Wow... I actually had no idea that there was an implementation of Visual Basic for GNOME in development. A sandboxed environment is how Microsoft should have implemented VBA in the first place - it's great to see this being done in GNOME.
And, I really wasn't taking a cheap shot at the GNOME security model.;-) You guys have done great so far. Keep up the good work.
Well, remember Gnumeric? In an interview, Miguel stated that he basically "copied [Microsoft] Excel". I wouldn't say its a stated design goal, but it seems to be the way the GNOME folks have been running things.
IMHO, its probably not all that bad of an idea: win the (business) public over with a stable and secure version of an interface they're used to. Then start "innovating".
ROTFLMAO. OMG. I just can't help thinking 'This is the value of M$'s integration with the OS'.
If you really want to die of laughter, check out Time's latest piece, which includes a "viewpoint" by Mr. Gates, defending the very integration you speak of.
My personal favorite from Gates: "Updates to Windows and Office technologies that could, for example, protect against attacks such as the Love Bug virus would also be much harder for computer users to obtain."
I'm going to take a wild guess and say no. I believe that to "own" a copyright under US law, you have to be the one who issues that copyright notice. Even in cases where you sign a copyright over to another party (e.g. sign your copyright on a Emacs patch over to the FSF), it's a two-way transaction: you waive your copyright to another party who accepts it.
Were Microsoft to acknowledge and accept the role as copyright holder for all of your slashdot postings, then you might have some grounds to argue that they didn't enforce it.
Someone mentioned this a couple of months back, but you could use GNU Stow for all but a few base libraries. Stow isolates each "package" into its own directory, creating links in/,/usr, or/usr/local automatically. All of the symlink management is done without a database file: you can use `make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/mypkg`, tar up mypkg, and you've got a self-contained binary package. To install, untar, and run `stow mypkg`.
I (and presumably most of slashdot's readers) advocate free software primarily for the "free speech" concept behind it: it allows programmers and administrators to modify any piece of code anywhere on their system. Given this (somewhat broad) assumption, what benefits do you believe free software gives an average end user (aside from improved code review by the community)? Do you see free software being adopted en masse by end users anytime soon? And if so, on what merits?
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Re:Why Gaming is important
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Keep in mind that Carmack is also an all around nice guy (tm). Take a look at this site detailing his relationship with the Starlight foundation. Not only does Carmack give back to our (gaming/coding)community, but he's also been pretty good to the community at large.
I attend a public high school in Columbus, Ohio (well, for about a month more). In the winter of 1999, our school system (the Columbus Public Schools) allocated some $2.5 million out of the system's budget in a deal with Dell to provide each school with one machine for every seven to ten kids. For our school, this means roughly 70 Dell Optiplex GX machines w/ 500mHz PIIIs and 128MB of RAM. I'm unclear exactly how much of the money for this endeavor came from public or private grants, but I've heard that at least $2 million was paid out of pocket.
We have a Physics teacher (who I respect a great deal) who flat-out refused to have anything to do with the program, turning over his allocation of 5-7 machines to someone else. Why? Here goes:
The machines came with Windows 98 installed, as well as DOS-based add-on "security" software that essentially renders the Windows shell useless. You can't even write files to the hard drive, for God's sake.
The internet connection is provided through what must be a shared dial-up line on some big quad-Xeon box in the office. I've seen faster 14.4K dial-up lines.
Students and teachers are forced to sign a "terms of service" agreement to use the computers, including a clause that holds a person who finds a security hole responsible. The terms warn to "not look for security flaws". You don't have to look: they're everywhere.
Along with the computers came a print network of about 25 printers. The last time any of them worked was three weeks ago. They have never all worked at the same time.
Not one shred of educational (calculus, physics, math, history) software has been allowed on any of the machines. To install any software, apply to the board, wait 6-8 weeks.
What's really ironic is that on the same day that the machines were brought in, I counted three major roof leaks in our building, some of which soaked students as they were eating lunch. I've had bad experiences with "technology in the (secondary) schools", but it could work - if teachers had some say in the application of the technology. Our physics stuff could be modeled easily on a Linux-based 386: assuming we and the teachers had control of it.
The BeOS is not based on a Unix Kernel, nor has it ever been. The BeOS ships with a set of GNU tools and has a POSIX-compliant filesystem, but does not run a Unix Kernel. In fact, the BeOS API is implemented mostly in C++.
The BeOS for Linux is simply a disk image and kernel image that load from Linux. Like running LoadLin from DOS, the BeOS kernel image replaces the running Linux kernel.
Interesting take on the installation:). More likely than Apple open-sourcing Quicktime would be Apple releasing a binary-only version for Unix/Linux. Because of all of the "intellectual property" involved in the codecs Quicktime uses, source to the codecs probably will never show up.
The installation program probably wouldn't be too hard to port, anyway. The HelixCode version of GNOME has an installation program that pulls down RPMs and installs them. I believe the source is available, too - Apple could probably just "borrow" it. Installing from machines on an outside internet connection is as easy as `lynx -source http://address-to-script/script.sh | sh`.
The installation program is probably the last of their worries in a binary only release - 2D X acceleration and direct hardware access is probably where they'd focus their efforts. Only then would they decide what information they wanted from your boxen;-).
Although I've never used LinuxPPC before and have never met Jason or Cassie Haas personally, but I've made a $25 donation to Mothers Against Drunk Driving in their names (we're working with a student's budget, here).
I would encourage anyone who can afford it to make a donation. LinuxPPC, Inc. and the Haas family do receieve notification of donations made in their honor. Not only does the money go toward a worthy cause, but it lets the Haas family know that they are in our thoughts.
It looks like the operating system enforces this policy (e.g. the users don't have to manually create links). It would function kind of like a really high-level form of file system compression. Files would become 'blocks', and the file system would keep one copy of each block with pointers to it for each duplicate instance of the file.
It's basically symbolic links enforced by the file system. Sparse files (where the free space is compressed with run-length encoding) is the next closest thing that comes to mind.
Threads, in SMP-capable operating systems, are split among available processors and run in parallel. Therefore, long-running and easily parallelizable jobs will be more suited for a dual-processor system. Make (with the -j3 argument) forks itself to run at least two gccs at a time, and therefore takes full advantage of this.
Processes (sometimes these implement threads) are split among the available processors as well. Because Linux/UNIX relies heavily on running numerous concurrent processes, a dual-processor system is probably more suited for it than a more monolithic or sequential workflow (e.g. a single non-threaded client application).
On a uniprocessor machine, concurrency among processes is simulated in a synchronous manner. Given 40 individual tasks, the processor iterates through each one, giving it a certain "quanta" of time and taking into account priorities and nice values. Though a bit oversimplified, a dual-processor configuration would allocate 20 tasks for each processor to iterate through. The result, in ideal configurations, is a perceived doubling in speed. In actuality, I/O and bus contention decreases this figure somewhat.
I checked shopper.com, and both a single unboxed Athlon 650 and a single unboxed PIII-500 are within $50-$75 of each other. Dual Athlons would be ideal (if the motherboards actually existed), but in this case you probably need to examine first how much you're willing to spend, and second, what you'll be doing with the box. Sometimes, I/O subsystems such as SCSI can make an equal or even greater perceived difference in speed.
If money is no object, get two of the fastest chips you can find. If you don't normally fork huge numbers of apache, g++, and gcc processes, the single Athlon may be a better value.
I hope this suggestion doesn't detract too much from your original intent to run Linux, but why not dual boot? Compilers under wine tend to be iffy, and there's no good way that I know of to cross-compile for Win32 using your toolset.
For a while I used VMware on my trusty U2W-SCSI PII box and found the whole experience a little bit too sluggish for daily use (I tried just about every flavor of Windows I could, including 2000). The processor benchmarked at around 333mHz inside the VM, but memory allocation and disk I/O on the virtual disk dragged down performance (yes, even on 10,000 RPM Ultra2 SCSI).
Here's my proposal, assuming you have sufficient disk space:
Divide the laptop's hard drive into at least 2 partitions; use the NT Boot Loader or LILO to dual boot between the two.
Since dual booting every time you want to access another OS gets annoying, purchase a copy of VMWare. There's an option to mount physical partitions like virtual disks, so you should be able to access either NT from Linux or Linux from NT like you were booting to the partition (albeit slower). This could allow you to run both Linux and Windows applications at the same time, and would allow for an elementary form of filesharing using Samba and the vmnet kernel module. You get better I/O performance this way too, which you're going to want on a laptop drive.
Finally, go grab some filesystem drivers that can read Ext2 and NTFS/FAT. Read-only NTFS (and experimental read/write) is already in the stable Linux kernel. The full list of supported filesystems for Linux is in the Module-HOWTO on your local howto site. For any other OS, check out the Filesystems HOWTO. This document is a "Filesystem map" that maps many types of filesystems to host OSs - it has just about every combination you could ask for. This will allow you to bypass VMware if you just want to view or edit files on the other OS's partition.
I think this method will prove more productive and more beneficial in the long run. Windows is still the right OS for Windows programming - this doesn't mean you can't mix linux in on the same machine, though.
I've been royally pissed at Netscape ever since they added the stupid "Shop" button in 4.6. "Shop" differs from "Stop" by one letter - and they put it right next to the "Stop" button. At 1600x1200 with text-only toolbars, I can never tell the difference between the two.
Every time I try to kill a loading page, I find myself whisked away to some "Netscape Store". Sheesh.
Please excuse me if the following advice is too basic; I'm sure our other slashdotters will boldly come to the rescue:
The way I usually remove source packages is with make uninstall in the package's source directory. On most (well-maintained or relatively recent) packages, this should reverse the make install command. You may still have to resort to locate to find empty directories, but it's a start.
If you haven't already, check out the UNIX Filesystem Hierarchy Standard to get a very general idea of where installers will put files. Granted, packages may not adhere to the standard, but usually the document can at least allow you to make educated guesses.
In a previous article, someone mentioned GNU Stow, available from ftp.gnu.org. Stow organizes installations into subdirectories of/usr/local, creating links in the $PATH to point to the executables.
BTW: If you can tackle the VMWare installation, regular source tarballs should be a piece of cake;-). I just installed it on Slackware today, and it was quite messy...
Yes, but not at a low-level. The Windows API is implemented in C, as are kernel drivers and the kernel itself. The APIs are accessible through MFC and other "wrapper" libraries. This situation is analogous to using C++ wrappers for GTK.
The BeOS is much closer to using C++ at a low-level: the interface to its APIs is exposed in C++, but the OS still uses C in its kernel. From what I understand, its *possible* to write a kernel module for the BeOS in C++, but strongly "discouraged" due to name-mangling and other fun C++ compiler features.
I (and maybe most of "us") know you solely through your creation of the C++ language and your assistance in authoring the ANSI standard for said language.
Aside from this one (albeit major) project, what do you work on from day to day? What projects are you currently involved in? Do you have any more language definitions/standards in the pipeline?
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
As if confusing the MPAA weren't funny enough...
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 1
Mr. Bad's explanation of the MPAA/DMCA/DVD-CCA situation is the funniest I've read so far. All those references to "The Man" and "evil corporations" can't touch this stuff. Sit back and enjoy:
There have been HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE hackers-rights violations all over the place. Bunches of people who just LINKED ON THEIR WEB PAGE to the DeCSS code have been sued! Just for having a link! Mother fucker! Also, the poor sap who did some of the first hacking on the project, Jon Johansen, was ARRESTED by ICY VIKING THUGS, and all his computers were seized, and even his DAD was thrown in the NORDIC CLINK! Imagine having to go to jail with your DAD, man. That would blow.
Ahh. The Nordic Clink. I couldn't have said it better myself:-).
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Re:CmdrTaco Forgot one thing
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 3
Lord... I feel sorry for whoever has to read the entire source to DeCSS.
"File One. CSS dash auth dot c. Static byte perm underscore varient equals zero x zero a, zero x zero eight, zero x zero e, zero x zero c, zero x zero b..."
Umm... How about (at least on Windoze) Alt+PrintScrn. Presto - the image is on the clipboard. For *nix, just use a screen-grabbing utility for X.
The rule still remains - anything you can see or hear *can* be copied. The closer the decryption chip gets to our brains, the less relevent this rule will be.;-)
I've been trying to keep my/. posting addiction under control, but I have to reply here -
Why are you in favor of this encryption "as long as the quality isn't affected"? Normally, engineers create products on silicon that solve problems - you buy these products because you have one of these problems and are looking to solve it. Okay, maybe Quake 3 doesn't qualify as a "problem" per se, but I think this is still a pretty valid generalization.:-)
Now, an engineering team and large company add cost to your components to implement on-the-fly encryption of your video signal. Does this help solve the problems you originally bought your machine for? No. Are you paying more money for a limitation on what *you* can do with *your* hardware that *you* paid for? You bet. Not only a limitation on your rights, but other companies rights. Suddenly, there could be a DVD-like licensing fee to design and sell a monitor. Want to hack around on your monitor/video adapter in the privacy of your own home? You're probably SOL. It'd be great if the standard would be open, but from what I've seen out of Intel, I don't see that happening. Please correct me if I'm wrong - I'll be happy.
Thre is an undeniable niceness to grabbing a zipfile, unloading it into a temp directory, running the program for while, deciding whether to keep it, or to delete the directory.
You've just described the relative benefits of precompiled binaries, *not* a particular packaging or installation system. Dependency-foo and Gnu-make-foo (both required elements of the broader unix-fu) are mainly products of the make system, the quality of code, and the nature of compilation in general.
As a windows refugee for roughly 1-2 years now, I can tell you that software installation under linux is the best I've seen. I can't speak for packaging systems, but the simple./configure && make && make install has done wonders for me. If you want really horrid dependency problems, try tracking down a COM object with the wrong version number - I've spent hours wading through hex GUIDs in that poor design choice known as the registry before, and come up with nothing. And these are binary-only releases, mind you.
Under linux, the first "package" I built was enlightenment. I read the INSTALL file, ran the requisite compilation commands, and started up enlightenment. I inadvertantly forgot to install the PNG library, so: rm -rf/usr/local/enlightenment, and the beast was "uninstalled".
The Unix "concept" already has really nice installation facilities without binary formats and RPMs. They're not graphical, though, which makes me wonder if the average user will *ever* feel comfortable using them.
You're mincing words here - Quake 3 is a fine piece of engineering, as are the GLX drivers Carmack has contributed to Linux as of lately. College does not automatically make an engineer, and engineering is not just limited to physical sciences. "Engineer" is a much broader term than you would believe, and I guarantee you that what Carmack does takes just as much skill as any lab scientist or physicist possesses.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... I actually had no idea that there was an implementation of Visual Basic for GNOME in development. A sandboxed environment is how Microsoft should have implemented VBA in the first place - it's great to see this being done in GNOME.
;-) You guys have done great so far. Keep up the good work.
And, I really wasn't taking a cheap shot at the GNOME security model.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
...and $10 goes to the first person to port the "ILOVEYOU" virus to Evolution. Hey - if we're emulating Microsoft, why not go all the way? :)
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Well, remember Gnumeric? In an interview, Miguel stated that he basically "copied [Microsoft] Excel". I wouldn't say its a stated design goal, but it seems to be the way the GNOME folks have been running things.
IMHO, its probably not all that bad of an idea: win the (business) public over with a stable and secure version of an interface they're used to. Then start "innovating".
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
ROTFLMAO. OMG. I just can't help thinking 'This is the value of M$'s integration with the OS'.
If you really want to die of laughter, check out Time's latest piece, which includes a "viewpoint" by Mr. Gates, defending the very integration you speak of.
My personal favorite from Gates: "Updates to Windows and Office technologies that could, for example, protect against attacks such as the Love Bug virus would also be much harder for computer users to obtain."
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I'm going to take a wild guess and say no. I believe that to "own" a copyright under US law, you have to be the one who issues that copyright notice. Even in cases where you sign a copyright over to another party (e.g. sign your copyright on a Emacs patch over to the FSF), it's a two-way transaction: you waive your copyright to another party who accepts it.
Were Microsoft to acknowledge and accept the role as copyright holder for all of your slashdot postings, then you might have some grounds to argue that they didn't enforce it.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Someone mentioned this a couple of months back, but you could use GNU Stow for all but a few base libraries. Stow isolates each "package" into its own directory, creating links in /, /usr, or /usr/local automatically. All of the symlink management is done without a database file: you can use `make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/mypkg`, tar up mypkg, and you've got a self-contained binary package. To install, untar, and run `stow mypkg`.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I (and presumably most of slashdot's readers) advocate free software primarily for the "free speech" concept behind it: it allows programmers and administrators to modify any piece of code anywhere on their system. Given this (somewhat broad) assumption, what benefits do you believe free software gives an average end user (aside from improved code review by the community)? Do you see free software being adopted en masse by end users anytime soon? And if so, on what merits?
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Keep in mind that Carmack is also an all around nice guy (tm). Take a look at this site detailing his relationship with the Starlight foundation. Not only does Carmack give back to our (gaming/coding)community, but he's also been pretty good to the community at large.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
We have a Physics teacher (who I respect a great deal) who flat-out refused to have anything to do with the program, turning over his allocation of 5-7 machines to someone else. Why? Here goes:
- The machines came with Windows 98 installed, as well as DOS-based add-on "security" software that essentially renders the Windows shell useless. You can't even write files to the hard drive, for God's sake.
- The internet connection is provided through what must be a shared dial-up line on some big quad-Xeon box in the office. I've seen faster 14.4K dial-up lines.
- Students and teachers are forced to sign a "terms of service" agreement to use the computers, including a clause that holds a person who finds a security hole responsible. The terms warn to "not look for security flaws". You don't have to look: they're everywhere.
- Along with the computers came a print network of about 25 printers. The last time any of them worked was three weeks ago. They have never all worked at the same time.
- Not one shred of educational (calculus, physics, math, history) software has been allowed on any of the machines. To install any software, apply to the board, wait 6-8 weeks.
What's really ironic is that on the same day that the machines were brought in, I counted three major roof leaks in our building, some of which soaked students as they were eating lunch. I've had bad experiences with "technology in the (secondary) schools", but it could work - if teachers had some say in the application of the technology. Our physics stuff could be modeled easily on a Linux-based 386: assuming we and the teachers had control of it.43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
"Well, Kyle... No! No No, No!"
The BeOS is not based on a Unix Kernel, nor has it ever been. The BeOS ships with a set of GNU tools and has a POSIX-compliant filesystem, but does not run a Unix Kernel. In fact, the BeOS API is implemented mostly in C++.
The BeOS for Linux is simply a disk image and kernel image that load from Linux. Like running LoadLin from DOS, the BeOS kernel image replaces the running Linux kernel.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Interesting take on the installation :). More likely than Apple open-sourcing Quicktime would be Apple releasing a binary-only version for Unix/Linux. Because of all of the "intellectual property" involved in the codecs Quicktime uses, source to the codecs probably will never show up.
;-).
The installation program probably wouldn't be too hard to port, anyway. The HelixCode version of GNOME has an installation program that pulls down RPMs and installs them. I believe the source is available, too - Apple could probably just "borrow" it. Installing from machines on an outside internet connection is as easy as `lynx -source http://address-to-script/script.sh | sh`.
The installation program is probably the last of their worries in a binary only release - 2D X acceleration and direct hardware access is probably where they'd focus their efforts. Only then would they decide what information they wanted from your boxen
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Although I've never used LinuxPPC before and have never met Jason or Cassie Haas personally, but I've made a $25 donation to Mothers Against Drunk Driving in their names (we're working with a student's budget, here).
I would encourage anyone who can afford it to make a donation. LinuxPPC, Inc. and the Haas family do receieve notification of donations made in their honor. Not only does the money go toward a worthy cause, but it lets the Haas family know that they are in our thoughts.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
It looks like the operating system enforces this policy (e.g. the users don't have to manually create links). It would function kind of like a really high-level form of file system compression. Files would become 'blocks', and the file system would keep one copy of each block with pointers to it for each duplicate instance of the file.
It's basically symbolic links enforced by the file system. Sparse files (where the free space is compressed with run-length encoding) is the next closest thing that comes to mind.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I checked shopper.com, and both a single unboxed Athlon 650 and a single unboxed PIII-500 are within $50-$75 of each other. Dual Athlons would be ideal (if the motherboards actually existed), but in this case you probably need to examine first how much you're willing to spend, and second, what you'll be doing with the box. Sometimes, I/O subsystems such as SCSI can make an equal or even greater perceived difference in speed.
If money is no object, get two of the fastest chips you can find. If you don't normally fork huge numbers of apache, g++, and gcc processes, the single Athlon may be a better value.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
For a while I used VMware on my trusty U2W-SCSI PII box and found the whole experience a little bit too sluggish for daily use (I tried just about every flavor of Windows I could, including 2000). The processor benchmarked at around 333mHz inside the VM, but memory allocation and disk I/O on the virtual disk dragged down performance (yes, even on 10,000 RPM Ultra2 SCSI).
Here's my proposal, assuming you have sufficient disk space:
- Divide the laptop's hard drive into at least 2 partitions; use the NT Boot Loader or LILO to dual boot between the two.
- Since dual booting every time you want to access another OS gets annoying, purchase a copy of VMWare. There's an option to mount physical partitions like virtual disks, so you should be able to access either NT from Linux or Linux from NT like you were booting to the partition (albeit slower). This could allow you to run both Linux and Windows applications at the same time, and would allow for an elementary form of filesharing using Samba and the vmnet kernel module. You get better I/O performance this way too, which you're going to want on a laptop drive.
- Finally, go grab some filesystem drivers that can read Ext2 and NTFS/FAT. Read-only NTFS (and experimental read/write) is already in the stable Linux kernel. The full list of supported filesystems for Linux is in the Module-HOWTO on your local howto site. For any other OS, check out the Filesystems HOWTO. This document is a "Filesystem map" that maps many types of filesystems to host OSs - it has just about every combination you could ask for. This will allow you to bypass VMware if you just want to view or edit files on the other OS's partition.
I think this method will prove more productive and more beneficial in the long run. Windows is still the right OS for Windows programming - this doesn't mean you can't mix linux in on the same machine, though.43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I've been royally pissed at Netscape ever since they added the stupid "Shop" button in 4.6. "Shop" differs from "Stop" by one letter - and they put it right next to the "Stop" button. At 1600x1200 with text-only toolbars, I can never tell the difference between the two.
Every time I try to kill a loading page, I find myself whisked away to some "Netscape Store". Sheesh.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
- The way I usually remove source packages is with make uninstall in the package's source directory. On most (well-maintained or relatively recent) packages, this should reverse the make install command. You may still have to resort to locate to find empty directories, but it's a start.
- If you haven't already, check out the UNIX Filesystem Hierarchy Standard to get a very general idea of where installers will put files. Granted, packages may not adhere to the standard, but usually the document can at least allow you to make educated guesses.
- In a previous article, someone mentioned GNU Stow, available from ftp.gnu.org. Stow organizes installations into subdirectories of
/usr/local, creating links in the $PATH to point to the executables.
BTW: If you can tackle the VMWare installation, regular source tarballs should be a piece of cake43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Yes, but not at a low-level. The Windows API is implemented in C, as are kernel drivers and the kernel itself. The APIs are accessible through MFC and other "wrapper" libraries. This situation is analogous to using C++ wrappers for GTK.
The BeOS is much closer to using C++ at a low-level: the interface to its APIs is exposed in C++, but the OS still uses C in its kernel. From what I understand, its *possible* to write a kernel module for the BeOS in C++, but strongly "discouraged" due to name-mangling and other fun C++ compiler features.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I (and maybe most of "us") know you solely through your creation of the C++ language and your assistance in authoring the ANSI standard for said language.
Aside from this one (albeit major) project, what do you work on from day to day? What projects are you currently involved in? Do you have any more language definitions/standards in the pipeline?
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Mr. Bad's explanation of the MPAA/DMCA/DVD-CCA situation is the funniest I've read so far. All those references to "The Man" and "evil corporations" can't touch this stuff. Sit back and enjoy:
There have been HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE hackers-rights violations all over the place. Bunches of people who just LINKED ON THEIR WEB PAGE to the DeCSS code have been sued! Just for having a link! Mother fucker! Also, the poor sap who did some of the first hacking on the project, Jon Johansen, was ARRESTED by ICY VIKING THUGS, and all his computers were seized, and even his DAD was thrown in the NORDIC CLINK! Imagine having to go to jail with your DAD, man. That would blow.
Ahh. The Nordic Clink. I couldn't have said it better myself
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Lord... I feel sorry for whoever has to read the entire source to DeCSS.
;-).
"File One. CSS dash auth dot c. Static byte perm underscore varient equals zero x zero a, zero x zero eight, zero x zero e, zero x zero c, zero x zero b..."
Heh. No thanks
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Umm... How about (at least on Windoze) Alt+PrintScrn. Presto - the image is on the clipboard. For *nix, just use a screen-grabbing utility for X.
;-)
The rule still remains - anything you can see or hear *can* be copied. The closer the decryption chip gets to our brains, the less relevent this rule will be.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
I've been trying to keep my /. posting addiction under control, but I have to reply here -
:-)
Why are you in favor of this encryption "as long as the quality isn't affected"? Normally, engineers create products on silicon that solve problems - you buy these products because you have one of these problems and are looking to solve it. Okay, maybe Quake 3 doesn't qualify as a "problem" per se, but I think this is still a pretty valid generalization.
Now, an engineering team and large company add cost to your components to implement on-the-fly encryption of your video signal. Does this help solve the problems you originally bought your machine for? No. Are you paying more money for a limitation on what *you* can do with *your* hardware that *you* paid for? You bet. Not only a limitation on your rights, but other companies rights. Suddenly, there could be a DVD-like licensing fee to design and sell a monitor. Want to hack around on your monitor/video adapter in the privacy of your own home? You're probably SOL. It'd be great if the standard would be open, but from what I've seen out of Intel, I don't see that happening. Please correct me if I'm wrong - I'll be happy.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
Thre is an undeniable niceness to grabbing a zipfile, unloading it into a temp directory, running the program for while, deciding whether to keep it, or to delete the directory.
./configure && make && make install has done wonders for me. If you want really horrid dependency problems, try tracking down a COM object with the wrong version number - I've spent hours wading through hex GUIDs in that poor design choice known as the registry before, and come up with nothing. And these are binary-only releases, mind you.
/usr/local/enlightenment, and the beast was "uninstalled".
You've just described the relative benefits of precompiled binaries, *not* a particular packaging or installation system. Dependency-foo and Gnu-make-foo (both required elements of the broader unix-fu) are mainly products of the make system, the quality of code, and the nature of compilation in general.
As a windows refugee for roughly 1-2 years now, I can tell you that software installation under linux is the best I've seen. I can't speak for packaging systems, but the simple
Under linux, the first "package" I built was enlightenment. I read the INSTALL file, ran the requisite compilation commands, and started up enlightenment. I inadvertantly forgot to install the PNG library, so: rm -rf
The Unix "concept" already has really nice installation facilities without binary formats and RPMs. They're not graphical, though, which makes me wonder if the average user will *ever* feel comfortable using them.
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
No offense, but that's bullshit.
You're mincing words here - Quake 3 is a fine piece of engineering, as are the GLX drivers Carmack has contributed to Linux as of lately. College does not automatically make an engineer, and engineering is not just limited to physical sciences. "Engineer" is a much broader term than you would believe, and I guarantee you that what Carmack does takes just as much skill as any lab scientist or physicist possesses.