I'm not 100% clear on this, but I think you're talking
about the controls here. In which case, WTF is
difficult about arrow keys for forward and backwards,
and space for pause?
The reason why you have to get used to that
sort of thing, is that unless I missed a trick
somewhere, they are not being paid to do
this 24/7 (JWZ should understand this as someone
who has also created free software), and that until
they had got the program to a certain point where
they might think it worthwhile to add a GUI option, you have nowhere to stick your beloved
scroll bars and clicky buttons and menus and
things to select various options with. Sorry.
I will agree with you and with JWZ that the
GUI part of mplayer is quite bad, which is why
I only used it once or twice after I first saw it.
Otherwise, I just use the plain command line.
99.9% of the time, I either run mplayer with no
command line flags, or with one or two flags that
I use a lot, eg -fs (gives full screen) or -vo x11 (to
avoid using the xv driver that has made X
crash once or twice when playing incomplete
videos. Sorry, but there's no right in bitching about
that, because it's a work in progress, they don't
claim it's bullet-proof).
Now, as for the GUI, well till about a year or so
ago, there wasn't even any GUI for it, there
was only the command line, because what these
people have basically done, is create a program
that can play practically anything under the fscking
sun. The GUI part came later, as an option, and
AFAIK was an experimental feature. Sure,
it turned out a bit crap. But they weren't making
the program bad, they were adding something
extra that we had gone without before.
Then JWZ, who sure, makes good screensaver
things and stuff, and doubtless a billion other
marvelous bits of code, calls the mplayer authors
"a bunch of fucking morons". No, sorry, wrong
wrong wrong. They made a damned brilliant piece
of software, and they are STILL WRITING IT. Calling
them morons for creating a bad user interface for
something they are not being paid for and haven't
claimed to have finished, is just as bad, IF
NOT WORSE than insulting those
people who can't understand a CLI program
that needs practically no effort to use, or
can't learn 3 or 4 simple keys to control the
thing. The program is normally an utter no-brainer
to use, but I'll bet it wasn't a no-brainer to code.
Normally, I myself tend to have a whinge and a
rant about things,
but seriously, they're absolutely the wrong
bunch to be bitching about, they do a first rate
job, if you think their GUI is badly designed
(which I agree about, but am not really bothered),
maybe you should be suggesting to them how
it should be rather than insulting them.
Right, firstly, as this whole thread is very very OT,
I shall put my vaguely on-topic bit first (in case it
vanishes off the end):
I wonder if China is imagining making a Beowulf
cluster out of those NESes? And this time, that
line even has a tiny core of sense to it, as
IIRC, China is
blocked from buying supercomputers or PCs over
a certain spec, and the slower the processors, the
less relevant communications latencies are in a
cluster. Now, back to the age-old argument.
A billion's always been a 1000,000,000 in the British Commonwealth too.
Where exactly did you drag that out from? Because I've certainly never ever heard that before, and if it is the case, then WTF was the point in the
word milliard? If you have difficulty with that word, look it up. If you can't find it, you need a better dictionary.
Afterall a thousand's not a hundred hundred, it's just ten hundred, so why do people think a
billion's a million million just because a million's a
thousand thousand.
That's got to be the most screwed up argument I've
heard in quite some time. You might as well say,
a dachsund isn't ten thousand, so why do people
think a billion is even a number?
Er, surely by your pattern, either
10x1000=million, or possibly, 100x1000=million. No?
Sorry, it's not entirely clear what your pattern is.
Look, ultimately, words such as ten, hundred, thousand, for little numbers that everyday people
use, are Germanic in origin, because the peasants
at the time of the Norman conquest of England would
have used such numbers in their everyday life.
Words such as million are French in origin (mille=thousand in French), because up till around the 14th
century, the Norman-French kings of England hardly
even spoke English, and the language of court and
all official state business was not English (it was
either French or Latin). True, I don't know when
the word Million was first used, it might not have
even been about during that time, but you
can bet that
when it first was, it wouldn't have been by the little
people, it would have been by somebody with a
million of something to count.
The derivation of billion, is that it is bi as
in 2, even though the mi in million was not
originally meaning 1 (like mono-). Hence,
1X (10^6)^1=million
1X (10^6)^2=billion
1X (10^6)^3=trillion
Which looks better if you think of it in terms
of just the number of zeros, as in 6*1 zeros,
6*2 zeros, 6*3 zeros.
If you try that with the American version, you have
to do:
1000X (10^3)^1=million
1000X (10^3)^2=billion
1000X (10^3)^3=trillion
Or, 3+(3*1) zeros, 3+(3*2) zeros, 3+(3*3) zeros.
Doesn't quite scan, does it?
It is true that nowadays, most of the use of
the word billion in UK, for instance on the news,
and in government announcements and things,
is the same as the US version, but you will still
find the more sensible English version (alongside
the US version) in the dictionary, if your
dictionary does not suck, and a good many
people understand that billion can be taken to
mean a million million.
My own feeling on it, is that the words
billion, trillion, etc are now broken. It's common
enough for many words to have more than one
meaning, but when it's a number, you really have
to pick some new bloody words. I'd suggest
borrowing some other language that
English has ties with -after all,
there are plenty out there- and maybe changing
them a bit to fit in
better. I'd favour getting the words from Germany
or Scandinavia or somewhere like that, but hell,
why not even India?? Of course,
it'll never happen.
I've got a SPARCclassic sat on a table behind me,
but it's probably too recent to be considered classic
(and has a few crappinesses that get in the way of
being classic, too).
I've probably still got 2 or maybe 3 old
Sinclair Spectrums (I think they were sold as Timex
TMS1000 or something in the US, I don't know-
I mean the colour ones, not the mono ones that were
known as ZX81s here), with the rubber keyboards that
wore out after a while, and the edge connectors that
would kill the machine dead if you tried to plug in or
unplug peripherals into them whilst the machines
were switched on (that'd be why I had more than 1-
some got broken). They're prolly too common to
be classic tho. I also still have somewhere the
"Sam Coupe", which was a fairly large machine
by MGT, that was supposed to be a souped up
Spectrum that was a bit more like an Amiga or
something. I quite liked that machine, but put it
away when I got my first PC.
We used to have a real archaic machine,
I think it was called an "ADAM II",
that was sort of like a minicomputer or something,
y'know, a big
floor-standing thing the size of a small fridge or
something. We kept it on the landing outside
my room. Took big disks that were at least a foot
across, with plastic shells with big handles
on top. Seriously, not making this up. In fact, one
of the James Bond films from the 80s was on TV
the other day, they showed them using disks
like that. My Dad got it
from work when they upgraded... I'm still not quite
sure why. Apparently he liked the language it used
(might have been Forth, I'm really not sure). I
forget when we got rid of that, but I expect that'd
be the sort of thing that collectors and computer
museums could be interested in (apart from the
size and the weight!).
Not sure what other sort of things we have about,
not counting the PCs there must be a fair few
oddities in our house.
The funny thing about the description given in the
story,
(pronounced Peeps, as in
marshmallow peeps)
is that I'm reasonably familiar with Samuel Pepys, but
I've never even heard of "marshmallow peeps".
How come American sweets and cakes and chocolates
and stuff seem to be so unheard of outside of America?
Hmm, something I read recently (written by an
American, so don't blame me) seemed to say
that American chocolate isn't that nice compared to
what we enjoy in the rest of the world (even here
in UK where the Europeans complain that our
usual chocolate isn't pure enough). That doesn't
seem to explain the Marshmallow Peeps thing tho.
peeps would be the African American vernacular for "peoples"
I've no idea about that (is this what you Slashdotters
call "Flamebait"? shrug), but UK comedian Harry
Enfield's character "Stavros" from
the 80's used the word Peeps in a similar way (well,
people, not peoples).
No, I don't have a link. Oh, OK then, I found this on E2.com. Hows that?
I seem to remember hearing that the brain stops growing
around the age of 14.
Alternatively, it could have been that the brain cells
start dying at that point, except that I think they're
supposed to be dying through your whole life, aren't
they??? <scratches head>
Wow, that's a pretty impressive feature. I suppose
the visible version the ghost held in the picture
must have been an early prototype- or will they
be like WindowsXP (or whichever version it was) and
need to be registered first before the company will activate
the effect?
It may be a factor that people often want these
things to be less obtrusive, but surely this would
just make you more likely to trip over it,
or something like that.
It is? Oh OK. I think I must have been thinking more
of the Quantum Gravity thing. Is it just the general
theory of relativity that deals with gravity? Or am
I getting my wires horribly crossed?
And is that proof of anti-particles that you mention,
because relativity
allows things going faster than light to go back in
time? What I think I'd dimly understood from
Feynman was
that anti-particles were fundamentally the same as
their normal-matter equivalents, but travelling the
opposite way in time, such that when they collided
(or were spontaneously generated), it
was actually just one particle sort of "bouncing" in
the temporal dimension, with an associated transfer
of energy one way or the other. Have I got that right?
I certainly have no idea about how it affects spin,
as I've never quite got what exactly spin meant
other than it seems to "classify" particles quite
significantly. I would be intrigued to hear some sort
of explanation about what spin actually meant.
Maybe I'm just sleepy, but
wasn't the anniversary two years
ago?
Well, reader, that's certainly an easy mistake to
make, considering the title of the story, but if
you look a little more carefully at the body, it
becomes clear that the title (perhaps chosen
by someone else) was wrong and
inaccurate in a very different way, probably
only badly chosen, due to a simple
misunderstanding of the facts:
On December 14, 1900, Max
Planck presented experimental results in front of the
German Physical Society and announced that
they could best be explained if energy exists in
discrete packets, which he called "quanta".
Today is the 100th birthday of Quantum Physics
As you can doubtless see from a second look,
it all fits into place that Planck's announcement,
which lead to other scientists further investigating the
full ramifications of the theory, was the conception
of Quantum Physics as we know and love it
today. Whilst the title is obviously innacurate,
the observation that today is Quantum Physics'
100th birthday is clearly correct, as it
is broadly accepted that models of reality have
a 2 year gestation period- a similar duration to
elephants, I believe.
Sadly, though, Quantum Physics has not been too
lucky in love, having had occasional brief flings with
50's icon Relativity, whom everyone would have
liked to see it matched up with, but it never
quite seemed to work out for them- it seems
they just had too many differences.
Although we all wish Quantum Physics well,
and it seems surely impossible that such a
great catch would never get married
(who knows, maybe good old Q.P will be able
to patch things up with Relativity after all),
it shall obviously not be having any anniversaries
for some time yet.
I'm fairly sure it was mostly thanks
to hackers who reverse engineered the Windows
drivers
WhaWhaWhat?? I'm inclined to suppose maybe you're
thinking about some other Matrox, because
with the G400 and G200, they allowed people like
the Utah-GLX programmers (doing the XFree-3.6's
OpenGL support, some years back) to register freely and get most of the
programming info they needed to do the job properly.
I think just about the only thing they kept secret was
the specs for some part of it that took microcode:
but IIRC they supplied the precompiled microcode for
them to upload, and the details for doing the actual
uploading, and presumably anything needed for
interfacing with that part of the chip.
I remember
following the mailing list (not understanding much,
admittedly), and I remember watching the debug
messages mentioning stuff about the microcode-using
part (I can't remember what it was called, had some
daft name like "zoom pipe" or summat. Someone
else will now remember and make me sound stupid).
But point was, with the G400, Matrox seemed about
as helpful as they could be, it didn't sound like the
developers were dissatisfied with the situation.
Whereas nVidia, on the other hand...
Now, I seem to remember the G450 had some extra
features that they were a bit more cagey about, and
they produced some small binary driver to
work with just that part, but that driver wasn't
required for general use, which was governed by
the larger, opensource part. The Parhelia thing,
though, I don't know about. Does that have any Linux drivers?
Irony is, that in response to this duplicated story,
10 zillion slashdotters have all said pretty much exactly
the same thing as each other.
Yeah, OK, I did too. Still ironic. And yes, for those who
like to debate the meaning of Irony (would that subject
be Ironology? *), I think that this case does fit the
definition pretty damned well.
*- Yes, yes, I expect it would be Etymology or
Didactics or something. And arguing that point might
be... somewhat ironic?
Yeah. At first it sounded like it was a
different story with a very coincidentally similar idea,
but then looking again, I realised that no, they even
seem to be referring to exactly the same
article in New Scientist!
It's one thing when you see a story that had run maybe
a few weeks earlier, but earlier on the same day? Ouch.
Which card will work hardware
accelerated out of the box on latest Mandrake or Redhat?
Er, well AFAICT, you can't get hardware 3d
acceleration on Linux without at least configuring
it a little bit, but if you mean "What cards won't I need to
download extra drivers for to get hardware accelearated
3d", then the answer would be roughly MGA G400, maybe G200, Radeon models up to 7500 (I think) as these are done by the free DRI drivers, and most
of the more recent 3dfx based cards.
Presuming you already have Linux installed,
you should look in the various/usr/doc/whatever
directories belonging to the XFree86 stuff (there
will probably be a whole load of different packages
required for X, I don't know about Redhat/Mandrake
as I use Debian) and look for a file like README.DRI,
which might be gzipped (it is for me). The file also
tells you how to make sure that X will try to use
OpenGL (not difficult, may already be done for you!)
Alternatively, the actual DRI webpages are more
up to date, and more thorough about which
versions of cards they support - look for the "status"
page for a start!
Configuring stuff, heh, I forget! If you have X set up
to use your card, and tell it to use OpenGL, it
will know whether your card can do it or not, and will
try to load the appropriate kernel module.
In my case, using a G400 card, it doesn't
manage this, as it wants to have the agpgart
module installed before the mga module, but
doesn't realise to do this, so when my machine's
booted, I normally modprobe the agpgart
module myself, and then the mga module, and then the
OpenGL works fine. Really, I should
set up the modules.conf files to do this automatically,
but I can't be bothered.
Bear in mind, that the mga module is only
right for using G400/G200 cards, and the other
cards would want other kernel modules! Also, those
other kernel modules might not have those
same requirements. In short, your mileage may vary.
But to return to the point in hand: If you don't want
to be downloading binary-only drivers, then nVidia
based cards are NOT what you want; they have no
opensource 3d drivers at all that I know of.
Some of the ATi cards are supported out of the box
(I don't know how well!!) and some are only
supported by ATi's driver so far, the one in the
article.
there's been a series of TV ads
recently in the UK
Well, not just recently, they've been going for
at least 5 years, maybe even 10. I certainly remember
jokes about John Major having it as his favourite advert
(don't even ask). So, that phrase is probably known by
everyone here now.
It's practically burnt into the nation's psyche. Well OK,
not quite.
If you don't believe me, then why
does Britain have problems with gun violence?
Huh? We do? <scratches head> I suppose in things
like bank robberies, and so on, the criminals have guns,
and about 10 years ago, the Mossside district of
Manchester become quite notorious for people
getting shot in feuds between drug gangs... but IIRC, that actually
worked out as very few people in total - the number of
people killed there overall was probably equivalent to
the people shot in a single day in the US! I suppose
that's not much solace to the people who were
killed, but yeah, I think most of them were members
of the opposing gangs.
Oh yeah, I think there was similar stuff in Liverpool
(not far from where I am) a year or so back. I think
a grand total of about 5 people were killed! That
was a disturbing few weeks.
But otherwise, no, I don't remember hearing much
about guns. There's certainly plenty of brawls
outside pubs and clubs. Occasionally some nut goes mad with
a sword (I can think of about 3 such reports), but that sort of thing makes NEWS.
National news. People sit up and pay attention to
dangerous weapons here, and I think the poster you
replied to was trying to make the point that maybe people in USA don't so much.
The trouble is, a screenshot is just
bitmap data. It can easily be faked.
Heck, yes, especially if it's of an application that
must primarily display text.
Even if the screenshots were
real, it wouldn't even mean that they had that
actual content, they could be random files
with fake names- potentially even created
with a virus.
If that sort of thing can be considered sufficient
evidence to effectively extort money from
people in a court, then you might as well cobble
together
some image of a program window wtih "I support
Al Quaeda and give them money" written in it,
and claim that it was gleamed from someone's
machine (perhaps by hacking, or that Tempest thing).
In fact, maybe these people being put through the
wringer for doing something so minor, should do
that, say "They're trying to bring down the western
world by prosecuting innocent members of the
public!". OK, possibly that's tasteless (not very).
Anyway, ultimately this kind of thing just proves how
important anonymous data-sharing networks like GNUnet * and
Freenet are- people keep on saying things like
"Oh, why would you want anonimity, you must
be up to no good"- but as you can see, pretty
much anything you might want to share with
someone, it is likely that someone somewhere
will want to stop you. Whoever it was that created
DeCSS would probably be quite content and
comfortable, not
worrying about prosecution (OK, maybe he was let
off, maybe not, I can't keep up with it all), if he'd
distributed his initial code via GNUnet or Freenet.
And now, so would these people in Denmark.
* - After a few times of trying to get GNUnet
to work,
I got pissed off at it seeming so impossible to setup
properly (because the documentation was
too unclear, or there were still bugs, I dunno),
and a month ago I mouthed off about it
on slashdot somewhere. Since then, I ended up
having another try as they released 0.4.7, and tada,
I got it to work. And once it was working? Pretty
decent. Bit slow, but that's because of the anonimity
measures. Not much content there, but the way to
improve that is to join in and provide some! Anyone
who decides to use it should realise that it's still work
in progress, and could well give you a hard time.
But, unlike Freenet, it doesn't need
Java, and is capable of making use of "transient
nodes" (fairly sure) - so if you use it on dial-up, you aren't just
leaching -I believe this was why I always found it
so hard to get anything on Freenet,
not enough permanent nodes.
So to sum up, I'm now backing GNUnet big style!
Watch out for version 0.5, coming soon apparently.
So not only has ATi opened the specs
to their hardware, they even paid to develop
open source DRI drivers for the Radeon
<DOUBLETAKE> [rereads AC's whole
post properly]
</DOUBLETAKE> Wow. I knew they'd
released enough specs for them to create the
driver, I'd never realised they even paid them
to do it. Hell, most Linux drivers are done for free!
That's neat...
That's a hell of a lot more
than nVidia has ever done.
Heh, that's for sure! Most of the cards nVidia come
out with tend to sound pretty impressive. Like those
ones they've done with sockets for shutter glasses
(which you normally only see in a few select
workstations like SGIs and the very occasional Sun).
But whilst I'm generally opposed to having closed
source software on my machine, I really
don't want to have any damned drivers or kernel
modules that are closed source. Apart from those
reasons given in my earlier post, I'm pretty
skeptical about what they'll do to my machine's
stability. So really, it was only that factor that made
me get a G400 rather than a nVidia card, but if
I upgrade soon, I'll be looking for a Radeon 7xxx
based card, to get those open source drivers.
And yeah, I gather some of the ATi cards support
shutter glasses too, but not any Radeons, AFAIK.
No matter, I've lived without 'em so far.
I think, maybe more to the point, the main issue is one of
maintenance. If a new kernel comes out, or a
new version of XFree, it might not be binary
compatible, or there may be meaningful API changes.
Now, OK, so ATi will likely get on to producing new,
updated drivers that are compatible. After all,
they want people to buy their stuff, and giving support
is good PR, makes people think that their products are
worth buying, etc. Further, good drivers help to
put their product in a good light.
Now then. What happens if when the change happens,
some time has passed, ATi have stopped producing
the cards in question, and have NEW
exciting GODMONSTER cards with support
for DirectX17 and its
wonderful new "Aardvark Mapping" technology
(none of which will be of any use to any of us who
aren't actually using Windows). What they want at
that point, is for us all to buy that new
card, so they get their money back on their huge
R&D investment (however much the things cost).
Now, whilst it may happen that they will
decide that continuing to suport old stuff is also
good PR and keeps people happy, that doesn't
always happen in our wonderful world of computing.
There is a very good chance that they will instead
say "No, we have discontinued support for our
old Radeon cards from 2002; They are still supported
under Linux kernel 2.4, but for a full feature-packed
multimedia virtual-reality 3d experience under
Linux 3.6, you should purchase one of our
GODMONSTER cards, which are fully
compatible with OpenGL1.0, and only cost
250 quid".
Well, that's what I think, anyway, but I'm a
great big cynic, and like to bitch about stuff. OTOH,
earlier Radeon cards apparently have open sourced
OpenGL support from the DRI (I don't know how
well these work as I myself have a Matrox card-
but I'd been thinking about Radeon recently), and
so maybe those are a good investment, I dunno.
I dunno - If it maintains backward
compatibility and doesn't break the network then what's
the harm?
Huh? As far as I'm concerned, the network is
broken. The initial design came about from some guy
(one of the Winamp creators, IIRC, but don't quote me
on that) knocking something together as a proof of
concept as a response to his new employer's (AOL/
Time-Warner) attitudes to file sharing, etc.
The original program was not as many people
mistakenly assumed (due to the name) free software,
it was closed source windows software, that other
people had to reverse engineer, the design was
fairly shoddy (because, as aforementioned, it was
more or less a proof of concept), leaving far too
much bandwidth spent on catering to people who
use firewalls (and much of the time, those
push requests simply get lost). Then, the countless
different clone implementations tend to not-quite
fit the same specifications (as each other,
let alone the original), causing no end of
problems.
I did use 2 or 3 different versions of Gnutella, for
quite some time, probably over a year. I got lots
of stuff. Of course, most of that is only half there,
because of not always finding the same files again,
or not being able to connect to a servent (most of
the time), or stupid screw-ups where you resume
a download, and find that the remote server is
actually sending you something else, so
you have to stop it and muck about with dd
or similar to carefully cut the file back to what it
was originally. Then, after a while, I noticed
not only people who were putting up lots of copies
of the exact same file (eg an advert for some site)
under numerous different (and totally misleading)
filenames (and also files that appeared to
be proper files, even having pretty large file sizes,
which turned out to be just windoze URL files,
padded with vast amounts of space), but even,
hacked up servents, that would return numerous
different responses to any query you could
come up with. EG, search for FOO BAR and they
would return exactly FOO_BAR.mpg, FOO_BAR.htm,
FOO_BAR.jpg, FOO_BAR.mp3, FOO_BAR.exe,
and eventually, more cunning variations. I'm sure
there were other similar things done by crackers
and spammers, et al, but I can't remember them all.
BUT, ultimately, the thing that makes
the Gnutella network broken most of all, to my mind,
is the sheer LEGIONS of such utter
CRETINS who have not the slightest
idea what they are doing, flooding the network
with queries that are almost GUARANTEED
to return absolutely f**k all, because they simply
do not get how the queries are matched. If they did,
they would probably still not be able to get it right.
A few months ago, I pretty much stopped using
Gnutella, as the network seemed to be getting
progressively worse, and I seemed to be able
to get less and less (and yes, I did used to
share some files- ones that people seemed to
want, too). I tried looking into various other P2P
type networks, like GiFT and Freenet, and GNUnet,
but felt badly let down by what I found. After a
while, I tried having another look at Gnutella, and
it was so screwed up it made me feel sick. The
flood of bad queries (now including torrents of
empty queries, about 80%, I'd say) was
even worse, and trying to search for anything
yielded almost exclusively the spam responses.
I kind of got the feeling that maybe groups like
the RIAA/MPAA could have been deliberately
creating the noise and spam themselves, to
try to make the network worthless.
After about ten or fifteen minutes of searching,
I gave up in dispair. As far as I'm concerned,
Gnutella is dead.
Well, if someone proposes a new version, and it
addresses most of these problems, IMO it would
really be best if it broke compatibility. Nice clean
break. Well, there's my 42 pence worth, flame
away, all.
however, the md5sums would catch
it (the md5sums in Gentoo are of the non-trojaned version, luckily)
Seeing the fact that the modifications to the source helped to obscure the trojan by making the pcap library
quietly ignore packets associated with the remote site,
reminded me of the paranoia I tend to feel over
security, and the mechanisms we use for it.
Such as, what if a cracker got into my machine and
set up (amongst other things) a patched version of
md5sum, that knew which files had been altered,
and what their orignal md5sums were, so I couldn't
rely on that for my security? This paranoia went as
far as worrying about whether it would be possible
for someone to alter gcc, such that not only would
it add malware functions to anything I compiled,
but also to work out when it was being used to
compile a compiler, and install this same such
functionality into that. I spent ages trying to
convince myself that that would be far too
complex to do, maybe even impossible * ,
but at the same time tried to work
out ways to bootstrap a C compiler that I could
believe was indeed utterly trojan-free.
<sigh>
I expect there's a word for that, and I'm sure it's
not one I want to hear:P
* -I'm sure that it could be made to use
certain cues, such as filenames, etc, to decide
that it was compiling part of a specific
compiler, such as another copy of gcc, and
only do the modification on that. But I'm sure
you can't write an algorithm to detect that a
piece of code constitutes a compiler, let alone
part of one (because of course, gcc
only works on one source file at a time, not whole
projects).
Wrong. Every context switch burns
hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of clock cycles.
Er, I freely admit that you probably know the subject
far better than I, but I thought that at least some
types of threading implementations meant that switching
between the threads of a single process were far less
expensive than full process-to-process context switches?
Anyone hypocritical enough to
deny the moon landing but use a microwave or watch
tv prety much deserves what they get.
Er... Now, I may be wrong, but I'd kind of thought
that TV was invented by a Scot, back in the 20's or
30's or so. He was supposed to have given the first
public demonstration of it in the town I grew up in. And
weren't microwaves (the waves, not the ovens) first
used in radar in WWII? (OK, I'm certainly far less sure
of that one, I don't have a WWII radar)
Anyway, I myself don't know if the program I saw
a few months back was this Fox production everyone
is talking about, but personally I thought that as
conspiracy theories went, theirs was
relatively well
argued. I certainly didn't go and say "Well, I think
they're right", but they raised some intriguing
points. An earlier poster gave a link to some site
that in turn gave fairly convincing counter-
arguments to them. As it is, I frankly don't care one
way or another who's right, it's not my
country claiming to have gone there not only
several times but also first, and I'm not in any
hurry to go myself. Things learnt from the landings
affect our modern life? Well, either they do or they
don't, and not knowing either way doesn't seem
to have changed my TV set.
Now I agree that at least many/most conspiracy
theorists are total fruitcakes, and maybe all these
guys who claim that it didn't happen (I don't
remember if any of them refused to believe
that man landed on the moon, or if they just
questioned it) are nutters too- I don't know any
of them at all, and don't remember much about how
they seemed on the program- but for gods sakes,
Slashdot seems to be coming over all witch-hunty
over this. Kill them! Kill them all! I know that
(most of?) you guys are joking, but seriously, you
should hear yourselves here.
I'd like to know, Is it that they're conspiracy
theorists, and being unreasonable and absolutely
not accepting that what they believe could
possibly be wrong (again, I don't remember how
they were), which would be a pretty
good reason to disdain them, or is it that some of
you don't want to be told that what you
believe could possibly be wrong, especially when
it involves your country and/or spheres of interest?
Like I say, I'm not especially bothered who's right.
In fact, can we have some Microsoft-bashing or
something instead now? I'm not happy with this
being on the unpopular side of the argument
business...
I Should point out I do agree with what you
say about the nature of science, and of
conspiracy theorists. But if people say "I'm not
going to debate that point" (because the other
person is a conspiracy theorist) it makes the
conspiracy theorists look like they have a point.
If the conspiracy theorists are unreasonable
deep-down, then the way to win the argument is
to clearly demonstrate that to people.
[Waits in flame proof bunker for moderators to
designate me a troll, or a gullible person who
sometimes listens to conspiracy theorists]
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why you have to get used to that sort of thing, is that unless I missed a trick somewhere, they are not being paid to do this 24/7 (JWZ should understand this as someone who has also created free software), and that until they had got the program to a certain point where they might think it worthwhile to add a GUI option, you have nowhere to stick your beloved scroll bars and clicky buttons and menus and things to select various options with. Sorry.
I will agree with you and with JWZ that the GUI part of mplayer is quite bad, which is why I only used it once or twice after I first saw it. Otherwise, I just use the plain command line. 99.9% of the time, I either run mplayer with no command line flags, or with one or two flags that I use a lot, eg -fs (gives full screen) or -vo x11 (to avoid using the xv driver that has made X crash once or twice when playing incomplete videos. Sorry, but there's no right in bitching about that, because it's a work in progress, they don't claim it's bullet-proof).
Now, as for the GUI, well till about a year or so ago, there wasn't even any GUI for it, there was only the command line, because what these people have basically done, is create a program that can play practically anything under the fscking sun. The GUI part came later, as an option, and AFAIK was an experimental feature. Sure, it turned out a bit crap. But they weren't making the program bad, they were adding something extra that we had gone without before.
Then JWZ, who sure, makes good screensaver things and stuff, and doubtless a billion other marvelous bits of code, calls the mplayer authors "a bunch of fucking morons". No, sorry, wrong wrong wrong. They made a damned brilliant piece of software, and they are STILL WRITING IT. Calling them morons for creating a bad user interface for something they are not being paid for and haven't claimed to have finished, is just as bad, IF NOT WORSE than insulting those people who can't understand a CLI program that needs practically no effort to use, or can't learn 3 or 4 simple keys to control the thing. The program is normally an utter no-brainer to use, but I'll bet it wasn't a no-brainer to code.
Normally, I myself tend to have a whinge and a rant about things, but seriously, they're absolutely the wrong bunch to be bitching about, they do a first rate job, if you think their GUI is badly designed (which I agree about, but am not really bothered), maybe you should be suggesting to them how it should be rather than insulting them.
I wonder if China is imagining making a Beowulf cluster out of those NESes? And this time, that line even has a tiny core of sense to it, as IIRC, China is blocked from buying supercomputers or PCs over a certain spec, and the slower the processors, the less relevant communications latencies are in a cluster. Now, back to the age-old argument. Where exactly did you drag that out from? Because I've certainly never ever heard that before, and if it is the case, then WTF was the point in the word milliard? If you have difficulty with that word, look it up. If you can't find it, you need a better dictionary. That's got to be the most screwed up argument I've heard in quite some time. You might as well say, a dachsund isn't ten thousand, so why do people think a billion is even a number? I'm listening... Er, surely by your pattern, either 10x1000=million, or possibly, 100x1000=million. No? Sorry, it's not entirely clear what your pattern is.
Look, ultimately, words such as ten, hundred, thousand, for little numbers that everyday people use, are Germanic in origin, because the peasants at the time of the Norman conquest of England would have used such numbers in their everyday life. Words such as million are French in origin (mille=thousand in French), because up till around the 14th century, the Norman-French kings of England hardly even spoke English, and the language of court and all official state business was not English (it was either French or Latin). True, I don't know when the word Million was first used, it might not have even been about during that time, but you can bet that when it first was, it wouldn't have been by the little people, it would have been by somebody with a million of something to count.
The derivation of billion, is that it is bi as in 2, even though the mi in million was not originally meaning 1 (like mono-). Hence,
1X (10^6)^1=million
1X (10^6)^2=billion
1X (10^6)^3=trillion
Which looks better if you think of it in terms of just the number of zeros, as in 6*1 zeros, 6*2 zeros, 6*3 zeros.
If you try that with the American version, you have to do:
1000X (10^3)^1=million
1000X (10^3)^2=billion
1000X (10^3)^3=trillion
Or, 3+(3*1) zeros, 3+(3*2) zeros, 3+(3*3) zeros. Doesn't quite scan, does it?
It is true that nowadays, most of the use of the word billion in UK, for instance on the news, and in government announcements and things, is the same as the US version, but you will still find the more sensible English version (alongside the US version) in the dictionary, if your dictionary does not suck, and a good many people understand that billion can be taken to mean a million million.
My own feeling on it, is that the words billion, trillion, etc are now broken. It's common enough for many words to have more than one meaning, but when it's a number, you really have to pick some new bloody words. I'd suggest borrowing some other language that English has ties with -after all, there are plenty out there- and maybe changing them a bit to fit in better. I'd favour getting the words from Germany or Scandinavia or somewhere like that, but hell, why not even India?? Of course, it'll never happen.
I've probably still got 2 or maybe 3 old Sinclair Spectrums (I think they were sold as Timex TMS1000 or something in the US, I don't know- I mean the colour ones, not the mono ones that were known as ZX81s here), with the rubber keyboards that wore out after a while, and the edge connectors that would kill the machine dead if you tried to plug in or unplug peripherals into them whilst the machines were switched on (that'd be why I had more than 1- some got broken). They're prolly too common to be classic tho. I also still have somewhere the "Sam Coupe", which was a fairly large machine by MGT, that was supposed to be a souped up Spectrum that was a bit more like an Amiga or something. I quite liked that machine, but put it away when I got my first PC.
We used to have a real archaic machine, I think it was called an "ADAM II", that was sort of like a minicomputer or something, y'know, a big floor-standing thing the size of a small fridge or something. We kept it on the landing outside my room. Took big disks that were at least a foot across, with plastic shells with big handles on top. Seriously, not making this up. In fact, one of the James Bond films from the 80s was on TV the other day, they showed them using disks like that. My Dad got it from work when they upgraded... I'm still not quite sure why. Apparently he liked the language it used (might have been Forth, I'm really not sure). I forget when we got rid of that, but I expect that'd be the sort of thing that collectors and computer museums could be interested in (apart from the size and the weight!).
Not sure what other sort of things we have about, not counting the PCs there must be a fair few oddities in our house.
How come American sweets and cakes and chocolates and stuff seem to be so unheard of outside of America? Hmm, something I read recently (written by an American, so don't blame me) seemed to say that American chocolate isn't that nice compared to what we enjoy in the rest of the world (even here in UK where the Europeans complain that our usual chocolate isn't pure enough). That doesn't seem to explain the Marshmallow Peeps thing tho.
No, I don't have a link. Oh, OK then, I found this on E2.com. Hows that?
Alternatively, it could have been that the brain cells start dying at that point, except that I think they're supposed to be dying through your whole life, aren't they??? <scratches head>
It may be a factor that people often want these things to be less obtrusive, but surely this would just make you more likely to trip over it, or something like that.
And is that proof of anti-particles that you mention, because relativity allows things going faster than light to go back in time? What I think I'd dimly understood from Feynman was that anti-particles were fundamentally the same as their normal-matter equivalents, but travelling the opposite way in time, such that when they collided (or were spontaneously generated), it was actually just one particle sort of "bouncing" in the temporal dimension, with an associated transfer of energy one way or the other. Have I got that right?
I certainly have no idea about how it affects spin, as I've never quite got what exactly spin meant other than it seems to "classify" particles quite significantly. I would be intrigued to hear some sort of explanation about what spin actually meant.
Notation reverses YOU!
Whereas of course,
In SOVIET RUSSIA,
RPN POLISHES you!
Although strictly speaking, that probably should have been:
In SOVIET POLAND,
Notation YOU! reverses
Whilst SOVIET RUSSIA has it's own method of doing these things, which didn't quite catch on in the west.
Sorry about that, everyone.
As you can doubtless see from a second look, it all fits into place that Planck's announcement, which lead to other scientists further investigating the full ramifications of the theory, was the conception of Quantum Physics as we know and love it today. Whilst the title is obviously innacurate, the observation that today is Quantum Physics' 100th birthday is clearly correct, as it is broadly accepted that models of reality have a 2 year gestation period- a similar duration to elephants, I believe.
Sadly, though, Quantum Physics has not been too lucky in love, having had occasional brief flings with 50's icon Relativity, whom everyone would have liked to see it matched up with, but it never quite seemed to work out for them- it seems they just had too many differences.
Although we all wish Quantum Physics well, and it seems surely impossible that such a great catch would never get married (who knows, maybe good old Q.P will be able to patch things up with Relativity after all), it shall obviously not be having any anniversaries for some time yet.
Hope this clears everything up,
Tomble
I think just about the only thing they kept secret was the specs for some part of it that took microcode: but IIRC they supplied the precompiled microcode for them to upload, and the details for doing the actual uploading, and presumably anything needed for interfacing with that part of the chip.
I remember following the mailing list (not understanding much, admittedly), and I remember watching the debug messages mentioning stuff about the microcode-using part (I can't remember what it was called, had some daft name like "zoom pipe" or summat. Someone else will now remember and make me sound stupid). But point was, with the G400, Matrox seemed about as helpful as they could be, it didn't sound like the developers were dissatisfied with the situation. Whereas nVidia, on the other hand...
Now, I seem to remember the G450 had some extra features that they were a bit more cagey about, and they produced some small binary driver to work with just that part, but that driver wasn't required for general use, which was governed by the larger, opensource part. The Parhelia thing, though, I don't know about. Does that have any Linux drivers?
Yeah, OK, I did too. Still ironic. And yes, for those who like to debate the meaning of Irony (would that subject be Ironology? *), I think that this case does fit the definition pretty damned well.
*- Yes, yes, I expect it would be Etymology or Didactics or something. And arguing that point might be... somewhat ironic?
It's one thing when you see a story that had run maybe a few weeks earlier, but earlier on the same day? Ouch.
Presuming you already have Linux installed, you should look in the various /usr/doc/whatever
directories belonging to the XFree86 stuff (there
will probably be a whole load of different packages
required for X, I don't know about Redhat/Mandrake
as I use Debian) and look for a file like README.DRI,
which might be gzipped (it is for me). The file also
tells you how to make sure that X will try to use
OpenGL (not difficult, may already be done for you!)
Alternatively, the actual DRI webpages are more up to date, and more thorough about which versions of cards they support - look for the "status" page for a start!
Configuring stuff, heh, I forget! If you have X set up to use your card, and tell it to use OpenGL, it will know whether your card can do it or not, and will try to load the appropriate kernel module. In my case, using a G400 card, it doesn't manage this, as it wants to have the agpgart module installed before the mga module, but doesn't realise to do this, so when my machine's booted, I normally modprobe the agpgart module myself, and then the mga module, and then the OpenGL works fine. Really, I should set up the modules.conf files to do this automatically, but I can't be bothered.
Bear in mind, that the mga module is only right for using G400/G200 cards, and the other cards would want other kernel modules! Also, those other kernel modules might not have those same requirements. In short, your mileage may vary.
But to return to the point in hand: If you don't want to be downloading binary-only drivers, then nVidia based cards are NOT what you want; they have no opensource 3d drivers at all that I know of. Some of the ATi cards are supported out of the box (I don't know how well!!) and some are only supported by ATi's driver so far, the one in the article.
It's practically burnt into the nation's psyche. Well OK, not quite.
Oh yeah, I think there was similar stuff in Liverpool (not far from where I am) a year or so back. I think a grand total of about 5 people were killed! That was a disturbing few weeks.
But otherwise, no, I don't remember hearing much about guns. There's certainly plenty of brawls outside pubs and clubs. Occasionally some nut goes mad with a sword (I can think of about 3 such reports), but that sort of thing makes NEWS. National news. People sit up and pay attention to dangerous weapons here, and I think the poster you replied to was trying to make the point that maybe people in USA don't so much.
Just my 1.3 pence worth.
Even if the screenshots were real, it wouldn't even mean that they had that actual content, they could be random files with fake names- potentially even created with a virus.
If that sort of thing can be considered sufficient evidence to effectively extort money from people in a court, then you might as well cobble together some image of a program window wtih "I support Al Quaeda and give them money" written in it, and claim that it was gleamed from someone's machine (perhaps by hacking, or that Tempest thing).
In fact, maybe these people being put through the wringer for doing something so minor, should do that, say "They're trying to bring down the western world by prosecuting innocent members of the public!". OK, possibly that's tasteless (not very).
Anyway, ultimately this kind of thing just proves how important anonymous data-sharing networks like GNUnet * and Freenet are- people keep on saying things like "Oh, why would you want anonimity, you must be up to no good"- but as you can see, pretty much anything you might want to share with someone, it is likely that someone somewhere will want to stop you. Whoever it was that created DeCSS would probably be quite content and comfortable, not worrying about prosecution (OK, maybe he was let off, maybe not, I can't keep up with it all), if he'd distributed his initial code via GNUnet or Freenet. And now, so would these people in Denmark.
* - After a few times of trying to get GNUnet to work, I got pissed off at it seeming so impossible to setup properly (because the documentation was too unclear, or there were still bugs, I dunno), and a month ago I mouthed off about it on slashdot somewhere. Since then, I ended up having another try as they released 0.4.7, and tada, I got it to work. And once it was working? Pretty decent. Bit slow, but that's because of the anonimity measures. Not much content there, but the way to improve that is to join in and provide some! Anyone who decides to use it should realise that it's still work in progress, and could well give you a hard time. But, unlike Freenet, it doesn't need Java, and is capable of making use of "transient nodes" (fairly sure) - so if you use it on dial-up, you aren't just leaching -I believe this was why I always found it so hard to get anything on Freenet, not enough permanent nodes. So to sum up, I'm now backing GNUnet big style! Watch out for version 0.5, coming soon apparently.
No, they're not paying me ; )
And yeah, I gather some of the ATi cards support shutter glasses too, but not any Radeons, AFAIK. No matter, I've lived without 'em so far.
Now, OK, so ATi will likely get on to producing new, updated drivers that are compatible. After all, they want people to buy their stuff, and giving support is good PR, makes people think that their products are worth buying, etc. Further, good drivers help to put their product in a good light.
Now then. What happens if when the change happens, some time has passed, ATi have stopped producing the cards in question, and have NEW exciting GODMONSTER cards with support for DirectX17 and its wonderful new "Aardvark Mapping" technology (none of which will be of any use to any of us who aren't actually using Windows). What they want at that point, is for us all to buy that new card, so they get their money back on their huge R&D investment (however much the things cost).
Now, whilst it may happen that they will decide that continuing to suport old stuff is also good PR and keeps people happy, that doesn't always happen in our wonderful world of computing. There is a very good chance that they will instead say "No, we have discontinued support for our old Radeon cards from 2002; They are still supported under Linux kernel 2.4, but for a full feature-packed multimedia virtual-reality 3d experience under Linux 3.6, you should purchase one of our GODMONSTER cards, which are fully compatible with OpenGL1.0, and only cost 250 quid".
Well, that's what I think, anyway, but I'm a great big cynic, and like to bitch about stuff. OTOH, earlier Radeon cards apparently have open sourced OpenGL support from the DRI (I don't know how well these work as I myself have a Matrox card- but I'd been thinking about Radeon recently), and so maybe those are a good investment, I dunno.
The original program was not as many people mistakenly assumed (due to the name) free software, it was closed source windows software, that other people had to reverse engineer, the design was fairly shoddy (because, as aforementioned, it was more or less a proof of concept), leaving far too much bandwidth spent on catering to people who use firewalls (and much of the time, those push requests simply get lost). Then, the countless different clone implementations tend to not-quite fit the same specifications (as each other, let alone the original), causing no end of problems.
I did use 2 or 3 different versions of Gnutella, for quite some time, probably over a year. I got lots of stuff. Of course, most of that is only half there, because of not always finding the same files again, or not being able to connect to a servent (most of the time), or stupid screw-ups where you resume a download, and find that the remote server is actually sending you something else, so you have to stop it and muck about with dd or similar to carefully cut the file back to what it was originally. Then, after a while, I noticed not only people who were putting up lots of copies of the exact same file (eg an advert for some site) under numerous different (and totally misleading) filenames (and also files that appeared to be proper files, even having pretty large file sizes, which turned out to be just windoze URL files, padded with vast amounts of space), but even, hacked up servents, that would return numerous different responses to any query you could come up with. EG, search for FOO BAR and they would return exactly FOO_BAR.mpg, FOO_BAR.htm, FOO_BAR.jpg, FOO_BAR.mp3, FOO_BAR.exe, and eventually, more cunning variations. I'm sure there were other similar things done by crackers and spammers, et al, but I can't remember them all.
BUT, ultimately, the thing that makes the Gnutella network broken most of all, to my mind, is the sheer LEGIONS of such utter CRETINS who have not the slightest idea what they are doing, flooding the network with queries that are almost GUARANTEED to return absolutely f**k all, because they simply do not get how the queries are matched. If they did, they would probably still not be able to get it right.
A few months ago, I pretty much stopped using Gnutella, as the network seemed to be getting progressively worse, and I seemed to be able to get less and less (and yes, I did used to share some files- ones that people seemed to want, too). I tried looking into various other P2P type networks, like GiFT and Freenet, and GNUnet, but felt badly let down by what I found. After a while, I tried having another look at Gnutella, and it was so screwed up it made me feel sick. The flood of bad queries (now including torrents of empty queries, about 80%, I'd say) was even worse, and trying to search for anything yielded almost exclusively the spam responses. I kind of got the feeling that maybe groups like the RIAA/MPAA could have been deliberately creating the noise and spam themselves, to try to make the network worthless. After about ten or fifteen minutes of searching, I gave up in dispair. As far as I'm concerned, Gnutella is dead.
Well, if someone proposes a new version, and it addresses most of these problems, IMO it would really be best if it broke compatibility. Nice clean break. Well, there's my 42 pence worth, flame away, all.
Sorry, couldn't resist it.
Such as, what if a cracker got into my machine and set up (amongst other things) a patched version of md5sum, that knew which files had been altered, and what their orignal md5sums were, so I couldn't rely on that for my security? This paranoia went as far as worrying about whether it would be possible for someone to alter gcc, such that not only would it add malware functions to anything I compiled, but also to work out when it was being used to compile a compiler, and install this same such functionality into that. I spent ages trying to convince myself that that would be far too complex to do, maybe even impossible * , but at the same time tried to work out ways to bootstrap a C compiler that I could believe was indeed utterly trojan-free.
<sigh> I expect there's a word for that, and I'm sure it's not one I want to hear :P
* -I'm sure that it could be made to use certain cues, such as filenames, etc, to decide that it was compiling part of a specific compiler, such as another copy of gcc, and only do the modification on that. But I'm sure you can't write an algorithm to detect that a piece of code constitutes a compiler, let alone part of one (because of course, gcc only works on one source file at a time, not whole projects).
Anyway, I myself don't know if the program I saw a few months back was this Fox production everyone is talking about, but personally I thought that as conspiracy theories went, theirs was relatively well argued. I certainly didn't go and say "Well, I think they're right", but they raised some intriguing points. An earlier poster gave a link to some site that in turn gave fairly convincing counter- arguments to them. As it is, I frankly don't care one way or another who's right, it's not my country claiming to have gone there not only several times but also first, and I'm not in any hurry to go myself. Things learnt from the landings affect our modern life? Well, either they do or they don't, and not knowing either way doesn't seem to have changed my TV set.
Now I agree that at least many/most conspiracy theorists are total fruitcakes, and maybe all these guys who claim that it didn't happen (I don't remember if any of them refused to believe that man landed on the moon, or if they just questioned it) are nutters too- I don't know any of them at all, and don't remember much about how they seemed on the program- but for gods sakes, Slashdot seems to be coming over all witch-hunty over this. Kill them! Kill them all! I know that (most of?) you guys are joking, but seriously, you should hear yourselves here.
I'd like to know, Is it that they're conspiracy theorists, and being unreasonable and absolutely not accepting that what they believe could possibly be wrong (again, I don't remember how they were), which would be a pretty good reason to disdain them, or is it that some of you don't want to be told that what you believe could possibly be wrong, especially when it involves your country and/or spheres of interest?
Like I say, I'm not especially bothered who's right. In fact, can we have some Microsoft-bashing or something instead now? I'm not happy with this being on the unpopular side of the argument business...
I Should point out I do agree with what you say about the nature of science, and of conspiracy theorists. But if people say "I'm not going to debate that point" (because the other person is a conspiracy theorist) it makes the conspiracy theorists look like they have a point. If the conspiracy theorists are unreasonable deep-down, then the way to win the argument is to clearly demonstrate that to people.
[Waits in flame proof bunker for moderators to designate me a troll, or a gullible person who sometimes listens to conspiracy theorists]