Will they pre-install other distributions..or at least give you a blank computer and a CD..or even just the computer? If not, it's still good news for Linux in general but not particularly for me since I don't want a copy of RedHat. And I'm not looking to buy a new system right now..:-)
Daniel
(PS: do they charge you for Linux and Windows or do they skip the Microsoft tax this way?)
According to Opic, "PGP claims to be a strong program, but it's not, because of the operating system it's running under. And those vulnerabilities are available to anyone who knows anything about programming."
What?? All programmers are going around breaking into my computer?
Ban programming! The logical consequence of programming is the end of security! Get those evil hackers to stop now!
sure we've got an emulator. it works well. it's a cool toy.
Yep
but the logical conclusion of emulators is no games.
Uh? Eh? What? How? If I can play the games I bought for my N64 on my computer, will this lead to the collapse of the gaming industry?
until we live in an energy free society, artists/programmers need (want) to be paid and if they don't get paid they have to work in mcdonalds etc.
This nicely ignores the fact that plenty of good (although often not flashy) games (and software!) have been made for free. But I still have no objection to paying for a game.
hiding behind oh well coding emulators isn't illegal, using ROMS is, is just facile. It is? Well, let's see your analogy:
its a bit like saying oh well building nuclear warheads isn't wrong, just using them is.
No, it's a bit like saying that oh well running debuggers isn't wrong, just using them to break copy protection is. Or oh well, running tcpdump isn't wrong, just using it to snoop on other people's packets is. Got it?
this is *not* an indirect attack on opensource software, it's a direct attack on people who rip other people off 'just because they can'.
But what does that have to do with emulators? My guess is that you've never even seen an emulator, and you don't even know what one is. I'll give you a hint: an emulator is not a device that lets you pirate ROMs.
You're arguing five things here (as far as I can tell) but I appreciate the way you tried to trick us into believing that they're synonymous by mixing them together.
(a) Pirating ROMs is illegal No-brainer.:-)
(b) 'Pirating' ROMs is Wrong.
I put quotes around pirating because AFAIK, what Nintendo is complaining about is not piracy but the copying of ROMs. This is not the same thing, in my understanding. Copying ROMs is when someone copies a ROM to (eg) a file image. Piracy is when that someone then gives or sells that image to another someone. There is a huge difference there! One should be entirely legal by any reasonable standard, the other is much hazier (although around here people will argue that both should be legal but I'm not going there:-) ) Obviously, Nintendo and software companies would love it if I had to pay for all my software again when I got a new computer (well, not Nintendo in this case), or if I couldn't make backup copies (what, your ROM is toasted? Buy a new one!). And in fact, I believe that the 'copy-protection' stuff and Nintendo's licenses now make this illegal. So (perhaps) it is illegal. But it is not wrong and I am appalled by FUD-ish attempts to raise moral outrage against it.
(c) Making emulators is illegal
The crux of your argument here is (summarized):
Copying ROMs is illegal. They must have copied ROMs to mke the emulator. Therefore they are evil, villanous software pirates.
A couple of possibilities come to mind (although I don't know the specifics of the case)
First: They did copy ROMs and bypass the copy-protection scheme when making the emulator.
Since I'm only dealing with legalities here..you're right. But I'm not sure that makes the emulator itself illegal. No really! The emulator is just a bunch of code that acts like an N64. If it doesn't contain any copyrighted Nintendo information, and doesn't itself bypass Nintendo security devices, I don't see how it can be illegal in and of itself. Only the creation of it involved an illegal act. It may be impossible to use it legally--BUT THIS TOO MIGHT BE POSSIBLE!!
Second: They didn't copy ROMs. Then, you ask, how did they make the emulator? I assume Nintendo has released specs for people to write games for the N64. Using those specs, it should be able to create an emulator that will run N64 games.
Third: They didn't copy ROMs and they couldn't get specs. In this case, assuming they have equipment to make their own ROMs, they still could have done it. It would be tedious, but I believe it would be possible to reverse engineer the N64 by creating their own ROM images, transferring them to cartridges, and then plugging them into the N64. I don't know whether this requires bypassing the copy protection, but it shouldn't.
Fourth: Well, I don't know everything there is to know about the N64. There may be another way to reverse-engineer it that is legal. So far, I don't think anyone really knows exactly how they did it; Nintendo is just trying to make an example of these people for daring to write a computer program that acts similarly to a Nintendo machine.
(d) Making emulators is Wrong
See my comment above on moral outrage. This is the most ridiculous statement I have heard in a long, long time. Heck, I've _written_ an emulator. It was for a chip I made up, and no-one's heard of it before or since, but I wrote it. Emulation is an incredibly fascinating technique and I suspect that people who pooh-pooh the technical interest argument aren't programmers, or have never done something for the sake of doing it. If the second case holds, I pity them.
(e) People who defend emulators are pirates or supporters of piracy.
McCarthianism at its best (or perhaps worst). First you try to demonize a group of people..then, when someone speaks out against it, you say "well, they're just the same!" Continue until all opposition shuts up. Not too logical but it works awfully well.
If they're in the right Nintendo will have to leave them alone. If they're in the wrong, they're software pirates and Nintendo has the right to pursue them.
(a) Nintendo has so much money that if these people go to court (which I doubt they will), they will almost certainly be found to be 'pirates' even if they can produce God Himself in court to testify for them.
(b) People don't seem to realize it, but emulation really is a Cool Thing to code. Emulation!=Piracy. Emulation==Making One Computer Think It's Another. It may be that there's no way to legally create an N64 emulator, because Nintendo keeps too tight a hold on the specs. IMO, that's just obnoxiousness on Nintendo's part.
(c) Illegality does not imply Wrongness. Especially these days when companies can buy custom-built laws. I do not personally pirate software but that doesn't mean that I think that (eg) copying a game you own onto a computer disk for your own use deserves the sort of retribution that it can legally receive. Software piracy laws have passed the point of absurdity and are now living in some little fantasy world of their own on the other side.
Just a question, don't a lot of companies put language in their licenses that more or less forbids reverse engineering their products or (in some cases) running them under emulation? And if so, would that (for those specific cases) invalidate the argument that emulation is 'fair use'? (Funny, when what's isn't legally fair..:-) )
Besides, An Exchange server can't really be compared to sendmail imho.. public folders? forms? workflow? shared calenders?.. Sure, there are apps to do it with unix(like) systems.. But exchange neatly bundles it all.
No distro has the right GTK+ (well, debian potato does but it's unstable and doesn't count:-) ), but all you need to do to install it is: (a) download the tar and extract (www.gtk.org) (b)./configure && make && [sudo|su -c] make install
It's stabilizing enough that the recent releases are fairly interchangable.
I believe Debian 2.1 ("frozen", should be released stable RSN) has the relevant imlib, although I could be wrong. I _know_ the rest of the libs should be fine.
AFAIK, GTK+ is nearing 1.2.0. Most of the software I've seen that uses the development libraries is developmental itself, and so it makes no sense to tie it to an older version of the library which is scheduled to be replaced soon.
In addition, I suspect that X11Amp uses skins? Those are probably done with GTK+ themes (although I haven't looked at the source yet so take this with a grain of salt:) )
Oh, and much of the stuff you listed should be on any new self-respecting linux system (linuxthreads is part of the standard C library now, imlib has stable versions out there, libpng, libgif (or libungif), and libjpeg are AFAIK optional but recommended (and again, they're stable and, IIRC, used by a bunch of stuff), zlib is pretty much universal--the latest version is 1.1.3 not 1.1.2 which you listed, and imagemagick is unrelated. Don't know what it's doing there. The only exotic and devel stuff I see is GTK+, Glib, and gettext--and I run programs using those almost continually on my system with ABSOLUTELY NO CRASHES DUE TO THE LIBRARIES. And they build quite nicely too (and I'm using the most difficult method of building them) )
Huh? How do you use a gun except to kill, wound, or in a last resort maim people? Are you planning to use it as a walking stick?
Emulators, on the contrarry, have legitimate uses; aside from the wow value (this is important, emulators are technically neat. I wonder if people who don't see this have ever programmed) and their use in debugging new systems (not just game systems; OSes can be written in emulation), people who legitimately own the game cartridges may want to play them on another platform. And yeah, some game's licenses don't allow you to do that. Personally I think that's _stupid_ but the fact that some games have restrictions like that is meaningless when the argument that is brought up is that their *only practical use* is to break the law and violate other people's rights.
(isn't shooting someone a violation of their rights? So why are guns more sacred than emulators? Emulators at least have legal uses, while the *only practical use* of a gun is to violate someone else's rights.)
I have a CD drive. I have a CD track ripper. I have an MP3 encoder. I have an MP3 player. I have an Ethernet card. And I have a number of MP3s on my drive. BY YOUR LOGIC, I have all these things in order to steal music and distribute it over the Internet. However, what I use them for is to avoid having to thumb through my CD collection when I want to listen to my favorite pieces of music. I can see an emulator being used in a parallel way (although I don't own a console so it wouldn't work so well.:-) )
(a) There are a zillion people on this site. They aren't clones of each other. Therefore, you will see conflicting opinions. (b) These are not necessarily exclusive. Note that the statement "Linux is going to destroy Microsoft" is in the future tense, while "Microsoft has no competition" is in the present tense. It is entirely possible to think that Linux will destroy Microsoft's stranglehold someday, while still thinking that Microsoft still has a stranglehold now. I think Linux won't really be in competition with Microsoft's stuff for at least 6 months, maybe even 2 years.
We need better PnP support--isapnp doesn't even work on newer motherboards..we need a 'desktop environment' (GNUstep, Gnome, KDE)..we need someone to straighten out the godawful video driver system (X..SVGALib..FBCon..KGI)..we need Debian to get apt right instead of cloning dselect into X (yuck)..we need RedHat to write a decent package system for X..we need all the distros to brush up their installation scripts)..and we need even more games to be written for Linux. I think that's about it, and I can see most of it (except maybe the video driver mess) being dealt with in under a year.
I don't know how to unpackage a RPM or DEB package. They are supposed to be simple. I have spent at least 12 hours trying to figure it out. I gave up.
Did you try dpkg --help? The first line of the output describes how to install a package: dpkg -i|--install...
Daniel
PS - in Debian, you usually use dselect to install packages, and dselect's interface _is_ a pain. I find it to be useful but it's almost impossible to learn. Hopefully apt will be better, although I tried it from CVS and was very worried at what I saw..
When the richest man in the world says "It would be nice to have xyz." It will be taken by his underlings as if it were a direct order, whether Gates actually meant it that way or not.
Reminds me of when thieves stole statues from some NY church. John Gotti said something like "That was not a very nice thing to do." The statues suddenly showed up again.:)
Then again, I don't classify myself much among the geeks (much less among that disgusting class of ``nerds'' Rob seems so fond of), so perhaps what I have to say isn't worth much to this discussion.;)
Slashdot Mirror
"Doctor, what's the diagnosis?"
"The patient seems to have suffered catastrophic failure of the sense of humor. It is almost certainly fatal, and there is no cure."
Daniel
Will they pre-install other distributions..or at least give you a blank computer and a CD..or even just the computer? If not, it's still good news for Linux in general but not particularly for me since I don't want a copy of RedHat. And I'm not looking to buy a new system right now.. :-)
Daniel
(PS: do they charge you for Linux and Windows or do they skip the Microsoft tax this way?)
According to Opic, "PGP claims to be a strong program, but it's not, because of the operating system it's running under. And those vulnerabilities are available to anyone who knows anything about programming."
What?? All programmers are going around breaking into my computer?
Ban programming! The logical consequence of programming is the end of security! Get those evil hackers to stop now!
Daniel
sure we've got an emulator. it works well. it's a cool toy.
Yep
but the logical conclusion of emulators is no games.
Uh? Eh? What? How? If I can play the games I bought for my N64 on my computer, will this lead to the collapse of the gaming industry?
until we live in an energy free society, artists/programmers need (want) to be paid and if they don't get paid they have to work in mcdonalds etc.
This nicely ignores the fact that plenty of good (although often not flashy) games (and software!) have been made for free. But I still have no objection to paying for a game.
hiding behind oh well coding emulators isn't illegal, using ROMS is, is just facile.
It is? Well, let's see your analogy:
its a bit like saying oh well building nuclear warheads isn't wrong, just using them is.
No, it's a bit like saying that oh well running debuggers isn't wrong, just using them to break copy protection is. Or oh well, running tcpdump isn't wrong, just using it to snoop on other people's packets is. Got it?
this is *not* an indirect attack on opensource software, it's a direct attack on people who rip other people off 'just because they can'.
But what does that have to do with emulators? My guess is that you've never even seen an emulator, and you don't even know what one is. I'll give you a hint: an emulator is not a device that lets you pirate ROMs.
Daniel
You're arguing five things here (as far as I can tell) but I appreciate the way you tried to trick us into believing that they're synonymous by mixing them together.
:-)
:-) ) Obviously, Nintendo and software companies would love it if I had to pay for all my software again when I got a new computer (well, not Nintendo in this case), or if I couldn't make backup copies (what, your ROM is toasted? Buy a new one!). And in fact, I believe that the 'copy-protection' stuff and Nintendo's licenses now make this illegal. So (perhaps) it is illegal. But it is not wrong and I am appalled by FUD-ish attempts to raise moral outrage against it.
(a) Pirating ROMs is illegal
No-brainer.
(b) 'Pirating' ROMs is Wrong.
I put quotes around pirating because AFAIK, what Nintendo is complaining about is not piracy but the copying of ROMs. This is not the same thing, in my understanding. Copying ROMs is when someone copies a ROM to (eg) a file image. Piracy is when that someone then gives or sells that image to another someone. There is a huge difference there! One should be entirely legal by any reasonable standard, the other is much hazier (although around here people will argue that both should be legal but I'm not going there
(c) Making emulators is illegal
The crux of your argument here is (summarized):
Copying ROMs is illegal. They must have copied ROMs to mke the emulator. Therefore they are evil, villanous software pirates.
A couple of possibilities come to mind (although I don't know the specifics of the case)
First: They did copy ROMs and bypass the copy-protection scheme when making the emulator.
Since I'm only dealing with legalities here..you're right. But I'm not sure that makes the emulator itself illegal. No really! The emulator is just a bunch of code that acts like an N64. If it doesn't contain any copyrighted Nintendo information, and doesn't itself bypass Nintendo security devices, I don't see how it can be illegal in and of itself. Only the creation of it involved an illegal act. It may be impossible to use it legally--BUT THIS TOO MIGHT BE POSSIBLE!!
Second: They didn't copy ROMs. Then, you ask, how did they make the emulator? I assume Nintendo has released specs for people to write games for the N64. Using those specs, it should be able to create an emulator that will run N64 games.
Third: They didn't copy ROMs and they couldn't get specs. In this case, assuming they have equipment to make their own ROMs, they still could have done it. It would be tedious, but I believe it would be possible to reverse engineer the N64 by creating their own ROM images, transferring them to cartridges, and then plugging them into the N64. I don't know whether this requires bypassing the copy protection, but it shouldn't.
Fourth: Well, I don't know everything there is to know about the N64. There may be another way to reverse-engineer it that is legal. So far, I don't think anyone really knows exactly how they did it; Nintendo is just trying to make an example of these people for daring to write a computer program that acts similarly to a Nintendo machine.
(d) Making emulators is Wrong
See my comment above on moral outrage. This is the most ridiculous statement I have heard in a long, long time. Heck, I've _written_ an emulator. It was for a chip I made up, and no-one's heard of it before or since, but I wrote it. Emulation is an incredibly fascinating technique and I suspect that people who pooh-pooh the technical interest argument aren't programmers, or have never done something for the sake of doing it. If the second case holds, I pity them.
(e) People who defend emulators are pirates or supporters of piracy.
McCarthianism at its best (or perhaps worst). First you try to demonize a group of people..then, when someone speaks out against it, you say "well, they're just the same!" Continue until all opposition shuts up. Not too logical but it works awfully well.
Daniel
If they're in the right Nintendo will have to leave them alone. If they're in the wrong, they're software pirates and Nintendo has the right to pursue them.
(a) Nintendo has so much money that if these people go to court (which I doubt they will), they will almost certainly be found to be 'pirates' even if they can produce God Himself in court to testify for them.
(b) People don't seem to realize it, but emulation really is a Cool Thing to code. Emulation!=Piracy. Emulation==Making One Computer Think It's Another. It may be that there's no way to legally create an N64 emulator, because Nintendo keeps too tight a hold on the specs. IMO, that's just obnoxiousness on Nintendo's part.
(c) Illegality does not imply Wrongness. Especially these days when companies can buy custom-built laws. I do not personally pirate software but that doesn't mean that I think that (eg) copying a game you own onto a computer disk for your own use deserves the sort of retribution that it can legally receive. Software piracy laws have passed the point of absurdity and are now living in some little fantasy world of their own on the other side.
Daniel
It's called /etc. :-)
/etc. )
(ok, ok, that's not exactly what you meant. But all my config files can be found under
Daniel
Just a question, don't a lot of companies put language in their licenses that more or less forbids reverse engineering their products or (in some cases) running them under emulation? And if so, would that (for those specific cases) invalidate the argument that emulation is 'fair use'? (Funny, when what's isn't legally fair.. :-) )
Daniel
Besides, An Exchange server can't really be compared to sendmail imho.. public folders? forms? workflow? shared calenders?.. Sure, there are apps to do it with unix(like) systems.. But exchange neatly bundles it all.
And this is a Good Thing??
Daniel
"unstable" is not as unstable as you may think.
:-)
I know. I'm running it.
Daniel
No distro has the right GTK+ (well, debian potato does but it's unstable and doesn't count :-) ), but all you need to do to install it is: ./configure && make && [sudo|su -c] make install
(a) download the tar and extract (www.gtk.org)
(b)
It's stabilizing enough that the recent releases are fairly interchangable.
I believe Debian 2.1 ("frozen", should be released stable RSN) has the relevant imlib, although I could be wrong. I _know_ the rest of the libs should be fine.
Daniel
AFAIK, GTK+ is nearing 1.2.0. Most of the software I've seen that uses the development libraries is developmental itself, and so it makes no sense to tie it to an older version of the library which is scheduled to be replaced soon.
:) )
In addition, I suspect that X11Amp uses skins? Those are probably done with GTK+ themes (although I haven't looked at the source yet so take this with a grain of salt
Oh, and much of the stuff you listed should be on any new self-respecting linux system (linuxthreads is part of the standard C library now, imlib has stable versions out there, libpng, libgif (or libungif), and libjpeg are AFAIK optional but recommended (and again, they're stable and, IIRC, used by a bunch of stuff), zlib is pretty much universal--the latest version is 1.1.3 not 1.1.2 which you listed, and imagemagick is unrelated. Don't know what it's doing there. The only exotic and devel stuff I see is GTK+, Glib, and gettext--and I run programs using those almost continually on my system with ABSOLUTELY NO CRASHES DUE TO THE LIBRARIES. And they build quite nicely too (and I'm using the most difficult method of building them) )
Daniel
Huh? How do you use a gun except to kill, wound, or in a last resort maim people? Are you planning to use it as a walking stick?
Emulators, on the contrarry, have legitimate uses; aside from the wow value (this is important, emulators are technically neat. I wonder if people who don't see this have ever programmed) and their use in debugging new systems (not just game systems; OSes can be written in emulation), people who legitimately own the game cartridges may want to play them on another platform. And yeah, some game's licenses don't allow you to do that. Personally I think that's _stupid_ but the fact that some games have restrictions like that is meaningless when the argument that is brought up is that their *only practical use* is to break the law and violate other people's rights.
(isn't shooting someone a violation of their rights? So why are guns more sacred than emulators? Emulators at least have legal uses, while the *only practical use* of a gun is to violate someone else's rights.)
Daniel
I have a CD drive. I have a CD track ripper. I have an MP3 encoder. I have an MP3 player. I have an Ethernet card. And I have a number of MP3s on my drive. BY YOUR LOGIC, I have all these things in order to steal music and distribute it over the Internet. However, what I use them for is to avoid having to thumb through my CD collection when I want to listen to my favorite pieces of music. I can see an emulator being used in a parallel way (although I don't own a console so it wouldn't work so well. :-) )
Daniel
2 thoughts:
(a) There are a zillion people on this site. They aren't clones of each other. Therefore, you will see conflicting opinions.
(b) These are not necessarily exclusive. Note that the statement "Linux is going to destroy Microsoft" is in the future tense, while "Microsoft has no competition" is in the present tense. It is entirely possible to think that Linux will destroy Microsoft's stranglehold someday, while still thinking that Microsoft still has a stranglehold now. I think Linux won't really be in competition with Microsoft's stuff for at least 6 months, maybe even 2 years.
We need better PnP support--isapnp doesn't even work on newer motherboards..we need a 'desktop environment' (GNUstep, Gnome, KDE)..we need someone to straighten out the godawful video driver system (X..SVGALib..FBCon..KGI)..we need Debian to get apt right instead of cloning dselect into X (yuck)..we need RedHat to write a decent package system for X..we need all the distros to brush up their installation scripts)..and we need even more games to be written for Linux. I think that's about it, and I can see most of it (except maybe the video driver mess) being dealt with in under a year.
Daniel
That explains why gnome-list is so quiet today. :-)
Daniel
Then write one.
Huh? I love GTK+, but I was under the impression that it was virtually guaranteed to go up in flames if you used it in a multithreaded way..
Daniel
I don't know how to unpackage a RPM or DEB package. They are supposed to be simple. I have spent at least 12 hours trying to figure it out. I gave up.
...
Did you try dpkg --help? The first line of the output describes how to install a package:
dpkg -i|--install
Daniel
PS - in Debian, you usually use dselect to install packages, and dselect's interface _is_ a pain. I find it to be useful but it's almost impossible to learn. Hopefully apt will be better, although I tried it from CVS and was very worried at what I saw..
When the richest man in the world says "It would be nice to have xyz." It will be taken by his underlings as if it were a direct order, whether Gates actually meant it that way or not.
:)
Reminds me of when thieves stole statues from some NY church. John Gotti said something like "That was not a very nice thing to do." The statues suddenly showed up again.
What about Thomas a Becket?
Daniel
So if you DON'T like the API or you feel like the API isn't open enough, DON'T PROGRAM FOR IT!
And, sir, if you don't like this country's antitrust policy or you feel it is politically motivated, DON'T LIVE HERE!
Meeting illogic with illogic,
Daniel
> Forget "should." Be pragmatic, and think about "is."
Why?
Daniel
Then again, I don't classify myself much among the geeks (much less among that disgusting class of ``nerds'' Rob seems so fond of), so perhaps what I have to say isn't worth much to this discussion. ;)
That makes two of us..
Daniel