Not all broadband providers suggest a firewall. I believe comcast explicitly forbids it, as their method of having multiple computers on a network is:
1) Purchase a 5-port hub
2) Plug cable modem into it.
3) Plug up to four computers into it
4) Pay $5 for each additional IP used
You are explicitly NOT allowed to have anything in front of those boxen, thus they would not be able to assign you IP's, and you would not pay them extra. The cap of 4 PC's is too low as well.
I understand that compressed digital audio definately has its place, and I am cursed with golden ears that can hear things that most people can't. I just wanted to rebuke the common saying that 128K/256K/whatever is the same as CD quality. Ogg's are very useful, as I can burn a couple CD's full of Ogg's and take them to work, as opposed to my whole collection. I'm listening to them on on $30 headphones at work anyway. I can still tell the difference on aformentioned headphones if I'm really listening, but as I'm coding away, I lose focus a bit.
You are using low bitrate. Use 256kbps and you get perfect CD-quality audio from both codecs.
Umm... you are completely wrong. 256kbps is far from perfect CD quality. Hell, CD-audio sucks ass. It's just the best mass-market standard we have. Listen to some freshly recorded music on a high-end, high-bandwidth analog tape, with Dolby-SR Analog noise reduction (adds another 3dB to your floor and cieling), on a high-end amp and pre-amp and a pair of B&W Nautilus 801 speakers... and tell me 256kbps is perfect.
I know the IO slave supports MP3 and Ogg, assuming you have the encoders installed, but the question was specifically for an alternative to MP3. Ogg is the only alternative to MP3 that is supported by the audiocd IO slave.
I'm using Ogg Vorbis for a number of reason. The reference encoder, while not perfect, is certainly not bad. The vast majority of the time,.ogg's sound noticeably better than MP3's of the same bitrate.
More importantly, Ogg Vorbis is free of any patents or any other restrictions. I could make a commercial hardware player if I wanted to, and not have to pay any royalties to anyone.
Finally, it integrates nicely with Konqueror's audioCD IO slave. You can simply type "audiocd:/ogg/" in Konq's location bar, and it shows you a list of.ogg files with the track names grabbed from FreeDB. To actually encode, one symply drags the.ogg file to another directory, and the IO slave works its magic.
Really, you're taking a gamble that enough other people will join your civil disobedience that the government can't ignore you.
That's one hell of a gamble in this case. The governments of the world cannot throw all the users of Kazaa in jail because they are anonymous. They can, however, jail those who made Kazaa, and use them to set examples of other programmers who would make P2P technologies.
Unfortunately, most of the public would not march for them. Most people are truly apathetic.
When I find a law is unjust, I contribute in a way I can: go to non-violent protests, write letters, sign campaigns, give cash to the EFF, NRA, Libertarian party, or whoever I think has the best chance to help fight it. I would not be willing to break the law unless it was a major force of tyrranny that threatened the lives of the people in my nation.
And get your ass thrown into jail? There are plenty of unjust laws in almost every civilized country. If you ignore them, however, the penalty is stiff.
I guess you could ignore the imprisonment as well, and get shot trying to escape.
Noise is a big problem for me. I lined the inside of some of my louder PCs with dynamat and carpet scraps, but that doesn't help with all the whiny SCSI disks. Not much I can say there. Maybe another ask Slashdot?
One way to eliminate noise from hard drives is to mount them in your case using rubber washers. This forms a tight connection, and minimizes vibration. You will still get some noise, but it will be greatly diminished.
That's basically what I got out of the article. Tough read, but really detailed.
ANYway, I do agree with his points to a degree, as it's consistent with the way some hackers behave. An important point to make that is not stated so bluntly in his article is that the hacker community is large, chaotic, and variable. Hackers tend to have a few signature traits in common, but are often motivated for different reasons. Some hack to learn, others to stroke their egos, others for self promotion to other hackers, others still for self promotion to employers, others for the belief that software should be free (think RMS), etc.
There is no unified reason why hackers hack, and why OSS works... except maybe just because it can work. What other industry could this be possible in? Open hardware isn't practicle because we don't all have the cash around to have chips and boards fabbed. Software is freely replicatable, so there are fewer barriers of entry for Joe Hacker.
Just because they use a cross-platform compiler does not mean they are not developing platform specific code. They are probably heavilly using Win32 based components, which makes the code very un-portable. If they had decided to use Qt or some other cross-platform library, this would not have been a problem.
It sucks, but a bad decision early in the design product makes some things impossible. The fact that the game itself is playable on Linux, Windows, and Mac is a huge thing, however, and IMHO much more important than the toolkit. That shows good design from the beginning.
We are not talking about a driver for a printer that was close source so the printer became useless on a system, we are talking about a very high level software piracy, where nobody wants to pay.
Bull! There are plenty of closed source drivers for Windows that have no implemented equivalents on other OS's, and those keep people from using free software. Just because that's less of a problem today, don't pretend it isn't a problem. Think of all the people out there with WinModems that are totally screwed if they want to try Linux. There are such things as WinPrinters and WinScanners as well.
But I'm old(er) now, and what my head tells me differs from what my stomack does : at some point in every major OSS project, businesses have to bring in cash to keep the ball going. It might feel disgusting, but it's the truth. RMS' head thinks the exact same way his stomack does, and that's stupid.
That's the way it is now, but not the way it has to be. At some point in the future, if the world abandoned propretary software, and all software available was free (as in speech), corporate backing wouldn't be necessary. Why would we need the help of the industry if there were no proprietary file formats or network protocols to reverse engineer or sign NDA's for.
Sure, interaction with business on some level is necessary (businesses offereing tech support, etc.), but good software will happen with or without industry if it is universally accepted. And yes, we can still all get paid doing custom development for different companies (everything from web sites to customized POS systems). Stallman has said for years that that if the world consisted of all free software, we could still get paid, but not as much.
Please note I am not arguing whether these cases are good or bad, I'm simply arguing alternative scenarios that others had presented.
There are some problems with the CD option. I personally want a solid state option, because I do not want the damn thing to skip when I'm working out.
The CD option is great if you have a burner and just need it for your daily commute. This is not at all an option for highly-active people, however. The solid state ones are smaller, more rugged, and skip-free.
As a long-time Windows gamer who recently switched to Linux, I recently ordered 3 titles from Loki to run on my reasonably-vanilla RedHat 7.1 system (Q3 Arena, SimCity 3000, Myth II). I assumed that in the rock-solid Linux environment, I'd be up and playing in minutes.
Foolish mortal.Q3 runs like molasses for no discernible reason, and SimCity and Myth won't even start. Other than the nifty metal Q3 box, I don't have a lot to show for all this.
It took me about 2 hours to figure out how to install nVidia's GLX and kernel drivers, and after that Quake III was a breeze to install... load X, login as root, rin the shell script, click a few buttons... and it was done. It even made a menu item for me in KDE. I get virtually identical framerate to Win98 on the same hardware (yes, I'm using updated drivers on both OS's, and Win98 is about 1-2 FPS faster, but Quake hangs the system occasionally under Windows. Not under Linux)
What Linux REALLY needs is more high-quality drivers like nVidia provides.
I don't know if this is still true, but Java's AWT toolkit is implemented with Motif on UNIX platforms. I haven't looked at the Java sources in a long time, so this may or may not be true for Sun's JVM.
If this is true, even Swing will be slowed down by the beastly Motif; Although Swing is written in pure Java, javax.swing.component inherits java.awt.containter! This means that in addition to being a widget completely rendered with Java code, it's sitting on a blank Motif widget as well! Lots of overhead.
Again, if this data is inaccurate or out of date, please let me know.
Yes, it's true. Netscape6/Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4 (at least as far as the UI goes). For better or for worse, Mozilla really is a platform, and along with it you get all of the overhead. But not only is that overhead seeing plenty of profiling and optimization, but keep in mind processor speed has at least doubled since the project began. And processor speed continues to increase. So while Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4, there will come a time when the performance difference will be statistical noise, and no one will care. Yes, we all want a competitor to IE that can beat it in performance now, but I like to think of Mozilla as the "browser of the future."
Although what you say about CPU's getting faster all the time at a seemingly exponential rate, the same cannot be said for other technologies, such as hard drives. Yeah, my current 7500 RPM IBM 75GXP is probably twice as fast as the 4000 RPM Western Digital Caviar drive in my old system, but my 1.2ghz Athlon is MUCH more than twice as fast as the 90mhz Pentium that was in the same machine. With Mozilla/NS6, things take forever to load, and swap constantly. My paltry 256MB of RAM is evidently not enough if I'm running Mozilla/NS6. That's why under Win32 I use IE, and under Linux I use Konqueror. Neither is perfect, but I run a lot of apps simultaneously, and don't want one app bogging everything down.
(Please see the parent to this... It's currently modded 0 as was posted by an AC)
Why is that a problem? The GPL is a Good Thing(TM). Every piece of code that I've written for the past four years I have GPL'd... including programs I've done for school. My university claims ownership of anything I write while attending, so I make sure they can't profit off my hard work without granting others' freedom.
You make it sound like the viral nature of the GPL is accidental... it's not! It's 100% intentional. Every developer knows what the GPL means when they start a GPL'd product. They want to make sure that NO fork of thier code can be used in non-free (as in speech) software.
If you don't like the concept of GPL'd software, then don't develop for it. Period. There are plenty of other open-source liscence alternatives. Or you can ask MS for the source code to *thier* products and see how they will feel about you commercially distributing a patch to thier code.
But I'm glad Linus beat him to the punch. I'm very grateful for Stallman's contribution to the software field, but in speaking and writing he often sounds like a total loon. Linus' writings are always so relaxed, eloquent, and poingent, even when he's basically calling someone an idiot.
My parents gave me the "these are the best days of your life" crap, and the "if you'd just act more normal, no one would pick on you" crap. My life started to get easier as soon as I stopped caring about my image, about dating, about what others thought in general.
The worst thing my parents ever told my is that in high school, I was to young to know real stress. I now am in college full time, working a full time job, and juggling a social life in between... it's nowhere near as stressful as high school was! There's no violence, geek bigotry, popularity contests, etc. to worry about.
If any geeky, rebellious, and/or non-conformist high-school students are out there and considering suicide -- take my advice, life gets way better after school. Don't listen to your parents bitching. Life only gets easier. Especially if you are intelligent, and go into a field like computer science, engineering, etc.
That's a fscking beautiful idea! I'll have to do this everywhere.
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$c=142;if((@a= unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;
$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+8 4])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$b=73;$e=256|(ord$b[4])>8^($f=($t=255 ) &($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q *8^$q>=8 )+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/ x/pack+/g;eval
The end users are benefitting from this. KDE comes out with a new feature. The GNOME people say "hey, that's cool... we should do that... but here's what we can do to make it better..." and the KDE people then see the improvements, and incorporate those improvements, and add improvents of their own. And then the GNOME people... you get the idea.
KDE and GNOME are different projects, have different goals, and have different design philosophies. I dig KDE because of a few little usability differences. I program for KDE because I love Qt's signals & slots event system. I learned UI development using propegated event handling in Java 1.1 (the EventListener model) and Qt's model makes perfect sense to me. As does KParts and DCOP. I feel at home.
GNOME people, however, are probably more comfortable in the way GTK+ handles things. I personally have a hard time following GNOME code, but that doesn't make it bad, just different.
Although I think interoperability between the two (shared file formats, themes, hints, messageing [KParts talking to Bonobo components, etc.]) would be a great thing, I don't think the projects should merge. Linux is all about choice. KDE and GNOME have distinctly different flavors, both of which are cool. I prefer KDE. About 1/3 of my friends and co-workers prefer GNOME, 1/3 prefer KDE, and 1/3 prefer any number of other window managers and environments (the CTO at my company uses TWM!) It's where they all feel comfortable.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Slashdot Mirror
What currency? Yen? USD?
Not all broadband providers suggest a firewall. I believe comcast explicitly forbids it, as their method of having multiple computers on a network is:
1) Purchase a 5-port hub
2) Plug cable modem into it.
3) Plug up to four computers into it
4) Pay $5 for each additional IP used
You are explicitly NOT allowed to have anything in front of those boxen, thus they would not be able to assign you IP's, and you would not pay them extra. The cap of 4 PC's is too low as well.
I understand that compressed digital audio definately has its place, and I am cursed with golden ears that can hear things that most people can't. I just wanted to rebuke the common saying that 128K/256K/whatever is the same as CD quality. Ogg's are very useful, as I can burn a couple CD's full of Ogg's and take them to work, as opposed to my whole collection. I'm listening to them on on $30 headphones at work anyway. I can still tell the difference on aformentioned headphones if I'm really listening, but as I'm coding away, I lose focus a bit.
Umm... you are completely wrong. 256kbps is far from perfect CD quality. Hell, CD-audio sucks ass. It's just the best mass-market standard we have. Listen to some freshly recorded music on a high-end, high-bandwidth analog tape, with Dolby-SR Analog noise reduction (adds another 3dB to your floor and cieling), on a high-end amp and pre-amp and a pair of B&W Nautilus 801 speakers... and tell me 256kbps is perfect.
I know the IO slave supports MP3 and Ogg, assuming you have the encoders installed, but the question was specifically for an alternative to MP3. Ogg is the only alternative to MP3 that is supported by the audiocd IO slave.
I'm using Ogg Vorbis for a number of reason. The reference encoder, while not perfect, is certainly not bad. The vast majority of the time, .ogg's sound noticeably better than MP3's of the same bitrate.
.ogg files with the track names grabbed from FreeDB. To actually encode, one symply drags the .ogg file to another directory, and the IO slave works its magic.
More importantly, Ogg Vorbis is free of any patents or any other restrictions. I could make a commercial hardware player if I wanted to, and not have to pay any royalties to anyone.
Finally, it integrates nicely with Konqueror's audioCD IO slave. You can simply type "audiocd:/ogg/" in Konq's location bar, and it shows you a list of
That's one hell of a gamble in this case. The governments of the world cannot throw all the users of Kazaa in jail because they are anonymous. They can, however, jail those who made Kazaa, and use them to set examples of other programmers who would make P2P technologies.
Unfortunately, most of the public would not march for them. Most people are truly apathetic.
When I find a law is unjust, I contribute in a way I can: go to non-violent protests, write letters, sign campaigns, give cash to the EFF, NRA, Libertarian party, or whoever I think has the best chance to help fight it. I would not be willing to break the law unless it was a major force of tyrranny that threatened the lives of the people in my nation.
"I say ignore all unjust laws."
And get your ass thrown into jail? There are plenty of unjust laws in almost every civilized country. If you ignore them, however, the penalty is stiff.
I guess you could ignore the imprisonment as well, and get shot trying to escape.
Noise is a big problem for me. I lined the inside of some of my louder PCs with dynamat and carpet scraps, but that doesn't help with all the whiny SCSI disks. Not much I can say there. Maybe another ask Slashdot?
One way to eliminate noise from hard drives is to mount them in your case using rubber washers. This forms a tight connection, and minimizes vibration. You will still get some noise, but it will be greatly diminished.
That's basically what I got out of the article. Tough read, but really detailed.
ANYway, I do agree with his points to a degree, as it's consistent with the way some hackers behave. An important point to make that is not stated so bluntly in his article is that the hacker community is large, chaotic, and variable. Hackers tend to have a few signature traits in common, but are often motivated for different reasons. Some hack to learn, others to stroke their egos, others for self promotion to other hackers, others still for self promotion to employers, others for the belief that software should be free (think RMS), etc.
There is no unified reason why hackers hack, and why OSS works... except maybe just because it can work. What other industry could this be possible in? Open hardware isn't practicle because we don't all have the cash around to have chips and boards fabbed. Software is freely replicatable, so there are fewer barriers of entry for Joe Hacker.
Just my $0.02...
Just because they use a cross-platform compiler does not mean they are not developing platform specific code. They are probably heavilly using Win32 based components, which makes the code very un-portable. If they had decided to use Qt or some other cross-platform library, this would not have been a problem.
It sucks, but a bad decision early in the design product makes some things impossible. The fact that the game itself is playable on Linux, Windows, and Mac is a huge thing, however, and IMHO much more important than the toolkit. That shows good design from the beginning.
Bull! There are plenty of closed source drivers for Windows that have no implemented equivalents on other OS's, and those keep people from using free software. Just because that's less of a problem today, don't pretend it isn't a problem. Think of all the people out there with WinModems that are totally screwed if they want to try Linux. There are such things as WinPrinters and WinScanners as well.
That's the way it is now, but not the way it has to be. At some point in the future, if the world abandoned propretary software, and all software available was free (as in speech), corporate backing wouldn't be necessary. Why would we need the help of the industry if there were no proprietary file formats or network protocols to reverse engineer or sign NDA's for.
Sure, interaction with business on some level is necessary (businesses offereing tech support, etc.), but good software will happen with or without industry if it is universally accepted. And yes, we can still all get paid doing custom development for different companies (everything from web sites to customized POS systems). Stallman has said for years that that if the world consisted of all free software, we could still get paid, but not as much.
Please note I am not arguing whether these cases are good or bad, I'm simply arguing alternative scenarios that others had presented.
There are some problems with the CD option. I personally want a solid state option, because I do not want the damn thing to skip when I'm working out.
The CD option is great if you have a burner and just need it for your daily commute. This is not at all an option for highly-active people, however. The solid state ones are smaller, more rugged, and skip-free.
-
As a long-time Windows gamer who recently switched to Linux, I recently ordered 3 titles from Loki to run on my reasonably-vanilla RedHat 7.1 system (Q3 Arena, SimCity 3000, Myth II). I assumed that in the rock-solid Linux environment, I'd be up and playing in minutes.
It took me about 2 hours to figure out how to install nVidia's GLX and kernel drivers, and after that Quake III was a breeze to install... load X, login as root, rin the shell script, click a few buttons... and it was done. It even made a menu item for me in KDE. I get virtually identical framerate to Win98 on the same hardware (yes, I'm using updated drivers on both OS's, and Win98 is about 1-2 FPS faster, but Quake hangs the system occasionally under Windows. Not under Linux)Foolish mortal.Q3 runs like molasses for no discernible reason, and SimCity and Myth won't even start. Other than the nifty metal Q3 box, I don't have a lot to show for all this.
What Linux REALLY needs is more high-quality drivers like nVidia provides.
I don't know if this is still true, but Java's AWT toolkit is implemented with Motif on UNIX platforms. I haven't looked at the Java sources in a long time, so this may or may not be true for Sun's JVM.
If this is true, even Swing will be slowed down by the beastly Motif; Although Swing is written in pure Java, javax.swing.component inherits java.awt.containter! This means that in addition to being a widget completely rendered with Java code, it's sitting on a blank Motif widget as well! Lots of overhead.
Again, if this data is inaccurate or out of date, please let me know.
--Aaron
Yes, it's true. Netscape6/Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4 (at least as far as the UI goes). For better or for worse, Mozilla really is a platform, and along with it you get all of the overhead. But not only is that overhead seeing plenty of profiling and optimization, but keep in mind processor speed has at least doubled since the project began. And processor speed continues to increase. So while Mozilla will never be as fast as NS4, there will come a time when the performance difference will be statistical noise, and no one will care. Yes, we all want a competitor to IE that can beat it in performance now, but I like to think of Mozilla as the "browser of the future."
Although what you say about CPU's getting faster all the time at a seemingly exponential rate, the same cannot be said for other technologies, such as hard drives. Yeah, my current 7500 RPM IBM 75GXP is probably twice as fast as the 4000 RPM Western Digital Caviar drive in my old system, but my 1.2ghz Athlon is MUCH more than twice as fast as the 90mhz Pentium that was in the same machine. With Mozilla/NS6, things take forever to load, and swap constantly. My paltry 256MB of RAM is evidently not enough if I'm running Mozilla/NS6. That's why under Win32 I use IE, and under Linux I use Konqueror. Neither is perfect, but I run a lot of apps simultaneously, and don't want one app bogging everything down.That URL is pretty lame... try this one instead:
www.verizoneatspoop.com
(Please see the parent to this... It's currently modded 0 as was posted by an AC)
Why is that a problem? The GPL is a Good Thing(TM). Every piece of code that I've written for the past four years I have GPL'd... including programs I've done for school. My university claims ownership of anything I write while attending, so I make sure they can't profit off my hard work without granting others' freedom.
You make it sound like the viral nature of the GPL is accidental... it's not! It's 100% intentional. Every developer knows what the GPL means when they start a GPL'd product. They want to make sure that NO fork of thier code can be used in non-free (as in speech) software.
If you don't like the concept of GPL'd software, then don't develop for it. Period. There are plenty of other open-source liscence alternatives. Or you can ask MS for the source code to *thier* products and see how they will feel about you commercially distributing a patch to thier code.
I'll agree that MS contributed, but saying thier contributions were even on par with Newton would be bordering on heresy in my book.
But I'm glad Linus beat him to the punch. I'm very grateful for Stallman's contribution to the software field, but in speaking and writing he often sounds like a total loon. Linus' writings are always so relaxed, eloquent, and poingent, even when he's basically calling someone an idiot.
Wow... you had an amazingly wonderful father.
My parents gave me the "these are the best days of your life" crap, and the "if you'd just act more normal, no one would pick on you" crap. My life started to get easier as soon as I stopped caring about my image, about dating, about what others thought in general.
The worst thing my parents ever told my is that in high school, I was to young to know real stress. I now am in college full time, working a full time job, and juggling a social life in between... it's nowhere near as stressful as high school was! There's no violence, geek bigotry, popularity contests, etc. to worry about.
If any geeky, rebellious, and/or non-conformist high-school students are out there and considering suicide -- take my advice, life gets way better after school. Don't listen to your parents bitching. Life only gets easier. Especially if you are intelligent, and go into a field like computer science, engineering, etc.
--Paladin
That's a fscking beautiful idea! I'll have to do this everywhere. $_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$c=142;if((@a= unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;
$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+8 4])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$b=73;$e=256|(ord$b[4])>8^($f=($t=255 ) &($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q *8^$q>=8 )+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/ x/pack+/g;eval
Tell that to Jon Johannessan (sp?)
The end users are benefitting from this. KDE comes out with a new feature. The GNOME people say "hey, that's cool... we should do that... but here's what we can do to make it better..." and the KDE people then see the improvements, and incorporate those improvements, and add improvents of their own. And then the GNOME people... you get the idea.
KDE and GNOME are different projects, have different goals, and have different design philosophies. I dig KDE because of a few little usability differences. I program for KDE because I love Qt's signals & slots event system. I learned UI development using propegated event handling in Java 1.1 (the EventListener model) and Qt's model makes perfect sense to me. As does KParts and DCOP. I feel at home.
GNOME people, however, are probably more comfortable in the way GTK+ handles things. I personally have a hard time following GNOME code, but that doesn't make it bad, just different.
Although I think interoperability between the two (shared file formats, themes, hints, messageing [KParts talking to Bonobo components, etc.]) would be a great thing, I don't think the projects should merge. Linux is all about choice. KDE and GNOME have distinctly different flavors, both of which are cool. I prefer KDE. About 1/3 of my friends and co-workers prefer GNOME, 1/3 prefer KDE, and 1/3 prefer any number of other window managers and environments (the CTO at my company uses TWM!) It's where they all feel comfortable.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"