Nevertheless, rather than just whining about the big, bad, evil DMV (who are mainly enforcing laws passed by others), it would be more productive to work to get the bad/outdated laws changed. Yes, that may mean fighting an uphill battle against a powerful lobby (existing cab companies), but it there is already a lot of public support for this.
That's not completely true, at least as the system works. If there is something sufficiently innovative that it is "not immediately obvious to someone trained in the field", then it essentially qualifies as an invention. Inventions can be small and limited in scope as well as large. The real problem is in determining what is innovative enough that it would not almost immediately occur to most people trained in the field as an obvious solution to the problem. It is a subjective test, and IMHO, too many patents are given for things that really shouldn't pass that test. Patents can always be contested, but, it is a long and expensive process, so bad patents have a way of sticking around.
Non-destructive editing. a 10x increase in speed of the basic engine (which will be needed for non-destructive editing) A macro recorder to easily record repetitive operations. photo-shop like history operations
A single window mode is not the most important thing GIMP needs to compete with Photoshop
Typing has definitely reduced my ability to hand write quickly and legibly, but not my ability to spell. I think spelling has been affected more by the fact that I write much less now than a long time ago.
I agree. This obviously isn't the ultimate alternative fuel vehicle, but this process has to start somewhere. Yes, it's expensive, yes it's hard to justify on pure economics at the current gas price of $3/gallon here in the US. But $3 gasoline isn't going to last forever. Last summer, before the economy crashed, we had $4.50 gas, and once the economy cycles back and demand for oil goes back up in the face of flat or declining world oil production, prices will likely climb even higher than that and the economic balance point will change. This car may be coming out a little before its time, but someone has to take the first step in this direction; it just happens to be GM, who everyone loves to hate right now.
Of course GM could totally botch things up like they did with the EV1, only time will tell if they learned anything from that and their current bankruptcy.
When I taught my son programming when he was around 11 or so, the project I picked was to have him write a stack calculator, including a simple GUI (like a simple version of the GNOME or KDE calculators). It taught most of the basic elements of a program, including a simple GUI, but unlike a really simple game who's novelty would wear off quickly, it was something he was able to use, improve, and be proud of for some time after finishing it.
As to what language to use, that's a hot topic and you'll hear lots of opinions. At the time, which was a long time ago, we used Tcl/Tk because it was simple, had a very easy-to-use fully integrated GUI toolkit (Tk), and was high level in that it avoided having to worry about complex issues like memory management and pointers, which could overwhelm some 11 year olds. OTOH, it taught programming concepts beyond what you could do with something really basic like LOGO. I'm not necessarily suggesting it now, however -- it might not be the right thing today, when there are other potentially better choices like Python, Java, etc.
Although many patents (both software and hardware) are bogus, the basic concept of the patent system has some validity and there are conditions where patents serve the public interest by encouraging innovation and at the same time making knowledge available to the public which would otherwise be kept as tight trade secrets by companies. In the case of universities, they have been loosing other sources of public funding and so earning some money from patent licensing may not inherently be a bad thing, but there should be requirements for patents obtained based on publicly funded research that although licensing fees could be charged for use by private companies, other universities and other publicly funded research institutions should be allowed to use the technology royalty free.
It shouldn't be hard, as long as you have any kernel/motherboard combination where suspend or hibernate work reliably. Just create a shutdown level that actually does a reboot, then modify the startup scripts to immediately do a suspend or hibernate as soon as the machine is booted if that shutdown level was used. The effective shutdown time will be longer (because it's actually a reboot), but the effective "boot" time will be very quick.
While probably do-able, this actually seems like overkill. Why not just use normal suspend/resume?
I have many gigs of digital photos and I have also more-or-less moved away from optical media for backup and switched to HDD. As the original poster mentioned, most of the "information" you find on the net about archival longevity of optical media is personal anecdotes or pet theories, and good hard data on archival longevity of CD-R or DVD+-R is hard to find. My own personal experience is that name brand discs do have fewer problems than cheap "house brands", but it's hard to quantify or say much beyond that.
Backing up to hard drives has a number of advantages:
1. It's a heck of a lot easier - in most cases of personal data backup, a few 1TB HDDs will hold all the data you need to back up, so there's no need to manage boxes of 100's of discs. I usually back up the same data onto two HDDs, and store one of them in a firesafe. If you're really worried, you can store one of them offsite.
2. Since no media will last forever, you will *always* need to roll your data over to new media every so many years. With HDDs, its *much* easier to roll your data over to new media every 5 or 6 years. Think of transferring two or three HDD's to a new HDD (by the time you roll over the data, the new HDD will probably hold all the data from those two or three older HDDs), compared to re-organizing and re-burning hundreds (or more) of CDs or DVDs.
The bottom line is that if a few HDDs don't hold enough data for your needs, then backing up to optical media will be totally out of the question anyway, and you will probably need to use tape.
"a 5GB movie, that's going to take you SEVERAL hours to complete"
At the speeds I get where I live, a 5GB download would take over 10 hours, and during that time, my connection would be very slow for anything else. With a service like Netflix, I can keep disks coming almost as fast as I could download them without even having to leave the house or honk down my connection. Granted, they are still rentals and you can't (legally) keep them, but you will still get the quality advantage.
Yes, in urban areas where 6Mb/s connections are common, downloads may be practical, but there are still large service areas that can't yet get those speeds.
CD's were outmoded 10+ years ago but are still the dominant format for music distribution. Likewise, standard DVD's will be around for a long time to follow. The large installed base of players and other equipment will ensure that any format that gets widespread adoption will remain in use (and presumably profitable) long after it is technically outmoded.
I have a 45 year old GE portable AM radio, and a 40+ year old Marantz stereo receiver that still works fine. Gameboys are very robust and can possibly take more physical abuse (my son's still works fine), but they have many years to go to catch up with some of these other things.
Yes, Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google, and it would be naive to assume that they don't have influence. But, some influence from Google may not necessarily be a bad thing, plus, where would mozilla/firefox be in terms of their competitive position if they were $56M/year poorer? Which is the lesser of evils?
GIMP vs. Photoshop Thread
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Come on folks, how hypocritical can we get. Although free software may win out in the long term, it's going to be a mixed world for quite a while. How many of us Linux users would want a system where you could never:
1. Watch a DVD 2. listen to an MP3 file 3. View any website with Flash content. 4. Use 3D acceleration on your ATI or NVIDIA card 5. Use your wireless card (Unless it happens to be an Intel). 6. Never view any websites with video content 7. Never use any website with Java content (OK, there aren't as many of these, but...) 8. Etc, etc.
I'm sure there are some of us who either don't need these things or force themselves to live without them on philosophical grounds, but I also suspect the majority of us don't. Fedora is pretty purist distro - how many Fedora users don't eventually go over to Livna or FreshRPMS and download codecs and video drivers?
Again, there are surely those who could live with a purist distro like Fedora out of the box, but I bet they are the minority. For everyone else who's ever downloaded an Nvidie driver or codec to criticize a distro who tries to include that stuff legally is pretty hypocritical.
Actually, I do the voicing and regulation myself, so this wouldn't apply. The only thing I don't trust myself with is tuning.
Now, I admit that wouldn't be the case for most people, but the few times I have had voicing or regulation done by a technician, it was always a separate additional charge above and beyond the tuning. Plus, regulation especially, doesn't usually need to be done more than once a year or even less unless the piano is extremely heavily used.
You would still save quite a bit by eliminating the tunings.
While just fluff for a guitar, the idea actually could make sense for a piano. Where I live, tunings from a reputable tuner are around $120 a pop, so two tunings per year sets me back $240. If a piano auto-tuner cost $1000, it would still have a reasonable return on investment, and I could have the piano *always* in tune.
Piano tuning is complex, though. Because of significant inharmonicities, string fundamentals are not usually tuned to perfect intervals - the tuner stretches the base and treble registers to account for this. The best-sounding tunings I've ever had are from old-school tuners who do it entirely by ear. What might work, however, would be a system where you would have the piano tuned by ear by an expert, then the system could learn this tuning and replicate it automatically.
For resizing images, GIMP defaults to using Linear interpolation, but you can change this to use cubic splines, which often gives better results. GIMP does not inherently support more complex interpolations such as Lanczos, but these generally only make a significant difference when upsampling (scaling up).
In any case, interpolating will blur the image slightly, even when scaling down, so most of the time applying a small to moderate amount of sharpening or unsharp-mask makes the images look much better.
You might be intrested in GIMPShop. I've never used it, but it is a modified version of GIMP designed to have an interface that is closer to that of Photoshop. There is some Photoshop fuctionality that is missing in GIMP, and this does change that, but it might help long-term Photoshop users become comfortable with GIMP faster, especially if you're in a situation where you need to use both. Again, I've never used it, so I can't speak as to how much it helps.
Actually GIMP's support for raw files has improved dramatically in the last few years. Install the UFRaw plugin, which most Linux distros package up and which supports the D70 as well as many others.
Firstly, I need to admit that I haven't read every word of leagalese in the GPL 3. I'm going primarily from analyses and summaries of others. I think the main problem is using a software license to determine more than just how the code is used and redistributed. To me, the issue isn't threatening patent lawsuits - if a software author has violated a patent (no matter how much I feel software patents shouldn't exist), then (s)he is open to a potential patent lawsuit no matter what the license. The issue is that the GPL3 tries to tell me what kind of arrangements I can make with my customers *outside* of just how the code is treated. It's a bit like saying "you can't redistribute this code if you redistribute it along with porn, because *I* think porn is wrong".
In summary, as I mentioned previously, I agree with some of the goals and intentions, but I don't believe it is right for a software license to attempt to dictate behaviour other than how the code itself is treated.
The change from GPL1 to GPL2 was more of a no-brainer. Even Linus adopted GPL2, and he's pretty much on the "business-friendly" side of the spectrum.
The thing that's new about GPL3, is that it tries to not only keep the code itself open and free, which I believe is a valid goal of a software license, but it tries to control *other* behaviors of an organization that are more marginally related to the code itself, such as patent cross-licensing agreements, etc. If a piece of software does not violate any known patents, then the license for that software should not restrict or control how a user conducts their patent cross-licensing or other aspects of their business.
Even though I may agree with some the philosophical aims of GPL3, I have a problem with a software code license that tries to reach out and control general business behavior of individuals or organizations. The GPL3 is basically an attempt to try to force organizations not to just keep the specific code open and free, but to align philosophically with more general business practices.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, rather than just whining about the big, bad, evil DMV (who are mainly enforcing laws passed by others), it would be more productive to work to get the bad/outdated laws changed. Yes, that may mean fighting an uphill battle against a powerful lobby (existing cab companies), but it there is already a lot of public support for this.
That's not completely true, at least as the system works. If there is something sufficiently innovative that it is "not immediately obvious to someone trained in the field", then it essentially qualifies as an invention. Inventions can be small and limited in scope as well as large. The real problem is in determining what is innovative enough that it would not almost immediately occur to most people trained in the field as an obvious solution to the problem. It is a subjective test, and IMHO, too many patents are given for things that really shouldn't pass that test. Patents can always be contested, but, it is a long and expensive process, so bad patents have a way of sticking around.
True, and lets not forget to add:
Non-destructive editing.
a 10x increase in speed of the basic engine (which will be needed for non-destructive editing)
A macro recorder to easily record repetitive operations.
photo-shop like history operations
A single window mode is not the most important thing GIMP needs to compete with Photoshop
Typing has definitely reduced my ability to hand write quickly and legibly, but not my ability to spell. I think spelling has been affected more by the fact that I write much less now than a long time ago.
I agree. This obviously isn't the ultimate alternative fuel vehicle, but this process has to start somewhere. Yes, it's expensive, yes it's hard to justify on pure economics at the current gas price of $3/gallon here in the US. But $3 gasoline isn't going to last forever. Last summer, before the economy crashed, we had $4.50 gas, and once the economy cycles back and demand for oil goes back up in the face of flat or declining world oil production, prices will likely climb even higher than that and the economic balance point will change. This car may be coming out a little before its time, but someone has to take the first step in this direction; it just happens to be GM, who everyone loves to hate right now.
Of course GM could totally botch things up like they did with the EV1, only time will tell if they learned anything from that and their current bankruptcy.
When I taught my son programming when he was around 11 or so, the project I picked was to have him write a stack calculator, including a simple GUI (like a simple version of the GNOME or KDE calculators). It taught most of the basic elements of a program, including a simple GUI, but unlike a really simple game who's novelty would wear off quickly, it was something he was able to use, improve, and be proud of for some time after finishing it.
As to what language to use, that's a hot topic and you'll hear lots of opinions. At the time, which was a long time ago, we used Tcl/Tk because it was simple, had a very easy-to-use fully integrated GUI toolkit (Tk), and was high level in that it avoided having to worry about complex issues like memory management and pointers, which could overwhelm some 11 year olds. OTOH, it taught programming concepts beyond what you could do with something really basic like LOGO. I'm not necessarily suggesting it now, however -- it might not be the right thing today, when there are other potentially better choices like Python, Java, etc.
Although many patents (both software and hardware) are bogus, the basic concept of the patent system has some validity and there are conditions where patents serve the public interest by encouraging innovation and at the same time making knowledge available to the public which would otherwise be kept as tight trade secrets by companies. In the case of universities, they have been loosing other sources of public funding and so earning some money from patent licensing may not inherently be a bad thing, but there should be requirements for patents obtained based on publicly funded research that although licensing fees could be charged for use by private companies, other universities and other publicly funded research institutions should be allowed to use the technology royalty free.
It shouldn't be hard, as long as you have any kernel/motherboard combination where suspend or hibernate work reliably. Just create a shutdown level that actually does a reboot, then modify the startup scripts to immediately do a suspend or hibernate as soon as the machine is booted if that shutdown level was used. The effective shutdown time will be longer (because it's actually a reboot), but the effective "boot" time will be very quick.
While probably do-able, this actually seems like overkill. Why not just use normal suspend/resume?
I have many gigs of digital photos and I have also more-or-less moved away from optical media for backup and switched to HDD. As the original poster mentioned, most of the "information" you find on the net about archival longevity of optical media is personal anecdotes or pet theories, and good hard data on archival longevity of CD-R or DVD+-R is hard to find. My own personal experience is that name brand discs do have fewer problems than cheap "house brands", but it's hard to quantify or say much beyond that.
Backing up to hard drives has a number of advantages:
1. It's a heck of a lot easier - in most cases of personal data backup, a few 1TB HDDs will hold all the data you need to back up, so there's no need to manage boxes of 100's of discs. I usually back up the same data onto two HDDs, and store one of them in a firesafe. If you're really worried, you can store one of them offsite.
2. Since no media will last forever, you will *always* need to roll your data over to new media every so many years. With HDDs, its *much* easier to roll your data over to new media every 5 or 6 years. Think of transferring two or three HDD's to a new HDD (by the time you roll over the data, the new HDD will probably hold all the data from those two or three older HDDs), compared to re-organizing and re-burning hundreds (or more) of CDs or DVDs.
The bottom line is that if a few HDDs don't hold enough data for your needs, then backing up to optical media will be totally out of the question anyway, and you will probably need to use tape.
"a 5GB movie, that's going to take you SEVERAL hours to complete"
At the speeds I get where I live, a 5GB download would take over 10 hours, and during that time, my connection would be very slow for anything else. With a service like Netflix, I can keep disks coming almost as fast as I could download them without even having to leave the house or honk down my connection. Granted, they are still rentals and you can't (legally) keep them, but you will still get the quality advantage.
Yes, in urban areas where 6Mb/s connections are common, downloads may be practical, but there are still large service areas that can't yet get those speeds.
CD's were outmoded 10+ years ago but are still the dominant format for music distribution. Likewise, standard DVD's will be around for a long time to follow. The large installed base of players and other equipment will ensure that any format that gets widespread adoption will remain in use (and presumably profitable) long after it is technically outmoded.
I have a 45 year old GE portable AM radio, and a 40+ year old Marantz stereo receiver that still works fine. Gameboys are very robust and can possibly take more physical abuse (my son's still works fine), but they have many years to go to catch up with some of these other things.
The project involves replacing Linux with Windows, and then reverting back if necessary. There is more info here (near the bottom).
Yes, Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google, and it would be naive to assume that they don't have influence. But, some influence from Google may not necessarily be a bad thing, plus, where would mozilla/firefox be in terms of their competitive position if they were $56M/year poorer? Which is the lesser of evils?
Someone had to start one. Post here...
Come on folks, how hypocritical can we get. Although free software may win out in the long term, it's going to be a mixed world for quite a while. How many of us Linux users would want a system where you could never:
1. Watch a DVD
2. listen to an MP3 file
3. View any website with Flash content.
4. Use 3D acceleration on your ATI or NVIDIA card
5. Use your wireless card (Unless it happens to be an Intel).
6. Never view any websites with video content
7. Never use any website with Java content (OK, there aren't as many of these, but...)
8. Etc, etc.
I'm sure there are some of us who either don't need these things or force themselves to live without them on philosophical grounds, but I also suspect the majority of us don't. Fedora is pretty purist distro - how many Fedora users don't eventually go over to Livna or FreshRPMS and download codecs and video drivers?
Again, there are surely those who could live with a purist distro like Fedora out of the box, but I bet they are the minority. For everyone else who's ever downloaded an Nvidie driver or codec to criticize a distro who tries to include that stuff legally is pretty hypocritical.
Does this violate any Amazon patents?
Actually, I do the voicing and regulation myself, so this wouldn't apply. The only thing I don't trust myself with is tuning.
Now, I admit that wouldn't be the case for most people, but the few times I have had voicing or regulation done by a technician, it was always a separate additional charge above and beyond the tuning. Plus, regulation especially, doesn't usually need to be done more than once a year or even less unless the piano is extremely heavily used.
You would still save quite a bit by eliminating the tunings.
While just fluff for a guitar, the idea actually could make sense for a piano. Where I live, tunings from a reputable tuner are around $120 a pop, so two tunings per year sets me back $240. If a piano auto-tuner cost $1000, it would still have a reasonable return on investment, and I could have the piano *always* in tune.
Piano tuning is complex, though. Because of significant inharmonicities, string fundamentals are not usually tuned to perfect intervals - the tuner stretches the base and treble registers to account for this. The best-sounding tunings I've ever had are from old-school tuners who do it entirely by ear. What might work, however, would be a system where you would have the piano tuned by ear by an expert, then the system could learn this tuning and replicate it automatically.
For resizing images, GIMP defaults to using Linear interpolation, but you can change this to use cubic splines, which often gives better results. GIMP does not inherently support more complex interpolations such as Lanczos, but these generally only make a significant difference when upsampling (scaling up).
In any case, interpolating will blur the image slightly, even when scaling down, so most of the time applying a small to moderate amount of sharpening or unsharp-mask makes the images look much better.
You might be intrested in GIMPShop. I've never used it, but it is a modified version of GIMP designed to have an interface that is closer to that of Photoshop. There is some Photoshop fuctionality that is missing in GIMP, and this does change that, but it might help long-term Photoshop users become comfortable with GIMP faster, especially if you're in a situation where you need to use both. Again, I've never used it, so I can't speak as to how much it helps.
Actually GIMP's support for raw files has improved dramatically in the last few years. Install the UFRaw plugin, which most Linux distros package up and which supports the D70 as well as many others.
If this is really a cross-site scripting vulnerability, NoScript might help protect against it (if you're using FireFox).
Firstly, I need to admit that I haven't read every word of leagalese in the GPL 3. I'm going primarily from analyses and summaries of others. I think the main problem is using a software license to determine more than just how the code is used and redistributed. To me, the issue isn't threatening patent lawsuits - if a software author has violated a patent (no matter how much I feel software patents shouldn't exist), then (s)he is open to a potential patent lawsuit no matter what the license. The issue is that the GPL3 tries to tell me what kind of arrangements I can make with my customers *outside* of just how the code is treated. It's a bit like saying "you can't redistribute this code if you redistribute it along with porn, because *I* think porn is wrong".
In summary, as I mentioned previously, I agree with some of the goals and intentions, but I don't believe it is right for a software license to attempt to dictate behaviour other than how the code itself is treated.
The change from GPL1 to GPL2 was more of a no-brainer. Even Linus adopted GPL2, and he's pretty much on the "business-friendly" side of the spectrum.
The thing that's new about GPL3, is that it tries to not only keep the code itself open and free, which I believe is a valid goal of a software license, but it tries to control *other* behaviors of an organization that are more marginally related to the code itself, such as patent cross-licensing agreements, etc. If a piece of software does not violate any known patents, then the license for that software should not restrict or control how a user conducts their patent cross-licensing or other aspects of their business.
Even though I may agree with some the philosophical aims of GPL3, I have a problem with a software code license that tries to reach out and control general business behavior of individuals or organizations. The GPL3 is basically an attempt to try to force organizations not to just keep the specific code open and free, but to align philosophically with more general business practices.