Let's assume your numbers are right. But remember, even 2% of the market is a LOT of people. If porting can be done 45 (90/2) times faster (in total person-hours) than creating the original game, the port will have at least the same profit margin as the Windows version. Probably a better profit margin, because of linux game scarcity.
I don't know how they can call this an alpha release when there are important bugs outstanding.
CSS2 provides a way to achieve the same effects as frames with none of the drawbacks. It's called "fixed positioning". Mozilla implements it, but their implementation needs to be, err, "fixed".
For heaven's sake, I have been waiting for a good implementation of this standard since it was called CSS-P. (Now you can't find mention of CSSP on the W3C site!)
Yeah, but what if a comment is only slightly Interesting? (Sort of like this one!) Say it doesn't deserve a 5, but it does deserve a 3. Who you gonna call?
There will be no native crusoe apps ever, because Transmeta values the ability to change the underlying hardware. Read the piece on Ars Technica, where they speculate that TM is working on chips with a hardware/software boundary that's different from Crusoe's.
Coasters are the big deal. (I've got an IDE CD-R too.)
It's very easy to make a coaster if the data can't get to the CD-R fast enough. This used to happen all the time, before they started putting bigger buffers on the IDE burners.
Today's IDE CD-R drives are more reliable, but you can still make a coaster by stressing your system while burning. Loading a big program could do it. Playing Quake III will do it. Because SCSI multitasks better, it will be less likely to make a coaster under stress.
So you can DO things with your computer while the CD-R burns.
You'll notice that the words "workstation" and "professional" figured prominently in this announcement, while games weren't even mentioned. Nvidea's Quadro, the big brother to the GeForce, is the real cause of this initiative. The Quadro does to SGI hardware what Linux did to Solaris and all the proprietary *nixes. It made it work on commodity hardware, and made it cheap. You'll
NVidea would have to be braindead *not* to get the Quadro working on Linux. Like Linux, it's a (much) cheaper alternative of comparable quality.
What I don't understand is how VA and SGI figure in this. Surely SGI realizes that the Quadro could hurt them badly.
There's an old joke about NTSC-- they say it means "Never the same colour". It was a compromise. Look at a video capture or two, and you'll see what I mean. Blech.
But by definition, analog NTSC and DTV can't co-exist on the same signal. One picture would interfere with the other. Tricks like WebTop that stick digital data into an unused region (the Vertical Blanking Interval) don't supply nearly enough bandwidth.
HDTV and NTSC can't co-exist because you can't fit HDTV into an analog NTSC signal at all. There's just too much information. You either have to make the bandwith much bigger, or put up with very, very crappy images.
HDTV has to be digital so it can be compressed. The only way NTSC and HDTV can coexist is if you broadcast them separately.
Of course, it's an open question whether HDTV is actually a good idea. Consumers don't like superior tech when it's too expensive.
The long wait for HDTV did create one positive benefit: technology matured, enabling television to go digital. An HDTV picture contains far more visual data than an old-style NTSC picture, because the screen is wider and the image is more detailed. At first no one could see a way of transmitting all this data through a traditional TV channel, which has a bandwidth of just 6 MHz. It was like trying to force four times as much water through an old, small pipe.
But if a picture can be digitized, it can be compressed. For instance, instead of transmitting all the pixels of a plain blue sky, you can send a code saying, "Paint the next 5,000 pixels blue." And if the sky doesn't change during a series of video frames, you can send a code saying, "Keep the sky the same as before." You can also use clever algorithms to average out color variations in ways that are almost imperceptible to the human eye. At the receiving end, a suitable new, improved, digital TV set can be smart enough to understand these coded instructions, decompress the signal, and turn it back into the original picture.
Meanwhile, digitized TV had some mind-boggling implications. If the huge amount of data in an HDTV transmission can be squeezed into one old-fashioned 6-MHz channel, consider what can be done to a low-quality NTSC picture if it, too, is digitized and compressed. It can be reduced to as little as 1 MHz, leaving 5 MHz of a traditional channel "spare."
No one argues that hackers are mis-portrayed in the media.
I disagree. Supposedly reputable news establishments generally attribute report break-ins, defacements, and theft (eg _cracking_ behavior, or malicious hacking) to hackers.
I think you agree with each other. Sometimes "argue" gets misused, and I think the original poster meant "No one disputes that hackers are mis-portrayed in the media."
Agreed. The only thing you can portably do is specify table cell widths (in percentages) that happen to break the paragraph in the appropriate place on the most common resolution.
HTML and CSS trade the precise control of a DTP program for portability, and I expect they will always make some tradeoff. If you must have a specific layout, try PDF.
As for fonts, you can always try Trudoc (www.trudoc.com). It's a portable font standard that comes with Netscape, and there's a (tiny) ActiveX control for IE. It's the closest we'll come to a standard for a while. . .
Your "standard" time method does not produce any year information, which is what the original poster was talking about.
It's very tricky to get the year from a time_t without converting it to a struct tm. Theoretically possible to write a mktime() clone, but it's not worth the effort.
So what's your point? That the Unix standard for dates is totally incomprehensible to humans?
Here's the approach I considered: Compile the original source. You'll need the compiler the Evil People used, but there's usually an indication of compiler in the binary. Compare your binary to the Evil People's binary. If there's a pattern match between the binaries, there must be a pattern match in the source. If the pattern is big enough, you've got a good case.
As you point out, optimisation will make it tricker. You may need to automate the process to try it with all possible options.
You can get free lawyers in a criminal case, but not usually in a civil case. That's how it works in Canada, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same in most systems based on British law.
The question here is "what if they don't release the code?" That's probably the most serious kind of GPL violation.
Perhaps the truth would be leaked by a community-minded programmer. Or maybe it would be obvious, from the way the software worked, that it was based on known GPL'ed software.
It's probably possible to reverse-engineer a binary to prove, in court, that it is based on certain source. Didn't say it was easy.
Lots of folks have chosen licenses that are "more free" by your terms. Look at X86 or the BSDs. Software that's GPL'ed is GPL'ed because the author liked that license the best.
Diversity is usually good. Although sometimes it makes it difficult to take components from one piece of software and add them to another. If they have different licenses.
I'm not dancing on the rooftops over it, but I think the GPL is the best solution in an imperfect world.
Gotta disagree. There are better reasons for going with GPL'ed software--such as: "It does the job really well, and the source is available".
Companies who use open-sourced software aren't necessarily looking to jump on a bandwagon. They just want free (beer) software. And it doesn't matter if they alienate the OS community, because they may not be targeting us.
What if TiVO or Be hadn't released source? Would it have affected their bottom line?
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So it doesn't matter whether you're right or not, as long as you have the smartest lawyer?
Let's assume your numbers are right.
But remember, even 2% of the market is a LOT of people. If porting can be done 45 (90/2) times faster (in total person-hours) than creating the original game, the port will have at least the same profit margin as the Windows version. Probably a better profit margin, because of linux game scarcity.
I don't know how they can call this an alpha release when there are important bugs outstanding.
CSS2 provides a way to achieve the same effects as frames with none of the drawbacks. It's called "fixed positioning". Mozilla implements it, but their implementation needs to be, err, "fixed".
For heaven's sake, I have been waiting for a good implementation of this standard since it was called CSS-P. (Now you can't find mention of CSSP on the W3C site!)
Yeah, but what if a comment is only slightly Interesting? (Sort of like this one!) Say it doesn't deserve a 5, but it does deserve a 3. Who you gonna call?
There will be no native crusoe apps ever, because Transmeta values the ability to change the underlying hardware. Read the piece on Ars Technica, where they speculate that TM is working on chips with a hardware/software boundary that's different from Crusoe's.
Coasters are the big deal. (I've got an IDE CD-R too.)
It's very easy to make a coaster if the data can't get to the CD-R fast enough. This used to happen all the time, before they started putting bigger buffers on the IDE burners.
Today's IDE CD-R drives are more reliable, but you can still make a coaster by stressing your system while burning. Loading a big program could do it. Playing Quake III will do it. Because SCSI multitasks better, it will be less likely to make a coaster under stress.
So you can DO things with your computer while the CD-R burns.
You'll notice that the words "workstation" and "professional" figured prominently in this announcement, while games weren't even mentioned.
Nvidea's Quadro, the big brother to the GeForce, is the real cause of this initiative. The Quadro does to SGI hardware what Linux did to Solaris and all the proprietary *nixes. It made it work on commodity hardware, and made it cheap. You'll
NVidea would have to be braindead *not* to get the Quadro working on Linux. Like Linux, it's a (much) cheaper alternative of comparable quality.
What I don't understand is how VA and SGI figure in this. Surely SGI realizes that the Quadro could hurt them badly.
Very cool.
If you "already do this [convert XML->HTML or XML->WAP]", how does that work? Is it custom?
There's an old joke about NTSC-- they say it means "Never the same colour". It was a compromise. Look at a video capture or two, and you'll see what I mean. Blech.
But by definition, analog NTSC and DTV can't co-exist on the same signal. One picture would interfere with the other. Tricks like WebTop that stick digital data into an unused region (the Vertical Blanking Interval) don't supply nearly enough bandwidth.
HDTV and NTSC can't co-exist because you can't fit HDTV into an analog NTSC signal at all. There's just too much information. You either have to make the bandwith much bigger, or put up with very, very crappy images.
HDTV has to be digital so it can be compressed. The only way NTSC and HDTV can coexist is if you broadcast them separately.
Of course, it's an open question whether HDTV is actually a good idea. Consumers don't like superior tech when it's too expensive.
Here's an excerpt from Wired 5.02, "The Great HDTV swindle":
The long wait for HDTV did create one positive benefit: technology matured, enabling television to go digital. An HDTV picture contains far more visual data than an old-style NTSC picture, because the screen is wider and the image is more detailed. At first no one could see a way of transmitting all this data through a traditional TV channel, which has a bandwidth of just 6 MHz. It was like trying to force four times as much water through an old, small pipe.
But if a picture can be digitized, it can be compressed. For instance, instead of transmitting all the pixels of a plain blue sky, you can send a code saying, "Paint the next 5,000 pixels blue." And if the sky doesn't change during a series of video frames, you can send a code saying, "Keep the sky the same as before." You can also use clever algorithms to average out color variations in ways that are almost imperceptible to the human eye. At the receiving end, a suitable new, improved, digital TV set can be smart enough to understand these coded instructions, decompress the signal, and turn it back into the original picture.
Meanwhile, digitized TV had some mind-boggling implications. If the huge amount of data in an HDTV transmission can be squeezed into one old-fashioned 6-MHz channel, consider what can be done to a low-quality NTSC picture if it, too, is digitized and compressed. It can be reduced to as little as 1 MHz, leaving 5 MHz of a traditional channel "spare."
I can see it now: "No, Steve Wozniak doesn't know me. He told me so!"
has anybody tried this out yet? does it work? I'm 200 miles away from my machine, so I can't...
Err. . . why would they release it if it didn't work?
Actually i am aware that KDE runs on top of X i gust prefer using KDE and find that KDE's feature are better that X
That's like saying "socks are better than shoes".
No one argues that hackers are mis-portrayed in the media.
I disagree. Supposedly reputable news establishments generally attribute report break-ins, defacements, and theft (eg _cracking_ behavior, or malicious hacking) to hackers.
I think you agree with each other. Sometimes "argue" gets misused, and I think the original poster meant "No one disputes that hackers are mis-portrayed in the media."
Agreed. The only thing you can portably do is specify table cell widths (in percentages) that happen to break the paragraph in the appropriate place on the most common resolution.
HTML and CSS trade the precise control of a DTP program for portability, and I expect they will always make some tradeoff. If you must have a specific layout, try PDF.
As for fonts, you can always try Trudoc (www.trudoc.com). It's a portable font standard that comes with Netscape, and there's a (tiny) ActiveX control for IE. It's the closest we'll come to a standard for a while. . .
The tag causes a browser to handle its contents like a single word. This can be useful for headlines.
Consider the phrase "Doctors solve genetic disorder". You don't want that rendered as
"Doctors solve genetic
disorder" --too ugly.
Wrap a around "genetic disorder" and you get
"Doctors solve
genetic disorder".
Your "standard" time method does not produce any year information, which is what the original poster was talking about.
It's very tricky to get the year from a time_t without converting it to a struct tm. Theoretically possible to write a mktime() clone, but it's not worth the effort.
So what's your point? That the Unix standard for dates is totally incomprehensible to humans?
Here's the approach I considered:
Compile the original source. You'll need the compiler the Evil People used, but there's usually an indication of compiler in the binary. Compare your binary to the Evil People's binary. If there's a pattern match between the binaries, there must be a pattern match in the source. If the pattern is big enough, you've got a good case.
As you point out, optimisation will make it tricker. You may need to automate the process to try it with all possible options.
Getting a subpoena may be easier. . .
Actually, he has several books out. Sheesh.
You can get free lawyers in a criminal case, but not usually in a civil case. That's how it works in Canada, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same in most systems based on British law.
The question here is "what if they don't release the code?" That's probably the most serious kind of GPL violation.
Perhaps the truth would be leaked by a community-minded programmer. Or maybe it would be obvious, from the way the software worked, that it was based on known GPL'ed software.
It's probably possible to reverse-engineer a binary to prove, in court, that it is based on certain source. Didn't say it was easy.
Lots of folks have chosen licenses that are "more free" by your terms. Look at X86 or the BSDs. Software that's GPL'ed is GPL'ed because the author liked that license the best.
Diversity is usually good. Although sometimes it makes it difficult to take components from one piece of software and add them to another. If they have different licenses.
I'm not dancing on the rooftops over it, but I think the GPL is the best solution in an imperfect world.
Gotta disagree. There are better reasons for going with GPL'ed software--such as: "It does the job really well, and the source is available".
Companies who use open-sourced software aren't necessarily looking to jump on a bandwagon. They just want free (beer) software. And it doesn't matter if they alienate the OS community, because they may not be targeting us.
What if TiVO or Be hadn't released source? Would it have affected their bottom line?
All depends on whether or not it's a good thing.