Search Amazon.com for Cowboy Bebop. They have an exclusive to Amazon deal on the series. You can buy all six discs in one package for $98, which is a lot cheaper than buying the individual discs anywhere else! I thought I would never get to see Bebop legitimately until I came across this deal.
Very nice, but why is he standing it next to a large radiator? Maybe the central heating packed in, and this monster storage array is going to keep him warm?
Thanks Josh! I was using version 1.0.4 that was the latest when I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago, which didn't have the --until switch. I've got 1.1.0 now, and my flac editting is surely going to be a lot easier:-)
Does anyone know if there is any way to edit FLAC files at the commandline? Like tell it to output a region from a starting time to an ending time to another file?
Editting 30-minute audio files on Linux is quite slow going using the GUI programs. The best I've yet found is GLAME, which at least lets me select a region then resize the region to get things right, but it takes an age. It would be much quicker to pinpoint the start and end points by listening in xmms, then use a commandline.
The parent is obviously a troll. For anyone taken in by the flawed logic of the parent, there is a solution to the problem presented, a developer who builds something from the open code and wants to commercialise it. All contributors to the project retain their own copyright, and thus are free to licence their code to others by different licenses. If the developer builds something from just the originally released code, he would have to negotiate a commercial license from the original authors. If he wants to commercialise something derrived from code from many contributors, he's going to need to get agreement and terms from all those contributors, or replace their code with his own.
Ultimately its pretty obvious why a non-comercial clause might appear in a license. The original developer doesn't want to have to pay someone else to play the finished game, when they themselves did so very much of the work.
The author of the article, Michael Wolff, wrote a book called Burn Rate back in 1998. Its all about how his small media company got sucked into the DotCom revolution, nearly made him very rich and nearly bankrupt, and generally pointed out that the bubble was going to burst, two years before it did. Most of his attempts to sell his company for lots of cash involved AOL, so he has plenty more to say about them in the book. And he made this point about AOL as the 'ultimate brown paper bag' in that book, so the article in a large part is just a rehash of his own work of four years ago. Still, a good book and a decent article.
Criticising the BBCs use of Real is actually bad for their use of Ogg. Within the BBC, using Real is a 'Not Microsoft' option. They don't want to be forced to use WM[A|V] and all the Microsoft streaming software. Management feel more comfortable with a commercial offering at the moment. If it comes to their attention that there are many complaints about Real, they will try to replace it with Microsoft. Ogg needs to prove itself alongside Real first.
Nostalgia rush! This takes me back to 1994, when I was buying a new PC, comparing features on machines from lots of different companies. Back then it was very common for a computer to come with Corel WP, or Lotus SmartSuite. There really was no de-facto standard for home computers, though I never saw any of these suites in use in eductational orgs (I was a student at the time).
What I really want are videos of current Japanese videogame commercials. A while ago some big gaming site posted the Chu-Chu Rocket commercial, and since then Edge (UK videogame magazine) has been summarising an ad each month. Now I am hooked!
Does anyone know where I can download some of these? I would particularly like to see the Japanese ad for Tactics Ogre: Knights Of Lodis on GBA.
How can you balance liking LotR so much that you spend time learning an Elvish language with not thinking the first film was an insult to the source?
Low points for me were having Frodo transported into Rivendell by Liv Tyler when in the source it is one of the defining moments of his character as he resists the Riders on his own, and the way that every journey appears to take exactly one day, and the film in total about a week, despite the source taking place over some months.
The film was made for people who are distinctly non-fanatical, people who have not read the books. Its only redeeming feature is that it may bring more people to read the books and come to see how poor the film is.
This is all relative to the books. On its own, the film is reasonably good, but by claiming to be a film of that story it is very poor.
Winamp does if you download the 'standard' version, but the 'lite' version doesn't (it just lacks the input plugin). On Linux, XMMS (the Winamp work-a-like) supports Ogg too.
Let me get this straight. They watch the anime Serial Experiments Lain, take the most superficial view of it and go away to make the Hollywood perspective on this, with appropriately enormous budget and pretty-boy lead.
Then, when the udder is starting to dry out, they think there will be more milk if they turn it back into a US-made anime?
Like videogames, all good anime comes from Japan. OK, some good videogames come from the UK, France and Texas, but the best come from Japan.
Actually, how can they call it anime if its not Japanese? Surely its just a cartoon series?
OK, do you have an opinion on what constitutes 'distributing'? This has been bothering me for some time. I have often seen people claim that you can use your GPL-derrivative for internal use without having to distribute source code, but I don't understand the basis of the claim.
For sure you don't have to put the source code up on a public FTP to let anyone have a copy. But don't you still have to make the source available, under the GPL, to anyone you distribute a binary? So there is nothing legally stopping someone inside your organisation demanding the code, then distributing it to the rest of the world. Its not even as if you could fire the guy, as he wouldn't have done anything wrong, just acting within his legal rights under the GPL.
I didn't mean to advocate the BSD there, and I agree that the end result is sometimes the odious embrace-and-extend. But for the times that has happened to the BSD TCP/IP stack, there have been hundreds if not thousands of times it has been reused in other applications, particularly embedded systems. In that context, the other reason for the BSD, the one I forgot earlier, comes out - interoperability. The other motivation I have heard for using the BSD is that you want to promote software interoperability by getting your implementation of a standard into as many different applications as possible. The downside of course is when a vendor with a strong market position just does an embrace-and-extend, which gives the double disrespect of abusing your code and damaging the environment for interoperability.
Anyway, I was trying to highlight the philosophical difference, not the pratical outcomes.
There is a big distinction between the GPL and the BSD-style licenses. The GPL is all about making sure that people who use GPL licensed code release their new code under the GPL too. The intention is to create more GPLed code. The BSD license is about propogating quality code. The idea is that if you think your code is a good implementation of something, you release it under the BSD, which allows anyone to use it in their own applications without being restricted in how they license their own code at all. A BSD coder doesn't care what use their code is put to or who profits from it, they just want it to be used. That's a pretty big difference:-)
"Most of them are gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software"
he implies that these people previously thought that it was not OK to use non-free software. That seems pretty unlikely. Most of the top kernel hackers work in the computer industry as their day job, so they are likely not wholely against non-free software anyway.
Linus Torvalds clearly doesn't have a problem with non-free software. This is a part of his pragmatic viewpoint. Perhaps he is socially engineering the project by trying to positively select other pragmatic people for the kernel project? It would likely be much easier to progress in the kernel project working with a team of pragmatists - less distracting flamewars for one thing.
Of course that doesn't help to progress the GNU project. What RMS would appear to advocate would be that some of the kernel hackers come off that project for a while to create the configuration management software that would best suit Linus.
It depends on your goals. But then, that's a pragmatic view, too.
If Konqueror or any other X-Windows application goes crazy, the easiest way to kill it is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Escape. The cursor changes to a skull and cross-bones, because XKill is now running. Click on any window of the crazy application and it will DIE!!! There, that's a lot simpler and more intuitive than Ctrl-Alt-Delete and working out which of the obscure program filenames corresponds to the program that's gone wrong. Point and click:-)
As another poster said, the US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK data protection act. Europe does though. This is one of the things that sticks in the wheels of international business. US companies seem to have few obligations regarding the data they collect about people. If they try to do business in Europe, they are breaking European laws if they siphon the data back to the US where they can abuse it as much as they like. Its a hot topic at international trade talks. For the moment us Europeans can feel that at least one of our laws is worthwhile. But don't expect it to last. The US is constantly trying to chip away at our resolve to keep this law, instead of doing the respectful thing for its own citizens and enact something similar and compatible.
What you're missing about Blair is that despite claiming to be a socialist, his likes nothing better than hanging out with the rich and famous. When he won his first election, he celebrated by throwing a party for pop stars and film stars. And he wastes no opportunity to hang out with BillG. He has sold out much of the UK government IT systems to M$, including this thing called the Government Gateway, which is now basically the world's biggest reference.Net installation - which has been mandated as something all local government organisations have to connect into by 2005. There was an article on The Register not many days ago about the number of serious M$ licences needed to connect each of the hundreds of local government offices to this thing.
And the idea is that any citizen or organisation wanting to interact with the government will do it online, though Gateway. And the government has this contract with M$ that says M$ can resell the product to other countries (it was built by M$ consultancy, whose massive rates were paid by the government), and the UK gets a mere 20% of the profit from any future sales. So now the UK government has a commercial motive to promote the M$ platform to as many other countries as possible. It makes me sick!
There is no such thing as a cool cup-holder. In any sane country its illegal to drink while driving because its too distracting. One of my favourite features of my E46 BMW is that it has NO cup-holders. Face it, for a cup-holder to be an effective preventer of spilled drinks, it has to be combined with a car engine that doesn't have enough torque to pull the skin off custard, and a driver who doesn't have the will to go round corners above a walking pace. Now I understand why the larger Audis I see often have such small engines - its to save the interior from coffee stains.
I'm on your side totally, and I hope very much that the XBox will fail, because I don't want to see the console games market go the way that the home computer market of the 80s did once MS started to take over.
But your take on the XBox hardware isn't right. Its based on commodity parts (PIII, GeForce4, RDRAM), but the architecture isn't the same as a PC. It has all the IO bottlenecks ironed out between the CPU, memory and GPU. This is an important factor in what makes a console with apparently low spec components capable of running games more breath-taking than those running on PCs several years newer. In that regard its closer to a PS2 than a PC.
Jet Set Radio Future is rubbish compared to the Dreamcast original. Okay the graphics have been seriously uprated, but its totally spoiled by the way that if you are within three feet of anything resembling a rail, you sort of warp to it and automatically grind. There is just no skill involved whatsoever. And the music of the original was better. Long live Jet Set Radio on Dreamcast!
The GBA screen has a beautiful picture when used in daylight. I bought mine in the winter, and played (and cursed) under artificial light for three months. Then a couple of weeks ago the nights became lighter with the season, and I was able to sit next to the window to play it. I couldn't believe how vibrant the colours are and how sharp the image, in Golden Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
Search Amazon.com for Cowboy Bebop. They have an exclusive to Amazon deal on the series. You can buy all six discs in one package for $98, which is a lot cheaper than buying the individual discs anywhere else! I thought I would never get to see Bebop legitimately until I came across this deal.
Very nice, but why is he standing it next to a large radiator? Maybe the central heating packed in, and this monster storage array is going to keep him warm?
GTA: Vice City
Thanks Josh! I was using version 1.0.4 that was the latest when I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago, which didn't have the --until switch. I've got 1.1.0 now, and my flac editting is surely going to be a lot easier :-)
Does anyone know if there is any way to edit FLAC files at the commandline? Like tell it to output a region from a starting time to an ending time to another file?
Editting 30-minute audio files on Linux is quite slow going using the GUI programs. The best I've yet found is GLAME, which at least lets me select a region then resize the region to get things right, but it takes an age. It would be much quicker to pinpoint the start and end points by listening in xmms, then use a commandline.
The parent is obviously a troll. For anyone taken in by the flawed logic of the parent, there is a solution to the problem presented, a developer who builds something from the open code and wants to commercialise it. All contributors to the project retain their own copyright, and thus are free to licence their code to others by different licenses. If the developer builds something from just the originally released code, he would have to negotiate a commercial license from the original authors. If he wants to commercialise something derrived from code from many contributors, he's going to need to get agreement and terms from all those contributors, or replace their code with his own.
Ultimately its pretty obvious why a non-comercial clause might appear in a license. The original developer doesn't want to have to pay someone else to play the finished game, when they themselves did so very much of the work.
The author of the article, Michael Wolff, wrote a book called Burn Rate back in 1998. Its all about how his small media company got sucked into the DotCom revolution, nearly made him very rich and nearly bankrupt, and generally pointed out that the bubble was going to burst, two years before it did. Most of his attempts to sell his company for lots of cash involved AOL, so he has plenty more to say about them in the book. And he made this point about AOL as the 'ultimate brown paper bag' in that book, so the article in a large part is just a rehash of his own work of four years ago. Still, a good book and a decent article.
Criticising the BBCs use of Real is actually bad for their use of Ogg. Within the BBC, using Real is a 'Not Microsoft' option. They don't want to be forced to use WM[A|V] and all the Microsoft streaming software. Management feel more comfortable with a commercial offering at the moment. If it comes to their attention that there are many complaints about Real, they will try to replace it with Microsoft. Ogg needs to prove itself alongside Real first.
Nostalgia rush! This takes me back to 1994, when I was buying a new PC, comparing features on machines from lots of different companies. Back then it was very common for a computer to come with Corel WP, or Lotus SmartSuite. There really was no de-facto standard for home computers, though I never saw any of these suites in use in eductational orgs (I was a student at the time).
What I really want are videos of current Japanese videogame commercials. A while ago some big gaming site posted the Chu-Chu Rocket commercial, and since then Edge (UK videogame magazine) has been summarising an ad each month. Now I am hooked!
Does anyone know where I can download some of these? I would particularly like to see the Japanese ad for Tactics Ogre: Knights Of Lodis on GBA.
How can you balance liking LotR so much that you spend time learning an Elvish language with not thinking the first film was an insult to the source?
Low points for me were having Frodo transported into Rivendell by Liv Tyler when in the source it is one of the defining moments of his character as he resists the Riders on his own, and the way that every journey appears to take exactly one day, and the film in total about a week, despite the source taking place over some months.
The film was made for people who are distinctly non-fanatical, people who have not read the books. Its only redeeming feature is that it may bring more people to read the books and come to see how poor the film is.
This is all relative to the books. On its own, the film is reasonably good, but by claiming to be a film of that story it is very poor.
Winamp does if you download the 'standard' version, but the 'lite' version doesn't (it just lacks the input plugin). On Linux, XMMS (the Winamp work-a-like) supports Ogg too.
Let me get this straight. They watch the anime Serial Experiments Lain, take the most superficial view of it and go away to make the Hollywood perspective on this, with appropriately enormous budget and pretty-boy lead.
Then, when the udder is starting to dry out, they think there will be more milk if they turn it back into a US-made anime?
Like videogames, all good anime comes from Japan. OK, some good videogames come from the UK, France and Texas, but the best come from Japan.
Actually, how can they call it anime if its not Japanese? Surely its just a cartoon series?
In what way is PostgreSQL not open source? Its distributed under the BSD license.
OK, do you have an opinion on what constitutes 'distributing'? This has been bothering me for some time. I have often seen people claim that you can use your GPL-derrivative for internal use without having to distribute source code, but I don't understand the basis of the claim.
For sure you don't have to put the source code up on a public FTP to let anyone have a copy. But don't you still have to make the source available, under the GPL, to anyone you distribute a binary? So there is nothing legally stopping someone inside your organisation demanding the code, then distributing it to the rest of the world. Its not even as if you could fire the guy, as he wouldn't have done anything wrong, just acting within his legal rights under the GPL.
I didn't mean to advocate the BSD there, and I agree that the end result is sometimes the odious embrace-and-extend. But for the times that has happened to the BSD TCP/IP stack, there have been hundreds if not thousands of times it has been reused in other applications, particularly embedded systems. In that context, the other reason for the BSD, the one I forgot earlier, comes out - interoperability. The other motivation I have heard for using the BSD is that you want to promote software interoperability by getting your implementation of a standard into as many different applications as possible. The downside of course is when a vendor with a strong market position just does an embrace-and-extend, which gives the double disrespect of abusing your code and damaging the environment for interoperability.
Anyway, I was trying to highlight the philosophical difference, not the pratical outcomes.
There is a big distinction between the GPL and the BSD-style licenses. The GPL is all about making sure that people who use GPL licensed code release their new code under the GPL too. The intention is to create more GPLed code. The BSD license is about propogating quality code. The idea is that if you think your code is a good implementation of something, you release it under the BSD, which allows anyone to use it in their own applications without being restricted in how they license their own code at all. A BSD coder doesn't care what use their code is put to or who profits from it, they just want it to be used. That's a pretty big difference :-)
Where RMS says:
"Most of them are gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software"
he implies that these people previously thought that it was not OK to use non-free software. That seems pretty unlikely. Most of the top kernel hackers work in the computer industry as their day job, so they are likely not wholely against non-free software anyway.
Linus Torvalds clearly doesn't have a problem with non-free software. This is a part of his pragmatic viewpoint. Perhaps he is socially engineering the project by trying to positively select other pragmatic people for the kernel project? It would likely be much easier to progress in the kernel project working with a team of pragmatists - less distracting flamewars for one thing.
Of course that doesn't help to progress the GNU project. What RMS would appear to advocate would be that some of the kernel hackers come off that project for a while to create the configuration management software that would best suit Linus.
It depends on your goals. But then, that's a pragmatic view, too.
If Konqueror or any other X-Windows application goes crazy, the easiest way to kill it is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Escape. The cursor changes to a skull and cross-bones, because XKill is now running. Click on any window of the crazy application and it will DIE!!! There, that's a lot simpler and more intuitive than Ctrl-Alt-Delete and working out which of the obscure program filenames corresponds to the program that's gone wrong. Point and click :-)
As another poster said, the US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK data protection act. Europe does though. This is one of the things that sticks in the wheels of international business. US companies seem to have few obligations regarding the data they collect about people. If they try to do business in Europe, they are breaking European laws if they siphon the data back to the US where they can abuse it as much as they like. Its a hot topic at international trade talks. For the moment us Europeans can feel that at least one of our laws is worthwhile. But don't expect it to last. The US is constantly trying to chip away at our resolve to keep this law, instead of doing the respectful thing for its own citizens and enact something similar and compatible.
What you're missing about Blair is that despite claiming to be a socialist, his likes nothing better than hanging out with the rich and famous. When he won his first election, he celebrated by throwing a party for pop stars and film stars. And he wastes no opportunity to hang out with BillG. He has sold out much of the UK government IT systems to M$, including this thing called the Government Gateway, which is now basically the world's biggest reference .Net installation - which has been mandated as something all local government organisations have to connect into by 2005. There was an article on The Register not many days ago about the number of serious M$ licences needed to connect each of the hundreds of local government offices to this thing.
And the idea is that any citizen or organisation wanting to interact with the government will do it online, though Gateway. And the government has this contract with M$ that says M$ can resell the product to other countries (it was built by M$ consultancy, whose massive rates were paid by the government), and the UK gets a mere 20% of the profit from any future sales. So now the UK government has a commercial motive to promote the M$ platform to as many other countries as possible. It makes me sick!
There is no such thing as a cool cup-holder. In any sane country its illegal to drink while driving because its too distracting. One of my favourite features of my E46 BMW is that it has NO cup-holders. Face it, for a cup-holder to be an effective preventer of spilled drinks, it has to be combined with a car engine that doesn't have enough torque to pull the skin off custard, and a driver who doesn't have the will to go round corners above a walking pace. Now I understand why the larger Audis I see often have such small engines - its to save the interior from coffee stains.
I'm on your side totally, and I hope very much that the XBox will fail, because I don't want to see the console games market go the way that the home computer market of the 80s did once MS started to take over.
But your take on the XBox hardware isn't right. Its based on commodity parts (PIII, GeForce4, RDRAM), but the architecture isn't the same as a PC. It has all the IO bottlenecks ironed out between the CPU, memory and GPU. This is an important factor in what makes a console with apparently low spec components capable of running games more breath-taking than those running on PCs several years newer. In that regard its closer to a PS2 than a PC.
Jet Set Radio Future is rubbish compared to the Dreamcast original. Okay the graphics have been seriously uprated, but its totally spoiled by the way that if you are within three feet of anything resembling a rail, you sort of warp to it and automatically grind. There is just no skill involved whatsoever. And the music of the original was better. Long live Jet Set Radio on Dreamcast!
The GBA screen has a beautiful picture when used in daylight. I bought mine in the winter, and played (and cursed) under artificial light for three months. Then a couple of weeks ago the nights became lighter with the season, and I was able to sit next to the window to play it. I couldn't believe how vibrant the colours are and how sharp the image, in Golden Sun.