Yes bundled DVD players exist. The original poster was asking about the reviewer's comment about "paying to add a DVD player to Linux". As far as I know this is totally impossible. The only options are to buy a Linux that includes a DVD player, put a free DVD player on it, or not play DVD's at all.
No, if he was talking about tarballs he would certainly mention that you had to type commands into a terminal, not "how to handle permissions". I agree I'm not sure what he is saying or talking about here. Fact is RPM's (unless you are an expert) don't give you much choice over permissions or where to install.
That argument makes no sense. If Microsoft was willing to lie and copy GPL code, then they are equally willing to lie about not looking at it. In fact somebody can claim "by saying they are not looking at GPL code, they must be covering something up, therefore their denial is proof that they are copying it".
There is no way for Microsoft to prevent made-up accusations like this and it is insane for them to change their behavior and limit their options because of this. I can claim they are killing kittens in their basement and the fact that such an accusation is possible does not mean they must avoid any contact between their employees and kittens. The exact same thing is true of GPL code, there is no logical reason to avoid looking at it.
It was his house, which he probably couldn't take to Morroco anyway. And it will probably sit there untouched and unsold by the feds and if he gets out of this he will get it back. So it is possible he got out of this for free!
you're saying a Windows developer could freely, minutely examine the Linux kernel, and then, without any degree of fear of legal repercussion, *implement the ideas expressed in that code* without GPL or other legal fallout. To be clear, he doesn't copy a single line of code, just reuses the good ideas, tweaks things based on the insights he gains, etc.
Do you really claim that?
Yes I am claiming that.
Read RMS's rants some time. Take a look at where he talks about reverse engineering. Even he says that learning from the source code is more important than some attempt to prevent a company from using your ideas.
Also legally the GPL is based on copyright, and only grants some exceptions to it's rules. Copyright allows exactly what you state above, therefore there is no way for the GPL to prevent it.
I think the only dangerous code is where people who read it have to sign NDA's or contracts that say they cannot copy any of the ideas.
Yes from further comments it sounds like it was possible to make this be a user-space program, and this is the solution being used for many other closed USB devices such as scanners and some other cameras. So I'm beginning to think the author is the one at fault, I cannot blame the kernel maintainers for wanting to limit the binary-loading interfaces to a small controlled area.
In addition another post apparently from some people who have studied the camera seems to indicate that the plugin was simply doing image processing of the same image, not reading extra data from the camera. No wonder Phillips want's it closed source! (if this is true, of course. But tricks like this are another danger of closed source that nobody here has mentioned).
I have no doubt they do use binaries of GPL'd projects (but would naturally avoid tainting themselves by looking, let along modifying, sources).
There is nothing wrong with looking at the source or even modifying it. Microsoft knows this (although they won't say that publically to avoid counteracting their FUD) and I'm sure they are modifying and testing GPL code plenty in there.
What they cannot do (without releasing the source) is redistribute the software. And they are not doing that.
"tainting" is a bogus argument, used to scare people from the GPL. I know for a fact that Microsoft has zero qualms about hiring people with intimate familiarity with GPL software, so they are litarlly lying when they make claims about this. If in fact "tainting" was true, Microsoft could not hire anybody with a single bit of exposure to any copyrighted or proprietary code. They would have to teach their employees in a private school from when they are 5 years old and prevent all contact with the outside world. Obviously they do not do this. "Tainting" is a lie and probably the deepest, most insidious piece of FUD from Microsoft. It's very sad when you see people who think they disagree with Microsoft fall into repeating it.
Can anybody with real knowledge explain this in more detail?
The Linux kernel certainly does allow a "hook to load a binary module". How about "load module"? Or "exec" for that matter. There are dozens of binary closed modules that work "out of the box" (NVidea for instance? All those NT wireless cards? And I personally am employeed selling an evil closed-source application for Linux and the kernel maintainers have not removed exec() to stop me!
So my first reaction is that this guy is trying to raise flames by blaming a technical decision he dislikes on GPL zealotry.
Conversely, it is quite possible that it is physically impossible to make the webcam work using the available kernel interfaces, in which case the kernel maintainers are in the wrong by removing this and not at least coming up with an alternative.
So will somebody in the know, without flaming for either side, explain the exact technical details, so we can really judge who is wrong here?
Re:Whose task is copy&paste
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
I would guess that if the programs can draw to the X server on some machine, they can access files on it. So some URL that gets to the current X server would work.
If the X server is going to be a data storage facilty, I would like to be able to access it using normal Unix file I/O calls. Maybe this is part of the X server, or maybe it is expected to be another service running on the same machine.
Re:Whose task is copy&paste
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
Network transparency is why I said "URL", not "filename".
Obviously the idea requires some extra stuff, like getting url read/write out of Qt/Gnome and into the basic Linux system where it belongs (I should be able to "cat/http/slashdot.org" and get the main page, without "cat" being rewritten). Also it would help if there were clean methods of creating temporary files that just stay in memory.
Re:Resolution limit
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 2, Informative
Are you talking about the 16-bit numbers used in some of the interface?
For window dimensions this is not likely to ever be a problem.
However it is a big problem for graphics. In effect the only way to reliably draw an arbitrary graphic is to do intersection testing and clipping in memory against +/-32767 planes before sending the lines. This is very difficult and expensive (and silly since X has to then do further clipping aganst the actual window area anyway). So most programs don't do this, resulting in graphics screwups when you zoom in or scroll your graphic sufficiently. Win32 also has the exact same problem, incidentally.
The solution appears to be that the entire X drawing code is being replaced with Cairo or OpenGL, or something like it, which accepts floating-point coordinates. The old code will remain only for back-compatability and will probably never be fixed, but it does not really matter.
Re:Whose task is copy&paste
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
You are right on track about the correct implementation, but it should not be visible to the user.
Any program that can work with graphics already has code to open a graphic file, interpret the contents, and insert it. It is stupid to have to have totally seperate code to interpret a memory buffer in a totally different format provided by an unrelated "copy and paste interface".
X has a chance to skip all the crap because the current copy and paste does not work anyway. Data copied should either be "UTF-8" or "URL", which are the only two things I have seen work in X programs anyway. If the user selects an image or anything that is not obviously a text string, then it should write that data to a temp file, and the copy should be the URL of that text file. And then when they paste it, the recieving program inserts that file, and gets to reuse all the interpreter they need anyway to insert data from files.
They also need to realize that the "middle mouse click" is not cut & paste, but in fact a much advanced version of drag & drop which allows the user to rearrange windows and launch & kill applications between when they "drag" and when they "drop". Ideally there should be NO difference between dragging a selection and middle-clicking in the receiving application.
The "non-straight scrollbar" appears to be caused by box edges being drawn above it. The scrollbar has a very thin box edge. Above it is a column header for the browser and it has a very thick edge (the fact that it draws an edge here at all appears to be a mistake?). The top area seems to have a bit of a fuzzy edge. Your eye tends to see the window edge as going down the center of these dark edges, rather than the right outside, and sees a crooked line.
In a lot of ways these bugs are actually caused by the use of toolkits. If Thunderbird drew everything in a single big block of code, it would probably look a lot more consistent.
I also agree that the text in the column titles is 1 pixel too low. But if you look at the selected line it appears 1 pixel too low there as well. Thus it is likely that the fix is to change whatever code they are using to center text vertically. I have run into this a lot, it requires careful tweaking. Do not use n/2, use n>>1 so that it rounds in the same direction even if n is negative! Then TEST at both even and odd font sizes and box sizes!
The first problem (misaligned boxes) I have certainly seen plenty of times on Windows. I agree that the miscentering of fonts is less common on Windows (it actually provides a GDI32 call to center text in a box).
You are wrong. Many, many Windows applications use their own toolkits. My own work (fltk) which was designed for Linux, is obviously very popular for Windows.
The main reasons are: to get a better toolkit API, to reuse code they have to write for the app anyway, to get portability to non-Windows, to get exact control over the appearance, to avoid screwups if Microsoft changes the size or appearance of their widgets, and many other reasons.
One thing you can say about Windows was that befor the "Luna" XP theme came up, it was pretty easy to get exact pixel-accurate copies of their controls and other toolkits copied them quite closely. This may lead you to think everything is using the same toolkit when in fact it is not. In fact most of the consistency on Linux is due to toolkits being made to match Windows98 so the Windows port matched.
I agree with a lot of what the various posters are saying here, just disagree with the "unify the toolkit" solution. If X had a "unified toolkit" it would have been Athena and we would still be using the middle mouse button to move the sliders, and it would look like crap, and "configuration" would consist of being able to swap black and white. X has proven that an almost 20-year old interface, because it was designed as a low-level, is able to implement things that were not even dreamed of then. We need to keep these ideas.
It would be nice if an api was provided with something like "draw a raised button with this UTF-8 string as a label" and that "themes" could modify this. More importantly than "consistency", this would avoid people writing their own with subtle bugs where the positining is off, like you complained about.
Re:More likely windows comparisons and GPU usage
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 1
Your idea of a lower-level GPU seems to be where things are going. It looks a lot like the final result will be a single OpenGL driver that can draw all over all a screen. X would be a seperate program that talks to the driver. Everything you do that changes the screen display is turned into OpenGL.
Some things need to be added to OpenGL still. Fonts and non-square clipping regions and a method to "draw this image from user memory using the current xform" that does not require creating a texture object. The most complex thing needed is some interface so that a connection to the OpenGL is limited to a certain surface, so that an X program can draw raw OpenGL without any chance of it being able to draw outside it's windows and with the same speed as though it had access to the actual driver.
If this is done right we might even see non-X experiments that can occupy the same screen as X does, with windows (or whatever) overlapping correctly.
Though I kind of doubt the original poster too, you are an ass. I know for a fact that Microsoft has zero qualms about hiring people who have vast experience and exposure to GPL code.
The "GPL is dangerous" stuff is a PR and FUD attack by them. They know it is false and know they have to ignore the FUD internally to get any work done. If they could not use a programmer who has seen some copyrighted code they would have to have a private school and teach their employees from when they are 5 years old and isolate them from the outside world. Obviously they don't do this.
I agree. It seems obvious that no matter what happens, the #1 company is going to act evil and ignore standards because it encourages lock-in, and everybody else will want standards, knowing that cooperation is the only way to compete with that lock-in.
It was IBM at one time. The fear that it would be Sun caused creation of the OSF by Dec and other companies. Now it is MicroSoft.
If MicroSoft loses their #1 position I think they will switch from "evil" to "good" so fast that it will make everybody's (including Gates) head spin. They will immediately start pushing standards, rewriting their code to standards, publishing source for sample implementations, and all the other stuff they refuse to do now. Take a look at how they fought the AOL IM protocols (where they were not #1) to see how fast they change.
Of course whoever is the new #1 (IBM? Novell? Sony?) will switch pretty quickly to evil, no matter how benevolent they seem right now. The hope is that Linux or some other open source will be more entrenched, raising the level at which interoperability is possible. Once upon a time standards monopolies controlled electricity and you could not plug competitors lights in. When IBM was evil you could not make hardware that plugged into their machine's interfaces. With MicroSoft it was the system. I would expect the next monopoly to only control application level stuff, it might be as powerful as MicroSoft Word's lock-in only.
In X.org there are two methods of rendering text. One is the "old" X Font stuff, and the other is the "new" XRender/Fontconfig/Xft stuff. The old stuff has been abandoned and does not use antialiasing. The new stuff does do antialiasing and this LCD trick.
To use the new stuff you have to rewrite a program that is using the old stuff (I don't like this and think XFree86 was stupid to not do something about it, but it is too late now).
If OO is still using the old interface, you are going to get non-antialiased fonts, and there is not much you can do. However this should be obvious because of the complete lack of antialiasing, not just the LCD stuff.
If it is using the new one, and you have got LCD antialiasing on other applications, it is not clear why you are not getting it here. It is possible that OO is messing with the fontconfig settings and not just leaving them the same as other programs are getting. That is bad and should be fixed by them. In my experience with Xft it seems difficult to do this, however, and may indicate a concerted effort to "fix" things by an OO programmer, this could be a serious mistake by them.
I don't want a picture of Tux on the key any more than I want a Microsoft logo. How about somebody make a keyboard with the word "Meta" printed on those keys (and "Menu" printed on that extra Windows key on the right).
This would help enormously for making manuals or telling people what keys to type over the phone or in an email.
The keys to bring up email are really stupid, too. Why are there not "OK", "Cancel", and "Help" keys? That would be enormously more user-friendly.
This is true of ALL outside code, not just GPL stuff. Many of Microsoft's employees work on code contracted from other companies. They are not allowed to copy that into products not under the contract. It is not that hard and has not scared them away from such contracts. The GPL is no different and no more dangerous.
Any claims about some special "GPL danger" is FUD, no matter who says it. GPL basically means the code is copyrighted. So is every single other piece of code in the world. Deal with it and stop trying to scare people away by making them think the GPL has some dark magical dangerous properties!
I used graphics mode quite a bit, as I was trying to develop a windowing system for use by Mark of the Unicorn software. I tried to do it "right" and actually used the MSDOS stdin/out as the interface, so a terminal was emulated by just sending the text and the driver drew it into a window. It was pretty cool but never really went beyond that and an line-drawing program. The intention was to add some locking interface to the stdin/out and use TSR programs to "multitask", none of this was ever done.
You are right, I forgot about the extra text-mode capabilities of the Hercules. Those were also useful, our word processor could be set to use those to preview more fonts.
Big difference from last year is that the backlight is an array of white LED's. Last year it was a rear-projected image. The new one has much better registration.
Biggest problem is that it runs hot, which shortens the life of the lcd and led's. According to the guy there it actually detects degradation of the LED's and increases the voltage as they age so the brightness remains constant.
Monitor is the size of a 17" LCD screen. The actual working parts seem to be 2" thick, but behind it is a 4" thick box that seems to be fans. It also sits atop a box that is the size of a slim bot PC, not sure what this does.
Input is DVI and it puts the signal for the LED's into the same signal. The first N (100 or so) lines are tghe LED, the rest are the LCD screen display. Currently they don't sync the changes to the LED's with the LCD's, I asked about this and then heard sevearal others ask the same question, so it is a problem. They promised they will be doing this in the next version.
Next door to the HDR was an almost as interesting demo of a 6-color projector. It was done by changing the filters in 2 normal 3-color DLP projectors, stacking them, and aligning the displays. Could achieve quite vivid blues. Maybe this and HDR should get together?
There were mice for PC's in 1984 or so. There was that "Microsoft Bus Mouse" which was an entire card that went in the machine. This could be used to run Microsoft Word (the non-Windows version) and in fact they sold a package containing both Word and the mouse. I know because I worked at a place doing our own pre-Windows word processor and we had to figure out how to work with that mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes bundled DVD players exist. The original poster was asking about the reviewer's comment about "paying to add a DVD player to Linux". As far as I know this is totally impossible. The only options are to buy a Linux that includes a DVD player, put a free DVD player on it, or not play DVD's at all.
No, if he was talking about tarballs he would certainly mention that you had to type commands into a terminal, not "how to handle permissions". I agree I'm not sure what he is saying or talking about here. Fact is RPM's (unless you are an expert) don't give you much choice over permissions or where to install.
That argument makes no sense. If Microsoft was willing to lie and copy GPL code, then they are equally willing to lie about not looking at it. In fact somebody can claim "by saying they are not looking at GPL code, they must be covering something up, therefore their denial is proof that they are copying it".
There is no way for Microsoft to prevent made-up accusations like this and it is insane for them to change their behavior and limit their options because of this. I can claim they are killing kittens in their basement and the fact that such an accusation is possible does not mean they must avoid any contact between their employees and kittens. The exact same thing is true of GPL code, there is no logical reason to avoid looking at it.
It was his house, which he probably couldn't take to Morroco anyway. And it will probably sit there untouched and unsold by the feds and if he gets out of this he will get it back. So it is possible he got out of this for free!
you're saying a Windows developer could freely, minutely examine the Linux kernel, and then, without any degree of fear of legal repercussion, *implement the ideas expressed in that code* without GPL or other legal fallout. To be clear, he doesn't copy a single line of code, just reuses the good ideas, tweaks things based on the insights he gains, etc.
Do you really claim that?
Yes I am claiming that.
Read RMS's rants some time. Take a look at where he talks about reverse engineering. Even he says that learning from the source code is more important than some attempt to prevent a company from using your ideas.
Also legally the GPL is based on copyright, and only grants some exceptions to it's rules. Copyright allows exactly what you state above, therefore there is no way for the GPL to prevent it.
I think the only dangerous code is where people who read it have to sign NDA's or contracts that say they cannot copy any of the ideas.
Yes from further comments it sounds like it was possible to make this be a user-space program, and this is the solution being used for many other closed USB devices such as scanners and some other cameras. So I'm beginning to think the author is the one at fault, I cannot blame the kernel maintainers for wanting to limit the binary-loading interfaces to a small controlled area.
In addition another post apparently from some people who have studied the camera seems to indicate that the plugin was simply doing image processing of the same image, not reading extra data from the camera. No wonder Phillips want's it closed source! (if this is true, of course. But tricks like this are another danger of closed source that nobody here has mentioned).
I have no doubt they do use binaries of GPL'd projects (but would naturally avoid tainting themselves by looking, let along modifying, sources).
There is nothing wrong with looking at the source or even modifying it. Microsoft knows this (although they won't say that publically to avoid counteracting their FUD) and I'm sure they are modifying and testing GPL code plenty in there.
What they cannot do (without releasing the source) is redistribute the software. And they are not doing that.
"tainting" is a bogus argument, used to scare people from the GPL. I know for a fact that Microsoft has zero qualms about hiring people with intimate familiarity with GPL software, so they are litarlly lying when they make claims about this. If in fact "tainting" was true, Microsoft could not hire anybody with a single bit of exposure to any copyrighted or proprietary code. They would have to teach their employees in a private school from when they are 5 years old and prevent all contact with the outside world. Obviously they do not do this. "Tainting" is a lie and probably the deepest, most insidious piece of FUD from Microsoft. It's very sad when you see people who think they disagree with Microsoft fall into repeating it.
Can anybody with real knowledge explain this in more detail?
The Linux kernel certainly does allow a "hook to load a binary module". How about "load module"? Or "exec" for that matter. There are dozens of binary closed modules that work "out of the box" (NVidea for instance? All those NT wireless cards? And I personally am employeed selling an evil closed-source application for Linux and the kernel maintainers have not removed exec() to stop me!
So my first reaction is that this guy is trying to raise flames by blaming a technical decision he dislikes on GPL zealotry.
Conversely, it is quite possible that it is physically impossible to make the webcam work using the available kernel interfaces, in which case the kernel maintainers are in the wrong by removing this and not at least coming up with an alternative.
So will somebody in the know, without flaming for either side, explain the exact technical details, so we can really judge who is wrong here?
I would guess that if the programs can draw to the X server on some machine, they can access files on it. So some URL that gets to the current X server would work.
If the X server is going to be a data storage facilty, I would like to be able to access it using normal Unix file I/O calls. Maybe this is part of the X server, or maybe it is expected to be another service running on the same machine.
Network transparency is why I said "URL", not "filename".
/http/slashdot.org" and get the main page, without "cat" being rewritten). Also it would help if there were clean methods of creating temporary files that just stay in memory.
Obviously the idea requires some extra stuff, like getting url read/write out of Qt/Gnome and into the basic Linux system where it belongs (I should be able to "cat
Are you talking about the 16-bit numbers used in some of the interface?
For window dimensions this is not likely to ever be a problem.
However it is a big problem for graphics. In effect the only way to reliably draw an arbitrary graphic is to do intersection testing and clipping in memory against +/-32767 planes before sending the lines. This is very difficult and expensive (and silly since X has to then do further clipping aganst the actual window area anyway). So most programs don't do this, resulting in graphics screwups when you zoom in or scroll your graphic sufficiently. Win32 also has the exact same problem, incidentally.
The solution appears to be that the entire X drawing code is being replaced with Cairo or OpenGL, or something like it, which accepts floating-point coordinates. The old code will remain only for back-compatability and will probably never be fixed, but it does not really matter.
You are right on track about the correct implementation, but it should not be visible to the user.
Any program that can work with graphics already has code to open a graphic file, interpret the contents, and insert it. It is stupid to have to have totally seperate code to interpret a memory buffer in a totally different format provided by an unrelated "copy and paste interface".
X has a chance to skip all the crap because the current copy and paste does not work anyway. Data copied should either be "UTF-8" or "URL", which are the only two things I have seen work in X programs anyway. If the user selects an image or anything that is not obviously a text string, then it should write that data to a temp file, and the copy should be the URL of that text file. And then when they paste it, the recieving program inserts that file, and gets to reuse all the interpreter they need anyway to insert data from files.
They also need to realize that the "middle mouse click" is not cut & paste, but in fact a much advanced version of drag & drop which allows the user to rearrange windows and launch & kill applications between when they "drag" and when they "drop". Ideally there should be NO difference between dragging a selection and middle-clicking in the receiving application.
The "non-straight scrollbar" appears to be caused by box edges being drawn above it. The scrollbar has a very thin box edge. Above it is a column header for the browser and it has a very thick edge (the fact that it draws an edge here at all appears to be a mistake?). The top area seems to have a bit of a fuzzy edge. Your eye tends to see the window edge as going down the center of these dark edges, rather than the right outside, and sees a crooked line.
In a lot of ways these bugs are actually caused by the use of toolkits. If Thunderbird drew everything in a single big block of code, it would probably look a lot more consistent.
I also agree that the text in the column titles is 1 pixel too low. But if you look at the selected line it appears 1 pixel too low there as well. Thus it is likely that the fix is to change whatever code they are using to center text vertically. I have run into this a lot, it requires careful tweaking. Do not use n/2, use n>>1 so that it rounds in the same direction even if n is negative! Then TEST at both even and odd font sizes and box sizes!
The first problem (misaligned boxes) I have certainly seen plenty of times on Windows. I agree that the miscentering of fonts is less common on Windows (it actually provides a GDI32 call to center text in a box).
You are wrong. Many, many Windows applications use their own toolkits. My own work (fltk) which was designed for Linux, is obviously very popular for Windows.
The main reasons are: to get a better toolkit API, to reuse code they have to write for the app anyway, to get portability to non-Windows, to get exact control over the appearance, to avoid screwups if Microsoft changes the size or appearance of their widgets, and many other reasons.
One thing you can say about Windows was that befor the "Luna" XP theme came up, it was pretty easy to get exact pixel-accurate copies of their controls and other toolkits copied them quite closely. This may lead you to think everything is using the same toolkit when in fact it is not. In fact most of the consistency on Linux is due to toolkits being made to match Windows98 so the Windows port matched.
I agree with a lot of what the various posters are saying here, just disagree with the "unify the toolkit" solution. If X had a "unified toolkit" it would have been Athena and we would still be using the middle mouse button to move the sliders, and it would look like crap, and "configuration" would consist of being able to swap black and white. X has proven that an almost 20-year old interface, because it was designed as a low-level, is able to implement things that were not even dreamed of then. We need to keep these ideas.
It would be nice if an api was provided with something like "draw a raised button with this UTF-8 string as a label" and that "themes" could modify this. More importantly than "consistency", this would avoid people writing their own with subtle bugs where the positining is off, like you complained about.
Your idea of a lower-level GPU seems to be where things are going. It looks a lot like the final result will be a single OpenGL driver that can draw all over all a screen. X would be a seperate program that talks to the driver. Everything you do that changes the screen display is turned into OpenGL.
Some things need to be added to OpenGL still. Fonts and non-square clipping regions and a method to "draw this image from user memory using the current xform" that does not require creating a texture object. The most complex thing needed is some interface so that a connection to the OpenGL is limited to a certain surface, so that an X program can draw raw OpenGL without any chance of it being able to draw outside it's windows and with the same speed as though it had access to the actual driver.
If this is done right we might even see non-X experiments that can occupy the same screen as X does, with windows (or whatever) overlapping correctly.
Though I kind of doubt the original poster too, you are an ass. I know for a fact that Microsoft has zero qualms about hiring people who have vast experience and exposure to GPL code.
The "GPL is dangerous" stuff is a PR and FUD attack by them. They know it is false and know they have to ignore the FUD internally to get any work done. If they could not use a programmer who has seen some copyrighted code they would have to have a private school and teach their employees from when they are 5 years old and isolate them from the outside world. Obviously they don't do this.
I agree. It seems obvious that no matter what happens, the #1 company is going to act evil and ignore standards because it encourages lock-in, and everybody else will want standards, knowing that cooperation is the only way to compete with that lock-in.
It was IBM at one time. The fear that it would be Sun caused creation of the OSF by Dec and other companies. Now it is MicroSoft.
If MicroSoft loses their #1 position I think they will switch from "evil" to "good" so fast that it will make everybody's (including Gates) head spin. They will immediately start pushing standards, rewriting their code to standards, publishing source for sample implementations, and all the other stuff they refuse to do now. Take a look at how they fought the AOL IM protocols (where they were not #1) to see how fast they change.
Of course whoever is the new #1 (IBM? Novell? Sony?) will switch pretty quickly to evil, no matter how benevolent they seem right now. The hope is that Linux or some other open source will be more entrenched, raising the level at which interoperability is possible. Once upon a time standards monopolies controlled electricity and you could not plug competitors lights in. When IBM was evil you could not make hardware that plugged into their machine's interfaces. With MicroSoft it was the system. I would expect the next monopoly to only control application level stuff, it might be as powerful as MicroSoft Word's lock-in only.
All the responders here seem to be confused.
In X.org there are two methods of rendering text. One is the "old" X Font stuff, and the other is the "new" XRender/Fontconfig/Xft stuff. The old stuff has been abandoned and does not use antialiasing. The new stuff does do antialiasing and this LCD trick.
To use the new stuff you have to rewrite a program that is using the old stuff (I don't like this and think XFree86 was stupid to not do something about it, but it is too late now).
If OO is still using the old interface, you are going to get non-antialiased fonts, and there is not much you can do. However this should be obvious because of the complete lack of antialiasing, not just the LCD stuff.
If it is using the new one, and you have got LCD antialiasing on other applications, it is not clear why you are not getting it here. It is possible that OO is messing with the fontconfig settings and not just leaving them the same as other programs are getting. That is bad and should be fixed by them. In my experience with Xft it seems difficult to do this, however, and may indicate a concerted effort to "fix" things by an OO programmer, this could be a serious mistake by them.
I don't want a picture of Tux on the key any more than I want a Microsoft logo. How about somebody make a keyboard with the word "Meta" printed on those keys (and "Menu" printed on that extra Windows key on the right).
This would help enormously for making manuals or telling people what keys to type over the phone or in an email.
The keys to bring up email are really stupid, too. Why are there not "OK", "Cancel", and "Help" keys? That would be enormously more user-friendly.
Microsoft did not have a booth at Siggraph. They have not had a booth for the last 3 Siggraphs.
This is true of ALL outside code, not just GPL stuff. Many of Microsoft's employees work on code contracted from other companies. They are not allowed to copy that into products not under the contract. It is not that hard and has not scared them away from such contracts. The GPL is no different and no more dangerous.
Any claims about some special "GPL danger" is FUD, no matter who says it. GPL basically means the code is copyrighted. So is every single other piece of code in the world. Deal with it and stop trying to scare people away by making them think the GPL has some dark magical dangerous properties!
Yes but they put an actual open source license on the files, instead of just copyrighting them. That is a difference.
I used graphics mode quite a bit, as I was trying to develop a windowing system for use by Mark of the Unicorn software. I tried to do it "right" and actually used the MSDOS stdin/out as the interface, so a terminal was emulated by just sending the text and the driver drew it into a window. It was pretty cool but never really went beyond that and an line-drawing program. The intention was to add some locking interface to the stdin/out and use TSR programs to "multitask", none of this was ever done.
You are right, I forgot about the extra text-mode capabilities of the Hercules. Those were also useful, our word processor could be set to use those to preview more fonts.
Big difference from last year is that the backlight is an array of white LED's. Last year it was a rear-projected image. The new one has much better registration.
Biggest problem is that it runs hot, which shortens the life of the lcd and led's. According to the guy there it actually detects degradation of the LED's and increases the voltage as they age so the brightness remains constant.
Monitor is the size of a 17" LCD screen. The actual working parts seem to be 2" thick, but behind it is a 4" thick box that seems to be fans. It also sits atop a box that is the size of a slim bot PC, not sure what this does.
Input is DVI and it puts the signal for the LED's into the same signal. The first N (100 or so) lines are tghe LED, the rest are the LCD screen display. Currently they don't sync the changes to the LED's with the LCD's, I asked about this and then heard sevearal others ask the same question, so it is a problem. They promised they will be doing this in the next version.
Next door to the HDR was an almost as interesting demo of a 6-color projector. It was done by changing the filters in 2 normal 3-color DLP projectors, stacking them, and aligning the displays. Could achieve quite vivid blues. Maybe this and HDR should get together?
There were mice for PC's in 1984 or so. There was that "Microsoft Bus Mouse" which was an entire card that went in the machine. This could be used to run Microsoft Word (the non-Windows version) and in fact they sold a package containing both Word and the mouse. I know because I worked at a place doing our own pre-Windows word processor and we had to figure out how to work with that mouse.