James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
I can't help asking how algorithms can be patented. I guess this comes up again and again, but I have some kind of mental block about accepting the concept, I suppose.
It's not that you have a mental block about accepting the concept. It is simply that the concept is nonsense. Convincing a court of that has so far been difficult. I look at it this way: You can't patent a mathematical formula or a number. Math is a fundamental property of the universe. Purely functional programming is math. So what if I implement one of Photoshop's fancy algorithms in something like Haskell? Or here's something even stranger: A computer program is just a string of bits. A string of bits is just a number. You can't patent or copyright a number. But as anything can be represented as a string of bits. So you can't count to infinity and publish the results along the way without violating every copyright there is. "Drink coca-cola." That's 128 bits exactly. There's another thread talking about filling up a 128 bit filesystem. Somewhere along the way counting through that address space they are going to reproduce someone's work.
The thing I've seen bear that out. In fact I believe one of the most common gripes (the confusion of too many windows and dialog boxes) is significantly improved in the next release. UI people are talking about how to _reduce_ choices on some menus, about removing filters in the "one trick pony" category, combining tools, ... The 2.6 release is supposed to remove obstacles to moving ahead faster -- I hope so.
I'm really not concerned about Gimp's lack of colorspaces and other things either. It already does everything I need to do. It's just a real pain to learn and use sometimes.
I'm also annoyed that it does not come with the required artistic talent packaged into the tarball/rpm.
I have found some nicely done video tutorials that I highly recommend. Look around at http://meetthegimp.org/
Cool! I'll check this out... -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
