What benefits? Best I can tell, trusted computing provides me, a consumer, no benefits over what exist today
How about better online games? Consider MMORPGs. To prevent cheating, they have to do various things server-side that would actually make more sense from a resource allocation point of view to do on the client.
For example, DAoC has to handle stealth on the server, calculating who should be able to see a stealthed character, and only sending that character's positions to clients that should see him, so that people with DAoC's equivalent of ShowEQ won't see them. However, those people can still see people who are hiding behind trees or hills or buildings--it would be too much work for the server to do the visibility calculations for everyone.
With a trusted client, they could just send the data on everyone in the area, and trust the client to not show what the player is not supposed to see.
Or how about monster AI? The monsters could be a lot smarter if they could run the AI on the client, instead of on the server.
Re:I'd accept DRM.
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Guess what? Giving a CD of good songs to your father is not one of your rights under copyright.
In the United States, it effectively is. That is, although it would violate section 106 of the Copyright Act, section 1008 says that the copyright owners can't sue him for it.
If something is against the law, but the law specifically says that there can be no punishment for it, is it really against the law?
It will be interesting to see just how much the AG wants those logs. It is very hard to really delete things. See this paper to find out just how hard it it.
It is an enormous, ugly piece of shit compared to the iPod
It's possible to be too small. Perhaps, being a man, I don't appreciate what it is like for people with delicate little girly hands, but I find Archos jukeboxes fit perfectly in my hand. Anything smaller would be a little awkward.
I also find the iPod to be rather ugly. It looks like it was designed by someone who designs overprices cigarette lighters.
I do have one question, however; how is it that Internet Explorer is able to rewrite TCP rules?
Simple: it doesn't. The blog the story referes to is almost certainly wrong. How many thousands of people have packet sniffed IE over the years? You'd think someone would have noticed this before if it were real.
You'd run into copyright infringement issues - the signed code would be property of the copyright owner, and redistributing it would almost definitely be illegal
I don't think so. First of all, I don't think a checksum (that's what is signed) meets the requirements for copyrightability. Second, even if it does, fair use allows copying when it is necessary for compatibility. Check out Sega vs. Activision (I think it was Activision...).
No, if XBox 2 games were signed with a different key, it would simply mean that XBox 2 would have to know both the new public key and the old public key if it was to play XBox 1 games.
Ok this may be a stupid question, but doesn't this violate that DMCA thingy that everyone is all concerned about? Just a thought
Well, as far as I recall, the DMCA doesn't say anything about trying to circumvent anything, only about actually circumventing things, so the question of whether this is a DMCA violation is purely academic, since they aren't going to come anywhere near cracking it.
So we're supposed to pump out open source libraries so that giant companies like Micro$oft can write proprietary applications around them and profit from our labor?
I always get a good laugh when someone worries that companies might profit from open source labor. Do these people ever bother to read the licenses, and the supporting documents?
If you don't want companies profiting from your labor, then do not use an open source license. It is that simple. Almost every open source license allows, by design, people to profit from open source who are not the authors of the program. E.g., by selling support. If you write a program and GPL it, and I make a good living selling support for it, that is profiting from your labor just as much as it would be if I were to use your program in a proprietary program.
Re:These types of stories need MORE publicity
on
Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
This is the kind of stuff that threatens to GUT one of the most important benefits of the internet. The ability to ridicule a company or government for things it has done to cause real harm to others is quite possibly one of the most important types of freedom of expression
That ability is not threatened at all by this. What is threatened is the ability to try to deceive people so as to mislead them about a company or government.
These sites were not parody sites. They were trying to confuse people into thinking they were Dow's site, and are using the claim of parody to try to hide their attempted identity theft.
Another interesting question about memory is what is your oldest memory that you can connect to the present by a nearly continuous chain of memory?
E.g., I can remember a fair amount of what I did today. I can remember a fair amount for yesterday. However, if I try to go back day by day...I can only get back a week or so, and then I'm out of the realm of actual memory, and more into the realm of deducing....that is, I don't recall doing anything unusual two weeks ago, so I deduce I must have done my normal stuff.
So, I've only got, it seems, a week or two of memory going back. Or, at least, I've only got a week or two organized so that it can be placed in sequence.
The author implies that new users have to buy a bunch of separate expansions to be current, at huge expense. This is not correct. There's a box available that contains the original game plus all expansion, for about $60. Every time a new expansion has come out, they've updated this uberedition to include it.
The author also greatly overstates the problem of expansions not being finished at release. Sure, the very high end zones of new expansions have sometimes been unfinished, but only a very small number of guilds are powerful enough to reach those before they are finished.
Sure, EQ has plenty of problems, but mostly the author is just whining pointlessly. Take the switch to a GM pool instead of per-server GMs. For everyone I've heard complain, I've heard someone else praise it as decreasing response time (ever need a GM when your server GM was off duty under the old system?)
Most likely you've heard from friends how great this "addictive" game is, how in-depth it can become, and how much fun you'll have playing it. As usual, however, you aren't getting the straight deal.
So, not only is the author saying my friends are lying to me about EQ...he says this is the usual situation with my friends? That's rather presumptuous of the author!
Real Player is a big mofo too, and nobody wants to wait to download it. Does Microsoft have to include this? How about QuickTime?
Microsoft has not been shipping an old version of Real Player of Quicktime. They have been shipping an old version of Java.
I see your point, that Microsoft is stunting Java's growth, but that's life. I don't think my tax dollars should be spent ensuring that Microsoft plays fair
It sounds like your beef is with antitrust law in general, rather than this particular application of it.
I think what he's getting at is that it shouldn't be Microsoft's responsibility to make sure Java is there
The thing is, Microsoft has been shipping Java, but an old version. Combined with their monopoly, that effectively makes that version of Java the version that programmers must code to.
I'be been playing around with 1.4 on Windows and Linux, and for a lot of things, it is quite nice, actually. The JIT has dealt with the performance problems of the past. However, I can't actually use 1.4 for anything we put on the web, because of all those Microsoft JVM's out there.
And before anyone says to just have my users download 1.4 from Sun, that's 9 meg. 9 meg is too big for modem users. There is a strong negative correlation between download size and download completions, and 9 meg is way into the high failure territory.
Re:No danger = no sale! (I want the REAL thing!)
on
Robocoaster
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· Score: 2
How can you be a "risk taker" if there is no risk?
Well, you certainly avoided taking the risk of actually finding out anything about the Robocoaster.:-) Go watch the video. That thing is way more risky than any modern rollercoaster.
With music, there is at least somewhat of a creditable argument that there is legitimate use being stopped by RIAA (independent bands distributing via P2P, copies for use in your car or with your portable player). (I say "somewhat of a creditable argument" because it only takes a few minutes on Gnutella watching the searches to see that the legitimate use is close to zero)
With movies, pretty much all of the activity MPAA is trying to stop is illegitimate.
Taking about going after the "low hanging fruit" is probably not the best choice of words for an article about porn sites. It took me a minute to realize what they really mean.
Also, looking at the alt.binary groups briefly, it seems like some of them may have legit (non-copyrighted) material. For example, it kind of looks like the alt.binaries.3d groups are where people post their own creations for others to critique. Likewise with the demoscene groups. The band Phish has a binary group
None of those things belong on Usenet. Usenet is a very wasteful way to distribute that kind of stuff, both in terms of bandwidth and storage space. All those things you mention belong on HTTP or FTP servers. Usenet would be a great way to distribute announcements of new things that are available on the HTTP or FTP servers, though.
One of the reasons they give is to encourage interdependence.
I had enough of that in EQ. I recall when my Ranger spent an hour traveling from GFay to Freeport...and then two hours trying to find someone to bind him in Freeport.
I recall guild events cancelled because we didn't have enough people of certain classes. I recall guild events saved when some people would switch from a class we had enough of to their alts of a class we needed more of.
This is completely retarded....No matter how it was encrypted, it would be cracked in all of about 2 hours after release.
So, if they stored game data client-side encrypted with GPG, it would be cracked within 2 hours? Did you learn everything you know about encryption by watching movies, or what?
Just in the initial purchase price alone, they could reserve a whole GB for you to use and still come out profiting.
Yeah...if they only had a few customers. Look, this thing is expected to be bigger than existing MMORPGs. EQ has about 500k subscribers. DAoC and UO have about 250k. Let's say they get a million.
Storing a big record for a customer is easy. Storing a million big records for your million customers is not easy. They need a database that can have a lot of big records, and handle 100k or more essentially concurrent updates to those records, in real time. This isn't a job for MySQL.
DAOC used the concept of the headstone. Go to the headstone and pray. You get your exp back. No need to worry about lost gear at all - you already got it back. Where is the risk?
You have the details wrong--and in this kind of thing, the details make all the difference. When you die in DAoC, you immediately lose a certain amount of experience. When you type "/release" to spawn back at your bind point, and the headstone is created, you lose that amount of experience again. When you go back to your grave and/pray, you get back what you lost on/release, but NOT what you got back for dying.
Also, you lose constitution when you die and/release, which must be restored by paying an NPC healer. At higher level, the cost is significant.
An "average" death in DAoC is a bigger setback than an "average" death in EQ, especially at higher levels, when it is likely you'll get a res. In EQ, the res restores most of the lost experience. In DAoC, all a res does is avoid the/release experience and constitution loss--you still take the immediate experience loss.
Slashdot Mirror
How about better online games? Consider MMORPGs. To prevent cheating, they have to do various things server-side that would actually make more sense from a resource allocation point of view to do on the client.
For example, DAoC has to handle stealth on the server, calculating who should be able to see a stealthed character, and only sending that character's positions to clients that should see him, so that people with DAoC's equivalent of ShowEQ won't see them. However, those people can still see people who are hiding behind trees or hills or buildings--it would be too much work for the server to do the visibility calculations for everyone.
With a trusted client, they could just send the data on everyone in the area, and trust the client to not show what the player is not supposed to see.
Or how about monster AI? The monsters could be a lot smarter if they could run the AI on the client, instead of on the server.
In the United States, it effectively is. That is, although it would violate section 106 of the Copyright Act, section 1008 says that the copyright owners can't sue him for it.
If something is against the law, but the law specifically says that there can be no punishment for it, is it really against the law?
It will be interesting to see just how much the AG wants those logs. It is very hard to really delete things. See
this paper to find out just how hard it it.
It's possible to be too small. Perhaps, being a man, I don't appreciate what it is like for people with delicate little girly hands, but I find Archos jukeboxes fit perfectly in my hand. Anything smaller would be a little awkward.
I also find the iPod to be rather ugly. It looks like it was designed by someone who designs overprices cigarette lighters.
Simple: it doesn't. The blog the story referes to is almost certainly wrong. How many thousands of people have packet sniffed IE over the years? You'd think someone would have noticed this before if it were real.
I don't think so. First of all, I don't think a checksum (that's what is signed) meets the requirements for copyrightability. Second, even if it does, fair use allows copying when it is necessary for compatibility. Check out Sega vs. Activision (I think it was Activision...).
No, if XBox 2 games were signed with a different key, it would simply mean that XBox 2 would have to know both the new public key and the old public key if it was to play XBox 1 games.
Well, as far as I recall, the DMCA doesn't say anything about trying to circumvent anything, only about actually circumventing things, so the question of whether this is a DMCA violation is purely academic, since they aren't going to come anywhere near cracking it.
You don't consider Yahoo to be enterprise level???
I always get a good laugh when someone worries that companies might profit from open source labor. Do these people ever bother to read the licenses, and the supporting documents?
If you don't want companies profiting from your labor, then do not use an open source license. It is that simple. Almost every open source license allows, by design, people to profit from open source who are not the authors of the program. E.g., by selling support. If you write a program and GPL it, and I make a good living selling support for it, that is profiting from your labor just as much as it would be if I were to use your program in a proprietary program.
That ability is not threatened at all by this. What is threatened is the ability to try to deceive people so as to mislead them about a company or government.
These sites were not parody sites. They were trying to confuse people into thinking they were Dow's site, and are using the claim of parody to try to hide their attempted identity theft.
Here's an idea: spend 5 seconds looking at the article before posting to slashdot.
E.g., I can remember a fair amount of what I did today. I can remember a fair amount for yesterday. However, if I try to go back day by day...I can only get back a week or so, and then I'm out of the realm of actual memory, and more into the realm of deducing....that is, I don't recall doing anything unusual two weeks ago, so I deduce I must have done my normal stuff.
So, I've only got, it seems, a week or two of memory going back. Or, at least, I've only got a week or two organized so that it can be placed in sequence.
How about the rest of you?
The author also greatly overstates the problem of expansions not being finished at release. Sure, the very high end zones of new expansions have sometimes been unfinished, but only a very small number of guilds are powerful enough to reach those before they are finished.
Sure, EQ has plenty of problems, but mostly the author is just whining pointlessly. Take the switch to a GM pool instead of per-server GMs. For everyone I've heard complain, I've heard someone else praise it as decreasing response time (ever need a GM when your server GM was off duty under the old system?)
So, not only is the author saying my friends are lying to me about EQ...he says this is the usual situation with my friends? That's rather presumptuous of the author!
Microsoft has not been shipping an old version of Real Player of Quicktime. They have been shipping an old version of Java.
I see your point, that Microsoft is stunting Java's growth, but that's life. I don't think my tax dollars should be spent ensuring that Microsoft plays fair
It sounds like your beef is with antitrust law in general, rather than this particular application of it.
The thing is, Microsoft has been shipping Java, but an old version. Combined with their monopoly, that effectively makes that version of Java the version that programmers must code to.
I'be been playing around with 1.4 on Windows and Linux, and for a lot of things, it is quite nice, actually. The JIT has dealt with the performance problems of the past. However, I can't actually use 1.4 for anything we put on the web, because of all those Microsoft JVM's out there.
And before anyone says to just have my users download 1.4 from Sun, that's 9 meg. 9 meg is too big for modem users. There is a strong negative correlation between download size and download completions, and 9 meg is way into the high failure territory.
Well, you certainly avoided taking the risk of actually finding out anything about the Robocoaster. :-) Go watch the video. That thing is way more risky than any modern rollercoaster.
With movies, pretty much all of the activity MPAA is trying to stop is illegitimate.
Taking about going after the "low hanging fruit" is probably not the best choice of words for an article about porn sites. It took me a minute to realize what they really mean.
None of those things belong on Usenet. Usenet is a very wasteful way to distribute that kind of stuff, both in terms of bandwidth and storage space. All those things you mention belong on HTTP or FTP servers. Usenet would be a great way to distribute announcements of new things that are available on the HTTP or FTP servers, though.
I had enough of that in EQ. I recall when my Ranger spent an hour traveling from GFay to Freeport...and then two hours trying to find someone to bind him in Freeport.
I recall guild events cancelled because we didn't have enough people of certain classes. I recall guild events saved when some people would switch from a class we had enough of to their alts of a class we needed more of.
So, if they stored game data client-side encrypted with GPG, it would be cracked within 2 hours? Did you learn everything you know about encryption by watching movies, or what?
Yeah...if they only had a few customers. Look, this thing is expected to be bigger than existing MMORPGs. EQ has about 500k subscribers. DAoC and UO have about 250k. Let's say they get a million.
Storing a big record for a customer is easy. Storing a million big records for your million customers is not easy. They need a database that can have a lot of big records, and handle 100k or more essentially concurrent updates to those records, in real time. This isn't a job for MySQL.
You have the details wrong--and in this kind of thing, the details make all the difference. When you die in DAoC, you immediately lose a certain amount of experience. When you type "/release" to spawn back at your bind point, and the headstone is created, you lose that amount of experience again. When you go back to your grave and
Also, you lose constitution when you die and
An "average" death in DAoC is a bigger setback than an "average" death in EQ, especially at higher levels, when it is likely you'll get a res. In EQ, the res restores most of the lost experience. In DAoC, all a res does is avoid the