You can help contribute to the development of WINE's media layer by buying a TransGaming subscription for $60 per year.
Anonymous means "didn't submit through /. account"
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Physical ASCII Mosaic
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· Score: 1
> An anonymous submitter, who might be Eric Harshberger...
Umm...
"Anonymous" in the case of story submissions refers to Anonymous Coward, the screen name of a guest user on Slashdot. Just as some ACs sign their comments with their name, so do some ACs who submit stories.
I think the speed at which Borland's compilers execute is evidence that they can generate fast code.
Not necessarily. If Borland's compiler is ten times less complex than GCC, but GCC produces code that's twice as fast, Borland's compiler compiled with itself will still feel five times as fast as GCC compiled with itself.
ever tried raising the warning level? MSVC catches _much_ more errors that way.
<grammar-national-socialist> First of all, "many" not "much" to agree with plural "errors." </grammar-national-socialist>
More to the point, it's not a warning; even with a warning setting on minimum, GCC will still report errors.
test.cpp:3: ANSI C++ forbids...
That's an ERROR, not a warning. Note the lack of "warning" immediately after the line number; GCC uses this convention to distinguish errors from warnings.
However, you're missing something. ANSI C++ forbids declaration of i with no type.
I understand that declaring a variable with a type made of only qualifiers (const, volatile, etc.) is illegal in C++, but what about unsigned i; or long j;? Are tokens such as "unsigned" and "long" considered qualifiers or part of the basic type?
And they can all be crappy, lowest common denominator games.
Lowest common denominator != crappy.
game can't use more than 24 megs of memory (gamecube)
No, 40 MiB (24 CPU + 16 PPU). PlayStation 2 has 36 MiB (32 CPU + 4 PPU). Xbox has 64 MB (shared), but its stripped-down Windows 2000 OS might diminish the advantage its extra RAM gives.
Consider that some fun games have been made on only 4 KiB of RAM and 40 KiB of ROM (Super Mario Bros. 1 for NES) and that T*tr*s has been done twice on the Atari 2600, which had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of VRAM.
game can't have high poly counts (PC with budget video card)
Street Fighter style games use only about ten quads on the screen, one for each player, one for each player's fireball, one for each player's status bar, and a few for the backgrounds, but that's about it.
game can't have complex interface (consoles)
"Complex" meaning what? What do you need for a first-person shooter? Two joysticks (one for move and one for turn), a couple triggers (fire and jump), and a couple other buttons (switch weapons, etc)? Want a sim/rts interface? SimCity for Super NES and C&C for PSX showed that sim/rts games can work on consoles. Or are you trying to make glorified chat rooms such as EverQuest?
I'm sorry, but web games will never match a true game.
If by "web games" you refer to games written in the Java programming language, I hereby direct your attention to BoycottAdvance Online. It emulates real games for a real system, namely Game Boy Advance.
Platform independant (real) games are a pipe dream.
No, you have that backwards. Pipe Dream is a platform-independent game:-)
Why buy gnu-pro gcc? If it's based on gcc, their custom gcc source code must be available.
Not necessarily. The copyright holder (in this case, FSF) can choose to license the software under any license, including a "no copy, no reverse engineer, all your firstborn are belong to us" type EULA.
Tell them that Windows != Microsoft Windows
on
Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2
After all, if linux users can get windows games to run on linux, why bother with a linux version???
It might convince developers to make sure that the win32 build works on both Microsoft Windows® brand win32 implementations and Wine brand win32 implementations.
Copyright infringement is MUCH more serious [than contract violation]
OK. Another angle: In some jurisdictions, 17 USC 117 is nullified when the copyright holder says it's nullified, but can the copyright holder say that using any legal instrument other than a contract? If the courts reject enforceability of shrink-wrap or click-through EULAs, and a case makes its way to the Supremes, it may bring 117 back from the dead. Is this likely, or do the immense financial resources of the big five entertainment companies prevent any likelihood of a favorable ruling? If not, what should I put in a letter to my representative and senators?
The exemptions in the DMCA are useless... "Summary judgement for plaintiff" overrides [the right to a jury trial]...
We'll see what the Supremes have to say about that. They can't just deny cert to every single copyright-related case that comes up in the United States court system.
Besides, I have another attack on the 17 USC 1201 that exploits the exemption for works that don't entirely fall into its "work protected under this title" scope. If even one of Charlie Chaplin's silent films (pre-1923 so it doesn't fall under perpetual copyright) is sold on DVD with CSS encryption, it may be possible to make a CSS decryptor that's marketed only for purposes of decrypting public domain content from a DVD (even though the rest of the DVD may be copyrighted under the compilation provisions).
But the DMCA gets around this since such modchips have are copy protection circumvention devices. So not only could this happen in the US, but it would happen a lot more easily
But if a fellow in the U.S. designed a modchip that allowed playing imports but blocked playing backups, Sony wouldn't be able to touch him under 17 USC 1201, especially given the substantial non-infringing use exceptions in 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(2) and the reverse engineering exception in 1201(f).
How do they distinguish live recordings from studio recordings (the kind usually ripped from CD's)?
For one thing, amateur live recordings typically doesn't have as much high frequency content as studio recordings. For another, audio fingerprinting technology can look for the crowd noise at the beginning and end of each song.
many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.
For one thing, FLAC performs a few percent better than SHN and has a more free license. For another, tests performed by r3mix.net have shown that it's possible to encode MP3 at a variable bit rate centered about 192 kbps and lose nothing audible. (Whether this is legal under the Fraunhofer patents is a different story.) MP3 and Ogg Vorbis produce significant quality loss in only the following situations: 1. low bit-rate operation, 2. crappy encoders, and 3. repeated conversions of wav -> compressed -> wav.
A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3
What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible, but it's still a measurable loss.
VMware [vmware.com] is a good solution for those windows apps you can't let go
So instead of letting go of your Windows apps, you let go of your money. VMware Workstation costs $300, and Windows 2000 Pro for VMware costs $200 plus the connect time to download the service packs. How again do you prevent people from cracking or infecting your box while you download from Windows Update? On the other hand, a year of TransGaming costs only $60.
I haven't tried to run WinMX with WINE yet. Has anyone?
According to CodeWeavers' app database, most features of WinMX work, but you need a copy of Windows to run the installer.
Not really...in fact, it was specifically worded ("owner of a particular copy") so as to not apply if a EULA was in force.
Contract law trumps copyright law. All 17 USC 117 says is that a contract that prohibits copying into RAM must be a signed contract, as a user can use the software without agreeing to a click-through "contract." The publisher gets the user on grounds not of copyright infringement but of breach of contract.
The net yaroze was in fact a VERY scaled down development system, if you can even call it that. It would use a serial cable to connect to the pc and had a special program to run. The most you could do was upload small programs the size of the playstations memory (2MB IIRC).
So in effect, what you got with the Yaroze was the same thing that you get now with the stock Game Boy Advance plus a PC to GBA link cable. The GBA uses a serial cable (attached to the PC's parallel port) to connect to the pc and has a special program to run (mb.exe). The most you can do is upload small programs the size of the GBA's memory (256 KB). It's designed for netbooting off cartridges, but it makes a nice devkit for those starting out in GBA development.
It did not allow access to the cd drive at all either.
Unlike Yaroze, the netboot method lets you access the cartridge, the serial port, everything. To keep the system from booting off the cart, hold Select+Start while booting and then send your boot image.
While you license the software, you still own the physical manifestation of it. I.E the media and box and such. This would likely be enough to qualify you for protection under this law.
You are correct. The language clearly states: "owner of a copy." If it were the copyright owner's right (as cpt kangarooski seems to think), the language would state "owner of copyright under this title" as in 17 USC 106.
the PS2 architechture is Sony's closed architechture, and that other companies( mod chip companies) DO NOT have any legal right to make modifications to Sony's PS2 architechture without legal consent fron Sony.
Under what law? Point me to the statute. URL?
Also, if you want to develope on your PS2, just try to obtain a PS2 Linux Kit like me. It is comming to the US and Europe also.
That's what Nintendo said about the 64DD Bulky Drive (a disk drive for Nintendo 64), but it stayed in Japan. Allow for the possibility that Sony might go back on its word.
I buy a game online which I have to download, as I am downloading the game its contents are copied into memory in various caches and routers along the route, what's the situation then....
The DMCA had a rider that made such ephemeral copies explicitly lawful in the USA.
No, [moving to Hong Kong to produce region busters] would be in violation of international copyright laws.
"International law" does not exist except in the implementation of treaties by contracting states. There's no treaty (except possibly a stretched interpretation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty) that prohibits circumventing region lockouts. The anti-circumvention language of the WIPO treaty is also apparently a bit weaker than that of 17 USC 1201.
In fact, New Zealand has already outlawed region coding as an unfair restraint of trade, and Australia is moving in that direction.
Or because he has a Lite-On CD-ROM, which fucks up the last two seconds of a track when extracting audio or even when playing it normally. (I have one of those; I use my burner to rip CDs.)
Slashdot Mirror
I went to find how to contribute to WINE
You can help contribute to the development of WINE's media layer by buying a TransGaming subscription for $60 per year.
> An anonymous submitter, who might be Eric Harshberger...
Umm...
"Anonymous" in the case of story submissions refers to Anonymous Coward, the screen name of a guest user on Slashdot. Just as some ACs sign their comments with their name, so do some ACs who submit stories.
I think the speed at which Borland's compilers execute is evidence that they can generate fast code.
Not necessarily. If Borland's compiler is ten times less complex than GCC, but GCC produces code that's twice as fast, Borland's compiler compiled with itself will still feel five times as fast as GCC compiled with itself.
ever tried raising the warning level? MSVC catches _much_ more errors that way.
<grammar-national-socialist> First of all, "many" not "much" to agree with plural "errors." </grammar-national-socialist>
More to the point, it's not a warning; even with a warning setting on minimum, GCC will still report errors.
test.cpp:3: ANSI C++ forbids...
That's an ERROR, not a warning. Note the lack of "warning" immediately after the line number; GCC uses this convention to distinguish errors from warnings.
However, you're missing something. ANSI C++ forbids declaration of i with no type.
I understand that declaring a variable with a type made of only qualifiers (const, volatile, etc.) is illegal in C++, but what about unsigned i; or long j;? Are tokens such as "unsigned" and "long" considered qualifiers or part of the basic type?
And they can all be crappy, lowest common denominator games.
Lowest common denominator != crappy.
game can't use more than 24 megs of memory (gamecube)
No, 40 MiB (24 CPU + 16 PPU). PlayStation 2 has 36 MiB (32 CPU + 4 PPU). Xbox has 64 MB (shared), but its stripped-down Windows 2000 OS might diminish the advantage its extra RAM gives.
Consider that some fun games have been made on only 4 KiB of RAM and 40 KiB of ROM (Super Mario Bros. 1 for NES) and that T*tr*s has been done twice on the Atari 2600, which had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of VRAM.
game can't have high poly counts (PC with budget video card)
Street Fighter style games use only about ten quads on the screen, one for each player, one for each player's fireball, one for each player's status bar, and a few for the backgrounds, but that's about it.
game can't have complex interface (consoles)
"Complex" meaning what? What do you need for a first-person shooter? Two joysticks (one for move and one for turn), a couple triggers (fire and jump), and a couple other buttons (switch weapons, etc)? Want a sim/rts interface? SimCity for Super NES and C&C for PSX showed that sim/rts games can work on consoles. Or are you trying to make glorified chat rooms such as EverQuest?
I'm sorry, but web games will never match a true game.
If by "web games" you refer to games written in the Java programming language, I hereby direct your attention to BoycottAdvance Online. It emulates real games for a real system, namely Game Boy Advance.
Platform independant (real) games are a pipe dream.
No, you have that backwards. Pipe Dream is a platform-independent game :-)
Why buy gnu-pro gcc? If it's based on gcc, their custom gcc source code must be available.
Not necessarily. The copyright holder (in this case, FSF) can choose to license the software under any license, including a "no copy, no reverse engineer, all your firstborn are belong to us" type EULA.
BUT you need not only a good font renderer, but also fonts that are hinted correctly.
Not with FreeType 2.0 based font servers. They hint fonts on the fly because Apple owns a United States patent on the TrueType hinting virtual machine.
After all, if linux users can get windows games to run on linux, why bother with a linux version???
It might convince developers to make sure that the win32 build works on both Microsoft Windows® brand win32 implementations and Wine brand win32 implementations.
Copyright infringement is MUCH more serious [than contract violation]
OK. Another angle: In some jurisdictions, 17 USC 117 is nullified when the copyright holder says it's nullified, but can the copyright holder say that using any legal instrument other than a contract? If the courts reject enforceability of shrink-wrap or click-through EULAs, and a case makes its way to the Supremes, it may bring 117 back from the dead. Is this likely, or do the immense financial resources of the big five entertainment companies prevent any likelihood of a favorable ruling? If not, what should I put in a letter to my representative and senators?
The exemptions in the DMCA are useless ... "Summary judgement for plaintiff" overrides [the right to a jury trial] ...
We'll see what the Supremes have to say about that. They can't just deny cert to every single copyright-related case that comes up in the United States court system.
Besides, I have another attack on the 17 USC 1201 that exploits the exemption for works that don't entirely fall into its "work protected under this title" scope. If even one of Charlie Chaplin's silent films (pre-1923 so it doesn't fall under perpetual copyright) is sold on DVD with CSS encryption, it may be possible to make a CSS decryptor that's marketed only for purposes of decrypting public domain content from a DVD (even though the rest of the DVD may be copyrighted under the compilation provisions).
So yes, it is illegal in the UK.
Is it true that there's no "fair use" or "fair dealing" provision in UK copyright law?
But the DMCA gets around this since such modchips have are copy protection circumvention devices. So not only could this happen in the US, but it would happen a lot more easily
But if a fellow in the U.S. designed a modchip that allowed playing imports but blocked playing backups, Sony wouldn't be able to touch him under 17 USC 1201, especially given the substantial non-infringing use exceptions in 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(2) and the reverse engineering exception in 1201(f).
How do they distinguish live recordings from studio recordings (the kind usually ripped from CD's)?
For one thing, amateur live recordings typically doesn't have as much high frequency content as studio recordings. For another, audio fingerprinting technology can look for the crowd noise at the beginning and end of each song.
many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.
For one thing, FLAC performs a few percent better than SHN and has a more free license. For another, tests performed by r3mix.net have shown that it's possible to encode MP3 at a variable bit rate centered about 192 kbps and lose nothing audible. (Whether this is legal under the Fraunhofer patents is a different story.) MP3 and Ogg Vorbis produce significant quality loss in only the following situations: 1. low bit-rate operation, 2. crappy encoders, and 3. repeated conversions of wav -> compressed -> wav.
A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3
What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible, but it's still a measurable loss.
VMware [vmware.com] is a good solution for those windows apps you can't let go
So instead of letting go of your Windows apps, you let go of your money. VMware Workstation costs $300, and Windows 2000 Pro for VMware costs $200 plus the connect time to download the service packs. How again do you prevent people from cracking or infecting your box while you download from Windows Update? On the other hand, a year of TransGaming costs only $60.
I haven't tried to run WinMX with WINE yet. Has anyone?
According to CodeWeavers' app database, most features of WinMX work, but you need a copy of Windows to run the installer.
Not really...in fact, it was specifically worded ("owner of a particular copy") so as to not apply if a EULA was in force.
Contract law trumps copyright law. All 17 USC 117 says is that a contract that prohibits copying into RAM must be a signed contract, as a user can use the software without agreeing to a click-through "contract." The publisher gets the user on grounds not of copyright infringement but of breach of contract.
I think it would show that precious space on the registration card or web page was being wasted by an option that so few people choose.
That's why you write it in the blank next to "Other".
The net yaroze was in fact a VERY scaled down development system, if you can even call it that. It would use a serial cable to connect to the pc and had a special program to run. The most you could do was upload small programs the size of the playstations memory (2MB IIRC).
So in effect, what you got with the Yaroze was the same thing that you get now with the stock Game Boy Advance plus a PC to GBA link cable. The GBA uses a serial cable (attached to the PC's parallel port) to connect to the pc and has a special program to run (mb.exe). The most you can do is upload small programs the size of the GBA's memory (256 KB). It's designed for netbooting off cartridges, but it makes a nice devkit for those starting out in GBA development.
It did not allow access to the cd drive at all either.
Unlike Yaroze, the netboot method lets you access the cartridge, the serial port, everything. To keep the system from booting off the cart, hold Select+Start while booting and then send your boot image.
While you license the software, you still own the physical manifestation of it. I.E the media and box and such. This would likely be enough to qualify you for protection under this law.
You are correct. The language clearly states: "owner of a copy." If it were the copyright owner's right (as cpt kangarooski seems to think), the language would state "owner of copyright under this title" as in 17 USC 106.
The Yaroze was released in the US by Sony- essentially a PS1SDK.
Except Sony didn't make near enough Yaroze units. It sold out quickly. Heck, they're so sold out that I can't even find them on eBay.
the PS2 architechture is Sony's closed architechture, and that other companies( mod chip companies) DO NOT have any legal right to make modifications to Sony's PS2 architechture without legal consent fron Sony.
Under what law? Point me to the statute. URL?
Also, if you want to develope on your PS2, just try to obtain a PS2 Linux Kit like me. It is comming to the US and Europe also.
That's what Nintendo said about the 64DD Bulky Drive (a disk drive for Nintendo 64), but it stayed in Japan. Allow for the possibility that Sony might go back on its word.
I buy a game online which I have to download, as I am downloading the game its contents are copied into memory in various caches and routers along the route, what's the situation then....
The DMCA had a rider that made such ephemeral copies explicitly lawful in the USA.
No, [moving to Hong Kong to produce region busters] would be in violation of international copyright laws.
"International law" does not exist except in the implementation of treaties by contracting states. There's no treaty (except possibly a stretched interpretation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty) that prohibits circumventing region lockouts. The anti-circumvention language of the WIPO treaty is also apparently a bit weaker than that of 17 USC 1201.
In fact, New Zealand has already outlawed region coding as an unfair restraint of trade, and Australia is moving in that direction.
The real question should be - if he owned the CD why was he downloading the song?
Because what he owned wasn't even a CD.
Or because he has a Lite-On CD-ROM, which fucks up the last two seconds of a track when extracting audio or even when playing it normally. (I have one of those; I use my burner to rip CDs.)