We can't pick the word to redefine. We can't pick a new definition for an existing word. It's way too late for that. We need a new word, that is also catchy enough for the media to pick up on of their own free will.
"Hacker" is off limits... it's already defined in the minds of millions (or billions). "Cracker" is already defined in the minds of billions. As are "virus" (computer program of infinite malicious power), "program" (magical thingy that can do anything), "Web" (aka the Internet, a magic place where people make money), and "Microsoft" (an innocent company that makes great software (it must be great because everyone uses it)), but those are seperate issues. Only a new word can be made to mean what we want it to mean.
Though I pessimistically point out that it will in all likelihood be treated as a new synonym for "hacker"/"cracker" within a week of its first use by the popular media (if it even gets that far).
I was wondering who would notice... this is an infinite progression. Everything on the Internet is now defamatory, according to Demon, if you take this to it's logical conclusion.
Language constantly changes, and the efforts of France to control it is a good demonstration of how hard it is. Forget it; the word "hacker" will mean "one who breaks into computer systems" until the press gets a clue about computing (about 20 years from now they might understand the 1990's... sadly, it will be 2020 by then).
It might have helped (eons ago) if the word chosen to mean what we mean by "hacker" hadn't sounded so violent (like the word "hack", as in "to chop violently at something"). It's too late now.
Let them call Mitnick a hacker. You can't stop them anyhow. What about the word void for people like us, you ask? If we stopped fighting so hard, one will develop. English abhors a vacuumn. "Techie"? "Techy?" "Ultra-geek?" Who knows, but you won't be able to control that either. And it will be co-opted and corrupted too.
Have patience, and let time take its course. The press certainly can't be educated any other way.
The idea behind all of the "warp drive" theories is that YOU never go faster then the speed of light; the space AROUND you does. The simplistic way of looking at things (i.e., the way without the math) is that you contract the space in front of you, while expanding the space behind you (magically, of course). Viola... you are traveling at some high speed on the macro level, yet you are at rest with respect to your space and that of everyone around you, even outside the bubble.
You really can't understand it without the math; the valid contradictions you bring up are a consequence of the math, so if these people say those consequences don't apply under these conditions, you sort of have to take their word for it. Remember... the REAL statement of the contradictions is in the math, not in the (miserably bad) English "translation".
You will never "hear" a good explanation... the math shoots way over English-the-language's proverbial "head".
No one needs 100% copy protection. Most people are happy with 99%. For instance, the Playstation crack: You need to install a new chip into the Playstation, about as complicated as you can get. How many people actually do that? (Considering you're a Slashdot reader, the answer may well be "All my friends", but Sony is more worried about the general public, not a fringe group they can't stop anyhow).
In the Playstation case, the difficulty is to crack a system. The difficulty that the RIAA faces here is that once a song is cracked, that song can be distributed endlessly, through already established channels. Moreover, there is a huge established demand for this. I really don't see how they can prevent the MP3 community from making illegal copies of music using already capable hardware. Since you can't mandate the replacement of the millions of CD players out there, what can you do?
Finally, it is virtually certain that cracking these things will be a matter of running something through some program written by a cracker after ripping it with one of the millions of CD readers that can currently rip CDs.
The cat is out of the bag, and they could only have what they want if they can go back in time and modify all the hardware. It's too late to implement a new hardware standard (years too late), and all software can be cracked, probably relatively easily. In fact, I bet there would a race of sorts amoung the ripper-programmers to see who could be the first to get the crack in.
Look in your processes (either Task Manager in NT, or CTRL-ALT-DELETE). Netscape sometimes hangs around, and you have to explicitly kill it. I haven't figured out the cause yet, but if you kill it, it should restart, fresh.
Silly to think that someone could gain influence over the Internet by implementing special HTML tags?
Head over to the Web Standards project, and note the troubles special HTML tags are even now causing.
Ponder how many browsers are available for the general public. And why aren't they around? Because they can't handle the "real web", which is populated with lots of special tags? (recall that many of the "special" tags have been standardized after the fact, like CENTER)
Consider whether the browser wars were NOT overhyped, but are, in fact, mostly over now. And Microsoft and Netscape both have tremendous influence on the Internet, with, say, Mosiac nothing but a faint memory.
It's not silly to think that... it's just that it already happened, and you no longer notice, because it's in the background.
How much ya wanna bet one of those patents have granted exclusive rights to use quantum mechanics in a computer? Not necessarily in so many words, but who knows WHAT could be gotten past the patent office as it stands now? Heck, word things right, and the entire UNIVERSE might be in patent violation (for performing some quantum "calculation" as a routine part of existance).
That would tend to make enforcement sort of difficult.
If they're "smart" and sell it at $250, then heck YES it's a great product. It's a steal even. But can they afford a $300-$500 loss on every unit? That's a _lot_ of games. At $700, it's much less competitive, and won't be even that competitve for very long (unless they want to really treat it like a computer, and half the price every several months).
I believe my main point stands... Sony does not understand computing. Most people assume they do when they make these assements. Heck, maybe they do, but competence in the console industry has NEVER equalled competence in the computer industry, and I don't think the two have merged yet (if they ever will; a machine to play games easily will probably always have a market).
OK, so Mr. Playstation wants to be a computer. Let's treat it like one.
Storage? Sorry, need to buy it. Recall the (justified) flap about the iMac?
Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?
If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
If everybody would get over the excitement of having a video game console work as a computer (oh my!), we'd see this for what it is: A cheap computer, in both senses of the word. It tries to be a computer, with video-game console ideals. Thing is, the computer industry isn't some kind of idiotic mindless stuck-in-the-ruts industry that everyone who seems to be excited about this seems to think it is. Being all the things Sony thinks the Playstation II can be means being a very complicated product, and I seriously doubt there's anybody at Sony who really understands the computer industry, who has to deal with that kind of complexity on a routine basis. "Does this game run on all the thousands of possible Playstation configurations there are?" is a question Sony has NEVER had to answer, and it's the biggest advantage the consoles have. The video game industry is quite bad at answering that question; see Sonic CD for a great example. (Also, Sonic R has many problems on my Riva 128, which I haven't heard a hint of from anyone of a fix... which should be simple)
I think the Sony will do reasonably well at the beginning... with its name power, it can hardly fail to. What happens after that is always difficult to tell. But Sony is hardly the first video game manufacturer to try to break into the computer buisness (Even the Intellivision tried that stunt!), and nobody else has come even close. That's because for all the video game industry (and its fans) thinks that the computer industry is somehow inferior, and not as difficult to be in as the computer industry, it is not easier and Sony has no experience there. Playstation-as-computer will go the way of the "Entertainment Computer System".
I think the/. effect is going to kill the server. It's already slow, and the story was just posted!
Perhaps this has already been discussed, but should/. voluntarily mirror any page it references when the server probably can't handle the load? Like this one?
If information is valuable, this amounts to theft. Since they have/had a monopoly, this is just evil. A class-action suit might be just what the doctor ordered.
Oddly enough for something written by a competitor, my BS detectors did not go off. Nothing they say is untrue, or even particularly spun. A few points are repeated a few times (but considering the target audience, that's a necessity).
Also, I am surprised at the humor in it (especially towards the end): DVD: If you put in the wrong DVD disc, hit yourself in the forehead and put in the correct one.
This needs to be said... over, and over, and OVER again. A lot of negativity has been thrown around by the geeks/nerds... it's become "cultural". If ever there was culture that can conciously add something to itself, this one is probably it, and I think this is A1 priority for ALL of us.
If we do not improve in this very area, there will not be a culture.
The grammar and speeling was terrrible. Its raelly distructing from the poirpose of the article.
By far, my favorite one was not regreting missing shool.
Frankly, this makes Katz look like a pretty careful writer (and he would be considered good home page quality, at the very least). Please ask the authors to clean it up, and not post it until they do. Our time is valuable, and considering the potential readership, time "lost" in fixing the grammar will be recouped by the readers very, very quickly.
Does it really make sense that there are 5 1/2 HOURS of "unedited" movie? Heck, I'd be surprised if there was 5 1/2 of footage shot! Of course, days and days of _tape_ has been shot... but 5 1/2 hours of real movie? And even if there is that much, editors exist for a reason. Fanatic or no, even if it was available, who in their right mind would want to see it? It would ruin the finely polished final product... and it's got to be dull...
OK, I do have a bit more to say. Slashdot without user comments isn't nearly as much fun, yet obviously, Palm Pilots and their ilk can't take much (even with compression).
With the new user rating systems, perhaps we could take
1. A light version of the Slashdot content, consisting of the main page as we now know it, and all "Read More" links (don't worry about other links; AvantGo can block all off-site links and I would hope any competitors could too, so that won't bloat the system).
2. On those Read More pages, give A: the whole story and B: The top 10 (or whatever) user-rated comments.
After the user rating system goes in, this shouldn't take "much work". There are probably about a 100 things that wouldn't take "much work", but, still, this would be really, really cool. I'd offer to help if I knew anything about Perl... do you take offers of assistance?
Anyhow, from the user's side, we'd take http://www.slasdot.org/lite as our home page, and go 1 link deep.
BELIEVE in JOHN KATZ and you SHALL BE HEALED of ALL your INFIRMITIES, be they WALLS, imposed by evil GOVERNMENTS, or WALLS, imposed by evil CORPORATIONS, or WHATEVER YOUR PROBLEM may BE. All you must DO is FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT, my hacker brethren! Preach it!
A nice introduction to the cultural effects of the net. But this is really preaching to the choir, don't you think? Is there anything in there that was new?
I'm going to assume this wasn't meant to broaden my horizens any, or introduce me to new information. Is it possible more of you seem to like this (in the 14 comments that were posted as I write this) because it does a good job of stroking your egos? For the/. audience, this article is purely redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
We can't pick the word to redefine. We can't pick a new definition for an existing word. It's way too late for that. We need a new word, that is also catchy enough for the media to pick up on of their own free will.
"Hacker" is off limits... it's already defined in the minds of millions (or billions). "Cracker" is already defined in the minds of billions. As are "virus" (computer program of infinite malicious power), "program" (magical thingy that can do anything), "Web" (aka the Internet, a magic place where people make money), and "Microsoft" (an innocent company that makes great software (it must be great because everyone uses it)), but those are seperate issues. Only a new word can be made to mean what we want it to mean.
Though I pessimistically point out that it will in all likelihood be treated as a new synonym for "hacker"/"cracker" within a week of its first use by the popular media (if it even gets that far).
D'oh! Ya beat me to it, Victor!
I was wondering who would notice... this is an infinite progression. Everything on the Internet is now defamatory, according to Demon, if you take this to it's logical conclusion.
Ooops... demon's home pages link to defamatory articles! Perhaps they should revoke thier access?
aka Symphonic Dragon
Language constantly changes, and the efforts of France to control it is a good demonstration of how hard it is. Forget it; the word "hacker" will mean "one who breaks into computer systems" until the press gets a clue about computing (about 20 years from now they might understand the 1990's... sadly, it will be 2020 by then).
It might have helped (eons ago) if the word chosen to mean what we mean by "hacker" hadn't sounded so violent (like the word "hack", as in "to chop violently at something"). It's too late now.
Let them call Mitnick a hacker. You can't stop them anyhow. What about the word void for people like us, you ask? If we stopped fighting so hard, one will develop. English abhors a vacuumn. "Techie"? "Techy?" "Ultra-geek?" Who knows, but you won't be able to control that either. And it will be co-opted and corrupted too.
Have patience, and let time take its course. The press certainly can't be educated any other way.
Your effort is better spent elsewhere.
Not a physicist, but I play one on TV.
The idea behind all of the "warp drive" theories is that YOU never go faster then the speed of light; the space AROUND you does. The simplistic way of looking at things (i.e., the way without the math) is that you contract the space in front of you, while expanding the space behind you (magically, of course). Viola... you are traveling at some high speed on the macro level, yet you are at rest with respect to your space and that of everyone around you, even outside the bubble.
You really can't understand it without the math; the valid contradictions you bring up are a consequence of the math, so if these people say those consequences don't apply under these conditions, you sort of have to take their word for it. Remember... the REAL statement of the contradictions is in the math, not in the (miserably bad) English "translation".
You will never "hear" a good explanation... the math shoots way over English-the-language's proverbial "head".
Bah! You have to select the last option for all of them to be "100% Elite". What kind of Jedi says "since when did I need advice on battling evil?"
More training the author requires. Yes, more.
- Yoda
In the Playstation case, the difficulty is to crack a system. The difficulty that the RIAA faces here is that once a song is cracked, that song can be distributed endlessly, through already established channels. Moreover, there is a huge established demand for this. I really don't see how they can prevent the MP3 community from making illegal copies of music using already capable hardware. Since you can't mandate the replacement of the millions of CD players out there, what can you do?
Finally, it is virtually certain that cracking these things will be a matter of running something through some program written by a cracker after ripping it with one of the millions of CD readers that can currently rip CDs.
The cat is out of the bag, and they could only have what they want if they can go back in time and modify all the hardware. It's too late to implement a new hardware standard (years too late), and all software can be cracked, probably relatively easily. In fact, I bet there would a race of sorts amoung the ripper-programmers to see who could be the first to get the crack in.
Look in your processes (either Task Manager in NT, or CTRL-ALT-DELETE). Netscape sometimes hangs around, and you have to explicitly kill it. I haven't figured out the cause yet, but if you kill it, it should restart, fresh.
- Head over to the Web Standards project, and note the troubles special HTML tags are even now causing.
- Ponder how many browsers are available for the general public. And why aren't they around? Because they can't handle the "real web", which is populated with lots of special tags? (recall that many of the "special" tags have been standardized after the fact, like CENTER)
- Consider whether the browser wars were NOT overhyped, but are, in fact, mostly over now. And Microsoft and Netscape both have tremendous influence on the Internet, with, say, Mosiac nothing but a faint memory.
It's not silly to think that... it's just that it already happened, and you no longer notice, because it's in the background.How much ya wanna bet one of those patents have granted exclusive rights to use quantum mechanics in a computer? Not necessarily in so many words, but who knows WHAT could be gotten past the patent office as it stands now? Heck, word things right, and the entire UNIVERSE might be in patent violation (for performing some quantum "calculation" as a routine part of existance).
That would tend to make enforcement sort of difficult.
If they're "smart" and sell it at $250, then heck YES it's a great product. It's a steal even. But can they afford a $300-$500 loss on every unit? That's a _lot_ of games. At $700, it's much less competitive, and won't be even that competitve for very long (unless they want to really treat it like a computer, and half the price every several months).
I believe my main point stands... Sony does not understand computing. Most people assume they do when they make these assements. Heck, maybe they do, but competence in the console industry has NEVER equalled competence in the computer industry, and I don't think the two have merged yet (if they ever will; a machine to play games easily will probably always have a market).
- Storage? Sorry, need to buy it. Recall the (justified) flap about the iMac?
- Exapandibility? Yeah, like a laptop. We all know how often THEY get expanded. Keep in mind the difficulty of expanding what will still be a GAME machine too... if you start creating games that require expansions, things are going to get complicated. Enough expansions, and now you've got a PC level of complexity, without true PC expandibility.
- Display? Nifty cool, it can pump out millions of polygons... to a TV screen. Wowie. Can it still do that to a real monitor?
- Believe it or not, browsing the web is not the be-all, end-all of computing. Can you write a paper? Balance a checkbook?
- Price? Look around. A $700 computer is already reasonably capable. Do you think that this is going to be any less true 6 months from now? And by the time this thing is out, we may be looking at the first breed of graphics accellerators that do geometry mapping as well.
If everybody would get over the excitement of having a video game console work as a computer (oh my!), we'd see this for what it is: A cheap computer, in both senses of the word. It tries to be a computer, with video-game console ideals. Thing is, the computer industry isn't some kind of idiotic mindless stuck-in-the-ruts industry that everyone who seems to be excited about this seems to think it is. Being all the things Sony thinks the Playstation II can be means being a very complicated product, and I seriously doubt there's anybody at Sony who really understands the computer industry, who has to deal with that kind of complexity on a routine basis. "Does this game run on all the thousands of possible Playstation configurations there are?" is a question Sony has NEVER had to answer, and it's the biggest advantage the consoles have. The video game industry is quite bad at answering that question; see Sonic CD for a great example. (Also, Sonic R has many problems on my Riva 128, which I haven't heard a hint of from anyone of a fix... which should be simple)If yes, then why on earth are you doing it on a game console?
I think the Sony will do reasonably well at the beginning... with its name power, it can hardly fail to. What happens after that is always difficult to tell. But Sony is hardly the first video game manufacturer to try to break into the computer buisness (Even the Intellivision tried that stunt!), and nobody else has come even close. That's because for all the video game industry (and its fans) thinks that the computer industry is somehow inferior, and not as difficult to be in as the computer industry, it is not easier and Sony has no experience there. Playstation-as-computer will go the way of the "Entertainment Computer System".
I think the /. effect is going to kill the server. It's already slow, and the story was just posted!
/. voluntarily mirror any page it references when the server probably can't handle the load? Like this one?
Perhaps this has already been discussed, but should
If information is valuable, this amounts to theft. Since they have/had a monopoly, this is just evil. A class-action suit might be just what the doctor ordered.
Oddly enough for something written by a competitor, my BS detectors did not go off. Nothing they say is untrue, or even particularly spun. A few points are repeated a few times (but considering the target audience, that's a necessity).
Also, I am surprised at the humor in it (especially towards the end):
DVD: If you put in the wrong DVD disc, hit yourself in the forehead and put in the correct one.
You know, they're supposed to be completely unplausible... this one really isn't.
If we do not improve in this very area, there will not be a culture.
The grammar and speeling was terrrible. Its raelly distructing from the poirpose of the article.
By far, my favorite one was not regreting missing shool.
Frankly, this makes Katz look like a pretty careful writer (and he would be considered good home page quality, at the very least). Please ask the authors to clean it up, and not post it until they do. Our time is valuable, and considering the potential readership, time "lost" in fixing the grammar will be recouped by the readers very, very quickly.
Does it really make sense that there are 5 1/2 HOURS of "unedited" movie? Heck, I'd be surprised if there was 5 1/2 of footage shot! Of course, days and days of _tape_ has been shot... but 5 1/2 hours of real movie? And even if there is that much, editors exist for a reason. Fanatic or no, even if it was available, who in their right mind would want to see it? It would ruin the finely polished final product... and it's got to be dull...
Ditto.
:)
OK, I do have a bit more to say. Slashdot without user comments isn't nearly as much fun, yet obviously, Palm Pilots and their ilk can't take much (even with compression).
With the new user rating systems, perhaps we could take
1. A light version of the Slashdot content, consisting of the main page as we now know it, and all "Read More" links (don't worry about other links; AvantGo can block all off-site links and I would hope any competitors could too, so that won't bloat the system).
2. On those Read More pages, give A: the whole story and B: The top 10 (or whatever) user-rated comments.
After the user rating system goes in, this shouldn't take "much work". There are probably about a 100 things that wouldn't take "much work", but, still, this would be really, really cool. I'd offer to help if I knew anything about Perl... do you take offers of assistance?
Anyhow, from the user's side, we'd take http://www.slasdot.org/lite as our home page, and go 1 link deep.
BELIEVE in JOHN KATZ and you SHALL BE HEALED of ALL your INFIRMITIES, be they WALLS, imposed by evil GOVERNMENTS, or WALLS, imposed by evil CORPORATIONS, or WHATEVER YOUR PROBLEM may BE. All you must DO is FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT, my hacker brethren! Preach it!
A nice introduction to the cultural effects of the net. But this is really preaching to the choir, don't you think? Is there anything in there that was new?
/. audience, this article is purely redundant.
I'm going to assume this wasn't meant to broaden my horizens any, or introduce me to new information. Is it possible more of you seem to like this (in the 14 comments that were posted as I write this) because it does a good job of stroking your egos? For the