I gave up using RPMs long ago because of the dependancy problems, and nowadays always compile from source. I find this generally causes a lot less problems. The only gripe I have is that large programs can take hours to compile.
My proposal is to distribute semi-compiled packages. The Distributor (i.e. Redhat) compiles the program on there machines as per normal, except they dont link it. They distribute a package containing.o files, and a makefile. Installing the package does the final step in compilation- linking the object files.
This would solve most dependancy problems. If I have a different version of a library with rpms, the program generally wont run. However if you you do the linking locally, the program is linked to your libs as if you compiled it yourself.
It also solves the time problem. Large packages would take no more than 20 seconds to link.
If you came up with a packaging system like this, and make it a little more flexible (Allow the user to choose install dir!!!!!), then you have a fast installation that works on pretty much any system.
You can't buy Assault rifles from your corner store anymore... So? I hate to tell you this, but while Americans were proudly upholding their constitution rights to carry Really Big Guns(tm), everyone else grew up and decided that giving Uzi's and Grenades to schoolkids isn't really a good idea.
Kinda... It would be similar to the magnet + coil produces electricity concept... except the magnet has to be moving relative to the coil for it to work. Same goes for gravity + superconducter.
If we got a really big superconducter and moved it back and forwards relative to the earth, then it would generate electricity, but it still wouldnt be more then the kinetic energy aplied to it in the first place.
If you just thought to yourself "put it in orbit", smack yourself and write out the laws of thermodynamics 100 times. The electricity produced would come from the kinetic energy you give it, so it's just a really fancy way of converting rocket fuel to electricty.
People, when hypnotised, have been able to recall even the most minor details about things that happened years before, so one could argue the brain does store everything (or at least a representation of everything... sort of like Vector Graphics). People just don't understand how to access it properly.
I like to think of hypnotism as some sort of "Debug Mode" that allows direct access to the lower levels of your brain that people have trouble accessing normally.
HAL Wasnt insane; he just has 2 sets of conflicting orders that he carried out in the only way possible- killing Frank Poole. It was really just a programming error.
He and David Bowman are later combined into one AI inside the monolith on Europa, and Hal/Bowman ends up saving the day by preventing the monolith from destroying Poole after he is resurected, and flys a mission to Europa.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read the books.
Opera is nice, but I found it often rendered pages incorrectly, had trouble with large pages, java, javascript, css, etc, and the Banner add annoyed me.
I havn't really tried it in a while; Guess I should go download the latest version and see what its like.
I've never understood Windows' fetish for rebooting. Even things like network settings can be reconfigured on the command line (Yes... NT had command line config tools) without a reboot, but you use the GUI and it wants to reboot, and half the time it even tries to reinstall all the drivers.
To install the nVidia drivers in Linux I had to extract two tarballs, type 'make' twice, and change one line in a config file. Not exactly rocket science.
And for the lazy ones out there, you can find a shell script that does it all for you (including the X config!) on google.
As for the nVidia drivers being unstable... I've had one crash. This happened when I had two X servers running, in different color depths, and with one running Quake3. On the other hand, XP loves crashing randomly and then throwing the "nvidia drivers caused a problem" message at me when I reboot.
What really shits me is the people that refuse to touch nVidia because they don't GPL the Linux drivers.... I mean, your lucky they are even writing the drivers in the first place, yet alone providing lots of documentation, and SUPPORTING them, even though they probably arn't getting anything out of it (I seriously doubt the existence of Linux drivers has significantly increased sales of nVidia cards)
Yes, but my point was that there isn't a physical reason why data cannot be sent in 8bit format, only a software one. Rather than trying to accomodate ancient protocols that do not make use of modern technology, we should be updating them. (And yes I am aware that getting everyone to update to a new version of NNTP that isn't fully backwards compatible would be a big job... but it needs to be done. The best example of this is IPv6- we need to upgrade, but no one wants to go through the teething problems that will result)
I'm all for standardisation... but sometimes it takes _forever_ to get something standardized. If someone writes a better product, they generally don't want to wait for it to be declared a standard, especially with something like uuencoding which has been around as long as usenet, and isn't going to be replaced in a hurry unless someone comes out and waves a product around yelling "hey try this. it works better". Ogg Vorbis isn't a standard by any means. Hell, it is still on RC3. _but_ a lot of people are using it because it has far better sound compression than mp3. You don't hear people complaining that Vorbis has jumped the standardisation process do you?
Personally I can't see why we can't just send the data as 8-bit binary. uuencode and similar encoding formats should have died out with UUCP years ago, since there is no physical reason why 8bits can't be sent over the wire anymore.
You pretty much nailed it with that statement. I've written a number of GPL'd programs, my current project being phpShare. I originally wrote it for personal use, but decided that it would be a good idea to give something back to the community, However I didn't want some company just stealing my hard work. The GPL fits that perfectly. I don't use it because of some political notion that all software should be free, but because it's the best fitting licence for my needs. If a company wants to sell my code commercially under a non-gpl licence, I can decide whether to give them the right to use it (possibly for a modest fee), or force them to abide by the GPL's rules.
If I wanted to start my own company and write software commercially, I most likely wouldn't use the GPL. I would probably release various parts of the code because I believe in Open Source, but I do not believe the GPL alone is commercially viable long term. Yes, there are companys that are starting to make a profit selling GPL'd software, but most of the revenue comes from services, not the actual sale of the software.
To sum it all up, the GPL is a great licence that is best suited for "part time" projects. It has proven that the community can come togethor and write some excellent software, BUT it is not the licence-to-end-all-licences. the Unix mantra of the right tool for the job applies here- use the right licence for the job at hand.
I've been using Blender for years, and while the interface drive nuts at first, I would now swear hands down that it is one of the best 3d modelers out there. It is a quality piece of work.
Hopefully they will have the sense to release Blender under an open-source licence, so that work on it may continue. It would be a shame to lose such a fine modeler.
Most of the health problems from space are due to the fact that you are in perpetual freefall, thus you experience no gravity, so your body slows regeneration of bone and muscle. If a space station was built that rotated fast enough, you could simulate enough gravity to slow that down to acceptable levels. (Although it would be hard to simulate earth gravity). Mars has 2/3 the gravity as earth, so you could stay there long term without too much trouble if you could find a way to get there faster (currently takes about a year for space probes). The moon only takes a few days, but the 1/9th gravity wouldn't be enough to stop bone and muscle decay.
A while ago I went and worked out all the codes. There might be more now, but heres all the ones from a few months ago.
Heres a list: GEOF SKROCE DARROW WRONG NUMBER GUNS MORPHEUS TRINITY DEJA VU STEAK AGENTBULLETTIME CRASH KEANU CARRIE LAURENCE TOKYO LOBBY MIRROR MIRROR SENTINAL NEBUCHADNEZZAR SENTINELLARGE800 x600 SITE CREDITS OWEN CHRYSALIS PAGE168 PAGE212 PAGE98 PAGE78 BILL RED REDPILL
On second thought, anyone know if matter + antimatter actually does = lots of energy? I thought that they were going to do some kind of experiment with that but I never heard any more.
Well, if we took.005 grammes of antimatter (quite a lot), and mixed it with the equivilant matter, we would be converting.01 grammes (.00001kg) of matter into energy,
so If we take E=MC^2
Where M=mass(in kg), C=speed of light (3*10^8 m/s)
= 1*10^-5* 3*10^8 * 3*10^8
= 1*10^-5 * 9*10^16
= 9 * 10^11 Joules of energy
Which is enough to light 10,000 100 watt light bulbs for about 10 days
It seams that robots will eventually replace humans at most tasks, leaving a large portion of the population unemployed. Perhaps at some stage in the future we will revert to some communism style of government, where robots do all the work, and humans live a life of luxery
Before you mod me down or throw around anti commie remarks, think about it. If AI and robots take over a large percentage of our jobs, the number of unemployed people will skyrocket, and most of the population would end up on unemployment compensation. If this happens, then Western nations would start looking less like Capitalism, and more like Communism.
personally, I think that spying on citizens is like masturbation. Everyone does it, no one admits it, and in the end it gets you nowhere.
Re:This will revolutionize color keying.
on
Video with Depth
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I was very bored when trying to make up a slashdot username. I got the words ass and rape, and combined them (Donkeys are sexy, you know!)
This will revolutionize color keying.
on
Video with Depth
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Normally, when you want to key in a false background in a scene, you need to have a constant color in the background (Hence the use of blue and green screens). If the background isn't flat, then you either have to go at it with photoshop frame by frame, or use expensive border tracking software which is less than perfect. You could spend hours setting up a scene just right, with screens placed in all the right places, making sure that there is nothing else that is the same color as the key, and planning camera angles for an action sequence, not to mention the struggle of getting the keying to work just right.
with this new technology, however, you could film an actor just about anywhere with very little preperation, and key him/her out based on depth AND color (some situations may need both), and easily pop new things both in front and behind the actor. It could save movie studios a lot of time, effort, and money for doing special effects, especially after you consider how easily it would be to generate a virtual stunt double from the 3d mesh (film the actor from a few angles, and merge the resulting 3d wireframe. Voila, perfect model down to the wrinkles in the skin)
The benifit of the elevator is that on the way down, you can convert all that gravitational potential energy back into electricity, so even though it takes a lot of energy to lift the elevator, you get most of it back.
Slashdot Mirror
"What we need is an Open Source application to capture a .ra or .ram stream, convert it to .ogg or .mp3 and optionally save it to a file or just play it"
MPlayer, now fully GPL'd, has (beta) support for realmedia, and comes with an encoder for many formats.
I gave up using RPMs long ago because of the dependancy problems, and nowadays always compile from source. I find this generally causes a lot less problems. The only gripe I have is that large programs can take hours to compile.
.o files, and a makefile. Installing the package does the final step in compilation- linking the object files.
My proposal is to distribute semi-compiled packages. The Distributor (i.e. Redhat) compiles the program on there machines as per normal, except they dont link it. They distribute a package containing
This would solve most dependancy problems. If I have a different version of a library with rpms, the program generally wont run. However if you you do the linking locally, the program is linked to your libs as if you compiled it yourself.
It also solves the time problem. Large packages would take no more than 20 seconds to link.
If you came up with a packaging system like this, and make it a little more flexible (Allow the user to choose install dir!!!!!), then you have a fast installation that works on pretty much any system.
The energy received from doing that would be insignificant.
You can't buy Assault rifles from your corner store anymore... So? I hate to tell you this, but while Americans were proudly upholding their constitution rights to carry Really Big Guns(tm), everyone else grew up and decided that giving Uzi's and Grenades to schoolkids isn't really a good idea.
Kinda... It would be similar to the magnet + coil produces electricity concept... except the magnet has to be moving relative to the coil for it to work. Same goes for gravity + superconducter. If we got a really big superconducter and moved it back and forwards relative to the earth, then it would generate electricity, but it still wouldnt be more then the kinetic energy aplied to it in the first place. If you just thought to yourself "put it in orbit", smack yourself and write out the laws of thermodynamics 100 times. The electricity produced would come from the kinetic energy you give it, so it's just a really fancy way of converting rocket fuel to electricty.
People, when hypnotised, have been able to recall even the most minor details about things that happened years before, so one could argue the brain does store everything (or at least a representation of everything... sort of like Vector Graphics). People just don't understand how to access it properly.
I like to think of hypnotism as some sort of "Debug Mode" that allows direct access to the lower levels of your brain that people have trouble accessing normally.
HAL Wasnt insane; he just has 2 sets of conflicting orders that he carried out in the only way possible- killing Frank Poole. It was really just a programming error.
He and David Bowman are later combined into one AI inside the monolith on Europa, and Hal/Bowman ends up saving the day by preventing the monolith from destroying Poole after he is resurected, and flys a mission to Europa.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read the books.
Opera is nice, but I found it often rendered pages incorrectly, had trouble with large pages, java, javascript, css, etc, and the Banner add annoyed me.
I havn't really tried it in a while; Guess I should go download the latest version and see what its like.
Konqueror 3 is looking pretty good. Alls' it needs are tabs.
I've never understood Windows' fetish for rebooting. Even things like network settings can be reconfigured on the command line (Yes... NT had command line config tools) without a reboot, but you use the GUI and it wants to reboot, and half the time it even tries to reinstall all the drivers.
To install the nVidia drivers in Linux I had to extract two tarballs, type 'make' twice, and change one line in a config file. Not exactly rocket science.
And for the lazy ones out there, you can find a shell script that does it all for you (including the X config!) on google.
As for the nVidia drivers being unstable... I've had one crash. This happened when I had two X servers running, in different color depths, and with one running Quake3. On the other hand, XP loves crashing randomly and then throwing the "nvidia drivers caused a problem" message at me when I reboot.
What really shits me is the people that refuse to touch nVidia because they don't GPL the Linux drivers.... I mean, your lucky they are even writing the drivers in the first place, yet alone providing lots of documentation, and SUPPORTING them, even though they probably arn't getting anything out of it (I seriously doubt the existence of Linux drivers has significantly increased sales of nVidia cards)
Thats not what I'm saying.... I'm saying that a lot of protocols, NNTP included, are outdated.
Yes, but my point was that there isn't a physical reason why data cannot be sent in 8bit format, only a software one. Rather than trying to accomodate ancient protocols that do not make use of modern technology, we should be updating them. (And yes I am aware that getting everyone to update to a new version of NNTP that isn't fully backwards compatible would be a big job... but it needs to be done. The best example of this is IPv6- we need to upgrade, but no one wants to go through the teething problems that will result)
I'm all for standardisation... but sometimes it takes _forever_ to get something standardized. If someone writes a better product, they generally don't want to wait for it to be declared a standard, especially with something like uuencoding which has been around as long as usenet, and isn't going to be replaced in a hurry unless someone comes out and waves a product around yelling "hey try this. it works better". Ogg Vorbis isn't a standard by any means. Hell, it is still on RC3. _but_ a lot of people are using it because it has far better sound compression than mp3. You don't hear people complaining that Vorbis has jumped the standardisation process do you?
Personally I can't see why we can't just send the data as 8-bit binary. uuencode and similar encoding formats should have died out with UUCP years ago, since there is no physical reason why 8bits can't be sent over the wire anymore.
You pretty much nailed it with that statement. I've written a number of GPL'd programs, my current project being phpShare. I originally wrote it for personal use, but decided that it would be a good idea to give something back to the community, However I didn't want some company just stealing my hard work. The GPL fits that perfectly. I don't use it because of some political notion that all software should be free, but because it's the best fitting licence for my needs. If a company wants to sell my code commercially under a non-gpl licence, I can decide whether to give them the right to use it (possibly for a modest fee), or force them to abide by the GPL's rules.
If I wanted to start my own company and write software commercially, I most likely wouldn't use the GPL. I would probably release various parts of the code because I believe in Open Source, but I do not believe the GPL alone is commercially viable long term. Yes, there are companys that are starting to make a profit selling GPL'd software, but most of the revenue comes from services, not the actual sale of the software.
To sum it all up, the GPL is a great licence that is best suited for "part time" projects. It has proven that the community can come togethor and write some excellent software, BUT it is not the licence-to-end-all-licences. the Unix mantra of the right tool for the job applies here- use the right licence for the job at hand.
I've been using Blender for years, and while the interface drive nuts at first, I would now swear hands down that it is one of the best 3d modelers out there. It is a quality piece of work.
Hopefully they will have the sense to release Blender under an open-source licence, so that work on it may continue. It would be a shame to lose such a fine modeler.
Most of the health problems from space are due to the fact that you are in perpetual freefall, thus you experience no gravity, so your body slows regeneration of bone and muscle. If a space station was built that rotated fast enough, you could simulate enough gravity to slow that down to acceptable levels. (Although it would be hard to simulate earth gravity). Mars has 2/3 the gravity as earth, so you could stay there long term without too much trouble if you could find a way to get there faster (currently takes about a year for space probes). The moon only takes a few days, but the 1/9th gravity wouldn't be enough to stop bone and muscle decay.
A while ago I went and worked out all the codes. There might be more now, but heres all the ones from a few months ago.
LAURENCE0 x6008
Heres a list:
GEOF
SKROCE
DARROW
WRONG NUMBER
GUNS
MORPHEUS
TRINITY
DEJA VU
STEAK
AGENTBULLETTIME
CRASH
KEANU
CARRIE
TOKYO
LOBBY
MIRROR MIRROR
SENTINAL
NEBUCHADNEZZAR
SENTINELLARGE80
SITE CREDITS
OWEN
CHRYSALIS
PAGE168
PAGE212
PAGE9
PAGE78
BILL
RED
REDPILL
On second thought, anyone know if matter + antimatter actually does = lots of energy? I thought that they were going to do some kind of experiment with that but I never heard any more.
.005 grammes of antimatter (quite a lot), and mixed it with the equivilant matter, we would be converting .01 grammes (.00001kg) of matter into energy,
Well, if we took
so If we take E=MC^2
Where M=mass(in kg), C=speed of light (3*10^8 m/s)
= 1*10^-5* 3*10^8 * 3*10^8
= 1*10^-5 * 9*10^16
= 9 * 10^11 Joules of energy
Which is enough to light 10,000 100 watt light bulbs for about 10 days
In the southern parts of Australia, we often get Ozone hole warnings along with the normal weather.
It seams that robots will eventually replace humans at most tasks, leaving a large portion of the population unemployed. Perhaps at some stage in the future we will revert to some communism style of government, where robots do all the work, and humans live a life of luxery
Before you mod me down or throw around anti commie remarks, think about it. If AI and robots take over a large percentage of our jobs, the number of unemployed people will skyrocket, and most of the population would end up on unemployment compensation. If this happens, then Western nations would start looking less like Capitalism, and more like Communism.
can be found here
personally, I think that spying on citizens is like masturbation. Everyone does it, no one admits it, and in the end it gets you nowhere.
I was very bored when trying to make up a slashdot username. I got the words ass and rape, and combined them (Donkeys are sexy, you know!)
Normally, when you want to key in a false background in a scene, you need to have a constant color in the background (Hence the use of blue and green screens). If the background isn't flat, then you either have to go at it with photoshop frame by frame, or use expensive border tracking software which is less than perfect. You could spend hours setting up a scene just right, with screens placed in all the right places, making sure that there is nothing else that is the same color as the key, and planning camera angles for an action sequence, not to mention the struggle of getting the keying to work just right.
with this new technology, however, you could film an actor just about anywhere with very little preperation, and key him/her out based on depth AND color (some situations may need both), and easily pop new things both in front and behind the actor. It could save movie studios a lot of time, effort, and money for doing special effects, especially after you consider how easily it would be to generate a virtual stunt double from the 3d mesh (film the actor from a few angles, and merge the resulting 3d wireframe. Voila, perfect model down to the wrinkles in the skin)
The benifit of the elevator is that on the way down, you can convert all that gravitational potential energy back into electricity, so even though it takes a lot of energy to lift the elevator, you get most of it back.