This is a utility that lets you read ext2fs partitions from NT/2000. I haven't heard of an actual filesystem driver that does this for Windows - but it would come in very handy...
This doesn't seem any different than the problem computer manufacturers face. They only support the hardware they sold you, and not peripherals you bought yourself - which can and often subtly affect the factory-installed stuff in the system, as any nerd who helps users with computer problems on a regular basis will tell you.
So all the support department needs to do is ascertain whether the customer is using a virgin copy of the product, and if not, support will be limited to the unchanged part of the code. The headaches that come with supporting factory-supplied stuff working alongside customer-supplied stuff are part of the territory - nothing new here.
One of my friends has been waiting on Alpha Centauri on Linux since they announced it. What was the holdup? I heard some rumor that the game was actually finished but it was held up because of package design issues or some junk like that. Anybody have any better idea? At least with Daikatana there was a whole new game to design terribly.
This product would be marketed at stupid management people of companies who are using some significant proportion of Linux and some significant proportion of MS. The one-company-being-accountable thing will play big here. The key to fighting it will be to standardize on one distro within a company or department ("see, RH is accountable in the same way MS is"), and to remember MS's historical competence at making crashy OSes.
Happily, MS can't patch the kernel or most anything else written for Linux and make it closed-source. They have to write a lot of stuff from scratch, which in the end means they have effectively made a new proprietary OS. Hooray
for the GPL.
And as had been said before, probably the best thing for them to do is to not use Linux at all, but BSD instead, because of its more permissive license. But since it will be proprietary, it would be just another proprietary MS OS.
Here's the biggest problem I see in actually doing this: Getting MS's retarded Win32 API to work right on Linux. (Wine is wonderful but not there yet.) And if they did, all they'd have is something that runs Win32 but doesn't crash as much as NT.
MS doesn't seem ready to throw out NT. Why not just make a decent POSIX compatibility layer for it? It is a decent implementation (though of a braindamaged design) and could certainly handle it.
Why hasn't anybody come up with an easy way to manage all this crap? Gosh, even Windows does it better! And I say this as a Linux supporter who wishes he had the time and expertise to do it himself...
1. Go to
Silicon Light's website (these are the people that invented this technology)
2. Click on "Client Access"
3. Type in "test" (no quotes) as the password.
Makes them look like one hell of a professional operation, don't you think?
I've been a nerd nearly all my life, but it still floors me to think that it takes longer for information carried by sound to travel between two people yelling to each other from opposite ends of a stadium in Sydney than it does for information carried by the Net to travel between two people chatting from opposite sides of the globe...anybody else feel this way?
Headline should read "What If There Were No Copyright Law?"
The depths that Slashdot's journalism have sunk to are disgusting.
How does this compare to MS Natural keyboard?
on
Keyless Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
My keyboard's design takes off on the MS Natural Keyboard. This design is a quite comfortable one for me. Does anybody know how this keyboard is better/worse than the "broken keyboard" design I like so much?
You can get the same effect by stopping every 5 minutes to play minesweeper.
Actually, you can get the same effect by stopping every five minutes and trying to get the fireplace in your living room to warp you to a secret room in your house where an odd-looking man is hiding.
Now the X-box is a different story. That should
be a great system too, the only doubt in my mind about that is whether developers will test out a new gaming company or stick with proven ones.
Actually,
lots of developers have signed up to develop for XBox. Despite Microsoft's continued insistence, it's a Windows PC in console packaging and as such is very easy to develop for, since so many people know DirectX.
Why does a project like this take more than an a few already-available head trackers, a few projectors, some cameras, gobs of bandwidth, and a week of time by a few people to make? I think I missed something here. I couldn't find any significantly new technology that they developed. Can somebody enlighten me?
The problem is that there's a very good chance such a thing WON'T get shut down... and you've already stated the reason yourself. You felt it necessary to distinguish between hackers and crackers. The problem is that 99% of "laypeople" don't know the difference, and don't particularly care.
My point was that at some point the laypeople WILL know the difference. If Sony's plans, as detailed in this story, actually come to fruition, I predict that some day the industry will be horribly embarrased when they screw up. Say the restrictive new products/laws/whatever somehow cause the release of sensitive information from some large company, who will then sue.
And let's not forget hardcore right-wingers. Usually I don't agree with them much, but I support them in their abhorrence of being monitored. They'll raise a ruckus about this...so all is not lost.
You make a very good point. I hadn't thought to interpret what I wrote that way!
Well, there is one good thing that could come of this, if and when this super-invasive copyright protection crap becomes a reality: As soon as it is released into the wild, hackers (not crackers) will pounce on it and find out how to defeat it. The protection systems will become more and more invasive until at some point the industry groups propose something completely ludicrous, even to laypeople...and then they'll be shot down. Ok, so I'm an optimist.
Besides, active copy protection schemes are fundamentally flawed: there must be some way to view the material legitimately. The material can be copied then and there. The media industries will never be able to monitor and cut off raw transfer of generic data, and that's how the material will be propagated.
Note to Sony: YOU are the ones who CANNOT win. There simply is no fucking way. Sure, you may take down Napster, but in the end you WILL LOSE. You cannot control other people's transfer of information to the level you want. And you'll take a major PR hit. You'll be the company that tried in vain to invade the PRIVATE communications of the general public--the quintessential Big Brother.
Fog is bad enough. What about people actively trying to do bad things to the network? Forget hacking. Just set off a smoke bomb. And what about packet sniffing? Send a model helicopter with an optical receiver to intercept the data...
What exactly did ShapeShifter do to deserve the arrest? What was the misdemeanor he was charged with? Funny how 2600 doesn't provide a link to the police website so readers can find out for themselves.
When arrests have to be made, the charges are never very serious.
And they weren't! He was charged with a misdemeanor!
Reports are conflicting as to whether he's being held on a million dollars bail or $500,000.
...for a misdemeanor?! I'm no expert at the legal system but this sounds ludicrous. Does somebody have a coherent, accurate report of this? Is this really all 2600 cracks it up to be?
Why not write a game? The last programming course I took had us write parts of a Pacman clone using multithreading. Using threads in that situation was perhaps the stupidest possible way to do it, but I certainly learned a lot about threads, and it was actually fun to work on it--much more fun than implementing my own bubble sort, for example.
I've been using SDL lately for my own project and it has a very clean and easy-to-use API for game programming, so your students wouldn't be overwhelmed by API complexity.
Granted, the kids wouldn't write every last detail of the game. Much of the internal machinery of the aforementioned Pacman was given to us and that was a good thing. But having your kids write something as simple as an object that plays audio using a callback function could work well as an assignment.
This could also be used to teach object-oriented programming habits. For each assignment the kids would get an interface for an object of the game that they have to write the implementation for. The kids' work could be tested by switching their object implementations with the teacher's implementation and seeing if things go wrong. By the end of the class one could theoretically take any combination of object implementations and compile them together to yield the finished game.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a utility that lets you read ext2fs partitions from NT/2000. I haven't heard of an actual filesystem driver that does this for Windows - but it would come in very handy...
So all the support department needs to do is ascertain whether the customer is using a virgin copy of the product, and if not, support will be limited to the unchanged part of the code. The headaches that come with supporting factory-supplied stuff working alongside customer-supplied stuff are part of the territory - nothing new here.
One of my friends has been waiting on Alpha Centauri on Linux since they announced it. What was the holdup? I heard some rumor that the game was actually finished but it was held up because of package design issues or some junk like that. Anybody have any better idea? At least with Daikatana there was a whole new game to design terribly.
That said, I'm a happy Linux user who just wants his OS of choice to be intelligently defended...
Just a few thoughts...
Why hasn't anybody come up with an easy way to manage all this crap? Gosh, even Windows does it better! And I say this as a Linux supporter who wishes he had the time and expertise to do it himself...
1. Go to Silicon Light's website (these are the people that invented this technology)
2. Click on "Client Access"
3. Type in "test" (no quotes) as the password.
Makes them look like one hell of a professional operation, don't you think?
I've been a nerd nearly all my life, but it still floors me to think that it takes longer for information carried by sound to travel between two people yelling to each other from opposite ends of a stadium in Sydney than it does for information carried by the Net to travel between two people chatting from opposite sides of the globe...anybody else feel this way?
The depths that Slashdot's journalism have sunk to are disgusting.
My keyboard's design takes off on the MS Natural Keyboard. This design is a quite comfortable one for me. Does anybody know how this keyboard is better/worse than the "broken keyboard" design I like so much?
Actually, you can get the same effect by stopping every five minutes and trying to get the fireplace in your living room to warp you to a secret room in your house where an odd-looking man is hiding.
Actually, lots of developers have signed up to develop for XBox. Despite Microsoft's continued insistence, it's a Windows PC in console packaging and as such is very easy to develop for, since so many people know DirectX.
Find it at ftp://metaverse.wuh.wustl.edu
Enjoy...
Why does a project like this take more than an a few already-available head trackers, a few projectors, some cameras, gobs of bandwidth, and a week of time by a few people to make? I think I missed something here. I couldn't find any significantly new technology that they developed. Can somebody enlighten me?
Perhaps a barf motif isn't the wave of the future...
Looks like companies STILL haven't learned how to make decent protection schemes--for much of anything--even after all these years!
i don't think many slashdotters are thrilled about GIFs, but that's no reason to ban it...
But isn't HackersQuest in another country, where this is definitely legal? Verant can't touch them!
My point was that at some point the laypeople WILL know the difference. If Sony's plans, as detailed in this story, actually come to fruition, I predict that some day the industry will be horribly embarrased when they screw up. Say the restrictive new products/laws/whatever somehow cause the release of sensitive information from some large company, who will then sue.
And let's not forget hardcore right-wingers. Usually I don't agree with them much, but I support them in their abhorrence of being monitored. They'll raise a ruckus about this...so all is not lost.
You make a very good point. I hadn't thought to interpret what I wrote that way!
Well, there is one good thing that could come of this, if and when this super-invasive copyright protection crap becomes a reality: As soon as it is released into the wild, hackers (not crackers) will pounce on it and find out how to defeat it. The protection systems will become more and more invasive until at some point the industry groups propose something completely ludicrous, even to laypeople...and then they'll be shot down. Ok, so I'm an optimist. Besides, active copy protection schemes are fundamentally flawed: there must be some way to view the material legitimately. The material can be copied then and there. The media industries will never be able to monitor and cut off raw transfer of generic data, and that's how the material will be propagated. Note to Sony: YOU are the ones who CANNOT win. There simply is no fucking way. Sure, you may take down Napster, but in the end you WILL LOSE. You cannot control other people's transfer of information to the level you want. And you'll take a major PR hit. You'll be the company that tried in vain to invade the PRIVATE communications of the general public--the quintessential Big Brother.
Fog is bad enough. What about people actively trying to do bad things to the network? Forget hacking. Just set off a smoke bomb. And what about packet sniffing? Send a model helicopter with an optical receiver to intercept the data...
So what if we don't have command.com anymore? NT has cmd.exe. Will that run on WinME?
This could have been remedied, CmdrTaco, by simply posting the same comment on a forum...
When arrests have to be made, the charges are never very serious.
And they weren't! He was charged with a misdemeanor!
Reports are conflicting as to whether he's being held on a million dollars bail or $500,000.
I've been using SDL lately for my own project and it has a very clean and easy-to-use API for game programming, so your students wouldn't be overwhelmed by API complexity.
Granted, the kids wouldn't write every last detail of the game. Much of the internal machinery of the aforementioned Pacman was given to us and that was a good thing. But having your kids write something as simple as an object that plays audio using a callback function could work well as an assignment.
This could also be used to teach object-oriented programming habits. For each assignment the kids would get an interface for an object of the game that they have to write the implementation for. The kids' work could be tested by switching their object implementations with the teacher's implementation and seeing if things go wrong. By the end of the class one could theoretically take any combination of object implementations and compile them together to yield the finished game.