Also, a capitalist societly like the US will be happy to take your money and defend your freedom. Okay, not that internet stocks are doing wonderfully or anything now, (right, Taco?) but I could see how this might send a chill through the British ISP market, or make people think twice before hosting their site there.
Heck, get one of those K00L country code domains, I *know* they don't care what you do with them... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Re:Hashes are built on encryption operations
on
QNX Crypt Cracked
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the information!
That first part sounds like what the O'Reilly book was saying. And yes, since much of this is still talent or black magic, it's often better to design an algorithm for a given purpose instead of adapting a popular one for a new purpose.
(I was looking through my old code for finding possible "large" prime numbers, (in my case, I think 100 digits is "large":) and *that* looked like black magic, even if it was a "simple", well-known algorithm in number theory... And as a C programmer, I never would have come up with it in a million years, I'd still be modding by all the primes I could find, or worse.:)
That last part sounds interesting... First, I assume you mean they would sign it with their private key, or am I completely misunderstanding you here? The server would know the public keys of the users, and thus be able to verify the signature, right? You might want to use more data than just a timestamp, or otherwise make it harder to decrypt/fake on the way, but basically that sounds good (not obviously flawed:).
It sounds like a good idea to me because it's simple. Basically it uses the signature as defense against tampering with the timestamp as proof of identity, instead of falling back on a more complex and also flawed system, such as using evidence, certificates, trust models, blah blah blah, and *still* having some of the same problems.
It amazes me how many concepts in cryptography are actually vapor, but are talked about just as seriously as the ones used every day. Government key escrow sounds like an intractable problem, but they keep talking about it as if they can legislate it into the future. And there's always that magical algorithm around the corner that could break all block ciphers in polynomial time, at least.:)
I don't know whether to blame the politicians or the mathematicians for this strange theoretical grounding that cryptography has... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right, because there isn't enough information. You have to do dictionary lookups, and whatnot. I haven't tried to prove it, but I'm sure it's been done. That's the point of using secure algorithms. Here's a reference.
Apparently 25 rounds of DES produces something pretty ugly, and no one has found a way to reverse-engineer it. There are probably more formal papers out there, but from the little I know about DES, *I* sure wouldn't want to try it, it's messy.:)
Heh heh. "Assuming a password is only used on one system"... Having "the password" in that case is no different than having "plaintext that gets the same hash value" (also "the password"). But good luck finding one. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Re:Why's hashing better than encryption here?
on
QNX Crypt Cracked
·
· Score: 2
That's right, but there's no good way to find this.
If you have a good hashing algorithm, you'd still have to brute-force search the keyspace to find a password that hashes to that value. And chances are, there aren't many other values that hash to it (hopefully none, use more bits for the hash if needed...)
If you had a *really* bad hashing algorithm, then there would be a lot of collisions, and it would be easy to find another password. But that's why we have peer review and whatnot...
And you can't reverse a hash to steal a password, that's the big advantage.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Don't encrypt passwords, hash them! Make sure there's enough information to identify a correct password, but not enough to reproduce it!
That having been said, I don't know enough to write a secure crypto algorithm without following in someone else's footsteps. (I know the basics of public-key cryptography, I could probably code that) But you know what? I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel here, not unless I proved it mathematically first.:)
...and if that decryption algorithm works, this'll be really embarrassing for them. (because it's *so* computationally simple, it should run in no time at all. I just don't have any random QNX "encrypted" data lying around to try it with...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Getting someone else to change their license isn't that hard if they're the only people who own the code. With a GPL'ed app, though, you'd need to ask all the contributors, which is a mess. I hope it works for you.
If it doesn't, though, there's always freshmeat, and there are lots of audio libraries out there, some of them GPL'ed, LGPL'ed, and whatnot.
There's the Open Source Audio Library Project, which is LGPL'ed, and unfinished but has a plan and some code to hack on... And apparently they use mpg123 for their mp3 routines, which does not suck. Don't believe the hype, if it isn't the fastest decoder, it's one of the fastest, really.
There are some nice looking mp3 libraries in the "free to use but restricted" category. Since I don't know what your requirements are, I figure I'd mention that. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, actually. And that should be "Right". Just because you don't understand what it means, or you think it's obvious doesn't mean it can't be profound, or important.
For a deeper understanding of this, read about The New Jersey approach. That's why Unix is more popular than Lisp machines, nowadays; sometimes "The Right Way To Do It" is too expensive... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
One thing I like about Carmack, besides the sheer programming skill and geekiness, (he's wearing a Dust Puppy shirt!) is the generic quotability.
John explained that there are "two reasons for not doing the right thing - you don't know how to do the right thing, or you choose to do it wrong for a good reason".
See? Microsoft has *no* excuse!
(*please*, Bill, tell me the reason... oh wait, NT is looking more like Unix every day...:)
Hey, let's have an "Ask John Carmack" on Slashdot, so we can find out how to find the cool chicks, like Katherine. I don't need that sort of advice, but some ACs on this thread sound like they need some help.:)
As to the rest of the article: Id is taking a new direction, not to "twitch" games, but back to single person stuff?
Hmm. All those in favor of Carmack making a *pretty* role-playing game, and giving Square a run for their money, say "Aye".
I haven't messed with NFS support, over here we use AFS instead.
Transarc's AFS Clients are decent, and I recently tried using arla instead. (so I could upgrade kernels, and also try out the open source solution...) At first, it was *really* slow, but I traced that back to an ethernet card problem. Now it runs even faster!
I know there's also the Coda project, which sounded really cool, but I guess that isn't so far along? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There are *lots* of open-source benchmarks, and of course we can make new and better ones, and get a test suite together.
For starters, the LBT (Linux Benchmarking Toolkit): Run the BYTEmarks (and the old UNIX ones too, they're funny), Whetstone, XBench... oh, and compile a stock kernel (and don't fiddle with the options, 2.0.0 was recommended then.)
Personally, I'd also suggest bonnie, it's a good benchmark for disk performance, but you'd have to have a range of options here. (testing disk performance and cache, so you'd really want a large number here too, just to be fair. 2*RAM?)
Also, when RedHat boots up, it has those RAID checksumming tests, those are good. They test different implementations of the same algorithm, so they say a lot about the individual chip. (whether it likes MMX, works well with different optimizations, and whatnot) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Maybe you can go into civilization occasionally, to purchase software on CD-ROMs?
I used computers just fine before I ever knew "net access" existed. I could play games, type in programs, and generally do anything I wanted to on my computer.
Also, I didn't know about *computers* when I lived in the mountains as a child, but when I came back to visit, I'm sure the people in the local commune were very glad they could run their laptop off of solar power. (and yes, there are places where people have phones, but aren't on the grid, too) I know they were using the laptop to teach the kids, and probably for other uses, besides. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
We were talking about this in my Science Fiction class. (because my teacher remembers when the *book* was getting hyped and promoted; he's still got some donated "limited edition" posters that were apparently being used as a tax shelter/deduction...)
Dude, I didn't expect John Travolta to be an alien! (the alien race is ST:TNG Klingons with straws up their noses? WTF?!??!)
All I can say is, if the movie looks as slick as the flash intro does, it should be pretty cool. We need more demostyle intros, even written in Flash, yeah! (and it didn't bug me about what platform I was running, which is good, since that isn't supposed to matter that much on the web, and browser id's are unreliable anyhow...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Shut up, dude, no one is doing the boy's homework for him, he merely asked for some pointers.
It's about as bad as me going up to a teacher or a friend who knows about the subject in question, and saying "I don't know where to get started, could you help me find some references?"
The *real* work is actually getting 18 pages out of this. Nanotech is pretty theoretical right now, and although computers are getting smaller and smarter, we don't have tiny robots or wonderful AI, so we can only speculate on what self-organizing nanites would behave like, or if they will ever exist.
Personally, I'd pick a subject with more information, but if he pulls it off, I'm sure it will be a great paper, even with no help from you! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, the modem network play was a really cool feature, I just wish I had done that back then more, instead of playing it solo.
Bit planes? Was that like the later levels on the SNES port? Those looked really cool, and pretty freaky, besides... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, I loved that game. And Masters of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic III, and Little Computer People.:)
I haven't played Dungeon Keeper yet, but I heard it was good, so I'll have to check it out.
Hey guys, was the sequel (or later PC releases) to Populous any good, and would I have a chance in getting them to run on Linux? I know they had ports of the old game on lots of systems too, but most of those were harder to control than the original, and wouldn't map that well back to the PC. (well, ok, maybe the Amiga one would, but I'd end up having to use an Amiga emulator, and I don't know them as well, anyhow.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That patent is ridiculous! How broad is the coverage on a patent like that? It looks like it wouldn't cover your game (your game isn't on a ROM or cartridge, so don't put it on one...) but should be invalid because of prior art. (without the examples that make it clear they're talking about a Dr. Mario-style game, I see nothing really different from, say, Tetris, which would be prior art.)
Of course, I know *why* they do this: they don't want any copycats, like Bulletproof software and their ultra-rare Tengen Tetris. Yep, competition is evil in the software market, at least when you're a big company. Or even if you're patent-happy. You've got to wonder how these people operate. Could I just sit around all day, prototyping ideas and calling my lawyers?
"Hmm, what metaphors can I patent today... How about an interactive, client-server app for easy ordering and delivery of food, on the web, using cookies and Java? 'Look, ma, a resturant menu, online!' For my next patent..." --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wouldn't want to see this technology in use if someone wrote a "virus"...
Who owns the NASA technology, anyhow? I know, we always hear about the benefits of "space-age" technology, but... do they license their patents, or does the gov't reap the benefits? And couldn't that money go towards NASA funding? Please? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, I wasn't confusing the two. I was happy that Aardman Animations was doing something useful, and sad that The Times in Britain looked so ugly. My ranting applies to the latter. I'd rather see people making good movies and giving them away for free than idly talking about it in bad HTML with weird licensing issues. Make more sense now?
Did you read both of my posts in this thread? I suppose not.
I was surprised that my post got moderated up to 5 too, but I don't see what "Offtopic" has to do with this. If the story didn't have to do with web content, please enlighten me as to the topic.
I'm also sickened that Alex, who took the time to reply to my post, got moderated down for being "Offtopic". He was completely *on* topic! Why? Because he was replying to my post. Reserve "Offtopic" for someone who posts on a story and just can't stop talking about how cool fried bananas are in his blender, okay? *That's* Offtopic. (it might also be "Funny" too.:)
However, thank you for replying instead of wasting mod points. I'd much rather get *actual* feedback as opposed to some monkey clicking 'Offtopic' and never telling me why. (don't worry, one of those monkeys took your advice, too)
I agree, my reply *was* hasty. It was a rant. I wasn't expecting a +5 for it! (see how far the moderators have slipped?:)
I care more about having a site at least look nice in most web browsers (at least IE, Netscape and w3m) because let's face it, people don't write pages for specs, and specs don't view pages. However, the Times page couldn't even do that. From a coding, design, *or* user interface point of view, it's just sorry.
Slashdot, however, at least works well. It has a functional design that people like to copy. And the validator people usually point to is somewhat overzealous. (no doctype? ALT tags are required?) I'm also not a big fan of later HTML specs, because I'd be happier without Frames, but they've taken over somewhat. So it isn't perfect, but it's definitely usable, and not openly offensive.
You didn't miss anything, except that I tend to free associate a tad too much. Yes, that's what I meant to say. No, that's not how you're supposed to interpret it. And why can't I say it in the same breath? Slashdot does, they just don't tell you. Besides, my point holds: if the web designers for The Times would make silly movie files instead, I'd be very thankful.;)
Ah, but *if* you have an account, the contract you agreed to by getting that account is in the U.K., and it's meant to be interpreted under their laws (says so at the bottom). I don't know how they expect to *enforce* such a badly-written and ad-hoc agreement, but there you are. Oh, and I linked to their "Terms & Conditions" page, so *if* I had an account, I would have broken the terms already. And if they were written in 1998, the more reason to change them.
Actually, the trademark issue *is* hard to understand, from the contract. I don't believe that's what it says. It might be precisely what they *meant*, but it certainly isn't what it says. That's why legal contracts *need* to be 10 times longer, and written in legalese. The same goes for your other point about changing the rules, it's all pretty vague and threatening, trying to get more mileage out of the law than it actually allows.
Heh heh. Funny story at the end, there. I say, if they can weasel their way in there, they can subject the Chinese populace to their crappy 'media'. We know corporations have no ethics, and I'm amused when they find themselves having to prove it to governments that have no ethics (read: governments). Competition is a good thing when it works, and I'm not sure if that's an instance of this. (it's like going from a one-party system to a two-party system. Either you have one real option, or you have a choice, sorta, but it's a choice between evils..)
I try not to follow politics if I can help it, and I don't watch that much TV just because it's so *BAD*. This is the same issue, really. If all the content on the web dropped out, I wouldn't surf, I'd find something better to do with my time, like code, maybe.:)
Thanks for the reply, Alex, nice post. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wasn't really talking about freedom, but more about personal preferences and good design. A business or a news outlet is going to do whatever they think is in their best interest. I would assume that their clients would enter into this somewhere.
Whenever you can make the world more useful and less annoying, you will find supporters. Originally, the web served this purpose, at least in part, and the web sites that succeeded furthered these goals.
(I'm thinking of places like google or freshmeat, they do something people want, and they do it well. Yahoo and slashdot were once squarely in this category, and I'd add all the IM software in it too, if they could work together...)
However, corporations ignore all that. They try to replace personability with reputation, and courtesy with lawsuits, and goodwill with money. And that can get you far in life, but it doesn't always get you to where you'd want to go.
Oh. And I'm *usually* a dumb bitch? Speak out, my man! Post your opinion. Even this little comment is something. Constructive feedback is a good thing... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an excellent point.
Also, a capitalist societly like the US will be happy to take your money and defend your freedom. Okay, not that internet stocks are doing wonderfully or anything now, (right, Taco?) but I could see how this might send a chill through the British ISP market, or make people think twice before hosting their site there.
Heck, get one of those K00L country code domains, I *know* they don't care what you do with them...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Didn't anyone watch "Real Genius"? Sheesh.... :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for the information!
:) and *that* looked like black magic, even if it was a "simple", well-known algorithm in number theory... And as a C programmer, I never would have come up with it in a million years, I'd still be modding by all the primes I could find, or worse. :)
:).
:)
That first part sounds like what the O'Reilly book was saying. And yes, since much of this is still talent or black magic, it's often better to design an algorithm for a given purpose instead of adapting a popular one for a new purpose.
(I was looking through my old code for finding possible "large" prime numbers, (in my case, I think 100 digits is "large"
That last part sounds interesting... First, I assume you mean they would sign it with their private key, or am I completely misunderstanding you here? The server would know the public keys of the users, and thus be able to verify the signature, right? You might want to use more data than just a timestamp, or otherwise make it harder to decrypt/fake on the way, but basically that sounds good (not obviously flawed
It sounds like a good idea to me because it's simple. Basically it uses the signature as defense against tampering with the timestamp as proof of identity, instead of falling back on a more complex and also flawed system, such as using evidence, certificates, trust models, blah blah blah, and *still* having some of the same problems.
It amazes me how many concepts in cryptography are actually vapor, but are talked about just as seriously as the ones used every day. Government key escrow sounds like an intractable problem, but they keep talking about it as if they can legislate it into the future. And there's always that magical algorithm around the corner that could break all block ciphers in polynomial time, at least.
I don't know whether to blame the politicians or the mathematicians for this strange theoretical grounding that cryptography has...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks, that's good to know. I was tempted to take a look at the algorithm again, it's been a while.
But in this case I don't think you'd have any plaintext... (unless you count the salt?)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
How many (other) people thought "PS/2? A weapons platform? I can't even get the microchannel support working!"
Please, call it something else, or I'll be confused forever!
(even "Sony PS2", as opposed to "IBM PS/2"...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right, because there isn't enough information. You have to do dictionary lookups, and whatnot. I haven't tried to prove it, but I'm sure it's been done. That's the point of using secure algorithms. Here's a reference.
:)
Apparently 25 rounds of DES produces something pretty ugly, and no one has found a way to reverse-engineer it. There are probably more formal papers out there, but from the little I know about DES, *I* sure wouldn't want to try it, it's messy.
Heh heh. "Assuming a password is only used on one system"... Having "the password" in that case is no different than having "plaintext that gets the same hash value" (also "the password"). But good luck finding one.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right, but there's no good way to find this.
:)
If you have a good hashing algorithm, you'd still have to brute-force search the keyspace to find a password that hashes to that value. And chances are, there aren't many other values that hash to it (hopefully none, use more bits for the hash if needed...)
If you had a *really* bad hashing algorithm, then there would be a lot of collisions, and it would be easy to find another password. But that's why we have peer review and whatnot...
And you can't reverse a hash to steal a password, that's the big advantage.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Don't encrypt passwords, hash them! Make sure there's enough information to identify a correct password, but not enough to reproduce it!
:)
That having been said, I don't know enough to write a secure crypto algorithm without following in someone else's footsteps. (I know the basics of public-key cryptography, I could probably code that) But you know what? I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel here, not unless I proved it mathematically first.
...and if that decryption algorithm works, this'll be really embarrassing for them. (because it's *so* computationally simple, it should run in no time at all. I just don't have any random QNX "encrypted" data lying around to try it with...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I thought all they really had patents on was the psychoacoustic model they use, but their lawyers just hate everybody.
:)
Anyone know (or have a good guess?) how legal mp3 encoders that don't pay them the "mp3 encoder tax" are, why, and which patents are being violated?
('cause I sure don't.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Getting someone else to change their license isn't that hard if they're the only people who own the code. With a GPL'ed app, though, you'd need to ask all the contributors, which is a mess. I hope it works for you.
:)
If it doesn't, though, there's always freshmeat, and there are lots of audio libraries out there, some of them GPL'ed, LGPL'ed, and whatnot.
I would love to see someone working on porting Cubic (now OpenCP) to Linux, it already runs under DOS, and "runs" under Win '95 too, and they've been planning on porting it to Unix, but I can't wait that long!
There's the Open Source Audio Library Project, which is LGPL'ed, and unfinished but has a plan and some code to hack on... And apparently they use mpg123 for their mp3 routines, which does not suck. Don't believe the hype, if it isn't the fastest decoder, it's one of the fastest, really.
There are some nice looking mp3 libraries in the "free to use but restricted" category. Since I don't know what your requirements are, I figure I'd mention that.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, actually. And that should be "Right". Just because you don't understand what it means, or you think it's obvious doesn't mean it can't be profound, or important.
For a deeper understanding of this, read about The New Jersey approach. That's why Unix is more popular than Lisp machines, nowadays; sometimes "The Right Way To Do It" is too expensive...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
See? Microsoft has *no* excuse!
(*please*, Bill, tell me the reason... oh wait, NT is looking more like Unix every day...
Hey, let's have an "Ask John Carmack" on Slashdot, so we can find out how to find the cool chicks, like Katherine. I don't need that sort of advice, but some ACs on this thread sound like they need some help.
As to the rest of the article: Id is taking a new direction, not to "twitch" games, but back to single person stuff?
Hmm. All those in favor of Carmack making a *pretty* role-playing game, and giving Square a run for their money, say "Aye".
("Aye!")
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I haven't messed with NFS support, over here we use AFS instead.
Transarc's AFS Clients are decent, and I recently tried using arla instead. (so I could upgrade kernels, and also try out the open source solution...) At first, it was *really* slow, but I traced that back to an ethernet card problem. Now it runs even faster!
I know there's also the Coda project, which sounded really cool, but I guess that isn't so far along?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Anyone remember the Benchmarking HOWTO?
There are *lots* of open-source benchmarks, and of course we can make new and better ones, and get a test suite together.
For starters, the LBT (Linux Benchmarking Toolkit):
Run the BYTEmarks (and the old UNIX ones too, they're funny), Whetstone, XBench... oh, and compile a stock kernel (and don't fiddle with the options, 2.0.0 was recommended then.)
Personally, I'd also suggest bonnie, it's a good benchmark for disk performance, but you'd have to have a range of options here. (testing disk performance and cache, so you'd really want a large number here too, just to be fair. 2*RAM?)
Also, when RedHat boots up, it has those RAID checksumming tests, those are good. They test different implementations of the same algorithm, so they say a lot about the individual chip. (whether it likes MMX, works well with different optimizations, and whatnot)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm, let's see...
Maybe you want to code?
Or write a paper?
Maybe you can go into civilization occasionally, to purchase software on CD-ROMs?
I used computers just fine before I ever knew "net access" existed. I could play games, type in programs, and generally do anything I wanted to on my computer.
Also, I didn't know about *computers* when I lived in the mountains as a child, but when I came back to visit, I'm sure the people in the local commune were very glad they could run their laptop off of solar power. (and yes, there are places where people have phones, but aren't on the grid, too) I know they were using the laptop to teach the kids, and probably for other uses, besides.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
We were talking about this in my Science Fiction class. (because my teacher remembers when the *book* was getting hyped and promoted; he's still got some donated "limited edition" posters that were apparently being used as a tax shelter/deduction...)
Dude, I didn't expect John Travolta to be an alien! (the alien race is ST:TNG Klingons with straws up their noses? WTF?!??!)
All I can say is, if the movie looks as slick as the flash intro does, it should be pretty cool. We need more demostyle intros, even written in Flash, yeah! (and it didn't bug me about what platform I was running, which is good, since that isn't supposed to matter that much on the web, and browser id's are unreliable anyhow...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Shut up, dude, no one is doing the boy's homework for him, he merely asked for some pointers.
It's about as bad as me going up to a teacher or a friend who knows about the subject in question, and saying "I don't know where to get started, could you help me find some references?"
The *real* work is actually getting 18 pages out of this. Nanotech is pretty theoretical right now, and although computers are getting smaller and smarter, we don't have tiny robots or wonderful AI, so we can only speculate on what self-organizing nanites would behave like, or if they will ever exist.
Personally, I'd pick a subject with more information, but if he pulls it off, I'm sure it will be a great paper, even with no help from you!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, the modem network play was a really cool feature, I just wish I had done that back then more, instead of playing it solo.
Bit planes? Was that like the later levels on the SNES port? Those looked really cool, and pretty freaky, besides...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, I loved that game. And Masters of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic III, and Little Computer People. :)
I haven't played Dungeon Keeper yet, but I heard it was good, so I'll have to check it out.
Hey guys, was the sequel (or later PC releases) to Populous any good, and would I have a chance in getting them to run on Linux? I know they had ports of the old game on lots of systems too, but most of those were harder to control than the original, and wouldn't map that well back to the PC. (well, ok, maybe the Amiga one would, but I'd end up having to use an Amiga emulator, and I don't know them as well, anyhow.)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That patent is ridiculous! How broad is the coverage on a patent like that? It looks like it wouldn't cover your game (your game isn't on a ROM or cartridge, so don't put it on one...) but should be invalid because of prior art. (without the examples that make it clear they're talking about a Dr. Mario-style game, I see nothing really different from, say, Tetris, which would be prior art.)
Of course, I know *why* they do this: they don't want any copycats, like Bulletproof software and their ultra-rare Tengen Tetris. Yep, competition is evil in the software market, at least when you're a big company. Or even if you're patent-happy. You've got to wonder how these people operate. Could I just sit around all day, prototyping ideas and calling my lawyers?
"Hmm, what metaphors can I patent today... How about an interactive, client-server app for easy ordering and delivery of food, on the web, using cookies and Java? 'Look, ma, a resturant menu, online!' For my next patent..."
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wouldn't want to see this technology in use if someone wrote a "virus"...
Who owns the NASA technology, anyhow? I know, we always hear about the benefits of "space-age" technology, but... do they license their patents, or does the gov't reap the benefits? And couldn't that money go towards NASA funding? Please?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I hope Microsoft is forced to retool Windows and add some more user-interface and safety features.
Then travesties like this wouldn't happen!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, I wasn't confusing the two. I was happy that Aardman Animations was doing something useful, and sad that The Times in Britain looked so ugly. My ranting applies to the latter. I'd rather see people making good movies and giving them away for free than idly talking about it in bad HTML with weird licensing issues. Make more sense now?
:)
Did you read both of my posts in this thread? I suppose not.
I was surprised that my post got moderated up to 5 too, but I don't see what "Offtopic" has to do with this. If the story didn't have to do with web content, please enlighten me as to the topic.
I'm also sickened that Alex, who took the time to reply to my post, got moderated down for being "Offtopic". He was completely *on* topic! Why? Because he was replying to my post. Reserve "Offtopic" for someone who posts on a story and just can't stop talking about how cool fried bananas are in his blender, okay? *That's* Offtopic. (it might also be "Funny" too.
However, thank you for replying instead of wasting mod points. I'd much rather get *actual* feedback as opposed to some monkey clicking 'Offtopic' and never telling me why. (don't worry, one of those monkeys took your advice, too)
later,
Peter
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree, my reply *was* hasty. It was a rant. I wasn't expecting a +5 for it! (see how far the moderators have slipped? :)
;)
:)
I care more about having a site at least look nice in most web browsers (at least IE, Netscape and w3m) because let's face it, people don't write pages for specs, and specs don't view pages. However, the Times page couldn't even do that. From a coding, design, *or* user interface point of view, it's just sorry.
Slashdot, however, at least works well. It has a functional design that people like to copy. And the validator people usually point to is somewhat overzealous. (no doctype? ALT tags are required?) I'm also not a big fan of later HTML specs, because I'd be happier without Frames, but they've taken over somewhat. So it isn't perfect, but it's definitely usable, and not openly offensive.
You didn't miss anything, except that I tend to free associate a tad too much. Yes, that's what I meant to say. No, that's not how you're supposed to interpret it. And why can't I say it in the same breath? Slashdot does, they just don't tell you. Besides, my point holds: if the web designers for The Times would make silly movie files instead, I'd be very thankful.
Ah, but *if* you have an account, the contract you agreed to by getting that account is in the U.K., and it's meant to be interpreted under their laws (says so at the bottom). I don't know how they expect to *enforce* such a badly-written and ad-hoc agreement, but there you are. Oh, and I linked to their "Terms & Conditions" page, so *if* I had an account, I would have broken the terms already. And if they were written in 1998, the more reason to change them.
Actually, the trademark issue *is* hard to understand, from the contract. I don't believe that's what it says. It might be precisely what they *meant*, but it certainly isn't what it says. That's why legal contracts *need* to be 10 times longer, and written in legalese. The same goes for your other point about changing the rules, it's all pretty vague and threatening, trying to get more mileage out of the law than it actually allows.
Heh heh. Funny story at the end, there. I say, if they can weasel their way in there, they can subject the Chinese populace to their crappy 'media'. We know corporations have no ethics, and I'm amused when they find themselves having to prove it to governments that have no ethics (read: governments). Competition is a good thing when it works, and I'm not sure if that's an instance of this. (it's like going from a one-party system to a two-party system. Either you have one real option, or you have a choice, sorta, but it's a choice between evils..)
I try not to follow politics if I can help it, and I don't watch that much TV just because it's so *BAD*. This is the same issue, really. If all the content on the web dropped out, I wouldn't surf, I'd find something better to do with my time, like code, maybe.
Thanks for the reply, Alex, nice post.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wasn't really talking about freedom, but more about personal preferences and good design. A business or a news outlet is going to do whatever they think is in their best interest. I would assume that their clients would enter into this somewhere.
Whenever you can make the world more useful and less annoying, you will find supporters. Originally, the web served this purpose, at least in part, and the web sites that succeeded furthered these goals.
(I'm thinking of places like google or freshmeat, they do something people want, and they do it well. Yahoo and slashdot were once squarely in this category, and I'd add all the IM software in it too, if they could work together...)
However, corporations ignore all that. They try to replace personability with reputation, and courtesy with lawsuits, and goodwill with money. And that can get you far in life, but it doesn't always get you to where you'd want to go.
Oh. And I'm *usually* a dumb bitch? Speak out, my man! Post your opinion. Even this little comment is something. Constructive feedback is a good thing...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.