Actually NAFTA and WTO proceedings are public and widely discussed in the media. At least you can find out what is going on. The ones you should be worried about are the secret, one-on-one talks between nations and multinationals. Those agreements you never hear about.
The one I have in mind is the agreement between France and Iran, at the time of the Shah, to build a nuclear reprocessing plant (shady). The plant was build with some Iranian money, but then the Ayatollahs took power and France reneged on the deal (very shady). After intense shady negotiations that failed the Iranians had one of the French executives that had been on the deal killed in his car at a red traffic light. No one knew what was going on. At the time the guy who had been executed in this fashion (Georges Besse, look it up on Google if you don't believe me) was the CEO of one of the French automobile constructor so no one could connect this act to anything, he had wisely gotten out of the Nuclear business but the Iranians had long memories. Shortly after that there was a shady, discreet transfer of large sums of money from France to Iran and things settled down.
The stuff of B series movies, except it really happened.
Actually I once saw a fascinating documentary on Tienanmen square, I forget the title unfortunately. The gist was that things are never as simple as they are portrayed in the media.
There were interesting tidbits about the content of the student's banners. The Chinese one were different to the English ones, along the lines of the Chinese banners saying they wanted more teachers (the ones the Chinese population would understand) and the English ones more democracy in China (the ones the Western media would immediately jump on). The chinese students played the media very well on that account. The sculpture of the `goddess of democracy' was a good one too.
The most interesting bit of information was that apparently the mass of people on the square was always changing. Students would get bored and go home, only to be replaced with new fresh ones, sometimes coming from a different city. Towards the second half of the `siege' the Chinese government finally tried to negociate a bit more reasonably. The small band of student leaders tried to get some democracy going by getting everyone on the square to vote on important decisions, in particular whether to continue the demonstration or go home. But because a large number of people on the square had actually just arrived, they never got enough votes to disband. Everybody wanted to stay.
There was a tearful young lady who was from the band of leader who was saying she was seeing the situation deteriorate before her eyes. She and the other who had stayed the whole time and gotten to talk to the authority were in fact in favour of going home in exchange for a few small benefits (more teachers?) and the promise of no witchhunt, but they could not get the numbers to agree on that.
Then the Chinese government lost patience and did the wrong thing. In my opinion they should have simply waited it out.
The Leidenfrost effect only works on liquids that evaporate due to contact to a surface with a higher temperature, for example if you sip a little liquid nitrogen, the small portion that evaporate by contact with your very hot tongue (compared to the temperature of LN2) creates an insulating interval between the rest of the LN2 and your tongue.
It does not apply here, your tongue is the bit that is getting hotter and thankfully cannot evaporate. But by all means don't believe me: try it out yourself. Fill a cup with near boiling water at 95C (nearly 200F) and try to sip a little right away. Then report here.
Just in case you want to sue me afterwards for giving you stupid advice: this will definitely burn your lips and your tongue.
When you find that the liquid has reached such a temperature that you can drink it, measure it. It will be below 70C and more than likely below 60C.
Well rest assured, the coffee that used to be served at McDonald was really really hot, so hot that if you tried to drink it you would simply burn your tongue. There is simply no way you can drink coffee at 90C/195F.
The water is supposed to be boiling when it hits the grains, but then it is supposed to cool off. In fact letting coffee for too long on the hot plate makes it bitter.
Normal drinking temperature is around 50-60C/90F, there is no reason to keep it hotter than that given the insulating foam cups that they use.
You should really keep your Linux box up to date even if it's only your home machine. Modern distributions such as Debian, RedHat (Fedora) and others make it very easy for you.
If you don't sooner or later you'll be hacked, you might or might not notice it, but other people will use your machine for purposes you did not intend (such as share software or copyrighted material, or relay spam).
It's not nearly as stable as RH9 is. For the life of me I couldn't get FC1 to work on a dual-Xeon with HT enabled. It would crash randomly between 2-48h after boot up with no hint, no oops, no panic, nothing. Just a hung machine. RH9 on that very same machine has been flawless.
I like the yum system though, and FC1 does work very well on single-CPU systems.
That's 7 levels. The article style only allows from \section down.
You can make up your own style and have more if you want but I believe the above is what the Chicago Book of Style recommends. Essentially (La)TeX enforces the CBS.
The proper way is simply to point out the flaws if they are real, not to wave arms and make qualitative comments about them. All mathematicians, being people, make mistakes, so much so that important proofs are often not considered valid until several years after publication, until enough interested people have studied the proof and agree that it is valid.
There was an original `proof' of the 4-colour theorem that was considered valid for something like 20 years until someone pointed out an assumption was wrong, I'm sure it's not even the most glaring example.
The prizes for the highly important proofs on the list of the Clay Mathematical Institute are supposed to be awarded only two years after publication in a major journal.
What happened to the poor Swedish woman is just math in action. You need to be prepared to defend your methods and to expect that people will pick on every detail of your work.
The huge problem pertaining to graphic cards is that they probably are, on PCs, the item that is replaced/upgraded most often and are developed at the highest pace immediately after CPUs.
While CPUs are well documented and a critical resource well looked after by developers, GPUs are in contrast shrouded in mystery and buried in patents. Also most kernel developers, I'd wager, don't care one bit about dual screens and accelerated OpenGL.
Before NVidia came on the scene with their drivers the high-quality multi-screen 3D Linux desktop was very very hard to come by. It think it is still true today that you cannot have accelerated 3D and xinerama together under XFree. This causes no problem with the NVidia drivers.
So yeah, it's bad, and the NVidia stuff does cause mountains of weird problems still (I still can have my USB webcam running with the combination of NVidia drivers, dual-head and SMP, not that this is crucial, mind you, but it is annoying). OSS drivers only give you 2D.
Meanwhile I'd like to know how are things with the ATI camp, probably not much better.
Paradoxically, if NVidia had not come forward with binary-only drivers, the situation would probably be a bit better even with their hardware: it would have been reverse-engineered to some extent.
However the pool of available talented OSS developer is finite, and some other project would have suffered almost certainly.
Re:I think my form of encryption is better
on
RSA-576 Factored
·
· Score: 5, Informative
OTP can't be cracked even with brute force, because there is no pattern in the encrypted result and each letter is coded independently of all the others.
To give you an example, think of a one-word message:
'GO' (= 0x47 Ox4F)
Here is a two-byte one-time pad:
Ox5E9C
Here is the result of the encryption:
0x474f xor 0x5E9H = 0x19d3
Now the OTP gives you back the unencrypted text if you have it:
0x19d3 xor 0x5E9C = 0x474f = 'GO'
Now, if you don't know the OTP and all you have is the encrypted text, then your only recourse is to try all the possibles OTPs with brute force. The problem is that amongst all the results, you will indeed have 'GO', but also 'NO', 'IT', '42', etc. All the possible two-letter words will be there, and there will be no way to find out which is the correct one.
This result trivially extends to messages of any length. Using brute force with OTPs only generates all the possible messages of a given lengths, giving no clue as to which is the correct one.
That's how it was defined at the time. However there was a small error in measurement and as result the Earth is not quite 40,000km in circumference along one meridian.
Someone has already replied along these lines, but I know exactly what 400 g of chips weigh like, how much is 300ml of any beverage and that I'm 1.78 m tall. Usually I do put about 35 l of petrol in my car and if I go at 75km/h in an urban area I should expect to be fined.
Yes, it's no trouble if you've been used to these units since childhood.
The meter was defined as the quarter a 10 millionth part of the Paris meridian (i.e the Paris meridian should be 40,000km in length; there was in fact a small error made in the measurement), not the distance from Paris to the North Pole. It is not quite as arbitrary as the distance between two landmarks, one of which is man-made.
The definition of the meter in fact spurred a major expedition to actually measure the length of this meridian, and so had some scientific value by itself. The choice of the Paris meridian is pretty much irrelevant, one had to choose one, it could have been Greenwich's or New-York's.
At the time it was a struggle to find a meaningful reference that wasn't man-made and yielded a convenient unit. Overall the metric system has done well in this regard.
> That makes it a little more interesting than the > usual things (like mapping [0,1] into two copies > of the interval [0,1]) that just provide > continuous mappings betwene points.
You are right of course, B-T is very interesting and totally non-trivial. The point I was trying to make is that it does not shatter our intuition and common sense as much as was implied in the parent post, and as such is not really a good example of the axiom of choice delivering bad outcomes, to borrow a bit of management-speak.
I didn't mod anything, it's not me sir, but your reasoning is incorrrect.
The original poster's statement is
| if laws worked THEN there would be no crime
Which is equivalent to
| laws don't work OR there would be no crime
Only one of these sides needs to be true for the whole statement to be true ; the only statement that is excluded is when you have both `laws work' and `there is crime' at the same time.
You interpreted the original statement as:
for the society to be crimeless, you don't need any law, i.e:
| no crime implies no law.
The original poster never wrote that. At most you could interpret the original post as:
| no crime DOES NOT IMPLY laws work.
I.e, for the society to be crimeless, laws are not sufficient (you need education, say), hardly something outrageous.
However, the following is always true:
no law implies no crime.
Because crime is defined by law. But this is getting silly.
The Banach-Tarski paradox is only a problem if you think you can do that in the real world.
To be able to decompose a ball as stated in the paradox you need a continuous ball, not one composed of atoms. In continuous space the number of points in a single ball or two or N is the same, and you can trivially map all the points in a ball B_1 to all of those in balls B_n.
Personally I don't see much problem in the B-T paradox, the only interesting bit is the number of pieces (4 to 6) that make it non-trivial.
> No amount of words can every describe some > events in the same way a picture can.
Yes it is possible, and the LoTR books succeed in that way. I remember being incredibly moved by the appendix on Aragorn and Arwen, that explains in very few pages what happens after, essentially. Good luck making that into a movie. I just can't picture Mortensen and Tyler having a crack at that bit which would measure up.
Since you mention the Bible, how about a little segment on Genesis. Notice how often it has been put on screen and how much great acting would help you. Not.
One point: the inspectors were never kicked out, they left of their own accord, after a lot of frustration, to be sure.
It was not in Saddam Hussein's interest to admit he had no weapons left. If he wanted to survive as a (horrible) leader, he had no choice but continue the hide-and-seek game.
All I'm saying is that everybody knew SH had no weapons left. The CIA admitted as much semi-secretly and only made up the numbers of the missing weapons so as not to give Saddam Hussein any reason to lift the embargo. Saddam Hussein knew he had no weapons left but was never going to admit it. The inspectors knew it because that's what they reported to the UN on several occasions.
Yes it was possible that the regime was hiding something but that is now very unlikely. In fact now all available Iraqi weapons scientists have been questionned by the US. The regime having fallen, I can't believe none of them would have pointed the US toward the famed cache of weapons or the hidden programme, or whatever.
*nothing* has turned up. There *are* no weapons, at least none left. If that is not proof of at least an OK job from the weapons inspectors, I don't know what it is. They themselves said, the weapons inspectors, from both the pre-1998 and the post 2002 period, that they believed that Iraq was WMD free.
The issue was that the US wanted to invade Iraq for good or for ill and needed a legal reason to invade. Again it is not permissible in international law to invade a country because one does not like the regime. So they made up the numbers, they cooked the evidence and brought the propaganda machine to the boil, and it worked very well with the American public. 100% all the way.
I am not saying that Saddam Hussein didn't need to be brought down, and that invading Iraq was not the only way to do it, but the fact is what has been presented to the American, Australian and UK public was not the truth.
Your post is not very correct. Most of the `cool utilities' under Linux are in fact GNU contributions. This starts with glibc, without which nothing would work, nearly all the traditional command line utilities such as the shell itself (bash) and stuff like ls, sed, awk, etc.
Of course then there is the basic development tools such as compilers, assemblers, linkers, etc. Good luck finding a BSD C++ compiler for example.
All of these are in constant developpment. Just to mention your remark on GCC, here is some information for you:
> Gcc is mostly done by Cygnus (redhat)
Incorrect.
The URL for GCC is still gcc.gnu.org. RedHat has little to do with GCC. They do contribute, of course, but that's all. You should remember that they released a famously broken version of GCC, gcc-2.96, for inclusion in their distribution, without approval or even prior consultation with the GCC people.
Everyone was very confused because the official GCC release at the time was 2.95 and so it looked like an upgrade, which it wasn't, let me tell you.
I'd say the relationship between GCC and Redhat became rather frosty as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually NAFTA and WTO proceedings are public and widely discussed in the media. At least you can find out what is going on. The ones you should be worried about are the secret, one-on-one talks between nations and multinationals. Those agreements you never hear about.
The one I have in mind is the agreement between France and Iran, at the time of the Shah, to build a nuclear reprocessing plant (shady). The plant was build with some Iranian money, but then the Ayatollahs took power and France reneged on the deal (very shady). After intense shady negotiations that failed the Iranians had one of the French executives that had been on the deal killed in his car at a red traffic light. No one knew what was going on. At the time the guy who had been executed in this fashion (Georges Besse, look it up on Google if you don't believe me) was the CEO of one of the French automobile constructor so no one could connect this act to anything, he had wisely gotten out of the Nuclear business but the Iranians had long memories. Shortly after that there was a shady, discreet transfer of large sums of money from France to Iran and things settled down.
The stuff of B series movies, except it really happened.
Actually I once saw a fascinating documentary on Tienanmen square, I forget the title unfortunately. The gist was that things are never as simple as they are portrayed in the media.
There were interesting tidbits about the content of the student's banners. The Chinese one were different to the English ones, along the lines of the Chinese banners saying they wanted more teachers (the ones the Chinese population would understand) and the English ones more democracy in China (the ones the Western media would immediately jump on). The chinese students played the media very well on that account. The sculpture of the `goddess of democracy' was a good one too.
The most interesting bit of information was that apparently the mass of people on the square was always changing. Students would get bored and go home, only to be replaced with new fresh ones, sometimes coming from a different city. Towards the second half of the `siege' the Chinese government finally tried to negociate a bit more reasonably. The small band of student leaders tried to get some democracy going by getting everyone on the square to vote on important decisions, in particular whether to continue the demonstration or go home. But because a large number of people on the square had actually just arrived, they never got enough votes to disband. Everybody wanted to stay.
There was a tearful young lady who was from the band of leader who was saying she was seeing the situation deteriorate before her eyes. She and the other who had stayed the whole time and gotten to talk to the authority were in fact in favour of going home in exchange for a few small benefits (more teachers?) and the promise of no witchhunt, but they could not get the numbers to agree on that.
Then the Chinese government lost patience and did the wrong thing. In my opinion they should have simply waited it out.
The Leidenfrost effect only works on liquids that evaporate due to contact to a surface with a higher temperature, for example if you sip a little liquid nitrogen, the small portion that evaporate by contact with your very hot tongue (compared to the temperature of LN2) creates an insulating interval between the rest of the LN2 and your tongue.
It does not apply here, your tongue is the bit that is getting hotter and thankfully cannot evaporate. But by all means don't believe me: try it out yourself. Fill a cup with near boiling water at 95C (nearly 200F) and try to sip a little right away. Then report here.
Just in case you want to sue me afterwards for giving you stupid advice: this will definitely burn your lips and your tongue.
When you find that the liquid has reached such a temperature that you can drink it, measure it. It will be below 70C and more than likely below 60C.
Good luck.
Well rest assured, the coffee that used to be served at McDonald was really really hot, so hot that if you tried to drink it you would simply burn your tongue. There is simply no way you can drink coffee at 90C/195F.
The water is supposed to be boiling when it hits the grains, but then it is supposed to cool off. In fact letting coffee for too long on the hot plate makes it bitter.
Normal drinking temperature is around 50-60C/90F, there is no reason to keep it hotter than that given the insulating foam cups that they use.
You should really keep your Linux box up to date even if it's only your home machine. Modern distributions such as Debian, RedHat (Fedora) and others make it very easy for you.
If you don't sooner or later you'll be hacked, you might or might not notice it, but other people will use your machine for purposes you did not intend (such as share software or copyrighted material, or relay spam).
I have tried all the weird tricks to no avail. Many have logged similar issues on bugzilla so I assume this is known (but not corrected yet AFAIK).
RMS lives in Baahston, you know, the little suburb south of Haahrvd (you know, the school). His accent is suspicious.
It's not nearly as stable as RH9 is. For the life of me I couldn't get FC1 to work on a dual-Xeon with HT enabled. It would crash randomly between 2-48h after boot up with no hint, no oops, no panic, nothing. Just a hung machine. RH9 on that very same machine has been flawless.
I like the yum system though, and FC1 does work very well on single-CPU systems.
With the book style you can have
\subsubsection{}
\part{}
\chapter{}
\section{}
\subsection{}
\paragraph{}
\subparagraph{}
That's 7 levels. The article style only allows from \section down.
You can make up your own style and have more if you want but I believe the above is what the Chicago Book of Style recommends. Essentially (La)TeX enforces the CBS.
Hi, impressive numbers.
Did you turn -ffast-math on with GCC? icc does that by default. On some applications it makes a significant difference.
AFAIK gcc does not turn it on even with -O3 because it makes the application non-IEEE compliant as far as the FP math is concerned.
The proper way is simply to point out the flaws if they are real, not to wave arms and make qualitative comments about them. All mathematicians, being people, make mistakes, so much so that important proofs are often not considered valid until several years after publication, until enough interested people have studied the proof and agree that it is valid.
There was an original `proof' of the 4-colour theorem that was considered valid for something like 20 years until someone pointed out an assumption was wrong, I'm sure it's not even the most glaring example.
The prizes for the highly important proofs on the list of the Clay Mathematical Institute are supposed to be awarded only two years after publication in a major journal.
What happened to the poor Swedish woman is just math in action. You need to be prepared to defend your methods and to expect that people will pick on every detail of your work.
The huge problem pertaining to graphic cards is that they probably are, on PCs, the item that is replaced /upgraded most often and are developed at the highest pace immediately after CPUs.
While CPUs are well documented and a critical resource well looked after by developers, GPUs are in contrast shrouded in mystery and buried in patents. Also most kernel developers, I'd wager, don't care one bit about dual screens and accelerated OpenGL.
Before NVidia came on the scene with their drivers the high-quality multi-screen 3D Linux desktop was very very hard to come by. It think it is still true today that you cannot have accelerated 3D and xinerama together under XFree. This causes no problem with the NVidia drivers.
So yeah, it's bad, and the NVidia stuff does cause mountains of weird problems still (I still can have my USB webcam running with the combination of NVidia drivers, dual-head and SMP, not that this is crucial, mind you, but it is annoying). OSS drivers only give you 2D.
Meanwhile I'd like to know how are things with the ATI camp, probably not much better.
Paradoxically, if NVidia had not come forward with binary-only drivers, the situation would probably be a bit better even with their hardware: it would have been reverse-engineered to some extent.
However the pool of available talented OSS developer is finite, and some other project would have suffered almost certainly.
OTP can't be cracked even with brute force, because there is no pattern in the encrypted result and each letter is coded independently of all the others.
To give you an example, think of a one-word message:
'GO' (= 0x47 Ox4F)
Here is a two-byte one-time pad:
Ox5E9C
Here is the result of the encryption:
0x474f xor 0x5E9H = 0x19d3
Now the OTP gives you back the unencrypted text if you have it:
0x19d3 xor 0x5E9C = 0x474f = 'GO'
Now, if you don't know the OTP and all you have is the encrypted text, then your only recourse is to try all the possibles OTPs with brute force. The problem is that amongst all the results, you will indeed have 'GO', but also 'NO', 'IT', '42', etc. All the possible two-letter words will be there, and there will be no way to find out which is the correct one.
This result trivially extends to messages of any length. Using brute force with OTPs only generates all the possible messages of a given lengths, giving no clue as to which is the correct one.
That's how it was defined at the time. However there was a small error in measurement and as result the Earth is not quite 40,000km in circumference along one meridian.
Someone has already replied along these lines, but I know exactly what 400 g of chips weigh like, how much is 300ml of any beverage and that I'm 1.78 m tall. Usually I do put about 35 l of petrol in my car and if I go at 75km/h in an urban area I should expect to be fined.
Yes, it's no trouble if you've been used to these units since childhood.
The meter was defined as the quarter a 10 millionth part of the Paris meridian (i.e the Paris meridian should be 40,000km in length; there was in fact a small error made in the measurement), not the distance from Paris to the North Pole. It is not quite as arbitrary as the distance between two landmarks, one of which is man-made.
The definition of the meter in fact spurred a major expedition to actually measure the length of this meridian, and so had some scientific value by itself. The choice of the Paris meridian is pretty much irrelevant, one had to choose one, it could have been Greenwich's or New-York's.
At the time it was a struggle to find a meaningful reference that wasn't man-made and yielded a convenient unit. Overall the metric system has done well in this regard.
> That makes it a little more interesting than the
> usual things (like mapping [0,1] into two copies
> of the interval [0,1]) that just provide
> continuous mappings betwene points.
You are right of course, B-T is very interesting and totally non-trivial. The point I was trying to make is that it does not shatter our intuition and common sense as much as was implied in the parent post, and as such is not really a good example of the axiom of choice delivering bad outcomes, to borrow a bit of management-speak.
Thanks for responding.
I didn't mod anything, it's not me sir, but your reasoning is incorrrect.
The original poster's statement is
| if laws worked THEN there would be no crime
Which is equivalent to
| laws don't work OR there would be no crime
Only one of these sides needs to be true for the whole statement to be true ; the only statement that is excluded is when you have both `laws work' and `there is crime' at the same time.
You interpreted the original statement as:
for the society to be crimeless, you don't need any law, i.e:
| no crime implies no law.
The original poster never wrote that. At most you could interpret the original post as:
| no crime DOES NOT IMPLY laws work.
I.e, for the society to be crimeless, laws are not sufficient (you need education, say), hardly something outrageous.
However, the following is always true:
no law implies no crime.
Because crime is defined by law. But this is getting silly.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
So in summary the anti-gun people think there are way more idiots with guns than violent/dangerous people with guns.
The pro-gun people think the opposite.
Apparently statistics are unable to convince either camp of who is right.
Either way it's a pretty grim view of humanity.
The Banach-Tarski paradox is only a problem if you think you can do that in the real world.
To be able to decompose a ball as stated in the paradox you need a continuous ball, not one composed of atoms. In continuous space the number of points in a single ball or two or N is the same, and you can trivially map all the points in a ball B_1 to all of those in balls B_n.
Personally I don't see much problem in the B-T paradox, the only interesting bit is the number of pieces (4 to 6) that make it non-trivial.
> No amount of words can every describe some
> events in the same way a picture can.
Yes it is possible, and the LoTR books succeed in that way. I remember being incredibly moved by the appendix on Aragorn and Arwen, that explains in very few pages what happens after, essentially. Good luck making that into a movie. I just can't picture Mortensen and Tyler having a crack at that bit which would measure up.
Since you mention the Bible, how about a little segment on Genesis. Notice how often it has been put on screen and how much great acting would help you. Not.
We'll just have to agree to disagree.
The lesson in this is that this kid has gone through the courts once, was vindicated in what he did, and is not afraid to go to court again.
He's unstoppable. Why would he stop? What a hero.
One point: the inspectors were never kicked out, they left of their own accord, after a lot of frustration, to be sure.
It was not in Saddam Hussein's interest to admit he had no weapons left. If he wanted to survive as a (horrible) leader, he had no choice but continue the hide-and-seek game.
All I'm saying is that everybody knew SH had no weapons left. The CIA admitted as much semi-secretly and only made up the numbers of the missing weapons so as not to give Saddam Hussein any reason to lift the embargo. Saddam Hussein knew he had no weapons left but was never going to admit it. The inspectors knew it because that's what they reported to the UN on several occasions.
Yes it was possible that the regime was hiding something but that is now very unlikely. In fact now all available Iraqi weapons scientists have been questionned by the US. The regime having fallen, I can't believe none of them would have pointed the US toward the famed cache of weapons or the hidden programme, or whatever.
*nothing* has turned up. There *are* no weapons, at least none left. If that is not proof of at least an OK job from the weapons inspectors, I don't know what it is. They themselves said, the weapons inspectors, from both the pre-1998 and the post 2002 period, that they believed that Iraq was WMD free.
The issue was that the US wanted to invade Iraq for good or for ill and needed a legal reason to invade. Again it is not permissible in international law to invade a country because one does not like the regime. So they made up the numbers, they cooked the evidence and brought the propaganda machine to the boil, and it worked very well with the American public. 100% all the way.
I am not saying that Saddam Hussein didn't need to be brought down, and that invading Iraq was not the only way to do it, but the fact is what has been presented to the American, Australian and UK public was not the truth.
He wrote the first `vi'. It's true!
Your post is not very correct. Most of the `cool utilities' under Linux are in fact GNU contributions. This starts with glibc, without which nothing would work, nearly all the traditional command line utilities such as the shell itself (bash) and stuff like ls, sed, awk, etc.
Of course then there is the basic development tools such as compilers, assemblers, linkers, etc. Good luck finding a BSD C++ compiler for example.
All of these are in constant developpment. Just to mention your remark on GCC, here is some information for you:
> Gcc is mostly done by Cygnus (redhat)
Incorrect.
The URL for GCC is still gcc.gnu.org. RedHat has little to do with GCC. They do contribute, of course, but that's all. You should remember that they released a famously broken version of GCC, gcc-2.96, for inclusion in their distribution, without approval or even prior consultation with the GCC people.
Everyone was very confused because the official GCC release at the time was 2.95 and so it looked like an upgrade, which it wasn't, let me tell you.
I'd say the relationship between GCC and Redhat became rather frosty as a result.