- Waiting for Regedit in Windows to search for a certain key or value.. I don't know what search algorithm Microsoft chose for that thing, but it's damn slow.
Re:This won't spell the end to software developmen
on
Perens on Patents
·
· Score: 1
There is an entire political party devoted to passing laws that nobody will respect.
I am a UK citizen, and I'm afraid I don't get your reference as I don't have much knowledge of US political parties.. But it sounds bad anyway.
Re:This won't spell the end to software developmen
on
Perens on Patents
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
limited to "the big boys" in countries that respect patents.
It is a bad idea to have laws that nobody can/will respect. This may encourage other easily-impressioned people to break the law in other areas. The laws are meant to be there to guide us into being good citizens, but when the legal way of doing things becomes ridiculous (prices of CDs, for instance), people don't seem too hesitant to look at and utilise illegal options.
Software patents should be abolished because of their dire consequences for innovation. They should not be kept and ignored, because eventually some greedy company might come along and try to boost its bottom line by litigating using software patents as its weapon of choice.
It's also impossible to think of a number made from the product of two primes, such that anyone else couldn't guess the two prime numbers from which it was made. But you *can* think of one such that it's damn hard (this is the basis of PGP encryption). Are PGP-encrypted files easy to break into? Nope.
And I bet that's what they intend to do with DRM. Make it damn hard to beat, no matter how much it pisses us off.
All we can hope for to avoid the careful thinking descending into a barrage of "We must enforce to protect our rights" by the **AA and other content providers alike, is some real techie experts to disspell the myth that DRM might actually a) work and b) be acceptable to users.
The file transfers would be disgustingly slow because of the overhead required to transcode every file
Bare in mind this can be done in parallel with the actual copying (via USB/Firewire, whatever) to improve things a bit, and with an average 4mb song, it might take ~30 seconds to encode to vorbis on my machine (Athlon 2400). That doesn't sound like a *huge* overhead.
And it would need proprietary software to put music on it
Well, there's open source software that can decode mp3, and apparently AAC is open too.. Does the LAME project pay per-download license fees?
But all the MP3 hardware out there uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip
I have an idea. How much sense would it make for a company to make a Vorbis-only (or perhaps Vorbis/FLAC-only) hardware player? Before you all scream, here is my line of thinking of why it might be a good idea:
* Primarily, no expensive license issues.
* Vorbis-decoding can be done using only integers (FLAC too?), which must save some hardware costs.
* It popularises the Vorbis/FLAC formats.
And for the burning issue of "what 99% of the population with music in other formats?". I would propose that the software frontend to this be able to transparently transcode your music from any format (using any software plugin available) to Vorbis (or FLAC if you don't want to lose quality), before copying to the device.
Benefits to consumer:
* Supports pretty much any format of music they might have.
* Would be very cheap to buy.
I don't think the loss of quality in transcoding will be so important, because after all this is just a portable device, not a portable studio. The only inconvience I could see to a consumer would be a slightly longer delay as audio is transcoded and copied, but at a suitable quality level, I don't think it could make that much of a difference. Of course, there wouldn't be any such extra delay if you were copying a Vorbis or FLAC file to begin with.
Saving on the hardware costs like that, and using software to handle all the numerous different audio formats sounds like a good idea to me, and so the manufacturer could probably sell it for a lot less than other players. And of course, we all know that Joe Average quite commonly picks the cheapest electronic device that does what they want, rather than worrying about its technical specs.
If it's not a series of common lense laws that the government thinks is the best way to go about solving the problem about complete idiots doing completely idiotic things whilst driving, then the best alternative would probably be a public education campaign.
Now I live in the UK, so my opinion may not be particularly brilliant here, but how difficult is it to pull off a huge-scale public education campaign in the US? I would have thought it would be quite difficult indeed.
So it's either public education, which is: * Great for people who may or may not have the common sense, but are willing to learn. * Good for intelligent people who have the common sense, but might find a few new things to learn anyway, without being patronised. * Useless on idiots who don't want to learn, or arrogant people who think they are brilliant, or can't possibly accept they may be wrong about something. * Expensive. Or it's going to be common-sense laws, which are: * Patronising, or freedom-inhibiting. * A wider net that will hopefully bash the stupid people into shape (not going to be educating? then we'll slap a law for it on yo ass). * A catch-all, albeit one that will be difficult to enforce.
Having never used the FB, I never knew it was buggy to the degree of randomly locking up.. Graphics card drivers do sound like they belong in the kernel but I can imagine the degree of complexity involved and so I can see why it hasn't been done so already.
I do, however, agree that this new 'political rehash' of the XFree86 core team could be used as an opportunity to do all the Right Things(TM) as a new development cycle continues.
You have to compile your kernel *without* agpgart support if you want to use NvAGP=1 in your XF86Config.
I currently have that option enabled in my configuration, using the older drivers (note: not these ones), driving two monitors from one Ti4200 incidentally, and it has been particularly stable.
Would it be such a bad idea to arrange applications as the grandparent suggested, in a logical hierarchy, and also have a suitable array of symlinks in/bin and/etc, and so on.
As in: /etc/$app ->/applications/$app/conf /bin/$app/$appexec ->/applications/$app/bin/$appexec
That way, we get the best of both worlds, having a logical arrangement of applications, while still having every binary/config in a global directory.
But I'm no wizard, so is there anything wrong with this idea?
Looking at their feature descriptions, shouldn't a group as influencial as Nullsoft be pushing better slogans than "Rip/encode music to MP3", in favour of "Rip your music to hard drive", in any format the user chooses of course. Ideally, the default format would be Ogg Vorbis and could be as simple as a button labelled "Copy music". I realise that takes away some incentive to pay, but it's the right thing to do, is it not?
Most people don't even know what an operating system -- hell, don't even know what "Windows" is.
Likewise, illiterate people won't have much use for borrowing books from a public library.
But as we educate more people in the use of computers, particularly with a view to free software, more people might just find this kind of thing useful, just as we increase the literacy rate then people find use in borrowing books from public libraries.
Even if this software library idea (which I think is fantastic) has problems now, it's a very good thing to think about for the technologically-educated people of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
- Waiting for Regedit in Windows to search for a certain key or value.. I don't know what search algorithm Microsoft chose for that thing, but it's damn slow.
I think they use Bogosort.
There is an entire political party devoted to passing laws that nobody will respect.
I am a UK citizen, and I'm afraid I don't get your reference as I don't have much knowledge of US political parties.. But it sounds bad anyway.
limited to "the big boys" in countries that respect patents.
It is a bad idea to have laws that nobody can/will respect. This may encourage other easily-impressioned people to break the law in other areas. The laws are meant to be there to guide us into being good citizens, but when the legal way of doing things becomes ridiculous (prices of CDs, for instance), people don't seem too hesitant to look at and utilise illegal options.
Software patents should be abolished because of their dire consequences for innovation. They should not be kept and ignored, because eventually some greedy company might come along and try to boost its bottom line by litigating using software patents as its weapon of choice.
Your haikus just then,
Though concealing much effort,
Totally sucked balls.
It's also impossible to think of a number made from the product of two primes, such that anyone else couldn't guess the two prime numbers from which it was made. But you *can* think of one such that it's damn hard (this is the basis of PGP encryption). Are PGP-encrypted files easy to break into? Nope.
And I bet that's what they intend to do with DRM. Make it damn hard to beat, no matter how much it pisses us off.
Whoops, I meant to say "We must enforce DRM to protect our rights".
I would mod you up if I had points.
All we can hope for to avoid the careful thinking descending into a barrage of "We must enforce to protect our rights" by the **AA and other content providers alike, is some real techie experts to disspell the myth that DRM might actually a) work and b) be acceptable to users.
I would love to get my hands on that original black knight's castle.
Do you mean either one of these?
The file transfers would be disgustingly slow because of the overhead required to transcode every file
Bare in mind this can be done in parallel with the actual copying (via USB/Firewire, whatever) to improve things a bit, and with an average 4mb song, it might take ~30 seconds to encode to vorbis on my machine (Athlon 2400). That doesn't sound like a *huge* overhead.
And it would need proprietary software to put music on it
Well, there's open source software that can decode mp3, and apparently AAC is open too.. Does the LAME project pay per-download license fees?
But all the MP3 hardware out there uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip
I have an idea. How much sense would it make for a company to make a Vorbis-only (or perhaps Vorbis/FLAC-only) hardware player? Before you all scream, here is my line of thinking of why it might be a good idea:
* Primarily, no expensive license issues.
* Vorbis-decoding can be done using only integers (FLAC too?), which must save some hardware costs.
* It popularises the Vorbis/FLAC formats.
And for the burning issue of "what 99% of the population with music in other formats?". I would propose that the software frontend to this be able to transparently transcode your music from any format (using any software plugin available) to Vorbis (or FLAC if you don't want to lose quality), before copying to the device.
Benefits to consumer:
* Supports pretty much any format of music they might have.
* Would be very cheap to buy.
I don't think the loss of quality in transcoding will be so important, because after all this is just a portable device, not a portable studio. The only inconvience I could see to a consumer would be a slightly longer delay as audio is transcoded and copied, but at a suitable quality level, I don't think it could make that much of a difference. Of course, there wouldn't be any such extra delay if you were copying a Vorbis or FLAC file to begin with.
Saving on the hardware costs like that, and using software to handle all the numerous different audio formats sounds like a good idea to me, and so the manufacturer could probably sell it for a lot less than other players. And of course, we all know that Joe Average quite commonly picks the cheapest electronic device that does what they want, rather than worrying about its technical specs.
Any comments?
If it's not a series of common lense laws that the government thinks is the best way to go about solving the problem about complete idiots doing completely idiotic things whilst driving, then the best alternative would probably be a public education campaign.
Now I live in the UK, so my opinion may not be particularly brilliant here, but how difficult is it to pull off a huge-scale public education campaign in the US? I would have thought it would be quite difficult indeed.
So it's either public education, which is:
* Great for people who may or may not have the common sense, but are willing to learn.
* Good for intelligent people who have the common sense, but might find a few new things to learn anyway, without being patronised.
* Useless on idiots who don't want to learn, or arrogant people who think they are brilliant, or can't possibly accept they may be wrong about something.
* Expensive.
Or it's going to be common-sense laws, which are:
* Patronising, or freedom-inhibiting.
* A wider net that will hopefully bash the stupid people into shape (not going to be educating? then we'll slap a law for it on yo ass).
* A catch-all, albeit one that will be difficult to enforce.
It's all about the compromise.
Having never used the FB, I never knew it was buggy to the degree of randomly locking up.. Graphics card drivers do sound like they belong in the kernel but I can imagine the degree of complexity involved and so I can see why it hasn't been done so already.
I do, however, agree that this new 'political rehash' of the XFree86 core team could be used as an opportunity to do all the Right Things(TM) as a new development cycle continues.
(NOT framebuffer because fb doesn't work well with some hardware)
Purely out of interest, what kind of hardware does the framebuffer not work well on?
"Wouldn't that be 0x0c?"
Nope, we were all thinking in base 13. Right?
What's wrong with making a good compiler that writes directly to machine code?
What's wrong with encouraging good clean portable code, using good clean portable libraries?
But seriously what the hell am I going to use Whiskey flavored condoms for?!
Well this is just a long shot, but how about having safe sex?
I got a *metre* of vodka.. like a huge test-tube with 500ml of vodka in it, one metre long.
What on earth are they trying to tell me?
Quickly! Download it before the parents gets moderated up!
You have to compile your kernel *without* agpgart support if you want to use NvAGP=1 in your XF86Config.
I currently have that option enabled in my configuration, using the older drivers (note: not these ones), driving two monitors from one Ti4200 incidentally, and it has been particularly stable.
Yes, they are all detailed in this commemorative set.
Would it be such a bad idea to arrange applications as the grandparent suggested, in a logical hierarchy, and also have a suitable array of symlinks in /bin and /etc, and so on.
/etc/$app -> /applications/$app/conf
/bin/$app/$appexec -> /applications/$app/bin/$appexec
As in:
That way, we get the best of both worlds, having a logical arrangement of applications, while still having every binary/config in a global directory.
But I'm no wizard, so is there anything wrong with this idea?
Looking at their feature descriptions, shouldn't a group as influencial as Nullsoft be pushing better slogans than "Rip/encode music to MP3", in favour of "Rip your music to hard drive", in any format the user chooses of course. Ideally, the default format would be Ogg Vorbis and could be as simple as a button labelled "Copy music". I realise that takes away some incentive to pay, but it's the right thing to do, is it not?
... and you played multiplayer using yourself as a human modem, carrying the ones and zeroes to your ISP by hand, upstream both ways!
Most people don't even know what an operating system -- hell, don't even know what "Windows" is.
Likewise, illiterate people won't have much use for borrowing books from a public library.
But as we educate more people in the use of computers, particularly with a view to free software, more people might just find this kind of thing useful, just as we increase the literacy rate then people find use in borrowing books from public libraries.
Even if this software library idea (which I think is fantastic) has problems now, it's a very good thing to think about for the technologically-educated people of the future.
Sorry.. Just to be clear, I was assuming the burn-on-demand model when I wrote my parent post..