You're right about the admins though, they most certainly won't let me have it. In fact, these boxes are so locked down, they're practically dumb terminals. Which is cool in a way, because these mere NT4 SP4 boxen appear to be as stable as some MS advocates say W2000 is. I do have issues with some of the UI decisions MS took though, so it probably will never be my favourite system, to put it mildly.
Agree with your description of the algorithm. Still, it relies on deliberate blurring. On a low-quality monitor this will reduce font quality.
As for my monitor, I was pleasantly surprised at its quality. It handles the 1280x1024 well. My eyes don't mind the 60Hz refresh, and it's otherwise well equipped to handle the sharpness. At 96x96 dpi it's far from print quality, but as I said, good Type 1 fonts are good enough not to need AA. I do use high quality 19" or 21" monitors at work, and I truly see not much of a difference.
While I will admit that AA looks nice on a decent monitor, I maintain that font quality is the most important aspect in determening the quality of the display.
Thanks for the tip. (Un)fortunately our admins have some clue, and these NT boxes are locked down pretty good. No third party software installs for me, sorry.
Yeah I know, my German is not perfect (I'm Dutch), but those babelfish translations hurt.
Gravenreuth vs. Linux distributor SuSE
After Samba and KIllustrator yet another Open Source program is keeping lawyers busy. Lawyer Guenther Freiherr(1) von Gravenreuth has obtained a preliminary injunction against German Linux distributor SuSE from the Muenchen State Court. The reason seems to be an Open Source program referenced on a SuSE-CD. It appears(2) that Gravenreuth has had the court forbid further shipments of the Neuremberg company's Linux distribution, as long as the contested program's name is used in that. This could lead to substantial losses for SuSE if it can no longer ship the already produced copies.
When asked, Freiherr von Gravenreuth confirmed to have obtained a preliminary injunction against the name(3) of an Open Source program. He declined to name further details because his client would want "to settle with the opposition" and did not want to be named. Christian Egle, press spokesman for SuSE GmbH, declared that his company would make its position known in the coming days.
Notes:
Freiherr: a title of minor nobility. Comparable to the English 'Sir'.
The original had "Offenbar" which can be translated in a variety of ways. I think that "It appears" is best here.
"Kennzeichnung" litteraly means "designation", or "distinguishing aspect". In context, "name" makes sense, but it is not the best translation.
I did have to play a little with the sentence construction, but I think this will make sense.
On a side note: Why does this bloody Windows (I'm at work) insist on raising the focused window? At home (Debian GNU/Linux) I could have left the original article on top and typed in the textbox simultaneously. Now I had to switch constantly. Grrr.
Well, AA text only gives us flashness, not readability. Well-designed (and well-implemented) fonts is what is needed.
Hogwash. Maybe your monitor is just so fuzzy that you can't tell the difference.
More hogwash. If you use decent Type 1 or Truetype fonts on a high resolution, Anti-Aliasing will decrease text quality. This is inherent in the algorithm employed. Remember that AA is a deliberate blurring of the font outlines in order to create the illusion of smoother curves/gradients.
Anecdotal evidence: I run a 17" monitor at 1280x1024, and with my default font set to Adobe New Century Schoolbook I have sharp and smooth text in Gnome. In KDE with AA turned on, everything becomes blurry.
Perhaps your fonts are so bad you think you need AA, but as the parent says, decent scalable screen fonts make AA all but unnecessary. It is mere eye candy.
The German magazine C't did a test of copy protected CDs recently. They found out that all protected CDs messed with the recorded audio in contravention of the standard. They communicated this to Philips' legal department. According to C't (a very trustworthy source) the Philips legal department reacted 'very interested'.
I don't know if this means Philips will take immediate action or sit on the sidelines until copy protection becomes common, but at least it is an encouraging sign. I believe they will take action sooner or later, as trying to sell CD-ROMS, CD/RW drives and DVD/RW drives is one of their core businesses, and these schemes will eat into that, and unlike other major vendors (*cough* Sony *cough*) Philips has no content division to contend with (they sold it about 2 years ago).
Time to give off a signal. Philips makes good, possibly even great equipment, and they appear to have a bit of a clue, so I'd say next time you need a stereo, TV, or CD(R/W) drive, buy Philips and be sure to let them know why.
Narsil will be reforged. The only question at this point is when Aragorn will receive Anduril.
He is already carrying it. If you look closely at the sword he is wearing in Bree, and the sword he is ominously holding on Caradhras (when Frodo loses the ring and Boromir is reluctant to give it back), you will see that that is a different sword he is wearing there. Look at the hilt: the one he is holding on Caradhras is longer. In D&D terms, in Bree he is wearing a mere longsword, while Anduril might qualify more as a bastardsword.
I hope you catch this, but a story in one of the more recent issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact did just that. If it is not available online, I can try to OCR it for you. My email addy is in my user info.
Slashdotters get this wrong so often in any Intellectual Property discussion that the one time it is correct, there is noone pointing out the reason for Red Hat's policy:
The name Red Hat is a trademark, and they cannot hold on to the trademark if they don't prevent dilution.
I think it is fine. They are acting to protect a valuable part of their business, their name recognition, and they are doing so in a nice, cooperative manner (no cease and desists yet, I hope?). I think the Linux community in general should support them on this, as it is only fair.
I am still rather new at combatting spam, but I subscribed to news.admin.net-abuse.email just in time to see the whole-of-nanae vs. Bennet Hasselton flame war in all its glory (and the Hipfloods of course). Bennet was not doing his cause any good in that discussion, and his prolific public defense of Media3 definitely served to paint spam opponents black.
...You're not trolling. I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan myself, and your impression is correct: for all Tolkien's strengths as a storyteller, his pacing is occasionally horrendous, especially in 'The Fellowship'.
Mostly this is because he is trying to fill in lots of background, and because he is trying to create an impression of the world.
If you can persist through 'The Fellowship', you will find that the story really picks up in 'The Two Towers' and apart from a few slow scenes in Frodo's trek through Mordor the pace becomes positively hectic.
Just persist, or even skim a little, and you will find that the story will start sucking you in from the moment the fellowship breaks up.
Yep, I guess that, in some parts of Europe at least, there will be more demand for network services per square kilometer. On the gripping hand, you do know that laying cable in densely populated urban areas is a lot more expensive than laying it in sparsely populated rural areas?
In Windows, you conceivably could boot into it for the first time 4 minutes ago, and 4 minutes later be able to figure out how to do sharing
And 5 minutes later your box is trojaned because you left the shares world-writeable. That is the problem with Windows: By oversimplifying things that are complex by nature, it sets up its users for disaster.
Ok, that refreshed my memory indeed. The Z80 starts, the boot rom checks for a CP/M boot floppy, and if it doesn't find it, it returns control to the 8502, which proceeds by running through the kernal initialisation/reset routine.
No, the MMU was a seperate chip. You are right though, the processor and the special chips (VIC and SID) in the C128 were all 85xx numbers. The difference was in the voltages being used to drive them I believe.
And I am quite sure that the Z80 wasn't turned on until you put in a CP/M boot disk. The regular way the C128 booted was by starting the kernal startup routine over jump vector 0xFFFE (IIRC that is the standard reset vector for a 65xx derivative. I could be mixing it up with the NMI though). The C128 kernal was no different from the original PET kernal as used from the PET series onwards, except for a few extra functions, such as PRIMM, and of course it could handle burst speeds on the serial IEEE bus it used for its disk drives.
I really liked those Commodore machines. They had a nice clean design, and were easy to hack around with. Taught me a lot of basic computer knowledge that did.
Ah, but that's the beauty of this show. It's actually a real-life implementation of the Prisoner's Dillema: Cooperate for a long term larger profit, or screw your opponent for a short-term smaller profit.
I do see all possible strategies implemented, but in the end the players that go home with the most amount of money are those that vote off the weakest link, not the strongest one.
I know you tried to be funny, but you are actually wrong. The Z80 in the C128 doesn't boot the machine. The C128 is actually a dual-processor machine: its main processor is a 6510 (a 6502 with a built-in I/O port). The Z80 must be specifically switched on, and when it is, it starts executing the CP/M BIOS and boots CP/M from a floppy.
The problem with WL is that the brightest out of the bunch almost never wins. By logic, when it gets down to the last 3 or 4, it's in the best interests of the other players to vote out the player who is clearly the strongest. This has happened on almost every single episode I've watched, sometimes quite a bit earlier in the game as well.
Frankly, although a very human thing to do, this is actually the dumbest strategy to use on 'The Weakest Link', as it is the stronger players that fill the pot by giving correct answers. Remember that there is a geometric progression in the prize money for every right answer. In fact, Anne Robinson keeps harping on that during the entire show (at least on the British shows). Perhaps the US candidates are too dumb to see this?
Bruce Schneier has remarked on this before: Microsoft treats vulnerabilities as a PR problem, not a security problem. This article proves that, since it is a marketeer acting as spokesperson on this vulnerability, and not Scott Culp, who is in charge of security at MS, and who should by rights be commenting on it.
lso, isn't there a company that holds a trademark on the term "CD"?
Yep. That would be Philips. And according to an article in the German magazine C't their legal department was very interested in hearing that people were selling CDs with the CDDA logo, while not being compliant with the standard.
From what I've seen in their marketing lately, Philips is doing the right thing. They are a hardware company now, after selling their music division 3 years ago, and they just want to sell good hardware. I think Philips may very well be interested in keeping 'fair use' alive if that means shifting more CD/DVD RW players.
Mart
Re:I'm another who doesn't understand the hype
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Is the rest of child-oriented literature really so bad that Harry Potter and the Philosophers' Stone seems godlike by comparison?
In a word: Yes.
At least here in the Netherlands there is a culture that says that children's literature must be in the first place educational, or pedagogical or any such buzzwords as are spouted by those purveyors of that soul-destroying pseudo-science that is called 'child psychology'. From what I've heard (I haven't read the books yet) J.K. Rowling hit on exactly what kids want: a good story.
Incidentally, the secondary (or even tertiary) importance of story, plot and likeable characters is what is considered vogue among so-called 'serious' adult literature too. Perhaps that is the reason that adults latch on to Harry Potter with the same fanaticism as kids seem to do.
You may have a point there. You did not say that any.rpm would install. I do read that implication in your review though, but that may be because, as I said, it is a very common mistake.
Anyway, thanks for a good review. It was overall factual and informative.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, bit of a brainfart there.
You're right about the admins though, they most certainly won't let me have it. In fact, these boxes are so locked down, they're practically dumb terminals. Which is cool in a way, because these mere NT4 SP4 boxen appear to be as stable as some MS advocates say W2000 is. I do have issues with some of the UI decisions MS took though, so it probably will never be my favourite system, to put it mildly.
MartOk, before some moderator goes mad, it was not my intention to use the +1 bonus, It just activated for the first time on this post.
MartAgree with your description of the algorithm. Still, it relies on deliberate blurring. On a low-quality monitor this will reduce font quality.
As for my monitor, I was pleasantly surprised at its quality. It handles the 1280x1024 well. My eyes don't mind the 60Hz refresh, and it's otherwise well equipped to handle the sharpness. At 96x96 dpi it's far from print quality, but as I said, good Type 1 fonts are good enough not to need AA. I do use high quality 19" or 21" monitors at work, and I truly see not much of a difference.
While I will admit that AA looks nice on a decent monitor, I maintain that font quality is the most important aspect in determening the quality of the display.
Thanks for the tip. (Un)fortunately our admins have some clue, and these NT boxes are locked down pretty good. No third party software installs for me, sorry.
MartYeah I know, my German is not perfect (I'm Dutch), but those babelfish translations hurt.
Gravenreuth vs. Linux distributor SuSE
After Samba and KIllustrator yet another Open Source program is keeping lawyers busy. Lawyer Guenther Freiherr(1) von Gravenreuth has obtained a preliminary injunction against German Linux distributor SuSE from the Muenchen State Court. The reason seems to be an Open Source program referenced on a SuSE-CD. It appears(2) that Gravenreuth has had the court forbid further shipments of the Neuremberg company's Linux distribution, as long as the contested program's name is used in that. This could lead to substantial losses for SuSE if it can no longer ship the already produced copies.
When asked, Freiherr von Gravenreuth confirmed to have obtained a preliminary injunction against the name(3) of an Open Source program. He declined to name further details because his client would want "to settle with the opposition" and did not want to be named. Christian Egle, press spokesman for SuSE GmbH, declared that his company would make its position known in the coming days.
Notes:
- Freiherr: a title of minor nobility. Comparable to the English 'Sir'.
- The original had "Offenbar" which can be translated in a variety of ways. I think that "It appears" is best here.
- "Kennzeichnung" litteraly means "designation", or "distinguishing aspect". In context, "name" makes sense, but it is not the best translation.
I did have to play a little with the sentence construction, but I think this will make sense.On a side note: Why does this bloody Windows (I'm at work) insist on raising the focused window? At home (Debian GNU/Linux) I could have left the original article on top and typed in the textbox simultaneously. Now I had to switch constantly. Grrr.
MartMore hogwash. If you use decent Type 1 or Truetype fonts on a high resolution, Anti-Aliasing will decrease text quality. This is inherent in the algorithm employed. Remember that AA is a deliberate blurring of the font outlines in order to create the illusion of smoother curves/gradients.
Anecdotal evidence: I run a 17" monitor at 1280x1024, and with my default font set to Adobe New Century Schoolbook I have sharp and smooth text in Gnome. In KDE with AA turned on, everything becomes blurry.
Perhaps your fonts are so bad you think you need AA, but as the parent says, decent scalable screen fonts make AA all but unnecessary. It is mere eye candy.
MartTrue.
The German magazine C't did a test of copy protected CDs recently. They found out that all protected CDs messed with the recorded audio in contravention of the standard. They communicated this to Philips' legal department. According to C't (a very trustworthy source) the Philips legal department reacted 'very interested'.
I don't know if this means Philips will take immediate action or sit on the sidelines until copy protection becomes common, but at least it is an encouraging sign. I believe they will take action sooner or later, as trying to sell CD-ROMS, CD/RW drives and DVD/RW drives is one of their core businesses, and these schemes will eat into that, and unlike other major vendors (*cough* Sony *cough*) Philips has no content division to contend with (they sold it about 2 years ago).
Time to give off a signal. Philips makes good, possibly even great equipment, and they appear to have a bit of a clue, so I'd say next time you need a stereo, TV, or CD(R/W) drive, buy Philips and be sure to let them know why.
MartNonononooooh! Not rock, fudge! That way we will have Hot Fudge Sundae (which falls on a Tuesday this year).
Mart (who saw a similar calculation before in one of his favourite novels)He is already carrying it. If you look closely at the sword he is wearing in Bree, and the sword he is ominously holding on Caradhras (when Frodo loses the ring and Boromir is reluctant to give it back), you will see that that is a different sword he is wearing there. Look at the hilt: the one he is holding on Caradhras is longer. In D&D terms, in Bree he is wearing a mere longsword, while Anduril might qualify more as a bastardsword.
MartI hope you catch this, but a story in one of the more recent issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact did just that. If it is not available online, I can try to OCR it for you. My email addy is in my user info.
Mart...to all the Slashdot staff and readership too!
Down here in the Netherlands we've done the gifts already on the 5th, but for those that do at Christmas, I wish you get your hearts' desires.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year all!
MartSlashdotters get this wrong so often in any Intellectual Property discussion that the one time it is correct, there is noone pointing out the reason for Red Hat's policy:
I think it is fine. They are acting to protect a valuable part of their business, their name recognition, and they are doing so in a nice, cooperative manner (no cease and desists yet, I hope?). I think the Linux community in general should support them on this, as it is only fair.
MartNo you're not.
I am still rather new at combatting spam, but I subscribed to news.admin.net-abuse.email just in time to see the whole-of-nanae vs. Bennet Hasselton flame war in all its glory (and the Hipfloods of course). Bennet was not doing his cause any good in that discussion, and his prolific public defense of Media3 definitely served to paint spam opponents black.
Mart...You're not trolling. I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan myself, and your impression is correct: for all Tolkien's strengths as a storyteller, his pacing is occasionally horrendous, especially in 'The Fellowship'.
Mostly this is because he is trying to fill in lots of background, and because he is trying to create an impression of the world.
If you can persist through 'The Fellowship', you will find that the story really picks up in 'The Two Towers' and apart from a few slow scenes in Frodo's trek through Mordor the pace becomes positively hectic.
Just persist, or even skim a little, and you will find that the story will start sucking you in from the moment the fellowship breaks up.
MartYep, I guess that, in some parts of Europe at least, there will be more demand for network services per square kilometer. On the gripping hand, you do know that laying cable in densely populated urban areas is a lot more expensive than laying it in sparsely populated rural areas?
So I guess it balances out in the end.
MartAnd 5 minutes later your box is trojaned because you left the shares world-writeable. That is the problem with Windows: By oversimplifying things that are complex by nature, it sets up its users for disaster.
MartOk, that refreshed my memory indeed. The Z80 starts, the boot rom checks for a CP/M boot floppy, and if it doesn't find it, it returns control to the 8502, which proceeds by running through the kernal initialisation/reset routine.
Mart (don't tell me I still got it wrong?)No, the MMU was a seperate chip. You are right though, the processor and the special chips (VIC and SID) in the C128 were all 85xx numbers. The difference was in the voltages being used to drive them I believe.
And I am quite sure that the Z80 wasn't turned on until you put in a CP/M boot disk. The regular way the C128 booted was by starting the kernal startup routine over jump vector 0xFFFE (IIRC that is the standard reset vector for a 65xx derivative. I could be mixing it up with the NMI though). The C128 kernal was no different from the original PET kernal as used from the PET series onwards, except for a few extra functions, such as PRIMM, and of course it could handle burst speeds on the serial IEEE bus it used for its disk drives.
I really liked those Commodore machines. They had a nice clean design, and were easy to hack around with. Taught me a lot of basic computer knowledge that did.
MartAh, but that's the beauty of this show. It's actually a real-life implementation of the Prisoner's Dillema: Cooperate for a long term larger profit, or screw your opponent for a short-term smaller profit.
I do see all possible strategies implemented, but in the end the players that go home with the most amount of money are those that vote off the weakest link, not the strongest one.
MartI know you tried to be funny, but you are actually wrong. The Z80 in the C128 doesn't boot the machine. The C128 is actually a dual-processor machine: its main processor is a 6510 (a 6502 with a built-in I/O port). The Z80 must be specifically switched on, and when it is, it starts executing the CP/M BIOS and boots CP/M from a floppy.
Mart (who hacked on one of those things)sessamoid wrote:
Frankly, although a very human thing to do, this is actually the dumbest strategy to use on 'The Weakest Link', as it is the stronger players that fill the pot by giving correct answers. Remember that there is a geometric progression in the prize money for every right answer. In fact, Anne Robinson keeps harping on that during the entire show (at least on the British shows). Perhaps the US candidates are too dumb to see this?
MartFrothy Walrus wrote:
Maybe because of this:
.Bruce Schneier has remarked on this before: Microsoft treats vulnerabilities as a PR problem, not a security problem. This article proves that, since it is a marketeer acting as spokesperson on this vulnerability, and not Scott Culp, who is in charge of security at MS, and who should by rights be commenting on it.
MartYep. That would be Philips. And according to an article in the German magazine C't their legal department was very interested in hearing that people were selling CDs with the CDDA logo, while not being compliant with the standard.
From what I've seen in their marketing lately, Philips is doing the right thing. They are a hardware company now, after selling their music division 3 years ago, and they just want to sell good hardware. I think Philips may very well be interested in keeping 'fair use' alive if that means shifting more CD/DVD RW players.
MartIn a word: Yes.
At least here in the Netherlands there is a culture that says that children's literature must be in the first place educational, or pedagogical or any such buzzwords as are spouted by those purveyors of that soul-destroying pseudo-science that is called 'child psychology'. From what I've heard (I haven't read the books yet) J.K. Rowling hit on exactly what kids want: a good story.
Incidentally, the secondary (or even tertiary) importance of story, plot and likeable characters is what is considered vogue among so-called 'serious' adult literature too. Perhaps that is the reason that adults latch on to Harry Potter with the same fanaticism as kids seem to do.
MartHmmm,
You may have a point there. You did not say that any .rpm would install. I do read that implication in your review though, but that may be because, as I said, it is a very common mistake.
Anyway, thanks for a good review. It was overall factual and informative.
Mart