TrollTech is releasing QT/Win 4 under the GPL. Their version of QT/Win 3 will not be released under the GPL, so this work is not completely redundant. Furthermore, I am almost positive that this project is what prompted TrollTech to GPL QT/Win 4. They have stated many times before that they would not, but when faced with the possibility of having QT/Linux 4 ported to Windows out of their control, they very wisely chose to GPL their own version instead to keep the QT developer community from fragmenting.
The FSF wrote the license; they are also its custodian and its principal enforcer. You don't believe them? What would it take to convince you, a choir of angels and God Himself?
So what I'm wondering is: will Cell make 3D accelerators obsolete? For some time graphics cards have been moving away from single-purpose graphics circuits toward general vector processing. CPUs are coming the other direction, from fully general instruction sets to specialized vector processing instructions. Cell seems to be the logical merger between a CPU and a graphics card. Will Cell workstations have the raw vector-processing power to make a 3D accelerator card redundant? Or will specialized graphics cards still be able to have a significant edge in rasterizing textured polygons?
Actually, you are mistaken. The code belongs to the corporation, not the employees, and the corporation can forbid the employees from distributing the GPL'd code they are making and using. Don't take my word for it, read the words straight from the mouth of the FSF.
So, here's the definitive answer: A company can take TrollTech's GPL'd QT, develop internal applications for free, and never give the source to anybody. If an employee distributes a copy, they are doing so without a license and the rights given by the GPL are void; so the company can't be caught in a situation where they are forced to suddenly open up their application after accidental distribution.
It sucks, but that's the GPL as it stands. I think this is a HUGE loophole in the GPL, and it should definitely be closed in GPL v3. The code should always be licensed to individuals, never corporations.
TrollTech is taking a big gamble here; probably they are being pushed into this by the projects out there working to port QT/X11 to Windows for KDE ports. It was only a matter of time, really. I think that they will see an unfortunately large revenue drop as a result of this. But on the bright side, KDE 4 will probably be ported to Windows in short order.
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs..
on
Hondas in Space
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The analogy also sucks because cars are mass-produced by the millions. If they only ever built 20 Honda Civics, they would cost a lot more than they do. The cost of developing the design of the Honda Civic is known only to Honda, but I could easily imagine it approaching the price of a typical space system; especially if you factor in the cost of its predecessors whose designs it borrows from (since that borrowing is not nearly as easy to do in a space system which is not merely a yearly update of a previous model). Only by selling hundreds of thousands of cars does Honda recoup that cost.
Why not use Wikipedia? The database is downloadable in its entirety, quite large, and contains plenty of great information about topics from advanced mathematics to pop culture; all in quite down-to-earth normal language written and refined by normal people. I think Wikipedia ought to be a tremendously great resource for computer learning research.
Ah but you do countersteer a bicycle. It is mostly subconscious and quite subtle, because your brain sees it as shifting your balance instead of turning, and you don't need to do it as much as on a motorcycle because the gyroscopic forces don't keep you upright as much, so you achieve your desired lean with much less countersteer (because gravity helps a lot). But you do countersteer slightly. Consciously exaggerating your countersteer works well for making fast turns, even on a bicycle.
All that rider leaning stuff I was talking about was for the "no hands" turning by leaning case, which is something Ungrounded Lightning had mentioned. I do imagine that it doesn't work very well on a motorcycle going 60 mph due to the huge gyroscopic forces keeping you upright. (I don't ride them myself). However, it should work on a slow motorcycle, and it works on a bicycle of course.
That demo was pretty cool. I saw it because I downloaded the "bill gates gets blue screen during product demo" video, and it was in the same presentation. Interested parties can download the whole thing here. or here. (You can stream it from MS faster but they edited out the many many techincal difficulties...)
Gyroscopic effects are not the reason that works. You're thinking too hard. Turning the handlebars left is merely a way to lean right. It works at any speed, without any gyroscopic force, and is a necessary part of bike riding for everybody. (I believe that this simple fact is the one thing that you must "get" subconsciously when you first learn to ride a bicycle.)
Turning by leaning does require gyroscopic force, but not in the way you describe. It is required to allow you to change your center of gravity by leaning. On a bike with no centrifugal force (a stopped bike), you cannot change your center of gravity by just leaning without turning the handlebars. If you could, it would be easy to sit upright on a stopped bike.
When gyroscopic force enters the equation, it does allow you to change your center of gravity by merely leaning your body. Once you lean to the right and move your center of gravity to the right, you start falling over to the right. The reason you don't fall over completely is that the wheel also turns to the right of its own accord, which turns you and brings it back under the moved center of gravity. But the main reason for the turning not gyroscopic force; the real reason is the fact that the turning axis for the front wheel is not vertical. This means that when the bike is leaning to the right, the front wheel has a natural tendancy to turn right, even when stationary. Imagine a bike on its kickstand; the wheel is always turned in the direction of the lean, right? That's not a coincidence. This is the reason why you will never see a bike with a straight vertical rod connecting the front wheel to the handlebars. (or if you do see one, it will be quite hard to ride, and look stupid to boot...) Gyroscopic force also has an effect here, but it is not the main player.
Actually, it does have to do with morality. Stealing CDs is morally different (note I didn't say better or worse) than downloading MP3s, because CDs are physical. Stealing physical property deprives the owner of its use. Pirating digital property does not.
From the point of view of the RIAA, downloading MP3s is worse than stealing CDs because it implies you are participating in the global piracy rings called P2P services, and probably committing thousands of copyright infringements automatically as people download files from you. While stealing CDs is bad, it doesn't scale the way P2P does.
From the point of view of many Slashdotters, downloading MP3s is better than stealing CDs because they believe the concept of enforcing artificial scarcity for intellectual property is misguided when in reality there is no such scarcity. Stealing CDs is still bad, because CDs are physical objects and thus scarce by nature.
By now you probably think I side with the Slashdotters. Actually lately I have been leaning toward the RIAA (slightly). I can see that enforcing scarcity on IP does provide incentives to produce it; thus encouraging the production of more and higher quality IP (i.e. Hollywood movies, big-name computer games). Without that enforced scarcity, many of the incentives (i.e. $$$) go away, and it is hard for me to see how IP of the quality we have today would continue to be produced. Maybe Windows could be replaced by Linux, but the LOTR movie trilogy, Doom III, World of Warcraft, etc are not like Linux. I would be very sad to see a world which could not produce them.
Actually, installing a Firefox XPI extension is *much harder* than downloading and executing an executable. There are like 10 steps involved, and some of the steps are quite non-obvious to nontechnical users, with plenty of warnings in red text, and even a timer you have to wait through. Whereas downloading and executing a program takes at most 4 clicks with one unremarkable warning dialog. So using an XPI to deliver malware would be pretty stupid and pointless, when you could just offer an executable to download.
Of course. But the sooner we have these connections, the faster the movie studios will be forced to address those issues. It's not like Internet connections are ever going to get any slower, so it's inevitable.
Half-Life actually had quite advanced AI that could smell and hear and stuff, but you can't really tell. What you see on your screen is "guy standing there" or "guy running away" or "guy running toward me" or "guy shooting" and that's about it. You can't express very much with only those actions. All the great AI in the world is no use if your characters can't express their complexity to the player. As a player you can't tell if the AI saw you or heard you or smelled you or just magically "knows" where you are; all you know is that it found you.
If NPCs could talk (I mean really make up phrases on the fly) and express convincing emotions, then you might be able to tell what was "going through the AI's head", as it were. Then you could actually realize the complexity behind the AI, and try to fool it in various ways. When the internal state of the AI is not reflected in recognizable actions of the NPCs, it turns into a black box with two states: "looking for player" and "trying to kill player".
In essence, the biggest problem with game AI is not making it complex, but expressing that complexity to the player through the NPCs.
You probably have about the cheapest and best service available anywhere in the US in the NYC metro area, due to high population density and general tech-savvy level. You're hardly a representative sample. Here in LA, I pay $60 for 3 Mbps download and 384 kbps upload (sucks for bittorrent). The fastest available service is Speakeasy DSL at 6 Mbps download and 768 kbps upload, but that costs $110 per month (and I'm considering it). Elsewhere it's worse, and of course in the country you're lucky to get broadband at all for any price.
10 megabits per second upload with no cap? Holy crap! I want your ISP! Imagine how amazing BitTorrent would be if every connection was like that! You could download hi-def TV shows and movies faster than you could watch them. You could do real-time P2P Internet video broadcasts, and have it actually work. Anybody could be their own TV station. Communication monopolies of all types would be on their deathbeds. Who needs cable TV when I can download what I want to watch, start watching in seconds (as the rest downloads faster than I can watch it), and watch it whenever I want?
We have only begun to tap the potential of the Internet. When the average connection can both download and serve hi-def video faster-than-real-time, we will really have arrived at the Internet of the future.
If you have a higher-quality source that you can re-encode from, you can use DivX and the quality will be just as good. If you only have the low-quality WMVs to encode from, there is no point in re-encoding them because the quality will be crap. It sounds to me like you tried this already and then discounted DivX as too low-quality, then came to Slashdot. The fact is that re-encoding already compressed files is pointless, might as well leave them as WMV. DivX is actually better than WMV, if you encode from the same source.
Firstly, the languages wouldn't be lost, they simply would be known by far fewer people. I don't see that as a sad thing, because I don't see the point in making people speak different languages when a single rich language with regional variation would be just as culturally rich and much more practically useful. Of course regional variation would endure, and it might even become more prominent than it is today in English, as you suggest. But the base language will be a common language, and people from all over will be able to understand each other without too much difficulty. That's the main advance I'm hoping for.
The ability to pick up words from other languages is moot, because in the process of creating this meta-language (remember: thousands of years), nearly all the useful, distinct concepts from the world's popular languages will be incorporated. What is left can be covered by inventing new words, as is also done in English today. (ex: blog) This process is just as interesting as cross-pollination, if not more so.
I see language as a means to an end (understanding), not an end in itself. I shed no tears for lost languages; only lost concepts and lost understanding. I believe a single language evolved in the way I describe could provide all the concepts and understanding from all of today's languages, with far fewer language barriers between cultures. That's my perspective.
Really Google ought to implement a user complaint system for AdWords. At first Google ads had a very high signal-to-noise ratio, but that ratio has now dropped to the point where Google ads are no better than the rest of the tripe that passes for advertising on the web these days. I used to look at Google ads as a source of useful information; but as a result of the declining quality the attention I pay to Google ads has gone down to about the same as other web ads (i.e. basically none). IMHO Google should work a lot harder to ensure the quality of the ads they are running, because surfers learn fast to ignore ads that are useless to them. Google doesn't want to teach surfers that AdWords ads are generally useless and misleading! If an advertiser publishes a link claiming to have an item, and that item is not available for immediate ordering on the *very first* page linked to by the ad, the advertiser should be fined harshly by Google. (ebay affiliates, this means you!) If the ad is low quality in other ways, and Google recieves complaints and verifies those complaints, that should also result in fines for the advertiser.
Alexa.com. That means that ebaumsworld.com is about the 500th most visited site on the Internet, and Slashdot is around the 1000th most visited. Look here. It's a useful tool, as far as you want to trust their statistics (probably not too far).
According to Alexa, ebaumsworld has a higher traffic ranking than Slashdot, at ~500 as opposed to ~1000. Furthermore, as the AC pointed out, it serves mostly multimedia files: flash, audio, and video. It uses *way* more bandwidth than Slashdot does.
I've spent several hours perusing their collection of funny/shocking videos. Once you start, you find it hard to stop. Also a few of their celebrity prank calls are hilarious. Be sure to use Firefox, though. It's a rather shady site, and you're guaranteed to at least get millions of popups in IE, if not several spyware installations. If you use Firefox, you won't have problems.
I just found out that there is a real-time-rendered version of that piece put out by ATI as a demo. It's a lot smaller than the movie, and it works on my GeForce card too.
Yeah, this isn't even a technically impressive robotic guitar, it's just a novelty item of the sort you might see at an exhibition of modern art. The pieces it plays are not anything like what a human can do. I would be much more impressed if someone made a live version of this robotic performance. (download the mpeg2 version, the others suck)
Those millions of people won't lose their identity, because they will die long before the transition is complete. Remember we're talking about a process that takes a *long* time. The children of those people will grow up using a language that is slightly changed, and so on.
There is a undeniable cost to society from the dissemination of sexually obscene material, although I will be the first to admit the difficulty of quantifying that cost.
That sentence is very close to a contradiction. I don't see how it's undeniable at all: I deny it. I believe a much more sexually open society, including the unrestricted dissemination of so-called "obscene" material, would be a healthier society. (Though I do think that wide distribution of obscene material in a sexually restrictive society can be bad, which is the situation we have today.) Care to give us some undeniable examples? Note that in order to be undeniable they must be completely independent of your religion.
Slashdot Mirror
TrollTech is releasing QT/Win 4 under the GPL. Their version of QT/Win 3 will not be released under the GPL, so this work is not completely redundant. Furthermore, I am almost positive that this project is what prompted TrollTech to GPL QT/Win 4. They have stated many times before that they would not, but when faced with the possibility of having QT/Linux 4 ported to Windows out of their control, they very wisely chose to GPL their own version instead to keep the QT developer community from fragmenting.
The FSF wrote the license; they are also its custodian and its principal enforcer. You don't believe them? What would it take to convince you, a choir of angels and God Himself?
So what I'm wondering is: will Cell make 3D accelerators obsolete? For some time graphics cards have been moving away from single-purpose graphics circuits toward general vector processing. CPUs are coming the other direction, from fully general instruction sets to specialized vector processing instructions. Cell seems to be the logical merger between a CPU and a graphics card. Will Cell workstations have the raw vector-processing power to make a 3D accelerator card redundant? Or will specialized graphics cards still be able to have a significant edge in rasterizing textured polygons?
So, here's the definitive answer: A company can take TrollTech's GPL'd QT, develop internal applications for free, and never give the source to anybody. If an employee distributes a copy, they are doing so without a license and the rights given by the GPL are void; so the company can't be caught in a situation where they are forced to suddenly open up their application after accidental distribution.
It sucks, but that's the GPL as it stands. I think this is a HUGE loophole in the GPL, and it should definitely be closed in GPL v3. The code should always be licensed to individuals, never corporations.
TrollTech is taking a big gamble here; probably they are being pushed into this by the projects out there working to port QT/X11 to Windows for KDE ports. It was only a matter of time, really. I think that they will see an unfortunately large revenue drop as a result of this. But on the bright side, KDE 4 will probably be ported to Windows in short order.
The analogy also sucks because cars are mass-produced by the millions. If they only ever built 20 Honda Civics, they would cost a lot more than they do. The cost of developing the design of the Honda Civic is known only to Honda, but I could easily imagine it approaching the price of a typical space system; especially if you factor in the cost of its predecessors whose designs it borrows from (since that borrowing is not nearly as easy to do in a space system which is not merely a yearly update of a previous model). Only by selling hundreds of thousands of cars does Honda recoup that cost.
Why not use Wikipedia? The database is downloadable in its entirety, quite large, and contains plenty of great information about topics from advanced mathematics to pop culture; all in quite down-to-earth normal language written and refined by normal people. I think Wikipedia ought to be a tremendously great resource for computer learning research.
All that rider leaning stuff I was talking about was for the "no hands" turning by leaning case, which is something Ungrounded Lightning had mentioned. I do imagine that it doesn't work very well on a motorcycle going 60 mph due to the huge gyroscopic forces keeping you upright. (I don't ride them myself). However, it should work on a slow motorcycle, and it works on a bicycle of course.
That demo was pretty cool. I saw it because I downloaded the "bill gates gets blue screen during product demo" video, and it was in the same presentation. Interested parties can download the whole thing here. or here. (You can stream it from MS faster but they edited out the many many techincal difficulties...)
Turning by leaning does require gyroscopic force, but not in the way you describe. It is required to allow you to change your center of gravity by leaning. On a bike with no centrifugal force (a stopped bike), you cannot change your center of gravity by just leaning without turning the handlebars. If you could, it would be easy to sit upright on a stopped bike.
When gyroscopic force enters the equation, it does allow you to change your center of gravity by merely leaning your body. Once you lean to the right and move your center of gravity to the right, you start falling over to the right. The reason you don't fall over completely is that the wheel also turns to the right of its own accord, which turns you and brings it back under the moved center of gravity. But the main reason for the turning not gyroscopic force; the real reason is the fact that the turning axis for the front wheel is not vertical. This means that when the bike is leaning to the right, the front wheel has a natural tendancy to turn right, even when stationary. Imagine a bike on its kickstand; the wheel is always turned in the direction of the lean, right? That's not a coincidence. This is the reason why you will never see a bike with a straight vertical rod connecting the front wheel to the handlebars. (or if you do see one, it will be quite hard to ride, and look stupid to boot...) Gyroscopic force also has an effect here, but it is not the main player.
I found a cool site that explains it all: Motorcycle stability and steering.
From the point of view of the RIAA, downloading MP3s is worse than stealing CDs because it implies you are participating in the global piracy rings called P2P services, and probably committing thousands of copyright infringements automatically as people download files from you. While stealing CDs is bad, it doesn't scale the way P2P does.
From the point of view of many Slashdotters, downloading MP3s is better than stealing CDs because they believe the concept of enforcing artificial scarcity for intellectual property is misguided when in reality there is no such scarcity. Stealing CDs is still bad, because CDs are physical objects and thus scarce by nature.
By now you probably think I side with the Slashdotters. Actually lately I have been leaning toward the RIAA (slightly). I can see that enforcing scarcity on IP does provide incentives to produce it; thus encouraging the production of more and higher quality IP (i.e. Hollywood movies, big-name computer games). Without that enforced scarcity, many of the incentives (i.e. $$$) go away, and it is hard for me to see how IP of the quality we have today would continue to be produced. Maybe Windows could be replaced by Linux, but the LOTR movie trilogy, Doom III, World of Warcraft, etc are not like Linux. I would be very sad to see a world which could not produce them.
Well what was the problem with DivX then, if you don't mind my asking?
Actually, installing a Firefox XPI extension is *much harder* than downloading and executing an executable. There are like 10 steps involved, and some of the steps are quite non-obvious to nontechnical users, with plenty of warnings in red text, and even a timer you have to wait through. Whereas downloading and executing a program takes at most 4 clicks with one unremarkable warning dialog. So using an XPI to deliver malware would be pretty stupid and pointless, when you could just offer an executable to download.
Of course. But the sooner we have these connections, the faster the movie studios will be forced to address those issues. It's not like Internet connections are ever going to get any slower, so it's inevitable.
If NPCs could talk (I mean really make up phrases on the fly) and express convincing emotions, then you might be able to tell what was "going through the AI's head", as it were. Then you could actually realize the complexity behind the AI, and try to fool it in various ways. When the internal state of the AI is not reflected in recognizable actions of the NPCs, it turns into a black box with two states: "looking for player" and "trying to kill player".
In essence, the biggest problem with game AI is not making it complex, but expressing that complexity to the player through the NPCs.
You probably have about the cheapest and best service available anywhere in the US in the NYC metro area, due to high population density and general tech-savvy level. You're hardly a representative sample. Here in LA, I pay $60 for 3 Mbps download and 384 kbps upload (sucks for bittorrent). The fastest available service is Speakeasy DSL at 6 Mbps download and 768 kbps upload, but that costs $110 per month (and I'm considering it). Elsewhere it's worse, and of course in the country you're lucky to get broadband at all for any price.
We have only begun to tap the potential of the Internet. When the average connection can both download and serve hi-def video faster-than-real-time, we will really have arrived at the Internet of the future.
If you have a higher-quality source that you can re-encode from, you can use DivX and the quality will be just as good. If you only have the low-quality WMVs to encode from, there is no point in re-encoding them because the quality will be crap. It sounds to me like you tried this already and then discounted DivX as too low-quality, then came to Slashdot. The fact is that re-encoding already compressed files is pointless, might as well leave them as WMV. DivX is actually better than WMV, if you encode from the same source.
The ability to pick up words from other languages is moot, because in the process of creating this meta-language (remember: thousands of years), nearly all the useful, distinct concepts from the world's popular languages will be incorporated. What is left can be covered by inventing new words, as is also done in English today. (ex: blog) This process is just as interesting as cross-pollination, if not more so.
I see language as a means to an end (understanding), not an end in itself. I shed no tears for lost languages; only lost concepts and lost understanding. I believe a single language evolved in the way I describe could provide all the concepts and understanding from all of today's languages, with far fewer language barriers between cultures. That's my perspective.
Really Google ought to implement a user complaint system for AdWords. At first Google ads had a very high signal-to-noise ratio, but that ratio has now dropped to the point where Google ads are no better than the rest of the tripe that passes for advertising on the web these days. I used to look at Google ads as a source of useful information; but as a result of the declining quality the attention I pay to Google ads has gone down to about the same as other web ads (i.e. basically none). IMHO Google should work a lot harder to ensure the quality of the ads they are running, because surfers learn fast to ignore ads that are useless to them. Google doesn't want to teach surfers that AdWords ads are generally useless and misleading! If an advertiser publishes a link claiming to have an item, and that item is not available for immediate ordering on the *very first* page linked to by the ad, the advertiser should be fined harshly by Google. (ebay affiliates, this means you!) If the ad is low quality in other ways, and Google recieves complaints and verifies those complaints, that should also result in fines for the advertiser.
Alexa.com. That means that ebaumsworld.com is about the 500th most visited site on the Internet, and Slashdot is around the 1000th most visited. Look here. It's a useful tool, as far as you want to trust their statistics (probably not too far).
I've spent several hours perusing their collection of funny/shocking videos. Once you start, you find it hard to stop. Also a few of their celebrity prank calls are hilarious. Be sure to use Firefox, though. It's a rather shady site, and you're guaranteed to at least get millions of popups in IE, if not several spyware installations. If you use Firefox, you won't have problems.
I just found out that there is a real-time-rendered version of that piece put out by ATI as a demo. It's a lot smaller than the movie, and it works on my GeForce card too.
Yeah, this isn't even a technically impressive robotic guitar, it's just a novelty item of the sort you might see at an exhibition of modern art. The pieces it plays are not anything like what a human can do. I would be much more impressed if someone made a live version of this robotic performance. (download the mpeg2 version, the others suck)
Those millions of people won't lose their identity, because they will die long before the transition is complete. Remember we're talking about a process that takes a *long* time. The children of those people will grow up using a language that is slightly changed, and so on.
That sentence is very close to a contradiction. I don't see how it's undeniable at all: I deny it. I believe a much more sexually open society, including the unrestricted dissemination of so-called "obscene" material, would be a healthier society. (Though I do think that wide distribution of obscene material in a sexually restrictive society can be bad, which is the situation we have today.) Care to give us some undeniable examples? Note that in order to be undeniable they must be completely independent of your religion.