Actually, his review isn't that hostile. He basically says that Xine and mplayer (the two biggest and liveliest projects at the moment) are both very capable of displaying the video, but both have braindead interfaces that place bells and whistles over usability. True enough. This isn't a matter of failing to provide an interface, just of doing it wrong.
Yes, media players on Linux have crappy interfaces. Most media players, regardless of platform, have crappy interfaces. Perhaps Linux is worse at the moment, but it's not the condemnation that the poster suggested it was.
TV Listings are available for do it yourself PVRs.
If you're willing to screenscrape, you can use XMLTV to get your listings. The only potential problem is that if lots of people start screenscraping the free web sources are likely to try and stop people from doing so.
If you're willing to pay for the service, you can use TVNow and pay $30 per year (about $2.50 per month, a fraction of what Tivo charges).
BAH. This is really stupid. Until someone hacks together something that actually works, and doesn't require a PHd in driver hacking, and syncs the audio properly, and has a 1/10^6 chance of working on someone else's build of linux/hardware, then let's not waste time discussing the *neato* applications of linux PVR. It's still a fantasy for private/OSS projects...
Chill. Relax. There is no need for longwinded rants with random bold words. No, the free software PVR projects are not ready for prime time yet. It shouldn't be suprisingly, they're all very new. Mozilla's few few years weren't terribly promising. Linux itself took many years before approaching general usability. For the software to reach a polished stage we need to start with the crappy first pass. There is lots of experimentation and playing around. Core components (like drivers to TV cards and MPEG encoders) are still early in the development stages themselves. Eventually things will settle down, all but a handful of projects will fold, and things will become ready for you. In the meantime, let other people do a little harmless cheerleading. We need early adopters and fans to help work out the bugs in the system, do development, and keep the developers inspired.
(If you feel a burning need to emphasize something, the <em> tag will generally give you a more subtle, easy to read result. Bold text tends to leap out, dominating the paragraph. If you really want readers to just focus on those key points, consider a bulletted list using <ul> and <li>)
Laws like this are designed to help parents protect children. For example - when I have a kid and hes 13, I will not want him looking at pornography...
When I have a thirteen year old kid, I don't want him looking at Nazi propoganda. Shall we pass a law restricting that from him? How about birth control information, or information on other religions, or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition?
It's hard enough to be a parent without having to actively defend my family from companies whose only real concern is making money. Laws like this can really help a parent, and if one accepts the premise that a parent should be restricting content to their children, there is no real downside.
There is a downside. It's not a huge one, but it's present. If I've decided to allow my sixteen year old son with his new driver's license to purchase a game, why should I have to travel with him to do it? I've decided he's old enough to handle it and want to encourage him to learn independence to get the game, why do I need to chaperone him? At least it's not as bad as a theater that forces me to sit with him through an R movie.
Ignoring that downside, there is no significant benefit. Worse, there is the illusion of benefit that may lead to parents relaxing their guard. As a kid I had relatively easy access to pornography, tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs, dispite all of them being illegal for me. As a result my parents still needed to keep an eye on me and talk me with me about these things, even though I theoretically didn't have access to them. The same will be true of violent video games. If you're raising your children well the law won't particularlly help. If you're raising your children poorly the law can't save you.
I suppose if people are insistent about this, I'd rather see such laws passed locally, not with one-size-fits-all rules passed down from D.C.
Well a lot of people CAN'T be trusted to raise their children. These kids grow up and their actions as adults affect the rest of us, too, so I have no problem with the government stepping in.
Sadly, all too true. However limiting access to violent video games seems like such a small and meaningless step. Kids who really want access, the kids who will harm society, will get access (much like they get access to tobacco, alcohol, pornography, weapons, and illegal drugs today). Compared to the violence and abuse that many of these kids see in real life, the fantastic world of a video game has a minimal impact.
If we really want to increase the number of kids who go on to become productive members of society there are more effective ways, primarily by improving the quality of education, especially in financially challenged school districts.
Only this law isn't aimed at parents. It's aimed at the kids. Nobody is mandating or prohibiting what adults buy for their children.
Such a law effectively says "We don't trust you to raise your children yourself. We'll decide which things children are and are not allowed access to by default, you'll need to specifically intervene to change those decisions." Of course, there are no similar laws preventing people from selling kids copies of the Bible, the Koran, information on birth control, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, news coverage of grisly wars or murders, works promiting socialism, captialism, nazism, free love, or marijuana or a host of other things that various parents would find unacceptable for their children. We're selecting a fairly arbitrary area (violence in video games) are creating a not terribly helpful law. Who does this law serve? Parents trying to protect their kids? There will remain a huge number of objectionable things available to kids, so the parents will need to continue to monitor and talk to their kids anyway. While you're discussing the evils of premaritial sex, filthy hippies, Rush Limbaugh, and whatever else you feel, adding in violent video games is pretty easy.
This sort of (proposed) law takes responsbility away from parents. This sort of law is trying to create a safe world where parents ignore their kids. Unfortunately you'll never succeed in creating such a world, there are too many loopholes and law breakers. As a kid I had relatively easy access to alcohol, illegal drugs, pornography, and tobacco. While the laws that strove to protect me from these things made it harder, it presents a very real danger to me. This sort of law creates a false sense of security in too many people. "I don't need to educate young Johnny on violence in games and explain why I feel it's wrong, since he can't possibly get access to violent games."
A popular argument for ratings (or worse, limits) is that it gives parents more options and information. Sure it does, but where do you draw the line? Some parents who believe strongly in creationism will object to their children having easy access to books on evolution. Should we label those and keep them out of kids hands? Perhaps they object to their children having easy access to what they consider objectionable political speech (Gotta project Johnny from those evil (Liberals|Conservatives). Another label for that? We'll need to label news and history similarly, there is a lot of violence there. And for the extremely socially conservative a travel brochure showing men and women in swimwear at the beach would be shocking, so another label for them (perhaps, "Women not in burquas"?). Ultimately parents need to take responsibility and monitor what their child sees. A lack of a Violence or Sexuality label doesn't mean that the work is acceptable. The only option gained is the option to not review the work yourself and to trust the simplistic label judgements of someone else.
Ratings and limits also limit what is available to consenting adults. Some businesses will simply decide to not carry works based on the rating (as opposed to reviewing the work itself). A particular rating may have a nasty stigma associated with it, discouraging potential customers. The NC-17 film rating in the United States is a good example. Many theaters will refuse to show such films, not out of a reasoned judgement, but for simple fear of backlash. Potential customers may be detered by a popular opinion that it must be smut. As a result of this many filmmakers chose to self-censor, carefully tweaking their work to fit into the target audience bin of G, PG, or R. Works beyond R are the exception as a result. Works that are a bit dangerous for their category (say, a relatively edgy PG work), get tamed down to ensure the desired rating. While it's still possible to make create films under this system, it does stifle some creativity.
The responsibility for raising children lies with their parents. There were no laws limiting my access to various books, video games, and the like when I was a kid. I certainly had access to many illegal things (alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs). My parents didn't monitor me constantly, so I could have done what I wanted. But I didn't. Why? Because my parents took reponsibility for me. They paid attention to me, they kept an eye on what media I consumed, talked to me, discussed ethics with me, set limits for me, and punished me when I violated those limits. We don't need more laws, we need good parents. Laws can't create good parents.
parents have a right to raise their children as they see fit by not letting them play video games (or watch a movie, or anything else for that matter).
Absolutely! Of course, my parents saw fit to not let me play certain video games, watch certain movies or television shows, read certain magazines, and in a few cases read certain books. They managed to do all of this without any laws enforcing it. Instead they relied on the tried and true method of actually being parents, involving themselves in my life, paying attention to me, striving to instill ethics in me, setting limits, and punishing me when I violated those limits. I seem to have turned out okay.
Laws like this are unnecessary and won't significantly change things. Good parents will continue to be good parents and bad parents will continue to be bad parents. Attempting to replace bad parents with laws is a terrible idea.
I dont think the GPL gives you more freedom since it takes away the freedom to use the code in anyway way you may wish.
All things are relative, including freedom. The GPL certainly gives you more freedom than Microsoft's EULA. Everything Microsoft's EULA allows the GPL allows. So in this common common case the GPL is more free.
The only license that gives you true freedom is the BSD one.
But the BSD license takes away my freedom to strip off the original authors copyright statement and delete the disclaimer of warrante. If we're going to demand absolute freedom you need to look at truly public domain software, no copyright.
It is ironic how over-estimated open source really is, rather than being seen for what it often really is
-A last ditch, before being kicked in the grave attempt
Yes, some software is open sourced as a last ditch rescue attempt. So what? Most of that software proceeds to fail and we forget about it. The successful open source software (Apache, Gnome, KDE, Gnumeric, Linux, GCC, GIMP, and others) isn't. It's software started for the sole purpose of providing the software in an open source way.
-A shirking of normal software development responsibilities.
Normal software development responsibilities typically come with a paycheck. If you'd like to pay for the software, I'm sure you can get the support and improvements you're interested in. There are even companies dedicated to this.
Many open source projects have exceptional documentation, great user interfaces, and are exceptionally stable. Sure, you'll find open source software with bad documentation, poor user interfaces, and are unstable. Of course, you'll also find proprietary software with these same flaws. I'm sure you avoid crappy proprietary software, so just start avoiding crappy open source software. Meanwhile people who do like the crappy open source software will keep working to improve it, perhaps to a level you're willing to use, or someone might decide to try a business model around supporting the software, bringing it to a level you'd accept.
With open source software I have additional options. If I'm dissatisfied with the interface or stability, I can fix it or hire someone else to fix it. There is typically an abundance of for-sale documentation for popular open source products (sure, it costs money, but since the software was cheap, spend some of your savings on a book).
Relatedly, could you point to the definition of ironic you're using? I'm not seeing one that matches your use.
Open source is overrated. When it comes to software, free as in beer is about 100x more important to the average consumer than free as in source code.
So what? Yes, most people don't appreciate the freedom of the source code. Most people also don't appreciate the freedom to repair their own cars. People tend to think short term costs. But that they don't care about the long term benefits doesn't invalidate those benefits.
No, you might not want to debug the Helix source. Great. But the open release still provide you with advantages. Previously, if you had a problem with the server or want a change, you had to go to Real. If Real wasn't interested you were out of luck. Now they have competition. If there is demand businesses will grow up around supporting and modifying the source in ways Reals won't. If there isn't demand you can still hire someone to do the work. You've just gained some options, but you can still go to Real if you want.
Of course, it may be that there isn't enough demand to create dedicated businesses, and the cost of hiring someone to make the change will also be unreasonable. Such is life, not all options pan out. But if the software remained proprietary the options would never have had a chance.
So I guess we like Real now?.... My, what a fickle crowd we are.
Why does this sort of foolishness always get moderated up? Here are some clues for the clearly clueless:
Slashdot is composed of a wide variety of people with varying opinions. Despite popular opinion Slashdot is not a hivemind. As a result the singular "voice" of Slashdot is a bit confused. You'll find this to be true of any forum with many voices. Would you equally complain that the Republican party is fickle because some Republicans are pro-abortion while others are anti-abortion?
Slashdot tries (and sometimes succeeds at) to report news for nerds. Even if Slashdot has a strong anti-Real bias, the release of this source code is newsworthy to many of the nerds reading. Similarly some of Slashdot's readers are extremely anti-large media, so Slashdot posts anti-large media stories ("Attacks on Copyright"). Other Slashdot readers are very pro-large media, so Slashdot posts pro-large media stories ("New Movie Coming Out").
You can't simply label a person or a company as Good or Bad. Most people are a bit more complex. If you believe that Free Software is Good but sleezy marketing is Bad, then Real's release is Good but their proprietary software is Bad. Depending on how you weigh things you personally might decide that Real is generally more Good than Bad, or more Bad than Good. You can still applaud the good works while condemning the bad works. Similarly,
Bill Gates donates lots of money to various charities. I think this is good. Bill Gates also knowingly lead his company to use monopoly power to squash competitors. I think this is bad. I'm not fickle or hypocritical, just appreciating the Bill Gates is a complex individual. It is extremely rare for people or companies to be Entirely Good or Entirely Bad.
This makes no sense to me... spam to me is primarily 1) friends sending stories, jokes, quizzes, etc...or 2) someone trying to sell you something.
You might want to change your definition. More common definitions are "Unsolicited commercial email" or "Unsolicited bulk email". Your definition looks like "Email I don't want to get". That's a tough rule to enforce using any system.
That said, the nice thing about your first spam category is most of them will stop copying you on that sort of junk after a "Thanks for thinking of me, but I'd rather not get this sort of stuff in the future. I really don't find it funny and I'm swamped in email as it is," email, they usually stop. If they don't stop, you can blacklist them (they're not going to change their return email address every day like bulk email spammers).
If you standardize an autoreply, so that websites could parse and return it, then so could the spammers, easily enough.
Sure, the spammers can autoreply, but it requires a working Reply-To address and a willingness to pay the bandwidth bill. By and large spammers don't have working Reply-To addresses and steal bandwidth by abusing poorly configured mail servers. So an automated system will in fact be "good enough" to stop many spammers.
Now, if we tweak the system so that the autoreply-reply requires some small amount of processing power (say, 5 seconds on a "typical" PC) and cache positive results (Bob replied correctly once, so I won't challenge him again), the situation gets easier. I personally won't mind because I don't contact that many new people so 5 seconds here and there won't even be noticable. Legit mailing lists will only grow by a (relatively) small number of subscribers each day and so their day to day cost will be relatively small. (And if it's a real problem the subscription information can clearly state "the message will come from example-list@example.com, please add that address to your trusted senders list!") A spammer forced to reply to the millions of addresses they spammed will have a serious problem, that sort of compute time will cost them real time.
Part of the reason for public, anonymous voting (anonymous in that your particualar vote can't be tracked to you) is to protect voters from threats. If someone threatens me ("Vote for Evil McEvilson or I'll harm your family"), I can simply say, "Sure enough", go to the polls, and vote against my McEvilson. The bully can't be sure I didn't vote for McEvilson (well, unless he doesn't get any votes at all...). Once you have non-public voting you can be threatened and the bully can watch you vote. While it may not be likely, it seems a reasonable enough concern that we need to think hard before moving to internet voting.
(Yes, absentee ballots have the exact same problem, which is an argument that one should only be given such a ballot if you are genuinely absent. And if we reschedule all of our elections to once per year, it will limit the number of people who need to vote absentee and make it easier for each person try to avoid being absent on the voting day.)
This used to be true, but there is now a standard C++ ABI on Linux which all the major compilers now follow, gcc included (from 3.2 onwards). This should now be a concern of the past... about time too.
It's a nice theory, but we were told that the C++ ABI was finalized and all would be well with GCC 3.0. Then GCC 3.1Then GCC 3.2. It needs a few years of stability before I'm willing to trust it.
I say all of this as a huge fan of C++ (I think it's the best language for most application development), and of GCC (my compiler of choice). C++ is a big language and it's hard to be certain that every last detail has been sorted out. It will take time. If you're writing "core system libraries," you shouldn't be on the cutting edge, you should be sticking yourself in a nice stable, boring place.
[dlopen/dlsym etc.] C++'s interface is just too messy to support this.
Which is of course why KDE uses this technique almost everywhere, dynamically loading C++ plugins on demand. KDE's component architecture (KParts) is built around doing exactly this. I think the Mozilla and OpenOffice.org component systems also work in essentially the same way. It does involve a little extra overhead (you use a ComponentFactory to create the object whose methods you call) but it's pretty minimal. It's just as easy for the programmer as it is to dlopen a C library and call functions, if not easier.
The point of making the interface available to dlopen/dlsym is that you can bootstrap yourself up with extremely minimal support. dlopen/dlsym are absolutely core elements of most unix-like operating systems. KParts/DCOM/COM/whatever are not. You need to link in at least minimal support to access the component system. The added complexity of the system increases the likelyhood of compatibility problems between different versions and implementations. (You can't completely avoid this as a problem, it's even possible with dlopen/dlsym, it's just less likely given the relatively simplicity.) While I must profess ignorance of the actual implementation and usage of KParts, I do have experience with Microsoft's similar COM. While COM is very useful, it is much more complicated than simply LoadLibrary.
Death+15 or minimum of 50 years, whichever comes last. Same basic formula as they have now, but more reasonable terms.
I've always been uncomfortable tying copyright to lifespan. If I decide that an author whose early work I really like isn't creating new work worth anything, I suddenly have incentive to wish for their death. Why tie copyright to lifespan at all? Copyright law had a fixed duration when it was original created and it wasn't a problem. Patent law still has a fixed duration and continues to work fine. (Actually patent law is horribly broken, but of all its parts, the fixed duration is not broken.)
That extent, for me, leads me to support a life+15* term.
I agree with the principle (what about works published just before you die), but not the solution. This sort of systems means that if you write a socially important book at age 25 and live to be 75 the work is restricted for 65 years. If you write another book at 70, it's only restricted for 20. That doesn't seem too fair. A flat duration would better serve everyone, no one would have incentive to hope for an authors death and you could easily determine when a work entered the public domain. Pick a healthy number (I like 50 years, but I'm open minded), and declare it to be the limit, regardless of owner or creation.
People can never create derivative works of disney characters for three reasons:
First, a derivative work can only be created by the original artist or someone they give permission to.
Well, at least until copyright expires. That is the entire point of the discussion. Once copyright expires I can make any sort of derivative work I like (Like Disney itself did when it made the Jungle Book 11 years after the copyright on the source material expired.
Second, the copyright on the original movies may expire but not on the artwork of the characters as long as Disney keeps using and changing them.
Copyright protects a specific concrete creation, not the concept. So while new Mickey works would have a new copyright start date, the old Mickey works do not. Once the copyright expires, I'm free to take a copy of "Steamboat Willie" and edit it into something, or study it carefully to learn how to draw Mickey, then draw (and sell) my own Mickey draws based on that knowledge.
Finally, Disney characters, such as Mickey Mouse, are also trademarked and therefore can never be used as long as Disney continues to maintain that Trademark. Trademarks never expire on their own accord.
This is true, and creates a fascinating new area for legal sorts to fight over. This clearly limits free speech in an area where something enters the public domain. It hasn't really come up before because prior to Mickey there hasn't been characters in copyright protected works which people wanted to reuse. One possibly defense is that you are allowed to use and reference trademarks as long as there is no possibility of someone confusing the source. This is why I can create a documentary on Disney, even using Disney's logos, even though Disney's copyright does cover the area of documentaries. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Darn shame it will be at least twenty more years before it starts playing out.
If anything, Windows is even more scriptable than linux because of COM and it's progeny, ActiveX.
If the software you're working with chose to provide a COM interface, and it exposes the functionality you want, it's documented well enough to use, and the language you're interested in can access COM. COM requires that lots of people play nice together. Also, the resulting scripts tend to be much more heavyweight.
The benefit of the command line is that text is the lowest common denominator. Even if a program never expected to be scripted, you can easily call it and parse its output with scripting. You can observe the output yourself and decide how to parse it, no documentation needed. You can also say very powerful and useful things in just a line or two of shell script. Want to do a bulk rename of a set of files as a once-off task? Easy in Bourne shell or Perl. Not quick so easy with various scripting languages and COM. (Fortunately you can use Perl on Windows.) Want a quick and dirty summary of the popularly over time of a particular web page on your unix server? Something like "cat access_log | awk '{print $4" " $7}' | grep $1 | sed -e 's/^\[//' -e 's/:.*//' | uniq -c" will do the job nicely. Most popular files on your unix web server? cat access_log access_log.resolved | awk '{print $7" "$9" "}' |sort |uniq -c|sort -nr. The equivalent in COM with a scripting language isn't anywhere nearly as pleasant. Unix admins assume everything is text and are comfortable whipping up once-off scripts to answer questions or solve problems. The individual tools are simple to learn one at a time as you go. COM has a significant overhead to learn the minimal things, and the minimal things are surprisingly non-trivial to write.
I've done development and administration on both Windows and Linux. When it comes to scripting, I'll take Linux any day.
Yes, I politely asked them to quiet down. No it didnt do any good.
Sometimes (usually?) you need to escalate beyond polite. Sure, as human beings who might just be making an innocent mistake they deserve a "You are being a distracting and making it hard to hear what is on stage" as a first warning. But all too often it won't work. So follow up with a "You're being really distracting. That's really rude to the people who actually want to hear the performance. If you'd like to continue talking, perhaps the halllway is a better place." If that fails you might as well be rude, they certainly are, "Now you're just being an asshole. Grow up and shut up." If that doesn't solve the problem, you're doomed.
Lets face it, C is not well suited for window environments.
Fair enough. Window environment programming really does benefit from a language with solid object oriented programming support.
But, C++ is not well suited to interacting with other languages or truly dynamic library use. These are two key elements of anything you're planning on making "core system libraries". Personally I include my GUI libraries in the fuzzy mess I label the core system libraries.
C's interface is the defacto interlanguage interface. Most mature languages develop some way of relatively easily explosing C functions in shared libraries. C's interface is very stable. C++'s varies from vendor to vendor and from compiler version to compiler version (GCC 2.95, 2.96, 3.0, 3.1, and 3.). A library in C plays well with Perl, Java, Python, C++, and many other languages. This is a good thing. (Mind you, this just means that the interface should be in C, but the implementation can be in C++. I certainly agree.)
Second C can be used dynamically. Not automatic dynamic linking, I'm talking about searching the filesystem for a library and using dlopen and dlsym (or LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress under Windows) to find functions you need. This technique is sometimes necessary and it's important that core libraries support it. C++'s interface is just too messy to support this.
Look at Windows. MFC is just C++ classes aound C stuff.
MFC suffers from more fundamental problems than being a C++ wrapper over a C interface. MFC was originally developed fairly early in C++'s life and so had to work around weaknesses in the early language and in Microsoft's early implementation. Those original workarounds remain in place for compatibility, but significantly complicate the code. MFC tries to be all things to all people, and it tried to accomplish this goal from version one. As a result, it's a giant interconnected monstrousity with lots of non-obvious magic. For the longest time any use of MFC required you to use the Document/View framework, and that assumption still runs throughout the code. It's not possible to point to a subset of MFC and say, "this is the GUI interface as distinct from the application framework code." MFC is too bloody big.
Thin Windows API C++ wrappers exist and are much more pleasant to use. You can easily cook up your own in a few days and slowly expand it as you need it. If you want a more heavy duty C++ wrapper over the Windows C API, there are some of those as well. One of them is called Qt.:-)
However, more recent evidence suggests that the technique is being used by major labels in-house, instead, and the sheer quantity of junk files found on the peer to peer networks today - purportedly residing on individual's PCs - points to continuing "poisoning". Why? Because users abort a junk download, or quickly delete a file. The alternative explanation for the persistence of this noise material is that users are extremely inattentive, and that's difficult to believe.
The Register dropped the ball on this. There is a non-trivial number of peer-to-peer users who just download things because they can. Much like the core of packrat warez traders they're not so much interested in the specifics as trying to have the largest collection. (And when you get warez from one of these packrats, you'll often get software that's seriously broken.) They're not really going to listen to the two months of continious music they have, just a small subset. Clearly they're rather have real songs, but they never bother to check. It only takes a few of these people to create the impression that the network is full of garbage.
You shouldn't need to call a lawyer to excercise your right to free speech. Furthermore, he created the site specifically to support the PCI-SIG. They've made it clear that he is not welcome to do so. Why should he go to effort to continue to support a group that treats him like crap?
If someone gives you a contract in.001 font size, no it is not illegal. It is up to you to say "I won't sign this, and I won't use your product."
Actually, a clause in a.001 point font (that is 0.0000138 inches, significantly smaller than the smallest line most laser printers can produce) isn't going to be visible to most people. Most people won't realize that the clause is there. They've been deceived as to the actual contents of the contract were. That is illegal. The question is where to draw the line between behaviors that are deceptive and illegal, and behaviors that are not.
(Of course, truly hard core laissez faire economics fans will point out that the market can correct for even this abuse after a few people get burned by it. Personally I'm not willing to fead the free market with the blood of innocents.
The Free Market is a theory that cannot be put into literal practice, much like frictionless surfaces that physics majors so love. There are many important little differences between the theory and the best possible practice. Most of them can be summed up as:
there is lag between an action and a response in the market. It's in this lag that peoples lives can be destroyed by the unscrupulous. Reducing production costs causes beef with a deadly disease to be shipped to consumers. Sure, the market will correct, after some people have died. (And if the lag between infection and symptoms is say, 10 years, alot of people are going to die.)
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While I certainly hope the projects improve their interfaces, it's not like they're only ones. QuickTime has problems (and used to be much worse!). RealOne's interface is ghastly as well. And don't forget Windows Media Player (scroll down to see a screenshot, helpfully described as "gorgeous", but certainly not "useful").
Yes, media players on Linux have crappy interfaces. Most media players, regardless of platform, have crappy interfaces. Perhaps Linux is worse at the moment, but it's not the condemnation that the poster suggested it was.
TV Listings are available for do it yourself PVRs.
If you're willing to screenscrape, you can use XMLTV to get your listings. The only potential problem is that if lots of people start screenscraping the free web sources are likely to try and stop people from doing so.
If you're willing to pay for the service, you can use TVNow and pay $30 per year (about $2.50 per month, a fraction of what Tivo charges).
Chill. Relax. There is no need for longwinded rants with random bold words. No, the free software PVR projects are not ready for prime time yet. It shouldn't be suprisingly, they're all very new. Mozilla's few few years weren't terribly promising. Linux itself took many years before approaching general usability. For the software to reach a polished stage we need to start with the crappy first pass. There is lots of experimentation and playing around. Core components (like drivers to TV cards and MPEG encoders) are still early in the development stages themselves. Eventually things will settle down, all but a handful of projects will fold, and things will become ready for you. In the meantime, let other people do a little harmless cheerleading. We need early adopters and fans to help work out the bugs in the system, do development, and keep the developers inspired.
(If you feel a burning need to emphasize something, the <em> tag will generally give you a more subtle, easy to read result. Bold text tends to leap out, dominating the paragraph. If you really want readers to just focus on those key points, consider a bulletted list using <ul> and <li>)
When I have a thirteen year old kid, I don't want him looking at Nazi propoganda. Shall we pass a law restricting that from him? How about birth control information, or information on other religions, or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition?
There is a downside. It's not a huge one, but it's present. If I've decided to allow my sixteen year old son with his new driver's license to purchase a game, why should I have to travel with him to do it? I've decided he's old enough to handle it and want to encourage him to learn independence to get the game, why do I need to chaperone him? At least it's not as bad as a theater that forces me to sit with him through an R movie.
Ignoring that downside, there is no significant benefit. Worse, there is the illusion of benefit that may lead to parents relaxing their guard. As a kid I had relatively easy access to pornography, tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs, dispite all of them being illegal for me. As a result my parents still needed to keep an eye on me and talk me with me about these things, even though I theoretically didn't have access to them. The same will be true of violent video games. If you're raising your children well the law won't particularlly help. If you're raising your children poorly the law can't save you.
I suppose if people are insistent about this, I'd rather see such laws passed locally, not with one-size-fits-all rules passed down from D.C.
Sadly, all too true. However limiting access to violent video games seems like such a small and meaningless step. Kids who really want access, the kids who will harm society, will get access (much like they get access to tobacco, alcohol, pornography, weapons, and illegal drugs today). Compared to the violence and abuse that many of these kids see in real life, the fantastic world of a video game has a minimal impact. If we really want to increase the number of kids who go on to become productive members of society there are more effective ways, primarily by improving the quality of education, especially in financially challenged school districts.
Such a law effectively says "We don't trust you to raise your children yourself. We'll decide which things children are and are not allowed access to by default, you'll need to specifically intervene to change those decisions." Of course, there are no similar laws preventing people from selling kids copies of the Bible, the Koran, information on birth control, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, news coverage of grisly wars or murders, works promiting socialism, captialism, nazism, free love, or marijuana or a host of other things that various parents would find unacceptable for their children. We're selecting a fairly arbitrary area (violence in video games) are creating a not terribly helpful law. Who does this law serve? Parents trying to protect their kids? There will remain a huge number of objectionable things available to kids, so the parents will need to continue to monitor and talk to their kids anyway. While you're discussing the evils of premaritial sex, filthy hippies, Rush Limbaugh, and whatever else you feel, adding in violent video games is pretty easy.
This sort of (proposed) law takes responsbility away from parents. This sort of law is trying to create a safe world where parents ignore their kids. Unfortunately you'll never succeed in creating such a world, there are too many loopholes and law breakers. As a kid I had relatively easy access to alcohol, illegal drugs, pornography, and tobacco. While the laws that strove to protect me from these things made it harder, it presents a very real danger to me. This sort of law creates a false sense of security in too many people. "I don't need to educate young Johnny on violence in games and explain why I feel it's wrong, since he can't possibly get access to violent games."
A popular argument for ratings (or worse, limits) is that it gives parents more options and information. Sure it does, but where do you draw the line? Some parents who believe strongly in creationism will object to their children having easy access to books on evolution. Should we label those and keep them out of kids hands? Perhaps they object to their children having easy access to what they consider objectionable political speech (Gotta project Johnny from those evil (Liberals|Conservatives). Another label for that? We'll need to label news and history similarly, there is a lot of violence there. And for the extremely socially conservative a travel brochure showing men and women in swimwear at the beach would be shocking, so another label for them (perhaps, "Women not in burquas"?). Ultimately parents need to take responsibility and monitor what their child sees. A lack of a Violence or Sexuality label doesn't mean that the work is acceptable. The only option gained is the option to not review the work yourself and to trust the simplistic label judgements of someone else.
Ratings and limits also limit what is available to consenting adults. Some businesses will simply decide to not carry works based on the rating (as opposed to reviewing the work itself). A particular rating may have a nasty stigma associated with it, discouraging potential customers. The NC-17 film rating in the United States is a good example. Many theaters will refuse to show such films, not out of a reasoned judgement, but for simple fear of backlash. Potential customers may be detered by a popular opinion that it must be smut. As a result of this many filmmakers chose to self-censor, carefully tweaking their work to fit into the target audience bin of G, PG, or R. Works beyond R are the exception as a result. Works that are a bit dangerous for their category (say, a relatively edgy PG work), get tamed down to ensure the desired rating. While it's still possible to make create films under this system, it does stifle some creativity.
The responsibility for raising children lies with their parents. There were no laws limiting my access to various books, video games, and the like when I was a kid. I certainly had access to many illegal things (alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs). My parents didn't monitor me constantly, so I could have done what I wanted. But I didn't. Why? Because my parents took reponsibility for me. They paid attention to me, they kept an eye on what media I consumed, talked to me, discussed ethics with me, set limits for me, and punished me when I violated those limits. We don't need more laws, we need good parents. Laws can't create good parents.
Absolutely! Of course, my parents saw fit to not let me play certain video games, watch certain movies or television shows, read certain magazines, and in a few cases read certain books. They managed to do all of this without any laws enforcing it. Instead they relied on the tried and true method of actually being parents, involving themselves in my life, paying attention to me, striving to instill ethics in me, setting limits, and punishing me when I violated those limits. I seem to have turned out okay.
Laws like this are unnecessary and won't significantly change things. Good parents will continue to be good parents and bad parents will continue to be bad parents. Attempting to replace bad parents with laws is a terrible idea.
All things are relative, including freedom. The GPL certainly gives you more freedom than Microsoft's EULA. Everything Microsoft's EULA allows the GPL allows. So in this common common case the GPL is more free.
But the BSD license takes away my freedom to strip off the original authors copyright statement and delete the disclaimer of warrante. If we're going to demand absolute freedom you need to look at truly public domain software, no copyright.
Yes, some software is open sourced as a last ditch rescue attempt. So what? Most of that software proceeds to fail and we forget about it. The successful open source software (Apache, Gnome, KDE, Gnumeric, Linux, GCC, GIMP, and others) isn't. It's software started for the sole purpose of providing the software in an open source way.
Normal software development responsibilities typically come with a paycheck. If you'd like to pay for the software, I'm sure you can get the support and improvements you're interested in. There are even companies dedicated to this.
Many open source projects have exceptional documentation, great user interfaces, and are exceptionally stable. Sure, you'll find open source software with bad documentation, poor user interfaces, and are unstable. Of course, you'll also find proprietary software with these same flaws. I'm sure you avoid crappy proprietary software, so just start avoiding crappy open source software. Meanwhile people who do like the crappy open source software will keep working to improve it, perhaps to a level you're willing to use, or someone might decide to try a business model around supporting the software, bringing it to a level you'd accept. With open source software I have additional options. If I'm dissatisfied with the interface or stability, I can fix it or hire someone else to fix it. There is typically an abundance of for-sale documentation for popular open source products (sure, it costs money, but since the software was cheap, spend some of your savings on a book).
Relatedly, could you point to the definition of ironic you're using? I'm not seeing one that matches your use.
So what? Yes, most people don't appreciate the freedom of the source code. Most people also don't appreciate the freedom to repair their own cars. People tend to think short term costs. But that they don't care about the long term benefits doesn't invalidate those benefits.
No, you might not want to debug the Helix source. Great. But the open release still provide you with advantages. Previously, if you had a problem with the server or want a change, you had to go to Real. If Real wasn't interested you were out of luck. Now they have competition. If there is demand businesses will grow up around supporting and modifying the source in ways Reals won't. If there isn't demand you can still hire someone to do the work. You've just gained some options, but you can still go to Real if you want.
Of course, it may be that there isn't enough demand to create dedicated businesses, and the cost of hiring someone to make the change will also be unreasonable. Such is life, not all options pan out. But if the software remained proprietary the options would never have had a chance.
Why does this sort of foolishness always get moderated up? Here are some clues for the clearly clueless:
You might want to change your definition. More common definitions are "Unsolicited commercial email" or "Unsolicited bulk email". Your definition looks like "Email I don't want to get". That's a tough rule to enforce using any system.
That said, the nice thing about your first spam category is most of them will stop copying you on that sort of junk after a "Thanks for thinking of me, but I'd rather not get this sort of stuff in the future. I really don't find it funny and I'm swamped in email as it is," email, they usually stop. If they don't stop, you can blacklist them (they're not going to change their return email address every day like bulk email spammers).
Sure, the spammers can autoreply, but it requires a working Reply-To address and a willingness to pay the bandwidth bill. By and large spammers don't have working Reply-To addresses and steal bandwidth by abusing poorly configured mail servers. So an automated system will in fact be "good enough" to stop many spammers.
Now, if we tweak the system so that the autoreply-reply requires some small amount of processing power (say, 5 seconds on a "typical" PC) and cache positive results (Bob replied correctly once, so I won't challenge him again), the situation gets easier. I personally won't mind because I don't contact that many new people so 5 seconds here and there won't even be noticable. Legit mailing lists will only grow by a (relatively) small number of subscribers each day and so their day to day cost will be relatively small. (And if it's a real problem the subscription information can clearly state "the message will come from example-list@example.com, please add that address to your trusted senders list!") A spammer forced to reply to the millions of addresses they spammed will have a serious problem, that sort of compute time will cost them real time.
(Yes, absentee ballots have the exact same problem, which is an argument that one should only be given such a ballot if you are genuinely absent. And if we reschedule all of our elections to once per year, it will limit the number of people who need to vote absentee and make it easier for each person try to avoid being absent on the voting day.)
It's a nice theory, but we were told that the C++ ABI was finalized and all would be well with GCC 3.0. Then GCC 3.1Then GCC 3.2. It needs a few years of stability before I'm willing to trust it.
I say all of this as a huge fan of C++ (I think it's the best language for most application development), and of GCC (my compiler of choice). C++ is a big language and it's hard to be certain that every last detail has been sorted out. It will take time. If you're writing "core system libraries," you shouldn't be on the cutting edge, you should be sticking yourself in a nice stable, boring place.
The point of making the interface available to dlopen/dlsym is that you can bootstrap yourself up with extremely minimal support. dlopen/dlsym are absolutely core elements of most unix-like operating systems. KParts/DCOM/COM/whatever are not. You need to link in at least minimal support to access the component system. The added complexity of the system increases the likelyhood of compatibility problems between different versions and implementations. (You can't completely avoid this as a problem, it's even possible with dlopen/dlsym, it's just less likely given the relatively simplicity.) While I must profess ignorance of the actual implementation and usage of KParts, I do have experience with Microsoft's similar COM. While COM is very useful, it is much more complicated than simply LoadLibrary.
I've always been uncomfortable tying copyright to lifespan. If I decide that an author whose early work I really like isn't creating new work worth anything, I suddenly have incentive to wish for their death. Why tie copyright to lifespan at all? Copyright law had a fixed duration when it was original created and it wasn't a problem. Patent law still has a fixed duration and continues to work fine. (Actually patent law is horribly broken, but of all its parts, the fixed duration is not broken.)
I agree with the principle (what about works published just before you die), but not the solution. This sort of systems means that if you write a socially important book at age 25 and live to be 75 the work is restricted for 65 years. If you write another book at 70, it's only restricted for 20. That doesn't seem too fair. A flat duration would better serve everyone, no one would have incentive to hope for an authors death and you could easily determine when a work entered the public domain. Pick a healthy number (I like 50 years, but I'm open minded), and declare it to be the limit, regardless of owner or creation.
Well, at least until copyright expires. That is the entire point of the discussion. Once copyright expires I can make any sort of derivative work I like (Like Disney itself did when it made the Jungle Book 11 years after the copyright on the source material expired.
Copyright protects a specific concrete creation, not the concept. So while new Mickey works would have a new copyright start date, the old Mickey works do not. Once the copyright expires, I'm free to take a copy of "Steamboat Willie" and edit it into something, or study it carefully to learn how to draw Mickey, then draw (and sell) my own Mickey draws based on that knowledge.
This is true, and creates a fascinating new area for legal sorts to fight over. This clearly limits free speech in an area where something enters the public domain. It hasn't really come up before because prior to Mickey there hasn't been characters in copyright protected works which people wanted to reuse. One possibly defense is that you are allowed to use and reference trademarks as long as there is no possibility of someone confusing the source. This is why I can create a documentary on Disney, even using Disney's logos, even though Disney's copyright does cover the area of documentaries. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Darn shame it will be at least twenty more years before it starts playing out.
If the software you're working with chose to provide a COM interface, and it exposes the functionality you want, it's documented well enough to use, and the language you're interested in can access COM. COM requires that lots of people play nice together. Also, the resulting scripts tend to be much more heavyweight.
The benefit of the command line is that text is the lowest common denominator. Even if a program never expected to be scripted, you can easily call it and parse its output with scripting. You can observe the output yourself and decide how to parse it, no documentation needed. You can also say very powerful and useful things in just a line or two of shell script. Want to do a bulk rename of a set of files as a once-off task? Easy in Bourne shell or Perl. Not quick so easy with various scripting languages and COM. (Fortunately you can use Perl on Windows.) Want a quick and dirty summary of the popularly over time of a particular web page on your unix server? Something like "cat access_log | awk '{print $4" " $7}' | grep $1 | sed -e 's/^\[//' -e 's/:.*//' | uniq -c" will do the job nicely. Most popular files on your unix web server? cat access_log access_log.resolved | awk '{print $7" "$9" "}' |sort |uniq -c|sort -nr. The equivalent in COM with a scripting language isn't anywhere nearly as pleasant. Unix admins assume everything is text and are comfortable whipping up once-off scripts to answer questions or solve problems. The individual tools are simple to learn one at a time as you go. COM has a significant overhead to learn the minimal things, and the minimal things are surprisingly non-trivial to write.
I've done development and administration on both Windows and Linux. When it comes to scripting, I'll take Linux any day.
Sometimes (usually?) you need to escalate beyond polite. Sure, as human beings who might just be making an innocent mistake they deserve a "You are being a distracting and making it hard to hear what is on stage" as a first warning. But all too often it won't work. So follow up with a "You're being really distracting. That's really rude to the people who actually want to hear the performance. If you'd like to continue talking, perhaps the halllway is a better place." If that fails you might as well be rude, they certainly are, "Now you're just being an asshole. Grow up and shut up." If that doesn't solve the problem, you're doomed.
Fair enough. Window environment programming really does benefit from a language with solid object oriented programming support.
But, C++ is not well suited to interacting with other languages or truly dynamic library use. These are two key elements of anything you're planning on making "core system libraries". Personally I include my GUI libraries in the fuzzy mess I label the core system libraries.
C's interface is the defacto interlanguage interface. Most mature languages develop some way of relatively easily explosing C functions in shared libraries. C's interface is very stable. C++'s varies from vendor to vendor and from compiler version to compiler version (GCC 2.95, 2.96, 3.0, 3.1, and 3.). A library in C plays well with Perl, Java, Python, C++, and many other languages. This is a good thing. (Mind you, this just means that the interface should be in C, but the implementation can be in C++. I certainly agree.)
Second C can be used dynamically. Not automatic dynamic linking, I'm talking about searching the filesystem for a library and using dlopen and dlsym (or LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress under Windows) to find functions you need. This technique is sometimes necessary and it's important that core libraries support it. C++'s interface is just too messy to support this.
MFC suffers from more fundamental problems than being a C++ wrapper over a C interface. MFC was originally developed fairly early in C++'s life and so had to work around weaknesses in the early language and in Microsoft's early implementation. Those original workarounds remain in place for compatibility, but significantly complicate the code. MFC tries to be all things to all people, and it tried to accomplish this goal from version one. As a result, it's a giant interconnected monstrousity with lots of non-obvious magic. For the longest time any use of MFC required you to use the Document/View framework, and that assumption still runs throughout the code. It's not possible to point to a subset of MFC and say, "this is the GUI interface as distinct from the application framework code." MFC is too bloody big.
Thin Windows API C++ wrappers exist and are much more pleasant to use. You can easily cook up your own in a few days and slowly expand it as you need it. If you want a more heavy duty C++ wrapper over the Windows C API, there are some of those as well. One of them is called Qt. :-)
The Register dropped the ball on this. There is a non-trivial number of peer-to-peer users who just download things because they can. Much like the core of packrat warez traders they're not so much interested in the specifics as trying to have the largest collection. (And when you get warez from one of these packrats, you'll often get software that's seriously broken.) They're not really going to listen to the two months of continious music they have, just a small subset. Clearly they're rather have real songs, but they never bother to check. It only takes a few of these people to create the impression that the network is full of garbage.
You shouldn't need to call a lawyer to excercise your right to free speech. Furthermore, he created the site specifically to support the PCI-SIG. They've made it clear that he is not welcome to do so. Why should he go to effort to continue to support a group that treats him like crap?
Actually, a clause in a .001 point font (that is 0.0000138 inches, significantly smaller than the smallest line most laser printers can produce) isn't going to be visible to most people. Most people won't realize that the clause is there. They've been deceived as to the actual contents of the contract were. That is illegal. The question is where to draw the line between behaviors that are deceptive and illegal, and behaviors that are not.
(Of course, truly hard core laissez faire economics fans will point out that the market can correct for even this abuse after a few people get burned by it. Personally I'm not willing to fead the free market with the blood of innocents. The Free Market is a theory that cannot be put into literal practice, much like frictionless surfaces that physics majors so love. There are many important little differences between the theory and the best possible practice. Most of them can be summed up as: there is lag between an action and a response in the market. It's in this lag that peoples lives can be destroyed by the unscrupulous. Reducing production costs causes beef with a deadly disease to be shipped to consumers. Sure, the market will correct, after some people have died. (And if the lag between infection and symptoms is say, 10 years, alot of people are going to die.) )