I happen to like the way FreeType does this (and Apple and Microsoft's new rendering in Vista (I forgot the name)). Although Microsoft's clamping to pixels avoids things getting fuzzy and hard to read, it also tends to make things look different from how they were supposed to look. Also (I suspect in combination with some kind of hinting), on Microsoft's old rendering, all fonts tend to look the same at small sizes.

FreeType fonts used to be blurry to the point that they would be hard to read. I haven't had that problem for years (I think the autohinter fixed that). Of course, more pixels also help. Yay, higher-resolution displays!

s/the Muslims, /people /

It's not the religion that's the problem, it's some individuals' attitudes. If you attribute this to the wrong property, you are going to both falsely accuse Muslims who aren't part of the problem and let off the hook non-Muslims who are. You can do better than that.

I'm not so sure more people with poor critical thinking and analytical skills is good for society as a whole. Just because not all work that needs to be done requires these skills doesn't mean these skills aren't good for the world.

Yes, of course. I think iOS is good in this respect.

Android, no. Java isn't the native API for anything, and Android's flavor of Java isn't the same as the other flavors of Java. Having said that, it's obviously a viable platform.

Most other smartphone OS announcements start out by saying "you will develop in HTML and JavaScript", and at that point I stop listening to anything else they have to say. While these APIs are universal, they really aren't good for developing applications in.

I really want this to succeed. First of all, QNX is awesome. I had the pleasure of working with it back in the day when they had the 1.44M demo disk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 has a video). At a time when GNU/Linux was working on getting POSIX-compliant and X was clunky and required some expertise to set up, QNX offered an OS with POSIX-compliance, real-time capabilities, a package manager, a GUI that worked out of the box, and managed to produce a 1.44M bootable diskette that showed off the OS with GUI and web browser.

Secondly, I want my software to be efficient. I'm sure you can do great things with J2ME, Dalvik, or even HTHL and JavaScript. But if you want the best performance or resources are at a premium (hello, battery-powered mobile devices!), you can do better by being closer to the metal. And we have APIs and programming languages that allow us to program closer to the metal. BlackBerry allows us to use those APIs and languages. The author of TFA makes fun of the BlackBerry APIs being in C. I see that as an advantage. You can easily build abstractions on top of low-level APIs. Getting efficiency back once it's been lost in someone's abstraction layer isn't as easy.

So, while it seems popular to make fun of BlackBerry these days, I really want them to succeed. I think they've made a great product that deserves our consideration. Of course, they have low market share and strong competitors - but then again, so did Apple when they launched the iPhone, and Google when they launched Android.

This is exactly the reason I haven't learned Android development. Why have me learn new APIs for old things? Give me the same APIs that I'm used to on the desktop to the extent that these are compatible with the mobile environment, and then I'll learn the APIs that are specific to the niche I'm developing for. And that's exactly what BlackBerry has done.

Glad to see OpenBSD is continuing to push for better security.

Has anybody been keeping tabs on performance, particularly on multicore systems? I'm curious what gains have been made there over recent years. I know that Linux and NetBSD have improved a lot, but what about OpenBSD?

True, there may not be viable alternatives. Still, you should be able to expect the supplier of the software to do at least a reasonably competent job. If the quality of the software is unreasonably low, the correct outcome isn't them making you pay more to solve problems that they shouldn't have created in the first place. You don't have to switch to an alternative supplier to demand that the supplier deliver at least reasonable quality, and withhold payment or sue for damages as necessary.

1. Criticise government
2. Become popular
3. Sue people
4. Government's court sides with you

I see some positive news in there. Apparently, you can be critical of the government, and still have the government support you.

And these are the cases where I think the customer should wonder if the company that developed the software actually did an acceptable job. In my view, the question is not "Do we have $10,000 to get our software running on an up-to-date operating system?" but "Why doesn't this software work, and what is the vendor going to do about it?"

Sometimes, the reason that an application won't work on a newer version of an operating system is that things in the operating system changed in ways that couldn't have been foreseen. E.g. if your application requires a driver to communicate with some hardware, and the driver API changes, I can accept that the application won't work on the newer OS without changes that one might reasonably charge for.

On the other hand, if the reason that the app won't work is that the developers did things wrong and it just happened to work under some specific set of circumstances, then I would argue that the app is broken, and the vendor should fix it. And if this isn't so much a mistake that wasn't caught but more of a systemic problem, they might want to do some hard thinking about how to do better in the future. Either way, charging the customer for a mistake you made in what is supposed to be your area of expertise (as opposed to the customer's) doesn't seem to be the right thing to do.

Axing products, not cooperating with governments wanting it to hand over data about the users, ... yes, Yahoo! is becoming Google.

Define "casual user". If you mean a user who cares about this stuff, they probably understand it. If they don't care about this stuff, they may or may not understand it, but I don't see why it matters.

I think you're laboring under the mistaken assumption that this reflects on the general state of Debian. The truth is that media support is a very specific issue, which, IIRC, was caused by intellectual property issues. For most other things, Debian has had a very complete and high-quality selection of packages. For proprietary media formats, they basically had none - although getting support for those was as simple as adding a repository that provided them (change one line and run a command, or do a couple of clicks - whichever you prefer).

In particular, the "broken" media support was not an issue with Debian generally being broken (it hasn't been) and it also wasn't an issue with Debian being behind other distros (Debian stable tends to have old software, but that is by design - if you want newer software, you can use backports, unstable, experimental, or third-party repositories).

By all means use the distro that works best for you. For me, that's Debian stable, because I want to minimize the amount of time I spend on maintenance. There is a trade-off between having newer software and having more testing performed on that software, and a trade-off between minimizing system maintenance effort and running up-to-date software, and I'm happy with how Debian stable makes these trade-offs. Every other OS I've used has had a higher maintenance burden.

Right, so running broadband infrastructure to rural areas is more expensive per household than in urban areas. That happens. Space tends to be more expensive in cities. That happens, too.

The fact that you don't need water and sewage infrastructure connected to a rural house just means that these aren't comparable to things that do need a connection to elsewhere. Do you have an electricity grid out there? Telephone lines? If so, these may be more comparable. If those can be done, than broadband cabling can be done. If you consider the costs for broadband to be too high, then, well, maybe don't get it. Your choice to live there, your choice if you want to pay for broadband or not. At least, that's the way I see it.

I think that agrees with what you said, but I'm not 100% sure.

Ah. I get it now. Thanks for clarifying. Where is the like button on this thing?