How long is it, before corporations begin to carve up the English dictionary and we won't be able to use a single word without following it with "(tm)"?
Too late. I just trademarked "TM" as a means of identifying a trademark. That means you need to put my "TM" after each "TM" you use. (No, you can't get out of it by using a Kleene star.)
Sorry, can't talk now. Got a meeting with my lawyers.
This would be like taking every word you ever said, taping it, and handing it over the the government. There it's put on permanent public display, for anyone and everyone to use against you whenver they need to.
What with everyone suing everyone nowadays, I wouldn't want to flame someone on Usenet, and then be sued for a few million dollars because I digitally signed it. Oops, made their case easier!
I think signing is great in the few places where it's necessary, but that's rare. You don't put your signature on every single word you speak; why would you want to do differently for digital communications?
Realistically, how long do you expect that to hold true?
Once a upon a time (in NY state, USA), it was legal for a person under twenty-one to possess alcohol, it was just illegal to sell it to them. Result: open parties in college dorms.
Then, somewhere around 1990, it became illegal to possess it, too. Result: drinking quietly in locked doors.
Jeez. If they could limit speed, why can't they set minimum speeds? Think of it:
Prevent idiots from driving 40mph in the fast lane. (If they could prevent the eternal left-blinker that would be great too, but maybe that's asking for too much.)
Prevent losers from slowing down to 15mph per-hour to "get a good look" at the accident or dude changing his tire.
Prevent total boneheads from stopping in the damn EZ-Pass toolboth lanes. ("Duh? Wheres the change bucket? Hello? Duh? Doris, there's no change bucket! Why don't they have a...")
Stop idiotic Boston pedestrians from jaywalking out in front of you- they're a lot more likely to actually use crosswalks if they know you can't stop!
Maybe it's just me, because the drivers in Boston just suck so much.
Last time I checked, I have to get my car inspected every year to make sure a minimum number of things are installed on my car: lights, good tires, etc. Cops can easily pull you over and say "your sticker is out-of-date" or "your light is out, go fix it now".
64 cent question: if a cop sees me speeding (and they can estimate speed very well by eye alone, don't let anyone else tell you otherwise), will he know?
Presumably, if you go to an inspection, they look to make sure you didn't mess with the device. If you did, you get fined, fail, or some other penalty.
Sure, I don't have to have to do these things. I could buy fresh tires and brakes, go to an inspection, and when I get home, put the bald ones back on. That way I'd never have to spend cash on tires again. I realize the difference between tires and a limiter- one's optional, one's not- but the point is it would be easier just to deal with it than play the swapping game.
I still think this is stupid idea, but never understimate the power of legislation to make stupid things happen.
It is time to refactor when making small changes causes more bugs than it fixes.
Simple, huh? It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is a prescription for running around in circles, like that gerbil you had in second grade. There is a vast difference between code that fails the minor-fix test above, and code You Think Is Bad.
This is the classic stovepipe system anti-pattern, and is caused when your code has too many intertwined and circular dependencies. When this happens, it's impossible to even predict how many areas will be affected by a given change. The code has reached the point of no return. (Note the original intent of object-oriented programmed is to reduce dependencies between varying systems.)
Of course, what most companies do that this point is hire a Mongolian Horde of programmers to fix things by brute-force, aka the "Warm Bodies" anti-pattern. By then, it's too late. Leave.
Unfortunately, as a junior developer, you probably shouldn't be making these decisions yourself; you'll only anger people above you. If there isn't a culture of refactoring when necessary, there's nothing that can be done. It must either always be there, or brought in and bought in from the top. Sadly, most PHBs do not understand this. I find it laughable when a PHB will hire 40 people for 4 years gang-banging the code, instead of having 3 or 4 smart people send a year refactoring.
X is designed for showing presentation-level graphics. HTML was designed for showing information at a higher level of abstraction. It leaves the layout unspecified; that's why it is so much smaller and faster.
Yes, of course there are layout hacks in HTML (tables, FONT, etc.) and proper layout (CSS) but you still don't have complete control over all pixels like in a regular app. You still don't know how big the window is, what fonts are available, what the screen size is, how many colors are available, etc, etc.
What's really needed is good, network-enabled Java clients, like Yahoo Games: you keep the presentation client-side, so just the information is sent across the wire.
...over here. Sure, it seems a little silly, but I wouldn't dismiss anyone who uses one. There are plenty of people who have hot-rod cars in sleeper exteriors because they like to suprise people at light-races, and there are plenty of people who dress up their cars because they like to show off.
Now, if you put a lame PC in a cool case, that's a different story. That's like putting ground effects on your Yugo.
Come on. You're responsible for looking out for yourself in this world. You have plenty of rights granted by the FCRA. Use them.
That means, you do go out and get a copy of your credit report every year, right? (Depending on which state you live, it might be even free.)
Make sure everything inside of it is what you expect. If not, call them up can fix it. Fix possible problems before they become real ones. You will need to do this before you buy a house, or car, so learn now while everything is still okay.
You won't believe what you see: my wife had credit charges from her mother, just because their names are similar (not even the same!). We had to call up and have these removed.
Additionally, you will see lots of bottom-feeding banks pinging your report for "pre-approved" offers. There were literally hundreds of credit checks by people that had no fucking business looking in there. Thankfully, you can call 1-888-5OPTOUT to stop this insanity. Do it now. They will mail you a form which you need to sign, but do it! Watch your "pre-approved" credit card snailmail spam drop to zero.
Okay, let's say they charge me five dollars a month to download any song I want. I would gladly pay for this if and only if:
1) The download is reliable
2) The encoding is good
Much like if I buy a CD, I expect the store to actually give me the CD when I give them the money (#1) and I expect the CD to not sound like absolute crap (#2). Okay, let's look at these two conditions, huh?
Download is reliable: right now, it takes me about 5-6 tries to get a song downloaded. Most of the connections either hang ("getting info...") or don't work ("user X is improperly configured"), the song is wrong ("great, Limp Bizkit with 75% of lyrics blanked out"), mistitled ("hey, Livin' La Vida Yoda doesn't sound like Weird Al!"), etc.
Encoding is good: right now, even if I'm careful to sort by time and download the longest one, 75% the encoding stinks. Either the last few seconds of the song is cut off, the rip is simply awful with distortion, or there are gaps in the middle. I need to sit and listen *carefully* to tell if it's a marginally decent rip.
The question is this: how can Napster address these issues, given their architecure? Answer: they can't. They would have to host music traditionally, from a central server, and that means they'd have to build the scalability for all zillion users instead of distributing across the users.
So, why use it? Right now, the time invested in compensating for 1 & 2 outweigh the price involved to get those one or two good tracks off of each CD. Moving to the pay model, it becomes much less compelling.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: record companies, I'll buy your MP3s if you make quality rips, have a large enough selection, provided at an affordable price, accurately titled, permanently located on a fast and stable server so I can link/bookmark it, and without any Draconian attempts to restrict fair use. That's the value that the record companies can best provide.
Guess what? Napster and this pay model can co-exist! If I really want a good rip, or get the whole album, I'll go pay. If I just want to sample, or don't mind taking extra time, I can go to Napster. I wish these dumb-ass companies would wake up already... I mean, this was obvious to me about one hour after using Napster.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft didn't invent much of the typographical technology you point to--most of it came from Apple, Adobe, Bitstream, and many other sources.
No, they didn't invent it. They did put money behind it, improved it, and stuck it in their OS. X never had decent font support because fonts are hard, and fonts cost real money.
They also did a good job at hinting these fonts at low monitor resolutions (75-100). Adobe and other font type suppliers didn't really care about this because their prime support is for high-resolution devices like printers. This is why, IMHO, TrueType fonts look better on screen than the equivalent Adobe fonts.
Think I'm an MS apologist? No. But I'll give 'em credit where I think they've done good work.
As for doing antialiasing behind the scenes in an X11 server, a hack like that may work most of the time, but it deviates from the definition and may break some applications.
How would it break the definition? What protocol message or Xlib API function does it break? Please tell me, because every X app I have, including GIMP, runs fine.
Now, if you're talking about the server-side font format, how does that matter to the client app at all? X may have a default cruddy font file format, but I don't see that affects the client in the least.
Re:Sounds really intuitive, no no, really.
on
3D GUI Project
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· Score: 1
The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized.
Actually, they got it almost right visually, but the interaction is completey wrong.
The start bar buttons have an oh-so-small border beneath them which completely negates the usability benefit of placing an item on the edge of the screen. The buttons may look "cooler" with the one-pixel border around them, but they're not any easier to track than any other button on the screen.
Apps doesn't need to be written to take advantage of anti-aliasing. I run an X server (not XFree86) that provides anti-aliased, hinted, TrueType fonts to all X legacy applications.
How? Well, the X server is Exceed and runs on Windows. I created font entires for Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, etc., in the X server. So, an X app could request to draw with Arial if it knew they existed (which almost none do). So, the trick is to make an alias for "helvetica", "times", and "courier", and point them to the MS fonts. Now, all the X apps get the scalabe TrueType fonts and don't need to know about them.
MS may stink at a certain things, but they did a good job on fonts. Their typography website is a great read.
My point is that if it can be done without protocol extensions on a PC X-server, it should possible to do it in XFree86. Granted, the Exceed server simply passes the font draw command to Windows, which has the TrueType renderer. But Exceed could use the FreeType render, right? Or can it already, and I'm just missing out because I can't figure out how to do it?
The released version doesn't get debugged every day!
Our internal development version is still under active development. We're adding new features and more scalablity every day. Those feaures are debugged before release.
TotalView probably does what you need. Other people have said it here, but I can add a little more info.
It's a parallel debugger, which means that it has built-in support for manipulating groups of objects, as if they were one: threads in a proceses, processes in a group, groups in a cluster, and so on. This means you don't need 20 windows to control a 20-thread app; we roll up an aggregated view into one window, commands work on the entire batch.
And yes, we support Linux, as well as almost every other Unix out there. You can snag a free demo license and download the bits from our website. And for those of you who like printf(), you can add them on-the-fly without recompiling. That saves time.
Disclosure: I am a developer on TotalView, but I do "eat my own dog food"- we use it every day on itself.
Wrong. I'm running an X server on NT, and it has a neat feature where I can map an X LFD onto a TrueType font. So all my X programs use perfectly scalalbe, anti-aliased fonts now, with no client modification. Duh squared.
There is nothing in X which prevents a server from rendering nice, anti-aliased fonts. It's a QOI issue.
Now, if non-PC X server vendors would just get off their butts and add *default* support for it...
Imlib alpha blends the image bits client side and sends the bits back to the server. This is Inefficient As Hell(tm), especially if you're on a remote display. Ever try to run GIMP across a dial-up connection?
Putting alpha-blending and anti-aliasing into the protocol allows the hard work to be done server side. That means 1) you don't push image bits over the wire and 2) the server hardware can accelerate it.
Also trying running MesaGL vs. hardware-accelerated glx to see the difference.
You have a far easier time if you work for a company that deploys you overseas first.
I used to work for a large multinational corporation and was deployed over in Germany for a summer. I know lots of people who have had much longer deployments. Some of which who have jumped ship and taken up full-time employment and residency overseas.
It is far easier to have someone else deal with all the hassles of doing this: moving all your stuff legally, getting various papers, work permits, taxes, and immunization, if someone else is footing the tab. This stuff is non-trivial, it takes many people, lawyers, and years to get it done right.
A deployment acts as a nice transition period; your company will pay you lots of extra money (per-diem), you can fly home occasionally for free, take time to learn the language, and bail out if you don't like it. It's much easier to look for a job overseas if you already live there, so you'll have more choices.
A big company like that will have lots of overseas projects, so you might even be able to pick where you want to go.
Sure, potential companies might pay for your expenses to fly out to interview and all you moving expenses. However, if you're already there, it makes you that much more marketable.
As for language, don't worry. European businesses workers mostly speak English; they need a common language to talk to other European countries. You'd be surprised how far you can get along without being able to speak the native language in a foreign country. Being able to read is far more important, and that's is relatively easy to learn on demand. For example, I can't speak much German (enough to order food, really) but I can read enough to run my own life when living there.
I haven't done any Windows GUI programming so I can't really compare, but GTK+ still has many distances measured in pixels. Getting resolution dependance out of our applications will take quite a long time.
The toolkit really needs support for geometry managment, which lays out things abstractly according to a preferred but unknown size. Even if the toolkit does support it, programmers don't always take advantage of it. Try changing the font of your favorite app or windoing system to 18-24 points to see. (Unreasonable, perhaps? Not if someone is sight-impaired.)
The other question I have is whether scalable graphics for the GUI is really feasible on existing 72 dpi displays with all the aliasing effects that implies.
Sure. Scaling is just done dumbly nowadays; it's quite possible nowadays to scale with minimal artifacts by using common 3D techniques such as anisotropic filtering. I have yet to see a windowing system that supports this nowadays, and integrates it with accelerated hardware.
I saw this in person at the SC2000 IBM booth a few days ago... the guy hawking it called it "Big Bertha". It was amazing. Seriously, no story can do it justice as you have to see it in person.
Unfortunately, they are going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year. The seller seemed confident that the price/availability would be going down/up very soon.
pr0n jokes aside, I know more than a few graphic artists who would rip out the liver of their best friends for one of these.
As for scalable graphics, this will be really interesting to see. One of Windows greater failings (IMHO) has always been its lack of geometry management. Most Windows apps basically nail things to specific X,Y positions in a dialog, rather than having a fluid layout which specifies relative attachments. (This is one area where Motif does something better than Windows). Geometry management scales with resolution or font size, where absoulte positioning doesn't.
Case 1: MS copy protects their products. Less people copy their products. When it comes time to audit/sue, there are less illegal versions to sue over.
Case 2: MS doesn't copy protect their product. More people copy their products. When it comes time to audit/sue, there are more illegal versions to sue over.
Slashdot Mirror
Too late. I just trademarked "TM" as a means of identifying a trademark. That means you need to put my "TM" after each "TM" you use. (No, you can't get out of it by using a Kleene star.)
Sorry, can't talk now. Got a meeting with my lawyers.
This would be like taking every word you ever said, taping it, and handing it over the the government. There it's put on permanent public display, for anyone and everyone to use against you whenver they need to.
What with everyone suing everyone nowadays, I wouldn't want to flame someone on Usenet, and then be sued for a few million dollars because I digitally signed it. Oops, made their case easier!
I think signing is great in the few places where it's necessary, but that's rare. You don't put your signature on every single word you speak; why would you want to do differently for digital communications?
Once a upon a time (in NY state, USA), it was legal for a person under twenty-one to possess alcohol, it was just illegal to sell it to them. Result: open parties in college dorms.
Then, somewhere around 1990, it became illegal to possess it, too. Result: drinking quietly in locked doors.
So how long until they take the next step?
- Prevent idiots from driving 40mph in the fast lane. (If they could prevent the eternal left-blinker that would be great too, but maybe that's asking for too much.)
- Prevent losers from slowing down to 15mph per-hour to "get a good look" at the accident or dude changing his tire.
- Prevent total boneheads from stopping in the damn EZ-Pass toolboth lanes. ("Duh? Wheres the change bucket? Hello? Duh? Doris, there's no change bucket! Why don't they have a...")
- Stop idiotic Boston pedestrians from jaywalking out in front of you- they're a lot more likely to actually use crosswalks if they know you can't stop!
Maybe it's just me, because the drivers in Boston just suck so much.64 cent question: if a cop sees me speeding (and they can estimate speed very well by eye alone, don't let anyone else tell you otherwise), will he know?
Presumably, if you go to an inspection, they look to make sure you didn't mess with the device. If you did, you get fined, fail, or some other penalty.
Sure, I don't have to have to do these things. I could buy fresh tires and brakes, go to an inspection, and when I get home, put the bald ones back on. That way I'd never have to spend cash on tires again. I realize the difference between tires and a limiter- one's optional, one's not- but the point is it would be easier just to deal with it than play the swapping game.
I still think this is stupid idea, but never understimate the power of legislation to make stupid things happen.
This is the classic stovepipe system anti-pattern, and is caused when your code has too many intertwined and circular dependencies. When this happens, it's impossible to even predict how many areas will be affected by a given change. The code has reached the point of no return. (Note the original intent of object-oriented programmed is to reduce dependencies between varying systems.)
Of course, what most companies do that this point is hire a Mongolian Horde of programmers to fix things by brute-force, aka the "Warm Bodies" anti-pattern. By then, it's too late. Leave.
Unfortunately, as a junior developer, you probably shouldn't be making these decisions yourself; you'll only anger people above you. If there isn't a culture of refactoring when necessary, there's nothing that can be done. It must either always be there, or brought in and bought in from the top. Sadly, most PHBs do not understand this. I find it laughable when a PHB will hire 40 people for 4 years gang-banging the code, instead of having 3 or 4 smart people send a year refactoring.
X is designed for showing presentation-level graphics. HTML was designed for showing information at a higher level of abstraction. It leaves the layout unspecified; that's why it is so much smaller and faster.
Yes, of course there are layout hacks in HTML (tables, FONT, etc.) and proper layout (CSS) but you still don't have complete control over all pixels like in a regular app. You still don't know how big the window is, what fonts are available, what the screen size is, how many colors are available, etc, etc.
What's really needed is good, network-enabled Java clients, like Yahoo Games: you keep the presentation client-side, so just the information is sent across the wire.
Proof or not, I was responding to the comment "it doesn't appear to be on ThinkGeek" with a statement of fact.
I couldn't care less about /.'s, or anyone's advertising motives... thanks to Junkbuster.
Now, if you put a lame PC in a cool case, that's a different story. That's like putting ground effects on your Yugo.
That means, you do go out and get a copy of your credit report every year, right? (Depending on which state you live, it might be even free.)
Make sure everything inside of it is what you expect. If not, call them up can fix it. Fix possible problems before they become real ones. You will need to do this before you buy a house, or car, so learn now while everything is still okay.
You won't believe what you see: my wife had credit charges from her mother, just because their names are similar (not even the same!). We had to call up and have these removed.
Additionally, you will see lots of bottom-feeding banks pinging your report for "pre-approved" offers. There were literally hundreds of credit checks by people that had no fucking business looking in there. Thankfully, you can call 1-888-5OPTOUT to stop this insanity. Do it now. They will mail you a form which you need to sign, but do it! Watch your "pre-approved" credit card snailmail spam drop to zero.
1) The download is reliable
2) The encoding is good
Much like if I buy a CD, I expect the store to actually give me the CD when I give them the money (#1) and I expect the CD to not sound like absolute crap (#2). Okay, let's look at these two conditions, huh?
Download is reliable: right now, it takes me about 5-6 tries to get a song downloaded. Most of the connections either hang ("getting info...") or don't work ("user X is improperly configured"), the song is wrong ("great, Limp Bizkit with 75% of lyrics blanked out"), mistitled ("hey, Livin' La Vida Yoda doesn't sound like Weird Al!"), etc.
Encoding is good: right now, even if I'm careful to sort by time and download the longest one, 75% the encoding stinks. Either the last few seconds of the song is cut off, the rip is simply awful with distortion, or there are gaps in the middle. I need to sit and listen *carefully* to tell if it's a marginally decent rip.
The question is this: how can Napster address these issues, given their architecure? Answer: they can't. They would have to host music traditionally, from a central server, and that means they'd have to build the scalability for all zillion users instead of distributing across the users.
So, why use it? Right now, the time invested in compensating for 1 & 2 outweigh the price involved to get those one or two good tracks off of each CD. Moving to the pay model, it becomes much less compelling.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: record companies, I'll buy your MP3s if you make quality rips, have a large enough selection, provided at an affordable price, accurately titled, permanently located on a fast and stable server so I can link/bookmark it, and without any Draconian attempts to restrict fair use. That's the value that the record companies can best provide.
Guess what? Napster and this pay model can co-exist! If I really want a good rip, or get the whole album, I'll go pay. If I just want to sample, or don't mind taking extra time, I can go to Napster. I wish these dumb-ass companies would wake up already... I mean, this was obvious to me about one hour after using Napster.
I must be nuts, 'cause these look anti-aliased to me.
No, they didn't invent it. They did put money behind it, improved it, and stuck it in their OS. X never had decent font support because fonts are hard, and fonts cost real money.
They also did a good job at hinting these fonts at low monitor resolutions (75-100). Adobe and other font type suppliers didn't really care about this because their prime support is for high-resolution devices like printers. This is why, IMHO, TrueType fonts look better on screen than the equivalent Adobe fonts. Think I'm an MS apologist? No. But I'll give 'em credit where I think they've done good work.
As for doing antialiasing behind the scenes in an X11 server, a hack like that may work most of the time, but it deviates from the definition and may break some applications.
How would it break the definition? What protocol message or Xlib API function does it break? Please tell me, because every X app I have, including GIMP, runs fine.
Now, if you're talking about the server-side font format, how does that matter to the client app at all? X may have a default cruddy font file format, but I don't see that affects the client in the least.
Actually, they got it almost right visually, but the interaction is completey wrong.
The start bar buttons have an oh-so-small border beneath them which completely negates the usability benefit of placing an item on the edge of the screen. The buttons may look "cooler" with the one-pixel border around them, but they're not any easier to track than any other button on the screen.
How? Well, the X server is Exceed and runs on Windows. I created font entires for Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, etc., in the X server. So, an X app could request to draw with Arial if it knew they existed (which almost none do). So, the trick is to make an alias for "helvetica", "times", and "courier", and point them to the MS fonts. Now, all the X apps get the scalabe TrueType fonts and don't need to know about them.
MS may stink at a certain things, but they did a good job on fonts. Their typography website is a great read.
My point is that if it can be done without protocol extensions on a PC X-server, it should possible to do it in XFree86. Granted, the Exceed server simply passes the font draw command to Windows, which has the TrueType renderer. But Exceed could use the FreeType render, right? Or can it already, and I'm just missing out because I can't figure out how to do it?
Our internal development version is still under active development. We're adding new features and more scalablity every day. Those feaures are debugged before release.
It's a parallel debugger, which means that it has built-in support for manipulating groups of objects, as if they were one: threads in a proceses, processes in a group, groups in a cluster, and so on. This means you don't need 20 windows to control a 20-thread app; we roll up an aggregated view into one window, commands work on the entire batch.
And yes, we support Linux, as well as almost every other Unix out there. You can snag a free demo license and download the bits from our website. And for those of you who like printf(), you can add them on-the-fly without recompiling. That saves time.
Disclosure: I am a developer on TotalView, but I do "eat my own dog food"- we use it every day on itself.
There is nothing in X which prevents a server from rendering nice, anti-aliased fonts. It's a QOI issue.
Now, if non-PC X server vendors would just get off their butts and add *default* support for it...
Imlib alpha blends the image bits client side and sends the bits back to the server. This is Inefficient As Hell(tm), especially if you're on a remote display. Ever try to run GIMP across a dial-up connection? Putting alpha-blending and anti-aliasing into the protocol allows the hard work to be done server side. That means 1) you don't push image bits over the wire and 2) the server hardware can accelerate it. Also trying running MesaGL vs. hardware-accelerated glx to see the difference.
I used to work for a large multinational corporation and was deployed over in Germany for a summer. I know lots of people who have had much longer deployments. Some of which who have jumped ship and taken up full-time employment and residency overseas.
It is far easier to have someone else deal with all the hassles of doing this: moving all your stuff legally, getting various papers, work permits, taxes, and immunization, if someone else is footing the tab. This stuff is non-trivial, it takes many people, lawyers, and years to get it done right.
A deployment acts as a nice transition period; your company will pay you lots of extra money (per-diem), you can fly home occasionally for free, take time to learn the language, and bail out if you don't like it. It's much easier to look for a job overseas if you already live there, so you'll have more choices. A big company like that will have lots of overseas projects, so you might even be able to pick where you want to go.
Sure, potential companies might pay for your expenses to fly out to interview and all you moving expenses. However, if you're already there, it makes you that much more marketable.
As for language, don't worry. European businesses workers mostly speak English; they need a common language to talk to other European countries. You'd be surprised how far you can get along without being able to speak the native language in a foreign country. Being able to read is far more important, and that's is relatively easy to learn on demand. For example, I can't speak much German (enough to order food, really) but I can read enough to run my own life when living there.
I bought Word 6.1; it did everything I needed it to do. I was happy. I didn't need to upgrade.
But everyone else got Word 95 bundled with their box. They sent me Word 95 docs. Word 6.1 couldn't read them.
So I bought Word 95; it did everything I needed it to do. I was happy. I didn't need to upgrade.
But everyone else got Word 97 bundled with their box. They sent me Word 97 docs. Word 95 couldn't read them.
Lather, rinse, repeat...
Oops, but that would be illegal, huh?
The toolkit really needs support for geometry managment, which lays out things abstractly according to a preferred but unknown size. Even if the toolkit does support it, programmers don't always take advantage of it. Try changing the font of your favorite app or windoing system to 18-24 points to see. (Unreasonable, perhaps? Not if someone is sight-impaired.)
The other question I have is whether scalable graphics for the GUI is really feasible on existing 72 dpi displays with all the aliasing effects that implies.
Sure. Scaling is just done dumbly nowadays; it's quite possible nowadays to scale with minimal artifacts by using common 3D techniques such as anisotropic filtering. I have yet to see a windowing system that supports this nowadays, and integrates it with accelerated hardware.
Unfortunately, they are going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year. The seller seemed confident that the price/availability would be going down/up very soon.
pr0n jokes aside, I know more than a few graphic artists who would rip out the liver of their best friends for one of these.
As for scalable graphics, this will be really interesting to see. One of Windows greater failings (IMHO) has always been its lack of geometry management. Most Windows apps basically nail things to specific X,Y positions in a dialog, rather than having a fluid layout which specifies relative attachments. (This is one area where Motif does something better than Windows). Geometry management scales with resolution or font size, where absoulte positioning doesn't.
Copy protection? C'mon. Think dollars:
Case 1: MS copy protects their products. Less people copy their products. When it comes time to audit/sue, there are less illegal versions to sue over.
Case 2: MS doesn't copy protect their product. More people copy their products. When it comes time to audit/sue, there are more illegal versions to sue over.
Which makes more money? Hm.