The real reason is that Apple's OS is not only better at handling the higher DPI but looks BETTER the higher it goes and at the same time, Microsoft's OS looks worse the more you try to scale it to a high DPI system.
Microsoft actually created their own fonts(think Arial) and rendering system for the sole purpose of making them look crisp on a low resolution display but at the same time they have painted themselves into a corner. They would have to change their GDI APIs to adopt a more Applish system and that would cause a whole slew of software compatibility issues. It's a chicken or the egg style problem.
You better patent the technique now Alan before the system changes from first to discover to first to file. Nvidia could just patent it and then you wouldn't be able to use it either.
Orange Juice is the death knell for almost any keyboard. I had to eventually throw away my old Atari 800 after spilling OJ on it... no amount of taking it apart and cleaning it would keep some of the keys from sticking in the down position.
Has any of your work been impacted or covered up by the USPTO's ability to declare a patent a secret? Were you compensated for the loss? How do feel about the confiscation both personally and in general?
Tabs are easiest to use. Its easy to convert tabs to spaces and not so easy to do the oppposite. When forced to use spaces for indents... i use one space... hehe... makes it easier for me to convert to tabs later on.
My girlfriend/wife/parent could have installed the software and agreed to the clickwrap license, but that doesn't mean that i do just because i sit down at that computer and start using it.
I have yet to see a clickwrap license that says only the clicker of this license may be allowed access to the machine this software will reside on.
No, you are wrong. Grammatical corrections AND language translation have been held by case law in the US to not be copyrightable. Books such as Moby-Dick(written in 1850-1851), under US copyright law, have no copyright protection. They are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. You can, by law, copy them as often as you wish and mail copies to every one in the US.
Software, when purchased in a store is exactly the same. Before you are forced to read the shrink wrap lincense but after you purchase the product, you may sell it to whoever you wish. This is assuming that the shrink wrap lincense is legally enforcible.
UCITA legislation recently passed in Maryland and Virginia. One of the purposes of UCITA was to make shrink wrap licences legally enforcable. If you live in one of those states they are. If you don't they most likely aren't. But the courts are still wrestling with this one.
The best thing to do is to take a little time and go research the issues. You can find the laws online(no your laws[other than building codes, but thats another story] are not copyrighted!). You can find the case law on-line. Do the research and come to your own conclusions.
Mr. Sklyarov will be found innocent either at trial or in pre-trial motions not because the "law is bad" but because the law doesn't apply to him.
Let me explain. The DMCA, contrairy to what some others have said, did not render his presentation in Las Vegas illegal. He was arrested for creating and distributing his illegal program. The problem with that is that established case law in this country will easily refute the charges.
Let me further explain. Previous cases have shown that when a non-US citizen does something outside the US that he/she could not forsee having an immediate impact on US citizens or property, that case is thrown out. Its thrown out because the US has no jursdiction over what was done.
How does this relate to the Sklyarov case? Mr. Sklyarov WROTE the program outside the US... no jurisdiction. He DISTRIBUTED the program to his parent company... no jurisdiction. His parent company then distributed the program to people in the US... possible jurisdiction. In any event, unless it can be shown that Mr. Sklyarov personally emailed a copy of his program to someone in the US, the US has NO JURISDICTION.
In other words the FBI arrested the wrong person. At best they could bring charges against the owner of the company if it is a private company or possibly the partners in a partnership or possibly the relevant employees in a corporation which would be whoever decided to specifically sell or license the software to US entities.
I agree that this law is evil and un-American and flies in the face of the Constitution, but this case will more than likely not resolve that dispute. Portions of the DMCA will most likely be ruled unconstitional by the supreme court of the US as a result of one of the other cases going on right now. Probably the Edward Felten case.
This begs the question from me - why reinvent the wheel?
Because the wheel needed reinventing.
Couldn't resources be better spent optimizing or developing any number of open graphics standards instead of pumping dev time into a relatively closed standard such as DirectX?
If you want to work on "optimizing or developing any number of open graphics standards
", then go ahead. These people want to work on DirectX support.
IMO, the advances made with DirectX compatibility via WINE will be redundant by the time they are finished. Graphics technologies move at insanely fast rate (I had read moores law CUBED somewhere) and by the time that yesteday's great DirectX functions are working great in WINE, we will already be two generations ahead.
MAME and its Linux sidekick XMAME are emulators for old game consoles and arcade coin-op games. People use these because they like playing old games. I certainly love playing my Atari 8-bit version of Mr. Do on my PC. As long as there are "classic" games, there will be people willing to spend time on emulation needed to play those "classic" games.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but DirectX is primarily used by games. I've never seen a killer office app that depends heavily on complex graphic functions via DirectX. Most applications dont need insane graphics acceleration. This move seems to be targeted towards making three-year old games run well in WINE. Why devote such resources to something in which very few people will actually have any benefit from?
"Very few people".... You mean not you! Back up "very few people" with some statistics. One of the great things about open source is that anyone can contribute in any way they see fit. If some"one" is contributing to Wine 3D Gaming, then at least one person has an interest in it and thats all it takes. You have no right to dictate what open source project deserves more attention. It is up to each and every one of us to decide how we can contribute to a greater whole.
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The real reason is that Apple's OS is not only better at handling the higher DPI but looks BETTER the higher it goes and at the same time, Microsoft's OS looks worse the more you try to scale it to a high DPI system.
Microsoft actually created their own fonts(think Arial) and rendering system for the sole purpose of making them look crisp on a low resolution display but at the same time they have painted themselves into a corner. They would have to change their GDI APIs to adopt a more Applish system and that would cause a whole slew of software compatibility issues. It's a chicken or the egg style problem.
See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
You better patent the technique now Alan before the system changes from first to discover to first to file. Nvidia could just patent it and then you wouldn't be able to use it either.
Orange Juice is the death knell for almost any keyboard. I had to eventually throw away my old Atari 800 after spilling OJ on it... no amount of taking it apart and cleaning it would keep some of the keys from sticking in the down position.
Has any of your work been impacted or covered up by the USPTO's ability to declare a patent a secret? Were you compensated for the loss? How do feel about the confiscation both personally and in general?
Tabs are easiest to use. Its easy to convert tabs to spaces and not so easy to do the oppposite. When forced to use spaces for indents... i use one space... hehe... makes it easier for me to convert to tabs later on.
My girlfriend/wife/parent could have installed the software and agreed to the clickwrap license, but that doesn't mean that i do just because i sit down at that computer and start using it.
I have yet to see a clickwrap license that says only the clicker of this license may be allowed access to the machine this software will reside on.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
No, you are wrong. Grammatical corrections AND language translation have been held by case law in the US to not be copyrightable. Books such as Moby-Dick(written in 1850-1851), under US copyright law, have no copyright protection. They are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. You can, by law, copy them as often as you wish and mail copies to every one in the US.
Software, when purchased in a store is exactly the same. Before you are forced to read the shrink wrap lincense but after you purchase the product, you may sell it to whoever you wish. This is assuming that the shrink wrap lincense is legally enforcible.
UCITA legislation recently passed in Maryland and Virginia. One of the purposes of UCITA was to make shrink wrap licences legally enforcable. If you live in one of those states they are. If you don't they most likely aren't. But the courts are still wrestling with this one.
The best thing to do is to take a little time and go research the issues. You can find the laws online(no your laws[other than building codes, but thats another story] are not copyrighted!). You can find the case law on-line. Do the research and come to your own conclusions.
Mr. Sklyarov will be found innocent either at trial or in pre-trial motions not because the "law is bad" but because the law doesn't apply to him. Let me explain. The DMCA, contrairy to what some others have said, did not render his presentation in Las Vegas illegal. He was arrested for creating and distributing his illegal program. The problem with that is that established case law in this country will easily refute the charges. Let me further explain. Previous cases have shown that when a non-US citizen does something outside the US that he/she could not forsee having an immediate impact on US citizens or property, that case is thrown out. Its thrown out because the US has no jursdiction over what was done. How does this relate to the Sklyarov case? Mr. Sklyarov WROTE the program outside the US... no jurisdiction. He DISTRIBUTED the program to his parent company... no jurisdiction. His parent company then distributed the program to people in the US... possible jurisdiction. In any event, unless it can be shown that Mr. Sklyarov personally emailed a copy of his program to someone in the US, the US has NO JURISDICTION. In other words the FBI arrested the wrong person. At best they could bring charges against the owner of the company if it is a private company or possibly the partners in a partnership or possibly the relevant employees in a corporation which would be whoever decided to specifically sell or license the software to US entities. I agree that this law is evil and un-American and flies in the face of the Constitution, but this case will more than likely not resolve that dispute. Portions of the DMCA will most likely be ruled unconstitional by the supreme court of the US as a result of one of the other cases going on right now. Probably the Edward Felten case.
This begs the question from me - why reinvent the wheel?
Because the wheel needed reinventing.
Couldn't resources be better spent optimizing or developing any number of open graphics standards instead of pumping dev time into a relatively closed standard such as DirectX?
If you want to work on "optimizing or developing any number of open graphics standards ", then go ahead. These people want to work on DirectX support.
IMO, the advances made with DirectX compatibility via WINE will be redundant by the time they are finished. Graphics technologies move at insanely fast rate (I had read moores law CUBED somewhere) and by the time that yesteday's great DirectX functions are working great in WINE, we will already be two generations ahead.
MAME and its Linux sidekick XMAME are emulators for old game consoles and arcade coin-op games. People use these because they like playing old games. I certainly love playing my Atari 8-bit version of Mr. Do on my PC. As long as there are "classic" games, there will be people willing to spend time on emulation needed to play those "classic" games.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but DirectX is primarily used by games. I've never seen a killer office app that depends heavily on complex graphic functions via DirectX. Most applications dont need insane graphics acceleration. This move seems to be targeted towards making three-year old games run well in WINE. Why devote such resources to something in which very few people will actually have any benefit from?
"Very few people".... You mean not you! Back up "very few people" with some statistics. One of the great things about open source is that anyone can contribute in any way they see fit. If some"one" is contributing to Wine 3D Gaming, then at least one person has an interest in it and thats all it takes. You have no right to dictate what open source project deserves more attention. It is up to each and every one of us to decide how we can contribute to a greater whole.