Is there really any question in anyone's mind whether or not the mere existence of P2P networks is legal? They clearly, clearly, are legal. There are clearly legal uses for them.
People who need proof should buy and install "World of Warcraft". Blizzard uses torrents to distribute all live patches above a certain size. That's just a single modern example.
..the Linux community is slowly evolving into a state of mob rule, with the cheerleaders being paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga.'
What? Slowly evolving into? Where has this guy been for the last ten years?
You're not talking about the Mac version. The Mac version just came out, and as Mac software goes, it actually is bleeding edge. I don't believe there's a single non-upgraded four year old Mac that can play it reasonably.
Recently, my strategy has been to buy the very last model in Apple's PowerBook lines. It's worked really well.
I got the last PowerBook G3 model in 2000. It was fairly maxed out, with a 500MHz G3 and over 300 megs of RAM. All the bugs had been worked out of that product line, and it performed very well. As a matter of fact, that laptop is still perfectly usable as long as I'm not trying to play modern games like KotOR or WoW on it.
A few years later, I got the last Titanium PowerBook G4 model. It's maxed out, with a 1GHz G4 and 1GB of RAM. All the bugs had been worked out of that product line, and it's performing very well as long as I'm not trying to play a bleeding edge modern game like KotOR. It makes Eclipse dance and sing. Office runs quickly and nicely. All the iApps work beautifully. I have no immediate reason to upgrade, unless I want to run real bleeding edge applications on it. (It's amazing -- I can run a portal server that services dozens of simultaneous users without having the machine even break a sweat, but fire up KotOR and everything grinds to a halt.)
My next purchase will probably be the last revision of the 15" Aluminum PowerBook G4. At some point they'll do something new, like add dual-core G4s or a G5. When they do, that'll be my signal to buy the last Aluminum G4 model.
Using this strategy has given me a great balance of inexpensive, well tested, and powerful machines with some serious longevity -- as I said, I'm still using that Pismo, and it's just fine for many applications.
No. No, I completely suck at it, and will probably never get any better. You should all come teach me how to play, in a high-stakes game at my place. Show a bad player like me how it's really done.
Yes, it is easy to get a generic ID. I know this. I don't want to. Basically, I'm offended by the idea that I should carry an ID. The option exists, but it's not mandatory. I don't have one. People should not assume everyone has ID. I've made it to the age of 36 without ever getting an ID, I see no reason to change now.
Once in a while a store gives me trouble, but the result is that they lose my business. You'd be surprised at how little you actually need one. Try going for a month without carrying one.
Today, you carry some form of ID, be it driver's license in the US, a national ID in Europe or whatever.
No, I don't. I don't carry an ID. I don't have a driver's license, having never learned to drive. The only kind of ID I have is a passport, and under normal circumstances I don't carry it. If I'm asked to provide proof of my identity, I simply can't. I don't carry any ID.
You can actually build a portable usability testing lab pretty cheaply. I've started to do so out of parts I already had laying around. The core of it is a pair of PowerBook laptops (one G3, one G4), each of which has an S-Video port, coupled with a Canopus ADVC-100 firewire video capture box. This lets me record a user's screen in its entirety into iMovie.
Couple that with an iPod with a voice recorder, an iSight camera to watch the user directly, and a key logger, and you've got a pretty decent usability testing lab. Since the mac has an X server, a VNC client, an RDC client for Windows Terminal Server, and Virtual PC, I can actually test software for pretty much any platform with stuff I cobbled together myself that fits into a suitcase.
Another component I've been playing with a little bit is "vnc2swf", which purports to attach to any VNC server and record everything that happens in the form of a flash file.
It's permitted, as long as emergency calls can still get through? What the fuck?
It seems to me that this is like saying microwave ovens are allowed to interfere with 802.11 as long as TCP packets with a ToS of 0 or 1 get through unmolested. That'd be great, sure, but physics does not care.
I use Audio Lunchbox, which lets you download in both 192kbit MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. I've also poked at Bleep, which currently supports MP3 and is thinking about FLAC.
Both of these are DRM-free and will give you files that work on Linux (or BeOS or PalmOS or an Amiga or a Newton or whatever).
My poor old web/mail server right now is a Tyan Tomcat IV D with two Pentium MMX chips running at 233MHz. It's been in constant service for years. Recently, I moved, and put the server in a co-worker's house so it'd remain up while my DSL was getting transferred to the new house. When we turned the machine back on, none of the CPU fans worked.
So, the machine is running with the lid off, with the FSB and clock multipliers set down as low as I could make them go. It's an SMP box with two 124MHz Pentium (not PPro, not P2, Pentium MMX) chips.
It's been running that way for over a week now. Seems to work. It ain't zippy, but there isn't much load on it, so it's okay. I doubt it'll survive the move back to the new house, so I'll probably throw its hard drive into either an Athlon 750 or 500MHz Alpha I've got sitting around.
Got a pointer to that "all GBA accessories are compatible" info? I've got link cables, cube cables, a card reader... I'd really like to see some official statement from Nintendo that all GBA accessories are compatible. Or at least a photo that shows the port. Got any URLs? I've hunted for them and been unable to locate 'em.
This is the deciding factor between me getting a Nintendo DS and an old-style GBA with Afterburner. I'll get one or the other, for multiplayer Cube games that use GBAs. If the DS won't work that way, a GBA with Afterburner will be my best bet.
(In this context, tethered to a console, the lack of rechargeable batteries and the large size are simply non-issues.)
That's not one of my questions. I want to know if it will do exactly what the GBA currently does, not something like what it does. I already knew you'd be able to play some multiplayer games with one cart. I'm concerned with the mechanics -- will you be able to do it exactly the same way, with the same physical cables, as a GBA? When another participant in the multiplayer game is an actual GBA?
I know wireless linking is an option for the non-GBA titles, for the DS-specific titles. But GBA titles are in general not going to be able to use that. Is that cable port there for them? If so, that's probably enough for cube connectivity, because that's exactly the way the cube connects today.
The one thing I'm dying to know that I haven't been able to discover is if this thing will be able to function as a GBA connected to a GameCube. Does it have the connector the Cube uses to connect to a GBA? Can it download code over that port and execute it as the GBA does?
If so, I'll probably buy one. I was going to buy a second GBA just for when people come over to play Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. If this thing can serve that niche as well as do everything else they say it'll do, I'll buy one of these and delegate "backup GBA controller" status to my current GBA SP.
Is music swapping down by actual volume, or just by percentage? That is, are people swapping less music, or did video/software swapping just grow faster than music swapping did?
If music swapping is actually down, could it be because there are viable legit music download services now? I know I've bought multiple albums from both iTMS and Audi Lunchbox myself...
This is one of the good things about working in academia. At my office, we've got no trade secrets, no heinous NDAs, and heck, we don't even have a real firewall (at CMU, the students are more dangerous than any outsiders). As far as apropriate workplace behavior goes, nobody bats an eye if my office is blasting out "Joe's Garage" during business hours.
Yeah, it's less money than when I worked out in industry, by maybe 20% or so. But between the benefits and the environment, well, damn. You ain't gettin' me back out into "the real world" again.
No, I'm saying that it's a marketing ploy be cause it is in actual fact not better than the solutions out there today, but decisions were made and messages were communicated merely to create the impresssion that it is. But I was a bit subtle about saying that, which can sometimes be a mistake in public forums.
If you rely on encryption that behaves like that, you're foolish and will have problems.
If you believe this is better than what has come before, you are more likely to rely on it.
Therefore, I actually think this will in practice cause more harm than good with regard to actual security.
IMHO, we need totally wide-open unencrypted wireless, with IPSec and nothing else running on top of that, with secure apps running on top of that. I think any crypto at this layer is essentially smoke and mirrors.
I'll be really shocked if it works in a way fundamentally different, from a user experience standpoint, than today's systems.
This means I'd bet someone $20 that it'll use a single shared key across the entire network, and client machines will obtain it from a user-entered password.
But since it uses AES, all sorts of people will get excited and believe it's secure.
So I see this as little more than a marketing ploy.
Is it more secure than WEP and WPA? Yes. Yes, it's more secure, because in order to get the password that lets you get on the network and steal network resources and intercept everyone's data, you'll need to run a key logger or watch over someone's shoulder or get a virus on to their machine instead of just watching network traffic.
I was wondering if the old credit card processing software my startup company wrote, most recently owned by Red Hat, was still available for download to users who already had license keys. No new license keys will ever be available, but for users who already had them, it's conceivable that they'd need to redownload the software if their credit card processing server crashed, or if they migrated operating systems (for example from SCO, which we did support, to Linux).
So, I wandered over to Red Hat's anonymous FTP server, and there it was -- a piece of closed-source software that the company hasn't supported since 2001 is still available for download at the same location it was at when it was a supported product.
Kudos to Red Hat for this. There's an extremely slim chance that some ex-customer could have been screwed if this closed-source copyrighted software had been removed from their download servers, but it hasn't been. It's still there. I applaud them.
(And it's not Red Hat's fault it was closed source. The NDAs that the banks and credit card companies required pretty much gave no other options to anybody who tried to do this sort of thing in a legit manner. There were pseudo-open-source efforts to do similar stuff, but none of them had the approval of the banks, and as far as I know they actually violated the terms the banks set for using their merchant accounts.)
(By the way, if anyone at Red Hat sees this message -- I'd love to re-obtain the rights to that old source code. To some extent I'm screwed by the copyright on the thing's source code. I've signed the NDAs, but I can't get my own source code back, even though I'd like to continue fixing bugs and updating clearing house compliance for free. But the customers were not screwed, and in the end that's much more important.)
I own three MagicCap based PDAs. Two of them, the PIC-1000 and the PIC-2000A, were manufactured by Sony. Neither of them has been made or supported for many years.
The worrisome thing: after Sony bailed, pretty much everyone else using the MagicCap OS did too. Today, you can't get the OS at all anymore, and you can't even really get a dev environment for it. Hopefully, PalmOS can hang on.
I had Graffiti when it was a separate product for Apple's Newton and General Magic's Magic Cap systems. I had a Palm III, Visor DX, and Visor Pro, running PalmOS. Now I've got a Palm Tungsten T3.
The Tungsten T3 ships with Graffiti 2. It's IMHO awful.
Here's an example of how: The letter "t" is done by a vertical top-to-bottom stroke followed by a horizontal left-to-right stroke. You can do them in either order. The letter L is done by a vertical top-to-bottom stroke. A space is done by a horizontal left-to-right stroke. What happens when you want to begin or end a word with the letter L? Bad things. There are habits you can learn to avoid problems, but it's much more difficult (for me) than Graffiti 1 was.
There's a set of files you can install on a Tungsten T3 or other Graffiti 2 handheld to make it start using Graffiti 1. I've got it installed. It makes the system usable for me.
Now, some of the Graffiti 2 patterns are actually better than Graffiti 1. For example, I can more reliably write a "G" with Graffiti 2 than with Graffiti 1. And some symbols were entered by writing something other than numbers in the numeric area, which was faster than the normal "dot prefix" method from Graffiti 1, and wasn't unreliable or aggravating.
Having a global preference to switch between Graffiti 1 and Graffiti 2 would be a good thing. It's even what the Newton was doing near the end there -- there were multiple recognition systems and you could switch between them.
But even better would be if it could be done on a character-by-character basis. For each letter, give me a list of strokes and let me put checkboxes next to the ones I want to enable.
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(nt)
Is there really any question in anyone's mind whether or not the mere existence of P2P networks is legal? They clearly, clearly, are legal. There are clearly legal uses for them.
People who need proof should buy and install "World of Warcraft". Blizzard uses torrents to distribute all live patches above a certain size. That's just a single modern example.
Why use Open Source? What's the big win? Sounds like the survey respondents think the answer is "it's free-as-in-freedom", not "it's free-as-in-beer".
You're not talking about the Mac version. The Mac version just came out, and as Mac software goes, it actually is bleeding edge. I don't believe there's a single non-upgraded four year old Mac that can play it reasonably.
Recently, my strategy has been to buy the very last model in Apple's PowerBook lines. It's worked really well.
I got the last PowerBook G3 model in 2000. It was fairly maxed out, with a 500MHz G3 and over 300 megs of RAM. All the bugs had been worked out of that product line, and it performed very well. As a matter of fact, that laptop is still perfectly usable as long as I'm not trying to play modern games like KotOR or WoW on it.
A few years later, I got the last Titanium PowerBook G4 model. It's maxed out, with a 1GHz G4 and 1GB of RAM. All the bugs had been worked out of that product line, and it's performing very well as long as I'm not trying to play a bleeding edge modern game like KotOR. It makes Eclipse dance and sing. Office runs quickly and nicely. All the iApps work beautifully. I have no immediate reason to upgrade, unless I want to run real bleeding edge applications on it. (It's amazing -- I can run a portal server that services dozens of simultaneous users without having the machine even break a sweat, but fire up KotOR and everything grinds to a halt.)
My next purchase will probably be the last revision of the 15" Aluminum PowerBook G4. At some point they'll do something new, like add dual-core G4s or a G5. When they do, that'll be my signal to buy the last Aluminum G4 model.
Using this strategy has given me a great balance of inexpensive, well tested, and powerful machines with some serious longevity -- as I said, I'm still using that Pismo, and it's just fine for many applications.
No. No, I completely suck at it, and will probably never get any better. You should all come teach me how to play, in a high-stakes game at my place. Show a bad player like me how it's really done.
Yes, it is easy to get a generic ID. I know this. I don't want to. Basically, I'm offended by the idea that I should carry an ID. The option exists, but it's not mandatory. I don't have one. People should not assume everyone has ID. I've made it to the age of 36 without ever getting an ID, I see no reason to change now.
Once in a while a store gives me trouble, but the result is that they lose my business. You'd be surprised at how little you actually need one. Try going for a month without carrying one.
You can actually build a portable usability testing lab pretty cheaply. I've started to do so out of parts I already had laying around. The core of it is a pair of PowerBook laptops (one G3, one G4), each of which has an S-Video port, coupled with a Canopus ADVC-100 firewire video capture box. This lets me record a user's screen in its entirety into iMovie.
Couple that with an iPod with a voice recorder, an iSight camera to watch the user directly, and a key logger, and you've got a pretty decent usability testing lab. Since the mac has an X server, a VNC client, an RDC client for Windows Terminal Server, and Virtual PC, I can actually test software for pretty much any platform with stuff I cobbled together myself that fits into a suitcase.
Another component I've been playing with a little bit is "vnc2swf", which purports to attach to any VNC server and record everything that happens in the form of a flash file.
It's permitted, as long as emergency calls can still get through? What the fuck?
It seems to me that this is like saying microwave ovens are allowed to interfere with 802.11 as long as TCP packets with a ToS of 0 or 1 get through unmolested. That'd be great, sure, but physics does not care.
With any luck I'll be back in 3 days anyway.
I use Audio Lunchbox, which lets you download in both 192kbit MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. I've also poked at Bleep, which currently supports MP3 and is thinking about FLAC.
Both of these are DRM-free and will give you files that work on Linux (or BeOS or PalmOS or an Amiga or a Newton or whatever).
My poor old web/mail server right now is a Tyan Tomcat IV D with two Pentium MMX chips running at 233MHz. It's been in constant service for years. Recently, I moved, and put the server in a co-worker's house so it'd remain up while my DSL was getting transferred to the new house. When we turned the machine back on, none of the CPU fans worked.
So, the machine is running with the lid off, with the FSB and clock multipliers set down as low as I could make them go. It's an SMP box with two 124MHz Pentium (not PPro, not P2, Pentium MMX) chips.
It's been running that way for over a week now. Seems to work. It ain't zippy, but there isn't much load on it, so it's okay. I doubt it'll survive the move back to the new house, so I'll probably throw its hard drive into either an Athlon 750 or 500MHz Alpha I've got sitting around.
Got a pointer to that "all GBA accessories are compatible" info? I've got link cables, cube cables, a card reader... I'd really like to see some official statement from Nintendo that all GBA accessories are compatible. Or at least a photo that shows the port. Got any URLs? I've hunted for them and been unable to locate 'em.
This is the deciding factor between me getting a Nintendo DS and an old-style GBA with Afterburner. I'll get one or the other, for multiplayer Cube games that use GBAs. If the DS won't work that way, a GBA with Afterburner will be my best bet.
(In this context, tethered to a console, the lack of rechargeable batteries and the large size are simply non-issues.)
That's not one of my questions. I want to know if it will do exactly what the GBA currently does, not something like what it does. I already knew you'd be able to play some multiplayer games with one cart. I'm concerned with the mechanics -- will you be able to do it exactly the same way, with the same physical cables, as a GBA? When another participant in the multiplayer game is an actual GBA?
I know wireless linking is an option for the non-GBA titles, for the DS-specific titles. But GBA titles are in general not going to be able to use that. Is that cable port there for them? If so, that's probably enough for cube connectivity, because that's exactly the way the cube connects today.
...the feature set.
The one thing I'm dying to know that I haven't been able to discover is if this thing will be able to function as a GBA connected to a GameCube. Does it have the connector the Cube uses to connect to a GBA? Can it download code over that port and execute it as the GBA does?
If so, I'll probably buy one. I was going to buy a second GBA just for when people come over to play Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. If this thing can serve that niche as well as do everything else they say it'll do, I'll buy one of these and delegate "backup GBA controller" status to my current GBA SP.
Is music swapping down by actual volume, or just by percentage? That is, are people swapping less music, or did video/software swapping just grow faster than music swapping did?
If music swapping is actually down, could it be because there are viable legit music download services now? I know I've bought multiple albums from both iTMS and Audi Lunchbox myself...
This is one of the good things about working in academia. At my office, we've got no trade secrets, no heinous NDAs, and heck, we don't even have a real firewall (at CMU, the students are more dangerous than any outsiders). As far as apropriate workplace behavior goes, nobody bats an eye if my office is blasting out "Joe's Garage" during business hours.
Yeah, it's less money than when I worked out in industry, by maybe 20% or so. But between the benefits and the environment, well, damn. You ain't gettin' me back out into "the real world" again.
No, I'm saying that it's a marketing ploy be cause it is in actual fact not better than the solutions out there today, but decisions were made and messages were communicated merely to create the impresssion that it is. But I was a bit subtle about saying that, which can sometimes be a mistake in public forums.
If you rely on encryption that behaves like that, you're foolish and will have problems.
If you believe this is better than what has come before, you are more likely to rely on it.
Therefore, I actually think this will in practice cause more harm than good with regard to actual security.
IMHO, we need totally wide-open unencrypted wireless, with IPSec and nothing else running on top of that, with secure apps running on top of that. I think any crypto at this layer is essentially smoke and mirrors.
I'll be really shocked if it works in a way fundamentally different, from a user experience standpoint, than today's systems.
This means I'd bet someone $20 that it'll use a single shared key across the entire network, and client machines will obtain it from a user-entered password.
But since it uses AES, all sorts of people will get excited and believe it's secure.
So I see this as little more than a marketing ploy.
Is it more secure than WEP and WPA? Yes. Yes, it's more secure, because in order to get the password that lets you get on the network and steal network resources and intercept everyone's data, you'll need to run a key logger or watch over someone's shoulder or get a virus on to their machine instead of just watching network traffic.
I was wondering if the old credit card processing software my startup company wrote, most recently owned by Red Hat, was still available for download to users who already had license keys. No new license keys will ever be available, but for users who already had them, it's conceivable that they'd need to redownload the software if their credit card processing server crashed, or if they migrated operating systems (for example from SCO, which we did support, to Linux).
So, I wandered over to Red Hat's anonymous FTP server, and there it was -- a piece of closed-source software that the company hasn't supported since 2001 is still available for download at the same location it was at when it was a supported product.
Kudos to Red Hat for this. There's an extremely slim chance that some ex-customer could have been screwed if this closed-source copyrighted software had been removed from their download servers, but it hasn't been. It's still there. I applaud them.
(And it's not Red Hat's fault it was closed source. The NDAs that the banks and credit card companies required pretty much gave no other options to anybody who tried to do this sort of thing in a legit manner. There were pseudo-open-source efforts to do similar stuff, but none of them had the approval of the banks, and as far as I know they actually violated the terms the banks set for using their merchant accounts.)
(By the way, if anyone at Red Hat sees this message -- I'd love to re-obtain the rights to that old source code. To some extent I'm screwed by the copyright on the thing's source code. I've signed the NDAs, but I can't get my own source code back, even though I'd like to continue fixing bugs and updating clearing house compliance for free. But the customers were not screwed, and in the end that's much more important.)
It also could do SMP. The first x86 SMP boxes were 486es, not Pentiums. IMHO, the 486 was more important than the pentium.
I own three MagicCap based PDAs. Two of them, the PIC-1000 and the PIC-2000A, were manufactured by Sony. Neither of them has been made or supported for many years.
The worrisome thing: after Sony bailed, pretty much everyone else using the MagicCap OS did too. Today, you can't get the OS at all anymore, and you can't even really get a dev environment for it. Hopefully, PalmOS can hang on.
I had Graffiti when it was a separate product for Apple's Newton and General Magic's Magic Cap systems. I had a Palm III, Visor DX, and Visor Pro, running PalmOS. Now I've got a Palm Tungsten T3.
The Tungsten T3 ships with Graffiti 2. It's IMHO awful.
Here's an example of how: The letter "t" is done by a vertical top-to-bottom stroke followed by a horizontal left-to-right stroke. You can do them in either order. The letter L is done by a vertical top-to-bottom stroke. A space is done by a horizontal left-to-right stroke. What happens when you want to begin or end a word with the letter L? Bad things. There are habits you can learn to avoid problems, but it's much more difficult (for me) than Graffiti 1 was.
There's a set of files you can install on a Tungsten T3 or other Graffiti 2 handheld to make it start using Graffiti 1. I've got it installed. It makes the system usable for me.
Now, some of the Graffiti 2 patterns are actually better than Graffiti 1. For example, I can more reliably write a "G" with Graffiti 2 than with Graffiti 1. And some symbols were entered by writing something other than numbers in the numeric area, which was faster than the normal "dot prefix" method from Graffiti 1, and wasn't unreliable or aggravating.
Having a global preference to switch between Graffiti 1 and Graffiti 2 would be a good thing. It's even what the Newton was doing near the end there -- there were multiple recognition systems and you could switch between them.
But even better would be if it could be done on a character-by-character basis. For each letter, give me a list of strokes and let me put checkboxes next to the ones I want to enable.