Perhaps you work on getting the Linux and Open Source community more open to the concept of allowing DRM, and not making it as evil the Devil. Because God forbid people actually making money off their labor, and how dare they try to protect their work! The Linux and OSS Community is great at screwing them selves over.
I guess this has been explained tons of times already, but here goes: Random Linux users probably don't care if there's DRM or not. Random Windows or OS X users probably don't care if there's DRM or not. I don't personally mind if iTunes would run on Linux with the exact same restrictions it has on Windows or OS X.
It's just that trying to fit DRM in existing open source projects is extremely problematic because everyone wants transparency. Current DRM depends on secrets. It depends on technology that wants things to be secret, all the while Linux folks are all about openness and interoperability.
Open source folks are more than happy to implement your DRM if you have a completely open specification. If you can't release the specification because it depends on a "secret" part and releasing it would undermine the whole thing, then it's a crappy attempt at DRM that will be undermined by l33t Hax0rz one day anyway, so why bother.
And as for myself, nobody needs to copy-protect things they sell to me. I won't copy them. Honest. The only P2P client I have at hand is Azureus, and that's for legit downloads only. I buy books and computer and video games and DVDs - not that much music, because CDs are overpriced and I have a radio too - and none get copied around. At worst I lend the stuff to my friends and family, and at that time I can't use them myself. So if you're a content provider, I have to ask, what is this DRM thing actually helping you for, anyway? What's the point of "protecting" the files, if I'm not copying them around anyway? (Don't say "you could" - stick to the facts. Don't say "someone else could" - stick to my case.)
Sure, I'd buy a lot of stuff online. If only paying for the stuff wasn't such a great big pain.
Why is it that international banking is such a great big headache? When the money or goods - virtual or not - cross the borders, everyone seems to be grabbing part of it, if not the governments then the people who transfer it?
Why isn't there a simple, universal, reliable, regulated method for transferring money internationally, no matter how big or small sum? A simple service you'd get automatically when you open a bank account, anywhere, in any bank in the world?
Because people go for the "it works for me" kind of approach. To American companies, credit card "works for me". As long as there's a stopgap measure that covers 85% of who they consider their market segment at the time, there's no problem. They just happen to ignore the tons of people who silently mutter "well, I'd love to get this, but I can't".
Sure, I'd love to buy music. I'd love to buy tons of music. I use Linux and have a (non-Visa-logo) Visa Electron. No iTunes for me? Well, looks like I'm still sticking to ocremix.org and remix.kwed.org for my music needs, then, it's not like other people are producing much music worth listening to anyway.
There used to be some sort of non-DRM MP3 store that had grand total of two songs available and required SMS messages as payment. That rocked. Yay. Too bad they never went past the pilot phase. Would have been the perfect model.
Think of Google. They went for the "long tail" thing - index every nook and cranny of the web, make web advertising easy for small sites, both as advertisers and as advertising space sellers, and make life easy for advertisement viewers too. Then think of search engines of 1996. Small indexes, tons of big-name advertisers, ludicruously priced annoying ads, "let's just focus on the big sites because that's where the money is". That didn't go too far, now did it? And where's Google now?
(Not saying Google Money Transfer would be a particularly good idea - PayPal is a private company and has a lot of problems not found in banks. Not saying Google should necessarily go to the music store business either. =)
I can easily remember pi up to that precision. My first "good" calculator had as 3.1415927, and I thought that was pretty odd, because Commodore 64 had one more decimal place: 3.14159265.
And you could type the pi symbol in C64, and it served as the constant's name. Haven't figured out how to do that in PC, aside of setting kb layout to greek, which is kind of complicated... =) (Argh, Slashcode seems to filter π, too. Welcome to year 2006, character sets are still a big problem in computing!) And people are complaining about proposed Unicode operators in Perl 6 - heck, in Commodore 64, not only we had non-ASCII operators (up-arrow for exponents), we had non-ASCII constant names, for pi! Er, PETSCII constant names. =)
I just tried to remember more decimal places than that. I guessed "3542", but apparently I got the last two wrong (should be "89"), I can't possibly guess why, as I'm not that huge fan of Douglas Adams and I'm running out of ideas besides that. Ah...
Can't work cooking dinner or Lamaze into a game? Is he serious? Has he ever heard of...Japan? Has he played a game since 1985?
Yeah, you could bake bread in Ultima VII! That's an epic role-playing game. Released in 1992. And that's an American game! Bet the Japanese figured how to integrate cooking even earlier...
delivering the first true on-the-fly, user-controlled supplements to a pre-recorded video format.
Great! The people who missed 1995 in videogames have finally a chance to relive the legendary golden era of Full Motion Video Multimedia CD-ROM Games! A little bit less compression artifacts, but the same two-penny production values, the same horrible acting, the same cheesy special effects and especially the same level of interactivity!
::runs in fear as the memories of the Philips CD-i commercials flood in mind...::
I've seen multi-angle used in exactly one feature movie: The Hunt for Red October has the texts at the beginning in different languages.
It's also used pretty often in special features (usually in storyboard/animatic/special effect comparisons where you can switch between storyboard/etc view, final movie view and one that shows both).
First, pick the proper colour mode (palette vs. 24bit). Crunch the palette as small as you actually need. And, of course, use the highest possible compression level.
Tools like pngcrush are also invaluable because you can leave out stuff you absolutely don't need. pngcrush -cc -brute tends to leave GIFs home weeping. =)
I didn't hear about that. Do you know when they removed it?
Ooops! Looks like it still exists: drivers/char/lp.c: printk(KERN_INFO "lp%d on fire\n", minor);. And here I could have sworn it was removed at one point.
I knew for sure that it did exist all this time in USB printer code, though. drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: static const char *usblp_messages[] = { "ok", "out of paper", "off-line", "on fire" };
And actually, now that I'm grepping kernel source, looks like there is a kernel-level yes-i'm-on-fire message of some kind: arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mcheck/p5.c: printk(KERN_EMERG "CPU#%d: Possible thermal failure (CPU on fire ?).\n", smp_processor_id());
Still, I mourn the fact that libc5 had "not a typewriter" and glibc has "inappropriate ioctl for device"... GNU project produces mostly boring and to-the-point software =)
Well, Linux already has support for various temperature sensors... but no kernel level sorry-I'm-on-fire support. They even removed the "lpX on fire" error...
why can't somebody offer a totally new way of making the menu. Start with "Program", where you have "Options" and "About" (maybe "Help" too), then "Document" or "File", and then "Edit", etc.. We're so used to File -> Exit that we stop thinking how illogical such a construct is... exit the file?
Congratulations, you just described the Mac OS X menu standards. =) In OS X, the first menu, that has the application's name, usually has the options and quit entries (as well as having standard key shortcuts for them, cmd+comma and cmd+q, respectively).
"Present choices and settings in terms of user goals, not technology"
...and in the example, it turns "Enable Internet Connection Sharing Host" and "Manual duplex" to "Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection" and "Print on both sides of the paper".
I agree on the principle, but it's funny how they chose both bad example and good example on how to use this rule.
"Manual duplex" is a bad way of saying "Print on both sides of the paper", it doesn't mean much if you take it out of context (my first thoughts were "there's still modems where you need to switch sending and receiving manually?"). But the ICS example is just too simplified. It's hard to read. Imagine hunting for the ICS option from a huge dialog. You need to read a lot of these "easy explanation" options. Too many words. "Share this computer's Internet connection" would be better.
The task-based language is okay, but in a lot of places in XP, I've found Microsoft is overdoing it and making the thing harder to use, rather than easier. Task descriptions just shouldn't get too wordy. If a longer explanation is needed, tooltips are there.
Use the first person (I, me, my) to let users tell the program what to do.
Ah, so Microsoft's stated goal of using my-spam is to create a friendlier atmosphere. I'm thinking they kind of succeed too well on that.
So use a GUI. Mencoder isn't supposed to be easy to use, and never claimed to be so.
Most Mencoder GUIs deal with trivial stuff like DVD ripping. Few seem to do what I had in mind - analog TV recording.
Writing reviews that have nothing good to say, and go one step further to be down right insulting isn't productive.
Probably, but ever heard of the expressions "please don't feed the trolls" and "turn the other cheek"? If mencoder people can't be bothered to treat the critique professionally (as in "detailed, considered explanation of which of the points ot the article are valid and which clearly aren't, with a modest statement that voices our disapproval of the tone of the article"), they'd better not say anything on the record, and if anyone asks informally, they'd just better explain "The article just was throughoutly misguided and wasn't helpful at all" - though one must remember that there's usually some wisdom in all critique.
You see, trolls like it when their comments get enshrined like this, for good or bad. What trolls don't like is when their plan backfires: Someone actually fixes the thing they complain about, because they have to come up with something else to stir more controversy about. (A pointed example: Trolls hate it when they spend a good week spamming "XXXX is gay!1!1!!!11" and the next week, the person in question comes out of the closet. Kind of hard to come up with insults related to that field when the person just replies "What an accurate observation" and "Why, that is actually quite incorrect, I haven't tried that sort of kinky behaviour yet.")
Stick to Totem. It's made for simple people.
Actually I'm sticking to VLC, and since the nightlies now support WMV3 and actually have working H.264, there go my last excuses to keep mplayer around. Once the VLC stream-to-file gets a bit more robust, I might ditch mencoder too.
Meanwhile, I have to keep wondering why mencoder's TV capture doesn't work. First, it started mysteriously messing up colourspaces, hogging tons of CPU while capturing, and now it can't record sound (doesn't think ALSA devices exist). I have no idea what's going on, and don't dare to contact anyone, as they probably (rightfully) say "I didn't change anything" isn't an excuse. *sigh*.
As for GUIs here, I expect the backends behind GUIs to not get mysteriously messed up after upgrade (think of cdrecord - at least the cdrecord executable works if the GUIs gets weird). mencoder has done so several times.
What are the mplayer folks actually saying in the manual?
Barr: MPlayer is nightmare to configure and install... okay, seems they have improved a little bit now. MPlayer: This is not the best researched article in the world! (In fact, we think that MPlayer is just simple to install and quite trivial to use!)
See? MPlayer folks don't even try to tear Barr's arguments apart logically, they just think Barr is full of it without saying why. And put it in their bloody user manual.
Whereas some other projects have this sort of approach to negative press:
Some reviewer, can't remember who: Amarok is a great app, it does this and this and this very well, but the documentation and logic behind this and that and the other was a bit bad. Amarok team: Ooo, look at this interesting review of Amarok! They got a very positive impression of us, but they thought that documentation and logic behind this and that and the other was less than satisfactory. We agree completely, and we're working on these!
See? "This article sucks" is not a defence. "This article is dead wrong because...", followed by some particularly thrilling explanation, is.
Anyone else remember the MPlayer uproar? The one that got him a mention in their documentation? Forever immortalized for being a jack-ass.
And making special exception to use user documentation to rip at reviewers is why I don't like MPlayer.
Soapbox about whatever you want. Just don't do it in the documentation.
Look at it from my point of view: I'm hopelessly confounded by mencoder command line options. MPlayer people basically point to this review that says mplayer is difficult to set up and user. Effing YES it's difficult to set up and use, that's why I'm reading this confusing documentation! I don't need a painful reminder that mencoder command likes are impossible to remember and I'm reading this documentation every bloody time I use the program, thank you very much! Makes it kind of easy to agree with Barr and think the MPlayer folks are being idiots, no?
Not exactly the reaction MPlayer people expected? Well, maybe they should try not put advocacy material to technical documentation. Bad reviews have nothing to do with technical documentation, that's a marketing issue.
And you shouldn't let the engineers do the marketing, right?
Ummmm.... Teddy + inkscape = not really much. However, I'd terribly appreciate Teddy + Blender. (There's open-source clones of Teddy too, like OpenTeddy. Not sure if it helps from Blender's PoV.)
If you mean "boy, wouldn't it be neat if Inkscape could do something like Flash, i.e., a 2D vector art program that works like a bitmap program", let me remind you that Inkscape can already automagically trace bitmaps with potrace, and potrace rules. Now, if only someone could port Ink9000 to Linux to do what Teddy does, only in reverse...
Making a copy, as you necessarily must when you download, would be infringement, OTOH.
Actually, taken extremely philosophically, download happens this way: The user initiates request (GET/music/britney_spears_-_oops_i_did_it_again.mp3 HTTP/1.1). This is not illegal yet. The server responds (HTTP/1.1 200 OK). This isn't illegal yet. But then happens something: The server fopen()s the file for reading, reads the octet stream and copies it up the wire to the HTTP client. That's the very illegal part. The user receives octet stream the server sends, and saves it to file. That's not illegal; it's the part analogous to when you are handed an unauthorised copy of a book by the unscrupulous book seller.
The "copying" that infringes the copyrights happens at the server end. Just because the only human party that does something in this copyright infringement is the user doesn't mean the serving user is off the hook - the serving user set up the server for specific reason of making available copies of copyrighted material to the users.
If you want an analogy from real life: Make 2000 counterfeit copies of a DVD, and dump them in an empty store. Unlock the door, put a sign on the door that says "free DVDs, come and get some while they last", and walk away. Just because you're not personally handing the copies to random passers-by, and the said passers-by actually have to walk in the store to grab a copy, doesn't make it any more legal. Nor does the fact that no money changes hands.
eventually someone will even port ActiveRecord to JRuby
I was under the impression ActiveRecord already worked under JRuby? After all, Camping apparently works under JRuby and it uses ActiveRecord. The tutorial speaks of something about JDBC.
Okay, so it may not work to really useful extent yet, and I hear Rails definitely won't work yet, but it's probably a start...
Recently, they also shut down one vendor who sold "backup copies". Only that the mention of that was in the small print of the user agreement, and the site just advertised selling really cheap software.
I don't think selling "backups" is any defense at all. Legitimate software vendors usually sell replacement media for legitimate customers for reasonable prices (I seem to remember reading someone getting in touch with Microsoft and receiving new Windows CDs for a couple of pennies by just verifying they did purchase the thing). Heck, to some corps it's same as if the media doesn't matter at all, they let just them to download the whole application and type in their serial number to run and install it. (My favourite is Neverwinter Nights, the Linux version says the retail package comes with "aluminium-reinforced Windoze brand coasters" and lets you download the entire darn game and data - just untar, run, and type in your CD key...)
Besides, the copyright laws usually allow you to make backup copies for your own use. Not any other way.
What's hard to uninstall?... Which unknown parties is it talking to?
You know, you sound exactly like your average spyware company representative. "Sure, you can easily uninstall this program. The uninstaller isn't ready yet, but come to our home page tomorrow. It's behind the 404'd hyperlink that says 'beware of the Gator,' er, 'Claria'. Yeah, you need to change the.html to.shtml by hand, shouldn't be hard to figure out, all pages on our website are.shtml instead of.html, anyone can see that." and "Why, it says it right here, in EULA, chapter 14, paragraph 32 section 6 clause 15, that we monitor your stuff how the heck you want and everything you do is sent to our server. Didn't you read this stuff? Tsk, tsk..."
You're half-right about the uninstallation though. Less annoying than true spyware. The uninstallee is still in for a crude surprise if they can't watch the movies or anything, but still... I think spying, even if it's in EULA, is still pretty much wrong unless they're really up front about it. (Think of Quake 4, which says "do you want to send anonymised configuration and performance data to Activision?" or something like that. Or Debian popularity-contest, which you need to install by hand and has extremely well stated purpose.)
Yup. Commodore made some, apparently, and later, CMD did, too. Those are pretty famous. Also, nowadays, there's this little hack called IDE64 that lets you use any IDE/ATA device, though I believe the disadvantage is that CBM/CMD drives work more or less like floppy drives through ordinary KERNAL calls (ie, plug in the drive, say LOAD "*",x,1, and guess what happens), and IDE64 needs patches to the software.
My understanding is that the patent only covers the LFN extension to the FAT directory structure.
Ah. And it was my understanding that DOSEmu (or was it FreeDOS or what? Can't remember anymore) was specifically skirting around the LFN patent by using a different method for short-name generation, so you didn't get MICROS~1 but something completely different...
Though I'm not a lawyer or anything and I don't know how that counts =)
The best use for DOS IMO is to run a BBS, but then, who wants to do that any more?
Everyone I know who were running a BBS were switching to that 'leet operating system called OS/2 that was apparently much cooler for running BBS - people couldn't afford a separate machine for their normal computer use. And then we got even better operating system for running BBSes, called Linux, but then everyone kind of said "but we have the Internet now", and forgot about it. =)
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this has been explained tons of times already, but here goes: Random Linux users probably don't care if there's DRM or not. Random Windows or OS X users probably don't care if there's DRM or not. I don't personally mind if iTunes would run on Linux with the exact same restrictions it has on Windows or OS X.
It's just that trying to fit DRM in existing open source projects is extremely problematic because everyone wants transparency. Current DRM depends on secrets. It depends on technology that wants things to be secret, all the while Linux folks are all about openness and interoperability.
Open source folks are more than happy to implement your DRM if you have a completely open specification. If you can't release the specification because it depends on a "secret" part and releasing it would undermine the whole thing, then it's a crappy attempt at DRM that will be undermined by l33t Hax0rz one day anyway, so why bother.
And as for myself, nobody needs to copy-protect things they sell to me. I won't copy them. Honest. The only P2P client I have at hand is Azureus, and that's for legit downloads only. I buy books and computer and video games and DVDs - not that much music, because CDs are overpriced and I have a radio too - and none get copied around. At worst I lend the stuff to my friends and family, and at that time I can't use them myself. So if you're a content provider, I have to ask, what is this DRM thing actually helping you for, anyway? What's the point of "protecting" the files, if I'm not copying them around anyway? (Don't say "you could" - stick to the facts. Don't say "someone else could" - stick to my case.)
Sure, I'd buy a lot of stuff online. If only paying for the stuff wasn't such a great big pain.
Why is it that international banking is such a great big headache? When the money or goods - virtual or not - cross the borders, everyone seems to be grabbing part of it, if not the governments then the people who transfer it?
Why isn't there a simple, universal, reliable, regulated method for transferring money internationally, no matter how big or small sum? A simple service you'd get automatically when you open a bank account, anywhere, in any bank in the world?
Because people go for the "it works for me" kind of approach. To American companies, credit card "works for me". As long as there's a stopgap measure that covers 85% of who they consider their market segment at the time, there's no problem. They just happen to ignore the tons of people who silently mutter "well, I'd love to get this, but I can't".
Sure, I'd love to buy music. I'd love to buy tons of music. I use Linux and have a (non-Visa-logo) Visa Electron. No iTunes for me? Well, looks like I'm still sticking to ocremix.org and remix.kwed.org for my music needs, then, it's not like other people are producing much music worth listening to anyway.
There used to be some sort of non-DRM MP3 store that had grand total of two songs available and required SMS messages as payment. That rocked. Yay. Too bad they never went past the pilot phase. Would have been the perfect model.
Think of Google. They went for the "long tail" thing - index every nook and cranny of the web, make web advertising easy for small sites, both as advertisers and as advertising space sellers, and make life easy for advertisement viewers too. Then think of search engines of 1996. Small indexes, tons of big-name advertisers, ludicruously priced annoying ads, "let's just focus on the big sites because that's where the money is". That didn't go too far, now did it? And where's Google now?
(Not saying Google Money Transfer would be a particularly good idea - PayPal is a private company and has a lot of problems not found in banks. Not saying Google should necessarily go to the music store business either. =)
I can easily remember pi up to that precision. My first "good" calculator had as 3.1415927, and I thought that was pretty odd, because Commodore 64 had one more decimal place: 3.14159265.
And you could type the pi symbol in C64, and it served as the constant's name. Haven't figured out how to do that in PC, aside of setting kb layout to greek, which is kind of complicated... =) (Argh, Slashcode seems to filter π, too. Welcome to year 2006, character sets are still a big problem in computing!) And people are complaining about proposed Unicode operators in Perl 6 - heck, in Commodore 64, not only we had non-ASCII operators (up-arrow for exponents), we had non-ASCII constant names, for pi! Er, PETSCII constant names. =)
I just tried to remember more decimal places than that. I guessed "3542", but apparently I got the last two wrong (should be "89"), I can't possibly guess why, as I'm not that huge fan of Douglas Adams and I'm running out of ideas besides that. Ah...
Yeah, you could bake bread in Ultima VII! That's an epic role-playing game. Released in 1992. And that's an American game! Bet the Japanese figured how to integrate cooking even earlier...
Oh, that game. Well, you can have it for free, actually. =)
Great! The people who missed 1995 in videogames have finally a chance to relive the legendary golden era of Full Motion Video Multimedia CD-ROM Games! A little bit less compression artifacts, but the same two-penny production values, the same horrible acting, the same cheesy special effects and especially the same level of interactivity!
::runs in fear as the memories of the Philips CD-i commercials flood in mind...::
I've seen multi-angle used in exactly one feature movie: The Hunt for Red October has the texts at the beginning in different languages.
It's also used pretty often in special features (usually in storyboard/animatic/special effect comparisons where you can switch between storyboard/etc view, final movie view and one that shows both).
Yep, you're probably doing something wrong.
First, pick the proper colour mode (palette vs. 24bit). Crunch the palette as small as you actually need. And, of course, use the highest possible compression level.
Tools like pngcrush are also invaluable because you can leave out stuff you absolutely don't need. pngcrush -cc -brute tends to leave GIFs home weeping. =)
Ooops! Looks like it still exists: drivers/char/lp.c: printk(KERN_INFO "lp%d on fire\n", minor);. And here I could have sworn it was removed at one point.
I knew for sure that it did exist all this time in USB printer code, though. drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: static const char *usblp_messages[] = { "ok", "out of paper", "off-line", "on fire" };
And actually, now that I'm grepping kernel source, looks like there is a kernel-level yes-i'm-on-fire message of some kind: arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mcheck/p5.c: printk(KERN_EMERG "CPU#%d: Possible thermal failure (CPU on fire ?).\n", smp_processor_id());
Still, I mourn the fact that libc5 had "not a typewriter" and glibc has "inappropriate ioctl for device"... GNU project produces mostly boring and to-the-point software =)
Well, Linux already has support for various temperature sensors... but no kernel level sorry-I'm-on-fire support. They even removed the "lpX on fire" error...
Congratulations, you just described the Mac OS X menu standards. =) In OS X, the first menu, that has the application's name, usually has the options and quit entries (as well as having standard key shortcuts for them, cmd+comma and cmd+q, respectively).
...and in the example, it turns "Enable Internet Connection Sharing Host" and "Manual duplex" to "Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection" and "Print on both sides of the paper".
I agree on the principle, but it's funny how they chose both bad example and good example on how to use this rule.
"Manual duplex" is a bad way of saying "Print on both sides of the paper", it doesn't mean much if you take it out of context (my first thoughts were "there's still modems where you need to switch sending and receiving manually?"). But the ICS example is just too simplified. It's hard to read. Imagine hunting for the ICS option from a huge dialog. You need to read a lot of these "easy explanation" options. Too many words. "Share this computer's Internet connection" would be better.
The task-based language is okay, but in a lot of places in XP, I've found Microsoft is overdoing it and making the thing harder to use, rather than easier. Task descriptions just shouldn't get too wordy. If a longer explanation is needed, tooltips are there.
Ah, so Microsoft's stated goal of using my-spam is to create a friendlier atmosphere. I'm thinking they kind of succeed too well on that.
Must... refrain... from... joking... MyComputerMyFilesMyDuploBricks! Arrrrggggh. Sorry.
Most Mencoder GUIs deal with trivial stuff like DVD ripping. Few seem to do what I had in mind - analog TV recording.
Probably, but ever heard of the expressions "please don't feed the trolls" and "turn the other cheek"? If mencoder people can't be bothered to treat the critique professionally (as in "detailed, considered explanation of which of the points ot the article are valid and which clearly aren't, with a modest statement that voices our disapproval of the tone of the article"), they'd better not say anything on the record, and if anyone asks informally, they'd just better explain "The article just was throughoutly misguided and wasn't helpful at all" - though one must remember that there's usually some wisdom in all critique.
You see, trolls like it when their comments get enshrined like this, for good or bad. What trolls don't like is when their plan backfires: Someone actually fixes the thing they complain about, because they have to come up with something else to stir more controversy about. (A pointed example: Trolls hate it when they spend a good week spamming "XXXX is gay!1!1!!!11" and the next week, the person in question comes out of the closet. Kind of hard to come up with insults related to that field when the person just replies "What an accurate observation" and "Why, that is actually quite incorrect, I haven't tried that sort of kinky behaviour yet.")
Actually I'm sticking to VLC, and since the nightlies now support WMV3 and actually have working H.264, there go my last excuses to keep mplayer around. Once the VLC stream-to-file gets a bit more robust, I might ditch mencoder too.
Meanwhile, I have to keep wondering why mencoder's TV capture doesn't work. First, it started mysteriously messing up colourspaces, hogging tons of CPU while capturing, and now it can't record sound (doesn't think ALSA devices exist). I have no idea what's going on, and don't dare to contact anyone, as they probably (rightfully) say "I didn't change anything" isn't an excuse. *sigh*.
As for GUIs here, I expect the backends behind GUIs to not get mysteriously messed up after upgrade (think of cdrecord - at least the cdrecord executable works if the GUIs gets weird). mencoder has done so several times.
What are the mplayer folks actually saying in the manual?
Barr: MPlayer is nightmare to configure and install... okay, seems they have improved a little bit now.
MPlayer: This is not the best researched article in the world! (In fact, we think that MPlayer is just simple to install and quite trivial to use!)
See? MPlayer folks don't even try to tear Barr's arguments apart logically, they just think Barr is full of it without saying why. And put it in their bloody user manual.
Whereas some other projects have this sort of approach to negative press:
Some reviewer, can't remember who: Amarok is a great app, it does this and this and this very well, but the documentation and logic behind this and that and the other was a bit bad.
Amarok team: Ooo, look at this interesting review of Amarok! They got a very positive impression of us, but they thought that documentation and logic behind this and that and the other was less than satisfactory. We agree completely, and we're working on these!
See? "This article sucks" is not a defence. "This article is dead wrong because...", followed by some particularly thrilling explanation, is.
And making special exception to use user documentation to rip at reviewers is why I don't like MPlayer.
Soapbox about whatever you want. Just don't do it in the documentation.
Look at it from my point of view: I'm hopelessly confounded by mencoder command line options. MPlayer people basically point to this review that says mplayer is difficult to set up and user. Effing YES it's difficult to set up and use, that's why I'm reading this confusing documentation! I don't need a painful reminder that mencoder command likes are impossible to remember and I'm reading this documentation every bloody time I use the program, thank you very much! Makes it kind of easy to agree with Barr and think the MPlayer folks are being idiots, no?
Not exactly the reaction MPlayer people expected? Well, maybe they should try not put advocacy material to technical documentation. Bad reviews have nothing to do with technical documentation, that's a marketing issue.
And you shouldn't let the engineers do the marketing, right?
Ummmm.... Teddy + inkscape = not really much. However, I'd terribly appreciate Teddy + Blender. (There's open-source clones of Teddy too, like OpenTeddy. Not sure if it helps from Blender's PoV.)
If you mean "boy, wouldn't it be neat if Inkscape could do something like Flash, i.e., a 2D vector art program that works like a bitmap program", let me remind you that Inkscape can already automagically trace bitmaps with potrace, and potrace rules. Now, if only someone could port Ink9000 to Linux to do what Teddy does, only in reverse...
...who lead the team that broke SDMI, thus pushing this wonderful DRM depression we live in forward for a couple of years...
Actually, taken extremely philosophically, download happens this way: The user initiates request (GET /music/britney_spears_-_oops_i_did_it_again.mp3 HTTP/1.1). This is not illegal yet. The server responds (HTTP/1.1 200 OK). This isn't illegal yet. But then happens something: The server fopen()s the file for reading, reads the octet stream and copies it up the wire to the HTTP client. That's the very illegal part. The user receives octet stream the server sends, and saves it to file. That's not illegal; it's the part analogous to when you are handed an unauthorised copy of a book by the unscrupulous book seller.
The "copying" that infringes the copyrights happens at the server end. Just because the only human party that does something in this copyright infringement is the user doesn't mean the serving user is off the hook - the serving user set up the server for specific reason of making available copies of copyrighted material to the users.
If you want an analogy from real life: Make 2000 counterfeit copies of a DVD, and dump them in an empty store. Unlock the door, put a sign on the door that says "free DVDs, come and get some while they last", and walk away. Just because you're not personally handing the copies to random passers-by, and the said passers-by actually have to walk in the store to grab a copy, doesn't make it any more legal. Nor does the fact that no money changes hands.
I was under the impression ActiveRecord already worked under JRuby? After all, Camping apparently works under JRuby and it uses ActiveRecord. The tutorial speaks of something about JDBC.
Okay, so it may not work to really useful extent yet, and I hear Rails definitely won't work yet, but it's probably a start...
Recently, they also shut down one vendor who sold "backup copies". Only that the mention of that was in the small print of the user agreement, and the site just advertised selling really cheap software.
I don't think selling "backups" is any defense at all. Legitimate software vendors usually sell replacement media for legitimate customers for reasonable prices (I seem to remember reading someone getting in touch with Microsoft and receiving new Windows CDs for a couple of pennies by just verifying they did purchase the thing). Heck, to some corps it's same as if the media doesn't matter at all, they let just them to download the whole application and type in their serial number to run and install it. (My favourite is Neverwinter Nights, the Linux version says the retail package comes with "aluminium-reinforced Windoze brand coasters" and lets you download the entire darn game and data - just untar, run, and type in your CD key...)
Besides, the copyright laws usually allow you to make backup copies for your own use. Not any other way.
You know, you sound exactly like your average spyware company representative. "Sure, you can easily uninstall this program. The uninstaller isn't ready yet, but come to our home page tomorrow. It's behind the 404'd hyperlink that says 'beware of the Gator,' er, 'Claria'. Yeah, you need to change the .html to .shtml by hand, shouldn't be hard to figure out, all pages on our website are .shtml instead of .html, anyone can see that." and "Why, it says it right here, in EULA, chapter 14, paragraph 32 section 6 clause 15, that we monitor your stuff how the heck you want and everything you do is sent to our server. Didn't you read this stuff? Tsk, tsk..."
You're half-right about the uninstallation though. Less annoying than true spyware. The uninstallee is still in for a crude surprise if they can't watch the movies or anything, but still... I think spying, even if it's in EULA, is still pretty much wrong unless they're really up front about it. (Think of Quake 4, which says "do you want to send anonymised configuration and performance data to Activision?" or something like that. Or Debian popularity-contest, which you need to install by hand and has extremely well stated purpose.)
I believe MikroBITTI published in 1980s some listing that played Edelweiss, so I think this one has been covered for quite a while...
Ever heard of GEOS? =)
Yup. Commodore made some, apparently, and later, CMD did, too. Those are pretty famous. Also, nowadays, there's this little hack called IDE64 that lets you use any IDE/ATA device, though I believe the disadvantage is that CBM/CMD drives work more or less like floppy drives through ordinary KERNAL calls (ie, plug in the drive, say LOAD "*",x,1, and guess what happens), and IDE64 needs patches to the software.
Ah. And it was my understanding that DOSEmu (or was it FreeDOS or what? Can't remember anymore) was specifically skirting around the LFN patent by using a different method for short-name generation, so you didn't get MICROS~1 but something completely different...
Though I'm not a lawyer or anything and I don't know how that counts =)
Everyone I know who were running a BBS were switching to that 'leet operating system called OS/2 that was apparently much cooler for running BBS - people couldn't afford a separate machine for their normal computer use. And then we got even better operating system for running BBSes, called Linux, but then everyone kind of said "but we have the Internet now", and forgot about it. =)