I wonder how this bill, if it passes, will affect DeCSS. I could imagine that, if it passes, "official" DVD players will start to have fine and legal "recording" functionality. Obviously, those won't be available on Linux.
So if the movie companies do provide a solution for the legitimate user - namely fully-featured (that of course includes recording) DVD player software - but only for the "average" one, namely the Windows user - would the platform-independent DeCSS be suddenly legal on Linux systems, where they don't provide a solution, but illegal on Windows, where they do?
Additionally, the traditional abbreviations were for "online phrases." When wat the last time you used "away from keyboard - AFK", "be right back - BRB", "laughing out loud" - LOL, "rolling on the floor laughing - ROTFL", etc., in a real life conversation?
You might not believe it, but German computer nerds actually use these English acronyms in everyday conversation, not spelling them, but pronouncing them as if they were words, which sounds extremely strange.
The problem is the horrible incompetence of the people that today "advise" you when it comes to computers. The idiots in "computer stores" today only know what press releases and commercials tell them.
ATI seems to be pushing the envelope more than NVidia at the moment, at least in more interesting ways.
I just wonder when the first OpenGL 2 implementations and applications will come out, so people can really use that card's features to their full extent on non-Windows platforms.
> There's no good reason to require you to have windows looking at acting in four different ways on the same desktop!
Right. But it isn't required. *YOU* choose to have differently looking applications on your desktop by installing applications that use different toolkits. You can always stick to one toolkit. Then you lose choice. But it's still your choice whether you do it or not, and that's the good thing about Open Source. It's NOT a problem.
It's all about choice! If you want to have your apps look the same across Gtk and KDE, use RedHat's patches. Choice again.
There's no problem of interoperability anymore. We finally have standards (and compliance) for the clipboard, window management and drag'n'drop. We will have stable component APIs for a long time. I'm sure that wrapper components will be developed so you can use Bonobo from KDE and KParts from Gnome applications. This gives you even more choice. Stop complaining about it!
By the way, a window manager that makes KDE and Gnome look the same is technically not feasible. RedHat just developed common themes, and patches that make the look even more similar.
This is just because on your usual Windows system, the font resolution is set wrong. Windows uses 96 dpi by default. Therefore, the 200dpi display shows text only half as big (or quarter as big, speaking of area) as it should be. The setting is well hidden in the "User Defined" button of the "Font Size" (the one where you set Large or Small Fonts) setting.
Something I couldn't find on the website - is fontconfig network transparent? I.e., is there a way for a remote application to render fonts stored on the local system, or would it have to resort to core X routines?
Be sure to have enabled the patented (and therefore by default disabled) hinting mechanisms in your libfreetype. They improve antialiased TT rendering quality quite a bit.
Definitely. I think Max Payne is highly underrated, and less known than it deserves to be. It has a great, compelling story told in a unique way (through COMIC STRIPS!) and interesting gameplay ideas like bullet time and eating painkillers. The MaxFX engine is stunning as well.
No, the music industry is a monopoly. If Warner releases artist X's new album in a fair-use-restricting format, say SACD, and only that, there's no way of getting hold of a CD or vinyl record of that album from a competing label.
Vinyl: No copy protection, no encryption, no way at all of limiting my fair use. Case closed. I try to get every album released in crippled, er, copy-protected form on vinyl.
Anyway, having read ATI's pages, I wonder whether they mean OpenGL 2.0 when speaking about "compliance with future OpenGL revisions" in their pixel and vertex shader chips.
Not possible. This is, thank God, still illegal in Germany. There's a rule that the commercials have to be strictly split from the programming. There are a few exceptions - for example, they made split-screen commercials legal during sports events, so that the broadcast doesn't have to be interrupted for the commercial - but that's about it.
Civ 3 was a big disappointment. Full of bugs, sluggish gameplay, an overpowered AI whose only strategy is war and betrayal, and a loveless (I don't know a better English word for this German expression) presentation without pretty graphics or sound, which is a problem of many free games but a complete embarassment (sp?) for a commercial one. Multiplayer, of course, comes as an add-on. I felt quite ripped off, to be honest.
Wiggins is right about some of the problems he points out, however, I found some of his arguments to be flawed.
1. No "best" browser.
This is a GOOD THING. It means that there are several products of good quality available, and I can do nothing but wonder how this point made #1 on the list. On Linux, there's browsers for everybody: Galeon, the GNOME browser, Konq, the KDE browser, and then there's Mozilla and Opera for DE-less people and lynx, links and w3m for the console.
Additionally, I find the anti-aliasing discussion more than tiresome. The author cites this as the reason for not using Galeon, which is ridiculous. CVS Mozilla & Galeon, if I'm not mistaken, do make use of AA fonts, anyway.
However, in my opinion, a point that the author already cited should be #1: Font configuration, or lack thereof. It's the biggest, hell, to me it's the ONLY major problem desktop Linux has these days, and it goes hand in hand with the printing dilemma. Again I point everybody to Keith Packard's fontconfig, which seems like it could be a solution (but I haven't had the time yet to take a thorough look at it). Lack of good fonts is a problem, but a minor one as long as MS doesn't pull back its Core Font collection.
7. Easy way of sharing files
No problem. Slightly modified NFS/SMB daemon, a piece of file manager code, there you go. Not really a big hurdle, and something that should definitely be implemented.
Well that's cheap. In Germany, new CDs are usually at EUR 17.99, 16.99 if they're cheap. 19.99 CDs are showing up more and more. Double CDs are 24.99 and up. I'm not going to talk about DVDs (25.99 to 29.99). And no "new release" discount here, instead, new CDs tend to have an extra EUR or two on their price tag. (Currently 1 EUR = 1 US$)
We're not talking about 10 or 15 years here, but about preserving history. This not only means that media last long, but also that the manner of reading the media will always be available. You just can't say if CD-ROM can be read in a hundred years, or even fifty, just like you can't say that you'll always remember copying around your archives every 15 years, or be able to do so.
The fact that floppy drives are still around is due to the simple fact that there hasn't been a cheap, easily rewritable media except the floppy disk until recently. With the cheapening of memory cards, the last kind of floppy will disappear just like the 5.25" floppy did. I have no functioning drive to read mine anymore. Just like that, there'll be zillions of new CD-like technologies in the future, and I don't believe that that technology will be backwards compatible to ours forever.
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I wonder how this bill, if it passes, will affect DeCSS. I could imagine that, if it passes, "official" DVD players will start to have fine and legal "recording" functionality. Obviously, those won't be available on Linux.
So if the movie companies do provide a solution for the legitimate user - namely fully-featured (that of course includes recording) DVD player software - but only for the "average" one, namely the Windows user - would the platform-independent DeCSS be suddenly legal on Linux systems, where they don't provide a solution, but illegal on Windows, where they do?
Shhh, don't say that out loud, or somebody will actually patent "array of function pointers accessed with menu item id".
The problem is the horrible incompetence of the people that today "advise" you when it comes to computers. The idiots in "computer stores" today only know what press releases and commercials tell them.
ATI seems to be pushing the envelope more than NVidia at the moment, at least in more interesting ways.
I just wonder when the first OpenGL 2 implementations and applications will come out, so people can really use that card's features to their full extent on non-Windows platforms.
Right. But it isn't required. *YOU* choose to have differently looking applications on your desktop by installing applications that use different toolkits. You can always stick to one toolkit. Then you lose choice. But it's still your choice whether you do it or not, and that's the good thing about Open Source. It's NOT a problem.
It's all about choice! If you want to have your apps look the same across Gtk and KDE, use RedHat's patches. Choice again.
There's no problem of interoperability anymore. We finally have standards (and compliance) for the clipboard, window management and drag'n'drop. We will have stable component APIs for a long time. I'm sure that wrapper components will be developed so you can use Bonobo from KDE and KParts from Gnome applications. This gives you even more choice. Stop complaining about it!
By the way, a window manager that makes KDE and Gnome look the same is technically not feasible. RedHat just developed common themes, and patches that make the look even more similar.
XFree86 is an inflexible pain in the ass, granted, but with a few helper applications, or a bit of experience, it's usable even for non-techie users.
The visible size of tubes is NEVER the advertised one. 32" TVs only show 30" as well.
This is just because on your usual Windows system, the font resolution is set wrong. Windows uses 96 dpi by default. Therefore, the 200dpi display shows text only half as big (or quarter as big, speaking of area) as it should be. The setting is well hidden in the "User Defined" button of the "Font Size" (the one where you set Large or Small Fonts) setting.
Something I couldn't find on the website - is fontconfig network transparent? I.e., is there a way for a remote application to render fonts stored on the local system, or would it have to resort to core X routines?
Be sure to have enabled the patented (and therefore by default disabled) hinting mechanisms in your libfreetype. They improve antialiased TT rendering quality quite a bit.
Will Galeon compile (or, even better, work without a recompile) with this or did they change the API again?
1. Buy 2.5 GHz processor
2. Clock at 2 GHz
3. Profit! Also in terms of power savings and processor lifetime.
Definitely. I think Max Payne is highly underrated, and less known than it deserves to be. It has a great, compelling story told in a unique way (through COMIC STRIPS!) and interesting gameplay ideas like bullet time and eating painkillers. The MaxFX engine is stunning as well.
No, the music industry is a monopoly. If Warner releases artist X's new album in a fair-use-restricting format, say SACD, and only that, there's no way of getting hold of a CD or vinyl record of that album from a competing label.
Vinyl: No copy protection, no encryption, no way at all of limiting my fair use. Case closed. I try to get every album released in crippled, er, copy-protected form on vinyl.
Anyway, having read ATI's pages, I wonder whether they mean OpenGL 2.0 when speaking about "compliance with future OpenGL revisions" in their pixel and vertex shader chips.
Could somebody please translate this pile of strange and confusing units to a sane (metric) system for me? Thanks so much.
Last time I checked, Barcelona was a town of about two million. What was the population of Paraguay again?
Not possible. This is, thank God, still illegal in Germany. There's a rule that the commercials have to be strictly split from the programming. There are a few exceptions - for example, they made split-screen commercials legal during sports events, so that the broadcast doesn't have to be interrupted for the commercial - but that's about it.
Civ 3 was a big disappointment. Full of bugs, sluggish gameplay, an overpowered AI whose only strategy is war and betrayal, and a loveless (I don't know a better English word for this German expression) presentation without pretty graphics or sound, which is a problem of many free games but a complete embarassment (sp?) for a commercial one. Multiplayer, of course, comes as an add-on. I felt quite ripped off, to be honest.
Wiggins is right about some of the problems he points out, however, I found some of his arguments to be flawed.
1. No "best" browser.
This is a GOOD THING. It means that there are several products of good quality available, and I can do nothing but wonder how this point made #1 on the list. On Linux, there's browsers for everybody: Galeon, the GNOME browser, Konq, the KDE browser, and then there's Mozilla and Opera for DE-less people and lynx, links and w3m for the console.
Additionally, I find the anti-aliasing discussion more than tiresome. The author cites this as the reason for not using Galeon, which is ridiculous. CVS Mozilla & Galeon, if I'm not mistaken, do make use of AA fonts, anyway.
However, in my opinion, a point that the author already cited should be #1: Font configuration, or lack thereof. It's the biggest, hell, to me it's the ONLY major problem desktop Linux has these days, and it goes hand in hand with the printing dilemma. Again I point everybody to Keith Packard's fontconfig, which seems like it could be a solution (but I haven't had the time yet to take a thorough look at it). Lack of good fonts is a problem, but a minor one as long as MS doesn't pull back its Core Font collection.
7. Easy way of sharing files
No problem. Slightly modified NFS/SMB daemon, a piece of file manager code, there you go. Not really a big hurdle, and something that should definitely be implemented.
Well that's cheap. In Germany, new CDs are usually at EUR 17.99, 16.99 if they're cheap. 19.99 CDs are showing up more and more. Double CDs are 24.99 and up. I'm not going to talk about DVDs (25.99 to 29.99). And no "new release" discount here, instead, new CDs tend to have an extra EUR or two on their price tag. (Currently 1 EUR = 1 US$)
Break a DVD, lose lots. Break a 2020 900 TB disk, lose everything. Every option has its downside.
We're not talking about 10 or 15 years here, but about preserving history. This not only means that media last long, but also that the manner of reading the media will always be available. You just can't say if CD-ROM can be read in a hundred years, or even fifty, just like you can't say that you'll always remember copying around your archives every 15 years, or be able to do so.
The fact that floppy drives are still around is due to the simple fact that there hasn't been a cheap, easily rewritable media except the floppy disk until recently. With the cheapening of memory cards, the last kind of floppy will disappear just like the 5.25" floppy did. I have no functioning drive to read mine anymore. Just like that, there'll be zillions of new CD-like technologies in the future, and I don't believe that that technology will be backwards compatible to ours forever.