Glad you like it. We don't do anything special, really. It's mostly just FreeType doing the rendering, and HarfBuzz doing the text layout. Hinting is turned off by default, though, as we find that looks a lot better once you get to 200dpi. A 2012 Nexus 7 is now considered a fairly low resolution device, even though its 216 dpi would be pretty amazing on a desktop.
The new CFF renderer that's now open sourced and part of FreeType should make the rendering of CFF fonts a lot better.
Well, I for one think the world would be a sadder place without pompous nerds like me. Not, of course, on the same level of cultural tragedy as if there weren't anonymous trolls, but still.
I took college classes from 9 to 13, then my parents pulled me out entirely. There were good and bad aspects to my path. At 13, actual graduate math classes were a bit over my head, and I felt a lot of pressure and feelings of failure because I couldn't quite hack them. Also, being isolated was hard, and it wasn't until I came back to grad school at 22 that I felt I developed my social skills properly. But being allowed to focus on intellectual pursuits was really nice in a way, and I actually look back on that fondly. Now I have my PhD and work for Google, and I do geeky things for fun. As one example, I'm noodling on keyboards, and, being me, I'm writing a DX7 synthesizer emulator. Most people consider the math of it to be impenetrably difficult, but, I'm like, "oh, _Bessel_ functions, I can dig that shit!"
I hope he does well and finds a path that makes him happy. One thing my parents did was keep me out of the newspapers (and off the front page of Slashdot, although we didn't have that then). I'm not sure whether that was entirely good or bad - publicity is valuable coin in today's society:)
Yep, that's me. And thanks a bunch for the recognition. I think there's more life in those concepts, and we'll probably see them continue to evolve, but it's taking way more time than any of us imagined in those heady, fast-moving days.
As you can see from my uid, I've been with you since almost the beginning. At times I've been frustrated with the quality of the posts, especially the pseudoscience garbage, but/. has always been one of my go-to places, and always enough interesting content to make it worthwhile to visit. Plus, the format of the site, especially the moderation system, has proved to have enduring worth, even with all the other changes going on. I wish you the best of success in whatever you choose to do next.
I did a couple of things like this back in the mid-90's. One used iterated fractals. I think the original idea was by Ian Goldberg, and I added the coloring.
http://www.tastyrabbit.net/visprint/
But I wasn't satisified by the fact that lots of different hash values produced similar-looking images, so I also cooked up one that had a guarantee that a single-bit change in the hash led to at least a single-bit difference in the image, and came up with these snowflakes:
That post is but one Googler's opinion. Here is another. Clearly, there is much in that original post with which I disagree, and neither of us is representing official Google policy.
The health insurance system in this country needs changing. If anyone tries to convince you otherwise, look at them as an arm of an organized, effective, and massively funded propaganda campaign. And if they're an unwitting arm, that just means they're not smart enough to tap in to their share of the obscene overhead that the insurance industry rakes in.
Overall, I think Google is going to do a lot more good than evil in terms of contributing to the debate on healthcare reform. If I thought this, or anything else they were doing, was really evil, I would not be working there.
I've been at Google a month now, and I am finding it very satisfying, even more so than I hoped for. A great deal of the corporate culture is simply about removing barriers that might keep you from doing your work. The Tech Stops are a perfect example of that - if you have a problem, they usually just fix it right then and there.
Before I joined up, I assumed that the meals were basically a strategy to extract the most hours of work from employees. Now that I'm here, I'm finding that it doesn't feel like "work late and we'll feed you" at all. Rather, it's an opportunity to get to know people better, make friends, build and strengthen those connections. And range and depth of talent of the people is truly incredible.
There's a lot more to the food than it being free, too. It's not just that it's "gourmet" either. Amazingly, the people who make and serve the food are as passionate about it as the engineers are about software. There's a garden inside the main campus where they grow veggies, and they use local sources as much as possible. Today, for a snack I had strawberries that were every bit as good as the wild ones I picked from patches when I was a boy. Turns out, they were grown right next to where the barista in my building's coffee bar lives. Earlier this week, there was pizza for the open source tech talk, and the guy who made it brought it himself, and chatted with the guests. That kind of quality and connection is something that I think everybody should aspire to in their lives, in food and in other areas.
I can see that not everybody would have a good experience working for Google, especially people who need their hand held all the time, or who have difficulty balancing the demands of work, life, family, etc. I personally like being treated like a grown-up, and appreciate being able to treat other people the same. But the culture there probably isn't for everybody.
If you look at the numbers Apple is claiming vs. the latest numbers posted at the SPEC site, then it would appear that the G5 is getting creamed by the Pentium 4 / Xeon.
First, single CPU performance. Apple claims 840 for SPECfp_base2000, and 800 for SPECint_base2000. A Dell Precision 360 with 3.2GHz P4 and DDR400 memory gives 1267 and 1242, respectively.
Next, dual-CPU. Apple claims 15.7 for SPECfp_rate_base2000 and 17.2 for SPECint_rate_base2000. A Dell Precision Workstation 650 with dual 3.06 GHz Xeons gives 18.0 and 25.6, respectively.
Of course, there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks, but in this case I think it's fair to compare actual SPEC numbers with vendor claims.
And don't get me wrong, I think Apples are wonderful systems. I recommend them to many of my friends. But for raw CPU power, they lag the Intel powerhouse.
My original thesis work was how to do this right
on
DNSSEC: Good Enough?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
But after wrestling with it for a long time, I've concluded that it's a very difficult problem.
I originally started investigating trust metrics as a way to identify trustworthy, credible sources of name->key binding data. The trust metrics turned out to be interesting and useful on their own, and a lot easier to deploy successfully. I think there's a lot of important research still to be done on the problem, but I'm not especially hopeful that it'll get done any time soon. For one, if your goal is to avoid single points of vulnerability, you have to build the service as a peer-to-peer network, and we're still struggling with the best way to design those, even for relatively simple tasks such as media piracy^Wsharing, much less anything mission-critical.
I do hope that anyone seriously looking into the question of secure name services at least skims my thesis drafts. There are some good ideas in there, and I have a funny feeling that people will be remaking all the same mistakes I did.
Re:Have to side with the GNU folks here.
on
Ghostscript Leaves GNU
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Mmm, nothing like being slashdotted. I'll try to comment on some factual points, though.
There is no "Artifex Public License". There is the AFPL, or "Aladdin Free Public License," but we've never claimed this to be open-source, as it's not consistent with the Open Source Definition.
Our decision separate from the GNU name has no effect on the freedoms guaranteed to our users. We've always done a GPL release within a year of the AFPL release, and will continue to do so.
The text quoted above correctly describes the AFPL versions of Ghostscript - commercial distribution is not allowed. However, commercial Linux distributions do of course distribute the GPL version.
No, it doesn't matter which. The torrent file is identical from both sources, and connects you to the same tracker. As it turns out, server load for the tracker is pretty minimal, but each download of the.torrent file chews up 150k or so.
Sounds like a trust metric to me
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 2
Hi,
Interesting proposal, 0x0d0a. It's quite similar to the trust metric work I've been pursuing for my PhD thesis, and which is implemented in Advogato.
In general, I find the attack-resistance of your proposal to be sound. However, because your horizon only goes out to a horizon of two, it's an easier problem to solve than the general trust case. If you try to extend your system to more hops, you'll probably find that the trust values fade very fast. This was one of the less expected results I found when I implemented the eigenvector-based diary ratings at Advogato.
In any case, I encourage you to look at my trust metric work, and to use the code I've released as well as the trust graph available at Advogato. This will probably help you test and develop your ideas further.
Heh, the PigeonRank page is definitely the best April Fools joke so far.
As part of my PhD research, I've been doing some analysis of the PageRank algorithm. A few weeks ago, I did some analysis of the attack-resistance properties, and found that it is one of two known instances of an attack resistant trust metric (the other being Advogato. To me, this is pretty exciting, as it would seem to support my belief that trust metrics have much wider use than the PKI-like applications that originally motivated my research.
The analysis of PageRank is in Chapter 6 of my thesis-in-progress. Also in the chapter is a discussion of how to apply the trust metric to more general metadata, as well as a distributed network model of the trust metric.
Serious hackers will also be interested in my spiffy research implementation of PageRank.
I'm very much interested in connecting with others who understand and appreciate these results. Lord knows why I'm posting to Slashdot... oh well, time to go back to feeding my pigeons.
From your description, it sounds like you are converting RGB colors into XYZ using only a linear matrix multiplication. This isn't correct - you also need to take gamma into account. If you want to follow a standard, try the sRGB colorspace. Otherwise, it might be good enough to simply raise the raw RGB values to the power of 2.4 or so before the matrix multiplication.
CIELAB is reasonably accurate for evaluating color differences, but research in color spaces that more accurately reflect perception is ongoing - a good recent paper is this one. Also, the Argyll color management system implements most of the color goodies you might want, including CIECAM97 (which is widely considered to be an improvement over CIELab).
It's amazing to me how little (and poorly) color theory is taught, in spite of color being one of the more universal human experiences. My guess is that this is largely to do with the cross-disciplinary nature of color. It's not merely a branch of physics, psychophysiology, pigment chemistry, math, or art, but overlaps all of them.
I didn't intend my diary entry to be a negative review of Argyll at all. In fact, I am very impressed with the software.
The problem with Argyll at present is that nobody has (yet) integrated all the pieces in such a way that your average graphic artist can make high quality profiles. The pieces are there, and they're of quite high quality. But (at present) you have to have some serious color science knowledge to ensure that you get good results.
My latest attempt at a profile on Argyll produces breathtaking clarity, but I'm still dealing with a purple hue shift for deep blues, which I'm pretty sure is caused by my use of CIE La*b* as the interim color space for gamut compression rather than CIECAM97. Argyll has support for the latter, it's just not what I used.
So I'm very hopeful that Argyll will serve as the engine for truly topnotch color management in the free software world. I'm not going to say anything about how long that will take, though. Right now, I'm not getting all that much encouragement from the user community, who seems to vastly prefer whining on Slashdot about how the current state of affairs is inadequate, rather than rolling up their sleeves, learning some color theory, building profiles, and helping develop the solution.
There, I've just whined on Slashdot myself. Thanks, I feel better now.
Re:What's most interesting..
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> And they did it without any help from the Open Source community.
Guess again. Gobe Productive actually uses Libart for the cool vector rendering. Not only that, but they've contributed some nice patches back, and they've paid for bug-fixing and enhancement work. So I think they do get the Open Source thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that sounds like a great company to work for. I wish I worked at a place that open-minded.
Oh, wait :)
print("\u{1F1E8}\u{1F1ED}")
Nope.
Glad you like it. We don't do anything special, really. It's mostly just FreeType doing the rendering, and HarfBuzz doing the text layout. Hinting is turned off by default, though, as we find that looks a lot better once you get to 200dpi. A 2012 Nexus 7 is now considered a fairly low resolution device, even though its 216 dpi would be pretty amazing on a desktop.
The new CFF renderer that's now open sourced and part of FreeType should make the rendering of CFF fonts a lot better.
Ahem.
Well, I for one think the world would be a sadder place without pompous nerds like me. Not, of course, on the same level of cultural tragedy as if there weren't anonymous trolls, but still.
I took college classes from 9 to 13, then my parents pulled me out entirely. There were good and bad aspects to my path. At 13, actual graduate math classes were a bit over my head, and I felt a lot of pressure and feelings of failure because I couldn't quite hack them. Also, being isolated was hard, and it wasn't until I came back to grad school at 22 that I felt I developed my social skills properly. But being allowed to focus on intellectual pursuits was really nice in a way, and I actually look back on that fondly. Now I have my PhD and work for Google, and I do geeky things for fun. As one example, I'm noodling on keyboards, and, being me, I'm writing a DX7 synthesizer emulator. Most people consider the math of it to be impenetrably difficult, but, I'm like, "oh, _Bessel_ functions, I can dig that shit!"
I hope he does well and finds a path that makes him happy. One thing my parents did was keep me out of the newspapers (and off the front page of Slashdot, although we didn't have that then). I'm not sure whether that was entirely good or bad - publicity is valuable coin in today's society :)
Yep, that's me. And thanks a bunch for the recognition. I think there's more life in those concepts, and we'll probably see them continue to evolve, but it's taking way more time than any of us imagined in those heady, fast-moving days.
As you can see from my uid, I've been with you since almost the beginning. At times I've been frustrated with the quality of the posts, especially the pseudoscience garbage, but /. has always been one of my go-to places, and always enough interesting content to make it worthwhile to visit. Plus, the format of the site, especially the moderation system, has proved to have enduring worth, even with all the other changes going on. I wish you the best of success in whatever you choose to do next.
I did a couple of things like this back in the mid-90's. One used iterated fractals. I think the original idea was by Ian Goldberg, and I added the coloring.
http://www.tastyrabbit.net/visprint/
But I wasn't satisified by the fact that lots of different hash values produced similar-looking images, so I also cooked up one that had a guarantee that a single-bit change in the hash led to at least a single-bit difference in the image, and came up with these snowflakes:
http://members.shaw.ca/dlakwi/snowflake/snowflake.html
Could be this is a better and slicker implementation than any of this stuff, but the underlying ideas are not quite new.
Nonono, what you really want to do is run a system daemon that pops up an X11 window every two hours with that message.
That post is but one Googler's opinion. Here is another. Clearly, there is much in that original post with which I disagree, and neither of us is representing official Google policy.
The health insurance system in this country needs changing. If anyone tries to convince you otherwise, look at them as an arm of an organized, effective, and massively funded propaganda campaign. And if they're an unwitting arm, that just means they're not smart enough to tap in to their share of the obscene overhead that the insurance industry rakes in.
Overall, I think Google is going to do a lot more good than evil in terms of contributing to the debate on healthcare reform. If I thought this, or anything else they were doing, was really evil, I would not be working there.
I've been at Google a month now, and I am finding it very satisfying,
even more so than I hoped for. A great deal of the corporate culture
is simply about removing barriers that might keep you from doing your
work. The Tech Stops are a perfect example of that - if you have a
problem, they usually just fix it right then and there.
Before I joined up, I assumed that the meals were basically a strategy
to extract the most hours of work from employees. Now that I'm here,
I'm finding that it doesn't feel like "work late and we'll feed you"
at all. Rather, it's an opportunity to get to know people better, make
friends, build and strengthen those connections. And range and depth
of talent of the people is truly incredible.
There's a lot more to the food than it being free, too. It's not just
that it's "gourmet" either. Amazingly, the people who make and serve
the food are as passionate about it as the engineers are about
software. There's a garden inside the main campus where they grow
veggies, and they use local sources as much as possible. Today, for a
snack I had strawberries that were every bit as good as the wild ones
I picked from patches when I was a boy. Turns out, they were grown
right next to where the barista in my building's coffee bar lives.
Earlier this week, there was pizza for the open source tech talk, and
the guy who made it brought it himself, and chatted with the guests.
That kind of quality and connection is something that I think
everybody should aspire to in their lives, in food and in other areas.
I can see that not everybody would have a good experience working for
Google, especially people who need their hand held all the time, or
who have difficulty balancing the demands of work, life, family, etc.
I personally like being treated like a grown-up, and appreciate being
able to treat other people the same. But the culture there probably
isn't for everybody.
If you look at the numbers Apple is claiming vs. the latest numbers posted at the SPEC site, then it would appear that the G5 is getting creamed by the Pentium 4 / Xeon.
First, single CPU performance. Apple claims 840 for SPECfp_base2000, and 800 for SPECint_base2000. A Dell Precision 360 with 3.2GHz P4 and DDR400 memory gives 1267 and 1242, respectively.
Next, dual-CPU. Apple claims 15.7 for SPECfp_rate_base2000 and 17.2 for SPECint_rate_base2000. A Dell Precision Workstation 650 with dual 3.06 GHz Xeons gives 18.0 and 25.6, respectively.
Of course, there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks, but in this case I think it's fair to compare actual SPEC numbers with vendor claims.
And don't get me wrong, I think Apples are wonderful systems. I recommend them to many of my friends. But for raw CPU power, they lag the Intel powerhouse.
The proposal for the secure nameserver is here: http://www.levien.com/fc.ps
And the draft thesis version is here: http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf
I originally started investigating trust metrics as a way to identify trustworthy, credible sources of name->key binding data. The trust metrics turned out to be interesting and useful on their own, and a lot easier to deploy successfully. I think there's a lot of important research still to be done on the problem, but I'm not especially hopeful that it'll get done any time soon. For one, if your goal is to avoid single points of vulnerability, you have to build the service as a peer-to-peer network, and we're still struggling with the best way to design those, even for relatively simple tasks such as media piracy^Wsharing, much less anything mission-critical.
I do hope that anyone seriously looking into the question of secure name services at least skims my thesis drafts. There are some good ideas in there, and I have a funny feeling that people will be remaking all the same mistakes I did.
Mmm, nothing like being slashdotted. I'll try to comment on some factual points, though.
There is no "Artifex Public License". There is the AFPL, or "Aladdin Free Public License," but we've never claimed this to be open-source, as it's not consistent with the Open Source Definition.
Our decision separate from the GNU name has no effect on the freedoms guaranteed to our users. We've always done a GPL release within a year of the AFPL release, and will continue to do so.
The text quoted above correctly describes the AFPL versions of Ghostscript - commercial distribution is not allowed. However, commercial Linux distributions do of course distribute the GPL version.
No, it doesn't matter which. The torrent file is identical from both sources, and connects you to the same tracker. As it turns out, server load for the tracker is pretty minimal, but each download of the .torrent file chews up 150k or so.
Interesting proposal, 0x0d0a. It's quite similar to the trust metric work I've been pursuing for my PhD thesis, and which is implemented in Advogato.
In general, I find the attack-resistance of your proposal to be sound. However, because your horizon only goes out to a horizon of two, it's an easier problem to solve than the general trust case. If you try to extend your system to more hops, you'll probably find that the trust values fade very fast. This was one of the less expected results I found when I implemented the eigenvector-based diary ratings at Advogato.
In any case, I encourage you to look at my trust metric work, and to use the code I've released as well as the trust graph available at Advogato. This will probably help you test and develop your ideas further.
Here's a url with links to most of the other stuff I'm talking about: http://www.levien.com/free/tmetric-HOWTO.html
I would greatly appreciate a listing of the files
in a Lindows install. If you can do this, please get in touch.
Heh, the PigeonRank page is definitely the best April Fools joke so far.
As part of my PhD research, I've been doing some analysis of the PageRank algorithm. A few weeks ago, I did some analysis of the attack-resistance properties, and found that it is one of two known instances of an attack resistant trust metric (the other being Advogato. To me, this is pretty exciting, as it would seem to support my belief that trust metrics have much wider use than the PKI-like applications that originally motivated my research.
The analysis of PageRank is in Chapter 6 of my thesis-in-progress. Also in the chapter is a discussion of how to apply the trust metric to more general metadata, as well as a distributed network model of the trust metric.
Serious hackers will also be interested in my spiffy research implementation of PageRank.
I'm very much interested in connecting with others who understand and appreciate these results. Lord knows why I'm posting to Slashdot... oh well, time to go back to feeding my pigeons.
From your description, it sounds like you are converting RGB colors into XYZ using only a linear matrix multiplication. This isn't correct - you also need to take gamma into account. If you want to follow a standard, try the sRGB colorspace. Otherwise, it might be good enough to simply raise the raw RGB values to the power of 2.4 or so before the matrix multiplication.
CIELAB is reasonably accurate for evaluating color differences, but research in color spaces that more accurately reflect perception is ongoing - a good recent paper is this one. Also, the Argyll color management system implements most of the color goodies you might want, including CIECAM97 (which is widely considered to be an improvement over CIELab).
It's amazing to me how little (and poorly) color theory is taught, in spite of color being one of the more universal human experiences. My guess is that this is largely to do with the cross-disciplinary nature of color. It's not merely a branch of physics, psychophysiology, pigment chemistry, math, or art, but overlaps all of them.
Try the gamut changes and see if that helps.
The reason you're stuck with low-speed Internet access is because your last mile is fiber, not copper.
Wow.
Hi Tim,
I didn't intend my diary entry to be a negative review of Argyll at all. In fact, I am very impressed with the software.
The problem with Argyll at present is that nobody has (yet) integrated all the pieces in such a way that your average graphic artist can make high quality profiles. The pieces are there, and they're of quite high quality. But (at present) you have to have some serious color science knowledge to ensure that you get good results.
My latest attempt at a profile on Argyll produces breathtaking clarity, but I'm still dealing with a purple hue shift for deep blues, which I'm pretty sure is caused by my use of CIE La*b* as the interim color space for gamut compression rather than CIECAM97. Argyll has support for the latter, it's just not what I used.
So I'm very hopeful that Argyll will serve as the engine for truly topnotch color management in the free software world. I'm not going to say anything about how long that will take, though. Right now, I'm not getting all that much encouragement from the user community, who seems to vastly prefer whining on Slashdot about how the current state of affairs is inadequate, rather than rolling up their sleeves, learning some color theory, building profiles, and helping develop the solution.
There, I've just whined on Slashdot myself. Thanks, I feel better now.
> And they did it without any help from the Open Source community.
Guess again. Gobe Productive actually uses Libart for the cool vector rendering. Not only that, but they've contributed some nice patches back, and they've paid for bug-fixing and enhancement work. So I think they do get the Open Source thing.
Actually, the slowdown is a stupid locking bug I just haven't gotten around to fixing on the production server.
'Course that won't stop me from suing the perpetrator under the DMCA anyway, once I find out who he is.