If this is really true, then I'm astounded. Every technical
writing I've seen that has refered to pounds as a
measure of force has referred to "pounds-force" or something like that. Every conversion table I've seen has
given conversion between lbs (pounds) and kgs (kilos),
and all my own physics classes (at UK A level, in
which I got an A, but I didn't do University level physics), we always had it drilled into us that KGs were a
unit of mass, Newtons are a measure of force, and
that weight is a force.
We were never told "actually pounds are a measure
of force, unlike kilograms", - pounds were never
even mentioned, because we don't officially use
imperial measurement any more, and certainly
science classes even in high school don't touch
them. In fact, a shopkeeper here was famously
prosecuted for selling his goods in imperial
measurement a few years ago. It's Ironic that
Americans call them things like "British" units!
So, I'll admit that it's quite possible that you are
right and I'm wrong on this. I'll just have to take your
word on it as I don't know!
(FWIW, in case you're thinking that prosecution was
a bit draconian, the law does permit giving the
imperial measure secondarily to the metric version,
which must be more prominent)
An alternative view is that a pound is neither a unit
of weight nor of mass, but of currency..
Weight is a force, and it should strictly be measured in N (newtons) in the SI scheme used in most of the world.
Mass is independent of gravity, and its SI unit (and also the normal non-scientific unit in metricised countries)
is the kilogram. A kilogram is roughly 2 of your old
imperial pounds.
Oh, this is getting boring now. I shouldn't have taken
the bait. Curse you, Anonymous Coward, you got
me again...
Anyway, alternative units of force to the Newton include
"kilogram force" and "pound force", but a kilogram
weighs different amounts depending on the
gravity in your location.
Sorry, but the same applies to pounds. You don't
get around it by being awkward and non-metric.
Whawhawhat? Did I miss something? Which kernel
version would you be talking about here?
It's been a few years since I used ALSA, and IIRC it
didn't work (I wanted to record stuff, and all I got was
static). I was never sure whether it was a bad card or
a bad driver, but I got a new sound card and used
a plain old OSS driver for it (the previous card only had a driver in ALSA, no OSS version).
As it happens, that soundcard didn't work right
either. And my current soundcard appears to make
my TV card lock up. Oh, the joys of PC hardware.
But I digress. OSS is pretty crap as sound architectures go, and I get the impression ALSA was intended
to work around its limitations, so I'd like to see if
it's really stable now.
So what does it got to do with what kind of (computer-based or otherwise) games I play?
Probably because it at least appears as though you are saying "Nethack is pointless because it is old fashioned". Now, looking at your original post, that may not have been exactly the case, but it does seem like he wasn't totaly wrong in thinking that.
Personally, I'm a fan of Nethack, and I'm 24. I've
been into it for a good long time, so is one of
my friends (and his brother). The Nethack
newsgroup (and the ones for other roguelikes) are
in a pretty healthy state,
so all in all, I'd say that no, Nethack is not dead, and not just being kept alive for a few
30-something sysadmins.
Well, that's how I see it, anyway.
(NB- I do play other games too)
I first found an old version of it on a CD of shareware
and PD type software that my Dad had got, when I
was around 16 or thereabouts (I'm 24 now). That
version didn't have the graphics, it was the plain
(but coloured) ASCII version. I kind of liked that quality,
somehow, and I'm glad I wasn't the sort of person who'd
say "Urgh, I'm not playing that", and gave it a
go. After a while (and especially after getting Linux)
I ended up trying later versions (and the variants
like NH+ and Slash'Em, etc), and I still play it.
Having said that, I tend to play for a few weeks, then
stop for a while. Because it's so damned hard, and I
always want to try to do fairly specific things that I
end up not being able to (like getting the skill that's
associated with the polymorph spell raised to expert,
to be able to polypile with impunity! Or was that
in Slash'em? I forget...). Also, in order to try out
certain strategies, I tend to play in wizard mode a
lot, which takes out all the fun:(
One of the things that disappointed me most, tho,
was realising that the Microscopic Space Fleet
didn't exist as an actual monster in the game. I'd
really wanted a pet one. Shame.
That's true enough. Nowadays, I really hate it
when I find games that insist you play using the cursor
keys (like the otherwise phenomenal XKobo* does) or
the numeric keypad (like Adom does). Primarily because
although such arrangements are nice and obvious,
they're damned awkward and uncomfortable.
Of course the one issue with using roguelike keys
in Nethack, is that I'm so lame at it I tend to play
in wizard mode. If I'm attacking something massively
out of depth (like a demon from a fountain or summat) to the north-west of me, I'm likely to end the game
when I'm asked "Die? Y/N". Ah well, I shouldn't be
cheating anyways, it takes all the fun out of it.
(*-XKobo isn't a Roguelike game, it's a fast arcade
game. The issue is that at the speed you play, you
want the key arrangement to fit your fingers. Like
hjkl does.)
...I'm, I'm sorry, really this has never happened to me before...
Aw, sorry, I just couldn't resist it. Personally, I've not
really watched it much recently (on plain UK tv that is),
but I did like it (and the film of course) when I watched it in
the past. Wonder which
series it is they're showing over here, I expect we should
get a fair few more before the end.
Hmm... I suppose that is the answer for me too,
as I don't get Cartoon Network (although I had it for about a year whilst at University, where it was mysteriously available in our
halls of residence for a few hours a day. We weren't told,
I just found it whilst tuning the TV, and decided not to look
a gift horse in the mouth). It used to be available on
ITV Digital, which I'd been interested in getting (because I
don't want to pay any money to Murdock for Sky TV),
but then ITV Digital went SPLAT and the free-to-view
digital terestrial TV service that has taken over from it
doesn't have Cartoon Network.
So, yes, it looks like DVDs and VHS are my options for
getting my Anime and Manga fix, because god only
knows, none of the analogue terrestrial channels here in UK have
shown any for years (apart from the crappy kids stuff like Digimon).
: (
NB- getting Anime on video would be less of an issue
if more of it was available in shops here. It tends
to be one small shelf in 1 or 2 big shops, and that's all.
In other words, it's utterly worthless to anyone who doesn't
have the luxury of a permanent connection, which is why
I don't use the thing.
Actually, that's not quite true- I don't use it because it's
unable to make use of systems without permanent
connections, which I presume to be the reason why the
vast vast majority of searches time out, even after, say
5 minutes or so, and the list of servers is very short. Also,
it uses horrible horrible java, and SWAMPS your machine
with threads- zillions of the little bastards (I never counted, but it filled several screens in both ps and ls/proc/, and as most of us have learnt, Linux
isn't really enormously fond of threads. They don't
break the system, but that many makes everything
crawl (NB- I know a reasonable bit of theory about
programming with threads, I don't hate the things, but
I think they should be used much more sparingly)
...Er, where was I? Oh yes, that was why I gave up using the
thing a few months back, after occasionally trying it
over a year or so. I recently looked into GNUnet, which
is along vaguely similar lines, but is written in C,
and has moderately different principles behind it.
Unfortunately that has issues of it's own, such
as wanting to implement its database as one directory
full of billions of 1K files. AND it didn't work. Supposedly they changed the database to a saner GDBM style
database, but I couldn't get that to work, and the
documentation is minimal. They're apparently working
on V 0.4.9, which they say will be very different, but
this seems to be forever over the horizon. I'd be interested in trying that one out, but all the other versions I've tried (3 or 4?) have been utterly broken.
Don't get me started on Gnutella tho, that was a bad proof-of-concept idea to begin with, and should have been put down it was so badly designed. I got a fair few files from it, but lots of them got corrupted, and half were unfinished, and now, the network is utterly DEAD- you won't get shit from it except from spammers who use hacked up servents to send replies to any single request that's made.
Similarily, I seem to remember first hearing about
water computers (or maybe some equivalent similar
to what you describe) being used in environments
where electricity could be dangerous- because
of possible fuel leaks and such.
Before this degenerates in to a flame war, I'll say this. These people need a country. However, they also need to stop killing each other. Blowing up
children is not a good way to get people to be sympathetic to your cause.
I totally agree with you.
Which side would you be referring to here, BTW?
(FWIW, I tend to feel that the whole situation there is
insane. I don't believe that they will ever resolve it,
but just keep slaughtering each other till the world
ends, over a place that people call The Holy Land.
Such a pointless waste, words can't express the stupidity of it.)
Incidentally, it'd be rather ironic if, in a discussion of
freedom of speech, we got modded down for being offtopic. Wouldn't it??
Yow, that's terrifying- I wish I knew Linux's internals
that well.
I think the closest I got to one of these situations was when I was
upgrading to glibc a few years back, and managed
to screw the process up leaving my system without any
libc (I renamed the original one* ). But after much panicking I found
that ldconfig at least was statically linked, and
sure enough it was able to restore all the symlinks,
bringing the system back to how it had been originally
(I was then able to do the upgrade properly).
That was clearly not even in the same solar system
as what he (Al Viro) had to deal with, but I suppose
he is a kernel developer, isn't he??
(*-Yes, I know it was lame of me to have done that,
I should have payed closer attention to the
instructions that said to cp it. We all make mistakes...)
I don't think I'd heard of these before today, but I had
been aware of Iomega's weird "click" disks or whatever
they'd called them- they were pretty small too, and held
about 50MB or so. I was interested in those, but IIRC
you could only get them for PCMCIA, and I don't have
a laptop.
For the sake of us outside the US, just how big is
a quarter, anyway?
I remember reading years ago something about how an
onion would glow in the dark if you stuck it in a
microwave... Hmm, that sounds insane, I expect I'm
forgetting some detail, like you had to paint it with
radium first or something stupid, but either way, I'm
fairly sure it wasn't a joke. Well, I never did try it, as I
didn't have a microwave then, and later I forgot.
Well, point is, supposing this story was real, is this
the same sort of thing? What's it all about?
And... ...What happens if you replace the tennis ball(s) with,
say, ping-pong ball(s)? Does it still work? Do they end
up on the moon? I have to know!!
Odd... I use Linux and open source almost exclusively
(I have an old Win95 -yes, 95- machine, that gathers
dust because I only really keep it for games that I rarely
play on it; my current Linux box is single boot),
but my own experience of the issue is that way too
much open source software has either no documentation
(or some microscopic readme that tells you nothing of
use), or has documentation that is incomplete.
My own pet grump in this regard is GTK/GDK, where it
would appear that they did documentation for 1.0
about 5 years ago, then gave up halfway through,
but carried on coding the next version anyway. Now
they're on 2.0, and version 1's documentation is
still unfinished. True, it's free software, they don't
owe me anything, it's not like they're getting payed
for it; but it's asking a bit much to expect me to want
to use the thing so badly that I'd go out of my way
to figure out all the ins and outs of the damn thing, to
work out what they, who know all about it
could have written down for all the world to see,
which would have
spared lots of people time that could have been
better spent-
so I've since given up trying to code stuff with GTK.
Yes, having said this, a pretty huge number of people
seem to have written things with GTK, but perhaps
what they needed had been documented, or perhaps they were far more patient. Perhaps they were more "leet" than me. Who knows.
Now, rant over, don't get me wrong- as I said, that's
just an example of how I feel documentation
is often dealt with in free software, it's hardly
particular to that project. Also, don't
anyone go making out that I'm claiming that
GTK/GDK is "bad software", because I'm not. I just
feel that being told "read the source" is a
fscked-up response for people to give when you
need documentation.
Oh well, perhaps we're both looking at
different software, or maybe I'm just a miserable
bugger. shrug
And Everything2.com has numerous stories of people
at science demo type things (much like this one being
planned, I suppose) having the Leidenfrost effect
demonstrated on them the other way, with
liquid nitrogen in their mouths, and it going horribly
wrong and putting them in hospital in mind-blowing
agony, with their bowels permanently screwed.
Granted, I haven't seen any proof for those stories
on e2, and I'm sure that the Leidenfrost effect is
real enough and does what it's claimed to when
it works, but that sort of thing does kind of
reinforce my preference to not just take someones
word that they know exactly what they're doing in
that sort of situation, you know?
Linux is not virus proof,
opensource is not virus proof.
This is a worm. A worm is not a virus, a virus is not a worm.
Nobody ever said Linux and opensource were
invulnerable to worms; the virus issue is different, and
really requires either exceptionally careless superusers,
or virus code that can search your
system for specific vulnerabilities that you
actually have in order to get root priveldges (AND ideally a closed-source
program for the virus to deliver itself to you with).
I've prolly missed some point there, but the issue remains: Virii and worms are 2 different things.
Not to mention the millions of chipset names.[SNIP]In Linux, you have to figure out who made the chipset on your card, which often isn't
labeled on the box or in the manual, so requires some
guessing or googling.
Hmm, since I started using Linux, my own approach to
this has been, to firstly get a very clear idea of what
devices and chipsets Linux currently supports, and then
go look for those exact devices or devices that I can
see have those chipsets.
The only problem arises that
my Hauppauge WinTV card (supported by the bttv
module), conflicts with my c-media sound card
(supported by cmpci module) and apparently
some other aspect of my system, to
cause my machine to lock solidly if I try to use the
TV card. -Note that I say there is some other aspect
to it, because every other sound card I've tried with
it (there have been a few) has made the TV card
screw up in one stupid
way or another. I've tried emailing the BTTV
developer for *any* advice, or any experience of
such lock-ups, etc, but he never replied.
So what can I do? Well, basically I can either
never use
my TV card until I'm able to buy parts for a second
(well, fourth...) system just to do TV capture, or
I can keep trying various settings to see if I can
ever make it stop hanging, whilst my FS
gets slowly corrupted.. Mmm, fun.
Anyway, regarding your point again, my approach
doesn't really cut it for most people, especially the
most everyday computer users. The situation isn't
the fault of Linux or of Linux programmers, though,
it's down to the manufacturers- they supply disks
of drivers for windows, which AFAIK mostly
consist of the chipset manufacturer's drivers, plus
data to tell windows that this product is to be using
those drivers, or something along those lines.
Those that produce stuff that also works with Linux
could fairly easily indicate so on the packaging,
and some of them actually do, but most
don't, because they wouldn't be able to supply
some pretty installer program that would cover
up the details like they could for Windows.
Oh, actually, perhaps they could. Oh I don't care,
it just sucks either way.
I only looked into that phenomenon just a few days ago,
whilst wandering through everything2.com.
I managed to find a generator that worked on Linux,
called Sbagen.
I don't think I've really got the hang of it, and I'm not
sure if I've got any effect out of the things (though I'm
using expensive headphones). Some of the sounds are quite
hard to listen to tho.
[searches through bookmarks file...]
SBaGen
I think the bloke has a non-sourceforge page too, forget whether the sf page links back to it. [shrug]
DISCLAIMER: Having seen this story, I tried firing up SBagen again, and am currently listening to theta-waves; any errors in my post are therefore due to being in a dream-like-state. So there.
Well, I don't read every single slashdot story,
so I can't say for sure whether people really do try
to link anything to Open Source and Free
Software. Ive not seen many stories on Chinese
oxen on Slashdot, but mebbe I've not been looking
hard enough.
However, intellectual property issues obviously always
affect Free Software, Open Source software, and
software and hardware in general, to some extent.
This story, is broadly about intellectual property. Many
other stories will have some connection to intellectual
property issues in at least some way.
Then there will be many other stories that aren't to
do with intellectual property, but are mostly to
do with Linux or Open Source software, this being
a nerd website (stuff that matters), and many (most?) nerds
who are computer nerds are using at least some
amount of Open Source software, and quite likely
Linux, and will probably want to read stories about
Linux and Open Source software. These stories
about Linux and Open Source software will
affect Linux and Open Source software
by virtue of being about Linux and Open Source
software.
There is the point that, AFAIK, DivX and all variants of
it, are MPEG-4 based; MPEG-4 has patents on it,
and any implementation of it is supposed to pay
a fee.
Now, to my knowledge it's not happened yet, but it
could just be a matter of time before projects creaing
free versions of DivX get crapped upon from a great
height, clobbered by either a cease-and-desist letter,
a lawsuit, or a very very big bill.
Oh, but that's surely not going to happen! Those
industry types won't mind, will they? They'll leave
nice little free software hackers alone! Well, that's
what people thought about Unisys (wasn't it them?)
and the patents involving GIFs (or part of them),
but eventually they changed their minds, and
proved RMS right by threatening to sue any
website using GIFs created with free software. *
It may turn out that some company will turn up
who will pay the fees to create DivX based
software (er... I guess MS did this already??), but
in most cases, well, they're going to be charging
big money for the encoding side, aren't they? So
that will be of less use for individuals wanting
to make videos (or DVD rips, which let's face
it, are going to make a difference), and as long
as some of those people have a reason to use
the Ogg/VP3 system to encode their stuff, that
is going to make a difference. Any content in
Ogg that anyone might want, is going to help.
Anyways, thats my 2.86 pence worth.
* -Admittedly, I haven't heard whether they
actually went through with their threat and did
sue anyone, but that doesn't mean they didn't.
non-existant color management (X says: what's that?)
I'm fairly sure I read somewhere that much (all??) of
the colour management algorithms and such things
are heavily protected by patents. Of course, I know
next-to-nothing about colour management, so it's
quite possible I misunderstood something wherever
it was that I read it, but the apparently knowledgable
people discussing the issue seemed to have been saying that
it made it more or less impossible.
Possibly someone who knows more about this will
appear and give us an answer. Anyone?
Oh, and I do at least agree about the way X
names fonts. OTOH, I'm sure it makes sense server-side, and I don't know whether it would be so hard
for programs to have a font selection thing that let
you choose them similar to the way Windows does
it and then translates the selections into X's standard
font naming format. It could be made into a widget,
or mebbe a library with a widget built on top of it.
Something like that.
..And as the picture was appearing, for a very brief
moment I assumed that the little tin-toy robot he had
in his hand was Gaak. Aw, shut up, I'm badly sleep-deprived
and currently hard-of-thinking.
Hmm, but does that little tin-toy robot have any
connection with a certain other red robot?
And to think, in the article, the Professor had been
saying "don't worry, they won't be taking over yet"...
I think he's in on it with them! Conspiracy!
God, I really need to sleep now. Careful! Brazil tomorrow!
Slashdot Mirror
. .
If this is really true, then I'm astounded. Every technical writing I've seen that has refered to pounds as a measure of force has referred to "pounds-force" or something like that. Every conversion table I've seen has given conversion between lbs (pounds) and kgs (kilos), and all my own physics classes (at UK A level, in which I got an A, but I didn't do University level physics), we always had it drilled into us that KGs were a unit of mass, Newtons are a measure of force, and that weight is a force.
We were never told "actually pounds are a measure of force, unlike kilograms", - pounds were never even mentioned, because we don't officially use imperial measurement any more, and certainly science classes even in high school don't touch them. In fact, a shopkeeper here was famously prosecuted for selling his goods in imperial measurement a few years ago. It's Ironic that Americans call them things like "British" units!
So, I'll admit that it's quite possible that you are right and I'm wrong on this. I'll just have to take your word on it as I don't know!
(FWIW, in case you're thinking that prosecution was a bit draconian, the law does permit giving the imperial measure secondarily to the metric version, which must be more prominent)
An alternative view is that a pound is neither a unit of weight nor of mass, but of currency..
Weight is a force, and it should strictly be measured in N (newtons) in the SI scheme used in most of the world.
Mass is independent of gravity, and its SI unit (and also the normal non-scientific unit in metricised countries) is the kilogram. A kilogram is roughly 2 of your old imperial pounds.
Oh, this is getting boring now. I shouldn't have taken the bait. Curse you, Anonymous Coward, you got me again...
Anyway, alternative units of force to the Newton include "kilogram force" and "pound force", but a kilogram weighs different amounts depending on the gravity in your location.
Sorry, but the same applies to pounds. You don't get around it by being awkward and non-metric.
It's been a few years since I used ALSA, and IIRC it didn't work (I wanted to record stuff, and all I got was static). I was never sure whether it was a bad card or a bad driver, but I got a new sound card and used a plain old OSS driver for it (the previous card only had a driver in ALSA, no OSS version).
As it happens, that soundcard didn't work right either. And my current soundcard appears to make my TV card lock up. Oh, the joys of PC hardware.
But I digress. OSS is pretty crap as sound architectures go, and I get the impression ALSA was intended to work around its limitations, so I'd like to see if it's really stable now.
Personally, I'm a fan of Nethack, and I'm 24. I've been into it for a good long time, so is one of my friends (and his brother). The Nethack newsgroup (and the ones for other roguelikes) are in a pretty healthy state, so all in all, I'd say that no, Nethack is not dead, and not just being kept alive for a few 30-something sysadmins.
Well, that's how I see it, anyway.
(NB- I do play other games too)
Having said that, I tend to play for a few weeks, then stop for a while. Because it's so damned hard, and I always want to try to do fairly specific things that I end up not being able to (like getting the skill that's associated with the polymorph spell raised to expert, to be able to polypile with impunity! Or was that in Slash'em? I forget...). Also, in order to try out certain strategies, I tend to play in wizard mode a lot, which takes out all the fun :(
One of the things that disappointed me most, tho, was realising that the Microscopic Space Fleet didn't exist as an actual monster in the game. I'd really wanted a pet one. Shame.
Of course the one issue with using roguelike keys in Nethack, is that I'm so lame at it I tend to play in wizard mode. If I'm attacking something massively out of depth (like a demon from a fountain or summat) to the north-west of me, I'm likely to end the game when I'm asked "Die? Y/N". Ah well, I shouldn't be cheating anyways, it takes all the fun out of it.
(*-XKobo isn't a Roguelike game, it's a fast arcade game. The issue is that at the speed you play, you want the key arrangement to fit your fingers. Like hjkl does.)
Aw, sorry, I just couldn't resist it. Personally, I've not really watched it much recently (on plain UK tv that is), but I did like it (and the film of course) when I watched it in the past. Wonder which series it is they're showing over here, I expect we should get a fair few more before the end.
So, yes, it looks like DVDs and VHS are my options for getting my Anime and Manga fix, because god only knows, none of the analogue terrestrial channels here in UK have shown any for years (apart from the crappy kids stuff like Digimon). : (
NB- getting Anime on video would be less of an issue if more of it was available in shops here. It tends to be one small shelf in 1 or 2 big shops, and that's all.
Actually, that's not quite true- I don't use it because it's unable to make use of systems without permanent connections, which I presume to be the reason why the vast vast majority of searches time out, even after, say 5 minutes or so, and the list of servers is very short. Also, it uses horrible horrible java, and SWAMPS your machine with threads- zillions of the little bastards (I never counted, but it filled several screens in both ps and ls /proc/, and as most of us have learnt, Linux
isn't really enormously fond of threads. They don't
break the system, but that many makes everything
crawl (NB- I know a reasonable bit of theory about
programming with threads, I don't hate the things, but
I think they should be used much more sparingly)
Don't get me started on Gnutella tho, that was a bad proof-of-concept idea to begin with, and should have been put down it was so badly designed. I got a fair few files from it, but lots of them got corrupted, and half were unfinished, and now, the network is utterly DEAD- you won't get shit from it except from spammers who use hacked up servents to send replies to any single request that's made.
Never mind. [/whinge off]
Similarily, I seem to remember first hearing about water computers (or maybe some equivalent similar to what you describe) being used in environments where electricity could be dangerous- because of possible fuel leaks and such.
Which side would you be referring to here, BTW?
(FWIW, I tend to feel that the whole situation there is insane. I don't believe that they will ever resolve it, but just keep slaughtering each other till the world ends, over a place that people call The Holy Land. Such a pointless waste, words can't express the stupidity of it.)
Incidentally, it'd be rather ironic if, in a discussion of freedom of speech, we got modded down for being offtopic. Wouldn't it??
I think the closest I got to one of these situations was when I was upgrading to glibc a few years back, and managed to screw the process up leaving my system without any libc (I renamed the original one* ). But after much panicking I found that ldconfig at least was statically linked, and sure enough it was able to restore all the symlinks, bringing the system back to how it had been originally (I was then able to do the upgrade properly).
That was clearly not even in the same solar system as what he (Al Viro) had to deal with, but I suppose he is a kernel developer, isn't he??
(*-Yes, I know it was lame of me to have done that, I should have payed closer attention to the instructions that said to cp it. We all make mistakes...)
For the sake of us outside the US, just how big is a quarter, anyway?
Well, point is, supposing this story was real, is this the same sort of thing? What's it all about?
And...
...What happens if you replace the tennis ball(s) with,
say, ping-pong ball(s)? Does it still work? Do they end
up on the moon? I have to know!!
My own pet grump in this regard is GTK/GDK, where it would appear that they did documentation for 1.0 about 5 years ago, then gave up halfway through, but carried on coding the next version anyway. Now they're on 2.0, and version 1's documentation is still unfinished. True, it's free software, they don't owe me anything, it's not like they're getting payed for it; but it's asking a bit much to expect me to want to use the thing so badly that I'd go out of my way to figure out all the ins and outs of the damn thing, to work out what they, who know all about it could have written down for all the world to see, which would have spared lots of people time that could have been better spent- so I've since given up trying to code stuff with GTK. Yes, having said this, a pretty huge number of people seem to have written things with GTK, but perhaps what they needed had been documented, or perhaps they were far more patient. Perhaps they were more "leet" than me. Who knows.
Now, rant over, don't get me wrong- as I said, that's just an example of how I feel documentation is often dealt with in free software, it's hardly particular to that project. Also, don't anyone go making out that I'm claiming that GTK/GDK is "bad software", because I'm not. I just feel that being told "read the source" is a fscked-up response for people to give when you need documentation.
Oh well, perhaps we're both looking at different software, or maybe I'm just a miserable bugger. shrug
NB-I still prefer free (as in GPL) software
Granted, I haven't seen any proof for those stories on e2, and I'm sure that the Leidenfrost effect is real enough and does what it's claimed to when it works, but that sort of thing does kind of reinforce my preference to not just take someones word that they know exactly what they're doing in that sort of situation, you know?
This is a worm. A worm is not a virus, a virus is not a worm.
Nobody ever said Linux and opensource were invulnerable to worms; the virus issue is different, and really requires either exceptionally careless superusers, or virus code that can search your system for specific vulnerabilities that you actually have in order to get root priveldges (AND ideally a closed-source program for the virus to deliver itself to you with).
I've prolly missed some point there, but the issue remains: Virii and worms are 2 different things.
The only problem arises that my Hauppauge WinTV card (supported by the bttv module), conflicts with my c-media sound card (supported by cmpci module) and apparently some other aspect of my system, to cause my machine to lock solidly if I try to use the TV card. -Note that I say there is some other aspect to it, because every other sound card I've tried with it (there have been a few) has made the TV card screw up in one stupid way or another. I've tried emailing the BTTV developer for *any* advice, or any experience of such lock-ups, etc, but he never replied.
So what can I do? Well, basically I can either never use my TV card until I'm able to buy parts for a second (well, fourth...) system just to do TV capture, or I can keep trying various settings to see if I can ever make it stop hanging, whilst my FS gets slowly corrupted.. Mmm, fun.
Anyway, regarding your point again, my approach doesn't really cut it for most people, especially the most everyday computer users. The situation isn't the fault of Linux or of Linux programmers, though, it's down to the manufacturers- they supply disks of drivers for windows, which AFAIK mostly consist of the chipset manufacturer's drivers, plus data to tell windows that this product is to be using those drivers, or something along those lines. Those that produce stuff that also works with Linux could fairly easily indicate so on the packaging, and some of them actually do, but most don't, because they wouldn't be able to supply some pretty installer program that would cover up the details like they could for Windows.
Oh, actually, perhaps they could. Oh I don't care, it just sucks either way.
I managed to find a generator that worked on Linux, called Sbagen.
I don't think I've really got the hang of it, and I'm not sure if I've got any effect out of the things (though I'm using expensive headphones). Some of the sounds are quite hard to listen to tho.
[searches through bookmarks file...]
SBaGen
I think the bloke has a non-sourceforge page too, forget whether the sf page links back to it. [shrug]
DISCLAIMER: Having seen this story, I tried firing up SBagen again, and am currently listening to theta-waves; any errors in my post are therefore due to being in a dream-like-state. So there.
However, intellectual property issues obviously always affect Free Software, Open Source software, and software and hardware in general, to some extent. This story, is broadly about intellectual property. Many other stories will have some connection to intellectual property issues in at least some way.
Then there will be many other stories that aren't to do with intellectual property, but are mostly to do with Linux or Open Source software, this being a nerd website (stuff that matters), and many (most?) nerds who are computer nerds are using at least some amount of Open Source software, and quite likely Linux, and will probably want to read stories about Linux and Open Source software. These stories about Linux and Open Source software will affect Linux and Open Source software by virtue of being about Linux and Open Source software.
1=1. QED. Or something.
Now, to my knowledge it's not happened yet, but it could just be a matter of time before projects creaing free versions of DivX get crapped upon from a great height, clobbered by either a cease-and-desist letter, a lawsuit, or a very very big bill.
Oh, but that's surely not going to happen! Those industry types won't mind, will they? They'll leave nice little free software hackers alone! Well, that's what people thought about Unisys (wasn't it them?) and the patents involving GIFs (or part of them), but eventually they changed their minds, and proved RMS right by threatening to sue any website using GIFs created with free software. *
It may turn out that some company will turn up who will pay the fees to create DivX based software (er... I guess MS did this already??), but in most cases, well, they're going to be charging big money for the encoding side, aren't they? So that will be of less use for individuals wanting to make videos (or DVD rips, which let's face it, are going to make a difference), and as long as some of those people have a reason to use the Ogg/VP3 system to encode their stuff, that is going to make a difference. Any content in Ogg that anyone might want, is going to help.
Anyways, thats my 2.86 pence worth.
* -Admittedly, I haven't heard whether they actually went through with their threat and did sue anyone, but that doesn't mean they didn't.
Possibly someone who knows more about this will appear and give us an answer. Anyone?
Oh, and I do at least agree about the way X names fonts. OTOH, I'm sure it makes sense server-side, and I don't know whether it would be so hard for programs to have a font selection thing that let you choose them similar to the way Windows does it and then translates the selections into X's standard font naming format. It could be made into a widget, or mebbe a library with a widget built on top of it. Something like that.
Hmm, but does that little tin-toy robot have any connection with a certain other red robot?
And to think, in the article, the Professor had been saying "don't worry, they won't be taking over yet"... I think he's in on it with them! Conspiracy!
God, I really need to sleep now. Careful! Brazil tomorrow!