Slashdot Mirror
Interview With Google's V8 Author Lars Bak
Dr Pete writes "Financial Times has an interesting piece about Lars Bak and Kasper Lund the authors of the V8 virtual machine in Google's Chrome browser. 'Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that's an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission's antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors such as Google a chance to claim ground.'" Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.
May actually be an option very soon. Internet explorer is completely uninstallable in the latest build of windows 7. (7022 & later)
Google chrome 2.0 has image scaling.
No, but the country is correct. Lars Bak, Kasper Lund and the drummer are all from Denmark.
Just use either portable chrome or portable chromium then, replacing the app folder with nearly-hourly builds from http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/LATEST (delete rlz.dll). But no auto-updates this way.
Non-scalable fonts are not subject to copyright in the United States, but may be subject to design patents. Scalable fonts in the other hand, are subject to copyright. The output of these fonts are not, but the font files themselves are.
If you want to think of it one way, scalable fonts are full blown computer programs, and are thereby subject to copyright, even if what they output is not. I can write a program that outputs the first million digits of pi, and the program can be subject to copyright protection, even though the output mist definitely is not. Same basic idea.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
It's the hinting - an embedded program used to transform the glyph images at small sizes, so they don't look crap.
That part definitely is copyrightable.
However, Freetype doesn't use hinting in TrueType / OpenType font files by default, because the technique is patented (by Apple). Instead, it has an auto-hinting system, which works just great when you have anti-aliasing or subpixel rendering turned on. I suppose one could simply create some fonts with the same metrics and general appearance as the Microsoft fonts, and use those instead.
Oddly, Apple don't seem to use hinting either since OS X.
Take this with as bigger grain of salt as you should with any AC post. But I run a couple of medium-size sites, technical in nature, but not exclusively for GNU/Linux users: the percentage of our visitors using GNU/Linux is at approx. 10%. My educated guess is that Slashdot's would be between 10-20%, given that it's aimed a little more at GNU/Linux users than either of the sites I run. Note: the second figure was pulled from my arse, the first figure was based on months of statistics for two Web sites.
Maybe Slashdot doesn't wish to publish that GNU/Linux only has 10%-20% market share, based on their statistics, but I don't think it's too shabby!
One thing's for certain: none of Slashdot's, or my site's, visitors are being recorded by the lame HitsLink software people keep referring to (as some panacea of evidence against GNU/Linux having any market share). Frankly, I know of no Web sites using their tracker, every site-owner, with a clue, uses Google Analytics. Sample bias anyone? :)