I'm sick of hearing about this. Lets dispel some myths.
1: You can copy music on and off an iPod with great ease. There is no magic DRM preventing this *at all*.
2: Apple are quite happy to let you rip their music to cd, and then to mp3. It's no different, and sounds no different from ripping a bought music cd.
3: The iPod only has DRM on it because Apple new they would get sued to fuck if they didn't, or if they went around allowing direct circumvention. By allowing copying to audio cd they avoid this via the fair use claim.
4: A *lot* of available iPod content is not DRM'd anyway.
The experiment, and all the hardware, would have had to be tested and verified as viable for use in the experiment. That would have taken at least a year, if not longer.
I would say it was likely the experiments exact hardware requirements were set in stone a year or two before launch. Flash drives are plentiful and reliable now, but may not have been deemed reliable enough at the time.
When it comes to space, tried and tested older equipment is better. Just ask the Russians.
I always buy my games (who needs to download multiple Gb files anyway, it's boring), but I hate these stupid copy protection schemes.
Most of the time I find someone posts a crack or workaround to gamecopyworld though, and they tend to work.
Not for freetards though, not one of them comes with a serial, you still have to buy the games.
I'll try Spore just as soon as the drm is bypassed, not before. I refuse to believe that I, as a legally purchasing game player, need to be watched by the content owner.
The primary difficulty with OpenSolaris is that is part of a new breed of corporate controlled Open Source.
Much as they might trumpet that it is, it isn't actually proper open source. I can't take it, rip out any bits I want and use them elsewhere. No matter what the license says, if I can't do that, it isn't 'Open', and as you point out, some bits you can't.
Also, it has hardly any developers not already on Suns payroll, and those that are independent are shackled by a lack of proper tools.
Sun doesn't want to engage with the open source community, they want to 'leverage' it, to exploit its advantages, and avoid its more uncomfortable freedoms.
It may be they listed it under scosource to show that scosource wasn't an unmitigated failure. A public relations stunt that is backfiring on them badly now.
Whatever, doesn't matter anyway, they are rapidly heading towards history and a fabulously lucrative book deal for PJ when she writes her history of the event.
There, consider yourselves enlightened. I found that out from an article in PC format, back in the long ago.
Also, for the 'it's not a language' crowd, it *was* for those of us who were learning how to program back then. Ok, I wouldn't use it now, but I really enjoyed it in the eighties.
That a non-trivial amount of free software users claim they care about "Free as in speech" but really want "Free as in can I crash on your couch?"
Indeed. I got into an exchange with a guy via email a few years back about my open source software because he wanted a user manual for it, and I couldn't do one as fast as he wanted.
The thing was, he didn't seem to grasp that I was too busy, and as he wouldn't be paying for it (I didn't ask, but he never offered), I was pretty much free to set my own timetable for such a thing.
He actually got annoyed with me, as if I was somehow failing him as a customer, at which point I just blocked his email address.
I have one now, it took months to do, and it's used by lots of people daily, but I don't know if he's one of them.
That is a lovely sentiment when it works out. If you end up destitute and homeless, or your child ends up with a treatable disease and you can't afford the treatment, it doesn't work so well.
The real world can be a harsh place.
True, but also leaning towards defeatist nonsense. Follow that line of thinking and you achieve nothing but a boring life. You have to take some risks..
Also, I don't live in the US, so I don't have to worry about medical treatment being withheld because i don't have insurance...
Oh, and BTW, if you succeed, these people will resent you for it
Yup. I lost quite a few 'friends' who appeared to resent what I was doing when I quit the 'normal' life and did what I wanted instead. I've tried to rebuild some of those relationships, water under the bridge and all that, but it hasn't worked. I still have a few friends from that time, but only a very few.
It's weird though, responses ranged from shock to outright insults when people learned what I was doing.
What do I have now though? New friends and a happiness I never had before. Ok, life may not be as easy financially right now, what with loans to pay back and all, but that will pass.
In order, no, just me at the time, but she got work, and I had the loan plus a weekend and holidays job.
The job kind of sucked, but you have to do these things if you want a new life.
Not too long ago. Actually nine years, not ten.
The loan payments aren't easy, but to be quite honest, I owe less then some friends who turned to spending to cope with their dissatisfaction in their lives. Hell, I got a new life out of it, that's got to be worth something.
Not having to look back whilst still in a career I didn't want and wishing I'd done it, that alone is worth the price.
I have a wife and kid, and had a long term career that I was fundamentally bored with. I quit, went to back uni, and ten years later don't regret a thing.
I say take the chance, or risk looking back in ten years and wondering where your life went, seriously.
It was the absurd level of investment which saw things like startups being valued higher than HP, Xerox, and if I remember rightly, the Ford Motor company, that caused that.
Venture capitalists poured billions into the industry without considering that the market had yet to produce the great new age of commerce that was promised.
Startups without a coherent product were valued as multiple million dollar companies, and attracted investment like dead dogs attract flies.
And all this at a time when I believe broadband wasn't even widely deployed.
It was a bust waiting to happen. It's just a shame that so many viable companies were taken down in the crash.
Imagine what Ballmer would make of that! It's more likely that his work will be handed to someone else, or another group, to manage. Not because he isn't up to it, but because it would be really bad PR for the FOSS movement to have a major file system managed by a convicted murderer.
Not all prisoners are murderers, so it's likely that FOSS contribution would be a good idea for some, sort of a rehab thing.
Our current mathematical framework still carries the stigma of the evil of zero and infinity. The idea that zero and infinity were to be feared held us back for centuries, and is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that it has quite possibly prevented us from discovering some quite interesting mathematics. It is for this reason that we cannot yet fully realise the potential of the work of Georg Cantor.
That aside, invention of mathematics really depends on what viewpoint you take.
As part of my doctoral thesis I describe a new mathematical technique. Did I invent it or discover it?
Beats me...
Personally, I think I invented my method. Mostly because discovery is to my mind reserved for the likes of Pythagoras and his ilk.
Invention could be discarded, but mathematical discoveries like the properties of triangles are, as far as I am concerned, fundamental statements about the workings of the universe.
I've been C coding for years, and I have to say, even though I like it, the number of things that I can do more easily with, say, Python, is getting larger.
I suspect that soon all I will use C for is writing shared libraries that I can call from some other language.
I wish people would stop banging on about C's memory problems. C has *no* memory management problem. It has no memory management at all, um, I mean, you just have to be careful when writing your code.
C is fast, seriously fast even. For that reason alone it will always have a place. I shouldn't think there will be many coders who only use C left soon though, because the job market for pure C programmers is pretty small these days.
Are you seriously telling us that you've broken friendships over disagreements about software licensing models?
When someone proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are a moron by getting really upset about such things, that's usually time to reassess friendship, yeah...
I've fallen out with some friends because even though I'm an open source developer, and have been for the last five years, I'm still in favour of closed source for some applications.
I am both amazed and dismayed by the extent to which such issues effect people.
Not only that, but almost everyone I know who has been what I would call a rabid opponent of proprietary code haven't themselves released any open source code. They just download the free stuff and get angry about the non free code without a single opinion that wasn't borrowed from someone else.
It seems to me that the fashion is that open source == hates proprietary. This is a nieve viewpoint in my opinion.
The Prime Directive, is a dramatic device, no more. It has no universally applicable elements.
We as a species have not even managed to apply the rules it describes to ourselves yet. The idea that we could apply such a thing to aliens when we can't even agree not to bankrupt poorer nations in the name of banking profits is laughable at best, deeply disturbing at worse.
it doesn't seem like anyone is seriously looking into fixing that
Well, when the benefits of owning dodgy patents can be into the tens of millions, it would be well worth sinking a few million into the right peoples pockets to make sure no change goes unchallanged.
All the while keeping any revision of the system on hold long enough for the rest of the world to overtake the US.
Yeah, there are places in the world where innovate is still a word with a real and exciting meaning, not just a tired and overused technology business buzzword. I do wish this would be realised by the people who are in a position to change this bizarre patent mess.
When you don't have to fight for your rights, they erode away
Yes, but when you do fight for your rights, people tend to get locked up or killed. That's not something your average armchair activist is going to be interested in. Better to rant on a web-page.
I should point out I'm not much interested in it either. Revolutions happen, people move on, and some people end up as fertilizer, then everything goes sour again under whatever 'enlightened' group took over.
I'd far rather argue on the web then risk getting killed any day.
As a computer science undergrad I really enjoyed my lab time, it was great way to socialise as well as work. Most of the time there wasn't much pressure.
As a post grad though I found that the lab, which I shared with six other people, was a distraction. Within a few months I'd changed to working from my lodgings over ssh. That way I got the resources I needed from my lab, but the peace and quiet I needed to get things done.
Labs can be great, but unless you can be certain of being undisturbed, they can be quite hard places to innovate.
I did my best programming work from home, and my best thinking whilst walking alongside our local river.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sick of hearing about this. Lets dispel some myths.
1: You can copy music on and off an iPod with great ease. There is no magic DRM preventing this *at all*.
2: Apple are quite happy to let you rip their music to cd, and then to mp3. It's no different, and sounds no different from ripping a bought music cd.
3: The iPod only has DRM on it because Apple new they would get sued to fuck if they didn't, or if they went around allowing direct circumvention. By allowing copying to audio cd they avoid this via the fair use claim.
4: A *lot* of available iPod content is not DRM'd anyway.
The experiment, and all the hardware, would have had to be tested and verified as viable for use in the experiment. That would have taken at least a year, if not longer.
I would say it was likely the experiments exact hardware requirements were set in stone a year or two before launch. Flash drives are plentiful and reliable now, but may not have been deemed reliable enough at the time.
When it comes to space, tried and tested older equipment is better. Just ask the Russians.
I always buy my games (who needs to download multiple Gb files anyway, it's boring), but I hate these stupid copy protection schemes.
Most of the time I find someone posts a crack or workaround to gamecopyworld though, and they tend to work.
Not for freetards though, not one of them comes with a serial, you still have to buy the games.
I'll try Spore just as soon as the drm is bypassed, not before. I refuse to believe that I, as a legally purchasing game player, need to be watched by the content owner.
1: Design a new search engine
2: Hire Google to run it for you
3:.....
4: DESTROY THEM!!!1111one
The primary difficulty with OpenSolaris is that is part of a new breed of corporate controlled Open Source.
Much as they might trumpet that it is, it isn't actually proper open source. I can't take it, rip out any bits I want and use them elsewhere. No matter what the license says, if I can't do that, it isn't 'Open', and as you point out, some bits you can't.
Also, it has hardly any developers not already on Suns payroll, and those that are independent are shackled by a lack of proper tools.
Sun doesn't want to engage with the open source community, they want to 'leverage' it, to exploit its advantages, and avoid its more uncomfortable freedoms.
It may be they listed it under scosource to show that scosource wasn't an unmitigated failure. A public relations stunt that is backfiring on them badly now.
Whatever, doesn't matter anyway, they are rapidly heading towards history and a fabulously lucrative book deal for PJ when she writes her history of the event.
Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
There, consider yourselves enlightened.
I found that out from an article in PC format, back in the long ago.
Also, for the 'it's not a language' crowd, it *was* for those of us who were learning how to program back then. Ok, I wouldn't use it now, but I really enjoyed it in the eighties.
That a non-trivial amount of free software users claim they care about "Free as in speech" but really want "Free as in can I crash on your couch?"
Indeed. I got into an exchange with a guy via email a few years back about my open source software because he wanted a user manual for it, and I couldn't do one as fast as he wanted.
The thing was, he didn't seem to grasp that I was too busy, and as he wouldn't be paying for it (I didn't ask, but he never offered), I was pretty much free to set my own timetable for such a thing.
He actually got annoyed with me, as if I was somehow failing him as a customer, at which point I just blocked his email address.
I have one now, it took months to do, and it's used by lots of people daily, but I don't know if he's one of them.
That is a lovely sentiment when it works out. If you end up destitute and homeless, or your child ends up with a treatable disease and you can't afford the treatment, it doesn't work so well.
The real world can be a harsh place.
True, but also leaning towards defeatist nonsense. Follow that line of thinking and you achieve nothing but a boring life.
You have to take some risks..
Also, I don't live in the US, so I don't have to worry about medical treatment being withheld because i don't have insurance...
Oh, and BTW, if you succeed, these people will resent you for it
Yup. I lost quite a few 'friends' who appeared to resent what I was doing when I quit the 'normal' life and did what I wanted instead.
I've tried to rebuild some of those relationships, water under the bridge and all that, but it hasn't worked. I still have a few friends from that time, but only a very few.
It's weird though, responses ranged from shock to outright insults when people learned what I was doing.
What do I have now though? New friends and a happiness I never had before. Ok, life may not be as easy financially right now, what with loans to pay back and all, but that will pass.
In order, no, just me at the time, but she got work, and I had the loan plus a weekend and holidays job.
The job kind of sucked, but you have to do these things if you want a new life.
Not too long ago. Actually nine years, not ten.
The loan payments aren't easy, but to be quite honest, I owe less then some friends who turned to spending to cope with their dissatisfaction in their lives. Hell, I got a new life out of it, that's got to be worth something.
Not having to look back whilst still in a career I didn't want and wishing I'd done it, that alone is worth the price.
I have a wife and kid, and had a long term career that I was fundamentally bored with. I quit, went to back uni, and ten years later don't regret a thing.
I say take the chance, or risk looking back in ten years and wondering where your life went, seriously.
It was the absurd level of investment which saw things like startups being valued higher than HP, Xerox, and if I remember rightly, the Ford Motor company, that caused that.
Venture capitalists poured billions into the industry without considering that the market had yet to produce the great new age of commerce that was promised.
Startups without a coherent product were valued as multiple million dollar companies, and attracted investment like dead dogs attract flies.
And all this at a time when I believe broadband wasn't even widely deployed.
It was a bust waiting to happen. It's just a shame that so many viable companies were taken down in the crash.
Imagine what Ballmer would make of that!
It's more likely that his work will be handed to someone else, or another group, to manage. Not because he isn't up to it, but because it would be really bad PR for the FOSS movement to have a major file system managed by a convicted murderer.
Not all prisoners are murderers, so it's likely that FOSS contribution would be a good idea for some, sort of a rehab thing.
'To consume more than one class of alcoholic beverage at a time'.
This has been known to university undergrads for centuries...
Our current mathematical framework still carries the stigma of the evil of zero and infinity.
The idea that zero and infinity were to be feared held us back for centuries, and is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that it has quite possibly prevented us from discovering some quite interesting mathematics. It is for this reason that we cannot yet fully realise the potential of the work of Georg Cantor.
That aside, invention of mathematics really depends on what viewpoint you take.
As part of my doctoral thesis I describe a new mathematical technique. Did I invent it or discover it?
Beats me...
Personally, I think I invented my method. Mostly because discovery is to my mind reserved for the likes of Pythagoras and his ilk.
Invention could be discarded, but mathematical discoveries like the properties of triangles are, as far as I am concerned, fundamental statements about the workings of the universe.
Just a little beyond my league.
I've been C coding for years, and I have to say, even though I like it, the number of things that I can do more easily with, say, Python, is getting larger.
I suspect that soon all I will use C for is writing shared libraries that I can call from some other language.
I wish people would stop banging on about C's memory problems. C has *no* memory management problem. It has no memory management at all, um, I mean, you just have to be careful when writing your code.
C is fast, seriously fast even. For that reason alone it will always have a place. I shouldn't think there will be many coders who only use C left soon though, because the job market for pure C programmers is pretty small these days.
Are you seriously telling us that you've broken friendships over disagreements about software licensing models?
When someone proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are a moron by getting really upset about such things, that's usually time to reassess friendship, yeah...
I've fallen out with some friends because even though I'm an open source developer, and have been for the last five years, I'm still in favour of closed source for some applications.
I am both amazed and dismayed by the extent to which such issues effect people.
Not only that, but almost everyone I know who has been what I would call a rabid opponent of proprietary code haven't themselves released any open source code. They just download the free stuff and get angry about the non free code without a single opinion that wasn't borrowed from someone else.
It seems to me that the fashion is that open source == hates proprietary. This is a nieve viewpoint in my opinion.
I should write my important information on any available boobies? Is that what you're saying?
The Prime Directive, is a dramatic device, no more. It has no universally applicable elements.
We as a species have not even managed to apply the rules it describes to ourselves yet. The idea that we could apply such a thing to aliens when we can't even agree not to bankrupt poorer nations in the name of banking profits is laughable at best, deeply disturbing at worse.
it doesn't seem like anyone is seriously looking into fixing that
Well, when the benefits of owning dodgy patents can be into the tens of millions, it would be well worth sinking a few million into the right peoples pockets to make sure no change goes unchallanged.
All the while keeping any revision of the system on hold long enough for the rest of the world to overtake the US.
Yeah, there are places in the world where innovate is still a word with a real and exciting meaning, not just a tired and overused technology business buzzword. I do wish this would be realised by the people who are in a position to change this bizarre patent mess.
I mean, just how many millimetre waves are people going to be smuggling onto airplanes?
Is there a market in black market millimetre waves that I'm not aware of?
When you don't have to fight for your rights, they erode away
Yes, but when you do fight for your rights, people tend to get locked up or killed. That's not something your average armchair activist is going to be interested in. Better to rant on a web-page.
I should point out I'm not much interested in it either. Revolutions happen, people move on, and some people end up as fertilizer, then everything goes sour again under whatever 'enlightened' group took over.
I'd far rather argue on the web then risk getting killed any day.
As a computer science undergrad I really enjoyed my lab time, it was great way to socialise as well as work. Most of the time there wasn't much pressure.
As a post grad though I found that the lab, which I shared with six other people, was a distraction. Within a few months I'd changed to working from my lodgings over ssh. That way I got the resources I needed from my lab, but the peace and quiet I needed to get things done.
Labs can be great, but unless you can be certain of being undisturbed, they can be quite hard places to innovate.
I did my best programming work from home, and my best thinking whilst walking alongside our local river.