To add slightly to what the others replying to your post have already said by reiterating what has been posted on slashdot many, many times before:
Unless "all the software you write with it" means "all the software that you create that incorporates source code taken from the source code of Linux" (and i would assume it is not, for i would expect that the prestigious StreetLawyer would not be one to make a grammar ambiguity mistake):
Such a license as you describe would not be compatible with the GPL, as the GPL demands that no use restrictions may be added to GPLed software. (See GPL section 6). So unless one individual entity has the copyright at this point to relicense the entire Linux kernel (unlikely-- *does* anyone? do you have to sign over your copyright to someone specific when you submit a kernel patch?), such a restriction (stating that if you write software using Linux you must open-source it) could not be added unless it were added to the GPL itself.
Please note that linux and other such GPLed products are always released under a certain version of the GPL, with the addition of the phrase "or at your option a later version of the GPL". Hence, even if new restrictions are added to the GPL, this does not affect GPLed code already out there.
In either of the cases described above, you are still free to simply use the older, less restrictively licensed versions of Linux already out there, as the GPL does not allow anyone to retract a license they have given someone under the terms of the GPL.
Except the thing is: Glorified identd+finger actually sounds like a pretty good idea, to me. I could go for that. I'd be happier just integrating that functionality into Jabber, though.. I mean, as long as we're putting talk(1) there, you might as well go all the way:)
(Warning: if the following post turns out to be nonsense, please forgive me.)
Let's say that 2002 comes, and hailstorm becomes something that has a point (beyond ensuring Microsoft gets to have SOMETHING installed by default in WinXP that they can charge a monthly fee for and that the average user won't be able to figure out how to turn off), and GNUStorm 0.6 or whatever gets written, and i install it on my Mac OS X box in my dorm and register my dormroom computer as my authentication authority.
How much flexibility will this hypothetical GNUStorm server have? Is the hailstorm protocol such that if i was running an authentication server, i could flexibly determine exactly what information and when that a given site is given about me? In what way? Oh, hell, is there ANY POINT AT ALL to hailstorm besides not having to type in your personal information/preferred password to every website, and making sure you don't make up 90% of the information you put on webforms? Is there ANYTHING hailstorm does that a web browser with a good autocomplete feature doesn't do?
And if i *could* limit who gets what information, would there be any point, since the sites will all be using the same backhanded information-sharing tactics they use now? If i use hailstorm once to sign onto MSN messenger, and i decide not to let microsoft.com's hailstorm server have any information besides the username and password they use to authenticate, couldn't they just contact some site that they partially own and that shipped me something once, say "hey, what do you have on this username", and get a full readout of my name, address, etc..? Umm.. i'm pretty sure that that last sentence doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but you get what i mean.. right?
If i am misunderstanding what Hailstorm is, i apologize, and request that someone more informed can set me straight. You'll have to excuse me, Microsoft seems to be working very hard to make sure everyone is as misinformed as they could possibly be as to the nature of.NET..
I realize all we are working off of here is unsubstantiated rumors, but i am still curious: can anyone tell me how the work is going along on the PPC multiple-core processor technology?
Are the PPC people still even exploring that direction, or it been abandoned on the logic that Mac OS X's efficient usage of MP makes multi-core chips unecessary? (does it?)
I do not know anything about the technical issues at stake here; i merely heard vague things about this technology a long time ago, and neat as it sounded, because of the extreme secrecy surrounding anything even remotely close to apple's product line it was never made quite clear to me if this technology was feasable or desirable..
Apple's Cocoa APIs allow you to write code in Java as well as Objective C, since both of these are highly dynamic object-oriented languages . I am not sure if the thingies that allow projectbuilder to compile java and seamlessly link java into objective c are part of apple's GCC additions or not.
Will it at some point be possible to use java to write GNUStep apps the way you can currently use java to write Cocoa apps, could apple's own GCC code or whatever be used to facilitate this, and does anyone know if there's been any progress on the attempts to make it possible to write Python code for either?
For as long as i've followed GNUStep, my interpretation of "stuff" has been that they have a goal of remaining as close to the Mac OS X/NeXT API as possible (for the purpose of facilitating portability)-- but that this is not their primary goal, andthey have no problem with diverging if they feel it is technically important. With this in mind, how will the fact that Apple has switched to a PDF-based display model-- one that seems to me to be slightly less technically elegant, and ccloser to the hardware-- while GNUStep has stayed with display postscript affect things? Will this make porting *much* more difficult? Which would be better, making a DPS-like library for os x or a Quartz-like library fopr GNUStep?
If i don't get any answers here, maybe i'll go ask the GNUStep mailing list...
But Windows and OS/2 keep the darn pointer around even when typing.
Actually:
I don't use any form of windows, but i was messing with a friend's Windows Millenium-running laptop the other day*, and happened to stumble into the Mouse settings-control panel thing.. as of WinME, and maybe some other versions of windows (i dont' know), there is now a checkbox for a mac-style "hide cursor on keypress" in the Mouse control panel. Very few people will likely ever take advantage of this, but still, there it is.
* i was trying to turn off their trackpad's irritating auto-click-on-touch behavior. i didn't manage to.. oh well.
You do not have to believe AOL/TW/etc is inherently evil in order to feel this merger is dangerous and Not Good.
No, this is not some evil scheming thing. Yes, this is a sane, valid, sensible business choice, and what AOL/TW would be expected to do. It's still really bad. AOL/TW is quite simply not to be trusted with that kind of market power. Not that they're evil or shifty; just that they're human. Just that that is too much power, too much control, too much influence, and in my opinion at least it is simply not safe to allow that much influence to be collected into one entity. And that AOL/TW has given [me, us] no reason to believe that they are (or will remain) responsible enough to use that power and influence in wholly responsible ways. And that whether or not the potential abuses of AOL/TW/AT&T (or even the current AOL/TW) were (are) to materialize, if those potential abuses do begin to slowly be implemented then there will be literally nothing in place to stop them.
Power Corrupts. I wish more people still believed that..
as far as size goes, there are plenty of companies out there that would dwarf AOLTW..
size, yes. both in terms of employee and $ power, yes, there are larger companies. However, two things:
First off, the issues are not with the simple size of this company, but about the strength and kinds of the leverage it would have. This is not about horizontal market power, although in some specific markets the resulting bethemoth would have LOTS of horizontal power; this is about vertical market power. Anyone alarmed is not alarmed by its mere strength, but by the huge number of markets that it has strength in.
Secondly, i for one am alarmed by a really large media company far more than i am by a really large steel company, simply because from watching current events it would seem to me that media companies are actively threatening my constitutional rights. The companies in the exact spaces that AOL/TW is in seem, to me, currently to be the only groups who are poised, willing, and actively trying to invade my personal privacy and freedom in ways that make me uncomfortable. There are lots of steel companies much "bigger" than AOL/TW, but the steel companies aren't the one paying elected representatives to support things like the SSSCA. (Of course, were i a union laborer my view of the steel companies would surely be different. And those steel companies are surely paying those same elected representatives to produce things like corporate welfare and lax environmental regulations. However, this does not change the fact that raw size goes a LOT further with media than it does with heavy industries.)
p.s.: if my english is a bit garbled this morning, please excuse me. low amounts of sleep longwinded + run-on sentences... [slurrring]tha'sallthankyu.
Thinking of uses for this...
on
MenuetOS Debuts
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Well.. just a thought..
Was trying to think of maybe how this would be good for anything other than rootdisks and novelty value.. and then i started thinking.. well.. 44-khz stereo sound, workable gui, MIDI support..
I can't get the thought out of my head that something-- maybe not this specific OS, because this specific OS is tied to the x86, but maybe something patterned on the same general system design-- like this would maybe be actually useful as an embedded OS for a sampler.
Am i just completely on crack, or would a sampler/synthesiser with a small lcd screen and an os like this one be as cool as it seems to me it would be?
Then again, any really cool stuff you could do with such a system-- say, letting you program your own midi synths in realtime-- would *demand* that it have an interpreter for something more high-level than assembly built in, and doing, say, a LISP/Python interpreter in an environment written wholly in assembly could maybe get messy. Maybe we'd rather have an OS written in LISP in our samplers....?
Is it just me, or does this seem like a REALLY bad idea??
I mean.. crap. Hundreds of linux users setting up computers and then getting really drunk. I can just see this. People stumbling around drunk in the evening, absentmindedly tripping and falling into the spaghetti-cable mess between card tables.. and since everyone is drunk, no one can get them out.. so they remain in a tangled heap until the conference ends and they are discovered by maintenance crews. A quake game in which everyone is just kind of sliding around in slow motion, moving forward and then turning slowly (their crosshairs wobbling) to shoot at each other and missing. And then strafing into the lava by accident. A man stumbles in from drinking, collapses at his cardtable and wakes up the next morning with a throbbing headache in front of a screen covered in near-gibberish written sometime during the previous night that later turns out to be a threaded messaging cgi system written in perl. A weepy drunk guy, unable to deal with his repeatedly crashing X Server because he's not thinking clearly, goes and drinks to forget his troubles until he dies of alchohol poisoning. The SUSE team, sitting on the floor with the guy who wrote Kontour, halfconsiously swinging beer cans in the air and singing Filk in german. The guy who's been writing all those "BSD is dying" trolls standing and angrily yelling, his voice slurring, threatening physical violence against the one mac user who dared to show up for some reason. A bunch of british football hooligans who stagger around, challenge random people to FIFA 2001, lose, and then beat the victors up and smash their playstations. A LARGE HORDE OF PEOPLE GETTING DRUNK AND POSTING ON SLASHDOT EN MASSE.
Interesting. I have never heard of this "NOW" thing, but wish i had.
The direction i would like to see this/. discussion take is this: So, what came out of NOW? How far did they get, and is it far enough that there's something interesting there for the hobbyist faction to take up and continue work on as a volunteer project? Is there any code written, are there any design documents that have been released..? Does Progeny's withdrawal from this project mean it is dead, or simply that work will not be continuing at the same sustained rate? If there are design docs out there, are they complete enough that semiprofessional volunteers could finish the project from here without buggering it up horribly?
Just for the benefit of the others reading this slashdot thread: The AtheOS FAQ has a note on portability that slashdot readers might find informative. You should read it. Wish i'd noticed that before i posted.. hm. i feel stupid.
Do you consider it likely that at some point in the near future AtheOS will develop a PPC port?
I realize that the AtheOS developers are very busy with the hard work they are doing and that there is no good reason for them to expend effort on a PPC port. However i was wondering if you think that there is enough interest among extant developers familiar with the ppc/chrp/macintosh platform that someone might feel like cobbling together a port.
That being said, i was checking and trying to figure out: does AtheOS have some kind of flexible arbitrary-server auto-upgrade "package"-style system along the lines of the debian apt-get? if not, are there plans to implement one, or perhaps port apt-get and dselect to atheos?
Please excuse my ignorance.
- mcc
(I am quite curious about AtheOS, and have been meaning for some time to try to check it out (well, or at least check out the screenshots and read the API documentation, since as implied above i do not personally have an x86 machine on which to test the OS..)-- i was thinking about looking over the atheos webpage yesterday morning, actually. I'm looking forward to learning more about this OS in the future.. if only i knew more now, maybe i'd have some better questions:):shrugs: oh well. thanks.)
Just a quick question. What, exactly, do you mean to by your reference to "MAC", and how does whatever "MAC" stands for in this case connect to file system protection? Do you mean that the file system protection is somehow (how?) related to ethernet MAC addresses, or is this some acronym i am not familiar with?
(p.s. once you've explained this definition/use of MAC, maybe could you add an entry to everything2 explaining it there? ^_^ just checking.)
I am really curious as to what they mean by a "computer" in this specific case. I mean, i have heard that they've done quantum computers capable of picking phone numbers out of a list of four, and such. Which while a HUGE accomplishment is still rather primitive.. Is this just going to be another one of those? A simplistic test machine?
Or is this going to be, like, you know, a real *computer*? Something that can be given general calcuations and work through them? By using the word "computer", are they thinking that what they make is actually going to be something turing-complete, or at least comparable to ENIAC, or maybe even one of the bethemoths that used to sit in the basement of a college (where the computer science students would sign up for a block of time, then come by, drop off large stacks of punchcards, and then wander by the next day to collect the results of the program)?
More importantly, though-- and this is what i'm really wondering about-- if they actually are building a quantum computer that is capable of going into the realm of *running actual programs of some sort*.. what programming language will be used? How will these programs be written? What will the "machine code" look like, and how possible will it be to write software for this in high level languages? (I.e. will it be possible to do HLL abstractions as we do with current computers, at least at first, or will hand-optimisation be too necessary to allow things like "compiling"? I am not 100% sure what a "von neumann" architecture is, but as far as i understand things there are some implicit assumptions in the way that things like C work that kind of only make sense if computers are designed at least generally the way they are now. How different would the architecture of a quantum computer be in a general sense, and how much would current programming languages have to change to make sense in that architecture? Which language is in its current state closest to something that would make sense for the creation of programs on a quantum computer architecture-- C, Python/java, LISP/scheme, Haskell/ML, or APL/Mercury? Or something i've never heard of?
Or is it that special boards or setups whatever will have to be hardwired and specially set up for each specific task (although it will do those tasks really quickly), and this will not be a general-purpose computer capable of doing things like loading and executing an arbitrary written-as-software program?
And to get into the complete castles-in-the-air-speculation realm.. if it is a true general-purpose computer, are they going to try to give it, like, you know, an operating system with things like a kernel and process manager and networking capabilities? Are they going to just stick with letting programs be fed in manualy, or is the thing that they say will take ten years something that is at least realistic to think that you could build one, set it in the basement of a college, and let all the students telnet to it and build and run programs while using some equivilent of unix talk/write to message each other and tyrannical sysadmins constantly watch to see if anyone is playing quantum games so they can kill those processes? (I don't care if they acctually *do* that. Just if that's realistic, my mind is totally blown. I doubt it's realistic.)
Or is anything that may be completed so far in the future they can't really say what it will look like at this point?
I am deathly curious. I desire explanations, or at least links to academic webpages explaining, what sorts of things this computer would do and in what way we would go about giving it its programmatical instructions. Pleasepleaseplease i thank you in advance?
-mcc
If It Can't Process Church Numerals Then What Good Is It
How, exactly, is your script going to find out that gator is running on the remote computer?
What language you do this in, in what medium it's running, and whatever you mean by "java script" (a java servlet? a java applet (however that would work)? an (even more rediculously circumvented by gator than the rest) javascript? javascript is *not* java.).. none of these are really relevant, i don't think; the methodology of how you would detect gator's presence (which i find it hard to believe there is any way to do, althoughsince i do not have any windows boxes around to install Gator on for testing i can't say that for certain) would be rather the same.
Is it that you know something i don't and Gator announces some kind of information about itself in the http headers, or are you just guessing that there is some way? Please enlighten me.
And to explain my last comment: if you are correct, if it is possible for a web server to detect the presence of gator, Gator will not die; Gator will just fix whatever mistake allowed its presence on the client computer to be known to servers, and release a new version whose presence is totally undetectable, making the blocking impossible. However as i have said i would guess the current version of Gator is undetectable and unblockable. It make any more sense when i say it that way?
yes why not, I can run a small script to check If they run gator
And how, pray tell, would you do that?
As far as i can tell, Gator does not give any indication in the outgoing HTTP headers that it is running. Why would it? Does it? Why do you think it would? If it does, why? If it does, and large websites start denying access to people running Gator, then how long do you think it will be before a new version of Gator that doesn't announce its presence is released?
There is no way a web server can know what software is running on a client machine unless that software chooses to advertise its presence. Sorry.
Isn't taping a phone call without both party's knowledge/consent illegal?
The legality of phone call taping is, as far as i can tell, governed by state law. Therefore the legality of taping a phone call without the consent of both parties would vary depending on what state the phone call took place in. (If the call happened across state lines, i assume federal law would have jurisdiction.)
I found this rather informative webpage on google, and it claims that in Oklahoma you only need the consent of one of the parties involved in order to record a phone conversation. So your answer is: No.
(P.S. : That page also claims further down the page that federal law only requires the consent of one party, and that federal law also takes jurisdiction if you go and make the call from an indian reservation or the lobby of a federal building. Which is kind of interesting and probably totally accurate, but not very relevant considering both parties involved here were in oklahoma.)
Apple's biggest responsibility is to stay in business, not to "not hold us back."
I didn't mean to imply apple was somehow "holding us back", just that apple is holding themselves back. (Unless by the "us" in that sentence you refer to "mac users", and maybe not even then.)
there's a pretty good chance you're right about the whole apple-can't-survive-as-a-software-company thing. I do understand the business problems involved in abandoning apple's ppc-only stance, and i do still see apple's earlier cloning experiment as a horrible mistake (at least the way it was implemented). I do think, though, that were apple to release a Cocoa compatibility layer for windows and linux (the way NeXT did) they could win over tremendous developer support as a write-for-one-platform-ship-for-three solution, and that once they won the developers' compatibility Mac OS X could win the consumer OS market over on pure level of quality. But i'm not sure. (though, yeh, the unethical things microsoft could and would do to stop that would be truly scary, and the government would probably do little or nothing to stop it, and apple's probably smart to not try. i don't know. it's probably unlikely apple could go forever without microsoft eventually labelling them a threat again, though..) Moot point anyway.. it'll never happen, so what does it matter what the effects will be?
Linux will always be there, but owning the desktop?
::re-reads his post to check to see if he actually claimed linux would own the desktop.. oops. yeh. i did. sorry.::
Yeh, probably not. You're right, i was wrong. I do think oss OSes will in the future be at a tremendous advantage, but that doesn't necessarily mean victory.
Not until the American consumer applies to their purchases a little more intellectual horsepower than a hamster's.
The below is almost wholly opinion based on vague observations of the universe. You may want to skip over this post, it rambles. I almost either posted it as AC or didn't post it, but i'm osting it using my account so i can get the score so people can see it and respond to it. I don't want moderator points, just responses, preferably from people who think i'm wrong (and can politely justify thinking i'm wrong).
Once again, this is a sign that operating systems that tie you to a given hardware architecture are holding us back, and that apple made a horrible mistake in not porting mac os x to alien hardware.
Those companies that make software platforms need to realize that they **need** to learn to be hardware agnostic. Completely. Tying yourself to a platform is just not safe. Your operating systems need to be designed such that the hardware communication bits and the operating system bits are totally seperated-- as os x/mach is-- and you need to find a way to make the practice of distributing biaries obsolete. We need, badly, some kind of abstract machine code that can be "compiled" to any hardware-specific machine code in an equally optimised fashion. I mean-- you would compile your program not to machine code, but to some kind of rpm-like package in a standard abstract machine code, the user would obtain and double-click this package, and the package would compile itself into the machine code of the computer the user is sitting at. (Since this would require retaining some algorhythm information in the machine code, this would make disassembling / reverse engineering easier, of course, but it would still be highly rpeferable from a corporation's point of view than releasing your source for people to compile would be.) And no, unless your hardware is designed to make JIT interpreters transparent, VMs are not the way to do this.
If they do not find a way to do this? Well, wholly open source operating environments (i.e., systems with no closed source portions, such as debian) will then have an incredible, incredible advantage at some indeterminite point in the future (once there is actually a) actual competition in the processor market between a variety of architecture types, instead of the current "you're imitating x86, you're apple, or you are very high-end" situation and b) a large enough portion of linux/bsd users to sustain actual competition in the processor architecture market). Why? Because once the current ways of doing things start to exhaust Moore's Law, and people start looking for incredibly different ways of doing things, we will start to see a whole class of devices that only really shine under open source software-- because the closed-source world has to ship a different installer for each hardware architecture that the OS runs on, and the open-source world only has to ship one.tar.gz file and it will work on all architectures including future ones. Apple and Microsoft can port their OSes, sure, but what to? Moving an OS to a wholly different architecture is a HUGE undertaking, one i think only apple has done before, when they moved from 680x0 to PPC. Apple did that about as well as anyone could, and it was a tortorous process, in which the PPC macs had to have a built in 68k emulator that the last 10 years worth of software-- and at first, parts of the operating system-- all had to run through. The result was that until OS 8 came and the last bit of 68k asm was purged from the operating system, everything ran at a speed far under the PPC's potential. Emulators are *slow* and not fun, and convincing every app designer to recompile and redistribute their apps and/or release "fat" binaries for every mac app they sell is not easy. Besides which, this is only temporary; you just have to wait long enough, and eventually your architecture will exhaust its limits. Apple can cling to the PPC for a long time, and they can move again if they have to. But even if they do move to a different processor architecture-- which will be stronger? Mac OS XVII, which after much porting work by apple and all mac os vendors runs flawlessly on the Motorola DXM architecture, or ErOS 6, which can run on the Motorola DXM *and* the Intel Ubertanium86 *and* four other completely new architectures with alien instruction sets-- all completely flawlessly because all software is distributed as source code, and the user just compiles everything they install on their own machines, with the compiler optimising things for what the user needs most? Without a way for each user to compile the code, the decision of which architecture to switch to would have to be unanimous for all users of the operating system-- pick one path and stick to it-- instead of letting the individual user choose which architecture has the most cost-for-speed-efficient chips at the moment. There is, of course, the possibility of compiling your entire operating system and all apps into some VM, so that the OS and apps don't know which processor they're running on, but this would be slow too (unless you could have all machines regardless of processor have a coprocessor to do the JIT compiling for your VM in realtime, but that would be clumsy in practice)
(Please note that i don't particularly think that open source software ruling the software industry would be a bad thing at all.)
I don't think microsoft would bother with either bytcode or emualtion, though; they'll just stay where they are, where they're comfortable, and assume that they'll halt change in the processor market rather than change in the processor market halting them. (Meaning once we're all using chips that realign their logic pathway map for each program, and MS is still using something x86-compatible, game companies will start noticing linux and it'll all be over for MS.) Apple, meanwhile, has ALREADY used their Super Kernel Messaging Mach Microkernel Powers to easily create an OS that, thanks to brilliant design, runs equally well on all architectures it is written for and can be ported to a new one in a matter of days ("there are billions of incompatible wintel devices, and you have drivers for none of them" nonwithstanding). And once they had done this, what did they do? Release it for one system and one system only. Had they come up with a way to distribute software in abstract machine code (in the way i clumsily described it above) and announced plans to at some point in the future release os x versions for all architectures in existence, they would now be poised to conquer the world; but they didn't. And they're not.
Either way. Someday, we will reach a point where the operating system must be completely agnostic as regards hardware. This means abstractly designed architectures like Hurd and Mac OS X will have an enourmous, enourmous advantage, and hardware-tied monolithic thingies like Linux will have to flounderingly transition to each new architecture. (PS: which of the above two camps does NT fall into? HAL? What's that?) It also means that debian's decision to let apt-get compile and install source packages for you as transparently as if they had been binaries is the only correct desicion they or anybody else could have made..
However i suspect (although i am not certain) that Ed Avis's point was that watching a 100fps rendered-in-realtime line-removal wireframe-only (with the wireframes colored based on a stripped-down version of the shading algorhythm) version of FF:TSW would be really fucking cool. I mean, if i wanted to see FF:TSW, i'd go to the theater. But if i went to siggraph, i'd want to see something i haven't seen. I'd want to see ff:tsw specially rendered in such a way that all skin textures were replaced with astroturf.
C'mon, square, where's your creativity? You can render the thing in realtime, yeh, and it's maybe among the most impressive demonstrations ever committed by a human-- but you could do so much more. WHy not set up a booth like that, but with an interactive console such that the spectators can replace certain predetermined aspects of the movie with values that make no sense?
NVIDIA EMPLOYEE: OK, what do y'all want to do now? GUY IN BACK OF CROWD: can you make alec baldwin's head twice as big? NVIDIA EMPLOYEE:[checks screen for options and types something] ALL: SWEET!!
I mean, just think of the possibilities of something like that! Replace the old guy with a model of Sonic the Hedgehog. Continuously render all of the members of alec baldwin's team wearing NVIDIA t-shirts, or (yum) in skimpy bathing suits. Screw with the viscosity values in the renderer such that aki's hair always acts as if it is in zero-g. Or take out all the backgrounds and use the extra processing power to render all the characters with waist-length hair. I mean, just think. 30 minutes of work by the renderer programmers, and that would be the coolest demo EVER!!!
that being said, i too am boggling at nvidia. How long until we're playing FPSes with Aki-quality hair on the characters?
OK, really, I have nothing terribly socially relevant or interesting to say. However, in summary:
d00d!!
One can standardize the method while leaving open enough details to maintan obscurity.
In traditional ("real") security, yes, because there the security has the clear, definite goal of sperating the universe into two groups: those who have access to the information, and those who do not. Those who have the key/password/whatever can access this server, or decrypt this email, or whatever; those who can't, can't. WIth this aim, you can actually *use* cryptography, which is based on real, solid, one-way math; and since you are using math and not secrets to protect your stuff, you can use standards.
In "copy protection" (i.e. "use control"), however, this is not the case. Here, the person you are giving access to is the same person that you are attempting to limit. The "has access" and "does not have access" distinction is eliminated completely. The "shared secret" of the "key" that makes up the inherent obscurity part of any security is no longer something that is used to unlock the book; it is something that is used to limit when and how the book can be unlocked by a person who posesses a key. Your "enemy" is not some evil person who has intercepted your encrypted email; your enemy is the person who has purchased your product. Therefore, you cannot put the security into cryptography-style math, becuase if the person you have sold the product to can pay $25 to ANSI and get the copy of your "standard", they can see how you are preventing copying, remove the prevention, and copy all they like. In the end, security through obscurity of method is all you have, because obscuring the key is not an option-- you must give your enemy a copy of the key for them to be able to watch your dvd at all! And since the enemy has a key, all that is needed is for one of the enemy to reverse-engineer or figure out how their key works, and your copy protection scheme has become completely useless.
It is important to note here that most content-protection forms i have seen thus far-- most notably CSS-- are there with the "copy protection" aspect there not as the primary goal, but just as a side effect, with use limitations being the primary purpose. CSS is there not to prevent the copying of movies, but there so that nobody can build a nonliscensed DVD player-- meaning that nobody can build a DVD player without paying money to the dvd forum, and that all dvd players can conform to the exact demands of the dvd forum (like, nobody can watch THe Sixth Sense without watching a trailer first, or watch a japanese movie on an american player before the movie companies decide they're good and ready to release the japanese movie in america), meaning nobody can invoke fair use and use a dvd in a way inconsistent with the desires of the dvd forum. The "copy prevention" thing is there mostly as a smokescreen, and so using a legitimate open standard for dvd devices would not work here; a scheme which would restrict illegal & immoral redistribution without restricting who can build devices for the viewing of dvds would be unacceptable to the dvd forum.
Please note that i am referring only to the traditional, nefarious form of "copy protection", the one that is more accurately described as "use control". If by "copy protection" you mean some kind of watermarking/tracing scheme, then that is not what i refer to in the above paragraphs, and i have nothing in particular to say on that subject at this time.
-mcc
help me help me i'm in a windows computer lab and i miss applespell
Write a decent compatibility library, or tweak SDL for your own uses. Port to that. It would be a bit more work to try to cover up all the loose places where the compatibility library doesn't fit that os well, but you'd be able to simulteneously release for linux, mac, mac os x, and linuxppc, and maybe later on put together a SUPER HAPPY FISH BONUS PACK! with playstation2 versions of like four of the games you just ported to linux/mac.
If you're going to bother with the herculean task of porting spaghetti code (which most games are) to a different operating system, take the extra time to work in a sane portability architecture. In doing so you'll probably at least double your possible target audience with not *that* much work.
That being said, you probably could make more money off the mac users. Mac users probably aren't as heavy into gaming, true, but mac users are a captive audience. Unlike (((the majority of!))) linux users, mac users do'nt have the option of booting into windows. Now that bungie is dead, they have only what can be ported or emulated, and because there have been almost no new mac ports to speak of in nearly forever they are mostly starved for decent games and will probably run anything even mediocre that runs on their computers.
What? Bitter because Loki seems to be gone, and dynamix seems to be gone, and i will probably never get that mac os x version of Tribes 2 i've been wanting so badly? Who, me?
I have lost the respect of an unidentified person somewhere who has nothing better to do at 11:58 PM on a friday than read and respond to random comments about star wars on slashdot.org!
It is clear i have disgraced myself and my family by reading star wars novels in the seventh grade between classes. I must now ritually disembowel myself in the seppaku ritual.
While there have been a LOT of star wars books by a variety of authors, and the universe described by them is QUITE intricate, the star wars movies are definitely wholly the creation of LucasArts.
Books exist for all the movies, but these books are based on the movies and NOT the other way around. I *believe* that the books based on the new movies are being released to stores *before* the movie is released but *after* the movie is written, and that the books based on the original movies came out after the movies had left theatres, and that they all describe the exact same events. Don't quote me on any of that.
While LucasArts has apparently agreed that the movies will respect the continuity of the books, this doesn't make a big difference in terms of Episodes 1-3; no book so far has covered events which take place prior to the beginning of the original Star Wars movie (well, OK, they did a couple small-time books about shit that Lando Calrissian and Han Solo got into when they were young. That doesn't count, and there is no way those books could affect the events of any movie.), and almost all of them take place years after Return of the Jedi ends. Therefore, for episodes 1-3, LucasArts doesn't have to work very hard to get things to match up with the continuity of the books; we have only tiny, tiny vague references to work with as to what the sequence of events before the first Star Wars movie was. We know *some* things about the nature of the technology the Clone Wars were based on. That's about it. Other than that, Lucas can make up whatever wierd shit he wants (and so far, he has) without worrying about conflicting the books, because the books are so incredibly vague about what happened during the fall of the Old Republic.
Episodes 7-9, whenever they finally come, will have to work a good bit harder to come up with something really interesting without affecting the timeline of the books, as the hundred years after Return of the Jedi ends is just full of books. It's been conjectured that episodes 7-9 will happen in the same timespan, but not the same continuity, as the Jedi Academy series of books, but there's absolutely no way of knowing.
As far as "force-o-meters" go, there have been various hints in the various books as to that it is at least possible to create machines to detect when someone nearby is "strong in the force"; the Jedi Academy series includes a machine found in an abandoned building that was previously controlled by imperial administrators which was able, vaguely, to identify force-sensitive individuals-- those strong in the force had different energy signatures, or something, as interpreted by this machine. That thing was more along the lines of using heat-seeking goggles to see people in the dark, though, and how the thing worked wasn't explained (because they didn't know how it worked), as opposed to this "midichloreans" (??) blood-test crud.
Don't worry Samuel L Jackson and Frank Oz will save us.
About 90 seconds. 50 seconds if i had a working windows box handy to grab screenshots from.
I really want to know if this happened or not. I can't honestly say it did. I'm just bothered as all get out that i can't find any hard confirmation one way or the other, and REALLY alarmed that *no one seems to care much*.
Honestly, the one thing i was hoping more than anything else in posting that comment you responded to was it would start some kind of discussion along the lines of "did this happen". Or that i'd have about 10 people jumping on me questioning the events (which i did not personally witness). Except, um, instead i've been modded up to 4, and you're my only reply.
Either way, umm, this is important. No? If it happened, we need to get proof set in stone (get handles on the non-AC people making the allegations, try to find some kind of records..) so MS can't claim later it didn't happen. But if it DIDN'T happen, then the comments scattered throughout the earlier code red threads on this subject (all of which claimed personal involvement, none of which i saw were left uncontradicted) were libel, and need to be responded to in their original threads and corrected before it's too late, the slashdot discussions are converted to static html pages, and hundreds of people like me are left walking away believing a rather elaborate hoax.
The record needs to be set straight, one way or the other. What happened?
*Is* this not a big deal as i seem to think it is? *Should* i just sit back and assume that if something serious happened, the news will eventually get record of it?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless "all the software you write with it" means "all the software that you create that incorporates source code taken from the source code of Linux" (and i would assume it is not, for i would expect that the prestigious StreetLawyer would not be one to make a grammar ambiguity mistake):
In either of the cases described above, you are still free to simply use the older, less restrictively licensed versions of Linux already out there, as the GPL does not allow anyone to retract a license they have given someone under the terms of the GPL.
Hmm. Interesting way of putting it..
:)
Except the thing is: Glorified identd+finger actually sounds like a pretty good idea, to me. I could go for that. I'd be happier just integrating that functionality into Jabber, though.. I mean, as long as we're putting talk(1) there, you might as well go all the way
Well, whatever.
(Warning: if the following post turns out to be nonsense, please forgive me.)
.NET..
Let's say that 2002 comes, and hailstorm becomes something that has a point (beyond ensuring Microsoft gets to have SOMETHING installed by default in WinXP that they can charge a monthly fee for and that the average user won't be able to figure out how to turn off), and GNUStorm 0.6 or whatever gets written, and i install it on my Mac OS X box in my dorm and register my dormroom computer as my authentication authority.
How much flexibility will this hypothetical GNUStorm server have? Is the hailstorm protocol such that if i was running an authentication server, i could flexibly determine exactly what information and when that a given site is given about me? In what way? Oh, hell, is there ANY POINT AT ALL to hailstorm besides not having to type in your personal information/preferred password to every website, and making sure you don't make up 90% of the information you put on webforms? Is there ANYTHING hailstorm does that a web browser with a good autocomplete feature doesn't do?
And if i *could* limit who gets what information, would there be any point, since the sites will all be using the same backhanded information-sharing tactics they use now? If i use hailstorm once to sign onto MSN messenger, and i decide not to let microsoft.com's hailstorm server have any information besides the username and password they use to authenticate, couldn't they just contact some site that they partially own and that shipped me something once, say "hey, what do you have on this username", and get a full readout of my name, address, etc..? Umm.. i'm pretty sure that that last sentence doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but you get what i mean.. right?
If i am misunderstanding what Hailstorm is, i apologize, and request that someone more informed can set me straight. You'll have to excuse me, Microsoft seems to be working very hard to make sure everyone is as misinformed as they could possibly be as to the nature of
I realize all we are working off of here is unsubstantiated rumors, but i am still curious: can anyone tell me how the work is going along on the PPC multiple-core processor technology?
Are the PPC people still even exploring that direction, or it been abandoned on the logic that Mac OS X's efficient usage of MP makes multi-core chips unecessary? (does it?)
I do not know anything about the technical issues at stake here; i merely heard vague things about this technology a long time ago, and neat as it sounded, because of the extreme secrecy surrounding anything even remotely close to apple's product line it was never made quite clear to me if this technology was feasable or desirable..
Anyone care to enlighten me on, like, stuff?
- Apple's Cocoa APIs allow you to write code in Java as well as Objective C, since both of these are highly dynamic object-oriented languages . I am not sure if the thingies that allow projectbuilder to compile java and seamlessly link java into objective c are part of apple's GCC additions or not.
- For as long as i've followed GNUStep, my interpretation of "stuff" has been that they have a goal of remaining as close to the Mac OS X/NeXT API as possible (for the purpose of facilitating portability)-- but that this is not their primary goal, andthey have no problem with diverging if they feel it is technically important. With this in mind, how will the fact that Apple has switched to a PDF-based display model-- one that seems to me to be slightly less technically elegant, and ccloser to the hardware-- while GNUStep has stayed with display postscript affect things? Will this make porting *much* more difficult? Which would be better, making a DPS-like library for os x or a Quartz-like library fopr GNUStep?
If i don't get any answers here, maybe i'll go ask the GNUStep mailing list...Will it at some point be possible to use java to write GNUStep apps the way you can currently use java to write Cocoa apps, could apple's own GCC code or whatever be used to facilitate this, and does anyone know if there's been any progress on the attempts to make it possible to write Python code for either?
But Windows and OS/2 keep the darn pointer around even when typing.
Actually:
I don't use any form of windows, but i was messing with a friend's Windows Millenium-running laptop the other day*, and happened to stumble into the Mouse settings-control panel thing.. as of WinME, and maybe some other versions of windows (i dont' know), there is now a checkbox for a mac-style "hide cursor on keypress" in the Mouse control panel. Very few people will likely ever take advantage of this, but still, there it is.
* i was trying to turn off their trackpad's irritating auto-click-on-touch behavior. i didn't manage to.. oh well.
You do not have to believe AOL/TW/etc is inherently evil in order to feel this merger is dangerous and Not Good.
No, this is not some evil scheming thing. Yes, this is a sane, valid, sensible business choice, and what AOL/TW would be expected to do. It's still really bad. AOL/TW is quite simply not to be trusted with that kind of market power. Not that they're evil or shifty; just that they're human. Just that that is too much power, too much control, too much influence, and in my opinion at least it is simply not safe to allow that much influence to be collected into one entity. And that AOL/TW has given [me, us] no reason to believe that they are (or will remain) responsible enough to use that power and influence in wholly responsible ways. And that whether or not the potential abuses of AOL/TW/AT&T (or even the current AOL/TW) were (are) to materialize, if those potential abuses do begin to slowly be implemented then there will be literally nothing in place to stop them.
Power Corrupts. I wish more people still believed that..
as far as size goes, there are plenty of companies out there that would dwarf AOLTW..
size, yes. both in terms of employee and $ power, yes, there are larger companies. However, two things:
First off, the issues are not with the simple size of this company, but about the strength and kinds of the leverage it would have. This is not about horizontal market power, although in some specific markets the resulting bethemoth would have LOTS of horizontal power; this is about vertical market power. Anyone alarmed is not alarmed by its mere strength, but by the huge number of markets that it has strength in.
Secondly, i for one am alarmed by a really large media company far more than i am by a really large steel company, simply because from watching current events it would seem to me that media companies are actively threatening my constitutional rights. The companies in the exact spaces that AOL/TW is in seem, to me, currently to be the only groups who are poised, willing, and actively trying to invade my personal privacy and freedom in ways that make me uncomfortable. There are lots of steel companies much "bigger" than AOL/TW, but the steel companies aren't the one paying elected representatives to support things like the SSSCA. (Of course, were i a union laborer my view of the steel companies would surely be different. And those steel companies are surely paying those same elected representatives to produce things like corporate welfare and lax environmental regulations. However, this does not change the fact that raw size goes a LOT further with media than it does with heavy industries.)
p.s.: if my english is a bit garbled this morning, please excuse me. low amounts of sleep longwinded + run-on sentences... [slurrring]tha'sallthankyu.
Well.. just a thought..
:)
Was trying to think of maybe how this would be good for anything other than rootdisks and novelty value.. and then i started thinking.. well.. 44-khz stereo sound, workable gui, MIDI support..
I can't get the thought out of my head that something-- maybe not this specific OS, because this specific OS is tied to the x86, but maybe something patterned on the same general system design-- like this would maybe be actually useful as an embedded OS for a sampler.
Am i just completely on crack, or would a sampler/synthesiser with a small lcd screen and an os like this one be as cool as it seems to me it would be?
Then again, any really cool stuff you could do with such a system-- say, letting you program your own midi synths in realtime-- would *demand* that it have an interpreter for something more high-level than assembly built in, and doing, say, a LISP/Python interpreter in an environment written wholly in assembly could maybe get messy. Maybe we'd rather have an OS written in LISP in our samplers....?
Oh, the hell with it. Forget i brought it up
Is it just me, or does this seem like a REALLY bad idea??
I mean.. crap. Hundreds of linux users setting up computers and then getting really drunk. I can just see this. People stumbling around drunk in the evening, absentmindedly tripping and falling into the spaghetti-cable mess between card tables.. and since everyone is drunk, no one can get them out.. so they remain in a tangled heap until the conference ends and they are discovered by maintenance crews. A quake game in which everyone is just kind of sliding around in slow motion, moving forward and then turning slowly (their crosshairs wobbling) to shoot at each other and missing. And then strafing into the lava by accident. A man stumbles in from drinking, collapses at his cardtable and wakes up the next morning with a throbbing headache in front of a screen covered in near-gibberish written sometime during the previous night that later turns out to be a threaded messaging cgi system written in perl. A weepy drunk guy, unable to deal with his repeatedly crashing X Server because he's not thinking clearly, goes and drinks to forget his troubles until he dies of alchohol poisoning. The SUSE team, sitting on the floor with the guy who wrote Kontour, halfconsiously swinging beer cans in the air and singing Filk in german. The guy who's been writing all those "BSD is dying" trolls standing and angrily yelling, his voice slurring, threatening physical violence against the one mac user who dared to show up for some reason. A bunch of british football hooligans who stagger around, challenge random people to FIFA 2001, lose, and then beat the victors up and smash their playstations. A LARGE HORDE OF PEOPLE GETTING DRUNK AND POSTING ON SLASHDOT EN MASSE.
Umm.. damn. I wish i was in germany.
Interesting. I have never heard of this "NOW" thing, but wish i had.
/. discussion take is this: So, what came out of NOW? How far did they get, and is it far enough that there's something interesting there for the hobbyist faction to take up and continue work on as a volunteer project? Is there any code written, are there any design documents that have been released..? Does Progeny's withdrawal from this project mean it is dead, or simply that work will not be continuing at the same sustained rate? If there are design docs out there, are they complete enough that semiprofessional volunteers could finish the project from here without buggering it up horribly?
The direction i would like to see this
Just curious.
Hmm, oops.
:)
Just for the benefit of the others reading this slashdot thread: The AtheOS FAQ has a note on portability that slashdot readers might find informative. You should read it. Wish i'd noticed that before i posted.. hm. i feel stupid.
i'm going to go crawl into a hole now. seeya.
Some minor questions.
:) :shrugs: oh well. thanks.)
Do you consider it likely that at some point in the near future AtheOS will develop a PPC port?
I realize that the AtheOS developers are very busy with the hard work they are doing and that there is no good reason for them to expend effort on a PPC port. However i was wondering if you think that there is enough interest among extant developers familiar with the ppc/chrp/macintosh platform that someone might feel like cobbling together a port.
That being said, i was checking and trying to figure out: does AtheOS have some kind of flexible arbitrary-server auto-upgrade "package"-style system along the lines of the debian apt-get? if not, are there plans to implement one, or perhaps port apt-get and dselect to atheos?
Please excuse my ignorance.
- mcc
(I am quite curious about AtheOS, and have been meaning for some time to try to check it out (well, or at least check out the screenshots and read the API documentation, since as implied above i do not personally have an x86 machine on which to test the OS..)-- i was thinking about looking over the atheos webpage yesterday morning, actually. I'm looking forward to learning more about this OS in the future.. if only i knew more now, maybe i'd have some better questions
Just a quick question. What, exactly, do you mean to by your reference to "MAC", and how does whatever "MAC" stands for in this case connect to file system protection? Do you mean that the file system protection is somehow (how?) related to ethernet MAC addresses, or is this some acronym i am not familiar with?
(p.s. once you've explained this definition/use of MAC, maybe could you add an entry to everything2 explaining it there? ^_^ just checking.)
I am really curious as to what they mean by a "computer" in this specific case. I mean, i have heard that they've done quantum computers capable of picking phone numbers out of a list of four, and such. Which while a HUGE accomplishment is still rather primitive.. Is this just going to be another one of those? A simplistic test machine?
Or is this going to be, like, you know, a real *computer*? Something that can be given general calcuations and work through them? By using the word "computer", are they thinking that what they make is actually going to be something turing-complete, or at least comparable to ENIAC, or maybe even one of the bethemoths that used to sit in the basement of a college (where the computer science students would sign up for a block of time, then come by, drop off large stacks of punchcards, and then wander by the next day to collect the results of the program)?
More importantly, though-- and this is what i'm really wondering about-- if they actually are building a quantum computer that is capable of going into the realm of *running actual programs of some sort*.. what programming language will be used? How will these programs be written? What will the "machine code" look like, and how possible will it be to write software for this in high level languages? (I.e. will it be possible to do HLL abstractions as we do with current computers, at least at first, or will hand-optimisation be too necessary to allow things like "compiling"? I am not 100% sure what a "von neumann" architecture is, but as far as i understand things there are some implicit assumptions in the way that things like C work that kind of only make sense if computers are designed at least generally the way they are now. How different would the architecture of a quantum computer be in a general sense, and how much would current programming languages have to change to make sense in that architecture? Which language is in its current state closest to something that would make sense for the creation of programs on a quantum computer architecture-- C, Python/java, LISP/scheme, Haskell/ML, or APL/Mercury? Or something i've never heard of?
Or is it that special boards or setups whatever will have to be hardwired and specially set up for each specific task (although it will do those tasks really quickly), and this will not be a general-purpose computer capable of doing things like loading and executing an arbitrary written-as-software program?
And to get into the complete castles-in-the-air-speculation realm.. if it is a true general-purpose computer, are they going to try to give it, like, you know, an operating system with things like a kernel and process manager and networking capabilities? Are they going to just stick with letting programs be fed in manualy, or is the thing that they say will take ten years something that is at least realistic to think that you could build one, set it in the basement of a college, and let all the students telnet to it and build and run programs while using some equivilent of unix talk/write to message each other and tyrannical sysadmins constantly watch to see if anyone is playing quantum games so they can kill those processes? (I don't care if they acctually *do* that. Just if that's realistic, my mind is totally blown. I doubt it's realistic.)
Or is anything that may be completed so far in the future they can't really say what it will look like at this point?
I am deathly curious. I desire explanations, or at least links to academic webpages explaining, what sorts of things this computer would do and in what way we would go about giving it its programmatical instructions. Pleasepleaseplease i thank you in advance?
-mcc
If It Can't Process Church Numerals Then What Good Is It
You misunderstand.
How, exactly, is your script going to find out that gator is running on the remote computer?
What language you do this in, in what medium it's running, and whatever you mean by "java script" (a java servlet? a java applet (however that would work)? an (even more rediculously circumvented by gator than the rest) javascript? javascript is *not* java.).. none of these are really relevant, i don't think; the methodology of how you would detect gator's presence (which i find it hard to believe there is any way to do, although since i do not have any windows boxes around to install Gator on for testing i can't say that for certain) would be rather the same.
Is it that you know something i don't and Gator announces some kind of information about itself in the http headers, or are you just guessing that there is some way? Please enlighten me.
And to explain my last comment: if you are correct, if it is possible for a web server to detect the presence of gator, Gator will not die; Gator will just fix whatever mistake allowed its presence on the client computer to be known to servers, and release a new version whose presence is totally undetectable, making the blocking impossible. However as i have said i would guess the current version of Gator is undetectable and unblockable. It make any more sense when i say it that way?
yes why not, I can run a small script to check If they run gator
And how, pray tell, would you do that?
As far as i can tell, Gator does not give any indication in the outgoing HTTP headers that it is running. Why would it? Does it? Why do you think it would? If it does, why? If it does, and large websites start denying access to people running Gator, then how long do you think it will be before a new version of Gator that doesn't announce its presence is released?
There is no way a web server can know what software is running on a client machine unless that software chooses to advertise its presence. Sorry.
Isn't taping a phone call without both party's knowledge/consent illegal?
The legality of phone call taping is, as far as i can tell, governed by state law. Therefore the legality of taping a phone call without the consent of both parties would vary depending on what state the phone call took place in. (If the call happened across state lines, i assume federal law would have jurisdiction.)
I found this rather informative webpage on google, and it claims that in Oklahoma you only need the consent of one of the parties involved in order to record a phone conversation. So your answer is: No.
(P.S. : That page also claims further down the page that federal law only requires the consent of one party, and that federal law also takes jurisdiction if you go and make the call from an indian reservation or the lobby of a federal building. Which is kind of interesting and probably totally accurate, but not very relevant considering both parties involved here were in oklahoma.)
Apple's biggest responsibility is to stay in business, not to "not hold us back."
I didn't mean to imply apple was somehow "holding us back", just that apple is holding themselves back. (Unless by the "us" in that sentence you refer to "mac users", and maybe not even then.)
there's a pretty good chance you're right about the whole apple-can't-survive-as-a-software-company thing. I do understand the business problems involved in abandoning apple's ppc-only stance, and i do still see apple's earlier cloning experiment as a horrible mistake (at least the way it was implemented). I do think, though, that were apple to release a Cocoa compatibility layer for windows and linux (the way NeXT did) they could win over tremendous developer support as a write-for-one-platform-ship-for-three solution, and that once they won the developers' compatibility Mac OS X could win the consumer OS market over on pure level of quality. But i'm not sure. (though, yeh, the unethical things microsoft could and would do to stop that would be truly scary, and the government would probably do little or nothing to stop it, and apple's probably smart to not try. i don't know. it's probably unlikely apple could go forever without microsoft eventually labelling them a threat again, though..) Moot point anyway.. it'll never happen, so what does it matter what the effects will be?
Linux will always be there, but owning the desktop?
::re-reads his post to check to see if he actually claimed linux would own the desktop.. oops. yeh. i did. sorry.::
Yeh, probably not. You're right, i was wrong. I do think oss OSes will in the future be at a tremendous advantage, but that doesn't necessarily mean victory.
Not until the American consumer applies to their purchases a little more intellectual horsepower than a hamster's.
WHich will never happen.
:)
The below is almost wholly opinion based on vague observations of the universe. You may want to skip over this post, it rambles. I almost either posted it as AC or didn't post it, but i'm osting it using my account so i can get the score so people can see it and respond to it. I don't want moderator points, just responses, preferably from people who think i'm wrong (and can politely justify thinking i'm wrong).
.tar.gz file and it will work on all architectures including future ones. Apple and Microsoft can port their OSes, sure, but what to? Moving an OS to a wholly different architecture is a HUGE undertaking, one i think only apple has done before, when they moved from 680x0 to PPC. Apple did that about as well as anyone could, and it was a tortorous process, in which the PPC macs had to have a built in 68k emulator that the last 10 years worth of software-- and at first, parts of the operating system-- all had to run through. The result was that until OS 8 came and the last bit of 68k asm was purged from the operating system, everything ran at a speed far under the PPC's potential. Emulators are *slow* and not fun, and convincing every app designer to recompile and redistribute their apps and/or release "fat" binaries for every mac app they sell is not easy. Besides which, this is only temporary; you just have to wait long enough, and eventually your architecture will exhaust its limits. Apple can cling to the PPC for a long time, and they can move again if they have to. But even if they do move to a different processor architecture-- which will be stronger? Mac OS XVII, which after much porting work by apple and all mac os vendors runs flawlessly on the Motorola DXM architecture, or ErOS 6, which can run on the Motorola DXM *and* the Intel Ubertanium86 *and* four other completely new architectures with alien instruction sets-- all completely flawlessly because all software is distributed as source code, and the user just compiles everything they install on their own machines, with the compiler optimising things for what the user needs most? Without a way for each user to compile the code, the decision of which architecture to switch to would have to be unanimous for all users of the operating system-- pick one path and stick to it-- instead of letting the individual user choose which architecture has the most cost-for-speed-efficient chips at the moment. There is, of course, the possibility of compiling your entire operating system and all apps into some VM, so that the OS and apps don't know which processor they're running on, but this would be slow too (unless you could have all machines regardless of processor have a coprocessor to do the JIT compiling for your VM in realtime, but that would be clumsy in practice)
Once again, this is a sign that operating systems that tie you to a given hardware architecture are holding us back, and that apple made a horrible mistake in not porting mac os x to alien hardware.
Those companies that make software platforms need to realize that they **need** to learn to be hardware agnostic. Completely. Tying yourself to a platform is just not safe. Your operating systems need to be designed such that the hardware communication bits and the operating system bits are totally seperated-- as os x/mach is-- and you need to find a way to make the practice of distributing biaries obsolete. We need, badly, some kind of abstract machine code that can be "compiled" to any hardware-specific machine code in an equally optimised fashion. I mean-- you would compile your program not to machine code, but to some kind of rpm-like package in a standard abstract machine code, the user would obtain and double-click this package, and the package would compile itself into the machine code of the computer the user is sitting at. (Since this would require retaining some algorhythm information in the machine code, this would make disassembling / reverse engineering easier, of course, but it would still be highly rpeferable from a corporation's point of view than releasing your source for people to compile would be.) And no, unless your hardware is designed to make JIT interpreters transparent, VMs are not the way to do this.
If they do not find a way to do this? Well, wholly open source operating environments (i.e., systems with no closed source portions, such as debian) will then have an incredible, incredible advantage at some indeterminite point in the future (once there is actually a) actual competition in the processor market between a variety of architecture types, instead of the current "you're imitating x86, you're apple, or you are very high-end" situation and b) a large enough portion of linux/bsd users to sustain actual competition in the processor architecture market). Why? Because once the current ways of doing things start to exhaust Moore's Law, and people start looking for incredibly different ways of doing things, we will start to see a whole class of devices that only really shine under open source software-- because the closed-source world has to ship a different installer for each hardware architecture that the OS runs on, and the open-source world only has to ship one
(Please note that i don't particularly think that open source software ruling the software industry would be a bad thing at all.)
I don't think microsoft would bother with either bytcode or emualtion, though; they'll just stay where they are, where they're comfortable, and assume that they'll halt change in the processor market rather than change in the processor market halting them. (Meaning once we're all using chips that realign their logic pathway map for each program, and MS is still using something x86-compatible, game companies will start noticing linux and it'll all be over for MS.) Apple, meanwhile, has ALREADY used their Super Kernel Messaging Mach Microkernel Powers to easily create an OS that, thanks to brilliant design, runs equally well on all architectures it is written for and can be ported to a new one in a matter of days ("there are billions of incompatible wintel devices, and you have drivers for none of them" nonwithstanding). And once they had done this, what did they do? Release it for one system and one system only. Had they come up with a way to distribute software in abstract machine code (in the way i clumsily described it above) and announced plans to at some point in the future release os x versions for all architectures in existence, they would now be poised to conquer the world; but they didn't. And they're not.
Either way. Someday, we will reach a point where the operating system must be completely agnostic as regards hardware. This means abstractly designed architectures like Hurd and Mac OS X will have an enourmous, enourmous advantage, and hardware-tied monolithic thingies like Linux will have to flounderingly transition to each new architecture. (PS: which of the above two camps does NT fall into? HAL? What's that?) It also means that debian's decision to let apt-get compile and install source packages for you as transparently as if they had been binaries is the only correct desicion they or anybody else could have made..
However i suspect (although i am not certain) that Ed Avis's point was that watching a 100fps rendered-in-realtime line-removal wireframe-only (with the wireframes colored based on a stripped-down version of the shading algorhythm) version of FF:TSW would be really fucking cool. I mean, if i wanted to see FF:TSW, i'd go to the theater. But if i went to siggraph, i'd want to see something i haven't seen. I'd want to see ff:tsw specially rendered in such a way that all skin textures were replaced with astroturf.
C'mon, square, where's your creativity? You can render the thing in realtime, yeh, and it's maybe among the most impressive demonstrations ever committed by a human-- but you could do so much more. WHy not set up a booth like that, but with an interactive console such that the spectators can replace certain predetermined aspects of the movie with values that make no sense?I mean, just think of the possibilities of something like that! Replace the old guy with a model of Sonic the Hedgehog. Continuously render all of the members of alec baldwin's team wearing NVIDIA t-shirts, or (yum) in skimpy bathing suits. Screw with the viscosity values in the renderer such that aki's hair always acts as if it is in zero-g. Or take out all the backgrounds and use the extra processing power to render all the characters with waist-length hair. I mean, just think. 30 minutes of work by the renderer programmers, and that would be the coolest demo EVER!!!
that being said, i too am boggling at nvidia. How long until we're playing FPSes with Aki-quality hair on the characters?
OK, really, I have nothing terribly socially relevant or interesting to say. However, in summary:
d00d!!
One can standardize the method while leaving open enough details to maintan obscurity.
In traditional ("real") security, yes, because there the security has the clear, definite goal of sperating the universe into two groups: those who have access to the information, and those who do not. Those who have the key/password/whatever can access this server, or decrypt this email, or whatever; those who can't, can't. WIth this aim, you can actually *use* cryptography, which is based on real, solid, one-way math; and since you are using math and not secrets to protect your stuff, you can use standards.
In "copy protection" (i.e. "use control"), however, this is not the case. Here, the person you are giving access to is the same person that you are attempting to limit. The "has access" and "does not have access" distinction is eliminated completely. The "shared secret" of the "key" that makes up the inherent obscurity part of any security is no longer something that is used to unlock the book; it is something that is used to limit when and how the book can be unlocked by a person who posesses a key. Your "enemy" is not some evil person who has intercepted your encrypted email; your enemy is the person who has purchased your product. Therefore, you cannot put the security into cryptography-style math, becuase if the person you have sold the product to can pay $25 to ANSI and get the copy of your "standard", they can see how you are preventing copying, remove the prevention, and copy all they like. In the end, security through obscurity of method is all you have, because obscuring the key is not an option-- you must give your enemy a copy of the key for them to be able to watch your dvd at all! And since the enemy has a key, all that is needed is for one of the enemy to reverse-engineer or figure out how their key works, and your copy protection scheme has become completely useless.
It is important to note here that most content-protection forms i have seen thus far-- most notably CSS-- are there with the "copy protection" aspect there not as the primary goal, but just as a side effect, with use limitations being the primary purpose. CSS is there not to prevent the copying of movies, but there so that nobody can build a nonliscensed DVD player-- meaning that nobody can build a DVD player without paying money to the dvd forum, and that all dvd players can conform to the exact demands of the dvd forum (like, nobody can watch THe Sixth Sense without watching a trailer first, or watch a japanese movie on an american player before the movie companies decide they're good and ready to release the japanese movie in america), meaning nobody can invoke fair use and use a dvd in a way inconsistent with the desires of the dvd forum. The "copy prevention" thing is there mostly as a smokescreen, and so using a legitimate open standard for dvd devices would not work here; a scheme which would restrict illegal & immoral redistribution without restricting who can build devices for the viewing of dvds would be unacceptable to the dvd forum.
Please note that i am referring only to the traditional, nefarious form of "copy protection", the one that is more accurately described as "use control". If by "copy protection" you mean some kind of watermarking/tracing scheme, then that is not what i refer to in the above paragraphs, and i have nothing in particular to say on that subject at this time.
-mcc
help me help me i'm in a windows computer lab and i miss applespell
Don't port to linux. Don't port to mac, either.
Write a decent compatibility library, or tweak SDL for your own uses. Port to that. It would be a bit more work to try to cover up all the loose places where the compatibility library doesn't fit that os well, but you'd be able to simulteneously release for linux, mac, mac os x, and linuxppc, and maybe later on put together a SUPER HAPPY FISH BONUS PACK! with playstation2 versions of like four of the games you just ported to linux/mac.
If you're going to bother with the herculean task of porting spaghetti code (which most games are) to a different operating system, take the extra time to work in a sane portability architecture. In doing so you'll probably at least double your possible target audience with not *that* much work.
That being said, you probably could make more money off the mac users. Mac users probably aren't as heavy into gaming, true, but mac users are a captive audience. Unlike (((the majority of!))) linux users, mac users do'nt have the option of booting into windows. Now that bungie is dead, they have only what can be ported or emulated, and because there have been almost no new mac ports to speak of in nearly forever they are mostly starved for decent games and will probably run anything even mediocre that runs on their computers.
What? Bitter because Loki seems to be gone, and dynamix seems to be gone, and i will probably never get that mac os x version of Tribes 2 i've been wanting so badly? Who, me?
Oh, horror of horrors!
I have lost the respect of an unidentified person somewhere who has nothing better to do at 11:58 PM on a friday than read and respond to random comments about star wars on slashdot.org!
It is clear i have disgraced myself and my family by reading star wars novels in the seventh grade between classes. I must now ritually disembowel myself in the seppaku ritual.
*SOB* what have i done
While there have been a LOT of star wars books by a variety of authors, and the universe described by them is QUITE intricate, the star wars movies are definitely wholly the creation of LucasArts.
Books exist for all the movies, but these books are based on the movies and NOT the other way around. I *believe* that the books based on the new movies are being released to stores *before* the movie is released but *after* the movie is written, and that the books based on the original movies came out after the movies had left theatres, and that they all describe the exact same events. Don't quote me on any of that.
While LucasArts has apparently agreed that the movies will respect the continuity of the books, this doesn't make a big difference in terms of Episodes 1-3; no book so far has covered events which take place prior to the beginning of the original Star Wars movie (well, OK, they did a couple small-time books about shit that Lando Calrissian and Han Solo got into when they were young. That doesn't count, and there is no way those books could affect the events of any movie.), and almost all of them take place years after Return of the Jedi ends. Therefore, for episodes 1-3, LucasArts doesn't have to work very hard to get things to match up with the continuity of the books; we have only tiny, tiny vague references to work with as to what the sequence of events before the first Star Wars movie was. We know *some* things about the nature of the technology the Clone Wars were based on. That's about it. Other than that, Lucas can make up whatever wierd shit he wants (and so far, he has) without worrying about conflicting the books, because the books are so incredibly vague about what happened during the fall of the Old Republic.
Episodes 7-9, whenever they finally come, will have to work a good bit harder to come up with something really interesting without affecting the timeline of the books, as the hundred years after Return of the Jedi ends is just full of books. It's been conjectured that episodes 7-9 will happen in the same timespan, but not the same continuity, as the Jedi Academy series of books, but there's absolutely no way of knowing.
As far as "force-o-meters" go, there have been various hints in the various books as to that it is at least possible to create machines to detect when someone nearby is "strong in the force"; the Jedi Academy series includes a machine found in an abandoned building that was previously controlled by imperial administrators which was able, vaguely, to identify force-sensitive individuals-- those strong in the force had different energy signatures, or something, as interpreted by this machine. That thing was more along the lines of using heat-seeking goggles to see people in the dark, though, and how the thing worked wasn't explained (because they didn't know how it worked), as opposed to this "midichloreans" (??) blood-test crud.
Don't worry Samuel L Jackson and Frank Oz will save us.
How long would it take you to make such a fake?
About 90 seconds. 50 seconds if i had a working windows box handy to grab screenshots from.
I really want to know if this happened or not. I can't honestly say it did. I'm just bothered as all get out that i can't find any hard confirmation one way or the other, and REALLY alarmed that *no one seems to care much*.
Honestly, the one thing i was hoping more than anything else in posting that comment you responded to was it would start some kind of discussion along the lines of "did this happen". Or that i'd have about 10 people jumping on me questioning the events (which i did not personally witness). Except, um, instead i've been modded up to 4, and you're my only reply.
Either way, umm, this is important. No? If it happened, we need to get proof set in stone (get handles on the non-AC people making the allegations, try to find some kind of records..) so MS can't claim later it didn't happen. But if it DIDN'T happen, then the comments scattered throughout the earlier code red threads on this subject (all of which claimed personal involvement, none of which i saw were left uncontradicted) were libel, and need to be responded to in their original threads and corrected before it's too late, the slashdot discussions are converted to static html pages, and hundreds of people like me are left walking away believing a rather elaborate hoax.
The record needs to be set straight, one way or the other. What happened?
*Is* this not a big deal as i seem to think it is? *Should* i just sit back and assume that if something serious happened, the news will eventually get record of it?
..oh whatever..
blah.