A few years ago he wrote a little computer game with John
Carmack. You may
have heard of it... it was called Doom. He went on
to do Quake before falling out with Carmack, and
leaving id software to start his own company, Ion
Storm. They released the moderately successful
Deus Ex, and the, erm..., not so successful
Daikatana.
I notice, however, that he isn't getting flamed for offering ISOs.
Actually, I'm flaming him. Offering
an OpenBSD with IPF is one thing, but offering
bootable ISOs is another matter entirely. It's a direct
attack on OpenBSD's revenue stream. Granted, the
license has always allowed that, and relied on
the goodwill of the users to buy the official
product, rather than creating bootable ISOs. But
Darren never offered them before his falling out
with Theo, and starting to do so now really
doesn't show him in the best light... At one
point, I considered making bootable CDs myself,
but decided that it wouldn't be in the best
interests of the OpenBSD project (and hence,
indirectly, myself) to do so.
Nope, I don't get what you're trying to say here.
The question was about which non-MP3 codecs we
used. In that context, it's as easy to get ogg
(with oggenc) as it is to get MP3 (with lame,
bladeenc, etc.). If you're talking about downloading
music you don't own, rather than encoding it
yourself, then does it matter? You have
players for MP3 anyway. As for your argument about
your CD player supporting MP3 but not ogg, well
I've taken a stand on that one, and chosen not to
buy a portable player that doesn't do ogg. Until
I find one that does, I'll stick with minidisc.
The Oxford (United Kingdom) list tends to have reasonably high level of cluefulness
Equally, the GLLUG (Greater London) list has a fair
amount of technical knowledge. It's frequented by
both kernel and gcc/glibc hackers. Plus all the
other stuff you expect from a LUG list -- clueless
newbies, flamefests, etc. All the things that make
life interesting:-) But overall, it's a pretty
sound group.
When NEXT used display Postscript, they had to pay some license money to Adobe. Also Postscript compatible printer often were not called Postscript for licence reason.
Precisely. NeXT chose to license Adobe's PostScript RIP,
rather than reimplement it from scratch using the
publically available specs. That's doesn't make
PostScript any less open. It's a business decision.
Brother apparently chose to implement it themselves, which means they don't have to pay
a license fee to Adobe (but in the process, they
lose the right to use the PostScript trademark).
A business decision once again.
Despite what you may read anywhere else, RTFM
always stood for "Read The Manual" in the past.
The F was
always implied, never given explicitly. It's
only recently that people have started spelling
it out for the hard of perceiving (or worse,
trying to substitute politically correct
alternatives such as "fine"). Sigh. Such is the price of progress:-(
Its at its very best at [say] finding every article ever written on a line like 'ORA12345 Oracle'
Fortunately, this is no longer necessary. Oracle
eventually saw the light, and you can now look
this up directly without having to resort to the
web, or wonder who last took the dead tree manual
from the shelf and didn't replace it. You can get
this info you're looking for with:
Reprints of their complete works will soon appear. Happened for Heinlein, same for Asimov, Dick.
Yes, to an extent, that's true, but it's certainly
an exageration to say that their complete
works will be reprinted (I should know, I have a
complete Heinlein collection, and a large percentage
of it wasn't reprinted after his death). Same for
Asimov, but then with over 400 books published,
reprinting the whole lot was probably never going
to happen anyway. But I guess at least the more
important books will become available again,
which should give younger readers a taster,
and hopefully will trigger a few to go and hunt
out the more obscure titles in second hand
bookstores and the like.
here in the UK, you're lucky to find even one book by him on the shelves of the major bookstores
Yes, and that's a major problem. Today's SF readers
often aren't given the opportunity to find the
classic works in the genre. When was the last time
you saw a Van Vogt book for sale, for example?
Or anything by Alfred Bester? E.E. Doc Smith?
Jack Vance?
Even specialist
bookshops like New Worlds in Charing Cross Road
have very little of the classic works. Even the
major names (Asmiov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc.) only
have a few titles available in the major stores.
Yes, the world moves on, and shelf space needs
to be given to new authors, but I think the
balance has gone too far, and we need to remember
our roots. But what would I know? I'm interested
in the genre, not in maximising profits for the
large bookstore chains...
Re:Marooned in Realtime
on
True Names
·
· Score: 2
If you haven't read the peace war, i'd recommend picking it up.
Agree wholeheartedly. Having received "Across Realtime" for xmas, I've just finished "The Peace War", and am currently half way through "Marooned In Realtime". The Peace War, in particular, is an
outstanding work. Recommended to all.
It's the first Vinge I've read, and on the basis
of what I've found, I'll definitely be getting more...
A Unix machine without a C compiler? Can you name a few popular systems that have this problem?
Every single one of the production systems for which I'm responsible (currently Linux/x86,
Linux/SPARC, Solaris/SPARC, Tru64, AIX and OpenBSD). If you'd read my original message,
you'd see that the lack of a C compiler was
through choice, not lack of availability.
couldn't/wouldn't because no precompiled PPC packages existed or were only from sources I had no reason to trust.
That problem wouldn't be solved by a package
management system that compiled from source. A
source package from an untrusted location is just
as bad as a precompiled binary from the same
location.
Then the system takes the package and builds/installs it using a user account set aside for the purpose of installing non-base software.
Bah! Why is it that no one suggesting these sorts of
things has any operational experience? The chances
are that the machine on which you're installing
the package doesn't have a C compiler, which tends
to make your plans to build from source a little
unworkable. The usual answer is people telling me
that gcc is available for pretty much every system
these days, and that I should just install that.
No one seems to have the concept of installing
the minimum necessary to get the job done any
more, something that's particularly important on
public facing (and hence higher security risk)
boxen. Sigh.
It's just that Apple were smart enough to ditch X and come up with a better graphical system.
Better is a matter of opinion, and people who
claim that usually do so out of ignornance of X.
You're unlikely to find a better windowing system
than X any time soon. Sure, it has some problems
in current implementations, but those are being
fixed with time (alpha blending, antialiased fonts, etc.). X is so
much more than people think, and still has a long
way to go. If people put in the effort to get it
to where it was always intended to be, it'll be
untouchable. The ability for an application to
specify an editor widget, for example, but leave
the implementation as user-configurable. Sure,
most people will just stick with the standard
text box, but others can replace it with a vi
or a jed or even emacs-alike widget. For *all*
applications, not needing to be configured on a per-app basis. Those interested may find Alan Cox's
comments from his
April 7th diary entry enlightening.
Solaris 9 has a/dev/random and there's no intel version!
That's not quite true. I've spoken to people inside
Sun who say they've been running Solaris 9 on Intel,
so it does exist. They're just choosing not to
release it yet. Note that the article even mentions
that they're not ruling out releasing an Intel version in the
future.
It's a sad comment that even at Be, Inc., they only
had 20 BeBoxen left to auction off. I used to lust
after those things. I wish they'd taken off. If I
was in the US, I'd seriously consider trying to
snap one up at the auction.
No, dig is an apalling tool.
While it may well be far more powerful than
nslookup, the interface it presents to the end
user is awful.
It highlights perfectly everything that is
wrong with letting the average geek design a
user interface. Remember, it's not just DNS
administrators that want to do DNS queries.
Plus, of course, not all the world uses BIND
any more. Naturally, I firmly
believe that I'm the exception -- a geek that
can design a user interface for the rest of the
world. Perhaps that's the problem, though,
and we're
all naïve (or is that arrogant?) enough to overestimate our abilities, and believe we can
accurately guage (and allow for) the
stupidity of the average end user. But for
now, I'll continue living in my sheltered world, believing myself superior. I prefer it that way:-)
Personally speaking, yes, if that's what it takes
to do the books justice. Perhaps Glorfindel doesn't
add anything much to the story, but why arbitrarily
replace the character? What does that add
to the story? I appreciate that the film I
want to see would be too long to make economic
sense, but I feel it would be a better result.
Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a great film
--
I just think it could have been better. The
reforging of Narsil, for example, is an important
part of the story, yet was barely mentioned in
the film at all. Perhaps it'll show up in the DVD.
We can only hope.
The thing is, the books were such an important
part of my childhood that to arbitrarily change
them will never do them justice in my eyes. The
bits that were kept faithful to the books were
stunning. It just grates that he didn't
do that all the way through.
Consistent backups are trivial. Are there any common filesystems that provide this?
VxFS does for a start. My first point of call would
be to check whether the freevfxs filesystem in
linux supports the point in time copies of the real
thing. Or wait for Veritas's official release
(which is purely a marketing issue -- it's been
running on Linux for a long time inside Veritas).
Other than that, maybe check if XFS or JFS support
similar features.
you'd imagine they would use an open document format.
Care to expand on how PDF isn't an open format?
It's fully documented by Adobe in the book
"PDF Reference" (ISBN: 0201615886 for the current
1.3 version, or 0201758393 for the soon to
be released 1.4 version). It's also available
online in various places, for example, http://wotsit.org.
Furthermore, several independent implementations
of PDF encoders and viewers exist, such as
xpdf
and
ghostscript.
Yes, many PDFs include LZW compressed data, but
that's a problem with Unisys, not Adobe, and
there are non-patent-infringing ways of uncompressing the data anyway. Plus, modern PDFs
are compressed with the patent-free deflate
algorithm. So exactly how
more open do you want PDF to be?
people who insist on wasting huge amounts of money and time on "color matching" monitors and the like. IMNSHO, it simply cannot be done!
Agreed. The limited gamut of a CRT or LCD compared
to the press guarantees that if nothing else.
However, it makes sense to use colour matching
where possible to achieve as close an approximation
as possible. The only question then becomes how
much do you spend, and how close an approximation
do you want? The closer the approximation, the
more it'll cost (rising almost exponentially:-)
the classic problem that killed DEC, and is killing Tandem, Stratus, DG, and many others: the performance of the lowend is improving so quickly that we can do things on $1K machines that used to require $1M machines.
Actually, that's not true. Commodity PC hardware
can't do what a DG NUMA box, or a Tandem
or Stratus box could do, either from a technical
competence or a performance point of view.
But it can do a close
enough approximation that most people don't care.
No, the PC hardware won't give you five nines
reliability. Nor will it allow you to have a
single system image across 64 or more CPUs. But
most people are prepared to tolerate an occasional
reboot, and a loss of performance to save themselves a bucket load of cash.
And that's the problem. Why spend big bucks, when
you can get 90% of what you want for a couple of
grand? Sure, as a techie, I'd love to have a DG
AV35000 to play with, but realistically, unless
I'm running insane amounts of Oracle, I don't
need it. I can get the job done with a high end
PC. Not as quickly, sure, but quickly enough to
satisfy my business requirements.
how anyone ever came up with the cheats that were published monthly in my favorite ZX Spectrum (and later Commodore Amiga) magazine. I just assumed that somewhere, someone would get the infomation out of the programmers by sleeping with the despectacled geeks.
We used to do it on the Beeb by poring over hex dumps, looking
for the magic sequences of 6502 assembler
(the novelty quickly wore off, and we wrote a
program to do the search for us shortly afterwards:-) Ahhhh, wonderful memories. The BBC Micro was
an amazing hackers machine. Much more so than the
Spectrum or C64, by virtue of the fact that it
had in inbuilt assembler/disassembler and hex
dump. As for sleeping with despectacled geeks,
I sadly conformed to the stereotypes, and wasn't
much interested in that sort of thing at the
time. Of course,
things have changed somewhat since then:-)
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago he wrote a little computer game with John Carmack. You may have heard of it... it was called Doom. He went on to do Quake before falling out with Carmack, and leaving id software to start his own company, Ion Storm. They released the moderately successful Deus Ex, and the, erm..., not so successful Daikatana.
Actually, I'm flaming him. Offering an OpenBSD with IPF is one thing, but offering bootable ISOs is another matter entirely. It's a direct attack on OpenBSD's revenue stream. Granted, the license has always allowed that, and relied on the goodwill of the users to buy the official product, rather than creating bootable ISOs. But Darren never offered them before his falling out with Theo, and starting to do so now really doesn't show him in the best light... At one point, I considered making bootable CDs myself, but decided that it wouldn't be in the best interests of the OpenBSD project (and hence, indirectly, myself) to do so.
Nope, I don't get what you're trying to say here. The question was about which non-MP3 codecs we used. In that context, it's as easy to get ogg (with oggenc) as it is to get MP3 (with lame, bladeenc, etc.). If you're talking about downloading music you don't own, rather than encoding it yourself, then does it matter? You have players for MP3 anyway. As for your argument about your CD player supporting MP3 but not ogg, well I've taken a stand on that one, and chosen not to buy a portable player that doesn't do ogg. Until I find one that does, I'll stick with minidisc.
Equally, the GLLUG (Greater London) list has a fair amount of technical knowledge. It's frequented by both kernel and gcc/glibc hackers. Plus all the other stuff you expect from a LUG list -- clueless newbies, flamefests, etc. All the things that make life interesting :-) But overall, it's a pretty
sound group.
Precisely. NeXT chose to license Adobe's PostScript RIP, rather than reimplement it from scratch using the publically available specs. That's doesn't make PostScript any less open. It's a business decision. Brother apparently chose to implement it themselves, which means they don't have to pay a license fee to Adobe (but in the process, they lose the right to use the PostScript trademark). A business decision once again.
Despite what you may read anywhere else, RTFM always stood for "Read The Manual" in the past. The F was always implied, never given explicitly. It's only recently that people have started spelling it out for the hard of perceiving (or worse, trying to substitute politically correct alternatives such as "fine"). Sigh. Such is the price of progress :-(
Fortunately, this is no longer necessary. Oracle eventually saw the light, and you can now look this up directly without having to resort to the web, or wonder who last took the dead tree manual from the shelf and didn't replace it. You can get this info you're looking for with:
Yes, to an extent, that's true, but it's certainly an exageration to say that their complete works will be reprinted (I should know, I have a complete Heinlein collection, and a large percentage of it wasn't reprinted after his death). Same for Asimov, but then with over 400 books published, reprinting the whole lot was probably never going to happen anyway. But I guess at least the more important books will become available again, which should give younger readers a taster, and hopefully will trigger a few to go and hunt out the more obscure titles in second hand bookstores and the like.
Yes, and that's a major problem. Today's SF readers often aren't given the opportunity to find the classic works in the genre. When was the last time you saw a Van Vogt book for sale, for example? Or anything by Alfred Bester? E.E. Doc Smith? Jack Vance? Even specialist bookshops like New Worlds in Charing Cross Road have very little of the classic works. Even the major names (Asmiov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc.) only have a few titles available in the major stores. Yes, the world moves on, and shelf space needs to be given to new authors, but I think the balance has gone too far, and we need to remember our roots. But what would I know? I'm interested in the genre, not in maximising profits for the large bookstore chains...
Agree wholeheartedly. Having received "Across Realtime" for xmas, I've just finished "The Peace War", and am currently half way through "Marooned In Realtime". The Peace War, in particular, is an outstanding work. Recommended to all. It's the first Vinge I've read, and on the basis of what I've found, I'll definitely be getting more...
Every single one of the production systems for which I'm responsible (currently Linux/x86, Linux/SPARC, Solaris/SPARC, Tru64, AIX and OpenBSD). If you'd read my original message, you'd see that the lack of a C compiler was through choice, not lack of availability.
couldn't/wouldn't because no precompiled PPC packages existed or were only from sources I had no reason to trust.
That problem wouldn't be solved by a package management system that compiled from source. A source package from an untrusted location is just as bad as a precompiled binary from the same location.
Bah! Why is it that no one suggesting these sorts of things has any operational experience? The chances are that the machine on which you're installing the package doesn't have a C compiler, which tends to make your plans to build from source a little unworkable. The usual answer is people telling me that gcc is available for pretty much every system these days, and that I should just install that. No one seems to have the concept of installing the minimum necessary to get the job done any more, something that's particularly important on public facing (and hence higher security risk) boxen. Sigh.
Better is a matter of opinion, and people who claim that usually do so out of ignornance of X. You're unlikely to find a better windowing system than X any time soon. Sure, it has some problems in current implementations, but those are being fixed with time (alpha blending, antialiased fonts, etc.). X is so much more than people think, and still has a long way to go. If people put in the effort to get it to where it was always intended to be, it'll be untouchable. The ability for an application to specify an editor widget, for example, but leave the implementation as user-configurable. Sure, most people will just stick with the standard text box, but others can replace it with a vi or a jed or even emacs-alike widget. For *all* applications, not needing to be configured on a per-app basis. Those interested may find Alan Cox's comments from his April 7th diary entry enlightening.
That's not quite true. I've spoken to people inside Sun who say they've been running Solaris 9 on Intel, so it does exist. They're just choosing not to release it yet. Note that the article even mentions that they're not ruling out releasing an Intel version in the future.
That still falls into the trap of assuming that people wanting to do DNS queries are:
- DNS administrators
- Using BIND syntax
Fortunately, most Linux versions of host are compiled to provide more human readable output:Everything is relative. Compare the output of "nslookup slashdot.org" and "dig slashdot.org"...
It's a sad comment that even at Be, Inc., they only had 20 BeBoxen left to auction off. I used to lust after those things. I wish they'd taken off. If I was in the US, I'd seriously consider trying to snap one up at the auction.
No, dig is an apalling tool. While it may well be far more powerful than nslookup, the interface it presents to the end user is awful. It highlights perfectly everything that is wrong with letting the average geek design a user interface. Remember, it's not just DNS administrators that want to do DNS queries. Plus, of course, not all the world uses BIND any more. Naturally, I firmly believe that I'm the exception -- a geek that can design a user interface for the rest of the world. Perhaps that's the problem, though, and we're all naïve (or is that arrogant?) enough to overestimate our abilities, and believe we can accurately guage (and allow for) the stupidity of the average end user. But for now, I'll continue living in my sheltered world, believing myself superior. I prefer it that way :-)
Personally speaking, yes, if that's what it takes to do the books justice. Perhaps Glorfindel doesn't add anything much to the story, but why arbitrarily replace the character? What does that add to the story? I appreciate that the film I want to see would be too long to make economic sense, but I feel it would be a better result. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a great film -- I just think it could have been better. The reforging of Narsil, for example, is an important part of the story, yet was barely mentioned in the film at all. Perhaps it'll show up in the DVD. We can only hope. The thing is, the books were such an important part of my childhood that to arbitrarily change them will never do them justice in my eyes. The bits that were kept faithful to the books were stunning. It just grates that he didn't do that all the way through.
VxFS does for a start. My first point of call would be to check whether the freevfxs filesystem in linux supports the point in time copies of the real thing. Or wait for Veritas's official release (which is purely a marketing issue -- it's been running on Linux for a long time inside Veritas). Other than that, maybe check if XFS or JFS support similar features.
Care to expand on how PDF isn't an open format? It's fully documented by Adobe in the book "PDF Reference" (ISBN: 0201615886 for the current 1.3 version, or 0201758393 for the soon to be released 1.4 version). It's also available online in various places, for example, http://wotsit.org. Furthermore, several independent implementations of PDF encoders and viewers exist, such as xpdf and ghostscript. Yes, many PDFs include LZW compressed data, but that's a problem with Unisys, not Adobe, and there are non-patent-infringing ways of uncompressing the data anyway. Plus, modern PDFs are compressed with the patent-free deflate algorithm. So exactly how more open do you want PDF to be?
Agreed. The limited gamut of a CRT or LCD compared to the press guarantees that if nothing else. However, it makes sense to use colour matching where possible to achieve as close an approximation as possible. The only question then becomes how much do you spend, and how close an approximation do you want? The closer the approximation, the more it'll cost (rising almost exponentially :-)
Actually, that's not true. Commodity PC hardware can't do what a DG NUMA box, or a Tandem or Stratus box could do, either from a technical competence or a performance point of view. But it can do a close enough approximation that most people don't care. No, the PC hardware won't give you five nines reliability. Nor will it allow you to have a single system image across 64 or more CPUs. But most people are prepared to tolerate an occasional reboot, and a loss of performance to save themselves a bucket load of cash. And that's the problem. Why spend big bucks, when you can get 90% of what you want for a couple of grand? Sure, as a techie, I'd love to have a DG AV35000 to play with, but realistically, unless I'm running insane amounts of Oracle, I don't need it. I can get the job done with a high end PC. Not as quickly, sure, but quickly enough to satisfy my business requirements.
Ahem. I think you mean John Ronald Ruel Tolkein.
We used to do it on the Beeb by poring over hex dumps, looking for the magic sequences of 6502 assembler (the novelty quickly wore off, and we wrote a program to do the search for us shortly afterwards :-) Ahhhh, wonderful memories. The BBC Micro was
an amazing hackers machine. Much more so than the
Spectrum or C64, by virtue of the fact that it
had in inbuilt assembler/disassembler and hex
dump. As for sleeping with despectacled geeks,
I sadly conformed to the stereotypes, and wasn't
much interested in that sort of thing at the
time. Of course,
things have changed somewhat since then :-)