Others would possibly have OSSv4 implementations if the company didn't have a nutjob take on what the GPL means. At least one of their developers thinks that if you run a closed source app that needs sound like say Doom3 then you have to buy one of their commercial licenses. Even RMS doesn't have such an expansive idea of what the GPL does and does not do:
The really good part is in one of the comments posted by one of the devs:
The point is that we (4Front) are the owners of the copyrights of OSS. We have the power to define the terms for usage of OSS. The terms are that you can use OSS "for free" if you use it from GPLed applications. Otherwise it will be "for a fee".
And this is for a sound stack that is supposedly distributed under GPL terms. Last time I heard, writing to/dev/dsp is not linking. Since what they publicly say is in direct contradiction to the GPL, I take it to mean that ONLY their commercial licenses have validity.
Yes, they DO have the power to "define the terms of usage of OSS" but they DO NOT have the power to rewrite the GPL. Since what they want is a trialware license then they should remove the GPL boilerplate from their downloads and substitute such a license.
The OP isn't entirely incorrect. GE for one is designing locomotives with more sophisticated power systems to increase fuel efficiency. Namely, they are incorporating regenerative braking and a battery system;
The second book of Donaldson's Gap Series had a subplot around such a hardware attack. Ships in this series actually had Data Officers who were in charge of shipboard I.T. The Data First of an outlaw vessel tried to extort the Captain with a logic bomb in the ship's systems that he had to periodically stave off. This was deadly because without the computers you had no way of knowing where you were among other problems. It turned out he had hidden his virus in doctored interface cards so that it would keep coming back even if you reloaded the computers from a protected store.
I'm in the same boat and just got the lowest model iPad and Proloque2go for my son. Our iPad in an an Otter Case. It is a thick plastic shell that is installed semipermanently on the iPad and even has a transparent cover for the touch screen that still allows normal use of the screen. It has already survived being thrown down on the floor once. I don't know if it is mil-spec or not but it will definitely take more abuse encased in this thing than not. So you might want to look into that.
I can also second the bureaucratic maze around all this. We've been turned down twice by the state for the approved $7000 dollar dedicated speech device. Apparently his verified diagnosis of autism and apraxia "does not merit" his getting that device. Bottom line is he is a nine year old who doesn't talk. We had to get the iPad and our county MRDD payed for the app. Since the iPad is general purpose they wouldn't pay for that but they DID get the app. The iPad, Otter Case, and app are around $700 all told. That is still a lot but beats the dedicated devices by a factor of 10. I hope it puts them out of business and that is because I've discovered that vendors of all manner of adaptive and educational materials have us over a barrel. What I half-suspect will happen instead is some bullshit patent or other IP lawsuit now that their nasty little jig is up.
And I hear you on the single income. I'm in THAT boat too for basically the same reasons. Hopefully we see something like this for low end Android devices soon. That could cut the price by at least half. I'd like to see these dedicated device vendors choke on that too.
And I too am frustrated by all the media coverage those well heeled enough to drop 50K/yr on therapies get. I have little doubt the outcome for my kid would have been a lot better if I could have afforded it. Let's see some coverage on those us who don't have a starter castle, two honking SUVs, and 50,000 more a year to spare just for specialized therapies.
There is still the matter of what Atari charged for 2600 Pac-Man and the fact that Ms. Pac-Man didn't suck. At a minimum the maze and colors could have been more accurate without increasing the size of the rom; the main reason the homebrews are larger is they try to include the intermissions, have the eyes of the ghosts follow Pac-Man, have the fruits change with the levels, and other aspects of the arcade version.
I doubt Activision or Imagic would have released such a lame Pac-Man if one of them were fortunate enough to have that license. Even at that time, the 4k games they were producing tended to "push" the 2600 more.
(Then again, I am somewhat of a defender (no pun intended) of Pac Man on the 2600, due to the hardware limitations.)
You really shouldn't be. It was thrown together and slapdash. The 2600 was capable of a better Pac-Man and several homebrewers have proved it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOHGz5f5Hmg
That one is the original 4k codebase of A2600 Pac-Man expanded to 8k. The maze is the same but the colors, sounds, and animations are improved. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-TdtJ2_ggY
No video for this one. This was a 2600 Pac-Man done from scratch in 99 and is very hard to find. Incidentally, the youtube videos are unkind in that they don't capture flickering sprites well. The objects don't disappear like that in actual play.I took it for granted Defender had to suck on the 2600 until I saw Defender II (Stargate): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKac14skeSA
I'm not saying it wasn't a very limited console; it was. But with more ram and rom in the carts and talented developers it was capable of more than commonly supposed.
Atari 2600 titles went for $25 to $70 in their heyday and that was in early eighties dollars. Prices for Intellivision and Colecovision titles were comparable. During the crash of '84 you could snap them up for $5 or $10 apiece. As a kid I loved the crash for making a lot of games affordable but didn't understand at the time the industry was shutting down for a couple of years. When the NES came along, that sort of pricing continued adjusted upward a tick or two for inflation. If anything games are quite a bit cheaper to acquire nowadays since they still tend to be $15 to $70 depending if you're getting something used or a bit older although they try to get you with subscription services and downloadable content.
Somehow that man was able to trade in on his personal mythos and by sticking to basic KISS practices and turn pretty damned much anything he wants to sell into instant gold. hell look at the iPad, which is an iPod touch made bigger and just as damned unergonomic, and look at how it is treated like the second coming. Give the man credit folks, I swear he could probably sell ice cream to Eskimos.
2. REALLY hoping someone can make an OpenOffice fork/port/whatever that makes full use of the Qt toolkit. Instead of just getting the look of native widgets (which is what I understood efforts to date had been doing?) actually use the real Qt widgets and let the Qt toolkit handle that part of things. Probably requires major reworking of OpenOffice, but moments like this tend to be good times to take new directions like that. Let Qt do what it does so well and handle the cross-platform GUI widgets, and focus on the Office stuff.
More to the point, it would be nice if it was componetized to the extent that the backend document and data code were cleanly separate and callable from UI code. Then new interfaces could be done in whatever you like and the backend code could be used alone for things like document conversion servers.
Re:Waiting for a capable PostgreSQL front-end
on
PostgreSQL 9.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Better that it be Access rather than FileMaker Pro. There is an upgrade path of sorts from Access to SQL Server. So if you have one of those unfortunate cases where it was mandated that a dinky workgroup app be shoved out enterprise wide then at least there are options to move the data and app logic to platforms that can take the load. I'm not saying that it's easy but someone who knows what they are doing can get started on fixing it pretty quickly.
That situation with Filemaker Pro is much uglier and Filemaker Pro does even more to encourage marginal developers. FM Pro is an unholy glop of database, scripting language, and a widget set. Trouble with any of those domains tends to impact the other two. And one commercial FM Pro app I was saddled with would corrupt data when too many users hit the server at once. "Too many" being around 12 users. The other cute thing about that app was every person who used it had to have FM Pro client installed on the machine. The developer was a reseller for FileMaker too. Maybe THAT is why he didn't create a standalone runtime that could connect to the server. I'm happy to say that nasty thing is mostly phased out now.
Find a web filtering appliance and reverse the polarity.
The FAQs for DansGuardian used to tell you that you can't do that. Now they tell you that if you want to build a whitelist or greylist of ONLY hardcore than sure!
As a counterpoint, I found it dead easy with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Asus 701. It was about as many clicks and menus as it takes on OS X and WinXP. Now a given distribution may not always make it that easy for you but this should basically be solved for the distros intended for desktop use.
True but I bet these drivers speak volumes to the devs who have been producing reverse engineered drivers. Since these will doubtless have to be tweaked to get into the Linux and BSD kernels I suppose the opportunity is there comment them enough to be fairish documentation.
It could also mean more 2.6.x kernels. Many of these devices gave you the choice of either using the binary blob drivers and a 2.4 based firmware or you could go to 2.6 and hope for the best with the reverse engineered drivers.
I knew about that but I ride herd on a number of buildings each having it's own proxy server. When I'm slinging issue tickets, it is much easier to switch among those proxies on the fly. For work such as verifying the operation of a proxy, Chrome's virtues like javascript and rendering speed don't make up for my ability to quickly switch the context Firefox operates under on the fly. I also maintain a ssh socks 5 proxy to my home connection if I want to verify whether or not an issue is confined to our network or is more general. Foxyproxy-like functionality at work really is a deal breaker as far Chrome is concerned.
I'd dearly love to have Chrome's greasy speed mated to Firefox's interface and versatility. Unfortunately, I have yet to see anything like that on the horizon.
Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945
on
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's no worse than doing a regedit import which I've had to do to fix presumably Grandma-ready Windows issues.
That lack of a proxy engine makes Chrome/Chromium mostly a no-go for me. I need to be able to switch which proxy I'm using in the browser on the fly without affecting the rest of the OS. Foxyproxy does this very well in Firefox but the closest Chrome equivalent I could find just does an awkward switch of the OS proxy settings.
'Pragmatic' has become a code word for "short term expedience" when one wants to shout down those worried about legality or freedom-to-implement. What is expedient now can very well turn out not to be 'pragmatic' in the long-term.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tleilaxu would be the ones with the ghola liver but the Ixians would be happy to supply you with a cyborg liver.
Others would possibly have OSSv4 implementations if the company didn't have a nutjob take on what the GPL means. At least one of their developers thinks that if you run a closed source app that needs sound like say Doom3 then you have to buy one of their commercial licenses. Even RMS doesn't have such an expansive idea of what the GPL does and does not do:
http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=8
The really good part is in one of the comments posted by one of the devs:
The point is that we (4Front) are the owners of the copyrights of OSS. We have the power to define the terms for usage of OSS. The terms are that you can use OSS "for free" if you use it from GPLed applications. Otherwise it will be "for a fee".
And this is for a sound stack that is supposedly distributed under GPL terms. Last time I heard, writing to /dev/dsp is not linking. Since what they publicly say is in direct contradiction to the GPL, I take it to mean that ONLY their commercial licenses have validity.
Yes, they DO have the power to "define the terms of usage of OSS" but they DO NOT have the power to rewrite the GPL. Since what they want is a trialware license then they should remove the GPL boilerplate from their downloads and substitute such a license.
The OP isn't entirely incorrect. GE for one is designing locomotives with more sophisticated power systems to increase fuel efficiency. Namely, they are incorporating regenerative braking and a battery system;
http://www.getransportation.com/rail/rail-products/locomotives/hybrid-locomotive.html
The second book of Donaldson's Gap Series had a subplot around such a hardware attack. Ships in this series actually had Data Officers who were in charge of shipboard I.T. The Data First of an outlaw vessel tried to extort the Captain with a logic bomb in the ship's systems that he had to periodically stave off. This was deadly because without the computers you had no way of knowing where you were among other problems. It turned out he had hidden his virus in doctored interface cards so that it would keep coming back even if you reloaded the computers from a protected store.
You're probably thinking of "conveyor" ocean currents not the the Gulf Stream.
I'm in the same boat and just got the lowest model iPad and Proloque2go for my son. Our iPad in an an Otter Case. It is a thick plastic shell that is installed semipermanently on the iPad and even has a transparent cover for the touch screen that still allows normal use of the screen. It has already survived being thrown down on the floor once. I don't know if it is mil-spec or not but it will definitely take more abuse encased in this thing than not. So you might want to look into that.
I can also second the bureaucratic maze around all this. We've been turned down twice by the state for the approved $7000 dollar dedicated speech device. Apparently his verified diagnosis of autism and apraxia "does not merit" his getting that device. Bottom line is he is a nine year old who doesn't talk. We had to get the iPad and our county MRDD payed for the app. Since the iPad is general purpose they wouldn't pay for that but they DID get the app. The iPad, Otter Case, and app are around $700 all told. That is still a lot but beats the dedicated devices by a factor of 10. I hope it puts them out of business and that is because I've discovered that vendors of all manner of adaptive and educational materials have us over a barrel. What I half-suspect will happen instead is some bullshit patent or other IP lawsuit now that their nasty little jig is up.
And I hear you on the single income. I'm in THAT boat too for basically the same reasons. Hopefully we see something like this for low end Android devices soon. That could cut the price by at least half. I'd like to see these dedicated device vendors choke on that too.
And I too am frustrated by all the media coverage those well heeled enough to drop 50K/yr on therapies get. I have little doubt the outcome for my kid would have been a lot better if I could have afforded it. Let's see some coverage on those us who don't have a starter castle, two honking SUVs, and 50,000 more a year to spare just for specialized therapies.
"A friend of mine knew his phone was being tapped so he ended every phone conversation with 'Fuck Hoover!'."
- George Carlin.
There is still the matter of what Atari charged for 2600 Pac-Man and the fact that Ms. Pac-Man didn't suck. At a minimum the maze and colors could have been more accurate without increasing the size of the rom; the main reason the homebrews are larger is they try to include the intermissions, have the eyes of the ghosts follow Pac-Man, have the fruits change with the levels, and other aspects of the arcade version.
I doubt Activision or Imagic would have released such a lame Pac-Man if one of them were fortunate enough to have that license. Even at that time, the 4k games they were producing tended to "push" the 2600 more.
(Then again, I am somewhat of a defender (no pun intended) of Pac Man on the 2600, due to the hardware limitations.)
You really shouldn't be. It was thrown together and slapdash. The 2600 was capable of a better Pac-Man and several homebrewers have proved it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOHGz5f5Hmg
That one is the original 4k codebase of A2600 Pac-Man expanded to 8k. The maze is the same but the colors, sounds, and animations are improved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-TdtJ2_ggY
This one is Ms. Pac-Man hacked into Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man itself was proof Pac-Man could have been better.
http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=1022
No video for this one. This was a 2600 Pac-Man done from scratch in 99 and is very hard to find.
Incidentally, the youtube videos are unkind in that they don't capture flickering sprites well. The objects don't disappear like that in actual play.I took it for granted Defender had to suck on the 2600 until I saw Defender II (Stargate):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKac14skeSA
I'm not saying it wasn't a very limited console; it was. But with more ram and rom in the carts and talented developers it was capable of more than commonly supposed.
Atari 2600 titles went for $25 to $70 in their heyday and that was in early eighties dollars. Prices for Intellivision and Colecovision titles were comparable. During the crash of '84 you could snap them up for $5 or $10 apiece. As a kid I loved the crash for making a lot of games affordable but didn't understand at the time the industry was shutting down for a couple of years. When the NES came along, that sort of pricing continued adjusted upward a tick or two for inflation. If anything games are quite a bit cheaper to acquire nowadays since they still tend to be $15 to $70 depending if you're getting something used or a bit older although they try to get you with subscription services and downloadable content.
Somehow that man was able to trade in on his personal mythos and by sticking to basic KISS practices and turn pretty damned much anything he wants to sell into instant gold. hell look at the iPad, which is an iPod touch made bigger and just as damned unergonomic, and look at how it is treated like the second coming. Give the man credit folks, I swear he could probably sell ice cream to Eskimos.
It's called the Reality Distortion Field.
I love my new REM cd. It's the Wake Up Bomb.
2. REALLY hoping someone can make an OpenOffice fork/port/whatever that makes full use of the Qt toolkit. Instead of just getting the look of native widgets (which is what I understood efforts to date had been doing?) actually use the real Qt widgets and let the Qt toolkit handle that part of things. Probably requires major reworking of OpenOffice, but moments like this tend to be good times to take new directions like that. Let Qt do what it does so well and handle the cross-platform GUI widgets, and focus on the Office stuff.
More to the point, it would be nice if it was componetized to the extent that the backend document and data code were cleanly separate and callable from UI code. Then new interfaces could be done in whatever you like and the backend code could be used alone for things like document conversion servers.
Better that it be Access rather than FileMaker Pro. There is an upgrade path of sorts from Access to SQL Server. So if you have one of those unfortunate cases where it was mandated that a dinky workgroup app be shoved out enterprise wide then at least there are options to move the data and app logic to platforms that can take the load. I'm not saying that it's easy but someone who knows what they are doing can get started on fixing it pretty quickly.
That situation with Filemaker Pro is much uglier and Filemaker Pro does even more to encourage marginal developers. FM Pro is an unholy glop of database, scripting language, and a widget set. Trouble with any of those domains tends to impact the other two. And one commercial FM Pro app I was saddled with would corrupt data when too many users hit the server at once. "Too many" being around 12 users. The other cute thing about that app was every person who used it had to have FM Pro client installed on the machine. The developer was a reseller for FileMaker too. Maybe THAT is why he didn't create a standalone runtime that could connect to the server. I'm happy to say that nasty thing is mostly phased out now.
Find a web filtering appliance and reverse the polarity.
The FAQs for DansGuardian used to tell you that you can't do that. Now they tell you that if you want to build a whitelist or greylist of ONLY hardcore than sure!
http://contentfilter.futuragts.com/wiki/doku.php?id=faq
Fine. The 'special sauce' is just thousand island dressing away. But such an incident would give me severe doubts about the mayo.
Well I did love the "You're not running! You're scampering!" bit.
As a counterpoint, I found it dead easy with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Asus 701. It was about as many clicks and menus as it takes on OS X and WinXP. Now a given distribution may not always make it that easy for you but this should basically be solved for the distros intended for desktop use.
True but I bet these drivers speak volumes to the devs who have been producing reverse engineered drivers. Since these will doubtless have to be tweaked to get into the Linux and BSD kernels I suppose the opportunity is there comment them enough to be fairish documentation.
It could also mean more 2.6.x kernels. Many of these devices gave you the choice of either using the binary blob drivers and a 2.4 based firmware or you could go to 2.6 and hope for the best with the reverse engineered drivers.
And the US Navy interdicting Somali ones can't bode well for this hurricane season......
I knew about that but I ride herd on a number of buildings each having it's own proxy server. When I'm slinging issue tickets, it is much easier to switch among those proxies on the fly. For work such as verifying the operation of a proxy, Chrome's virtues like javascript and rendering speed don't make up for my ability to quickly switch the context Firefox operates under on the fly. I also maintain a ssh socks 5 proxy to my home connection if I want to verify whether or not an issue is confined to our network or is more general. Foxyproxy-like functionality at work really is a deal breaker as far Chrome is concerned.
I'd dearly love to have Chrome's greasy speed mated to Firefox's interface and versatility. Unfortunately, I have yet to see anything like that on the horizon.
It's no worse than doing a regedit import which I've had to do to fix presumably Grandma-ready Windows issues.
That lack of a proxy engine makes Chrome/Chromium mostly a no-go for me. I need to be able to switch which proxy I'm using in the browser on the fly without affecting the rest of the OS. Foxyproxy does this very well in Firefox but the closest Chrome equivalent I could find just does an awkward switch of the OS proxy settings.
'Pragmatic' has become a code word for "short term expedience" when one wants to shout down those worried about legality or freedom-to-implement. What is expedient now can very well turn out not to be 'pragmatic' in the long-term.