Ah. Sorry 'bout that; I don't do much graphics work, so I didn't catch that the Gimp doesn't do that. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to implement.....
Patrick promised not to artificially inflate the version numbers anymore.
I'm guessing that a higher-than-usual proportion of Slackware boxes don't run X at all; thus, upgrading to X 4.0 isn't as significant as it would be on, say, RedHat.
Hmm, actually, now that you mention it, it would be interesting to compare Photoshop on Mac OS vs. Gimp on, say, YellowDog or TurboLinux, on identical hardware.
Why does everybody always pick stock installs of RedHat for these tests? I'd much rather see the test done on a better distribution with some normal configuration tweaking, vs. Win98SE with reasonable tweaking. I mean, I hope you're not doing graphics benchmarks with Sendmail, Apache, and a gazillion other daemons running in the background?
No extra optimizing software should be installed, though. Just changing the configuration of the software that the distribution comes with.
I do remember using a preview copy of Be 1 and trying out that terrain demo on a PowerPC. Seeing a mac render so many polygons at one time at full 35fps almost gave me a heart attack. I dont know the details of why Be is so good on the graphics side, but it looks like its still the same way..
The PowerPC is generally a better platform than x86 for such things. The Mac OS is old and tired and tends to bog it down; hopefully Mac OS X will fix that.
Sounds like an excellent idea. If they see that you are keeping records of your communication, it may alert them that you're up to something - in which case, they'll start paying attention.
Obviously, the patent system has gotten out of hand lately. We all know that. This may be just the thing to get it fixed, though, and I suspect that may be what BT is doing. If so, kudos to them.
Do you honestly think that AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Earthlink, etc. will actually start paying royalties to British Telecom for something as lame as hyperlinks?!? Hell no. They're huge companies with a large influence in the federal government, and if they all get hit with this, I have no doubt that the patent system will be changed.
Microsoft won't acknowledge Linux as a viable platform for anything until a year after the Supreme Court gets done with the antitrust case - assuming they uphold the breakup. As for Mac Office and Mac IE, monopolizing office productivity suites and the Web is even more important than maintaining their desktop OS monopoly.
If you recall all the way back to 1997, the only reason Microsoft developed Office 98 for the Mac at all is because Apple forced them into it. Apple caught Microsoft doing something blatently illegal, and rather than take them to court (long drawn out legal process where nobody wins), they signed an agreement requiring Microsoft to continue to develop and support Office and IE on the Mac (as well as a bunch of other things, like paying Apple gobs of money, buying $250 million of non-voting shares of AAPL, signing a patent licensing agreement, etc. etc.).
As you also may or may not recall, Microsoft has already dropped development of IE/Mac. If the appeals courts overturn the breakup (I don't expect it but Microsoft definitely has something up their sleeve), I wouldn't be surprised if they drop Office too.
And of course, lest there be any confusion, porting Carbon apps (such as Office and IE - well, Office isn't even Carbonized yet but it will be eventually) from Mac OS X to other versions of UNIX just isn't going to happen. Yeah, the core is BSD, but on top of that it's a Mac.
Personally, I don't care what the CTOs think. I'm a geek, and Slackware appears to be the best geek distro of Linux. For those of you who aren't geeks, there's Debian, Corel, SuSE, and, um, a couple of others.
If the CTO really wants the business to succeed, he'll find geeks to run the servers - not business-oriented people who happen to know computers and will try to keep them working because they're geting paid, but geeks who are passionate about what they do and would probably keep doing it for free if they didn't have bills to worry about. These are the people that will pour their soul into making things run smoothly - and these are the people who run Slackware.
(Note that I'm not advocating letting them do it for free, nor am I claiming that all geeks only run Slackware.)
To make things more interesting, Netscape 4.x has (IMHO) a broken implementation of the Referer field: it reports whatever URL the user happened to be on, not necessarily the URL they linked from.
If you click the above link to my home page, my server is supposed to see that you came from this article on Slashdot. That's all well and good.
If you type a random URL - say, http://www.yahoo.com/ - into your address bar now, should Yahoo see that you came from Slashdot? I'd call that an invasion of privacy. Netscape sends that information.
If somebody creates a file in Word97, e-mails it to you, you edit it in StarOffice and make a minor change, then e-mail it back to them, I'll bet you something will be wrong with the formatting. Maybe not something really big and obvious, but something.
And arguably in both cases this is because people are asking the program/format to do more than it was ever intended to. Both html browsers and word processors were originally intended to format documents dynamically and squish them into shape using some fairly general parameters of window/page size, font, etc. The problem is that people are now turning around and trying to use both as detailed page description formats that place each letter or object precisely on the screen. Given the underlying assumptions of the renderer, it shouldn't be surprising that this doesn't work right. If you really want to fix the words onto the page, use a desktop publishing program or convert to PDF.
You're exactly correct, except that people do use Word to do weird things like embed a spreadsheet or a bitmap with weird page layout elements and such, adjusting their margins a tenth of an inch at a time to make everything fit just perfectly on one page. They use Word. They don't use PDF.
Sure, some people use PDF, and for them, everything works - but if everybody did that, this wouldn't be an issue.
Yes, it really is a monopoly. The last time I submitted a résumé to a temp agency, I e-mailed it as a PDF. I was asked to re-send it in Word format. This sort of thing is VERY common.
It all comes down to control. The artist should be in control because it's their copyright. The masses shouldn't be in control, and neither should the RIAA.
According to Courtney Love's recent speech, it's usually not the artist's copyright; it's the record company's. So if the artist wants to share their music on Napster (as even Lars Ulrich says they should have the right to do), they don't legally have that right, because the RIAA is in control.
I'm starting to understand why people around Slashdot get very cranky. I think you must be the 200th person who has answered an argument about the legality of x with the answer that x is illegal. Does that sound like an argument?
Um, I got the distinct impression that he meant "stealing" in the moral sense, not so much as in the legal sense. Yes, some people consider stealing to be morally wrong, regardless of the legality of it.
The QPL isn't free because it is not GPL compatible. Look up the definition of free software. To me, open source isn't good enough (look that up, too), it has to be free. They aren't the same. The thing that bugs me about the QPL and KDE is that KDE is violating the GPL, claiming they are working to solve the problems, and generally trying to avoid the problem while saying they care.
The QPL is good enough that Debian considers it free, and considering how picky they are about such things, I'll take their word for it. Whose definition of free are you using?
Be very careful what you say, I do not depend on the GPL to keep any software free. I do not contribute to GPL'd projects because of the license. I also keep the GPL'd software I use to the smallest possible ammount.
Sorry, no offense meant towards users of *BSD and other non-GPL'd OSes.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
For a list of distros, check Apple's Linux page. Of course, NetBSD and OpenBSD are available as well.
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Patrick promised not to artificially inflate the version numbers anymore.
I'm guessing that a higher-than-usual proportion of Slackware boxes don't run X at all; thus, upgrading to X 4.0 isn't as significant as it would be on, say, RedHat.
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No extra optimizing software should be installed, though. Just changing the configuration of the software that the distribution comes with.
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www.be.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) PHP/3.0.12 on FreeBSD
While we're on the subject:
www.apple.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris
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The PowerPC is generally a better platform than x86 for such things. The Mac OS is old and tired and tends to bog it down; hopefully Mac OS X will fix that.
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Do you honestly think that AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Earthlink, etc. will actually start paying royalties to British Telecom for something as lame as hyperlinks?!? Hell no. They're huge companies with a large influence in the federal government, and if they all get hit with this, I have no doubt that the patent system will be changed.
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If you recall all the way back to 1997, the only reason Microsoft developed Office 98 for the Mac at all is because Apple forced them into it. Apple caught Microsoft doing something blatently illegal, and rather than take them to court (long drawn out legal process where nobody wins), they signed an agreement requiring Microsoft to continue to develop and support Office and IE on the Mac (as well as a bunch of other things, like paying Apple gobs of money, buying $250 million of non-voting shares of AAPL, signing a patent licensing agreement, etc. etc.).
As you also may or may not recall, Microsoft has already dropped development of IE/Mac. If the appeals courts overturn the breakup (I don't expect it but Microsoft definitely has something up their sleeve), I wouldn't be surprised if they drop Office too.
And of course, lest there be any confusion, porting Carbon apps (such as Office and IE - well, Office isn't even Carbonized yet but it will be eventually) from Mac OS X to other versions of UNIX just isn't going to happen. Yeah, the core is BSD, but on top of that it's a Mac.
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If the CTO really wants the business to succeed, he'll find geeks to run the servers - not business-oriented people who happen to know computers and will try to keep them working because they're geting paid, but geeks who are passionate about what they do and would probably keep doing it for free if they didn't have bills to worry about. These are the people that will pour their soul into making things run smoothly - and these are the people who run Slackware.
(Note that I'm not advocating letting them do it for free, nor am I claiming that all geeks only run Slackware.)
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If you click the above link to my home page, my server is supposed to see that you came from this article on Slashdot. That's all well and good.
If you type a random URL - say, http://www.yahoo.com/ - into your address bar now, should Yahoo see that you came from Slashdot? I'd call that an invasion of privacy. Netscape sends that information.
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You're exactly correct, except that people do use Word to do weird things like embed a spreadsheet or a bitmap with weird page layout elements and such, adjusting their margins a tenth of an inch at a time to make everything fit just perfectly on one page. They use Word. They don't use PDF.
Sure, some people use PDF, and for them, everything works - but if everybody did that, this wouldn't be an issue.
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According to Courtney Love's recent speech, it's usually not the artist's copyright; it's the record company's. So if the artist wants to share their music on Napster (as even Lars Ulrich says they should have the right to do), they don't legally have that right, because the RIAA is in control.
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Um, I got the distinct impression that he meant "stealing" in the moral sense, not so much as in the legal sense. Yes, some people consider stealing to be morally wrong, regardless of the legality of it.
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The QPL is good enough that Debian considers it free, and considering how picky they are about such things, I'll take their word for it. Whose definition of free are you using?
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Sorry, no offense meant towards users of *BSD and other non-GPL'd OSes.
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