"Sega only wins when they support a powerful software library."
Have you *seen* the games on Dreamcast? They are easily the best line up of games in the first two years of a console on any system since the SNES. Unfortunately, they will be the only two years. What killed sega is that they had no money for marketing after the saturn failed and coin ops in general bombed. And Sony has a LOT of money for marketing.
Re:Usefulness and Innovation and Power: Three Thin
on
The Future Of The GUI?
·
· Score: 1
In fact, nobody *uses* Eros - it just isn't practical right now.
Erm... these guys are planning to write
it in perl. How is that ever going to be
maintainable? Perl *doesn't* work for
large projects.
For something like this, I would say
C is by far the most sensible option.
Perl has got to be one of the stupidest,
maybe narrowly beaten by sh. If you really
have to use a no static type checking
interpreted langauge, at least python
is maintainable....
We already have BSD and Linux, does
anyone really see that any real problems
are going to be solved with another
POSIX style OS? Even with the microkernel
differences, it really doesn't look like
a big step forward...if you want to build
a new OS, why not actually make it new?
I'd be far more willing to switch / put
effort into something which actually has
some potential to change things - like
EROS. see http://www.eros-os.org/
Eg mathematically provable security,
orthogonal persistance.
Erm.
Sorry, but you lose.
1) Saying "I am going to marked down to -1 for this, I'm such a rebel!" is pathetic. Its sad that some moderators still fall for it.
Why can't there be a "-1 Asked for it"
moderation option?
2) Linux is a kernel - it provides an API to program to. It has no CLI or GUI in the kernel.
*Any* user interface is "another layer".
On an iPaq, it makes sense to have a gui.
Of course you could stick it in the kernel,
but why? There is no guaranteed performance
improvement. Sticking things in the kernel
randomly is generally a bad thing. Especially if your reason is "another layer"... its called abstraction, folks!
Using linux gives a familiar platform for development, and it is easy to port.
Why the hell is it *bad* to port?
Of course, it would be better if the whole
world ran eros - www.eros-os.org - but it would need to be finished first... and linux is the best bet currently.
Make another entry in devfs. This can simply be to a buffer in kernel memory. Then the firmware can just be catted into this file, from startup scripts, or I think you can get modutils to run a script for you after you insert your module.
They need to justify their continuing licence fee. This would be a pretty cheap way to do it. They don't charge for the news on their website ( news.bbc.co.uk ). And no ads! The licence fee is only for TVs, not radios. And very few people in Britain think the licence fee is a bad thing. (ie only ultra right wing tories, who would like to sell the BBC to themselves cheaply, like they did to a lot of other publically owned industries).
The general tone of the comments here makes me want to weep - I can not believe the amount of bitching.
There are a few points of FUD always bandied about in these discussions.
1) GNOME is unstable. This is wrong, plain and simple. 1.0 was released too early, and gave people a bad impression. Does the fact that GNOME was unstable make it unstable now? No!
2) GNOME is a hack. People generally say this because they can not understand OO in C. If you like C++, fine, use it. Use one of the GTK C++ bindings, eg gtk--. The GTK+ object system is more flexible due to its dynamic nature, and it is (in my experience) easier to know what is going on - no pointer assignments doing copies remotely over CORBA, due to the fun of operator overloading.
3) Its all an RMS conspiracy against KDE. This is the "Debian hates KDE!" type stuff. The fact is that it is a breach of the licence to distribute KDE in binary form right now, as they still don't seem to have made up their minds on what to do (Artistic Licence, GPL exception). This will be fixed I'm sure.
There are a lot of other stupid things people say, but by now I would hope/. moderators would know not to moderate that kind of post up.
My oh my, you are confused. If you release your product under the GPL, anyone can use, modify and redistribute under the terms of the GPL. If someone wants to licence it off you for binary only distribution, then you can sell it to them under a different licence. If you had actually read my post, it says that you should only accept contributions assigning copyright, allowing you to continue to relicence for proprietary software. But instead you decided to talk crap. Fine.
That is what I presume they meant. However, they can grant their code under another licence, for a fee. This could be a standard game engine licence. They could only do this if all copyright holders agree. The easiest way to do this is to remain sole copyright holder by only taking contributions that assign copyright.
Some people have said this could not be open source if you need to pay a license for commercial redistribution. They are just plain wrong.
The easiest and IMO best way to do this is to licence under the GPL, then sell licence exceptions. Include a note with the open source release that says only submissions assigning copyright will be accepted into the code base (still fully acknowledging authorship in the code and credits). A nice addition would be giving Lionhead share options to major contributors.
This could definitley work, and if people really want to licence the engine in for redistribution binary form, they just pay for a special licence from Lionhead.
There is a status in English law called a "vexatious litigator". I think you can do a private prosection to get this status conferred onto someone. I don't know exactly what happens when you get this status - maybe judges just always through your cases out of court...
Maybe everyone should band up and try to get this status conferred onto that bloke, as he certainly seems a bit vexatious, allegedly. Notice, no names!
Maybe some one who is more up on English law could comment on this possibility?
You really shouldn't be generating gnumeric files like that - the file format may change - probably to one based on libefs (binary) or, maybe, Microsoft structured storage, if the short names can be worked around(MS SS only lets you have 32 byte names for streams). The reason binary formats are being considered is:
*embedding binary data( eg images) in base64 in an XML file is a bit skanky *searching a whole bunch of XML files for a particular attribute is much harder than with a well designed binary format. However, for full text search, a background process doing indexing is probably the only way. Thats going to be part of what Eazel are doing, so this point may be moot.
I would like it if XML were able to be used, but the performance for, eg, an embedded 40meg video, is not likely to be great.
The correct way to create gnumeric spread sheets from other applications is through bonobo automation - and if in doing this you come across something too hard to do, you should get on to the gnumeric developers and tell them your woes. These interface changes will be easier to deal with than if the structure of the file changes.
Computing in UK schools has been a shambles for a very long time.
A little bit of history: Most schools had a BBC computer (thats right one BBC) until about 1990. This was an 8 bit machine, with some good features when it launched, but it was expensive. Nobody used it but schools. In 1990, it was literally a joke. "I may as well be using a BBC!" It was manufactured by Acorn and branded BBC as a marketing ploy. Nobody ever got fired for buying a BBC!
Then something new came along. Archimedes. This was also created by Acorn, and while it had a nice OS, it was underpowered compared to PCs, and expensive due to low volume. This was marketed as the successor to the BBC, as it was made by Acorn and there was a BBC emulator.
The schools then all gave up, and started buying Windows machines. Around the end of the Win 3.1 era. Computer classes, which used to teach BASIC programming, were degraded into lessons on MS Word.
The problem has been the low level of cluefulness possessed by the people in the schools in charge of IT. These are usually people who have been pressed into doing it because they have a computer at home, or they are a maths teacher, or some other specious reason. I know this because I used to work on the faults desk of an educational ISP. You can imagine the kind of questions we used to get.
It maybe that this give away will help. But I doubt it very much. The schools need funding so they can employ dedicated people. Unfortunately, any people they do employ are likely to be Microsoft Certified Button Pushers, and will run a mile when they are asked to install Red Hat. And almost every state school I know of have far more urgent funding needs. Like teachers salaries.
(Hope that someone reads down far enough to moderate this up). The site has a good explanation of what DTE is, but I don't know how active they are.
They have a patch against 2.2.13, which was created on Dec 13 1999. So its not too out of date, though it will have to be forward ported to 2.3 I suppose...
Maybe the NSA should be spending their money elsewhere - or maybe they should clue up to what open source is all about.
I wonder what is covered by the patent Secure are so proud of?
(Hope that someone reads down far enough to moderate this up). The site has a good explanation of what DTE is, but I don't know how active they are.
They have a patch against 2.2.13, which was created on Dec 13 1999. So its not too out of date, though it wil have to be forward ported to 2.3 I suppose...
Maybe the NSA should be spending their money elsewhere - or maybe they should clue up to what open source is all about.
I wonder what is covered by the patent Secure are so proud of?
Lucas has been granted a monopoly over this work, with the aim of promoting the creation of other works of a creative nature. He is now abusing that monopoly, by trying to get people to buy the VHS and DVD. If this was a monopoly he had created himself, rather than created by the idiocy of copyright, he would surely be brought up on antitrust charges.
Copyright is a very strange thing. It is granted to give people "protection", yet it is almost always used as an extortion device. It is a right granted without responsiblity. This is unlike most other other rights we have in our societies:
Freedom : revoked if you break criminal law
Free speech: revoked if you slander, libel, or attempt to induce a disruption of the peace
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Microsoft would not sign any drivers that work under vmware? And then when vmware changes the card it emulates, DMCA them to death.
Not a crime, its a tort.
"Sega only wins when they support a powerful software library."
Have you *seen* the games on Dreamcast? They are easily the best line up of games in the first two years of a console on any system since the SNES. Unfortunately, they will be the only two years. What killed sega is that they had no money for marketing after the saturn failed and coin ops in general bombed. And Sony has a LOT of money for marketing.
In fact, nobody *uses* Eros - it just isn't practical right now.
It looks like to do this for GTK+ 1.2 would be pretty easy as well. Just
gdkdraw.c
gdkfont.c
gdkprivate.h
I'd have to look closer to see if it would break binary compatibilty, in which it'll have to wait for 2.0. anyway.
Erm... these guys are planning to write
it in perl. How is that ever going to be
maintainable? Perl *doesn't* work for
large projects.
For something like this, I would say
C is by far the most sensible option.
Perl has got to be one of the stupidest,
maybe narrowly beaten by sh. If you really
have to use a no static type checking
interpreted langauge, at least python
is maintainable....
We already have BSD and Linux, does
anyone really see that any real problems
are going to be solved with another
POSIX style OS? Even with the microkernel
differences, it really doesn't look like
a big step forward...if you want to build
a new OS, why not actually make it new?
I'd be far more willing to switch / put
effort into something which actually has
some potential to change things - like
EROS. see http://www.eros-os.org/
Eg mathematically provable security,
orthogonal persistance.
Really, who is going to buy this?
If you give galeon a try, you won't
see any need for this proprietary stuff....
galeon.sourceforge.org
and it integrates with gnome - it is
quick and uncluttered too.
Hopefully the mozilla component
from nautilus will follow this philosophy too.
Erm.
Sorry, but you lose.
1) Saying "I am going to marked down to -1 for this, I'm such a rebel!" is pathetic. Its sad that some moderators still fall for it.
Why can't there be a "-1 Asked for it"
moderation option?
2) Linux is a kernel - it provides an API to program to. It has no CLI or GUI in the kernel.
*Any* user interface is "another layer".
On an iPaq, it makes sense to have a gui.
Of course you could stick it in the kernel,
but why? There is no guaranteed performance
improvement. Sticking things in the kernel
randomly is generally a bad thing. Especially if your reason is "another layer"... its called abstraction, folks!
Using linux gives a familiar platform for development, and it is easy to port.
Why the hell is it *bad* to port?
Of course, it would be better if the whole
world ran eros - www.eros-os.org - but it would need to be finished first... and linux is the best bet currently.
In kernel space, no memory mappings need to
be changed at all.
In a user->kernel switch, the kernel memory
must be remapped read/write.
Several hundred instructions may be expended
doing this.
Make another entry in devfs.
/proc file.
This can simply be to a buffer in kernel memory.
Then the firmware can just be catted into this file, from startup scripts, or I think you can get modutils to run a script for you after you insert your module.
If you are targeting 2.2, use a
Repeat after me:
ioctl is evil!
They need to justify their continuing licence fee. This would be a pretty cheap way to do it. They don't charge for the news on their website ( news.bbc.co.uk ). And no ads!
The licence fee is only for TVs, not radios. And very few people in Britain think the licence fee is a bad thing. (ie only ultra right wing tories, who would like to sell the BBC to themselves cheaply, like they did to a lot of other publically owned industries).
If sony loses money on hardware, why would they care? would'nt they prefer someone else to lose money on hardware for them?
Don't use enlightenment.
The general tone of the comments here makes me want to weep - I can not believe the amount of bitching.
/. moderators would know not to moderate that kind of post up.
There are a few points of FUD always bandied about in these discussions.
1) GNOME is unstable.
This is wrong, plain and simple. 1.0 was released too early, and gave people a bad impression. Does the fact that GNOME was unstable make it unstable now? No!
2) GNOME is a hack.
People generally say this because they can not understand OO in C. If you like C++, fine, use it.
Use one of the GTK C++ bindings, eg gtk--.
The GTK+ object system is more flexible due to its dynamic nature, and it is (in my experience) easier to know what is going on - no pointer assignments doing copies remotely over CORBA, due to the fun of operator overloading.
3) Its all an RMS conspiracy against KDE.
This is the "Debian hates KDE!" type stuff.
The fact is that it is a breach of the licence to distribute KDE in binary form right now, as they still don't seem to have made up their minds on what to do (Artistic Licence, GPL exception).
This will be fixed I'm sure.
There are a lot of other stupid things people say,
but by now I would hope
My oh my, you are confused.
If you release your product under the GPL, anyone can use, modify and redistribute under the terms of the GPL.
If someone wants to licence it off you for binary only distribution, then you can sell it to them under a different licence. If you had actually read my post, it says that you should only accept contributions assigning copyright, allowing you to continue to relicence for proprietary software.
But instead you decided to talk crap. Fine.
That is what I presume they meant. However, they can grant their code under another licence, for a fee. This could be a standard game engine licence. They could only do this if all copyright holders agree. The easiest way to do this is to remain sole copyright holder by only taking contributions that assign copyright.
Yes, but to redistribut in binary only form, you need another license. This can only be granted if all copyright holders agree.
Some people have said this could not be open source if you need to pay a license for commercial redistribution. They are just plain wrong.
The easiest and IMO best way to do this is to licence under the GPL, then sell licence exceptions. Include a note with the open source release that says only submissions assigning copyright will be accepted into the code base (still fully acknowledging authorship in the code and credits). A nice addition would be giving Lionhead share options to major contributors.
This could definitley work, and if people really want to licence the engine in for redistribution binary form, they just pay for a special licence from Lionhead.
IANAL, but...
There is a status in English law called a "vexatious litigator". I think you can do a private prosection to get this status conferred onto someone. I don't know exactly what happens when you get this status - maybe judges just always through your cases out of court...
Maybe everyone should band up and try to get this status conferred onto that bloke, as he certainly seems a bit vexatious, allegedly. Notice, no names!
Maybe some one who is more up on English law could comment on this possibility?
You really shouldn't be generating gnumeric files like that - the file format may change - probably to one based on libefs (binary) or, maybe, Microsoft structured storage, if the short names can be worked around(MS SS only lets you have 32 byte names for streams). The reason binary formats are being considered is:
*embedding binary data( eg images) in base64 in an XML file is a bit skanky
*searching a whole bunch of XML files for a particular attribute is much harder than with a well designed binary format. However, for full text search, a background process doing indexing is probably the only way. Thats going to be part of what Eazel are doing, so this point may be moot.
I would like it if XML were able to be used, but the performance for, eg, an embedded 40meg video, is not likely to be great.
The correct way to create gnumeric spread sheets from other applications is through bonobo automation - and if in doing this you come across something too hard to do, you should get on to the gnumeric developers and tell them your woes. These interface changes will be easier to deal with than if the structure of the file changes.
Computing in UK schools has been a shambles for a very long time.
A little bit of history:
Most schools had a BBC computer (thats right one BBC) until about 1990. This was an 8 bit machine, with some good features when it launched, but it was expensive. Nobody used it but schools. In 1990, it was literally a joke. "I may as well be using a BBC!" It was manufactured by Acorn and branded BBC as a marketing ploy. Nobody ever got fired for buying a BBC!
Then something new came along. Archimedes. This was also created by Acorn, and while it had a nice OS, it was underpowered compared to PCs, and expensive due to low volume. This was marketed as the successor to the BBC, as it was made by Acorn and there was a BBC emulator.
The schools then all gave up, and started buying Windows machines. Around the end of the Win 3.1 era. Computer classes, which used to teach BASIC programming, were degraded into lessons on MS Word.
The problem has been the low level of cluefulness possessed by the people in the schools in charge of IT. These are usually people who have been pressed into doing it because they have a computer at home, or they are a maths teacher, or some other specious reason. I know this because I used to work on the faults desk of an educational ISP. You can imagine the kind of questions we used to get.
It maybe that this give away will help. But I doubt it very much. The schools need funding so they can employ dedicated people. Unfortunately, any people they do employ are likely to be Microsoft Certified Button Pushers, and will run a mile when they are asked to install Red Hat. And almost every state school I know of have far more urgent funding needs. Like teachers salaries.
oops - messed it up last time! Doh!
at this url: http://research-cistw.saic.com/cace/dte.html
(Hope that someone reads down far enough to moderate this up). The site has a good explanation of what DTE is, but I don't know how active they are.
They have a patch against 2.2.13, which was created on Dec 13 1999. So its not too out of date, though it will have to be forward ported to 2.3 I suppose...
Maybe the NSA should be spending their money elsewhere - or maybe they should clue up to what open source is all about.
I wonder what is covered by the patent Secure are so proud of?
at this url:
(Hope that someone reads down far enough to moderate this up). The site has a good explanation of what DTE is, but I don't know how active they are.
They have a patch against 2.2.13, which was created on Dec 13 1999. So its not too out of date, though it wil have to be forward ported to 2.3 I suppose...
Maybe the NSA should be spending their money elsewhere - or maybe they should clue up to what open source is all about.
I wonder what is covered by the patent Secure are so proud of?
I see this as abuse of copyright.
Lucas has been granted a monopoly over this work, with the aim of promoting the creation of other works of a creative nature. He is now abusing that monopoly, by trying to get people to buy the VHS and DVD. If this was a monopoly he had created himself, rather than created by the idiocy of copyright, he would surely be brought up on antitrust charges.
Copyright is a very strange thing. It is granted to give people "protection", yet it is almost always used as an extortion device. It is a right granted without responsiblity. This is unlike most other other rights we have in our societies: