How would you feel if you invented a high-efficiency engine design, failed to market it to any of the major auto-makers and as you were going bankrupt, Ford started producing something very similar and selling it without giving you credit?
This has happened many times in history and the 'Ford's in those cases have had to either pay up to the inventor or had really good lawyers.
That's what patents are for. Why don't you go file a few of your own instead of being pissed for no reason?
Then surely you don't remember very well. Before AMD and now Intel started pushing low-power CPUs, Transmeta was there with the concept. Transmeta was at the forefront of Intel-compatible low-power CPUs with dynamic power profiles dependant on usage.
It was well vaunted at their launch that a laptop running a DVD wouldn't last as long on battery as if it were doing word processing.
The fact they didn't catch on isn't relevant to what they contributed to the industry itself.
Thief was a great PC game a few years back, but if you didn't have a good sound card and good speakers, you wouldn't enjoy it half as much as someone who did. It was one of the first games to truly immerse you in your audio environment and use it as cues in the game so thoroughly.
If the next version of Dynasty Warriors has thousands of dudes on the battlefield at once (I sure hope it does), they're going to look like crap in SD and that's to be expected. Do you truly believe that any game released on a 'high definition' console should have to label its games in this way? Besides, its Microsoft who says gaming should be at 720p and Sony who said that they should be playable at 480i but look better at 1080p. I agree, but there's playable and then there's playable. If you can't tell which guys are badguys cause there's only 6 pixels drawing him...
For what? Read my post and tell me how the GPL is inappropriate for use on devices that can't use other software. The software is free to use/edit/change/migrate to another hardware platform.
You have no implicit right to use any software you like on one-use hardware devices. I'm glad certain router companies leave their hardware flash upgradable so I can load a different version of Linux on them, but if they didn't, its none of my concern -- I could just buy OEM hardware without the lockouts and still use that same GPL routing software on it.
Buy hardware that supports your freedoms if you want to, but it has nothing to do with the GPL.
From 640x480 I hope you mean... if you can't tell the image quality difference between 1920x1080 and 512x384, you're legally blind -- go get checked, really.
I play numerous game types that will benefit hugely from HD resolutions. War games with large numbers of characters on screen at once are one, RPGs and games of their ilk with many objects in inventories are another (more items with smaller icons that are just as easy to see at HD as their counterparts were in SD (think Morrowind vs. Oblivion on XBox vs. 360).
I've always thought the "needs HD" argument was stupid in the first place. Nobody needs HD like nobody needs a faster car or a nicer coloured iPod or fancier looking computer cases. What Sony and Microsoft think they're doing is giving us something we'll enjoy and want and I think they're right.
If you don't like the benefit of HD gaming, then just lose out for a couple years, don't go crying to me about it. I haven't played PC games at resolutions neering SDTV in many years now and I don't want to go back to 640x480 for the next generation of console gaming. 1920x1080 is just awsome in comparison.
Personally, its not a loophole -- and Linus doesn't seem to think so either, although RMS obviously does. But to use his own examples, if I bought a digital book that was using GPL'd software, I'd still be able to read books with that software on other hardware by modifying the GPL software in question. Its possible I wouldn't be able to use my modified software on the hardware I bought, but that's a hardware issue, not a software one and the GPL's about software.
PS, I like trusted computing and locking down CPUs -- its great for business situations that require good solid security and allows for enhanced mandatory access control systems. Sure, it might suck if misused in a home environment, but it can also be very useful (like making gaming consoles that are guaranteed to all behave the same way).
That's not a loophole at all -- the loophole is that you can lock down the CPU to only run signed code and this has nothing to do with Linux at all. Its perfectly plausible that Microsoft could give you the source code to whatever runs on an XBox 360 up front and let you play with it all you want, but that you still wouldn't be able to get your modified versions to load up on your 360 since it requires signed code.
The openness of the software doesn't necessarily reflect on the hardware it runs on. And in case you missed it, please note, you do not need to do anything wierd to the OS or base kernel to make this possible on a hardware platform.
That said, usually hardware hacks are forthcoming that remove such limitations with time (on the XBox, PS2 and PSP so far at least...)
His point is that if you already have root privileges, you could do anything (including much more dangerous things) than being able to change how binfmt is handled.
Security is about not letting people get root access in the first place, or use SELinux to restrict what root users can do (or both).
Personally I believe in God and I have no problem with good science either. What I don't understand is people who believe that being scientific precludes having beliefs. You don't study or research everything you think; you take most of it on faith that someone else did, or didn't. There is a lot of your life based on belief in others / belief in process / belief in the system / etc. and you'd pretty much be a basket case if you tried to be 'scientific' about your entire world.
I have no problem reconciling my belief in God with my belief in science.
This is the case in the Bourne Identity which allows you to play the original theatrical version or the new beginning and ending tacked on as well. Several movies I've seen do this already (and the additional footage is of course lower quality).
The one I'd love to see though is say the Lord of the Rings trilogy done so you can watch the theatrical version (for the shorter-movie-loving wife) or the DVD versions turning on or off the extra scenes live (and switching to the appropriate version of the soundtrack).
That I see as a valuable way to be able to author a DVD... not adding overlays.
Intelligent design is irrelevant to string theory; or the big bang for that matter. Given the amount of entropy in the universe, we're basically still dealing with how things "may" happen and "may" have begun anyway.
Pretending for a moment than an all-powerful being created this entire reality around me milliseconds ago and I never actually typed that first sentence at all but simply remember having done so as some sort of cosmic practical joke, there's no reason not to study what could have happened nonetheless.
All that to say this -- a grand infinitely powerful creator's existance would be potentially unprovable and is therefore pretty unscientific as a study (unless one found such proof elsewhere). String theory is just as bad right now. Neither is very scientific.
I'm sure programming for the first time on any hardware platform is hard -- especially when nobody has ever done it before. We're talking an entirely new hardware platform here, no books, no well-known optimizations or hangups, no tricks of the trade yet, new new.
That said, IBM is already shipping Cell based servers as I understand it, so I'm sure the programmer base is growing in leaps and bounds as we speak and there may be some downright awesome code being written for it much sooner than we think.
Your PS2 comment made me smile too -- nothing like God of War or Black existed for the PS2 five years ago, but they do now. The programmers have figured already out the hard stuff (sorry, stole that line from a SCEA developper on the God of War 'making of' featurette) and just have optimizations and tweaking left in the making of new games.
I know what you mean... I've been writing code (database industry primarily) for years now and I can't imagine what they were thinking in RAM costs. "Ok, we've got $1000 per unit manufacturing budget, lets only put in 256MB of RAM for apps, no no, 1G would cost an extra $10."
That said, I have no idea how most of my PS2 games were made with only 32MB of RAM available, so I'll sit back and watch the results with everyone else.
I'm getting sick of reading "the PS3 is harder to program for" from people who've never written code on it.
You do realize the PS3 dev kids come with a huge number of SDKs including massive middleware options for physics, 3D rendering, audio, etc. and a great toolchain? It may not be as idiot-friendly as MS's tools (something Microsoft has always been good at -- their tools that is), but its very thorough. Its not like Bethseda had to sit down and write Cell assembly all day every day. The Unreal engine is available for use (although I doubt they used that), the same tree engine they use on the XBox360 is available, movie codecs are already written, etc.
Sure, optimizing for the low levels of a PS3 engine would be more challenging perhaps than the simpler XBox360 core, most of this can be written in high level languages and compiled easily (with GCC no less) to work quite well out of the box. Go read some real developper information on what Sony provides with a dev kit. The major complaint was that the dev kits weren't as plentiful as hoped -- which indicates that quite a few companies wanted them.
That is to say, there's no mysterious membrane at the edge of the sky holding all the air in for us -- its held there by gravity acting on the mass of the air particles.
I've been thinking the same thing ever since they announced HD-DVD as a future add-on. Also consider that the XBox360 is still really noisy. Have you read the releases about the PS3? Its quiet. Very quiet. Quiet, compact, and without a big power brick. Sweet.
Not to mention BD movies, great games and backward compatibility.
My PS2 DVD drive is finally giving out after 3 years of brutal use and I'm trying to convince my wife that a PS3 would be a better investment than a new DVD drive since it would play the old games too.
The only thing I haven't seen yet is a review on Sony's up/downscaling quality.
That is, how does a 1080i game look at 720p and how do 720p native games look at 1080i?
#2 includes web browsers now (mine spikes 100% frequently for Flash / embedded video / javascript on AJAX sites).
Also it includes chat programs (which include real time voice/video communciation), and others. Many people are finding their PCs too slow to do 'new' things with because those 'new' things are hard on the CPU.
Slashdot Mirror
You're completely missing the idea. How about this: "Mr Smith here raped my daughter last night"
Ok, now tell me that should be protected speech.
Of course its not -- unless its true. Feel free to say it, if its true.
And don't bring up fiction -- fiction writers are very careful to point out that their works make no reference to real people, alive or dead.
How would you feel if you invented a high-efficiency engine design, failed to market it to any of the major auto-makers and as you were going bankrupt, Ford started producing something very similar and selling it without giving you credit?
This has happened many times in history and the 'Ford's in those cases have had to either pay up to the inventor or had really good lawyers.
That's what patents are for. Why don't you go file a few of your own instead of being pissed for no reason?
Then surely you don't remember very well. Before AMD and now Intel started pushing low-power CPUs, Transmeta was there with the concept. Transmeta was at the forefront of Intel-compatible low-power CPUs with dynamic power profiles dependant on usage.
It was well vaunted at their launch that a laptop running a DVD wouldn't last as long on battery as if it were doing word processing.
The fact they didn't catch on isn't relevant to what they contributed to the industry itself.
Thief was a great PC game a few years back, but if you didn't have a good sound card and good speakers, you wouldn't enjoy it half as much as someone who did. It was one of the first games to truly immerse you in your audio environment and use it as cues in the game so thoroughly.
...
If the next version of Dynasty Warriors has thousands of dudes on the battlefield at once (I sure hope it does), they're going to look like crap in SD and that's to be expected. Do you truly believe that any game released on a 'high definition' console should have to label its games in this way? Besides, its Microsoft who says gaming should be at 720p and Sony who said that they should be playable at 480i but look better at 1080p. I agree, but there's playable and then there's playable. If you can't tell which guys are badguys cause there's only 6 pixels drawing him
For what? Read my post and tell me how the GPL is inappropriate for use on devices that can't use other software. The software is free to use/edit/change/migrate to another hardware platform.
You have no implicit right to use any software you like on one-use hardware devices. I'm glad certain router companies leave their hardware flash upgradable so I can load a different version of Linux on them, but if they didn't, its none of my concern -- I could just buy OEM hardware without the lockouts and still use that same GPL routing software on it.
Buy hardware that supports your freedoms if you want to, but it has nothing to do with the GPL.
In lots of countries, sure there is -- its called judicial oversight.
The police don't get to walk into my house for almost any reason and if they do, I have recourse against them.
Sorry if you live in the USA though.
Add the forwarding patch to dnscache from tinydns.org and forward to the IPs mentionned above.
/service/dnscache*/root/servers
Otherwise, consider putting one of those IPs in a file named spamhaus.org under
This may or may not work depending on the configuration of the servers at those IPs.
From 640x480 I hope you mean ... if you can't tell the image quality difference between 1920x1080 and 512x384, you're legally blind -- go get checked, really.
I play numerous game types that will benefit hugely from HD resolutions. War games with large numbers of characters on screen at once are one, RPGs and games of their ilk with many objects in inventories are another (more items with smaller icons that are just as easy to see at HD as their counterparts were in SD (think Morrowind vs. Oblivion on XBox vs. 360).
I've always thought the "needs HD" argument was stupid in the first place. Nobody needs HD like nobody needs a faster car or a nicer coloured iPod or fancier looking computer cases. What Sony and Microsoft think they're doing is giving us something we'll enjoy and want and I think they're right.
If you don't like the benefit of HD gaming, then just lose out for a couple years, don't go crying to me about it. I haven't played PC games at resolutions neering SDTV in many years now and I don't want to go back to 640x480 for the next generation of console gaming. 1920x1080 is just awsome in comparison.
Personally, its not a loophole -- and Linus doesn't seem to think so either, although RMS obviously does. But to use his own examples, if I bought a digital book that was using GPL'd software, I'd still be able to read books with that software on other hardware by modifying the GPL software in question. Its possible I wouldn't be able to use my modified software on the hardware I bought, but that's a hardware issue, not a software one and the GPL's about software.
PS, I like trusted computing and locking down CPUs -- its great for business situations that require good solid security and allows for enhanced mandatory access control systems. Sure, it might suck if misused in a home environment, but it can also be very useful (like making gaming consoles that are guaranteed to all behave the same way).
That's not a loophole at all -- the loophole is that you can lock down the CPU to only run signed code and this has nothing to do with Linux at all. Its perfectly plausible that Microsoft could give you the source code to whatever runs on an XBox 360 up front and let you play with it all you want, but that you still wouldn't be able to get your modified versions to load up on your 360 since it requires signed code.
...)
The openness of the software doesn't necessarily reflect on the hardware it runs on. And in case you missed it, please note, you do not need to do anything wierd to the OS or base kernel to make this possible on a hardware platform.
That said, usually hardware hacks are forthcoming that remove such limitations with time (on the XBox, PS2 and PSP so far at least
His point is that if you already have root privileges, you could do anything (including much more dangerous things) than being able to change how binfmt is handled.
Security is about not letting people get root access in the first place, or use SELinux to restrict what root users can do (or both).
How on earth did that get rated insightful? His point is moot -- the article says he has done exactly what the parent requests.
Obviously neither the parent nor the mods in question read the article at all.
Personally I believe in God and I have no problem with good science either. What I don't understand is people who believe that being scientific precludes having beliefs. You don't study or research everything you think; you take most of it on faith that someone else did, or didn't. There is a lot of your life based on belief in others / belief in process / belief in the system / etc. and you'd pretty much be a basket case if you tried to be 'scientific' about your entire world.
I have no problem reconciling my belief in God with my belief in science.
This is the case in the Bourne Identity which allows you to play the original theatrical version or the new beginning and ending tacked on as well. Several movies I've seen do this already (and the additional footage is of course lower quality).
... not adding overlays.
The one I'd love to see though is say the Lord of the Rings trilogy done so you can watch the theatrical version (for the shorter-movie-loving wife) or the DVD versions turning on or off the extra scenes live (and switching to the appropriate version of the soundtrack).
That I see as a valuable way to be able to author a DVD
Intelligent design is irrelevant to string theory; or the big bang for that matter. Given the amount of entropy in the universe, we're basically still dealing with how things "may" happen and "may" have begun anyway.
Pretending for a moment than an all-powerful being created this entire reality around me milliseconds ago and I never actually typed that first sentence at all but simply remember having done so as some sort of cosmic practical joke, there's no reason not to study what could have happened nonetheless.
All that to say this -- a grand infinitely powerful creator's existance would be potentially unprovable and is therefore pretty unscientific as a study (unless one found such proof elsewhere). String theory is just as bad right now. Neither is very scientific.
No, Pamela Anderson is not a walking supercomputer.
As pointed out elsewhere ...
If the rocket explodes on launch, the container of fuel will most likely be undamaged.
If the probe smashes into Mars and makes a big hole, it will probably still have the container of fuel at the bottom of the hole.
This is a well proven technology.
I'm sure programming for the first time on any hardware platform is hard -- especially when nobody has ever done it before. We're talking an entirely new hardware platform here, no books, no well-known optimizations or hangups, no tricks of the trade yet, new new.
That said, IBM is already shipping Cell based servers as I understand it, so I'm sure the programmer base is growing in leaps and bounds as we speak and there may be some downright awesome code being written for it much sooner than we think.
Your PS2 comment made me smile too -- nothing like God of War or Black existed for the PS2 five years ago, but they do now. The programmers have figured already out the hard stuff (sorry, stole that line from a SCEA developper on the God of War 'making of' featurette) and just have optimizations and tweaking left in the making of new games.
I know what you mean ... I've been writing code (database industry primarily) for years now and I can't imagine what they were thinking in RAM costs. "Ok, we've got $1000 per unit manufacturing budget, lets only put in 256MB of RAM for apps, no no, 1G would cost an extra $10."
That said, I have no idea how most of my PS2 games were made with only 32MB of RAM available, so I'll sit back and watch the results with everyone else.
The terms "rush" and "do quickly" are different.
... if it takes 3 minutes, it takes 3 minutes, not 30 seconds.
Yous till can't rush a stirfry
Its not rushed if its done in the right amount of time, even if that amount of time is short relative to other foods.
I'm getting sick of reading "the PS3 is harder to program for" from people who've never written code on it.
You do realize the PS3 dev kids come with a huge number of SDKs including massive middleware options for physics, 3D rendering, audio, etc. and a great toolchain? It may not be as idiot-friendly as MS's tools (something Microsoft has always been good at -- their tools that is), but its very thorough. Its not like Bethseda had to sit down and write Cell assembly all day every day. The Unreal engine is available for use (although I doubt they used that), the same tree engine they use on the XBox360 is available, movie codecs are already written, etc.
Sure, optimizing for the low levels of a PS3 engine would be more challenging perhaps than the simpler XBox360 core, most of this can be written in high level languages and compiled easily (with GCC no less) to work quite well out of the box. Go read some real developper information on what Sony provides with a dev kit. The major complaint was that the dev kits weren't as plentiful as hoped -- which indicates that quite a few companies wanted them.
There's no bubble.
Its a ball, not a bubble.
That is to say, there's no mysterious membrane at the edge of the sky holding all the air in for us -- its held there by gravity acting on the mass of the air particles.
Think Jupiter.
I've been thinking the same thing ever since they announced HD-DVD as a future add-on. Also consider that the XBox360 is still really noisy. Have you read the releases about the PS3? Its quiet. Very quiet. Quiet, compact, and without a big power brick. Sweet.
Not to mention BD movies, great games and backward compatibility.
My PS2 DVD drive is finally giving out after 3 years of brutal use and I'm trying to convince my wife that a PS3 would be a better investment than a new DVD drive since it would play the old games too.
The only thing I haven't seen yet is a review on Sony's up/downscaling quality.
That is, how does a 1080i game look at 720p and how do 720p native games look at 1080i?
You need to move into the modern era.
#2 includes web browsers now (mine spikes 100% frequently for Flash / embedded video / javascript on AJAX sites).
Also it includes chat programs (which include real time voice/video communciation), and others. Many people are finding their PCs too slow to do 'new' things with because those 'new' things are hard on the CPU.