Yes, I'm aware that compilers are largely OS-independent seeing as all of the OS-specific code is contained within the libraries. However from the Project Kylix press release here, I read the following:
Plans are for Project Kylix to be powered by a new high-speed native C/C++/Delphi compiler for Linux...
Yeah, I was looking at the Lazarus stuff earlier and was impressed by how far they'd got porting the VCL. On the other hand Borland are also writing a native Linux compiler, which I'd assume will include all of the opimization tricks which make most commercial compilers superior to free ones. Coding this will probably take as long, and I doubt the Free Pascal Compiler will ever produce as tight code as the Kylix one (unless Borland comapletely cock it up).
Have you ever looked through the entire class hierarchy of the VCL Deplhi uses? If you start at the base class TObject and work down through TPersistant, TComponent, TStream and all of the rest you'd realise that there is a huge amount of work just porting the library across so that it works with Linux rather than the Win32 API.
And that's not even counting the effort required to port the IDE, standard libraries, compiler, debugger, profiler etc. etc. A full RAD tool is a very large program.
I don't really know but I'd guess that George Lucas holds tight rein over the trademarks from Star Wars, and to produce anything using them you'd have to come up with a hefty license fee, which is probably why there haven't been any projects of the kind you describe (although there was a Star Wars RPG by Mayfair Games IIRC).
Also pardoy is allowed by the US Constitution as part of free speech whereas the situation here is very different - you are not using your right to comment on the Star Wars genre, you are using it as the basis for your own work. At least, I'm sure that's how his lawyers would see it.
Yes, I thought some of the regular/. readers might appreaciate that link:) Perhaps even more appropriately, try www.hotgrits.com for another grits related site.
If you're looking for insight into how corporatism and politics work together to control software and technology -- and to potentially stifle free speech and individual choice -- you can't do better. Nor will you find a more textbook-perfect example of dubious, perhaps even unconstitutional, Internet law.
Well, apart from UCITA perhaps.
One reason free music sources proliferated so rapidly was that they often piggy-backed on educational and other sites where music seekers congregated. College students could download music on their schools' sites, in part because the schools believed they were simply neutral, non-liable carriers of content. Since there was no Internet law governing content on Web sites, nobody knew if that was true or not. But it certainly isn't true anymore.
If this is carried out to its full extent then no-one will have a web page hosted in the US unless its for something really inoffensive, like cooking - check out this site. By forcing sites to be legally responsible for their content this law ensures that content will remain minimal - for small organisations like colleges that would be unable to continually monitor the content of student web pages it will be far easier simply not to have these web pages. It's far easier for them to do this than to face repeated lawsuits.
The real point of this law is intimidation. It's main target is not professional pirates, most of whom don't live in the US anyway, or the people who download pirate music, most of whom it'd be very difficult and time-consuming to catch, but smaller bodies which can be easily accused and which cannot effectively fight back given such accusations. This law is just another way of the music industry asserting their control over music - one of the oldest parts of human culture and one of the few things which separate us from animals.
Not to contradict you, but, I think in Britain you are guilty until proven innocent in all crimes, so the burden of proof ALWAYS lies with the defendant.
That's not true, in Britain you're innocent until proven guilty just like in the US. What might be causing the confusion is one of the provisions in the Criminal Justice Act in which anything you use in court which you didn' say when you were arrested can be used against you. Or at least that's my interpretation of it, but IANAL.
However it is a precedent and I wouldn't be supprised if the UK or EU use this template for modelling there own laws.
I'm not entirely sure if I remember this correctly but I believe that the High Court over here in the UK ruled that end-user license agreements were not valid and had not power in law, so something like the UCITA as it stands could not become law over here. Of course they could still try to get the rest of it passed...
This is what the internet is all about: making people dizzy, so dizzy that they fall off of their high pedestals and fall into the muck of the real world, the real world portrayed by the internet, the internet that is a big revolutionary revolution that's revolving so quickly that people get dizzy. And the internet revoluiton, led by revolting geeks, is a geekfest among revolutions. That's what I meme.
Now that is fucking excellent. A truly marvellous parody of Jon Katz:)
Well, true it is another troll from the dmg, but unfortunately it didn't really provoke anyone and just got a load of well-informed polite responses, which is nice for what it says about/. (although it's not the norm) but not really the point of a troll, which is to expose the clueless.
Why has this been moderated as a troll? IIRC the moderator guidelines say that you shouldn't moderate things down on the basis of personal disagreement, and I can't see anything offsensive in his comment. There have been plenty of books written in this style before.
I think the point is that Perl does have a large syntax with some very arbitrary constructs which have come from features being added well after the initial design of the language. I mean you can do OOP in Perl, but the syntax is somewhat clumsy compared to other languages, Pyhon especially. And then there's the Perl motto - "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (IIRC) - which means that for a beginner code can be confusing simply because it is coded in a different manner than what the student has seen before.
Also while I'm sure Perl can be used for large projects it doesn't really shine here. It's great for CGI scripts and other small standalone applications, but it can easily get unmanagable for a large project.
Before the flames begin, note that I'm not bashing Perl in any way, I'm just saying it wouldn't be my choice for a first language to teach students.
For a while I've been programming an interesting raytracing system which can do all of the reflection, refraction, atmospheric, fractal, and textural effects of a standard raytracer but all in real time. Of course realtime is relative. I'm sure it will do it at 20fps or so on a 1gz machine, but on a p133 it won't even be worth looking at.
Now I remember when doing something like that would take at least 6 hours on my old ST:) Seriously though of course there are applications which can always use more processing power. Raytracing is an obvious one, but also doing hard disk recording of multiple audio and MIDI sources with software DSP effects.
I'm sorry but I can't think WTF I would need 1 GHz for. I'm currently managing with a P133 which, although a little too slow for comfort, still just about manages to cope with my demands. And even if I did want a 1 GHz processor to show off to my mates I'd wait for the 1 GHz Athlon to come out rather than buy a chip based on an outmoded and inefficient design.
And with Intel's recent track record in supplying their processors I think you'll be lucky to get one of the dozen systems that'll be available in the next year:)
I'm wondering whether this might actually be an unintended side-effect.
It's kinda hard to tell from the article whether Sony had intended this or knew about it in advance, but I would imagine a company with Sony's experiance and resources would have been able to work this out in advance. So they must have had a good reason for this.
I'm guessing that it's to do with the fact that it's a DVD player as well as a games console. Each region will get a PSX2 specifically coded to accept only DVDs from their region.
1. Like another poster noted, why the hell do I want another M$ process running in the background on my machine.
Well if they've got any sense it'll most likely be an optional process. I'd imagine you don't have to use it.
2. What if other non-MS software needs the file to exist someplace, even if it is a duplicate, and Win2K symlinks it out-ta there?
Well seeing as how his would be done transparently by the OS there shouldn't be any problem here for processes using the APIs. Processes relying on lower-level methods will obviously have to be rewritten to take this into account, but most apps will run perfectly.
3. What about data replication? I might actually want to store the file in two places -- even if it is bit for bit the same.
I'd imagine you can configure it to ignore certain files when it checks for duplicates. So if you have a file which you have to have duplicates then flag it in the options. If they don't allow this then I think that's a flaw.
4. Do I really trust their OS to check dependencies in anything other than MFC code (where I don't trust them at all by the way -- too many bad experiences)?
Why should it matter whether you use MFC, VCL or whatever? It'll all be done at the system level and shouldn't require any changes to existing code.
Well Sony don't really want anyone exporting their console from Japan before they're ready to launch it overseas. That way they can change the setup of the console and charge what they like in the US and Europe, safe in the knowledge that this time it's illegal for someone to import one from Japan where it'll likely be cheaper. Remember Sega's antics with the Megadrive/Genesis? It's similar except this time Sony have actually managed to get the law behind them.
On the other hand, it migth be that the method uses Javascript, but at which point this nulls and voids any statement on "working on all existing browsers".
From freashmeat you can see that the appropriate file for it is called Robust.jar, so I think you're probably correct there:)
It seems that at the moment the only way to play in this kind of game is to join up with a play-by-(E)mail game. Of course you lose out on the immediacy of a real-time game, but you do gain a lot more role-playing opportunity, especially if it is moderated by a human rather than a computer.
It's a pity there's nothing like that because I'd definitely go for it. Still, this kind of open-ended online game is going to be more and more popular as the technology for it improves and hopefully we'll get to the point where there are enough games so that we could choose whatever we want.
Some answers to your points. The UK government doesn't subsidise net access but the telecom industry is regulated in such a way that ISPs can take a share of the amount you are charged for the phone connection. So these ISPs don't charge you to use them. There are also some companies that have totally free services using either freephone numbers or by asking you to change your phone company to theirs.
Slashdot Mirror
Additional problems include overheating and freezing.
LOL! Why doesn't it shatter then?
They're also porting C++ Builder to Linux so you don't have to dirty your hands with the evil of Pascal ;) There's a press release here.
Yes, I'm aware that compilers are largely OS-independent seeing as all of the OS-specific code is contained within the libraries. However from the Project Kylix press release here, I read the following:
Plans are for Project Kylix to be powered by a new high-speed native C/C++/Delphi compiler for Linux ...
That's the reason I made that statement.
Yeah, I was looking at the Lazarus stuff earlier and was impressed by how far they'd got porting the VCL. On the other hand Borland are also writing a native Linux compiler, which I'd assume will include all of the opimization tricks which make most commercial compilers superior to free ones. Coding this will probably take as long, and I doubt the Free Pascal Compiler will ever produce as tight code as the Kylix one (unless Borland comapletely cock it up).
Have you ever looked through the entire class hierarchy of the VCL Deplhi uses? If you start at the base class TObject and work down through TPersistant, TComponent, TStream and all of the rest you'd realise that there is a huge amount of work just porting the library across so that it works with Linux rather than the Win32 API.
And that's not even counting the effort required to port the IDE, standard libraries, compiler, debugger, profiler etc. etc. A full RAD tool is a very large program.
I'm sorry, but how cool is that? It's one of those things which is just so bad that it's good. *pika* *pika* :)
I don't really know but I'd guess that George Lucas holds tight rein over the trademarks from Star Wars, and to produce anything using them you'd have to come up with a hefty license fee, which is probably why there haven't been any projects of the kind you describe (although there was a Star Wars RPG by Mayfair Games IIRC).
Also pardoy is allowed by the US Constitution as part of free speech whereas the situation here is very different - you are not using your right to comment on the Star Wars genre, you are using it as the basis for your own work. At least, I'm sure that's how his lawyers would see it.
Have a listen to some of the stuff at Fun Sounds, especially this news story about two men and their gerbil...
Yes, I thought some of the regular /. readers might appreaciate that link :) Perhaps even more appropriately, try www.hotgrits.com for another grits related site.
If you're looking for insight into how corporatism and politics work together to control software and technology -- and to potentially stifle free speech and individual choice -- you can't do better. Nor will you find a more textbook-perfect example of dubious, perhaps even unconstitutional, Internet law.
Well, apart from UCITA perhaps.
One reason free music sources proliferated so rapidly was that they often piggy-backed on educational and other sites where music seekers congregated. College students could download music on their schools' sites, in part because the schools believed they were simply neutral, non-liable carriers of content. Since there was no Internet law governing content on Web sites, nobody knew if that was true or not. But it certainly isn't true anymore.
If this is carried out to its full extent then no-one will have a web page hosted in the US unless its for something really inoffensive, like cooking - check out this site. By forcing sites to be legally responsible for their content this law ensures that content will remain minimal - for small organisations like colleges that would be unable to continually monitor the content of student web pages it will be far easier simply not to have these web pages. It's far easier for them to do this than to face repeated lawsuits.
The real point of this law is intimidation. It's main target is not professional pirates, most of whom don't live in the US anyway, or the people who download pirate music, most of whom it'd be very difficult and time-consuming to catch, but smaller bodies which can be easily accused and which cannot effectively fight back given such accusations. This law is just another way of the music industry asserting their control over music - one of the oldest parts of human culture and one of the few things which separate us from animals.
Not to contradict you, but, I think in Britain you are guilty until proven innocent in all crimes, so the burden of proof ALWAYS lies with the defendant.
That's not true, in Britain you're innocent until proven guilty just like in the US. What might be causing the confusion is one of the provisions in the Criminal Justice Act in which anything you use in court which you didn' say when you were arrested can be used against you. Or at least that's my interpretation of it, but IANAL.
However it is a precedent and I wouldn't be supprised if the UK or EU use this template for modelling there own laws.
I'm not entirely sure if I remember this correctly but I believe that the High Court over here in the UK ruled that end-user license agreements were not valid and had not power in law, so something like the UCITA as it stands could not become law over here. Of course they could still try to get the rest of it passed...
This is what the internet is all about: making people dizzy, so dizzy that they fall off of their high pedestals and fall into the muck of the real world, the real world portrayed by the internet, the internet that is a big revolutionary revolution that's revolving so quickly that people get dizzy. And the internet revoluiton, led by revolting geeks, is a geekfest among revolutions. That's what I meme.
Now that is fucking excellent. A truly marvellous parody of Jon Katz :)
Well, true it is another troll from the dmg, but unfortunately it didn't really provoke anyone and just got a load of well-informed polite responses, which is nice for what it says about /. (although it's not the norm) but not really the point of a troll, which is to expose the clueless.
Why has this been moderated as a troll? IIRC the moderator guidelines say that you shouldn't moderate things down on the basis of personal disagreement, and I can't see anything offsensive in his comment. There have been plenty of books written in this style before.
I think the point is that Perl does have a large syntax with some very arbitrary constructs which have come from features being added well after the initial design of the language. I mean you can do OOP in Perl, but the syntax is somewhat clumsy compared to other languages, Pyhon especially. And then there's the Perl motto - "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (IIRC) - which means that for a beginner code can be confusing simply because it is coded in a different manner than what the student has seen before.
Also while I'm sure Perl can be used for large projects it doesn't really shine here. It's great for CGI scripts and other small standalone applications, but it can easily get unmanagable for a large project.
Before the flames begin, note that I'm not bashing Perl in any way, I'm just saying it wouldn't be my choice for a first language to teach students.
For a while I've been programming an interesting raytracing system which can do all of the reflection, refraction, atmospheric, fractal, and textural effects of a standard raytracer but all in real time. Of course realtime is relative. I'm sure it will do it at 20fps or so on a 1gz machine, but on a p133 it won't even be worth looking at.
Now I remember when doing something like that would take at least 6 hours on my old ST :) Seriously though of course there are applications which can always use more processing power. Raytracing is an obvious one, but also doing hard disk recording of multiple audio and MIDI sources with software DSP effects.
I'm sorry but I can't think WTF I would need 1 GHz for. I'm currently managing with a P133 which, although a little too slow for comfort, still just about manages to cope with my demands. And even if I did want a 1 GHz processor to show off to my mates I'd wait for the 1 GHz Athlon to come out rather than buy a chip based on an outmoded and inefficient design.
And with Intel's recent track record in supplying their processors I think you'll be lucky to get one of the dozen systems that'll be available in the next year :)
I'm wondering whether this might actually be an unintended side-effect.
It's kinda hard to tell from the article whether Sony had intended this or knew about it in advance, but I would imagine a company with Sony's experiance and resources would have been able to work this out in advance. So they must have had a good reason for this.
I'm guessing that it's to do with the fact that it's a DVD player as well as a games console. Each region will get a PSX2 specifically coded to accept only DVDs from their region.
1. Like another poster noted, why the hell do I want another M$ process running in the background on my machine.
Well if they've got any sense it'll most likely be an optional process. I'd imagine you don't have to use it.
2. What if other non-MS software needs the file to exist someplace, even if it is a duplicate, and Win2K symlinks it out-ta there?
Well seeing as how his would be done transparently by the OS there shouldn't be any problem here for processes using the APIs. Processes relying on lower-level methods will obviously have to be rewritten to take this into account, but most apps will run perfectly.
3. What about data replication? I might actually want to store the file in two places -- even if it is bit for bit the same.
I'd imagine you can configure it to ignore certain files when it checks for duplicates. So if you have a file which you have to have duplicates then flag it in the options. If they don't allow this then I think that's a flaw.
4. Do I really trust their OS to check dependencies in anything other than MFC code (where I don't trust them at all by the way -- too many bad experiences)?
Why should it matter whether you use MFC, VCL or whatever? It'll all be done at the system level and shouldn't require any changes to existing code.
Well Sony don't really want anyone exporting their console from Japan before they're ready to launch it overseas. That way they can change the setup of the console and charge what they like in the US and Europe, safe in the knowledge that this time it's illegal for someone to import one from Japan where it'll likely be cheaper. Remember Sega's antics with the Megadrive/Genesis? It's similar except this time Sony have actually managed to get the law behind them.
On the other hand, it migth be that the method uses Javascript, but at which point this nulls and voids any statement on "working on all existing browsers".
From freashmeat you can see that the appropriate file for it is called Robust.jar, so I think you're probably correct there :)
Well it sounds like an interesting concept bu unfortunately I can't get to the site already. Surely it's too soon for the /. effect?
It seems that at the moment the only way to play in this kind of game is to join up with a play-by-(E)mail game. Of course you lose out on the immediacy of a real-time game, but you do gain a lot more role-playing opportunity, especially if it is moderated by a human rather than a computer.
It's a pity there's nothing like that because I'd definitely go for it. Still, this kind of open-ended online game is going to be more and more popular as the technology for it improves and hopefully we'll get to the point where there are enough games so that we could choose whatever we want.
Some answers to your points. The UK government doesn't subsidise net access but the telecom industry is regulated in such a way that ISPs can take a share of the amount you are charged for the phone connection. So these ISPs don't charge you to use them. There are also some companies that have totally free services using either freephone numbers or by asking you to change your phone company to theirs.