3-D-accelerators do not accelerate high-quality rendering, where ray-tracing and radisiosity and such are used.
They're great for when you're modelling, so you can get a quick preview and get a decent idea of how highlights and textures are going to look, but, for the final render, they're not very useful.
It's only a matter of time before the public rises up and demands accountability for software. Imagine a senator getting elected on the platform of promising to put programmers behind bars for writing software that is unreliable. Or a district attorney setting out to put programmers behind bars, not for hacking or writing viruses, but for writing products that don't meet government standards.
That'll probably be when I stop coding, then. Or, rather, it'll be the day that I stop being able to give to people the software that I write.
Then they'll set out to put other types of artists behind bars for producing things that don't meet government standards, and I won't be able to share anything with anyone.
I'll still produce, but I'll need to keep everything locked up, hidden away from society.
What a horrible way to live.
Oh, yeah: anyone who uses a number-system of a base equal to or larger than 13 (ie: hexadecimal) realises that "C#" is "twelve pounds"--that's a pretty heavy language:)
Barnes&Noble has John Lions' Commentary on Unix for about $35 dollars--this is definitely real operating system code, but is a good deal thinner than more modern codebases (ie: Scott Maxwell's Linux Core Kernel Commentary, which is good)
You can tell esd to use a specific device with the -d parameter, and you can tell it to use TCP and bind a different port by using the -tcp and -port options.
So, you can set up multiple EsounD instances by doing something like: esd -d/dev/dsp0 -tcp -port 12345 esd -d/dev/dsp1 -tcp -port 12346 esd -d/dev/dsp2 -tcp -port 12347
Any programs that have built-in support for EsounD (ie: anything GNOME) can be told to use a specific host:port for audio output.
What's more: a lot of programs that just try to open/dev/dsp can be launched with the esddsp script, which will cause them to use EsounD for their audio output, ie:
esddsp --server=localhost:12347 netscape
Given a build of Netscape that's dynamically linked against the same C library you build your local copy of EsounD (unless you're running an a.out build, it probably is;) with, netscape's audio will acutally come out on/dev/dsp2 (try viewing a shockwave thing with audio, or something).
Of course, with free software, the proper thing to do would be to patch the source so that it doesn't just assume that/dev/dsp is the proper device to open, and send the patch back to the author/maintainer of the software:)
Replace "ttyS0" with whatever serial port you really want to use, of course, and make sure that you're serial port is set up with the correct baud rate and such, probably using stty.
When you post, you get a three-choice radio-button box, like: [o] Yes, you can reprint this [ ] No, you can't reprint this--don't even ask [ ] Ask before reprinting
Put something into the user preferences, so that people can choose a default (like the plain/html/extrans selector), and we're set.
This would really cut down on the work that someone has to do when looking for things that they can quote.
I've always thought that "Lesstif" was punny, `less tif' being the opposite of `mo' tif' (`more tif'). Motif appears to have a reputation for being big and sluggish--perhaps that comes from having too much tif, in which case less tif would be better.
"Believe me, these tools are not even close to cutting it. Sure, many of those Oracle shops could (technically) use Sybase, MS-SQL, Informix and so on, but support contracts required for these sites are very demanding - engineers on site within hours, *CODE FIXED* within hours. Yes, Oracle will recompile Oracle and ship you a fixed binary within 24hours of a bug report - you just have to pay..."
Would I have to pay more or less for this than for someone else to fix it?
Being able to read file-systems is built into the Linux kernel; being able to create them or do things like export them via NFS can be done completely in userspace--Linux's kernelspace NFS-export is purely for speed. I've found that 2.2.x can't export things that it has mounted over NFS, but you be able to export whatever you want with a userspace daemon, until knfsd issues are resolved.
Is it possible to mix GTK+ and raw Xlib?
on
Motif's Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
"Motif is just an absolute nightmare to deal with. Half of what you want to do, has to be done hrough Xlib or Xt calls anyway!"
Enlightenment needed a file-selector, and they would've used GTK+, but they couldn't figure out how to make GTK+ and Xlib work together, so they had to write their own file-selector, and thus was born EFM.
Is it possible to mix GTK+ And Xlib? If it's not, then I suppose that that's something that Motif has going for it.
"C'mon, the only payment the author/sponsor is asking for is two lines of text on boot up"
Counting the 12 names on the credits-page of the reiserfs web site, at 2 lines per contributor, that's 24 lines. This reminds me of the FSF's note on why the BSD advertising clause became a Bad Thing.
But, regarless of the degree of severity of annoyance-features, speaking as a free-software-developer: why does someone intentionally add inconvenience for their users? Actually, hell--I'll ask that just as a software-developer. To say something like, `you can only use my software if you keep this CREDITS-file on-disk at all times, and read it before every invokation of the software', is mean and wrong. And, no, it doesn't matter how much inconvenience or annoyance my users are willing to tolerate, I'm writing software for them to help make their world better.
A friend of mine recently bought a used computer with Windows 95 on it, and he wanted to reinstall the system to try to fix some broken aspects of the system. He had a perfectly legal Windows-95 installation-disc. When the installation-routine asked for the registration number, we typed it in, and it was rejected. We tried other numbers, and they were all rejected until we reformatted the drive and had a fresh go at it.
A while back, I discovered that Microsoft Word refused to open multiple file with the same name simultaneously, even if they were in different directories.
The amount of intentional difficulty that had been built into these systems is just mind-boggling.... That is not the right thing to do.
"Don't delete the sponsorship messages! Yes, it's open source which gives you the ability to remove the tags just like you have the ability to run `rm -f CREDITS' on every tarball you extract."
And what's wrong with me removing CREDITS files from my own system?
"I know I'd be pissed off if someone used my code without giving me credit, or if there was a renegade patch running around that REMOVED my line in the credits."
There's a difference between removing the CREDITS file from my disk and distributing something with a modified credits-list.
Personally, I really dislike having to look at a credits-list or a splash-screen or other such things every time I load a piece of software, which is why I don't inflict such things upon my own users.
Having an accurate list of credits that people can view is different than having a list of credits that people must view.
Hm. I suppose that the CREDITS file and a list of credits in the software's init routine aren't the same, after all. Hm. Why not put a list of all of the sponsors in a `SPONSORS' file?
"However, I have to agree with this poster. There is far TOO much duplication of effort. I can see the need for four or even five email clients to account for individual taste but the twelve to twenty out there in the world is bordering on silly. Instead, we could all be better focused on moving aspects of applications and the interface forward."
I think that our time can be better spent by writing software, rather than repeating how `useless' the efforts of our peers are.
Writing twelve to twenty e-mail clients is more useful than saying, `you people are silly' and writing nothing.
The first step in `banning' someone is to disallow them speaking about something; the rest includes disallowing him to be speak in public at all, and disallowing him to be in the same room with more than one person simultaneously, except members of his immediate family.
"Security is going to become more and more important as more people get connected. I expect that eventually some lawsuits will be filed. I wonder how long that will take and what the outcomes will be..."
I don't anticipate many lawsuits against companies like Red Hat (at least not in response to things like this), and any lawsuits that do occur are not going to go very far.
The reasonably-sized print on a Mandrake 6.0 package:
DISCLAIMER AND LIMITATIONS OF REMEDIES
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS AND COMPANY SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT WILL COMPANY BE HELD LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY LOSS OF PROFIT OR OTHER INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES EVEN IF COMPANY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. COMPANY DOES NOT WARRANT, GUARANTEE OR MAKE ANY PRESENTATIONS REGARDING THE USE, OR THE RESULTS OF THE USE, OF THE SOFTWARE IN TERMS OF CORRECTNESS, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, CURRENTNESS, OR OTHERWISE AND DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE OPERATION OF ANY SOFTWARE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR FREE. COMPANY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES NOT STATED HERIN. NO ORAL OR WRITTEN IN FORMATION OR ADVICE GIVEN COMPANY OR OTHERS SHALL CREATE A WARRANTY OR IN ANY WAY INCREASE THE SCOPY OF THE FOREGOING WARRANTY, AND NEITHER SUBLICENSEE NOT PURCHASER MAY RELY ON ANY SUCH INFORMATION OR ADVICE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR LIMITATION OR EXLUSION OF LIABILITY FOR INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THE ABOVE EXLUSIONS AND/OR LIMITATIONS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.
Other distributors also tend to include disclaimers such as this.
How do they get away with this disclaimer? Why is this alright, but it'd be horrendous for Microsoft to disclaim any liability on their software, and put a back door in it?
Well, even if there is a back door put into a piece of free or open-source software, you can take it out.
Unicode (ISO-10646?) is, I believe, a superset of ISO-8859-1 (Latin1, which is itself a superset of ASCII); so all characters <0x100 (256:)) should be identical to their Latin1 counterparts, and, furthermore, those <128 function the same as they do in ASCII (ISO-646).
"Apple refuses to allow Be to get the specifications necessary for BeOS to run on the G3/G4 processors."
That's interesting, considering that Apple doesn't own those processor specs; the PowerPC chip design belongs to IBM--aside from the fact that Macs now contain them, what does Apple have to do with PPC?
Slashdot Mirror
3-D-accelerators do not accelerate high-quality rendering, where ray-tracing and radisiosity and such are used.
They're great for when you're modelling, so you can get a quick preview and get a decent idea of how highlights and textures are going to look, but, for the final render, they're not very useful.
It's only a matter of time before the public rises up and demands accountability for software. Imagine a senator getting elected on the platform of promising to put programmers behind bars for writing software that is unreliable. Or a district attorney setting out to put programmers behind bars, not for hacking or writing viruses, but for writing products that don't meet government standards.
That'll probably be when I stop coding, then. Or, rather, it'll be the day that I stop being able to give to people the software that I write.
Then they'll set out to put other types of artists behind bars for producing things that don't meet government standards, and I won't be able to share anything with anyone.
I'll still produce, but I'll need to keep everything locked up, hidden away from society.
What a horrible way to live.
Oh, yeah: anyone who uses a number-system of a base equal to or larger than 13 (ie: hexadecimal) realises that "C#" is "twelve pounds"--that's a pretty heavy language:)
But, how much do some other languages weigh?
"... there are no programs for Linux on PowerPC anyways."
:\
Actually, the only software that I've had real difficulty getting to build in run on a PowerPC, with regard to Linux, is the kernel itself
Those of who program in INTERCAL call it "mesh".
Barnes&Noble has John Lions' Commentary on Unix for about $35 dollars--this is definitely real operating system code, but is a good deal thinner than more modern codebases (ie: Scott Maxwell's Linux Core Kernel Commentary, which is good)
You can tell esd to use a specific device with the -d parameter, and you can tell it to use TCP and bind a different port by using the -tcp and -port options.
/dev/dsp0 -tcp -port 12345 /dev/dsp1 -tcp -port 12346 /dev/dsp2 -tcp -port 12347
/dev/dsp can be launched with the esddsp script, which will cause them to use EsounD for their audio output, ie:
/dev/dsp2 (try viewing a shockwave thing with audio, or something).
/dev/dsp is the proper device to open, and send the patch back to the author/maintainer of the software:)
So, you can set up multiple EsounD instances by doing something like:
esd -d
esd -d
esd -d
Any programs that have built-in support for EsounD (ie: anything GNOME) can be told to use a specific host:port for audio output.
What's more: a lot of programs that just try to open
esddsp --server=localhost:12347 netscape
Given a build of Netscape that's dynamically linked against the same C library you build your local copy of EsounD (unless you're running an a.out build, it probably is;) with, netscape's audio will acutally come out on
Of course, with free software, the proper thing to do would be to patch the source so that it doesn't just assume that
Hacking on CVS, a while ago, I found that the protocol uses two strings to signify that the client is or is not allowed to connect to the server:
"ILOVEYOU"
"IHATEYOU"
Try this:
/dev/ttyS0
perl -ne 'system $_'
Replace "ttyS0" with whatever serial port you really want to use, of course, and make sure that you're serial port is set up with the correct baud rate and such, probably using stty.
When you post, you get a three-choice radio-button box, like:
[o] Yes, you can reprint this
[ ] No, you can't reprint this--don't even ask
[ ] Ask before reprinting
Put something into the user preferences, so that people can choose a default (like the plain/html/extrans selector), and we're set.
This would really cut down on the work that someone has to do when looking for things that they can quote.
I've always thought that "Lesstif" was punny, `less tif' being the opposite of `mo' tif' (`more tif'). Motif appears to have a reputation for being big and sluggish--perhaps that comes from having too much tif, in which case less tif would be better.
"Believe me, these tools are not even close to cutting it. Sure, many of those Oracle shops could (technically) use Sybase, MS-SQL, Informix and so on, but support contracts required for these sites are very demanding - engineers on site within hours, *CODE FIXED* within hours. Yes, Oracle will recompile Oracle and ship you a fixed binary within 24hours of a bug report - you just have to pay..."
Would I have to pay more or less for this than for someone else to fix it?
Being able to read file-systems is built into the Linux kernel; being able to create them or do things like export them via NFS can be done completely in userspace--Linux's kernelspace NFS-export is purely for speed.
I've found that 2.2.x can't export things that it has mounted over NFS, but you be able to export whatever you want with a userspace daemon, until knfsd issues are resolved.
"Motif is just an absolute nightmare to deal with. Half of what you want to do, has to be done hrough Xlib or Xt calls anyway!"
Enlightenment needed a file-selector, and they would've used GTK+, but they couldn't figure out how to make GTK+ and Xlib work together, so they had to write their own file-selector, and thus was born EFM.
Is it possible to mix GTK+ And Xlib? If it's not, then I suppose that that's something that Motif has going for it.
"I would say that communism is a political model and its economic analog is socialism."
Communism is `a form of socialism that abolishes private ownership'.
"C'mon, the only payment the author/sponsor is asking for is two lines of text on boot up"
Counting the 12 names on the credits-page of the reiserfs web site, at 2 lines per contributor, that's 24 lines. This reminds me of the FSF's note on why the BSD advertising clause became a Bad Thing.
But, regarless of the degree of severity of annoyance-features, speaking as a free-software-developer: why does someone intentionally add inconvenience for their users? Actually, hell--I'll ask that just as a software-developer. To say something like, `you can only use my software if you keep this CREDITS-file on-disk at all times, and read it before every invokation of the software', is mean and wrong. And, no, it doesn't matter how much inconvenience or annoyance my users are willing to tolerate, I'm writing software for them to help make their world better.
A friend of mine recently bought a used computer with Windows 95 on it, and he wanted to reinstall the system to try to fix some broken aspects of the system. He had a perfectly legal Windows-95 installation-disc. When the installation-routine asked for the registration number, we typed it in, and it was rejected. We tried other numbers, and they were all rejected until we reformatted the drive and had a fresh go at it.
A while back, I discovered that Microsoft Word refused to open multiple file with the same name simultaneously, even if they were in different directories.
The amount of intentional difficulty that had been built into these systems is just mind-boggling.... That is not the right thing to do.
"Qt is good for companies who want to port their apps to and from Windows, since it's C++."
So is GTK+:)
GTK+ is also Python, Perl, Pike, Haskell, TOM, Ada, Dylan, Eiffel, Scheme, Objective C, Pascal, Javascript, and a few other languages:)
"Don't delete the sponsorship messages! Yes, it's open source which gives you the ability to remove the tags just like you have the ability to run `rm -f CREDITS' on every tarball you extract."
And what's wrong with me removing CREDITS files from my own system?
"I know I'd be pissed off if someone used my code without giving me credit, or if there was a renegade patch running around that REMOVED my line in the credits."
There's a difference between removing the CREDITS file from my disk and distributing something with a modified credits-list.
Personally, I really dislike having to look at a credits-list or a splash-screen or other such things every time I load a piece of software, which is why I don't inflict such things upon my own users.
Having an accurate list of credits that people can view is different than having a list of credits that people must view.
Hm. I suppose that the CREDITS file and a list of credits in the software's init routine aren't the same, after all.
Hm. Why not put a list of all of the sponsors in a `SPONSORS' file?
"However, I have to agree with this poster. There is far TOO much duplication of effort. I can see the need for four or even five email clients to account for individual taste but the twelve to twenty out there in the world is bordering on silly. Instead, we could all be better focused on moving aspects of applications and the interface forward."
I think that our time can be better spent by writing software, rather than repeating how `useless' the efforts of our peers are.
Writing twelve to twenty e-mail clients is more useful than saying, `you people are silly' and writing nothing.
"Second, I am neither suggesting that Stallman is a Communist nor that Communism itself is evil. It is a system of government."
Isn't communism more a system of economy?
The first step in `banning' someone is to disallow them speaking about something; the rest includes disallowing him to be speak in public at all, and disallowing him to be in the same room with more than one person simultaneously, except members of his immediate family.
"What comes next in the size measurement after terabyte?"
/~esr/jargon/html/entry/quantifiers.html.
petabyte.
See http://www.tuxedo.org
I don't anticipate many lawsuits against companies like Red Hat (at least not in response to things like this), and any lawsuits that do occur are not going to go very far.
The reasonably-sized print on a Mandrake 6.0 package:
Other distributors also tend to include disclaimers such as this.
How do they get away with this disclaimer? Why is this alright, but it'd be horrendous for Microsoft to disclaim any liability on their software, and put a back door in it?
Well, even if there is a back door put into a piece of free or open-source software, you can take it out.
Unicode (ISO-10646?) is, I believe, a superset of ISO-8859-1 (Latin1, which is itself a superset of ASCII); so all characters <0x100 (256:)) should be identical to their Latin1 counterparts, and, furthermore, those <128 function the same as they do in ASCII (ISO-646).
"Apple refuses to allow Be to get the specifications necessary for BeOS to run on the G3/G4 processors."
That's interesting, considering that Apple doesn't own those processor specs; the PowerPC chip design belongs to IBM--aside from the fact that Macs now contain them, what does Apple have to do with PPC?