I have done some OpenGL work with GTK+.
GTK+ does not support OpenGL out of the box, so to speak, but you can get a package called gtkglarea which adds an OpenGL widget.
If you use GTK+ v1.2, then gtkglarea v1.2.x packages are easy to find and come with many distros (e.g. Redhat).
However, I would recommend that you use GTK+ 2.x, since you are coding a new application, and GTK+ 2.x is much improved. There is no *official* version of gtkglarea for GTK+ 2.0 though. HOWEVER, you can get gtkglarea v1.99.0. Look on developer.gnome.org. I think.
GTK+'s main advantages are its maturity, its solid design, and its comprehensive selection of widgets. If your application is going to reach an appreciable size, then you will want a good widget set like GTK+.
As a C++ programmer, I find GTK+'s reliance on vanilla C to be a little irritating, however, you can gtk GTK-- which is a C++ wrapper for it. I prefer to use GTK+ directly though, so I interface my C++ code with GTK+ by using static member functions for callbacks.
Hope that helps
Mr. Meanie
I don't think this is really fraud, or illegal
on
Unmaking The Game
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· Score: 1
I don't play EQ, so please excuse any inaccuracies..... Also, IANAL...
If I understand correctly EQ players can learn trade skills, ie making arrows, and sell these for EQ platinum. By using a macro to do the work, they are simply mechanising the process, much like say knives were made by hand (by a blachsmith?) in the middle ages, but are manufactured by machine these days. The macro users are simply automating a manual process; the manual process of mouse clicking!
I think it would be hard to convince a court or jury that this deserves punishment. I wouldn't be surprised if Verant killed your account for this activity though; there would be something in the EULA.
We all need a way to vent anger, and computer games provide a good way of doing it. However, you wouldn't want to allow young children to play 18 rated games (e.g. 8 year old playing Soldier of Fortune 2), that wouldn't be good at all (That game is seriously fucked up). Theres nothing wrong with a bit of cartoon violence, or the old shoot em ups you see in arcades, though. These things were part of my staple diet when I had an Atari ST in the early 90s. [nostalgia] I miss those games. [/nostalgia]
This is a damn good idea. Sony can use the physical watermark to prevent piracy WITHOUT requiring that mandatory DRM be included in every piece of computer hardware and software. (Which would kill a large proportion of the software industry due to exhorbatant licensing costs)
This is the future. I suggest that Hollywood and the music recording industry be encouraged to use solutions like this; this was they can be as restrictive as they like with respect to their content and the devices that play it (through licensing), without affecting PCs and the internet. I would suggest that the entertainment industry DISALLOW manufacturers from producing players that interface with PCs. After all, not many people will buy high quality SACDs only to put them thru a PC soundcard rather than a good HiFi, or buy a DVD to watch it on a PC monitor rather than a personal cinema. Just live with it: If a PCs can play MPAA/RIAA content, DRM will become mandatory. You can't have one without the other; MPAA/RIAA wont let you. I would suggest that the two be walled off from one another, to restrict the damage done to the computer industry.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would rather have a PC that cannot play music/movies (thus needing a separate HiFi and TV), and have no DRM, than find myself unable to use my PC the way I want to (I like to write and distribute open source software with my PC).
Just remember, if you don't like the onerous DMCA style conditions attached to media like SACD / DVDs, just DON'T BUY THEM!!! (don't pirate them either; you'd just give the MPAA and the RIAA all the reason they need to convince the government to make DRM mandatory)
Professor Robins of Harvard points out that "the Web has changed the scale of these things." Had there been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather than 2002, he says, it is possible that no one would have ever known. "Back then, you would not have had the technical ability to gather all these bits and pieces of information, while today you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known that if you take a lot of random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and the Net makes it easier to collect random noise."
Unfortunately, DARPA is now in the process of designing the TIA (Total Information Awareness) system (here and here):
It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards
... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.
So, in other words, the TIA system is DESIGNED to attempt to find pattens in a few petbytes of random noise.
As an OSS developer, software patents are a topic that concern me.
Some of the more worrying cases in the US involve small to medium enterprises getting sued for patent violation by large companies, or IP holding companies (set up specifically to obtain revenue by suing others for patent violation), where prior art exists for the patents involved! These patents were usually granted by the USPTO because either the staff there are overworked and don't have the time to check it out properly, or the prior art was obscure and hidden away somewhere..... Unfortunately, proving prior art and getting a patent revoked involves an expensive court case, which is beyond the means of the small to medium enterprises.
So my suggestion is this: You get a patent from the patent office and not a court, and the patent office has the power to either grant or refuse a patent. Given that the patent office can grant a patent, shouldn't they be able to revoke one too? In this case, someone who is being sued for violation of a patent for which prior art exists, can challenge the patent for small cost (say less than a patent application) by providing the necessary proof of prior art to the PTO.
I think that Redhat was right to get its own patents. Open source needs some software patents of its own to bargain with. Or at least use them to block certain monopolistic companies from certain areas of computer software.
I should start by saying that I loathe the idea of the SSSCA/CBDTPA totally, since it would kill open source, and grant MS a monopoly as they own the patent on DRM tech in computers. Well, more of a monopoly than they already have =)
But really, how bad is the DMCA (not CBDTPA)? Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that the DMCA affects me personally, and doesn't have to affect most GNU/Linux users.
It seems to me that most posters here talk of the DMCA as if it is something which is impossible to escape. Its not. No one here relies on DVD movies, or the latest tasteless music from the record companies FOR THEIR SURVIVAL. There are alternatives. There is genuinely free music from the 'net (mp3.com, etc), or an indie movie festival. Maybe ifilm.com. You can avoid being affected by the DMCA simply by refusing to make use of protected content.
So, the movie studios and recording industry want the DMCA to protect their content.... Blizzard wants to protected their game server.... So what? Don't like it? Don't buy it, don't pirate it, and DON'T LISTEN TO/WATCH IT. You DO have a choice. Yes, that may mean not having Tron 2 (when its out) or LOTR, or Warcraft 3 or whatever the latest fad is, but if you really want to take the moral high ground with these people (media industry), simply crying "I like shiny things" wont help.
For the record, I do think changes need to be made to the DMCA to prevent future cases like the Skyralov case or the Felten case. These are quite franly sickening; you should not be on dodgy legal ground just for doing encryption research. Some provisions need to be made for this.
Otherwise, let them keep their stupid DMCA. =) It doesn't affect me, and it WONT AFFECT YOU IF YOU DON'T LET IT. =) The DMCA can ONLY be applied to specific works, unlike say software patents for instance.
- MrMeanie
P.S. Personally, I use GNU/Linux almost exclusively. I am currently coding an open source program. (not affected at all) I don't have any illegal MP3s on my system. (I like to take the moral highground and criticise the music recording industry:-P, and I think it would be hypocritical of me to complain about their efforts to 'protect' their content if I had illegal music on my system) Despite having a DVD drive in my computer, the only DVDs I have are cover discs from Linux format magazine. I have no DVD movies, because of the DMCA and lack of fair use rights; to play a DVD any way I want (ie on Linux) I would have to break the law, therefore I boycott them. I will continue to boycott any medium which disallows what is commonly called fair use. As far as I can see, I make use of NO protected content, therefore the DMCA has NO effect.
FOR loops: a question, ANSI C++, C++98, C++99....
on
GCC 3.0 Released
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· Score: 2
Certain compilers, including previous releases of GCC and Metrowerks Codewarrior allowed the following:
for (int i = 0; i x; i++)
{
[....]
}//scope of int i ends here so....
for (int i = 0; i y; i++)//...redeclaring int i doesn't blow up
{
[....]
}
Does GCC 3.0 still allow this?
The above code 'feature' is not allowed under the ANSI C++. Under ANSI C++, the int i variable scope will continue beyond the for loop. IMHO the ANSI standard does not make sense WRT this issue. This is commonly thought to be a bug in the ANSI C++ spec (or so I am led to believe).
I do not know about C++ 98/99/whatever standard. Any URLs anyone?
Microsoft once said that the then highly valued Linux companies were a passing fad, and that investors would lose interest in supporting them. If what is said in this article is true, MS was right, I am afraid.
It really irritates me as a matter of fact. This just makes it harder for other free software companies to get funding. This is the last thing we need.
Meahwhile I do NOT believe that Doom caused Columbine, I believe that it is common sense not to give an 18 rated movie to an 8 year old. AFAIK young children are quite impressionable, and they will try to find role models; giving them violent/unsuitable ones is a bad idea. For people who are more mature; those in their mid to late teens, such material is most probably fine.
A rating system for games probably isn't such a bad idea in a way, since it would prevent kids from obtaining unsuitable material.
NOTE: I am not saying that violent movies and games are bad (although they may be unnecessary in some cases), I am saying that it is a bad idea to give such material to a young child. This is what a rating system can prevent.
nVidia pixel shaders work like this; see the information on their site wrt coding for the GeForce / GeForce2 with OpenGL. Judging by John Carmacks comments wrt GeForce3 pixel shaders, they haven't changed much since then.
They are quite usable, but then the "circuits" you build are not in excess of 25 stages long (most likely less than that).
I wish everyone would just let Napster die.
The entertainment industry would try to push CPRM and similar systems onto us no matter what, but with no better rationale than 'its going to make us richer' the politicians would probably strike it down. Now the RIAA/MPAA will claim CPRM is an 'anti-piracy' measure as opposed to 'screw-our-customers' system. PLEASE, GIVE UP PEOPLE, YOU ARE ONLY MAKING THINGS HARDER ON YOURSELVES IN THE FUTURE; if internet users appear to be a bunch of thieving pirates (as the entertainment industry probably puts it), then we will get screwed over and over again. There will be more battles for our freedoms which will need fighting. Lets make sure our situation is LEGALLY WATERPROOF next time. This whole p2p thing is a huge mess imho.
I don't like letting big business control me any more than the next guy, but please, realise that with their huge budgets they have an unfair advantage over us. If we are going to fight them, we must make sure we are on very solid legal ground. If we are not we are doomed from the start.
To the FSF: please choose a battle where a win is definite; you lose this one and we're all screwed.
I think I would be kind of glad if this killed Napster. It would go a long way to keeping the RIAA off our backs. Sorry ppl, I would rather lose Napster than see the whole of the internet and all the computer hardware I own remotely controlled by the entertainment industry. Lets hope this thing takes off.
Hmm. Forget terraforming Mars or the Moon for life, how about terraforming and building your house on an asteroid!!! (Forgetting problems like low/zero gravity of course).
I would be tempted to do the above. Seriously.
I would like to suggest that those in a position to do so, encourage Leadbeater to continue at full speed on his current course. I would also want to encourage other moronic eCEOs and venture capitalists to follow his lead. Let me explain.
I get the idea that Leadbeater is suggesting that future eCompanies should avoid geeks. Well thats fine by me. I don't want to be stuck in cubicle at AOL/Time Warner for any period of time anyway. Of course, when you remove the geeks from your potential work force, what are you left with? A bunch of second rate tech staff whose only motivation is that the Net is supposed to be a pot of gold. People like that would have trouble maintining a LAN with 4 win9x machines, let alone a webserver..... Any companies in that position will collapse even faster than the current crop; Leadbeater is headed on a course of self-destruction. An appropriate ending for such a man.
It seems to me that other/.ers (Jon Katz too) would agree with me when I say that the dotcoms killed the free spirit and high signal to noise ratio of the early 90s internet. I would like to encourage the remainder of the dotcommers to band up with Leadbeater and head for self-destruction with him.
I agree heartily. The early internet (and computer industry in general) was much better in the early nineties. Mainly due to the fact that it was inhabited by intelligent and interesting people, as opposed to morons trying to make buckets of cash from a crappy business plan.
Linux is for EVERYBODY to do as they wish with. That is its power; its openness.
I personally use GUIs and IDEs to help me develop code because it makes navigating and manipulating my code a LOT easier.
Trying to figure out how a large open source program works is so much easier when you have software like Source Navigator to help you navigate the source QUICKLY. Try doing that with vi.
If Linux was owned by purists such as yourself then it would never have got past the "tiny hacker OS" stage that it was in when Torvalds first released the kernel.
I hope this particular suit doesn't go through...
People agreed not to sell items and accounts as part of the EULA...
With this suit setting a precedent we may find people trying to sue people for outcomes of more online games. I got the impression that some people were considering litigation (or some lawyers would like it anyways) because the author of the Sims released a patch that contained items that would make your character fall ill and probably die.
As someone who is hoping to get into the games industry some time I *really* do not need to face law suits because some moron didn't like the fact that he doesn't win because he sucks.
MrMeanie
Many of you may not agree with this, but it kinda makes me wish that MP3, DivX, DeCSS, etc had never been invented/written...... I know most people like their MP3 collections, but if we had never done anything to piss the corporations off, they wouldn't be trying to screw us.
I think that there may be times when we have to accept that we are like ants to the corporate giants, and if we avoid pissing them off (ie think about our actions carefully first; you reading this Napster?) they wont try to step on us.
Accepting that the corporations have the upper hand is not fair, but life is unfair by nature.
So, next time some computer geek 'genius' invents some new technology, lets be intelligent about it like we are supposed to be, and plan things out better next time. Next time round, the actions brought against us are likely to make hard drive copy protection look like a fart in a whirlwind.
The internet hardware and software was invented by geeks. At first, they owned the net too. It was a small network (compared to its current size), consisting of those who had sufficient computer skills to hook up, university academics, and the likes. Due to the level of computer literacy required to get online in those early days (early 1990s), it was a fad, a geeks toy, so the majority of the population hadn't even heard of it, let alone wanted to be part of it. It was so small it was hardly a blip on the corporate and government radars. No point advertising on the net, not enough viewers; no damn banner ads. No point restricing free speech, not enough people doing 'bad things' with it.
Then came ISPs such as AOL which make getting online so easy that a trained monkey could do it. The masses started getting online. Corporations started to care about their online image, filling the net with advertisments, and suing anyone who tried to use the right of free speech to criticise them.
Paedophiles, terrorists, etc saw the net's anonimity as an opportuniuty to avoid getting caught by the law. They perverted the net's main attractions to their unpleasant ends. As expected, the general populous started getting upset.
The powerful people in government who have a habit of wanting to control everyone and everything decided that cyberspace, no longer a fad, but something much bigger and more important, was worth spending time and money controlling.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, I guess thats where we (as geeks) went wrong. We lowered the standard of entry onto the internet by making getting online too easy, to such an extent that the masses came, drawing the interest of Big Brother.
Some may regard my views as snobbery; preferring the net to be a somewhat exclusive society; keeping the average person out of the loop and preventing them from reaping the reward of online freedom, but in doing this, we have ensured that online freedom is doomed; the people wishing to restrict and monitor us have so much power that fighting them may be nearly impossible. If only the internet had remained a geeks toy, the big boys would have never taken interest. The net would be as cool as it was in 1995.
Many may not like the idea of an 'exclusive society', but by making the internet a small user-unfriendly geek toy, most people would not even be interested in becoming a part of it, you wouldn't have to turn people away.
I have often asked myself, would it be possible to set up an alternative to the net? A place which is just for computer geeks, scientists, and academics, somewhere where freedom of speech rules. Something that is too small to attract the interests of corporations and governments.
Imagine the hax0ring potential.....
on
Techno Jacket
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· Score: 1
Haxoring someones clothes....
Remote undressing.....
Make the MP3 player insult them all day.....
Its good to see a major site like Tom's Hardware giving Linux some limelight.
As for those 'l33t users' who say that games will somehow damage your precious OS, this is nonsense. Thats the wonderful thing about Linux, because its Open Source, and there are many distros, you can tune it to do exactly what you want (unlike with other OSs); you want a console-only network station for a l33t user, get Slackware or Debian, or grow your own distro. You want games, get SuSe, or Redhat or something and install high powered drivers, and games and stuff; ITS YOUR CHOICE; YOUR POWER! USE IT!
Slashdot Mirror
I have done some OpenGL work with GTK+.
GTK+ does not support OpenGL out of the box, so to speak, but you can get a package called gtkglarea which adds an OpenGL widget.
If you use GTK+ v1.2, then gtkglarea v1.2.x packages are easy to find and come with many distros (e.g. Redhat).
However, I would recommend that you use GTK+ 2.x, since you are coding a new application, and GTK+ 2.x is much improved. There is no *official* version of gtkglarea for GTK+ 2.0 though. HOWEVER, you can get gtkglarea v1.99.0. Look on developer.gnome.org. I think.
Links:
Gnome ftp site
Gnome ftp mirror
GTK+'s main advantages are its maturity, its solid design, and its comprehensive selection of widgets. If your application is going to reach an appreciable size, then you will want a good widget set like GTK+.
As a C++ programmer, I find GTK+'s reliance on vanilla C to be a little irritating, however, you can gtk GTK-- which is a C++ wrapper for it. I prefer to use GTK+ directly though, so I interface my C++ code with GTK+ by using static member functions for callbacks.
Hope that helps
Mr. Meanie
I don't play EQ, so please excuse any inaccuracies.....
Also, IANAL...
If I understand correctly EQ players can learn trade skills, ie making arrows, and sell these for EQ platinum.
By using a macro to do the work, they are simply mechanising the process, much like say knives were made by hand (by a blachsmith?) in the middle ages, but are manufactured by machine these days.
The macro users are simply automating a manual process; the manual process of mouse clicking!
I think it would be hard to convince a court or jury that this deserves punishment. I wouldn't be surprised if Verant killed your account for this activity though; there would be something in the EULA.
We all need a way to vent anger, and computer games provide a good way of doing it. However, you wouldn't want to allow young children to play 18 rated games (e.g. 8 year old playing Soldier of Fortune 2), that wouldn't be good at all (That game is seriously fucked up).
Theres nothing wrong with a bit of cartoon violence, or the old shoot em ups you see in arcades, though. These things were part of my staple diet when I had an Atari ST in the early 90s. [nostalgia] I miss those games. [/nostalgia]
This is a damn good idea. Sony can use the physical watermark to prevent piracy WITHOUT requiring that mandatory DRM be included in every piece of computer hardware and software. (Which would kill a large proportion of the software industry due to exhorbatant licensing costs)
This is the future. I suggest that Hollywood and the music recording industry be encouraged to use solutions like this; this was they can be as restrictive as they like with respect to their content and the devices that play it (through licensing), without affecting PCs and the internet. I would suggest that the entertainment industry DISALLOW manufacturers from producing players that interface with PCs. After all, not many people will buy high quality SACDs only to put them thru a PC soundcard rather than a good HiFi, or buy a DVD to watch it on a PC monitor rather than a personal cinema.
Just live with it: If a PCs can play MPAA/RIAA content, DRM will become mandatory. You can't have one without the other; MPAA/RIAA wont let you. I would suggest that the two be walled off from one another, to restrict the damage done to the computer industry.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would rather have a PC that cannot play music/movies (thus needing a separate HiFi and TV), and have no DRM, than find myself unable to use my PC the way I want to (I like to write and distribute open source software with my PC).
Just remember, if you don't like the onerous DMCA style conditions attached to media like SACD / DVDs, just DON'T BUY THEM!!! (don't pirate them either; you'd just give the MPAA and the RIAA all the reason they need to convince the government to make DRM mandatory)
Professor Robins of Harvard points out that "the Web has changed the scale of these things." Had there been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather than 2002, he says, it is possible that no one would have ever known. "Back then, you would not have had the technical ability to gather all these bits and pieces of information, while today you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known that if you take a lot of random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and the Net makes it easier to collect random noise."
:
... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.
Unfortunately, DARPA is now in the process of designing the TIA (Total Information Awareness) system (here and here)
It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards
So, in other words, the TIA system is DESIGNED to attempt to find pattens in a few petbytes of random noise.
As an OSS developer, software patents are a topic that concern me.
Some of the more worrying cases in the US involve small to medium enterprises getting sued for patent violation by large companies, or IP holding companies (set up specifically to obtain revenue by suing others for patent violation), where prior art exists for the patents involved!
These patents were usually granted by the USPTO because either the staff there are overworked and don't have the time to check it out properly, or the prior art was obscure and hidden away somewhere.....
Unfortunately, proving prior art and getting a patent revoked involves an expensive court case, which is beyond the means of the small to medium enterprises.
So my suggestion is this: You get a patent from the patent office and not a court, and the patent office has the power to either grant or refuse a patent. Given that the patent office can grant a patent, shouldn't they be able to revoke one too?
In this case, someone who is being sued for violation of a patent for which prior art exists, can challenge the patent for small cost (say less than a patent application) by providing the necessary proof of prior art to the PTO.
I think that Redhat was right to get its own patents. Open source needs some software patents of its own to bargain with. Or at least use them to block certain monopolistic companies from certain areas of computer software.
/me prepares to get modded to -infinity....
:-P, and I think it
I should start by saying that I loathe the idea of the SSSCA/CBDTPA totally, since it would kill open source, and grant MS a monopoly as they
own the patent on DRM tech in computers. Well, more of a monopoly than they already have =)
But really, how bad is the DMCA (not CBDTPA)? Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that the DMCA affects me personally, and
doesn't have to affect most GNU/Linux users.
It seems to me that most posters here talk of the DMCA as if it is something which is impossible to escape. Its not. No one here relies
on DVD movies, or the latest tasteless music from the record companies FOR THEIR SURVIVAL. There are alternatives. There is genuinely
free music from the 'net (mp3.com, etc), or an indie movie festival. Maybe ifilm.com. You can avoid being affected by the DMCA simply
by refusing to make use of protected content.
So, the movie studios and recording industry want the DMCA to protect their content.... Blizzard wants to protected their game server....
So what? Don't like it? Don't buy it, don't pirate it, and DON'T LISTEN TO/WATCH IT. You DO have a choice. Yes, that may mean not having
Tron 2 (when its out) or LOTR, or Warcraft 3 or whatever the latest fad is, but if you really want to take the moral high ground with
these people (media industry), simply crying "I like shiny things" wont help.
For the record, I do think changes need to be made to the DMCA to prevent future cases like the Skyralov case or the Felten case. These
are quite franly sickening; you should not be on dodgy legal ground just for doing encryption research. Some provisions need to be made
for this.
Otherwise, let them keep their stupid DMCA. =) It doesn't affect me, and it WONT AFFECT YOU IF YOU DON'T LET IT. =) The DMCA can ONLY be
applied to specific works, unlike say software patents for instance.
- MrMeanie
P.S. Personally, I use GNU/Linux almost exclusively. I am currently coding an open source program. (not affected at all) I don't have
any illegal MP3s on my system. (I like to take the moral highground and criticise the music recording industry
would be hypocritical of me to complain about their efforts to 'protect' their content if I had illegal music on my system) Despite
having a DVD drive in my computer, the only DVDs I have are cover discs from Linux format magazine. I have no DVD movies, because of
the DMCA and lack of fair use rights; to play a DVD any way I want (ie on Linux) I would have to break the law, therefore I boycott
them. I will continue to boycott any medium which disallows what is commonly called fair use. As far as I can see, I make use of NO
protected content, therefore the DMCA has NO effect.
Certain compilers, including previous releases of GCC and Metrowerks Codewarrior allowed the following:
//scope of int i ends here so....
//...redeclaring int i doesn't blow up
for (int i = 0; i x; i++)
{
[....]
}
for (int i = 0; i y; i++)
{
[....]
}
Does GCC 3.0 still allow this?
The above code 'feature' is not allowed under the ANSI C++. Under ANSI C++, the int i variable scope will continue beyond the for loop. IMHO the ANSI standard does not make sense WRT this issue. This is commonly thought to be a bug in the ANSI C++ spec (or so I am led to believe).
I do not know about C++ 98/99/whatever standard. Any URLs anyone?
Microsoft once said that the then highly valued Linux companies were a passing fad, and that investors would lose interest in supporting them. If what is said in this article is true, MS was right, I am afraid.
It really irritates me as a matter of fact. This just makes it harder for other free software companies to get funding. This is the last thing we need.
Meahwhile I do NOT believe that Doom caused Columbine, I believe that it is common sense not to give an 18 rated movie to an 8 year old. AFAIK young children are quite impressionable, and they will try to find role models; giving them violent/unsuitable ones is a bad idea. For people who are more mature; those in their mid to late teens, such material is most probably fine.
A rating system for games probably isn't such a bad idea in a way, since it would prevent kids from obtaining unsuitable material.
NOTE: I am not saying that violent movies and games are bad (although they may be unnecessary in some cases), I am saying that it is a bad idea to give such material to a young child. This is what a rating system can prevent.
'Those with the most money win.'
Or anyone who can convince the politicians to take their side.
nVidia pixel shaders work like this; see the information on their site wrt coding for the GeForce / GeForce2 with OpenGL. Judging by John Carmacks comments wrt GeForce3 pixel shaders, they haven't changed much since then.
They are quite usable, but then the "circuits" you build are not in excess of 25 stages long (most likely less than that).
I wish everyone would just let Napster die.
The entertainment industry would try to push CPRM and similar systems onto us no matter what, but with no better rationale than 'its going to make us richer' the politicians would probably strike it down. Now the RIAA/MPAA will claim CPRM is an 'anti-piracy' measure as opposed to 'screw-our-customers' system. PLEASE, GIVE UP PEOPLE, YOU ARE ONLY MAKING THINGS HARDER ON YOURSELVES IN THE FUTURE; if internet users appear to be a bunch of thieving pirates (as the entertainment industry probably puts it), then we will get screwed over and over again. There will be more battles for our freedoms which will need fighting. Lets make sure our situation is LEGALLY WATERPROOF next time. This whole p2p thing is a huge mess imho.
I don't like letting big business control me any more than the next guy, but please, realise that with their huge budgets they have an unfair advantage over us. If we are going to fight them, we must make sure we are on very solid legal ground. If we are not we are doomed from the start.
To the FSF: please choose a battle where a win is definite; you lose this one and we're all screwed.
I think I would be kind of glad if this killed Napster. It would go a long way to keeping the RIAA off our backs. Sorry ppl, I would rather lose Napster than see the whole of the internet and all the computer hardware I own remotely controlled by the entertainment industry. Lets hope this thing takes off.
Hmm. Forget terraforming Mars or the Moon for life, how about terraforming and building your house on an asteroid!!! (Forgetting problems like low/zero gravity of course).
I would be tempted to do the above. Seriously. /.ers (Jon Katz too) would agree with me when I say that the dotcoms killed the free spirit and high signal to noise ratio of the early 90s internet. I would like to encourage the remainder of the dotcommers to band up with Leadbeater and head for self-destruction with him.
I would like to suggest that those in a position to do so, encourage Leadbeater to continue at full speed on his current course. I would also want to encourage other moronic eCEOs and venture capitalists to follow his lead. Let me explain.
I get the idea that Leadbeater is suggesting that future eCompanies should avoid geeks. Well thats fine by me. I don't want to be stuck in cubicle at AOL/Time Warner for any period of time anyway. Of course, when you remove the geeks from your potential work force, what are you left with? A bunch of second rate tech staff whose only motivation is that the Net is supposed to be a pot of gold. People like that would have trouble maintining a LAN with 4 win9x machines, let alone a webserver..... Any companies in that position will collapse even faster than the current crop; Leadbeater is headed on a course of self-destruction. An appropriate ending for such a man.
It seems to me that other
I agree heartily. The early internet (and computer industry in general) was much better in the early nineties. Mainly due to the fact that it was inhabited by intelligent and interesting people, as opposed to morons trying to make buckets of cash from a crappy business plan.
"Authorities could not estimate how much the prank cost. Asked it the charges could lead to jail time, Piazza said, "Sure"."
Cost? Jail? It was a prank ffs. Lighten up people.
I guess engineers just know how to have fun.
Linux is for EVERYBODY to do as they wish with. That is its power; its openness.
I personally use GUIs and IDEs to help me develop code because it makes navigating and manipulating my code a LOT easier.
Trying to figure out how a large open source program works is so much easier when you have software like Source Navigator to help you navigate the source QUICKLY. Try doing that with vi.
If Linux was owned by purists such as yourself then it would never have got past the "tiny hacker OS" stage that it was in when Torvalds first released the kernel.
I hope this particular suit doesn't go through... People agreed not to sell items and accounts as part of the EULA... With this suit setting a precedent we may find people trying to sue people for outcomes of more online games. I got the impression that some people were considering litigation (or some lawyers would like it anyways) because the author of the Sims released a patch that contained items that would make your character fall ill and probably die. As someone who is hoping to get into the games industry some time I *really* do not need to face law suits because some moron didn't like the fact that he doesn't win because he sucks. MrMeanie
Many of you may not agree with this, but it kinda makes me wish that MP3, DivX, DeCSS, etc had never been invented/written...... I know most people like their MP3 collections, but if we had never done anything to piss the corporations off, they wouldn't be trying to screw us.
I think that there may be times when we have to accept that we are like ants to the corporate giants, and if we avoid pissing them off (ie think about our actions carefully first; you reading this Napster?) they wont try to step on us.
Accepting that the corporations have the upper hand is not fair, but life is unfair by nature.
So, next time some computer geek 'genius' invents some new technology, lets be intelligent about it like we are supposed to be, and plan things out better next time. Next time round, the actions brought against us are likely to make hard drive copy protection look like a fart in a whirlwind.
The internet hardware and software was invented by geeks. At first, they owned the net too. It was a small network (compared to its current size), consisting of those who had sufficient computer skills to hook up, university academics, and the likes. Due to the level of computer literacy required to get online in those early days (early 1990s), it was a fad, a geeks toy, so the majority of the population hadn't even heard of it, let alone wanted to be part of it. It was so small it was hardly a blip on the corporate and government radars. No point advertising on the net, not enough viewers; no damn banner ads. No point restricing free speech, not enough people doing 'bad things' with it.
Then came ISPs such as AOL which make getting online so easy that a trained monkey could do it. The masses started getting online. Corporations started to care about their online image, filling the net with advertisments, and suing anyone who tried to use the right of free speech to criticise them.
Paedophiles, terrorists, etc saw the net's anonimity as an opportuniuty to avoid getting caught by the law. They perverted the net's main attractions to their unpleasant ends. As expected, the general populous started getting upset.
The powerful people in government who have a habit of wanting to control everyone and everything decided that cyberspace, no longer a fad, but something much bigger and more important, was worth spending time and money controlling.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, I guess thats where we (as geeks) went wrong. We lowered the standard of entry onto the internet by making getting online too easy, to such an extent that the masses came, drawing the interest of Big Brother.
Some may regard my views as snobbery; preferring the net to be a somewhat exclusive society; keeping the average person out of the loop and preventing them from reaping the reward of online freedom, but in doing this, we have ensured that online freedom is doomed; the people wishing to restrict and monitor us have so much power that fighting them may be nearly impossible. If only the internet had remained a geeks toy, the big boys would have never taken interest. The net would be as cool as it was in 1995.
Many may not like the idea of an 'exclusive society', but by making the internet a small user-unfriendly geek toy, most people would not even be interested in becoming a part of it, you wouldn't have to turn people away.
I have often asked myself, would it be possible to set up an alternative to the net? A place which is just for computer geeks, scientists, and academics, somewhere where freedom of speech rules. Something that is too small to attract the interests of corporations and governments.
Haxoring someones clothes....
Remote undressing.....
Make the MP3 player insult them all day.....
Its good to see a major site like Tom's Hardware giving Linux some limelight.
As for those 'l33t users' who say that games will somehow damage your precious OS, this is nonsense. Thats the wonderful thing about Linux, because its Open Source, and there are many distros, you can tune it to do exactly what you want (unlike with other OSs); you want a console-only network station for a l33t user, get Slackware or Debian, or grow your own distro. You want games, get SuSe, or Redhat or something and install high powered drivers, and games and stuff; ITS YOUR CHOICE; YOUR POWER! USE IT!