This is based on the assumption that traffic laws are bad, we should not have to follow them, and the police who are trying to enforce them are enemies to be avoided.
I disagree. Traffic laws exist to protect the safety of others. I'd be the first to agree that speed limits are way too conservative in some places, but I'm glad there is a limit. The public built its roads by popular consensus; it's not infringing on anyone's "rights" to set traffic laws; the people who invested in those roads have agreed to establish certain guidelines as to their use.
Speeding tickets suck. But you don't have a right to speed unless you own the road. If we agree that traffic laws should be enforced, shouldn't it be done in the most efficient way possible? If enforcement is done automatically, maybe traffic cops could do something more useful, like patrolling dangerous neighborhoods or improving the response time for emergencies. Once I needed help from a cop, and she was too busy setting up a speed trap to listen.
blah. The "emotion chip" is indeed nice, but it's little more than a 300+ MHz MIPS with some extra instructions for fast linear algebra.
If China wanted these, they could get them easily. Just buy PS2's and pull out the chips, and steal a PS2 devkit from somewhere. Devkits ship with a stack of manuals describing the PS2's architecture in great detail, including a thorough description of the EE processor.
I *really* doubt China needs/wants Emotion Engines for its guided missiles. A nice chip, yes, but not THAT much better than a cheap PC processor.
Umm, right. There's already a popular product, so nobody else should even try to come up with something better. With that kind of attitude we'd still be living in the dark ages.
Vorbis may not be as popular as MP3, but it's technically superior, and it works, right now. The compression and sound quality are excellent. The people behind it are working hard to have support included in popular players, and have even written a firmware update for the HipZip portable player to add Vorbis support (I just bought one of these players, and the Vorbis update does indeed work). Furthermore, Ogg Vorbis is not patented, and you don't have to pay royalties to anyone to use it (whereas Thompson charges significant royalties for MP3-related products).
So yes, it's the underdog compared to MP3, but it's far from through. With the attitude of "it's not the most popular and therefore it's pointless", though, we have little to look forward to in this world.
How 'bout some polite but clear messages indicating that the community disapproves of this action and wishes for them to stop, lest they receive bad publicity and a tougher fight than they bargained for?
Remember, they'll only do this if they think it'll be profitable.
Let's invoice the law firm for the Slashdot article... say one DM for every reader? Their actions forced us to raise media attention. When they pay up, donate it to the KDE project...
On one hand this seems like a gross invasion of privacy. But consider that you're using a $10k+ vehicle provided by this company, and that you've signed a very specific contract with them regarding the use of that vehicle. Provided that they tell you beforehand, can anyone supply a compelling reason why it's immoral or unethical for them to monitor one of their cars with GPS?
Of course customers won't like that, and they'd probably lose some business for it. But just as contract law allows us to uphold the GPL et al, a car rental company has the right to impose almost any terms it wishes on a rental contract -- and if you don't like those terms, you don't have to sign on the dotted line.
a) it doesn't try to do multimedia IO itself; it serves as a common interface between DirectX, xlib, fbdev, etc. So you have all the support base of the platform's native toolkit, with a cross platform API.
b) it's free software (in the RMS sense). If you don't like it, you can change it.
c) it was developed for porting commercial games, and it has a proven track record. Every Loki title uses SDL.
d) it is simple and intuitive. This is largely subjective, of course; give it a try and decide for yourself.
I think it was more a matter of "Loki releases $PRODUCT", not "New book on Linux programming". I thumbed through your book at the bookstore, and it looks very good. I hope to have a chance to read it sometime.
I don't know what Loki's motives for commissioning this were, but I can tell you mine: I wanted to learn this stuff myself. One of the best ways to learn something is to write it out for someone else. In the process of writing PLG, I became a serious SDL user, learned the quirks of OSS, reverse engineered ESD (that's what you have to do when there's no @#$%ing documentation:), and taught myself framebuffer console programming, as well as a bit about video signals, etc.
So I think it's reasonable to say I know a bit about the mechanics of Linux game programming now. Now maybe someone else can benefit. Maybe it'll sell a million copies, make DirectX obsolete, and get a penguin logo painted on every street corner. But probably not. That's not why I wrote it.
Or maybe some Linux-using 12 year old will pick it up and get into game programming. It would make my day to know that.
This is not a troll; I'm just wondering why so many people seem to be supporting this hack. Sure, it's kind of neat, but it allows people to steal service. How is this anything but cheating?
In other words, could someone please list some reasons why DirecTV is in the wrong and the hackers are in the right here? I just want to know.
Wait for about 10 years. Compare the state of free software to the state of "shared source" or whatever they call it this week.
I'm willing to bet that gcc will still be in wide use, Emacs will still be a choice editor (along with vim, of course), Perl 7.0 or later will have an absurd marketshare, and Apache will still be serving up data (not sure about http, but the Apache team is a forward thinking bunch, and I'm sure they'll adapt).
I'm also willing to bet that Microsoft will still be alive and strong, copyright law will be even further adulterated, and the USPTO will still be granting dumb patents.
I also suspect that in 10 years we'll still be arguing over free software. Microsoft will claim that free software is bad for business, we'll point out that it's actually not bad for anything but their profits, and the cycle will continue.
Sure, they can win small, isolated victories. But even if 2600 lost, do you think that would even begin to stop the spread of DeCSS-related software, or the people who made it possible? No way! It would probably do quite the opposite (mirroring campaigns, etc).
2600 may be a casualty of war, but there are a hell of a lot more angry hackers on the battlefield, and they can't target 'em all.
First off, VLC is pretty cool. I tried it a while back, and it worked almost perfectly. Just like a DVD player should, under any OS. Hats off to its creators.
But the CSS crack is old news by now. While the MPA (not the RIAA) is entangled in futile litigation, we're watching movies. We have been for a long time. Dave Touretsky's gallery of CSS descramblers (http://cs.cmu.edu/~dst) has grown to an enormous size, there are several Copyleft anti-DVD CCA shirts at every LUG meeting, and the algorithm is very well understood by now. I propose that we consider this a victory of information and move on to other fronts... There's plenty else to fight.
Actually, the Vesta Pro can be had for as little as $20, so it's definitely worth hacking up and experimenting with.
To get better quality, you'd have to buy a considerably more expensive camera; probably $500+, at least. That's not appealing to a low-budget amateur (this IS just a hobby for many astronomers). Even then, there's no guarantee your results would be better. A "professional" grade camera may very well use the same CCD chip as something like the Vesta.
There are two major problems amateur astronomers have to deal with: sensitivity and atmospheric turbulence.
Often the objects an astronomer is trying to photograph are very faint, and they might not reliably register on the CCD. Stacking up (adding together) a bunch of image frames allows even the faintest readings to show up.
The other problem is turbulence. Temperature differentials in the atmosphere can cause optical distortion. By taking hundreds of frames of the same object, you have the luxury of selecting the least distorted frames for processing.
Basically, integration/stacking lets you extract as much detail as possible out of a large set of imperfect images.
My dad has gotten into this lately (using the same webcam -- the Vesta Pro is known for this). It's really fun to watch him do create his images -- he points the telescope and camera at the object, takes about 100 frames of video with the webcam, and brings the computer back inside to process the frames. He has a simple algorithm for selecting the clearest images, and he integrates the best frames into a single image with various software.
Sure thing, and sometimes it's even justified. If you write good code that someone else finds useful, you SHOULD be proud of it, and it should make you want to write more.
Slashdot Mirror
Shrug. Having fun is the whole point. It just happens that the result is useful for real work (most of the time).
-John
This is based on the assumption that traffic laws are bad, we should not have to follow them, and the police who are trying to enforce them are enemies to be avoided.
I disagree. Traffic laws exist to protect the safety of others. I'd be the first to agree that speed limits are way too conservative in some places, but I'm glad there is a limit. The public built its roads by popular consensus; it's not infringing on anyone's "rights" to set traffic laws; the people who invested in those roads have agreed to establish certain guidelines as to their use.
Speeding tickets suck. But you don't have a right to speed unless you own the road. If we agree that traffic laws should be enforced, shouldn't it be done in the most efficient way possible? If enforcement is done automatically, maybe traffic cops could do something more useful, like patrolling dangerous neighborhoods or improving the response time for emergencies. Once I needed help from a cop, and she was too busy setting up a speed trap to listen.
-John
blah. The "emotion chip" is indeed nice, but it's little more than a 300+ MHz MIPS with some extra instructions for fast linear algebra.
If China wanted these, they could get them easily. Just buy PS2's and pull out the chips, and steal a PS2 devkit from somewhere. Devkits ship with a stack of manuals describing the PS2's architecture in great detail, including a thorough description of the EE processor.
I *really* doubt China needs/wants Emotion Engines for its guided missiles. A nice chip, yes, but not THAT much better than a cheap PC processor.
-John
Umm, right. There's already a popular product, so nobody else should even try to come up with something better. With that kind of attitude we'd still be living in the dark ages.
Vorbis may not be as popular as MP3, but it's technically superior, and it works, right now. The compression and sound quality are excellent. The people behind it are working hard to have support included in popular players, and have even written a firmware update for the HipZip portable player to add Vorbis support (I just bought one of these players, and the Vorbis update does indeed work). Furthermore, Ogg Vorbis is not patented, and you don't have to pay royalties to anyone to use it (whereas Thompson charges significant royalties for MP3-related products).
So yes, it's the underdog compared to MP3, but it's far from through. With the attitude of "it's not the most popular and therefore it's pointless", though, we have little to look forward to in this world.
-John
...what about popup message boxes in general?
/etc/hosts. Every time Konqueror can't reach one, it pops up a message box to inform me.
I for one do not want a popup message box every time Konqi can't reach a URL. Can't it just flash a message in the status bar or something?
I have a bunch of adservers blackholed in
Just one of my peeves with respect to modern GUIs. Anyone else share my thoughts on this, or feel strongly otherwise?
-John
Who ever suggested mailbombing them?
How 'bout some polite but clear messages indicating that the community disapproves of this action and wishes for them to stop, lest they receive bad publicity and a tougher fight than they bargained for?
Remember, they'll only do this if they think it'll be profitable.
-John
Let's invoice the law firm for the Slashdot article... say one DM for every reader? Their actions forced us to raise media attention. When they pay up, donate it to the KDE project...
-John
rsw@isarpatent.com seems to be the appropriate point of contact. Let them know that they're irritating a hornet's nest.
-John
On one hand this seems like a gross invasion of privacy. But consider that you're using a $10k+ vehicle provided by this company, and that you've signed a very specific contract with them regarding the use of that vehicle. Provided that they tell you beforehand, can anyone supply a compelling reason why it's immoral or unethical for them to monitor one of their cars with GPS?
Of course customers won't like that, and they'd probably lose some business for it. But just as contract law allows us to uphold the GPL et al, a car rental company has the right to impose almost any terms it wishes on a rental contract -- and if you don't like those terms, you don't have to sign on the dotted line.
-John
SDL has quite a lot going for it:
a) it doesn't try to do multimedia IO itself; it serves as a common interface between DirectX, xlib, fbdev, etc. So you have all the support base of the platform's native toolkit, with a cross platform API.
b) it's free software (in the RMS sense). If you don't like it, you can change it.
c) it was developed for porting commercial games, and it has a proven track record. Every Loki title uses SDL.
d) it is simple and intuitive. This is largely subjective, of course; give it a try and decide for yourself.
-John
I think it was more a matter of "Loki releases $PRODUCT", not "New book on Linux programming". I thumbed through your book at the bookstore, and it looks very good. I hope to have a chance to read it sometime.
-John
Some of the best SDL acceleration is actually under the framebuffer console with a Matrox or 3Dfx card. SDL talks to the card directly then.
-John
I think you're over-analyzing it a bit. :)
:), and taught myself framebuffer console programming, as well as a bit about video signals, etc.
I don't know what Loki's motives for commissioning this were, but I can tell you mine: I wanted to learn this stuff myself. One of the best ways to learn something is to write it out for someone else. In the process of writing PLG, I became a serious SDL user, learned the quirks of OSS, reverse engineered ESD (that's what you have to do when there's no @#$%ing documentation
So I think it's reasonable to say I know a bit about the mechanics of Linux game programming now. Now maybe someone else can benefit. Maybe it'll sell a million copies, make DirectX obsolete, and get a penguin logo painted on every street corner. But probably not. That's not why I wrote it.
Or maybe some Linux-using 12 year old will pick it up and get into game programming. It would make my day to know that.
-John
No. I wrote this book. It is not deliberately obfuscated. But by all means have a look and decide that for yourself.
-John
This is not a troll; I'm just wondering why so many people seem to be supporting this hack. Sure, it's kind of neat, but it allows people to steal service. How is this anything but cheating?
In other words, could someone please list some reasons why DirecTV is in the wrong and the hackers are in the right here? I just want to know.
-John
There's one true way to figure out who's right.
Wait for about 10 years. Compare the state of free software to the state of "shared source" or whatever they call it this week.
I'm willing to bet that gcc will still be in wide use, Emacs will still be a choice editor (along with vim, of course), Perl 7.0 or later will have an absurd marketshare, and Apache will still be serving up data (not sure about http, but the Apache team is a forward thinking bunch, and I'm sure they'll adapt).
I'm also willing to bet that Microsoft will still be alive and strong, copyright law will be even further adulterated, and the USPTO will still be granting dumb patents.
I also suspect that in 10 years we'll still be arguing over free software. Microsoft will claim that free software is bad for business, we'll point out that it's actually not bad for anything but their profits, and the cycle will continue.
-John
I went geocaching. Found the GCA30 cache (www.geocaching.com). Nice hike in Sullivan Valley. Woohoo!
Ugh! My fluorescent tan is gone -- replaced by a real sunburn! I'm shrivelling up! Help!!
-John
Sure, they can win small, isolated victories. But even if 2600 lost, do you think that would even begin to stop the spread of DeCSS-related software, or the people who made it possible? No way! It would probably do quite the opposite (mirroring campaigns, etc).
2600 may be a casualty of war, but there are a hell of a lot more angry hackers on the battlefield, and they can't target 'em all.
-John
First off, VLC is pretty cool. I tried it a while back, and it worked almost perfectly. Just like a DVD player should, under any OS. Hats off to its creators.
But the CSS crack is old news by now. While the MPA (not the RIAA) is entangled in futile litigation, we're watching movies. We have been for a long time. Dave Touretsky's gallery of CSS descramblers (http://cs.cmu.edu/~dst) has grown to an enormous size, there are several Copyleft anti-DVD CCA shirts at every LUG meeting, and the algorithm is very well understood by now. I propose that we consider this a victory of information and move on to other fronts... There's plenty else to fight.
-John
Actually, the Vesta Pro can be had for as little as $20, so it's definitely worth hacking up and experimenting with.
To get better quality, you'd have to buy a considerably more expensive camera; probably $500+, at least. That's not appealing to a low-budget amateur (this IS just a hobby for many astronomers). Even then, there's no guarantee your results would be better. A "professional" grade camera may very well use the same CCD chip as something like the Vesta.
-John
There are two major problems amateur astronomers have to deal with: sensitivity and atmospheric turbulence.
Often the objects an astronomer is trying to photograph are very faint, and they might not reliably register on the CCD. Stacking up (adding together) a bunch of image frames allows even the faintest readings to show up.
The other problem is turbulence. Temperature differentials in the atmosphere can cause optical distortion. By taking hundreds of frames of the same object, you have the luxury of selecting the least distorted frames for processing.
Basically, integration/stacking lets you extract as much detail as possible out of a large set of imperfect images.
-John
Here's a link to his site.
-John
I never said free software was a viable way to make a living. It's probably not. Someone with a family to feed might need to look elsewhere.
For me, free software is a leisure pursuit. I don't *have* to get paid for that.
-John
Loki is neither free nor open. Loki ports commercial games to a free OS. So yes, I'd expect to get paid for that.
-John
Sure thing, and sometimes it's even justified. If you write good code that someone else finds useful, you SHOULD be proud of it, and it should make you want to write more.
-John