Possibly OT, but many LCDs really don't like to be run higher than 60Hz. In fact, my Viewsonic's manual states explicitly that doing so for long periods will destroy it. Just something you might want to check.
It shouldn't ever take more than 30 seconds to turn on subpixel rendering on any system and have the fonts look better than without it.
If anything, blame your vendor for shipping the instructions (in form of a driver) for getting it running under Windows but not under X.
Do advertisers really give a crap about reaching poor people?
"Have you been exposed to ASBESTOS? Were you HURT ON THE JOB? Do you have MERCURY FILLINGS? Have you ever STUBBED YOUR TOE? Someone may OWE YOU MONEY!"
I used to like watching stupid TV shows when I had to stay home sick from work. "Texas Justice" is ideally suited to semi-hallucinational viewing; even if you miss 10 minutes to go vomit, you can pick up where you left off afterward (it's like TiVo in your brain!). Watching hundreds of ads for personal injury lawyers, check cashing companies, guaranteed-issue credit cards, and sure-fire roads to success kinda ruins the experience.
Yes, but there are a great many Americans who do rely on television to stay connected to the world
There are worse things in life than reading a newspaper. They have in-depth news coverage, classified ads (ever gotten a job through TV that didn't require you to invest?), comics for when you need a laugh, and coupons. Use an average of one $0.50 coupon per day and they pay for themselves. Use more than that and you're making a profit off the deal.
Besides, I'd bet it's easy to get a subsidized newspaper subscription if you ask someone. I'd buy someone a year of the local rag before I'd give them a month of basic cable.
So, what did you use for the horizontal and vertical sizes? My first guess would be something like 337mm x 270mm - is that approximate what you came up with?
BTW, what's your refresh set to?
I still don't think that X's use of possible incorrect DCC values makes it inherently bad. You probably had to load a monitor driver to get Windows to look good on LCD, unless you're very lucky. If Dell gave you a valid X.org config section on the driver disk alongside the Windows drivers, chances are we wouldn't be having this conversation.
hazardous for hundreds of thousands or millions of years
Nitpick: The longer the half-life, the fewer decays per unit time. Stuff that's dangerous for a couple of days is far, far more dangerous than the basically stable elements you mentioned.
Work system:
Distro: Gentoo (before that: Debian, with same results)
KDE version: 3.{4.1,4.0,3.x,2.x,1.x}
X11 version: X.org 6.{8.2, 8.1, 8.0} and XFree86 4.x before that
Font: Bitstream *, MSTT (Arial, TNR, etc.) sizes 13 and up (for normal text like reading web pages, text editing, etc. Smaller than that for icon labels and so on).
Monitor: Viewsonic VA721
Graphics card: Onboard nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] rev 162 (according to Xorg.0.log)
Home system:
Distro: FreeBSD 5-STABLE
KDE version: 3.4.0
X11 version: X.org 6.8.2
Font: same as above
Monitor: Samsung something or another
Graphics card: nVidia something or another
One critical note that another poster mentioned: you have to make sure that your DisplaySize is exactly correct! I added this to the Monitor section of my xorg.conf:
DisplaySize 325 260
That magically upgraded my display from "looks awful" to "Cleartype? Bah!"
Re:Concentrate on decent font supp -- mod parent u
on
Xorg and Desktop Eyecandy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Fonts in linux do suck
Categorically: no. Fonts on your system suck. On my system, they look as good as they do on the nearby PCs and Macs. Whether because of
hardware issues with your particular setup, or
you're using a strange distro that doesn't have necessary support for decent subpixel AA (note: even the name brand guys screw up sometimes so "mine must be right because I use $foo!" will be ignored), or
you haven't set it up correctly,
your situation is not universal. I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but I can't stand people claiming that "Linux can't do $bar" when I personally use it to do $bar every day. Certain may have problems with $bar on their setup, but that doesn't mean that no one else can manage it.
Re:Concentrate on decent font supp -- mod parent u
on
Xorg and Desktop Eyecandy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Here's a hint: when people say they've tried damn near everything
No you didn't. You said that you tried a few things but completely left out how you tried to go about them. Maybe your attempts were misguided and you missed the obvious solution? If the grandparent used the same method to configure two different operating systems on two different pieces of hardware, maybe he's on to something that you're overlooking.
Just because you're less bad than 19/20 of entrants in a particular contest not related to the subject at hand doesn't mean that you're an expert on this topic.
Father of two daughters approaching college faster than he wants to admit.
Same boat - I am so not looking forward to that day.
OP: Got a webserver of your own? Why not put the Windows equivalent of "curl http://myserver.example.com/secretpage" in autoexec.bat or whatever passes for a bootup script these days? If the laptop goes missing, watch your server logs like a hawk and get ready to call the police the instant a geographically-identifiable IP makes a request.
...at sequential reading. Wanna run the same test with bonnie++ or another benchmark that slams the drive with random accesses? I'll bet the near-zero seek penalty on solid state media makes up for quite a bit of its currently mediocre sequential access.
Imagine a database where you're writing millions of tiny blocks of data all over the place. Within reason, fast seeks are about as important as fast IO.
What I said was that COMPANIES do not have to pay for it, thus it makes Canada more attractive to companies.
Where's -1: Failed Econ 101 when you need it?
There are two ways this can go:
Government taxes corporations to pay for national health care.
Government taxes employees to pay for national health care.
In the first case, the companies have to pay for health care. In the second case, the companies have to pay the employees more to give them the same net income. Either way, the companies are paying for health care. Honestly, where do people get this dumb idea that it's possible to selectively tax certain parties without them spreading the joy?
Now, it's reasonable to debate whether the amount they pay is reasonable for the breadth and depth of coverage supplied to Canada's citizens. There's no obviously "correct" answer to that question. However, pretending that the taxes manifest themselves from the aether doesn't give your argument a lot of credence.
Canada has a universal healthcare system so corporations do not have to pay for their employees health care
You mean that health care is free in Canada? I always assumed that is was paid for by taxes, presumably on those same corporations that would be paying for health insurance in the US.
Without illegal aliens, the Americans working as unskilled labor would enjoy a sudden and dramatic boost in their wages
...and they all lived Happily Ever After. Because, as we all know, unskilled labor was previously well paying, carried lots of benefits, and was staffed by educated full-time workers.
In reality, though, few adults compete with immigrants for low-paying, unskilled work. I don't have much time or energy to pity the high school students who are undercut in their summer jobs by people who've moved here to experience The American Way.
The role of the military is to turn otherwise rational people into state killers.
My role in the military was to become an operating room technician. It did this by giving me an associate's degree in biology upon completion of a year of 50-hour-a-week schooling. Fortunately, almost everyone in my class lived in off-base civilian housing, so there was plenty of time to try to learn to surf, enjoy the San Diego night life, and otherwise enjoy being a young adult in SoCal.
I think your perception of military life is bizarrely wrong, at least for those in technical jobs. Sure, the Army has a big infantry. I never personally knew a single person in the Navy whose direct job was killing, though.
You must be a frickin' genius, considering the ASVAB is a percentile score. Unless, that is, you meant 119 on the raw score (range: 80-320), in which case I rescind the "genius" part.
No, you are selling the website to the client, not thier customers. If the client is thinking in terms of pretty pictures instead of useability and robust technology, then you give them pretty pictures.
Not if you want to keep them, you don't. If someone goes to a doctor, they expect to be given a treatment plan to follow. They go to a lawyer or accountant because they don't know those fields forward and backward. They go to you because they don't understand the web. If you give them what they want instead of what they need, then they'll drive you crazy asking why they're not getting as many visitors as they thought they should. Do you want to be the one to tell them that it's because the work you did for them is inferior, even if only because you did what they asked?
If you're just starting out, it can be tempting or necessary to take on bad clients. However, you can and should prioritize your clients based on their willingness to let you do the job that you specialize in once you can afford to do so.
I've told would-be customers to take their business elsewhere - that my reputation was more important than their money. Lord knows I'm not Bill Gates, so if I can do it, you probably can, too.
There are great places for virtual filesystem code
...until you bring in cross-platform compatibility as a requirement. I run KDE on FreeBSD, not Linux, so kernel layers are right out. By the time you go through all the work of making nice, portable virtual filesystem layers, I imagine you'll inevitably end up with something at least as complex as KIO slaves anyway.
Re:An interesting thing to watch
on
KOffice 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
HTML is supposed to be a "standard" but it's often forgivable when pages render differently from machine to machine and browser to browser.
Forgivable? Expected! No one should reasonably think that a page will render the same on IE at 640x480 as Konqueror at 1600x1200. The web is not print; it's a complete different media.
But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.
People who expect word processor documents to be to-the-pixel identical on different machines are on crack. What if the recipient of your document uses a different paper size than you (eg letter vs A4)?
If you need exact positioning, then use a page layout system or language. Getting consistent results from a word processor is simply coincidental, even if that's what usually happens. Chalk it up to luck and plan better next time if it's really important to you.
But OpenOffice is painful for me to use in an otherwise KDE-only desktop. For starters, it doesn't use KIO slaves, so I can't open files fish sftp:// fish://, or webdav:// from remote hosts. That and a million other small things (like load time) make KWord much more pleasant for me in daily usage.
I'm glad we have two strong, popular office suites that don't compete for resources -- that is, KDE folks probably have little interest in hacking OpenOffice and vice versa. Now that they'll be sharing a common file format, it'll be nice to be able to pick the right tool for a particular job and know that users can still view the results in their environment of choice.
There's no point in arguing politics, the one truth is that there is no truth
You're wrong and I CAN PROVE IT BY YELLING LOUDER THAN YOU.
Even in a newspaper we let reporters, people with $$$, hollywood stars (WTF?!?) and politicians shape our news.
In all seriousness, thanks for the reminder. As broken as Slashdot's moderation is, at least we don't have to tolerate much "+5: Famous", except for the occasional visit from Wil Wheaton, and he's good people.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly OT, but many LCDs really don't like to be run higher than 60Hz. In fact, my Viewsonic's manual states explicitly that doing so for long periods will destroy it. Just something you might want to check.
It shouldn't ever take more than 30 seconds to turn on subpixel rendering on any system and have the fonts look better than without it.
If anything, blame your vendor for shipping the instructions (in form of a driver) for getting it running under Windows but not under X.
"Have you been exposed to ASBESTOS? Were you HURT ON THE JOB? Do you have MERCURY FILLINGS? Have you ever STUBBED YOUR TOE? Someone may OWE YOU MONEY!"
I used to like watching stupid TV shows when I had to stay home sick from work. "Texas Justice" is ideally suited to semi-hallucinational viewing; even if you miss 10 minutes to go vomit, you can pick up where you left off afterward (it's like TiVo in your brain!). Watching hundreds of ads for personal injury lawyers, check cashing companies, guaranteed-issue credit cards, and sure-fire roads to success kinda ruins the experience.
FWIW, in my experience a 5 minute timeout is every bit as effective as a 4 hour (?!?!?) delay, so don't assume that more is better.
<plug>More good ideas at Free Software Magazine.</plug>
There are worse things in life than reading a newspaper. They have in-depth news coverage, classified ads (ever gotten a job through TV that didn't require you to invest?), comics for when you need a laugh, and coupons. Use an average of one $0.50 coupon per day and they pay for themselves. Use more than that and you're making a profit off the deal.
Besides, I'd bet it's easy to get a subsidized newspaper subscription if you ask someone. I'd buy someone a year of the local rag before I'd give them a month of basic cable.
BTW, what's your refresh set to?
I still don't think that X's use of possible incorrect DCC values makes it inherently bad. You probably had to load a monitor driver to get Windows to look good on LCD, unless you're very lucky. If Dell gave you a valid X.org config section on the driver disk alongside the Windows drivers, chances are we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Nitpick: The longer the half-life, the fewer decays per unit time. Stuff that's dangerous for a couple of days is far, far more dangerous than the basically stable elements you mentioned.
Distro: Gentoo (before that: Debian, with same results)
KDE version: 3.{4.1,4.0,3.x,2.x,1.x}
X11 version: X.org 6.{8.2, 8.1, 8.0} and XFree86 4.x before that
Font: Bitstream *, MSTT (Arial, TNR, etc.) sizes 13 and up (for normal text like reading web pages, text editing, etc. Smaller than that for icon labels and so on).
Monitor: Viewsonic VA721
Graphics card: Onboard nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] rev 162 (according to Xorg.0.log)
Home system:
Distro: FreeBSD 5-STABLE
KDE version: 3.4.0
X11 version: X.org 6.8.2
Font: same as above
Monitor: Samsung something or another
Graphics card: nVidia something or another
One critical note that another poster mentioned: you have to make sure that your DisplaySize is exactly correct! I added this to the Monitor section of my xorg.conf:
That magically upgraded my display from "looks awful" to "Cleartype? Bah!"
Categorically: no. Fonts on your system suck. On my system, they look as good as they do on the nearby PCs and Macs. Whether because of
your situation is not universal. I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but I can't stand people claiming that "Linux can't do $bar" when I personally use it to do $bar every day. Certain may have problems with $bar on their setup, but that doesn't mean that no one else can manage it.
No you didn't. You said that you tried a few things but completely left out how you tried to go about them. Maybe your attempts were misguided and you missed the obvious solution? If the grandparent used the same method to configure two different operating systems on two different pieces of hardware, maybe he's on to something that you're overlooking.
Just because you're less bad than 19/20 of entrants in a particular contest not related to the subject at hand doesn't mean that you're an expert on this topic.
So use some of that 74MW of excess power to drive a big frickin' air conditioner. Sheesh, people get some vision!
Same boat - I am so not looking forward to that day.
OP: Got a webserver of your own? Why not put the Windows equivalent of "curl http://myserver.example.com/secretpage" in autoexec.bat or whatever passes for a bootup script these days? If the laptop goes missing, watch your server logs like a hawk and get ready to call the police the instant a geographically-identifiable IP makes a request.
...and don't get me started on the issue of remixes.
...at sequential reading. Wanna run the same test with bonnie++ or another benchmark that slams the drive with random accesses? I'll bet the near-zero seek penalty on solid state media makes up for quite a bit of its currently mediocre sequential access.
Imagine a database where you're writing millions of tiny blocks of data all over the place. Within reason, fast seeks are about as important as fast IO.
Where's -1: Failed Econ 101 when you need it?
There are two ways this can go:
In the first case, the companies have to pay for health care. In the second case, the companies have to pay the employees more to give them the same net income. Either way, the companies are paying for health care. Honestly, where do people get this dumb idea that it's possible to selectively tax certain parties without them spreading the joy?
Now, it's reasonable to debate whether the amount they pay is reasonable for the breadth and depth of coverage supplied to Canada's citizens. There's no obviously "correct" answer to that question. However, pretending that the taxes manifest themselves from the aether doesn't give your argument a lot of credence.
You mean that health care is free in Canada? I always assumed that is was paid for by taxes, presumably on those same corporations that would be paying for health insurance in the US.
...and they all lived Happily Ever After. Because, as we all know, unskilled labor was previously well paying, carried lots of benefits, and was staffed by educated full-time workers.
In reality, though, few adults compete with immigrants for low-paying, unskilled work. I don't have much time or energy to pity the high school students who are undercut in their summer jobs by people who've moved here to experience The American Way.
My role in the military was to become an operating room technician. It did this by giving me an associate's degree in biology upon completion of a year of 50-hour-a-week schooling. Fortunately, almost everyone in my class lived in off-base civilian housing, so there was plenty of time to try to learn to surf, enjoy the San Diego night life, and otherwise enjoy being a young adult in SoCal.
I think your perception of military life is bizarrely wrong, at least for those in technical jobs. Sure, the Army has a big infantry. I never personally knew a single person in the Navy whose direct job was killing, though.
You must be a frickin' genius, considering the ASVAB is a percentile score. Unless, that is, you meant 119 on the raw score (range: 80-320), in which case I rescind the "genius" part.
Sincerely,
"99" from Navy boot camp class 92086.
Sounds fishy to me.
Not if you want to keep them, you don't. If someone goes to a doctor, they expect to be given a treatment plan to follow. They go to a lawyer or accountant because they don't know those fields forward and backward. They go to you because they don't understand the web. If you give them what they want instead of what they need, then they'll drive you crazy asking why they're not getting as many visitors as they thought they should. Do you want to be the one to tell them that it's because the work you did for them is inferior, even if only because you did what they asked?
If you're just starting out, it can be tempting or necessary to take on bad clients. However, you can and should prioritize your clients based on their willingness to let you do the job that you specialize in once you can afford to do so.
I've told would-be customers to take their business elsewhere - that my reputation was more important than their money. Lord knows I'm not Bill Gates, so if I can do it, you probably can, too.
...until you bring in cross-platform compatibility as a requirement. I run KDE on FreeBSD, not Linux, so kernel layers are right out. By the time you go through all the work of making nice, portable virtual filesystem layers, I imagine you'll inevitably end up with something at least as complex as KIO slaves anyway.
Forgivable? Expected! No one should reasonably think that a page will render the same on IE at 640x480 as Konqueror at 1600x1200. The web is not print; it's a complete different media.
But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.
People who expect word processor documents to be to-the-pixel identical on different machines are on crack. What if the recipient of your document uses a different paper size than you (eg letter vs A4)?
If you need exact positioning, then use a page layout system or language. Getting consistent results from a word processor is simply coincidental, even if that's what usually happens. Chalk it up to luck and plan better next time if it's really important to you.
I'm glad we have two strong, popular office suites that don't compete for resources -- that is, KDE folks probably have little interest in hacking OpenOffice and vice versa. Now that they'll be sharing a common file format, it'll be nice to be able to pick the right tool for a particular job and know that users can still view the results in their environment of choice.
User: My computer's not working!
Tech: Imagine that it's working and look at it again.
User: Hey! How'd you do that?
Ugh. I never go there.
There's no point in arguing politics, the one truth is that there is no truth
You're wrong and I CAN PROVE IT BY YELLING LOUDER THAN YOU.
Even in a newspaper we let reporters, people with $$$, hollywood stars (WTF?!?) and politicians shape our news.
In all seriousness, thanks for the reminder. As broken as Slashdot's moderation is, at least we don't have to tolerate much "+5: Famous", except for the occasional visit from Wil Wheaton, and he's good people.