Because the alternative is a lot worse. As long as there is a perception that you should be using a PVR to record movies there is less of a perception that you should be using a general purpose device. It so happens that general purpose device may also let you burn IP onto removable media while the PVR gives producers a certain level of control over what consumers can do with that IP.
Theoretically some cameras split light onto 3 CCDs so the RGB component on each CCD is spacially equivalent. Some projectors merge 3 CRT's so the image projection for each component is spacially equivalent. The problem is these mechanisms aren't very heavily marketed for consumers. Foveon is the first to sell to consumers.
It's not speed and it's not 100% convenience. Set top boxes are the sweet spot between total control of intellectual property by consumers and total control by producers. They give you just the power than you paid for while not allowing you to do what you didn't pay for. In fact the convenience is so important that most of you will opt for set top boxes no matter how uncopyable the media is. Add some effective marketing and you've just found the solution to the piracy crisis.
> The excitement of the LinuxWorld Expo simply
> cannot be expressed in words.
Looks like the things that were introduced last year and passed off as extremely boring took a while to sink in. Telecommuniations, business mergers, storage software, and women in taylored tweed was all extremely boring last year but after a year of heavy economic reality, consumers have finally dropped their obsession with e-commerce and softened to the next big thing. Maybe this means stocks will go up again.
GCC still only generates mostly 8086 instructions from 20 years ago and only a small number of 386 instructions. Most of the optimization in the last 10 years was reordering for pipelined architectures, which doesn't matter anymore now that the hardware does most of the reordering. At least the Pentium III supports 100 instructions not generated by GCC.
Turning point of the history of the human race
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 2
As important and life altering as Loki is in public message forums there's still hardly anything in my life which they had a meaningful impact in. I never used their multimedia libraries. I never played their games. If the Loki brand was responsible for adding some feature to some library somewhere it was probably nothing that couldn't have been done under another brand name.
Even if I played their games it would have been the porting, the final step in the game's creation which they did. Even if I used their libraries the functionality in those libraries would have only been shrinkwrapping for functions that other groups already implemented, whether it was the frame buffer device, the console, GLX, or OSS. There was nothing in their libraries that made them necessary if you wanted to access the functionality at all.
The business model of the 90's was shrink wrapping and Loki did exactly what they were supposed to do to get popular in the 90's. Shrink wrapping and porting isn't enough to sustain a business nowadays but creating enough new functionality to sustain a business is impossible for most people.
I would have been ecstatic if someone made personal clusters consisting of dual 1.5Ghz Athlon nodes on gigabit ethernet a long time ago yet only now has someone decided to market personal clusters of single Celerons. Time to give up on the technically possible and base wish lists only on the technically marketable.
As far as I know no-one watches TV on anything that they have the ability or the desire to hack themselves. Watching TV on a PC used to allow people to copy it but no-one watches TV on a PC anymore. Even though copying DVD's was possible on PC's, it was already too inconvenient to play them on PC's let alone copy them on PC's.
That leaves hackers of X Boxes and set top boxes as the only meaningful grounds for copy protection. Unless kids start soldering PCI traces in their X Boxes or put up with an enourmous amount of inconvenience before getting the footage to even play, copy protection for appliances is going to be redundant.
I haven't seen any interest in Quicktime on UNIX. Unix hackers may not have liked Microsoft in the past but they're not stupid. Microsoft is going to be around for a long time and no-one wants to use a format that isn't going to be around for a long time.
Don't suppose they pulled the end of the month as the date to shut down out of thin air.
Since it would take a month to get another
service provider I'll probably end up still with AT&T
@ Home and paying for a month of downtime.
Like handheld organizers, service providers are another thing we keep
getting told we need to have yet are left on our own to figure out
why. Service providers are supposed to store CD collections for us,
record TV shows for us, buy groceries for us, connect us to the internet,
yet the amount of
downtime we're caused by centralizing everything
makes me wish we had a good reason for buying them.
When you release a substantial piece of
software corporations usually expect you to pay
your own support costs, including flying to the
location to troubleshoot it. They expect the
support cost to be covered in the license fee,
which for you was 0. If you don't provide support
they'll make you wish you never gave out the
software to begin with.
Can definitely assert that open source video editing took a hit. Kino and Linux Video Studio programs are great consumer tools but no good for professional work. The professional offerings died when VA Research/linux/software/I.O.U. tanked, not to mention cluster management software. Let's put it this way.
4 years ago open source was moving a lot faster with software costs not being the responsibility of the programmers while X Box, Pocket PC, and C# seemed dead in the water. Today open source programmers have to pay for their own software and criticizing those dead in the water projects, X Box, Pocket PC, and C# for being too slow get you banished from slashdot.
Maybe in the PDA calendar worshipping world Linux is Microsoft's biggest threat but I never figured out as many uses for PDA's as the computer science world keeps telling us there are. In the XBox, Divx world there's no threat as far as I can tell and no-one is daring to criticize the XBox.
Where Microsoft has lost the mighty PDA the case of dying a painful death of stabbing and electrocution if you don't immediately run out and buy an XBox has certainly been put forth enough times.
gcc has gotten so far behind the specialized instruction set curve that you're better off writing hardware descriptions for an FPGA using iverilog than spending $500 to write useful software for a modern instruction set.
I found that the abstraction functionality has gotten so minimal in the newer display libraries that it's easier just to access/dev/fb0 directly.
If you're doing all your graphics in OpenGL there's no reason to abstract/dev/fb0. FBDRI does all the/dev/fb0 calls.
Since no-one's writing desktop software anymore the framebuffer device is ideal for the new one-device one-purpose market.
Not that Red Hat is releasing any more versions of their desktop operating system but I suspected months ago that the operating system would get much harder to use and details about operating system security would get much harder to find in order to prevent terrorist attacks on computer networks.
The last time anyone designed a board with the intention of supporting Linux drivers for it was 1998. There was a time we thought winmodems were bad. Not many slashdotters remember what a winmodem is but since 1998 every piece of hardware can be considered specifically designed for Windows. Not that not having desktops which can run Linux is bad. When was the last time anyone wrote a story about a desktop PC?
Unfortunately while some of us still want to determine our own business ventures and say what we want, we're constrained by the majority of the human population which wants to be controlled. You can't for instance, start a business in Silicon Valley without first having Microsoft approve it because the technology for running a business of any worth is controlled by Microsoft.
You can't broadcast material of any form without Microsoft's approval because every means of information transmission is controlled by Microsoft. Sometimes the restrictions are rediculous, like using the color red because red is a Microsoft color or saying contacts are better than glasses because Bill Gates wears glasses. I especially hate not being able to travel freely because it would disrupt Microsoft's ability to balance its monthly license revenue across the world. I'm probably going to move to China where at least you can change lanes on the freeway without written permission from MS.
As far as I know, writing professional non destructive editor for free is going to expose you to liability battles because of the amount of money professionals risk on the software and the assumption that the software is going to carry their $250 million talent's voice to DVD.
The GPL is worthless at protecting you in a high cost environment like professional audio. That's why you won't see open source programmers giving out more than simple wave editors and utilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the alternative is a lot worse. As long as there is a perception that you should be using a PVR to record movies there is less of a perception that you should be using a general purpose device. It so happens that general purpose device may also let you burn IP onto removable media while the PVR gives producers a certain level of control over what consumers can do with that IP.
Theoretically some cameras split light onto 3 CCDs so the RGB component on each CCD is spacially equivalent. Some projectors merge 3 CRT's so the image projection for each component is spacially equivalent. The problem is these mechanisms aren't very heavily marketed for consumers. Foveon is the first to sell to consumers.
Signing up for the mailing list in order to gain access to the bitkeeper download can be a bitch.
It's not speed and it's not 100% convenience. Set top boxes are the sweet spot between total control of intellectual property by consumers and total control by producers. They give you just the power than you paid for while not allowing you to do what you didn't pay for. In fact the convenience is so important that most of you will opt for set top boxes no matter how uncopyable the media is. Add some effective marketing and you've just found the solution to the piracy crisis.
> The excitement of the LinuxWorld Expo simply
> cannot be expressed in words.
Looks like the things that were introduced last year and passed off as extremely boring took a while to sink in. Telecommuniations, business mergers, storage software, and women in taylored tweed was all extremely boring last year but after a year of heavy economic reality, consumers have finally dropped their obsession with e-commerce and softened to the next big thing. Maybe this means stocks will go up again.
Get rid of it.
Is the SGI workstation wireless? Is it handheld? Is it a lego brick?
GCC still only generates mostly 8086 instructions from 20 years ago and only a small number of 386 instructions. Most of the optimization in the last 10 years was reordering for pipelined architectures, which doesn't matter anymore now that the hardware does most of the reordering. At least the Pentium III supports 100 instructions not generated by GCC.
As important and life altering as Loki is in public message forums there's still hardly anything in my life which they had a meaningful impact in. I never used their multimedia libraries. I never played their games. If the Loki brand was responsible for adding some feature to some library somewhere it was probably nothing that couldn't have been done under another brand name.
Even if I played their games it would have been the porting, the final step in the game's creation which they did. Even if I used their libraries the functionality in those libraries would have only been shrinkwrapping for functions that other groups already implemented, whether it was the frame buffer device, the console, GLX, or OSS. There was nothing in their libraries that made them necessary if you wanted to access the functionality at all.
The business model of the 90's was shrink wrapping and Loki did exactly what they were supposed to do to get popular in the 90's. Shrink wrapping and porting isn't enough to sustain a business nowadays but creating enough new functionality to sustain a business is impossible for most people.
Is the mainframe wireless? Is it handheld?
I would have been ecstatic if someone made personal clusters consisting of dual 1.5Ghz Athlon nodes on gigabit ethernet a long time ago yet only now has someone decided to market personal clusters of single Celerons. Time to give up on the technically possible and base wish lists only on the technically marketable.
As far as I know no-one watches TV on anything that they have the ability or the desire to hack themselves. Watching TV on a PC used to allow people to copy it but no-one watches TV on a PC anymore. Even though copying DVD's was possible on PC's, it was already too inconvenient to play them on PC's let alone copy them on PC's.
That leaves hackers of X Boxes and set top boxes as the only meaningful grounds for copy protection. Unless kids start soldering PCI traces in their X Boxes or put up with an enourmous amount of inconvenience before getting the footage to even play, copy protection for appliances is going to be redundant.
I haven't seen any interest in Quicktime on UNIX. Unix hackers may not have liked Microsoft in the past but they're not stupid. Microsoft is going to be around for a long time and no-one wants to use a format that isn't going to be around for a long time.
Don't suppose they pulled the end of the month as the date to shut down out of thin air.
Since it would take a month to get another
service provider I'll probably end up still with AT&T
@ Home and paying for a month of downtime.
Like handheld organizers, service providers are another thing we keep
getting told we need to have yet are left on our own to figure out
why. Service providers are supposed to store CD collections for us,
record TV shows for us, buy groceries for us, connect us to the internet,
yet the amount of
downtime we're caused by centralizing everything
makes me wish we had a good reason for buying them.
When you release a substantial piece of
software corporations usually expect you to pay
your own support costs, including flying to the
location to troubleshoot it. They expect the
support cost to be covered in the license fee,
which for you was 0. If you don't provide support
they'll make you wish you never gave out the
software to begin with.
Can definitely assert that open source video editing took a hit. Kino and Linux Video Studio programs are great consumer tools but no good for professional work. The professional offerings died when VA Research/linux/software/I.O.U. tanked, not to mention cluster management software. Let's put it this way.
4 years ago open source was moving a lot faster with software costs not being the responsibility of the programmers while X Box, Pocket PC, and C# seemed dead in the water. Today open source programmers have to pay for their own software and criticizing those dead in the water projects, X Box, Pocket PC, and C# for being too slow get you banished from slashdot.
Maybe in the PDA calendar worshipping world Linux is Microsoft's biggest threat but I never figured out as many uses for PDA's as the computer science world keeps telling us there are. In the XBox, Divx world there's no threat as far as I can tell and no-one is daring to criticize the XBox.
Where Microsoft has lost the mighty PDA the case of dying a painful death of stabbing and electrocution if you don't immediately run out and buy an XBox has certainly been put forth enough times.
gcc has gotten so far behind the specialized instruction set curve that you're better off writing hardware descriptions for an FPGA using iverilog than spending $500 to write useful software for a modern instruction set.
I voted for I.O.U. to replace Linux .
Is anyone not working on one of these at their day job?
I found that the abstraction functionality has gotten so minimal in the newer display libraries that it's easier just to access /dev/fb0 directly.
/dev/fb0. FBDRI does all the /dev/fb0 calls.
If you're doing all your graphics in OpenGL there's no reason to abstract
Since no-one's writing desktop software anymore the framebuffer device is ideal for the new one-device one-purpose market.
Not that Red Hat is releasing any more versions of their desktop operating system but I suspected months ago that the operating system would get much harder to use and details about operating system security would get much harder to find in order to prevent terrorist attacks on computer networks.
The last time anyone designed a board with the intention of supporting Linux drivers for it was 1998. There was a time we thought winmodems were bad. Not many slashdotters remember what a winmodem is but since 1998 every piece of hardware can be considered specifically designed for Windows. Not that not having desktops which can run Linux is bad. When was the last time anyone wrote a story about a desktop PC?
Unfortunately while some of us still want to determine our own business ventures and say what we want, we're constrained by the majority of the human population which wants to be controlled. You can't for instance, start a business in Silicon Valley without first having Microsoft approve it because the technology for running a business of any worth is controlled by Microsoft.
You can't broadcast material of any form without Microsoft's approval because every means of information transmission is controlled by Microsoft. Sometimes the restrictions are rediculous, like using the color red because red is a Microsoft color or saying contacts are better than glasses because Bill Gates wears glasses. I especially hate not being able to travel freely because it would disrupt Microsoft's ability to balance its monthly license revenue across the world. I'm probably going to move to China where at least you can change lanes on the freeway without written permission from MS.
As far as I know, writing professional non destructive editor for free is going to expose you to liability battles because of the amount of money professionals risk on the software and the assumption that the software is going to carry their $250 million talent's voice to DVD.
The GPL is worthless at protecting you in a high cost environment like professional audio. That's why you won't see open source programmers giving out more than simple wave editors and utilities.