You are missing the point of emulation, according to the people that produce emulators.
With emulation going more mainstream every day, there are a lot of people around today that treat and use emulation as another form of warez. But the people writing the emulators, and the old-skool fans have two driving interests in this. Most important is the technical challenge involved. And in the background, there is the idea of preserving 'video game heritage'.
CPS2shock are acting completely within these aims in doing what they have done, and not going any further. They have no interest in playing the latest titles, and they don't have anything but respect for Capcom. This isn't an 'us and them' issue, unlike most encryption stories. This is more about responsibility and technical excellence.
I saw an improvement of 3fps when running UltraHLE under Wine in Linux, compared to Windows 98 optimised by that Norton tool. I can't check it again though, as I got rid of Windows and my Voodoo 2 (which UltraHLE requires).
Everybody has to become a wanabe American in your view.
Well said! There should be an international anti-USian culture organisation. I would join it immediately. It disgusts me to see so many of my countrymen (I am British) exhibiting the sentiment that they dream that they were born USian. If they like the idea so much, they should just go there are do that, not try to destroy the culture of the country of their birth. The most recent example would be those moronic Budweiser adverts. You only have to step outside your front door to hear some idiot screaming... no I can't bring myself to type it actually.
Why are you comparing this game to Quake and Quake II? And others here are comparing it to Duke Nukem. What is the relavence of a mouse to this game? Check out the PlayStation screenshots and you will see that this IS NOT a first person shooter. In the review he mentioned that it was like Resident Evil.
For the poor disadvantaged PC gamers out there that haven't seen the light of console gaming yet, there are many games, Resident Evil included, that ARE NOT first person shooters. I understand that this will come as a shock to you, but you have to be told, for your own good. That's right, there really are games that are not FPSes. Incredible, huh? Even more incredible, you might think, that although a few FPSes are sublime (Doom, Quake x, Half Life, Unreal, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark), the majority of the other thousands of PC FPSes suck. But if they are all you have every played, you might not realise this until you get a console.
Wow, thanks for those details. I am amazed that there is science behind the claim I originally challenged. There is a group in this country (Britain) called the Anti-Nazi League made up of all the ultra-politically correct people. They have teenage members in every school and college. I have always kicked back against political correctness, so have had a conflict or two with this group. I'm pretty sure that this group, who always portray themselves as being in the right, the only right, would denounce that research (and burn all the books about it of course;-) Just shows that their work has succeeded in closing my mind to an area of research they would like to kill. Essentially they couldn't allow a genetic link to anything to publicly be known, because they think it fuels Nazi fantasies about genocide. I believe that if they could, they would get everyone to believe that race isn't genetic either.
Can you provide any serious research that proves that homosexuallity is genetic? Thats a pretty interesting claim... If it was, wouldn't the trait have died out long ago? I mean its naturally deselecting...
As far as the salad thing goes, here in the UK we have to put up with this whining traitor old age pensioner called Alistair Cook on the radio, who broadcasts his 'Letter From America'. He is an Englishman who emigrated to the USA at the end of the second world war, and has spent the last fifty years bitching about how much better he likes it there. He is of course comparing the US of the 21st century to the England of 1945, complete with food rationing. Meanwhile, back at the point...
One of his broadcasts recently was about how America has the healthiest diet in the world, by a long way, in particular because Americans eat less meat and eat a lot more salad and vegetables. Is there any truth in this? Its just that everyone I know who has been to the US, including my best friend who lives there at the moment, says that meals there are like three times bigger than here, and that the meal is _dominated_ by a big chunk of meat.
So this becomes worthy of reportage the day that darling peacefire.org gets blocked. Am I the only person sick of hearing about Jamie's pet project?
The article filter needs a new feature, the ability to filter the intersection of two or more categories. I don't want to give up seeing all the YRO articles, but if I could filter out all of them posted by Jamie, I'm sure that all I would be cancelling is articles about these peacefire.org ninnies.
I mean what is this guy on? One day YRO is about what an infringement of YRO it is to be spammed, the next it is about how YRO are being infringed by people that are trying to stop the promotion of tools that make it possible to spam - lets face it the only people that spam are actually those without the ability to ever understand how it is done well enough to implement it themselves.
How amusing, the last time Freenet came up on/. I checked it out, and commented that it wasn't really promoting free speech but free pR0n, and got modded down as flamebait. Today the same comment by a different author is front-page stuff;-)
Re:Or try Allegro, but watch out for i-opener effe
on
Dreamcast Runs Linux
·
· Score: 1
Any commercial developer that tried this would have trouble producing and distributing their software. To be legitimate they have to get Sega to produce the GD-ROMs for them. If they try to produce their own disks they will be using licensed code without a license, so they will get sued. This is because for a disk to be bootable, it has to contain a chunk of code in its bootstrap that is byte-for-byte identical to some code held on ROM. That is the code that displays the Dreamcast logo and 'licensed by Sega' message (see here and here).
So don't expect Linux or any other alternative operating system to kill Sega anytime soon.
Personally, I think it is pretty cool that Sega chose such a relatively easy to circumvent copy-protection scheme in the first place. It allows them to sue any violator they choose, and at the same time allows grass-roots home coders to do their own thing and learn how to code on some serious gaming hardware. This also makes it easier for import gamers, as you can easily create boot disks that let you play any-region disks (such as the Action Replay CDX). Sega 'did the right thing' in this respect with the Saturn too. Its region control was done by jumpers, so it took very little expertise or technology to make your Saturn capable of playing foreign games.
The last Microsoft license I paid for was DOS 6.22, for the reason you stated - no choice when I bought a machine. I have built all my machines since then, so I didn't have to pay the Microsoft tax. And even if I did have a license, I have better uses for my hard-disk than filling it up with an OS I don't use and some pretty pathetic games.
The easy way to play enjoyable, accessible games with the greatest levels of playability is to get a console. It costs less than a Windows licence, and you don't have to mess with patches and drivers (well, not unless you get a Microsoft Vapour-Box).
No, the guys at MIT have their terms correct, the X server really is a server - it is a display server.
Just because you commonly use it to run xterms or whatever from another machine, on the machine you are currently at, it is equally possible to be sitting at that other machine, point your DISPLAY environment variable at another machine whose display you would like things to appear on, then run X apps from there. You have to set the X server's security setting to allow it first. People do this all the time for audio (going by the announcements on Freshmeat, anyway) - why not do this for display, too? The most obvious use would be for timetable screens in railway stations, etc.
It seems obvious to me that publishing and selling a dead-tree edition of this book is equivalent to selling a binary only version of a free software project. The most you can do with a dead-tree is scribble notes on it, that's not giving back now, is it!
Stop banging on these guys, they put in the work, they deserve some reward for all the work they have put in! They are letting us all read it on our low resolution displays for free.
DVD really needs to reach critical mass, I would truly hate to find that not enough people have bought players and disks for the format to receive continued support (now I don't think that is actually going to happen...)
But I have been fearing the day that DVD goes mainstream for some time. At the moment, a large proportion of the DVD buying audience are audio and videophiles, and film-lovers. We won't buy a disk if it doesn't have great extras. We won't buy a disk if it only has a 4:3 pan&scan image - we want cinematic widescreen. At the moment, the publishers have to make the effort to produce high quality disks to suceed.
But when everyone and their dog has a DVD player, will they publishers still put in the effort? My girlfriend doesn't understand why I rate DVD over VHS, and when she looks at films in the shop, she would rather have the 4:3, how can we stop this insanity? People are just used to the shape of their TV set, and seem to think they are missing out if the top and bottom of the screen are black. Look at VHS in the shops, how many films come out in widescreen? Its the few, and you have to wait for the 'special edition'.
Anyone out there share my paranoia? Someone please convince me this isn't going to happen.
Let me get this straight. Someone searches for pr0n on Google, and claims that they find it. Someone else says that you can't find that pr0n on Google. Someone else says you might be able to.
So what?
I thought the point of the Google system was that if you were searching with the term 'Liv Tylyer' the top links would be for genuine Liv Tyler web pages, rather than getting pr0n. People would shitting themselves about censorship and free speech (here on/.) if Google didn't let search for pr0n!
This only matters if the search for pr0n isn't returning pr0n at all but something totally unrelated. Search engines, even Google, often return hits that are related by not specifically what you are searching for. Some dude searched for Liv Tyler pr0n and got Cindy Crawford pr0n. Is that going to kill him?
The Saturn and the Dreamcast are Sega products. I hate to break your dellusion, but Sega is a JAPANESE company. Panzer Dragoon Saga, one of the best titles released for Saturn, came out in mid 1998, and was one of the last games published for the console.
The Japanese won't buy a USian console. No console will suceed without success in Japan. The Japanese developers won't produce for a console that doesn't sell well in Japan, and as they make 99.9% of all decent console games, there will be no point buying any such system. Japan is the biggest videogames market in the world, second place the USA, very closely followed by the UK and Europe.
What happened to the Atari Jaguar? How about the 3DO? Thankfully the Japanese didn't buy those pieces of silicon crap.
Meanwhile some people slate the Dreamcast on the grounds that it is losing developer support in the west, it continues to get support from the big Japanese developers, who are also working hard on PS2 titles, whilst they also prepare some amazing launch titles for Gamecube. I say the Dreamcast is all the better for not having crappy western style games released for it, making it look like the general quality of software is low.
I totally agree with you. I have a Celeron 300a->450, and though by looking at the numbers I can see that it is 'out of date', I just can't see the need to upgrade at all. What application is there that runs appreciably faster on one of today's superchips? OK my kernel might compile faster.
My previous machine was a P100, which is now giving perfectly adequate performance to my parents for word-processing, web and email. I kept it four years, and only towards the very end of that time did I begin to feel it was underpowered.
It gets to me that the author just assumes that anyone who owns a PC and reads/. is going to be playing games on it. I have consoles for that. The 33Mhz processor of my PSX does not need upgrading, and most of the games I have for it kick the arse of all the PC games I have seen recently, which are basically all jut Quake or C&C redone anyway.
This guy claims to have done a ton of market research, and yet he thinks that Dreamcast runs WinCE. His research appears to have gone about as far as looking at the little icon on the outside of the console, without even reading the sub-title below it!
Where/how are you going to store your game saves? How many games are there these days that don't allow you to save your progress, or even your high-scores (a bit retro I know) AT ALL?
Consoles overcome this with memory-cards, but that scheme is obviously not going to work on a PC. Well, not unless someone invents a new PC memory card that plugs in to some standard port, say USB or something. But then you'd have to buy extra hardware to play the game...
The obvious and better solution is to get a console. That is the true solution to Linux's lack of games, too. Don't fill up your hard-disk with games that won't even work any more after a couple of years worth of hardware upgrades, and distract you from your work. Just get yourself a console, sit in your comfy chair infront of your big TV and experience true game-play (and virtually no bugs at all - ever seen a patch for an N64 game and I don't mean so you can play it on a backup device).
Re:One last defense of my gender on /.
on
Deja For Sale
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· Score: 1
Her nick is like advertising because its one conspicous feature is that it screams 'I am female' at you, where as most nicks don't present any information about the owner at all.
On the Internet, I make no such assertions about the identity or attributes of people I meet there. I certainly wouldn't ever default to white male USian. The only time I come into contact with people that fit that category are at work and on/. Indeed, almost everyone I have ever met purely on the Internet came from Scandinavia.
Re:One last defense of my gender on /.
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 1
I don't support the abuse you have suffered on/. but ask yourself for a moment if you are in any way helping the situation with your nick.
Look at the nicks used by pretty much every other poster here. The closest anyone else gets to revealing any information about their identity is to run their initials together with their surname, from which you cannot infer their sex. Your nick leaves no doubt what sex you are (or wish to portray yourself as).
I know someone who enjoys bloking, which is to say he assigns himself a female nick then logs on to IRC. He gets all the abuse, and finds it funny. There are a lot of people out there that do it, and it leads me to be skeptical about anyone who advertises their sex, as your nick does.
"On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog" I believe the cartoon frame once said (probably Farside?). Your previous post was great, I really enjoyed it, I didn't look at your nick because it isn't and shouldn't be relevant. But to the trolls, its just an open invitation. If your nick was BlackGeek they would call you a nigger. If it was Gay&Proud they would call you a fag. If it was SchoolNerd they would torment you about your age. If it was AMWhateverYourSurnameIs they would only be able to abuse you for the contents of your posting.
On my machine, libqt.so was about 7.5MB before, and 5MB after. And it is definitely worthwhile doing the recompile if you have the fatter version of the binary, in terms of speed and memory useage.
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing the point of emulation, according to the people that produce emulators.
With emulation going more mainstream every day, there are a lot of people around today that treat and use emulation as another form of warez. But the people writing the emulators, and the old-skool fans have two driving interests in this. Most important is the technical challenge involved. And in the background, there is the idea of preserving 'video game heritage'.
CPS2shock are acting completely within these aims in doing what they have done, and not going any further. They have no interest in playing the latest titles, and they don't have anything but respect for Capcom. This isn't an 'us and them' issue, unlike most encryption stories. This is more about responsibility and technical excellence.
I saw an improvement of 3fps when running UltraHLE under Wine in Linux, compared to Windows 98 optimised by that Norton tool. I can't check it again though, as I got rid of Windows and my Voodoo 2 (which UltraHLE requires).
Everybody has to become a wanabe American in your view.
Well said! There should be an international anti-USian culture organisation. I would join it immediately. It disgusts me to see so many of my countrymen (I am British) exhibiting the sentiment that they dream that they were born USian. If they like the idea so much, they should just go there are do that, not try to destroy the culture of the country of their birth. The most recent example would be those moronic Budweiser adverts. You only have to step outside your front door to hear some idiot screaming... no I can't bring myself to type it actually.
Why are you comparing this game to Quake and Quake II? And others here are comparing it to Duke Nukem. What is the relavence of a mouse to this game? Check out the PlayStation screenshots and you will see that this IS NOT a first person shooter. In the review he mentioned that it was like Resident Evil.
For the poor disadvantaged PC gamers out there that haven't seen the light of console gaming yet, there are many games, Resident Evil included, that ARE NOT first person shooters. I understand that this will come as a shock to you, but you have to be told, for your own good. That's right, there really are games that are not FPSes. Incredible, huh? Even more incredible, you might think, that although a few FPSes are sublime (Doom, Quake x, Half Life, Unreal, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark), the majority of the other thousands of PC FPSes suck. But if they are all you have every played, you might not realise this until you get a console.Wow, thanks for those details. I am amazed that there is science behind the claim I originally challenged. There is a group in this country (Britain) called the Anti-Nazi League made up of all the ultra-politically correct people. They have teenage members in every school and college. I have always kicked back against political correctness, so have had a conflict or two with this group. I'm pretty sure that this group, who always portray themselves as being in the right, the only right, would denounce that research (and burn all the books about it of course ;-) Just shows that their work has succeeded in closing my mind to an area of research they would like to kill. Essentially they couldn't allow a genetic link to anything to publicly be known, because they think it fuels Nazi fantasies about genocide. I believe that if they could, they would get everyone to believe that race isn't genetic either.
Can you provide any serious research that proves that homosexuallity is genetic? Thats a pretty interesting claim... If it was, wouldn't the trait have died out long ago? I mean its naturally deselecting...
As far as the salad thing goes, here in the UK we have to put up with this whining traitor old age pensioner called Alistair Cook on the radio, who broadcasts his 'Letter From America'. He is an Englishman who emigrated to the USA at the end of the second world war, and has spent the last fifty years bitching about how much better he likes it there. He is of course comparing the US of the 21st century to the England of 1945, complete with food rationing. Meanwhile, back at the point...
One of his broadcasts recently was about how America has the healthiest diet in the world, by a long way, in particular because Americans eat less meat and eat a lot more salad and vegetables. Is there any truth in this? Its just that everyone I know who has been to the US, including my best friend who lives there at the moment, says that meals there are like three times bigger than here, and that the meal is _dominated_ by a big chunk of meat.
So this becomes worthy of reportage the day that darling peacefire.org gets blocked. Am I the only person sick of hearing about Jamie's pet project?
The article filter needs a new feature, the ability to filter the intersection of two or more categories. I don't want to give up seeing all the YRO articles, but if I could filter out all of them posted by Jamie, I'm sure that all I would be cancelling is articles about these peacefire.org ninnies.
I mean what is this guy on? One day YRO is about what an infringement of YRO it is to be spammed, the next it is about how YRO are being infringed by people that are trying to stop the promotion of tools that make it possible to spam - lets face it the only people that spam are actually those without the ability to ever understand how it is done well enough to implement it themselves.
How amusing, the last time Freenet came up on /. I checked it out, and commented that it wasn't really promoting free speech but free pR0n, and got modded down as flamebait. Today the same comment by a different author is front-page stuff ;-)
Any commercial developer that tried this would have trouble producing and distributing their software. To be legitimate they have to get Sega to produce the GD-ROMs for them. If they try to produce their own disks they will be using licensed code without a license, so they will get sued. This is because for a disk to be bootable, it has to contain a chunk of code in its bootstrap that is byte-for-byte identical to some code held on ROM. That is the code that displays the Dreamcast logo and 'licensed by Sega' message (see here and here).
So don't expect Linux or any other alternative operating system to kill Sega anytime soon.
Personally, I think it is pretty cool that Sega chose such a relatively easy to circumvent copy-protection scheme in the first place. It allows them to sue any violator they choose, and at the same time allows grass-roots home coders to do their own thing and learn how to code on some serious gaming hardware. This also makes it easier for import gamers, as you can easily create boot disks that let you play any-region disks (such as the Action Replay CDX). Sega 'did the right thing' in this respect with the Saturn too. Its region control was done by jumpers, so it took very little expertise or technology to make your Saturn capable of playing foreign games.
The last Microsoft license I paid for was DOS 6.22, for the reason you stated - no choice when I bought a machine. I have built all my machines since then, so I didn't have to pay the Microsoft tax. And even if I did have a license, I have better uses for my hard-disk than filling it up with an OS I don't use and some pretty pathetic games.
The easy way to play enjoyable, accessible games with the greatest levels of playability is to get a console. It costs less than a Windows licence, and you don't have to mess with patches and drivers (well, not unless you get a Microsoft Vapour-Box).
No, the guys at MIT have their terms correct, the X server really is a server - it is a display server.
Just because you commonly use it to run xterms or whatever from another machine, on the machine you are currently at, it is equally possible to be sitting at that other machine, point your DISPLAY environment variable at another machine whose display you would like things to appear on, then run X apps from there. You have to set the X server's security setting to allow it first. People do this all the time for audio (going by the announcements on Freshmeat, anyway) - why not do this for display, too? The most obvious use would be for timetable screens in railway stations, etc.
It seems obvious to me that publishing and selling a dead-tree edition of this book is equivalent to selling a binary only version of a free software project. The most you can do with a dead-tree is scribble notes on it, that's not giving back now, is it!
Stop banging on these guys, they put in the work, they deserve some reward for all the work they have put in! They are letting us all read it on our low resolution displays for free.
Good work, KDE writer people!
Very good points. Thanks, I feel much better now.
DVD really needs to reach critical mass, I would truly hate to find that not enough people have bought players and disks for the format to receive continued support (now I don't think that is actually going to happen...)
But I have been fearing the day that DVD goes mainstream for some time. At the moment, a large proportion of the DVD buying audience are audio and videophiles, and film-lovers. We won't buy a disk if it doesn't have great extras. We won't buy a disk if it only has a 4:3 pan&scan image - we want cinematic widescreen. At the moment, the publishers have to make the effort to produce high quality disks to suceed.
But when everyone and their dog has a DVD player, will they publishers still put in the effort? My girlfriend doesn't understand why I rate DVD over VHS, and when she looks at films in the shop, she would rather have the 4:3, how can we stop this insanity? People are just used to the shape of their TV set, and seem to think they are missing out if the top and bottom of the screen are black. Look at VHS in the shops, how many films come out in widescreen? Its the few, and you have to wait for the 'special edition'.
Anyone out there share my paranoia? Someone please convince me this isn't going to happen.
Yesterday was Halloween, not April Fools Day. Anyone who thinks this really is the pronouncement of the Satan of Software is on crack.
Let me get this straight. Someone searches for pr0n on Google, and claims that they find it. Someone else says that you can't find that pr0n on Google. Someone else says you might be able to.
/.) if Google didn't let search for pr0n!
So what?
I thought the point of the Google system was that if you were searching with the term 'Liv Tylyer' the top links would be for genuine Liv Tyler web pages, rather than getting pr0n. People would shitting themselves about censorship and free speech (here on
This only matters if the search for pr0n isn't returning pr0n at all but something totally unrelated. Search engines, even Google, often return hits that are related by not specifically what you are searching for. Some dude searched for Liv Tyler pr0n and got Cindy Crawford pr0n. Is that going to kill him?
The Saturn and the Dreamcast are Sega products. I hate to break your dellusion, but Sega is a JAPANESE company. Panzer Dragoon Saga, one of the best titles released for Saturn, came out in mid 1998, and was one of the last games published for the console.
For real. But I was responding to the /. listing, which began with the line:
/. readers.
risotto writes "There's always that dilemma of whether to upgrade your CPU or your video card first.
and not:
The people at Sharky Extreme always have the dilemma of whether to upgrade their CPU or their video card first.
I know that PC fan-boys have that dilema, but risotto was extending this to all the
Hey, I wonder whether PC hardware would have developed this far if it was only being driven by business applications, without games too?
The Japanese won't buy a USian console. No console will suceed without success in Japan. The Japanese developers won't produce for a console that doesn't sell well in Japan, and as they make 99.9% of all decent console games, there will be no point buying any such system. Japan is the biggest videogames market in the world, second place the USA, very closely followed by the UK and Europe.
What happened to the Atari Jaguar? How about the 3DO? Thankfully the Japanese didn't buy those pieces of silicon crap.
Meanwhile some people slate the Dreamcast on the grounds that it is losing developer support in the west, it continues to get support from the big Japanese developers, who are also working hard on PS2 titles, whilst they also prepare some amazing launch titles for Gamecube. I say the Dreamcast is all the better for not having crappy western style games released for it, making it look like the general quality of software is low.
Thank God for the Japanese!
I totally agree with you. I have a Celeron 300a->450, and though by looking at the numbers I can see that it is 'out of date', I just can't see the need to upgrade at all. What application is there that runs appreciably faster on one of today's superchips? OK my kernel might compile faster.
/. is going to be playing games on it. I have consoles for that. The 33Mhz processor of my PSX does not need upgrading, and most of the games I have for it kick the arse of all the PC games I have seen recently, which are basically all jut Quake or C&C redone anyway.
My previous machine was a P100, which is now giving perfectly adequate performance to my parents for word-processing, web and email. I kept it four years, and only towards the very end of that time did I begin to feel it was underpowered.
It gets to me that the author just assumes that anyone who owns a PC and reads
This guy claims to have done a ton of market research, and yet he thinks that Dreamcast runs WinCE. His research appears to have gone about as far as looking at the little icon on the outside of the console, without even reading the sub-title below it!
Where/how are you going to store your game saves? How many games are there these days that don't allow you to save your progress, or even your high-scores (a bit retro I know) AT ALL?
Consoles overcome this with memory-cards, but that scheme is obviously not going to work on a PC. Well, not unless someone invents a new PC memory card that plugs in to some standard port, say USB or something. But then you'd have to buy extra hardware to play the game...
The obvious and better solution is to get a console. That is the true solution to Linux's lack of games, too. Don't fill up your hard-disk with games that won't even work any more after a couple of years worth of hardware upgrades, and distract you from your work. Just get yourself a console, sit in your comfy chair infront of your big TV and experience true game-play (and virtually no bugs at all - ever seen a patch for an N64 game and I don't mean so you can play it on a backup device).
Her nick is like advertising because its one conspicous feature is that it screams 'I am female' at you, where as most nicks don't present any information about the owner at all.
/. Indeed, almost everyone I have ever met purely on the Internet came from Scandinavia.
On the Internet, I make no such assertions about the identity or attributes of people I meet there. I certainly wouldn't ever default to white male USian. The only time I come into contact with people that fit that category are at work and on
I don't support the abuse you have suffered on /. but ask yourself for a moment if you are in any way helping the situation with your nick.
Look at the nicks used by pretty much every other poster here. The closest anyone else gets to revealing any information about their identity is to run their initials together with their surname, from which you cannot infer their sex. Your nick leaves no doubt what sex you are (or wish to portray yourself as).
I know someone who enjoys bloking, which is to say he assigns himself a female nick then logs on to IRC. He gets all the abuse, and finds it funny. There are a lot of people out there that do it, and it leads me to be skeptical about anyone who advertises their sex, as your nick does.
"On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog" I believe the cartoon frame once said (probably Farside?). Your previous post was great, I really enjoyed it, I didn't look at your nick because it isn't and shouldn't be relevant. But to the trolls, its just an open invitation. If your nick was BlackGeek they would call you a nigger. If it was Gay&Proud they would call you a fag. If it was SchoolNerd they would torment you about your age. If it was AMWhateverYourSurnameIs they would only be able to abuse you for the contents of your posting.
On my machine, libqt.so was about 7.5MB before, and 5MB after. And it is definitely worthwhile doing the recompile if you have the fatter version of the binary, in terms of speed and memory useage.