Is it better to spend $500 today than $800 today? Yes--*everyone* knows that one.
Not always. If the $500 I spend today lasts for one year, but the $800 I could have spent would have lasted two, it's better to spend the $800.
My Dell is a about 18 months old and I'm considering a replacement; the sum total of upgrades I'd have to buy to keep it going make it attractive to just replace the box. My year-old iMac is going strong, and the late-2000 Cube is still playing all the games I've bought recently.
YMMV of course, but the numbers I've seen for businesses (which jibe with my personal experience) show that Apples stay in service more than twice as long, with fewer service calls. There's more to consider when calculating cost than just the sticker price.
I'd do away with packages & installers altogether in favor of directory-based applications a la RiscOS and MacOS. You can how this could work with the ROX project.
Drag 'n drop installation! Think of the possibilities! Of course if you have OS X anywhere you don't have to imagine it...
That's a bullshit analogy and you know it. Sales of books and music are cash-for-goods transactions of non-material IP, but I don't have the right to copy and distribute them as I see fit. That's why we have copyright. Software is fundamentally no different than books and music. The 'innovation' of recasting software transactions as a license rather than a cash-for-goods is immoral and would be found invalid by any honest court.
That's his point, which you completely missed. Software is effectively a cash-for-goods transaction and not a lease, no matter what the 'license' says. As a cash-for-goods transaction, software should be subject to the doctrine of first sale (look it up).
The attempt to recast software as a lease of rights rather than a cash-for-goods is immoral and (should it ever be tested in a court that isn't bought and paid for) ultimately invalid.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't address games that are intended to have no central authority-- like all the FPS games that give the server hosting software away.
As long as code executes on fundamentally untrusted platforms and as long as code is imperfect, there is no way to prevent cheating or exploiting in a multiplayer game. That's just the way it is; more technology isn't going to change it a whit, especially for
If we approach the problem socially, however, solutions present themselves.
Many games provide unique identifiers for each installation, like Half-Life/CounterStrike. This is usually an anti-piracy measure-- but we could use it to control cheating. Banning by unique ID is part of the solution, but not everything. Consider a solution modeled on USENET killfiles--
I join a game, and the client downloads the UIDs of the other connected players. The client compares this list against my personal list of people I don't like to play against (cheaters-- or maybe just obnoxious twits) and notifies me if any are in the game. I can then make an informed decision about whether to play there or look elsewhere.
Clients could also collaborate; if a player joins who's on my 'shit list,' I could allow the client to notify the other players. Perhaps even an automated voting scheme could be enabled-- a player UID thats on enough people's shit lists could be automatically banned (assuming the server allows it).
Yes, there would be a market for new UIDs, much as there is a market for CD keys. However, if the client makes it easy enough to maintain the shit list, that in and of itself is only a temporary problem. As a side-effect, if an ID gets widespread my client plonks the whole lot of cheaters with one entry.
The emergent behaviour of such a system would force all the cheaters to play each other on cheater-friendly servers. At that point, who cares? 8) I see this as a win-win scenario; cheaters get to cheat, and the rest of us don't get bothered.
Some games are partway there. Tribes2 and some CS admin mods have voting mechanisms that kick/ban players; but this doesn't carry over between servers, whereas the above scheme would.
A third-party tool would help, but to be really effective it needs to be integrated into the game client so that all players are using it.
I was running Jeremy Nixon's cleanfeed on my backbone servers at its most aggressive, and I was vigilant at keeping both it and my customized filters up-to-date.
IIRC, I was catching an estimated 90% of the spam overall. Most of what slipped by was still in alt.binaries.*, but I think it was clean enough to say that most of the traffic I was seeing was, in fact, porn.
The comments about CD ripping and uploading today is of course accurate. But somehow I doubt people's appetite for pron has abated in recent years.
You gripe about the included browser three times, and indirectly whine about Chimera (by complaining about the beachball) one time, but name IE exactly once-- in a sentence condemning Apple for including it at the end of the article-- without suggesting what the alternative could possibly have been.
On other sites I'd call that at least "-1 disingenuous."
Overall, the tone of your article indicates you went into this little test looking for things not to like. You found some, but you had to really look. Congratulations.
Additionally, your article contains misleading statements that call into question your credentials. For instance, under "What's Wrong With the Mac" you cite the G4's purported lack of speed in video editing as a problem that needs correcting, using the existence of the dual-G4 tower systems as proof. However, you weren't using a G4, but a G3. It is misleading to extend your experience with a G3 to the G4 line; they have significant architectural differences. A less careful or less informed reader will take you at your word, which is frankly a crock of shit.
So yes, moron. I stick by my initial description. I certainly wouldn't call it journalism.
The majority of $ these people have is caught up in MS stock. From what I hear, with out the stock options, these people make a lot less than everyone else. So you really do need to treat them like they are in a cult, or they WILL flip out on you.
Not really. The MSC (Microsoft Consulting) dude I work next to makes somewhat more than I do, without considering options (don't ask how I know). I'm paid very, very well for where I live. His benefits are simply outstanding-- free medical/dental coverage is nothing to sneeze at; especially when my own went up over 60% this year.
Options are, however, simply a clever ploy to get employees to pay some of their own salary. Personally, I don't take them unless they're fully unencumbered-- i.e., I can sell them immediately on the options market. Needless to say, I have yet to have an employer do so.
However, the MS community around Seattle is extremely insular. They work, socialize, play and live together, with very little mixing with the rest of the world. The cult analogy is very apt in that regard.
So 5% of the potential viewers might not be able to view your site? So what.
Actually, this number for Apple's market share is most probably incorrect. Apple gets approximately 5% of all computer sales each year; this is true. But to extend that to say that 5% of all computers in use are Apples is misrepresenting the "market share" statistic.
The fact is, Apple systems remain in use up to four times longer than Intel-based systems, on average. While a PC-based business may do a tech refresh every 1.5 to 2 years, an Apple-based business will refresh every 4-5 years. The interval is often longer for home systems.
A more appropriate comparison is that of the installed base; IOW, what percentage of active systems are Apple vs. Intel-- a statistic which, AFAIK, doesn't exist because it's very hard to gather.
...isn't the browser, it's WebCore and JavaScriptCore. The browser is a convenient testbed for both cores that has the happy side-effect of producing a useful app (and thousands of eyes to point out parse and render defects).
Personally, I think Apple as a corporation could care less whether Safari lives or dies. But either way, OS X gains WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which will prove to be indispensible frameworks in the future.
The real problem with PayPal isn't with what it is, but with what it isn't. PayPal is *not* an escrow service. They say it flat out. And I'll be damned if I'll give my money in trust to a party that isn't.
Escrow.com *is* an escrow service. There are others. Yes, it costs more. But you have 1) protection, and 2) legal recourse if you get screwed.
They actually have a duty to their shareholders to do this.
I hate that phrase.
A company incorporated in the US and its officers have no such duty to their shareholders. They have the duty to serve the public good, in return for which the personal assets of the shareholders are exempted from being counted as corporate assets subject to seizure to settle debts.
For example: if someone was standing outside of someone else's house and that first person was selling keys to that house without the owner's permission, then that would be illegal.
You're missing the point, and your example is not appropriate as a result. Your example above is an action, not a tool. Making and selling the keys would be illegal. The grinder to make the keys would not be.
Crime is about actions and intent, not physical objects.
Interestingly, Disney has been increasingly deriving its works from folklore and myth, since this neatly avoids having to pay any kind of license to a creator.
This is a case of the pigeons coming home to roost. Disney has helped to create a culture of artists that is particularly sensitive to the market for licensing derivative works. As it becomes harder for them to license original work with acceptable margins, they turn to...the public domain.
1. If you read the _original_ ruling in this case you will find that the judges said something to the effect of - it's not up to use to determine if 70 years is "too long".
Actually, what the appeal decision said was that there was no exceeding the bounds of Congressional authority in retrospectively extending copyright protections so long as the extension itself was limited. IOW, multiple overlapping finite extensions are just fine.
It's still hogwash, but it's a different kind of soap.
"Self-expiring" email schemes work essentially the same way: a trusted key authority generates and stores encryption keys for any and all email. Reading an email requires authentication to the key authority, which either returns the key or decrypts the email. After a preset time, the key authority purges the encryption key, after which the email encrypted with that key is theoretically unreadable.
These schemes have several practical problems and weaknesses:
1) These are closed email systems. Composing, sending, receiving and reading all protected email *must* take place within the system. Communication outside the system typically involves a web-based email solution-- you don't actually send the email, you send a URL to a server that hosts the email for the recipient, and a one-time authenticator to access it.
2) There is no protection for email that is removed from the system. Screen captures, saving as text, etc. all remove the email from the "expiry" system, rendering it moot.
3) The key authority is a central point of failure. Reading any protected email requires that the key authority be online and available, and that it's keystore be intact. Any interruption in this services makes *all* email hosted by that service unavailable-- and this is (conceivably) all email in your enterprise.
4) If the key store is ever archived-- a typical response to worries about (3), above-- the archived keys can be used to access old mail that has otherwise "expired," or "shredded." There is nothing in the application of the encryption that prevents an archived key from being used past its valid date, should it be recovered from a backup or recovered forensically the key server's storage.
It's more like "We didn't see them coming, so we need more precise guns." As an anti-personnel weapon system, you have nearly unlimited range within line of sight-- and zero collateral damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Not always. If the $500 I spend today lasts for one year, but the $800 I could have spent would have lasted two, it's better to spend the $800.
My Dell is a about 18 months old and I'm considering a replacement; the sum total of upgrades I'd have to buy to keep it going make it attractive to just replace the box. My year-old iMac is going strong, and the late-2000 Cube is still playing all the games I've bought recently.
YMMV of course, but the numbers I've seen for businesses (which jibe with my personal experience) show that Apples stay in service more than twice as long, with fewer service calls. There's more to consider when calculating cost than just the sticker price.
Shareware games is where the real creativity is these days.
I'd do away with packages & installers altogether in favor of directory-based applications a la RiscOS and MacOS. You can how this could work with the ROX project.
Drag 'n drop installation! Think of the possibilities! Of course if you have OS X anywhere you don't have to imagine it...
That's a bullshit analogy and you know it. Sales of books and music are cash-for-goods transactions of non-material IP, but I don't have the right to copy and distribute them as I see fit. That's why we have copyright. Software is fundamentally no different than books and music. The 'innovation' of recasting software transactions as a license rather than a cash-for-goods is immoral and would be found invalid by any honest court.
That's his point, which you completely missed. Software is effectively a cash-for-goods transaction and not a lease, no matter what the 'license' says. As a cash-for-goods transaction, software should be subject to the doctrine of first sale (look it up).
The attempt to recast software as a lease of rights rather than a cash-for-goods is immoral and (should it ever be tested in a court that isn't bought and paid for) ultimately invalid.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't address games that are intended to have no central authority-- like all the FPS games that give the server hosting software away.
--and therefore requires a social solution.
As long as code executes on fundamentally untrusted platforms and as long as code is imperfect, there is no way to prevent cheating or exploiting in a multiplayer game. That's just the way it is; more technology isn't going to change it a whit, especially for
If we approach the problem socially, however, solutions present themselves.
Many games provide unique identifiers for each installation, like Half-Life/CounterStrike. This is usually an anti-piracy measure-- but we could use it to control cheating. Banning by unique ID is part of the solution, but not everything. Consider a solution modeled on USENET killfiles--
I join a game, and the client downloads the UIDs of the other connected players. The client compares this list against my personal list of people I don't like to play against (cheaters-- or maybe just obnoxious twits) and notifies me if any are in the game. I can then make an informed decision about whether to play there or look elsewhere.
Clients could also collaborate; if a player joins who's on my 'shit list,' I could allow the client to notify the other players. Perhaps even an automated voting scheme could be enabled-- a player UID thats on enough people's shit lists could be automatically banned (assuming the server allows it).
Yes, there would be a market for new UIDs, much as there is a market for CD keys. However, if the client makes it easy enough to maintain the shit list, that in and of itself is only a temporary problem. As a side-effect, if an ID gets widespread my client plonks the whole lot of cheaters with one entry.
The emergent behaviour of such a system would force all the cheaters to play each other on cheater-friendly servers. At that point, who cares? 8) I see this as a win-win scenario; cheaters get to cheat, and the rest of us don't get bothered.
Some games are partway there. Tribes2 and some CS admin mods have voting mechanisms that kick/ban players; but this doesn't carry over between servers, whereas the above scheme would.
A third-party tool would help, but to be really effective it needs to be integrated into the game client so that all players are using it.
Unless, of course, you were female.
I was running Jeremy Nixon's cleanfeed on my backbone servers at its most aggressive, and I was vigilant at keeping both it and my customized filters up-to-date.
IIRC, I was catching an estimated 90% of the spam overall. Most of what slipped by was still in alt.binaries.*, but I think it was clean enough to say that most of the traffic I was seeing was, in fact, porn.
The comments about CD ripping and uploading today is of course accurate. But somehow I doubt people's appetite for pron has abated in recent years.
When I was running the USENET servers of a top 100 service about 5 years ago, an average of 95% of the daily traffic by bytes was in alt.binaries.*
Of that traffic, 80% was in alt.binaries.*erotica*.
Total traffic as 12-14GB/day. You figure it out.
You gripe about the included browser three times, and indirectly whine about Chimera (by complaining about the beachball) one time, but name IE exactly once-- in a sentence condemning Apple for including it at the end of the article-- without suggesting what the alternative could possibly have been.
On other sites I'd call that at least "-1 disingenuous."
Overall, the tone of your article indicates you went into this little test looking for things not to like. You found some, but you had to really look. Congratulations.
Additionally, your article contains misleading statements that call into question your credentials. For instance, under "What's Wrong With the Mac" you cite the G4's purported lack of speed in video editing as a problem that needs correcting, using the existence of the dual-G4 tower systems as proof. However, you weren't using a G4, but a G3. It is misleading to extend your experience with a G3 to the G4 line; they have significant architectural differences. A less careful or less informed reader will take you at your word, which is frankly a crock of shit.
So yes, moron. I stick by my initial description. I certainly wouldn't call it journalism.
I'm flabbergasted. What a moron.
The majority of $ these people have is caught up in MS stock. From what I hear, with out the stock options, these people make a lot less than everyone else. So you really do need to treat them like they are in a cult, or they WILL flip out on you.
Not really. The MSC (Microsoft Consulting) dude I work next to makes somewhat more than I do, without considering options (don't ask how I know). I'm paid very, very well for where I live. His benefits are simply outstanding-- free medical/dental coverage is nothing to sneeze at; especially when my own went up over 60% this year.
Options are, however, simply a clever ploy to get employees to pay some of their own salary. Personally, I don't take them unless they're fully unencumbered-- i.e., I can sell them immediately on the options market. Needless to say, I have yet to have an employer do so.
However, the MS community around Seattle is extremely insular. They work, socialize, play and live together, with very little mixing with the rest of the world. The cult analogy is very apt in that regard.
Too bad you're lying.
Actually, this number for Apple's market share is most probably incorrect. Apple gets approximately 5% of all computer sales each year; this is true. But to extend that to say that 5% of all computers in use are Apples is misrepresenting the "market share" statistic.
The fact is, Apple systems remain in use up to four times longer than Intel-based systems, on average. While a PC-based business may do a tech refresh every 1.5 to 2 years, an Apple-based business will refresh every 4-5 years. The interval is often longer for home systems.
A more appropriate comparison is that of the installed base; IOW, what percentage of active systems are Apple vs. Intel-- a statistic which, AFAIK, doesn't exist because it's very hard to gather.
...isn't the browser, it's WebCore and JavaScriptCore. The browser is a convenient testbed for both cores that has the happy side-effect of producing a useful app (and thousands of eyes to point out parse and render defects).
Personally, I think Apple as a corporation could care less whether Safari lives or dies. But either way, OS X gains WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which will prove to be indispensible frameworks in the future.
The real problem with PayPal isn't with what it is, but with what it isn't. PayPal is *not* an escrow service. They say it flat out. And I'll be damned if I'll give my money in trust to a party that isn't.
Escrow.com *is* an escrow service. There are others. Yes, it costs more. But you have 1) protection, and 2) legal recourse if you get screwed.
They actually have a duty to their shareholders to do this.
I hate that phrase.
A company incorporated in the US and its officers have no such duty to their shareholders. They have the duty to serve the public good, in return for which the personal assets of the shareholders are exempted from being counted as corporate assets subject to seizure to settle debts.
That's it.
For example: if someone was standing outside of someone else's house and that first person was selling keys to that house without the owner's permission, then that would be illegal.
You're missing the point, and your example is not appropriate as a result. Your example above is an action, not a tool. Making and selling the keys would be illegal. The grinder to make the keys would not be.
Crime is about actions and intent, not physical objects.
Mac, Win, Linux, Sparc Solaris all have working players [...]
Uh, Real.com has no working player for Mac OS X.
HTH, HAND.
Interestingly, Disney has been increasingly deriving its works from folklore and myth, since this neatly avoids having to pay any kind of license to a creator.
This is a case of the pigeons coming home to roost. Disney has helped to create a culture of artists that is particularly sensitive to the market for licensing derivative works. As it becomes harder for them to license original work with acceptable margins, they turn to...the public domain.
1. If you read the _original_ ruling in this case you will find that the judges said something to the effect of - it's not up to use to determine if 70 years is "too long".
Actually, what the appeal decision said was that there was no exceeding the bounds of Congressional authority in retrospectively extending copyright protections so long as the extension itself was limited. IOW, multiple overlapping finite extensions are just fine.
It's still hogwash, but it's a different kind of soap.
/me chortles.
'man xwd' Enjoy.
Wanna buy a bridge?
"Self-expiring" email schemes work essentially the same way: a trusted key authority generates and stores encryption keys for any and all email. Reading an email requires authentication to the key authority, which either returns the key or decrypts the email. After a preset time, the key authority purges the encryption key, after which the email encrypted with that key is theoretically unreadable.
These schemes have several practical problems and weaknesses:
1) These are closed email systems. Composing, sending, receiving and reading all protected email *must* take place within the system. Communication outside the system typically involves a web-based email solution-- you don't actually send the email, you send a URL to a server that hosts the email for the recipient, and a one-time authenticator to access it.
2) There is no protection for email that is removed from the system. Screen captures, saving as text, etc. all remove the email from the "expiry" system, rendering it moot.
3) The key authority is a central point of failure. Reading any protected email requires that the key authority be online and available, and that it's keystore be intact. Any interruption in this services makes *all* email hosted by that service unavailable-- and this is (conceivably) all email in your enterprise.
4) If the key store is ever archived-- a typical response to worries about (3), above-- the archived keys can be used to access old mail that has otherwise "expired," or "shredded." There is nothing in the application of the encryption that prevents an archived key from being used past its valid date, should it be recovered from a backup or recovered forensically the key server's storage.
Just some thoughts.
It's more like "We didn't see them coming, so we need more precise guns." As an anti-personnel weapon system, you have nearly unlimited range within line of sight-- and zero collateral damage.
And that, I think, is the real key.