Much like custom vertex shaders and reconfigurable GPUs have greatly increased the capability of modern graphics cards and greatly reduced the amount of CPU cycles required for very complex real-time 3D graphics, I think that a reconfigurable logic coprocessor model has real potential to take certain computationally intensive repetitive tasks off the hands of a dedicated CPU. The problem of course is that the technology doesn't currently exist to, say, compile an arbitrary chunk of C code into a program that can run on an FPGA computer - the compiler technology is mentioned in the article as the current limiting reagent. A common understanding of how this should work needs to be developed, and rules for when it's useful, and the relationship between I/O constraints and processing speedups needs to be taken into consideration.
In general this "partitioning" process seems to be somewhat domain-specific and difficult. If you could do something like integrate into a JIT environment something that identified computationally intensive, repetitive, small-sized chunks that aren't I/O constrained, and be able to generate FPGA code on the fly, that would be tres cool.
Can anybody really explain why it's so hard to make a somewhat higher level language that can be compiled down to VHDL and combined with various chunks of library code into a specific FPGA configuration?
What's that sonny? Back when I was a boy, we didn't have printers - we copied binary off a tape, and transcribed error messages at 1 letter per minute onto clay tablets. And you would never hear us complain! No, we loved it! We were damned grateful when we got our first punch card reader....
Gaachh, kids these days, and their newfangled "printers"...
No, they are using both. Go to their web page and try reading it again. The reason they use a haiku embedded in the header is that a haiku is a known form of art, and thus is protected under copyright law. They use their service name as a trademark embedded in their header as well. That's the whole point - a two pronged legal defense against unauthorized use of their header, so if one challenge fails in court, they can use the other.
You could do this same thing with any arbitrary bit of text that is long enough to be considered a novel work under copyright law. There is nothing particuarly unique about their "SWE" haiku-containing chunk of email header text. The interesting part is that I gather they were aiming to produce something long enough to be copyrightable (the haiku is a "work of art" that is definitely protectable under copyright law) and the use of their trademarked phrases and slogans in the header pattern is protectable by trademark law.
This gives them a dual-pronged legal attack approach on anybody who uses their header without permission, which I suppose makes it easier to enforce. And, in fact, they force their own hand by including trademarked slogans, because failure to sue violators would result in possible loss of trademark rights over time.
However, the part that irks me is that according to their FAQ they have patented their "system". Their system? How the hell can you patent the use of a legal mechanism? There is no technical novelty to their spam filtering mechanism, and in fact, they provide no spam filtering themselves, you just set up Spam Assassin or other programs to account appropriately for their particular headers. I've seen plenty of other header-flagging schemes for assisting spam filtering. The novelty then is claiming both copyright and trademark to the header text? Okay, this makes me not terribly fond of this company, even though it's nice and all that they are giving royalty-free "licenses" to individuals, I am not clear that they could ever successfully prosecute a patent case against anybody else who uses header-filtering of copyrighted or trademarked text of their own choosing to fight spam. Anyone have any information on case law describing patents of legal constructs? How would that differ from trying to patent a tax shelter mechanism? If you could actually do that, don't you think KPMG et. al. would have been using patent law to protect their legal constructs all along?
This is just one of those funny, small, novel legal ideas that would be nice to generate and give away to better humanity, but is simply crazy to try to build a business around.
No, they are not "using it to pass a different impression of reality". It merely reflects that more people linked to and were interested in a definition that the author believes is banal, and which he describes as "revolution lite". Tough shit, I say.
Now there are real cases of abuse of PageRank - those abuses pretty much about to ways of piling on links to _falsely_ improve PageRank ranking. And we all agree those are bad because they don't reflect _real_ links or _real_ interest from the broader internet community. Is that happening in this case? The author of this article presents absolutely NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that it is, and in fact presents description of what I would describe as evidence to the contrary (that many blogs are linking to this article). He simple considers that illigitimate because those many blog authors share a view other than his own. How on earth does this mean that PageRank is being used to pass on an _incorrect_ impression of reality? It's certainly a "different" impression of reality as you describe it, than the one the author holds, but that doesn't make it wrong unless there was actual abuse of the system and PageRank.
No, it's just like peer review, because of course Slashdot moderators are authorities in a subject area relevant to the posts they moder.... oh wait, never mind.
Yes, but that's the whole point of PageRank. It is not a _flaw_ in PageRank. It's a feature. If more people put up webpages that link to a page, then it becomes more important in Google-land. Thus their definition, however banal you may think it is, gets priority. Tough shit. You wanted a democratic source of information, now you've got it in the web. If you prefer infofascism and centralized control of meanings and definitions, then you can find that too out there, I'm sure.
Personally, I don't get the problem here. All Google measures, and all ANY computerized searching system can measure, is what *other people* think is important. It can't measure the actual relative import of different ideas - that would be known as a strong AI problem. Now here we are critizing and whining about Google for doing its job too well. If the "other meaning" of "Second Superpower" is so fucking important, why aren't more people talking about it and linking to articles about it?
Dude, Francis Crick basically built an entire discipline, an entire branch of science. Watson made some substantial contributions to that discipline (mRNA etc.) as well. These two guys didn't just discover the double helix structure of DNA, they did tons of seminal work that set the stage for modern genomics, protein science and molecular biology.
Ya know, if I only succeed at creating one entirely new field of knowledge in life, I think I'll look back on my life as a success. Also, as a note, for the last 20 years (or more?) Francis Crick has been working on the rather different field of neurobiology and specifically, the biological origins of human consciousness. In particular, "Crick has published extensively on the neural basis of attention, REM sleep, consciousness and visual awareness" to quote his biography blurb from the Salk Institute. Perhaps it hasn't made headlines, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done other important research.
Most importantly, you don't seem to realize that the way science works is that sometimes you don't really know exactly how important something is when you are working on it. Sometimes, only in retrospect does it become clear if a piece of work is an interesting and novel phenomenon on its own, or more deeply significant, "groundbreaking" research.
There will still be an "integrated" approach possible, since the standalone mail/news client will also be semi-embeddable through the extension mechanism or some other plug-in mechanism. So for those who want their browser and mail/news reader to feel tightly integrated, that will still be a possibility. This change has more to do with changing the culture of the organization and the development process/versioning process and so on. Yes, the XPFE browser will go away, but the lighter faster components that replace it will provide as much functionality with a more modular approach. I'm sure you'll still be able to download a monolithic package with Phoenix/Minotaur/etc. all together with all the Phoenix extensions you know and love, giving you just as much breadth of functionality in one package if you want it. The key is that for those who want smaller, faster and lighter, they can have it their way too, and peaceful coexistance will be possible. And yes, the Phoenix UI is faster and more responsive than Mozilla's, and this is quite noticeable even on my older PIII 600 desktop.
The RFEs you mention, will hopefully be things that are implementable as extensions to Phoenix - this will take some of the burden of feature enhancement requests off of the Mozilla.org folks and let others develop them independently.
Exactly. And that's part of the point of this move. Rather than have a bunch of components that are part of a big nebulous project with versioning, releasing and other kinds of dependencies, where the mail/news component is the neglected step-brother of the browser component part of a big monolithic mass, roll it out into a separate standalone application, with its own user community, using a lighter-weight Phoenix-style GUI. This should combine the efforts of the Mozilla Mail/News developers, the Thunderbird project and the Minotaur project under one roof, working on a standalone mail/news component that should, if Phoenix is a useful model) be much faster and less buggy than its predecessor.
Honestly, the change is mostly cultural and social - a separate development community and process, and a dedicated user community were integral to Phoenix's success. Mozilla has been too large and faceless to really bring the user community in close touch with the developer community in the same way that happens in the Mozillazine Phoenix forums. And the development process seems less nebulous, less roadmap and process driven, and more feature and stability driven.
My only hope is that integration of Phoenix into the Mozilla main project effort doesn't kill exactly those things we love about the project, but it's good to see all those thoughts on changing cultural elements of the Mozilla.org process up in their new roadmap - a breath of fresh air indeed.
This does not look like an April Fool's joke. Thereby leaving everybody who expected the headline involving turning turkey guts into fuel oil to be a joke thoroughly stumped for clever things to say.
My guess is that the Slashdot eds thought it _was_ an April Fool's joke or they wouldn't have posted it today. If they repost it a second time within the next two hours though, we'll know it must be true.
Do the editors realize that it undermines the whole point of April Fool's Day when everything they post is a joke? Of course, this is the one day out of the year when Taco and friends actually _realize_ the stuff they are posting is BS.
Yeah, it seems to run very well, the preemption patch is fabulous, new scheduler and whatever other magic made it into 2.5. Subjectively, X feels more responsive on my older hardware (okay, it's a PIII 650 but still a generation behind the times), which is running Mandrake 9.1 with KDE 3.1 now, on the 2.5.66 kernel.
This is however still a DEVELOPMENT kernel. I put that in big letters because it's very, very true. Lots of kernel modules won't compile still. Documentation for what has changed is somewhat spotty, and it took me some time to get everything working decently. And getting a system that can boot into 2.4 or 2.5 seems quite difficult with the new modutils package (or at least I haven't gotten it working yet - have to reinstall modutils RPM if I want to boot into 2.4).
Also there's a major bug with ext3 right now in 2.5.66 - if your computer doesn't shut down cleanly, the journal recovery in 2.5 seems completely broken - I have to reboot into 2.4, let the 2.4 kernel do the journal recover, do a clean shutdown, and THEN boot back into 2.5. Pain in the ass, especially since I've had two hard crashes since I upgraded to 2.5. Also 2.5.66 doesn't compile out of the box with default config. Had to patch one file with a patch from LKML.
So in short, 2.5 may be more stable than usual devel branches, but don't delude yourself about what you are getting into. If you want the latest and greatest in performance for your desktop machine, give it a try. But I wouldn't run even a low uptime-requirement server with it yet.
I didn't believe this, and assumed it was a troll or some propaganda, but it is covered in other places, such as The Scotsman [thescotsman.co.uk].
Yes, and the coverage it gets there is quite different. A carload of Iraqi civilians rushed towards a military patrol on a bridge in the middle of the night and was mistaken for a potential car bomber or hostile vehicle. Very different from what this article insinuates - intentional killing of Iraqi women and children.
Oh come on. Nobody's going to deny that bad things happen all around, and they aren't all being shown by the American media. But you sound like a moronic Chomskyite when you start making claims that a "US patrol killed fleeing women and children". That's absurd on the face of it. Did bad things happen in Vietnam? Yes, under the stress of extended conflict, soldiers broke down psychologically and committed some real atrocities. I simply don't believe and there is no reason to believe that any such things have been done intentionally on the ground in Iraq. I have heard no such credible reports - and mind you, I don't consider Arab propaganda news sites that claim the US is intentionally targetting civilian marketplaces or using nuclear weapons in Iraq to be credible sources for anything. These are fodder for the rabid, irrational Arab street, and nobody with half a brain or a modicum of education would buy any of it.
Maybe you should stop reading so much Chomsky and come back down to reality here. We all recognize the fallibility and bias inherent to any reporting, and that most commercial American media outlets are very cautious about specific images of dead people and blown up babies they are willing to put on the screen because of how the public would perceive it. But normal people don't see conspiracies to withold information from the American public around every corner - most journalists still have basic integrity and dedication to the truth, and try to police their own bias (sources like Fox News, who embrace their bias, excluded - but even then, at least you know it's there and can filter out all the gungho patriotic fervor stuff).
Well, I respectfully disagree. I think you and I basically see eye to eye on the idea of being able to make higher-level GUI API calls, and _presumably_, also having a higher-level protocol for communications between the "client" and "server" (or application and windowing system to get away from X terminology). We are in 100% agreement that a programmer should ALWAYS make an API call that says "render string 'foo' at location bar", rather than say "retrieve font bitmap foo, now do some internal font rendering in client, transmit back bitmap baz to server..." or whatever the hell goes in with the old school X infrastructure.
XRender seemed to greatly improve font output quality in X. And I understand it, XRender and the Xft extensions basically do exactly what we both agree should have been done. In other words, it's already there. For example, Xft has the API call:
void XftDrawStringUtf8 (XftDraw *d, XftColor *color, XftFont *font, int x, int y, XftChar8 *string, int len);
Clearly this DOES let you draw a UTF-8 string on a button pretty damned easily. Now where we disagree is whether this is "good enough". I judge this based on opening up my KDE desktop and looking at the apps that I want to use. Evolution (which is better than Kmail), Phoenix, OpenOffice - shit, these are all Gtk applications. Oh wait, you mean Gtk apps don't look right with my KDE desktop? Separate themes, different theming functions (which I can't for the life of me figure out how to access without having Gnome on my machine). This is a nightmare.
Face it. Windows at least strongly suggests policy for everything. You can always go and roll your own in Windows too. But all the normal desktop apps have consistent colors, toolbar structure, use the same fonts, render them through the same system, and so on. If everybody used Gtk or if everybody used Qt, I suppose there wouldn't be a problem, but they don't. I don't like people "innovating" with new GUI toolkits. If you need to create a custom widget for a specific app, fine, but I want one set of menus, one set of text drawing functions, etc.
Perhaps it could be solved by a common theming system and some basic shared libraries that are developed cooperatively between Qt and Gtk so that they can still "innovate" separately all they want, but keep some of these basic functions consistent to guarantee a common look and feel without having to play ridiculous games looking for themes like BlueCurve specifically designed to look alike on both systems.
I really recommend doing a full upgrade to 9.1 then. It uses the latest FreeType, comes with a pre-rolled Xft-enabled Mozilla 1.3, XFree86 4.3, and you can get all the addons (hacked FreeType with "patent-be-damned" features enabled, MSFonts RPM, etc.) from Texstar's RPM archive (which you can add easily to your urpmi media list for dumb-easy updating).
All the "clipped font rendering" issues (like your clipped S and so forth) that I had with my older Mandrake 9 installation are finally gone with my current 9.1 install, and I finally feel comfortable enough looking at the fonts that I can imagine using this desktop a significant part of my day. And some of the KDE 3.1.1 styles (like liquid) have some truly slick eye candy to them. The big problem remaining here is X's window redraw speed when you move windows around and the like. Some have claimed that the 2.5.x Linux kernels fix this with some changes to timing or interrupt parameters to make a more "desktop-friendly" kernel (like that magic constant you used to be able to tweak in the kernel to get a much more responsive desktop). Of course, the distros should have been doing this all along to make a real out-of-the-box desktop GUI experience that works and feels qualitatively fast on all modern hardware. Until they get that working, Linux just ain't going to be ready for the desktop.
I wish I could show you a screenshot of my current KDE 3.1 desktop on Mandrake 9.1 with the Liquid Style. Perhaps Liquid is a bit too much of an OS X knockoff for my tastes, but the effects and eye candy (real menu transparency, etc.) are beautiful, and the font rendering (using the MSFonts pack from texstar, again, you have to go to texstar to get the good addons for Mandrake), it looks great. And I didn't do any nose-to-the-monitor tweaking, I just added two or three RPMs from texstar to a stock Mandrake 9.1 distro (and installed the NVidia binary drivers), and this desktop looks great.
And my primary desktop system is a Windows XP box, with a Viewsonic VA800 17.4" LCD screen, so I definitely appreciate the quality of font rendering in WinXP fully, but I'm amazed by what a good job this Linux box is doing, even looking at it side-by-side with my WinXP box.
I generally agree with you on the X sucks ass front, but a lot of this is the fault of the distros that fail to package things together nicely. I agree, the X infrastructure _should_ be replaced, and while I admire Keith's efforts to fix it in the short term, I think a real architectural rethinking is necessary (which is what I suggested in my post). The problem is the XFree86 group seems hopelessly attached to a shitty codebase, and a dying window system architecture based on the fundamentally wrong idea of separating "policy" from everything else (sorry, I know some people don't like it when this gets said, but it's true - Windows is a very successful desktop OS, as is Mac OS (relative to Linux) and they both do lots of policy dictation. In fact, the biggest criticism of Windows that keeps Mac users on their Mac hardware is that there isn't enough policy dictation in Windows.
Despite all of this, I encourage you to check out Mandrake 9.1, and pop in the texstar RPMs (which should be part of the standard distro). The Liquid Style running in KDE 3.1 on Mandrake 9.1 looks truly beautiful, comparable in eye candy quality to Windows and OS X, and this setup performs pretty well on my old PIII 700 with an old school GeForce 256. Of course, the X window repainting is still frustratingly slower than it is on Windows with similar amounts of eye candy, even on the same hardware, and that shouldn't be an issue with even this level of hardware, though it's not TERRIBLE with the Nvidia binary drivers.
This isn't quite so true anymore. The font rendering on a modern distro (I'm using Mandrake 9.1 right now) looks comparable to or better than the font rendering on my Windows box. At least, when it's using _good_ True Type fonts, anti-aliasing, hinting, and so forth enabled in FreeType. I've seen some intermittent kerning problems in slightly older versions of FreeType (like in Mandrake 9), but these appear to be largely resolved now. For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.
That being said, there is still a mess behind the scenes with font rendering. These non-TrueType legacy fonts sitting around should just go away. The frustration that sometimes, mystically, some fonts get anti-aliased and some don't - this isn't something end-users should have to deal with (and to the credit of the Mandrake people, I haven't yet seen any of these problems with the default fontconfig in 9.1). The real problem is the mixing together of all the "legacy" X11 fonts for old school X Windows apps with new TrueType fonts used in modern XRender/Xft apps. This creates a font management nightmare. What's worse is none of the font management programs make all this stuff crystal clear and usable, even for an experienced user.
So yes, font management is still a big thorn in the side of the X Window System, though it's much better now than it used to be, with Xft/XRender. I don't really see why we would do anything other than A) incrementally improve those and B) make the old rendering system OPTIONAL and try to get everything in modern Linux distros ported over to used the new X rendering infrastructure.
Rather than writing new font management subsystems for X, perhaps we should look for the longer term to alternatives to X, architectures that are cleaner for a desktop environment, where we can provide source-level compatibility for Qt and Gtk apps, and make the old X protocol a strap-on (like running an X server on a Windows box, or on Mac OS X), so that people who need to run legacy X apps can still do so, but that those who want a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-use desktop environment can get it.
No, don't "move bad programmers into management". You are paritally on target with your other points, probably because you understand how programming and the engineering process in general works (like you said, the hardware guys have understood this for years).
Management needs to be smart enough to understand how programmers do their work. The idea that people directly managing programmers should be awful programmers with little experience is a wretched idea. And certainly, don't reward bad programmers by promoting them - find a task they add value to in the organization, or get rid of them, period. If they exhibit _talent_ at management (they enjoy mentoring, they have good people skills, they seem organized and disciplined, put together good documentation, and relate well to non-technical people) THEN promote them into management roles. Don't do it to get them out of programming, do it because they add more value (and presumably want to) be managing people.
Furthermore, you're point about good programmers not being forced to mentor inexperienced programmers is an iffy point. Sometimes it's helpful, to a certain extent, to get a new member of a team up to speed sooner. A good programmer, of course, doesn't really need much mentoring, they can pick up code, read it, and get themselves up to speed (and these are the people you REALLY want on your team). But most average programmers need help, especially when they are coming in to a project already underway or a large existing codebase. I agree wholeheartedly that if your best programmers spend all their time mentoring, they spend none of their time programming which is very bad. This is why ideally you won't try to grow a team with too many inexperienced people mid-project - never more than 1 inexperienced person for each 2 experienced folks at a time, until that inexperienced person has been brought up to speed (i.e. requires little to no "active mentoring" to work effectively on the tasks deemed to be on target for their programming skills).
Anyway, these are some of my experiences and rules of thumb. Take em or leave em.
Given that much of what you are suggesting sounds similar to what I think Keith wants to do, why not join forces with him? Either inside or outside the current XFree86 team, it matters not to me or to anyone else. If the current team won't adapt to the needs of the product going forward, then fuck em. I agree with most of your recommendations, by the way, and when I toyed with some of this stuff a while back my conclusion was it would be easier to make a windowing system from scratch, adding onto DirectFB as a base (a comprehensible, well-organized codebase) rather than trying to refactor and fix the XFree86 codebase (jumpin' jeeeeeebus, what a mess).
Basically, X has become pretty irrelevant for Linux on the desktop. I mean, today, it's necessary, but in the future, anything that has a working backend for Qt and Gtk is a viable starting point, since it's source level compatible out of the box with the vast majority of modern Unix desktop apps. Whether it's a kludge or thunk layer doesn't matter to me, I just want those apps to work now, and a "one true way" to build apps for the future (a native toolkit integrated into the windowing system). The separation of policy from rendering and window management was a nice experiment, but it results in so much added complexity, with so few benefits. I think a reasonable skinning mechanism and the ability to create custom windows with custom features for "exception conditions" is really all you need to satisfy all the desktop apps requirements.
This is bullshit. Did you attend Harvard? No? Oh, I see. You're making unsubstantiated claims.
It is still possible today at Harvard to graduate cum laude with mediocre grades, if you have a very strong thesis. Honors determinations are largely made on a department-by-department basis (there are University-wide baseline grade standards, but generally the departmental determinations are what matters, since the baseline University standard is a low-B average minimum for honors). In some departments, the thesis is weighted quite heavily, in others, not as much so. In some, they take the LESSER honors-level recommendation of both (if you had summa grades but a cum laude thesis, you only graduate cum laude).
In any case, cum laude really only means you graduated in the top 30%-40% of your class at Harvard. Magna cum laude implies you were in the top 10-20%, and summa cum laude implies you were in the top 2-3%.
Are there easy majors at Harvard? Of course, just like at the vast majority of schools. If you want to just say you have the degree, it's not too hard. And government ain't one of the harder ones, it's true. But don't discredit the institution based on that or the graduates from it - that would be the equivalent of me discrediting Michigan State graduates based on the fact that a moron got a degree in "Communications" there. I graduated in physics, magna cum laude, from Harvard, and I assure you it was no cakewalk.
We are about to invade Iraq, and all we can talk about is who sells Red Hat and who uses Yellow Dog. I mean, there is a time and place for all things. But really, maybe we should all collectively tune in to CNN and keep track of the world around us as events unfold before our eyes. Good, bad, or indifferent, it's happening, it's big news, and we should keep track of the things that really matter.
And while I don't exactly support the idea of preemptive attacks on pseudo-rogue nations that have no proven ability or desire to strike out at us or our allies currently, it's comforting to know that we have a military capable of neutralizing serious foreign threats.
It would be even more comforting if we had a President who knew how to cooperate on the world stage, to use the tools of diplomacy and foreign policy to avoid the wars that put young men and women's lives on the line. These men and women of the same age group as the many Slashdot readers. Men and women with sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. We should support our troops as individuals, brave people willing to die defending their country and ideals, even if they, like us, don't always agree with the ideals or policies of our leaders.
But at the same time, we can't forget that our President is a loose cannon, putting the stability and safety of our world on the line with a risky gamble, based on questionable evidence and questionable policies, that may lead us down the path to further war and conflict in other regions around the globe.
Slashdot Mirror
In general this "partitioning" process seems to be somewhat domain-specific and difficult. If you could do something like integrate into a JIT environment something that identified computationally intensive, repetitive, small-sized chunks that aren't I/O constrained, and be able to generate FPGA code on the fly, that would be tres cool.
Can anybody really explain why it's so hard to make a somewhat higher level language that can be compiled down to VHDL and combined with various chunks of library code into a specific FPGA configuration?
Gaachh, kids these days, and their newfangled "printers"...
No, they are using both. Go to their web page and try reading it again. The reason they use a haiku embedded in the header is that a haiku is a known form of art, and thus is protected under copyright law. They use their service name as a trademark embedded in their header as well. That's the whole point - a two pronged legal defense against unauthorized use of their header, so if one challenge fails in court, they can use the other.
This gives them a dual-pronged legal attack approach on anybody who uses their header without permission, which I suppose makes it easier to enforce. And, in fact, they force their own hand by including trademarked slogans, because failure to sue violators would result in possible loss of trademark rights over time.
However, the part that irks me is that according to their FAQ they have patented their "system". Their system? How the hell can you patent the use of a legal mechanism? There is no technical novelty to their spam filtering mechanism, and in fact, they provide no spam filtering themselves, you just set up Spam Assassin or other programs to account appropriately for their particular headers. I've seen plenty of other header-flagging schemes for assisting spam filtering. The novelty then is claiming both copyright and trademark to the header text? Okay, this makes me not terribly fond of this company, even though it's nice and all that they are giving royalty-free "licenses" to individuals, I am not clear that they could ever successfully prosecute a patent case against anybody else who uses header-filtering of copyrighted or trademarked text of their own choosing to fight spam. Anyone have any information on case law describing patents of legal constructs? How would that differ from trying to patent a tax shelter mechanism? If you could actually do that, don't you think KPMG et. al. would have been using patent law to protect their legal constructs all along?
This is just one of those funny, small, novel legal ideas that would be nice to generate and give away to better humanity, but is simply crazy to try to build a business around.
Now there are real cases of abuse of PageRank - those abuses pretty much about to ways of piling on links to _falsely_ improve PageRank ranking. And we all agree those are bad because they don't reflect _real_ links or _real_ interest from the broader internet community. Is that happening in this case? The author of this article presents absolutely NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that it is, and in fact presents description of what I would describe as evidence to the contrary (that many blogs are linking to this article). He simple considers that illigitimate because those many blog authors share a view other than his own. How on earth does this mean that PageRank is being used to pass on an _incorrect_ impression of reality? It's certainly a "different" impression of reality as you describe it, than the one the author holds, but that doesn't make it wrong unless there was actual abuse of the system and PageRank.
No, it's just like peer review, because of course Slashdot moderators are authorities in a subject area relevant to the posts they moder.... oh wait, never mind.
Personally, I don't get the problem here. All Google measures, and all ANY computerized searching system can measure, is what *other people* think is important. It can't measure the actual relative import of different ideas - that would be known as a strong AI problem. Now here we are critizing and whining about Google for doing its job too well. If the "other meaning" of "Second Superpower" is so fucking important, why aren't more people talking about it and linking to articles about it?
Ya know, if I only succeed at creating one entirely new field of knowledge in life, I think I'll look back on my life as a success. Also, as a note, for the last 20 years (or more?) Francis Crick has been working on the rather different field of neurobiology and specifically, the biological origins of human consciousness. In particular, "Crick has published extensively on the neural basis of attention, REM sleep, consciousness and visual awareness" to quote his biography blurb from the Salk Institute. Perhaps it hasn't made headlines, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done other important research.
Most importantly, you don't seem to realize that the way science works is that sometimes you don't really know exactly how important something is when you are working on it. Sometimes, only in retrospect does it become clear if a piece of work is an interesting and novel phenomenon on its own, or more deeply significant, "groundbreaking" research.
The RFEs you mention, will hopefully be things that are implementable as extensions to Phoenix - this will take some of the burden of feature enhancement requests off of the Mozilla.org folks and let others develop them independently.
Honestly, the change is mostly cultural and social - a separate development community and process, and a dedicated user community were integral to Phoenix's success. Mozilla has been too large and faceless to really bring the user community in close touch with the developer community in the same way that happens in the Mozillazine Phoenix forums. And the development process seems less nebulous, less roadmap and process driven, and more feature and stability driven.
My only hope is that integration of Phoenix into the Mozilla main project effort doesn't kill exactly those things we love about the project, but it's good to see all those thoughts on changing cultural elements of the Mozilla.org process up in their new roadmap - a breath of fresh air indeed.
My guess is that the Slashdot eds thought it _was_ an April Fool's joke or they wouldn't have posted it today. If they repost it a second time within the next two hours though, we'll know it must be true.
I'll be happily browing the web with Phallus 0.7 on my Enlightenment 1.0 setup any minute now!
Do the editors realize that it undermines the whole point of April Fool's Day when everything they post is a joke? Of course, this is the one day out of the year when Taco and friends actually _realize_ the stuff they are posting is BS.
This is however still a DEVELOPMENT kernel. I put that in big letters because it's very, very true. Lots of kernel modules won't compile still. Documentation for what has changed is somewhat spotty, and it took me some time to get everything working decently. And getting a system that can boot into 2.4 or 2.5 seems quite difficult with the new modutils package (or at least I haven't gotten it working yet - have to reinstall modutils RPM if I want to boot into 2.4).
Also there's a major bug with ext3 right now in 2.5.66 - if your computer doesn't shut down cleanly, the journal recovery in 2.5 seems completely broken - I have to reboot into 2.4, let the 2.4 kernel do the journal recover, do a clean shutdown, and THEN boot back into 2.5. Pain in the ass, especially since I've had two hard crashes since I upgraded to 2.5. Also 2.5.66 doesn't compile out of the box with default config. Had to patch one file with a patch from LKML.
So in short, 2.5 may be more stable than usual devel branches, but don't delude yourself about what you are getting into. If you want the latest and greatest in performance for your desktop machine, give it a try. But I wouldn't run even a low uptime-requirement server with it yet.
Yes, and the coverage it gets there is quite different. A carload of Iraqi civilians rushed towards a military patrol on a bridge in the middle of the night and was mistaken for a potential car bomber or hostile vehicle. Very different from what this article insinuates - intentional killing of Iraqi women and children.
Maybe you should stop reading so much Chomsky and come back down to reality here. We all recognize the fallibility and bias inherent to any reporting, and that most commercial American media outlets are very cautious about specific images of dead people and blown up babies they are willing to put on the screen because of how the public would perceive it. But normal people don't see conspiracies to withold information from the American public around every corner - most journalists still have basic integrity and dedication to the truth, and try to police their own bias (sources like Fox News, who embrace their bias, excluded - but even then, at least you know it's there and can filter out all the gungho patriotic fervor stuff).
XRender seemed to greatly improve font output quality in X. And I understand it, XRender and the Xft extensions basically do exactly what we both agree should have been done. In other words, it's already there. For example, Xft has the API call:
void XftDrawStringUtf8 (XftDraw *d, XftColor *color, XftFont *font, int x, int y, XftChar8 *string, int len);
Clearly this DOES let you draw a UTF-8 string on a button pretty damned easily. Now where we disagree is whether this is "good enough". I judge this based on opening up my KDE desktop and looking at the apps that I want to use. Evolution (which is better than Kmail), Phoenix, OpenOffice - shit, these are all Gtk applications. Oh wait, you mean Gtk apps don't look right with my KDE desktop? Separate themes, different theming functions (which I can't for the life of me figure out how to access without having Gnome on my machine). This is a nightmare.
Face it. Windows at least strongly suggests policy for everything. You can always go and roll your own in Windows too. But all the normal desktop apps have consistent colors, toolbar structure, use the same fonts, render them through the same system, and so on. If everybody used Gtk or if everybody used Qt, I suppose there wouldn't be a problem, but they don't. I don't like people "innovating" with new GUI toolkits. If you need to create a custom widget for a specific app, fine, but I want one set of menus, one set of text drawing functions, etc.
Perhaps it could be solved by a common theming system and some basic shared libraries that are developed cooperatively between Qt and Gtk so that they can still "innovate" separately all they want, but keep some of these basic functions consistent to guarantee a common look and feel without having to play ridiculous games looking for themes like BlueCurve specifically designed to look alike on both systems.
All the "clipped font rendering" issues (like your clipped S and so forth) that I had with my older Mandrake 9 installation are finally gone with my current 9.1 install, and I finally feel comfortable enough looking at the fonts that I can imagine using this desktop a significant part of my day. And some of the KDE 3.1.1 styles (like liquid) have some truly slick eye candy to them. The big problem remaining here is X's window redraw speed when you move windows around and the like. Some have claimed that the 2.5.x Linux kernels fix this with some changes to timing or interrupt parameters to make a more "desktop-friendly" kernel (like that magic constant you used to be able to tweak in the kernel to get a much more responsive desktop). Of course, the distros should have been doing this all along to make a real out-of-the-box desktop GUI experience that works and feels qualitatively fast on all modern hardware. Until they get that working, Linux just ain't going to be ready for the desktop.
And my primary desktop system is a Windows XP box, with a Viewsonic VA800 17.4" LCD screen, so I definitely appreciate the quality of font rendering in WinXP fully, but I'm amazed by what a good job this Linux box is doing, even looking at it side-by-side with my WinXP box.
Despite all of this, I encourage you to check out Mandrake 9.1, and pop in the texstar RPMs (which should be part of the standard distro). The Liquid Style running in KDE 3.1 on Mandrake 9.1 looks truly beautiful, comparable in eye candy quality to Windows and OS X, and this setup performs pretty well on my old PIII 700 with an old school GeForce 256. Of course, the X window repainting is still frustratingly slower than it is on Windows with similar amounts of eye candy, even on the same hardware, and that shouldn't be an issue with even this level of hardware, though it's not TERRIBLE with the Nvidia binary drivers.
That being said, there is still a mess behind the scenes with font rendering. These non-TrueType legacy fonts sitting around should just go away. The frustration that sometimes, mystically, some fonts get anti-aliased and some don't - this isn't something end-users should have to deal with (and to the credit of the Mandrake people, I haven't yet seen any of these problems with the default fontconfig in 9.1). The real problem is the mixing together of all the "legacy" X11 fonts for old school X Windows apps with new TrueType fonts used in modern XRender/Xft apps. This creates a font management nightmare. What's worse is none of the font management programs make all this stuff crystal clear and usable, even for an experienced user.
So yes, font management is still a big thorn in the side of the X Window System, though it's much better now than it used to be, with Xft/XRender. I don't really see why we would do anything other than A) incrementally improve those and B) make the old rendering system OPTIONAL and try to get everything in modern Linux distros ported over to used the new X rendering infrastructure.
Rather than writing new font management subsystems for X, perhaps we should look for the longer term to alternatives to X, architectures that are cleaner for a desktop environment, where we can provide source-level compatibility for Qt and Gtk apps, and make the old X protocol a strap-on (like running an X server on a Windows box, or on Mac OS X), so that people who need to run legacy X apps can still do so, but that those who want a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-use desktop environment can get it.
Management needs to be smart enough to understand how programmers do their work. The idea that people directly managing programmers should be awful programmers with little experience is a wretched idea. And certainly, don't reward bad programmers by promoting them - find a task they add value to in the organization, or get rid of them, period. If they exhibit _talent_ at management (they enjoy mentoring, they have good people skills, they seem organized and disciplined, put together good documentation, and relate well to non-technical people) THEN promote them into management roles. Don't do it to get them out of programming, do it because they add more value (and presumably want to) be managing people.
Furthermore, you're point about good programmers not being forced to mentor inexperienced programmers is an iffy point. Sometimes it's helpful, to a certain extent, to get a new member of a team up to speed sooner. A good programmer, of course, doesn't really need much mentoring, they can pick up code, read it, and get themselves up to speed (and these are the people you REALLY want on your team). But most average programmers need help, especially when they are coming in to a project already underway or a large existing codebase. I agree wholeheartedly that if your best programmers spend all their time mentoring, they spend none of their time programming which is very bad. This is why ideally you won't try to grow a team with too many inexperienced people mid-project - never more than 1 inexperienced person for each 2 experienced folks at a time, until that inexperienced person has been brought up to speed (i.e. requires little to no "active mentoring" to work effectively on the tasks deemed to be on target for their programming skills).
Anyway, these are some of my experiences and rules of thumb. Take em or leave em.
Basically, X has become pretty irrelevant for Linux on the desktop. I mean, today, it's necessary, but in the future, anything that has a working backend for Qt and Gtk is a viable starting point, since it's source level compatible out of the box with the vast majority of modern Unix desktop apps. Whether it's a kludge or thunk layer doesn't matter to me, I just want those apps to work now, and a "one true way" to build apps for the future (a native toolkit integrated into the windowing system). The separation of policy from rendering and window management was a nice experiment, but it results in so much added complexity, with so few benefits. I think a reasonable skinning mechanism and the ability to create custom windows with custom features for "exception conditions" is really all you need to satisfy all the desktop apps requirements.
It is still possible today at Harvard to graduate cum laude with mediocre grades, if you have a very strong thesis. Honors determinations are largely made on a department-by-department basis (there are University-wide baseline grade standards, but generally the departmental determinations are what matters, since the baseline University standard is a low-B average minimum for honors). In some departments, the thesis is weighted quite heavily, in others, not as much so. In some, they take the LESSER honors-level recommendation of both (if you had summa grades but a cum laude thesis, you only graduate cum laude).
In any case, cum laude really only means you graduated in the top 30%-40% of your class at Harvard. Magna cum laude implies you were in the top 10-20%, and summa cum laude implies you were in the top 2-3%.
Are there easy majors at Harvard? Of course, just like at the vast majority of schools. If you want to just say you have the degree, it's not too hard. And government ain't one of the harder ones, it's true. But don't discredit the institution based on that or the graduates from it - that would be the equivalent of me discrediting Michigan State graduates based on the fact that a moron got a degree in "Communications" there. I graduated in physics, magna cum laude, from Harvard, and I assure you it was no cakewalk.
And while I don't exactly support the idea of preemptive attacks on pseudo-rogue nations that have no proven ability or desire to strike out at us or our allies currently, it's comforting to know that we have a military capable of neutralizing serious foreign threats.
It would be even more comforting if we had a President who knew how to cooperate on the world stage, to use the tools of diplomacy and foreign policy to avoid the wars that put young men and women's lives on the line. These men and women of the same age group as the many Slashdot readers. Men and women with sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. We should support our troops as individuals, brave people willing to die defending their country and ideals, even if they, like us, don't always agree with the ideals or policies of our leaders.
But at the same time, we can't forget that our President is a loose cannon, putting the stability and safety of our world on the line with a risky gamble, based on questionable evidence and questionable policies, that may lead us down the path to further war and conflict in other regions around the globe.