Isn't freshmeat.net more about getting updates of those one, two apps per week that really interest you? Plus learning about new stuff?
I understand that StarOffice is too big to download for many people (that's why they ship a CD of it for little money) but it's a bit questionable (from an ecological point of view, IMHO) to collect 50 CD's per year that you'll never use again.
I agree C't is a pretty good general-purpose computer magazine. However, once you want something more specialized you'll be on your own (e.g. in case you don't want all those product tests). As an example, I once got my hands on US Dr Dobbs Journal (http://www.ddj.com). It is (was at the time) quite a good technical computer magazine that is centered on what would be the Knowledge / Programming part in C't. But it's virtually impossible (and would be quite uncomfortable) to find DDJ in a library (even in a city with a university oriented towards technology), you (as a normal student) cannot subscribe to it because it's way to expensive outside of the US and you won't find but one article online (I can understand that decision). The point is, I want that information and would pay for it the adequate sum but cannot get it (once I earn that much money I don't think I have the time left for reading it;-(). Somebody should come up with a safe way for micro payments. I could even pick exactly what I want to read. There is a DDJ article on XML query languages? I'll pay for it because going through all those W3C pages is quite time-consuming! An introduction to XML? Nah, I don't need that anymore. And BTW, I don't think it's enough just to surf the net for finding good background articles. It's a very difficult task to write an understandable, technically correct text on a specific topic, and nobody is going to write, edit, and publish this for free.
You can still consider yourself lucky - it's easier to buy games in the Netherlands than in Germany. I had no problems finding a copy of Q2 in the NL, but German shops cannot advertise for violent games (they're for adults only, treated like pornography). Some shops have a copy if you explicitly ask for them, but it's a long search to find one. What a strange situation... I don't think it'll be different with Q3.
Now that there were some US-like killings in Germany (a student kills his history teacher with a knife, another one shoots several persons with his father's weapons) the media are already catching up and do the same bad coverage (from the journalistic point of view) as in the US, so I guess the situation will not become better. Sigh...
Don't get me wrong, those killings are tragic. But I think they're unrelated to the fact that violent video games were played by these individuals. In the typical German way (vorauseilender Gehorsam) all future games by companies like id soft get the 'adult' label.
See the platform page of the Kaffe Java Virtual Machine. They ported it to about anything... But it's only a 1.1 compliant VM.
The Blackdown ports overview can be found here. But AFAIK they're Linux only (although on several platforms). They have a pre-1.2 JDK which runs pretty well.
While I know about NT's disadvantages compared to 'the Unix approach' of operating systems by personal experience, I have no clue about those OS's that have to work with scarce ressources like WinCE, PalmOS etc. Any URL's with a fair comparison? To become more on-topic -- is there a real technical reason for Sony to drop WinCE or is it just the fact that Microsoft may not be the most pleasant company to do business with? The article gave no background on that...
Maybe someone can answer this: Why would the NSA try to get a patent on such a technology? Their interest in it is obvious, but why "come out" with it? Is there a commercial interest in large-scale automated eavesdropping? Everyone now has confirmed what they're doing (you probably could have guessed anyway), they'll get a lot of negative publicity again. They certainly won't try to get patents on other algorithms that might give them an advantage in their intelligence (something like a revolutionary prime factoring algorithm). Why this one?
That contradicts the open source definition as given by Bruce Perens.
There is a commented version in the book "Open Sources" on p. 82, point 6. No discrimination against persons or groups. He gives the example of an abortion clinic and an anti-abortion organization, and I think he's totally right there. Once you start restricting organizations and people, where will you draw the line?
"Enthusiasm for Linux is coming from the very highest level of the Government in China,"
Ehm, excuse me, but I hardly believe that top politicians have an idea of what an operating system is, let alone being able to make an educated evaluation of the superiority of Linux over, say, NT or Solaris.
Imagine Clinton, Chirac, Blair, Schroeder talking about 'their favourite OS' - an amusing thought. Of course I see the advantage for a country like China of having a free, reliable OS that comes with no trap doors included and can even run on older hardware. As the decision maker of such an isolated country that is not in close relations to the US (to put it mildly) I wouldn't trust any 'NT server, Chinese version', tested, modified and approved of by the NSA. Wherever you want to go today, we're looking over your shoulder;-)
I would not feature Tux at all. It may be a cute mascot of sorts as others have mentioned, but certainly it will not communicate to the masses what Linux is about. It might make your task much more difficult, but the Penguin is a no-brainer easy way out. It's great that the penguin has been established as a mascot for Linux and it should be used whenever possible. Marketing strategists spend lots of money on coming up with a symbol people are gonna recognize. That doesn't mean Tux has to be the center of attention on such a cover, and it would be great if not the exact same image of Tux would be used over and over again as it is the case (look at the ads of a Linux-related magazine and you'll find a gazillion copies of that EPS(?!) file). However, people with a computer background will recognize the penguin-Linux connection immediately, and covers are about getting the attention of someone looking at it. You can hardly start elaborating on Linux' stability etc. on the cover of a magazine! If there is a cute penguin, alright, that's a beginning. Maybe the network aspect could be emphasized somehow.
..., it is not clear at all if it is legal to distribute and use the MPEG-2 reference decoders,
But the reference decoders would not have to be distributed, they're available already. The LAME project is merely a huge patch. A user would of course need to get the reference decoder, the patch, apply the patch and compile everything. This would certainly shrink down the number of potential users because it's not simply point and click installation.
and sooner or later you'll have to optimize patented stuff.
Yes, that is questionable indeed - is it allowed? In what countries? Time-critical parts like the IDCT are not covered by patents (they're indeed used in JPEG already), so a good knowledge of the internals of MPEG-2 is required to answer the question about patented and time-critical parts of the decoder. You lost me here!;-) Anyone?!
What will the DVD version cost, compared to the CD's? I couldn't find the price (or the announcement) on their site. I don't think that the medium itself will make much of a difference compared to the overall cost of a copy of the distribution...
The deflate algorithm can be used in TIFF, it's only poorly supported (not really a fault of the TIFF viewers and editors, the format is a real mess, to fully support it is almost impossible). See libtiff for a free library that can deal with it.
PNG's superscede TIFF's, not GIF's. Lets put Deflate into GIF and call it GIF99a. ARGH! No, let GIF die. PNG is very well designed (checksums, great specs, the folks who created it really knew what they did), so please make it your choice!
There will be no decrease in quality as both GIF and PNG use lossless compression methods while JPEG (at least the most widely used part of it, it has a lossless mode, too, which is used in medical imaging) is lossy - it gets much better compression results at the costs of not recreating the exact original, which isn't visible to human beholders whenever the quality settings used to encode weren't too extreme.
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't believe PNGs have this ability. Wrong, PNG has support for paletted images with 2, 4 and 8 bits per pixel. Moreover, the compression method is the only thing that will determine the resulting file size. That's why PNG beats GIF all the time, it has a better method including clever filtering as a pre-compression step.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well. JPEG's are for continuous-tone images (== photos), GIF's are aimed at pictures with large areas of the some colors and relatively few colors, e.g. cartoons. That's why PNG and JPEG hardly overlap, it has nothing to do with the size of the image. Palettes wouldn't make sense in JPEG, the compression method in it works on truecolor data only.
How about an approach similar to the LAME project? Take some ISO reference code for an MPEG-2 decoder and offer just patches to that code instead of a complete application. You could include decryption, assembly optimization of time-critical parts like IDCT etc. AFAIK, distributing patches is not against the law anywhere, it seems to work for LAME. Then again, IANAL.
The advantage of free software for governments (and businesses) as you describe it is clear to me, but exchanging sources that everyone understands (including comments and variable names in English) seems to be a 'must', otherwise you could use closed-source software anyway.
ok, do you bother reading the original message before you reply? First off, he was talking about the people in the film. But I'm not, I'm talking about its computer-related flaws. This is a discussion forum, so why shouldn't I talk about the film's weaknesses once he mentioned the film itself?
(forget that the actual method wasn't 100% sound, but how many people out there really understand the physics of it?) It's really not all that far off... Whenever I see cheap animations of data that is automatically decrypted and interpreted without knowing anything about the original clear text, I don't like it. That's just my opinion... Of course I know that the more probable approach would be less spectacular in the movie.
Yeah, right. With all the major and minor flaws related to computers in that film, the invalid IP was done on purpose! I think that's unlikely, but even if they did it on purpose, that's not obvious, just a possibility.
If a scientist is a female, she has long legs which are revealed at some point, and the plot surprises us in the middle of the movie by showing how she is a repressed sexual tigress.
;-)
Don't forget: at first she's wearing glasses that are way too large and a her hair as a bun (sp?) - then she takes off the glasses, opens her hair and - surprise! - she's drop dead beautiful. Ever seen Loaded Weapon 1?!
Is Sneakers that film where everybody wants to have that super-secret crypto box that can magically break any encryption method? That film was lousy... Worst scene: After applying the box to some console garbage text, every white-on-black character is 'decrypted' to a graphical street map in a really lousy puzzle animation kind-of effect...
What I find most interesting is that obviously, the studios don't have the idea of letting some computer-savy person check a script for basic errors. It would take about three hours, doesn't cost too much and would remove the most obvious flaws... Remember that IP with a number larger than 255 in it in 'The Net'?
BTW, you get to another level if you watch the translated version of such a movie - the translators obviously don't have a clue (with regard to computers) so they're using the wrong vocabulary for technical terms all the time and you find yourself guessing what the original (= English) meaning could have been! Just like Babelfish... It's at that point where it starts being funny again!
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Isn't freshmeat.net more about getting updates of those one, two apps per week that really interest you? Plus learning about new stuff?
I understand that StarOffice is too big to download for many people (that's why they ship a CD of it for little money) but it's a bit questionable (from an ecological point of view, IMHO) to collect 50 CD's per year that you'll never use again.
I agree C't is a pretty good general-purpose computer magazine. However, once you want something more specialized you'll be on your own (e.g. in case you don't want all those product tests). As an example, I once got my hands on US Dr Dobbs Journal (http://www.ddj.com). It is (was at the time) quite a good technical computer magazine that is centered on what would be the Knowledge / Programming part in C't. But it's virtually impossible (and would be quite uncomfortable) to find DDJ in a library (even in a city with a university oriented towards technology), you (as a normal student) cannot subscribe to it because it's way to expensive outside of the US and you won't find but one article online (I can understand that decision). The point is, I want that information and would pay for it the adequate sum but cannot get it (once I earn that much money I don't think I have the time left for reading it ;-(). Somebody should come up with a safe way for micro payments. I could even pick exactly what I want to read. There is a DDJ article on XML query languages? I'll pay for it because going through all those W3C pages is quite time-consuming! An introduction to XML? Nah, I don't need that anymore. And BTW, I don't think it's enough just to surf the net for finding good background articles. It's a very difficult task to write an understandable, technically correct text on a specific topic, and nobody is going to write, edit, and publish this for free.
You can still consider yourself lucky - it's easier to buy games in the Netherlands than in Germany. I had no problems finding a copy of Q2 in the NL, but German shops cannot advertise for violent games (they're for adults only, treated like pornography). Some shops have a copy if you explicitly ask for them, but it's a long search to find one. What a strange situation... I don't think it'll be different with Q3.
Now that there were some US-like killings in Germany (a student kills his history teacher with a knife, another one shoots several persons with his father's weapons) the media are already catching up and do the same bad coverage (from the journalistic point of view) as in the US, so I guess the situation will not become better. Sigh...
Don't get me wrong, those killings are tragic. But I think they're unrelated to the fact that violent video games were played by these individuals. In the typical German way (vorauseilender Gehorsam) all future games by companies like id soft get the 'adult' label.
See the platform page of the Kaffe Java Virtual Machine. They ported it to about anything... But it's only a 1.1 compliant VM.
The Blackdown ports overview can be found here. But AFAIK they're Linux only (although on several platforms). They have a pre-1.2 JDK which runs pretty well.
While I know about NT's disadvantages compared to 'the Unix approach' of operating systems by personal experience, I have no clue about those OS's that have to work with scarce ressources like WinCE, PalmOS etc. Any URL's with a fair comparison? To become more on-topic -- is there a real technical reason for Sony to drop WinCE or is it just the fact that Microsoft may not be the most pleasant company to do business with? The article gave no background on that...
Yeah, something like GEL - The GNU Eavesdropping Library, a GPL'd package brought to you by the NSA. Should make it into any larger distribution... ;-)
Maybe someone can answer this: Why would the NSA try to get a patent on such a technology? Their interest in it is obvious, but why "come out" with it? Is there a commercial interest in large-scale automated eavesdropping? Everyone now has confirmed what they're doing (you probably could have guessed anyway), they'll get a lot of negative publicity again. They certainly won't try to get patents on other algorithms that might give them an advantage in their intelligence (something like a revolutionary prime factoring algorithm). Why this one?
That contradicts the open source definition as given by Bruce Perens.
;-) Here's the URL of the chapter I talked about: http://www.oreilly.com/ catalog/opensources/book/perens.html.
There is a commented version in the book "Open Sources" on p. 82, point 6.
No discrimination against persons or groups. He gives the example of an abortion clinic and an anti-abortion organization, and I think he's totally right there. Once you start restricting organizations and people, where will you draw the line?
The very interesting book can be read online and even downloaded from oreilly.com. Or you could just buy a copy!
"Enthusiasm for Linux is coming from the very highest level of the Government in China,"
;-)
Ehm, excuse me, but I hardly believe that top politicians have an idea of what an operating system is, let alone being able to make an educated evaluation of the superiority of Linux over, say, NT or Solaris.
Imagine Clinton, Chirac, Blair, Schroeder talking about 'their favourite OS' - an amusing thought. Of course I see the advantage for a country like China of having a free, reliable OS that comes with no trap doors included and can even run on older hardware. As the decision maker of such an isolated country that is not in close relations to the US (to put it mildly) I wouldn't trust any 'NT server, Chinese version', tested, modified and approved of by the NSA. Wherever you want to go today, we're looking over your shoulder
Is there some page on the be.com site where I could order a demo CD? Is the demo downloadable somewhere? I'd like to try it with my hardware...
It seems they're making progress - see the status page, updated on Oct 30.
But you're right, I'd also like to know how Sun's support of a Linux JDK might look a year after they announced it...
Maybe you'd like to test the preview of Borland's Linux version of JBuilder 3, it's available here.
BTW, the Blackdown folks also seem to make progress with their Linux 1.2.2 JDK, see the updated status page.
I would not feature Tux at all. It may be a cute mascot of sorts as others have mentioned, but certainly it will not communicate to the masses what Linux is about. It might make your task much more difficult, but the Penguin is a no-brainer easy way out.
It's great that the penguin has been established as a mascot for Linux and it should be used whenever possible. Marketing strategists spend lots of money on coming up with a symbol people are gonna recognize. That doesn't mean Tux has to be the center of attention on such a cover, and it would be great if not the exact same image of Tux would be used over and over again as it is the case (look at the ads of a Linux-related magazine and you'll find a gazillion copies of that EPS(?!) file). However, people with a computer background will recognize the penguin-Linux connection immediately, and covers are about getting the attention of someone looking at it. You can hardly start elaborating on Linux' stability etc. on the cover of a magazine! If there is a cute penguin, alright, that's a beginning. Maybe the network aspect could be emphasized somehow.
..., it is not clear at all if it is legal to distribute and use the MPEG-2 reference decoders,
;-) Anyone?!
But the reference decoders would not have to be distributed, they're available already. The LAME project is merely a huge patch. A user would of course need to get the reference decoder, the patch, apply the patch and compile everything. This would certainly shrink down the number of potential users because it's not simply point and click installation.
and sooner or later you'll have to optimize patented stuff.
Yes, that is questionable indeed - is it allowed? In what countries? Time-critical parts like the IDCT are not covered by patents (they're indeed used in JPEG already), so a good knowledge of the internals of MPEG-2 is required to answer the question about patented and time-critical parts of the decoder. You lost me here!
What will the DVD version cost, compared to the CD's? I couldn't find the price (or the announcement) on their site. I don't think that the medium itself will make much of a difference compared to the overall cost of a copy of the distribution...
The deflate algorithm can be used in TIFF, it's only poorly supported (not really a fault of the TIFF viewers and editors, the format is a real mess, to fully support it is almost impossible). See libtiff for a free library that can deal with it.
PNG's superscede TIFF's, not GIF's. Lets put Deflate into GIF and call it GIF99a.
ARGH! No, let GIF die. PNG is very well designed (checksums, great specs, the folks who created it really knew what they did), so please make it your choice!
There will be no decrease in quality as both GIF and PNG use lossless compression methods while JPEG (at least the most widely used part of it, it has a lossless mode, too, which is used in medical imaging) is lossy - it gets much better compression results at the costs of not recreating the exact original, which isn't visible to human beholders whenever the quality settings used to encode weren't too extreme.
(IIRC, JPG transparency isn't widely supported yet)?
Ehm, there is no transparency support in JPEG's. Where did you hear that?
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't believe PNGs have this ability.
Wrong, PNG has support for paletted images with 2, 4 and 8 bits per pixel. Moreover, the compression method is the only thing that will determine the resulting file size. That's why PNG beats GIF all the time, it has a better method including clever filtering as a pre-compression step.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well.
JPEG's are for continuous-tone images (== photos), GIF's are aimed at pictures with large areas of the some colors and relatively few colors, e.g. cartoons. That's why PNG and JPEG hardly overlap, it has nothing to do with the size of the image. Palettes wouldn't make sense in JPEG, the compression method in it works on truecolor data only.
How about an approach similar to the LAME project? Take some ISO reference code for an MPEG-2 decoder and offer just patches to that code instead of a complete application. You could include decryption, assembly optimization of time-critical parts like IDCT etc. AFAIK, distributing patches is not against the law anywhere, it seems to work for LAME. Then again, IANAL.
What good comes from non-intellegible comments?
The advantage of free software for governments (and businesses) as you describe it is clear to me, but exchanging sources that everyone understands (including comments and variable names in English) seems to be a 'must', otherwise you could use closed-source software anyway.
ok, do you bother reading the original message before you reply? First off, he was talking about the people in the film.
But I'm not, I'm talking about its computer-related flaws. This is a discussion forum, so why shouldn't I talk about the film's weaknesses once he mentioned the film itself?
(forget that the actual method wasn't 100% sound, but how many people out there really understand the physics of it?) It's really not all that far off...
Whenever I see cheap animations of data that is automatically decrypted and interpreted without knowing anything about the original clear text, I don't like it. That's just my opinion... Of course I know that the more probable approach would be less spectacular in the movie.
Yeah, right. With all the major and minor flaws related to computers in that film, the invalid IP was done on purpose! I think that's unlikely, but even if they did it on purpose, that's not obvious, just a possibility.
BTW, no need to become insulting.
If a scientist is a female, she has long legs which are revealed at some point, and the plot surprises us in the middle of the movie by showing how she is a repressed sexual tigress.
;-)
Don't forget: at first she's wearing glasses that are way too large and a her hair as a bun (sp?) - then she takes off the glasses, opens her hair and - surprise! - she's drop dead beautiful. Ever seen Loaded Weapon 1?!
Is Sneakers that film where everybody wants to have that super-secret crypto box that can magically break any encryption method? That film was lousy... Worst scene: After applying the box to some console garbage text, every white-on-black character is 'decrypted' to a graphical street map in a really lousy puzzle animation kind-of effect...
What I find most interesting is that obviously, the studios don't have the idea of letting some computer-savy person check a script for basic errors. It would take about three hours, doesn't cost too much and would remove the most obvious flaws... Remember that IP with a number larger than 255 in it in 'The Net'?
BTW, you get to another level if you watch the translated version of such a movie - the translators obviously don't have a clue (with regard to computers) so they're using the wrong vocabulary for technical terms all the time and you find yourself guessing what the original (= English) meaning could have been! Just like Babelfish... It's at that point where it starts being funny again!