Are you a lawyer? Are you qualified to comment on the law in this case?
So, you actually want lawyers making all the decision on this? Should they decide if IE really can't be removed from Windows, just to give one example?
I don't think the eBook formats themselves are all that relevant to this discussion. What about simple text or html files? I've read two full books (one wasn't complete, but it was easily larger than the other, which was Brave New World) in HTML - plain black on white and well-sized columns make it easy to read - and, just this week, a not-so-short story in a plain text file ("The Duel", from A Set of Six by Joseph Conrad, provided by the Gutenberg Project).
I could easily do all my reading on a computer were it not for the fact that I inevitably get side-tracked by the other things I can do there and that my computer, complete with monitor and keyboard, is nowhere near as portable as the latest DDJ (although I'm sure if reading books on computers became popular everyone would be talking about how we would all die from the excessive radiation). In the end, trying to force something into the current "eBook" formats will probably only make it harder to read - HTML can be read with anything from the latest X with nice anti-aliased fonts to lynx over an SSH connection, and text files can be displayed on everything resembling a computer.
The primary argument against eBooks, really, isn't so much cost as the old truism "people don't like to read off a computer screen."
Actually, my main problem with reading off a computer screen is that I all to often get impatient and go play breakout, code something, or start following links. I though reading off a screen sounded hard, but after trying it it's quite easy; I've read a couple of books and numerous longer-than-usual documents online. If I had a PDA with no games, UNIX shells (see iPaq with Linux), or editors, I could read from it for hours:)
They aren't entirely wrong to do this. The best (most readable) column width is about 65 characters - after that it becomes more difficult to read. They could put two columns, but this is better than having a full page of text like most sites do.
Actually, Counter-Strike is a mod for Half-Life, which is based on the Quake2 engine (either that or Quake - I'm a bit confused from conflicting reports I heard in the early days of Half-Life, but I believe it's Quake2). That means Ghost Recon is the only game on your list not based on an id engine.
There are many open-source game projects, such as FreeCiv, OpenTux (not sure about this; the OSS fork of TuxRacer), and Crystal Space, just to mention a few larger ones. I'm sure every Linux game project could use help, but as a/. article on FreeCiv mentioned recently, they really need help on the art (and other content). You don't need to port commercial games; if we (the Linux community) can produce good games that are free, that could be a selling point for home users. Linuz already has a number of small games that are very well done (such as LBreakout and Penguin Command), but larger games could help to attract people.
I am currently working on a cross-platform game (currently closed, but the future is still undecided) with the goal of making a high-quality space sim. (If you want to see it, we have a small site).
However, Microsoft did not hurt BSD by using their network stack. If MS had not told anyone that they used the BSD network stack, the situation today would be exactly the same.
It only runs on Windows anyways - it can't hurt the security that much:)
Re:Entertainment and limited leisure time.
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 2
Oh, it was just so much work for me. First I had to download the nVidia drivers (gasp!) and (because I chose the SRPMS) rebuild and install them - that was 4 commands! 4 commands I'll never get back! After that, I downloaded the wolfenstein demo, and when I ran the installer I had to choose a directory to install to (~/wolftest2) AND a binary directory (~/bin)! And, to top it all off, the game doesn't automatically start when I want to play! (I know wolf isn't a Loki game, but it's the same installer)
My server (which runs about 10 daemons in addition to many other small things) has an uptime of 72 days and not a single problem (It's been about 80 since I installed slackware on it, and I'm now running 2.4.12-ac6 - I had to reboot to get that in and another time after I reconfigured it for IPv6). I think the most telling thing about my experience is that my kernel was the most recent one available last time I rebooted. I'm going for 256 days, then I'll put in a new kernel:)
After reading the interview, I agree with this. Rik says:
You want me to answer that question in how many books ?;) Well, lets make a short answer. Andrea's VM is an attempt to improve the performance of the Linux VM without modifying the structure of the VM. He seems to succeed at it very well, but due to the fact that he doesn't modify the structure of the VM his VM still has the same fundamental problems as the Linux VM. My VM is an attempt to attack some of the fundamental problems the Linux VM has, at the moment still without too much performance tuning.
In other words, he's trying experimental ideas, while AA is improving on a stable system. Experimental development should not be done in the main kernel tree! I think once he has implemented his ideas and stabilized the development of his VM it might have better chances of getting back in. I think in the long run he actually has a better chance, because once he has something to show for all this, if his ideas are right, he should have a much better VM. Until then I agree with Linus' decision.
Most people buy these devices to listen to music (at least I did). If you want a portable hard drive, then get one. Don't complain when an MP3 player doesn't work like a portable hard drive - it isn't one.
Lets look at that another way: an averga MP3 is 128Kbps, or 16KB/s. One hour would be approximately 56.25MB. In other words, you can transfer one hour of music in under a minute (at max speed, but that's assumed everywhere else). I've seen a post on this story saying "I can wake up and choose 500 songs to put on my iPod and have them there in no time" - how many of you do this every morning? Transfering enough music to listen to for a week straight (assuming you have the space) would take 157 minutes - under 3 hours. You could set it up in the afternoon and not have to stay up late to shut down the computer. But, most people don't listen to music all the time. If you only use it 3 hours per day, divide that by 8 - 20 minutes to transfer enough music to last you a week.
Unless you reformat the drive and reload your entire music collection regularly, this really isn't bad. Sure, it could be faster, but the iPod is expensive and has a very small capacity - probably the smallest of the portable hard-drive based players. I think most of them are iPod killers.
On the other hand, someone commented a few days ago about the fact that now a decent computer for doing average tasks could cost as much as the MS software that would be on it. For some people, we've already passed the necessary power and as the passable hardware gets cheaper, software will be an increasing part of the price. We're not talking about people who will be buying dual-Athlons with a 1GB of RAM and a RAID5 array of 180GB hard-drives - if this is talking about what I think it is, the average computer might be 750Mhz with 128MB or RAM. Another factor is that Microsoft software requirse more and more resources, so they are pushing up the lower limit too fast for some people.
I've noticed that even a lot of more techincal sites have anoying ads. Slashdot is the only site I've seen that actually has interesting ads, but then for them it's not that hard:) I think they could get a higher hit rate by thinking about who will want to see their ads.
This post brought to you by a Maxtor hard drive sold by a Slashdot advertiser to a Slashdot reader because of Slashdot ads.
I have developped a program based on MD5 that can compress any file down to one byte nearly instantaneously*. It adds a.sc extension. Copy this code into a file and make it executable, then run it with the filename as the first parameter:
#!/bin/bash
md5sum $1 >.supercompressed
dd if=.supercompressed of=$1.sc bs=1 count=1 >/dev/null 2>&1
rm -f.supercompressed
* Warning: decompression is not supported. You can tell if another file is itentical to the original by compressing it and comparing the results, but it has a very high uncertainty.
However, this is an _encoded_ file. Any attempts to decode it are subject to prosecution under the DMCA, and I didn't give permission to anyone to view it - for all you're allowed to know, I'm archiving random data on Slashdot. In fact, Apple can't even check if it is really the file in question:)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you a lawyer? Are you qualified to comment on the law in this case?
So, you actually want lawyers making all the decision on this? Should they decide if IE really can't be removed from Windows, just to give one example?
I don't think the eBook formats themselves are all that relevant to this discussion. What about simple text or html files? I've read two full books (one wasn't complete, but it was easily larger than the other, which was Brave New World) in HTML - plain black on white and well-sized columns make it easy to read - and, just this week, a not-so-short story in a plain text file ("The Duel", from A Set of Six by Joseph Conrad, provided by the Gutenberg Project).
I could easily do all my reading on a computer were it not for the fact that I inevitably get side-tracked by the other things I can do there and that my computer, complete with monitor and keyboard, is nowhere near as portable as the latest DDJ (although I'm sure if reading books on computers became popular everyone would be talking about how we would all die from the excessive radiation). In the end, trying to force something into the current "eBook" formats will probably only make it harder to read - HTML can be read with anything from the latest X with nice anti-aliased fonts to lynx over an SSH connection, and text files can be displayed on everything resembling a computer.
The primary argument against eBooks, really, isn't so much cost as the old truism "people don't like to read off a computer screen."
:)
Actually, my main problem with reading off a computer screen is that I all to often get impatient and go play breakout, code something, or start following links. I though reading off a screen sounded hard, but after trying it it's quite easy; I've read a couple of books and numerous longer-than-usual documents online. If I had a PDA with no games, UNIX shells (see iPaq with Linux), or editors, I could read from it for hours
If you don't render HTML, this doesn't happen. In KMail you can render HTML without loading external objects.
They aren't entirely wrong to do this. The best (most readable) column width is about 65 characters - after that it becomes more difficult to read. They could put two columns, but this is better than having a full page of text like most sites do.
If IIS had even half the market share of Apache, it would be much more dnagerous.
Actually, Counter-Strike is a mod for Half-Life, which is based on the Quake2 engine (either that or Quake - I'm a bit confused from conflicting reports I heard in the early days of Half-Life, but I believe it's Quake2). That means Ghost Recon is the only game on your list not based on an id engine.
There are many open-source game projects, such as FreeCiv, OpenTux (not sure about this; the OSS fork of TuxRacer), and Crystal Space, just to mention a few larger ones. I'm sure every Linux game project could use help, but as a /. article on FreeCiv mentioned recently, they really need help on the art (and other content). You don't need to port commercial games; if we (the Linux community) can produce good games that are free, that could be a selling point for home users. Linuz already has a number of small games that are very well done (such as LBreakout and Penguin Command), but larger games could help to attract people.
I am currently working on a cross-platform game (currently closed, but the future is still undecided) with the goal of making a high-quality space sim. (If you want to see it, we have a small site).
That's as unlikely as it is interesting, but it would be fun to have more choice when building a new computer than what parts you put in.
However, Microsoft did not hurt BSD by using their network stack. If MS had not told anyone that they used the BSD network stack, the situation today would be exactly the same.
It only runs on Windows anyways - it can't hurt the security that much :)
Oh, it was just so much work for me. First I had to download the nVidia drivers (gasp!) and (because I chose the SRPMS) rebuild and install them - that was 4 commands! 4 commands I'll never get back! After that, I downloaded the wolfenstein demo, and when I ran the installer I had to choose a directory to install to (~/wolftest2) AND a binary directory (~/bin)! And, to top it all off, the game doesn't automatically start when I want to play! (I know wolf isn't a Loki game, but it's the same installer)
They have enough information to fail dependency checks :)
What exactly is the ports system? Anyone up for some extra karma? :)
You could finish HURD if you need a 1337 UNIX :)
My server (which runs about 10 daemons in addition to many other small things) has an uptime of 72 days and not a single problem (It's been about 80 since I installed slackware on it, and I'm now running 2.4.12-ac6 - I had to reboot to get that in and another time after I reconfigured it for IPv6). I think the most telling thing about my experience is that my kernel was the most recent one available last time I rebooted. I'm going for 256 days, then I'll put in a new kernel :)
He should be contributing to the Linux kernel! Who needs another measure of the distance to the moon?
In other words, he's trying experimental ideas, while AA is improving on a stable system. Experimental development should not be done in the main kernel tree! I think once he has implemented his ideas and stabilized the development of his VM it might have better chances of getting back in. I think in the long run he actually has a better chance, because once he has something to show for all this, if his ideas are right, he should have a much better VM. Until then I agree with Linus' decision.
Most people buy these devices to listen to music (at least I did). If you want a portable hard drive, then get one. Don't complain when an MP3 player doesn't work like a portable hard drive - it isn't one.
Lets look at that another way: an averga MP3 is 128Kbps, or 16KB/s. One hour would be approximately 56.25MB. In other words, you can transfer one hour of music in under a minute (at max speed, but that's assumed everywhere else). I've seen a post on this story saying "I can wake up and choose 500 songs to put on my iPod and have them there in no time" - how many of you do this every morning? Transfering enough music to listen to for a week straight (assuming you have the space) would take 157 minutes - under 3 hours. You could set it up in the afternoon and not have to stay up late to shut down the computer. But, most people don't listen to music all the time. If you only use it 3 hours per day, divide that by 8 - 20 minutes to transfer enough music to last you a week.
Unless you reformat the drive and reload your entire music collection regularly, this really isn't bad. Sure, it could be faster, but the iPod is expensive and has a very small capacity - probably the smallest of the portable hard-drive based players. I think most of them are iPod killers.
On the other hand, someone commented a few days ago about the fact that now a decent computer for doing average tasks could cost as much as the MS software that would be on it. For some people, we've already passed the necessary power and as the passable hardware gets cheaper, software will be an increasing part of the price. We're not talking about people who will be buying dual-Athlons with a 1GB of RAM and a RAID5 array of 180GB hard-drives - if this is talking about what I think it is, the average computer might be 750Mhz with 128MB or RAM. Another factor is that Microsoft software requirse more and more resources, so they are pushing up the lower limit too fast for some people.
I've noticed that even a lot of more techincal sites have anoying ads. Slashdot is the only site I've seen that actually has interesting ads, but then for them it's not that hard :) I think they could get a higher hit rate by thinking about who will want to see their ads.
This post brought to you by a Maxtor hard drive sold by a Slashdot advertiser to a Slashdot reader because of Slashdot ads.
I have developped a program based on MD5 that can compress any file down to one byte nearly instantaneously*. It adds a .sc extension. Copy this code into a file and make it executable, then run it with the filename as the first parameter:
.supercompressed
/dev/null 2>&1
.supercompressed
#!/bin/bash
md5sum $1 >
dd if=.supercompressed of=$1.sc bs=1 count=1 >
rm -f
* Warning: decompression is not supported. You can tell if another file is itentical to the original by compressing it and comparing the results, but it has a very high uncertainty.
Slashdot is written in Perl. A reposting of an obfuscated C program was stopped by the 'lameness filter'. Do you believe in coincidences?
However, this is an _encoded_ file. Any attempts to decode it are subject to prosecution under the DMCA, and I didn't give permission to anyone to view it - for all you're allowed to know, I'm archiving random data on Slashdot. In fact, Apple can't even check if it is really the file in question :)