Ah, I remember looking at the sorting algorithm in a low level graphics library. Tightly hand coded, packed to keep every pipeline stage filled and make optimal use of all the parallel units in a VLIW graphics processor, it was probably the most efficient bubble sort I'd ever seen.

I coded up a quicksort to about the same degree of tightness in a couple days, and, golly gee, a whole bunch of code suddenly got faster. Some MUCH faster... That was Lesson 1 for me. Optimize algorithms before optimizing implementations.

For persons using screen readers to read web content (Apple VoiceOver, for example) the option to simplify the content of an article and automatically pull it together as a single page is wonderful.

Try closing your eyes and reading, via a text to speech system, a typical Forbes article broken across five pages packed with links, for example. This option or the Firefox Readability extension speeds things up something wonderful.

I just wish that pre-production meetings between producers and writers could be recorded and popped onto DVDs as extras. Then you'd see where some of the goofier decisions in film making come from.

Oh, it won't happen, of course. The sort of producers that come up with these things take themselves much too seriously to want their 'process' exposed for mere entertainment.

This was a great book. I shudder to think of what they'll do with it in a movie. 3D. That means the producers will want something scary to repeatedly shove in the face of the audience. This won't end well...

First, they'll have to get rid of the fighting suits. Too expensive, and to much CGI or practical effects needed. Besides, how can we see the brilliant acting if the actors are all canned?

Second, the Taurans just aren't scary enough. They should look like multiple species of giant insects.

Third, using dead stellar objects for the FTL transportation of canned primates is so 1980. The Stargate collapsar should be a big ring thingie the troops can just walk through. This also gets rid of the tired old spaceship gags, saves money on effects, and avoids breaks in the action.

Keep the salute, though. That tests big with the 18-24 male demographic.

If Pystar can win on OSX, the same argument could, in principle, be made for other operating systems.

Correct. One could simply pay the market price for an operating system or other software, and use it in any manner one wants without regard for terms of the associated license.

One could, for example, use a GNU/Linux operating system as the basis for a set-top box, and ignore the terms of the GPL license as irrelevant, as they have already paid the going rate for the software.

When your pretty graph goes back "millions" of years, then you might have a point, but 400k out of 3.5 billion years, this is about as useful as grabbing a handful of random people from a barney the dinosaur concert and using them to stereotype the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.

Oh, snap! That's your problem right there. That graph just goes back too diddly-darn far. Why, the earth is only 6,000 years old. All this talk of millions or billions of years is just crazy talk.

You're not going to get anywhere with your fact-based agendas.

znu is right. bonch is wrong.

Screenshots are all raster data. Bitmaps. Pixels. And yes, raster data can be embedded in PDF files.

Rasterization of each app's vector drawing operations occurs primarily within the application. through the app's Quartz drawing context. (OpenGL may be used there, so if someone wants to get really pedantic, the actual generation of pixels might be happening in the GL driver and GPU.)

This is getting pretty far off topic. (Welcome to /.)

Work?

I'm retired, you insensitive clod!

Now excuse me, I have to tell those damn kids to get off my lawn.

NeXTSTEP 4.0 Alpha; sometimes mis-called Beta on web sites.

The software featured tabs across the screen bottom for various window types. (We cribbed these for Mac OS 8.5 after the merger, as the tabbed window feature.) The Documents tab was a window which presented icons of documents, each of which could be a preview of the actual document, badged to indicate the associated application.

This implementation nicely meets all the claims, but predates the patent application by 5 years. I won't bother going through all the details, but Cygnus is boned. Software patent litigation as a business model is so last decade...