Sigh, why do these articles always have such blatent "bending" of the truth?:)
While Linux can only run on a few kinds of computers, NetBSD can run on more than 22...
Currently Linux is actively developed for Alpha, ARM, IA64, x86 (IA32), PPC, MIPS, m68k, and sparc(64). There is also a sh3 port, but I'm not sure how active it is (9 architectures).
NetBSD currently runs on Alpha, m68k, ARM, PPC, ix86 (IA32), MIPS, ns32k, sh3, sparc(64), and vax (10 architectures).
Note these are chip architectures, the "kinds of computers" is much larger. Under NetBSD there are explicit ports to different computers running the same chip, for instance a macppc port and a ofppc port even though they both use PowerPC chips. Linux doesn't differentiate ports like this, so it would appear that Linux is ported to far less machines than NetBSD.
Earlier this year there were a number of well-publicized security problems involving the Linux operating system. During that time my computer was frequently attacked. However, since I wasn't running Linux, I wasn't vulnerable. Linux is the favored operating system for most of the attackers on the Internet, which is another reason I don't use it.
99.5% (give or take) of all exploits for the Linux OS are distribution binary exploits, not kernel exploits.
This means that if you had SSH installed on your box and a security announcement regarding SSH on Linux was put out, chances are you would be vulnerable as well. The real difference is that exploit code examples for Linux are far more common than for *BSD.
I would almost say though that a lot of the daemons *BSD uses are typically higher quality than what the Linux world uses, but nothing really stops someone from packaging say an OpenBSD FTP server with a Linux distribution (I believe Debian does now).
All can run most programs that are written for Linux, and frequently they can run the programs faster than Linux itself.
I've seen this argument a lot, but I have yet to see a benchmark performed on any modern kernel. The last benchmark I saw as for a 1.2.x kernel which was quite a while ago.
If I had to pick out the single difference between the BSD community as a whole and the proponents of Linux, I would say it is something called ''correctness.'' The BSD developers are more concerned that the underlying technology in their operating systems be implemented in a manner consistent with the overall design of the systems. Linux developers, overall, are more interested in just putting together something that works.
Linus Torvalds is one of the most anal retentive people on this planet (no offense Linus). You see him all the time rejecting patches because of poor architecture design. Of course, he only handles (for the most part) the intel port & generic linux system, but the other subsystem heads are just as bad.
Really, unless you are a kernel developer (ie, you've had patches accepted), you really can't begin to understand the pain and torture that one has to go through to get a patch accepted, especially when they implement new features:)
Really, when it all comes down to it, how different is Linux from *BSD? I mean, if you took a *BSD system and stuck a Linux kernel instead of a *BSD kernel and changed any type of incompatibilities... would you think it still inferior?
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong:)
From what I understand, prolonged exposure to low wattage microwaves can be damanging to exposed soft tissues in your body (such as eyes), but the output of a CPU probably won't do it.
There are studies on metabolic, reproductive, and neurological changes associated with low intensity EMR.
Anyway, here are a few facts from the WTO study on EMF:
RF Fields above 10 GHz are absorbed at the skin surface, with very little of the energy penetrating into the underlying tissues.
For adverse health effects, such as eye cataracts and skin burns, to occur from exposure to RF fields above 10 GHz, power densities above 1000 W/m2 are needed. Such densities are not found in everyday life. They do exist in very close proximity to powerful radars. Current exposure standards preclude human presence in this areas.
RF fields between 1 MHz and 10 GHz penetrate exposed tissues and produce heating due to energy absorption in these tissues. The depth of pentration of the RF field into the tissue depends on the frequency of the field and is greater for lower frequencies.
An SAR of at least 4 W/kg is needed to produce adverse health effects in people exposed to RF fields in this frequency range. Such energies are found tens of meters away from powerful FM antennas at the top of high towers, which makes these areas inaccessible.
Most adverse health effects that could occur from exposure to RF fields between 1 MHz and 10 GHz are consistent with responses to induced heating, resulting in rises in tissue or body temperatures higher than 1C.
It might also be noteworthy to know that a lot of cases today probably won't shield well against frequencies above 1 GHz so you might start having problems with phones, radios and the like.
The Hamburger patent attorney Hauck, Graalfs, Wehnert have have the word sign protected "Linux" in the german patent office. This today a colleague of the Sozietät confirmed on inquiry of c' t. Also the german sign sheet itemizes the sign protection. In notebooks 36 of the 9.9.1999 (page 9919), Linux is listed under the acts sign 399,36 517.6 in the category software.
What sign proprietor Roy Boldt with the registration plans, is unclear. The manager of the Hamburger system house and the firm deliberation ChannelOne was today by telephone not attainable in spite of several attempts. Whether it around a new case of Markengrabbing acts itself, or whether Boldt wants to act unselfish like a More austrian Linux-noted proprietor , Remains first of all in the darkening. To be sure Boldt of the sign "Linux" can be not yet certain itself. To US-right, the Trademarks have lain since 1997 with Linux-father Linus Torvalds. Torvalds must itself the rights however first before court erstreiten.
The exit of a comparable lawsuit in Germany would be meanwhile uncertain. After information of the german patent office, the sign right ends at the respective country boundaries. How it goes on here by land, becomes first in the next weeks appear.
At the 9.12.99, the contradiction time period against word sign "Linux" expires. Until there, anybody can make a so named "relative protection hindrance" validly. The patent office is already mobilized for such a case. The form planned for contingent objections "W7202 " has already a firm place in the Internet.
There seems to be a bit of confusion about the ability to license BSD code as GPL.
A software license defines restrictions you wish to place on the use of your software/code. It is a legally binding agreement between the copyright holder and the user. These restrictions can not be overridden by sublicensing the code unless permission is explicitly given.
A copyright notice defines ownership of the code. You do not need to place a copyright notice in your work to hold the copyright. The second you write it (in the US), it is protected under copyright law unless you explicitly release it to the public domain.
Code which is in the "public domain" has no copyright. You used to see people who would release code to the public domain with restrictions, however in the US "public domain" means public domain, so the restrictions won't hold up.
Unless explicitly forbidden by a license, you can sublicense code under whatever terms you wish. The terms of the new license can not conflict with the old license (sublicense, not relicense).
This allowed people such as Microsoft to take BSD code and place it under MS EULA. The EULA does not place any restrictions to make it incompatible with the original BSD license.
That said, it is completely legal to sublicense BSD source code as GPL as long as the GPL does not conflict with the BSD license, which, by the looks of it, it doesn't.
[disclaimer: this is all information I gathered from law usenet groups and various legal web sites so it may not be completely accurate. if there are any copyright lawyers who want to correct me, please do.]
Many proponents of Linux and the GPL are quick to state that "if FreeBSD wants to use GPL'd code, FreeBSD should GPL itself." However, this would be illegal. The majority of FreeBSD is owned by the Regents of the University of California, where it was originally developed. Removing the existing license without the permission of the Regents would be no different that releasing a version of GCC with a BSD copyright in place of the GPL.
I've read through the GPL many times, unless FreeBSD contains another license besides the pure BSD license, it is completely legal to swap out the license with the GPL without permission from the Regents.
I've heard this argument a lot that the BSD license is fundementally incompatible with the GPL. I can't find why that would be a case. The only restriction on compatibility that GPL maintains is that you are not allowed to infringe upon the rights given to you by the GPL. Placing a restriction on copyright notices, which the GPL already does in two seperate clauses doesn't seem to make this incompatible.
The actual clause for restriction is:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions.
You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Nowhere does the GPL state that you are given the right not to distribute the source without a copyright, in fact, the GPL makes it's own copyright restrictions in two places before this:
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty...
and
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice
If I've made a mistake interpretting the GPL, please explain what I'm missing.
Incorrect, it requires no restrictions be placed that contradict the terms of the license. The copyright notice does *NOT* contradict the license as the license has basically the exact same notice in it.
Here's that exact clause:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
Note how it says you may not impose further restrictions on the rights granted. The copyright notice does *NOT* impose upon the rights as it is in paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 section c.
As far as I can tell, it is perfectly legal to include BSD licensed code in a GPL program. This is a big loss to *BSD folks because Linux kernel types can integrate their code but the reverse can not happen unless you segregate it or switch the entire kernel source over to GPL.
I've read over the GPL several times and can't find any reason why the BSD license is incompatible with the GPL.
The GPL states the BSD requirements in it (copyright notice) and the only clause that comes close to saying BSD is incompatible with GPL is the sublicensing restrictions clause, but it clearly is not incompatible with the BSD license if you read it carefully.
The picture used to represent the FBSD daemon is clearly the Christian interpretation of demons, not from the Greco-Roman Daimon. The Christian demon is described as a spirit with no body which has a nasty habit of posessing other people's bodies. They aren't even top dog in Christian mythology, they are inferior to archangels.
The Greek daimon was not exactly something I'd want as a mascot anyway. A daimon is a supernatural being of the lowest order, inferior to other supernatural beings. It sits at a level between the gods and man.
There are earlier definitions of demons being called daimones or "divine powers". Later however daimones began to refer more towards the spirits of the dead (Roman) and to the above daimon. They also refer to spirits which each person is assigned to watch over.
I really wish they would have had an artist create their credit card.
There's nothing worse than handing someone a poorly designed credit card when you go to charge something. Especially when you are at a restaurant or an expensive store.
I don't know what's worse, that faded out brown penguin with the cheezy platinum logo in the upper right or the blue card with the funny offset box.
Maybe I'm nit picking. There are some pretty nice looking credit cards out there, but they are hard to find with a decent rate.
MBNA actually makes some pretty full color deals of Hawaii and what not. They also make cards for several other companies that are quite pretty, the Garfield one is surprisingly well done as is the Gateway Computer one.
While having a TrueType font rendering system sounds great and all, there don't appear to be any free TrueType fonts which are all that much better than their T1 counterparts.
Good TrueType fonts are typically manually hinted. Also, each style of the font such as italic, bold, and bold italic are individual fonts instead of having the font renderer try to fake it.
This results in a much cleaner, crisper font than what you get from using one of the many font creation programs out there.
Unfortunately, the skill involved in creating manually hinted fonts doesn't come cheap and while individual fonts can't be patented, they can be copywrited.
Microsoft has been somewhat generous and made a few commonly used typefaces available for limited distribution at no cost. I believe these include Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana and Courier, which is really all you need 99% of the time.
The exception being menus and what not, these typically use a font specially created for small labels. I believe MS uses MS Sans Serif for this.
The entire idea that we can place every person with a common interest, common belief, or common background into nice little square boxes with extreme generalizations is one of the many quirks of human behavior.
A lot of it has become taboo in our culture as well. Someone who is part of the majority can never ever generalize something who is part of the minority because you would be called racist, sexist, or one of a hundred other 'ists' out there.
The truth is, generalizations almost never work. Not every geek is antisocial, not every nerd wears glasses, not every hacker is malicious, not every male is aggressive, and not every female is passive.
However, before you start making generalizations about so-called geeks. Maybe you should ask the people you include in your geek-class if they think they are a geek.
So, said that, the only generalization I can make about geeks is that they are non-conformists. They do something that is not in step with popular society which makes them geeks.
Given that today it is now popular to use computers and use the internet... guess what? Chances are, if you were a geek because you played with machines, you probably aren't now.
You got that right. As far as I know, there are no good manually hinted truetype fonts freely available for distribution.
There are really only a few fonts we need:
Arial/Helvitica
Times/Times New Roman
Courier New
Manually hinted fonts typically seperate each font type into seperate files. Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic are all really seperate fonts under Windows and MacOS.
This gives a much higher quality font that what you see if you try to apply Bold and Italic to a font.
Creating fonts with those little font creation programs doesn't cut it, going in and manually hinting the font file will always give you better results. There are very few people who can manually hint a font and make it look good, it is truly an art.
Microsoft has made a few fonts available for free download, but you still have to agree to their license.
I find it amazing that, even though a kernel release has no features of bugfixes which directly impact a user, that user feels compelled into upgrading.
People actually argue that Linux releases too many kernel upgrades too often. As if someone stands behinds them, points a gun at their head and forces to them compile and install the kernel.
I think this is probably one of those reasons FreeBSD is perceived to be more stable than Linux. It's because Linux people reboot their damn boxes for kernel upgrades every week (or 4) for no reason other than to have a spiffy new version number.
If you have a production server, don't fix what's not broken. Kernel upgardes for the sake of kernel upgrades is not a good reason:)
Personally I prefer SSL telnet. There are a few reasons, most importantly that SSL/TLS are open standards.
The next thing is that SSL telnet can be implemented directly ontop of your existing telnet daemon and autoswitch between encrypted & non-encrypted clients.
No special daemons, just your plain old telnet daemon with a few patches to authenticate and encrypt via SSL. Of you can just stick in a copy of sslwrap in front of your telnet daemon and not make any changes at all.
Not to mention once you get OpenSSL up and running, you can hookup SSL POP3, SSL SMTP, SSL FTP, SSL NFS, etc.
While most of these don't have Windows clients, SSL SMTP and SSL POP3 do. There is an SSL telnet client for windows, but I don't know how good it is.
And OpenSSL has a host of useful programs from md5 to sha which come in handy once in a while.
Sure, that would make sense. But I checked at least a half-dozen web sites running LinuxPPC and none of the Apache's matched the behavior crack.linuxppc.org had.
The definition for both biological and computer viruses is a entity (program) which inserts itself into another entity in order to propigate itself.
Viruses can be good or bad... it all depends.
define behavior that is considered "harmful" to a computer user
Any time when system performance or integrity drops because of the virus.
Name one thing that a human can do that a machine cannot.
Humans are machines, so this is not a logical comparison.
But if you want to compare today's computers against a human's brain, then it's pretty easy. The human brain is capable of analog operations, today's mainstream computers are not. There are a few chips coming out which are analog and not digital..
X.Org Becomes X Technology Steward Industry consortium to guide the future of the X Window System
Menlo Park, CA., May 12, 1999 - X.Org, a newly formed organization of The Open Group, has today become the official steward of the X Window System technology and the technical experts for the X Window System standards. Member companies include Compaq Computer Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hummingbird Communications Ltd., International Business Machines Corporation, SGI, Sun Microsystems Inc. and many others.
Berlin is a new windowing system for Unix systems designed to replace the aging X Window System. Berlin is currently released under LGPL and is developed using an open development model. We are sponsored in part by SPI who also sponsors the Debian and GNOME projects.
Berlin operates on the object level. All GUI components (widgets), applications, and non-visual components such as audio components, are CORBA accessible components. This means they are network transparent, platform independent, and language independent.
To do things like displaying an application run on a server on your local workstation (the way X does), we abstracted 2D and 3D APIs as much as possible, we also implemented commonly used functions in the display server to reduce the network traffic as much as possible.
If you are familiar with how ActiveX components in Windows work, this should be a very familiar model. All communication between components, applications and Berlin is done via CORBA using the OmniORB2 CORBA ORB (which is recognized as the fastest CORBA implementation out there).
Because we use CORBA, any language with CORBA bindings will be usable for writing Berlin applications and components. These include C, C++, Perl, Java, Python and much more.
We adopted a paradigm similar to the classic Model-View-Controller so that the look of individual components such as buttons is not directly tied to it's interface and can be swapped out easily and painlessly. New components that ship with applications, and indeed the applications themselves, can be used freely by other applications extending the reusability of code to the extreme.
A lot of Berlin's design was taken from Fresco, the competing toolkit to Motif. Fresco is still one of the most advanced toolkits out there and it's influences can be seen in several newer toolkits such as Java's JFC.
Instead of implementing our own video drivers in userspace as X does, our backend currently uses Mesa an OpenGL implementation, but can be replaced without much work. Current versions of Mesa can use a wide variety of video drivers from the integrated drivers in the Linux kernel to X itself.
Overall, we hope to provide all the power we can to developers while ending the excessive desire to create new toolkits in order to add a single widget or modify an existing one.
1) To develop for X you have to be an X Consortium member which costs about $50k/year to do any real work. This is why so much work is being done on layers above X, because no one can actually submit the kind of radical modifications to X that are needed to bring it into the 90's.
2) The X consortium maintains full control over X itself... meaning they can (and have at least once) change the licensing to kill off any free implementations such as xfree86.
3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.
4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.
5) Of course there are C++ and Java toolkits out there, but until they are standard within X, it's a big war. I have roughly 15 X toolkits on my machine to run a total of 8 programs and a window manager. Doesn't anyone else think this is silly?
6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours:)
7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.
Once you understand the basics, you can switch between different applications and automatically pickup that the scisors in the toolbar means cut or that the file menu will have an 'exit' entry or even that ctrl-c will copy the selected text (most of the time at least:)
Slashdot Mirror
Currently Linux is actively developed for Alpha, ARM, IA64, x86 (IA32), PPC, MIPS, m68k, and sparc(64). There is also a sh3 port, but I'm not sure how active it is (9 architectures).
NetBSD currently runs on Alpha, m68k, ARM, PPC, ix86 (IA32), MIPS, ns32k, sh3, sparc(64), and vax (10 architectures).
Note these are chip architectures, the "kinds of computers" is much larger. Under NetBSD there are explicit ports to different computers running the same chip, for instance a macppc port and a ofppc port even though they both use PowerPC chips. Linux doesn't differentiate ports like this, so it would appear that Linux is ported to far less machines than NetBSD.
99.5% (give or take) of all exploits for the Linux OS are distribution binary exploits, not kernel exploits.
This means that if you had SSH installed on your box and a security announcement regarding SSH on Linux was put out, chances are you would be vulnerable as well. The real difference is that exploit code examples for Linux are far more common than for *BSD.
I would almost say though that a lot of the daemons *BSD uses are typically higher quality than what the Linux world uses, but nothing really stops someone from packaging say an OpenBSD FTP server with a Linux distribution (I believe Debian does now).
I've seen this argument a lot, but I have yet to see a benchmark performed on any modern kernel. The last benchmark I saw as for a 1.2.x kernel which was quite a while ago.
Linus Torvalds is one of the most anal retentive people on this planet (no offense Linus). You see him all the time rejecting patches because of poor architecture design. Of course, he only handles (for the most part) the intel port & generic linux system, but the other subsystem heads are just as bad.
Really, unless you are a kernel developer (ie, you've had patches accepted), you really can't begin to understand the pain and torture that one has to go through to get a patch accepted, especially when they implement new features
Really, when it all comes down to it, how different is Linux from *BSD? I mean, if you took a *BSD system and stuck a Linux kernel instead of a *BSD kernel and changed any type of incompatibilities... would you think it still inferior?
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong
--
There are studies on metabolic, reproductive, and neurological changes associated with low intensity EMR.
Anyway, here are a few facts from the WTO study on EMF:
Anyhow, for more information visit the WTO EMF web site.
It might also be noteworthy to know that a lot of cases today probably won't shield well against frequencies above 1 GHz so you might start having problems with phones, radios and the like.
--
Anyway, combine this with babelfish and you have something which is almost understandable.
(freetranslations.com german -> broken english)(end german -> broken english translation)
--
A software license defines restrictions you wish to place on the use of your software/code. It is a legally binding agreement between the copyright holder and the user. These restrictions can not be overridden by sublicensing the code unless permission is explicitly given.
A copyright notice defines ownership of the code. You do not need to place a copyright notice in your work to hold the copyright. The second you write it (in the US), it is protected under copyright law unless you explicitly release it to the public domain.
Code which is in the "public domain" has no copyright. You used to see people who would release code to the public domain with restrictions, however in the US "public domain" means public domain, so the restrictions won't hold up.
Unless explicitly forbidden by a license, you can sublicense code under whatever terms you wish. The terms of the new license can not conflict with the old license (sublicense, not relicense).
This allowed people such as Microsoft to take BSD code and place it under MS EULA. The EULA does not place any restrictions to make it incompatible with the original BSD license.
That said, it is completely legal to sublicense BSD source code as GPL as long as the GPL does not conflict with the BSD license, which, by the looks of it, it doesn't.
Here are some URLs for people who are interested:
[disclaimer: this is all information I gathered from law usenet groups and various legal web sites so it may not be completely accurate. if there are any copyright lawyers who want to correct me, please do.]
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I've heard this argument a lot that the BSD license is fundementally incompatible with the GPL. I can't find why that would be a case. The only restriction on compatibility that GPL maintains is that you are not allowed to infringe upon the rights given to you by the GPL. Placing a restriction on copyright notices, which the GPL already does in two seperate clauses doesn't seem to make this incompatible.
The actual clause for restriction is:Nowhere does the GPL state that you are given the right not to distribute the source without a copyright, in fact, the GPL makes it's own copyright restrictions in two places before this:
and
If I've made a mistake interpretting the GPL, please explain what I'm missing.
--
Here's that exact clause:
Note how it says you may not impose further restrictions on the rights granted. The copyright notice does *NOT* impose upon the rights as it is in paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 section c.
As far as I can tell, it is perfectly legal to include BSD licensed code in a GPL program. This is a big loss to *BSD folks because Linux kernel types can integrate their code but the reverse can not happen unless you segregate it or switch the entire kernel source over to GPL.
--
I've read over the GPL several times and can't find any reason why the BSD license is incompatible with the GPL.
The GPL states the BSD requirements in it (copyright notice) and the only clause that comes close to saying BSD is incompatible with GPL is the sublicensing restrictions clause, but it clearly is not incompatible with the BSD license if you read it carefully.
--
The picture used to represent the FBSD daemon is clearly the Christian interpretation of demons, not from the Greco-Roman Daimon. The Christian demon is described as a spirit with no body which has a nasty habit of posessing other people's bodies. They aren't even top dog in Christian mythology, they are inferior to archangels.
The Greek daimon was not exactly something I'd want as a mascot anyway. A daimon is a supernatural being of the lowest order, inferior to other supernatural beings. It sits at a level between the gods and man.
There are earlier definitions of demons being called daimones or "divine powers". Later however daimones began to refer more towards the spirits of the dead (Roman) and to the above daimon. They also refer to spirits which each person is assigned to watch over.
--
I really wish they would have had an artist create their credit card.
There's nothing worse than handing someone a poorly designed credit card when you go to charge something. Especially when you are at a restaurant or an expensive store.
I don't know what's worse, that faded out brown penguin with the cheezy platinum logo in the upper right or the blue card with the funny offset box.
Maybe I'm nit picking. There are some pretty nice looking credit cards out there, but they are hard to find with a decent rate.
MBNA actually makes some pretty full color deals of Hawaii and what not. They also make cards for several other companies that are quite pretty, the Garfield one is surprisingly well done as is the Gateway Computer one.
--
How comparable is the hardware in a Dreamcast to a new PC with a good 3D card?
I mean sure, the thing costs very little money compared to a PC, but if you were to buy one of those little sub-400 jobs and add a TNT2...
Maybe I've been spoiled, but games on console boxes don't look as good as PC games.
--
While having a TrueType font rendering system sounds great and all, there don't appear to be any free TrueType fonts which are all that much better than their T1 counterparts.
Good TrueType fonts are typically manually hinted. Also, each style of the font such as italic, bold, and bold italic are individual fonts instead of having the font renderer try to fake it.
This results in a much cleaner, crisper font than what you get from using one of the many font creation programs out there.
Unfortunately, the skill involved in creating manually hinted fonts doesn't come cheap and while individual fonts can't be patented, they can be copywrited.
Microsoft has been somewhat generous and made a few commonly used typefaces available for limited distribution at no cost. I believe these include Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana and Courier, which is really all you need 99% of the time.
The exception being menus and what not, these typically use a font specially created for small labels. I believe MS uses MS Sans Serif for this.
--
Don't you just love the world today?
The entire idea that we can place every person with a common interest, common belief, or common background into nice little square boxes with extreme generalizations is one of the many quirks of human behavior.
A lot of it has become taboo in our culture as well. Someone who is part of the majority can never ever generalize something who is part of the minority because you would be called racist, sexist, or one of a hundred other 'ists' out there.
The truth is, generalizations almost never work. Not every geek is antisocial, not every nerd wears glasses, not every hacker is malicious, not every male is aggressive, and not every female is passive.
However, before you start making generalizations about so-called geeks. Maybe you should ask the people you include in your geek-class if they think they are a geek.
So, said that, the only generalization I can make about geeks is that they are non-conformists. They do something that is not in step with popular society which makes them geeks.
Given that today it is now popular to use computers and use the internet... guess what? Chances are, if you were a geek because you played with machines, you probably aren't now.
--
Actually, he is right. I posted this in a comment yesterday which shows at the top of the SGI Announces New Strategy and Alliance article.
:)
I also submitted the story yesterday but they said that they were already posting a SGI story and so they wouldn't post mine.
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There are really only a few fonts we need:
- Arial/Helvitica
- Times/Times New Roman
- Courier New
Manually hinted fonts typically seperate each font type into seperate files. Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic are all really seperate fonts under Windows and MacOS.This gives a much higher quality font that what you see if you try to apply Bold and Italic to a font.
Creating fonts with those little font creation programs doesn't cut it, going in and manually hinting the font file will always give you better results. There are very few people who can manually hint a font and make it look good, it is truly an art.
Microsoft has made a few fonts available for free download, but you still have to agree to their license.
--
I hope that clears it up.
As far as a converter, well... probably not for a while.
--
I submitted this earlier today, but it didn't get posted.
A message on the XFS Open Source Site has some new information. XFS is going to be released under the GPL.
See their PDF Doc on what this release will cover. It looks like they are holding back the real-time multimedia features of XFS, but that's about it.
Some source is already available for download, the rest will be up as soon as they clean up the source code for GPL'ing.
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I find it amazing that, even though a kernel release has no features of bugfixes which directly impact a user, that user feels compelled into upgrading.
:)
People actually argue that Linux releases too many kernel upgrades too often. As if someone stands behinds them, points a gun at their head and forces to them compile and install the kernel.
I think this is probably one of those reasons FreeBSD is perceived to be more stable than Linux. It's because Linux people reboot their damn boxes for kernel upgrades every week (or 4) for no reason other than to have a spiffy new version number.
If you have a production server, don't fix what's not broken. Kernel upgardes for the sake of kernel upgrades is not a good reason
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Personally I prefer SSL telnet. There are a few reasons, most importantly that SSL/TLS are open standards.
The next thing is that SSL telnet can be implemented directly ontop of your existing telnet daemon and autoswitch between encrypted & non-encrypted clients.
No special daemons, just your plain old telnet daemon with a few patches to authenticate and encrypt via SSL. Of you can just stick in a copy of sslwrap in front of your telnet daemon and not make any changes at all.
Not to mention once you get OpenSSL up and running, you can hookup SSL POP3, SSL SMTP, SSL FTP, SSL NFS, etc.
While most of these don't have Windows clients, SSL SMTP and SSL POP3 do. There is an SSL telnet client for windows, but I don't know how good it is.
And OpenSSL has a host of useful programs from md5 to sha which come in handy once in a while.
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Sure, that would make sense. But I checked at least a half-dozen web sites running LinuxPPC and none of the Apache's matched the behavior crack.linuxppc.org had.
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Just doing some basic tests, the version of LinuxPPC on www.linuxppc.org doesn't match what's on crack.linuxppc.org.
For one thing the Apache server has been modified.
I thought this was supposed to be a clean install?
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Their project list on http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ lists the following ongoing projects:
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The definition for both biological and computer viruses is a entity (program) which inserts itself into another entity in order to propigate itself.
Viruses can be good or bad... it all depends.
Any time when system performance or integrity drops because of the virus.
Humans are machines, so this is not a logical comparison.
But if you want to compare today's computers against a human's brain, then it's pretty easy.
The human brain is capable of analog operations, today's mainstream computers are not. There are a few chips coming out which are analog and not digital..
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Different name, same difference.
X.Org Becomes X Technology Steward Industry consortium to guide the future of the X Window System
Menlo Park, CA., May 12, 1999 - X.Org, a newly formed organization of The Open Group, has today become the official steward of the X Window System technology and the technical experts for the X Window System standards. Member companies include Compaq Computer Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hummingbird Communications Ltd., International Business Machines Corporation, SGI, Sun Microsystems Inc. and many others.
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Berlin is a new windowing system for Unix systems designed to replace the aging X Window System. Berlin is currently released under LGPL and is developed using an open development model. We are sponsored in part by SPI who also sponsors the Debian and GNOME projects.
Berlin operates on the object level. All GUI components (widgets), applications, and non-visual components such as audio components, are CORBA accessible components. This means they are network transparent, platform independent, and language independent.
To do things like displaying an application run on a server on your local workstation (the way X does), we abstracted 2D and 3D APIs as much as possible, we also implemented commonly used functions in the display server to reduce the network traffic as much as possible.
If you are familiar with how ActiveX components in Windows work, this should be a very familiar model. All communication between components, applications and Berlin is done via CORBA using the OmniORB2 CORBA ORB (which is recognized as the fastest CORBA implementation out there).
Because we use CORBA, any language with CORBA bindings will be usable for writing Berlin applications and components. These include C, C++, Perl, Java, Python and much more.
We adopted a paradigm similar to the classic Model-View-Controller so that the look of individual components such as buttons is not directly tied to it's interface and can be swapped out easily and painlessly. New components that ship with applications, and indeed the applications themselves, can be used freely by other applications extending the reusability of code to the extreme.
A lot of Berlin's design was taken from Fresco, the competing toolkit to Motif. Fresco is still one of the most advanced toolkits out there and it's influences can be seen in several newer toolkits such as Java's JFC.
Instead of implementing our own video drivers in userspace as X does, our backend currently uses Mesa an OpenGL implementation, but can be replaced without much work. Current versions of Mesa can use a wide variety of video drivers from the integrated drivers in the Linux kernel to X itself.
Overall, we hope to provide all the power we can to developers while ending the excessive desire to create new toolkits in order to add a single widget or modify an existing one.
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1) To develop for X you have to be an X Consortium member which costs about $50k/year to do any real work. This is why so much work is being done on layers above X, because no one can actually submit the kind of radical modifications to X that are needed to bring it into the 90's.
:)
:)
2) The X consortium maintains full control over X itself... meaning they can (and have at least once) change the licensing to kill off any free implementations such as xfree86.
3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.
4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.
5) Of course there are C++ and Java toolkits out there, but until they are standard within X, it's a big war. I have roughly 15 X toolkits on my machine to run a total of 8 programs and a window manager. Doesn't anyone else think this is silly?
6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours
7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.
Once you understand the basics, you can switch between different applications and automatically pickup that the scisors in the toolbar means cut or that the file menu will have an 'exit' entry or even that ctrl-c will copy the selected text (most of the time at least
Of course, I am biased on this subject...
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