I ask you, so what?
Every other decent editor already HAS spell checking and bracket hilighting. Vim is just catching up. It has become so ingrained in developers' minds that people have been quite inattentive to other good editors popping up over the years. Kate is one good example.
Yes, there is a Rockbox port. Daniel is the one working on it. In fact, Sandisk has contacted Rockbox developers about the port, and even mailed them a "development" version of the player, with a JTAG flashing cable attached. It's pretty cool- hopefully it will work well. The sandisk player is based on the PortalPlayer chip, which is very similar to iPod.. this is a slightly upgraded chip, and I believe it has two ARM cores. So effectively you have a dual-core MP3 player.
(a) Why would they shut it down due to a flaw in their own code? Why not issue an update? Besides, how is shutting it down going to prevent existing users from taking advantage?
(b) I do not even own an xbox 360, or any modern gaming console for that matter. And even if I did, there is still no need to resort to name calling.
Who said that the license here is absolute?
If there ever arises a situation where the military absolutely MUST use this product to prevent the deaths of millions of people, the developers always have the option to consider re-licensing the product for military applications, should a pressing need ever arise.
The immediate thought is to make a wrapper to run linux or signed code or maybe a bootloader to run commercial copied games (as if you can't already do that). But, you will probably be running your game on top of an existing MS environment instead of straight on the CPU like a commercial game. Still, such an engine would be quite complex, and as sure as we know Microsoft, there are bound to be many corner cases or unchecked buffers. This makes another fairly accessible product in which a flaw can be found which can be used to run native unsigned code. Maybe... one can always hope.
The open-source community comes up with something innovative and something that could be patented. But it may be such a basic software feature that noone bothers to patent, or may not have the means to patent. Random Evil Company X comes along, sees said product, submits a patent application and it somehow goes through. Then what?
The only way would be to barrage the patent office with applications for every tiny little thing. But not everyone has the means to do this.
Would many of us slashdot readers even get past reading SCO... before getting into flame mode?
Seriously, the Supreme Court has made rulings like this in the past, especially some of the school related cases in the 50s... They made one ruling based on the facts on the case but set a different standard for further cases pretaining to such matter.
It is possible to a certain extent with video this way because of the interlacing. With an interlaced image, only half of the lines are displayed, and each second 60 such half-frames are displayed (making for 30 full frames per second). If you get a good deinterlacing algorithm going, you can recover the extra lines thrugh motion approximation, etc. This gives you a noninterlaced image at a full vertical resolution.
Nothing will improve the horizontal resolution however.
The thing about modern computer performance
on
The End of Native Code?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Software will always expand to fill available resources with useless secondary gimmicks. I mean, look at Vista and its requirements. You would hope that when purchasing a PC that the available resources you are paying for will be used by applications you use. Instead, looks like the OS will be eating most of that up. It is the operating system's job to facilitate applicatons' access to resources, not to squander them on mostly useless (although arguably pretty) features.
Maybe this is why it is beta, but it doesn't work well at all.
Graphics for me only work with one combination of settings and the map trails, sometimes cuts out, and flickers to the extreme. Yes I have OpenGL set up and working with hardware acceleration, and other programs work fine. Go figure... Good with static images though, but you can use google maps for that just as well.
Thanks for the linux version but it can definitely be better
Extortion? The information is already out there. Besides, if it was something the seller did not want to come out, he should have wiped the HD or not have commited ebay fraud in the first place.
Interesting point of note-
The seller's ebay site lists 4 feedback items, three of these being negative. Even assuming that the three negative feedbacks were posted after the sale in question, who buys a laptop from someone with a feedback count of 1? The buyer should have definitely done some basic research on the seller when buying something expensive, like a laptop. Especially with all the ebay fraud around lately (P-p-p-powerbook anyone?) Come on, it is one click to check feedback.
Link to the laptop article itself
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 0, Redundant
http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/
This is where the actual good stuff comes in.
It's written (purposefully) from the person of the seller, if anyone is confused.
I do believe it is possible to fully read/write an NTFS partition from Linux by using a wrapper for a real NTFS.SYS. While this is not an ideal solution, it certainly works. You need ntfs.sys from windows xp but if you are trying to access an NTFS partition, you are likely to have this already somewhere. Just copy it over.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/02/ 1536227
Okay. So if Vista needs >256MB of available memory to run, then you gotta wonder, how much free memory is left to applications? Come on, do we really need such a memory hog of an OS?
I can totally see MS making Vista pre-allocate a huge chunk of memory for "OS Purposes" and then making a hidden API that allows MS-specific programs to allocate from this area, while third party programs will only to work with the resources that are left.
Seems Gates would mock anything that doesn't put money in his pocket. What's good for free software is bad for people making money from proprietary software, so no prizes for guessing why Gates would want to brush this type of thing off.
The better question would be, when will we ever see this machine?
So how many options were cut?
on
Gnome 2.14 Released
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· Score: 1, Insightful
So let's see...
How many options/preferences were cut in this release?
I've been an avid gnome supporter but lately I switched to KDE 3.5, something I would have never imagined doing.
Seems that lately the Gnome people think the fewer options a program has, the better. Something about how testing multiple code paths is difficult and bad for QA. While this may be true to a certain extent, Gnome people take it to ridiculous lengths. I mean, god forbid there be an if statement in the code!
I have actually had a few discussions with the devs on IRC about it and the option philosophy is pretty dang ridiculous.
Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux. They probably know what they are doing. And even to a newbie, an option on window behavior will not do any harm. Yes, the whole 'linux-on-the-desktop' camp will tell you that simplifying programs is a good thing, but radically cutting out options is not the way to do this.
What about direct hydrogen fuel cells? Those could technically be run in reverse to, in essence, recharge the cell. No point in having to put more fuel in - have a container for the waste steam from the reaction, condense it to water, then electrolyze it when AC power is available. No point in letting the steam vent, anyway - it would just condense in/on the machine and rust or corrode the electronics
Is that quite so?
Wouldn't there be taps on the transformer for approximately 12V and approximately 5V, and then the potentials finely adjusted using DC-DC regulators? Wouldn't that have less loss?
Taking this a bit further, why not have an entire rack power supply that can deliver a rail of 3.3V, 5V, and 12V to each server, thus eliminating the need for a high-current DC-DC converter on the target board? I am excluding things like the exotic voltages for CPU and RAM, but still it is the 12V and 5V rails that would have to be able to source significantly more current.
What about solid state based media, ie flash drives, etc? These work by tunneling electrons onto a metal plate floating in a layer of glass above a junction on the chip. Theoretically these should not wear out. Yes, the substrate degrades with repeated writes, but what about using say, USB flash drives or CF cards as an archiving medium? Shouldn't those last?
Slashdot Mirror
Because come on, now. The internet is not a truck. It's a series of Tubes.....
Aaaah never mind.
I ask you, so what? Every other decent editor already HAS spell checking and bracket hilighting. Vim is just catching up. It has become so ingrained in developers' minds that people have been quite inattentive to other good editors popping up over the years. Kate is one good example.
Yes, there is a Rockbox port. Daniel is the one working on it. In fact, Sandisk has contacted Rockbox developers about the port, and even mailed them a "development" version of the player, with a JTAG flashing cable attached. It's pretty cool- hopefully it will work well. The sandisk player is based on the PortalPlayer chip, which is very similar to iPod.. this is a slightly upgraded chip, and I believe it has two ARM cores. So effectively you have a dual-core MP3 player.
(a) Why would they shut it down due to a flaw in their own code? Why not issue an update? Besides, how is shutting it down going to prevent existing users from taking advantage?
(b) I do not even own an xbox 360, or any modern gaming console for that matter. And even if I did, there is still no need to resort to name calling.
Who said that the license here is absolute?
If there ever arises a situation where the military absolutely MUST use this product to prevent the deaths of millions of people, the developers always have the option to consider re-licensing the product for military applications, should a pressing need ever arise.
The immediate thought is to make a wrapper to run linux or signed code or maybe a bootloader to run commercial copied games (as if you can't already do that). But, you will probably be running your game on top of an existing MS environment instead of straight on the CPU like a commercial game. Still, such an engine would be quite complex, and as sure as we know Microsoft, there are bound to be many corner cases or unchecked buffers. This makes another fairly accessible product in which a flaw can be found which can be used to run native unsigned code. Maybe... one can always hope.
Okay, imagine this.
The open-source community comes up with something innovative and something that could be patented. But it may be such a basic software feature that noone bothers to patent, or may not have the means to patent. Random Evil Company X comes along, sees said product, submits a patent application and it somehow goes through. Then what?
The only way would be to barrage the patent office with applications for every tiny little thing. But not everyone has the means to do this.
The question is, if WGA is not installed, how does a computer know to contact the MS server and verify?
So what exactly is SCOTUS?
Would many of us slashdot readers even get past reading SCO... before getting into flame mode?
Seriously, the Supreme Court has made rulings like this in the past, especially some of the school related cases in the 50s... They made one ruling based on the facts on the case but set a different standard for further cases pretaining to such matter.
It is possible to a certain extent with video this way because of the interlacing. With an interlaced image, only half of the lines are displayed, and each second 60 such half-frames are displayed (making for 30 full frames per second). If you get a good deinterlacing algorithm going, you can recover the extra lines thrugh motion approximation, etc. This gives you a noninterlaced image at a full vertical resolution. Nothing will improve the horizontal resolution however.
Software will always expand to fill available resources with useless secondary gimmicks. I mean, look at Vista and its requirements. You would hope that when purchasing a PC that the available resources you are paying for will be used by applications you use. Instead, looks like the OS will be eating most of that up. It is the operating system's job to facilitate applicatons' access to resources, not to squander them on mostly useless (although arguably pretty) features.
Maybe this is why it is beta, but it doesn't work well at all.
Graphics for me only work with one combination of settings and the map trails, sometimes cuts out, and flickers to the extreme. Yes I have OpenGL set up and working with hardware acceleration, and other programs work fine. Go figure... Good with static images though, but you can use google maps for that just as well.
Thanks for the linux version but it can definitely be better
Extortion? The information is already out there. Besides, if it was something the seller did not want to come out, he should have wiped the HD or not have commited ebay fraud in the first place.
Interesting point of note- The seller's ebay site lists 4 feedback items, three of these being negative. Even assuming that the three negative feedbacks were posted after the sale in question, who buys a laptop from someone with a feedback count of 1? The buyer should have definitely done some basic research on the seller when buying something expensive, like a laptop. Especially with all the ebay fraud around lately (P-p-p-powerbook anyone?) Come on, it is one click to check feedback.
http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/ This is where the actual good stuff comes in. It's written (purposefully) from the person of the seller, if anyone is confused.
Yeah. I've got this laptop here. It can run for at least twenty hours on four AA batteries. Not very powerful or fast, but it gets the job done. http://www.dentaku-museum.com/hc/computer/m100/m10 0-2.jpg
I do believe it is possible to fully read/write an NTFS partition from Linux by using a wrapper for a real NTFS.SYS. While this is not an ideal solution, it certainly works. You need ntfs.sys from windows xp but if you are trying to access an NTFS partition, you are likely to have this already somewhere. Just copy it over. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/02/ 1536227
Okay. So if Vista needs >256MB of available memory to run, then you gotta wonder, how much free memory is left to applications? Come on, do we really need such a memory hog of an OS?
I can totally see MS making Vista pre-allocate a huge chunk of memory for "OS Purposes" and then making a hidden API that allows MS-specific programs to allocate from this area, while third party programs will only to work with the resources that are left.
Will I be able to play it on my Phanton console?
Seems Gates would mock anything that doesn't put money in his pocket. What's good for free software is bad for people making money from proprietary software, so no prizes for guessing why Gates would want to brush this type of thing off.
The better question would be, when will we ever see this machine?
So let's see...
How many options/preferences were cut in this release?
I've been an avid gnome supporter but lately I switched to KDE 3.5, something I would have never imagined doing.
Seems that lately the Gnome people think the fewer options a program has, the better. Something about how testing multiple code paths is difficult and bad for QA. While this may be true to a certain extent, Gnome people take it to ridiculous lengths. I mean, god forbid there be an if statement in the code!
I have actually had a few discussions with the devs on IRC about it and the option philosophy is pretty dang ridiculous.
Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux. They probably know what they are doing. And even to a newbie, an option on window behavior will not do any harm. Yes, the whole 'linux-on-the-desktop' camp will tell you that simplifying programs is a good thing, but radically cutting out options is not the way to do this.
What about direct hydrogen fuel cells? Those could technically be run in reverse to, in essence, recharge the cell. No point in having to put more fuel in - have a container for the waste steam from the reaction, condense it to water, then electrolyze it when AC power is available. No point in letting the steam vent, anyway - it would just condense in/on the machine and rust or corrode the electronics
Is that quite so? Wouldn't there be taps on the transformer for approximately 12V and approximately 5V, and then the potentials finely adjusted using DC-DC regulators? Wouldn't that have less loss?
Taking this a bit further, why not have an entire rack power supply that can deliver a rail of 3.3V, 5V, and 12V to each server, thus eliminating the need for a high-current DC-DC converter on the target board? I am excluding things like the exotic voltages for CPU and RAM, but still it is the 12V and 5V rails that would have to be able to source significantly more current.
What about solid state based media, ie flash drives, etc? These work by tunneling electrons onto a metal plate floating in a layer of glass above a junction on the chip. Theoretically these should not wear out. Yes, the substrate degrades with repeated writes, but what about using say, USB flash drives or CF cards as an archiving medium? Shouldn't those last?
Don't actually put this in your lap. You may get burned by all the condensing vapor.
Seriously though, haven't similar things been done yet?