When (if?) I get enough disposable cash I am getting a dish, sending the S-video signal to my WinTV card and playing it on a 32" presentation monitor.
S-Video to WinTV?? I would suggest a digital capture card inside your PC. Just get the cable from dish to PCI card and you're done. S-Video looks like shit compared to digital broadcast signal captured by specialized card inside your computer. And while you're spending cash get a high quality DLP projector instead of that 32" monitor. How 160" wide-screen sounds like? [Disclaimer: I only have 80" 4:3 screen but S-Video looks like shit even with it. I also have Hauppauge WinTV card and I can assure that while it's an OK card it's far from perfect.]
However, with less than perfect source your best bet is to have interlaced display. I've seen far too many DVD's/digital broadcasts that have flags set saing that the content is 16:9 progressive when it's in reality 4:3 interlaced and so on. With a traditional TV equipped with a 16:9/4:3 (auto)toggle you probably don't even notice the problem but with hardware that honors those flags (e.g. turns of deinterlacer for source that has progressive flag set on) the result is often miserable.
I don't think that has a lot to do with it, since shipping the items in question from the US would cost much more than from within the EU, therefore making up much of the difference.
Well, considering that at least in Finland getting something posted across the country by national post office is costing roughly the same as getting something posted from US to the country by other companies, I can tell you that posting costs don't matter. Much bigger issue is (was?) that you have to pick up the package from customs personally if its value is more than about 50 bucks.
When you capture life on video, you capture everything in that 1/30 of a second, including all movement. If u look on a frame in a movie, u see that everything is blurry [...] so to get the maximum fluidity, like in real life, you need this infinite FPS.
There is a much better solution, and 3DFX was attempting to introduce that, namely Motion Blur
The problem is that all those motion blur effects are linear and create even remotely realistic looking images only for objects that move linearly for the time period. If the object accelerates and rotates in the same time the required motion blur isn't linear and the only way to make it look good is to render a lot of frames for the time period and blend them together. Not to mention morphing of object; imagine a bullet hitting a wall -- in 1/30th of a second the bullet is moving towards the wall, morphing during the hit and bouncing to some direction, all during the single frame. How on the earth are you supposed to render it realistically if you only calculate positions for the start and the end of the period as normally done for those real time "motion blur" effects?
The three CDs freely downloadable version of Mandrake 8.2 includes OpenOffice.org office suite. Default fonts look butt-ugly though. As the downmodded anonymous coward said, it's version 641. Suite contains:
OpenOffice.org Writer
OpenOffice.org Math
OpenOffice.org Draw
OpenOffice.org Calc
OpenOffice.org Impress
Equivalent parts for KOffice are included too. A MS word document I tried opened fine in OpenOffice.org Writer but didn't look quite right with KWord.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 2
Think of the "software as a book" metaphore. You don't need a license to read a book, just as you don't need a license to use software. The author of a book does not give up copyright when they sell a million copies of a book --- you didn't agree to a license, yet you cannot photocopy a book and sell it.
As I see it, a book is more like a file that's meant to be used with a given software, instead of software itself. A more correct analogy would be a book written in some unknown language with an enclosed contract offer to give a way to decrypt the content if agreed to. Seller could then claim that they're selling the book (file) and licensing the algorithm (software) as a separate product. Whether or not they could prevent others from distributing the algorighm would depend on a given country's laws as algorithms alone cannot be patented in many countries and could therefore be distributed freely. A binary could be claimed to be a data file to be used with software called "Operating System," though.
One could claim that binary is simply encrypted version of the source code (content scrambling algorithm) and it's meant to be used with [encrypted] data files to obtain access to copyrighted content. Perhaps DMCA could be applied?
...a lot like todays audio equipment. The crap will look like this and the better stuff like this. Expect all visible surfaces to be manufactured from brushed aluminium, chrome and glass. The quality of the product will be inverse to the number of blinking lights in the front.
Lindows isn't selling their distribution yet, reall--they're letting people pay for the privilege of being beta-testers; the final product isn't even done yet. Beta testers are commonly defined by their contracts/livenses as employees and forbidden from distributing copies of the beta software.
No. The GPL says that anyone who receives a copy of your version from you has the right to redistribute copies (modified or not) of that version. It does not give you permission to distribute the work on any more restrictive basis.
Yes. For instance, you can accept a contract develop changes and agree not to release your changes until the client says ok. This is permitted because in this case no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA.
You can also release your changes to the client under the GPL, but agree not to release them to anyone else until the client says ok. In this case, too, no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA, or under any additional restrictions.
The GPL would give the client the right to redistribute your version, but in this scenario the client will choose not to exercise that right.
I understand this as: it's okay to develop under NDA (that is, you have access to source, but you're not allowed to distribute anything) but it's not okay to work under NDA and receive only binary. Of course, if this interpretation isn't correct, GPL could be circumvented by "hiring" all the users as employers for the wage of -99 bucks.
Yeah, mouse gestures rock. Especially because I can easily make my own actions. For example my middle mouse button opens link in new tab in the background. However, if I drag to right while pressing middle mouse button on link it opens link in new tab in the foreground. Dragging up, right and down closes all the other tabs in my copy too.
After you have installed mouse gestures from Optimoz simply edit.../chrome/mozgest/content/gestimp.js to modify gestures as you like.
However, there's a bug that causes install to fail partially in some of the latest nightly builds. After install you have to edit.../chrome/mozgest/content/ pref/mozgestPrefOverlay.xul and replace all occurrences of "outliner" with "tree" to make preferences work (pref should be the in the advanced preferences branch, after editing you need to restart Mozilla). Do this only if you cannot see "Mouse Gestures" pref in the Advanced preferences brach.
Why the fuck do people think that market value mean anything? [...] I think tomorrow I will IPO my dog tickling business at 10 trillion shares at $1 each.
But the difference is that MS has already sold all those shares - not for the price they're today, though. If you start selling your Dog Tickling(R) shares you'll quickly realize that it's not you who decides the share price.
Market value is far from real value, but it gives you a ballpark figure about how much you have to pay for the whole thing. You know, if you want to buy MS, you have to get majority of its shares and when you go and start buying all those shares the price will start climbing. It's not like you'll get discount if you buy more. You're not going to have the whole company for today's market price. On the other hand, if you have a really big pile of those shares you can't get today's market price in cash if you sell them immediatly.
What nobody seems to ever mention in these threads is that Sony has $68-$80BN (depending on who you ask). They could by two Microsofts.
I think it was: MS has $38B in cash. The numbers mentioned for Square, Nintendo and EA were total company market values if I understood it correctly. The point was that MS could buy all those in cash. Read this for some idea how much money Billg makes from Microsoft alone.
Consider that he made this money in the 25 years or so since Microsoft was founded in 1975. If you presume that he has worked 14 hours a day on every business day of the year since then, that means he's been making money at a staggering million dollars per hour, around $300 per second.
It's not likely Sony (market value $46B) could buy Microsoft (market value $297B).
I mean, one rather popular OS I know of got up to about 98 until they decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch again because it wasn't any good.
Actually, there was also a release called "ME" after that -- perhaps they run out of numbers?
[...] Perfect for placing outside ones door as a lock (log in with username and password, without any feedback at all, to gain access to the house). [...]
Just when you thought getting the key into keyhole was hard while being drunk there's a guy suggesting that you should type random patterns (no words in passwords) into invisible keyboard!
Installing Bearshare also installs two secret spyware apps.
Yeah, but I was able to figure this out! The dialog in question presented during installation has following checkboxes:
BearShare
BearShare Desktop Icon
SaveNow
New.net Domain Names
Desktop Shortcuts: Links to Great Products
n-CASE Ad Delivery System
Simply uncheck everything else but BearShare and there's no spyware. To be honest, if you couldn't figure out which of those you need then I'd suggest you to sell your PC and purchase Xbox or PS2 instead.
("Secret spyware" that was mentioned contains New.net and SaveNow)
[You don't really think that I GUI log into 300 machines to install a patch, do you?]
and some of your applications have dialog boxes that need clicking
Assuming that these are server systems[...]
Uh, you need like 300 servers if you use Windows? I think it's safe to assume he's talking about workstations. The point is you often need to reboot windows boxes [to install/update software] and it's hard remotely with those.
Oh, one little offtopic question: why does Internet Explorer use a collection of.lnk files to keep your favourites, instead of one clean bookmark.html file like Mozilla or Netscape? I never understood this concept.
Perhaps guys in Redmond thought "everything is a file" for a change. This way you can organize your bookmarks with standard filesystem tools. I'd rather use.bookmark as the extension or no extension at all but in windows world you simply cannot have more than 3 letters for extension:)
I forget how, but at some point I was taking pictures of my monitor and it's clear to see that the phosphorous glows some time after the beam has hit it. I'd say about 1/5 of the screen was still visible in the pictures, brightest on the scanline the beam had just passed and dimming on upwards about 1/5 of the screen until it was too dark to see. I would think the best you could do then is obtain the average color of each scanline, which isn't of much use.
I'd say that the shutter time was about 1/5th of your screen refresh rate. If you take a photo of 100Hz monitor with 10ms shutter time full screen should be visible with equal intensity simply because monitor can draw full screen in 10ms. With 5ms shutter time you get exactly half the screen and so on.
If you constantly measure light level and digitize it every 5 ns [1] you should be able to get pixel intensity value for every single pixel on a 1600x1200@85Hz screen. The problem is to get meaningful readings with 5 ns "shutter time". Fortunately for you, there'll be much extra noise from the light emitted from the still more or less gloving previous pixels and office lighting and whatnot. However, the pixel the CRT is currently drawing is the brightest and this is how it works... if it works. If you want to make it hard for 'them' just use high resolution with high refresh rate. And extra small fonts.
1. Roughtly the time needed per pixel when drawing 1600x1200@85Hz, I calculated this as 1/(1800x1400x85) sec to take CRT scanning into account.
BUT most important to consumers is the fact that MPEG-4 compression is just NOT SUITABLE for high-definition content which is meant to be seen on a decently large screen (29 inches and above). MPEG-4 simply produces too many artifacts (even today with low-bit-rate MPEG-2 you can see on cable how dark images in motion seen to leave a "ghost" behind).
I think this HD-DVD standard in question would use bitrates equal to current MPEG2 streams but with MPEG4 content. If your DivX video seems lower quality than MPEG2 DVD it might be that your DivX video has 750kbps bitrate compared to about 5Mbps bitrate of MPEG2 video. If you compare 1600x1200@5Mbps/MPEG4 with 768x576@5Mbps/MPEG2 stream it should be clear that the former one is much better.
And what comes to "ghosts" in low light scenes it's only issue with current encoder software. Basically current encoders are using linear comparision between original and compressed instead of logarithmic and they treat 2 to 4 in intensity like 244 to 246 even though the former one has 100% increase and the latter one has 0.8% increase. Obviously you're going to notice ghosting due to this in darker scenes only.
Though, I have to admit that when you consider the CPU power needed to even decode 1600x1200 resolution MPEG4 stream it might be cheaper to jump to blue laser. Not to speak anything about real-time recording/encoding! If only they could create single RW standard this time.
In case you think your copy of Mozilla supports view source correctly you might want to try this. Just click Go! and select view source. Does the source look like it belongs to page you're viewing? Please don't go to bug #55583 unless you really have to. We don't want bugzilla to be slashdotted again.
o that I can configure it to automatically accept any cookies of short duration (i.e. expiration not specified or specified to be within one day) on a per-site basis.
I personally prefer more Mozilla's way of doing it. You can limit maximum duration of cookie to whatever you want. My current setting for maximum cookie life is 14 days. There's no reason to block cookies just because the happen to define overly long life. In addition to that you could totally block cookies from some ad hosts.
With current tech, we could create a 486 based word processing machine, thinner, cheaper, lighter, and with a week's worth of power, rather than just a few hours.
Sure, but only if you don't need a display for word prosessing. It's not like there's a tech available to make cheap enough displays that can be run for weeks with small battery only. And you have seen GBA - we need display that generates light.
I'm thinking of cases like Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, which shipped with Wine as part of the product -- those should require a proprietary license if they don't want to release the source code to the Office suite.
Anything which is distributed for Windows and just being used with Wine incidentally (like Microsoft Office) should be usable for free, though perhaps a clause in the license would be needed to make that explicit?
This sounds like a really weird suggestion to me. Wouldn't this make companies steer away from supporting Linux? If you release for Windows only, and point people to Wine project when they ask about Linux support, you don't have to pay anything. If, on the other hand, you decide to support Linux officially with wine you would have to pay. Why would any company pay for a license to support Linux? If a company cannot distribute wine with the proprietary software they probably won't support Linux at all and fewer people will use Linux because it doesn't have required software.
If you really want to increase installed Linux base make it really easy for any company to support Linux with wine if they decide not to do real port. Perhaps you could state in the license that proprietary software must tell clearly to end user that the software uses wine and that's because company has decided that Linux doesn't need native port. This would help to get Linux supported officially and still making use of wine for official support a little disgraceful for a company. Hopefully more people would start using Linux (because more software existed) and more companies doing native ports (because using wine wouldn't be a nicest answer even though it'd work).
And some of us can hear above 22 kHz, so 44 kHz recordings aren't even adequate theoretically.
And some dogs can hear much higher sounds, too, but why should I care? If there's someone who can see infra-red light should we modify each and every TV setup out there? Should we discard CDs because they aren't theoretically adequate?
The thruth is many people cannot even hear 18 kHz, some even barely 16 kHz and these people cannot hear any difference between 44 kHz and 96 kHz sound no matter how good the setup is. For me, MP3s sound just fine. On the other hand, I don't consider DVD as a high quality image source simply because the resolution is so low. Yeah, it can contain all the detail a regular TV set can ever show but I think that tells us more about the quality of regular TV set than the quality of DVD image. Majority of people seem to be happy with DVD quality so I really don't expect to get anything better in at least a decade. Though luck, but I have to live with it.
In Blizzard's games, the routines used by the installer to verify authenticity of a CD key actually checks for compliance to a much more broad algorithm than the keys are actually manufactured by.
Yeah, but it's only question of time when the first keygen starts bombing multiplayer authentication with generated keys until one is okayed and returns only that to end user. Yeah, perhaps your IP gets logged but you wouldn't run that kind of program on your own computer, would you? Local library or ISPs shell would be just fine.
Current system could work if keys were big enough so that hitting real key with keygen would be hard but, unfortunately, as long as end user has to type in the code during install you cannot input that many bits into the key anyway.
> [...] long-term memory copyright infringment [...]
If you found the parent post interesting or funny and haven't seen Memento then it's time to visit local video store...
it seems that with the previous generation of 3D cards, the technology had reached the point where any game with a reasonable game engine could be run at 1024X768x32bit with all the detail goodies turned on at framerates that were completely playable.
IANJC, but...
If your GPU can run 1024x768 with all goodies on, then there clearly isn't enough goodies to select from. Have you seen Final Fantasy/Shrek/Monsters Inc? Every one of those look a lot better than any computer game even from basic NTSC set. And that's much worse than 640x480! Clearly we need much more polygons, better lighting calculations and what not. The current trend is to run the same old games with ever higher resolutions - what's it good to be able to see individual polygons more clear? Is it somehow cooler to view borders of polygons instead of pixels and spend hefty amounts of processing power on it? Vertex and pixel shaders sound to me exactly what we need.
Currently we have like 20K polygons/frame. With 800x600 it makes average of 24 pixels/polygon. When we have more like 4 pixels/polygon, then it's the time to increase resolution. I'd say 200K polygons/frame should look pretty good at 1024x768. Make that times 10 for even remotely realistic looking results. The problem I'm seeing is unevenly distributed polygons. There's 10K polygons used to figure in the distant taking 20x20 pixels from screen and in the same time there's only 2400 polygons used to render the rest of the world. When largest polygon on the screen has less than 10 pixels I'm happy.
And when we have GPUs and game engines that are able to display Final Fantasy looking graphics I will compare to the real movies.
Slashdot Mirror
S-Video to WinTV?? I would suggest a digital capture card inside your PC. Just get the cable from dish to PCI card and you're done. S-Video looks like shit compared to digital broadcast signal captured by specialized card inside your computer. And while you're spending cash get a high quality DLP projector instead of that 32" monitor. How 160" wide-screen sounds like? [Disclaimer: I only have 80" 4:3 screen but S-Video looks like shit even with it. I also have Hauppauge WinTV card and I can assure that while it's an OK card it's far from perfect.]
However, with less than perfect source your best bet is to have interlaced display. I've seen far too many DVD's/digital broadcasts that have flags set saing that the content is 16:9 progressive when it's in reality 4:3 interlaced and so on. With a traditional TV equipped with a 16:9/4:3 (auto)toggle you probably don't even notice the problem but with hardware that honors those flags (e.g. turns of deinterlacer for source that has progressive flag set on) the result is often miserable.
Well, considering that at least in Finland getting something posted across the country by national post office is costing roughly the same as getting something posted from US to the country by other companies, I can tell you that posting costs don't matter. Much bigger issue is (was?) that you have to pick up the package from customs personally if its value is more than about 50 bucks.
There is a much better solution, and 3DFX was attempting to introduce that, namely Motion Blur
The problem is that all those motion blur effects are linear and create even remotely realistic looking images only for objects that move linearly for the time period. If the object accelerates and rotates in the same time the required motion blur isn't linear and the only way to make it look good is to render a lot of frames for the time period and blend them together. Not to mention morphing of object; imagine a bullet hitting a wall -- in 1/30th of a second the bullet is moving towards the wall, morphing during the hit and bouncing to some direction, all during the single frame. How on the earth are you supposed to render it realistically if you only calculate positions for the start and the end of the period as normally done for those real time "motion blur" effects?
Why aren't any distros including OpenOffice?
The three CDs freely downloadable version of Mandrake 8.2 includes OpenOffice.org office suite. Default fonts look butt-ugly though. As the downmodded anonymous coward said, it's version 641. Suite contains:
Equivalent parts for KOffice are included too. A MS word document I tried opened fine in OpenOffice.org Writer but didn't look quite right with KWord.
Think of the "software as a book" metaphore. You don't need a license to read a book, just as you don't need a license to use software. The author of a book does not give up copyright when they sell a million copies of a book --- you didn't agree to a license, yet you cannot photocopy a book and sell it.
As I see it, a book is more like a file that's meant to be used with a given software, instead of software itself. A more correct analogy would be a book written in some unknown language with an enclosed contract offer to give a way to decrypt the content if agreed to. Seller could then claim that they're selling the book (file) and licensing the algorithm (software) as a separate product. Whether or not they could prevent others from distributing the algorighm would depend on a given country's laws as algorithms alone cannot be patented in many countries and could therefore be distributed freely. A binary could be claimed to be a data file to be used with software called "Operating System," though.
One could claim that binary is simply encrypted version of the source code (content scrambling algorithm) and it's meant to be used with [encrypted] data files to obtain access to copyrighted content. Perhaps DMCA could be applied?
...a lot like todays audio equipment. The crap will look like this and the better stuff like this. Expect all visible surfaces to be manufactured from brushed aluminium, chrome and glass. The quality of the product will be inverse to the number of blinking lights in the front.
Hmm... lets see what FSF has to say.
"Does the GPL allow me to distribute a modified or beta version under a nondisclosure agreement?":
" Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?"
I understand this as: it's okay to develop under NDA (that is, you have access to source, but you're not allowed to distribute anything) but it's not okay to work under NDA and receive only binary. Of course, if this interpretation isn't correct, GPL could be circumvented by "hiring" all the users as employers for the wage of -99 bucks.
After you have installed mouse gestures from Optimoz simply edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/gestimp.js to modify gestures as you like.
However, there's a bug that causes install to fail partially in some of the latest nightly builds. After install you have to edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/ pref/mozgestPrefOverlay.xul and replace all occurrences of "outliner" with "tree" to make preferences work (pref should be the in the advanced preferences branch, after editing you need to restart Mozilla). Do this only if you cannot see "Mouse Gestures" pref in the Advanced preferences brach.
But the difference is that MS has already sold all those shares - not for the price they're today, though. If you start selling your Dog Tickling(R) shares you'll quickly realize that it's not you who decides the share price.
Market value is far from real value, but it gives you a ballpark figure about how much you have to pay for the whole thing. You know, if you want to buy MS, you have to get majority of its shares and when you go and start buying all those shares the price will start climbing. It's not like you'll get discount if you buy more. You're not going to have the whole company for today's market price. On the other hand, if you have a really big pile of those shares you can't get today's market price in cash if you sell them immediatly.
I think it was: MS has $38B in cash. The numbers mentioned for Square, Nintendo and EA were total company market values if I understood it correctly. The point was that MS could buy all those in cash. Read this for some idea how much money Billg makes from Microsoft alone.
It's not likely Sony (market value $46B) could buy Microsoft (market value $297B).
Actually, there was also a release called "ME" after that -- perhaps they run out of numbers?
Just when you thought getting the key into keyhole was hard while being drunk there's a guy suggesting that you should type random patterns (no words in passwords) into invisible keyboard!
Yeah, but I was able to figure this out! The dialog in question presented during installation has following checkboxes:
- BearShare
- BearShare Desktop Icon
- SaveNow
- New.net Domain Names
- Desktop Shortcuts: Links to Great Products
- n-CASE Ad Delivery System
Simply uncheck everything else but BearShare and there's no spyware. To be honest, if you couldn't figure out which of those you need then I'd suggest you to sell your PC and purchase Xbox or PS2 instead.("Secret spyware" that was mentioned contains New.net and SaveNow)
Uh, you need like 300 servers if you use Windows? I think it's safe to assume he's talking about workstations. The point is you often need to reboot windows boxes [to install/update software] and it's hard remotely with those.
Perhaps guys in Redmond thought "everything is a file" for a change. This way you can organize your bookmarks with standard filesystem tools. I'd rather use .bookmark as the extension or no extension at all but in windows world you simply cannot have more than 3 letters for extension :)
I'd say that the shutter time was about 1/5th of your screen refresh rate. If you take a photo of 100Hz monitor with 10ms shutter time full screen should be visible with equal intensity simply because monitor can draw full screen in 10ms. With 5ms shutter time you get exactly half the screen and so on.
If you constantly measure light level and digitize it every 5 ns [1] you should be able to get pixel intensity value for every single pixel on a 1600x1200@85Hz screen. The problem is to get meaningful readings with 5 ns "shutter time". Fortunately for you, there'll be much extra noise from the light emitted from the still more or less gloving previous pixels and office lighting and whatnot. However, the pixel the CRT is currently drawing is the brightest and this is how it works... if it works. If you want to make it hard for 'them' just use high resolution with high refresh rate. And extra small fonts.
1. Roughtly the time needed per pixel when drawing 1600x1200@85Hz, I calculated this as 1/(1800x1400x85) sec to take CRT scanning into account.
I think this HD-DVD standard in question would use bitrates equal to current MPEG2 streams but with MPEG4 content. If your DivX video seems lower quality than MPEG2 DVD it might be that your DivX video has 750kbps bitrate compared to about 5Mbps bitrate of MPEG2 video. If you compare 1600x1200@5Mbps/MPEG4 with 768x576@5Mbps/MPEG2 stream it should be clear that the former one is much better.
And what comes to "ghosts" in low light scenes it's only issue with current encoder software. Basically current encoders are using linear comparision between original and compressed instead of logarithmic and they treat 2 to 4 in intensity like 244 to 246 even though the former one has 100% increase and the latter one has 0.8% increase. Obviously you're going to notice ghosting due to this in darker scenes only.
Though, I have to admit that when you consider the CPU power needed to even decode 1600x1200 resolution MPEG4 stream it might be cheaper to jump to blue laser. Not to speak anything about real-time recording/encoding! If only they could create single RW standard this time.
In case you think your copy of Mozilla supports view source correctly you might want to try this. Just click Go! and select view source. Does the source look like it belongs to page you're viewing? Please don't go to bug #55583 unless you really have to. We don't want bugzilla to be slashdotted again.
I personally prefer more Mozilla's way of doing it. You can limit maximum duration of cookie to whatever you want. My current setting for maximum cookie life is 14 days. There's no reason to block cookies just because the happen to define overly long life. In addition to that you could totally block cookies from some ad hosts.
Sure, but only if you don't need a display for word prosessing. It's not like there's a tech available to make cheap enough displays that can be run for weeks with small battery only. And you have seen GBA - we need display that generates light.
Anything which is distributed for Windows and just being used with Wine incidentally (like Microsoft Office) should be usable for free, though perhaps a clause in the license would be needed to make that explicit?
This sounds like a really weird suggestion to me. Wouldn't this make companies steer away from supporting Linux? If you release for Windows only, and point people to Wine project when they ask about Linux support, you don't have to pay anything. If, on the other hand, you decide to support Linux officially with wine you would have to pay. Why would any company pay for a license to support Linux? If a company cannot distribute wine with the proprietary software they probably won't support Linux at all and fewer people will use Linux because it doesn't have required software.
If you really want to increase installed Linux base make it really easy for any company to support Linux with wine if they decide not to do real port. Perhaps you could state in the license that proprietary software must tell clearly to end user that the software uses wine and that's because company has decided that Linux doesn't need native port. This would help to get Linux supported officially and still making use of wine for official support a little disgraceful for a company. Hopefully more people would start using Linux (because more software existed) and more companies doing native ports (because using wine wouldn't be a nicest answer even though it'd work).
And some dogs can hear much higher sounds, too, but why should I care? If there's someone who can see infra-red light should we modify each and every TV setup out there? Should we discard CDs because they aren't theoretically adequate?
The thruth is many people cannot even hear 18 kHz, some even barely 16 kHz and these people cannot hear any difference between 44 kHz and 96 kHz sound no matter how good the setup is. For me, MP3s sound just fine. On the other hand, I don't consider DVD as a high quality image source simply because the resolution is so low. Yeah, it can contain all the detail a regular TV set can ever show but I think that tells us more about the quality of regular TV set than the quality of DVD image. Majority of people seem to be happy with DVD quality so I really don't expect to get anything better in at least a decade. Though luck, but I have to live with it.
Yeah, but it's only question of time when the first keygen starts bombing multiplayer authentication with generated keys until one is okayed and returns only that to end user. Yeah, perhaps your IP gets logged but you wouldn't run that kind of program on your own computer, would you? Local library or ISPs shell would be just fine.
Current system could work if keys were big enough so that hitting real key with keygen would be hard but, unfortunately, as long as end user has to type in the code during install you cannot input that many bits into the key anyway.
> [...] long-term memory copyright infringment [...]
If you found the parent post interesting or funny and haven't seen Memento then it's time to visit local video store...
IANJC, but...
If your GPU can run 1024x768 with all goodies on, then there clearly isn't enough goodies to select from. Have you seen Final Fantasy/Shrek/Monsters Inc? Every one of those look a lot better than any computer game even from basic NTSC set. And that's much worse than 640x480! Clearly we need much more polygons, better lighting calculations and what not. The current trend is to run the same old games with ever higher resolutions - what's it good to be able to see individual polygons more clear? Is it somehow cooler to view borders of polygons instead of pixels and spend hefty amounts of processing power on it? Vertex and pixel shaders sound to me exactly what we need.
Currently we have like 20K polygons/frame. With 800x600 it makes average of 24 pixels/polygon. When we have more like 4 pixels/polygon, then it's the time to increase resolution. I'd say 200K polygons/frame should look pretty good at 1024x768. Make that times 10 for even remotely realistic looking results. The problem I'm seeing is unevenly distributed polygons. There's 10K polygons used to figure in the distant taking 20x20 pixels from screen and in the same time there's only 2400 polygons used to render the rest of the world. When largest polygon on the screen has less than 10 pixels I'm happy.
And when we have GPUs and game engines that are able to display Final Fantasy looking graphics I will compare to the real movies.