I can see online gaming on the Dreamcast really taking off. (1) It'll take the pain out of getting online -- no more downloading Gamespy, searching for a server that's not too many hops away, patching your game up 'til it works etc etc. (2) Consoles will attract some more "fun" games. I'm personally a keen console gamer, and I'd far rather play something like Chu Chu Rocket online than an over-serious Quake clone. The chance to take part in a worldwide Bomberman league -- now that would be terrific.
The PlayStation 2 is theoretically more powerful than the SGI workstations that created the original Toy Story!
True enough, but utterly irrelevant, since Toy Story was not rendered in realtime. We'll see seom fantastic graphics on the PS2, but I'm guessing they won't be up to the standards of Toy Story (and certainly not at the resulution of 35mm film). --
Read the article. This is not a monitoring technology. The car finds out where it is via GPS (hence satellite), and controls its own speed accordingly. The satellites merely broadcast.
Would it be more acceptable if rather than apply the brakes, a speaker were to sound an alarm whenever the car exceeds the current speed limit?
Exactly what human rights does this violate? I'm guessing that a lot of the posters here assume that the satellite somehow tracks the position of every car, and the government can watch your movements. That's not the system described in the article: the device in the car gets its location through GPS, and limits the maximum speed accordingly. I don't see any privacy or human rights issues here.
There are a couple of problems: the first is mentioned in the article, the danger that some drivers would just floor it for the duration of the journey and let the machine keep their speed legal (as my driving instructor used to say, it's a limit not a target).
Secondly, although I'd discount the "escape from carjackers, volcanoes etc" arguments, there are many occasions when I feel it is reasonable to exceed the speed limit momentarily. If you're stuck behind a tractor on a windy road, and you're on the only straight for tens of miles, you want to overtake as quickly as possible, to stay on the wrong side of the road for as short a time as possible. When you get back in your lane, then you return to the correct speed limit.
I *would* argue that while vehicles have become safer (better brakes, visibility, etc), the speed limits are still designed for the cars of the 1970s.
Perhaps the most reasonable way to deploy these things would be to make them an option, and to subsidise the cost of purchase (from road tax). If it were cheap enough, I'd certainly consider buying one -- I'd like to stay under 30mph in built up areas, but frankly it's a challenge. It just seems to slow.
One more thing. My car, and most I've driven, like to be in third gear at 30 MPH, and fourth gear at about 40MPH and higher. Most cars in the UK have a manual gearbox -- I can't see this device being safe unless it works in conjunction with an automatic gearbox... Hmmmm. --
One of the primary reasons the RiscOS GUI was so fast and responsive is that they got seasoned games writers to code the GUI.
All well and good - they got stuff like solid drags going on a 1 meg machine long before PCs could manage it -- but it sacrificed proper abstraction. I wouldn't like to try porting RiscOS to a new architecture; I'd imagine the whole lot is in ARM assembly language.
Cloning the desktop is a great idea. The only shame is that (like Mac software), the paradigm relies on *all* apps groking the interface. e.g. the RiscOS save dialogue is just a file icon, and a field to type the filename into. To save it to a directory, you drag the icon. That's great if all your apps share that method, but a UI pain in the arse, if they don't. Still, that's always been the blessing and the curse enjoyed by X. --
Maybe you've been lucky with VCRs. A friend of mine was recently asked to retune his parents' VCR when they moved somewhere with different frequencies. They'd lost the manual. He eventually gave up, and was forced to contact the manufacturers and order a manual.
It turned out that to get the tuning menu, you hold down PLAY and FFWD together.
In the world I live in, developers, Open or closed, are attracted by platforms with large user bases.
Why, then, did all those people contribute to Linux in 1993? Why weren't they busy writing code for something with a wide user base, like Windows (very popular at the time, I gather).
ESR has said some odd things, but he was right when he noted that most Open Source developers do it to scratch a personal itch. If you want other developers to help out on a project -- make it something they'll be interested in *using*, and if it's something with a large scope, make it modular so people can write their own bits independently without treading on each others' toes (see Apache, the Gimp, Emacs).
UNIX originally attracted a lot of coders because the pipe mechanism suited programs that were small and acted as 'modules' -- "tr" isn't much use on its own...
I believe there is a set of applications that lack the glamour or the in-built hackability that makes them attractive to volounteer developers. Whether open or closed source, I think these tasks need coders motivated by a paycheque (or some other reimbursement). --
Well said. It concerns me that just because I support Free Software, many might expect me to agree with ESR (for example) on issues of extreme libertarianism and gun control. --
A lot of the work Id did with bots for Q3 was trying to give them human-like weaknesses. It's easy to write a 'bot which will tear through the level killing everything with 100% accuracy. It's a lot harder to make them play like a real person (and a lot more fun to play against) --
Database client (unknown to you) asks the server "Please send me everyone's salary, and this one person's ID number"
Server does what it's told.
Client uses your ID number to decide which salary to report back to you.
Because it is not documented that the server sends the whole lot, you're expected not to realised, so as long as you don't poke around, your boss's salary remains a secret.
Minimum disclosure means that you are *never* given more information than you are allowed or require. --
I didn't get the impression that ESR was criticising the Quake implementation.
No -- what he was doing was responding to those who would claim "look, freeing Quake made it easier to hack -- therefore free SSL implementations (or whatever) must be easier to hack than the proprietary equivalent". That's a point that needed refuting, and ESR had a fair crack at doing so. --
"Also, shame on you ESR for describing the Quake 1 source release as a lump of coal."
I don't think you've understood Eric's turn of phrase. In parts of Western culture (Scottish? Not sure.. I'm a Welshman, so we have different traditions) there is a tradition of bringing a lump of coal through the front door on New Year's Day -- it's supposed to bring good luck for the year ahead. Eric is describing the Quake source as a welcome gift.
I'm sure he'd be the first to welcome something which simulates an arsenal of high-powered weapons... He'll be eagerly awaiting "Defend your homestead against the commies" when it's released:) --
I'd say the GPL has made a lot of difference to the way Linux is treated in the commercial world.
The world is littered with non-free forks of free BSDs -- if hte original had been GPL'd, we'd all have got to share those changes.
For example -- I remember a BSD based Internet gateway for novell networks. That will be a kernel hack, but the BSD world did not get to see the source.
A couple of recent Linux examples are the Tivo kernel changes and the port to IBM System 390. It's unlikely that either of those sets of code would have been released as source if the GPL didn't force it.
That said, we're seeing a lot of Apache code gifted from commerce (although there's a lot of proprietary stuff I'd also like to see freed). I'd say that Linux has proved to many large companies that freeing the source is not necessarily an act of selflessness. Now they've been forced to try it, they can go on to free source even when the licence says they don't have to. --
Aaaaw, it hardly needs saying, but I'll say it anyway. In the case of health care, you only pay for it (through taxes) if you can afford to. If you're penniless, other people fund your healthcare through income tax. That, to me, is fair.
It's even more fair in the case of rubbish collection, since your neighbour might decide they'd rather let the rubbish mount up in the street. Pay for it through taxes, and becoming a public nuicance in this way suddenly becomes less tempting.
There are unfair ways to tax, but I don't think income tax is one of them. I choose to live in a country with a (admittedly crumbling) National Health Service (I don't believe many countries would deny me a work permit if I chose to move) and I opt out of my employer's private medicine plan, because I feel it is a small token of support for the NHS infrastructure (the more people have health insurance, the more statistics politicians have to support cutting NHS funds).
What alternative way do we have of supporting the less fortunate (because fortune has a great part to play -- I despise the "if they're poor they should buck up and earn themselves some money" rhetoric) ? Charity? I say no. I say the state has a duty to protect every citizen.
BTW we're talking about a closed(ish) system. You do appreciate that growth in one place is accompanied by depression elsewhere? The "free market" is what encourages companies to pay Mexian orphans to stitch footballs for pennies a day. --
People like ESR, Linus, Alan Cox, RMS, Larry Wall etc. enjoy coding. You'd be lucky to find anyone who enjoys emptying your bins as much.
The economics of software are different because it's cheap to redistribute, and you can give it away without losing your own copy. Building roads, keeping schools in good repair, policing -- all these things do not work like software.
Maybe it would be possible to run a country by charging for services (hey, you Yanks have to pay for hospital care, don't you?) but there is no parallel to be made with Free Software. --
If you're such a militant agnostic, you might consider giving your money to a less militantly Christian charity...
OK, I know they do some great work with the homeless, but I'm sure there are other charities that do equally good work but don't lace it with evangelism (and all those horrible military trappings).
Well, I'm an atheist. Not a pagan, not an agnostic -- an atheist. I have a christmas tree in the house because I like shiny things, and it gives me a pleasantly warm feeling. Hell, I like music with sleighbells in it (Roy Wood!).
... but then I'm an atheist brought up in a predominantly protestant (Welsh nonconformist) community, I guess that 'd make a difference.
At least this way I don't get hung-up and invent Mr Hanky:)
I'm not familiar with the mozilla source, but since hooks have been left in for netscape to put in RSA code, I'd be very surprised indeed if it weren't dead easy to drop in some OpenSSL.
Woohoo: 128bit encryption for all. --
Re:RMS wrote too much code :-)
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 2
So who's the better person? The person who writes a blank cheque to the local homeless shelter, or the person who works there as a volounteer?
Giving away money is easy (if you have it), giving up the chance to have money is harder. RMS is not a rich man. He could have been, if he'd ignored his ideals and applied himself to the pursuit of money -- if he'd taken money from Lucid, he'd have made a start on his fortune.
I'm guessing they've licensed or written some proprietary filesystem designed for very low fragmentation (after all, fragmentation would be a disaster for real time video). Implementing an interface for userspace filesystems is nice, though. People could use that for all sorts of neat tricks -- akin to the/proc filesystem, but not in the kernel. --
I wouldn't be surprised if there was no shell as we know it. It may not even contain init -- everything but the kernel could be proprietary software.
Wonder what you could build for the same price... you'd lose the rating features, the automated recording etc... you could implement the pause-live-TV... you could set stuff to record remotely... you could program your video using cron and at, rather than the nasty, nasty interfaces we usually have to suffer... you'd have random access... you could archive to CD...
1) Recording stuff based on what you've enjoyed in the past is all well and good -- but won't your viewing get more and more homogenous? Maybe they could build communities, so that people could recommend stuff to each other, or something -- some human element to keep it from getting too samey.
2) I'd be interested to know how cheap/easy a tivo-alike would be to build. I'd love to have a direct-to-disk VCR which I could control remotely: if I could check its status from work, ask it to record a program via email (or via an SMS->email gateway), that would be so cool. --
Re:RMS wrote too much code :-)
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
re: the more code you write the bigger say you get: correction: the more billions you have the more say you get. Talk is cheap..let see some cash.
Having lots of cash means you're working hard for yourself. We should other people be impressed by that? --
Slashdot Mirror
I can see online gaming on the Dreamcast really taking off. (1) It'll take the pain out of getting online -- no more downloading Gamespy, searching for a server that's not too many hops away, patching your game up 'til it works etc etc.
(2) Consoles will attract some more "fun" games. I'm personally a keen console gamer, and I'd far rather play something like Chu Chu Rocket online than an over-serious Quake clone. The chance to take part in a worldwide Bomberman league -- now that would be terrific.
--
The PlayStation 2 is theoretically more powerful than the SGI workstations that created the original Toy Story!
True enough, but utterly irrelevant, since Toy Story was not rendered in realtime. We'll see seom fantastic graphics on the PS2, but I'm guessing they won't be up to the standards of Toy Story (and certainly not at the resulution of 35mm film).
--
Read the article. This is not a monitoring technology. The car finds out where it is via GPS (hence satellite), and controls its own speed accordingly. The satellites merely broadcast.
Would it be more acceptable if rather than apply the brakes, a speaker were to sound an alarm whenever the car exceeds the current speed limit?
--
Exactly what human rights does this violate?
I'm guessing that a lot of the posters here assume that the satellite somehow tracks the position of every car, and the government can watch your movements. That's not the system described in the article: the device in the car gets its location through GPS, and limits the maximum speed accordingly. I don't see any privacy or human rights issues here.
There are a couple of problems: the first is mentioned in the article, the danger that some drivers would just floor it for the duration of the journey and let the machine keep their speed legal (as my driving instructor used to say, it's a limit not a target).
Secondly, although I'd discount the "escape from carjackers, volcanoes etc" arguments, there are many occasions when I feel it is reasonable to exceed the speed limit momentarily. If you're stuck behind a tractor on a windy road, and you're on the only straight for tens of miles, you want to overtake as quickly as possible, to stay on the wrong side of the road for as short a time as possible. When you get back in your lane, then you return to the correct speed limit.
I *would* argue that while vehicles have become safer (better brakes, visibility, etc), the speed limits are still designed for the cars of the 1970s.
Perhaps the most reasonable way to deploy these things would be to make them an option, and to subsidise the cost of purchase (from road tax). If it were cheap enough, I'd certainly consider buying one -- I'd like to stay under 30mph in built up areas, but frankly it's a challenge. It just seems to slow.
One more thing. My car, and most I've driven, like to be in third gear at 30 MPH, and fourth gear at about 40MPH and higher. Most cars in the UK have a manual gearbox -- I can't see this device being safe unless it works in conjunction with an automatic gearbox... Hmmmm.
--
One of the primary reasons the RiscOS GUI was so fast and responsive is that they got seasoned games writers to code the GUI.
All well and good - they got stuff like solid drags going on a 1 meg machine long before PCs could manage it -- but it sacrificed proper abstraction. I wouldn't like to try porting RiscOS to a new architecture; I'd imagine the whole lot is in ARM assembly language.
Cloning the desktop is a great idea. The only shame is that (like Mac software), the paradigm relies on *all* apps groking the interface. e.g. the RiscOS save dialogue is just a file icon, and a field to type the filename into. To save it to a directory, you drag the icon. That's great if all your apps share that method, but a UI pain in the arse, if they don't. Still, that's always been the blessing and the curse enjoyed by X.
--
Maybe you've been lucky with VCRs. A friend of mine was recently asked to retune his parents' VCR when they moved somewhere with different frequencies. They'd lost the manual. He eventually gave up, and was forced to contact the manufacturers and order a manual.
It turned out that to get the tuning menu, you hold down PLAY and FFWD together.
... eeeew.
--
In the world I live in, developers, Open or closed, are attracted by platforms with large user bases.
Why, then, did all those people contribute to Linux in 1993? Why weren't they busy writing code for something with a wide user base, like Windows (very popular at the time, I gather).
ESR has said some odd things, but he was right when he noted that most Open Source developers do it to scratch a personal itch. If you want other developers to help out on a project -- make it something they'll be interested in *using*, and if it's something with a large scope, make it modular so people can write their own bits independently without treading on each others' toes (see Apache, the Gimp, Emacs).
UNIX originally attracted a lot of coders because the pipe mechanism suited programs that were small and acted as 'modules' -- "tr" isn't much use on its own...
I believe there is a set of applications that lack the glamour or the in-built hackability that makes them attractive to volounteer developers. Whether open or closed source, I think these tasks need coders motivated by a paycheque (or some other reimbursement).
--
Well said. It concerns me that just because I support Free Software, many might expect me to agree with ESR (for example) on issues of extreme libertarianism and gun control.
--
A lot of the work Id did with bots for Q3 was trying to give them human-like weaknesses. It's easy to write a 'bot which will tear through the level killing everything with 100% accuracy. It's a lot harder to make them play like a real person (and a lot more fun to play against)
--
Because it is not documented that the server sends the whole lot, you're expected not to realised, so as long as you don't poke around, your boss's salary remains a secret.
Minimum disclosure means that you are *never* given more information than you are allowed or require.
--
I didn't get the impression that ESR was criticising the Quake implementation.
No -- what he was doing was responding to those who would claim "look, freeing Quake made it easier to hack -- therefore free SSL implementations (or whatever) must be easier to hack than the proprietary equivalent". That's a point that needed refuting, and ESR had a fair crack at doing so.
--
"Also, shame on you ESR for describing the Quake 1 source release as a lump of coal."
:)
I don't think you've understood Eric's turn of phrase. In parts of Western culture (Scottish? Not sure.. I'm a Welshman, so we have different traditions) there is a tradition of bringing a lump of coal through the front door on New Year's Day -- it's supposed to bring good luck for the year ahead. Eric is describing the Quake source as a welcome gift.
I'm sure he'd be the first to welcome something which simulates an arsenal of high-powered weapons... He'll be eagerly awaiting "Defend your homestead against the commies" when it's released
--
In the words of the tshirt worn by the ne'er-do-well irish geezer on Brookside (a british soap) -- "A new millennium starts every second".
Can't we celebrate new year 2001, though -- when all this y2k problem nonsense is ovre with?
Ta.
--
I'd say the GPL has made a lot of difference to the way Linux is treated in the commercial world.
The world is littered with non-free forks of free BSDs -- if hte original had been GPL'd, we'd all have got to share those changes.
For example -- I remember a BSD based Internet gateway for novell networks. That will be a kernel hack, but the BSD world did not get to see the source.
A couple of recent Linux examples are the Tivo kernel changes and the port to IBM System 390. It's unlikely that either of those sets of code would have been released as source if the GPL didn't force it.
That said, we're seeing a lot of Apache code gifted from commerce (although there's a lot of proprietary stuff I'd also like to see freed). I'd say that Linux has proved to many large companies that freeing the source is not necessarily an act of selflessness. Now they've been forced to try it, they can go on to free source even when the licence says they don't have to.
--
Aaaaw, it hardly needs saying, but I'll say it anyway. In the case of health care, you only pay for it (through taxes) if you can afford to. If you're penniless, other people fund your healthcare through income tax. That, to me, is fair.
It's even more fair in the case of rubbish collection, since your neighbour might decide they'd rather let the rubbish mount up in the street. Pay for it through taxes, and becoming a public nuicance in this way suddenly becomes less tempting.
There are unfair ways to tax, but I don't think income tax is one of them. I choose to live in a country with a (admittedly crumbling) National Health Service (I don't believe many countries would deny me a work permit if I chose to move) and I opt out of my employer's private medicine plan, because I feel it is a small token of support for the NHS infrastructure (the more people have health insurance, the more statistics politicians have to support cutting NHS funds).
What alternative way do we have of supporting the less fortunate (because fortune has a great part to play -- I despise the "if they're poor they should buck up and earn themselves some money" rhetoric) ? Charity? I say no. I say the state has a duty to protect every citizen.
BTW we're talking about a closed(ish) system. You do appreciate that growth in one place is accompanied by depression elsewhere? The "free market" is what encourages companies to pay Mexian orphans to stitch footballs for pennies a day.
--
Maybe it would be possible to run a country by charging for services (hey, you Yanks have to pay for hospital care, don't you?) but there is no parallel to be made with Free Software.
--
Yeah, but the bad Linux reviews are wrong. The bad PM reviews are right.
Luckily PM has an excuse -- it's a movie for kids.
No, seriously -- all the star wars films are bound to come out on DVD and video sometime. Why is it news when they do. All movies do it.
--
If you're such a militant agnostic, you might consider giving your money to a less militantly Christian charity...
OK, I know they do some great work with the homeless, but I'm sure there are other charities that do equally good work but don't lace it with evangelism (and all those horrible military trappings).
--
Well, I'm an atheist. Not a pagan, not an agnostic -- an atheist. I have a christmas tree in the house because I like shiny things, and it gives me a pleasantly warm feeling. Hell, I like music with sleighbells in it (Roy Wood!).
:)
... but then I'm an atheist brought up in a predominantly protestant (Welsh nonconformist) community, I guess that 'd make a difference.
At least this way I don't get hung-up and invent Mr Hanky
--
I'm not familiar with the mozilla source, but since hooks have been left in for netscape to put in RSA code, I'd be very surprised indeed if it weren't dead easy to drop in some OpenSSL.
Woohoo: 128bit encryption for all.
--
So who's the better person? The person who writes a blank cheque to the local homeless shelter, or the person who works there as a volounteer?
Giving away money is easy (if you have it), giving up the chance to have money is harder. RMS is not a rich man. He could have been, if he'd ignored his ideals and applied himself to the pursuit of money -- if he'd taken money from Lucid, he'd have made a start on his fortune.
Why must I take the (flame) bait, so?
--
I'm guessing they've licensed or written some proprietary filesystem designed for very low fragmentation (after all, fragmentation would be a disaster for real time video). Implementing an interface for userspace filesystems is nice, though. People could use that for all sorts of neat tricks -- akin to the /proc filesystem, but not in the kernel.
--
I wouldn't be surprised if there was no shell as we know it. It may not even contain init -- everything but the kernel could be proprietary software.
Wonder what you could build for the same price... you'd lose the rating features, the automated recording etc... you could implement the pause-live-TV... you could set stuff to record remotely... you could program your video using cron and at, rather than the nasty, nasty interfaces we usually have to suffer... you'd have random access... you could archive to CD...
Hmmm...
--
A couple of considerations:
1) Recording stuff based on what you've enjoyed in the past is all well and good -- but won't your viewing get more and more homogenous? Maybe they could build communities, so that people could recommend stuff to each other, or something -- some human element to keep it from getting too samey.
2) I'd be interested to know how cheap/easy a tivo-alike would be to build. I'd love to have a direct-to-disk VCR which I could control remotely: if I could check its status from work, ask it to record a program via email (or via an SMS->email gateway), that would be so cool.
--
re: the more code you write the bigger say you get: correction: the more billions you
have the more say you get. Talk is cheap..let see some cash.
Having lots of cash means you're working hard for yourself. We should other people be impressed by that?
--