I'm not so sure if the limitations in audio and video applications are due to the i386 architecture or Windows, but I'm inclined to think it's more a software problem than a hardware problem.
It's definately a Software problem--more specifically it's Windows. Sucky audio and video was the exact reason I switched from Windows to Linux. In Linux it's quite simply better! I'll explain.
I love Linux for the limited things it does so well and reliably, but really wish there were more creative applications for Linux than there are.
Yes there are! MPlayer is simply the best encoder/decoder I've ever seen. It is very optimized, and plays the most formats very well. I imagine that I can write a good video editing program with it, but I recently heard of a new KEncoder front-end for MEncdoer. So I'll have to try it. There are other programs out there, but Linux is for sure nicer for my everyday things than Windows.
Perhaps we'll find out whether it's the hardware architecture or the operating system that's limited productive creative applications sooner than we think. We just need those Windows users to keep jumping ship; since the MacHeads don't appear to be willing to do so...
I really don't think there's anything wrong with the x86 PC architecture. I usually build my comp from scratch so I go x86 no matter what (sorry I don't do Mac). I like my own custom edge on everything. But when your in the business of whole pre-built computers, comparing x86 versus Mac PPC, they are virtually the same, performance, and price (although you do have many more options and probably get a better deal on PC's, and Mac's are slightly more expensive, but hey cost isn't that important usually). But hey Apple might go to intel platform so... either way... no difference.
Will I be able to buy one of these things _without_ Microsoft XP? As things are heading right now, Microsoft OS's will cost more than these alone.
If they offer these alone (you may go out and purchase XP if you want, having the option, but...) , then they -will- be a hot seller, because they will be extremely affordable right from the start.
I read about this at OQO site a few days ago. I would post a link to their FAQ now, but it already got slashdotted so I can't do that. Basically one thing that got my attention was they intend, is for the price of this to be less than the average laptop. I would figure so because it doesn't come with that many extravagent components. I expect it to be less than $1000. I sure hope they mass produce it and maybe come out with a cheaper model.
Also in their faq, they say that they're not trying to compete with PDA's, although I think they will indirectly, even though they aren't the same kind of product.
Hi, I was the one that helped identify early on how to fix War3 for wine. I use winehq because for me it's faster and looks slightly better.
This is true, although the the new WineX supports opengl very similar to my old patch. So there is less difference here. Although I think winehq is still better because of a couple other new things. BTW, I don't understand why they haven't released their sources for with CVS, because it's such a rediculously easy patch, not really a major benefit for them to keep it hidden.
In-game movies don't work, but xine and mplayer play them fine. I'm happy.
I've been thinking about making a non-official patch finding a way just to execute movies through mplayer (or your choice?). That way, it gives much better movie rendering support than what WineX will ever provide. A simple fix like that. I'm also conidering fixing the restoring minimized opengl window problem too.
After these couple things, I'm happy with wine right now.
The nice thing about Mplayer, it's the fastest player, and probably the smallest (All good for a PDA). The mplayer binary on my k6-3 is only 1.5 Mb and thats with a bunch of extra junk.
Yeah, you don't want to miss this part of the article. Supposably another important tech has already been approved.
In related news, the FCC recently approved the commercial use of ultrawideband, which provides a fast and secure way of sending wireless transmissions.
If I'm not mistaken, ultrawideband elimates noise problems and allows gigabyte size transfer rates.
OK, it wasn't my main point they treat people like theives all the time. It was you treat someone, wrongly like a thief, it will only hurt you in turn.
Second, I don't dress like a thug. As far as what I wore that day, blue jeans and t-shirt. Nothing baggy. I was wearing a coat. It was raining hard at the time, but it was no trench coat or anything. It was a normal coat, nothing menacing. It was definately not a racial thing, because everyone involved here was white!
She was also an airhead. She must have spotted me with the cell phone, of course, but the conversation with her didn't make any sense at the time. And she was very rude in the way she talked. She didn't have any brains because it would have taken only a second to realize that there is no way I could steal a cell phone when the cell phones they have for sell are all locked up anyways?
I'll get my stuff off the net from people who don't assume that I'm a criminal.
They'd like to accuse people they're criminals all the time!! And these sort of things distance people from buying anything.
I was with my friend in best buy looking at cell phone stuff. Some teenager girl worker comes up and asks if she could help us, we said no we're just looking around. Then she looked all mad and she was staring at us we did not understand why. Then she forcefully asked, so what kind of cell phone do you have?? So my friend said he had a Nokia 5180. I had one too, hidden in my pocket, but it was like none of her business anyways, so I kept quiet. We got what we wanted but we sat there for a minute confused still on why she asked the question. And she was still standing there watching us, so we're like, okay lets go. We go pay for the thing and at the same time she goes and talks to two guys by the exit. When we were done paying, ready to walk out, The two guys stop me. They asked if they could search me, I was like why?? My friend said just cooperate. But I insisted why? They asked do you have a certain cell phone. I said MY CELL PHONE? I showed them. They were like okay... but still asked to search me, and of course they found I wasn't stealing anything. So somehow the girl saw I had a cell phone but thought I was stealing it. And they were all airheads.
And so I wasn't ready on ever going back there. I don't think I ever have. So if a store adopts a policy acting people are all theives (aka add copy protection) if they buy CDs, of course they're gonna get a drop in sells.
It's not like there is one big program called "Windows" running your computer. There are many programs like Explorer.exe, taskman.exe, systray.exe, mplayer2.exe, messenger, kernel32, the scheduler, iexplore.exe,...
SURE, the DLL's are common among almost all the programs, but I know you can break down the system into components (or programs?) and shell integration (that is, registry entries) and remove, for example, the Internet Explorer integration from the shell, so it is like it is not there anymore.
I know this because I've built a windows 95 b system, component by component (without going into details... really you don't want me to do that) That way, I can use my own browser and shell, WITHOUT any of Microsoft contiunual nuicenses and usually with performance gain (like speed). Cygwin is kind of nice to run with windows, but I don't run windows anymore, so I guess this is the end of this topic!!
Orcs were removed because of lameness, especially after they removed the pig farms. Many of the remaining Orc beta testers complained that pigs are the main orc staple and they simple couldn't completely remove the pigs from the game. Well lo an behold, the developers were looking for a new flying critter (one where they can polymorph flying units without them falling to their death you know because frost wyrms have rights, and should be equal, this is from part of the azeroth manifesto) and guess what? They created the largest orc scandal to date in all public mockery to the race, and made the flying critter a pig! So remember when you see the flying pig in the game in such an unaccustom manner, just remember what blizzard did to the orcs.
poor state of documentation under linux
on
Qt For The Console
·
· Score: 1
I was trying to find documentation on how to run this program. My main question was it a library similar to aalib or was it a program I run? The site said most of it is found under the original qt docs, which I don't think it even mentions it. The the gzip had an index.html as a doc. Loaded it up, and found it just a skeleton of documentation with no real content.
No man page either.
So I thought, well it must be another typical program with poor documentation. It seems programmers these days don't even think about releasing any information until after 1.0?
So I found the qtconsole executible after 'make' so I'm off to try it. I seriously hope that the program is lacking as much as the documentation.
Re:It's not THEIR copyright they're worried about.
on
The Future of MMORPGs
·
· Score: 1
What do you do when someone lovingly crafts and recreates someone elses copyrighted work inside YOUR game? By doing that, your game is now publishing someone elses copyrighted works. That's what they're terrified of, that some jackass is going to make a perfect replica of the Millenium Falcon in The Sims Online, and they're going to get their asses sued off by LucasFilm.
Easy:
Most likely, the game will some kind of account/character system. The person will have an account name. Whenever someone creates game objects, it records the creator account name. If someone creates copyrighted material, they can trace it down and they can delete/disable his account, while removing all his objects.
Really, it sounds like what I said before. Worlds will become easier to modify for the user. And there may be an ownership problem where a user creates something good, and a company wants to assume ownership, through their license agreement (you forfit all your rights of creation and ownership to them)
Of course, user-created content has a lot of sticky issues. Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and current Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment and Star Wars Galaxies, expressed the problem without mincing words: "Our corporations are terrified of this." Intellectual property, ownership, and copyright issues are just the beginning of the uncharted territory. More importantly, how can a game design rationalize the desire to give players creative power with the need for a controlled environment? Are the two mutually exclusive? Solving this problem seemed to be the top agenda in the next generation of games.
Why do corporations think they can control user-created content as their own, in MMORPG's? We have enough of this problem in the real world, just with their damn license agreements.
What an MMORPG needs is a GPL-like license, that way, all changes are made availible in return for promoting the world's depth. It doesn't have to be programming, but anything created from the world's sense of creation.
People make worlds, to achieve their own goals, not give corps fatter pockets.
I have an AGP Nividia Geforce 2 MX, and an AMD K6-3 333 MHz. I have experienced these memory corruption, graphical anomolies, and lockups in linux and windows 95.
I noticed that AMD K6-3 was not mentioned, but it has to exist on it. The K6-3 was made with the same instruction set as a pre-Athlon. Thus the bug definately exists.
There was a scientific american on pbs a while back where they actually described people as human cyborgs. I don't think they were really cyborgs, what they really were was just people wearing computers. They actually already exist, and have been around for some years. Alec Baldwin even tried it out.
I couldn't find anything about it on the scientific american, but this another article on that website, somewhat dated. I think the guy that wrote it also envisioned wearable wireless devices.
Here is a wearable computer you can even buy, meant mainly for military, or scientific use, I'm sure you can get one. It runs a transmeta crusoe chip.
As we develop new services, we want to maintain your trust while continuing to meet your service needs with innovative products. By sharing account information among Qwest's family of companies, and by
aggregating information to learn more about trends and purchasing patterns, we can serve you better.
So this would include MSN? Are they part of the big family too?
Wouldn't surprise me - them sharing information. Glad I'm no longer on Qwest DSL and Phone.
Ouch! IE 5 for Solaris - 68 MB hard drive space, 32 MB (64 recommended) of RAM IE for HP-UX - 87 MB hard drive space, 64 MB (96 recommended) of RAM Solaris IE 5 SP1 - 110 MB hard drive space, 64 MB (96 recommended) of RAM HP-UX IE 5 SP1 - 120 MB of hard drive space, 64 MB (96...) or RAM.
Wow these requirements are higher than IE 5.5 for Windows! I dunno if I would trust MS writing Unix applications now. From the looks of it, it looks bizzarly bloated, and after a recent linux bloat discussion, I don't think MS Unix ports will be in our best interests;)
They say in the article that Linux development is slowing and as for the reason: "the engineer community is abandoning it left and right for Mac OS X. While the true free software advocates will stick with Linux to the death, those who just want to get work done and not fight with the OS are switching like crazy. This is a real problem for software developed as open source because, as these users leave there will be less interest in the OS and the continuing evolvement of the mess of Linux desktop technologies will slow considerably."
But I say that is from their perspective. What I see is a KDE 3.0 coming faster than ever, and even a solidly progressing Gnome.
I haven't seen Linux slowing at all. In fact, it has progressing faster than in the past. They're just Mac OS X superiority optimists. And they like to pick on tiny Linux, because some people think Linux has a tiny share of the market or not growing.
Windows = Dos + MacOS,(you know adding graphical "windows" to a command prompt)
Come on really... You can't make anything in the computer world without basing it off of something else. And if Microsoft gets upset in this, so they'll probably win. Lindows loses it's identity of being Windows-like, and it won't sell, destroying a competitor.
Microsft is keeping the "Windows From Linux" by using a common term in any GUI. They didn't invent the Windows that they use, so why should they be allowed to prevent derivates of Windows?
What about when someone gets on the internet to do their XP activation? A newly installed XP will be unsecure as well.
"Product Activation works by verifying that a software program's product key has not been used on more personal computers than intended by the software's license. You must use the product key in order to install the software and then it is transformed into an installation ID number. You use an activation wizard to provide the installation ID number to Microsoft either through a secure transfer over the Internet, or by telephone. A confirmation ID is sent back to your machine to activate your product."
Notice they say,"secure transfer over the Internet."
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wanting to know how to do this for several months now.
Thanks.
(no relation to narftrek--just coincidence)
It's definately a Software problem--more specifically it's Windows. Sucky audio and video was the exact reason I switched from Windows to Linux. In Linux it's quite simply better! I'll explain.
Yes there are! MPlayer is simply the best encoder/decoder I've ever seen. It is very optimized, and plays the most formats very well. I imagine that I can write a good video editing program with it, but I recently heard of a new KEncoder front-end for MEncdoer. So I'll have to try it. There are other programs out there, but Linux is for sure nicer for my everyday things than Windows.
I really don't think there's anything wrong with the x86 PC architecture. I usually build my comp from scratch so I go x86 no matter what (sorry I don't do Mac). I like my own custom edge on everything. But when your in the business of whole pre-built computers, comparing x86 versus Mac PPC, they are virtually the same, performance, and price (although you do have many more options and probably get a better deal on PC's, and Mac's are slightly more expensive, but hey cost isn't that important usually). But hey Apple might go to intel platform so... either way... no difference.
Will I be able to buy one of these things _without_ Microsoft XP? As things are heading right now, Microsoft OS's will cost more than these alone.
If they offer these alone (you may go out and purchase XP if you want, having the option, but...) , then they -will- be a hot seller, because they will be extremely affordable right from the start.
I read about this at OQO site a few days ago. I would post a link to their FAQ now, but it already got slashdotted so I can't do that. Basically one thing that got my attention was they intend, is for the price of this to be less than the average laptop. I would figure so because it doesn't come with that many extravagent components. I expect it to be less than $1000. I sure hope they mass produce it and maybe come out with a cheaper model.
Also in their faq, they say that they're not trying to compete with PDA's, although I think they will indirectly, even though they aren't the same kind of product.
Hi, I was the one that helped identify early on how to fix War3 for wine.
I use winehq because for me it's faster and looks slightly better.
This is true, although the the new WineX supports opengl very similar to my old patch. So there is less difference here. Although I think winehq is still better because of a couple other new things. BTW, I don't understand why they haven't released their sources for with CVS, because it's such a rediculously easy patch, not really a major benefit for them to keep it hidden.
In-game movies don't work, but xine and mplayer play them fine. I'm happy.
I've been thinking about making a non-official patch finding a way just to execute movies through mplayer (or your choice?). That way, it gives much better movie rendering support than what WineX will ever provide. A simple fix like that. I'm also conidering fixing the restoring minimized opengl window problem too.
After these couple things, I'm happy with wine right now.
ahh you beat me =)
The nice thing about Mplayer, it's the fastest player, and probably the smallest (All good for a PDA). The mplayer binary on my k6-3 is only 1.5 Mb and thats with a bunch of extra junk.
AHumbleOpinion is insightful, not lordpixels stupid rant.
Yeah, you don't want to miss this part of the article. Supposably another important tech has already been approved.
In related news, the FCC recently approved the commercial use of ultrawideband, which provides a fast and secure way of sending wireless transmissions.
If I'm not mistaken, ultrawideband elimates noise problems and allows gigabyte size transfer rates.
OK, it wasn't my main point they treat people like theives all the time. It was you treat someone, wrongly like a thief, it will only hurt you in turn.
Second, I don't dress like a thug. As far as what I wore that day, blue jeans and t-shirt. Nothing baggy. I was wearing a coat. It was raining hard at the time, but it was no trench coat or anything. It was a normal coat, nothing menacing. It was definately not a racial thing, because everyone involved here was white!
She was also an airhead. She must have spotted me with the cell phone, of course, but the conversation with her didn't make any sense at the time. And she was very rude in the way she talked. She didn't have any brains because it would have taken only a second to realize that there is no way I could steal a cell phone when the cell phones they have for sell are all locked up anyways?
They'd like to accuse people they're criminals all the time!! And these sort of things distance people from buying anything.
I was with my friend in best buy looking at cell phone stuff. Some teenager girl worker comes up and asks if she could help us, we said no we're just looking around. Then she looked all mad and she was staring at us we did not understand why. Then she forcefully asked, so what kind of cell phone do you have?? So my friend said he had a Nokia 5180. I had one too, hidden in my pocket, but it was like none of her business anyways, so I kept quiet. We got what we wanted but we sat there for a minute confused still on why she asked the question. And she was still standing there watching us, so we're like, okay lets go. We go pay for the thing and at the same time she goes and talks to two guys by the exit. When we were done paying, ready to walk out, The two guys stop me. They asked if they could search me, I was like why?? My friend said just cooperate. But I insisted why? They asked do you have a certain cell phone. I said MY CELL PHONE? I showed them. They were like okay... but still asked to search me, and of course they found I wasn't stealing anything. So somehow the girl saw I had a cell phone but thought I was stealing it. And they were all airheads.
And so I wasn't ready on ever going back there. I don't think I ever have. So if a store adopts a policy acting people are all theives (aka add copy protection) if they buy CDs, of course they're gonna get a drop in sells.
It's not like there is one big program called "Windows" running your computer. There are many programs like Explorer.exe, taskman.exe, systray.exe, mplayer2.exe, messenger, kernel32, the scheduler, iexplore.exe, ...
... really you don't want me to do that) That way, I can use my own browser and shell, WITHOUT any of Microsoft contiunual nuicenses and usually with performance gain (like speed). Cygwin is kind of nice to run with windows, but I don't run windows anymore, so I guess this is the end of this topic!!
SURE, the DLL's are common among almost all the programs, but I know you can break down the system into components (or programs?) and shell integration (that is, registry entries) and remove, for example, the Internet Explorer integration from the shell, so it is like it is not there anymore.
I know this because I've built a windows 95 b system, component by component (without going into details
OH BTW that prof picked a good target.
I'm a beta tester, so all this is true.
Orcs were removed because of lameness, especially after they removed the pig farms. Many of the remaining Orc beta testers complained that pigs are the main orc staple and they simple couldn't completely remove the pigs from the game. Well lo an behold, the developers were looking for a new flying critter (one where they can polymorph flying units without them falling to their death you know because frost wyrms have rights, and should be equal, this is from part of the azeroth manifesto) and guess what? They created the largest orc scandal to date in all public mockery to the race, and made the flying critter a pig! So remember when you see the flying pig in the game in such an unaccustom manner, just remember what blizzard did to the orcs.
I was trying to find documentation on how to run this program. My main question was it a library similar to aalib or was it a program I run? The site said most of it is found under the original qt docs, which I don't think it even mentions it. The the gzip had an index.html as a doc. Loaded it up, and found it just a skeleton of documentation with no real content.
No man page either.
So I thought, well it must be another typical program with poor documentation. It seems programmers these days don't even think about releasing any information until after 1.0?
So I found the qtconsole executible after 'make' so I'm off to try it. I seriously hope that the program is lacking as much as the documentation.
Easy:
Most likely, the game will some kind of account/character system. The person will have an account name. Whenever someone creates game objects, it records the creator account name. If someone creates copyrighted material, they can trace it down and they can delete/disable his account, while removing all his objects.
Really, it sounds like what I said before. Worlds will become easier to modify for the user. And there may be an ownership problem where a user creates something good, and a company wants to assume ownership, through their license agreement (you forfit all your rights of creation and ownership to them)
Why do corporations think they can control user-created content as their own, in MMORPG's? We have enough of this problem in the real world, just with their damn license agreements.
What an MMORPG needs is a GPL-like license, that way, all changes are made availible in return for promoting the world's depth. It doesn't have to be programming, but anything created from the world's sense of creation.
People make worlds, to achieve their own goals, not give corps fatter pockets.
I wonder if the Mozilla 1.0 release will coincide with anAOL internal switch to Linux?
I have an AGP Nividia Geforce 2 MX, and an AMD K6-3 333 MHz. I have experienced these memory corruption, graphical anomolies, and lockups in linux and windows 95.
I noticed that AMD K6-3 was not mentioned, but it has to exist on it. The K6-3 was made with the same instruction set as a pre-Athlon. Thus the bug definately exists.
Not sure about K6/K6-2, but it is possible.
There was a scientific american on pbs a while back where they actually described people as human cyborgs. I don't think they were really cyborgs, what they really were was just people wearing computers. They actually already exist, and have been around for some years. Alec Baldwin even tried it out.
I couldn't find anything about it on the scientific american, but this another article on that website, somewhat dated. I think the guy that wrote it also envisioned wearable wireless devices.
Here is a wearable computer you can even buy, meant mainly for military, or scientific use, I'm sure you can get one. It runs a transmeta crusoe chip.
The future is close, and it will be cool.
As we develop new services, we want to maintain your trust while continuing to meet your service needs with innovative products. By sharing account information among Qwest's family of companies, and by
aggregating information to learn more about trends and purchasing patterns, we can serve you better.
So this would include MSN? Are they part of the big family too?
Wouldn't surprise me - them sharing information. Glad I'm no longer on Qwest DSL and Phone.
MS has a port to UNIX of IE - http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/ [microsoft.com]
;)
unfortunately, it's only for Solaris and HP-UX
Yeah I remember about that now. But the big question is, why not a Linux compatible version of Office? (and why not IE too?)
I took a look at your link and found the Unix IE system requirements.
Ouch!
IE 5 for Solaris - 68 MB hard drive space, 32 MB (64 recommended) of RAM
IE for HP-UX - 87 MB hard drive space, 64 MB (96 recommended) of RAM
Solaris IE 5 SP1 - 110 MB hard drive space, 64 MB (96 recommended) of RAM
HP-UX IE 5 SP1 - 120 MB of hard drive space, 64 MB (96...) or RAM.
Wow these requirements are higher than IE 5.5 for Windows! I dunno if I would trust MS writing Unix applications now. From the looks of it, it looks bizzarly bloated, and after a recent linux bloat discussion, I don't think MS Unix ports will be in our best interests
You could say the same things about Internet Explorer as well?
They say in the article that Linux development is slowing and as for the reason:
"the engineer community is abandoning it left and right for Mac OS X. While the true free software advocates will stick with Linux to the death, those who just want to get work done and not fight with the OS are switching like crazy. This is a real problem for software developed as open source because, as these users leave there will be less interest in the OS and the continuing evolvement of the mess of Linux desktop technologies will slow considerably."
But I say that is from their perspective. What I see is a KDE 3.0 coming faster than ever, and even a solidly progressing Gnome.
I haven't seen Linux slowing at all. In fact, it has progressing faster than in the past. They're just Mac OS X superiority optimists. And they like to pick on tiny Linux, because some people think Linux has a tiny share of the market or not growing.
Lindows = Windows + Linux
Linux = Linus + Unix??
Else where I found scribbled:
Windows = Dos + MacOS,(you know adding graphical "windows" to a command prompt)
Come on really... You can't make anything in the computer world without basing it off of something else. And if Microsoft gets upset in this, so they'll probably win. Lindows loses it's identity of being Windows-like, and it won't sell, destroying a competitor.
Microsft is keeping the "Windows From Linux" by using a common term in any GUI. They didn't invent the Windows that they use, so why should they be allowed to prevent derivates of Windows?
This is the source of the previous quote.
What about when someone gets on the internet to do their XP activation? A newly installed XP will be unsecure as well.
"Product Activation works by verifying that a software program's product key has not been used on more personal computers than intended by the software's license. You must use the product key in order to install the software and then it is transformed into an installation ID number. You use an activation wizard to provide the installation ID number to Microsoft either through a secure transfer over the Internet, or by telephone. A confirmation ID is sent back to your machine to activate your product."
Notice they say,"secure transfer over the Internet."