Er, dude, no... Novell's work on SuSE is all released as free software, and that includes the plugin they're writing for OpenOffice to make it compatible with Microsoft's file format.
Why would you want to sue people for writing their own code and releasing it under whatever license they choose?
This is a very good question. But consider: if you wrote a few extra lines of source code to add some feature to GNU grep, for example, and then you distributed your extra code as proprietary, so you have to pay $10 for the privilege of patching it into grep and rebuilding... you can think about the ethical issues, but more importantly in this discussion, what is the legal situation? Is your bit of extra code a derived work of the grep source code? IANAL but the consensus seems to be yes.
Then suppose you don't make code that patches into the source files but you do distribute a whole extra source file to be included at link time. Perhaps it provides its own implementation of printf() to be used instead of the C library's one, or something. Is the copyright situation different from if you'd made a patch to the source? Again I can't rule for certain, but I think that in most jurisdictions your extra object file would still be considered a derived work of GNU grep, or at least, you couldn't distribute copies of grep with your extra file already included. Perhaps it would be different if you just distributed the.c file and let people include it in grep as they wished; maybe it would depend on whether your extra code was grep-specific and based on grep's own internal data structures.
MS is probably never going to come after you for license money. But they might go after big companies that support linux -- IBM, RedHat, etc. And they might scare large enterprise customers away from linux.
They might do all of those things, and others besides. It's not as if they haven't tried to already. I don't see how the Novell deal makes any difference. I agree with the parent poster - nobody has given any explanation beyond handwaving and vague associations. I'm disappointed by the Groklaw article; I thought it was going to give some solid legal reasons why the MS-Novell agreement affects free software.
Yeah, it's a trap! I blame Novell. Fortunately RMS will change GPLv2 to stop Tivo from installing SuSE on OLPC laptops, though I don't know if it will help with the SCO lawsuit in Massachusetts.
There's no shortage of disk space, but there is a shortage of editors and human effort needed to moderate and sort out all these articles. That's one reason to try to keep un-notable content out of Wikipedia.
Anything including the word 'should' is a normative statement (an opinion) not a positive one (factual). It may be obvious and widely accepted as true - most think it obvious that murder 'should' be punished - but it remains a matter of opinion not fact.
An example of a positive statement would be: providing hands-on sex education will reduce teenage pregnancy. This is positive because it talks about facts and (in principle at least) it can be tested. Whether it's suitable for Wikipedia would depend on having references and research that demonstrate this 'fact'.
OTOH, saying that white people are smarter than black people is a positive statement (whether or not it is true), and yes it may end your career. In Britain a politician recently got in trouble for drawing attention to the government's crime statistics, which show more black criminals than white ones.
X.org and XFree86 may have anti-aliasing, but do they have ClearType style anti-aliasing that takes advantage of the placement of RGB elements in the display? I think not. Certainly on my Fedora Linux system I see the traditional greyscale anti-aliasing but never any coloured fringes to fonts, and I've never been prompted about whether my display is a CRT or LCD, which would be necessary to decide whether to use ClearTypeish magic.
Both IE6 and IE7 run under Wine with a bit of fiddling... I see no need to mess around with virtual PC images and running a whole Windows instance. A Wine instance is much more hygienic.
'Sub-pixel anti-aliasing' on RISC OS wasn't / isn't the same thing as ClearType at all. It means to rasterize a font with an offset of, say, half a pixel horizontally, so you might have two bitmaps for the letter L, one shifted to the left by half a pixel, and then the font system isn't limited to drawing letters at exact pixel offsets. This is useful for small text where otherwise the letters in a word might appear a bit too clumped or too spaced out due to the restriction of aligning each letter on an exact pixel boundary. RISC OS provided half-pixel anti-aliasing in the horizontal and vertical directions, so it would create four raster images instead of one for each letter. You could certainly combine this with the ClearType idea of lighting up individual RGB elements.
I'm almost tempted to fire up arcem and make some screenshots (get the CVS version)... unfortunately I don't have a RISC OS image to hand.
'Font smoothing' in earlier versions of Windows (Windows 95 etc), as you say, isn't true anti-aliasing; I think it just makes the font as normal and then smudges it. This reduces rather than enhances detail.
I disagree, I think the ClearType idea is fairly novel (lots of ideas seem obvious in retrospect, and you think that anyone could have thought of them at the time, but nobody else did), but the question of whether it 'deserves' a patent isn't a good question to ask because the patent system is not based on morality or what a company 'deserves'. ClearType should not be patentable because software in general should not be patentable, because it's not economically beneficial to extend the patent system to software.
'Every windowing system does this' - is there an implementation of something similar for X11? I mean the RGB special subpixel idea, not the traditional greyscale anti-aliasing which has been around for a long time.
According to this article, Microsoft's ClearType does seem to be a new thing and not a copy of the anti-aliasing used on the Apple II. The tone of the article makes it sound as though ClearType is nothing new, but if you read the details you see that Apple's anti-aliasing uses neighbouring grey pixels to smooth the boundary between black and white (something used in many font systems since), but Microsoft's thing goes a step further and uses the separate R,G,B pixel layout of an LCD to fill in one-third or two-thirds of a pixel horizontally. This wouldn't work with colour televisions or CRT monitors, even if they have a Trinitron-like horizontal layout, because you can't reliably control individual phosphors.
I'm all in favour of 'nothing new has been invented since 1970' but unless Apple was using _coloured_ pixels (not shades of grey) to smooth the border between black and white, by taking advantage of the different placement of red, green and blue elements on the display, then I don't think Microsoft copied this particular idea from the Apple II.
Re:Solid but takes some tweaking.
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
I used to use Red Hat and I've stayed with Fedora out of inertia. It seems like a perfectly reasonable if somewhat boring distribution. Red Hat's enterprise stuff is even more boring. That is usually a good thing.
Right now, however, I'm trying to work out how to replace the hard disk in my PC and transfer files from the old disk to the new one. It used to be you could just 'mount' but Fedora uses LVM by default, which has about forty different commands and manual pages. There's no handy tool to say 'just find all the partitions on this disk and mount them for me read-only'. In a way I miss using Slackware when everything was so simple you could fix it yourself, and tinker around without fear of making irreversible screwups.
I think the right balance is the original term when copyright was introduced: 14 years, with a possible extension for another 14 while the author is still alive.
Thanks for the suggestion. I just got the buffet at Chutneys restaurant. L7.25 including a cup of tea, and not bad. I ate a bit too quickly (which I always do, and particularly in this case because they were closing soon) and gave myself hiccups.
I don't know what the default page was - from this screenshot it looks like the browser defaulted to your home page (which you might have needed to set by hand) but may have had a way to enter a URL from the menus.
Take $20 and try to buy a meal in London - in Paris - in Buenos Aires. I'm sure you won't find that London has the best food. The existence of a small number of vastly expensive restaurants doesn't do much good when 80% of the population is stuck with junk food.
Tim B-L's first browser didn't show URLs... they were meant to be technical implementation details and not exposed to the user. In practice, though, an idealistic approach like that is never going to work because people still want to include URLs in plain text documents, and there's no sensible index of the Web to use as an alternative.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there is lack of discipline and vigorous training in our Comprehensive Schools? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think young people welcome some structure and leadership in their lives? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do they respond to a challenge? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Might you be in favour of reintroducing National Service? Bernard Woolley: Er, I might be. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes or no? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Of course, after all you've said you can't say no to that. On the other hand, the surveys can reach opposite conclusions. (next survey) Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Are you unhappy about the growth of armaments? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there's a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think it's wrong to force people to take arms against their will? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Would you oppose the reintroduction of conscription? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: There you are, Bernard. The perfectly balanced sample.
The Republic of Ireland is more or less the only country that uses both English and the euro. It is normal for the euro sign to be written as a prefix, see for example the Irish site for Komplett.
In languages other than English there are different conventions. But you wouldn't argue that an amount of one and a half euros should be written 1,50 instead of 1.50 just because lots of Euroland countries use a comma instead of a decimal point.
Yeah, and he didn't mention Ruby on Rails even once.
Re:Does any major site use pure CSS?
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the point is that wanting 'a 100px cell' is kinda silly. The size in pixels should always change according to the output device: on a 1200dpi laser printer, making your cell 100 pixels wide will be rather small. Are you _sure_ you always want to specify the exact number of pixels? Isn't it better to give general guidance and let the rendering engine make some of its own decisions?
If you decide when planning the experiment that you're going to put the second photon into state X, and then 50ms before you do so you observe the first photon going into state X, then arguably you've seen some communication going backwards in time, but no information. You knew that state X was going to be used anyway.
More interesting would be to measure the state of the first photon and use that to affect the second one. So if the first one goes to state X, set the second one 50ms later to state Y, and vice versa. Or fix up a random number generator to change the state of the second photon and then observe the first photon to predict 50ms ahead of time what the random number is going to be. I'd expect this kind of thing is impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
SuSE was originally based on Slackware... a few years back you could still see SuSE packages organized into Slackware 'disk sets'.
Er, dude, no... Novell's work on SuSE is all released as free software, and that includes the plugin they're writing for OpenOffice to make it compatible with Microsoft's file format.
Then suppose you don't make code that patches into the source files but you do distribute a whole extra source file to be included at link time. Perhaps it provides its own implementation of printf() to be used instead of the C library's one, or something. Is the copyright situation different from if you'd made a patch to the source? Again I can't rule for certain, but I think that in most jurisdictions your extra object file would still be considered a derived work of GNU grep, or at least, you couldn't distribute copies of grep with your extra file already included. Perhaps it would be different if you just distributed the
Yeah, it's a trap! I blame Novell. Fortunately RMS will change GPLv2 to stop Tivo from installing SuSE on OLPC laptops, though I don't know if it will help with the SCO lawsuit in Massachusetts.
There's no shortage of disk space, but there is a shortage of editors and human effort needed to moderate and sort out all these articles. That's one reason to try to keep un-notable content out of Wikipedia.
Anything including the word 'should' is a normative statement (an opinion) not a positive one (factual). It may be obvious and widely accepted as true - most think it obvious that murder 'should' be punished - but it remains a matter of opinion not fact.
An example of a positive statement would be: providing hands-on sex education will reduce teenage pregnancy. This is positive because it talks about facts and (in principle at least) it can be tested. Whether it's suitable for Wikipedia would depend on having references and research that demonstrate this 'fact'.
OTOH, saying that white people are smarter than black people is a positive statement (whether or not it is true), and yes it may end your career. In Britain a politician recently got in trouble for drawing attention to the government's crime statistics, which show more black criminals than white ones.
X.org and XFree86 may have anti-aliasing, but do they have ClearType style anti-aliasing that takes advantage of the placement of RGB elements in the display? I think not. Certainly on my Fedora Linux system I see the traditional greyscale anti-aliasing but never any coloured fringes to fonts, and I've never been prompted about whether my display is a CRT or LCD, which would be necessary to decide whether to use ClearTypeish magic.
Both IE6 and IE7 run under Wine with a bit of fiddling... I see no need to mess around with virtual PC images and running a whole Windows instance. A Wine instance is much more hygienic.
'Sub-pixel anti-aliasing' on RISC OS wasn't / isn't the same thing as ClearType at all. It means to rasterize a font with an offset of, say, half a pixel horizontally, so you might have two bitmaps for the letter L, one shifted to the left by half a pixel, and then the font system isn't limited to drawing letters at exact pixel offsets. This is useful for small text where otherwise the letters in a word might appear a bit too clumped or too spaced out due to the restriction of aligning each letter on an exact pixel boundary. RISC OS provided half-pixel anti-aliasing in the horizontal and vertical directions, so it would create four raster images instead of one for each letter. You could certainly combine this with the ClearType idea of lighting up individual RGB elements.
I'm almost tempted to fire up arcem and make some screenshots (get the CVS version)... unfortunately I don't have a RISC OS image to hand.
'Font smoothing' in earlier versions of Windows (Windows 95 etc), as you say, isn't true anti-aliasing; I think it just makes the font as normal and then smudges it. This reduces rather than enhances detail.
I disagree, I think the ClearType idea is fairly novel (lots of ideas seem obvious in retrospect, and you think that anyone could have thought of them at the time, but nobody else did), but the question of whether it 'deserves' a patent isn't a good question to ask because the patent system is not based on morality or what a company 'deserves'. ClearType should not be patentable because software in general should not be patentable, because it's not economically beneficial to extend the patent system to software.
'Every windowing system does this' - is there an implementation of something similar for X11? I mean the RGB special subpixel idea, not the traditional greyscale anti-aliasing which has been around for a long time.
According to this article, Microsoft's ClearType does seem to be a new thing and not a copy of the anti-aliasing used on the Apple II. The tone of the article makes it sound as though ClearType is nothing new, but if you read the details you see that Apple's anti-aliasing uses neighbouring grey pixels to smooth the boundary between black and white (something used in many font systems since), but Microsoft's thing goes a step further and uses the separate R,G,B pixel layout of an LCD to fill in one-third or two-thirds of a pixel horizontally. This wouldn't work with colour televisions or CRT monitors, even if they have a Trinitron-like horizontal layout, because you can't reliably control individual phosphors.
I'm all in favour of 'nothing new has been invented since 1970' but unless Apple was using _coloured_ pixels (not shades of grey) to smooth the border between black and white, by taking advantage of the different placement of red, green and blue elements on the display, then I don't think Microsoft copied this particular idea from the Apple II.
I used to use Red Hat and I've stayed with Fedora out of inertia. It seems like a perfectly reasonable if somewhat boring distribution. Red Hat's enterprise stuff is even more boring. That is usually a good thing.
Right now, however, I'm trying to work out how to replace the hard disk in my PC and transfer files from the old disk to the new one. It used to be you could just 'mount' but Fedora uses LVM by default, which has about forty different commands and manual pages. There's no handy tool to say 'just find all the partitions on this disk and mount them for me read-only'. In a way I miss using Slackware when everything was so simple you could fix it yourself, and tinker around without fear of making irreversible screwups.
I think the right balance is the original term when copyright was introduced: 14 years, with a possible extension for another 14 while the author is still alive.
Thanks for the suggestion. I just got the buffet at Chutneys restaurant. L7.25 including a cup of tea, and not bad. I ate a bit too quickly (which I always do, and particularly in this case because they were closing soon) and gave myself hiccups.
I don't know what the default page was - from this screenshot it looks like the browser defaulted to your home page (which you might have needed to set by hand) but may have had a way to enter a URL from the menus.
Take $20 and try to buy a meal in London - in Paris - in Buenos Aires. I'm sure you won't find that London has the best food. The existence of a small number of vastly expensive restaurants doesn't do much good when 80% of the population is stuck with junk food.
Tim B-L's first browser didn't show URLs... they were meant to be technical implementation details and not exposed to the user. In practice, though, an idealistic approach like that is never going to work because people still want to include URLs in plain text documents, and there's no sensible index of the Web to use as an alternative.
Yes, Minister put it best:
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there is lack of discipline and vigorous training in our Comprehensive Schools?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think young people welcome some structure and leadership in their lives?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do they respond to a challenge?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Might you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?
Bernard Woolley: Er, I might be.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes or no?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Of course, after all you've said you can't say no to that. On the other hand, the surveys can reach opposite conclusions.
(next survey)
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Are you unhappy about the growth of armaments?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there's a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think it's wrong to force people to take arms against their will?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Would you oppose the reintroduction of conscription?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: There you are, Bernard. The perfectly balanced sample.
'Linus' is already a Roman name - from the Greek 'Linos'. According to many theologians, the second Pope was one Saint Linus.
The Republic of Ireland is more or less the only country that uses both English and the euro. It is normal for the euro sign to be written as a prefix, see for example the Irish site for Komplett.
In languages other than English there are different conventions. But you wouldn't argue that an amount of one and a half euros should be written 1,50 instead of 1.50 just because lots of Euroland countries use a comma instead of a decimal point.
Yeah, and he didn't mention Ruby on Rails even once.
I think the point is that wanting 'a 100px cell' is kinda silly. The size in pixels should always change according to the output device: on a 1200dpi laser printer, making your cell 100 pixels wide will be rather small. Are you _sure_ you always want to specify the exact number of pixels? Isn't it better to give general guidance and let the rendering engine make some of its own decisions?
If you decide when planning the experiment that you're going to put the second photon into state X, and then 50ms before you do so you observe the first photon going into state X, then arguably you've seen some communication going backwards in time, but no information. You knew that state X was going to be used anyway.
More interesting would be to measure the state of the first photon and use that to affect the second one. So if the first one goes to state X, set the second one 50ms later to state Y, and vice versa. Or fix up a random number generator to change the state of the second photon and then observe the first photon to predict 50ms ahead of time what the random number is going to be. I'd expect this kind of thing is impossible.
Surely the theme tune from Flipper would have been more appropriate?