I can't speak for the current X11R6 tree, as I've not seen it recently (having not needed pure "X" in years), but in the past, releases DID include a working X server, but for specific hardware used by the members of the X Consortium that funded the work. In particular, the X11R6 distribution included an X server for Solaris and Ultrix boxes at the time, and likely now supports Tru64 (or whatever they're calling what was once OSF-1 at the time) and Solaris.
These X servers were hardly optimized, but they did correctly implement the server side of the X protocols and all extensions provided by the X consortium.
As for "sample implementations?" Its rare for a vendor to make changes in Xlib or Xt. The only "sample" is the X server. Xlib connects the the server by several means now, depending on the DISPLAY variable. Sockets aren't the only means provided by Xlib. In fact, before "Direct X" meant something to microsoft or to some XML dealer, it was the original name for an implementation of the C Xlib library that overrode the server and drew directly to the screen, provided the DISPLAY variable allowed that.
Biggest problem (and this was stated several times, by western as well as russian sources):
The waters at that depth are VERY active. Divers wouldn't have enough equipment to stay under control. Its not like the depths of the titanic or the depths of that nature (300+ feet) in the smoother-flowing carribean. The waters at the bottom of that part of northern europe are horrendous; they couldn't get a rescue sub to hold still long enough to connect.
And if a sub couldn't hold still, don't expect a diver to be able to stand still in that...
"Always remember that the weapon in your hand was made by the lowest bidder..."
Re:PC is hardly dead - but it may not be very well
on
Vanishing Game Genres
·
· Score: 2
Almost all games on the PC fall into the categories described - most of these are clones of games which have been around for years.
I'd agree to that to a certain degree...heck,
even top-selling "Civilization" (and all its varients and sequels) are still basically based on the old "Empire" engine, which was running perfectly well on unix and vaxen boxes before PC's were around. Civ just added the "theme" of history, and features there-of, based on the science development model in its A-H boardgame namesake.
M.U.L.E. still rocks as probably the best PC game ever, IMHO.
Their system for word-borrowing is simple: if the concept doesn't exist in Japanese, they adopt it as a new bit of vocabulary, rather than trying to explain or synthesize a new term.
As opposed to the American/English approach (inherited from our German side, in spite of the French/Latin connection) of generating compound words.
Which is where our modern computer language names come from, especially when you add typists's lazyness to it (print_formatted -> printf).
If the Japanese language was too ambiguous to give clear orders, how on earth could Japan in the space of 40 years develop a very productive, highly advanced industrial system?
By using English to describe any concept that couldn't be clearly expressed in Japanese. Keep in mind, most Japanese industrial leaders (in the 1950s), and much of their middle management, were trained in America. This is for their post-war development, and the eventual introduction of "quality" to Japanese work (which didn't exist prior to the 1960s).
As for productivity? Well, the other side of it is that the Japanese have an affinity for management and control systems that's far more efficient than ours. Controlling people is something that can be done in any language.
Yes, but you'd have to sue them to get the courts to even consider it ($$$), THEN you'd still be responsible for paying for the agreed upon licensing ($$$).
Yes, but though its unethical (especially to the Constitution framer's original concept behind granting patents), having a patent (and thus, publishing the details on how to make something) does grant them the right to license that technology at a fee.
Anybody who does the work without securing a license is in violation.
And if they refuse to license anybody, then every "clone" of the product is illegal.
Robert Fripp just copied that article on his diary, adding the caption: My only substantial criticism of Steve's commentary is that it paints the music industry in too positive a light.
Robert Fripp: "When the artist makes a mistake, the artist pays for it. When the record label makes a mistake, the artist pays for it."
Just because an album didn't sell doesn't mean the band is free. Termination of a contract generally terminates the band. If a solo artist, he's pretty much out of the industry, unless some other label thinks they can do better and buys him out of his contract and debts (again, taking the money out of future royalties). With a band, either the same happens, or the band breaks up, and each member negotiates separately with the label's lawyers on how much they individually "cost" to buy out their subset of the contract.
Most just leave the industry alltogether, and hope they don't have too much of a permanent debt on their hands (after liquidating as much of their equipment as they think they can bare to live without) and get on with their lives, musical or otherwise. Yes, labels lose some on non-selling artists, but they do everything they can to minimize those losses and keeping the burden on 1) the artist, 2) the distributor, or 3) the retailers.
In a failed release, the label can say we "own" the album as colateral until the debt of the advance is paid off. But it ain't the labels' by default.
Steve Albini wrote a rant on labels and finances that's a little more accurate on the numbers (but no friendlier) than Love's article. It shows more modest sales (250K), and then goes through the numbers to show the band in deep financial shit even after that strong a showing in the market...
The "Line Item Veto" that became law was restricted to budget items only. It was not a full-feature version that some people want.
The idea that this might pass constitutionality was that congress has the power to create the budget, and if congress released part of that power of its own will (allowing the president more power over what goes into/out-of the budget), that would be ok. The Constitution declares otherwise.
They didn't lobby to get it in. A clerk added it (as an "edit and clarification") at the "suggestion" of the RIAA (a fact discovered weeks after it was in there). It wasn't even discussed in congressional committee until Hendley brought it up.
That clerk later left the congressional office and now works as a lobbyist for the RIAA.
My conspiracy-hunting section of my brain certainly sees clues for an illegal bribe in there somewhere...
Not necessarilly. A cash cow is a cash cow. "The Doors" (to give an example) continue to sell. Well.
The RIAA is looking into the idea that another media form will replace CD's. When that replacement is "complete" (meaning the labels don't make CDs anymore, so EVERYBODY must move to the new format and replace the best of their entire collection -- just like they did w/ vynal in the late 80s), then the labels will get a whole new influx of cash for "old product".
If the Doors gain ownership of their works, they can renegotiate a duplication and distribution deal that will pay substantially more.
This is what the "Majors" fear. That they will lose the cash cow of these "classic rock" releases that 1) continue to sell in current media, and 2) will likely go back to being major sellers when the media changes away from CDs.
He claimed that this was the investment the companies made that justified the high prices
Well, that's all good and well except for one thing.
The artist still pays for all of it. Everything. "Recouped from royalties". The artist gets an advance, and from that advance the artist pays the producer (who may also get "points", meaning a percentage of the album's gross). The advance also pays for the engineer, the studio, the media, etc...yes, the studio pays in advance to get the album recorded...
BUT when the royalties are paid, the advance is deducted.
This means that the artist has now paid for the album to be made by paying back the "loan" that was the advance out of the royalties of the sale (usually only 10-15% of the album gross).
So the artist pays for the album to be made. The fact that the label owns the album is nothing but pure theft and slavery.
It is theft for the label to own it in the first place.
Aside from "promotion", every aspect of making an album is recouped against the artists' royalties, not the larger label's percentage. This can even include buying the group out of a smaller label's contract.
That's actually not that far off. Numerous British groups back in the 60s found out lousy and variable our voltage systems are when half their instruments wouldn't work without voltage regulators. Robert Fripp (King Crimson) has described how the Mellotron (which works by playing an analog tape at variable speed to control pitch; effectively an analog sampler) would get disasterously out of tune due to American power fluctuations.
inventing the web is like inventing a faucet. the pipes were already in place.
Along with plenty of examples of protocols that had too much baggage (technical or philosophical) to be of excessive use anymore. Sometimes, making something "right" just takes looking at so many "wrongs" (ftp, gopher, etc...). The presence of the wrongs makes the right appear.
Another factor is that a label may be 100% independent, but has to rely on distributors that are owned by the larger RIAA labels. Independent distributors are these days notorious for going out of business, and in their chapter 11 filings, have neither responsibility to return the albums to the group, nor pay any royalties collected so far.
Many groups and independent labels, have gone broke themselves just because their distributors have gone broke and used chapter 11 protection to avoid paying up.
I found edna about 2 days after i submitted the question, and it seemed to do the job well.
In addition, I got the apache system to work well enough for my needs (though i need to fitz with LAME to get smaller files -- 44/128s would kill my bitrate quota). the trick was to add the "audio/x-mpegurl m3u" line to the server mime.types file (it isn't there by default).
If you are using someone else's server (you can't change conf info), you can also do it by puting the line "AddType audio/x-mpegurl.m3u" in the.htaccess file for the directory containing the m3us. to minimize constant.htaccess accessing (apache will look it up for every load in that path), you might consider putting all the.m3u files in a single directory by themselves.
Thanks for the pointers...
Hey -- when were we not "warned" about it all?
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
Star Trek has been preaching anti-eugenics since its inception.
Think about it -- Space Seed/Star Trek 2, The TNG episode were kids' super-immune systems attacked normal people, the whole thing w/ Bashir in DS9...
you could say anything except for straight 1's and 0's are syntactic sugar if you wanted to... Some of this syntactic sugar you don't even need to type! (e.g. garbage collection is implicit for Java)
Again, you miss the point. There's language features that are the primary goal of the language, and then there's language features that exist for "convenience" or to address secondary goals. "Class", "Private", "Public" directly support an implementation of Object-Oriented programming (and the encapsulation needed to be OO); these aren't sugars, they are essential to the language to get the primary goal (OO) achieved. Garbage collection is a primary goal of java.
The "+" operator on Strings is a convenience and therefore a sugar. It is in no way necessary to the primary goal of Java as an OO language.
And everybody who's tried to read someone elses "sugar-coated" Perl code knows its next to impossible without also being a super-expert yourself.
Productivity in "version 1" is nothing when maintainance costs (time taken to figure out what the fuck is going on with code you didn't write) outweigh initial version costs by a factor of 5 or more (Brooks talks numbers this high, so don't think i'm exagerating).
Perl and its sugar work best when the person/group who's writing the code are the only ones who touch it. Beyond that, you start hitting limits on how much of the sugars someone is willing to learn, and one group's essentials are another groups "avoid this at all costs".
Happens in C++ as well (especially since not all compilers are ISO compliant yet and each is missing different features), but Perl's syntax evolution has exagerated the effect.
It's platform neutral. C# has been sent to the ECMA too - so where's the vendor lock-in?
huh?
Lock-in 1: Every object is a COM object. To get that "feature" of the language, you have to use it on a platform that supports COM. Right now, there are 2 : Windows and Mac. And the Mac only has it because MS built COM for it in order to keep vendor lock-in with Office and I.E..
Lock-in 2: Who else is gonna build a C# compiler? Why would they?
Borland? They've got Delphi as their OO alternative. IBM? Oracle? None of the big names have any reason to get in bed with Microsoft anymore. Name one company that stands anything to gain by building a competing C# compiler with Microsoft?
MS is trying the "standards body" merely to have some form of official support for the form of the language so 3rd party vendors might feel some incentive to build libraries...but they don't need to since COM support is built in -- existing COM objects already provide a vast set of libraries.
If there isn't an alternative, then standards-bodies be damned, its a "de facto standard" and we have vendor lock-in.
Sweeteners exist to support secondary goals of the language, or exist merely as afterthoughts for "programmer convenience" when using the meat and potatoes of the primary goals. Operator overloading in C++ supported a secondary goal of C++ -- allow objects to be syntactically utilized as if they were primitives. Inner classes in Java allow Objects to have support implementation pieces kept secure, or to have proxies serve as adapters to other subsystems; these could be done with external classes (and had been for the first generation of the language), therefore the addition was a sugar (more a gravy, actually, I'd say).
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These X servers were hardly optimized, but they did correctly implement the server side of the X protocols and all extensions provided by the X consortium.
As for "sample implementations?" Its rare for a vendor to make changes in Xlib or Xt. The only "sample" is the X server. Xlib connects the the server by several means now, depending on the DISPLAY variable. Sockets aren't the only means provided by Xlib. In fact, before "Direct X" meant something to microsoft or to some XML dealer, it was the original name for an implementation of the C Xlib library that overrode the server and drew directly to the screen, provided the DISPLAY variable allowed that.
The waters at that depth are VERY active. Divers wouldn't have enough equipment to stay under control. Its not like the depths of the titanic or the depths of that nature (300+ feet) in the smoother-flowing carribean. The waters at the bottom of that part of northern europe are horrendous; they couldn't get a rescue sub to hold still long enough to connect.
And if a sub couldn't hold still, don't expect a diver to be able to stand still in that...
"Always remember that the weapon in your hand was made by the lowest bidder..."
I'd agree to that to a certain degree...heck, even top-selling "Civilization" (and all its varients and sequels) are still basically based on the old "Empire" engine, which was running perfectly well on unix and vaxen boxes before PC's were around. Civ just added the "theme" of history, and features there-of, based on the science development model in its A-H boardgame namesake.
M.U.L.E. still rocks as probably the best PC game ever, IMHO.
As opposed to the American/English approach (inherited from our German side, in spite of the French/Latin connection) of generating compound words.
Which is where our modern computer language names come from, especially when you add typists's lazyness to it (print_formatted -> printf).
By using English to describe any concept that couldn't be clearly expressed in Japanese. Keep in mind, most Japanese industrial leaders (in the 1950s), and much of their middle management, were trained in America. This is for their post-war development, and the eventual introduction of "quality" to Japanese work (which didn't exist prior to the 1960s).
As for productivity? Well, the other side of it is that the Japanese have an affinity for management and control systems that's far more efficient than ours. Controlling people is something that can be done in any language.
for most people, its too much ($$$) to deal with.
Anybody who does the work without securing a license is in violation.
And if they refuse to license anybody, then every "clone" of the product is illegal.
Robert Fripp just copied that article on his diary, adding the caption: My only substantial criticism of Steve's commentary is that it paints the music industry in too positive a light.
Just because an album didn't sell doesn't mean the band is free. Termination of a contract generally terminates the band. If a solo artist, he's pretty much out of the industry, unless some other label thinks they can do better and buys him out of his contract and debts (again, taking the money out of future royalties). With a band, either the same happens, or the band breaks up, and each member negotiates separately with the label's lawyers on how much they individually "cost" to buy out their subset of the contract.
Most just leave the industry alltogether, and hope they don't have too much of a permanent debt on their hands (after liquidating as much of their equipment as they think they can bare to live without) and get on with their lives, musical or otherwise. Yes, labels lose some on non-selling artists, but they do everything they can to minimize those losses and keeping the burden on 1) the artist, 2) the distributor, or 3) the retailers.
In a failed release, the label can say we "own" the album as colateral until the debt of the advance is paid off. But it ain't the labels' by default.
Steve Albini wrote a rant on labels and finances that's a little more accurate on the numbers (but no friendlier) than Love's article. It shows more modest sales (250K), and then goes through the numbers to show the band in deep financial shit even after that strong a showing in the market...
The "Line Item Veto" that became law was restricted to budget items only. It was not a full-feature version that some people want.
The idea that this might pass constitutionality was that congress has the power to create the budget, and if congress released part of that power of its own will (allowing the president more power over what goes into/out-of the budget), that would be ok. The Constitution declares otherwise.
From what I remember reading on it...
They didn't lobby to get it in. A clerk added it (as an "edit and clarification") at the "suggestion" of the RIAA (a fact discovered weeks after it was in there). It wasn't even discussed in congressional committee until Hendley brought it up.
That clerk later left the congressional office and now works as a lobbyist for the RIAA.
My conspiracy-hunting section of my brain certainly sees clues for an illegal bribe in there somewhere...
The RIAA is looking into the idea that another media form will replace CD's. When that replacement is "complete" (meaning the labels don't make CDs anymore, so EVERYBODY must move to the new format and replace the best of their entire collection -- just like they did w/ vynal in the late 80s), then the labels will get a whole new influx of cash for "old product".
If the Doors gain ownership of their works, they can renegotiate a duplication and distribution deal that will pay substantially more.
This is what the "Majors" fear. That they will lose the cash cow of these "classic rock" releases that 1) continue to sell in current media, and 2) will likely go back to being major sellers when the media changes away from CDs.
Well, that's all good and well except for one thing.
The artist still pays for all of it. Everything. "Recouped from royalties". The artist gets an advance, and from that advance the artist pays the producer (who may also get "points", meaning a percentage of the album's gross). The advance also pays for the engineer, the studio, the media, etc...yes, the studio pays in advance to get the album recorded...
BUT when the royalties are paid, the advance is deducted.
This means that the artist has now paid for the album to be made by paying back the "loan" that was the advance out of the royalties of the sale (usually only 10-15% of the album gross).
So the artist pays for the album to be made. The fact that the label owns the album is nothing but pure theft and slavery.
It is theft for the label to own it in the first place.
Aside from "promotion", every aspect of making an album is recouped against the artists' royalties, not the larger label's percentage. This can even include buying the group out of a smaller label's contract.
Actually, those regulators are common practice,
installed in pretty much every device. Back in the 60s, they weren't.
That's actually not that far off. Numerous British groups back in the 60s found out lousy and variable our voltage systems are when half their instruments wouldn't work without voltage regulators. Robert Fripp (King Crimson) has described how the Mellotron (which works by playing an analog tape at variable speed to control pitch; effectively an analog sampler) would get disasterously out of tune due to American power fluctuations.
Along with plenty of examples of protocols that had too much baggage (technical or philosophical) to be of excessive use anymore. Sometimes, making something "right" just takes looking at so many "wrongs" (ftp, gopher, etc...). The presence of the wrongs makes the right appear.
Many groups and independent labels, have gone broke themselves just because their distributors have gone broke and used chapter 11 protection to avoid paying up.
In addition, I got the apache system to work well enough for my needs (though i need to fitz with LAME to get smaller files -- 44/128s would kill my bitrate quota). the trick was to add the "audio/x-mpegurl m3u" line to the server mime.types file (it isn't there by default).
If you are using someone else's server (you can't change conf info), you can also do it by puting the line "AddType audio/x-mpegurl .m3u" in the .htaccess file for the directory containing the m3us. to minimize constant .htaccess accessing (apache will look it up for every load in that path), you might consider putting all the .m3u files in a single directory by themselves.
Thanks for the pointers...
Think about it -- Space Seed/Star Trek 2, The TNG episode were kids' super-immune systems attacked normal people, the whole thing w/ Bashir in DS9...
It goes on and on...
Again, you miss the point. There's language features that are the primary goal of the language, and then there's language features that exist for "convenience" or to address secondary goals. "Class", "Private", "Public" directly support an implementation of Object-Oriented programming (and the encapsulation needed to be OO); these aren't sugars, they are essential to the language to get the primary goal (OO) achieved. Garbage collection is a primary goal of java.
The "+" operator on Strings is a convenience and therefore a sugar. It is in no way necessary to the primary goal of Java as an OO language.
Productivity in "version 1" is nothing when maintainance costs (time taken to figure out what the fuck is going on with code you didn't write) outweigh initial version costs by a factor of 5 or more (Brooks talks numbers this high, so don't think i'm exagerating).
Perl and its sugar work best when the person/group who's writing the code are the only ones who touch it. Beyond that, you start hitting limits on how much of the sugars someone is willing to learn, and one group's essentials are another groups "avoid this at all costs".
Happens in C++ as well (especially since not all compilers are ISO compliant yet and each is missing different features), but Perl's syntax evolution has exagerated the effect.
huh?
Lock-in 1: Every object is a COM object. To get that "feature" of the language, you have to use it on a platform that supports COM. Right now, there are 2 : Windows and Mac. And the Mac only has it because MS built COM for it in order to keep vendor lock-in with Office and I.E..
Lock-in 2: Who else is gonna build a C# compiler? Why would they?
Borland? They've got Delphi as their OO alternative. IBM? Oracle? None of the big names have any reason to get in bed with Microsoft anymore. Name one company that stands anything to gain by building a competing C# compiler with Microsoft?
MS is trying the "standards body" merely to have some form of official support for the form of the language so 3rd party vendors might feel some incentive to build libraries...but they don't need to since COM support is built in -- existing COM objects already provide a vast set of libraries.
If there isn't an alternative, then standards-bodies be damned, its a "de facto standard" and we have vendor lock-in.
The missing fourth paragraph:
Sweeteners exist to support secondary goals of the language, or exist merely as afterthoughts for "programmer convenience" when using the meat and potatoes of the primary goals. Operator overloading in C++ supported a secondary goal of C++ -- allow objects to be syntactically utilized as if they were primitives. Inner classes in Java allow Objects to have support implementation pieces kept secure, or to have proxies serve as adapters to other subsystems; these could be done with external classes (and had been for the first generation of the language), therefore the addition was a sugar (more a gravy, actually, I'd say).