I think the point is that broadband could do with more killer apps. Currently companies are unwilling to let their content loose on the net due to piracy concerns, whereas if there was a pervasive, fairly reliable DRM system, a lot more companies would make use of broadband, which in turn would make people more likely to buy it.
Sure, you may say, why would people pay for what they can get *now* for free?
a) It's still not that easy to get. Sure, you can use kazaa, but it's not really reliable or quick b) Legal systems would get marketed. I'm sure this makes a lot of difference. If people were getting ads on TV all the time advertising on-demand movies, streaming music etc, they'd be a lot more tempted to get broadband.
I have a Canon S500, and it has a system that detects when the ink is about to run out and when the ink has run out. I'm always surprised at how many prints I get between it telling me the ink is low and when it refuses to print any more, but it does give you some time to get around to getting some new cartridges. When the cartridge has expired, There doesn't seem to be very much ink left, although it is a bit difficult to tell - the cartridges are full of a cotton wool-like substance, presumably to stop the ink sloshing about. I've never had any bad prints as result of ink running out, so it seems they leave enough ink in to ensure that your last print will always be good, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what you want.
If you have European-style data protection legislation, most of these things cannot be done legally. It can't stop abuse, but it can prevent it from becoming the norm.
Three year old kids are more competent than you imagine! They can play simple games, but do normally require a bit of supervision. The biggest problem is that at that age they can't read, so navigating menus and interpreting any messages that are given to them can be a problem.
On my normal browser window size (probably about 800 pixel high) each of the pages in the article was a least three and a half 'screens' long, even for pages which only held two paragraphs of text.
What is this idiocy? Okay, I can understand the ad in the middle and the banner ad, but they've got just *so* much shite around the sides - only about 20% of the page is the article itself.
Oh, and just to stay on-topic, I've got an IWILL motherboard with C-Media onboard sound on my home PC, and it sounds fine to me. The speakers are reasonable (Cambridge Soundworks I think) and are fine for all my needs. For playing music on (which I don't do much) the sound seems like its lacking a little richness, but I think that's probably because the speakers aren't really designed with music in mind.
This one goes about three to four times as fast as a normal one does. It has acceleration and decelleration zones at the beginning and end, as it would be far too fast to get on otherwise.
"Let us also recall the recent guilt of Great Britian in Northern Ireland using very similar methods as the Israelis"
While it is true that the government of Great Britain did commit some despicable acts in Northern Ireland, they were nothing like the methods that Israel is using against the Palestinians.
At no point did the British Army start blowing down the doors of civillian houses with explosives, or bulldozing houses while the occupants were still inside. They never laid seige to Jerry Adam's house and bombarded it. They never prevented Jerry Adams from travelling abroad. (Although for a while they did band him from speaking on TV...). They never had a policy of assassination against IRA memebers, and they never used helicopter gunships to attack IRA members and their families, blowing up anybody else who happened to be nearby.
During the whole period of the troubles, the British Government probably only killed about 40 people. The Israeli government has killed something like 3000 palestinians.
Now, it is also true while that the IRA did kill a lot of people, (several hundred), The palestinian terrorist organisations have killed considerably more (probably getting near 2000 people now)
Personally I think that if both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict had taken a few leads from the way things are being solved in Northern Ireland, hundreds of people would still be alive today.
Film Gimp is a step in the right direction, but when we last evaluated it, it was very unstable. It is still useful if you need to do HDR work, though.
Yes, I'm not talking about the toon shading, I'm talking about all the other 2D textures that you need, even if you are doing a toon-look animation. There will still be loads of 2D textures that you need for backgrounds, particle systems etc... and even the 3D toon characters themselves may have some texturing. All of these need a decent 2D program, and I'm afraid the gimp just isn't up to it.
I was pointing out that most of the applications we user are not free or open source, but rather are commercial, closed-source Linux applications.
The big thing we are missing is Photoshop for Linux.
As for the compositing systems:
Flame and Inferno run on SGI IRIX machine with custom harware. The Avid systems run on Windows. The Quantel Henrys ran their own Quantel system - I'm not sure what the modern Quantel systems run on Certainly the only compositing system I know of that runs on Linux is Shake. Most of the others have custom hardware and don't run on Linux.
I work in one of Europe's largest post production houses, and we've moved most things over to Linux now. However, we still need Windows to run Adobe Photoshop, as there's still nothing suitable yet in Linux. The GIMP just doesn't cut it, and I'm sure it's the same with them.
Sure, the modelling, animation and rendering were probably all done on Linux, but it's probably not correct to say that it was done exclusively on Linux. I bet there were a bunch of Windows or Macs with Photoshop on them being used there, and unless they did all their compositing on Shake, they'll have probably used some dedicated compositing systems.
Linux works quite well in visual effects, largely because all those who grew up using IRIX workstations find it quite familiar. The pipelining and scripting stuff is easier than it is in NT/2000/XP. However, it's worth noting that the vast majority of the actual graphics software we use is still commercial/proprietary - there's not much in the way of Open Source stuff out there of a sufficiently high quality. The notable exception to this is 'Liquid' a maya->Renderman convertor, and to a lesser extent FilmGimp - useful because there's not much else that will edit High Dynamic Range images, but less useful because it still appears to be rather unstable...
At no point was there any kind of click-through or shrink-wrap license when I got my Xbox - it really *is* my hardware. Even with the best lawyers in the world, I don't think Microsoft would be able to convince a court that everybody who owns an Xbox doesn't actually own it I mean, where would the madness end? Ford could start insisting that it was actually just lending out all its motor cars...
Yeah, you learn how to waste three hours doing a task that should take three minutes...
My, I'm real glad I learnt how to use this vastly overcomplicated configuration system when on other systems I could have set it up with a few mouse clicks! That's what I call valueable information!
Really, I'm not trolling. Linux really does crash on me, and so does X. It really pisses me off. (The other thing that pisses me off is people who insist that Linux doesn't crash and that you must be lying and/or have some kind of crap computer with a memory problem if it does, but that's another story...)
I have heard that Debian is the Holy Land of Linux, but I've gotta use RedHat as we're running several proprietary programs here that are only supported on it.
However, I'd really like to know what it is about Debian that is meant to make it so much more stable than other distributions - I mean, surely much of the same stuff is running underneath?
There. I've said it. It does crash. Not that often, but it does crash. However the thing that crashes quite a lot is X. Yeah, sure, you can just restart X and be thankful it hasn't ruined your 'uptime'. Whoopeedoo.
However all the applications you were running will have been killed, and any work that you had that wasn't saved will have been lost.
I think it's important to note that this should not be viewed as some kind of anti-spam panacea; it's just another tool in our anti-spam toolbox.
Sure, it's easy to get past this system - just write the spamming program so that it retries all of its mail after two hours. However, this does have one huge disadvantage for the spammer: their mail does not get through the first time. This means that things like blacklists and the like have much longer to respond than they normally do.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why Games Developers don't tend to write Linux games, and they've got nothing to do with Windows emulators.
1) It's pretty difficult to get most games to run with Windows emulators anyway
2) There's hardly any market for Linux games. It's quite a lot of effort for very few sales. (You have to remember that it's very difficult to make a profit with Windows games, let alone Linux ones...)
3) Support is even harder than it is for Windows. There's just so many different distributions and configurations of Linux. If you look at the big 3D packages, for example, they'll often only support you on a couple of distributions - e.g. Redhat 7.3 or 8.
4) 3D and sound tend to be much harder to set up, and the drivers tend not to be supported by the hardware manufacturers.
5) The libraries are not as good. The SDL is certainly a step in the right direction, but it's just not as mature or well documented as DirectX.
Even if the windows emulators didn't exist, there'd still be hardly any commercial games written for Linux.
The original poster claimed that the Linux Kernel had more programmer talent than the whole of Microsoft, Sun, IBM and SCO put together, not just the kernel programmers.
I'd still be surprised if the Linux Kernel got more programmer time put into it than the Windows kernel, and even more surprised if it got more time than the Windows and Solaris kernels...
(It's a bit more difficult to talk about IBM, as I think some of their engineers work on the Linux Kernel anyway...)
I'm sure that some of the Linux dev guys are very clever, but they've hardly got the monopoly on talent. Sure, there's also a lot of people with the option of looking at the code, but I imagine a very small proportion of them do so. How many people actually understand the kernel well enough to sumbit a patch? probably a couple of thousand. So you're still left with a couple of thousand people part time versus many thousands of people working on it full time.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is that broadband could do with more killer apps. Currently companies are unwilling to let their content loose on the net due to piracy concerns, whereas if there was a pervasive, fairly reliable DRM system, a lot more companies would make use of broadband, which in turn would make people more likely to buy it.
Sure, you may say, why would people pay for what they can get *now* for free?
a) It's still not that easy to get. Sure, you can use kazaa, but it's not really reliable or quick
b) Legal systems would get marketed. I'm sure this makes a lot of difference. If people were getting ads on TV all the time advertising on-demand movies, streaming music etc, they'd be a lot more tempted to get broadband.
I have a Canon S500, and it has a system that detects when the ink is about to run out and when the ink has run out. I'm always surprised at how many prints I get between it telling me the ink is low and when it refuses to print any more, but it does give you some time to get around to getting some new cartridges. When the cartridge has expired, There doesn't seem to be very much ink left, although it is a bit difficult to tell - the cartridges are full of a cotton wool-like substance, presumably to stop the ink sloshing about. I've never had any bad prints as result of ink running out, so it seems they leave enough ink in to ensure that your last print will always be good, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what you want.
I've not tried refilling the cartridges yet.
If you have European-style data protection legislation, most of these things cannot be done legally. It can't stop abuse, but it can prevent it from becoming the norm.
Three year old kids are more competent than you imagine! They can play simple games, but do normally require a bit of supervision. The biggest problem is that at that age they can't read, so navigating menus and interpreting any messages that are given to them can be a problem.
I think the word we have for that is actually 'sabotage'.
On my normal browser window size (probably about 800 pixel high) each of the pages in the article was a least three and a half 'screens' long, even for pages which only held two paragraphs of text.
What is this idiocy? Okay, I can understand the ad in the middle and the banner ad, but they've got just *so* much shite around the sides - only about 20% of the page is the article itself.
Oh, and just to stay on-topic, I've got an IWILL motherboard with C-Media onboard sound on my home PC, and it sounds fine to me. The speakers are reasonable (Cambridge Soundworks I think) and are fine for all my needs. For playing music on (which I don't do much) the sound seems like its lacking a little richness, but I think that's probably because the speakers aren't really designed with music in mind.
Full Motion Video
This one goes about three to four times as fast as a normal one does. It has acceleration and decelleration zones at the beginning and end, as it would be far too fast to get on otherwise.
"Let us also recall the recent guilt of Great Britian in Northern Ireland using very similar methods as the Israelis"
While it is true that the government of Great Britain did commit some despicable acts in Northern Ireland, they were nothing like the methods that Israel is using against the Palestinians.
At no point did the British Army start blowing down the doors of civillian houses with explosives, or bulldozing houses while the occupants were still inside. They never laid seige to Jerry Adam's house and bombarded it. They never prevented Jerry Adams from travelling abroad. (Although for a while they did band him from speaking on TV...). They never had a policy of assassination against IRA memebers, and they never used helicopter gunships to attack IRA members and their families, blowing up anybody else who happened to be nearby.
During the whole period of the troubles, the British Government probably only killed about 40 people. The Israeli government has killed something like 3000 palestinians.
Now, it is also true while that the IRA did kill a lot of people, (several hundred), The palestinian terrorist organisations have killed considerably more (probably getting near 2000 people now)
Personally I think that if both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict had taken a few leads from the way things are being solved in Northern Ireland, hundreds of people would still be alive today.
Film Gimp is a step in the right direction, but when we last evaluated it, it was very unstable. It is still useful if you need to do HDR work, though.
"The BBC ... are not known for rash accusations"
;-)
I'm not sure Alastair Campbell would agree...
Yes, I'm not talking about the toon shading, I'm talking about all the other 2D textures that you need, even if you are doing a toon-look animation. There will still be loads of 2D textures that you need for backgrounds, particle systems etc... and even the 3D toon characters themselves may have some texturing. All of these need a decent 2D program, and I'm afraid the gimp just isn't up to it.
I was pointing out that most of the applications we user are not free or open source, but rather are commercial, closed-source Linux applications.
The big thing we are missing is Photoshop for Linux.
As for the compositing systems:
Flame and Inferno run on SGI IRIX machine with custom harware.
The Avid systems run on Windows.
The Quantel Henrys ran their own Quantel system - I'm not sure what the modern Quantel systems run on
Certainly the only compositing system I know of that runs on Linux is Shake. Most of the others have custom hardware and don't run on Linux.
I work in one of Europe's largest post production houses, and we've moved most things over to Linux now. However, we still need Windows to run Adobe Photoshop, as there's still nothing suitable yet in Linux. The GIMP just doesn't cut it, and I'm sure it's the same with them.
Sure, the modelling, animation and rendering were probably all done on Linux, but it's probably not correct to say that it was done exclusively on Linux. I bet there were a bunch of Windows or Macs with Photoshop on them being used there, and unless they did all their compositing on Shake, they'll have probably used some dedicated compositing systems.
Linux works quite well in visual effects, largely because all those who grew up using IRIX workstations find it quite familiar. The pipelining and scripting stuff is easier than it is in NT/2000/XP. However, it's worth noting that the vast majority of the actual graphics software we use is still commercial/proprietary - there's not much in the way of Open Source stuff out there of a sufficiently high quality. The notable exception to this is 'Liquid' a maya->Renderman convertor, and to a lesser extent FilmGimp - useful because there's not much else that will edit High Dynamic Range images, but less useful because it still appears to be rather unstable...
At no point was there any kind of click-through or shrink-wrap license when I got my Xbox - it really *is* my hardware. Even with the best lawyers in the world, I don't think Microsoft would be able to convince a court that everybody who owns an Xbox doesn't actually own it I mean, where would the madness end? Ford could start insisting that it was actually just lending out all its motor cars...
Yeah, you learn how to waste three hours doing a task that should take three minutes...
My, I'm real glad I learnt how to use this vastly overcomplicated configuration system when on other systems I could have set it up with a few mouse clicks! That's what I call valueable information!
I think you'll need a lot for your hat.
My name has the same soundex as Saif al-Adil, who is apprently one of Al-Quaida's most senior operatives.
Well, I can tell my next trip to visit my fiancee's family in Washington DC is going to be fun...
Really, I'm not trolling. Linux really does crash on me, and so does X. It really pisses me off. (The other thing that pisses me off is people who insist that Linux doesn't crash and that you must be lying and/or have some kind of crap computer with a memory problem if it does, but that's another story...)
I have heard that Debian is the Holy Land of Linux, but I've gotta use RedHat as we're running several proprietary programs here that are only supported on it.
However, I'd really like to know what it is about Debian that is meant to make it so much more stable than other distributions - I mean, surely much of the same stuff is running underneath?
LINUX DOES CRASH!
There. I've said it. It does crash. Not that often, but it does crash. However the thing that crashes quite a lot is X. Yeah, sure, you can just restart X and be thankful it hasn't ruined your 'uptime'. Whoopeedoo.
However all the applications you were running will have been killed, and any work that you had that wasn't saved will have been lost.
This is Slashdot. I can't see you making much money, somehow...
I think it's important to note that this should not be viewed as some kind of anti-spam panacea; it's just another tool in our anti-spam toolbox.
Sure, it's easy to get past this system - just write the spamming program so that it retries all of its mail after two hours. However, this does have one huge disadvantage for the spammer: their mail does not get through the first time. This means that things like blacklists and the like have much longer to respond than they normally do.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why Games Developers don't tend to write Linux games, and they've got nothing to do with Windows emulators.
1) It's pretty difficult to get most games to run with Windows emulators anyway
2) There's hardly any market for Linux games. It's quite a lot of effort for very few sales. (You have to remember that it's very difficult to make a profit with Windows games, let alone Linux ones...)
3) Support is even harder than it is for Windows. There's just so many different distributions and configurations of Linux. If you look at the big 3D packages, for example, they'll often only support you on a couple of distributions - e.g. Redhat 7.3 or 8.
4) 3D and sound tend to be much harder to set up, and the drivers tend not to be supported by the hardware manufacturers.
5) The libraries are not as good. The SDL is certainly a step in the right direction, but it's just not as mature or well documented as DirectX.
Even if the windows emulators didn't exist, there'd still be hardly any commercial games written for Linux.
The original poster claimed that the Linux Kernel had more programmer talent than the whole of Microsoft, Sun, IBM and SCO put together, not just the kernel programmers.
I'd still be surprised if the Linux Kernel got more programmer time put into it than the Windows kernel, and even more surprised if it got more time than the Windows and Solaris kernels...
(It's a bit more difficult to talk about IBM, as I think some of their engineers work on the Linux Kernel anyway...)
I'm sure that some of the Linux dev guys are very clever, but they've hardly got the monopoly on talent. Sure, there's also a lot of people with the option of looking at the code, but I imagine a very small proportion of them do so. How many people actually understand the kernel well enough to sumbit a patch? probably a couple of thousand. So you're still left with a couple of thousand people part time versus many thousands of people working on it full time.