and bingo, you've got a black screen. That's 35 lines of code, and it could have been less if I hadn't included error-checking and other nice things like that. For the record, most of it was cribbed from the SDL Introduction.
SDL is a beautiful, compact API that's also nicely extensible (eg. SDL_image, SDL_mixer, SDL_net, smpeg, etc.). There's no *way* you need 150 lines of code to do interesting things with SDL.
BAD. Just BAD. Ugh. My old boss used to say, "The customer isn't always right -- but they are always a customer."
My gosh -- talking about "demon customers" is just terribly bad PR. I've never shopped at a Best Buy, and after reading that, I don't think I ever will. I don't care if they think I'm the angel fucking Gabriel of a customer, if they're calling customers "demons" I don't want to deal with them.
It's one thing to scam the store out of money, for example buying sale items and returning for full price. It's another thing *entirely* to "take up too much of a salesperson's time." As defined by who? Some marketroid from Upper Management? I've often asked salespeople questions just because I was needed the information to make an informed purchasing decision, and eventually made an informed decision not to buy the product. Now, *I* don't think I was taking up too much of their time, but...
Or only buying at sales. Come on, think like a (skinflint) customer, especially if said customer isn't from the area and needs to drive a ways to get to your store -- gee, store X is holding a storewide sale again, I better check that out. You hold the sale, you deal with the skinflints. If the skinflints are a problem, hold fewer sales, don't just turn them away! You have to deal with the fact that not all of your customers are going to be consumerist sheep.
C'mon, people, the employees are there (or *should* be there) to help customers, and if they do a decent job the company should make money. If you need to resort to "firing" customers to make money, the customers may not be your problem.
Yes, because blinding minimum-wage theater employees for just doing their job is a *really* good idea.
Not that fining somebody $BIGNUM and giving them up to a year in prison for camcording a movie is a good idea, either, but it isn't the employees' fault that the MPAA has its collective head up its butt.
Now, if it was a certified MPAA goon, on the other hand (think Agent Smith)...
Dangit, we *never* get people with camcorders into a movie. I obviously need to encourage people to tape movies at my theater so I can bust them and collect the reward money. (evil grin)
Interestingly enough, I noted in the Apple Developer Tools license (which I read just today) that Apple says something along the lines of "using this product doesn't mean that we won't take your ideas and make our own." That warning is really close to the top, so if you read the license at all, you can't claim nobody warned you.
It's real nice that your father can make that much money, but I know a lot of *couples* with master's-level college educations who can barely scrape $50,000 *together*. Part of it is being able to find employment in the fields you want, where you want to live; part of it is hard work; and another part of it is just plain dumb luck.
Tell you what, if I stayed in my home state and tried to work in computers, I would be *very* lucky to make more than $40,000. The jobs *just* *plain* *aren't* *here.*
The majority of rich people don't hoard their money. That idea is an untrue stereotype. The majority invest it, start new companies, hire more employees, expand their businesses, buy expensive cars, boats, homes, etc. and, in general, keep the economy moving.
Unlike the poor people, who, when given a tax break, hide the extra money in mattresses because they don't know what to do with it.
Okay, enough sarcasm.
The difference between a poor family, or even a lower middle-class family, and a rich family is that when the rich family saves $200 on taxes, they buy another big screen TV. When poor or middle-class family saves money on taxes, they buy *groceries*. Bush cut taxes, maybe, but the bottom 50% or so isn't any better off.
Should the top 40% pay 95% of the taxes? The top 30%? The top 20%?
Yes -- you make the money, you pay the taxes on it. Should the top 40% pay 90% of their income above, say, $100,000 in taxes, like they did in the 30's and 40's? Doubtful. Should they pay more than they do now? Definitely.
The top 50% *may* pay 95% of the taxes (doubtful) in terms of the government's total tax intake. The top 50% are not paying anywhere *near* 95%, or even 50%, of their *income*. Remember, the tax system is a bracketed system, so if the tax rate for the lowest bracket gets reduced a couple percent, *everyone*, from Jane Welfare to Bill Gates, pays less in taxes on the income in that bracket. I realize that wealth naturally accretes in the hands of the few -- I'm a realist about economics -- but I don't think we need to help that process along any. Since money naturally trickes *up*, and economic health is determined by the movement of money, why the hell are we giving the tax breaks to the people who would get the money anyway? Keynesian economics requires none of the hand-waving you need to make Reaganomics seem sensible. Giving tax breaks to the rich to "stimulate the economy" is like pouring water into the ocean and waiting for it to flow to the mountains.
How much money do you need to live, anyway? $30,000 a year? $50,000 a year? $100,000 a year? There's a certain point at which you can purchase pretty much every basic thing you could ever need (food, clothes, and shelter) -- above that, it's gravy. You sure as hell better be giving some of it back to help people who aren't able to pull the big bucks in through their jobs. Maybe the rich use less in government services -- that's mostly because they can afford to get theirs elsewhere. The more the poor are able to afford their own medical care and groceries, the less they have to rely on the government for that.
Try living within spitting distance of the poverty line, and *then* tell me that the rich deserve their tax breaks. How many plasma screen TVs and yachts do you need, anyway?
It isn't orbital, so even the Chinese are still ahead of US private industry (g). AFAIK, he'll just leave the earth's atmosphere, get his 3-4 minutes of weightlessness, and head back down, so I think ballistic is the proper term.
At the same time, if they pull it off, it will be truly an incredible moment, and I'll join everybody else in wishing him good luck and Godspeed as he flies into the history books.
Did it ever occur to them that maybe it is just a really good album and that the people buying it are people who don't steal music anyways?
I haven't heard the Velvet REvolvers, or whatever this band is called, but I want to make one thing perfectly clear -- this is *not* about people stealing music, or even whether "stealing" is the right term to apply to peer-to-peer filesharing. This is about people who have legitimately purchased a product, who are attempting to do something they can legitimately, *legally* do with any other product of its nature (rip it to the hard disk), being prevented from doing so by a program embedded on the CD. I can legally rip any other CD to my hard disk, but because the record companies put their DRM technology on the CD, which I must bypass to rip, suddenly it is illegal for me to rip my own legitimately purchased CDs. I have *lost* the right to rip *my* CDs, even if I'm only going to use them on my own computer. As Prof. Lessig says, code is law. Or, put better than I can by someone upthread, DRM is a folding chair.
If this were anything but a music CD, we would say, "The record company is selling a trojaned piece of software, this music CD with a program on it that installs automatically on 90% of the systems it is likely to be used on and cripples the most people installed, say, a small-time word-processing program and discovered that it screwed up their CD-ROM drive, wouldn't they cry foul? Except it's a music CD, and the record companies are slowly training us to think about music in a manner much different than we think about other forms of information.
Which is interesting, because they miss an opportunity to slam Fedora -- it *doesn't* come with built-in MP3 support (licensing issues), and they say it does. OTOH, they say Fedora *doesn't* have pop-up blocking available, and of course Mozilla has included that for a long time.
Kind of stupid, in my opinion. Still, it's an interesting way to persuade people to try them *all* out -- ain't the GPL great?
As far as I can tell, ideally your home theater is pretty close to the computer/DSL line, or you can bring the Ethernet to the theater (eg. in my home, it would be braindead easy to wire up an Ethernet port by the TV, since my sister's computer is maybe ten feet away).
Otherwise, if you want to use *both* wireless Internet and wireless stereo, you have to buy two AirPort Express thingies, and connect one to your DSL and the other to your stereo -- or, you could use an existing AirPort Extreme base station and just add this wireless node at the stereo.
I agree that it's kind of annoying. I really think someone should be building wireless repeaters into devices like lamps that have fewer functions. Still, this is a wicked-cool technology, especially if it will work with non-Apple wireless networks. Wireless connection dodgy at the college library? Plug one of these babies in, and away you go!
I'll second what HanClinto said: that's basically the way I learned to program -- my grandfather wrote stuff for me in GW-BASIC (I know, I know...), helped me understand what changing stuff did, and let me fly. Best way to learn computers -- seriously.
Indeed. I live in a farming community, and I've heard stories about how the federal government under FDR *paid* farmers to dump milk on the ground, till under crops, and slaughter animals to reduce the supply so the prices would go back up. One group of farmers apparently formed a sort of posse outside a creamery (make dairy products)-- if another farmer brought his milk in, they would make him to turn around or empty his truck by force.
Interestingly enough, I mentioned this to a guy I met who was involved with NASA -- maybe not employed, maybe just a consultant or contractor, I can't remember -- and he hadn't heard of it. He was talking about how hydrogen was too explosive to ever be used to power vehicles, just think of the Hindenburg. I said basically what you said. "It's been in a lot of the mainstream science rags. I think I saw it in Discover." And he said, nope, can't be, I haven't heard of it.
I was somewhat disappointed, since I had expected to be working with people who were *more* knowledgeable than random Slashdot readers.:)
I can just hear the attorney trying to contain his laughter as he writes that. "So, basically, Your Honor, they haven't got a case." Snicker snicker snort...
Right, because everyone and their mother is going to run out, download a piece of Open Source software, buy, beg, borrow, or steal an OS X disk, and install both on their desktop PCs because they want a Mac instead.
I mean, look at what happened to Microsoft when those Linux hippies came out with an operating system that ran *natively* on PC hardware. Poof! Marketshare gone overnight.
(/sarcasm)
Now if a) the emulation got so good it was reasonably close to a native PPC, and if b) a company started selling PC hardware running the emulator and Apple's OS (in violation of the OS X EULA, I might add), Apple's legal department would probably go after them. Until then, however, I suspect the project is entirely safe. It will mostly be used by hackers interested in the inner workings of the PPC architecture and/or OS X. Even if it does get fast enough it could be used for day-to-day tasks, it still isn't likely to catch on in a big way.
This is quite interesting, and I'll freely admit that the jury is still out on exactly what is going on in our atmosphere. At the same time, the author of the article talks a lot about science actually contradicting global warming, even though the title of his book blames scientists for overstating their case, so I'm a little unsure just *how* *much* science was actually involved. The article didn't, to me, seem to acknowledge the reality of the (very real!) scientific debate over global warming, viz. whether it occurs, how much warming may happen, and how big a problem that will be.
In addition, the Cato Institute has as its slogan "Individual Liberty, Limited Government, Free Markets, and Peace" and Rupert Murdoch on its board of directors, so I'm not sure I consider them an unbiased source. I'd be more interested in hearing a *scientist* (perhaps a climatologist instead of a "senior fellow in environmental studies," whatever that is) critique the science of The Day After Tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
SDL is a beautiful, compact API that's also nicely extensible (eg. SDL_image, SDL_mixer, SDL_net, smpeg, etc.). There's no *way* you need 150 lines of code to do interesting things with SDL.
BAD. Just BAD. Ugh. My old boss used to say, "The customer isn't always right -- but they are always a customer."
My gosh -- talking about "demon customers" is just terribly bad PR. I've never shopped at a Best Buy, and after reading that, I don't think I ever will. I don't care if they think I'm the angel fucking Gabriel of a customer, if they're calling customers "demons" I don't want to deal with them.
It's one thing to scam the store out of money, for example buying sale items and returning for full price. It's another thing *entirely* to "take up too much of a salesperson's time." As defined by who? Some marketroid from Upper Management? I've often asked salespeople questions just because I was needed the information to make an informed purchasing decision, and eventually made an informed decision not to buy the product. Now, *I* don't think I was taking up too much of their time, but...
Or only buying at sales. Come on, think like a (skinflint) customer, especially if said customer isn't from the area and needs to drive a ways to get to your store -- gee, store X is holding a storewide sale again, I better check that out. You hold the sale, you deal with the skinflints. If the skinflints are a problem, hold fewer sales, don't just turn them away! You have to deal with the fact that not all of your customers are going to be consumerist sheep.
C'mon, people, the employees are there (or *should* be there) to help customers, and if they do a decent job the company should make money. If you need to resort to "firing" customers to make money, the customers may not be your problem.
Yes, because blinding minimum-wage theater employees for just doing their job is a *really* good idea.
Not that fining somebody $BIGNUM and giving them up to a year in prison for camcording a movie is a good idea, either, but it isn't the employees' fault that the MPAA has its collective head up its butt.
Now, if it was a certified MPAA goon, on the other hand (think Agent Smith)...
Dangit, we *never* get people with camcorders into a movie. I obviously need to encourage people to tape movies at my theater so I can bust them and collect the reward money. (evil grin)
That's funny. I work at a movie theater, and I'm able to "upsell" people to one of our combos without resorting to any kind of sleight-of-hand.
Perhaps because it's only an 11-cent difference. Or maybe because there are a lot of cheapskates around here...
Upselling like you describe -- ugh.
Interestingly enough, I noted in the Apple Developer Tools license (which I read just today) that Apple says something along the lines of "using this product doesn't mean that we won't take your ideas and make our own." That warning is really close to the top, so if you read the license at all, you can't claim nobody warned you.
Can you tell I've been working on data structures in C lately?
Oh! Harder! malloc() me harder!
It's real nice that your father can make that much money, but I know a lot of *couples* with master's-level college educations who can barely scrape $50,000 *together*. Part of it is being able to find employment in the fields you want, where you want to live; part of it is hard work; and another part of it is just plain dumb luck.
Tell you what, if I stayed in my home state and tried to work in computers, I would be *very* lucky to make more than $40,000. The jobs *just* *plain* *aren't* *here.*
gift is a pretty decent console P2P app (currently has plugins for OpenFT, Gnutella, and FastTrack).
Anyways... I'm about to go *back* to Iraq in September.
:)
Good luck!
(Maybe the Iraqi Linux Users Group needs volunteers?
The majority of rich people don't hoard their money. That idea is an untrue stereotype. The majority invest it, start new companies, hire more employees, expand their businesses, buy expensive cars, boats, homes, etc. and, in general, keep the economy moving.
Unlike the poor people, who, when given a tax break, hide the extra money in mattresses because they don't know what to do with it.
Okay, enough sarcasm.
The difference between a poor family, or even a lower middle-class family, and a rich family is that when the rich family saves $200 on taxes, they buy another big screen TV. When poor or middle-class family saves money on taxes, they buy *groceries*. Bush cut taxes, maybe, but the bottom 50% or so isn't any better off.
Should the top 40% pay 95% of the taxes? The top 30%? The top 20%?
Yes -- you make the money, you pay the taxes on it. Should the top 40% pay 90% of their income above, say, $100,000 in taxes, like they did in the 30's and 40's? Doubtful. Should they pay more than they do now? Definitely.
The top 50% *may* pay 95% of the taxes (doubtful) in terms of the government's total tax intake. The top 50% are not paying anywhere *near* 95%, or even 50%, of their *income*. Remember, the tax system is a bracketed system, so if the tax rate for the lowest bracket gets reduced a couple percent, *everyone*, from Jane Welfare to Bill Gates, pays less in taxes on the income in that bracket. I realize that wealth naturally accretes in the hands of the few -- I'm a realist about economics -- but I don't think we need to help that process along any. Since money naturally trickes *up*, and economic health is determined by the movement of money, why the hell are we giving the tax breaks to the people who would get the money anyway? Keynesian economics requires none of the hand-waving you need to make Reaganomics seem sensible. Giving tax breaks to the rich to "stimulate the economy" is like pouring water into the ocean and waiting for it to flow to the mountains.
How much money do you need to live, anyway? $30,000 a year? $50,000 a year? $100,000 a year? There's a certain point at which you can purchase pretty much every basic thing you could ever need (food, clothes, and shelter) -- above that, it's gravy. You sure as hell better be giving some of it back to help people who aren't able to pull the big bucks in through their jobs. Maybe the rich use less in government services -- that's mostly because they can afford to get theirs elsewhere. The more the poor are able to afford their own medical care and groceries, the less they have to rely on the government for that.
Try living within spitting distance of the poverty line, and *then* tell me that the rich deserve their tax breaks. How many plasma screen TVs and yachts do you need, anyway?
And of course the fact that *you* have no idea what you're talking about doesn't make you arrogant, either.
I found that line... amusing. Because we all know that American comics are "just for kids," right?
It isn't orbital, so even the Chinese are still ahead of US private industry (g). AFAIK, he'll just leave the earth's atmosphere, get his 3-4 minutes of weightlessness, and head back down, so I think ballistic is the proper term.
At the same time, if they pull it off, it will be truly an incredible moment, and I'll join everybody else in wishing him good luck and Godspeed as he flies into the history books.
Did it ever occur to them that maybe it is just a really good album and that the people buying it are people who don't steal music anyways?
I haven't heard the Velvet REvolvers, or whatever this band is called, but I want to make one thing perfectly clear -- this is *not* about people stealing music, or even whether "stealing" is the right term to apply to peer-to-peer filesharing. This is about people who have legitimately purchased a product, who are attempting to do something they can legitimately, *legally* do with any other product of its nature (rip it to the hard disk), being prevented from doing so by a program embedded on the CD. I can legally rip any other CD to my hard disk, but because the record companies put their DRM technology on the CD, which I must bypass to rip, suddenly it is illegal for me to rip my own legitimately purchased CDs. I have *lost* the right to rip *my* CDs, even if I'm only going to use them on my own computer. As Prof. Lessig says, code is law. Or, put better than I can by someone upthread, DRM is a folding chair.
If this were anything but a music CD, we would say, "The record company is selling a trojaned piece of software, this music CD with a program on it that installs automatically on 90% of the systems it is likely to be used on and cripples the most people installed, say, a small-time word-processing program and discovered that it screwed up their CD-ROM drive, wouldn't they cry foul? Except it's a music CD, and the record companies are slowly training us to think about music in a manner much different than we think about other forms of information.
Which is interesting, because they miss an opportunity to slam Fedora -- it *doesn't* come with built-in MP3 support (licensing issues), and they say it does. OTOH, they say Fedora *doesn't* have pop-up blocking available, and of course Mozilla has included that for a long time.
Kind of stupid, in my opinion. Still, it's an interesting way to persuade people to try them *all* out -- ain't the GPL great?
As far as I can tell, ideally your home theater is pretty close to the computer/DSL line, or you can bring the Ethernet to the theater (eg. in my home, it would be braindead easy to wire up an Ethernet port by the TV, since my sister's computer is maybe ten feet away).
Otherwise, if you want to use *both* wireless Internet and wireless stereo, you have to buy two AirPort Express thingies, and connect one to your DSL and the other to your stereo -- or, you could use an existing AirPort Extreme base station and just add this wireless node at the stereo.
I agree that it's kind of annoying. I really think someone should be building wireless repeaters into devices like lamps that have fewer functions. Still, this is a wicked-cool technology, especially if it will work with non-Apple wireless networks. Wireless connection dodgy at the college library? Plug one of these babies in, and away you go!
I'll second what HanClinto said: that's basically the way I learned to program -- my grandfather wrote stuff for me in GW-BASIC (I know, I know...), helped me understand what changing stuff did, and let me fly. Best way to learn computers -- seriously.
Hats off to you, man!
Indeed. I live in a farming community, and I've heard stories about how the federal government under FDR *paid* farmers to dump milk on the ground, till under crops, and slaughter animals to reduce the supply so the prices would go back up. One group of farmers apparently formed a sort of posse outside a creamery (make dairy products)-- if another farmer brought his milk in, they would make him to turn around or empty his truck by force.
I was *hoping* someone would get around to using these signs. (And hoping no one would *need* to.)
Interestingly enough, I mentioned this to a guy I met who was involved with NASA -- maybe not employed, maybe just a consultant or contractor, I can't remember -- and he hadn't heard of it. He was talking about how hydrogen was too explosive to ever be used to power vehicles, just think of the Hindenburg. I said basically what you said. "It's been in a lot of the mainstream science rags. I think I saw it in Discover." And he said, nope, can't be, I haven't heard of it.
:)
I was somewhat disappointed, since I had expected to be working with people who were *more* knowledgeable than random Slashdot readers.
I can just hear the attorney trying to contain his laughter as he writes that. "So, basically, Your Honor, they haven't got a case." Snicker snicker snort...
Right, because everyone and their mother is going to run out, download a piece of Open Source software, buy, beg, borrow, or steal an OS X disk, and install both on their desktop PCs because they want a Mac instead.
I mean, look at what happened to Microsoft when those Linux hippies came out with an operating system that ran *natively* on PC hardware. Poof! Marketshare gone overnight.
(/sarcasm)
Now if a) the emulation got so good it was reasonably close to a native PPC, and if b) a company started selling PC hardware running the emulator and Apple's OS (in violation of the OS X EULA, I might add), Apple's legal department would probably go after them. Until then, however, I suspect the project is entirely safe. It will mostly be used by hackers interested in the inner workings of the PPC architecture and/or OS X. Even if it does get fast enough it could be used for day-to-day tasks, it still isn't likely to catch on in a big way.
This is quite interesting, and I'll freely admit that the jury is still out on exactly what is going on in our atmosphere. At the same time, the author of the article talks a lot about science actually contradicting global warming, even though the title of his book blames scientists for overstating their case, so I'm a little unsure just *how* *much* science was actually involved. The article didn't, to me, seem to acknowledge the reality of the (very real!) scientific debate over global warming, viz. whether it occurs, how much warming may happen, and how big a problem that will be.
In addition, the Cato Institute has as its slogan "Individual Liberty, Limited Government, Free Markets, and Peace" and Rupert Murdoch on its board of directors, so I'm not sure I consider them an unbiased source. I'd be more interested in hearing a *scientist* (perhaps a climatologist instead of a "senior fellow in environmental studies," whatever that is) critique the science of The Day After Tomorrow.