They have published few specs - only after number of on-line petitions and PR harassments.
As far as specs go, nVidia in some respect is less hated than Intel: later already has greater history of keeping everything confidential, sometimes not sharing even with partners.
That's of course different in markets Intel trying to enter right now e.g. telecom: they are very nice and polite, often sending updated specs to you even without asking.
But as desktop market concerned, make no mistake: Intel could be worst partner. As long as they have an edge over competitors, they wouldn't move a single finger to help OSS. Just like they btw actually do in desktop market.
Their driver might suck big time - as it's open source counter-part - yet in long term, ATI has huge advantage right now. In my eyes, sincere Linux support is huge advantage - though I game exclusively on Windows.
Needless to say, that dialog ATI had established with its Linux users and OSS developer community would also contribute positively to their proprietary drivers.
Both Intel and nVidia - proprietary driver companies - should be on defensive right now.
I'm pretty sure that whatever Intel is cooking up would be big - because many manufacturers do live off Intel created x86 eco-system. nVidia has always thrived to capture top of the market, often neglecting its normal users. But always remained very closed. ATI on another simply had no choice but to do something new and radical: so they supported Linux and OSS. Unlike nVidia, they also license CrossFire.
I think the GPU market battle is overhyped, yet I would gladly follow all the buzz.
Again: that acceleration would be dog slow because communication over bus is slow
If you read my proposal, instead of skipping every third word or so, you'd notice that I'm asking for a BitBlt-like function, which is done from one part of the video card memory to another. No communication is involved except for the command itself, which is the whole bloody point in the first place.
OK, I'm n00b. I'm system developer n00b. And I also have seen real benchmarks of video hardware from decade ago (and also simple recent tests) where calling H/W acceleration was dog slow for all the reasons I have described in GP.
I do not mind to be n00b, but unless you would try to do it by yourself once - program hardware a bit - your proposal is pretty worthless and make you look even worse than n00b.
Layers, FUSE has to add, send latencies high and reliability down. I wouldn't trust my data to it. Though as nice workaround I gladly use it;)
And in case of VMware, raw i/o is actually used as a way to improve latencies and memory consumption by bypassing OS file cache. Guest OSs normally have their own caches anyway.
But of course they work on internal image presentation, internal bitmask presentation, etc. That's why you have bunch of fancy APIs you can use to write portable program without headaches.
Problem is that, the loop in GGP post, simply cannot be implemented efficiently. That loop is slow and unscalable regardless where you would put it: CPU or GPU. That's why you have fancy internal presentations to allow chips to parallelize the operations. But since most expensive operation happens to be communication with video H/W, they pack whole bunch of operations into one big operation called "scene rendering."
Again: that acceleration would be dog slow because communication over bus is slow (due to frequency difference between CPU and GPU - in worst case interrupt also might be involved). It can only be fast when you can glue lots of such operations together and communication with H/W is performed in few (per frame) requests as possible.
That's why we have DirectX and OpenGL. Without the APIs it all would be even slower.
P.S. In past I programmed PCI133 bus. It is blazingly fast - unless you send something byte by byte without memory mapped I/O (that's how our h/w guy did it in the beginning). I had cases when doing simple hand-shake (REQ->RSP->ACK) with device was taking 2-3ms. If communication is done properly, one can send about 2MB of data in the same 2-3ms time. IOW, accessing H/W capabilities directly would only make whole system slow due to high rate of small requests. The only solution is to talk with hardware with large requests with many operations included - precisely what modern video cards are doing for past decade.
P.P.S. And the internal frame presentation actually optimized for RAMDAC (or whatever it is called on new DVI/HDMI cards). The device is responsible for converting pixels into frequency a display can make picture from. This is actually slowest of all operations in video cards: sending a frame to the display. Now it is also done in parallel - modern cards have enough spare video memory.
Meanwhile reader arcticstoat passes on Intel's latest claim that rasterisation will die out the next few years, possibly in favour of ray tracing.
I'd love that to happen.
But reality is that several best games I have played were... 2D.
Intel, Good luck adding RT to 2D graphics.;)
RT in my experience is rather expensive - on end of development. Not all games manage to exploit all lighting models. And RT needs that even more than actual 3D graphics. It would take some long time for games to adopt it. On side of CADs picture is much simpler: they are easy to fork $$$ for good and fast rendering.
IO is always slow. But there are some tricks to make it faster. But most of the performance tricks lose their advantages with FUSE (e.g. mmap'ed IO or direct IO or raw io, whatever sales call it today). VMware uses bunch of the tricks to actually speed up it's IO and it really works well with normal in-kernel file systems. But not with FUSE.
Apple has the "attention to details" thing on their product development plan.
I understand that most geeks only look at specs.
But I also consider day to day routine important. And for many things Macs with Mac OS X are magnitude better compared to Dell with Vista. Devil in details, so to say.
Point is, newly bought Mac is ready out of box for average Joe Six-Pack. Newly bought Dell with Vista has to be brought to your geek friend to make out of it something the Joe Six-Pack can use.
You can't like Dell - because it is albeit useful but only a tool. But you can like Apple products because they are made to be liked. And they are also useful. That's why I can easily imaging that some people might get religious over stuff which "Just Works" (c).
P.S. To be frank, I have seen the Macfanboism only in US. US is in particular over-religious place. People get there religious over different things all the time. Apple is literally religious about making good stuff, so some people start following: and it is only logical.
How painful installation is going to be on average WinXP box, bloated with usual little things which makes Windows usable?
I'm planning an upgrade more or less specifically for Fallout 3. But I kind of do not want to find myself as before with Quake 4 which essentially refused to work on my new PC with SecuRom hanging and giving blank non-descriptive error. Playing with NoCDCrack old truth was proven again: games which are refuse to play, probably are not worth to play at all.
It would be sad if Betheda would spoil the fun with some DRM.
By this logic, if AMD had quit processor business long time ago, we would never had 64 bit CPUs for under $100. Probably we wouldn't have CPUs under $100 at all.
P.S. I never really had problems with VIA chipsets. I have more problems now with my aging nForce4 mobo than I ever had with all Ali+Intel+VIA based mobos combined in past decade. Surprisingly, Ali was most stable to me - but was sold off due to compatibility with newer video cards. Intel's low-end was really low-end and was very very slow and feature-less. VIA delivered decent performance and nice feature set for fair price. nForce4 I have now has bunch of problems including support for 4GB RAM and SATA CD/DVD drives.
Decent example of php5 (zf, in fact) e-commerce (bleh): Magento, 2008 sourceforge best new project.
What specifically does OO make better about it? What's an example?
OK. You already got a bunch of silly responses sending you to read think books.
But as developer who got first experience with OO about 15 years ago, I'd opine that OO is all about improved code organization.
There is literally ZERO of OO code which can't be written in plain functional language.
To me, biggest advantage of OO, is that it allows (at least partially) implement interfaces between code parts. Also some OO languages allow you make sure the interfaces are followed to some degree. OO is also easier to document, because it introduces extra layer of code organization - classes - something what in functional languages have no distinct identity and require extra (documentation and communication) effort when defining.
OO is mere utility. If you wrote many large programs in C, chances are good that you would see many good uses for C++. Not always. Not for every project. Yet, on many occasions, C++ can save some time. Equally, there are projects where C can save some time and choosing C++ is would only make things more complicated.
Yes. Business would keep old business model as long as possible. Changing infrastructure is something literally everybody avoids in corporations. That's why they are going to be stuck with M$ for some indefinite time.
But that's absolutely not problem with PHP (and open source in general). First is that you can always pay some 3rd party to do support for your. Second. F/LOSS in corporations has (at least in my experience) different usage pattern. While they would shoot dead anybody even suggesting to update working version of M$Exchange server, they would easily and gladly throw new version of Linux/Apache/MySQL/etc into mix.
That's quite explainable. To get decent support from M$ is always problem. And problems of e.g. M$Exchange are epic exercise in humiliation. Apache or generic Linux problem? Thanks to Google, within hours you would find somebody on the net with the very same problem. Withing few more hours somebody would suggest solution or workaround. Even more, I see that IT departments which deploy and use F/LOSS internally, do lots of testing. You shouldn't be surprised finding your own admin giving a solution on some forum.
I'm not sure whom should I praise more in the case: community around many open source projects or Google which makes it possible for the people to find each other and form communities.
I'm tired of waiting.... so I'm going to try to goad you developers into starting a few new projects.
I presume that Sutor meant "industry software" as narrow specialized tools used by many companies internally.
But the Sutor seems to not to get the problem with the industry software. (Or he is intentionally pitching at lack of backward compatibility in Vista). Such software has few buyers and often developed with very sophisticated model called "snow ball." 20 years ago, somebody written little tool for DOS to do some work. Then somebody added another function. Then somebody sold it to another company. Then somebody added GUI. Then - Windows 1/2/3 support (because it is backward compatible). Then - Win95 support (because it is backward compatible). Then - support to run in backward compatible mode on Win2k.
As you can guess, most of industrial software look and work horribly. But they are used mostly by engineers who only care about work being done - not how it is done.
The point now, is that the industrial software also has to be rewritten for Vista. It is not all that rosy now in Windows land too. But I heard already that some backward compatible toolkits are made now to convert code developed for Win95/2k/XP to run on Vista. So I guess the ball would keep rolling for some long time.
Adobe apps have lots of dependencies and supporting even few Linux flavors/releases take effort. Unless of course you have some Linux gurus on payroll who can implement such support easily.
Business-wise, of course, Linux market is too small for Adobe to even bother to make an effort. Also, such companies like very much to establish partnership with OS vendor (and in case of Mac OS and Windows this are single entities) for support. But that again impossible in Linux. This is not a problem of Linux per se - this is a problem of how old software houses are working inside. (They just dumbly want to have somebody to blame for problems.)
At the moment, it seems, Adobe choose to (informally) support running its applications in Wine.
If there's truth to the assumption about.NET objects, then it's a monumentally stupid decision on Microsoft's behalf.
It's not stupid. It's just Microsoft.
They never really learned the lesson of allowing ActiveX in browser. They still go through pains of flagging all possible ActiveX components as not accessible from browser - instead of flagging the ActiveX components which are allowed to be loaded in browser.
Apparently, the same now happening with.Net stuff.
SecurityNazis: Self-signed SSL is untrusted!!!! Admins and Users: Untrusted != invalid!!! SecurityNazis: But self-signed SSL is really really untrusted!!!! Admins and Users: Untrusted != invalid!!! We do not care!!!! SecurityNazis: But we care!!!! Though we do not browse WWW - because it is untrusted.
and so on. Not really informative on its own. Essentially, people who do only one thing with Web - exploit trivial bugs and claim credit for doing so, so called "security researchers" - against simple users who do only surf web - intranet and internet - argue with each other, constantly failing to find common ground. Because they, well, do not have one.
This was resolved in 1976 and is (I believe) part of the Berne Convention.
Ah... European style copyrights with American style enforcement.
What'a nice blend...
On other side, if you create something, you get two things: copyright and authorship. And the two things are different. In the context of digital downloads, **AA intentionally messes them up: constantly talking about people who create, while the people who create something under **AA rarely hold copyrights. And it's copyright holders who profit mainly (and often exclusively).
The difference between Europe and US is that in Europe you still (mostly) have to make a profit from your actions for that to be called infringement (no damages can be claimed here otherwise). Copyrights were always associated with money - and if something doesn't involved money, then you can't claim damages. But that was different in US for some time.
At least I haven't heard about claims like "the people destroy our business" fly in the local courts.
I'd say, Ubuntu was first distro which actually made Gnome look good in general and fonts in particular. (Before Ubuntu kicked in, default fonts to read menus/ets in Gnome 2.x required a microscope. No font settings dialog was presentin 2.0.x releases either.)
I would also add that default Kubuntu isn't really good example of KDE setup. Many complain about it. Even I complain about it. If you like *buntus - then use default Ubuntu and do not wander around. The beauty of such easy-to-use distros is in their default settings: do not like them - do not use the distro.
But to give an example of up-to-date Debian-based KDE-centric distro... Well, I'm still looking for it by myself ~_~
Would it mean, that because the copyright notice has been removed (it was on the CD case for sure, or the load screen of the DVD), then you don't know you are infringing? As much as I applaud the rest of the complaints, this is just silly.
IANAL, but to me it is not silly.
From my understanding, to be present with proper copyright notice, is what required for proper copyright enforcement.
How can you know that you breached copyrights? How can you know whose copyrights you have breached??
As I understand, RIAA/MPAA have just bought up extension of US anti-bootleg laws to cover also digital distribution. But in case of bootlegs it is clear infringement, since both parties know that goods are counterfeit.
With digital distribution, in advent of indie artists and free software, it became all not that clear. Making CD available for free is exception because printing it costs money. Making something available online for download - is dirt cheap. Old media was expensive thus it had such restrictive anti-counterfeit laws. New media - Internet - is used now more as media, not as platform for business, since prices for the media scale by much higher magnitude and do not force you to be a business to take part. Bootlegs are business because they profit by selling somebody's work cheaper. Torrents are hardly anything but sharing what you liked with other hoping that they would also like it. There is no profit involved.
Consequently, on Internet, you really need to know what belongs to whom and which rights belong to whom.
And unless you see copyright notice, you are essentially is innocent. You do not know your rights nor do you know whom rights belong. As older copyright enforcement went (before outbreak of bootlegs in US) copyright holder normally issued first "cease and desist" letters which were generally informing you that you are breaching their copyrights. Only after that one could sue you for infringement. Since bootlegs were (and I presume are) so widespread, copyright holders had essentially "out-sourced" enforcement of their copyrights to general law enforcement. It doesn't mean that actual model, when same laws are applied to Internet, is right.
the source is a horrifying abomination worthy only of the renegade god Moloch. It is not a good learning example.
Hm.. Well, you can always see it as how to NOT to write code. First.
Second. If code is really shitty, that means as first assignment one can try to improve it. Reading code and trying to improve it (though might be tough at first) helps develop into better programmer.
After all, there should be some work for good elves too;)
btw, there are bunch of games written in Python using PyGames framework. That to me sounds definitely as good idea. Using PyGl you can also utilize 3D things.
After all I have read on forums about downloadable NWN2 (not Steam), I'm pretty sure whatever DRM is - it is still crippling user experience.
What was worth one thread admins have tried to shutdown many times (as soon they close one - new one was appearing) complaining that game asks for disk to be in drive. Comment "gotta keep the disk in drive if you wanna play" had really angered many people. After many complains/etc the stupid support realized that last update for *downloadable* version had turned game into *disk-installed* version, which requires disk in drive (which is of course not there because this is downloadable game).
DRM remains DRM. Whatever shape it takes.
P.S. And yes, I stopped buying games in retail shops - I buy on-line now.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now GPUs cannot be used widely by software because they are relatively expensive and support is sparse.
The point is to integrate the GPU functions deeper into system, allowing cheap low-end integrated boards to also have GPUs.
nVidia tries hard to keep the GPU acceleration exclusive to high-end. Intel and AMD/ATI want it to hit low-end - the market where most money are.
Intel? documents??
They have published few specs - only after number of on-line petitions and PR harassments.
As far as specs go, nVidia in some respect is less hated than Intel: later already has greater history of keeping everything confidential, sometimes not sharing even with partners.
That's of course different in markets Intel trying to enter right now e.g. telecom: they are very nice and polite, often sending updated specs to you even without asking.
But as desktop market concerned, make no mistake: Intel could be worst partner. As long as they have an edge over competitors, they wouldn't move a single finger to help OSS. Just like they btw actually do in desktop market.
ATI recently released specs for their R600 chips.
Their driver might suck big time - as it's open source counter-part - yet in long term, ATI has huge advantage right now. In my eyes, sincere Linux support is huge advantage - though I game exclusively on Windows.
Needless to say, that dialog ATI had established with its Linux users and OSS developer community would also contribute positively to their proprietary drivers.
Both Intel and nVidia - proprietary driver companies - should be on defensive right now.
I'm pretty sure that whatever Intel is cooking up would be big - because many manufacturers do live off Intel created x86 eco-system. nVidia has always thrived to capture top of the market, often neglecting its normal users. But always remained very closed. ATI on another simply had no choice but to do something new and radical: so they supported Linux and OSS. Unlike nVidia, they also license CrossFire.
I think the GPU market battle is overhyped, yet I would gladly follow all the buzz.
Again: that acceleration would be dog slow because communication over bus is slow
If you read my proposal, instead of skipping every third word or so, you'd notice that I'm asking for a BitBlt-like function, which is done from one part of the video card memory to another. No communication is involved except for the command itself, which is the whole bloody point in the first place.
OK, I'm n00b. I'm system developer n00b. And I also have seen real benchmarks of video hardware from decade ago (and also simple recent tests) where calling H/W acceleration was dog slow for all the reasons I have described in GP.
I do not mind to be n00b, but unless you would try to do it by yourself once - program hardware a bit - your proposal is pretty worthless and make you look even worse than n00b.
P.S. BTW, read in
And where are the latencies?
And how well safety of data are ensured??
Throughput alone is meaningless to real world.
Layers, FUSE has to add, send latencies high and reliability down. I wouldn't trust my data to it. Though as nice workaround I gladly use it ;)
And in case of VMware, raw i/o is actually used as a way to improve latencies and memory consumption by bypassing OS file cache. Guest OSs normally have their own caches anyway.
Uhm... They ARE implemented in hardware.
But of course they work on internal image presentation, internal bitmask presentation, etc. That's why you have bunch of fancy APIs you can use to write portable program without headaches.
Problem is that, the loop in GGP post, simply cannot be implemented efficiently. That loop is slow and unscalable regardless where you would put it: CPU or GPU. That's why you have fancy internal presentations to allow chips to parallelize the operations. But since most expensive operation happens to be communication with video H/W, they pack whole bunch of operations into one big operation called "scene rendering."
Again: that acceleration would be dog slow because communication over bus is slow (due to frequency difference between CPU and GPU - in worst case interrupt also might be involved). It can only be fast when you can glue lots of such operations together and communication with H/W is performed in few (per frame) requests as possible.
That's why we have DirectX and OpenGL. Without the APIs it all would be even slower.
P.S. In past I programmed PCI133 bus. It is blazingly fast - unless you send something byte by byte without memory mapped I/O (that's how our h/w guy did it in the beginning). I had cases when doing simple hand-shake (REQ->RSP->ACK) with device was taking 2-3ms. If communication is done properly, one can send about 2MB of data in the same 2-3ms time. IOW, accessing H/W capabilities directly would only make whole system slow due to high rate of small requests. The only solution is to talk with hardware with large requests with many operations included - precisely what modern video cards are doing for past decade.
P.P.S. And the internal frame presentation actually optimized for RAMDAC (or whatever it is called on new DVI/HDMI cards). The device is responsible for converting pixels into frequency a display can make picture from. This is actually slowest of all operations in video cards: sending a frame to the display. Now it is also done in parallel - modern cards have enough spare video memory.
No sweat, guys.
DirectX D2D has that from the beginning. Do not remember the name for the feature (something with "key").
OpenGL has that from the beginning. In 2D mode, when Z=0.0f, simple alpha mask using monochrome bitmap. Supported as feature and quite works fast.
Meanwhile reader arcticstoat passes on Intel's latest claim that rasterisation will die out the next few years, possibly in favour of ray tracing.
I'd love that to happen.
But reality is that several best games I have played were ... 2D.
Intel, Good luck adding RT to 2D graphics. ;)
RT in my experience is rather expensive - on end of development. Not all games manage to exploit all lighting models. And RT needs that even more than actual 3D graphics. It would take some long time for games to adopt it. On side of CADs picture is much simpler: they are easy to fork $$$ for good and fast rendering.
IO is always slow. But there are some tricks to make it faster. But most of the performance tricks lose their advantages with FUSE (e.g. mmap'ed IO or direct IO or raw io, whatever sales call it today). VMware uses bunch of the tricks to actually speed up it's IO and it really works well with normal in-kernel file systems. But not with FUSE.
With Dell it is always "devil in details."
Apple has the "attention to details" thing on their product development plan.
I understand that most geeks only look at specs.
But I also consider day to day routine important. And for many things Macs with Mac OS X are magnitude better compared to Dell with Vista. Devil in details, so to say.
Point is, newly bought Mac is ready out of box for average Joe Six-Pack. Newly bought Dell with Vista has to be brought to your geek friend to make out of it something the Joe Six-Pack can use.
You can't like Dell - because it is albeit useful but only a tool. But you can like Apple products because they are made to be liked. And they are also useful. That's why I can easily imaging that some people might get religious over stuff which "Just Works" (c).
P.S. To be frank, I have seen the Macfanboism only in US. US is in particular over-religious place. People get there religious over different things all the time. Apple is literally religious about making good stuff, so some people start following: and it is only logical.
How much DRM the game is going to include?
How painful installation is going to be on average WinXP box, bloated with usual little things which makes Windows usable?
I'm planning an upgrade more or less specifically for Fallout 3. But I kind of do not want to find myself as before with Quake 4 which essentially refused to work on my new PC with SecuRom hanging and giving blank non-descriptive error. Playing with NoCDCrack old truth was proven again: games which are refuse to play, probably are not worth to play at all.
It would be sad if Betheda would spoil the fun with some DRM.
By this logic, if AMD had quit processor business long time ago, we would never had 64 bit CPUs for under $100. Probably we wouldn't have CPUs under $100 at all.
P.S. I never really had problems with VIA chipsets. I have more problems now with my aging nForce4 mobo than I ever had with all Ali+Intel+VIA based mobos combined in past decade. Surprisingly, Ali was most stable to me - but was sold off due to compatibility with newer video cards. Intel's low-end was really low-end and was very very slow and feature-less. VIA delivered decent performance and nice feature set for fair price. nForce4 I have now has bunch of problems including support for 4GB RAM and SATA CD/DVD drives.
What specifically does OO make better about it? What's an example?
OK. You already got a bunch of silly responses sending you to read think books.
But as developer who got first experience with OO about 15 years ago, I'd opine that OO is all about improved code organization.
There is literally ZERO of OO code which can't be written in plain functional language.
To me, biggest advantage of OO, is that it allows (at least partially) implement interfaces between code parts. Also some OO languages allow you make sure the interfaces are followed to some degree. OO is also easier to document, because it introduces extra layer of code organization - classes - something what in functional languages have no distinct identity and require extra (documentation and communication) effort when defining.
OO is mere utility. If you wrote many large programs in C, chances are good that you would see many good uses for C++. Not always. Not for every project. Yet, on many occasions, C++ can save some time. Equally, there are projects where C can save some time and choosing C++ is would only make things more complicated.
Yes. Business would keep old business model as long as possible. Changing infrastructure is something literally everybody avoids in corporations. That's why they are going to be stuck with M$ for some indefinite time.
But that's absolutely not problem with PHP (and open source in general). First is that you can always pay some 3rd party to do support for your. Second. F/LOSS in corporations has (at least in my experience) different usage pattern. While they would shoot dead anybody even suggesting to update working version of M$Exchange server, they would easily and gladly throw new version of Linux/Apache/MySQL/etc into mix.
That's quite explainable. To get decent support from M$ is always problem. And problems of e.g. M$Exchange are epic exercise in humiliation. Apache or generic Linux problem? Thanks to Google, within hours you would find somebody on the net with the very same problem. Withing few more hours somebody would suggest solution or workaround. Even more, I see that IT departments which deploy and use F/LOSS internally, do lots of testing. You shouldn't be surprised finding your own admin giving a solution on some forum.
I'm not sure whom should I praise more in the case: community around many open source projects or Google which makes it possible for the people to find each other and form communities.
I'm tired of waiting.... so I'm going to try to goad you developers into starting a few new projects.
I presume that Sutor meant "industry software" as narrow specialized tools used by many companies internally.
But the Sutor seems to not to get the problem with the industry software. (Or he is intentionally pitching at lack of backward compatibility in Vista). Such software has few buyers and often developed with very sophisticated model called "snow ball." 20 years ago, somebody written little tool for DOS to do some work. Then somebody added another function. Then somebody sold it to another company. Then somebody added GUI. Then - Windows 1/2/3 support (because it is backward compatible). Then - Win95 support (because it is backward compatible). Then - support to run in backward compatible mode on Win2k.
As you can guess, most of industrial software look and work horribly. But they are used mostly by engineers who only care about work being done - not how it is done.
The point now, is that the industrial software also has to be rewritten for Vista. It is not all that rosy now in Windows land too. But I heard already that some backward compatible toolkits are made now to convert code developed for Win95/2k/XP to run on Vista. So I guess the ball would keep rolling for some long time.
Adobe apps have lots of dependencies and supporting even few Linux flavors/releases take effort. Unless of course you have some Linux gurus on payroll who can implement such support easily.
Business-wise, of course, Linux market is too small for Adobe to even bother to make an effort. Also, such companies like very much to establish partnership with OS vendor (and in case of Mac OS and Windows this are single entities) for support. But that again impossible in Linux. This is not a problem of Linux per se - this is a problem of how old software houses are working inside. (They just dumbly want to have somebody to blame for problems.)
At the moment, it seems, Adobe choose to (informally) support running its applications in Wine.
If there's truth to the assumption about .NET objects, then it's a monumentally stupid decision on Microsoft's behalf.
It's not stupid. It's just Microsoft.
They never really learned the lesson of allowing ActiveX in browser. They still go through pains of flagging all possible ActiveX components as not accessible from browser - instead of flagging the ActiveX components which are allowed to be loaded in browser.
Apparently, the same now happening with .Net stuff.
For lazy souls link to BugZilla bug 433422
Brief of discussion:
SecurityNazis: Self-signed SSL is untrusted!!!!
Admins and Users: Untrusted != invalid!!!
SecurityNazis: But self-signed SSL is really really untrusted!!!!
Admins and Users: Untrusted != invalid!!! We do not care!!!!
SecurityNazis: But we care!!!! Though we do not browse WWW - because it is untrusted.
and so on. Not really informative on its own. Essentially, people who do only one thing with Web - exploit trivial bugs and claim credit for doing so, so called "security researchers" - against simple users who do only surf web - intranet and internet - argue with each other, constantly failing to find common ground. Because they, well, do not have one.
This was resolved in 1976 and is (I believe) part of the Berne Convention.
Ah... European style copyrights with American style enforcement.
What'a nice blend...
On other side, if you create something, you get two things: copyright and authorship. And the two things are different. In the context of digital downloads, **AA intentionally messes them up: constantly talking about people who create, while the people who create something under **AA rarely hold copyrights. And it's copyright holders who profit mainly (and often exclusively).
The difference between Europe and US is that in Europe you still (mostly) have to make a profit from your actions for that to be called infringement (no damages can be claimed here otherwise). Copyrights were always associated with money - and if something doesn't involved money, then you can't claim damages. But that was different in US for some time.
At least I haven't heard about claims like "the people destroy our business" fly in the local courts.
It all depends on settings.
I'd say, Ubuntu was first distro which actually made Gnome look good in general and fonts in particular. (Before Ubuntu kicked in, default fonts to read menus/ets in Gnome 2.x required a microscope. No font settings dialog was presentin 2.0.x releases either.)
I would also add that default Kubuntu isn't really good example of KDE setup. Many complain about it. Even I complain about it. If you like *buntus - then use default Ubuntu and do not wander around. The beauty of such easy-to-use distros is in their default settings: do not like them - do not use the distro.
But to give an example of up-to-date Debian-based KDE-centric distro ... Well, I'm still looking for it by myself ~_~
Would it mean, that because the copyright notice has been removed (it was on the CD case for sure, or the load screen of the DVD), then you don't know you are infringing? As much as I applaud the rest of the complaints, this is just silly.
IANAL, but to me it is not silly.
From my understanding, to be present with proper copyright notice, is what required for proper copyright enforcement.
How can you know that you breached copyrights? How can you know whose copyrights you have breached??
As I understand, RIAA/MPAA have just bought up extension of US anti-bootleg laws to cover also digital distribution. But in case of bootlegs it is clear infringement, since both parties know that goods are counterfeit.
With digital distribution, in advent of indie artists and free software, it became all not that clear. Making CD available for free is exception because printing it costs money. Making something available online for download - is dirt cheap. Old media was expensive thus it had such restrictive anti-counterfeit laws. New media - Internet - is used now more as media, not as platform for business, since prices for the media scale by much higher magnitude and do not force you to be a business to take part. Bootlegs are business because they profit by selling somebody's work cheaper. Torrents are hardly anything but sharing what you liked with other hoping that they would also like it. There is no profit involved.
Consequently, on Internet, you really need to know what belongs to whom and which rights belong to whom.
And unless you see copyright notice, you are essentially is innocent. You do not know your rights nor do you know whom rights belong. As older copyright enforcement went (before outbreak of bootlegs in US) copyright holder normally issued first "cease and desist" letters which were generally informing you that you are breaching their copyrights. Only after that one could sue you for infringement. Since bootlegs were (and I presume are) so widespread, copyright holders had essentially "out-sourced" enforcement of their copyrights to general law enforcement. It doesn't mean that actual model, when same laws are applied to Internet, is right.
the source is a horrifying abomination worthy only of the renegade god Moloch. It is not a good learning example.
Hm.. Well, you can always see it as how to NOT to write code. First.
Second. If code is really shitty, that means as first assignment one can try to improve it. Reading code and trying to improve it (though might be tough at first) helps develop into better programmer.
After all, there should be some work for good elves too ;)
btw, there are bunch of games written in Python using PyGames framework. That to me sounds definitely as good idea. Using PyGl you can also utilize 3D things.
Give him nethack (or any other OSS game) to play. After a while when he will get interested - give him the source code for it.
Programming games is probably most engaging activity. I'm 31 now - but still on it ;)
After all I have read on forums about downloadable NWN2 (not Steam), I'm pretty sure whatever DRM is - it is still crippling user experience.
What was worth one thread admins have tried to shutdown many times (as soon they close one - new one was appearing) complaining that game asks for disk to be in drive. Comment "gotta keep the disk in drive if you wanna play" had really angered many people. After many complains/etc the stupid support realized that last update for *downloadable* version had turned game into *disk-installed* version, which requires disk in drive (which is of course not there because this is downloadable game).
DRM remains DRM. Whatever shape it takes.
P.S. And yes, I stopped buying games in retail shops - I buy on-line now.