When the HTML is in your email, it's like you've invited the sender's web server into your machine, with a local document that is crafted like to remote documents you request in your browser. But the average user doesn't know this, or the power that document has to do things without your knowledge. I would recommend those who like HTML messages with links and such to view email with auto-image loading OFF; if there's a funny picture within, you can load it by clicking on it. Otherwise, do use text with attachments.
It is quite possible for them to get at your physical address or phone number if you've given that information once before to an unscrupulous vendor whose privacy policy you didn't review. Additionally, just having your email address is enough annoyance. Spam filters or not, it's very annoying a burden on mail servers.
I went to high school at Thomas Jefferson in Arlington, VA. While the regular Novell LAN was run by a county employee, our computer systems lab was run and maintained completely by students. It's been this way for 10 years now, and we've been doing just fine. It was there that I got my first real Unix exposure (we have PCs running Linux and SGIs running Irix), and that got me a leg up into a systems administration position where I work. Of course, the student sysadmins don't wield limitless power, we have two teachers who are responsible that the kids are doing the right thing. But they only provide administrative guidance, but the students do all work: programming, hardware purchase recommendations, and software upkeep.
Couldn't be more wrong. As I remember it, the nerds usually find these shows first, and get tired of them when all their cool peers 'discover' it for themselves. What happens is the collective attention span of all the kids shifts, and latches onto whatever (lucky) new experimental show the networks test. Such as is with pokemon, and whatever is to come.
They just want to point out vunerabilities in poorly understood, emerging technological fields. It's like watching the 11 o'clock news, with headlines like "Cell phones cause cancer".
At least that's what I take from it.
I feel safe venturing a remote guess that the author has never even used linux, so let's not put too much stress on it.
another company couldn't pick it up at a stable point, and run with it. IBM could start adding their own features to the linux kernel, and call it something else, no problem. Of course they'd have to either release it under the GPL or work something out with Linus, but it's entirely possible. Then we worry about fragmentation; so would IBM, or whoever. These companies should try to organize a working group with a purpose similar to POSIX, guaranteeing interoperability of the various kernels (maybe even BSD), minus extra features. This would ensure a good future market for Linux, and allow vendors and organizations to pick it up and run with it they way they see fit.
Does this make you somehow smarter than everyone else? Smarter than me? Forget it "dumb fuckwits". I randomly take my crack at writing wise-ass replies to people who sound like idiots. I guess I got lucky this time.
Also, Macs don't suck. The PowerPC architecture is revolutionary and (I think) aesthetically pleasing. It is the MacOS (=9) that sucks.
and I was thouroughly pleased. I agree with Timothy, I was dissapointed that the network stack was ignored... especially when so much time is devoted to various types of memory allocation. Unless they have a book cooking to cover this topic, I feel mystified by the networking code. However, it was very beneficial to see how the VFS works, and the chapter on the Second Extended Filesystem was very insightful and informative. Furthermore, I liked the treatment of the bootstrapping process in the Appendix; this was most helpful in understanding it so you can exact finer boot control. Now I want Writing Device Driver! I give it an 8.
I run it [mandrake tooled to 2.2.18] on a P90 and it loads from BIOS to Gnome in under 30 seconds. Win98 takes 3 minutes, and the hard drive isn't finished thrashing yet. Yessir, progress.
BTW if you read this book you'd know that Linux doesn't load the "legacy junk" unless you have the hardware in your box. Can you say "pH33r d4 kernel m0dule5?"
The US can be a really neat place. There's lots of pretty girls and guys, sexual freedom (ignore the Sunday morning pundits; nobody actually cares, not even George Bush Jr.) And there's every kind of food, and all (most) of it cheap. Cost of living is comparable to other highly rated countries (Canada, Japan, etc.), although part of that comes from having lots of land to play with (and assoc. taxes). It can also be really horrible when it comes to certain things. That is: getting certain electronics from japan (you know which ones), and being able to speak your mind and having someone listen to you even though you're not on MTV.
Of course, if you're really smart, you'll invent a new popular medium like the Internet which will solve both those problems (like eBay and Slashdot respectively)
Until then it's buying an island. When will Sealand start selling real estate?:)
I did some research earlier this year to establish if there was sufficient evidence to show prior art in BT's claims. Indeed, Nelson's Xanadu was a working concept which was publicly available, and was created 7 years prior to BT's inception of it's technology. Also, note that BT's patent specifically covers teletext devices attached to servers, and not networked computers. My question is, why not go after Minitel? Oh wait, I remember, too late you stupid jerks. They only "rediscovered" it 3 years ago. Sounds like an important technology to them, huh? I bet they even had a website at the time...
Indeed, the availability of editable Text and associated effects in the Photoshop are quite useful, and I use it more than GIMP for that reason alone. However, one must understand that the GIMP tries to be friendly to all users of X and supports bitmapped fonts. It's font tool wants to render a layer, either with bitmaps from X, or TTF/Type-1 rendering... and that's it. One shot, one model, one layer. If they would drop support for non-scalable fonts, it would be a lot easier to do what PS does. Or they could have two font tools (like "textbox" and the old one).
Now my beef about Photoshop: if you're going to support realtime vectors in the form of fonts, why not add full Illustrator functionality, with vector layers? God how I miss a simple circle or arc tool in PS. Same to GIMP, let's see some vectors!
The redundancy of these systems is one of the reasons why we have some of these problems. I would love to reduce my access to the outside world to a single coax or fiber connection to my ISP or Telco, and have all services derived from it. If the government would like to tap my phone, I'll leave a port open on my PBX emulator (if there is such a thing).
I look at the situation now and want to throw up; vendors paying for stuff that is already being payed for by someone else, names and numbers being bought in blocks and hoarded, etc. etc., protocols that don't want to work with each other, a government that couldn't even fathom the complexity of the system but wants a chokehold on it. We're so screwed.
Yes, I was immediately aware of X's monochrome bitmap text representation. However, it does not mean we couldn't change that. There might be some programs that would break with new libraries, but most just rely on the X server to handle everything but the string's contents.
Furthermore, alpha blending is as simple as hacking up your 32-bit display mode so that the unused byte contains the transparency information and is not just ignored by the X server when drawing and clipping windows. Most apps would end up (directly or indirectly) zeroing that byte, which would convey "Totally opaque" so nothing breaks.
We could also define additional flags such that apps without transparency would be optimized and clipping enabled for stuff underneath, etc. Or flags that would specify what kind of blending to use for the window (mix, additive, screen, multiply, etc.). Can you say cool special effects? Think the GIMP's layers all the time.
I distinctly remember my dad freaking out when he first saw the carnage that was Doom II. He didn't like me playing it so much.
About 2 years later we bought C&C Red Alert, and it got my dad hooked. He'd play it for hours straight if you didn't make him go cut the lawn or something. Now we play networked games of Quake Arena, and it's brought us closer than ever.
Simply stated, VGA montiors do not emit light at equal powers for equal changes in the values stored in the raster image. They relate by a power function (or gamma function, hence the name) Since the anti-aliasing works by linearly interpolating between the foreground and background, the edges might look too fuzzy and dark to the human eye due to that inconsistency. To make it seem more smooth, like text on paper, we fuddle with how much blending we use between the foreground and background to account for gamma and the eye's sensitivity. Same thing in Quake, you adjust the gamma for different monitors so the transition from light to dark looks convincingly real.
About 3 years ago when I was first exposed to linux, I wondered XFree didn't support anti-aliasing or alpha blending. It seemed like a pretty (easy, logical, neat) thing to implement, but why wasn't it happening? I had experienced games that used this technique, and was quite impressed. Microsoft beat XFree/KDE to the punch in Windows 2000, but did it take that to make the free GUI weenies realize that it was important to implement?
I'm a CS major. A lot of us Linux users are. We hate not knowing how the NT kernel works. We hate paying thousands of dollars and signing non-disclosure agreements just to take a peek. Linux is an attempt to do it all over. And guess what? It's doing a damn good job, considering that it's practically reverse engineering (minus any BSD stuff). Linux==communism? Hardly. Linux is the means to an end. I think the vendors who see it destined for a desktop market, etc. are disillusioned.
It's bringing the Unix environment home. How do you think I learned Solaris (Sys V)? Training courses?
Innovation? Here's innovation for you:
Kernel modules (no reboots!)
Proc filesystem
Clone syscall interface...there's probably a lot more but I don't want to misrepresent.
Also, do not confuse Linux (the kernel) with GNU's entourage (compiler, libraries, tools, etc.) and XFree. The distributions put these together. Talk to them about packaging innovative windowing systems.
I think the Supreme Court did the right thing. They cannot decide for us who the president should be; assuredly they could not pin either of them upon us. More than likely, they had their own reservations about the two candidates, and in everyone's best interest, told us that it's Florida's problem. And it is. Perhaps they're sending those two a subtle hint: whoever backs down first will save face.
At the same time I cannot help but be disappointed. I have this feeling of dread knowing that the reason why voter turnout is so bad is because no one (as in general sentiment) wants these airbags to be our leaders. I feel mentally paralyzed by the actions of our leaders, by the way in which they're chosen. Mechanical punch cards are entirely unacceptable. Let's consider margin of error, folks. We're in the grey zone, and it cannot be undone. For the next four years, I don't think I'll be able to listen to The State of The Union Address; the complete uncertainty with which he was chosen will dishearten me, knowing it could just as easily have been a different man.
The problem is ENTIRELY XUL. Have you tried Galeon (GTK interface on Gecko engine)? It runs like a dream. Actually, Mozilla can use any widget set (chosen at compile time) to draw the rendered output. You have your choice between Motif, GTK and I forget the rest. GTK is actually a good choice, because Imlib then handles all the nasty details of making sure PNG files get displayed properly, etc. etc. And AFAIK, GTK is very fast (provided it isn't pixmapping any widgets).
In fact, video games inspired me to be a creator. I wouldn't have been interested in computer programming if it weren't for my awe at the original NES. As soon as I got into Doom II I was downloading editors and making my own maps. I believe games can inspire otherwise the participants to give something back, whether it's a Quake mod, or an attempt at making the next Unreal. Perhaps this isn't so prevelant in the console gaming world, but still.
DjVu is applicable for any raster image. It just happens to be good at seperating high constrast regions (text) out of the image. And they may be referencing the name AT&T gave to the whole technology, while LizardTech chose to split it up into two distinct groups.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine is at work now, but later tonight, will translate the article in full for the benefit of those who can't read Japanese. I can't wait.
When the HTML is in your email, it's like you've invited the sender's web server into your machine, with a local document that is crafted like to remote documents you request in your browser. But the average user doesn't know this, or the power that document has to do things without your knowledge. I would recommend those who like HTML messages with links and such to view email with auto-image loading OFF; if there's a funny picture within, you can load it by clicking on it. Otherwise, do use text with attachments.
It is quite possible for them to get at your physical address or phone number if you've given that information once before to an unscrupulous vendor whose privacy policy you didn't review. Additionally, just having your email address is enough annoyance. Spam filters or not, it's very annoying a burden on mail servers.
I went to high school at Thomas Jefferson in Arlington, VA. While the regular Novell LAN was run by a county employee, our computer systems lab was run and maintained completely by students. It's been this way for 10 years now, and we've been doing just fine. It was there that I got my first real Unix exposure (we have PCs running Linux and SGIs running Irix), and that got me a leg up into a systems administration position where I work.
Of course, the student sysadmins don't wield limitless power, we have two teachers who are responsible that the kids are doing the right thing. But they only provide administrative guidance, but the students do all work: programming, hardware purchase recommendations, and software upkeep.
Go TJ!
Couldn't be more wrong. As I remember it, the nerds usually find these shows first, and get tired of them when all their cool peers 'discover' it for themselves. What happens is the collective attention span of all the kids shifts, and latches onto whatever (lucky) new experimental show the networks test. Such as is with pokemon, and whatever is to come.
They just want to point out vunerabilities in poorly understood, emerging technological fields. It's like watching the 11 o'clock news, with headlines like "Cell phones cause cancer".
At least that's what I take from it.
I feel safe venturing a remote guess that the author has never even used linux, so let's not put too much stress on it.
another company couldn't pick it up at a stable point, and run with it. IBM could start adding their own features to the linux kernel, and call it something else, no problem. Of course they'd have to either release it under the GPL or work something out with Linus, but it's entirely possible. Then we worry about fragmentation; so would IBM, or whoever. These companies should try to organize a working group with a purpose similar to POSIX, guaranteeing interoperability of the various kernels (maybe even BSD), minus extra features. This would ensure a good future market for Linux, and allow vendors and organizations to pick it up and run with it they way they see fit.
Does this make you somehow smarter than everyone else? Smarter than me? Forget it "dumb fuckwits". I randomly take my crack at writing wise-ass replies to people who sound like idiots. I guess I got lucky this time.
Also, Macs don't suck. The PowerPC architecture is revolutionary and (I think) aesthetically pleasing. It is the MacOS (=9) that sucks.
and I was thouroughly pleased. I agree with Timothy, I was dissapointed that the network stack was ignored... especially when so much time is devoted to various types of memory allocation. Unless they have a book cooking to cover this topic, I feel mystified by the networking code. However, it was very beneficial to see how the VFS works, and the chapter on the Second Extended Filesystem was very insightful and informative. Furthermore, I liked the treatment of the bootstrapping process in the Appendix; this was most helpful in understanding it so you can exact finer boot control. Now I want Writing Device Driver! I give it an 8.
I run it [mandrake tooled to 2.2.18] on a P90 and it loads from BIOS to Gnome in under 30 seconds. Win98 takes 3 minutes, and the hard drive isn't finished thrashing yet. Yessir, progress.
BTW if you read this book you'd know that Linux doesn't load the "legacy junk" unless you have the hardware in your box. Can you say "pH33r d4 kernel m0dule5?"
The US can be a really neat place. There's lots of pretty girls and guys, sexual freedom (ignore the Sunday morning pundits; nobody actually cares, not even George Bush Jr.) And there's every kind of food, and all (most) of it cheap. Cost of living is comparable to other highly rated countries (Canada, Japan, etc.), although part of that comes from having lots of land to play with (and assoc. taxes). It can also be really horrible when it comes to certain things. That is: getting certain electronics from japan (you know which ones), and being able to speak your mind and having someone listen to you even though you're not on MTV.
:)
Of course, if you're really smart, you'll invent a new popular medium like the Internet which will solve both those problems (like eBay and Slashdot respectively)
Until then it's buying an island. When will Sealand start selling real estate?
I did some research earlier this year to establish if there was sufficient evidence to show prior art in BT's claims. Indeed, Nelson's Xanadu was a working concept which was publicly available, and was created 7 years prior to BT's inception of it's technology. Also, note that BT's patent specifically covers teletext devices attached to servers, and not networked computers. My question is, why not go after Minitel? Oh wait, I remember, too late you stupid jerks. They only "rediscovered" it 3 years ago. Sounds like an important technology to them, huh? I bet they even had a website at the time...
I just realized that what I asked for is the main new feature in PS 6.0   :)
Okay GIMPish devs, get your butts in gear!
Indeed, the availability of editable Text and associated effects in the Photoshop are quite useful, and I use it more than GIMP for that reason alone. However, one must understand that the GIMP tries to be friendly to all users of X and supports bitmapped fonts. It's font tool wants to render a layer, either with bitmaps from X, or TTF/Type-1 rendering... and that's it. One shot, one model, one layer. If they would drop support for non-scalable fonts, it would be a lot easier to do what PS does. Or they could have two font tools (like "textbox" and the old one).
Now my beef about Photoshop: if you're going to support realtime vectors in the form of fonts, why not add full Illustrator functionality, with vector layers? God how I miss a simple circle or arc tool in PS. Same to GIMP, let's see some vectors!
It [Photoshop, PaintShop] lacks extensibility for the common user without special tools.
So how is it a rip-off? It's a one-up!
I look at the situation now and want to throw up; vendors paying for stuff that is already being payed for by someone else, names and numbers being bought in blocks and hoarded, etc. etc., protocols that don't want to work with each other, a government that couldn't even fathom the complexity of the system but wants a chokehold on it. We're so screwed.
I'm moving to Sealand
Yes, I was immediately aware of X's monochrome bitmap text representation. However, it does not mean we couldn't change that. There might be some programs that would break with new libraries, but most just rely on the X server to handle everything but the string's contents.
Furthermore, alpha blending is as simple as hacking up your 32-bit display mode so that the unused byte contains the transparency information and is not just ignored by the X server when drawing and clipping windows. Most apps would end up (directly or indirectly) zeroing that byte, which would convey "Totally opaque" so nothing breaks.
We could also define additional flags such that apps without transparency would be optimized and clipping enabled for stuff underneath, etc. Or flags that would specify what kind of blending to use for the window (mix, additive, screen, multiply, etc.). Can you say cool special effects? Think the GIMP's layers all the time.
Here here!
I distinctly remember my dad freaking out when he first saw the carnage that was Doom II. He didn't like me playing it so much.
About 2 years later we bought C&C Red Alert, and it got my dad hooked. He'd play it for hours straight if you didn't make him go cut the lawn or something. Now we play networked games of Quake Arena, and it's brought us closer than ever.
* Thumbs Up + Wink *
Simply stated, VGA montiors do not emit light at equal powers for equal changes in the values stored in the raster image. They relate by a power function (or gamma function, hence the name) Since the anti-aliasing works by linearly interpolating between the foreground and background, the edges might look too fuzzy and dark to the human eye due to that inconsistency. To make it seem more smooth, like text on paper, we fuddle with how much blending we use between the foreground and background to account for gamma and the eye's sensitivity. Same thing in Quake, you adjust the gamma for different monitors so the transition from light to dark looks convincingly real.
Hope this helps.
About 3 years ago when I was first exposed to linux, I wondered XFree didn't support anti-aliasing or alpha blending. It seemed like a pretty (easy, logical, neat) thing to implement, but why wasn't it happening? I had experienced games that used this technique, and was quite impressed. Microsoft beat XFree/KDE to the punch in Windows 2000, but did it take that to make the free GUI weenies realize that it was important to implement?
*groans*
...there's probably a lot more but I don't want to misrepresent.
Also, do not confuse Linux (the kernel) with GNU's entourage (compiler, libraries, tools, etc.) and XFree. The distributions put these together. Talk to them about packaging innovative windowing systems.
I'm a CS major. A lot of us Linux users are. We hate not knowing how the NT kernel works. We hate paying thousands of dollars and signing non-disclosure agreements just to take a peek. Linux is an attempt to do it all over. And guess what? It's doing a damn good job, considering that it's practically reverse engineering (minus any BSD stuff). Linux==communism? Hardly. Linux is the means to an end. I think the vendors who see it destined for a desktop market, etc. are disillusioned. It's bringing the Unix environment home. How do you think I learned Solaris (Sys V)? Training courses? Innovation? Here's innovation for you: Kernel modules (no reboots!) Proc filesystem Clone syscall interface
I think the Supreme Court did the right thing. They cannot decide for us who the president should be; assuredly they could not pin either of them upon us. More than likely, they had their own reservations about the two candidates, and in everyone's best interest, told us that it's Florida's problem. And it is. Perhaps they're sending those two a subtle hint: whoever backs down first will save face.
At the same time I cannot help but be disappointed. I have this feeling of dread knowing that the reason why voter turnout is so bad is because no one (as in general sentiment) wants these airbags to be our leaders. I feel mentally paralyzed by the actions of our leaders, by the way in which they're chosen. Mechanical punch cards are entirely unacceptable. Let's consider margin of error, folks. We're in the grey zone, and it cannot be undone. For the next four years, I don't think I'll be able to listen to The State of The Union Address; the complete uncertainty with which he was chosen will dishearten me, knowing it could just as easily have been a different man.
The problem is ENTIRELY XUL. Have you tried Galeon (GTK interface on Gecko engine)? It runs like a dream. Actually, Mozilla can use any widget set (chosen at compile time) to draw the rendered output. You have your choice between Motif, GTK and I forget the rest. GTK is actually a good choice, because Imlib then handles all the nasty details of making sure PNG files get displayed properly, etc. etc. And AFAIK, GTK is very fast (provided it isn't pixmapping any widgets).
In fact, video games inspired me to be a creator. I wouldn't have been interested in computer programming if it weren't for my awe at the original NES. As soon as I got into Doom II I was downloading editors and making my own maps. I believe games can inspire otherwise the participants to give something back, whether it's a Quake mod, or an attempt at making the next Unreal. Perhaps this isn't so prevelant in the console gaming world, but still.
DjVu is applicable for any raster image. It just happens to be good at seperating high constrast regions (text) out of the image. And they may be referencing the name AT&T gave to the whole technology, while LizardTech chose to split it up into two distinct groups.