Except that it's harder and harder to get the specs I do want.
About a year ago, I searched and searched for a notebook which was smallish (15") but had anything resembling a decent 3D accelerator card. No such beast. 15" was the smallest you could get. I started looking later on and even 15" started to become less common. The higher end 3d cards only came in notebooks with 17" screens.
Luckily this trend is subsiding. Dell now offers a 12" notebook with a decent 3d card. But your assertion that 'choice' will be there is only slightly true. Yeah, cheapass worthless notebooks might have single screens (if the dual-screen thing becomes popular).
Hopefully the market will side with me and enough people will demand high-end notebooks with single screens that there will still be a lot of options there.
I don't want notebooks to get any larger than they are, thanks. And two full screens will suck up an enormous amount of battery life, too. I'd rather have longer battery life and a more portable device than a dual-17" (or 20" (single) as Dell is making now) monster of a notebook.
I'm all about Christian charity, too. There sure are a lot of people who could use our help. Why is RAW targetted? I wonder how much these people who are sending him money send to other charities?
Luckily, copyrights aren't mandatory! If RAW had wanted, he could have released all his work into the public domain and requested donations rather than royalties! He chose to go with the system.
Frankly, neither you nor I have any idea why he's out of money right now. Obviously his illness is a part of it--frankly, if I got Polio, I wouldn't have a job or insurance (for very long), either. I spend money on non-necessities, and I'm sure RAW has, as well. The point is, for you to say in big bold letters, "copyright is a lousy way to see that authors can make a living" and assert Robert's situation as proof is without logical basis or factual knowledge. At least, if you have factual knowledge (like you're a personal friend of his who knows that he's lived in poverty for his entire life despite having a pretty big cult following of books, games, etc) you've chosen to leave that information out of your post.
Simply put (as others have) it's the publishers associations that have really screwed artists. They take the lion's share of the dough and give out pittances as royalties. Again though, the individual makes the choice to join these groups. RAW could have self-published. Would he have made much money from it? No, almost certainly not, as self-publishing is expensive and doesn't get you quite the wide support base that using a major publisher does. Could the publisher's associations take less out of the book sales in order to give more to the artists? Absolutely, and I'm sure they'd still be getting fatter all the time.
Copyright in-and-of-itself is not bad. It's only bad when coupled with extreme greed. It's sad when artists get hooked into the system, but that's a choice they made. If they want out, they are more than welcome to get a different job. I think that Robert probably got paid to do what he loved, probably got paid more than I do, and probably got screwed (like lots of people do) by illness that took away his source of income. People don't stand up and collect donations on Slashdot for old computer programmers who lost their hands or are too old to see the screens anymore, do they? Maybe I'm just on the wrong website for that particular brand of charity.
Actually, it's not copyright which has created the situation you witness, but cartels of companies ripping off artists by demanding 90% of their profits.
That said, it's up to the artists to deal with this. They can either self-publish (an expensive and difficult proposition, and they'll probably never get wide coverage) or go with someone who handles all that, but takes a large part as a fee. Note that copyright has no impact here, only contract law.
You ask why people can't create Harry Potter fanfic and rise to greateness? If they're such great authors, why can't they create their own characters? Copyright would then work for them, too.
No, copyright has an important place in the world. It's simply grown far too large.
If copyright didn't exist, we wouldn't need the GPL. Most of us just want people to play by the same rules--i.e. if you're going to use copyright and want to include a GPL'd bit of code in your project, then GPL the project as per the terms of the GPL (simplification, I know, but it gets the point across).
Besides, I think that copyright holds a very useful purpose. My problem is the system which has made copyright indefinitely long and removed the original social contract behind it. Before the extensions were purchased by lobbiests and made legal by the courts, there was a chance that I or my children might benefit from a work copyrighted in my lifetime (and by benefit, of course, I mean that we might be able to take that work and create our own from it). Now, that simply isn't the case. As soon as a major piece of "intellectual property" comes up for copyright, whoever owns it will throw a few million at Congress to get a new extension. This is what irritates me, not that copyright exists, but that it has become infinite, for all intents and purposes.
They'll probably never consider the context. These aren't reasonable people we're talking about.
The Oblivion nudity patch simply removed certain textures that were layered in sequence. I'm not sure, but I think the Sims use the same technique (although they cover the "naughty" bits in the lowest texture level). Should a game have a higher rating just because the textures are there? I suspect these people will believe that they should be.
What embedded products are you referring to? I wasn't aware that OpenBSD was the basis for many.
As far as that goes, though, you can often license specs from hardware companies in these cases. You'll be forced to sign an NDA, meaning that you can't release the source or specs, but it would mean you can fix problems.
If the driver/specification reveals trade secrets about your hardware, it also gives your competition an edge. And it does so in order to target that 3% that doesn't use Windows or OS X (assuming the company write Apple drivers.)
Yes, all of your friends run Linux. In the real world, not that many people really do. The number gets reduced even more significantly when start discounting servers, which still need drivers, but a much smaller subset of them (no one sane runs a server over 802.11, and servers have no need for advanced graphics capabilities).
I'm less interested in the caller-id function than simply call notification. I can't tell you how many times I've missed a call when my phone is on vibrate because I simply didn't feel it. I suspect that having the vibrations on my wrist will be more noticeable. Hopefully this watch will work with my non-symbian non-Ericsson phone.
Depends. If the only way software will run is if MICROSOFT signs it, then no.
I think you're confusing the accuracy of my statement with your own opinions on how things should run and what level of control of your own PC that you're willing to give up.
Two solutions: 1) Only signed code is allowed. User clicks on malware, it's not MS certified to run on Windows, it gets denied. 2) User is allowed to run unsigned code or code which is signed but not verified in any way. User clicks on malware. Malware is installed on computer. We're in the exact same situation as now.
Like I said, most people here won't like that solution, but it is the only way to perfectly remove the end-user as the malware writers' vector of attack.
Except that there is no effective way to prevent social engineering.
Many viruses back in the DOS days were spread through BBS systems--not through software holes, but because a user wanted some warez or something. That still happens today, with stupid little flash games like "dwarfbowling" or whatever. No matter how many prompts Windows throws at them, people are going to click. But if their antivirus software throws up a warning and says, "THIS IS A VIRUS." many of them stop.
TPM+proper software design is the only way this can be mitigated. I think most people here don't care for that solution.
But are you also willing to pay for the games? Otherwise, I don't see how you're going to get them on a PSP (particularly with a Sony (tm) emulator, which probably won't allow ISOs.)
See, except that they do have evidence. The question is whether what they have counts when it gets before a judge. They aren't picking IP addresses out of thin air and making up that this person was violating copyright, they're saying, "This person is sharing files which look quite a bit like our music. I'm not going to download it to verify, but I'm going to sue." Realistically, a judge is going to assume that you are actually sharing the file, and I doubt you could convince him otherwise, particularly if the RIAA has 11 other songs that they did download.
And don't argue "what ifs" or "but I'd do it just to screw with the RIAA". What matters is appearance, here, because ultimately the RIAA could take any mp3 and claim that they got it from you. How could anyone possibly prove otherwise? When we're talking about something as nebulous as a digital copy of music, it's virtually impossible to determine the origin of a file.
Performance is probably a big reason that it isn't enabled by default. It might not be a huge deal on workstations or desktops where there is no gaming, but for gaming machines, you want faster load times, and on laptops with slower hard drives, the effect of EFS is going to be noticeable.
I used file encryption for awhile, but the speed issues really turned me off of it. It also reduced my notebook's 'unplugged time' by quite a bit. I'd guess that these issues are a really good reason to turn this off by default, and that's not even bringing up conspiracy theories with the NSA/FBI or compatibility issues with non-US deployments (is EFS available outside the US, given that silly munitions export thing?)
So, Apple is saying the the claim made by the SecureWorks guys to Krebs ("the same exploit works on the internal Airport card") is a BIG FAT LIE: they did not have an exploit or if they did, they lied when they said they had shared the details with Apple.
This is what Apple has been saying all along. This is not a change, not news, and certainly not any further proof that they are telling the truth (i.e. there's really no way to know whether or not Maynor/actually/ talked to them or not).
Maynor and Cache said that similar flaws existed on many platforms. They said that Intel's drivers had the flaw, and that it was funny that Intel had released a new driver version a week before Black Hat. They also said that the flaw was exploitable on the MacBook using the third-party device and drivers. And they also said that the flaw was exploitable on the Airport with Apple's own drivers.
Now I don't know who to believe in this--both parties have a stake in it (Apple with their reputation as having a 'secure' platform, and Maynor/Cache have their reputations as security consultants). They are on opposing sides, and honestly, Maynor/Cache's statements are a little weaker since they still have not publicly demonstrated the vulnerability on anything but third-party Intel Macbook hardware. Nevertheless, it seems like almost no one writes the whole story (hell, I've probably missed a lot of it, but at least I'm not making allegations regarding anyone's character, here) and makes wild, flaming allegations about how "Maynor's full of shit because they didn't even USE an Apple card" (which, of course, was stated very clearly in the video, had anyone bothered to watch it) or your statement, which completely misses the fact that they claimed that the vulnerability was exploitable using Apple 1st party hardware.
The drive in my set-top DVD player is going out. [aww] Luckily it can be replaced with a standard DVD-Rom for a computer. [yay!] Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to find 1x drives these days, so the new drive is going to be pretty loud. [aww]
I don't mind the additions nearly as much as I mind the changes, which are much harder to fix, unfortunately. But yes, it should be quite possible to strip out the added scenes.
Most "classic" games are pretty disappointing for me to go back and play now. Only a few really continue to hold my interest--The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Metroid right off the top of my head. Add in the SNES versions of each tame, and the N64 Zeldas, and there look to be only a few virtual console games I'll be interested in.
Nintendo needs to be really careful with the games they release there and in what order, or else they might turn off a lot of people like me from 'classic gaming.'
I've seen the original DVDs. If you compare them to the SE versions (particularly scenes that weren't altered for content or CG) you can see that the difference is night and day.
It's obviously Lucas' call, but with a fairly large and vocal (on the web, at least) group of fans wanting the originals, you'd think he'd have done a better job.
Exactly. They may not have actually wanted a complete working product.. they probably wanted to see what you thought of their task, see what assumptions you made, see if you could convince them that their timeline was infeasible, etc.
I knew a guy who went into an interview and was asked to solve some intractable problem. He was able to point out that their request wasn't feasible and provided some alternate options. This story wouldn't be interesting, of course, if he hadn't gotten the job.
I suspect that even if a person couldn't have written a webserver in C++ in 4 hours, they might still have had a shot at the job depending upon how they approached the problem.
There's no reason I can think of that compression can't be tied to DRM such that the only way you can decode it is to simultaneously decompress it. In this case, you get the unencoded, unencrypted stream meaning some form of (probably lossy) recompression is necessary.
Of course, with the whole 'protected data path' thing, they're working on making it pretty hard to get a digital 'rip'. With watermarks and laws requiring all recording devices to respect them, they can close the analog hole, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that it's harder and harder to get the specs I do want.
About a year ago, I searched and searched for a notebook which was smallish (15") but had anything resembling a decent 3D accelerator card. No such beast. 15" was the smallest you could get. I started looking later on and even 15" started to become less common. The higher end 3d cards only came in notebooks with 17" screens.
Luckily this trend is subsiding. Dell now offers a 12" notebook with a decent 3d card. But your assertion that 'choice' will be there is only slightly true. Yeah, cheapass worthless notebooks might have single screens (if the dual-screen thing becomes popular).
Hopefully the market will side with me and enough people will demand high-end notebooks with single screens that there will still be a lot of options there.
I don't want notebooks to get any larger than they are, thanks. And two full screens will suck up an enormous amount of battery life, too. I'd rather have longer battery life and a more portable device than a dual-17" (or 20" (single) as Dell is making now) monster of a notebook.
I'm all about Christian charity, too. There sure are a lot of people who could use our help. Why is RAW targetted? I wonder how much these people who are sending him money send to other charities?
Luckily, copyrights aren't mandatory! If RAW had wanted, he could have released all his work into the public domain and requested donations rather than royalties! He chose to go with the system.
Frankly, neither you nor I have any idea why he's out of money right now. Obviously his illness is a part of it--frankly, if I got Polio, I wouldn't have a job or insurance (for very long), either. I spend money on non-necessities, and I'm sure RAW has, as well. The point is, for you to say in big bold letters, "copyright is a lousy way to see that authors can make a living" and assert Robert's situation as proof is without logical basis or factual knowledge. At least, if you have factual knowledge (like you're a personal friend of his who knows that he's lived in poverty for his entire life despite having a pretty big cult following of books, games, etc) you've chosen to leave that information out of your post.
Simply put (as others have) it's the publishers associations that have really screwed artists. They take the lion's share of the dough and give out pittances as royalties. Again though, the individual makes the choice to join these groups. RAW could have self-published. Would he have made much money from it? No, almost certainly not, as self-publishing is expensive and doesn't get you quite the wide support base that using a major publisher does. Could the publisher's associations take less out of the book sales in order to give more to the artists? Absolutely, and I'm sure they'd still be getting fatter all the time.
Copyright in-and-of-itself is not bad. It's only bad when coupled with extreme greed. It's sad when artists get hooked into the system, but that's a choice they made. If they want out, they are more than welcome to get a different job. I think that Robert probably got paid to do what he loved, probably got paid more than I do, and probably got screwed (like lots of people do) by illness that took away his source of income. People don't stand up and collect donations on Slashdot for old computer programmers who lost their hands or are too old to see the screens anymore, do they? Maybe I'm just on the wrong website for that particular brand of charity.
Actually, it's not copyright which has created the situation you witness, but cartels of companies ripping off artists by demanding 90% of their profits.
That said, it's up to the artists to deal with this. They can either self-publish (an expensive and difficult proposition, and they'll probably never get wide coverage) or go with someone who handles all that, but takes a large part as a fee. Note that copyright has no impact here, only contract law.
You ask why people can't create Harry Potter fanfic and rise to greateness? If they're such great authors, why can't they create their own characters? Copyright would then work for them, too.
No, copyright has an important place in the world. It's simply grown far too large.
If copyright didn't exist, we wouldn't need the GPL. Most of us just want people to play by the same rules--i.e. if you're going to use copyright and want to include a GPL'd bit of code in your project, then GPL the project as per the terms of the GPL (simplification, I know, but it gets the point across).
Besides, I think that copyright holds a very useful purpose. My problem is the system which has made copyright indefinitely long and removed the original social contract behind it. Before the extensions were purchased by lobbiests and made legal by the courts, there was a chance that I or my children might benefit from a work copyrighted in my lifetime (and by benefit, of course, I mean that we might be able to take that work and create our own from it). Now, that simply isn't the case. As soon as a major piece of "intellectual property" comes up for copyright, whoever owns it will throw a few million at Congress to get a new extension. This is what irritates me, not that copyright exists, but that it has become infinite, for all intents and purposes.
They'll probably never consider the context. These aren't reasonable people we're talking about.
The Oblivion nudity patch simply removed certain textures that were layered in sequence. I'm not sure, but I think the Sims use the same technique (although they cover the "naughty" bits in the lowest texture level). Should a game have a higher rating just because the textures are there? I suspect these people will believe that they should be.
What embedded products are you referring to? I wasn't aware that OpenBSD was the basis for many.
As far as that goes, though, you can often license specs from hardware companies in these cases. You'll be forced to sign an NDA, meaning that you can't release the source or specs, but it would mean you can fix problems.
If the driver/specification reveals trade secrets about your hardware, it also gives your competition an edge. And it does so in order to target that 3% that doesn't use Windows or OS X (assuming the company write Apple drivers.)
Yes, all of your friends run Linux. In the real world, not that many people really do. The number gets reduced even more significantly when start discounting servers, which still need drivers, but a much smaller subset of them (no one sane runs a server over 802.11, and servers have no need for advanced graphics capabilities).
I'm less interested in the caller-id function than simply call notification. I can't tell you how many times I've missed a call when my phone is on vibrate because I simply didn't feel it. I suspect that having the vibrations on my wrist will be more noticeable. Hopefully this watch will work with my non-symbian non-Ericsson phone.
Except that my phone will connect to multiple Bluetooth devices. So his sentenace may be grammatically correct, but it is factually incorrect.
Depends. If the only way software will run is if MICROSOFT signs it, then no.
I think you're confusing the accuracy of my statement with your own opinions on how things should run and what level of control of your own PC that you're willing to give up.
Two solutions: 1) Only signed code is allowed. User clicks on malware, it's not MS certified to run on Windows, it gets denied.
2) User is allowed to run unsigned code or code which is signed but not verified in any way. User clicks on malware. Malware is installed on computer. We're in the exact same situation as now.
Like I said, most people here won't like that solution, but it is the only way to perfectly remove the end-user as the malware writers' vector of attack.
Except that there is no effective way to prevent social engineering.
Many viruses back in the DOS days were spread through BBS systems--not through software holes, but because a user wanted some warez or something. That still happens today, with stupid little flash games like "dwarfbowling" or whatever. No matter how many prompts Windows throws at them, people are going to click. But if their antivirus software throws up a warning and says, "THIS IS A VIRUS." many of them stop.
TPM+proper software design is the only way this can be mitigated. I think most people here don't care for that solution.
But are you also willing to pay for the games? Otherwise, I don't see how you're going to get them on a PSP (particularly with a Sony (tm) emulator, which probably won't allow ISOs.)
See, except that they do have evidence. The question is whether what they have counts when it gets before a judge. They aren't picking IP addresses out of thin air and making up that this person was violating copyright, they're saying, "This person is sharing files which look quite a bit like our music. I'm not going to download it to verify, but I'm going to sue." Realistically, a judge is going to assume that you are actually sharing the file, and I doubt you could convince him otherwise, particularly if the RIAA has 11 other songs that they did download.
And don't argue "what ifs" or "but I'd do it just to screw with the RIAA". What matters is appearance, here, because ultimately the RIAA could take any mp3 and claim that they got it from you. How could anyone possibly prove otherwise? When we're talking about something as nebulous as a digital copy of music, it's virtually impossible to determine the origin of a file.
Performance is probably a big reason that it isn't enabled by default. It might not be a huge deal on workstations or desktops where there is no gaming, but for gaming machines, you want faster load times, and on laptops with slower hard drives, the effect of EFS is going to be noticeable.
I used file encryption for awhile, but the speed issues really turned me off of it. It also reduced my notebook's 'unplugged time' by quite a bit. I'd guess that these issues are a really good reason to turn this off by default, and that's not even bringing up conspiracy theories with the NSA/FBI or compatibility issues with non-US deployments (is EFS available outside the US, given that silly munitions export thing?)
And why couldn't they still claim it now?
So, Apple is saying the the claim made by the SecureWorks guys to Krebs ("the same exploit works on the internal Airport card") is a BIG FAT LIE: they did not have an exploit or if they did, they lied when they said they had shared the details with Apple.
/actually/ talked to them or not).
This is what Apple has been saying all along. This is not a change, not news, and certainly not any further proof that they are telling the truth (i.e. there's really no way to know whether or not Maynor
The problem is that nobody gets the story right.
Maynor and Cache said that similar flaws existed on many platforms. They said that Intel's drivers had the flaw, and that it was funny that Intel had released a new driver version a week before Black Hat. They also said that the flaw was exploitable on the MacBook using the third-party device and drivers. And they also said that the flaw was exploitable on the Airport with Apple's own drivers.
Now I don't know who to believe in this--both parties have a stake in it (Apple with their reputation as having a 'secure' platform, and Maynor/Cache have their reputations as security consultants). They are on opposing sides, and honestly, Maynor/Cache's statements are a little weaker since they still have not publicly demonstrated the vulnerability on anything but third-party Intel Macbook hardware. Nevertheless, it seems like almost no one writes the whole story (hell, I've probably missed a lot of it, but at least I'm not making allegations regarding anyone's character, here) and makes wild, flaming allegations about how "Maynor's full of shit because they didn't even USE an Apple card" (which, of course, was stated very clearly in the video, had anyone bothered to watch it) or your statement, which completely misses the fact that they claimed that the vulnerability was exploitable using Apple 1st party hardware.
The drive in my set-top DVD player is going out. [aww] Luckily it can be replaced with a standard DVD-Rom for a computer. [yay!] Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to find 1x drives these days, so the new drive is going to be pretty loud. [aww]
I don't mind the additions nearly as much as I mind the changes, which are much harder to fix, unfortunately. But yes, it should be quite possible to strip out the added scenes.
Most "classic" games are pretty disappointing for me to go back and play now. Only a few really continue to hold my interest--The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Metroid right off the top of my head. Add in the SNES versions of each tame, and the N64 Zeldas, and there look to be only a few virtual console games I'll be interested in.
Nintendo needs to be really careful with the games they release there and in what order, or else they might turn off a lot of people like me from 'classic gaming.'
I've seen the original DVDs. If you compare them to the SE versions (particularly scenes that weren't altered for content or CG) you can see that the difference is night and day.
It's obviously Lucas' call, but with a fairly large and vocal (on the web, at least) group of fans wanting the originals, you'd think he'd have done a better job.
Exactly. They may not have actually wanted a complete working product.. they probably wanted to see what you thought of their task, see what assumptions you made, see if you could convince them that their timeline was infeasible, etc.
I knew a guy who went into an interview and was asked to solve some intractable problem. He was able to point out that their request wasn't feasible and provided some alternate options. This story wouldn't be interesting, of course, if he hadn't gotten the job.
I suspect that even if a person couldn't have written a webserver in C++ in 4 hours, they might still have had a shot at the job depending upon how they approached the problem.
There's no reason I can think of that compression can't be tied to DRM such that the only way you can decode it is to simultaneously decompress it. In this case, you get the unencoded, unencrypted stream meaning some form of (probably lossy) recompression is necessary.
Of course, with the whole 'protected data path' thing, they're working on making it pretty hard to get a digital 'rip'. With watermarks and laws requiring all recording devices to respect them, they can close the analog hole, too.