True enough. A Raspberry Pi, ODroid, or any other super-cheap computer is "just a computer". Except that it's also a computer that a kid could tinker around on without making a more serious computer unusable, and it's easier to use it to talk to other electronics, sensors, etc than a PC-style computer. It works well as a kind of compromise between a more expensive computer and a microcontroller. It doesn't do either job as well, but it's more flexible.
Ah, a "No True Scotsman" argument. From personal experience, I always skipped past the "program an elevator" section of the book and went straight to the chapters on graphics and sound. When I ran into something I didn't understand, I'd read the relevant section earlier in the book, but the "behind the scenes" stuff isn't what drew me in at first.
I'll agree that eventually, someone who actually enjoys coding will take joy in writing whatever they can. An algorithm with a slightly better runtime complexity will be fascinating...but that's not necessarily what sparks the initial interest.
No they are not, they are a combination of hardware and software
But we *have* open software to run on those. That just leaves the hardware that you could be talking about.
Yes, like the Linux kernel. But there isnt much you can do with just that.
Well, and the entire rest of the OS, if you don't count some of the drivers and firmware (which require either reverse engineering or published hardware specs from the manufacturers to implement openly).
But where is the free software (let's exclude the hardware component for a minute) version of these products?
Well, again, aside from BIOS/firmware and some drivers if I want all my hardware's features to work, it's here. We don't just have a kernel, we have full general-purpose OSes.
My point is that the idea that everybody should ditch closed source and proprietary software in favor of FOSS is misguided because FOSS doesn't have all the answers.
...And if the closed/proprietary software were to be open, then FOSS *would* have all the answers. As far as I can tell, that's the end goal of "the movement".
Sorry I mean restrictive open source (GPL) as opposed to permissive open source (BSD, et. al).
So did I. I see GPL-like licenses as being more protective than restrictive. They protect my access to code derived from the projects that are licensed that way. It's just a matter of perspective. I don't *want* to take someone else's open source code and make a closed-source derivative product. Until we have non-eternal copyright terms, I wouldn't really want to see someone *else* doing that either.
Proprietary and Free software work together to produce innovative products but there are a lot of absolutists with very limited vision that seem to think FOSS is the answer to everything.
I can see the benefit of a system where proprietary software is closed for a period of time, in order to encourage development of new technology, and then made open to enrich the public as a whole. I don't see that happening, so out of practicality, I'll accept closed/proprietary software and hardware as a stopgap. It does the job right now, and I'll just buy the next-available closed system when my current one doesn't have the functionality that I need.
Wait. Are you talking about software or hardware? A laptop, tablet, smartphone, activity tracker, or smartwatch is a piece of hardware. All of those things can, and often *do* have a core of open-source software that they're built around. Hardware is much more difficult to manufacture than software is. If someone sends me the appropriate source code, I can get a working product by typing a few things in on my keyboard. If someone sends me hardware design files, I suppose that I'd either have to buy a FPGA of the appropriate size and speed for the hardware or I'd have to start talking to chipfabs about the 1-device manufacture run that I'd like them to undertake.
Hardware and software are apples and oranges. Although it would be convenient if open hardware were as easy to make as open software, it's not.
Fact is restrictive open source isnt producing innovation
I've never felt restricted by open-source software. The problem has always been closed systems, for me. Although, I suppose that the licensing issues go to the back of your mind anyhow when you've got a system that won't do what you want, and there is no way for you or anyone else but the vendor to fix it.
Is a useless "feature" that goes through review and testing, but is more for amusement of the coders and/or customers than for any practical purpose, not an Easter egg just because it was known by the developers who wrote and tested it?
Oh, get the stick out of your ass. A little immaturity never hurt anyone (as long as that's all it is). Put the egg through review and testing like any other feature, or write it as something impossibly simple (undocumented program flag that prints out the programmer's name or something).
Done correctly, it's no more harmful than adding any other bit of code that wasn't explicitly asked for, like extra options/modes that were useful during development and don't hurt the function of the end product.
Duverger's Law. Due to a (presumably) unforeseen tendency of the US voting system, there's a strong tendency toward a two-party system. In the past, there were other prominent political parties. The tendency is that a party makes a major misstep, and a new party gains popularity, replacing it. Occasionally there are groups that split off into their own movements, but most of the time they fade away or re-absorb back into one of the major parties.
That's a much better argument than the AC made, and it's a fairly valid point (depending on area, of course). It worked halfway-reasonably for me on anything that wasn't a twitch game; with that kind of thing, even the display lag of most LCD monitors can be a downside, so I'd expect cloud gaming to be out of the question, even streaming purely over the local network (like that Steam streaming capability).
If they've got to pay to get the hardware in the first place, then have to pre-pay for service, then I don't see the problem. You won't get money from the people that don't give it to you up-front, and if they take it to pawn? *Shrug* All well. The hardware has the worst margin out of the bundle anyhow, so they're doing you a favor by spreading it out so that more people can sign up for the service.
And if you send a repo man out to the slums, all you're going to get back is a repo man corpse.
In even a halfway-civilized country? Bad parts of town are where they're likely to get more work, anyhow. They're used to it.
You're making a lot of assumptions about someone you don't know. Do you need a hug, AC? It sounds like life has treated you roughly. I'm living my hopes and dreams. If your dreams are to ridicule strangers on the internet, then I'm glad that you're doing something that you find fulfilling. Otherwise, keep your chin up, I'm sure things will work out for you somehow. Have a nice day!
Sometimes the font is unattractive, and I'm sure that Netflix would prefer to have captions that appear the same between their different offerings. Plus, it's better to have nicer text than the stuff that was optimized for display on a 480i CRT.
Hahahaha. OK, AC. You can't even put your own pseudonym to your post. I get it; it's scary. Go spend time with your "cool" people, and don't worry your little head about things beyond your ken. Laugh at the goofy nerds, and buy whatever privacy-leaking/invading shit you'd like.
And? Money is money, and there are a lot more poor people than rich ones. Unlike the car or furniture, the streaming service wouldn't even have to send out a repo man if they didn't pay, either. They'd just cut off service.
They inherited that policy from IBM. I've got an R32 from about 2003, and learned about its BIOS whitelist while researching upgrades (it was a gift, and didn't have wifi capability when I got it).
Some DVDs only provide bitmap captions, without the text encoded anywhere. In fact, more of my DVDs work that way than actually have a text CC stream. If you have a bitmap of some text, OCR is the way to go to extract it.
Selling "Cloud Compute Power" for video games doesn't make economic sense.
Kind of like furniture rental, right? You've got to provide locations close to your customers, and your prices have to reflect the additional overhead. You don't have to have lower prices *over time* as long as you have lower prices *right now*. Sell (or better, rent out) a $50 streaming stick+bluetooth gamepad, and offer subscription plans for $20/month, or something. $70 to start playing right now is easier to stomach than a minimum of $250 for a console and $20 for a game, the same way that $50/month (or whatever) for a couch is easier to stomach than $500 to buy the thing outright. It's a good idea in theory, going after the people that can afford a small-ish monthly payment, but can't (or won't) pay a larger upfront fee to actually own the system that they're using.
These stories about Sony have been around a LONG time, long before your DVR. You should have known better.
The first nasty thing from Sony that really stands out in my memory was the root kit in 2005. I'm sure that their history of customer-hostile amoral actions goes back farther than that, but I'm not specifically aware of what those actions were. It was before the time that I really had a reason to pay attention (since it wasn't my money that they were taking before right around that time).
My point is that there's always someone getting impacted by their first Sony Evil Action, so it's expected that every time they do something shitty, some new person is going to be surprised by them. I'm sure that they were also doing questionable things before 1992...yet you were also their customer at one point. You obviously should've known better, for the same reasons that the GP should've known better, right?
I'm almost positive that it's just some guy's little project, not anything that Nintendo had any part in. He's got Mac, Windows, and Linux binaries posted, as well as the Unity project itself, so even when Nintendo knocks the files down, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone else continue with enhancements to it.
One of my first exposures to programming was when I was 9 and someone gave me a book full of Basic games. I couldn't type worth beans, and I suspect that the dialect that the book's software was in was different than the MS QBasic interpreter on the family computer. It sucked to spend an hour a day for a week to type in a program, have a typo or incompatibility somewhere, and to not have any idea where the problem was.
That was a much more reasoned and informative post than most of the others I've seen in this thread, thank you. Generally, what I've been seeing is a lot of "If you do X, then fuck you! Why? You're an asshole, that's why! Evidence? Details? We don't need no stinkin' information!" Seeing something with at least a fair amount of explanation behind it is refreshing.
1) What does "not necessarily the case" mean, to you? To me, it means that the equipment is available, but it's not something that one carries around with oneself all the time.
I'll give you the point on digital broadcast radio; a copy of the bitstream should be easy to record. I tend to forget about its existence, since I don't have a receiver.
2) It's fine for non-audiophiles. Digital radio is transmitted at 48-128kbit/s in the U.S.using lossy compression anyhow, and it would still outperform FM, which is more than likely playing from digital audio sources anyhow, even for the analog transmissions.
Vinyl's a non sequitur here. How many people would be able to record to vinyl anyhow? And if they've got their own higher-quality recording of the music, then they aren't going to be listening to it on the radio (let alone recording it from there), so it's a moot point.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough. A Raspberry Pi, ODroid, or any other super-cheap computer is "just a computer". Except that it's also a computer that a kid could tinker around on without making a more serious computer unusable, and it's easier to use it to talk to other electronics, sensors, etc than a PC-style computer. It works well as a kind of compromise between a more expensive computer and a microcontroller. It doesn't do either job as well, but it's more flexible.
Ah, a "No True Scotsman" argument. From personal experience, I always skipped past the "program an elevator" section of the book and went straight to the chapters on graphics and sound. When I ran into something I didn't understand, I'd read the relevant section earlier in the book, but the "behind the scenes" stuff isn't what drew me in at first.
I'll agree that eventually, someone who actually enjoys coding will take joy in writing whatever they can. An algorithm with a slightly better runtime complexity will be fascinating...but that's not necessarily what sparks the initial interest.
No they are not, they are a combination of hardware and software
But we *have* open software to run on those. That just leaves the hardware that you could be talking about.
Yes, like the Linux kernel. But there isnt much you can do with just that.
Well, and the entire rest of the OS, if you don't count some of the drivers and firmware (which require either reverse engineering or published hardware specs from the manufacturers to implement openly).
But where is the free software (let's exclude the hardware component for a minute) version of these products?
Well, again, aside from BIOS/firmware and some drivers if I want all my hardware's features to work, it's here. We don't just have a kernel, we have full general-purpose OSes.
My point is that the idea that everybody should ditch closed source and proprietary software in favor of FOSS is misguided because FOSS doesn't have all the answers.
...And if the closed/proprietary software were to be open, then FOSS *would* have all the answers. As far as I can tell, that's the end goal of "the movement".
Sorry I mean restrictive open source (GPL) as opposed to permissive open source (BSD, et. al).
So did I. I see GPL-like licenses as being more protective than restrictive. They protect my access to code derived from the projects that are licensed that way. It's just a matter of perspective. I don't *want* to take someone else's open source code and make a closed-source derivative product. Until we have non-eternal copyright terms, I wouldn't really want to see someone *else* doing that either.
Proprietary and Free software work together to produce innovative products but there are a lot of absolutists with very limited vision that seem to think FOSS is the answer to everything.
I can see the benefit of a system where proprietary software is closed for a period of time, in order to encourage development of new technology, and then made open to enrich the public as a whole. I don't see that happening, so out of practicality, I'll accept closed/proprietary software and hardware as a stopgap. It does the job right now, and I'll just buy the next-available closed system when my current one doesn't have the functionality that I need.
Hardware and software are apples and oranges. Although it would be convenient if open hardware were as easy to make as open software, it's not.
Fact is restrictive open source isnt producing innovation
I've never felt restricted by open-source software. The problem has always been closed systems, for me. Although, I suppose that the licensing issues go to the back of your mind anyhow when you've got a system that won't do what you want, and there is no way for you or anyone else but the vendor to fix it.
Is a useless "feature" that goes through review and testing, but is more for amusement of the coders and/or customers than for any practical purpose, not an Easter egg just because it was known by the developers who wrote and tested it?
Oh, get the stick out of your ass. A little immaturity never hurt anyone (as long as that's all it is). Put the egg through review and testing like any other feature, or write it as something impossibly simple (undocumented program flag that prints out the programmer's name or something).
Done correctly, it's no more harmful than adding any other bit of code that wasn't explicitly asked for, like extra options/modes that were useful during development and don't hurt the function of the end product.
There are "real" easter eggs in Android related to this: http://www.askvg.com/hidden-secret-easter-eggs-and-daydreams-in-google-android-devices/
Duverger's Law. Due to a (presumably) unforeseen tendency of the US voting system, there's a strong tendency toward a two-party system. In the past, there were other prominent political parties. The tendency is that a party makes a major misstep, and a new party gains popularity, replacing it. Occasionally there are groups that split off into their own movements, but most of the time they fade away or re-absorb back into one of the major parties.
That's a much better argument than the AC made, and it's a fairly valid point (depending on area, of course). It worked halfway-reasonably for me on anything that wasn't a twitch game; with that kind of thing, even the display lag of most LCD monitors can be a downside, so I'd expect cloud gaming to be out of the question, even streaming purely over the local network (like that Steam streaming capability).
And if you send a repo man out to the slums, all you're going to get back is a repo man corpse.
In even a halfway-civilized country? Bad parts of town are where they're likely to get more work, anyhow. They're used to it.
You're making a lot of assumptions about someone you don't know. Do you need a hug, AC? It sounds like life has treated you roughly. I'm living my hopes and dreams. If your dreams are to ridicule strangers on the internet, then I'm glad that you're doing something that you find fulfilling. Otherwise, keep your chin up, I'm sure things will work out for you somehow. Have a nice day!
Sometimes the font is unattractive, and I'm sure that Netflix would prefer to have captions that appear the same between their different offerings. Plus, it's better to have nicer text than the stuff that was optimized for display on a 480i CRT.
Hahahaha. OK, AC. You can't even put your own pseudonym to your post. I get it; it's scary. Go spend time with your "cool" people, and don't worry your little head about things beyond your ken. Laugh at the goofy nerds, and buy whatever privacy-leaking/invading shit you'd like.
And? Money is money, and there are a lot more poor people than rich ones. Unlike the car or furniture, the streaming service wouldn't even have to send out a repo man if they didn't pay, either. They'd just cut off service.
They inherited that policy from IBM. I've got an R32 from about 2003, and learned about its BIOS whitelist while researching upgrades (it was a gift, and didn't have wifi capability when I got it).
Some DVDs only provide bitmap captions, without the text encoded anywhere. In fact, more of my DVDs work that way than actually have a text CC stream. If you have a bitmap of some text, OCR is the way to go to extract it.
Selling "Cloud Compute Power" for video games doesn't make economic sense.
Kind of like furniture rental, right? You've got to provide locations close to your customers, and your prices have to reflect the additional overhead. You don't have to have lower prices *over time* as long as you have lower prices *right now*. Sell (or better, rent out) a $50 streaming stick+bluetooth gamepad, and offer subscription plans for $20/month, or something. $70 to start playing right now is easier to stomach than a minimum of $250 for a console and $20 for a game, the same way that $50/month (or whatever) for a couch is easier to stomach than $500 to buy the thing outright. It's a good idea in theory, going after the people that can afford a small-ish monthly payment, but can't (or won't) pay a larger upfront fee to actually own the system that they're using.
These stories about Sony have been around a LONG time, long before your DVR. You should have known better.
The first nasty thing from Sony that really stands out in my memory was the root kit in 2005. I'm sure that their history of customer-hostile amoral actions goes back farther than that, but I'm not specifically aware of what those actions were. It was before the time that I really had a reason to pay attention (since it wasn't my money that they were taking before right around that time).
My point is that there's always someone getting impacted by their first Sony Evil Action, so it's expected that every time they do something shitty, some new person is going to be surprised by them. I'm sure that they were also doing questionable things before 1992...yet you were also their customer at one point. You obviously should've known better, for the same reasons that the GP should've known better, right?
"An Em-Oh-Oh-See", or "A mook". The choice of indefinite article tells you which way the writer was thinking about the acronym.
I'm almost positive that it's just some guy's little project, not anything that Nintendo had any part in. He's got Mac, Windows, and Linux binaries posted, as well as the Unity project itself, so even when Nintendo knocks the files down, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone else continue with enhancements to it.
One of my first exposures to programming was when I was 9 and someone gave me a book full of Basic games. I couldn't type worth beans, and I suspect that the dialect that the book's software was in was different than the MS QBasic interpreter on the family computer. It sucked to spend an hour a day for a week to type in a program, have a typo or incompatibility somewhere, and to not have any idea where the problem was.
That was a much more reasoned and informative post than most of the others I've seen in this thread, thank you. Generally, what I've been seeing is a lot of "If you do X, then fuck you! Why? You're an asshole, that's why! Evidence? Details? We don't need no stinkin' information!" Seeing something with at least a fair amount of explanation behind it is refreshing.
I think you're missing my point. Define "sugar". Which subset of saccharides are you talking about skipping out on?
Crackers, pizza crust, etc are carbs, and carbs are sugar, unless I'm missing something.
1) What does "not necessarily the case" mean, to you? To me, it means that the equipment is available, but it's not something that one carries around with oneself all the time.
I'll give you the point on digital broadcast radio; a copy of the bitstream should be easy to record. I tend to forget about its existence, since I don't have a receiver.
2) It's fine for non-audiophiles. Digital radio is transmitted at 48-128kbit/s in the U.S.using lossy compression anyhow, and it would still outperform FM, which is more than likely playing from digital audio sources anyhow, even for the analog transmissions.
Vinyl's a non sequitur here. How many people would be able to record to vinyl anyhow? And if they've got their own higher-quality recording of the music, then they aren't going to be listening to it on the radio (let alone recording it from there), so it's a moot point.