So if a shoplifter is caught stealing a bottle of whiskey, or a multipack of cigarettes, or a pack of nappies after shopping there without incident for a period, should he/she be treated leniantly?
Good grief, settle down. That's not a good analogy for this case. In this case, it's as if your kid tries to carry a pack of gum out of the store along with your $100 of groceries you just bought, and they fine you $5000 and put your picture up in the lobby to make an example out of you and your beligerent child.
There didn't appear to be any intent to pirate in the Ball case, but the BSA was looking for an example for cheap press. They got the press they deserved.
But what the fudge does this have to do with trustworthy computing? It's just another email worm, and it relies heavily on user stupidity, much moreso than the msblaster worm.
It's the irony that the Trustworthy Computing campaign is a marketing solution to a technical problem. These viruses and worms do not only rely on user stupidity. They thrive in a suite of products by Microsoft that have been "designed" from the ground up to provide features, features, features, usually at the expense of quality and security. Features that most users don't want. Features that could generally be accomplished by using existing features, but hey, some user may not want to click twice here, so let's make a new feature!
Trustworthy Computing is Microsoft's response to the quandry they've helped to create for their customers. In short, it is simply a marketing trick. Pick some old-fashioned sounding words like "Trustworthy" and keep repeating them often enough, and eventually people will believe it. And why not? Since computers are technical black magic, the users have no choice but to trust them.
Considering that ATI probably didn't make out well with the GameCube, and NVidia didn't fare much better with the XBox, shouldn't they be scrambling to provide hardware for the PS3 instead of fighting over the "scraps", since the PS2 has pretty much cleaned up the console market? Not trying to start a flame war, but 50/8/8 is pretty much a win. Does Sony produce their own GPUs?
If I were a GPU manufacturer, I'd rather have my widgets in 50-60 million PS2 units rather than 8 million GC or XBox units. Anyone know the story on this one?
Often, if I have to switch hats from programmer to designer
Why not set up a separate user on your system for this, with different desktop settings, resolutions, etc. Even different video drivers. I do this at home to play games. I have a "gamer" user that launches XFree86 like this:
startx -- --xf86config XF86Config.gamer
The XF86Config.gamer file is in/etc/X11. I used this so I could use the fast-but-less-stable NVidia video drivers for games, but still use the stable stock drivers for "business" use. The NVidia drivers are now stable enough for both uses, but I still use the separate user because it has no bloated desktop system to steal memory away from games. You can even launch X into another virtual desktop and switch between screens with Alt-F7/F8. Keep in mind though that the second user to log in will not have rights to the audio device and other console devices.
This is nice because it shows you where your money comes from and where it goes, instead of stipulating that it appears and disappears in your asset accounts (savings, checking, etc). I can tell you exactly how much money I've spent on automobile-related expenses since I started using GNU-cash.
But, isn't this what categories are for in Quicken? I recall in my Windows days being able to view my expenditures in a nice pie chart per month, separated by categories, or view income vs. expense month-by-month. I use GnuCash now, but only as a crude check register; if it can do more than that, then those features have been lurking quietly indeed...
It makes you wonder why all motherboards don't come with receivers that can automagically receive the (shortwave?) time pulses sent from the atomic clocks (one is in Colorado, US). I know you can get a wall clock that will do this for about $20-30USD at Wal-mart; I'm assuming the actual parts needed on a M/B would be about a dollar or two of parts.
the problem with opensource is that people quickly get in over their heads an abandon project before they complete enough to mention.
Sorry, as a developer of almost 10 years I have to comment. I can't count how many closed-source projects I've seen (some I have been a part of, unfortunately) that never saw the light of day for the same reasons or due to internal politics. It's not an open-source development problem, it's a development problem. With closed-source, however, the projects sit and rot on a company's hard drive. At least with OSS someone can pick up the code later and make another go at it.
It's not fair to cite mainstream developments like Linux or Mozilla as the way all open source is any more than it's fair to cite Microsoft's history on things like security and reliability as the way all closed source is.
Actaully, in my experience I'm much more likely to dive into the code for a small app which is probably quite unknown. I rarely dive into the Mozilla or OpenOffice sources (for example) because they are so big and complex that it takes time just to get a build environment setup. Small projects like most sourceforge projects take ten minutes to get a build set up and completed.
Is it worth $2000+ when I can get a laptop for $1000+ that can basicially do the same thing except Now I can't use a pen? No way.
Agreed. Also, haven't I seen those Wacom drawing/CAD tablets on eBay for about $100USD, for those odd times when you need to draw or write? I would expect a dedicated drawing tablet would be more tactile and more rugged than drawing directly on the screen. Plus, having the drawing tablet and output screen separate makes writing easier for us southpaws...
Re:depends on your flavor of nostalgia
on
fvwm Turns Ten
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· Score: 1
I keep trying out all these newer WMs, and they always seem to be missing some essential feature that I've come to depend on over the years, and/or they're massive, bloated monstrosities that don't do noticably more than my old workhorse.
I know how you feel. I always end up going back to fvwm2 for the clean, fast operation. Customizing it is a real pain, and my config files are so old that I can't use the latest versions.
Might I suggest trying xfce, which I have been using for several months with no end in sight. It's default config is klunky, but I can send you my config file(s) with some better defaults, most notably desktop switching using the scroll wheel, which I like much better than screen edge flipping now. XFCE comes with a file browser and other *really* fast utilities. It also works very well over remote X.
Pfft... my GeForce 7 TI/XR/DDR-Ultra 12x can do better than that... And that's with UT-2005 with all the Team KickA*s(c) patches applied with Super-AA and xTreem Transparency (TM) turned on...
Well, they way I see it, they loose $100 per unit sold. So if they sell 500 units, they loose $5000.
You might want to run this through your calculator first...
...surely you haven't forgetten the true Saturday morning kickoff show: The Bay City Rollers. Who could forget Sha-na-na and Bowser? Started at 6:30 CST back in the day.
Are you saying that in order to be considered "successful", you want NASA to kick some alien ass in order to secure our access to their natural resources?
Absolutely not. You misunderstood my statement, and if it was not clear, I apologize. The parent post first drew the comparison between NASA and the DoD. I simply pointed out that the average taxpayer can easily see the effects of DoD funding, whether they agree with those effects or not (apparently you do not, but that is another topic). NASA has not provided a public display to the taxpayers of what said tax dollars have provided, other than some more boring shuttle experiments, a constanly-on-the-verge-of-shutdown space station, and several failed X-planes.
Compare the annual budget of NASA to, say one Naval warship, or one fleet of Army communication vans, or virtually anything DoD.
But the difference here is that we can park one of these carrier groups off the coast of some country and either exert enormous political pressure or wage an air war within days. Our DoD budget recently gave everyone who has CNN a spectacular display of where our tax dollars are going as it defeated an entrenched enemy within a couple of weeks. NASA has failed to do the same.
The shuttle program sucked up so much money that NASA became an unprofitable trucking company, rather than a blue-sky research and exploration group. I thought the more-cheaper-faster Mars program was a success, even if two of the craft were lost. The Sojourner cost not much more than a couple of shuttle launches, and excited a nation again. NASA is still lost and directionless, with an expensive albatross around its neck (Shuttle fleet).
I never worked for NASA so maybe I'm one of those "ignorant taxpayer/voters" that used to pay your salary, but I do know that from age 7-13 I read Odyssey religously and gradually lost interest when the only NASA press was (a) yet another secret Air Force satellite was launched on STS-xxx, or (b) STS-yyy: how do moths mate in zero gravity? The rehashed Viking articles were much more inspiring.
I see your point, agrounds, but here's the rationale from the peanut gallery.
"copy a:\times.ttf c:\windows\fonts"
"Download fonts. Open Control Panel | Fonts. Select File | Install New Font..."
"On some Windows machines, just right-click the font and choose "Install" or Send To | Fonts"
"Open My Computer, and go to c:\Windows\Fonts (c:\winnt on some Windows versions). Copy the fonts to this folder"
Do you realize this means there are at least *FOUR* different ways to install fonts on Windows (Five, actually, if you're using an ancient version with Adobe Type Manager).
...not a personal attack, Cereal, just a little jab to remind you that things aren't so clean and green on the other side of the fence, either. (And check out that file browser in the Install Fonts menu item... that looks like old 16-bit era GUI controls)
It is not Xft that renders fonts. It's the freetype lib. Xft is a client side API that uses fontconfig to select fonts. If you update your freetype lib to 2.1.4 you will probably see a few more enhancements.
Now I'm really confused. The docs I read seem to say the exact opposite of your statement. From the Freetype home page:
Note that FreeType 2 is a font service and doesn't provide APIs to perform higher-level features, like text layout or graphics processing (e.g. colored text rendering, "hollowing", etc..). However, it greatly simplifies these tasks by providing a simple, easy to use and uniform interface to access the content of font files.
XFT is the name of the client-side library developed by Keith Packard to handle the new X11 extension named XRender. More information can be found on this page or that one.
XFT is the library used by the Qt toolkit and upcoming GTK 2.0 to display anti-aliased fonts. [emphasis added]
Instead you should really appreciate the amazing work that has been done by the freetype project. Especially David Turner has been cranking out algorithms to make your linux desktop look nice with AA fonts, even without the patented hinter.
I'll give credit and free beer to those involved, and gladly. Can anybody clear this up, though?
Pixie dust. Or, more accurately, the xft2 library which renders the fonts. RH8.0 used it, but the Mozilla RH8 shipped with was not compiled against the library unless you compiled it yourself or downloaded the _rh8_xft mozilla rpms. I had no idea how much the font renderer mattered before RH8... pretty much any font looks good onscreen with xft + AA.
Yes, it is quite impressive, especially considering that without anti-aliasing the Luxi fonts don't look that impressive. This is the first system besides a Mac that I've been able to use anti-aliased fonts and not get a headache or annoyed. I much prefer the RH fonts to my XP box at work, which I set to disable AA below about 14 points because the clarity suffers IMO.
I don't know if this program is limited to non-PDAs, but if Toshiba makes a change to the kernel memory management routines that breaks 3rd party software, then you have a fork, and unless Microsoft incorporates this change into the next version of CE (and assuming all the vendors adopt it... remember they have custom changes they have to merge now), then you could have a condition where software like "US Streets and Maps" will run on HP PDAs but not on Toshibas, but then HP made a change that makes "Pro Solitaire" crawl but runs fine on an iPaq... This seems much worse than the current Win9x/NT forking.
Maybe they've found a solution to this, but I'm not going to dig through MS docs to find out. Frankly, I could care less. I only use MS dev tools because I have to (for now), not because I want to. Luckily I don't have to touch CE.
Anything less than complete parity with Windows drivers FEATURE FOR FEATURE is unacceptable. Linux is STILL not there.
This makes no sense, but nice troll. You could have just as easily said: "My XP ATI graphics drivers don't have the same options as they do on WinMe. Microsoft Windows is STILL not there yet."
Whose fault is it, Linux, or the hardware manufacturers whose job to write quality drivers is being accomplished by outside F/OSS developers? Anyway, I've found this (driver feature exclusion) to work both ways. My venerable old SB Awe64 always has been more stable than it ever was on Win9x, especially when loading in MIDI sound fonts. The Creative GUI would freeze while loading, and I had about a 20% chance of total lockup. The sfxload util has never failed in Linux and never locks the machine.
I also recall my old Riva 128 card magically was able to display 1024x768 x 16bpp when I went to Linux. The option never occured in the Windows drivers. Then again, my Laser printer only printed 300dpi in Linux when it printed 600dpi in Windows, but I've been told it only prints 300dpi in XP. I learned that lesson: don't buy WinHardware (I'm looking at you, NEC).
If you have a problem with drivers, write your hardware manufacturer, and don't use as many CAPITAL LETTERS when you do so.
Slashdot Mirror
So if a shoplifter is caught stealing a bottle of whiskey, or a multipack of cigarettes, or a pack of nappies after shopping there without incident for a period, should he/she be treated leniantly?
Good grief, settle down. That's not a good analogy for this case. In this case, it's as if your kid tries to carry a pack of gum out of the store along with your $100 of groceries you just bought, and they fine you $5000 and put your picture up in the lobby to make an example out of you and your beligerent child.
There didn't appear to be any intent to pirate in the Ball case, but the BSA was looking for an example for cheap press. They got the press they deserved.
But what the fudge does this have to do with trustworthy computing? It's just another email worm, and it relies heavily on user stupidity, much moreso than the msblaster worm.
It's the irony that the Trustworthy Computing campaign is a marketing solution to a technical problem. These viruses and worms do not only rely on user stupidity. They thrive in a suite of products by Microsoft that have been "designed" from the ground up to provide features, features, features, usually at the expense of quality and security. Features that most users don't want. Features that could generally be accomplished by using existing features, but hey, some user may not want to click twice here, so let's make a new feature!
Trustworthy Computing is Microsoft's response to the quandry they've helped to create for their customers. In short, it is simply a marketing trick. Pick some old-fashioned sounding words like "Trustworthy" and keep repeating them often enough, and eventually people will believe it. And why not? Since computers are technical black magic, the users have no choice but to trust them.
Then why hasn't Microsoft changed the typo on this page
They've been trying, but their machines keep rebooting on their own for some reason...
Considering that ATI probably didn't make out well with the GameCube, and NVidia didn't fare much better with the XBox, shouldn't they be scrambling to provide hardware for the PS3 instead of fighting over the "scraps", since the PS2 has pretty much cleaned up the console market? Not trying to start a flame war, but 50/8/8 is pretty much a win. Does Sony produce their own GPUs?
If I were a GPU manufacturer, I'd rather have my widgets in 50-60 million PS2 units rather than 8 million GC or XBox units. Anyone know the story on this one?
Why not set up a separate user on your system for this, with different desktop settings, resolutions, etc. Even different video drivers. I do this at home to play games. I have a "gamer" user that launches XFree86 like this:
The XF86Config.gamer file is in
But, isn't this what categories are for in Quicken? I recall in my Windows days being able to view my expenditures in a nice pie chart per month, separated by categories, or view income vs. expense month-by-month. I use GnuCash now, but only as a crude check register; if it can do more than that, then those features have been lurking quietly indeed...
Or, as Homer J. said:
"I don't have time to read it. Just give me the gist of it, son."
It makes you wonder why all motherboards don't come with receivers that can automagically receive the (shortwave?) time pulses sent from the atomic clocks (one is in Colorado, US). I know you can get a wall clock that will do this for about $20-30USD at Wal-mart; I'm assuming the actual parts needed on a M/B would be about a dollar or two of parts.
Is it worth $2000+ when I can get a laptop for $1000+ that can basicially do the same thing except Now I can't use a pen? No way.
Agreed. Also, haven't I seen those Wacom drawing/CAD tablets on eBay for about $100USD, for those odd times when you need to draw or write? I would expect a dedicated drawing tablet would be more tactile and more rugged than drawing directly on the screen. Plus, having the drawing tablet and output screen separate makes writing easier for us southpaws...
I know how you feel. I always end up going back to fvwm2 for the clean, fast operation. Customizing it is a real pain, and my config files are so old that I can't use the latest versions.
Might I suggest trying xfce, which I have been using for several months with no end in sight. It's default config is klunky, but I can send you my config file(s) with some better defaults, most notably desktop switching using the scroll wheel, which I like much better than screen edge flipping now. XFCE comes with a file browser and other *really* fast utilities. It also works very well over remote X.
More than 3000 frames per second?
Pfft... my GeForce 7 TI/XR/DDR-Ultra 12x can do better than that... And that's with UT-2005 with all the Team KickA*s(c) patches applied with Super-AA and xTreem Transparency (TM) turned on...
Well, they way I see it, they loose $100 per unit sold. So if they sell 500 units, they loose $5000.
You might want to run this through your calculator first...
Are you saying that in order to be considered "successful", you want NASA to kick some alien ass in order to secure our access to their natural resources?
Absolutely not. You misunderstood my statement, and if it was not clear, I apologize. The parent post first drew the comparison between NASA and the DoD. I simply pointed out that the average taxpayer can easily see the effects of DoD funding, whether they agree with those effects or not (apparently you do not, but that is another topic). NASA has not provided a public display to the taxpayers of what said tax dollars have provided, other than some more boring shuttle experiments, a constanly-on-the-verge-of-shutdown space station, and several failed X-planes.
Compare the annual budget of NASA to, say one Naval warship, or one fleet of Army communication vans, or virtually anything DoD.
But the difference here is that we can park one of these carrier groups off the coast of some country and either exert enormous political pressure or wage an air war within days. Our DoD budget recently gave everyone who has CNN a spectacular display of where our tax dollars are going as it defeated an entrenched enemy within a couple of weeks. NASA has failed to do the same.
The shuttle program sucked up so much money that NASA became an unprofitable trucking company, rather than a blue-sky research and exploration group. I thought the more-cheaper-faster Mars program was a success, even if two of the craft were lost. The Sojourner cost not much more than a couple of shuttle launches, and excited a nation again. NASA is still lost and directionless, with an expensive albatross around its neck (Shuttle fleet).
I never worked for NASA so maybe I'm one of those "ignorant taxpayer/voters" that used to pay your salary, but I do know that from age 7-13 I read Odyssey religously and gradually lost interest when the only NASA press was (a) yet another secret Air Force satellite was launched on STS-xxx, or (b) STS-yyy: how do moths mate in zero gravity? The rehashed Viking articles were much more inspiring.
I see your point, agrounds, but here's the rationale from the peanut gallery.
"60% new code!"
I really really shouldn't, but I can't resist:
...not a personal attack, Cereal, just a little jab to remind you that things aren't so clean and green on the other side of the fence, either. (And check out that file browser in the Install Fonts menu item... that looks like old 16-bit era GUI controls)
"copy a:\times.ttf c:\windows\fonts"
"Download fonts. Open Control Panel | Fonts. Select File | Install New Font..."
"On some Windows machines, just right-click the font and choose "Install" or Send To | Fonts"
"Open My Computer, and go to c:\Windows\Fonts (c:\winnt on some Windows versions). Copy the fonts to this folder"
Do you realize this means there are at least *FOUR* different ways to install fonts on Windows (Five, actually, if you're using an ancient version with Adobe Type Manager).
Now I'm really confused. The docs I read seem to say the exact opposite of your statement. From the Freetype home page:
And the FreeType Related Projects Page says this about XFT: Instead you should really appreciate the amazing work that has been done by the freetype project. Especially David Turner has been cranking out algorithms to make your linux desktop look nice with AA fonts, even without the patented hinter.
I'll give credit and free beer to those involved, and gladly. Can anybody clear this up, though?
Pixie dust. Or, more accurately, the xft2 library which renders the fonts. RH8.0 used it, but the Mozilla RH8 shipped with was not compiled against the library unless you compiled it yourself or downloaded the _rh8_xft mozilla rpms. I had no idea how much the font renderer mattered before RH8... pretty much any font looks good onscreen with xft + AA.
Yes, it is quite impressive, especially considering that without anti-aliasing the Luxi fonts don't look that impressive. This is the first system besides a Mac that I've been able to use anti-aliased fonts and not get a headache or annoyed. I much prefer the RH fonts to my XP box at work, which I set to disable AA below about 14 points because the clarity suffers IMO.
Forking is not allowed.
I don't know if this program is limited to non-PDAs, but if Toshiba makes a change to the kernel memory management routines that breaks 3rd party software, then you have a fork, and unless Microsoft incorporates this change into the next version of CE (and assuming all the vendors adopt it... remember they have custom changes they have to merge now), then you could have a condition where software like "US Streets and Maps" will run on HP PDAs but not on Toshibas, but then HP made a change that makes "Pro Solitaire" crawl but runs fine on an iPaq... This seems much worse than the current Win9x/NT forking.
Maybe they've found a solution to this, but I'm not going to dig through MS docs to find out. Frankly, I could care less. I only use MS dev tools because I have to (for now), not because I want to. Luckily I don't have to touch CE.
Anything less than complete parity with Windows drivers FEATURE FOR FEATURE is unacceptable. Linux is STILL not there.
This makes no sense, but nice troll. You could have just as easily said: "My XP ATI graphics drivers don't have the same options as they do on WinMe. Microsoft Windows is STILL not there yet."
Whose fault is it, Linux, or the hardware manufacturers whose job to write quality drivers is being accomplished by outside F/OSS developers? Anyway, I've found this (driver feature exclusion) to work both ways. My venerable old SB Awe64 always has been more stable than it ever was on Win9x, especially when loading in MIDI sound fonts. The Creative GUI would freeze while loading, and I had about a 20% chance of total lockup. The sfxload util has never failed in Linux and never locks the machine.
I also recall my old Riva 128 card magically was able to display 1024x768 x 16bpp when I went to Linux. The option never occured in the Windows drivers. Then again, my Laser printer only printed 300dpi in Linux when it printed 600dpi in Windows, but I've been told it only prints 300dpi in XP. I learned that lesson: don't buy WinHardware (I'm looking at you, NEC).
If you have a problem with drivers, write your hardware manufacturer, and don't use as many CAPITAL LETTERS when you do so.
...considering that at 9KB/second nobody has gotten past ISO 2 of 3 to install and review the thing...