Slashdot Mirror
Xft Hack Improves Antialiased Font Rendering
Eugenia writes: "Font antialiasing first made its way to XFree through Qt/KDE only a year ago and GTK+/Gnome followed some time after. Even with the latest version of Freetype 2.08, which reportedly brings better quality, the result is still not up to par with the rendering quality found on some commercial OSes. David Chester has hacked through the Xft library and he achieved an incredibly good quality on antialias rendering under XFree86. With this hack, at last, XFree can deliver similar aesthetic results to Mac OS X's or Windows' rendering engines. Check the two brand-new screenshots ('before' and 'after') at his web page and notice the difference with your own eyes."
My program today discusses the ancient art of having a wank on a public transport vehicle (bus, train, boat - it doesnt matter)
You will need :
Just remember to give them the secret handshake - which is of course, a hand full of the results of your wank.
They will have a really good laugh about it and you will be the best of friends.
This has been a community service announcement to the fellow horny students of the world.Sorry to say this... but the only possible explanation is.. THE POLICE WHO ARRESTED YOU ARE ALIENS FROM MARS!!
Now dont be alarmed, its happened before. The fact that this highly instructive and foolproof method failed you and got you arrested, can only mean that they are not human police.
There is a way though! - Here is what you need to do...
Ring your local MP and say :
You can now relax, because the special "Anti Alien Task Force which stop honest citizens wanking on buses" will save you.Case closed!
Troll 25 of 131 from the annals of the Troll Library .
Reality: The oft-heard cry of the noisiest KDE advocates. No explanation is given - the reader is expected to simply grok the wholesomeness of KDE, and the lack of this mystical quality in GNOME. It's nonsense of course. Neither desktop is particularly "integrated" compared to Windows XP, and certainly not compared any version of the Apple Mac.
Reality: Again, such nebulous arguments are never explained, and the reader is expected to simply understand the truth. Both KDE and GNOME have user-interface irritations (indeed, all systems do) - but "ease of use" is not a simple thing to measure. What about application (see GNOME apps later) installation and removal: GNOME has the excellent RedCarpet by Ximian , which makes the installation, removal and updating of applications trivial. KDE users are expected to fend for themselves with brutal command line driven systems. GNOME also has the excellent Ximian setup tools to handle various very tricky cross-platform and potentially risky system configuration operations - KDE offers a few small half-assed Linux-only tools, which make no attempt at check-pointing to return to known working configurations.
Reality: In what sense? Arguably more people use KDE - but it is a close run thing. Most KDE zealots claim the results of online polls as proof of their superior userbase... which is, quite frankly, complete and utter nonsense. Online polls are the joke of the century; it doesn't even require a motivated script kiddie to render then worthless. A single post on a zealot-ridden site can reduce the result to a running joke. Popularity is also difficult to measure when both GNOME and KDE are frequently installed on the same system - and indeed, can co-exist except for certain applications such as panels. Many KDE users actually run GNOME applications for their superior features and stability.
One of the few solid measures of popularity is the adoption in commercial use - and here, GNOME is far ahead. Both Hewlett- Packard and Sun Microsystems have committed to using GNOME as the desktop for their Unix systems. This ties in with the previously mentioned ease of use - Sun's major contribution to the GNOME effort is in the areas of user/developer documentation, testing, accessiblity and user-testing. Three of the less glamourous parts of desktop development. The arrival of the GNOME 2.x series will see these contributions reach fruitition and allow GNOME to make a quantum leap ahead of KDE in most of the basic computer/user issues.
Reality: Oh for a penny every time this lie is told in any KDE story! Konqueror is a fine piece of software - it's authors deserve plently of praise - it is, however, quite unreliable and lax in its support of basic web standards compared to either Mozilla or Opera . It is also extremely slow - slower than the latest incarnations of the GNOME Nautilus filemanager/browser.
Reality: See also: Qt/TrollTech. Easily the most common wail heard by KDE developers - and yet it is easily disproved by looking at the actual applications for GNOME/GTK and KDE/Qt . KDE applications often have larger version numbers than GNOME ones... an old trick played by commerical software developers. Most KDE apps seem to jump for 1.x releases long before they are ready - KOffice being the best example. None of the components in Koffice are worthy of a 1.0 release, let alone 1.1 or 1.2. GNOME applications wait longer and get more testing in their 0.x stages and despite shorter development phases mature more quickly and reach stable featureful release states more quickly: the superb Evolution (groupware/email), Gnumeric (spreadsheet), Pan (newsreader), The GIMP (image manipulation), Abiword (word processing), RedCarpet
Reality: KDE is written in C++. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it is when the programmers do not know enough to avoid certain pitfalls that can plague software projects. Stupid use of ++/-- with C++ objects; masses of unnecessary allocations and deallocations of memory, and the most cretinous of all, blaming the extremely slow startup times of KDE apps on GCC. The GNOME 1.x releases were hardly svelt (2.x fixes many of these issues), but GNOME is a fashion cat-walk superwaif when compared to KDE's 500lb fat-momma cheese-burger scoffing trailer trash. One need only look at the recent fuss over ugly KDE hacks (such as prelinking) to see the problem inherent in the KDE architecture and basic design.
Reality: Fundamental misunderstanding. KDE releases as one big lump of code due to its use of C++ and the consequent problems with libraries. It bumps the version number of the entire KDE system for the smallest modifications. GNOME, on the other hand is componentized and each component releases on a (almost) separate schedule, bumping it's own version number but not the main GNOME version. Occasional releases of the entire GNOME system are done, and that's when the GNOME version number is bumped (currently it is 1.4). To see this in action, use RedCarpet and you will regular updates to GNOME components. GNOME development is not slower, it is in fact faster and more advanced. Lamers and newbies, however, fail to understand the advantages and just see KDE 1.1.1 followed a few weeks later by KDE 1.1.2. Wow! KDE roolz.
Reality: Qt started out as non-Free. KDE developers knew this violated the GPL and are therefore untrustworthy. KDE core developers work for TrollTech. Expensive per developer licensing for writing closed-source with Qt. Labyrinthine licensing nightmare.
Reality: Most KDE apps, such as those from The Kompany are actually Qt apps because they want to port to the more lucrative Windows/Qt market.
Reality: Mosfet liquid theme is an ugly and unstable hack. GNOME GTk icons are of a far higher quality than the cartoonish and confusing KDE ones. Qt is basically a Windows-look on a Unix platform.
Shut up man, you made my girlfriend cry!
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Don't let the door hit you on the butt on the way out. If you don't like it, yes, please leave and quit annoying those of us that are happy here.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
seriously... who gives a fuck?
Oh, and children of bodom fucking rules...
Well, that's the price we gladly pay for having a user-friendly and easy to learn GUI and operating system.
It's wrong to claim that linux is more secure than windows. The reason why "exploits" are constantly being found in Windows and IE is because so many people are actually using them! How was it? "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"? Bugs being shallow means that they're found.
Now, the open source operating systems and browsers might appear more secure but that's only because a) they are difficult to use and thus tend not to be targetted by the least skillful hackers and b) only a miniscule number of computer users are using linux and alternative browsers. The latter fact means that no-one's really that interested in hacking into such a system? Where's the eliteness in that?
-October_30th (posting as an AC because of a IP ban)
And I guess You are using Galeon, Mozilla or Konqueror. Wow, you are so cool. Unfortunately they don't display some IE-only sites pretty well. So you also have to ditch YOUR shitty browser.
Go troll somewhere else
The point remains, in XP you don't have to RTFM or STFW to figure out how to activate sub-pixel rendering. That's because selecting it from a drop-down-menu is comparatively intuitive, all other restrictions of Windows notwithstanding. :)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.