The Internet does not exist. It is a figment of the imagination of people in power and the laymen who listen to them. I come from a glorious history of the BBS days (I ran a fairly large multinode Chicagoland BBS for years) where I witnessed the "birth" of the consumer Internet -- thousands of interconnected mini-networks that created a larger one. Now it is millions of mini-networks that make up this thing we call the Net, but it still doesn't exist. There are thousands of Internets, and there is no real way to regulate them.
You are correct, of course. Just as FidoNet was (is?) a collection of "nets" (as store-and-forward networks go), so is the Internet a bigger and more elaborate collection of Nets. There is no central control. There is no Net. Everyone network is just hooked to everyone else's network. That's it.
BTW--slightly OT here, but I just knew there was a reason I liked you. Which one did you run? ExecPC?
Don't do it -- don't give the Federal government ANY chance to regulate or require ANYTHING.
As if they had the power in the first place. The Commerce clause doesn't give them any more right to regulate the Internet than it does to the FCC to regulate the airwaves. But they just continually ignore the highest law in the land, referring to it as "archaic" and "out of date". The Founding Fathers must be rolling in their graves...
Not necessarily. Linux seems to be about new ideas and reinventing the wheel. Why are there so many file systems for example? There are valid reasons to have different interfaces.
Indeed. Why are there so many filesystems? Because there are good reasons for it. Some filesystems, like ISO9660, provide access to standards-based media (CDs, DVDs), others like ext3 are intended to provide advanced features like journalling and still retain backward compatibility with ext2 utilities. Still others, like ReiserFS and XFS are intended to provide the most advanced features and highest performance possible; ReiserFS as an overall enterprise-class server filesystem and XFS provides excellent performance for streaming media applications. JFS tries to add compatibility with AIX5L. Each filesystem addresses a different need.
This is also true of Xen vs. VMWare. VMWare was originally geared at doing desktop stuff; they later tuned things for server virtualization; but the aim has always been to provide as much compatibility with all the major guest and host operating systems. Xen is aimed at doing server virtualization with maximum performance -- the number and types of guest OSes isn't as important, as Xen basically only supports running Linux on Linux. Other OSes may work as well, but the main goals are different.
Ubuntu is not a company, it is a community-driven distribution. Canonical Ltd. is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.
Not true at all. If it weren't for the Ubuntu Technical Board, Ubuntu wouldn't be the highly polished, well-integrated desktop distribution that it is. They decide what packages make it into the distro, what features will make it into the release, and how the parts will integrate together. Additionally there are project-based teams that deal with the nuts and bolts and local teams that deal with the issues of L10n adn I18n. Some of these teams include people from Canonical, and others are comprised of strictly members of the community. It's not lopsided like some other Open Source projects with corporate backers, like OpenOffice.org or Mozilla or even the Fedora Core Project. In my mind, Ubuntu represents a good balance between community interest and corporate interest...the question becomes will Canonical, Ltd. make money on its investment or not?
This CRN article underscores the current hotness of the geek market.
Look at all the advertising on Slashdot, Linux.com, Digg, and other geek hangouts...believe me, marketeers care about the geek market, and if AMD has any smarts at all, so do they.
And certainly that 2.1GHZ conroe is sold as Core II 6600, which means intel is cheating, because its only as fast as an A64 5000. Do you get the point? Clockspeed is so yesterday. Just forget it.
In a world where you were running true CISC chips and every instruction took at least one clock cycle, and most took several, clock speed was everything. Now you have superscalar instructions, dual cores, special optimizations for multimedia, 3D graphics, etc., and well, clock speed doesn't seem to mean much anymore, except perhaps to distinguish between different generations of one particular line of chips.
Benchmarking with real-world apps is where it's at. How does this chip perform for gaming, vs. how does that chip perform for video editing and playback? It's all about your application, and you need to decide what chip you need based on what you're going to do with it -- and that's the same for any piece of hardware these days, and has been for many years. It's just that it used to be that usually what you needed was the bleeding edge high-performance CPU, and now things are a lot more diverse. AMD and Intel make different lines of chips aimed at different sets of users. Add to that the fact that systems makers are making machines optimized and targeted at different users and it's a different world than it was even just a few years ago.
I see CPUs and systems become more and more specialized -- while many gamers have one machine they use for games and another for e-mail and Web, you'll start to see people buying "video editing" computers and "PVR" computers, and mobile devices for e-mail, and another machine for office apps. It's already starting to happen and the trend seems to be continuing.
... But hopefully they'll kick the ATI driver team up the arse and get a decent set of drivers out (for Windows and Linux).
Modded funny? I don't think so.
I think AMD knows that the Linux crowd is amongst their biggest fans. Let's face it, geeks like the underdog, especially when they produce competitive or even in some cases superior products than the market leaders. That's one of the reason's for Apple's recent successes on the Macintosh platform. Seriously.
Maybe AMD will make their ATI division really appeal to us and open source their drivers. If they did, the crucial thing is that they will eat NVidia for lunch in the geek market.
People on/. are always downplaying the geek market, but we're very affluent... especially when companies realize that we affect the buying decisions of everyone around us. When we recommend a product, it goes.
Heck, right now you can even get a 1.8Ghz Intel Core Due for less than what R^3 wants for the 1.53 Ghz Celeron M. You can't even get an Intel Core Duo on the R^3 model.
Screw that.
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
tried using GIMP with Inkscape for a while, but gave up out of frustration when I realized how much it was disturbing my workflow because of this one missing feature! When I was asked to "make this box a little smaller and shift its drop shadow to the left", I had to delete several layers generated by the above plugin, select the remaining effect layers and the one containing the box, move and resize them all, then reapply the plugin with a different angle on the drop shadow. All I had to do in Photoshop was move and resize the box and change the drop-shadow angle - dynamic rendering took care of the rest for me.
The script-fu plugin you mention...I downloaded it and installed it into GIMP's scripts directory, and I see what you're saying. The script makes certain things easier, yes, and it does so by copying layers and then linking them to the original and so forth. Nothing you couldn't have done by hand -- I've used these same techniques for years, but it is nice and convenient to have it all one in package.
I will say, though, that while, yes, you have to basically start over with the effects if you change or resize the box (or text, which makes you have to re-apply ALL the effects;), it's not that that bad. In fact, it's a lot easier than it could have been had you not used the script-fu.
Sure it's easier in Photoshop, but what did you save? 30 seconds or so? It's not like you had to start over and redo the whole thing just because you didn't have Photoshop's layer effects...it was more of a minor inconvenience.
But that's what it boils down to -- What are your priorities? If you want a stable and secure platform, an OS and application set that you have the freedom to change yourself, and the piece of mind that you aren't putting money into Microsoft's swindling coffers, use GIMP and Linux. If, OTOH, that extra 30 seconds to one minute or so to change the drop shadow really bugs you that much, use Photoshop on Windows. Or better yet, on Mac OS X -- I guess 2 outta 3 ain't bad!
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
They are the original 'layer effects' and that's where the plugins that let you do stroke, emboss, bevel, etc. get their functionality from. PSPI will let you use any Photoshop plugins that do these layer effects, whether included with Photoshop/Fireworks, or from a third party plugin. Of course, all this assumes you know how to get PSPI up and running with the plugins in the first place, but it's not really all that difficult if you follow the instructions provided.
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
GIMP includes the 'core' layer effects in the layers dialog under the dubiously-labelled 'Mode:' selection. All the standard ones, Multiply, divide, dissolve, colors, etc. are there. With the 'Opacity' slider, you can control alpha blending.
If you need to use some of the third party plugins for Photoshop, there's a GIMP plugin that will let you use Photoshop plugins in gimp called pspi that will let you use just about any third-party Photoshop plugins, even on Linux.
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
I would love to recommend it as a free tool to my friends that do this sort of work 45 hours a week. But I can't. Not due to any single missing feature but because Artists are not inherently computer-people. It's not just a list manipulators to them, it's a set of tools like pencils or brushes-in-the-hand that they have invested their thinking in.
I've used GIMP for several years now for professional compositing work, and the thing I have to wonder about is this: Why do so many people think that this tool is so different from Photoshop? You mention pencils and brushes, these concepts both exist in GIMP.
Besides, for those whoe REALLY want something that is less of a learning curve, there's always GimpShop. Honestly, I can work with either, but I think I actually prefer the native GIMP interface. I think it's easier.
If that's the best example they can come up with... Geezz, malware writers probably eat cereal, too. Why not blame Kellogg's?
And they probably use the Win32 SDK, too. Maybe we could blame Microsoft. You know, I bet they use SMTP-based e-mail to communicate, too! We should blame Jon Postel for writing RFC 821!
Ooh! I'll bet they use Intel processors, too! And AMD! Hang 'em all, I say!
Perhaps there needs to be some catchy name for this type of attack, but really it's just a new example of the common overflow bug.
How's about "programmer dumbass attack"? Seems quite apt, to me. Any programmer worth his salt knows that he has to check for invalid data, yet so many software developers (both open source and closed source) let code go to production levels that fails to perform even the most basic of validations.
Maybe we need to send a bunch of programmers back to basic training! "Security boot camp"! Only let's make it real tough: make them all write basic currency conversion programs and for every piece of invalid data that makes it through without being validated, that program's author loses a finger! That'll teach 'em!:-P
Unfortunately, while Xen requires a modified OS in order to run. While Xen runs most Linux distros fabulously with their modified Linux kernel, Xen will not run Windows as a guest OS.
OTOH, there is QEMU, which will run a whole slew of guest OSes on Linux or any other OS without modifications to either the host or the guest. Add in the (unfortunately) non-Free QEMU accelerator, and you've got an virtualized Windows (XP or 2000) that runs as well as it would with VMWare.
Lesbian couples can now eliminate the external sperm doner and Heather can have two mommies who are both her biological parents. All children will be girls,
w00t! This'll give the feminist movement new steam! What do we need men for? Wait...what am I saying...?
At some point you have to trust someone, unfortunately. The only way to be completely sure, as Ken Thompson himself points out in a roundabout way, is to build a computer and all of its software (include firmware, microcode, etc.) completely from scratch, using no one else's software at all, since such malware could even be inserted into firmware or even the CPUs microcode. Let me just say that the task would be next to impossible today, even for the DOD.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, of course. Just as FidoNet was (is?) a collection of "nets" (as store-and-forward networks go), so is the Internet a bigger and more elaborate collection of Nets. There is no central control. There is no Net. Everyone network is just hooked to everyone else's network. That's it.
BTW--slightly OT here, but I just knew there was a reason I liked you. Which one did you run? ExecPC?
As if they had the power in the first place. The Commerce clause doesn't give them any more right to regulate the Internet than it does to the FCC to regulate the airwaves. But they just continually ignore the highest law in the land, referring to it as "archaic" and "out of date". The Founding Fathers must be rolling in their graves...
Nah. Most of those burned through all their VC, going bankrupt in the late 90s/early 2000s, all of which caused the stock market to tank.
Indeed. Why are there so many filesystems? Because there are good reasons for it. Some filesystems, like ISO9660, provide access to standards-based media (CDs, DVDs), others like ext3 are intended to provide advanced features like journalling and still retain backward compatibility with ext2 utilities. Still others, like ReiserFS and XFS are intended to provide the most advanced features and highest performance possible; ReiserFS as an overall enterprise-class server filesystem and XFS provides excellent performance for streaming media applications. JFS tries to add compatibility with AIX5L. Each filesystem addresses a different need.
This is also true of Xen vs. VMWare. VMWare was originally geared at doing desktop stuff; they later tuned things for server virtualization; but the aim has always been to provide as much compatibility with all the major guest and host operating systems. Xen is aimed at doing server virtualization with maximum performance -- the number and types of guest OSes isn't as important, as Xen basically only supports running Linux on Linux. Other OSes may work as well, but the main goals are different.
Not true at all. If it weren't for the Ubuntu Technical Board, Ubuntu wouldn't be the highly polished, well-integrated desktop distribution that it is. They decide what packages make it into the distro, what features will make it into the release, and how the parts will integrate together. Additionally there are project-based teams that deal with the nuts and bolts and local teams that deal with the issues of L10n adn I18n. Some of these teams include people from Canonical, and others are comprised of strictly members of the community. It's not lopsided like some other Open Source projects with corporate backers, like OpenOffice.org or Mozilla or even the Fedora Core Project. In my mind, Ubuntu represents a good balance between community interest and corporate interest...the question becomes will Canonical, Ltd. make money on its investment or not?
$80,000-$100,000 a year.
You're kidding, right? I wouldn't be so sure.
According to this Washington Post article:
This telephony online article is 4 years old, but believe me, the love is still there.
This CRN article underscores the current hotness of the geek market.
Look at all the advertising on Slashdot, Linux.com, Digg, and other geek hangouts...believe me, marketeers care about the geek market, and if AMD has any smarts at all, so do they.
In a world where you were running true CISC chips and every instruction took at least one clock cycle, and most took several, clock speed was everything. Now you have superscalar instructions, dual cores, special optimizations for multimedia, 3D graphics, etc., and well, clock speed doesn't seem to mean much anymore, except perhaps to distinguish between different generations of one particular line of chips.
Benchmarking with real-world apps is where it's at. How does this chip perform for gaming, vs. how does that chip perform for video editing and playback? It's all about your application, and you need to decide what chip you need based on what you're going to do with it -- and that's the same for any piece of hardware these days, and has been for many years. It's just that it used to be that usually what you needed was the bleeding edge high-performance CPU, and now things are a lot more diverse. AMD and Intel make different lines of chips aimed at different sets of users. Add to that the fact that systems makers are making machines optimized and targeted at different users and it's a different world than it was even just a few years ago.
I see CPUs and systems become more and more specialized -- while many gamers have one machine they use for games and another for e-mail and Web, you'll start to see people buying "video editing" computers and "PVR" computers, and mobile devices for e-mail, and another machine for office apps. It's already starting to happen and the trend seems to be continuing.
Modded funny? I don't think so.
I think AMD knows that the Linux crowd is amongst their biggest fans. Let's face it, geeks like the underdog, especially when they produce competitive or even in some cases superior products than the market leaders. That's one of the reason's for Apple's recent successes on the Macintosh platform. Seriously.
Maybe AMD will make their ATI division really appeal to us and open source their drivers. If they did, the crucial thing is that they will eat NVidia for lunch in the geek market.
People on
So what's Kaspersky doing that's making it so much better? Or was the study paid for by Kaspersky? It sounds suspiciously like FUD to me.
Heck, right now you can even get a 1.8Ghz Intel Core Due for less than what R^3 wants for the 1.53 Ghz Celeron M. You can't even get an Intel Core Duo on the R^3 model.
Screw that.
tried using GIMP with Inkscape for a while, but gave up out of frustration when I realized how much it was disturbing my workflow because of this one missing feature! When I was asked to "make this box a little smaller and shift its drop shadow to the left", I had to delete several layers generated by the above plugin, select the remaining effect layers and the one containing the box, move and resize them all, then reapply the plugin with a different angle on the drop shadow. All I had to do in Photoshop was move and resize the box and change the drop-shadow angle - dynamic rendering took care of the rest for me.
;), it's not that that bad. In fact, it's a lot easier than it could have been had you not used the script-fu.
The script-fu plugin you mention...I downloaded it and installed it into GIMP's scripts directory, and I see what you're saying. The script makes certain things easier, yes, and it does so by copying layers and then linking them to the original and so forth. Nothing you couldn't have done by hand -- I've used these same techniques for years, but it is nice and convenient to have it all one in package.
I will say, though, that while, yes, you have to basically start over with the effects if you change or resize the box (or text, which makes you have to re-apply ALL the effects
Sure it's easier in Photoshop, but what did you save? 30 seconds or so? It's not like you had to start over and redo the whole thing just because you didn't have Photoshop's layer effects...it was more of a minor inconvenience.
But that's what it boils down to -- What are your priorities? If you want a stable and secure platform, an OS and application set that you have the freedom to change yourself, and the piece of mind that you aren't putting money into Microsoft's swindling coffers, use GIMP and Linux. If, OTOH, that extra 30 seconds to one minute or so to change the drop shadow really bugs you that much, use Photoshop on Windows. Or better yet, on Mac OS X -- I guess 2 outta 3 ain't bad!
They are the original 'layer effects' and that's where the plugins that let you do stroke, emboss, bevel, etc. get their functionality from. PSPI will let you use any Photoshop plugins that do these layer effects, whether included with Photoshop/Fireworks, or from a third party plugin. Of course, all this assumes you know how to get PSPI up and running with the plugins in the first place, but it's not really all that difficult if you follow the instructions provided.
GIMP includes the 'core' layer effects in the layers dialog under the dubiously-labelled 'Mode:' selection. All the standard ones, Multiply, divide, dissolve, colors, etc. are there. With the 'Opacity' slider, you can control alpha blending.
If you need to use some of the third party plugins for Photoshop, there's a GIMP plugin that will let you use Photoshop plugins in gimp called pspi that will let you use just about any third-party Photoshop plugins, even on Linux.
I've used GIMP for several years now for professional compositing work, and the thing I have to wonder about is this: Why do so many people think that this tool is so different from Photoshop? You mention pencils and brushes, these concepts both exist in GIMP.
Besides, for those whoe REALLY want something that is less of a learning curve, there's always GimpShop. Honestly, I can work with either, but I think I actually prefer the native GIMP interface. I think it's easier.
And they probably use the Win32 SDK, too. Maybe we could blame Microsoft. You know, I bet they use SMTP-based e-mail to communicate, too! We should blame Jon Postel for writing RFC 821!
Ooh! I'll bet they use Intel processors, too! And AMD! Hang 'em all, I say!
How's about "programmer dumbass attack"? Seems quite apt, to me. Any programmer worth his salt knows that he has to check for invalid data, yet so many software developers (both open source and closed source) let code go to production levels that fails to perform even the most basic of validations.
Maybe we need to send a bunch of programmers back to basic training! "Security boot camp"! Only let's make it real tough: make them all write basic currency conversion programs and for every piece of invalid data that makes it through without being validated, that program's author loses a finger! That'll teach 'em!
Unfortunately, while Xen requires a modified OS in order to run. While Xen runs most Linux distros fabulously with their modified Linux kernel, Xen will not run Windows as a guest OS. OTOH, there is QEMU, which will run a whole slew of guest OSes on Linux or any other OS without modifications to either the host or the guest. Add in the (unfortunately) non-Free QEMU accelerator, and you've got an virtualized Windows (XP or 2000) that runs as well as it would with VMWare.
Dude. You owe me a keyboard! That was the funniest damned thing I've read all day.
LOL. I don't know why nobody bothers to google for it before they try calling it. Maybe it just looks innocuous enough... ;)
Does anyone else see the irony in the original poster's nick?
I just knew Microsoft would rue the day that it hired Duke Nukem Forever's release manager
Right. Testing will be 80% done by January, making Windows Vista the most thoroughly tested Microsoft operating system ever.
At some point you have to trust someone, unfortunately. The only way to be completely sure, as Ken Thompson himself points out in a roundabout way, is to build a computer and all of its software (include firmware, microcode, etc.) completely from scratch, using no one else's software at all, since such malware could even be inserted into firmware or even the CPUs microcode. Let me just say that the task would be next to impossible today, even for the DOD.