I wish any viruses that affected me would refuse to be infect other people unless I agreed to allow them to also have an opt out clause on further infection to third parties.
You have to admit it would be quite effective at stopping the common cold.
Here are some animation tools Blender, Synfig. Go away and do something cool - say 60 seconds of original animation with some artistic merit.
Then give it away, including the source files you used to make it.
If it's any good it'll be hard. Really, trust me on this. I am very pro open content and I was shocked how hard it was to actually give things away. (More so with my writing than with animation, and I won't even try to kid myself that it would ever be good enough to sell.)
Not only has it massivly increased my respect for those who *do* give away significant work under the GPL and similar licenses, it's also I hope made me a small amount less hypocritical in holding the view that all information should be Free. But I can't say that I view casual piracy the same way I did before either.
There is also Synfig (link to screenshot) for Linux/OS X which is a vector package aimed at animators. I haven't come accross it before, although it was linked frm the Slashdot article, so I'll be back with a review in, uh, 12-20 hours. Pass the jolt please:)
I'm a huge fan of vector drawing, even to the point of using Inkscape to animate stuff. I can't wait to try this out, especially if it has better support for frame generation.
Half of the Slashdot crowd will just download the flick and wonder why the producers are so disappointed in the film's performance at the box office.
Then they will post about the virtues of free software... knowing full well that they really mean beer.
These people argue that copying from people who give nothing away, refuse to allow derivatives and generally try to lock up art with DRM and copyright extensions to avoid it entering the commons is in no way equal to going against the wishes of people who do give things away for you to do with as you please, as long as the rights are retained for everyone who gets a copy.
I may not agree with them, but I don't see much hypocracy there.
He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago.
This could have as much to do with the number of sellers going up as it could be about the number of buyers dropping due to being put off by being scammed by either a seller or, more likley, eBay/Paypal.
The number of duplicate items listed for just about anything you care to name is staggering nowadays, so it's rare to get into a bidding situation over anything even slightly common. There were, for example, about 30 Aiptek 12000U graphics tablets on there when I was looking for one (and all of them were more expensive than buying one efrom scan - they work with Linux too fwiw).
The tagline on my website has been "because even this is better than television" since I threw my TV away during the second year of college, 5 years ago.
I don't miss it.
Well, yes. The strength of the OSS movement is that, technically, anything can be done. The fact that this has yet to be done points at a larger problem - the people who can, don't.
The people who can, have. Then they turned it into a library and now iPod support is available in
Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?
And the best bit is that I (and probably you soon) got moderated down for saying it.
What do you expect Linux devs to do? Magically support every bit of hardware in existance without decent specs and no access to the closed DRM which makes the bit people are most unhappy to leave behind tick? Yes, I am aware that the actual format is open, thank you very much, but the DRM is not and so purchased large music libraries are non-trivial to convert to something that works on any platform.
And yet the iPod does work on Linux (even the new ones). How about that for good service, and all for free I might add.
Well, it's not friendly to first post trolls perhaps.
In my case I plugged in my MP3 player, it showed up on the desktop, I copied over some MP3s and they worked. Some people might have said this was because I picked an MP3 player that implimented a standard (USB bulk storage) protocol rather than one from a vendor who aims to keep everything locked up tight, but personally I think that it's just trying to make you jealous.
Ah, someone who missed out on the heady days of being a wireless systems engineer in 2002.
The business plan went like this:
Buy everyone in the area a base station, install high capacity network links, give out free mesh-capable PDAs.
????
Profit!
Re:It's not exactly 'open' or 'free'
on
Tibet's Mesh
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Like anything else, it will require (expensive) investments in infrastructure. Or am I missing something?
Yes, I did used to do this for a living (and would do it again if someone wants to pay me for it).
In theory there is nothing to stop a world spanning global mesh, except of course for:
limitations of the speed of light
the size of the routing table
lack of trust in intermediate nodes
node induced latency
oceans
Let's say that your networking technology has a max range of 100m, and the town is a very densly inhabited 10km square, which is pretty much a best case. Getting accross town requires 100 hops and if each of them adds 10ms latency (a pretty low estimate) thats 1000ms. How do you fancy playing quake with 1000ms of lag?
The *best* use for mesh networks is as a complimentary network. Because bandwidth rises in a geometric relationship with the number of nodes (x^n is the limit where x is link bandwidth, but it won't happen due to technology limitations and a bunch of other things) as a very high capacity bulk carrier it probably cant be beaten. Combine it with a smart information distribution system and information redundancy* and you could do some very impressive things.
That way you free up you *real* bandwidth, the latency middle ground of mesh-to-wireless-direct-backhaul, for web browsing as all of the porn and youtube junk is transiting the bulk delivery system. Add on one-hop-to-wired-PoP for latency critical apps such as VoIP and you gain a seamless, layered, high capacity and high performance network.
*I wrote a paper looking at using freenet plus an overlying signing mechanism and co-ordinated seeding as a reliable distribution system in 2003, I'll have to dig it ou and publish it some day.
If you want to set up a mesh network in your own neighbourhood then you can take a look at a free, open source mesh network software package from Mitre corp. I used to use it in a past life to build networks that were adequate for VOIP with some tuning (and a lot of broadcast voodoo), and the ability to route traffic via more than one end node is fantastic. Set up a base station in every home with an 802.11g backhaul (and decent antennas) to provide the basic mesh, terminate in one or two houses with a fast cable/DSL connection and bang, instant multihomed network for everyone worth pi geek points.
Is built the entire plane out of sodium. That way crashing it into the sea (or flying it through a rain cloud) would achieve the desired effect without all of the expense and inconvenience of organised terrorism.
1) Try to instruct a novice user to find and download the free version on their website. Not an easy task but doable.
This certainly used to be a massive problem (the easiest way was in fact to use the link provided by the BBC which went directly too it) but these days their download page (the one you get to by clicking real player on the front page) outlines your options pretty clearly.
2) Try to install it without it inserting stuff into Windows startup - I use Startup Control Panel but not everyone is so lucky.
Not really a problem when installing on Linux, so I can't help you there. Windows users should be used to it by now from WMParasite anyway. Maybe someone who has installed a more recent version than you have can provide some insight.
3) Try to remove the messages/popups etc. from a standard installation - again, not for the novice.
Last time I ran Real Player on Windows that just involved changing the settings in the options tab. Now, i'll not overestimate the technical ability of most users, but unless things have changed it wasn't a lot harder than grasping the principle of how to turn your computer on.
What are you talking about? Helix won't play media from the BBC.
It does with Real's plugin. While that isn't free *yet* I hope it is in the future. In the mean time I welcome a vendor who shows they have good intentions and are working on the details. It's definatly preferable to the many vendors who prefer to try and firebomb the project.
(You need 4 years of engineering graduate school to acquire this level of cynicism folks.)
I've been very impressed with Real's approach of late (ever since Helix, really, although they did some good things before then). They are showing a very cooperative attitude - enough to overcome any ill will I might have felt towards them - and I hope that they get a warm reception for this contribution that encourages them to embrace the open source/free software community further.
I do wonder though if any of this open source love is being pushed by the BBC? They are after all proabbly one of the biggest single drivers of Real installations and have demonstrated in the past their ability to push Real to change their stance.
I'm thinking particuarly of the fact that the BBC cancelled it's Ogg testing aboiut the same time that the whole Helix thing started - could Real opening up a bit in return for no migration to open source or free software codecs have been the price?
this, a highly opinionated and biased article about evolution being proof of the existance of God. I suppose Slashdot is good for creativity after all:)
And a bit odd in it's selections. It shows Vista (not yet released) but it doesn't show Compiz (under KDE), which is here today and puts Linux well over the top in terms of eye candy.
I might add that there is a distinct lack of console love as well. I demand equal treatment for bash! Show me the ~$
And I have to wonder...that is less than 100.00 what?
Fear not comrade, it's all part of the move to make Slashdot less US centric - this way, rather than just having foreigners confused about how much things cost, everyone gets to be confused about how much things cost.
But Visio at least can be used to draw pretty pictures. 8)
So can Access! Create a table (rows 1,000 columns 1,000) and map 1 for black 0 for grey and no value for white... it's an ideal way to store your pictures in the database!
Try this in one of ym databases and I *will* shoot you.
Even my old university has now upgraded their labs to FC5, and they are so cheap that they actually asked if there was a discount on a GPL upgrade license.
FFM with the menubar at the top is entireley practical as long as you use sloppy focus mode. Modern WMs also support delay-to-focus - IE moving the mouse quickly to the menubar won't change focus.
Maybe once they have taken focus-follows-mouse (sorry, pet axe to grind - but it triples in value with translucent desktop objects) they can also copy the rest of the cutting edge eye candy in Compiz, like the insane yet cool cube thing and the rather more useful copacity.
Lossless/procedural scaling allows detail to go up as resolution rises instead of apparent quality going down. I believe that Vector Icons and Fonts are a target for KDE4.
In any event DRM hardware that stops popular garbage being played without a license isn't really an issue - it'll push people who don't like the situation to make their own. In fact that's kind of the best thing that could happen to indie media, increasing the pool of contributors massivly.
The only kind of bad DRM hardware is the kind that stops users playing, modifying or distributing their _own_ stuff cheaply and easily*. That's the real issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish any viruses that affected me would refuse to be infect other people unless I agreed to allow them to also have an opt out clause on further infection to third parties.
You have to admit it would be quite effective at stopping the common cold.
Here are some animation tools Blender, Synfig. Go away and do something cool - say 60 seconds of original animation with some artistic merit.
Then give it away, including the source files you used to make it.
If it's any good it'll be hard. Really, trust me on this. I am very pro open content and I was shocked how hard it was to actually give things away. (More so with my writing than with animation, and I won't even try to kid myself that it would ever be good enough to sell.)
Not only has it massivly increased my respect for those who *do* give away significant work under the GPL and similar licenses, it's also I hope made me a small amount less hypocritical in holding the view that all information should be Free. But I can't say that I view casual piracy the same way I did before either.
There is also Synfig (link to screenshot) for Linux/OS X which is a vector package aimed at animators. I haven't come accross it before, although it was linked frm the Slashdot article, so I'll be back with a review in, uh, 12-20 hours. Pass the jolt please :)
Wikipedia has more on Xara (of course).
I'm a huge fan of vector drawing, even to the point of using Inkscape to animate stuff. I can't wait to try this out, especially if it has better support for frame generation.
Half of the Slashdot crowd will just download the flick and wonder why the producers are so disappointed in the film's performance at the box office.
Then they will post about the virtues of free software... knowing full well that they really mean beer.
These people argue that copying from people who give nothing away, refuse to allow derivatives and generally try to lock up art with DRM and copyright extensions to avoid it entering the commons is in no way equal to going against the wishes of people who do give things away for you to do with as you please, as long as the rights are retained for everyone who gets a copy.
I may not agree with them, but I don't see much hypocracy there.
He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago.
This could have as much to do with the number of sellers going up as it could be about the number of buyers dropping due to being put off by being scammed by either a seller or, more likley, eBay/Paypal.
The number of duplicate items listed for just about anything you care to name is staggering nowadays, so it's rare to get into a bidding situation over anything even slightly common. There were, for example, about 30 Aiptek 12000U graphics tablets on there when I was looking for one (and all of them were more expensive than buying one efrom scan - they work with Linux too fwiw).
The tagline on my website has been "because even this is better than television" since I threw my TV away during the second year of college, 5 years ago. I don't miss it.
The people who can, have. Then they turned it into a library and now iPod support is available in
- amaroK
- gPodder
- gtkpod
- iPodDisk
- podtool
- and Rhythmbox
you were saying?Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?
And the best bit is that I (and probably you soon) got moderated down for saying it.
What do you expect Linux devs to do? Magically support every bit of hardware in existance without decent specs and no access to the closed DRM which makes the bit people are most unhappy to leave behind tick? Yes, I am aware that the actual format is open, thank you very much, but the DRM is not and so purchased large music libraries are non-trivial to convert to something that works on any platform.
And yet the iPod does work on Linux (even the new ones). How about that for good service, and all for free I might add.
Linux is *not* user friendly,
Well, it's not friendly to first post trolls perhaps.
In my case I plugged in my MP3 player, it showed up on the desktop, I copied over some MP3s and they worked. Some people might have said this was because I picked an MP3 player that implimented a standard (USB bulk storage) protocol rather than one from a vendor who aims to keep everything locked up tight, but personally I think that it's just trying to make you jealous.
The business plan went like this:
Yes, I did used to do this for a living (and would do it again if someone wants to pay me for it).
In theory there is nothing to stop a world spanning global mesh, except of course for:
- limitations of the speed of light
- the size of the routing table
- lack of trust in intermediate nodes
- node induced latency
- oceans
Let's say that your networking technology has a max range of 100m, and the town is a very densly inhabited 10km square, which is pretty much a best case. Getting accross town requires 100 hops and if each of them adds 10ms latency (a pretty low estimate) thats 1000ms. How do you fancy playing quake with 1000ms of lag?The *best* use for mesh networks is as a complimentary network. Because bandwidth rises in a geometric relationship with the number of nodes (x^n is the limit where x is link bandwidth, but it won't happen due to technology limitations and a bunch of other things) as a very high capacity bulk carrier it probably cant be beaten. Combine it with a smart information distribution system and information redundancy* and you could do some very impressive things.
That way you free up you *real* bandwidth, the latency middle ground of mesh-to-wireless-direct-backhaul, for web browsing as all of the porn and youtube junk is transiting the bulk delivery system. Add on one-hop-to-wired-PoP for latency critical apps such as VoIP and you gain a seamless, layered, high capacity and high performance network.
*I wrote a paper looking at using freenet plus an overlying signing mechanism and co-ordinated seeding as a reliable distribution system in 2003, I'll have to dig it ou and publish it some day.
If you want to set up a mesh network in your own neighbourhood then you can take a look at a free, open source mesh network software package from Mitre corp. I used to use it in a past life to build networks that were adequate for VOIP with some tuning (and a lot of broadcast voodoo), and the ability to route traffic via more than one end node is fantastic. Set up a base station in every home with an 802.11g backhaul (and decent antennas) to provide the basic mesh, terminate in one or two houses with a fast cable/DSL connection and bang, instant multihomed network for everyone worth pi geek points.
Is built the entire plane out of sodium. That way crashing it into the sea (or flying it through a rain cloud) would achieve the desired effect without all of the expense and inconvenience of organised terrorism.
1) Try to instruct a novice user to find and download the free version on their website. Not an easy task but doable.
This certainly used to be a massive problem (the easiest way was in fact to use the link provided by the BBC which went directly too it) but these days their download page (the one you get to by clicking real player on the front page) outlines your options pretty clearly.
2) Try to install it without it inserting stuff into Windows startup - I use Startup Control Panel but not everyone is so lucky.
Not really a problem when installing on Linux, so I can't help you there. Windows users should be used to it by now from WMParasite anyway. Maybe someone who has installed a more recent version than you have can provide some insight.
3) Try to remove the messages/popups etc. from a standard installation - again, not for the novice.
Last time I ran Real Player on Windows that just involved changing the settings in the options tab. Now, i'll not overestimate the technical ability of most users, but unless things have changed it wasn't a lot harder than grasping the principle of how to turn your computer on.
What are you talking about? Helix won't play media from the BBC.
It does with Real's plugin. While that isn't free *yet* I hope it is in the future. In the mean time I welcome a vendor who shows they have good intentions and are working on the details. It's definatly preferable to the many vendors who prefer to try and firebomb the project.
For 20 minutes before Microsoft break the spec.
(You need 4 years of engineering graduate school to acquire this level of cynicism folks.)
I've been very impressed with Real's approach of late (ever since Helix, really, although they did some good things before then). They are showing a very cooperative attitude - enough to overcome any ill will I might have felt towards them - and I hope that they get a warm reception for this contribution that encourages them to embrace the open source/free software community further.
I do wonder though if any of this open source love is being pushed by the BBC? They are after all proabbly one of the biggest single drivers of Real installations and have demonstrated in the past their ability to push Real to change their stance.
I'm thinking particuarly of the fact that the BBC cancelled it's Ogg testing aboiut the same time that the whole Helix thing started - could Real opening up a bit in return for no migration to open source or free software codecs have been the price?
this, a highly opinionated and biased article about evolution being proof of the existance of God. I suppose Slashdot is good for creativity after all :)
I might add that there is a distinct lack of console love as well. I demand equal treatment for bash! Show me the ~$
Before you were born:
After you are dead:
And I have to wonder...that is less than 100.00 what?
Fear not comrade, it's all part of the move to make Slashdot less US centric - this way, rather than just having foreigners confused about how much things cost, everyone gets to be confused about how much things cost.
So can Access! Create a table (rows 1,000 columns 1,000) and map 1 for black 0 for grey and no value for white... it's an ideal way to store your pictures in the database!
Even my old university has now upgraded their labs to FC5, and they are so cheap that they actually asked if there was a discount on a GPL upgrade license.
FFM with the menubar at the top is entireley practical as long as you use sloppy focus mode. Modern WMs also support delay-to-focus - IE moving the mouse quickly to the menubar won't change focus.
But we have borrowed Expose in return.
Maybe once they have taken focus-follows-mouse (sorry, pet axe to grind - but it triples in value with translucent desktop objects) they can also copy the rest of the cutting edge eye candy in Compiz, like the insane yet cool cube thing and the rather more useful copacity.
Lossless/procedural scaling allows detail to go up as resolution rises instead of apparent quality going down. I believe that Vector Icons and Fonts are a target for KDE4.
In any event DRM hardware that stops popular garbage being played without a license isn't really an issue - it'll push people who don't like the situation to make their own. In fact that's kind of the best thing that could happen to indie media, increasing the pool of contributors massivly.
The only kind of bad DRM hardware is the kind that stops users playing, modifying or distributing their _own_ stuff cheaply and easily*. That's the real issue.