Not sure that was the best example. True, the rhyming explanation was rather lame, but if the sexual harassment lawsuits were founded, then there might be another more awkward reason for Koko's choice of sign...
Indeed. I think part of the problem is that most modern games are too invested in flash, blink and shine, and squandering their opportunities for being evocative. For a game to be really evocative requires either a full-on cinematic treatment (which tends to interfere with gameplay), or a really economical treatment which is minimalist in the same way good poetry is.
I think Ico and Shadow of the Colossus did pretty well on that count, actually, without explicitly fleshing out the plot or characters that much. Stringing together a few highly evocative elements with minimal distractions seems to be enough to get your brain to do the rest.
Yes, but think of the sex positions that would be possible!
Reality check, four words: Newton's Laws of Motion. You'd have to constantly fight to keep hold on each other so you didn't drift off in opposite directions. I suspect that'd be more than a little distracting.
The dividing line is whether the game currency is readily exchangable with "real" currency. True of Linden Dollars, not true of Monopoly money.
The corollary to this is that if Monopoly money were readily convertible with "real" currency, and your winnings were significant in "real" dollars, you probably would owe taxes.
1) The entrance has a guard desk, in which case the (armed) guard challenges them, not you or the secretary.
2) It's a swipe-in side door with no guard.
In the latter case, you let them go, but contact the guard desk with a physical description and get a guard out there to deal with them. Even if they're on the parking lot, they're still on company property.
It's worth noting that even if the person is cooperative, unless the guard desk is very close, you should probably call the guard to come to you rather than escorting them to the guard.
No, the way it works is that if you challenge someone and they don't have a badge, you don't shrug and let them wander off to try again with someone else. You call security, and security deals with them. Once security has them in custody, they can check them out against employee records and if they're legit, they're issued with a temporary badge and back on their way without too much delay. The flip side of it is that if they're not legit, security is generally more equipped to deal with them if they get violent than you are.
Generally those two things are unrelated. In this case, though, open source development is what is fueling the unauthorized copies. The copy bot in this case is built on the open source project libsecondlife, and the copy bot itself is open source and part of that project.
Well, I'm glad you didn't mean what it sounded like you meant, but that's still rather like saying that open source is related to piracy because e.g. mplayer (which can be and is used to rip DVD video) is open source. There's a very loose and misleading sense in which it's true, but the fundamental problem is that information is inherently copyable, and that has nothing to do with Open Source. There are closed-source DVD rippers, and there are also geometry rippers for closed-source worlds like World of Warcraft.
We have content creators that were thriving because of DRM-- the content creators wouldn't have put the same kind of time and effort into their creations if they couldn't be protected. And we have all that business coming to an abrupt close because of open source development.
Uh, whoa whoa whoa... since when has "open source development" meant "making unauthorized copies"?
You can't lump together the people working on independently creating something like Inkscape with the people distributing cracked copies of Illustrator. They are two completely separate things.
The latter, conventionally called "piracy" (rightly or wrongly), is why those businesses are coming to an abrupt close, facilitated by the fact that their business models were not particularly sound in the face of that reality.
The concept of Elephants Dream (no apostrophe) might have been interesting, but the writing was atrocious and failed to communicate it. Just because something is "high concept" doesn't excuse it from needing to be well-executed.
If I were the CO of NORAD, and somebody told me there was a portal just below my command post through which very nasty aliens were constantly attempting to travel, I'd have very strong views about its immediate relocation.
Of course, since (as the other poster pointed out) the CO at NORAD isn't that high on the totem pole, if he kept bitching about it the obvious solution would be to relocate NORAD. Hmmmm...
The Ubuntu and Fedora installer hangs have nothing to do with bloat -- most likely you're dealing with a buggy Linux driver for some piece of hardware in your system, or (less likely) a piece of hardware which doesn't respond well to the installer's means of hardware autodetection. If it's hanging with a simple black screen, it's almost certainly video-related.
SusE and Mandriva may work because they ship with a different version of the kernel and drivers, or probe for hardware differently. If they're unbearably slow to use on a 2GHz machine, though, my first guess would be that you're running at a high (> 1024x768) resolution and not getting any graphics acceleration. This would be especially painful if you're accustomed to using Windows on the same hardware with accelerated drivers.
The underlying system, even with a lot of services running, is just not that resource-intensive otherwise -- I know, I've used Linux on fairly modest (500-700MHz) machines for a long time. You're right that modern distros don't cater to older hardware (and they install too much crap by default), but it isn't anywhere near as bad as you think it is, and I don't think that's your problem here. If anything, your problem is most likely that your video hardware is too new and/or has an uncooperative vendor (which isn't your fault).
The problem is that the proposed scheme is far too easy to quietly abuse without a warrant. You will probably notice if someone starts tearing up the concrete in your building's basement or putting holes in your drywall without proper authorization; the same can't be said of tapping electronic systems. Since these sorts of systems can also be cracked, the unauthorized tappers needn't even be law enforcement...
No, that'll just give you a PNG file with a.jpeg extension. Some programs might figure that out and display it anywaon, but we don't have JPEG export yet.
Okay, I just got a friend with Acrobat to test our PDF export from 0.44.
Good news and bad news:
+ Good news is that it looks like alpha gets correctly exported for solid fills and strokes.
- Bad news is that we still don't do alpha in gradients, and per-object opacity is implemented wrong (it's applied to the stroke and fill individually rather than compositing them and applying opacity to the composited version). Urgh.
I think one of our SoC students is supposed to be doing a cairo-based PDF export for 0.45; I'll look at backporting that to 0.44 stable when it's done.
Ah, yeah, the opacity thing. I made sure that the guy implementing the layers dialog added an opacity slider to it.:)
Caveat: I think the rewritten PDF export does alpha properly (and there seems to be some code in there dealing with transparency groups), but I've not personally tested it. Let me know if it falls short and I'll see if we can get any fixes backported into the 0.44 stable series.
Yeah, and that's the scary part. People just don't get that. Don't seem to be able to make that logical connection between "public" and "everyone can see this".
You should probably also note that even if the roundtrip were clean as far as remembering the black level, CYMK and SVG's native sRGB color space have different gamuts -- some colors representable in one aren't representable in the other and vice-versa.
However, it is possible that we might eventually be able to support specifying spot or process colors via SVG's icc-color() construct (which SVG allows you to specify alongside an sRGB color) -- we've just got to do a lot of architectural work first (the beginnings of which happened with 0.44).
I believe alpha channel for PDF export has been fixed for 0.44, though there are still some rough areas like text handling and font subsetting that need to be addressed. We can't really do alpha in EPS since Postscript doesn't support it, and in fact the problem with our original PDF export was that it used EPS as an intermediate representation.
With regard to layers, 0.44 has also introduced a layer palette and UI support for nested layers (the underlying codebase has supported nested layers since layers were first introduced).
Finally, once the SoC project to implement support for SVG filter effects completes, we should get support for layer effects (actually per-object, not just per-layer) in the 0.45 - 0.47 timeframe.
As far as support for multipage documents goes, we will have to support multipage documents once SVG does (it's a feature slated for SVG 1.2, which hasn't been finalized yet). Until then we're sticking to the released versions of the SVG standard for the most part.
As far as documentation goes, we do have a manual, but I can't blame you for not knowing about it, given there's no option for it in the help menu. We need to decide what we're going to do with it really -- integrate it in the app, or shell out to a browser pointed to the online version. The former means integrating an HTML viewer of some stripe; the latter's probably easier, but still hairy to do in a cross-platform fashion.
For what it's worth, we do also support converting vector objects to embedded bitmaps (Edit|Make a Bitmap Copy from the menu, or Alt+B); it's a relatively new feature (introduced in 0.43, I think), so it's possible the version of Inkscape you tried didn't have it.
Lastly, 0.44 does integrate with littlecms for display purposes, so we've got the beginnings of CMS support now. It's still a long way from what you'd want for printing (namely, speccing specific spot or CYMK process colors) though. Officially upporting Pantone is probably never going to happen because of Pantone's agressive patent and trademark enforcement policies, but you might see "underground" user-created Pantone swatch sets emerge.
Oh. Actually, there's one other deficiency you didn't highlight: printing. Our EPS and PDF export has improved a lot in recent releases, but printing directly from inkscape STINKS. We will be working on that. While our primary focus is indeed on SVG and the web (hence that stuff gets implemented first), we aren't uninterested in the print world.
One last thing -- could you do me a favor and please file a bug (or even just reply to this post and I'll file a bug) describing what we do wrong with punctuation in vertical text? If you can provide some test cases or expected/actual image pairs that'd be ideal. Unfortunately vertical text isn't a feature any of the main developers use personally, but it is one we want to support correctly.
If we're going to drag the Old Testament into this, be aware that the Church teaches that the moral requirements of the Old Testament apply to Christians, but the civil and ritual requirements do not (and from a Catholic point of view, the Church's interpretation of the Bible takes precedence, not yours or mine). Otherwise today Catholics would be sacrificing bulls, punishing crimes with stoning, and practicing mandatory circumcision. Given this, I don't see that there is a practical conflict with e.g. the punishments mandated in Deuteronomy.
I think you're right that the point I was trying to make regarding suicide bombers was mostly irrelevent, and also that I did ignore the point Pius IX intended to make. Both Quanta Cura and the Catechism (2109) are emphatic that the simple preservation of the public order is not an adequate "due limit", and that there is not an intrinsic moral right to error (i.e. beliefs contrary to the Catholic faith). However, the Catechism does state that freedom from religious coercion is a moral right.
In particular, there would seem to be a conflict between a blanket condemnation of the idea that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society" and paragraph 2108 of the Catechism. It may be that Pius IX's statement, as far as it concerns the civil order, falls outside the realm of faith and morals to which infallibility is strictly limited, but that seems like a cop-out. Other than that I don't have a good answer now. Sorry.
FWIW, the parent is quoting from Quanta Cura, an 1864 encyclical by Pope Pius IX. In the quoted passage, he is condemning the notion of an absolute liberty of conscience and speech in all situations. Since the encyclical is in many ways a reaction to the excesses of Spanish disestablishment (making this post on-topic), this Pope isn't particularly concerned with condemning the opposite extreme, but others have done so. If you want to get a better sense of how this slots into Catholic teaching overall, it might be helpful to look at paragraphs 2106-2109 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which include Quanta Cura among their footnotes.
2106 "Nobody may be forced to act against his convictions, nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience in religious matters in private or in public, alone or in association with others, within due limits." This right is based on the very nature of the human person, whose dignity enables him freely to assent to the divine truth which transcends the temporal order. For this reason it "continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it."
2107 "If because of the circumstances of a particular people special civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional organization of a state, the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom must be recognized and respected as well."
2108 The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error, but rather a natural right of the human person to civil liberty, i.e., immunity, within just limits, from external constraint in religious matters by political authorities. This natural right ought to be acknowledged in the juridical order of society in such a way that it constitutes a civil right.
2109 The right to religious liberty can of itself be neither unlimited nor limited only by a "public order" conceived in a positivist or naturalist manner. The "due limits" which are inherent in it must be determined for each social situation by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority in accordance with "legal principles which are in conformity with the objective moral order."
While I doubt everyone on Slashdot would totally agree the details, there is not a blanket condemnation of civil rights here, but an acknowledgement of their limits. I'd hope it is clear to most people that there are "due limits" on freedom of conscience; as an extreme example, while some suicide bombers may have religious motives and be honestly following their consciences, murdering innocents is nonetheless objectively evil and contrary to the common good.
Yeah, it does seem like kind of a dumb idea, doesn't it? Especially given how often we read about Peter screwing up in the New Testament (I'm serious, the guy had a prime talent for putting his foot in his mouth; just read the rest of Matthew 16!), and the conduct of some of his successors.
And yet, the Catholic Church has lasted 2000 years like this; try to name another institution from that era which survives today. I think the important thing is that we're not talking about building a Church on a man left to his own devices. It's Jesus building his Church on Peter, not Peter doing it on his own, so its stability is going to depend on Jesus, not on Peter's own merits.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure that was the best example. True, the rhyming explanation was rather lame, but if the sexual harassment lawsuits were founded, then there might be another more awkward reason for Koko's choice of sign...
Indeed. I think part of the problem is that most modern games are too invested in flash, blink and shine, and squandering their opportunities for being evocative. For a game to be really evocative requires either a full-on cinematic treatment (which tends to interfere with gameplay), or a really economical treatment which is minimalist in the same way good poetry is.
I think Ico and Shadow of the Colossus did pretty well on that count, actually, without explicitly fleshing out the plot or characters that much. Stringing together a few highly evocative elements with minimal distractions seems to be enough to get your brain to do the rest.
Reality check, four words: Newton's Laws of Motion. You'd have to constantly fight to keep hold on each other so you didn't drift off in opposite directions. I suspect that'd be more than a little distracting.
Perhaps get a lot of RAM and don't bother with swap? It's not strictly required.
The dividing line is whether the game currency is readily exchangable with "real" currency. True of Linden Dollars, not true of Monopoly money.
The corollary to this is that if Monopoly money were readily convertible with "real" currency, and your winnings were significant in "real" dollars, you probably would owe taxes.
In a secure facility, there are two cases:
1) The entrance has a guard desk, in which case the (armed) guard challenges them, not you or the secretary.
2) It's a swipe-in side door with no guard.
In the latter case, you let them go, but contact the guard desk with a physical description and get a guard out there to deal with them. Even if they're on the parking lot, they're still on company property.
It's worth noting that even if the person is cooperative, unless the guard desk is very close, you should probably call the guard to come to you rather than escorting them to the guard.
No, the way it works is that if you challenge someone and they don't have a badge, you don't shrug and let them wander off to try again with someone else. You call security, and security deals with them. Once security has them in custody, they can check them out against employee records and if they're legit, they're issued with a temporary badge and back on their way without too much delay. The flip side of it is that if they're not legit, security is generally more equipped to deal with them if they get violent than you are.
Well, I'm glad you didn't mean what it sounded like you meant, but that's still rather like saying that open source is related to piracy because e.g. mplayer (which can be and is used to rip DVD video) is open source. There's a very loose and misleading sense in which it's true, but the fundamental problem is that information is inherently copyable, and that has nothing to do with Open Source. There are closed-source DVD rippers, and there are also geometry rippers for closed-source worlds like World of Warcraft.
Uh, whoa whoa whoa ... since when has "open source development" meant "making unauthorized copies"?
You can't lump together the people working on independently creating something like Inkscape with the people distributing cracked copies of Illustrator. They are two completely separate things.
The latter, conventionally called "piracy" (rightly or wrongly), is why those businesses are coming to an abrupt close, facilitated by the fact that their business models were not particularly sound in the face of that reality.
Inkscape (nee Sodipodi) is another one.
The concept of Elephants Dream (no apostrophe) might have been interesting, but the writing was atrocious and failed to communicate it. Just because something is "high concept" doesn't excuse it from needing to be well-executed.
Of course, since (as the other poster pointed out) the CO at NORAD isn't that high on the totem pole, if he kept bitching about it the obvious solution would be to relocate NORAD. Hmmmm...
The Ubuntu and Fedora installer hangs have nothing to do with bloat -- most likely you're dealing with a buggy Linux driver for some piece of hardware in your system, or (less likely) a piece of hardware which doesn't respond well to the installer's means of hardware autodetection. If it's hanging with a simple black screen, it's almost certainly video-related.
SusE and Mandriva may work because they ship with a different version of the kernel and drivers, or probe for hardware differently. If they're unbearably slow to use on a 2GHz machine, though, my first guess would be that you're running at a high (> 1024x768) resolution and not getting any graphics acceleration. This would be especially painful if you're accustomed to using Windows on the same hardware with accelerated drivers.
The underlying system, even with a lot of services running, is just not that resource-intensive otherwise -- I know, I've used Linux on fairly modest (500-700MHz) machines for a long time. You're right that modern distros don't cater to older hardware (and they install too much crap by default), but it isn't anywhere near as bad as you think it is, and I don't think that's your problem here. If anything, your problem is most likely that your video hardware is too new and/or has an uncooperative vendor (which isn't your fault).
The problem is that the proposed scheme is far too easy to quietly abuse without a warrant. You will probably notice if someone starts tearing up the concrete in your building's basement or putting holes in your drywall without proper authorization; the same can't be said of tapping electronic systems. Since these sorts of systems can also be cracked, the unauthorized tappers needn't even be law enforcement...
No, that'll just give you a PNG file with a .jpeg extension. Some programs might figure that out and display it anywaon, but we don't have JPEG export yet.
Okay, I just got a friend with Acrobat to test our PDF export from 0.44.
Good news and bad news:
+ Good news is that it looks like alpha gets correctly exported for solid fills and strokes.
- Bad news is that we still don't do alpha in gradients, and per-object opacity is implemented wrong (it's applied to the stroke and fill individually rather than compositing them and applying opacity to the composited version). Urgh.
I think one of our SoC students is supposed to be doing a cairo-based PDF export for 0.45; I'll look at backporting that to 0.44 stable when it's done.
Ah, yeah, the opacity thing. I made sure that the guy implementing the layers dialog added an opacity slider to it. :)
Caveat: I think the rewritten PDF export does alpha properly (and there seems to be some code in there dealing with transparency groups), but I've not personally tested it. Let me know if it falls short and I'll see if we can get any fixes backported into the 0.44 stable series.
Yeah, and that's the scary part. People just don't get that. Don't seem to be able to make that logical connection between "public" and "everyone can see this".
You should probably also note that even if the roundtrip were clean as far as remembering the black level, CYMK and SVG's native sRGB color space have different gamuts -- some colors representable in one aren't representable in the other and vice-versa.
However, it is possible that we might eventually be able to support specifying spot or process colors via SVG's icc-color() construct (which SVG allows you to specify alongside an sRGB color) -- we've just got to do a lot of architectural work first (the beginnings of which happened with 0.44).
FYI...
I believe alpha channel for PDF export has been fixed for 0.44, though there are still some rough areas like text handling and font subsetting that need to be addressed. We can't really do alpha in EPS since Postscript doesn't support it, and in fact the problem with our original PDF export was that it used EPS as an intermediate representation.
With regard to layers, 0.44 has also introduced a layer palette and UI support for nested layers (the underlying codebase has supported nested layers since layers were first introduced).
Finally, once the SoC project to implement support for SVG filter effects completes, we should get support for layer effects (actually per-object, not just per-layer) in the 0.45 - 0.47 timeframe.
As far as support for multipage documents goes, we will have to support multipage documents once SVG does (it's a feature slated for SVG 1.2, which hasn't been finalized yet). Until then we're sticking to the released versions of the SVG standard for the most part.
As far as documentation goes, we do have a manual, but I can't blame you for not knowing about it, given there's no option for it in the help menu. We need to decide what we're going to do with it really -- integrate it in the app, or shell out to a browser pointed to the online version. The former means integrating an HTML viewer of some stripe; the latter's probably easier, but still hairy to do in a cross-platform fashion.
For what it's worth, we do also support converting vector objects to embedded bitmaps (Edit|Make a Bitmap Copy from the menu, or Alt+B); it's a relatively new feature (introduced in 0.43, I think), so it's possible the version of Inkscape you tried didn't have it.
Lastly, 0.44 does integrate with littlecms for display purposes, so we've got the beginnings of CMS support now. It's still a long way from what you'd want for printing (namely, speccing specific spot or CYMK process colors) though. Officially upporting Pantone is probably never going to happen because of Pantone's agressive patent and trademark enforcement policies, but you might see "underground" user-created Pantone swatch sets emerge.
Oh. Actually, there's one other deficiency you didn't highlight: printing. Our EPS and PDF export has improved a lot in recent releases, but printing directly from inkscape STINKS. We will be working on that. While our primary focus is indeed on SVG and the web (hence that stuff gets implemented first), we aren't uninterested in the print world.
One last thing -- could you do me a favor and please file a bug (or even just reply to this post and I'll file a bug) describing what we do wrong with punctuation in vertical text? If you can provide some test cases or expected/actual image pairs that'd be ideal. Unfortunately vertical text isn't a feature any of the main developers use personally, but it is one we want to support correctly.
If we're going to drag the Old Testament into this, be aware that the Church teaches that the moral requirements of the Old Testament apply to Christians, but the civil and ritual requirements do not (and from a Catholic point of view, the Church's interpretation of the Bible takes precedence, not yours or mine). Otherwise today Catholics would be sacrificing bulls, punishing crimes with stoning, and practicing mandatory circumcision. Given this, I don't see that there is a practical conflict with e.g. the punishments mandated in Deuteronomy.
I think you're right that the point I was trying to make regarding suicide bombers was mostly irrelevent, and also that I did ignore the point Pius IX intended to make. Both Quanta Cura and the Catechism (2109) are emphatic that the simple preservation of the public order is not an adequate "due limit", and that there is not an intrinsic moral right to error (i.e. beliefs contrary to the Catholic faith). However, the Catechism does state that freedom from religious coercion is a moral right.
In particular, there would seem to be a conflict between a blanket condemnation of the idea that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society" and paragraph 2108 of the Catechism. It may be that Pius IX's statement, as far as it concerns the civil order, falls outside the realm of faith and morals to which infallibility is strictly limited, but that seems like a cop-out. Other than that I don't have a good answer now. Sorry.
While I doubt everyone on Slashdot would totally agree the details, there is not a blanket condemnation of civil rights here, but an acknowledgement of their limits. I'd hope it is clear to most people that there are "due limits" on freedom of conscience; as an extreme example, while some suicide bombers may have religious motives and be honestly following their consciences, murdering innocents is nonetheless objectively evil and contrary to the common good.
Yeah, it does seem like kind of a dumb idea, doesn't it? Especially given how often we read about Peter screwing up in the New Testament (I'm serious, the guy had a prime talent for putting his foot in his mouth; just read the rest of Matthew 16!), and the conduct of some of his successors.
And yet, the Catholic Church has lasted 2000 years like this; try to name another institution from that era which survives today. I think the important thing is that we're not talking about building a Church on a man left to his own devices. It's Jesus building his Church on Peter, not Peter doing it on his own, so its stability is going to depend on Jesus, not on Peter's own merits.