Well, consider you are a terminally ill patient depending on your doctor to survive. The doctor has to eat and so they have to charge you for both expensive medicine and labour. Thus, you owe doctor money, even if you haven't payed it yet, you basically are in a state where your well-being depends on you having spared cash or other goods the doctor may want - maybe by some freakish thought they want your wife or your house, and liberate you from shelling out money. You have a mutual agreement where you provide doctor with something, and the doctor provides you with an extension to your precious life on Earth. You owe eachother, you depend on each other - the good doctor needs likes of you for income, and you need them. This is all that I meant with "owing". In principle, this is the same as two governments owing money to each other - in essense, as money carries no value but what is agreed upon, the governments are either pissed off both or acknowledge that they are co-dependent on eachother. As wars are very expensive these days, and as the current state of modern civilisation urgently needs innovation, we are either approaching a Peak Value / Peak Dollar (drawing paralell to Peak Oil) and thus simply can erase each others debts and shake hands and say "Clean slate mate, let's work together from the bottom again" (hardware reset in a way) or you can get aggressive, which is stupid, given the monetary reasons.
The cue here is the fact that mankind slowly but surely approaches that deciding point in time where everyone owes everyone else, directly or indirectly, money, but is unable to pay. Just look at U.S. - trillions in debt, everything is just promised back in promises themselves. Everything is in a perpetual state of "I owe you" . That's hardly news, since, ironically, the very natural state of existence is owing eachother. The problem is converting this into real value, and demanding it back. That's the difference part.
Likewise, by virtue of unberable capitalism economy, where you need to maximize your profits at any cost to survive, it was only a matter of time before it came to this - the fight against piracy is so acute that even pirating anti-piracy IP becomes an option. The lesson to learn here is - if you can't live by your own rules, don't impose them on others.
The ultimate lesson you should have learned, is to not convert anybody to anything. Because things are fleeting, and by the time you are wrong, people have lost their confidence in your conversion process. The especially applies to software, and especially to open source software, and especially to people like you who used it from 2003-2004. Software is like LEGO - bits and pieces constantly changing the arrangement to compose something. It is naive of you to expect something to stay the same forever. What you CAN hope for is for the process of arranging pieces to improve to the point where it does not cause users of a particular construction any visible discomfort. This is where software industry fails. We treat our users like lab subjects.
You sound like somebody who used to go to church as a good Christian, but has since embraced atheism. After converting a good handful from the mundane, of course.
Oh gods, when will they realize it's not the most hip and fashionable Photoshop filters that make a good desktop experience. Drop shadows can be a good thing for depth perception with windows and panels, but drop shadows and highlights and glow filters everywhere, rounded corners like it's a an IKEA catalog and soon to be that copied-to-death reflection effect everywhere - that does not make a computer desktop. They have 10 graphic designer per 1 programmer probably. Figures, it's one thing sliding sliders in Photoshop, and another methodically going over thousands of lines of code. Still, that does not mean this is second coming of Jesus. It's the good old KDE, wrapped in fancy packaging again, rest assured. What they need to do is completely isolate the looks from the walks, and don't tout updates to the former as anything newsworthy. If they indeed value their "skinnability" that much, then the looks shouldn't really matter, should they? They should read about MVC too.
GNOME may be stupid, and I have my gripes with it (if anything it seems the whole idiocy with overused effects and translucency has smitten GNOME as well), but at least they do some work on the less shall we say obvious things, but things which support the entire desktop foundation - single configuration interface, consistency, at least at the top of the vendor pyramid, etc.
KDE still appears to be like a spare time college project, and i don't mean it as a good thing.
Filmatise events of "Star Control 2" instead. The story is just as rich, if not richer. One could even keep most of the stage props from an already started ME filming production:-)
The point is that since the ECMA specification is open and standardized, the work of producing interpreter code is very straightforward and in fact already available in a relatively-platform-independent programming language - C - as f.e. SpiderMonkey project by Mozilla. This all as opposed to having to wade through vague SWF "specification" by Adobe AND to account for the quirks of the Flash Player (which is the de-facto SWF player) while doing that.
Shorter put, as evidence and observation would have it, making GNASH has proven to be far more difficult than making Spidermonkey. That alone says it all, pretty much.
Binary vs plain-text has nothing to do with this. What is important is that there is a plain-text program (i.e. source code) that can make sense of the "binary".
If we would follow your model, we would also need ten times storage space for everything. That is not always feasable. Computers think in binary, no need to force them to read human text because you do. If you disagree, read the first paragraph again.
I bow to your orating skills, sir. Sometimes it is far more valuable to be able to express ones opinions in a clear manner, than actually being right about everything. And I don't mean that you are wrong, but posts like this one make Slashdot a good place to be.
You are a lying sack of shit. I am using a Thinkpad T43 from 2005 with a single core Pentium M CPU on an Ubuntu 32-bit 9.04 and that Pacman thing runs just fine with Firefox 3.5.9.
Don't be silly. First of all, there are stores that think just ramming YOUR card number along with some juicy details like owner name, expiration data, and CVC code, in their OWN MySQL database is a good idea. If you have a brain, you know that's a store to watch out for. THen again, most respected smaller stores in full knowledge they don't know how to do banking "outsource" it by means of delegating all sensitive stuff through some net-banking provider which is usually your bank. When your bank fucks up, you call them and get the money back. This is why we expect it otherwise online - because you won't get your money back otherwise. Banks carry responsibility, a random website that is stupid enough to require you login to buy a box of vintage Coke bottles, in effect, does not.
If we assume that your fingerprint is assembled wholly at your side, then I would say you are RELATIVELY safe from it being disassembled into components that could compromise your realworld identity. One way to make the fingerprint irreversible like that is to encrypt it with a throw-away random key, also at client side. The unique but absolutely meaningless string arriving at the other end will uniquely identify YOUR END, NOT YOU. You can continue shopping and surfing porn, and all they got is a random string. If the porn site wants a fingerprint, they will get another value which will also identify you ACROSS THEIR DOMAIN. The two parties will not be able to cross-correlate their "databases" for any result. They will each contain a database of non-colliding pieces of data, one per each unique user, but they will not make any sense of comparing these.
Well, if you are going to enlighten us on Flash, let me help you. You can go much farther than just forwarding the list of fonts to a fingerprint making machine. Why not also grab:
1. Flash Player version and host OS 2. Flash Player "is a debugger player version" flag 3. Flash Player "is embedded" (browser/standalone) flag
There is more, like locale, accessibility flags delegated from the OS, and I would imagine some 5 or 10 more samples that will help you with the fingerpring entropy. Flash is wonderful!
Appreciate practical thinking, but it is also very small minded of you. It won't get you very far in any direction. There will be other query objects than fonts. What do you propose for them? "Don't advertise this?" checkbox for each and every bit of an API.
Fingerprinting efficiency is supported by the very same factor that improves usability of computers. In my opinion, even with your understandable good motivation, the results will not be something the users will like. A lot of applications will break because someone decided to clear the "Don't advertise my fonts" FOR the user, because they themselves are paranoid. Fair enough, but like always, your users will not even hate you for it, they will switch to an alternative. Unless you go fascist and deny them that too.
I would say we are currently at the infancy of fingerprinting. It is a really powerful concept in my opinion, but what it lacks is some help from the field of statistics. What I am getting at is this: imagine you have a script that randomly shuffles and/or adds bogus font references. Todays fingerprinting is more than fragile enough to take you as a completely different client, indeed.
Tomorrow however, they will start stat'ing graphs where they will identify the periods/wavelets based on the bogus data you spew out, and they will make a pattern out of it. That pattern will add to your unique fingerprint, and you are at the start tile again. Think about it. Of course, a bit science-fiction, but who thought someone would actually go as far as fingerprinting anyway?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
No worries, we, inmates, will soon run the asylum.
Well, consider you are a terminally ill patient depending on your doctor to survive. The doctor has to eat and so they have to charge you for both expensive medicine and labour. Thus, you owe doctor money, even if you haven't payed it yet, you basically are in a state where your well-being depends on you having spared cash or other goods the doctor may want - maybe by some freakish thought they want your wife or your house, and liberate you from shelling out money. You have a mutual agreement where you provide doctor with something, and the doctor provides you with an extension to your precious life on Earth. You owe eachother, you depend on each other - the good doctor needs likes of you for income, and you need them. This is all that I meant with "owing". In principle, this is the same as two governments owing money to each other - in essense, as money carries no value but what is agreed upon, the governments are either pissed off both or acknowledge that they are co-dependent on eachother. As wars are very expensive these days, and as the current state of modern civilisation urgently needs innovation, we are either approaching a Peak Value / Peak Dollar (drawing paralell to Peak Oil) and thus simply can erase each others debts and shake hands and say "Clean slate mate, let's work together from the bottom again" (hardware reset in a way) or you can get aggressive, which is stupid, given the monetary reasons.
The cue here is the fact that mankind slowly but surely approaches that deciding point in time where everyone owes everyone else, directly or indirectly, money, but is unable to pay. Just look at U.S. - trillions in debt, everything is just promised back in promises themselves. Everything is in a perpetual state of "I owe you" . That's hardly news, since, ironically, the very natural state of existence is owing eachother. The problem is converting this into real value, and demanding it back. That's the difference part.
Likewise, by virtue of unberable capitalism economy, where you need to maximize your profits at any cost to survive, it was only a matter of time before it came to this - the fight against piracy is so acute that even pirating anti-piracy IP becomes an option. The lesson to learn here is - if you can't live by your own rules, don't impose them on others.
The ultimate lesson you should have learned, is to not convert anybody to anything. Because things are fleeting, and by the time you are wrong, people have lost their confidence in your conversion process. The especially applies to software, and especially to open source software, and especially to people like you who used it from 2003-2004. Software is like LEGO - bits and pieces constantly changing the arrangement to compose something. It is naive of you to expect something to stay the same forever. What you CAN hope for is for the process of arranging pieces to improve to the point where it does not cause users of a particular construction any visible discomfort. This is where software industry fails. We treat our users like lab subjects.
You sound like somebody who used to go to church as a good Christian, but has since embraced atheism. After converting a good handful from the mundane, of course.
Oh gods, when will they realize it's not the most hip and fashionable Photoshop filters that make a good desktop experience. Drop shadows can be a good thing for depth perception with windows and panels, but drop shadows and highlights and glow filters everywhere, rounded corners like it's a an IKEA catalog and soon to be that copied-to-death reflection effect everywhere - that does not make a computer desktop. They have 10 graphic designer per 1 programmer probably. Figures, it's one thing sliding sliders in Photoshop, and another methodically going over thousands of lines of code. Still, that does not mean this is second coming of Jesus. It's the good old KDE, wrapped in fancy packaging again, rest assured. What they need to do is completely isolate the looks from the walks, and don't tout updates to the former as anything newsworthy. If they indeed value their "skinnability" that much, then the looks shouldn't really matter, should they? They should read about MVC too.
GNOME may be stupid, and I have my gripes with it (if anything it seems the whole idiocy with overused effects and translucency has smitten GNOME as well), but at least they do some work on the less shall we say obvious things, but things which support the entire desktop foundation - single configuration interface, consistency, at least at the top of the vendor pyramid, etc.
KDE still appears to be like a spare time college project, and i don't mean it as a good thing.
Just about any UNIX shell, including 'sh' and most of its modern derivatives, is orders of magnitude more powerful than DOS batch file processor.
I don't see any voting bins...
Filmatise events of "Star Control 2" instead. The story is just as rich, if not richer. One could even keep most of the stage props from an already started ME filming production :-)
iShiver
So, you are pretending to get the big and deep picture? Gee, and there was I, reading Steve Jobs' latest letter, thinking he WAS an idealist.
Seriously though, you are seeing things.
The point is that since the ECMA specification is open and standardized, the work of producing interpreter code is very straightforward and in fact already available in a relatively-platform-independent programming language - C - as f.e. SpiderMonkey project by Mozilla. This all as opposed to having to wade through vague SWF "specification" by Adobe AND to account for the quirks of the Flash Player (which is the de-facto SWF player) while doing that.
Shorter put, as evidence and observation would have it, making GNASH has proven to be far more difficult than making Spidermonkey. That alone says it all, pretty much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)
Binary vs plain-text has nothing to do with this. What is important is that there is a plain-text program (i.e. source code) that can make sense of the "binary".
If we would follow your model, we would also need ten times storage space for everything. That is not always feasable. Computers think in binary, no need to force them to read human text because you do. If you disagree, read the first paragraph again.
I bow to your orating skills, sir. Sometimes it is far more valuable to be able to express ones opinions in a clear manner, than actually being right about everything. And I don't mean that you are wrong, but posts like this one make Slashdot a good place to be.
There is nothing in the license agreement that prohibits making and distributing SWF players. I just read it.
You are a lying sack of shit. I am using a Thinkpad T43 from 2005 with a single core Pentium M CPU on an Ubuntu 32-bit 9.04 and that Pacman thing runs just fine with Firefox 3.5.9.
Are you serious? :-)
Fake!
Don't be silly. First of all, there are stores that think just ramming YOUR card number along with some juicy details like owner name, expiration data, and CVC code, in their OWN MySQL database is a good idea. If you have a brain, you know that's a store to watch out for. THen again, most respected smaller stores in full knowledge they don't know how to do banking "outsource" it by means of delegating all sensitive stuff through some net-banking provider which is usually your bank. When your bank fucks up, you call them and get the money back. This is why we expect it otherwise online - because you won't get your money back otherwise. Banks carry responsibility, a random website that is stupid enough to require you login to buy a box of vintage Coke bottles, in effect, does not.
If we assume that your fingerprint is assembled wholly at your side, then I would say you are RELATIVELY safe from it being disassembled into components that could compromise your realworld identity. One way to make the fingerprint irreversible like that is to encrypt it with a throw-away random key, also at client side. The unique but absolutely meaningless string arriving at the other end will uniquely identify YOUR END, NOT YOU. You can continue shopping and surfing porn, and all they got is a random string. If the porn site wants a fingerprint, they will get another value which will also identify you ACROSS THEIR DOMAIN. The two parties will not be able to cross-correlate their "databases" for any result. They will each contain a database of non-colliding pieces of data, one per each unique user, but they will not make any sense of comparing these.
Well, if you are going to enlighten us on Flash, let me help you. You can go much farther than just forwarding the list of fonts to a fingerprint making machine. Why not also grab:
1. Flash Player version and host OS
2. Flash Player "is a debugger player version" flag
3. Flash Player "is embedded" (browser/standalone) flag
There is more, like locale, accessibility flags delegated from the OS, and I would imagine some 5 or 10 more samples that will help you with the fingerpring entropy. Flash is wonderful!
Appreciate practical thinking, but it is also very small minded of you. It won't get you very far in any direction. There will be other query objects than fonts. What do you propose for them? "Don't advertise this?" checkbox for each and every bit of an API.
Fingerprinting efficiency is supported by the very same factor that improves usability of computers. In my opinion, even with your understandable good motivation, the results will not be something the users will like. A lot of applications will break because someone decided to clear the "Don't advertise my fonts" FOR the user, because they themselves are paranoid. Fair enough, but like always, your users will not even hate you for it, they will switch to an alternative. Unless you go fascist and deny them that too.
I would say we are currently at the infancy of fingerprinting. It is a really powerful concept in my opinion, but what it lacks is some help from the field of statistics. What I am getting at is this: imagine you have a script that randomly shuffles and/or adds bogus font references. Todays fingerprinting is more than fragile enough to take you as a completely different client, indeed.
Tomorrow however, they will start stat'ing graphs where they will identify the periods/wavelets based on the bogus data you spew out, and they will make a pattern out of it. That pattern will add to your unique fingerprint, and you are at the start tile again. Think about it. Of course, a bit science-fiction, but who thought someone would actually go as far as fingerprinting anyway? :-)
Screen size, not window size.
Why so serious?