The directors should be thankful to CleanFlicks for bringing their business to customers who wouldn't otherwise have purchased these films.
Perhaps some directors don't like approaching their films from the point of view that's it's a business venture, rather that it's their artistic creation and vision. I don't really have an opinion either way on this specific case, but it's a fairly one-sided view to only look at it from a commercial perspective.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'restart', but I presume you mean to resume. If that's the case, you can pause and resume the downloads, you have to double click on an entry in the 'Download Manager' to pop up it's individual window, and you can pause and resume it from within there. Not such a great interface though, those controls should really be in the main window too.
Also, as far as the blocking of Playboy and other sex sites goes, any country where you can walk into a bar and have two prostitutes sitting on your lap within 5 minutes (no joke) has far more serious moral issues to deal with than a few internet sex sites. Enough said.
Perhaps by blocking sex sites, they think they can stimulate the local economy? Ooh that was a bad pun...
Well go on then, let's see your program. You may want to take a look at this first. If you think that 'simple' fonts like Helvetica are made from circles and 45 degree lines, you've got another thing coming. Go and draw some like that in a vector graphics program. See how well they come out.
Such a program is a thought that people have had before, but getting a machine to do a human's job just doesn't work. The issue is that fonts aren't interpreted by machines - they're interpreted by humans, and you need a human that understands human perception and cognition in order to design something that works with a human audience.
You're absolutely wrong with regards to the copyrights on fonts - copyrights regard the implementations - you're perhaps somehow confusing this with patents. The original wood cuts or lead printing blocks' copyrights have expired - feel free to scan them and re-create the fonts from them. That's what Adobe, Linotype etc. do and it's an immense job. The font files themselves *are* copyrighted by the respective companies, because they're implementations. It's the implementation, whether it be a digital file, a printed page, or whatever that copyright applies to. If you're volunteering to digitise Stanley Morison's old Times New Roman drawings in to a digital font that's usable, readable and doesn't look like junk, then great! You could probably go and get a high paying job at Adobe with that kind of talent. As a side note, owning copyrights on fonts is hardly owning the language. They made the implementations of those fonts, so they own the copyrights. Nobody's taking away the ability for you to make your own, and nobody's taking away your pen and paper.
And by the way, 4x4 full screen antialiasing is an OpenGL feature. It'll only work when you're playing games and won't do a think to your desktop (unless you're somehow running an OpenGL window system liek MacOS Quartz Extreme). Either you really have no clue, or you're just trolling.
In any case, I'm sure everyone in the Linux community are eagerly awaiting your clear, communicative, perfectly readable machine-generated fonts, so I'll let you get back to work.
Like I said - have you ever designed a font? Have you ever studied typography? It seems that your understanding of type is what's sloppy.
Typeface design is so much more than plugging in numbers into an equation. It's quite arrogant, not to mention misguided, to believe that there is a technological solution to every problem and the brilliant type designers of our history could have easily been replaced by a machine.
Of course fonts can be defined as mathematical equations - any piece of vector graphics can be. That doesn't make it easy for a computer to make something that's pleasing to the eye.
It requires knowledge of human perception, of optics, visual design and of linguistics. If it were so esy to write a program to design a font for you, then why haven't any of the major software companies like Microsoft of Adobe done this already? They could be making millions out of these generated font faces. The reason is that there is no simple solution. Typeface design requires an exceptional eye for detail and a lot of hard work.
And, duh, if you knew anything about fonts, you'd find that TTFs, Postscript fonts are already vector graphics and thus defined at every possible font size, however the rasterisation algorithms used don't have any knowledge of human perception, of characters and letterforms - they just know pixels. Hinting is a process that is performed at small point sizes to, in a sense, override the software and manually place the pixels for the optimum readable representation of that font. If you're volunteering to write rasterisation software that will eliminate the need for hinting, go right ahead. It's something MS, Adobe, Apple, the ghostscript people and anyone else in the business of displaying fonts on screen have decided way too hard to do, and continued to employ specialised designers to set it properly.
And yes, fonts do need to be designed for all the different bold, italic etc. variations. Open up a vector graphics program and slant a font in a serif typeface (such as Times) to the right. Then type in the same character in italics. In the italics version, the glyph will be quite different, the serifs having taken on a curved effect rather than just slanting the stems (which would make it incredibly ugly).
If you believe you can create a 'simple' program to do months, if not years of detailed type design, then go right ahead. I'd be very interested to see the results. I'm certain you'll find that it's an incredibly more complicated topic than you imagine and that *gasp* skillsets other than computer programming may actually have some use in our society.
(apologies for the bad typography in the above post;)
Who's fucking dense? The original poster wasn't talking about a zillion fonts, he was talking about one. The time it takes to make just one font that's suitable to be read on screen is astounding. The MS web fonts are hinted (the pixels are hand placed) for I think about 8 different point sizes, in order to maximise on-screen readability, and to get a good result, it's an inordinate amount of work.
Contrary to what you may believe, designing 'plain' fonts for on-screen readability is much, much harder than designing decorative ones for print. So many factors need to be taken in to consideration in order to preserve the look of the font, yet keep it readable on-screen at the same time. And half-arsed jobs won't cut it. When you're looking at fonts day in day out on screen, they need to be as readable as they possibly can be, otherwise you're leading to eyestrain and frustration. Your comments about Arial being easy to recreate from scratch are hilarious. Have you ever designed a font? Have you ever gone through, analysing each character and hinting them at multiple sizes? You coudln't jsut copy the MS version since that would be copyright infringement - it's have to be a completely original work from scratch.
There are reasons there are professional font designers - it's a full time effort that can span months or even years for a font family (eg. bold, italic, etc.) It's not the sort of thing that some dude in a basement can knock up over a weekend with some coffee and pizza.
Who's fucking dense? The original poster wasn't talking about a zillion fonts, he was talking about one. The time it takes to make just one font that's suitable to be read on screen is astounding. The MS web fonts are hinted (the pixels are hand placed) for I think about 8 different point sizes, in order to maximise on-screen readability, and to get a good result, it's an inordinate amount of work.
Contrary to what you may believe, designing 'plain' fonts for on-screen readability is much, much harder than designing decorative ones for print. So many factors need to be taken in to consideration in order to preserve the look of the font, yet keep it readable on-screen at the same time. And half-arsed jobs won't cut it. When you're looking at fonts day in day out on screen, they need to be as readable as they possibly can be, otherwise you're leading to eyestrain and frustration. Your comments about Arial being easy to recreate from scratch are hilarious. Have you ever designed a font? Have you ever gone through, analysing each character and hinting them at multiple sizes? You coudln't jsut copy the MS version since that would be copyright infringement - it's have to be a completely original work from scratch.
There are reasons there are professional font designers - it's a full time effort that can span months or even years for a font family (eg. bold, italic, etc.) It's not the sort of thing that some dude in a basement can knock up over a weekend with some coffee and pizza.
The problem with that example is that filenames are all proper nouns, and they all need to be referred to in the definite article (I think that's the correct grammatical term?). The disctinction between 'any' school and 'the' School doesn't translate to filenames, because you're always referring to a file in particular, not a collection of files (which would perhaps be a directory, or a find query or something).
From reading other articles on online law issues, AFAIK, the way current US law (and that of most other countries too) sees things is that the content of a server is under the jurisdiction of the country that the server is located in. To try and make an analogy to the offline world, outsiders were coming into Russian 'online territory' to buy, rather than Elcomsoft going out into other countries (other countries' servers) and selling it there. Perhaps if Elcomsoft had put it up for auction on ebay, or started a Yahoo! shop or something, it would have been quite different.
The point I was making is that Dmitry's case is quite different and much less cut-and-dried than outsiders coming in and willfully damaging an Australian's personal property on sovereign Australian soil.
It's different because of where the actions occurred. Dimitiri was doing his thing, in Russia, under the laws of Russia, which don't criminalise him. No illegal activity was taking place in the US - the only shaky argument the US officials had was that ElcomSoft was making the software available for US citizens to purchase (even though the server itself was in Russia).
Now if the RIAA hack my computer (which is right here in Australia), the crime is taking place in Australia, and thus falls under Australian law's jurisdiction. They have committed a crime within the nation of Australia, and they can be arrested for it.
The Japan one I can go with. But surely that's against Sony's rules too.
The fact that Sony may not like you playing import games doesn't mean it's any less of a fair use of the mod chip. Who cares what Sony says - all that matters is the law (then again, in this day and age the lines are becoming blurrier:( )
Though interestingly, the apple store (www.apple.com/store) is still using Garamond for almost everything. Perhaps they just haven't gotten around to changing it yet.
XFree86 does this right. You set the desktop resolution to the highest resolution that your monitor/video card can do. If that's "too small" then you increase font sizes. Decreasing the resolution and wasting what your hardware can do is *not* the answer.
My last monitor ran at 1024x768 at 75Hz and 1280x1024 at 60Hz. The 60Hz refresh rate was painful on my eyes, so I always ran it at 1024x768. Under your scheme, I'd always be running at 1280x1024, which would kill my eyes. Not a very good idea at all.
Maybe this isn't "intuitive" to a windows user, but you know, so what? C-x,c,v aren't intuitive to me...
It may not be more 'intuitive' per se, but it's a lot easier for users since you can easily find the menu options and commands for those actions by looking in the menu bar under 'Edit'. How does the user find out that copying/pasting under X requires the middle mouse button (used in a method that conflicts with the conceptual model that users have of the mouse's function - selection does not perform an action, just prepares something to have an action performed upon it later). For the most part, all the things that can be done can be found in the menu bar (much more so on a Mac than Windows anyway).
A lot of unixy things like the middle-mouse copying and pasting, X display resolution switching etc, aren't documented in an easy to find place - causing the user to waste time going out and searching for information on how to complete some of the most basic tasks.
We could make this so-called war on drugs a real war. We go in to Columbia with some military force and start taking out the cartels. I'm not trolling -- I'm serious. I'm sure our satellites must be able to detect some large drug facilities. We'll just go in there and bomb them.
And to think that Americans wonder why others would hate them enough to commit terrorist acts against them. Sheesh.
I agree with the sentiment, but there's nothing in copyright law that commits people to releasing source code once the copyright term has finished. All it means is that you can re-distribute the copyrighted material (most usually the binaries) at will, legally. If the source code was never released to the public, there's no law that forces you to suddenly make it available.
if you wanted any hope of selling your 3D card, you had to run Quake. And to do that, you had to support OpenGL. Period.
Not exactly.. My Canopus Pure3d (3Dfx Voodoo 1) ran both Quake, Quake 2 and a lot of other games perfectly (and my Voodoo Banshee with Quake 3), and it was by no means OpenGL compatible. A heck of a lot of games (like the Quakes, for example) had 'GL miniport drivers', IIRC containing a subset of the full OpenGL api, specific to that game in question. I would have loved to have full OpenGL support on those cards for 3d modelling work etc, but I couldn't.
(note: It's possible to get full OpenGL support on the Banshee now, but only in a much more recent driver version, and a with bit of fiddling around. It certainly wasn't there when it was released.)
What about Win32s? I'm no developer, but I seem to recall installing some extra libraries (WinG, Win32s) on my Win 3.11 box in order to use 32 bit apps. Am I completely wrong about this?
2.2 No right is granted to Licensee to create derivative works of or to redistribute (other than with the Original Software or a derivative thereof) the screen imprinter fonts identified in subdirectory/lib/font/bit/lucida and printer fonts (Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Sans Italic, Lucida Sans Demibold, Lucida Typewriter, Lucida Sans Typewriter83), identified in subdirectory/sys/lib/postscript/font.
I'm no font nerd, but I imagine the group creating the software are completely unrelated to the creators of the font. Also, aside from the fact that code and font data can both be stored on a computer, what has the GPL got to do with copyright terms on fonts?
Not much.. RMS is criticising the fact that the Lucida etc. fonts included with Plan 9 aren't free/open source/whatever and can't be modified, redistributed etc. I suppose this may make re-distribution of the Plan 9 OS a bit difficult, as in the screenshot here, Lucida seems to be used quite extensively in the windowing system.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know your local motor registry laws, but at least where I live, owning a car isn't a prerequisite to having a drivers' license.
p.s. anyone intrested on starting the os x port??
There's been an OS X port for plenty of time now. You can download the free beta here.
The directors should be thankful to CleanFlicks for bringing their business to customers who wouldn't otherwise have purchased these films.
Perhaps some directors don't like approaching their films from the point of view that's it's a business venture, rather that it's their artistic creation and vision. I don't really have an opinion either way on this specific case, but it's a fairly one-sided view to only look at it from a commercial perspective.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'restart', but I presume you mean to resume. If that's the case, you can pause and resume the downloads, you have to double click on an entry in the 'Download Manager' to pop up it's individual window, and you can pause and resume it from within there. Not such a great interface though, those controls should really be in the main window too.
Also, as far as the blocking of Playboy and other sex sites goes, any country where you can walk into a bar and have two prostitutes sitting on your lap within 5 minutes (no joke) has far more serious moral issues to deal with than a few internet sex sites. Enough said.
Perhaps by blocking sex sites, they think they can stimulate the local economy? Ooh that was a bad pun...
Additionally, that e-Blaster software even traps and logs the keystrokes of the workstation
:)
Perhaps the solution is to practise typing in rot13?
Well go on then, let's see your program. You may want to take a look at this first. If you think that 'simple' fonts like Helvetica are made from circles and 45 degree lines, you've got another thing coming. Go and draw some like that in a vector graphics program. See how well they come out.
Such a program is a thought that people have had before, but getting a machine to do a human's job just doesn't work. The issue is that fonts aren't interpreted by machines - they're interpreted by humans, and you need a human that understands human perception and cognition in order to design something that works with a human audience.
You're absolutely wrong with regards to the copyrights on fonts - copyrights regard the implementations - you're perhaps somehow confusing this with patents. The original wood cuts or lead printing blocks' copyrights have expired - feel free to scan them and re-create the fonts from them. That's what Adobe, Linotype etc. do and it's an immense job. The font files themselves *are* copyrighted by the respective companies, because they're implementations. It's the implementation, whether it be a digital file, a printed page, or whatever that copyright applies to. If you're volunteering to digitise Stanley Morison's old Times New Roman drawings in to a digital font that's usable, readable and doesn't look like junk, then great! You could probably go and get a high paying job at Adobe with that kind of talent. As a side note, owning copyrights on fonts is hardly owning the language. They made the implementations of those fonts, so they own the copyrights. Nobody's taking away the ability for you to make your own, and nobody's taking away your pen and paper.
And by the way, 4x4 full screen antialiasing is an OpenGL feature. It'll only work when you're playing games and won't do a think to your desktop (unless you're somehow running an OpenGL window system liek MacOS Quartz Extreme). Either you really have no clue, or you're just trolling.
In any case, I'm sure everyone in the Linux community are eagerly awaiting your clear, communicative, perfectly readable machine-generated fonts, so I'll let you get back to work.
Like I said - have you ever designed a font? Have you ever studied typography? It seems that your understanding of type is what's sloppy.
Typeface design is so much more than plugging in numbers into an equation. It's quite arrogant, not to mention misguided, to believe that there is a technological solution to every problem and the brilliant type designers of our history could have easily been replaced by a machine.
Of course fonts can be defined as mathematical equations - any piece of vector graphics can be. That doesn't make it easy for a computer to make something that's pleasing to the eye.
It requires knowledge of human perception, of optics, visual design and of linguistics. If it were so esy to write a program to design a font for you, then why haven't any of the major software companies like Microsoft of Adobe done this already? They could be making millions out of these generated font faces. The reason is that there is no simple solution. Typeface design requires an exceptional eye for detail and a lot of hard work.
And, duh, if you knew anything about fonts, you'd find that TTFs, Postscript fonts are already vector graphics and thus defined at every possible font size, however the rasterisation algorithms used don't have any knowledge of human perception, of characters and letterforms - they just know pixels. Hinting is a process that is performed at small point sizes to, in a sense, override the software and manually place the pixels for the optimum readable representation of that font. If you're volunteering to write rasterisation software that will eliminate the need for hinting, go right ahead. It's something MS, Adobe, Apple, the ghostscript people and anyone else in the business of displaying fonts on screen have decided way too hard to do, and continued to employ specialised designers to set it properly.
And yes, fonts do need to be designed for all the different bold, italic etc. variations. Open up a vector graphics program and slant a font in a serif typeface (such as Times) to the right. Then type in the same character in italics. In the italics version, the glyph will be quite different, the serifs having taken on a curved effect rather than just slanting the stems (which would make it incredibly ugly).
If you believe you can create a 'simple' program to do months, if not years of detailed type design, then go right ahead. I'd be very interested to see the results. I'm certain you'll find that it's an incredibly more complicated topic than you imagine and that *gasp* skillsets other than computer programming may actually have some use in our society.
(apologies for the bad typography in the above post ;)
Who's fucking dense? The original poster wasn't talking about a zillion fonts, he was talking about one. The time it takes to make just one font that's suitable to be read on screen is astounding. The MS web fonts are hinted (the pixels are hand placed) for I think about 8 different point sizes, in order to maximise on-screen readability, and to get a good result, it's an inordinate amount of work.
Contrary to what you may believe, designing 'plain' fonts for on-screen readability is much, much harder than designing decorative ones for print. So many factors need to be taken in to consideration in order to preserve the look of the font, yet keep it readable on-screen at the same time. And half-arsed jobs won't cut it. When you're looking at fonts day in day out on screen, they need to be as readable as they possibly can be, otherwise you're leading to eyestrain and frustration. Your comments about Arial being easy to recreate from scratch are hilarious. Have you ever designed a font? Have you ever gone through, analysing each character and hinting them at multiple sizes? You coudln't jsut copy the MS version since that would be copyright infringement - it's have to be a completely original work from scratch.
There are reasons there are professional font designers - it's a full time effort that can span months or even years for a font family (eg. bold, italic, etc.) It's not the sort of thing that some dude in a basement can knock up over a weekend with some coffee and pizza.
Who's fucking dense? The original poster wasn't talking about a zillion fonts, he was talking about one. The time it takes to make just one font that's suitable to be read on screen is astounding. The MS web fonts are hinted (the pixels are hand placed) for I think about 8 different point sizes, in order to maximise on-screen readability, and to get a good result, it's an inordinate amount of work.
Contrary to what you may believe, designing 'plain' fonts for on-screen readability is much, much harder than designing decorative ones for print. So many factors need to be taken in to consideration in order to preserve the look of the font, yet keep it readable on-screen at the same time. And half-arsed jobs won't cut it. When you're looking at fonts day in day out on screen, they need to be as readable as they possibly can be, otherwise you're leading to eyestrain and frustration. Your comments about Arial being easy to recreate from scratch are hilarious. Have you ever designed a font? Have you ever gone through, analysing each character and hinting them at multiple sizes? You coudln't jsut copy the MS version since that would be copyright infringement - it's have to be a completely original work from scratch.
There are reasons there are professional font designers - it's a full time effort that can span months or even years for a font family (eg. bold, italic, etc.) It's not the sort of thing that some dude in a basement can knock up over a weekend with some coffee and pizza.
The problem with that example is that filenames are all proper nouns, and they all need to be referred to in the definite article (I think that's the correct grammatical term?). The disctinction between 'any' school and 'the' School doesn't translate to filenames, because you're always referring to a file in particular, not a collection of files (which would perhaps be a directory, or a find query or something).
Yes I have. Har har.
From reading other articles on online law issues, AFAIK, the way current US law (and that of most other countries too) sees things is that the content of a server is under the jurisdiction of the country that the server is located in. To try and make an analogy to the offline world, outsiders were coming into Russian 'online territory' to buy, rather than Elcomsoft going out into other countries (other countries' servers) and selling it there. Perhaps if Elcomsoft had put it up for auction on ebay, or started a Yahoo! shop or something, it would have been quite different.
The point I was making is that Dmitry's case is quite different and much less cut-and-dried than outsiders coming in and willfully damaging an Australian's personal property on sovereign Australian soil.
It's different because of where the actions occurred. Dimitiri was doing his thing, in Russia, under the laws of Russia, which don't criminalise him. No illegal activity was taking place in the US - the only shaky argument the US officials had was that ElcomSoft was making the software available for US citizens to purchase (even though the server itself was in Russia).
Now if the RIAA hack my computer (which is right here in Australia), the crime is taking place in Australia, and thus falls under Australian law's jurisdiction. They have committed a crime within the nation of Australia, and they can be arrested for it.
The Japan one I can go with. But surely that's against Sony's rules too.
:( )
The fact that Sony may not like you playing import games doesn't mean it's any less of a fair use of the mod chip. Who cares what Sony says - all that matters is the law (then again, in this day and age the lines are becoming blurrier
Though interestingly, the apple store (www.apple.com/store) is still using Garamond for almost everything. Perhaps they just haven't gotten around to changing it yet.
Or perhaps the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing's AlphaServer cluster, ranked as the 42nd most powerful in the world...
XFree86 does this right. You set the desktop resolution to the highest resolution that your monitor/video card can do. If that's "too small" then you increase font sizes. Decreasing the resolution and wasting what your hardware can do is *not* the answer.
My last monitor ran at 1024x768 at 75Hz and 1280x1024 at 60Hz. The 60Hz refresh rate was painful on my eyes, so I always ran it at 1024x768. Under your scheme, I'd always be running at 1280x1024, which would kill my eyes. Not a very good idea at all.
Maybe this isn't "intuitive" to a windows user, but you know, so what? C-x,c,v aren't intuitive to me...
It may not be more 'intuitive' per se, but it's a lot easier for users since you can easily find the menu options and commands for those actions by looking in the menu bar under 'Edit'. How does the user find out that copying/pasting under X requires the middle mouse button (used in a method that conflicts with the conceptual model that users have of the mouse's function - selection does not perform an action, just prepares something to have an action performed upon it later). For the most part, all the things that can be done can be found in the menu bar (much more so on a Mac than Windows anyway).
A lot of unixy things like the middle-mouse copying and pasting, X display resolution switching etc, aren't documented in an easy to find place - causing the user to waste time going out and searching for information on how to complete some of the most basic tasks.
We could make this so-called war on drugs a real war. We go in to Columbia with some military force and start taking out the cartels. I'm not trolling -- I'm serious. I'm sure our satellites must be able to detect some large drug facilities. We'll just go in there and bomb them.
And to think that Americans wonder why others would hate them enough to commit terrorist acts against them. Sheesh.
I agree with the sentiment, but there's nothing in copyright law that commits people to releasing source code once the copyright term has finished. All it means is that you can re-distribute the copyrighted material (most usually the binaries) at will, legally. If the source code was never released to the public, there's no law that forces you to suddenly make it available.
It sure is, I saw it on Friday in Sydney.
if you wanted any hope of selling your 3D card, you had to run Quake. And to do that, you had to support OpenGL. Period.
Not exactly.. My Canopus Pure3d (3Dfx Voodoo 1) ran both Quake, Quake 2 and a lot of other games perfectly (and my Voodoo Banshee with Quake 3), and it was by no means OpenGL compatible. A heck of a lot of games (like the Quakes, for example) had 'GL miniport drivers', IIRC containing a subset of the full OpenGL api, specific to that game in question. I would have loved to have full OpenGL support on those cards for 3d modelling work etc, but I couldn't.
(note: It's possible to get full OpenGL support on the Banshee now, but only in a much more recent driver version, and a with bit of fiddling around. It certainly wasn't there when it was released.)
What about Win32s? I'm no developer, but I seem to recall installing some extra libraries (WinG, Win32s) on my Win 3.11 box in order to use 32 bit apps. Am I completely wrong about this?
Not much.. RMS is criticising the fact that the Lucida etc. fonts included with Plan 9 aren't free/open source/whatever and can't be modified, redistributed etc. I suppose this may make re-distribution of the Plan 9 OS a bit difficult, as in the screenshot here, Lucida seems to be used quite extensively in the windowing system.
Sheesh I'm from FF too.. Had no idea there were that man people around here reading /. :)