Yes, yes, we know what a botnet is; and VNC. It's stretching it a bit to think this "super hacker" was doing all this stuff on a 56K dial up and 4 bit VNC don't you think ?
And one would assume that a simple gun or just a normal bomb will be sufficient for state-sanctioned assassinations, no?
Yeah, I would have thought so. So why did the Russian government use radioactive material to attack someone in a foreign country ? Don't you think that the trail (which spread to several places in London) could be likened to a dirty bomb ? And how many places can you get that stuff ? Two or three, which makes it highly likely to be state sanctioned. Do you think that's a fair comparison, Russia can assassinate someone in your country using a highly contaminating radioactive toxin against trying to extradite a gangster ?
Been reading/watching too many thriller novels/movies, are we? Read before you post!
Isn't that what I'm implying ? He's scanning 65k machines via his botnet, running password checkers in just over 8 minutes. And he checks the IP addresses of all connected machines and can find whether they are military bases or not, 'cause he's got a list of military IP addresses ?
The third item sounds plausible if he turns the VNC bit depth way, way down
So he has VNC turned down to 4 bits but he can clearly see something is not man made ? Why would VNC judder ? The worst I've had is parts of the screen refreshing very slowly - but he's viewing a static image. And on this super slow connection it just so happens that the first picture he pulls up has the juicy details he's after ? Please. What about the bit where he says "although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up" and "no rivets, no seams" ? Can you see individual rivets on the space shuttle or on the ISS from the higher quality, official NASA footage ?
some poor guy noticed his computer acting up on his own, and chatted with the cracker by opening up a text editor and taking turns typing. All of this is very plausible
Read the article, it's not "some guy" it's a "network engineer", in NASA, who thinks it's normal for someone else to be using his computer ? And what, he just fires up WordPad for a chat, as you normally do when someone is hacking your machine ?
So basically he's being punished because he embarrased a US institution that should know better about computer security. You have got to be joking! He has only embarrassed himself, and now the joke is on him. Read this interview:
He scanned 65,000 machines in about "8 minutes" by "tying together other people's machines" using a 56k dial up connection
During a hacking escapade he chatted to an engineer who "saw" him, via WordPad
His connection was so slow he wrote a clever program that "turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering". Juddering ?! What kind of display was he using, a slide projector ?
He couldn't save any of the pictures he downloaded but despite the "juddering" low resolution "It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made" and what with the slow connection, when he got cut off "I saw the guy's hand move across."
C'mon, this guy is an utter joke, none of the above is plausible. If any of these claims were anywhere near true then he is a script kiddy at best. Mentally unstable more like.
See, some crazy Russian murdered another Russian spy in London with some nasty radioactive poison. Pretty serious right? Yep, a hell of a lot more serious than some gangster boss living in the UK is when a foreign government sanctions the use of radioactive materials on foreign soil. This is no mere assassination. What if the UK dropped a dirty bomb to the home address of the prime suspect in Russia ? That would be an act of war, wouldn't it ?
Nothing gets my ire more than the supposedly super serious ad that goes "Don't make a recording of this film because your equipment MIGHT be confiscated and you MAY be asked to accompany a police office to answer some questions". Nothing like a completely vague threat with dubious claims to keep the population in line. Well, my primary school teacher did say that we were the worst class that she's had to teach in the last 3 years...
I work in a software company, and I can assure you that we would be writing just as much software if there were no software patents.?
The chances are you aren't checking patents to see if the algorithm you just implemented is already patented. It's unreasonable most of the time.
The way the system works, the author must write a clear explanation of the invention but then they can shroud it with rarely used terms, give it an awkward or vague title; finally a lawyer turns it into legally correct but very confusing terms in order to make sure you get maximum scope. Reading patents is asking for a headache.
But this is exactly what you do with patents with the current system. You file your invention and then hit someone on the head with it. This is exactly what Microsoft is doing. I agree with Linus and others that the probability is that 90% of them are trivial, but if you tell someone what patents they are infringing you are just giving them the opportunity to work around the patent and you can't beat them on the head with it. That's why Microsoft have taken this approach.
Also, we have NEVER wondered how to write a particular algorithm, then found the solution in some patent disclosure document. Do you realize how absurd that sounds? In a Utopian world, patents would be written nicely and you would simply search the patent database and quickly find if someone has had your idea before or solved a similar problem.
Can someone please explain to me how software patents "promote science and the useful arts?"
Sure, it's the basic idea for all patents: in order to disseminate inventions and ideas the government allows individuals to get a time limited monopoly on the idea. In order to do so, the individual must publish the working details of the invention so that after the monopoly expires other people can use it. Arguably, at the initial publishing stage other people can see your idea and think of other techniques, inspired by your technological advances. The idea is that everyone knows how new inventions work rather than being kept secret and hidden away for a long period of time.
The downside is that it's an all or nothing system. If I have a great idea I patent it (costly) other people might infringe on it anyway (they have deeper wallets than me), someone might have invented it before me but I didn't know about it, I may not be able to get it to market on time and the duration of the monopoly is vastly reduced. If I try to keep it secret until I am ready someone else might patent it.
Your problem is not with software patents per se, they could potentially be useful. The OSS community is fighting a battle by publishing it's work immediately thus rendering it prior art and unpatentable.
It's the way the patent system is implemented that is the problem, allowing frivolous and obvious ideas to be protected. As an inventor, if there is a chance your idea can be patented then you should probably try. At the end of the day, the US patent office gets lots of work, money, the lawyers are happy etc etc.
Getting constitutional lawyers to change the US patent office ? Would it work ?
No you can't, "The yellow crank, while cute, in the end proved impractical; it migrated to the AC adapter as it also morphed into one or more other types of human-power devices."
Quote (my emphasis): It seems to me that they could probably get the first batch paid for by us geeks who have been drooling over the OLPC hardware for a while.
Pray tell, which aspect of the OLPC hardware have you been drooling over ?
The 7.5 inch pseudo-color screen, the lack of hard disk, low memory, etc ? I'm confused.
As an example of what can be done with a low cost computing platform, I'm as interested as the next geek but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's spittle producing stuff, isn't it ?
It's designed for kids and people who have never used a computer before. How did you come to post on Slashdot if you want to run Sugar (apart from inquisitiveness) ?
just pointing out that you can't always use Europe as a gauge for success.;-)
"Firefox usage near 25% in Europe" - how is that not a gauge for success ?
I would say that means about 1/4 of users in Europe are running Firefox, so
in Europe, as a gauge of success I reckon that you can quite clearly use
such results to indicate how successful this result is. OK ?
SFX magazine is well known for it's love of Serenity/Firefly. You only have to read a single issue to know this.
SFX is also known for it's Farscape addiction. I'm surprised they didn't manage to get Peacekeeper Wars into the poll.
The only interesting thing about this article is how survey results can be influenced by current trends. In 10 years will
anyone remember Serenity or will they remember Star Wars ?
> with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga
Amiga had tabbed browsing long before the concept came to Netscape/Mozilla. I think Opera was (one of ?) the first and IBrowse on the Amiga was very very soon afterwards. So you could have done tabbed browsing on your Amiga but I doubt you could have done 6 Slashdot tabs even if Amiga had support for CSS, because the pages are pretty big even for other platforms.
>> because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive
The parent is wrong, viruses came from people swapping vast quantities of infected cracked games, not from the design of the disk drive. In fact, the floppy drive which could detect if a disk was in the drive coupled with an OS that reacted to it was a good feature. No more "insert disk and then click OK" dialogues, just "Insert disk".
> Did the Amiga hardware include a motorized floppy drive similar to the Apple Macintosh floppy drive?
If you mean motorised eject then no. These weren't "standard" x86 drives; I don't know about other differences but you could store 880 KB on a formatted floppy or 1.76 MB on the rare high density drives.
As someone who has made a "backwards" move in the past and is doing another one right now; I'd say
that you need to be clear in your own mind what you intend to get out of it and make sure that in the big picture it is a forwards move.
Otherwise you may just be putting off the inevitable. Like another poster said, you may find the job you think you want is
nothing like your understanding of it.
If you had a specialism in area X, moved to systems work but now are thinking about going back to X then this
does suggest you'll end up back in systems after a short time.
When I made my so-called backwards moves, I made sure there was also a change of direction and also a contingency if it
wasn't all I expected it to be; usually just a backup plan about what I want to do next and some thought into how to do it.
If your backup plan is "return to systems" then you clearly haven't thought things through.
In 5 years time when you move on from the engineering job, a lot of people will be asking why your resume shows you left a much higher paying, more responsible, better job for a lower one. What happened that was so bad ? Were you fired ?...
No, the rich elite in Bangkok were sick of the PM elected by the rural majority, because he was taxing them heavily for social services
No, the rural majority were equally sick of him, apart from in a few places. Anyone with any sense could easily see that his actions after his failed fake election were plain dubious (placing himself as stand-in PM and then not doing anything to change the situation).
Thailand is a constitutional monarchy where the King has no actual power. Rumors have it that the Royal Family didn't learn that a coup had actually taken place until after it happened
I fully agree that it is very likely they didn't learn about it until afterwards. But to the point, the king did support it and without his support it would not have been possible. If he had said to the generals "please roll back your tanks to your bases and allow the people to run the country" they most definitely would have done so.
More likely, he is canceling this because the last thing a military dictatorship wants is informed citizens.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
The military have always been in charge, what makes you think Thailand was not
a military state ? Did you never wonder why Thai Police uniforms look similar to army uniforms ?
The military took over because they, and the people were sick of their duely elected Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra,
running the country so badly, doing dodgy deals, faking a re-election, indulging in nepotism. Thousands of people were turning
up to protests in Lumphini Park every week.
The King would not go along with the military on this unless it was good for the people.
More likely he is cancelling OLPC because he doesn't understand it, doesn't have the money for it or industry "explained" to him why it's not a good idea.
The FSF is the Free Software Foundation... It isn't some nebulous movement.
Well done! I would never have known that, except, I did. That's why I said "To me".
When you use the prefix "to me" it means that this is your personal impression of something.
It is not an invitation to pedants.
Novell will then be forced to choose to continue using the old frozen GPL v.2 versions, or to keep up with the everyone else and use the newer GPL v.3 versions which would force them (or rather Microsoft) to back out of the Microsoft deal
Even if we assume that Microsoft are only "quite" naive, I find it rather hard to believe that they would pay good money to Novell for the rights to software that Novell do not own the rights to and cannot deliver under GPL 3.
So, either Novell and Microsoft were so dumb they signed up to a deal they cannot complete or perhaps the actual deal they signed is something a bit more sensible than most/.'ers think. In the first case it's not worth worrying about and the second case doesn't hurt OSS/GNU/FSF anyway so everyone can chill out.
> The end of the world is not nigh
And it's not ni! either (OK. Monty Python reference over)
When are FUD-crazed/. readers going to realise...
1. Novell does not own Linux. They do some deal with Microsoft, so what ? They got some free lunches (probably).
2. If mono is more compatible with.net (I don't care but I'm sure someone will) then it's a good thing, right ?
3. Are Novell really p***ing off FSF ? Who are the FSF ? To me FSF is some nebulous movement, it's certainly not an organisation that's right now organising protests in the street.
4. Does anyone really care ? If Novell and FSF don't talk, how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ?
They can't, as long as they respect the licencing.
5. If Novell keep pumping out a few decent bits and pieces of Linux software then can't we be happy with that ?
6. Microsoft haven't pulled a fast one. I'm ready to believe that MS needed compatibility with the rest of the world because OpenOffice.org etc are just getting to strong. They're not the monopoly they used to be. Look at Firefox if you need another example.
OK, OK, PDF is not a standard but that's not what I said.
What I said was
>> Getting something like XPS into printers would not make it a standard.
And I still say that getting XPS into a printer would not standardize it. Getting an international standards body to ratify it and publishing a document that describes it in detail is the way to go.
There is a lot of hardware that implements non-standard standards and they suck.
> If people were instead targeting frozen implementions inside printer firmwares
> The reason it would be great to get it in printers is that it would force it to be a STANDARD
Getting something like XPS into printers would not make it a standard.
If you want to make it a standard you need to put it in front of a standards
body, get it ratified and publish it so that people can use it.
Even standards aren't always that great, especially when you have to pay
extortionate costs just to read them or patent fees
to make an implementation.
Alternate columns are not dark; all the pixels are lit. The parallax barrier is stopping light but the width of each stripe of the barrier is tiny so the effect of "dark" columns is barely perceptible. If you took a normal LCD monitor and turned off alternate columns (subpixels or pixels) you wouldn't get eyestrain unless you are using tiny fonts - you probably get eyestrain anyway.
Wow, just think what might have happened if Sharp had used this in their other 'no glasses required' 3D displays (http://www.sharp3d.com/), wait a minute... (sorry about the sarcasm, try following the link)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, yes, we know what a botnet is; and VNC. It's stretching it a bit to think this "super hacker" was doing all this stuff on a 56K dial up and 4 bit VNC don't you think ?
And one would assume that a simple gun or just a normal bomb will be sufficient for state-sanctioned assassinations, no?Yeah, I would have thought so. So why did the Russian government use radioactive material to attack someone in a foreign country ? Don't you think that the trail (which spread to several places in London) could be likened to a dirty bomb ? And how many places can you get that stuff ? Two or three, which makes it highly likely to be state sanctioned. Do you think that's a fair comparison, Russia can assassinate someone in your country using a highly contaminating radioactive toxin against trying to extradite a gangster ?
Been reading/watching too many thriller novels/movies, are we? Read before you post!Isn't that what I'm implying ? He's scanning 65k machines via his botnet, running password checkers in just over 8 minutes. And he checks the IP addresses of all connected machines and can find whether they are military bases or not, 'cause he's got a list of military IP addresses ?
The third item sounds plausible if he turns the VNC bit depth way, way downSo he has VNC turned down to 4 bits but he can clearly see something is not man made ? Why would VNC judder ? The worst I've had is parts of the screen refreshing very slowly - but he's viewing a static image. And on this super slow connection it just so happens that the first picture he pulls up has the juicy details he's after ? Please. What about the bit where he says "although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up" and "no rivets, no seams" ? Can you see individual rivets on the space shuttle or on the ISS from the higher quality, official NASA footage ?
some poor guy noticed his computer acting up on his own, and chatted with the cracker by opening up a text editor and taking turns typing. All of this is very plausibleRead the article, it's not "some guy" it's a "network engineer", in NASA, who thinks it's normal for someone else to be using his computer ? And what, he just fires up WordPad for a chat, as you normally do when someone is hacking your machine ?
- He scanned 65,000 machines in about "8 minutes" by "tying together other people's machines" using a 56k dial up connection
- During a hacking escapade he chatted to an engineer who "saw" him, via WordPad
- His connection was so slow he wrote a clever program that "turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering". Juddering ?! What kind of display was he using, a slide projector ?
- He couldn't save any of the pictures he downloaded but despite the "juddering" low resolution "It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made" and what with the slow connection, when he got cut off "I saw the guy's hand move across."
C'mon, this guy is an utter joke, none of the above is plausible. If any of these claims were anywhere near true then he is a script kiddy at best. Mentally unstable more like. See, some crazy Russian murdered another Russian spy in London with some nasty radioactive poison. Pretty serious right? Yep, a hell of a lot more serious than some gangster boss living in the UK is when a foreign government sanctions the use of radioactive materials on foreign soil. This is no mere assassination. What if the UK dropped a dirty bomb to the home address of the prime suspect in Russia ? That would be an act of war, wouldn't it ?Absolutely.
Nothing gets my ire more than the supposedly super serious ad that goes "Don't make a recording of this film because your equipment MIGHT be confiscated and you MAY be asked to accompany a police office to answer some questions". Nothing like a completely vague threat with dubious claims to keep the population in line. Well, my primary school teacher did say that we were the worst class that she's had to teach in the last 3 years...
The chances are you aren't checking patents to see if the algorithm you just implemented is already patented. It's unreasonable most of the time.
The way the system works, the author must write a clear explanation of the invention but then they can shroud it with rarely used terms, give it an awkward or vague title; finally a lawyer turns it into legally correct but very confusing terms in order to make sure you get maximum scope. Reading patents is asking for a headache.
But this is exactly what you do with patents with the current system. You file your invention and then hit someone on the head with it. This is exactly what Microsoft is doing. I agree with Linus and others that the probability is that 90% of them are trivial, but if you tell someone what patents they are infringing you are just giving them the opportunity to work around the patent and you can't beat them on the head with it. That's why Microsoft have taken this approach.
Also, we have NEVER wondered how to write a particular algorithm, then found the solution in some patent disclosure document. Do you realize how absurd that sounds? In a Utopian world, patents would be written nicely and you would simply search the patent database and quickly find if someone has had your idea before or solved a similar problem.Sure, it's the basic idea for all patents: in order to disseminate inventions and ideas the government allows individuals to get a time limited monopoly on the idea. In order to do so, the individual must publish the working details of the invention so that after the monopoly expires other people can use it. Arguably, at the initial publishing stage other people can see your idea and think of other techniques, inspired by your technological advances. The idea is that everyone knows how new inventions work rather than being kept secret and hidden away for a long period of time.
The downside is that it's an all or nothing system. If I have a great idea I patent it (costly) other people might infringe on it anyway (they have deeper wallets than me), someone might have invented it before me but I didn't know about it, I may not be able to get it to market on time and the duration of the monopoly is vastly reduced. If I try to keep it secret until I am ready someone else might patent it.
Your problem is not with software patents per se, they could potentially be useful. The OSS community is fighting a battle by publishing it's work immediately thus rendering it prior art and unpatentable.
It's the way the patent system is implemented that is the problem, allowing frivolous and obvious ideas to be protected. As an inventor, if there is a chance your idea can be patented then you should probably try. At the end of the day, the US patent office gets lots of work, money, the lawyers are happy etc etc.
Getting constitutional lawyers to change the US patent office ? Would it work ?
> If the power goes out, you can crank-start it
No you can't, "The yellow crank, while cute, in the end proved impractical; it migrated to the AC adapter as it also morphed into one or more other types of human-power devices."
No crank.
Quote (my emphasis):
It seems to me that they could probably get the first batch paid for by us geeks who have been drooling over the OLPC hardware for a while.
Pray tell, which aspect of the OLPC hardware have you been drooling over ?
The 7.5 inch pseudo-color screen, the lack of hard disk, low memory, etc ? I'm confused.
As an example of what can be done with a low cost computing platform, I'm as interested as the next geek but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's spittle producing stuff, isn't it ?
Why would you want to run Sugar ?
It's designed for kids and people who have never used a computer before. How did you come to post on Slashdot if you want to run Sugar (apart from inquisitiveness) ?
just pointing out that you can't always use Europe as a gauge for success. ;-)
"Firefox usage near 25% in Europe" - how is that not a gauge for success ?
I would say that means about 1/4 of users in Europe are running Firefox, so in Europe, as a gauge of success I reckon that you can quite clearly use such results to indicate how successful this result is. OK ?
SFX magazine is well known for it's love of Serenity/Firefly. You only have to read a single issue to know this. SFX is also known for it's Farscape addiction. I'm surprised they didn't manage to get Peacekeeper Wars into the poll.
The only interesting thing about this article is how survey results can be influenced by current trends. In 10 years will anyone remember Serenity or will they remember Star Wars ?
> Firefox with 6 Slashdot tabs and 1 gmail tab
> with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga
Amiga had tabbed browsing long before the concept came to Netscape/Mozilla. I think Opera was (one of ?) the first and IBrowse on the Amiga was very very soon afterwards. So you could have done tabbed browsing on your Amiga but I doubt you could have done 6 Slashdot tabs even if Amiga had support for CSS, because the pages are pretty big even for other platforms.
Precisely, you get your desktop up very fast after logging in, then you have a 5 minute wait while XP, er, finishes booting up.
>> because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive
The parent is wrong, viruses came from people swapping vast quantities of infected cracked games, not from the design of the disk drive. In fact, the floppy drive which could detect if a disk was in the drive coupled with an OS that reacted to it was a good feature. No more "insert disk and then click OK" dialogues, just "Insert disk".
> Did the Amiga hardware include a motorized floppy drive similar to the Apple Macintosh floppy drive?
If you mean motorised eject then no. These weren't "standard" x86 drives; I don't know about other differences but you could store 880 KB on a formatted floppy or 1.76 MB on the rare high density drives.
As someone who has made a "backwards" move in the past and is doing another one right now; I'd say that you need to be clear in your own mind what you intend to get out of it and make sure that in the big picture it is a forwards move. Otherwise you may just be putting off the inevitable. Like another poster said, you may find the job you think you want is nothing like your understanding of it.
If you had a specialism in area X, moved to systems work but now are thinking about going back to X then this does suggest you'll end up back in systems after a short time.
When I made my so-called backwards moves, I made sure there was also a change of direction and also a contingency if it wasn't all I expected it to be; usually just a backup plan about what I want to do next and some thought into how to do it. If your backup plan is "return to systems" then you clearly haven't thought things through. In 5 years time when you move on from the engineering job, a lot of people will be asking why your resume shows you left a much higher paying, more responsible, better job for a lower one. What happened that was so bad ? Were you fired ?...
Good luck!
No, the rich elite in Bangkok were sick of the PM elected by the rural majority, because he was taxing them heavily for social services
No, the rural majority were equally sick of him, apart from in a few places. Anyone with any sense could easily see that his actions after his failed fake election were plain dubious (placing himself as stand-in PM and then not doing anything to change the situation).
Thailand is a constitutional monarchy where the King has no actual power. Rumors have it that the Royal Family didn't learn that a coup had actually taken place until after it happened
I fully agree that it is very likely they didn't learn about it until afterwards. But to the point, the king did support it and without his support it would not have been possible. If he had said to the generals "please roll back your tanks to your bases and allow the people to run the country" they most definitely would have done so.
More likely, he is canceling this because the last thing a military dictatorship wants is informed citizens.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
The military have always been in charge, what makes you think Thailand was not a military state ? Did you never wonder why Thai Police uniforms look similar to army uniforms ?
The military took over because they, and the people were sick of their duely elected Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, running the country so badly, doing dodgy deals, faking a re-election, indulging in nepotism. Thousands of people were turning up to protests in Lumphini Park every week.
The King would not go along with the military on this unless it was good for the people.
More likely he is cancelling OLPC because he doesn't understand it, doesn't have the money for it or industry "explained" to him why it's not a good idea.
Do your homework.
The FSF is the Free Software Foundation... It isn't some nebulous movement.
Well done! I would never have known that, except, I did. That's why I said "To me". When you use the prefix "to me" it means that this is your personal impression of something. It is not an invitation to pedants.
Thank you.
Novell will then be forced to choose to continue using the old frozen GPL v.2 versions, or to keep up with the everyone else and use the newer GPL v.3 versions which would force them (or rather Microsoft) to back out of the Microsoft deal
/.'ers think. In the first case it's not worth worrying about and the second case doesn't hurt OSS/GNU/FSF anyway so everyone can chill out.
Even if we assume that Microsoft are only "quite" naive, I find it rather hard to believe that they would pay good money to Novell for the rights to software that Novell do not own the rights to and cannot deliver under GPL 3.
So, either Novell and Microsoft were so dumb they signed up to a deal they cannot complete or perhaps the actual deal they signed is something a bit more sensible than most
> The end of the world is not nigh
/. readers going to realise...
.net (I don't care but I'm sure someone will) then it's a good thing, right ?
And it's not ni! either (OK. Monty Python reference over)
When are FUD-crazed
1. Novell does not own Linux. They do some deal with Microsoft, so what ? They got some free lunches (probably).
2. If mono is more compatible with
3. Are Novell really p***ing off FSF ? Who are the FSF ? To me FSF is some nebulous movement, it's certainly not an organisation that's right now organising protests in the street.
4. Does anyone really care ? If Novell and FSF don't talk, how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ? They can't, as long as they respect the licencing.
5. If Novell keep pumping out a few decent bits and pieces of Linux software then can't we be happy with that ?
6. Microsoft haven't pulled a fast one. I'm ready to believe that MS needed compatibility with the rest of the world because OpenOffice.org etc are just getting to strong. They're not the monopoly they used to be. Look at Firefox if you need another example.
Was that a rant ? Sorry if it was.
> If I hired an engineer to do a building, I'd probably want accuracy to the inch.
The nearest inch ?
Where are you, Liberia ?
Inches are so 1790s (I read my own link you know).
Seriously though, one inch is nowhere near the accuracy you need to "do a building" as you quaintly put it.
Sorry, I'm too lazy to think of a humourous response to the sense of perspective thing.
OK, OK, PDF is not a standard but that's not what I said.
What I said was
>> Getting something like XPS into printers would not make it a standard.
And I still say that getting XPS into a printer would not standardize it. Getting an international standards body to ratify it and publishing a document that describes it in detail is the way to go.
There is a lot of hardware that implements non-standard standards and they suck.
> If people were instead targeting frozen implementions inside printer firmwares
Oh, you mean, like a standard ?
Getting something like XPS into printers would not make it a standard. If you want to make it a standard you need to put it in front of a standards body, get it ratified and publish it so that people can use it.
Even standards aren't always that great, especially when you have to pay extortionate costs just to read them or patent fees to make an implementation.
Alternate columns are not dark; all the pixels are lit. The parallax barrier is stopping light but the width of each stripe of the barrier is tiny so the effect of "dark" columns is barely perceptible. If you took a normal LCD monitor and turned off alternate columns (subpixels or pixels) you wouldn't get eyestrain unless you are using tiny fonts - you probably get eyestrain anyway.
Wow, just think what might have happened if Sharp had used this in their other 'no glasses required' 3D displays (http://www.sharp3d.com/), wait a minute... (sorry about the sarcasm, try following the link)