The only thing that gif has that is realy neat is animations. Mabie we can get the W3 to come up with a "Animated PNG" file format.
There's already enough file formats out there that new ones showing up shouldn't be a problem. PNG for non-lossy compression, and JPEG for complex images where a little bit of lossy compression won't hurt.
A good vector format would be neat, but... someone'd have to come up with a good open standard... and well, I'm not holding my breath
Heck, I'd have switched to.png and.jpg for everything a year ago, it's just that damn Nutscrape couldn't do.png until like 4.5 - and.jpg is, well, lossy.
Especially for commercial sites, the felt that supporting a wide range of browsers was more important than using the most appropriate image format.
There are many problems with ignoring privacy. Here's another:
If a stupid law gets passed, I'm going to ignore it, and I don't want it to be easy for the feds to find out and procecute.
An example of a law that I consider stupid is fireworks being illegal in Massachussetts. If I want to risk burning my hand to be able to see pretty fire and here the bottle rocket go *pop*, then that's what I'm going to do. I don't want the local cops to be able to see the E-mail to my uncle in california that says "Hey, can you send me a gross of bottle rockets by UPS?".
And if your response is "You shouldn't just ignore stupid laws, you should try to do petition your legislator or something" then my answer is "been there, tried that, I want my damn fireworks now, not in 2060!"
And so then if you ever did anything "Suspicious" they could find a place where you broke the law but they decided it was unimportant and throw you in the slammer.
Even if it *were* as bad as all that it'd be better than what the US'll be in 7 years if the current trends continue. According to CNN, 30% of the people here in the USA think that "Our schools would be safer if we got rid of Television, Movies, and the Internet and made it illegal to own any weapon more dangerous than a toothpick - and if this happened it would be good." Yes, that is a slight exageration, but...
Who knows? What I do know is that having only a select few people who can understand the law, and having it so that a judge can interpret the law hoever he damn well pleases is a violation of one of the few rights I think that people should have... the right to know what the laws are so as to allow them to attempt to not violate those laws.
I think I'm going to go do that too, but it isn't enough.
We all have to get together and remind everyone of some basic points:
Ben Franklin quote, on the order of "If you're willing to give up a little freedom for a little security then you deserve neithor".
The USA has a constitution and a bill of rights. These cannot be ignored.
The constitution grants congress the right to make laws - It does not grant congress the right to form other bodys with the right to make laws, therefore any law made by the FCC, the EPA, or any fedral "Authority" but congress is *null and void*.
America is the "Land of the Free". Laws restrict freedom by definition. There should be a minimum of laws in America.
Any legal system where you need to go to law school for years to get a minimal understanding of it is *too complex*, the KISS principal applys to legal systems too.
One obvious right that everyone keeps forgetting is the right to *know what laws affect you at any given time in any given place*. See the point above for why this right is denied from Americans.
If an action doesn't adversly affect other people, there is no reason for that action to be illegal.
I could come up with a more, but...
If the USA doesn't clean up it's damn act, I'm moving north 500 Miles as soon as I finish college (7 years from now for a bachlor's degree, arghh!)
Verry simply: This nation of the US was founded on certain principles. These principles existed for two primary reasons:
Ensure personal freedom.
Ensure the people's ability to cause a revolution if need be.
This act by the FCC infinges on both of those - It is therefore a Bad Thing(TM). It's a matter of principle, and with the current situation in the USA we can't let the government pull *any crap*. This is crap, and the government is pulling it.
Commerialisation of OpenSource is the ultimate victory. It's what good old RMS has been working twords for nigh on 15 years now, cause if Linux beats NT, and KOffice beats MSOffice, then Joe average office worker doesn't have to sign away his soul and his right to be nice to his friends and co-workers just to be able to work in his job that earns him $10/hour.
Even now this is possible, or nearly so, but as GPLed software (Not just any Open Source software, software released under the GPL) gets more and more supported by corporate interests, it'll get harder and harder to sell propriatary compeditors to the GPL'd software.
I've got dozens of NT boxes that I've never needed to press the reset switch on. So does my experience negate this story?
Well, you didn't need to press the reset button, you could have set the power switch to off, and then back to on. You just used the reset button because it was easier.
I think that'd help a little, but it doesn't prevent congress from passing lame-ass laws, they just have to read out the lame-ass law in it's entirety.
It also doesn't do anything about lame state laws, nor does it do anything about "entities able to pass law-like rules" like the EPA. (Damnit, the Constitution says "Congress may make laws" not "Congress may designate any other organization, and then that organization can make laws too"
The entire legal system in the USA is out of control. It needs to be redone, from scratch.
Also, don't I have the right to see what laws affect me? Yea, I thought so too. Where can I go download a copy? Which section in my public library? What, the laws arn't avalible? I thought that as well.
The laws should be simple enough that they can be taught in school in their entirety, and once a working system gets set up (Aka, the current sytem isn't a "Working System") it should be nigh on impossible to tweak it and add on unnessisary stupidity!
Arghhh!!!! I'm going to wright up a thingie and submit it as a top level Slashdot article. This subject pisses me off!
They've already done the porting work to windows, and they can't expect people who are wrighting free software for *any platform* to be able to or be willing to pay $1500 for a licence for a UI toolkit.
Didn't their mothers teach them to play nice and share when they were little? =P
Troll Tech is supposed to make money on Commercial Software being developed on top of Qt.
If people are wrighting free software for Windows they ain't gonna pay $1500 for a UI toolkit, they're gonna use GTK+ or even (pah) MFC. Better for Troll if they are using Qt, even if Troll isn't making money on that project, because they may pay for a commercial licence for future commercial product that they are making, yes?
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With free software image tools, support for PNG is more common than support for gif.
Adobe's PDF format may be good, but I think an open format could end up being better, mabie one that uses JPG and PNG compression for images?
The only thing that gif has that is realy neat is animations. Mabie we can get the W3 to come up with a "Animated PNG" file format.
There's already enough file formats out there that new ones showing up shouldn't be a problem. PNG for non-lossy compression, and JPEG for complex images where a little bit of lossy compression won't hurt.
A good vector format would be neat, but... someone'd have to come up with a good open standard... and well, I'm not holding my breath
Heck, I'd have switched to .png and .jpg for everything a year ago, it's just that damn Nutscrape couldn't do .png until like 4.5 - and .jpg is, well, lossy.
Especially for commercial sites, the felt that supporting a wide range of browsers was more important than using the most appropriate image format.
There are many problems with ignoring privacy. Here's another:
If a stupid law gets passed, I'm going to ignore it, and I don't want it to be easy for the feds to find out and procecute.
An example of a law that I consider stupid is fireworks being illegal in Massachussetts. If I want to risk burning my hand to be able to see pretty fire and here the bottle rocket go *pop*, then that's what I'm going to do. I don't want the local cops to be able to see the E-mail to my uncle in california that says "Hey, can you send me a gross of bottle rockets by UPS?".
And if your response is "You shouldn't just ignore stupid laws, you should try to do petition your legislator or something" then my answer is "been there, tried that, I want my damn fireworks now, not in 2060!"
And so then if you ever did anything "Suspicious" they could find a place where you broke the law but they decided it was unimportant and throw you in the slammer.
I'll keep my privacy, thanks.
Realy simply, the Supreme Court should rule "Software is not patentable -> All binary data shall henceforth be copyrightable but not patentable"
This would make much more legal sense than the allowing software patents, at least in a "This will work cleanly" sense.
Whatever =P
Even if it *were* as bad as all that it'd be better than what the US'll be in 7 years if the current trends continue. According to CNN, 30% of the people here in the USA think that "Our schools would be safer if we got rid of Television, Movies, and the Internet and made it illegal to own any weapon more dangerous than a toothpick - and if this happened it would be good." Yes, that is a slight exageration, but...
Who knows? What I do know is that having only a select few people who can understand the law, and having it so that a judge can interpret the law hoever he damn well pleases is a violation of one of the few rights I think that people should have... the right to know what the laws are so as to allow them to attempt to not violate those laws.
I think I'm going to go do that too, but it isn't enough.
We all have to get together and remind everyone of some basic points:
If the USA doesn't clean up it's damn act, I'm moving north 500 Miles as soon as I finish college (7 years from now for a bachlor's degree, arghh!)
Verry simply: This nation of the US was founded on certain principles. These principles existed for two primary reasons:
This act by the FCC infinges on both of those - It is therefore a Bad Thing(TM).
It's a matter of principle, and with the current situation in the USA we can't let the government pull *any crap*. This is crap, and the government is pulling it.
In an "Emergency Situation" it's good to have the entire kernel source. Also how about "Well, I forgot to download TCP/IP, damn, i'm screwed"
I think I saw a Win32 app on there once, and you could theorettically compile most of the programs there for *any* UNIX...
No. Unfortunately this other is not as strong in the ways of the Source.
His licencing and development meathod promote fragmentation and propriaterization - he allows the intrusion of the Dark Side.
The penguin cannot be lost, for, without him, we must rely on the Hurd, and the Hurd, as they say, is Crufty.
Commerialisation of OpenSource is the ultimate victory. It's what good old RMS has been working twords for nigh on 15 years now, cause if Linux beats NT, and KOffice beats MSOffice, then Joe average office worker doesn't have to sign away his soul and his right to be nice to his friends and co-workers just to be able to work in his job that earns him $10/hour.
Even now this is possible, or nearly so, but as GPLed software (Not just any Open Source software, software released under the GPL) gets more and more supported by corporate interests, it'll get harder and harder to sell propriatary compeditors to the GPL'd software.
Dude. You're right. I've seen it before too.
Mabie it's a Microsoft plant, attempting to spread random FUD.
I've got dozens of NT boxes that I've never needed to press the reset switch on. So does my experience negate this story?
Well, you didn't need to press the reset button, you could have set the power switch to off, and then back to on. You just used the reset button because it was easier.
=P
He he.
I think that'd help a little, but it doesn't prevent congress from passing lame-ass laws, they just have to read out the lame-ass law in it's entirety.
It also doesn't do anything about lame state laws, nor does it do anything about "entities able to pass law-like rules" like the EPA. (Damnit, the Constitution says "Congress may make laws" not "Congress may designate any other organization, and then that organization can make laws too"
The entire legal system in the USA is out of control. It needs to be redone, from scratch.
Also, don't I have the right to see what laws affect me? Yea, I thought so too. Where can I go download a copy? Which section in my public library? What, the laws arn't avalible? I thought that as well.
The laws should be simple enough that they can be taught in school in their entirety, and once a working system gets set up (Aka, the current sytem isn't a "Working System") it should be nigh on impossible to tweak it and add on unnessisary stupidity!
Arghhh!!!! I'm going to wright up a thingie and submit it as a top level Slashdot article. This subject pisses me off!
Dude, I'm a geek, and I wake up at 4am and go to sleep at 5pm. (Yes, this is local time).
The thing about geeks is that they are not all exactly the same =P
I can probably send a nicer e-birthday-card. All I've gotta do is send a Email consisting of:
And have a neat HTMLized card at that address, or you could just send a image as an attachment (PNG or JPEG)
Ahh, but I do know how many in-house propriateary UNIXes got *major* support from Intel to port to Merced. The number I speak of is ZERO.
One possible short-term solution: Making Qt apps work on a free Windows X server.
That's a nasty kludge.
Troll Tech has already done the porting work, and they should be nice and share! =P
They've already done the porting work to windows, and they can't expect people who are wrighting free software for *any platform* to be able to or be willing to pay $1500 for a licence for a UI toolkit.
Didn't their mothers teach them to play nice and share when they were little? =P
Troll Tech is supposed to make money on Commercial Software being developed on top of Qt.
If people are wrighting free software for Windows they ain't gonna pay $1500 for a UI toolkit, they're gonna use GTK+ or even (pah) MFC. Better for Troll if they are using Qt, even if Troll isn't making money on that project, because they may pay for a commercial licence for future commercial product that they are making, yes?