Uh, I thought they'd given up on that idea when it turned out to be absurdly impractical? (Their idea was that you could opt to install some magic software, whose purpose would be to 'prove' your innocence if wrongly accused of piracy. How that was supposed to work out was never clarified.)
Did they change their minds again? Just how old are the specs in question? Anyone?
Unfortunately, even the most studious lack of infringement won't prevent you from getting abusively sued into bankruptcy. It's all about the implied threat, Miguel.
> The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders > for the trend toward casual or "easy" games.
Yeah. Care to cite specific examples? Because this, here, until proved otherwise, sounds like gamer nerd handwringing over their hobby's new mass popularity, no more.
Have you played the new Super Mario game? Care to name some other Mario games that are harder? Take your time, I'll wait. Heck, has there ever been a Mario game where failing one time too many on a single level, no matter how many lives you have, means you can't reach 100% completion unless you trash your save game and start over from scratch?
Hell, have you played the Wii poster child, Mario Kart? How are those mirror cups going? Unlocked the Rainbow Road expert staff ghost yet? Beaten it?
Just because it's easy to get into for newbies does NOT make it unchallenging. Seriously, guys, this is the same line of thinking that gives us people who seem to think that user friendly and powerful GUIs are mutually exclusive. It's a real design challenge to reconcile both, I know. This makes it all the more important to recognize and laud those attempts that succeed.
You'd have to ask Celeste, or another one of our fine usability experts.:) Maybe a pop-up accessible from the right-click menu could let you see the loaded libraries for the process in question, with their respective memory usage? And from that pop-up you could select the library you want per-process usage for.
Or maybe the process list could open in tree mode, with the libraries and their memory usage as children nodes of each process node.
The above should already reveal interesting behaviors, such as, for instance, that Konqueror never unloads a library after having needed it once to display a KPart.
It's not a matter of things changing or not changing. It's a matter of things changing faster than 1/ living species and 2/ civilization can adapt. Geological-scale shifts in decades is what's worrisome, not the shift in itself.
That's not at all how I read that (IMHO interesting) comment. What I read is: lack of expertise on in a field robs you of both the ability to form an accurate opinion, and the ability to perceive the holes in your reasoning that led you that that inaccurate opinion. Ignorance begetting confidence, in all good faith. Which is nothing new at all (one of the most enlightening psychology paper I've ever read -- do check it out). It has nothing to do with being a 'moron', and that you read it as such possibly tells more about you than it does about the original poster.
First, the positive: the System Activity app is excellent, one of the pieces of KDE that doesn't piss me off of late. I was particularly impressed when I noticed that System Activity takes note when I strace a process and adjusts its display accordingly. It's the small details.
Now, on to the feature request: more detailed memory displays. Based on the mouseover text for the memory column I am not sure if the calculation is made based on the contents/proc/<pid>/smap (Shared_* and Private_*) or guestimated from RSS and VSZ as used to be traditional. A way to group processes by library loaded and (private) memory allocated for those libraries would also be great. No big deal if you find it too much trouble to implement, though: SysAct is already pretty damn fine and I like it.
1/ I understand the fair hearing clause is sufficient to invalidate the horrible HADOPI law in France. In fact, I suspect it was put in there specifically for this purpose. The Sarkozy government tried to make Internet access termination automatic by hammering it into the same simplified, no-hearing judiciary subsystem that handles traffic fines, and this clause explicitly disallows that.
2/ The clause of due respect for presumption of innocence means that the onus will be on the recording industry representative to prove that it was you who downloaded, so suing on the basis of the IP address alone may not be sufficient anymore. The HADOPI law tried to make the owner of the account associated with the IP automatically guilty for anything that happened on that IP. This may not fly anymore.
3/ If a standard judiciary procedure is required, then it means a judge will have to decide of your sentence fairly. Making Internet termination an option, not an obligation. And judges don't tend to apply the maximal sentence without good reason. That, and French judges aren't exactly fond of the Sarkozy government, as a whole.
Now, don't you worry, I'm pretty sure that the Sarkozy government will (once again) rewrite their broken law to be just about as bad as the EU will let them get away with. But this is still a step up from the current state of things.
You probably mean it as a joke but this is in fact an excellent question.
Here's the point about France: the last three or four centuries of its history can be summed up as one long ongoing slo-mo rebellion of a varyingly disenfranchised majority against a well entrenched, rich and powerful minority.
The majority in question is very deeply attached to what rights and social benefits it managed to conquer over the centuries, knowing all too well from experience what happens when it lets its guard down. (Hence the constant strikes and latent social unrest.)
The powerful minority is very well connected and organized since De Gaulle, and it just so happens that the constitution dating back from De Gaulle is set up so 1/ only the two biggest parties have a chance to be relevant, but 2/ smaller parties can still attract votes long enough to hamper the biggest party in their respective wing.
Only the political landscape of France is made up of one big right wing party with just a few much smaller ones, and a larger array of smaller left wing parties.
That, and the right wing has been very good at preying on the latent xenophobic fears of an aging population, too.
Though I still think that in a Condorcet-fair election the right wing wouldn't stand a chance.
That's how you can end up with a pretty damn left-leaning people consistently ruled by a pretty damn right-leaning group of politicians. France has had less left wing presidents since WW2 than the USA, for chrissake. The mind boggles.
1/ Staying in the middle/front of the pack will get you pummeled with all that the opponents behind can throw at you. 2/ For this reason, keeping around offensive items as opposed to defensive items is a poor strategy. 3/ Besides, POW blocks and lightning bolts specifically exist to make item hoarding a poor strategy as well.
The thing people don't realize with Mario Kart is that it's a hard game that pretends to be easy, because it's already fun even when you suck at first.
In fact, I never cease to be amazed at how well balanced Mario Kart Wii is. The effect of most items can be mitigated to some extent. Off the top of my mind there are at least three or four ways to limit how much the blue shell will affect your race. Some are bitching hard to pull, but hey, you're going for first place, right? Gotta work for it.
The only really succesful approach I found is to be just a bit faster than your opponents -- and there are many ways to tend toward that goal, the most important of which being in equal parts the quality of your trajectories and a good tactic use of the circuit's features -- and a good knowledge of how to make the best defensive use of your items. A skilled player can cross the finish line of Rainbow Road 30 to 40 seconds ahead of the closest AI opponents in hard mode. Can you do that? If not, then you're not a skilled player, and that's where your problem is.
A good way to tell where you actually stand is to go through time trial mode and try to unlock (and then beat) all the Expert Staff Ghosts. No items there, so it's just you against the circuit. When you can routinely race ahead of most or all expert ghosts you'll find the regular championship and multiplayer modes significantly more manageable.
By which I mean you'll still lose now and then. Just not as much. That's the Mario Kart philosophy: work hard, and you'll pull ahead often -- but not always. That's okay. That's life. And it's been a fun ride either way.
I would very much not count on this. The rewritten law is designed to route around the Conseil Constitutionnel's earlier objections.
Now the convictions will have to be signed off by a judge using the ordonnance pénale procedure, which is, if I got it correctly, the procedure used to deliver, for instance, driving-related fines. The gist of it: a cop has no right to sentence you to anything, only a judge can, but it's assumed that if a cop directly witnessed you speeding then you're as good as guilty and a simplified, faster procedure is thus used; that's the ordonnance pénale. You can challenge the ruling, in which case it goes to a regular court.
So is this procedure appropriate to the case of copyright infringement? Hell no. To start with infringement can be witnessed as coming from a given IP address, not an identified person, making those cases immensely less clear cut than common driving-related offenses. But does that make it unconstitutional? Nope, I don't think. My bet is that the law will likely stand as such.
The law tries to brain-damagedly route around the lack of direct IP to person mapping by making the owner of the Internet account legally responsible for everything that happens on it. I'm not sure of the constitutionality of that, but I'm afraid it may stand too, ill-thought patch job that it is. Meaning the death of open access points.
So I wouldn't be optimistic.
All this because the French president's trophy wife is a singer. The mind boggles.
> Have we really reached the point where "Good enough is"
No. I'd say we reached it one generation ago. More precisely: one generation ago is when we've reached the point where style matters more than polycount. Not saying that next-gen games aren't awfully pretty: some are. What I'm saying, though, is that there are many ways to go for pretty, and polycount and high-resolution aren't fundamental to a good number of those. See Okami, for instance.
I suspect this is the lesson Nintendo learned. Last generation, they had (arguably) the best hardware, and while they made the most money of all three console hardware makers (owing to their policy not to sell at a loss), the GameCube is not a terribly big commercial success. So they went a different road this time.
When are achievements computed? Instantly, as a batch? How much additional database load do they cause, how were the necessary schema modifications applied over a million+ users? Were some possible achievements dropped due to technical complexity?
C'mon, we're all geeks here, give us the interesting geeky stuff!
Qt already ships with WebKit as of Qt 4.4, released a while ago. Mind you, I don't consider it usable yet, seeing as the included WebKit is a little dated and lacks such features as, you know, Netscape plugin support (so no Flash).
Qt 4.5 will ship a more recent and useful version of WebKit, however, with support for such things as W3C selectors API, 100% ACID3 compliance, HTML5 audio and video, CSS canvas drawing, masks and reflections, and a few more things.
Nevertheless, KHTML is still set to remain Konqueror's default rendering engine, as far as I understand, for reasons of trust, quite simply. I don't necessarily agree, mind you, but I do understand, if nothing else, the wisdom of keeping a hand on the source code for urgent security fixes, rather than wait that it goes through the whole chain of Apple - WebKit - Qt - KDE.
Mind you, this is KDE, so switching to WebKit by default is probably one setting away. Probably in Configure file associations > text/html > Embedding, move webkitpart to the top of the preferred service list. I'm going to do that right away, actually.
Over here, they created telco regulations at the turn of the century, at a time the incumbent providers were already very few and very entrenched.
It was horrible.
The regulations got used. When the entrenched telcos tried to stifle the growth of up-and-coming providers with underhanded tactics, they got punished -- I kid you not! The mind boggles. Those guys were only trying to keep making money!
So now we got up to 20Mbps (in the countryside, don't know about cities) with no cap, with such things as custom reverse DNS and IPv6 as free options, installation on Linux officially supported, TV-over-DSL with hundreds of channels, and, oh, free phone to half the planet, too, all for a fixed monthly rate of about $22. The horror! The former entrenched telcos weeped a lot as they lost the marketshare they were rightfully entitled to.
Some silly liberals are probably going to bring forth some silly theory about the point of regulation being to prevent attempts by private interests to stifle competition, but that's a silly notion, of course. And probably a little subversive.
>... the semantic web never did, and never will take off without significant AI involvement.
I understand that the point of Nepomuk is to allow for automated tagging by the standard tools of the KDE desktop. For instance, say you receive a picture from an IM contact who KDE also knows (through the address book framework, Akonadi) lives in Europe.
Then Nepomuk would allow you to make search queries as "Bring up all the pictures that people living in Europe sent me last week". Well, that's the theoretical goal anyway; we will see if they ever get there.
There's one nifty application already: you can create a Folder View plasmoid on your desktop, and instead of making it display ~/Desktop/ as usual, you can make it display the result of a query through the Nepomuk KIO slave. See here how it works.
Thanks for the interesting input -- I'd mod you up, but I have already contributed to the thread, obviously.
If the game (which was standalone Portal, mind you, not the Orange Box) can indeed be installed and played offline, then my objection no longer holds. The box, however, does explicitly state otherwise; I'd like to be able to understand why.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, I thought they'd given up on that idea when it turned out to be absurdly impractical? (Their idea was that you could opt to install some magic software, whose purpose would be to 'prove' your innocence if wrongly accused of piracy. How that was supposed to work out was never clarified.)
Did they change their minds again? Just how old are the specs in question? Anyone?
Dude. They're casual even about fighting homebrew. :P
> That will probably be all undone as a condition to EU membership
Why?
Unfortunately, even the most studious lack of infringement won't prevent you from getting abusively sued into bankruptcy. It's all about the implied threat, Miguel.
> The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders
> for the trend toward casual or "easy" games.
Yeah. Care to cite specific examples? Because this, here, until proved otherwise, sounds like gamer nerd handwringing over their hobby's new mass popularity, no more.
Have you played the new Super Mario game? Care to name some other Mario games that are harder? Take your time, I'll wait. Heck, has there ever been a Mario game where failing one time too many on a single level, no matter how many lives you have, means you can't reach 100% completion unless you trash your save game and start over from scratch?
Hell, have you played the Wii poster child, Mario Kart? How are those mirror cups going? Unlocked the Rainbow Road expert staff ghost yet? Beaten it?
Just because it's easy to get into for newbies does NOT make it unchallenging. Seriously, guys, this is the same line of thinking that gives us people who seem to think that user friendly and powerful GUIs are mutually exclusive. It's a real design challenge to reconcile both, I know. This makes it all the more important to recognize and laud those attempts that succeed.
You'd have to ask Celeste, or another one of our fine usability experts. :) Maybe a pop-up accessible from the right-click menu could let you see the loaded libraries for the process in question, with their respective memory usage? And from that pop-up you could select the library you want per-process usage for.
Or maybe the process list could open in tree mode, with the libraries and their memory usage as children nodes of each process node.
The above should already reveal interesting behaviors, such as, for instance, that Konqueror never unloads a library after having needed it once to display a KPart.
What do you think?
It's not a matter of things changing or not changing. It's a matter of things changing faster than 1/ living species and 2/ civilization can adapt. Geological-scale shifts in decades is what's worrisome, not the shift in itself.
That's not at all how I read that (IMHO interesting) comment. What I read is: lack of expertise on in a field robs you of both the ability to form an accurate opinion, and the ability to perceive the holes in your reasoning that led you that that inaccurate opinion. Ignorance begetting confidence, in all good faith. Which is nothing new at all (one of the most enlightening psychology paper I've ever read -- do check it out). It has nothing to do with being a 'moron', and that you read it as such possibly tells more about you than it does about the original poster.
Oh, brilliant. Thank you for the opportunity.
First, the positive: the System Activity app is excellent, one of the pieces of KDE that doesn't piss me off of late. I was particularly impressed when I noticed that System Activity takes note when I strace a process and adjusts its display accordingly. It's the small details.
Now, on to the feature request: more detailed memory displays. Based on the mouseover text for the memory column I am not sure if the calculation is made based on the contents /proc/<pid>/smap (Shared_* and Private_*) or guestimated from RSS and VSZ as used to be traditional. A way to group processes by library loaded and (private) memory allocated for those libraries would also be great. No big deal if you find it too much trouble to implement, though: SysAct is already pretty damn fine and I like it.
> How can these people be allowed to reign free?
The Rome treaty.
I understand the balance of power will be shifting back in favor of the Parliament when the Lisbon treaty goes into effect.
So elect your representatives wisely, good folks.
I hear your point, but I beg to differ.
1/ I understand the fair hearing clause is sufficient to invalidate the horrible HADOPI law in France. In fact, I suspect it was put in there specifically for this purpose. The Sarkozy government tried to make Internet access termination automatic by hammering it into the same simplified, no-hearing judiciary subsystem that handles traffic fines, and this clause explicitly disallows that.
2/ The clause of due respect for presumption of innocence means that the onus will be on the recording industry representative to prove that it was you who downloaded, so suing on the basis of the IP address alone may not be sufficient anymore. The HADOPI law tried to make the owner of the account associated with the IP automatically guilty for anything that happened on that IP. This may not fly anymore.
3/ If a standard judiciary procedure is required, then it means a judge will have to decide of your sentence fairly. Making Internet termination an option, not an obligation. And judges don't tend to apply the maximal sentence without good reason. That, and French judges aren't exactly fond of the Sarkozy government, as a whole.
Now, don't you worry, I'm pretty sure that the Sarkozy government will (once again) rewrite their broken law to be just about as bad as the EU will let them get away with. But this is still a step up from the current state of things.
You probably mean it as a joke but this is in fact an excellent question.
Here's the point about France: the last three or four centuries of its history can be summed up as one long ongoing slo-mo rebellion of a varyingly disenfranchised majority against a well entrenched, rich and powerful minority.
The majority in question is very deeply attached to what rights and social benefits it managed to conquer over the centuries, knowing all too well from experience what happens when it lets its guard down. (Hence the constant strikes and latent social unrest.)
The powerful minority is very well connected and organized since De Gaulle, and it just so happens that the constitution dating back from De Gaulle is set up so 1/ only the two biggest parties have a chance to be relevant, but 2/ smaller parties can still attract votes long enough to hamper the biggest party in their respective wing.
Only the political landscape of France is made up of one big right wing party with just a few much smaller ones, and a larger array of smaller left wing parties.
That, and the right wing has been very good at preying on the latent xenophobic fears of an aging population, too.
Though I still think that in a Condorcet-fair election the right wing wouldn't stand a chance.
That's how you can end up with a pretty damn left-leaning people consistently ruled by a pretty damn right-leaning group of politicians. France has had less left wing presidents since WW2 than the USA, for chrissake. The mind boggles.
Except that:
1/ Staying in the middle/front of the pack will get you pummeled with all that the opponents behind can throw at you.
2/ For this reason, keeping around offensive items as opposed to defensive items is a poor strategy.
3/ Besides, POW blocks and lightning bolts specifically exist to make item hoarding a poor strategy as well.
The thing people don't realize with Mario Kart is that it's a hard game that pretends to be easy, because it's already fun even when you suck at first.
In fact, I never cease to be amazed at how well balanced Mario Kart Wii is. The effect of most items can be mitigated to some extent. Off the top of my mind there are at least three or four ways to limit how much the blue shell will affect your race. Some are bitching hard to pull, but hey, you're going for first place, right? Gotta work for it.
The only really succesful approach I found is to be just a bit faster than your opponents -- and there are many ways to tend toward that goal, the most important of which being in equal parts the quality of your trajectories and a good tactic use of the circuit's features -- and a good knowledge of how to make the best defensive use of your items. A skilled player can cross the finish line of Rainbow Road 30 to 40 seconds ahead of the closest AI opponents in hard mode. Can you do that? If not, then you're not a skilled player, and that's where your problem is.
A good way to tell where you actually stand is to go through time trial mode and try to unlock (and then beat) all the Expert Staff Ghosts. No items there, so it's just you against the circuit. When you can routinely race ahead of most or all expert ghosts you'll find the regular championship and multiplayer modes significantly more manageable.
By which I mean you'll still lose now and then. Just not as much. That's the Mario Kart philosophy: work hard, and you'll pull ahead often -- but not always. That's okay. That's life. And it's been a fun ride either way.
I would very much not count on this. The rewritten law is designed to route around the Conseil Constitutionnel's earlier objections.
Now the convictions will have to be signed off by a judge using the ordonnance pénale procedure, which is, if I got it correctly, the procedure used to deliver, for instance, driving-related fines. The gist of it: a cop has no right to sentence you to anything, only a judge can, but it's assumed that if a cop directly witnessed you speeding then you're as good as guilty and a simplified, faster procedure is thus used; that's the ordonnance pénale. You can challenge the ruling, in which case it goes to a regular court.
So is this procedure appropriate to the case of copyright infringement? Hell no. To start with infringement can be witnessed as coming from a given IP address, not an identified person, making those cases immensely less clear cut than common driving-related offenses. But does that make it unconstitutional? Nope, I don't think. My bet is that the law will likely stand as such.
The law tries to brain-damagedly route around the lack of direct IP to person mapping by making the owner of the Internet account legally responsible for everything that happens on it. I'm not sure of the constitutionality of that, but I'm afraid it may stand too, ill-thought patch job that it is. Meaning the death of open access points.
So I wouldn't be optimistic.
All this because the French president's trophy wife is a singer. The mind boggles.
Apparently this site runs Django, and was built in but a few days. Great show of open source power there! Worth a mention IMHO.
... You're WAY behind the times.
I got a buddy who is an astrophysicist and worked at NASA, and he tells me his department ditched FORTRAN years ago in favor of Python+Numeric.
I hear you about the need for badass number crunching tools. It's your assumption that only FORTRAN fits that particular bill which is erroneous.
Not to say that FORTRAN doesn't have its use. It's just that other tools have since become better at some of those.
Python Numeric homepage. Check it out.
> Have we really reached the point where "Good enough is"
No. I'd say we reached it one generation ago. More precisely: one generation ago is when we've reached the point where style matters more than polycount. Not saying that next-gen games aren't awfully pretty: some are. What I'm saying, though, is that there are many ways to go for pretty, and polycount and high-resolution aren't fundamental to a good number of those. See Okami, for instance.
I suspect this is the lesson Nintendo learned. Last generation, they had (arguably) the best hardware, and while they made the most money of all three console hardware makers (owing to their policy not to sell at a loss), the GameCube is not a terribly big commercial success. So they went a different road this time.
Touché.
When are achievements computed? Instantly, as a batch? How much additional database load do they cause, how were the necessary schema modifications applied over a million+ users? Were some possible achievements dropped due to technical complexity?
C'mon, we're all geeks here, give us the interesting geeky stuff!
Qt already ships with WebKit as of Qt 4.4, released a while ago. Mind you, I don't consider it usable yet, seeing as the included WebKit is a little dated and lacks such features as, you know, Netscape plugin support (so no Flash).
Qt 4.5 will ship a more recent and useful version of WebKit, however, with support for such things as W3C selectors API, 100% ACID3 compliance, HTML5 audio and video, CSS canvas drawing, masks and reflections, and a few more things.
Nevertheless, KHTML is still set to remain Konqueror's default rendering engine, as far as I understand, for reasons of trust, quite simply. I don't necessarily agree, mind you, but I do understand, if nothing else, the wisdom of keeping a hand on the source code for urgent security fixes, rather than wait that it goes through the whole chain of Apple - WebKit - Qt - KDE.
Mind you, this is KDE, so switching to WebKit by default is probably one setting away. Probably in Configure file associations > text/html > Embedding, move webkitpart to the top of the preferred service list. I'm going to do that right away, actually.
You mean something like this? It's already in HEAD and will ship with Qt 4.5.
Over here, they created telco regulations at the turn of the century, at a time the incumbent providers were already very few and very entrenched.
It was horrible.
The regulations got used. When the entrenched telcos tried to stifle the growth of up-and-coming providers with underhanded tactics, they got punished -- I kid you not! The mind boggles. Those guys were only trying to keep making money!
So now we got up to 20Mbps (in the countryside, don't know about cities) with no cap, with such things as custom reverse DNS and IPv6 as free options, installation on Linux officially supported, TV-over-DSL with hundreds of channels, and, oh, free phone to half the planet, too, all for a fixed monthly rate of about $22. The horror! The former entrenched telcos weeped a lot as they lost the marketshare they were rightfully entitled to.
Some silly liberals are probably going to bring forth some silly theory about the point of regulation being to prevent attempts by private interests to stifle competition, but that's a silly notion, of course. And probably a little subversive.
> 4) Decent IDE for Python that does not suck balls
You want Eric. Great piece of software, very complete, great debugger integration.
> ... the semantic web never did, and never will take off without significant AI involvement.
I understand that the point of Nepomuk is to allow for automated tagging by the standard tools of the KDE desktop. For instance, say you receive a picture from an IM contact who KDE also knows (through the address book framework, Akonadi) lives in Europe.
Then Nepomuk would allow you to make search queries as "Bring up all the pictures that people living in Europe sent me last week". Well, that's the theoretical goal anyway; we will see if they ever get there.
There's one nifty application already: you can create a Folder View plasmoid on your desktop, and instead of making it display ~/Desktop/ as usual, you can make it display the result of a query through the Nepomuk KIO slave. See here how it works.
Thanks for the interesting input -- I'd mod you up, but I have already contributed to the thread, obviously.
If the game (which was standalone Portal, mind you, not the Orange Box) can indeed be installed and played offline, then my objection no longer holds. The box, however, does explicitly state otherwise; I'd like to be able to understand why.