Firefox 3 relies on the Cairo (svg) and Pango (typesetting) libraries, which are included with and used by newer versions of the GTK (I thought it was >= 2.8, but meh). Especially when using older linux systems (like RHEL4) to which you do not have root access, trying to build all of the updated libraries in a little bottle just to run firefox 3 is a pretty tall order. IIRC, when I tried, I had to start at glibc and work my way up - I never did get it to work properly.
I use neither firefox nor windows, so I don't know for sure, but wouldn't the automatic updater have upgraded most of those people to Firefox 3 when it was released?
If that is the case, then the only people impacted by this would be those who deliberately refused the upgrade.
As I understand it, these ratings are, in large part, a way to help environmentally conscious consumers buy green products. By not disclosing that information, they make this impossible for consumers to do accurately. Reducing their scores for not cooperating is about the only means they have to pressure the companies into being more consumer-frieldny in this matter. While it may be flawed as a study, it functions correctly as a guide to buying products you know to be environmentally-friendly.
Think if it a different way: If you showed up for a university exam or a job interview, and refused to disclose what you knew about the subject in question, wouldn't *you* expect to get low marks, too? If you in fact knew a great deal about the subject, you could claim that the exam/interview was a flawed study, but the fact of the matter is that you refused to participate, and in this case you don't get the benefit of the doubt.
I think you may have the Giga/Gibi lables confused. Depending on your definition of Gigabyte, Gigabytes are either the same size or smaller than Gibibytes
A Gibibyte is 2^30 (1,073,741,824) bytes. This is the only definition that exists for this term. A Gigabyte traditionally also means 2^30 bytes, however 'Giga' is actually a base-10 prefix for 1000^3 (as used in the metric system), and therefore has a second menaing of 1,000,000,000 bytes (slightly less than 2^30 bytes).
Hard drive makers were quick to jump on the fact that they could advertise their drives as larger than they were by exploiting this double definition. If anything, what we should want is for hard drives to actually by labeled in Gibibytes to remove the manufacturer's ability to short-change customers.
Since gigabytes are the same or smaller than gibibytes, claiming that it can hold 10 x 25 Gigabyte movies gives us no guarantee that it will be properly, non-deceptively labeled.
This is somethat that a lot of people tend to overlook, either because they don't understand how a hard drive works, or because they don't stop and think about it. Loading programmes, especially ones which rely on libraries, translation files, multimedia, etc... at other locations on a disk would greatly slow down a HDD in comparison to an SSD.
Contrasted with SSDs, which are pretty much random access devices, in order to read each of those files from an HDD, there are basically 3 time factors to consider.
1. Seek time. The time it takes to move a reader head to a specific track (ring of data on a platter). Assuming that there is only this read taking place, you can pretty much assume that the reader head moves from its current location to the correct spot on the disk right away. Things are not always this pretty, though.
2. Rotation time. On average, you will have to wait half a rotation for the correct spot on the disk to spin around to the reader heads. There may be algorithms designed to mitigate this by reading even as it waits. In case the read is large enough to span a significant portion of the track, it can append that buffered data later, but I don't know if this is done or not.
3. Read time. This is the amount of time required to read the data off of a single track, and can take up to 1 rotation of the platter to complete.
So while the GP has a point in that people need to be careful about what kinds of statistics they believe, he/she glosses over the fact that reading a single piece of data with an HDD is hardly a random access, constant time operation (or linear time for n pieces of data).
Its not as if real money is any more tangible when its sitting in a bank account.
Are things like wow gold really anything more than the electronic equivalent of gift certificates nowadays or banks that printed their own bank notes way back when? Surely the theft of either of those would be taken seriously - I don't see why this should be any different.
Every time that a new software bug or vulnerability is uncovered, I feel better and better about my choice to stick with an abacus instead of using these computer things.
Yes, it would be convenient to have it in my home or office, but you never know when some giant glaring exploit is going to appear and leave you open to pwnage due to some software company drinking a cold frosty can of fail.
Wait for the verdict about Apple and Psystar then a couple of days later you'll see morons suing Sony and Microsoft because they want Halo for their PS3.
But that isn't an analogous case. An analogous case to Psystar's actions would be if someone started making an "XBox 360 Compatible" console (ie roughly same hardware specs), and preloaded it with a copy of the XBox360 OS that you can buy separately in a retail store. The end result being that you can run XBox360 games on this clone-a-console machine.
My above example (which IMHO is more representative of the situation than yours was) sounds more like what Compaq did to IBM, resulting in the open IBM-Compatible PC market than like people suing software makers for not porting their products to completely different hardware platforms and OS APIs.
The question then becomes: Given that there is no reason why these games couldn't run on the XBox360 Clone with no extra effort from anyone, is Microsoft (as the XBox360 OS creator) allowed to tell the clone maker that they cannot do certain things with a copy of the XBox360 OS that they bought, including bundling and reselling it? Knowing that the XBox360 OS is the only way to run XBox 360 games, is there any legitimate reason that XBox360 games should only be allowed to run on XBox360 hardware, if running them on a clone is just as easy?
In this case, it isn't much of an issue since, AFAIK, Microsoft doesn't sell the OS independently of the hardware. But Apple does. That's how Psystar got legitimate copies of it.
Apple has already replied to Psystar's idiotic "monopoly" arguments, citing about a dozen cases that say absolutely clearly a single product of a company cannot possibly constitute a meaningful "market", and therefore Apple cannot have a meaningful monopoly in the non-existing market of "MacOS X compatible computers".
What about computers that are able to run Mac OS X applications? Clearly, there is more than just the one of them, and Apple hardware is the only EULA compliant way to use any applications which are not open source or cross-platform.
Can Apple have a meaningful monopoly in the market of "Mac OS X Application compatible computers"?
I can't count the number of times my ass has been saved by being able to boot my powerbook/ibook/macbook as a firewire drive.
The original comment was about using Target Disk Mode to recover files off of a computer's hard drive. There is no reason why a LiveCD wouldn't work. Linux is able to read the contents of a mac hd just fine, and in this context, there is no need to run os x executables just to handle data recovery. And its not like a liveCD is incapable of having more tools installed on it while its running - the package manager (or manual installation) can still install the kinds of tools you would want for data recovery.
As for things like installing from DVD on a CD-only machine from another machine with a DVD reader, it sounds like the kind of thing that networking would be able to handle nowadays. I don't know macs that well, but it would be pretty trivial on linux at least.
I'm a big FLOSS fan, and I think that MS is being pretty underhanded here, but the problem here is that, like "open source", "organic" has a pretty vague meaning in general.
Here's another valid definition of "Organic":
Of or pertaining to compounds which are
derivatives of hydrocarbons; pertaining to, or denoting,
any one of a large series of carbon-containing compounds
which are related to the carbon compounds produced by
biological processes (such as methane, oils, fats, sugars,
alcohols, ethers, proteins, etc.) and include many
substances of artificial production which may or may not
occur in animals or plants; -- contrasted with
inorganic.
[1913 Webster +PJC]
"Organic" is being used to imply a kind of purity of origin, but that is hardly its only meaning. Organic chemistry, for example, is probably using a definition of organic that is closer to the one above than the one used to label packages of spinach.
In the same way, "Open Source" has the implication of Free/Libre software in it, but it is never explicitly stated. When someone else starts using another valid interpretation of the phrase, they may be sneaky and unscrupulous, but IMHO, its really the fault of the original promoter for not choosing a better label. They should have seen it coming.
KDE is dysfunctional, overwhelms me with options, looks like shit (well, that can be themed, but...) and just generally sucks.
If Gnome had been chosen instead and as much time had been spent on polishing Gnome as Mandrake/Mandriva has spent on polishing KDE, we would not have this discussion.... Mandriva (i.e. Gmandriva) would already rule the desktop.
Sadly, I see more and more development time wasted on supporting / trying to polish KDE into something usable instead of just throwing the towel into the ring and going with Gnome.
====
Sorry if this offends your sensabilities, but I just couldn't resist, and I think that is pretty much sums up the silly debate between KDE and Gnome users who are both happy with their own choices.
We use this exact pen and paper system in Canada, and TV stations are usually able to make a pretty good prediction by midnight as to who will win. The next morning, the newspaper headlines almost always confirm what the tv stations were predicting the night before.
I guess it's just a coincidence (or crazy random happenstance - DrHorrible) that both marriage and procreation require a man and woman. What are the chances of that?
Mixed doubles require a man and a woman, too. Maybe that's where babies come from.
Yes, marriage and family are related, but why does it have to be a strictly traditional family. Maybe its two men who want to adopt a child, or use a surrogate, or two women and a sperm donor.
If marriage is just about procreation, then we'd best keep all the sterile people from getting married. Not to mention those sixty-something people remarrying after losing their partner. Once women have gone through "the change", they shouldn't be allowed to get married anymore.
Marriage is related to procreation in the same way that sexual desire or love is. Sure, procreation was probably its original motivator, but its not a direct correlation, and it's not limited to its original scope, If it were, homosexuals wouldn't want to get married. It's like being attracted to someone sterile. Sexual attraction is about procreation, so should you stop loving them because you can never have a child? That homosexuals do fall in love, experience sexual attraction, and want to marry is perhaps a sign that they are all now something more than just a way to tether a father-provider to a mother-nurturer.
This was said in jest, but if your city's busses are good enough to include bike racks, and you are able to find a bus route that will take you close to where you work, you can take the bike with you, and just bike home.
It plucks the main menu (File, Edit, View,...) out of application windows and displays in in the panel in an applet. The result is a menu bar in the same location as on os x.
Ideally, the number of threads a program uses should be no more than the number of processors available. Otherwise, you are wasting time context switching instead of processing.
An exception to this kind of rule should really be made for graphical user interfaces. In the case of GUI applications, time wasted in context switching is less important than keeping the UI responsive and the user happy.
Any kind of heavy lifting (IO-blocking or otherwise) should really be done on a different thread than the one that is responsible for handling the user interface. This allows the user interface to stay responsive, providing the user with feedback (progress bar, time estimate, reassurance that the programme hasn't locked up, etc...) and the ability to cancel the work in progress.
Sometimes you can modify the resource intense code to play nice with a GUI by working in chunks, but usually this is, IMHO, the wrong approach, since it means changing the logic/implementation of a programme to cater to a specific UI.
Nonsense. KHTML is LGPL. Apple could have used the libraries without contributing anything back.
Apple couldn't have used the KHTML library without giving back because KHTML uses QT specifically for it's widgets. I suppose they technically could have, but not practically. The only options apple really had were:
1. Not to use KHTML at all 2. Use QT widgets in their browser. They would never do this. 3. Modify (and distribute) a modified version that handles other types of widgets
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3 relies on the Cairo (svg) and Pango (typesetting) libraries, which are included with and used by newer versions of the GTK (I thought it was >= 2.8, but meh). Especially when using older linux systems (like RHEL4) to which you do not have root access, trying to build all of the updated libraries in a little bottle just to run firefox 3 is a pretty tall order. IIRC, when I tried, I had to start at glibc and work my way up - I never did get it to work properly.
I use neither firefox nor windows, so I don't know for sure, but wouldn't the automatic updater have upgraded most of those people to Firefox 3 when it was released?
If that is the case, then the only people impacted by this would be those who deliberately refused the upgrade.
90^2 is 8100 (and 10^2=100 for a total of 8200) - maybe the GP just got the 8 and 1 reversed
As I understand it, these ratings are, in large part, a way to help environmentally conscious consumers buy green products. By not disclosing that information, they make this impossible for consumers to do accurately. Reducing their scores for not cooperating is about the only means they have to pressure the companies into being more consumer-frieldny in this matter. While it may be flawed as a study, it functions correctly as a guide to buying products you know to be environmentally-friendly.
Think if it a different way: If you showed up for a university exam or a job interview, and refused to disclose what you knew about the subject in question, wouldn't *you* expect to get low marks, too? If you in fact knew a great deal about the subject, you could claim that the exam/interview was a flawed study, but the fact of the matter is that you refused to participate, and in this case you don't get the benefit of the doubt.
Now someone tells me that it won't turn into a dancing robot! I've been trying to figure out how to do that for ever, now!
Theres some money I could have spent better.
I think you may have the Giga/Gibi lables confused. Depending on your definition of Gigabyte, Gigabytes are either the same size or smaller than Gibibytes
A Gibibyte is 2^30 (1,073,741,824) bytes. This is the only definition that exists for this term.
A Gigabyte traditionally also means 2^30 bytes, however 'Giga' is actually a base-10 prefix for 1000^3 (as used in the metric system), and therefore has a second menaing of 1,000,000,000 bytes (slightly less than 2^30 bytes).
Hard drive makers were quick to jump on the fact that they could advertise their drives as larger than they were by exploiting this double definition. If anything, what we should want is for hard drives to actually by labeled in Gibibytes to remove the manufacturer's ability to short-change customers.
Since gigabytes are the same or smaller than gibibytes, claiming that it can hold 10 x 25 Gigabyte movies gives us no guarantee that it will be properly, non-deceptively labeled.
This is somethat that a lot of people tend to overlook, either because they don't understand how a hard drive works, or because they don't stop and think about it. Loading programmes, especially ones which rely on libraries, translation files, multimedia, etc... at other locations on a disk would greatly slow down a HDD in comparison to an SSD.
Contrasted with SSDs, which are pretty much random access devices, in order to read each of those files from an HDD, there are basically 3 time factors to consider.
1. Seek time. The time it takes to move a reader head to a specific track (ring of data on a platter). Assuming that there is only this read taking place, you can pretty much assume that the reader head moves from its current location to the correct spot on the disk right away. Things are not always this pretty, though.
2. Rotation time. On average, you will have to wait half a rotation for the correct spot on the disk to spin around to the reader heads. There may be algorithms designed to mitigate this by reading even as it waits. In case the read is large enough to span a significant portion of the track, it can append that buffered data later, but I don't know if this is done or not.
3. Read time. This is the amount of time required to read the data off of a single track, and can take up to 1 rotation of the platter to complete.
So while the GP has a point in that people need to be careful about what kinds of statistics they believe, he/she glosses over the fact that reading a single piece of data with an HDD is hardly a random access, constant time operation (or linear time for n pieces of data).
Equipping Linux on a computer, USING CHILD LABOR IN CHINA, costs $5 each.
Linux. So easy, even children can install it!
Its not as if real money is any more tangible when its sitting in a bank account.
Are things like wow gold really anything more than the electronic equivalent of gift certificates nowadays or banks that printed their own bank notes way back when? Surely the theft of either of those would be taken seriously - I don't see why this should be any different.
I agree!
Every time that a new software bug or vulnerability is uncovered, I feel better and better about my choice to stick with an abacus instead of using these computer things.
Yes, it would be convenient to have it in my home or office, but you never know when some giant glaring exploit is going to appear and leave you open to pwnage due to some software company drinking a cold frosty can of fail.
Days like this justify my paranoia.
Wait for the verdict about Apple and Psystar then a couple of days later you'll see morons suing Sony and Microsoft because they want Halo for their PS3.
But that isn't an analogous case. An analogous case to Psystar's actions would be if someone started making an "XBox 360 Compatible" console (ie roughly same hardware specs), and preloaded it with a copy of the XBox360 OS that you can buy separately in a retail store. The end result being that you can run XBox360 games on this clone-a-console machine.
My above example (which IMHO is more representative of the situation than yours was) sounds more like what Compaq did to IBM, resulting in the open IBM-Compatible PC market than like people suing software makers for not porting their products to completely different hardware platforms and OS APIs.
The question then becomes: Given that there is no reason why these games couldn't run on the XBox360 Clone with no extra effort from anyone, is Microsoft (as the XBox360 OS creator) allowed to tell the clone maker that they cannot do certain things with a copy of the XBox360 OS that they bought, including bundling and reselling it? Knowing that the XBox360 OS is the only way to run XBox 360 games, is there any legitimate reason that XBox360 games should only be allowed to run on XBox360 hardware, if running them on a clone is just as easy?
In this case, it isn't much of an issue since, AFAIK, Microsoft doesn't sell the OS independently of the hardware. But Apple does. That's how Psystar got legitimate copies of it.
Apple has already replied to Psystar's idiotic "monopoly" arguments, citing about a dozen cases that say absolutely clearly a single product of a company cannot possibly constitute a meaningful "market", and therefore Apple cannot have a meaningful monopoly in the non-existing market of "MacOS X compatible computers".
What about computers that are able to run Mac OS X applications? Clearly, there is more than just the one of them, and Apple hardware is the only EULA compliant way to use any applications which are not open source or cross-platform.
Can Apple have a meaningful monopoly in the market of "Mac OS X Application compatible computers"?
I can't count the number of times my ass has been saved by being able to boot my powerbook/ibook/macbook as a firewire drive.
The original comment was about using Target Disk Mode to recover files off of a computer's hard drive. There is no reason why a LiveCD wouldn't work. Linux is able to read the contents of a mac hd just fine, and in this context, there is no need to run os x executables just to handle data recovery. And its not like a liveCD is incapable of having more tools installed on it while its running - the package manager (or manual installation) can still install the kinds of tools you would want for data recovery.
As for things like installing from DVD on a CD-only machine from another machine with a DVD reader, it sounds like the kind of thing that networking would be able to handle nowadays. I don't know macs that well, but it would be pretty trivial on linux at least.
I'm a big FLOSS fan, and I think that MS is being pretty underhanded here, but the problem here is that, like "open source", "organic" has a pretty vague meaning in general.
Here's another valid definition of "Organic":
"Organic" is being used to imply a kind of purity of origin, but that is hardly its only meaning. Organic chemistry, for example, is probably using a definition of organic that is closer to the one above than the one used to label packages of spinach.
In the same way, "Open Source" has the implication of Free/Libre software in it, but it is never explicitly stated. When someone else starts using another valid interpretation of the phrase, they may be sneaky and unscrupulous, but IMHO, its really the fault of the original promoter for not choosing a better label. They should have seen it coming.
If /. wants to pontificate about censorship they should do it in the cause of a more upright citizen.
Isn't the whole point of free speech that people should be free to say what they'd like especially when others find it distastful or inappropriate?
Its not really freedom if you're only allowed to say tasteful things, is it?
I disagree. I seriously hate KDE.
KDE is dysfunctional, overwhelms me with options, looks like shit (well, that can be themed, but...) and just generally sucks.
If Gnome had been chosen instead and as much time had been spent on polishing Gnome as Mandrake/Mandriva has spent on polishing KDE, we would not have this discussion.... Mandriva (i.e. Gmandriva) would already rule the desktop.
Sadly, I see more and more development time wasted on supporting / trying to polish KDE into something usable instead of just throwing the towel into the ring and going with Gnome.
====
Sorry if this offends your sensabilities, but I just couldn't resist, and I think that is pretty much sums up the silly debate between KDE and Gnome users who are both happy with their own choices.
Of course superstition isn't as good as science, but its a poor-mans substitute. No one lives long enough to test things in the wild, so you make do.
Superstition is really just Pascal's Wager. Take the example of the tiger behind the rustling grass:
If you believe its there and it is there, you get to live.
If you believe its there and it isn't there, no big deal.
If you don't believe and its isn't there, no big deal.
If you don't believe and it is there, you die.
Religion? Maybe not, but superstition seems to be possible. At least for pigeons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition#Superstition_and_psychology
We use this exact pen and paper system in Canada, and TV stations are usually able to make a pretty good prediction by midnight as to who will win. The next morning, the newspaper headlines almost always confirm what the tv stations were predicting the night before.
I guess it's just a coincidence (or crazy random happenstance - DrHorrible) that both marriage and procreation require a man and woman. What are the chances of that?
Mixed doubles require a man and a woman, too. Maybe that's where babies come from.
Yes, marriage and family are related, but why does it have to be a strictly traditional family. Maybe its two men who want to adopt a child, or use a surrogate, or two women and a sperm donor.
If marriage is just about procreation, then we'd best keep all the sterile people from getting married. Not to mention those sixty-something people remarrying after losing their partner. Once women have gone through "the change", they shouldn't be allowed to get married anymore.
Marriage is related to procreation in the same way that sexual desire or love is. Sure, procreation was probably its original motivator, but its not a direct correlation, and it's not limited to its original scope, If it were, homosexuals wouldn't want to get married. It's like being attracted to someone sterile. Sexual attraction is about procreation, so should you stop loving them because you can never have a child? That homosexuals do fall in love, experience sexual attraction, and want to marry is perhaps a sign that they are all now something more than just a way to tether a father-provider to a mother-nurturer.
This was said in jest, but if your city's busses are good enough to include bike racks, and you are able to find a bus route that will take you close to where you work, you can take the bike with you, and just bike home.
It plucks the main menu (File, Edit, View, ...) out of application windows and displays in in the panel in an applet. The result is a menu bar in the same location as on os x.
Heres an example screenshot.
http://linuxdesktop.cn/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/globalmenusmallscreenshot.png
Ideally, the number of threads a program uses should be no more than the number of processors available. Otherwise, you are wasting time context switching instead of processing.
An exception to this kind of rule should really be made for graphical user interfaces. In the case of GUI applications, time wasted in context switching is less important than keeping the UI responsive and the user happy.
Any kind of heavy lifting (IO-blocking or otherwise) should really be done on a different thread than the one that is responsible for handling the user interface. This allows the user interface to stay responsive, providing the user with feedback (progress bar, time estimate, reassurance that the programme hasn't locked up, etc...) and the ability to cancel the work in progress.
Sometimes you can modify the resource intense code to play nice with a GUI by working in chunks, but usually this is, IMHO, the wrong approach, since it means changing the logic/implementation of a programme to cater to a specific UI.
Actually, if you're looking for a global menubar for GNOME, there is one, it's just not an official part of GNOME.
http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/
Install some deb files, add the applet to a panel, and you're done. Menus will automatically reappear in their own windows if you remove it later.
Nonsense. KHTML is LGPL. Apple could have used the libraries without contributing anything back.
Apple couldn't have used the KHTML library without giving back because KHTML uses QT specifically for it's widgets. I suppose they technically could have, but not practically. The only options apple really had were:
1. Not to use KHTML at all
2. Use QT widgets in their browser. They would never do this.
3. Modify (and distribute) a modified version that handles other types of widgets