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User: StarBar

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  1. Why not Gnome or KDE instead of Aqua? on No More Mac Tweaking? · · Score: 1

    I am an ascii guy so I don't care mush about GUI:s but only when I need to surf the web or read email. Why can't Gnome or KDE be ported to Mac OS/X? I don't know much about it and have still Mac OS 9 on my iMac back there in the corner, so is it possible?

  2. There's no such thing as a free lunch on How Could TV Survive Without Commercials? · · Score: 1

    Either we pay through taxes, subscription fees or commercials. Skip the commercials if you want, the push model is outdated anyway. Today we want to look for the information, not get it down our throats during the favourite soap opera. The trick for the operators is to go IP TV. With IP TV an up channel is enabled to the end user so s(he) can interactivelly choose what to look for. Click on the car (in the movie), a soap (in the soap opera) or the celebrity to be transferred to an information site (not advertisment site!) about the topic. If you don't care you don't care. Also ordering pizza from a nearby restaurant, movies on demand, on-line gaming and instant news about your favourite war will convince some people to pay.

    Pushed ads is an outdated business model!!

  3. SD is afraid of openess on Sigma Designs/XVid Update · · Score: 1


    I have been working with STB designs based on Sigma's RealMagic chip for some years now. During this period of time it has been a hazzle to get source code even under NDA, and even then some parts are still binaries.

    We did the same as many other RealMagic developers I have come across, we wrote our own replacement for the standard driver binaries. A fraction of the size, much better performance AND source code! I will look into the NDA issues and try to make it open source, but really Sigma should do it at their own!

    I think that Sigma is afraid because they have a history as PCI card manufacturer with killing competition, but who will steal their chip by looking at the source code? They are afraid of getting a load of requests for improvements and patches to take care of. They are afraid of getting too much to do maybe!? Why not donate a pile of RealMagic eval cards to the open source teams willing to support it?? My (not so) humble opinion is that they are ancient dinosaurs from the early PC ages where propriatery meant profitable.

    Wake up Sigma you are killing your own market!!!

  4. Re:Open Source is Not A Business on Open Source & Embedded · · Score: 1

    I agree fully with your view. The interesting question is what RedHat has for a profit center. I always thought that selling CD:s with Linux is very close to selling Hot Dogs, they get old pretty fast. Stallman once claimed to write free, smaller and faster replacements for UNIX programs. Today this is history but not many has understood the reasons why he did it. They still try to make money from software. I think Red Hat and its alike has made a great work gathering venture cap for the open source cause. It IS a bubble and it will burst, but the open source will always remain for those who got their profit centers right.

    After the bubble bursts a lot of bad open source software will vanish and we will wash out what is worth saving and build on that. An evolutionary thing I would like to say and it is not a reversable process. I vonder though why the investors views a possible future market share by open source software as attractive. I mean zero dollar one time is as much as zero dollar a zillion times. *scratch* I am probably too stupid for that game...

    In my opinion Red Hat and many of their alikes are very much aware of this but while trying to think big they loose focus from "small and fast" and just keeping "free" will not make it. I have dissapointing experiences giving up installing Redhat on an old PC with a small (600 Mb) hard disk as well as trying to read a word document using Staroffice with only 64 Mb of RAM! M stands for mega (million) remember! *sigh*

    'nough said

  5. Privacy is overrated anyways... on National Biometric IDs · · Score: 1

    In sweden we have had computer registered ID #:s for decades, it is simply your birth day plus four digits. Before that all churches registered births, marriages, deaths and such matters for many hundred years. The problem is not the information itself but the authentication of persons causing and using it. Unless one have something to hide privacy is not the problem.

  6. This is good. on Preemptible Kernel Patch Accepted · · Score: 2, Informative

    Preemptiveness give the kernel the possibility to change direction in the middle of a leap, and later get back to that point to finalize the leap, what ever system call that is. It will of course not do this for no reason, only if an important event has happened that has a higher priority than the current running event. A little like 'nice' but much more powerful. Can't be bad, can it?

    The next thing to have is predicatability in kernel space, then we can calculate the exact max latency to expect between the important event and the systems respons to it... belive it or not. Check out with Monta Vista for this feature, I am sure they are thinking about it.

  7. Re:What this gives you on Video with Depth · · Score: 1

    I think what you describe is very close to what they are trying to do with MPEG-4 animation extensions. Doing this with live content is very exciting. A movie will not be a series of pictures but rather a scenario with a number of pre defined view paths which the viewer can choose between. The same goes for fully animated movies like "Final Fantasy" and "Toy Story". In either case the size of what is broadcasted shrinks dramatically.

  8. Re:Kyoto on Limited-Use DVD Technology · · Score: 1

    Look who is whining! Worried about your barbeque and loosing weight or what? Difference is that YOU can do something about it. Europeans DO worry, but can do very little about it. Guess that the commies spent too much money on gagging with the US over the years. And yeahh the Germans lost most of their trees during and after the war using the Marshall help... Don't be so.... never mind just sign the damned thing so we can turn these bad habbits of ours around. And those one time DVD:s... what a waste!! Use Video on Demand instead and you will much better of, IM(not so)HO

  9. Re:What this gives you on Video with Depth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Depth information and movement can give a chance to triangulate objects targeted.
    From there you probably can move on to the more sophisticated compression techniques
    (soon to be) intruduced my MPEG-4.

    Ever seen the move "Enemy of the state" where they triangulate 3D shapes with satellites
    and movements? Great techniques in that movie, but scary scenario.

  10. Characters should remain on Finale for Final Fantasy Studio · · Score: 1

    These kind of characters are really low cost between casts. I think the project tried to do too much at once. Instead the characters should be maintained and developed in a separate company while movie making and and marketing should be business as usual through for instance Pixar and agents. This way the characters could continue to evolve independently of certain movies success or failures. MPEG-4 animations extension will help boost this when (/if) those will be released.

  11. Re:This is the most ridiculous article... on Is Evolution Over In Humans? · · Score: 1

    I think NOT. Evolution is not neccessarily based on DNA. Today capitalism, and the world economomy in large, is a much bigger threat to human than any biological threats. Those who are thrilled by earning money will always be biologically fixed while those most fitted biologically could end up in the third world or be homeless. On the contrary I think there are the places we can still see biologically healthy DNA based evolution. So for survival I suggest plenty of interracial relations with a lot of kids. The white race is in especially bad condition I think, knowing it first hand. Just see how we separated unwanted people from the rest of us by sending zillions of boats to America and the criminals to Australia. What a biologically wasteful thing to do. The article may be right, we do mix our genes, but the wrong results are sorted out based on artificial criterias.

    On the other hand we can see science fiction like Matrix, the movie, to be what Jules Verne was hundred years ago. Be prepared to choose the blue pill and let the AI:s restore our biological evolution ;-)

  12. Re:$.02 per hour.... on New MPEG-4 Licensing Scheme · · Score: 1

    One reason for supplying MPEG-4 is to lower the need of bandwidth which is good for the operator. Also with a lower price (-$2,25) the player will be cheaper one can imagine... but no! The player will also decode MPEG-2 of course. Which means that the end user both pays for a more expensive decoder ($2,25 + $0,25) AND a traffic fee... Hey, what is wrong with MPEG-2?

    I want fiber to my home anyway!!

  13. add also VR googles and IRL goes poof!! on Think And Click · · Score: 1

    This is what I have waited for. A truly scientific project legalizing laziness to its extreme!! These guys have the budget and brains make something that will not sell and will be baught by some buziness minded content owner who will add VR googles and a multiuser 3D world.... Just like Count Zero's mummy was hooked up in the interactive soap opera (William Gibson) and killed during a date with the main male star in VR!! Virtual will goes real and vice versa. I will add Pizza Express to my stock portfolio asap

    Now we are just waiting for the neural feedback generator brain plug-in and why not the enzyme dropper generator feeding your brain with controlled doozes of dope to get happy, sad, angry etc...

    I will never get bored again!!! :-))

  14. Re:Growing pains on Linus Does Not Scale · · Score: 1

    Why must stuff grow big sizewise just because it is popular? It only means that a *lot* of stuff you don't need or want will end up in your lap. The more stuff you got the harder it is to get it right and keep it working, so I hope not.

    Scalability, IMHO, is *not* the ability to apply a lot of more or less maintained patches to the kernel but to remove stuff you don't want from it. I think the kernel is too big as it is.

    Just think about how many features you pay for and don't use in Micro$oft products and it is expensive to fit in your box and run at a deasent speed. Bugs?!?? well....it's hard to have control over such massive amounts of code so what can we expect...and expensive of course....let us not end up there Linus, keep it fit!

  15. Re:Compilers are designed to make things easier on Intel C/C++ Compiler Beats GCC · · Score: 1

    In that case, why even have compilers? Why not require all programmers to be talented enough to write assembly language directly?

    The language doesn't matter. The algorithms used are much more important than compiler optimizations. Poor algorithms are the reason you need hundreds of Mhz and Gigabytes of disk to be able to write a simple letter these days.

    Just think about it: 500 000 000 CPU cycles every second and still it takes so long to get that word processor up and running! And it's buggy!!

    So let's think about how to write code rather than what the compiler does with it IMHO.

  16. Re:Speed is everything?.... on Intel C/C++ Compiler Beats GCC · · Score: 1

    Well, that is a philosophical question weather the compiler should compensate for a programmers lack of talent or not. In my opinion you should never expect stuff that comes out from a compiler to be better than what went in to it. Still many compilers tries to do that leaving programmers with lack of talent unknown of that. These people never develop their highlevel language skills and are always very dependant on their tools. Good luck!

  17. Speed is everything?.... on Intel C/C++ Compiler Beats GCC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I once worked in a company making compilers for embedded systems, and debuggers. At one point we were outperformed by a 3-400% compared to a competitor. 6 months later we were twice as fast as they were for that specific benchmark. I wonder how many customers actually used that for something useful? The hard part is actually debugging and portability. And for speed I would say that a profiler can make miracles finding the hotspots needing optimizations. Just hand optimize those spots and you are doing fine with your favourite tools.

    Also with optimizations follows compiler bugs (i.e. the compiler generates faulty code) that are very hard to find especially if you don't have the source to your compiler.

    Finally I think Intel just want to capture customers as thet did with their compilers in the early 90:s (ie PLM and Intel C) It's just not in their interest to be portable. With all this in mind such compilers could be good for a specific project but I'd be careful to build anything on highly optimizing compilers in general and not on a sound design.

  18. Re:Of all the horrible formats... on TiVo To Support RealNetwork Formats · · Score: 1

    Well in fact MPEG-4 has borrowed some ideas from Quicktime according to this overview. Same sh*t but different color. MPEG4 is a djungle, exciting but dangerous... will take a long time before we see anything but a slightly improved compression and some new patented audio formats. MPEG4 encoders sucks so far.

    Sorry!

    PS
    A standard IMHO is something more than one company/person agrees to before using it. Not something that is tossed down your throat for no reason. MS sucks!
    DS