Re:Still no word from the pr0n industry
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
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· Score: 1
While that has been true up to the present, apparently, because porn 'actors' are not usually the most attractive in the world, high definition doesn't really do them any favours. Thus the porn industry isn't really itching to go HD.
You and anyone who says "it's open enough" don't know what you're talking about. Without the freedom to fork, you don't have any freedoms at all.
Without that freedom, you and all that code you & your team spent 18 months coding are sitting under the thumb of Sun. Sun can tell you which platforms you can migrate to in the future (unless of course you want to rewrite everything in something non-java). If it is against Sun's business interest to port / allow a port of java to architecture/os xyz, you're not going to be using it.
It may not even be the fault of Sun being aggressive. What if Sun drops java? What if Sun goes bust? What if Sun has a hostile takeover by a company who wants to sweep java under the rug? One way or another there could be no more java releases.
So in 5 - 10 years time when the industry makes another architecture/os leap, you're stuck running on platforms which were around in 2005, no matter how much cheaper & faster the more common new systems are. Time to rewrite plenty of code.
It's not hard to imagine - people are making the jump to amd64 now. A couple of years from now, amd64 will be the commodity hardware standard. Cheap and easily available. Imagine if Sun had for one reason or another dropped java in 2003 with no amd64 port.
No amd64 java. We'll have to stay running our systems in deprecated 32bit mode. Or rewrite everything. Or use one of the unofficial java replacements that's come up to fill the cracks. But oh no, those would be forks that comply to no standard!
And really, please drop the myth of open source incompatible fragmentation.
Python's been going for around 15 years. How many python standards are there to code to?
Perl's been going for longer. How many perl forks are there?
How may rubies?
How many phps are there?
Now let's look at some closed languages:
All I can think of is your beloved java. MS, IBM, Sun, Kaffe, GCJ... Your strategy of keeping it closed to prevent incompatible versions doesn't seem to have worked!
If you want all of your code to be under your own control, don't write it in java.
95% of the sites I (and almost every other web user) visit use javascript in some way, shape, or form.
I don't think that's true. Or at least the javascript is just unnecessary gubbins.
I've been browsing with javascript disabled for the last 4 years. I only occasionally have to load up my other (js enabled) profile or konqueror to check something in.
I love the way they say "...the benefits of the bill had been obscured by special interest groups" as though the special interest groups are a bad thing.
Should for instance a farming bill not be influenced by farmers? Farmers are a 'special interest group'.
In fact, when I think of the phrase 'special interest group' I think of people who have a special interest in getting something through, - i.e. - they're going to be able to screw a lot of money out of people if they get their way, which is far more descriptive of the pro patent lawyer groups / large software companies.
I've always found Oracle's licensing to be pretty wrong-headed at every turn. You can sense that they really don't feel they need to compete on price, which is usually the ultimate undoing of an overly arrogant company.
Probably never. xgl is just an experiment put together by one guy. Unless your future ideal platform is an X server running a cairo app running on glitz running on opengl running another virtual X server inside it, and then possibly another glx app inside that, this won't be the mainstream solution.
Or of course you could forgo the uppermost X server and run it straight on a framebuffer of some kind, but that would require all vendors shipping linux GL drivers to completely rehaul their drivers and agree on another spec. And then the poor DRI guys would have to rethink things. And then will this be linux specific? Will it require a completely different interface for freebsd/openbsd/darwin? And you'd be throwing away all of xorg. What's that, ten years work? And that includes input drivers, keymaps, xinerama, font systems...
Ah wait and how will xv work? Not all vendors have YUV conversion routines in their 3d engines.
The freedesktop people need to do a bit more head scratching before they come up with a neat solution for the future. It's not as simple as 'wow xgl cool!'.
Let's just hope they release a Linux port and 'vcl' so we can do something useful with the vector units...
Oh, and if the xbox was a target for a self-hosting linux solution, I think the Cell will be irrestible:-)
Oh man, can you imagine what porting Linux is going to be like? According to the article, there's no user separation on the SPEs. How's this all going to affect memory protection? Sounds like the kernel is going to have to spend all its time dealing out SPEs to individual processes.
In fact getting any real (non embedded/special purpose) kernel ported to this thing will be quite a task.
And those customers would be free to make as many copies as they wanted, give the copies to anyone and make changes, because it would still be under the GPL. So everything would be fine.
You're right about the technicality there, but you're really talking about scarcity, not licensing.
what if I want to make commercial software released under the GPL, and provide the source to my paying customers, do I have to buy a license?
That wouldn't be GPL. With the GPL you have to give the source to anyone who asks for a copy, whether they're customers or not.
What if I don't sell the software but provide support for 120/hr?
You can do whatever you like, the GPL has nothing to do with support.
What if I GPL my software, including the Qt libs, and my customer turns around and sells it to 4000 other people, with source under the GPL?
If it's still under the GPL, everything's fine. If they're trying to resell it to 4000 people binary only, they're breaking the GPL of Qt (and you, unless you have them specific permission).
I think their plan is half-baked.
This is nothing new. It is the GPL. These questions were considered 20 years ago.
If something links with GPL code, it has to be GPLd too. Unless you get a specific waiver of the GPL from the person who wrote the software. Which is essentially what the Trolltech commercial license is.
This is why the LGPL was created. It is used for libraries that the authors want to allow commercial users to link to, no strings attached. Now, if Qt were under the LGPL, anyone would be allowed to link anything to it free of charge. But it's not.
Another project trying to do something similar is liboil, the Library of Optimised Inner Loops.
However in the future I can see things changing for the structure of the stardard PC.
At the moment in a high end machine you have the CPU, which is a scalar processor, a GPU, which is in essence a glorified vector processor (not just useful for graphics, as projects like GpGPU are showing us), and SIMD extensions to the CPU to allow it to do small amounts of vector processing.
Scalar processors are good for some things (branchy code) and vector processors are good for other things (very predictable parallel code). Having both is very useful.
I would say in the next 5-10 years we will see the GPU join together with the SIMD extensions to provide a seperate general purpose vector processor.
PCs will ship with two processors - one scalar, one vector. And everyone will be happy.
Now, whether this will be transparent to the programmer depends on how automatic code optimisation progresses over the next few years. Is Intel's icc auto vectorisation already good enough? Don't know.
Also, I recently set up my.asoundrc file for software mixing with alsa, and used esd for gnome sounds and piped to alsa. I get sound in pretty much everything simultaneously, nothing holding the soundcard, but if another user uses gdmflexiserver to log in, that user will have no sound.
That's because ~/.asoundrc is a user specific file. That's why it's in your home directory. If you wanted these settings to apply to all users, you should have put the same settings in/etc/asound.conf
Did you really think you could make a change to the global configuration as an unpriviliged user?
The tentacle screensaver is not a MacOS X ripoff. They're all ports of the same screensaver. It was originally written as a little hack by an opengl nerd, and Apple liked it so much that they included it in jaguar/panther (I forget). It's just been ported pretty much everywhere.
I really really wish Netscape/AOL would realise that 'Netscape' products are actually harming the browser world and just go away. It's bad enough that they steal firefox's* thunder (har har), but they also manage to give it a bad name by releasing shitty related products and confusing fickle internet users.
Netscape, nobody wants you, you are not doing good for web standards, please die.
Slashdot Mirror
While that has been true up to the present, apparently, because porn 'actors' are not usually the most attractive in the world, high definition doesn't really do them any favours. Thus the porn industry isn't really itching to go HD.
Erm. If you don't want these kde 'toys', don't install the kdetoys package.
I knew about this, now you all know about this and it makes me feel far less self satisfied and clever now that it's common knowledge.
I'm sorry, but I find this highly amusing.
Stupid people are easily amused.
Your whole argument hinges on the idea that slashdot is one huge hiveminded decision making organisation.
It is not. There are lots of people on slashdot each of whom have individual opininons.
You yourself show you argument to be fucking stupid.
But it applies to the majority
Nice 'fact' there, buddy.
and the nature of Slashdot's posting system tends to encourage groupthink.
Not quite. It encourages stupid rash sensationalist posts. Which you have just proven.
The reason 60% of movies conveniently never make a profit is so that they don't have to pay the relevant taxes.
The movie industry are the kings of fiddling the books.
Without that freedom, you and all that code you & your team spent 18 months coding are sitting under the thumb of Sun. Sun can tell you which platforms you can migrate to in the future (unless of course you want to rewrite everything in something non-java). If it is against Sun's business interest to port / allow a port of java to architecture/os xyz, you're not going to be using it.
It may not even be the fault of Sun being aggressive. What if Sun drops java? What if Sun goes bust? What if Sun has a hostile takeover by a company who wants to sweep java under the rug? One way or another there could be no more java releases.
So in 5 - 10 years time when the industry makes another architecture/os leap, you're stuck running on platforms which were around in 2005, no matter how much cheaper & faster the more common new systems are. Time to rewrite plenty of code.
It's not hard to imagine - people are making the jump to amd64 now. A couple of years from now, amd64 will be the commodity hardware standard. Cheap and easily available. Imagine if Sun had for one reason or another dropped java in 2003 with no amd64 port.
No amd64 java. We'll have to stay running our systems in deprecated 32bit mode. Or rewrite everything. Or use one of the unofficial java replacements that's come up to fill the cracks. But oh no, those would be forks that comply to no standard!
And really, please drop the myth of open source incompatible fragmentation.
Python's been going for around 15 years. How many python standards are there to code to?
Perl's been going for longer. How many perl forks are there?
How may rubies?
How many phps are there?
Now let's look at some closed languages:
All I can think of is your beloved java. MS, IBM, Sun, Kaffe, GCJ... Your strategy of keeping it closed to prevent incompatible versions doesn't seem to have worked!
If you want all of your code to be under your own control, don't write it in java.
95% of the sites I (and almost every other web user) visit use javascript in some way, shape, or form.
I don't think that's true. Or at least the javascript is just unnecessary gubbins.
I've been browsing with javascript disabled for the last 4 years. I only occasionally have to load up my other (js enabled) profile or konqueror to check something in.
Package management is balkanized and bad in general
Right, whereas windows doesn't even have any package management.
I love the way they say "...the benefits of the bill had been obscured by special interest groups" as though the special interest groups are a bad thing.
Should for instance a farming bill not be influenced by farmers? Farmers are a 'special interest group'.
In fact, when I think of the phrase 'special interest group' I think of people who have a special interest in getting something through, - i.e. - they're going to be able to screw a lot of money out of people if they get their way, which is far more descriptive of the pro patent lawyer groups / large software companies.
Do you ever wonder why macintosh fanboys are famed for not knowing what they're talking about?
I've always found Oracle's licensing to be pretty wrong-headed at every turn. You can sense that they really don't feel they need to compete on price, which is usually the ultimate undoing of an overly arrogant company.
Kinda reminds you of Quark, doesn't it?
...is out in the world and some 3rd world company reverse engineers it and takes all their profits?
Oh man, you're right. We don't want people in the third world to have viable businesses. That would be awful.
Probably never. xgl is just an experiment put together by one guy. Unless your future ideal platform is an X server running a cairo app running on glitz running on opengl running another virtual X server inside it, and then possibly another glx app inside that, this won't be the mainstream solution.
Or of course you could forgo the uppermost X server and run it straight on a framebuffer of some kind, but that would require all vendors shipping linux GL drivers to completely rehaul their drivers and agree on another spec. And then the poor DRI guys would have to rethink things. And then will this be linux specific? Will it require a completely different interface for freebsd/openbsd/darwin? And you'd be throwing away all of xorg. What's that, ten years work? And that includes input drivers, keymaps, xinerama, font systems...
Ah wait and how will xv work? Not all vendors have YUV conversion routines in their 3d engines.
The freedesktop people need to do a bit more head scratching before they come up with a neat solution for the future. It's not as simple as 'wow xgl cool!'.
The vector units on the cell only have support for 32 bit floats.
Let's just hope they release a Linux port and 'vcl' so we can do something useful with the vector units...
:-)
Oh, and if the xbox was a target for a self-hosting linux solution, I think the Cell will be irrestible
Oh man, can you imagine what porting Linux is going to be like? According to the article, there's no user separation on the SPEs. How's this all going to affect memory protection? Sounds like the kernel is going to have to spend all its time dealing out SPEs to individual processes.
In fact getting any real (non embedded/special purpose) kernel ported to this thing will be quite a task.
And those customers would be free to make as many copies as they wanted, give the copies to anyone and make changes, because it would still be under the GPL. So everything would be fine.
You're right about the technicality there, but you're really talking about scarcity, not licensing.
Apart from the fact that it's not (yet) portable, and if Microsoft had its way it would never be portable at all.
Are you new to the GPL?
what if I want to make commercial software released under the GPL, and provide the source to my paying customers, do I have to buy a license?
That wouldn't be GPL. With the GPL you have to give the source to anyone who asks for a copy, whether they're customers or not.
What if I don't sell the software but provide support for 120/hr?
You can do whatever you like, the GPL has nothing to do with support.
What if I GPL my software, including the Qt libs, and my customer turns around and sells it to 4000 other people, with source under the GPL?
If it's still under the GPL, everything's fine. If they're trying to resell it to 4000 people binary only, they're breaking the GPL of Qt (and you, unless you have them specific permission).
I think their plan is half-baked.
This is nothing new. It is the GPL. These questions were considered 20 years ago.
If something links with GPL code, it has to be GPLd too. Unless you get a specific waiver of the GPL from the person who wrote the software. Which is essentially what the Trolltech commercial license is.
This is why the LGPL was created. It is used for libraries that the authors want to allow commercial users to link to, no strings attached. Now, if Qt were under the LGPL, anyone would be allowed to link anything to it free of charge. But it's not.
Another project trying to do something similar is liboil, the Library of Optimised Inner Loops.
However in the future I can see things changing for the structure of the stardard PC.
At the moment in a high end machine you have the CPU, which is a scalar processor, a GPU, which is in essence a glorified vector processor (not just useful for graphics, as projects like GpGPU are showing us), and SIMD extensions to the CPU to allow it to do small amounts of vector processing.
Scalar processors are good for some things (branchy code) and vector processors are good for other things (very predictable parallel code). Having both is very useful.
I would say in the next 5-10 years we will see the GPU join together with the SIMD extensions to provide a seperate general purpose vector processor.
PCs will ship with two processors - one scalar, one vector. And everyone will be happy.
Now, whether this will be transparent to the programmer depends on how automatic code optimisation progresses over the next few years. Is Intel's icc auto vectorisation already good enough? Don't know.
Also, I recently set up my .asoundrc file for software mixing with alsa, and used esd for gnome sounds and piped to alsa. I get sound in pretty much everything simultaneously, nothing holding the soundcard, but if another user uses gdmflexiserver to log in, that user will have no sound.
/etc/asound.conf
That's because ~/.asoundrc is a user specific file. That's why it's in your home directory. If you wanted these settings to apply to all users, you should have put the same settings in
Did you really think you could make a change to the global configuration as an unpriviliged user?
Why did they choose linaire, the world's most hideous linux distribution?
The tentacle screensaver is not a MacOS X ripoff. They're all ports of the same screensaver. It was originally written as a little hack by an opengl nerd, and Apple liked it so much that they included it in jaguar/panther (I forget). It's just been ported pretty much everywhere.
I really really wish Netscape/AOL would realise that 'Netscape' products are actually harming the browser world and just go away. It's bad enough that they steal firefox's* thunder (har har), but they also manage to give it a bad name by releasing shitty related products and confusing fickle internet users.
Netscape, nobody wants you, you are not doing good for web standards, please die.
*And other standards compliant browsers.
Minor tip: set up mythweb on the machine, do a little port forwarding magic on your NAT box, and set up a dyndns client.
When you're at work or even the other side of the world, you can go onto the web and tell your myth box to record something you forgot about.
Magic.
Indeed. The Athlon64 has had its hypertransport lines chopped.