The BSD kernel has been forked several times, has it not? Why can't the same thing happen with Linux? I am surprised it hasn't happened already, but I suppose this would be due to excellent leadership on their part...
Though this thread seems to imply a fork is somehow negative. How can this be? Either you will have a choice between two kernels or one will suck and no one will use it. What makes having a choice bad? Oh yeah, most of you come from the MS world and are brainwashed.
Yes, but how long until they will also start charging to make copies of anything? Say you want to transfer those pictures you took on your camera to your computer. I'm betting after a while camera companies and MS will get in bed so they can charge you for that. They'll probably call it a developing fee or something.
They already fooled my mother into thinking she has to buy "developing" packs to print out pictures she takes, that is the only thing she understands. They cost about the same as taking it to a photo place to develop. I try to tell her she can copy them to her computer, but well...she doesn't get it.
Of course, photographers and those who understand will search for nonDRM cameras, but I think plenty of (probably older) people will be fooled.
Will probably be the same for many other things. It will probably have to be slipped in slowly, but I think they will at least try it. I suppose the good side is it'll push more people away from proprietary crap and into more open standards. Let's just hope it won't be too late.
Yes, but if you don't need more than 10 GB of storage, then a new 100 GB drive won't benefit you anyway...
However, when you do upgrade, you can still keep one old drive and use it for a backup/ portable storage. I've seen pleny of IDE to USB converters. Even a 10 GB drive gives more space and will be cheaper than a flash drive. Yes, they are more bulky, but a smaller flash drive can still be a companion for when you don't have the big drive around. Do the math: from the prices I've seen, a 1 GB flash drive + a converter costs less than a 2 GB flash drive. Even with an ancient 10 GB hard drive, 11 GB gives you much more storage than just a 2 gb flash drive alone...
So you are saying if someone from star trek scans the hard drive of the programmer or graphic designer, they have the valuable original? No wait! That is a copy too!
As for a painting, go ask any collector of art. If they learned one of their paintings were an exact molecule by molecule copy, would it be as valuable? I'm telling you, they will say no, it would be worthless. The value from an original painting comes from the fact the actual artist worked on that physical object, not because it looks exactly like the painting. From an archaeologist's standpoint, they would be the same because you could study them without any differences, but to a collector, they are different.
Everything you buy is labor. Money is just an exchange for labor. I'll do this job and get paid this much, someone else will do another job and they will be paid. I will pay the second guy's employer and get some of the fruits of his labor...and so on.
Not everyone follows the rules. In the physical world, you can steal things almost as easily as you can infringe someone's copyright in the virtual. It is just most people are just and resonable, and the rest are usually (what is the word) subdued into submission by the majority. Economies wouldn't work otherwise. Some people may get screwed in the process, but it happens. Nothing is perfect.
Of course that assumes everyone only labors with the specific intent they will be paid in some future date. This isn't true. Some people do things for the love of it or to help others or because they want/need to produce something for their use.
You can already make an exact copy of the material part of a painting--it's visual representation. The reason Picaso's paintings are a collectors item is the fact he physically painted on them. So if even EXACT copies of his paintings could be made molecule by molecule, the copies would not be any more valuable. However, people would have one hell of a time detecting which were the copies and which was the original...
Now if they wanted a specific painting because the way it looked, then yes, other people making copies would devalue the price because there would be other suppliers for what they wanted at a lower price (or for free).
Obviously in a virtual environment, everything is a copy, so having an original as a collector's item isn't really an option. However, having a unique item is sometimes an option (depends on the system), and a cloning program would cause problems for an item's uniqueness. If 20 other copies showed up in a game, your item would not be as valuable.
You have a point, but the Picasso thing is a straw man to throw you off. It is a completely different situation.
SL should make it easy to hire creators on contract to produce new objects. Create an escrow like system where any number of players can commit to paying for a product that meets whatever contractural requirements the players and creators agree on. That way the incentive to create new objects will still exist without the economic drag of artificial monopolies.
This sounds like The Street Performer Protocol. Anyone know how sucessful this technique is? I've only heard of the guy who wrote The Circle trying it, but I can't remember what happend. Seems like it would work for well known authors at the very least...
What the hell are you talking about? Support NVIDIA or ATI? Well, you have to do that with MS windows too. You just have to program in OpenGL, as DirectX in MSWindows.
All the different distros? They just have a few different packaging formats. Last time I checked, they all used GNU libc, X11, and OpenGL, so the binaries need not be different. Just don't link in the latest bleeding edge, and it will only be a problem for those who haven't upgraded their box for 10 years. I'll let you in on a little secret: MS didn't have a packaging format at all for a long time. People just made self extracting.exes. It sucked, but people got by. Even if you are too stupid and lazy to put your package into the different distro's formats, you can just create a self extracting tarball. Not any more difficult than MS's OS.
Except Linux has packaging formats, and there is a program to convert between them.
Unless you are talking about all the different bleeding edge support libs a developer might use? Well requiring users to install those would be a mess in both Linux and MSWindows. Professional apps usually either static link them in or include them on the CD.
And the "OSS vs ALSA" debate? First off, if you support OSS, it will work on ALSA. They made it backward compatible. Second, you are saying MS has never upgraded their sound APIs?
The kernel doesn't even come into account until you start messing with the system directly. The program is supposed to be linked against libraries. GNU made a crappy hack, but the newer versions of libc are backward compatible with the older ones. Similar story with X11 and OpenGL. If the game was trying to manipulate hardware directly or some such, a different kernel may cause problems, but I'd be worried if a game started doing that to my computer...
In fact, I doubt it would be any more difficult to write a game using OpenGL / GLUT and Posix standards and have it cross compile to many different systems (Linux, Macs, *BSD,...) than it would be to write a game for MS Windows. I don't know what sound interface Macs use, but OSS would work on both Linux and FreeBSD--I assume the other BSDs as well.
I don't know why you crackheads think supporting Linux is really so much more difficult than MS Windows. Must be wishful thinking, since you are too brain dead to wrap your little mind around something besides your "great master."
Your post seems a bit long. How about this summary: Clueless bastards who write the anticheat programs only develop for MS Windows, fuck everyone else they say.
I remember when I would play Unreal Tournament online. I did not run any hacks at all. In fact, most of the time, the only mods I had at all were the offical ones. Quite a few times I was flagged as a "cheater" and banned because some dumbass writing the cheat detection program assumed everyone would be running Windows.
As I understand, if you go to any US mint and ask to exchange your US currency with an equal value of gold, they will do it. If you go to an online game and ask to get an equal value of gold for your online currency, you get nothing. Sounds like a stronger guarantee to me...
So you are saying if a software company sells CDs of their programs to retailers and permits the retailers to redistribute the CDs, then they've forfeited their copyrights? Retailers buy software specificly to resell and redistribute it.
Or how about software companies who make libraries for other software companies to use? If the companies who buy couldn't redistribute the libraries, the software they make themselves wouldn't be very useful. (Have you ever tried to run a program without a library it requires?)
You are essentially saying copyright is now lifted.
Wooo Hoo! Hey boys, fire up yer burners! We gon'a give 50,000 of our friends a copy o' Micer-sorft Winders Ex-Peeeoo!!! And it be all legal too! Yeah!
Then according to you, every wireless card/router must be a theft device. I see no mention of the "victims" securing their access point, so the kid's wireless card probably just found their connection. The kid essentially got 3 years in jail for walking in an open door.
I don't know what all this talk about encryption and "breaking into" are about. The article doesn't mention the "victims" were using any sort of protection at all. In fact that is probably how he accessed their connection. I suppose the kid just turned on his computer one day and he had internet access. Probably didn't understand what was happening. Now he is in prison for it. It is likely there was no malicious intent at all. He is just a teenager afterall, I'm sure he didn't understand someone had to be paying for an internet connection.
Licensing the design would mean more companies searching for ways to make more parts. Undoubtedly, at least one of them would either know another supplier who could produce the scarce part, or be a company capible of producing said part. I imagine at least Philips could make the lasers. They bought out the chip manufacturer Signetics, so at the minimum they have access to creating their own chips, why not lasers and whatever else they need too? At any rate, more parts are going to be produced because there will be far more people trying to get them produced, rather than just a handful of people at Sony. IMHO anyway...
Except it is not a free market. Who else can make game consoles which will play PS3 games? Answer is: anyone who wants to be sued into the ground. The demand side may be a free market, but the supply side isn't.
In some way Sony is responsible. They could license units to other companies. 3do did that, though the pricetag killed their system. Who the hell would pay $600+ for a game system...oh wait. Don't forget creating proprietary systems creates artificial scarcity. Binary formats and APIs should be standarized for both games and other programs. After all, a game console is just a computer, with more emphasis on video rendering. I suppose they are a little better in this area as they have a Linux kit, so at least one can use their system like a normal computer too...
Calculating on the fly creates many "natural" variations in the visual. You'd need some huge bitmaps to hold anything remotely similar in appearance. Even then, close up views of the texture would be a problem--procedural textures have infinite zoom. In addition, it is difficult to match the algorithm so that it tiles well enough where it doesn't look really crappy.
You don't need to spend 100+ times the processing power either. In the eighties my Atari 130XE took eight+ hours to do a low rez fractal--I think at 320x240 or so. Now my "out of date" computer's CPU (1.8GHz underclocked to 1.2) can do the same julia fractal at 1024x768 in under a second. The GPU would be much much faster because there are many of them in parallel, and most procedural textures aren't quite as complex as a julia fractal. It would probably need only several cycles per pixel on a given algorithmic unit. Considering a GPU core has many units calculating at once, I don't see how it is going to be a huge slowdown over memory hogging bitmaps. Most (if not all) video cards can do texture compression on the fly. That is a processor intensive function too.
Raytracers have been using procedural textures for a long time. I should know, I've been raytracing as a hobby for several years, and I almost always use a procedural texture. If you really must see, I have an account at deviantart. They aren't very good, but many of them are raytracings with procedural functions used on both the color and normals. I don't think they would have turned out as well if I had tried to muck with bitmaps. I have special trouble with getting the tiling to match.
Why would you do computations every frame when you can do them once and amortize the cost over hundreds of frames?
Okay. Why would you do computations for 3d all the time, when you can just create a RGBA bitmap once, and move it around the screen/ zoom all you want? It certainly would cut down CPU usage. Why have 3d acceleration at all?
The answer is it looks better. The main reason it is in the "generate bitmap, upload to vid card" stage is more because enough programmers aren't experienced with using the GPU to render proc textures and such. Many probably don't even have access to the specs to program the GPU at all.
Procedural textures can be created by the GPU, so creating them on the fly is not as big a problem as you think.
No shit you will need "artists" who know how to create procedural textures rather than someone who uses photoshop. Why the hell are so many bringing this up as if it isn't obvious. Do you people work for the government or something?
Would you take someone off the street who happens to know how to sculpt clay and ask her to make 3d model on a computer? I don't think so. It has about as much chance of working as you getting a bj from a CEO.
...like comparing the murder rate in a city with 10 million with 15 murders to a city with 100,000 with 10 murders and saying the city with 100,000 is safer because their are less murders 33.3% fewer murders!
Just wait until the guy finds the BFG, ripper, sniper rifle or chainsaw. That 10 million city will be cut down in a matter of hours. Well, unless his ISP starts throttling the connection. Then some n00bs will call him a cheater because of the erratic behaviour and kick him from the server. f00k!
I would say start with your neighbors. Try to make agreements with them to use WiFi and even wires to make a neighborhood wide LAN. With wifi, you can even just set it up and explain the idea with a webpage for the snoopy / network curious in your area. You'll probably need to put access points around in your front and back yards (just hide them in a lawn gnome or something). I've been seriously considering doing this. I haven't tried messing with WiFi yet, and I am not in much of a position to try it now, but it seems like a good idea to me. Especially if you have a neibor who also uses open source too...it only takes one person to download off the internet, then everyone else can get it off the LAN.
Yes, you will only be able to communicate with a small group of people, but it will be unregulated, and you can buy normal internet too. Dialup isn't too bad for some things. It is not as if you can't do both. Just make sure your setup is secure. You don't want some script kiddie next door getting you kicked off your isp.
Yes. I had Comcast "broadband" for a few years, and it sucked. Out of every week, it was down at least a couple of hours, sometimes days, and only when I caught it. They had horrible uptime. Not to mention the restrictions. No "servers", essentially they only wanted you to "surf" email and the web. Then if you had Linux, tech support wouldn't help at all, even if it obviously wasn't a OS issue. Total crap.
Right now I'm on dialup. Doesn't seem as problematic. My ISP even supports Linux
.pyc files are for python code translated into a python specific bytecode..pyo files are an optimized version. The bytecode is interpeted by the python program in every case. It only loads faster because python translates the source code anyway, and has to convert from source to bytecode if you run a.py file alone. With pyc/o files, the first step is already done. Running directly from raw source would suck for many reasons--more complex and even slower.
The pyc and pyo files are not native machine code like what comes out of gcc or nasm. Native machine files don't require a separate program to run, though they need something to load them into memory and usually support libs. pyc/o files always require the python binary to run them in addition to any support modules.
Python "compiles" to a python specific bytecode which is intepreted by the python program. When I say compile, I mean the code is translated into the computer's native machine code for the processor. Interpeting and runnnig bytecode is still much slower than running a native program with the processor.
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The BSD kernel has been forked several times, has it not? Why can't the same thing happen with Linux? I am surprised it hasn't happened already, but I suppose this would be due to excellent leadership on their part...
Though this thread seems to imply a fork is somehow negative. How can this be? Either you will have a choice between two kernels or one will suck and no one will use it. What makes having a choice bad? Oh yeah, most of you come from the MS world and are brainwashed.
Yes, but how long until they will also start charging to make copies of anything? Say you want to transfer those pictures you took on your camera to your computer. I'm betting after a while camera companies and MS will get in bed so they can charge you for that. They'll probably call it a developing fee or something.
They already fooled my mother into thinking she has to buy "developing" packs to print out pictures she takes, that is the only thing she understands. They cost about the same as taking it to a photo place to develop. I try to tell her she can copy them to her computer, but well...she doesn't get it.
Of course, photographers and those who understand will search for nonDRM cameras, but I think plenty of (probably older) people will be fooled.
Will probably be the same for many other things. It will probably have to be slipped in slowly, but I think they will at least try it. I suppose the good side is it'll push more people away from proprietary crap and into more open standards. Let's just hope it won't be too late.
Yes, but if you don't need more than 10 GB of storage, then a new 100 GB drive won't benefit you anyway...
However, when you do upgrade, you can still keep one old drive and use it for a backup/ portable storage. I've seen pleny of IDE to USB converters. Even a 10 GB drive gives more space and will be cheaper than a flash drive. Yes, they are more bulky, but a smaller flash drive can still be a companion for when you don't have the big drive around. Do the math: from the prices I've seen, a 1 GB flash drive + a converter costs less than a 2 GB flash drive. Even with an ancient 10 GB hard drive, 11 GB gives you much more storage than just a 2 gb flash drive alone...
So you are saying if someone from star trek scans the hard drive of the programmer or graphic designer, they have the valuable original? No wait! That is a copy too!
As for a painting, go ask any collector of art. If they learned one of their paintings were an exact molecule by molecule copy, would it be as valuable? I'm telling you, they will say no, it would be worthless. The value from an original painting comes from the fact the actual artist worked on that physical object, not because it looks exactly like the painting. From an archaeologist's standpoint, they would be the same because you could study them without any differences, but to a collector, they are different.
Everything you buy is labor. Money is just an exchange for labor. I'll do this job and get paid this much, someone else will do another job and they will be paid. I will pay the second guy's employer and get some of the fruits of his labor...and so on.
Not everyone follows the rules. In the physical world, you can steal things almost as easily as you can infringe someone's copyright in the virtual. It is just most people are just and resonable, and the rest are usually (what is the word) subdued into submission by the majority. Economies wouldn't work otherwise. Some people may get screwed in the process, but it happens. Nothing is perfect.
Of course that assumes everyone only labors with the specific intent they will be paid in some future date. This isn't true. Some people do things for the love of it or to help others or because they want/need to produce something for their use.
You can already make an exact copy of the material part of a painting--it's visual representation. The reason Picaso's paintings are a collectors item is the fact he physically painted on them. So if even EXACT copies of his paintings could be made molecule by molecule, the copies would not be any more valuable. However, people would have one hell of a time detecting which were the copies and which was the original...
Now if they wanted a specific painting because the way it looked, then yes, other people making copies would devalue the price because there would be other suppliers for what they wanted at a lower price (or for free).
Obviously in a virtual environment, everything is a copy, so having an original as a collector's item isn't really an option. However, having a unique item is sometimes an option (depends on the system), and a cloning program would cause problems for an item's uniqueness. If 20 other copies showed up in a game, your item would not be as valuable.
You have a point, but the Picasso thing is a straw man to throw you off. It is a completely different situation.
This sounds like The Street Performer Protocol. Anyone know how sucessful this technique is? I've only heard of the guy who wrote The Circle trying it, but I can't remember what happend. Seems like it would work for well known authors at the very least...
That sucks. I heard about the dollar no longer being directly backed by gold, but I didn't know they do not exchange gold for dollars anymore...
What the hell are you talking about? Support NVIDIA or ATI? Well, you have to do that with MS windows too. You just have to program in OpenGL, as DirectX in MSWindows.
All the different distros? They just have a few different packaging formats. Last time I checked, they all used GNU libc, X11, and OpenGL, so the binaries need not be different. Just don't link in the latest bleeding edge, and it will only be a problem for those who haven't upgraded their box for 10 years. I'll let you in on a little secret: MS didn't have a packaging format at all for a long time. People just made self extracting .exes. It sucked, but people got by. Even if you are too stupid and lazy to put your package into the different distro's formats, you can just create a self extracting tarball. Not any more difficult than MS's OS.
Except Linux has packaging formats, and there is a program to convert between them.
Unless you are talking about all the different bleeding edge support libs a developer might use? Well requiring users to install those would be a mess in both Linux and MSWindows. Professional apps usually either static link them in or include them on the CD.
And the "OSS vs ALSA" debate? First off, if you support OSS, it will work on ALSA. They made it backward compatible. Second, you are saying MS has never upgraded their sound APIs?
The kernel doesn't even come into account until you start messing with the system directly. The program is supposed to be linked against libraries. GNU made a crappy hack, but the newer versions of libc are backward compatible with the older ones. Similar story with X11 and OpenGL. If the game was trying to manipulate hardware directly or some such, a different kernel may cause problems, but I'd be worried if a game started doing that to my computer...
In fact, I doubt it would be any more difficult to write a game using OpenGL / GLUT and Posix standards and have it cross compile to many different systems (Linux, Macs, *BSD,...) than it would be to write a game for MS Windows. I don't know what sound interface Macs use, but OSS would work on both Linux and FreeBSD--I assume the other BSDs as well.
I don't know why you crackheads think supporting Linux is really so much more difficult than MS Windows. Must be wishful thinking, since you are too brain dead to wrap your little mind around something besides your "great master."
Your post seems a bit long. How about this summary: Clueless bastards who write the anticheat programs only develop for MS Windows, fuck everyone else they say.
I remember when I would play Unreal Tournament online. I did not run any hacks at all. In fact, most of the time, the only mods I had at all were the offical ones. Quite a few times I was flagged as a "cheater" and banned because some dumbass writing the cheat detection program assumed everyone would be running Windows.
As I understand, if you go to any US mint and ask to exchange your US currency with an equal value of gold, they will do it. If you go to an online game and ask to get an equal value of gold for your online currency, you get nothing. Sounds like a stronger guarantee to me...
So you are saying if a software company sells CDs of their programs to retailers and permits the retailers to redistribute the CDs, then they've forfeited their copyrights? Retailers buy software specificly to resell and redistribute it.
Or how about software companies who make libraries for other software companies to use? If the companies who buy couldn't redistribute the libraries, the software they make themselves wouldn't be very useful. (Have you ever tried to run a program without a library it requires?)
You are essentially saying copyright is now lifted.
Wooo Hoo! Hey boys, fire up yer burners! We gon'a give 50,000 of our friends a copy o' Micer-sorft Winders Ex-Peeeoo!!! And it be all legal too! Yeah!
Then according to you, every wireless card/router must be a theft device. I see no mention of the "victims" securing their access point, so the kid's wireless card probably just found their connection. The kid essentially got 3 years in jail for walking in an open door.
I don't know what all this talk about encryption and "breaking into" are about. The article doesn't mention the "victims" were using any sort of protection at all. In fact that is probably how he accessed their connection. I suppose the kid just turned on his computer one day and he had internet access. Probably didn't understand what was happening. Now he is in prison for it. It is likely there was no malicious intent at all. He is just a teenager afterall, I'm sure he didn't understand someone had to be paying for an internet connection.
Licensing the design would mean more companies searching for ways to make more parts. Undoubtedly, at least one of them would either know another supplier who could produce the scarce part, or be a company capible of producing said part. I imagine at least Philips could make the lasers. They bought out the chip manufacturer Signetics, so at the minimum they have access to creating their own chips, why not lasers and whatever else they need too? At any rate, more parts are going to be produced because there will be far more people trying to get them produced, rather than just a handful of people at Sony. IMHO anyway...
Except it is not a free market. Who else can make game consoles which will play PS3 games? Answer is: anyone who wants to be sued into the ground. The demand side may be a free market, but the supply side isn't.
In some way Sony is responsible. They could license units to other companies. 3do did that, though the pricetag killed their system. Who the hell would pay $600+ for a game system...oh wait. Don't forget creating proprietary systems creates artificial scarcity. Binary formats and APIs should be standarized for both games and other programs. After all, a game console is just a computer, with more emphasis on video rendering. I suppose they are a little better in this area as they have a Linux kit, so at least one can use their system like a normal computer too...
Calculating on the fly creates many "natural" variations in the visual. You'd need some huge bitmaps to hold anything remotely similar in appearance. Even then, close up views of the texture would be a problem--procedural textures have infinite zoom. In addition, it is difficult to match the algorithm so that it tiles well enough where it doesn't look really crappy.
You don't need to spend 100+ times the processing power either. In the eighties my Atari 130XE took eight+ hours to do a low rez fractal--I think at 320x240 or so. Now my "out of date" computer's CPU (1.8GHz underclocked to 1.2) can do the same julia fractal at 1024x768 in under a second. The GPU would be much much faster because there are many of them in parallel, and most procedural textures aren't quite as complex as a julia fractal. It would probably need only several cycles per pixel on a given algorithmic unit. Considering a GPU core has many units calculating at once, I don't see how it is going to be a huge slowdown over memory hogging bitmaps. Most (if not all) video cards can do texture compression on the fly. That is a processor intensive function too.
Raytracers have been using procedural textures for a long time. I should know, I've been raytracing as a hobby for several years, and I almost always use a procedural texture. If you really must see, I have an account at deviantart. They aren't very good, but many of them are raytracings with procedural functions used on both the color and normals. I don't think they would have turned out as well if I had tried to muck with bitmaps. I have special trouble with getting the tiling to match.
Okay. Why would you do computations for 3d all the time, when you can just create a RGBA bitmap once, and move it around the screen/ zoom all you want? It certainly would cut down CPU usage. Why have 3d acceleration at all?
The answer is it looks better. The main reason it is in the "generate bitmap, upload to vid card" stage is more because enough programmers aren't experienced with using the GPU to render proc textures and such. Many probably don't even have access to the specs to program the GPU at all.
Procedural textures can be created by the GPU, so creating them on the fly is not as big a problem as you think.
No shit you will need "artists" who know how to create procedural textures rather than someone who uses photoshop. Why the hell are so many bringing this up as if it isn't obvious. Do you people work for the government or something?
Would you take someone off the street who happens to know how to sculpt clay and ask her to make 3d model on a computer? I don't think so. It has about as much chance of working as you getting a bj from a CEO.
Just wait until the guy finds the BFG, ripper, sniper rifle or chainsaw. That 10 million city will be cut down in a matter of hours. Well, unless his ISP starts throttling the connection. Then some n00bs will call him a cheater because of the erratic behaviour and kick him from the server. f00k!
I would say start with your neighbors. Try to make agreements with them to use WiFi and even wires to make a neighborhood wide LAN. With wifi, you can even just set it up and explain the idea with a webpage for the snoopy / network curious in your area. You'll probably need to put access points around in your front and back yards (just hide them in a lawn gnome or something). I've been seriously considering doing this. I haven't tried messing with WiFi yet, and I am not in much of a position to try it now, but it seems like a good idea to me. Especially if you have a neibor who also uses open source too...it only takes one person to download off the internet, then everyone else can get it off the LAN.
Yes, you will only be able to communicate with a small group of people, but it will be unregulated, and you can buy normal internet too. Dialup isn't too bad for some things. It is not as if you can't do both. Just make sure your setup is secure. You don't want some script kiddie next door getting you kicked off your isp.
Right now I'm on dialup. Doesn't seem as problematic. My ISP even supports Linux
.pyc files are for python code translated into a python specific bytecode. .pyo files are an optimized version. The bytecode is interpeted by the python program in every case. It only loads faster because python translates the source code anyway, and has to convert from source to bytecode if you run a .py file alone. With pyc/o files, the first step is already done. Running directly from raw source would suck for many reasons--more complex and even slower.
The pyc and pyo files are not native machine code like what comes out of gcc or nasm. Native machine files don't require a separate program to run, though they need something to load them into memory and usually support libs. pyc/o files always require the python binary to run them in addition to any support modules.
Python "compiles" to a python specific bytecode which is intepreted by the python program. When I say compile, I mean the code is translated into the computer's native machine code for the processor. Interpeting and runnnig bytecode is still much slower than running a native program with the processor.