Maybe $200 products wouldn't be possible, but Microworkz did just do a $299 deal that did include Win98. I picked one up because it also came with a year of free dialup from Earthlink (my existing dialup ISP). That basically made it a $50 PC to play with. That's got to make the margins MUCH leaner than the one's they can get with the iToaster.
The Webzter (the PC I picked up from them) wasn't exactly a screamer, but Cyrix 300, 32/3.2/56K, etc. isn't bad. Of course it wasn't such a good deal if you needed to order the CD-ROM and floppy drive from them, but I had a couple of each lying around.
A couple of months ago, I was watching C-SPAN while staying home from work sick and they had a thing from a book trade show. Ingram (or somebody like them) was demonstrating this process they had of printing one copy of a book pretty much as cheaply as a bunch. They stored the book digitally and the machine printed cut and prepared it for the cover which was printed on a different machine a few feet away. The whole thing was done pretty quickly and looked pretty good. Ingram was touting it as a solution for out of print books. They were saying that when the system was entirely in place you could order an OOP book the same way you'd order any out of stock book from Ingram. For the customer it would be transparent. You order your book and either they find a copy or they print a new one. Forgive the errors in my memory of the show, but I found it interesting.
Since when did he say it was? His point wasn't that both types of replacement technologies were owned by Microsoft, but that two technologies that were supposed to replace some other technology haven't yet caught on. ActiveX was supposed to supplant Java and, as you said, PNG was to supplant GIF. His point is that neither of these things has happened yet.
PNG support is spotty. According to the spec it is superior, but no one has implemented the spec entirely that I know of. The GIF decoder isn't the issue, but the LZW compression encoder is.
For me, the loss of copyright would be felt more in the loss of attribution protection than in distribution protection.
I don't care if someone copies and passes to a friend a copy of a short story of mine. They can burn it onto CD, put it up on a web site, whatever as long as they don't get money for it. However, if they turn around and try to sell it to Harper Collins, the true benefit of copyright protection comes in. Because the story is attributed to me, only I have the right to sell it and claim it as mine.
The phrase "such as" is usually considered a parenthetical, and they should have included the commas to indicate meaning. The closer one is usually intended, except that the "such as" marks it off as a parenthetical statement.
I most wholeheartedly agree that the author needs to learn some simple communication skills.
Though it wasn't the best sentence ever, they were not claiming Stallman introduction of *Linux* in 1984.
As expected, Slashdot's readers gave Gore 2000 a shellacking for appropriating "open source" -- a tech reference for nonproprietary, open-to-all software systems such as the Linux OS that has attained mythical status since it was touted by the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman in 1984.
Parse the sentence. Everything following the dash is a definition of "open source". That which has "attained mythical status" and was "touted" is not the Linux OS, but the "tech reference for nonproprietary, open-to-all software systems" *SUCH AS LINUX*. All they're saying is that Stallman touted OSS (though they should have used the "free" term) since 1984.
Anti-aliasing comes into play when you have a curve of any sort or a sharp edge. Try drawing a circle on graph paper and you'll see that you get a jagged edge around the curves. Anti-aliasing fills in the surrounding areas with blending colors to smooth out the jaggies. For transparency that can cause a problem when only one color is allowed as transparent like in GIF. Since the fill-in colors are a blend between the background and the object, there are many shades in between, but only one can be transparent. You end up with a halo of the blending colors around the object.
Response in Latin/French/Norse/Spanish English.
on
Feature:Free Linux
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· Score: 1
Since, without all of those and many more, English wouldn't be what it is today, we should change the name of the language. And for that matter, we should be sure to give credit to the European Catholic monks for keeping the Western writing system and literacy alive during the dark ages. Every time we use the Latin character set we should give credit to those monks and we should become Catholics, because that was the belief of those who kep the system alive.
We don't necessarily need to take on the beliefs of those to whom we are indebted. I'm thankful to William the Bastard for bringing the French infusion into England and increasing the vocabulary of the language. However, I think he was a jerk for doing it as well. I'm going to continue to use the words his actions infused, but I don't have to give him credit every time I use one.
Did you see the quality of the episode IV-VI film from the archives? They had to go to digital to save the film. It was really faded. And that's only 20 years old. Film fades and degrades over time. What happens if you expose your box of precious photgraphs to the extended times of bright light? They fade out. What happens if you leave a CD-ROM in the same light? Pretty much nothing. (heat would destroy both)
Are you trying to say that a 100 years from now, no one will be able to decode the data stream from a digital photo? You've got to be kidding me. Yes, VHS and other physical formats may have problems due to lack of hardware, but digital formats do not. Look at the fact that MP3 works on hard disk, removable disk, CD-ROM, streamed over a network . . . It doesn't matter because it's all just data. In the hundred years that pass from now till then, do you think that no one will make sure that their is software translation for the current DVD or other digital formats? We still build graphics software that opens the old 1 bit paint images, why would we abandon and be unable to decode other old forms of data. It just doesn't make sense.
After 12 inches of snow, I had to "hack" my way out of my driveway this morning in MN. Clean air, low cost of living etc. make MN full of benefits, just like Linux. Also, just like Linux, there are hardships, but some of us are weather and environment hackers, sub-zero cyclists, etc. who enjoy the challenge and the rewards of living here.
Most farmers are definitely not relying on anything that depends on Y2K stuff. On Dec 31, 1999 there will be 90,000 turkeys at my parents farm, and on Jan 1, 2000, there will be 90,000 turkeys on the farm. If the processing plant wants some of those, they will fill up their trucks with diesel (that they have in private tanks attached to analog number pumps), and drive to the farm, load up some of the turkeys and cut them up with knives.
The bank came out to my parents to check on their "Y2K compliance". My dad looked at them and said, "I'll write a different date on this piece of paper." Basically, there wasn't anything related to raising the turkey's that was directly dependant on anything affected by Y2K bugs.
When I was growing up we burned our trash in a major way. We took a Caterpiller (the big one) and created a garbage pit on the farm. It was at Least 15-20 feet deep at the deep end. We put old appliances, furniture, and all of our garbage in there and once every couple of months or so, we'd torch the whole works. That would condense what was in there and we could add to it again.
We also burned huge piles of brush and added tires and used oil to it to burn faster.
This kind of stuff is common among farmers, who are pretty much on their own for disposal of this stuff. In the city you just have to get rid of a couple of bags of garbage a week, but when a farm generates 4 or 5 dumpsters full of brush or other burnable garbage, and it costs a fortune to haul it away, they just torch it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe $200 products wouldn't be possible, but Microworkz did just do a $299 deal that did include Win98. I picked one up because it also came with a year of free dialup from Earthlink (my existing dialup ISP). That basically made it a $50 PC to play with. That's got to make the margins MUCH leaner than the one's they can get with the iToaster.
The Webzter (the PC I picked up from them) wasn't exactly a screamer, but Cyrix 300, 32/3.2/56K, etc. isn't bad. Of course it wasn't such a good deal if you needed to order the CD-ROM and floppy drive from them, but I had a couple of each lying around.
A couple of months ago, I was watching C-SPAN while staying home from work sick and they had a thing from a book trade show. Ingram (or somebody like them) was demonstrating this process they had of printing one copy of a book pretty much as cheaply as a bunch. They stored the book digitally and the machine printed cut and prepared it for the cover which was printed on a different machine a few feet away. The whole thing was done pretty quickly and looked pretty good. Ingram was touting it as a solution for out of print books. They were saying that when the system was entirely in place you could order an OOP book the same way you'd order any out of stock book from Ingram. For the customer it would be transparent. You order your book and either they find a copy or they print a new one. Forgive the errors in my memory of the show, but I found it interesting.
What the heck. I don't care if xoom.com dies.t .htm
http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/jwynia/counterran
Since when did he say it was? His point wasn't that both types of replacement technologies were owned by Microsoft, but that two technologies that were supposed to replace some other technology haven't yet caught on. ActiveX was supposed to supplant Java and, as you said, PNG was to supplant GIF. His point is that neither of these things has happened yet.
PNG support is spotty. According to the spec it is superior, but no one has implemented the spec entirely that I know of. The GIF decoder isn't the issue, but the LZW compression encoder is.
For me, the loss of copyright would be felt more in the loss of attribution protection than in distribution protection.
I don't care if someone copies and passes to a friend a copy of a short story of mine. They can burn it onto CD, put it up on a web site, whatever as long as they don't get money for it. However, if they turn around and try to sell it to Harper Collins, the true benefit of copyright protection comes in. Because the story is attributed to me, only I have the right to sell it and claim it as mine.
The phrase "such as" is usually considered a parenthetical, and they should have included the commas to indicate meaning. The closer one is usually intended, except that the "such as" marks it off as a parenthetical statement.
I most wholeheartedly agree that the author needs to learn some simple communication skills.
Though it wasn't the best sentence ever, they were not claiming Stallman introduction of *Linux* in 1984.
As expected, Slashdot's readers gave Gore 2000 a shellacking for appropriating "open source" -- a tech reference for nonproprietary, open-to-all software systems such as the Linux OS that has attained mythical status since it was touted by the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman in 1984.
Parse the sentence. Everything following the dash is a definition of "open source". That which has "attained mythical status" and was "touted" is not the Linux OS, but the "tech reference for nonproprietary, open-to-all software systems" *SUCH AS LINUX*. All they're saying is that Stallman touted OSS (though they should have used the "free" term) since 1984.
PLAY the little shockwave thing and see if you still think it's real.
There's also a native Win32 port of GIMP at:
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/
Paint Shop Pro at http://www.jasc.com. Doesn't implement it entirely, but it is there.
Anti-aliasing comes into play when you have a curve of any sort or a sharp edge. Try drawing a circle on graph paper and you'll see that you get a jagged edge around the curves. Anti-aliasing fills in the surrounding areas with blending colors to smooth out the jaggies. For transparency that can cause a problem when only one color is allowed as transparent like in GIF. Since the fill-in colors are a blend between the background and the object, there are many shades in between, but only one can be transparent. You end up with a halo of the blending colors around the object.
Since, without all of those and many more, English wouldn't be what it is today, we should change the name of the language. And for that matter, we should be sure to give credit to the European Catholic monks for keeping the Western writing system and literacy alive during the dark ages. Every time we use the Latin character set we should give credit to those monks and we should become Catholics, because that was the belief of those who kep the system alive.
We don't necessarily need to take on the beliefs of those to whom we are indebted. I'm thankful to William the Bastard for bringing the French infusion into England and increasing the vocabulary of the language. However, I think he was a jerk for doing it as well. I'm going to continue to use the words his actions infused, but I don't have to give him credit every time I use one.
Did you see the quality of the episode IV-VI film from the archives? They had to go to digital to save the film. It was really faded. And that's only 20 years old. Film fades and degrades over time. What happens if you expose your box of precious photgraphs to the extended times of bright light? They fade out. What happens if you leave a CD-ROM in the same light? Pretty much nothing. (heat would destroy both)
Are you trying to say that a 100 years from now, no one will be able to decode the data stream from a digital photo? You've got to be kidding me. Yes, VHS and other physical formats may have problems due to lack of hardware, but digital formats do not. Look at the fact that MP3 works on hard disk, removable disk, CD-ROM, streamed over a network . . . It doesn't matter because it's all just data. In the hundred years that pass from now till then, do you think that no one will make sure that their is software translation for the current DVD or other digital formats? We still build graphics software that opens the old 1 bit paint images, why would we abandon and be unable to decode other old forms of data. It just doesn't make sense.
After 12 inches of snow, I had to "hack" my way out of my driveway this morning in MN. Clean air, low cost of living etc. make MN full of benefits, just like Linux. Also, just like Linux, there are hardships, but some of us are weather and environment hackers, sub-zero cyclists, etc. who enjoy the challenge and the rewards of living here.
Most farmers are definitely not relying on anything that depends on Y2K stuff. On Dec 31, 1999 there will be 90,000 turkeys at my parents farm, and on Jan 1, 2000, there will be 90,000 turkeys on the farm. If the processing plant wants some of those, they will fill up their trucks with diesel (that they have in private tanks attached to analog number pumps), and drive to the farm, load up some of the turkeys and cut them up with knives.
The bank came out to my parents to check on their "Y2K compliance". My dad looked at them and said, "I'll write a different date on this piece of paper." Basically, there wasn't anything related to raising the turkey's that was directly dependant on anything affected by Y2K bugs.
When I was growing up we burned our trash in a major way. We took a Caterpiller (the big one) and created a garbage pit on the farm. It was at Least 15-20 feet deep at the deep end. We put old appliances, furniture, and all of our garbage in there and once every couple of months or so, we'd torch the whole works. That would condense what was in there and we could add to it again.
We also burned huge piles of brush and added tires and used oil to it to burn faster.
This kind of stuff is common among farmers, who are pretty much on their own for disposal of this stuff. In the city you just have to get rid of a couple of bags of garbage a week, but when a farm generates 4 or 5 dumpsters full of brush or other burnable garbage, and it costs a fortune to haul it away, they just torch it.