since Beck himself has been questioned about his sources for musical accompanyment
And Marilyn Manson apparently stole from the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy. Listen to "I Don't Like the Drugs" (1998) and "It's All About the Benjamins (rock remix)" (1997). Then look me in the eye and say Manson didn't copy Puffy for the chorus.
Now listen to "Jump" by The Movement, "Tribal Dance" by 2 Unlimited, and the theme from the first "Mission: Impossible" movie. I don't know what exactly was first, but I smell copying.
Well, at least you can't own a chord progression ("The Day The World Went Away" by Nine Inch Nails vs. "Stranger in Moscow" by Michael Jackson).
Funny how geocities doesn't have enough bandwidth for their hosted sites, but the 'temporarily unavailble' page loads in a blink with a ton of ads.
Because GeoCities hosted pages have only one ad each. On the other hand, the ton of ads on the "This page is slashdotted" page probably pays for it and then some.
drive the device without revealing intellectual property
Instead of saying "intellectual property", say "copyrights", "patents", or "trade secrets", which are almost completely unrelated to one another in the U.S. federal and state legal codes. Under which part of the law do you claim your company is trying to protect its monopoly?
Is your company trying to make money selling drivers? Don't. Here's why not:
Later Xerox gave the AI Lab a newer, faster printer, one of the first laser printers. It was driven by proprietary software that ran in a separate dedicated computer, so we couldn't add any of our favorite features. We could arrange to send a notification when a print job was sent to the dedicated computer, but not when the job was actually printed (and the delay was usually considerable). There was no way to find out when the job was actually printed; you could only guess. And no one was informed when there was a paper jam, so the printer often went for an hour without being fixed.
The system programmers at the AI Lab were capable of fixing such problems, probably as capable as the original authors of the program. Xerox was uninterested in fixing them, and chose to prevent us, so we were forced to accept the problems. They were never fixed.
Satisfies "News for Nerds" OR "Stuff that matters"
on
Design Patterns
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· Score: 1
I guess it's a repositioning of "Slashdot: News for Nerds" to "Slashdot: Stuff for People."
"Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." I take this to mean that all articles SHOULD match either "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that matters" or both. This article apparently matches the latter.
You may find the following pages of links interesting as well:
And when was the last time you saw someone playing a homebrew game on an emulator?
Yesterday, I was working on my Tetris clone for the NES. When I release the first public milestone, it will be the first Tetris clone on the NES licensed as free software.
My name is Damian Yerrick, and I'm a homebrew console game developer.
after reading your post, I just openened a new browser and got there from Google! [redirect to www.bugzilla.org]
Except www.bugzilla.org is not bugzilla.mozilla.org. Bugzilla.org hosts information about the Bugzilla software. Bugzilla.mozilla.org hosts the bug database for Mozilla software.
When I want to link from Slashdot to an item on b.m.o, I do it through makeashorterlink.com, which replaces Referer: information so that b.m.o can't tell that a hit came from Slashdot. (It doesn't work for b.m.o's homepage because makeashorterlink.com thinks b.m.o's URL is already short enough, and tinyurl.com preserves Referer: information.)
What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale
Each Bugzilla entry carries a "severity" anywhere from "enhancement" (request for additional functionality) to "trivial" (slight misalignment of text in form pushbuttons) to "minor" to "normal" to "major" to "critical" (usually a crash or data loss) to "blocker" (a build fails smoketests).
President Clinton could not have prevented the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from becoming federal law in the United States. Both bills passed the House and Senate by "unanimous consent", which means that there wasn't even enough opposition to force a roll call vote (at least 20 percent), and each house voted on the bills by voice (AYE, NO, the ayes have it). Such a voice vote implies at least 81 percent support in each house.
If the President vetoes a bill, it goes back to the House and Senate for a roll-call vote, and if each house has 67 percent support for a bill, the bill passes over the President's veto. Thus, whether or not Clinton signed either of the bills has no bearing on anything important.
Hmm, sorry, don't really understand the first sentance there.
It was a bad joke about the word "integration" meaning "a mathematical operation analogous to the area between two curves".
stuff like seamless transitions of files between host drives and virtual drives
If you make a FAT formatted disk image, you can mount it in Virtual PC and in Finder. Then when you save a file in one environment, it'll show up in the other. (I suggested FAT because implementations generally sync the directory track often.)
What about all the apps that there are no equivalents for?
And which Wine doesn't run?
in many cases there simply is no equivalent for a piece of software (that is good enough, that has feature X etc)
That's what the GNU project is supposed to solve. "Feature X" is often a matter more of patents than of anything else. Which features are you talking about?
I have IE6 here on Linux because it runs the adobe svg plugin with host scripting integration - no other browser supports that, not even Mozilla
I know that the Adobe SVG plug-in doesn't work with Mozilla, but does the MathML/SVG builds of Mozilla support scripting?
Business apps usually are custom written
And can easily be recompiled with Winelib. In general, I'd think it would be easier to obtain source code for custom software than for mass-market proprietary software.
in the ideal world you would be able to use your favourite apps regardless of what APIs they were written to
In the real world, you have Java technology and the.NET framework, each of which exists on multiple independent platforms. Even for apps compiled to native code, once you have the source, it's as easy as setting up a partial compatibility layer to run one OS's API on another OS (e.g. winelib to compile win32 apps on unix, or cygwin to go the other way).
doesn't integrate very well with the host environment
Waterloo Maple brand symbolic math software should integrate and differentiate fine on Virtual PC. And don't Windows's biggest security problems spring from the "integration" of Internet Explorer into the shell? Or by "integration" do you just mean "rootless" that supports the clipboard and drag?
you still need Windows.
As AC pointed out, the full retail version of Virtual PC includes a copy of OEM Windows XP Professional. And if that's too expensive, buy the version that includes DOS and install Mandrake and Crossover Office. It should run enough apps to ease the transition from Windows applications to Mac and Java applications.
a NTSC television will give you the end effect of a frame rate cap of 30 frames per second
Not if you play to the interlacing, as I mentioned in my other comment.
How to up your frame rate on a console game
on
Doom 3 Alpha Leaked
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· Score: 2
I'm particularly aware of this because the PS2 game I'm working on tends to run at 30 fps in the game shell, but occasionally hits 60.
If your game engine is fill-rate bound and running at a solid 40 to 50 fps, and it's being displayed on an interlaced display (such as a standard television set), you can go 60 fps real easy: just render the odd scanlines in odd frames and the even scanlines in even frames. That's what Tobal No. 1 (PSX virtua fighter clone) and Ehrgeiz (Tobal with textures) do. But it still won't help if your engine is T&L bound.
Patent evergreening can delay generics even longer
on
Ogg Support For iTunes
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· Score: 4, Informative
In a bit more than a decade, the mp3 patent will have expired
It won't matter if Fraunhofer manages to "evergreen" the patent. Patent evergreening, which involves patenting a minor variation, intermediate product, or process used to produce a product, is common in the pharmaceutical industry. Often, when a drug's patent is about to expire, a pharma company will patent a new version of a drug and then lobby the FDA to label the original version no longer "safe and effective" and make it a controlled substance. It happened to Seldane. I see no reason why an analogous technique (patenting minor variations on MP3, or slamming MP3 as a "music piracy tool" in favor of mp3PRO) could not be applied to codec patents as well.
Well, [decoding Vorbis on DSP chips] is already taken care of with the release of the BSD-licensed "Tremor" integer decoder.
Three reasons why it may not help:
1. Some players decode MP3 audio with an ASIC that isn't LBA-complete[1]; they take MP3 on one pin and produce WAV on the other, and they cannot be reconfigured for any other audio format.
2. Though the iPod player, uses a pair of ARM processors for decoding the audio and running the menus, and those ARM processors can be upgraded in firmware, the flash chip may not have enough storage to hold both the MP3 decoder and the Ogg decoder.
[1] "LBA-complete" denotes a machine that can run any algorithm that fits into RAM, that is, a general purpose computing device. It's a weaker form of Turing-completeness which cannot be achieved because it requires infinite storage; a Linear Bounded Automaton restricts the available memory to a multiple of the size of the input.
DVDs are convenient for full backups
on
Sony DRU-500A Review
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· Score: 3, Insightful
how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?
How about monthly full backups of a large storage device? Daily incremental backups (everything changed since yesterday) and weekly differential backups (everything changed since the last full backup) only go so far. Eight CDs don't even total six gigabytes.
How about storage of digital video? It's big, and too-heavy compression will destroy its suitability for use in further editing.
Video Gaming income is starting to compare with Hollywood.
Actually, console and PC gaming combined have surpassed the movie industry. But as with movies, games have become formulaic, and every hit game subsidizes 19 stinkers.
there will be 6 produced under the [Disney/Pixar] deal (Toy Story, A Bugs Life, Toy Story II, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Cars)
What about Monsters, Inc.? Does that make seven, or is Cars now an independent film?
Re:Problem is not permissive licensing but ad clau
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 1
When GPL'ed code is compatible with BSD licenced code, then I'll start giving a damn about what YOU think.
According to the GNU license list, code under the new BSD license can be used in a program licensed under the GNU GPL. Thus, the licenses are compatible.
Problem is not permissive licensing but ad clause
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 1
I'm betting you are one of the people who removes BSD licenses to replace them with a GPL licence
Yes, I do that, but only where the BSD licensed portion makes up a small part of the derivative work.
The problem I have is not with permissive licensing vs. copyleft licensing (BSD vs. GPL), but rather with the BSD license vs. the old BSD license with the advertising clause.
Re:Setting the record straight
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 1
It doesn't stop you from ripping out the copyright notices and claiming that it was written then by you.
Yes it does, way back in section 1 (my emphasis):
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and
appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice [...]
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: [...]
"An appropriate copyright notice" is defined by copyright law and would include all contributors who have not Assigned their contributions to the maintainer.
I wish folks would stop bowing down to the GPL as if it were given to you by God and thus infallible
I don't. I understand that an X11 style license is more appropriate in some occasions.
Slashdot Mirror
since Beck himself has been questioned about his sources for musical accompanyment
And Marilyn Manson apparently stole from the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy. Listen to "I Don't Like the Drugs" (1998) and "It's All About the Benjamins (rock remix)" (1997). Then look me in the eye and say Manson didn't copy Puffy for the chorus.
Now listen to "Jump" by The Movement, "Tribal Dance" by 2 Unlimited, and the theme from the first "Mission: Impossible" movie. I don't know what exactly was first, but I smell copying.
Well, at least you can't own a chord progression ("The Day The World Went Away" by Nine Inch Nails vs. "Stranger in Moscow" by Michael Jackson).
Funny how geocities doesn't have enough bandwidth for their hosted sites, but the 'temporarily unavailble' page loads in a blink with a ton of ads.
Because GeoCities hosted pages have only one ad each. On the other hand, the ton of ads on the "This page is slashdotted" page probably pays for it and then some.
drive the device without revealing intellectual property
Instead of saying "intellectual property", say "copyrights", "patents", or "trade secrets", which are almost completely unrelated to one another in the U.S. federal and state legal codes. Under which part of the law do you claim your company is trying to protect its monopoly?
Is your company trying to make money selling drivers? Don't. Here's why not:
I guess it's a repositioning of "Slashdot: News for Nerds" to "Slashdot: Stuff for People."
"Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." I take this to mean that all articles SHOULD match either "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that matters" or both. This article apparently matches the latter.
You may find the following pages of links interesting as well:
We don't need Disney to find Nemo
And when was the last time you saw someone playing a homebrew game on an emulator?
Yesterday, I was working on my Tetris clone for the NES. When I release the first public milestone, it will be the first Tetris clone on the NES licensed as free software.
My name is Damian Yerrick, and I'm a homebrew console game developer.
NES | GBA
after reading your post, I just openened a new browser and got there from Google! [redirect to www.bugzilla.org]
Except www.bugzilla.org is not bugzilla.mozilla.org. Bugzilla.org hosts information about the Bugzilla software. Bugzilla.mozilla.org hosts the bug database for Mozilla software.
When I want to link from Slashdot to an item on b.m.o, I do it through makeashorterlink.com, which replaces Referer: information so that b.m.o can't tell that a hit came from Slashdot. (It doesn't work for b.m.o's homepage because makeashorterlink.com thinks b.m.o's URL is already short enough, and tinyurl.com preserves Referer: information.)
What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale
Each Bugzilla entry carries a "severity" anywhere from "enhancement" (request for additional functionality) to "trivial" (slight misalignment of text in form pushbuttons) to "minor" to "normal" to "major" to "critical" (usually a crash or data loss) to "blocker" (a build fails smoketests).
Tipper Gore went after music in the 1980s, saying that everyone should listen to U2
At least in that case, everybody would be following the right Bono, not the wrong one who would later hit a tree.
Who signed DMCA into law again?
President Clinton could not have prevented the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from becoming federal law in the United States. Both bills passed the House and Senate by "unanimous consent", which means that there wasn't even enough opposition to force a roll call vote (at least 20 percent), and each house voted on the bills by voice (AYE, NO, the ayes have it). Such a voice vote implies at least 81 percent support in each house.
If the President vetoes a bill, it goes back to the House and Senate for a roll-call vote, and if each house has 67 percent support for a bill, the bill passes over the President's veto. Thus, whether or not Clinton signed either of the bills has no bearing on anything important.
[Trillian] wouldn't be worth using if someone wrote a Win32 native GUI for GAIM. Too bad GAIM wasn't started on Qt...
Homework: Port Kinkatta or Kopete to Windows.
Mobile P4's for instance use a lower core voltage.
In other words, they're underclocked P4s.
the mobile cpu's have the speedstep circuitry built in, the desktop cpu's do not
Half true. The desktop processors have a form of SpeedStep built in that underclocks a hot processor, running it only every other microsecond.
Hmm, sorry, don't really understand the first sentance there.
It was a bad joke about the word "integration" meaning "a mathematical operation analogous to the area between two curves".
stuff like seamless transitions of files between host drives and virtual drives
If you make a FAT formatted disk image, you can mount it in Virtual PC and in Finder. Then when you save a file in one environment, it'll show up in the other. (I suggested FAT because implementations generally sync the directory track often.)
What about all the apps that there are no equivalents for?
And which Wine doesn't run?
in many cases there simply is no equivalent for a piece of software (that is good enough, that has feature X etc)
That's what the GNU project is supposed to solve. "Feature X" is often a matter more of patents than of anything else. Which features are you talking about?
I have IE6 here on Linux because it runs the adobe svg plugin with host scripting integration - no other browser supports that, not even Mozilla
I know that the Adobe SVG plug-in doesn't work with Mozilla, but does the MathML/SVG builds of Mozilla support scripting?
Business apps usually are custom written
And can easily be recompiled with Winelib. In general, I'd think it would be easier to obtain source code for custom software than for mass-market proprietary software.
in the ideal world you would be able to use your favourite apps regardless of what APIs they were written to
In the real world, you have Java technology and the .NET framework, each of which exists on multiple independent platforms. Even for apps compiled to native code, once you have the source, it's as easy as setting up a partial compatibility layer to run one OS's API on another OS (e.g. winelib to compile win32 apps on unix, or cygwin to go the other way).
doesn't integrate very well with the host environment
Waterloo Maple brand symbolic math software should integrate and differentiate fine on Virtual PC. And don't Windows's biggest security problems spring from the "integration" of Internet Explorer into the shell? Or by "integration" do you just mean "rootless" that supports the clipboard and drag?
you still need Windows.
As AC pointed out, the full retail version of Virtual PC includes a copy of OEM Windows XP Professional. And if that's too expensive, buy the version that includes DOS and install Mandrake and Crossover Office. It should run enough apps to ease the transition from Windows applications to Mac and Java applications.
When Apple figure out how to get Windows apps working on MacOS (don't think it'll happen myself)
Connectix has already figured this out. Buy the Virtual PC 5 emulator for Mac OS.
a NTSC television will give you the end effect of a frame rate cap of 30 frames per second
Not if you play to the interlacing, as I mentioned in my other comment.
I'm particularly aware of this because the PS2 game I'm working on tends to run at 30 fps in the game shell, but occasionally hits 60.
If your game engine is fill-rate bound and running at a solid 40 to 50 fps, and it's being displayed on an interlaced display (such as a standard television set), you can go 60 fps real easy: just render the odd scanlines in odd frames and the even scanlines in even frames. That's what Tobal No. 1 (PSX virtua fighter clone) and Ehrgeiz (Tobal with textures) do. But it still won't help if your engine is T&L bound.
In a bit more than a decade, the mp3 patent will have expired
It won't matter if Fraunhofer manages to "evergreen" the patent. Patent evergreening, which involves patenting a minor variation, intermediate product, or process used to produce a product, is common in the pharmaceutical industry. Often, when a drug's patent is about to expire, a pharma company will patent a new version of a drug and then lobby the FDA to label the original version no longer "safe and effective" and make it a controlled substance. It happened to Seldane. I see no reason why an analogous technique (patenting minor variations on MP3, or slamming MP3 as a "music piracy tool" in favor of mp3PRO) could not be applied to codec patents as well.
Well, [decoding Vorbis on DSP chips] is already taken care of with the release of the BSD-licensed "Tremor" integer decoder.
Three reasons why it may not help:
1. Some players decode MP3 audio with an ASIC that isn't LBA-complete[1]; they take MP3 on one pin and produce WAV on the other, and they cannot be reconfigured for any other audio format.
2. Though the iPod player, uses a pair of ARM processors for decoding the audio and running the menus, and those ARM processors can be upgraded in firmware, the flash chip may not have enough storage to hold both the MP3 decoder and the Ogg decoder.
3. What if the player maker got a sweeter unit royalty deal with RCA, the U.S. sublicensor of the MP3 patent, for pledging to keep the device MP3-only?
[1] "LBA-complete" denotes a machine that can run any algorithm that fits into RAM, that is, a general purpose computing device. It's a weaker form of Turing-completeness which cannot be achieved because it requires infinite storage; a Linear Bounded Automaton restricts the available memory to a multiple of the size of the input.
how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?
How about monthly full backups of a large storage device? Daily incremental backups (everything changed since yesterday) and weekly differential backups (everything changed since the last full backup) only go so far. Eight CDs don't even total six gigabytes.
How about storage of digital video? It's big, and too-heavy compression will destroy its suitability for use in further editing.
maybe the GBA is selling games left and right because there's no other handheld on the market
Palm? Pocket PC? The rumored Pocket PC based "XBoy"?
and certainly none that have the horsepower to emulate such games.
Anybody tried VisualBoyAdvance (GBA emulator) on a Tablet PC?
Video Gaming income is starting to compare with Hollywood.
Actually, console and PC gaming combined have surpassed the movie industry. But as with movies, games have become formulaic, and every hit game subsidizes 19 stinkers.
there will be 6 produced under the [Disney/Pixar] deal (Toy Story, A Bugs Life, Toy Story II, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Cars)
What about Monsters, Inc.? Does that make seven, or is Cars now an independent film?
When GPL'ed code is compatible with BSD licenced code, then I'll start giving a damn about what YOU think.
According to the GNU license list, code under the new BSD license can be used in a program licensed under the GNU GPL. Thus, the licenses are compatible.
I'm betting you are one of the people who removes BSD licenses to replace them with a GPL licence
Yes, I do that, but only where the BSD licensed portion makes up a small part of the derivative work.
The problem I have is not with permissive licensing vs. copyleft licensing (BSD vs. GPL), but rather with the BSD license vs. the old BSD license with the advertising clause.
It doesn't stop you from ripping out the copyright notices and claiming that it was written then by you.
Yes it does, way back in section 1 (my emphasis):
"An appropriate copyright notice" is defined by copyright law and would include all contributors who have not Assigned their contributions to the maintainer.
I wish folks would stop bowing down to the GPL as if it were given to you by God and thus infallible
I don't. I understand that an X11 style license is more appropriate in some occasions.