For what it's worth I've seen similar nubers of people start with Mandrake Linux and stick with it, and really like it.
I think what makes the biggest difference is the people around to give support. If you use SuSE (say), and can't answer Mandrake-specific questions like how to use rpmdrake or urpmi, or don't know about Mandrake Control Centre, people asking you questions might not get the best answers. If someone asks me about YaST under SuSE, I can't help them either. One friend switched away from SuSE for that reason: he wanted support that neither I nor his other frinds could give him.
If your friends say they are moving back to MS Windows, try to find out why, and whether they'd prefer a Linux distribution that you can help them with more, if you are willing and have time, or see if someone else can help mentor them for a while. Or show them #mandrake (or #debian or whatever) so they have somewhere to ask questions.
Yes, Mandrake 9.1 beta has Xft, fontconfig 2, and antialiased fonts in both gnome and KDE, as well as mozilla and a number of other programs.
I don't think Mandrake is lagging particularly here; cooker (Mandrake beta) has had antialiased fonts for quite some time, a few weeks after the 9.0 release. I agree it was unfortunate that it wasn't possible to include in 9.0, but I think Mandrake made the right decision in delaying their release for reliability issues but not for features.
It's probably better to discourage people from downloading random RPMs withuot knowing what they are doing -- but if the package was signed with a known public key, and the checksum matched the one in the urpmi database, then maybe it'd be OK.
Those people I mentioned who reinstall Linux a lot, often tried installing a source tarball and didn't know how to configure it for their system; if they'd used urpmi, all would have been well.
Note that there's still approx. 3 months before a scheduled release, so I'd expect the kernel and XFree86 versions to be later.
The package management tools have also been evolving fast -- if you follow the cooker list, you'll know that the gtk+ 2 version of rpmgrake is out, and it's much faster and improved. (and there's an update to urpmi, too).
At this point, urpmi is approaching the usefulness and robustness of apt-get, albeit with slightly fewer features -- e.g. no "suggested other packages". It's possible those willl come later, at least in principle: there's nothing inherent about RPM that prevents such features.
If 9.0 crashed for you, the right thing to do was to report the problems one by one, and help get them fixed for everyone -- not wait 3 months and then whine on slashdot that there were problems. Maybe the Mandrake developers didn't have your hardware. Maybe the XFree86 developers didn't have a machine with your video card, soundcard and disk controller, and couldn't reproduce the problem.
In general I think Mandrake is going in a good direction: making a Linux distribution that's easy to administer and use, but that is powerful enough for experienced users and admins (e.g. distributed package management, command-line configuration possible), has reliable automated package downloading and installation (including dependencies), and yet that uses the standard config files for everything, so that you can still administer it the "old fashioned way" be editing/etc/fstab or whatever... hence, a distributionthat appeals to new users, and also can be used by developers.
Some of Mandrake's tools (e.g. draksync, a graphical front end to rsync that can use ssh) could do with being moved to sourceforge or somewhere and being more widely used.
Having a Linux distribution that most people can install in 20 minutes to an hour, with no difficult questions, makes a big difference. People moving from MS Windows are often used to reinstalling frequently: this way, wen they can't fix a problem, instead of going back to Windows, they go reinstall Linux, until they learn more about reconfiguring and fixing stuff. And if they never learn how to reconfigure, and always reinstall, it's still a win if it doesn't crash, is Free, open, and they can have a say in what packages are available.
There was a power outage at MIT (note: it's in Cambridge, MA, not Redmond) where lists.w3.org is hosted. This was because of sheduled building work, and the date was published several weeks in advance.
I encourage you to try again -- most or all of the W3C systems seem to be running OK now.
You're also welcome to email me directly (liam at w3.org) if you want to understand more about what W3C does, or how it is organised to minimise the chance that one company can control specifications - or you can read our web site.
It's not that the W3C Team want to see software patents or encumbered specifications. But we can't make them go away.
So the question becomes, how do we survive, and how does the Web survive, and move forward, in a world with software patents?
Part of that involves negotiation with the large companies who hold the largest patent portfolios: it would be almost useless trying to publish a patent policy document if the holders of most of the patents didn't agree to it. So there are some pretty complex constraints.
Simply writing to say, software patents are bad, isn't going to help much. But if you have solid constructive ideas on how to change things, or on how to come to consensus and agreement both with GPL implementations of specifications and with the need that large organizations have stated they have, to keep patents for "deefensive use", I think that would be very helpful.
Of course, just writing to say you like the current draft patent policy, or that you want to see some specific change, or that you don't like it and why, is also helpful, although it does add work for W3C staff, who are obliged to reply to every comment!
If you really want to make a difference, write to your political representative - congressperson, member of european parliament, MP, etc. - and say that software patents are bad for business, are bad for research, are bad for the future of the world, and will cause Orcs to attack Helm's Deep.
Well, maybe Helm's Deep isn't about patents, and not everyone agrees patents (or orcs!) are bad, But if you want software patents to go away you need to be heard. The DMCA had approx. 300 public comments; writing really does make a difference.
Wow, what a lot of false information. Maybe this will help a little. Disclaimer: I am XML Activity Lead at W3C, so I have a bias.
The new Visio is using SVG.
The new Word lets you use any XML vocabulary you like. How obfuscated it is is *entirely* up to you.
It's not using base64 to put binary propietary data into XML documents. It's using plain XML.
It's well-formed, and Word appears not to make up thousands of elements. The person in charge of this project is actually clueful, and was in the W3C XML Working Group (1996-1998 by the way).
The tools all use XSLT extensively.
It wouldn't surprise me if you could get Word to read and write the OpenOffice format just fine. There's a restriction that you can't re-order content in Word right now, I think.
People claiming to have "insider info" and then posting blatant falsehoosd, or claiming you can put binary data directly in XML, aren't helping here. Even if you get high from hating Microsoft, the open source community and Free software world need to understand that the goalposts have moved a little.
The extent of corporate assets tied up in memos, reportsand other documents is very large, massively higher than the collective value of relational databases.
Yes, it looks as if Microsoft has suddenly discovered XML just as they suddenly discovered the Web. In fact, they were involved heavily in XML from the start, were among the first to ship commercial support for XML, and have been working on XML in Office 11 for a long time.
I've tried for some time to get some high quality fonts "donated" to Gnome or XFree86; although this work is still continuing, we're not getting very far. Here's why. Maybe you can help.
It's *difficult* (as others have said) to design a successful typeface. For a poorly hinted font, an hour or two on each character design will get you basic latin one in about five weeks, and then you spend another two weeks with hinting. If that sounds a lot of time, remember that you need to adjust sidebearings (nn sit further apart than oo, or you'll get spots of light and dark on a page/screen, for example) and kerning (Wa closer together than Wh, "r," closer than "n,", "fk" further apart to aviod a glob at the top.
It turns out that an R isn't simply a P with a tail, an E sn't an F with an extra leg, in most designs, particularly the more calligraphic such as Palatino.
So, it's a lot of work to make a font, and for Linux and the Free Software movement, we want fonts that support as many languages as possible, and as many scripts as possible, so that as many people as possible can use the software.
That means even mnore work, and a lot of time from people who are primarily creative artists and designers, with a strong techincal background.
There are three main font formats in widespread professional use today: TrueType, Type 1 and OpenType.
It turns out that TrueType fonts are more expensive to produce in high quality than Type 1 outlines, because with Type 1 outlines, most of the hinting is in the renderer, so the code is only written once; with TrueType, individual fonts have bytecode instructions to do hinting, and it's different for each font.
OpenType lets you embed both Type 1 and TT outlines in the same font file, along with metadata for supporting lots of languages. So if yuo use Type 1 outlines, you avoid the Apple patent on TrueType.
One way forward would be to gather enough money to pay some font designers to make some new fonts. Another way would be to make a one-time payment to buy rights to existing fonts. Probably best would be a mixture: start with existing fonts and extend their Unicode coverage.
What would a Free Font be? Probably we need something slightly different from the GPL. In particular, it might not be OK to redistribute a modified Free Font without making clear that you have changed it, because otherwise you could reduce its quality or destroy the artistic integrity of the design, and give the artist who designed it a bad reputation.
Font *outlines* (i.e. the design of a typeface) are protected by copyright outside the USA, because they are recognised as artistic works. In the US, they are not protected, for historical reasons. In both cases, the font *names* are often registered trademarks, so you see Palladium because Palatino is a trademark, I think of Linotype; Dutch instead of Times (Monotype), Swiss instead of Helvetica, and so on.
This means it's not OK to start with existing designs, unless they are old enough - e.g. using the original designs of William Caslon from the 1720s is OK, using Adobe Caslon is not OK, at least not without permission.
So, we need type designers to give permission, or to make new designs.
We need more work on the FreeType Type 1 support, so that we don't have to worry about the software patent on TrueType rendering.
We need an independent legal entity so that designers have someone to negotiate with, and so that money can be paid to them. Maybe the Gnome Foudnation or XFree86.org would do, as long as the fonts can be used with any software, not just Gnome or the X Window System.
I do not have enough time to do a lot of work here, but I *am* willing to help introduce people to font designers and other resources, and to help explain the technological issues.
Hacking on a font renderer takes serious skill, as does designing fonts. But maybe programmers can contribute to FreeType, and to pfaedit (how about a Gnome port, too?) and to ghostscript. Programs like Mandrake's FontDrake can be worked on (it's GPL'd I think).
Who wants to help build a font portal, somewhere people can download Free Fonts from, and with links to font designers who can help customise fonts, and to non-free fonts you can buy?
Who wants to donate a server and some bandwidth? Set up a mailing list?
Remember, we need fonts that are Free, not just ones that don't cost anything, and we need high quality, and support for lots of languages.
If you read this far, my thanks, and let's make something happen. Post here, or feel free to send email [liam at holoweb dot net, will work]
Liam
Re:No, this is not about W3C staff wanting RAND sp
on
W3C Ponders RAND Again
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Reading your other comments, I think all I can say usefully is that it's not a goal of the w3C team members (the staff) to publish specs that cannot be implemnted openly and freely. You (and others) may be reading more into the wording than was intended. But, it's hard to read and interpret email without the full context, and neither of us were at the meeting.
I'm not sure I have explained this very clearly - Digital Mage, feel free to email me if that will help (liam at w3 dot org). I have not seen an "official" W3C response, and neither can I give you one, but I can maybe help you understand the issues, and also show you how you can send effective feedback to W3C working groups.
Liam
[sorry, my personal web site is down right now, www.w3.org/People/Quin works though]
No, this is not about W3C staff wanting RAND specs
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W3C Ponders RAND Again
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No, this is not about W3C staff wanting RAND specifications.
It's about what to do if we're working on a specification that the community (including the open source community) needs/wants, and we discover that some aspect of it is covered by software patents.
In that case, you might not be able to have an open source implementation, and W3C has to ask, (1) should the work be dropped altogether, or (2) is there a central core that can be implemented freely, avoiding the patent? If so, should the non-free part still be standardised, and under what terms?
By making an extension to a specification, an implementation can conform without that (possibly non-free) extension, but at the same time w3C can require W3C member organizations to agree to "non-discriminatory" terms, i.e. forcing them to agree to licence the patent to their competitors.
That may be better than having no specification at all, I don't know.
Note: I work at W3C, and am not involved in the specific work mentioned, nor in the patent policy group.
For what it's worth, science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction regularly appears on the bestseller lists in the UK.
E.g. at the Times this week [1] I see books by Steven King and David Gemmel, Star Wars Episode II.
I don't know whether that's because people in the UK have wider reading habits, or whether it's because the list is less subject to political coruption, for example. The UK music charts sometimes have a classical work, such as Gorcki's 3rd symphony or (less recently) the pie Jesu from Lloyd Webber's Requiem, which was number 1 in the singles charts for several weeks.
Or maybe it's because there's only 20% of the population of the US, so there's less flattening to mediocrity, I don't know.
An alternative source for the book
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Agile Modeling
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You can buy this book at Wiley (the publisher's site), and it's likely that the author will get more royalties. (in theory my contract gives me a higher percentage for direct sales, although it's unlikely my XML books would ever sell enough to get me royalties)
These days I tend to use Mandrake Linux, which usually sets up X and the monitor and mouse automatically.
I first used X (not XFree86) in 1988 or so, on a 386 with a horribly expensive video card. But it worked.
I still have some binaries from 1990 or so (SPARC, SunOS 4) that still run and talk to the X server. For that matter I still have some NeWS programs (like display PostScript) that don't run because NeWS died.
So, it's cool that we're finally getting antialiasing, downloadable outline fonts, and maybe even user-defined server-side graphics paths. Welcome to 1990. Ten years old, but with a lot of catching up to do.
In other areas, like Keith Packard's new XML-based configuration format, XFree86 is setting trends for the rest of Unix/Linux to follow. And where it's behind, it's being worked on.
It'll be interesting to see if X has enough momentum (I think it does) that Berin will die too, a footnote because not mainstream enough. just like NeWS.
NeWS was trivial to install, no config file at all. Installation matters, but applications matter more.
McLuhan was a visionary, yes; even he didn't predict the extent to which media would be controlled. See Transnationale for information about who owns which media company.
There are several more or less independent Media firms and portals - this is a snapshot taken from several, last Summer.
I once went to a Linux Users' group meeting in Toronto, held in the building where Marshall McLuhan taught, which was an interesting experience.
It is clear that we have to act to keep any independent news at all. Compare the BBC with CNN, and then realise that, in effect, these are both government organizations. Luckily, in the US, the New York Times and its subsidiary, the Boston Globe have more balanced reporting than CNN; perhaps they have to, to stay alive.
When your news is controlled by the government, so are your opinions. Example: are the computers being resisted in Cuba because the country is trying to keep its culture and way of life in the face of increasing globalisation, or is it because computers are a luxury they can't afford (don't pretend they increase farmers' productivity when the farm workers have them) or is it to control the spread of ideas? To look at that in detail you'd have to ask whether photocopiers and printing presses are controlled.
The article is openly anti-communist: it wants everywhere to be like America, and measures Freedom in terms of American-ness, it seems. I want to measure Freedom differently.
Freedom is the ability to form your own opinions and to act on them. Freedom must be tempered with Responsibility towards other people: you are not free to limit other people's Freedom. Opinions must be based on Information and Understanding, and Society must work hard to make that possible. In a truly Free society everyone can go to college or university to study to the limit of their abilities. In a truly Free society, Rights are replaced by real choices.
How do we get there in the West, when we have been so tied to the idea that Freedom means Power over Other People?
Perhaps hactivism is part of it. But it has to be aimed at education, at flow of information, not simply at sharing bigoted ideals and corruption.
What Freedom we have, will only stay, will only grow, if we share it.
In the late 1990s companies started to monitor their employees' electronic mail, in case anyone was not working, or was not towing te corporate line.
Then they started to watch where people surfed. After all, employees were not executives, they could not be trusted.
In 2002 they started to monitor Instant Messages and to log them all.
In 2004 software to trnascribe telephone calls became common, and these too were logged.
By the end of 2010 and the unbiquity of the thought transponder, the slavery of the employee was complete, and all human spirit was destroyed in the never-ending quests for profit and longer golf sessions.
All employees dressed identically, lived in identical houses with identical husbands, and wore identical corporate socks.
Is this the future we want?
How do we tell the corporate world that life is about people, not profit? The joy of sharing, of living in a community, of being alive, that is what matters. Take off those corporate socks and be free!
(is your postal mail is being monitored too? did you have rights, once?)
It's easy to say, this seems reasonable. It's hard to take a stand for what seems right. Do it anyway.
People rarely get the full settlement they ask for in US lawsuits, so they have to set out by asking for at least twice what they thing they should get.
A fairer settlement might be to require that Microsoft remove the proprietary extensions, or make those a separate download or something.
MPEG is an ISO activity, not a W3C one. As far as I can tell, ISO (International Organization for Standardization, not an acronym, www.iso.ch) doesn't have a patent policy a sfar as I am aware.
Since I work at W3C, and since this is public information, I can tell you that no, the W3C has never wanted to publish specifications (recommendations) that are encumbered by patents or royalties. However, we don't have any authority over the MPEG committee.
(I am Liam Quin, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin; I am in the XML activity and not directly involved in the patent policy group, so send comments about that to the public list not to me.)
Ask carefully about the warranty, and see if you can get it extended.
You have to use this.
Trackpad or stick or external mouse? Screens much larger than 14" are a pain in a 'plane or train seat. Battery life needs to be comparable to max journey time.
Are you planning to run Linux? NetBSD?
Check the hardware compatibility list. Look for other people using the same model. Don't believe the manufacturer when they say, SoundBlaster Compatible (one popular type needs a Windows driver to download microcode for example)
Currently I'm using an Acer Travelmate 602TER. There were some problems with the CD drive, and I had to send it back under warranty. The warranty means they pick up the laptop, and return it two days later, at their expense, fixed. I have yet to see anything as good elsewhere, although it's always possible if you pay more, I expect.
In 1987 Sun Microsystems shipped a Networked Extensible Windowing System (NeWS) that was based on an object-oriented superset of PostScript.
Although that project is dead (sadly), part of it lived on in Java. One problem was that the Unix programming community did not embrace PostScript hcking. It's hard to debug, too. NeWS was also slow, although on a SPARCstation 20 (like a slow Pentium) it wasn't much slower than X for most things and faster for some others (e.g. it had better font support!).
There were some attempts to make publicly available versions of NeWS but I have not seen anything about these for several years. SinceI no longer keep the OpenWindows FAQ, maybe no-one told me, though:-)
The Berlin Consortium's project is the closest thing I'm aware of today, and at least some of the Berlin designers aer/were aware of NeWS.
The DPS/X extension is a shadow of NeWS, a toy by comparison. NeWX's Display PostScript is closer, better in some ways, although the NeWS language extensions seemed to me better done.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you can use urpmi --auto-select after adding a suitable source. Seee www.urpmi.org or aso plf.zarb.org for more info on setting up urpmi.
At the very least you'll want to add sources for security updates (Mandrake Update will do this automatically) and for contributed software.
For what it's worth I've seen similar nubers of people start with Mandrake Linux and stick with it, and really like it.
I think what makes the biggest difference is the people around to give support. If you use SuSE (say), and can't answer Mandrake-specific questions like how to use rpmdrake or urpmi, or don't know about Mandrake Control Centre, people asking you questions might not get the best answers.
If someone asks me about YaST under SuSE, I can't help them either. One friend switched away from SuSE for that reason: he wanted support that neither I nor his other frinds could give him.
If your friends say they are moving back to MS Windows, try to find out why, and whether they'd prefer a Linux distribution that you can help them with more, if you are willing and have time, or see if someone else can help mentor them for a while. Or show them #mandrake (or #debian or whatever) so they have somewhere to ask questions.
Yes, Mandrake 9.1 beta has Xft, fontconfig 2, and antialiased fonts in both gnome and KDE, as well as mozilla and a number of other programs.
I don't think Mandrake is lagging particularly here; cooker (Mandrake beta) has had antialiased fonts for quite some time, a few weeks after the 9.0 release. I agree it was unfortunate that it wasn't possible to include in 9.0, but I think Mandrake made the right decision in delaying their release for reliability issues but not for features.
It's probably better to discourage people from downloading random RPMs withuot knowing what they are doing -- but if the package was signed with a known public key, and the checksum matched the one in the urpmi database, then maybe it'd be OK.
Those people I mentioned who reinstall Linux a lot, often tried installing a source tarball and didn't know how to configure it for their system; if they'd used urpmi, all would have been well.
Note that there's still approx. 3 months before a scheduled release, so I'd expect the kernel and XFree86 versions to be later.
/etc/fstab or whatever... hence, a distributionthat appeals to new users, and also can be used by developers.
The package management tools have also been evolving fast -- if you follow the cooker list, you'll know that the gtk+ 2 version of rpmgrake is out, and it's much faster and improved. (and there's an update to urpmi, too).
At this point, urpmi is approaching the usefulness and robustness of apt-get, albeit with slightly fewer features -- e.g. no "suggested other packages". It's possible those willl come later, at least in principle: there's nothing inherent about RPM that prevents such features.
If 9.0 crashed for you, the right thing to do was to report the problems one by one, and help get them fixed for everyone -- not wait 3 months and then whine on slashdot that there were problems. Maybe the Mandrake developers didn't have your hardware. Maybe the XFree86 developers didn't have a machine with your video card, soundcard and disk controller, and couldn't reproduce the problem.
In general I think Mandrake is going in a good direction: making a Linux distribution that's easy to administer and use, but that is powerful enough for experienced users and admins (e.g. distributed package management, command-line configuration possible), has reliable automated package downloading and installation (including dependencies), and yet that uses the standard config files for everything, so that you can still administer it the "old fashioned way" be editing
Some of Mandrake's tools (e.g. draksync, a graphical front end to rsync that can use ssh) could do with being moved to sourceforge or somewhere and being more widely used.
Having a Linux distribution that most people can install in 20 minutes to an hour, with no difficult questions, makes a big difference. People moving from MS Windows are often used to reinstalling frequently: this way, wen they can't fix a problem, instead of going back to Windows, they go reinstall Linux, until they learn more about reconfiguring and fixing stuff. And if they never learn how to reconfigure, and always reinstall, it's still a win if it doesn't crash, is Free, open, and they can have a say in what packages are available.
There was a power outage at MIT (note: it's in Cambridge, MA, not Redmond) where lists.w3.org is hosted. This was because of sheduled building work, and the date was published several weeks in advance.
I encourage you to try again -- most or all of the W3C systems seem to be running OK now.
You're also welcome to email me directly (liam at w3.org) if you want to understand more about what W3C does, or how it is organised to minimise the chance that one company can control specifications - or you can read our web site.
[Lam Quin, XML Activity Lead, W3C]
It's not that the W3C Team want to see software patents or encumbered specifications. But we can't make them go away.
So the question becomes, how do we survive, and how does the Web survive, and move forward, in a world with software patents?
Part of that involves negotiation with the large companies who hold the largest patent portfolios: it would be almost useless trying to publish a patent policy document if the holders of most of the patents didn't agree to it. So there are some pretty complex constraints.
Simply writing to say, software patents are bad, isn't going to help much. But if you have solid constructive ideas on how to change things, or on how to come to consensus and agreement both with GPL implementations of specifications and with the need that large organizations have stated they have, to keep patents for "deefensive use", I think that would be very helpful.
Of course, just writing to say you like the current draft patent policy, or that you want to see some specific change, or that you don't like it and why, is also helpful, although it does add work for W3C staff, who are obliged to reply to every comment!
If you really want to make a difference, write to your political representative - congressperson, member of european parliament, MP, etc. - and say that software patents are bad for business, are bad for research, are bad for the future of the world, and will cause Orcs to attack Helm's Deep.
Well, maybe Helm's Deep isn't about patents, and not everyone agrees patents (or orcs!) are bad, But if you want software patents to go away you need to be heard. The DMCA had approx. 300 public comments; writing really does make a difference.
Disclaimer: I am XML Activity Lead at W3C.
Wow, what a lot of false information. Maybe this will help a little. Disclaimer: I am XML Activity Lead at W3C, so I have a bias.
The new Visio is using SVG.
The new Word lets you use any XML vocabulary you like. How obfuscated it is is *entirely* up to you.
It's not using base64 to put binary propietary data into XML documents. It's using plain XML.
It's well-formed, and Word appears not to make up thousands of elements. The person in charge of this project is actually clueful, and was in the W3C XML Working Group (1996-1998 by the way).
The tools all use XSLT extensively.
It wouldn't surprise me if you could get Word to read and write the OpenOffice format just fine. There's a restriction that you can't re-order content in Word right now, I think.
People claiming to have "insider info" and then posting blatant falsehoosd, or claiming you can put binary data directly in XML, aren't helping here. Even if you get high from hating Microsoft, the open source community and Free software world need to understand that the goalposts have moved a little.
The extent of corporate assets tied up in memos, reportsand other documents is very large, massively higher than the collective value of relational databases.
Yes, it looks as if Microsoft has suddenly discovered XML just as they suddenly discovered the Web. In fact, they were involved heavily in XML from the start, were among the first to ship commercial support for XML, and have been working on XML in Office 11 for a long time.
--
Liam Quin
Do we need a Free Font Foundation?
I've tried for some time to get some high quality fonts "donated" to Gnome or XFree86; although this work is still continuing, we're not getting very far. Here's why. Maybe you can help.
It's *difficult* (as others have said) to design a successful typeface. For a poorly hinted font, an hour or two on each character design will get you basic latin one in about five weeks, and then you spend another two weeks with hinting. If that sounds a lot of time, remember that you need to adjust sidebearings (nn sit further apart than oo, or you'll get spots of light and dark on a page/screen, for example) and kerning (Wa closer together than Wh, "r," closer than "n,", "fk" further apart to aviod a glob at the top.
It turns out that an R isn't simply a P with a tail, an E sn't an F with an extra leg, in most designs, particularly the more calligraphic such as Palatino.
So, it's a lot of work to make a font, and for Linux and the Free Software movement, we want fonts that support as many languages as possible, and as many scripts as possible, so that as many people as possible can use the software.
That means even mnore work, and a lot of time from people who are primarily creative artists and designers, with a strong techincal background.
There are three main font formats in widespread professional use today: TrueType, Type 1 and OpenType.
It turns out that TrueType fonts are more expensive to produce in high quality than Type 1 outlines, because with Type 1 outlines, most of the hinting is in the renderer, so the code is only written once; with TrueType, individual fonts have bytecode instructions to do hinting, and it's different for each font.
OpenType lets you embed both Type 1 and TT outlines in the same font file, along with metadata for supporting lots of languages. So if yuo use Type 1 outlines, you avoid the Apple patent on TrueType.
One way forward would be to gather enough money to pay some font designers to make some new fonts. Another way would be to make a one-time payment to buy rights to existing fonts. Probably best would be a mixture: start with existing fonts and extend their Unicode coverage.
What would a Free Font be? Probably we need something slightly different from the GPL. In particular, it might not be OK to redistribute a modified Free Font without making clear that you have changed it, because otherwise you could reduce its quality or destroy the artistic integrity of the design, and give the artist who designed it a bad reputation.
Font *outlines* (i.e. the design of a typeface) are protected by copyright outside the USA, because they are recognised as artistic works. In the US, they are not protected, for historical reasons. In both cases, the font *names* are often registered trademarks, so you see Palladium because Palatino is a trademark, I think of Linotype; Dutch instead of Times (Monotype), Swiss instead of Helvetica, and so on.
This means it's not OK to start with existing designs, unless they are old enough - e.g. using the original designs of William Caslon from the 1720s is OK, using Adobe Caslon is not OK, at least not without permission.
So, we need type designers to give permission, or to make new designs.
We need more work on the FreeType Type 1 support, so that we don't have to worry about the software patent on TrueType rendering.
We need an independent legal entity so that designers have someone to negotiate with, and so that money can be paid to them. Maybe the Gnome Foudnation or XFree86.org would do, as long as the fonts can be used with any software, not just Gnome or the X Window System.
I do not have enough time to do a lot of work here, but I *am* willing to help introduce people to font designers and other resources, and to help explain the technological issues.
Hacking on a font renderer takes serious skill, as does designing fonts. But maybe programmers can contribute to FreeType, and to pfaedit (how about a Gnome port, too?) and to ghostscript. Programs like Mandrake's FontDrake can be worked on (it's GPL'd I think).
Who wants to help build a font portal, somewhere people can download Free Fonts from, and with links to font designers who can help customise fonts, and to non-free fonts you can buy?
Who wants to donate a server and some bandwidth?
Set up a mailing list?
Remember, we need fonts that are Free, not just ones that don't cost anything, and we need high quality, and support for lots of languages.
If you read this far, my thanks, and let's make something happen. Post here, or feel free to send email [liam at holoweb dot net, will work]
Liam
Reading your other comments, I think all I can say usefully is that it's not a goal of the w3C team members (the staff) to publish specs that cannot be implemnted openly and freely. You (and others) may be reading more into the wording than was intended. But, it's hard to read and interpret email without the full context, and neither of us were at the meeting.
I'm not sure I have explained this very clearly - Digital Mage, feel free to email me if that will help (liam at w3 dot org). I have not seen an "official" W3C response, and neither can I give you one, but I can maybe help you understand the issues, and also show you how you can send effective feedback to W3C working groups.
Liam
[sorry, my personal web site is down right now, www.w3.org/People/Quin works though]
No, this is not about W3C staff wanting RAND specifications.
It's about what to do if we're working on a specification that the community (including the open source community) needs/wants, and we discover that some aspect of it is covered by software patents.
In that case, you might not be able to have an open source implementation, and W3C has to ask, (1) should the work be dropped altogether, or (2) is there a central core that can be implemented freely, avoiding the patent? If so, should the non-free part still be standardised, and under what terms?
By making an extension to a specification, an implementation can conform without that (possibly non-free) extension, but at the same time w3C can require W3C member organizations to agree to "non-discriminatory" terms, i.e. forcing them to agree to licence the patent to their competitors.
That may be better than having no specification at all, I don't know.
Note: I work at W3C, and am not involved in the specific work mentioned, nor in the patent policy group.
For what it's worth, science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction regularly appears on the bestseller lists in the UK.
m l
E.g. at the Times this week [1] I see books by Steven King and David Gemmel, Star Wars Episode II.
I don't know whether that's because people in the UK have wider reading habits, or whether it's because the list is less subject to political coruption, for example. The UK music charts sometimes have a classical work, such as Gorcki's 3rd symphony or (less recently) the pie Jesu from Lloyd Webber's Requiem, which was number 1 in the singles charts for several weeks.
Or maybe it's because there's only 20% of the population of the US, so there's less flattening to mediocrity, I don't know.
[1] www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,264-289569,00.ht
You can buy this book at Wiley (the publisher's site), and it's likely that the author will get more royalties. (in theory my contract gives me a higher percentage for direct sales, although it's unlikely my XML books would ever sell enough to get me royalties)
Liam Quin
These days I tend to use Mandrake Linux, which usually sets up X and the monitor and mouse automatically.
I first used X (not XFree86) in 1988 or so, on a 386 with a horribly expensive video card. But it worked.
I still have some binaries from 1990 or so (SPARC, SunOS 4) that still run and talk to the X server. For that matter I still have some NeWS programs (like display PostScript) that don't run because NeWS died.
So, it's cool that we're finally getting antialiasing, downloadable outline fonts, and maybe even user-defined server-side graphics paths. Welcome to 1990. Ten years old, but with a lot of catching up to do.
In other areas, like Keith Packard's new XML-based configuration format, XFree86 is setting trends for the rest of Unix/Linux to follow. And where it's behind, it's being worked on.
It'll be interesting to see if X has enough momentum (I think it does) that Berin will die too, a footnote because not mainstream enough. just like NeWS.
NeWS was trivial to install, no config file at all. Installation matters, but applications matter more.
McLuhan was a visionary, yes; even he didn't predict the extent to which media would be controlled. See Transnationale for information about who owns which media company.
There are several more or less independent Media firms and portals - this is a snapshot taken from several, last Summer.
I once went to a Linux Users' group meeting in Toronto, held in the building where Marshall McLuhan taught, which was an interesting experience.
It is clear that we have to act to keep any independent news at all. Compare the BBC with CNN, and then realise that, in effect, these are both government organizations. Luckily, in the US, the New York Times and its subsidiary, the Boston Globe have more balanced reporting than CNN; perhaps they have to, to stay alive.
When your news is controlled by the government, so are your opinions. Example: are the computers being resisted in Cuba because the country is trying to keep its culture and way of life in the face of increasing globalisation, or is it because computers are a luxury they can't afford (don't pretend they increase farmers' productivity when the farm workers have them) or is it to control the spread of ideas? To look at that in detail you'd have to ask whether photocopiers and printing presses are controlled.
The article is openly anti-communist: it wants everywhere to be like America, and measures Freedom in terms of American-ness, it seems. I want to measure Freedom differently.
Freedom is the ability to form your own opinions and to act on them. Freedom must be tempered with Responsibility towards other people: you are not free to limit other people's Freedom. Opinions must be based on Information and Understanding, and Society must work hard to make that possible. In a truly Free society everyone can go to college or university to study to the limit of their abilities. In a truly Free society, Rights are replaced by real choices.
How do we get there in the West, when we have been so tied to the idea that Freedom means Power over Other People?
Perhaps hactivism is part of it. But it has to be aimed at education, at flow of information, not simply at sharing bigoted ideals and corruption.
What Freedom we have, will only stay, will only grow, if we share it.
In the late 1990s companies started to monitor their employees' electronic mail, in case anyone was not working, or was not towing te corporate line.
Then they started to watch where people surfed. After all, employees were not executives, they could not be trusted.
In 2002 they started to monitor Instant Messages and to log them all.
In 2004 software to trnascribe telephone calls became common, and these too were logged.
By the end of 2010 and the unbiquity of the thought transponder, the slavery of the employee was complete, and all human spirit was destroyed in the never-ending quests for profit and longer golf sessions.
All employees dressed identically, lived in identical houses with identical husbands, and wore identical corporate socks.
Is this the future we want?
How do we tell the corporate world that life is about people, not profit? The joy of sharing, of living in a community, of being alive, that is what matters. Take off those corporate socks and be free!
(is your postal mail is being monitored too? did you have rights, once?)
It's easy to say, this seems reasonable. It's hard to take a stand for what seems right. Do it anyway.
--
People rarely get the full settlement they ask for in US lawsuits, so they have to set out by asking for at least twice what they thing they should get.
A fairer settlement might be to require that Microsoft remove the proprietary extensions, or make those a separate download or something.
But that's for others to decide.
--
MPEG is an ISO activity, not a W3C one. As far as I can tell, ISO (International Organization for Standardization, not an acronym, www.iso.ch) doesn't have a patent policy a sfar as I am aware.
Since I work at W3C, and since this is public information, I can tell you that no, the W3C has never wanted to publish specifications (recommendations) that are encumbered by patents or royalties. However, we don't have any authority over the MPEG committee.
(I am Liam Quin, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin; I am in the XML activity and not directly involved in the patent policy group, so send comments about that to the public list not to me.)
Your laptop will go wrong.
Ask carefully about the warranty, and see if you can get it extended.
You have to use this.
Trackpad or stick or external mouse? Screens much larger than 14" are a pain in a 'plane or train seat. Battery life needs to be comparable to max journey time.
Are you planning to run Linux? NetBSD?
Check the hardware compatibility list. Look for other people using the same model. Don't believe the manufacturer when they say, SoundBlaster Compatible (one popular type needs a Windows driver to download microcode for example)
Currently I'm using an Acer Travelmate 602TER. There were some problems with the CD drive, and I had to send it back under warranty. The warranty means they pick up the laptop, and return it two days later, at their expense, fixed. I have yet to see anything as good elsewhere, although it's always possible if you pay more, I expect.
In 1987 Sun Microsystems shipped a Networked Extensible Windowing System (NeWS) that was based on an object-oriented superset of PostScript.
Although that project is dead (sadly), part of it lived on in Java. One problem was that the Unix programming community did not embrace PostScript hcking. It's hard to debug, too. NeWS was also slow, although on a SPARCstation 20 (like a slow Pentium) it wasn't much slower than X for most things and faster for some others (e.g. it had better font support!).
There were some attempts to make publicly available versions of NeWS but I have not seen anything about these for several years. SinceI no longer keep the OpenWindows FAQ, maybe no-one told me, though :-)
The Berlin Consortium's project is the closest thing I'm aware of today, and at least some of the Berlin designers aer/were aware of NeWS.
The DPS/X extension is a shadow of NeWS, a toy by comparison. NeWX's Display PostScript is closer, better in some ways, although the NeWS language extensions seemed to me better done.
I made this random art in 1989, so it's nearly ten :-) It uses PostScript.
years old
The texts are intended as a spoof on pretentious art criticism.
http://www.groveware.com/~lee/aris.html