It is supposedly a sniffing box, rather than a box the traffic flows through. However even a sniffing box could deter traffic (I've seen at least one "firewall" that did sniff only and sent RST on suspect connections), although you can get around that, too.
The FBI blurb did not describe the technical issues that are the reason why Earthlink did not allow Carnivore. If it is truly a plain sniffer, how could there be technical issues? The answer is there are such issues, such as determining where to sniff. Maybe the FBI wants the ISP to re-arrange the network so all traffic goes through a single switch where they connect to?
The article suggested to me that there were technical issues (as opposed to legal or political ones) that influenced Earthlink to deny Carnivore. Perhaps it is the case that if the technical issues are resolved, they might allow Carnivore in.
Unlike many thousands of smaller ISPs, Earthlink is a 5-9's kind of operation. They have architectured their network to ensure a minimum of downtime. I've been a subscriber for a few months and have experienced no outages (aside from the IRC server being attacked, but that's not really in the 5-9's realm). Building a network like that is no easy task. You have to make it so that NO single failure can bring it down. No... you have to make it so that you can have one each of everything fail and it still be fully functional.
I've designed a couple of smaller networks like this, and there are a lot of technical issues involved. If Carnivore were to be in them to be able to monitor the network, and assuming it was just operating in sniff mode (which is all it should need to do) it would still have to have multiple connections at multiple switches, and almost certainly multiple boxes all over the place. Deploying something like Carnivore while also NOT disrupting the network would be a major project.
There is also the issue of how to get a sniffing tap into the network in the first place. In a small network I recently designed, it would have to tap into 4 different switches to be able to capture everything. My design at least did have switches, most of which can set up port 0 as promiscuous (though if it has a bandwidth lower than the whole switch, you lose packets). Earthlink is way larger than what I built, and has so many points of presence and so many points of exit, that I would imagine that Carnivore would have to be deployed in perhaps as many as 100 instances, each of which having perhaps approaching 100 fiber connections. That kind of scale may well not even be practical (aside from the fact that the ISP is probably already using the promiscuous port for other purposes).
There are other approaches that reduce the scale, such as policy routing port 25 through different paths. But even then you have to have first a point where port 25 is diverted from, and then a point where port 25 can be re-injected without being re-diverted again, and that forces an architecture with more hops than most ISPs have (an architecture that also doesn't scale to 5-9's very well, either).
I suspect Carnivore has technical limitations when you consider the scale of some of the networks like Earthlink/Mindspring/Netcom and others like AOL. Then what about all of those smaller ISPs. If the big ISPs let Carnivore in, many people will shift to the smaller ISPs (not necessarily because they have something to hide, either) so it would end up having to be deployed nearly everywhere (though maybe it can be done at the upstream backbone).
I just don't see it being that simple to do. Anyone else have any more technical details on this black box?
The principle behind FCC regulation of broadcasting in the USA was that the radio spectrum needed to be managed because it was not practical to just allow anyone who wanted to use it however they wanted to use it to go ahead and use it. Today, technology allows much great use of the radio spectrum in the air than they could have imagined then. Still, there are only 67 TV channels in the USA, and that number is declining (most cities cannot use 14-20).
FCC regulation has extended to Cable TV which doesn't have the problems of over the air broadcasting. Anyone with the money to hang their own wires could do so and it won't interfere (for the most part). Still, it is regulated. And there are some causes for it, or at least there used to be. One reason was that the resources required were so immense, but once paid out and deployed, so much was possible on a shared basis, that governments thought this should be done. That and the fact that public resources were being used to lay the wires (varies by jurisdiction).
The FCC could very well try to apply regulations of Cable TV to internet broadcasting. Obviously the internet model already permits massive sharing, and the technology has made so much possible. But government bureaucrats may still not see it this way. They may still want to control things such as content. Can we legally advertise cigarettes on the internet, even if it is a broadcasting format? What about pornographic images of children which there are clearly broad laws against? How do you define what laws apply and what laws do not (especially laws made before the internet existed)?
There is an opposing danger, too. What if monopoly control of the internet facilities ends up giving too few too much control over it all, and they end up doing things that stop the little guy, or the controversial (especially anti-big-corporation) speech, from happening or getting out very far? Would we want government to step in and prevent the monopoly control?
You as a parent should be in control over what your children watch, be it on over-the-air TV, cable TV, or internet. If you think the content is inappropriate, then decline to allow them to view it. If you think you need a government to help you with it, then I guess that's your business since I don't live in Australia. It wouldn't go over very well here.
One way to ensure you have an Australian content is to work to make sure there is a lot of Australian content being produced. Actually I'd love to watch it from here in Texas.
Geek places like/. get my rot13 address because (at least for now) geeks (at least the UNIX derived subset) know how to deal with that. Other places get addresses that have my real domain, and actually get delivered to a distinct mailbox. That way I can see not only what spam picks up that address, but also how many people fail to correct the address (many, actually). My usenet postings are like that.
But the idea of unique codes for every submission of an e-mail address is very intriguing. I may have to do that.
run your own root dns -- Grass Roots Servers
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Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 2
I put together a concept a few years ago where those whoe run (or want to run) their own DNS would simply set it up as a root server by being authoritative for the "." zone. Within that zone, they put in the TLDs they want, and reference the name servers where they want that TLD data to come from.
The idea came to me as a result of TLD wars between different people who wanted to be the authority over the same TLD and had even already accepted registrations in those TLDs. I thought about who really should decide who is the authority for a given TLD (a number of different groups were trying to emerge at the time to do that). My thought was that it should be the open market, the people, the grass roots.
Roots?
So I coined "Grass Roots Servers" to designate the idea that each individual operator of a DNS server can choose for themselves what TLDs and who supplies the data. If you wanted to let NSI be authority for.com then you can (and I did). But you wouldn't have to if you didn't want to. If you wanted to leave.xxx out for a religious oriented ISP, great. If you wanted to hook into an underground source for the.mp3 TLD zone (now what what could that possibly be for?:-) you could.
The big stumbling block I saw was the difficulty in building a complete "." zone and keeping it up to date (servers do change) without destroying your selections in the process. So I gathered up as much data as I could get at that time (it is now out of date a bit) and built a web page CGI that would let you choose from known sources and it would build a "." zone file for you. It would also provide a means to save a page with hidden input fields that would come back with your original selections so you could regenerate the zone file again from your selections and new data.
It's open sourced (you can download source and the old database at the bottom of the page) because I wanted there to be many sources of info about TLD sources, just to make sure no one entity could grab control.
It is still online at http://grs.ipal.net/. I have not updated it. If there is interest, I can resume it, or you can grab the code and data and go for it yourself.
I found an animated, no-cache, zero-age, self-reloading, web bug on dice.com that has a web bug at the bottom of the page (you can see it easily at the very end of the HTML source). The fact that it is animated, with no caching, and instant expire set causes it to keep reloading, which not only tells them where you visit, but also how long you leave the page up. And it's a f---ing obnoxious annoying 5086 bytes that keeps being downloaded over and over.
Block hitbox.com (all subdomain names, too) from your web proxies! Maybe I should make this my new sig.
For one sided DIMM, that's 8 (or 9 for ECC) chips, or for doubled sided, 16 (or 18). So that comes out to $68 for a 64meg DIMM (SS) and $136 for a 128meg DIMM (DS), more for ECC. And that's just the cost of buying the chips for DIMMs. There are of course are few more parts, materials, and assumbly production costs, as well as distribution and related sales costs. The chips will be the biggest part, but don't expect DIMMs to be as low as $68 or $136 of the chip prices are $8.50.
What I heard was the most of Taiwan manufacturing was back online in about 2-3 weeks. That would have had an effect lasting longer, but I doubt if it is the significant effect any more, unless there was some unrepairable damage in manufacturing there.
Neither open source nor closed source by itself makes a system secure. There are way too many systems, both open ones and closed ones, that are swiss cheese, to even think that security can derive from either mechanism.
With regard to security, what open source would allow you to do is verify whether or not a given system truly is designed to a rigid trusted specification. None are now, and OpenBSD seems to have the greatest potential. But I'm absolutely NOT going to trust the security of a closed system just because the marketing folks, and their hired security consultant, says it's perfectly secure.
The question I think is this: If you do have a system you believe is truly secure, does making it open source compromise that security? I believe that if it did, it is flawed in design and can't possibly meet spec.
Where closed systems get an advantage with regard to security is when they are really not secure. That advantage gained is a delay between market introduction and discovery of its insecurity (perhaps by reverse engineering).
I can't remember the exact year this was, but it was prior to 1986. I used a text terminal based program called xinfo running on the TOPS-20 based DECsystem-2060 at Ohio State University. This was my first encounter with hyperlinking and it seeded my mind with ideas. It predates the patent issuance, although not the filing date. But that wasn't all new work, so there had to be prior art from which it was based. Maybe someone can find that.
Is this the case we can finally, once and for all, use to prove the USPTO issues patents on common sense?
In/. technogeek is the common language. Emmerse yourself in and learn.
Re:A whole load of Fourier Analysis...
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Cleartype In Depth
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· Score: 2
I was definitely wondering about that. I suspect a simpler approach (and certainly not patentable in the context of the clear thinking minds of/. readers) is to simply perform the type rendering, and hinting, in separate color spaces shifted by an amount intended to correct for the particular display in use, be it discrete LCD, analog LCD, or striped CRT. Still, that alone is not the whole effect. There is an effect of the fuzziness of the edges varying by horizontal position with respect to pixel alignment, and this, too, varies by color plane (absolute for discrete LCD). The Fourier Analysis could come into play to correct for this, though I suspect some pre-generated masks would really be all that would be needed.
The Apple II doesn't really do this. It uses the properties of the NTSC colorburst signal to create color from a synchronized high-resolution monochrome signal. The physical "subpixels" on the CRT can't be aligned to this signal, and the end result is fuzziness, not clarity. The R,G,B phosphors on the screen are not directly addressed.
No, but there is still a color shift effect which results from using pixeling to effect NTSC "modulation". I remember seeing at least one program on my old long-gone Apple ][ which attemtped to compensate for this effect. That was limited by the lack of ability to change pixel value. I did play around with time-coding it to get that effect anyway on long-duration color photographs made from the CRT screen.
CRT's and even analog LCD's don't gain anything from this, as this technology needs direct access to the R,G,B elements of the display to create antialiased text that is as sharp as possible. It even needs to know the order of the RGB elements. This done through wholly digital displays that directly address the color pixels on the display, such as an LCD on a laptop. The next step would be to make this independent of the display type, with tuning tools or profiles for individual display devices.
Yes they do. It may not be as much, and certainly more complex to compensate for since you don't get to syncronize the effect at the pixel level. But a CRT, especially a vertically striped one, has the effect of shifting the color planes relative to each other at sub-pixel levels, and the effect used in ClearType partially compensates for this. The correction is a matter of degree and probably could be optimized for a specific CRT tube at a specific scan geometry. But it is very real and I can visually see it in the images from the Microsoft Research page. What ClearType is probably also doing is adjusting the snap points as well so that hinting applies differently in different color planes (and thus not necessarily shifting the color planes by the same amount for each character cell).
Television does this naturally, being a wholly analog system. Point a color camera at some text, and the edges of the text will fall on the color elements within the camera, irregardless of arbitrary pixel boundaries. If you magnify a still image on a TV set, you'll notice that any sharp edges are defined independantly of the positions of the color elements, and they are "smooth". In contrast, any computer-generated edges show a bias toward pixels, causing some jagginess in even the best anti-aliased graphic. Of course, if the source camera and the receiving TV set have different color element geometries, the result will be a little off.
When it comes to single tube (vidicon) and color CCD image pickup devices, then television actually has more of a problem with just the color plane shifting effect. I remember reading an article in one of the broadcasting tech journals at the time regarding this, and how some circuitry was used to correct this in the YUV color space, as opposed to the RGB color space. It happened to mention that CRT displays introduced a muted form of the same effect, but could not be corrected for because of all the variations that existed. I remember thinking at the time that it would be relatively simple to correct for that for a Sony Trinitron display, if I could first split the video into RGB signals, then apply a time-base corrector. It would not have been cost effective for a consumer device. But the sharp, crisp, image I saw on Tektronix studio monitors back then (late 1970's, when I worked in broadcasting) made me wonder if they were employing some of this. Perhaps we should inquire of Tek as to what research they have done with this, as well as Kodak, which I know has done research to correct things like this in their CCD cameras.
Re:Anti-aliasing on conventional monitors.
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Cleartype In Depth
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· Score: 2
The effect may not be as pronounced on a vertically striped CRT as on an LCD, but I can actually see the difference on my Sony Trinitron (tm) monitor. The text is noticeably sharper in all the sizes.
Interestingly, though, the basics for this technology has been around for a while. Display stripes are not the only source of color-biased (and hence reverse biasable) geometric effects. Image pickup devices such as single tube video camera of a couple decades ago, and current color CCD cameras, have these effects even more extreme because of the more coarse striping that exists.
I would suggest that a correction for the effect of the display device could be applied in general to the whole video signal being displayed, and there would be improvement overall. Then type hinting would still have to take into consideration that the snap points aren't the same for each color plane (part of what is apparently going on in Cleartype, anyway).
These supposedly-important new web standards seemed to be the cause of much of the bloat. I don't everyone wants to be imposed upon to have to have something that monolitically does everything anyone ever proposed. So I'm happy to see those things not included.
Still, they could be included if it is done by making them modular. They have to be separate files for each feature, with the main process knowing how to find things (dynamic library search) and also handles the absence gracefully (sorry, no application to handle that document class). They need to be separately downloadable, but also convenient to download all you want at the same time.
Those separate apps can then be made to appear integrated or appear separate but that should always be, like anything else, user choice.
This it intended to stop dual booting Linux/BSD
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Copyrant
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· Score: 5
This recovery CD apparently restores the whole original state, including the partitioning. If that is so, you will not be able to repartition and reinstall Windows (and then add Linux and/or BSD), because it will restore your original partitioning, which gives Windows the whole disk again.
IMHO, this is a Microsoft tactic intended to keep people from giving Linux or BSD a try. It's all part of the campaign of trying to lock people and businesses in and not let them discover any way out. I knew they would try to pull things to lock out other operating systems, and do so in a way that looks like they are doing something else. This appears to be the start of that effort.
I could be in a position of contributing to the crime of theft of intellectual property if I allow these things to come through my proxy server. So I guess I better block them all now.
So, Bruce, does that mean you would be willing to pay a UNIX/TCP/IP sysadmin $150k/yr? That's what I calculate as the appropriate salary for living and working where you describe, which is still nearly double that of where I live (Dallas, Texas).
I still get calls from employers in SV (none from EB yet) wanting, often desperately (like the one guy last week that didn't understand what "no" meant about 10 times in a row), to bring people in from elsewhere in the country. I guess instead of saying "no" (which doesn't seem to phase them) I need to say "$440k" (my calculated amount required to have a chance at getting a mortgage on a house in SV).
Vast amounts of things out there that work are hacks. Sure it's a hack. Animation is a hack, too, but it's extremely popular. Sure, it's inefficient, but people often don't care about that if it gives them what they want.
As for meeting the standard, in the GIF89A standard, there is a clause that reads "A Local Color Table is always associated with the graphic that immediately follows it". The rotating pallettes which were popular back when PCs had 256 color video, violated this part of the standard because they were applying the local color table to image blocks that had been previously rendered. Were you complaining about that back then?
I use NON-compressed GIF now to avoid the licensing issues. PNG doesn't work on my browser because no one implemented a plug-in for it (Netscape 3) for Linux to support PNG in-line. Netscape 4 was way too buggy (and still is at 4.72 even though there is finally PNG support) to even use. Maybe... maybe... Mozilla/Netscape 6 will change that. It remains to be seen (i.e. hasn't, yet).
Sadly, PNG was a great idea gone bad because it just wasn't promoted well enough. That, and the lack of animation in the original version, effectively killed it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is supposedly a sniffing box, rather than a box the traffic flows through. However even a sniffing box could deter traffic (I've seen at least one "firewall" that did sniff only and sent RST on suspect connections), although you can get around that, too.
You mean like Earthlink would have to unplug their own sniffers from the promiscuous ports of the switches to be able to plug in Carnivore?
Not if you set up a route-map that black holes all packets coming from the sniffing interface.
The FBI blurb did not describe the technical issues that are the reason why Earthlink did not allow Carnivore. If it is truly a plain sniffer, how could there be technical issues? The answer is there are such issues, such as determining where to sniff. Maybe the FBI wants the ISP to re-arrange the network so all traffic goes through a single switch where they connect to?
The article suggested to me that there were technical issues (as opposed to legal or political ones) that influenced Earthlink to deny Carnivore. Perhaps it is the case that if the technical issues are resolved, they might allow Carnivore in.
Unlike many thousands of smaller ISPs, Earthlink is a 5-9's kind of operation. They have architectured their network to ensure a minimum of downtime. I've been a subscriber for a few months and have experienced no outages (aside from the IRC server being attacked, but that's not really in the 5-9's realm). Building a network like that is no easy task. You have to make it so that NO single failure can bring it down. No... you have to make it so that you can have one each of everything fail and it still be fully functional.
I've designed a couple of smaller networks like this, and there are a lot of technical issues involved. If Carnivore were to be in them to be able to monitor the network, and assuming it was just operating in sniff mode (which is all it should need to do) it would still have to have multiple connections at multiple switches, and almost certainly multiple boxes all over the place. Deploying something like Carnivore while also NOT disrupting the network would be a major project.
There is also the issue of how to get a sniffing tap into the network in the first place. In a small network I recently designed, it would have to tap into 4 different switches to be able to capture everything. My design at least did have switches, most of which can set up port 0 as promiscuous (though if it has a bandwidth lower than the whole switch, you lose packets). Earthlink is way larger than what I built, and has so many points of presence and so many points of exit, that I would imagine that Carnivore would have to be deployed in perhaps as many as 100 instances, each of which having perhaps approaching 100 fiber connections. That kind of scale may well not even be practical (aside from the fact that the ISP is probably already using the promiscuous port for other purposes).
There are other approaches that reduce the scale, such as policy routing port 25 through different paths. But even then you have to have first a point where port 25 is diverted from, and then a point where port 25 can be re-injected without being re-diverted again, and that forces an architecture with more hops than most ISPs have (an architecture that also doesn't scale to 5-9's very well, either).
I suspect Carnivore has technical limitations when you consider the scale of some of the networks like Earthlink/Mindspring/Netcom and others like AOL. Then what about all of those smaller ISPs. If the big ISPs let Carnivore in, many people will shift to the smaller ISPs (not necessarily because they have something to hide, either) so it would end up having to be deployed nearly everywhere (though maybe it can be done at the upstream backbone).
I just don't see it being that simple to do. Anyone else have any more technical details on this black box?
The principle behind FCC regulation of broadcasting in the USA was that the radio spectrum needed to be managed because it was not practical to just allow anyone who wanted to use it however they wanted to use it to go ahead and use it. Today, technology allows much great use of the radio spectrum in the air than they could have imagined then. Still, there are only 67 TV channels in the USA, and that number is declining (most cities cannot use 14-20).
FCC regulation has extended to Cable TV which doesn't have the problems of over the air broadcasting. Anyone with the money to hang their own wires could do so and it won't interfere (for the most part). Still, it is regulated. And there are some causes for it, or at least there used to be. One reason was that the resources required were so immense, but once paid out and deployed, so much was possible on a shared basis, that governments thought this should be done. That and the fact that public resources were being used to lay the wires (varies by jurisdiction).
The FCC could very well try to apply regulations of Cable TV to internet broadcasting. Obviously the internet model already permits massive sharing, and the technology has made so much possible. But government bureaucrats may still not see it this way. They may still want to control things such as content. Can we legally advertise cigarettes on the internet, even if it is a broadcasting format? What about pornographic images of children which there are clearly broad laws against? How do you define what laws apply and what laws do not (especially laws made before the internet existed)?
There is an opposing danger, too. What if monopoly control of the internet facilities ends up giving too few too much control over it all, and they end up doing things that stop the little guy, or the controversial (especially anti-big-corporation) speech, from happening or getting out very far? Would we want government to step in and prevent the monopoly control?
How to balance this is the big issue I see.
You as a parent should be in control over what your children watch, be it on over-the-air TV, cable TV, or internet. If you think the content is inappropriate, then decline to allow them to view it. If you think you need a government to help you with it, then I guess that's your business since I don't live in Australia. It wouldn't go over very well here.
One way to ensure you have an Australian content is to work to make sure there is a lot of Australian content being produced. Actually I'd love to watch it from here in Texas.
Be sure it is one that has REMOVED the HTTP X_Forwarded_For: header, which is normally enabled in caching programs like Squid.
Geek places like /. get my rot13 address because (at least for now) geeks (at least the UNIX derived subset) know how to deal with that. Other places get addresses that have my real domain, and actually get delivered to a distinct mailbox. That way I can see not only what spam picks up that address, but also how many people fail to correct the address (many, actually). My usenet postings are like that.
But the idea of unique codes for every submission of an e-mail address is very intriguing. I may have to do that.
I put together a concept a few years ago where those whoe run (or want to run) their own DNS would simply set it up as a root server by being authoritative for the "." zone. Within that zone, they put in the TLDs they want, and reference the name servers where they want that TLD data to come from.
The idea came to me as a result of TLD wars between different people who wanted to be the authority over the same TLD and had even already accepted registrations in those TLDs. I thought about who really should decide who is the authority for a given TLD (a number of different groups were trying to emerge at the time to do that). My thought was that it should be the open market, the people, the grass roots.
Roots?
So I coined "Grass Roots Servers" to designate the idea that each individual operator of a DNS server can choose for themselves what TLDs and who supplies the data. If you wanted to let NSI be authority for .com then you can (and I did). But you wouldn't have to if you didn't want to. If you wanted to leave .xxx out for a religious oriented ISP, great. If you wanted to hook into an underground source for the .mp3 TLD zone (now what what could that possibly be for? :-) you could.
The big stumbling block I saw was the difficulty in building a complete "." zone and keeping it up to date (servers do change) without destroying your selections in the process. So I gathered up as much data as I could get at that time (it is now out of date a bit) and built a web page CGI that would let you choose from known sources and it would build a "." zone file for you. It would also provide a means to save a page with hidden input fields that would come back with your original selections so you could regenerate the zone file again from your selections and new data.
It's open sourced (you can download source and the old database at the bottom of the page) because I wanted there to be many sources of info about TLD sources, just to make sure no one entity could grab control.
It is still online at http://grs.ipal.net/ . I have not updated it. If there is interest, I can resume it, or you can grab the code and data and go for it yourself.
I found an animated, no-cache, zero-age, self-reloading, web bug on dice.com that has a web bug at the bottom of the page (you can see it easily at the very end of the HTML source). The fact that it is animated, with no caching, and instant expire set causes it to keep reloading, which not only tells them where you visit, but also how long you leave the page up. And it's a f---ing obnoxious annoying 5086 bytes that keeps being downloaded over and over.
Block hitbox.com (all subdomain names, too) from your web proxies!
Maybe I should make this my new sig.
If I give you free beer, and you get drunk and have a serious car wreck, can I be sued or should I be off the hook?
For one sided DIMM, that's 8 (or 9 for ECC) chips, or for doubled sided, 16 (or 18). So that comes out to $68 for a 64meg DIMM (SS) and $136 for a 128meg DIMM (DS), more for ECC. And that's just the cost of buying the chips for DIMMs. There are of course are few more parts, materials, and assumbly production costs, as well as distribution and related sales costs. The chips will be the biggest part, but don't expect DIMMs to be as low as $68 or $136 of the chip prices are $8.50.
What I heard was the most of Taiwan manufacturing was back online in about 2-3 weeks. That would have had an effect lasting longer, but I doubt if it is the significant effect any more, unless there was some unrepairable damage in manufacturing there.
Neither open source nor closed source by itself makes a system secure. There are way too many systems, both open ones and closed ones, that are swiss cheese, to even think that security can derive from either mechanism.
With regard to security, what open source would allow you to do is verify whether or not a given system truly is designed to a rigid trusted specification. None are now, and OpenBSD seems to have the greatest potential. But I'm absolutely NOT going to trust the security of a closed system just because the marketing folks, and their hired security consultant, says it's perfectly secure.
The question I think is this: If you do have a system you believe is truly secure, does making it open source compromise that security? I believe that if it did, it is flawed in design and can't possibly meet spec.
Where closed systems get an advantage with regard to security is when they are really not secure. That advantage gained is a delay between market introduction and discovery of its insecurity (perhaps by reverse engineering).
I can't remember the exact year this was, but it was prior to 1986. I used a text terminal based program called xinfo running on the TOPS-20 based DECsystem-2060 at Ohio State University. This was my first encounter with hyperlinking and it seeded my mind with ideas. It predates the patent issuance, although not the filing date. But that wasn't all new work, so there had to be prior art from which it was based. Maybe someone can find that.
Is this the case we can finally, once and for all, use to prove the USPTO issues patents on common sense?
In /. technogeek is the common language. Emmerse yourself in and learn.
I was definitely wondering about that. I suspect a simpler approach (and certainly not patentable in the context of the clear thinking minds of /. readers) is to simply perform the type rendering, and hinting, in separate color spaces shifted by an amount intended to correct for the particular display in use, be it discrete LCD, analog LCD, or striped CRT. Still, that alone is not the whole effect. There is an effect of the fuzziness of the edges varying by horizontal position with respect to pixel alignment, and this, too, varies by color plane (absolute for discrete LCD). The Fourier Analysis could come into play to correct for this, though I suspect some pre-generated masks would really be all that would be needed.
No, but there is still a color shift effect which results from using pixeling to effect NTSC "modulation". I remember seeing at least one program on my old long-gone Apple ][ which attemtped to compensate for this effect. That was limited by the lack of ability to change pixel value. I did play around with time-coding it to get that effect anyway on long-duration color photographs made from the CRT screen.
Yes they do. It may not be as much, and certainly more complex to compensate for since you don't get to syncronize the effect at the pixel level. But a CRT, especially a vertically striped one, has the effect of shifting the color planes relative to each other at sub-pixel levels, and the effect used in ClearType partially compensates for this. The correction is a matter of degree and probably could be optimized for a specific CRT tube at a specific scan geometry. But it is very real and I can visually see it in the images from the Microsoft Research page. What ClearType is probably also doing is adjusting the snap points as well so that hinting applies differently in different color planes (and thus not necessarily shifting the color planes by the same amount for each character cell).
When it comes to single tube (vidicon) and color CCD image pickup devices, then television actually has more of a problem with just the color plane shifting effect. I remember reading an article in one of the broadcasting tech journals at the time regarding this, and how some circuitry was used to correct this in the YUV color space, as opposed to the RGB color space. It happened to mention that CRT displays introduced a muted form of the same effect, but could not be corrected for because of all the variations that existed. I remember thinking at the time that it would be relatively simple to correct for that for a Sony Trinitron display, if I could first split the video into RGB signals, then apply a time-base corrector. It would not have been cost effective for a consumer device. But the sharp, crisp, image I saw on Tektronix studio monitors back then (late 1970's, when I worked in broadcasting) made me wonder if they were employing some of this. Perhaps we should inquire of Tek as to what research they have done with this, as well as Kodak, which I know has done research to correct things like this in their CCD cameras.
The effect may not be as pronounced on a vertically striped CRT as on an LCD, but I can actually see the difference on my Sony Trinitron (tm) monitor. The text is noticeably sharper in all the sizes.
Interestingly, though, the basics for this technology has been around for a while. Display stripes are not the only source of color-biased (and hence reverse biasable) geometric effects. Image pickup devices such as single tube video camera of a couple decades ago, and current color CCD cameras, have these effects even more extreme because of the more coarse striping that exists.
I would suggest that a correction for the effect of the display device could be applied in general to the whole video signal being displayed, and there would be improvement overall. Then type hinting would still have to take into consideration that the snap points aren't the same for each color plane (part of what is apparently going on in Cleartype, anyway).
These supposedly-important new web standards seemed to be the cause of much of the bloat. I don't everyone wants to be imposed upon to have to have something that monolitically does everything anyone ever proposed. So I'm happy to see those things not included.
Still, they could be included if it is done by making them modular. They have to be separate files for each feature, with the main process knowing how to find things (dynamic library search) and also handles the absence gracefully (sorry, no application to handle that document class). They need to be separately downloadable, but also convenient to download all you want at the same time.
Those separate apps can then be made to appear integrated or appear separate but that should always be, like anything else, user choice.
This recovery CD apparently restores the whole original state, including the partitioning. If that is so, you will not be able to repartition and reinstall Windows (and then add Linux and/or BSD), because it will restore your original partitioning, which gives Windows the whole disk again.
IMHO, this is a Microsoft tactic intended to keep people from giving Linux or BSD a try. It's all part of the campaign of trying to lock people and businesses in and not let them discover any way out. I knew they would try to pull things to lock out other operating systems, and do so in a way that looks like they are doing something else. This appears to be the start of that effort.
I could be in a position of contributing to the crime of theft of intellectual property if I allow these things to come through my proxy server. So I guess I better block them all now.
So, Bruce, does that mean you would be willing to pay a UNIX/TCP/IP sysadmin $150k/yr? That's what I calculate as the appropriate salary for living and working where you describe, which is still nearly double that of where I live (Dallas, Texas).
I still get calls from employers in SV (none from EB yet) wanting, often desperately (like the one guy last week that didn't understand what "no" meant about 10 times in a row), to bring people in from elsewhere in the country. I guess instead of saying "no" (which doesn't seem to phase them) I need to say "$440k" (my calculated amount required to have a chance at getting a mortgage on a house in SV).
Hopefully Slackware will make it there, soon.
Vast amounts of things out there that work are hacks. Sure it's a hack. Animation is a hack, too, but it's extremely popular. Sure, it's inefficient, but people often don't care about that if it gives them what they want.
As for meeting the standard, in the GIF89A standard, there is a clause that reads "A Local Color Table is always associated with the graphic that immediately follows it". The rotating pallettes which were popular back when PCs had 256 color video, violated this part of the standard because they were applying the local color table to image blocks that had been previously rendered. Were you complaining about that back then?
I use NON-compressed GIF now to avoid the licensing issues. PNG doesn't work on my browser because no one implemented a plug-in for it (Netscape 3) for Linux to support PNG in-line. Netscape 4 was way too buggy (and still is at 4.72 even though there is finally PNG support) to even use. Maybe ... maybe ... Mozilla/Netscape 6 will change that. It remains to be seen (i.e. hasn't, yet).
Sadly, PNG was a great idea gone bad because it just wasn't promoted well enough. That, and the lack of animation in the original version, effectively killed it.