Here's a perfect example: When's the last time you heard of a company making money selling Commodore 64 games? The Commodore 64 is a perfect example of an obsolete technology. But even though the technology is obsolete, and for all practical purposes, worthless, the games themselves will be copyrighted for another 90 bazillion years (give or take a few). Even the companies that still exist (like EA) are not making a dime from these games, yet they are still protected. Why? How does that benefit anyone?
It benefits them in that they retain the exclusive right to re-release their old games for modern platforms. They have been pretty much screwed out of this by the emulation community(of which I count myself a member), but it still allows companies to maintain exclusive control of names like Pac Man, Metroid, and Frogger. All of these come from ancient games, but they are still valuable marketing assets.
If someone "pirates" a Commodore 64 game today, does the SPA consider it a loss for the company at the software's full, 1985 retail price?
But of course:) The more inflated their figures are, the better they justify their employment.
Agreed. People need to start distinguishing between cards that are made to be DirectSound acceleration hardware (like SoundBlaster) and cards that are made to deliver decent quality analogue audio.
How is "when you control the hardware specification" any less of a monopoly?
What part of Original Equipment Manufacturer do you not understand? OEM's always control the hardware specification on systems that they produce, so they can preconfigure Linux to load whatever drivers are needed without user intervension. They already do the same with Windows.
I can fry my hard disk and be up with windows [patches and all] in under 3 hours or so [assuming my hardware is not broken...]. That includes all the reboot time and such [and coke breaks].
The reason why you can do this is because your system was already spec'd out for Windows or it came with an OEM version of Windows with all the drivers you need properly configured(my system won't just work with a retail windows cd for instance). My point is simply that an OEM could easily do the same with Linux, just at a lower price.
For starters the average home user won't get passed the root login screen since they will be stumped as to what the password is.
So the OEM has to set GDM or KDM to log into a non-root account by default, that's not difficult.
Then when there NIC or video card is not working they will not know to run Xconfigurator or whatever...
When you control the hardware specification this is not an issue, and people that buy highly integrated systems usually aren't planning on upgrading by hand.
I used to think the same thing about the same thing about the whole ease of use issue, then I tried XP. Truth be told, for just file managing, web browsing, and all that crap KDE is vastly superior to Windows (and I hate KDE, don't get me wrong).
At least somebody gets it...I do so wish one of the big OEM's would just grow a pair and say "This computer is $600 with Windows and Word or $500 with Linux and StarOffice."
No large companies are going to switch to desktop Linux of any kind without inside influence, but Linux could easily take the low end market with a very little OEM support.
Of course you realize that bandwidth of that sort is more or less worthless for most applications. All that matters is low latency, and that RDRAM probably carries something in the neighborhood of 80~100ns as compared to >10ns latency of modern DRAM.
That and said 300mhz proc has virtually no ability to execute serial instructions(no, 128 bit word size does not make it faster). Without a vectorizing compiler the PS2 has precious little computational power.
So for any non-game tasks, my Athlon 550 is probably a great deal faster.
before you unmount the filesystem, as the bug only affects dirty inodes(so mounting ro would fix it). Also, if you can't or don't want to physically pull the plug, you could always do a
# telinit S
#
# umount
# sync
# reboot
There was a mail that read something like this on LKML, but I'm having trouble finding it. You might want to find it if you're thinking about shutting down that way, just in case I forgot something horribly stupid.
Companies that do obscure stuff probably pull crap like this all the time and just assume nobody is going to notice. After all, if they did tell anyone, Mplayer could just be suddenly declared 'free for noncommercial use' in future versions. Granted this isn't legal or right or anything, but it is probably a financially safer route to take in a lot of cases.
I do so wish moderators would read links before modding. The linked page only has to do with making their router play nice with an Airport base station, which is not really "Mac".
Linksys really is ass on a stick though. They don't guarantee anything beyond the ability to route HTTP, and all that I have seen from them has been finicky and kept rather short uptimes.
But, I suspect it's only a matter of a year or two until you see real $300 "Wintendo" boxes based on the IBM AT architecture that hook up to your TV. That is, unless Microsoft plays some nasty OEM tricks.
Microsoft already has...the reason why there are no $300 Wintendos for sale is because at that price point, Windows makes up better than 1/2 of the wholesale value of the console. MS can and probably will screw the OEM's out of the console business so long as they can control the price of Windows.
Why not just help finish the DirectFB [directfb.org] and then keep everything native on linux. X is not as fast as a framebuffer, and BeOS was known for its video editing abilities.
Because DirectFB is a pointless hack. If implemented correctly(ie, not reliant on any X protocol stuff), such a BeOS wrapper for XFree would probably run faster than DirectFB would simply because DGA and Xv get to use video card drivers that recieve much more attention and are consequently better tuned.
I don't really check up on these things much, but just how fast would a nVidia card run without their closed source drivers? Also how about 3d acceleration with any other card? X integration would do much for its 3d capabilities.
M$ finally dropped dos, lets drop xwindows.
M$ has yet to drop DOS, it still seems to be in WinXP after all. They simply replaced pure DOS with something that could do everything it can (including run DOS) plus some extra crap. Any X server supporting DGA or Xv can do everything DirectFB can, but can DirectFB do everything that X can?
What if the person that they finally decide to chase after doesn't have the money or resources to put up with IBM's legal department? Old unknown patents are really dangerous (scenarios like GIF and MP3 come to mind).
IBM isn't holy, these are the same people that want to put hardware copy control on your hard drive. Though at the same time, I doubt they did this on purpose. There's probably an idiot in some idiot somewhere in IBM who honestly thought this was a new thing.
Yeah, I bought a 75gxp for ~$140 when they were shiny and new...that one died in four months, they sent me a refurbished replacement...which died in TWO WEEKS. During which time my WesternDigital drive in the same box experienced no problems.
Eventually I just shelled out another $200 and bought a WD800BB, which has been going good for about a week now.
It would be really cool if I could get some of my money back, as it seems I and a great deal of people on StorageReview.com's (just check the tech support board) forums have gotten totally shafted on this.
Really, that's what it's intended for, and just like with the ungodly pricey/heavy iridium phones, there are probably people who need this kind of functionality right now who will buy a few too.
Linux didn't have enough market share to warrent them supporting the team arena mod, but that didn't stop them.
I seem to recall that large parts of quake were designed on IRIX machines and they are rather better suited to 3d stuff than PC's, so it probably would be almost trivial to get it playable.
I like id, they are one of the few game companies out there whose sense of fun doesn't stop where the buck does, and they seem to acually care about their customers.
This has nothing to do with Windows software, as I have failed to complain about various posts for Windows-only game releases.
The point is that I was rather annoyed to see an EXTREMELY poorly written article about very well known software that has been out for ages. This is IMO, not "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters".
The tone of the article seems to indicate using file sharing on platforms other than Windows because it was titled "File Sharing: Decentralizing, Open-Source Fasttrack" and contained phrases like "which was originally only accessible under Windows". Posting a list of mostly closed source and Windows only clients seemed out of place to me.
This anger over assuming/. is a Linux related site really disturbs me. If a site runs mostly Linux related articles, is owned by a Linux company, and links to sites like freshmeat.net and linux.com, then it would be safe to assume that it plays to a mostly Linux crowd.
It's kind of neat and all, but a list of mostly windows clients doesn't really hold much interest for what is mostly a linux crowd.
Not to be mean, but this list in particular doesn't even clearly distinguish between the way the client and the protocol it uses, and is rather incomplete(no filesharing client list is complete without Lopster).
The open source kazaa/morpheus client seems promising, but it looks a bit prerelease, not quite News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters grade material really.
Let's try this one again with the magic of substitution:
Let me get this straight--they admit that their
COMPUTER is hackable PLUS they're releasing the specs? I don't get. Won't the specs just make it easier to hack? Personally, I favor security, even if it happens to be security through obscurity.
I don't know that I'd want to buy a COMPUTER if I knew hackers could take control of it. The consequences of hackers infiltrating a COMPUTER could range from the merely annoying to the catastrophic.
As well, has anybody assessed the national security risks associated with hackable COMPUTERS, in light of the recent terror attacks?
I sincerely hope this was a troll.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than
feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish
to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person,
it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either
must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of
men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and
as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you
their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the
need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And
that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected
other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by
payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be
earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied
upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than
one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation
which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity
for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment
which never fails.
> Uhmm... No... Over 90K died in the inital blast at Hiroshima... Only 20k people in the WTC...
Man, people go fucking daft when disasters happen. What does Hiroshima have to do with Pearl Harbor exactly? I really hate to be mean about it, but at least Hiroshima actually accomplished something other than killing a whole bunch of people.
I think you overestimate the intelligence of the average/. reader...
I mean really, does anyone wonder why there has never been another truly Grade A genious like Alan Turing or Seymour Cray running around the computer industry?
People like this aren't likely to be scared by sensationalist ramblings, and unlike the fictional (and rather unrealistic) Good Will Hunting monologue, they probably realise the necesity of things like the NSA.
Slashdot Mirror
It benefits them in that they retain the exclusive right to re-release their old games for modern platforms. They have been pretty much screwed out of this by the emulation community(of which I count myself a member), but it still allows companies to maintain exclusive control of names like Pac Man, Metroid, and Frogger. All of these come from ancient games, but they are still valuable marketing assets.
If someone "pirates" a Commodore 64 game today, does the SPA consider it a loss for the company at the software's full, 1985 retail price?
But of course :) The more inflated their figures are, the better they justify their employment.
Two thoughts:
1. NEVER EVER CONVERT BETWEEN LOSSY FORMATS, it will add unnesessary artifacts and ruin the audio quality.
2. I wasn't aware that the thought police would be any more able to charge money for posession of MP3's than Ogg's .
Agreed. People need to start distinguishing between cards that are made to be DirectSound acceleration hardware (like SoundBlaster) and cards that are made to deliver decent quality analogue audio.
What part of Original Equipment Manufacturer do you not understand? OEM's always control the hardware specification on systems that they produce, so they can preconfigure Linux to load whatever drivers are needed without user intervension. They already do the same with Windows.
I can fry my hard disk and be up with windows [patches and all] in under 3 hours or so [assuming my hardware is not broken...]. That includes all the reboot time and such [and coke breaks].
The reason why you can do this is because your system was already spec'd out for Windows or it came with an OEM version of Windows with all the drivers you need properly configured(my system won't just work with a retail windows cd for instance). My point is simply that an OEM could easily do the same with Linux, just at a lower price.
For starters the average home user won't get passed the root login screen since they will be stumped as to what the password is.
So the OEM has to set GDM or KDM to log into a non-root account by default, that's not difficult.
Then when there NIC or video card is not working they will not know to run Xconfigurator or whatever...
When you control the hardware specification this is not an issue, and people that buy highly integrated systems usually aren't planning on upgrading by hand.
I used to think the same thing about the same thing about the whole ease of use issue, then I tried XP. Truth be told, for just file managing, web browsing, and all that crap KDE is vastly superior to Windows (and I hate KDE, don't get me wrong).
At least somebody gets it...I do so wish one of the big OEM's would just grow a pair and say "This computer is $600 with Windows and Word or $500 with Linux and StarOffice."
No large companies are going to switch to desktop Linux of any kind without inside influence, but Linux could easily take the low end market with a very little OEM support.
Of course you realize that bandwidth of that sort is more or less worthless for most applications. All that matters is low latency, and that RDRAM probably carries something in the neighborhood of 80~100ns as compared to >10ns latency of modern DRAM.
That and said 300mhz proc has virtually no ability to execute serial instructions(no, 128 bit word size does not make it faster). Without a vectorizing compiler the PS2 has precious little computational power.
So for any non-game tasks, my Athlon 550 is probably a great deal faster.
Debian for PPC has been around for a while. Installation is not pleasant of course, but it does work quite nicely on my old 603/200.
It seems the second set of commands got mangled, sorry:
telinit S
kill everything but your shell
sync
unmount everything but root
sync
reboot
To avoid corruption on unmount, simply type
# sync
before you unmount the filesystem, as the bug only affects dirty inodes(so mounting ro would fix it). Also, if you can't or don't want to physically pull the plug, you could always do a
# telinit S
#
# umount
# sync
# reboot
There was a mail that read something like this on LKML, but I'm having trouble finding it. You might want to find it if you're thinking about shutting down that way, just in case I forgot something horribly stupid.
Companies that do obscure stuff probably pull crap like this all the time and just assume nobody is going to notice. After all, if they did tell anyone, Mplayer could just be suddenly declared 'free for noncommercial use' in future versions. Granted this isn't legal or right or anything, but it is probably a financially safer route to take in a lot of cases.
Linksys really is ass on a stick though. They don't guarantee anything beyond the ability to route HTTP, and all that I have seen from them has been finicky and kept rather short uptimes.
Microsoft already has...the reason why there are no $300 Wintendos for sale is because at that price point, Windows makes up better than 1/2 of the wholesale value of the console. MS can and probably will screw the OEM's out of the console business so long as they can control the price of Windows.
Because DirectFB is a pointless hack. If implemented correctly(ie, not reliant on any X protocol stuff), such a BeOS wrapper for XFree would probably run faster than DirectFB would simply because DGA and Xv get to use video card drivers that recieve much more attention and are consequently better tuned.
I don't really check up on these things much, but just how fast would a nVidia card run without their closed source drivers? Also how about 3d acceleration with any other card? X integration would do much for its 3d capabilities.
M$ finally dropped dos, lets drop xwindows.
M$ has yet to drop DOS, it still seems to be in WinXP after all. They simply replaced pure DOS with something that could do everything it can (including run DOS) plus some extra crap. Any X server supporting DGA or Xv can do everything DirectFB can, but can DirectFB do everything that X can?
As long as we're going for broke, how's about a little preemption too?
What if the person that they finally decide to chase after doesn't have the money or resources to put up with IBM's legal department? Old unknown patents are really dangerous (scenarios like GIF and MP3 come to mind).
IBM isn't holy, these are the same people that want to put hardware copy control on your hard drive. Though at the same time, I doubt they did this on purpose. There's probably an idiot in some idiot somewhere in IBM who honestly thought this was a new thing.
Yeah, I bought a 75gxp for ~$140 when they were shiny and new...that one died in four months, they sent me a refurbished replacement...which died in TWO WEEKS. During which time my WesternDigital drive in the same box experienced no problems.
Eventually I just shelled out another $200 and bought a WD800BB, which has been going good for about a week now.
It would be really cool if I could get some of my money back, as it seems I and a great deal of people on StorageReview.com's (just check the tech support board) forums have gotten totally shafted on this.
Really, that's what it's intended for, and just like with the ungodly pricey/heavy iridium phones, there are probably people who need this kind of functionality right now who will buy a few too.
Linux didn't have enough market share to warrent them supporting the team arena mod, but that didn't stop them.
I seem to recall that large parts of quake were designed on IRIX machines and they are rather better suited to 3d stuff than PC's, so it probably would be almost trivial to get it playable.
I like id, they are one of the few game companies out there whose sense of fun doesn't stop where the buck does, and they seem to acually care about their customers.
This has nothing to do with Windows software, as I have failed to complain about various posts for Windows-only game releases.
/. is a Linux related site really disturbs me. If a site runs mostly Linux related articles, is owned by a Linux company, and links to sites like freshmeat.net and linux.com, then it would be safe to assume that it plays to a mostly Linux crowd.
The point is that I was rather annoyed to see an EXTREMELY poorly written article about very well known software that has been out for ages. This is IMO, not "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters".
The tone of the article seems to indicate using file sharing on platforms other than Windows because it was titled "File Sharing: Decentralizing, Open-Source Fasttrack" and contained phrases like "which was originally only accessible under Windows". Posting a list of mostly closed source and Windows only clients seemed out of place to me.
This anger over assuming
Not to be mean, but this list in particular doesn't even clearly distinguish between the way the client and the protocol it uses, and is rather incomplete(no filesharing client list is complete without Lopster).
The open source kazaa/morpheus client seems promising, but it looks a bit prerelease, not quite News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters grade material really.
- Let me get this straight--they admit that their
- COMPUTER is hackable PLUS they're releasing the specs? I don't get. Won't the specs just make it easier to hack? Personally, I favor security, even if it happens to be security through obscurity.
I sincerely hope this was a troll.I don't know that I'd want to buy a COMPUTER if I knew hackers could take control of it. The consequences of hackers infiltrating a COMPUTER could range from the merely annoying to the catastrophic.
As well, has anybody assessed the national security risks associated with hackable COMPUTERS, in light of the recent terror attacks?
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than
feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish
to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person,
it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either
must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of
men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and
as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you
their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the
need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And
that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected
other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by
payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be
earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied
upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than
one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation
which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity
for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment
which never fails.
I think we all know who said this...
Man, people go fucking daft when disasters happen. What does Hiroshima have to do with Pearl Harbor exactly? I really hate to be mean about it, but at least Hiroshima actually accomplished something other than killing a whole bunch of people.
I mean really, does anyone wonder why there has never been another truly Grade A genious like Alan Turing or Seymour Cray running around the computer industry?
People like this aren't likely to be scared by sensationalist ramblings, and unlike the fictional (and rather unrealistic) Good Will Hunting monologue, they probably realise the necesity of things like the NSA.