Yeah. I also heard about this explanation. The reasoning behind that was the so-called 'trusted-path'.
A co-worked explained me half a dozen of times that this trusted-path made windows more secure than unix.
"You see, when you press ctrl-alt-del you have a direct-secure connection, bla, bla, bla"
One day, the beta of DirectDraw arrived. One of the example was a little ball that spinned on a corner of the screen. To stop it, I ctrl-alt-deleted to get the NT3.51 task manager.
The ball continued spinning on the 'trusted' screen... Trusted path my ass...
> It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
It is not a problem. In a few hundred of years, when the copyright will expire, you'll get your DVD version.
Your examples are too recent. M$ brought much more to us:
Basic everywhere. At time of smalltalk and lisp, they pushed basic. Thanks for that. They ruined my life.
DOS, EMM, XMS, 640Kb limit, A20 gate. The whole DOS api. It was not at stone age, folks, it was in the 80's. This harmed a lot of children, that ended-up re-developing unix in the 90's. Digital civilisation lost about 10 years in the process.
The paperclip. This harmed millions of users.
The login panel that is dismissed with the escape key. The 'control-alt-del' to login. Someone should pay for that.
Winmodems. Don't forget winmodems.
Oh, and the 10bits in the cylinder number. The 504Mb limitation of hard drive ? And the 8Gb limit ?
And FAT, the Fragmented Allocation Table ? Who should pay for the countless hours morons spend looking DEFRAG.EXE painfully moving blocks around ?
And the windows API ? Winsock ? The API where you need a hidden window to receive data on a socket ?
Oh my god. I don't want to break microsoft apart, I want to dissolve bill gates in an acid bath.
> A drop-down list with (several) hundred items is sheer lunacy
This is not an excuse not to handle it properly. (I don't know why, but this recall me the mswindows combox boxes where you have about 3 of 4 lines of avalaible data, probably because someone decided that using a combo with a few dozen of lines would be 'sheer lunacy')
> Indeed if you find the user having to select from an unfiltered set of that many items, then you probably need to reexamine the design of that portion of the application.
Nonsense. You have a number in the interface. You click on it, and want to drill through. Unfortunately, there are 6000 facts hidden behind it. The user *want* to see them, probably because he want to sort them and find a particular one. Sure, he could do a quety for that, but scanning in a list is sometimes easier/more confortable. I can use list of 100K items if the list is sorted meaningfully. There are user hitting the 65K lines limit in excel spreadsheet every day ?
Hell, with you reasoning, we should suppress any kind of visualisation of log files, as those are basically list of thousands of items.
> Just going on this one clue, it appears that your more fundamental problem might be immature abilities in your designers.
Nope. Its problem is that he is using a toolkit that doesn't scale to the user needs. Sure, and application that _requires_ the user to dig into list with hundred of elements is severly ill-desgined, but one that _prevent_ a power user to look at its data is plain broken.
If a developer want to make anything resonable (like a scroll list with 1000 items sorted by date), he should not be prevented because the toolkit implementors are using o(N^2) algorithms.
> the memory-consumtion of KDE + X + everything else is still below 40 MB.
This is funny as hell. This is what is called a resource hog. And YES, gnome is a resource hog too. And Mac OS X also. And win32 too.
A NeXT machine was running fine (in 2.x) with only 8Mb of ram. A color station under 3.3 would run fine with 32Mb of ram. This means the OS + the workspace + edit + a few apps (real apps, like Mathematica or Improv)
And before that, Geoworks ran real fast in extremely low memory conditions.
Still below 40MB before having started any usefull application ? Nothing to be proud of...Of course adding java binding will make 40MB of bloat looking ridiculous...
SENSE (Size of disk + sector size)
POWERON (start the drive)
POWEROFF (stops the drive)
FLUSH (make sure cached data is on the media)
and EJECT (eject removable device)
> This leads me to believe that Nvidia's goal with this chipset is not to improve the 3D gaming experience of their customers, but rather to lure developers into using these (admittedly excellent) new features
I disagree. Their programmable vertex shaders are a very good idea. Of course developers may want to directly access this features, and maybe make games that requires GeForce3. But there are very good sides too.
First, having programmable vertex shaders can help them implementing better opengl drivers (for instance glTexGen). This will help existing programs.
Second, a lot of new tricks can be experimented. 128 SIMD instructions is huge. I for one, would love to hack on this a few weeks. My mind blows on all the tricks that can be done basically free. Creative use of the vertex shader will undoubtely be implemented by competition, and would ends up as "standard" open gl extensions.
(Btw, I don't see any noise function, or texture lookup ops. Maybe I should check more closely).
> avoid the GeForce3, and avoid any games written to depend on its features
I don't see a reason to avoid the GF3. Of course, avoiding games that *only* support it is a good idea. In the same vein, we should avoid games that only support DirectX, and games that runs on windows.
> My right to breathe clean air an not be forced into a crippling and multi-day hospitalizing asthma attack trumps your right to smoke every time
Get your head out of your ass. Americans are by far the biggest polluter on earth.
The right of the rest of the planet to breath clean air, to have a ozone shield, to have trees, to give a healthy land to their childs, to have non-polluted water is crippled by your right to pollute.
> I promise not to shoot my guns into the crowd you are standing in if you promise not to smoke in the crowd that I'm standing in.
You are polluting my air with your car. Should I shoot you ?
Go listen to Denis Leary "I'm an Asshole". Lyrics are here:
http://www.dannyland.org/~dannyman/lyrics/asshol e. html
> News flash buddy: London is more dangerous than most US cities, with the exception of US cities with gun bans.
News flash buddy: I don't live in London. I don't even live in England. I am not even british. (It was not that hard to guess, I cited 'Disgusting cheese' as a downpoint for the US...)
> A gun in my belt makes me a hell of a lot safer [...]
<scared joke>
Seeing how fast you are to make judgment, I must confess that a gun in your belt makes me feel a hell less safer...
</scared joke>
> Would you care to elaborate on this? Specifically, how does US life seem brainfucked
Mmm. A few ones. Two weeks of holidays per year. Possibility of getting fired in the day. Disgusting cheese. Omnipresence of cars. Cult of money. Stupid laws [no drink before 21, but can drive a car at 16, smoking laws]. What seems to be social clustering (all house looking similar in a road is nightmare vision, for me). Omnipresence of litigation. Violence (Police everywhere, lot of Guns owner. Death penalty)
> and what do you find superior about life in your country?
I grew there. You may note that I did not said that it _was_, but that it _seemed_. And this is the whole point of the article too. I don't think he said that Utah sucks (even if he probably think it is the case), but that Drink laws make state looking intrusive.
> versions 7.0 and above, 6.5 and below is a stability nightmare
I know someone that worked as a DBA in the WPG-DBOPS group at Microsoft,
He had an NT 3.51 system running MSSQL 4.21a.
It ran flawlessly for over a year (including the DBMS) before finally crashing.
> However, your argument of Microsoft using a closed source ogg codec is a dangerous one. 'Embrace and Extend"
Microsoft could do this with mp3 in a blink of the eye (and for a few hundred of millions of $). At least, with ogg, everyone have to compete on the same ground.
> the code would have to be linked against some decidedly CLOSED SOURCE code, thus chucking the GPL out the window
Of course, vorbis was LGPL, not GPL. So this point was voided at start. You can link a LGPL library with whatever you want. Only modifications made to the library have to be published. But you also have to let users relink, which is quite hard on an embedded system...:-)
> That will be a great deal harder to justify now....
Not really. You can argue that keeping improvment on the library closed will make maintenance and merge with future version more and more difficult, and that you will basically fork the codebase. Explain them that, if you give your improvment back, you'll get the benefits of *all* the improvments made to the library.
> Most likely your Napster client has a private key and a public key. When you get an MP3 from someone else, your client gives their client the public key, their box uses this key to encode the outgoing.mp3 as a.nap, then it can only be played on your box because only your box has the private key.
The private key have to be on the client to play the file. So, reverse engineering of.nap files is possible. And, if the underlying is a MP3 stream, then the original MP3 can be re-constructed.
Napster doing something like that is like putting a huge blinking neon, reading "hack me" on each napster copy.
This is funny. I expressed myself so badly that you think I played the devil advocate. Far from this. There wasn't much sarcasm in the previous post.
The fax machine I talk about have its ink cartridge with what is called in France a 'puce'. This is an electronic counter that cannot be reset. Communication with this counter is crypted so they are hard to fake. Such counters are used in telephone cards, and other similar devices.
The 'puce' is sold with the ink cartridge. You have to put it into a special place in the fax machine. If the chip is not in place, the machine consider it is out of ink, no matter how much real ink is in the cartridge.
Each time the fax machine outputs a page (from a remote fax machine, when doing a local copy, or when printing its log/stats), it burns a cell of the 'puce'.
If you buy a '50-page' ink cartridge, the 'puce' have exactly 50 burnable cells. Ie, after 50 pages, your fax machine decides that it is out of ink, even if all printed pages were blank, and the cartridge is full of physicall ink.
Of course, it also means that you cannot refill the cartridge. It also means that the fax machine maker (sagem) have a guarantee revenue stream on each page you print. There cannot be any grey market for their cartridge. If they go out of business, you can use the fax machine as a doorstop. If they decide that your model is obsolete, then you are out of luck. If they want to ask 1 $ per page, you have no choice other than to pay them.
This is artificial scarcity done in order to trap customer and boost revenues.
> The ink in the cartridge is a limited resource - it runs out, and there's nothing you can do about it
In fact, the physicall ink is totally irrelevant: by buying a cartridge, you are in reality buying the right to print 50 pages. This is why I beleive that it is quite relevant to the music idea (from a high level point of view, not from a implementation point of view). Owning something will mean less and less.
> That's changing the rules - we'd no longer be buying the music (or even access to a copy of the music on a given physical medium), we'd be hiring it
That's it. I once bought a fax machine. When I opened it, I found that the ink cartridge had a little chip that was used as a "gauge" to "warn me when the cartridge was out of ink". Of course it measured the amount of pages, and a cartridge was not usable if the "gauge" was empty. With a 50-page cartridge I could only "print" 50 blank pages.
I bring the fax machine to the store, telling them that they did not understood me and I wanted to _buy_ one, not to _rent_ one.
Anyway, the most scary thing in that, is that most people don't understand what made me upset.
> The only real way to handle bad ideas is to challenge them with better ideas.
Sure. Challenge them with your ideas, while they challenge you and your relatives with baseball bats.
Now, let's have a public debate on why paedophilia is good (okay, maybe we should need the consent of one of the parents, but beside that, it looks really fun.)
You also said:
> Furthermore, isolating a group of bad-ideas-supporters does not help to win them over.
> So really, all censorship does is impede debate
This is definitely not proved. There is no debate of any sort with those guys. They would win, because they don't give a fuck about what you think.
Do the fact of beeing able to talk about the "church" of scientology enable USA to "win them over". Did you saw any debate there ? In france, there is something called a 'droit the reponse' (right to answer), that can be used when something slanderous is said in a newspaper. The newspaper have to publish this. The Front National (french wannabe nazi party) uses this systematically. Each time an article says anything about the FN, they send a very verbose 'droit the reponse', in order to get newspaper space. Where is the debate ? Nowhere.
> The alternative would of course be to make the book a part of the school curriculum. There it can be discussed with children and they can see for themselves what is wrong with the arguments given in the book. All the mysticism surrounding a book disappears and it just becomes another lesson from history - one that we all know we should not forget.
Of course it would not work. You seem to think that by arguing with a neo-nazi you could make him change its mind.
Go back on earth.
Last discussion I had with a neo-nazi ended with:
"You think too much. You are dangerous. When we'll take over the country, you'll be in the first we'll kill" (translated from french, but verbatim).
Ban them. Squish them. Marginalize them. You cannot talk with those people. We should learn from history.
The lesson she learned worth much more than any "A" she could have. She learned about unwritten rules. She wanted to uncover a hidden fact ("People are racist"), and, in the process, found another one ("School are facist").
This is real science, my friend. No, all she have to do is a fair experiment to prove that...
A single thing is clear in the article. Microsoft is scared to death.
Finding why is quite easy. RMS wanted to kill IP, or at least to guarantee that you can use a computer without selling your soul. He deserve credit for starting the fight.
But MS didn't care about RMS.
Then linux came. A toy operating system. MS was a bit scared by linux, because it attacked its bottom line. They used FUD tactics against it, and failed miserabily, because it only gave linux more momentum. MS could have destroyed linux a few years ago (hiring key developers, releasing a MS linux, playing strong-arm with early adopters and media, dealing with EOM to close hardware, obfuscating protocols, actively detroying linux paritions at install, challenging the GPL, pushing BSD ahead), but the anti-trust trial probably prevented this to be done at full force (they did a bit of everything, but no real move). All in all they were not really scared.
Then, in a couple of years, IBM embraced linux, Sun embraced GPL, several office clones where released, desktop environments were becoming standard. This is scary.
What are the key applications of MS ?
* The OS. Free OS exists
* Internet Explorer. A key app to get people hooked to windows. Mozilla exists, and can't be destroyed.
* Office. Office clones exists.
* Backoffice. This is ta big advantage remaining. No open source product can stand against SQL Server or Analysis Services. But joe random user don't care.
* Visual Basic. Another advantage, cause it is the de-facto development standard on windows. They integrate it in every app, to make it ubiquitous.
* Third party apps. Mostly DirectX games (see around yourself people that use computers. What are the apps they use that have absolutely no free counterparts ? Recent games. Most lusers I know that run windows at home uses IE/OutlookExpress/Word and 5 or 6 games). Be sure that the x-box strategy is the to re-inforce that.
Anyway, FUD have been showed not to work.
GPL prevents embrace and extend.
Note that the sole protection (beside its huge amount of users) of 'open source' is the GPL. This is what prevent MS to "compete" (ie: getting inter-operability by using the code, modifying code, then preventing open-source to play catch-up).
Anti-trust trial is over (anyone that think that US govt will do anything is dumb beyond belief).
Microsoft is flexing its muscle and will probably try many simultaneous tactics.
Getting govt to refuse GPL would be a huge point to them. What they really want is probably to get universities to ban GPL (something like : you can't get govt fund if you produce GPLed code, or better, if you use GPLed code). It is a war for developer mindshare. It'll take years to get that. They need to pervert public perception of the GPL. They need to dramatically decrease the amount of GPL developpers.
Another attack angle that is obvious is the divide tactic. MS will play BSD against GPL. Unfortunately for them, the issues of GPL vs BSD are well known, and most intelligent people understand that both licenses have their use (and LGPL have its use too).
An interesting attack angle is the court challenge of the GPL. You can bet that millions of dollars are currently spent to find how, and to bribe key people. But will MS have the balls to challenge the GPL ? This would be a disastrous PR, in an order that have never been done before. They may loose big time.
Most promising angle of attack, is to totally change the rules of the game. Getting content protection into the hardware, promoting the use of 'trusted' system software and 'trusted' media applications, is a way to prevent *any* digital media to be delivered to open-source platform. OTOH, it is also a way to push people into a 'free' media system. After all, it is the proprietary software mess that started the free software movment. Making media distribution proprietary is perhaps the best path to a free-media system...
Anyway, the free software camp is getting stronger everyday. It will definitely be an interesting fight.
> Name ONE problem on this planet that is the result of the poor workings of evolution
Humans. They destroy the planet and the life forms out there. We have no predators.
If evolution worked well, we would have either bigger brain to be less stupid, or smaller brain so we didn't invent all the shit that is out there. Or we would have been stupid enough to kill ourself last century. This did not occured. Planet earth is doomed. Evolution at fault. Film at 11.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I also heard about this explanation. The reasoning behind that was the so-called 'trusted-path'.
A co-worked explained me half a dozen of times that this trusted-path made windows more secure than unix.
"You see, when you press ctrl-alt-del you have a direct-secure connection, bla, bla, bla"
One day, the beta of DirectDraw arrived. One of the example was a little ball that spinned on a corner of the screen. To stop it, I ctrl-alt-deleted to get the NT3.51 task manager.
The ball continued spinning on the 'trusted' screen... Trusted path my ass...
Cheers,
--fred
> It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
It is not a problem. In a few hundred of years, when the copyright will expire, you'll get your DVD version.
Cheers,
--fred
Your examples are too recent. M$ brought much more to us:
Basic everywhere. At time of smalltalk and lisp, they pushed basic. Thanks for that. They ruined my life.
DOS, EMM, XMS, 640Kb limit, A20 gate. The whole DOS api. It was not at stone age, folks, it was in the 80's. This harmed a lot of children, that ended-up re-developing unix in the 90's. Digital civilisation lost about 10 years in the process.
The paperclip. This harmed millions of users.
The login panel that is dismissed with the escape key. The 'control-alt-del' to login. Someone should pay for that.
Winmodems. Don't forget winmodems.
Oh, and the 10bits in the cylinder number. The 504Mb limitation of hard drive ? And the 8Gb limit ?
And FAT, the Fragmented Allocation Table ? Who should pay for the countless hours morons spend looking DEFRAG.EXE painfully moving blocks around ?
And the windows API ? Winsock ? The API where you need a hidden window to receive data on a socket ?
Oh my god. I don't want to break microsoft apart, I want to dissolve bill gates in an acid bath.
Cheers,
--fred
> A drop-down list with (several) hundred items is sheer lunacy
This is not an excuse not to handle it properly. (I don't know why, but this recall me the mswindows combox boxes where you have about 3 of 4 lines of avalaible data, probably because someone decided that using a combo with a few dozen of lines would be 'sheer lunacy')
> Indeed if you find the user having to select from an unfiltered set of that many items, then you probably need to reexamine the design of that portion of the application.
Nonsense. You have a number in the interface. You click on it, and want to drill through. Unfortunately, there are 6000 facts hidden behind it. The user *want* to see them, probably because he want to sort them and find a particular one. Sure, he could do a quety for that, but scanning in a list is sometimes easier/more confortable. I can use list of 100K items if the list is sorted meaningfully. There are user hitting the 65K lines limit in excel spreadsheet every day ?
Hell, with you reasoning, we should suppress any kind of visualisation of log files, as those are basically list of thousands of items.
> Just going on this one clue, it appears that your more fundamental problem might be immature abilities in your designers.
Nope. Its problem is that he is using a toolkit that doesn't scale to the user needs. Sure, and application that _requires_ the user to dig into list with hundred of elements is severly ill-desgined, but one that _prevent_ a power user to look at its data is plain broken.
If a developer want to make anything resonable (like a scroll list with 1000 items sorted by date), he should not be prevented because the toolkit implementors are using o(N^2) algorithms.
Cheers,
--fred
> Java is was a neat idea executed very badly.
I would agree, if you replace 'neat idea' by either 'dumbed down smalltalk' or 'sluggish objective-C'.
Cheers,
--fred
> the memory-consumtion of KDE + X + everything else is still below 40 MB.
This is funny as hell. This is what is called a resource hog. And YES, gnome is a resource hog too. And Mac OS X also. And win32 too.
A NeXT machine was running fine (in 2.x) with only 8Mb of ram. A color station under 3.3 would run fine with 32Mb of ram. This means the OS + the workspace + edit + a few apps (real apps, like Mathematica or Improv)
And before that, Geoworks ran real fast in extremely low memory conditions.
Still below 40MB before having started any usefull application ? Nothing to be proud of...Of course adding java binding will make 40MB of bloat looking ridiculous...
Cheers,
--fred
May I ask for:
SENSE (Size of disk + sector size)
POWERON (start the drive)
POWEROFF (stops the drive)
FLUSH (make sure cached data is on the media)
and EJECT (eject removable device)
Cheers,
--fred
> This leads me to believe that Nvidia's goal with this chipset is not to improve the 3D gaming experience of their customers, but rather to lure developers into using these (admittedly excellent) new features
I disagree. Their programmable vertex shaders are a very good idea. Of course developers may want to directly access this features, and maybe make games that requires GeForce3. But there are very good sides too.
First, having programmable vertex shaders can help them implementing better opengl drivers (for instance glTexGen). This will help existing programs.
Second, a lot of new tricks can be experimented. 128 SIMD instructions is huge. I for one, would love to hack on this a few weeks. My mind blows on all the tricks that can be done basically free. Creative use of the vertex shader will undoubtely be implemented by competition, and would ends up as "standard" open gl extensions.
(Btw, I don't see any noise function, or texture lookup ops. Maybe I should check more closely).
> avoid the GeForce3, and avoid any games written to depend on its features
I don't see a reason to avoid the GF3. Of course, avoiding games that *only* support it is a good idea. In the same vein, we should avoid games that only support DirectX, and games that runs on windows.
Not very realistic...
Cheers,
--fred
> My right to breathe clean air an not be forced into a crippling and multi-day hospitalizing asthma attack trumps your right to smoke every time
l e. html
Get your head out of your ass. Americans are by far the biggest polluter on earth.
The right of the rest of the planet to breath clean air, to have a ozone shield, to have trees, to give a healthy land to their childs, to have non-polluted water is crippled by your right to pollute.
> I promise not to shoot my guns into the crowd you are standing in if you promise not to smoke in the crowd that I'm standing in.
You are polluting my air with your car. Should I shoot you ?
Go listen to Denis Leary "I'm an Asshole". Lyrics are here:
http://www.dannyland.org/~dannyman/lyrics/assho
Cheers,
--fred
> News flash buddy: London is more dangerous than most US cities, with the exception of US cities with gun bans.
News flash buddy: I don't live in London. I don't even live in England. I am not even british. (It was not that hard to guess, I cited 'Disgusting cheese' as a downpoint for the US...)
> A gun in my belt makes me a hell of a lot safer [...]
<scared joke>
Seeing how fast you are to make judgment, I must confess that a gun in your belt makes me feel a hell less safer...
</scared joke>
Cheers,
--fred
> Would you care to elaborate on this? Specifically, how does US life seem brainfucked
Mmm. A few ones. Two weeks of holidays per year. Possibility of getting fired in the day. Disgusting cheese. Omnipresence of cars. Cult of money. Stupid laws [no drink before 21, but can drive a car at 16, smoking laws]. What seems to be social clustering (all house looking similar in a road is nightmare vision, for me). Omnipresence of litigation. Violence (Police everywhere, lot of Guns owner. Death penalty)
> and what do you find superior about life in your country?
I grew there. You may note that I did not said that it _was_, but that it _seemed_. And this is the whole point of the article too. I don't think he said that Utah sucks (even if he probably think it is the case), but that Drink laws make state looking intrusive.
Cheers,
--fred
> Do issues like [...] social life really affect where engineers and programmers want to work?
Of course. For instance US life seems so brainfucked from this side of the atlantic that I refused to move over several time.
Cheers,
--fred
> versions 7.0 and above, 6.5 and below is a stability nightmare
I know someone that worked as a DBA in the WPG-DBOPS group at Microsoft,
He had an NT 3.51 system running MSSQL 4.21a.
It ran flawlessly for over a year (including the DBMS) before finally crashing.
Stop spreading your lies.
Cheers,
--fred
> However, your argument of Microsoft using a closed source ogg codec is a dangerous one. 'Embrace and Extend"
Microsoft could do this with mp3 in a blink of the eye (and for a few hundred of millions of $). At least, with ogg, everyone have to compete on the same ground.
Cheers,
--fred
> the code would have to be linked against some decidedly CLOSED SOURCE code, thus chucking the GPL out the window
:-)
Of course, vorbis was LGPL, not GPL. So this point was voided at start. You can link a LGPL library with whatever you want. Only modifications made to the library have to be published. But you also have to let users relink, which is quite hard on an embedded system...
> That will be a great deal harder to justify now....
Not really. You can argue that keeping improvment on the library closed will make maintenance and merge with future version more and more difficult, and that you will basically fork the codebase. Explain them that, if you give your improvment back, you'll get the benefits of *all* the improvments made to the library.
Cheers,
--fred
binary freedom is a trap ! What we really want is source freedom !
</joke>
Cheers,
--fred
> Most likely your Napster client has a private key and a public key. When you get an MP3 from someone else, your client gives their client the public key, their box uses this key to encode the outgoing .mp3 as a .nap, then it can only be played on your box because only your box has the private key.
.nap files is possible. And, if the underlying is a MP3 stream, then the original MP3 can be re-constructed.
The private key have to be on the client to play the file. So, reverse engineering of
Napster doing something like that is like putting a huge blinking neon, reading "hack me" on each napster copy.
Software copy protection is futile.
Cheers,
--fred
> Stop trying to play devil's advocate :-)
This is funny. I expressed myself so badly that you think I played the devil advocate. Far from this. There wasn't much sarcasm in the previous post.
The fax machine I talk about have its ink cartridge with what is called in France a 'puce'. This is an electronic counter that cannot be reset. Communication with this counter is crypted so they are hard to fake. Such counters are used in telephone cards, and other similar devices.
The 'puce' is sold with the ink cartridge. You have to put it into a special place in the fax machine. If the chip is not in place, the machine consider it is out of ink, no matter how much real ink is in the cartridge.
Each time the fax machine outputs a page (from a remote fax machine, when doing a local copy, or when printing its log/stats), it burns a cell of the 'puce'.
If you buy a '50-page' ink cartridge, the 'puce' have exactly 50 burnable cells. Ie, after 50 pages, your fax machine decides that it is out of ink, even if all printed pages were blank, and the cartridge is full of physicall ink.
Of course, it also means that you cannot refill the cartridge. It also means that the fax machine maker (sagem) have a guarantee revenue stream on each page you print. There cannot be any grey market for their cartridge. If they go out of business, you can use the fax machine as a doorstop. If they decide that your model is obsolete, then you are out of luck. If they want to ask 1 $ per page, you have no choice other than to pay them.
This is artificial scarcity done in order to trap customer and boost revenues.
> The ink in the cartridge is a limited resource - it runs out, and there's nothing you can do about it
In fact, the physicall ink is totally irrelevant: by buying a cartridge, you are in reality buying the right to print 50 pages. This is why I beleive that it is quite relevant to the music idea (from a high level point of view, not from a implementation point of view). Owning something will mean less and less.
Cheers,
--fred
> That's changing the rules - we'd no longer be buying the music (or even access to a copy of the music on a given physical medium), we'd be hiring it
That's it. I once bought a fax machine. When I opened it, I found that the ink cartridge had a little chip that was used as a "gauge" to "warn me when the cartridge was out of ink". Of course it measured the amount of pages, and a cartridge was not usable if the "gauge" was empty. With a 50-page cartridge I could only "print" 50 blank pages.
I bring the fax machine to the store, telling them that they did not understood me and I wanted to _buy_ one, not to _rent_ one.
Anyway, the most scary thing in that, is that most people don't understand what made me upset.
Cheers,
--fred
> The only real way to handle bad ideas is to challenge them with better ideas.
Sure. Challenge them with your ideas, while they challenge you and your relatives with baseball bats.
Now, let's have a public debate on why paedophilia is good (okay, maybe we should need the consent of one of the parents, but beside that, it looks really fun.)
You also said:
> Furthermore, isolating a group of bad-ideas-supporters does not help to win them over.
> So really, all censorship does is impede debate
This is definitely not proved. There is no debate of any sort with those guys. They would win, because they don't give a fuck about what you think.
Do the fact of beeing able to talk about the "church" of scientology enable USA to "win them over". Did you saw any debate there ? In france, there is something called a 'droit the reponse' (right to answer), that can be used when something slanderous is said in a newspaper. The newspaper have to publish this. The Front National (french wannabe nazi party) uses this systematically. Each time an article says anything about the FN, they send a very verbose 'droit the reponse', in order to get newspaper space. Where is the debate ? Nowhere.
Cheers,
--fred
> The alternative would of course be to make the book a part of the school curriculum. There it can be discussed with children and they can see for themselves what is wrong with the arguments given in the book. All the mysticism surrounding a book disappears and it just becomes another lesson from history - one that we all know we should not forget.
Of course it would not work. You seem to think that by arguing with a neo-nazi you could make him change its mind.
Go back on earth.
Last discussion I had with a neo-nazi ended with:
"You think too much. You are dangerous. When we'll take over the country, you'll be in the first we'll kill" (translated from french, but verbatim).
Ban them. Squish them. Marginalize them. You cannot talk with those people. We should learn from history.
Cheers,
--fred
> She should get an "A".
The lesson she learned worth much more than any "A" she could have. She learned about unwritten rules. She wanted to uncover a hidden fact ("People are racist"), and, in the process, found another one ("School are facist").
This is real science, my friend. No, all she have to do is a fair experiment to prove that...
Cheers,
--fred
> Sorry man, but a bunch of geeks whining is not interesting. Trolls get variations of those four topics on the front page every day at kuro5hin.
Yeah. I sometimes check kuro5hin and read the comments. It is mostly ridiculous contentless mojo-whoring / self-satisfaction / mutual dick-sucking
Btw, you missed the (paraphrased)
5. I have a gun, and love it. But what can I use it for ?
6. Since last year, I got one year older, but still can't get laid. Am I homosexual ?
7. I am white, male, healthy, I never had a baby and my parent gives me money every month. Here is my position on abortion.
Kuro5hin is deadly ridiculous. If they had Anonymous Cowards, the quality would probably be better.
Cheers,
--fred
A single thing is clear in the article. Microsoft is scared to death.
Finding why is quite easy. RMS wanted to kill IP, or at least to guarantee that you can use a computer without selling your soul. He deserve credit for starting the fight.
But MS didn't care about RMS.
Then linux came. A toy operating system. MS was a bit scared by linux, because it attacked its bottom line. They used FUD tactics against it, and failed miserabily, because it only gave linux more momentum. MS could have destroyed linux a few years ago (hiring key developers, releasing a MS linux, playing strong-arm with early adopters and media, dealing with EOM to close hardware, obfuscating protocols, actively detroying linux paritions at install, challenging the GPL, pushing BSD ahead), but the anti-trust trial probably prevented this to be done at full force (they did a bit of everything, but no real move). All in all they were not really scared.
Then, in a couple of years, IBM embraced linux, Sun embraced GPL, several office clones where released, desktop environments were becoming standard. This is scary.
What are the key applications of MS ?
* The OS. Free OS exists
* Internet Explorer. A key app to get people hooked to windows. Mozilla exists, and can't be destroyed.
* Office. Office clones exists.
* Backoffice. This is ta big advantage remaining. No open source product can stand against SQL Server or Analysis Services. But joe random user don't care.
* Visual Basic. Another advantage, cause it is the de-facto development standard on windows. They integrate it in every app, to make it ubiquitous.
* Third party apps. Mostly DirectX games (see around yourself people that use computers. What are the apps they use that have absolutely no free counterparts ? Recent games. Most lusers I know that run windows at home uses IE/OutlookExpress/Word and 5 or 6 games). Be sure that the x-box strategy is the to re-inforce that.
Anyway, FUD have been showed not to work.
GPL prevents embrace and extend.
Note that the sole protection (beside its huge amount of users) of 'open source' is the GPL. This is what prevent MS to "compete" (ie: getting inter-operability by using the code, modifying code, then preventing open-source to play catch-up).
Anti-trust trial is over (anyone that think that US govt will do anything is dumb beyond belief).
Microsoft is flexing its muscle and will probably try many simultaneous tactics.
Getting govt to refuse GPL would be a huge point to them. What they really want is probably to get universities to ban GPL (something like : you can't get govt fund if you produce GPLed code, or better, if you use GPLed code). It is a war for developer mindshare. It'll take years to get that. They need to pervert public perception of the GPL. They need to dramatically decrease the amount of GPL developpers.
Another attack angle that is obvious is the divide tactic. MS will play BSD against GPL. Unfortunately for them, the issues of GPL vs BSD are well known, and most intelligent people understand that both licenses have their use (and LGPL have its use too).
An interesting attack angle is the court challenge of the GPL. You can bet that millions of dollars are currently spent to find how, and to bribe key people. But will MS have the balls to challenge the GPL ? This would be a disastrous PR, in an order that have never been done before. They may loose big time.
Most promising angle of attack, is to totally change the rules of the game. Getting content protection into the hardware, promoting the use of 'trusted' system software and 'trusted' media applications, is a way to prevent *any* digital media to be delivered to open-source platform. OTOH, it is also a way to push people into a 'free' media system. After all, it is the proprietary software mess that started the free software movment. Making media distribution proprietary is perhaps the best path to a free-media system...
Anyway, the free software camp is getting stronger everyday. It will definitely be an interesting fight.
Cheers,
--fred
> Name ONE problem on this planet that is the result of the poor workings of evolution
Humans. They destroy the planet and the life forms out there. We have no predators.
If evolution worked well, we would have either bigger brain to be less stupid, or smaller brain so we didn't invent all the shit that is out there. Or we would have been stupid enough to kill ourself last century. This did not occured. Planet earth is doomed. Evolution at fault. Film at 11.
Cheers,
--fred