Well, Windows doesn't *really* antialias fonts - it just smooths them out a bit. Which isn't the same thing, really.
But that's not the real problem with Windows and font smoothing (even MS don't have the gall to call it "anti-aliasing").
The problem is that Windows doesn't smooth the fonts that really need smoothing - those at 10pt and below. Smoothing 72pt fonts, while it makes your PowerPoint slides look nice, isn't really all that important. To reap the real benefits of anti-aliasing (deceive the eyes that there's more spatial information than there really is) you need to anti-alias the small fonts. But smoothing looks very sucky at small point sizes, but it's relatively quick, which I guess is why most fonts on Windows don't smooth below about 10pt.
There's only one OS that I'm personally aware of that has ever done The Right Thing in anti-aliasing, and that was RISC OS on the Acorn Archimedes series of computers. That knew about proper sub-pixel antialiasing, and you could tune it quite precisely.
ClearType is more like "real" antialiasing, and I can't for the life of me work out why they didn't put it into Windows 2000.
But that's by the by. You asked about Linux. I don't think antialiasing fonts should be too much of an issue, at least at first. I think that having well hinted fonts, so that all three legs of a 12pt lowercase m only have one pixel each with 1 pixel spacing *every time*, for example, makes for better display. Poorly hinted fonts don't anti-alias well, either. (Although it has to be said that if you don't have any well-hinted fonts on the page, then the badly hinted ones tend to look OK when anti-aliased, at least until a decent font turns up:)
An example of badly hinted fonts is the URW-Fonts collection. They print fine, but they render grim.
The problem with the X font rendering code (and I just *know* I'm gonna get corrected here) is that it can't deal with glyphs as anything but bitmaps; that is, black'n'white. I understand that it would be a considerable rewrite to provide AA support in X. --
So why can't I install Linux on it and play XRacer?
Actually, I don't think Microsoft has the savvy to enter the console market and make all that much of an impression - sure, their games software is reasonably good (think Age Of Empires and Flight Simulator) but those games have a goodly collection of patches. You can't do that in the console world. When you release, you have to get it right first time.
It'll be too expensive, too slow and too late - remember the PC Jr?
I'll be playing WipeOut 4 on my PS2, without a doubt. Never has such a *cool* series of games ever existed on any platform. (And never have the ports of that game to other platforms been so poor). --
Remember the game "The Legacy"? It was quite revolutionary, for 1992.
But it was very hard.
So, I did what anyone would have done - I fired up the PC Tools disk editor and edited the level files *on disk* to remove all the walls in each level.
...is a computer that doesn't need a mains electricity supply, much like the Bayliss radio.
This wouldn't be too hard to do. Hook up a battery (or batteries) with the handcrank to charge them up, and then you could use APM or something so that the computer could tell you to get off your ass and start cranking again... (This is where you need a gullible but physically strong friend)
This would help the adoption of technology in the areas that otherwise just wouldn't get it. --
If you were going all-out for performance on a Linux web server, why would you choose Apache?
Wouldn't Zeus or thttpd be a better alternative?
Doesn't Roxen outpace Apache?
Don't get me wrong. Apache provides a level of flexibility and power that few web servers can match. But this test was about performance, not the real-world advantages of Apache. (URL rewriting totally rules, for example).
I had formed the impression, from interviews in the press, from his conduct over the PacketStorm affair, that JP was not a great deal more than a script kiddie with attitude.
This was an opportunity to rectify that perception.
Instead, he attacks as some form of defence. Sorry, but when I see someone getting *this* defensive, there's usually something to defend. Weakness and inadequacy.
A shame, really. Instead of defusing all those negative opinions, he's reinforced them.
"It doesn't matter what you do, or what you say. There's a billion Chinese people who don't give a shit".
Armesto is right when he says that the usual state of world history is to be dependent by what China does (paper. gunpowder. blast furnace. dividing bulkhead. large-scale administration. And that's only the TECHNOLOGY), and that the current Western hegemony is only a blip.
I'm network admin (among other things) for a small part of a big company - I manage some 150 computers, with 120 programmers and 30 clerical staff.
Many of the people have internet access, and I have one rule - if it's illegal, it's intolerable. I won't even let you use my wires to download it then transfer it to a CD, or your own laptop. No funny business on my wires/disks, full stop.
However, I won't investigate your own, personal laptop. I will insist you install my antivirus software before you connect it to my network, but I won't poke around.
Machines owned by the company are an open book to me. Nothing illegal or unlicenced is allowed. Full stop. Because I'm liable.
If CMU investigated machines that were the private property of students, that's wrong; in that case, you've got to catch them in the act via a packet sniffer or something. However, if the files were resident on hard disks bought and paid for by CMU, then they had every right to investigate the legality of those files. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a quiet word with the individuals concerned, instead of going in guns blazing... --
On the installer thing, I'm used to using the NT installer as a base - everything is better than that:)
I'm specifically looking for the value that Debian add (not necessarily in terms of proprietary software - isn't Debian under the Social Licence or somesuch, with *only* Free Software?) but in terms of layout/nifty tools etc.
I'll give it a whirl. I'll either like it or I won't, but I will give it a fair crack of the whip (like I did with SuSE - ran 5.2 for about 6 months before YaST rotted my mind one time too many).
One question though. I run a couple or three boxes, and at the moment, they're all Red Hat. So can I manage a Debian box properly with LinuxConf?
I'm a long-time Red Hat user, but I'm curious about Debian.
Now, it's going to take more than a pretty installer to make me switch distros, but I could be persuaded...
So, I guess the question is this: what would you say to persuade me to switch? What does Debian do better than the rest? Or even just better than Red Hat? --
"Spend a few minutes wondering what will happen to the people who would get thrown out of work by a Microsoft collapse. Try to figure out the consequences on the economy, and the real life fallout will ensue. After you spend a minute or two thinking about that, then post your screeds."
That's exactly the argument used here in the UK in defence of selling Hawk fighters and riot control equipment to Indonesia. It doesn't wash. Microsoft's collapse may have bad effects, but that's no reason to stop it happening.
Consider what kind of a society you live in where, in order to maintain the status quo, you have to allow entities like Microsoft to break the law... --
I have to take issue with point 1, in as much as you *can* replace the DCL CLI that comes with VMS.
Not many people do, as it's so damn powerful, but you can do it.
DCL is extremely good, if a little strange to look at initially (what's with the $ at the start of every line, for example?); however, it has string handling that is way ahead of any *NIX shell. 'course that argument goes away a bit if Perl lives on your system... but not everyone does, or wants to use it.
Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition (25 Clients) : £2699
Red Hat Linux w/as many connections as you friggin' want : £74.99
As usual, Microsoft aren't comparing apples with apples. Vanilla NT Server is nowhere near as featureful as Enterprise, and NetWare is much, much cheaper to manage than NT (hell, you don't end up paying for your techs to walk to the computer room to reboot the server every week). --
is that Microsoft's licensing model is insanely complicated now.
Go to this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/order/license.ht m
and tell me WTF is going on there. I really don't understand who MS is trying to serve (besides themselves, that is) by having a licensing model that DEC would have been proud of 15 years ago.
And $319 for a single user full license for NT Workstation? Are they taking the piss?
When I first hit reply, I was going to say something along the lines of "Don't be silly" then I stopped and thought a bit and there's no reason for this not to work, because of kernel modules.
You'd have to be able to pick a kernel from a list, depending on your architecture, but after that, compiling half-a-dozen kernel modules isn't going to kill your elderly 486, is it?
In my perfect world, the ONLY time you'd ever recompile the whole thing (or download a new one) was when the version changed enough for you to want/need it.
Can any kernel gurus tell me how feasible it would be to restrict the kernel compilation stage to new modules? --
No. I do no mathematics. That's for people cleverer than I.
I love LaTeX for it's fandabbidozy structure, tables of contents, indexes and the like.
being able to do:
\subsection{Froznits - The Dirty Truth}
and I KNOW it's going to come out right, both on the page, in the contents and elsewhere.
It's a lot less random than things like Word or WordPro for long, structured documents.
Also I can break a doc up into separate physical files (handy for book-sized things) and have a master file with the equivalent of a big load of #includes in it, so the actual content doesn't have to cloud the structure if you don't want to.
The thing I always found with the original RailRoad Tycoon was that the game always panned out the same; instead of making big strategic decisions, I was faffing about with the minutiae (sp?) of bus loading/unloading decisions at individual stations.
What I wanted was some kind of simple scripting language where I could write a few simple rules for my vehicles and stations, rather than having to point and click for absolutely everything.
Are there any games like this? (And don't say Core Wars:)
OT: The X10 adverts are downright offensive, Rob. Bin 'em. --
Spielberg makes feelgood films. He's good at it, but would never have made Dead Man Walking (great film, BTW, and I don't even like Susan Sarandon or Sean Penn). Notice how the USA was the only country fighting the Germans in SPR? It would have been a bitter pill for the American film-going audience to be told that actually, it was Stalin that crushed Germany and the rest of the world just happened to get lucky...
Spielberg is also commercially minded - not quite to the ridiculous extremes of the Disney films - but he's not daft.
Wallace & Gromit are two of the most merchandised characters ever. Here in the UK you can get W&G *everything*.
I don't think Spielberg is an artist. He's good at what he does, but what he does is Product.
Park and Spielberg are a natural mix - and Park could do with some of the money that DreamWorks have. --
Slashdot Mirror
"If anybody asks me, I'll say: 'you mean there is a liscence on that .pdf? I open all my .exe files with Winzip -- Don't you!?!?'"
Well, executing a selfextractor isn't an option for me, running Linux as I do.
The zip tools for Linux have an option for getting stuff out of selfextractors.
So that is what I would use "in the ordinary course of operation".
--
than having to go through all that tedious "having an original idea" stuff.
--
Well, Windows doesn't *really* antialias fonts - it just smooths them out a bit. Which isn't the same thing, really.
But that's not the real problem with Windows and font smoothing (even MS don't have the gall to call it "anti-aliasing").
The problem is that Windows doesn't smooth the fonts that really need smoothing - those at 10pt and below. Smoothing 72pt fonts, while it makes your PowerPoint slides look nice, isn't really all that important. To reap the real benefits of anti-aliasing (deceive the eyes that there's more spatial information than there really is) you need to anti-alias the small fonts. But smoothing looks very sucky at small point sizes, but it's relatively quick, which I guess is why most fonts on Windows don't smooth below about 10pt.
There's only one OS that I'm personally aware of that has ever done The Right Thing in anti-aliasing, and that was RISC OS on the Acorn Archimedes series of computers. That knew about proper sub-pixel antialiasing, and you could tune it quite precisely.
ClearType is more like "real" antialiasing, and I can't for the life of me work out why they didn't put it into Windows 2000.
But that's by the by. You asked about Linux. I don't think antialiasing fonts should be too much of an issue, at least at first. I think that having well hinted fonts, so that all three legs of a 12pt lowercase m only have one pixel each with 1 pixel spacing *every time*, for example, makes for better display. Poorly hinted fonts don't anti-alias well, either. (Although it has to be said that if you don't have any well-hinted fonts on the page, then the badly hinted ones tend to look OK when anti-aliased, at least until a decent font turns up:)
An example of badly hinted fonts is the URW-Fonts collection. They print fine, but they render grim.
The problem with the X font rendering code (and I just *know* I'm gonna get corrected here) is that it can't deal with glyphs as anything but bitmaps; that is, black'n'white. I understand that it would be a considerable rewrite to provide AA support in X.
--
So why can't I install Linux on it and play XRacer?
Actually, I don't think Microsoft has the savvy to enter the console market and make all that much of an impression - sure, their games software is reasonably good (think Age Of Empires and Flight Simulator) but those games have a goodly collection of patches. You can't do that in the console world. When you release, you have to get it right first time.
It'll be too expensive, too slow and too late - remember the PC Jr?
I'll be playing WipeOut 4 on my PS2, without a doubt. Never has such a *cool* series of games ever existed on any platform. (And never have the ports of that game to other platforms been so poor).
--
Remember the game "The Legacy"? It was quite revolutionary, for 1992.
:)
But it was very hard.
So, I did what anyone would have done - I fired up the PC Tools disk editor and edited the level files *on disk* to remove all the walls in each level.
Having defragmented the disk first, of course
People don't do things like that any more...
--
"If you're on the ball as an admin, you shouldn't have many script kiddy problems."
:)
If you're in charge of an S/390, I hope you *are* on the ball
Linux or OS/390, the choice is irrelevant - at the end of the day you have to secure it.
--
Um, are these Attack Trees some kind of stealth weapon?
Or a home security option that doesn't need Winalot?
"Ideal for home security. Attractive *and* functional, guaranteed to enhance and secure any driveway"
Are they fierce? Can they tell the difference between friend and foe?
--
...is a computer that doesn't need a mains electricity supply, much like the Bayliss radio.
This wouldn't be too hard to do. Hook up a battery (or batteries) with the handcrank to charge them up, and then you could use APM or something so that the computer could tell you to get off your ass and start cranking again... (This is where you need a gullible but physically strong friend)
This would help the adoption of technology in the areas that otherwise just wouldn't get it.
--
If you were going all-out for performance on a Linux web server, why would you choose Apache?
Wouldn't Zeus or thttpd be a better alternative?
Doesn't Roxen outpace Apache?
Don't get me wrong. Apache provides a level of flexibility and power that few web servers can match. But this test was about performance, not the real-world advantages of Apache. (URL rewriting totally rules, for example).
So why did Red Hat choose Apache?
--
At least it is according to the Linus Torvalds FAQ
--
I had formed the impression, from interviews in the press, from his conduct over the PacketStorm affair, that JP was not a great deal more than a script kiddie with attitude.
This was an opportunity to rectify that perception.
Instead, he attacks as some form of defence. Sorry, but when I see someone getting *this* defensive, there's usually something to defend. Weakness and inadequacy.
A shame, really. Instead of defusing all those negative opinions, he's reinforced them.
Oh, well.
--
It's like the old saying goes.
"It doesn't matter what you do, or what you say. There's a billion Chinese people who don't give a shit".
Armesto is right when he says that the usual state of world history is to be dependent by what China does (paper. gunpowder. blast furnace. dividing bulkhead. large-scale administration. And that's only the TECHNOLOGY), and that the current Western hegemony is only a blip.
Peter.
--
I'm network admin (among other things) for a small part of a big company - I manage some 150 computers, with 120 programmers and 30 clerical staff.
Many of the people have internet access, and I have one rule - if it's illegal, it's intolerable. I won't even let you use my wires to download it then transfer it to a CD, or your own laptop. No funny business on my wires/disks, full stop.
However, I won't investigate your own, personal laptop. I will insist you install my antivirus software before you connect it to my network, but I won't poke around.
Machines owned by the company are an open book to me. Nothing illegal or unlicenced is allowed. Full stop. Because I'm liable.
If CMU investigated machines that were the private property of students, that's wrong; in that case, you've got to catch them in the act via a packet sniffer or something. However, if the files were resident on hard disks bought and paid for by CMU, then they had every right to investigate the legality of those files. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a quiet word with the individuals concerned, instead of going in guns blazing...
--
On the installer thing, I'm used to using the NT installer as a base - everything is better than that :)
I'm specifically looking for the value that Debian add (not necessarily in terms of proprietary software - isn't Debian under the Social Licence or somesuch, with *only* Free Software?) but in terms of layout/nifty tools etc.
I'll give it a whirl. I'll either like it or I won't, but I will give it a fair crack of the whip (like I did with SuSE - ran 5.2 for about 6 months before YaST rotted my mind one time too many).
One question though. I run a couple or three boxes, and at the moment, they're all Red Hat. So can I manage a Debian box properly with LinuxConf?
Ta for your time
Peter.
--
I'm a long-time Red Hat user, but I'm curious about Debian.
Now, it's going to take more than a pretty installer to make me switch distros, but I could be persuaded...
So, I guess the question is this: what would you say to persuade me to switch? What does Debian do better than the rest? Or even just better than Red Hat?
--
"Spend a few minutes wondering what will happen to the people who would get thrown out of work by a Microsoft collapse. Try to figure out the consequences on the economy, and the real life fallout will ensue. After you spend a minute or two thinking about that, then post your screeds."
That's exactly the argument used here in the UK in defence of selling Hawk fighters and riot control equipment to Indonesia. It doesn't wash. Microsoft's collapse may have bad effects, but that's no reason to stop it happening.
Consider what kind of a society you live in where, in order to maintain the status quo, you have to allow entities like Microsoft to break the law...
--
They're not dropping NT support any time soon, I see...
Hmm... W2K isn't the sure thing it's supposed to be, is it?
--
I have to take issue with point 1, in as much as you *can* replace the DCL CLI that comes with VMS.
Not many people do, as it's so damn powerful, but you can do it.
DCL is extremely good, if a little strange to look at initially (what's with the $ at the start of every line, for example?); however, it has string handling that is way ahead of any *NIX shell. 'course that argument goes away a bit if Perl lives on your system... but not everyone does, or wants to use it.
I feel better now.
(I'm also a VMS admin, can't you tell?)
--
Netware 5 Server w/25 connections : £2487
Windows NT Server 4.0 (25 clients) : £1174
Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition (25 Clients) : £2699
Red Hat Linux w/as many connections as you friggin' want : £74.99
As usual, Microsoft aren't comparing apples with apples. Vanilla NT Server is nowhere near as featureful as Enterprise, and NetWare is much, much cheaper to manage than NT (hell, you don't end up paying for your techs to walk to the computer room to reboot the server every week).
--
is that Microsoft's licensing model is insanely complicated now.
t m
c ing/DetailPriceList.asp
Go to this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/order/license.h
and tell me WTF is going on there. I really don't understand who MS is trying to serve (besides themselves, that is) by having a licensing model that DEC would have been proud of 15 years ago.
And $319 for a single user full license for NT Workstation? Are they taking the piss?
http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/eval/Pri
Home users are going to do one of two things:
1. Look elsewhere (BeOS, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD (right))
2. Pirate it. W2K retail sales are going to be so, so sad.
I think MS have started believing their own bullshit.
--
When I first hit reply, I was going to say something along the lines of "Don't be silly" then I stopped and thought a bit and there's no reason for this not to work, because of kernel modules.
You'd have to be able to pick a kernel from a list, depending on your architecture, but after that, compiling half-a-dozen kernel modules isn't going to kill your elderly 486, is it?
In my perfect world, the ONLY time you'd ever recompile the whole thing (or download a new one) was when the version changed enough for you to want/need it.
Can any kernel gurus tell me how feasible it would be to restrict the kernel compilation stage to new modules?
--
No. I do no mathematics. That's for people cleverer than I.
I love LaTeX for it's fandabbidozy structure, tables of contents, indexes and the like.
being able to do:
\subsection{Froznits - The Dirty Truth}
and I KNOW it's going to come out right, both on the page, in the contents and elsewhere.
It's a lot less random than things like Word or WordPro for long, structured documents.
Also I can break a doc up into separate physical files (handy for book-sized things) and have a master file with the equivalent of a big load of #includes in it, so the actual content doesn't have to cloud the structure if you don't want to.
Peter.
--
The thing I always found with the original RailRoad Tycoon was that the game always panned out the same; instead of making big strategic decisions, I was faffing about with the minutiae (sp?) of bus loading/unloading decisions at individual stations.
:)
What I wanted was some kind of simple scripting language where I could write a few simple rules for my vehicles and stations, rather than having to point and click for absolutely everything.
Are there any games like this? (And don't say Core Wars
OT: The X10 adverts are downright offensive, Rob. Bin 'em.
--
Seems natural to me...
Spielberg makes feelgood films. He's good at it, but would never have made Dead Man Walking (great film, BTW, and I don't even like Susan Sarandon or Sean Penn). Notice how the USA was the only country fighting the Germans in SPR? It would have been a bitter pill for the American film-going audience to be told that actually, it was Stalin that crushed Germany and the rest of the world just happened to get lucky...
Spielberg is also commercially minded - not quite to the ridiculous extremes of the Disney films - but he's not daft.
Wallace & Gromit are two of the most merchandised characters ever. Here in the UK you can get W&G *everything*.
I don't think Spielberg is an artist. He's good at what he does, but what he does is Product.
Park and Spielberg are a natural mix - and Park could do with some of the money that DreamWorks have.
--
It's not monolithic - it's a microkernel with a HAL.
:)
Everything else you said stands
(Don't diss VMS - it's great. And has a real journalling file system, and proper clustering too)
--