Better: Get yourself a small-ish room. Fill the room with 10 workstations and a projector. You work on a computer on the projector -- probably with RDP/VNC access to the other machines in the room, so that in most cases, if a user has a problem, you can take over their computer and demonstrate the solution to the entire room.
Basically, do what you would do in your video, but with one group, once a week, and actually be there for it. Should only take 30-45 mins, right? Figure it might take an hour or two, but basically, the reason you're doing this live (instead of a Flash video) is so that you get to demonstrate on a real machine (and they can try it on one as well), and you get to answer any questions that they have, immediately, in front of the group, without having to go one-on-one with every single one (and probably answer the same questions).
Also, talk to HR and see if you can get the authority to fire people for technical incompetence, or at least deny them access to your network. Basically, if you have to spend more than an hour or so educating them, they need to come back when they've learned how to click a mouse -- or they're too stupid to use a computer. Personally, I think I could tutor just about anyone to use a computer as well as I can, but there's only so much time you can invest in someone before it makes sense to hire someone else instead -- if someone requires more than an hour of training in basic stuff like logging on and MS Word, they should go find another way to educate themselves, then try again -- it shouldn't be your job, any more than it should be accounting's job to teach people basic addition.
I don't mean actually change the vote so these assclowns don't keep getting elected. I mean, bring your cracking kit (including a key and a printout of the screenshot of their website), and if you find one of these machines in your booth, walk out and complain to election officials. Don't just demand that you, yourself, be allowed to vote with something else -- demand that the machine be removed, and tell them that you are prepared to demonstrate just how insecure it is.
Then, if they don't listen to you, but still don't arrest you or steal your kit, go back into the booth and rig it so that 100% of the votes will go to whoever you want -- or 200%, if you can do that. The point, again, is not to make your guy win, but to force them to let everyone vote again, without the machines. (Of course, they could force everyone to re-vote on the same machines, but you just do the same trick again, and give the media an anonymous tip that you've rigged the election.)
We're at the point now of "I can't fucking believe this isn't front page news every goddamn day." In other words, this particular corruption is at the point where it's blindingly obvious enough that we should be able to bring it to the news, and eventually to "we the people" -- so that, eventually, no one in their right mind will allow their vote to be counted by a Diebold machine. Hopefully, this mistrust will extend to their ATM machines (which actually aren't nearly as bad), so that eventually, Diebold will have to die -- it's not that they can't do a good job, it's just that the company is so obviously run by corrupt fuckers -- or morons, but ultimately, there's not enough of a difference to matter here.
The emulator I tried for PS1 games did have graphical glitches -- which really bugged me in FF7 and FF8 cinematics -- but it also did use OpenGL for some of the graphics. Not all -- and not all of them could go high-res anyway, other than anti-aliasing (which is the name of the "fancy algorithm" you were talking about) -- consider FMV cutscenes, hand-painted backgrounds/skyboxes, and so on.
And for the most part, they won't be able to improve the models themselves. I'd do very, very aggressive Level-of-Detail, but that only makes sense because I'd do PC games -- about the only thing they really could improve directly there is round surfaces where they actually used, say, OpenGL's implementation of that, and that's assuming OpenGL -- which I don't think was on the PS1.
I'm betting it can run some PS2 games in high-res, though, or at least get rid of some of the lag that creeps through when you push a console... maybe... but if it's at all like the PS1, I remember that not all PS1 games could deal with a faster CPU -- remember, games can make assumptions about the clock speed and native resolution of a console, and they have access to a lot of the hardware. Even though you can emulate a memory card on a hard disk, the virtual memory card is likely at least as slow as a real one, just so you don't confuse the game.
One thing I should mention, some people do improve their games by making them easier -- or at least consistent in their difficulty. Jak & Daxter was mostly easy, partly because you could skip most of the game, by choosing easier alternatives -- it's a pretty open game; each area needs x number of Power Cells, and there are probably 2x or 3x quests you can do in that area which give you a Power Cell. But some parts were hard; for instance, the final boss is very difficult, and since he's a boss, you have to fight him anyway.
The sequel, Jak II, is the kind of thing you'd hate. Responding to what they thought gamers wanted, they made it more linear, gave it more of a plot, and made it MUCH harder, even MUCH darker of a theme. Worse, it was inconsistently hard -- you'd get relatively easy missions, then suddenly something impossibly hard, or things that were hard in different ways.
The final game in the trilogy, Jak 3, wasn't really any easier, but it had a much gentler progression -- you'd be getting the practice you need, and still progressing, as it got steadily harder, but it wouldn't really feel that much harder, because you'd be better by then.
I imagine you'd still give up on Jak 3, but I imagine it'd be much, much better for you. So, I'd suggest that it might be a bit of an overreaction for you to just give up on a developer because of that. One solution might be to simply have some good friends -- maybe a significant other, but in any case, someone who lives physically close to you -- who play games, so you can go to their place and play their games, so you can get an idea of which ones you might buy for yourself. Or, buy games and trade them -- if you buy a game you don't like, trade it with a friend for one you do.
In any case, why limit yourself to three difficulty levels? I have a friend who typically buys a game, opens it up, puts it on "hard", and finishes it in a day or two -- saving him money, too, as he just rents them, rather than buying them. My brother will play a level over and over again, till he finally beats it -- no matter how hard it is, he just memorizes a way through it. And there's you -- from what you're telling me, you're just lazy enough that most games should have cheats, although I'd much rather have there be an "easy" enough mode that you don't need them.
Most games that seem to have this figured out actually have four difficulty levels, at least. Quake 3 has five:
I can win
Bring it on
Hurt me plenty
Hardcore
Nightmare
Halo (1 and 2) has four:
Easy
Normal
Heroic
Legendary
And Duke Nukem 3D also has four:
Piece of cake
Let's rock
Come get some
Damn, I'm good
I think what you're really looking for, though, is games that don't have any difficulty settings -- but manage to be interesting enough for you, and easy enough for me. Pretty much any Zelda falls under this category -- if it ever gets too hard, you can just look up the solution. Ocarina of Time was a masterpiece. Or Final Fantasy games -- Final Fantasy X pretty much never requires coordination, only enough patience to cut through to the next save point. If you ever get stuck, you can run around a save point to gain experience -- it may be tedious, but it's not hard.
In general, these kinds of skills are transferable, too. I'm decent at an FPS -- pretty much _any_ FPS. I haven't played all of them, but they aren't different enough that it's actually hard to learn a new one. The coordination I get from playing a game on "Normal" (instead of "Easy" or "Godmode" all the time) -- it's still fun every step of the "practice", but I can pick up wildly different kinds of games relatively easily.
One final note: Keep in mind that the point of standard deviation here is that you're not the market, and my mother's not the market. The market generally can handle t
You could play Dune 2, in which you must give every single unit an order. So: Click the troop, click where you want him to go. Rinse and repeat for however many you have. I think they at least attack automatically...
Or, you could play Starcraft. Click+drag to select a squad -- up to 12 units, where some units (dropships, overlords) can carry other units inside them. Click where you want them to go, watch them attack anything they find (or run, depending on what mode you have them set to).
Or, you could play Natural Selection. Drop some things, click a guy, order him to go build them. Or, most of the time, you don't even have to do that -- just tell him over voice chat what you want him to do, if he's not doing it already -- you can play Natural Selection as an FPS or be the Commander and play it as an RTS, and the commander is ordering around other, real human players, who think it's an FPS.
Technically, yes, it takes away from the interactivity. But you still have to be there, still thinking of a strategy and where to go next, and it does take away the tedium. It has the computer doing exactly what you know you'd be doing anyway.
I'm not saying I want aimbots in an FPS -- after all, the whole point of an FPS is your reflexes and accuracy. I am saying, however, that clicking one troop at a time (in Dune) is not really a skill, certainly not the kind that makes the game fun. Zergling rushes are fun, but they'd be absolute hell in Dune.
So, similarly -- I don't actually mind, say, Final Fantasy X, where the game waits for you to choose what to do for every single player's move. But let's face it, the whole point of the interactivity is not tapping X to have Auron attack when you know he's going to attack every turn unless something different happens. The whole point of any of the gameplay is for you to make decisions like figuring out that a zombie boss can be killed with a couple of Pheonix Downs -- the bot won't do that for you -- or deciding whether to move in, or when to use your salvos of missiles.
As you say yourself:
The greatness of video games is in the greatness of decision making
Either you're a thinker, or you're not a thinker. This isn't something for a school to teach.
Yes, that's the attitude my school took. First Computer Science course, first day, they explain Hello World... in Java. In DETAIL.
Which means we got a lovely lesson on classes, methods, strings, system libraries, static methods... On the first damned day.
After that, it was pretty much a crawl, but the few lectures I went to were absolutely worthless. This woman knew her stuff... sort of... but she didn't have a clue how to teach a real beginner. Which was fine with me -- I knew what I was doing, looked it up online, and generally taught myself, did the labs from my dorm over the school network, and got a decent grade without setting foot in the classroom after the first couple of weeks.
And yet, the few times that I did show up in the lab -- mostly as my job as a lab monitor -- I did find people who had absolutely no clue. I helped them -- didn't do their work for them, but helped them figure it out -- and I think, despite having the advantage of actually working one-on-one, I think I did a better job than the teacher.
However, high school was completely different.
In high school, I was constantly challenged to think, and to communicate, and debate. Class of 25 boys (yes, private school, fucking HATED the gender segregation) -- take Physics. Teacher would come in with a topic -- say, Black Holes -- and we'd have a class discussion on it. Those two words were probably all that was written in his curriculum, if anything, but he knew what he was doing -- we'd talk about black hole evaporation, the big crunch, big bang theory, the nature of consciousness (Matrix discussions), all kinds of things.
There were less than 5 guys in that class, if any, who didn't participate enough to get what was going on.
And it's true, if you can't think, this won't help. But most people are capable of being a thinker, and while it may not be the job of college, school can certainly nurture that -- or ignore it (resulting in most of the morons in software development today), or filter out those who haven't practiced thinking, or even stifle any kind of thinking.
You could say it's something that should be done in high school, or by parents... whatever. It's part of education, and if I had anything to say about it, every school would support it. Hell, my philosophy courses in college were all about that...
Which brings me to a completely irrelevant, but very important point. CS students should be able to choose between a Calculus prereq and Philosophy -- right now Philosophy is seen as entirely unrelated, but I'd argue that the kind of thinking it teaches is much more relevant than math.
Yes, but you're still incurring context switches and network latency, which I imagine adds up to more than the FUSE overhead.
Consider NFS. With NFS, you have exactly the number of context switches you would on a local FS -- you go app -> kernel -> remote kernel -> kernel -> app. The kernel is doing all the network stuff, all the filesystem stuff, and all the NFS stuff.
But definitely once you get into caching -- I know you're putting that off, and I'd also encourage you to look at the fscache/cachefs... whatever they're calling it, there are people working on a solution for caching NFS stuff. What I'd really like to see is something like the FUSE caches that exist now, but in kernel space -- to, say, mount/nfs onto/cached, and have it all cached as local files within/cached, the way InterMezzo was supposed to work -- letting me do things like use Reiser4 for a local cache, if I'm so inclined.
Same here, with the added complication that I run multiple operating systems. That's why I started netfs. Unfortunately, developing the kernel modules was too high a barrier for me.
If you can make it work well with one OS, you're likely to find people to help you port. I'd be all for portability if it weren't for what I see as potentially massive performance issues...
I'm working on my own programming language (Mana), which is meant to be (1) fit for interactive use; specifically, as a shell, and (2) be suitable for large projects as well.
Those are two of my three (or is it four now?) requirements from a language, before starting my own ambitious projects.
Important features are: simple and convenient syntax, macros,
Good... For my part, I want it to be something like Perl, and especially like Perl6 and Ruby, in that large chunks of the language can be written in or modified by the same language. I'm guessing macros will help with that...
strongly typed
Good for performance, I think. I'd suggest that strongly typed doesn't mean we can't do the kind of implicit typecasts everyone likes -- and, for that matter, I don't see dynamically-typed languages having their dynamic typing taken advantage of.
compiles to native code
I like bytecode. Partly because I occasionally hear of benchmarks where a VM outperforms native code -- it can do optimizations at runtime that aren't really possible at compile time; for instance, pick one of two possible implementations based on which performs best under the current workload.
But mostly, I like bytecode because I want my software to be portable at that level. One of my ambitious projects may be proprietary, or at least encourage proprietary development, and languages like Java kind of force people to be cross-platform without having to really think about it. And the ambition of my project is such that I'd want 90% of office-like apps to be written in it, making the business world no longer platform-dependent.
There are some reasons I think this will work, but this may be getting beyond what I want to talk to on Slashdot. I'm partly paranoid of my ideas being stolen, partly paranoid of being laughed at, but it would also be nice to have this in email or something else. My Jabber ID is the same as my email address, if you want to talk.
In any case, an intermediate representation (bytecode) should be possible to compile down to machine code. In fact, gcj does just that for Java.
automatic resource reclamation (memory, but also file handles and whatever else one implements)
In this case, I think it'd be nice to have this be possible to fine-tune for a particular app. To have everything managed, but have the app (or object, or library) be able to force reclamation, at least.
Then, the filesystem would be extended with permissions (done right; not based on uids like in NFS) and write support.
Hmm. How does that look? I can see some sort of mapping local uids to remote uids, or more advanced schemes like ACLs, but other than that...
Eventually, it's on to replication and perhaps distribution.
I'm guessing that means a file can be stored on more than one machine, and it will be cached on-disk locally? Basically, like coda, but open?
Sounds good!
I doubt that matters when you're interacting over the network anyway.
LANs are pretty fast, and then there's gigabit. With aggressive caching, you should be able to make really nice "diskless" machines, where you have a box with 20 gigs or so of disk space, but which boots and runs from the network (from a fileserver or a cluster of fileservers), using that only as a local cache -- the administrative benefits of diskless combined with the performance characteristics of local installation.
Unfortunately, I've never found a network FS that I like for that purpose, and the few that were close enough to try, I could never get to work.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil, yada yada.
True enough, to a point. I guess I always want to make sure that I'm optimized enough in the beginning, so I wouldn't have to rewrite the whole entire app for performance considerations. For instance, I'd hate to, say, write a game in Perl, then have to rewrite the whole thing in C++ just for the performance.
Then, too, I want more out of my environment (language, tools, OS) than anything provides right now, which means I'd better get started!
You mean like OpenID, if it can ever get off the ground?
That's what I'd really like to see. Single sign on, but it's your single sign on... There is a plan for simple profile exchange, too, but it doesn't have nearly the amount of information you'd want on, say, a MySpace profile. Still, that's how I'd do it -- then my friends could use MySpace, Facebook, orkut, or whatever, and see my profile there, when it's actually hosted on my own server.
But it's only just becoming feasable for single sign on -- it's a long way from actually replacing social networking. Still...
When? It's already happened. I currently satisfy myself with free radio, and with the services online that do give un-DRM'd music. And not for free, I don't know where in your twisted little corporate mind "$15/month" becomes "free music!!!!11one"
are you going to push for legislation demanding they publish their music without DRM?
Way to make a strawman. I just searched my own post to make sure, and in fact, I said absolutely nothing about "government", "legal", "legit", "law", or "legislation". Go ahead -- you say you're using Firefox, go read my post, hit your slash key, and search for those words.
No, let them use DRM, I'll just boycott it. As far as legislation, I'd be perfectly happy if we had no legislation about DRM. Unfortunately, we have pro-DRM legislation -- it's called the DMCA.
this is reality - major software companies generally don't publish software in a way that can (easily) be ripped off any more.
Actually, yes, they do. If you only knew just how easily...
The bitch of DRM today isn't that it's hard for pirates, or even moderately sophisticated end-users who value fair use. The bitch of it is, it is a pain in the ass and the wallet for legitimate users (who don't want to have to crack things just to make them play on their early-adopter, HDCP-free, but still very good HDTV), and does nothing to stop pirates.
I'm sorry - I said something besides slash-dogma - mod me down - I'm a troll... please don't hurt me...
This is just unnecessary. If I had mod points, I'd mod you flamebait for this alone -- the rest of your post is just misinformed and stupid, which means I wouldn't waste mod points on it. You're not insightful, but until you used "slash-dogma" as an excuse not to think your response through, you weren't a troll, either.
There are specific things like flashblock, but I've even gone so far as to have Adblock block JavaScript files -- preventing me from seeing that IntelliTXT crap.
VLC 0.8.6 supports FLV out of the box, on every platform I've used it on, as it's in ffmpeg now -- I use mplayer on x86_64 Linux, and VLC on PPC OS X.
The extension claims to be from videodownloader.net, and is working just fine on both the platforms I mentioned. It used to be Windows only (because the only FLV-playing software was Windows-only), but as it's working now on my 64-bit Linux Firefox, I figure it's pretty universal.
Tell me, if Macro-Dobe is so pro-open-source, why haven't they released the SWF standard under a license that allows competing players to be developed with that spec? For that matter, since the Flash player is free anyway, why don't they give us the source code to that, and keep selling their $700 developer software?
You see, they're pro-open-source where they can simply use open source software to further their own ends -- the project you pointed to is a server -- so long as they get total, absolute control on the client side. And, for that matter, on the production side -- unless I'm misunderstanding, you still have to buy Flash (for around $700) in order to create the content, even if your server is open.
And certainly, they support any app -- open source or not -- which requires you to use Flash (and pay that $700). Frankly, they don't give a damn what you do with it, as long as you keep paying them for upgrades.
That is not even comparable to Sun releasing ALL of Java as open source. (And by the way, it's spelled Java, not JAVA.)
Now, about Flash for apps -- problem is, it's so damned slow. Maybe Java is slower, I don't know. But really, I'm ignoring any comments you make about a virtual machine, mostly because I don't want horribly intrusive banner ads to be programmable, but more relevantly, I'll refer you to the benchmark I ran. Come on, if they can't even get video playback right, how are we supposed to trust them with real apps?
You are aware that the statement "traditional video decoders can do it in a fraction of that" does in fact refer to compression, right? Compression which, I might add, gives much better quality for the same filesize?
Alright, you know what? You're on. On my 1.8 ghz amd64, running a 64-bit Firefox with nspluginwrapper, it takes about 10-20% CPU for the Amateur Musician video -- at its normal size. Now, making that run fullscreen, it's closer to 60%. I admit it's a bit out of date -- I'm using Flash 9.0.27.78 instead of 9.0.31.0, upgrading now (because it takes Gentoo awhile.) However, before I actually grab that upgrade, tell me, has anything changed?
Because out of curiosity, I downloaded the FLV with Video Downloader -- oh, and discovered that I already had it downloaded, whoops -- and played it with mplayer. At its native resolution, I barely saw mplayer on my process list (sorted by CPU usage) -- it hovered around 0.3% CPU. I tried running it fullscreen, but with true fullscreen, nothing's on top of it, so I couldn't see the process list -- instead, I just hit the "maximize" button. Same results -- if I saw mplayer at all, it was at 0.3% CPU.
Could it be that it's letting X or the kernel do a lot of its work? Well, at around 2% system (kernel) usage and less than 10% X usage -- with X also running Firefox (still open to the same video, even if it's over), gaim, bittorrent, and an assload of translucent terminal windows, it was still using many times less CPU to run it fullscreen than Flash did to run it in a tiny little YouTube panel embedded into my browser.
If you like, I can run more tests -- for one, I don't quite have the latest flash, and for another, I was running it in nspluginwrapper, so it might be slightly faster inside the browser -- but if that were true, why is the nspluginwrapper binary itself (where I assume Flash is being loaded to) the one using all that CPU? Because that's what was using 60% CPU to play fullscreen -- I wasn't measuring X or the kernel then.
Now for the anecdotal evidence: Flash 9 is better, especially on Linux, but it's still slow and jerky occasionally. Consider the wonderful flash game fl0w: no matter what you say, fl0w just isn't that complex a game, visually, compared to, say, Quake4. Yet Quake4 plays flawlessly on this machine, while fl0w occasionally lags a few frames. Or, consider that just now, I tried playing the same Amateur video one more time while I was running the update (to get the latest Flash, among other things) -- and the video lagged while I was compiling software. Now, I know I can probably fix this by setting niceness levels (process priorities), but mplayer NEVER lags due to CPU. The only place I can make mplayer lag is disk access, and then it's only a second or two until the system seems to adapt -- just as much disk activity, but no more mplayer lag.
So, in short, it's not the compression, it's the fact that Adobe's software is just that fucking bad that it's 5-20 times less efficient than mplayer. You're free to test it on your own -- maybe it's the plugin wrapper I used? Maybe it would be much better with a 32-bit Firefox? But then, I'm not the only one complaining.
And by the way, consider that most games include some form of "vector animation", and most of them run much, much faster on my box than Flash does -- even though the Linux flash has always been slower than Windows, even Windows flash gets slower when you try to display even moderately complex vector animations at a full 1600x1200.
Oh, if there's any doubt in your mind, I just ran a couple more tests to be sure. Elephant's Dream, the HD version -- wider than my screen, so I didn't run it fullscreen, probably 1080p -- around 30-35% CPU usage, maybe another 8% from X. And yes, it's compressed.
Finally grabbed one of the HD demos from Apple's website. 720p, the "Toby Mac - Gone" music video. Lots of TV static, split screens (completely different scene on the left half of t
Care to share your ideas on this netfs project of yours? I was planning something similar...
But more seriously, I'd pick a platform and stick to it -- and right now I like Linux, because it's so ubiquitous. If you're looking for a cross-platform way of developing filesystems, you might consider trying some sort of wrapper library in-kernel, though...
Because FUSE is slow, and FUSE will always be slow. The way I understand it, even a filesystem that creates exactly one file that simply reads "hello, world", is going to take four context switches to read that file. Consider "cat foo": cat -> kernel -> FUSE daemon -> kernel -> cat
I'd like to look more deeply into this sometime, though. I remember back when Hans Reiser was introducing Reiser4 and "plugins", and others were saying that Linux already has a filesystem plugin layer -- the Linux VFS, which all other filesystems use. So, I want to know if the Linux VFS itself is portable enough to target that instead...
Yes, that is what you can do with FUSE, but you can also do that without FUSE. All FUSE is doing is making it much, much easier.
FUSE is far from the only link from kernel space to userspace, and far from the only one where the kernel is coming to a userspace daemon with requests. For instance, udev is a system where the kernel tells the udev daemon about a new device, and the udev daemon looks in its config files and creates a device node (those files in/dev) -- this is what allows you to plug in a USB keychain device and expect it to work, or at least expect to be able to mount it right away.
Basically, the kernel is the thing behind the thing you're using right now. To over-simplify, kernel is to OS what CPU is to PC. Most kernels are monolithic, meaning it's a single program -- more specifically, a single process. Linux (the kernel) is one gigantic, multi-threaded x86 process.
Now, kernel programming is hard. Very hard. You basically have to program in C, but you get absolutely no libraries that aren't already in the kernel -- remember, most shared libraries are stored as files on a filesystem? Well, where does the filesystem get its libraries? So if you want a library in the kernel, you have to put it there -- which is pretty much like porting it.
You also have pretty much no memory protection, as far as I know. You know, things that would segfault a normal program -- or "illegal operation" on Windows? It's the kernel that handles that. Basically, this means that if you end up with a pointer to some address you didn't mean it to, you'll be able to write there -- which means anything in the kernel can pretty much scribble all over anything in RAM, which means a bug in the kernel can screw up your system in absolutely any way imaginable, including file corruption. This is why we don't like the nVidia drivers, by the way -- they're binary, a black box, and sometimes they do have serious bugs, with serious consequences, including file corruption. Think of all the complaints people have had about Flash and Java crashing Firefox (admittedly not as much lately, but still), and imagine that's your entire OS, and you start to get the picture.
So, even if your program is written entirely in C, there are many things you can't do in the kernel that you can do outside the kernel -- which means, userspace.
So writing a filesystem in FUSE means you can use libgmail, you can write your filesystem in Perl or Python, you can call librar without having to teach the Kernel to understand RAR files...
Generally, anything you can do with FUSE, you could theoretically do with something else, including doing it IN the kernel. You do it with something specialized, like, say, a specific API through which the kernel calls a program in userland which understands RAR files. You could even port librar to the kernel -- technically, you can actually do anything in the kernel, it's just harder. FUSE puts it in userspace, making it easy.
And now it's portable, too. Remember, userspace isn't all that different between Unices -- often, you can make an initial port of a simple, commandline app from Linux to OS X simply by recompiling. So all those cute little filesystems people have been writing for Linux -- including ntfs3g, but also sshfs, gmailfs, all that other stuff -- those all work on OS X now, and the only people who had to deal with the OS X kernel are the FUSE team.
The drawback is speed -- context switches. A context switch (for those who don't know) is what happens when you flip from executing userland code to kernel code, or vice versa -- and it takes a little bit of time. Everything you do is now automatically four context switches -- some app tries to access a file, so it asks the kernel to open that file. The kernel then talks to your FUSE daemon, so now the FUSE daemon is running. That's two already. Even if the daemon does nothing other than send "Hello, world!" back to the app, it has to send it back to the kernel, first... That's ignoring things like,
I'll refer you to Bug #155528, in which AbiWord 2.4.6 is released, and this bug report is filed on Nov 17th of 2006. Someone bumped the ebuild for the plugins (copied the ebuild file from 2.4.5), and it built and ran just fine, which is what I like about Gentoo -- ridiculously transparent, anyone who can do a little shell scripting can fix issues with packages.
So, you'd think this would be a simple, simple upgrade.... Nope. On Jan 1st of 2007, they bumped AbiWord to 2.4.6, but left the plugins were at 2.4.5, meaning you had a circular dependency loop -- tell Portage to update (-uDN world), and it would upgrade AbiWord to 2.4.6, because that's the latest version. Do it again, and it downgrades to 2.4.5, because that's where the plugins are.
So, one person informs them of this by adding to the report. Someone else says "abiword-plugins needs to be bumped. Thanks." I finally came in Jan 14th, and asked "Is anyone out there?" The next day, it was bumped.
Yes, it took them from Nov 17th to Jan 14th -- almost a month to do a fucking version bump. Rename two files, run one command to generate digests, commit to CVS. And they wonder why people are leaving for Debian and Ubuntu...
One wonders how they would handle a real bug. Actually, I have another one:
A bug in the jabberd init script. Opened 8/14. Found a strange hack to fix it, submitted that the same day, asking someone to tell me why my hack worked, and what the "right way" of doing it would be. 8/16, someone joined the discussion to say my hack worked, but agreed it's a hack... 9/4 something was marked dupe... 9/5 was the first patch that looked like it did the Right Thing. Few more "me too"s, few more dupes... 10/8, another update broke both my hack and the "Right Thing". 10/11, someone finally gave us a completely new init script.
Now, the final script was really the right thing to do, but one has to wonder... It's an init script. How can it be so hard to fix an init script that it takes them almost two months?!
Final exhibit, saved for last because I made a bit of an ass of myself on this one: Enigmail disappears from amd64. Now, I admit, a bug report may not be the right place to bitch about how insanely long this is taking... But still: Filed on 8/07/06, and I have a comment on 9/19 complaining about the lack of Enigmail 0.94.1, which seems to have been released on 8/12. Over a month and no upgrade in sight -- but the existing "stable" build is completely broken. On 9/29, I finally posted my success following someone else's crazy hack that somehow worked, but still no actual fix. Finally fixed on 10/19.
So, over a month with no upgrade (and a broken older version), but the new version was just as broken. Finally fixed two months after the original report. I think I can honestly say that I've only had Apple be slower at dealing with known, verified bug reports.
And I just checked... apparently, my enigmail didn't get automatically rebuilt with my last Thunderbird upgrade. Fortunately, remerging it fixed the problem... I was about to reopen that report.
If others are worse than Gentoo, it makes me think that maybe the idea of a central authority for a Linux distro is no longer workable. Sure, things like Flash will go in right away (and faster on Gentoo, because Portage is easy to work with both technically and legally for that sort of thing), but the less popular things -- like, say, Enigmail and AbiWord -- always seem to be a few months behind. Yes, months, plural -- even Microsoft is starting to look better, with their "Patch Tuesday".
Yes, the sync problem is fixed. Or, if you're like me, you can avoid the Flash and just download the video (VideoDownloader extension) and play it in VLC. In fact, I think that's in ffmpeg now, so probably VLC, mplayer, and whatever else you want.
I realize that was sarcasm, but I actually liked Duke 3D, and I still prefer it to Doom for some good old-fashioned Deathmatching. The Devastator is just fun.
No matter how late, no matter how much it sucks, I will be playing Duke Nukem Forever. The only question is whether I'll drop $50-60 on launch day (or pre-order) or whether I'll wait a few months and buy it for $20 off Steam or something.
I mean, come on -- Duke Nukem is one game that it should not be hard to make a good sequel to.
They defeated the Goa'uld -- fine. Just keep in mind, this isn't the movie. There were plenty of good Stargate episodes that didn't deal with directly fighting some specific enemy.
The same thing is true of Star Trek, by the way. If you remember, there were probably a grand total of -- what -- 3 TOS episodes involving Klingons? Same with TNG -- The Borg are a persistent enemy, perhaps, but we almost never see them.
The Stargate writers need to go back and examine what worked in the plotlines which had absolutely nothing to do with enemies, certainly not the same old boring enemy, episode after episode, season after season.
Then again, I would agree with you that a last episode is a good thing. The worst Anime that I'm still addicted to is Bleach and Naruto, and they are ongoing -- compare to Trigun, Fullmetal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, Noir, even Ghost in the Shell, which ran for one or two seasons, maybe one or two movies, each a self-contained story, a single plot with a definite ending. Naruto had the right idea, initially -- the Zabuza plotline ended -- but the Orochimaru/Sasuke thing was wearing a little thin, last I checked (around Ep 200).
So yes, I miss O'Neill, but what bugs me the most about the Ori is that we don't need to immediately replace one enemy with another, especially an enemy identical to the Goa'uld in just about every respect. Show us cool things like the superpower wristbands, learning to communicate with the Unus (sp?), Jaffa political issues, Earth political issues (maybe have a press release that isn't countered with holographic stuff?)... Even if you're going to give us another enemy, how about some really strange/creepy replicators? How about you grow some balls and actually kill off a beloved character -- should've killed O'Neill instead of retiring him to Hammond's position.
In other words, it would be really nice to see some actual creativity, or at least some variety in what you rip off from other sci-fi.
What everyone's pointing out that you're missing about iTunes is that if it was really about Piracy, wouldn't Apple and Microsoft be teaming up to provide one DRM scheme to rule them all, so you could play your DRM'd files on everything? Wouldn't they be open to letting you burn not just one CD (for a price), but any amount -- and, for that matter, if they let you burn that CD, why bother with the DRM in the first place?
No, you're kidding yourself if you think this is about anything other than lockin and market control. Think about it: If HD-DVD and Blu-Ray encryption works, you'd have to buy the same movie three times for three different devices -- once for your home theater, once for your PSP, and once for your video iPod (or iPhone). Think about movie soundtracks -- without DRM (or with DRM currently cracked on DVDs), and with a few good movies offering music-only audio tracks on the DVD, I could just rip that and play it on my iPod. And keep in mind: If you've got an iPod, and want to buy a Zune, you'll have to buy all your music all over again -- or vice versa.
And if they were really about supporting the consumer, they would allow us to do anything we want with the stuff we buy to own. Although I don't think it's necessary to have DRM on a subscription service (see below), I also think it's kind of appropriate, whereas if I buy the album, it's mine, and your control stops as soon as I rip it to FLAC and sort it onto my Linux fileserver.
I'm playing around with some services that offer $15 / month all-you-can-eat music. this wouldn't be possible without some heavy DRM.
I imagine it would, if the service itself was worthwhile. Oh, you justify it now -- calculate it out, and you could pay for the service for 15 years and not spend as much as it might cost you to buy all those CDs. But what if a year from now, the service is providing absolutely nothing new, other than forcing you to keep paying a monthly fee to keep listening to "your" music?
Won't happen, I know. But when you really think about it, if an organization (Magnatune, Mindawn, and others) can sell me an album for $5 (cheaper than iTunes!) for download as mp3, vorbis, or FLAC -- yes, FLAC, completely lossless, completely open format, no DRM at all -- if Magnatune and Mindawn are even moderately successful with that, I think a service like you're suggesting could work.
On the other hand, keep in mind that it's competing with radio -- and keep in mind that radio works even with absolutely no DRM, allowing things like RadioShark, or broadcasting completely unprotected mp3 streams over the Internet. Hell, our local radio station manages to do that as an almost entirely community-run project (no full-time employees)... But somehow they're paying for bandwidth, air time, and licensing fees. Do they know something the RIAA doesn't?
Slashdot Mirror
(Or Keynote, or OO Impress.)
Better: Get yourself a small-ish room. Fill the room with 10 workstations and a projector. You work on a computer on the projector -- probably with RDP/VNC access to the other machines in the room, so that in most cases, if a user has a problem, you can take over their computer and demonstrate the solution to the entire room.
Basically, do what you would do in your video, but with one group, once a week, and actually be there for it. Should only take 30-45 mins, right? Figure it might take an hour or two, but basically, the reason you're doing this live (instead of a Flash video) is so that you get to demonstrate on a real machine (and they can try it on one as well), and you get to answer any questions that they have, immediately, in front of the group, without having to go one-on-one with every single one (and probably answer the same questions).
Also, talk to HR and see if you can get the authority to fire people for technical incompetence, or at least deny them access to your network. Basically, if you have to spend more than an hour or so educating them, they need to come back when they've learned how to click a mouse -- or they're too stupid to use a computer. Personally, I think I could tutor just about anyone to use a computer as well as I can, but there's only so much time you can invest in someone before it makes sense to hire someone else instead -- if someone requires more than an hour of training in basic stuff like logging on and MS Word, they should go find another way to educate themselves, then try again -- it shouldn't be your job, any more than it should be accounting's job to teach people basic addition.
I'm dead serious.
I don't mean actually change the vote so these assclowns don't keep getting elected. I mean, bring your cracking kit (including a key and a printout of the screenshot of their website), and if you find one of these machines in your booth, walk out and complain to election officials. Don't just demand that you, yourself, be allowed to vote with something else -- demand that the machine be removed, and tell them that you are prepared to demonstrate just how insecure it is.
Then, if they don't listen to you, but still don't arrest you or steal your kit, go back into the booth and rig it so that 100% of the votes will go to whoever you want -- or 200%, if you can do that. The point, again, is not to make your guy win, but to force them to let everyone vote again, without the machines. (Of course, they could force everyone to re-vote on the same machines, but you just do the same trick again, and give the media an anonymous tip that you've rigged the election.)
We're at the point now of "I can't fucking believe this isn't front page news every goddamn day." In other words, this particular corruption is at the point where it's blindingly obvious enough that we should be able to bring it to the news, and eventually to "we the people" -- so that, eventually, no one in their right mind will allow their vote to be counted by a Diebold machine. Hopefully, this mistrust will extend to their ATM machines (which actually aren't nearly as bad), so that eventually, Diebold will have to die -- it's not that they can't do a good job, it's just that the company is so obviously run by corrupt fuckers -- or morons, but ultimately, there's not enough of a difference to matter here.
And it depends on the kind of salesperson. Bill Hicks said it best...
The emulator I tried for PS1 games did have graphical glitches -- which really bugged me in FF7 and FF8 cinematics -- but it also did use OpenGL for some of the graphics. Not all -- and not all of them could go high-res anyway, other than anti-aliasing (which is the name of the "fancy algorithm" you were talking about) -- consider FMV cutscenes, hand-painted backgrounds/skyboxes, and so on.
And for the most part, they won't be able to improve the models themselves. I'd do very, very aggressive Level-of-Detail, but that only makes sense because I'd do PC games -- about the only thing they really could improve directly there is round surfaces where they actually used, say, OpenGL's implementation of that, and that's assuming OpenGL -- which I don't think was on the PS1.
I'm betting it can run some PS2 games in high-res, though, or at least get rid of some of the lag that creeps through when you push a console... maybe... but if it's at all like the PS1, I remember that not all PS1 games could deal with a faster CPU -- remember, games can make assumptions about the clock speed and native resolution of a console, and they have access to a lot of the hardware. Even though you can emulate a memory card on a hard disk, the virtual memory card is likely at least as slow as a real one, just so you don't confuse the game.
Alright, you do have some valid points.
One thing I should mention, some people do improve their games by making them easier -- or at least consistent in their difficulty. Jak & Daxter was mostly easy, partly because you could skip most of the game, by choosing easier alternatives -- it's a pretty open game; each area needs x number of Power Cells, and there are probably 2x or 3x quests you can do in that area which give you a Power Cell. But some parts were hard; for instance, the final boss is very difficult, and since he's a boss, you have to fight him anyway.
The sequel, Jak II, is the kind of thing you'd hate. Responding to what they thought gamers wanted, they made it more linear, gave it more of a plot, and made it MUCH harder, even MUCH darker of a theme. Worse, it was inconsistently hard -- you'd get relatively easy missions, then suddenly something impossibly hard, or things that were hard in different ways.
The final game in the trilogy, Jak 3, wasn't really any easier, but it had a much gentler progression -- you'd be getting the practice you need, and still progressing, as it got steadily harder, but it wouldn't really feel that much harder, because you'd be better by then.
I imagine you'd still give up on Jak 3, but I imagine it'd be much, much better for you. So, I'd suggest that it might be a bit of an overreaction for you to just give up on a developer because of that. One solution might be to simply have some good friends -- maybe a significant other, but in any case, someone who lives physically close to you -- who play games, so you can go to their place and play their games, so you can get an idea of which ones you might buy for yourself. Or, buy games and trade them -- if you buy a game you don't like, trade it with a friend for one you do.
In any case, why limit yourself to three difficulty levels? I have a friend who typically buys a game, opens it up, puts it on "hard", and finishes it in a day or two -- saving him money, too, as he just rents them, rather than buying them. My brother will play a level over and over again, till he finally beats it -- no matter how hard it is, he just memorizes a way through it. And there's you -- from what you're telling me, you're just lazy enough that most games should have cheats, although I'd much rather have there be an "easy" enough mode that you don't need them.
Most games that seem to have this figured out actually have four difficulty levels, at least. Quake 3 has five:
Halo (1 and 2) has four:
And Duke Nukem 3D also has four:
I think what you're really looking for, though, is games that don't have any difficulty settings -- but manage to be interesting enough for you, and easy enough for me. Pretty much any Zelda falls under this category -- if it ever gets too hard, you can just look up the solution. Ocarina of Time was a masterpiece. Or Final Fantasy games -- Final Fantasy X pretty much never requires coordination, only enough patience to cut through to the next save point. If you ever get stuck, you can run around a save point to gain experience -- it may be tedious, but it's not hard.
In general, these kinds of skills are transferable, too. I'm decent at an FPS -- pretty much _any_ FPS. I haven't played all of them, but they aren't different enough that it's actually hard to learn a new one. The coordination I get from playing a game on "Normal" (instead of "Easy" or "Godmode" all the time) -- it's still fun every step of the "practice", but I can pick up wildly different kinds of games relatively easily.
One final note: Keep in mind that the point of standard deviation here is that you're not the market, and my mother's not the market. The market generally can handle t
You could play Dune 2, in which you must give every single unit an order. So: Click the troop, click where you want him to go. Rinse and repeat for however many you have. I think they at least attack automatically...
Or, you could play Starcraft. Click+drag to select a squad -- up to 12 units, where some units (dropships, overlords) can carry other units inside them. Click where you want them to go, watch them attack anything they find (or run, depending on what mode you have them set to).
Or, you could play Natural Selection. Drop some things, click a guy, order him to go build them. Or, most of the time, you don't even have to do that -- just tell him over voice chat what you want him to do, if he's not doing it already -- you can play Natural Selection as an FPS or be the Commander and play it as an RTS, and the commander is ordering around other, real human players, who think it's an FPS.
Technically, yes, it takes away from the interactivity. But you still have to be there, still thinking of a strategy and where to go next, and it does take away the tedium. It has the computer doing exactly what you know you'd be doing anyway.
I'm not saying I want aimbots in an FPS -- after all, the whole point of an FPS is your reflexes and accuracy. I am saying, however, that clicking one troop at a time (in Dune) is not really a skill, certainly not the kind that makes the game fun. Zergling rushes are fun, but they'd be absolute hell in Dune.
So, similarly -- I don't actually mind, say, Final Fantasy X, where the game waits for you to choose what to do for every single player's move. But let's face it, the whole point of the interactivity is not tapping X to have Auron attack when you know he's going to attack every turn unless something different happens. The whole point of any of the gameplay is for you to make decisions like figuring out that a zombie boss can be killed with a couple of Pheonix Downs -- the bot won't do that for you -- or deciding whether to move in, or when to use your salvos of missiles.
As you say yourself:
Decision making. Not tedium.
Yes, that's the attitude my school took. First Computer Science course, first day, they explain Hello World... in Java. In DETAIL.
Which means we got a lovely lesson on classes, methods, strings, system libraries, static methods... On the first damned day.
After that, it was pretty much a crawl, but the few lectures I went to were absolutely worthless. This woman knew her stuff... sort of... but she didn't have a clue how to teach a real beginner. Which was fine with me -- I knew what I was doing, looked it up online, and generally taught myself, did the labs from my dorm over the school network, and got a decent grade without setting foot in the classroom after the first couple of weeks.
And yet, the few times that I did show up in the lab -- mostly as my job as a lab monitor -- I did find people who had absolutely no clue. I helped them -- didn't do their work for them, but helped them figure it out -- and I think, despite having the advantage of actually working one-on-one, I think I did a better job than the teacher.
However, high school was completely different.
In high school, I was constantly challenged to think, and to communicate, and debate. Class of 25 boys (yes, private school, fucking HATED the gender segregation) -- take Physics. Teacher would come in with a topic -- say, Black Holes -- and we'd have a class discussion on it. Those two words were probably all that was written in his curriculum, if anything, but he knew what he was doing -- we'd talk about black hole evaporation, the big crunch, big bang theory, the nature of consciousness (Matrix discussions), all kinds of things.
There were less than 5 guys in that class, if any, who didn't participate enough to get what was going on.
And it's true, if you can't think, this won't help. But most people are capable of being a thinker, and while it may not be the job of college, school can certainly nurture that -- or ignore it (resulting in most of the morons in software development today), or filter out those who haven't practiced thinking, or even stifle any kind of thinking.
You could say it's something that should be done in high school, or by parents... whatever. It's part of education, and if I had anything to say about it, every school would support it. Hell, my philosophy courses in college were all about that...
Which brings me to a completely irrelevant, but very important point. CS students should be able to choose between a Calculus prereq and Philosophy -- right now Philosophy is seen as entirely unrelated, but I'd argue that the kind of thinking it teaches is much more relevant than math.
Consider NFS. With NFS, you have exactly the number of context switches you would on a local FS -- you go app -> kernel -> remote kernel -> kernel -> app. The kernel is doing all the network stuff, all the filesystem stuff, and all the NFS stuff.
But definitely once you get into caching -- I know you're putting that off, and I'd also encourage you to look at the fscache/cachefs... whatever they're calling it, there are people working on a solution for caching NFS stuff. What I'd really like to see is something like the FUSE caches that exist now, but in kernel space -- to, say, mount /nfs onto /cached, and have it all cached as local files within /cached, the way InterMezzo was supposed to work -- letting me do things like use Reiser4 for a local cache, if I'm so inclined.
If you can make it work well with one OS, you're likely to find people to help you port. I'd be all for portability if it weren't for what I see as potentially massive performance issues...
Those are two of my three (or is it four now?) requirements from a language, before starting my own ambitious projects.
Good... For my part, I want it to be something like Perl, and especially like Perl6 and Ruby, in that large chunks of the language can be written in or modified by the same language. I'm guessing macros will help with that...
Good for performance, I think. I'd suggest that strongly typed doesn't mean we can't do the kind of implicit typecasts everyone likes -- and, for that matter, I don't see dynamically-typed languages having their dynamic typing taken advantage of.
I like bytecode. Partly because I occasionally hear of benchmarks where a VM outperforms native code -- it can do optimizations at runtime that aren't really possible at compile time; for instance, pick one of two possible implementations based on which performs best under the current workload.
But mostly, I like bytecode because I want my software to be portable at that level. One of my ambitious projects may be proprietary, or at least encourage proprietary development, and languages like Java kind of force people to be cross-platform without having to really think about it. And the ambition of my project is such that I'd want 90% of office-like apps to be written in it, making the business world no longer platform-dependent.
There are some reasons I think this will work, but this may be getting beyond what I want to talk to on Slashdot. I'm partly paranoid of my ideas being stolen, partly paranoid of being laughed at, but it would also be nice to have this in email or something else. My Jabber ID is the same as my email address, if you want to talk.
In any case, an intermediate representation (bytecode) should be possible to compile down to machine code. In fact, gcj does just that for Java.
In this case, I think it'd be nice to have this be possible to fine-tune for a particular app. To have everything managed, but have the app (or object, or library) be able to force reclamation, at least.
Might also be nice to either fi
Hmm. How does that look? I can see some sort of mapping local uids to remote uids, or more advanced schemes like ACLs, but other than that...
I'm guessing that means a file can be stored on more than one machine, and it will be cached on-disk locally? Basically, like coda, but open?
Sounds good!
LANs are pretty fast, and then there's gigabit. With aggressive caching, you should be able to make really nice "diskless" machines, where you have a box with 20 gigs or so of disk space, but which boots and runs from the network (from a fileserver or a cluster of fileservers), using that only as a local cache -- the administrative benefits of diskless combined with the performance characteristics of local installation.
Unfortunately, I've never found a network FS that I like for that purpose, and the few that were close enough to try, I could never get to work.
True enough, to a point. I guess I always want to make sure that I'm optimized enough in the beginning, so I wouldn't have to rewrite the whole entire app for performance considerations. For instance, I'd hate to, say, write a game in Perl, then have to rewrite the whole thing in C++ just for the performance.
Then, too, I want more out of my environment (language, tools, OS) than anything provides right now, which means I'd better get started!
You mean like OpenID, if it can ever get off the ground?
That's what I'd really like to see. Single sign on, but it's your single sign on... There is a plan for simple profile exchange, too, but it doesn't have nearly the amount of information you'd want on, say, a MySpace profile. Still, that's how I'd do it -- then my friends could use MySpace, Facebook, orkut, or whatever, and see my profile there, when it's actually hosted on my own server.
But it's only just becoming feasable for single sign on -- it's a long way from actually replacing social networking. Still...
Which they bought, right? It doesn't seem to look much better now, but I haven't been there in awhile, so I don't know.
When? It's already happened. I currently satisfy myself with free radio, and with the services online that do give un-DRM'd music. And not for free, I don't know where in your twisted little corporate mind "$15/month" becomes "free music!!!!11one"
Way to make a strawman. I just searched my own post to make sure, and in fact, I said absolutely nothing about "government", "legal", "legit", "law", or "legislation". Go ahead -- you say you're using Firefox, go read my post, hit your slash key, and search for those words.
No, let them use DRM, I'll just boycott it. As far as legislation, I'd be perfectly happy if we had no legislation about DRM. Unfortunately, we have pro-DRM legislation -- it's called the DMCA.
Actually, yes, they do. If you only knew just how easily...
The bitch of DRM today isn't that it's hard for pirates, or even moderately sophisticated end-users who value fair use. The bitch of it is, it is a pain in the ass and the wallet for legitimate users (who don't want to have to crack things just to make them play on their early-adopter, HDCP-free, but still very good HDTV), and does nothing to stop pirates.
This is just unnecessary. If I had mod points, I'd mod you flamebait for this alone -- the rest of your post is just misinformed and stupid, which means I wouldn't waste mod points on it. You're not insightful, but until you used "slash-dogma" as an excuse not to think your response through, you weren't a troll, either.
If you just want FLV, mplayer has an aalib output. It's actually pretty useless, but pretty funny... Kind of like aaquake.
There are specific things like flashblock, but I've even gone so far as to have Adblock block JavaScript files -- preventing me from seeing that IntelliTXT crap.
VLC 0.8.6 supports FLV out of the box, on every platform I've used it on, as it's in ffmpeg now -- I use mplayer on x86_64 Linux, and VLC on PPC OS X.
The extension claims to be from videodownloader.net, and is working just fine on both the platforms I mentioned. It used to be Windows only (because the only FLV-playing software was Windows-only), but as it's working now on my 64-bit Linux Firefox, I figure it's pretty universal.
Tell me, if Macro-Dobe is so pro-open-source, why haven't they released the SWF standard under a license that allows competing players to be developed with that spec? For that matter, since the Flash player is free anyway, why don't they give us the source code to that, and keep selling their $700 developer software?
You see, they're pro-open-source where they can simply use open source software to further their own ends -- the project you pointed to is a server -- so long as they get total, absolute control on the client side. And, for that matter, on the production side -- unless I'm misunderstanding, you still have to buy Flash (for around $700) in order to create the content, even if your server is open.
And certainly, they support any app -- open source or not -- which requires you to use Flash (and pay that $700). Frankly, they don't give a damn what you do with it, as long as you keep paying them for upgrades.
That is not even comparable to Sun releasing ALL of Java as open source. (And by the way, it's spelled Java, not JAVA.)
Now, about Flash for apps -- problem is, it's so damned slow. Maybe Java is slower, I don't know. But really, I'm ignoring any comments you make about a virtual machine, mostly because I don't want horribly intrusive banner ads to be programmable, but more relevantly, I'll refer you to the benchmark I ran. Come on, if they can't even get video playback right, how are we supposed to trust them with real apps?
You are aware that the statement "traditional video decoders can do it in a fraction of that" does in fact refer to compression, right? Compression which, I might add, gives much better quality for the same filesize?
Alright, you know what? You're on. On my 1.8 ghz amd64, running a 64-bit Firefox with nspluginwrapper, it takes about 10-20% CPU for the Amateur Musician video -- at its normal size. Now, making that run fullscreen, it's closer to 60%. I admit it's a bit out of date -- I'm using Flash 9.0.27.78 instead of 9.0.31.0, upgrading now (because it takes Gentoo awhile.) However, before I actually grab that upgrade, tell me, has anything changed?
Because out of curiosity, I downloaded the FLV with Video Downloader -- oh, and discovered that I already had it downloaded, whoops -- and played it with mplayer. At its native resolution, I barely saw mplayer on my process list (sorted by CPU usage) -- it hovered around 0.3% CPU. I tried running it fullscreen, but with true fullscreen, nothing's on top of it, so I couldn't see the process list -- instead, I just hit the "maximize" button. Same results -- if I saw mplayer at all, it was at 0.3% CPU.
Could it be that it's letting X or the kernel do a lot of its work? Well, at around 2% system (kernel) usage and less than 10% X usage -- with X also running Firefox (still open to the same video, even if it's over), gaim, bittorrent, and an assload of translucent terminal windows, it was still using many times less CPU to run it fullscreen than Flash did to run it in a tiny little YouTube panel embedded into my browser.
If you like, I can run more tests -- for one, I don't quite have the latest flash, and for another, I was running it in nspluginwrapper, so it might be slightly faster inside the browser -- but if that were true, why is the nspluginwrapper binary itself (where I assume Flash is being loaded to) the one using all that CPU? Because that's what was using 60% CPU to play fullscreen -- I wasn't measuring X or the kernel then.
Now for the anecdotal evidence: Flash 9 is better, especially on Linux, but it's still slow and jerky occasionally. Consider the wonderful flash game fl0w: no matter what you say, fl0w just isn't that complex a game, visually, compared to, say, Quake4. Yet Quake4 plays flawlessly on this machine, while fl0w occasionally lags a few frames. Or, consider that just now, I tried playing the same Amateur video one more time while I was running the update (to get the latest Flash, among other things) -- and the video lagged while I was compiling software. Now, I know I can probably fix this by setting niceness levels (process priorities), but mplayer NEVER lags due to CPU. The only place I can make mplayer lag is disk access, and then it's only a second or two until the system seems to adapt -- just as much disk activity, but no more mplayer lag.
So, in short, it's not the compression, it's the fact that Adobe's software is just that fucking bad that it's 5-20 times less efficient than mplayer. You're free to test it on your own -- maybe it's the plugin wrapper I used? Maybe it would be much better with a 32-bit Firefox? But then, I'm not the only one complaining.
And by the way, consider that most games include some form of "vector animation", and most of them run much, much faster on my box than Flash does -- even though the Linux flash has always been slower than Windows, even Windows flash gets slower when you try to display even moderately complex vector animations at a full 1600x1200.
Oh, if there's any doubt in your mind, I just ran a couple more tests to be sure. Elephant's Dream, the HD version -- wider than my screen, so I didn't run it fullscreen, probably 1080p -- around 30-35% CPU usage, maybe another 8% from X. And yes, it's compressed.
Finally grabbed one of the HD demos from Apple's website. 720p, the "Toby Mac - Gone" music video. Lots of TV static, split screens (completely different scene on the left half of t
It seems to me that kioslaves would be able to perform better than fuse ever could. Maybe the best solution would be some sort of glibc hack?
Care to share your ideas on this netfs project of yours? I was planning something similar...
But more seriously, I'd pick a platform and stick to it -- and right now I like Linux, because it's so ubiquitous. If you're looking for a cross-platform way of developing filesystems, you might consider trying some sort of wrapper library in-kernel, though...
Because FUSE is slow, and FUSE will always be slow. The way I understand it, even a filesystem that creates exactly one file that simply reads "hello, world", is going to take four context switches to read that file. Consider "cat foo": cat -> kernel -> FUSE daemon -> kernel -> cat
I'd like to look more deeply into this sometime, though. I remember back when Hans Reiser was introducing Reiser4 and "plugins", and others were saying that Linux already has a filesystem plugin layer -- the Linux VFS, which all other filesystems use. So, I want to know if the Linux VFS itself is portable enough to target that instead...
Yes, that is what you can do with FUSE, but you can also do that without FUSE. All FUSE is doing is making it much, much easier.
/dev) -- this is what allows you to plug in a USB keychain device and expect it to work, or at least expect to be able to mount it right away.
FUSE is far from the only link from kernel space to userspace, and far from the only one where the kernel is coming to a userspace daemon with requests. For instance, udev is a system where the kernel tells the udev daemon about a new device, and the udev daemon looks in its config files and creates a device node (those files in
Basically, the kernel is the thing behind the thing you're using right now. To over-simplify, kernel is to OS what CPU is to PC. Most kernels are monolithic, meaning it's a single program -- more specifically, a single process. Linux (the kernel) is one gigantic, multi-threaded x86 process.
Now, kernel programming is hard. Very hard. You basically have to program in C, but you get absolutely no libraries that aren't already in the kernel -- remember, most shared libraries are stored as files on a filesystem? Well, where does the filesystem get its libraries? So if you want a library in the kernel, you have to put it there -- which is pretty much like porting it.
You also have pretty much no memory protection, as far as I know. You know, things that would segfault a normal program -- or "illegal operation" on Windows? It's the kernel that handles that. Basically, this means that if you end up with a pointer to some address you didn't mean it to, you'll be able to write there -- which means anything in the kernel can pretty much scribble all over anything in RAM, which means a bug in the kernel can screw up your system in absolutely any way imaginable, including file corruption. This is why we don't like the nVidia drivers, by the way -- they're binary, a black box, and sometimes they do have serious bugs, with serious consequences, including file corruption. Think of all the complaints people have had about Flash and Java crashing Firefox (admittedly not as much lately, but still), and imagine that's your entire OS, and you start to get the picture.
So, even if your program is written entirely in C, there are many things you can't do in the kernel that you can do outside the kernel -- which means, userspace.
So writing a filesystem in FUSE means you can use libgmail, you can write your filesystem in Perl or Python, you can call librar without having to teach the Kernel to understand RAR files...
Generally, anything you can do with FUSE, you could theoretically do with something else, including doing it IN the kernel. You do it with something specialized, like, say, a specific API through which the kernel calls a program in userland which understands RAR files. You could even port librar to the kernel -- technically, you can actually do anything in the kernel, it's just harder. FUSE puts it in userspace, making it easy.
And now it's portable, too. Remember, userspace isn't all that different between Unices -- often, you can make an initial port of a simple, commandline app from Linux to OS X simply by recompiling. So all those cute little filesystems people have been writing for Linux -- including ntfs3g, but also sshfs, gmailfs, all that other stuff -- those all work on OS X now, and the only people who had to deal with the OS X kernel are the FUSE team.
The drawback is speed -- context switches. A context switch (for those who don't know) is what happens when you flip from executing userland code to kernel code, or vice versa -- and it takes a little bit of time. Everything you do is now automatically four context switches -- some app tries to access a file, so it asks the kernel to open that file. The kernel then talks to your FUSE daemon, so now the FUSE daemon is running. That's two already. Even if the daemon does nothing other than send "Hello, world!" back to the app, it has to send it back to the kernel, first... That's ignoring things like,
I'll refer you to Bug #155528, in which AbiWord 2.4.6 is released, and this bug report is filed on Nov 17th of 2006. Someone bumped the ebuild for the plugins (copied the ebuild file from 2.4.5), and it built and ran just fine, which is what I like about Gentoo -- ridiculously transparent, anyone who can do a little shell scripting can fix issues with packages.
So, you'd think this would be a simple, simple upgrade.... Nope. On Jan 1st of 2007, they bumped AbiWord to 2.4.6, but left the plugins were at 2.4.5, meaning you had a circular dependency loop -- tell Portage to update (-uDN world), and it would upgrade AbiWord to 2.4.6, because that's the latest version. Do it again, and it downgrades to 2.4.5, because that's where the plugins are.
So, one person informs them of this by adding to the report. Someone else says "abiword-plugins needs to be bumped. Thanks." I finally came in Jan 14th, and asked "Is anyone out there?" The next day, it was bumped.
Yes, it took them from Nov 17th to Jan 14th -- almost a month to do a fucking version bump. Rename two files, run one command to generate digests, commit to CVS. And they wonder why people are leaving for Debian and Ubuntu...
One wonders how they would handle a real bug. Actually, I have another one:
A bug in the jabberd init script. Opened 8/14. Found a strange hack to fix it, submitted that the same day, asking someone to tell me why my hack worked, and what the "right way" of doing it would be. 8/16, someone joined the discussion to say my hack worked, but agreed it's a hack... 9/4 something was marked dupe... 9/5 was the first patch that looked like it did the Right Thing. Few more "me too"s, few more dupes... 10/8, another update broke both my hack and the "Right Thing". 10/11, someone finally gave us a completely new init script.
Now, the final script was really the right thing to do, but one has to wonder... It's an init script. How can it be so hard to fix an init script that it takes them almost two months?!
Final exhibit, saved for last because I made a bit of an ass of myself on this one: Enigmail disappears from amd64. Now, I admit, a bug report may not be the right place to bitch about how insanely long this is taking... But still: Filed on 8/07/06, and I have a comment on 9/19 complaining about the lack of Enigmail 0.94.1, which seems to have been released on 8/12. Over a month and no upgrade in sight -- but the existing "stable" build is completely broken. On 9/29, I finally posted my success following someone else's crazy hack that somehow worked, but still no actual fix. Finally fixed on 10/19.
So, over a month with no upgrade (and a broken older version), but the new version was just as broken. Finally fixed two months after the original report. I think I can honestly say that I've only had Apple be slower at dealing with known, verified bug reports.
And I just checked... apparently, my enigmail didn't get automatically rebuilt with my last Thunderbird upgrade. Fortunately, remerging it fixed the problem... I was about to reopen that report.
If others are worse than Gentoo, it makes me think that maybe the idea of a central authority for a Linux distro is no longer workable. Sure, things like Flash will go in right away (and faster on Gentoo, because Portage is easy to work with both technically and legally for that sort of thing), but the less popular things -- like, say, Enigmail and AbiWord -- always seem to be a few months behind. Yes, months, plural -- even Microsoft is starting to look better, with their "Patch Tuesday".
Yes, the sync problem is fixed. Or, if you're like me, you can avoid the Flash and just download the video (VideoDownloader extension) and play it in VLC. In fact, I think that's in ffmpeg now, so probably VLC, mplayer, and whatever else you want.
I realize that was sarcasm, but I actually liked Duke 3D, and I still prefer it to Doom for some good old-fashioned Deathmatching. The Devastator is just fun.
No matter how late, no matter how much it sucks, I will be playing Duke Nukem Forever. The only question is whether I'll drop $50-60 on launch day (or pre-order) or whether I'll wait a few months and buy it for $20 off Steam or something.
I mean, come on -- Duke Nukem is one game that it should not be hard to make a good sequel to.
They defeated the Goa'uld -- fine. Just keep in mind, this isn't the movie. There were plenty of good Stargate episodes that didn't deal with directly fighting some specific enemy.
The same thing is true of Star Trek, by the way. If you remember, there were probably a grand total of -- what -- 3 TOS episodes involving Klingons? Same with TNG -- The Borg are a persistent enemy, perhaps, but we almost never see them.
The Stargate writers need to go back and examine what worked in the plotlines which had absolutely nothing to do with enemies, certainly not the same old boring enemy, episode after episode, season after season.
Then again, I would agree with you that a last episode is a good thing. The worst Anime that I'm still addicted to is Bleach and Naruto, and they are ongoing -- compare to Trigun, Fullmetal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, Noir, even Ghost in the Shell, which ran for one or two seasons, maybe one or two movies, each a self-contained story, a single plot with a definite ending. Naruto had the right idea, initially -- the Zabuza plotline ended -- but the Orochimaru/Sasuke thing was wearing a little thin, last I checked (around Ep 200).
So yes, I miss O'Neill, but what bugs me the most about the Ori is that we don't need to immediately replace one enemy with another, especially an enemy identical to the Goa'uld in just about every respect. Show us cool things like the superpower wristbands, learning to communicate with the Unus (sp?), Jaffa political issues, Earth political issues (maybe have a press release that isn't countered with holographic stuff?)... Even if you're going to give us another enemy, how about some really strange/creepy replicators? How about you grow some balls and actually kill off a beloved character -- should've killed O'Neill instead of retiring him to Hammond's position.
In other words, it would be really nice to see some actual creativity, or at least some variety in what you rip off from other sci-fi.
What everyone's pointing out that you're missing about iTunes is that if it was really about Piracy, wouldn't Apple and Microsoft be teaming up to provide one DRM scheme to rule them all, so you could play your DRM'd files on everything? Wouldn't they be open to letting you burn not just one CD (for a price), but any amount -- and, for that matter, if they let you burn that CD, why bother with the DRM in the first place?
No, you're kidding yourself if you think this is about anything other than lockin and market control. Think about it: If HD-DVD and Blu-Ray encryption works, you'd have to buy the same movie three times for three different devices -- once for your home theater, once for your PSP, and once for your video iPod (or iPhone). Think about movie soundtracks -- without DRM (or with DRM currently cracked on DVDs), and with a few good movies offering music-only audio tracks on the DVD, I could just rip that and play it on my iPod. And keep in mind: If you've got an iPod, and want to buy a Zune, you'll have to buy all your music all over again -- or vice versa.
And if they were really about supporting the consumer, they would allow us to do anything we want with the stuff we buy to own. Although I don't think it's necessary to have DRM on a subscription service (see below), I also think it's kind of appropriate, whereas if I buy the album, it's mine, and your control stops as soon as I rip it to FLAC and sort it onto my Linux fileserver.
I imagine it would, if the service itself was worthwhile. Oh, you justify it now -- calculate it out, and you could pay for the service for 15 years and not spend as much as it might cost you to buy all those CDs. But what if a year from now, the service is providing absolutely nothing new, other than forcing you to keep paying a monthly fee to keep listening to "your" music?
Won't happen, I know. But when you really think about it, if an organization (Magnatune, Mindawn, and others) can sell me an album for $5 (cheaper than iTunes!) for download as mp3, vorbis, or FLAC -- yes, FLAC, completely lossless, completely open format, no DRM at all -- if Magnatune and Mindawn are even moderately successful with that, I think a service like you're suggesting could work.
On the other hand, keep in mind that it's competing with radio -- and keep in mind that radio works even with absolutely no DRM, allowing things like RadioShark, or broadcasting completely unprotected mp3 streams over the Internet. Hell, our local radio station manages to do that as an almost entirely community-run project (no full-time employees)... But somehow they're paying for bandwidth, air time, and licensing fees. Do they know something the RIAA doesn't?