No, it really wasn't a troll, although maybe I was a little harsh. I was just annoyed by the absolute arrogance of MP3 to not even ask how anyone else felt about them doing it.
What is that supposed to mean? I don't have to ask GM's permission to use my sedan off-road. I don't have to ask Microsoft's permission to compile Open Source software with Visual C++.
If you're stupid enough to think that "Intellectual Property" is actual, real property, then at least be consistent about it. I bought it? Then it's mine and I don't need permission to use it legally.
The smarter course would be to recognize that there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property". But I'm not holding my breath for that acknowledgement, not while non-thinkers run around praising the status quo as loudly as possible.
I'm glad someone noticed this. The Free Software movement is founded on the principle that code should not have owners, or in other words, that it is not a kind of property.
Not really. Any time the author asserts a license for his code he's asserting -- to some degree -- that he has property rights over the code.
Corporate software licenses are restrictive in that they grant a bare minimum of privileges to the purchaser while retaining all ownership rights for the publisher. Most Open Source licenses are less restrictive, but they assert property rights nonetheless.
The classic example, the GPL, doesn't assert any property rights for the individual author, but instead asserts them for the nebulous Public. In other words, software doesn't belong to any one person, it belongs to everyone. It's not myproperty, it's everyone's property. But it's still treated as property.
The only Open Source attitude that truly denies intellectual property is the unencumbered license exemplified by ZLIB and PNG. The authors make disclaimers for the sake of their own liability, and that's it.
Why would a "truly intelligent machine" understand exploitation (in whatever sense) to be an unfair thing? Why wouldn't "truly intelligent machines[s]" understand their work as a happy, fulfilling endeavor?
The problem with most theories on "intelligent machines" is that they suffer from extreme anthropomorphism.
I encourage you to speak for yourself. Nobody here said that Open Source was somehow about cheating people. What I said was that Open Source embodies the desire to independently create and modify technologies so that they more closely resemble the individual's needs and expectations. Opening the source code of software is one of the easiest and most direct ways of achieving that freedom, and we encourage individuals and organizations to participate so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of said freedom.
Instead of interjecting your own prejudicial slant with phrases like "cracking cases" and "reverse engineering proprietary products" -- both of which refer to activities I did not, and never will, promote -- why not read what I actually wrote? Responding honestly to others is the first step toward thinking for yourself.
I don't care what thieves call themselves nowadays, but you're misrepresenting yourselves to the company and abusing an oversight in the companies marketing plans.
No, I'm not. I don't own an I-Opener, and I haven't "misrepresented" myself to anyone. My objection is to your sweeping aspersions against anyone interested in controlling his or her own future on his or her own terms.
You seem to have a fundamental hang-up about do-it-yourselfers, and you're passing it off as an argument against "thieves" -- a description which certainly does not apply to me, let alone the thousands of individuals you've so carelessly maligned with your comments.
I was trying to find a diplomatic way of saying "shove it up your ass and die, you prissy motherfucker, don't call me names I don't deserve", but something was lost in the translation. Now that I've (hopefully) gotten the true meaning across in its native language, I hope the issue's been settled.
Allow me to be the first to welcome you to what we call "Open Source". Here's how it works: when something doesn't work the way we want it to work, we change it ourselves.
Sometimes people call this "freeloading" or "whiny" because our expectations don't always fall in line with the way mass-media broadcasting and advertising inform us. Generally, those people have made a fatal assumption: capitalism == mass-media and Big Business.
There's a growing group of smart, talented people who no longer believe that free market capitalism has to mean giving up our privileges to large corporations. We call ourselves "Open Source contributors" and we're known by what we create, not by what we "steal".
It's an offensive concept to those who have a vested interest in the status quo. It will probably take some generational die-off before the "senators' sons" individuals no longer exert such a powerful influence over the gullible public. But eventually, I think, people will learn to enjoy thinking and doing for themselves rather than hiring a scapegoat with a shiny suit and silver tongue.
The point is that one demographic represents the next 20 years or so, and the other demographic represents the rest of humanity's future. You decide which is a better benchmark by which to judge computing technology's progress, eh?
Automobile geek is someone who spends their entire life taking their cars apart, rebuilding them and swapping parts from one car to another, etc. Just driving them doesn't qualify as a automobile geek.
That's a new standard you just made up. What would have been an "automobile geek" 60 years ago might know how to change the oil, that's it.
Unless you're proposing a sliding scale, and think that a "geek" is simply anyone who spends more time with a particular hobby than most others, you have to accept that "computer geeks" aren't stigmatic freaks; they're simply ahead of everyone else. And in that context, they're representative of the future norm, not some deviant present.
In short, get used to the way geeks work. Pretty much everyone is going to work that way, eventually. There's no point making arguments about how nerdy computers are; you might as well say that automobiles are nerdy and that we're all nerds.
Same thing with computers, if you know how to start the computer and load Word then you're not a computer geek. You have to do more.
Is that because geeks are too "geeky", or is it because norms are too "normal"? Considering the fact that the next generation will probably know how to -- at the very least -- program simple but expressive commands into an interpreter, I'd say it's the geeks who represent the better investment.
You can worry about pampering the dying breed all you like; there's probably money in it. But never forget that it's a dead-end.
wouldn't the point of anti-aliasing in the lower res cases be to deal with the fact that they are lower resolution?
Yeah, exactly right. But why are you "dealing with the fact that they are lower resolution"? Is it to improve readability? Or is it to improve the aesthetic?
I would venture to say that for the purposes of readability, anti-aliasing is a liability at sizes of 18px and below.
I'd agree that anti-aliasing larger glyphs improves the aesthetic. However, in a general-purpose UI, fonts of that size are rarely used. Better to let the application which renders those large glyphs decide how to handle them.
Anti-aliasing fonts just isn't particularly useful for the most common purposes. Glyphs are just little symbols; they're not necessarily supposed to be perfectly-rendered curves. Anti-aliasing fonts at normal sizes (10,12,14 pixels) does _not_ markedly improve readability, although to a certain sense of aesthetics it can make the screen look "prettier".
If you want to experiment with this yourself, compare Acrobat-render PDF files with small text to Web-browser-rendered HTML files with small text. It's much easier on the eyes to read the HTML file in a Web browser.
A real improvement in readability would be increased pixel resolution. It's remarkable that we're stuck at 72dpi; a 200dpi display would render normal, aliased font glyphs _very_ attractively and _very_ readably.
Forget anti-aliasing of fonts in the generic UI. As noted elsewhere, good hinting and higher resolutions are the best goals.
It gets so tiring, listening to people preach about the difference between "computer geeks" and "normal people", and how "computer geeks" are some kind of special interest.
Listen up: your children are going to be computer geeks. Period. The last generation of non-"computer geeks" is growing up right now. If you plan to live for another 20-30 years, you'd better get fricking used to the fact that this generation of computer-illiterate fools is the LAST generation of computer-illiterate fools.
For Chrissake, I can just imagine this crap 60 years ago, with people going on and on about "automobile geeks". And 400 years ago, going on and on about those crazy "clean-freak geeks" overseas who risk getting "the flux" by bathing every day.
The widely-used M680x0 was a representative chip design for its time (1979 and on) and featured a full 32-bit internal architecture, although its data bus was only 16 bits wide. The 68020 (1984) had a full 32-bit data bus.
There are zillions of 32-bit operating systems for IA32. Some of the more well-known include the various BSDs, Linux, Windows NT, Solaris, and NeXTStep.
Jeez, none of the really good posts get any kind of attention (or positive moderation). This idea of explicitly designating what kind of freedom is being offered is the most lucid remark on the subject I've seen in a long time.
Maybe, but it's of considerable cheer to note that Darwin's elitist uses for evolution (evolved white man versus the "savages") lives on today in the words and actions of his successors.
JA2 was the best game I ever owned. All of what makes gaming fun for me: strategy, tactics, guns, plot, realism, variety, mercenaries, and little unexpected surprises. A game that is truly refined, and a standout in its genre.
I'll buy the thing all over again just to have it in Linux, especially since the expansion is coming. I just finished JA2 for the third time after a brief hiatus, and it was still as fun as the first time.
Some of us -- in my AP Chem class way back -- were so interested in the chemical interactions behind explosives that we looked up the instructions -- in our own textbooks. The teacher was thrilled and helped us make guncotton under supervision.
[It's very easy: equal parts strong nitric acid with strong sulfuric acid, mix with a big wad of cotton, heat, stir, boil off residue. Wash thoroughly to remove acid and then strain to remove all moisture. Pack in small bricks and store in cool, unlit place]
We safely destroyed the stuff after we finished, but it was a great learning experience.
Well, considering how ludicrously easy the PNG team has made adding PNG support, it's pretty much a no-brainer. Have you ever written a PNG-reader/displayer? Trust me, it's about 100 lines of well-spaced, well-commented code. LibPNG is the bomb.
For example, where I go to school, everyone on campus has the same area code and same prefix. When you ask someone for their number you either get 1) 2 digits if you're in the same dorm or 2) 4 digits if they're in a different one.
Y2K redux. No, there is no axiom that says user interfaces should accept invalid or badly-formed user input if possible. You have to train the user, too, y'know.
Open Source is about more than license fees. It's about the licenses, too. That's why license issues are argued as frequently as anything else in this community.
This is the sort of thing RDF was designed to overcome. If search engine providers would agree upon an RDF model for describing content, Web site designers could begin building it into site. That would allow accessing databases automatically, and the standardized formatting would allow search engines to return queries in novel new presentations, like the AppleSauce plug-in of yore.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it really wasn't a troll, although maybe I was a little harsh. I was just annoyed by the absolute arrogance of MP3 to not even ask how anyone else felt about them doing it.
What is that supposed to mean? I don't have to ask GM's permission to use my sedan off-road. I don't have to ask Microsoft's permission to compile Open Source software with Visual C++.
If you're stupid enough to think that "Intellectual Property" is actual, real property, then at least be consistent about it. I bought it? Then it's mine and I don't need permission to use it legally.
The smarter course would be to recognize that there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property". But I'm not holding my breath for that acknowledgement, not while non-thinkers run around praising the status quo as loudly as possible.
MJP
No, just set your maximum uploads to 0 (zero). It will start bugging you to re-enable uploads every time you startup Napster, but it works.
MJP
I'm glad someone noticed this. The Free Software movement is founded on the principle that code should not have owners, or in other words, that it is not a kind of property.
Not really. Any time the author asserts a license for his code he's asserting -- to some degree -- that he has property rights over the code.
Corporate software licenses are restrictive in that they grant a bare minimum of privileges to the purchaser while retaining all ownership rights for the publisher. Most Open Source licenses are less restrictive, but they assert property rights nonetheless.
The classic example, the GPL, doesn't assert any property rights for the individual author, but instead asserts them for the nebulous Public. In other words, software doesn't belong to any one person, it belongs to everyone. It's not myproperty, it's everyone's property. But it's still treated as property.
The only Open Source attitude that truly denies intellectual property is the unencumbered license exemplified by ZLIB and PNG. The authors make disclaimers for the sake of their own liability, and that's it.
MJP
Why would a "truly intelligent machine" understand exploitation (in whatever sense) to be an unfair thing? Why wouldn't "truly intelligent machines[s]" understand their work as a happy, fulfilling endeavor?
The problem with most theories on "intelligent machines" is that they suffer from extreme anthropomorphism.
MJP
I encourage you to speak for yourself. Nobody here said that Open Source was somehow about cheating people. What I said was that Open Source embodies the desire to independently create and modify technologies so that they more closely resemble the individual's needs and expectations. Opening the source code of software is one of the easiest and most direct ways of achieving that freedom, and we encourage individuals and organizations to participate so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of said freedom.
Instead of interjecting your own prejudicial slant with phrases like "cracking cases" and "reverse engineering proprietary products" -- both of which refer to activities I did not, and never will, promote -- why not read what I actually wrote? Responding honestly to others is the first step toward thinking for yourself.
MJP
I don't care what thieves call themselves nowadays, but you're misrepresenting yourselves to the company and abusing an oversight in the companies marketing plans.
No, I'm not. I don't own an I-Opener, and I haven't "misrepresented" myself to anyone. My objection is to your sweeping aspersions against anyone interested in controlling his or her own future on his or her own terms.
You seem to have a fundamental hang-up about do-it-yourselfers, and you're passing it off as an argument against "thieves" -- a description which certainly does not apply to me, let alone the thousands of individuals you've so carelessly maligned with your comments.
I was trying to find a diplomatic way of saying "shove it up your ass and die, you prissy motherfucker, don't call me names I don't deserve", but something was lost in the translation. Now that I've (hopefully) gotten the true meaning across in its native language, I hope the issue's been settled.
MJP
Allow me to be the first to welcome you to what we call "Open Source". Here's how it works: when something doesn't work the way we want it to work, we change it ourselves.
Sometimes people call this "freeloading" or "whiny" because our expectations don't always fall in line with the way mass-media broadcasting and advertising inform us. Generally, those people have made a fatal assumption: capitalism == mass-media and Big Business.
There's a growing group of smart, talented people who no longer believe that free market capitalism has to mean giving up our privileges to large corporations. We call ourselves "Open Source contributors" and we're known by what we create, not by what we "steal".
It's an offensive concept to those who have a vested interest in the status quo. It will probably take some generational die-off before the "senators' sons" individuals no longer exert such a powerful influence over the gullible public. But eventually, I think, people will learn to enjoy thinking and doing for themselves rather than hiring a scapegoat with a shiny suit and silver tongue.
Cheers,
MJP
No, Senior UNIX Administrators are paid a lot of money. Use an online headhunter site to do a comparison. MJP
The point is that one demographic represents the next 20 years or so, and the other demographic represents the rest of humanity's future. You decide which is a better benchmark by which to judge computing technology's progress, eh?
Seems like a pretty simple decision, to me.
MJP
Automobile geek is someone who spends their entire life taking their cars apart, rebuilding them and swapping parts from one car to another, etc. Just driving them doesn't qualify as a automobile geek.
That's a new standard you just made up. What would have been an "automobile geek" 60 years ago might know how to change the oil, that's it.
Unless you're proposing a sliding scale, and think that a "geek" is simply anyone who spends more time with a particular hobby than most others, you have to accept that "computer geeks" aren't stigmatic freaks; they're simply ahead of everyone else. And in that context, they're representative of the future norm, not some deviant present.
In short, get used to the way geeks work. Pretty much everyone is going to work that way, eventually. There's no point making arguments about how nerdy computers are; you might as well say that automobiles are nerdy and that we're all nerds.
Same thing with computers, if you know how to start the computer and load Word then you're not a computer geek. You have to do more.
Is that because geeks are too "geeky", or is it because norms are too "normal"? Considering the fact that the next generation will probably know how to -- at the very least -- program simple but expressive commands into an interpreter, I'd say it's the geeks who represent the better investment.
You can worry about pampering the dying breed all you like; there's probably money in it. But never forget that it's a dead-end.
MJP
wouldn't the point of anti-aliasing in the lower res cases be to deal with the fact that they are lower resolution?
Yeah, exactly right. But why are you "dealing with the fact that they are lower resolution"? Is it to improve readability? Or is it to improve the aesthetic?
I would venture to say that for the purposes of readability, anti-aliasing is a liability at sizes of 18px and below.
I'd agree that anti-aliasing larger glyphs improves the aesthetic. However, in a general-purpose UI, fonts of that size are rarely used. Better to let the application which renders those large glyphs decide how to handle them.
MJP
Anti-aliasing fonts just isn't particularly useful for the most common purposes. Glyphs are just little symbols; they're not necessarily supposed to be perfectly-rendered curves. Anti-aliasing fonts at normal sizes (10,12,14 pixels) does _not_ markedly improve readability, although to a certain sense of aesthetics it can make the screen look "prettier".
If you want to experiment with this yourself, compare Acrobat-render PDF files with small text to Web-browser-rendered HTML files with small text. It's much easier on the eyes to read the HTML file in a Web browser.
A real improvement in readability would be increased pixel resolution. It's remarkable that we're stuck at 72dpi; a 200dpi display would render normal, aliased font glyphs _very_ attractively and _very_ readably.
Forget anti-aliasing of fonts in the generic UI. As noted elsewhere, good hinting and higher resolutions are the best goals.
MJP
It gets so tiring, listening to people preach about the difference between "computer geeks" and "normal people", and how "computer geeks" are some kind of special interest.
Listen up: your children are going to be computer geeks. Period. The last generation of non-"computer geeks" is growing up right now. If you plan to live for another 20-30 years, you'd better get fricking used to the fact that this generation of computer-illiterate fools is the LAST generation of computer-illiterate fools.
For Chrissake, I can just imagine this crap 60 years ago, with people going on and on about "automobile geeks". And 400 years ago, going on and on about those crazy "clean-freak geeks" overseas who risk getting "the flux" by bathing every day.
MJP
The widely-used M680x0 was a representative chip design for its time (1979 and on) and featured a full 32-bit internal architecture, although its data bus was only 16 bits wide. The 68020 (1984) had a full 32-bit data bus.
There are zillions of 32-bit operating systems for IA32. Some of the more well-known include the various BSDs, Linux, Windows NT, Solaris, and NeXTStep.
MJP
here here! I agree 100%
You mean "Hear, hear".
If you didn't know the spelling, but had to guess between "here, here" and "hear, hear", which would make more sense to you?
MJP
Jeez, none of the really good posts get any kind of attention (or positive moderation). This idea of explicitly designating what kind of freedom is being offered is the most lucid remark on the subject I've seen in a long time.
MJP
Maybe, but it's of considerable cheer to note that Darwin's elitist uses for evolution (evolved white man versus the "savages") lives on today in the words and actions of his successors.
Bravo!
MJP
JA2 was the best game I ever owned. All of what makes gaming fun for me: strategy, tactics, guns, plot, realism, variety, mercenaries, and little unexpected surprises. A game that is truly refined, and a standout in its genre.
I'll buy the thing all over again just to have it in Linux, especially since the expansion is coming. I just finished JA2 for the third time after a brief hiatus, and it was still as fun as the first time.
Hoo-roo! It must be my lucky day!
MJP
Some of us -- in my AP Chem class way back -- were so interested in the chemical interactions behind explosives that we looked up the instructions -- in our own textbooks. The teacher was thrilled and helped us make guncotton under supervision.
[It's very easy: equal parts strong nitric acid with strong sulfuric acid, mix with a big wad of cotton, heat, stir, boil off residue. Wash thoroughly to remove acid and then strain to remove all moisture. Pack in small bricks and store in cool, unlit place]
We safely destroyed the stuff after we finished, but it was a great learning experience.
MJP
Well, considering how ludicrously easy the PNG team has made adding PNG support, it's pretty much a no-brainer. Have you ever written a PNG-reader/displayer? Trust me, it's about 100 lines of well-spaced, well-commented code. LibPNG is the bomb.
MJP
For example, where I go to school, everyone on campus has the same area code and same prefix. When you ask someone for their number you either get 1) 2 digits if you're in the same dorm or 2) 4 digits if they're in a different one.
Y2K redux. No, there is no axiom that says user interfaces should accept invalid or badly-formed user input if possible. You have to train the user, too, y'know.
MJP
Open Source is about more than license fees. It's about the licenses, too. That's why license issues are argued as frequently as anything else in this community.
MJP
For a stimulating and relaxing 7 minutes, put on Underworld's M.E. and browse the Earth Views catalog. Truly transcendental.
MJP
Unless you need something right now, that about wraps up the entire article, seriously. XFree86 4.0 will support DDC, problem solved.
MJP
This is the sort of thing RDF was designed to overcome. If search engine providers would agree upon an RDF model for describing content, Web site designers could begin building it into site. That would allow accessing databases automatically, and the standardized formatting would allow search engines to return queries in novel new presentations, like the AppleSauce plug-in of yore.
MJP