It's not that easy. When the US seperated from Great Britain, this was the situation. A rich colony with tons of native resources and great leadership fighting a (compartively) upstart World Power who was an ocean away, busy fighting other wars, and didn't care all that much about keeping the colony anyway. In China, the situation is very different. You've got an entrenched government, supported by afformentioned rich colony, with a huge amount of millitary and intelligence resources, in a country with a thousands-year history of repressive governments, vs a billion relatively poor people with few natural resources (under their control), no leaders, and no communications network to speak of. The modern police state has made the conventional revolution very difficult. Without strong leaders, especially, no uprising can happen. And it is exactly this kind of thing (the firewall) that prevents strong leaders from rising. Take the SSR as an example. Did the people there overthrow their communist government? Hell no. It collapsed due to intense competition with the most powerful nation on earth, and even then it took internal forces in the government itself to finally open things up.
Obviously some geeks are helping the government out in implementing this, no? The selective blocking software is non-trivial. What are those guys thinking? How can you be part of the technology sector and still help limit people's access to it? Do these guys realize that they're going to Geek Hell?
As far as I can see it, it only helps the creators of the media to ensure the stuff they sell does not get mis-used. >>>>>>>> By violating the rights of the consumer. The end does not justify the means (funny how that phrase has fallen out of common use these days...).
Couple of things: 1) You haven't heard of Cleartype? Where exactly have you been living? Its a software technology that takes advantage of the design of LCDs to make text look sharper. http://grc.com/cleartype.htm
2) Ideally, it would be high-res AND multiple monitors. Personally, I'd prefer the high-res. Even with 133 dpi, ClearType makes text almost as nice to read as paper. Given that I stare at text for hours a day (coding) it is quite a luxury.
A lot of stuff IS coded in number of pixels, but fortunately its getting increasingly rare these days. With stuff like Longhorn and Quartz and Berlin, you should be able to get real rescalable GUIs. Besides, its not that bad even now. My 15" laptop LCD runs at 1600x1200, and Windows is perfectly usable. The only real problem is websites that don't scale, and I've gotten around that problem by just not using those websites anymore. Luckily,/. and OSNews scale great (look just as nice on my 320x240 PocketPC as on my laptop:) so I'm happy.
Umm, on a 300 DPI monitor, the thin lines would be more pixels. And yes, one-pixel lines would be impossible to see. Even on my LCD, one pixel-wide text is very difficult to read.
You are outdated. My 15" LCD runs at 133 dpi. It makes reading/. like reading the morning paper. However, it still has to use tricks (like sub-pixel antialiasing -- ClearType) to do that. That creates lots of problems for me on Linux, because Xft really isn't as good at Cleartype-style rendering as Windows XP. When we get ultra-high-res flat panels, we can stop using all these tricks and enjoy incredible text rendering.
yak without thinking about the cost >>>>>>>>> Note to self: After ascending to high-dictatorship of the universe, raise phone rates. It will decrease the general stupidity of the population.
That's because Redhat removed identification information from the "About" boxes of KDE applications. You can't blame the KDE guys for getting pissesd that they make this nice software, and the project doesn't get recognized for it. Sure its allowable by the GPL, but it isn't polite by any means. And there was no reason to do it. What did they think, that mentioning the KDE project could confuse users? ("But I thought I was running Redhat!") Come on. Take a look at common Windows apps like Yahoo messenger and AIM. They've got branding information all over them. Does it confuse users? I doubt it. People aren't that stupid.
Its largely not needed anymore. Even from a performance standpoint, its not really an issue because Linux links in drivers as just another.o file. Thus, there is the new Linux driver model in 2.5 (it'll be awhile before everything uses it though) and Linus has stated that he wants to remove compiled-in drivers and make everything dynamic.
A) Doesn't suck. B) Isn't loaded with cruft. Thanks to COM interface versioning, the newest DirectX interfaces are comparitively clean. It just seems much junkier than it is due to MSs way of naming fields and methods and its insistance on using structures to pass API parameters. C) It isn't controlled by a single interest. Its the result of a lot of back and forth between MS, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
I despise Windows as much as the next guy, but lying about its strenghts doesn't help.
Umm, DirectX isn't a wrapper. DirectX is an independent system that bypasses a lot of antiquated Windows functionality. DirectX is usually supported at the driver level, existing alongside Windows APIs like GDI and Win32 audio. SDL is a wrapper over whatever services are native to the platform. On Windows, SDL is a wrapper over DirectX. On Linux, its a wrapper over OSS and the XInput APIs.
Windows-only, x86-only crapola like DirectX >>>>>>> DirectX might be Windows only and x86 only, but it isn't crapola. Give good technology the respect that it deserves.
Actually, the current X implementation of subpixel rendering isn't nearly as good as Cleartype itself. This is speaking from personal experience. I've got a 133 dpi laptop screen, and Cleartype makes fonts look like I'm reading a piece of paper. Sub-pixel AA in Xft has less color fringing for certain fonts, but overall the edges look harsher, and in many cases the type is rendered much more lightly than Cleartype renders it. This becomes quite a problem with italic fonts. The italic fonts on/.'s front page, for example, are really hard to read because Xft renders them one-pixel thick, which is very hard to see when the pixels are so small. Cleartype renders it with more fuzz (magnified) but the letters look much more substantive. Also, there are a lot of tricks with partial hinting and gamma correction that Cleartype does and Xft doesn't.
SDL is just a wrapper over underlying sound mechanisms. Plus, while SDL and OpenGL may be cleaner (okay, the are definately cleaner) they are far less powerful than DirectX. Now, with OpenGL 2.0 coming out and if OpenAL and OpenML get integrated into SDL, things might change, but as yet, there is still not real competition to DirectX.
This means that in the worst case scenario, every color will have to be spread across 6.25 pixels. >>>>>>>> I have no idea what kind of LSD induced images you're looking at, but the real problem is full-color images use lots of one shade, not a little bit of lots of shades. Thus, worst case, you have something like a gradient, with the 16! values of each shade spread out over 10 pixels. Not a good tradeoff for a machine that's supposed to view photos and whatnot. And p0rn will look terrible with all the skin-tones all stratified like that!
Slashdot Mirror
force pixel-sized fonts
>>>>>>>>
You know, I really shouldn't have to quote your own post for you.
It's not that easy. When the US seperated from Great Britain, this was the situation. A rich colony with tons of native resources and great leadership fighting a (compartively) upstart World Power who was an ocean away, busy fighting other wars, and didn't care all that much about keeping the colony anyway. In China, the situation is very different. You've got an entrenched government, supported by afformentioned rich colony, with a huge amount of millitary and intelligence resources, in a country with a thousands-year history of repressive governments, vs a billion relatively poor people with few natural resources (under their control), no leaders, and no communications network to speak of. The modern police state has made the conventional revolution very difficult. Without strong leaders, especially, no uprising can happen. And it is exactly this kind of thing (the firewall) that prevents strong leaders from rising. Take the SSR as an example. Did the people there overthrow their communist government? Hell no. It collapsed due to intense competition with the most powerful nation on earth, and even then it took internal forces in the government itself to finally open things up.
Obviously some geeks are helping the government out in implementing this, no? The selective blocking software is non-trivial. What are those guys thinking? How can you be part of the technology sector and still help limit people's access to it? Do these guys realize that they're going to Geek Hell?
As far as I can see it, it only helps the creators of the media to ensure the stuff they sell does not get mis-used.
>>>>>>>>
By violating the rights of the consumer. The end does not justify the means (funny how that phrase has fallen out of common use these days...).
Couple of things:
1) You haven't heard of Cleartype? Where exactly have you been living? Its a software technology that takes advantage of the design of LCDs to make text look sharper. http://grc.com/cleartype.htm
2) Ideally, it would be high-res AND multiple monitors. Personally, I'd prefer the high-res. Even with 133 dpi, ClearType makes text almost as nice to read as paper. Given that I stare at text for hours a day (coding) it is quite a luxury.
The Windows font APIs are all point based, it would actually take wrk to bypass it and do things in pixel sizes... People still do it, don't they?
Umm, World War III was planned to happen back in the 60's. That's what these things were built to withstand.
A lot of stuff IS coded in number of pixels, but fortunately its getting increasingly rare these days. With stuff like Longhorn and Quartz and Berlin, you should be able to get real rescalable GUIs. Besides, its not that bad even now. My 15" laptop LCD runs at 1600x1200, and Windows is perfectly usable. The only real problem is websites that don't scale, and I've gotten around that problem by just not using those websites anymore. Luckily, /. and OSNews scale great (look just as nice on my 320x240 PocketPC as on my laptop :) so I'm happy.
Or, just go ahead and set the "DPI" setting to 200... Works much better!
50pt print, btw, is 50/72's of an inch, not 50 pixels.
Umm, on a 300 DPI monitor, the thin lines would be more pixels. And yes, one-pixel lines would be impossible to see. Even on my LCD, one pixel-wide text is very difficult to read.
You are outdated. My 15" LCD runs at 133 dpi. It makes reading /. like reading the morning paper. However, it still has to use tricks (like sub-pixel antialiasing -- ClearType) to do that. That creates lots of problems for me on Linux, because Xft really isn't as good at Cleartype-style rendering as Windows XP. When we get ultra-high-res flat panels, we can stop using all these tricks and enjoy incredible text rendering.
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/te xt/Pd/key.html
Now, what's that mean? Why did they pick it?
Why? Can't I wait until this actually happens to care about it?
>>>>>>>
Cuz by then, you're already fucked.
This will probably go the way of the processor serial number. It'll come out, people will complain, and it will dissapear.
yak without thinking about the cost
>>>>>>>>>
Note to self: After ascending to high-dictatorship of the universe, raise phone rates. It will decrease the general stupidity of the population.
That's because Redhat removed identification information from the "About" boxes of KDE applications. You can't blame the KDE guys for getting pissesd that they make this nice software, and the project doesn't get recognized for it. Sure its allowable by the GPL, but it isn't polite by any means. And there was no reason to do it. What did they think, that mentioning the KDE project could confuse users? ("But I thought I was running Redhat!") Come on. Take a look at common Windows apps like Yahoo messenger and AIM. They've got branding information all over them. Does it confuse users? I doubt it. People aren't that stupid.
Its largely not needed anymore. Even from a performance standpoint, its not really an issue because Linux links in drivers as just another .o file. Thus, there is the new Linux driver model in 2.5 (it'll be awhile before everything uses it though) and Linus has stated that he wants to remove compiled-in drivers and make everything dynamic.
Been doing that for years. Its not the quality of the rendering (glyph shapes) its the quality of the smoothing mechanism.
The DirectX API
A) Doesn't suck.
B) Isn't loaded with cruft. Thanks to COM interface versioning, the newest DirectX interfaces are comparitively clean. It just seems much junkier than it is due to MSs way of naming fields and methods and its insistance on using structures to pass API parameters.
C) It isn't controlled by a single interest. Its the result of a lot of back and forth between MS, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
I despise Windows as much as the next guy, but lying about its strenghts doesn't help.
Umm, DirectX isn't a wrapper. DirectX is an independent system that bypasses a lot of antiquated Windows functionality. DirectX is usually supported at the driver level, existing alongside Windows APIs like GDI and Win32 audio. SDL is a wrapper over whatever services are native to the platform. On Windows, SDL is a wrapper over DirectX. On Linux, its a wrapper over OSS and the XInput APIs.
Windows-only, x86-only crapola like DirectX
>>>>>>>
DirectX might be Windows only and x86 only, but it isn't crapola. Give good technology the respect that it deserves.
Actually, the current X implementation of subpixel rendering isn't nearly as good as Cleartype itself. This is speaking from personal experience. I've got a 133 dpi laptop screen, and Cleartype makes fonts look like I'm reading a piece of paper. Sub-pixel AA in Xft has less color fringing for certain fonts, but overall the edges look harsher, and in many cases the type is rendered much more lightly than Cleartype renders it. This becomes quite a problem with italic fonts. The italic fonts on /.'s front page, for example, are really hard to read because Xft renders them one-pixel thick, which is very hard to see when the pixels are so small. Cleartype renders it with more fuzz (magnified) but the letters look much more substantive. Also, there are a lot of tricks with partial hinting and gamma correction that Cleartype does and Xft doesn't.
SDL is just a wrapper over underlying sound mechanisms. Plus, while SDL and OpenGL may be cleaner (okay, the are definately cleaner) they are far less powerful than DirectX. Now, with OpenGL 2.0 coming out and if OpenAL and OpenML get integrated into SDL, things might change, but as yet, there is still not real competition to DirectX.
Actually, with HP, a different display chip was substituted in the manufacturing run by accident.
This means that in the worst case scenario, every color will have to be spread across 6.25 pixels.
>>>>>>>>
I have no idea what kind of LSD induced images you're looking at, but the real problem is full-color images use lots of one shade, not a little bit of lots of shades. Thus, worst case, you have something like a gradient, with the 16! values of each shade spread out over 10 pixels. Not a good tradeoff for a machine that's supposed to view photos and whatnot. And p0rn will look terrible with all the skin-tones all stratified like that!