The original poster is mistaken just as you noticed, but I would not be so quick to think he is a "GPL fanatic". In fact I suspect he is somebody who has swallowed the anti-GPL FUD that it is a "virus" that somehow is attached to the code and makes it permanently released somehow.
The poster may even have ulterior motives to try to promote this misconception.
Also, lots of projects that release GPL code want copyrights assigned to them for submitted patches. The FSF itself does this.
Ok, so per your argument, Apple hasn't "created wealth" with the iPhone, they've really just created an "iPhone scarcity"?
If there were no patents or copyright, there would be a LOT more iPhones and they would be a lot cheaper, they would be manufactured by a hundered different companies and sold for just a bit more than the cost of parts and labor. So yes they have indeed used patents and copyright to create a IPhone scarcity. The GP is exactly right and you just don't understand what he is saying.
It would be pretty easy to determine if somebody is taking your piano, and then shoot him. You just stay near the piano, with a gun, and watch it.
I don't think that is going to work to prevent somebody from singing your song. Sitting near the song watching it with a gun is not going to prevent that person who heard it last week and is now in China from singing it.
I agree with the GP that there is a VAST difference and you are refusing to see it.
I very much agree that is a strong possibility. They are not as stupid as people may think and faking this argument would be very clever.
They may have shut down or interfered with a real site, or perhaps many of them. They may also have not done anything! But now any terrorist who used some secretive internet resource that seems to not be working correctly now (probably lots of them just because of the secretive nature) is going to have doubts and think that possibly information they put on their before is now known to the CIA.
Technicolor only used one lens. There was a beam splitter behind it that directed one of the colors to it's film, and the other two colors films were stacked back-to-back.
I remember hearing about an experiment, using measurements of oxygen consumption, that showed that a human sitting in a chair watching TV burned less calories than a human sitting in a chair doing nothing! Does anybody remember this and can find any references? I think the experiment was quite old so there was no test of using a computer, but it may be related to this.
I think I downloaded a binary executable and put it in/usr/bin and it worked. Not sure where I got it. Don't have it any more as I wiped everything when updating to 9.x. We did need SVN 1.5 because they did something complex with the repository so that checkout for platform A (such as Linux) did not checkout all the files needed for other platforms (such as Windows/Mac). This was pretty vital as these guys liked to check in compiled binaries.
I agree, but this mistake does appear to be common and it would be nice if Ubuntu addressed it in at least making it easy to fix.
The complaint comparing it to Windows is unfair. There are plenty of users of Windows who are just smart enough to fuck up their systems by editing files or installing some 3rd party "accelerator" or something. This is the same thing. "Grandma" is not going to download and install the Nvidia driver, so saying that "grandma can't fix it" is not at all fair, when nobody complains that Grandma can't fix messed up tweaks to low-level Windows files either.
However if perhaps Microsoft took examples of fucked-up systems and made their install software smart enough to get around or fix this mess when you updated to the next version, then they would be doing something that Ubuntu is not doing. I don't know if they are doing anything like this so I cannot comment on it. I can also see a slippery slope: Ubuntu or Windows could always fix anything by throwing away all hand-made tweaks and reverting to stock behavior on any update. That can be equally frustrating for a user to lose their changes however. Not clear if it is possible to distinguish a fuck up the user wants to clean from a careful adjustment they want to keep.
He manually installed the NVidia drivers from the NVidia page. This I can confirm royally fucks up Ubuntu so that it will break if you do much of anything to the kernel or if you attempt to turn the driver on or off.
I don't think Ubuntu can do much to fix NVidia's behavior but it would be nice if they added some ui to their hardware installer to detect this and at least cleanly remove the NVidia install and then install the Ubuntu one. I have never been able to do this except by reinstalling the entire operating system (ok I'm probably an idiot but I try to delete everything I can and it still won't decide to install the Ubuntu file).
I find it hard to believe. I thought maybe you are trying either some really new or really old version, but on my Ubuntu machine I have 1.5.2 (r32768) so that does not seem to be the problem. Been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and using svn extensively (as this is how I accessed development code at work) and never had problems.
I do remember somewhat earlier having to update to a new version (perhaps this 1.5) but this was on the older Mandrake machine I had. Even then it was no problem though I had to download not from the repository but from the svn site.
Being a Unix-based development tool, subversion has always been by far one of the easiest things to install and I never ever worried it may not work, and certainly never had a problem.
Maybe there is something else called SVN? Otherwise I can't imagine what your problem was.
According to RTFA she was paid to do it and was nuts in the head a bit, too. The video was not put on YouTube, it was put on a secretive pay animal-torture site. I think they assumed it would not be seen publicly and anybody who had it would be ashamed to show it to anybody else.
Dragging the top or bottom bar makes it go full-vertical
Can you explain this please? As far as I can tell dragging to the top makes it full-screen and dragging to the bottom does nothing special.
Dragging to the top to maximize has been around forever on various Linux window managers, but I do think the half-screen maximize for the side drag is a clever idea and kudos to them. I'm sure it will be copied everywhere soon.
A shortcut for maximize-vertically is dearly wanted, not clear if they provided this (other than the half-screen thing, which may be sufficient if you can then move the window away from the left). This used to be common on Linux window managers (usually ctrl+maximize button) but those idiots seem to have forgotten about it.
I would not only blame IE. The problem I saw was lots of png files marked with a gamma of 1.0 when in fact they had a gamma of 2.2, because of stupid software writers who said "hey I'm not raising this.gif file to any power, so it must mean the gamma is 1".
That sounds like you were running into problems converting the linear value to a fixed-point format.
If for instance you stored 255*value into an 8-bit number, and you looked at the brightness of the value 1, you would see it is quite noticably much brighter than black (it would be as bright as an 8-bit sRGB value of 20). Therefore at the black end you are going to see extreme posterization.
Raising the number of bits helps but you still end up with surprises. Sometimes lighting does things like divide a value by 10 and then multiply by 10 again later, thus introducing the posterization even with 16 or more bits.
I don't think you can do linear without also using a floating-point format. In effect you are choosing a logarithmic format (the exponent of the float is very similar to a log), but the CPU knows how to quickly work with the equivalent linear value.
I don't think "32 bit" is what fixed it. What fixed it is that Photoshop also translated to some linear space as a side-effect of whatever he did to convert to 32 bit.
If you have 32 bits I strongly recommend using floating point in it rather than some image format, and if you have floating point then linear light levels work very good. I also recommend 16-bit half floats if you have 16 bits, attempts to make GIMP support 16 bit integers are a waste of time I think, they should go for half.
This is because the gamma value that programs wrote to the png file is wrong.
I think almost all software nowadays ignores png gamma values. I have gotten in some arguments with some color management folks because imho it works best to ignore *all* "color management" such as embedded profiles. They are wrong far more often than they are right, because the whole field is very confusing and software is filled with a zillion bugs.
To answer the grandparent, the "gamma" is used to convert the numbers in the file into the actual brightness, the formula for brightness is pow(N/MAX, 1/GAMMA), where N = number in file, MAX = largest number file can store, and GAMMA = gamma value.
My software has been calculating in linear space for over a decade now (this is the Nuke Compositor currenlty produced by The Foundry but at the time it was used by Digital Domain for Titanic). You can see some pages I wrote on the effect here: http://mysite.verizon.net/~spitzak/conversion/composite.html. See here for the overall paper: http://mysite.verizon.net/~spitzak/conversion/index.html and a Siggraph paper on the conversion of such images here: http://mysite.verizon.net/~spitzak/conversion/sketches_0265.pdf, in fact a lot more work went into figuring out how to get such linear images to show on the screen on hardware of that era than on the obvious need to do the math in linear. Initial work on this was done for Apollo 13 as the problems with gamma were quite obvious when scaling images of small bright objects against the black of space.
For typical photographs the effect is not very visible in scaling, as the gamma curve is very close to a straight line for two close points and thus the result is not very much different. Only widely separated points (ie very high contrast images with sharp edges) will show a visible difference. This probably means you are trying to scale line art, there are screenshots in the html pages showing the results of this. Far worse errors can be found in lighting calculations and in filtering operations such as blur. At the time even the most expensive professional 3D renderers were doing lighting completely wrong, but things have gotten better now that they can use floating point intermediate images.
One big annoyance is that you better do the math in floating point. Even 16 bits is insufficient for linear light levels as the black points will be too far apart and visible (the space is wasted on many many more white levels than you ever would need). A logarithmic system is needed, and on modern hardware you might as well use IEEE floating point, or the ILM "half" standard for 16-bit floating point.
Just to be fair, C++0x is adding support for exactly this example.
There is a way to do the foreach but I don't know it. A more obvious thing is the ability to declare an auto variable as "auto a = foo()" and the compiler figures out the return type of foo() and makes a be that type, this gets rid of that::iterator line which is by far the ugliest part.
Most (or at least the ones I use) modern video players seem to hide the mouse for you at the same time they hide the other controls. This is when in full screen mode. It would be nice if they hid the mouse at other times.
As for the other thing, I certainly NEVER can find the mouse despite it being visible unless I move it. Human brains are about 10000 times better at detecting movement than doing matching of a tiny pattern so I find it hard to believe that you ever actually find the mouse without actually moving it. I would admit that a broken implementation that has some delay before the mouse becomes visible would be a pain but I have not seen such a WM. I could imagine programs attempting to do this could be slow because they need to be swapped in, for that reason I would like to see systems do this automatically.
I meant that the mouse cursor is hidden when you type a key that is actually being USED by the software. Not that you type the "hide the mouse cursor key".
Come on now, at least try to come up with logical arguments that don't assume that the window manager is designed in the stupidest way possible!
I will repeat what I have already said 4 times in response to this: The mouse cursor can be hidden when the user types, and reappear when the mouse is moved. This solves the "I have to move the cursor out of the way" complaints. In fact I would do this even if point to type is not implemented.
If that really is a problem, add a flag that has to be turned on that says "Don't raise me on click!" and default it off.
I think also you are seriously overestimating how hard it would be to fix toolkits (which simply have to raise windows when user clicks on empty space). Also you seem to be unaware that all non-toolkit programs already do this (as they date back to when this was the behavior of X). Also you seem to have missed the fact that click in the title bar, alt-tab, taskbar, etc will still raise windows. Experiment with actual users to see if they even notice, I don't think they will.
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The original poster is mistaken just as you noticed, but I would not be so quick to think he is a "GPL fanatic". In fact I suspect he is somebody who has swallowed the anti-GPL FUD that it is a "virus" that somehow is attached to the code and makes it permanently released somehow.
The poster may even have ulterior motives to try to promote this misconception.
Also, lots of projects that release GPL code want copyrights assigned to them for submitted patches. The FSF itself does this.
Whoa! Well you sure proved which side the mathematical idiots are on!
The traditional Kilo, Mega, Tera are 2^10, 2^20 and 2^30!!!
Might want to check up on that before you make any more boneheaded posts!
Ok, so per your argument, Apple hasn't "created wealth" with the iPhone, they've really just created an "iPhone scarcity"?
If there were no patents or copyright, there would be a LOT more iPhones and they would be a lot cheaper, they would be manufactured by a hundered different companies and sold for just a bit more than the cost of parts and labor. So yes they have indeed used patents and copyright to create a IPhone scarcity. The GP is exactly right and you just don't understand what he is saying.
There is a HUGE difference.
It would be pretty easy to determine if somebody is taking your piano, and then shoot him. You just stay near the piano, with a gun, and watch it.
I don't think that is going to work to prevent somebody from singing your song. Sitting near the song watching it with a gun is not going to prevent that person who heard it last week and is now in China from singing it.
I agree with the GP that there is a VAST difference and you are refusing to see it.
I very much agree that is a strong possibility. They are not as stupid as people may think and faking this argument would be very clever.
They may have shut down or interfered with a real site, or perhaps many of them. They may also have not done anything! But now any terrorist who used some secretive internet resource that seems to not be working correctly now (probably lots of them just because of the secretive nature) is going to have doubts and think that possibly information they put on their before is now known to the CIA.
Technicolor only used one lens. There was a beam splitter behind it that directed one of the colors to it's film, and the other two colors films were stacked back-to-back.
I remember hearing about an experiment, using measurements of oxygen consumption, that showed that a human sitting in a chair watching TV burned less calories than a human sitting in a chair doing nothing! Does anybody remember this and can find any references? I think the experiment was quite old so there was no test of using a computer, but it may be related to this.
I think I downloaded a binary executable and put it in /usr/bin and it worked. Not sure where I got it. Don't have it any more as I wiped everything when updating to 9.x. We did need SVN 1.5 because they did something complex with the repository so that checkout for platform A (such as Linux) did not checkout all the files needed for other platforms (such as Windows/Mac). This was pretty vital as these guys liked to check in compiled binaries.
I agree, but this mistake does appear to be common and it would be nice if Ubuntu addressed it in at least making it easy to fix.
The complaint comparing it to Windows is unfair. There are plenty of users of Windows who are just smart enough to fuck up their systems by editing files or installing some 3rd party "accelerator" or something. This is the same thing. "Grandma" is not going to download and install the Nvidia driver, so saying that "grandma can't fix it" is not at all fair, when nobody complains that Grandma can't fix messed up tweaks to low-level Windows files either.
However if perhaps Microsoft took examples of fucked-up systems and made their install software smart enough to get around or fix this mess when you updated to the next version, then they would be doing something that Ubuntu is not doing. I don't know if they are doing anything like this so I cannot comment on it. I can also see a slippery slope: Ubuntu or Windows could always fix anything by throwing away all hand-made tweaks and reverting to stock behavior on any update. That can be equally frustrating for a user to lose their changes however. Not clear if it is possible to distinguish a fuck up the user wants to clean from a careful adjustment they want to keep.
He manually installed the NVidia drivers from the NVidia page. This I can confirm royally fucks up Ubuntu so that it will break if you do much of anything to the kernel or if you attempt to turn the driver on or off.
I don't think Ubuntu can do much to fix NVidia's behavior but it would be nice if they added some ui to their hardware installer to detect this and at least cleanly remove the NVidia install and then install the Ubuntu one. I have never been able to do this except by reinstalling the entire operating system (ok I'm probably an idiot but I try to delete everything I can and it still won't decide to install the Ubuntu file).
You mean subversion?
I find it hard to believe. I thought maybe you are trying either some really new or really old version, but on my Ubuntu machine I have 1.5.2 (r32768) so that does not seem to be the problem. Been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and using svn extensively (as this is how I accessed development code at work) and never had problems.
I do remember somewhat earlier having to update to a new version (perhaps this 1.5) but this was on the older Mandrake machine I had. Even then it was no problem though I had to download not from the repository but from the svn site.
Being a Unix-based development tool, subversion has always been by far one of the easiest things to install and I never ever worried it may not work, and certainly never had a problem.
Maybe there is something else called SVN? Otherwise I can't imagine what your problem was.
According to RTFA she was paid to do it and was nuts in the head a bit, too. The video was not put on YouTube, it was put on a secretive pay animal-torture site. I think they assumed it would not be seen publicly and anybody who had it would be ashamed to show it to anybody else.
Dragging the top or bottom bar makes it go full-vertical
Can you explain this please? As far as I can tell dragging to the top makes it full-screen and dragging to the bottom does nothing special.
Dragging to the top to maximize has been around forever on various Linux window managers, but I do think the half-screen maximize for the side drag is a clever idea and kudos to them. I'm sure it will be copied everywhere soon.
A shortcut for maximize-vertically is dearly wanted, not clear if they provided this (other than the half-screen thing, which may be sufficient if you can then move the window away from the left). This used to be common on Linux window managers (usually ctrl+maximize button) but those idiots seem to have forgotten about it.
I would not only blame IE. The problem I saw was lots of png files marked with a gamma of 1.0 when in fact they had a gamma of 2.2, because of stupid software writers who said "hey I'm not raising this .gif file to any power, so it must mean the gamma is 1".
That sounds like you were running into problems converting the linear value to a fixed-point format.
If for instance you stored 255*value into an 8-bit number, and you looked at the brightness of the value 1, you would see it is quite noticably much brighter than black (it would be as bright as an 8-bit sRGB value of 20). Therefore at the black end you are going to see extreme posterization.
Raising the number of bits helps but you still end up with surprises. Sometimes lighting does things like divide a value by 10 and then multiply by 10 again later, thus introducing the posterization even with 16 or more bits.
I don't think you can do linear without also using a floating-point format. In effect you are choosing a logarithmic format (the exponent of the float is very similar to a log), but the CPU knows how to quickly work with the equivalent linear value.
Linear data needs a lot more than 8 bits to work correctly. Most "raw" formats use 12 or more.
So I would think anything storing white as 255 is going to use a gamma curve and 127 is not 1/2 white but some darker value.
I don't think "32 bit" is what fixed it. What fixed it is that Photoshop also translated to some linear space as a side-effect of whatever he did to convert to 32 bit.
If you have 32 bits I strongly recommend using floating point in it rather than some image format, and if you have floating point then linear light levels work very good. I also recommend 16-bit half floats if you have 16 bits, attempts to make GIMP support 16 bit integers are a waste of time I think, they should go for half.
This is because the gamma value that programs wrote to the png file is wrong.
I think almost all software nowadays ignores png gamma values. I have gotten in some arguments with some color management folks because imho it works best to ignore *all* "color management" such as embedded profiles. They are wrong far more often than they are right, because the whole field is very confusing and software is filled with a zillion bugs.
To answer the grandparent, the "gamma" is used to convert the numbers in the file into the actual brightness, the formula for brightness is pow(N/MAX, 1/GAMMA), where N = number in file, MAX = largest number file can store, and GAMMA = gamma value.
My software has been calculating in linear space for over a decade now (this is the Nuke Compositor currenlty produced by The Foundry but at the time it was used by Digital Domain for Titanic). You can see some pages I wrote on the effect here: http://mysite.verizon.net/~spitzak/conversion/composite.html. See here for the overall paper: http://mysite.verizon.net/~spitzak/conversion/index.html and a Siggraph paper on the conversion of such images here: http://mysite.verizon.net/~spitzak/conversion/sketches_0265.pdf, in fact a lot more work went into figuring out how to get such linear images to show on the screen on hardware of that era than on the obvious need to do the math in linear. Initial work on this was done for Apollo 13 as the problems with gamma were quite obvious when scaling images of small bright objects against the black of space.
For typical photographs the effect is not very visible in scaling, as the gamma curve is very close to a straight line for two close points and thus the result is not very much different. Only widely separated points (ie very high contrast images with sharp edges) will show a visible difference. This probably means you are trying to scale line art, there are screenshots in the html pages showing the results of this. Far worse errors can be found in lighting calculations and in filtering operations such as blur. At the time even the most expensive professional 3D renderers were doing lighting completely wrong, but things have gotten better now that they can use floating point intermediate images.
One big annoyance is that you better do the math in floating point. Even 16 bits is insufficient for linear light levels as the black points will be too far apart and visible (the space is wasted on many many more white levels than you ever would need). A logarithmic system is needed, and on modern hardware you might as well use IEEE floating point, or the ILM "half" standard for 16-bit floating point.
Just to be fair, C++0x is adding support for exactly this example.
There is a way to do the foreach but I don't know it. A more obvious thing is the ability to declare an auto variable as "auto a = foo()" and the compiler figures out the return type of foo() and makes a be that type, this gets rid of that ::iterator line which is by far the ugliest part.
I don't know if this is a troll, but yes if it actually is a copy of the book (not the original), you are in trouble.
Most (or at least the ones I use) modern video players seem to hide the mouse for you at the same time they hide the other controls. This is when in full screen mode. It would be nice if they hid the mouse at other times.
As for the other thing, I certainly NEVER can find the mouse despite it being visible unless I move it. Human brains are about 10000 times better at detecting movement than doing matching of a tiny pattern so I find it hard to believe that you ever actually find the mouse without actually moving it. I would admit that a broken implementation that has some delay before the mouse becomes visible would be a pain but I have not seen such a WM. I could imagine programs attempting to do this could be slow because they need to be swapped in, for that reason I would like to see systems do this automatically.
I meant that the mouse cursor is hidden when you type a key that is actually being USED by the software. Not that you type the "hide the mouse cursor key".
Come on now, at least try to come up with logical arguments that don't assume that the window manager is designed in the stupidest way possible!
I will repeat what I have already said 4 times in response to this: The mouse cursor can be hidden when the user types, and reappear when the mouse is moved. This solves the "I have to move the cursor out of the way" complaints. In fact I would do this even if point to type is not implemented.
If that really is a problem, add a flag that has to be turned on that says "Don't raise me on click!" and default it off.
I think also you are seriously overestimating how hard it would be to fix toolkits (which simply have to raise windows when user clicks on empty space). Also you seem to be unaware that all non-toolkit programs already do this (as they date back to when this was the behavior of X). Also you seem to have missed the fact that click in the title bar, alt-tab, taskbar, etc will still raise windows. Experiment with actual users to see if they even notice, I don't think they will.