I can think of two good reasons for this, future proofing and form factor. If you are installing any sort of large number of these, you could be looking at keeping them around for quite a while in which case you don't really want to have to scrap them all when Linksys decides to stop support. If your not buying many then it's all about the form factor and simplicity I guess, 130x21x91 is pretty small and on a small network could be brilliant for popping on and off portable storage, even just as a backup device.
Well according to 9971010(a presumably accurate mirror of the article):
Linux was the next subject, and the Linux server is done. They are using it at Quakecon, but it is a couple of weeks of testing away from being released. The Linux client is a bit further away.
So I'd guess it's alive but in need of finalising. Given the track record of id, I would be stunned if a Linux client does not appear. I will not however be buying until I can play it on Linux, I would still buy it though even if it would only run on binary X servers (i.e. nvidia or ati's own). Are any Free X servers capable of delivering the sort of performance Doom3 requires?
I'm always tempted by this argument, but it has one massive flaw, it endorses their system! I would much rather contribute to paying the EFF to employ staff at the patent office who try to act as unofficial assistants to the patent examiners and provide them with prior art or arguments towards obviousness to patents as quickly as possible. The second half of this is to try and bust as many existing patents as possible cheaply by getting the Patent Office to revoke them...
My scepticism would be in the willingness of the Patent Office to co-operate, but perhaps if the presented materials were available for anyone who is then attacked by a patent which is granted and if those materials have a history in court of proving sufficient, the courts may even start putting pressure on the Patent Office to pay attention to this stuff and stop wasting the courts time (could the EFF sue the Patent Office for not revoking patents in the face of clear evidence?).
I can't believe that the body has no problem with living without a pulse! I would have expected complicated side effects (the lack of rythm disturbing some other micro or macro cycles). Any biologists in the house care to explain how far back in evolutionary terms it is since we last had no pulse? Does nothing depend on it or do we really have the diversity in our dna to adapt to the situation?
Re:/.'s vie for 'private' LOTR production casting
on
Celebrity Casting For LOTR
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I realise this, that's why it would take a long time, and also produce multiple films! Continuity would be appalling for a very long time (the pure cg would have it easier), but over time people would be able to cut parts together (it would be one way for a budding editor to show how creative they can be). Also note that I certainly wasn't talking about shooting on film! The actors changing from scene to scene would be a nightmare unless of course you don't show the "wrong" actors, and use the dialog from the right ones:-) Over time I would imagine some interesting works would come out, just look what people did with the Star Wars Kid.
Re:/.'s vie for 'private' LOTR production casting
on
Celebrity Casting For LOTR
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hmm, could someone start a public project to create a LOTR film or would copyright prevent a Free project? I'm thinking a project where people contribute footage, models, scripts, audio, edits or just rendering time. Simultaneously it could build a cg and live version of the film, both continuously evolving and without any canonical versions (so people can include/exclude Bombadil et al in their own cuts. I imagine it would be a very long time before any sort of film would appear from such a project which would be to any sort of broadcast standards, but it could also provide an mountain of material as the basis for Free games/multi-user environments etc. If it ever did manage to finish a film, it would probably have half a dozen shortly afterwards, both different styled versions of the same, and even "spin-off" films ("The Hobbit", "The Council of Elrond" or "Gollum's Tale").
No compromise of distributor deals? Are you kidding me? You think that a distirbutor will just go "fine, release on iTunes first, we'll still pay you as much"? U2 are the sort of band that has fans queing to get their hands on new album releases (and here in Ireland anyway you can probably expect lots of record shops to open a at midnight). This is the sort of event that traditional distributors live for, they would not be happy to see it go, I can only imagine Apple are willing to pay the cost so they can have such an event for themselves (I wonder what it will cost them and if they would make any money on the U2 sales).
Hmm, I want to support Id and I want to buy this game. But I want them to know I am buying it to run under linux. Should I go to a store and buy the game and not care? Should I buy it online from them and is there anyway to tell them "Linux Sale"? Should I wait for the OSX version, cause I'd rather be counted with them then with Windows, and would there be any problem with using the OSX media with a x86 Linux? Come on ID, tell me what to do! Set up some way for us to be counted if you aren't making a box!
Has anyone thought that once something is in Free Software it cannot possibly be patentable anymore as the Software is a piece of prior art? So there should be no need to patent things, just demonstrate them openly and the idea is unpatentable! It seems the problem is though that a patent is only revealed a long time after it is applied for and it's not easy enough to squash a patent. In an ideal world (that still includes patent examiners or a policy that is fara too lenient on granting patents), supporters of Free Software would watch all patents coming out, produce the prior art, hand it to the Patent Office, and have the patent squashed, but this isn't an ideal world is it.
I can just picture a beowolf cluster of them.... no wait, before you mod me down, my cricket club could do with a giant led scoreboard so all I have to do is wait til most people wanna dump them, get my hands on a few hundred and build a little bluetooth machine to control them. I'm not insane... REALLY @~}
And a mouse button isn't a hardware button how? Having read the referenced patents to this one (ok, I didn't I scanned all the abstracts) it would seem to me that this one seems to be prior art in itself! I cannot see what this is all about, but then again IANAPL. I did read the MS patent, and I cannot see anything innovative about it (application has different actions based on duration of button press including couting presses within a set period, hmm lets go patent using morse code and variations thereof on buttons, oh wait, that's what this is!).
Yep, to me morse code is the prior art, short or long presses, with an amount of time from the start (morse would be end I think) of each press to register the next, and a different response (letter) depending on the total pattern of button presses (they just go for . - and..). What's next, patent key combinations on limited computing devices be they serial or parrallel (:wq or ^C)?
Filed: July 12, 2002
Dated: April 27, 2004
This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/226,031, filed Jan. 5, 1999 now abandoned. The entire subject matter of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/226,031 is specifically incorporated herein by reference.
It also references material back to 1985, so who the hell is a patent lawyer who can figure out what the hell is going on here (I'm off to try and see what all those references are about).
It's great that libdvdcss et al are still out there, but not a single Linux distro (that I am aware of) ships able to play encrypted DVDs so while you think the hackers won, I say they lost as newcomers to Linux who just try and play a DVD have problems.
Even the quickest checking would help you discover that IBM started advertising Linux long before this suit was filed, a quick search yields the date March 2001 for the Avery Brooks ad for example.
I would suggest that the best way to do this would be to create a minimal custom knoppix-alike cd for each revision of the test (maybe every 6 months), simply pop in the cd, tell it which partition to use and then come back later to see the results (and email them, or find out where to pick them up from under your normal os with a network connection, or save them to floppy etc.). The test suite could include reporting all aspects of the system and could ensure the tests were run under perfectly known conditions. Then you can gather the results and process away to produce graphs and statistcs and even some form of dynamic interface to the data. This could of course do far more than just filesystem tests but could in fact benchmark the entire system (and maybe even help to build a hardware support database).
I haven't booted it yet, but I think knx-hdinstall is gone know from knoppix, and knoppix-installer is the installation tool. Of course you can also just use a persistent home directory to keep some things around, and if you visit klik.berlios.de you can even install (some) more applications into that persistent home.
The notion that there should be "the installer" is itself flawed. Many different people need many different kinds of installers.
And this is exactly the issue that debian-installer wants to address, by creating a modular framework to be used for installing debian. One of the original promises was that a gui would be slapped on around it and one of the obvious benfits of the new method is that it seems to be far easier to shape the installation (so a corporation could create their own tweaked installer internally which always does X,Y,Z). Debian-installer is not "the installer" it is "the installer framework", this doesn't stop others from creating their own independant installers, but it seems like a far more questionable occupation when you can just tweak d-i (and possibly hit 9+ platforms). I wouldn't be at all surprised if d-i is relatively ignored (except for the fact that reviews will start saying "new installer just works, simply") until a while after it reaches version 1 (sarge release?), but then I wonder if all the other OS's mightn't start asking "Anaconda, why? why not just use d-i?". The bottom line is horses for courses and debian are trying to train a horse decathlete!
Your onto something! Fianna Fail (the main party in government, they dwarf their coalition partners roughly 10:1) had to drop "Republican" from their name on the machines because it wouldn't fit (though the link suggests that is a lie). Guess they needed more time to check their patches.
Well the problem is that Labour suddenly decided that perhaps going for Proportional Representation (as they had said they would) wasn't such a good idea when they suddenly found themselves back in power. The only hope for the UK to get out of the current mess is for the Lib Dems to actually follow through on their exceedingly long standing promise to bring in PR. Of course first you have to get the Lib Dems into power, the question is which would you see first, a LibDem+??? coalition bringing in PR or a Labour+Tory Coalition refusing to?
One minor one is that Windows 95 boots with a pretty graphic splash screen while Linux spews ugly status messages too quickly to even read; what's the point of that? (There's a bootsplash patch for the Linux kernel, but it hasn't been updated for 2.6.5 yet, and it requires the ability to patch and reconfigure a kernel.)
You can add a bootsplash to Linux without a kernel patch, knoppix has had a splash like this for a short while (though it doesn't happen by default) and the next version should even feature a nice progress bar (it'll be on by default with my remaster). Corel Linux had a splash from the beginning (I'm sure others had it before then, but it's the first I remember and it was quite a few years ago now), so I guess it is really a long standing distribution choice at this stage... I wonder why?
As the article mentions the real big deal here is that this is being done by the same guy who patented the technique NASA used to clean up footage from the moon. It's not the scanning, but the automated digital cleaning which is the news and takes the 600 PowerMacs!
as long as the kiosk can access my machine remotely and query it's installed packages to determine the upgrades I require... seriously, what's wrong with using a package manager to install the apps you mention, or better yet just getting it to upgrade them (apt-get upgrade). It seems the distributions need to do a better job (perhaps a la lindows point and click site) of letting people know what software is just an automated install away.
Who wants to go chasing drivers, I find it much nicer to have all my hardware just work (ok not everything, but everything I ever bought with linux in mind) without having to figure out who distributes the drivers for my XXX. Oh and having it autodetect the new hardware installed automatically and then it just works, no chasing drivers, thats the icing on the cake! Of course if you have hardware that doesn't work with linux or isn't supported by your distro yet, then your in experimental territory, but you should have known that when you bought the part or what are you complaining about (and for windows don't forget versions can make a big difference too).
What everyday task do you have to drop to the cli for?
Finally I think you forgot a word in your post, geek! Your average "geek" user wants to be able to install or upgrade software and hardware easily, your average user just wants to be able to do the things they use their computer for (email, games, music, photos, wp, web) and not have to worry about installing hardware or software, that's what there geek friend/relative is for! I'd say at most 1 in 5 computer users install software if they can avoid it, the rest get someone else to do it for them or at least talk them through it.
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I can think of two good reasons for this, future proofing and form factor. If you are installing any sort of large number of these, you could be looking at keeping them around for quite a while in which case you don't really want to have to scrap them all when Linksys decides to stop support. If your not buying many then it's all about the form factor and simplicity I guess, 130x21x91 is pretty small and on a small network could be brilliant for popping on and off portable storage, even just as a backup device.
I'm always tempted by this argument, but it has one massive flaw, it endorses their system! I would much rather contribute to paying the EFF to employ staff at the patent office who try to act as unofficial assistants to the patent examiners and provide them with prior art or arguments towards obviousness to patents as quickly as possible. The second half of this is to try and bust as many existing patents as possible cheaply by getting the Patent Office to revoke them ...
My scepticism would be in the willingness of the Patent Office to co-operate, but perhaps if the presented materials were available for anyone who is then attacked by a patent which is granted and if those materials have a history in court of proving sufficient, the courts may even start putting pressure on the Patent Office to pay attention to this stuff and stop wasting the courts time (could the EFF sue the Patent Office for not revoking patents in the face of clear evidence?).
I can't believe Yahoo is in the same ballpark as google! Better go check my rankings over there!
I can't believe that the body has no problem with living without a pulse! I would have expected complicated side effects (the lack of rythm disturbing some other micro or macro cycles). Any biologists in the house care to explain how far back in evolutionary terms it is since we last had no pulse? Does nothing depend on it or do we really have the diversity in our dna to adapt to the situation?
I realise this, that's why it would take a long time, and also produce multiple films! Continuity would be appalling for a very long time (the pure cg would have it easier), but over time people would be able to cut parts together (it would be one way for a budding editor to show how creative they can be). Also note that I certainly wasn't talking about shooting on film! The actors changing from scene to scene would be a nightmare unless of course you don't show the "wrong" actors, and use the dialog from the right ones :-) Over time I would imagine some interesting works would come out, just look what people did with the Star Wars Kid.
Hmm, could someone start a public project to create a LOTR film or would copyright prevent a Free project? I'm thinking a project where people contribute footage, models, scripts, audio, edits or just rendering time. Simultaneously it could build a cg and live version of the film, both continuously evolving and without any canonical versions (so people can include/exclude Bombadil et al in their own cuts. I imagine it would be a very long time before any sort of film would appear from such a project which would be to any sort of broadcast standards, but it could also provide an mountain of material as the basis for Free games/multi-user environments etc. If it ever did manage to finish a film, it would probably have half a dozen shortly afterwards, both different styled versions of the same, and even "spin-off" films ("The Hobbit", "The Council of Elrond" or "Gollum's Tale").
No compromise of distributor deals? Are you kidding me? You think that a distirbutor will just go "fine, release on iTunes first, we'll still pay you as much"? U2 are the sort of band that has fans queing to get their hands on new album releases (and here in Ireland anyway you can probably expect lots of record shops to open a at midnight). This is the sort of event that traditional distributors live for, they would not be happy to see it go, I can only imagine Apple are willing to pay the cost so they can have such an event for themselves (I wonder what it will cost them and if they would make any money on the U2 sales).
Hmm, I want to support Id and I want to buy this game. But I want them to know I am buying it to run under linux. Should I go to a store and buy the game and not care? Should I buy it online from them and is there anyway to tell them "Linux Sale"? Should I wait for the OSX version, cause I'd rather be counted with them then with Windows, and would there be any problem with using the OSX media with a x86 Linux? Come on ID, tell me what to do! Set up some way for us to be counted if you aren't making a box!
Has anyone thought that once something is in Free Software it cannot possibly be patentable anymore as the Software is a piece of prior art? So there should be no need to patent things, just demonstrate them openly and the idea is unpatentable! It seems the problem is though that a patent is only revealed a long time after it is applied for and it's not easy enough to squash a patent. In an ideal world (that still includes patent examiners or a policy that is fara too lenient on granting patents), supporters of Free Software would watch all patents coming out, produce the prior art, hand it to the Patent Office, and have the patent squashed, but this isn't an ideal world is it.
I can just picture a beowolf cluster of them .... no wait, before you mod me down, my cricket club could do with a giant led scoreboard so all I have to do is wait til most people wanna dump them, get my hands on a few hundred and build a little bluetooth machine to control them. I'm not insane ... REALLY @~}
And a mouse button isn't a hardware button how? Having read the referenced patents to this one (ok, I didn't I scanned all the abstracts) it would seem to me that this one seems to be prior art in itself! I cannot see what this is all about, but then again IANAPL. I did read the MS patent, and I cannot see anything innovative about it (application has different actions based on duration of button press including couting presses within a set period, hmm lets go patent using morse code and variations thereof on buttons, oh wait, that's what this is!).
Yep, to me morse code is the prior art, short or long presses, with an amount of time from the start (morse would be end I think) of each press to register the next, and a different response (letter) depending on the total pattern of button presses (they just go for . - and ..). What's next, patent key combinations on limited computing devices be they serial or parrallel (:wq or ^C)?
Filed: July 12, 2002 Dated: April 27, 2004 This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/226,031, filed Jan. 5, 1999 now abandoned. The entire subject matter of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/226,031 is specifically incorporated herein by reference. It also references material back to 1985, so who the hell is a patent lawyer who can figure out what the hell is going on here (I'm off to try and see what all those references are about).
It's great that libdvdcss et al are still out there, but not a single Linux distro (that I am aware of) ships able to play encrypted DVDs so while you think the hackers won, I say they lost as newcomers to Linux who just try and play a DVD have problems.
Even the quickest checking would help you discover that IBM started advertising Linux long before this suit was filed, a quick search yields the date March 2001 for the Avery Brooks ad for example.
I would suggest that the best way to do this would be to create a minimal custom knoppix-alike cd for each revision of the test (maybe every 6 months), simply pop in the cd, tell it which partition to use and then come back later to see the results (and email them, or find out where to pick them up from under your normal os with a network connection, or save them to floppy etc.). The test suite could include reporting all aspects of the system and could ensure the tests were run under perfectly known conditions. Then you can gather the results and process away to produce graphs and statistcs and even some form of dynamic interface to the data. This could of course do far more than just filesystem tests but could in fact benchmark the entire system (and maybe even help to build a hardware support database).
The installer on Knoppix 3.4 is called "knoppix-installer" and not "knx-hdinstall". The old installer has indeed been removed, and replaced.
I haven't booted it yet, but I think knx-hdinstall is gone know from knoppix, and knoppix-installer is the installation tool. Of course you can also just use a persistent home directory to keep some things around, and if you visit klik.berlios.de you can even install (some) more applications into that persistent home.
And this is exactly the issue that debian-installer wants to address, by creating a modular framework to be used for installing debian. One of the original promises was that a gui would be slapped on around it and one of the obvious benfits of the new method is that it seems to be far easier to shape the installation (so a corporation could create their own tweaked installer internally which always does X,Y,Z). Debian-installer is not "the installer" it is "the installer framework", this doesn't stop others from creating their own independant installers, but it seems like a far more questionable occupation when you can just tweak d-i (and possibly hit 9+ platforms). I wouldn't be at all surprised if d-i is relatively ignored (except for the fact that reviews will start saying "new installer just works, simply") until a while after it reaches version 1 (sarge release?), but then I wonder if all the other OS's mightn't start asking "Anaconda, why? why not just use d-i?". The bottom line is horses for courses and debian are trying to train a horse decathlete!
Your onto something! Fianna Fail (the main party in government, they dwarf their coalition partners roughly 10:1) had to drop "Republican" from their name on the machines because it wouldn't fit (though the link suggests that is a lie). Guess they needed more time to check their patches.
Well the problem is that Labour suddenly decided that perhaps going for Proportional Representation (as they had said they would) wasn't such a good idea when they suddenly found themselves back in power. The only hope for the UK to get out of the current mess is for the Lib Dems to actually follow through on their exceedingly long standing promise to bring in PR. Of course first you have to get the Lib Dems into power, the question is which would you see first, a LibDem+??? coalition bringing in PR or a Labour+Tory Coalition refusing to?
You can add a bootsplash to Linux without a kernel patch, knoppix has had a splash like this for a short while (though it doesn't happen by default) and the next version should even feature a nice progress bar (it'll be on by default with my remaster). Corel Linux had a splash from the beginning (I'm sure others had it before then, but it's the first I remember and it was quite a few years ago now), so I guess it is really a long standing distribution choice at this stage ... I wonder why?
As the article mentions the real big deal here is that this is being done by the same guy who patented the technique NASA used to clean up footage from the moon. It's not the scanning, but the automated digital cleaning which is the news and takes the 600 PowerMacs!
as long as the kiosk can access my machine remotely and query it's installed packages to determine the upgrades I require ... seriously, what's wrong with using a package manager to install the apps you mention, or better yet just getting it to upgrade them (apt-get upgrade). It seems the distributions need to do a better job (perhaps a la lindows point and click site) of letting people know what software is just an automated install away.
Who wants to go chasing drivers, I find it much nicer to have all my hardware just work (ok not everything, but everything I ever bought with linux in mind) without having to figure out who distributes the drivers for my XXX. Oh and having it autodetect the new hardware installed automatically and then it just works, no chasing drivers, thats the icing on the cake! Of course if you have hardware that doesn't work with linux or isn't supported by your distro yet, then your in experimental territory, but you should have known that when you bought the part or what are you complaining about (and for windows don't forget versions can make a big difference too).
What everyday task do you have to drop to the cli for?
Finally I think you forgot a word in your post, geek! Your average "geek" user wants to be able to install or upgrade software and hardware easily, your average user just wants to be able to do the things they use their computer for (email, games, music, photos, wp, web) and not have to worry about installing hardware or software, that's what there geek friend/relative is for! I'd say at most 1 in 5 computer users install software if they can avoid it, the rest get someone else to do it for them or at least talk them through it.