Graphics cards have become the single greatest hassle when installing Linux. Many of them don't even work correctly in frame buffer or VESA mode anymore, and if they do, they are slow.
I think that we are in for a major change in graphics hardware, going from more proprietary, special-purpose hardware to basically vectorized general-purpose hardware. If you keep the card more general purpose, you will probably at least get lots of orders from universities and research labs working on new ways of doing 3D graphics and using 3D graphics cards for compute-intensive applications.
On the other hand, Linux hardware vendors and users would probably also like to have a cheap, low-end card that just works with every OSS and supports commonly used functions. So, something with good 2D acceleration (both bitblit and Postscript models) and some cheap 3D support would serve those needs. And such a card could also become popular for Windows if it accelerates Windows desktop functions well and (in contrast to all the proprietary trash that's out for Windows) has a simple, clean, and hence reliable, driver.
A couple of points, though. First, it's probably the high-end open 3D card that would pay the bills, at least initially, and it would be sold to a niche market. But a high degree of programmability and flexibility would be its selling point. Second, sadly, decent Windows support would probably also be important for it to sell well because many people still want to have the option of booting into Windows.
I think this could be a good way for a smaller graphics card company to get a steady revenue stream because, while the market is small in relative terms, it is probably a decent size in absolute terms and you'd have it largely to yourself.
Oh, another thing that would be important would be good marketing: banner ads on OSS sites, getting the drivers into X implementations, making sure the major distributions include suport, etc.
QEMU is nifty, but it's an emulator and apparently a bit slow. Colinux lets you run a Linux kernel directly under Windows as an application, without the slowdown of an emulator. It even comes with ready-made Fedora and Debian disk images.
Germany and The Netherlands are preparing Europian legislation to log every email message you send, to log every url you are visiting for at least a year "to fight terror".
Well, as opposed to other nations that are doing that, at least they are passing legislation...:-)
Cocoa developers keep raving about it and its development environment. It might be useful if people familiar with it and some other development environment/platform to provide some more specifics. In what way is it supposed to be better than Eclipse, VisualStudio, Sharpdevelop? In what way is Cocoa supposed to be better than Swing, SWT, Gtk+, XUL?
The reason why Gates is where he is today is because he was ruthless and at the right place at the right time. Kildall was neither. It made little difference what Gates shipped, as long as it managed to generate a prompt and wasn't too good (a goal he met with distinction).
The problem with the IETF/Microsoft standard was that it had restrictions on use and sublicensing; that was a problem for businesses and OSS, and it probably represented a calculated attempt by Microsoft to hurt open source.
Yahoo's patent license is very different (e.g., it is sublicenseable) and appears to be compatible with OSS. Restrictions on trademark use are not an obstacle to open source implementations (and, in fact, are kind of redundant, since you couldn't use Yahoo's trademarks even if the license didn't specifically exclude it).
the sole purpose of a sender verification solution in connection with e-mail
But what other area could the patent possibly apply to? To the degree that the patent has any content at all, it is the application of a simple signature scheme to sender verification. If it applied to other fields of use, then it would amount to Yahoo! getting a patent on digital signatures in general, which just doesn't make sense.
Putting the public keys only into the DNS system seems to make adoption of such a system quite a bit more difficult than it needs to be. Why not also allow people to put the public keys on web pages? The goal is to have senders prove their identity, and the level of proof required by recipients as well as the nature might differ depending on the application. Many people may be quite happy knowing a web site under the control of the sender of a piece of mail.
So, say, you get mail from "someone@mydomain.com". The signature specifies that the public key is on "http://www2.mydomain.com/mail_signature.html" and uses that to verify the signature on the mail message. The recipient gets to decide whether the URL "http://www2.mydomain.com/mail_signature.html" is close enough to "someone@mydomain.com" to accept the public key from there (a reasonable default would be to accept it when the mail host is a suffix of the URL host).
This wouldn't exclude putting public keys in the DNS system, and those keys might be "more trusted" by users, but it would make it much easier for regular users to deploy and use such a system, regardless of whether their ISP is keeping up with the times. In particular, I would imagine users writing mail rules to treat different cases differently (signed with DNS key, signed with matching web site, signed with non-matching web site, incorrect signature, unsigned).
Leaving aside the question of how the DNS records get updated, is it possible to implement Yahoo's domain signatures (both signing and verification) in a mail client (Evolution, Thunderbird), or does it have to be in the server? It looks to me like that should be possible, but it's not completely clear from the spec.
If it is, then one way of getting these more widely used might be to integrate support for them into mail clients. That way, people with personal domains can sign their outgoing messages, and they can write filter rules (e.g., in Mozilla/Firefox) to deal with unsigned messages, correctly signed messages, and incorrectly signed messages as they like.
Well, ANSI C99 got variable length arrays instead. However neither alloca nor VLAs are as efficient as letting the compiler deal with memory management without human interference. Good, efficient memory management is like instruction scheduling: it's too complex to do by hand.
"In other words, if someone else were to implement 1 click ordering, and Amazon sued them, this case would have no bearing on that one."
That is correct. Basically, the judge said that the 1-click system Amazon implemented does not infringe the '055 patent. Whether and what Amazon has a patent on one-click doesn't matter.
I wouldn't want to be having to spend X dollars on hardware to run a game that would be able to run on my current machine, were it written in a faster language.
Using C can be quite inefficient: you write a lot of code by hand that the compiler can't optimize for you; if you let the compiler deal with things like memory management, it can also optimize that code. For example, a lot of C programs retain memory far longer than necessary and call malloc/free unnecessarily when alloca would do.
Java probably isn't the answer for you, because it comes with a lot of baggage you neither want nor need. But there are languages that give you C-like performance and power and yet do more for you out of the box: various Pascal dialects, Modula-2, Modula-3, Ada, and others. Even C++ is a better alternative to C that doesn't cost you anything in terms of performance.
The article is a long-winded statement of some simple and commonsense notions:
Programming will splinter into a number of more specialized occupations (e.g., database programmers, GUI developers, etc.; that's, of course, already a big trend)
Tools will let people with no programming experience create new applications (some tools like that exist, but they have rather limited applications).
Programming will become "industrialized", carried out by assembly-line software factory workers (maybe, but noone has made this work really well yet).
AI will obviate the need for programming altogether (I'll believe it when I see it).
"in linking sundry phenomenon as part of a poorly understood hypothesis"
One of the key determinants of the range of a species is temperature. So, observing changes in the range of species is one way in which one can determine whether there have been long-term changes in temperature.
"The jump in CO2 may be real but the presumed jump in temps may be more illusory than previously supposed"
Or it may not be, we just don't know. The way to gain more certainty is to get more data from different sources than we have used before. Observing the range and distribution of species over time is such a data source.
Anywho, my main point is to eliminate the whole 'someone other then you decides what is deemed air-able or not'
There are some things that need to be broadcast even if very few people are watching, like political debates, legislative sessions, educational programs, etc. That stuff needs to be broadcast so that people have it available when they need it, so that it is available anonymously, and so that people can keep an eye on the government. Yet, such content can't be self-supporting because few people would pay for it. That's the kind of content publicly financed broadcasting should really be for.
But the problem with the German public broadcasting is what you are saying: they forcibly take your money and then decide what you should see. That would be somewhat less galling if they at least had as good taste as the BBC, but they don't.
Another problem is that with the Internet, all of this becomes irrelevant: you can already get any content any time you choose for your Internet subscription; there is no need anymore for public broadcasting of any form. The television licensing fees should instead go into creating a universal public internet archive of important public content (again, legislative sessions, etc.), not into filming the latest German soap opera.
I lived in both Germany and the US for many years, and I can tell the US have the *worst* public news.
The US has lots of really bad news reporting, but it also has some really good news reporting. It doesn't matter what the relative amounts are, if you want good news coverage in the US, you can get it. And with the Internet, it has gotten even easier.
without taxes and only minor advertising income; not quite like the German mandatory fee but similar in spirit.
The "spirit" is quite different: German public broadcasting is expanding and trying to compete with commercial broadcasting, using mandatory fees to do so, while US public broadcasting, by necessity, focuses on their social and cultural roles. US public broadcasting is far from perfect, but its programming seems to be closer to what public broadcasting should be, and they seem to be using the funds they have much more effectively.
I'm all for using tax money to support public broadcasting, even in Germany. But it seems to me German public broadcasters are running out of control.
The last reaction I've read from the pro-PC fee camp is that the fees would be required from the companies on a per-site basis, that is it doesn't matter whether you have 20 or 20000 PCs in an office complex, you always pay 18Euro/month.
I believe the proposal is based on the physical size and will likely be much higher than EU 18/month. And for what? People at those companies aren't watching television.
And given that NONE of those require you to have a TV license, what's your point?
In Germany, most of them require people to pay for a license, and there is now a discussion about adding PCs into the mix. That's the point of this discussion.
If you think that this doesn't matter for you in the UK, you are wrong. The German public broadcasting system is doing this because they are losing people to the Internet; the BBC may well follow.
Furthermore, something like a DVD player requires a screen and those screens often have TV tuners built in even if you don't use them (see the title).
Altogether, your reasoning that you only need a TV license if you want to watch TV is either naive or disingenuous.
US law enforcement seizing equipment in Europe cause for concern, just like European law enforcement seizing equipment in the US would be cause for concern. But European law enforcement seizing equipment in Europe is, a priori, OK (of course, they may still misbehave or screw up, but law enforcement does that with some regularity).
And, yes, something like this can be bad for a company or web site. But this seems to go a little too far:
Indymedia insists that the servers are returned because each day they are inoperable and Indymedia's irreplaceable data is unaccessible means greater material damages to the Indymedia operation worldwide.
Don't these people have backups? And they should at least be able to get the text/html portions of their data back up on line very quickly.
I don't think anything where a pay-per-view model makes sense belongs on public broadcasting.
Public broadcasting should be for legislative meetings, townhall meetings, cultural events (publicly sponsored theater, opera, etc.), political debates, and educational content (e.g., broadcasts of lectures). That kind of content should be open and free for all, with no decoder.
Anything else belongs on either not-for-profit broadcasters (who should be supported by tax dollars when needed, just like other arts/cultural institutions) or private commercial broadcasters. Those can choose their packaging and business models as needed, including pay-per-view.
Want to have a TV? Then expect to contribute a small amount toward the running of 8 TV and 9 national (plus dozens of local) radio stations from the BBC.
I don't want to have a TV. Really, I don't.
But I do want to have a PC, and a car, and a DVD player, and all sorts of other devices. Some of those, unavoidably, include radio and/or television receivers. Furthermore, even if they don't include a receiver, these people are trying to redefine everything from PCs to cellphones as "receivers".
So, it's disingenuous to portray this as a choice. It's a tax. And it's an inefficiently administered tax that operates outside the usual budgeting process. Public broadcasting should be funded out of government funds, and, frankly, it should be scaled back considerably in Germany because it has grown far beyond its original purpose.
It's very hard to get the full political spectrum in the U.S.
No, it's not "very hard". You may not have piped it into your eyeballs like other stuff, but you can get it pretty easily if you want to.
Pacifica, and it has very few stations (though many of its shows are played on a number of campus radio stations at colleges across the country.)
That, and a few hundred million personal computers: they stream their content and they have lots of programs on the web.
You really don't realize how far to the right the media has swung in the U.S. until you look at centrist broadcasting from the rest of the world
Whether the vast majority of US media are right wing (which they are) and whether you can still get excellent political coverage in the US are two entirely separate questions.
conservative media czars don't 'happen' to be popular - they are popular because of the billions of dollars that they spend to promote & advertise their stations over all else...
And how is going to create a second-rate public broadcasting system (like the one in Germany) going to help with that?
nevermind, just keep telling yourself that CNN & Fox are 'unbiased' while you suck on that soma pill...
See, you just demonstrated again what the real problem is: people who can't be bothered to read or understand what other people write. People like you.
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Including all those C subtleties when dealing with two dimensional arrays.
ANSI C99 has regular multidimensional arrays, just like in Pascal or Fortran 77.
So I write C as if it's Pascal, with none of that pointery elegance.
That's a good thing, believe me. Use pointers sparingly. And C pointers are rarely elegant.
Graphics cards have become the single greatest hassle when installing Linux. Many of them don't even work correctly in frame buffer or VESA mode anymore, and if they do, they are slow.
I think that we are in for a major change in graphics hardware, going from more proprietary, special-purpose hardware to basically vectorized general-purpose hardware. If you keep the card more general purpose, you will probably at least get lots of orders from universities and research labs working on new ways of doing 3D graphics and using 3D graphics cards for compute-intensive applications.
On the other hand, Linux hardware vendors and users would probably also like to have a cheap, low-end card that just works with every OSS and supports commonly used functions. So, something with good 2D acceleration (both bitblit and Postscript models) and some cheap 3D support would serve those needs. And such a card could also become popular for Windows if it accelerates Windows desktop functions well and (in contrast to all the proprietary trash that's out for Windows) has a simple, clean, and hence reliable, driver.
A couple of points, though. First, it's probably the high-end open 3D card that would pay the bills, at least initially, and it would be sold to a niche market. But a high degree of programmability and flexibility would be its selling point. Second, sadly, decent Windows support would probably also be important for it to sell well because many people still want to have the option of booting into Windows.
I think this could be a good way for a smaller graphics card company to get a steady revenue stream because, while the market is small in relative terms, it is probably a decent size in absolute terms and you'd have it largely to yourself.
Oh, another thing that would be important would be good marketing: banner ads on OSS sites, getting the drivers into X implementations, making sure the major distributions include suport, etc.
QEMU is nifty, but it's an emulator and apparently a bit slow. Colinux lets you run a Linux kernel directly under Windows as an application, without the slowdown of an emulator. It even comes with ready-made Fedora and Debian disk images.
Germany and The Netherlands are preparing Europian legislation to log every email message you send, to log every url you are visiting for at least a year "to fight terror".
:-)
Well, as opposed to other nations that are doing that, at least they are passing legislation...
at least the object-oriented, modular version called SCHEME.
Scheme is neither object-oriented nor "modular" (in the sense of having built-in modules). That's probably why it is a good teaching language.
I guess this partially intertia, having done this since the 1970s
Maybe it's because it's working for them.
Cocoa developers keep raving about it and its development environment. It might be useful if people familiar with it and some other development environment/platform to provide some more specifics. In what way is it supposed to be better than Eclipse, VisualStudio, Sharpdevelop? In what way is Cocoa supposed to be better than Swing, SWT, Gtk+, XUL?
The reason why Gates is where he is today is because he was ruthless and at the right place at the right time. Kildall was neither. It made little difference what Gates shipped, as long as it managed to generate a prompt and wasn't too good (a goal he met with distinction).
The problem with the IETF/Microsoft standard was that it had restrictions on use and sublicensing; that was a problem for businesses and OSS, and it probably represented a calculated attempt by Microsoft to hurt open source.
Yahoo's patent license is very different (e.g., it is sublicenseable) and appears to be compatible with OSS. Restrictions on trademark use are not an obstacle to open source implementations (and, in fact, are kind of redundant, since you couldn't use Yahoo's trademarks even if the license didn't specifically exclude it).
the sole purpose of a sender verification solution in connection with e-mail
But what other area could the patent possibly apply to? To the degree that the patent has any content at all, it is the application of a simple signature scheme to sender verification. If it applied to other fields of use, then it would amount to Yahoo! getting a patent on digital signatures in general, which just doesn't make sense.
Putting the public keys only into the DNS system seems to make adoption of such a system quite a bit more difficult than it needs to be. Why not also allow people to put the public keys on web pages? The goal is to have senders prove their identity, and the level of proof required by recipients as well as the nature might differ depending on the application. Many people may be quite happy knowing a web site under the control of the sender of a piece of mail.
So, say, you get mail from "someone@mydomain.com". The signature specifies that the public key is on "http://www2.mydomain.com/mail_signature.html" and uses that to verify the signature on the mail message. The recipient gets to decide whether the URL "http://www2.mydomain.com/mail_signature.html" is close enough to "someone@mydomain.com" to accept the public key from there (a reasonable default would be to accept it when the mail host is a suffix of the URL host).
This wouldn't exclude putting public keys in the DNS system, and those keys might be "more trusted" by users, but it would make it much easier for regular users to deploy and use such a system, regardless of whether their ISP is keeping up with the times. In particular, I would imagine users writing mail rules to treat different cases differently (signed with DNS key, signed with matching web site, signed with non-matching web site, incorrect signature, unsigned).
Leaving aside the question of how the DNS records get updated, is it possible to implement Yahoo's domain signatures (both signing and verification) in a mail client (Evolution, Thunderbird), or does it have to be in the server? It looks to me like that should be possible, but it's not completely clear from the spec.
If it is, then one way of getting these more widely used might be to integrate support for them into mail clients. That way, people with personal domains can sign their outgoing messages, and they can write filter rules (e.g., in Mozilla/Firefox) to deal with unsigned messages, correctly signed messages, and incorrectly signed messages as they like.
Well, ANSI C99 got variable length arrays instead. However neither alloca nor VLAs are as efficient as letting the compiler deal with memory management without human interference. Good, efficient memory management is like instruction scheduling: it's too complex to do by hand.
"In other words, if someone else were to implement 1 click ordering, and Amazon sued them, this case would have no bearing on that one."
That is correct. Basically, the judge said that the 1-click system Amazon implemented does not infringe the '055 patent. Whether and what Amazon has a patent on one-click doesn't matter.
I wouldn't want to be having to spend X dollars on hardware to run a game that would be able to run on my current machine, were it written in a faster language.
Using C can be quite inefficient: you write a lot of code by hand that the compiler can't optimize for you; if you let the compiler deal with things like memory management, it can also optimize that code. For example, a lot of C programs retain memory far longer than necessary and call malloc/free unnecessarily when alloca would do.
Java probably isn't the answer for you, because it comes with a lot of baggage you neither want nor need. But there are languages that give you C-like performance and power and yet do more for you out of the box: various Pascal dialects, Modula-2, Modula-3, Ada, and others. Even C++ is a better alternative to C that doesn't cost you anything in terms of performance.
"in linking sundry phenomenon as part of a poorly understood hypothesis"
One of the key determinants of the range of a species is temperature. So, observing changes in the range of species is one way in which one can determine whether there have been long-term changes in temperature.
"The jump in CO2 may be real but the presumed jump in temps may be more illusory than previously supposed"
Or it may not be, we just don't know. The way to gain more certainty is to get more data from different sources than we have used before. Observing the range and distribution of species over time is such a data source.
Anywho, my main point is to eliminate the whole 'someone other then you decides what is deemed air-able or not'
There are some things that need to be broadcast even if very few people are watching, like political debates, legislative sessions, educational programs, etc. That stuff needs to be broadcast so that people have it available when they need it, so that it is available anonymously, and so that people can keep an eye on the government. Yet, such content can't be self-supporting because few people would pay for it. That's the kind of content publicly financed broadcasting should really be for.
But the problem with the German public broadcasting is what you are saying: they forcibly take your money and then decide what you should see. That would be somewhat less galling if they at least had as good taste as the BBC, but they don't.
Another problem is that with the Internet, all of this becomes irrelevant: you can already get any content any time you choose for your Internet subscription; there is no need anymore for public broadcasting of any form. The television licensing fees should instead go into creating a universal public internet archive of important public content (again, legislative sessions, etc.), not into filming the latest German soap opera.
I lived in both Germany and the US for many years, and I can tell the US have the *worst* public news.
The US has lots of really bad news reporting, but it also has some really good news reporting. It doesn't matter what the relative amounts are, if you want good news coverage in the US, you can get it. And with the Internet, it has gotten even easier.
without taxes and only minor advertising income; not quite like the German mandatory fee but similar in spirit.
The "spirit" is quite different: German public broadcasting is expanding and trying to compete with commercial broadcasting, using mandatory fees to do so, while US public broadcasting, by necessity, focuses on their social and cultural roles. US public broadcasting is far from perfect, but its programming seems to be closer to what public broadcasting should be, and they seem to be using the funds they have much more effectively.
I'm all for using tax money to support public broadcasting, even in Germany. But it seems to me German public broadcasters are running out of control.
The last reaction I've read from the pro-PC fee camp is that the fees would be required from the companies on a per-site basis, that is it doesn't matter whether you have 20 or 20000 PCs in an office complex, you always pay 18Euro/month.
I believe the proposal is based on the physical size and will likely be much higher than EU 18/month. And for what? People at those companies aren't watching television.
And given that NONE of those require you to have a TV license, what's your point?
In Germany, most of them require people to pay for a license, and there is now a discussion about adding PCs into the mix. That's the point of this discussion.
If you think that this doesn't matter for you in the UK, you are wrong. The German public broadcasting system is doing this because they are losing people to the Internet; the BBC may well follow.
Furthermore, something like a DVD player requires a screen and those screens often have TV tuners built in even if you don't use them (see the title).
Altogether, your reasoning that you only need a TV license if you want to watch TV is either naive or disingenuous.
And, yes, something like this can be bad for a company or web site. But this seems to go a little too far:Don't these people have backups? And they should at least be able to get the text/html portions of their data back up on line very quickly.
I don't think anything where a pay-per-view model makes sense belongs on public broadcasting.
Public broadcasting should be for legislative meetings, townhall meetings, cultural events (publicly sponsored theater, opera, etc.), political debates, and educational content (e.g., broadcasts of lectures). That kind of content should be open and free for all, with no decoder.
Anything else belongs on either not-for-profit broadcasters (who should be supported by tax dollars when needed, just like other arts/cultural institutions) or private commercial broadcasters. Those can choose their packaging and business models as needed, including pay-per-view.
Want to have a TV? Then expect to contribute a small amount toward the running of 8 TV and 9 national (plus dozens of local) radio stations from the BBC.
I don't want to have a TV. Really, I don't.
But I do want to have a PC, and a car, and a DVD player, and all sorts of other devices. Some of those, unavoidably, include radio and/or television receivers. Furthermore, even if they don't include a receiver, these people are trying to redefine everything from PCs to cellphones as "receivers".
So, it's disingenuous to portray this as a choice. It's a tax. And it's an inefficiently administered tax that operates outside the usual budgeting process. Public broadcasting should be funded out of government funds, and, frankly, it should be scaled back considerably in Germany because it has grown far beyond its original purpose.
It's very hard to get the full political spectrum in the U.S.
No, it's not "very hard". You may not have piped it into your eyeballs like other stuff, but you can get it pretty easily if you want to.
Pacifica, and it has very few stations (though many of its shows are played on a number of campus radio stations at colleges across the country.)
That, and a few hundred million personal computers: they stream their content and they have lots of programs on the web.
You really don't realize how far to the right the media has swung in the U.S. until you look at centrist broadcasting from the rest of the world
Whether the vast majority of US media are right wing (which they are) and whether you can still get excellent political coverage in the US are two entirely separate questions.
conservative media czars don't 'happen' to be popular - they are popular because of the billions of dollars that they spend to promote & advertise their stations over all else...
And how is going to create a second-rate public broadcasting system (like the one in Germany) going to help with that?
nevermind, just keep telling yourself that CNN & Fox are 'unbiased' while you suck on that soma pill...
See, you just demonstrated again what the real problem is: people who can't be bothered to read or understand what other people write. People like you.