Many people truncate URLs to avoid dealing with broken site navigation systems. Mozilla and Galeon even have an "up" button. Other pages may become unlinked but may still be linked from a log or search engine. Some files, like/robots.txt, are almost never linked to, yet everybody knows they are there. And more than once, I have mistyped a host name along with a URL and gotten a web page that looked not entirely public (logs, etc.).
In some areas of law, it's unavoidable drawing fuzzy boundaries and considering intent. However, in this case, anybody who wants to protect their information on the web easily can, using standard web access control schemes; they don't need to rely on using obscure URLs. Let's not burden the courts with this.
This is part of a more general and disturbing trend, where lazy system admins don't spend the time set up their systems correctly, or management hires incompetent and cheap staff, and then try to use the court system and police (i.e., taxpayer money) to make up for their own shortcomings.
By the way, moderator types,it really sucks bad when one can't express a contrary opinion without getting marked as 'flamebait'. It's not a crime to think Linux sucks.
Yeah, as opposed to the "even handed moderation" from Macintosh zealots? Anything remotely critical or even questioning of Apple is immediately modded down by the Macintosh crowd.
Ultimately, users will decide, no matter what power trips or delusions certain user populations have.
Of course, it is worth something to be
free from 20 years of questionable architecture
decisions.
Macintoshes are mostly PC hardware (PCI, AGP, IDE, USB, etc.) with a PPC processor. And the Macintosh software is mostly NeXTStep with an OS9 and BSD compatibility layer, all of which go back to the early 1980's. So, what is Apple actually "free from"?
I fail to see your point, when compared to Windows. Since the 'standard' programming language for Linux is C, and OSX and Linux share the vast majority of the basic API's and the rest (X11) are available as a free download, I fail to see your point in comparison to Linux/BSD.
I didn't make that comparison between OS X and Linux, BSD, or Windows. And I agree with your analysis: all three systems, OS X, Linux, and Windows, are based on roughly the same 20 year old technology.
The difference is that many Linux and Windows developers have no illusions about that. But Apple claims that they have a system for the future and don't show any intention of wanting to move forward to something better.
My question to Apple is and remains: where are you moving forward to in terms of software architecture; Cocoa/Quartz/Objective-C is not a satisfactory answer to me.
You can write full-fledged OSX applications that cross-compile for GNUStep on Linux TODAY.
Yes, and the miniscule use that GNUStep receives today should tell you something about the desirability of the GNUStep/OpenStep/Cocoa APIs--even when people get it for free, they don't want to use it.
No Apple isn't going to give away the rest of MacOS X. As much as many folks go gimme-gimme-gimme-for-free Apple's management has fiduciary responsibility to keep the company profitable; giving away MacOS X in its entirety will not further that goal.
Well, what will further that goal, then? Do you really believe that software developers are going to switch in droves to a proprietary, single platform set of APIs that requires the use of a 20 year old unsafe programming language? APIs that are only implemented on the hardware from a single company, which ships a very limited range of machines?
I certainly don't: I think Cocoa and Quartz are a dead end, with no prospect of widespread adoption by software developers, outside a die-hard community of Mac developers. Calls for Apple to open source the GUI have nothing to do with "gimme-gimme-gimme", they are simply a reflection that most developers and companies don't want to commit a lot of time and effort to a set of APIs that stand and fall with the fortunes of a single vendor. Open sourcing Cocoa and Quartz wouldn't make the APIs technically more attractive, but at least they would ensure their continued existence.
In any case, I don't actually want Apple to open source Cocoa and Quartz--I think it would just prolong the agony. I think Cocoa and Quartz will have to be replaced within a few years with something very different--unless Apple goes out of business first.
Would have loved to. Only thing is, none of the Linux based PDA's provide any software for actually syncing to a Linux desktop! ACK!
They actually do: because they just run Linux and store things in a Linux file system, you can use any of a large number of methods for synchronizing (rsync, unison, NFS, etc.) and remote access (ssh, X11, VNC, etc.).
the only reasonable way to put a PDA to use today for a Unix user is to buy a Palm
Well, as I was saying, for basic PDA functionality using the built-in Palm applications, I agree.
My point is: for anything beyond basic PDA functionality, PalmOS is not a good platform, at least not in the near future. And for custom or third party apps apps, you don't get any support from Palm for hotsyncing on Linux anyway--you are definitely better off there with Linux and Linux tools.
The hardware looks pretty decent; I suppose you pay a premium for the compact
size.
However, the software isn't all that great. Basically, under PalmOS 5,
your application code runs as interpreted 68k instructions. Only system
calls and some specially written subroutines (which, presumably, cannot make
system calls), run as native ARM code. Presumably, this will get fixed
with PalmOS 6.
What apparently won't get fixed is the basic PalmOS architecture. PalmOS
was designed as a very lightweight OS for simple PDA applications: calendaring,
TODO lists, etc., on very simple devices. It was fine for that: small
and memory efficient.
But $500 devices like the Tungsten are in a different class. With ARM
processors, they are more powerful than many workstations of a few years
ago. You don't need that kind of device for basic PDA functionality--just
buy a $100 Zire instead.
The reason why people pay $500 for a PDA is either because they want an
executive toy, or it is for running "enterprise applications", multimedia
apps, scientific apps, speech recognition, etc. And for that, PalmOS
just sucks: the window system and toolkit are resolution dependent and simplistic,
the file system is a hack, the system lacks installers or package managers,
multitasking is poor, image support is poor, and on and on.
So, what does it all mean? If you want a PDA, get a Sony SJ-30 or
a Palm Zire, or a Palm m500--they are great PDAs with great built-in apps.
If you want a handheld to develop custom apps for, to port software
to, etc., get a Linux PDA (or a PocketPC if you must)--you'll pay less and get something that's a whole lot better for the purpose.
This seems similar to Microsoft's attempt at "shared source"--a reaction
to a very real threat from open source projects, although the Helix license
is a little more liberal. Ogg Vorbis and similar projects must really
be scaring RealNetworks.
Overall, I suppose it's good: a documented media format is better than an
undocumented one even if the documented media format comes with strings attached.
But I'll still stick with completely open formats.
Open hardware to me means that there can be multiple compatible implementations.
Whether that's because of a de-facto standard or a real standard doesn't
really matter that much.
The current blade servers are just really small IBM-compatible PCs (except
for the HPUX models, etc), so they are no more nor less "open" than any other
PC hardware.
It's not quite that simple. For blade servers, it's not just the individual
PC compatibility that matters, but also whether the backplane, interconnect,
and maintenance interfaces are open.
The notion of "open" makes sense for hardware, although it is slightly different
than from software. "Open" hardware that is documented, hardware that conforms
to standards, hardware that has well-defined interfaces for software, hardware
that is at least licensed under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
RS232C, parallel ports, PC104, PCI, ISA, USB, IDE, etc., all can be considered
reasonably open. Stuff that comes only from a single company, requires
proprietary drivers, etc., is not open.
An "open" standard for blade servers would be nice. And, in fact, there
are such standards: passive PCI backplanes, networking backplanes, and EuroBoards.
Look around the web--there are plenty of systems to build open blade
servers on--servers that are open in terms of both hardware and software.
The music industry controls the signal:noise ratio of the music scene.
And why do we need companies with multi-million dollar profits to do that?
If on-line broadcasting and downloading become ubiquitous, then word of mouth, mailing lists,
newspaper reviews, and on-line reviews are sufficient to let people make
their own choices. We don't need Hilary or Mickey Mouse to decide for us
what is "signal" and what is "noise".
You can't make a readable font on an 8 x 14 pixel grid, sorry.
About 50 years of experience with bitmapped fonts prove you wrong. The
main thing you can't do with an 8x14 pixel grid is satisfy a snob.
As for your 5 x 7 pixel font suggestions... no thanks. Your problem isn't
with antialiased fonts, it's with fonts that are just too darned small. Use
a type size on the screen that's large enough, antialias it, and your eye
strain problems will disappear.
I don't have a problem with eye strain--I use well-designed bitmapped fonts for most of my text.
The original X11 bitmapped fonts are not very readable fonts. Readable fonts, as have been noted elsewhere time and time again, have just the right x-height, stroke width, serif size, and so on. Bitmapped computer fonts don't have any of those things.
Come on, think about it. With bitmapped fonts, every single pixel is placed by hand--you can't get more control than that. A bitmapped font designer can choose whatever x-height, stroke width, and serif size, he wants.
So what makes a font readable? A readable font is one in which the letters look like what you expect them to look like. Good serif fonts have glyphs that are easy for the eye to recognize at virtually any size from billboard down to postage stamp. Antialiasing helps make fonts more readable because it makes the glyphs look more like what you expect them to look like.
Readability is influenced by lots of factors. Familiarity helps. But so do contrast and other features. At small sizes, antialiasing blurs out characters so much that readability suffers. And familiarity is easily acquired, while low contrast affects readability no matter how long you stare at a blurry font.
I suggest you try "micro" (a 3x5 font) or "5x7" (a, guess, 5x7 font) on X11. Then try to get something as readable at that size out of a scalable TrueType font. Good luck. Mini7 and SeveNet are other examples where Mac typographers, of all people, threw away scalable type or antialiasing to get readability at small sizes.
The UNIX desktop market is indeed large as far as Apple is concerned. Linux desktop use alone is probably comparable to Mac OS X, and there are many users of workstations from IBM, Sun, and others.
And, yes, switching from UNIX has indeed been part of Apple's overall advertising campaign, although not usually in their TV spots.
Some of the original X11 bitmapped fonts are probably among the most readable fonts anywhere. They were hand-designed and tuned over the years.
The point of TrueType is not to give you more readable fonts than good manually designed ones, it is to give you complete families of decent fonts at many screen resolutions and sizes; that's needed because it would be way too much work to design all those font instances by hand. Still, if you did, you'd only improve the TrueType output.
Furthermore, anti-aliasing, font smoothing, and similar tricks do make pages appear prettier, but they generally don't enhance readability, and may even degrade it. That's why, among other things, many systems let you turn off font smoothing below a certain size. Cleartype and its equivalents, however, may help with readability, since they really do increase spatial resolution (at the cost of color fidelity).
Re:Jesus, what is wrong with you L.Z.'s?!!!
on
Porsche Designs a Laptop
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
when you've got a perfectly crunchy BSD distro in Mac OS X?
Unfortunately, you don't. BSD support on OSX is more like Cygwin on Windows: the command line tools and systemn call interface work, but system management, the GUI, and the kernel itself differ greatly.
However, I agree: if you are going to buy a Mac, it doesn't make sense to run Linux on it: you are paying a premium for the ability to run MacOS. If you just want a sleek laptop for Linux, there are cheaper choices (like this one).
for all intents and purposes it is really 56kbps average? Just limit it to 56kpbs and admit you're a filthy fucking slimeball corporation and the business model of giving users t-1 speeds at a tenth of the price of a t-1 is flawed.
No, what is flawed is your understanding. A 56kbps average isn't the same as a 56kbps limit. You can have T1 speeds at a tenth of the price of a T1 if you only use it 10% of the time. And that is exactly what I want as a user: web pages that I don't have to wait for, but not continuous streaming at the maximum possible rate. And to achieve that tradeoff, what you limit isn't the instantaneous rate, you limit the average rate per month, i.e., you limit volume. And that's exactly what these companies are doing, and they are telling you in clear and certain terms.
I think use of the word "transition" illustrates the pipe dream that Apple has: UNIX users will leave UNIX in droves to commit to using Mac OS X.
I don't think that's going to happen, and I think Apple is shooting themselves in the foot with that assumption. UNIX users like open systems: that come from multiple vendors and have open specifications. If they didn't, they would have moved to Windows long ago.
Sure, there are some UNIX users that really go for the OS X pretty look and are happy with a BSD-like system call interface and a C compiler. But I think for the most part, OS X enjoys popularity among UNIX users only to the degree that it is UNIX compatible. If Apple wants to be in the UNIX market in the long term, rather than just receive a brief shot in the arm from a few UNIX converts, they need to make a long-term commitment to interoperating more with UNIX systems, and they need to give up dreams of "transitioning" UNIX users to Mac OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
In some areas of law, it's unavoidable drawing fuzzy boundaries and considering intent. However, in this case, anybody who wants to protect their information on the web easily can, using standard web access control schemes; they don't need to rely on using obscure URLs. Let's not burden the courts with this.
This is part of a more general and disturbing trend, where lazy system admins don't spend the time set up their systems correctly, or management hires incompetent and cheap staff, and then try to use the court system and police (i.e., taxpayer money) to make up for their own shortcomings.
Well, except for the CPU, what's different? Macintosh uses the same bus, the same graphics cards, and most of the same I/O ports.
Yeah, as opposed to the "even handed moderation" from Macintosh zealots? Anything remotely critical or even questioning of Apple is immediately modded down by the Macintosh crowd.
Ultimately, users will decide, no matter what power trips or delusions certain user populations have.
What he means is that Darwin lacks a GUI and GUI apps. Obviously, Linux has plenty of those.
That, and the fact that its imaging system is based on Postscript.
That is a big speedbump to people adapting their legacy code.
Why should they bother? Gtk+, KDE, and X11 are much more widespread, and they give you a much wider variety of languages to program them in.
Macintoshes are mostly PC hardware (PCI, AGP, IDE, USB, etc.) with a PPC processor. And the Macintosh software is mostly NeXTStep with an OS9 and BSD compatibility layer, all of which go back to the early 1980's. So, what is Apple actually "free from"?
I didn't make that comparison between OS X and Linux, BSD, or Windows. And I agree with your analysis: all three systems, OS X, Linux, and Windows, are based on roughly the same 20 year old technology.
The difference is that many Linux and Windows developers have no illusions about that. But Apple claims that they have a system for the future and don't show any intention of wanting to move forward to something better.
My question to Apple is and remains: where are you moving forward to in terms of software architecture; Cocoa/Quartz/Objective-C is not a satisfactory answer to me.
You can write full-fledged OSX applications that cross-compile for GNUStep on Linux TODAY.
Yes, and the miniscule use that GNUStep receives today should tell you something about the desirability of the GNUStep/OpenStep/Cocoa APIs--even when people get it for free, they don't want to use it.
Well, what will further that goal, then? Do you really believe that software developers are going to switch in droves to a proprietary, single platform set of APIs that requires the use of a 20 year old unsafe programming language? APIs that are only implemented on the hardware from a single company, which ships a very limited range of machines?
I certainly don't: I think Cocoa and Quartz are a dead end, with no prospect of widespread adoption by software developers, outside a die-hard community of Mac developers. Calls for Apple to open source the GUI have nothing to do with "gimme-gimme-gimme", they are simply a reflection that most developers and companies don't want to commit a lot of time and effort to a set of APIs that stand and fall with the fortunes of a single vendor. Open sourcing Cocoa and Quartz wouldn't make the APIs technically more attractive, but at least they would ensure their continued existence.
In any case, I don't actually want Apple to open source Cocoa and Quartz--I think it would just prolong the agony. I think Cocoa and Quartz will have to be replaced within a few years with something very different--unless Apple goes out of business first.
They actually do: because they just run Linux and store things in a Linux file system, you can use any of a large number of methods for synchronizing (rsync, unison, NFS, etc.) and remote access (ssh, X11, VNC, etc.).
the only reasonable way to put a PDA to use today for a Unix user is to buy a Palm
Well, as I was saying, for basic PDA functionality using the built-in Palm applications, I agree.
My point is: for anything beyond basic PDA functionality, PalmOS is not a good platform, at least not in the near future. And for custom or third party apps apps, you don't get any support from Palm for hotsyncing on Linux anyway--you are definitely better off there with Linux and Linux tools.
However, the software isn't all that great. Basically, under PalmOS 5, your application code runs as interpreted 68k instructions. Only system calls and some specially written subroutines (which, presumably, cannot make system calls), run as native ARM code. Presumably, this will get fixed with PalmOS 6.
What apparently won't get fixed is the basic PalmOS architecture. PalmOS was designed as a very lightweight OS for simple PDA applications: calendaring, TODO lists, etc., on very simple devices. It was fine for that: small and memory efficient.
But $500 devices like the Tungsten are in a different class. With ARM processors, they are more powerful than many workstations of a few years ago. You don't need that kind of device for basic PDA functionality--just buy a $100 Zire instead.
The reason why people pay $500 for a PDA is either because they want an executive toy, or it is for running "enterprise applications", multimedia apps, scientific apps, speech recognition, etc. And for that, PalmOS just sucks: the window system and toolkit are resolution dependent and simplistic, the file system is a hack, the system lacks installers or package managers, multitasking is poor, image support is poor, and on and on.
So, what does it all mean? If you want a PDA, get a Sony SJ-30 or a Palm Zire, or a Palm m500--they are great PDAs with great built-in apps. If you want a handheld to develop custom apps for, to port software to, etc., get a Linux PDA (or a PocketPC if you must)--you'll pay less and get something that's a whole lot better for the purpose.
Yes, and that's some price as well. The Tungsten series is way too expensive for the GBA target market.
This seems similar to Microsoft's attempt at "shared source"--a reaction to a very real threat from open source projects, although the Helix license is a little more liberal. Ogg Vorbis and similar projects must really be scaring RealNetworks.
Overall, I suppose it's good: a documented media format is better than an undocumented one even if the documented media format comes with strings attached. But I'll still stick with completely open formats.
Open != Standardized.
Open hardware to me means that there can be multiple compatible implementations. Whether that's because of a de-facto standard or a real standard doesn't really matter that much.
The current blade servers are just really small IBM-compatible PCs (except for the HPUX models, etc), so they are no more nor less "open" than any other PC hardware.
It's not quite that simple. For blade servers, it's not just the individual PC compatibility that matters, but also whether the backplane, interconnect, and maintenance interfaces are open.
The notion of "open" makes sense for hardware, although it is slightly different than from software. "Open" hardware that is documented, hardware that conforms to standards, hardware that has well-defined interfaces for software, hardware that is at least licensed under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. RS232C, parallel ports, PC104, PCI, ISA, USB, IDE, etc., all can be considered reasonably open. Stuff that comes only from a single company, requires proprietary drivers, etc., is not open.
An "open" standard for blade servers would be nice. And, in fact, there are such standards: passive PCI backplanes, networking backplanes, and EuroBoards. Look around the web--there are plenty of systems to build open blade servers on--servers that are open in terms of both hardware and software.
The music industry controls the signal:noise ratio of the music scene.
And why do we need companies with multi-million dollar profits to do that?
If on-line broadcasting and downloading become ubiquitous, then word of mouth, mailing lists, newspaper reviews, and on-line reviews are sufficient to let people make their own choices. We don't need Hilary or Mickey Mouse to decide for us what is "signal" and what is "noise".
Well, for the price of a couple of movies, you can also get a proxy (any kind of web hosting with Perl scripting will do) in the US or Europe.
You can't make a readable font on an 8 x 14 pixel grid, sorry.
About 50 years of experience with bitmapped fonts prove you wrong. The main thing you can't do with an 8x14 pixel grid is satisfy a snob.
As for your 5 x 7 pixel font suggestions... no thanks. Your problem isn't with antialiased fonts, it's with fonts that are just too darned small. Use a type size on the screen that's large enough, antialias it, and your eye strain problems will disappear.
I don't have a problem with eye strain--I use well-designed bitmapped fonts for most of my text.
This House believes that 'the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music
Well, "this house" believes that it is rampant commercialism that is actually a threat to the future of music.
Come on, think about it. With bitmapped fonts, every single pixel is placed by hand--you can't get more control than that. A bitmapped font designer can choose whatever x-height, stroke width, and serif size, he wants.
So what makes a font readable? A readable font is one in which the letters look like what you expect them to look like. Good serif fonts have glyphs that are easy for the eye to recognize at virtually any size from billboard down to postage stamp. Antialiasing helps make fonts more readable because it makes the glyphs look more like what you expect them to look like.
Readability is influenced by lots of factors. Familiarity helps. But so do contrast and other features. At small sizes, antialiasing blurs out characters so much that readability suffers. And familiarity is easily acquired, while low contrast affects readability no matter how long you stare at a blurry font.
I suggest you try "micro" (a 3x5 font) or "5x7" (a, guess, 5x7 font) on X11. Then try to get something as readable at that size out of a scalable TrueType font. Good luck. Mini7 and SeveNet are other examples where Mac typographers, of all people, threw away scalable type or antialiasing to get readability at small sizes.
And, yes, switching from UNIX has indeed been part of Apple's overall advertising campaign, although not usually in their TV spots.
The point of TrueType is not to give you more readable fonts than good manually designed ones, it is to give you complete families of decent fonts at many screen resolutions and sizes; that's needed because it would be way too much work to design all those font instances by hand. Still, if you did, you'd only improve the TrueType output.
Furthermore, anti-aliasing, font smoothing, and similar tricks do make pages appear prettier, but they generally don't enhance readability, and may even degrade it. That's why, among other things, many systems let you turn off font smoothing below a certain size. Cleartype and its equivalents, however, may help with readability, since they really do increase spatial resolution (at the cost of color fidelity).
Unfortunately, you don't. BSD support on OSX is more like Cygwin on Windows: the command line tools and systemn call interface work, but system management, the GUI, and the kernel itself differ greatly.
However, I agree: if you are going to buy a Mac, it doesn't make sense to run Linux on it: you are paying a premium for the ability to run MacOS. If you just want a sleek laptop for Linux, there are cheaper choices (like this one).
No, what is flawed is your understanding. A 56kbps average isn't the same as a 56kbps limit. You can have T1 speeds at a tenth of the price of a T1 if you only use it 10% of the time. And that is exactly what I want as a user: web pages that I don't have to wait for, but not continuous streaming at the maximum possible rate. And to achieve that tradeoff, what you limit isn't the instantaneous rate, you limit the average rate per month, i.e., you limit volume. And that's exactly what these companies are doing, and they are telling you in clear and certain terms.
I don't think that's going to happen, and I think Apple is shooting themselves in the foot with that assumption. UNIX users like open systems: that come from multiple vendors and have open specifications. If they didn't, they would have moved to Windows long ago.
Sure, there are some UNIX users that really go for the OS X pretty look and are happy with a BSD-like system call interface and a C compiler. But I think for the most part, OS X enjoys popularity among UNIX users only to the degree that it is UNIX compatible. If Apple wants to be in the UNIX market in the long term, rather than just receive a brief shot in the arm from a few UNIX converts, they need to make a long-term commitment to interoperating more with UNIX systems, and they need to give up dreams of "transitioning" UNIX users to Mac OS X.