I'm not around to see the 5:30 showing, but one of my roommates is, and he's pointed out a couple of things that were cut for the earlier broadcast but left in the midnight one. Mostly brief scenes that the producers apparently thought were too violent or gory. One that I remember off the top of my head was when Hiro was being rescued from the medical center and he'd broken through one of the wrist straps on his own, leaving a good bit of blood on the table.
--Phil (/me tries to imagine the reaction of the average American to Lain.)
It's not really the same. What I'd like to see is a channel devoted to unaltered anime. The Cartoon Network is currently aimed primarily at kids, so they want to "sanitize" any anime before they show it. Were they to spin off an anime-only channel, they would (hopefully) target it more at adults and leave the anime untouched.
--Phil (And, while I'm dreaming, we'll make all of the anime on the new channel subbed, too.)
"Half the scientists in the universe were working on jamming the Electronic Thumb's signals, and the other half were working on jamming the jamming signals..."
--Phil (I, personally, have never before heard of "blocked anonymous call rejection override".)
Mp3s have curved my CD purchases, and I dont know many people who cant say the same thing....
I can say the opposite. My CD purchases were curbed a while ago by having to pay rent and buy food and other such little things. As such, I've gotten picky about my music, and have now bought several CDs on the basis of having heard mp3s of the songs first. In some cases, I would probably have bought a CD, if not necessarily the one that I did get. In others, though, I heard the mp3s, said, "Wow! They're really good!" and went out ant bought a CD.
--Phil (Although most mp3s I've heard that weren't from my CD collection came from friends' computers.)
In this case what exactly does ala mean? Is this an exclusive CmdrTaco word?
It's a misspelling of the phrase à la. (It's often spelled without the accent over the 'a'.) The phrase is roughly a synonym for "similar to" or "like". I believe it's of French derivation.
--Phil (It is nice to see someone going after all the poor grammar and spelling around here.)
Yes, everyone has to turn the fonts into bitmaps at some point. X, however, only knows about bitmaps. Thus, when it needs to scale a font, it scales it like a bitmap, not like a vector image. This can lead to some rather nasty looking characters if the requested size is too different from the available sizes. As for truetype fonts, the truetype font server does a pretty good job of telling the X server that it has fonts in common sizes, but, because of the way the X font protocol works, the server now thinks that fonts are only available in those sizes. If it needs something else, it will take the closest size from the font server and then scale it as a bitmap to reach the ultimately desired size. A fully truetype-aware system would just take the truetype font, scale it as a vector image to the appropriate size, and then turn it into a bitmap for display.
As for X requesting appropriate sizes, that's not exactly how it works. The font server is expected to tell X what font sizes it can provide. X then does any further scaling of the fonts on its own. This works when your fonts are all bitmaps, but not with vector-based fonts.
I'll have to take a look at XFree4, since you say it supports truetype fonts on its own. (I've been trying to be lazy and wait for the.debs, but I've also been told that it supports GL rendering into a window on the 3dfx chipset. Eventually the temptation will be too much...)
--Phil (And today's auxiliary lesson is to check URLs before clicking.)
Check out this Slashdot post. Last Wednesday, DeadSea estimated that Katz would be comparing geek and mutant alienation within a week. Not only that, but Ralph Wiggam was talking about making side bets on the occurence of phrases like "post-Columbine".
--Phil (Still hoping for more (hopefully better) columnists for Slashdot--get rid of the Katz monopoly.)
The problem with fonts in X isn't so much the lack of antialiasing but the fact that X only understands bitmapped fonts. This often leads to pronounced jaggies when the requested font size and the available sizes differ. Currently, in order to use trye type fonts, you have to use an X font server that takes takes the fonts and makes bitmaps out of them, telling the X server that it can provide a different image for every font size it can think of. Even so, if the X server ends up needing a font size not explicitly listed by the true type font server, it will grab what it deems to be the closest size and scale the bitmap.
The core X protocol is unable to understand anything but bitmapped fonts. I don't know how feasable a true type X extension would be.
--Phil (I still haven't gotten my fonts working exactly as I'd like them.)
IMO, tools like VNC obsoleted the "power" of X ages ago.
Not really. VNC works at, basically, the pixel level of the screen. The VMC protocol amounts to sending a list of all of the pixels that just changed to the client. X at least allows for more abstraction than that.
99% of the time, the X client and server are on the same system.
Speak for yourself. My ratio is probably closer to 75% local. Most of the apps I run are indeed local, but I make frequent use of the ability to run programs remotely and display on my desktop. This is useful for doing stuff on my servers, which are in another room and headless anyway. At home, I really like my X terminal. It's small and quiet (no moving parts) but allows me to use any of the other computers in the place more conveniently.
X isn't perfect (it's very far from being perfect), but for me the advantages far outweigh the problems.
Unless, of course, you happen to be familiar with non-American English. In British English, companies are considered to be a collection of people, and are a plurality.
--Phil (If you're going to complain about things, it helps to be right.)
It seems to me that Debian advocates believe that the reason for KDE's non-inclusion is a problem with the QPL rather than a problem with Debian. If they believe that they would be morally wrong to include KDE in their distribution because it is not "free" enough for them, then this is their choice. But is there really a need to try to modify the QPL in order to satisfy them?
The problem is not that the QPL isn't free enough. (I don't think it is, but that's another post.) The problem is that the QPL and the GPL are not compatible, yet KDE has a number of GPLed programs linked with QPLed code (QT). QT 2.0 itself is part of Debian's main distribution--it's free by the definition of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian is merely concerned with the legality or distributing incompatibly licensed software.
As we all know, the great thing about open source is that it empowers the user - if you do not like an aspect of the software, then you are perfecty free to fork the code and take things in your own direction.
But just try forking a QPLed program... (Sorry. I'll get back on track now.)
Surely it is fine to maintain the
status quo, and allow Debian to remain without KDE (allowing it to maintain its moral philosophy) and to have other forked versions of Debian which include the non-free software that dome users require.
If someone else else wants to do that, that's fine. It doesn't change the incompatibility between the multiple licenses in KDE's code. Until they're sure they can satisfy the software's licenses, I doubt Debian will touch KDE.
--Phil (I seem to be posting a lot in this article... I really like Debian.)
Why not make the GPL more compatible with the QPL?
(I'm quoting what you meant to say.) Ignoring for the moment the fact that the GPL was around long before the QPL, how would you propose to do as you suggest? The GPL is so popular specifically because of what it says. Changing parts of it to be more compatible with the QPL or any other license would necessitate removing a lot of things that other people specifically want in their license. Modifying the GPL as a whole because it's incompatible with another license is not a move that many people would like, and not something that the FSF is likely to do, anyway.
Another possibility is for KDE programs that are otherwise GPLed to have an addendum to the GPL saying that linking with QT is permitted. (Note that the Linux kernel has a similar addendum specifically excluding third party kernel modules from the GPL on the kernel.) This addendum to the GPL is the sort of thing a number of Debian people were pursuing, in the interests of ensuring the legality of Debian distributing KDE. That effort ended up not going extremely far. Some original authors couldn't be contacted and permission to change the license couldn't be granted. Some authors refused to modify the license on their code, feeling that it would weaken the freeness of the software. (Relative freeness of various licenses is a flamewar for another time.) As it stands now, the GPL and the QPL are incompatible and it appears that neither side is going to try to accomidate the other. (I, personally, like the GPL as it is and, were it to be changed to be QPL compatible (as I said, not likely), I, and probably many other people, would release my software under the old, IMHO better, GPL.)
Finally (and somewhat tangentially to the rest of my post), you said
This is especially true considering there are no major sticking points in the QPL which prevent widespread acceptance.
This is not entirely true. One specific part of the license that I don't like is the patchware clause. It basically says that any modifications to the program that are distributed by anyone other than the original author must be distributed as patches and not integrated into the main source tree. This clause tremendously encumbers antone who wants to fork a QPLed project. I understand Troll's reasons for that clause and I respect their right to license their software as they see fit, but I don't have to like their license and I would not put such a license on my software. --Phil (I hope I managed to avoid ranting too much there.)
But Debian isn't about the "majority". Debian is about producing a high quality, free Linux distribution. (Whether the "high quality" part or the "free" part is more important depends on who you talk to. I lean towards the "free" side.)
If you want KDE, you have several options. You can download the.debs from KDE's site. They even give you a line to add to/etc/apt/sources.list so that you can install and manage KDE with apt. If you don't like Debian's stance on KDE at all, you can always go to another distribution, such as Red Hat or Mandrake, that includes KDE by default. Don't get after Debian for not behaving the exact way you want them to behave. They're taking a stand on an issue they feel strongly about, but you still have your options.
--Phil (For that matter, the majority of computer users still use Windows...)
The way I see it, and this is how I moderate when I have the points, is that a "flamebait" post is one filled solely with invective, with no content to back it up. Such posts contribute nothing to a reasonable discussion.
--Phil (I tend to mod good posts up more often than bad posts down, though.)
I have never had Electric Eyes crash on me, even when loading multiple hundreds of images. I tend to start it from the cvommand line, so I can get all of my images in that manner. (Dialog box? What's that?:) Eye of Gnome is another purpotedly decent image viewer. I've never tried it, though.
--Phil (Where did I get all those images? One day, I found that the Doonesbury site had every Doonesbury strip ever written...)
I'm posting this with mozilla. Before that, I used Navigator 4., but what I used to use isn't the point.
As for the non-free software I have on my system--vrms tells me that I have: gpg-idea and gpg-rsa - for compatibility with PGP (note that these are also non-US); mpg123 - because I have scripts that use it, but I could change those to use one of the completely free mp3 players; various mySQL packages - I haven't yet replaced these with their GPLed counterparts because I don't use them all that much; snes9x - utility wins out over freeness here, because I do like playing games occasionally. I also have Civilization: Call To Power and Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but I have no problem with non-free games. (Rather, I have little problem with them. I would prefer games with free engines and merely non-free data, but I tend not care much about this issue, as games aren't really an incredibly importand part of my system.)
Of the non-free packages I have, the only one I would go out of my way to get, were Debian to drop non-free, would be snes9x, because there are acceptable free alternatives to all of the others. (I could probably live without snes9x, but, as I said, I do like to play games. (Curse you, ray, for showing me Seiken Densetsu 3!))
--Phil (I started using Debian specifically because I liked their attitude towards free software.)
[Insert whining about slashdot reporting old stories.]
See! This was posted previously on August 30, 199 and March 8, 1999. (And there was also a hardware change announced on June 27, 1998, but Rob apparently didn't have a testing period before that switch.)
Actually, it's somewhat interesting to watch both Slashdot's progression through various hardware and the Slashdot readers' responses to the changes.
--Phil (It's also interesting just to look at the change in overall attitude of the comments through time.)
I was able to turn up "The Happy Days Ahead", a chapter from Heinlein's Expanded Universe. In this chapter, he talks about making scientific predictions in works of science fiction. Near the beginning of the chapter, he mentions what happened with the waterbed.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein gives a fairly detailed (if somewhat simplistic--read it yourself) description of a water bed. A number of years later, someone attempted to patent the water bed, only to be denied the patent on the basis of the prior art in Heinlein's book. Heinlein does point out that the attempted patentor was not the creator of the first water bed. The creator of the first physical water bed actually sent Heinlein a free water bed when the came out and named his company the "Share-Water Bed Company". --Phil (Google is your friend)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not around to see the 5:30 showing, but one of my roommates is, and he's pointed out a couple of things that were cut for the earlier broadcast but left in the midnight one. Mostly brief scenes that the producers apparently thought were too violent or gory. One that I remember off the top of my head was when Hiro was being rescued from the medical center and he'd broken through one of the wrist straps on his own, leaving a good bit of blood on the table.
--Phil (/me tries to imagine the reaction of the average American to Lain.)
It's not really the same. What I'd like to see is a channel devoted to unaltered anime. The Cartoon Network is currently aimed primarily at kids, so they want to "sanitize" any anime before they show it. Were they to spin off an anime-only channel, they would (hopefully) target it more at adults and leave the anime untouched.
--Phil (And, while I'm dreaming, we'll make all of the anime on the new channel subbed, too.)
"Half the scientists in the universe were working on jamming the Electronic Thumb's signals, and the other half were working on jamming the jamming signals..."
--Phil (I, personally, have never before heard of "blocked anonymous call rejection override".)
I can say the opposite. My CD purchases were curbed a while ago by having to pay rent and buy food and other such little things. As such, I've gotten picky about my music, and have now bought several CDs on the basis of having heard mp3s of the songs first. In some cases, I would probably have bought a CD, if not necessarily the one that I did get. In others, though, I heard the mp3s, said, "Wow! They're really good!" and went out ant bought a CD.
--Phil (Although most mp3s I've heard that weren't from my CD collection came from friends' computers.)
..And you're only allowed to profit off of someone else's music if you're in the RIAA...
--Phil (I have certainly bought CDs because I heard the music first in mp3s.)
It's a misspelling of the phrase à la. (It's often spelled without the accent over the 'a'.) The phrase is roughly a synonym for "similar to" or "like". I believe it's of French derivation.
--Phil (It is nice to see someone going after all the poor grammar and spelling around here.)
Yes, everyone has to turn the fonts into bitmaps at some point. X, however, only knows about bitmaps. Thus, when it needs to scale a font, it scales it like a bitmap, not like a vector image. This can lead to some rather nasty looking characters if the requested size is too different from the available sizes. As for truetype fonts, the truetype font server does a pretty good job of telling the X server that it has fonts in common sizes, but, because of the way the X font protocol works, the server now thinks that fonts are only available in those sizes. If it needs something else, it will take the closest size from the font server and then scale it as a bitmap to reach the ultimately desired size. A fully truetype-aware system would just take the truetype font, scale it as a vector image to the appropriate size, and then turn it into a bitmap for display.
As for X requesting appropriate sizes, that's not exactly how it works. The font server is expected to tell X what font sizes it can provide. X then does any further scaling of the fonts on its own. This works when your fonts are all bitmaps, but not with vector-based fonts.
I'll have to take a look at XFree4, since you say it supports truetype fonts on its own. (I've been trying to be lazy and wait for the .debs, but I've also been told that it supports GL rendering into a window on the 3dfx chipset. Eventually the temptation will be too much...)
--Phil (And today's auxiliary lesson is to check URLs before clicking.)
Check out this Slashdot post. Last Wednesday, DeadSea estimated that Katz would be comparing geek and mutant alienation within a week. Not only that, but Ralph Wiggam was talking about making side bets on the occurence of phrases like "post-Columbine".
--Phil (Still hoping for more (hopefully better) columnists for Slashdot--get rid of the Katz monopoly.)
The problem with fonts in X isn't so much the lack of antialiasing but the fact that X only understands bitmapped fonts. This often leads to pronounced jaggies when the requested font size and the available sizes differ. Currently, in order to use trye type fonts, you have to use an X font server that takes takes the fonts and makes bitmaps out of them, telling the X server that it can provide a different image for every font size it can think of. Even so, if the X server ends up needing a font size not explicitly listed by the true type font server, it will grab what it deems to be the closest size and scale the bitmap.
The core X protocol is unable to understand anything but bitmapped fonts. I don't know how feasable a true type X extension would be.
--Phil (I still haven't gotten my fonts working exactly as I'd like them.)
Not really. VNC works at, basically, the pixel level of the screen. The VMC protocol amounts to sending a list of all of the pixels that just changed to the client. X at least allows for more abstraction than that.
Speak for yourself. My ratio is probably closer to 75% local. Most of the apps I run are indeed local, but I make frequent use of the ability to run programs remotely and display on my desktop. This is useful for doing stuff on my servers, which are in another room and headless anyway. At home, I really like my X terminal. It's small and quiet (no moving parts) but allows me to use any of the other computers in the place more conveniently.
X isn't perfect (it's very far from being perfect), but for me the advantages far outweigh the problems.
--Phil (If only NeWS had supplanted X.)
A true minimalist (when not in text mode) would probably be using Athena, not Motif...
:)
--Phil (Then use lwm and you should be set.
That wouldn't work if (as I assumed) they're testing the keyboards themselves...
--Phil (I'd love to see "Cool, it works with Linux" on all my hardware.)
It would have been even more amusing if your last haiku had read:
Ack! Help! Cannot stop
Self-expression in haiku
<THUD!> Ah, better. Thanks...
--Phil (Twice five syllables / plus seven can't say much, but / that's haiku for you.)
Indeed.
--Phil (channel!)
Unless, of course, you happen to be familiar with non-American English. In British English, companies are considered to be a collection of people, and are a plurality.
--Phil (If you're going to complain about things, it helps to be right.)
The point is that something needs to change. Right now, KDE is shipping software under incompatible licenses. Please read Xtifr's post on the subject.
--Phil (Incidentally, someone really needs to mod Xtifr's post up.)
The problem is not that the QPL isn't free enough. (I don't think it is, but that's another post.) The problem is that the QPL and the GPL are not compatible, yet KDE has a number of GPLed programs linked with QPLed code (QT). QT 2.0 itself is part of Debian's main distribution--it's free by the definition of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian is merely concerned with the legality or distributing incompatibly licensed software.
But just try forking a QPLed program... (Sorry. I'll get back on track now.)
If someone else else wants to do that, that's fine. It doesn't change the incompatibility between the multiple licenses in KDE's code. Until they're sure they can satisfy the software's licenses, I doubt Debian will touch KDE.
--Phil (I seem to be posting a lot in this article... I really like Debian.)
(I'm quoting what you meant to say.) Ignoring for the moment the fact that the GPL was around long before the QPL, how would you propose to do as you suggest? The GPL is so popular specifically because of what it says. Changing parts of it to be more compatible with the QPL or any other license would necessitate removing a lot of things that other people specifically want in their license. Modifying the GPL as a whole because it's incompatible with another license is not a move that many people would like, and not something that the FSF is likely to do, anyway.
Another possibility is for KDE programs that are otherwise GPLed to have an addendum to the GPL saying that linking with QT is permitted. (Note that the Linux kernel has a similar addendum specifically excluding third party kernel modules from the GPL on the kernel.) This addendum to the GPL is the sort of thing a number of Debian people were pursuing, in the interests of ensuring the legality of Debian distributing KDE. That effort ended up not going extremely far. Some original authors couldn't be contacted and permission to change the license couldn't be granted. Some authors refused to modify the license on their code, feeling that it would weaken the freeness of the software. (Relative freeness of various licenses is a flamewar for another time.) As it stands now, the GPL and the QPL are incompatible and it appears that neither side is going to try to accomidate the other. (I, personally, like the GPL as it is and, were it to be changed to be QPL compatible (as I said, not likely), I, and probably many other people, would release my software under the old, IMHO better, GPL.)
Finally (and somewhat tangentially to the rest of my post), you said
This is not entirely true. One specific part of the license that I don't like is the patchware clause. It basically says that any modifications to the program that are distributed by anyone other than the original author must be distributed as patches and not integrated into the main source tree. This clause tremendously encumbers antone who wants to fork a QPLed project. I understand Troll's reasons for that clause and I respect their right to license their software as they see fit, but I don't have to like their license and I would not put such a license on my software.--Phil (I hope I managed to avoid ranting too much there.)
But Debian isn't about the "majority". Debian is about producing a high quality, free Linux distribution. (Whether the "high quality" part or the "free" part is more important depends on who you talk to. I lean towards the "free" side.)
If you want KDE, you have several options. You can download the .debs from KDE's site. They even give you a line to add to /etc/apt/sources.list so that you can install and manage KDE with apt. If you don't like Debian's stance on KDE at all, you can always go to another distribution, such as Red Hat or Mandrake, that includes KDE by default. Don't get after Debian for not behaving the exact way you want them to behave. They're taking a stand on an issue they feel strongly about, but you still have your options.
--Phil (For that matter, the majority of computer users still use Windows...)
The way I see it, and this is how I moderate when I have the points, is that a "flamebait" post is one filled solely with invective, with no content to back it up. Such posts contribute nothing to a reasonable discussion.
--Phil (I tend to mod good posts up more often than bad posts down, though.)
I have never had Electric Eyes crash on me, even when loading multiple hundreds of images. I tend to start it from the cvommand line, so I can get all of my images in that manner. (Dialog box? What's that? :) Eye of Gnome is another purpotedly decent image viewer. I've never tried it, though.
--Phil (Where did I get all those images? One day, I found that the Doonesbury site had every Doonesbury strip ever written...)
I'm posting this with mozilla. Before that, I used Navigator 4., but what I used to use isn't the point.
As for the non-free software I have on my system--vrms tells me that I have: gpg-idea and gpg-rsa - for compatibility with PGP (note that these are also non-US); mpg123 - because I have scripts that use it, but I could change those to use one of the completely free mp3 players; various mySQL packages - I haven't yet replaced these with their GPLed counterparts because I don't use them all that much; snes9x - utility wins out over freeness here, because I do like playing games occasionally. I also have Civilization: Call To Power and Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but I have no problem with non-free games. (Rather, I have little problem with them. I would prefer games with free engines and merely non-free data, but I tend not care much about this issue, as games aren't really an incredibly importand part of my system.)
Of the non-free packages I have, the only one I would go out of my way to get, were Debian to drop non-free, would be snes9x, because there are acceptable free alternatives to all of the others. (I could probably live without snes9x, but, as I said, I do like to play games. (Curse you, ray, for showing me Seiken Densetsu 3!))
--Phil (I started using Debian specifically because I liked their attitude towards free software.)
Smith & Wesson: The original "point and click" interface.
--Phil (Well, no one else had said it yet...)
[Insert whining about slashdot reporting old stories.]
See! This was posted previously on August 30, 199 and March 8, 1999. (And there was also a hardware change announced on June 27, 1998, but Rob apparently didn't have a testing period before that switch.)
Actually, it's somewhat interesting to watch both Slashdot's progression through various hardware and the Slashdot readers' responses to the changes.
--Phil (It's also interesting just to look at the change in overall attitude of the comments through time.)
I was able to turn up "The Happy Days Ahead", a chapter from Heinlein's Expanded Universe. In this chapter, he talks about making scientific predictions in works of science fiction. Near the beginning of the chapter, he mentions what happened with the waterbed.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein gives a fairly detailed (if somewhat simplistic--read it yourself) description of a water bed. A number of years later, someone attempted to patent the water bed, only to be denied the patent on the basis of the prior art in Heinlein's book. Heinlein does point out that the attempted patentor was not the creator of the first water bed. The creator of the first physical water bed actually sent Heinlein a free water bed when the came out and named his company the "Share-Water Bed Company".--Phil (Google is your friend)