Re:Does adding every ingredient make it better?
on
C# 2.0 Spec Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That's crazy. Universities don't teach programming languages except as tools to teach more important concepts.
Thats a great idea. Sounds great on paper, sounds great in theory. Sounds great while you're playing around with a bubble sort.
After that, its a load of crap.
Tell you what: You learn your bubble sort however you want. Your assignment is to write a program that uses a row colored spheres with numbers texture mapped to the surface of the sphere to demonstrate how the bubble sort actually operates.
I learned to do this at my university, and was lucky enough to get a professor that hadn't bought into the Windows Thing, and tought graphics programming with OpenGL (available everywhere) instead of DirectX (available in windows, and if you're lucky, wine).
In fact, when you get out of your pretty little university, you can try and get a job on "I know my programming theory". If you don't know the language and APIs that Company X is using, you're sunk. These days they don't settle for learning on the job. I had a wonderful job interview for developing an interesting application, I wowed them all with my knowledge, except for one little thing: I didn't know Perl/GTK which was what they were writing their application in. A few weeks later I got a check in the mail for my flight, car rental, and hotel and a thank you letter for taking the time to interview them in person.
Does adding every ingredient make it better?
on
C# 2.0 Spec Released
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Seriously, do they think that if they take every little feature of every other programming language, they are actually going to come out with something useful?
All they are going to get is a language that nobody will understand all of because its just too complex. Are they just out to sell the massive books and training courses that will be needed in order to learn C#2? Is this their plan to "lock in" universities to teaching microsoft programing to all levels, because it will take 4 years of classes just to cover it all?
That is stupidiest BS I've seen. OS can e.g. override firmware of the disk drive.
Right... So Mandrake now has a program that upgrades CDROM firmwares? If so, I want it because I have a DVD drive I want to patch to RPC1, but I have to find a windows machine to do this on right now!
You know, I suspect what really happened is that some developer at LG got lazy and thought "Gee, we don't support feature 0xF00 on our cdrom, so lets make 0xF00 the burn-firmware command! That will save me a whole vector in the command table!"
if software damages hardware, it's software fault.
Only if the software says "here, burn this firmware" and provides a bogus firmware will I accept your claim. If the software says "Give me sector 12503" and the hardware has a bug in it that makes it think its getting a firmware update, thats all hardware.
Say you've killed the griefer in the virtual world. What does he care?
(for this I'll define griefing as one or more high-level people killing a low level person, once or repeatedly)
I think this got covered in Snow Crash, where Raven's head got cut off and placed in a case that protected it from the server cleanup, preventing the user from logging on again.
Solving the problem of griefers is probably an extremely difficult task. I've been thinking of a few ideas that may or may not work...
First would be Jail. If you're caught killing someone with a large level difference below you, you're thrown in jail by very powerful guards who keep you there for (yourLV-theirLV) hours of playtime. Or you can opt for a level reduction (say you lose half the levels between here and there) instead. It reduces the time between griefing incidents, as either the character is stuck in jail, or the character has to spend time re-levelling.
A second idea I had, which sort of requires you to not be squicky on religion, would be the idea of gods and demons inside the world, which your characters are aligned with. PKing would decrease your alignment with the gods and increase it with the demons, which could get you cool powers, but also net you various weaknesses (perhaps changing your character into an undead creature with all the weaknesses that entails). The gods could then consider newbies as being "under their protection" and simply prevent griefing kills, in whatever way seems best to the storyline (whether they just shield the character from damage, or come down from the heavens and smite the griefer in a huge display of power...)
Critical patches for important services get applied ASAP. If I can't turn it off or firewall it off, then we notify clients of impending emergency downtime and go at it.
That said, if I can firewall it off or turn it off, the patch can wait until its well tested.
Lets say we take this glass disk and put two large bags on it, one side filled with water, and the other side empty. You squeeze the water through the disk, providing the pressure difference to generate elecricity, until the other bag is full. Does squeezing the other bag and moving the water back through the disk the other way also generate electricity?
Quit being cheap little theives. When you download copyrighted music, you're doing so illegally and subject to the laws of your jurisdiction.
Yeah, I go to the store and shell out $1,500,000 for every cd I buy (thats for a 10 song CD at $150,000 each). What, you mean music doesn't cost that much? Thats funny, thats how much the RIAA is charging...
Copyright law as it stands is absurd. Why not "let the punishment fit the crime". You download the latest Britney Spears album, you pay the cost of the album. That would be the most logical thing to do. None of this suing people for billions of dollars.
Oh and <insert copyright infrigement is not theft and is not a criminal offense rant here>
Like I said before, the software is strictly US-centric. If I even thought that some other country might be able to use the software I'd either require input to be provided in UTF-8 (which, with the exception of string manipulation (ie, substr(), str_replace(), word wrapping, etc. is handled quite well, assuming the input is valid, the output will always be valid.) or not use PHP.
We actually used PHP for the purpose of rapid development and user-interface prototyping, and ran afoul of the #1 Stupid Project Mistake: Never show your boss a project that appears to work if you intend to rewrite it completely. "Why re-write it? It works just fine like it is". Our final goal was to have everything converted over to perl once the UI was stable enough (nice thing about PHP is that the person doing web development can load it up in a web-editor and edit the webpage without knowing or messing with the PHP. Try that with perl.)
We do this quite well here. We survive by naming variables in a way that makes sense "$first_name" and using common sense "gee $first_name must be a string" and by using functions we wrote to "protect" the database backend from accidentially inserting a string in place of a number "makeNumeric($zipcode)" (which, what do you know, protects us from sql insertion attacks as well as clearing up whether that should be "55555-5555" or "555555555". And yes, our software is limited to the US by design).
We have two developers. Progress may not be as snappy as my boss would like, but it beats struggling with the various servers trying to get them to all fit together and work together and run continuously to get j2ee or whatever the latest java-as-a-CGI buzzword is these days.
OpenSSH is a part of Linux as much as RPC or Windows Messaging is a part of Windows.
Wow, you mean theres no way at all I could run a box without OpenSSH? You should tell that to my workstation I'm writing this on right this second.
Sure, you can turn off RPC after you install windows, but I had Debian installed without any servers at all. Do you think you could log in and shut off RPC fast enough to avoid picking up a worm or two while on a network (like, say, when you register XP over the internet)? Just to let you know, my friend brought his laptop over and hooked it to the internet for the first time, and he picked up the worm while we were still waiting for windows update to get started downloading the fixes.
they often find holes before anyone else does. Linux mostly seems to do reactive fixes
Define "before anyone else does". You mean some indeterminate time between some group with a zero-disclosure policy discovers the bug and reports it directly to microsoft months ago and when Bored College Student discovers it a week ago and takes down his school's registrar's office? Just because the bug doesn't show up on major-name-brand buglists doesn't mean people don't know about it. Take the recent OpenSSH bug, there were exploits in the wild and rumors of it being used long before the bug itself was announced.
So, given microsoft's history of whining at the full-disclosure lists where its obvious that microsoft takes weeks to months to patch a problem, isn't it obvious that they much prefer the zero-disclosure method where they take weeks to months to patch a problem but you don't know about it?
Microsoft has been good lately about doing proactive security reviews
The only reason we got a half-dozen patches this week was because Microsoft was already fixing two holes in a row in the RPC code that someone else found. If this had been policy, then IIS would have been entirely fixed within weeks of the first bug in it, and it wouldn't be the bug-ridden unused pile of junk it is now (which disproves the old saying that "if it was more popular there would be more attacks for it" which doesn't hold for apache). But alas, nobody took the time to proactively fix IIS, or much of anything else Microsoft has released. Though its hard to tell what all is getting patched these days since Microsoft has dumbed down their patches to the point where they read "install this patch or a remote attacker could take over your system" and be completely devoid of any information whatsoever.
I haven't heard any instances of them using it to kill the competition.
Yet.
Pay attention to Mono and lets see how long MS lets it run. They've already made "threatening" remarks with respect to Mono. Not outright "we're going to sue you" but along the lines of "we have patents that cover what you're doing" type messages to the public.
Because, face it, Mono will be the first real challenge to Microsoft that they couldn't just buy out or otherwise take over. Not to mention that the existance of the Mono framework means that.net's vaunted "platform independence" will mean that their software cannot just be independent on all microsoft platforms.
Given that at the time I was the sole developer and the person sued for infringement, yes, I do in fact know what went on here. Claims are not limited by later claims, in fact if you read a random sampling of modern patents, they follow this pattern:
Claim 1: Blah blah Claim 2: The process in claim 1 using a widget Claim 3: The process in claim 1 using a cog Claim 4: The process in claim 1 using a psychic boar tied to a rock which in turn is resting on a switch which is connected to the power mains for the purpose of disabling the system when the psychic boar receives the telepathic order to move.
And so on. The reason for this is NOT to "limit" the first claim, its because if you patent "chair with 3 legs", I can claim that my "chair with 4 legs" is a novel improvement and therefore patentable (even though it contains 3 legs). By cramming in every possible improvement and variation they can think of into a single patent, they cut that kind of innovation off at the knees.
My particular case involved a patent where I just happened to win by just a hair, and I only got "doesn't infringe" not "this patent is a pile of crap". (Basically it came down to their Claim #1, which everything was based on, cited specifically a process which used "two databases". Mine used one database. There was much pulling of hair and arguing semantics over whether two tables within a single database was two databases.)
Sure, the article is game-related, but BT has become popular for distributing Linux ISOs.
And even though people talk about how independent musicians sharing their music over p2p is just a front for everyone swapping crappy metallica songs, I was able to find several copies of God Ate My Homework's songs on Kazaa. And thats legal usage too.
Secondly, wildly broad claims normally start, and increasingly narrow claims are made as one works down the ordered list. Therefore, the first thing you claim is going to be ridiculously broad.
And therein lies the problem. Because the patent office granted this patent, that first wild claim is enforceable. Patent law says that every claim individually is protected (we went through this at work when we were sued, trying to find a way out). And knowing microsoft, and the huge amount of money they have for these things, they will attempt to enforce it if they can kill a competitor by doing so.
nice little boot disc that allows a US Gamecube to play Japanese games
Except that the Japanese companies are already learning how to deal with this. I forgot where, but I think there was an article on/. earlier where (I think it was a mario kart game, running without any kind of HUD) games were going to run crippled with Freeloader. Freeloader was a great idea, its just a shame that Nintendo is already trying to kill it, even though it has no piracy potential at all unlike modchips and this bug.
So, you are cheering the circumvention of anti-piracy protection by *claiming* you want to spread Linux to the gamecube. Seems like one of those "wink wink nudge nudge" statement I make about *trying* games out on my GBA emulator.
You are aware that there is a steadily growing number of homebrew dreamcast games, being that its the only other easily "hacked" modern-ish console.
Not only that, but loaders like these allow those of us who look forward to games which will never be released in the US or who want to get their hands on them early play them without voiding warranties or paying twice as much for a second copy of essentially the same hardware, only with the "Japan" bit set instead of "US". And don't come whining to me about the copyright holders wishes to keep sales in a certain region. As a godless money-grubbing company they have no right or grounds to refuse my money, especially since the cost of a game in Japan tends to be much higher than games here.
Will people abuse the hack? Of course. People abuse paint thinner, glue, and many other things that when used properly benefit us all. You don't see people demanding that those of us who use them for their intended purpose give them up, though. Meanwhile I'll continue to use my DC bootloader to play Napple Tale, which I purchased in Japan legally.
Aside from the umount -l someone else pointed out, you should check out the documentation for pivot_root. This is what initrd images use to umount the ramdisk / and swap it with the harddrive/
You always have to have something as/, but you could easily make / a ramdisk, and have the harddrives completely unmounted.
As far as I can see from a quick reading, the idea is not that you see what people are typing, but that you have an indicator which lets you know that they are typing.
And the appearance of what they are typing is somehow not an indicator that they are typing?
is that the application creates the directory itself on first run.
The fact is that it does. Well, ok, so it produces an empty config instead of a commented-out one, but mplayer's been capable of creating the directory on the fly for a while now.
All that it needs is comments in the config, and the language, eyesight, and artistic taste detection routines.
Uh, moron, who said anything about killing? What about merging?
So lets see. You start with two, and when you're done, you have one. Yep. looks like Competition has been murdered here.
The point is, mplayer has a GUI specifically because Xine had a GUI. Xine can play sorenson specifically because mplayer worked out how to do it. If they had merged before this point, you'd have xine with a gui, or mplayer with sorenson, but unless you somehow managed to keep the entire gang of coders together, and they didn't all just decide to sit on their linux platform monopoly and turn out version after version of crap like Windows Media Player has been doing since 7, you wouldn't have xineplayer with sorenson and a GUI.
Not to mention the fact that even the best modular coding isn't hotswappable like you seem to infer. "what about merging?" you say. Merging what? The code bases are largely going to be incompatible. Even in perfectly modular, packaged code (which neither project is), you simply don't have a use for every module and widget that package X provides. Other modules and widgets that package X provides is almost, but not quite, exactly what you want, so you're still not going to use them (or in the case of open source, you stop everything you're doing to rewrite those widgets to the way you want them to be). What is compatible between them is probably already going to have been implemented. You'd wind up scrapping a majority of the code, and the half of the coders who lost out would either quit or spend their time getting re-acquainted with their new project.
Instead we need ten of each, all reinventing the wheel.
In a parallel universe not so far from ours, once upon a time Thag and Urg set out to invent an object that would make moving things easier. Thag beat stones together until he thought "this is the perfect shape for moving things!" Urg, seeing Thag's shape, beat stones together until he thought "this is better than Thag's shape".
Then one day, Overly Critical Guy came and said "now, now, we only need one of these objects, now don't we?" and Thag and Urg decided to put their minds together. The result? Urg's pounded a large rock into a triangle-shaped stone, then Thag pounded a square hole into the middle of it. While the axle was born 200 years sooner in this universe, the entire dawn of civilization was set back 500 because Guy decided nobody should to try to make a better wheel.
If you want to create a well-engineered product for widespread use, you'd better get your act together and make a simple install procedure
Right.
You came up with the idea, you work on it.
I want to be there though when you get the Nobel Prize for the first psychic installation procedure ever.
The author of the article whines that make install didn't produce ~/.mplayer/*...
So make install is supposed to psychically know what users are going to run the software? Maybe make a copy in every/home/*/.mplayer/* ? Oh, and while its at it, it will figure out what language you speak (maybe from locale...) and how crappy your eyesight is so it can download and automatically install the appropriate language and size fonts. Not only that, but this install process will also psychically work out your aesthetic preferences (for every user of the system!) and download and install the appropriate skin, too.
Yep, I see a bright future ahead for you, soon-to-be-a-Laureate.
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That's crazy. Universities don't teach programming languages except as tools to teach more important concepts.
Thats a great idea. Sounds great on paper, sounds great in theory. Sounds great while you're playing around with a bubble sort.
After that, its a load of crap.
Tell you what: You learn your bubble sort however you want. Your assignment is to write a program that uses a row colored spheres with numbers texture mapped to the surface of the sphere to demonstrate how the bubble sort actually operates.
I learned to do this at my university, and was lucky enough to get a professor that hadn't bought into the Windows Thing, and tought graphics programming with OpenGL (available everywhere) instead of DirectX (available in windows, and if you're lucky, wine).
In fact, when you get out of your pretty little university, you can try and get a job on "I know my programming theory". If you don't know the language and APIs that Company X is using, you're sunk. These days they don't settle for learning on the job. I had a wonderful job interview for developing an interesting application, I wowed them all with my knowledge, except for one little thing: I didn't know Perl/GTK which was what they were writing their application in. A few weeks later I got a check in the mail for my flight, car rental, and hotel and a thank you letter for taking the time to interview them in person.
Seriously, do they think that if they take every little feature of every other programming language, they are actually going to come out with something useful?
All they are going to get is a language that nobody will understand all of because its just too complex. Are they just out to sell the massive books and training courses that will be needed in order to learn C#2? Is this their plan to "lock in" universities to teaching microsoft programing to all levels, because it will take 4 years of classes just to cover it all?
That is stupidiest BS I've seen. OS can e.g. override firmware of the disk drive.
Right... So Mandrake now has a program that upgrades CDROM firmwares? If so, I want it because I have a DVD drive I want to patch to RPC1, but I have to find a windows machine to do this on right now!
You know, I suspect what really happened is that some developer at LG got lazy and thought "Gee, we don't support feature 0xF00 on our cdrom, so lets make 0xF00 the burn-firmware command! That will save me a whole vector in the command table!"
if software damages hardware, it's software fault.
Only if the software says "here, burn this firmware" and provides a bogus firmware will I accept your claim. If the software says "Give me sector 12503" and the hardware has a bug in it that makes it think its getting a firmware update, thats all hardware.
Also note only LG drives are affected.
Say you've killed the griefer in the virtual world. What does he care?
(for this I'll define griefing as one or more high-level people killing a low level person, once or repeatedly)
I think this got covered in Snow Crash, where Raven's head got cut off and placed in a case that protected it from the server cleanup, preventing the user from logging on again.
Solving the problem of griefers is probably an extremely difficult task. I've been thinking of a few ideas that may or may not work...
First would be Jail. If you're caught killing someone with a large level difference below you, you're thrown in jail by very powerful guards who keep you there for (yourLV-theirLV) hours of playtime. Or you can opt for a level reduction (say you lose half the levels between here and there) instead. It reduces the time between griefing incidents, as either the character is stuck in jail, or the character has to spend time re-levelling.
A second idea I had, which sort of requires you to not be squicky on religion, would be the idea of gods and demons inside the world, which your characters are aligned with. PKing would decrease your alignment with the gods and increase it with the demons, which could get you cool powers, but also net you various weaknesses (perhaps changing your character into an undead creature with all the weaknesses that entails). The gods could then consider newbies as being "under their protection" and simply prevent griefing kills, in whatever way seems best to the storyline (whether they just shield the character from damage, or come down from the heavens and smite the griefer in a huge display of power...)
That wouldn't happen to be April 1, 2004, would it?
Critical patches for important services get applied ASAP. If I can't turn it off or firewall it off, then we notify clients of impending emergency downtime and go at it.
That said, if I can firewall it off or turn it off, the patch can wait until its well tested.
Lets say we take this glass disk and put two large bags on it, one side filled with water, and the other side empty. You squeeze the water through the disk, providing the pressure difference to generate elecricity, until the other bag is full. Does squeezing the other bag and moving the water back through the disk the other way also generate electricity?
Quit being cheap little theives. When you download copyrighted music, you're doing so illegally and subject to the laws of your jurisdiction.
Yeah, I go to the store and shell out $1,500,000 for every cd I buy (thats for a 10 song CD at $150,000 each). What, you mean music doesn't cost that much? Thats funny, thats how much the RIAA is charging...
Copyright law as it stands is absurd. Why not "let the punishment fit the crime". You download the latest Britney Spears album, you pay the cost of the album. That would be the most logical thing to do. None of this suing people for billions of dollars.
Oh and <insert copyright infrigement is not theft and is not a criminal offense rant here>
Like I said before, the software is strictly US-centric. If I even thought that some other country might be able to use the software I'd either require input to be provided in UTF-8 (which, with the exception of string manipulation (ie, substr(), str_replace(), word wrapping, etc. is handled quite well, assuming the input is valid, the output will always be valid.) or not use PHP.
We actually used PHP for the purpose of rapid development and user-interface prototyping, and ran afoul of the #1 Stupid Project Mistake: Never show your boss a project that appears to work if you intend to rewrite it completely. "Why re-write it? It works just fine like it is". Our final goal was to have everything converted over to perl once the UI was stable enough (nice thing about PHP is that the person doing web development can load it up in a web-editor and edit the webpage without knowing or messing with the PHP. Try that with perl.)
We do this quite well here. We survive by naming variables in a way that makes sense "$first_name" and using common sense "gee $first_name must be a string" and by using functions we wrote to "protect" the database backend from accidentially inserting a string in place of a number "makeNumeric($zipcode)" (which, what do you know, protects us from sql insertion attacks as well as clearing up whether that should be "55555-5555" or "555555555". And yes, our software is limited to the US by design).
We have two developers. Progress may not be as snappy as my boss would like, but it beats struggling with the various servers trying to get them to all fit together and work together and run continuously to get j2ee or whatever the latest java-as-a-CGI buzzword is these days.
OpenSSH is a part of Linux as much as RPC or Windows Messaging is a part of Windows.
Wow, you mean theres no way at all I could run a box without OpenSSH? You should tell that to my workstation I'm writing this on right this second.
Sure, you can turn off RPC after you install windows, but I had Debian installed without any servers at all. Do you think you could log in and shut off RPC fast enough to avoid picking up a worm or two while on a network (like, say, when you register XP over the internet)? Just to let you know, my friend brought his laptop over and hooked it to the internet for the first time, and he picked up the worm while we were still waiting for windows update to get started downloading the fixes.
they often find holes before anyone else does. Linux mostly seems to do reactive fixes
Define "before anyone else does". You mean some indeterminate time between some group with a zero-disclosure policy discovers the bug and reports it directly to microsoft months ago and when Bored College Student discovers it a week ago and takes down his school's registrar's office? Just because the bug doesn't show up on major-name-brand buglists doesn't mean people don't know about it. Take the recent OpenSSH bug, there were exploits in the wild and rumors of it being used long before the bug itself was announced.
So, given microsoft's history of whining at the full-disclosure lists where its obvious that microsoft takes weeks to months to patch a problem, isn't it obvious that they much prefer the zero-disclosure method where they take weeks to months to patch a problem but you don't know about it?
Microsoft has been good lately about doing proactive security reviews
The only reason we got a half-dozen patches this week was because Microsoft was already fixing two holes in a row in the RPC code that someone else found. If this had been policy, then IIS would have been entirely fixed within weeks of the first bug in it, and it wouldn't be the bug-ridden unused pile of junk it is now (which disproves the old saying that "if it was more popular there would be more attacks for it" which doesn't hold for apache). But alas, nobody took the time to proactively fix IIS, or much of anything else Microsoft has released. Though its hard to tell what all is getting patched these days since Microsoft has dumbed down their patches to the point where they read "install this patch or a remote attacker could take over your system" and be completely devoid of any information whatsoever.
I haven't heard any instances of them using it to kill the competition.
.net's vaunted "platform independence" will mean that their software cannot just be independent on all microsoft platforms.
Yet.
Pay attention to Mono and lets see how long MS lets it run. They've already made "threatening" remarks with respect to Mono. Not outright "we're going to sue you" but along the lines of "we have patents that cover what you're doing" type messages to the public.
Because, face it, Mono will be the first real challenge to Microsoft that they couldn't just buy out or otherwise take over. Not to mention that the existance of the Mono framework means that
I threw together some sites I use at work when developing websites for clients.
Visibone has some extremely useful color palettes and educational links.
Vischeck can convert individual images or entire websites to simulate one of three forms of color blindness.
I was going to throw in some more educational sites about color blindness, but I think you all can search Google yourselves.
Given that at the time I was the sole developer and the person sued for infringement, yes, I do in fact know what went on here. Claims are not limited by later claims, in fact if you read a random sampling of modern patents, they follow this pattern:
Claim 1: Blah blah
Claim 2: The process in claim 1 using a widget
Claim 3: The process in claim 1 using a cog
Claim 4: The process in claim 1 using a psychic boar tied to a rock which in turn is resting on a switch which is connected to the power mains for the purpose of disabling the system when the psychic boar receives the telepathic order to move.
And so on. The reason for this is NOT to "limit" the first claim, its because if you patent "chair with 3 legs", I can claim that my "chair with 4 legs" is a novel improvement and therefore patentable (even though it contains 3 legs). By cramming in every possible improvement and variation they can think of into a single patent, they cut that kind of innovation off at the knees.
My particular case involved a patent where I just happened to win by just a hair, and I only got "doesn't infringe" not "this patent is a pile of crap". (Basically it came down to their Claim #1, which everything was based on, cited specifically a process which used "two databases". Mine used one database. There was much pulling of hair and arguing semantics over whether two tables within a single database was two databases.)
Sure, the article is game-related, but BT has become popular for distributing Linux ISOs.
And even though people talk about how independent musicians sharing their music over p2p is just a front for everyone swapping crappy metallica songs, I was able to find several copies of God Ate My Homework's songs on Kazaa. And thats legal usage too.
Secondly, wildly broad claims normally start, and increasingly narrow claims are made as one works down the ordered list. Therefore, the first thing you claim is going to be ridiculously broad.
And therein lies the problem. Because the patent office granted this patent, that first wild claim is enforceable. Patent law says that every claim individually is protected (we went through this at work when we were sued, trying to find a way out). And knowing microsoft, and the huge amount of money they have for these things, they will attempt to enforce it if they can kill a competitor by doing so.
He claims to be a free thinking liberal
As soon as you stick a label on, its no longer free-thinking, now is it?
If you call yourself a free-thinking liberal or a free-thinking conservative, clearly you aren't think freely about the other end of the spectrum.
nice little boot disc that allows a US Gamecube to play Japanese games
/. earlier where (I think it was a mario kart game, running without any kind of HUD) games were going to run crippled with Freeloader. Freeloader was a great idea, its just a shame that Nintendo is already trying to kill it, even though it has no piracy potential at all unlike modchips and this bug.
Except that the Japanese companies are already learning how to deal with this. I forgot where, but I think there was an article on
So, you are cheering the circumvention of anti-piracy protection by *claiming* you want to spread Linux to the gamecube. Seems like one of those "wink wink nudge nudge" statement I make about *trying* games out on my GBA emulator.
You are aware that there is a steadily growing number of homebrew dreamcast games, being that its the only other easily "hacked" modern-ish console.
Not only that, but loaders like these allow those of us who look forward to games which will never be released in the US or who want to get their hands on them early play them without voiding warranties or paying twice as much for a second copy of essentially the same hardware, only with the "Japan" bit set instead of "US". And don't come whining to me about the copyright holders wishes to keep sales in a certain region. As a godless money-grubbing company they have no right or grounds to refuse my money, especially since the cost of a game in Japan tends to be much higher than games here.
Will people abuse the hack? Of course. People abuse paint thinner, glue, and many other things that when used properly benefit us all. You don't see people demanding that those of us who use them for their intended purpose give them up, though. Meanwhile I'll continue to use my DC bootloader to play Napple Tale, which I purchased in Japan legally.
Aside from the umount -l someone else pointed out, you should check out the documentation for pivot_root. This is what initrd images use to umount the ramdisk / and swap it with the harddrive /
/, but you could easily make / a ramdisk, and have the harddrives completely unmounted.
You always have to have something as
As far as I can see from a quick reading, the idea is not that you see what people are typing, but that you have an indicator which lets you know that they are typing.
And the appearance of what they are typing is somehow not an indicator that they are typing?
It's not like the silence ... is really meant to be pornography.
Is this a bad time to mention that I whack off to 4'33"? I happen to have it timed so that I finish up right when the song ends.
is that the application creates the directory itself on first run.
The fact is that it does. Well, ok, so it produces an empty config instead of a commented-out one, but mplayer's been capable of creating the directory on the fly for a while now.
All that it needs is comments in the config, and the language, eyesight, and artistic taste detection routines.
Uh, moron, who said anything about killing? What about merging?
So lets see. You start with two, and when you're done, you have one. Yep. looks like Competition has been murdered here.
The point is, mplayer has a GUI specifically because Xine had a GUI. Xine can play sorenson specifically because mplayer worked out how to do it. If they had merged before this point, you'd have xine with a gui, or mplayer with sorenson, but unless you somehow managed to keep the entire gang of coders together, and they didn't all just decide to sit on their linux platform monopoly and turn out version after version of crap like Windows Media Player has been doing since 7, you wouldn't have xineplayer with sorenson and a GUI.
Not to mention the fact that even the best modular coding isn't hotswappable like you seem to infer. "what about merging?" you say. Merging what? The code bases are largely going to be incompatible. Even in perfectly modular, packaged code (which neither project is), you simply don't have a use for every module and widget that package X provides. Other modules and widgets that package X provides is almost, but not quite, exactly what you want, so you're still not going to use them (or in the case of open source, you stop everything you're doing to rewrite those widgets to the way you want them to be). What is compatible between them is probably already going to have been implemented. You'd wind up scrapping a majority of the code, and the half of the coders who lost out would either quit or spend their time getting re-acquainted with their new project.
Instead we need ten of each, all reinventing the wheel.
In a parallel universe not so far from ours, once upon a time Thag and Urg set out to invent an object that would make moving things easier. Thag beat stones together until he thought "this is the perfect shape for moving things!" Urg, seeing Thag's shape, beat stones together until he thought "this is better than Thag's shape".
Then one day, Overly Critical Guy came and said "now, now, we only need one of these objects, now don't we?" and Thag and Urg decided to put their minds together. The result? Urg's pounded a large rock into a triangle-shaped stone, then Thag pounded a square hole into the middle of it. While the axle was born 200 years sooner in this universe, the entire dawn of civilization was set back 500 because Guy decided nobody should to try to make a better wheel.
If you want to create a well-engineered product for widespread use, you'd better get your act together and make a simple install procedure
...
/home/*/.mplayer/* ? Oh, and while its at it, it will figure out what language you speak (maybe from locale...) and how crappy your eyesight is so it can download and automatically install the appropriate language and size fonts. Not only that, but this install process will also psychically work out your aesthetic preferences (for every user of the system!) and download and install the appropriate skin, too.
Right.
You came up with the idea, you work on it.
I want to be there though when you get the Nobel Prize for the first psychic installation procedure ever.
The author of the article whines that make install didn't produce ~/.mplayer/*
So make install is supposed to psychically know what users are going to run the software? Maybe make a copy in every
Yep, I see a bright future ahead for you, soon-to-be-a-Laureate.