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Since this is likely to turn into a discussion of our favorite text editors, I have to say that I really like Notepadqq (http://notepadqq.altervista.org/wp/). It's inspired by Notepad++ and it feels very similar for those of us who do most of our work in Windows. Combine it with the Inconsolata font (http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html) and you can't go wrong.

Inconsolata

It's a simple, clean font.
He took special care to make sure l,I, and 1 all look different, as well as 0, O.
Looks good at low resolution.

So what you're saying is that it's like Inconsolata, but fourteen years late, and slashvertised.

I find the Inconsolata very good for diagrams and other texts that need a monospaced font.
advantages:
- Monospaced
- has a slashed zero
- The brackets are higher than the other characters. So you instinctively see what's inside the brackets.
- has an open license.
http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

OSS is never pro-active;

Can you prove this positive statement? It has in the past, for example TeX has made major contributions to typesetting (before widesread software patents too...). It's still happening, for example, there is Spiro, but it's only coincidence that I have heard of it. Vorbis was pretty darn good, speex is well regarded, FLAC is among the best. I'm not aware of everything that is happening under the popularity radar? Are you?

Why is "no one" (see Dirac, Snow) working on the next video standard? They are not interested in video codecs (lack of focus is a much bigger issue then lack of innovation in FLOSS), they don't want to fuck with patent threats or they are already busily besting the inventors in implementing their inventions (see x264 and similar).

There are a number of fonts that are openly available, and can be packaged via fontsquirrel for you. I've done this with Inconsolata and even a CP437 font before, I tend to use it as my preferred fixed-width font. There's options out there. :) In terms of branding alone, being able to buy a brand font from a font foundry for website use would be awesome. Though I think most fonts should simply be available.

Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.

Additionally, which monospaced font you use matters. You need one that's designed to be readable and to make clear distinctions between 0 and O, l and 1, and so on. I use Raph Levien's Inconsolata for coding, and it's excellent (and available under the Open Font License).

On Fedora, yum install levien-inconsolata-fonts.

Couldn't agree more. While XML is just crappy, but bearable as a document description language, it is an utter failure as a data description language. It ain't really human-readable and it's machine readable with just a lot of effort.

Whether this push for ever more complex XML-based thingies has method or is just aimless madness, the effect is the same: the decommoditizing of our basic constructs.

When will I need XSLT to just make sense of my /etc/passwd?

Just compare the sizes of the XML library on your computer with the size of an interpreter, compiler or any other program in this category (and this other program is most probably doing something useful!)

My favourite comparison is

    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 151308 2009-12-13 23:05 /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 147700 2008-01-26 17:36 /usr/lib/liblua5.1.so.0.0.0

And in Lua you get a bytecode interpreter, a proper garbage collector and a decent runtime library for free.

XML is a denial of service attack on us.

This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, including: [...] Spiro splines, [...]

Is it just me or does anybody else also like Spiros more than Beziers?

There's an impressive video of Spiro splines being used in Inkscape here.

Otherwise it looks like Inconsolata is similar enough:

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

I've been using Inconsolata for coding purposes for a while, and think that it's just beautiful (also both free and Free).

Your mileage may vary, of course.

and I'm waiting for the reports of burning Thinkpads that I know will eventually come

Don't hold your breath.

1. There was already a factory recall for a certain model that was a potential fire hazard.
2. None of the workaday everyday batteries carry a charge long enough for it to reach flash point temperature.

Thinkpads were built like tanks, but they even took the tank analogy one step further: if the battery power were the gas, you get the gas milage equivalent of the tank as well.

You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price. The odds are that the neither will notice the difference in performance given the volume of pictures they take.

It seems to me as if nerds, with a natural ability with details are vulnerable to decommoditization of hardware, something which they're paranoid about in software.

http://www.levien.com/free/decommoditizing.html

The idea is that you can sell a generic performance product $x and a 'high end product for discerning consumers' at $2x. The high end product may actually have a lower performance for price one, but everyone wants to a be a 'discerning consumer', 'early adopter' and so on.

Is there really any difference between someone who willingly overspends by several hundred percent on ultra high end storage devices, so they can transfer the few pictures they take a year a second or so quicker and someone who does the same on sports shoes so they can pose in the mall?

Taco also needs to ditch the present moderation system and go with the Advogato trust metric.

• The Sender ID fiasco;
• Microsoft's general intention to "decommoditize" protocols

Yes, some people have thought about it. DHTs can lead to land grabs (where someone writes a script that claims every name they can generate) and network partitions that cause different clients to see different mappings (like IRC netsplits, but worse).

The most interesting proposed solution IMO is the Levien trust metric (PDF), but it doesn't guarantee consistent mappings if each user acts as their own trust root and it potentially requires users to input trust info.

• 4,500,919 Schreiber
• 4,941,038 Walowit
• 5,343,311 Arazi

You can use GPL-covered code in your new BSD-licensed projects by relicensing the derivative work under the GNU GPL. Or you can merge the two programs together, creating a GPL derivative (the new BSD license is GPL-compatible). Or you could run the GPL-covered program, see what it does, and reimplement the program entirely (we're dealing with copyrighted works here, not patent exclusions which prohibit leveraging the idea).

But speaking of patents, which this thread is, there are good reasons why you would want to switch to the GPL: the GPL is the most popular free software license, the GPL will grant you access to more patents than the new BSD license, and the GPL has patent language whereas the new BSD does not. Raph Levien has granted "a fully paid up, nonexclusive, royalty free license to practice the patents" he lists on his patent page. That means you get access to the 500 IBM patents (a patent pledge with huge strings attached that might not make it worth your while to use this access) plus Levien's patents (which are granted on far more reasonable grounds). Also, the GPL has some language concerning patent licensing, the new BSD has none. The next GPL (GPL v3) is said to have more language concerning patents. I know of no change planned for the new BSD license's language.

SVG support.

Jpeg2000 support.

I'd rather have a T-series ThinkPad over an X-series. The T-series are the heirs to the 600 series (I currently have a 400MHz 600e) and weigh about five pounds. You can get one with Centrino Inside or Pentium-M with a different wireless chipset. (hint: the Cisco wireless is currently the most Linux friendly of the three available for this machine.)

Actually ThinkPads and PowerBooks/iBooks compare pretty favorably to one another. Both are built to last. The choice between IBM and Apple is more a question of which platform you prefer rather than quality.

BTW both IBM and Apple have had battery problems in the past. The 600 series battery is notorious for losing capacity, and the PB 5300 might have caught fire a few times thanks to a flaw in its LiIon battery.

There are other reasons, too. RGB-to-CMYK color space conversion, for example, is not a patented technique, but Gimp still lacks that basic requirement. (It may have gotten it just recently; if so, the point still stands that it only got it just recently.)

To convert color space accurately, you need color space profiles, gamut matching, etc. GIMP can decompose RGB images to CMYK, but poorly. If you want to do better, the field is littered with many patents.

Color space management is a hard problem, and even the existing methods in Photoshop and other professional tools are relatively weak, but can be massaged into getting good results. Ironically, this is one area where patents may be particularly well justified; there is literally hundreds of millions of dollars of research into human perceptivity and colorspace matching that arguably would not have occurred if the investment could not be recouped.

The proposal for the secure nameserver is here: http://www.levien.com/fc.ps

And the draft thesis version is here: http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf

I originally started investigating trust metrics as a way to identify trustworthy, credible sources of name->key binding data. The trust metrics turned out to be interesting and useful on their own, and a lot easier to deploy successfully. I think there's a lot of important research still to be done on the problem, but I'm not especially hopeful that it'll get done any time soon. For one, if your goal is to avoid single points of vulnerability, you have to build the service as a peer-to-peer network, and we're still struggling with the best way to design those, even for relatively simple tasks such as media piracy^Wsharing, much less anything mission-critical.

I do hope that anyone seriously looking into the question of secure name services at least skims my thesis drafts. There are some good ideas in there, and I have a funny feeling that people will be remaking all the same mistakes I did.

The proposal for the secure nameserver is here: http://www.levien.com/fc.ps

And the draft thesis version is here: http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf

I originally started investigating trust metrics as a way to identify trustworthy, credible sources of name->key binding data. The trust metrics turned out to be interesting and useful on their own, and a lot easier to deploy successfully. I think there's a lot of important research still to be done on the problem, but I'm not especially hopeful that it'll get done any time soon. For one, if your goal is to avoid single points of vulnerability, you have to build the service as a peer-to-peer network, and we're still struggling with the best way to design those, even for relatively simple tasks such as media piracy^Wsharing, much less anything mission-critical.

I do hope that anyone seriously looking into the question of secure name services at least skims my thesis drafts. There are some good ideas in there, and I have a funny feeling that people will be remaking all the same mistakes I did.

For anyone who uses BitTorrent, here is a torrent file with which to download the ISO.

The same .torrent (though this time not garbled :) is avaiable here and here ... Guess something went wrong on the server side ;)

BitTorrent Link of Mandrake 9.1 <-- You need BitTorrent to click here.

Download BitTorrent Here or `apt-get install bittorrent` on debian, and I think there is a port for it for you FreeBSD people.

Anyone who wants to get this file, should try using BitTorrent to get it. It is a file swarming application that helps everyone get the file by uploading pieces of the file you have already downloaded. It should transfer faster, and the best part is, everyone gets the file faster than the Mandrake FTP site, which I am sure has limited bandwidth.

Props to the other people mentioning BitTorrent.

Deveolpers should now concentrate on bringing GIMP up to parity with PS. We need something like the Mozilla project for the GIMP. (as far as the visibility)

I love using PS, but would love to use GIMP more. Free compared to $600 is a big incentive. Let's face it, Adobe is one of the big guns behind BSA, and many of us would go to an alternative if presented.

Here is one reason why free GIMP has trouble competing with PhotoShop. Patents still surround the use of CYMK color management. For home, hobby or even small office use, this is not a problem. But for prepress use, this is a big obstacle. Color matching before four-color printing or six-color printing is important unless you want some funky looking publications. When these patents expire, I expect the more mature GIMP will really start to take off, and more development resources will be thrown at it.

The problem is that these batteries aren't failing because of the batteries themselves, but because of a bug in the little processor on the battery that is supposed to manage the battery "intelligently". There is a great website that explains all this for frustrated TP owners here

Someone came up with the solution of putting a piece of paper over two of the 4 contacts on the battery. When I did this, I got 45 minutes more use from a battery that APM was telling me was dead. (The TP is beeping telling me I have 3% batt power left. I suspend to disk, put the paper on, start up again and work for another 45 min.)

The problem is not the physical batteries! It might be a problem with a BIOS update. In any event, I have quit buying new batteries and am waiting for IBM to come up with a solution.

This is a well documented (not by IBM though) problem with the ThinkPad 600 series. I have two worthless batteries sitting in my closet. Also, I seem to remember reading that this model does not fare well when Linux is installed, i.e. the battery dies even quicker. Here are some links you should check out. here here, and here.

just picked one of these up the other day. got 2.4.20 w/ apm in kernel running on it. set up a script to monitor its power consumption, and just let it sit for most of a day. discharged normally from 96% to 37%, then dropped to 5% over the course of 1 minute and ticked down to 1% before i shut it down and recharged it. so, the first theory was, well, its a 6 cell pack, perhaps 2 of the cells are going bad (resulting in ~32% or 1/3 of the 'available' charge going away), but since then, i've used it 2 more times, where i've run it down quite a bit, and the 'big drop' point seems to be getting lower (aka last time i checked, it went from 34% to 5%, which isn't great, but if the trend continues, the battery will seem to 'recover').
time to karma whore:
Another Thinkpad 600 users' battery stories
excerpts from the linux mailing list about the problem
and another users overview of the battery problem on the thinkpad 600
apmiser which you can get with tpctl will help your batteries last longer while you're on the road (note: you'll need APM support in the kernel to use'em)
Tips for better life out of LiIon batteries

This happened to my 600-Something too.
More information can be found here, it even explains how to get some more life out of your battery.

Interesting proposal, 0x0d0a. It's quite similar to the trust metric work I've been pursuing for my PhD thesis, and which is implemented in Advogato.

In general, I find the attack-resistance of your proposal to be sound. However, because your horizon only goes out to a horizon of two, it's an easier problem to solve than the general trust case. If you try to extend your system to more hops, you'll probably find that the trust values fade very fast. This was one of the less expected results I found when I implemented the eigenvector-based diary ratings at Advogato.

In any case, I encourage you to look at my trust metric work, and to use the code I've released as well as the trust graph available at Advogato. This will probably help you test and develop your ideas further.

Here's a url with links to most of the other stuff I'm talking about: http://www.levien.com/free/tmetric-HOWTO.html

I do know of at least one individual owner of software patents - Raph Levien. But yeah, you are certainly right about the industry as a whole.

I think software patents might work if they were limited to a very short term (1-2 years, 3 at the very most). This way you'd be encouraged to go out, invent something, and try to make a profit from it right away - rather than lurking around in a dark corner waiting to surprise the industry with an unexpected patent attack. (which seems to be par for the course these days...)

I have been thinking of a similar idea. What would be the potential for taking an HP like approach to Free patents. HP claims patents on some W3C technologies, and requires reciprocal royalty free licenses from all implementers, as mentioned in section 3.4 of the W3C Patent Policy. To what extent could this be used in a similar manner to what Ralph Levian is doing to break the back of software patents altogether?

In particular, I'm thinking of object oriented patterns, which are the building blocks of an enormous portion of modern software. A well documented pattern contains much of the same information as a patent application - motivation, solution, variations, etc. Suppose, for example, a patent on the facade pattern. Require reciprocal RF licenses on any software patent used in conjunction with an implementation of facade. A few dozen powerful patterns could affect an enormous portion of patent encumbered software.

I'm intrigued about this. I hope that they'll do the right thing. I'd like to see an immediate and permanent license to anyone writing code under the GPL, as done by Raph Levien, plus a firm statement about free licensing to code under all other OSI approved licenses on request (there can't be a blanket statement as there can with the GPL). But in addition, I'd like to see Red Hat actively working towards reform of the patent system as it stands now.

Well.

Unfortunately there's too many patents in the field. It is impossible to create a software which doesn't violate at least some of them. For example color management is highly protected area. From this background it's pretty simple why there isn't any commercially viable open source options available...

Ville

I found this site interesting a few months ago. The jpeg2k standard may have changed since then, but I doubt it. It concludes that jpeg2k doesn't have a better size/quality tradeoff than jpeg.

SVG is a good vector format for the arena it was designed to serve (primarily, the web). For other uses, the text based markup is a tad bloated, and the fact that it's easily scriptable isn't a factor. It's not perfect, but the web needs a good, open vector graphics format, and SVG is a well designed option, in most ways. I just wish they'd get the fonts right. Of course, Flash has been providing web based vector graphics for ages. It's just that it was always aimed at presentation, and didn't take into account accessibility, searching, consistency of navigation and all the other things that we should expect a vector format to provide. In that respect, SVG is a significant step forward, and I hope it starts to gain widespread acceptance soon. But with even Mozilla not supporting it in many of the standard builds, it has a way to go before that stage.

Heh, the PigeonRank page is definitely the best April Fools joke so far.

As part of my PhD research, I've been doing some analysis of the PageRank algorithm. A few weeks ago, I did some analysis of the attack-resistance properties, and found that it is one of two known instances of an attack resistant trust metric (the other being Advogato. To me, this is pretty exciting, as it would seem to support my belief that trust metrics have much wider use than the PKI-like applications that originally motivated my research.

The analysis of PageRank is in Chapter 6 of my thesis-in-progress. Also in the chapter is a discussion of how to apply the trust metric to more general metadata, as well as a distributed network model of the trust metric.

Serious hackers will also be interested in my spiffy research implementation of PageRank.

I'm very much interested in connecting with others who understand and appreciate these results. Lord knows why I'm posting to Slashdot... oh well, time to go back to feeding my pigeons.

Heh, the PigeonRank page is definitely the best April Fools joke so far.

As part of my PhD research, I've been doing some analysis of the PageRank algorithm. A few weeks ago, I did some analysis of the attack-resistance properties, and found that it is one of two known instances of an attack resistant trust metric (the other being Advogato. To me, this is pretty exciting, as it would seem to support my belief that trust metrics have much wider use than the PKI-like applications that originally motivated my research.

The analysis of PageRank is in Chapter 6 of my thesis-in-progress. Also in the chapter is a discussion of how to apply the trust metric to more general metadata, as well as a distributed network model of the trust metric.

Serious hackers will also be interested in my spiffy research implementation of PageRank.

I'm very much interested in connecting with others who understand and appreciate these results. Lord knows why I'm posting to Slashdot... oh well, time to go back to feeding my pigeons.

Bruce

• Natural brush types ala Painter Another example w/screenshots is at Wet Dream by Raph Levien.
• TrueType support through the Freetype plug-in (separate install)
• Whither film support?

Otherwise, the GIMP is coming along nicely - very well done! My only gripe is a bug under Solaris that's a show-stopper.

• Natural brush types ala Painter Another example w/screenshots is at Wet Dream by Raph Levien.
• TrueType support through the Freetype plug-in (separate install)
• Whither film support?

Otherwise, the GIMP is coming along nicely - very well done! My only gripe is a bug under Solaris that's a show-stopper.

> I'll need a retainer for that.

No need.

http://www.levien.com/patents.html

But also look at gimp-print for a very impressive example of what a "pure" free software project is capable of. What Bruce said originally is true - all we (the free software community) needs is the basic documents about how to get the dots on the page, and we can do a damn fine job of arranging them. I believe "intellectual property" is a non-issue for getting inkjet drivers under Linux.

A fair amount of info on color management tools is on my color management page. One of the most exciting pieces of technology is the Argyll color management system.

The main thing that's lacking right now is integration. A lot of the pieces exist, but they're tied together yet. I plan on integrating Argyll into Ghostscript over the next few months, so that's likely to be a good start.

Interestingly enough, X had a very good start at a color management system (XCMS). However, as far as I know, nobody ever used this seriously, so it's yet another hunk of worthless junk hanging off the X server. This type of thing still "works", though:

xterm -fg CIEXYZ:0.371298/0.201443/0.059418

Of course, the chance of your monitor actually matching the CIE color is pretty close to nil.

In any case, there's quite a bit of work underway, and it's reasonable to expect that Linux will eventually have good color management. If you want it sooner rather than later, contribute to one of the projects!

I still agree we should avoid further intrusions of important non-free software into our pure hard disks (by important I don't mean simple stuff like xsnow), and Netscape is one example of what happens; people don't even think about this anymore. Someone port Kmeleon to Linux please!

Agreed, although they really need to sort the font problems out. Given the MS monopoly on the desktop, the font issues are unlikely to kill SVG, just as they haven't killed web pages in general. It just becomes really annoying when people assume that because it looks fine on their platform, it'll look fine for everyone.

You misspelled "a royal pain in the *ss". As the author of Gill makes painfully clear, vector graphics is hard, standards compliance makes it harder, and XML (with all the baggage it entails) makes it a monster. Care to share why you thought XML would make it easy?

And wouldn't it be neat to have a freely available, widely used free-both-ways vector animation format?

And wouldn't it be neat if everyone was happy, shared their music, and ran Linux on Alpha? Maybe, but it'll be a long road before we get there.

You misspelled "a royal pain in the *ss". As the author of Gill makes painfully clear, vector graphics is hard, standards compliance makes it harder, and XML (with all the baggage it entails) makes it a monster. Care to share why you thought XML would make it easy?

And wouldn't it be neat to have a freely available, widely used free-both-ways vector animation format?

And wouldn't it be neat if everyone was happy, shared their music, and ran Linux on Alpha? Maybe, but it'll be a long road before we get there.

Here are some answers to your suggestions:

• Vector layers. They are no there yet, although this has been discussed several times among the GIMP developers. The current implementation of paths (using the bezier tool) is already using some vectors and the FreeType plug-in can convert text to paths, but this is not exactly what you want. Note that you can apply some basic transformations to the paths (rotation, scaling, shearing), but the support for vectors in the GIMP is still limited. Currently, if you want to work with vectors, it is better to try Gill, the GNOME illustration app. Maybe Gill and GIMP could be merged in the future?
• Non-linear history. This has also been discussed several times, and this will be part of version 2.0. This was even mentioned on a page that the article refers to.
• Line tools. Did you know that you can already draw straight lines, circles, squares and other shapes with the GIMP? To draw a straight line, select any painting tool, click where you want to start your line, then hold shift and click a second time. To draw a circle or a square, use the corresponding selection tools to make a selection, then use Edit->Stroke. The latest development version of the GIMP contains some tips explaining how to do that easily. You can even do some exotic things such as drawing lines with a gradient or with a fading brush.
• Dynamic seletors. Well, I am not sure that I understand what you want. I would be interested in more details...

Many things are already possible with the upcoming version 1.2 of the GIMP. I suggest that you have a look at the tips and on-line help that are distributed with the current version, or that you have a look at some of the recent books, such as Grokking the GIMP or the GIMP handbook by Sven.