Ever notice that the Trekkie philosophy of not making multiple copies of something with the transporter is just DRM in disguise?
I mean, if I were a red shirt, I'd certainly prefer to have my duplicate go down to be zapped, and (in the unlikely event that he's not killed), let his molecules be scattered to the winds when his lifespan is up.
Heck, they can't even reconstitute something from the buffers once someone's dead. What's up with that? The only reasonable explanation is DRM.
Clearly, we must act now to prevent this horrible future awaiting our great-grandchildren. Take up the battle cry now: Freedom to replicate!
I suppose this is better than the prior method, which was to have your technology bought by some company, held for years, and then finally released 'free' as a goodwill gesture (such as DRI's GEM).
Of course, the problem with that approach is that if anyone showed an interest in the product, you would retain the license (such as DR DOS).
I understand there's cool stuff out there (like the BeOS) that has so much proprietary stuff embedded in it that it can't be released without scraping through the code for ages. I'm starting to doubt if the non-Sybase code will ever be removed from OpenWatcom.
Personally, I liked it better when companies released things for free just to spite their competitors, like Sun did with OpenOffice when they discovered it wasn't profitable. (I'm talking about source and a reasonable license, so Microsoft 'giving away' IE doesn't count.)
If it boots and runs off CD, does that mean I can't use my cd drive?
Unfortunately, that's correct.
If I change some settings, won't they be lost when I reboot?
It will allow you to save some of your settings to floppy. For example, I can save my network settings. However, I have to run the network setup tool (under the Knoppix menu) to get them to work.
Lastly, what package manager does it use?
I think so, although you can ckeck Knoppix forum for a definitive answer. The people have been quite helpful there.
I got a copy from CheapBytes. Very cool. I've handed out more than a dozen copies since then. People are a lot more willing to try it out once they find out it won't touch your hard drive (unless you want it to).
It's come in handy a couple of times, like when my hard drive flaked out. I talked my non-techie wife through setting up KPPP and KMail over the phone so she had internet access. (Fortunately, it was just a loose cable)
I've used DemoLinux before that, as well as the SUSE demo CD, but Knoppix is much nicer. The only feature I miss is DemoLinux's ability to anchor part of the file system to the hard drive...
There's a little more behind this than meets the eye. Both Xandros and CodeWeavers have a significant share owned by a holding company, Linux Global Partners . Other companies in their portfolio include Ximian, Gobe, Metro Link, and GNU Cash. All of the companies are fully independent, but as Linux Global Partner's web site states,
Our operating strategy is to integrate our partner companies into a collaborative network that leverages our collective knowledge and resources. With the goal of holding our partner company interests for the long-term, we use our collective resources to actively develop the business strategies, operations and management teams of our partner companies.
Maybe I'm being paraniod here, but it looks like Linux Global Partners is buying up lots of Linux technology. And given that Xandros doesn't follow the "free as in beer" model, I've got to wonder how this bodes for the future of Linux. I mean, the projects are still under GPL, but that doesn't mean it will be released for free. Clearly they are in this to turn a profit.
Erm... yes, check out the detail. I think you'll find the toilet's a bit hard to flush.
That said, Gilles has been putting out some amazing POV-Ray pictures, and to complain that he uses Poser characters is a bit odd. That's the whole point of using Poser.
Well, that and making CGI pr0n afforable to the masses. C'mon people! Isn't this what computer technology is all about?
Ironically, when I heard a blurb this afternoon about this on my local NPR station, the commentator made a point of saying the study's author was saying this wasn't caused by global warming.
However, this article makes it clear the author blames a good portion of the recent loss on global warming.
It also tells a dramatic story of environmental disaster not caused by people, both fairly recently:
The core data showed that in 1790, the cycle changed, the rains lessened and drought took hold in the region, a condition that continued for seven years until 1796 when the monsoons returned.
"That event was major," Thompson said. "It killed more than 600,000 people in one region of India alone. And that was at a time when global populations were much less than they are today." (Estimates place the world population in 1800 at 980 million.) "If a similar event occurred today, the social and economic disruptions would be horrendous," he said. Current world population is just over 6 billion people.
as well as 4,000 years ago:
That wet period ended and the ice corings show that Africa slid into a deep drought about 4,000 years ago.
This dry period, said Thompson, is also found in other records, including some written history.
"This dry period appears in the historic record in Egypt," he said. "Writings on tombs talk about sand dunes moving across the Nile and people migrating. Some have called this the Earth's first dark age."
Africa was not alone in the global drought. Thompson said other records show that civilizations during this period collapsed in India, the Middle East and South America.
So, yeah, global warming is pretty important. But compared to Mother Nature, we look like rank amateurs.
But that's ok... we appear to be rapidly catching up.
This program never seems to get any publicity, but it's a free, highly functional open source modelling + renderer + animation package. It's got just about all the features you could ask for:
Excellent documentation and tutorials
Scanline rendering for quick & dirty previews
Raytracing for slow and pretty pictures
Bones and pose-based animation
Inverse kinematics
Global illumination
User-friendly interface
Actively being developed
Cool procedural texture editor
It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D (a great open source modeller based on Nendo gives you a complete Open Source animation package.
This is certainly true - there are quite a number of lighter toolkits. I haven't used wxEmbedded yet, but a normal wxWindows application isn't going to be that lightweight.
The good news is that a maximal application isn't going to weigh in at much more than a minimal application.
What sets wxWindows apart from most toolkits is that it's not just a widget toolkit - it portably supports file paths, configuration files and printing, to name a few classes.
For many lightweight applications, these may not be appropriate. But as your application increases in functionality, wxWindows can keep up with it.
Mind you, this is probably not appropriate for embedded applications.
> AFAIK, wxWindows is a very old toolkit, > created before 1995.
Except that it was totally rewritten with the release of wxWindows 2 (started around '98), and it's undergoing constant revision and updating.
wxEmbedded is a spinoff of wxUniversal, a project underwritten by SciTech to create a portable set of widgets that can be used on a minimal windowing system. One of the results of this is wxEmbedded; another is wxX11, which should replaced wxMotif, which has been languishing.
It should also (in theory) make it fairly easy to port wxWindows to new platforms, since wxUniversal can be used until native bindings are written. Basically, all the goodness of Qt without MOC, licensing issues, etc.
Not to complain about Qt, of course - KDE pretty much proves how great a library Qt is.
But wxWindows fits the bill for us penniless cross-platform developers.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, if I were a red shirt, I'd certainly prefer to have my duplicate go down to be zapped, and (in the unlikely event that he's not killed), let his molecules be scattered to the winds when his lifespan is up.
Heck, they can't even reconstitute something from the buffers once someone's dead. What's up with that? The only reasonable explanation is DRM.
Clearly, we must act now to prevent this horrible future awaiting our great-grandchildren. Take up the battle cry now: Freedom to replicate!
OK, where's the funny part again?
- Gather products from your failed
.com
- Offer to make them 'free'
- Profit!
I suppose this is better than the prior method, which was to have your technology bought by some company, held for years, and then finally released 'free' as a goodwill gesture (such as DRI's GEM).Of course, the problem with that approach is that if anyone showed an interest in the product, you would retain the license (such as DR DOS).
I understand there's cool stuff out there (like the BeOS) that has so much proprietary stuff embedded in it that it can't be released without scraping through the code for ages. I'm starting to doubt if the non-Sybase code will ever be removed from OpenWatcom.
Personally, I liked it better when companies released things for free just to spite their competitors, like Sun did with OpenOffice when they discovered it wasn't profitable. (I'm talking about source and a reasonable license, so Microsoft 'giving away' IE doesn't count.)
Hey! Who removed the funny part from my sig?
Unfortunately, that's correct.
It will allow you to save some of your settings to floppy. For example, I can save my network settings. However, I have to run the network setup tool (under the Knoppix menu) to get them to work.
I think so, although you can ckeck Knoppix forum for a definitive answer. The people have been quite helpful there.
It's come in handy a couple of times, like when my hard drive flaked out. I talked my non-techie wife through setting up KPPP and KMail over the phone so she had internet access. (Fortunately, it was just a loose cable)
I've used DemoLinux before that, as well as the SUSE demo CD, but Knoppix is much nicer. The only feature I miss is DemoLinux's ability to anchor part of the file system to the hard drive...
All in all, a very nice distribution.
Nope, this is Slashdot!
You're right, of course. I guess that does make me a blithering moron. :)
This topic has been already been posted twice - in anticipation of the results. And this "news" story is posted prior to having read the content.
That's almost as irritating as my constant use of italics.
Which part of the word "editor" are we having difficulty with today?
Maybe I'm being paraniod here, but it looks like Linux Global Partners is buying up lots of Linux technology. And given that Xandros doesn't follow the "free as in beer" model, I've got to wonder how this bodes for the future of Linux. I mean, the projects are still under GPL, but that doesn't mean it will be released for free. Clearly they are in this to turn a profit.
I guess the free ride has to end at some point.
That said, Gilles has been putting out some amazing POV-Ray pictures, and to complain that he uses Poser characters is a bit odd. That's the whole point of using Poser.
Well, that and making CGI pr0n afforable to the masses. C'mon people! Isn't this what computer technology is all about?
Did I say pr0n? I meant art! Art!
However, this article makes it clear the author blames a good portion of the recent loss on global warming.
It also tells a dramatic story of environmental disaster not caused by people, both fairly recently:
- The core data showed that in 1790, the cycle changed, the rains lessened and drought took hold in the region, a condition that continued for seven years until 1796 when the monsoons returned.
as well as 4,000 years ago:"That event was major," Thompson said. "It killed more than 600,000 people in one region of India alone. And that was at a time when global populations were much less than they are today." (Estimates place the world population in 1800 at 980 million.) "If a similar event occurred today, the social and economic disruptions would be horrendous," he said. Current world population is just over 6 billion people.
- That wet period ended and the ice corings show that Africa slid into a deep drought about 4,000 years ago.
This dry period, said Thompson, is also found in other records, including some written history.
So, yeah, global warming is pretty important. But compared to Mother Nature, we look like rank amateurs. But that's ok... we appear to be rapidly catching up."This dry period appears in the historic record in Egypt," he said. "Writings on tombs talk about sand dunes moving across the Nile and people migrating. Some have called this the Earth's first dark age."
Africa was not alone in the global drought. Thompson said other records show that civilizations during this period collapsed in India, the Middle East and South America.
Didn't you ever look at the screen when Windows9x/2000/Me/XP boots up? Sure looks like a flag to me.
.
Which explains the urge I get to salute every time my machine reboots...
Or how about that funky key between the Alt and Ctrl on US keyboards? Same freakin' flag, and after all these years it *still* gets in the way.
Even when I'm using KDE... *Sigh*
-- I'm a sig. Isn't meta humour funny?
This program never seems to get any publicity, but it's a free, highly functional open source modelling + renderer + animation package. It's got just about all the features you could ask for:
It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D (a great open source modeller based on Nendo gives you a complete Open Source animation package.
This is certainly true - there are quite a number of lighter toolkits. I haven't used wxEmbedded yet, but a normal wxWindows application isn't going to be that lightweight.
The good news is that a maximal application isn't going to weigh in at much more than a minimal application.
What sets wxWindows apart from most toolkits is that it's not just a widget toolkit - it portably supports file paths, configuration files and printing, to name a few classes.
For many lightweight applications, these may not be appropriate. But as your application increases in functionality, wxWindows can keep up with it.
Mind you, this is probably not appropriate for embedded applications.
Well, you don't have to use C++. There are bindings to Python, Perl, Basic, Lua, JavaScript and Eiffel.
> AFAIK, wxWindows is a very old toolkit,
> created before 1995.
Except that it was totally rewritten with the release of wxWindows 2 (started around '98), and it's undergoing constant revision and updating.
wxEmbedded is a spinoff of wxUniversal, a project underwritten by SciTech to create a portable set of widgets that can be used on a minimal windowing system. One of the results of this is wxEmbedded; another is wxX11, which should replaced wxMotif, which has been languishing.
It should also (in theory) make it fairly easy to port wxWindows to new platforms, since wxUniversal can be used until native bindings are written. Basically, all the goodness of Qt without MOC, licensing issues, etc.
Not to complain about Qt, of course - KDE pretty much proves how great a library Qt is.
But wxWindows fits the bill for us penniless cross-platform developers.