Re:Is there anything of use in SCO
on
Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 2
The source code would probably not be very useful. Their kernel is certainly different enough from Linux to be not useful at all, and the tools are redundant because the GNU tools do everything that the UnixWare tools can do.
One possible use for the UnixWare tools would be for compatibility, ps for example has a completely different syntax in SVR4 systems. And the sourcecode would be interresting for historical reasons..
Beside that SCO probably has lots of engineers that are very experienced with Unix and high-end features. This could be the most interresting asset of SCO for Linux.
If you are interested in old video games, you should check out the VAPS-Site. VAPS is the Video Arcade Preservation Society and tries to collect old video arcade machines, especially old and rare games.
Speaking of ASPs and the future of computing: what happened to Broadway? Broadway was XConsortium's X11R6.4 server and was intended to "web-enable" (cool buzzword) X11. It did so by including a new X protocol (LBX) with lower bandwidth requirements and adding features neccessary to run applications from untrusted sources on your X server. I think this sounds like a great and relativly simple way to provide applications over the net. The last thing I heard was that XFree 4.0 should be based on X11R6.4, but the release notes dont mention any of the broadway features, nor could I find any application for this. Info, anyone?
I always asked myself whether there is an official FSF statement about games. While relatively simple games (like GNU chess) can be written by individuals in their spare time, projects that take many man years certainly can not, and the classical revenue streams for open-source companies like selling support obviously doent work with games. So are there any FSF suggestions on how to write commercial-grade games as free software, or does the FSF tolerate at least games based on non-free art.
For corporate developers these models are more attractive than closed-source development models. Basically it means "you can fix the bugs and hope that the fix will be included in the next release". This is much better than the "if there is a bug and you pay enough money or are very lucky, it might be fixed in the next release" model of traditional closed-sourced software. Of course, OpenSource software is still better, but there isnt open-sourced software for everything, and it is much easier to convince the management to buy software from a big vendor than to use OSS and rely on a small company for support or do not have any professional support at all.
I would recommend to use Python as a first language. It is less-cryptic than most other languages (perl, Java), is multi-platform - so your kids could also program for Win - and there are libraries for almost everything. I would not recommend to use a RAD environment like Delphi or VB. Of course, a RAD tool lets them create form-based applications faster, but in the end it is more frustrating, especially as kids usually are not very interested in form-based applications... RAD only makes sense if you understand the generated code completly and write the kind of programs the RAD tool was designed for.
Will there be any stores in the future? Sooner or later someone will create a global system where you can compare prices directly, and this will ultimately force manufacturers to sell their goods directly. "Real-life" shops might have a chance to survive, because they offer an exhibition of products the make it possible to pick the product up immediately. But online, there will only be no use for shops. Competition will remove all middlemen between the customer and the manufacturer. Only those that offer extra-service, a real benefit to the customer have a chance.
The article keeps the assumption that a Linux virus must (like on Windows) infect binaries. This isnt true, it could as well copy itself into some place of the user's home directory (for example, somewhere deep in the ~/.netscape directory) and then start itself from a file like.profile,.bashrc or.xsession, assuming that the naive user will never look at them.
Affecting a binary doesnt make sense on Linux, as users almost never distribute them directly - if they distribute software, they send source-tarballs, RPMs or DEBs. And the RPMs are the real weakness: a virus could infect the RPM to spread itself. The solution for this problem would be the use of digital signatures.
>>I buy a book worth $50 from Amazon.com. I pay 25% VAT of both the book and the shipping at the time of delivery (appr. $50 + $6 + 25% = $70).
In Germany, if you order something to your home address, you usually dont have to pay VAT or any duties. I have ordered books for 100-200$ and hardware for 50$ from the US without paying anything. However, if you use a a business address as shipping address, you will always have to pay a lot (VAT, import duties, stuff like that), and this can be up to 50% (that I paid for 4 T-Shirts from copyleft).
>Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design.
Bluetooth is designed for short ranges only. The first devices will have a range of 10 meters, later they will extend the specication to up to 100m for some devices...
IMHO the main problem with streaming video in OpenSource systems for low-bandwidth are the algorithms behind them. Putting 10 frames in 6 kb (if you assume a good 56 kbit connection) every second means that you have to use only 600 bytes for each picture, minus sound and perhaps a keyframe every few seconds. Maybe I am wrong, but it sounds like a lot of research is neccessary to get a reasonable quality with these conditions. The OpenSource community is usually good at engineering but less often at inventing new things.
Are there any published algorithms that would enable us to write low-bandwidth video streaming with acceptable quality? What about universities, are there any research projects out there with usuable results?
Isn't this why we have short int, long int, and char data types - so we can tell the compiler these things?
Even if your language supports short or char arithmetics (C and Java do not, they convert everything to integers first) and would use the registers that way, this is not all you can to to optimize the code. In the texture mapping inner loops of the article is a piece of code where 2 16-bit numbers are put into a 32-bit register, and then two 32-bit registers are ADDed to save an add. In this situation overflows of the 16-bit parts are critical, but an overflow of the lower 16-bits are not as bad as an overflow of the upper 16-bits. If the lower 16-bits overflow, you will only lose the precision of the least significant bit of the upper 16-bits. So when accuracy is not so important, you can ignore the overflow of the lower 16-bits and loose 1 bit of the arithmetic precision in the upper 16 bits. Try to explain this to your compiler...
Of course, you can use assertions and similar things to tell your compiler more about your code, but then you agree that the compiler is worse than the human programmer, because it can only produce better code when the human takes a larger part of the compiler's job.
I have already heard that assumption that a compiler can generate better code than a programmer a thousand of times, but it does not get more true by repeating it - it is false. At least until compilers are able to understand the program. In every program there are things the compiler simply doesnt know. For example, in x86 assembler it is possible to save some cycles (and memory accesses) by using 16-bit or even 8-bit registers instead of 32 bit registers. You can double the number of registers by doing it. You need to be sure that the values in the registers are below 65536 or 256 to use these tricks, and the programmer can know this, but the compiler cant. The compiler might profile the possible value range if it is a really advanced compiler (I never heard of any compiler actually doing this), but it cannot be sure so it must at least check the values before for the case that they arent.
As long as the programmer has more knowledge than the compiler, he will always find tricks to save an instruction here or there and outperform the compilers this way. You can find a great example of such programming tricks in the PCGPEs article about texture mapping inner loops here.
Even if the chinese government restricts encryption, this should be one of the less important worries for the chinese peole. Check out Amnesty International's Annual Reports on China.
LinuxOne takes over the world (or at least Taiwan)
on
LinuxOne At It Again?
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· Score: 1
What I hate about patent is that they mean that you just cant do something anymore, even if you (re-)invent it yourself. The probability of reinventing is much higher with simple inventions, of course, but if somebody has never heard of Google (and can prove this) and has the same idea, he is not allowed to use it. That is not fair.
I really like FreeBSD, but I am not sure whether a Java port on FreeBSD would really make sense. My main concern is that AFAIK FreeBSD does not support (Kernel-)Threads. Or has this changed in 3.0?
I wonder why Informix is not on the list. I dont have any experience with Informix, but had problems with older Oracles (version 7.x, not on linux). Informix looks interesiting and scalability seems to be more than sufficient for this job.
Well, Essen isnt a bad place to live in (especially the south of Essen), but if you come to Germany as a tourist, you will probably find more attractions somewhere else (in Berlin, Munich or Hamburg, for example)... perhaps the most interresting thing is that Essen is not a city in the middle of nowhere, in this region are a lot of big cities next to each other. From Essen you can reach cities of comparable size (around 0.5 Mio people) like Duesseldorf, Dortmund, Bochum or Duisburg in less than 30 minutes, and there are a lot of smaller cities with 100000 inhabitants or more in the same region. But, as you said, Essen is a former industrial city, like all other in this region with the exception of Duesseldorf.
Attractions in or around Essen are:
Many awful musicals that are surprisingly popular in Germany (Starlight Express, Joseph, Les Miseres and some smaller in D'dorf)
Warner Movie World in Bottrop
Hmm, i cant remember more, this is probably not a good sign...
I have this Deja Vu, all the pictures look like those 'fractal' graphics from 80's games like Rescue on Fractalus on old Ataris or Captain Blood on Atari ST/Amigas. Looks like they re-invented them and filled them with some colors. But displaying some landscapes with simple formulars is MUCH simpler than displaying complex graphics. If they show a tree based on ther 'formulars' and in high framerate they would impress me. But not with landscapes...
I agree with LT that software prices will go down, but I cant see how software prices can fail because of a reduced number of updates. The current update system is more like renting software. When you buy Windows, for example, you update it every 2-5 years, and pay for the development by doing this. Essentially this is renting. If there wouldnt be a need for updating, MS had to demand a much larger one-time-fee, so prices would go up. The reason I can see for lower software prices is increased competition. Large cooperations are fighting for market share (see Netscape vs. IE and MS Office vs. Star Office), and increasingly Open Source software takes market share from commercial software. Someday the Open Source model will win, not only because of its lower prices, but also because it offers advantages like the possibility of custom modifications. Commercial software cannot beat this, its only chance is better marketing or throwing more programmers at a problem (resulting in products that are bloated and usually worse). In the long term this wont help, and software companies will get their revenues by support&training, doing custom modifications for customers or developing software that is so specialised that the open-source development is not economical.
Re:Hardware, politics and legal precedent...
on
MP3 CD Players?
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· Score: 1
BTW, there is a new MP3 player out by Grundig (in germany a really large electronics firm, but probably not as known outside europe). The technical data of the MPaxx is much like the first Rio (32 MB), but the nice thing is that they support Linux, officially.
Slashdot Mirror
The source code would probably not be very useful. Their kernel is certainly different enough from Linux to be not useful at all, and the tools are redundant because the GNU tools do everything that the UnixWare tools can do.
One possible use for the UnixWare tools would be for compatibility, ps for example has a completely different syntax in SVR4 systems. And the sourcecode would be interresting for historical reasons..
Beside that SCO probably has lots of engineers that are very experienced with Unix and high-end features. This could be the most interresting asset of SCO for Linux.
On IMDB is a link to the X-Men Trailer in RealVideo format, so you can view it on Linux..
If you are interested in old video games, you should check out the VAPS-Site. VAPS is the Video Arcade Preservation Society and tries to collect old video arcade machines, especially old and rare games.
Speaking of ASPs and the future of computing: what happened to Broadway? Broadway was XConsortium's X11R6.4 server and was intended to "web-enable" (cool buzzword) X11. It did so by including a new X protocol (LBX) with lower bandwidth requirements and adding features neccessary to run applications from untrusted sources on your X server. I think this sounds like a great and relativly simple way to provide applications over the net. The last thing I heard was that XFree 4.0 should be based on X11R6.4, but the release notes dont mention any of the broadway features, nor could I find any application for this. Info, anyone?
I always asked myself whether there is an official FSF statement about games. While relatively simple games (like GNU chess) can be written by individuals in their spare time, projects that take many man years certainly can not, and the classical revenue streams for open-source companies like selling support obviously doent work with games.
So are there any FSF suggestions on how to write commercial-grade games as free software, or does the FSF tolerate at least games based on non-free art.
For corporate developers these models are more attractive than closed-source development models. Basically it means "you can fix the bugs and hope that the fix will be included in the next release". This is much better than the "if there is a bug and you pay enough money or are very lucky, it might be fixed in the next release" model of traditional closed-sourced software. Of course, OpenSource software is still better, but there isnt open-sourced software for everything, and it is much easier to convince the management to buy software from a big vendor than to use OSS and rely on a small company for support or do not have any professional support at all.
I would recommend to use Python as a first language. It is less-cryptic than most other languages (perl, Java), is multi-platform - so your kids could also program for Win - and there are libraries for almost everything.
I would not recommend to use a RAD environment like Delphi or VB. Of course, a RAD tool lets them create form-based applications faster, but in the end it is more frustrating, especially as kids usually are not very interested in form-based applications... RAD only makes sense if you understand the generated code completly and write the kind of programs the RAD tool was designed for.
Will there be any stores in the future? Sooner or later someone will create a global system where you can compare prices directly, and this will ultimately force manufacturers to sell their goods directly. "Real-life" shops might have a chance to survive, because they offer an exhibition of products the make it possible to pick the product up immediately. But online, there will only be no use for shops. Competition will remove all middlemen between the customer and the manufacturer. Only those that offer extra-service, a real benefit to the customer have a chance.
The article keeps the assumption that a Linux virus must (like on Windows) infect binaries. This isnt true, it could as well copy itself into some place of the user's home directory (for example, somewhere deep in the ~/.netscape directory) and then start itself from a file like .profile, .bashrc or .xsession, assuming that the naive user will never look at them.
Affecting a binary doesnt make sense on Linux, as users almost never distribute them directly - if they distribute software, they send source-tarballs, RPMs or DEBs. And the RPMs are the real weakness: a virus could infect the RPM to spread itself. The solution for this problem would be the use of digital signatures.
Their screenshots look nice, which (sawmill?) theme do they use?
>>I buy a book worth $50 from Amazon.com. I pay 25% VAT of both the book and the shipping at the time of delivery (appr. $50 + $6 + 25% = $70).
In Germany, if you order something to your home address, you usually dont have to pay VAT or any duties. I have ordered books for 100-200$ and hardware for 50$ from the US without paying anything. However, if you use a a business address as shipping address, you will always have to pay a lot (VAT, import duties, stuff like that), and this can be up to 50% (that I paid for 4 T-Shirts from copyleft).
You're almost right. In Germany you pay 6% VAT for food, books and other dead trees and 16% for everything else.
>Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design.
Bluetooth is designed for short ranges only. The first devices will have a range of 10 meters, later they will extend the specication to up to 100m for some devices...
Are there any published algorithms that would enable us to write low-bandwidth video streaming with acceptable quality? What about universities, are there any research projects out there with usuable results?
Even if your language supports short or char arithmetics (C and Java do not, they convert everything to integers first) and would use the registers that way, this is not all you can to to optimize the code. In the texture mapping inner loops of the article is a piece of code where 2 16-bit numbers are put into a 32-bit register, and then two 32-bit registers are ADDed to save an add. In this situation overflows of the 16-bit parts are critical, but an overflow of the lower 16-bits are not as bad as an overflow of the upper 16-bits. If the lower 16-bits overflow, you will only lose the precision of the least significant bit of the upper 16-bits. So when accuracy is not so important, you can ignore the overflow of the lower 16-bits and loose 1 bit of the arithmetic precision in the upper 16 bits. Try to explain this to your compiler...
Of course, you can use assertions and similar things to tell your compiler more about your code, but then you agree that the compiler is worse than the human programmer, because it can only produce better code when the human takes a larger part of the compiler's job.
As long as the programmer has more knowledge than the compiler, he will always find tricks to save an instruction here or there and outperform the compilers this way. You can find a great example of such programming tricks in the PCGPEs article about texture mapping inner loops here.
Even if the chinese government restricts encryption, this should be one of the less important worries for the chinese peole. Check out Amnesty International's Annual Reports on China.
See
http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=Cohf:u
What I hate about patent is that they mean that you just cant do something anymore, even if you (re-)invent it yourself. The probability of reinventing is much higher with simple inventions, of course, but if somebody has never heard of Google (and can prove this) and has the same idea, he is not allowed to use it. That is not fair.
I really like FreeBSD, but I am not sure whether a Java port on FreeBSD would really make sense. My main concern is that AFAIK FreeBSD does not support (Kernel-)Threads. Or has this changed in 3.0?
I wonder why Informix is not on the list. I dont have any experience with Informix, but had problems with older Oracles (version 7.x, not on linux). Informix looks interesiting and scalability seems to be more than sufficient for this job.
Attractions in or around Essen are:
- Many awful musicals that are surprisingly popular in Germany (Starlight Express, Joseph, Les Miseres and some smaller in D'dorf)
- Warner Movie World in Bottrop
Hmm, i cant remember more, this is probably not a good sign...I have this Deja Vu, all the pictures look like those 'fractal' graphics from 80's games like Rescue on Fractalus on old Ataris or Captain Blood on Atari ST/Amigas. Looks like they re-invented them and filled them with some colors. But displaying some landscapes with simple formulars is MUCH simpler than displaying complex graphics. If they show a tree based on ther 'formulars' and in high framerate they would impress me. But not with landscapes...
I agree with LT that software prices will go down, but I cant see how software prices can fail because of a reduced number of updates. The current update system is more like renting software. When you buy Windows, for example, you update it every 2-5 years, and pay for the development by doing this. Essentially this is renting. If there wouldnt be a need for updating, MS had to demand a much larger one-time-fee, so prices would go up.
The reason I can see for lower software prices is increased competition. Large cooperations are fighting for market share (see Netscape vs. IE and MS Office vs. Star Office), and increasingly Open Source software takes market share from commercial software. Someday the Open Source model will win, not only because of its lower prices, but also because it offers advantages like the possibility of custom modifications. Commercial software cannot beat this, its only chance is better marketing or throwing more programmers at a problem (resulting in products that are bloated and usually worse). In the long term this wont help, and software companies will get their revenues by support&training, doing custom modifications for customers or developing software that is so specialised that the open-source development is not economical.
BTW, there is a new MP3 player out by Grundig (in germany a really large electronics firm, but probably not as known outside europe). The technical data of the MPaxx is much like the first Rio (32 MB), but the nice thing is that they support Linux, officially.