Slashdot Mirror

There is an article at tidbits that talks about this very issue.

I submitted a thoughtful TidBits article on this subject, as well as an Andy Ihnatko article I can't find again. Both were rejected -- a week ago! (There's also a MacWeek interview with ESR.) Didn't occur to me to frame them as an Ask Slashdot ;-)

Anyway, on the subject, there's a long history of freeware for the Mac, frequently with source available. I think that FSF-style free software never caught on because of the difficulty of Mac programming and the lack of good free development tools.

If you get most of yer daily quotient of geek news from said media, you might actually get into a head space where you believe that linux's domination of Joe Q. Enduser's desktop is imminent.

Every time I read here that Linux has 10 (15, 20 ...) percent of the desktop market, I always think it would be a useful reality check for Slashdot to publish the breakdown of OS/browser in their page hits. Reading posts here, it's easy to think that everyone else is using lynx on Linux. I'm wondering how much market share Linux really has even among the /. readership.

TidBits (a Mac site) did a poll a while ago asking readers what browser they use and compared the results to the reality of their server logs. What people say they use -- iCab. What they really use -- IE.

http://db.tidbits.com/tbtalk/t lkmsg.lasso?MsgID=7417

It was referred to as an "open wallet" project :) p.s. I thought about submitting this as a story but figured it wouldn't make the cut.

There were articles in TidBits about this recently. The first is pretty Mac-centric, while the second is more relevant to the question here.

There were articles in TidBits about this recently. The first is pretty Mac-centric, while the second is more relevant to the question here.

From TidBits :

"As Stacker for DOS became popular, Mr. Bill became interested in the technology and asked the president of Stac to contact Microsoft about including it in DOS. Keep in mind that DOS's main competitor, DR-DOS from Novell, already includes compression capabilities. "

{Hmmm, M$ behind again! Gotta start 'innovating' haha!}

"Stac and Microsoft negotiated licensing issues, and Microsoft refused to pay any royalty to Stac for the license, making it clear that if they didn't use Stac's technology, they would use someone else's, and even at one point showing Stac a spreadsheet outlining the adverse impact on Stacker's sales if this happened. "

{Cooperate, or we will squash you like an insect with our powerful DOS monopoly; Hahaha - amazing that we have it with bozo's like DR and Novell adding features we don't have, those LOSERS!}

"As negotiations continued, it became clear that Microsoft wanted Stac's technology but didn't want to pay for it. Irritated, Stac broke off the talks. Finally, Microsoft called Stac again, because they determined that their own compression code infringed on at least one of Stac's patents. Microsoft promised to send Stac a licensing proposal and a beta of DOS 6.0. A month or so later, in January of 1993, Microsoft sent the beta, but included a note saying essentially "Don't worry about the patent stuff. We are just going to keep our changed code which does not infringe."

"All fine and nice, but when Stac examined the beta, they determined that it infringed on two of Stac's patents. That's not the end of the story though. Microsoft sent Stac a preliminary press release that Microsoft plans to license, for free, the compression code in DoubleSpace, to all comers to create an opportunity for third parties to enhance DOS 6.0's compression features with add-on boards, chips, and software. Needless to say, Stac was not pleased, and brought in the legal howitzers.

{Anyway, disk compression is no big deal - but this is just one example of 'business as usual' at the helm of a company pushing the envelope of 'competition' which more than once croses the line into bullying and predation.}

Have a nice day!

Chuck

Part One Part Two

As others have pointed out here, you can trade bandwidth for latency, by such tricks as not trying to compress. In the Cheshire article, he mentions that the Apple Geoport semi-modem should have been able to reduce latency considerably, by knowing when a packet was complete (but didn't). The same argument applies to WinModems, if I understand them correctly. But I bet they don't do that either.

Anywyay, whether this thing actually works, it certainly is technically reasonable.

Part One Part Two

As others have pointed out here, you can trade bandwidth for latency, by such tricks as not trying to compress. In the Cheshire article, he mentions that the Apple Geoport semi-modem should have been able to reduce latency considerably, by knowing when a packet was complete (but didn't). The same argument applies to WinModems, if I understand them correctly. But I bet they don't do that either.

Anywyay, whether this thing actually works, it certainly is technically reasonable.

-F.

Here's some info.

-F.

Personally, I find that TrueType fonts look very nice in X (with RedHat 6.0's xfs (freetype) or xfstt). I've compared them with the local NT box with a 'real' TT font renderer, and they are at least as good.

Indeed they do look quite nice if you use a good font. However, you're forgotting about antialiasing. That's part of what makes Windows tt rendering so good. Freetype already supports this, so it shouldn't be too hard to hack something in, though the proper way is to use alpha-blended drawables, I expect. Perhaps with the hardware accelerated Imlib extension in XFree 5.0?

2) Many of the standard XFree fonts were donated and they weren't really high quality.

This is definitely true. Microsoft, oddly enough, has commissioned some very good truetype screen fonts. Unfortunately, there're not redistributable, but you can download them here for free; unzip works on the Windows 'self-extracting' .exe files.

One thing to remeber is that Netscape is broken as regards scaleable fonts. That's why some pages look really odd with tiny fonts. However, if you do a trick (deals with typing in the font size in preferences), my Netscape fonts look as good as NT's on all pages.

I think this is more a function of the lack of resolution-independence in the OS. Most operating systems make different (wrong) assumptions about the physical resolution of your monitor, so a webpage that looks reasonable under one OS won't on another. See this tidbits article for details.

From TidBITS.

http://db.tidbits.com/ac tion.lasso?-search&-database=TEPArticles&-layout=T BArticleDetail&-response=tb%2fItemDetail .html&-timeout=180&ArticleID=05168

I highly recommend the Kinesis. Get the programmable version for the Macros.