You may dislike the GPL but it does not qualify
as crap. Rather it is a well designed piece of
legalese to achieve some goals that you do not
agree with.
I think the oposite regarding your comparison to
donating to the red cross: people releasing BSD code
are the one being taken advantage of. It might end
up in Microsoft products even without your
knowledge, whereas Microsoft cannot legally use
GPLed code without making their software also free.
The GPL is also not a virus in the sense that it
does not propagate without the consent of the
developers.
Not true, there hasn't been any new large
oil field discovered in the last 15 years or so,
and this is not for the lack of exploration.
Russia knows how to E&P for oil. Think Siberia.
They are in the same position. I don't know about
China honestly.
There are probably still quite a bit of oil
around but it will be harder and harder to produce.
Well informed people think that oil prices will
start to rise sharply in the next 10 years or so
because demand will keep rising and production
will not be able to keep up. The hardest hit
will be the developed world, and primarily
the US.
This is not to mean that we are running out of
oil now, but that the finiteness of this resource
will start to be felt by all sooner than expected,
and I think this is a good thing, it
will reduce car usage (or at least petrol usage)
and if we are clever we can all benefit from
it (cleaner air).
There was a Scientific American article about
this last year, if my memory serves me well.
DeCSS has everything to do with copying and you know it.
You are correct if pirates were copying DVDs onto other DVDs, but in fact they are ripping DVDs using a version of DeCSS and encoding them back to CDs (or on the Internet) using the DivX codec. The marketroids are in fact quite correct in this instance, unfortunately (if you don't believe me you can do you own research, it is rather easy to find rips of current blockbusters on the net).
The point is it should be legal for owners of DVDs to be able to do that on their own collection (for archival, distribution on a home network, whatever), just like people do with MP3s.
I'm having terrible experiences with the Nvidia
closed source driver from their hardware. It does
work for 3D acceleration but it doesn't play nice
with Xinerama (dual head) and it crashes all the
time. I have a TNT2+Millenium I, a dual PIII-500
and running 7.1 with 2.4.12-ac4.
1- Linux runs fine on a 486, keep it that way
(think of schools, 3rd world and fun hardware
projects)
2- When you force people to upgrade the economy
might improve but the landfills get crowded. It's
true not just for PCs, but PCs contain
toxic materials and requires special landfills.
> [...] LaTEX, TEX [...] are very difficult to
> learn to use effectively [..] not well polished
> [...] lack well-integrated user documentation.
This is bloody ridiculous. Have you read
the TeXBook or the Lamport LaTeX book?
Knuth is also the inventor of litteral
programming. The documentation *is* the source
code (not the other way around).
I can't talk about BIND or Sendmail but you find
good GUIs for them these days (under RH for
example, try linuxconf).
> But it's not professional.
Sorry? To you professional means w/ a nice GUI,
online documentation and sold under a slick
package? Have you actually tried to learn
Visual C++ or Excel from the online documentation
or from the package manual?
To me professional means someone has put their
life work and their professional reputation
into it. Certainly TeX fits this description.
You don't need to log out to get an
8-bit visual. Assuming you are running
X on display 0, you can simply type:
% startx -- -bpp 8:1
This start *another* 8-bit display on:1. To
switch between displays you can use the
control-shift-Fn keys (on my machine, F7 for
display 0 and F8 for display 1).
I agree that it would be nice to have 8-bit pseudo
color on 24bit screen, but don't forget that
on those workstations, this facility is actually
supported in hardware. The number of 8-bit
independent pseudo-colors windows is limited
to a few (3 typically). After that colours start
to flash... Cheers.
> Although GCC has served well, it's gotten > pretty crufty over the years.
Has it? I haven't noticed myself. From my own little benchmarks, it produces better executables (in term of speed) than all the commercial compilers I've pitted it against. And it does Fortran, Java, Objective-C and even Ada. Not to mention C++. Of course it's also a cross-compiler. A feature seen in every other compilers these days, isn't it?
Crufty? I don't think so. Thank you for showing so much respect and understanding of the work of hundreds of volunteers over a couple of decades.
Qt is nice but not the only solution. If you need to do cross-platform Linux/Windows development without having to suffer too much here are some pointers based on my experience:
FLTK is very simple and fast but has its own look and feel (on the plus side Unix and Windows application look exactly the same). WxWindows is a wrapper on top of win32 and GTK+ or Motif (your choice) so is a bit slower, but the toolkit itself is a bit richer.
You can use the cygwin or the mingw32 compilers to work with FLTK on windows, which makes it really totally free, not quite as good a development environment as Linux, but close enough. WxWindows requires VC++ I believe (I'm not sure, I use the python bindings with a pre-compiled version. Very fast development cycle: http://alldunn.com/wxPython/).
Slashdot Mirror
You may dislike the GPL but it does not qualify
as crap. Rather it is a well designed piece of
legalese to achieve some goals that you do not
agree with.
I think the oposite regarding your comparison to
donating to the red cross: people releasing BSD code
are the one being taken advantage of. It might end
up in Microsoft products even without your
knowledge, whereas Microsoft cannot legally use
GPLed code without making their software also free.
The GPL is also not a virus in the sense that it
does not propagate without the consent of the
developers.
Not true, there hasn't been any new large
oil field discovered in the last 15 years or so,
and this is not for the lack of exploration.
Russia knows how to E&P for oil. Think Siberia.
They are in the same position. I don't know about
China honestly.
There are probably still quite a bit of oil
around but it will be harder and harder to produce.
Well informed people think that oil prices will
start to rise sharply in the next 10 years or so
because demand will keep rising and production
will not be able to keep up. The hardest hit
will be the developed world, and primarily
the US.
This is not to mean that we are running out of
oil now, but that the finiteness of this resource
will start to be felt by all sooner than expected,
and I think this is a good thing, it
will reduce car usage (or at least petrol usage)
and if we are clever we can all benefit from
it (cleaner air).
There was a Scientific American article about
this last year, if my memory serves me well.
Cheers
DeCSS has everything to do with copying and you know it.
You are correct if pirates were copying DVDs onto other DVDs, but in fact they are ripping DVDs using a version of DeCSS and encoding them back to CDs (or on the Internet) using the DivX codec. The marketroids are in fact quite correct in this instance, unfortunately (if you don't believe me you can do you own research, it is rather easy to find rips of current blockbusters on the net).
The point is it should be legal for owners of DVDs to be able to do that on their own collection (for archival, distribution on a home network, whatever), just like people do with MP3s.
According to my calculator, it's 362.873896 kg
I'm having terrible experiences with the Nvidia
closed source driver from their hardware. It does
work for 3D acceleration but it doesn't play nice
with Xinerama (dual head) and it crashes all the
time. I have a TNT2+Millenium I, a dual PIII-500
and running 7.1 with 2.4.12-ac4.
> 1) Use port forwarding over ssh instead of
> DISPLAY=insecure_as_hell. Please, firewall X
> (6001-6006)!
Well, if you encrypt all of your X connections that
may be the reason why you feel X is slow.
Use xauth authentication and X is not insecure
and is fast.
1- Linux runs fine on a 486, keep it that way
(think of schools, 3rd world and fun hardware
projects)
2- When you force people to upgrade the economy
might improve but the landfills get crowded. It's
true not just for PCs, but PCs contain
toxic materials and requires special landfills.
> [...] LaTEX, TEX [...] are very difficult to
> learn to use effectively [..] not well polished
> [...] lack well-integrated user documentation.
This is bloody ridiculous. Have you read
the TeXBook or the Lamport LaTeX book?
Knuth is also the inventor of litteral
programming. The documentation *is* the source
code (not the other way around).
I can't talk about BIND or Sendmail but you find
good GUIs for them these days (under RH for
example, try linuxconf).
> But it's not professional.
Sorry? To you professional means w/ a nice GUI,
online documentation and sold under a slick
package? Have you actually tried to learn
Visual C++ or Excel from the online documentation
or from the package manual?
To me professional means someone has put their
life work and their professional reputation
into it. Certainly TeX fits this description.
You don't need to log out to get an
:1
:1. To
8-bit visual. Assuming you are running
X on display 0, you can simply type:
% startx -- -bpp 8
This start *another* 8-bit display on
switch between displays you can use the
control-shift-Fn keys (on my machine, F7 for
display 0 and F8 for display 1).
I agree that it would be nice to have 8-bit pseudo
color on 24bit screen, but don't forget that
on those workstations, this facility is actually
supported in hardware. The number of 8-bit
independent pseudo-colors windows is limited
to a few (3 typically). After that colours start
to flash... Cheers.
This is the classic histogram sort algorithm,
also called `distributive sort'. The reference
is
Isaac, E. and Singleton. R (1956) `sorting
by address calculation', J. Assoc. Comp. Mach.
3, 169-174.
See also
Knuth, D. (1973) `Sorting and Searching'. The
art of computer programming. Vol 3, Addison-Wesley
ISBN 0-201-03803-X, pp: 78-80
days will be short then.
Note that if R is large and N small you are in trouble memory wise.
> Although GCC has served well, it's gotten
> pretty crufty over the years.
Has it? I haven't noticed myself. From
my own little benchmarks, it produces better
executables (in term of speed) than all the
commercial compilers I've pitted it against.
And it does Fortran, Java, Objective-C and
even Ada. Not to mention C++.
Of course it's also a cross-compiler.
A feature seen in every other compilers these
days, isn't it?
Crufty? I don't think so. Thank you for
showing so much respect and understanding of the
work of hundreds of volunteers over a couple
of decades.
Qt is nice but not the only solution. If you need to do cross-platform Linux/Windows development without having to suffer too much here are some pointers based on my experience:
I'd personally recommend FLTK: http://www.fltk.org for a nice, easy to use C++ toolkit that works flawlessly between many Unices, Linux and windows, and of course wxWindows which is now well-proven (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smar t/wxwin/).
FLTK is very simple and fast but has its own look and feel (on the plus side Unix and Windows application look exactly the same). WxWindows is a wrapper on top of win32 and GTK+ or Motif (your choice) so is a bit slower, but the toolkit itself is a bit richer.
You can use the cygwin or the mingw32 compilers to work with FLTK on windows, which makes it really totally free, not quite as good a development environment as Linux, but close enough. WxWindows requires VC++ I believe (I'm not sure, I use the python bindings with a pre-compiled version. Very fast development cycle: http://alldunn.com/wxPython/).
I hope this helps.