mplayer CVS can get the video. Xine can play the video, also.
mplayer-0.90pre5 isn't new enough
Re:Pesky 0 at end of every string
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
Fuck.
I meant to say
every time I use any function referenced in
<string.h>
sheesh I regressed talking about regressions. that's depressing
Pesky 0 at end of every string
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
Here's one I never fixed.
I've found that every time I use any function referenced in , I end up with a character with value 0 (I'll call it 'NUL') tagged to the end of every string! weird, eh?
I never solved this. I just have this grotesque hack that from now on whenever I reach a 'NUL' in the string I assume I'm at the end of the string.
=)
april fool's, folks.
Seriously though, most bugs that became memorable I don't want to talk about.
I make typos when I type, and once when calling malloc, instead of doing malloc(nmemb * sizeof(char *)), I missed and wrote malloc(nmemb * sizeof(char )) (My finger slipped when hitting the * ??; notice the space after 'char'..). Anyway it was close enough that when I glanced at that part I didn't think anything was wrong. I debugged the hell out of everything else. Took 10 minutes to find where it was =) 10 years won't be long enough to get over the shame...
debian violating social contract
on
Kernel Summit Wrapup
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I quote the second day of the summary (which is now also up:
In the last part of the talk, Bdale whipped out his Debian T-shirt and raised the question: does Debian violate its Social Contract by shipping the Linux kernel? The issue, of course, is the inclusion of proprietary firmware in a number of device drivers. Kernel developers, as a whole, seem unconcerned about proprietary firmware...
Ok, I'm a debian user/admin, I user it on all my machines, but this is just plain retarted. The kernel of your O.S. distribution violates your policies? Change your policies then.. or take the rod out of your ass.
it's funny how whenever you start to vehemently say 'for the people,' under weird beauracracy it can easily turn into 'we know what the people need better then they do' *sigh*
One angle + heightmap means inflexible view angle
on
3D TV For The Masses?
·
· Score: 1
I didn't know how to title this comment properly
Anyway, if you take one camera angle and add to it a heightmap, You will have a 3d view, but only from one angle. You can't rotate the scene or anything like that. Well, you can, but there is no mechanism encoding what, for instance, is on the back of an object. You could do a limited level of rotation on the scene, and it would do neat perspective effects (objects closer to camera would move more than those farther back), however if you rotated around the scene 180 degrees.... yeah you see what I mean.
It would look pretty damn cool looking from the front, however.
I am a programmer, so yes I get could 2D perf too.
Fonts look good for me too, but for most people's setups they don't.
I was speaking for the average case, not mine. I don't expect people to have to compile their own mozilla or put special lines in/etc/apt/sources.list to get AA fonts in their browser..
OK, is anyone else sick of the inane way in which we compliment ourselves continuously?
Come on, we really do not need to say these sort of things nah nah, we fixed something first, we're better than you. Does anyone else find it retarted that you can crash an X server just by telling it to display a font which is too big?
What about the fact that we STILL don't really take advantage of gfx hardware for 2D presentation? or the fact that fonts still look like ass?
If you think we can laugh at others, check those market share figures. We have a lot of work to do.
Don't mean to nitpick, but I know quite a bit about Richard D. James, and this has nothing to do with sales.
Actually, if you read the article, you'd note that this is from Windowlicker, released in 1999, and that neither RDJ nor his recording company have made any commotion about this fact.. so clearly publicity had nothing to do with it.
This guy just loves messing around. He's ridiculously creative, and is trying out new things all the time. Recently in an interview he stated that when he composes, what he does is cause himself to go to sleep for a while, imagine a piece of music while he sleeps, and then wake up and try to recreate it as best he can.
This may sound dorky or gimmicky, but it's amazing. I mean, if you are imagining the sound in a dream, it is an aural stream of conscience--you are not being inhibited at all by your abilities to use certain equipment, and hence the sound is as close to how you really want it to sound as possible, there being no such physical impediments (yes I just said the same thing multiple times. sorry, getting a point across).
he's quite a phenomenon. I love him. On his recent CD he has a few tracks of prepared piano--I'm very impressed he broke into that realm. He's also collaborated with philip glass.
He's a real creative genius.. his output spans many different styles; he is constantly coming up with new and drastically differing ideas...
oh yeah, when I said too much, I meant too much good press.. the reviews always seem to praise xine. Great product, and very polished!! I used it a lot.. but I'm putting money on mplayer =)
this one for instance only mentions a few pathetic gripes with it.. stop being so lazy!! it's a new app!!
For some reason mplayer doesn't seem to get too much press. But honestly, it is easily the best one..
At the moment it is easily the fastest (I know; I have a p500, and the speed difference between it and many others (I've tried way more than this review) is incredible), and development is very fast at the moment (xine is rather stagnant). The team is working hard at getting core features down before they hit the frills. Some people may argue that all the optimizations aren't supposed to be considered core issues, but screw that. I want smooth DVD playback!!
At this moment they have lots of amazing features like mencoder, which is a related video encoding project, vidix output (their own hardware accelerated video output, which is blazing fast), support for many many file types, and the speed is incredible.
Some gripes people have had, for instance (a) wasn't GPL and (b) binaries need to be compiled on a specific machine for optimization--both are moot points now! They are now fully GPL and are moving all the optimization to runtime configurable rather than compile-time defined (they are very far along with this). You should expect official packages to enter all distributions soon.
Really, it's an amazing project. They catch some flak, but honestly, it performs very well, and is going to get even better! Once the core has stabilized they will polish up all the outside stuff.
You can do it through anecdotes, or just regular asides, but I believe it is invaluable to divulge them a set of ubiquitous linux/unix principles.
I don't mean to list many, because I guess they're obvious, but some important ones are
**The functionally in unix is partially hidden functionality.. this means that a lot of times a program can do lots of things you want it to, but it simply isn't apparent like it is in windows. In windows a lot of the workings most people want are very accessible on the surface (though note that if you want it to do something uncustomary... then you're in a pit!), though in unix you usually have to dig some. This is a bad example, but yesterday I was writing some SNMP code using the excellent net-snmp (ucd-snmp) packages, and needed it done now, so to learn some variable structures exactly I used headers and gdb to dump some exact var info.. that's a linux way.
many windows people when approached with linux view features they don't see as features that don't exist.
files. It's all files. devices, filesystems, directories (nothing unusual there), named pipes, etc. Maybe show off some fun stuff (like you can use mount [device] to mount a CD image file and use it is if you'd mounted a CD. showing off this type of stuff would make this concept stick I feel (and reiterate =))
Flexibility. different UIs are a nice way to show this easily
First off, if people are spending X amount of money now on computers, and in 2 years it's.9X due to decreasing hardware costs, then they are happy. if the hardware is actually 80% of it's cost and windows has actually gone up in price, they still leave the transaction happy.
I mean, come on, how many people even know what an OS/windows is? it's not like they will know they are having 'the tax' put on their purchase.
Hmm, I disagree. Maybe what you say is somewhere else in the EULA.. but anyway:
IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALIDLY LICENSED COPY OF ANY VERSION OR EDITION OF MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98, MICROSOFT WINDOWS MILLENUM EDITION, MICROSOFT WINDOWS 2000 OPERATING SYSTEM OR ANY MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM THAT IS A SUCCESSOR TO ANY OF THOSE OPERATING SYSTEMS (EACH AN "OS PRODUCT"), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.
All I see here is the fact that you need a copy of windows to use this. But you can definitely use it on linux (or any other), given this.
This isn't exactly the same topic, but a related issue and something I've been upset about for years.
Namely: graphics drivers should be moved into the kernel, which should provide a very low level graphics API
There are many people opposed to this as bloat in the kernel. But come on, there are so many things in the kernel that should be called bloat if gfx is bloat (like sound for instance).
And of course this is related to video. I think these low level drivers would include support for TV/out, processing signals from TV cards, standardizing APIs.. etc.
Anyway, I have many reasons FOR this.
We have massive duplication of effort with many different projects developing their own low level drivers for gfx cards. this would eliminate that. Sure they could all have some card-specific code, but we wouldn't see nearly the level of duplicated effort we do now (think GGI-X-directfb-svgalib-list goes on)
It is my belief that vendors would be more motivated to create drivers if we had a simple and super standard low level API. 'gfx driver for linux' wouldn't mean 'write an xserver' or 'write an svgalib driver also'
This in my belief is what it would take to get linux gfx to a much higher state
So the meaningless cycle of my life will find a way to perpetuate it's own pointlessness; Staying up late screwing around and suffering through mornings will cause me to be able to do just thought forever!
ha, just kidding.
Important to note however is that MANY studies (at this point it can't really be contested) point out that reduced sleep leads directly to memory problems. Personally I can say that I have slept much less the past few years and I have much trouble (yes of course this can be unrelated).
But honestly, find your perfect amount, but avoid for any reason getting too little. Yes we all do, and I do to so I'm not following my own advice, but I think remembering good things in my life is a little more important than dying from heart disease when I'm totally senile (85) rather than moderately senile (80).
unfortunately, thinking does stop working all too often =)...
I meant of course, "so don't think that things will stop working," which is, of course, a phrase barely meeting the thinking level of a 3rd grader, reinforcing my point that thinking stops working =)
Alsa has been hoping for kernel inclusion for _quite_ a long time. If you search mailing list archives, this issue has been around for a while, and has been a serious issue since the 2.0 days IIRC.
Some history, Alsa kindof grew out of the enhanced Gravis ultrasound drivers (not to say that you'll find any code lingering.. it just came out of that project).
That said, this will bump up linux sound a quantum leap.
The major thing that caused ALSA to not be included was stability--their API would change drastically and suddenly all the time (which may be a good thing, though it was done VERY suddenly and often without notice). That aside that has stabilized as they approach a 1.0 release.
Note that there are oss compatability functions, and support for tons of soundcards, so don't think that thinks will stop working.
As a matter of fact, you can expect this to really push things forward (yes I'm repeating myself, but I can't stress this enough). Many good sound apps now already require ALSA. if you check out their website (linked in the main story), amongst other info you can find their supported card matrix.
I tip my hat to the ALSA team, for their great work and perseverance. thanks a million!! We can all look forward to better sound (more features, lower latency, more flexible API, everything you want) now =)
I have seen many hilarious posts labelling something in a story "troll of the year". Well, to whoever is having fun following these, you can add from this story
What I am trying to say is that Linux is not more secure than Windows. It's impossible.
That's what Paul Thurrott said in his response to our response to his linux security post.
He then magnifies the situation by saying
Because I think with my head, and not with my heart.
as his concluding statement.
I'm not even going to say anything. This guy has set himself better than anyone could possibly try to do for him...
Also, 0.9.8 does not include a fix for a bug [mozilla.org] that caused porn sites to give 404 or 403 errors when users tried to open thumbnail links in separate windows.
you guys are really going to take a beating for that one. better whip out the asbestos.
Reporting software releases
on
Animate Your LILO
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Ok, anyone who whines about slashdot reporting this software release should be shot.
I don't mean to sound as if I'm a pointless loser who tweaks the crap out of linux all day (uhh...) but I haven't had my jaw drop when looking at a screenshot for a LONG time (maybe since some early FVWM-XPM release (which later became E (by the way, anyone who bitches about E, enlightenment combined with nice free gui toolkits revolutionized the look of the linux desktop.. but E really gave it flair that many WMs have now.. anyway (too much parenthetical nesting))))
so this is one of those statements like the one on the aalib (ansi) quake page, which says, if you have to ask why, you are not a member of the intended audience
Re-using (good) code is so nice (example libSDL). It really is a bad move to go reinvent the wheel. and honestly not many commercial game coders want to write games in Xlib (hah)
Uh All games work out of the box here (ok fine recently I had to hack up old school sasteroids to run on svgalib but you get the picture). Basically everyone uses SDL, less use straight Xlib and vga, and a very small number will use hermes or allegro or clanlib or something like that. In either case it's no big deal
Your dist problably by this point has or will have soon some apt-wannabe feature. Personally, apt is the ONLY thing that ever made me use a dists packages, and a healthy chunk of the fact that I'm still so in love with linux.
Oh yeah, see all those posts and stories about
the linux community being whiny unpaying bitches,
notice that companies aren't as excited to fund us as they used to be, US gov't likes being nearsighted, um, what else to say other than grow up? were not in any position to act like this
Xwindows Xtensions? which? DGA? hah, DGA 1 has been standard forever, DGA2 also.
You'll notice that a big system is very hard to run by volunteer's without good organization. For example debian has lots of stuff automated and running like clockwork, making the human developer tasks (at least somewhat) less annoying. Having good core libraries is what makes a great environment
Slashdot Mirror
mplayer CVS can get the video. Xine can play the video, also.
mplayer-0.90pre5 isn't new enough
I meant to say
sheesh I regressed talking about regressions. that's depressing
Here's one I never fixed.
..). Anyway it was close enough that when I glanced at that part I didn't think anything was wrong. I debugged the hell out of everything else. Took 10 minutes to find where it was =) 10 years won't be long enough to get over the shame...
I've found that every time I use any function referenced in , I end up with a character with value 0 (I'll call it 'NUL') tagged to the end of every string! weird, eh?
I never solved this. I just have this grotesque hack that from now on whenever I reach a 'NUL' in the string I assume I'm at the end of the string.
=)
april fool's, folks.
Seriously though, most bugs that became memorable I don't want to talk about.
I make typos when I type, and once when calling malloc, instead of doing malloc(nmemb * sizeof(char *)), I missed and wrote malloc(nmemb * sizeof(char )) (My finger slipped when hitting the * ??; notice the space after 'char'
Ok, I'm a debian user/admin, I user it on all my machines, but this is just plain retarted. The kernel of your O.S. distribution violates your policies? Change your policies then.. or take the rod out of your ass.
it's funny how whenever you start to vehemently say 'for the people,' under weird beauracracy it can easily turn into 'we know what the people need better then they do' *sigh*
You do not need a mac or w9x machine, or a crossover plugin. The work people have done xine which was referred to on slashdot plays this successfully.
Yes, I'm watching it now.
Just a sec.
Did you ever play doom?
now, second point.
Do you code? If so, and the technological achievement of that engine doesn't impress you?
E3 is noisy, E3 is loud, E3 is hype. But this is doom3.
and you my friend, are no carmack.
8 athlons would melt all the snow in alaska
(obpost)
I didn't know how to title this comment properly
Anyway, if you take one camera angle and add to it a heightmap, You will have a 3d view, but only from one angle. You can't rotate the scene or anything like that. Well, you can, but there is no mechanism encoding what, for instance, is on the back of an object. You could do a limited level of rotation on the scene, and it would do neat perspective effects (objects closer to camera would move more than those farther back), however if you rotated around the scene 180 degrees.... yeah you see what I mean.
It would look pretty damn cool looking from the front, however.
About the 2D perf, I was referring to X.
/etc/apt/sources.list to get AA fonts in their browser..
I am a programmer, so yes I get could 2D perf too.
Fonts look good for me too, but for most people's setups they don't.
I was speaking for the average case, not mine. I don't expect people to have to compile their own mozilla or put special lines in
OK, is anyone else sick of the inane way in which we compliment ourselves continuously?
Come on, we really do not need to say these sort of things nah nah, we fixed something first, we're better than you. Does anyone else find it retarted that you can crash an X server just by telling it to display a font which is too big?
What about the fact that we STILL don't really take advantage of gfx hardware for 2D presentation? or the fact that fonts still look like ass?
If you think we can laugh at others, check those market share figures. We have a lot of work to do.
Don't mean to nitpick, but I know quite a bit about Richard D. James, and this has nothing to do with sales.
Actually, if you read the article, you'd note that this is from Windowlicker, released in 1999, and that neither RDJ nor his recording company have made any commotion about this fact.. so clearly publicity had nothing to do with it.
This guy just loves messing around. He's ridiculously creative, and is trying out new things all the time. Recently in an interview he stated that when he composes, what he does is cause himself to go to sleep for a while, imagine a piece of music while he sleeps, and then wake up and try to recreate it as best he can.
This may sound dorky or gimmicky, but it's amazing. I mean, if you are imagining the sound in a dream, it is an aural stream of conscience--you are not being inhibited at all by your abilities to use certain equipment, and hence the sound is as close to how you really want it to sound as possible, there being no such physical impediments (yes I just said the same thing multiple times. sorry, getting a point across).
he's quite a phenomenon. I love him. On his recent CD he has a few tracks of prepared piano--I'm very impressed he broke into that realm. He's also collaborated with philip glass.
He's a real creative genius.. his output spans many different styles; he is constantly coming up with new and drastically differing ideas...
oh yeah, when I said too much, I meant too much good press.. the reviews always seem to praise xine. Great product, and very polished!! I used it a lot.. but I'm putting money on mplayer =)
this one for instance only mentions a few pathetic gripes with it.. stop being so lazy!! it's a new app!!
For some reason mplayer doesn't seem to get too much press. But honestly, it is easily the best one..
At the moment it is easily the fastest (I know; I have a p500, and the speed difference between it and many others (I've tried way more than this review) is incredible), and development is very fast at the moment (xine is rather stagnant). The team is working hard at getting core features down before they hit the frills. Some people may argue that all the optimizations aren't supposed to be considered core issues, but screw that. I want smooth DVD playback!!
At this moment they have lots of amazing features like mencoder, which is a related video encoding project, vidix output (their own hardware accelerated video output, which is blazing fast), support for many many file types, and the speed is incredible.
Some gripes people have had, for instance (a) wasn't GPL and (b) binaries need to be compiled on a specific machine for optimization--both are moot points now! They are now fully GPL and are moving all the optimization to runtime configurable rather than compile-time defined (they are very far along with this). You should expect official packages to enter all distributions soon.
Really, it's an amazing project. They catch some flak, but honestly, it performs very well, and is going to get even better! Once the core has stabilized they will polish up all the outside stuff.
many windows people when approached with linux view features they don't see as features that don't exist.
I'm sorry, but this isn't correct.
.9X due to decreasing hardware costs, then they are happy. if the hardware is actually 80% of it's cost and windows has actually gone up in price, they still leave the transaction happy.
First off, if people are spending X amount of money now on computers, and in 2 years it's
I mean, come on, how many people even know what an OS/windows is? it's not like they will know they are having 'the tax' put on their purchase.
it's a nice wish, but sorry.
All I see here is the fact that you need a copy of windows to use this. But you can definitely use it on linux (or any other), given this.
Namely: graphics drivers should be moved into the kernel, which should provide a very low level graphics API
There are many people opposed to this as bloat in the kernel. But come on, there are so many things in the kernel that should be called bloat if gfx is bloat (like sound for instance).
And of course this is related to video. I think these low level drivers would include support for TV/out, processing signals from TV cards, standardizing APIs.. etc.
So the meaningless cycle of my life will find a way to perpetuate it's own pointlessness; Staying up late screwing around and suffering through mornings will cause me to be able to do just thought forever!
ha, just kidding.
Important to note however is that MANY studies (at this point it can't really be contested) point out that reduced sleep leads directly to memory problems. Personally I can say that I have slept much less the past few years and I have much trouble (yes of course this can be unrelated).
But honestly, find your perfect amount, but avoid for any reason getting too little. Yes we all do, and I do to so I'm not following my own advice, but I think remembering good things in my life is a little more important than dying from heart disease when I'm totally senile (85) rather than moderately senile (80).
unfortunately, thinking does stop working all too often =)...
I meant of course, "so don't think that things will stop working," which is, of course, a phrase barely meeting the thinking level of a 3rd grader, reinforcing my point that thinking stops working =)
Alsa has been hoping for kernel inclusion for _quite_ a long time. If you search mailing list archives, this issue has been around for a while, and has been a serious issue since the 2.0 days IIRC.
Some history, Alsa kindof grew out of the enhanced Gravis ultrasound drivers (not to say that you'll find any code lingering.. it just came out of that project).
That said, this will bump up linux sound a quantum leap.
The major thing that caused ALSA to not be included was stability--their API would change drastically and suddenly all the time (which may be a good thing, though it was done VERY suddenly and often without notice). That aside that has stabilized as they approach a 1.0 release.
Note that there are oss compatability functions, and support for tons of soundcards, so don't think that thinks will stop working.
As a matter of fact, you can expect this to really push things forward (yes I'm repeating myself, but I can't stress this enough). Many good sound apps now already require ALSA. if you check out their website (linked in the main story), amongst other info you can find their supported card matrix.
I tip my hat to the ALSA team, for their great work and perseverance. thanks a million!! We can all look forward to better sound (more features, lower latency, more flexible API, everything you want) now =)
That's what Paul Thurrott said in his response to our response to his linux security post.
He then magnifies the situation by saying
as his concluding statement.
I'm not even going to say anything. This guy has set himself better than anyone could possibly try to do for him...
you guys are really going to take a beating for that one. better whip out the asbestos.
Ok, anyone who whines about slashdot reporting this software release should be shot.
I don't mean to sound as if I'm a pointless loser who tweaks the crap out of linux all day (uhh...) but I haven't had my jaw drop when looking at a screenshot for a LONG time (maybe since some early FVWM-XPM release (which later became E (by the way, anyone who bitches about E, enlightenment combined with nice free gui toolkits revolutionized the look of the linux desktop.. but E really gave it flair that many WMs have now.. anyway (too much parenthetical nesting))))
so this is one of those statements like the one on the aalib (ansi) quake page, which says, if you have to ask why, you are not a member of the intended audience
the linux community being whiny unpaying bitches,
notice that companies aren't as excited to fund us as they used to be, US gov't likes being nearsighted, um, what else to say other than grow up? were not in any position to act like this
Xwindows Xtensions? which? DGA? hah, DGA 1 has been standard forever, DGA2 also.
You'll notice that a big system is very hard to run by volunteer's without good organization. For example debian has lots of stuff automated and running like clockwork, making the human developer tasks (at least somewhat) less annoying. Having good core libraries is what makes a great environment
really, think about it some
yeah.
...Though I doubt she will willingly part with them. I mean, it's either the dildos, or something that is not only micro but also soft