De facto, permissions on the net are the logical OR of the permissions in the various jurisdictions. I.e, if activity X is permitted anywhere, it is permitted everywhere. (This is just another way to say that the internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it).
This is quite clearly a good thing, and the Right thing. However, some legal jurisdictions haven't caught up with the modern world yet.
In my view, the best fonts were the 100dpi bitmap fonts, followed by Tahoma, and Terminus with antialiasing off, and full-hinting enabled. Until we get 600dpi monitors, I (and about 20% of the world) will definitely stick with sharpness and readability instead of the blurry hack that is antialiasing. However, some fonts are meant to be hinted but not antialiased, and others are designed for antialiasing but not hinting. Which are these?
Is there any protocol to explain which is which? I've just set up a wireless network, which is deliberately open, and I'm happy for people to make reasonable use of this. These days, I'd expect that anyone who has an open wifi network is leaving it open deliberately (and the burden of proof would be on the other side).
Obviously, we don't trust the "inside" of our network, but as well as providing a public service, some plausible deniability is useful:-)
Even when I did GCSE's 12 years ago, the science exam was trivially easy. Admittedly I'm quite a good scientist, but I found the paper simple to the point of being insulting - having worked for 3 years for it, I objected to being asked stupid questions such as "Here is a picture of some plastic water pipes. Why are they made of plastic?". It seems to me that:
1)In order to make science "more interesting", we should make it more rigorous, and more challenging. At the moment, it's just dull (unless the teachers can ignore the syllabus and not focus on the exams). Health and safety mania doesn't help. [I was lucky: my teachers had a healthy contempt for the more idiotic rules - we were always sensible, but didn't treat 0.1 molar acids as being more dangerous in the lab than in the kitchen]
2)We shouldn't worry so much about less able students being put off science; we should care about the bright ones being put off.
3)A C is not a decent pass grade - it's the lowest grade that isn't a "fail". D,E,F grades are worthless. Likewise, it's simply absurd to consider doing A-level physics without also doing maths.
4)You can't run before you can walk. The current approach is to supplant the "dry" things like mechanics by "sexy" things such as Fusion,Quantum,etc. But the "hot topics" are too hard, so they get covered at a very simplistic level. That just isn't satisfying - there's none of the excitement that comes from suddenly *understanding* how (part of) the real world works.
Currently, in a vain attempt to make everyone aware of the basics of science, we're denying our brightest pupils the ability to actually *do* real science. And by dumbing it down (either by making it very easy, or only covering the "sexy" stuff), there's no thrill of actual discovery left.
A sync might take some considerable time (even rsync is a few minutes with lots of files). What if the user needs to interrupt it. You probably should make this manual (at least via a confirmation dialog), so that if the user is only connecting for a few seconds, it does not try to sync. Also, the user can then control priority - he may want to get to the web first, rather than waiting while an Office service pack downloads...
1)Kcontrol should be scriptable. There's no easy way to apply KDE settings from the CLI. (unlike gconf). An easy way would be to implement DCOP for every item in Kcontrol. Motivation: it often takes me longer to set up KDE as I like/recommend it than to do the rest of the install; copying ~/.kde across is not appropriate for a machine which will be used by someone else.
2)KDE and spaces in filenames should be (optionally) transparently converted to/from underscores. Spaces look much prettier on the desktop, but are a real nuisance at the shell. [For example, xmms does this with playlists]
3)KDE - traskbar - drag to re-arrange the applications. (gnome now does this; a patch was submitted years ago, but has never been merged).
4)Ubuntu is great, but it would be wonderful to have an easy way to turn on the "geek" options. For example:
* The boot screen - would be much better if it were verbose, in the same way as gentoo or knoppix. These are both outstanding - and visually attractive. Ubuntu (with splash=verbose, or splash=none) however remains monochrome, will not accept vga=794, and is actually too verbose (so much trivial information, no easy way to see what services are starting).
* Switching back to emacs/bash keybindings. (Ctrl-A = go to start of line, not "select all", etc)
* Ubuntu doesn't ship all of PHP (eg php5-gmp is not compiled).
5)Fonts. I'm in the sizeable minority here, but I *hate* antialiasing - I much prefer sharply defined fonts to blurry ones. However, this requires properly hinted fonts, which means the MS corefonts, particularly Tahoma. Can we please have some free (not just gratis) fonts that are well-hinted for non-antialiasing?
6)Firefox is a dreadful memory hog! My new machine is a 64-bit system - the major advantage is to allow Fx to address > 4GB of swap.
[I've already reported bugs on these, but they aren't getting any attention.]
At the moment, most of the people who run a particular piece of software are using a stable distribution, and therefore are usually running something 3-9 months old. This has the following problems:
- The majority of potential bug-reporters aren't running the latest release. Bug reports are less useful.
- When you do report a bug, and it gets fixed upstream, you still don't get to enjoy the fix until the next distro cycle.
- The release-test-fix-use-release cycle is much longer than it would otherwise be, and a lot of talent is wasted.
- Most users have to live with most bugs for 6 months.
What I'd like to see is every package being built at least weekly from CVS by the distro. Then, the user can optionally install certain specific apps at will from this "testing" repository, without having to update his entire install to unstable. Now, the cycle runs:
User sees bug; user installs latest binary, and quickly verifies bug still present; user reports bug; developer fixes bug; user gets latest build. (all in less than a week, rather than 6 months).
I know it's possible to do all this by hand, but why not automate it? Most users will happily spend 10 minutes on a bug-report, but not 2 hours. [Ubuntu's "prevu" does help a bit here, but it's still not automatic enough.]
Was it really? 3 years of W98 is the main reason I switched to Linux in 2001 (and have never used Windows on my own machine since). We do still have an old laptop running W95, and, while it doesn't get asked to do much, it does get used every day(*) - and I've never seen it crash.
(*)It's in the kitchen, and is used to telnet to a port on a machine in my father's office. That machine then announces that "lunch|dinner is ready". [Anyone interested in writing such a program can build it from bash,festival,xinetd in about an hour.]
What I don't understand is why umsdos was killed off? It actually provides a reasonably good solution: the universal compatibility of FAT, with an ugly-hack to add permissions, modes and links. Also, although FAT is ugly, it does have 2 advantages:
1)Non journalling - so we don't quickly destroy flash devices 2)Simple - it's actually quite hard to destroy a FAT fileystem by eg pulling out a USB stick without unmounting it.
1)Try installing Ubuntu in "safe graphics mode" (i.e. the vesa driver). No 3d eye-candy, but it *does* work. If you're wary of doing an install and then wishing you'd left vista alone, try installing on a USB stick.
[FWIW, My expensive T60p laptop is cursed with an ATI card, and the fglrx driver is unstable, so I just use the vesa driver. I get full resolution and colour depth - I just had to forego the pretty GL screensavers]
2)In my experience, a cheap USB soundcard (eg Behringer UCA-202 for $25) will wipe the floor with any internal card. 16-bit, stereo sound is perfectly good enough - and you avoid all the hums and interference that arise from having audio inside the case (even good soundcards suffer from this).
Could we at least have an option to make gimp run in a single full-screen window? I agree that, if you want to do lots of complex things in gimp, it's quite useful to have multiple windows. But for simple work, why can't GIMP do the same as every single other program, and get all the toolbars etc into the same place! Most applications get this right; some eg thunderbird even let you choose between layouts to suit yourself. (The other big offenders are kooka and digikam).
Incidentally, xaralx would be a fantastic alternative, but it seems to be dying - there's been no activity this year.
Sorry - that wasn't what I meant. What I mean is this:
When I am writing a given program, I tend to scroll up/down repeatedly, and I frequently need to look at bits of the code. However, many of the longer comments are things I won't need to read again for a few months. When I go back to some code, of course I need to see in detail "now, why did I do that?". So, I make a tradeoff:
* When reading a long comment, I have to do a bit of extra horizontal-scrolling.
* When working on the code, I can save a lot of vertical scrolling.
(It helps that I use a trackpoint, so I can easily scroll in either axis, without moving hands out of typing position.)
May I suggest that comments should not be included in this rule. I tend to keep the code always on the screen, but sometimes let comments scroll off-screen to the right (up to column 300 ish). This is because most of the time, I don't expect to re-read the comment very frequently, and by doing this, I can economize on vertical space.
BTW, I tend to work at about 200 columns on the desktop (20", 1600x1200), and 190 cols on my laptop (15", 1600x1200). I find the "Terminal [DEC]" font, or "Courier New" to be the best for clarity - having full hinting enabled (Ubuntu just works; Mandrake requires the patched libfreetype6), and anti-aliasing off.
You're quite right - but it hasn't actually worked that way since the days when one master artisan would secretly pass on techniques for working stained glass to his pupils, and patents (monopolies) were granted to encourage publication.
Are you really saying that these things would only be available as a result of the patent system? If so, why should anyone make aspirin nowadays - the patent has expired, so there's obviously no money in it! And most of the chemical industry was founded in Switzerland at the turn of the century - a country which did not (at the time) have patents. Incidentally, if you look into the history of Edison/Westinghouse, it isn't especially pretty - the fights over patents substantially slowed down introduction of new technology.
1)The way to capitalize on an invention is to be first to market, and implement good manufacturing and marketing. The actual invention isn't as important as you'd think. (Eg the iPod - very little real innovation).
2)If I make a new gumplestong-fruzzler, I want to be protected *from* other people claiming I infringe their "IP". Small inventors are more likely to be the victims of a patent suit than the defenders of it.
Also, worth mentioning how patents prevent technical advances. For example, the development of FM radio was stalled for years because the patents were held by 3 different companies who wouldn't cross-license. Or the most effective combination-pills for AIDS are only available in India, and not in the West. Or, we get market fragmentation in order to work-around patents (eg AAC,MP3,WMA,OGG) which makes devices that support all formats more expensive.
The problem isn't just the "dumb" patents, but it's the notion of a patent in the first place which is wrong. We should be working to eliminate all patents. No patent has ever spurred innovation; many have severely held it back. Some pharma patents are indirectly responsible for people dying.
The problem with your idea is that it helps the patent examiner, thereby reducing the ratio of dumb:smart patents. This lowers the cost of obtaining a patent. What we need is some sort of hash: if you have an "obvious" idea, you publish in such a way that it cannot be searched for easily until the patent has been granted (i.e. publish, but don't index) - thus the patent can be overthrown easily, but the patent office remains overwhelmed, inefficient, and expensive.
By Denver, I of course meant Vail/Beaver Creek - which does have excellent skiing. As for Disney, we're a little old for it now, and I tend to have other issues with them, due to the fact that Disney have been the prime movers in copyright extension ("we want to own the mouse forever, but we'll still borrow what we like from the Brothers Grimm.")
Since the fingerprinting began, none of my family has visited the USA. We probably never will again. Which is a shame, since we used to come to Orlando and to ski in Denver - and we probably spent $50+k in Europe that would have gone to the USA over the last 5 years. As far as I'm concerned, I'll come back to the USA when they prove (a)that they actually want to welcome us as guests, and (b)when the USA starts to believe in its own principles again. For now, the US have a *lot* to answer for, and unfortunately, many of our British politicians are catching the same security-at-any-price disease.
One more thing: I suggest you aim for a small project. It tends to be easier to get involved, and since developers are more scarce, you'll be able to make more of a difference. Also, the source tends to be a bit smaller, so it's easier to understand. Big projects (eg kernel, kde, firefox, OOo) are still very welcoming to developers, but you may find it harder to get started.
Also, consider a few other topics, eg: Distributions (interface stuff for Ubuntu, DSL enhancements), VoIP (linphone/ekiga), embedded (openzaurus), emulation (Qemu) or just write some useful shell-scripts. Documentation writing is good too!
Unfortunately, my (otherwise excellent) T60p thinkpad is crippled by having a FireGL 5200 ATI graphics card. The fglrx driver works well enough mostly (although no AIGLX at all), but about once a week, doing something like scrolling a page will crash the machine. I've gone back to the VESA driver - at least it doesn't crash.
Unfortunately, the vesa driver doesn't support any 2D acceleration, such as copy-rectangle. This means that scrolling large pages is CPU-limited (on a very fast core-duo machine!).
Slashdot Mirror
De facto, permissions on the net are the logical OR of the permissions in the various jurisdictions. I.e, if activity X is permitted anywhere, it is permitted everywhere. (This is just another way to say that the internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it).
This is quite clearly a good thing, and the Right thing. However, some legal jurisdictions haven't caught up with the modern world yet.
In my view, the best fonts were the 100dpi bitmap fonts, followed by Tahoma, and Terminus with antialiasing off, and full-hinting enabled.
Until we get 600dpi monitors, I (and about 20% of the world) will definitely stick with sharpness and readability instead of the blurry hack that is antialiasing. However, some fonts are meant to be hinted but not antialiased, and others are designed for antialiasing but not hinting. Which are these?
Is there any protocol to explain which is which? I've just set up a wireless network, which is deliberately open, and I'm happy for people to make reasonable use of this. These days, I'd expect that anyone who has an open wifi network is leaving it open deliberately (and the burden of proof would be on the other side).
:-)
Obviously, we don't trust the "inside" of our network, but as well as providing a public service, some plausible deniability is useful
Next time, buy a thinkpad! Not only are they really easy to disassemble/reassemble, but you can download the service manual from IBM.
Or, just say "Sorry - my data is confidential, you can't have the hard disk".
Even when I did GCSE's 12 years ago, the science exam was trivially easy. Admittedly I'm quite a good scientist, but I found the paper simple to the point of being insulting - having worked for 3 years for it, I objected to being asked stupid questions such as "Here is a picture of some plastic water pipes. Why are they made of plastic?". It seems to me that:
1)In order to make science "more interesting", we should make it more rigorous, and more challenging. At the moment, it's just dull (unless the teachers can ignore the syllabus and not focus on the exams). Health and safety mania doesn't help. [I was lucky: my teachers had a healthy contempt for the more idiotic rules - we were always sensible, but didn't treat 0.1 molar acids as being more dangerous in the lab than in the kitchen]
2)We shouldn't worry so much about less able students being put off science; we should care about the bright ones being put off.
3)A C is not a decent pass grade - it's the lowest grade that isn't a "fail". D,E,F grades are worthless. Likewise, it's simply absurd to consider doing A-level physics without also doing maths.
4)You can't run before you can walk. The current approach is to supplant the "dry" things like mechanics by "sexy" things such as Fusion,Quantum,etc. But the "hot topics" are too hard, so they get covered at a very simplistic level. That just isn't satisfying - there's none of the excitement that comes from suddenly *understanding* how (part of) the real world works.
Currently, in a vain attempt to make everyone aware of the basics of science, we're denying our brightest pupils the ability to actually *do* real science. And by dumbing it down (either by making it very easy, or only covering the "sexy" stuff), there's no thrill of actual discovery left.
A sync might take some considerable time (even rsync is a few minutes with lots of files). What if the user needs to interrupt it.
You probably should make this manual (at least via a confirmation dialog), so that if the user is only connecting for a few seconds, it does not try to sync. Also, the user can then control priority - he may want to get to the web first, rather than waiting while an Office service pack downloads...
A few things which need to be fixed:
1)Kcontrol should be scriptable. There's no easy way to apply KDE settings from the CLI. (unlike gconf). An easy way would be to implement DCOP for every item in Kcontrol. Motivation: it often takes me longer to set up KDE as I like/recommend it than to do the rest of the install; copying ~/.kde across is not appropriate for a machine which will be used by someone else.
2)KDE and spaces in filenames should be (optionally) transparently converted to/from underscores. Spaces look much prettier on the desktop, but are a real nuisance at the shell. [For example, xmms does this with playlists]
3)KDE - traskbar - drag to re-arrange the applications. (gnome now does this; a patch was submitted years ago, but has never been merged).
4)Ubuntu is great, but it would be wonderful to have an easy way to turn on the "geek" options. For example:
* The boot screen - would be much better if it were verbose, in the same way as gentoo or knoppix. These are both outstanding - and visually attractive. Ubuntu (with splash=verbose, or splash=none) however remains monochrome, will not accept vga=794, and is actually too verbose (so much trivial information, no easy way to see what services are starting).
* Switching back to emacs/bash keybindings. (Ctrl-A = go to start of line, not "select all", etc)
* Ubuntu doesn't ship all of PHP (eg php5-gmp is not compiled).
5)Fonts. I'm in the sizeable minority here, but I *hate* antialiasing - I much prefer sharply defined fonts to blurry ones. However, this requires properly hinted fonts, which means the MS corefonts, particularly Tahoma. Can we please have some free (not just gratis) fonts that are well-hinted for non-antialiasing?
6)Firefox is a dreadful memory hog! My new machine is a 64-bit system - the major advantage is to allow Fx to address > 4GB of swap.
[I've already reported bugs on these, but they aren't getting any attention.]
At the moment, most of the people who run a particular piece of software are using a stable distribution, and therefore are usually running something 3-9 months old. This has the following problems:
- The majority of potential bug-reporters aren't running the latest release. Bug reports are less useful.
- When you do report a bug, and it gets fixed upstream, you still don't get to enjoy the fix until the next distro cycle.
- The release-test-fix-use-release cycle is much longer than it would otherwise be, and a lot of talent is wasted.
- Most users have to live with most bugs for 6 months.
What I'd like to see is every package being built at least weekly from CVS by the distro. Then, the user can optionally install certain specific apps at will from this "testing" repository, without having to update his entire install to unstable. Now, the cycle runs:
User sees bug; user installs latest binary, and quickly verifies bug still present; user reports bug; developer fixes bug; user gets latest build. (all in less than a week, rather than 6 months).
I know it's possible to do all this by hand, but why not automate it? Most users will happily spend 10 minutes on a bug-report, but not 2 hours. [Ubuntu's "prevu" does help a bit here, but it's still not automatic enough.]
Was it really? 3 years of W98 is the main reason I switched to Linux in 2001 (and have never used Windows on my own machine since).
We do still have an old laptop running W95, and, while it doesn't get asked to do much, it does get used every day(*) - and I've never seen it crash.
(*)It's in the kitchen, and is used to telnet to a port on a machine in my father's office. That machine then announces that "lunch|dinner is ready". [Anyone interested in writing such a program can build it from bash,festival,xinetd in about an hour.]
Or, "exercise while U walk - burn calories as you commute" ;-)
What I don't understand is why umsdos was killed off? It actually provides a reasonably good solution: the universal compatibility of FAT, with an ugly-hack to add permissions, modes and links. Also, although FAT is ugly, it does have 2 advantages:
1)Non journalling - so we don't quickly destroy flash devices
2)Simple - it's actually quite hard to destroy a FAT fileystem by eg pulling out a USB stick without unmounting it.
Thoughts:
1)Try installing Ubuntu in "safe graphics mode" (i.e. the vesa driver). No 3d eye-candy, but it *does* work. If you're wary of doing an install and then wishing you'd left vista alone, try installing on a USB stick.
[FWIW, My expensive T60p laptop is cursed with an ATI card, and the fglrx driver is unstable, so I just use the vesa driver. I get full resolution and colour depth - I just had to forego the pretty GL screensavers]
2)In my experience, a cheap USB soundcard (eg Behringer UCA-202 for $25) will wipe the floor with any internal card. 16-bit, stereo sound is perfectly good enough - and you avoid all the hums and interference that arise from having audio inside the case (even good soundcards suffer from this).
Could we at least have an option to make gimp run in a single full-screen window? I agree that, if you want to do lots of complex things in gimp, it's quite useful to have multiple windows. But for simple work, why can't GIMP do the same as every single other program, and get all the toolbars etc into the same place! Most applications get this right; some eg thunderbird even let you choose between layouts to suit yourself. (The other big offenders are kooka and digikam).
Incidentally, xaralx would be a fantastic alternative, but it seems to be dying - there's been no activity this year.
Sorry - that wasn't what I meant. What I mean is this:
When I am writing a given program, I tend to scroll up/down repeatedly, and I frequently need to look at bits of the code. However, many of the longer comments are things I won't need to read again for a few months. When I go back to some code, of course I need to see in detail "now, why did I do that?". So, I make a tradeoff:
* When reading a long comment, I have to do a bit of extra horizontal-scrolling.
* When working on the code, I can save a lot of vertical scrolling.
(It helps that I use a trackpoint, so I can easily scroll in either axis, without moving hands out of typing position.)
May I suggest that comments should not be included in this rule. I tend to keep the code always on the screen, but sometimes let comments scroll off-screen to the right (up to column 300 ish). This is because most of the time, I don't expect to re-read the comment very frequently, and by doing this, I can economize on vertical space.
BTW, I tend to work at about 200 columns on the desktop (20", 1600x1200), and 190 cols on my laptop (15", 1600x1200). I find the "Terminal [DEC]" font, or "Courier New" to be the best for clarity - having full hinting enabled (Ubuntu just works; Mandrake requires the patched libfreetype6), and anti-aliasing off.
You're quite right - but it hasn't actually worked that way since the days when one master artisan would secretly pass on techniques for working stained glass to his pupils, and patents (monopolies) were granted to encourage publication.
Are you really saying that these things would only be available as a result of the patent system? If so, why should anyone make aspirin nowadays - the patent has expired, so there's obviously no money in it! And most of the chemical industry was founded in Switzerland at the turn of the century - a country which did not (at the time) have patents. Incidentally, if you look into the history of Edison/Westinghouse, it isn't especially pretty - the fights over patents substantially slowed down introduction of new technology.
I think you missed out 2 things:
1)The way to capitalize on an invention is to be first to market, and implement good manufacturing and marketing. The actual invention isn't as important as you'd think. (Eg the iPod - very little real innovation).
2)If I make a new gumplestong-fruzzler, I want to be protected *from* other people claiming I infringe their "IP". Small inventors are more likely to be the victims of a patent suit than the defenders of it.
Also, worth mentioning how patents prevent technical advances. For example, the development of FM radio was stalled for years because the patents were held by 3 different companies who wouldn't cross-license. Or the most effective combination-pills for AIDS are only available in India, and not in the West. Or, we get market fragmentation in order to work-around patents (eg AAC,MP3,WMA,OGG) which makes devices that support all formats more expensive.
The problem isn't just the "dumb" patents, but it's the notion of a patent in the first place which is wrong. We should be working to eliminate all patents. No patent has ever spurred innovation; many have severely held it back. Some pharma patents are indirectly responsible for people dying.
The problem with your idea is that it helps the patent examiner, thereby reducing the ratio of dumb:smart patents. This lowers the cost of obtaining a patent. What we need is some sort of hash: if you have an "obvious" idea, you publish in such a way that it cannot be searched for easily until the patent has been granted (i.e. publish, but don't index) - thus the patent can be overthrown easily, but the patent office remains overwhelmed, inefficient, and expensive.
By Denver, I of course meant Vail/Beaver Creek - which does have excellent skiing. As for Disney, we're a little old for it now, and I tend to have other issues with them, due to the fact that Disney have been the prime movers in copyright extension ("we want to own the mouse forever, but we'll still borrow what we like from the Brothers Grimm.")
Since the fingerprinting began, none of my family has visited the USA. We probably never will again. Which is a shame, since we used to come to Orlando and to ski in Denver - and we probably spent $50+k in Europe that would have gone to the USA over the last 5 years. As far as I'm concerned, I'll come back to the USA when they prove (a)that they actually want to welcome us as guests, and (b)when the USA starts to believe in its own principles again. For now, the US have a *lot* to answer for, and unfortunately, many of our British politicians are catching the same security-at-any-price disease.
One more thing: I suggest you aim for a small project. It tends to be easier to get involved, and since developers are more scarce, you'll be able to make more of a difference. Also, the source tends to be a bit smaller, so it's easier to understand. Big projects (eg kernel, kde, firefox, OOo) are still very welcoming to developers, but you may find it harder to get started.
Also, consider a few other topics, eg: Distributions (interface stuff for Ubuntu, DSL enhancements), VoIP (linphone/ekiga), embedded (openzaurus), emulation (Qemu) or just write some useful shell-scripts. Documentation writing is good too!
How did the parent get marked as Troll? Clearly, it's Funny!
Unfortunately, my (otherwise excellent) T60p thinkpad is crippled by having a FireGL 5200 ATI graphics card.
The fglrx driver works well enough mostly (although no AIGLX at all), but about once a week, doing something like scrolling a page will crash the machine. I've gone back to the VESA driver - at least it doesn't crash.
Unfortunately, the vesa driver doesn't support any 2D acceleration, such as copy-rectangle. This means that scrolling large pages is CPU-limited (on a very fast core-duo machine!).