We had a really unpleasant rail disaster in the UK a while ago. One of the survivors, who was horrifically burned, made a point of harassing the government over safety measures and so on.
Fast forward a little way and a leaked memo appeared, asking party machinery (just the Labour party here) to get details on her, and see if she was working with the opposition in order to discredit her.
This is the nub of it, a lot of people have stuff to hide. It might not even be anythign that is a crime, but purely something that you are ashamed of, or might affect how other people see you (which, in this day and age, can be pretty much anything). It basically is a useful tool to settle personal scores, and to stop people from exercising their rights to loudly question their political masters.
Now, I'm not saying this WILL occur, but it certainly can. They can neuter your ability to effectively say anything about the government.
I used to think like you, but now I disagree - malloc problems in complex applications aren't always simple. If you want massive code reuse you end up unnecessarily copying, or generally doing large amounts of allocation/deallocation. It's pretty hideous.
Some of the problems can be fixed by massive redesign, but half of the time this simply makes the application harder to understand.
D'oh, my fault for lack of reading the original better. Surely this simply comes down to a case of making sure you don't put the same information more than once? So bold text becomes a specific type of text, and is bracketed as such - and you simply write code that makes sure you don't define the same thing six hundred times. Or am I way off base here? Probably am. Still, it doesn't sound impossible to me.
Why? This is a file format. The word processor will handle it all for you.
I don't think this is going to be like HTML when you expect to write it yourself. I imagine this will look more like the OpenOffice file format where you have multiple XML files inside a ZIP file (along with graphics and other multimedia stored inside the zip)
I don't care so much about the porn, but I don't like what this does. A lot of people are ashamed of things. They might not want their parents to know that they are visiting sites that disagree with biblical fundamentalism, they might be chatting to people who they don't usually associate with.
What bothers me is that in some communities this won't be a "I have a problem with porn, please monitor it for me", it will become socially mandatory, and those that avoid it will be shunned and thought of having something to hide.
Nice idea for porn viewers anonymous. But in widespread use I don't like the idea
We haven't signed the schengen treaty - French people still have to have passports - the problem that you have is with the geneva convention. Dumping that would work really well, I'm sure.
(More realistically, the problem is with the attitude of the courts system, but that's a whole long discussion. The economist has an article about it this week)
They list loads of games that are coming out, yet I'm willing to offload £200 on an Xbox *SOLELY* for Toejam & Earl 3. For me, it is the killer game.
But hey, I own a Gamecube and a Playstation 2 already so...... (I honestly think you can't just buy one platform anymore - you have to have all of them. Damned exclusives)
Does nobody miss the days of the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad, where games were frequently available on every platform, despite being originally written in assembler! Where if you can find a game for one, you could find it for another? Exclusives are very irritating.
If you put loops into the language, does this present a nice denial of service approach?
Would there be a limit on how much code you could execute at once?
It sounds like it could be potentially flawed otherwise, and yes, I know there are a number of flaws in X anyway (in terms of nasty things you can do) if you have a client connected to a server
Well, I kinda agree. I'm too lazy to hunt down my DVD player for my newly "cleaned" Windows partition, so I've been watching Buffy season 3 with a combination of xine (to marvel at the menus) and vlc to actually watch the damn things.
Yesterday, being pissed off with my inability to watch the Prisoner I went bleeding edge.
CVS copy of xine-lib xine-ui xine-dvdnav libdvdnav
I then got libdvdread 0.9.3 and libdvdcss 1.2.0 - both of which can be found off freshmeat. I had libdvdread 0.9.2 (which is what is in Debian unstable), but it doesn't like the far less buggy version of libdvdcss - so it's well worth "rolling your own" - I didn't have any compilation problems. If you do though, I'd recommend using stow - it rocks.
I didn't have time to test all my DVDs, but it plays a fair number of them. Buffy Season 1 Disc 2 (American release) Buffy Season 3 Disc 2 (British release) Simpsons Season 1 Disc 3 (British release) South Park (Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls et al - American release)
It's not perfect - I can crash xine now, but it's a lot closer than it ever has been.
It really is nice getting menus and everything on an opensource Linux player when I have the source code to everything from the css system to dvdread in my home directory;>
Xine isn't ready for prime time - if you try hard enough you can still break it - it doesn't have the error recovery it needs and it's still too flakey, but it's closer than it's been in the last 2 years or so.
I can't delete this crap. I'm certain I've lost recording space because of it (it might just now have been reserved, but that's not good enough).
That however, is not what bothers me. What bothers is me most is that I didn't expect this sort of crap from them. I thought that my £10 a month odd would be enough.
While at the moment I don't have a choice, soon I will have. I can either get Sky+, or continue with a TiVo. With Sky+ I can watch something live while taping something else. I get value for my £10. I however, hate Sky, and I certainly wouldn't have put this crap past them. It dissapoints me that TiVo have dropped to this level. Sky+ has teething troubles, but I paid my £10 a month to TiVo happily with a crapload of problems, having to wait for fucking ever to get Version 2 software which had decent features such as padding, and season pass prioritisation. Sky+ will get better and they will paste TiVo unless they offer a good service, and this isn't it.
Do I mind it taping this stuff and giving it priority? No. But I want to be able to delete it. I'm never going to watch this show. Nobody else is going to watch it. It being there for 5 more days is just going to piss me off.
It'd be great if somebody can tell me when the next one is so that I can force something else to be recorded when it was on.
Possibly "Yes, Prime Minister" (based on the TV show of the same name). Just a guess. Can't think of anything else
Re:For windows. Any one know of apps for Linux?
on
VoIP for the Masses!
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· Score: 2
ummmmm, speak freely for Linux perchance?
There should be a link on said slashdotted page, otherwise you can just apt-get "speak-freely" and it'll work. Unfortunately it's slightly less user-friendly than it is under Windows (lots of command line apps), but it seems to work as well for me.
Nvidia won't (at least they wouldn't when I had a nvidia card, before I ditched them and went to ATI) allow redistribution. They do provide rpms etc - but no debs.
I'm sure nvidia could make you have to install all sorts of stuff under Windows and type all sorts of crud, but it doesn't have to be done this way.
(Note, Linux is not as crippled as you make out, it's just that people don't make the best possible usage of systems such as apt-get and it's "competitors". These are in fact, much nicer - as the driver vendor would have a script (you'd have to come up with some sort of delivery system, but that wouldn't be too complicated - this could add a single line to a resource such as/etc/apt/sources.list - and then your drivers could be upgraded in much the same way as Windows upgrades Messenger and other apps)
They're very interlinked. The CSS contracts require region-protection (at least I believe it's the contracts). If our politicians actually either had a clue, or cared about the people they claim to represent rather than getting lots of nice benefits from businesses then they could ammend the appropriate laws *very* easily to eliminate region encoding - simply by stating that a copy protection system is only protected by the state if that is the sole purpose of its usage and that it is contracted out on that arrangement.
Of course, politicians in general (including those in the UK) have all been happily bought up, or are just too stupid to actually look at the issues involved.
There are a stack of emulators for PocketPC at least. You can get Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance (although it's not particularly usable on current systems), Megadrive, SNES, Game Gear, Master System emulators, as well as a stack of other platforms. The SNES and Megadrive ones aren't really that usable on current platforms, but they might be usable for slower games.
Scummvm has been ported - so that you can play old games from Zak McCracken (although I don't think Arisme's build currently has any support for it), up to Full Throttle, and soon Monkey Island 3.
I spend most of my time now playing games such as Dizzy on the Spectrum - there's a very nice emulator called PocketClive - which seems more than playable for old games such as these. For the Palm I haven't seen that much - I was hoping that somebody would write a Spectrum emulator (was even considering it when I had that elusive thing known as free time), but as of yet, it appears the PocketPC is where it's at.
Don't forget games such as Snails - which is a nice "new" game, based upon Worms and that sort of program. it's fun to play and quite cheap. Also the people are very pleasant.
There's lots of discussion of this sort of thing on PocketMatrix (www.pocketmatrix.com) and they have forums which are very well peopled. If you want to find other games to play, then PocketGamer (www.pocketgamer.org) is also very good.
I think that the interesting time is going to come when the new PDAs come out with the higher end ARMs - they should be capable of emulating everything up to the SNES at a decent framerate, although this might have an unfortunate effect on the original games market for PDAs. Still, we'll have to see.
Obfuscated source code is not GPLable.....
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2, Redundant
This doesn't seem too hard, although the part is limited. To quote from the GPL
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
In this case - obfuscated code is not the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it - your company isn't going to be making the modifications to the obfuscated version - they're going to use an internal version and make modifications to that instead. In which case they would be in violation of the GPL. A bit of an arse to litigate I would guess.
Until of course, a couple of years later, our politicians are given some free flights and some quality time with Britney and they pass even worse laws.
Or did you think our politicians were not as corrupt.... It's a tragic shame that we didn't keep the death penalty just for politicians who perform "favours".
Over here, it means that we get the right to control who gets access to data about us, and we get the right to view data held upon us.
So, for example, it is a requirement to ask me if they want to sell my details to spam me (although of course, they usually try and hide it), and that, if say, the government, or my doctor, or my employer has information on me, for a small fee (the cost of looking up the information), I can demand access to it.
I live in Ealing (London) where some wankers decided to try and blow up our local underground station. So they got them on security camera! Except of course, you can't make them out. Any person with half a brain isn't exactly going to be caught on security cameras.
I just wonder how useful the laws we've brought in have actually "helped", and how many people they've hindered. Of course, I somehow doubt we'll get any real figures....
Slashdot Mirror
We had a really unpleasant rail disaster in the UK a while ago. One of the survivors, who was horrifically burned, made a point of harassing the government over safety measures and so on.
Fast forward a little way and a leaked memo appeared, asking party machinery (just the Labour party here) to get details on her, and see if she was working with the opposition in order to discredit her.
This is the nub of it, a lot of people have stuff to hide. It might not even be anythign that is a crime, but purely something that you are ashamed of, or might affect how other people see you (which, in this day and age, can be pretty much anything). It basically is a useful tool to settle personal scores, and to stop people from exercising their rights to loudly question their political masters.
Now, I'm not saying this WILL occur, but it certainly can. They can neuter your ability to effectively say anything about the government.
And that's not even going all the way.
I used to think like you, but now I disagree - malloc problems in complex applications aren't always simple. If you want massive code reuse you end up unnecessarily copying, or generally doing large amounts of allocation/deallocation. It's pretty hideous.
Some of the problems can be fixed by massive redesign, but half of the time this simply makes the application harder to understand.
D'oh, my fault for lack of reading the original better. Surely this simply comes down to a case of making sure you don't put the same information more than once? So bold text becomes a specific type of text, and is bracketed as such - and you simply write code that makes sure you don't define the same thing six hundred times. Or am I way off base here? Probably am. Still, it doesn't sound impossible to me.
Why? This is a file format. The word processor will handle it all for you.
I don't think this is going to be like HTML when you expect to write it yourself. I imagine this will look more like the OpenOffice file format where you have multiple XML files inside a ZIP file (along with graphics and other multimedia stored inside the zip)
I don't care so much about the porn, but I don't like what this does. A lot of people are ashamed of things. They might not want their parents to know that they are visiting sites that disagree with biblical fundamentalism, they might be chatting to people who they don't usually associate with.
What bothers me is that in some communities this won't be a "I have a problem with porn, please monitor it for me", it will become socially mandatory, and those that avoid it will be shunned and thought of having something to hide.
Nice idea for porn viewers anonymous. But in widespread use I don't like the idea
We haven't signed the schengen treaty - French people still have to have passports - the problem that you have is with the geneva convention. Dumping that would work really well, I'm sure.
(More realistically, the problem is with the attitude of the courts system, but that's a whole long discussion. The economist has an article about it this week)
Doesn't seem that way. Sky+ doesn't seem anything like a TIVO. It appears to me that Sky care too much about their crummy interface.
(my mum has Sky, I have a TiVo)
YM "I might not be able to buy the games that I want"
Try obtaining a PAL Playstation version of Chrono Trigger sometime. Or Chrono Cross. Or Legend of Mana.
In the article it points out that you will still be able to use your domain even if you are commercial.
.org names."
" While the domain will be marketed to nonprofits, others will not be prohibited from registering
HTH
They list loads of games that are coming out, yet I'm willing to offload £200 on an Xbox *SOLELY* for Toejam & Earl 3. For me, it is the killer game.
But hey, I own a Gamecube and a Playstation 2 already so...... (I honestly think you can't just buy one platform anymore - you have to have all of them. Damned exclusives)
Does nobody miss the days of the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad, where games were frequently available on every platform, despite being originally written in assembler! Where if you can find a game for one, you could find it for another? Exclusives are very irritating.
Much though I hate to point this out, VB has (had?) this. - with the 'With' statement.
.blah = True .colour = Purple .......
Now it's been like, 3 years since I coded VB, but I vaguely remember it being something like
With Something.SomethingElse.Thingy.Blah
End With
I miss it in Java. It seems nice for those cases when you need to do lots of property setting. Might be able to do it in Mozart?
If you put loops into the language, does this present a nice denial of service approach?
Would there be a limit on how much code you could execute at once?
It sounds like it could be potentially flawed otherwise, and yes, I know there are a number of flaws in X anyway (in terms of nasty things you can do) if you have a client connected to a server
Well, I kinda agree. I'm too lazy to hunt down my DVD player for my newly "cleaned" Windows partition, so I've been watching Buffy season 3 with a combination of xine (to marvel at the menus) and vlc to actually watch the damn things.
;>
Yesterday, being pissed off with my inability to watch the Prisoner I went bleeding edge.
CVS copy of
xine-lib
xine-ui
xine-dvdnav
libdvdnav
I then got libdvdread 0.9.3 and libdvdcss 1.2.0 - both of which can be found off freshmeat. I had libdvdread 0.9.2 (which is what is in Debian unstable), but it doesn't like the far less buggy version of libdvdcss - so it's well worth "rolling your own" - I didn't have any compilation problems. If you do though, I'd recommend using stow - it rocks.
I didn't have time to test all my DVDs, but it plays a fair number of them.
Buffy Season 1 Disc 2 (American release)
Buffy Season 3 Disc 2 (British release)
Simpsons Season 1 Disc 3 (British release)
South Park (Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls et al - American release)
It's not perfect - I can crash xine now, but it's a lot closer than it ever has been.
It really is nice getting menus and everything on an opensource Linux player when I have the source code to everything from the css system to dvdread in my home directory
Xine isn't ready for prime time - if you try hard enough you can still break it - it doesn't have the error recovery it needs and it's still too flakey, but it's closer than it's been in the last 2 years or so.
I'm a UK TiVo owner.
I can't delete this crap. I'm certain I've lost recording space because of it (it might just now have been reserved, but that's not good enough).
That however, is not what bothers me. What bothers is me most is that I didn't expect this sort of crap from them. I thought that my £10 a month odd would be enough.
While at the moment I don't have a choice, soon I will have. I can either get Sky+, or continue with a TiVo. With Sky+ I can watch something live while taping something else. I get value for my £10. I however, hate Sky, and I certainly wouldn't have put this crap past them. It dissapoints me that TiVo have dropped to this level. Sky+ has teething troubles, but I paid my £10 a month to TiVo happily with a crapload of problems, having to wait for fucking ever to get Version 2 software which had decent features such as padding, and season pass prioritisation. Sky+ will get better and they will paste TiVo unless they offer a good service, and this isn't it.
Do I mind it taping this stuff and giving it priority? No. But I want to be able to delete it. I'm never going to watch this show. Nobody else is going to watch it. It being there for 5 more days is just going to piss me off.
It'd be great if somebody can tell me when the next one is so that I can force something else to be recorded when it was on.
Possibly "Yes, Prime Minister" (based on the TV show of the same name). Just a guess. Can't think of anything else
ummmmm, speak freely for Linux perchance?
There should be a link on said slashdotted page, otherwise you can just apt-get "speak-freely" and it'll work. Unfortunately it's slightly less user-friendly than it is under Windows (lots of command line apps), but it seems to work as well for me.
Nvidia won't (at least they wouldn't when I had a nvidia card, before I ditched them and went to ATI) allow redistribution. They do provide rpms etc - but no debs.
I'm sure nvidia could make you have to install all sorts of stuff under Windows and type all sorts of crud, but it doesn't have to be done this way.
As opposed to now, where I can install a driver by *gasp* clicking on it and selecting "install"
/etc/apt/sources.list - and then your drivers could be upgraded in much the same way as Windows upgrades Messenger and other apps)
I'm missing something here..... (apt-get install xserver)
(Note, Linux is not as crippled as you make out, it's just that people don't make the best possible usage of systems such as apt-get and it's "competitors". These are in fact, much nicer - as the driver vendor would have a script (you'd have to come up with some sort of delivery system, but that wouldn't be too complicated - this could add a single line to a resource such as
They're very interlinked. The CSS contracts require region-protection (at least I believe it's the contracts). If our politicians actually either had a clue, or cared about the people they claim to represent rather than getting lots of nice benefits from businesses then they could ammend the appropriate laws *very* easily to eliminate region encoding - simply by stating that a copy protection system is only protected by the state if that is the sole purpose of its usage and that it is contracted out on that arrangement.
Of course, politicians in general (including those in the UK) have all been happily bought up, or are just too stupid to actually look at the issues involved.
There are a stack of emulators for PocketPC at least. You can get Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance (although it's not particularly usable on current systems), Megadrive, SNES, Game Gear, Master System emulators, as well as a stack of other platforms. The SNES and Megadrive ones aren't really that usable on current platforms, but they might be usable for slower games.
Scummvm has been ported - so that you can play old games from Zak McCracken (although I don't think Arisme's build currently has any support for it), up to Full Throttle, and soon Monkey Island 3.
I spend most of my time now playing games such as Dizzy on the Spectrum - there's a very nice emulator called PocketClive - which seems more than playable for old games such as these. For the Palm I haven't seen that much - I was hoping that somebody would write a Spectrum emulator (was even considering it when I had that elusive thing known as free time), but as of yet, it appears the PocketPC is where it's at.
Don't forget games such as Snails - which is a nice "new" game, based upon Worms and that sort of program. it's fun to play and quite cheap. Also the people are very pleasant.
There's lots of discussion of this sort of thing on PocketMatrix (www.pocketmatrix.com) and they have forums which are very well peopled. If you want to find other games to play, then PocketGamer (www.pocketgamer.org) is also very good.
I think that the interesting time is going to come when the new PDAs come out with the higher end ARMs - they should be capable of emulating everything up to the SNES at a decent framerate, although this might have an unfortunate effect on the original games market for PDAs. Still, we'll have to see.
This doesn't seem too hard, although the part is limited. To quote from the GPL
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
In this case - obfuscated code is not the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it - your company isn't going to be making the modifications to the obfuscated version - they're going to use an internal version and make modifications to that instead. In which case they would be in violation of the GPL. A bit of an arse to litigate I would guess.
Until of course, a couple of years later, our politicians are given some free flights and some quality time with Britney and they pass even worse laws.
Or did you think our politicians were not as corrupt.... It's a tragic shame that we didn't keep the death penalty just for politicians who perform "favours".
Is this about the Data Protection Act?
Over here, it means that we get the right to control who gets access to data about us, and we get the right to view data held upon us.
So, for example, it is a requirement to ask me if they want to sell my details to spam me (although of course, they usually try and hide it), and that, if say, the government, or my doctor, or my employer has information on me, for a small fee (the cost of looking up the information), I can demand access to it.
Sounds like a good law to me.
I live in Ealing (London) where some wankers decided to try and blow up our local underground station. So they got them on security camera! Except of course, you can't make them out. Any person with half a brain isn't exactly going to be caught on security cameras.
I just wonder how useful the laws we've brought in have actually "helped", and how many people they've hindered. Of course, I somehow doubt we'll get any real figures....
I seem to remember reading that the United States and Britain have a "no-spying" clause.
Mind you, given how far Tony Blair is up Dubya's arse, I don't think they'd need to spy to get all they need to know