The Hercules was monochrome, 1 bit per pixel, not 4 color as you suggest. The non-square pixels were a real pain for any real graphics.
However I agree in general that the article author does not know what he was talking about. Higher resolution graphics than the Mac were commonly available on a PC at that time.
This is absolutely false. Yes people writing the open source themselves are not getting any money, but it allows them to do it and develop skills and publish the stuff they are interested in. In the meantime it encourages open platforms with published programming information, so that commercial (closed!) software can still be written without expensive NDA's.
If it were not for open source I'm afraid that 100% of all software would have to be written by Microsoft or by employees of large multinationals that are able to afford the NDA needed to get the information from Microsoft or from the hardware manufacturers.
I am absolutely certain that if it were not for Open Source, I would be out of a job.
Even though I personally am certainly going to vote Democrat this election, I have to point out that such correlations are almost meaningless. It could just as well indicate that people vote for Democrats when they think (correctly) that things are going to get better. More likely there is no correspondance whatsoever, as there is a delay of many years between anything any administration does and the stable result (this of course means that whenevery anything bad happens the people in power can say it was the fault of the previous administration, while somehow anything good that happens is the result of the current administration).
Are there security holes in Flash? Have not heard of any.
SVG would also be a good idea, it is equivalent to Flash but completely standardized and open and the files are text. Unfortunately there are no working implementations yet.
Supposedly the voter for P2 will look at the paper printout before putting it in the ballot box. If it says "P1" then hopefully at least a few will complain and somebody will realize the voting machine is changing their votes.
If instead the machine prints P2, then a recount of a random subset of the voting precints will hopefully show that the paper ballots don't match the electronic results, and realize again the machine is changing the votes.
The whole point behind the paper trail is to make the chance of getting caught if you add dirty tricks to the voting machine code high. It is believed this will remove the incentive to do this, which everybody with the slightest knowledge of how computers work is very much afraid of.
The general public is idiots. They think the only way for a voting machine to make a mistake is if some "evil hacker" does something. The makers of the machines are many orders of magnitude more dangerous than a "hacker" but people are completely oblivious to the danger.
Tried the above image in Safari on OS/X and it went bye-bye after a great deal of disk thrashing. Offered me the chance to submit a bug report to Apple, but I didn't bother, as I figure somebody else has told them already...
What the hell are you talking about. Ever heard of a method of releasing information called copyright. I think that is what you want.
You seem to be describing public-domain software. Copyright means everybody can see it but they can't make their own versions, so maybe some people who look at it will send their fixes back to you, which seems to be what you want.
It is true the term "open source" is associated with GPL-style licenses, which are somewhere between public domain and strict copyright. The idea is that people can make their own versions of software but the original author is not prevented from seeing those changes and coyping the results back into their original.
Believe me most stuff is released GPL for very selfish and greedy reasons by the authors, they certainly see benifit in it for themselves. Otherwise why not just use public domain?
Although I agree that the desktop needs some work, your complaints are almost all irrelevant to an HP laptop with Linux preinstalled.
Its clunky to configure irrelevant if it is preinstalled as it is already configured.
has issues with even common hardware (many manufacturers still refuse to ship Linux drivers) hopefully this is not a problem for the preinstalled version, though there have been examples of linux laptops shipped with hardware that just does not work.
comes with an RTFM mentality for support Apparently this comes with HP support.
and requires you to fiddle with initialization scripts again irrelevant for a pre-installed laptop.
What's more open office is a poor replacement for MS Office, and the same is true where there are apps to replace the industry standard. This complaint is the only one of 5 that is legitimate for a preinstalled machine.
In reality font smoothing on all new KDE and Gnome programs (and also many other programs using other toolkits) is controlled by the file ~/.fonts.conf. (they use Xft and Freetype2 and Fontconfig to draw the fonts, these are all shared just like KDE and Gnome all use X11).
The problem is in fact these "desktop environments". Both try to write the fonts.conf but neither correctly reads the settings stored by the other program, and I think Gnome just reads it's own data and ignores the fonts. I discovered this annoyance when I found that Gnome control panels could get much nicer font smoothing than KDE, and if you ran KDE control panel it would gradually mangle them.
Finally I figured this out and saved the.fonts.conf file from Gnome and fiddled with it until KDE does not mangle it (it now adds a block to the end every time I log in, I just checked and there are about 100 copies of 8 lines of XML, perhaps I should truncate it...).
This is not user-friendly in any way whatsoever. Internally I believe the implementation is correct, but we need a "set up the fonts" program that does ONLY the job of setting up the fonts with a GUI, and that any program can call. "Desktops" are the wrong answer.
The best example of apparent speed increase is double-buffered windows, where you don't see it redraw but instead it draws in an off-screen area and then puts the entire new image on screen at once.
Until recently this was always slower than on-screen redrawing, mostly because it bypassed video hardware acceleration (this is 2D I'm talking about, not 3D). Therefore it took as much as three times longer before the screen was updated to the current state. Yet despite the fact that it was literally slower, it looks faster to users.
I guess then the GPL is a "permit", not a "license", in your terms. The GPL says "you can do this thing that is normally illegal", which is a huge difference from a contract. If you choose to ignore the GPL then you lose nothing because you can do even less than you could before, that is why there is no need to "accept" it.
Your analogy also fails in that a fishing license does not grant you the right/authority/permission to fish in *any* pond. The GPL grants you the right to use *specific" code.
Huh? I didn't mean a literal fishing license. I meant a theoretical private "you can fish in this specific pond" license. Though I still don't understand what you are saying.
What I meant was that if you ran those Qt apps under Gnome, you would see exactly the same thing. They would look no worse and no better, they would choose the exact same fonts.
I think you are actually arguing the same thing as I am.
The GPL does not force you to release your source code. Conversely, releasing your source code does not get you out of a GPL violation either, which is what the second half of your post is saying.
It is possible that a GPL infringer could make a settlement offer that involves releasing the source code. However this could be true of any closed-source contract or any kind of contract (many have suggested that Microsoft could "get out of" the anti-trust ruling by releasing their source code). The infringer might also offer to stand on their head for a day as a settlement offer, and that might be accepted. It is all the same thing.
Conversely, just because the GPL says you can violate the copyright if you release the source code, releasing the source code later on does not get you out of the violation. This would be equivalent to saying that if you are caught for shoplifting, you can get out of it by paying only the price of the item! (in case somebody does not get the joke: that would make shoplifting zero-risk and everybody would do it for everything they wanted)
The only legal things said about copyright violations is that the infringer must ceast distributing the infringing material, and must pay monetary damages, or make a settlement offer.
The GPL is a License, not a Contract. This makes a huge difference:
A fishing license might say "if you fish without a license there is a $10 fine. To get a license you must give the owner of the pond ten million dollars." I am pretty certain that if you fished in the pond without a license, you would be liable for the $10 fine. The existence of this offer does NOT mean you are liable for ten million dollars.
If you went to the owner of the pond and agreed to give him 10 million dollars and signed a contract to that effect, and then went and fished without giving him the money, then there is a very good chance you are liable for the ten millon.
Saying "Telstra never intended to use Linux and used it as a ruse to get Microsoft to lower their prices" implies "Telstra never thought there was any chance Linux is better than Microsoft". Get it? It means Linux is bad, or at least that Telstra thinks it's bad!!! Get it now?
The assumption is because Microsoft gave them a discount!. Duh.
I don't think "Telstra was using Linux to get a Microsoft discount", which seems to be the prevailing opinion here, in any way means "Linux is good". In fact it implies that Telstra had no intention of using Linux and did not think it would work for them, and successfully fooled Microsoft into believing otherwise.
If Linux was "good" then most people would be saying "Microsoft got scared because their lockin did not work" or something.
The fact is that the prevailing opinion here is decidely anti-Linux. Posters here are a lot more realistic than the trolls think.
That means either making Windows and Office and such better so they are worth that high price (great for consumers)
Actually they may have a problem here, as consumers don't want or need improvements, especially to Office. The program is perfectly capable of doing everything almost all users need, and this has been true for almost eight years now. Microsoft's greatest competitor (outweighing Linux by at least an order of magnitude) is old Microsoft installations.
Forced upgrades (ie if you don't upgrade, your computer is going to stop working or stop talking to other computers) is Microsoft's only hope to continue their currrent profit margins. Unfortunately this requires a certain amount of evil intentions, which makes people hate them, and possibly makes it difficult to get some of their engineers (who I suspect sometimes still have a sense of ethics) to implement them.
Add Plan9 and 9P to Linux. This allows interpretation of most filenames to be done by user level programs and by remote services. This gives you encryption and compression and lots of other stuff that some people think are "filesystem" things. This also gives you the ability to put the entire "database" in user space, ie "/search/foo=bar" would be a directory listing all the files in the system that match the "foo=bar" criteria, dynamically created.
Add Plan9 union mounts to Linux.
Move all of the "ioslaves" that are in KDE/Gnome and move them to using 9P. The program "cat" should be able to open any string you can type into the fanciest KDE file browser and copy the contents. Instead of colon use slash. See 9P for details.
Hit all the idiots with a clue by 4 until they figure out that a "filename" is a STREAM OF BYTES. It is not "text". This means no "canocolization" or "convert to wide characters" or "make sure it is legal UTF-8" or any of the other crap that we have been putting up with for years and years that has killed all progress in this field. Microsoft is of course the worst offender here, but new Unix designs are not so hot either, note that with locales I can easily create a file that I cannot display in KDE, that is wrong.
"Metadata" should be required to be a cache of information figured out from the file. Do you want the postagestamp image? Look for the metadata, but if it is not there, run a program that will create it. Although physically not prevented, metadata that cannot be recreated from file data should be considerd a bad idea because it will be lost if the file is moved. This gets rid of all need to transmit metadata. Also it allows the metadata to be stored on a different system than the file, which is very useful if the file is remote or you don't have permission to write it.
Using ReiserFS or EXT3 or NTFS WinFS is all trivial issues compared to this stuff.
I belive all metadata must be able to be determined from the file's contents. Think of it as a cache of information figured out from the file, not as "extra information".
Oddly enough everybody talking about "databases" thinks this way, saying that files are inserted into the database depending on their contents, but when people start thinking about "metadata" they get all confused.
First step would be to set the "type" metadata by examining the file's contents and looking for magic header bytes. Then postage-stamp images, comments, author, and other information may be extracted by programs that know about the various types. Eventually I think even filenames and permissions and ACL's would be stored in the file data.
Exactly how is versioning going to save you from a disk crash? Versioning is quite useful, but it does not mean you don't have to backup. The older versions are on the same disk and will be lost at the same time in case of hardware failure.
Versioning is somewhat useful for speeding up incremental backups, possibly. But lots of other designs can also speed these up.
Sure you can. If you want to cheat you have to figure out a way to produce the same results from the counts in the vote recording machines that printed the ballot, and the same result if humans count the paper ballots.
Oh my god, the inventor of the transistor did not have a security clearance, but we are using them in military hardware! What if he hid a evil back door in there?
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The Hercules was monochrome, 1 bit per pixel, not 4 color as you suggest. The non-square pixels were a real pain for any real graphics.
However I agree in general that the article author does not know what he was talking about. Higher resolution graphics than the Mac were commonly available on a PC at that time.
This is absolutely false. Yes people writing the open source themselves are not getting any money, but it allows them to do it and develop skills and publish the stuff they are interested in. In the meantime it encourages open platforms with published programming information, so that commercial (closed!) software can still be written without expensive NDA's.
If it were not for open source I'm afraid that 100% of all software would have to be written by Microsoft or by employees of large multinationals that are able to afford the NDA needed to get the information from Microsoft or from the hardware manufacturers.
I am absolutely certain that if it were not for Open Source, I would be out of a job.
Even though I personally am certainly going to vote Democrat this election, I have to point out that such correlations are almost meaningless. It could just as well indicate that people vote for Democrats when they think (correctly) that things are going to get better. More likely there is no correspondance whatsoever, as there is a delay of many years between anything any administration does and the stable result (this of course means that whenevery anything bad happens the people in power can say it was the fault of the previous administration, while somehow anything good that happens is the result of the current administration).
Flash should work pretty good.
Are there security holes in Flash? Have not heard of any.
SVG would also be a good idea, it is equivalent to Flash but completely standardized and open and the files are text. Unfortunately there are no working implementations yet.
That's the purpose of the paper trail.
Supposedly the voter for P2 will look at the paper printout before putting it in the ballot box. If it says "P1" then hopefully at least a few will complain and somebody will realize the voting machine is changing their votes.
If instead the machine prints P2, then a recount of a random subset of the voting precints will hopefully show that the paper ballots don't match the electronic results, and realize again the machine is changing the votes.
The whole point behind the paper trail is to make the chance of getting caught if you add dirty tricks to the voting machine code high. It is believed this will remove the incentive to do this, which everybody with the slightest knowledge of how computers work is very much afraid of.
The general public is idiots. They think the only way for a voting machine to make a mistake is if some "evil hacker" does something. The makers of the machines are many orders of magnitude more dangerous than a "hacker" but people are completely oblivious to the danger.
Tried the above image in Safari on OS/X and it went bye-bye after a great deal of disk thrashing. Offered me the chance to submit a bug report to Apple, but I didn't bother, as I figure somebody else has told them already...
What the hell are you talking about. Ever heard of a method of releasing information called copyright. I think that is what you want.
You seem to be describing public-domain software. Copyright means everybody can see it but they can't make their own versions, so maybe some people who look at it will send their fixes back to you, which seems to be what you want.
It is true the term "open source" is associated with GPL-style licenses, which are somewhere between public domain and strict copyright. The idea is that people can make their own versions of software but the original author is not prevented from seeing those changes and coyping the results back into their original.
Believe me most stuff is released GPL for very selfish and greedy reasons by the authors, they certainly see benifit in it for themselves. Otherwise why not just use public domain?
Although I agree that the desktop needs some work, your complaints are almost all irrelevant to an HP laptop with Linux preinstalled.
Its clunky to configure irrelevant if it is preinstalled as it is already configured.
has issues with even common hardware (many manufacturers still refuse to ship Linux drivers) hopefully this is not a problem for the preinstalled version, though there have been examples of linux laptops shipped with hardware that just does not work.
comes with an RTFM mentality for support Apparently this comes with HP support.
and requires you to fiddle with initialization scripts again irrelevant for a pre-installed laptop.
What's more open office is a poor replacement for MS Office, and the same is true where there are apps to replace the industry standard. This complaint is the only one of 5 that is legitimate for a preinstalled machine.
In reality font smoothing on all new KDE and Gnome programs (and also many other programs using other toolkits) is controlled by the file ~/.fonts.conf. (they use Xft and Freetype2 and Fontconfig to draw the fonts, these are all shared just like KDE and Gnome all use X11).
.fonts.conf file from Gnome and fiddled with it until KDE does not mangle it (it now adds a block to the end every time I log in, I just checked and there are about 100 copies of 8 lines of XML, perhaps I should truncate it...).
The problem is in fact these "desktop environments". Both try to write the fonts.conf but neither correctly reads the settings stored by the other program, and I think Gnome just reads it's own data and ignores the fonts. I discovered this annoyance when I found that Gnome control panels could get much nicer font smoothing than KDE, and if you ran KDE control panel it would gradually mangle them.
Finally I figured this out and saved the
This is not user-friendly in any way whatsoever. Internally I believe the implementation is correct, but we need a "set up the fonts" program that does ONLY the job of setting up the fonts with a GUI, and that any program can call. "Desktops" are the wrong answer.
The best example of apparent speed increase is double-buffered windows, where you don't see it redraw but instead it draws in an off-screen area and then puts the entire new image on screen at once.
Until recently this was always slower than on-screen redrawing, mostly because it bypassed video hardware acceleration (this is 2D I'm talking about, not 3D). Therefore it took as much as three times longer before the screen was updated to the current state. Yet despite the fact that it was literally slower, it looks faster to users.
I guess then the GPL is a "permit", not a "license", in your terms. The GPL says "you can do this thing that is normally illegal", which is a huge difference from a contract. If you choose to ignore the GPL then you lose nothing because you can do even less than you could before, that is why there is no need to "accept" it.
Your analogy also fails in that a fishing license does not grant you the right/authority/permission to fish in *any* pond. The GPL grants you the right to use *specific" code.
Huh? I didn't mean a literal fishing license. I meant a theoretical private "you can fish in this specific pond" license. Though I still don't understand what you are saying.
What I meant was that if you ran those Qt apps under Gnome, you would see exactly the same thing. They would look no worse and no better, they would choose the exact same fonts.
I think you are actually arguing the same thing as I am.
The GPL does not force you to release your source code. Conversely, releasing your source code does not get you out of a GPL violation either, which is what the second half of your post is saying.
It is possible that a GPL infringer could make a settlement offer that involves releasing the source code. However this could be true of any closed-source contract or any kind of contract (many have suggested that Microsoft could "get out of" the anti-trust ruling by releasing their source code). The infringer might also offer to stand on their head for a day as a settlement offer, and that might be accepted. It is all the same thing.
Conversely, just because the GPL says you can violate the copyright if you release the source code, releasing the source code later on does not get you out of the violation. This would be equivalent to saying that if you are caught for shoplifting, you can get out of it by paying only the price of the item! (in case somebody does not get the joke: that would make shoplifting zero-risk and everybody would do it for everything they wanted)
The only legal things said about copyright violations is that the infringer must ceast distributing the infringing material, and must pay monetary damages, or make a settlement offer.
The GPL is a License, not a Contract. This makes a huge difference:
A fishing license might say "if you fish without a license there is a $10 fine. To get a license you must give the owner of the pond ten million dollars." I am pretty certain that if you fished in the pond without a license, you would be liable for the $10 fine. The existence of this offer does NOT mean you are liable for ten million dollars.
If you went to the owner of the pond and agreed to give him 10 million dollars and signed a contract to that effect, and then went and fished without giving him the money, then there is a very good chance you are liable for the ten millon.
I guess I'm not explaining this clearly.
Saying "Telstra never intended to use Linux and used it as a ruse to get Microsoft to lower their prices" implies "Telstra never thought there was any chance Linux is better than Microsoft". Get it? It means Linux is bad, or at least that Telstra thinks it's bad!!! Get it now?
Are you kidding? Microsoft relies almost 100% on the perception that the OS is "free" and comes with the computer.
The assumption is because Microsoft gave them a discount!. Duh.
I don't think "Telstra was using Linux to get a Microsoft discount", which seems to be the prevailing opinion here, in any way means "Linux is good". In fact it implies that Telstra had no intention of using Linux and did not think it would work for them, and successfully fooled Microsoft into believing otherwise.
If Linux was "good" then most people would be saying "Microsoft got scared because their lockin did not work" or something.
The fact is that the prevailing opinion here is decidely anti-Linux. Posters here are a lot more realistic than the trolls think.
That means either making Windows and Office and such better so they are worth that high price (great for consumers)
Actually they may have a problem here, as consumers don't want or need improvements, especially to Office. The program is perfectly capable of doing everything almost all users need, and this has been true for almost eight years now. Microsoft's greatest competitor (outweighing Linux by at least an order of magnitude) is old Microsoft installations.
Forced upgrades (ie if you don't upgrade, your computer is going to stop working or stop talking to other computers) is Microsoft's only hope to continue their currrent profit margins. Unfortunately this requires a certain amount of evil intentions, which makes people hate them, and possibly makes it difficult to get some of their engineers (who I suspect sometimes still have a sense of ethics) to implement them.
Text output does not vary depending on the window manager.
Both X and Windows do 3D acceleration in more than one application at a time right now.
The real difference is that everything passes through the 3D engine, avoiding the need to implement 2D parallel versions.
The X equivalent is Cairo and they appear to have switched to an OpenGL backend.
Add Plan9 and 9P to Linux. This allows interpretation of most filenames to be done by user level programs and by remote services. This gives you encryption and compression and lots of other stuff that some people think are "filesystem" things. This also gives you the ability to put the entire "database" in user space, ie "/search/foo=bar" would be a directory listing all the files in the system that match the "foo=bar" criteria, dynamically created.
Add Plan9 union mounts to Linux.
Move all of the "ioslaves" that are in KDE/Gnome and move them to using 9P. The program "cat" should be able to open any string you can type into the fanciest KDE file browser and copy the contents. Instead of colon use slash. See 9P for details.
Hit all the idiots with a clue by 4 until they figure out that a "filename" is a STREAM OF BYTES. It is not "text". This means no "canocolization" or "convert to wide characters" or "make sure it is legal UTF-8" or any of the other crap that we have been putting up with for years and years that has killed all progress in this field. Microsoft is of course the worst offender here, but new Unix designs are not so hot either, note that with locales I can easily create a file that I cannot display in KDE, that is wrong.
"Metadata" should be required to be a cache of information figured out from the file. Do you want the postagestamp image? Look for the metadata, but if it is not there, run a program that will create it. Although physically not prevented, metadata that cannot be recreated from file data should be considerd a bad idea because it will be lost if the file is moved. This gets rid of all need to transmit metadata. Also it allows the metadata to be stored on a different system than the file, which is very useful if the file is remote or you don't have permission to write it.
Using ReiserFS or EXT3 or NTFS WinFS is all trivial issues compared to this stuff.
I belive all metadata must be able to be determined from the file's contents. Think of it as a cache of information figured out from the file, not as "extra information".
Oddly enough everybody talking about "databases" thinks this way, saying that files are inserted into the database depending on their contents, but when people start thinking about "metadata" they get all confused.
First step would be to set the "type" metadata by examining the file's contents and looking for magic header bytes. Then postage-stamp images, comments, author, and other information may be extracted by programs that know about the various types. Eventually I think even filenames and permissions and ACL's would be stored in the file data.
Exactly how is versioning going to save you from a disk crash? Versioning is quite useful, but it does not mean you don't have to backup. The older versions are on the same disk and will be lost at the same time in case of hardware failure.
Versioning is somewhat useful for speeding up incremental backups, possibly. But lots of other designs can also speed these up.
May I build the vote scanning machine?
Sure you can. If you want to cheat you have to figure out a way to produce the same results from the counts in the vote recording machines that printed the ballot, and the same result if humans count the paper ballots.
Oh my god, the inventor of the transistor did not have a security clearance, but we are using them in military hardware! What if he hid a evil back door in there?