It would take more than an addition to 4.0 to support that, it would take a pretty fundamental change in X-Windows itself.
X fonts are returned to the server from the font server as monochrome pixmaps. Font servers expect to send that, x servers expect to get that, and the client programs all expect that. You'd need to extend the X protocol to support grayscale pixmaps for the fonts, recode the font server to be able to send them, and the clients to be able to understand them.
IMHO, I don't see it happening. Some client programs where it would be useful could be extended to do it the way Gimp does it (request the font at a size a few multiples bigger than needed, and resize it down on the fly), but it would be application specific, and I can't see very many applications needing it.
I thought for a while about poking around in Mozilla and trying to add the ability to do that in there, but since I decided to do it, I haven't managed to get a single copy of Mozilla to run on either of my decent Linux development systems...
I think Mozilla is a place it'd be nice to see that support.
I'm not exactly sure why your post ended up moderated so high, most of the points you made were addressed in the article.
Nowhere did it say it flys 6 feet off the ground. The intitial test flight is 6 feet off the ground.
If the device leaves the ground, its not a car. Hovercraft are not cars and can not be brought on or over public streets under their own power.
Its definately an aircraft. In fact, the article specifically says its an aircraft, and when its available, anyone with a pilots license could fly it.
On the fuel economy standpoint, aircraft are always rated in gallons per hour. A small aircraft like a single engine Cessna runs 8-10 gallons per hour. This thing has four engines, so 24 gallons an hour isn't bad and is what any pilot used to flying multiengine aircraft would be used to.
So there's a perfectly good definition of what the vehicle is, and that's pretty damn good fuel milage for an aircraft of its type, probably too good.
I first saw this aircraft probably six or seven years ago on TV. This company has been claiming this was right around the corner for a decade now. I don't believe they'll ever sell any, except perhaps a few one-off X-class planes (I doubt they'll get FAA certification on the design, its very expensive...) and I don't believe there is a big enough market to mass produce a new multiengine aircraft enough to get the price as low as they claim.
Virtually all of those will hard power off even if the system is hung if you hold the power switch down for five seconds...
Sometimes they don't make that clear in the manual though. Its a problem if you have Linux on them and don't know that, and don't compile the kernel to shut the system off on halt.
This might be related to the Linux "use" at Lucas Digital that caused some discussion last week. Then again it might not and it just made me think of it.
If I had a rack of Linux servers with ATX supplies (which, coincidentally, I do), and wanted to make sure they came back on when power was lost (doh, didn't think of that, what are you running a server without a UPS for anyway???), then I might use a spare 386 or 486 I've got kicking around to do it.
Its a piece of cake to wire a relay to a parallel port, there's schematics all over the place on the net to do it. Trim the power supply's "on" pins, wire them to the relay, and you could easy control the power of 8 systems from the parallel port with maybe $40 worth of hardware. Its not exactly what the question was asking, but it might be useful. Maybe Slashdot needs something like this for when the machine misbehaves.;)
Also useful in case of an errant init 0 instead of init 6...
Alternately, I think those Matrix Orbital displays with the keypad interface also have eight digital outputs on them, you could wire one of those to a serial port, and trigger the relays with those outputs. Running some monitoring software to put the status of the machines on the LCD, you've got a nifty monitoring/control system.
Its a good idea. Too bad the current tree has been pretty well horked for the last day or two, and like a bonehead I forgot to check the tinderbox status before I pulled it.
On another note though, for those who don't watch the mozilla status daily, M6 is probably going to hit the ftp site tommorrow they're saying...
Its already been pulled into a new branch, and I think the general trouble (particularly with Linux builds) in the tree are on the main branch leading to M7.
Hmmmm... maybe I'll pull the M6 branch and check this out.:)
The final print of the movie was spit out of a computer. Not "several scenes" were rendered by a computer on film. Every frame of the movie was.
That's not that unusual, by the way. Avid systems and the like have been used pleanty of times for all-digital film editing. Once the images are in the computer, the output quality doesn't depend on whether or not any actual effects were layed into the film -- there was probably a bit of color correction done, and stuff like that.
This is all the way movies are going to be made in the future. Its easier, and getting to be cheaper to do shooting, and editing in digital, and will soon be the preferred method of presentation too.
It'll be a godsend for future film students too -- when the camera prices drop enough that digital film cameras are the standard fare at school instead of 16mm Bolex or other type cameras, it'll sure save a lot of $$$.
I probably dropped $500 a semester or more on film when I was in school. And that doesn't by that much film.:)
Launching a satellite is pretty far fetched -- he'd need to buy a piece of the radio spectrum he could use, and it'd have to be a fairly high power transmission, all things that are very unlikely to be allowed. Low power (DSS-like) transmissions are too prone to signal fade during rain and things like that -- and no theater owner in their right mind would risk being unable to show a film during a rainy day (when it seems to me to be the best time to see them!)
There are in fact several theaters showing it. It had been talked about for the last year or so leading up to the release, and in my understanding (which is just from industry rags I've read), its only two or three theaters showing it, and its very limited showings (ie, not around the clock)
The resolution used isn't terribly high, less than HDTV resolution, but higher than DVD. (1280x768 sticks out in my head, but that might not be right..., but its not even 1080i HDTV resolution)
The explanation was that with the sharper focus, brighter image (no shutter used), and lack of garbage on the film, viewers wouldn't know the difference. I'm not sure they're projecting it onto a very big screen though -- that resolution seems low for 500 person megatheaters and the like.
LucasFilm's intent over the last half-dozen years since I first read about some of the talk about the prequels, was Episode I would be shot on film, with test digital distributions. I *think* I remember reading that those test distributions are on custom hardware, basically on a high-rate DVD -- twenty to thirty minutes worth, much like a film reel -- although that may have changed, because I've seen gossip about the satellite stuff. I've lost the list I had of the theaters that were showing the digital Episode I, unfortunately.
Episodes II and III are supposed to be shot digitally, without using film. Aparently Lucasfilm has been spending a lot of time developing digital film cameras that can push data off the camera and onto a high-speed storage system fast enough to do film quality recording without using film. 24fps is obviously the low end, I'm not sure how much bandwidth they ended up with for running at higher frame rates.
Some of the reasons I'd read for the move was a significant drop in cost over time (a lot of arthouse films are being shot on mini-DV and other digital formats like Digital BetaMax, because $30 for a tape sure beats $100 for three minutes of film...) The most interesting feature I read about was the ability to prerender the effects and do the compositing in realtime at the camera -- so the monitors show the finished shot, and alignment issues and problems with actors not fully interacting with effects can be taken care of immediately. Also read rumors of experiments to do real time digital character rendering, so an actor in a motion-recording outfit can be in front of the camera, and the camera would end up recording the CGI character in real time.
Anyway, I digress. Episodes II and III are supposed to go out for larger digital releases, with more of a push for them to be digital on III than II. That's why there's been talk about big theater chains arranging financing so they can do low-rate financing for their member theaters to be able to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars it will take to put digital systems in megaplexes.
It'll be interesting to see if theaters end up using a direct broadcast method of displaying movies as they shift to digital, or if they go with a multi-disc optical solution like a high bitrate DVD-based format. Personally I'd think DVD would be the way to go. They're cheap to produce, even as one-offs. There's no reason you could build military-grade decryption hardware into the playback units and key the distribution discs to that particular unit and theater. Steal the discs, its not of any use if you don't steal the reader. If the reader has to verify keys against the distributors system, then even stealing the unit won't help.
Satellite seems unlikely because of all the differing times a show can play, and the expense of the satellite time.
I had this problem at home, where my masquerading/firewall system also runs a 750 meg Squid proxy to keep my poor 56k modem from getting too bogged down when I'm using a bunch of computers at once.
You just need to turn on or get someone to turn on port 81 as a valid proxy port. My assumption is you're running through a firewall, and there's a proxy that handles getting the data through it. That proxy probably has the common ones (80, 443, 8080) as acceptable ports. Using 81 is sort of wierd, but thats how to fix it.
Right click on the image, and say View Image (figuring you're in Netscape) -- you'll be able to see what the error message is. If you get an error page, you're probably hitting a proxy that needs to be fixed. If you don't connect -- ie, eventually you get a can't connect error -- then its probably a firewall.
As of last friday, I noticed that posts starting at higher than one was still happening. Not sure if that being turned off is part of the changes that just happened, but Friday it definately did post comments at higher than 1.
I think it makes sense in some circumstances to do that -- especially in lengthy discussions, where people who typically consistantly make good comments might jump in late in the discussion, and end up far enough down the list where a moderator won't run across it.
Someone who consistantly ends up with their posts moderated up to 2, 3 or higher probably should start at 2. I'd be more interested in reading those comments right away.
Personally, I don't like this new categorization of moderator points though... what happens when one person promotes it for being insightful, and another for something else? Or do these just represent the old -1 to 5 scale? If so, I don't think its intuitive that "Informative" is more significant than "Insightful" -- since in most discussions, I'm more interested in insightful comments than simply informative ones.
If they DO still represent numbers, then I think the numbers should show up with them. If they don't, I think some clarification of what happens when more than one moderator moderates a comment with differing reasons.
I think its actually generally easier installing a new version of Linux than upgrading to a newer distribution version. I've had bad luck upgrading from one RedHat version to another, mostly because of a single features that is lacking (or was as of 5.2) -- the ability to tell the installer to upgrade anything thats installed, and not do anything else, without having to know whats installed. It should be easy enough to let it do that, but it isn't intuitive if it does.
Sometimes is good to start clean, though.:)
And its nice that I can reinstall a full gig+ linux system in a half hour.
The install experience I described before was NOTHING like my attempt to upgrade Windows 95 to 98 on this machine. I won't even try to describe that one, for fear of the government cracking down on obscene content on Slashdot.;)
Ironically with Windows, I've had better luck running Windows 98 on this computer (AMD K6-2-3D, VIA Apollo MVP chipset, 64 meg ram, UDMA drives, ATI Rage Pro adapter) under VMWare's machine than by itself. Good to know Linux can run Windows better than it can run itself!
Windows 98 still crashes anytime I use OpenGL applications. Which means no Quake3 Test.
1) Put CD in drive, turn on machine. 2) Keep accepting defaults
Voila! Done.
Same machine, Windows 98:
1) Put cd in drive, boot machine. 2) Voila! Linux
Wait... no Windows installer? NO! Windows 98's install CD isn't bootable.
3) Search for the box Win98 came in for an hour. 4) Stop searching, start searching for a DOS boot disc 5) Disc boots, no CD-Rom driver. 6) Search for a half hour for the cd-rom drivers 7) Hack up a new boot disc 8) Reboot 9) Oops, there goes Linux, too bad it didn't even ask if I wanted to partition the drives. 10) Let it chunk away for an half hour 11) Hard lock? Dammit! 12) Reboot 13) Perform step 10 again 14) Reboot 15) Nope, still not done installing. 16) What do you mean, unknown ethernet card? 17) What do you mean no drivers for the sound card? 18) Why the FSCK am I only getting 256 colors? 19) Search for the G200 driver CD 20) Install video drivers 21) What? Why the HELL isn't the ethernet working any more? 22) Oh yeah, never was. Search for ethernet drivers again. 23) Oops, not online. Go use a linux system to search for drivers. 24) Woohoo, ethernet, lets install Quake3 25) Dammit to hell, never found sound drivers 26) Search net for an hour for sound drivers 27) Give up for a few days 28) Found drivers, install them 29) System's working, three days later. Except now I've got to install software. Lets hope the newer Microsoft applications don't remove any DLLs that are going to keep other stuff from working...
I'd say we should start a team whose purpose is to demonstrate the inability for Microsoft products to be used for reliable enterprise applications, but they keep beating us to it.
First there was the Windows development team. Then there was the OS/2 development team. Hmmm... and the NT development team. Um... the Bob development team. Um... Windows 9x development team. Windows 2000... Hmmm... Internet Explorer SQL Server development team... Backoffice (if there is such a development team)
And I've got a box of dead Microsoft mice too...
This isn't worrisome, because for every person they've got fighting Linux, they've to 2,000 or more developers working to release products that demonstrate its better!
There are probably fifty things in an average house that are as equally capable of killing someone if ingested. Just don't inhale it, or eat it. They were converting some portion of another material into uranium and plutonium. I'm no nuclear engineer, but I know the reaction has to do with slow moving neutrons, and they've got to pass through a certain amount of material before they lose enough energy to get trapped in the nucleus and change the material. Any faster and they'll fission the nucleas.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong you nuclear engineer types...)
Thus the production was probably theoretical, and not actually tested for (although if theory says its there, you're pretty safe in assuming it is there). With the plutonium confined to the interior of the sample, you're not going to ingest it.
I also don't think its quite as dangerous as tree-huggers typically make it out to be. The warning on the Lysol toilet mint I put in my john the other day was a lot scarier!
Where do you see mention of GL support with the Voodoo3? The information on that site explicitly says X is supported with a beta server, but there is no 3-D support.
Although this does seem to be the most promising possibility...
I've got three PCs running AGP cards just fine. AFAIK, AGP looks the same as PCI to Linux, only faster.
Regardless, I've got one system with a Matrix Millenium G200 AGP running Linux, one with an ATI Mach 64 Rage AGP and my home system thats got an ATI Rage Pro.
I blew most of my morning getting the tatterd remains of a rarely-used Windows98 partition working again, just so I could play the Quake3 Test since there's such lousy 3-D support among hardware vendors under Linux.
Does anyone know if there are any AGP video cards that have accelerated X-windows support and OpenGL support under Linux? It seems the Voodoo3 boards don't, and I'll be damned if I can find anyone who makes all-in-one Voodoo 2 cards that are confirmed to work under Linux.
(I can say though, that I DO miss playing those quake-type games sometimes...);)
Rob, how can it not be what you expected? According to this you're on the board of directors for the site? Hadn't heard that.
Anyway, I hope they keep up a good archive of projects being worked on. Thats the thing I miss the most about linux.com -- these days I can never find various projects when I want to. freshmeat.net and the (almost as useful) linuxapps.com are good, but have a lot of fluff in them, and aren't really project-based.
GNU/Solaris? GNU/Windows?
on
GNU Inside?
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I've replaced the corresponding binaries on many/most of the Solaris systems I've administrated with the FSF versions... I run Win32 ports of most of them under Windows when I have the misfortune of having to use it.
Not once when someone asked me what platform I was running did I say, oh I've got a GNU/Windows desktop machine and my server is an UltraSparc2 running GNU/Solaris.
This whole argument is completely rediculous, and about RMS being unhappy that when "Open Source" hit it big, it wasn't because of the Hurd project.
I wonder if RedHat or one of the other companies compiled their distribution using another compiler, like Metrowork's upcoming CodeWarrior compiler, would he still object to just calling it Linux?
Is he upset about the fact that 1/10th of an average distribution is FSF code? Is he upset that all of it is compiled with his utilities? Should Quake have been called GNU/Quake, being compiled with DJGPP? He's bitching a lot about this and not really being all that clear why and what he really wants.
It seems unreasonable to even ASK that Linux be called GNU/Linux if its based on the fact that FSF tools are being used to build the software, since, as I said, he didn't gripe about Quake, or any of the other programs using them.
If its the fact that FSF code makes up some small but significant portion of an average Linux distribution, I'd think calling it XFree86/Linux makes more sense. I've got more X crap on here than FSF. Hell, I've got more Mozilla stuff on here than FSF.
I think you're right. I thought so the first time "freemware" was announced.
I doubt it'll get anywhere. I mean look at Bochs... an interesting concept, but one thousands of CS students have done. Lots of people have written emulators for a lot of different platforms. Hacking away in their dorm room, there's probably a lot who threw in ways to dynamically convert the code to native code.
Bochs isn't technically anything more impressive than the Mac emulators, Amiga emulators, and so on all the way back to PDP-11 emulators and (my favorite) Atari 8-bit emulators. And its a whole lot less useful.
I think you're exactly right about the motivations of the project precisely because of how completely different the two projects actually are.
I think the other posts saying this project is damaging to VMware are correct in its intent, but not in its reality. This is vaporware, nothing more. Patents aside, whats the odds that this'll turn into a useful program that can actually compete with VMware? Slim. Probably wouldn't be too far off saying none.
And at a (completely reasonable) $99 cost, why bother?
There's actually a bunch of PCs that already do that. (The sharing video ram with the system.)
Most of HP's low end consumer machines do that.
Computers with a better unified memory architecture are going to probably be the next big change in PCs. At some point legacy busses, and separate busses for video (AGP) and peripherals (PCI) are going to have to go away.
SGI's got the right idea with the way the O2's are put together, and the NUMA architecture used in the O200's and up.
I hope we see from SGI a series of Intel based machines, moving further away from the 20-year-old PC architecture. The need for legacy support is dropping drastically these days, not to mention a product like VMWare can do a significant job of hiding the non-standard hardware from legacy applications.
The visual workstations are a good first step.
Of course SGI beat Apple to making trendy looking computers by ten years too.
On a side note, did anyone else see the story on here a half hour ago about the glowing mice? Where'd it go?
I bought a Slashdot mug from them and was *very* disappointed with the quality. Its looks like just a sticker stuck to the mug, and the image on the sticker is extremely blurry.
I wouldn't waste the $$$. If you've got a burning desire for a custom mug, a lot of photo stores can have them made and the quality is a lot better.
I seem to recall reading last year that the visual range the scanners use is not the human-visible range, which is what miniaturized monitors display in.
I think they're into the near infared, so that the image remains contrasty with people whose eye color changes, etc...
Either way, I'd guess if you had a way to get a hires animated image of someone's eye, and fool the machine (which has to be looking for other facial items to even locate the eye -- you don't stick them in front of the camera with these), you're probably clever enough to steal the money from the bank in less easily-catchable ways than stealing from an ATM.
You do know that ATM machines photograph every transaction right? You're gonna look pretty silly holding the display over one of your eyes and hoping it'll work.
Slashdot Mirror
It would take more than an addition to 4.0 to support that, it would take a pretty fundamental change in X-Windows itself.
X fonts are returned to the server from the font server as monochrome pixmaps. Font servers expect to send that, x servers expect to get that, and the client programs all expect that. You'd need to extend the X protocol to support grayscale pixmaps for the fonts, recode the font server to be able to send them, and the clients to be able to understand them.
IMHO, I don't see it happening. Some client programs where it would be useful could be extended to do it the way Gimp does it (request the font at a size a few multiples bigger than needed, and resize it down on the fly), but it would be application specific, and I can't see very many applications needing it.
I thought for a while about poking around in Mozilla and trying to add the ability to do that in there, but since I decided to do it, I haven't managed to get a single copy of Mozilla to run on either of my decent Linux development systems...
I think Mozilla is a place it'd be nice to see that support.
I'm not exactly sure why your post ended up moderated so high, most of the points you made were addressed in the article.
Nowhere did it say it flys 6 feet off the ground. The intitial test flight is 6 feet off the ground.
If the device leaves the ground, its not a car. Hovercraft are not cars and can not be brought on or over public streets under their own power.
Its definately an aircraft. In fact, the article specifically says its an aircraft, and when its available, anyone with a pilots license could fly it.
On the fuel economy standpoint, aircraft are always rated in gallons per hour. A small aircraft like a single engine Cessna runs 8-10 gallons per hour. This thing has four engines, so 24 gallons an hour isn't bad and is what any pilot used to flying multiengine aircraft would be used to.
So there's a perfectly good definition of what the vehicle is, and that's pretty damn good fuel milage for an aircraft of its type, probably too good.
I first saw this aircraft probably six or seven years ago on TV. This company has been claiming this was right around the corner for a decade now. I don't believe they'll ever sell any, except perhaps a few one-off X-class planes (I doubt they'll get FAA certification on the design, its very expensive...) and I don't believe there is a big enough market to mass produce a new multiengine aircraft enough to get the price as low as they claim.
Virtually all of those will hard power off even if the system is hung if you hold the power switch down for five seconds...
Sometimes they don't make that clear in the manual though. Its a problem if you have Linux on them and don't know that, and don't compile the kernel to shut the system off on halt.
This might be related to the Linux "use" at Lucas Digital that caused some discussion last week. Then again it might not and it just made me think of it.
;)
If I had a rack of Linux servers with ATX supplies (which, coincidentally, I do), and wanted to make sure they came back on when power was lost (doh, didn't think of that, what are you running a server without a UPS for anyway???), then I might use a spare 386 or 486 I've got kicking around to do it.
Its a piece of cake to wire a relay to a parallel port, there's schematics all over the place on the net to do it. Trim the power supply's "on" pins, wire them to the relay, and you could easy control the power of 8 systems from the parallel port with maybe $40 worth of hardware. Its not exactly what the question was asking, but it might be useful. Maybe Slashdot needs something like this for when the machine misbehaves.
Also useful in case of an errant init 0 instead of init 6...
Alternately, I think those Matrix Orbital displays with the keypad interface also have eight digital outputs on them, you could wire one of those to a serial port, and trigger the relays with those outputs. Running some monitoring software to put the status of the machines on the LCD, you've got a nifty monitoring/control system.
Its a good idea. Too bad the current tree has been pretty well horked for the last day or two, and like a bonehead I forgot to check the tinderbox status before I pulled it.
:)
On another note though, for those who don't watch the mozilla status daily, M6 is probably going to hit the ftp site tommorrow they're saying...
Its already been pulled into a new branch, and I think the general trouble (particularly with Linux builds) in the tree are on the main branch leading to M7.
Hmmmm... maybe I'll pull the M6 branch and check this out.
The final print of the movie was spit out of a computer. Not "several scenes" were rendered by a computer on film. Every frame of the movie was.
:)
That's not that unusual, by the way. Avid systems and the like have been used pleanty of times for all-digital film editing. Once the images are in the computer, the output quality doesn't depend on whether or not any actual effects were layed into the film -- there was probably a bit of color correction done, and stuff like that.
This is all the way movies are going to be made in the future. Its easier, and getting to be cheaper to do shooting, and editing in digital, and will soon be the preferred method of presentation too.
It'll be a godsend for future film students too -- when the camera prices drop enough that digital film cameras are the standard fare at school instead of 16mm Bolex or other type cameras, it'll sure save a lot of $$$.
I probably dropped $500 a semester or more on film when I was in school. And that doesn't by that much film.
Launching a satellite is pretty far fetched -- he'd need to buy a piece of the radio spectrum he could use, and it'd have to be a fairly high power transmission, all things that are very unlikely to be allowed. Low power (DSS-like) transmissions are too prone to signal fade during rain and things like that -- and no theater owner in their right mind would risk being unable to show a film during a rainy day (when it seems to me to be the best time to see them!)
There are in fact several theaters showing it. It had been talked about for the last year or so leading up to the release, and in my understanding (which is just from industry rags I've read), its only two or three theaters showing it, and its very limited showings (ie, not around the clock)
The resolution used isn't terribly high, less than HDTV resolution, but higher than DVD. (1280x768 sticks out in my head, but that might not be right..., but its not even 1080i HDTV resolution)
The explanation was that with the sharper focus, brighter image (no shutter used), and lack of garbage on the film, viewers wouldn't know the difference. I'm not sure they're projecting it onto a very big screen though -- that resolution seems low for 500 person megatheaters and the like.
LucasFilm's intent over the last half-dozen years since I first read about some of the talk about the prequels, was Episode I would be shot on film, with test digital distributions. I *think* I remember reading that those test distributions are on custom hardware, basically on a high-rate DVD -- twenty to thirty minutes worth, much like a film reel -- although that may have changed, because I've seen gossip about the satellite stuff. I've lost the list I had of the theaters that were showing the digital Episode I, unfortunately.
Episodes II and III are supposed to be shot digitally, without using film. Aparently Lucasfilm has been spending a lot of time developing digital film cameras that can push data off the camera and onto a high-speed storage system fast enough to do film quality recording without using film. 24fps is obviously the low end, I'm not sure how much bandwidth they ended up with for running at higher frame rates.
Some of the reasons I'd read for the move was a significant drop in cost over time (a lot of arthouse films are being shot on mini-DV and other digital formats like Digital BetaMax, because $30 for a tape sure beats $100 for three minutes of film...) The most interesting feature I read about was the ability to prerender the effects and do the compositing in realtime at the camera -- so the monitors show the finished shot, and alignment issues and problems with actors not fully interacting with effects can be taken care of immediately. Also read rumors of experiments to do real time digital character rendering, so an actor in a motion-recording outfit can be in front of the camera, and the camera would end up recording the CGI character in real time.
Anyway, I digress. Episodes II and III are supposed to go out for larger digital releases, with more of a push for them to be digital on III than II. That's why there's been talk about big theater chains arranging financing so they can do low-rate financing for their member theaters to be able to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars it will take to put digital systems in megaplexes.
It'll be interesting to see if theaters end up using a direct broadcast method of displaying movies as they shift to digital, or if they go with a multi-disc optical solution like a high bitrate DVD-based format. Personally I'd think DVD would be the way to go. They're cheap to produce, even as one-offs. There's no reason you could build military-grade decryption hardware into the playback units and key the distribution discs to that particular unit and theater. Steal the discs, its not of any use if you don't steal the reader. If the reader has to verify keys against the distributors system, then even stealing the unit won't help.
Satellite seems unlikely because of all the differing times a show can play, and the expense of the satellite time.
I had this problem at home, where my masquerading/firewall system also runs a 750 meg Squid proxy to keep my poor 56k modem from getting too bogged down when I'm using a bunch of computers at once.
You just need to turn on or get someone to turn on port 81 as a valid proxy port. My assumption is you're running through a firewall, and there's a proxy that handles getting the data through it. That proxy probably has the common ones (80, 443, 8080) as acceptable ports. Using 81 is sort of wierd, but thats how to fix it.
Right click on the image, and say View Image (figuring you're in Netscape) -- you'll be able to see what the error message is. If you get an error page, you're probably hitting a proxy that needs to be fixed. If you don't connect -- ie, eventually you get a can't connect error -- then its probably a firewall.
As of last friday, I noticed that posts starting at higher than one was still happening. Not sure if that being turned off is part of the changes that just happened, but Friday it definately did post comments at higher than 1.
I think it makes sense in some circumstances to do that -- especially in lengthy discussions, where people who typically consistantly make good comments might jump in late in the discussion, and end up far enough down the list where a moderator won't run across it.
Someone who consistantly ends up with their posts moderated up to 2, 3 or higher probably should start at 2. I'd be more interested in reading those comments right away.
Personally, I don't like this new categorization of moderator points though... what happens when one person promotes it for being insightful, and another for something else? Or do these just represent the old -1 to 5 scale? If so, I don't think its intuitive that "Informative" is more significant than "Insightful" -- since in most discussions, I'm more interested in insightful comments than simply informative ones.
If they DO still represent numbers, then I think the numbers should show up with them. If they don't, I think some clarification of what happens when more than one moderator moderates a comment with differing reasons.
I think its actually generally easier installing a new version of Linux than upgrading to a newer distribution version. I've had bad luck upgrading from one RedHat version to another, mostly because of a single features that is lacking (or was as of 5.2) -- the ability to tell the installer to upgrade anything thats installed, and not do anything else, without having to know whats installed. It should be easy enough to let it do that, but it isn't intuitive if it does.
:)
;)
Sometimes is good to start clean, though.
And its nice that I can reinstall a full gig+ linux system in a half hour.
The install experience I described before was NOTHING like my attempt to upgrade Windows 95 to 98 on this machine. I won't even try to describe that one, for fear of the government cracking down on obscene content on Slashdot.
Ironically with Windows, I've had better luck running Windows 98 on this computer (AMD K6-2-3D, VIA Apollo MVP chipset, 64 meg ram, UDMA drives, ATI Rage Pro adapter) under VMWare's machine than by itself. Good to know Linux can run Windows better than it can run itself!
Windows 98 still crashes anytime I use OpenGL applications. Which means no Quake3 Test.
Easier? Hardly.
On two machines at work, I install linux:
1) Put CD in drive, turn on machine.
2) Keep accepting defaults
Voila! Done.
Same machine, Windows 98:
1) Put cd in drive, boot machine.
2) Voila! Linux
Wait... no Windows installer? NO! Windows 98's install CD isn't bootable.
3) Search for the box Win98 came in for an hour.
4) Stop searching, start searching for a DOS boot disc
5) Disc boots, no CD-Rom driver.
6) Search for a half hour for the cd-rom drivers
7) Hack up a new boot disc
8) Reboot
9) Oops, there goes Linux, too bad it didn't even ask if I wanted to partition the drives.
10) Let it chunk away for an half hour
11) Hard lock? Dammit!
12) Reboot
13) Perform step 10 again
14) Reboot
15) Nope, still not done installing.
16) What do you mean, unknown ethernet card?
17) What do you mean no drivers for the sound card?
18) Why the FSCK am I only getting 256 colors?
19) Search for the G200 driver CD
20) Install video drivers
21) What? Why the HELL isn't the ethernet working any more?
22) Oh yeah, never was. Search for ethernet drivers again.
23) Oops, not online. Go use a linux system to search for drivers.
24) Woohoo, ethernet, lets install Quake3
25) Dammit to hell, never found sound drivers
26) Search net for an hour for sound drivers
27) Give up for a few days
28) Found drivers, install them
29) System's working, three days later. Except now I've got to install software. Lets hope the newer Microsoft applications don't remove any DLLs that are going to keep other stuff from working...
That's easier?
I'd say we should start a team whose purpose is to demonstrate the inability for Microsoft products to be used for reliable enterprise applications, but they keep beating us to it.
First there was the Windows development team.
Then there was the OS/2 development team.
Hmmm... and the NT development team.
Um... the Bob development team.
Um... Windows 9x development team.
Windows 2000...
Hmmm... Internet Explorer
SQL Server development team...
Backoffice (if there is such a development team)
And I've got a box of dead Microsoft mice too...
This isn't worrisome, because for every person they've got fighting Linux, they've to 2,000 or more developers working to release products that demonstrate its better!
There are probably fifty things in an average house that are as equally capable of killing someone if ingested. Just don't inhale it, or eat it. They were converting some portion of another material into uranium and plutonium. I'm no nuclear engineer, but I know the reaction has to do with slow moving neutrons, and they've got to pass through a certain amount of material before they lose enough energy to get trapped in the nucleus and change the material. Any faster and they'll fission the nucleas.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong you nuclear engineer types...)
Thus the production was probably theoretical, and not actually tested for (although if theory says its there, you're pretty safe in assuming it is there). With the plutonium confined to the interior of the sample, you're not going to ingest it.
I also don't think its quite as dangerous as tree-huggers typically make it out to be. The warning on the Lysol toilet mint I put in my john the other day was a lot scarier!
And I thought hacking together DEC mainframes, or three-phase power circuits was cool.
Nuclear reactor? Why didn't I ever think of that!
Where do you see mention of GL support with the Voodoo3? The information on that site explicitly says X is supported with a beta server, but there is no 3-D support.
Although this does seem to be the most promising possibility...
I've got three PCs running AGP cards just fine. AFAIK, AGP looks the same as PCI to Linux, only faster.
Regardless, I've got one system with a Matrix Millenium G200 AGP running Linux, one with an ATI Mach 64 Rage AGP and my home system thats got an ATI Rage Pro.
All three work beautifully in X.
I blew most of my morning getting the tatterd remains of a rarely-used Windows98 partition working again, just so I could play the Quake3 Test since there's such lousy 3-D support among hardware vendors under Linux.
;)
Does anyone know if there are any AGP video cards that have accelerated X-windows support and OpenGL support under Linux? It seems the Voodoo3 boards don't, and I'll be damned if I can find anyone who makes all-in-one Voodoo 2 cards that are confirmed to work under Linux.
(I can say though, that I DO miss playing those quake-type games sometimes...)
Rob, how can it not be what you expected? According to this you're on the board of directors for the site? Hadn't heard that.
Anyway, I hope they keep up a good archive of projects being worked on. Thats the thing I miss the most about linux.com -- these days I can never find various projects when I want to. freshmeat.net and the (almost as useful) linuxapps.com are good, but have a lot of fluff in them, and aren't really project-based.
I've replaced the corresponding binaries on many/most of the Solaris systems I've administrated with the FSF versions... I run Win32 ports of most of them under Windows when I have the misfortune of having to use it.
Not once when someone asked me what platform I was running did I say, oh I've got a GNU/Windows desktop machine and my server is an UltraSparc2 running GNU/Solaris.
This whole argument is completely rediculous, and about RMS being unhappy that when "Open Source" hit it big, it wasn't because of the Hurd project.
I wonder if RedHat or one of the other companies compiled their distribution using another compiler, like Metrowork's upcoming CodeWarrior compiler, would he still object to just calling it Linux?
Is he upset about the fact that 1/10th of an average distribution is FSF code? Is he upset that all of it is compiled with his utilities? Should Quake have been called GNU/Quake, being compiled with DJGPP? He's bitching a lot about this and not really being all that clear why and what he really wants.
It seems unreasonable to even ASK that Linux be called GNU/Linux if its based on the fact that FSF tools are being used to build the software, since, as I said, he didn't gripe about Quake, or any of the other programs using them.
If its the fact that FSF code makes up some small but significant portion of an average Linux distribution, I'd think calling it XFree86/Linux makes more sense. I've got more X crap on here than FSF. Hell, I've got more Mozilla stuff on here than FSF.
I think you're right. I thought so the first time "freemware" was announced.
I doubt it'll get anywhere. I mean look at Bochs... an interesting concept, but one thousands of CS students have done. Lots of people have written emulators for a lot of different platforms. Hacking away in their dorm room, there's probably a lot who threw in ways to dynamically convert the code to native code.
Bochs isn't technically anything more impressive than the Mac emulators, Amiga emulators, and so on all the way back to PDP-11 emulators and (my favorite) Atari 8-bit emulators. And its a whole lot less useful.
I think you're exactly right about the motivations of the project precisely because of how completely different the two projects actually are.
I think the other posts saying this project is damaging to VMware are correct in its intent, but not in its reality. This is vaporware, nothing more. Patents aside, whats the odds that this'll turn into a useful program that can actually compete with VMware? Slim. Probably wouldn't be too far off saying none.
And at a (completely reasonable) $99 cost, why bother?
There's actually a bunch of PCs that already do that. (The sharing video ram with the system.)
Most of HP's low end consumer machines do that.
Computers with a better unified memory architecture are going to probably be the next big change in PCs. At some point legacy busses, and separate busses for video (AGP) and peripherals (PCI) are going to have to go away.
SGI's got the right idea with the way the O2's are put together, and the NUMA architecture used in the O200's and up.
Even an x86 version of the O2 would be cool.
I hope we see from SGI a series of Intel based machines, moving further away from the 20-year-old PC architecture. The need for legacy support is dropping drastically these days, not to mention a product like VMWare can do a significant job of hiding the non-standard hardware from legacy applications.
The visual workstations are a good first step.
Of course SGI beat Apple to making trendy looking computers by ten years too.
On a side note, did anyone else see the story on here a half hour ago about the glowing mice? Where'd it go?
I bought a Slashdot mug from them and was *very* disappointed with the quality. Its looks like just a sticker stuck to the mug, and the image on the sticker is extremely blurry.
I wouldn't waste the $$$. If you've got a burning desire for a custom mug, a lot of photo stores can have them made and the quality is a lot better.
KMFMS has some cool stuff on it. I bought the mousepad/t-shirt combo.
Any industrial geek's gotta have it!
I seem to recall reading last year that the visual range the scanners use is not the human-visible range, which is what miniaturized monitors display in.
I think they're into the near infared, so that the image remains contrasty with people whose eye color changes, etc...
Either way, I'd guess if you had a way to get a hires animated image of someone's eye, and fool the machine (which has to be looking for other facial items to even locate the eye -- you don't stick them in front of the camera with these), you're probably clever enough to steal the money from the bank in less easily-catchable ways than stealing from an ATM.
You do know that ATM machines photograph every transaction right? You're gonna look pretty silly holding the display over one of your eyes and hoping it'll work.