I spent a few years in the IT publishing industry because of my heavy involvement in publishing in the 80’s for various organisations I worked for. In the early 90’s I was a distributor for Quark, Aldus (Pagemaker before Adobe bought Aldus and destroyed all their good work), Framemaker (another good company destroyed by Adobe) and others. I came acros a good article about the terrible injustice M$ has done to the world regarding publishing generally and fonts in particular.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, but if you’re in a hurry, scroll down to the section entitled: Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and FontFocus
and: Microsoft and Adobe: Sub-pixel Positioning and Kerning
And then (sadly): Linux – Inheriting the Worst
]]>I had the same problem with Ubuntu (around v7.04) until I switched to CentOS, which has this fixed already, (that I have to support for clients).
Heres a ‘HOW TO’ thread at the Ubuntu forums about a way to improve the font rendering that may help:
HOW TO: Improve Ubuntu font rendering
Here’s another (at Ubuntu Geek):
Improved subpixel font rendering for Feisty Fawn/Hardy Heron
And this is specifically about improving font rendering on LCD’s (though not specific to Ubuntu, it may give you some pointers):
Good luck! ๐
]]>Sadly, the really good products don’t stand a chance against The Dweebs greedy paranoia. He has spent hundred’s of millions in the past destroying any product that may have a half chance. Remember DESQview/X from Quarterdeck? It was beginning to overtake Windows 3 in the early 90’s, so M$ launched the horrid BOB on a naive and unsuspecting world! As soon as DESQview was destroyed, BOB was killed to many thankful wails of relief!! M$ have a long and sordid history of this kind of tactic, not to mention outright theft. Another example with the brilliant DRI GEM Desktop and later, GEM/3.
Dinosaur Sighting: Microsoft Bob
Microsoft BOB Image Gallery
At the time, the general public though Bob looked nice and easy to use. As we all know, the public takes a very long time to realise that something that looks good on the surface is not necessarily very good underneath!
Of course, all of these GUI’s have their roots at Xerox. Primarily the Xerox Star Workstation (officially the Xerox 8010 Information System) circa 1981, but also the Xerox Alto circa 1973.
See also: The Xerox “Star”: A Retrospective a paper by Jeff Johnson and Teresa L. Roberts, U S WEST Advanced Technologies. Note: There is a nice graph near the bottom that summarizes how the various systems related. ๐
And then there was the PERQ! Designed by ICL (and then Three Rivers Computer Corp) in the mid-late 70’s using their own in-house designed CPU and other components. ๐ It had a display with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels! That was incredible at that time, and unavailable on M$ OS’s until the mid-90’s, many years later. The PERQ CPU was designed to directly execute p-code, thus making it an extremely fast (in it’s day) Pascal interpreter and compiler. Here’s a PDF brochure (check out the prices! $2k for a 1MB FDD! LOL) :
Three Rivers PERQ Brochure PDF
Strangely… There was a 24MB fixed-disk option (a 14″ Shugart from memory) that was cheaper than the 1MB Floppy disk drive (only $1,500). It also had a built in (working) speech synthesizer and an optional 10Mb networking. ๐
I actually got to play with some PERQ workstations. I was tasked to design an interface system so PERQ’s could run off a Pyramid Technology SMP multi-processor system running OS/x (one of the first SMP UNIX variants that supported both BSD & SVR4) in the late 80’s. The combination made for a powerful tool for real-time analysis by the MI org I worked for then. ๐
The real father of the ‘interactive user interface’ (and many other things) was Dr. Douglas Engelbart mostly whilst at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) back when the USA actually did real research. ๐
I could go on… but I need a coffee! ๐ ๐
]]>Even if you have a subscription they are constantly trying to screw you out of the products the subscription is supposed to cover. If they spent as much on R&D as they spent on lawyers, they would be producing a much better product that would be a hell of a lot cheaper to maintain.
It is unfortunate that in this business the best products are rarely selected as the winner.
]]>The problem is that it’s very inconsistent. This is why Dell refused to install Vista on new PC’s for over a year and forced M$ to extend the life of XP.
Yes, Cutler and crew did a great job all things considered. ๐ The original NT was fast and secure. The Dweeb killed it after NT 3.1 after discovering the security was TOO good! He couldn’t easily see what everyone was doing. ๐
I still have a copy of the original ‘Inside Windows NT’ book by Helen Custer. Most people don’t realise that NT 3.1 was released in ’93, before Win 95. Most think it came out at the end of the 90’s. The problems really began when M$ and IBM had a falling out over OS/2. The Dweeb wanted to own it all even though much of it was already covered by IBM patents etc. The NT3.1 core was based on POSIX and OS/2. After M$ refused to pay royalties to IBM, they were forced to remove the OS/2 components thus ruining a good, stable OS. And we have the have the garbage from M$ today because The Dweeb is a totally greedy SOB who wants to own everything! ๐
]]>If I could just get one last client to change, I would be Linux all around. It would make life so much easier as it has the tools built-in to find problems if something breaks.
Ah, the joys of grep! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the MS search come up empty looking for files, and I then find using a manual search. Even when it finds them I have to screw around getting a location from the damn ap as it changes the display settings every time I run it. I haven’t got a clue as to who the model user for the ap is supposed to be.
Hey, everyone here realizes it’s crap, but we have to deal with it because it’s a near monopoly. One day…
]]>Steve, the original NT was created by Dave Cutler and a group from DEC who were brought in to do it by Microsoft. These are the people who created VMS and RSX-11, and their original version was a great OS. I had family working for DEC and we played with it on an Intel box and an Alpha, as it was written to be a device independent 32 bit system. Then it was “broken” for backwards compatibility with Microsoft apps. NT was the basis for 2000 and XP, and all they have really done is strip some of what was inserted to break the original version.
They should have sold the original version and fixed the broken apps, instead of breaking it to work with them.
]]>M$ should have stopped at XP. That was the (relatively) most stable OS they ever produced. As for NT, I would not voluntarily return to the days of the Blue Screen of Death. That was a serious PITA in a 24×7 production environment, as one of my clients could tell you.
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