Slashdot Mirror

Some of the bigger studios (notably Fox) are starting to use something called 'Region Code Extension' (RCE) on their disk. With this the first commands the DVD player find on the disc are (in pseudo code):

let r = Region Code;
if(r == 1)
jump to movie
else
jump to naughty person page
endif

Where 'jump to naughty person page' jumps to a still-frame saying somthing like 'You can't play this disk in this region'. A multi-region player can't cope with this since it reports its region mask as 0xff so will still jump to the still-frame.

Only a plyer set to play region 1, and only region 1 can play the disk. Hence to play it you need a DVD player which allows you to reset the region an arbitary number of times (rarer) rather than a 'multi-region' one (more common).

Of course some Linux DVD players simply have a 'region' field in their config file which defeats this :)

I found a nice program a couple of days ago.

Try pfaedit. It supports TTF fonts as well as bitmap fonts and has a lot of good features. It supports simple latin-1 fonts as well as unicode fonts and author seems to really know what he's doing since website tells a lot about differences and inner workings of different font types. Pfaedit seems to try its best to convert everything necessary so user doesn't have to worry about them too much.

It is a work in progress but I think good artists can make miracles with it. Website also has good documentation altough I think in-program documentation could be a bit better (just to know where to start). I tried it myself a bit but since I'm no artist..

Website also links to other free font editors but pfaedit seems to be most mature. Most of others only support bitmap fonts.

As someone who has spent almost two years working on building, from the ground up, the technology for something similar, but having had to kill the project mainly due to lack of external interest, I think the main advantage of DustCity is the target audience. The Counter-Strike user community seems to be very strong, and of course already centers around creating 3D content. Plus, the idea of integrating clans and giving them the ability to build their own "homes" in DustCity seems obvious, but is hopefully brilliant just as well. Now, if only my home PC was powerful enough to actually do 3D things on... ;^)

Oh, and for the curious: check out the results of the above-mentioned effort, which was sponsored by one of Sweden's coolest research companies, at verse.sf.net. It's all Free Software, using a combination of GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses. Never mind the bitterness of the opening (final) diary entries. ;^)

WAV doesn't make sense, but FLAC does. FLAC is a lossless audio encoder which typically achieves 2:1 compression on ordinary music files (such as WAV's ripped from CD's). That is roughly 50% more than 320kbps MP3. For the audiophiles, it is an attractive option.

Phatnoise makes a car MP3 player that plays FLAC files. Of course, the words "car" and "audiophile" usually don't go together, unless we're talking about rich dudes who ride around in limousines, drinking champagne, listening to Beethoven, and ruling the world using a cell phone.

Although, as others have pointed out, Konqueror is really a *nix app (not just a Linux app or even an X app, as commonly assumed). You'd be best off just grabbing a copy of Mozilla if you're really worried.

--
Evan (no reference, not even to a certain Toho Industries character)

Nice system for list matching:
a-s-k.sf.net

Or, if you're not willing to sacrifice (or mess with) your MDA, check out ASK. It does about the same thing and works with sendmail, procmail, qmail, etc.

A-S-K

ASK is a system similar to yours with some tweaks:
If you send someone email, and they reply to it, leaving in your .sig, they are automatically whitelisted.

Mailing lists are handled automagically.

Check it out:
http://a-s-k.sf.net

Pros:

• Completely database independent, including using an internal dictionary.
• Can update database tables automatically.
• Provides a nice entity/relation-view of the database.
• XML import/export support.

• Can only search "all" and "by relation" for now.
• Not too many database backends.
• Not the world's most efficient sql.

As someone who works on a "distribution", I can say that it's not that simple. There's a *lot* of work that goes into fixing things that break on the move to new compilers, and into handling binary incompatibilities.

Apple has moved to GCC 3.1 with their new MacOSX release, and it's been a *real* pain handling the switch. The issue is not a matter of things that have been rebuilt to work with each other, the issue is maintaining backwards compatibility with old binaries. If joe sixpack built some package into /usr/local that uses C++, it will be broken when he upgrades... it's the same on every distro, unless you build things twice, or rebuild *everything*.

Yes, there is.

It is CLI only, though I think someone wrote a GUI wrapper. And yes I use it to mow the lawn. I find it works best with other headphones. I use a set of Sony's myself.

I have one and it works ok. I also had a PMP300SE, and in many ways it is nicer. The Linux software works really well.

If I was to get a new one, I think I would get a CD type or the Archos jukebox.

Often the free software development model is criticized for simply rebuilding what has been done already. And I feel that the release of the Quake engines and DooM engines have exemplified this very inadequacy.

I had hoped that we would see some really brilliant things come out of the GPL releases of these codebases, and, in reality some very good, cleaned-up clients have been developed. I certainly enjoy the mouselook, higher resolutions, and enhanced levels that have been developed from the DooM engine (see DooMWorld to see the kind of stuff that's out there). The improved QuakeWorld client I'm aware of is pretty nice. And Q^2 has a good Quake 2 client.

But these are just the obvious extensions of what was already done. The community now has (for the most part) all the source and tools that went into making Half-Life, the most successful game to come out of all of these codebases. Yet, to my knowledge, no project has arisen from the community to mold the next such game. How about another story-driven game that people would compare to Deus Ex? Or an all-out action game in the same vein as Soldier of Fortune? Or how about a freaking free software teamplay game that we compare to Counterstrike so that Linux users can play a team-oriented online FPS using free software only and not rely on WINE or WINEX? Or meld two free software projects and connect a Z-machine interpreter with the Quake engine and make a text-command driven story with a 3D view of the action?

These are things that would demonstrate just how momentous and visionary the release of the Quake source under the GPL was. Yet, all the community has managed to come up with is Quake++.

People slam my posts for being negative lately. That I'm ripping on people that have done good work. That's fine, I've got the skin for it. (Try USENET...) I admit that some really find refactoring and coding has gone into redoing the Linux Quake clients. But really, I hear plenty of bitching about how Linux (and other free OS) don't have good games and don't get the attention of the big game companies. Yet, when empowered to do new and exciting things and to make your own games, the group is content to simply recompile Quake for the Zaurus and call it a day. That's good work, for sure, but it's not the kind of work that's going to move free software forward and make it the kind of interesting world that non-free software people take a real interest in.

Again, I'm not making a judgment about the quality of the work that has been done. It's great. But now that you have the best raw materials from John Carmack, can we see real creativity out of the free software gaming world? (FWIW, I think CrystalSpace has done a good job of attracting some interesting new development.)

With Cinelerra, Ardour, and Blender, I may finally have reason to buy a new machine and stuff this Celeron 366 in a car or something. It's been going strong for 5 years and I'd hate to have to replace it, but there's sadly not enough power in it anymore. :(

Ahh, the joys of been a poor (as in beer) teenage geek.

While browsing the LGames website, and I noticed he prominently displays a "Legalise Marijuana" badge on his front page. This sort of puerile proselytising reflects badly both on the project and all Linux users, and I implore Mr. Speck to remove it. Regardless of your feelings about the drug war issue, a Linux games pages in not the place to raise it. What is the average Joe going to think when he searches for "linux games" on Google, comes to the lgames website, and is immediately assaulted with this image? When trying to get friends and coworkers to switch to Linux, by far the hardest hurdle I have to overcome is the stereotype of Linux users as freeloading, dirty, overzealous pigs who try to shove their dogma down the throats of anyone who talks to them. Things like Speck's shameless pot-promotion do little to help overcome this. I hope this post of mine will help him come to his senses.

Really not sure what you mean: Alsa? Jack (same architecture as CoreAudio, oh, and PortAudio does the same thing BTW)? MusicKit? LADSPA?

The samples are low-quality mp3s. How LAME.

Was that supposed to be some kind of really bad pun?

I installed the Gimp on a 333MHz Blueberry iMac yesterday... using Fink. Pre-compiled binary, made it easy as pie.

xine is what you are looking for. It can play DVDs, DivX's and pretty much anything else and can also output via NVidia cards TV output or via a Hollywood Plus/Sigma Designs hardware card (re-encoding to MPEG on the fly in the latter case for non-MPEG files).

Some posts further down recommend interpreted languages like Python and LISP (jeez!) for such applications. They must be joking.

Lisp is not an "interpreted language" (if there even is such a thing as a *language* which needs to be interpreted). In fact, most open-source Lisp systems, as well as all commerical Lisps are compiled into native code.

I find it hard to believe that many people seem to think that after 40+ years of existence, Lisp is still interpreted, as if Lisp users, developers, and researchers were incapable of doing any better.

If you still have those old Lucasgames/LucasArts classics somewhere in the attic, check out ScummVM - an amazing project that allows you to run your old favourites (Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, etc.) on your modern box (windows,unix,dremacast!).
Of course, if you don't, you can go buy the old dos games for cheap money on the next corner.

Old Sierra On-Line games (Larry, etc) were written in a bytecode language and interpreters for many platforms, incuding Mac, were available. Sarien and FreeSCI are free interpreters and can play most of those classic games. Sarien has been ported to MacOS classic and OSX.

it's a full Red Hat system on a floppy

On a floppy? He must be using lzip.

It's nice to dream, but for now and for the forseeable future, the software just isn't there.

Not true. Check out Ardour, Audacity, Ecasound, MusE, or some of the other 10,000 apps on Dave Phillp's Linux Sound and MIDI Apps page

It's nice to dream, but for now and for the forseeable future, the software just isn't there.

Not true. Check out Ardour, Audacity, Ecasound, MusE, or some of the other 10,000 apps on Dave Phillp's Linux Sound and MIDI Apps page

I wouldn't dream of switching from a Mac or Windows until you could get a version of Cakewalk, Logic, or Pro Tools on it.

Before long there may be free software projects that will be just as good if not better than the commercial competition. Ardour's stated goal is to make ProTools irrelevent, and the project is led by the extremely clueful Paul Davis. It's undergoing active development, though it supports many features right now.

MIDI seems to be a weaker point: MuSE and Rosegarden are two sequencers I know of, but I've never tried them.

In fact I am right now listening to the scsi session of the OSDN/Usenix Kernel Summit and they are talking about their concern of spinning too many scsi devices up at once since it could spike your power supply and fry it.

t.

> I used to use the 'vi' binding in 'nn', which gave me a full curses screen to
> type my posts. Now I type Slashdot comments in this puny little HTML
> textarea. What has the world come to?

If you are on a supported platform you could have been using
w3m. With it you could have the wonderful
experience of editing textareas with your favourite editor (which is emacs of
course ;-).

I use the nvrec tools (specifically DIVX4rec) to record tvshows into divx4 without a problem on a PIII 833. I had a fair amount of problems until I moved to the Video 4 Linux 2 API which is leaps and bounds better for what I use it for. I would like to mention though that recent versions of the nvrec tools were causeing quite a bit of interlacing problems for me, so I've gone back to the end of may snapshots. I've never had a sound synch problem before, are you using v4l2 or v4l?

I'd always thought MySQL was a fast, simple database until I built a Type-II JDBC driver for it.

Because the API does not allow more than one result (MYSQL_RES structure) per connection, and the client libraries are not thread safe by default, any Java classes must be synchronized on the connection. In addition, all rows in a result must be retrieved completely using mysql_store_result rather than the more network efficient mysql_use_result.

The JDBC specification insists (sensibly, in my opinion) that Statement objects be thread safe. The necessary synchronization and use of mysql_store_result severely limits the speed of any mutithreaded application sharing a connection, and probably discounts the speed benefits of MySQL over other free databases.

I would guess the same problems exist with other multithreaded languages using MySQL, and developers should consider these limitations before blindly agrreing with MySQL propaganda that the database if faster than its competitors for running web applications.

If anyone's interested, I just ported this to Mac OS X, so you can use this WM with XDarwin. You need Xfree86 installed (you can get it from Fink).

Untar and ungzip the package.
cd to the source directory.
With your favorite editor, edit utils/Makefile.am by deleting the reference to minivol on the bin_PROGRAMS line, and removing the minivol_SOURCES line.
Run automake, ./configure, make and make install.
Make the appropriate modifications to ~/.xinitrc.

I have developed a project called JSPBlog which is a Weblog written in JSP.
I found a million and one written in PHP, so I developed mine in JSP and servlets...
I always loved the idea of a weblog. You can take a look at it at http://jspblog.sf.net

The only way to have a cross-platform help-desk tool, is to access it from a web interface. Discard all non web interface product - but these days all products do provide such web access.
Then you could use a free, opensource product. On the project I'm working on right now we use f2w Helpdesk. We had to install it on a linux Box. We had problems installing the prerequisite on our Solaris box. The software is quite simple to manage, and quite powerfull. Is 100% customisable and can even be accessed from Lynx based browser !!
The product is python and zope based.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

I think a more effective way to "evangelize" open source projects is to emphasize the superiority of the development model for human creativity projects.

I think the key concept here is "creativity"(1). Perhaps the open source development model (typically defined as being a loosely-collected group of developers working together via some collaborative medium such as the internet, for fun and not necessarily profit) works well for projects that can be said to be "creative", but unfortunately 99.995%(2) of all software projects are not what I would consider "creative". They may be reimplimentations of something that's already been done (say, a media player, or a word processor, or a text editor, or a compiler, or ...), though they may be adding new concepts and capabilities. They may also be just plain drudgery (specialized software for an accounting firm, for example). Are these projects "creative"? Depends. I'd probably say "no", for the majority of them, but you may have a different opinion. As well, even where "creative" applications are concerned, a majority of the code is boring code that needs to be written but is more busy work than anything else. In general (and there are exceptions to this, of course), most open source developers prefer to focus on the more "fun" parts of the software rather than doing the various menial tasks that need to be done(3). This is understandable, because if you're not getting paid to do this, you're doing it in your spare time. Why would you want to spend your spare time doing something boring when you could be out doing something else instead?

Anyway, on to my point. What I'm getting at here is that the open source development process is not necessarily superior to more traditional proprietary development processes, nor is there an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that it may be. For every successful open source project out there that can be held up as a shining example of the open source development process, there are hundreds of projects languishing under the model, with little or no "external" (ie, outside the initial author or group of authors) development or bug reporting, and a whole lot of these projects have only gotten so far as implementing some of their cool ideas and just get bogged down when they get into the other 80% or so of the code that's not "cool"(4). At least as far as proprietary software is concerned, you can be reasonably sure that the boring parts will get done as well as the interesting parts, because there is incentive to do the boring work (ie, a paycheck).

------

1. For "creativity", I'm using the definition of the base "creative" as "Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative", and not the more broad "Having the ability or power to create".

2. I'm making up my statistics, but the actual numbers are not important. What is important is that the number is large. It may be 75%, or 83%, or 99%, but it's still a large majority.

3. Prime example: the addition of fairly useless "fun" things to Mozilla, like Chatzilla, at a point in time where development resources would've been better spent fixing bugs aiming towards a 1.0 release. Yeah, yeah, Mozilla did finally release their 1.0 version, but the fact still stands that many of the contributing developers apparently were more concerned with writing "cool code" than with fixing bugs.

4. Check Freshmeat or SourceForge (SourceForge is much worse about this than Freshmeat) some time and see all the stagnant open source projects that have never gone anywhere, nor ever will. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of them. Temper the successes of each Linux, Apache, FreeBSD, or other high-profile open source project by the failures of all of those projects. Note that I'm not saying the ratio is any better in the proprietary world (though if I had to guess, I'd say it is), but at least with proprietary software there's some form of motivation aside from "This'd be cool".

It's a common mistake to imagine rpm packages as a big, uniform package base serving all distributions that use the format. It isn't. Each vendor can package software in a different way, built with different options and with different dependecies. Some distributions based on rpm are even migrating to a packaging layout more similar to Debian than Red Hat (e.g. libfoobar2 instead of foobar-libs).

So the answer is yes, you must have a different graph for each vendor.

As a side note, I've done that before using Gustavo Niemeyer's depmanager. If you don't work with a very restrict set of packages, the graph becomes very, very dense and confuse. But it's good to find dependency errors.

I am not a game programmer, but I have a few suggestions that may help out:

I don't know how much programming experience you have, but from what you said, it seems you only know some Visual Basic. You may want to start with a good high level language then move to C/C++. How about Java? If you learn it properly, it should teach you good object oriented programming techniques--plus it has some similarities to C++. Python may be a good contender as well, however I haven't done much with it, so I can't say. I heard both those languages have OpenGL interfaces. They allow you to link with C, so you can ease your way into C/C++.

You may want to check out Crystal Space, OGRE, and other open source game libraries/engines. They could be a good stepping stone to building your first game.

You may want to learn some assembly language. You probably won't write entire programs in it, however at times you may need to optimize certain parts of your code. In addition, it can help you understand how the compiler/CPU interprets the code and how to make it run faster. I'm not sure of a good book/site to learn assembly--most of my info about it is outdated. Going to the processor manufacturer's sites will give you documentation for the instruction sets at the very least.

When you look at the assembly info, make sure you learn the MMX instructions. They should speed up your game code in some situations. MMX macros for C also exist too--I thought there was one called libMMX. I can't seem to find it now.

Usenet can be a good help too. The comp.graphics.algorithms FAQ has lots of information.

It would also be a good idea to learn as much as you can about math and physics like the other poster said. I recommend Technical Mathematics with Caculus by Paul Calter--it goes from very basic math all the way through caculus. As for physics, I don't have any suggestions, however the Calter book does touch on some physics concepts.

Any decent browser nowadays can block popups while keeping Javascript enabled. Go get Mozilla, Galeon, Opera, Konqueror... the list goes on and on.

In short: Don't use IE, and you won't get popups. Your browsing experience will also be faster and more intuitive.

One would think that gaim would be a good argument that interoperability is possible, given that it spports AIM/ICQ (Oscar), MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Napster, and Zephyr.

the forgotten project utah-glx , to which nVidia donated code to get the TNT* cards going for XFree86 has actually continued the developement, ported the code to XFree86 4.x and added support for Geforce2 - as GF2 and Geforce4mx shares the same GPU it may be possible to at least support the lower end nVidia cards in XFree86

however... still think the binary drivers sucks, I bought an ATI instead, and I'm perfectly happy with it, better TV-out too :)

It keeps getting worse and worse. NT5 had an estimated 65000 bugs, if I recall correctly, but at a few grams per bug (when they don't fly), nobody cared about such a tiny mass. But now NT7 would be large enough for continental scale devastation? Wow. That must be a serious number of bugs.

On the other hand, announcing a product 17 years before it hits, come on, that's not really serious, even by NT's standards.

You think you know about programming?

Guess you need to try google again because the NoUturn link is old and not correct. There is a quicktime component that allows ogg files to be played in iTunes, as well as quicktime player. It worked in iTunes2 and it works in iTunes3. The component isn't perfect as it doesn't support vorbis comments but it does work to play ogg files in iTunes.

You can get a beta quicktime component that will allow you to play oggs in iTunes and other quicktime aware apps. The iPod does it's mp3 decoding on hardware and there is not currently a solution for software decoding. I wouldn't expect one any time soon either.

Check out camelbones and see if that scratches your itch.

For the most part, you're sadly correct on much of what you said.

On the bright side, though, Linux actually has working tuner and capture drivers for a lot of ATI hardware here at the gatos project.

No, you missed it. Click on the 'MojoNation' Hive-Hex tab and you will find a link to the LGPL sites of both the EGTProtocol and the MNET verison of MojoNation.

No, you missed it. Click on the 'MojoNation' Hive-Hex tab and you will find a link to the LGPL sites of both the EGTProtocol and the MNET verison of MojoNation.

I haven't looked for a complete list of what you get on a normal install, but you can safely assume a fairly vanilla BSD kit, including development tools: emacs, perl, gcc, etc. It's all free with MacOS X, as it should be. The supplied versions aren't always the most up-to-date, but that's what fink is for.

Also, the Mac OS development environment (which includes updates to NeXTStep's really-quite-impressive development environment, Interface Maker and Project Builder, full API docs etc) is a free download. I believe it's included on the harddrive (as an installable package) on new machines.

Your best bet is to check developer.apple.com. Signing up as a developer is free, although you have to pay $700+ to get stuff like advance betas of the OS, WWDC proceedings on DVD.

you may want to have a look at the rox desktop .

It's very nice, in fact I'd go as far to say it is my favorite interface of ANY gui out there. Nice and simple, works with your system and not inspite of it.

Now, if you'd like to see some elements of look and feel change, submit it as a description or drawing. If the main guys over there won't listen to you I will, and I'll change code :-)

rox is pretty much a blank slate to work with, it's very young, and the gui it comes with doesn't have all the bells and whistles, instead those are made by applets. I'm developing a lot of applets it needs, so I may be in a position to help you.

Speaking of the old Quest games...

Hero6 is an attempt to recreate an adventure game inspired by the Quest for Glory series. Just thought I would note it. :)

On the subject of "construction kits", the mad engine is the adventure game engine Hero6 is using to accomplish this. In case you are interesting :)

Thanks

For what it's worth, KevEdit (my ZZT editor) can play ZZT games in Linux if you've got DOSEMU installed. The linux code is in CVS, the stable version is still DOS only...