So by your logic, if b.net checking CD keys doesn't prevent piracy it should be allowed to be encouraged? My magic 8-ball tells me you're destined to run a company into the ground. I hope you don't have any authority somewhere I have a stake in. You don't seem to grasp the concept anyhow, if a thousand b.net servers pop up and a majority of them have people playing with pirated copies of b.net games Blizzard stands to lose megabucks.
A b.net clone can let people with pirated serial numbers for games play a b.net game. Say I run a popular b.net clone server that doesn't check for the game's serial number, a hundred people regularly connect to it and only twenty five of them have valid copies of the game. Blizzard has lost out on seventy five sales of the game and the pirates have no penalties for pirating the game. Blizzard makes megabucks you say and thus seventy five less sales isn't even a market statistic. What happens when there's thousands of people running b.net clones each with a hundred regular users a majority of which don't have valid copies of the game. That amounts to appriciable percentages of revenues being lost. It makes sense to disallow b.net clone servers even if those developers personally aren't infringing on any of Blizzard's copyrights. Warez copies of Warcraft 3 are going to hit servers weeks or days before the game is actually released, if these people can connect their warez copy of it to a b.net server that doesn't give a shit who copies the game Blizzard is going to lose out on a ton of sales because there's thousands of college and high school students with fat connections who don't feel they ought to pay for a video game.
While Baldur's Gate isn't an RTS or anything they do almost exactly as you suggest and release different games all based on the same engine. If you play Planescape:Torment or Icewind Dale everything but the graphics and command frame are pretty much identical with maybe a few improvements or tweaks here and there. Tales of Sword Coast and Heart of Winter were just a couple of additional maps on top of the original game. I think the problem with adding a new race to games like Starcraft and Diablo is they are balanced from the beginning. While the three races of Starcraft play differently they balance out in the end because you adjust to strategy or play style to suit a specific race. Adding a new one in the middle throws that system out of whack for a very long time because you've changed the dynamics of the whole game. Even in Diablo the added characters were justy cheap additions which combined traits of different classes into a new character, the new amalgam didn't really have a big advantage over any of the original classes for the most part. Expansions get really critically reviewed when they change every aspect of the game rather than just providing a little extra play time for those who've already been at it for a while.
The OSX themes are more than just bitmaps, they are look and feel aspects. They are going after people calling their themes Aqua and using the same visuals with little to no variation to real Aqua stuff. People are obviously copying Aqua's look because they like it and think it is cool and smooth. If the themes were THAT original Apple would have no grounds to go after them would they?
The.doc translation is actually pretty recent (well at least the ability to read Word97/2k.doc files) and has only been included since AW v6.1. I was sort of disappointed because when I used ClarisWorks way back when it had great Office compatibility and then I bought AW 6.0 and it didn't even support.doc files at all. There's a large number of AW users who are pissed off at Apple because there were so many versions of AW that went by without proper file support for popular formats. If you're a longtime Mac user bragging about you brand spanking new PowerMac and then can't even open a Word document much to your chagrin it is going to leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Fire is also buggy as shit and jumps off a virtual cliff at random times because it felt like it for some reason. I've begun to think that Fire's developers were trying write a clone of Lemmings and ended up with an IM client. I know plenty of people who've had to stop using Fire because it couldn't do something as simple as receive a message from an MSN user. If you're going to write a third party client for somebody else's network you should AT LEAST be able to talk with the first party clients on that network. Maybe the next version will kick ass and be the best thing since buttered toast but as for right now, no thank you.
Stomping out stuff that looks like Aqua is about protecting property which they created. Not everyone is into the open sharing of something they created. If they specifically tell you "don't copy our shit" and you feel like you ought to be able to go and copy their shit, you get what you deserve when they come in and stomp you. If you open a fast food resturant with two bigass yellow arches called MacDon's you're going to get legally bitch slapped for good reason. The look of Aqua is just as much a visual association with MacOS and thus Apple as golden arches is with McDonalds even if Aqua isn't specifically trademarked.
I think for a next generation packaging system Apple ought to adopt concepts from their frameworks method of binary packaging. A package would contain an XML header relaying to the installation program information like the file contents, checksums, a list of required and a list of optional packages, install and make instructions (including file destinations), a hash of the compressed file, and a dependancy list. The installer program would scan the header and ask the user which parts they wanted to install or install options based on arguments like installprogram -a packagename would install the entire package or some such. Since there's a hash of the compressed file it could be checked against a hash stored on the server the package came from for confirmation, from there the installer would figure out using information of the header whether it had to just cp and chmod some files or if it had to compile them from source. Packages could come in source only or binary only or in combination packages containing both. The frameworks the installation fromworks would output to (or just plain directories) could contain a header telling which files exist on the drive and a master lister of installations could be kept by the installation program. So you could whip it open and remove GNOME lets say and it would consult a relatively small XML file telling it where the GNOME XML resource file is and then procede to uninstall the files listed there. The XML header for the package could be even compressed inside the file and follow a standard naming convention so the install program could grab the header out of the compressed file in order to do the rest of the work, this would cut down space needed for the XML file since a good majority of headers are being repeated several times and just taking up space.
Re:GNOME vs KDE for the newbie
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GNOME 2.0 Beta
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· Score: 2
Nautilus acting like Windows Explorer is less Nautilus emulating Windows and more Nautilus better following the concepts laid out by the Macintosh HIG which is one of the best books on computer itnerfaces I've read. Windows has gone from an almost unusable state where iconic representations had little to do with the actual underlying concept of the object being manipulated to emulating what MacOS had done and use consistant and easy to understand metaphors. Nautilus like Windows has begun to better noun then verb principals, seeing an object and then telling the program to do something to that object. File management is basic and not really the aim of either Explorer or Nautilus, both are trying to do their best to present media to the user, the actual content of the file rather than a mere representation of the file itself.
This is why Windows has a thumbnail mode, you can browse through a directory full of pictures by visual cues rather than archaic file names which may or may not have anything at all to do with the actual content of the file. Like I said it is going to be easier to find a picture I took if I can see them all rather than just names of pictures. I guess its just me in this case, I use Nautilus and Explorer to browse through my files which are mostly pictures and music files and the occassional bits of source code. Actual management of files isn't really my prime concern when I open up Nautilus or Explorer. I don't need to go in an rearrange them very often.
Why is it evil for a company to want to control every aspect of their product in the hands of users. Should Ford use Mopar parts? Should they be forced to use Mopar parts because I decide I want them in my Ford car? Should I be able to stick Motorcraft parts in a Neon or Intrpid? Who the fuck are you to tell me what my product should and shouldn't do? If you don't like it ignore it. I defend Apple's position not because I dislike Microsoft or some absurd Linux zealot binary view of the world but because your premise, that a company should not have control over their product, is just plain stupid. If you want a say in how a company does things invest enough into them to have a say in their operations. It is their fucking product, unless you want to foot the bill to fab microelectronics and program an entire operating system and software to go along with it shut the fuck up.
Re:GNOME vs KDE for the newbie
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GNOME 2.0 Beta
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· Score: 2
Nautilus runs fast for me on my YDL installation on my Powerbook. I'm running Ximian as well and my PB is a Lombard 333. Nautilus takes a second or two to start up but once it is running the going is pretty smooth. The start up speed doesn't bother me much because it is as fast or faster as an Explorer window on my PC. I think Nautilus has so many features so it can be held up to Windows Explorer which has a huge featureset and is actually competitive with the modern Windows desktop rather than playing catch up with Windows 3.11. I'm not much of a theme guy but I do like the ability for a file manager to discern some context for my files and know what they are and adapt the display of them accordingly. For me it is useful to be able to scroll a directory full of pictures with thumbnails and tags telling me how big the picture is. That is how I scan through photographs when I'm looking at them after getting my film back from processing, I don't brose through a list of names hoping to remember that image10056.jpg was that really awesome shot of the Rockies I took a couple months ago. That is just me though, some people just want a flat list hold the mayo so gmc works just fine.
Re:Well, it's certainly limiting applicability...
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Could Mono Kill Gnome?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why do people keep bringing up DirectX as a competitor to OpenGL? DirectX came about because developers were tired of having to reinvent the wheel whenever they wanted to do something more complex than merely tell GDI to write out a couple of bitmaps to form a window. Read the DX developer books (the Microsoft Press ones) they give a good deal of insight into the original ideas behind DX. DirectX was never intended for people to use instead of OpenGL, if that were the case Microsoft could have kept Windows from properly using OpenGL libraries. DirectX is not a fucking product they sell, noone fucking sells OpenGL. Don't compare oranges to bricks man.
You seem to think.NET is an API like DX or OpenGL, some portions are indeed APIs but most portions of it are just communication specifications. This whole todo about Mono and thus GNOME being Microsoft's bitch is so retarded. It is much better to have software that can talk to a wide range of software as opposed to only being compatible with a narrow range of software. It allows for vendor independence as well as forward and backwards compatibility. If a bunch of vendors produce software that does FOO and are all using specified guidelines for FOO communication you can pick any one of those vendors (or write your own software) that does FOO and you aren't locked into using software from a single vendor. Using Mono and supporting.NET communication schemes GNOME software can talk to closed source software using the same schemes. A great example is GDict, it is only going to work with dictionary services that it knows how to use. A SOAP version though could query a server to see if it is running a service and once it finds out if it is it can figure out how to query it as to get the results it is looking for.
It has been reported by the Register, the unofficial source of all slashdot news, that at least 22 slashdot geeks have been found dead this evening from sponteneous combustion. Apparently they were viewing a recent slashdot article containing the words Blizzard Entertainment and the acronym DMCA in the same paragraph. Reports are still sketchy but it is believed that seeing the company responsible for geek favourites such as Diablo and Starcraft enforce their will with the DMCA simply caused the slashdot geeks to explode. It is also feared that more such explosions have taken place because many of these victims are living in basements and bedrooms of their parents' houses and missed the call to dinner. Who knows how many more geeks will be found in this manner.
The problem with considering e-mail to bve private communication is the fact it is not very private or discrete. E-mailing someone is sort of like standing in the middle of a crowd and yelling to them hoping nobody else pays attention to what you just said to them. Technically unencrypted e-mail has no expectation of privacy because it is sent in the open as it were and anyone interested could read it. An ISP has to comply with court orders to turn over e-mail records if they keep them because they are just giving information that was sent in the clear anyhow. If you sent sensitive information (say a bank account number) on a postcard and then someone used that information to remove all the money from the account the court would laugh you out of the building for being so stupid as to assume a message sent out in the open had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Ergo, always encrypt your damn e-mail!
Security problem solved, no one can snoop your password if you can't type it in anymore. Unless of course they phreak your brain with a PET scanner or crush your balls in a walnut cracker until you tell them. Methods to circumvent either wetware attack is an exercise for the reader.
I'm not really sure even a iconic password is going to be secure from key loggers as they can just as easily monitor mouse click events as they can monitor keyboard click events. A slightly sophisticated trojan could easily so screen captures and correlate them with mouseclicks or key presses. Remember Back Orifice, it was basically remote desktop mirroring with a remote control function. The infiltration of a system inserting a slightly perverted system service the user wouldn't notice would be pretty effective at stealing passwords. Whether you're clicking icons in a 3D game or typing them. Maybe though you could make a self contained system consisting of an infrared camera and IR lighting to track the focus of someone's eyeballs. They would just focus on the icon and click a button to select it, after all the icons were selected it could send a hash of your password to the system for verification. At least then snoopers would have to get REALLY sophisticated to figure out what your password was, at least replace your camerawith an uber-hacked version.
That would work only so far as to disgruntle both the intended user and unintended user. If it took me a minute to type in my username and password how often do you think I would do it? Would I maybe leave myself logged in when I got up to take a walk or to get a drink? That'd set me up for a whole new security mess. It's been shown that difficult to use authentication schemes are far too often left unused simply because users are too lazy (even the security conscious). This of course makes you question your paranoia level. If you wanted to impliment this sort of thing on your system I'd say go for it but if you were my sys admin and I had to hunt for every character of my password you'd end up with a shoe shoved sideways up your ass.
The video game idea is still iconic, if you run around selecting the proper icon (eg. character model standing around) you're still limited by the number of character models you've got available and the number of them you've got to select. The only real benefit iconic password schemes have over is it is sort of difficult to use a wetware exploit by watching over someone's shoulder or spying on what they type on the keyboard. I can still attack the password conventionally and with a limited set of icons it would be fairly quick work to search through the possible keyspace for the correct password. That's what I'm getting at here. Iconic video game passwords only add complexity to an already complex system for a user. Sure remebering to click a white rabit model and then a japanese schoolgirl model and then a red suited super hero model might be easy to remember but the interface is going to suck and far too much time is going to be wasted jumping through those hoops.
My G3 Powerbook is damn near silent while running even after playing Diablo 2 for hours on end. I agree with the folks suggesting old laptops rather than building a new MiniPC, the laptop would cost about the same and have some added benefits.
You get a stock battery backup and the power supply is external and fanless.
Comes with a screen and keyboard for any local terminal work you need to do.
Few to no fans at all and with enough memory very veyr little swapping is going to be done and even whe nthere is you'd be hard pressed to hear it.
It's a freakin laptop which means you can take your work with you easily.
There's quite a few laptops that can be had fairly cheap I think I might suggest looking into older Powerbook laptops. Older PC laptops in many cases are clunky, hot, and I wouldn't REALLY trust them to be on 24/7. If you avoid the Powerbook 5300s you'll probably land a keeper. A particular model of note is the PB 2400 which is/was a subnotebook. It weighs about four and a half pounds and leaves the floppy and CD drive as external devices. You could stick YDL on it to do your coding work, it has revitalized many a Powerbook that is unable to run OSX. If you wanted a little more power you can find Wallstreet (older G3 based Powerbooks with 12 or 14 inch screens) PBs hovering around 500$ sometimes. Lombards and Pismos go for a grand or more if in good condition. Even if you went with a PC laptop it would probably be a bit more useful overal to you than a dedicated MiniPC sitting in your bedroom.
I replaced the stock 4.3GB Travelstar in my G3 Powerbook with a newer 20GB model last year and at first I was worried something went wrong because I could never hear the damn thing. Even the fans in the sucker hardly ever come on, I can't recall them coming on even after a 12 hour Diablo 2 marathon, if they did I didn't hear them.
There's two problems with the picture click password schemes. Both methods are susceptible to keystroke logging programs as the authentication module is going to have entry and exit points which means they can be monitored. The second problem is specifically with choosing icons as a password. There's a definite feasible number of icons you can fit on a screen and have people be able to distinguish, this limiting factor affects your ability to have a complex enough password so that it can't be easily guessed. With a typed ASCII password you've got 2^128*n password combinations (where n is the number of symbols in your password), with an iconic password you've only got y^n password combinations (where y in the total number of icons which is limited to how many can be displayed on the screen at once). You could have as many icons as ASCII characters I suppose but that would be difficult for many people to cope with. Any two similar icons would cause confusion in users. If you remember an icon by general visual cues you might end up screwed over if multiple icons had the same cues with slightly varying colours or something. This is an Roman alphabet reading American point of view though, Asian readers probably think I'm retarded because my alphabet has less than 3000 characters.
So..does it come with TEMPEST-proof console fonts too? I think that would be the big todo for the really paranoid (aside from coming with a foldout F cage). Highly anti-aliased fonts work decently (in theory) thrwarting VE screen captures but if you're running soley in the console I would think you're at a decent risk of having your data captured considering the regularity of the screen and the unique shaping of console fonts. A little off topic but I was wondering if one could impliment a Matrix style command shell where white space was replaced on screen from/dev/rand in a light font like light grey and then when you type the letters would either be dark grey or white to distinguish them from the random letter replacing white space. While somewhat hard to read it would cause so much static VE screen captures which of crappy monitors can be done with a slightly hacked AM radio, would be pretty difficult to make out. It would just be cool to make a shell that just did that to begin with. Pop open a terminal and have it look super funky would make a pretty badass shell theme.
Wired this month is carrying an article about a similar idea using blimps. From the article the blimp stays aloft for like 3 years and carries a moderate amount of wireless equipment which can provide coverage for an area about 72km in diameter. I forget the exact altitude at which they hover but it is somewhere above regular air traffic and high enough to be safe from most weather patterns. Way back when Popular Mechanics had an article about high altitude airplanes (which has been posted several times on slashdot) that would also carry high speed communications equipment. I always thought it would be rather efficient to use airborne but not quite orbital space stations to relay radio traffic. You get the coverage or a space borne satellite without the inherent cost of lighting an explosion under its ass and launching it into orbit.
In free space? Who needs to repeat freshman physics? In the solar system you're still bound by the gravity of the Sun. Besides being drawn in by the Sun intertia is resistance to fucking change in velocity. Look it the fuck up.
Slashdot Mirror
So by your logic, if b.net checking CD keys doesn't prevent piracy it should be allowed to be encouraged? My magic 8-ball tells me you're destined to run a company into the ground. I hope you don't have any authority somewhere I have a stake in. You don't seem to grasp the concept anyhow, if a thousand b.net servers pop up and a majority of them have people playing with pirated copies of b.net games Blizzard stands to lose megabucks.
A b.net clone can let people with pirated serial numbers for games play a b.net game. Say I run a popular b.net clone server that doesn't check for the game's serial number, a hundred people regularly connect to it and only twenty five of them have valid copies of the game. Blizzard has lost out on seventy five sales of the game and the pirates have no penalties for pirating the game. Blizzard makes megabucks you say and thus seventy five less sales isn't even a market statistic. What happens when there's thousands of people running b.net clones each with a hundred regular users a majority of which don't have valid copies of the game. That amounts to appriciable percentages of revenues being lost. It makes sense to disallow b.net clone servers even if those developers personally aren't infringing on any of Blizzard's copyrights. Warez copies of Warcraft 3 are going to hit servers weeks or days before the game is actually released, if these people can connect their warez copy of it to a b.net server that doesn't give a shit who copies the game Blizzard is going to lose out on a ton of sales because there's thousands of college and high school students with fat connections who don't feel they ought to pay for a video game.
While Baldur's Gate isn't an RTS or anything they do almost exactly as you suggest and release different games all based on the same engine. If you play Planescape:Torment or Icewind Dale everything but the graphics and command frame are pretty much identical with maybe a few improvements or tweaks here and there. Tales of Sword Coast and Heart of Winter were just a couple of additional maps on top of the original game. I think the problem with adding a new race to games like Starcraft and Diablo is they are balanced from the beginning. While the three races of Starcraft play differently they balance out in the end because you adjust to strategy or play style to suit a specific race. Adding a new one in the middle throws that system out of whack for a very long time because you've changed the dynamics of the whole game. Even in Diablo the added characters were justy cheap additions which combined traits of different classes into a new character, the new amalgam didn't really have a big advantage over any of the original classes for the most part. Expansions get really critically reviewed when they change every aspect of the game rather than just providing a little extra play time for those who've already been at it for a while.
The OSX themes are more than just bitmaps, they are look and feel aspects. They are going after people calling their themes Aqua and using the same visuals with little to no variation to real Aqua stuff. People are obviously copying Aqua's look because they like it and think it is cool and smooth. If the themes were THAT original Apple would have no grounds to go after them would they?
The .doc translation is actually pretty recent (well at least the ability to read Word97/2k .doc files) and has only been included since AW v6.1. I was sort of disappointed because when I used ClarisWorks way back when it had great Office compatibility and then I bought AW 6.0 and it didn't even support .doc files at all. There's a large number of AW users who are pissed off at Apple because there were so many versions of AW that went by without proper file support for popular formats. If you're a longtime Mac user bragging about you brand spanking new PowerMac and then can't even open a Word document much to your chagrin it is going to leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Fire is also buggy as shit and jumps off a virtual cliff at random times because it felt like it for some reason. I've begun to think that Fire's developers were trying write a clone of Lemmings and ended up with an IM client. I know plenty of people who've had to stop using Fire because it couldn't do something as simple as receive a message from an MSN user. If you're going to write a third party client for somebody else's network you should AT LEAST be able to talk with the first party clients on that network. Maybe the next version will kick ass and be the best thing since buttered toast but as for right now, no thank you.
Stomping out stuff that looks like Aqua is about protecting property which they created. Not everyone is into the open sharing of something they created. If they specifically tell you "don't copy our shit" and you feel like you ought to be able to go and copy their shit, you get what you deserve when they come in and stomp you. If you open a fast food resturant with two bigass yellow arches called MacDon's you're going to get legally bitch slapped for good reason. The look of Aqua is just as much a visual association with MacOS and thus Apple as golden arches is with McDonalds even if Aqua isn't specifically trademarked.
I think for a next generation packaging system Apple ought to adopt concepts from their frameworks method of binary packaging. A package would contain an XML header relaying to the installation program information like the file contents, checksums, a list of required and a list of optional packages, install and make instructions (including file destinations), a hash of the compressed file, and a dependancy list. The installer program would scan the header and ask the user which parts they wanted to install or install options based on arguments like installprogram -a packagename would install the entire package or some such. Since there's a hash of the compressed file it could be checked against a hash stored on the server the package came from for confirmation, from there the installer would figure out using information of the header whether it had to just cp and chmod some files or if it had to compile them from source. Packages could come in source only or binary only or in combination packages containing both. The frameworks the installation fromworks would output to (or just plain directories) could contain a header telling which files exist on the drive and a master lister of installations could be kept by the installation program. So you could whip it open and remove GNOME lets say and it would consult a relatively small XML file telling it where the GNOME XML resource file is and then procede to uninstall the files listed there. The XML header for the package could be even compressed inside the file and follow a standard naming convention so the install program could grab the header out of the compressed file in order to do the rest of the work, this would cut down space needed for the XML file since a good majority of headers are being repeated several times and just taking up space.
Nautilus acting like Windows Explorer is less Nautilus emulating Windows and more Nautilus better following the concepts laid out by the Macintosh HIG which is one of the best books on computer itnerfaces I've read. Windows has gone from an almost unusable state where iconic representations had little to do with the actual underlying concept of the object being manipulated to emulating what MacOS had done and use consistant and easy to understand metaphors. Nautilus like Windows has begun to better noun then verb principals, seeing an object and then telling the program to do something to that object. File management is basic and not really the aim of either Explorer or Nautilus, both are trying to do their best to present media to the user, the actual content of the file rather than a mere representation of the file itself.
This is why Windows has a thumbnail mode, you can browse through a directory full of pictures by visual cues rather than archaic file names which may or may not have anything at all to do with the actual content of the file. Like I said it is going to be easier to find a picture I took if I can see them all rather than just names of pictures. I guess its just me in this case, I use Nautilus and Explorer to browse through my files which are mostly pictures and music files and the occassional bits of source code. Actual management of files isn't really my prime concern when I open up Nautilus or Explorer. I don't need to go in an rearrange them very often.
Why is it evil for a company to want to control every aspect of their product in the hands of users. Should Ford use Mopar parts? Should they be forced to use Mopar parts because I decide I want them in my Ford car? Should I be able to stick Motorcraft parts in a Neon or Intrpid? Who the fuck are you to tell me what my product should and shouldn't do? If you don't like it ignore it. I defend Apple's position not because I dislike Microsoft or some absurd Linux zealot binary view of the world but because your premise, that a company should not have control over their product, is just plain stupid. If you want a say in how a company does things invest enough into them to have a say in their operations. It is their fucking product, unless you want to foot the bill to fab microelectronics and program an entire operating system and software to go along with it shut the fuck up.
Nautilus runs fast for me on my YDL installation on my Powerbook. I'm running Ximian as well and my PB is a Lombard 333. Nautilus takes a second or two to start up but once it is running the going is pretty smooth. The start up speed doesn't bother me much because it is as fast or faster as an Explorer window on my PC. I think Nautilus has so many features so it can be held up to Windows Explorer which has a huge featureset and is actually competitive with the modern Windows desktop rather than playing catch up with Windows 3.11. I'm not much of a theme guy but I do like the ability for a file manager to discern some context for my files and know what they are and adapt the display of them accordingly. For me it is useful to be able to scroll a directory full of pictures with thumbnails and tags telling me how big the picture is. That is how I scan through photographs when I'm looking at them after getting my film back from processing, I don't brose through a list of names hoping to remember that image10056.jpg was that really awesome shot of the Rockies I took a couple months ago. That is just me though, some people just want a flat list hold the mayo so gmc works just fine.
Why do people keep bringing up DirectX as a competitor to OpenGL? DirectX came about because developers were tired of having to reinvent the wheel whenever they wanted to do something more complex than merely tell GDI to write out a couple of bitmaps to form a window. Read the DX developer books (the Microsoft Press ones) they give a good deal of insight into the original ideas behind DX. DirectX was never intended for people to use instead of OpenGL, if that were the case Microsoft could have kept Windows from properly using OpenGL libraries. DirectX is not a fucking product they sell, noone fucking sells OpenGL. Don't compare oranges to bricks man.
.NET is an API like DX or OpenGL, some portions are indeed APIs but most portions of it are just communication specifications. This whole todo about Mono and thus GNOME being Microsoft's bitch is so retarded. It is much better to have software that can talk to a wide range of software as opposed to only being compatible with a narrow range of software. It allows for vendor independence as well as forward and backwards compatibility. If a bunch of vendors produce software that does FOO and are all using specified guidelines for FOO communication you can pick any one of those vendors (or write your own software) that does FOO and you aren't locked into using software from a single vendor. Using Mono and supporting .NET communication schemes GNOME software can talk to closed source software using the same schemes. A great example is GDict, it is only going to work with dictionary services that it knows how to use. A SOAP version though could query a server to see if it is running a service and once it finds out if it is it can figure out how to query it as to get the results it is looking for.
You seem to think
It has been reported by the Register, the unofficial source of all slashdot news, that at least 22 slashdot geeks have been found dead this evening from sponteneous combustion. Apparently they were viewing a recent slashdot article containing the words Blizzard Entertainment and the acronym DMCA in the same paragraph. Reports are still sketchy but it is believed that seeing the company responsible for geek favourites such as Diablo and Starcraft enforce their will with the DMCA simply caused the slashdot geeks to explode. It is also feared that more such explosions have taken place because many of these victims are living in basements and bedrooms of their parents' houses and missed the call to dinner. Who knows how many more geeks will be found in this manner.
The problem with considering e-mail to bve private communication is the fact it is not very private or discrete. E-mailing someone is sort of like standing in the middle of a crowd and yelling to them hoping nobody else pays attention to what you just said to them. Technically unencrypted e-mail has no expectation of privacy because it is sent in the open as it were and anyone interested could read it. An ISP has to comply with court orders to turn over e-mail records if they keep them because they are just giving information that was sent in the clear anyhow. If you sent sensitive information (say a bank account number) on a postcard and then someone used that information to remove all the money from the account the court would laugh you out of the building for being so stupid as to assume a message sent out in the open had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Ergo, always encrypt your damn e-mail!
Security problem solved, no one can snoop your password if you can't type it in anymore. Unless of course they phreak your brain with a PET scanner or crush your balls in a walnut cracker until you tell them. Methods to circumvent either wetware attack is an exercise for the reader.
I'm not really sure even a iconic password is going to be secure from key loggers as they can just as easily monitor mouse click events as they can monitor keyboard click events. A slightly sophisticated trojan could easily so screen captures and correlate them with mouseclicks or key presses. Remember Back Orifice, it was basically remote desktop mirroring with a remote control function. The infiltration of a system inserting a slightly perverted system service the user wouldn't notice would be pretty effective at stealing passwords. Whether you're clicking icons in a 3D game or typing them. Maybe though you could make a self contained system consisting of an infrared camera and IR lighting to track the focus of someone's eyeballs. They would just focus on the icon and click a button to select it, after all the icons were selected it could send a hash of your password to the system for verification. At least then snoopers would have to get REALLY sophisticated to figure out what your password was, at least replace your camerawith an uber-hacked version.
That would work only so far as to disgruntle both the intended user and unintended user. If it took me a minute to type in my username and password how often do you think I would do it? Would I maybe leave myself logged in when I got up to take a walk or to get a drink? That'd set me up for a whole new security mess. It's been shown that difficult to use authentication schemes are far too often left unused simply because users are too lazy (even the security conscious). This of course makes you question your paranoia level. If you wanted to impliment this sort of thing on your system I'd say go for it but if you were my sys admin and I had to hunt for every character of my password you'd end up with a shoe shoved sideways up your ass.
The video game idea is still iconic, if you run around selecting the proper icon (eg. character model standing around) you're still limited by the number of character models you've got available and the number of them you've got to select. The only real benefit iconic password schemes have over is it is sort of difficult to use a wetware exploit by watching over someone's shoulder or spying on what they type on the keyboard. I can still attack the password conventionally and with a limited set of icons it would be fairly quick work to search through the possible keyspace for the correct password. That's what I'm getting at here. Iconic video game passwords only add complexity to an already complex system for a user. Sure remebering to click a white rabit model and then a japanese schoolgirl model and then a red suited super hero model might be easy to remember but the interface is going to suck and far too much time is going to be wasted jumping through those hoops.
There's quite a few laptops that can be had fairly cheap I think I might suggest looking into older Powerbook laptops. Older PC laptops in many cases are clunky, hot, and I wouldn't REALLY trust them to be on 24/7. If you avoid the Powerbook 5300s you'll probably land a keeper. A particular model of note is the PB 2400 which is/was a subnotebook. It weighs about four and a half pounds and leaves the floppy and CD drive as external devices. You could stick YDL on it to do your coding work, it has revitalized many a Powerbook that is unable to run OSX. If you wanted a little more power you can find Wallstreet (older G3 based Powerbooks with 12 or 14 inch screens) PBs hovering around 500$ sometimes. Lombards and Pismos go for a grand or more if in good condition. Even if you went with a PC laptop it would probably be a bit more useful overal to you than a dedicated MiniPC sitting in your bedroom.
I replaced the stock 4.3GB Travelstar in my G3 Powerbook with a newer 20GB model last year and at first I was worried something went wrong because I could never hear the damn thing. Even the fans in the sucker hardly ever come on, I can't recall them coming on even after a 12 hour Diablo 2 marathon, if they did I didn't hear them.
There's two problems with the picture click password schemes. Both methods are susceptible to keystroke logging programs as the authentication module is going to have entry and exit points which means they can be monitored. The second problem is specifically with choosing icons as a password. There's a definite feasible number of icons you can fit on a screen and have people be able to distinguish, this limiting factor affects your ability to have a complex enough password so that it can't be easily guessed. With a typed ASCII password you've got 2^128*n password combinations (where n is the number of symbols in your password), with an iconic password you've only got y^n password combinations (where y in the total number of icons which is limited to how many can be displayed on the screen at once). You could have as many icons as ASCII characters I suppose but that would be difficult for many people to cope with. Any two similar icons would cause confusion in users. If you remember an icon by general visual cues you might end up screwed over if multiple icons had the same cues with slightly varying colours or something. This is an Roman alphabet reading American point of view though, Asian readers probably think I'm retarded because my alphabet has less than 3000 characters.
So..does it come with TEMPEST-proof console fonts too? I think that would be the big todo for the really paranoid (aside from coming with a foldout F cage). Highly anti-aliased fonts work decently (in theory) thrwarting VE screen captures but if you're running soley in the console I would think you're at a decent risk of having your data captured considering the regularity of the screen and the unique shaping of console fonts. A little off topic but I was wondering if one could impliment a Matrix style command shell where white space was replaced on screen from /dev/rand in a light font like light grey and then when you type the letters would either be dark grey or white to distinguish them from the random letter replacing white space. While somewhat hard to read it would cause so much static VE screen captures which of crappy monitors can be done with a slightly hacked AM radio, would be pretty difficult to make out. It would just be cool to make a shell that just did that to begin with. Pop open a terminal and have it look super funky would make a pretty badass shell theme.
Wired this month is carrying an article about a similar idea using blimps. From the article the blimp stays aloft for like 3 years and carries a moderate amount of wireless equipment which can provide coverage for an area about 72km in diameter. I forget the exact altitude at which they hover but it is somewhere above regular air traffic and high enough to be safe from most weather patterns. Way back when Popular Mechanics had an article about high altitude airplanes (which has been posted several times on slashdot) that would also carry high speed communications equipment. I always thought it would be rather efficient to use airborne but not quite orbital space stations to relay radio traffic. You get the coverage or a space borne satellite without the inherent cost of lighting an explosion under its ass and launching it into orbit.
Stop the world I want to get of...oh. Well thanks then mate.
In free space? Who needs to repeat freshman physics? In the solar system you're still bound by the gravity of the Sun. Besides being drawn in by the Sun intertia is resistance to fucking change in velocity. Look it the fuck up.