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GNU is Not Unix

FSF Award to Brian Paul & Get The Stream 78

Posted by Hemos from the giving-proper-creds dept.
During LWCE last week, LinuxWorld Paris was also going on. RMS [?] was there, and gave this year's award to Brian Paul. Brian is known for his amazing work on the Mesa 3D Graphics library - and deserves lots of credit. They took a *really* big video shoot of it - you can grab the video and a player from our servers at SourceForge.
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FSF Award to Brian Paul & Get The Stream More

FSF Award to Brian Paul & Get The Stream

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  • School Trip (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Our school class just took a trip to the Mesa 3D Graphics Library. It was just breath taking! It took all day for us to get through the whole place. If you're ever in the neigborhood, I highly recommend it.

    I get paid a nickel [sendmoreinfo.com] for every email I read!

  • Ummm . . . 1.08GB of data ~= 1100MB

    1100MB on 56Kbps (~6KB/sec FULL throttle) is 52.4 hours!

    1100MB on Cable/DSL (say ~200KB/sec) is 1.5 hours!

    I know that it's win/mac only (officially . . .), but can we have a DIVX ;) link, plz?

    Anyway, congrats to Paul -- his work on the lib is awesome!
  • What the hell is that thing in the lower left corner of this picture [fsf.org]? "Cousin it" from the Addam's family? Or is it the back of somebody's head, and if so, how in the world did his head get so pointy? I knew that old-school hackers are traditionally hairy, but, damn.


    --

  • Yea, public domain so Microsoft and the like can legitamately rip us all off.

    Give me a break. The GPL protects the rights of free software authors. It's a Good Thing(tm).

  • It just seems to me an interesting intellectual exercise to consider whether the FSF, which is all about open source solidarity and comradeship among developers, is really the organisation to be promoting prizes. Prizes by their nature split and devide, and cause people to compete who should be cooperating on projects. This kind of attitude could decrease quality of work produced.

    Also, it just seems rather antithetical to the ideals of the FSF on the whole. They should be about equality and justice, not divisive avarice and glory.

    An interesting idea to consider, anyway.

    They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  • 1.08GB. Could this be the largest ever file directly linked to from slashdot's front page? Are slashdot trying to slashdot sourceforge? I thought they were your friends.
  • Are the editors of slashdot getting a little antsy trying to slashdot servers?

    I my download dialog box is correct, you just posted a link on the frontpage to a 1,000 Meg file (aka 1G). Ignoring the cost (which if people DO deceide to download this would be considerable), this doesn't seem like a terribly nice thing to do. And anyone willing to download a 1G file just to watch an award being given is really out of their minds.

    Why not post a file 1/10th this size? Consider this a call for someone to shrink this down to something that makes sense.

  • The story of this story. Tim Purdue is on the secret VA Linux corporate phoneline to the Slashdot geek compound:

    TP "Hey there guys, been working on doing some cross promotion."

    Hemos "No way dude, these open source freaks get all high and mighty when they see the hand of money meddling."

    TP "No problem, I was looking over the alogrithem we use to determine which projects are hot and which are not. An important component of the matrix is number of bits downloaded"

    Hemos "I see, let me what I can do."

    Seeing as this is the only explanation other than insanity, you KNOW it must be true.

  • Mesa3D is good stuff (Score:4)

    by __aawwih8715 ( 4861 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @01:14PM (#451119)

    I'm glad to see that SGI has not tried to do anything to stop or hinder the mesa3d project. SGI has allowed him to succeed where others have hindered. Anyone remember 3dfx getting pissed off when creative labs made a glide wrapper for their tnt card?

    As i have heard, SGI has done nothing but help this guy and the project. I'm very glad to see that.
    Chalk another one up for sgi.
  • MESA is a great implementation of OpenGL. I do not wish to take away anything from the creators of this great piece of technology. However, I feel that for most 'joe average' users, it will be percieved as an elitists 3d library, used by physists and geologers and the like, with no real relavence to todays fast-paced 3d games.

    Linux really badly needs DirectX support, otherwise, the games developers will give up on it as a platform.

    I mean, OpenGL and MESA may be technically superior, but if nobody writes any games for them, Linux will be starved of quality software.

    Linux developers need to swallow their pride, and take a trip to microsoft [microsoft.com] where there is a full and comprehensive spec sheet [olsentwins.com]. I believe its 'open source' too.

    All thats getting in the way of a complete directX implementaiton for linux, is the pride of a few developers.

    Not everything microsoft does is bad even I can see that(and I hate them!!!).

  • Yeah, eventually it'll end up like those fistfights we see every year between the Nobel candidates.
  • Would you mind reposting the movie in a compressed streaming format that is not platform-specific? Apart from the fact that a 1 GB uncompressed (or at least badly-compressed; you can fit over 3 hours of DivX in that size, and i doubt this is a 3-hour presentation) stream is rather crappy to begin with, having it being only playable on some non-standard player available only on the Slashcode servers and not ported to anything other than Linux is even worse.
  • Actually, I am quite pleased someone actually has the source to their videos availible for once. Every time I get a trailer, or a cool movie, I usually end up asking the author for a vob/mpeg2 version. 90% of the time they laugh, sometimes the actually give me one. I like downloading those small, horrible looking, headache inducing, small videos as a preveiw(which in this case, wasn't availible), and if the first thing that goes through my head isn't "this sucks", I usually try to get a vob. Thank you for actually posting the full video, although it would have been nice to include a DiVX version as a preview(which I could make easily, its just the servers/my net connection is pretty loaded, so it might take me a while to get the source).
  • Holy hell. How many people actually downloaded this? That's the biggest file I've seen online or elsewhere.
  • Ripping off? I see a conflict of idealogy. If you put it into the public domain, you want people to use it. You have given permission for anyone to use it in any manner they want. How can that be ripping off? Oh, I know - you've got that strange notion that freedom only comes through forcing others to conform to your licensing ideas...
  • AFAICT, it's an MPEG2 video stream. It should play with any DVD player software on Windows or Mac. Linux, OTOH...I'm not sure if this vlc program works or not. I can get audio, but I don't seem to get any video. I'll try a few things, but I suspect this thing will just sit around on my HD for a while.

    --

  • Is it just me? (Score:3)

    by SymLink-Dyn ( 122202 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @03:50PM (#451127)
    Does this smell slightly political? Posting in high quality VOB format (DVD encoding, no?) when a smaller/lower quality compression would clearly be more appropriate makes it look like some foundation is being laid. "Look Your Honor, all these nice open source hippies use DVD video to freely distribute their videos! And on Linux!"

    Mind you, I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it seems kind of silly to try and sneak this in the back door.

    Then again, I could be just crazy.

  • What're you people whining about, that's only 1.5 ISO's. Many Linuces are bigger than that.

    -B

  • You might be interested in reading my rant [half-empty.org] on half-empty.

  • DirectX is an absolute piece of shit from a programmer's standpoint. The API could only be described as "grotty" on the inside (c.f. library versions and context pointers, or the gawdawfulisms that are inherent in win32 to begin with like the code needed to open the simplest window). By comparison OpenGL's api is incredibly well laid-out. The two offer a similar set of features (OpenGL works just was well with 2d or isomorphic setups, linear transformations being what they are), but DX puts you through a lot more pain to get at them. If you were a programmer and you just had to use a DirectX-like API to feel happy, see SDL [libsdl.org], which provides many of the gruntwerk features of DX and is much cleaner (and is cross platform). (NB: SDL doesn't do 3d or drawing primitives itself but there are many, many addon modules to accomplish this stuff; OpenGl rendering contexts are provided, see the SDLization of the NeHe tutorials on the sdl site.)

    WRT speed, well, OpenGL on linux is an interesting question. At best it's second fiddle to mature OpenGl platforms like SGI. But if you have an NVIDIA card or one of the DRI-supported cards you're probably set to play most games. True, many games are coded in DX, but OpenGL is far from dead (Q3 is native opengl, as are all the Q3-engine-using games; UT works very well in opengl mode, etc. (I like FPS games so that's where my examples are coming from.)).

    Anyway, linux already has the beginnings of pretty good DirectX support in the form of the recent developments from the Wine camp. For me the litmus test is "can I play StarCraft on Linux?", and the answer is "yes." :-) (Now if I could just find my fscking StarCraft disk :-/ moving sucks.)


    --
    Fuck Censorship.
  • I thought we consumers were supposed to buy things because they're novel and trendy, not because they're useful. Isn't that why everyone got rid of their radios and now listens to 8kbit AM quality streaming audio? Isn't that why everyone got rid of their TV's and now watches thumbnail video streams?
  • oh man ! I thought that the goatsex man was vomit-inducing enough, but now you show us something worse : HANSON !!! People, please don't click on that link. You'll get nightmares !!! LOL
  • creating nothing more than a system by which they may exploit the rights of genuine coders who wish to make their work truly free

    And they do this how?

    "Today, we've switched Joe Programmer's normal license with the GPL. "
    "Shhh.. Let's see if he notices.. "
    "Joe can't tell the difference!"
    " GPL, now with Flavour Crystals!"
    (apologies to Folgers).

    They wish to spread the evil practice of licensing, and even attempt to say that such licensing will aid in giving software freedom! How ridiculous is that!

    That's like saying that you shouldn't grab your guns and pop off a few enemy soldiers when the Canadians decide to conquer Buffalo, because then "you'll only serve to further the spread of war and violence, which are bad, mmmkay?". Software companies fight the freedom of code and users with onerous licenses, we fight back with licenses.

    There is only one way to truly free content[snip]

    Sure is! Let each programmer freely choose his license, and let him be secure in the fact that someone else isn't going to flame him for it. That's freedom.
  • Yes, but Linux is useful. A video is pretty lame. I'm sure sourceforge is real pleased right now.
  • I'm sure source forge has this file hosted on a SGI fiber storage server with DS5 backbone access.
  • Accually it's currently hosted on the SourceForge projects infastructure. Which is 5 web/ftp servers and a 100Mbit Drop from exodus west.

  • Re:Memo: Corporate X-promotion. (Score:3)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @04:30PM (#451138) Homepage Journal
    Seeing as this is the only explanation other than insanity

    Insanity? Naw, there are plenty!

    1. Hemos didn't check the link.
    2. Hemos checked the link, but cancelled the transfer without noticing the size.
    3. Hemos has his own OC-192, and he never noticed. One paltry gig does tend to fly by, y'know.
    4. Hemos has a grudge against the guy running the server.
    5. Hemos is doing the guy running the server a favor; After all, nothing like a slashdotting to get your hardware budget increased!
    6. Hemos is drunk.
    7. CmdrTaco is drunk, and posting as Hemos.
    8. There's a pool running on how many downloads there will be, and Hemos has his money on "150"
    9. The upstream provider is offering a PlayStation 2 to the first customer to exceed 20,000Gb/s for a sustained period, and Hemos wants one.
  • Um. I hate to say it, but this vlc program appears to be a piece of junk. However, it's the only program that I've tried so far that decodes anything. I tried xine, and it has messages flying by about some demux error. OMS, well, I can't even figure out if I'm getting oms to run, nonetheless play this thing.

    I'm an utter moron when it comes to a lot of this video stuff. I can run ./configure, etc, but there's no way in hell I would be able to debug it.
    --
  • So, you want 1000's of people to simultaneously downlad a 1GB file from slashcode.srouceforge.net eh? No problem. My dsl line will now suck (what appears to be) about 30kBps of your bandwidth for the next oh, 7 hours. I can spare it. Can you?

  • Hmm ... I'm now 300meg into the file with *gasp* Internet Explorer ... Opera crashed on first sight of that thing, and I my Linux box doesn't have a gig free ... Maybe I _should_ finally compile wget for Windoze :-)
  • #define *really* 10^30 Ha ha, btw, I forgot add my rant about consumer DVD software to my previous post. Although the quality of most hardware DVD players is excelent, I really hate most DVD playing software. Complete hardware and studio quality software is ok, but most of that MMX accelerated windows stuff is horrible. MMX has some good uses for approximations and stuff, but should never touch actualy data(IMHO). Most of the windows players I have seen, and some linux players(thankfully most can turn off MMX acc., but they don't look as bad as the windows players in the first place), seem to have "noise", which really annoys me. If I use a good algo to decode, this "noise" goes away. Too bad for me if I have to decode on a dual athalon for full speed ;). Hmm. -- I am listening to 128k streaming music right now, wishing that I could lug around an ADAT and an ups for power in my backpack so it could actually sound good.
  • 1 gig file. Damn. Getting 40 K though.... only 8 hours left.
    This is, in a geeky way, kind of cool. I've never downloaded a 1 gig file before.
    In anycase, I want a server that can handle this shit, and whatever upstream connection that box has. It'd be a hell of a warez server :)
  • What the hell is that thing in the lower left corner of this picture? "Cousin it" from the Addam's family? Or is it the back of somebody's head,

    DING!

    There you go.

    What you are missing, though, is the fashionable black beret being worn, see against the black curtains, and the black shadows.

    It is covering about two thirds of the head of hair you are looking at.

  • anyone seen it? (Score:4)

    by friscolr ( 124774 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @05:30PM (#451146) Homepage
    before we get all crazy about how Ridiculous it is to post a link to a 1+ Gig file in such a manner...

    Has anyone actuallly seen this video???
    Maybe it's Really Good!
    i bet it includes the director's cut, comments from the award givers, alternative endings, and maybe even an interactive first person ceremony at the end!

    i can't wait (the 2 hours it'll take) to see this! i'm as excited with anticipation as when i stood in line 30+ days for Star Wars tickets!

    -f

  • Nice try. Good thing that most JavaScript is filtered before it even hits Windows, and IE does not have anything even remotely scripted turned on :-)

    Next time, give me con/con, will ya ? Or maybe just something _really_ nasty. Like a satellite picture of my home or smth. Be creative. ;)
  • That just about says it all.
    --
  • I'd be very very very supprized if this was css encrypted... the .vob format is just basically an MPEG-2 stream with AC3 audio...
  • DirectX is an absolute piece of shit from a programmer's standpoint.

    If only that mattered.

  • The problem is that DivX is not an open standard. MPEG2 isn't either, but at least there are free, opensource, players. That's all. DivX sucks.

    --
  • If you aren't having video, it's likely you are using a buggy RedHat with gcc 2.96. Try to remove lib/yuvmmx.so before launching vlc.

    --
  • This is an MPEG2 stream. Yes, it's huge. And it's very bad quality. But at least, it is platform independant. DivX isn't OpenSource, and isn't even platform independent (x86 only), while there are MPEG2 players for almost all platforms. As for the player, it runs under Linux, but also all flavours of Unix, as well as BeOS and even Hurd ! Talk about non-standard player. Tsk.


    --
  • DS-5 Frame Rates range around 850 Mbps and are practically only working on fiber. Coax can get up to DS-4 with its 274 Mbps. Serious backbone.
  • having it being only playable on some non-standard player available only on the Slashcode servers and not ported to anything other than Linux is even worse.


    Does anybody else see this as amusing? Normally, it's us Linuxen who are left to complain about "no players for our OS".
  • file(1) only says it's data ;-(
  • It is worth pointing out that Mesa is distributed under a BSD-style license. (was LGPLed) But the FSF still recognizes it and award its author. It is great that despite FSF's preference for the GPL, this preference does not turn into bias in the award selection process and BSDed software authors have the same opportunity as GPLed software authors to earn the award.
  • Of course the problem is that MPEG2 is a rather crappy format, as the low quality of this enourmous 1GB file will show you. An equivalent-quality DivX ;-) encoded file would be more in the range of 500MB.
  • The problem with giving people an award is that you can't award everybody at once. The judges were tied and one person ended up having to be the tie-breaker, which was indeed a difficult choice. But I think everyone concerned took it in the right spirit.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Mesa is under a Free Software license, why would FSF not like it? It is an MIT license (BSD without the advertising restriction). FSF accepts that as a Free Software license. Yes, the GPL is preferred because it keeps software free, but the MIT license is free as well.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • A PS2? thats not very much for 20,000 gbits.... lol. But seeing as how im only getting 45 KBps of sourceforge, i doubt even an oc192 would help much. and my ISP (bellsouth) even uses exodus as well... hmm oh well, source forge must be insanely busy...
  • and in just several hours, VA Linux will have it deposited for my viewing pleasure. Most of the discs I've BOUGHT I can't seem to watch.
  • Thanks! I actually have an updated package (gcc-2.96-69), but I guess that wasn't enough.

    Unfortunately, the video is out of sync, and it crashes with a segfault shortly after Stallman actually starts talking...

    the terminal window shows all sorts of errors like this:

    vpar error: premature end of picture
    vpar error: Invalid motion_vector code
    vpar error: Invalid motion_vector code
    vpar error: Invalid motion_vector code
    vpar error: premature end of picture
    vpar error: DCT coeff (intra) is out of bounds

    --
  • Yes but the difference is that OpenGL is just that... and open standard. If SGI got all upset about it, then they would no longer have an open standard.

    Part of SGI owning the highend GL market for such a long time was that they had a spec that they created and extended and hardware that rocked on it. By keeping it open, others could learn it and program for it, always wishing for that day that they had an SGI box to *really* play with it on.

    Closing the standard would have been worse for SGI then had IBM squashed all the IBM compatables.

  • Well, to be fair, Brian Paul originally did license Mesa under the GPL. He changed his license when given the opportunity to be included in the XFree86 Distribtion (Which is BSD/MIT licensed).

    Which has been great, BTW.

    pan
  • I hope you don't take my hatred of your preppy stuck up ass too personally, but I must say, that you are a genuine pie^H^H^H -oh, wait- you link to goatse.cx in your user href... you must be a very funny troll. my mistake.
  • did I just say that? where are my inhibitions?

    my apologies.
  • Well if it ain't our old friend Dust Puppy!

    --
  • I tried xine, and it has messages flying by about some demux error.

    That's my fault - I'm the Xine documentation guy and I'm still hacking my SGML. The reason for the demux error is you live in the United States, where the legality of non MPAA licensed DVD players is undertain. Therefore, the version of xine you downloaded off sourceforge is not able to work with the content scrambling system used on most DVDs.

    Those of us that live elsewhere in the world can download binary packages and source from non-US countries [cjb.net]
  • > Sure is! Let each programmer freely choose his license, and let him be secure in the fact that someone else isn't going to flame him for it. That's freedom.

    Yeah, but what if you're a multiclass "troll/hacker" and you chose the license as flamebait? Shouldn't freedom allow flaimbaiters to get flamed when they want to?

    --
  • No, the reason for the demux error is that Xine doesn't properly handle corrupted streams yet. The VOB is _not_ encrypted.

    --

  • Mind you, I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it seems kind of silly to try and sneak this in the back door.

    Silly? Hm.. IMHO, it's brilliant (except for the file size issue). Embracing the format is a good step toward the goal of "commoditizing" it.

    If you want to get into the realm of silliness, then do this: CSS-encrypt it and then supply a second (much smaller) file containing the keys. Then whoever owns the video could sue all the DVD player manufacturers under DMCA for the "crime" of being compatable. ;-) Just cut and paste MPAA's arguments, and if you can get the same judge, then you'de get the same decision, right? EFF would have to rush to MPAA's defense!


    ---
  • Actually, it may not be as rediculous as everyone thought, but I can't be sure about it. The player they linked to actually streams the file off the network! Would have been nice for them to tell everyone that before they posted the link, but now that I know... Besides, the file crashes my (Windows98SE) DVD player! If I can ever get the thing to play back, I'll encode it to DivX:-) and post it somewhere...
  • Does this smell slightly political? Posting in high quality VOB format when a smaller/lower quality compression would clearly be more appropriate

    Isn't DVD basically uncompressed?
    all these nice open source hippies use DVD video to freely distribute their videos!

    But the list of free video compression formats is very small - non-existent? - so they probably didn't have much choice (given that RMS ain't gonna use something non-free like MPEG).
  • Well ... Talk about not thinking for a few minutes and then just leaving the darn thing on :)

    Of course I could just have fired up command line ftp or far or ncftp/cygwin or whatever it is that I would have needed, but since the process was already started, why not play Russian Roulette with IE ?

    The file is not really watcheable on Windows, either (or maybe it's the stream ?) -- lots of artifacts (sound and video-wise) here ... I redownloaded it with the linux box, same result. Ah well. 34:31 Minutes in 1.1gig, what do you expect :)

  • You may be right - but the error most definitely also occurs when attempting to play CSS enabled films with non-CSS enabled Xine. Regardless, I'm checking my work with xine-devel...

    I am aware the VOB Slashdot posted isn't encrypted. But we weren't talking about that just then - the poster I'm replying to was talking about how he tried using Xine to play DVDs.

  • Hardly. How would you like to create a new program, say a secure instant messaging program, which you release into the public domain.

    From this point, any company can take it, slap their name on it, make it their proprietary work, and sell it without giving you any credit. They can also deny you the ability to use any changes they make.

    That doesn't sound like freedom to me, it sounds like opening yourself to exploitation.

    The motivation of free software authors is usually the boost they get from people using their software. Take that away and there's no point in writing it.

  • Warning: I'm human. Sometimes stuff I post here is wrong. Use your head. Question authority

    Bwawahaha! I knew Perens was arrogant, but I never foresaw him appointing himself as "authority". What a wanker ;-)

  • Good one. You actually sounded like a vicious license zealot. May I suggest next time, you base the troll on the premise that "FSF? Communist? They're just enforcing Christian sharing morality in an increasingly immoral and cut throat society." Early enough, it should get you a +5 Interesting..

  • You don't need to compile it, you can get Unix Utils for Win32 at http://www.weihenstephan.de/~syring/win32/UnxUtils .html [weihenstephan.de]. wget must be one of the most useful Gnu utilities there is out there!

  • Bwawahaha! I knew Perens was arrogant, but I never foresaw him appointing himself as an "authority". What a wanker ;-)
  • po0OOOo000O0ooOOO00
    mo00Oo)ooo000
    POO
    po00
  • o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o00o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
    oOoOoOOooOOooOOoOOOoOOoOoOooOoo00000OOOoOoOOoOOooo OooOoOOooOOoOOOoOOoOOo

    Poo

    wee

  • DS5? (Score:2)

    by sulli ( 195030 )
    If you want to go above 100 Mbps (as described below) you would almost certainly buy an OC3 (Optical Carrier, 155 Mbps), OC12 (622 Mbps), or above. DSx facilities aren't in common usage due to the much higher capacity of fiber.

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