This is really off-topic, but did anyone besides me (and a bunch of people in my office) notice the removal of the Slashdot article about the new DVD spec playing WMA files?
Did it ever occur to you that it is the responsibility of every thug, capo, and don of a mob family to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition? And did it occur to you that it's the responsibility of every mother to do everything in her power to protect her child? Every system has members with responibilities, but that wasn't my point.
If you lined up all the possible civil ideologies: socialism/communism, nazism, fundamentalist islamism, mobsterism, democratic capitalism... line them up and pick the best one, the one that advances society, the one that creates technology, the one that makes life more comfortable for it's members.. I'd say that's capitalism. I know it's not 100% perfect, especially with a government that allows for corruptness (which I don't think is a good thing, and breaks an otherwise perfect system) but it's the best one yet.
So my point was that capitalism is the best system we could possibly have, and within that system, the members has to fulfil certain responsibilites to keep that system going.
Which is perhaps why it is time that we moved on from such a model. If the only way I can succeed is by making someone else fail isn't it just a grown-up version of school-yard teasing, make someone else feel bad so I feel better.
It's still healthy competition. Let's say there were two car companies in this country that made only one model of car each. Of course each is going to try and make their car more appealing, and make their company more profitable. So then one starts to outshine the other, they make more money, reinvest in themselves, get better and better, etc. Soon that successful company corners the market. Did they intentionally make the other company fail? I guess it's all how you look at it.
Healthy competition is great until the scales tip to one side too much, then everyone cries foul. But that's not to say that another well-run company (or even community in the case of linux) could rise up and challenge the dominant player. There are a dozen such entities poised to do such a thing right now. *
Are you suggesting we move on to communism, where the only motivation to do something better is... well, there isn't unless you feel like doing something good for your fellow man. That would be really nice, but the reality is that probably 10% of the population would be motivated by the kindness of their hearts, while the other 90% would do the bare minimal that's asked. Look at the standard of living in communist countries.
* As a side note, in case anyone is even reading this and cares: I don't particularly like Windows, but I stick up for their capitalist rights. I don't think they were unfair in their rise to power, just that other companies made errors in judgements in their attempts to compete with MS. For example: Apple, who not only wanted to dominate the software market but the hardware one as well, refused to release any version of their OS for Intel for fears that it would hurt their hardware sales. If they released MacOS or even OSX for Intel, I'd bet a large sum of money that the userbase of Windows and OSX would be almost even in a few years!
I did a search for some of my old email addresses. After reading old posts, I've come to the conclusion that I've actually gotten stupider over the years. I blame all the beer I drank during the dot-com years.
(I know this message will probably be marked troll, but here goes)
...seems like same old Microsoft tricks.
Would you guys just grow up? Did it ever occure to you that it is the responsibility of every employee, executive, and board member of a company to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition? If they don't, they are committing a crime against their own company (and against the principles of capitalism for that matter).
I agree with you and have said much the same in arguments.
But, I just bought one because I do have a job that pays over $100/hour, and for relaxation I hack these things and hook them up to my home network. It sure beats watching TV.
But you're right though. The same thought depresses me. But if you think that's bad, I've worked with people that wasted hundreds of man-hours dicking around with alternative hardware at work. Like this one guy that spent weeks building a console server out of a linux box and one of those multiport serial cards. For one day of this guys pay we could've bought a hardware version from Black Box.
I dunno. I've used almost every *nix windowing system over the last 10 years, and have consistantly run into problem with even the most simple copy+paste operation. For example: I tried copying text from a terminal window into he url textbox in mozilla, and nothing pasted. I'd say with *nix I have a 50% success rate. With windows, 90%.
And that's not even counting other object types besides text. In windows I can right-click on a picture in a browser, copy it, open photoshop, create a new document, and hit paste. Shit, I can even drag a picture from a web page into photoshop and it automatically does all that.
Unfortunately I think the whole copy/paste system is antique and non intuitive. Of course the same goes for most OS concepts for that matter.
Basically, "fair use" means you won't get in trouble for a little sharing, but it doesn't mean it'll be easy.
Of course hard or easy, if it's protected by some form of copy protection, under the DMCA, it's illegal to break the copy protection (or even discuss how to do so) even if it is for fair use.
Me != lawyer, but wouldn't GPL requirements only apply if I entered into a contract with the owner of their code? I wasn't paying attention, but I don't remember agreeing to an end-user-license-agreement last time I installed linux. But I dunno since I get the impression that the Slashdot/Opensource community is opposed to EULAs...
Or is it that because they hold the Copyrights, so they can specify how the materials are used? If that's the case, then aren't we contradicting the usual Slashdot opinion that copyright laws should protect the copyright, and not be used to enforce the license restrictions (or copy protection)?
I'm sure this kinda stuff has been brought up before, and I'm not trying to stir up trouble or argue... I'm Just curious.
Are they going to tag this up with all DVD-players requiring social security number to verify your age ?
No, the MPAA (oops, sorry, I meant their puppets, the politicians) will just tack some more language on their next DMCA that makes circumvention of an age restriction device punishable by law.
What tools? I haven't used MPE/xl in 10 years, but I don't remember it having any tools other than file copy (the OS doesn't even support directories if I remmeber correctly) and db schema stuff.
Although I do remember how me and a guy cracked (yes as in warez) a text editor for mpe/xl once. Each 3000 has a serial code that shows up as a read-only environment variable, and a lot of software uses that as a software key. i.e.: if you tried to copy a program to another box, it saw a different serial and said "no, you copyied this". So our hack was to create a slightly different environment variable called HPSUSAM, and store the serial # from the machine we copied the program from. Then we used a binary editor to search through the program for any occurance of "HPSUSAN" and replace with "HPSUSAM". m41nfr4m3 h4>0r1n6 1s 1337.
A hypothetical article from the future on the downfall of the web:
In the beginning it was a penny per page, theoretically to just recover the cost of serving the page. Then a few sites decided their content is worth more, so they charged a few more pennies. Soon pages costed a dollar or more.
Meanwhile thousands of people had already been copying the content to their local disk to view again in the future, or perhaps share with a friend.
Since web sites were finally making a little money, large contect companies began buying them all up. In the end only a handful of companies owned a majority of the contant on the net. Prices rose and rose.. The actual authors were of course being paid only small fractions of a penny.
All of a sudden the price/page hits a certain sweet-spot where the cost is higher than the value, and people start file-swapping pages. The WWWAA (World Wide Web Association of America) was formed to 'protect web page author's rights'. Lobbyists were deployed, campains were launched, laws were passed, and copyright protection mechanisms were put in place and made illegal to circumvent.
I worked in a record store during Highschool. At the time I didn't realize that the inventory/cash register system was based on Xenix on a 286, with wyse terminals and cash drawers for the cash registers. Up till then my computer experience was limited to Commodore, AppleII, Mac, and Dos PC home computers.
I was bored one day at the register, so I started hitting random keys at the menus. The ! key triggered a back door which led me to a shell. I freaked and thought I crashed the program, so I hit random keys until I finally hit ctrl-d and exited back out to the POS program. Later I tried exploring the shell. Still not knowing it was unix, I tried entering one char commands, which did nothing. Then I went through each combination of 2 letter commands, and came up with cd, ls, etc... It blew my mind.
Anyway, I chatted with the vender and eventually they disclosed what os the system was running. I went out and bought a few books on Xenix and unix, and learned absolutely everything possible about the system between customers. At one point the developers removed the ! backdoor, but by then I already knew that the more command (which the system used for reports) would also allow me to escape to a shell, so that didn't stop me.
Anyway, 12 years later, I'm a sr. engineer and run a smattering of *nix boxes, everything from my personal BSD and OSX systems at home, all the way up to the UltraSparc Sun Fire servers at work. All thanks to some boredom and a little hacking.
BTW, the system the record store used was called RecordTrack, and I actually saw it still being used in a record store recently.
Slashdot Mirror
Good! The best part about CGI are the bloopers and outtakes. Funny!
Oh, that's sarcasm btw.
"...we'll have an independent analysis commissioned by DH Brown..."
Hahahaha!
"PS: I used to run Exchange -- so if you think I am not tracking this message, think again."
Yeah, I wonder how long it will take for MS to release a version of the Exchange client that doesn't allow copying&pasting and screenshots...
Less about you, more about the book.
Ha! I heard this on AM radio before I heard it on Slashdot.
agreed. never thought of reading all the -1 posts tho. thanks.
It's good to hear a voice of reason around here once in a while.
Does this mean I can patent the inevitable CrackDRM.exe?
This is really off-topic, but did anyone besides me (and a bunch of people in my office) notice the removal of the Slashdot article about the new DVD spec playing WMA files?
Did it ever occur to you that it is the responsibility of every thug, capo, and don of a mob family to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition?
And did it occur to you that it's the responsibility of every mother to do everything in her power to protect her child? Every system has members with responibilities, but that wasn't my point.
If you lined up all the possible civil ideologies: socialism/communism, nazism, fundamentalist islamism, mobsterism, democratic capitalism... line them up and pick the best one, the one that advances society, the one that creates technology, the one that makes life more comfortable for it's members.. I'd say that's capitalism. I know it's not 100% perfect, especially with a government that allows for corruptness (which I don't think is a good thing, and breaks an otherwise perfect system) but it's the best one yet.
So my point was that capitalism is the best system we could possibly have, and within that system, the members has to fulfil certain responsibilites to keep that system going.
Which is perhaps why it is time that we moved on from such a model. If the only way I can succeed is by making someone else fail isn't it just a grown-up version of school-yard teasing, make someone else feel bad so I feel better.
It's still healthy competition. Let's say there were two car companies in this country that made only one model of car each. Of course each is going to try and make their car more appealing, and make their company more profitable. So then one starts to outshine the other, they make more money, reinvest in themselves, get better and better, etc. Soon that successful company corners the market. Did they intentionally make the other company fail? I guess it's all how you look at it.
Healthy competition is great until the scales tip to one side too much, then everyone cries foul. But that's not to say that another well-run company (or even community in the case of linux) could rise up and challenge the dominant player. There are a dozen such entities poised to do such a thing right now. *
Are you suggesting we move on to communism, where the only motivation to do something better is... well, there isn't unless you feel like doing something good for your fellow man. That would be really nice, but the reality is that probably 10% of the population would be motivated by the kindness of their hearts, while the other 90% would do the bare minimal that's asked. Look at the standard of living in communist countries.
* As a side note, in case anyone is even reading this and cares: I don't particularly like Windows, but I stick up for their capitalist rights. I don't think they were unfair in their rise to power, just that other companies made errors in judgements in their attempts to compete with MS. For example: Apple, who not only wanted to dominate the software market but the hardware one as well, refused to release any version of their OS for Intel for fears that it would hurt their hardware sales. If they released MacOS or even OSX for Intel, I'd bet a large sum of money that the userbase of Windows and OSX would be almost even in a few years!
I did a search for some of my old email addresses. After reading old posts, I've come to the conclusion that I've actually gotten stupider over the years. I blame all the beer I drank during the dot-com years.
you got me there :)
(I know this message will probably be marked troll, but here goes)
...seems like same old Microsoft tricks.
Would you guys just grow up? Did it ever occure to you that it is the responsibility of every employee, executive, and board member of a company to do everything in their power (including 'old tricks') to try and beat out the competition? If they don't, they are committing a crime against their own company (and against the principles of capitalism for that matter).
I agree with you and have said much the same in arguments.
But, I just bought one because I do have a job that pays over $100/hour, and for relaxation I hack these things and hook them up to my home network. It sure beats watching TV.
But you're right though. The same thought depresses me. But if you think that's bad, I've worked with people that wasted hundreds of man-hours dicking around with alternative hardware at work. Like this one guy that spent weeks building a console server out of a linux box and one of those multiport serial cards. For one day of this guys pay we could've bought a hardware version from Black Box.
I dunno. I've used almost every *nix windowing system over the last 10 years, and have consistantly run into problem with even the most simple copy+paste operation. For example: I tried copying text from a terminal window into he url textbox in mozilla, and nothing pasted. I'd say with *nix I have a 50% success rate. With windows, 90%.
And that's not even counting other object types besides text. In windows I can right-click on a picture in a browser, copy it, open photoshop, create a new document, and hit paste. Shit, I can even drag a picture from a web page into photoshop and it automatically does all that.
Unfortunately I think the whole copy/paste system is antique and non intuitive. Of course the same goes for most OS concepts for that matter.
"Look, I can copy this web link from one window and paste it into my browser. Oh, wait, that didn't work."
Of course hard or easy, if it's protected by some form of copy protection, under the DMCA, it's illegal to break the copy protection (or even discuss how to do so) even if it is for fair use.
inal
The Slashdot Scooby gang wins another one. We can all go home now.
haha, funny you mention sbc. that's where i work.
Or is it that because they hold the Copyrights, so they can specify how the materials are used? If that's the case, then aren't we contradicting the usual Slashdot opinion that copyright laws should protect the copyright, and not be used to enforce the license restrictions (or copy protection)?
I'm sure this kinda stuff has been brought up before, and I'm not trying to stir up trouble or argue... I'm Just curious.
No, the MPAA (oops, sorry, I meant their puppets, the politicians) will just tack some more language on their next DMCA that makes circumvention of an age restriction device punishable by law.
What tools? I haven't used MPE/xl in 10 years, but I don't remember it having any tools other than file copy (the OS doesn't even support directories if I remmeber correctly) and db schema stuff.
Although I do remember how me and a guy cracked (yes as in warez) a text editor for mpe/xl once. Each 3000 has a serial code that shows up as a read-only environment variable, and a lot of software uses that as a software key. i.e.: if you tried to copy a program to another box, it saw a different serial and said "no, you copyied this". So our hack was to create a slightly different environment variable called HPSUSAM, and store the serial # from the machine we copied the program from. Then we used a binary editor to search through the program for any occurance of "HPSUSAN" and replace with "HPSUSAM". m41nfr4m3 h4>0r1n6 1s 1337.
A hypothetical article from the future on the downfall of the web:
In the beginning it was a penny per page, theoretically to just recover the cost of serving the page. Then a few sites decided their content is worth more, so they charged a few more pennies. Soon pages costed a dollar or more.
Meanwhile thousands of people had already been copying the content to their local disk to view again in the future, or perhaps share with a friend.
Since web sites were finally making a little money, large contect companies began buying them all up. In the end only a handful of companies owned a majority of the contant on the net. Prices rose and rose.. The actual authors were of course being paid only small fractions of a penny.
All of a sudden the price/page hits a certain sweet-spot where the cost is higher than the value, and people start file-swapping pages. The WWWAA (World Wide Web Association of America) was formed to 'protect web page author's rights'. Lobbyists were deployed, campains were launched, laws were passed, and copyright protection mechanisms were put in place and made illegal to circumvent.
F that.
I worked in a record store during Highschool. At the time I didn't realize that the inventory/cash register system was based on Xenix on a 286, with wyse terminals and cash drawers for the cash registers. Up till then my computer experience was limited to Commodore, AppleII, Mac, and Dos PC home computers.
I was bored one day at the register, so I started hitting random keys at the menus. The ! key triggered a back door which led me to a shell. I freaked and thought I crashed the program, so I hit random keys until I finally hit ctrl-d and exited back out to the POS program. Later I tried exploring the shell. Still not knowing it was unix, I tried entering one char commands, which did nothing. Then I went through each combination of 2 letter commands, and came up with cd, ls, etc... It blew my mind.
Anyway, I chatted with the vender and eventually they disclosed what os the system was running. I went out and bought a few books on Xenix and unix, and learned absolutely everything possible about the system between customers. At one point the developers removed the ! backdoor, but by then I already knew that the more command (which the system used for reports) would also allow me to escape to a shell, so that didn't stop me.
Anyway, 12 years later, I'm a sr. engineer and run a smattering of *nix boxes, everything from my personal BSD and OSX systems at home, all the way up to the UltraSparc Sun Fire servers at work. All thanks to some boredom and a little hacking.
BTW, the system the record store used was called RecordTrack, and I actually saw it still being used in a record store recently.