Sometimes there are simply no good alternatives to binary blobs available. Case in point, the nvidia closed source graphics drivers. As it stands nvidia currently produce the best graphics drivers available for linux hands down. The intel open source drivers don't even come close and both open source and closed source ATI drivers are a joke.
The nvidia driver is the only linux graphics driver which supports:
a) The full opengl spec, in hardware. The intel drivers fall back to software for some opengl calls and don't support frame buffer objects at all. b) A proper memory manager which enables, among other things, framebuffer objects and true redirected direct rendering, none of this AIGLX bullshit. c) Any kind of opengl or compositing on multiple monitors d) Reliable video and opengl vsync e) Working video decode acceleration for modern high definition h264 video. f) Proper colour/gamma adjustment for the X screen g) Overscan adjustment for dvi to hdmi adapters
It also has by far the fastest opengl performance, is the most stable and just generally works the best out of all the linux graphics drivers. If you want decent graphics performance on linux, forget the open source drivers, go with nvidia. I'm sure anybody who has struggled getting dual monitors to work properly with any other driver will agree with me.
I know this might be a hit to my karma, but one area in which open source really isn't up to par is graphics drivers. I'd love good open source drivers for display hardware as much as anybody but for the moment nvidia's closed source drivers just wipe the floor with everything else. If you're going to complain to anybody, complain to ATI for not putting enough effort into their open source driver, although recently this has been improving with additions like DRI2 and GEM.
So before becoming evangelical and denouncing closed source modules as evil, try improving the open source modules so that they come close to the same stability and functionality.
"And perhaps another day CmdrTaco posts a request asking everyone to email Nvidia about their Linux drivers."
Nvidia currently produce the best graphics drivers available for linux hands down. The intel open source drivers don't even come close and both open source and closed source ATI drivers are a joke.
The nvidia driver is the only linux graphics driver which supports:
a) The full opengl spec, in hardware. The intel drivers fall back to software for some opengl calls and don't support frame buffer objects at all. b) A proper memory manager which enables, among other things, framebuffer objects and true redirected direct rendering, none of this AIGLX bullshit. c) Any kind of opengl or compositing on multiple monitors d) Reliable video and opengl vsync e) Working video decode acceleration for modern high definition h264 video. f) Proper colour/gamma adjustment for the X screen g) Overscan adjustment for dvi to hdmi adapters
It also has by far the fastest opengl performance, is the most stable and just generally works the best out of all the linux graphics drivers. If you want decent graphics performance on linux, forget the open source drivers, go with nvidia.
I know this might be a hit to my karma, but one area in which open source really isn't up to par is graphics drivers. I'd love good open source drivers for display hardware as much as anybody but for the moment nvidia's closed source drivers just wipe the floor with everything else. If you're going to complain to anybody, complain to ATI for not putting enough effort into their open source driver, although recently this has been improving with additions like DRI2 and GEM.
Yes, but if it is implemented in gallium3d, this means that:
1) Any driver using gallium3d will automatically support video decoding 2) It is very easy to add extensions to the protocol, ie finally support something other than mpeg2 which is very outdated now anyway.
If you are located in the UK, why not try out the UK Free Software Network ISP? All their profits go to open source software funding, they set well defined badnwidth limits and good speeds, and don't interfere with your network traffic like some ISPs do. I haven't used them before, but it looks awesome and I will definately be switching in the near future.
A better solution all round to this sort of thing is to run the NoScript Firefox extension. It blocks javascript from all sites except those you specifically allow, either for a session or forever. It really does give you better security, even against 0-day exploits. It's also useful all the time for sites that like to bombard you with javascript crap like these spam sites do.
I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone that is vaguely security conscious.
Oh my. Somebody is going to get into _big_ trouble. The Swiss are _very_ independent minded, perhaps even moreso than Americans. They also take their laws very seriously and playing games is quite simply not allowed.
Oh you must be referring to the same independent minded Americans who voted George Bush into office TWICE, of which 37% believe that teaching of evolution in schools should be abolished and replaced with creationism; of which 61% believe that torture is justified in order to "beat the t'urrists". The same Americans who have calmly bent over for the last ten or so years and allowed themselves to be anally savaged by big business and their own government. The same independent minded people that will accept just about any violation of their so-called constitutional rights as soon as somebody mentions the word "terrorism".
Yeah. Real independent. I'll take Switzerland thanks.
There is another layer you can add (if you're REALLY that paranoid...)
Connect your wireless router to a separate nic in a server type pc. On that nic, ONLY allow connections on port 22 for ssh. You can ssh in on that port and use the server as a proxy through another nic to the internet. Then an attacker will not only have to break through the WPA2 and mac address filtering, but will then have to break into an ssh protected pc to actually do anything useful. That is not a trivial task.
"Another common belief, but the sad reality is that most music has always stunk."
I disagree with this. I personally tend to listen to a lot of older music (early 90s and before). I'm 18 so nobody can claim it's because I'm just being nostalgic. I have a firmly held belief that what makes modern music so unpalatable to older listeners used to listening in the 70s and 80s is NOT the quality of the actual music itself. The difference lies in the way the music is produced.
If you used to listen to a lot of older music in the 70s and 80s (and sometimes early 90s) you will probably find modern music fatiguing to listen to. It might sound like a wall of noise, with little to no dynamic range or variation - A BLAND SOUND THAT IS JUST A CONTINUOUS ASSAULT ON THE EARS WITH NO BREAKS. This isn't just your imagination - this is due to an actual phenomenon:
Enter the loudness war. Modern music when produced tends to be subjected to the producers desire to make it just as loud or louder than all the other songs on the radio, CD changer or itunes music collection. Human hearing determines loudness by the root mean square value of the sound's power. The PCM format (used in CDs and any music ripped from CDs) has hard limits on how loud a sound can be. Within these limits, the absolute loudest sound you can produce is a square wave. As sound engineers are pushed to master cds at higher and higher volumes, they are forced to resort to using extremely aggressive volume compression and hard clipping techniques to get the perceived volume up. This results in a waveform that starts to approximate a square wave the harder it is pushed. IT IS THE EQUIVALENT OF CONTINUOUSLY BEING SHOUTED AT BY SOMEBODY WITH A MONOTONIC VOICE OF CONSTANT VOLUME THAT DOESN'T NEED TO TAKE ANY BREATHS.
Unfortunately this technique is rampant in the music production industry - virtually all modern music sounds like this. A lot of younger people just accept that this is the way music always sounds, and when an older or better produced cd comes on they might tend to think that because it sounds much quieter, there is something wrong with it. I think that if the music industry stopped putting so much pressure on sound engineers to MAKE THEIR CDS SO LOUD then they people might actually enjoy listening to the music more, and cd sales might just increase.
Rockbox is free open source firmware for DAPs that allows you to play Doom! Granted the frame rate is a little juddery and the controls aren't laid out perfectly, but who cares? It's Doom! On an ipod! Every geek on slashdot should be drooling at the thought!
I supposed I should also point out at this moment that Rockbox also supports, among many, many other things:
-Voice driven menus for the visually impaired -A gameboy and gameboy colour emulator -Over 15 sound codecs, including ogg and flac -Gapless playback -Replaygain -A five band parametric equalizer -Dual booting with original firmware and others, including ipodlinux.
And runs on the following architectures:
-Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch) -Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio -Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5 and M5L -iriver: H100, H300 and H10 series -SanDisk: Sansa c200, e200 and e200R series (not the v2 models) -Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series)
More are in development. Unfortunately there isn't likely to be a port for 6th generation ipods for a very long time, if ever, due to the firmware encryption present on these devices.
Dude - you just summed up my entire life stance in one post. I've always got funny looks when I try to explain this to people because most people have real trouble believing that there isn't some overriding purpose in their lives. Maybe I'll direct them at this post in future.
Am I the only one here who is seeing parallels between the early stages of synthetic life creation, and the emergence of software in computers. Both started in education, with the "source code" as it were, freely available to everyone. As time went on, software became more commercialized and we ended up with the widespread usage of closed source and intellectual property we have today.
I sure hope there's a Richard Stallman out there to stand up for open source genetics, or a branch of science that can change the course of history will probably end up getting bogged down in lawsuits and patents.
Actually think it's awesome that even twenty YEARS after it's launch, voyager 2 is STILL doing useful science. Another thing that astounds me is how the engineers managed to ensure that even after all these years in the hostile environment of space, this machine is still perfectly functional.
Watch the youtube video. It's a very enlightening talk by Naomi Wolf about her new book. C'mon americans, get off your arses and save your own damn country!
Not what tor was intended for!
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Tor was never intended to SECURE traffic. It is an ANOMYMISER. It is designed to cope with compromised nodes and still provide military grade anonymity.
It's important to remember that security and anonymity are different things.
Sciece students at university should be taught the value of citing reliable and verifiable sources. Wikipedia is an incerdible resource - whenever I want to find out more about a particular topic, I go straight to wikipedia to get an overview, and it can act as an excellent springboard towards more and better sources of information.
However, I can also understand the professor's attitudes - although they may contribute to wikipedia themselves, this does not assure the accuracy of every statement made there. Whilst wikipedia is making a valiant effort to cite all of its references and backup every point, it is clearly unrealistic to expect a collaborative encyclopedia to cite reliable sources for every statement made. Unfortunately, the sciences are extremely rigorous about making verifiable claims, and the collaborative nature or wikipedia automatically excludes it from this list. It should never be cited as a primary resource in a real world scientific paper.
The role wikipedia should play in education is... education, surprisingly! If I ever want to find out anything about any topic in the world (or even off-world!) my first stop is wikipedia. It is an incredible tool for giving oneself a rough education in any topic, but for an in depth education about said topic, wikipedia is not sufficient, and unfortunately, it is not reliable enough to count as a valid source in scientific papers.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes there are simply no good alternatives to binary blobs available. Case in point, the nvidia closed source graphics drivers. As it stands nvidia currently produce the best graphics drivers available for linux hands down. The intel open source drivers don't even come close and both open source and closed source ATI drivers are a joke.
The nvidia driver is the only linux graphics driver which supports:
a) The full opengl spec, in hardware. The intel drivers fall back to software for some opengl calls and don't support frame buffer objects at all.
b) A proper memory manager which enables, among other things, framebuffer objects and true redirected direct rendering, none of this AIGLX bullshit.
c) Any kind of opengl or compositing on multiple monitors
d) Reliable video and opengl vsync
e) Working video decode acceleration for modern high definition h264 video.
f) Proper colour/gamma adjustment for the X screen
g) Overscan adjustment for dvi to hdmi adapters
It also has by far the fastest opengl performance, is the most stable and just generally works the best out of all the linux graphics drivers. If you want decent graphics performance on linux, forget the open source drivers, go with nvidia. I'm sure anybody who has struggled getting dual monitors to work properly with any other driver will agree with me.
I know this might be a hit to my karma, but one area in which open source really isn't up to par is graphics drivers. I'd love good open source drivers for display hardware as much as anybody but for the moment nvidia's closed source drivers just wipe the floor with everything else. If you're going to complain to anybody, complain to ATI for not putting enough effort into their open source driver, although recently this has been improving with additions like DRI2 and GEM.
So before becoming evangelical and denouncing closed source modules as evil, try improving the open source modules so that they come close to the same stability and functionality.
Sam
"And perhaps another day CmdrTaco posts a request asking everyone to email Nvidia about their Linux drivers."
Nvidia currently produce the best graphics drivers available for linux hands down. The intel open source drivers don't even come close and both open source and closed source ATI drivers are a joke.
The nvidia driver is the only linux graphics driver which supports:
a) The full opengl spec, in hardware. The intel drivers fall back to software for some opengl calls and don't support frame buffer objects at all.
b) A proper memory manager which enables, among other things, framebuffer objects and true redirected direct rendering, none of this AIGLX bullshit.
c) Any kind of opengl or compositing on multiple monitors
d) Reliable video and opengl vsync
e) Working video decode acceleration for modern high definition h264 video.
f) Proper colour/gamma adjustment for the X screen
g) Overscan adjustment for dvi to hdmi adapters
It also has by far the fastest opengl performance, is the most stable and just generally works the best out of all the linux graphics drivers. If you want decent graphics performance on linux, forget the open source drivers, go with nvidia.
I know this might be a hit to my karma, but one area in which open source really isn't up to par is graphics drivers. I'd love good open source drivers for display hardware as much as anybody but for the moment nvidia's closed source drivers just wipe the floor with everything else. If you're going to complain to anybody, complain to ATI for not putting enough effort into their open source driver, although recently this has been improving with additions like DRI2 and GEM.
Sam
Yesterday I tried to rip Rolling Stones' "A Bigger Bang" using exact audio copy in burst mode. It didn't work, the drive kept speeding up and down. :(
The disc is copy controlled: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Copy_control_logo.png
Easily fixed:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4294404/Rolling_Stones-A_Bigger_Bang/
The other alternative is simply to use a linux ripper, cdparanoia works fine.
Sam
You can improve battery life on notebooks by enabling "laptop mode" in Ubuntu. It isn't enabled by default, google it.
What you are talking about exists, it is called the pandora. Info here: http://pandorawiki.org/Main_Page
sam
Yes, but if it is implemented in gallium3d, this means that:
1) Any driver using gallium3d will automatically support video decoding
2) It is very easy to add extensions to the protocol, ie finally support something other than mpeg2 which is very outdated now anyway.
Sam
Site still works with the coral cache
That's nothing.
I use wget to retrive the web page, then cat it to stdout and render it mentally.
I also get this problem, and I'm on a 24mbit dedicated university pipe - this is not a comcast issue.
If you are located in the UK, why not try out the UK Free Software Network ISP? All their profits go to open source software funding, they set well defined badnwidth limits and good speeds, and don't interfere with your network traffic like some ISPs do. I haven't used them before, but it looks awesome and I will definately be switching in the near future.
I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone that is vaguely security conscious.
This could be very useful for older computers or embedded devices such as routers.
You mean this one?
Oh you must be referring to the same independent minded Americans who voted George Bush into office TWICE, of which 37% believe that teaching of evolution in schools should be abolished and replaced with creationism; of which 61% believe that torture is justified in order to "beat the t'urrists". The same Americans who have calmly bent over for the last ten or so years and allowed themselves to be anally savaged by big business and their own government. The same independent minded people that will accept just about any violation of their so-called constitutional rights as soon as somebody mentions the word "terrorism".
Yeah. Real independent. I'll take Switzerland thanks.
This is why you don't get any malware for linux.
There is another layer you can add (if you're REALLY that paranoid...)
Connect your wireless router to a separate nic in a server type pc. On that nic, ONLY allow connections on port 22 for ssh. You can ssh in on that port and use the server as a proxy through another nic to the internet. Then an attacker will not only have to break through the WPA2 and mac address filtering, but will then have to break into an ssh protected pc to actually do anything useful. That is not a trivial task.
"Another common belief, but the sad reality is that most music has always stunk."
I disagree with this. I personally tend to listen to a lot of older music (early 90s and before). I'm 18 so nobody can claim it's because I'm just being nostalgic. I have a firmly held belief that what makes modern music so unpalatable to older listeners used to listening in the 70s and 80s is NOT the quality of the actual music itself. The difference lies in the way the music is produced.
If you used to listen to a lot of older music in the 70s and 80s (and sometimes early 90s) you will probably find modern music fatiguing to listen to. It might sound like a wall of noise, with little to no dynamic range or variation - A BLAND SOUND THAT IS JUST A CONTINUOUS ASSAULT ON THE EARS WITH NO BREAKS. This isn't just your imagination - this is due to an actual phenomenon:
Enter the loudness war. Modern music when produced tends to be subjected to the producers desire to make it just as loud or louder than all the other songs on the radio, CD changer or itunes music collection. Human hearing determines loudness by the root mean square value of the sound's power. The PCM format (used in CDs and any music ripped from CDs) has hard limits on how loud a sound can be. Within these limits, the absolute loudest sound you can produce is a square wave. As sound engineers are pushed to master cds at higher and higher volumes, they are forced to resort to using extremely aggressive volume compression and hard clipping techniques to get the perceived volume up. This results in a waveform that starts to approximate a square wave the harder it is pushed. IT IS THE EQUIVALENT OF CONTINUOUSLY BEING SHOUTED AT BY SOMEBODY WITH A MONOTONIC VOICE OF CONSTANT VOLUME THAT DOESN'T NEED TO TAKE ANY BREATHS.
This youtube video can demonstrate the process far better than I can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Unfortunately this technique is rampant in the music production industry - virtually all modern music sounds like this. A lot of younger people just accept that this is the way music always sounds, and when an older or better produced cd comes on they might tend to think that because it sounds much quieter, there is something wrong with it. I think that if the music industry stopped putting so much pressure on sound engineers to MAKE THEIR CDS SO LOUD then they people might actually enjoy listening to the music more, and cd sales might just increase.
Sam
Rockbox is free open source firmware for DAPs that allows you to play Doom! Granted the frame rate is a little juddery and the controls aren't laid out perfectly, but who cares? It's Doom! On an ipod! Every geek on slashdot should be drooling at the thought!
I supposed I should also point out at this moment that Rockbox also supports, among many, many other things:
-Voice driven menus for the visually impaired
-A gameboy and gameboy colour emulator
-Over 15 sound codecs, including ogg and flac
-Gapless playback
-Replaygain
-A five band parametric equalizer
-Dual booting with original firmware and others, including ipodlinux.
And runs on the following architectures:
-Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
(not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch)
-Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
-Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5 and M5L
-iriver: H100, H300 and H10 series
-SanDisk: Sansa c200, e200 and e200R series (not the v2 models)
-Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series)
More are in development. Unfortunately there isn't likely to be a port for 6th generation ipods for a very long time, if ever, due to the firmware encryption present on these devices.
More information is available on the rockbox home page, at http://www.rockbox.org/
Sam
Dude - you just summed up my entire life stance in one post. I've always got funny looks when I try to explain this to people because most people have real trouble believing that there isn't some overriding purpose in their lives. Maybe I'll direct them at this post in future.
Am I the only one here who is seeing parallels between the early stages of synthetic life creation, and the emergence of software in computers. Both started in education, with the "source code" as it were, freely available to everyone. As time went on, software became more commercialized and we ended up with the widespread usage of closed source and intellectual property we have today.
I sure hope there's a Richard Stallman out there to stand up for open source genetics, or a branch of science that can change the course of history will probably end up getting bogged down in lawsuits and patents.
Actually think it's awesome that even twenty YEARS after it's launch, voyager 2 is STILL doing useful science. Another thing that astounds me is how the engineers managed to ensure that even after all these years in the hostile environment of space, this machine is still perfectly functional.
Wouldn't it just make so much more sense if all slashdot links used the coral cache?
Or would that just ruin the fun?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc
Watch the youtube video. It's a very enlightening talk by Naomi Wolf about her new book. C'mon americans, get off your arses and save your own damn country!
Tor was never intended to SECURE traffic. It is an ANOMYMISER. It is designed to cope with compromised nodes and still provide military grade anonymity.
It's important to remember that security and anonymity are different things.
Sciece students at university should be taught the value of citing reliable and verifiable sources. Wikipedia is an incerdible resource - whenever I want to find out more about a particular topic, I go straight to wikipedia to get an overview, and it can act as an excellent springboard towards more and better sources of information.
However, I can also understand the professor's attitudes - although they may contribute to wikipedia themselves, this does not assure the accuracy of every statement made there. Whilst wikipedia is making a valiant effort to cite all of its references and backup every point, it is clearly unrealistic to expect a collaborative encyclopedia to cite reliable sources for every statement made. Unfortunately, the sciences are extremely rigorous about making verifiable claims, and the collaborative nature or wikipedia automatically excludes it from this list. It should never be cited as a primary resource in a real world scientific paper.
The role wikipedia should play in education is... education, surprisingly! If I ever want to find out anything about any topic in the world (or even off-world!) my first stop is wikipedia. It is an incredible tool for giving oneself a rough education in any topic, but for an in depth education about said topic, wikipedia is not sufficient, and unfortunately, it is not reliable enough to count as a valid source in scientific papers.