Eep! If the default settings are broken, and 80% of users use the default settings, then there is no 'only' about it.
Thing is, the default isn't KDE/Bluecurve, the default is GNOME/Bluecurve - as such, the only thing needed to remember is that if you change from GNOME to KDE, you need to change the theme as well.
For everyone else, you can use the following command on a Cisco with CEF enabled, which drops all traffic that does not have a source address that is routed through the interface the packet was received on:
"ip verify unicast reverse-path"
The way to turn on reverse-path filtering on a Linux firewall is:
for i in/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/rp_filter; do
echo 2 > $i
done
no, no - that was "The Hobbit" cartoon version... the FotR cartoon was made by different people, and didn't have random pointless singing by orcs.
It still sucked, but was nowhere NEAR as bad as The Disneyfied Hobbit movie. It actually had some redeeming qualities, like the flashback to Smeagol strangling his brother Deagol and taking the Ring - I keep waiting for that flashback to show up in the Peter Jackson films. If it doesn't happen in Return of the King that would suck - I was totally expecting it in The Two Towers after he called himself a murderer, but they left the obvious hook unexplained instead.
"Give us that ring, Deagol my love." "Why, Smeagol?" "Because it's my birthday, my love... and I wants it!"
Look, for instance, at he relationship between humans and cockroaches. They LIKE us. We may try to kill them, but our environment is so plentiful to them that5 we can't do jack against them. They have tyhe upper han. But they don't try to destroy us. They have different needs than we do, so they live alongside us.
Obviously you haven't been in my kitchen.
They've taken the fridge and microwave, and we're not getting them back any time soon. I think we might have to send in a special forces unit soon to raid the cupboard for spaghetti.
When Noam Chomsky signs an M.I.T. paycheck does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of a Cambodian peasant?
Somehow I missed the part where Noam Chomsky conspired to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Cambodia and install a murderous puppet regime loyal to those occupying seats of power in the U.S...
Oh, wait - that would be because he didn't.
Henry Kissinger did do these things. This is why he can't leave the country anymore - he'd be arrested and put on trial as a war criminal. I'd really love to understand any resemblance you see between him and Noam Chomsky.
The next addition (if it's not part already) of TIA will be keeping track of who accesses public databases looking for information about public figures.
Remember our good friend Henry Kissinger? He just resigned from the non-partisan committee to investigate September 11, and changed his answering machine message because of all the flak over having a war criminal and cover-up artist in charge of the most sensitive piece of police work going on right now. I'm sure he's in favor of locking up people who look for his personal info... or at least overthrowing their democratically elected leaders and installing a dictator who will kill them anyway.
(aside: I can't stop laughing at this one joke on the most recent page of Get Your War On -- When Kissinger signs a government paycheck, does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of an East Timorese child?)
Personally, I used to love to buy CDs... my local record store hasn't seen my face in about a year now though.
There are two reasons for this. The first one is that the economy slumped, my job sucks ass, and I can't afford much in the way of luxury items. Electricity, food, and rent about does it for me. The second reason is that I've had my car broken into twice (over a year apart) and the CDs stolen out of it both times. If you think they're expensive to buy now, wait until you have to buy them for the third time.
I still buy CDs in one situation only -- having just heard the band play a show up on stage. If I'm not seeing them live, I'm not buying their music. It's just not worth it to me.
Finding open source products to meet your needs should never involve you having to think, "Now, if I use this open source filter to block certain internet sites from my 20 year old son...is that violation of human rights or not?"
Umm.. I've never heard anybody (except the United States with their stupid drinking age limit) claim that a 20+ year old person wasn't a fully mature human being (in general - President Bush could be considered an exception). Is there something you'd like to share?:)
If you like post-apocalyptic fairy-tales with zombies, or skateboarding, check out Red Moon Rising It's based on a White Wolf RPG campaign he ran a few years ago, told from the point of view of an NPC, a 12 year old skateboarder named Andrew...
and it's fucking awesome! Click the link now, human!
Just to clarify (or nitpick, if you prefer - but please consider it constructive criticism) the first part of your post there:
...if this system was socialist then there would be no meddling. Because socialism would say that MSFT was the ideal company to continue and they would buy all of the arguments that MSFT makes...
That's a common misconception, thanks to the Cold War era speeches made by people such as McCarthy, as well as earlier rhetoric by Marx and Engels attempting to exclude Bakunin and other anarchists from the International.
Socialism, or "state socialism" (concentration of power in the hands of the state) and socialism (concentration of social assets in the hands of the workers, achieved to its full potential only by direct democracy) are two vastly different things. Please use "S"ocialism when referring to a government such as the defunct U.S.S.R., wherein the state encompasses all capital and productive labour thereof. "s"ocialism is a much nicer animal:)
He's on the right track - the difference isn't so great.
A good (or even decent, these days) realtime 3D engine is going to support skeletal animation, so you're halfway to modeling movable meshes.
There's two real differences, and one of them is simply a matter of what data you put in, and the other is quickly becoming an actual part of realtime engines (I suspect either the next release of a "major" game, or the one after that).
The first is simply that if you add vertices and pretty textures and procedurally generated effects and other eye candy to the point where you're only getting a fraction of a frame per second, it's no longer realtime even if you're still using the same engine, right?;)
The second big thing is doing *both* halves of the IK function per frame. Currently in game development, the first half of IK work (placing the targets for the movement and recording keyframes) is done in a 3d modeling program, and the second half (interpolating between keyframes to actually generate animation) is done in the realtime engine.
UT2003's "ragdoll" system is an example of doing both halves of IK in realtime (or per frame, if you have enough data that you're not running in realtime - see above). A 3D modeling program would allow you to set an arbitrary situation, put force in the anchor points, and generate an animation.
In the near (2-4 years) future, models for realtime engines won't require keyframes to make the skeletal animation work. You'll just drop in a model with some metadata attached to it that says "this is a hand" "this is a foot" "this is a knee" and the program knows that to take a step, it should move the foot forward a certain amount - the reason engines will move in this direction is because that will allow their animations to respond to the environment better, cleaner, and without extra work on the artists' part (in fact, less work on the artists' part). For instance, placing one foot on a stair and the other foot on the step below, or being able to block a punch thrown at the character's face without "teleporting" both characters into the appropriate positions for the pregenerated animation (or worse, allowing one character's arm to clip through the other's).
So, to make a long point short - there's not too much difference between making a realtime engine and a non-realtime engine. Any optimizations that make it run faster are still good, as long as you're not sacrificing quality to do so. You want the physics to work realistically regardless (for your personal value of realistic, of course). So what's the diff?
Yeah, but that still doesn't make sense, unless you mean to say that we're living in hell now...
Come to think of it, that might explain my boss...
Re:How does the FPS compare to Windows??
on
UT2003 LiveCD
·
· Score: 2
Dude, UT2003 is doing *way* more stuff than RTCW.
Their "ragdoll" system is actually performing *both* halves of the IK solution in real-time. Prior to this, games (including Quake 3 and RTCW) had pre-animated poses and only used skeletal animation to interpolate between keyframes. See the dead bodies slumped against the wall or draped over a balustrade? In RTCW, they would be sticking *through* the wall or lying flat on top of the rail. Not very realistic. Now you see the difference?
UT2003 doesn't even take it as far as it can go - they only do full IK on dead bodies. They're still using traditional animation on the "living" models. Once they start doing that, you'll need some *hefty* CPU power to calculate all the animation. But it will be *so* pretty...
Dude, chill for a sec -- I didn't say this was "regular" or "standard" or anything like that. My system worked perfectly out of the box. So did my little brother's when I installed Linux on his computer for christmas last year.:)
I'm just saying that if it isn't working, there's a way to troubleshoot it and a way to fix it (namely, upgrade your drivers).
Sounds to me like you don't have DRI configured properly -- if you don't have 3d working in the first place under Linux, it's not going to magically work on Linux because you're running a game under an emulator:)
Run glxgears (may be called just gears on some systems) and make sure your frame rate is appropriate for your system / graphics card.
i.e. On my box here at work I'm getting around 220 FPS (i810 and celeron 833) My box at home gets somewhere in the low one-thousands, IIRC (ATI Radeon and Athlon XP 1.4GHz)
Run glxinfo and check two things: 1) make sure there's a line that says "direct rendering: Yes" 2) make sure the OpenGL renderer string is named for your hardware (this one says "Mesa DRI I810 20010321")
If those two lines aren't correct then you need to recompile your kernel and make sure you enable DRM for your graphics card. If that still doesn't do it, I'd say upgrade XFree86 and Mesa (if you install everything from binary packages) or download and compile XFree86 from CVS (if you're feeling brave).
Re:I'll show it to you when we get back. . .
on
In Print: MegaTokyo
·
· Score: 2
I've hardly ever liked any print comics -- I read stories for the *plot*. Art is good, but it's a bonus, it's not the reason I buy a book. Why spend 3 to 5 dollars on a comic with 5 minutes worth of plot development when 6 dollars will get me a full-length paperback novel?
I've been pleasantly surprised by two print comics though.
First and foremost: Thieves and Kings by Mark Oakley (M'Oak). I give it 10 stars out of five:) Order the first four trade paperbacks from marsimports.com now now now!! (it's self-published, so give the guy your support!) The plot is *killer*. I especially like the fact that there's one or two pages in almost every issue that are text only (with a little bit of art around the edge), so you really get your money's worth in plot development. Especially when it's stuff that can't really be described well in comic format. (like one text block that goes into describing the background of a dragon to explain his psychological development. That would have suffered in comic form - it would have been like "just get back to the story!", but as a text insert it adds considerably to the flavor and impact of the character)
Secondly... you've probably had other people recommend it to you already, but they're actually right in this case: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez. It takes a little while to get into the main plot, but it creeps me out like an H.P. Lovecraft story when the doughboys start seriously talking and stuff. The advantage of this one is that the story is finished and you can buy it all in one trade paperback (the "Director's Cut").
Looks like there'll be a third print comic I like once dead-tree-MT comes out;)
Slightly off-topic, does anybody know what's wrong with 8-bit Theatre? I haven't been able to reach it in months.:(
I really liked it back when I could read it, but now I check it like once every three weeks and always "No response from www.nuklearpower.com". Very sad.
Doesn't respond to pings or anything. If anybody knows what's up, could you let me know?
You don't need to worry yourself none about them rogue asteroids - just tell ol' Unca Dubya, he'll take care of 'em all! (now where did I put that big red button...)
I don't have any idea how well Windows does SMP (the only report I've gotten firsthand from a friend was with NT 4.0 SP5 vs. Redhat 5.2 with a custom-built kernel on a dual-Celeron box, but Redhat creamed NT back then... don't know if the story's changed).
The threading implementation bit, however, I can say is complete FUD. At the moment the threading implementation is slightly less than *twice* as good as WinXP's implementation, which was an improvement over Win2K's. Here's a good article (good series of articles, in fact, comparing many low-level features of Windows and Linux)
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-rt7/.
AFAIK, the "thread implementation" FUD got started from an article that stated that at the kernel level Linux managed threads the same as lightweight processes... the part the FUD-mongers *don't* tell you is that the article went on to say that the deal was not that threads were slowed down to the point of LWPs, but that LWPs on Linux executed much faster than threads on either Solaris or Windows.
The answer is simple - it's perfectly in line with the expressed will of the U.S. government.
Capitalists value capital more than they do human life (otherwise they would be called "socialists"). Under this more-capitalist-every-day regime we've got at the moment, the penalties for stealing money (or even potential earnings, witness the DMCA) are much harsher than penalties for all but the most heinous murders.
> Unfortunately the shadow from a 2d object is also 2d, so your theory needs a little work:)
It actually depends on the subspace you're talking about. If you're talking about a 3d subspace (which I assume you are), the shadow of a 2d object can be either 1d or 2d, depending on the angle of the light to the surface of the 2d object. (if the light hits edge on, it casts a 1d shadow)
In a 2d subspace, objects only cast 1d shadows, because there is no "sideways" in which the light can hit the flat part of the surface. The 2d light source is always edge on to the 2d object occupying the same plane.
> Yeah, okay, what about the -ugly-and-wierd-font-descriptors-it-uses?
What about them? Users usually don't see these, programmers do.
The only reason you'd need to look at them (that I can think of offhand anyway) is if you're *trying* to find out what foundry made your font. ("Damn it, I want adobe times, not BSR times!") And in that case, I can't think of an equivalent way to find the same information under MacOS or Windows, so X's solution is clearly better.
Slashdot Mirror
Eep! If the default settings are broken, and 80% of users use the default settings, then there is no 'only' about it.
Thing is, the default isn't KDE/Bluecurve, the default is GNOME/Bluecurve - as such, the only thing needed to remember is that if you change from GNOME to KDE, you need to change the theme as well.
For everyone else, you can use the following command on a Cisco with CEF enabled, which drops all traffic that does not have a source address that is routed through the interface the packet was received on:
"ip verify unicast reverse-path"
The way to turn on reverse-path filtering on a Linux firewall is:
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/rp_filter; do
for i in
echo 2 > $i
done
no, no - that was "The Hobbit" cartoon version... the FotR cartoon was made by different people, and didn't have random pointless singing by orcs.
It still sucked, but was nowhere NEAR as bad as The Disneyfied Hobbit movie. It actually had some redeeming qualities, like the flashback to Smeagol strangling his brother Deagol and taking the Ring - I keep waiting for that flashback to show up in the Peter Jackson films. If it doesn't happen in Return of the King that would suck - I was totally expecting it in The Two Towers after he called himself a murderer, but they left the obvious hook unexplained instead.
"Give us that ring, Deagol my love."
"Why, Smeagol?"
"Because it's my birthday, my love... and I wants it!"
Look, for instance, at he relationship between humans and cockroaches. They LIKE us. We may try to kill them, but our environment is so plentiful to them that5 we can't do jack against them. They have tyhe upper han. But they don't try to destroy us. They have different needs than we do, so they live alongside us.
Obviously you haven't been in my kitchen.
They've taken the fridge and microwave, and we're not getting them back any time soon. I think we might have to send in a special forces unit soon to raid the cupboard for spaghetti.
When Noam Chomsky signs an M.I.T. paycheck does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of a Cambodian peasant?
Somehow I missed the part where Noam Chomsky conspired to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Cambodia and install a murderous puppet regime loyal to those occupying seats of power in the U.S...
Oh, wait - that would be because he didn't.
Henry Kissinger did do these things. This is why he can't leave the country anymore - he'd be arrested and put on trial as a war criminal. I'd really love to understand any resemblance you see between him and Noam Chomsky.
The next addition (if it's not part already) of TIA will be keeping track of who accesses public databases looking for information about public figures.
Remember our good friend Henry Kissinger? He just resigned from the non-partisan committee to investigate September 11, and changed his answering machine message because of all the flak over having a war criminal and cover-up artist in charge of the most sensitive piece of police work going on right now. I'm sure he's in favor of locking up people who look for his personal info... or at least overthrowing their democratically elected leaders and installing a dictator who will kill them anyway.
(aside: I can't stop laughing at this one joke on the most recent page of Get Your War On -- When Kissinger signs a government paycheck, does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of an East Timorese child?)
Personally, I used to love to buy CDs... my local record store hasn't seen my face in about a year now though.
There are two reasons for this. The first one is that the economy slumped, my job sucks ass, and I can't afford much in the way of luxury items. Electricity, food, and rent about does it for me. The second reason is that I've had my car broken into twice (over a year apart) and the CDs stolen out of it both times. If you think they're expensive to buy now, wait until you have to buy them for the third time.
I still buy CDs in one situation only -- having just heard the band play a show up on stage. If I'm not seeing them live, I'm not buying their music. It's just not worth it to me.
Now I get to hear those "In Soviet Russia" jokes over my web radio.
In Soviet Russia, the jokes will hear YOU!!
Finding open source products to meet your needs should never involve you having to think, "Now, if I use this open source filter to block certain internet sites from my 20 year old son...is that violation of human rights or not?"
Umm.. I've never heard anybody (except the United States with their stupid drinking age limit) claim that a 20+ year old person wasn't a fully mature human being (in general - President Bush could be considered an exception). Is there something you'd like to share? :)
If you like post-apocalyptic fairy-tales with zombies, or skateboarding, check out Red Moon Rising It's based on a White Wolf RPG campaign he ran a few years ago, told from the point of view of an NPC, a 12 year old skateboarder named Andrew...
and it's fucking awesome! Click the link now, human!
Just to clarify (or nitpick, if you prefer - but please consider it constructive criticism) the first part of your post there:
That's a common misconception, thanks to the Cold War era speeches made by people such as McCarthy, as well as earlier rhetoric by Marx and Engels attempting to exclude Bakunin and other anarchists from the International.
Socialism, or "state socialism" (concentration of power in the hands of the state) and socialism (concentration of social assets in the hands of the workers, achieved to its full potential only by direct democracy) are two vastly different things. Please use "S"ocialism when referring to a government such as the defunct U.S.S.R., wherein the state encompasses all capital and productive labour thereof. "s"ocialism is a much nicer animal :)
You can look here Anarchist FAQ, Section H: Why do anarchists oppose state socialism? for more details and a more scholarly discussion on the differences between the two.
He's on the right track - the difference isn't so great.
;)
A good (or even decent, these days) realtime 3D engine is going to support skeletal animation, so you're halfway to modeling movable meshes.
There's two real differences, and one of them is simply a matter of what data you put in, and the other is quickly becoming an actual part of realtime engines (I suspect either the next release of a "major" game, or the one after that).
The first is simply that if you add vertices and pretty textures and procedurally generated effects and other eye candy to the point where you're only getting a fraction of a frame per second, it's no longer realtime even if you're still using the same engine, right?
The second big thing is doing *both* halves of the IK function per frame. Currently in game development, the first half of IK work (placing the targets for the movement and recording keyframes) is done in a 3d modeling program, and the second half (interpolating between keyframes to actually generate animation) is done in the realtime engine.
UT2003's "ragdoll" system is an example of doing both halves of IK in realtime (or per frame, if you have enough data that you're not running in realtime - see above). A 3D modeling program would allow you to set an arbitrary situation, put force in the anchor points, and generate an animation.
In the near (2-4 years) future, models for realtime engines won't require keyframes to make the skeletal animation work. You'll just drop in a model with some metadata attached to it that says "this is a hand" "this is a foot" "this is a knee" and the program knows that to take a step, it should move the foot forward a certain amount - the reason engines will move in this direction is because that will allow their animations to respond to the environment better, cleaner, and without extra work on the artists' part (in fact, less work on the artists' part). For instance, placing one foot on a stair and the other foot on the step below, or being able to block a punch thrown at the character's face without "teleporting" both characters into the appropriate positions for the pregenerated animation (or worse, allowing one character's arm to clip through the other's).
So, to make a long point short - there's not too much difference between making a realtime engine and a non-realtime engine. Any optimizations that make it run faster are still good, as long as you're not sacrificing quality to do so. You want the physics to work realistically regardless (for your personal value of realistic, of course). So what's the diff?
Yeah, but that still doesn't make sense, unless you mean to say that we're living in hell now...
Come to think of it, that might explain my boss...
Dude, UT2003 is doing *way* more stuff than RTCW.
Their "ragdoll" system is actually performing *both* halves of the IK solution in real-time. Prior to this, games (including Quake 3 and RTCW) had pre-animated poses and only used skeletal animation to interpolate between keyframes. See the dead bodies slumped against the wall or draped over a balustrade? In RTCW, they would be sticking *through* the wall or lying flat on top of the rail. Not very realistic. Now you see the difference?
UT2003 doesn't even take it as far as it can go - they only do full IK on dead bodies. They're still using traditional animation on the "living" models. Once they start doing that, you'll need some *hefty* CPU power to calculate all the animation. But it will be *so* pretty...
Dude, chill for a sec -- I didn't say this was "regular" or "standard" or anything like that. My system worked perfectly out of the box. So did my little brother's when I installed Linux on his computer for christmas last year. :)
I'm just saying that if it isn't working, there's a way to troubleshoot it and a way to fix it (namely, upgrade your drivers).
Sounds to me like you don't have DRI configured properly -- if you don't have 3d working in the first place under Linux, it's not going to magically work on Linux because you're running a game under an emulator :)
Run glxgears (may be called just gears on some systems) and make sure your frame rate is appropriate for your system / graphics card.
i.e. On my box here at work I'm getting around 220 FPS (i810 and celeron 833)
My box at home gets somewhere in the low one-thousands, IIRC (ATI Radeon and Athlon XP 1.4GHz)
Run glxinfo and check two things:
1) make sure there's a line that says "direct rendering: Yes"
2) make sure the OpenGL renderer string is named for your hardware (this one says "Mesa DRI I810 20010321")
If those two lines aren't correct then you need to recompile your kernel and make sure you enable DRM for your graphics card. If that still doesn't do it, I'd say upgrade XFree86 and Mesa (if you install everything from binary packages) or download and compile XFree86 from CVS (if you're feeling brave).
I've hardly ever liked any print comics -- I read stories for the *plot*. Art is good, but it's a bonus, it's not the reason I buy a book. Why spend 3 to 5 dollars on a comic with 5 minutes worth of plot development when 6 dollars will get me a full-length paperback novel?
:)
;)
I've been pleasantly surprised by two print comics though.
First and foremost: Thieves and Kings by Mark Oakley (M'Oak). I give it 10 stars out of five
Order the first four trade paperbacks from marsimports.com now now now!! (it's self-published, so give the guy your support!)
The plot is *killer*. I especially like the fact that there's one or two pages in almost every issue that are text only (with a little bit of art around the edge), so you really get your money's worth in plot development. Especially when it's stuff that can't really be described well in comic format. (like one text block that goes into describing the background of a dragon to explain his psychological development. That would have suffered in comic form - it would have been like "just get back to the story!", but as a text insert it adds considerably to the flavor and impact of the character)
Secondly... you've probably had other people recommend it to you already, but they're actually right in this case: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez. It takes a little while to get into the main plot, but it creeps me out like an H.P. Lovecraft story when the doughboys start seriously talking and stuff. The advantage of this one is that the story is finished and you can buy it all in one trade paperback (the "Director's Cut").
Looks like there'll be a third print comic I like once dead-tree-MT comes out
Slightly off-topic, does anybody know what's wrong with 8-bit Theatre? I haven't been able to reach it in months. :(
I really liked it back when I could read it, but now I check it like once every three weeks and always "No response from www.nuklearpower.com". Very sad.
Doesn't respond to pings or anything. If anybody knows what's up, could you let me know?
> Look at the ship in WOC...
> I like the special effects in WOC...
> Wrath of Khan was an awesome movie...
Ok, you know how to spell "Khan", so I've *got* to ask...
What the hell is "WOC"? Wrath of Cgleba?
Isn't it obvious?
;)
OpenCola is the soft drink you're looking for. Sparkly and refreshing, with an open-source recipe. OpenCola is simply the choice of a GNU generation
A *rogue* asteroid? Is that like a rogue nation?
You don't need to worry yourself none about them rogue asteroids - just tell ol' Unca Dubya, he'll take care of 'em all! (now where did I put that big red button...)
I don't have any idea how well Windows does SMP (the only report I've gotten firsthand from a friend was with NT 4.0 SP5 vs. Redhat 5.2 with a custom-built kernel on a dual-Celeron box, but Redhat creamed NT back then... don't know if the story's changed).
The threading implementation bit, however, I can say is complete FUD. At the moment the threading implementation is slightly less than *twice* as good as WinXP's implementation, which was an improvement over Win2K's.r y/l-rt7/.
Here's a good article (good series of articles, in fact, comparing many low-level features of Windows and Linux) http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/libra
AFAIK, the "thread implementation" FUD got started from an article that stated that at the kernel level Linux managed threads the same as lightweight processes... the part the FUD-mongers *don't* tell you is that the article went on to say that the deal was not that threads were slowed down to the point of LWPs, but that LWPs on Linux executed much faster than threads on either Solaris or Windows.
Hope this has done a good job disabusing you ;)
The answer is simple - it's perfectly in line with the expressed will of the U.S. government.
Capitalists value capital more than they do human life (otherwise they would be called "socialists"). Under this more-capitalist-every-day regime we've got at the moment, the penalties for stealing money (or even potential earnings, witness the DMCA) are much harsher than penalties for all but the most heinous murders.
> Unfortunately the shadow from a 2d object is also 2d, so your theory needs a little work :)
It actually depends on the subspace you're talking about. If you're talking about a 3d subspace (which I assume you are), the shadow of a 2d object can be either 1d or 2d, depending on the angle of the light to the surface of the 2d object. (if the light hits edge on, it casts a 1d shadow)
In a 2d subspace, objects only cast 1d shadows, because there is no "sideways" in which the light can hit the flat part of the surface. The 2d light source is always edge on to the 2d object occupying the same plane.
> Yeah, okay, what about the -ugly-and-wierd-font-descriptors-it-uses?
What about them? Users usually don't see these, programmers do.
The only reason you'd need to look at them (that I can think of offhand anyway) is if you're *trying* to find out what foundry made your font. ("Damn it, I want adobe times, not BSR times!") And in that case, I can't think of an equivalent way to find the same information under MacOS or Windows, so X's solution is clearly better.