* The license is restricted to use on certain operating systems, those which fit a category they call "open source". Both the Free Software Movement and the Open Source Movement consider use restrictions unacceptable.
Er, that would mean that Qt is not open source, since the QPL tells you what you may and may not 'use' the software for. (Whereas with the GPL and other licences, using the software is not restricted, but distributing copies of it may be.)
Okay, the QPL's statement of what you may use Qt for seems to cover all the bases - developing, compiling and linking programs, and developing new free programs - but technically it would count as non-free, since there may be some use which is not mentioned and thus implicitly disallowed. In fact the condition that programs must be 'legally developed' is a bit worrying - eg if DeCSS were ruled to be illegal, you couldn't link it with Qt even in some more liberal country where use of DeCSS were allowed.
Many websites are now offering MP4 versions of popular movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix.
The Wizard of Oz? It's ironic that under any sane copyright system, this film would have passed into the public domain long ago. Indeed I expect that in many countries, this is the case.
A Project Gutenberg equivalent (names please?) for old movies and TV programmes might be useful.
I found that XFree86 4.0 would not detect my graphics card, although it worked with 3.3.x. However I am using an old card (onboard ET4000), so it's possible that support for this configuration isn't so important any more.
In Britain before telecoms deregulation, the second largest telephone network was owned by British Rail. This was spun off into Racal Telecom, which was recently bought by 'Global Crossing' (whose web site is so poor I won't even link to it).
Similarly Energis is a company which sends data traffic over the National Grid power cables.
I'm sure Elite on the BBC requires 32Kbyte of RAM. Still impressive of course. I don't know about the case - you probably could not stand on it - but the system as a whole is certainly pretty solid. Many have survived eighteen years' use in schools.
I've suggested similar ideas to this on previous Slashdot stories, but what the heck, I'll suggest it again.
Everyone with a registered Ebay account should start demanding that Ebay shut down auctions. Pick those that involve software, books or something else that could vaguely involve 'intellectual property'. See what happens.
The problem with this is that not everyone has the same amount of money as Microsoft has to spend on lawyers. So it might not work. But at least it would piss off the Ebay people;->
It's fairly obvious that prices are not 'skyrocketing'. But if they did, as happened last year, and stayed high, what would happen?
When software was just beginning to get bloated (I remember being shocked that CorelDraw required a massive 20Mbyte), it became expensive to get a large enough hard disk (80Mbyte or so). Disk prices, at least at first, didn't drop enough for consumers to keep up with the increased demand for disk space. This led to a brief period of disk compression programs such as Stacker, which slowed down your machine a little but let you fit about 60% more stuff on your disk (typically). Eventually {Double,Drive}Space was included as a standard feature of MS-DOS (and then Win95). But now that disks are so cheap, I doubt if anyone bothers with it on a new system.
Similarly, a couple of years later, starting just before the launch of Win95, it started getting expensive to fit a system with the amount of RAM needed to run modern bloated applications. Products such as RAM Doubler appeared for the PC and Mac. (The PC version of one such program turned out to be a total fraud - it didn't compress things at all - but the others did actually do something.) In common with the disk compressors, the 'Double' in the name is misleading; you don't get anywhere near the same performance as a system with twice the RAM.
The way these RAM compressors (or at least Quarterdeck's offering) work is to set aside an area of memory, say 25% of physical RAM, for compressed pages. When the remaining memory gets full, pages are compressed and stored in the buffer instead of being paged to disk. When the buffer gets full you do have to go to disk, but you can write compressed pages and several of them at once, so disk activity is less. Compressing the pages takes CPU time, but most PCs have fast CPU relative to disk speed so the speed burden isn't too great.
Having said that, I didn't notice any wonderful speedup from Quarterdeck's RAM booster (can't remember the name) on a 16Mbyte machine, and it made Windows less stable. But done right, it might work.
Could you do something similar for Linux? One tactic might be to create a RAM disk with some of your memory, and use something like the crusty old DoUbLe (or however it's spelt) code to make it a 'compressed partition'. Then get Linux to swap to that before going to disk.
However you wouldn't get the benefit of pages being compressed when they go to disk, nor of compressed pages being simply moved from the RAM-swap to the swap partition. AFAIK you can tell Linux to use one swap device in preference to another, but you can't ask for a tiered swap scheme where pages from one device spill onto the next. (Please correct me if I am wrong.)
Another problem is that with DoUbLe, the size of the device varies according to how well things have compressed so far, and swapping requires a fixed-size device. So none of this would probably work at all.
But there are plenty of ultra-fast compression algorithms out there (LZO is fast and GPLed) which you might stick in the kernel. Then get the kernel to compress pages and dump them in a big pile somewhere, and to swap them out only when there is no alternative (or when the system is idle).
I have no idea whether such a scheme would make a significant difference; I'd guess that many of the most bloated programs do have highly compressible data areas though. If it did work, then Linux would be able to survive a memory shortage better than other OSes. It might also help ultra-cheapskate manufacturers making thin clients or mobile devices.
IANA chemist, but IIRC biological molecules sometimes appear in left-handed and right-handed versions, but the two versions do different things. For example, one of the molecules that gives oranges an orangey flavour - its mirror image is found in lemons, giving them a different flavour. Also with some drugs, the right-handed version might be beneficial and all the side effects come from the left-handed version. But it's difficult to manufacture one without getting an equal amount of the other. See the article Happily, it's an asymmetrical world for more.
(As for polarizing light in two different directions, I don't see why that's such a big deal. Liquid crystals do this already depending on what voltage you apply to them.)
A trademark isn't really a monopoly; you can stop others from using your _name_ but not stop them from making competing (or even identical) products.
Patents are designed to create a monopoly. However this monopoly should be only on the new technology which was invented. I was referring to the practice of patenting _existing_ practices - the host of software patents which involve taking an existing business method and putting it on the Web are like this.
It's bad because the 'trademark' is on the product itself, not on any particular name or brand.
The idea with trademarks is that you can have competition, as long as people aren't misled by products which claim to be brand X but aren't. If you buy Coca-Cola(tm) you know what you are getting.
However, with a trademark on the smell, nobody else can make grass-smelling tennis balls. Not even if they call them something else and make it clear that they are a different manufacturer. The trademark laws are meant to protect consumers, but here it is consumers who are losing out due to lack of competition.
It's funny how sensible practices like trademarks, patents and so on always seem to degenerate into 'monopoly for sale' schemes.
Couldn't people just run an IA-64 emulator on their own machine? It would be really slow compared to the real thing, but a 600MHz 686 running an IA-64 emulator might be only a hundred times slower than the real thing. A hundred times slower is still a reasonable speed for many interactive programs that spend most of their time waiting for user input. And you'd still edit and compile your program natively.
Apparently HP are making an emulator, but I don't know if it will be free (speech or beer). ARM Ltd provide a GPLed emulator for their chips, it would be nice if Intel started doing the same. At the very least, it would show up hardware bugs if a program gave a different result when ran on the (debugged) emulator than on the real CPU.
I think that Cascading Style Sheets _should_ mean that you can set up your own colour schemes, which override those used by Slashdot. If Slashdot is using CSS properly, that is.
I don't know if any browser lets you specify different stylesheets for different sites though.
This device, as far as I can see from the New Scientist article, outputs _uncompressed_ digital data. That's fine if it's going straight to a screen, but would chew up enormous amounts of space to record.
If you wanted to record from a DVD or from an MPEG-2 based digital TV transmission, you'd probably also use MPEG-2 or some other lossy compression to save on space. Certainly this is what the new digital VCRs (using a hard disk) do. And if you wanted to make a bootleg copy of a DVD, again you'd need to MPEG-2 compress the signal.
But decompressing the disc's contents (even to a digital signal) and then recompressing them using a lossy algorithm will mean that the copy has reduced quality. So this is not a way to make perfect copies of DVDs, which supposedly is what the movie industry is scared of.
It's also a rather inelegant solution to get MPEG-2 data from a disc, TV aerial or satellite dish, decompress it with a set-top-box, output it as an uncompressed video signal, and then recompress it again. Life will be much simpler once you can directly access the original MPEG-2 data. With DVDs this is via DeCSS (I think), and with digital television you would need the receiver part of an STB, without the part that turns the MPEG-2 into a video signal.
Then you will be able to record directly from DVDs or TV transmissions onto your PC's hard disk, or onto a digital VCR. And you will then be able to make perfect copies (which you can do already with DVDs just by copying the disc, DeCSS and SDI outputs are red herrings for large-scale piracy). But you can't make perfect copies using this device, just pretty good copies.
TUIPeer is a text-mode look-and-feel for the Java AWT. Would it be possible to do the same thing for Mozilla? If that happened then Mozilla and all apps based on its widget set would be runnable over telnet or in an xterm. It might give the Lynx users something to worry about:-)
What sort of system is needed to run the current 2.3 and 2.4-test kernels? Going from 2.0 to 2.2 was a big jump in memory consumption, although apparently things did improve a little during the late 2.1 series.
Will I still be able to run the latest kernel on my 8Mbyte machine?
I think 'make config' is the hardest part. And it's the most important bit - if you are happy with the default set of kernel features, why bother to build a new one?
Slashdot Mirror
Er, that would mean that Qt is not open source, since the QPL tells you what you may and may not 'use' the software for. (Whereas with the GPL and other licences, using the software is not restricted, but distributing copies of it may be.)
Okay, the QPL's statement of what you may use Qt for seems to cover all the bases - developing, compiling and linking programs, and developing new free programs - but technically it would count as non-free, since there may be some use which is not mentioned and thus implicitly disallowed. In fact the condition that programs must be 'legally developed' is a bit worrying - eg if DeCSS were ruled to be illegal, you couldn't link it with Qt even in some more liberal country where use of DeCSS were allowed.
Click the link all you like. Just make sure you have disabled JavaScript, as any security-conscious person would.
The Wizard of Oz? It's ironic that under any sane copyright system, this film would have passed into the public domain long ago. Indeed I expect that in many countries, this is the case.
A Project Gutenberg equivalent (names please?) for old movies and TV programmes might be useful.
I found that XFree86 4.0 would not detect my graphics card, although it worked with 3.3.x. However I am using an old card (onboard ET4000), so it's possible that support for this configuration isn't so important any more.
What's to stop people 'spamming the index'? When your site gets a query, you could respond with 'very strong match' in the hope of getting more hits.
Who is enforcing that sites won't just lie? Maybe some sort of collaborative moderation a la Slashdot would be needed?
In Britain before telecoms deregulation, the second largest telephone network was owned by British Rail. This was spun off into Racal Telecom, which was recently bought by 'Global Crossing' (whose web site is so poor I won't even link to it).
Similarly Energis is a company which sends data traffic over the National Grid power cables.
Well, an internet is a big network connecting several smaller networks. The Internet is one internet which uses the TCP/IP set of protocols.
Does anybody realize just how dated this 'Python 3000' stuff is going to sound in a thousand years' time?
I'm sure Elite on the BBC requires 32Kbyte of RAM. Still impressive of course. I don't know about the case - you probably could not stand on it - but the system as a whole is certainly pretty solid. Many have survived eighteen years' use in schools.
My PS/2 Model 80 already has a carrying handle. A carrying handle and a sticker saying '18kg+'...
I think that 'hehe' is even more evil and conspiratorial than 'heh heh'. But more importantly, you can lengthen it, eg 'hehehe'.
Is there a place that sells 387s? I need a 387 and three 387SXes for my various old PCs.
I've suggested similar ideas to this on previous Slashdot stories, but what the heck, I'll suggest it again.
;->
Everyone with a registered Ebay account should start demanding that Ebay shut down auctions. Pick those that involve software, books or something else that could vaguely involve 'intellectual property'. See what happens.
The problem with this is that not everyone has the same amount of money as Microsoft has to spend on lawyers. So it might not work. But at least it would piss off the Ebay people
What about Gnome-o-Phone? Also, a Freshmeat search might be helpful...
It's fairly obvious that prices are not 'skyrocketing'. But if they did, as happened last year, and stayed high, what would happen?
When software was just beginning to get bloated (I remember being shocked that CorelDraw required a massive 20Mbyte), it became expensive to get a large enough hard disk (80Mbyte or so). Disk prices, at least at first, didn't drop enough for consumers to keep up with the increased demand for disk space. This led to a brief period of disk compression programs such as Stacker, which slowed down your machine a little but let you fit about 60% more stuff on your disk (typically). Eventually {Double,Drive}Space was included as a standard feature of MS-DOS (and then Win95). But now that disks are so cheap, I doubt if anyone bothers with it on a new system.
Similarly, a couple of years later, starting just before the launch of Win95, it started getting expensive to fit a system with the amount of RAM needed to run modern bloated applications. Products such as RAM Doubler appeared for the PC and Mac. (The PC version of one such program turned out to be a total fraud - it didn't compress things at all - but the others did actually do something.) In common with the disk compressors, the 'Double' in the name is misleading; you don't get anywhere near the same performance as a system with twice the RAM.
The way these RAM compressors (or at least Quarterdeck's offering) work is to set aside an area of memory, say 25% of physical RAM, for compressed pages. When the remaining memory gets full, pages are compressed and stored in the buffer instead of being paged to disk. When the buffer gets full you do have to go to disk, but you can write compressed pages and several of them at once, so disk activity is less. Compressing the pages takes CPU time, but most PCs have fast CPU relative to disk speed so the speed burden isn't too great.
Having said that, I didn't notice any wonderful speedup from Quarterdeck's RAM booster (can't remember the name) on a 16Mbyte machine, and it made Windows less stable. But done right, it might work.
Could you do something similar for Linux? One tactic might be to create a RAM disk with some of your memory, and use something like the crusty old DoUbLe (or however it's spelt) code to make it a 'compressed partition'. Then get Linux to swap to that before going to disk.
However you wouldn't get the benefit of pages being compressed when they go to disk, nor of compressed pages being simply moved from the RAM-swap to the swap partition. AFAIK you can tell Linux to use one swap device in preference to another, but you can't ask for a tiered swap scheme where pages from one device spill onto the next. (Please correct me if I am wrong.)
Another problem is that with DoUbLe, the size of the device varies according to how well things have compressed so far, and swapping requires a fixed-size device. So none of this would probably work at all.
But there are plenty of ultra-fast compression algorithms out there (LZO is fast and GPLed) which you might stick in the kernel. Then get the kernel to compress pages and dump them in a big pile somewhere, and to swap them out only when there is no alternative (or when the system is idle).
I have no idea whether such a scheme would make a significant difference; I'd guess that many of the most bloated programs do have highly compressible data areas though. If it did work, then Linux would be able to survive a memory shortage better than other OSes. It might also help ultra-cheapskate manufacturers making thin clients or mobile devices.
Does any of that make sense?
IANA chemist, but IIRC biological molecules sometimes appear in left-handed and right-handed versions, but the two versions do different things. For example, one of the molecules that gives oranges an orangey flavour - its mirror image is found in lemons, giving them a different flavour. Also with some drugs, the right-handed version might be beneficial and all the side effects come from the left-handed version. But it's difficult to manufacture one without getting an equal amount of the other. See the article Happily, it's an asymmetrical world for more.
(As for polarizing light in two different directions, I don't see why that's such a big deal. Liquid crystals do this already depending on what voltage you apply to them.)
A trademark isn't really a monopoly; you can stop others from using your _name_ but not stop them from making competing (or even identical) products.
Patents are designed to create a monopoly. However this monopoly should be only on the new technology which was invented. I was referring to the practice of patenting _existing_ practices - the host of software patents which involve taking an existing business method and putting it on the Web are like this.
Digital VCRs do exist. See a Slashdot story on digital VCRs.
It's bad because the 'trademark' is on the product itself, not on any particular name or brand.
The idea with trademarks is that you can have competition, as long as people aren't misled by products which claim to be brand X but aren't. If you buy Coca-Cola(tm) you know what you are getting.
However, with a trademark on the smell, nobody else can make grass-smelling tennis balls. Not even if they call them something else and make it clear that they are a different manufacturer. The trademark laws are meant to protect consumers, but here it is consumers who are losing out due to lack of competition.
It's funny how sensible practices like trademarks, patents and so on always seem to degenerate into 'monopoly for sale' schemes.
Couldn't people just run an IA-64 emulator on their own machine? It would be really slow compared to the real thing, but a 600MHz 686 running an IA-64 emulator might be only a hundred times slower than the real thing. A hundred times slower is still a reasonable speed for many interactive programs that spend most of their time waiting for user input. And you'd still edit and compile your program natively.
Apparently HP are making an emulator, but I don't know if it will be free (speech or beer). ARM Ltd provide a GPLed emulator for their chips, it would be nice if Intel started doing the same. At the very least, it would show up hardware bugs if a program gave a different result when ran on the (debugged) emulator than on the real CPU.
I think that Cascading Style Sheets _should_ mean that you can set up your own colour schemes, which override those used by Slashdot. If Slashdot is using CSS properly, that is.
I don't know if any browser lets you specify different stylesheets for different sites though.
This device, as far as I can see from the New Scientist article, outputs _uncompressed_ digital data. That's fine if it's going straight to a screen, but would chew up enormous amounts of space to record.
If you wanted to record from a DVD or from an MPEG-2 based digital TV transmission, you'd probably also use MPEG-2 or some other lossy compression to save on space. Certainly this is what the new digital VCRs (using a hard disk) do. And if you wanted to make a bootleg copy of a DVD, again you'd need to MPEG-2 compress the signal.
But decompressing the disc's contents (even to a digital signal) and then recompressing them using a lossy algorithm will mean that the copy has reduced quality. So this is not a way to make perfect copies of DVDs, which supposedly is what the movie industry is scared of.
It's also a rather inelegant solution to get MPEG-2 data from a disc, TV aerial or satellite dish, decompress it with a set-top-box, output it as an uncompressed video signal, and then recompress it again. Life will be much simpler once you can directly access the original MPEG-2 data. With DVDs this is via DeCSS (I think), and with digital television you would need the receiver part of an STB, without the part that turns the MPEG-2 into a video signal.
Then you will be able to record directly from DVDs or TV transmissions onto your PC's hard disk, or onto a digital VCR. And you will then be able to make perfect copies (which you can do already with DVDs just by copying the disc, DeCSS and SDI outputs are red herrings for large-scale piracy). But you can't make perfect copies using this device, just pretty good copies.
TUIPeer is a text-mode look-and-feel for the Java AWT. Would it be possible to do the same thing for Mozilla? If that happened then Mozilla and all apps based on its widget set would be runnable over telnet or in an xterm. It might give the Lynx users something to worry about :-)
What sort of system is needed to run the current 2.3 and 2.4-test kernels? Going from 2.0 to 2.2 was a big jump in memory consumption, although apparently things did improve a little during the late 2.1 series.
Will I still be able to run the latest kernel on my 8Mbyte machine?
I think 'make config' is the hardest part. And it's the most important bit - if you are happy with the default set of kernel features, why bother to build a new one?