Slashdot Mirror

is there even any debate

It's a toss-up between GNU/Linux and *BSD, the Free operating systems with the greatest device support.

I know I am going to rip CD's to no end once vorbis support compression of the redundancy between audio channels

Are you thinking "mid-side stereo" like FM and MP3 use? The mid-side equation (a + b) + (a - b) = 2a is patented when used in digital audio coding.

For $15 you can get the barebones edition with stereo audio and no special features (plus a load of pre-movie advertising like on VHS). Then for $30 you get

Even more pre-movie advertising that you can't even skip. DVD has a "legal notice" function (designed for displaying FBI Warnings) that disables fast-forward while it is set. Some DVDs start with ten minutes of commercials and mark them as "legal notices" so you have to either watch them, turn off the TV, leave the room, or use some DeCSS-type software.

They won't understand conceptually what it is

What part of "It's an add-on to Windows Media Player that allows it to play full-length motion pictures" wouldn't Joe Sixpack understand?

They have to go and find it and download it.

Same thing for Winamp, to play MP3 audio.

There's no paper manual

File | Print... (The only paper manuals you need are those for your computer and printer.)

and no tech suport number to call.

Ever try calling Microsoft tech support?

And when they install it, no "DiVX" icon appears on their desktop leading to a screen with a colourful and intuitive user interface.

So have the codec's installer make a shortcut to WiMP and label it DivX. WiMP 7 is colorful enough (but I wouldn't say all that intuitive). Who'll know the difference?

The most expensive part about producing a stand-alone player that can decode an MPEG-4 encoded disc is the decoding circuitry itself.

Unless the decoding circuitry is just a CPU (such as Emotion Engine, TI DSP, AMD Duron, or Crusoe) customized for DSP. It would just read encoded data, decode it, and blast it to the framebuffer.

What about the concept of a Set-top DivX box? in theory, this could work, and it might work very nicely, if done properly.

In practice, you better change the name. The name "DivX ;-)" is too close to "DIVX", a word associated in consumer minds with "hassle."

So if I download a Divx:-0 movie and burn it to a CD, it'll play on my DIVX player

Completely separate technology. Circuit City DIVX uses MPEG2 compression (as does DVD), whereas DivX ;-) uses something more akin to MPEG4. MPEG2 players can't interpret MPEG4 usefully.

So energetic/enthuiastic users develop drivers so that larger companies can "sell" support to less energetic/enthusiastic users.

So why don't hardware makers publish drivers for their hardware?

Does it require people to manually update their master certificates? This usually doesn't go down too well with joe-sixpack.

Then provide an "installer" program to update the certs. If Joe Sixpack will run elfbowl.exe or sextris.exe, then he'll probably run install-certs.exe. And if you play some cheesy animation while the certs are being updated, this program will spread just as fast as elfbowl.

Even with the 3d generated characters, its likely bluescreens

Not if they're using Linux or some other *nix on the render farm ;-)

they'd end up paying more for animation artisits, modelers, renderers, hardware, software, than they'd pay an up and coming actor.

Unless they want a character that doesn't look like Homo sapiens. (For instance, I stopped watching Trek because all the aliens looked like humans with makeup and suits on.) Or perhaps they want to do something else that cannot be achieved with living human actors.

"So use puppets for those." No. Lucas commented that Yoda the muppet was the only "fake" looking character in Episode 5.

Also, X is ugly as sin, and no Window Manager can hide that.

What's so ugly about X11? It's just a graphics subsystem (equivalent to Win32's GDI). I can see your point if you're talking about Motif and CDE, or the default configuration of a particular distribution, but slap a decent theme onto GTK+ and Sawfish and it's no longer ugly. If you really want it, there's a theme that looks almost pixel-perfect like Microsoft Windows. (Are Windows's widgets any less ugly than Motif's?)

Yes, X only takes 30MB. But your GNOME session adds another 30MB, and your window manager adds anywhere from 10MB (for FVWM, the Fuckingugly Virtual Window Manager) to 512BM (for Enlightenment; the window manager which proves that enough eye candy can make up for any lack of usefulness).

Provided you believe top, which double- and triple-counts shared memory. For example, when some drivers map video card memory three times, top counts it three times. GNOME isn't as bloated as you think; a lot of the memory that GNOME programs appear to use is in .so (shared library) files (which also are multi-counted). Mozilla isn't a hog either; top overcounts any multithreaded app.

If you think a WM is ugly, design a new color scheme and post it somewhere. You bash GNOME for being bloated, but is KDE any better? (Please take this flamewar to the NES if you must continue it.)

dude. why don't you splurge and buy a $40 card that is supported?

Because some of us are on a laptop or other computer whose video subsystem can't be replaced easily. Does XFree86 support PCMCIA video cards?

if a reference to the content creator was included with a file -- where you could give money to the content creators

Then use the format's tagging facility. For tarballs, use a text file named README. For MP3 audio, use ID3v2.

GTK+ features a very nice feature of keyboard-bindings-on-the-fly. Simply move your mouse over the menu item (without clicking it), press the desired key combination - and there you have it. Wish to erase the combination? Move the mouse above the menu item, and press Del.

Which leaves 127 typeable characters (C-space C-a C-b C-c C-d ... { | } ~) and 127 more with the Alt key (C-M-space C-M-a ... M-| M-~). What if you have more filters installed than 254?

And still, how do you bring up a contextual (right-click) menu from the keyboard? (In Windows, it's Shift+F10 or the key between RWin and RCtrl.) Seeing as how some apps stuff most of their interface under contextual menus, this can get in the way.

What does the former East Germany have to do with RAM?

Nothing to my knowledge, but I can see how you'd think that (Deutsch Democratic(sic) Republic). This is what all that alphabet soup really means:

• RAM: Random Access Memory
• DRAM: Dynamic RAM (information contained in one capacitor as opposed to several transistors, but each row of the memory matrix must be refreshed a couple hundred times a second)
• EDO: Extended Data Out (accesses are pipelined to an extent; one can start as another is finishing)
• SDRAM: Synchronous DRAM (uses a clocked protocol to expand on EDO)
• DDR: Double Data Rate (the internal bus is twice as wide, and the external bus is multiplexed so as to send a word both on the rising and falling edge of the clock)
• DRDRAM: Direct Rambus® DRAM. According to this Hardware Central report, "Its goal is to get rid of the latency." I don't think it has achieved that goal in the slightest.

I hope this clarifies what "DDR" means. Of course, I could be talking out of my proverbial ass.

What would be even more insane is if they released [Windows] under a BSD license.

Except there's already a Windows-compatible OS under a BSD-style non-copyleft license, and Microsoft wouldn't be "innovating" anything by copying FreeBSD (BSD2 licensed) plus XFree86 (MIT licensed) plus Wine.

If it's called "Black and White" why are the screenshots in full color? Don't the game developers remember that some of us still have grayscale, greenscale, or amberscale monitors?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Well apparently the lamers at progeny don't think so seeing as they are anti-kde

Well, something has to go on the second CD. There is more stuff in Debian GNU/Linux than can be bzip2 compressed into 650 megabytes. The installer most likely needs both discs anyway. How do you know the criterion wasn't "a-j first CD; k-z second CD"?

>>GNOME bashing
>KDE bashing
This flamewar is over. If you wish to continue fighting about GNOME vs. KDE, I suggest you look at Battle of the Desktops.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

MOV for movie sites

Apple would love this.

Like USENET, DNS needs a .ALT top level domain

OpenNIC already has the .null TLD, which is similar to the alt.* hierarchy of Usenet. The .parody domain could cut down on reverse domain name hijacking by parody targets.

HTTP already has Content-Encoding: gzip . But the bulk of HTTP transfer (on a kilobyte basis) is already tightly compressed (PNG and JPEG images; MP3 audio; Flash, MNG, and MPEG animations; bzip2 tarballs) so this will help only for HTML and MIDI.

It would obviously require a compatible browser

Or a compatible proxy. But AFAIK Mozilla and IE (two biggest browsers) already support it.

By then, you should be able to pick up a PSONE from Funcoland for $15.

Except the PSONE apparently has no serial port for connecting a console to another console for two-player two-TV gaming.

Sony used the CPU from the PSX to manage the PS2, allowing it to play PSX games also. So of course Sony will use the PS2 CPUs (i hate pluralizing intialations), probly in an all on one chip setup, to manage the PS3. That leaves them with no backwards compatibility with the PSX.

Except the PSX chip is required to run PS2 games; it serves as an I/O processor. This arrangement is fairly common; a Sega Master System is the I/O processor for the Sega Genesis.

Sony just keeps building that game base.

Actually, that was Toaplan.

The other reason why no one has dropped 8.3 is that everyone is doing LFN differently. OS/2 can not read Windows LFN, Windows can not read OS/2 LFNs. No need to bring Apple into it.

Mac OS 8.x supports Windows 9x's VFAT long filenames on FAT filesystems.

The other irritating feature is that LFN is supported when the GUI is loaded. You can not fix a LFN from a Win9x boot disk.

Typical Microsoft practice of tying various things to their OS (in this case the GUI). You can add LFN support to DOS with LFNDOS. Works for LFN-compatible DOS programs such as command.com 9x, edit.com 9x, and all DJGPP programs.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Go ahead. Just _try_ tab completion or ad[vV]anced.{glob,pattern}s on MICROS~1.

I just did. It worked. Know why? I use Bash instead of command.com. A good version of Bash DOES exist for both DOS and Windows (see my earlier comment #41).

I'm not on Linux (I miss tab completion the most), so I can't grep for it

If you use Red Hat Cygwin (GNU software for Windows) or the full version of DJGPP (GNU software for DOS), you get bash and grep.

Back on topic... lack of tab completion in the WinDOS distributions is what keeps us using easy-to-type 8.3 names.

How exactly is the music going to be CD quality if you can store 5 hours on 500 megs.

500 megabytes / 5 hours * 8,000,000 bits/megabyte / * hr/3600 s = about 224 kilobit/s. And 224 kbit is just about enough for sounds-just-as-good-as-a-CD quality; see also r3mix.

>>A LAN-party network may not even be connected to the Internet >More of a problem, but how often does this happen?

Whenever the LAN party is at a location that doesn't have a DSL or cable connection that allows multiple IPs and/or won't cut off service if you use NAT. Do you really want to pay a million dollars to pack up and move yourself, your family, and your seven friends and their families to a town (or area thereof) that offers DSL or cable? Or will you play games that don't require authentication to a central server?

The key difference is that a pure multiplayer game (like Quake3 or Phantasy Star Online) will always have the network connection active and so the validation is no big deal.

Except Quake 3's network design is nothing like Phantasy Star Online's, and Quake 3 has a single player.

I understand central authentication being used in games that require a connection to the full Internet, such as massively multiplayer games such as EverQuest. I don't understand such authentication being used in LAN-oriented games such as Quake 3 or Tribes (AYBABTU). A LAN-party network may not even be connected to the Internet.

Thing is, Tribes 2 is going to use central authentication, but it isn't massively multiplayer. I can't see people buying business DSL just to get multiple IPv4 addresses so that everyone at a LAN party can authenticate to Sierra's central server.

I think a 56 Kilobit connection could easily handle 4 Kilobits.

Not when a site is slashdotted within five minutes and it isn't even sending at 4 kilobits.

(That didn't turn out too well... let's try that again.)

__________________________________________________

I think a 56 Kilobit connection could easily handle 4 Kilobits.

Wow! It'd let me surf an order of magnitude faster. From the article:

An average session, browsing the Internet, handling e-mails and coding in C++ results in a fairly satisfactory 60:1, with bitrates in the order of 4Kbps.

apparently we have been stealing from the companies that charge 14.99 for a cd that costs them about 50 cents to package and market.

It costs more than that to market a CD. It costs to record the music, it costs to license the samples used on the CD, and it costs to produce promotional tools such as a website or music video.

Napster is going down for all the wrong reasons.

The "wrong reasons" you're referring to include the fact that recording artists who publish their work for a free download have a very hard time getting their work on mainstream radio thanks to under-the-table payola systems that the RIAA and NAB maintain.

When English first forked from the Germanic trunk, it too had a flexible word order. The languages spoken in Star Wars world most likely evolved in a similar fashion.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

If people are just too lazy to check the FreeDB option in their clients and start contributing

Where's that option in the latest Winamp again? The current CDDB developers' license requires that you access no CD metadata source except Gracenote CDDB. This means that clients cannot connect to FreeDB.

Thus, on Windows 95, a GPL program could not link to DirectX (which isn't a part of the OS proper).

I guess I misinterpreted "operating system." If it comes with the operating system distribution or can be obtained as part of an OS vendor's upgrade package, it is considered part of the OS; "the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable." It seems you just have to make DirectX 8 or the Visual Basic libraries a separate download and make a case for "this is an OS vendor sanctioned OS upgrade."

how does the license of the language one uses in any way related to the license of the software?

Not the license of the language itself, but the license of the libraries used to implement the language. For example, the C language itself has no license, whereas Cygwin (a Win32 implementation of POSIX, including gcc) has a GPL libc, infecting just about every program (unless you use the msvcrt.dll support, in which case you fall under the OS exception).

Does this mean that it isn't morally wrong to make a developer pay for a toolkit just because the OSS community doesn't like his preferred OS? Does a GPL program on Windows count any less than a GPL program on Linux?

The Windows version of Qt that Trolltech sells may contain GPL incompatible code licensed from other entities; it costs money to develop GPL compatible code. This is part of why Mozilla took so long to replace some of the features of older Netscape releases. But Qt Free Edition is under GPL; you are free to start a project to port it to whatever platform you choose. According to QT's README, "If you want to port Qt to a new platform, please read the PORTING file."

Applicability of patents is decided in court ... not by lawyers alone.

Unless (as is often the case, especially in patent and copyright suits) the big corp has more money to pay for lawyers and bribe the judge than you do and can simply drag the trial until you're out of money.

So, according to your logic, I couldn't license a Perl program under the BSD license, since it would conflict with the GPL?

If you plan to link in both a GPL'd library (module, whatever) and a proprietary library that doesn't come with the OS, there would be a conflict. If you plan to link in a GPL'd library and also use the old advertising clause version of the BSD license, there would be a conflict.

BeOS is proprietory, and I use OSS software all the time.

There are two types of libraries that can be linked into a GPL'd program: (a) GPL compatible libraries and (b) libraries that are included with the operating system distribution and are distributed separately from the program. BeOS programs use the latter, but the MS Visual Basic runtime is neither.

There wasn't a large library of free software on UNIX either, until GNU came along.

There wasn't a large library of free software anywhere until the GNU project, especially because Richard M. Stallman apparently invented the copyleft that keeps free software free.

Don't tell me the same can't be done on Windows.

This seems to imply that a "critical mass" of free software will be achieved much faster on free operating systems. Go spread the word about Wine (a free clone of Windows that runs on top of POSIX+X11). Get it installed at your local LUG's installfest, and you'll see more free software on Windows, as users create programs that run both on their free OS (Wine) and their friends' systems (MS Windows).

As of yesterday, Gracenote has posted a *free* (FREE, NO COST) license to freeware developers.

There's a difference between freeware and free software. The terms of the non-commercial license conflict with those of a certain popular free software license.

Check this out:

The Licensed Application will only be distributed for non-commercial use on General Purpose Personal Computers. "General Purpose Personal Computers" or "PCs" are general purpose personal computers consisting of a desktop or laptop model, a display monitor, keyboard and mouse. PCs do not include any attachments or peripherals except an external CD drive, DVD drive, hard drive, printer, scanner and/or analog Audio Equipment such as speakers. An external device that reads TOC and also displays text or graphics is NOT a PC.

The real GPL compatibility killer: "You agree not to modify or disable any Gracenote CDDB Client functions or to otherwise interfere with the operation of the Gracenote CDDB Client." Also, "The Client ID must be embedded in binary form in your Licensed Application, and must not be easily extractable by End-Users or other developers."

Or this:

You will use the Gracenote CDDB Client and the Gracenote CDDB Database as the exclusive source for CD identification and Data when your Licensed Application accesses such information by reading a CD's TOC or disc identification number and retrieves Data or related data via the Internet. ... Your Licensed Application shall not have or enable a function that permits transmission of TOC or the combination of TOC together with Data to anyone other than Gracenote.

Of course, there are a couple patents on using a TOC hash as a database key that keep you from just using FreeDB instead.

According to http://www.cddb.com/dev/lic/sched_c.html, hashing a CD's TOC is patented, which means that Gracenote can send lawyers to take down FreeDB at any time. Go to delphion.com and look up U.S. Patents 5987525, 6061680, and 6154773.

Considering Grip uses FreeDB by default

FreeDB infringes U.S. Patents #5,987,525; #6,061,680; #6,154,773, and other patents issued or pending, and foreign counterparts. See also non-commercial license terms schedule C.

Okay, I didn't realize it'd require a port. However, I take offense to your "hostile to free software" comment. Windows has an extensive freeward community

I assume "freeward" is a misspelling for "freeware." In that case, I know about all royalty-free binaries, but most of them are not free software. There's a difference.

OSS software does not need to run on an OSSOS.

But copylefted free software can never be written in Visual Basic, as that would require providing the source code of the MS Visual Basic runtime and releasing it under a compatible license. Tough luck getting Microsoft to comply there. (Or is the VB runtime covered by the operating system exception to the common licenses?)

And there isn't that large of a library of GPL'd Windows software to infect Windows programs with GPL either.

7. Use Plural Forms From Other Languages: A contributor was the proud author of a VMS script that kept track of the "statii" returned from various "Vaxen". Esperanto, Klingon and Hobbitese qualify as languages for these purposes. For pseudo-Esperanto pluraloj, add oj. You will be doing your part toward world peace.

The hobbits in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings spoke a language called Westron, which remains largely undocumented as it was completely translated into English in the novel.

30. Insist on using "c" for const in C++ and other languages that directly enforce the const-ness of a variable.

Funny thing is, I was actually taught pretty much that, as the convention in the Mac environment is to use "k" before constants.

Seriously folks, this is an excellent reference on how to write a code obfuscator for code that should be recompilable but not modifiable (under the EULA). Several UNIX apps are distributed this way.

NOT UNTIL LINUX RUNS DIRECTX APPS, and then I will JUMP ONTO LINUX soooo fast

Wine already implements a subset of DirectDraw and DirectInput, enough to run many older (and more imaginative) games. And there are libraries such as Allegro and ClanLib that make porting across Windows (DirectX) and Linux (X11/DGA) a matter of a recompile.

LINUX IS NOT READY FOR GAMES, not yet. Name a game that you can just install and start playing without touching any config files.

Once you have the Allegro library installed from source tarball (./configure; make depend; make; su -c make install), you can run any free Allegro game such as freepuzzlearena, TOD, or scores of others. There are also emulators to run other platforms' games (such as TuxNES and SNES9x).

It specifically says that the code is generated based on the hardware in your system. Unless you swapped out hardware as part of your format-and-reinstall

What if the format-and-reinstall was because you swapped out hardware? What if you are installing Windows onto the new hard drive you just bought? Luckily, there's a better way: Generic Windows. It's Wine running on top of Linux or BSD. And as long as developers continue to support Windows 9x, Wine will be fine.

>>Back on topic: will qt free edition (or xfree86)
>>ever be ported to windows 9x?
>Probably not in this lifetime.

YM "not by Trolltech." Qt Free is GPL and can be ported. XFree has already been ported to NT, and there's a good shareware X server from Microimages called MI/X. I don't think it would be that hard to get Qt Free running under Win32, or does Qt have some technical issues I'm not aware of that one of its biggest competitors that has been ported to Win32 doesn't?

"write one, run anywhere" widget set

Java Swing, Tcl/Tk, GTK+, Allegro... The field is already crowded.

-tetris, and galaaxia are all there for the taking off the internet if you wanna do something a little more "usefull" with your calculator

It may have been a falling tetramino game, but it wasn't Tetris, as that's a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC.

The snake game sucks

While we're on the topic of Nintendo consoles, you can get a version of the snake game for NES here.

Still, I'd rather play Tetris.

Do you want generic falling tetraminoes, or do you want to pay through your no$e for the Tetris brand?

Yes, the Game Boy Advance console is compatible with almost all official titles that run on Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Color. There is one title (Workboy) that does not function because it requires a special keyboard that can connect only to the original Game Boy's serial port.

It accomplishes this the same way the Sega Genesis plays Master System games and the PlayStation 2 plays PlayStation games: it includes a miniaturized version of the previous system, used in native games for I/O processing. It's as if you had a 386 on an ISA bus and an Alpha or PowerPC on a PCI bus on the same machine.

I'd really like to see a "graphing calculator" attachment for GBC or GBA. That baby would sell because "now you can take your Game Boy console to school and your teacher won't care!"