... as long as it doesn't interfere with my rights to reprogram anything using any free/libre software and doesn't intefere with my fair use rights to use the content I pay for.
When a consumer rips a song from a CD and gives the digital file a name, the computer hardware, ripping software and other digital data together create a digital file identified by a distinct hash code. If the user rips the same song with an older computer - even with the same software - the file will have a different hash code. The slightest change in the music source, computer hardware, ripping software, P2P protocol, file name or length of recording will change the hash code identifying the resulting MP3 file.
For example, while searching for a Madonna song at the RIAA offices, dozens of users were sharing the same Madonna title over LimeWire - but six users were sharing the digital files with identical hash codes. Since it is highly improbable that more than one user would have the exact combination of equipment and timing to create identical hash codes, the investigator says, the six users are likely sharing copies of the same file that one person originally uploaded to the internet and that was later downloaded and shared by other users.
How does this extra information get into the digital file to create distinct hash codes? It must be the software that does it.
I've ripped music from CDs I own (just to play on my own computer, of course). There is often different results. But I was curious about that and did some tests. I found that the results varied due to some kind of sample shifting going on. The raw data (before compression) was different only by a shifted amount. It seems to be a timing issue in how the transfer is done from CDDA discs. But it turns out there are only 7 distinct possible shifts. I found that by running the rip in a loop for a few days and checksumming each.
It's the MP3 files people upload and share. So it's the hash codes of those files that matter. So if they are different by more than 7 (or whatever might be the issue with different CD drives) unique values, then the compression code must be inserting something. It could be as mundane as the date. Open source people could get into their programs and stomp that out easily enough.
Actually, I have been able to see the contours of very slight color or brightness change on large smooth surfaces that have a slight color or brightness gradient. In very "noisy" scenes, I can't see it nor do I expect to. Going from 24-bit to 30-bit (that's from 8-bit to 10-bit per color) can make a difference in removing that contouring effect.
Video standards for broadcasting and movie production already use what they call 10-bit resolution, which is 10 bits per each color. So this display would be just what they might want. The high end broadcast grade displays from companies like Sony already do 10-bit or better.
Some digital cameras are even going to 42-bit color (that's 14 bits per each color).
... lets you get the color just right if no one has a monitor that can display it right (aside from the small handful that get this one for their own work)?
In American litigation (which I've been working in since 1974), the term "ex parte" means "without notice".
Put 2 lawyers in the same room and you will get at least 2 differing opinions:-)
Thesewebpages seem to say something different. But it could matter whether one is describing the effect or how it is used, or just the basis of the words in their Latin roots. And certainly "without notice" pretty much describes Ex Parte everywhere I've seen it used (via various news and online sources since IANAL).
The government has acknowledged that paedophiles may be circumventing the law by using computer technology to manipulate real photographs or videos of abuse into drawings or cartoons.
What law are they circumventing? The law that was intended to protect the children by outlawing erotic/abuse pictures of them? Or are they just circumventing some person's idea of what the law should be? Sure, if you think that generated erotic/abuse images should be illegal, go ahead and propose the law change (and explain why we need it, such as to avoid encourging actual abuse from happening). But until there is a law against some particular action, don't say that action is circumventing any law when no law makes it illegal (or if there is one already, then enforce it).
Lots of stuff runs Java just fine. Your DVD player runs Java. You should worry less about it being Java based and worry more about what the Java programmers have made it do at the behest of companies known to install rootkits, intercept selected packets, and in general spy on everyone.
I don't want a cable company spying on me. I started being concerned with this around 1982 when I was a subscriber to QUBE cable system. I had read about people claiming to be charged for movies they never watched. That actually happened to me once at an overnight hour I was asleep though they did delete the charges. Then I found that QUBE had managed to pull my credit report even though I had not given them an SSN. I was also getting 2 to 3 times as much junk mail and telemarketing phone calls compared to before and after I lived in Columbus.
So I guess I will have to use a reverse blocking amplifier to prevent any reverse signals from the TV that might expose what channels I'm choosing to watch. Of course that won't work in the future when cable systems go entirely to switched programming (but that would be an all new standard for TVs so it's still at least a while in the future).
Oh, and before anyone tries to tell me that they could be spying on my internet traffic right now, all they see are SSH sessions between my router and one of several servers I have access do. Dynamic (SOCKS based) port forwarding is a nice feature. Yeah, yeah, the server providers could be spying on me, but I'm not so worried about them.
Maybe they will require that you bring the CDs with you to prove the recordings on your iPOD are legal. If you forgot them, then they will give you a form to sign allowing them to contact your local police or FBI branch to go search your home (and everything in it, of course) for these CDs (and you will have to wait several hours while they carry out that search). Your taxes are hard at work protecting our nation from destruction by those evil music infringers.
The circuit breaker feeding the distribution wires (that were damaged in some way by an unknown cause) apparently failed. These distribution wires are running somewhere between 7200 and 19800 volts relative to ground. What is happening is that as the wires burn down in various places, that voltage is crossing over to the 120 volt (relative to ground) wires going into the homes. The insulation on the home wiring would be rated for 600 volts, which means they could fail with as little as 2400 volts or less. Circuit breakers in the homes are irrelevant. The wires going to the homes, the meters on the sides of the houses, the circuit breakers inside, and other wiring in the houses, are getting at least 7200 volts and arcing is happening even right through the insulation.
Assuming that the house does not actually catch fire and burn down (if it did, the firemen can do nothing about it until the power is confirmed to be permanently off), all of the wiring inside, circuit breakers, and electrical fixtures, will have to be replaced due to the damaged insulation.
The semantics I'm speaking of are all the details about how various mouse and keyboard actions perform things in either the virtual console that is in text mode, vs. other things like virtual console frame buffer mode (similar to text mode but not exactly the same) and in X Windows, which is much different. A lot of people would see these as minor differences, or maybe not even see the difference at all.
I do expect the hardware design to be a learning curve. I've worked with hardware before, but the design aspect was decades ago with a couple analog circuits. I do have some understanding of hardware at the circuit level. However, I have no experience with FPGAs. I think I could work with someone that knows digital hardware design to make a very improved video card design (not FPGA based). I'd have to learn what is involved with FPGAs to know how far I can go with that. It might be interesting.
The semantics of a "full screen" are different. I don't know the details, but apparently X operates in a very minimal way. I'm guessing the client then has direct access to the interface of the low level graphical device specific driver, through the X protocol messages. This allows things like changing the video mode and geometry. It also allows total control where the window manager no longer has access to the keyboard and mouse. That would allow screen savers to block access to the desktop until a password is given to them.
The alternative is opening a window as large as the screen, but still be a window. I was able to open Firefox that large, but I did have to do some positioning to move it up and left so the window manager decorations went off the edge. I think in that mode, the window manager is still in control (it let me move the window around) and you could fire up small overlapping windows on top of it through some access to the window manager (which since the big window covers everything, would not be via mouse clicks).
I used FVWM for this with a legacy configuration file. Fancier stuff like Gnome have these task bars that they try to prevent windows from overlapping onto. You'd either have to defeat that or accept a window not quite so full in size. For me, it doesn't actually have to be 100% full. If it's 96% full that's still good. If that's OK for you, that should make it easy to get other windows on top. I personally don't need the other windows as long as I have separate desktops I can switch to by keyboard. And I think once a client has full screen control, it's no longer desktop specific, either.
I'm looking for documentation or a book that covers how to program for X at the lowest level (e.g. NOT using libraries with the exception of the one core Xlib). I wouldn't even mind programming at the X Protocol level. I used to have a book on the X Protocol, but can no longer find it and what docs I have found online seem incomplete or ancient.
I don't really have an answer to that, although it is really the same thing -- after all, one pixel you're on one character, one pixel you're on another, either way. In a GUI, it makes sense to simply click somewhere between the character you want and the character you don't.
Of course, that's not a solution, just amazed it was a problem. I'm also not entirely sure I see advantages to your way, other than that you're used to it -- give it a few weeks, maybe?
Another trick I like, though it isn't always applicable, is double-click -- selects a word -- and double-click+drag, to select multiple words.
When I'm stretching the highlighting with the left button held down and moving the mouse, each character one by one inverts to show highlighting. As I move from left to right, at about the middle of a character that character will invert. But, if I let off the left button at that point it loses the invert and that character is not among the highlighted. To be sure it stays highlighted, beyond that middle position almost to the right edge of the character. That's just unnatural and results in lots highlighting errors that just don't happen in text mode. It would be a good start if the highlighting remained consistent. It would be better if it would highlight the character as soon as the mouse pointer was on any visible part of the character.
Depending on the window manager, yes, you could do that. I always do it one by one, but I do see shortcuts for all of them which can be set.
And checking again with Konsole, yes, I can switch to an arbitrary "session" (read: tab) with a configurable keystroke. And it's possible to hide the tab bar. Unfortunately, it seems to be limited to 12 such keystrokes/sessions out of the box, but I suspect it would be possible to change that with a config file, and if not, it should be a trivial hack, even if you know nothing about GUI programming.
The Shift and Ctrl keys already have standard meanings for text mode and terminals (e.g. Ctrl-C and such). So that leaves the Alt key as a means to use other keys to jump to sessions. In virtual console text mode I have almost all characters in the main part of the keyboard configured to select a console. I have 60 text consoles plus 3 X servers. The first 12 text consoles are Alt+F1 throigh Alt+F12. All the numbers and letters and special characters, when combined with Alt, jump to a corresponding console. Since I think in terms of position, it's easy for me to remember that I left a certain SSH session on the Alt+H key, for example. A lot of those keys have various special meanings in the window manager. I guess what I need is a window manager that will let me bind every one of them to a different desktop, and let me do 63 or 64 desktops.
I worry how slow that will be. Changing now from one xterm to another is a bit slower than I'd like. Text mode virtual console is much faster because less data is copied and the kernel does it (e.g. no context switch). I sometimes switch back and forth between two text consoles very rapidly checking that SHA1 checksums generated in different sessions on supposedly identical files really represents identical files. There is no blinking between these changes when in text mode. When I change desktops now in X, things get blanked out and redrawn. One window vanishes and the background shows up ever so briefly (a significant fraction of a video frame scan time), then the switched-to window pops up blank (all white) then the characters are redrawn. I don't want those steps to happen. I want it to just draw the new data over the old data (but obviously be complete about it).
Do you know anything about FPGA programming? Seems like it might become as big a project either way...
No, I don't. But I am more of a low-level programmer. I did 10 years of assembly programming before I moved "up" to C. Then I did some web programming in PHP (but I still prefer C even for that). I do a little "high le
If you know how to configure/hack a terminal emulator under X to make it work like virtual console text mode does, please be my guest. I've tried 3 different terminal emulators and none do. I've looked at docs and cannot find any way to configure them to do so. What I have not done is hack their code. I looked at the code of a couple of them and didn't want to deal with the mess.
Among the requirements is to change the mouse mode so that it always treats the character it is over as one of those to be included in any highlighting. By default everything in X has a different mode where at some positions within the character it is considered to not be on that character. Because of that mode of operation, I find that, frequently, a character at the beginning or end is not included in the highlighting. Additionally, I cannot extend the existing highlighting with a right click as I can in virtual console text mode. How do YOU extend highlighting in an X terminal?
Changing the mouse pointer from a pixel stepping "I-bar" to an inverse block of the whole character cell, would be nice (that's what I have in text mode).
I also need an instant change from one terminal screen to another terminal screen directly. That means no fancy moving or sliding of windows or desktops in and out and no switching screens in rotation one by one. Maybe this is best done by desktops rather than windows. And each terminal needs to be mappable to a shifted key so that I can hold a shifter key (such as ALT which I do for virtual console text mode, but a different key can be used for this). I can, for example, hold ALT and press one of the mapped keys (traditionally a function key along the top row, but it can be any key on the keyboard through keymapping... and I do use a lot of them for 60 text mode virtual consoles). And this needs to work even if the terminal emulator is in full screen mode because I'll probably have it in that mode a lot (another reason switching by desktop may make sense). Switching by mouse click doesn't have to be ruled out, but switching by keyboard is a must because I work faster that way.
I also needs some better text fonts. I'm sure I can do that much myself with the right tools. I just haven't pursued that much because of the other issues blocking me from using X for any of this.
My programming area is networks and servers. I don't know anything about GUI programming. So I don't want to be involved in hacking a terminal emulator to achieve this. But I think it probably has to be hacked a lot to do it. If you know that kind of programming, maybe you can tell me what is involved.
The advantages you mention are true. But they are not yet enough to overcome the disadvantages (some described above).
I'm more of a video card user. But I could try to learn what it takes to program this card. I'd just want to be sure that what I want to do is feasible. The actual designers might understand if it is or not.
Much of my computer use, including almost all programming, is done in text mode with Linux virtual console semantics, which work better and faster than terminal emulation under X does (for people that are used to it having done it this way since Linux came out, and on other systems before that). The trouble is, modern video cards have not kept up with text mode because most people don't use it. While they can still do it in basic VGA modes, they cannot do more advanced levels of text mode. Some cards, such as the Matrox Millennium G450 AGP, do OK up to a point, but have limits (maximum number of video scan lines in text mode is 1024, and a limitation on pixel clock).
What I want in a video card is one that can do text mode and still also do graphics mode, both in a pixel geometry at least as much as 2560x1600 (which the OGD1 lists). I don't need a lot of the other features for this usage case that other video cards focus on, such as 3D rendering.
Maybe this card can do some new text mode advances, with the right FPGA programming, such as 16-bit character modes (with 16-bit attributes) and not be limited to 8 or 9 pixel character width. Maybe it can also cache all the text buffers in its 256MB of RAM. Assuming 256k bytes per buffer, that's up to 1024 virtual consoles (but a lot of memory would need to be taken away to use for font storage). Another possibility would be overlaying graphics and text mode together.
What I don't know are two things: 1: how easy it is to program this card... and 2: how easy it would be to do what I want to do. I can't know the 2nd without learning the programming, unless someone that already understands the programming for this card and understand what it is I want to do can figure that out and tell me.
Another idea might be way beyond this card until a GPU is available. That idea is to run an X server right inside the card. Then a simple driver in Linux/BSD could pass the X connection streams into the card, and a process can do network listens for remote clients.
But you can upgrade your Windows Media Center by replacing all the software bits with something called Linux Media Center, without any added cost. Just call up Microsoft and demand a refund and tell them you've switched to Linux Media Center and tell then to send you a postage prepaid box to return your Windows Media Center disks and books in.
I want to minimize any vibration in taking the shots. Once the mirror is up, what I want is for it to just do all the bracketed shots. I could use a shutter cable or whatever. This will be on a tripod. I just want those shots to all be framed as close alike as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
... as long as it doesn't interfere with my rights to reprogram anything using any free/libre software and doesn't intefere with my fair use rights to use the content I pay for.
How does this extra information get into the digital file to create distinct hash codes? It must be the software that does it.
I've ripped music from CDs I own (just to play on my own computer, of course). There is often different results. But I was curious about that and did some tests. I found that the results varied due to some kind of sample shifting going on. The raw data (before compression) was different only by a shifted amount. It seems to be a timing issue in how the transfer is done from CDDA discs. But it turns out there are only 7 distinct possible shifts. I found that by running the rip in a loop for a few days and checksumming each.
It's the MP3 files people upload and share. So it's the hash codes of those files that matter. So if they are different by more than 7 (or whatever might be the issue with different CD drives) unique values, then the compression code must be inserting something. It could be as mundane as the date. Open source people could get into their programs and stomp that out easily enough.
Actually, I have been able to see the contours of very slight color or brightness change on large smooth surfaces that have a slight color or brightness gradient. In very "noisy" scenes, I can't see it nor do I expect to. Going from 24-bit to 30-bit (that's from 8-bit to 10-bit per color) can make a difference in removing that contouring effect.
Video standards for broadcasting and movie production already use what they call 10-bit resolution, which is 10 bits per each color. So this display would be just what they might want. The high end broadcast grade displays from companies like Sony already do 10-bit or better.
Some digital cameras are even going to 42-bit color (that's 14 bits per each color).
... lets you get the color just right if no one has a monitor that can display it right (aside from the small handful that get this one for their own work)?
Put 2 lawyers in the same room and you will get at least 2 differing opinions :-)
These web pages seem to say something different. But it could matter whether one is describing the effect or how it is used, or just the basis of the words in their Latin roots. And certainly "without notice" pretty much describes Ex Parte everywhere I've seen it used (via various news and online sources since IANAL).
Go find it, again. You know you want to make a link to it.
From TFA:
The government has acknowledged that paedophiles may be circumventing the law by using computer technology to manipulate real photographs or videos of abuse into drawings or cartoons.What law are they circumventing? The law that was intended to protect the children by outlawing erotic/abuse pictures of them? Or are they just circumventing some person's idea of what the law should be? Sure, if you think that generated erotic/abuse images should be illegal, go ahead and propose the law change (and explain why we need it, such as to avoid encourging actual abuse from happening). But until there is a law against some particular action, don't say that action is circumventing any law when no law makes it illegal (or if there is one already, then enforce it).
... stick figures having sex if the sticks are short?
And tracking what non-pay channels you watch.
Lots of stuff runs Java just fine. Your DVD player runs Java. You should worry less about it being Java based and worry more about what the Java programmers have made it do at the behest of companies known to install rootkits, intercept selected packets, and in general spy on everyone.
I don't want a cable company spying on me. I started being concerned with this around 1982 when I was a subscriber to QUBE cable system. I had read about people claiming to be charged for movies they never watched. That actually happened to me once at an overnight hour I was asleep though they did delete the charges. Then I found that QUBE had managed to pull my credit report even though I had not given them an SSN. I was also getting 2 to 3 times as much junk mail and telemarketing phone calls compared to before and after I lived in Columbus.
So I guess I will have to use a reverse blocking amplifier to prevent any reverse signals from the TV that might expose what channels I'm choosing to watch. Of course that won't work in the future when cable systems go entirely to switched programming (but that would be an all new standard for TVs so it's still at least a while in the future).
Oh, and before anyone tries to tell me that they could be spying on my internet traffic right now, all they see are SSH sessions between my router and one of several servers I have access do. Dynamic (SOCKS based) port forwarding is a nice feature. Yeah, yeah, the server providers could be spying on me, but I'm not so worried about them.
What a worthless site.
Maybe they will require that you bring the CDs with you to prove the recordings on your iPOD are legal. If you forgot them, then they will give you a form to sign allowing them to contact your local police or FBI branch to go search your home (and everything in it, of course) for these CDs (and you will have to wait several hours while they carry out that search). Your taxes are hard at work protecting our nation from destruction by those evil music infringers.
Is this one easier to understand? It's a small construction crane, but big enough to contact a power line. Don't try this at home or anywhere.
The circuit breaker feeding the distribution wires (that were damaged in some way by an unknown cause) apparently failed. These distribution wires are running somewhere between 7200 and 19800 volts relative to ground. What is happening is that as the wires burn down in various places, that voltage is crossing over to the 120 volt (relative to ground) wires going into the homes. The insulation on the home wiring would be rated for 600 volts, which means they could fail with as little as 2400 volts or less. Circuit breakers in the homes are irrelevant. The wires going to the homes, the meters on the sides of the houses, the circuit breakers inside, and other wiring in the houses, are getting at least 7200 volts and arcing is happening even right through the insulation.
Assuming that the house does not actually catch fire and burn down (if it did, the firemen can do nothing about it until the power is confirmed to be permanently off), all of the wiring inside, circuit breakers, and electrical fixtures, will have to be replaced due to the damaged insulation.
You don't know what a real arc is until it hits your house.
The semantics I'm speaking of are all the details about how various mouse and keyboard actions perform things in either the virtual console that is in text mode, vs. other things like virtual console frame buffer mode (similar to text mode but not exactly the same) and in X Windows, which is much different. A lot of people would see these as minor differences, or maybe not even see the difference at all.
I do expect the hardware design to be a learning curve. I've worked with hardware before, but the design aspect was decades ago with a couple analog circuits. I do have some understanding of hardware at the circuit level. However, I have no experience with FPGAs. I think I could work with someone that knows digital hardware design to make a very improved video card design (not FPGA based). I'd have to learn what is involved with FPGAs to know how far I can go with that. It might be interesting.
The semantics of a "full screen" are different. I don't know the details, but apparently X operates in a very minimal way. I'm guessing the client then has direct access to the interface of the low level graphical device specific driver, through the X protocol messages. This allows things like changing the video mode and geometry. It also allows total control where the window manager no longer has access to the keyboard and mouse. That would allow screen savers to block access to the desktop until a password is given to them.
The alternative is opening a window as large as the screen, but still be a window. I was able to open Firefox that large, but I did have to do some positioning to move it up and left so the window manager decorations went off the edge. I think in that mode, the window manager is still in control (it let me move the window around) and you could fire up small overlapping windows on top of it through some access to the window manager (which since the big window covers everything, would not be via mouse clicks).
I used FVWM for this with a legacy configuration file. Fancier stuff like Gnome have these task bars that they try to prevent windows from overlapping onto. You'd either have to defeat that or accept a window not quite so full in size. For me, it doesn't actually have to be 100% full. If it's 96% full that's still good. If that's OK for you, that should make it easy to get other windows on top. I personally don't need the other windows as long as I have separate desktops I can switch to by keyboard. And I think once a client has full screen control, it's no longer desktop specific, either.
I'm looking for documentation or a book that covers how to program for X at the lowest level (e.g. NOT using libraries with the exception of the one core Xlib). I wouldn't even mind programming at the X Protocol level. I used to have a book on the X Protocol, but can no longer find it and what docs I have found online seem incomplete or ancient.
I don't really have an answer to that, although it is really the same thing -- after all, one pixel you're on one character, one pixel you're on another, either way. In a GUI, it makes sense to simply click somewhere between the character you want and the character you don't. Of course, that's not a solution, just amazed it was a problem. I'm also not entirely sure I see advantages to your way, other than that you're used to it -- give it a few weeks, maybe? Another trick I like, though it isn't always applicable, is double-click -- selects a word -- and double-click+drag, to select multiple words.
When I'm stretching the highlighting with the left button held down and moving the mouse, each character one by one inverts to show highlighting. As I move from left to right, at about the middle of a character that character will invert. But, if I let off the left button at that point it loses the invert and that character is not among the highlighted. To be sure it stays highlighted, beyond that middle position almost to the right edge of the character. That's just unnatural and results in lots highlighting errors that just don't happen in text mode. It would be a good start if the highlighting remained consistent. It would be better if it would highlight the character as soon as the mouse pointer was on any visible part of the character.
Depending on the window manager, yes, you could do that. I always do it one by one, but I do see shortcuts for all of them which can be set. And checking again with Konsole, yes, I can switch to an arbitrary "session" (read: tab) with a configurable keystroke. And it's possible to hide the tab bar. Unfortunately, it seems to be limited to 12 such keystrokes/sessions out of the box, but I suspect it would be possible to change that with a config file, and if not, it should be a trivial hack, even if you know nothing about GUI programming.
The Shift and Ctrl keys already have standard meanings for text mode and terminals (e.g. Ctrl-C and such). So that leaves the Alt key as a means to use other keys to jump to sessions. In virtual console text mode I have almost all characters in the main part of the keyboard configured to select a console. I have 60 text consoles plus 3 X servers. The first 12 text consoles are Alt+F1 throigh Alt+F12. All the numbers and letters and special characters, when combined with Alt, jump to a corresponding console. Since I think in terms of position, it's easy for me to remember that I left a certain SSH session on the Alt+H key, for example. A lot of those keys have various special meanings in the window manager. I guess what I need is a window manager that will let me bind every one of them to a different desktop, and let me do 63 or 64 desktops.
I worry how slow that will be. Changing now from one xterm to another is a bit slower than I'd like. Text mode virtual console is much faster because less data is copied and the kernel does it (e.g. no context switch). I sometimes switch back and forth between two text consoles very rapidly checking that SHA1 checksums generated in different sessions on supposedly identical files really represents identical files. There is no blinking between these changes when in text mode. When I change desktops now in X, things get blanked out and redrawn. One window vanishes and the background shows up ever so briefly (a significant fraction of a video frame scan time), then the switched-to window pops up blank (all white) then the characters are redrawn. I don't want those steps to happen. I want it to just draw the new data over the old data (but obviously be complete about it).
Do you know anything about FPGA programming? Seems like it might become as big a project either way...
No, I don't. But I am more of a low-level programmer. I did 10 years of assembly programming before I moved "up" to C. Then I did some web programming in PHP (but I still prefer C even for that). I do a little "high le
If you know how to configure/hack a terminal emulator under X to make it work like virtual console text mode does, please be my guest. I've tried 3 different terminal emulators and none do. I've looked at docs and cannot find any way to configure them to do so. What I have not done is hack their code. I looked at the code of a couple of them and didn't want to deal with the mess.
Among the requirements is to change the mouse mode so that it always treats the character it is over as one of those to be included in any highlighting. By default everything in X has a different mode where at some positions within the character it is considered to not be on that character. Because of that mode of operation, I find that, frequently, a character at the beginning or end is not included in the highlighting. Additionally, I cannot extend the existing highlighting with a right click as I can in virtual console text mode. How do YOU extend highlighting in an X terminal?
Changing the mouse pointer from a pixel stepping "I-bar" to an inverse block of the whole character cell, would be nice (that's what I have in text mode).
I also need an instant change from one terminal screen to another terminal screen directly. That means no fancy moving or sliding of windows or desktops in and out and no switching screens in rotation one by one. Maybe this is best done by desktops rather than windows. And each terminal needs to be mappable to a shifted key so that I can hold a shifter key (such as ALT which I do for virtual console text mode, but a different key can be used for this). I can, for example, hold ALT and press one of the mapped keys (traditionally a function key along the top row, but it can be any key on the keyboard through keymapping ... and I do use a lot of them for 60 text mode virtual consoles). And this needs to work even if the terminal emulator is in full screen mode because I'll probably have it in that mode a lot (another reason switching by desktop may make sense). Switching by mouse click doesn't have to be ruled out, but switching by keyboard is a must because I work faster that way.
I also needs some better text fonts. I'm sure I can do that much myself with the right tools. I just haven't pursued that much because of the other issues blocking me from using X for any of this.
My programming area is networks and servers. I don't know anything about GUI programming. So I don't want to be involved in hacking a terminal emulator to achieve this. But I think it probably has to be hacked a lot to do it. If you know that kind of programming, maybe you can tell me what is involved.
The advantages you mention are true. But they are not yet enough to overcome the disadvantages (some described above).
I'm more of a video card user. But I could try to learn what it takes to program this card. I'd just want to be sure that what I want to do is feasible. The actual designers might understand if it is or not.
Much of my computer use, including almost all programming, is done in text mode with Linux virtual console semantics, which work better and faster than terminal emulation under X does (for people that are used to it having done it this way since Linux came out, and on other systems before that). The trouble is, modern video cards have not kept up with text mode because most people don't use it. While they can still do it in basic VGA modes, they cannot do more advanced levels of text mode. Some cards, such as the Matrox Millennium G450 AGP, do OK up to a point, but have limits (maximum number of video scan lines in text mode is 1024, and a limitation on pixel clock).
What I want in a video card is one that can do text mode and still also do graphics mode, both in a pixel geometry at least as much as 2560x1600 (which the OGD1 lists). I don't need a lot of the other features for this usage case that other video cards focus on, such as 3D rendering.
Maybe this card can do some new text mode advances, with the right FPGA programming, such as 16-bit character modes (with 16-bit attributes) and not be limited to 8 or 9 pixel character width. Maybe it can also cache all the text buffers in its 256MB of RAM. Assuming 256k bytes per buffer, that's up to 1024 virtual consoles (but a lot of memory would need to be taken away to use for font storage). Another possibility would be overlaying graphics and text mode together.
What I don't know are two things: 1: how easy it is to program this card ... and 2: how easy it would be to do what I want to do. I can't know the 2nd without learning the programming, unless someone that already understands the programming for this card and understand what it is I want to do can figure that out and tell me.
Another idea might be way beyond this card until a GPU is available. That idea is to run an X server right inside the card. Then a simple driver in Linux/BSD could pass the X connection streams into the card, and a process can do network listens for remote clients.
Because they can't handle the truth!
But you can upgrade your Windows Media Center by replacing all the software bits with something called Linux Media Center, without any added cost. Just call up Microsoft and demand a refund and tell them you've switched to Linux Media Center and tell then to send you a postage prepaid box to return your Windows Media Center disks and books in.
I want to minimize any vibration in taking the shots. Once the mirror is up, what I want is for it to just do all the bracketed shots. I could use a shutter cable or whatever. This will be on a tripod. I just want those shots to all be framed as close alike as possible.
Had Canon finally added auto-bracketing in the 450D?