It sounds like your sound card is a piece of shit. As much as I hate, hate, hate Creative Labs, their SB Lives have good hardware mixing capabilities that the Linux drivers can use out of the box.
I also think there's a big difference between a patent owned by Linyos Torovoltos, who may have principles that prevent him from using the patent offensively, and a patent owned by the completley amoral Megacorp, Inc., a machination driven purely by the greed of its shareholders.
Megacorp, Inc. may say that it will only use its patents defensively, and maybe it will--today. But maybe tomorrow its stock is owned by a different set of shareholders; perhaps they aren't quite as secure with Megacorp's market position as the previous set were, and decide to start using the patent to make money.
Bottom line is, you can trust some people--you can not trust a corporation.
Yeah, unfortunatly the ffii.org page on them hasn't been updated for a while. But given what they have said and done in the past, unless I see them actively moving against the CIID, they are still on my evil list.
Nokia could stop campaigning in favour of software patents in Europe.
> But [Nokia] are still not a big player in the patent business and they know that > they might find themselves in a bad position if software patent laws are > introduced in the EU and strengthened elsewhere.
Nokia seems absolutely pro-swpat. Their patent department has done lots of lobbying in conferences and in the European Parliament. We encountered the head of their IP department, Tim Frain, in Bournemouth in summer 2002. Participants at the conference easily demonstrated that his arguments are economic nonsense. http://swpat.ffii.org/gasnu/nokia/index.en.html
Campaigners are opposed by representatives from large companies, including Nokia, which the FFII reports is engaged in energetic Pro-Patent Lobbying Efforts. Nokia argues that software patents "provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe, and to promote licensing and technology transfer". http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/13/eu_patent_ protest/
Meanwhile, lobbyists in favour of software patents are also gearing up for the fight. FFII has obtained a copy of a round-robin letter being circulated by Nokia's Tim Frain (Nokia/Southwood) and Dany Ducoulombier (Nokia/Brussels) for pro-patent signatures before April 8th. The letter calls on ministers to drop their objections, and to support a draft text issued by the Irish Presidency on March 17th. http://lwn.net/Articles/79930/
Yup. For UK readers like me, the best bet looks to be an MSI PC54G2 card. Now if only I could sell this SMC piece of crap for anywhere near the price I bought it for...:)
Useless as in, every device currently available (at least in the UK and I thought the US) uses the SMC 2802W V2 chipset, that the prism54 driver won't support. Bastard manufacturers made the change without changing their products' model numbers, or even FCC IDs(!), so you don't know what you will get until you get it. That's the reason I am stuck with using the shitty Windows drivers via the excellent ndiswrapper.
prism54 chipset cards suck anyway, because you need to use non-Free firmware.
Are there actually any Free 802.11g drivers for Linux? Last time I checked, the only one in the kernel was prism54, which is useless for any device you can buy at the moment.:(
"There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith."
Somehow, I don't think BitTorrent, Inc. supplied anyone with a copy of Revenge of the Sith. It would be nice to see them sue the MPAA for slander/libel/defamation/whatever though.
The 1400-word terms and conditions for MSN.CO.UK's strong-IP "Thought Thieves" film competition are quite the read, even if you're not the 14-17 year-old they're intended to be read and understood by and complied with in their therein bywhich entirety. Entries must be the "sole work and creation of the person submitting the film" (no sharing your precious intellectual property fluids with your cameraman, Mr Auteur); must not "use third party intellectual property rights" (no furniture, no architecture, only clouds as background);
> What if someone made a film about how the very idea of this contest is "stolen" > from Orwell's 1984. Then showed goose-stepping soldiers dragging Bill off to a > reeducation camp.
You'd have to clear the rights on that with Orwell's estate, plus whoever has the movie rights. Also, whoever owns the patent on goose-stepping facist soldiers.
I am not disputing that there are other programs that write SWF files. Nor do I claim that there are no other players (I do claim, however, that there are no other working players.;))
I merely wish to point out that Flash is not an open standard.
The spec is not frely available. There is no test suite for third party implementations. There is no Free reference implementation--only the official player, and if the spec differs from the player, you're fucked.
Pursuant to the terms and conditions of this License, you are granted a nonexclusive license to use the Specification for the sole purposes of developing Products that output SWF.
While you are perfectly correct to stick with Flash since it's the only solution that works, I must point out that SWF is not an open standard. It is a proprietry format, only supported by by a single vendor, without any usable documentation.
If anyone bothered to read the original original article, you'd all see that this is a total non-story, distorted by several layers of idiotic "journalists".
1. KDE developer posts on blog expressing frustration at idiot Slashdot readers 2. Through several layers of "journalists" the meaning of this event is mutated 3. CNET story OMG OPEN SOURCE DIVORCE!!! 4. Slashdot story OMG HAX!! 5. Three hundred comments by the same idiot Slashdot users from 1., who didn't bother to read the story this time round either
There is no ???, however the Profit goes to CNET who get money per impression from their advertisers!
1. You should be submitting mail over the submit port (587). 2. The poster specified that users should be able to unblock port 25 if they want to. Blueyonder could make this a part of their portal along with the existing account settings.
They can edit the article once Mirrordot has completed mirroring. It does it so quickly that I assume it has a subscription and can take advantage of the subscriber-only period.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like your sound card is a piece of shit. As much as I hate, hate, hate Creative Labs, their SB Lives have good hardware mixing capabilities that the Linux drivers can use out of the box.
I also think there's a big difference between a patent owned by Linyos Torovoltos, who may have principles that prevent him from using the patent offensively, and a patent owned by the completley amoral Megacorp, Inc., a machination driven purely by the greed of its shareholders.
Megacorp, Inc. may say that it will only use its patents defensively, and maybe it will--today. But maybe tomorrow its stock is owned by a different set of shareholders; perhaps they aren't quite as secure with Megacorp's market position as the previous set were, and decide to start using the patent to make money.
Bottom line is, you can trust some people--you can not trust a corporation.
Yeah, unfortunatly the ffii.org page on them hasn't been updated for a while. But given what they have said and done in the past, unless I see them actively moving against the CIID, they are still on my evil list.
> What else or better could Nokia do?
Nokia could stop campaigning in favour of software patents in Europe.
> But [Nokia] are still not a big player in the patent business and they know that
> they might find themselves in a bad position if software patent laws are
> introduced in the EU and strengthened elsewhere.
Nokia's pro-swpat lobying efforts say otherwise.
Not difficult.
_ protest/
Nokia seems absolutely pro-swpat. Their patent department has done lots of lobbying in conferences and in the European Parliament. We encountered the head of their IP department, Tim Frain, in Bournemouth in summer 2002. Participants at the conference easily demonstrated that his arguments are economic nonsense. http://swpat.ffii.org/gasnu/nokia/index.en.html
Campaigners are opposed by representatives from large companies, including Nokia, which the FFII reports is engaged in energetic Pro-Patent Lobbying Efforts. Nokia argues that software patents "provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe, and to promote licensing and technology transfer". http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/13/eu_patent
Meanwhile, lobbyists in favour of software patents are also gearing up
for the fight. FFII has obtained a copy of a round-robin letter being
circulated by Nokia's Tim Frain (Nokia/Southwood) and Dany Ducoulombier
(Nokia/Brussels) for pro-patent signatures before April 8th. The letter
calls on ministers to drop their objections, and to support a draft text
issued by the Irish Presidency on March 17th. http://lwn.net/Articles/79930/
xlsfonts will list fonts available under the old X11 fonts system, and fc-list will list fonts available to Fontconfig.
xfontsel also has a fontconfig equivalent: gtk2fontsel.
Read Politics and the English Language and say that again.
It seems to have gotten a lot slower recently, now that idiots are routing BitTorrent traffic through the network.
Yup. For UK readers like me, the best bet looks to be an MSI PC54G2 card. Now if only I could sell this SMC piece of crap for anywhere near the price I bought it for... :)
Useless as in, every device currently available (at least in the UK and I thought the US) uses the SMC 2802W V2 chipset, that the prism54 driver won't support. Bastard manufacturers made the change without changing their products' model numbers, or even FCC IDs(!), so you don't know what you will get until you get it. That's the reason I am stuck with using the shitty Windows drivers via the excellent ndiswrapper.
prism54 chipset cards suck anyway, because you need to use non-Free firmware.
OMG TEH TAIWANESE ARE COMING
Maybe we should just nuke the entire country to be safe?
This looks like The One, at least once they port it to 2.6 and get it merged[0].
;)
Now if I could only find somewhere to buy a (PCI) card using the rt2500, then I could finally ditch this SMC 2802W V2 piece of shit.
[0] and Debian makes a release containing the subsequent kernel...
Are there actually any Free 802.11g drivers for Linux? Last time I checked, the only one in the kernel was prism54, which is useless for any device you can buy at the moment. :(
"There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith."
Somehow, I don't think BitTorrent, Inc. supplied anyone with a copy of Revenge of the Sith. It would be nice to see them sue the MPAA for slander/libel/defamation/whatever though.
It's better than top posting and conveniently omitting responses to/glossing over your opponent's points.
> This faux-Usenet quote-and-nitpick posting style is SO ANNOYING.
> What if someone made a film about how the very idea of this contest is "stolen"
> from Orwell's 1984. Then showed goose-stepping soldiers dragging Bill off to a
> reeducation camp.
You'd have to clear the rights on that with Orwell's estate, plus whoever has the movie rights. Also, whoever owns the patent on goose-stepping facist soldiers.
I am not disputing that there are other programs that write SWF files. Nor do I claim that there are no other players (I do claim, however, that there are no other working players. ;))
I merely wish to point out that Flash is not an open standard.
The spec is not frely available. There is no test suite for third party implementations. There is no Free reference implementation--only the official player, and if the spec differs from the player, you're fucked.
"Flash is an open standard (SWF)"
While you are perfectly correct to stick with Flash since it's the only solution that works, I must point out that SWF is not an open standard. It is a proprietry format, only supported by by a single vendor, without any usable documentation.
Mod parent up!
If anyone bothered to read the original original article, you'd all see that this is a total non-story, distorted by several layers of idiotic "journalists".
1. KDE developer posts on blog expressing frustration at idiot Slashdot readers
2. Through several layers of "journalists" the meaning of this event is mutated
3. CNET story OMG OPEN SOURCE DIVORCE!!!
4. Slashdot story OMG HAX!!
5. Three hundred comments by the same idiot Slashdot users from 1., who didn't bother to read the story this time round either
There is no ???, however the Profit goes to CNET who get money per impression from their advertisers!
Of course, when the Secure Audio Path software requires your media player to make use of Palladium in order to play sound, you're fucked.
1. You should be submitting mail over the submit port (587).
2. The poster specified that users should be able to unblock port 25 if they want to. Blueyonder could make this a part of their portal along with the existing account settings.
They can edit the article once Mirrordot has completed mirroring. It does it so quickly that I assume it has a subscription and can take advantage of the subscriber-only period.
Mirrordot link to the video file.