If you think Open Source is ALWAYS better than Proprietary, then why the hell is Blizzard's software so fucking good? Now that they've proven you wrong, the only way you can rectify the situation is by boycotting the software.
I could care less if Blizzard's product is Open Source or proprietary. If you had even the faintest clue, and followed the whole thing at all, you'd know that. I care that Blizzard is trying to stamp out an Open Source project using the legal system. That's all I care about. Period. If they want their games to be proprietary, that's just fine by me. It's when they attack a perfectly legitimate Open Source project that I get annoyed.
It's really quite pathetic how clueless you mindless game buying drones can be.
By purchasing Blizzard's product, you're only hurting yourself in the long run by contributing to a litigous atmosphere surrounding any Open Source project that somehow threaten a piece of proprietary software. Such an atmosphere will ultimately have a chilling effect on the development of all such software.
But hey, you gotta have your game fix, right? Obviously, that's the most important thing in the world. After all, actions don't really have consequences outside of your own immediate gratification, do they?
It's pathetic how clueless you mindless game buying drones can be.
By purchasing Blizzard's product, you're only hurting yourself in the long run by contributing to a litigous atmosphere surrounding any Open Source project that somehow threaten a piece of proprietary software. Such an atmosphere will ultiamtely have a chilling effect on the development of all such software.
But hey, you gotta have your game fix, right? Obviously, that's the most important thing in the world. After all, actions don't really have consequences, do they?
Or, let 'em use the Linux equivalents and be happy. I have a friend who's not much of a geek who's been using Linux for over a year now with few problems. Her biggest problem is the fact that HR departments _demand_ Word documents.:-(
From other posts I've seen here, it looks like XP actually works, but is unsupported. I can completely understand the author's reasons for this choice.
Well then, you're saying ill-informed people should ride roller coasters and get killed in the name of 'fun'. People bungie jump, base jump, skydive, hanglide and do any number of other things that have well known poor safety records, and it doesn't reduce the 'fun factor' for them.
Most people thing amusement parks are supposed to be completely safe. If they aren't, then people have to choose how much of a risk they want to take. It's wrong to let people take risks they haven't been given any chance at all to understand.
I'm all for the warning in the visor of the car. If all cars had such warnings, people might make more intelligent descisions about risk. For example, most people seem to be under the greatly mistaken impression that SUVs are safer. From what I've read, it seems that SUVs are no safer for the driver or passengers, and lots less safe for people in non-SUVs. Perhaps, if people actually knew that, they wouldn't buy them for reasons of safety.
Well, this would be all fine and good if I were adequately informed of the danger of riding a particular coaster. I'm certainly no engineer, and couldn't make any kind of good assessment of the safety of a particular roller coaster.
So, if there isn't going to be regulation as to how many Gs you can expose riders to, there should be a requirement for them to prominently post information on maximum expected g-forces, and comprehensive safety history of that particular ride.
An invasion of privacy on unencrypted data on a public network? And you're surprised? If you think that packets everywhere aren't being logged, sniffed, freeze-dried and reconstituted then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet actually works.
If someone hacks my *private* network or illegally obtains my private encryption keys, then *that's* an invasion of my privacy.
Ahh, so a rule that isn't enforced by an architectural constraint isn't a rule at all. That means that when my fist connects with your face, it must be perfectly OK because there was nothing preventing me from doing so. That's really how your argument reads.
Now, on the Internet, it's very hard to enforce certain kinds of laws unless you build in architectural constraints. We can have a debate as to whether or not the law should exist, given the costs of enforcing it within a certain set of architectural constraints. But, you can't argue that a law doesn't exist, or shouldn't be followed because there is no architectural constraint (actual code preventing you from doing it).
That kind of thinking will lead to laws declaring certain architectures legal, or illegal, so it will be impossible not to follow the law because the architecture makes it impossible. The CBDTPA act and the DMCA are perfect examples. You're kind of thinking implicitly endorses the method by which they attempt to enforce the law.
it gives off as much light as a much brighter incandescant bulb.
Really? How does it do that?
It uses quantum effects to generate the light. It'd take a long time, and a little more knowledge than I have to adequately explain how semiconductors create light. The short explanation, with terms left unexplained, is this:
A solid-state semiconducting diode is one type of semiconductor (N-type) with an excess of free electrons (not a negative charge, precisely) and another type (P-type) with an excess of 'holes', or places where it's favorable for an extra electron to be. You could think N-type as a flat field of golf balls and P-type as a field of little cups.
Now, the field is flat, so there's no reason for the golf balls to go anywhere. There's also a small wall between the golf balls and cups. Applying an electric charge to the system both tilts the field, and adds extra golf balls to the side farthest from the cups. When a golf ball lands in a cup, it moves into a state where it has less potential energy, particularily since it's also just gone over the little hill.
Now, systems of atoms release energy through distributing vibration. So, a real golf ball and cup would heat up a little, and you get some sound (vibrating air). But, electrons absorb and release energy by absorbing and releasing photons, or 'particles' of light. So, when the electron (golf ball) falls into the hole (cup), a photon of a specific frequency (because it's a very precise amount of energy) is released.
No energy is really lost in this whole process. A tiny bit of energy is lost to resistance as the electrons (and holes actually, but that made the analogy trickier) moved over the surface, and some of the photons will be absorbed before they leave the semiconductor, but it's largely very efficient.
Now, that will make an LED of one, specific color, determined by the depth of the holes, and the little ridge (band gap) between the plane of electrons and plane of holes. In order to get white light, you have to have more colors. This is usually done by packing three LEDs together in the same package, along with some system of getting their light to mingle and be reflected in a particular direction. This system too absorbs some of the photons, but it's also pretty efficient.
In contrast, incadescent bulbs work by exciting lots and lots of electrons in a filament into random states of excitation, and when they come back down, they release photons of all kinds of wavelengths, mostly in the deep infrared. Incadescent bulbs therefore waste tons of energy in heat.
Flourescent bulbs are a bit better in the they excite electrons in a gas to a very high energy state using high voltages. These electrons then release mostly UV when they drop back down, but there's a phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb that absorbs UV and re-releases visible light photons. This is lots more efficient than an incandescent bulb, but a lot of energy is still lost.
IF SO was selling gasoline at $2 what would stop someone from starting to sell gasoline for $1. They would soon steal all the customers from SO. The only way to create a monopoly is for the government to pass a law saying only company X can sell merchandise Y. Without that law anyone can start compete, and if they can deliver a better product they will survive and capture marketshares.
There are many ways in which a monopoly can keep this from happening. Like buying out any competitor. Or, telling railroad companies they'll stop shipping oil using their tracks if the ship oil for their competitor too. Or convincing car manufacturers (by adding the additives and making 'non-compliant' cars break down) to make their engines reliant on additives to your gas that you've patented.
In short, a monopoly has many options for eliminating competition and creating a permanently distorted market. So, in the interest of a truly free market, it's in our best interests for a government to break up monopolies that pursue agressive strategies for maintaining their hold on the market.
Don't you feel horrible exposing all these people who previously didn't have to deal with the intense RF radiation of a computer and monitor to debilitating RF radiation?
In any case, 6400x4800 on a 19" (or even a 25"!!!) is insane.:)
No it's not. I wouldn't continue having 8 pixel fonts, or even 'large fonts' (though I don't use Windows, and so don't have a specific 'large fonts' option). I would go for fonts where every character was 30 pixels wide. You'd get an amazing crispness and detail, especially if you also had anti-aliasing for those fonts. I might even try my hand at adding a '/' to the zeros in the nice Unicode fonts so I could use those for development.
That sounds like exactly what I'd want. Sadly, I'd probably have to have a salary of $200k/yr to afford it. That's not likely anytime in the next year or two, by which time that price will be obsolete.:-)
It'd be fun to buy those for the major members of the GNOME development team so they'd feel compelled to make things look right on such monitors. *grin*
Actually, what I really want is a 6400x4800 screen. Then I can have small fonts that are scaled fonts, not bitmaps, so I can get antialiasing too.:-)
On a 21.3" inch viewable area, I should be able to get a good 220 characters across, which is 29 pixels at 6400x4800. That's plenty enough pixels for a high quality scaled anti-aliased font. I think monitors and CPUs will be up to it in 3-5 years. I can't wait.
1600x1200 is just barely enough for what I want on a 21" screen. You have to do 7 or 8 pixel wide characters, which have to be painstakingly done as bitmaps in order to look right.
I've been waiting forever for a 1600x1200 LCD monitor. I do all of my work currently on 19" CRTs running at 1600x1200. And, for games, where you want a lower res, the LCD pixel averaging thing doesn't work badly at all. I've tested.
No, when they get down to $2k, I'll start thinking seriously of getting one.:-)
From the comments posted by the guy I replied to, no, I don't think so, though I could very well be wrong. Caring about this kind of thing in userland has been my obsession for years now.:-) It's actually quite surprising how many mistakes people make because they don't think the problem through carefully, or don't have a good design background in solving those kinds of problems.
Why not trigger the interrupt immediately, but continue to buffer frames and let the CPU grab all the frames in one go when it gets around to servicing the interrupt?
Actually, with a sophisticated card, driver, and OS, the range of systems which could pull in a full gigabit/sec would be vastly increased. It requires some careful thought and programming.
I sat down and sketched out a sample of how things might go, and realized I was missing some important details. On detail being the fact that it takes time to copy the data from the card to memory, and the CPU can be doing other things in that time. So, it requires more than 10 minutes thought, but I'm sure given a day or two, and access to relevant documentation about how various bits work, I could sketch out a driver design that made near optimal use of the available hardware, and wouldn't be that hard to implement in hardware either.
Why don't you just admit that you're paying for someone to continue to update and improve the software instead of playing all these stupid semantic games?
There are two big flaws in your argument. First, what happens when Redhat finally puts out usable software? Do you stop "investing" because your goal has been reached? Eventually any business is going to have to leave childhood (the investment stage) and enter adulthood (the making money all on your own stage). Investment as a long term business plan is known in most circles as a "ponzi scheme".
The thing about software that makes Open Source work, is that it's never finished. There will always be more to add to it. And if the program has gotten so big and crufty that there's nothing to add, then there's a new, smaller program to take it's place and have stuff added to it.
The ponzi scheme analogy is also not correct because at every step of the way you get return on your investment in the form of usable software. It becomes more usable over time, giving you further return on your continuing investment. Usable software is a process, not a destination.
There are two solutions to this problem. One is coercion, and it is the method that RMS advocates. He wants a software tax to finance free software development. But there is a much friendly solution. Realize that free software is indeed free beer along with being free "speech", and stop trying to sell it. Find something else to sell instead. It might be services, support, proprietary addons, or even plush Tux dolls, but you'll go broke selling free software.
When I buy a piece of free software, I'm not buying the software. I'm buying the future of that software. Software is much more like the lighthouse maintainer than the lighthouse. It ages with time. Security flaws are found, new capabilities are needed, new environments need to be supported. Software always needs work. In fact, software has very little initial capital investment. Linux was created by one man in Finland while he was a student at a University. Now, of course, Linux has a huge number of people contributing lots of time and energy to it.
The simple thing is, you have the wrong model stuck in your head. You think of a piece of software as a lighthouse, which has a huge initial capital investment and gives its rewards over the years with very little additional funding. Software is not like that at all. It requires a tiny capital investment, and ever increasing investment over the years to keep it up-to-date, bug free, and have the features required for today.
When an investment house floats an IPO and gives the IPOing company millions of dollars, it's not called charity because they expect a direct return on their investment greater than the invested money. The same when I buy copies of RedHat or sign up for subscriptions. I'm investing in the future of the software I use. I expect greater returns in terms of usable software than the money I put in. If I didn't put this money in, I would not get the software I wanted because it would stop being made.
It's not charity. Charity is an investment in the world around you that you expect no direct repayment for. You expect some sort of vague repayment in that if you make your society a better one somehow, you will reap those benefits too, but there's no way to determine an ROI in any reasonable sense.
The money I give to RedHat has a direct ROI. I'm getting something measurable for my money. Sure, I _may_ get some of that value if I don't invest, but if nobody invested no value would be created, and I'd be much worse off than I was before.
I think you persist in willfully misunderstanding their business plan in the service of the "You can't make money selling Libre Software" meme.
I use RedHat, and religiously buy a new box with every release so they get money and it stays on retail shelves. I know I don't _have_ to, but in my own cost/benefit analysis, the money I spend on their boxes is well worth it. I'm not making a 'donation', I'm consciously investing in my own future. I'm investing in the security updates I know I'll recieve. I'm investing in the next version that I know they are working on. RedHat has earned my trust in this regard, and I know that to continue to produce the things I need and/or treasure, they need my support.
It's not free software, it's Libre software. It takes time, and effort to produce. The people who put in that time and effort need to eat as much as the rest of us. When people like you spread the 'donation' meme, you devalue their work and falsely give the impression that it's voluntary and a 'gift' when what it really is is an investment in the future of a product you use daily.
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I could care less if Blizzard's product is Open Source or proprietary. If you had even the faintest clue, and followed the whole thing at all, you'd know that. I care that Blizzard is trying to stamp out an Open Source project using the legal system. That's all I care about. Period. If they want their games to be proprietary, that's just fine by me. It's when they attack a perfectly legitimate Open Source project that I get annoyed.
It's really quite pathetic how clueless you mindless game buying drones can be.
By purchasing Blizzard's product, you're only hurting yourself in the long run by contributing to a litigous atmosphere surrounding any Open Source project that somehow threaten a piece of proprietary software. Such an atmosphere will ultimately have a chilling effect on the development of all such software.
But hey, you gotta have your game fix, right? Obviously, that's the most important thing in the world. After all, actions don't really have consequences outside of your own immediate gratification, do they?
It's pathetic how clueless you mindless game buying drones can be.
By purchasing Blizzard's product, you're only hurting yourself in the long run by contributing to a litigous atmosphere surrounding any Open Source project that somehow threaten a piece of proprietary software. Such an atmosphere will ultiamtely have a chilling effect on the development of all such software.
But hey, you gotta have your game fix, right? Obviously, that's the most important thing in the world. After all, actions don't really have consequences, do they?
I know about abiword, and it wasn't good enough for what she wants to do. It may be now. I don't know.
Or, let 'em use the Linux equivalents and be happy. I have a friend who's not much of a geek who's been using Linux for over a year now with few problems. Her biggest problem is the fact that HR departments _demand_ Word documents. :-(
From other posts I've seen here, it looks like XP actually works, but is unsupported. I can completely understand the author's reasons for this choice.
Well then, you're saying ill-informed people should ride roller coasters and get killed in the name of 'fun'. People bungie jump, base jump, skydive, hanglide and do any number of other things that have well known poor safety records, and it doesn't reduce the 'fun factor' for them.
Most people thing amusement parks are supposed to be completely safe. If they aren't, then people have to choose how much of a risk they want to take. It's wrong to let people take risks they haven't been given any chance at all to understand.
I'm all for the warning in the visor of the car. If all cars had such warnings, people might make more intelligent descisions about risk. For example, most people seem to be under the greatly mistaken impression that SUVs are safer. From what I've read, it seems that SUVs are no safer for the driver or passengers, and lots less safe for people in non-SUVs. Perhaps, if people actually knew that, they wouldn't buy them for reasons of safety.
Well, this would be all fine and good if I were adequately informed of the danger of riding a particular coaster. I'm certainly no engineer, and couldn't make any kind of good assessment of the safety of a particular roller coaster.
So, if there isn't going to be regulation as to how many Gs you can expose riders to, there should be a requirement for them to prominently post information on maximum expected g-forces, and comprehensive safety history of that particular ride.
Ahh, so a rule that isn't enforced by an architectural constraint isn't a rule at all. That means that when my fist connects with your face, it must be perfectly OK because there was nothing preventing me from doing so. That's really how your argument reads.
Now, on the Internet, it's very hard to enforce certain kinds of laws unless you build in architectural constraints. We can have a debate as to whether or not the law should exist, given the costs of enforcing it within a certain set of architectural constraints. But, you can't argue that a law doesn't exist, or shouldn't be followed because there is no architectural constraint (actual code preventing you from doing it).
That kind of thinking will lead to laws declaring certain architectures legal, or illegal, so it will be impossible not to follow the law because the architecture makes it impossible. The CBDTPA act and the DMCA are perfect examples. You're kind of thinking implicitly endorses the method by which they attempt to enforce the law.
It uses quantum effects to generate the light. It'd take a long time, and a little more knowledge than I have to adequately explain how semiconductors create light. The short explanation, with terms left unexplained, is this:
A solid-state semiconducting diode is one type of semiconductor (N-type) with an excess of free electrons (not a negative charge, precisely) and another type (P-type) with an excess of 'holes', or places where it's favorable for an extra electron to be. You could think N-type as a flat field of golf balls and P-type as a field of little cups.
Now, the field is flat, so there's no reason for the golf balls to go anywhere. There's also a small wall between the golf balls and cups. Applying an electric charge to the system both tilts the field, and adds extra golf balls to the side farthest from the cups. When a golf ball lands in a cup, it moves into a state where it has less potential energy, particularily since it's also just gone over the little hill.
Now, systems of atoms release energy through distributing vibration. So, a real golf ball and cup would heat up a little, and you get some sound (vibrating air). But, electrons absorb and release energy by absorbing and releasing photons, or 'particles' of light. So, when the electron (golf ball) falls into the hole (cup), a photon of a specific frequency (because it's a very precise amount of energy) is released.
No energy is really lost in this whole process. A tiny bit of energy is lost to resistance as the electrons (and holes actually, but that made the analogy trickier) moved over the surface, and some of the photons will be absorbed before they leave the semiconductor, but it's largely very efficient.
Now, that will make an LED of one, specific color, determined by the depth of the holes, and the little ridge (band gap) between the plane of electrons and plane of holes. In order to get white light, you have to have more colors. This is usually done by packing three LEDs together in the same package, along with some system of getting their light to mingle and be reflected in a particular direction. This system too absorbs some of the photons, but it's also pretty efficient.
In contrast, incadescent bulbs work by exciting lots and lots of electrons in a filament into random states of excitation, and when they come back down, they release photons of all kinds of wavelengths, mostly in the deep infrared. Incadescent bulbs therefore waste tons of energy in heat.
Flourescent bulbs are a bit better in the they excite electrons in a gas to a very high energy state using high voltages. These electrons then release mostly UV when they drop back down, but there's a phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb that absorbs UV and re-releases visible light photons. This is lots more efficient than an incandescent bulb, but a lot of energy is still lost.
There are many ways in which a monopoly can keep this from happening. Like buying out any competitor. Or, telling railroad companies they'll stop shipping oil using their tracks if the ship oil for their competitor too. Or convincing car manufacturers (by adding the additives and making 'non-compliant' cars break down) to make their engines reliant on additives to your gas that you've patented.
In short, a monopoly has many options for eliminating competition and creating a permanently distorted market. So, in the interest of a truly free market, it's in our best interests for a government to break up monopolies that pursue agressive strategies for maintaining their hold on the market.
Don't you feel horrible exposing all these people who previously didn't have to deal with the intense RF radiation of a computer and monitor to debilitating RF radiation?
No it's not. I wouldn't continue having 8 pixel fonts, or even 'large fonts' (though I don't use Windows, and so don't have a specific 'large fonts' option). I would go for fonts where every character was 30 pixels wide. You'd get an amazing crispness and detail, especially if you also had anti-aliasing for those fonts. I might even try my hand at adding a '/' to the zeros in the nice Unicode fonts so I could use those for development.
That sounds like exactly what I'd want. Sadly, I'd probably have to have a salary of $200k/yr to afford it. That's not likely anytime in the next year or two, by which time that price will be obsolete. :-)
It'd be fun to buy those for the major members of the GNOME development team so they'd feel compelled to make things look right on such monitors. *grin*
Actually, what I really want is a 6400x4800 screen. Then I can have small fonts that are scaled fonts, not bitmaps, so I can get antialiasing too. :-)
On a 21.3" inch viewable area, I should be able to get a good 220 characters across, which is 29 pixels at 6400x4800. That's plenty enough pixels for a high quality scaled anti-aliased font. I think monitors and CPUs will be up to it in 3-5 years. I can't wait.
1600x1200 is just barely enough for what I want on a 21" screen. You have to do 7 or 8 pixel wide characters, which have to be painstakingly done as bitmaps in order to look right.
And, yes, I like very tiny letters. :-)
I've been waiting forever for a 1600x1200 LCD monitor. I do all of my work currently on 19" CRTs running at 1600x1200. And, for games, where you want a lower res, the LCD pixel averaging thing doesn't work badly at all. I've tested.
No, when they get down to $2k, I'll start thinking seriously of getting one. :-)
"Homland Security"'s biggest job is to make everybody feel insecure to justify their own existence. How much more Orwellian can you get than that?
Almost my entire music collection is in oggs now.
From the comments posted by the guy I replied to, no, I don't think so, though I could very well be wrong. Caring about this kind of thing in userland has been my obsession for years now. :-) It's actually quite surprising how many mistakes people make because they don't think the problem through carefully, or don't have a good design background in solving those kinds of problems.
IMHO, the 'intelligent descision' should just fall out of how it's all designed instead of being an explicit part of the low level design.
Why not trigger the interrupt immediately, but continue to buffer frames and let the CPU grab all the frames in one go when it gets around to servicing the interrupt?
Actually, with a sophisticated card, driver, and OS, the range of systems which could pull in a full gigabit/sec would be vastly increased. It requires some careful thought and programming.
I sat down and sketched out a sample of how things might go, and realized I was missing some important details. On detail being the fact that it takes time to copy the data from the card to memory, and the CPU can be doing other things in that time. So, it requires more than 10 minutes thought, but I'm sure given a day or two, and access to relevant documentation about how various bits work, I could sketch out a driver design that made near optimal use of the available hardware, and wouldn't be that hard to implement in hardware either.
No, it wouldn't. It just wouldn't be copied from kernel memory to user space memory.
Also, the PCI bus is lots slower than the memory bus, by a factor of 4 or 8.
Why don't you just admit that you're paying for someone to continue to update and improve the software instead of playing all these stupid semantic games?
The thing about software that makes Open Source work, is that it's never finished. There will always be more to add to it. And if the program has gotten so big and crufty that there's nothing to add, then there's a new, smaller program to take it's place and have stuff added to it.
The ponzi scheme analogy is also not correct because at every step of the way you get return on your investment in the form of usable software. It becomes more usable over time, giving you further return on your continuing investment. Usable software is a process, not a destination.
When I buy a piece of free software, I'm not buying the software. I'm buying the future of that software. Software is much more like the lighthouse maintainer than the lighthouse. It ages with time. Security flaws are found, new capabilities are needed, new environments need to be supported. Software always needs work. In fact, software has very little initial capital investment. Linux was created by one man in Finland while he was a student at a University. Now, of course, Linux has a huge number of people contributing lots of time and energy to it.
The simple thing is, you have the wrong model stuck in your head. You think of a piece of software as a lighthouse, which has a huge initial capital investment and gives its rewards over the years with very little additional funding. Software is not like that at all. It requires a tiny capital investment, and ever increasing investment over the years to keep it up-to-date, bug free, and have the features required for today.
When an investment house floats an IPO and gives the IPOing company millions of dollars, it's not called charity because they expect a direct return on their investment greater than the invested money. The same when I buy copies of RedHat or sign up for subscriptions. I'm investing in the future of the software I use. I expect greater returns in terms of usable software than the money I put in. If I didn't put this money in, I would not get the software I wanted because it would stop being made.
It's not charity. Charity is an investment in the world around you that you expect no direct repayment for. You expect some sort of vague repayment in that if you make your society a better one somehow, you will reap those benefits too, but there's no way to determine an ROI in any reasonable sense.
The money I give to RedHat has a direct ROI. I'm getting something measurable for my money. Sure, I _may_ get some of that value if I don't invest, but if nobody invested no value would be created, and I'd be much worse off than I was before.
I think you persist in willfully misunderstanding their business plan in the service of the "You can't make money selling Libre Software" meme.
I use RedHat, and religiously buy a new box with every release so they get money and it stays on retail shelves. I know I don't _have_ to, but in my own cost/benefit analysis, the money I spend on their boxes is well worth it. I'm not making a 'donation', I'm consciously investing in my own future. I'm investing in the security updates I know I'll recieve. I'm investing in the next version that I know they are working on. RedHat has earned my trust in this regard, and I know that to continue to produce the things I need and/or treasure, they need my support.
It's not free software, it's Libre software. It takes time, and effort to produce. The people who put in that time and effort need to eat as much as the rest of us. When people like you spread the 'donation' meme, you devalue their work and falsely give the impression that it's voluntary and a 'gift' when what it really is is an investment in the future of a product you use daily.