The legality of DivX is questionable. First off, it was orignally based on Microsoft's ASF format (a simple hack to put the codec into an AVI file). Next, Project Mayo re-developed it into their own implementation, complete with an "open source" license. However, once the project got far enough, Project Mayo shut down the CVS. Soon after they made a commercial product out of it. Yes, you can still download 4.0 alpha 50, but it's a year old.
So, not only does DivX use (or did use) "stolen technology" from Microsoft, the project centers around stolen code garnered from lies and deception. On top of that, it is an MPEG4 implementation of sorts, so usage of it probably requires licensing fees.
That's why "everyone doesn't just switch to DivX."
Once in a while, I'll reply to the solicitors. Of course nine times out of ten it's a bogus email address, but once in a while it actually goes through.
I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied! He (sarcastically, obviously) invited me to attempt to destroy his country.
I was expecting a DoS flood of Nigerian solicitations (which caused me to learn how to use procmail really fast), but, again, to my amazement, the spams stopped.
The moral: never underestimate the threat of tanks.
Square's lost its edge. The past five Final Fantasies are just reworkings of the same statistics systems and packing ever more video into the gameplay. This isn't to say the games aren't fun to play, but I just can't get excited anymore when I'm fifty feet away from my foe and magically injure him by waving my sword in the air (well, okay, they actually did something about this one).
Add to this the fact that Square has virtually no experience in multiplayer gaming and I just can't get excited about the next installment, either. The Japanese are about as good at making this type of game as the US is at making RPGs.
Really, I hope I can eat my words. I long for the days when I was so eager to buy a Square game (or any game) that I hung around Electronics Boutique all day waiting for the shipment to arrive.
XHMTL 1.0, which is the current W3C recommendation to replace HTML 4.0, IS XML!! The next version of HTML will be XHTML 2.x probably, there will be no HTML 5.x, so people that want to take advantage of any new features introduced in the next version will be using XML for their pages. They will just be using a specific DTD known as XHTML.
1) There will be no HTML 5 because the W3C wrestled control of the HTML standard back from Netscape and Microsoft and is placing new work in appropriate places (DOM, XML, etc). Proper HTML has been mostly feature complete since 3.0. The only real major addition I can think of is tables, which have a valid use when they are not being butchered by 99.5% of web sites (W3C included). HTML 4 added some SGML-derived descriptive tags that everyone should use but doesn't.
2) The next recommendation is XHTML 1.1, which is basically XHTML 1.0 with the "flavors" removed (only "strict" now) and some hooks for other W3C technologies.
3) "The XHTML is XML" thing doesn't mean much. HTML is XML is SGML. They're all based on a tag format defined in a 1986 standard. HTML 4 needed very minor hacks to make it XML compatible. In fact, the only one I can think of is the new tag completion rule. Besides ending single tag elements, this doesn't affect things much since tag minimization has been depreciated for years.
I've found that XML is one of the most misunderstood technologies out there, people seem to think that it's a drastic departure from what they know and nobody seems to understand where it's true power lies. XML is not going to replace PHP, Perl, Python, C, Java, or anything else.
On the contrary, I don't think it is misunderstood. By "us" at least. I can't tell you how many times I've laughed at these absurd concoctions for XML: TCP protocols, file systems, database backends...it just goes on. XML is a tag language. It does things tag languages do. XML is a minor extension of SGML to escape the 1986-ness of the format.
XML isn't the end-all future, but these publications make it seem that way, and when it's not that it's Java.
Not a direct reply to your statement, but it's related to this and other statements in the thread.
If we all went by the idiom, "the average person will NEVER need more than X," then we'd still be shipping 450Mhz CPU, 128MB RAM, Windows 98 desktops. We aren't obviously, and haven't in a while. Several factors lead to this:
1) What are they doing? Your wimpy 450MHz doesn't look like much compared to his dual 8 GHz. The fact that his will actually cost less at that point doesn't help much.
2) Cost less? Yes, because (grossly) obsolete technology is always more expensive to produce since it relies on obsolete manufacturing methods. Furthermore, less demand also inflates price.
3) There is ALWAYS something to do with a new PC, and there is never an exception. Encoding DivX movies using today's PCs is like using a 1996 computer to encode MP3s. Editorials are complaining about the XBox not having 128MB of RAM and that's a dedicated game console. Games aren't going to decrease in requirements, and 1GB will be required to run that latest game to the fullest by the end of the year. Developers don't like waiting hours for their large source to compile, be it C or frames of computer rendered animation. In short, until we have that fabled LCARS thing that knows what we want before we want it, computer growth will not falter.
Anyway, since standard RAM configurations double about every two years (from 256K in 1982 to 256MB in 2002), 512MB doesn't seem like *too* low an estimate for the average machine 2004, though I have a feeling that will be more of a low end model. 1 or 2 GB seems more reasonable with the 4GB for power users.
All I want to know is, when were these glory days of ICQ?
1996-1998. By early 1999 people already started migrating to AIM, though most used both at that point. The ICQ99 client killed the interface. Proior clients were lean in requirments and were optimized for memory usage (kinda) and screen real estate (no IM client even comes close to ICQ 97's/98's small screen footprint, about a 2 × 4 inch box). ICQ2000 killed it even more with the obnoxious ads, and ICQ2001 competely broke connectivity with all prior clients except ICQ2000. This effectively killed all the clones, but it left some 25% of their total audience still using ICQ99 or before in the dark, which is probably what AOL wanted.
These days even I don't use ICQ, though I was with it early on. I can't even send messages to people, and only about two people use it that aren't on other services. If they haven't already, Mirabilis will probably see a decline in "regular" (e.g. the dedicated) users, and by 2004 we'll just see a link to aol.com on the homepage.
"Console-mode" meaning VT220 emulation? Or VESA/VGA?
All three: BIOS calls for VESA, SVGAlib for...VGA, and AAlib for true terminal. Of course AAlib is strictly text, but the quality is surprisingly good for a bunch of letters, to say the least.
The article by Moore wasn't bad. I liked his frank and realistic observations. But Kimbro's quote within the article is so petty it hurts. Linux has always been the underdog, hype or not. Kimbro's "WE WIN WE KILL LINUX HA HA HA" attitude is astounding considering the history of the Apple corporation and its fall from grace.
Much of the Linux software comes from GNU and friends and much of that worked its way into OSX. Kimbro's "OPEN SOURCE IS DEAD NOW!!!" statements are disgusting.
These statements are just sour grapes from a man who was insulted at insinuations that Linux could possibly be overrunning MacOS. Kicking around the underdog is embarassing.
Sure there might be a bit of a double standard here, but, really, how often do Linux evangelists come out and say, "Take that, Amiga! Die Atari!" The suggestion of such is ridiculous.
but the best way to sneer at the RIAA would be to press "copy protected" recordings of the concert(s)! Yeah! Go freedom!
Re:Actually, I did find a very signifcant omission
on
History of SquareSoft
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Don't put too much stock into this article. It's full of fluff and omissions. Most of it is mini-reviews of games and the only real history they give is the breakup with Nintendo that everyone knows about. They didn't even mention the tension that lead up to the breakup. The writers obviously didn't do any research or they'd know the abusive license policies Nintendo had in the 80s and early 90s and how Square did not like those policies to say the least. They didn't mention Nintendo's strong arm intimidation tactics nor their exhorbinant licensig fees.
They also barely mentioned the renaming scandal. The real reason Final Fantasy IV was called II was Nintendo originally was supposed to port all three NES Final Fantasies. But they grossly underestimated the translation effort and it took them three years. Nintendo will tell you the renaming was to "prevent confusion," but it was really a coverup.
Nor did they mention the constantly broke stats of the company in the 1980s or the truly terrible Famicom Disc System games that never made it over here.
This is a sad article. If I wanted reviews I'd go elsewhere. A history is supposed to be about the company's workings over the years, not one paragraph blurbs about the U.S.-only releases of a company.
[Reinstalling] might even be slightly beneficial, as you'll reinstall newer versions and get rid of various cruft.
That's true, though some distributions are better at managing cruft than others. Debian, for example, (theoretically) fully erases old packages when it installs new ones, ensuring that the system is always relatively "clean." That said, Debian tends to leave old libraries behind, especially those which lack backward/forward compatibility (like python, libstdc++, and GTK), but a bi-yearly manual prune of the packaging system gets rid of those.
You'll have some orphaned entries in/usr/share,/var,/etc and the like frome time to time, but it won't add up to much, maybe a megabyte or two.
Some data has been saved just because it's convenient or simply less bother than having to actively remove it.
This is true with everybody, but most people don't consciously separate "useless" and "useful" data or just don't do it well enough. More often than not all data often gets bogged in a quagmire that would take days or weeks to properly sort. Most users don't want to lose their "good" data, which can be irreplaceable things such as essays, programs, art, and (self-written) music, even if it means keeping a few gigs of shit around.
Anyway I think there should be a standard place for stuff which will be shared between users
So I'm not the only one. I've had different places, ranging from/var/something to/something. I even had exported data in/mnt subdirectories and/usr/local. Right now I just place most of my data on a drive attached to/home/ftp so if I ever decide to share files through FTP it'll be easy to jail.
"Most Debian Developers take care of a *single* package."
What? How do you know?
This one's pretty easy. The maintainers' names are plastered all over the place and there are easy referencing methods. He's mostly right, though I think the norm might be something like two or three packages.
"the Debian packagers *care*"
Really? More than people who make rpms? How much more do they care?
This is subjective, but it's very easy to get in tough directly with the maintainers, who usually listen to your problems.
Or you could do what Rutgers University does and threaten students with nasty emails promising account revocation if you exceed 200 megabytes of traffic per day.
You can generally download and run more things from Microsoft than they advertize. Almost nobody knows about IE 5 for Windows 3.1, but it exists. Similarly, you can get updates for Windows 95, but you'll have to stray from "Windows Update."
If you want to use the newest components, your software has to require a newer version of IE, which also ties you to the versions of Windows that that version of IE supports.
Any product that supports Windows 98 must also support Internet Explorer 4. Internet Explorer 6 is available for Windows 95 (have to dig a little bit), so your argument makes little sense.
Also, any.NET app written will not run on Windows 95.... the framework is not supported on that platform.
Yes, yes, but how does not being able to get DirectX 8.1 affect your University? I'll bet you use a fixed set of possibly old but stable applications as well. Most of these will not include Counterstrike. There is no need to upgrade, and I never made a statement arguing that Windows 95 users should upgrade.
Depite what the Korean-hosted old-warez sites tell you, there is no such thing as "abandonware" and the copyrights will still stand, even if the product is essentially obliterated off the face of the planet. No, there is no "24 hours to delete your downloads" law, either.
Agreed. To take your ideology a step farther, you could use 98lite to strip down 98[SE] (slightly faster kernel than 95) but not ME (I experienced serious issues with anything below a PII) and use applications like Opera or Eudora Lite though the latter is becoming difficult to get.
Possibly because Win95 kinda marked the end of true DOS
Not really. If anything, Windows 95's DOS 7 was even better than 6 if you negate the downgraded utilities. Sure you had to buy a new version of QEMM, but the only things that wouldn't run were broken version-locked garbage anyway. ME's DOS 8 (boot disks) is another matter, though, and I've had some problems using that. But since ME is supposed to "kill" DOS, is that really a surprise?
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MPEG-4 can be suited for a variety of MIPSes platforms, DivX cannot.
I believe MPlayer can play DivX on non-x86 through ffmpeg.
Why doesn't everyone just switch to DivX?
The legality of DivX is questionable. First off, it was orignally based on Microsoft's ASF format (a simple hack to put the codec into an AVI file). Next, Project Mayo re-developed it into their own implementation, complete with an "open source" license. However, once the project got far enough, Project Mayo shut down the CVS. Soon after they made a commercial product out of it. Yes, you can still download 4.0 alpha 50, but it's a year old.
So, not only does DivX use (or did use) "stolen technology" from Microsoft, the project centers around stolen code garnered from lies and deception. On top of that, it is an MPEG4 implementation of sorts, so usage of it probably requires licensing fees.
That's why "everyone doesn't just switch to DivX."
Once in a while, I'll reply to the solicitors. Of course nine times out of ten it's a bogus email address, but once in a while it actually goes through.
I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied! He (sarcastically, obviously) invited me to attempt to destroy his country.
I was expecting a DoS flood of Nigerian solicitations (which caused me to learn how to use procmail really fast), but, again, to my amazement, the spams stopped.
The moral: never underestimate the threat of tanks.
Square's lost its edge. The past five Final Fantasies are just reworkings of the same statistics systems and packing ever more video into the gameplay. This isn't to say the games aren't fun to play, but I just can't get excited anymore when I'm fifty feet away from my foe and magically injure him by waving my sword in the air (well, okay, they actually did something about this one).
Add to this the fact that Square has virtually no experience in multiplayer gaming and I just can't get excited about the next installment, either. The Japanese are about as good at making this type of game as the US is at making RPGs.
Really, I hope I can eat my words. I long for the days when I was so eager to buy a Square game (or any game) that I hung around Electronics Boutique all day waiting for the shipment to arrive.
XHMTL 1.0, which is the current W3C recommendation to replace HTML 4.0, IS XML!! The next version of HTML will be XHTML 2.x probably, there will be no HTML 5.x, so people that want to take advantage of any new features introduced in the next version will be using XML for their pages. They will just be using a specific DTD known as XHTML.
1) There will be no HTML 5 because the W3C wrestled control of the HTML standard back from Netscape and Microsoft and is placing new work in appropriate places (DOM, XML, etc). Proper HTML has been mostly feature complete since 3.0. The only real major addition I can think of is tables, which have a valid use when they are not being butchered by 99.5% of web sites (W3C included). HTML 4 added some SGML-derived descriptive tags that everyone should use but doesn't.
2) The next recommendation is XHTML 1.1, which is basically XHTML 1.0 with the "flavors" removed (only "strict" now) and some hooks for other W3C technologies.
3) "The XHTML is XML" thing doesn't mean much. HTML is XML is SGML. They're all based on a tag format defined in a 1986 standard. HTML 4 needed very minor hacks to make it XML compatible. In fact, the only one I can think of is the new tag completion rule. Besides ending single tag elements, this doesn't affect things much since tag minimization has been depreciated for years.
I've found that XML is one of the most misunderstood technologies out there, people seem to think that it's a drastic departure from what they know and nobody seems to understand where it's true power lies. XML is not going to replace PHP, Perl, Python, C, Java, or anything else.
On the contrary, I don't think it is misunderstood. By "us" at least. I can't tell you how many times I've laughed at these absurd concoctions for XML: TCP protocols, file systems, database backends...it just goes on. XML is a tag language. It does things tag languages do. XML is a minor extension of SGML to escape the 1986-ness of the format.
XML isn't the end-all future, but these publications make it seem that way, and when it's not that it's Java.
Not a direct reply to your statement, but it's related to this and other statements in the thread.
If we all went by the idiom, "the average person will NEVER need more than X," then we'd still be shipping 450Mhz CPU, 128MB RAM, Windows 98 desktops. We aren't obviously, and haven't in a while. Several factors lead to this:
1) What are they doing? Your wimpy 450MHz doesn't look like much compared to his dual 8 GHz. The fact that his will actually cost less at that point doesn't help much.
2) Cost less? Yes, because (grossly) obsolete technology is always more expensive to produce since it relies on obsolete manufacturing methods. Furthermore, less demand also inflates price.
3) There is ALWAYS something to do with a new PC, and there is never an exception. Encoding DivX movies using today's PCs is like using a 1996 computer to encode MP3s. Editorials are complaining about the XBox not having 128MB of RAM and that's a dedicated game console. Games aren't going to decrease in requirements, and 1GB will be required to run that latest game to the fullest by the end of the year. Developers don't like waiting hours for their large source to compile, be it C or frames of computer rendered animation. In short, until we have that fabled LCARS thing that knows what we want before we want it, computer growth will not falter.
Anyway, since standard RAM configurations double about every two years (from 256K in 1982 to 256MB in 2002), 512MB doesn't seem like *too* low an estimate for the average machine 2004, though I have a feeling that will be more of a low end model. 1 or 2 GB seems more reasonable with the 4GB for power users.
All I want to know is, when were these glory days of ICQ?
1996-1998. By early 1999 people already started migrating to AIM, though most used both at that point. The ICQ99 client killed the interface. Proior clients were lean in requirments and were optimized for memory usage (kinda) and screen real estate (no IM client even comes close to ICQ 97's/98's small screen footprint, about a 2 × 4 inch box). ICQ2000 killed it even more with the obnoxious ads, and ICQ2001 competely broke connectivity with all prior clients except ICQ2000. This effectively killed all the clones, but it left some 25% of their total audience still using ICQ99 or before in the dark, which is probably what AOL wanted.
These days even I don't use ICQ, though I was with it early on. I can't even send messages to people, and only about two people use it that aren't on other services. If they haven't already, Mirabilis will probably see a decline in "regular" (e.g. the dedicated) users, and by 2004 we'll just see a link to aol.com on the homepage.
It'll be a cold day in hell before AAC usurps MP3.
"Console-mode" meaning VT220 emulation? Or VESA/VGA?
All three: BIOS calls for VESA, SVGAlib for...VGA, and AAlib for true terminal. Of course AAlib is strictly text, but the quality is surprisingly good for a bunch of letters, to say the least.
The article by Moore wasn't bad. I liked his frank and realistic observations. But Kimbro's quote within the article is so petty it hurts. Linux has always been the underdog, hype or not. Kimbro's "WE WIN WE KILL LINUX HA HA HA" attitude is astounding considering the history of the Apple corporation and its fall from grace.
Much of the Linux software comes from GNU and friends and much of that worked its way into OSX. Kimbro's "OPEN SOURCE IS DEAD NOW!!!" statements are disgusting.
These statements are just sour grapes from a man who was insulted at insinuations that Linux could possibly be overrunning MacOS. Kicking around the underdog is embarassing.
Sure there might be a bit of a double standard here, but, really, how often do Linux evangelists come out and say, "Take that, Amiga! Die Atari!" The suggestion of such is ridiculous.
but the best way to sneer at the RIAA would be to press "copy protected" recordings of the concert(s)! Yeah! Go freedom!
Don't put too much stock into this article. It's full of fluff and omissions. Most of it is mini-reviews of games and the only real history they give is the breakup with Nintendo that everyone knows about. They didn't even mention the tension that lead up to the breakup. The writers obviously didn't do any research or they'd know the abusive license policies Nintendo had in the 80s and early 90s and how Square did not like those policies to say the least. They didn't mention Nintendo's strong arm intimidation tactics nor their exhorbinant licensig fees.
They also barely mentioned the renaming scandal. The real reason Final Fantasy IV was called II was Nintendo originally was supposed to port all three NES Final Fantasies. But they grossly underestimated the translation effort and it took them three years. Nintendo will tell you the renaming was to "prevent confusion," but it was really a coverup.
Nor did they mention the constantly broke stats of the company in the 1980s or the truly terrible Famicom Disc System games that never made it over here.
This is a sad article. If I wanted reviews I'd go elsewhere. A history is supposed to be about the company's workings over the years, not one paragraph blurbs about the U.S.-only releases of a company.
[Reinstalling] might even be slightly beneficial, as you'll reinstall newer versions and get rid of various cruft.
/usr/share, /var, /etc and the like frome time to time, but it won't add up to much, maybe a megabyte or two.
That's true, though some distributions are better at managing cruft than others. Debian, for example, (theoretically) fully erases old packages when it installs new ones, ensuring that the system is always relatively "clean." That said, Debian tends to leave old libraries behind, especially those which lack backward/forward compatibility (like python, libstdc++, and GTK), but a bi-yearly manual prune of the packaging system gets rid of those.
You'll have some orphaned entries in
Some data has been saved just because it's convenient or simply less bother than having to actively remove it.
This is true with everybody, but most people don't consciously separate "useless" and "useful" data or just don't do it well enough. More often than not all data often gets bogged in a quagmire that would take days or weeks to properly sort. Most users don't want to lose their "good" data, which can be irreplaceable things such as essays, programs, art, and (self-written) music, even if it means keeping a few gigs of shit around.
Anyway I think there should be a standard place for stuff which will be shared between users
/var/something to /something. I even had exported data in /mnt subdirectories and /usr/local. Right now I just place most of my data on a drive attached to /home/ftp so if I ever decide to share files through FTP it'll be easy to jail.
So I'm not the only one. I've had different places, ranging from
"Most Debian Developers take care of a *single* package."
What? How do you know?
This one's pretty easy. The maintainers' names are plastered all over the place and there are easy referencing methods. He's mostly right, though I think the norm might be something like two or three packages.
"the Debian packagers *care*"
Really? More than people who make rpms? How much more do they care?
This is subjective, but it's very easy to get in tough directly with the maintainers, who usually listen to your problems.
Or you could do what Rutgers University does and threaten students with nasty emails promising account revocation if you exceed 200 megabytes of traffic per day.
Note I said shrink wrapped. You can buy open packages for a few bucks.
You can generally download and run more things from Microsoft than they advertize. Almost nobody knows about IE 5 for Windows 3.1, but it exists. Similarly, you can get updates for Windows 95, but you'll have to stray from "Windows Update."
If you want to use the newest components, your software has to require a newer version of IE, which also ties you to the versions of Windows that that version of IE supports.
.NET app written will not run on Windows 95.... the framework is not supported on that platform.
.NET isn't vaporware.
Any product that supports Windows 98 must also support Internet Explorer 4. Internet Explorer 6 is available for Windows 95 (have to dig a little bit), so your argument makes little sense.
Also, any
Get back to this when
Yes, yes, but how does not being able to get DirectX 8.1 affect your University? I'll bet you use a fixed set of possibly old but stable applications as well. Most of these will not include Counterstrike. There is no need to upgrade, and I never made a statement arguing that Windows 95 users should upgrade.
Yes, it does take a bit of searching:
http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/dists/
Depite what the Korean-hosted old-warez sites tell you, there is no such thing as "abandonware" and the copyrights will still stand, even if the product is essentially obliterated off the face of the planet. No, there is no "24 hours to delete your downloads" law, either.
Agreed. To take your ideology a step farther, you could use 98lite to strip down 98[SE] (slightly faster kernel than 95) but not ME (I experienced serious issues with anything below a PII) and use applications like Opera or Eudora Lite though the latter is becoming difficult to get.
Come on, it's not like you'll find a lot of support by current apps for say, Linux 1.0.x either.
You mean you CAN'T find libc4 binaries anywhere? Man, what Internet are you from?
Possibly because Win95 kinda marked the end of true DOS
Not really. If anything, Windows 95's DOS 7 was even better than 6 if you negate the downgraded utilities. Sure you had to buy a new version of QEMM, but the only things that wouldn't run were broken version-locked garbage anyway. ME's DOS 8 (boot disks) is another matter, though, and I've had some problems using that. But since ME is supposed to "kill" DOS, is that really a surprise?