As an example... the software checks back with Microsoft to make sure that Microsoft thinks the software I'm running was paid for. That's not for my benefit at all, it's there for Microsoft. Similarly their media player will try to keep me from making copies of things and give them to my friends. That's also not for my benefit either, it's for Microsoft's.
The ISP you work for is breaking the end-to-end principle. I would never choose you as an ISP as I believe the model you have is broken and bad for the Internet as a whole. Luckily ISPs are generally small and local enough that most people can make this choice if they want. I would urge any friend I had to make the same choice I would.
Exactly. I have protections right now that keep people from randomly using my network, but I've been intending to remove them as soon as I get some sort of bandwidth shaping in place and set up the appropriate firewall rules. I WANT to share my network, and I don't think I should have to rename it to some silly name in order to do it. That's how it's supposed to work.
I don't want Microsoft's stamp of approval on any of my software because that most likely means the software is doing things that help out Microsoft at my expense. That's what it means for all of the software they put their stamp of approval on now.
I agree with you, and understand why you might want to leave. My personal biggest reason for criticizing Sony is the DRM in Blu-Ray. But Zonk's comment was ridiculous and his half-retraction was too little, too late.
The conspiracy theory logic of Sony being responsible in part because they manufactured the shortage is interesting, but not really tenable. I would've had much less problem with Zonk's comment though if he had floated that theory directly instead of just implying it.
When I first saw Zonk's comment I thought the article was stating that Sony had hired these guys, because that's the only explanation that leaves Sony with all the blame. And that is apparently (I still haven't RTFA) a totally false impression that the editor is directly responsible for.
No, it's about giving people freedom at the expense of other people's freedom to restrict freedom. For example, the law against kidnapping restricts my freedom to put you in a cage even as it promises you the freedom from random people sticking you in cages.
Umm, and so because they are people, they should be allowed to make hardware that they never really sell, but lie about selling. Because, you know, if they sold it to me, I'd get to do whatever it is I wanted with it. But because of the DMCA, they get to sue any mod-chip manufacturers, and realistically I only get to do what they want me to with it. Hardly even a lease, much less a sale.
What, exactly, does the GPLv3 keep people from doing that they could do before? If your only answer is the thing requiring that if a piece of hardware comes with GPL software that I must be given the needed tools to change that software, then I submit that it is the hardware manufacturer trying to restrict my freedom and that the GPL is protecting it. Do you have a better or different answer?
I do think all analogies are flawed, and I struggled to find one I thought would fit at all. In modern America of course, those who would thwart the engineer have a new word to wave around. They can yell 'security' and everybody will duck, hide and abandon their belief in any part of the constitution whatsoever.
I considered the 'blowing up the bridge' case in thinking about this. To me, the act of blowing up the bridge is what's wrong, not the testing. I agree that the engineer's motives should come under scrutiny. But scrutiny does not mean that they should automatically assumed to be bad.
I do not believe that things should be criminalized unless it can be shown that they are either directly materially harmful, or that there is only a miniscule possibility of the action ever leading to anything but material harm. And I believe even that standard may be a little too lax and that 'only a miniscule' should be replaced with 'no'.
This is actually a really pressing first amendment issue IMHO. This stuff should not be anymore illegal than someone putting a strain gauge on important bridge supports and discovering that the bridge is likely to collapse when 5 18-wheelers go over it at the same time. This kind of targeted disclosure only improves security in the long run.
In fact with the way the laws are written right now, companies act just like politicians would if it were trivial to prove libel.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1
Whee! This post is worthy of its own entry in The Daily WTF. I'm sure glad I don't with you.
This is quite true. OTOH, I do not think that any of the rules in BSD do anything to enhance freedom as a whole. They are largely about giving credit where credit is due. And while this is fine as it goes, it does little to try to preserve or enhance the freedom of the average software user.
I consider the GPLv2 to be less free than the BSD license in precisely the same way as living in a country with a constitution and laws is less free than living in a country without them. Which of those two countries would you rather live in? I know which I'd rather live in. The GPL is a statement of the rules under which we are all free.
And the GPLv3's insistence that I be able to replace the GPL code in my Tivo with my own versions seems to me like a restriction much along the same lines. Whether this is an encroachment on freedom that the GPL should be concerned with is open to debate. But that restricting my ability to do this is an encroachment on my freedom is not open to debate.
While I agree with this statement, it is not enough in and of itself to indict Stallman for this particular crime. So, if you truly think this way about him, please show me some actual evidence instead of merely "This is usually true, so it must be true of Richard Stallman too.".
Re:I frequently disagree with Richard Stallman
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When Stallman is Attacked
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· Score: 2, Informative
They do fork over every single GNU program included in their distribution already. You seem to be very confused about how commercial companies in the free software space operate. A request of that nature by Richard Stallman or anyone else would be to point at the.torrent file for the source CDs. It's all there.
That's how Mandrake/Mandriva got their start. They grabbed all of RedHat's source CDs, and re-branded it as their own after making some changes they considered usability improvements.
I think you're so mired in thinking one way about how software can be sold that you can't see the reality that's right in front of your eyes.
Well, it doesn't matter if most real-world applications are CPU bound or not. Once you start using the 64-bit instructions, your calling conventions and the size of particular data types (like pointers) changes. So either you have to have two different versions of every single library in the system (which will take up twice as much memory when they're both loaded) or you have all your applications be 64-bit.
I'm not going to load up 32-bit versions of every library under the sun just so Flash player can work. That's ridiculous. It's a waste of memory (include precious CPU L1 and L2 cache space) and hard-drive space. And I'm not going to go back to running my OS in 32-bit mode at 50% of the performance just to run Flash Player either.
So, no, I don't think that it's required for performance reasons for Flash player to be 64-bit. But it's required for reasons of some reasonable level of compatibility. And it's not that hard to write code that's clean enough to be ported to a 64-bit platform with few or no modifications. Thousands of Open Source projects have done it, many much more complicated than Flash Player.
The major benefit is the fact that the 64-bit architecture has many extra registers that the 32-bit architecture doesn't have. This makes code written for the 64-bit architecture much faster than code written for the 32-bit architecture even if the code does all 32-bit math.
You do not understand the nature of proprietary development. I think Flash player has a number of major issues internally that make me reluctant to use it for anything. It seems to eat CPU at a low level constantly even when no Flash animations are showing. I don't trust that thing farther than I can throw it.
I'm betting that the code is a huge rats nest with numerous and obscure places where assumptions were made about the sizes of various types that prevent the code from being ported to 64-bit.
That's the only conclusion I can come to after their failure to do this even though 64-bit CPUs have been out for almost 2 years now.
FUSE is an interesting idea, and may help to some extent (no pun intended). But, for example, I want to create a large database in a ~/.dir that consists of many mostly tiny files named after base32 representations of hashes of other bits of data. I could stuff all this data into a database, but the format of the data in the files is going to be highly variable, and some of them will be quite large, so I don't think that's a good solution unless blobs (which are pretty icky in and of themselves) are used.
OTOH, forcing people to mount ~/.dir as a FUSE filesystem to get decent performance doesn't seem right either. Though maybe it's a good idea because much of that data will be highly sensitive cryptographic information, and I could include encryption.
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As an example... the software checks back with Microsoft to make sure that Microsoft thinks the software I'm running was paid for. That's not for my benefit at all, it's there for Microsoft. Similarly their media player will try to keep me from making copies of things and give them to my friends. That's also not for my benefit either, it's for Microsoft's.
The ISP you work for is breaking the end-to-end principle. I would never choose you as an ISP as I believe the model you have is broken and bad for the Internet as a whole. Luckily ISPs are generally small and local enough that most people can make this choice if they want. I would urge any friend I had to make the same choice I would.
Exactly. I have protections right now that keep people from randomly using my network, but I've been intending to remove them as soon as I get some sort of bandwidth shaping in place and set up the appropriate firewall rules. I WANT to share my network, and I don't think I should have to rename it to some silly name in order to do it. That's how it's supposed to work.
Stupid law.
I don't want Microsoft's stamp of approval on any of my software because that most likely means the software is doing things that help out Microsoft at my expense. That's what it means for all of the software they put their stamp of approval on now.
I agree with you, and understand why you might want to leave. My personal biggest reason for criticizing Sony is the DRM in Blu-Ray. But Zonk's comment was ridiculous and his half-retraction was too little, too late.
The conspiracy theory logic of Sony being responsible in part because they manufactured the shortage is interesting, but not really tenable. I would've had much less problem with Zonk's comment though if he had floated that theory directly instead of just implying it.
When I first saw Zonk's comment I thought the article was stating that Sony had hired these guys, because that's the only explanation that leaves Sony with all the blame. And that is apparently (I still haven't RTFA) a totally false impression that the editor is directly responsible for.
No, it's about giving people freedom at the expense of other people's freedom to restrict freedom. For example, the law against kidnapping restricts my freedom to put you in a cage even as it promises you the freedom from random people sticking you in cages.
Umm, and so because they are people, they should be allowed to make hardware that they never really sell, but lie about selling. Because, you know, if they sold it to me, I'd get to do whatever it is I wanted with it. But because of the DMCA, they get to sue any mod-chip manufacturers, and realistically I only get to do what they want me to with it. Hardly even a lease, much less a sale.
What, exactly, does the GPLv3 keep people from doing that they could do before? If your only answer is the thing requiring that if a piece of hardware comes with GPL software that I must be given the needed tools to change that software, then I submit that it is the hardware manufacturer trying to restrict my freedom and that the GPL is protecting it. Do you have a better or different answer?
I take it you don't bother to read the article before posting?
I do think all analogies are flawed, and I struggled to find one I thought would fit at all. In modern America of course, those who would thwart the engineer have a new word to wave around. They can yell 'security' and everybody will duck, hide and abandon their belief in any part of the constitution whatsoever.
I considered the 'blowing up the bridge' case in thinking about this. To me, the act of blowing up the bridge is what's wrong, not the testing. I agree that the engineer's motives should come under scrutiny. But scrutiny does not mean that they should automatically assumed to be bad.
I do not believe that things should be criminalized unless it can be shown that they are either directly materially harmful, or that there is only a miniscule possibility of the action ever leading to anything but material harm. And I believe even that standard may be a little too lax and that 'only a miniscule' should be replaced with 'no'.
This is actually a really pressing first amendment issue IMHO. This stuff should not be anymore illegal than someone putting a strain gauge on important bridge supports and discovering that the bridge is likely to collapse when 5 18-wheelers go over it at the same time. This kind of targeted disclosure only improves security in the long run.
In fact with the way the laws are written right now, companies act just like politicians would if it were trivial to prove libel.
Whee! This post is worthy of its own entry in The Daily WTF. I'm sure glad I don't with you.
I'm not saying it does. I believe I said the exact opposite.
I like that quote. Thanks! :-)
This is quite true. OTOH, I do not think that any of the rules in BSD do anything to enhance freedom as a whole. They are largely about giving credit where credit is due. And while this is fine as it goes, it does little to try to preserve or enhance the freedom of the average software user.
I consider the GPLv2 to be less free than the BSD license in precisely the same way as living in a country with a constitution and laws is less free than living in a country without them. Which of those two countries would you rather live in? I know which I'd rather live in. The GPL is a statement of the rules under which we are all free.
And the GPLv3's insistence that I be able to replace the GPL code in my Tivo with my own versions seems to me like a restriction much along the same lines. Whether this is an encroachment on freedom that the GPL should be concerned with is open to debate. But that restricting my ability to do this is an encroachment on my freedom is not open to debate.
While I agree with this statement, it is not enough in and of itself to indict Stallman for this particular crime. So, if you truly think this way about him, please show me some actual evidence instead of merely "This is usually true, so it must be true of Richard Stallman too.".
They do fork over every single GNU program included in their distribution already. You seem to be very confused about how commercial companies in the free software space operate. A request of that nature by Richard Stallman or anyone else would be to point at the .torrent file for the source CDs. It's all there.
That's how Mandrake/Mandriva got their start. They grabbed all of RedHat's source CDs, and re-branded it as their own after making some changes they considered usability improvements.
I think you're so mired in thinking one way about how software can be sold that you can't see the reality that's right in front of your eyes.
You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means!
What were the editors thinking?! I'm flabbergasted that this didn't make the front page. It certainly deserved the space more than the gaim article.
Well, it doesn't matter if most real-world applications are CPU bound or not. Once you start using the 64-bit instructions, your calling conventions and the size of particular data types (like pointers) changes. So either you have to have two different versions of every single library in the system (which will take up twice as much memory when they're both loaded) or you have all your applications be 64-bit.
I'm not going to load up 32-bit versions of every library under the sun just so Flash player can work. That's ridiculous. It's a waste of memory (include precious CPU L1 and L2 cache space) and hard-drive space. And I'm not going to go back to running my OS in 32-bit mode at 50% of the performance just to run Flash Player either.
So, no, I don't think that it's required for performance reasons for Flash player to be 64-bit. But it's required for reasons of some reasonable level of compatibility. And it's not that hard to write code that's clean enough to be ported to a 64-bit platform with few or no modifications. Thousands of Open Source projects have done it, many much more complicated than Flash Player.
OK, two years of widespread availability of 8086/80186/80286/80386/... compatible 64-bit processors. :-)
The major benefit is the fact that the 64-bit architecture has many extra registers that the 32-bit architecture doesn't have. This makes code written for the 64-bit architecture much faster than code written for the 32-bit architecture even if the code does all 32-bit math.
You do not understand the nature of proprietary development. I think Flash player has a number of major issues internally that make me reluctant to use it for anything. It seems to eat CPU at a low level constantly even when no Flash animations are showing. I don't trust that thing farther than I can throw it.
I'm betting that the code is a huge rats nest with numerous and obscure places where assumptions were made about the sizes of various types that prevent the code from being ported to 64-bit.
That's the only conclusion I can come to after their failure to do this even though 64-bit CPUs have been out for almost 2 years now.
FUSE is an interesting idea, and may help to some extent (no pun intended). But, for example, I want to create a large database in a ~/.dir that consists of many mostly tiny files named after base32 representations of hashes of other bits of data. I could stuff all this data into a database, but the format of the data in the files is going to be highly variable, and some of them will be quite large, so I don't think that's a good solution unless blobs (which are pretty icky in and of themselves) are used.
OTOH, forcing people to mount ~/.dir as a FUSE filesystem to get decent performance doesn't seem right either. Though maybe it's a good idea because much of that data will be highly sensitive cryptographic information, and I could include encryption.