Don't even need the floppies, I put debian on my old sparc IPX with just the network (boot image fed into forth with tftp, NFS mount the root filesystem). --------
Let's face it: at the present time there's nothing under Linux that works as well as Microsoft Office. Period.
You're right that this is the most important statement. You're wrong in alot of the other things you say. You point out that in order for an environment to survive, it has to run MS Office. This begs the question, why?? Two very simple reasons: 1. The file formats. This is the most important, because if you can read and write office files, you're almost there. 2. The learning curve. Almost all the time, if you try to show someone a great program (like blender) they get interested but don't have the time to learn it. My point:
Applixware Office Lets get one fscking thing straight, Applixware is NOT AbiWord. Repeat that. Applixware is commercial software for linux. Its very fast, very easy, complete, cheap, available now, etc.. It works and feels just like MS Office, and it reads and writes Office files better then any other native Linux alternative. My girlfriend switched over to Linux after Windows gave up the ghost for the last time. She runs Debian. She loves it. She is your typical windows user. She uses both Gnome and KDE (with kdm as her display manager, which allows her to easily select either gnome or KDE).
Everyone who is claiming linux is dead on the desktop needs to look around. Plenty of us make it work just fine. And by the way, I don't think the developers of these wonderful desktop tools give two shits what this ass at LinuxPlanet has to say. --------
Everyone who for a second believes that IPv6 is going to leave anyone out in the cold when it comes time to upgrade hasn't read a SINGLE document describing it. Here is a link for you. Click it. Now. Don't tell me I didn't warn you. That link is a semitechnical overview of IPv6, but for some more important details, see the RFC describing the new sockets system.
One thing I want you to get absolutely sure is that IPv6 is fully backward compatible with v4 AND you can switch an individual host or router from v4 to v6 without cutting out any of your v4 customers. From the first link:
Ease of transition is a key point in the design of IPng. It is not something [that] was added in at the end. IPng is designed to interoperate with IPv4. Specific mechanisms (embedded IPv4 addresses, pseudo-checksum rules, etc.) were built into IPng to support transition and compatibility with IPv4. It was designed to permit a gradual and piecemeal deployment with a minimum of dependencies.
BTW, another poster made a comment about how 'IPv6 is dead till it ships in a microsoft stack. When it does, IPv6 will be real instantly.' What kind of idiocy!?! Did IPv4 just suddenly become important because Microsoft added it to Win95?!? And besides, with something as important as the IP, no one company (or two, even MS + Cisco have their limits) can dictate what and how it will be. Why don't you go and write some applications that use IPv6 in a way that people want and can't be done in IPv4. Then, and only then, does it become real.
Squid is a great web proxy cache that many ISP's use to get the same result. It also has hooks built into it to easily join cache heirarchies and NLANR. Its 100% open source too.
Coming back to the topic, squid, akamai, freenet, or any other heirarchal cache structure could make these incredibly high bandwidth home connections work without destroying the servers those customers want to get to. Even when I was using a 56 k connection, I ran squid in my house to save bandwidth. If you applied the same idea to 100 people with 100 mbit connections in their homes, all hooking into a cache-mother at their ISP's office, I think everyone would be happy.
Alot of people (okay, maybe not _alot_) use IE 5 for hp-ux and solaris. But in order to get it running, you have to also download most of the already ported Win32 API as well.
This evidence kind of implies that it really wouldn't be hard at all to port IE or Office or most other microsoft code to BSD or even Linux, but its not about easy porting. I imagine, since IE is going to the new microsoft applications company, that we will see a version of it for Linux very soon after the operating systems division's stock drops below $30. Why beat a dead horse, as they say.. But then again, none of this is really gnu.
I'm currently using freewwweb until Cable comes to my area, but the most glaring problem I have with them is a few weeks ago they put up a firewall that blocks port 25 to anything but their own smtp server. I use qmail and mutt on my laptop to send my mail, and for most people running sendmail and most unix MUA's, it tries to use the sendmail binary for mail, instead of opening an SMTP connection outside. I don't want to switch mail clients just to do mail, I finally have it setup the way I like.
I asked their tech support about this and they replied (it seemed without even reading the message) that they do not support Linux and their policies are not debatable.
True, I'm still using them, but I'd like to find something better yet still free and workable with UNIX. I don't have a windows partition so installing a windows client isn't an option. Anyone have any suggestions?
> But there are a lot of other reasons why GPS isn't very good for aviation use:
> GPS does not handle altitude very accurately
> GPS does not handle high speeds all that well.
True, GPS does have some short comings. I don't know if you've ever flown a plane with GPS, but its a world of difference versus The Old Way. There are better instruments for reporting altitude and airspeed, GPS gives you a good groundspeed reading as well. But aboveall, the best thing about GPS is that you know where you are.
Most other pilots I've talked to prefer the combination of a GPS feeding a movingmap display. Neither instrument is approved for IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) so you're not supposed to just blindly trust it for your position, but if you're in an emergency situation and you need to find someplace to put the plane down, the GPS will tell you where the closest strip is that can handle your plane.
A couple years ago, Hasbro bought up several classic titles to have software companies rewrite them in all the modern 3-D splendor that wasn't available to the orignal designers.
A few years ago, I was a programming intern for a game programming company in Gaithersburg, MD. We worked on Centipede there and Hasbro was the publisher, they had brought the project to us. For those who never played (quite a few), the main game wasn't like the old one, it was given a plot and a hero (Wally), and 3D Scenery, etc.. An action game with an objective to stop the evil Centipede Queen. Well Hasbro had plans to work on several more classic games ("retrogames" as they called them..). They asked us (and probably any other developer working on one of their "retrogames") to make sure we included a classic version of those old games which was supposed to be the exact same game as the old one only with 3D graphics.
Now Hasbro is tired of paying royalties after purchasing the titles so I guess now they have successfully argued they don't have to. This won't stifle modern game design, it doesn't have to. Modern game design, according to most publishers, not just Hasbro, is retrogames. Not just retrogames, but sequels, and just more of the same. Publishers want to be sure that they will get a return so according to some boardroom line graph, new game ideas never sell. I mean cmon, what works for EA Sports has to work for everyone. Look how Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy haven't changed since the last time you played em. There are some publishers out there appreciate orginality, probably the most daring one being Gathering Of Developers, but their problem is that they don't have the financial backing companies like Hasbro have, so they only put money behind very few titles, and their requirements are strict. Our company couldn't put a game out with them because one of their requirements is to have _aready_ put out a succesful game. Others, like id Software (even though Quake 3 is another fps, it was an untested idea that #1, you need a 3D Accelerator to play it, and #2, the big one, that there is really no single player), and Bungie with Halo, and Sierra when they put out HalfLife (valve was the developer, and I still give them credit for putting out the greatest game of all time) and a couple others who put out quality software. They have the money to do this tough..The solution? Support small-time games, support shareware games, and find out before hand that sequels and retrogames suck. Play something fresh.
Short term solution could be that one of the companies releases their format to the public, we grab it, polish it where necessary, and develop all kind of players & stuff for it
I write code like a fifth grader so correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't this be done today with mpeg? I mean, we've got the source code, we've even got Loki's mpeg library. And I understand that this wouldn't be used by the big content providers as we would be able to save the downloads, but I want to be able to save downloads, and I want anyone to be able to publish their works without paying >$1000 for a codec I can't even view, let alone save. Those big content providers will eventually have to do something different, as some poster has already commented, their security through obscurity will, and on some occasions has, been compromised.
I'm supposed to see this movie tomorrow with my girlfriend and some friends, and from what I've seen of the previews, I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way you do. It just seems to be the best new movie to come out in a while so what good new movies are there or are coming out soon?
I've got $60 worth of movie gift certificates that I want to use. I don't want to resort to renting Akira again. If anyone can recommend a better scifi or just a damn half-way interesting movie, please, say something or email me directly. Remove the spamless.
Many people seem to be implying with their posts that Nintendo shouldn't be responsible for people hurting themselves from playing too much. This isn't exactly the case. For those who don't play Mario Party, here's how it works:
The game is kind-of-like a board game. The object is to get as many stars as possible. The person with the most stars at the end is the "Super Star". Stars cost money, and at the end of every turn, the players play a [semi]random mini-game in competition for coins. The hand devastation comes from some minigames where the way you win is by rotating the analog stick as fast as you can. (Games like tug-of-war and pattle battle). Nintendo put grips into the tops of their analog sticks so that it would be easier to make fine controls in games like Mario World, which is really just shortsided on their part, thinking that all that stick would be good for is meneuvering in a 3D enviornment.
Anyway, after playing even one of these minigames where the object is to rotate the stick, your hand is raw. In most minigames, this is not the objective, but they are frequent enough that by the end of the whole game, you are in some serious pain (even though you had a great time).
This is probably one of the most fun nintendo games there is. Its designed for 4 players at a time, everyone can see the whole screen all the time (no split screen [ala any first person shooter or any racing game] where you get some small fraction of an already small screen), and no one can become a "master" and just make the game uninteresting for everyone else. Rent it and call some friends over. Then get some free Nintendo brand gloves too =].
This free glove thing is just a little late. They recently released Mario Party 2 (more of the same thing with some nice new stuff and more games), where all of the stick-rotating minigames have been removed. Upside: At least Nintendo listens to their customers and tries hard to put good stuff in the box, unlike some broken, rushed-to-market, DVD, Internet, Stereo, do-everything-else-in-the-known-universe-for-under -$500, fit-video-games-somewhere-in-there machines.
Correct if I'm wrong (really), but where _could_ you put the descrambler where at some point it would not be possible to grab a digital copy of the data. Does this make sense? Since it is digitally encrypted digital information (huh? =]) at some point it will be digitally decrypted and then translated to real pixels for your eye? No matter where you put the descrambler, it will have to have a layer between it and the display conversion, right? And especially since this is proposed for lcd's and other digital displays, you eventually get a perfect picture. So why couldn't you just grab it there (if you reverse engineered the hardware enough?).
And I think CmdrTaco made a valid, simple point one time on geeks in space, regarding DVD's, but it applies to all content scrambling systems, "If we can watch them, we can rip them."
It has potential to be a good thing. The army has been using games like doom and quake for some time to help train group tactics and other armies do the same thing. If they continue thier trend of "virtualizing" war, they will soon no longer need the foot soldier. The soldier will become a machine, while the human is back at HQ controlling it, or a platoon of them.
This would be a much better situation then we currently have, despite the doom-sayers. A mechanized soldier would never shoot an innocent. No more mother's getting notices of their son's untimely demise. And war's could actually be won or lost really fast. And this extends to not just infantry, but air power too. I read an article in (i think) popular science that described new fighter/bomber jets that had a wingspan of 2 meters and flew pilotless. The plan was for them to attack in swarms with remote pilots sitting on the ground.
The sad part is that none of it has to happen, but it will anyway. If those same mech soldiers were used as man power in countries that need it, well you know the rest... But some guys like to fight..
This camera seems to do what researchers at Berkeley have been doing for a while now, but its getting to consumer level. The culmination of this technology is to be able to give the computer a regular 35mm photograph and let it reconstruct perfect models and textures of everything it sees.
The Berkeley researches have this working, only it takes more steps and more time. Alot of these techniques were used in The Matrix for stuff like the bullet time shot and the scene in the beginning where the girl does the levitating crane-kick. See this picture for another example if you have no idea what I'm talking about. And its all done in BSD so, yeah, Linux could probably do it too, even if this Minolta camera doesn't let you (they won't be the only ones with a cool-ass-3d-camera-you've-gotta-have).
These techniques are the future, not just for games, but for anything 3D. Its still polygon meshes too, so all of our other techniques for working with polygons (clipping, colision detection, transformations, etc..) still work fine just little to no modelling time. (but then of course, how do you do the really cool stuff like alien worlds or evil monsters?)
Kinda reminds me of an old Doom map modelled after the bethesda movie theater close to my house. =]
I guess this camera and software combo are the comercialization of this research. Go there if you want to know how it all works and how cool it can be.
I work at an ISP as a netadmin/tech support. The tech room gets calls _every day_ from people that want to get AOL off of their machine. I know we all have heard the story before, and I'm not the first to say something, but I just hope someone at AOL reads this thread. Why make it so difficult?
It doesn't help AOL one bit to make their software hard to remove. Their tech support won't even help you do it, they give you the usual Microsoft run around stating that its easy to use and they can help you get it working. When the customer comes to us to help them, he gets angry. I know most of us using *nix don't have this problem, but DUN on a windows machine is a really big hassle to reinstall. These problems just make for an angry AOL customer, who is now awake to what kind of a company AOL is. The customer then tells their friends about how bad AOL is. Bad word of mouth is can destroy good PR, even if you do own Time Warner.
The worst part is that done correctly, AOL can be a decent service for a lot of people. My brother is a geek who runs linux, but he loves Mac's, always has. He uses AOL and has so for a long time because there is this awesome mud there. I tell him there are better mud's out there, ones you don't have to pay for, and he's tried them, but he just likes this one. And I can understand that, its his preference, but even he hates the run around he gets with his connection and if he could find a game that is as entertaining to him elsewhere, he would take it up in a second.
My prediction is that AOL's burning of their own customers will be their downfall, not crap technology or terrible business ideas. For a service that touts its ease-of-use, to make so many people so angry is going to have serious repurcussions (sp?). Look at how Microsoft is today, sure they might still have the market share, but people are seriously looking into alternatives because they are tired of the problems. Everyone gets what they deserve, it just usually takes a while.
Dave
I wanted to rant harder, but its been a very long day, and I think we all have read this before, but its my tuppence.
Shortly before releasing the GeForce, SGI was broke up its departments. One of the results of this breaking was that they transferred 50 engineers to Nvidia, some of whom helped write the original OpenGL spec, and some who worked on their best hardware.
This thread to an earlier slashdot story has a post titled "Why Nvidia is doing this..." (sorry, couldn't find direct link) gives a very likely future which we are starting to see more of. SGI's machines are too expensive and are not selling well enough, so do what IBM and Linux have done, migrate away from specialized high end machines.
I share the opinion that SGI and Nvidia are teaming up to make workstations that _destroy_ NT performance based on Open Source Linux. SGI's visual workstations sold very poorly because they were overpriced for the performance their modified NT could give them. Now couple a free operating system with awesome off-the-shelf hardware and you've got a killer workstation for cheap.
And now, I guess VA comes into play because they have the knowledge and experience to really bring hardware and Linux together for maximum performance.
Dave
What goes around comes around..
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 3
If a company wants to keep the source a secret, my problem is not that they violate the GPL by doing so. Their maintentance, bugfixes, etc. become their problem and less of the communities.
What bugs me is the potential for an employee to be fired for distributing this source back to the community. Now it becomes his argument that the GPL grants him the right to do this, and they should not have fired him.
So now the company is sued for violating the GPL by that individual. The GPL still holds. And the whole mess just becomes a lesson that violating the GPL is a bad idea.
From the FAQ: Q. What is new in the 3D acceleration module? A. The 3D portion of the driver has been in updated to take better advantage of the RIVA TNT/TNT2 products. 3D rendering in 32bpp is now supported and textures are no longer limited to be square powers of 2. Support for NVIDIA GeForce 256 based products has also been added.
This is much better then the teaser they gave us in June. With the june driver and X 3.3.3.1 I would get around 14 fps in q3demo1. GLX module and X 3.3.5 gets me around 9. This driver with X 3.3.5 plays nice at 24. It doesn't sound like much, but its still an indirect rendering driver. I can settle with that till X 4.0 and DRI comes around. I'm just tired of nvidia getting a bad rep from the glx-dev folks.
And it is much more stable (though opening the register specs, ala 3dfx and matrox would be nicer) then the older driver. But still, I send my thanks. And you should too. Now.
From the FAQ: Q. What is new in the 3D acceleration module? A. The 3D portion of the driver has been in updated to take better advantage of the RIVA TNT/TNT2 products. 3D rendering in 32bpp is now supported and textures are no longer limited to be square powers of 2. Support for NVIDIA GeForce 256 based products has also been added. This is much better then the teaser they gave us in June. With the june driver and X 3.3.3.1 I would get around 14 fps in q3demo1. GLX module and X 3.3.5 gets me around 9. This driver with X 3.3.5 plays nice at 24. It doesn't sound like much, but its still an indirect rendering driver. I can settle with that till X 4.0 and DRI comes around. I'm just tired of nvidia getting a bad rep from the glx-dev folks. And it is much more stable (though opening the register specs, ala 3dfx and matrox would be nicer) then the older driver. But still, I send my thanks. And you should too. Now. Dave
I'm not sure how many of us are avid anime fans, but there is an extremely good movie out there named Ghost In The Shell. The setting is in the not-too-distant future where biomechanical enhancements are common. It is almost to the point that to be 100% human is out of the ordinary. This sets up a situation where hackers can not only telnet into someones iToaster and burn homes down but directly into someone's brain/soul (ghost).
For the skeptics, this movie does more than show how different the world will be, but how common the changes will seem.
I've tried all the linux mp3 encoders I can find (l3enc, mp3enc, bladeenc, etc..) and I've found that if you are encoding for audio quality, I use 160 kbps, they all sound the same.. Bladeenc is the fastest though.. To automate everything I use Grip w/ cdparanoia and bladeenc, just pop a CD in, hit Rip+Encode, and you are left with exactly what you want..
btw, in case it hasn't been explained, cdparanoia is a ripping program.. Its audio quality is great because of some very good algorithms to elimate jitter / scratches / any other audio problem.. I can give it a CD that will barely play in my stereo and the wav's that come out of it are perfect.. If it finds an audio defect, it tries to go over that spot on the cd again and again to get the right data..
Or Grip (http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~oliphant/grip/) for us enlightened folks:) it does the exact same thing.. and it goes great with DigitalDJ using a mySQL database to manage all your mp3's..
Slashdot Mirror
Don't even need the floppies, I put debian on my old sparc IPX with just the network (boot image fed into forth with tftp, NFS mount the root filesystem).
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Let's face it: at the present time there's nothing under Linux that works as well as Microsoft Office. Period.
You're right that this is the most important statement. You're wrong in alot of the other things you say. You point out that in order for an environment to survive, it has to run MS Office. This begs the question, why?? Two very simple reasons: 1. The file formats. This is the most important, because if you can read and write office files, you're almost there. 2. The learning curve. Almost all the time, if you try to show someone a great program (like blender) they get interested but don't have the time to learn it. My point:
Applixware Office Lets get one fscking thing straight, Applixware is NOT AbiWord. Repeat that. Applixware is commercial software for linux. Its very fast, very easy, complete, cheap, available now, etc.. It works and feels just like MS Office, and it reads and writes Office files better then any other native Linux alternative. My girlfriend switched over to Linux after Windows gave up the ghost for the last time. She runs Debian. She loves it. She is your typical windows user. She uses both Gnome and KDE (with kdm as her display manager, which allows her to easily select either gnome or KDE).
Everyone who is claiming linux is dead on the desktop needs to look around. Plenty of us make it work just fine. And by the way, I don't think the developers of these wonderful desktop tools give two shits what this ass at LinuxPlanet has to say.
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Everyone who for a second believes that IPv6 is going to leave anyone out in the cold when it comes time to upgrade hasn't read a SINGLE document describing it. Here is a link for you. Click it. Now. Don't tell me I didn't warn you. That link is a semitechnical overview of IPv6, but for some more important details, see the RFC describing the new sockets system.
One thing I want you to get absolutely sure is that IPv6 is fully backward compatible with v4 AND you can switch an individual host or router from v4 to v6 without cutting out any of your v4 customers. From the first link:
Ease of transition is a key point in the design of IPng. It is not something [that] was added in at the end. IPng is designed to interoperate with IPv4. Specific mechanisms (embedded IPv4 addresses, pseudo-checksum rules, etc.) were built into IPng to support transition and compatibility with IPv4. It was designed to permit a gradual and piecemeal deployment with a minimum of dependencies.
BTW, another poster made a comment about how 'IPv6 is dead till it ships in a microsoft stack. When it does, IPv6 will be real instantly.' What kind of idiocy!?! Did IPv4 just suddenly become important because Microsoft added it to Win95?!? And besides, with something as important as the IP, no one company (or two, even MS + Cisco have their limits) can dictate what and how it will be. Why don't you go and write some applications that use IPv6 in a way that people want and can't be done in IPv4. Then, and only then, does it become real.
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Squid is a great web proxy cache that many ISP's use to get the same result. It also has hooks built into it to easily join cache heirarchies and NLANR. Its 100% open source too.
Coming back to the topic, squid, akamai, freenet, or any other heirarchal cache structure could make these incredibly high bandwidth home connections work without destroying the servers those customers want to get to. Even when I was using a 56 k connection, I ran squid in my house to save bandwidth. If you applied the same idea to 100 people with 100 mbit connections in their homes, all hooking into a cache-mother at their ISP's office, I think everyone would be happy.
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I was actually watching lain (again) while this story was posted.
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Alot of people (okay, maybe not _alot_) use IE 5 for hp-ux and solaris. But in order to get it running, you have to also download most of the already ported Win32 API as well.
This evidence kind of implies that it really wouldn't be hard at all to port IE or Office or most other microsoft code to BSD or even Linux, but its not about easy porting. I imagine, since IE is going to the new microsoft applications company, that we will see a version of it for Linux very soon after the operating systems division's stock drops below $30. Why beat a dead horse, as they say.. But then again, none of this is really gnu.
Dave
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I'm currently using freewwweb until Cable comes to my area, but the most glaring problem I have with them is a few weeks ago they put up a firewall that blocks port 25 to anything but their own smtp server. I use qmail and mutt on my laptop to send my mail, and for most people running sendmail and most unix MUA's, it tries to use the sendmail binary for mail, instead of opening an SMTP connection outside. I don't want to switch mail clients just to do mail, I finally have it setup the way I like.
I asked their tech support about this and they replied (it seemed without even reading the message) that they do not support Linux and their policies are not debatable.
True, I'm still using them, but I'd like to find something better yet still free and workable with UNIX. I don't have a windows partition so installing a windows client isn't an option. Anyone have any suggestions?
Dave
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> But there are a lot of other reasons why GPS isn't very good for aviation use:
> GPS does not handle altitude very accurately
> GPS does not handle high speeds all that well.
True, GPS does have some short comings. I don't know if you've ever flown a plane with GPS, but its a world of difference versus The Old Way. There are better instruments for reporting altitude and airspeed, GPS gives you a good groundspeed reading as well. But aboveall, the best thing about GPS is that you know where you are.
Most other pilots I've talked to prefer the combination of a GPS feeding a movingmap display. Neither instrument is approved for IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) so you're not supposed to just blindly trust it for your position, but if you're in an emergency situation and you need to find someplace to put the plane down, the GPS will tell you where the closest strip is that can handle your plane.
wannabe aviator.
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A couple years ago, Hasbro bought up several classic titles to have software companies rewrite them in all the modern 3-D splendor that wasn't available to the orignal designers.
A few years ago, I was a programming intern for a game programming company in Gaithersburg, MD. We worked on Centipede there and Hasbro was the publisher, they had brought the project to us. For those who never played (quite a few), the main game wasn't like the old one, it was given a plot and a hero (Wally), and 3D Scenery, etc.. An action game with an objective to stop the evil Centipede Queen. Well Hasbro had plans to work on several more classic games ("retrogames" as they called them..). They asked us (and probably any other developer working on one of their "retrogames") to make sure we included a classic version of those old games which was supposed to be the exact same game as the old one only with 3D graphics.
Now Hasbro is tired of paying royalties after purchasing the titles so I guess now they have successfully argued they don't have to. This won't stifle modern game design, it doesn't have to. Modern game design, according to most publishers, not just Hasbro, is retrogames. Not just retrogames, but sequels, and just more of the same. Publishers want to be sure that they will get a return so according to some boardroom line graph, new game ideas never sell. I mean cmon, what works for EA Sports has to work for everyone. Look how Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy haven't changed since the last time you played em. There are some publishers out there appreciate orginality, probably the most daring one being Gathering Of Developers, but their problem is that they don't have the financial backing companies like Hasbro have, so they only put money behind very few titles, and their requirements are strict. Our company couldn't put a game out with them because one of their requirements is to have _aready_ put out a succesful game. Others, like id Software (even though Quake 3 is another fps, it was an untested idea that #1, you need a 3D Accelerator to play it, and #2, the big one, that there is really no single player), and Bungie with Halo, and Sierra when they put out HalfLife (valve was the developer, and I still give them credit for putting out the greatest game of all time) and a couple others who put out quality software. They have the money to do this tough..The solution? Support small-time games, support shareware games, and find out before hand that sequels and retrogames suck. Play something fresh.
karma whore.
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Short term solution could be that one of the companies releases their format to the public, we grab it, polish it where necessary, and develop all kind of players & stuff for it
I write code like a fifth grader so correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't this be done today with mpeg? I mean, we've got the source code, we've even got Loki's mpeg library. And I understand that this wouldn't be used by the big content providers as we would be able to save the downloads, but I want to be able to save downloads, and I want anyone to be able to publish their works without paying >$1000 for a codec I can't even view, let alone save. Those big content providers will eventually have to do something different, as some poster has already commented, their security through obscurity will, and on some occasions has, been compromised.
Feel free to slap me with a trout if I'm wrong.
Dave
I'm supposed to see this movie tomorrow with my girlfriend and some friends, and from what I've seen of the previews, I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way you do. It just seems to be the best new movie to come out in a while so what good new movies are there or are coming out soon?
I've got $60 worth of movie gift certificates that I want to use. I don't want to resort to renting Akira again. If anyone can recommend a better scifi or just a damn half-way interesting movie, please, say something or email me directly. Remove the spamless.
Dave
Many people seem to be implying with their posts that Nintendo shouldn't be responsible for people hurting themselves from playing too much. This isn't exactly the case. For those who don't play Mario Party, here's how it works:
r -$500, fit-video-games-somewhere-in-there machines.
The game is kind-of-like a board game. The object is to get as many stars as possible. The person with the most stars at the end is the "Super Star". Stars cost money, and at the end of every turn, the players play a [semi]random mini-game in competition for coins. The hand devastation comes from some minigames where the way you win is by rotating the analog stick as fast as you can. (Games like tug-of-war and pattle battle). Nintendo put grips into the tops of their analog sticks so that it would be easier to make fine controls in games like Mario World, which is really just shortsided on their part, thinking that all that stick would be good for is meneuvering in a 3D enviornment.
Anyway, after playing even one of these minigames where the object is to rotate the stick, your hand is raw. In most minigames, this is not the objective, but they are frequent enough that by the end of the whole game, you are in some serious pain (even though you had a great time).
This is probably one of the most fun nintendo games there is. Its designed for 4 players at a time, everyone can see the whole screen all the time (no split screen [ala any first person shooter or any racing game] where you get some small fraction of an already small screen), and no one can become a "master" and just make the game uninteresting for everyone else. Rent it and call some friends over. Then get some free Nintendo brand gloves too =].
This free glove thing is just a little late. They recently released Mario Party 2 (more of the same thing with some nice new stuff and more games), where all of the stick-rotating minigames have been removed.
Upside: At least Nintendo listens to their customers and tries hard to put good stuff in the box, unlike some broken, rushed-to-market, DVD, Internet, Stereo, do-everything-else-in-the-known-universe-for-unde
Dave
Correct if I'm wrong (really), but where _could_ you put the descrambler where at some point it would not be possible to grab a digital copy of the data. Does this make sense? Since it is digitally encrypted digital information (huh? =]) at some point it will be digitally decrypted and then translated to real pixels for your eye? No matter where you put the descrambler, it will have to have a layer between it and the display conversion, right? And especially since this is proposed for lcd's and other digital displays, you eventually get a perfect picture. So why couldn't you just grab it there (if you reverse engineered the hardware enough?).
And I think CmdrTaco made a valid, simple point one time on geeks in space, regarding DVD's, but it applies to all content scrambling systems, "If we can watch them, we can rip them."
Dave
It has potential to be a good thing. The army has been using games like doom and quake for some time to help train group tactics and other armies do the same thing. If they continue thier trend of "virtualizing" war, they will soon no longer need the foot soldier. The soldier will become a machine, while the human is back at HQ controlling it, or a platoon of them.
This would be a much better situation then we currently have, despite the doom-sayers. A mechanized soldier would never shoot an innocent. No more mother's getting notices of their son's untimely demise. And war's could actually be won or lost really fast. And this extends to not just infantry, but air power too. I read an article in (i think) popular science that described new fighter/bomber jets that had a wingspan of 2 meters and flew pilotless. The plan was for them to attack in swarms with remote pilots sitting on the ground.
The sad part is that none of it has to happen, but it will anyway. If those same mech soldiers were used as man power in countries that need it, well you know the rest... But some guys like to fight..
Expect this trend to continue.
This camera seems to do what researchers at Berkeley have been doing for a while now, but its getting to consumer level. The culmination of this technology is to be able to give the computer a regular 35mm photograph and let it reconstruct perfect models and textures of everything it sees.
The Berkeley researches have this working, only it takes more steps and more time. Alot of these techniques were used in The Matrix for stuff like the bullet time shot and the scene in the beginning where the girl does the levitating crane-kick. See this picture for another example if you have no idea what I'm talking about. And its all done in BSD so, yeah, Linux could probably do it too, even if this Minolta camera doesn't let you (they won't be the only ones with a cool-ass-3d-camera-you've-gotta-have).
These techniques are the future, not just for games, but for anything 3D. Its still polygon meshes too, so all of our other techniques for working with polygons (clipping, colision detection, transformations, etc..) still work fine just little to no modelling time. (but then of course, how do you do the really cool stuff like alien worlds or evil monsters?)
Kinda reminds me of an old Doom map modelled after the bethesda movie theater close to my house. =]
Dave
I guess this camera and software combo are the comercialization of this research. Go there if you want to know how it all works and how cool it can be.
Dave
I work at an ISP as a netadmin/tech support. The tech room gets calls _every day_ from people that want to get AOL off of their machine. I know we all have heard the story before, and I'm not the first to say something, but I just hope someone at AOL reads this thread. Why make it so difficult?
It doesn't help AOL one bit to make their software hard to remove. Their tech support won't even help you do it, they give you the usual Microsoft run around stating that its easy to use and they can help you get it working. When the customer comes to us to help them, he gets angry. I know most of us using *nix don't have this problem, but DUN on a windows machine is a really big hassle to reinstall. These problems just make for an angry AOL customer, who is now awake to what kind of a company AOL is. The customer then tells their friends about how bad AOL is. Bad word of mouth is can destroy good PR, even if you do own Time Warner.
The worst part is that done correctly, AOL can be a decent service for a lot of people. My brother is a geek who runs linux, but he loves Mac's, always has. He uses AOL and has so for a long time because there is this awesome mud there. I tell him there are better mud's out there, ones you don't have to pay for, and he's tried them, but he just likes this one. And I can understand that, its his preference, but even he hates the run around he gets with his connection and if he could find a game that is as entertaining to him elsewhere, he would take it up in a second.
My prediction is that AOL's burning of their own customers will be their downfall, not crap technology or terrible business ideas. For a service that touts its ease-of-use, to make so many people so angry is going to have serious repurcussions (sp?). Look at how Microsoft is today, sure they might still have the market share, but people are seriously looking into alternatives because they are tired of the problems. Everyone gets what they deserve, it just usually takes a while.
Dave
I wanted to rant harder, but its been a very long day, and I think we all have read this before, but its my tuppence.
This is not flaimbait, merely information.
Shortly before releasing the GeForce, SGI was broke up its departments. One of the results of this breaking was that they transferred 50 engineers to Nvidia, some of whom helped write the original OpenGL spec, and some who worked on their best hardware.
This thread to an earlier slashdot story has a post titled "Why Nvidia is doing this..." (sorry, couldn't find direct link) gives a very likely future which we are starting to see more of. SGI's machines are too expensive and are not selling well enough, so do what IBM and Linux have done, migrate away from specialized high end machines.
I share the opinion that SGI and Nvidia are teaming up to make workstations that _destroy_ NT performance based on Open Source Linux. SGI's visual workstations sold very poorly because they were overpriced for the performance their modified NT could give them. Now couple a free operating system with awesome off-the-shelf hardware and you've got a killer workstation for cheap.
And now, I guess VA comes into play because they have the knowledge and experience to really bring hardware and Linux together for maximum performance.
Dave
If a company wants to keep the source a secret, my problem is not that they violate the GPL by doing so. Their maintentance, bugfixes, etc. become their problem and less of the communities.
What bugs me is the potential for an employee to be fired for distributing this source back to the community. Now it becomes his argument that the GPL grants him the right to do this, and they should not have fired him.
So now the company is sued for violating the GPL by that individual. The GPL still holds. And the whole mess just becomes a lesson that violating the GPL is a bad idea.
Dave
From the FAQ:
Q. What is new in the 3D acceleration module?
A. The 3D portion of the driver has been in updated to take better advantage of the RIVA TNT/TNT2 products. 3D rendering in 32bpp is now supported and textures are no longer limited to be square powers of 2. Support for NVIDIA GeForce 256 based products has also been added.
This is much better then the teaser they gave us in June. With the june driver and X 3.3.3.1 I would get around 14 fps in q3demo1. GLX module and X 3.3.5 gets me around 9. This driver with X 3.3.5 plays nice at 24. It doesn't sound like much, but its still an indirect rendering driver. I can settle with that till X 4.0 and DRI comes around. I'm just tired of nvidia getting a bad rep from the glx-dev folks.
And it is much more stable (though opening the register specs, ala 3dfx and matrox would be nicer) then the older driver. But still, I send my thanks. And you should too. Now.
Dave
From the FAQ: Q. What is new in the 3D acceleration module? A. The 3D portion of the driver has been in updated to take better advantage of the RIVA TNT/TNT2 products. 3D rendering in 32bpp is now supported and textures are no longer limited to be square powers of 2. Support for NVIDIA GeForce 256 based products has also been added. This is much better then the teaser they gave us in June. With the june driver and X 3.3.3.1 I would get around 14 fps in q3demo1. GLX module and X 3.3.5 gets me around 9. This driver with X 3.3.5 plays nice at 24. It doesn't sound like much, but its still an indirect rendering driver. I can settle with that till X 4.0 and DRI comes around. I'm just tired of nvidia getting a bad rep from the glx-dev folks. And it is much more stable (though opening the register specs, ala 3dfx and matrox would be nicer) then the older driver. But still, I send my thanks. And you should too. Now. Dave
I'm not sure how many of us are avid anime fans, but there is an extremely good movie out there named Ghost In The Shell. The setting is in the not-too-distant future where biomechanical enhancements are common. It is almost to the point that to be 100% human is out of the ordinary. This sets up a situation where hackers can not only telnet into someones iToaster and burn homes down but directly into someone's brain/soul (ghost).
For the skeptics, this movie does more than show how different the world will be, but how common the changes will seem.
I've tried all the linux mp3 encoders I can find (l3enc, mp3enc, bladeenc, etc..) and I've found that if you are encoding for audio quality, I use 160 kbps, they all sound the same.. Bladeenc is the fastest though.. To automate everything I use Grip w/ cdparanoia and bladeenc, just pop a CD in, hit Rip+Encode, and you are left with exactly what you want..
btw, in case it hasn't been explained, cdparanoia is a ripping program.. Its audio quality is great because of some very good algorithms to elimate jitter / scratches / any other audio problem.. I can give it a CD that will barely play in my stereo and the wav's that come out of it are perfect.. If it finds an audio defect, it tries to go over that spot on the cd again and again to get the right data..
urls:
Grip -> http://www.ling.ed.uk/~oliphant/grip/
Cdparanoia -> http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
Bladeenc -> http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/
hope this is of service,
Dave
Or Grip (http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~oliphant/grip/) for us enlightened folks :)
it does the exact same thing..
and it goes great with DigitalDJ using a mySQL database to manage all your mp3's..
I've heard about domino before and I've even seen the commercials but I'm just wondering what kind of program is domino.. what does it do?