If any of these fails, you're either totally fucked, or you've suffered a setback which requires you to do one or several steps again. And with film, you can't offset initial costs by selling CDs at gigs, because you have no gigs. Don't think that a lack of gigs means you have more time on your hands: if you actually want to make money out of indie film, you're working your arse off 18x7 for it.
Those are the reasons why, upon leaving university in 1999 with a degree in film and a bit of experience in short film and theatre production and writing, I turned to a job which would make me more money: tending bar. How d'ya like them apples?
Video playback is the big kicker for me in linux, too - especially as I have old hardware which I can't replace.
A lot of the performance issues in video playback come from the player having to scale the video to your screen resolution. Unless you're using the right drivers for your video card, this is done in software, and eats cpu time like nothing else.
It's a dirty hack, but if you change down to a screenmode which is close to the encoded horizontal resolution of your video clip and scale to fit, or just watch it at normal resolution, you'll get fast, crisp fullscreen playback with properly synched sound every time - barring badly encoded video files or pre-1996 hardware. I guess you could also script this into a wrapper which detects the size of the file you're playing, restarts the X server and calls mplayer to play the file with your specified options, but I've neither the talent nor the inclination to do it...
This is the issue I'd most like resolved - proper hardware video support. And I mean PROPER support, with free or at least open source drivers. I can't count the number of times I've failed to get those damn nvidia drivers working...
But I think the most important weapon in *nix's arsenal in the upcoming war against worms, viruses, trojans and whatall, is the community. A community which designs multiple apps for the same task (diversity), sticks to security-focussed design principles (priorities), and will work to update a vulnerable piece of software winthin hours of a vulnerability's emergence. Linux, particularly, is a very competitive market; much more so than any other segment of the OS industry. There are many distributions, including many commercial distributions, with what amount to very similar products, all vying for marketshare.
First, the code is strong and well-audited, and runs on a more secure base. Second, the diversity of *nix environments will slow the advance of any given exploit, and buy the community valuable time to fix the holes as and when they appear. Third, if they know what's good for them, the commercial *nix distributions will be absolutely GAGGING for an opportunity to provide better support than their rivals, because that and marketing is all that really separates them. This will mean R&D money being funneled into projects like OpenBSD (from which numerous security standards have come to the "softer" *nices), Spamassassin, ClamAV, Debian-Security, SELinux and so on. This can only be a good thing.
Seriously, it's just about a new way of thinking about the issue. Not to say that nobody will get burnt - any war has casualties - but *nix is far better situated to defend itself in this war than any previous system has been. I'm cautious, but I'm not worried.
the Korean government is already a major user of Linux
This is probably true at higher levels, but every government office I've seen (immigration, driver licensing, local government, municipal libraries, etc. all run exclusively on older versions of windows - 98, Me and 2000.
BTW you know very little about Linux - flash, javascript and popups (unless you disable them) all work on all the major Linux browsers.
Thanks, I'm not a complete muppet and I do realise this. There's a difference between "will work on" and "designed for". In my day to day browsing life I read many Korean sites (for work and play), and the fact of the matter is that Korean webmasters design for IE6 due to demand. As someone said earlier, this was the US 3 or 4 years ago - things have changed. Well, nothing is more likely to make Korean people change browsers than to have access to a home-grown, nationally branded operating system. But damn, there's some inertia to overcome.
Apache != *nix - it runs on windows too, you know.
Still, it is nice to see IIS take big hits in April and November 2003, in favour of apache. If I recall correcly, that pretty closely matches a couple of serious exploits...
Just like with cars, cameras, cellphone technology, etc. They won't be satisfied with playing third fiddle to the Japanese and Chinese, they'll make their own distro, just to be different.
Of course, like Kia cars are built locally from Mazda/Ford specs, and like Daewoos are built from GM plans, this will be built from a common base (probably Asianux) and touted as an all-Korean project.
What interests me, though, is that this is even being considered as an option. Honestly, I haven't met a single Korean in my 114 months here who has even heard of linux, let alone one who'd actually consider using it. This country is completely hooked on windows, internet explorer and ActiveX. Check out a few typicalkoreanwebsites for more flash, javascript, popups and other assorted evilness than you can probably bear...
Yeah, um, four was the number of the beer I was opening. My bad.
I think is that community benefit from the distributed computing exercises of gmail (and like someone said above, whatever they do next) will surely be a benign side-effect, but it certainly isn't the reason or motive for this project. The motive, and what all four of my points above boils down to, is that google craves ubiquity. They revolutionised search technology without becoming a big, evil mega-corporation, and now they're looking at revolutionising consumer email service, and pushing the distributed filesystem boat out much further indeed than anyone else before. They want, more than anything, to be the people who did it first, and to collect the attendant respect, advertising revenue and (eventually) investment.
There are a few sites, including this one which allow you to check any pop address from a web interface. Also seems to do imap and ssl, but I've not tried those.
Tres useful. Doesn't help your email forwarding situation though, sorry.
L
You're kidding, right? Gmail is four things that I can see, and none of them are community service:
AdSense fulfilling its destiny, by (eventually) gaining an extra several hundred million pairs of eyes every day
A massive experiment in distributed computing and data management, the fruits of which will be phenomenally valuable
The ability to simultaneously put every other free email provider (and by force of ubiquity, every competing search engine) out of business, just in time for an IPO. Yes, Microsoft, Yahoo, that means YOU.
Well, really. If it was going to be like that, I'd be forced to pay the babysitter/daycare/whatever for an extra hour (or several) every session, just because I'm a good guy.
And $160, once, buys a lot of pre-planned extra hours.
Yup. My primary school got clever on it, and used the first 3 letters of a student's first name with the first letter of their last name. Yup, small school, only 300 students.
The fact that we're embracing interactive entertainment instead of passive narrative is something to be proud of.
This is a really interesting point, but the fact remains that all scripted games (including all computer games, by necessity of design) are only as interactive as their creators want them to be. While you may think you have a personal, one-on-one relationship with Nameless One, you're consuming the story of Planescape: Torment to only a slightly lesser degree than you consumed the story of Indiana Jones all those years ago.
Historically, entertainment and narrative have always been interactive - it's just that the interactivity always took place on a very profound level, over the course of generations. All of a sudden we have all this micro-level interactivity, and people think it's something different. Well, it's no different, really, it's just much, much faster.
Right with you here. Two all-time favourite games.
"A novel is a simple, static thing, with predigested emotions and experiences."
You're not reading the right novels. Sure, the vast bulk of fictional printed matter is droll shite, but c'mon. Could you have generalised any more widely?
Books which have involved me recently: Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls"; Joe Conrad's "Karain". If I could make Karain into a film, I would.
The criticism of games as mindless time-wasters, that is. Sure, there will always be those games, but for several decades now games, computer and otherwise, have differed from other forms of cultural expression only in their format and to a lesser degree in that they tend to reflect a much more heterogeneous pool of authorship.
The fact is that in its first decades (turn of the C19th until about 1920), moving pictures were broadly considered to be the inferior cousins of theatre performances or opera. Just as with the explosion of colour film and synch sound following the late 1920s, and the rise of the Hollywood studios, we will see a phenomenal rise in the ubiquity of computer games in hand with rising levels of technological knowhow, cheapening hardware and bandwidth, and peoples' increasing desire to define their own worldview and pastimes.
Where there is demand, so there will be supply. Uptake of interactive games has never been higher; the quality and complexity and scope of games has never been greater. Games are the way of the future.
(Speaking as a film geek, old-skool DnD geek, and RPG game designer:)
Anyone who doesn't think Casablanca, Der Ring des Niebelungen or the Glorious Ninth has no value as anything other than entertainment is quite delusional.
Yeah, I've run Mandy 9.1 and 9.2, Knoppix, Mepis and Morphix from HD, RH9 and FC1 under KDE without any terrible trouble at 128MB. Getting another 128 helped measurably, though.
... this card comes in a bunch of old laptops. It can't be swapped out. Upgrading an entire laptop is rather more costly than replacing an obsolete soundcard.
Slashdot Mirror
it is something you could do in the average vacation time alloted you by any decent job (2-3 weeks per year, maybe more).
Crap. Making indie film is just like making indie music. It goes roughly like this:
Concept => Script => Cast/Crew => Kit => Location => Post-Production => Packaging => Marketing => Distribution
If any of these fails, you're either totally fucked, or you've suffered a setback which requires you to do one or several steps again. And with film, you can't offset initial costs by selling CDs at gigs, because you have no gigs. Don't think that a lack of gigs means you have more time on your hands: if you actually want to make money out of indie film, you're working your arse off 18x7 for it.
Those are the reasons why, upon leaving university in 1999 with a degree in film and a bit of experience in short film and theatre production and writing, I turned to a job which would make me more money: tending bar. How d'ya like them apples?
L
Video playback is the big kicker for me in linux, too - especially as I have old hardware which I can't replace.
A lot of the performance issues in video playback come from the player having to scale the video to your screen resolution. Unless you're using the right drivers for your video card, this is done in software, and eats cpu time like nothing else.
It's a dirty hack, but if you change down to a screenmode which is close to the encoded horizontal resolution of your video clip and scale to fit, or just watch it at normal resolution, you'll get fast, crisp fullscreen playback with properly synched sound every time - barring badly encoded video files or pre-1996 hardware. I guess you could also script this into a wrapper which detects the size of the file you're playing, restarts the X server and calls mplayer to play the file with your specified options, but I've neither the talent nor the inclination to do it...
This is the issue I'd most like resolved - proper hardware video support. And I mean PROPER support, with free or at least open source drivers. I can't count the number of times I've failed to get those damn nvidia drivers working...
L
... they're always so clicquey.
L
You're not wrong.
But I think the most important weapon in *nix's arsenal in the upcoming war against worms, viruses, trojans and whatall, is the community. A community which designs multiple apps for the same task (diversity), sticks to security-focussed design principles (priorities), and will work to update a vulnerable piece of software winthin hours of a vulnerability's emergence. Linux, particularly, is a very competitive market; much more so than any other segment of the OS industry. There are many distributions, including many commercial distributions, with what amount to very similar products, all vying for marketshare.
First, the code is strong and well-audited, and runs on a more secure base. Second, the diversity of *nix environments will slow the advance of any given exploit, and buy the community valuable time to fix the holes as and when they appear. Third, if they know what's good for them, the commercial *nix distributions will be absolutely GAGGING for an opportunity to provide better support than their rivals, because that and marketing is all that really separates them. This will mean R&D money being funneled into projects like OpenBSD (from which numerous security standards have come to the "softer" *nices), Spamassassin, ClamAV, Debian-Security, SELinux and so on. This can only be a good thing.
Seriously, it's just about a new way of thinking about the issue. Not to say that nobody will get burnt - any war has casualties - but *nix is far better situated to defend itself in this war than any previous system has been. I'm cautious, but I'm not worried.
L
>> All his trucks have a sticker on the back that say "you are passing another Fox".
Except in reality, it's more likely they're passing you. Truck drivers == kings of the road.
L
(Note lack of Soviet Russia joke...)
the Korean government is already a major user of Linux
This is probably true at higher levels, but every government office I've seen (immigration, driver licensing, local government, municipal libraries, etc. all run exclusively on older versions of windows - 98, Me and 2000.
BTW you know very little about Linux - flash, javascript and popups (unless you disable them) all work on all the major Linux browsers.
Thanks, I'm not a complete muppet and I do realise this. There's a difference between "will work on" and "designed for". In my day to day browsing life I read many Korean sites (for work and play), and the fact of the matter is that Korean webmasters design for IE6 due to demand. As someone said earlier, this was the US 3 or 4 years ago - things have changed. Well, nothing is more likely to make Korean people change browsers than to have access to a home-grown, nationally branded operating system. But damn, there's some inertia to overcome.
L
Apache != *nix - it runs on windows too, you know.
Still, it is nice to see IIS take big hits in April and November 2003, in favour of apache. If I recall correcly, that pretty closely matches a couple of serious exploits...
L
s/114/14/g
L
Just like with cars, cameras, cellphone technology, etc. They won't be satisfied with playing third fiddle to the Japanese and Chinese, they'll make their own distro, just to be different. Of course, like Kia cars are built locally from Mazda/Ford specs, and like Daewoos are built from GM plans, this will be built from a common base (probably Asianux) and touted as an all-Korean project. What interests me, though, is that this is even being considered as an option. Honestly, I haven't met a single Korean in my 114 months here who has even heard of linux, let alone one who'd actually consider using it. This country is completely hooked on windows, internet explorer and ActiveX. Check out a few typical korean websites for more flash, javascript, popups and other assorted evilness than you can probably bear...
L
Yeah, um, four was the number of the beer I was opening. My bad.
I think is that community benefit from the distributed computing exercises of gmail (and like someone said above, whatever they do next) will surely be a benign side-effect, but it certainly isn't the reason or motive for this project. The motive, and what all four of my points above boils down to, is that google craves ubiquity. They revolutionised search technology without becoming a big, evil mega-corporation, and now they're looking at revolutionising consumer email service, and pushing the distributed filesystem boat out much further indeed than anyone else before. They want, more than anything, to be the people who did it first, and to collect the attendant respect, advertising revenue and (eventually) investment.
L
There are a few sites, including this one which allow you to check any pop address from a web interface. Also seems to do imap and ssl, but I've not tried those.
Tres useful. Doesn't help your email forwarding situation though, sorry.
L
You're kidding, right? Gmail is four things that I can see, and none of them are community service:
- AdSense fulfilling its destiny, by (eventually) gaining an extra several hundred million pairs of eyes every day
- A massive experiment in distributed computing and data management, the fruits of which will be phenomenally valuable
- The ability to simultaneously put every other free email provider (and by force of ubiquity, every competing search engine) out of business, just in time for an IPO. Yes, Microsoft, Yahoo, that means YOU.
Nope, nothing charitable about it. LWell, really. If it was going to be like that, I'd be forced to pay the babysitter/daycare/whatever for an extra hour (or several) every session, just because I'm a good guy.
And $160, once, buys a lot of pre-planned extra hours.
L
Not for long. My high-school German teacher, Mrs Michalski, had a son called Michael, aka Mick. he's be pushing 20 by now, I guess...
L
Yup. My primary school got clever on it, and used the first 3 letters of a student's first name with the first letter of their last name. Yup, small school, only 300 students.
But Shiella Thomas's parents made them change it.
L
Actually, in English the word is "Unionise".
Only in American would anyone use "Unionize".
L
The fact that we're embracing interactive entertainment instead of passive narrative is something to be proud of.
This is a really interesting point, but the fact remains that all scripted games (including all computer games, by necessity of design) are only as interactive as their creators want them to be. While you may think you have a personal, one-on-one relationship with Nameless One, you're consuming the story of Planescape: Torment to only a slightly lesser degree than you consumed the story of Indiana Jones all those years ago.
Historically, entertainment and narrative have always been interactive - it's just that the interactivity always took place on a very profound level, over the course of generations. All of a sudden we have all this micro-level interactivity, and people think it's something different. Well, it's no different, really, it's just much, much faster.
L
"Deus Ex" or "Planescape: Torment"
Right with you here. Two all-time favourite games.
"A novel is a simple, static thing, with predigested emotions and experiences."
You're not reading the right novels. Sure, the vast bulk of fictional printed matter is droll shite, but c'mon. Could you have generalised any more widely?
Books which have involved me recently: Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls"; Joe Conrad's "Karain". If I could make Karain into a film, I would.
L
The criticism of games as mindless time-wasters, that is. Sure, there will always be those games, but for several decades now games, computer and otherwise, have differed from other forms of cultural expression only in their format and to a lesser degree in that they tend to reflect a much more heterogeneous pool of authorship.
:)
The fact is that in its first decades (turn of the C19th until about 1920), moving pictures were broadly considered to be the inferior cousins of theatre performances or opera. Just as with the explosion of colour film and synch sound following the late 1920s, and the rise of the Hollywood studios, we will see a phenomenal rise in the ubiquity of computer games in hand with rising levels of technological knowhow, cheapening hardware and bandwidth, and peoples' increasing desire to define their own worldview and pastimes.
Where there is demand, so there will be supply. Uptake of interactive games has never been higher; the quality and complexity and scope of games has never been greater. Games are the way of the future.
(Speaking as a film geek, old-skool DnD geek, and RPG game designer
L
Anyone who doesn't think Casablanca, Der Ring des Niebelungen or the Glorious Ninth has no value as anything other than entertainment is quite delusional.
It's not all about facts, you know.
L
Knoppix in runlevel 2 - text only mode.
If you get 128 or more ram, you'll be able to manage, though. I've run plenty on pII233/128.
L
(696969)
Yeah, with that UID she'll believe you too...
L
Heh, my birthday is March 13, so I have it marked on the calendar already.
:)
Happily, Madame Guerin has no objection to either of these special birthday treats
L
Yeah, I've run Mandy 9.1 and 9.2, Knoppix, Mepis and Morphix from HD, RH9 and FC1 under KDE without any terrible trouble at 128MB. Getting another 128 helped measurably, though.
L
... this card comes in a bunch of old laptops. It can't be swapped out. Upgrading an entire laptop is rather more costly than replacing an obsolete soundcard.
L