Heh, I did much the same thing, except my approach was
much more, eh... ad-hoc, and for some reason it seemed a
good idea at first to use m4 to write most of it.
Unfortunately, by the time it all started to go horribly wrong
(because I found how slow m4 got when pressed to
do anything complex), I found it a bit daunting to convert
all that stuff to Perl. So it's been kind of languishing for
the past month or so, unfortunately, as has my website.
AFAIK, I'm the only one who ever used it (I've not put it
on Freshmeat yet, too primitive).
(before anybody asks, the system was to create pages
for a statically served website, no PHP etc; It runs
on my desktop and then uploads the content to the
server. Actually, strictly speaking, it's not really made for
blogging, it's just a general CMS- but you could use it
as a simple blog of sorts)
But the thing is, one could conceivably design a CPU of
sorts (a state machine, at any rate; I couldn't honestly
say what construes a CPU) that would treat the video data
as instructions and produces frames of video accordingly.
Or alternatively, you could just class the video player
as an interpreter for an interpreted language (rather like
Postscript *is* a language).
I agree that the law probably would still see DVDs as
a type of "AudioVisual works", but from a technical
angle, he has a point. Although there is still a question of
whether such an "instruction set" could be considered
to be turing-complete.. Hmm, probably wouldn't be- but
I can't say for sure, too tired. Anyway, as you say:
confusing the issue isn't likely to help matters.
Yeah, I'd heard about that variant. Didn't help me much
though- I'm using Linux, and not only does the program
I use to decode the AVIs ("avi2yuv", which is frankly
rather archaic and wobbly) not accept it, but IIRC the
XawTV and "Streamer" tools I use to do the capturing
don't produce it.
Well, IIRC, at least. Or perhaps it was one of the
newer versions of XawTV being able to produce that
format, and I had to downgrade back to the previous
version, due to the
huge number of frames it kept dropping. Meh, it was so
long ago I looked into it that I've forgotten by now.
My ideal solution would be to have equivalent
tools that can put the raw video in another
container format instead, such as OGG, or possibly
this new Matroska thingummy, such that the file size
isn't limited. But I don't think anybody
else is interested in doing that (despite the prodigious
amounts of disk space people seem willing to waste
nowadays), and I know sweet FA
about A/V sync and all that crap, so it probably won't
happen.
W00t! Somebody else has been watching "Look
Around You", hmm?:D
Quite coincidentally, that was one of
the programs I tried to capture in raw AVI (to compress later
to MPEG) a year or 2 ago... Pity it turned out AVI totally
collapses after 2 GB, eh. I got about 7 minutes worth.
Incidentally, did I go completely insane, or did I
genuinely see Peter Seraphinowitz (sp??) in the credits of
Star Wars Episode Thingy as the voice of Darth Maul???
There's a system named "Lout" that was created in the
early 90's (after 8 years of research!!) that's sort of
similar to TeX and LaTeX, but has some nice
advantages. EG: It isn't designed around US-ASCII, it
produces postscript directly (and uses PS fonts),
it's very flexible and easy to configure and write
macros for, it's abosultely tiny compared
to TeX, etc etc.
If you want to check it out, the creator wrote a free
(GPL) implementation named "Basser" Lout (after his
university IIRC), which comes with loads of documentation
and runs on Linux (Debian offers a package, dunno
about other distros), other unices, and Windows.
Oh, and like TeX, you can do maths stuff with it, but the
equations are expressed in a format based on eqn
instead. Luckily that has a whole chapter dedicated to it
in the docs. There's some sort of extra package that
offers "TeX style" maths, but it seems that's just in terms
of fonts; that too is described in the docs.
The Lout sourceforge
page was started fairly recently as a repository for
Lout info, in case you have a tough time finding much.
As the bloke creating Y (and numerous others before him)
has pointed out, allowing it to be network transparent
DOES NOT
make X slow. When it's run locally, you just use unix domain
sockets instead of TCP ones.
Regardless, you will STILL need a client-server architecture
of some sort to allow more than one process to be able
to use the system without them all tripping over each other.
I quite fancy the idea of Y, I'd already thought it'd be a
handy extension to X to allow programmable server-side
widget sets, that GTK etc could use directly if available.
It's been suggested that an extension could be added to
Y to give an X compatibility layer, which'd help. And
whilst we're looking at starting afresh, perhaps we could
find other (genuine) things that we don't like about X,
hmm? Things that it'd be too hard to implement cleanly
whilst still being able to call the thing X, you know.
Anyway, it'd be a change to have a less clumsy name
than "The X Windowing System". I've always hated
that- although "Y Windows" is a bit flawed in itself (as
somebody's Abott+Costello joke earlier demonstrated). I
know that X was the successor to "W", just like C was
the successor to B (from BCPL)... but do we always
have to follow these lame naming patterns? I
suppose it gives the thing a sense of "officialness", but...
SPF? Very neat, hadn't heard of that before. About time
somebody did something about the whole header
forgability issue- IMO that alone (unless I've
misunderstood what it's designed to stop) would be
enough to deal with most spam anyways.
Before I saw your posting, I was thinking that perhaps one
way to deal with it would be for a similar approach to the
"social networks" and "web of trust" ones to be applied to
the servers and networks themselves: each network could
keep a list of mail servers on other networks that
they trust to not be open relays or spam hosts, etc, and
for mail sent from other servers, they could check the
lists that other trusted networks keep. They could then
choose to add those servers to their own lists too if they
turned out to be OK. Some means would need to
be made for new servers to be able to get on somebody's
list, of course...
But the point is ultimately, that dealing with the Spam
issue by filtering on the content is just stupid, it's a
losing battle as they keep finding new stupid ways to
get past the filters, and the filters will always have some
risk of blocking legitimate emails. What if I send a
parody of a spam to a friend as a joke? And if we only
use filters at the user's end, the burden of the traffic is
still felt by our ISPs and email providers. There HAS
to be a way to block it at the source.
In following this story, I keep seeing the term DFSG used
by people, including Branden in that discussion. Anyone
want to fill me in on WTF that is? Don't
think I've heard it before today.
Yeah, I use that quite a bit, it's nice, but it's a bit buggy
(the slightly old version I have from Debian, at least)- I
forget the exact details, but IIRC it would muck
about with the file names or node names or something.
Whatever it was, it affected GDB and GDBM, and it
assumed references to one were actually references to
the other (I forget which way round it did this).
Perhaps this was something to do with the format itself,
but IIRC the plain old info command didn't do that.
Actually, hold on...
...OK: No, GNU info doesn't, and pinfo thought gdb was
short for gdbm. This may be fixed in newer versions, but
the web page doesn't seem to say, and I don't care
enough to try installing from source. Apart from that,
it is a pretty good info browser, especially
considering how I used to get tied in knots before by
GNU info (hate hate hate GNU info).
It's possible the previous posters' definitions of what would
(or does) make this a pyramid scheme are actually correct,
but to me, the relevant point is:
AFAICT, every single pyramid scheme is specifically
sold as a means to make money, especially lots of
it. This scheme, however, seems to me to be a product
you could plausibly want, that you can also make
a bit of extra cash with as a bonus.
Does this make sense? I think it does, personally.
Not being a particularly space-oriented nerd nor a
Merkin, I saw the topic and just thought of
Saturn 3,
you know, the one where Harvey Keitel fires the bloke
through the big cheese-grater into space and then
makes his robot go mad and fancy the blonde bird
and stuff.
Or something. Um. Hey, I should become a film
reviewer, eh?
Well anyhow, I did get which one the subject
was about after a moment or two, so no harm done
(and no offence meant to our trans-atlantic cousins,
BTW;).
I think that would be in keeping with the principle of
(higher) taxes for luxury-type things. Not that colour
TV is a luxury of course, but B&W TV is sort of an
anti-luxury. Or something.
Put another way, B&W
TVs are more likely to be owned by poorer people,
hence a lower license fee.
Let's not forget that the BBC is funded by a compulsory flat-rate tax called the 'television license fee'.
The license fee is paid by all households that watch TV
(actually, I seem to remember OAPs became exempt
recently, but maybe I'm getting mixed up there).
You can get a cheaper license if you only have a
B&W TV set.
But in what way is watching TV compulsory?
You can still listen to radio without paying the
license fee (and for that matter, one man managed
to prove to the courts that he'd rendered his TV
set only able to show satellite TV, so he didn't have
to pay either).
Anyways, was this all a troll? Note I don't care much
about replying to trolls. If someone's saying
something that's totally misleading and some people
would end up believing them, then
what do you do, let the bullshit spread?
There have been multiplayer roguelikes, but not many,
and they've generally not got that far. Because
roguelikes basically aren't suited to multiplayer games.
They could keep the gameplay the same, if
you don't mind the possibility that you'll have to
wait maybe a few hours (or strictly, forever)
between each single step; otherwise, you
have to fundamentally change it (eg, stop it being
turn based). Then other gameplay details would start
to look odd, and before you know it, you've changed
it into Quake.
why not allow for 72 pin EDO
simms, instead of using more modern RAM?
I didn't see any specs for built-in RAM on the site, but
if you're talking about the add-on SRAM modules, then
realise that SRAM is not the same as SDRAM (or
SDR-SDRAM or DDR-SDRAM), but is a type of memory
that's as old as time (slight exaggeration...). Unlike
DRAM, SRAM doesn't need refresh signals and weird
crap like that. Makes life a bit easier. I think it is
supposed to be quite a lot more expensive though.
OTOH maybe you knew that and was talking about
something else.
Yeah, Junkyard Wars, what was the point in that?
Load of people making huge machines, but they were
just made out of rubbish!
It would have obviously been much better to just
have an hour long program looking at an actual
tank or an excavator, that hadn't just been built from
bits, as they'd be much more powerful.
(I write this in full knowledge that some irony-deficient
mod will not get what I'm saying.)
Mnnnn... yes, you have a point about it being
dishonest... but some would say
"what goes around comes around".
It was just a thought though- I'm sure they'll collapse
either way. They've poked too many big fish in the eye
to avoid having a whole heap of crap dumped on them.
As Neil Morrisey (the voice of Bob the Builder, at least
in UK, I don't know about America) was in Men
Behaving Badly for about a decade or so, there'd likely
be lots of appropriately adult lines to get the toy to say
whilst having it still plausibly sound like it's still Bob
saying them.
If they were to get them back and in passing,
heard one exclaiming "Sha-mon, Motherfucker!"
(with a sample of the Michael Jackson
character from Bo-Selecta), they'd
notice straight away whether or not they heard the
actual words said, because the voices would be
wrong.
Of course, the person checking the toys might
not even be familiar with Bob the Builder (I've only
seen about 10 seconds of it myself), so perhaps it
wouldn't make a difference...
Hmm, that's kind of worrying. I don't want to see them
win out just because sheer hype gave them enough
on-paper-only funds to help support their legal fees
or anything else...
...Could we launch a Counter-FUD? Could hundreds
of thousands of anonymous Slashbots spread enough
arbitrary nasty rumours about SCO that people who
don't know what's going on either way are far less
likely to invest in them instead? Or could that backfire on us
somehow?
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, by the time it all started to go horribly wrong (because I found how slow m4 got when pressed to do anything complex), I found it a bit daunting to convert all that stuff to Perl. So it's been kind of languishing for the past month or so, unfortunately, as has my website. AFAIK, I'm the only one who ever used it (I've not put it on Freshmeat yet, too primitive).
(before anybody asks, the system was to create pages for a statically served website, no PHP etc; It runs on my desktop and then uploads the content to the server. Actually, strictly speaking, it's not really made for blogging, it's just a general CMS- but you could use it as a simple blog of sorts)
Virtually All Voluminous Virginal Men
Slashdot, eh? Evidently a work of divination! There was also mention of the location of the Holy Grail - but I think they were probably mistaken.
I agree that the law probably would still see DVDs as a type of "AudioVisual works", but from a technical angle, he has a point. Although there is still a question of whether such an "instruction set" could be considered to be turing-complete.. Hmm, probably wouldn't be- but I can't say for sure, too tired. Anyway, as you say: confusing the issue isn't likely to help matters.
Well, IIRC, at least. Or perhaps it was one of the newer versions of XawTV being able to produce that format, and I had to downgrade back to the previous version, due to the huge number of frames it kept dropping. Meh, it was so long ago I looked into it that I've forgotten by now.
My ideal solution would be to have equivalent tools that can put the raw video in another container format instead, such as OGG, or possibly this new Matroska thingummy, such that the file size isn't limited. But I don't think anybody else is interested in doing that (despite the prodigious amounts of disk space people seem willing to waste nowadays), and I know sweet FA about A/V sync and all that crap, so it probably won't happen.
Quite coincidentally, that was one of the programs I tried to capture in raw AVI (to compress later to MPEG) a year or 2 ago... Pity it turned out AVI totally collapses after 2 GB, eh. I got about 7 minutes worth.
Incidentally, did I go completely insane, or did I genuinely see Peter Seraphinowitz (sp??) in the credits of Star Wars Episode Thingy as the voice of Darth Maul???
If you want to check it out, the creator wrote a free (GPL) implementation named "Basser" Lout (after his university IIRC), which comes with loads of documentation and runs on Linux (Debian offers a package, dunno about other distros), other unices, and Windows.
Oh, and like TeX, you can do maths stuff with it, but the equations are expressed in a format based on eqn instead. Luckily that has a whole chapter dedicated to it in the docs. There's some sort of extra package that offers "TeX style" maths, but it seems that's just in terms of fonts; that too is described in the docs.
The Lout sourceforge page was started fairly recently as a repository for Lout info, in case you have a tough time finding much.
That context being a post on Slashdot, yes? ;)
As the bloke creating Y (and numerous others before him) has pointed out, allowing it to be network transparent DOES NOT make X slow. When it's run locally, you just use unix domain sockets instead of TCP ones.
Regardless, you will STILL need a client-server architecture of some sort to allow more than one process to be able to use the system without them all tripping over each other.
I quite fancy the idea of Y, I'd already thought it'd be a handy extension to X to allow programmable server-side widget sets, that GTK etc could use directly if available. It's been suggested that an extension could be added to Y to give an X compatibility layer, which'd help. And whilst we're looking at starting afresh, perhaps we could find other (genuine) things that we don't like about X, hmm? Things that it'd be too hard to implement cleanly whilst still being able to call the thing X, you know.
Anyway, it'd be a change to have a less clumsy name than "The X Windowing System". I've always hated that- although "Y Windows" is a bit flawed in itself (as somebody's Abott+Costello joke earlier demonstrated). I know that X was the successor to "W", just like C was the successor to B (from BCPL)... but do we always have to follow these lame naming patterns? I suppose it gives the thing a sense of "officialness", but...
Before I saw your posting, I was thinking that perhaps one way to deal with it would be for a similar approach to the "social networks" and "web of trust" ones to be applied to the servers and networks themselves: each network could keep a list of mail servers on other networks that they trust to not be open relays or spam hosts, etc, and for mail sent from other servers, they could check the lists that other trusted networks keep. They could then choose to add those servers to their own lists too if they turned out to be OK. Some means would need to be made for new servers to be able to get on somebody's list, of course...
But the point is ultimately, that dealing with the Spam issue by filtering on the content is just stupid, it's a losing battle as they keep finding new stupid ways to get past the filters, and the filters will always have some risk of blocking legitimate emails. What if I send a parody of a spam to a friend as a joke? And if we only use filters at the user's end, the burden of the traffic is still felt by our ISPs and email providers. There HAS to be a way to block it at the source.
In following this story, I keep seeing the term DFSG used by people, including Branden in that discussion. Anyone want to fill me in on WTF that is? Don't think I've heard it before today.
Perhaps this was something to do with the format itself, but IIRC the plain old info command didn't do that. Actually, hold on...
AFAICT, every single pyramid scheme is specifically sold as a means to make money, especially lots of it. This scheme, however, seems to me to be a product you could plausibly want, that you can also make a bit of extra cash with as a bonus.
Does this make sense? I think it does, personally.
Funny, I read that gift as being "for when you want to try to drink grated wax".
Or something. Um. Hey, I should become a film reviewer, eh?
Well anyhow, I did get which one the subject was about after a moment or two, so no harm done (and no offence meant to our trans-atlantic cousins, BTW ;).
Put another way, B&W TVs are more likely to be owned by poorer people, hence a lower license fee.
But in what way is watching TV compulsory?
You can still listen to radio without paying the license fee (and for that matter, one man managed to prove to the courts that he'd rendered his TV set only able to show satellite TV, so he didn't have to pay either).
Anyways, was this all a troll? Note I don't care much about replying to trolls. If someone's saying something that's totally misleading and some people would end up believing them, then what do you do, let the bullshit spread?
They could keep the gameplay the same, if you don't mind the possibility that you'll have to wait maybe a few hours (or strictly, forever) between each single step; otherwise, you have to fundamentally change it (eg, stop it being turn based). Then other gameplay details would start to look odd, and before you know it, you've changed it into Quake.
OTOH maybe you knew that and was talking about something else.
It would have obviously been much better to just have an hour long program looking at an actual tank or an excavator, that hadn't just been built from bits, as they'd be much more powerful.
(I write this in full knowledge that some irony-deficient mod will not get what I'm saying.)
I think he was saying that because the explanation appears to be copied word for word.
It was just a thought though- I'm sure they'll collapse either way. They've poked too many big fish in the eye to avoid having a whole heap of crap dumped on them.
If they were to get them back and in passing, heard one exclaiming "Sha-mon, Motherfucker!" (with a sample of the Michael Jackson character from Bo-Selecta), they'd notice straight away whether or not they heard the actual words said, because the voices would be wrong.
Of course, the person checking the toys might not even be familiar with Bob the Builder (I've only seen about 10 seconds of it myself), so perhaps it wouldn't make a difference...
...Could we launch a Counter-FUD? Could hundreds of thousands of anonymous Slashbots spread enough arbitrary nasty rumours about SCO that people who don't know what's going on either way are far less likely to invest in them instead? Or could that backfire on us somehow?
Hey, I could you lot some replacement rocks, I've got plenty and these are 100% authentic! Honest!