Today's typical mass produced consumer electronic device is manufactured just as shoddily. Unless you get into the real high end, the quality of the average product, esp. when compared with earlier times is catastrophic. My father's 30 year old record player still works like a charm, only few of today's DVD players will work in 30 years. Why? Because today cheapness always wins over quality and because with digital devices, shoddy manufacturing doesn't imply bad function.
Yes and no. While 8 bits might be enough for displaying a final image, it definitely isn't for the preprocessing. Classic photography has what is called an "exposure window":
When making a positive from a negative, you can flexibly set the points of blackness/whiteness on the negative that should be the darkest/lightest point on your positive. This works because the negative film offers enough resolution for producing a naturally looking image even if you only take a part of its spectrum.
The digital image on your camera, however, can not be used like this. If you try pulling such an image from an 8-bit image, the result would look extremely unnatural. This is also the reason why good scanners have a resolution of 12 bits per color or more, professional negative scanners sometimes work with 14 bits.
The most important problem, IMO, is not how the sensor is constructed but the color resolution. 8 bits per color is not enough. Decent cameras work with more internally or with pseudo-logarithmic sensitivity, but the main problem that the final product has only 8 bits per color remains.
MPEG 4 doesn't give a 6:1 improvement over MPEG 2. 2:1 perhaps, 3:1 if you're lucky. It takes a lot of extra bits to get rid of that blurriness, smeariness and the static texture artifacts that have to be gotten rid of for a quality product. Remember, this will perhaps be watched on a BIG screen, projected perhaps.
The perfect media would just be good old MPEG 2 on a laserdisc-sized DVD.
- Double the size means a lot more space (pi times? too lazy to calculate)
- Laserdisc size things are cool (think LPs and, uh, laserdiscs)
- Giant, pretty covers would be back
- Laserdiscs are cool
No. "NTSC/PAL" on a DVD refers only to resolution and frame rate (24 for NTSC vs. 25 for PAL). The encoding is done in the D/A part of the player. The formats on the DVD are so similar that converting PAL to NTSC, vice-versa, PAL to PAL w/ 24fps etc. is trivial, just nobody does it. I guess it's a marketing thing.
I mirror sid (the distribution we use) on the file server, which updates every night
IMO, if you want to keep your employment, don't. Although sid works quite well most of the time, there is no guarantee that the next nightly update won't screw up things heavily. Remember when pam broke?
Use woody, the two-week testing period is a good filter for the hard bugs.
I care. There's a lot of things going on behind the scenes for Gnome 2. Gnome 2 is a major redesign. If you noticed, the sheer number of compound document/corba/etc architectures that appeared and died in the 1.0->1.2->1.4 cycle could only result in chaos.
Gnome 2 is a big, big clean-up and for the first time Gnome will provide a stable, mature and reliable development architecture. KDE has had this since KDE 2, and just like KDE took off in terms of application and accessory development since the KDE 2 release, Gnome app development will take off once Gnome 2 is out.
Let me explain: The major part of an environment like Gnome or KDE is not what is visible to the user, but the framework. Things like DCOP or KIO in KDE, orbit and bonobo in Gnome. If you want a pretty desktop with nifty features, all you have to do is write some applications which is minor work compared to designing and implementing an application interoperation framework. What was done for Gnome 1.4->2.0 was a complete framework rehaul. What was done in KDE 2.0->3.0 was mostly application development.
I do agree that Gnome 2 is late. They should have ditched 1.4 and gone for 2.0 immediately after the 1.2 release, as the user-visible changes were minor. IMO.
BTW, Gtk 2 offers more than just AA. It's also a completely new text rendering engine (Pango) that kicks the ass of everything else out there.
Loki doomed to fail, IMO. The problem was not Loki, all of their ports I use are technically top-notch, but the market and the users.
The users don't want to buy a game for Linux at full price when the Windows version has been out for months and is sold for low prices, ESPECIALLY when you can get binaries to use with the game data from the Windows CD for free.
Game marketers see no demand for Linux games. They have their stuff written for D3D ("because it's Microsoft and if it's Microsoft it's good") and don't give a rat's ass about who will port their stuff to Linux.
Loki approached game developers, buying licenses for big amounts of money, and then hoped to get it back by selling their games for full price when the Win... we've been there. They basically did free work for the game developers. This just isn't right. In a perfect world, the game makers would approach Loki and PAY THEM to port the game to Linux. But since we don't live in a perfect world, but in one that is ruled by money and Microsoft-controlled pseudostandards, Loki failed and was doomed to fail from the beginning.
There's no such thing as Netnews, perhaps you're talking about Usenet. File distribution over Usenet is HIGHLY inefficient because the stuff has to be base64 encoded which blows it up quite a bit.
This isn't true. RTCW's shots don't go exactly where you aim. The weapons have different levels of accuracy, from the wildly spraying Venom Gun over the more accurate pistols, the more accurate 9mm machinegun, the Sten and the 7.62mm machine gun to the paratrooper and sniper rifles.
It will be very easy soon, with XFree, KDE2, Gnome2, console (with a few patches) all supporting Unicode and Gtk2's sophisticated text rendering, the "port" from English to a far-east language will merely be translation work, such as ports to Western languages always were.
Re:Horizontal Scroll Bar for new Text Widget?
on
Looking Ahead at GNOME 2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Lo and behold, Gtk 2 won't need a hscroll because it will have word wrapping (finally!). The developerworks articles on Gtk 2 have a few screenshots.
Finally, a consistent version of Gnome. I've been using Gnome (1.2 and 1.4) for about a year now, and was even driven to KDE for some time by Gnome 1's extreme ugliness in terms of consistency. Several different CORBA interfaces for the same thing. Ancient, slow-ass Gtk+. A file manager (gmc) that comes with its own collection of file type bindings, independent from the rest of Gnome.
As it looks, Gnome 2 will finally offer a consistent and well-defined set of mechanisms, enabling reliable inter-application operation and efficient working.
Now, if the Gtk+ team has sorted out Gtk 1's horrible slowness, Gnome 2 looks like something I could fall in love with.
Oh yes? Such like Windows' fantastic C api that is *way* more cluttered than Gnome 2's due to MS's strict backwards compatibility. Windows developers know the pains of dealing with "versioned" function names, *Ex elements etc.
If you want a C++ interface to Gnome, go ahead, help developing a wrapper library.
Re:change the keyboard, change ASCII ...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Fontwise, no character has been replaced because the Euro has always had its Unicode point. Encodingwise, the "international currency sign" was killed off in favor of the Euro in Latin-9, and again, no problems in Unicode.
GnuCash is adequate for many Linux users' needs, but the latest version has so many dependency problems that it is nearly impossible for "ordinary" users to install.
The mom&pop ISPs also can't compete because they simply can't afford the ridiculously low prices.
Here in Germany, the big telephone network owner's daughter company T-Online sold Internet connection over a year for so cheap (EUR 40/mo, unlimited) that they themselves got into the red numbers. They survived, because of the shady relationship with the big guys who own the network, but every week a smaller ISP couldn't anymore. It's the brute force of the market. $BIG_ISP offers unlimited access for EUR 30. $SMALL_ISP offers access for EUR 25 basic fee, then EUR 1 per hour. Where do you go? To the big boys. Who dies? Mr. ISP next door.
The real problem and reason why printing in Linux, esp. from the GUI, is a pain in the behind is that no distribution has a working system-wide font configuration mechanism where X and gs can painlessly access the same fonts (Recently I stated that Debian does, but it still has problems with font names with spaces in them, rendering it practically useless because many common truetype fonts have spaces in them) and the lack of a working printing toolkit. I don't know about libgnomeprint, but Qt/KDE's printing is horribly, horribly broken.
This leads to the dilemma that GUI application developers not only have to write routines to display their data on screen, but also ones to bring everything to Postscript. Web browsers are a prime example where the screen display is complex enough so that there's no more resources left to reinvent the wheel in Postscript, leading to Mozilla's broken printing.
The final problem is the lack of Unicode support in the ancient Postscript/Type 1 font standard. The introduction of the Euro made this painfully obvious for European Linux users.
Before we look at the hardware, we need a reliable printing library that surpasses Postscript's stone-age encoding, rendering out every single character. I believe libgnomeprint wants to do that, but I haven't been tracking it. We need a printing system that does not rely on printer drivers that are compiled into the PS rasterizer (lpr, ugh!) or has other quirks (cups is a step forward with its modularity and two behind with its own rasterizing program, effectively introducing a separate app for PS->screen and PS->printer). The hardware support is already here, but what use is a fast car if you can't get the door open? (Don't you just love metaphors?)
Screw smallness!
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't want a smaller mp3 player. Current ones are just about the right size. I want a digital music player with at least 128MB, *BIG* display, Ogg Vorbis support, fast USB connection, and an open interface that can be easily accessed from non-Windows systems as a block device. I also want good sound quality. Will there be such a thing? I highly doubt it.
Why is it that manufacturers of portable devices think that smaller automatically equals better? Cell phones suffer the same problem. Why does nobody care about the factors that actually make up quality anymore?
Slashdot Mirror
Today's typical mass produced consumer electronic device is manufactured just as shoddily. Unless you get into the real high end, the quality of the average product, esp. when compared with earlier times is catastrophic. My father's 30 year old record player still works like a charm, only few of today's DVD players will work in 30 years. Why? Because today cheapness always wins over quality and because with digital devices, shoddy manufacturing doesn't imply bad function.
Yes and no. While 8 bits might be enough for displaying a final image, it definitely isn't for the preprocessing. Classic photography has what is called an "exposure window":
When making a positive from a negative, you can flexibly set the points of blackness/whiteness on the negative that should be the darkest/lightest point on your positive. This works because the negative film offers enough resolution for producing a naturally looking image even if you only take a part of its spectrum.
The digital image on your camera, however, can not be used like this. If you try pulling such an image from an 8-bit image, the result would look extremely unnatural. This is also the reason why good scanners have a resolution of 12 bits per color or more, professional negative scanners sometimes work with 14 bits.
The most important problem, IMO, is not how the sensor is constructed but the color resolution. 8 bits per color is not enough. Decent cameras work with more internally or with pseudo-logarithmic sensitivity, but the main problem that the final product has only 8 bits per color remains.
MPEG 4 doesn't give a 6:1 improvement over MPEG 2. 2:1 perhaps, 3:1 if you're lucky. It takes a lot of extra bits to get rid of that blurriness, smeariness and the static texture artifacts that have to be gotten rid of for a quality product. Remember, this will perhaps be watched on a BIG screen, projected perhaps.
The perfect media would just be good old MPEG 2 on a laserdisc-sized DVD.
- Double the size means a lot more space (pi times? too lazy to calculate)
- Laserdisc size things are cool (think LPs and, uh, laserdiscs)
- Giant, pretty covers would be back
- Laserdiscs are cool
You can't compare the processing power of a CPU, a completely programmable jack of all trades, to a dedicated IC like the ones found in DVD players.
Today, a dedicated MPEG 4 decoding IC would just be as dirt cheap to manufacture as one for MPEG 2.
No. "NTSC/PAL" on a DVD refers only to resolution and frame rate (24 for NTSC vs. 25 for PAL). The encoding is done in the D/A part of the player. The formats on the DVD are so similar that converting PAL to NTSC, vice-versa, PAL to PAL w/ 24fps etc. is trivial, just nobody does it. I guess it's a marketing thing.
This is utter BS, and you know that. I for one am happy to know that I can't accidentally screw up my system when logged in as a user with a keypress.
IMO, if you want to keep your employment, don't. Although sid works quite well most of the time, there is no guarantee that the next nightly update won't screw up things heavily. Remember when pam broke? Use woody, the two-week testing period is a good filter for the hard bugs.
I care. There's a lot of things going on behind the scenes for Gnome 2. Gnome 2 is a major redesign. If you noticed, the sheer number of compound document/corba/etc architectures that appeared and died in the 1.0->1.2->1.4 cycle could only result in chaos.
Gnome 2 is a big, big clean-up and for the first time Gnome will provide a stable, mature and reliable development architecture. KDE has had this since KDE 2, and just like KDE took off in terms of application and accessory development since the KDE 2 release, Gnome app development will take off once Gnome 2 is out.
Let me explain: The major part of an environment like Gnome or KDE is not what is visible to the user, but the framework. Things like DCOP or KIO in KDE, orbit and bonobo in Gnome. If you want a pretty desktop with nifty features, all you have to do is write some applications which is minor work compared to designing and implementing an application interoperation framework. What was done for Gnome 1.4->2.0 was a complete framework rehaul. What was done in KDE 2.0->3.0 was mostly application development.
I do agree that Gnome 2 is late. They should have ditched 1.4 and gone for 2.0 immediately after the 1.2 release, as the user-visible changes were minor. IMO.
BTW, Gtk 2 offers more than just AA. It's also a completely new text rendering engine (Pango) that kicks the ass of everything else out there.
Do you think it's coincidence that the proposed release of KDE 3 is set for a mere 3 days after the Gnome 2 release?
Loki doomed to fail, IMO. The problem was not Loki, all of their ports I use are technically top-notch, but the market and the users.
The users don't want to buy a game for Linux at full price when the Windows version has been out for months and is sold for low prices, ESPECIALLY when you can get binaries to use with the game data from the Windows CD for free.
Game marketers see no demand for Linux games. They have their stuff written for D3D ("because it's Microsoft and if it's Microsoft it's good") and don't give a rat's ass about who will port their stuff to Linux.
Loki approached game developers, buying licenses for big amounts of money, and then hoped to get it back by selling their games for full price when the Win... we've been there. They basically did free work for the game developers. This just isn't right. In a perfect world, the game makers would approach Loki and PAY THEM to port the game to Linux. But since we don't live in a perfect world, but in one that is ruled by money and Microsoft-controlled pseudostandards, Loki failed and was doomed to fail from the beginning.
There's no such thing as Netnews, perhaps you're talking about Usenet. File distribution over Usenet is HIGHLY inefficient because the stuff has to be base64 encoded which blows it up quite a bit.
Hate to burst your bubble, but CS is a mod for Half-Life, which is a beefed-up Quake 1 engine.
This isn't true. RTCW's shots don't go exactly where you aim. The weapons have different levels of accuracy, from the wildly spraying Venom Gun over the more accurate pistols, the more accurate 9mm machinegun, the Sten and the 7.62mm machine gun to the paratrooper and sniper rifles.
I did and noticed xterm continuing to update without a hitch. What are you trying to say?
Of course it is. Those are crappy 96kbps CBR mp3s.
It will be very easy soon, with XFree, KDE2, Gnome2, console (with a few patches) all supporting Unicode and Gtk2's sophisticated text rendering, the "port" from English to a far-east language will merely be translation work, such as ports to Western languages always were.
Lo and behold, Gtk 2 won't need a hscroll because it will have word wrapping (finally!). The developerworks articles on Gtk 2 have a few screenshots.
Finally, a consistent version of Gnome. I've been using Gnome (1.2 and 1.4) for about a year now, and was even driven to KDE for some time by Gnome 1's extreme ugliness in terms of consistency. Several different CORBA interfaces for the same thing. Ancient, slow-ass Gtk+. A file manager (gmc) that comes with its own collection of file type bindings, independent from the rest of Gnome.
As it looks, Gnome 2 will finally offer a consistent and well-defined set of mechanisms, enabling reliable inter-application operation and efficient working.
Now, if the Gtk+ team has sorted out Gtk 1's horrible slowness, Gnome 2 looks like something I could fall in love with.
Oh yes? Such like Windows' fantastic C api that is *way* more cluttered than Gnome 2's due to MS's strict backwards compatibility. Windows developers know the pains of dealing with "versioned" function names, *Ex elements etc.
If you want a C++ interface to Gnome, go ahead, help developing a wrapper library.
Fontwise, no character has been replaced because the Euro has always had its Unicode point. Encodingwise, the "international currency sign" was killed off in favor of the Euro in Latin-9, and again, no problems in Unicode.
This guy obviously isn't using Debian.
The mom&pop ISPs also can't compete because they simply can't afford the ridiculously low prices.
Here in Germany, the big telephone network owner's daughter company T-Online sold Internet connection over a year for so cheap (EUR 40/mo, unlimited) that they themselves got into the red numbers. They survived, because of the shady relationship with the big guys who own the network, but every week a smaller ISP couldn't anymore. It's the brute force of the market. $BIG_ISP offers unlimited access for EUR 30. $SMALL_ISP offers access for EUR 25 basic fee, then EUR 1 per hour. Where do you go? To the big boys. Who dies? Mr. ISP next door.
The real problem and reason why printing in Linux, esp. from the GUI, is a pain in the behind is that no distribution has a working system-wide font configuration mechanism where X and gs can painlessly access the same fonts (Recently I stated that Debian does, but it still has problems with font names with spaces in them, rendering it practically useless because many common truetype fonts have spaces in them) and the lack of a working printing toolkit. I don't know about libgnomeprint, but Qt/KDE's printing is horribly, horribly broken.
This leads to the dilemma that GUI application developers not only have to write routines to display their data on screen, but also ones to bring everything to Postscript. Web browsers are a prime example where the screen display is complex enough so that there's no more resources left to reinvent the wheel in Postscript, leading to Mozilla's broken printing.
The final problem is the lack of Unicode support in the ancient Postscript/Type 1 font standard. The introduction of the Euro made this painfully obvious for European Linux users.
Before we look at the hardware, we need a reliable printing library that surpasses Postscript's stone-age encoding, rendering out every single character. I believe libgnomeprint wants to do that, but I haven't been tracking it. We need a printing system that does not rely on printer drivers that are compiled into the PS rasterizer (lpr, ugh!) or has other quirks (cups is a step forward with its modularity and two behind with its own rasterizing program, effectively introducing a separate app for PS->screen and PS->printer). The hardware support is already here, but what use is a fast car if you can't get the door open? (Don't you just love metaphors?)
I don't want a smaller mp3 player. Current ones are just about the right size. I want a digital music player with at least 128MB, *BIG* display, Ogg Vorbis support, fast USB connection, and an open interface that can be easily accessed from non-Windows systems as a block device. I also want good sound quality. Will there be such a thing? I highly doubt it. Why is it that manufacturers of portable devices think that smaller automatically equals better? Cell phones suffer the same problem. Why does nobody care about the factors that actually make up quality anymore?