Among other things SUSE's parent company is Novell which is US based. Repositories not run by SUSE/Novell may include said library but then it is not SUSE themselves doing it...
As far as I know none of the commercially backed Linux distros include libdvdcss in their standard repositories/CDs (this is different to including a commercial DVD player though as those are unlikely to be libdvdcss based). Many Linux distributions are also distributed in America and including such risky (in terms of attracting expensive lawsuits) technology would be too great for a commercial company that saught to do business in the US. MP3 playback using libmad (as oppossed to the fluendo stuff) or AAC playback using libfaad run into similar distribution issues for vendors.
Samuel Bass: "Essentially, whenever you play Command & Conquer 4, be it in single-player, co-op, skirmish, or online, you earn experience that collects in your persistent player profile. Within the profile, you use your experience pool to level up your classes, earning new units, structures, powers, and upgrades. Since your profile is persistent across the game, you can then take your new toys and put them to use in any of our game modes.
[..]
"As a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we'll be shipping without any form of DRM."
In short, I have no idea just what that means. My current reading is that it is one of "you have to be online to play any multiplayer games" or "you have to be online to run the game at all".
If I were a rival to Goldman Sachs I would be terrified of someone offering me Goldman's source code. If I use it and Goldman find out then I'm in a world of trouble. If I use it but Goldman don't know for a bit AND the person who offered it knows I used it, then they can blackmail me. Even if I don't use it there could be expensive legal battles to prove my innocence ("Exhibit A shows the same loop variable counter is used in these two different source code bases." "?!"). How do I know it's not a trap? It would be like someone offering the secret of Coke to Pepsi - what do you expect Pepsi to do? Use the secret? What if they like their product more?
Obviously there must be another angle if this situation is true to drive someone to actually do it. I just can't figure it out at the moment.
You certainly can't link against it without being GPL/MIT yourself but I doubt that stops you using calling a program that does the encoding of a file with x264. As an example LAME is GPL and gets used all over the place. The ffmpeg stuff is also quite popular.
I guess "popular" would need to be defined. Are we counting programs or are we counting videos produced with a particular encoder? I'd guess that whatever Adobe ships would be the most popular for the later and some open source thing if you were counting the former...
I have a recent Ubuntu on a machine from 2000. Things actually feel faster than they did back in 2000 because the kernel itself is more preemptible and things like the IO scheduler have shown up in intervening years. Firefox feels better than Netscape 4 and so forth. Suspend to RAM/hibernate work for me with newer Linux releases (yes I am aware that it's still an issue for others). On boot more things happen in parallel which makes things faster. ACPI support is much improved.
The machine itself still has a dual booting Windows 98 on it (not the original install) and that runs quickly but again became "faster" over time with the release of new drivers before eventually becoming slower as the drivers became focussed on newer hardware.
You happened to pick a point that can go both ways (usually software becomes slower but it can go the other way). OSX is apparently another piece of software that has allegedly become faster on subsequent major releases (I'd imagine this only applies to fresh installs).
I wonder whose lawn I've just stood on - it's simply too easy to do...
The warning about not powering your PC off with a USB stick inside might well be true but I've not heard anything concrete about it elsewhere.
A few days ago I did this - powered down a desktop PC with a uSB stick attached (I was too lazy to safely remove the stick first). A day later I put the USB stick in another machine and it was completely empty - zeros as far as the hexdump could see (including the partition table)...
Now it could be unhappy coincidence but it seem awfully fishy that these two events would happen so close to each other so if I guess anecdotally I will start advising people to pull USB sticks before powering off PCs wherever possible.
OSS on Linux often did NOT work. Try playing sound with the original Quake 3 on Linux with a driver that didn't support mmap. Free drivers for hardware often didn't seem to exist or were very fiddly to get going.
For some reason which I have yet to understand, they picked option 2 and ALSA was born.
And that is why your comment was poor criticism and comes off as a rant. Good criticism looks up the reasons WHY people did stuff and then gives feedback on those rather than just guessing. You could have answered back against each of the points mentioned in Cleaning up the Linux Desktop Audio Mess Linux Symposium paper rather than just saying "don't know".
Starting with FreeBSD 4, the kernel did mixing in software if the sound card didn't support it.
Doing audio software mixing in the kernel has been frowned upon in the Linux land for years (to do it really well you want to use floating point). I could be wrong but I believe that Microsoft have moved most of audio mixing out of the kernel with Vista so I do not think this view is as extreme as it used to be.
It may be the old OSS 3 version, that stayed in the kernel for a long time but wasn't really maintained after ALSA became new and exciting.
When you have two implementations people can choose which to maintain. I hear that support for devfs was lower after udev went in...
a lot of systems started shipping with userspace sound daemons
Userspace mixing daemons were happening long before ALSA was shipped by default. esound was definitely shipped back in 1999. Userspace daemons also add support for things like network audio...
There is real, detailed critism of ALSA's flaws on an OSS developer's blog. This is far more useful than what you've posted here.
Now don't get me wrong - there are definite issues with Linux audio and these issues have driven some people away from Linux entirely. However those issues are not the ones you are talking about (my hope is that things are slowly improving too). Most users don't care about program portability (OSX and Windows have different audio APIs after all) - they just want working sound on their system. I don't see OSS being the solution to that...
My apologies - I didn't know what you had already tried. It looks like I just told you what you already knew.
As for has anything changed, I think you would be better off asking on the Linux wireless mailing list rather than Slashdot as that's where the devs are. Certainly there have been changes made to the Ralink wifi drivers but whether they would help your case is something I would just have to ask someone else or read the source (and time is limited as it stands).
I wasn't trying to shoot down your theory. It's just that I felt that just finding out that you had master mode support would not be enough to know whether it would really work and that something else could be wrong even if master mode worked. I am basically agreeing with your observation that with what you currently know it's not worth pouring more time on this until you learn of a reason why something would have changed.
I would guess the ability get at raw frames is down to firmware support that has a mode that passes packets unchanged to the OS in a known manner rather than additional hardware. This is an extra that most people simply don't need and is another thing that can go wrong so I'd guess some vendors feel no need to expose such a feature.
I'm (*cough*) in my late twenties and I've gone back University to do an MSc (I already have a BSc). So far the decision to do this is proving usefully interesting (but perhaps more so in areas of life outside of my degree topic). I can't answer your real question as at this moment in time I cannot say what course doing this additional degree has set my life down - I do not finish until September this (2009) year. I can tell you a little bit about the experience of studying at University again though...
On the whole the other students on your course will be younger than you. Even though the age gap between myself and them is not very large, I would argue that a bunch of years is enough to start showing a difference. There seem to be things they can do that I cannot (they really can do real work throughout the night whereas by 12am I am totally dead to the world). The sheer amount of work that some them can achieve is immense - at times it can seem relentless. They often find it easier to relate to each each as they are the same age and sometimes have a similar mindset. Additionally many of them live on campus so things which are easier for them (getting to a 9:15 lecture) require planning from me (a trip to Uni from home takes 30 minutes so I have to be ready to go by 8:45).
The flip side though is that I can occasionally leverage experience. Once in a while a situation will come up that seems similar to something I have seen elsewhere and this can allow me to approach a problem in a different way. I may not solve the problem faster but it can generate a different set of results. Compared to my younger self, I find that I can now relate to those lecturing AND the students thus allowing me to have a different style of conversation. Additionally, learning how to better relate to the other students is often an enjoyable experience; sometimes it feels like by hanging out with them you start picking up on their energy and thus start feeling (and acting) younger yourself (you start trying to do more)...
I do not know why but people are often very willing to listen to what I say and I am now more willing to say it too! The whole thing is a great confidence booster but it's a double edged sword (however both edges are sharp which can leads to speedy conclusions).
I don't find this degree any easier than my first degree. All hope that doing this would be an easy ride were blown away in the first term as my various weaknesses were made painfully clear to me. So just being older doesn't trivialise the degree but it can act as a huge motivator. Being a mature student (and thus announcing that you are prepared to face issues your colleagues will not) often means you are there because you REALLY want to be and not just because you fell into it. This may allow you to extract extra knowledge from a situation to non-mature students and as hinted at earlier others will pick up on this too.
I guess all of the above is a long way of saying that you have to think carefully about why you are doing the degree before you embark on it. What you actually obtain from it may not be the things that land you that stellar job and you will be up against young folks often willing to do the same for less when you are going for that job. As such you need to be offering more than the people going for the job are (so that piece of paper alone is not enough now you are older). Think about what you expect out of degree very carefully and CHECK to see whether your chosen degree and institution will really offer it. I have met (young) students upset with their choice and they feel locked in (although I suspect even they would say small parts have been useful now they are further in). I never knew it at the time but it was the things that I did outside my course (that were available because I was at a University) that had the biggest job impact after my first degree.
As I said at the start of this post I don't know what this will lead to for me (I hope it is something good!) but regardless of that doing degrees has changed
The Linux wireless drivers page lists which drivers support master/access point mode (see the AP column). The list isn't perfect (the hostap driver definitely supports AP mode:-) but it seems to be a case of omissions. The table also says what form factor the supported chipsets come in (so you can tell which ones you will be able to get in USB form). I'd guess the rt2500usb or p54usb drivers would be your best bet.
Another useful page is the Linux wireless chipset directory which tries to list which cards have which chipsets (there's even a single page table with all the added chipsets but I won't link to it from here). This lets you build a list of boxes with the desired chipsets inside them (finding out whether this is true in reality can in itself can be a fraught process though). The chipset is really the important part in all of this.
I'm not going to point to an Amazon page because I have not bought a USB wifi card with the capabilities you describe from Amazon. I'm in no position to tell you that XYZ USB device on Amazon definitely works as I haven't done it myself. I have used hostapd on Linux and OpenBSD before now on a creaky old Prism 2.5 card and that worked for me but again that's not what you asked.
Finally here's a guide to using hostapd to set a card up in access point mode (just using iwconfig to set master mode is not enough). Googling for hostapd linux will turn up plenty more guides which may be easier to follow.
OCC (although a quick web search suggests no one uses this term:) is where the computer has some "unnatural" advantage over typical human players - super speed/teleportation when its kart falls to last place after being forced off the road, incredible aim through dense fog when the player is not making sound, the ability to spawn a seemingly infeasibly large number of units in a short space of time, creating resources that require being free from pesky annoyances like money constraints, computer soccer players never receiving game changing injuries etc.
All of these have been done usually for AI complexity, time or challenge reasons. The trick is to implement them in a way that the player does not notice them so they are no longer obvious (or to let the player use them too - e.g. slower car boost).
If you just write the file and rename without syncing and CHECKING(!) whether the sync worked you can get into the case where the file does not have what you thought might be in when a crash occurs before the file is completely written. If a crash occurs then you could learn that the rename did not act as a barrier to write. If no crash occurs then things will be as you expect (you won't see no/half the data in the file as the OS can present a "finished" view by showing you its buffers) while the OS is still writing the data to disk.
When you don't check whether your data was synced to disk all bets are off as to what the files you are writing will contain (different filesystems will show different behaviour - e.g. XFS is good at showing applications with this problem much to the chagrin of unwary users). Apps need to either arrange it so that they don't care or do an explicit fsync and check the result before going further (or use O_DIRECT I guess). As a user you can arrange for your filesystem to be mounted in strict "sync" mode (which ensures everything is being written out all the time) but you'll pay a heavy speed price for doing so. I guess users could also force a sync and wait for it to finish before doing any crashes/abrupt losses of power (but this requires future seeing abilities to work every time)...
My phone is an old monochrome Nokia and I've just tried what you explained after I went to the main menu. I can't get 1-2-1 to work (after the first 1 it seems to be waiting for more numbers e.g. to form 11) but the fact that there exists number shortcuts is spot on! I always wondered what those numbers at the top right of the screen meant...
Slashdot Mirror
Among other things SUSE's parent company is Novell which is US based. Repositories not run by SUSE/Novell may include said library but then it is not SUSE themselves doing it...
As far as I know none of the commercially backed Linux distros include libdvdcss in their standard repositories/CDs (this is different to including a commercial DVD player though as those are unlikely to be libdvdcss based). Many Linux distributions are also distributed in America and including such risky (in terms of attracting expensive lawsuits) technology would be too great for a commercial company that saught to do business in the US. MP3 playback using libmad (as oppossed to the fluendo stuff) or AAC playback using libfaad run into similar distribution issues for vendors.
This was also revisited by the blue pill author Joanna Rutkowska in a later (less technical) article on Tomshardware (found via Slashdot).
i.e. you have a Windows server and a Linux client. Might not be enough for your purposes though.
Samuel Bass: "Essentially, whenever you play Command & Conquer 4, be it in single-player, co-op, skirmish, or online, you earn experience that collects in your persistent player profile. Within the profile, you use your experience pool to level up your classes, earning new units, structures, powers, and upgrades. Since your profile is persistent across the game, you can then take your new toys and put them to use in any of our game modes.
[..]
"As a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we'll be shipping without any form of DRM."
In short, I have no idea just what that means. My current reading is that it is one of "you have to be online to play any multiplayer games" or "you have to be online to run the game at all".
If I were a rival to Goldman Sachs I would be terrified of someone offering me Goldman's source code. If I use it and Goldman find out then I'm in a world of trouble. If I use it but Goldman don't know for a bit AND the person who offered it knows I used it, then they can blackmail me. Even if I don't use it there could be expensive legal battles to prove my innocence ("Exhibit A shows the same loop variable counter is used in these two different source code bases." "?!"). How do I know it's not a trap? It would be like someone offering the secret of Coke to Pepsi - what do you expect Pepsi to do? Use the secret? What if they like their product more?
Obviously there must be another angle if this situation is true to drive someone to actually do it. I just can't figure it out at the moment.
This was always one of the things that came to haunt me for using an (3.0 based) Amiga for so long - no TCP/IP stack built in...
In fact there's an archive of Tim Sweeney of posts and interviews out on the web.
As an aside, I remember reading an article Tim wrote about the programming languages back in 2000...
You certainly can't link against it without being GPL/MIT yourself but I doubt that stops you using calling a program that does the encoding of a file with x264. As an example LAME is GPL and gets used all over the place. The ffmpeg stuff is also quite popular.
I guess "popular" would need to be defined. Are we counting programs or are we counting videos produced with a particular encoder? I'd guess that whatever Adobe ships would be the most popular for the later and some open source thing if you were counting the former...
I have a recent Ubuntu on a machine from 2000. Things actually feel faster than they did back in 2000 because the kernel itself is more preemptible and things like the IO scheduler have shown up in intervening years. Firefox feels better than Netscape 4 and so forth. Suspend to RAM/hibernate work for me with newer Linux releases (yes I am aware that it's still an issue for others). On boot more things happen in parallel which makes things faster. ACPI support is much improved.
The machine itself still has a dual booting Windows 98 on it (not the original install) and that runs quickly but again became "faster" over time with the release of new drivers before eventually becoming slower as the drivers became focussed on newer hardware.
You happened to pick a point that can go both ways (usually software becomes slower but it can go the other way). OSX is apparently another piece of software that has allegedly become faster on subsequent major releases (I'd imagine this only applies to fresh installs).
I wonder whose lawn I've just stood on - it's simply too easy to do...
Phew! Thanks for the save...
Moblin can supposedly be made to boot very quickly.
What type of extra detail are you looking for?
The warning about not powering your PC off with a USB stick inside might well be true but I've not heard anything concrete about it elsewhere.
A few days ago I did this - powered down a desktop PC with a uSB stick attached (I was too lazy to safely remove the stick first). A day later I put the USB stick in another machine and it was completely empty - zeros as far as the hexdump could see (including the partition table)...
Now it could be unhappy coincidence but it seem awfully fishy that these two events would happen so close to each other so if I guess anecdotally I will start advising people to pull USB sticks before powering off PCs wherever possible.
OSS on Linux often did NOT work. Try playing sound with the original Quake 3 on Linux with a driver that didn't support mmap. Free drivers for hardware often didn't seem to exist or were very fiddly to get going.
For some reason which I have yet to understand, they picked option 2 and ALSA was born.
And that is why your comment was poor criticism and comes off as a rant. Good criticism looks up the reasons WHY people did stuff and then gives feedback on those rather than just guessing. You could have answered back against each of the points mentioned in Cleaning up the Linux Desktop Audio Mess Linux Symposium paper rather than just saying "don't know".
Starting with FreeBSD 4, the kernel did mixing in software if the sound card didn't support it.
Doing audio software mixing in the kernel has been frowned upon in the Linux land for years (to do it really well you want to use floating point). I could be wrong but I believe that Microsoft have moved most of audio mixing out of the kernel with Vista so I do not think this view is as extreme as it used to be.
It may be the old OSS 3 version, that stayed in the kernel for a long time but wasn't really maintained after ALSA became new and exciting.
When you have two implementations people can choose which to maintain. I hear that support for devfs was lower after udev went in...
a lot of systems started shipping with userspace sound daemons
Userspace mixing daemons were happening long before ALSA was shipped by default. esound was definitely shipped back in 1999. Userspace daemons also add support for things like network audio...
There is real, detailed critism of ALSA's flaws on an OSS developer's blog. This is far more useful than what you've posted here.
Now don't get me wrong - there are definite issues with Linux audio and these issues have driven some people away from Linux entirely. However those issues are not the ones you are talking about (my hope is that things are slowly improving too). Most users don't care about program portability (OSX and Windows have different audio APIs after all) - they just want working sound on their system. I don't see OSS being the solution to that...
There was an Amiga utility called NoClick that could stop the clicking but it looks like it had some risks with 3rd party disk drives. It worked well on my Amiga A1200's internal drive though.
And you'll notice the BIOS goes quicker too :-) (obviously this isn't a practical thing to do)
And *gasp* - you're using swap on the "Gen 0" SSD of an EeePC? Stop! You'll "burn" a hole into your Gen 0 SSD where your swap was :-(
My apologies - I didn't know what you had already tried. It looks like I just told you what you already knew.
As for has anything changed, I think you would be better off asking on the Linux wireless mailing list rather than Slashdot as that's where the devs are. Certainly there have been changes made to the Ralink wifi drivers but whether they would help your case is something I would just have to ask someone else or read the source (and time is limited as it stands).
I wasn't trying to shoot down your theory. It's just that I felt that just finding out that you had master mode support would not be enough to know whether it would really work and that something else could be wrong even if master mode worked. I am basically agreeing with your observation that with what you currently know it's not worth pouring more time on this until you learn of a reason why something would have changed.
I would guess the ability get at raw frames is down to firmware support that has a mode that passes packets unchanged to the OS in a known manner rather than additional hardware. This is an extra that most people simply don't need and is another thing that can go wrong so I'd guess some vendors feel no need to expose such a feature.
I'm (*cough*) in my late twenties and I've gone back University to do an MSc (I already have a BSc). So far the decision to do this is proving usefully interesting (but perhaps more so in areas of life outside of my degree topic). I can't answer your real question as at this moment in time I cannot say what course doing this additional degree has set my life down - I do not finish until September this (2009) year. I can tell you a little bit about the experience of studying at University again though...
On the whole the other students on your course will be younger than you. Even though the age gap between myself and them is not very large, I would argue that a bunch of years is enough to start showing a difference. There seem to be things they can do that I cannot (they really can do real work throughout the night whereas by 12am I am totally dead to the world). The sheer amount of work that some them can achieve is immense - at times it can seem relentless. They often find it easier to relate to each each as they are the same age and sometimes have a similar mindset. Additionally many of them live on campus so things which are easier for them (getting to a 9:15 lecture) require planning from me (a trip to Uni from home takes 30 minutes so I have to be ready to go by 8:45).
The flip side though is that I can occasionally leverage experience. Once in a while a situation will come up that seems similar to something I have seen elsewhere and this can allow me to approach a problem in a different way. I may not solve the problem faster but it can generate a different set of results. Compared to my younger self, I find that I can now relate to those lecturing AND the students thus allowing me to have a different style of conversation. Additionally, learning how to better relate to the other students is often an enjoyable experience; sometimes it feels like by hanging out with them you start picking up on their energy and thus start feeling (and acting) younger yourself (you start trying to do more)...
I do not know why but people are often very willing to listen to what I say and I am now more willing to say it too! The whole thing is a great confidence booster but it's a double edged sword (however both edges are sharp which can leads to speedy conclusions).
I don't find this degree any easier than my first degree. All hope that doing this would be an easy ride were blown away in the first term as my various weaknesses were made painfully clear to me. So just being older doesn't trivialise the degree but it can act as a huge motivator. Being a mature student (and thus announcing that you are prepared to face issues your colleagues will not) often means you are there because you REALLY want to be and not just because you fell into it. This may allow you to extract extra knowledge from a situation to non-mature students and as hinted at earlier others will pick up on this too.
I guess all of the above is a long way of saying that you have to think carefully about why you are doing the degree before you embark on it. What you actually obtain from it may not be the things that land you that stellar job and you will be up against young folks often willing to do the same for less when you are going for that job. As such you need to be offering more than the people going for the job are (so that piece of paper alone is not enough now you are older). Think about what you expect out of degree very carefully and CHECK to see whether your chosen degree and institution will really offer it. I have met (young) students upset with their choice and they feel locked in (although I suspect even they would say small parts have been useful now they are further in). I never knew it at the time but it was the things that I did outside my course (that were available because I was at a University) that had the biggest job impact after my first degree.
As I said at the start of this post I don't know what this will lead to for me (I hope it is something good!) but regardless of that doing degrees has changed
The Linux wireless drivers page lists which drivers support master/access point mode (see the AP column). The list isn't perfect (the hostap driver definitely supports AP mode :-) but it seems to be a case of omissions. The table also says what form factor the supported chipsets come in (so you can tell which ones you will be able to get in USB form). I'd guess the rt2500usb or p54usb drivers would be your best bet.
Another useful page is the Linux wireless chipset directory which tries to list which cards have which chipsets (there's even a single page table with all the added chipsets but I won't link to it from here). This lets you build a list of boxes with the desired chipsets inside them (finding out whether this is true in reality can in itself can be a fraught process though). The chipset is really the important part in all of this.
I'm not going to point to an Amazon page because I have not bought a USB wifi card with the capabilities you describe from Amazon. I'm in no position to tell you that XYZ USB device on Amazon definitely works as I haven't done it myself. I have used hostapd on Linux and OpenBSD before now on a creaky old Prism 2.5 card and that worked for me but again that's not what you asked.
Finally here's a guide to using hostapd to set a card up in access point mode (just using iwconfig to set master mode is not enough). Googling for hostapd linux will turn up plenty more guides which may be easier to follow.
Good luck!
OCC (although a quick web search suggests no one uses this term :) is where the computer has some "unnatural" advantage over typical human players - super speed /teleportation when its kart falls to last place after being forced off the road, incredible aim through dense fog when the player is not making sound, the ability to spawn a seemingly infeasibly large number of units in a short space of time, creating resources that require being free from pesky annoyances like money constraints, computer soccer players never receiving game changing injuries etc.
All of these have been done usually for AI complexity, time or challenge reasons. The trick is to implement them in a way that the player does not notice them so they are no longer obvious (or to let the player use them too - e.g. slower car boost).
If you just write the file and rename without syncing and CHECKING(!) whether the sync worked you can get into the case where the file does not have what you thought might be in when a crash occurs before the file is completely written. If a crash occurs then you could learn that the rename did not act as a barrier to write. If no crash occurs then things will be as you expect (you won't see no/half the data in the file as the OS can present a "finished" view by showing you its buffers) while the OS is still writing the data to disk.
When you don't check whether your data was synced to disk all bets are off as to what the files you are writing will contain (different filesystems will show different behaviour - e.g. XFS is good at showing applications with this problem much to the chagrin of unwary users). Apps need to either arrange it so that they don't care or do an explicit fsync and check the result before going further (or use O_DIRECT I guess). As a user you can arrange for your filesystem to be mounted in strict "sync" mode (which ensures everything is being written out all the time) but you'll pay a heavy speed price for doing so. I guess users could also force a sync and wait for it to finish before doing any crashes/abrupt losses of power (but this requires future seeing abilities to work every time)...
Rob Landley has a project called Firmware Linux that can do compliation of ARM binaries inside QEMU which might help sidestep the issue of code that does not support HOSTCC (at a speed price).
My phone is an old monochrome Nokia and I've just tried what you explained after I went to the main menu. I can't get 1-2-1 to work (after the first 1 it seems to be waiting for more numbers e.g. to form 11) but the fact that there exists number shortcuts is spot on! I always wondered what those numbers at the top right of the screen meant...
Thanks!
It's quite possible but it may also produce unexpected/unwanted results (remember it only has to be good enough to compile a compiler).
So the general answer is no it will not be faster. This is because as a final step (the so called stage3) it compiles itself with itself. This assumes icc isn't malicious (yes I know - Trusting Trust and Countering Trusting Trust etc).