There isn't a merge planned in the roadmap. Instead there is a new colour model library (don't ask me what it's called, I've forgotten) in development which will make it easy to write new colour models as plugins. That's the idea, anyway: last time I checked on progress it seemed like only a few preliminary ideas were coming together, it isn't even pre-alpha. So I wouldn't expect a stable version based on this till at least late 2006, or even 2007. Perhaps the roadmap will even change altogether.
I came to the gimp from PSP (years and years ago, shortly after the invention of the transistor;-)) and found it very easy to do basic things and very hard to do complex things. Then I discovered the gimp manual (available online somewhere, see gimp.org when it's recovered from its current slashdotting) and learned a great deal from it. There are still a few concepts I find awkward (mainly to do with transparency), but I'm not convinced I would find them any easier in a different package.
I really liked the gimp-1.2 UI: the "everything is in the context menu or separate windows" just appeals for some reason.
But for those of you who like menus along the top - they're there in 1.3; for those of you who want to combine control windows - you can do this too, switching between controls with tabs. Really, from what I've used of it so far, it seems you can customise the UI pretty much any which way.
I'm still itching for gimp-2.2 or whenever they finally put high-resolution colour models back in. 8 bits per channel is a real limitation for use with scanned film: you have to be so much more careful to get the scan settings correct than if gimp could actually cope with the whole 48bpp scan.
Tut, you got it right (the goal of Free software is to have software that is Free), then you went and spoilt it by adding on lots of other stuff that doesn't logically follow. So long as there is good Free software available I don't care about Windows one way or the other. Sooner or later there will be Free software projects that are better than their proprietary alternatives - if people want to keep using Microsoft, that's fine, but if they want to switch to a Free solution that's good - they have the freedom to do so. Microsoft can do what it likes so long as we have the freedom to ignore it, which Free software provides. A natural consequence of having top-notch Free software is that users may abandon MS in droves, leaving them to shrivel and die, but that isn't the aim of Free software.
This strikes me as weird. The whole point of the ban on export of supercomputers was that they could be used to simulate nuclear explosions - but this was back in the '70s, when a gigaflop really was a supercomputer. Today, therefore, with a competent physicist and a good programmer, any old desktop PC can simulate nuclear explosions at least as well as the technology the US was keen to avoid exporting in the '70s (including, presumably, fusion devices) in a few months. I can't see the point in retaining a ban on export of supercomputers even if the bar is raised - nuclear simulations are already possible with off-the-shelf hardware that isn't covered by restrictions and, though I suppose biological simulations may well require more CPU time, if the various distributed biocomputation projects are anything to go by they also parallelise well, making them tractable by a cluster of conventional hardware as well as by traditional supercomputers.
Those problems don't seem to be universal - the commercial radio stations in the UK don't have that level of advertising. If the RIAA is charging too much in royalties I'd say that was an RIAA problem, not an mp3 problem (FWIW, all my mp3/oggs are legal).
If anything I'd say it's slashdot and groklaw that has brought "many eyes" to the situation.
Investors tend to work alone - certainly more alone than the many dedicated, knowledgeable people who are putting in the hard yards at groklaw. Sure, the groklaw people have a bias - everyone does in this world - but if SCO was really correct I think by now the effort would be going in to fixing Linux rather than trying to bluster.
I'm stil enjoying the quasiregular 'slashdot comedy hour' but I've long since given up on the idea that SCO has anything worthwhile, otherwise they'd have landed their killer punch by now - I think the investors have just plain got it wrong. It happens.
Agreed as regards that particular system, but if you get a rootshell you can use the system as a base for further attacks far more effectively than if you only have access to the apache account. nmap, running services from privileged ports etc. are all valid reasons for a blackhat wanting a specifically root account.
The problem with this model of programming is that it puts too much emphasis on "where are we going next" instead of "how do we make what we have more stable than it is already". While both of these are important facets of a successful project I feel that this system has a tendency to overemphasise the former without due regard to the latter - new features are easy to quantify whereas stability is more difficult. This seems likely to give rise to the "Microsoft Outlook" syndrome where you end up with a piece of software that can do everything that can feasibly be expected of an email reader, but has very serious flaws both in implementation and ideology. I don't believe this is inherent in the "scrum" methodology but I do think that the centring on too-regular team meetings will cause over-focus on featurism at the expense of QA and stability checking. At best, it will take a stronger team leader to keep a "scrum" project on course than if it were developed by other, less short-term-goal-focussed means.
Since you will not put on public record which Unix code is in Linux I have no way of ascertaining whether or not I am using it. Until you can demonstrate that Linux does contain code to which you hold a valid copyright I feel under no obligation to certify whether or not I am using Linux in the first place.
True - but remember that if you have demons running you're not single-user anymore. If you can trust all the remotely-accessible software on your system, by all means feel free to ignore the patch (I intend to), but don't assume you're single-user just because no other humans have accounts.
Slashdot is probably not the best forum to get a timely response from the maintainers of the relevant parts of the kernel or X. Perhaps you should file a bug report in a more appropriate place?
As far as I understand it all this means is Jon is free. The case wasn't taken to the Norwegian Supreme Court, so no legal precedent was made (presumably the reason why it didn't go to the SC). I may have misunderstood things (in the best/. tradition IANANL) but I don't think so.
My blog is really only a journal. Only I can post to it. My email sending cgi will only send email to me (and can't post in my journal or anything like that). If I start getting spam through the cgi then I can just add a challenge-response front end to block it - it doesn't present a wider issue as the spammers still don't have my email address - once the cgi is made human-only they can't send me spam any more. But that's a little bit annoying for people, so I'll only do that if it becomes a problem - so far it hasn't for me.
So here's a question you can't ask: why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"? In one scenario, we are acknowleding that men tend to be physically stronger than women (even though you can find counterexamples), and in the other we are not.
Interesting point. I suspect it's because throughout history men of different races have competed against each other in war. They still want to compete against each other in more peaceful events (ask any distance runner whether he'd be happier running in events where the Kenyans and Ethiopians had been segregated out and they'd say no - athletes want to test themselves against the best. As far as women go there hasn't been a tradition of competing directly with men in battle (other than a few notable exceptions). I guess that carries over into most sport. Besides, the sporting differences between men and women are generally of a greater magnitude than between men of different races: if you were to admit women to open-gender Olympic trials they would still very rarely make it to the finals.
Having said that, in my sport (climbing) strength isn't everything and women have climbed some of the hardest routes in the world. Lynn Hill is still the only person, man or woman, to have free-climbed two of the pitches on the Nose on El Capitan. Still, on average, men do better, and I suspect it comes back to the hunter-killer 'design' of a man: kill prey for the tribe, kill other tribes for land. Do better than everything else.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
Also, timed tests are biased against women, since women are taught to be more deliberative and less decisive. When the same tests are untimed, women do much better relative to men.
The timing of tests just measures another facet of skill: in life, there isn't time to debate everything to the nth degree, and decisiveness is a very important skill. If you are correct that women are actually taught to be less decisive I find that a scandal. But it's the fault of the education system for being discriminatory, not the tests.
It's not, really. My email address is not available online, but I'm still quite contactable via email - I have a perlscript (with the To: email hardcoded in and some sanity checking on the inputs) that allows people to email me without ever seeing the address.
It's not yet another layer of interface, it's done as a theme engine. Theme engines are already a part of the desktop, they already do all the theming. This one just does it differently (by interpreting the KDE theme definition instead of the gnome one). Nothing to see here, move along...
Yes, just like a catastrophic loss of all the fuel pumps would render them pretty useless. Onboard the plane there will presumably be multiple redundant GPS receivers. As for the satellites... Well, it's always possible that one might fail unexpectedly but there are several of them and a plane is in as good a place to see them as anything. It's extremely unlikely that they'd all fail simultaneously.
If all Cringely's predictions are this vague I'm embarrassed for him that he only gets 70% of them near enough to count as a success.
Besides which, linux has coped fine with SCO. Even if there were any infringing code (which, after all the contradictory, facile BS SCO has been spouting, I somehow doubt) it would be a very easy matter within the current kernel development framework to either rewrite the code or dike it out -- if SCO would say what, exactly, the code was. The problem isn't one of the linux development model, it's a problem with SCO and their blatant disregard for honesty, the truth or any kind of propriety. If there was some (unspecified) "other" development model used, we would still rely on SCO telling us what the infringing code was so that it could be fixed or removed.
Believe me, if there was a problem with the linux kernel development system that meant the whole thing could be brought down using lawyers, Microsoft would have torn us apart years ago. In terms of unpleasantness (and certainly in terms of competence) SCO has nothing on MS Legal.
You're seriously suggesting that it would require a 700MB scan to get the same image quality as a single printed photo in the magazine? For 700MB at 32 bits/pixel we can have 175 megapixels (if stored uncompressed). Given that the camera of choice for remote travel photographers is very often a 35mm of some description, whether SLR or rangefinder, that's about 10,000dpi, or roughly 2500dpi if printed at 6x4" in the magazine. That's just ludicrous. For one thing, that resolution of image would be hugely impractical for most of their readers to use, for another it's technically quite impractical for them to provide and finally that's without compression... What they're far more likely to do is provide 1024x768 high-quality jpegs, at which filesize they could fit a great many onto a CD.
Arguing that the CD is the same as the magazine is akin to saying since my subscription entitles me to all issues of the magazine for a certain period, I am owed the CD because it is no different than the magazine and contains the issues that covers my subscription - something I think NGS would disagree with and point out the Cd is a different beast.
Not at all. Suppose NG were to publish their magazine in paperback and hardback format every month: I find it hard to believe someone could argue that the hardback format counted as a new work, yet clearly your subscription to one format of the magazine wouldn't entitle you to free copies of the other format. In the same way, why should your subscription to the existing dead-tree format magazine entitle you to the CD version? For my money, so long as the content (editiorials, articles, photos) is the same then it's the same magazine. Just because they bundle a swiss-army knife with one version or some search tools with another version shouldn't suddenly make the two versions new publications.
For one thing, it's predominantly a British probe. For another: what on earth is the connection between a space program and a war? Or are you going to bitch about everything done by every country that didn't support the war?
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't a merge planned in the roadmap. Instead there is a new colour model library (don't ask me what it's called, I've forgotten) in development which will make it easy to write new colour models as plugins. That's the idea, anyway: last time I checked on progress it seemed like only a few preliminary ideas were coming together, it isn't even pre-alpha. So I wouldn't expect a stable version based on this till at least late 2006, or even 2007. Perhaps the roadmap will even change altogether.
I came to the gimp from PSP (years and years ago, shortly after the invention of the transistor ;-)) and found it very easy to do basic things and very hard to do complex things. Then I discovered the gimp manual (available online somewhere, see gimp.org when it's recovered from its current slashdotting) and learned a great deal from it. There are still a few concepts I find awkward (mainly to do with transparency), but I'm not convinced I would find them any easier in a different package.
I really liked the gimp-1.2 UI: the "everything is in the context menu or separate windows" just appeals for some reason.
But for those of you who like menus along the top - they're there in 1.3; for those of you who want to combine control windows - you can do this too, switching between controls with tabs. Really, from what I've used of it so far, it seems you can customise the UI pretty much any which way.
I'm still itching for gimp-2.2 or whenever they finally put high-resolution colour models back in. 8 bits per channel is a real limitation for use with scanned film: you have to be so much more careful to get the scan settings correct than if gimp could actually cope with the whole 48bpp scan.
Tut, you got it right (the goal of Free software is to have software that is Free), then you went and spoilt it by adding on lots of other stuff that doesn't logically follow. So long as there is good Free software available I don't care about Windows one way or the other. Sooner or later there will be Free software projects that are better than their proprietary alternatives - if people want to keep using Microsoft, that's fine, but if they want to switch to a Free solution that's good - they have the freedom to do so.
Microsoft can do what it likes so long as we have the freedom to ignore it, which Free software provides.
A natural consequence of having top-notch Free software is that users may abandon MS in droves, leaving them to shrivel and die, but that isn't the aim of Free software.
This strikes me as weird. The whole point of the ban on export of supercomputers was that they could be used to simulate nuclear explosions - but this was back in the '70s, when a gigaflop really was a supercomputer. Today, therefore, with a competent physicist and a good programmer, any old desktop PC can simulate nuclear explosions at least as well as the technology the US was keen to avoid exporting in the '70s (including, presumably, fusion devices) in a few months.
I can't see the point in retaining a ban on export of supercomputers even if the bar is raised - nuclear simulations are already possible with off-the-shelf hardware that isn't covered by restrictions and, though I suppose biological simulations may well require more CPU time, if the various distributed biocomputation projects are anything to go by they also parallelise well, making them tractable by a cluster of conventional hardware as well as by traditional supercomputers.
Those problems don't seem to be universal - the commercial radio stations in the UK don't have that level of advertising. If the RIAA is charging too much in royalties I'd say that was an RIAA problem, not an mp3 problem (FWIW, all my mp3/oggs are legal).
If anything I'd say it's slashdot and groklaw that has brought "many eyes" to the situation.
Investors tend to work alone - certainly more alone than the many dedicated, knowledgeable people who are putting in the hard yards at groklaw. Sure, the groklaw people have a bias - everyone does in this world - but if SCO was really correct I think by now the effort would be going in to fixing Linux rather than trying to bluster.
I'm stil enjoying the quasiregular 'slashdot comedy hour' but I've long since given up on the idea that SCO has anything worthwhile, otherwise they'd have landed their killer punch by now - I think the investors have just plain got it wrong. It happens.
Agreed as regards that particular system, but if you get a rootshell you can use the system as a base for further attacks far more effectively than if you only have access to the apache account. nmap, running services from privileged ports etc. are all valid reasons for a blackhat wanting a specifically root account.
The problem with this model of programming is that it puts too much emphasis on "where are we going next" instead of "how do we make what we have more stable than it is already". While both of these are important facets of a successful project I feel that this system has a tendency to overemphasise the former without due regard to the latter - new features are easy to quantify whereas stability is more difficult. This seems likely to give rise to the "Microsoft Outlook" syndrome where you end up with a piece of software that can do everything that can feasibly be expected of an email reader, but has very serious flaws both in implementation and ideology. I don't believe this is inherent in the "scrum" methodology but I do think that the centring on too-regular team meetings will cause over-focus on featurism at the expense of QA and stability checking. At best, it will take a stronger team leader to keep a "scrum" project on course than if it were developed by other, less short-term-goal-focussed means.
Dear Mr. McBride,
Since you will not put on public record which Unix code is in Linux I have no way of ascertaining whether or not I am using it. Until you can demonstrate that Linux does contain code to which you hold a valid copyright I feel under no obligation to certify whether or not I am using Linux in the first place.
Yours truly etc.
True - but remember that if you have demons running you're not single-user anymore. If you can trust all the remotely-accessible software on your system, by all means feel free to ignore the patch (I intend to), but don't assume you're single-user just because no other humans have accounts.
Slashdot is probably not the best forum to get a timely response from the maintainers of the relevant parts of the kernel or X. Perhaps you should file a bug report in a more appropriate place?
As far as I understand it all this means is Jon is free. The case wasn't taken to the Norwegian Supreme Court, so no legal precedent was made (presumably the reason why it didn't go to the SC). I may have misunderstood things (in the best /. tradition IANANL) but I don't think so.
My blog is really only a journal. Only I can post to it. My email sending cgi will only send email to me (and can't post in my journal or anything like that). If I start getting spam through the cgi then I can just add a challenge-response front end to block it - it doesn't present a wider issue as the spammers still don't have my email address - once the cgi is made human-only they can't send me spam any more. But that's a little bit annoying for people, so I'll only do that if it becomes a problem - so far it hasn't for me.
That's not copy protection. The mac just committed suicide after being forced to play Celine Dion :-)
So here's a question you can't ask: why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"? In one scenario, we are acknowleding that men tend to be physically stronger than women (even though you can find counterexamples), and in the other we are not.
Interesting point. I suspect it's because throughout history men of different races have competed against each other in war. They still want to compete against each other in more peaceful events (ask any distance runner whether he'd be happier running in events where the Kenyans and Ethiopians had been segregated out and they'd say no - athletes want to test themselves against the best.
As far as women go there hasn't been a tradition of competing directly with men in battle (other than a few notable exceptions). I guess that carries over into most sport. Besides, the sporting differences between men and women are generally of a greater magnitude than between men of different races: if you were to admit women to open-gender Olympic trials they would still very rarely make it to the finals.
Having said that, in my sport (climbing) strength isn't everything and women have climbed some of the hardest routes in the world. Lynn Hill is still the only person, man or woman, to have free-climbed two of the pitches on the Nose on El Capitan. Still, on average, men do better, and I suspect it comes back to the hunter-killer 'design' of a man: kill prey for the tribe, kill other tribes for land. Do better than everything else.
Also, timed tests are biased against women, since women are taught to be more deliberative and less decisive. When the same tests are untimed, women do much better relative to men.
The timing of tests just measures another facet of skill: in life, there isn't time to debate everything to the nth degree, and decisiveness is a very important skill. If you are correct that women are actually taught to be less decisive I find that a scandal. But it's the fault of the education system for being discriminatory, not the tests.
It's not, really. My email address is not available online, but I'm still quite contactable via email - I have a perlscript (with the To: email hardcoded in and some sanity checking on the inputs) that allows people to email me without ever seeing the address.
It's not yet another layer of interface, it's done as a theme engine. Theme engines are already a part of the desktop, they already do all the theming. This one just does it differently (by interpreting the KDE theme definition instead of the gnome one).
Nothing to see here, move along...
Yes, just like a catastrophic loss of all the fuel pumps would render them pretty useless. Onboard the plane there will presumably be multiple redundant GPS receivers. As for the satellites... Well, it's always possible that one might fail unexpectedly but there are several of them and a plane is in as good a place to see them as anything. It's extremely unlikely that they'd all fail simultaneously.
If all Cringely's predictions are this vague I'm embarrassed for him that he only gets 70% of them near enough to count as a success.
Besides which, linux has coped fine with SCO. Even if there were any infringing code (which, after all the contradictory, facile BS SCO has been spouting, I somehow doubt) it would be a very easy matter within the current kernel development framework to either rewrite the code or dike it out -- if SCO would say what, exactly, the code was. The problem isn't one of the linux development model, it's a problem with SCO and their blatant disregard for honesty, the truth or any kind of propriety. If there was some (unspecified) "other" development model used, we would still rely on SCO telling us what the infringing code was so that it could be fixed or removed.
Believe me, if there was a problem with the linux kernel development system that meant the whole thing could be brought down using lawyers, Microsoft would have torn us apart years ago. In terms of unpleasantness (and certainly in terms of competence) SCO has nothing on MS Legal.
You're seriously suggesting that it would require a 700MB scan to get the same image quality as a single printed photo in the magazine? For 700MB at 32 bits/pixel we can have 175 megapixels (if stored uncompressed). Given that the camera of choice for remote travel photographers is very often a 35mm of some description, whether SLR or rangefinder, that's about 10,000dpi, or roughly 2500dpi if printed at 6x4" in the magazine. That's just ludicrous. For one thing, that resolution of image would be hugely impractical for most of their readers to use, for another it's technically quite impractical for them to provide and finally that's without compression...
What they're far more likely to do is provide 1024x768 high-quality jpegs, at which filesize they could fit a great many onto a CD.
Arguing that the CD is the same as the magazine is akin to saying since my subscription entitles me to all issues of the magazine for a certain period, I am owed the CD because it is no different than the magazine and contains the issues that covers my subscription - something I think NGS would disagree with and point out the Cd is a different beast.
Not at all. Suppose NG were to publish their magazine in paperback and hardback format every month: I find it hard to believe someone could argue that the hardback format counted as a new work, yet clearly your subscription to one format of the magazine wouldn't entitle you to free copies of the other format. In the same way, why should your subscription to the existing dead-tree format magazine entitle you to the CD version? For my money, so long as the content (editiorials, articles, photos) is the same then it's the same magazine. Just because they bundle a swiss-army knife with one version or some search tools with another version shouldn't suddenly make the two versions new publications.
For one thing, it's predominantly a British probe. For another: what on earth is the connection between a space program and a war? Or are you going to bitch about everything done by every country that didn't support the war?
I wonder if it was running BSD? ;-P