package does not ship in a condition like you suggest. Hell, it doesn't even ship as the default MTA. Exim has been the default MTA since before 2.1 shipped (previously, the default was smail). You only get sendmail if you ask for it, and even then it isn't in an insecure condition.
Likewise, the inetd package's post-install script asks you if you want the "offending" lines commented out for you, recommending "yes", and defaulting to "yes".
Commenting out those lines aren't security measures, either...there have been no discovered security flaws in chargen and friends, and there's not really any reason to think there are any in their code...it's an anti-DOS measure, to keep people from being able to make you flood yourself off the net.
It's called the Hydrogen Bomb, sparky.
Even in Uranian orbit, Hydrogen is damn hard to liquify just by refrigeration -- you need high pressure too.
Helium liquifies before hydrogen does, since it's heavier. So you refrigerate/compress to liquify the He-4, dump it back into the Uranian atmosphere. Refrigerate more to liquify the He-3, dump the hydrogen gas, and boom...liquid He-3.
Here's the beauty of the thing: The waste products of He-3 refinement are:
Cool, huh?
As was said in the article, we just need to mine a small portion of the lunar surface, enough to power our society for the next few thousand years, and give us a stepping stone to the gas giants...where we'll be able to get virtually all the He3 we'll ever need.
You got the right answer, but your details were wrong.
Actually, The Apple I and the II family (except for the IIgs) did not use the 6800 (superior in nearly every way to the 8080, by the way). They used the Western Design Center (not to be confused with Western Digital Corp.) 6502, which was designed for things like washing machines. The 6502 was about a tenth of the 8080's price tag and not much worse. The 6800, on the other hand, was about the same price, maybe a little less.
The 68000 was picked for the Mac because it was a better hunk of silicon, not because of prior history with Motorola.
Umm, are you sure you actually read the book? It's fundamentally Scientologist; remember how the Psychlos got started? Why were they so nasty?
Psychlos, Catrists = Psychiatrists. In Hubbard's Scientologist world, psychiatrists are nothing more than drug pushers out to enslave the world and turn everyone into drug-addicted depraved lunatics...and only Scientology (Johnnie Goodboy Tyler) can save us.
The first thing he did was release "QuakeWorld 2.51", without source and in violation of id Software's trademarks ("QuakeWorld" is a registered trademark), and with a trivial change to the protocol. We had a QuakeForge client connecting to and playing on his servers within hours.
After complaints that there was no source, the release was pulled from the Web page so that they would not have to provide source, never mind that he is still responsible for providing source for 2.51 for another 3 years.
2.52 was released with source, so we breathed a collective sigh of relief...until we noticed the 2.53 release.
QuakeLives 2.53 was released _only_ as a patch to the 2.52 binary distribution ZIP file. The patch was actually larger than the 2.52 zipfile itself! All so that he wouldn't have to release the source (he claimed that since he wasn't patching the source, he didn't have to).
With the 2.54 beta, he decided to start forging alliances...with Ambush of MegaTF, who was given a binary distribution of QL with the information that he could redistribute at will...until someone came asking for source, at which point Slade began to claim that Ambush was redistributing illegally, even to the point of claiming he was warezing it.
And that brings us up to today...and this is the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
As a member of the QuakeForge project, I'm almost glad to see this on slashdot, though I'm also saddened to see that it has had to go this far. We (QuakeForge, and the other groups like QuakeWorld Forever) have been struggling to get the word out of what "Slade" has been pulling for the past month.
QuakeLives in general, and Slade in particular, have been trying to violate the intent and letter of the GPL any way they can. It's a great insult to work diligently on improving the Quake source, doing all our damn-good merge work, only to see somebody try to do an end-run around the community process by keeping their source secret and making alliances to ensure that their secret source version becomes the de facto standard.
What vindictive licensing? It's the GPL, which is strangely enough perfect for games.
The great part of this situation is that you can create your own game, and sell it. The code is not what's valuable from a game point of view, it's the data files -- and those belong to YOU if you created them. Charge fifty bucks a CD, no problem...you just have to give people the source to the engine. Big deal, the engine is not the game -- it's just the interpreter that runs the game.
The Geek Compound is in Holland, MI.