It doesn't take advantage of a hole in the windows software, like an unchecked buffer or anything.
It does take advantage of the fact that Windows allows a blank user password as a valid means of authentication. In fact, it does take advantage of "an unchecked buffer" of sorts, as the "set password" phase of the new account wizard apparently fails to check whether or not there's anything in the buffer holding the new user's password!
$0.99 per track. I think that's a bit steep unless they have some slick way of giving you album art and liner notes or other bonus materials.
To me, the fact that the good songs on an album are no longer "tied" (by antitrust definition) to the filler more than makes up for that. This service is for people who want singles; this one is for people who want albums.
That you pay for your connection is entirely irrelevant. That is a sunk cost
In the United States, an Internet connection with acceptable web-surfing and e-mail speed costs $10 to $20 per month depending on provider. An Internet connection with acceptable music-downloading speed costs $30 per month more than that. This price difference between dial-up and broadband is your "additional charges for downloading".
Why on earth would you ever pay $20+ for a set of lower-than-cd-quality songs without the physical CD or packaging?
Because I don't have to buy the songs I don't want. Many recent albums have about two or three singles and 8+ filler tracks.
no more distribution/pressing/packaging costs.
What about the cost of maintaining the system's back end, front end, and Internet connection?
The artist should take over their own promotion and distribution of their music via their website - or a 3rd party hosting service.
So in that case, without the backing of a major music publisher and a major record label, how is an artist supposed to verify that the song he wrote doesn't infringe the copyright of a song he happened to have heard on the radio? (Take Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs for precedent.)
The old-style music distributors are obsolete
The labels still have one purpose in the modern music industry: to separate the Universal Records wheat from the MP3.com chaff. They sign only acts that are good enough to have a reasonable chance of commercial success.
Charging $2 or even $1 per song is NOT CHEAP. Cheap is 25c to maybe 50c depending on the song.
I don't think a US$0.25 per song price point would be realistic. It costs US$0.08 per downloaded song just to pay the songwriter, and not only will that increase in step with the Consumer Price Index, but it can be even higher outside the U.S.
I find $1 per song REALLY CHEAP. An album costs $14 new at Best Buy or $7 used at a local pawn shop. If it has three good songs and nine senseless filler, it can be cheaper to buy the good songs at $1 per than to spend $7 on an album, even after figuring in music downloading's share of the marginal cost of high-speed Internet access vs. dial-up Internet access.
The NES port of Contiki is developed by Groepaz and currently works but without networking support because there is no networking hardware for the NES available (yet!).
If you know much about electrical engineering, the nesdev community could use your expertise in creating network hardware for the NES. Even a high-speed serial port would be a good thing.
Tell me again why the editors keep posting clear solicitations for legal advice to Ask Slashdot...
Believe it or not, many Slashdot readers have talked with attorneys, and some may have discussed similar issues with their counsel. Secondhand legal advice ("my lawyer told me this") is good for an initial survey of the legal landscape so that a client can know some of what's going on before the initial consultation.
Disclaimers: No warranty, this isn't legal advice, make sure your BS meter is well calibrated, etc.
Don't those idiots realize that 4 player capable GameCube with progressive scan would be the ultimate platform for some serious Worms action?
It takes a much bigger company to publish a console game than to publish a PC game. Besides, most 5-year-old television sets (the displays used for GCN systems in practice) cannot interpret a progressive signal.
Worms on GC would be a better party game then Super Mario Party
I don't like the Mario Party series either. The preferred party game in my circle of friends is Super Smash Bros.
I thought Mario was a plumber, not a janitor!
The Mario brothers take whatever jobs they can get in this recession.
Why the fuck is he running around with a vacuum cleaner sucking up GHOSTS?
Why did the ghostbusting title released at the GCN launch feature Luigi Mario? Easy. Nintendo didn't want to license the Ghostbusters franchise.
To help you remember the difference between Super Mario Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion: Luigi sucks, Mario blows, and Yoshi swallows.
Ignore the scripts of the latest DreamWorks, Fox, and Disney animated features and concentrate only on their visual production values. How can you claim that animation can not be of a high quality?
A lot of people will buy 64 bit versions of games whether they really get any benefit from the 64 bitness or not.
But what if games only come in a 64-bit version? I'm thinking about Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, Tetrisphere, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Paper Mario, etc. Many of those didn't get any benefit from the 64-bitness (especially The New Tetris and Dr. Mario 64), but the N64 was the only console Nintendo was supporting at the time (the Super NES had died by then).
I'll point out the story of the wolf and the three pigs who made their houses out of straw, wood, and brick.
In the version of "The Three Little Pigs" that I heard, the wolf only wanted to borrow a cup of sugar, not knowing how stingy his porcine neighbors were. Blowing the house down? That was an accident; the wolf had a cold. But this doesn't change your point that brick construction survives great winds better than thatch or wood.
Why not? People [patch binary executable files] all the time on other OSes.
Games on Windows for one, come to mind.
No. As Gordonjcp mentioned they replace binaries, for precisely the reason you state next:
Now yes one will have to draw a line at which one sends the whole thing vs a diff (75%?).
A fellow often sees such an effect from a whole-program compiler optimization or from re-engineering to fix bugs, especially when the compiler uses a different register allocation or when the developer has added or removed a field or method from a class.
It's that or wait till everyone has Broadband.
I would rather not sit still for over seven years while the local cable monopolies and the local telephone monopolies get their collective poop together and push the price of broadband down to where dial-up is today. I know people who are still on 33.6 because they are banned from working and have parents too poor to fit a modem into their disposable income.
Nahm I don't see how it would make "apt-get install foo" any easier.
Especially because even though apt-get automatically fetches and installs dependencies, it takes an hour to do so over dial-up. And no, home-priced broadband isn't available everywhere in the United States, let alone everywhere in the world.
So... you're arguing for dropping GIF support, right?
No, I'm asking what's the best way to deliver small animated images to a web browser without all the overhead of Flash or the patent problems of GIF.
Decompressing LZW data is apparently not covered under the LZW patent. If you remove support for reading GIF images from a web browser you develop, you'll get endless tech support calls from people who claim that "the damn intarweb's busted."
You have to defend trademarks, not patents or copyrights. You can sit and let a patent stagnate for 10 years and then sue the balls off everyone later.
If an alleged infringer convinces a U.S. court that a patent holder has harmed competitors by delaying legal action relating to a patent, the court may impose "laches" on him. Laches would mean that he cannot collect damages for infringements that had occurred before the patent holder brought legal action. Precedent states that a delay of at least six years is presumed harmful to competitors.
(2) Subject to the payment of fees under this title, such grant shall be for a term beginning on the date on which the patent issues and ending 70 years after the death of the last surviving inventor.
GIF possibly patented? Well, now we have.png, which is also a superior format.
It's not superior if nobody can view it. Among popular web browsers, only KHTML-based (Konqueror; Safari) and Gecko-based (Mozilla; Netscape) browsers can display the MNG format. The most popular web browser supports GIF animations but not PNG animations out of the box. Thus, to reach the largest audiences, web sites will still serve animated advertisement banners as GIF instead of MNG.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't take advantage of a hole in the windows software, like an unchecked buffer or anything.
It does take advantage of the fact that Windows allows a blank user password as a valid means of authentication. In fact, it does take advantage of "an unchecked buffer" of sorts, as the "set password" phase of the new account wizard apparently fails to check whether or not there's anything in the buffer holding the new user's password!
The password from Wargames protects the authorization to use a missile with a nuclear warhead.
Perhaps the best solution would be biometrics?
Bruce Schneier warns that biometrics cannot be revoked. If somebody pirates your thumbprint, you can't be issued a new one ;-)
If you had read the article (jk) then you would know that the worm attacks those with simply passwords like [empty]
And what's the password for a new account on Windows XP Home Edition created by the most obvious method, using all default settings?
Answer: [empty]
My computer's password is not performa6230.
You're paying the artist for their time and talent, which has a value.
If I'm paying the author of the work, then why does the copyright last for several decades after the author has died?
$0.99 per track. I think that's a bit steep unless they have some slick way of giving you album art and liner notes or other bonus materials.
To me, the fact that the good songs on an album are no longer "tied" (by antitrust definition) to the filler more than makes up for that. This service is for people who want singles; this one is for people who want albums.
That you pay for your connection is entirely irrelevant. That is a sunk cost
In the United States, an Internet connection with acceptable web-surfing and e-mail speed costs $10 to $20 per month depending on provider. An Internet connection with acceptable music-downloading speed costs $30 per month more than that. This price difference between dial-up and broadband is your "additional charges for downloading".
Why on earth would you ever pay $20+ for a set of lower-than-cd-quality songs without the physical CD or packaging?
Because I don't have to buy the songs I don't want. Many recent albums have about two or three singles and 8+ filler tracks.
no more distribution/pressing/packaging costs.
What about the cost of maintaining the system's back end, front end, and Internet connection?
The artist should take over their own promotion and distribution of their music via their website - or a 3rd party hosting service.
So in that case, without the backing of a major music publisher and a major record label, how is an artist supposed to verify that the song he wrote doesn't infringe the copyright of a song he happened to have heard on the radio? (Take Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs for precedent.)
The old-style music distributors are obsolete
The labels still have one purpose in the modern music industry: to separate the Universal Records wheat from the MP3.com chaff. They sign only acts that are good enough to have a reasonable chance of commercial success.
Will offer mp3 in high quality. Propriatory players do not cut it
Didn't you just contradict yourself? If you want a non-proprietary lossy audio format with hardware support, Ogg's pretty much the way to go.
Charging $2 or even $1 per song is NOT CHEAP. Cheap is 25c to maybe 50c depending on the song.
I don't think a US$0.25 per song price point would be realistic. It costs US$0.08 per downloaded song just to pay the songwriter, and not only will that increase in step with the Consumer Price Index, but it can be even higher outside the U.S.
I find $1 per song REALLY CHEAP. An album costs $14 new at Best Buy or $7 used at a local pawn shop. If it has three good songs and nine senseless filler, it can be cheaper to buy the good songs at $1 per than to spend $7 on an album, even after figuring in music downloading's share of the marginal cost of high-speed Internet access vs. dial-up Internet access.
There's no PPP yet folks
Some dial-up Internet access providers still support SLIP (serial line IP), the protocol that PPP largely replaced.
According to the ports page:
If you know much about electrical engineering, the nesdev community could use your expertise in creating network hardware for the NES. Even a high-speed serial port would be a good thing.
Tell me again why the editors keep posting clear solicitations for legal advice to Ask Slashdot...
Believe it or not, many Slashdot readers have talked with attorneys, and some may have discussed similar issues with their counsel. Secondhand legal advice ("my lawyer told me this") is good for an initial survey of the legal landscape so that a client can know some of what's going on before the initial consultation.
Disclaimers: No warranty, this isn't legal advice, make sure your BS meter is well calibrated, etc.
Don't those idiots realize that 4 player capable GameCube with progressive scan would be the ultimate platform for some serious Worms action?
It takes a much bigger company to publish a console game than to publish a PC game. Besides, most 5-year-old television sets (the displays used for GCN systems in practice) cannot interpret a progressive signal.
Worms on GC would be a better party game then Super Mario Party
I don't like the Mario Party series either. The preferred party game in my circle of friends is Super Smash Bros.
I thought Mario was a plumber, not a janitor!
The Mario brothers take whatever jobs they can get in this recession.
Why the fuck is he running around with a vacuum cleaner sucking up GHOSTS?
Why did the ghostbusting title released at the GCN launch feature Luigi Mario? Easy. Nintendo didn't want to license the Ghostbusters franchise.
To help you remember the difference between Super Mario Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion: Luigi sucks, Mario blows, and Yoshi swallows.
cartoony graphics are not high quality
Ignore the scripts of the latest DreamWorks, Fox, and Disney animated features and concentrate only on their visual production values. How can you claim that animation can not be of a high quality?
I want to look into my 3D monitor and see a monster; not a cartoon.
Everybody who has preordered The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, where everything looks like a cartoon, disagrees with you.
A lot of people will buy 64 bit versions of games whether they really get any benefit from the 64 bitness or not.
But what if games only come in a 64-bit version? I'm thinking about Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, Tetrisphere, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Paper Mario, etc. Many of those didn't get any benefit from the 64-bitness (especially The New Tetris and Dr. Mario 64), but the N64 was the only console Nintendo was supporting at the time (the Super NES had died by then).
and you also get to live in a hobbit-hole of sorts
This has been covered previously here on Slashdot.
I'll point out the story of the wolf and the three pigs who made their houses out of straw, wood, and brick.
In the version of "The Three Little Pigs" that I heard, the wolf only wanted to borrow a cup of sugar, not knowing how stingy his porcine neighbors were. Blowing the house down? That was an accident; the wolf had a cold. But this doesn't change your point that brick construction survives great winds better than thatch or wood.
If your Linux machine has an x86 (Intel, AMD, VIA, etc) processor, Kiplinger TaxCut should work in Wine.
Why not? People [patch binary executable files] all the time on other OSes. Games on Windows for one, come to mind.
No. As Gordonjcp mentioned they replace binaries, for precisely the reason you state next:
Now yes one will have to draw a line at which one sends the whole thing vs a diff (75%?).
A fellow often sees such an effect from a whole-program compiler optimization or from re-engineering to fix bugs, especially when the compiler uses a different register allocation or when the developer has added or removed a field or method from a class.
It's that or wait till everyone has Broadband.
I would rather not sit still for over seven years while the local cable monopolies and the local telephone monopolies get their collective poop together and push the price of broadband down to where dial-up is today. I know people who are still on 33.6 because they are banned from working and have parents too poor to fit a modem into their disposable income.
Not if this bill passes.
Nahm I don't see how it would make "apt-get install foo" any easier.
Especially because even though apt-get automatically fetches and installs dependencies, it takes an hour to do so over dial-up. And no, home-priced broadband isn't available everywhere in the United States, let alone everywhere in the world.
So... you're arguing for dropping GIF support, right?
No, I'm asking what's the best way to deliver small animated images to a web browser without all the overhead of Flash or the patent problems of GIF.
Decompressing LZW data is apparently not covered under the LZW patent. If you remove support for reading GIF images from a web browser you develop, you'll get endless tech support calls from people who claim that "the damn intarweb's busted."
You have to defend trademarks, not patents or copyrights. You can sit and let a patent stagnate for 10 years and then sue the balls off everyone later.
If an alleged infringer convinces a U.S. court that a patent holder has harmed competitors by delaying legal action relating to a patent, the court may impose "laches" on him. Laches would mean that he cannot collect damages for infringements that had occurred before the patent holder brought legal action. Precedent states that a delay of at least six years is presumed harmful to competitors.
Be glad it's not like this:
GIF possibly patented? Well, now we have .png, which is also a superior format.
It's not superior if nobody can view it. Among popular web browsers, only KHTML-based (Konqueror; Safari) and Gecko-based (Mozilla; Netscape) browsers can display the MNG format. The most popular web browser supports GIF animations but not PNG animations out of the box. Thus, to reach the largest audiences, web sites will still serve animated advertisement banners as GIF instead of MNG.