Given that they haven't yet managed to create a CD that is uncopyable, what makes them think they're going to be able to make one that is copyable for a while and then becomes uncopyable? That's a much harder problem.
Strictly from a technical perspective it isn't possible - from the perspective of a CD/DVD drive, copying is the same as reading. It's just reading data and sending it to... wherever, it doesn't know where, and it really doesn't care. Making a disc "uncopyable" really isn't practically possible - that's been shown time and again with the spectacular failures of various attempts at CD "copy protection".
Well, if you're not big on social interaction (like me) or you just really like games... I can see it. Besides, there are already over 6 billion people on the planet... we don't all need to make more.
Yes, but not the binary codecs for the Real 10 video and audio formats - and without those, the stuff it can play is stuff I can easily play through another player (like xine), so why would I need their player for that?
How's about they do a build for Linux on architectures _other_ than x86? Like, say, PowerPC? I'd like to get rid of the old version of RealPlayer on my PowerBook and upgrade to something newer (if for no other reason than having current Real codecs for use with Xine...), but unfortunately they still seem to be falling into the "Linux == x86" trap. Sigh.
I did mine in Firefox on Linux - on my PowerBook. It worked just fine. Didn't have to boot MacOS, didn't have to use Wine in qemu, didn't have to go to a Windows machine. Pretty good, if you ask me.
The whole point of a journalling FS is that it 'knows' what files are suspect after a major outage and it quarantines them, it's not any better at preventing them from being corrupted.
I hope you've never taken a course on databases. If you did, what you just said there would make your instructor cry. The whole concept of filesystem journalling springs from the concept of databases, with a filesystem being a special case of database concepts. The idea of the journal is to keep a record of changes, and be able to apply them periodically in sets, to keep the database (or in our case, the filesystem) in a consistent state. Every so often, a checkpoint is run, where the changes noted in the journal are applied to the stored data, synced out, and the journal is resumed after the checkpoint is completed. You always know the data was consistent as of the last checkpoint, so you won't end up with the database (filesystem) all hosed up.
It doesn't magically "know" about or "quarantine" "suspect files", it just batches the changes in such a way that things remain consistent. Computers depend on consistency. Hence, consistency is the name of the game.
I encountered JFS problems some time back, way before it went into the mainline kernel. I was using it back when they were still working things out so the Linux version could (a) remount the filesystem read-only and (b) mount a dirty filesystem read-only. There have been a few issues since, but my PowerBook has been very happy with JFS since I switched it over some months ago - and my PowerMac 7500 has been happy as well.
I heartily recommend you give JFS another look - it's come a long way, and when bugs _do_ pop up, the IBM guys working on it will hop to it and figure out the problem, and not tell you "oh yah, that'll be fixed in the next version! that's a few months away, but..."
Seconded. My PowerBook and PowerMac 7500 both use JFS as their root filesystem, and it works great. The few times I've had a crash with my PowerBook, no lost files, and it takes at most a few seconds for journal replay to finish. (I can count them passing on one hand.)
The ones who wrote Internet Explorer when Netscape was already on it's third release?
Err... "wrote"? Did you say "wrote"? Don't you mean stole from Spyglass? That's more how it went down - Microsoft has almost never in its history come up with anything on its own. IE is certainly no exception to that./me sets his karma ablaze...
How so? I mean, obviously all the worms and viruses floating around... but not being a Windows user (I run Linux on all my systems), I'm not really too aware of things like that about Windows, other than to know it does happen, and hear about the aftermath.
And who's going to stop someone from setting up their own IRC server, and setting their own rules about how things are run? I'll save you time and answer the question for you - nobody, that's who.
It's not like there's some imaginary body that has 100% total control of everything that happens everywhere, every second on every IRC channel. Other than on networks like Freenode, where the guy who runs the network is a control freak, it's mostly a loose affiliation of people running IRC servers who decide to network them together, and that's about all there is to say on the subject.
It's like civilization in the "real world" - people generally agree that there are certain good rules to live by. Trying to force everyone to operate by your rules, or else, is just probably going to encourage them to go do what they want on their own, whether you like it or not.
They can't, due to DJB's license terms. It's the same reason Linux distros don't typically include it - binary distribution isn't allowed, plus they can't release sources with any patches. They'd have to install the developer tools, patch the sources, build, and install, every time you install OS X.. and I don't think that'd go over well with the typical OS X audience.
But the real question is, what's going out with the new OS X release? It's been a ritual for Apple to exorcise support for a particular group of hardware from OS X - with 10.2, all support for hardware prior to the G3 went away; with 10.3, it was the death of support for OldWorld systems. So what will it be this time? "G4 and up only" as of 10.4, mayhaps? Hm?
Sounds like they are fixing a compatibility problem to me. I don't see a problem here.
There is no "compatibility problem". They've said the only reason they did this was to prevent the "module XXXX license wasn't GPL, marking tainted" or whatever message, because they claim it confused some people. It would, in fact, still work if it didn't lie about its license, just with the taint message logged for each of the sub-modules that are used as part of the driver.
A newbie would be intimidated by the whole process and try to read the docs as carefully as possible before trying it, so it can't be them...
You're right on the first part - they would be intimidated, surely. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who won't read ANY documentation, no matter how intimidated or confused they are, for whatever reason. I don't claim to understand it, but some people (more and more, it seems) are of this mindset.
Not that I'm agreeing with Linuxant's move here - the kernel saying that the module(s) being loaded is/are tainted is an informational message, and I don't really think it should be suppressed. Maybe there's some way that if a module depends on another module that's already tainted (linking symbols it exports), that the message can be suppressed without lying to the kernel about its license. That would certainly be preferable.
I've heard the "single sign-on/single authentication token/one ring to rule them all/whatever" spiel before. However, this is not an improvement by any means - it just makes it _easier_, not harder, for someone to impersonate you. If you have a single identifying token that electronic devices everywhere can use to know you, how many things does a potential no-goodnik need to become, for all intents and purposes, you? Hm... let me count... that's right, ONE. If someone can steal or copy the identifying token, they are you. And if they choose, they can then make it so you are not.
Not that it's particularly hard now. (One nasty aunt managed to get my mom declared deceased - that took some time to convince banks and such that no, in fact, she was not dead.) But beating the "single sign-on! universal identity!" drum is not the answer - it makes it easier to steal your identity, not to mention if you're privacy-paranoid, it makes it easy for your movements to be tracked by one or more TLOs (three-letter organizations).
I'll agree that the current system of passwords is imperfect at best, but unless you want to carry a dozen authentication tokens, or buy an expensive biometric identity device, or something like that, it's the best of a lot of imperfect options. Also, if users would get over the urge to write passwords down and leave them laying around - there's nothing wrong (IMO) with writing a password down, as long as you keep it on your person _at all times_, just like you would a driver's license, a Social Security card, or anything else that is used as an identity-affirming object. If people would treat passwords like they do (or should) treat any other such object, you'd see less sites forcing password changes, and forcing password complexity checks, and all the other things that users moan and complain about regarding passwords. The problem is not entirely technical - it's also a social one.
I've done it on several of my Debian machines, and it's hardly been arduous. Out of all my personal boxes, only one remains running 2.4.x - and that's because of (a) a buggy USB device driver in 2.6.x, and (b) the em8300 driver that I use. Other than building the kernel, as long as your system is reasonably up to date, all you need to install is the 'module-init-tools' stuff that 2.6.x needs for module loading, and you're ready to go.
They bashed on it, from what I've heard from Solaris admins, for good reason - because it was really, really bad. Its hardware support is very narrow, and it doesn't generally compare well (software available and such) with Solaris on SPARC. Linux has, for quite awhile now, had a serious edge in supported hardware. Even the *BSDs, with their supported-hardware lists being somewhat on the anemic side compared to Linux, handily beat out Solaris/x86. And as others have mentioned, the whole thing with Sun killing it off, then bringing it back, first for money, then for free, isn't going to give potential users huge amounts of confidence in it as a platform.
Reverse DNS is done by the provider, and there isn't really a uniform naming scheme for reverse mappings for customer-provisioned IPs. If it were easier to parse WHOIS records, however, using ARIN (and APNIC, and KRNIC, and the other organizations that allocate IP space across the globe) would be the best way to verify where someone is actually originating from based on their IP address. Unfortunately WHOIS records remain very difficult to machine parse for a variety of reasons - because different registrars use different formats, mostly, and they don't want to make it too easy for spammers to retrieve information out of WHOIS data. Sure makes it hard for those who have legitimate uses for that kind of info.
I'm sure your old Apple II RGB display doesn't have an AGC (automatic gain control) circuit. Modern TVs do have them, which is why VCRs and DVD players connected directly to them don't have a problem.
Why is it that every "copy protection" system exploits some flaw in a technology that, given a chance, would be fixed in a later iteration of the technology, but someone manages to make an artificial restriction to hold the fixes back to keep their stupid copy-protection technology from working? It's really a poor situation, if you ask me. They really need to figure out it's hopeless to try to enact these ridiculous copy-protection schemes. Technology moves on, as well it should - and putting artificial restrictions on it is stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that they haven't yet managed to create a CD that is uncopyable, what makes them think they're going to be able to make one that is copyable for a while and then becomes uncopyable? That's a much harder problem.
Strictly from a technical perspective it isn't possible - from the perspective of a CD/DVD drive, copying is the same as reading. It's just reading data and sending it to... wherever, it doesn't know where, and it really doesn't care. Making a disc "uncopyable" really isn't practically possible - that's been shown time and again with the spectacular failures of various attempts at CD "copy protection".
That, or get a Sears catalog, and order a life.
What is this "life" of which you speak? Is it some new game? With better graphics, maybe?
Well, if you're not big on social interaction (like me) or you just really like games... I can see it. Besides, there are already over 6 billion people on the planet... we don't all need to make more.
file suit for libel (or is slander the printed version and libel the spoken version??)
Slander is spoken. Libel is in print.
Yes, but not the binary codecs for the Real 10 video and audio formats - and without those, the stuff it can play is stuff I can easily play through another player (like xine), so why would I need their player for that?
I thought he pronounced it as "my money machine"... but of course, I could be wrong.
How's about they do a build for Linux on architectures _other_ than x86? Like, say, PowerPC? I'd like to get rid of the old version of RealPlayer on my PowerBook and upgrade to something newer (if for no other reason than having current Real codecs for use with Xine...), but unfortunately they still seem to be falling into the "Linux == x86" trap. Sigh.
I did mine in Firefox on Linux - on my PowerBook. It worked just fine. Didn't have to boot MacOS, didn't have to use Wine in qemu, didn't have to go to a Windows machine. Pretty good, if you ask me.
The whole point of a journalling FS is that it 'knows' what files are suspect after a major outage and it quarantines them, it's not any better at preventing them from being corrupted.
I hope you've never taken a course on databases. If you did, what you just said there would make your instructor cry. The whole concept of filesystem journalling springs from the concept of databases, with a filesystem being a special case of database concepts. The idea of the journal is to keep a record of changes, and be able to apply them periodically in sets, to keep the database (or in our case, the filesystem) in a consistent state. Every so often, a checkpoint is run, where the changes noted in the journal are applied to the stored data, synced out, and the journal is resumed after the checkpoint is completed. You always know the data was consistent as of the last checkpoint, so you won't end up with the database (filesystem) all hosed up.
It doesn't magically "know" about or "quarantine" "suspect files", it just batches the changes in such a way that things remain consistent. Computers depend on consistency. Hence, consistency is the name of the game.
I encountered JFS problems some time back, way before it went into the mainline kernel. I was using it back when they were still working things out so the Linux version could (a) remount the filesystem read-only and (b) mount a dirty filesystem read-only. There have been a few issues since, but my PowerBook has been very happy with JFS since I switched it over some months ago - and my PowerMac 7500 has been happy as well.
I heartily recommend you give JFS another look - it's come a long way, and when bugs _do_ pop up, the IBM guys working on it will hop to it and figure out the problem, and not tell you "oh yah, that'll be fixed in the next version! that's a few months away, but..."
Seconded. My PowerBook and PowerMac 7500 both use JFS as their root filesystem, and it works great. The few times I've had a crash with my PowerBook, no lost files, and it takes at most a few seconds for journal replay to finish. (I can count them passing on one hand.)
The ones who wrote Internet Explorer when Netscape was already on it's third release?
/me sets his karma ablaze...
Err... "wrote"? Did you say "wrote"? Don't you mean stole from Spyglass? That's more how it went down - Microsoft has almost never in its history come up with anything on its own. IE is certainly no exception to that.
A dog with bricks tied to its head, maybe?
How so? I mean, obviously all the worms and viruses floating around... but not being a Windows user (I run Linux on all my systems), I'm not really too aware of things like that about Windows, other than to know it does happen, and hear about the aftermath.
And who's going to stop someone from setting up their own IRC server, and setting their own rules about how things are run? I'll save you time and answer the question for you - nobody, that's who.
It's not like there's some imaginary body that has 100% total control of everything that happens everywhere, every second on every IRC channel. Other than on networks like Freenode, where the guy who runs the network is a control freak, it's mostly a loose affiliation of people running IRC servers who decide to network them together, and that's about all there is to say on the subject.
It's like civilization in the "real world" - people generally agree that there are certain good rules to live by. Trying to force everyone to operate by your rules, or else, is just probably going to encourage them to go do what they want on their own, whether you like it or not.
Include tinyDNS
They can't, due to DJB's license terms. It's the same reason Linux distros don't typically include it - binary distribution isn't allowed, plus they can't release sources with any patches. They'd have to install the developer tools, patch the sources, build, and install, every time you install OS X.. and I don't think that'd go over well with the typical OS X audience.
But the real question is, what's going out with the new OS X release? It's been a ritual for Apple to exorcise support for a particular group of hardware from OS X - with 10.2, all support for hardware prior to the G3 went away; with 10.3, it was the death of support for OldWorld systems. So what will it be this time? "G4 and up only" as of 10.4, mayhaps? Hm?
Sounds like they are fixing a compatibility problem to me. I don't see a problem here.
There is no "compatibility problem". They've said the only reason they did this was to prevent the "module XXXX license wasn't GPL, marking tainted" or whatever message, because they claim it confused some people. It would, in fact, still work if it didn't lie about its license, just with the taint message logged for each of the sub-modules that are used as part of the driver.
A newbie would be intimidated by the whole process and try to read the docs as carefully as possible before trying it, so it can't be them...
You're right on the first part - they would be intimidated, surely. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who won't read ANY documentation, no matter how intimidated or confused they are, for whatever reason. I don't claim to understand it, but some people (more and more, it seems) are of this mindset.
Not that I'm agreeing with Linuxant's move here - the kernel saying that the module(s) being loaded is/are tainted is an informational message, and I don't really think it should be suppressed. Maybe there's some way that if a module depends on another module that's already tainted (linking symbols it exports), that the message can be suppressed without lying to the kernel about its license. That would certainly be preferable.
I've heard the "single sign-on/single authentication token/one ring to rule them all/whatever" spiel before. However, this is not an improvement by any means - it just makes it _easier_, not harder, for someone to impersonate you. If you have a single identifying token that electronic devices everywhere can use to know you, how many things does a potential no-goodnik need to become, for all intents and purposes, you? Hm... let me count... that's right, ONE. If someone can steal or copy the identifying token, they are you. And if they choose, they can then make it so you are not.
Not that it's particularly hard now. (One nasty aunt managed to get my mom declared deceased - that took some time to convince banks and such that no, in fact, she was not dead.) But beating the "single sign-on! universal identity!" drum is not the answer - it makes it easier to steal your identity, not to mention if you're privacy-paranoid, it makes it easy for your movements to be tracked by one or more TLOs (three-letter organizations).
I'll agree that the current system of passwords is imperfect at best, but unless you want to carry a dozen authentication tokens, or buy an expensive biometric identity device, or something like that, it's the best of a lot of imperfect options. Also, if users would get over the urge to write passwords down and leave them laying around - there's nothing wrong (IMO) with writing a password down, as long as you keep it on your person _at all times_, just like you would a driver's license, a Social Security card, or anything else that is used as an identity-affirming object. If people would treat passwords like they do (or should) treat any other such object, you'd see less sites forcing password changes, and forcing password complexity checks, and all the other things that users moan and complain about regarding passwords. The problem is not entirely technical - it's also a social one.
I've done it on several of my Debian machines, and it's hardly been arduous. Out of all my personal boxes, only one remains running 2.4.x - and that's because of (a) a buggy USB device driver in 2.6.x, and (b) the em8300 driver that I use. Other than building the kernel, as long as your system is reasonably up to date, all you need to install is the 'module-init-tools' stuff that 2.6.x needs for module loading, and you're ready to go.
They bashed on it, from what I've heard from Solaris admins, for good reason - because it was really, really bad. Its hardware support is very narrow, and it doesn't generally compare well (software available and such) with Solaris on SPARC. Linux has, for quite awhile now, had a serious edge in supported hardware. Even the *BSDs, with their supported-hardware lists being somewhat on the anemic side compared to Linux, handily beat out Solaris/x86. And as others have mentioned, the whole thing with Sun killing it off, then bringing it back, first for money, then for free, isn't going to give potential users huge amounts of confidence in it as a platform.
They just come used from the factory.
Reverse DNS is done by the provider, and there isn't really a uniform naming scheme for reverse mappings for customer-provisioned IPs. If it were easier to parse WHOIS records, however, using ARIN (and APNIC, and KRNIC, and the other organizations that allocate IP space across the globe) would be the best way to verify where someone is actually originating from based on their IP address. Unfortunately WHOIS records remain very difficult to machine parse for a variety of reasons - because different registrars use different formats, mostly, and they don't want to make it too easy for spammers to retrieve information out of WHOIS data. Sure makes it hard for those who have legitimate uses for that kind of info.
I'm sure your old Apple II RGB display doesn't have an AGC (automatic gain control) circuit. Modern TVs do have them, which is why VCRs and DVD players connected directly to them don't have a problem.
Why is it that every "copy protection" system exploits some flaw in a technology that, given a chance, would be fixed in a later iteration of the technology, but someone manages to make an artificial restriction to hold the fixes back to keep their stupid copy-protection technology from working? It's really a poor situation, if you ask me. They really need to figure out it's hopeless to try to enact these ridiculous copy-protection schemes. Technology moves on, as well it should - and putting artificial restrictions on it is stupid.