I recall from a previous/. discussion on this matter that although the TiVo guys GPLd the bits they had to (changes to the kernel), they worked around having to GPL the difficult bit:
They wanted a filesystem suitable for direct-to-disk video recording: after all you don't want garbage collection or on-the-fly defragging to kick in while you're recording the Simpsons. They used some proprietary technology to achieve this. Filesystems generally involve a kernel change.
Instead, they implemented an NFS-like filesystem, with the TCP/IP bit taken out: i.e. the kernel communicates with a userland process, which in turn does the HDD management.
Their userland process is *not* GPLd, and I understand it's protected by some patents.
Buying a game you don't actually like, to help drive the market, might *seem* like a good idea: but won't it skew the marketeers' stats? I mean, I'm no fan of First Person Shooters: if I buy Quake III for Linux, won't that encourage the suits to port U.T. but not bother with (say) Puzzle Bobble? --
How about a familiar API called DirectX, a fixed spec for less incompatibility, and the support of many PC developers who are not willing to program on the PlayStation?
Sounds like a Dreamcast to me.
However, as the owner of nine different consoles, I can truthfully say that there are *no* games I want to play which are available for PC and not for an existing console -- and dozens of console games I love which are unavailable for PC.
A "fixed spec for less incompatibility" is not something Microsoft have brought to the table. It's what consoles have been about since the 2600. --
I think everyone was being just as(even more) critical when Sony rolled out their Playstation. "What, we already have Nintendo and Sega - Sony makes walkmans and compact disk players, they won't survive in the console market!"
Sony brought something new to the table: theirs was the first console where 3D performance was more of a design aim than 2D. Playstation did OK, but not great, for a while, then Sony pulled a marketing masterstroke, and made gaming "cool", by pushing Psygnosis' WipeOut.
What can MS bring to the table? I think of MS as being a very dull company. They make Excel: dull. Maybe X-box can be marketed as a "sensible" console which can also be used to do online banking or something...
.. but remember, 3DO was supposed to be something for all the family, too. --
When you're selling hardware in the quantities Sega or Sony or Nintendo expect to sell a console, the whole *unit* is a commodity part.
The advantage in using "off the shelf" components would be the enonomy of mass-production. Enough Playstations/Dreamcast/Whatever get made, that the economy of scale eventually becomes a given.
I'm seing various reports around the net suggesting that another problem the PS2 has is that the 4Mb of video RAM is holding it back.
The thing has a fill rate second to none, but when 4Mb has to hold the framebuffer *and* textures, at 640x480x32bit, texture RAM is in *very* short supply.
Dreamcast has 8Mb video RAM, FWIW.
In the long term, Sony expect developers to begin streaming textures from DVD to alleviate the problem.
Also, it seems that Dreamcast and N64 have "free" (i.e. no performance hit) anti-aliasing in hardware. PS2 has antialiasing routines, but there is a performance hit. This explains the jaggies in some of the launch titles. --
Another good reason is that Sony's graphics system has proven to kick Dreamcast's not-all-that-impressive ass.
"Has proven"? When, where?
Make no mistake, the PS2 is massively more powerful than the DC (since it's more than a year newer) -- but in terms of actual games, no PS2 games look significantly nicer than the sublime Soul Calibur. From the footage I've seen of Ridge Racer V (MPEGs off the web), it seems a lot less impressive than Crazy Taxi, which is bustling with details and runs at a nice smooth 60FPS.
I have no doubt that the real graphical power of PS2 will get utilised in some future game, but for now, since coders have had time to get to grips with Dreamcast, the games themselves have the edge.
It'll be interesting to see how long these problems stay in people's memories. Sony's marketing, and the fawning Sony tends to get in the media, means that it's likely that in 6 months' time, all the PS2 launch problems will be forgotten.
Compare this with Sega's lot. The Dreamcast is an excellent, solid machine although of course not as cutting-edge as it was at its Japanese launch, oh so long ago -- but the launch problems, which were similar to those Sony are experiencing now, are still dragged out whenever the Dreamcast is discussed. --
Until Dreamcast has anything but games that seem to be like crappy copies of their earlier titles with better graphics rendering I won't care.
At present, Power Stone and Crazy Taxi are both Dreamcast games which break the mould and have no obvious forerunner. Innovative Dreamcast games yet to come (to the West) include Chu Chu Rocket, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio, and probably others I can't at the moment remember.
The mix is pretty similar on PS2 -- lots of sequels and prettied-up rehashes (Tekken Tag Tournament, Ridge Racer 5, Street Fighter Ex, etc.), along with several innovative titles such as Fantavision (which looks fantastic). --
That depends where you study. Where I studied, a large number of the CS staff were harcore Mac users (we did some vile coursework where we had to write Hypercard stacks which illustrated floating point arithmetic. Our AI tutor wrote a LISP interpreter for teaching [QALisp] in QuickApp).
Yet another professor, quite rightly favoured LaTeX for his slides and handouts, since there was a lot of algebra in there.
Most of the "proper" programming was done on Suns -- and the PCs were useful when you couldn't find a console or a VT220 to get your work done on.
Moral: don't assume that everywhere is like your place. There are a good number of sites where MS Office is *not* the defacto standard. --
So you're worried about the credibility of accredited counsellors, and you're willing to criticize them and their professional training.... and yet you're happy to promote anonymous "self-help" quacks in chat rooms and newsgroups??
Something doesn't add up here.
Nonsense. Professional councellors speak from a position of "authority". They're expected to come up with "solutions". The people in chat rooms and newsgroups have no such labels. They're not expected to advise: just listen and possibly compare experiences.
I suspect anyone trying to offer advice in anything but the most gentle-suggestion like terms would get kicked pretty quickly. --
Anonymity on the web is almost entirely focused on the ability to perform porn-related transactions without shame. Anyone who thinks it has anything to do with anything else needs a clue.
Quite apart from the fact that your observation is patently untrue (and other replies have dealt with that) -- why do you question the right of an individual to "perform porn-related transactions without shame"? It seems to me that looking at porn anonymously is as much a "right" as anything else. --
http://www.var.cx/dfsi/ describes the "Distributed Fileserver over IRC project, which appears to have died because of Napster's success.
DFSI, technically, appears to be the better solution: a vanilla IRC server is all that is required on the server side. The web page says that bandwidth usage is heavy, but my brief look at it didn't flag anything that would be significantly more bandwidth-intensive than Napster.
The way it (and Napster) works, is that the client broadcasts a search query on a channel. Other clients on the channel send their matches as a private message (like/msg on a vanilla IRC client). The querying client may then request a file transfer from whichever client reported a match and seemed the best bet (fewest transfers in progress/fastest link/whatever).
I dunno how firewall-friendly IRC file sends are, but other than that I can't see much wrong with it. Certainly better than inventing a new protocol. --
He seemed to think that the original still had some features not available in pdksh or elsewhere.
The single feature which has repeatedly stung people I know, moving from ksh on AIX to bash or pdksh on Linux, is this:
echo 1 2 3 | read x y z echo $z $y $x
In ksh, the result is "3 2 1". In any other shell I've tried, because the "read" occurs in a subprocess with its own environment, $x $y and $z are empty.
If I'm not busy at some point this week, I might have a look at the ksh source to see whether it treats read differently to other shell builtins... --
Aaaah, I remember the days: NCSA Mosaic. We'd spend hours in XV, trying to reduce the colour depth to 4 bits, or 3...
And the hours we spent finding the perfect Mosaic Grey (in the absence of transparent GIFs) (192R,192G,192B, in case you're interested: but not on Macs) --
Speaking personally, and probably for a lot of other people, I can't get excited about a project which is/only/ for Windows.
There's nothing wrong with open source code for Windows, but it would be better if your work was cross-platform, or at the very least easy to port after-the-fact.
Note that most of the GNU projects are available for Windows, as are things like Samba, Perl, etc.
A Delphi module though? Good luck.
A lot of the benefits (to the author) of releasing code open source is somewhat proportional to the size of the community that uses it (and therefore eyeballs the code). If the userbase is small, you're unlikely to reap the benefits.
Sorry to be so negative. Release it anyway, just because it makes you feel good:) --
People make duplicates of files for good reasons(it's a bad idea to assume they are clueless). They may want to have a fair copy of a document before it is mangled by the commitee process. They may wish to check out a document to create a version fork.
I imagine we're talking about the filesystem equivalent of copy-on-write memory management here.
When you copy the the document, it makes a link. To the user it just looks like a copy. When you modify the "copy", the filesystem sees that it's no longer the same data, and it becomes a real copy.
You could begin to do this on levels smaller than the file level, I guess, so that files which were identical only in places would have the advantage of compression: I dunno whether MS do though. --
I can understand getting in trouble for forwarding crap (the usual spam, chain-mails, etc.) - but only by those who you forward it to. If you didn't send the purity test to the admins and none of your friends complained to them about it, how did they find out? If they read your e-mail, then I'd say this is something you really should object to!
Actually, one of my friends found it so amusing, he sent the whole thing to the dot-matrix printer queue; then forgot about it. An admin found this *big* pile of paper on the out tray, and of course, the From: header was the first userID on the page, and that found its way to some big cheeses.
I had to make my case to someone "important", and basically made it clear that I didn't consider the material to be obscene (it wasn't), but that I understood that it was an abuse of the university's IT services (it was).
The guy who printed it bought me a Guinness in apology. One of the best Guinnesses I've ever had, because I gave blood immediately before;) --
It's not the library's job to provide unlimited, unfiltered access to every bit of information that could possibly reside in the world.
Actually, I'd argue that was exactly what a library's role was. They may fall short (because it's such a difficult job), but that's what their aim should be. --
My current company, and previous company have blocking software, and there really haven't been any serious problems finding sites and information that are useful. I am sure some legitimate sites are blocked, and I am sure that some illegitmate sites aren't, but I surf a lot (maybe too much at work), and it just hasn't been a problem.
Perhaps if you were a twelve year old girl trying to find advice because you were being sexually abused at home, you would have had more trouble? --
Is keeping a 14 year-old kid from learning how to build an atomic bomb or learning the finer points of doing it doggy-style really censorship?
Yes. It's censorship.You're allowed to approve of it, but do remember it is censorship.
If you believe that some things should be kept from the eyes of children, then you believe in censorship. There's no shame in that. Censorship is not a dirty word.
In my case however, I really see no reason why a fourteen year old shouldn't see either of the things you mention:
The principles of how to make an Atomic Bomb should probably have been taught to a 14 year old in their physics lessons: they should have access to the details if they consult more advanced textbooks.
As for "learning the finer points of doing it doggy-style" -- a fourteen year old who's interested in such things is either going to learn about it, and do it right (i.e. safely, avoiding pregnancy, avoiding perverts etc.), or they're going to learn the hard way, and increase our rape/teenage pregnancy/STD statistics.
In fact, I have a hard time thinking of anything which ought truly be hidden from a child's eyes. If it's out in the open, we have a better chance of putting the material in its proper context. If a child looks at porn in secret, they get odd ideas about sexuality. If you know they're looking at porn, you can take them aside and say "y'know, most women aren't really like that you know". --
Slashdot Mirror
I recall from a previous /. discussion on this matter that although the TiVo guys GPLd the bits they had to (changes to the kernel), they worked around having to GPL the difficult bit:
They wanted a filesystem suitable for direct-to-disk video recording: after all you don't want garbage collection or on-the-fly defragging to kick in while you're recording the Simpsons. They used some proprietary technology to achieve this. Filesystems generally involve a kernel change.
Instead, they implemented an NFS-like filesystem, with the TCP/IP bit taken out: i.e. the kernel communicates with a userland process, which in turn does the HDD management.
Their userland process is *not* GPLd, and I understand it's protected by some patents.
--
Buying a game you don't actually like, to help drive the market, might *seem* like a good idea: but won't it skew the marketeers' stats? I mean, I'm no fan of First Person Shooters: if I buy Quake III for Linux, won't that encourage the suits to port U.T. but not bother with (say) Puzzle Bobble?
--
How about a familiar API called DirectX, a fixed spec for less incompatibility, and the support of many PC developers who are not willing to program on the PlayStation?
Sounds like a Dreamcast to me.
However, as the owner of nine different consoles, I can truthfully say that there are *no* games I want to play which are available for PC and not for an existing console -- and dozens of console games I love which are unavailable for PC.
A "fixed spec for less incompatibility" is not something Microsoft have brought to the table. It's what consoles have been about since the 2600.
--
I think everyone was being just as(even more) critical when Sony rolled out their Playstation. "What, we already have Nintendo and Sega - Sony makes walkmans and compact disk players, they won't survive in the console market!"
Sony brought something new to the table: theirs was the first console where 3D performance was more of a design aim than 2D. Playstation did OK, but not great, for a while, then Sony pulled a marketing masterstroke, and made gaming "cool", by pushing Psygnosis' WipeOut.
What can MS bring to the table? I think of MS as being a very dull company. They make Excel: dull. Maybe X-box can be marketed as a "sensible" console which can also be used to do online banking or something...
.. but remember, 3DO was supposed to be something for all the family, too.
--
When you're selling hardware in the quantities Sega or Sony or Nintendo expect to sell a console, the whole *unit* is a commodity part.
The advantage in using "off the shelf" components would be the enonomy of mass-production. Enough Playstations/Dreamcast/Whatever get made, that the economy of scale eventually becomes a given.
--
Which journalists?
/. merely provided a link. Slashdot say "this site says this thing", and link to the site.
As I recall, the site in question said "there are rumours circling the Internet that...", which was true.
So... no bad journalism there, just people who can't read, or who can't make value judgements about fact, opinion, conjecture.
--
Before you start criticising Slashdot, note that the Slashdot story cited its (only) source, and provided a link to it.
It's up to us to decide how well we value that source.
--
Someone make sure and post a story when a games company other than Loki uses OpenAL instead of DirectSound for a Windows game.
Then I'll be mightily impressed.
For now it's a noble and admirable effort. Kudos to 'em.
--
I'm seing various reports around the net suggesting that another problem the PS2 has is that the 4Mb of video RAM is holding it back.
The thing has a fill rate second to none, but when 4Mb has to hold the framebuffer *and* textures, at 640x480x32bit, texture RAM is in *very* short supply.
Dreamcast has 8Mb video RAM, FWIW.
In the long term, Sony expect developers to begin streaming textures from DVD to alleviate the problem.
Also, it seems that Dreamcast and N64 have "free" (i.e. no performance hit) anti-aliasing in hardware. PS2 has antialiasing routines, but there is a performance hit. This explains the jaggies in some of the launch titles.
--
Another good reason is that Sony's graphics system has proven to kick Dreamcast's not-all-that-impressive ass.
"Has proven"? When, where?
Make no mistake, the PS2 is massively more powerful than the DC (since it's more than a year newer) -- but in terms of actual games, no PS2 games look significantly nicer than the sublime Soul Calibur. From the footage I've seen of Ridge Racer V (MPEGs off the web), it seems a lot less impressive than Crazy Taxi, which is bustling with details and runs at a nice smooth 60FPS.
I have no doubt that the real graphical power of PS2 will get utilised in some future game, but for now, since coders have had time to get to grips with Dreamcast, the games themselves have the edge.
--
It'll be interesting to see how long these problems stay in people's memories. Sony's marketing, and the fawning Sony tends to get in the media, means that it's likely that in 6 months' time, all the PS2 launch problems will be forgotten.
Compare this with Sega's lot. The Dreamcast is an excellent, solid machine although of course not as cutting-edge as it was at its Japanese launch, oh so long ago -- but the launch problems, which were similar to those Sony are experiencing now, are still dragged out whenever the Dreamcast is discussed.
--
Until Dreamcast has anything but games that seem to be like crappy copies of their earlier titles with better graphics rendering I won't care.
At present, Power Stone and Crazy Taxi are both Dreamcast games which break the mould and have no obvious forerunner. Innovative Dreamcast games yet to come (to the West) include Chu Chu Rocket, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio, and probably others I can't at the moment remember.
The mix is pretty similar on PS2 -- lots of sequels and prettied-up rehashes (Tekken Tag Tournament, Ridge Racer 5, Street Fighter Ex, etc.), along with several innovative titles such as Fantavision (which looks fantastic).
--
That depends where you study. Where I studied, a large number of the CS staff were harcore Mac users (we did some vile coursework where we had to write Hypercard stacks which illustrated floating point arithmetic. Our AI tutor wrote a LISP interpreter for teaching [QALisp] in QuickApp).
Yet another professor, quite rightly favoured LaTeX for his slides and handouts, since there was a lot of algebra in there.
Most of the "proper" programming was done on Suns -- and the PCs were useful when you couldn't find a console or a VT220 to get your work done on.
Moral: don't assume that everywhere is like your place. There are a good number of sites where MS Office is *not* the defacto standard.
--
So you're worried about the credibility of accredited counsellors, and you're willing to criticize them and their professional training.... and yet you're happy to promote anonymous "self-help" quacks in chat rooms and newsgroups??
Something doesn't add up here.
Nonsense. Professional councellors speak from a position of "authority". They're expected to come up with "solutions". The people in chat rooms and newsgroups have no such labels. They're not expected to advise: just listen and possibly compare experiences.
I suspect anyone trying to offer advice in anything but the most gentle-suggestion like terms would get kicked pretty quickly.
--
Anonymity on the web is almost entirely focused on the ability to perform porn-related transactions without shame. Anyone who thinks it has anything to do with anything else needs a clue.
Quite apart from the fact that your observation is patently untrue (and other replies have dealt with that) -- why do you question the right of an individual to "perform porn-related transactions without shame"? It seems to me that looking at porn anonymously is as much a "right" as anything else.
--
Yes. Glorified IRC client.
/msg on a vanilla IRC client). The querying client may then request a file transfer from whichever client reported a match and seemed the best bet (fewest transfers in progress/fastest link/whatever).
http://www.var.cx/dfsi/ describes the "Distributed Fileserver over IRC project, which appears to have died because of Napster's success.
DFSI, technically, appears to be the better solution: a vanilla IRC server is all that is required on the server side. The web page says that bandwidth usage is heavy, but my brief look at it didn't flag anything that would be significantly more bandwidth-intensive than Napster.
The way it (and Napster) works, is that the client broadcasts a search query on a channel. Other clients on the channel send their matches as a private message (like
I dunno how firewall-friendly IRC file sends are, but other than that I can't see much wrong with it. Certainly better than inventing a new protocol.
--
He seemed to think that the original still had some features not available in pdksh or elsewhere.
The single feature which has repeatedly stung people I know, moving from ksh on AIX to bash or pdksh on Linux, is this:
echo 1 2 3 | read x y z
echo $z $y $x
In ksh, the result is "3 2 1".
In any other shell I've tried, because the "read" occurs in a subprocess with its own environment, $x $y and $z are empty.
If I'm not busy at some point this week, I might have a look at the ksh source to see whether it treats read differently to other shell builtins...
--
Aaaah, I remember the days: NCSA Mosaic. We'd spend hours in XV, trying to reduce the colour depth to 4 bits, or 3...
And the hours we spent finding the perfect Mosaic Grey (in the absence of transparent GIFs) (192R,192G,192B, in case you're interested: but not on Macs)
--
Speaking personally, and probably for a lot of other people, I can't get excited about a project which is /only/ for Windows.
:)
There's nothing wrong with open source code for Windows, but it would be better if your work was cross-platform, or at the very least easy to port after-the-fact.
Note that most of the GNU projects are available for Windows, as are things like Samba, Perl, etc.
A Delphi module though? Good luck.
A lot of the benefits (to the author) of releasing code open source is somewhat proportional to the size of the community that uses it (and therefore eyeballs the code). If the userbase is small, you're unlikely to reap the benefits.
Sorry to be so negative. Release it anyway, just because it makes you feel good
--
Where have you been?
http://www.empeg.com -- it's based on ARM and it runs Linux.
--
People make duplicates of files for good reasons(it's a bad idea to assume they are clueless). They may want to have a fair copy of a document before it is mangled by the commitee process. They may wish to check out a document to create a version fork.
I imagine we're talking about the filesystem equivalent of copy-on-write memory management here.
When you copy the the document, it makes a link. To the user it just looks like a copy. When you modify the "copy", the filesystem sees that it's no longer the same data, and it becomes a real copy.
You could begin to do this on levels smaller than the file level, I guess, so that files which were identical only in places would have the advantage of compression: I dunno whether MS do though.
--
I can understand getting in trouble for forwarding crap (the usual spam, chain-mails, etc.) - but only by those who you forward it to. If you didn't send the purity test to the admins and none of your friends complained to them about it, how did they find out? If they read your e-mail, then I'd say this is something you really should object to!
;)
Actually, one of my friends found it so amusing, he sent the whole thing to the dot-matrix printer queue; then forgot about it. An admin found this *big* pile of paper on the out tray, and of course, the From: header was the first userID on the page, and that found its way to some big cheeses.
I had to make my case to someone "important", and basically made it clear that I didn't consider the material to be obscene (it wasn't), but that I understood that it was an abuse of the university's IT services (it was).
The guy who printed it bought me a Guinness in apology. One of the best Guinnesses I've ever had, because I gave blood immediately before
--
It's not the library's job to provide unlimited, unfiltered access to every bit of information that could possibly reside in the world.
Actually, I'd argue that was exactly what a library's role was. They may fall short (because it's such a difficult job), but that's what their aim should be.
--
My current company, and previous company have blocking software, and there really haven't been any serious problems finding
sites and information that are useful. I am sure some legitimate sites are blocked, and I am sure that some illegitmate sites aren't,
but I surf a lot (maybe too much at work), and it just hasn't been a problem.
Perhaps if you were a twelve year old girl trying to find advice because you were being sexually abused at home, you would have had more trouble?
--
Is keeping a 14 year-old kid from learning how to build an atomic bomb or learning the finer points of doing it doggy-style really censorship?
Yes. It's censorship.You're allowed to approve of it, but do remember it is censorship.
If you believe that some things should be kept from the eyes of children, then you believe in censorship. There's no shame in that. Censorship is not a dirty word.
In my case however, I really see no reason why a fourteen year old shouldn't see either of the things you mention:
The principles of how to make an Atomic Bomb should probably have been taught to a 14 year old in their physics lessons: they should have access to the details if they consult more advanced textbooks.
As for "learning the finer points of doing it doggy-style" -- a fourteen year old who's interested in such things is either going to learn about it, and do it right (i.e. safely, avoiding pregnancy, avoiding perverts etc.), or they're going to learn the hard way, and increase our rape/teenage pregnancy/STD statistics.
In fact, I have a hard time thinking of anything which ought truly be hidden from a child's eyes. If it's out in the open, we have a better chance of putting the material in its proper context. If a child looks at porn in secret, they get odd ideas about sexuality. If you know they're looking at porn, you can take them aside and say "y'know, most women aren't really like that you know".
--