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Perhaps "normal" computers will exist as locked-down platforms while only programmers and hobbyists will have what we know as computers today.

That's what I'm afraid of. There are two uses of a computer: viewing works of authorship and creating them. Video game consoles and iPad-style tablets are good for viewing works, not for creating them, and this is primarily due to manufacturer fiat enforced through mandatory verification of digital signatures. If the majority of personal computing moves to locked-down platforms, we risk it becoming cost-prohibitive to make the leap from consuming to creating.

Hopefully computer parts will still be available in the future for the DIY crowd after the demand for the typical desktop PC finally dries up.

Sure, they'll be available. Otherwise, nobody will have the capacity to create works to play on these locked-down devices. But we're heading toward having to pay upwards $3,000, have a Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S number for your own company, and have professional programming work on your resume just to obtain a license in your own name to install a compiler on a computer that you ow^H^H perpetually lease.

netbook in my idea is a sub class of laptop that has enough processing power to consume but not enough to effectively create.

I have a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 with a dual-core Atom CPU, 1 GB of RAM, and Ubuntu 11.04, and I can do plenty of creating on it. Apart from the 10.1" internal monitor (which can be fixed with a VGA cable and an HDTV), this is comparable to a P4 of a few years ago. I've never had a problem running GIMP on a netbook, though it needs a bit of rearrangement of tool palettes to make everything fit on a 1024x600 pixel screen. Nor have I had a problem running Modplug Tracker to compose music. It runs GCC to compile and run 2D video games, and with an external keypad and mouse, it runs Blender to edit 3D models.

What I have a problem with is the existence of devices capable of consuming but not creating. Lately, as the computing power of small devices has increased, manufacturers have begun to enforce this with mandatory verification of digital signatures more than with differences in actual computing power. If a device for consuming costs $300 but a device for creating costs $2,500 and requires a D&B D-U-N-S number, people aren't going to be tempted to just try creating one day.

I know of one solution (repeal the CTEA and significantly narrow the DMCA), but it'll never be implemented because big copyright controls Congressional primary elections.

you can't spell DMCA without tha big fat "D"

The D is for digital. If you mean Democrats, remember that the DMCA made it through both houses of the U.S. Congress by unanimous consent procedures. This means both Republicans and Democrats were for it. I think I know why that is: nobody gets elected without MAFIAA help.

You can get free SSL certs

StartSSL certificates are valid only for individuals, not businesses. For an individual's web site run as a hobby, the price of a domain-validated cert isn't a barrier as much as the price of hosting that includes a dedicated IP address. A lot of clients still lack SNI, which means they can't see more than one unique certificate on port 443 of a given IP address, and that isn't very compatible with shared hosting providers' common practice of putting upwards of a thousand different domains on a single IPv4 address.

from startssl

I thought StartSSL had shut down. When did it resume services? Google startssl resume only gives stories about the initial suspension, not the resumption.

A VPS with a dedicated IP is what, $40/month or less?

Which is still an order of magnitude more than shared hosting. The cheapest HTTPS hosting plans I've found are on this list.

There's a small list of PC games that allow it

Thank you. I added the link in my own recommendations page.

If by "far better prices" you mean zero as the only available choice, then how are people supposed to cover the cost of developing high-quality video games or tax preparation software?

By running their own repo/PPA, or paying someone else to broker that service, and only allowing access to paying customers.

To be perfectly clear: I'm not saying you have to use only your distro's repositories. I'm saying that the Debian/RedHat repo model is a way, way better example of secure software delivery than the Apple App Store.

sit on a couch with my friends

Consensus is that sitting on a couch with friends to play a video game is overrated and that you should be sitting in separate chairs.

and play my PS3

Consensus is that Sony products are overrated, especially since the XCP and Hotz scandals. Groupthink is also that you should be playing PC games instead. FPS and RTS handle better with a mouse, and consensus is that genres outside of FPS and RTS matter little.

cooperatively

You got them there. Consensus is that multiplayer means all other players are your opponents. But even in a cooperative game, there appears not to be enough space on the screen for two players' views in an RTS.

'No, more like the Linux RPM/Deb model that's only been around for... what? a couple of decades? And which offer far better prices, control and access to the market.

If by "far better prices" you mean zero as the only available choice, then how are people supposed to cover the cost of developing high-quality video games or tax preparation software?

Either way, I'm thinking he needs some time in a SDLC class

Free will is an important part of the experiment. Is the SDLC teacher going to encourage God to leave out free will next time?

You have to be accepted by Steam in order to have your game on the service.

From Steamworks FAQ: "For new games we look for unique and interesting gameplay and art, and of course it should be fun!" That doesn't give much detail, especially how much of a budget they're expecting to produce "unique and interesting [...] art". Another technical criterion is that it run on a PC, which has its own limitations such as generally smaller monitors than consoles.

I don't know what the system is on the XBox.

Xbox Live Indie Games, as I understand it, starts with legal residence in select countries plus paying $99 per year to join App Hub in order to run your game on a console. Other App Hub members perform "peer review", or evaluation of your game against a technical requirements checklist. Some of the requirements include 1. being written entirely in C# (or another verifiably type-safe language supported by XNA), not C++; and 2. not having any dialogue written in the made-up language of a fictional culture. (Sorry, Tolkien wannabes.) If your game passes peer review, it gets added to Indie Games for as long as you maintain your App Hub membership. Indie Games are not available in countries with a government-imposed requirement of classification of all video games for objectionable material.

if his link farm wasn't to entertainment media, but rather to expensive software developed in the US

With a few exceptions, expensive software is subject to competition from close substitutes distributed as free software. Entertainment is the best known exception.

Traditionally, it goes soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box. But with powerful media corporations corrupting the electoral process by choosing which issues and which candidates for public office to play up and which to play down on national TV news, should the jury box be moved in front of the ballot box now?

I claim that there are some kinds of software that can never be free under this system of things. These include high-production-value video games and tax preparation software. What would Mr. Stallman say is wrong with this claim?

The nVidia drivers can be free, since Hurd would need them in order to run in the first place. What could be done is have a minimal functionality set of free/open drivers that would enable Hurd to use that GPU in the first place. But if richer functionality is needed, the devotion to 'freedom' will need to be sacrificed a bit.

VMware, otoh, can never be free, since it includes Windows, as well as Windows licenses that are payable to M$. So it's not something anyone can just give away - not even VMware itself. If users are willing to sacrifice the use of Windows VMs, then they could go w/ alternatives like Xen. One would have thought the fanatics @ GNU would have thought of coming up w/ a free virtualization software to bundle w/ the GNU packages - something as functional as GTK or GCC.

Would Tetris be better if you got to choose the blocks

Lockjaw Tetromino Game lets players add the "small pieces" (domino I2, straight tromino I3, and bent tromino L3) to the tetrominoes, or remove the I tetromino from the mix for certain kinds of training, or even remove everything but the squiggly S and Z pieces.

I claim that there are some kinds of software that can never be free under this system of things.

Never say never. The games, for example.
You wrote (and I emphasized):

and the authors of high-quality other components still haven't adopted free culture motives to the same extent as programmers.

There is no warranty that for the future this will still hold true.

I claim that there are some kinds of software that can never be free under this system of things. These include high-production-value video games and tax preparation software. What would Mr. Stallman say is wrong with this claim?

Creation of the universe? A botched experiment of some extra-universal scientists.

If the extra-universal scientist's name happens to be Jehovah, this is not unlike what I believe. An alien who goes by Satan has been botching the experiment for the past few millennia, and it has been revealed how he will handle this: once Satan finishes iterating through every possible botch all the way up to World War V, Jehovah will put Satan on death row for 1000 years to show how it should have been done.

You can easily take God out of the equation or simply replace him with something equally outlandish or even more rational without worsening the likelihood.

I'm sort of seeing what you mean: any religious belief is isomorphic to science fiction.

Okay. What are they then?

http://www.pineight.com/contact/

I would say you don't have children.

I have no children of my own, and watching my aunt's children probably doesn't count.

And in a democracy, the government *is* the people

The United States is not a democracy. In order for a representative legislature to work, elected representatives have to represent all their constituents. But in practice, legislators tend to represent for-profit interests more than not-for-profit interests because for-profit interests help them get elected. For example, legislators represent publishers of non-free copyrighted works more than libraries (or for that matter the rest of the fair use industry) because publishers of non-free copyrighted works own the news media, and without news coverage, a candidate can't get his name out to voters in his district.

Why can't we vote with regulation?

Because of MPAA control over TV news. The major TV news outlets in the United States are all owned by movie studios, and candidates for the U.S. Congress won't take positions against major movie studios during an election campaign for fear of TV news branding such candidates as irrelevant.

random monthly fees (like the bogus "tax-recovery" fee they still charge)

If regulators were to impose unfunded mandates on you, how would you recover the cost of implementing these mandates?

A cross-platform application is ideally split into two layers: a "model", "logic tier", or "back-end" that defines the rules of the game, and a "view", "presentation tier", or "front-end" that displays the state of the game to the player. The front-end generally needs to be ported to each platform, but as long as the platforms have a programming language in common, they can share the same back-end.

The trouble comes when not all platforms even support the same programming language. Windows supports almost every programming language you can think of. Mac OS X and iOS support Objective-C and C++. Android supports Java and C++. One might conclude from just this that a model should be written in C++ and a view in the platform's preferred language. But the App Hub platforms (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live Indie Games) support only C# and other languages that compile to 100% pure CIL, and standard C++ isn't among them. One might try writing the model in C# to target both the App Hub platforms and other platforms, but an individual or 2-man startup might not have the money to buy a copy of MonoTouch and Mono for Android ($400 each or $650 as a bundle), especially when sales are this low.

Other Slashdot users have told me not to worry about targeting the App Hub platforms and other platforms for one product. It would appear that just forgetting about Windows Phone 7 is viable because almost nobody has a Windows Phone 7 device, and a game intended for Xbox Live Indie Games will be so different in fundamental design from a PC- or mobile-centric game (four gamepads vs. one mouse or one touch screen) that not even a complete rewrite view can smoothly abstract over the differences.

All music currently in the hit parades are (at least partially) copied from songs popular years ago.

If so many songs are being copied, why aren't there more plagiarism* lawsuits like the one over "My Sweet Lord"?

* Plagiarism here means infringement with unattribution.

This is one interesting thing about mobile development. Each platform pretty much dictates a programming language of choice. If its a language you don't mind working in, then its not a problem. But that's not always the case.

Finding a language unpleasant to work in isn't the problem as much as the fact that I would prefer to write an application's logic layer once and then write platform-specific presentation layers on top of that. It has worked for me in the past, where I've quickly ported a PC game to Game Boy Advance homebrew by writing a new view for the model. But this fails when platforms lack a common language in which to write the logic layer. (See Multitier; Don't repeat yourself.)

I dont want a tv that would go the length of telling ME what to do

And there are millions of apathetic voters disagree with you. TV tells people what music to like, what beverage to drink, and even whom to vote for. Viewers are not the customers; they are a product to be bought and sold.

It's also exactly the reason why you should choose a layered architecture, and preferably MVC/MVP or MVVM.

I too am a fan of model-view-controller and other layered architectures. But a layered architecture doesn't help if the different platforms don't share a language. Imagine that I need to support one platform that supports only standard C++ and Objective-C and another platform that supports only 100% pure .NET IL. In which language should I write the model? Or should I write the model in an interpreted language and write an interpreter for each platform? I'm hesitant to do so for fear of the hit to speed and battery life.

If you must script, NEVER EVER concatenate SQL. If no ORM is availble, use whatever languages parameterized SQL scheme.

I'm looking for an easy-to-use alternative to concatenation in cases like these. For the example, the right side of SQL operator IN is a 1-column table:

SELECT username, joinDate FROM dxt_users
WHERE username IN ('filbert', 'bluebear', 'chief')

But some DBMS APIs do not support table-valued parameters, only scalar-value parameters. I could parameterize the values in the table on the right side of IN, but only if I have to know in advance how many placeholders to use (for example, username IN (?, ?, ?)), and I almost never do. So without concatenation, how do I build the right side of an SQL IN expression? Or do you recommend CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE with one column, executing a parameterized statement to INSERT values into this table one at a time, and then using this table as the right side of an IN or JOIN?

Ensure your site doesn't have any SQL injection vulnerabilities.

I use parameterized statements where I can, and even in those two cases where parameterized statements are more trouble than they're worth, I do my best to minimize those parts where I have to do manual escaping, and I test those places with "Bobby Tables" style patterns to make sure single quote characters are handled properly. What tools help for finding places that I may have missed?

Encrypt credit card numbers (if you need to store them; preferably you don't).

Ordinarily, I don't. But if I encrypt something in a database, what are best practices to store the decryption keys?

Only allow ports 80/443 from the world

Anything wrong with allowing port 587 in (authenticated SMTP message submission)?

and only admin ports from known IP addresses.

As I understand it, this works only one pays extra from a static IP at the office and doesn't work from home. What am I missing?

Discs are what you use when you can't easily use Netflix. See these advantages of discs that I've collected from previous Slashdot discussions.

You could just make your sprites in the classic size that targets 240p displays, as seen on the ColecoVision through the PS1, and use the existing pixel art resizers such as Scale3x or hq3x to upscale them to 720p. And if you want really big sprites, you can Scale2x, then retouch, then repeat. This algorithm appears to be an alternative approach that does much the same thing.

Not only does Linux have the mother of all "App Stores" forever, no, that mother is also still mentally healthy

Assume for a moment that the user can figure out 1. that the commands are eix and emerge and 2. how to navigate to man eix and man emerge. Now how does your Linux "app store" handle payment for apps that by their nature can't very well be free? Google gentoo emerge payment didn't turn up anything useful.

Windows handles high resolutions perfectly, you just handle windows poorly. You need to increase you monitor's DPI setting.

Go ahead. Set your PC's density to 160 DPI to match your monitor and viewing distance. And watch applications whose developers have never thoroughly tested them at any density other than 96 DPI break.

Xerox can [trademark] a shortening of the term Xerography ("dry printing").

But where did the second X come from? That's a big part of what makes it a coined term.

Apple has been using the term and suffix .app since it bought NeXT.

As have distributors of warez, in the "appz" section. Compare the refrain of "The Warez Song" by Test of Time, released on MP3.com in either 1999 or 2000: "One more game, one more app, one more serial, one more crack, warez are the only thing for me."

So if Windows can bar Lindows

Microsoft settled with Lindows because Lindows had too much of a chance to win the lawsuit and prove "windows" generic or descriptive at most. Small-w windows had been part of operating systems since the X Window System if not Mac OS before it.

Go ask Yahoo if Yahoo is copyrighted.

No, it's trademarked. The term was invented by Jonathan Swift to refer to a fictional human society lacking in effective hygiene, found on the island of the Houyhnhnms in the 1726 satiric novel Travels into Several Remote Nations. Like Apple and Amazon, the Yahoo! mark is arbitrary, which one step below an original coinage. But "app" was used generically for computer programs long before iOS 2, and the dispute here is whether "app store" has acquired a strong enough secondary meaning associated with Apple Inc. A jury will probably have to decide that.

The OP used the word "applications" which is a superset of packages and does not have the root limitation within the context of this conversation.

I am aware of three kinds of applications: packages, bare executables in an archive format, and source archives. Packages tend to require root. Source archives require installing build-essential or your platform's equivalent, which is a package and requires root. Besides, not all kinds of application can be distributed as source code due to lack of proven methods of development cost recovery. (Please correct me if this article is wrong.) As I understand it, this leaves bare executables.

[GNU/Linux distributors] do, however, have various practices in place to put up a barrier between the hostile network and the dumb user, and these things teach the user it's better to go to the trusted repo first

The historical problem here is that GNU/Linux distributors have historically been reluctant to allow non-free software into their repositories. Not all applications can be made free. It'll take a while to see whether Ubuntu can succeed in bucking this trend.

Except when traveling internationally. Your portable DVD player still works with the DVDs that you brought, but your Netflix device is IP banned. See other advantages of discs that I gleaned from a previous Slashdot discussion.

except that your portable dvd player only works with the disks you brought with you and not with the ones you buy there - along with the ones you brought with you not working in the hotel .. damn funny how region codes work.. guess you will have to hop on that bandwagon and buy your movie again while your traveling.

The mere $9 a month I pay (and that's ALL I pay for TV since I cancelled my cable)

Let me guess: You don't live with people who like to watch live news or live sports.

What MPAA has to learn is that consumers like a business model where actually 'owning' DVD's is not a choice that most want.

Unless they have single-digit-year-old kids who "wanna watch Sin-duh-weh-wuh again, Daddy."

I really don't care to own a plastic disc with a movie burned on it when I can fire up my laptop or PC or Playstation or Wii and watch any move I want, anywhere I have an internet connection.

Except when traveling internationally. Your portable DVD player still works with the DVDs that you brought, but your Netflix device is IP banned. See other advantages of discs that I gleaned from a previous Slashdot discussion.

By the time I'm home in the evening, even a slow DSL line could have a true DVD-level copy available for watching without interruption.

But some people demand BD-level picture quality, and that's why a lot of people still swear by DVDs by mail. And among those happy with DVD quality, a lot of them use Wii consoles, which don't have a lot of built-in storage space.

The US system in contrast has historically had two main partites that mostly share the same political ideology, and work very hard to demonstrate their differences on a limited number of areas, with many of their party members holding some views (and voting for those views) in direct contradition to their partie's political planks. To me the latter is a healthy democracy that has had time to come to a gerneral concensus about things.

This general consensus between the GOP and the Dems happens to include the notion that expansion of the scope and enforcement of copyright is desirable. Take a wild guess how the pro-copyright filter bubble came to be.

I'm not sure telling people that they should swap out Internet for the cable box as a TV source is all that wise.

In the US you have Netflix at least.

One can't get news and sports on Netflix. See further thoughts on the issue collected from a previous Slashdot discussion.

it's time to start changing the laws.

How? I don't know about Canada, but the major news organizations in my country are co-owned with movie studios. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News have been seen to use their channels as soapboxes to frame the issues and candidates in a manner favorable to Walt Disney Pictures, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, and Twentieth Century Fox Films respectively. The news organizations hope that by election day, voters will 1. forget about copyright as an issue and 2. forget about any candidate who has expressed views that could harm the movie studios' opportunity for profit if enacted into law.

Chrome does or did support H.264.

Did; no longer does. Any installed versions that did have been automatically updated to a version that no longer does.

Safari will be an issue for a while but to work around it you can include two videos

How much does MPEG-LA charge for a license to use FFmpeg on U.S. soil to encode videos for use in Safari and IE?

Chrome Frame

Which is also a plug-in, and the IT department is more likely to authorize installation of Adobe Flash Player enterprise-wide than installation of Google Chrome Frame enterprise-wide. Please see more arguments that I've collected.

In a democracy everyone gets one vote. In a corporation only a few people with money really matter.

In a representative democracy, only the corporations that choose the candidates matter.

web-based games

By this, did you mean pure single-player JavaScript + Canvas, or something involving round-trips to the server?

news aggregation

With a fixed set of feeds, I assume.

a comment system using anonymous comments

Imagine Slashdot with all comments at score 0. Would you want to stick around?

(creating a useful spam filter is an exceptional exercise in complex programming. Abuses can be banned by IP address.)

And watch the abuser power-cycle his modem for a new IP address.

Anyway, I've summarized comments from you and others in my article. Someone is likely to post a comment on the opposing side, namely that applications like these aren't sticky enough, a few weeks later in the follow-up story.

Saying "ATM machines" is like saying "FTP protocol."

Repeating the noun is good for disambiguating them from Asynchronous Transfer Mode or [expletive] The Police.

The core logic is identical for all versions of the application

ooh yet another opportunity to put in a redundant post plugging my shitty website.

Say you have an application designed for both PCs and Android devices. The core logic is identical for all versions of the application; they just have different front ends. Now say the application wasn't written in the Java programming language to begin with but instead in standard C++. Can one compile standard C++ to Dalvik bytecode? Or would it involve a line-by-line rewrite by hand into the Java programming language? Such a rewrite would likely introduce errors, and it would require all future changes to the application's logic to be made in parallel in both the standard C++ version and the Java programming language version.

I wonder how many of today's creators are only creating because they happened to be in a home with a desktop or laptop because that was previously the only choice for consuming?

I'm working on an essay about stepping up from consuming to creating, and I'd appreciate your comments.

actual laws (hopefully made without corrupting influences)

I laughed out loud. Because MPAA members control TV news, the MPAA gets to choose which issues and which candidates the general public is aware of. For example, they won't do a piece on people running up against the restrictions of DRM, nor will they do a piece on the various export-the-DMCA treaties that the United States has negotiated over the past few years. And any candidate proposing real change to copyright's scope in favor of librarians and the public will suffer the same fate as Ron Paul in his 2008 presidential run: unable to get a word in edgewise at the televised debate.