For the past year I have been reading every thread like this on/. and thinking that the sim (as in flight/car/physical as opposed to whats that little guy doing) is the most sensible genre for open source development. Let me explain why...
The sim genre of game depends on three main charectoristics: Model, Locations and AV. Unix has been used for decades to provide an environment for performing simulations (cfd, fea, etc.) and I cannot see any reason why a Linux system would have any problem with the Model. Open source development would also surely provide the best position for reviewing and analysing these models to refine and improve upon them (let the academic world lose on it, I can easily imagine it being used in University courses for CS and Engineering), the only downside would be the potential for requirements to upgrade engines for playing particular games. I would also presume (I am an optimist) that if this was taken on to a serious degree the model would be useful for all genre of games, with the ability to add and remove levels of realism at compile time (who needs to calculate the bending stress of the player from a rocket in Quake unless you want really, really realistic gore but it is kind-of important to know it in the Suspension of your F1 car coming into the straight at Indy).
Locations for sims are generally real world locations, and surely these are exactly the sorts of models which should be developed once under an Open Source licensce for re-use. I would help design levels for places I can get to (and places I can get detailed enough data on) just to make my F1 or Flight Sim more realistic. I am surprised that as yet I have not seen an Open Source Project to map the world!!! The benfits of such a project are huge... and the simple fact that people wanting to use real world places on a PC would ALWAYS start here should mean that it would be under constant revision and ultimatley reach very high levels of quality (for most of the planet anyway I'd say it would be 5-10 years).
Within a sim I always feel the AV elements are the least important as long as things remain clear. I don't care if the car ahead of me uses 16 faces instead of about 1024 curves to describe its shape as long as I don't get thrown off the road for rolling over usable kurbs (though its aero model will obviously be less accurate if the 16 faces are used there). I love F1 games and if it races like an F1 car (down to the suspension, rollers, tyre pressure and dampers I selected) then it can be pretty ugly. Who believes a great OS game engine and game would remain ugly for long? I would suspect it someone would simply get it using OpenGL and/dev/dsp and let the system be fast enough (and with the 1GHz+GeForce II you can expect to see as a minimum spec real soon we'll have horsepower to burn). If the engine is a 3d model surely it should be able to pump out the 3d data required directly for an OpenGL world.
I don't think the FPS genre is suited to the OS development model, the game is highly dependant on weapons design, atmospheric effects (artistic work) and AI and these are things that come best from small teams of designers under a director (IMHO, think of a film being made by everyone shooting their bits and sticking them together, it could only work if it was a documentary of scenes from around the world or similar) and not from everyone chipping in to do their bit. We could make an OS FPS but it could never be definitive. A sim for vehicles however could easily become definitive as I believe that it would be relatively early in its life cycle when we would see companies from Boeing to Ferrari contributing (not their designs or specs but improvements to the model so they can use it for real work) and from that point on we could take the model as a dependable piece of OS software like Linux, emacs and apache (to name a small subset), the physical mapping is an ongoing work and will progress faster and faster as its use increases (more games that are being played are produced which derive their maps from it).
One post I read mentioned that one of these projects has the hope of being a complete war simulator....but why stop there? If it can simulate a tank and a helicopter and an aircraft carrier, can it not simulate a Grand Prix, a Red Arrow display or anything else! A grand scheme to hatch, lets just make sure we stop thinking game with this one and think simulation and flexibility.....cause then OS will work and win this battle (what other hope do we have of flying the Shuttle using NASA's own sim of it).
Perhaps I am a bit confused, but not quite as you explained it....let me clarify.
I believed that RSA was ONLY a symmetric algorithm and that 128 bit had already been brute forced (I think it was obviously 64 bit I was thinking of) and hence I was saying 1024 bit as the sort of level at which you can think it will not be brute forced inside a generation (though it may become open due to a hole in the algorithm). I just remebered the EFF (wasn't it) building the old-tech cracking box for $100,000 and taking export strength encryption out in 9 secs? And I though it was 128-bit in about 9 days (but it was probably 56-bit or 64-bit).
Just to note if I had been talking public key systems I think I would have gone with 4096 (and not 1024 as it is just too close to the breakable edge). Thanks for clarifying things though:-)
There seems to be one slight point you are missing....every "secure" site out there (AFAIK) uses RSA encryption. We want apache and mozilla to be able to play with everyone else ASWELL as offering technically superior solutions.
Also while RSA has been cracked, the costs of cracking are still appreciable for correct strength encryption (i.e. not that 40 or 56 bit stuff the US government wanted to make all the terrorists use so they could read their communications). AFAIK if you use 1024 bit RSA encryption it is going to take millions of dollars years to break it and that is good enough for my email, even 128 bit encryption is going to take $100,000 a week or two to open. If you are sending data that could have someone willing to spend a fortune to gain access, the best thing to do is to invest a bit of time yourself into verifying the best route for transfering the data taking into account the entire process (key-exchange, route of couriers for possible ambush if any physical acts, tapped lines etc. etc.).
What this NSS is about is howto stop Joe Publics purchase of their T -Shirt online from giving their credit card details to anyone who can packet sniff the route.
NSS 3.1 provides, for the first time, a complete open-source implementation of the crypto libraries used to implement security features in these products, including a new implementation of the RSA algorithm.
and it offers the Mozilla Crypto FAQ as a link to discuss the implications of the expiration of the RSA patents.
Is it just me or has the number of people posting to stories who have not looked at the content been increasing to a critical S/N ratio?
MSWord '.doc' can contain scripts that are interpreted, but fundamentally anything not compiled(binary) is data - including.perl &.java
So does that mean that if I translate DeCSS (or any other non-DMCA compliant program) to perl (how about a new category in the perl poetry competition for DeCSS) then it will become an expression and not a program and therefore be protected by Free Speach? (I'm Irish so I don't care now, but I want to see these laws smashed before I have to care).
Oh well, time to test my C skills to see how it goes:-)
This is actually a very, very good idea. One of the alleged reasons for this competition in the first place is to try and track the people who would or could crack this. I for one couldn't (unless I happened to be the perfect monkey happening on War and Peace at the keyboard) but I would want to see this cracked the second it is released. I am going to go and download everything I can find now, and everyone else who wants to see this cracked in the end should do the same. Then when they go chasing the crackers we can watch them plough through the slashdot effect to try and find a culprit.
Of course if I happen to have a monkey day and do crack it......I'll be waiting for launch time:-) About the only thing this competition should guarantee is that everything will be broken even quicker than before!
yet again we have provided someone with a rake load of traffic for.....NOTHING.
The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.
I haven't been as happy in a long time as when I saw this story posted (this is essentially the decision I am making in the next fortnight or so baring the Radeon) and to have actually read a document on what you could get out of these under Linux would have been brilliant. Instead I am another person writing a comment about the quality of the posted story on/.
because we knew that tracks were going to end up on Napster, so why not have some fun with it?
And the poll (on CNN) asks:
Do you agree with this Trojan-style approach taken by the Barenaked Ladies?
And the results after 3583 Votes are:
Yes: 57% (2037)
No: 43% (1546)
Really, we have already seen porn banners and usage tracking scams on Gnutella and Napster, here one band is actually using the medium to try and do a bit of self promotion. They (I'm sure) are under no self-delusion that they are going to manage to obfuscate access to the real mp3s of their music, they are just reminding all the people who are hunting for their music that it would be nice if they actually paid for it.
The REAL question is could the RIAA break Napster/Gnutella etc. as a useful tool by bombarding it with files like these (or just corrupt mp3s) and would it be economically viable to do this (just how much bandwidth would they need).
Do you honestly think a few thousand "oooh corporation X is soooooo bad" posts on internet sites _really_ get noticed by corporations?
Yep, I do. What effect they have would be minimal however they most certainly would notice the flak they have been receiving in the last year (think G7 summits for example of more vocal and certainly noticed examples than websites).
how many of you have DVD players?
About 3 months ago I bought a Creative DVD 8x kit with the DxR3 card. I have yet to manage to buy a DVD to even try playing one on it because I will not support the assh*les. The closest I came to buying a DVD was with both SouthPark BLU (can't remember which MPAA type was actually distributing though that stopped me) and Madonna's Music video with AliG (but than the RIAA would get money out of me...no can't do it). I don't have any other DVD equipment and it was PC Plus's distribution of Cover DVDs (and in particular a double sided one half win, one half Suse6.4 DVD edition) that got me to buy one.
I don't buy DVDs, Videos, Cinema Tickets or Music (excluding club and radio). I put my money where my mouth is and it hasn't killed me. Do you think they've noticed yet...I don't but it doesn't stop me. The question with these things is always will anyone break from the sheep mentality and say "we don't care if everyone does X, Y is right so thats what we do, even if it does mean we don't make as much OR we charge more".
It is not right for corporations to live for the LCD but they do, I honestly think that one is the matter of the public standing up for itself and refusing crap just because everything is crap. If we can vote with our wallets we will win.
As for the need for nanny state intervention...why not. I have no problem with the government muscling in on MS, they must be subjected to the same rules and we all must apply them though... Vote with your wallet or Vote with the ballot Paper but either way VOTE
If your using mozilaa (2000091306 anyway) you can set the Search button on the Toolbar to take your location box string and use it as the search term to your choice of the engines from netscape.com. you can even get the results coming into the sidebar (seems to also put them in the browser window...but looking at it that's perfect:-)
No need for visiting the Netscape Search Page and no need for the '?'
Now what the fsck sort of a comment is that! Did you read the story? So its great for Google that where they were once doing a good job of finding directory sites due to their link based analysis, they are now finding only Yahoo! Are you on drugs? Are you the Signal11 that means I'm gonna get my karma slapped?
NOTHING IN THIS IS ABOUT ADVERTISING so why are you shouting about it? This is actually bad news for Google as it appears to be demonstrable evidence that their deal with Yahoo has caused them to lose one of their competitive advantages. how long before your precious advertising limitations are gone and will that be good for Google?
Yup, the point I was trying to make was that what they are doing is not any different to the car salesman....... none of us like to see people taken for a free ride.
We cannot object to the concept on principle, but this is a topic for Slashdot discussion because we should be trying to see if there are any ways they could be using which are not or should not be legal. If they are only gathering your info from their site I don't believe anyone can have a problem with that. If they are matching this up with data from other sources (e.g. doubleclick as mentioned) to track you all over the place because you are one of their customers that is equivalent to hiring a PI to follow you to see how you drive cars and which of your friends cars you look at and how much money you have and..... you get the idea it is illegal.
Just because it is digital and/or online should not change the legailty of an issue, the difficulty is in coming up with suitable paradigms for these new online techniques in the real world whose law should apply.
I don't want anything for free except my Freedom, I just feel that whether legal or not we should all draw attention to the immoral business acts (such as patenting the one-click shopping IMHO) of any company so that we can vote with our wallets, hits and feet rather than be dragged along in the blind.
I don't know if Amazon are doing anything immoral here, but I think it more likely for someone here to know (or figure out) what they are doing than in any other forum.
74% said big companies have too much political influence
more than 80% agreed that entertainment and popular culture are dominated by corporate money which seeks mass appeal over quality
More than 95% of the survey's participants said they agreed with this statement:
"U.S. crporations should have more than one purpose. They also owe something to their workers and the communities in which they operate, and they should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities."
Admitedly someone can't spell (crporations) but it is reassuring beyond belief to see that 95% of the surveys respondents do not agree with the capatilist tripe that gets spouted so often (especially here on Slashdot..."it's their xxx they can do what they want with it" etc.etc.). Morality is alive and well, I can't wait to see the backlash build against the media corporations who have spent 30 years developing a mass market that hates them for being so patronising:-)
The problem is not that they are charging whatever price they want.... the problem is that they are (most certainly though I have no proof) using every bit of data they can gather through cookies and doubleclick and invisible images etc. With all the demographic data they can gather they can start trying to guess (with some degree of accuracy) how much they can get away with charging you.
Now when you arrive at amazon, what they would want is to ID you as a cross-shopper and therefore ensure they give you the lowest price in the marketplace, it might recongise me as a convienince shopper who would rather save the 20 minutes and not care if it costs an extra few dollars. What happens when I decide to use my friends PC and then end up gettting a higher price (or lower) on that purchase? We here on Slashdot don't seem to like the idea of user data tracking at the levels that would make this useful to Amazon, and I find repugnant the idea that they would use these systems for a real world purpose (as opposed to generating stats). Should a shop be able to surupticiously mark you down as an easy touch? Used car salesmen have done it for long enough and while we all agree that it is a case of "buyer beware" is there not a point at which it is criminal?
I'd gues you have been marked as Flamebait because everything you said was in an aggressive and derogatory manor (imho) and I think your post highlights something I mentioned once before....Slashdot needs BOTH -1 Flamebait and +1 Flamebait. Some posts are just plain agro and are obviously looking for a fight, but if they are relevant, insightful, interesting or just plain the right argument to be having (as opposed to well DVDs play better on *BSD because I can optimise my.........) then they should be moderated up as worthwhile posts even if they are prodominently Flamebait. Flamebait can most definetly be positive, it can inspire discussions and that is what Slashdot is about. The stupid negative moderation of provocative posts simply because they are provacative must end. I guess Andover wouldn't like this though as it might make the site a little less palatable to the mass market. Slashdot already is zealous and biased, so why not let people express their opinions and let the arguments ensue instead of trying to get the arguments moderated down for being inciteful (to flame).
I am running Corel Linux Second Edition (2.2.16 kernel) at present and all of its Netscape Bookmarks (and it has a relatively nice selection including Slashdot) pass through product.corel.com, as does the default Homepage which is a corel page. I presume this is to gather usage info and stats and don't really have a problem with this sort of tactic. If you don't like the extra smidge of traffic generated fix your bookmarks. If you don't know about it should you care? I don't think so. You are simply providing some usage analysis data and all that is visible is the standard CGI environment (such as User Agent, IP, etc.). It lets them (Corel, MS, Netscape) see just how many users they have, what versions they are using and how useful their bookmarks are. Personal info gathering is still down to the browser (and whether it allows javascript etc), nothing has changed. It has the potential to be about as obnoxious as doubleclick and deserves the same treatment, care and fix it or don't care and let them gather some info based on your usage. Now if anyone can prove that these redirects are used to do some form of persistent tracking and that they are gathering email addresses I will take a different view. Until then...Dear Slashdot, please stop posting stupid argumentative stories (like InterVideo's press release dissappearing when it is sitting in plain site).
I'm not sure about the case you are refering to but the only case I remeber was the Applied Cryptography example, where the book which described all aspects of encryption technology and contained substantial amounts of code could be exported from the US but NOT with the accompanying CD-Rom. Could DeCSS be distrbuted harm free by paper? Or does the DMCA get this aswell. If paper is ok, what about a fax? If a fax is ok can we post the fax (i.e. the data stream of a g3 fax) online and link to that?
uClinux-cisco2500-0.1.tar.gz is 1169524 bytes INSTALL is 13164 bytes README is 254 bytes
linux.bin is 1071900 bytes
uClinux-c2500-uClinux-2_0_38_1pre7.diff is 4351814 bytes
Wristwatches, Routers and what next?
Personally I like the idea of being able to hack anything you want into the router....let it be FREE, but I wonder at the potential havoc that could be caused by bugs in these if it ever adopted in volume (what's cisco's record like at security and bug fixing and will any GPL/OS solution be any better)? I also agree with a previous poster that Cisco are not going to be happy with this if it is viable for production systems. I can forsee the DoJ anti-trust case where Cisco are taken to task for hacking their routers and engaging in anti-competitive practices to maintain their monopoly.....oh dear, somethings never change.
Yep, I heard of Elite (and even worked with the father of its creator/one of its creators). The thing about Elite is that it is a pure Space Stategy Game, no First Person type element (or Pod racing). I want a game where after I leg it round a corner from the squad of Imperial Stormtroopers who are trying to blast me for nicking their power unit, I can hop into my POD/Falcon/HideOut to try and dodge them. I want nearly every game genre covered through one universe, where the aims are gone, the world mearly turns out as the sum of the inputs of its players, and with enough players the game goes beyond the influence of its creators sort-off).
Elite is a marvellous game but you either miss my point entirley or you have a rather grand impression of it.
I have always thought the Ultimate Game myself would be a massive online Star Wars Universe where we can all try to take out DeathStars, lead rebellions, go spying.....whatever we want (pod race to make money, kill innocent bystanders, join Jabba, be a bounty hunter). If the infrastucture was capable of dealing with a million players and the games wouldn't collapse after a few years or so I reckon we could soon see newspapers publishing little tit-bits of news on the war of the Alliance V the Empire.
So how long before Lucas Arts are ready to bring all their Star Wars games together into this beast and would you play?
It's great to see so many people trumping in with the definitions of mass, HOWEVER I am afraid that the original poster is correct.
The standard unit of mass is the kg, and the kg is defined as the mass of a platinum (I think) block stored in Paris. The block is meant to be exactly the same mass as 0.1m x 0.1m x 0.1m of pure water at maximum volume (i.e. 4 degrees C) at standard atmospheric pressure (sea-level, 1 Bar????). Unfortunatley for the idiots making the "block" they never noticed or were unable to discover with the current methods that they were about 0.04% out and hence the whole water idea had to be scrapped and the block was used instead. The question is why did the idiots not just stick with the physical definition and stuff the block!
As for the meter etc. It was created as 1/10e7 of the quarter circumference of the earth through both poles and Paris...however as this is patently absurd and useless it was actually the distance between two scratches held on a metal "ruler". This was subsequently re-expressed (and the definition of the width of the scratches etc. made moot) as both the distance travelled by a certain number of wavelengths of the red-orange emissions of krypton 69 (or some other isotope, I hate chemistry) AND the distance travelled by light in the micro fraction of a second it takes to go a meter (debate has ensued previously over which is the true definition of a meter but I believe it is the multiple of the wavelength of the Krypton).
since physical definition (that is, definition using physical features available everywhere) is the whole point of the metric system.
The whole point of the metric system was to provide a scalable system without all the 12 of these or 16 or those or 3 of these makes a schnugelbindel, a consequence was meant to be the definition of all values by inrefutable physical quantities.....It failed. You could define the Imperial measures by similar means (reduce number of wavelngths and you have a yard, work out the volume of water for a pound) but they would still be a pig to work with when scaling (how big is 10e13 inches or 10e13 cm, I know my mind loves the latter and detests the former). Metric is about the number 10, not about definitions.
Irish Music Rights Organisation gets Legal too
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 3
Their Legal Claims basically amount to all workplaces will buy a licence from them for any music.
I saw an envelope in my parents house today with "KEEP (re jargon!)" handwritten on addressed to the Company Secretary, My
Father's Name, His Address...No company mentioned. I had to peek inside (they often leave computer related junk mail around
for me to see/dump) and saw it was from the Irish Music Rights Orgainsation. Now my father's main business (based at home)
is software development and has family members as occassional employees beyond himself. I just had to include the full
text/html (all emphasis theirs) of the two pages because they are such incredible reading but in brief summary they are
requesting that as public music in work requires a licence, they want a declaration on music use in the place of business and the
equipment (including private)......Read on...
I wonder who will release first.....Debian, Storm, Corel????
Wonder how much they will co-operate like Linux people should??
End Result, Debian is THE "Free" OS, by the people for the people and soon it will have two interfaces that dummies can be let loose on (in terms of damaging them not them damaging the machine:-).
Slashdot Mirror
For the past year I have been reading every thread like this on /. and thinking that the sim (as in flight/car/physical as opposed to whats that little guy doing) is the most sensible genre for open source development. Let me explain why...
The sim genre of game depends on three main charectoristics: Model, Locations and AV. Unix has been used for decades to provide an environment for performing simulations (cfd, fea, etc.) and I cannot see any reason why a Linux system would have any problem with the Model. Open source development would also surely provide the best position for reviewing and analysing these models to refine and improve upon them (let the academic world lose on it, I can easily imagine it being used in University courses for CS and Engineering), the only downside would be the potential for requirements to upgrade engines for playing particular games. I would also presume (I am an optimist) that if this was taken on to a serious degree the model would be useful for all genre of games, with the ability to add and remove levels of realism at compile time (who needs to calculate the bending stress of the player from a rocket in Quake unless you want really, really realistic gore but it is kind-of important to know it in the Suspension of your F1 car coming into the straight at Indy).
Locations for sims are generally real world locations, and surely these are exactly the sorts of models which should be developed once under an Open Source licensce for re-use. I would help design levels for places I can get to (and places I can get detailed enough data on) just to make my F1 or Flight Sim more realistic. I am surprised that as yet I have not seen an Open Source Project to map the world!!! The benfits of such a project are huge... and the simple fact that people wanting to use real world places on a PC would ALWAYS start here should mean that it would be under constant revision and ultimatley reach very high levels of quality (for most of the planet anyway I'd say it would be 5-10 years).
Within a sim I always feel the AV elements are the least important as long as things remain clear. I don't care if the car ahead of me uses 16 faces instead of about 1024 curves to describe its shape as long as I don't get thrown off the road for rolling over usable kurbs (though its aero model will obviously be less accurate if the 16 faces are used there). I love F1 games and if it races like an F1 car (down to the suspension, rollers, tyre pressure and dampers I selected) then it can be pretty ugly. Who believes a great OS game engine and game would remain ugly for long? I would suspect it someone would simply get it using OpenGL and /dev/dsp and let the system be fast enough (and with the 1GHz+GeForce II you can expect to see as a minimum spec real soon we'll have horsepower to burn). If the engine is a 3d model surely it should be able to pump out the 3d data required directly for an OpenGL world.
I don't think the FPS genre is suited to the OS development model, the game is highly dependant on weapons design, atmospheric effects (artistic work) and AI and these are things that come best from small teams of designers under a director (IMHO, think of a film being made by everyone shooting their bits and sticking them together, it could only work if it was a documentary of scenes from around the world or similar) and not from everyone chipping in to do their bit. We could make an OS FPS but it could never be definitive. A sim for vehicles however could easily become definitive as I believe that it would be relatively early in its life cycle when we would see companies from Boeing to Ferrari contributing (not their designs or specs but improvements to the model so they can use it for real work) and from that point on we could take the model as a dependable piece of OS software like Linux, emacs and apache (to name a small subset), the physical mapping is an ongoing work and will progress faster and faster as its use increases (more games that are being played are produced which derive their maps from it).
One post I read mentioned that one of these projects has the hope of being a complete war simulator....but why stop there? If it can simulate a tank and a helicopter and an aircraft carrier, can it not simulate a Grand Prix, a Red Arrow display or anything else! A grand scheme to hatch, lets just make sure we stop thinking game with this one and think simulation and flexibility.....cause then OS will work and win this battle (what other hope do we have of flying the Shuttle using NASA's own sim of it).
Perhaps I am a bit confused, but not quite as you explained it....let me clarify.
I believed that RSA was ONLY a symmetric algorithm and that 128 bit had already been brute forced (I think it was obviously 64 bit I was thinking of) and hence I was saying 1024 bit as the sort of level at which you can think it will not be brute forced inside a generation (though it may become open due to a hole in the algorithm). I just remebered the EFF (wasn't it) building the old-tech cracking box for $100,000 and taking export strength encryption out in 9 secs? And I though it was 128-bit in about 9 days (but it was probably 56-bit or 64-bit).
Just to note if I had been talking public key systems I think I would have gone with 4096 (and not 1024 as it is just too close to the breakable edge). Thanks for clarifying things though :-)
There seems to be one slight point you are missing....every "secure" site out there (AFAIK) uses RSA encryption. We want apache and mozilla to be able to play with everyone else ASWELL as offering technically superior solutions.
Also while RSA has been cracked, the costs of cracking are still appreciable for correct strength encryption (i.e. not that 40 or 56 bit stuff the US government wanted to make all the terrorists use so they could read their communications). AFAIK if you use 1024 bit RSA encryption it is going to take millions of dollars years to break it and that is good enough for my email, even 128 bit encryption is going to take $100,000 a week or two to open. If you are sending data that could have someone willing to spend a fortune to gain access, the best thing to do is to invest a bit of time yourself into verifying the best route for transfering the data taking into account the entire process (key-exchange, route of couriers for possible ambush if any physical acts, tapped lines etc. etc.).
What this NSS is about is howto stop Joe Publics purchase of their T -Shirt online from giving their credit card details to anyone who can packet sniff the route.
If you check the link you will see:
and it offers the Mozilla Crypto FAQ as a link to discuss the implications of the expiration of the RSA patents.Is it just me or has the number of people posting to stories who have not looked at the content been increasing to a critical S/N ratio?
So does that mean that if I translate DeCSS (or any other non-DMCA compliant program) to perl (how about a new category in the perl poetry competition for DeCSS) then it will become an expression and not a program and therefore be protected by Free Speach? (I'm Irish so I don't care now, but I want to see these laws smashed before I have to care).
Oh well, time to test my C skills to see how it goes :-)
This is actually a very, very good idea. One of the alleged reasons for this competition in the first place is to try and track the people who would or could crack this. I for one couldn't (unless I happened to be the perfect monkey happening on War and Peace at the keyboard) but I would want to see this cracked the second it is released. I am going to go and download everything I can find now, and everyone else who wants to see this cracked in the end should do the same. Then when they go chasing the crackers we can watch them plough through the slashdot effect to try and find a culprit.
Of course if I happen to have a monkey day and do crack it......I'll be waiting for launch time:-) About the only thing this competition should guarantee is that everything will be broken even quicker than before!
Oooooops how blind of me
Duh Slashdot,
yet again we have provided someone with a rake load of traffic for.....NOTHING.
The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.
I haven't been as happy in a long time as when I saw this story posted (this is essentially the decision I am making in the next fortnight or so baring the Radeon) and to have actually read a document on what you could get out of these under Linux would have been brilliant. Instead I am another person writing a comment about the quality of the posted story on /.
Do you agree with this Trojan-style approach taken by the Barenaked Ladies?
And the results after 3583 Votes are:
Yes: 57% (2037)
No: 43% (1546)
Really, we have already seen porn banners and usage tracking scams on Gnutella and Napster, here one band is actually using the medium to try and do a bit of self promotion. They (I'm sure) are under no self-delusion that they are going to manage to obfuscate access to the real mp3s of their music, they are just reminding all the people who are hunting for their music that it would be nice if they actually paid for it.
The REAL question is could the RIAA break Napster/Gnutella etc. as a useful tool by bombarding it with files like these (or just corrupt mp3s) and would it be economically viable to do this (just how much bandwidth would they need).
About 3 months ago I bought a Creative DVD 8x kit with the DxR3 card. I have yet to manage to buy a DVD to even try playing one on it because I will not support the assh*les. The closest I came to buying a DVD was with both SouthPark BLU (can't remember which MPAA type was actually distributing though that stopped me) and Madonna's Music video with AliG (but than the RIAA would get money out of me...no can't do it). I don't have any other DVD equipment and it was PC Plus's distribution of Cover DVDs (and in particular a double sided one half win, one half Suse6.4 DVD edition) that got me to buy one.
I don't buy DVDs, Videos, Cinema Tickets or Music (excluding club and radio). I put my money where my mouth is and it hasn't killed me. Do you think they've noticed yet...I don't but it doesn't stop me. The question with these things is always will anyone break from the sheep mentality and say "we don't care if everyone does X, Y is right so thats what we do, even if it does mean we don't make as much OR we charge more".
It is not right for corporations to live for the LCD but they do, I honestly think that one is the matter of the public standing up for itself and refusing crap just because everything is crap. If we can vote with our wallets we will win.
As for the need for nanny state intervention...why not. I have no problem with the government muscling in on MS, they must be subjected to the same rules and we all must apply them though...
Vote with your wallet or Vote with the ballot Paper but either way VOTE
If your using mozilaa (2000091306 anyway) you can set the Search button on the Toolbar to take your location box string and use it as the search term to your choice of the engines from netscape.com. you can even get the results coming into the sidebar (seems to also put them in the browser window...but looking at it that's perfect :-)
No need for visiting the Netscape Search Page and no need for the '?'
Now what the fsck sort of a comment is that! Did you read the story? So its great for Google that where they were once doing a good job of finding directory sites due to their link based analysis, they are now finding only Yahoo!
Are you on drugs? Are you the Signal11 that means I'm gonna get my karma slapped?
NOTHING IN THIS IS ABOUT ADVERTISING so why are you shouting about it? This is actually bad news for Google as it appears to be demonstrable evidence that their deal with Yahoo has caused them to lose one of their competitive advantages. how long before your precious advertising limitations are gone and will that be good for Google?
Yup, the point I was trying to make was that what they are doing is not any different to the car salesman....... none of us like to see people taken for a free ride.
We cannot object to the concept on principle, but this is a topic for Slashdot discussion because we should be trying to see if there are any ways they could be using which are not or should not be legal. If they are only gathering your info from their site I don't believe anyone can have a problem with that. If they are matching this up with data from other sources (e.g. doubleclick as mentioned) to track you all over the place because you are one of their customers that is equivalent to hiring a PI to follow you to see how you drive cars and which of your friends cars you look at and how much money you have and ..... you get the idea it is illegal.
Just because it is digital and/or online should not change the legailty of an issue, the difficulty is in coming up with suitable paradigms for these new online techniques in the real world whose law should apply.
I don't want anything for free except my Freedom, I just feel that whether legal or not we should all draw attention to the immoral business acts (such as patenting the one-click shopping IMHO) of any company so that we can vote with our wallets, hits and feet rather than be dragged along in the blind.
I don't know if Amazon are doing anything immoral here, but I think it more likely for someone here to know (or figure out) what they are doing than in any other forum.
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Admitedly someone can't spell (crporations) but it is reassuring beyond belief to see that 95% of the surveys respondents do not agree with the capatilist tripe that gets spouted so often (especially here on Slashdot..."it's their xxx they can do what they want with it" etc.etc.). Morality is alive and well, I can't wait to see the backlash build against the media corporations who have spent 30 years developing a mass market that hates them for being so patronising:-)The problem is not that they are charging whatever price they want.... the problem is that they are (most certainly though I have no proof) using every bit of data they can gather through cookies and doubleclick and invisible images etc. With all the demographic data they can gather they can start trying to guess (with some degree of accuracy) how much they can get away with charging you.
Now when you arrive at amazon, what they would want is to ID you as a cross-shopper and therefore ensure they give you the lowest price in the marketplace, it might recongise me as a convienince shopper who would rather save the 20 minutes and not care if it costs an extra few dollars. What happens when I decide to use my friends PC and then end up gettting a higher price (or lower) on that purchase? We here on Slashdot don't seem to like the idea of user data tracking at the levels that would make this useful to Amazon, and I find repugnant the idea that they would use these systems for a real world purpose (as opposed to generating stats). Should a shop be able to surupticiously mark you down as an easy touch? Used car salesmen have done it for long enough and while we all agree that it is a case of "buyer beware" is there not a point at which it is criminal?
I'd gues you have been marked as Flamebait because everything you said was in an aggressive and derogatory manor (imho) and I think your post highlights something I mentioned once before....Slashdot needs BOTH -1 Flamebait and +1 Flamebait. Some posts are just plain agro and are obviously looking for a fight, but if they are relevant, insightful, interesting or just plain the right argument to be having (as opposed to well DVDs play better on *BSD because I can optimise my .........) then they should be moderated up as worthwhile posts even if they are prodominently Flamebait. Flamebait can most definetly be positive, it can inspire discussions and that is what Slashdot is about. The stupid negative moderation of provocative posts simply because they are provacative must end. I guess Andover wouldn't like this though as it might make the site a little less palatable to the mass market. Slashdot already is zealous and biased, so why not let people express their opinions and let the arguments ensue instead of trying to get the arguments moderated down for being inciteful (to flame).
I am running Corel Linux Second Edition (2.2.16 kernel) at present and all of its Netscape Bookmarks (and it has a relatively nice selection including Slashdot) pass through product.corel.com, as does the default Homepage which is a corel page. I presume this is to gather usage info and stats and don't really have a problem with this sort of tactic. If you don't like the extra smidge of traffic generated fix your bookmarks. If you don't know about it should you care? I don't think so. You are simply providing some usage analysis data and all that is visible is the standard CGI environment (such as User Agent, IP, etc.). It lets them (Corel, MS, Netscape) see just how many users they have, what versions they are using and how useful their bookmarks are. Personal info gathering is still down to the browser (and whether it allows javascript etc), nothing has changed. It has the potential to be about as obnoxious as doubleclick and deserves the same treatment, care and fix it or don't care and let them gather some info based on your usage. Now if anyone can prove that these redirects are used to do some form of persistent tracking and that they are gathering email addresses I will take a different view. Until then ...Dear Slashdot, please stop posting stupid argumentative stories (like InterVideo's press release dissappearing when it is sitting in plain site).
I'm not sure about the case you are refering to but the only case I remeber was the Applied Cryptography example, where the book which described all aspects of encryption technology and contained substantial amounts of code could be exported from the US but NOT with the accompanying CD-Rom. Could DeCSS be distrbuted harm free by paper? Or does the DMCA get this aswell. If paper is ok, what about a fax? If a fax is ok can we post the fax (i.e. the data stream of a g3 fax) online and link to that?
INSTALL is 13164 bytes
README is 254 bytes
linux.bin is 1071900 bytes
uClinux-c2500-uClinux-2_0_38_1pre7.diff is 4351814 bytes
Wristwatches, Routers and what next?
Personally I like the idea of being able to hack anything you want into the router....let it be FREE, but I wonder at the potential havoc that could be caused by bugs in these if it ever adopted in volume (what's cisco's record like at security and bug fixing and will any GPL/OS solution be any better)? I also agree with a previous poster that Cisco are not going to be happy with this if it is viable for production systems. I can forsee the DoJ anti-trust case where Cisco are taken to task for hacking their routers and engaging in anti-competitive practices to maintain their monopoly.....oh dear, somethings never change.
Yep, I heard of Elite (and even worked with the father of its creator/one of its creators). The thing about Elite is that it is a pure Space Stategy Game, no First Person type element (or Pod racing). I want a game where after I leg it round a corner from the squad of Imperial Stormtroopers who are trying to blast me for nicking their power unit, I can hop into my POD/Falcon/HideOut to try and dodge them. I want nearly every game genre covered through one universe, where the aims are gone, the world mearly turns out as the sum of the inputs of its players, and with enough players the game goes beyond the influence of its creators sort-off).
Elite is a marvellous game but you either miss my point entirley or you have a rather grand impression of it.
I have always thought the Ultimate Game myself would be a massive online Star Wars Universe where we can all try to take out DeathStars, lead rebellions, go spying.....whatever we want (pod race to make money, kill innocent bystanders, join Jabba, be a bounty hunter). If the infrastucture was capable of dealing with a million players and the games wouldn't collapse after a few years or so I reckon we could soon see newspapers publishing little tit-bits of news on the war of the Alliance V the Empire.
So how long before Lucas Arts are ready to bring all their Star Wars games together into this beast and would you play?
The standard unit of mass is the kg, and the kg is defined as the mass of a platinum (I think) block stored in Paris. The block is meant to be exactly the same mass as 0.1m x 0.1m x 0.1m of pure water at maximum volume (i.e. 4 degrees C) at standard atmospheric pressure (sea-level, 1 Bar????). Unfortunatley for the idiots making the "block" they never noticed or were unable to discover with the current methods that they were about 0.04% out and hence the whole water idea had to be scrapped and the block was used instead. The question is why did the idiots not just stick with the physical definition and stuff the block!
As for the meter etc. It was created as 1/10e7 of the quarter circumference of the earth through both poles and Paris...however as this is patently absurd and useless it was actually the distance between two scratches held on a metal "ruler". This was subsequently re-expressed (and the definition of the width of the scratches etc. made moot) as both the distance travelled by a certain number of wavelengths of the red-orange emissions of krypton 69 (or some other isotope, I hate chemistry) AND the distance travelled by light in the micro fraction of a second it takes to go a meter (debate has ensued previously over which is the true definition of a meter but I believe it is the multiple of the wavelength of the Krypton).
The whole point of the metric system was to provide a scalable system without all the 12 of these or 16 or those or 3 of these makes a schnugelbindel, a consequence was meant to be the definition of all values by inrefutable physical quantities.....It failed. You could define the Imperial measures by similar means (reduce number of wavelngths and you have a yard, work out the volume of water for a pound) but they would still be a pig to work with when scaling (how big is 10e13 inches or 10e13 cm, I know my mind loves the latter and detests the former). Metric is about the number 10, not about definitions.
Their Legal Claims basically amount to all workplaces will buy a licence from them for any music.
I saw an envelope in my parents house today with "KEEP (re jargon!)" handwritten on addressed to the Company Secretary, My Father's Name, His Address...No company mentioned. I had to peek inside (they often leave computer related junk mail around for me to see/dump) and saw it was from the Irish Music Rights Orgainsation. Now my father's main business (based at home) is software development and has family members as occassional employees beyond himself. I just had to include the full text/html (all emphasis theirs) of the two pages because they are such incredible reading but in brief summary they are requesting that as public music in work requires a licence, they want a declaration on music use in the place of business and the equipment (including private)......Read on...
I wonder who will release first.....Debian, Storm, Corel???? :-).
Wonder how much they will co-operate like Linux people should??
End Result, Debian is THE "Free" OS, by the people for the people and soon it will have two interfaces that dummies can be let loose on (in terms of damaging them not them damaging the machine