Re:KDE3 -pre is in Red Hat's Skipjack
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
Right, which is what they are planning to do:
Web Browser (Mozilla)
is the menu entry, and
Browse the web, blah blah blah
is the tooltip. Like I said. Like you said. Program description in the menu (with app name in parenthesis for backwards compatibility) and detailed description in the tooltip.
-Erik
Re:KDE3 -pre is in Red Hat's Skipjack
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
I believe the Gnome 2.0 menu proposal implements something like this. For example,
Web Browser (Mozilla) [Browse the World Wide Web or local HTML documents]
Email (Evolution) [Read and send email, manage tasks, contacts, and calendars]
The site is TERRIBLE. It's a 3 pictures on a HORRIBLE background that hurts my eyes.
Yeah, if you're dense enough to think that the site is just that page. There's a link down at the bottom for more pictures... there are actually 5-10 pages of pictures with 3-5 pictures on each page w/ descriptions. Much smarter to do it that way than put it all on one page, especially considering there are no thumbnails.
-Erik
Re:How to Google Whack...
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
That's hard.
underbelly metanoia is a 2, but I can't find any ones.
It's hard enough to compete with Microsoft to get a persons attention, and convince them to try a new OS.
Absolutely... it's not like some college student could ever drum up an amateur kernel in his dorm room that would ever hope to gain as much mind-share as Linux.
Well, the last piece of software I bought was RedHat 7.2. Maybe college students are buying more software because there are more and more viable alternatives from companies worth supporting. I've never paid for Windows--I never wanted Microsoft to have my money. But now that I run Linux I send my money even when I don't have to.
I feel like most of the cash I send to RedHat comes back to me in the form of better product and a stronger Linux community. Most of what I send to MS goes to advertising and shareholders.
What I'm saying is that you're not increasing the effective resolution if just increase the display resolution. If your characters are 20 pixels high, and you double the screen resolution, the characters are still 20 pixels high. They are no sharper. In order to take advantage of the extra resolution you need a display engine that displays everything twice as big.
Check out this page which I just threw up. It shows the difference at the pixel level between ClearType and this guys hack.
You can see that ClearType isn't just using grays, it's using other colors... presumably that will only make a difference on LCDs. But you can see quite clearly that ClearType is trying to get full pixels whenever it can. Look at the second leg of the 'n'... it's a gray blob with the XFree hack, but Cleartype has a solid black line.
With this hack, if the edge of a character goes straight down the middle of a pixel, the pixel is lit up at 50% brightness. That means if you have a 1px wide black line that straddles the border between pixels, you end up seeing a 2px wide gray line. On the other hand, without AA, the renderer forces the line to one side or the other, which is where the aliasing comes from.
ClearType takes something a of a middle of the road approach. It takes the hinting into account, trying to push things towards pixel borders when it can, but not forcing it too much. This is what XFree does by default, the only thing is that it does the hinting rather poorly, so you still see a lot of the effects of "forcing" the text towards the pixel boundaries.
Evil empire or not, ClearType on a CRT is by far the cleanest AA screen displayed type I've ever seen. I imagine it's even sharper on an LCD. I can't wait for Linux to develop a competetive solution (we're almost there!)
I have the S110, which gets about 20s of 320x240 video. It's somewhat limiting, but good enough for quite a bit. It's the price you pay for the tiny form factor.
The latter is a power Disney does not want you to have.
This is a point that should be emphasized. My friends and I have made a hobby of making short (3-15min) films with my Canon PowerShot S110. It takes 20 second video clips at 320x240, which I can string together into some pretty funny shorts with music overlayed and sound effects and titles here and there. It's downright amateurish, but the people I show these films too (especially the ones who know me and my friends) lough out loud for ten minutes. And they got to keep the $8.75 they pay for a feature film.
OK, so a ten minute amateur short isn't exactly FOTR. But the point is film is becoming a very accessible medium when people can make movies with a $300 camera that they bought for still pictures.
I would say, as Pixar nears fulfillment of their contract, their relationship will become more and more of Michael Eisner kissing Pixar's ass.
That is, if Disney knows what's good for them. Lately it seems Disney can't make a decent movie and Pixar couldn't produce a flop if they wanted to. (Knock on wood) The last thing Disney wants to do is have Pixar go shopping around for another distributer four years from now.
Amen. The last thing I want to see is have Pixar's creative freedom resrained even further. I want to see where that talent can go, and while childreb's films have worked well for them, there may come a time when they decided they should be doing something else. Better then that they can take their small company and move. To be part of Disney, I feel, would bind them to a certain genre unnecessarily.
I was suggesting that homosexuality is not in the same class as cancer, alzheimers, heart disease, and mental retardation. I pointed out that impregnating women is not the bread and butter of human existence.
Cancer - that denies you life, which is the bread and butter of human existence
Alzheimers - that denies you coherent thought, which is the bread and butter of human existence
heart disease - slows you down, and kills you, see Cancer above.
mental retardation - denies you intellectual equality with the bulk of the world. But I am unsure that that is really necessary for a full life. I'd put that in the gray area.
Clearly there are many things which hamper a child's ability to live a full life. And I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't screen for those. I'm merely suggesting that homosexuality is not one of those things, and perhaps we needn't screen for it. By screening for it, we're limiting the diversity in life that makes life worth living.
For genetic based homosexulity, there is no question that it is a genetic defect to be attracted to the wrong sex (I mean, duh)...if it were possible to screen my sperm or my wife's egg for the defect, I would certainly do it.
Would you screen your zygotes for the kind of personality that would get them picked on in school? Would you want to prevent them from ever beind dumped?
What you're talking about is denying your child experience. Being gay is not a defect, it's a part of a person's identity and it's as much a blessing as a curse--just like any other facet of someone's identity. Yes, gay men are uninterested in impregnating women. Impregnating women is hardly the center of any man's existence in these times. Raising children, spending time with friends, falling in love, pursuing challenges--these are the bread and butter of human life, not shooting your sperm into a fertile woman.
I'm as straight as anyone, but I don't think it's my place to say my child's life would be better if they were not gay. It's not my choice to make, and the repercussions of my choice are not something I can pin down easily as "homosexuality is a defect". As a parent, it's not my job to deny my child experience, it's to supply them with love and support.
Schools should be teaching many languages to each student. That way, they will be prepared to learn any language they need on the job in short order.
Schools should teach whatever language suits the concepts they are trying to teach. It's not their job to teach students minutia like syntax.
I learned C++ for my introductory courses, Java in software engineering. We're now using C++ again for algorithms, but I've gone out and learned PHP and Perl on my own for the web stuff I do in my spare time. And part of the reason I run GNOME and not KDE is so I can learn C. I do my homework in linux and port to Windows to hand into my T.A.'s so I get a little taste of the cross-platform issues.
I take the responsibility for learning these things myself. I don't want my professors to teach me them because it's a waste of their time and expertise. Teach me theory, teach me wisdom, don't teach me pointers.
It does nothing to decrease the complexity of the system, it just shifts some of the complexity to another software engineer.
This statement is true, but incomplete. Complexity doesn't just shift horizontally, it moves down. Instead of writing bindings for libraries X, Y, and Z in languages A, B, and C (3*3=9 projects) you just write one binding per language and all your libraries only have to be written once. (3*1+3*1=6 projects)
If you increase the complexity another notch and port your libraries to platforms L,M,N you all of the sudden have 3*3*3=27 projects (port each lib to each language, then port each of those to each platform). Whereas with the CLR you only have 3+3+3=9 (port VM to three platforms, bind three languages to CLR, write three apps for CLR)
To me, it seems it really is decreasing complexity.
Has it crossed anyones mind that this is our chance to get MS to help kill themselves? They want.NET on linux, it gives.NET more market penetration, but then again, once.NET is on linux, who needs windows?
I generally agree with you that windows interopability seems like a good thing for linux, but there's one question that lurks in the back of mind:
If this is good for linux and bad for windows, why is Microsoft doing it? This is the same company that offered to take the education market away from apple as a punishment. I can't figure out what Microsoft's motive is in letting the mono project happen, but I also can't rid myself of the sinking suspicion that Microsoft's motives are in some way self-serving.
Do you have any thoughts about why MS is doing this?
My favorite part of the article is how they're going to send Commander Keen up there to blast all the space debris in low-ish orbit so it doesn't hit the space elevator.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, which is what they are planning to do:
Web Browser (Mozilla)
is the menu entry, and
Browse the web, blah blah blah
is the tooltip. Like I said. Like you said. Program description in the menu (with app name in parenthesis for backwards compatibility) and detailed description in the tooltip.
-Erik
I believe the Gnome 2.0 menu proposal implements something like this. For example,
Web Browser (Mozilla) [Browse the World Wide Web or local HTML documents]
Email (Evolution) [Read and send email, manage tasks, contacts, and calendars]
CD Player [Play music CDs]
Where the [bracketed] text is the tooltip.
-Erik
The only difference between a 1st year grad student and a 4th year undergrad is an acceptance letter.
-Erik
The site is TERRIBLE. It's a 3 pictures on a HORRIBLE background that hurts my eyes.
Yeah, if you're dense enough to think that the site is just that page. There's a link down at the bottom for more pictures... there are actually 5-10 pages of pictures with 3-5 pictures on each page w/ descriptions. Much smarter to do it that way than put it all on one page, especially considering there are no thumbnails.
-Erik
That's hard.
underbelly metanoia is a 2, but I can't find any ones.
-Erik
It's hard enough to compete with Microsoft to get a persons attention, and convince them to try a new OS.
Absolutely... it's not like some college student could ever drum up an amateur kernel in his dorm room that would ever hope to gain as much mind-share as Linux.
Oh, wait.
-Erik
Well, the last piece of software I bought was RedHat 7.2. Maybe college students are buying more software because there are more and more viable alternatives from companies worth supporting. I've never paid for Windows--I never wanted Microsoft to have my money. But now that I run Linux I send my money even when I don't have to.
I feel like most of the cash I send to RedHat comes back to me in the form of better product and a stronger Linux community. Most of what I send to MS goes to advertising and shareholders.
-Erik
What I'm saying is that you're not increasing the effective resolution if just increase the display resolution. If your characters are 20 pixels high, and you double the screen resolution, the characters are still 20 pixels high. They are no sharper. In order to take advantage of the extra resolution you need a display engine that displays everything twice as big.
-Erik
Check out this page which I just threw up. It shows the difference at the pixel level between ClearType and this guys hack.
You can see that ClearType isn't just using grays, it's using other colors... presumably that will only make a difference on LCDs. But you can see quite clearly that ClearType is trying to get full pixels whenever it can. Look at the second leg of the 'n'... it's a gray blob with the XFree hack, but Cleartype has a solid black line.
-Erik
With this hack, if the edge of a character goes straight down the middle of a pixel, the pixel is lit up at 50% brightness. That means if you have a 1px wide black line that straddles the border between pixels, you end up seeing a 2px wide gray line. On the other hand, without AA, the renderer forces the line to one side or the other, which is where the aliasing comes from.
ClearType takes something a of a middle of the road approach. It takes the hinting into account, trying to push things towards pixel borders when it can, but not forcing it too much. This is what XFree does by default, the only thing is that it does the hinting rather poorly, so you still see a lot of the effects of "forcing" the text towards the pixel boundaries.
Evil empire or not, ClearType on a CRT is by far the cleanest AA screen displayed type I've ever seen. I imagine it's even sharper on an LCD. I can't wait for Linux to develop a competetive solution (we're almost there!)
-Erik
So, if you want text that looks nice, get yourself a 150dpi or higher monitor and don't bother with anti-aliasing.
Could you please point me to the resolution independent graphics engine for Linux that would be necessary to take advantage of a 150dpi monitor?
Otherwise it's still 72dpi, it's just that the inches are smaller than usual.
-Erik
I have the S110, which gets about 20s of 320x240 video. It's somewhat limiting, but good enough for quite a bit. It's the price you pay for the tiny form factor.
-Erik
The latter is a power Disney does not want you to have.
This is a point that should be emphasized. My friends and I have made a hobby of making short (3-15min) films with my Canon PowerShot S110. It takes 20 second video clips at 320x240, which I can string together into some pretty funny shorts with music overlayed and sound effects and titles here and there. It's downright amateurish, but the people I show these films too (especially the ones who know me and my friends) lough out loud for ten minutes. And they got to keep the $8.75 they pay for a feature film.
OK, so a ten minute amateur short isn't exactly FOTR. But the point is film is becoming a very accessible medium when people can make movies with a $300 camera that they bought for still pictures.
-Erik
I would say, as Pixar nears fulfillment of their contract, their relationship will become more and more of Michael Eisner kissing Pixar's ass.
That is, if Disney knows what's good for them. Lately it seems Disney can't make a decent movie and Pixar couldn't produce a flop if they wanted to. (Knock on wood) The last thing Disney wants to do is have Pixar go shopping around for another distributer four years from now.
-Erik
Amen. The last thing I want to see is have Pixar's creative freedom resrained even further. I want to see where that talent can go, and while childreb's films have worked well for them, there may come a time when they decided they should be doing something else. Better then that they can take their small company and move. To be part of Disney, I feel, would bind them to a certain genre unnecessarily.
-Erik
I was suggesting that homosexuality is not in the same class as cancer, alzheimers, heart disease, and mental retardation. I pointed out that impregnating women is not the bread and butter of human existence.
Cancer - that denies you life, which is the bread and butter of human existence
Alzheimers - that denies you coherent thought, which is the bread and butter of human existence
heart disease - slows you down, and kills you, see Cancer above.
mental retardation - denies you intellectual equality with the bulk of the world. But I am unsure that that is really necessary for a full life. I'd put that in the gray area.
Clearly there are many things which hamper a child's ability to live a full life. And I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't screen for those. I'm merely suggesting that homosexuality is not one of those things, and perhaps we needn't screen for it. By screening for it, we're limiting the diversity in life that makes life worth living.
-Erik
For genetic based homosexulity, there is no question that it is a genetic defect to be attracted to the wrong sex (I mean, duh)...if it were possible to screen my sperm or my wife's egg for the defect, I would certainly do it.
Would you screen your zygotes for the kind of personality that would get them picked on in school? Would you want to prevent them from ever beind dumped?
What you're talking about is denying your child experience. Being gay is not a defect, it's a part of a person's identity and it's as much a blessing as a curse--just like any other facet of someone's identity. Yes, gay men are uninterested in impregnating women. Impregnating women is hardly the center of any man's existence in these times. Raising children, spending time with friends, falling in love, pursuing challenges--these are the bread and butter of human life, not shooting your sperm into a fertile woman.
I'm as straight as anyone, but I don't think it's my place to say my child's life would be better if they were not gay. It's not my choice to make, and the repercussions of my choice are not something I can pin down easily as "homosexuality is a defect". As a parent, it's not my job to deny my child experience, it's to supply them with love and support.
-Erik
'640K^H^H^H^H 4 gigs is more memory than anyone will ever need.'
-Erik
Schools should be teaching many languages to each student. That way, they will be prepared to learn any language they need on the job in short order.
Schools should teach whatever language suits the concepts they are trying to teach. It's not their job to teach students minutia like syntax.
I learned C++ for my introductory courses, Java in software engineering. We're now using C++ again for algorithms, but I've gone out and learned PHP and Perl on my own for the web stuff I do in my spare time. And part of the reason I run GNOME and not KDE is so I can learn C. I do my homework in linux and port to Windows to hand into my T.A.'s so I get a little taste of the cross-platform issues.
I take the responsibility for learning these things myself. I don't want my professors to teach me them because it's a waste of their time and expertise. Teach me theory, teach me wisdom, don't teach me pointers.
-Erik
opening a new window in any shape or form takes *forever*
I'm using Galeon (1.0.3) and it takes ~3.5 seconds from when I hit CTRL+N to when the new window is up and my home page is fully loaded.
It takes ~3.0 seconds to open a new tab. Galeon is great... the robustness of Gecko, with a nice lightweight, responsive front-end.
-Erik
Guess I can retire this topic icon
As others have pointed out, you shouldn't retire it. I might suggest updating it, though.
-Erik
It does nothing to decrease the complexity of the system, it just shifts some of the complexity to another software engineer.
This statement is true, but incomplete. Complexity doesn't just shift horizontally, it moves down. Instead of writing bindings for libraries X, Y, and Z in languages A, B, and C (3*3=9 projects) you just write one binding per language and all your libraries only have to be written once. (3*1+3*1=6 projects)
If you increase the complexity another notch and port your libraries to platforms L,M,N you all of the sudden have 3*3*3=27 projects (port each lib to each language, then port each of those to each platform). Whereas with the CLR you only have 3+3+3=9 (port VM to three platforms, bind three languages to CLR, write three apps for CLR)
To me, it seems it really is decreasing complexity.
-Erik
Has it crossed anyones mind that this is our chance to get MS to help kill themselves? They want .NET on linux, it gives .NET more market penetration, but then again, once .NET is on linux, who needs windows?
I generally agree with you that windows interopability seems like a good thing for linux, but there's one question that lurks in the back of mind:
If this is good for linux and bad for windows, why is Microsoft doing it? This is the same company that offered to take the education market away from apple as a punishment. I can't figure out what Microsoft's motive is in letting the mono project happen, but I also can't rid myself of the sinking suspicion that Microsoft's motives are in some way self-serving.
Do you have any thoughts about why MS is doing this?
-Erik
My favorite part of the article is how they're going to send Commander Keen up there to blast all the space debris in low-ish orbit so it doesn't hit the space elevator.
-Erik