If Linux gets a lot bigger, but Debian doesn't get bigger with it-- so what?
The Debian developers seem to be happy to work on Debian for their own use and for the use of the people who use it now. As long as that audience doesn't shrink too much-- and I doubt it will, for though many slashdot posters love to scoff at this, there are some people who use Debian for philosophical and other reasons-- then the same number of people will continue to use Debian.
Yeah, I agree that Debian needs to move forward and needs to make sure it stays as close to the "cutting edge" as possible. But I don't understand why other Linux distributions exploding into extreme popularity among people not currently using Linux at all must detract from Debian. That sort of "must be the market leader to survive" mentality may work for commerical entities (be they open or closed source companies), but Debian isn't one such beast.
Indeed, I suspect what will happen is that the "mainstream" distros will become more attached to proprietary offerings. Red Hat's made amazing contributions to the open source community, but if their users are demanding crossover office sorts of things bundled with Microsoft Office, and M$ agrees to licence that, I'd be surprised if Red Hat didn't go for it. There will be those who will stick with Debian for philosophical reasons-- and so long as there are enough of them to provide a core of Debian maintainers, why not? It doesn't hurt anybody else.
That's the great thing about free software. Anybody who wants to do their own thing can do their own thing, without being beholden to what somebody else is doing, and without requiring anybody else to be beholden to them.
That way, other people could still get the code, but at least he could re-incorporate all of the changes to date into a new propreitry system, and start charging for it. Whether people would buy it or not is a different story, but if he made changes people really wanted and they weren't in the free BSD-licensed version, he would at least have a shot of making money from it without depending entirely on donations. (AND there would still be a free version). Of course, this is Slashdot. People here are convinced the GPL is better for some reason.
Maybe some people like the GPL because, say, they understand it, unlike you?
Any code he wrote himself and which was his own code he can re-release under any licence he wants, even if he already released it GPL. The GPL does not stop you from releasing your own code under any other licence; it can't. It can stop you from releasing code incorporating somebody else's GPLed code, but then again that's the point-- to protect the original author from having their code used in a way they don't want.
It's disinformation to suggest that if somebody releases their own code as GPL, they can't later release it as something else. It's poor thinking to then take that incorrect assertion and use it as a basis for attacking the GPL.
...or does his list of features that would have made the next version so amazing (e.g. all new shell, all new scripting language, etc.) read a bit like "all new wheel, invented from scratch"?
Maybe it would have been great. But all I see is him claiming he was going to throw out most of the core utilities. This in and itself doesn't make anything great. It's only great if whatever replaces them is so much better that it was worth the effort doing it. Otherwise, it really is just reinventing the wheel.
Perhaps I don't have enough perspective on the LRP to understand why this is such a big deal, but reading the page leads me to believe that the LRP had become one of those projects that was much, much more ambitious than it needed to be. Projects like that will always have a hard time surviving. Sure, it's tragic that programmers have a hard time finding work, and that companies who freely sell and profit from Linux have a hard time "giving back" to the open source programmers who made it possible. On the other hand, I find it difficult to morn a project that, so far as I can tell from what little I see on that exit letter, was something that was neither practical nor maybe even particularly necessary.
Why is this news? Because there was a previous Slashdot story on this.
If the guy really was poorly treated by the NY Times, then Slashdot owes it to him to have a front page story setting the record straight. Otherwise Slashdot would be an unwitting accessory in parrotting the NY Times article. (And, yeah, while there's the comments which may be the opportunity to set things straight, the comments don't have nearly the prominence that the front page headlines do, and not everybody reads them.)
All 3 of the graphics programs I use routinely creat PNG's that are larger than gif's, now this may not be a problem with the format persee, but it is a problem with the real world implementations that are out there and are being used.
You should consider another possibility: you don't know what you're doing.
Do you know the difference between a 24-bit true color and an 8-bit palette image? (This is not an insult or rhetorical question, it's a real question-- you may.) Many image processors and paint programs work naturally in 24-bits. If you save to PNG, they will then naturally save those images in 24-bit format. To save to GIF, though, they must first be converted to 8-bit palette format. With (for example) the Gimp, you have to do this explicitly, so you'll know you're doing it. However, it's possible that some paint programs may do it automatically, without telling you it's been done. This will make for smaller files, but information has been lost. When you read it back in, you will only have 246 different colors in the image, regardless of how many where there originally. If you read the PNG back in, the image will be exactly as you saved it. (Unless you had all sorts of complicated layers, in which case you need an even heavier file format.)
PNG can save images in 8-bit format, in which case a good implementation will give you an image about the same size or a bit smaller than a GIF image. But they don't have to. GIF images have to be saved that way. Naturally, saving an image in 24-bit format will create a larger file than saving one in 8-bit format. (And, it may be different by more than a factor of 3, for reasons having to do with the compression algorithm.)
Before comparing the merits of image formats looking just at the file sizes saved, you have to make sure you understand what is being saved.
JPG is a whole 'nuther ball of wax. That's a 24-bit image format, but it's lossy. That's why they can be so small. But, again, if you read the image back in, it won't be exactly the same; some colors will have been modified slightly. (How much depends on the quality setting you used when saving the JPEG image.) If you're expecting to read and write an image repeatedly, JPEG is a bad format to use, as each time you read and write it, more information gets lost. In that case, you're much better off using PNG images.
2. Rather than sitting there waiting for Godot, I always tried to get some work done.
As a general rule, teachers don't like students doing homework in their classes. If this is a office hour, perhaps that should be your main focus here.
Err... there's a rather extreme difference between doing homework in the middle of a class when students and professors (both present) are supposed to be interacting with each other, and office hours when a professor is supposed to be available but may not have any students present.
Do you read on the bus? Do you feel guilty about it? 'cause you really ought to be focusing on communting, you know.
What we need to do is give the world the tools to control their reproduction, and then educate them about when reproduction is a good idea. And specifically in the empty countries we need to figure out social engineering techniques to allow our countries to accept as many immigrants as possible without becoming ugly melting pots like the US or losing our national identity.
I agree fully except for the last bit. Nothing wrong with a melting pot-- an ugly melting pot is bad, sure, but there's nothing wrong with a melting pot. And I'm not sure I agree that America is an ugly melting pot. The ugliest things about America, in my opinion, have nothing to do with it being a melting pot. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
Regarding national identiy, that's a fluid thing. It will change with time, even if if there is no immigration or emigration. If you really want to allow immigrants, then they will, by their very nature, change the national identity. And that's OK.
I do have to say that I like it that there still are places on Earth that have lots of empty space and natural resources. I'd hate to fill up every last one of them. I do agree, though, that the problem is that the crowded places are getting more crowded, and those crowded countries tend to be the ones burning down most of the rainforests. (Sometimes, though, that's in creating products for rich Americans, so I'm pointing no finger in any direction that doesn't include backwards.)
Perhaps you should realize that since you've fulfilled your primary purpose as a human being (reproduction), all you're doing is taking up space and resources needed by the next generation to raise its offspring.
In other words, hurry up and die. Your life past this point is merely an exercise in selfish indulgence.
I assume this was just a joke, but...
Au contraire. Given that there are 6 billion people and growing on this planet, and given that a depressingly large fraction of them live in crushing poverty, overpopulation is a huge problem, and it's only getting worse. The solution? Fewer offspring. Nowadays, the selfish indugence is having kids. Sure, we want the species to continue, but there's no worry about that at the moment. (It's like spaying your dog or cat; there's no anger that there won't be kittens and puppies, so it's best for all concerned to spay.)
I'm not saying nobody should have kids. But if we want to have any hope of the people on this planet living in relative comfort and prosperity, we need to overcome that evolutionary programmed urge to procreate-- which is selfish on a species level, if not an individual level. Sure, evolution designed us so that our purpose is to reproduce, but unless we want the whole world to live in squalor, we now have to redefine that purpose.
So go on to professional school and develop your brain when you're older. Learn math, contribute to human knowledge even when you're past the age when "tradition" dictates you can make your best contribution. Bettering ourselves and our world should be the purpose of existence now, not just producing more and more kids to use the dwindling resources of this planet. Meanwhile, we need to figure out a way to seriously limit the number of kids produced each year while preserving as much personal freedom as we can.
After sending forward the EFF's letter, as well as one of my own through physical mail, I got an E-mail message from Rob Briley, the TN House rep supporting the TN law. He said that those who opposed the law hadn't read the amendment, and that terrible amounts of misinformation were being spread about it. (I wrote back telling him that even with his amendment, I really didn't want that law.) In particular, he said that he had never been contacted by the MPAA, and wondered why people thought that.
Given that this TN law is like the others and coming at the same time, I'm suspicious. It's possible that this just happened to come up on its own and be similar. More likely, though, Briley was contacted by somebody trying to get him to push this law. It's possible Briley is just lying to me, but it's also entirely plausible that Briely doesn't even know he's being used as a pawn of the MPAA.
Gotta love this country.
tndigitalfreedom.org has an account of several people showing up at a senate commitee hearing on the law. It was clear that most of the sentaors simply didn't understand the implication of the law... and they were relying on a cable industry guy to interpret it for them. When they learned that perhaps there were other things to worry about, they delayed passing the law out of committee. The alarming thing about this is that even though the senators showed a desire to do the right thing once they learned of worries, it does mean that it would have just rubber stamped through if the tndigitialfreedom people hadn't showed up. In other words, our state legislatures are probably passing laws they don't understand all the time, just because whatever industry lobbyist is interpreting it for them makes them feel all warm and fuzzy about it.
We're not heading towards World Democracy or even World Communism, but World Feudalism. It is rapidly getting to the point that if you want to invent or create something, you will need to do so under the aegis of a large corporation. You will need the legal and financial backing of a large corporation (your feudal lord) to protect you (with their own patent portfolio) if you want to create anything-- otherwise, one of the other fedual lords will quash you, and you won't be big enough to defend yourself. In exchange, you will show fealty to your corporate feudal lord by signing over any rights to anything you create, hopefully being reasonably well paid in the process.
Most people may be relatively comfortable, or at least fed, but the individualist creator simply won't be able to exist. (And, alas, nobody will think there's anything wrong with this. Most of the world doesn't really care about freedom of thought. Once they're fed and comfortable, people seem to care care more about bread and circuses (or SUVs and HDTVs) than actual liberty.)
Yes, global intellectual property concerns are making the world safe for medieval forms of government and social organization.
The internet is as flexible and free today as it is simply because it grew up before it was on the radar of the marketing and legal arms of corporate America, and the legislators they send campaign donations to. We're very fortunate about this; an open architecture is what the Internet is "stuck" with, and it's proving difficult for those who would replace it with a closed arcitecture to work against that history.
You had better believe that if we rebuilt the information superhighway from scratch, it would have in place all the controls and restrictions that the various entertainment industry wants, and would be run on standards and protocols which are closed and proprietary. (Many likely from Microsoft, but they would probably be "magnanimous" and licence other proprietary protocols from other companies who have influence with legislators from other states.) In the end, you would not have nearly the flexible and open Internet we have today, but rather something much closer to the one-way "content delivery" system that the entertainment first thought the Internet was, and is now trying to legislate the Internet to be (once they realized that it wasn't naturally that).
A corporation is preventing you from doing something, which is their right according to law.
So maybe, semantically, this isn't a sign of it being a "police" state. But it sure as hell is a very serious and disturbing sign of it being an oppressive state, whatever the medium of that oppression.
"There are people, especially older people who lived through the McCarthy era, who might be intimidated by this," he said.
All I can say is, GOOD! I'm sure many of these same older people (whose sensibilities that some libraries are trying to protect) voted for the president and members of congress we have that gave us this act. All the better if they are made to realize just what they are voting for, and what is being done in the name of "protecting us from terrorsim."
Scare tactics, spreading baseless FUD, and all that aren't good. Stating the facts and allowing people to be informed about what the government is giving itself the right to do, however, is a different matter altogether. Those who lived through the McCarthy era may have the perspective to realize that they should be intimidated by this, while those of us who are younger can shrug off based on the rest of that quote (that the probability that any one person will have their records searched is low, since there are so many people).
Specifically define data series through selection.
Have a NICE looking graph.
Your third point is a matter of aesthetic opinion. What specifically is wrong with the charts you can get now? What do you want that you don't have? All you've said is "I don't like what I see"; that doesn't go very far in specifying what's unusable.
Your second point: I do that a lot, if you mean what I think you mean. At any rate, I can select disjoint columns by holding down the control key and use that for making charts.
Your first point: I haven't tried it, but I'm surprised you can't do it. However, once I have made a chart in OOo Calc, I am able to cut it and paste that chart into other documents... on its own page even.
I've done far more than cursory inspection of Calc, though probably you wouldn't consider what I've done a real test since I'm probably not using the same subset of the functionality that you are.
If you can not understand why Open Office needs to open Word files perfectly, then you may as well get used to staring at those cubicle walls and getting used to that funky smell, since it will take a severe lack of judgement on your manager's part for you to get promoted above a coding monkey.
You're so kind. You also don't have a clue what you're talking about with your personal inferrences.
I do understand why, practically speaking, it is very useful to be able to open Word files "perfectly". However, that to me does not disqualify OOo from being "usable". All it qualifies it is being "compatable with Word". If the only purpose of an office suite is to be compatable with Word, then nothing but Word will be usable, and you've got yourself a nice clean definition that's by and large useless.
Other than being compatable with fill-in-the-blank program (even if that blank is filled with a wildly popular program), what usability is missing from OOo? That's what I'm trying to ask. If it's just Word compatability that's the problem, then I'd say it is fully usable as an office suite.
I'm irked, for instance, that I can't seem to export something from xfig that I can then import into OpenOffice.org draw. Sure, they both claim to support DXF, but in practice the thing gets garbled going from one to the other.
The main reason to do this is, for me, is to take Postscript files written out by another program (e.g. PGPLOT) and then be able to read and manipulate them in OpenOffice.org the way Illustrator can. I can use "ps2edit" to get them (mostly) into Xfig, but I haven't yet figured out a combination of tools to let me get them into OOo Draw and edit them.
You'd think that both would support SVG if that were the great standard it were. But nothing seems to. Or does it?
The one steady complaint I hear is "doesn't do a perfect job of opening Microsoft Office formats". THat complaint is, even if true, ridiculous. If OpenOffice.org is to replace MS Office, sure, the path to getting there is easier of people don't have to notice, but eventually the proprietary MS formats would become irrelevant. This isn't a real criticism. Might as well criticise Word for not being able to open all those legacy LaTeX files that scientists and mathemticians have all over the places, huh?
(Not that I consider anything legacy about LaTeX myself... I still think that is definitely the right way to do large and technical documents.)
The only realy complaint that I've got about OOo is the support for animations in Impress. It seems to crash on Flash animations even on computers where I've got the Flash plugin installed... and it seems to depend on the Flash plugin from mozilla, rather than from itself. First, I'd much rather there were an open vector animation format out there for OOo to use, but that's not necessarily OOo's fault; if there is one, it doesn't have widespread acceptance and prominence. But, even beyond that, I haven't figured out how to embed MPEG or similar animations into OOo presentations, nor have I figured out how to get OOo to put its screen to the back so that if I hack in mplayer via a command line script (not the best interface for most people using Impress, but one that works for me), the full screen animation can even be seen.
As far as I'm concerned, solve that issue in Impress, and OOo is way more than anything I'd want out of an office suite like that.
Well, OK, and the equation editor is severely limited. (Only 8 colours?) Plus it's a pain... I speak TeX equations, and am resisting learning a new one. Right now, I usually use TeX and ImageMagick to put equations in my Impress presentations as transparent PNG images.
What are the things that people like Larry Ellison think are missing that make it only "almost" usable?
I'm interested as to why someone who has "nothing to hide" should be worried about mass surveillance by their government?
Ask yourself what you do every day.
Then ask yourself if, seriously, everything that you do and which you consider "nothing to hide" is also something that every potentially powerful religious political group or other self-appointed "guardian of public morality" would also consider "nothing to hide."
If we lived in a utopian society where individualism was respted, where victimless crimes were just considered poor judgement but nothing to bring charges on, and where moral judgements were considered private opinions and not a reason for censure or imprisionment, then a university surveillance society (e.g. like what's depicted in Robert J. Sawyers' Hominids and Humans) could actually be a good thing. Unfortunately, we live in a society where people are lining up to condemn others for wrong thinking, where people can't wait to limit each other's freedoms in the name of morality and other arbitrary reasons.
Are you a homosexual? Do you read any pornographic magazines? Heck, do you look at lingeire catalogs? Do you ever drink alcohol before noon? Do you ever masturbate? Do you ever post to "hacker" message boards like Slashdot? Do you read opinions online critical of the government? Critical of the RIAA? Do you believe that Islam may be at it's core a pecaeful religion? Worse, are you a muslim? Are you an atheist? Do you ever send personal E-mail while at work? Do you ever look at sports scores or other personal sites while at work? How about when you're telecommunting from home?
There are so many various groups with strong opinions about other people's personal morality who have a lot of political influence in this country that I simply do not trust society with universal surveillance capabilities. If we really did respect individual freedom as much as we claim to, then no problem. In the mean time, when we've got things like the DMCA and the philosophy behind it, and when it's a struggle to get anti-homosexual-sex laws stricken from the books, a universal surveillance society will turn this country into a totalitarian state. Nearly everybody has something to hide. Even if you don't really, even if you don't do anything you're embarassed about and if you don't do anything to hurt anybody, there is probably some sort of fundamentalist group out there with a lot of sympathy and ability to get somebody elected who does think you ought to hide it. The easier it is for them to track down the people like you doing these "immoral" things you didn't think you had to hide, the more likely you are, in the best case, to check your own behavior-- behavior you would otherwise have thought innocuous. (And in the worst case, you'd be brought up on charges for it.)
-Rob
Re:universal urge to proceate? uh, no
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I'd say humans tend to think their purpose is life is whatever they've decded it is.
Individually, yes. But collectively, or statistically, just look at the overpopulation of the Earth and it becomes clear that the #1 proprority of our species is to spread itself as much as possible. This isn't a conscious decision or what any world leaders has decided is the priority, but it's what we seem to be best at.
We tend to put way too much meaning into things, and this results in a misreading of evolution.
Taken literally, I would agree. However, metaphorically, our species has a "desire" to procreate thanks to evolution. (In that had we not had it to the level we do, we probably wouldn't have had enough other advantages to survive.)
It's very common in physical (or other non-conscious) systems to talk about what the system "wants" to do, or what it has a desire to do. When we talk that way, we don't really mean that the system has a conscious, feeling desire. The gravitational attraction of the Earth means that an object "wants" to get as close to the center of the Earth as it can (all else being equal). Same thing.
So I don't think I'm reading too much into evolution, once you understand that I'm just using "desire" metaphorically.
-Rob
Re:Procreation
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Procreation is not the natural urge. It's just the side-effect of the natural urge.
On the individual level, yes. However, the individual urge is the side-effect of the species collective desire to procreate, which was selected for evolutionarily.
Medical research spending has much quicker payoffs than fundamental physics research.
Thank you. I'm glad somebody out there read my post and had some idea of what it was I was talking about, and was willing to respond thoughtfully without personal attacks. And, that somebody out there is willing to take a critical look at our current system without asusming that anybody so doing is stupid and unamerican and ignoring the fact that we need to fund drug research.
In fact, physics (and other science) research was exactly the model I have in mind.
One question, to which I don't know the answer, is to what extent the federal government already funds drug research. I've heard it said that some fraction of drugs that come to market (and are patented) already receive some federal funding. This has a few implications. First, we could be "double-paying" if tax money is supporting this as is. Second, the increase in costs to the government to fund most drug research wouldn't be as huge as they would be otherwise (amking the switch more affordable). Now, I've also heard it said that drug companies "pay back" the grants they get on succesful drugs; but, of course, a lot of research involves going down blind alleys and such, so it's not clear how much of a pay back this really would be. I don't know what the numbers for any of this are, but presumably that could be figured out.
I just wish we as a society would seriously consider the "scientfic research" model for pharmaceutical research, and then put the results of that research out unpatented. I can't tell you it will solve all of the ills we have, but it might be better than our current system, so we should at least seriously consider it. (I don't think we will, but we should.)
Anybody who doesn't believe the current system has ills is kidding themselves (such as "what's the big if some people can't afford drugs, it's not a fundamental right", which was the "defense" of the current system one person posted! I mean, c'mon. Who cares if it's defined as a fundamental right? If we can come up with a system that allows for greater, more affordable health, without restricting individual freedom of speech and other fundamental rights, that other system should be considered. And, indeed, nobody here is talking about restricting fundamental rights; quite the opposite, indeed, since patents are government regulations and government restrictions.)
Slashdot Mirror
If Linux gets a lot bigger, but Debian doesn't get bigger with it-- so what?
The Debian developers seem to be happy to work on Debian for their own use and for the use of the people who use it now. As long as that audience doesn't shrink too much-- and I doubt it will, for though many slashdot posters love to scoff at this, there are some people who use Debian for philosophical and other reasons-- then the same number of people will continue to use Debian.
Yeah, I agree that Debian needs to move forward and needs to make sure it stays as close to the "cutting edge" as possible. But I don't understand why other Linux distributions exploding into extreme popularity among people not currently using Linux at all must detract from Debian. That sort of "must be the market leader to survive" mentality may work for commerical entities (be they open or closed source companies), but Debian isn't one such beast.
Indeed, I suspect what will happen is that the "mainstream" distros will become more attached to proprietary offerings. Red Hat's made amazing contributions to the open source community, but if their users are demanding crossover office sorts of things bundled with Microsoft Office, and M$ agrees to licence that, I'd be surprised if Red Hat didn't go for it. There will be those who will stick with Debian for philosophical reasons-- and so long as there are enough of them to provide a core of Debian maintainers, why not? It doesn't hurt anybody else.
That's the great thing about free software. Anybody who wants to do their own thing can do their own thing, without being beholden to what somebody else is doing, and without requiring anybody else to be beholden to them.
-Rob
That way, other people could still get the code, but at least he could re-incorporate all of the changes to date into a new propreitry system, and start charging for it. Whether people would buy it or not is a different story, but if he made changes people really wanted and they weren't in the free BSD-licensed version, he would at least have a shot of making money from it without depending entirely on donations. (AND there would still be a free version). Of course, this is Slashdot. People here are convinced the GPL is better for some reason.
Maybe some people like the GPL because, say, they understand it, unlike you?
Any code he wrote himself and which was his own code he can re-release under any licence he wants, even if he already released it GPL. The GPL does not stop you from releasing your own code under any other licence; it can't. It can stop you from releasing code incorporating somebody else's GPLed code, but then again that's the point-- to protect the original author from having their code used in a way they don't want.
It's disinformation to suggest that if somebody releases their own code as GPL, they can't later release it as something else. It's poor thinking to then take that incorrect assertion and use it as a basis for attacking the GPL.
-Rob
...or does his list of features that would have made the next version so amazing (e.g. all new shell, all new scripting language, etc.) read a bit like "all new wheel, invented from scratch"?
Maybe it would have been great. But all I see is him claiming he was going to throw out most of the core utilities. This in and itself doesn't make anything great. It's only great if whatever replaces them is so much better that it was worth the effort doing it. Otherwise, it really is just reinventing the wheel.
Perhaps I don't have enough perspective on the LRP to understand why this is such a big deal, but reading the page leads me to believe that the LRP had become one of those projects that was much, much more ambitious than it needed to be. Projects like that will always have a hard time surviving. Sure, it's tragic that programmers have a hard time finding work, and that companies who freely sell and profit from Linux have a hard time "giving back" to the open source programmers who made it possible. On the other hand, I find it difficult to morn a project that, so far as I can tell from what little I see on that exit letter, was something that was neither practical nor maybe even particularly necessary.
-Rob
Why is this news? Because there was a previous Slashdot story on this.
If the guy really was poorly treated by the NY Times, then Slashdot owes it to him to have a front page story setting the record straight. Otherwise Slashdot would be an unwitting accessory in parrotting the NY Times article. (And, yeah, while there's the comments which may be the opportunity to set things straight, the comments don't have nearly the prominence that the front page headlines do, and not everybody reads them.)
-Rob
Must there be profanity on the front page?
Not everybody is using journaling filesystems yet, so for them fsck isn't yet profane.
-Rob
What I meant when I said:
When you read it back in, you will only have 246 different colors in the image, regardless of how many where there originally.
was:
When you read it back in, you will only have 256 different colors in the image, regardless of how many were there originally.
I type too fast to look literate :/
-Rob
All 3 of the graphics programs I use routinely creat PNG's that are larger than gif's, now this may not be a problem with the format persee, but it is a problem with the real world implementations that are out there and are being used.
You should consider another possibility: you don't know what you're doing.
Do you know the difference between a 24-bit true color and an 8-bit palette image? (This is not an insult or rhetorical question, it's a real question-- you may.) Many image processors and paint programs work naturally in 24-bits. If you save to PNG, they will then naturally save those images in 24-bit format. To save to GIF, though, they must first be converted to 8-bit palette format. With (for example) the Gimp, you have to do this explicitly, so you'll know you're doing it. However, it's possible that some paint programs may do it automatically, without telling you it's been done. This will make for smaller files, but information has been lost. When you read it back in, you will only have 246 different colors in the image, regardless of how many where there originally. If you read the PNG back in, the image will be exactly as you saved it. (Unless you had all sorts of complicated layers, in which case you need an even heavier file format.)
PNG can save images in 8-bit format, in which case a good implementation will give you an image about the same size or a bit smaller than a GIF image. But they don't have to. GIF images have to be saved that way. Naturally, saving an image in 24-bit format will create a larger file than saving one in 8-bit format. (And, it may be different by more than a factor of 3, for reasons having to do with the compression algorithm.)
Before comparing the merits of image formats looking just at the file sizes saved, you have to make sure you understand what is being saved.
JPG is a whole 'nuther ball of wax. That's a 24-bit image format, but it's lossy. That's why they can be so small. But, again, if you read the image back in, it won't be exactly the same; some colors will have been modified slightly. (How much depends on the quality setting you used when saving the JPEG image.) If you're expecting to read and write an image repeatedly, JPEG is a bad format to use, as each time you read and write it, more information gets lost. In that case, you're much better off using PNG images.
-Rob
2. Rather than sitting there waiting for Godot, I always tried to get some work done.
As a general rule, teachers don't like students doing homework in their classes. If this is a office hour, perhaps that should be your main focus here.
Err... there's a rather extreme difference between doing homework in the middle of a class when students and professors (both present) are supposed to be interacting with each other, and office hours when a professor is supposed to be available but may not have any students present.
Do you read on the bus? Do you feel guilty about it? 'cause you really ought to be focusing on communting, you know.
-Rob
What we need to do is give the world the tools to control their reproduction, and then educate them about when reproduction is a good idea. And specifically in the empty countries we need to figure out social engineering techniques to allow our countries to accept as many immigrants as possible without becoming ugly melting pots like the US or losing our national identity.
I agree fully except for the last bit. Nothing wrong with a melting pot-- an ugly melting pot is bad, sure, but there's nothing wrong with a melting pot. And I'm not sure I agree that America is an ugly melting pot. The ugliest things about America, in my opinion, have nothing to do with it being a melting pot. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
Regarding national identiy, that's a fluid thing. It will change with time, even if if there is no immigration or emigration. If you really want to allow immigrants, then they will, by their very nature, change the national identity. And that's OK.
I do have to say that I like it that there still are places on Earth that have lots of empty space and natural resources. I'd hate to fill up every last one of them. I do agree, though, that the problem is that the crowded places are getting more crowded, and those crowded countries tend to be the ones burning down most of the rainforests. (Sometimes, though, that's in creating products for rich Americans, so I'm pointing no finger in any direction that doesn't include backwards.)
-Rob
Perhaps you should realize that since you've fulfilled your primary purpose as a human being (reproduction), all you're doing is taking up space and resources needed by the next generation to raise its offspring.
In other words, hurry up and die. Your life past this point is merely an exercise in selfish indulgence.
I assume this was just a joke, but...
Au contraire. Given that there are 6 billion people and growing on this planet, and given that a depressingly large fraction of them live in crushing poverty, overpopulation is a huge problem, and it's only getting worse. The solution? Fewer offspring. Nowadays, the selfish indugence is having kids. Sure, we want the species to continue, but there's no worry about that at the moment. (It's like spaying your dog or cat; there's no anger that there won't be kittens and puppies, so it's best for all concerned to spay.)
I'm not saying nobody should have kids. But if we want to have any hope of the people on this planet living in relative comfort and prosperity, we need to overcome that evolutionary programmed urge to procreate-- which is selfish on a species level, if not an individual level. Sure, evolution designed us so that our purpose is to reproduce, but unless we want the whole world to live in squalor, we now have to redefine that purpose.
So go on to professional school and develop your brain when you're older. Learn math, contribute to human knowledge even when you're past the age when "tradition" dictates you can make your best contribution. Bettering ourselves and our world should be the purpose of existence now, not just producing more and more kids to use the dwindling resources of this planet. Meanwhile, we need to figure out a way to seriously limit the number of kids produced each year while preserving as much personal freedom as we can.
-Rob
After sending forward the EFF's letter, as well as one of my own through physical mail, I got an E-mail message from Rob Briley, the TN House rep supporting the TN law. He said that those who opposed the law hadn't read the amendment, and that terrible amounts of misinformation were being spread about it. (I wrote back telling him that even with his amendment, I really didn't want that law.) In particular, he said that he had never been contacted by the MPAA, and wondered why people thought that.
Given that this TN law is like the others and coming at the same time, I'm suspicious. It's possible that this just happened to come up on its own and be similar. More likely, though, Briley was contacted by somebody trying to get him to push this law. It's possible Briley is just lying to me, but it's also entirely plausible that Briely doesn't even know he's being used as a pawn of the MPAA.
Gotta love this country.
tndigitalfreedom.org has an account of several people showing up at a senate commitee hearing on the law. It was clear that most of the sentaors simply didn't understand the implication of the law... and they were relying on a cable industry guy to interpret it for them. When they learned that perhaps there were other things to worry about, they delayed passing the law out of committee. The alarming thing about this is that even though the senators showed a desire to do the right thing once they learned of worries, it does mean that it would have just rubber stamped through if the tndigitialfreedom people hadn't showed up. In other words, our state legislatures are probably passing laws they don't understand all the time, just because whatever industry lobbyist is interpreting it for them makes them feel all warm and fuzzy about it.
Great, huh?
-Rob
We're not heading towards World Democracy or even World Communism, but World Feudalism. It is rapidly getting to the point that if you want to invent or create something, you will need to do so under the aegis of a large corporation. You will need the legal and financial backing of a large corporation (your feudal lord) to protect you (with their own patent portfolio) if you want to create anything-- otherwise, one of the other fedual lords will quash you, and you won't be big enough to defend yourself. In exchange, you will show fealty to your corporate feudal lord by signing over any rights to anything you create, hopefully being reasonably well paid in the process.
Most people may be relatively comfortable, or at least fed, but the individualist creator simply won't be able to exist. (And, alas, nobody will think there's anything wrong with this. Most of the world doesn't really care about freedom of thought. Once they're fed and comfortable, people seem to care care more about bread and circuses (or SUVs and HDTVs) than actual liberty.)
Yes, global intellectual property concerns are making the world safe for medieval forms of government and social organization.
-Rob
The internet is as flexible and free today as it is simply because it grew up before it was on the radar of the marketing and legal arms of corporate America, and the legislators they send campaign donations to. We're very fortunate about this; an open architecture is what the Internet is "stuck" with, and it's proving difficult for those who would replace it with a closed arcitecture to work against that history.
You had better believe that if we rebuilt the information superhighway from scratch, it would have in place all the controls and restrictions that the various entertainment industry wants, and would be run on standards and protocols which are closed and proprietary. (Many likely from Microsoft, but they would probably be "magnanimous" and licence other proprietary protocols from other companies who have influence with legislators from other states.) In the end, you would not have nearly the flexible and open Internet we have today, but rather something much closer to the one-way "content delivery" system that the entertainment first thought the Internet was, and is now trying to legislate the Internet to be (once they realized that it wasn't naturally that).
-Rob
A corporation is preventing you from doing something, which is their right according to law.
So maybe, semantically, this isn't a sign of it being a "police" state. But it sure as hell is a very serious and disturbing sign of it being an oppressive state, whatever the medium of that oppression.
-Rob
From the article:
"There are people, especially older people who lived through the McCarthy era, who might be intimidated by this," he said.
All I can say is, GOOD! I'm sure many of these same older people (whose sensibilities that some libraries are trying to protect) voted for the president and members of congress we have that gave us this act. All the better if they are made to realize just what they are voting for, and what is being done in the name of "protecting us from terrorsim."
Scare tactics, spreading baseless FUD, and all that aren't good. Stating the facts and allowing people to be informed about what the government is giving itself the right to do, however, is a different matter altogether. Those who lived through the McCarthy era may have the perspective to realize that they should be intimidated by this, while those of us who are younger can shrug off based on the rest of that quote (that the probability that any one person will have their records searched is low, since there are so many people).
-Rob
What planet are you from?!?!?!?
Your third point is a matter of aesthetic opinion. What specifically is wrong with the charts you can get now? What do you want that you don't have? All you've said is "I don't like what I see"; that doesn't go very far in specifying what's unusable.
Your second point: I do that a lot, if you mean what I think you mean. At any rate, I can select disjoint columns by holding down the control key and use that for making charts.
Your first point: I haven't tried it, but I'm surprised you can't do it. However, once I have made a chart in OOo Calc, I am able to cut it and paste that chart into other documents... on its own page even.
I've done far more than cursory inspection of Calc, though probably you wouldn't consider what I've done a real test since I'm probably not using the same subset of the functionality that you are.
-Rob
If you can not understand why Open Office needs to open Word files perfectly, then you may as well get used to staring at those cubicle walls and getting used to that funky smell, since it will take a severe lack of judgement on your manager's part for you to get promoted above a coding monkey.
You're so kind. You also don't have a clue what you're talking about with your personal inferrences.
I do understand why, practically speaking, it is very useful to be able to open Word files "perfectly". However, that to me does not disqualify OOo from being "usable". All it qualifies it is being "compatable with Word". If the only purpose of an office suite is to be compatable with Word, then nothing but Word will be usable, and you've got yourself a nice clean definition that's by and large useless.
Other than being compatable with fill-in-the-blank program (even if that blank is filled with a wildly popular program), what usability is missing from OOo? That's what I'm trying to ask. If it's just Word compatability that's the problem, then I'd say it is fully usable as an office suite.
-Rob
Did you not get the memo about SVG?
Did anybody?
I know of it but... what supports it?
I'm irked, for instance, that I can't seem to export something from xfig that I can then import into OpenOffice.org draw. Sure, they both claim to support DXF, but in practice the thing gets garbled going from one to the other.
The main reason to do this is, for me, is to take Postscript files written out by another program (e.g. PGPLOT) and then be able to read and manipulate them in OpenOffice.org the way Illustrator can. I can use "ps2edit" to get them (mostly) into Xfig, but I haven't yet figured out a combination of tools to let me get them into OOo Draw and edit them.
You'd think that both would support SVG if that were the great standard it were. But nothing seems to. Or does it?
-Rob
What's not usable about OpenOffice.org now?
The one steady complaint I hear is "doesn't do a perfect job of opening Microsoft Office formats". THat complaint is, even if true, ridiculous. If OpenOffice.org is to replace MS Office, sure, the path to getting there is easier of people don't have to notice, but eventually the proprietary MS formats would become irrelevant. This isn't a real criticism. Might as well criticise Word for not being able to open all those legacy LaTeX files that scientists and mathemticians have all over the places, huh?
(Not that I consider anything legacy about LaTeX myself... I still think that is definitely the right way to do large and technical documents.)
The only realy complaint that I've got about OOo is the support for animations in Impress. It seems to crash on Flash animations even on computers where I've got the Flash plugin installed... and it seems to depend on the Flash plugin from mozilla, rather than from itself. First, I'd much rather there were an open vector animation format out there for OOo to use, but that's not necessarily OOo's fault; if there is one, it doesn't have widespread acceptance and prominence. But, even beyond that, I haven't figured out how to embed MPEG or similar animations into OOo presentations, nor have I figured out how to get OOo to put its screen to the back so that if I hack in mplayer via a command line script (not the best interface for most people using Impress, but one that works for me), the full screen animation can even be seen.
As far as I'm concerned, solve that issue in Impress, and OOo is way more than anything I'd want out of an office suite like that.
Well, OK, and the equation editor is severely limited. (Only 8 colours?) Plus it's a pain... I speak TeX equations, and am resisting learning a new one. Right now, I usually use TeX and ImageMagick to put equations in my Impress presentations as transparent PNG images.
What are the things that people like Larry Ellison think are missing that make it only "almost" usable?
-Rob
I'm interested as to why someone who has "nothing to hide" should be worried about mass surveillance by their government?
Ask yourself what you do every day.
Then ask yourself if, seriously, everything that you do and which you consider "nothing to hide" is also something that every potentially powerful religious political group or other self-appointed "guardian of public morality" would also consider "nothing to hide."
If we lived in a utopian society where individualism was respted, where victimless crimes were just considered poor judgement but nothing to bring charges on, and where moral judgements were considered private opinions and not a reason for censure or imprisionment, then a university surveillance society (e.g. like what's depicted in Robert J. Sawyers' Hominids and Humans) could actually be a good thing. Unfortunately, we live in a society where people are lining up to condemn others for wrong thinking, where people can't wait to limit each other's freedoms in the name of morality and other arbitrary reasons.
Are you a homosexual? Do you read any pornographic magazines? Heck, do you look at lingeire catalogs? Do you ever drink alcohol before noon? Do you ever masturbate? Do you ever post to "hacker" message boards like Slashdot? Do you read opinions online critical of the government? Critical of the RIAA? Do you believe that Islam may be at it's core a pecaeful religion? Worse, are you a muslim? Are you an atheist? Do you ever send personal E-mail while at work? Do you ever look at sports scores or other personal sites while at work? How about when you're telecommunting from home?
There are so many various groups with strong opinions about other people's personal morality who have a lot of political influence in this country that I simply do not trust society with universal surveillance capabilities. If we really did respect individual freedom as much as we claim to, then no problem. In the mean time, when we've got things like the DMCA and the philosophy behind it, and when it's a struggle to get anti-homosexual-sex laws stricken from the books, a universal surveillance society will turn this country into a totalitarian state. Nearly everybody has something to hide. Even if you don't really, even if you don't do anything you're embarassed about and if you don't do anything to hurt anybody, there is probably some sort of fundamentalist group out there with a lot of sympathy and ability to get somebody elected who does think you ought to hide it. The easier it is for them to track down the people like you doing these "immoral" things you didn't think you had to hide, the more likely you are, in the best case, to check your own behavior-- behavior you would otherwise have thought innocuous. (And in the worst case, you'd be brought up on charges for it.)
-Rob
I'd say humans tend to think their purpose is life is whatever they've decded it is.
Individually, yes. But collectively, or statistically, just look at the overpopulation of the Earth and it becomes clear that the #1 proprority of our species is to spread itself as much as possible. This isn't a conscious decision or what any world leaders has decided is the priority, but it's what we seem to be best at.
-Rob
Can a species have a desire?
We tend to put way too much meaning into things, and this results in a misreading of evolution.
Taken literally, I would agree. However, metaphorically, our species has a "desire" to procreate thanks to evolution. (In that had we not had it to the level we do, we probably wouldn't have had enough other advantages to survive.)
It's very common in physical (or other non-conscious) systems to talk about what the system "wants" to do, or what it has a desire to do. When we talk that way, we don't really mean that the system has a conscious, feeling desire. The gravitational attraction of the Earth means that an object "wants" to get as close to the center of the Earth as it can (all else being equal). Same thing.
So I don't think I'm reading too much into evolution, once you understand that I'm just using "desire" metaphorically.
-Rob
Procreation is not the natural urge. It's just the side-effect of the natural urge.
On the individual level, yes. However, the individual urge is the side-effect of the species collective desire to procreate, which was selected for evolutionarily.
-Rob
Medical research spending has much quicker payoffs than fundamental physics research.
Thank you. I'm glad somebody out there read my post and had some idea of what it was I was talking about, and was willing to respond thoughtfully without personal attacks. And, that somebody out there is willing to take a critical look at our current system without asusming that anybody so doing is stupid and unamerican and ignoring the fact that we need to fund drug research.
In fact, physics (and other science) research was exactly the model I have in mind.
One question, to which I don't know the answer, is to what extent the federal government already funds drug research. I've heard it said that some fraction of drugs that come to market (and are patented) already receive some federal funding. This has a few implications. First, we could be "double-paying" if tax money is supporting this as is. Second, the increase in costs to the government to fund most drug research wouldn't be as huge as they would be otherwise (amking the switch more affordable). Now, I've also heard it said that drug companies "pay back" the grants they get on succesful drugs; but, of course, a lot of research involves going down blind alleys and such, so it's not clear how much of a pay back this really would be. I don't know what the numbers for any of this are, but presumably that could be figured out.
I just wish we as a society would seriously consider the "scientfic research" model for pharmaceutical research, and then put the results of that research out unpatented. I can't tell you it will solve all of the ills we have, but it might be better than our current system, so we should at least seriously consider it. (I don't think we will, but we should.)
Anybody who doesn't believe the current system has ills is kidding themselves (such as "what's the big if some people can't afford drugs, it's not a fundamental right", which was the "defense" of the current system one person posted! I mean, c'mon. Who cares if it's defined as a fundamental right? If we can come up with a system that allows for greater, more affordable health, without restricting individual freedom of speech and other fundamental rights, that other system should be considered. And, indeed, nobody here is talking about restricting fundamental rights; quite the opposite, indeed, since patents are government regulations and government restrictions.)
-Rob