The SB PCI128 doesn't have wavetable in hardware; it's done in software under Windows. Essentially, it locks the samples into memory in a certain area of main memory so that they can be used by the software emulation and piped into the secondary audio output channel.
I know of no hardware wavetable for the SB PCI128.
Incidentally, I've found the SB PCI128 (ens1370 chip version, that is) to be a bit unstable under Mandrake 7.0. (Mandrake 7.0 uses ALSA, btw) Does anyone else have this problem? I get this weird clicking noise whenever there's stuff accessing either the video card or the hard drive at the same time as audio is playing..
(I've attempted to follow this up on the userlist, but I don't know how many ALSA users actually read the user's mailing list..)
I go to Carleton University, and have paid $100/year to use the university internet connection.
Just last month, the university banned the use of Napster. They say it was taking up too much bandwidth. I'll agree; I couldn't get a decent transfer speed on a kernel tarball before 3:00am.
Here, they have looked into what it would take to do traffic shaping. The argument they've made against it is that they can't afford the type of system they'd need to do the traffic shaping. In order to do packet shaping, the box in the middle has to actually pull apart the headers for EVERY packet going through; you need a really hella-fast machine to be able to do that on the speed of connection we have to the internet. Since they don't seem to have the money for such a machine, they're going with the tried and true method of just banning it.
This is one of the reasons I'm moving out of res next year; they've essentially banned all the ports! I can't do a file transfer through ICQ, because that's blocked. The FTP port to my own computer is blocked. The HTTP port to my system's blocked, and I have to use a proxy to connect going outwards (so they know where I've been..!). IRC? Ha! They've blocked ident, so I can't even get onto a decent Efnet server, and even when I do, I can't SEND files, only recieve through there.
Essentially the only way I can semi-discretely share information with the outside world is through email..!
Like I said, moving outta here next year. University connections suck ass, especially for the amount of money you have to pay for 'em.
The amount of time it takes to craft a quality product has nothing to do with the model used to craft it. The reason the OSS model tends to produce code with fewer bugs is because more people means more people making sure that the software design's a good one, (in the planning stage) and problems in the finished code get fixed easier and quicker because people have the source.
That having been said, the total amount of time it takes to create an OSS product is a heckuva lot longer than that it takes to create a closed-source product. Sometimes because messier code is used, often because the developers are able to communicate easier, and definitely because they have more time to work on it.
This is why projects like Mozilla and the Gnome-related company Miguel started up are so important; they're experiments in how we can get better-quality OSS software developed quicker and better.
Nope! Didn't miss a thing. Only thing is that you actually read the link, unlike the Slashdot editor who posted this...
I'm all for 0-day articlez, d00dz, but let's try and get this stuff right, okay? This is really gonna piss a lotta people off if slashdot keeps it up. (I'll betcha anything that someone already submitted this article earlier, with the facts straight, and it was rejected.) I can tell you all that a few trends are going to develop if the editors don't smarten up:
Inaccurate article info posted about previously-submitted material ----> people who actually make an effort to be accurate stop submitting articles to Slashdot
Old articles reposted ----> readership declines. (oh, is today a repeat?)
Andover.Net buys Slashdot ----> slashdot editors spend more time "networking," writing code, less time maintaining site.
More moderator controls ----> people pour red hot grits all over Natalie Portman.
Suggestion: send all articles through a filter, whereby all links in the article are checked against those that have already been posted on slashdot in the past. Then you can colour code 'em so that the slashdot editors know which have already been posted about, and which haven't.
Additionally, I'd recommend actually following the link, and totally ignoring what the original person posted. After following the link, if you think you're going to post it on Slashdot, come back and check what they wrote. If they got it wrong, write something else but give them kudos for finding the link.
Another suggestion I've heard several people mention is a seperate slashdot page that lists every possible submission in the submission queue. Let people with moderation points go in there and moderate up or down the articles themselves. (This doesn't mean that the higher-karmaed articles necessarily have to be added; just that they'd be more likely to be looked at by the editors.)
Also, I know it's been said many a time before, but I'd just like to repeat that getting people from other time zones to be editors would be a good thing. Weekends are pretty slow otherwise.
One last wee little suggestion; give any "extra" editors a posting limit for the day. This way, they'll be more inclined to weed through the crap, rather than just posting the crap along with the good.
You should care; Canada and the US have an agreement, whereby Canadians agree to the same restrictions and laws placed upon US goods, in exchange for Canada being deemed domestic to the US.
The upshot of this is that Canadians are bound to the shrink-wrap licences of US software, and have the same restrictions placed on them for any item copyrighted in the US that's sold in Canada as a domestic release.
Translation: circumventing copy protection on a US domestically-sold item in Canada is illegal in Canada, and punishable by law.
Damn, but I hate gov'ts and big business..
James -- http://chat.carleton.ca/~jhelfert
Re:Out of the Real World
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 2
The only reason they continue to "screw like rabbits," as you put it, is because the rate of death is so much higher for them. As soon as a country reaches a certain level of advancement, birth rates tend to drop off.
People seem to forget that Canada and the US used to have similar birth rates, back before we stablized. It wasn't until people stopped living/working to survive, and started living to entertain themselves that birthrates dropped. As soon as you get people with disposable income, they'll find something else to do for entertainment. (It's the people who are dissatisfied or have no money that have lots of kids.)
If you'll look at the population of Canada and the US, you'll notice that it's dropping right now. We're actually going backwards in some areas.
Incidentally, this is a very cold way of looking at it; these people in other countries are no different than you and me. The only difference is that they were born into bondage, while we were born with the silver spoon in our mouths. To compare them so easily to rabbits is reminiscient of our past mistakes when dealing with other cultures and "population control."
See, the English have done a lot of damage in this area; look at Africa, where segregation was instituted that only recently people are starting to fix. Look at Canada and the US, where we're only now starting to help the natives of these lands reclaim some of their birthrights. And then there's India, Kuwait, etc., where we REALLY screwed up.
True, you and I might not be English. I'm personally half Irish, half Polish. I COME from an oppressed background. However, I have been educated to have an English mind, and I have to learn from those who taught me's mistakes. My background makes no difference; my education does.
Besides, you think that offloading part of the world's population will help..!? Come on! Okay, so we get rid of a certain bit now.. but a few years down the road, we'll have to do it again.. and again.. and again...
Now what happens if those people we offloaded decide that they're going to have lots of kids too? A hundred years from now, we're back at square one as the moon is completely colonized. So we start spreading out further, and further..
The cycle doesn't end; we have to nip this problem in the bud.
I don't see why they think I would want to download a movie that's been pirated off of a DVD. After all, the reason for DVDs is their high quality; do I really want to get a low-quality copy of a DVD off the internet?
All of the movies you'll find floating around the internet are "in theater" copies. They were taken in the theater by some guy with a camcorder the day the movie was released into theaters. The people who are doing these rips could care less about high quality; the demand out there, as I understand it, is for the latest thing. People don't want to spend days downloading something of really really low quality if they can rent it for cheaper than it costs them for internet access. They want what they can't have, which are movies that aren't released yet.
Just be glad Monolith themselves aren't making the port. They're a really unreliable company. I bought the game--Windows version--last year, and am still awaiting their AMD 3dNow! enhancements patch. They promised this back when they released the game. The latest patch available is v2.2 which states, in the readme:
- Added support for AMD's 3DNow! technology (thanks to Jayeson Lee-Steere at AMD for helping us implement support). If you have an AMD 3DNow! compliant CPU, you can enable this feature by selecting d3d3dnow.ren under the Display button in the Shogo launcher. Enabling this feature should provide about a 5%-15% speed improvement. NOTE: Enabling this feature on non-AMD hardware may cause unpredictable results.
NOTE: We will release the d3d3dnow.ren as a separate upgrade patch shortly after the release of the 2.2 patch. Check the Shogo website for the most recent info www.shogo-mad.com.
..the readme's dated 3-9-1999..
That was my first and last purchase of a Monolith product; they've proven to me that they don't take their userbase seriously.
(Another amusing fact about Shogo; the soundtrack is awesome..! But Monolith chopped up the bgm into little eencie weencie.wav files, and named them randomly to keep people from enjoying it outside of the game. THEN they have the nerve to try and sell me a seperate audio cd with the exact same BGM on it..!!)
Actually, there was a really good pro-open source article a few days ago (Monday 10th) in the Ottawa Citizen that was all about DVDs and DeCSS. It was on the back page of the high tech/business section. The article isn't online at www.ottawacitizen.com, though, because they bought the article from a US newspaper. (I can't remember the name of the paper it was taken from, though.)
Or you could just install it where it was meant to be installed;/usr/local/bcast2000
Then symlink/usr/local/bcast2000/bcast2000.sh to/usr/bin/bcast2000
That bash script'll set the library path for you, so you can keep the whole distro together, in case you don't want it and have to delete it.
Anyone interested in making rpms? I'd make 'em myself, but I can't for the life of me figure it all out. (And I still can't find the back key binding for the info-page reader. blah.)
They're just pointing out that it's not a perfect product, that's all.
If you'll read the news section, you'll see that these people put their heart and soul into this project. (and sunk a good deal of money in it, too.) After releasing a preliminary version to see if anyone was interested, and seeing that it wasn't quite so hot of a market as they thought, they decided to instead release it GPLed to the public.
It's not vapourware; I'm using it right now on my system. And from what I've seen so far, it looks very nice. Clean interface, highly configurable, standard interface design, lightening fast toolkit, plugin support, etc. Plus it comes with source! Sweet!
This is the product I've been waiting for.:)
(I just wish my ATi TV tuner had a video4linux driver, so I could really test this puppy out. Could someone test out it's performance for us with a supported card, and tell us how it performs? It'd be neat to know how well it captures--whether or not it drops frames, and stuff like that.)
Well, with a computer, the knowledge is essentially coming from the person who wrote the software, right? So you're not really learning from the computer.
Likewise, when you're reading from a book, you're not gleaning any information from the tree and ink itself; you're gleaning it from the mind of whomever wrote the book.
The best way to learn is straight from the mind of someone else; there are little connections between ideas that can't be fully expressed on paper, but can be easily dictated and reinforced, with the aid of questions, by a teacher.
Btw, one of the reasons books work so well in conveying ideas is because there's very little adaption to an idea required to be able to transcribe it on paper. On the other hand, computer programs for teaching things to students are very unflexible, in that they have to be interpreted into the computer's tongue, and then back again, before they reach the student.
Hmm.. but the problem isn't that the teachers need to be trained. The problem is that we need teachers who are as enthusiastic about learning with their computers as the kids are.
Right now, training is the last thing that I'd want to give a teacher who has to teach kids about computers. Whenever someone's just taught something, they tend to teach it to other people the same way it was taught to them. ie; you use the same crutches (memory mneumonics, etc.) that your teacher used.
The students, on the other hand, will be more interested in endless experimentation. You'll have kids messing around in the control panel, trying to figure out how to change the colors.. you'll have others messing with the command line options on command line programs.. These are the sorts of things that kids like to do when learning something like this. And it's also the way they learn best.
So what happens when you've got a bunch of teachers, who were trained one way trying to teach a bunch of kids, who are inclined to try to learn another way? A disaster. The kids will tend to have a difficult time paying attention; they'll wander around, trying out everything in sight. What's this do? How about this? Ooo, this is neat..
It's not long before the teacher loses it.
See, training and learning are two totally different things; training is whenever you force a crutch on the student to help them speed up the learning process, at the cost of them being less intuitive with the material. Learning is whenever you attempt to fully understand the material, ("zen") at the expense of time.
That's not to say that training is bad; I'm just saying that by training the students, you're forcing them to use the same crutches that their teachers use.
Problem is, the teacher's crutches may seem especially stupid to a kid. The recycle bin in the upper left-hand corner of the screen? Why? Let's move that recycle bin to the lower right-hand corner. It's still a recycle bin, still does the same thing. But lookie, it goes here now. And if I move this over here, and this over here.. yes, now everything's perfectly organized!
What happens, though, if the teacher was using "third icon from the top left" as their mneumonic for where the recycle bin is? This is the crux of the problem, you see. The teacher was using this crutch, and the student just pulled it out from under them. Two things can happen at this point; (a) teacher berates the student for doing something they're not supposed to, because they're not using the same crutch that they are, or (b) the teacher recognizes that this is another learning opportunity, and goes with the flow.
All the teachers I've ever had, who've just gotten off of computer training, are of the (a) variety. It's very rare that you'll see one of the (b) variety. The problem is that in order for the teacher to be this openminded, they have to be able to give time to each and every one of their students. And with class sizes what they are nowadays, one on one interaction with students is definitely not high on the list of priorities for teachers.
So I guess it all comes down to this; books and teachers versus teachers and computers. Which is better? I'd say there is no better. The problem we face is the learning curve of the computer. It's a lot like the learning curve for interacting with other people; it takes a long time to figure it all out, and the rules don't always carry over from one entity to another.
You see, we could dump the requirement of using a computer onto a parent---but that's not right, because using a computer requires the use of the alphabet. But use of the alphabet is taught in school, so that has to be taught first... The problem is a chicken/egg problem, because if the child knew how to use a computer, then the task of teaching with a computer is greatly simplified.
So should the school or the parent teach the child how to use a computer? That's what I think's the real question we need to be asking.
I suspect we're not getting the full story; if this is a legit story, then I would have to say that one of the following must be true:
(a) The secretary who "accidentally" sent the prototype did so intentionally, and the person it was sent to was suspected of being in cahoots.
(c) The secretary intentionally sent the prototype to that address, and then forwarded the address to whomever she was secretly working for. They went and picked it up wearing NYPD uniforms.
(c) Microsoft got a discount on some NYPD costumes from a local custome shop.
Now that we're getting more OpenGL games than ever coming out for Linux, I think it might be a good time to address the problem of video card hardware support.
Many of us don't have 3D accelerators that work under Linux. While I'd like to have my hardware working under Linux, I realize that it's probably not going to happen any time this millenium.
So instead, I have a suggestion. Mesa currently has only one mode for software rendering--high quality. Is there any way that a low-quality software rendering mode could be introduced into Mesa? How difficult would it be to add this to the libraries, maybe have it switched on/off by an environment variable? How much of a slow-down would it introduce into the libraries, by having forked logic like this?
Because honestly, if I were to buy a copy of Quake III right now, I'd have to buy the Windows version because I haven't the "right" hardware 3D-accelerator. A sped-up, but much less visually correct, version of Mesa might make it easier for someone like me to bite the bullet and buy the Linux version, so that when I upgrade/if I upgrade to a 3D accelerated card, I'll have it under the OS I prefer.
(I realize this is pretty selfish, but it's also one of the reasons why you're not going to see many Windows users switching over to Linux any time soon. If I can't install Linux on someone else's 600Mhz Athalon, and be able to show them a kick-ass 3D game with a frame rate higher than 1.5/s...)
I was comparing this new device's main feature to another feature we've already got; the screen saver. I was attempting to make a base for my case; I'd hardly consider that off-topic to the ORIGINAL post. (Your emphasis, not mine.)
I somehow get the feeling that this would become very annoying very quickly. I absolutely detest when screensavers come on; I have them set to 30min, or 40min or more before I let them activate, because they really piss me off.
It's gotten worse now that I have a TV card; I'm very close to permanently deactivating them totally.
What I'm wondering is how long this'll take before people realize just how annoying this new feature is? I mean, most computer people are, admitedly, control freaks with their computers. How many of them do you think will want half of the controls disappearing off the screen the second they let go of their mouse?!
How about those of us who prefer to use keyboard shortcuts half the time? Will they make us purchase a TouchKeyboard so that the controls will reappear when we touch the alt key..?
And let's not even get started on the confusion this'll cause for newbies..
Maybe someone else will think this is great, but my personal reaction is an emphatic no. I'll agree Microsoft's made some nice mice in their time, but this idea sucks the big one.
(The only use I can think of for this would be on pr0n sites, as a measure for how interested the viewer is in the content. But I doubt Microsoft would want to market it in that manner..)
Truth is, folks, they've been doing this for the last few months; they gave the specs out to the GATOS project, GGI and the XFree86 team. This is just their marketing team putting the final spin on things.
Notice there's no mention of any effort to actually help develop anything more; they're only going to be sending out the specs to more open source groups.
Still really cool, but I think they're trying to take credit from the other people writing the software.
If it's such a success, why couldn't this become a yearly event?
We already have linux conventions, why not extend the idea to source conventions? I think it'd be a neat idea if someone picked up the ball, and started a yearly convention where companies could set up booths with computers, and programmers could mill around looking at the different companys' source. I can see several immediate benefits here.
First of all, you've got more people looking at other peoples' source code, which I think is a good thing. People can look at the code, offer suggestions...even implement their suggestions in person. (To a degree.)
You've got good pre-exposure for job-hunting programmers. Hey, I'd personally love to look at the source code I'll be working on at a particular company. You can learn a lot about the way a company's run, and the type of people who work there, by looking at the code. (And especially from reading their comments.:)
Another plus is the pride aspect. Think about it; would you code sloppily, and put your name on, something that's going to be viewed by the general public? Your potential new employer? Thought so.
Programmers, getting tired of telling your PHB how that code should/really/ be implemented? There'd be a whole mess of programmers out there, looking at your code, noticing the same problems you've been noticing. Just make sure to keep that suggestion box near those consoles!
If you're planning on an upcoming release of an extensible game engine, and your wondering how it's going to be recieved, this'd also be a great place to get feedback. Do we really need this feature, or can it wait until the gold edition/bugfix/service pack?
There are tons of other benefits, but I can leave that to others to discuss. (We've heard them all before, anyways, from those advocating open source software.) What I should probably also address are the copyright problems that would be associated with such an event.
Personally, I think if you had everyone entering the convention sign an NDA, that'd do it. Sure, there'd be a little bit of intellectual property getting out, and it'd probably be used in other products, but then again, your company'd benefit just as well as the competition. And if you're really worried about a particular piece of code staying proprietary, just only allow access to the compiled version.
Honestly, I don't see why this couldn't be done. It'd be of real benefit to all, and it might even cause a few of the more actively anti-open source-minded companies to rethink their position.
Slashdot Mirror
The SB PCI128 doesn't have wavetable in hardware; it's done in software under Windows. Essentially, it locks the samples into memory in a certain area of main memory so that they can be used by the software emulation and piped into the secondary audio output channel.
I know of no hardware wavetable for the SB PCI128.
Incidentally, I've found the SB PCI128 (ens1370 chip version, that is) to be a bit unstable under Mandrake 7.0. (Mandrake 7.0 uses ALSA, btw) Does anyone else have this problem? I get this weird clicking noise whenever there's stuff accessing either the video card or the hard drive at the same time as audio is playing..
(I've attempted to follow this up on the userlist, but I don't know how many ALSA users actually read the user's mailing list..)
James
My mommy told me to never buy 1.0 of a product; they're always buggy. I'm waiting for the point releases!
James
I go to Carleton University, and have paid $100/year to use the university internet connection.
Just last month, the university banned the use of Napster. They say it was taking up too much bandwidth. I'll agree; I couldn't get a decent transfer speed on a kernel tarball before 3:00am.
Here, they have looked into what it would take to do traffic shaping. The argument they've made against it is that they can't afford the type of system they'd need to do the traffic shaping. In order to do packet shaping, the box in the middle has to actually pull apart the headers for EVERY packet going through; you need a really hella-fast machine to be able to do that on the speed of connection we have to the internet. Since they don't seem to have the money for such a machine, they're going with the tried and true method of just banning it.
This is one of the reasons I'm moving out of res next year; they've essentially banned all the ports! I can't do a file transfer through ICQ, because that's blocked. The FTP port to my own computer is blocked. The HTTP port to my system's blocked, and I have to use a proxy to connect going outwards (so they know where I've been..!). IRC? Ha! They've blocked ident, so I can't even get onto a decent Efnet server, and even when I do, I can't SEND files, only recieve through there.
Essentially the only way I can semi-discretely share information with the outside world is through email..!
Like I said, moving outta here next year. University connections suck ass, especially for the amount of money you have to pay for 'em.
James
--
http://chat.carleton.ca/~jhelfert
The amount of time it takes to craft a quality product has nothing to do with the model used to craft it. The reason the OSS model tends to produce code with fewer bugs is because more people means more people making sure that the software design's a good one, (in the planning stage) and problems in the finished code get fixed easier and quicker because people have the source.
That having been said, the total amount of time it takes to create an OSS product is a heckuva lot longer than that it takes to create a closed-source product. Sometimes because messier code is used, often because the developers are able to communicate easier, and definitely because they have more time to work on it.
This is why projects like Mozilla and the Gnome-related company Miguel started up are so important; they're experiments in how we can get better-quality OSS software developed quicker and better.
James
Nope! Didn't miss a thing. Only thing is that you actually read the link, unlike the Slashdot editor who posted this...
I'm all for 0-day articlez, d00dz, but let's try and get this stuff right, okay? This is really gonna piss a lotta people off if slashdot keeps it up. (I'll betcha anything that someone already submitted this article earlier, with the facts straight, and it was rejected.) I can tell you all that a few trends are going to develop if the editors don't smarten up:
Inaccurate article info posted about previously-submitted material ----> people who actually make an effort to be accurate stop submitting articles to Slashdot
Old articles reposted ----> readership declines. (oh, is today a repeat?)
Andover.Net buys Slashdot ----> slashdot editors spend more time "networking," writing code, less time maintaining site.
More moderator controls ----> people pour red hot grits all over Natalie Portman.
Suggestion: send all articles through a filter, whereby all links in the article are checked against those that have already been posted on slashdot in the past. Then you can colour code 'em so that the slashdot editors know which have already been posted about, and which haven't.
Additionally, I'd recommend actually following the link, and totally ignoring what the original person posted. After following the link, if you think you're going to post it on Slashdot, come back and check what they wrote. If they got it wrong, write something else but give them kudos for finding the link.
Another suggestion I've heard several people mention is a seperate slashdot page that lists every possible submission in the submission queue. Let people with moderation points go in there and moderate up or down the articles themselves. (This doesn't mean that the higher-karmaed articles necessarily have to be added; just that they'd be more likely to be looked at by the editors.)
Also, I know it's been said many a time before, but I'd just like to repeat that getting people from other time zones to be editors would be a good thing. Weekends are pretty slow otherwise.
One last wee little suggestion; give any "extra" editors a posting limit for the day. This way, they'll be more inclined to weed through the crap, rather than just posting the crap along with the good.
Comments?
James
--
http://chat.carleton.ca/~jhelfert
"..too little too late"..? [groan] If the beanies weren't already over, I'd nominate CmdrTaco for "worst bad pun of the year." ;P
James
You should care; Canada and the US have an agreement, whereby Canadians agree to the same restrictions and laws placed upon US goods, in exchange for Canada being deemed domestic to the US.
The upshot of this is that Canadians are bound to the shrink-wrap licences of US software, and have the same restrictions placed on them for any item copyrighted in the US that's sold in Canada as a domestic release.
Translation: circumventing copy protection on a US domestically-sold item in Canada is illegal in Canada, and punishable by law.
Damn, but I hate gov'ts and big business..
James
--
http://chat.carleton.ca/~jhelfert
The only reason they continue to "screw like rabbits," as you put it, is because the rate of death is so much higher for them. As soon as a country reaches a certain level of advancement, birth rates tend to drop off.
People seem to forget that Canada and the US used to have similar birth rates, back before we stablized. It wasn't until people stopped living/working to survive, and started living to entertain themselves that birthrates dropped. As soon as you get people with disposable income, they'll find something else to do for entertainment. (It's the people who are dissatisfied or have no money that have lots of kids.)
If you'll look at the population of Canada and the US, you'll notice that it's dropping right now. We're actually going backwards in some areas.
Incidentally, this is a very cold way of looking at it; these people in other countries are no different than you and me. The only difference is that they were born into bondage, while we were born with the silver spoon in our mouths. To compare them so easily to rabbits is reminiscient of our past mistakes when dealing with other cultures and "population control."
See, the English have done a lot of damage in this area; look at Africa, where segregation was instituted that only recently people are starting to fix. Look at Canada and the US, where we're only now starting to help the natives of these lands reclaim some of their birthrights. And then there's India, Kuwait, etc., where we REALLY screwed up.
True, you and I might not be English. I'm personally half Irish, half Polish. I COME from an oppressed background. However, I have been educated to have an English mind, and I have to learn from those who taught me's mistakes. My background makes no difference; my education does.
Besides, you think that offloading part of the world's population will help..!? Come on! Okay, so we get rid of a certain bit now.. but a few years down the road, we'll have to do it again.. and again.. and again...
Now what happens if those people we offloaded decide that they're going to have lots of kids too? A hundred years from now, we're back at square one as the moon is completely colonized. So we start spreading out further, and further..
The cycle doesn't end; we have to nip this problem in the bud.
James
--
http://chat.carleton.ca/~jhelfert
Another idea might be to reverse-engineer the Windows ASF wrapper api, and create a plugin loader for xanim that runs through wine.
If I remember correctly, there's an xmms plugin which does something like this; I don't know how fast it is, though..
James
Okie dokie, people; first one to impliment a parody site called "Sloshed @" gets a cookie. ;-)
James
Small problem; linux gaming companies run linux. Thusly, their pipes are a bit more stable, and not quite so easy to clog as them NT boxes.. ;-)
James
I don't see why they think I would want to download a movie that's been pirated off of a DVD. After all, the reason for DVDs is their high quality; do I really want to get a low-quality copy of a DVD off the internet?
All of the movies you'll find floating around the internet are "in theater" copies. They were taken in the theater by some guy with a camcorder the day the movie was released into theaters. The people who are doing these rips could care less about high quality; the demand out there, as I understand it, is for the latest thing. People don't want to spend days downloading something of really really low quality if they can rent it for cheaper than it costs them for internet access. They want what they can't have, which are movies that aren't released yet.
James
Just be glad Monolith themselves aren't making the port. They're a really unreliable company. I bought the game--Windows version--last year, and am still awaiting their AMD 3dNow! enhancements patch. They promised this back when they released the game. The latest patch available is v2.2 which states, in the readme:
.wav files, and named them randomly to keep people from enjoying it outside of the game. THEN they have the nerve to try and sell me a seperate audio cd with the exact same BGM on it..!!)
...
- Added support for AMD's 3DNow! technology (thanks to Jayeson Lee-Steere
at AMD for helping us implement support). If you have an AMD 3DNow!
compliant CPU, you can enable this feature by selecting d3d3dnow.ren
under the Display button in the Shogo launcher. Enabling this feature
should provide about a 5%-15% speed improvement. NOTE: Enabling this
feature on non-AMD hardware may cause unpredictable results.
NOTE: We will release the d3d3dnow.ren as a separate upgrade patch
shortly after the release of the 2.2 patch. Check the Shogo
website for the most recent info www.shogo-mad.com.
..the readme's dated 3-9-1999..
That was my first and last purchase of a Monolith product; they've proven to me that they don't take their userbase seriously.
(Another amusing fact about Shogo; the soundtrack is awesome..! But Monolith chopped up the bgm into little eencie weencie
*grumble* *grumble*
James
Actually, there was a really good pro-open source article a few days ago (Monday 10th) in the Ottawa Citizen that was all about DVDs and DeCSS. It was on the back page of the high tech/business section. The article isn't online at www.ottawacitizen.com, though, because they bought the article from a US newspaper. (I can't remember the name of the paper it was taken from, though.)
James
Or you could just install it where it was meant to be installed; /usr/local/bcast2000
/usr/local/bcast2000/bcast2000.sh to /usr/bin/bcast2000
Then symlink
That bash script'll set the library path for you, so you can keep the whole distro together, in case you don't want it and have to delete it.
Anyone interested in making rpms? I'd make 'em myself, but I can't for the life of me figure it all out. (And I still can't find the back key binding for the info-page reader. blah.)
James
They're just pointing out that it's not a perfect product, that's all.
:)
If you'll read the news section, you'll see that these people put their heart and soul into this project. (and sunk a good deal of money in it, too.) After releasing a preliminary version to see if anyone was interested, and seeing that it wasn't quite so hot of a market as they thought, they decided to instead release it GPLed to the public.
It's not vapourware; I'm using it right now on my system. And from what I've seen so far, it looks very nice. Clean interface, highly configurable, standard interface design, lightening fast toolkit, plugin support, etc. Plus it comes with source! Sweet!
This is the product I've been waiting for.
(I just wish my ATi TV tuner had a video4linux driver, so I could really test this puppy out. Could someone test out it's performance for us with a supported card, and tell us how it performs? It'd be neat to know how well it captures--whether or not it drops frames, and stuff like that.)
James
Well, with a computer, the knowledge is essentially coming from the person who wrote the software, right? So you're not really learning from the computer.
Likewise, when you're reading from a book, you're not gleaning any information from the tree and ink itself; you're gleaning it from the mind of whomever wrote the book.
The best way to learn is straight from the mind of someone else; there are little connections between ideas that can't be fully expressed on paper, but can be easily dictated and reinforced, with the aid of questions, by a teacher.
Btw, one of the reasons books work so well in conveying ideas is because there's very little adaption to an idea required to be able to transcribe it on paper. On the other hand, computer programs for teaching things to students are very unflexible, in that they have to be interpreted into the computer's tongue, and then back again, before they reach the student.
Which really kinda sucks. Ah well..
James
Hmm.. but the problem isn't that the teachers need to be trained. The problem is that we need teachers who are as enthusiastic about learning with their computers as the kids are.
Right now, training is the last thing that I'd want to give a teacher who has to teach kids about computers. Whenever someone's just taught something, they tend to teach it to other people the same way it was taught to them. ie; you use the same crutches (memory mneumonics, etc.) that your teacher used.
The students, on the other hand, will be more interested in endless experimentation. You'll have kids messing around in the control panel, trying to figure out how to change the colors.. you'll have others messing with the command line options on command line programs.. These are the sorts of things that kids like to do when learning something like this. And it's also the way they learn best.
So what happens when you've got a bunch of teachers, who were trained one way trying to teach a bunch of kids, who are inclined to try to learn another way? A disaster. The kids will tend to have a difficult time paying attention; they'll wander around, trying out everything in sight. What's this do? How about this? Ooo, this is neat..
It's not long before the teacher loses it.
See, training and learning are two totally different things; training is whenever you force a crutch on the student to help them speed up the learning process, at the cost of them being less intuitive with the material. Learning is whenever you attempt to fully understand the material, ("zen") at the expense of time.
That's not to say that training is bad; I'm just saying that by training the students, you're forcing them to use the same crutches that their teachers use.
Problem is, the teacher's crutches may seem especially stupid to a kid. The recycle bin in the upper left-hand corner of the screen? Why? Let's move that recycle bin to the lower right-hand corner. It's still a recycle bin, still does the same thing. But lookie, it goes here now. And if I move this over here, and this over here.. yes, now everything's perfectly organized!
What happens, though, if the teacher was using "third icon from the top left" as their mneumonic for where the recycle bin is? This is the crux of the problem, you see. The teacher was using this crutch, and the student just pulled it out from under them. Two things can happen at this point; (a) teacher berates the student for doing something they're not supposed to, because they're not using the same crutch that they are, or (b) the teacher recognizes that this is another learning opportunity, and goes with the flow.
All the teachers I've ever had, who've just gotten off of computer training, are of the (a) variety. It's very rare that you'll see one of the (b) variety. The problem is that in order for the teacher to be this openminded, they have to be able to give time to each and every one of their students. And with class sizes what they are nowadays, one on one interaction with students is definitely not high on the list of priorities for teachers.
So I guess it all comes down to this; books and teachers versus teachers and computers. Which is better? I'd say there is no better. The problem we face is the learning curve of the computer. It's a lot like the learning curve for interacting with other people; it takes a long time to figure it all out, and the rules don't always carry over from one entity to another.
You see, we could dump the requirement of using a computer onto a parent---but that's not right, because using a computer requires the use of the alphabet. But use of the alphabet is taught in school, so that has to be taught first... The problem is a chicken/egg problem, because if the child knew how to use a computer, then the task of teaching with a computer is greatly simplified.
So should the school or the parent teach the child how to use a computer? That's what I think's the real question we need to be asking.
James
I suspect we're not getting the full story; if this is a legit story, then I would have to say that one of the following must be true:
(a) The secretary who "accidentally" sent the prototype did so intentionally, and the person it was sent to was suspected of being in cahoots.
(c) The secretary intentionally sent the prototype to that address, and then forwarded the address to whomever she was secretly working for. They went and picked it up wearing NYPD uniforms.
(c) Microsoft got a discount on some NYPD costumes from a local custome shop.
(d) One helluva bribe must've changed hands.
Anyone have any other ideas..?
James
Now that we're getting more OpenGL games than ever coming out for Linux, I think it might be a good time to address the problem of video card hardware support.
Many of us don't have 3D accelerators that work under Linux. While I'd like to have my hardware working under Linux, I realize that it's probably not going to happen any time this millenium.
So instead, I have a suggestion. Mesa currently has only one mode for software rendering--high quality. Is there any way that a low-quality software rendering mode could be introduced into Mesa? How difficult would it be to add this to the libraries, maybe have it switched on/off by an environment variable? How much of a slow-down would it introduce into the libraries, by having forked logic like this?
Because honestly, if I were to buy a copy of Quake III right now, I'd have to buy the Windows version because I haven't the "right" hardware 3D-accelerator. A sped-up, but much less visually correct, version of Mesa might make it easier for someone like me to bite the bullet and buy the Linux version, so that when I upgrade/if I upgrade to a 3D accelerated card, I'll have it under the OS I prefer.
(I realize this is pretty selfish, but it's also one of the reasons why you're not going to see many Windows users switching over to Linux any time soon. If I can't install Linux on someone else's 600Mhz Athalon, and be able to show them a kick-ass 3D game with a frame rate higher than 1.5/s...)
James
I was comparing this new device's main feature to another feature we've already got; the screen saver. I was attempting to make a base for my case; I'd hardly consider that off-topic to the ORIGINAL post. (Your emphasis, not mine.)
James
I somehow get the feeling that this would become very annoying very quickly. I absolutely detest when screensavers come on; I have them set to 30min, or 40min or more before I let them activate, because they really piss me off.
It's gotten worse now that I have a TV card; I'm very close to permanently deactivating them totally.
What I'm wondering is how long this'll take before people realize just how annoying this new feature is? I mean, most computer people are, admitedly, control freaks with their computers. How many of them do you think will want half of the controls disappearing off the screen the second they let go of their mouse?!
How about those of us who prefer to use keyboard shortcuts half the time? Will they make us purchase a TouchKeyboard so that the controls will reappear when we touch the alt key..?
And let's not even get started on the confusion this'll cause for newbies..
Maybe someone else will think this is great, but my personal reaction is an emphatic no. I'll agree Microsoft's made some nice mice in their time, but this idea sucks the big one.
(The only use I can think of for this would be on pr0n sites, as a measure for how interested the viewer is in the content. But I doubt Microsoft would want to market it in that manner..)
James
Truth is, folks, they've been doing this for the last few months; they gave the specs out to the GATOS project, GGI and the XFree86 team. This is just their marketing team putting the final spin on things.
Notice there's no mention of any effort to actually help develop anything more; they're only going to be sending out the specs to more open source groups.
Still really cool, but I think they're trying to take credit from the other people writing the software.
James
If it's such a success, why couldn't this become a yearly event?
:)
/really/ be implemented? There'd be a whole mess of programmers out there, looking at your code, noticing the same problems you've been noticing. Just make sure to keep that suggestion box near those consoles!
We already have linux conventions, why not extend the idea to source conventions? I think it'd be a neat idea if someone picked up the ball, and started a yearly convention where companies could set up booths with computers, and programmers could mill around looking at the different companys' source. I can see several immediate benefits here.
First of all, you've got more people looking at other peoples' source code, which I think is a good thing. People can look at the code, offer suggestions...even implement their suggestions in person. (To a degree.)
You've got good pre-exposure for job-hunting programmers. Hey, I'd personally love to look at the source code I'll be working on at a particular company. You can learn a lot about the way a company's run, and the type of people who work there, by looking at the code. (And especially from reading their comments.
Another plus is the pride aspect. Think about it; would you code sloppily, and put your name on, something that's going to be viewed by the general public? Your potential new employer? Thought so.
Programmers, getting tired of telling your PHB how that code should
If you're planning on an upcoming release of an extensible game engine, and your wondering how it's going to be recieved, this'd also be a great place to get feedback. Do we really need this feature, or can it wait until the gold edition/bugfix/service pack?
There are tons of other benefits, but I can leave that to others to discuss. (We've heard them all before, anyways, from those advocating open source software.) What I should probably also address are the copyright problems that would be associated with such an event.
Personally, I think if you had everyone entering the convention sign an NDA, that'd do it. Sure, there'd be a little bit of intellectual property getting out, and it'd probably be used in other products, but then again, your company'd benefit just as well as the competition. And if you're really worried about a particular piece of code staying proprietary, just only allow access to the compiled version.
Honestly, I don't see why this couldn't be done. It'd be of real benefit to all, and it might even cause a few of the more actively anti-open source-minded companies to rethink their position.
James
Kylix.
Sounds to me like it's KDE-only. (I could be wrong, though.)
James