Yeah, fuck directX! We don't need an implementation of it! While we're at it, we don't need an implementation of Appletalk or SMB either! And an implementation of the X Windows API? Who wants that? It's bad news because it'll make people program for that instead of our own API! And while we're at it, let's just get rid of our standard C API all together and write our own! Yeah! Fuck DirectX! Who would want an implementation of that!?!
perl/python: Find me a better commercial scripting language, please...
The linux kernel itself: More stable than Win2k and far far far superior to Win 98/95
Granted, these aren't for the consumer doing basic office work or games (except for the kernel), but they're much more mature apps than the office/game apps that haven't been around as long. These point to what's coming, as do wonderful apps like Gnumeric and Konquerer, which are both almost set to give their windows counterparts a real run for their money. Give the community some time, it's all a work in progress.
Avie Tevanian isn't looking for "street cred", he's looking to sell an OS, and the way to do that is to provide the most value you can to the customer, be it in the form of ease of use, a pretty GUI, or lots of apps. Mac OS X did not need to include the dev tools (OSX Server doesn't even install them by default, you have to hunt around for your webobjects CD to add them yourself) even if typical UNIX systems normally do. As this whole article is about, OSX isn't your typical UNIX!
Anyhow, the point of my post wasn't that linux is better or worse necessarily, but to show that linux does deliver in other ways than the promise listed in the article. I mean, the entire point of the article is that OS X empowers the common man and one of the ways they are empowering the common man is by copying the modus operandi of linux: empowerment to the developer. Developers are users too, just of a different sort. Apple has changed it's ways by supporting the developer as they never have before. While you may chalk this up to "street-cred", it's not about that. It's about empowering the user, even if that user isn't "the common man."
As a side note, I'm really excited about OS X, and I'm glad it's around. I'm taking the approach more along the lines of "what can we take from this?" rather than "this sucks! We dont' need it!" On the contrary, we need it to kick our sorry asses in to gear, we've been following MS for too long;-) I hope both OS's continue to have their core purposes, but that doesn't mean that they can't learn from each other. And the fact is, Apple has learned from Linux much as Linux will learn from Apple.
As a side note, it's interesting that they're bundling all the dev tools with the system at all. When the original mac shipped, it was the first to come with no development environment at all! Even dos had good ol' Q-Basic (or whatever it was) but the mac had nothing until Bill Atkinson sat down and wrote hypercard, which was really a major precursor to the web in some ways.
Now they're saying that the OS for the common man needs these tools as much as the OS for the guru. I know that I was hurt by being a Mac head and not having anything to program on until I saved enough money for a $100 copy of Code Warrior and another $100+ for the documentation and books. Granted, I may not be the average mac user, but the average mac user in my experience loves to create content! They say this themselves and they're proud of it. but by not having the tools to create content for the mac rather than on it they stifled a lot of young programmers. Just think of the amount of early shareware written in Basic for the PC.
Now they're including the dev tools, which is a good thing. It'll encourage aspiring young hackers to sit down with a compiler and learn how the hell their machine works beyond the bells and whistles. They can grab the code for Darwin and look through it to see what's going on under the hood. They can write something in java, or C, or C++, or perl, or just about anything because the tools are there. And do you want to know the reason? Linux.
Open Software zealots screamed about how good open code was, and Apple opened it. Free/Open software types sat down with their free tools and coded a whole mess of software that is flexible enough to actually take on Microsoft in ways that Apple never could have done. Apple is seeing the benefit to empowering the developer, rather than crippling them, and this is why the tools are there. With all the nifty third party apps, they don't really need to include the tools and they could continue on just like before, but they're not.
So, while Linux may have promised the UNIX for the common man (which I think is a load of shit, "Linux" can't promise anything), it does show that you can empower the common man in ways that Apple just did not understand in the slightest before. That's the kind of power that Linux delivers, and Apple can only mimick.
Exact same reason I dropped the Mac, and I haven't looked back in the least (although I'm running OSX Server here at work, which isn't bad if you stay on the command line)
I think the idea of designing a UI as though the command line never existed isn't all it's cracked up to be. Granted, if I were to choose one or the other for intuitiveness, I'd choose the GUI, but I think that the GUI should operate as though the command line never was, but be open to manipulation via the command line, if need be.
This is a really tough nut to engineer, and while you see some horrible hacks of it on systems like linux, the idea is that the user never needs to know how to use the command line if they don't want, and they can do all their work via the GUI, but all the underlying stuff should be easily manipulatable via the console so that those people feel at home too. Remember, the console is a UI, it's just designed more for a different kind of user. The trick is to fully accomodate both and not force them to interact if they don't want.
As for your evaluation of Linux UI standards, I agree with you entirely, and it's pretty sad. If you're forking GNOME, what are you going to be modeling your UI on? Mac? Other? Some hybrid? The idea is really interesting to me, if you'd let me know more I'd love to hear about it.
I support the idea of a ratings system for video games. With all the talk now about how parents aren't paying enough attention to their kids, I think it's important to provide some tools for parents to supervise. Granted, something like filterware which doesn't work and actually hinders more than it helps is a high profile example of a flaming failure, but I think this would be better. Many parents trust their kids to the ratings system, and I hear relatively few complaints in that area except by kids who aren't old enough to see R movies (I was one of them too;-)
This system would help parents decide what to let their kids buy, while still letting that college student check out Soldier of Fortune. What's so wrong with that? If we're going to be casting blame on bad parenting, then shouldn't we help the parents to be good parents without hindering free speech? Remember, a mother can still buy the latest Playboy DVD for their son if they want to, the ratings won't hinder their video game buying abilities any more than it will their movie buying abilities. It'll just help them make better choices.
I'm sorry, but I have to throw a word in for silent scope. It's a wonderful variation on the gun->monitor theme because you're not just blasting the hell out of everything, but really sniping. The only arcade game that has excited me at all since the days of Street Fighter 2 and TMNT. It's the only reason I'll even drop in to an arcade any more. Silent Scope 2's competitive feature can't be beat either. If only other arcade developers would come up with ideas that good.
Run this script in the unzipped archive's folder to fix case dependencies:
or i in `find . | grep -iE "\.(gif|png|jpg)$"`
do
echo $i
if [ ! -d "$i" ]
then
mv "$i" "`dirname "$i"`"/"`echo \`basename $i\` | perl -pe 'y/[A-Z]/[a-z]/'`"
fi
done
It was posted by someone named "RedHatDude" on the message board.
Rage 128 is updated. For everyone who's been having their rage card lock up, go black, and not let you do anything, a four line fix went in to the driver (it's the kernel module) that fixed it. It's due to early Rage 128 cards and a buffer problem. So, if you've had that happen to you too, then grab it!
Well, while I agree that "free speech areas" are pretty absurd, the idea that Freenet is contributing to this is just wrong. The Internet is not composed of "places" but of mediums. Whether your medium is an mp3, a gif, HTML file, or whatever, that's what makes up the internet. The method that you choose to share that medium is relatively inconsequential, and using a method like freenet helps to protect your speech via whatever medium you want to use, in ways that it isn't protected in a browser. The same item on freenet can be accessed from any computer on the internet with the right program, no different than having something available only via ftp.
And because of things like freenet, there are people in countries outside the US who don't have the benefit of the First Amendment, who now have a tool in their fight to say what they need to say. These people need a tool like freenet simply because the other options are totally inadequate in promoting the freedoms that they should have.
Remember, Freenet's goal isn't to limit the freedoms of other protocols, but to provide a safe haven on the internet for people who need it. Just because there is free speech on freenet does not mean that there can't be free speech on the web. Mutual exclusivism isn't a rule of the game.
It's not difference for difference's sake, it's differences for choice's sake! We get plenty of choice to run our system the way we want, whether it's to run apt-get or rpm, use BSD printing management or CUPS, or even how many virtual desktops you want. This isn't just a distro specific thing, this is the UNIX philosophy that allows us to string together programs the way we want. The Linux distros are simply an extension of this. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job.
I don't know if you actually use linux, but I've never had something really break because of some inane thing like a different window manager, screensaver, or font. The things that break things are much like those on Mac or Windows... missing dll's (lib.so's), broken programs and drivers, and misconfigured systems. These things are no different in Mac or Windows, it's just easier to mess up in linux because the user is generally trusted.
And there are higher rules to the system, but even a system that says "screw that" can still take a piece of software, rearrange it, and redistribute it so that it will run and install just fine on their system. It's choice. You can't do these things most other places. And if diversity and choice doesn't spawn innovation, then I don't know what does.
I thought they meant this FIPS! I figured it was taking it a bit far making a disk partitioning program in to an Advanced Encryption Standard, but you never know...;-)
Yeah, I think the 2D stuff is generalized, but there are a lot of ways to do it, and that's driver related. See this post to dri-devel about what's been accelerated using AGP and DRM accel, and this post on performance with the new r128 driver. Still very very new code, and other posts indicate the numbers may not be totally accurate, but if it is, then it's a good start for much better 2d performance from X.
This isn't meant to be a troll, but I would like an honest answer as to why I'd want to buy this. I mean, Solaris is a more stable OS than linux, but what's it really got over it? I'd love to have this really bitchin' workstation that puts my PII 400 to shame, but would this be that much better than just a faster PC? Could someone who uses Solaris (I never have) let me know how it's better than Linux, and what the motivation really is for getting one of these? If you're successful, I may be looking at a new toy and a fat credit card bill:-)
I don't think Corel should sink their money in to making their own distro, only to compete with all the other ones out there. Granted, there are some good things about it (I love anything Debian based;-) but why don't they just throw their resources in to more useful areas like Word Perfect and such?
While I'm happy about all the work they put in to Wine, I think that if they actually migrated the program to something that's a little more linux friendly, then maybe it'd be worth grabbing. They have mature product on their hands and a brand name to boot, which could sway the businesses and home users looking for something familar. "Oh, I remember Word Perfect! I guess this linux thing can't be so bad." The problem is that WP looks and feels like ass on linux. If they actually used something like the Gtk or Qt then it'd be. If Corel sunk their resources in to the task of making their apps really really good under linux then maybe they'd do better. I mean, why compete in the distro wars when you're already so far out in front in terms of the apps you've got?
Well, it's a kludged and hacked solution not because there's preassure to keep the genome short, but because just about everything that can evolve does, and if it works then it stays there. This includes random kludges as well as some elegant stuff.
The human genome is big. Really big. And most of it is garbage... non-coding sequences and such. This is direct evidence that there's no evolutionary preassure to keep the genome short. This doesn't mean there's preassure to keep it long either, because viruses and bacteria are incredibly prolific and they have short genomes. It's been argued that the advantage (and I think this is only one advantage) for a longer genome like ours is that it provides a ton of raw material for stuff to happen. Most of it won't work, but occasionally something will. And it's kept. Now it might not be the prettiest functionality out there, but then again there's no brain that's working logically on it like with code (whether or not there's a brain at all working on it is a whole other bag of worms;-).
Evolution is random. I think that the fact that genetic algorithms come up with this stuff is an incredibly good point (I've been meaning to check those things out forever) and that this is simply how things work.
the model of one gene, one protein seems to be broken
The One Gene, One Enzyme hypothesis of Beadle and Tatum has been broken (although not entirely so, and the principle remains the same) for quite some time. We've known for a long time about alternate reading frames (DNA is read in triplets, so if you shift over one before you start reading, you're in a different frame), genes within genes (more in viruses than eukaryotes like us), alternate splicing, post-translational modification of proteins (insulin is a cool example of this) and many many other such things that you say spell "BAD news for darwinists". Here's why you're wrong.
Darwin didn't fully understand his own theory because he didn't have any idea how any of his changes were made. The best he had to go with were major phenotypic changes such as a bird's color or a turtle's shell size. He didn't have any idea how these things were coded nor how they were expressed. As such, his statement of invalidity was wrong.
Complexity is one of the natural byproducts of evolution. Random mutations occur (this is a proven fact) and these changes often express something as a phenotype. As a result, anything you can possibly imagine tends to happen because it occurs randomly. Random changes produce complexity, that's why turbulence is such an impossible problem for fluid dynamicists: because it spontaneously occurs at the molecular level producing conmplex behaviors at the aggregate level. In other words: complexity happens naturally. This happens in living systems too, and as random changes aggregate they form more complex sytems. Bacteria spontaneously evolve from putting a bunch of the right chemicals in a naturally occuring sack. Bacteria evolve sacks within sacks and incorporate other bacteria to help them. Then they start sticking together and sharing their resources and suddenly we have protists. These cells start specializing their functions and influencing each other and suddenly we have complexity. All this happens spontaneously.
It's not a single simple change that occurs to cause a new species. It's a ton of unrelated simple changes that aggregate to form new structures. If the changes don't work (i.e. broken gene) the organism dies and nature moves on. If it does something, then it keeps on doing it. That's why we have so many different and complex levels of gene regulation.
So your claim that the smaller than estimated number of genes is bad news for evolutionists is a load of garbage because things like post-transcriptional gene regulation can lead to a whole host of different proteins by modification of RNA, the protein, or even the DNA itself (as in immunoglobins). Plus, there are plenty of proteins that serve multiple functions, such as hormones. All this spells out a great deal of complexity which, as I've already shown you, is a natural feature of evolution. Maybe you should take your "Geeks4Christ" argument re-read it, then compare it to some actual scientific literature. The paper on the human genome just published in Nature is particularly good, I recommend it highly.
I think another thing to point is that the word "theory" is very poorly percieved by the nonscientific community. When most people think of "theory" they are actually thinking of "hypothesis", which is an idea that doesn't have much (or any) evidence to support it. The scientific definition of theory is that it's an idea that has a great deal of evidence to support it and has yet to be disproven. Many many things we take as "fact" are actually labeled as "theory" by science because they can't be totally proven.
The use of the term Scientifc Creationism is an obvious sham, and it also sticks it to science in one of its weak areas: the general public's ignorance. By saying that "It's just a theory" is just a choice to totally ignore how science works, which is a very sad thing.
Iron exists in relative abundance throughout the universe, whether there is life or not.
Of course it does, that's his point. Plus iron is required for the lives of many creatures. The real reason you can argue against the rock idea is that iron doesn't contain the genetic material. You can't make a bacteria resistant to ampicillin with iron, but you can do this with DNA. Just because something is there doesn't mean that it's an integral part of how it got there.
Plus, iron doesn't change over time... it'll always just be good old Fe. DNA sequences change. And change over time is the very definition of evolution. And it's also why we're descended from bacteria, whether we enjoy admitting it or not.
Yeah, I know I missed the licenses and I should be flogged for it, but that wasn't really my intention anyway:-)
Granted, while copyleft software may hurt and kill software companies it benefits just about everyone else. Granted, your "dark side" of the GPL has merits in that end users can not simply go to a corporation to request changes, they can go to the original author of the program. Unfortunately, the way to ultimately get a feature isn't to pay for it or even request it, but to write it for yourself. And while this may not be of much direct use to the end users, it does allow for different benefits than the ones you discuss.
While X company may have to foot a large chunk of the bill in order to implement a feature that they later give away, because any company implementing another feature must do the exact same thing, the overall value of the software is increased for everyone. This can not happen with the BSD license, because only those in the OSS community will actually release their changes, and as such the actual library stagnates in comparison to the proprietary model. The BSD license very directly benefits those with the huge proprietary library (Microsoft) because it does not level the playing field for anyone starting with the BSD library. In this sense, it is the BSD license which kills competition. The GPL might kill off proprietary competition, but it sets up a real free alternative to the standard set by the most powerful player.
In the end, there are benefits to both licenses, but I don't think that you can say that the BSD license really helps the little guy. It just doesn't. The only company that can do anything with the BSD library in reality is Apple, and they're just another version of the 800 pound gorilla.
And I think that you're still ignoring the fact that by forcing all of a software's features to be free that companies benefit by not having to pay the Microsoft tax, which is a big deal. Ironically, I think that in this sort of area, that of the end user, the BSD and GPL license don't seem to be so different from each other. They have largely been complimentary to each other in terms of providing functionality, whether it be Perl's artistic license, Gnome's GPL, or FreeBSD's BSD license (got them right this time, I think;-), these products work together to provide functionality that is free in both senses. Overall, I think that the BSD vs. GPL is a pointless debate because they both provide equivalent functionality and work together to produce a good system. The debate doesn't end with the end user, it only ends with your definition of freedom, and on that people are going to differ, and as a result so are licenses.
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Yeah, fuck directX! We don't need an implementation of it! While we're at it, we don't need an implementation of Appletalk or SMB either! And an implementation of the X Windows API? Who wants that? It's bad news because it'll make people program for that instead of our own API! And while we're at it, let's just get rid of our standard C API all together and write our own! Yeah! Fuck DirectX! Who would want an implementation of that!?!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
- Apache: Beats IIS in security and portability
- PHP: Runs neck and neck with ASP or beats it
- gcc: More standards compliant than VCC
- bash: Better than the Win2k shell by far
- perl/python: Find me a better commercial scripting language, please...
- The linux kernel itself: More stable than Win2k and far far far superior to Win 98/95
Granted, these aren't for the consumer doing basic office work or games (except for the kernel), but they're much more mature apps than the office/game apps that haven't been around as long. These point to what's coming, as do wonderful apps like Gnumeric and Konquerer, which are both almost set to give their windows counterparts a real run for their money. Give the community some time, it's all a work in progress."I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Avie Tevanian isn't looking for "street cred", he's looking to sell an OS, and the way to do that is to provide the most value you can to the customer, be it in the form of ease of use, a pretty GUI, or lots of apps. Mac OS X did not need to include the dev tools (OSX Server doesn't even install them by default, you have to hunt around for your webobjects CD to add them yourself) even if typical UNIX systems normally do. As this whole article is about, OSX isn't your typical UNIX!
;-) I hope both OS's continue to have their core purposes, but that doesn't mean that they can't learn from each other. And the fact is, Apple has learned from Linux much as Linux will learn from Apple.
Anyhow, the point of my post wasn't that linux is better or worse necessarily, but to show that linux does deliver in other ways than the promise listed in the article. I mean, the entire point of the article is that OS X empowers the common man and one of the ways they are empowering the common man is by copying the modus operandi of linux: empowerment to the developer. Developers are users too, just of a different sort. Apple has changed it's ways by supporting the developer as they never have before. While you may chalk this up to "street-cred", it's not about that. It's about empowering the user, even if that user isn't "the common man."
As a side note, I'm really excited about OS X, and I'm glad it's around. I'm taking the approach more along the lines of "what can we take from this?" rather than "this sucks! We dont' need it!" On the contrary, we need it to kick our sorry asses in to gear, we've been following MS for too long
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
As a side note, it's interesting that they're bundling all the dev tools with the system at all. When the original mac shipped, it was the first to come with no development environment at all! Even dos had good ol' Q-Basic (or whatever it was) but the mac had nothing until Bill Atkinson sat down and wrote hypercard, which was really a major precursor to the web in some ways.
Now they're saying that the OS for the common man needs these tools as much as the OS for the guru. I know that I was hurt by being a Mac head and not having anything to program on until I saved enough money for a $100 copy of Code Warrior and another $100+ for the documentation and books. Granted, I may not be the average mac user, but the average mac user in my experience loves to create content! They say this themselves and they're proud of it. but by not having the tools to create content for the mac rather than on it they stifled a lot of young programmers. Just think of the amount of early shareware written in Basic for the PC.
Now they're including the dev tools, which is a good thing. It'll encourage aspiring young hackers to sit down with a compiler and learn how the hell their machine works beyond the bells and whistles. They can grab the code for Darwin and look through it to see what's going on under the hood. They can write something in java, or C, or C++, or perl, or just about anything because the tools are there. And do you want to know the reason? Linux.
Open Software zealots screamed about how good open code was, and Apple opened it. Free/Open software types sat down with their free tools and coded a whole mess of software that is flexible enough to actually take on Microsoft in ways that Apple never could have done. Apple is seeing the benefit to empowering the developer, rather than crippling them, and this is why the tools are there. With all the nifty third party apps, they don't really need to include the tools and they could continue on just like before, but they're not.
So, while Linux may have promised the UNIX for the common man (which I think is a load of shit, "Linux" can't promise anything), it does show that you can empower the common man in ways that Apple just did not understand in the slightest before. That's the kind of power that Linux delivers, and Apple can only mimick.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Exact same reason I dropped the Mac, and I haven't looked back in the least (although I'm running OSX Server here at work, which isn't bad if you stay on the command line)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think the idea of designing a UI as though the command line never existed isn't all it's cracked up to be. Granted, if I were to choose one or the other for intuitiveness, I'd choose the GUI, but I think that the GUI should operate as though the command line never was, but be open to manipulation via the command line, if need be.
This is a really tough nut to engineer, and while you see some horrible hacks of it on systems like linux, the idea is that the user never needs to know how to use the command line if they don't want, and they can do all their work via the GUI, but all the underlying stuff should be easily manipulatable via the console so that those people feel at home too. Remember, the console is a UI, it's just designed more for a different kind of user. The trick is to fully accomodate both and not force them to interact if they don't want.
As for your evaluation of Linux UI standards, I agree with you entirely, and it's pretty sad. If you're forking GNOME, what are you going to be modeling your UI on? Mac? Other? Some hybrid? The idea is really interesting to me, if you'd let me know more I'd love to hear about it.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I support the idea of a ratings system for video games. With all the talk now about how parents aren't paying enough attention to their kids, I think it's important to provide some tools for parents to supervise. Granted, something like filterware which doesn't work and actually hinders more than it helps is a high profile example of a flaming failure, but I think this would be better. Many parents trust their kids to the ratings system, and I hear relatively few complaints in that area except by kids who aren't old enough to see R movies (I was one of them too ;-)
This system would help parents decide what to let their kids buy, while still letting that college student check out Soldier of Fortune. What's so wrong with that? If we're going to be casting blame on bad parenting, then shouldn't we help the parents to be good parents without hindering free speech? Remember, a mother can still buy the latest Playboy DVD for their son if they want to, the ratings won't hinder their video game buying abilities any more than it will their movie buying abilities. It'll just help them make better choices.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Sorry, that "or" at the beginning is really a "for"
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I'm sorry, but I have to throw a word in for silent scope. It's a wonderful variation on the gun->monitor theme because you're not just blasting the hell out of everything, but really sniping. The only arcade game that has excited me at all since the days of Street Fighter 2 and TMNT. It's the only reason I'll even drop in to an arcade any more. Silent Scope 2's competitive feature can't be beat either. If only other arcade developers would come up with ideas that good.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Run this script in the unzipped archive's folder to fix case dependencies:
or i in `find . | grep -iE "\.(gif|png|jpg)$"`
do
echo $i
if [ ! -d "$i" ]
then
mv "$i" "`dirname "$i"`"/"`echo \`basename $i\` | perl -pe 'y/[A-Z]/[a-z]/'`"
fi
done
It was posted by someone named "RedHatDude" on the message board.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Rage 128 is updated. For everyone who's been having their rage card lock up, go black, and not let you do anything, a four line fix went in to the driver (it's the kernel module) that fixed it. It's due to early Rage 128 cards and a buffer problem. So, if you've had that happen to you too, then grab it!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Well, while I agree that "free speech areas" are pretty absurd, the idea that Freenet is contributing to this is just wrong. The Internet is not composed of "places" but of mediums. Whether your medium is an mp3, a gif, HTML file, or whatever, that's what makes up the internet. The method that you choose to share that medium is relatively inconsequential, and using a method like freenet helps to protect your speech via whatever medium you want to use, in ways that it isn't protected in a browser. The same item on freenet can be accessed from any computer on the internet with the right program, no different than having something available only via ftp.
And because of things like freenet, there are people in countries outside the US who don't have the benefit of the First Amendment, who now have a tool in their fight to say what they need to say. These people need a tool like freenet simply because the other options are totally inadequate in promoting the freedoms that they should have.
Remember, Freenet's goal isn't to limit the freedoms of other protocols, but to provide a safe haven on the internet for people who need it. Just because there is free speech on freenet does not mean that there can't be free speech on the web. Mutual exclusivism isn't a rule of the game.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
To "ed" simply reply "ex"
;-)
That way you get all the vi people on your side by default as well.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It's not difference for difference's sake, it's differences for choice's sake! We get plenty of choice to run our system the way we want, whether it's to run apt-get or rpm, use BSD printing management or CUPS, or even how many virtual desktops you want. This isn't just a distro specific thing, this is the UNIX philosophy that allows us to string together programs the way we want. The Linux distros are simply an extension of this. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job.
I don't know if you actually use linux, but I've never had something really break because of some inane thing like a different window manager, screensaver, or font. The things that break things are much like those on Mac or Windows... missing dll's (lib.so's), broken programs and drivers, and misconfigured systems. These things are no different in Mac or Windows, it's just easier to mess up in linux because the user is generally trusted.
And there are higher rules to the system, but even a system that says "screw that" can still take a piece of software, rearrange it, and redistribute it so that it will run and install just fine on their system. It's choice. You can't do these things most other places. And if diversity and choice doesn't spawn innovation, then I don't know what does.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I thought they meant this FIPS! I figured it was taking it a bit far making a disk partitioning program in to an Advanced Encryption Standard, but you never know... ;-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Yeah, I think the 2D stuff is generalized, but there are a lot of ways to do it, and that's driver related. See this post to dri-devel about what's been accelerated using AGP and DRM accel, and this post on performance with the new r128 driver. Still very very new code, and other posts indicate the numbers may not be totally accurate, but if it is, then it's a good start for much better 2d performance from X.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Who says open source doesn't innovate? ;-)
(* it's just a joke!)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
This isn't meant to be a troll, but I would like an honest answer as to why I'd want to buy this. I mean, Solaris is a more stable OS than linux, but what's it really got over it? I'd love to have this really bitchin' workstation that puts my PII 400 to shame, but would this be that much better than just a faster PC? Could someone who uses Solaris (I never have) let me know how it's better than Linux, and what the motivation really is for getting one of these? If you're successful, I may be looking at a new toy and a fat credit card bill :-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I don't think Corel should sink their money in to making their own distro, only to compete with all the other ones out there. Granted, there are some good things about it (I love anything Debian based ;-) but why don't they just throw their resources in to more useful areas like Word Perfect and such?
While I'm happy about all the work they put in to Wine, I think that if they actually migrated the program to something that's a little more linux friendly, then maybe it'd be worth grabbing. They have mature product on their hands and a brand name to boot, which could sway the businesses and home users looking for something familar. "Oh, I remember Word Perfect! I guess this linux thing can't be so bad." The problem is that WP looks and feels like ass on linux. If they actually used something like the Gtk or Qt then it'd be. If Corel sunk their resources in to the task of making their apps really really good under linux then maybe they'd do better. I mean, why compete in the distro wars when you're already so far out in front in terms of the apps you've got?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Well, it's a kludged and hacked solution not because there's preassure to keep the genome short, but because just about everything that can evolve does, and if it works then it stays there. This includes random kludges as well as some elegant stuff.
;-).
The human genome is big. Really big. And most of it is garbage... non-coding sequences and such. This is direct evidence that there's no evolutionary preassure to keep the genome short. This doesn't mean there's preassure to keep it long either, because viruses and bacteria are incredibly prolific and they have short genomes. It's been argued that the advantage (and I think this is only one advantage) for a longer genome like ours is that it provides a ton of raw material for stuff to happen. Most of it won't work, but occasionally something will. And it's kept. Now it might not be the prettiest functionality out there, but then again there's no brain that's working logically on it like with code (whether or not there's a brain at all working on it is a whole other bag of worms
Evolution is random. I think that the fact that genetic algorithms come up with this stuff is an incredibly good point (I've been meaning to check those things out forever) and that this is simply how things work.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I just wanted to let you know that this is one of the best posts I've ever read on /. It's all right there.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Darwin didn't fully understand his own theory because he didn't have any idea how any of his changes were made. The best he had to go with were major phenotypic changes such as a bird's color or a turtle's shell size. He didn't have any idea how these things were coded nor how they were expressed. As such, his statement of invalidity was wrong.
Complexity is one of the natural byproducts of evolution. Random mutations occur (this is a proven fact) and these changes often express something as a phenotype. As a result, anything you can possibly imagine tends to happen because it occurs randomly. Random changes produce complexity, that's why turbulence is such an impossible problem for fluid dynamicists: because it spontaneously occurs at the molecular level producing conmplex behaviors at the aggregate level. In other words: complexity happens naturally. This happens in living systems too, and as random changes aggregate they form more complex sytems. Bacteria spontaneously evolve from putting a bunch of the right chemicals in a naturally occuring sack. Bacteria evolve sacks within sacks and incorporate other bacteria to help them. Then they start sticking together and sharing their resources and suddenly we have protists. These cells start specializing their functions and influencing each other and suddenly we have complexity. All this happens spontaneously.
It's not a single simple change that occurs to cause a new species. It's a ton of unrelated simple changes that aggregate to form new structures. If the changes don't work (i.e. broken gene) the organism dies and nature moves on. If it does something, then it keeps on doing it. That's why we have so many different and complex levels of gene regulation.
So your claim that the smaller than estimated number of genes is bad news for evolutionists is a load of garbage because things like post-transcriptional gene regulation can lead to a whole host of different proteins by modification of RNA, the protein, or even the DNA itself (as in immunoglobins). Plus, there are plenty of proteins that serve multiple functions, such as hormones. All this spells out a great deal of complexity which, as I've already shown you, is a natural feature of evolution. Maybe you should take your "Geeks4Christ" argument re-read it, then compare it to some actual scientific literature. The paper on the human genome just published in Nature is particularly good, I recommend it highly.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think another thing to point is that the word "theory" is very poorly percieved by the nonscientific community. When most people think of "theory" they are actually thinking of "hypothesis", which is an idea that doesn't have much (or any) evidence to support it. The scientific definition of theory is that it's an idea that has a great deal of evidence to support it and has yet to be disproven. Many many things we take as "fact" are actually labeled as "theory" by science because they can't be totally proven.
The use of the term Scientifc Creationism is an obvious sham, and it also sticks it to science in one of its weak areas: the general public's ignorance. By saying that "It's just a theory" is just a choice to totally ignore how science works, which is a very sad thing.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Plus, iron doesn't change over time... it'll always just be good old Fe. DNA sequences change. And change over time is the very definition of evolution. And it's also why we're descended from bacteria, whether we enjoy admitting it or not.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Yeah, I know I missed the licenses and I should be flogged for it, but that wasn't really my intention anyway :-)
;-), these products work together to provide functionality that is free in both senses. Overall, I think that the BSD vs. GPL is a pointless debate because they both provide equivalent functionality and work together to produce a good system. The debate doesn't end with the end user, it only ends with your definition of freedom, and on that people are going to differ, and as a result so are licenses.
Granted, while copyleft software may hurt and kill software companies it benefits just about everyone else. Granted, your "dark side" of the GPL has merits in that end users can not simply go to a corporation to request changes, they can go to the original author of the program. Unfortunately, the way to ultimately get a feature isn't to pay for it or even request it, but to write it for yourself. And while this may not be of much direct use to the end users, it does allow for different benefits than the ones you discuss.
While X company may have to foot a large chunk of the bill in order to implement a feature that they later give away, because any company implementing another feature must do the exact same thing, the overall value of the software is increased for everyone. This can not happen with the BSD license, because only those in the OSS community will actually release their changes, and as such the actual library stagnates in comparison to the proprietary model. The BSD license very directly benefits those with the huge proprietary library (Microsoft) because it does not level the playing field for anyone starting with the BSD library. In this sense, it is the BSD license which kills competition. The GPL might kill off proprietary competition, but it sets up a real free alternative to the standard set by the most powerful player.
In the end, there are benefits to both licenses, but I don't think that you can say that the BSD license really helps the little guy. It just doesn't. The only company that can do anything with the BSD library in reality is Apple, and they're just another version of the 800 pound gorilla.
And I think that you're still ignoring the fact that by forcing all of a software's features to be free that companies benefit by not having to pay the Microsoft tax, which is a big deal. Ironically, I think that in this sort of area, that of the end user, the BSD and GPL license don't seem to be so different from each other. They have largely been complimentary to each other in terms of providing functionality, whether it be Perl's artistic license, Gnome's GPL, or FreeBSD's BSD license (got them right this time, I think
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."