My thoughts exactly. "Open Source" has become hideously misused on one of the very places where it should be properly used -- Slashdot.
"Open Source" could reasonably be used to refer to an image, I suppose, if it was in some sort of format that also stored a fully log of everything done to produce the image. Newer versions of Photoshop, for example, do this. A simple.png does not cut it.
"Free Media" makes more sense than "Open Media".
If it isn't about making the blueprints openly available, then it isn't "open source".
Most people using Napster are going to be fifteen or so, not a thirty-year-old highly paid professional. For one, investing thirty minutes to save twelve bucks on a CD makes sense. For the other, it doesn't.
As the RIAA and friends move towards eliminating the middleman, prices will drop. This is their best defense against piracy -- if their costs drop enough to make it cheap enough to sell CDs for less than it's worth to pirate them, they've got it made.
There is a legal difference if you are using the legal terminology "copyright infringement" and "theft". What many people are pointing out is that many (perhaps most) do not feel that there is an ethical difference -- that the common usage of the word "piracy" really is a type of the thing referred to as the common usage of the word "theft".
I'd like to see people say "between 100kbps and 175kbps" for once. The technology and software has reached the point where using CBR is just stupid and (significantly) hurts sound quality. No one should be using anything but VBR mp3s (unless they're using ogg). If you're one of the people that knows what a bitrate is *and* notices a difference in quality between mp3 and original raw, then you should be using VBR-encoded MP3s, not CBR.
Yeah...these numbers are kind of useless, but they do let the RIAA point to a big number associated with "real criminals" out to make a profit and make their point in demanding tougher enforcement.
The real number that matters is how many net million CDs aren't being sold because the person obtained a free copy of the music. At least in the US, commercial piracy is dwarfed by not-for-profit piracy.
Amen. I remember going through classes and having to churn out preconditions and postconditions and hating it...but then realizing that assert() is your best friend in code. If a data structure should or shouldn't have something true at a given point, but in an assert() to ensure that it's the way you think it is. It helps you understand your code, and most importantly, if you change something else that has a ripple effect through the program that causes a crash hours later, a good set of assert() calls will finger the initial cause in one minute instead of one week.
This is particularly important in open source projects. Bob writes code that produces and uses a data structure and makes some assumptions about it. Now John makes a few improvements to the program, has no idea what assumptions Bob (who lives a continent away) has made, and modifies the data structures in a way that breaks Bob's code. John doesn't know what single change broke Bob's code, and Bob doesn't know all the things that John did that might affect his data structures. Liberal use of assert() will cost you nothing at runtime (compile with -DNDEBUG), takes only a tiny bit of extra typing, and is one of the very best weapons against program-spanning nasty errors.
I agree that C++ is a good replacement for C in many cases. However:
I can still generally compile and run five year old (since last revision) C programs without too much trouble. Frankly, five year old C++ programs have a habit of failing compilation on the first file -- too much change in the compilers.
I don't think that simply moving to a functional languages is an option for most people. I and others dislike using functional languages for larger programs.
As for lisp: first-order functions feel *right*, yes. They also end up causing code that is absolute hell to debug. Trying to find where the code for the function is that's being called in the current function can get to be really aggravating when you're working over someone else's code. I was puzzling my way through OpenLDAP code today, and function pointers alone make it frusterating to see what's going in in a program. When a language has good first-order functions (meaning) the programmers use them all over), and particularly if we throw in continuations, it's rough on the poor maintainers. This is one thing that C++ did right -- templated code is a Good Thing for maintainers, much easier to read than code that uses function pointers or first-order functions.
OpenBSD manages to do pretty well with a C kernel
*snicker* Okay, find me a high performance Common LISP kernel.
(Or possibly, someone could teach students that when the lecturer says that the presentation doesn't need to be in Powerpoint that it really doesn't and you don't have to spend 10 hours on the layout when you could just print off a set of overheads from Word.)
There's far too many Celeron 700s that are used as dumb X11 terminals, too!
Actually, if I were administering a univ. computer network, taking those Celerons (starting to get a bit slow under XP) and turning them into powerful, easy to administer X terminals seems like a really *good* idea.
Beats having people install Windows on it and then spending all your time using those slow, shoddy Win32 X servers.
Most of the people I talk to in the "art" community don't know you can get Photoshop for Windows.
Photoshop for Windows is kind of flaky (at least it wasn't that stable on my NT box), uses that godawful MDI, and at least the last time I looked, still didn't have a bunch of the major plugins that were sold on the Mac.
And I'm not a pro artist producing output for print -- I rarely do more than retouch things for onscreen viewing. Last time I looked, the MacOS had a complete, widely supported color management architecture (ColorSync) that Windows lacked an answer to. It may not seem like a big deal if you're the sort of person that doesn't have a $10k Radius monitor with a color probe and doesn't work with color profiles from all your output and input devices. But for the people putting out stuff for offset presses, this is a very major issue.
Macs had multimonitor support years before Windows. The current version of Windows has multimonitor support (and a few driver writers had hacked up pseudo-multimonitor support), but it's a pain to use -- dialogs pop up halfway across the screen and drivers fight with each other. That doesn't mean that there aren't Mac apps that aren't multimonitor-friendly, but years of people using multiple monitors has ironed out all the kinks that Windows needs another seven years or so to get rid of.
And why would someone want to migrate to Windows? I can rattle off the number of issues I have with Windows for ages. Now, Apple is hardly perfect either, but I'm not sure I'd call WinXP a better environment than OS X. There are fewer big commercial games on OS X, but if it's your work computer (or you aren't a hardcore gamer), it's not nearly as much of an issue. I'd call the Mac a reasonable choice. If you're comfortable with the Mac and you've been using it for years, then there isn't even an argument for Windows. The only Mac weakness is Apple's love for a sizeable profit margin on each computer they put out. But if you can afford to pay your way, you're looking at some good hardware and software.
Of course, if I had a G4, I'd probably just put Linux on it, but to every man his own OS.
700Mhz PowerPC G4 40GB Ultra ATA NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with 32 MB of DDR SDRAM Two 400-Mbps FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports (5); 8 watts shared (fortunately, Apple's long since stopped prepending all their new product names with Power or Quick) QuickTime Apple Pro Keyboard, Apple Pro Mouse
Yeesh. I thought "flat screen monitor" or "flat panel" sounded bad (Given that CRT manufacturers have been billing their monitors as flat for a long time).
I wish people would use the terms "CRT" and "LCD". They're easy to say and aren't ambiguous
Oh, come on. This is crypto work. No one is going to care about being off by a factor of.3 when they're talking about factoring time. A factor of 10 probably wouldn't bother them that much.
I think it's fairly reasonable. The nice thing about these being posted to Slashdot is that they allow public discussion of features the latest releases. I learned quite a bit about the pros and cons of devfs by following the Slashdot discussion about it.
There is always going to be something on Slashdot that you aren't interested in. Kernel releases, Star Wars, anime, whatever. There are too many different tastes to please everyone. But you have preferences that allow filtering, and article summaries and headlines to help you decide whether to read an article. I'd rather see more material on Slashdot than less, and decide what's interesting myself.
Finally, redundancy complaints aren't really reasonable. Yes, you can get anime news on an anime site, world events on BBC, linux kernel releases on kernel.org, etc. But because the Net is so large and provides so much information, there's redundant sources for amost all types of information. The point of Slashdot is to provide a nice selection of interesting information to browse at an idle point in your day. Including more information and then letting people filter seems to achive that goal well.
Would you rather play Nintendo games through an emulator, or that NES attached to the TV in the corner
I don't really play NES games, but I do play SNES games (on snes9x), and I can definitely say that I'd rather play in an emulated environment. I turn on some of the resolution enhancement modes, have an unlimited number of Game Genie codes that can be entered (plus can use Pro-Action Replay and Gold Finger codes), can get interpolated Mode 7 scaling, can speedily zip through boring or annoying bits of a game, can save the memory state at any point and go back to that point...why would you want to use the original at *all*?
Since GNU C++ is quite good when it comes to standards compliance
I'm not sure how it compares to other compilers, but g++ certainly has its share of nonstandard extensions. No compiler is innocent when it comes to being extension-free.:-)
void foo (int a) { int b[a]; }, for instance, really isn't kosher, but gcc/g++ allow it.
Slashdot Mirror
I figured DRM was a typo for GSM.
My thoughts exactly. "Open Source" has become hideously misused on one of the very places where it should be properly used -- Slashdot.
.png does not cut it.
"Open Source" could reasonably be used to refer to an image, I suppose, if it was in some sort of format that also stored a fully log of everything done to produce the image. Newer versions of Photoshop, for example, do this. A simple
"Free Media" makes more sense than "Open Media".
If it isn't about making the blueprints openly available, then it isn't "open source".
I see you managed to use a piece of software for what it was designed to do
Well...I see your point, but gcc and emacs are also designed to produce software together, yet actually doing so isn't necessarily trivial.
Most people using Napster are going to be fifteen or so, not a thirty-year-old highly paid professional. For one, investing thirty minutes to save twelve bucks on a CD makes sense. For the other, it doesn't.
As the RIAA and friends move towards eliminating the middleman, prices will drop. This is their best defense against piracy -- if their costs drop enough to make it cheap enough to sell CDs for less than it's worth to pirate them, they've got it made.
There is a legal difference if you are using the legal terminology "copyright infringement" and "theft". What many people are pointing out is that many (perhaps most) do not feel that there is an ethical difference -- that the common usage of the word "piracy" really is a type of the thing referred to as the common usage of the word "theft".
not 128kbps, but at LEAST than 196kbps
I'd like to see people say "between 100kbps and 175kbps" for once. The technology and software has reached the point where using CBR is just stupid and (significantly) hurts sound quality. No one should be using anything but VBR mp3s (unless they're using ogg). If you're one of the people that knows what a bitrate is *and* notices a difference in quality between mp3 and original raw, then you should be using VBR-encoded MP3s, not CBR.
IMNSHO, of course.
Yeah...these numbers are kind of useless, but they do let the RIAA point to a big number associated with "real criminals" out to make a profit and make their point in demanding tougher enforcement.
The real number that matters is how many net million CDs aren't being sold because the person obtained a free copy of the music. At least in the US, commercial piracy is dwarfed by not-for-profit piracy.
Amen. I remember going through classes and having to churn out preconditions and postconditions and hating it...but then realizing that assert() is your best friend in code. If a data structure should or shouldn't have something true at a given point, but in an assert() to ensure that it's the way you think it is. It helps you understand your code, and most importantly, if you change something else that has a ripple effect through the program that causes a crash hours later, a good set of assert() calls will finger the initial cause in one minute instead of one week.
This is particularly important in open source projects. Bob writes code that produces and uses a data structure and makes some assumptions about it. Now John makes a few improvements to the program, has no idea what assumptions Bob (who lives a continent away) has made, and modifies the data structures in a way that breaks Bob's code. John doesn't know what single change broke Bob's code, and Bob doesn't know all the things that John did that might affect his data structures. Liberal use of assert() will cost you nothing at runtime (compile with -DNDEBUG), takes only a tiny bit of extra typing, and is one of the very best weapons against program-spanning nasty errors.
I agree that C++ is a good replacement for C in many cases. However:
I can still generally compile and run five year old (since last revision) C programs without too much trouble. Frankly, five year old C++ programs have a habit of failing compilation on the first file -- too much change in the compilers.
I don't think that simply moving to a functional languages is an option for most people. I and others dislike using functional languages for larger programs.
As for lisp: first-order functions feel *right*, yes. They also end up causing code that is absolute hell to debug. Trying to find where the code for the function is that's being called in the current function can get to be really aggravating when you're working over someone else's code. I was puzzling my way through OpenLDAP code today, and function pointers alone make it frusterating to see what's going in in a program. When a language has good first-order functions (meaning) the programmers use them all over), and particularly if we throw in continuations, it's rough on the poor maintainers. This is one thing that C++ did right -- templated code is a Good Thing for maintainers, much easier to read than code that uses function pointers or first-order functions.
OpenBSD manages to do pretty well with a C kernel
*snicker* Okay, find me a high performance Common LISP kernel.
(Or possibly, someone could teach students that when the lecturer says that the presentation doesn't need to be in Powerpoint that it really doesn't and you don't have to spend 10 hours on the layout when you could just print off a set of overheads from Word.)
Has Microsoft won the world, or what?
There's far too many Celeron 700s that are used as dumb X11 terminals, too!
Actually, if I were administering a univ. computer network, taking those Celerons (starting to get a bit slow under XP) and turning them into powerful, easy to administer X terminals seems like a really *good* idea.
Beats having people install Windows on it and then spending all your time using those slow, shoddy Win32 X servers.
Most of the people I talk to in the "art" community don't know you can get Photoshop for Windows.
Photoshop for Windows is kind of flaky (at least it wasn't that stable on my NT box), uses that godawful MDI, and at least the last time I looked, still didn't have a bunch of the major plugins that were sold on the Mac.
And I'm not a pro artist producing output for print -- I rarely do more than retouch things for onscreen viewing. Last time I looked, the MacOS had a complete, widely supported color management architecture (ColorSync) that Windows lacked an answer to. It may not seem like a big deal if you're the sort of person that doesn't have a $10k Radius monitor with a color probe and doesn't work with color profiles from all your output and input devices. But for the people putting out stuff for offset presses, this is a very major issue.
Macs had multimonitor support years before Windows. The current version of Windows has multimonitor support (and a few driver writers had hacked up pseudo-multimonitor support), but it's a pain to use -- dialogs pop up halfway across the screen and drivers fight with each other. That doesn't mean that there aren't Mac apps that aren't multimonitor-friendly, but years of people using multiple monitors has ironed out all the kinks that Windows needs another seven years or so to get rid of.
And why would someone want to migrate to Windows? I can rattle off the number of issues I have with Windows for ages. Now, Apple is hardly perfect either, but I'm not sure I'd call WinXP a better environment than OS X. There are fewer big commercial games on OS X, but if it's your work computer (or you aren't a hardcore gamer), it's not nearly as much of an issue. I'd call the Mac a reasonable choice. If you're comfortable with the Mac and you've been using it for years, then there isn't even an argument for Windows. The only Mac weakness is Apple's love for a sizeable profit margin on each computer they put out. But if you can afford to pay your way, you're looking at some good hardware and software.
Of course, if I had a G4, I'd probably just put Linux on it, but to every man his own OS.
There's an open source group doing it.
Read the pretentious component names:
700Mhz PowerPC G4
40GB Ultra ATA
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with 32 MB of DDR SDRAM
Two 400-Mbps FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports (5); 8 watts shared
(fortunately, Apple's long since stopped prepending all their new product names with Power or Quick) QuickTime
Apple Pro Keyboard, Apple Pro Mouse
flat-tube monitor
Yeesh. I thought "flat screen monitor" or "flat panel" sounded bad (Given that CRT manufacturers have been billing their monitors as flat for a long time).
I wish people would use the terms "CRT" and "LCD". They're easy to say and aren't ambiguous
Aside from the lack of USB support and other MS efforts to force upgrades, NT 4.0 actually is (IMHO) a better OS than Win2k.
Oh, come on. This is crypto work. No one is going to care about being off by a factor of .3 when they're talking about factoring time. A factor of 10 probably wouldn't bother them that much.
I haven't used qmail, but I have used postfix, which is supposed to be even simpler and more straightforward than qmail. I've been very happy with it.
Tell that to Afghanistan.
Naah. Ten to one it's just plain Jane industrial espionage.
Includes ALSA support, and a bunch of low-latency improvements. Probably some efficiency improvements. A new build system.
I think it's fairly reasonable. The nice thing about these being posted to Slashdot is that they allow public discussion of features the latest releases. I learned quite a bit about the pros and cons of devfs by following the Slashdot discussion about it.
There is always going to be something on Slashdot that you aren't interested in. Kernel releases, Star Wars, anime, whatever. There are too many different tastes to please everyone. But you have preferences that allow filtering, and article summaries and headlines to help you decide whether to read an article. I'd rather see more material on Slashdot than less, and decide what's interesting myself.
Finally, redundancy complaints aren't really reasonable. Yes, you can get anime news on an anime site, world events on BBC, linux kernel releases on kernel.org, etc. But because the Net is so large and provides so much information, there's redundant sources for amost all types of information. The point of Slashdot is to provide a nice selection of interesting information to browse at an idle point in your day. Including more information and then letting people filter seems to achive that goal well.
Now, maybe more fine-grained filters w
Would you rather play Nintendo games through an emulator, or that NES attached to the TV in the corner
I don't really play NES games, but I do play SNES games (on snes9x), and I can definitely say that I'd rather play in an emulated environment. I turn on some of the resolution enhancement modes, have an unlimited number of Game Genie codes that can be entered (plus can use Pro-Action Replay and Gold Finger codes), can get interpolated Mode 7 scaling, can speedily zip through boring or annoying bits of a game, can save the memory state at any point and go back to that point...why would you want to use the original at *all*?
My roommate uses ogle, and it has no problems. It's also the most fully-featured Linux DVD player.
I love mplayer, but light on setup effort it's not.
Since GNU C++ is quite good when it comes to standards compliance
:-)
I'm not sure how it compares to other compilers, but g++ certainly has its share of nonstandard extensions. No compiler is innocent when it comes to being extension-free.
void foo (int a) { int b[a]; }, for instance, really isn't kosher, but gcc/g++ allow it.