...what the hell are they going to do after 26 releases?
I lay awake in bed at night wondering the same thing, cold sweat running down my face as I count down the seconds until the release of Ubuntu 17.10. Then I consider that the world is becoming increasingly unstable and fractured and I realise that there's a good chance the human race will destroy itself in a fiery hellstorm of nuclear war long before then. With this thought comes overwhelming relief and I cry myself to sleep with tears of joy that I will never have to face the terrible reality of knowing what comes after Zesty Zebra.
The difference is that VHS was popular and entrenched in the market before something else came along. With Blu-Ray that doesn't seem very likely. Beating HD-DVD has only caused prices to go up since there's no longer a need to compete, and HDTVs are still a relatively small market of TVs in people's homes and will continue to be so for years to come. Factor in things like people still figuring out how to make good looking HD content and plenty of people who still don't see anything wrong with DVD and VHS and you can begin the see the friction preventing Blu-Ray from making any ground in the next few years. By the time those things are overcome there's a good chance there'll either be a better format, or HD content widely available online, making Blu-Ray obsolete before it ever gets a chance to be the default format that everybody buys their content in.
Although we often think of the average consumer as clueless about longetivity and future-proofing I've seen a lot of evidence that the general public aren't convinced by Blu-Ray. It's only just won the HD Wars and yet already the average guy on the street can smell Blu-Ray's blood in the water.
As far as I'm concerned China has every obligation other countries do. I wasn't trying to diminish China's responsibilities, just making the point that America has them too and has failed to act on them.
You've mentioned the effects of China and Europe on poor innocent America. Now, who's monitoring the effects of the USA's pollution? You know, that one developed country that still hasn't ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
Acknowledging and investigating the global effects of local pollution is a worthy endeavour, just as long as it's done in a balanced and open manner. We don't need yet another of the US's "Do as we say not as we do" hypocritical standpoints.
At least read the summary next time. If you had you'd have noticed it's quite clearly not a patent for the keys themselves, but the practice of scrolling a specific amount regardless of the current view settings (eg. zoom). As such your keyboard is irrelevant, a peice of software that implements those keys in the standard way however is absolutely relevant.
Briefly, the present invention provides a method and system for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as a row height corresponding to a row of one or more pages of a page set, so as to display a next page set from the precise vertical location into the page that the previous page set started, regardless of the current zoom percentage. For example, if the middle of a page set is at the top of the viewing area, after scrolling, the middle of the next page set is at the top of the viewing area. This operation occurs on receiving specific user input, e.g., a Page Up or Page Down key command.
Notice that the use of the Page Down/Up keys is an example of input that would be used in concert with the patent, so it's crystal clear that they're not trying to patent the keys themselves.
Not that what they're patenting is any less ridiculous, but let's at least get straight what ridiculous thing we're talking about.
There's a very big difference between blocking certain sites on a single public wi-fi service and blocking all internet access to a site or service from within an entire country.
And just for the record that site you linked to is complete bullshit. It doesn't even verify that the sites were blocked intentionally, didn't ask them for comment to explain or investigate, and doesn't even provide confirmation of who is responsible for running the St. Pancras International wifi network. It's entirely possible its privately managed and the government doesn't even determine what gets blocked and what doesn't.
But who cares about facts when you've got conspiracy theories and vitriol?
It should really be troll rather than flamebait. As far as "wasting" mod points though: AC or otherwise, modding the crap down is as important as modding the good stuff up. And come on, you get 15 of the fuckers these days, you can spare 1 to put a troll in his place.
Umm.. the question was nothing to do with whether IT security professionals feel good about themselves because of the job they do. He's asking if the mindset required to do the job negatively affects their attitude in other aspects of their life.
No people will have a choice to freely and legitimately download old content, which would be preferable to illegitimate new content
I have very big doubts about that. I think the vast majority of pirates don't care about legality at all. They just want whatever they can get away with for free now. Id is actually a good example here, what with them releasing the source for Quake 1, 2, and 3 several years afterwards. How much do you think piracy has gone down because there are some free games running on the Quake 3 engine? I'm guessing not at all.
It also becomes cheaper to make new games as some of the older engines would be public domain.
Just because the copyright expires on something doesn't immediately make it open source. It would be legal to take whatever has been released (ie. binaries) and do what you wish with them, but the source would still belong to the developers until they decide to release it. With the cost of creating an engine and therefore the value of selling it I don't see source release to be a likely occurrence until it's no longer in contention with newer engines (as with Id's actions I mentioned above).
What about the games starting off in the bargain bin for a tenner, rather than forty or fifty quid? A lower price point might go a long way to persuading pirates to part with their cash.
Perhaps. Unfortunately I doubt any big publishers have the cojones to release a major peice of software at a lower price point to make a useful comparison. Currently the only place they might try it is on something like Steam, but that's useless of course because any piracy-softening effects will immediately be lauded as Steam's anti-piracy measures working and it'll become yet another pro-DRM circlejerk.
Care to elaborate how this would stop piracy? Obviously after that date nobody can pirate those products anymore but the vast majority of piracy (at least the piracy that really bothers software developers and movie makers) occurs in the first 6 months of release.
Are you suggesting that people knowing that the copyright will expire sooner will cause them to wait 5 years until things are available legally for free? I honestly don't think that's true, so unless you've got something to back that up I think we can discount that as a valid argument - especially given that 90% of games are available for a fiver in the bargain bin within 18 months of release.
I'm no fan of DRM, Trusted Computing, or any other anti-piracy measure currently employed by major software publishers, but I don't see how copyright law has any tangible relationship to this subject.
Such as what? What exactly are you proposing hardware manufacturers do about software piracy and peer-to-peer networking? You've said there's lots they can do but provided no examples. Give some.
The easiest is a USB dongle, a lot of the more serious companies just do that.
That's a hardware solution, but it's provided by the software developer/publisher. There's nothing preventing Id or any other software producer using USB dongles right now (beyond it cutting into their bottom line of course). Todd Hollenshead seems to think there's something the hardware manufacturers themselves should be doing to make life easier for software developers.
Q: It's the barrier-for-entry thing isn't it? It's really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?
Todd Hollenshead: There's lots of things that they could do but [...]
The next question should have been: Such as what? What exactly are you proposing hardware manufacturers do about software piracy and peer-to-peer networking? You've said there's lots they can do but provided no examples. Give some.
#1: Firefox 3 is now available. Would you like to upgrade? (Yes/Later/STFU and never bother me again!)
If I take option 3 (STFU), there should never be a #2.
Well the idea is that the first notice is an update notice for Firefox 3 whereas the second one is an end-of-life notice for Firefox 2 which gives the Firefox 3 update as a possible course of action. I could live with that situation, provided of course that if I say no to both Mozilla will trust me to know better than they do about what's best for me.
Yes, because people love to read long pages of text and never just click the first button at the bottom of the dialog.
Who said anything about long pages of text? I gave two sentences and another space for a brief (ie. 1-2 sentence) elaboration on what a lack of security updates will mean for the user. If people literally click the first button at the bottom of every dialog they see then no amount of security updates will save them, those people are walking liabilities and shouldn't be allowed within 50ft of a computer. Even so, Firefox already implements a method to deal with such people in their download-action dialogs - a couple of seconds between the dialog appearing and the buttons becoming enabled prevents this zombie clickthrough phenomenon.
More importantly, plenty of Firefox users don't know they're using Firefox, or don't care, and won't know how to react to such security notices.
The first notice is much simpler: users will recognise that they are 'upgrading' to a new version, almost all will allow it, and people who don't like the awesomebar or something have the option to deny. The second notice is just confusing to novice and casual users.
I find that hard to believe. Unless these people manually installed Firefox on Windows without knowing it? Or are we talking about those vast swathes of Linux users who don't know what Firefox is? AFAIK Ubuntu disables Firefox's update checker in lieu of using the distro update package manager anyway so this is a moot point for 99% of those hypothetical clueless Linux users.
You've kind of contradicted everything else with your final point anyway. The first notice is much simpler and almost all will allow it, so they will never even see the second notice.
OK I've changed my position on this a bit. There should be no more than two notices.
#1: Firefox 3 is now available. Would you like to upgrade? (Yes/Later/Go Away) #2: Firefox 2.x will cease to receive security updates in 1 week. --Brief explanation of risks posed here--. Would you like to update to Firefox 3? (Yes/Later/Go Away)
I guess the change of circumstance in that second situation deserves a second notice. However that should be it. Those two, nothing more.
That's not the point. My computer, my software, my choice. Remember "choice"? Mozilla was all about it at one point in time. It seems with greater market share comes all the negatives we've come to expect from other software vendors.
By all means ask the question. But respect my answer.
But again you're missing the point and clearly haven't read the article or even my post properly. Nobody is suggesting that the victim of every E-mail scam should be imprisoned. Mr. Agbi is explicitly stating that people who fall victims of scams in which they pay money believing that they are aiding in a different crime in hopes of receiving a cut of the profits from it should face prison.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that sentiment but it certainly isn't so ridiculous or outlandish as the/. summary would have you believe.
RTFA. He isn't suggesting people be jailed for stupidity, he's suggesting they be jailed for willingly aiding in a crime (or at least believing they are).
It's articles like this where the summary has completely missed the point that really highlights just how bad slashdotters are when it comes to reading articles. TFA is short and clear about the what the man was really suggesting and yet already some 90% of (non-joke) comments are about how stupidity isn't a crime.
And shame on the slashdot editor who posted this. I can't believe anyone could miss the point of the article so badly, so either he didn't read it or he deliberately went with a misleading summary for the extra "outrage" comments.
I'll post the pertinent bit here to save everyone the terrible inconvenience of clicking the article link:
In one version, the scammer poses as a government worker who has embezzled millions of dollars and is offering victims a percentage if they help retrieve the money by providing a relatively small amount of money for bribes or other charges.
Professor Olu Agbi said "greedy" Australians who tried to partake in these crimes - even though they are scams - should be arrested as well.
"People who send their money are as guilty as those who are asking them to send the money," he said.
Since the summary doesn't make this clear and I'm sure plenty of people won't RTFA, the good professor is referring to jailing those people who fall for scams in which they believe they are aiding embezzlers in order to get rich. It'll never happen of course, but it's not that unreasonable either really.
Somehow being a greedy criminal is OK as long as you're dumb enough to wind up as the victim in the attempt.
My bank uses a PIN in additional to the login. This actually makes sense to me - as PINs are generally easier to remember than my 10 digits random char-lists, but moreover it's at least honest about the purpose of these extra fields - and doesn't dupe people into leaving their pants down when the DB gets hacked one day.
So you think someone is going to hack the login database for a bank and is going to be focusing on the fact that your first pet's name was Mittens?
I'm happy with the 'get it working first - then make it pretty' approach taken by most.
Unfortunately that often turns into either: Get it working first, then get bored and move onto something new. or Get it working first, then start again from the ground up making it better (from the programmer's POV).
Somehow those final layers of polish just never seem to happen on too many open source projects.
Slashdot Mirror
...what the hell are they going to do after 26 releases?
I lay awake in bed at night wondering the same thing, cold sweat running down my face as I count down the seconds until the release of Ubuntu 17.10. Then I consider that the world is becoming increasingly unstable and fractured and I realise that there's a good chance the human race will destroy itself in a fiery hellstorm of nuclear war long before then. With this thought comes overwhelming relief and I cry myself to sleep with tears of joy that I will never have to face the terrible reality of knowing what comes after Zesty Zebra.
How many minutes until Pakistan demands the same treatment?
The difference is that VHS was popular and entrenched in the market before something else came along. With Blu-Ray that doesn't seem very likely. Beating HD-DVD has only caused prices to go up since there's no longer a need to compete, and HDTVs are still a relatively small market of TVs in people's homes and will continue to be so for years to come. Factor in things like people still figuring out how to make good looking HD content and plenty of people who still don't see anything wrong with DVD and VHS and you can begin the see the friction preventing Blu-Ray from making any ground in the next few years. By the time those things are overcome there's a good chance there'll either be a better format, or HD content widely available online, making Blu-Ray obsolete before it ever gets a chance to be the default format that everybody buys their content in.
Although we often think of the average consumer as clueless about longetivity and future-proofing I've seen a lot of evidence that the general public aren't convinced by Blu-Ray. It's only just won the HD Wars and yet already the average guy on the street can smell Blu-Ray's blood in the water.
As far as I'm concerned China has every obligation other countries do. I wasn't trying to diminish China's responsibilities, just making the point that America has them too and has failed to act on them.
You've mentioned the effects of China and Europe on poor innocent America. Now, who's monitoring the effects of the USA's pollution? You know, that one developed country that still hasn't ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
Acknowledging and investigating the global effects of local pollution is a worthy endeavour, just as long as it's done in a balanced and open manner. We don't need yet another of the US's "Do as we say not as we do" hypocritical standpoints.
At least read the summary next time. If you had you'd have noticed it's quite clearly not a patent for the keys themselves, but the practice of scrolling a specific amount regardless of the current view settings (eg. zoom). As such your keyboard is irrelevant, a peice of software that implements those keys in the standard way however is absolutely relevant.
To quote the patent text itself (emphasis added):
Briefly, the present invention provides a method and system for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as a row height corresponding to a row of one or more pages of a page set, so as to display a next page set from the precise vertical location into the page that the previous page set started, regardless of the current zoom percentage. For example, if the middle of a page set is at the top of the viewing area, after scrolling, the middle of the next page set is at the top of the viewing area. This operation occurs on receiving specific user input, e.g., a Page Up or Page Down key command.
Notice that the use of the Page Down/Up keys is an example of input that would be used in concert with the patent, so it's crystal clear that they're not trying to patent the keys themselves.
Not that what they're patenting is any less ridiculous, but let's at least get straight what ridiculous thing we're talking about.
There's a very big difference between blocking certain sites on a single public wi-fi service and blocking all internet access to a site or service from within an entire country.
And just for the record that site you linked to is complete bullshit. It doesn't even verify that the sites were blocked intentionally, didn't ask them for comment to explain or investigate, and doesn't even provide confirmation of who is responsible for running the St. Pancras International wifi network. It's entirely possible its privately managed and the government doesn't even determine what gets blocked and what doesn't.
But who cares about facts when you've got conspiracy theories and vitriol?
It should really be troll rather than flamebait. As far as "wasting" mod points though: AC or otherwise, modding the crap down is as important as modding the good stuff up. And come on, you get 15 of the fuckers these days, you can spare 1 to put a troll in his place.
Umm.. the question was nothing to do with whether IT security professionals feel good about themselves because of the job they do. He's asking if the mindset required to do the job negatively affects their attitude in other aspects of their life.
No people will have a choice to freely and legitimately download old content, which would be preferable to illegitimate new content
I have very big doubts about that. I think the vast majority of pirates don't care about legality at all. They just want whatever they can get away with for free now. Id is actually a good example here, what with them releasing the source for Quake 1, 2, and 3 several years afterwards. How much do you think piracy has gone down because there are some free games running on the Quake 3 engine? I'm guessing not at all.
It also becomes cheaper to make new games as some of the older engines would be public domain.
Just because the copyright expires on something doesn't immediately make it open source. It would be legal to take whatever has been released (ie. binaries) and do what you wish with them, but the source would still belong to the developers until they decide to release it. With the cost of creating an engine and therefore the value of selling it I don't see source release to be a likely occurrence until it's no longer in contention with newer engines (as with Id's actions I mentioned above).
What about the games starting off in the bargain bin for a tenner, rather than forty or fifty quid? A lower price point might go a long way to persuading pirates to part with their cash.
Perhaps. Unfortunately I doubt any big publishers have the cojones to release a major peice of software at a lower price point to make a useful comparison. Currently the only place they might try it is on something like Steam, but that's useless of course because any piracy-softening effects will immediately be lauded as Steam's anti-piracy measures working and it'll become yet another pro-DRM circlejerk.
Care to elaborate how this would stop piracy? Obviously after that date nobody can pirate those products anymore but the vast majority of piracy (at least the piracy that really bothers software developers and movie makers) occurs in the first 6 months of release.
Are you suggesting that people knowing that the copyright will expire sooner will cause them to wait 5 years until things are available legally for free? I honestly don't think that's true, so unless you've got something to back that up I think we can discount that as a valid argument - especially given that 90% of games are available for a fiver in the bargain bin within 18 months of release.
I'm no fan of DRM, Trusted Computing, or any other anti-piracy measure currently employed by major software publishers, but I don't see how copyright law has any tangible relationship to this subject.
Such as what? What exactly are you proposing hardware manufacturers do about software piracy and peer-to-peer networking? You've said there's lots they can do but provided no examples. Give some.
The easiest is a USB dongle, a lot of the more serious companies just do that.
That's a hardware solution, but it's provided by the software developer/publisher. There's nothing preventing Id or any other software producer using USB dongles right now (beyond it cutting into their bottom line of course). Todd Hollenshead seems to think there's something the hardware manufacturers themselves should be doing to make life easier for software developers.
Q: It's the barrier-for-entry thing isn't it? It's really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?
Todd Hollenshead: There's lots of things that they could do but [...]
The next question should have been:
Such as what? What exactly are you proposing hardware manufacturers do about software piracy and peer-to-peer networking? You've said there's lots they can do but provided no examples. Give some.
#1: Firefox 3 is now available. Would you like to upgrade? (Yes/Later/STFU and never bother me again!)
If I take option 3 (STFU), there should never be a #2.
Well the idea is that the first notice is an update notice for Firefox 3 whereas the second one is an end-of-life notice for Firefox 2 which gives the Firefox 3 update as a possible course of action. I could live with that situation, provided of course that if I say no to both Mozilla will trust me to know better than they do about what's best for me.
Yes, because people love to read long pages of text and never just click the first button at the bottom of the dialog.
Who said anything about long pages of text? I gave two sentences and another space for a brief (ie. 1-2 sentence) elaboration on what a lack of security updates will mean for the user. If people literally click the first button at the bottom of every dialog they see then no amount of security updates will save them, those people are walking liabilities and shouldn't be allowed within 50ft of a computer. Even so, Firefox already implements a method to deal with such people in their download-action dialogs - a couple of seconds between the dialog appearing and the buttons becoming enabled prevents this zombie clickthrough phenomenon.
More importantly, plenty of Firefox users don't know they're using Firefox, or don't care, and won't know how to react to such security notices.
The first notice is much simpler: users will recognise that they are 'upgrading' to a new version, almost all will allow it, and people who don't like the awesomebar or something have the option to deny. The second notice is just confusing to novice and casual users.
I find that hard to believe. Unless these people manually installed Firefox on Windows without knowing it? Or are we talking about those vast swathes of Linux users who don't know what Firefox is? AFAIK Ubuntu disables Firefox's update checker in lieu of using the distro update package manager anyway so this is a moot point for 99% of those hypothetical clueless Linux users.
You've kind of contradicted everything else with your final point anyway. The first notice is much simpler and almost all will allow it, so they will never even see the second notice.
OK I've changed my position on this a bit. There should be no more than two notices.
#1: Firefox 3 is now available. Would you like to upgrade? (Yes/Later/Go Away)
#2: Firefox 2.x will cease to receive security updates in 1 week. --Brief explanation of risks posed here--. Would you like to update to Firefox 3? (Yes/Later/Go Away)
I guess the change of circumstance in that second situation deserves a second notice. However that should be it. Those two, nothing more.
That's not the point. My computer, my software, my choice. Remember "choice"? Mozilla was all about it at one point in time. It seems with greater market share comes all the negatives we've come to expect from other software vendors.
By all means ask the question. But respect my answer.
But again you're missing the point and clearly haven't read the article or even my post properly. Nobody is suggesting that the victim of every E-mail scam should be imprisoned. Mr. Agbi is explicitly stating that people who fall victims of scams in which they pay money believing that they are aiding in a different crime in hopes of receiving a cut of the profits from it should face prison.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that sentiment but it certainly isn't so ridiculous or outlandish as the /. summary would have you believe.
RTFA. He isn't suggesting people be jailed for stupidity, he's suggesting they be jailed for willingly aiding in a crime (or at least believing they are).
It's articles like this where the summary has completely missed the point that really highlights just how bad slashdotters are when it comes to reading articles. TFA is short and clear about the what the man was really suggesting and yet already some 90% of (non-joke) comments are about how stupidity isn't a crime.
And shame on the slashdot editor who posted this. I can't believe anyone could miss the point of the article so badly, so either he didn't read it or he deliberately went with a misleading summary for the extra "outrage" comments.
I'll post the pertinent bit here to save everyone the terrible inconvenience of clicking the article link:
In one version, the scammer poses as a government worker who has embezzled millions of dollars and is offering victims a percentage if they help retrieve the money by providing a relatively small amount of money for bribes or other charges.
Professor Olu Agbi said "greedy" Australians who tried to partake in these crimes - even though they are scams - should be arrested as well.
"People who send their money are as guilty as those who are asking them to send the money," he said.
Not so outrageous now is it?
Since the summary doesn't make this clear and I'm sure plenty of people won't RTFA, the good professor is referring to jailing those people who fall for scams in which they believe they are aiding embezzlers in order to get rich. It'll never happen of course, but it's not that unreasonable either really.
Somehow being a greedy criminal is OK as long as you're dumb enough to wind up as the victim in the attempt.
I can see how that would be a problem, but your first post doesn't read anything like that.
It's pretty hard for a virus to read what's beneath the desk. Not impossible if the virus can control your employer's security cameras, but difficult.
If they're under your desk I don't think those are security cameras.
My bank uses a PIN in additional to the login. This actually makes sense to me - as PINs are generally easier to remember than my 10 digits random char-lists, but moreover it's at least honest about the purpose of these extra fields - and doesn't dupe people into leaving their pants down when the DB gets hacked one day.
So you think someone is going to hack the login database for a bank and is going to be focusing on the fact that your first pet's name was Mittens?
I'm happy with the 'get it working first - then make it pretty' approach taken by most.
Unfortunately that often turns into either:
Get it working first, then get bored and move onto something new.
or
Get it working first, then start again from the ground up making it better (from the programmer's POV).
Somehow those final layers of polish just never seem to happen on too many open source projects.