What do you mean, "one day"? Red Hat and Cygnus, arguably the epitomes of free software companies, have already merged. Why ask about something in the hypothetical when you have a particular example? Or is the submitter baiting for "evil capitalist" responses?
It's kind of funny--when I was a student, we complained endlessly about the quality of the Crime. It's obvious now that it was because we didn't read much "mainstream" journalism.
there's something about those little flippers and pinballs that makes the game seem so much more tangible then the N64 or anything on my PCs.
That's because it really is more tangible. On an N64 or PC, the "flippers" and "balls" are merely images projected onto a sheet of phosphors by an electron beam. This confused me for a while, too.
> But is Unix (or Linux) what it was ten years ago?
Linux and Unix have improved--but in incremental ways that don't introduce many new concepts to the user. That's Rob's point.
> Is Netscape?
No, Netscape sucks more now. With Mozilla we will hopefully finally have some progress. Jamie Zawinski has said he still uses a personally hacked Netscape 3.
> "Where is the innovation? Microsoft, mostly". 'nuff said.
"I'll just repeat Slashdot dogma, instead of considering that a creator of Unix might know something about systems innovation".
> Basically, his argument seems to be that if we don't completely change our software every few years, we're being stagnant
No, he's saying that we haven't appreciably changed our software at all.
Whereas, when I look around me at the Windows machines, I see integrated mail + contact list + calendar; good multimedia including streaming; input methods that allow entering Asian language text into any application; a debugger that let's you fix code on-the-fly. You can make academic claims about how this all originated somewhere else, or are merely composed of pieces that exist on Unix, but the fact remains that most Windows users have these things today, and most Unix users don't.
Now, to me a lot of these things still suck, but I can see that to many users, they are great improvements.
You are exactly right. But you have proved it to be true using meta-mathematical reasoning! So, it is not a mathematical proof.
More precisely, a mathematical proof is a set of mathematical statements, each implying the next by the rules of logic and arithmetic. If FLT is false, there exists a, b, c, n, such that yada yada. It is obvious that in this case, a trivial mathematical proof could be constructed. The contrapositive of this is that if a mathematical proof cannot be contructed, FLT is true.
If this intrigues you at all, go read Godel, Escher, Bach at your earliest convienience.
I don't have a negative outlook, I was just pointing out the results of past efforts. Quite a lot of research has gone into vector font rendering. Ask Abobe or Donald Knuth. For more detail, you might enjoy some of the pieces in Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas". When I said humans were way better, I meant it--an algorith that did as well at low resolutions would be considered a huge breakthrough.
Think about the problem this way. At low resolutions, the outline of a glyph may undergo non-trivial twisting and turning within a single pixel. Trying to capture this within a single scalar value (the darkness of that pixel) is clearly daunting.
Your proposal seems to me a non-starter. If you tweak the vectors to match the hinting, you have to do this for each resolution. In that case, your tweaked vectors are effectively the hinting.
Sorry I don't support every post I make to Slashdot. I hope this helps;)
This is a nice argument, but it has a fatal weakness that its proponents overlook. I fully believe that you buy CD's after sampling via Napster. But the only reason you do this is that you are accustomed to getting music via CD's, and you have a CD infrastructure (eg, a CD player).
But consider those who will acquire their musical habits over the next few years. Having computers, and lacking the the infrastructure and prediliction for CD's, they will be much less likely to buy CD's after hearing songs on Napster. In other words, Napster will be "native" music format for the next generation of music listeners, and they may well never buy a CD.
Like them or not, the music industry's fears are well founded for this reason.
As far as the broad storyline, it's pretty clear-cut. The press will notice Postgres appearing surreptitiously in company infrastructures, it will get the Linux treatment, commercial backing will spring up, the developers will become minor celebrities, it will become a staple of the low-end, and it will gradually encroach on the high-end.
The parallels with such projects as Linux and Apache are nearly perfect:
Compatibile with an existing, widely implemented and widely used standard (Unix, HTTP, SQL).
Usually used as the foundation for a higher level application, so managers aren't likely to detect its presence.
Many opportunities in low-end, budget constrained projects.
Used mostly by developers.
High reliability requirement.
Low usability and management tools requirement.
Developed by (currently) little known but dedicated hackers.
(And not least,) freedom!
It's great to know many of us won't have to put up with Oracle in a few years.
XML does not guarentee interoperability, editability, viewability, or manipulation.
Please don't think I'm at all down on SVG. It just seems there's a need to remind people that XML does not cure all your object definition and access woes.
... by this suggestion. Given that Microsoft has been found guilty of illegally leveraging their monopoly on the Bob and mouse markets, I see to reason to believe that the Bob and mouse "baby Bill" would act any differently.
"Middle tier" is just a fancy word for library. Of course you should separate the underlying logic from the Web glue, but you don't need a buzzword to do it. Further, the languages used in the first and second tiers are irrelevant to the logical separation.
I neglected the most important factor. Unless you're serving an intranet, the bottleneck has nothing to do with the server systems and code--it's the network connection to the client. Which makes efficiency even less important! Viva la Web and Perl!
Execution speed doesn't matter, because you're not doing any heavy manipulation, and today's processors can play several games of Quake at once!
Memory matters if you're poor, but if you have money, it's pretty easy to scale up by buying memory. Yeah, it makes me sick to see all that wasted RAM, too, but it's frequestly the easiest solution.
Speed to data is usually the bottleneck. To optimize this, you need to figure out what data access patterns you'll have and arrange the data storage to support them. An SQL database can be part of the solution, but is not a panacea. Your disk and network (for remote data) are important here, but get the design right first--disk and network are harder to scale up than memory!
Though your opinion on the feature additions themselves is not unreasonable, your assumptions about the process by which they came to be is entirely mistaken. As a rule, new ideas for Perl undergo scrupulous examination regarding their impact on usability, learnability, maintainability, backwards-compatibility, aesthetics, Perl-ish-ness, and performance. There is a strong anti-change sentiment among Perl hackers. The ordeal that would-be enhancements much survive is daunting indeed.
And on top of that, there remains the Larry test, which has proven spookily discerning.
Your claim that Larry "never considered these issues" is ignorant and frankly offensive. Similarly for the other Perl developers. Read what Larry has written about Perl, or look up the history of Perl 5 development. To see the process in action, read perl5-porters for a bit. (But arm thyself against flames!)
The asker obviously didn't understand the LGPL and its relationship to the GPL. Nor, for that matter, did he seem to have much experience with software copyrights and licensing. The question itself is hardly worth answering.
The LGPL was originally called the "Library General Public License", however RMS never intended it as "the GPL for libraries". To express his true intent, RMS renamed it the "Lesser General Public License.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html .
By your reasoning, traditional retailers would kill product brands, because one can compare competing probucts on the shelf. Maybe you buy generic ketchup, but most people don't.
Granted, index sites may provide more information on the options than retail stores, but this is only a matter of degree. It won't change the fact that people are drawn to brands in choosing the products they buy.
RMS should stick to activism
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 2
It's bizarre that you suggest that RMS is riding his programming credentials. His accomplishments as an activist and a thinker are unquestionably far greater. Do you think that McArthur grants are given for coding prowess? Does the public that knows of him know he wrote Emacs, or that he's a visionary?
Besides which, RMS has stated that he doesn't have much time for programming now, anyway.
Richard is as naive now as he was when he founded the GNU project.
What happens to these businesses over the long term is a big deal. What happened to their stocks over the last month (or whatever the period is) is immaterial to anyone but day traders.
And if you don't see the continuing importance of brands, you're blind. You're a net geek and an early adopter. What percentage of online shoppers will be like you in 5 years?
Slashdot Mirror
one day, it will happen ...
What do you mean, "one day"? Red Hat and Cygnus, arguably the epitomes of free software companies, have already merged. Why ask about something in the hypothetical when you have a particular example? Or is the submitter baiting for "evil capitalist" responses?
It's kind of funny--when I was a student, we complained endlessly about the quality of the Crime. It's obvious now that it was because we didn't read much "mainstream" journalism.
Really, read the original story.
That's because it really is more tangible. On an N64 or PC, the "flippers" and "balls" are merely images projected onto a sheet of phosphors by an electron beam. This confused me for a while, too.
What new needs have manifested themselves?
Most innovation is about figuring out what "needs" people have that they don't themselves realize.
To me, PalmOS is innovative.
Absolutely! And, to my knowledge, it is the product of industry, not academia. Maybe the palm isn't where academia should be, but the point stands.
I was a bit wary of commenting on the words of someone who obviously knows more than I, but I stand by my non-comment.
Your non-comment sounded to me like a scoff. Sorry if I misinterpreted.
> But is Unix (or Linux) what it was ten years ago?
Linux and Unix have improved--but in incremental ways that don't introduce many new concepts to the user. That's Rob's point.
> Is Netscape?
No, Netscape sucks more now. With Mozilla we will hopefully finally have some progress. Jamie Zawinski has said he still uses a personally hacked Netscape 3.
> "Where is the innovation? Microsoft, mostly". 'nuff said.
"I'll just repeat Slashdot dogma, instead of considering that a creator of Unix might know something about systems innovation".
> Basically, his argument seems to be that if we don't completely change our software every few years, we're being stagnant
No, he's saying that we haven't appreciably changed our software at all.
Whereas, when I look around me at the Windows machines, I see integrated mail + contact list + calendar; good multimedia including streaming; input methods that allow entering Asian language text into any application; a debugger that let's you fix code on-the-fly. You can make academic claims about how this all originated somewhere else, or are merely composed of pieces that exist on Unix, but the fact remains that most Windows users have these things today, and most Unix users don't.
Now, to me a lot of these things still suck, but I can see that to many users, they are great improvements.
% touch 'foo /bin/ln' /bin/ln' /etc/passwd' /etc/passwd' /sbin/init' /sbin init'
Perhaps someone else can think of something more devilish!% chmod u+s 'foo
% touch 'foo
% chmod u+s 'foo
% touch 'foo
% chmod u+s 'foo
You are exactly right. But you have proved it to be true using meta-mathematical reasoning! So, it is not a mathematical proof.
More precisely, a mathematical proof is a set of mathematical statements, each implying the next by the rules of logic and arithmetic. If FLT is false, there exists a, b, c, n, such that yada yada. It is obvious that in this case, a trivial mathematical proof could be constructed. The contrapositive of this is that if a mathematical proof cannot be contructed, FLT is true.
If this intrigues you at all, go read Godel, Escher, Bach at your earliest convienience.
Think about the problem this way. At low resolutions, the outline of a glyph may undergo non-trivial twisting and turning within a single pixel. Trying to capture this within a single scalar value (the darkness of that pixel) is clearly daunting.
Your proposal seems to me a non-starter. If you tweak the vectors to match the hinting, you have to do this for each resolution. In that case, your tweaked vectors are effectively the hinting.
Sorry I don't support every post I make to Slashdot. I hope this helps ;)
I'm looking at Tux, and having a real hard time seeing him biting himself in the foot.
But consider those who will acquire their musical habits over the next few years. Having computers, and lacking the the infrastructure and prediliction for CD's, they will be much less likely to buy CD's after hearing songs on Napster. In other words, Napster will be "native" music format for the next generation of music listeners, and they may well never buy a CD.
Like them or not, the music industry's fears are well founded for this reason.
The difficulty in doing this is the whole reason hinting exists. Humans are still way better at this than any known algorithm.
The parallels with such projects as Linux and Apache are nearly perfect:
- Compatibile with an existing, widely implemented and widely used standard (Unix, HTTP, SQL).
- Usually used as the foundation for a higher level application, so managers aren't likely to detect its presence.
- Many opportunities in low-end, budget constrained projects.
- Used mostly by developers.
- High reliability requirement.
- Low usability and management tools requirement.
- Developed by (currently) little known but dedicated hackers.
- (And not least,) freedom!
It's great to know many of us won't have to put up with Oracle in a few years.Repeat as necessary:
XML does not guarentee interoperability, editability, viewability, or manipulation.
Please don't think I'm at all down on SVG. It just seems there's a need to remind people that XML does not cure all your object definition and access woes.
... by this suggestion. Given that Microsoft has been found guilty of illegally leveraging their monopoly on the Bob and mouse markets, I see to reason to believe that the Bob and mouse "baby Bill" would act any differently.
man 3 tmpfile
Good point--the net connection is usually a throughput bottleneck, but not necessarily a latency bottleneck.
"Middle tier" is just a fancy word for library. Of course you should separate the underlying logic from the Web glue, but you don't need a buzzword to do it. Further, the languages used in the first and second tiers are irrelevant to the logical separation.
I neglected the most important factor. Unless you're serving an intranet, the bottleneck has nothing to do with the server systems and code--it's the network connection to the client. Which makes efficiency even less important! Viva la Web and Perl!
Though your opinion on the feature additions themselves is not unreasonable, your assumptions about the process by which they came to be is entirely mistaken. As a rule, new ideas for Perl undergo scrupulous examination regarding their impact on usability, learnability, maintainability, backwards-compatibility, aesthetics, Perl-ish-ness, and performance. There is a strong anti-change sentiment among Perl hackers. The ordeal that would-be enhancements much survive is daunting indeed.
And on top of that, there remains the Larry test, which has proven spookily discerning.
Your claim that Larry "never considered these issues" is ignorant and frankly offensive. Similarly for the other Perl developers. Read what Larry has written about Perl, or look up the history of Perl 5 development. To see the process in action, read perl5-porters for a bit. (But arm thyself against flames!)
The asker obviously didn't understand the LGPL and its relationship to the GPL. Nor, for that matter, did he seem to have much experience with software copyrights and licensing. The question itself is hardly worth answering.
That this confusion arises at all is an accident.
The LGPL was originally called the "Library General Public License", however RMS never intended it as "the GPL for libraries". To express his true intent, RMS renamed it the "Lesser General Public License.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html .
By your reasoning, traditional retailers would kill product brands, because one can compare competing probucts on the shelf. Maybe you buy generic ketchup, but most people don't.
Granted, index sites may provide more information on the options than retail stores, but this is only a matter of degree. It won't change the fact that people are drawn to brands in choosing the products they buy.
It's bizarre that you suggest that RMS is riding his programming credentials. His accomplishments as an activist and a thinker are unquestionably far greater. Do you think that McArthur grants are given for coding prowess? Does the public that knows of him know he wrote Emacs, or that he's a visionary?
Besides which, RMS has stated that he doesn't have much time for programming now, anyway.
Richard is as naive now as he was when he founded the GNU project.
What happens to these businesses over the long term is a big deal. What happened to their stocks over the last month (or whatever the period is) is immaterial to anyone but day traders.
And if you don't see the continuing importance of brands, you're blind. You're a net geek and an early adopter. What percentage of online shoppers will be like you in 5 years?