Microsoft - "Pretty Hate Machine" LinuxPPC - "Broken" Debian/PPC - "Fixed" LinuxCare - "The Downward Spiral" LinuxOne - "Further Down the Spiral" xscreensaver - "The Perfect Drug" the Mac OS - "The Fragile" Amiga - "Into the Void"
-mcc-baka i beat my machine, it's a part of me, it's inside of me i'm stuck in this dream, it's changing me, i am becoming
yes, they were in there, but not in the manner they're used today.
The Congress shall have power.. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
In other words, the constitution only includes patents and copyright to a reasonable, non-unlimited extent, and "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". This isn't what we're complaining about. This is a good thing. What we're complaining about is patents and copyrights used as weapons for corporations to silence individuals, something that was added much, much later, far after the first amendment bits.
What was originally there is more or less to _protect_ people-- i.e. to stop someone from taking the work of others at the expense of the original creator, such as burning 3000 copies of "Dre 2001" and selling them on the street, in which case Dre is in a very real way failing to recieve money that was his due, because 3000 people who would otherwise have bought the album from Dre bought them from the guy on the street. Making the case that the patent/copyright stuff in the constitution was intended to prevent people from taking ideas and concepts from a work and using those ideas and concepts to create a new, independent work, as is done in the case of a parody or the music of Negativland.. well, that doesn't seem to use the same spirit as the parts of the U.S. constitution, seeing as a new work as such would be progress of useful art, and the original creator suffers no loss.
You'll also notice the bits in the original constitution do not contradict free speech, really, and i see NOTHING in there to support the idea of preventing the spread of information-- i.e. preventing information about a technology from being spread. The idea behind the patents was originally to encourage the spread of information-- that in order to convince someone to allow science to progress, they would tell the world how their process worked, and in return would be granted a limited-time monopoly on that process. The idea that something like the DMCA could prevent someone from spreading information they found independantly about a process-- say, cyberpatrol's encryption scheme-- is completely antithetical to the original idea of a patent and what the constitution says, even if the information about said process is in a language other than English (say, C++..)
You'll also note the "for limited times" bit. Current copyright/patent laws extend far, far past the useful lifespan of the ideas they encompass, and the lifespan of a copyright seems to get longer every time that the date of the expiration of Mickey Mouse's copyright comes within the forseeable future. You think it will _ever_ be legal for me to distribute a Legend of Zelda 1 ROM, no matter how long i live and no matter how many years have passed since Nintendo has gotten a penny from that game? Ha.
So yeh, copyrights and patents do predate free speech in U.S. law to an extent, but not in any manner that is antithetical to the idea of free speech.
at least he spelled "mac" in lowercase letters.:) a lot of slashdot posters would have said something like "It also looks like MAC will be bringing Kerberos to OSX".. -_-
[explanation for anyone confused by my statement: "MAC" and "Mac" are not the same thing. A "mac" or a "Mac" is short for "Macintosh", which is a type of computer. An "MAC" is an adress hardwired into an ethernet card used for identification. i hope this clears things up a bit. Most Linux users should understand this already, since Unix-style file systems are case-sensitive and will allow files to coexist despite the fact that treated case-insensitive they have the same name.. i would be willing to bet though that there are some linux users out there who do call mac MAC, and i'd be willing to bet some of these people are the exact same people who bitch like crazy whenever anyone uses the phrase "x windows" in place of "x", even in contexts where "x" alone could also be construed to mean X the bot on undernet, X the anime, or X the san fransisco punk band.. i'm ranting now aren't i? sorry. i've had a bad day.. -_-]
"Alice" is not even an attempt at intelligence. It simply analyses speech patterns without any regard to content or context or previous sequence of conversation and regurgitates replies that were hard-coded in beforehand and designed entirely and simply to "sound realistic" and not at all to mean anything.
if you are looking for a web-based Artificial Intelligence which actually solves problems and attempts to in some way synthesize the information given to it based on context, i suggest you look at
i know nothing about NeWS, but have been very curious about it ever since i first heard of it.
I first heard of it in the X chapter of the UNIX haters handbook, which makes occational references to NeWS as a windowing system done right. It's also a very interesting read (not FUD at all, just reasonable if incendentary analysis..) and probably would tell you a little about NeWS..
The URL i just listed above, btw, which i just found now on Google, happens to contain a link to a series of NeWS resources, which i haven't read yet. draw your own conclusions.
I am very curious about NeWS, and if anyone out there has used it, please post and let us know anything about it you may have to say.. Or is there anyone who STILL uses it?
What are the differences between this, DPS, and Quartz? DPS and Quartz aren't capable of running over a network are they? (i fear this last sentance will ignite an irrelivant flamewar, but i'm curious, so i'll include it anyway..)
step 1: get person's cookie file step 2: sign onto ecommerce service as person step 3: change the person's default email adress with the service to a hotmail account (so they won't notice the "item hasbeen shipped" thing) step 4: mail something, as a "gift", to a P.O. box. they will let you do this.
If you get lucky no one will notice. Scarily enough, this would work.
I have reread your post several times and am totally unable to find any connection between your post and my post it replied to. Everything you've said is accurate, but i don't understand why you posted it or what it has to do with anything i said.
I only brought up Apple to point out that if the plugin were released under the LGPL rather than the GPL, Apple would be allowed to distribute the plugin as a part of quicktime, and might as such contribute code [i.e. bugfixes] to the LGPLed plugin.
I don't think the MPEG-4 plugin would not be "reverse engineered". MPEG-4 is an open standard. Why would you reverse engineer an open standard?
You'd really think they'd do it under the LGPL. First off this is something that one would think is going to be most useful LGPLed since it is essentially a library, not as an actual application, and thus GPLing it will merely limit its usefulness and at times cause extreme cumbersomeness... I doubt GPLing an mpeg-4 codec will entice anyone to release code under the GPL, but it will probably entice a lot of people to not USE the codec.. thus probably meaning they won't make any improvements to the codec itself.
but secondly and more importantly SINCE THE CODEC IS INTENDED TO BE USED AS A PLUG-IN TO QUICKTIME-- ESSENTIALLY BEING "LINKED INTO" AND IN ANY CASE CONSTITUTING A "WHOLE WORK" WITH QUICKTIME-- wouldn't releasing it under the GPL violate some things?
Or would the violation only apply if someone [apple] attempted to distribute quicktime _with_ the OSS liscence [a la LAME]? Would this be simply to keep apple from benefiting from a codec they didn't contribute to, by ensuring it can't be part of standard quicktime? Wouldn't that simply result in apple developing their own MPEG-4 codec?
Please correct any flaws in my logic.. but really i think the LGPL STILL is the correct choice for this kind of thing [standalone librarystyle mpeg4 codec, esp. one intended to be used as a plugin to a propeitary product] because it would make it the most useful for everyone while still ensuring any modifications to the codec itself are still kept open (as opposed to BSD style liscenses where everyone from microsoft to Real would rob the code blind..)
i'm sure nobody will ever read this post.. nobody reads/. discussions after a certain point.. blah
what about MPEG-2??? We have no MPEG-2 drivers for quicktime yet. I have this unbelievably wonderful G4 right here.. between the Rage 128 and Altivec, it is probably more equipped to handle MPEG-2 style math than any other personal computer ever made.. and i can't download a simple.m2v movie off the internet and run it. I don't know why Quicktime doesn't support it, as would seem the natural thing to do, but it doesn't, and i assume it has something to do with DVD. Apple does have a perfectly working MPEG-2 decoder in the Apple DVD player, but that won't run files off the hard drive. I can't normally run DVD player because i have macsbug installed and rebooting just for that seems kind of silly, but that doesn't matter since it wont' run files off a hard drive anyway. I have no use for DVDs, of course, it's just that that was what was in the machine. You'd think that now they are charging for quicktime, they could go to the bother of including things like MPEG video encoders or MPEG-2 playback to justify the cost, but.. guess not. Well, actually, if you compare it to _REALPLAYER_ you get a LOT for your money.. so i guess i shouldn't complain.. but..
blah.. of course making an MPEG-2 encoder would be somewhat redundant since it's clear apple HAS one they just won't DO anything with it. And of course making an MPEG-4 decoder for any platform would mean that it could be relatively quickly ported, and the mac would be a logical first choice because there are a you could write only the codec without having to worry about the structure (quicktime has it already), and the structure is one that many people knowledgable about such things as graphics programming would be likely to be familiar with..
still a tiny bit of a misdirected effort if you ask me.. i personally think the $5000 and theimac should go to whoever manages to finally come out with some HFS+ support for linux/BSD.:P
It's a shame that X didn't provide an attractive widget set in the first place (or, alternatively, that Motif was, and is, so expensive). Motif, with its rich configuratbility via resources seems cleaner to me in many ways thatn GTK. I presume this will be fixed in later GTK releases, and I hope to see support for X resources at some point...
I've begun to ramble now, so I'll stop, but I'll just round off by saying that vanilla X is almost certainly more configurable than you're giving it credit for.
It probably is, but still: I'm not saying that X, by itself, should have had a widget set. X's modularity is one of it's few truly good points. But what they should have thought to do is provide some kind of place to call the widgets-- i.e. a standard set of stub libraries or somesuch, where the application simply requests a widget of a certain abstract type, and whichever widget system is installed on the computer at the time handles the request. (i guess today we'd do that with some kind of XML, dunno how they'd have done it then..) I believe doing a similar thing to the open/save dialog boxes would seriously improve the *n?x experience.
The scroll bars were not meant as an example of something fundamentally wrong with X, just as an example of something that X users put up with for no apparent reason. Because even if it is somewhat configurable, you have to admit that the widgets in your average linux install are something of a mess, and certainly no better than mediocre. And yes, scrollbar appearance is a nitpick, but it's a pretty damn huge nitpick.
"configurability" isn't the issue-- just that the X people should have thought ahead enough to realize, y'know, at some point people are going to be designing widget systems. If they had thought to provide a nice little place for widgets to plug in we wouldn't have the problem now of having to totally recode everything in order to switch between Motif/Athena/GTK/Qt. Even if it wasn't their responsibility to have solved the problem ahead of time, the problem should have occurred to them.
(note to people about to flame me: not that X is _bad_, just that it's one of the few things i'm aware of in the linux/unix world where something is in hugely wide use because of inertia and no other reason without any serious attempts at alternatives. (yeh, yeh, berlin, whatever) Yes, X is good enough, and the idea is nifty, but i have no idea why people put up with the fundamental shortcomings X does have so easily when these tend to be the people who in other circumstances demand the best they can get, and if they can't get it, write an alternative. Like, the scrollbars. Linux scrollbars are almost invariably hideous, probably as a result of the motif disease which infects everything. That's a tiny thing, but pervasive, and nobody ever bothers doing anything about it. And yes, i realize the scrollbars aren't handled by X or the WM. I don't care. Would it be that difficult to go and _make_ it so they are? would it be that difficult to make a concerted effort to go look at all the standard X progs you're likely to use and jam in GTK scrollbars? Why does nobody bother caring about these things in X? I'm too tired to explain these comments in detail or give examples, so i'm going to get flamed to hell and back. But i could go into greater detail and explain such things if i felt like it. And the article gives a great deal of examples of things in X-- fundamental things-- which are clearly no better than barely acceptable but nobody cares about. So go read that. And i'd add some to the list, such as having a "move this rectangle on the screen over ten pixels" type function that worked, preferably in the xserver's processing, but i dont feel like looking up and checking to make sure x doesn't do such things acceptably already.
The point is, X works, but you could have something so much better if "the community" just tried. But it won't. Well, let's hope Berlin actually gets somewhere. whatever, i'm going to bed. What was NeWS?)
> What do you mean "goes the way of the DAT tape"?
Essentially locked out of any consumer market. I'm not implying they're going to destroy this MPEG tape format; that would be kind of impossible. i'm implying that they're going to force it into being the equivilent of where DAT is now. Very likely they're just going to bury it and pretend it never happened.
Look at where DAT is now: like you said, they're still around, they still work great, certain small groups of people still use them extensively, they are still the best. If you really know where to look, you can get the hardware and/or tapes.
Meanwhile, your average consumer isn't aware they exist, and there are no DATs for sale anywhere other than blank ones.
So this is probably where the DVHS thing is going to go: limited to hobbyist/professional filmmakers, a couple of people who really, really care about this kind of thing, and [i hope] anime fansubbers, whereas now DAT is limited to hobbyists or professionals recording audio [esp. if they need the recording apparatus to be relatively portable], a couple of audiophiles, and concert bootleggers. But meanwhile, if you taped something on your DVHS last night and you want to give it to a friend to watch-- well, that isn't going to happen. Just like with the dat tapes. What it will come down to is that it will be about as difficult to distribute DVHS as it is to distribute DAT. Finding anyone who is aware of either will not be easy. Meaning you'll be COMPLETELY stuck with the shitty-ass VHS and cassettes if you wanna give someone something you recorded and reuse the recording media later. *cassettes grumble grumble*
Until that time comes and it is guaranteed that the DVHS will never actually manage to gain mainstream acceptance no matter how much inherent goodness the format has, i predict anyone actually USING the DVHS to do anything will be harrassed by the MPAA and the TV/cable companies. Also the world is going to end on December 23, 2012.
-mcc-baka --- WARNING --- THIS POST MAY BE CONTENT-FREE --- 1 8UR|\| 4LL MY |V|P3Z 70 V1NYL R3C0RDZ 83C4U53 1 L1|3 7H3 \V4RM 50UND 0F 7H3 F0R|\/|47!! PH33R!!
Oh my goodness.. a good-quality rerecordable tape system?? That's AWESOME. It'll NEVER last. Because now we get to watch the MPAA and all the television companies bitch like hell and throw money at congress until this thing here goes the way of the DAT tape.
Well, there seems to be an unwritten rule that wealthy corporations do not attempt to stop other wealthy corporations from doing things they'd normally scream bloody murder about, so Phillips may get away with it. Phillips seems to have gotten away with the computerless CDR-copier thing, anyway, and i doubt much of anyone is using that for anything but piracy. I dunno. let's see.
I saw no reference in the specs to MPEG-2. maybe i missed something? It says it uses MPEG-1 for the audio.. which layer? 3? Or would that be too much encoding time? can it _play_ mp3/mp2 even if it can't record? I'm drooling thinking about any layer MPEG on a tape. VHS sound is so awful. ARRGH i wish these specs were more specific.
Hmm.. wonder how it handles the rewinds? better than DVD, you'd think? I'm just sitting here thinking about how unbelievably cool it would be to watch a tracking error (or even better forcably speeding up, slowing down, or running backward the drive) on an MPEG-based tape. MPEG artifacts are normally interesting, but watching it attempt to read MPEG and just get random bits sloshing back and forth.. TRIPPY. My pupils are dilating just thinking about it.
ROMs are small. Emulators aren't large. CDs are huge. you could probably fit every worthwhile N.E.S. game ever made into fifty megabytes. You could probably fit most of the worthwhile SNES and Genesis games into the 600 megs or so you'd have left.
I don't know how public the Dreamcast development process is, if you have to buy some expensive liscence or just grab a compiler or what, but if some *cough* third party could put together a couple emulators for the dreamcast.. just port the emus already out there, maybe throw in some debuggerish or game genie cheat modes.. well.. that would be one kickass CD-R, is all i have to say.
Too bad that the closed-minded game developers will never, ever allow such a cd to be published legitimately at any price, despite the fact they haven't made new copies of these games for years are no longer getting any money off them. Their loss. Such a shame that copyright law is going to continue being extended until those games never reach the public domain..
an obsolete computer "museum" i like a bit better.
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Quickies Rock!
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hey, i always thought of emulation pages as an "obsolete computer museum":) seems like a pretty damn complete list to me, even if the focus is on gaming machines. and i will take ANY day being able to RUN the obsolete computer over looking at pictures of them.. seriously, they have just about every old machine ever made, or about half of them anyway, represented there. Fascinating to look at these things, run them, and realize people--many of whom are reading this discussion right now-- actually USED them to DO things. and they're pieces of crap!:) [braces himself for hundreds of flames from angered PDP and C64 zealots]
this page in question is for us mac users only, but you get my point.. perhaps some kind person in the audience would post some emulation resources pointing to emulators that run on wintel or whatever flavors of *n?x you like.
oh and as long on we're on the subject i suppose you ought to look at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/retro/ for those of us who find programming languages as interesting as computers..
I don't think the emulator in question actually works on 68k macintoshes, it claims to requrie a 100Mhz PPC, though a VMWare-style hardware abstraction hack with almost no slowdown would be pretty easy to throw together for a 68k mac i'd imagine. Assuming anyone actually was WILLING to.
although not as cool of the story i once heard of the guy in germany who took a Power Mac and an Apple//gs, removed all the pieces from both, and put all the Power Mac pieces into the//gs.. leaving a power mac in a//gs case:)
i still wonder if that was real. supposedly there are pictures floating around somewhere.
i don't really know anything, but i seem to remember reading somewhere (slashdot? discover magazine?) about a bunch of seizmologists who found a way to get ultraaccurate (sub-meter) GPS readings by using some really wierd workaround to the system. It wasn't the "differential" one everyone else has mentioned where you average values, i think. I think it had something to do with the strength of the signal. But i can't quite remember.
Anyone know what i'm referring to and want to fill in the huge gaps in the story? Am i just on crack?
while the website here is an EXTREMELY good thing-- something that should have been made a LONG time ago-- it still is very incomplete.
i say this because it is completely restricted to.com,.net, and.org, totally ignoring everything else.
Some of those other-country TLDs--.nu,.to, whatever-- may be very good for some people. I for one registered a.cx domain (see webpage and email adress above) because i liked the price (i haven't found anything comparable in.com,.net or.org areas) and have been very happy with it so far. But other than.cx, i don't really know what country TLDs are open. There is no list i am aware of that lists all the TLDs along with who you register that TLD with, how much they charge, are people outside of that country legally allowed to register domains there, are there any odd legal rules (i. e. is it possible that you could have your domain name revoked at will), or even WHERE those domains are registered. Where do you register a.my domain? (malasia, right? no?) Because damned if i know. It isn't nic.my.
and what about.int? (international. i think. i think the U.N. controls it but i'm not sure.) did you even know there was a.int? (i'm only asking because i want unsigned.int or l.int.. i don't think i'm legally allowed to have them though:)).int isn't important, but it's indicative of the fact nobody really knows what's going on with the TLDs anymore. At least nobody you're likely to ever get to talk to, or for that matter come across on IRC/USENET..
Anything ranking or even _talking about_ non-international domains, and comparing them side by side with the international [.com.net.org] domains, would be an amazingly valuable resource. i hope that's what www.domainnamebuyersguide.com evolves into. At the moment they only offhandedely mention that country TLDs exist in the FAQ. As far as i'm aware,.us isn't even MENTIONED on the site anywhere. i thought everyone was supposed to be switching to.us..? At any rate the domain name buyer's guide shows great promise and i wish them luck..
that is a truly wierd statement you've made. I don't call frequent press releases and talking to the press, talking about how Fun and Easy the next WIndows will be with very few specific details anywhere, NEAR equivilent to the steady stream of periodic, sober, low-key descriptions of features and implementation details about 2.4 that have poured out from the people who make the kernel. Hype in my mind is essentially attempting to rile up the future end user and make the end user want whatever is being hyped. Whereas practically everything i've seen written about linux 2.4 isn't even intended to be READ by end users; just stuff by kernel developers for kernel developers..
if you're tired of hearing about the progress of linux 2.4, then don't just read things written about it until it's released.. sheesh.
Re:What it is and why Linux won't run on it.
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oh my God. the following post is horribly offtopic, but here goes anyway:
thank you. your post was like a breath of fresh air. especially on a topic that's slightly Apple-related, since such topics bring the flamebait masters out in droves.. i generally read anything on slashdot connected to Apple even tangenitally not expecting to find a single comment attatched that is the least bit coherent, accurate or informed. Your post was all three of these, and even better didn't mention apple! Apple really doesn't have a whole lot to do with this article and not a lot of posts in this thread seem to be aware of that.
Again, thank you. it's gotten to be very rare that i feel like a better/more informed person after reading a slashdot post, but your post did it to me. Ignore that second reply.:P
i just went to your page.. i never realized the Malkovich script was based on the same code as the Shodouka project.
so just a quick note here to tell you how completely and amazingly cool shodouka was/is..:) Even cooler than the Malkovich script.:) It's amazing the thing works. I don't now and never have spoken japaneese (unfortunately) but still, back in 1996, when i was in the eighth grade, shodouka was the coolest thing i had ever seen.:) Seriously, being able to go to anime pages in japaneese and actually see them the way they were MEANT to be seen completely rocked my world. Even if it was a little slow. -_-
i humbly bow down before your magnificence, oh great and mighty Ping.:)
OK.. i realize complaining about my own post being moderated UP is a little odd, but good LORD!
Where do you get off, moderating my post as "insightful"?? how could you POSSIBLY call that "insightful"?? there isn't one single bit of insight in the damn post! it's just a minor, somewhat interesting anecdote. I have no problem with it being moderated up-- i probably wouldn't have moderated it past score:1 myself had i been the one with the mod access, which is why i didn't put on the score:+1 bonus-- but if you're going to moderate, use ACCURATE moderation!! Don't just assume that because you're pushing the points in the right direction your job is done! The words are there for a _reason_, and "informative", "insightful" and "interesting" are NOT the same thing!! Moderators just mark everything as "insightful" no matter what it is, and it's starting to irritate me rather heavily. If people aren't going to distinguish between "insightful", "interesting" and "informative" when moderating, then cdmrtaco should just replace them with one single tag instead of three! Or at LEAST add some kind of lesser metamod penalty for "fair in that this should have been modded up, but not as insightful" or "fair in that this should have been modded down, but not as offtopic".. (since NOBODY is ever going to metamod misapplied "insightful" ratings if it's a good post)
and i wouldn't really mind normally.. but the entire POINT of the post i'm complaining about was to complain about moderators not thinking and applying "offtopic" to a post that should have been either "troll", "overrated" or not moderated at all.. and the post itself gets hit by a moderator who doesn't think and applies "insightful" where it should have been either "interesting", "underrated" or not moderated at all..
what is going ON here?? is there no escape from the misapplied moderation? ok, bitch-time is over. you can all go back to your homes now there's nothing more to see.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, let's think about this some more.
Microsoft - "Pretty Hate Machine"
LinuxPPC - "Broken"
Debian/PPC - "Fixed"
LinuxCare - "The Downward Spiral"
LinuxOne - "Further Down the Spiral"
xscreensaver - "The Perfect Drug"
the Mac OS - "The Fragile"
Amiga - "Into the Void"
-mcc-baka
i beat my machine, it's a part of me, it's inside of me
i'm stuck in this dream, it's changing me, i am becoming
"Ham radio".. ha!
"ARTeMiS" is merely a
front operation
for the communist
conspiracy to launch nukes
and blow up the moon
as a response to
the U.S. moon-nuke program.
(They're behind scedule.)
The truth is out there
but you refuse to believe.
(score, 0: flamebait)
yes, they were in there, but not in the manner they're used today.
The Congress shall have power.. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
In other words, the constitution only includes patents and copyright to a reasonable, non-unlimited extent, and "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". This isn't what we're complaining about. This is a good thing. What we're complaining about is patents and copyrights used as weapons for corporations to silence individuals, something that was added much, much later, far after the first amendment bits.
What was originally there is more or less to _protect_ people-- i.e. to stop someone from taking the work of others at the expense of the original creator, such as burning 3000 copies of "Dre 2001" and selling them on the street, in which case Dre is in a very real way failing to recieve money that was his due, because 3000 people who would otherwise have bought the album from Dre bought them from the guy on the street. Making the case that the patent/copyright stuff in the constitution was intended to prevent people from taking ideas and concepts from a work and using those ideas and concepts to create a new, independent work, as is done in the case of a parody or the music of Negativland.. well, that doesn't seem to use the same spirit as the parts of the U.S. constitution, seeing as a new work as such would be progress of useful art, and the original creator suffers no loss.
You'll also notice the bits in the original constitution do not contradict free speech, really, and i see NOTHING in there to support the idea of preventing the spread of information-- i.e. preventing information about a technology from being spread. The idea behind the patents was originally to encourage the spread of information-- that in order to convince someone to allow science to progress, they would tell the world how their process worked, and in return would be granted a limited-time monopoly on that process. The idea that something like the DMCA could prevent someone from spreading information they found independantly about a process-- say, cyberpatrol's encryption scheme-- is completely antithetical to the original idea of a patent and what the constitution says, even if the information about said process is in a language other than English (say, C++..)
You'll also note the "for limited times" bit. Current copyright/patent laws extend far, far past the useful lifespan of the ideas they encompass, and the lifespan of a copyright seems to get longer every time that the date of the expiration of Mickey Mouse's copyright comes within the forseeable future. You think it will _ever_ be legal for me to distribute a Legend of Zelda 1 ROM, no matter how long i live and no matter how many years have passed since Nintendo has gotten a penny from that game? Ha.
So yeh, copyrights and patents do predate free speech in U.S. law to an extent, but not in any manner that is antithetical to the idea of free speech.
at least he spelled "mac" in lowercase letters. :) a lot of slashdot posters would have said something like "It also looks like MAC will be bringing Kerberos to OSX".. -_-
[explanation for anyone confused by my statement: "MAC" and "Mac" are not the same thing. A "mac" or a "Mac" is short for "Macintosh", which is a type of computer. An "MAC" is an adress hardwired into an ethernet card used for identification. i hope this clears things up a bit. Most Linux users should understand this already, since Unix-style file systems are case-sensitive and will allow files to coexist despite the fact that treated case-insensitive they have the same name.. i would be willing to bet though that there are some linux users out there who do call mac MAC, and i'd be willing to bet some of these people are the exact same people who bitch like crazy whenever anyone uses the phrase "x windows" in place of "x", even in contexts where "x" alone could also be construed to mean X the bot on undernet, X the anime, or X the san fransisco punk band.. i'm ranting now aren't i? sorry. i've had a bad day.. -_-]
"Alice" is not even an attempt at intelligence. It simply analyses speech patterns without any regard to content or context or previous sequence of conversation and regurgitates replies that were hard-coded in beforehand and designed entirely and simply to "sound realistic" and not at all to mean anything.
if you are looking for a web-based Artificial Intelligence which actually solves problems and attempts to in some way synthesize the information given to it based on context, i suggest you look at
http://www.forum2000.org/
I assure you, you will be impressed.
i know nothing about NeWS, but have been very curious about it ever since i first heard of it.
I first heard of it in the X chapter of the UNIX haters handbook, which makes occational references to NeWS as a windowing system done right. It's also a very interesting read (not FUD at all, just reasonable if incendentary analysis..) and probably would tell you a little about NeWS..
The URL i just listed above, btw, which i just found now on Google, happens to contain a link to a series of NeWS resources, which i haven't read yet. draw your own conclusions.
I am very curious about NeWS, and if anyone out there has used it, please post and let us know anything about it you may have to say.. Or is there anyone who STILL uses it?
What are the differences between this, DPS, and Quartz? DPS and Quartz aren't capable of running over a network are they? (i fear this last sentance will ignite an irrelivant flamewar, but i'm curious, so i'll include it anyway..)
you're forgetting about "gift shipments".
step 1: get person's cookie file
step 2: sign onto ecommerce service as person
step 3: change the person's default email adress with the service to a hotmail account (so they won't notice the "item hasbeen shipped" thing)
step 4: mail something, as a "gift", to a P.O. box. they will let you do this.
If you get lucky no one will notice. Scarily enough, this would work.
I have reread your post several times and am totally unable to find any connection between your post and my post it replied to. Everything you've said is accurate, but i don't understand why you posted it or what it has to do with anything i said.
I only brought up Apple to point out that if the plugin were released under the LGPL rather than the GPL, Apple would be allowed to distribute the plugin as a part of quicktime, and might as such contribute code [i.e. bugfixes] to the LGPLed plugin.
I don't think the MPEG-4 plugin would not be "reverse engineered". MPEG-4 is an open standard. Why would you reverse engineer an open standard?
Do you know what the LGPL is?
What am i missing here?
-mcc-baka
You'd really think they'd do it under the LGPL.
/. discussions after a certain point.. blah
First off this is something that one would think is going to be most useful LGPLed since it is essentially a library, not as an actual application, and thus GPLing it will merely limit its usefulness and at times cause extreme cumbersomeness... I doubt GPLing an mpeg-4 codec will entice anyone to release code under the GPL, but it will probably entice a lot of people to not USE the codec.. thus probably meaning they won't make any improvements to the codec itself.
but secondly and more importantly SINCE THE CODEC IS INTENDED TO BE USED AS A PLUG-IN TO QUICKTIME-- ESSENTIALLY BEING "LINKED INTO" AND IN ANY CASE CONSTITUTING A "WHOLE WORK" WITH QUICKTIME-- wouldn't releasing it under the GPL violate some things?
Or would the violation only apply if someone [apple] attempted to distribute quicktime _with_ the OSS liscence [a la LAME]? Would this be simply to keep apple from benefiting from a codec they didn't contribute to, by ensuring it can't be part of standard quicktime? Wouldn't that simply result in apple developing their own MPEG-4 codec?
Please correct any flaws in my logic.. but really i think the LGPL STILL is the correct choice for this kind of thing [standalone librarystyle mpeg4 codec, esp. one intended to be used as a plugin to a propeitary product] because it would make it the most useful for everyone while still ensuring any modifications to the codec itself are still kept open (as opposed to BSD style liscenses where everyone from microsoft to Real would rob the code blind..)
i'm sure nobody will ever read this post.. nobody reads
what about MPEG-2??? .m2v movie off the internet and run it. I don't know why Quicktime doesn't support it, as would seem the natural thing to do, but it doesn't, and i assume it has something to do with DVD. Apple does have a perfectly working MPEG-2 decoder in the Apple DVD player, but that won't run files off the hard drive. I can't normally run DVD player because i have macsbug installed and rebooting just for that seems kind of silly, but that doesn't matter since it wont' run files off a hard drive anyway. I have no use for DVDs, of course, it's just that that was what was in the machine. You'd think that now they are charging for quicktime, they could go to the bother of including things like MPEG video encoders or MPEG-2 playback to justify the cost, but.. guess not. Well, actually, if you compare it to _REALPLAYER_ you get a LOT for your money.. so i guess i shouldn't complain.. but..
:P
We have no MPEG-2 drivers for quicktime yet. I have this unbelievably wonderful G4 right here.. between the Rage 128 and Altivec, it is probably more equipped to handle MPEG-2 style math than any other personal computer ever made.. and i can't download a simple
blah.. of course making an MPEG-2 encoder would be somewhat redundant since it's clear apple HAS one they just won't DO anything with it. And of course making an MPEG-4 decoder for any platform would mean that it could be relatively quickly ported, and the mac would be a logical first choice because there are a you could write only the codec without having to worry about the structure (quicktime has it already), and the structure is one that many people knowledgable about such things as graphics programming would be likely to be familiar with..
still a tiny bit of a misdirected effort if you ask me.. i personally think the $5000 and theimac should go to whoever manages to finally come out with some HFS+ support for linux/BSD.
It's a shame that X didn't provide an attractive widget set in the first place (or, alternatively, that Motif was, and is, so expensive). Motif, with its rich configuratbility via resources seems cleaner to me in many ways thatn GTK. I presume this will be fixed in later GTK releases, and I hope to see support for X resources at some point...
I've begun to ramble now, so I'll stop, but I'll just round off by saying that vanilla X is almost certainly more configurable than you're giving it credit for.
It probably is, but still:
I'm not saying that X, by itself, should have had a widget set. X's modularity is one of it's few truly good points. But what they should have thought to do is provide some kind of place to call the widgets-- i.e. a standard set of stub libraries or somesuch, where the application simply requests a widget of a certain abstract type, and whichever widget system is installed on the computer at the time handles the request. (i guess today we'd do that with some kind of XML, dunno how they'd have done it then..) I believe doing a similar thing to the open/save dialog boxes would seriously improve the *n?x experience.
The scroll bars were not meant as an example of something fundamentally wrong with X, just as an example of something that X users put up with for no apparent reason. Because even if it is somewhat configurable, you have to admit that the widgets in your average linux install are something of a mess, and certainly no better than mediocre. And yes, scrollbar appearance is a nitpick, but it's a pretty damn huge nitpick.
"configurability" isn't the issue-- just that the X people should have thought ahead enough to realize, y'know, at some point people are going to be designing widget systems. If they had thought to provide a nice little place for widgets to plug in we wouldn't have the problem now of having to totally recode everything in order to switch between Motif/Athena/GTK/Qt. Even if it wasn't their responsibility to have solved the problem ahead of time, the problem should have occurred to them.
I, too, am now rambling, so i shall stop.
X has a level of "acceptable mediocrity".
now where have i heard that before.
(note to people about to flame me: not that X is _bad_, just that it's one of the few things i'm aware of in the linux/unix world where something is in hugely wide use because of inertia and no other reason without any serious attempts at alternatives. (yeh, yeh, berlin, whatever) Yes, X is good enough, and the idea is nifty, but i have no idea why people put up with the fundamental shortcomings X does have so easily when these tend to be the people who in other circumstances demand the best they can get, and if they can't get it, write an alternative. Like, the scrollbars. Linux scrollbars are almost invariably hideous, probably as a result of the motif disease which infects everything. That's a tiny thing, but pervasive, and nobody ever bothers doing anything about it. And yes, i realize the scrollbars aren't handled by X or the WM. I don't care. Would it be that difficult to go and _make_ it so they are? would it be that difficult to make a concerted effort to go look at all the standard X progs you're likely to use and jam in GTK scrollbars? Why does nobody bother caring about these things in X? I'm too tired to explain these comments in detail or give examples, so i'm going to get flamed to hell and back. But i could go into greater detail and explain such things if i felt like it. And the article gives a great deal of examples of things in X-- fundamental things-- which are clearly no better than barely acceptable but nobody cares about. So go read that. And i'd add some to the list, such as having a "move this rectangle on the screen over ten pixels" type function that worked, preferably in the xserver's processing, but i dont feel like looking up and checking to make sure x doesn't do such things acceptably already.
The point is, X works, but you could have something so much better if "the community" just tried. But it won't. Well, let's hope Berlin actually gets somewhere. whatever, i'm going to bed. What was NeWS?)
> What do you mean "goes the way of the DAT tape"?
Essentially locked out of any consumer market. I'm not implying they're going to destroy this MPEG tape format; that would be kind of impossible. i'm implying that they're going to force it into being the equivilent of where DAT is now. Very likely they're just going to bury it and pretend it never happened.
Look at where DAT is now: like you said, they're still around, they still work great, certain small groups of people still use them extensively, they are still the best. If you really know where to look, you can get the hardware and/or tapes.
Meanwhile, your average consumer isn't aware they exist, and there are no DATs for sale anywhere other than blank ones.
So this is probably where the DVHS thing is going to go: limited to hobbyist/professional filmmakers, a couple of people who really, really care about this kind of thing, and [i hope] anime fansubbers, whereas now DAT is limited to hobbyists or professionals recording audio [esp. if they need the recording apparatus to be relatively portable], a couple of audiophiles, and concert bootleggers.
But meanwhile, if you taped something on your DVHS last night and you want to give it to a friend to watch-- well, that isn't going to happen. Just like with the dat tapes. What it will come down to is that it will be about as difficult to distribute DVHS as it is to distribute DAT. Finding anyone who is aware of either will not be easy. Meaning you'll be COMPLETELY stuck with the shitty-ass VHS and cassettes if you wanna give someone something you recorded and reuse the recording media later. *cassettes grumble grumble*
Until that time comes and it is guaranteed that the DVHS will never actually manage to gain mainstream acceptance no matter how much inherent goodness the format has, i predict anyone actually USING the DVHS to do anything will be harrassed by the MPAA and the TV/cable companies. Also the world is going to end on December 23, 2012.
-mcc-baka
--- WARNING --- THIS POST MAY BE CONTENT-FREE ---
1 8UR|\| 4LL MY |V|P3Z 70 V1NYL R3C0RDZ 83C4U53 1 L1|3 7H3 \V4RM 50UND 0F 7H3 F0R|\/|47!! PH33R!!
Oh my goodness.. a good-quality rerecordable tape system?? That's AWESOME. It'll NEVER last.
Because now we get to watch the MPAA and all the television companies bitch like hell and throw money at congress until this thing here goes the way of the DAT tape.
Well, there seems to be an unwritten rule that wealthy corporations do not attempt to stop other wealthy corporations from doing things they'd normally scream bloody murder about, so Phillips may get away with it. Phillips seems to have gotten away with the computerless CDR-copier thing, anyway, and i doubt much of anyone is using that for anything but piracy. I dunno. let's see.
I saw no reference in the specs to MPEG-2. maybe i missed something? It says it uses MPEG-1 for the audio.. which layer? 3? Or would that be too much encoding time? can it _play_ mp3/mp2 even if it can't record?
I'm drooling thinking about any layer MPEG on a tape. VHS sound is so awful. ARRGH i wish these specs were more specific.
Hmm.. wonder how it handles the rewinds? better than DVD, you'd think?
I'm just sitting here thinking about how unbelievably cool it would be to watch a tracking error (or even better forcably speeding up, slowing down, or running backward the drive) on an MPEG-based tape. MPEG artifacts are normally interesting, but watching it attempt to read MPEG and just get random bits sloshing back and forth.. TRIPPY. My pupils are dilating just thinking about it.
-mcc-baka
so where is this going to go eventually..?
ROMs are small. Emulators aren't large. CDs are huge. you could probably fit every worthwhile N.E.S. game ever made into fifty megabytes. You could probably fit most of the worthwhile SNES and Genesis games into the 600 megs or so you'd have left.
I don't know how public the Dreamcast development process is, if you have to buy some expensive liscence or just grab a compiler or what, but if some *cough* third party could put together a couple emulators for the dreamcast.. just port the emus already out there, maybe throw in some debuggerish or game genie cheat modes..
well..
that would be one kickass CD-R, is all i have to say.
Too bad that the closed-minded game developers will never, ever allow such a cd to be published legitimately at any price, despite the fact they haven't made new copies of these games for years are no longer getting any money off them. Their loss.
Such a shame that copyright law is going to continue being extended until those games never reach the public domain..
http://emulation.net/
:) :) [braces himself for hundreds of flames from angered PDP and C64 zealots]
hey, i always thought of emulation pages as an "obsolete computer museum"
seems like a pretty damn complete list to me, even if the focus is on gaming machines. and i will take ANY day being able to RUN the obsolete computer over looking at pictures of them..
seriously, they have just about every old machine ever made, or about half of them anyway, represented there. Fascinating to look at these things, run them, and realize people--many of whom are reading this discussion right now-- actually USED them to DO things. and they're pieces of crap!
this page in question is for us mac users only, but you get my point.. perhaps some kind person in the audience would post some emulation resources pointing to emulators that run on wintel or whatever flavors of *n?x you like.
oh and as long on we're on the subject i suppose you ought to look at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/retro/
for those of us who find programming languages as interesting as computers..
A TI-92 emulator for the macintosh is available here.
I don't think the emulator in question actually works on 68k macintoshes, it claims to requrie a 100Mhz PPC, though a VMWare-style hardware abstraction hack with almost no slowdown would be pretty easy to throw together for a 68k mac i'd imagine. Assuming anyone actually was WILLING to.
although not as cool of the story i once heard of the guy in germany who took a Power Mac and an Apple //gs, removed all the pieces from both, and put all the Power Mac pieces into the //gs.. leaving a power mac in a //gs case :)
i still wonder if that was real. supposedly there are pictures floating around somewhere.
> crack. definitely crack.
ok.
thanks for the clarification.
i don't really know anything, but i seem to remember reading somewhere (slashdot? discover magazine?) about a bunch of seizmologists who found a way to get ultraaccurate (sub-meter) GPS readings by using some really wierd workaround to the system. It wasn't the "differential" one everyone else has mentioned where you average values, i think. I think it had something to do with the strength of the signal. But i can't quite remember.
Anyone know what i'm referring to and want to fill in the huge gaps in the story? Am i just on crack?
while the website here is an EXTREMELY good thing-- something that should have been made a LONG time ago-- it still is very incomplete.
.com, .net, and .org, totally ignoring everything else.
.nu, .to, whatever-- may be very good for some people. I for one registered a .cx domain (see webpage and email adress above) because i liked the price (i haven't found anything comparable in .com, .net or .org areas) and have been very happy with it so far. But other than .cx, i don't really know what country TLDs are open. There is no list i am aware of that lists all the TLDs along with who you register that TLD with, how much they charge, are people outside of that country legally allowed to register domains there, are there any odd legal rules (i. e. is it possible that you could have your domain name revoked at will), or even WHERE those domains are registered. Where do you register a .my domain? (malasia, right? no?) Because damned if i know. It isn't nic.my.
.int? (international. i think. i think the U.N. controls it but i'm not sure.) did you even know there was a .int? (i'm only asking because i want unsigned.int or l.int.. i don't think i'm legally allowed to have them though :)) .int isn't important, but it's indicative of the fact nobody really knows what's going on with the TLDs anymore. At least nobody you're likely to ever get to talk to, or for that matter come across on IRC/USENET..
.net .org] domains, would be an amazingly valuable resource. i hope that's what www.domainnamebuyersguide.com evolves into. At the moment they only offhandedely mention that country TLDs exist in the FAQ. As far as i'm aware, .us isn't even MENTIONED on the site anywhere. i thought everyone was supposed to be switching to .us..?
i say this because it is completely restricted to
Some of those other-country TLDs--
and what about
Anything ranking or even _talking about_ non-international domains, and comparing them side by side with the international [.com
At any rate the domain name buyer's guide shows great promise and i wish them luck..
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
um, "hype"?
are periodic progress reports "hype"?
that is a truly wierd statement you've made. I don't call frequent press releases and talking to the press, talking about how Fun and Easy the next WIndows will be with very few specific details anywhere, NEAR equivilent to the steady stream of periodic, sober, low-key descriptions of features and implementation details about 2.4 that have poured out from the people who make the kernel. Hype in my mind is essentially attempting to rile up the future end user and make the end user want whatever is being hyped. Whereas practically everything i've seen written about linux 2.4 isn't even intended to be READ by end users; just stuff by kernel developers for kernel developers..
if you're tired of hearing about the progress of linux 2.4, then don't just read things written about it until it's released.. sheesh.
oh my God.
:P
the following post is horribly offtopic, but here goes anyway:
thank you. your post was like a breath of fresh air.
especially on a topic that's slightly Apple-related, since such topics bring the flamebait masters out in droves.. i generally read anything on slashdot connected to Apple even tangenitally not expecting to find a single comment attatched that is the least bit coherent, accurate or informed.
Your post was all three of these, and even better didn't mention apple! Apple really doesn't have a whole lot to do with this article and not a lot of posts in this thread seem to be aware of that.
Again, thank you. it's gotten to be very rare that i feel like a better/more informed person after reading a slashdot post, but your post did it to me. Ignore that second reply.
i just went to your page..
:) Even cooler than the Malkovich script. :) It's amazing the thing works. I don't now and never have spoken japaneese (unfortunately) but still, back in 1996, when i was in the eighth grade, shodouka was the coolest thing i had ever seen. :) Seriously, being able to go to anime pages in japaneese and actually see them the way they were MEANT to be seen completely rocked my world. Even if it was a little slow. -_-
:)
i never realized the Malkovich script was based on the same code as the Shodouka project.
so just a quick note here to tell you how completely and amazingly cool shodouka was/is..
i humbly bow down before your magnificence, oh great and mighty Ping.
OK.. i realize complaining about my own post being moderated UP is a little odd, but good LORD!
Where do you get off, moderating my post as "insightful"?? how could you POSSIBLY call that "insightful"?? there isn't one single bit of insight in the damn post! it's just a minor, somewhat interesting anecdote. I have no problem with it being moderated up-- i probably wouldn't have moderated it past score:1 myself had i been the one with the mod access, which is why i didn't put on the score:+1 bonus-- but if you're going to moderate, use ACCURATE moderation!! Don't just assume that because you're pushing the points in the right direction your job is done! The words are there for a _reason_, and "informative", "insightful" and "interesting" are NOT the same thing!!
Moderators just mark everything as "insightful" no matter what it is, and it's starting to irritate me rather heavily. If people aren't going to distinguish between "insightful", "interesting" and "informative" when moderating, then cdmrtaco should just replace them with one single tag instead of three! Or at LEAST add some kind of lesser metamod penalty for "fair in that this should have been modded up, but not as insightful" or "fair in that this should have been modded down, but not as offtopic".. (since NOBODY is ever going to metamod misapplied "insightful" ratings if it's a good post)
and i wouldn't really mind normally.. but the entire POINT of the post i'm complaining about was to complain about moderators not thinking and applying "offtopic" to a post that should have been either "troll", "overrated" or not moderated at all.. and the post itself gets hit by a moderator who doesn't think and applies "insightful" where it should have been either "interesting", "underrated" or not moderated at all..
what is going ON here??
is there no escape from the misapplied moderation?
ok, bitch-time is over. you can all go back to your homes now there's nothing more to see.