On the other hand, if Blockbuster buys a new DVD for $20 and rents it 15 times at $4/rent, that is Blockbuster walking away with a 300% return on the investment.
For new movies, Blockbuster are more likely paying $120-200 per disc. I remember trying to order a movie that hadn't quite been released on video to buy yet (can't remember which one) and the people in tBlockbuster said I could have it if I paid the 'rental store' price for it, which was about £80 at the time! They only drop the price once they've advertised a consumer release for purchase.
Anyone want to take bets on how long it'll take before some "news" show does an "investigative report" on "broken CDs" and tells the average consumer to look for the CD-DA logo to ensure that the disc will work in their car, DVD player, and CD-compatible game console?
Yes, it happened last week but unfortunately it was BBC fucking Watchdog, the most ineffectual consumer affairs programme in the entire universe because they're more concerned with doing witty set pieces and puns than any research. The presenter, Nicki Campbell is a goon who just spouts the scripts he's given without any kind of insight into what he's actually saying, and his fearsome band of reporters look and talk like they're from a teeny-bopper tribute band. The whole experience is broadcast live, a completely crazy decision because none of the presenters are up to much more than following their autocues. Okay, so I enjoy sitting and getting apoplectic at the television once a week, my girlfriend loves it, but this was symptomatic of the approach of the whole program: they spent a good 3-4 minutes of prime-time television asking consumers in London whether they could tell the difference between copy-protected versions of Natalie Imbruglia, and the 'real McCoy', and concluded their report by saying that, well, the record company will replace copy-protected CDs with 'proper' copies if anyone has any complaints. Hoorah. Did they mention the issues raised by MP3 ripping? Fair use? The dilution of the CD standard? Hardly, it was mainly just a few minutes of moaning how the latest pop won't play on laptop CD players, but as with every issue they cover, they never like to rock the boat too much, or attempt any insight into what these complaints might be a symptom of.
Seriously, you guys (who weren't in the UK) should have seen the piece they did on Windows XP. That half-hour weekly slot has so much potential to become a fearsome adversary to corporations, but what they always do when somebody complains about a product to them is to show the product's advert in full, as they did with XP, and then invite some rep from the company to come on to answer some previously-scripted 'hard-hitting' questions about the product. What usually happens is that the smart company rep defuses the question in about the first five seconds, then proceeds to use the prime time television slot to gush about the product's benefits. As happened, expertly, with the Microsoft rep. The presenter occasionally interrupts to repeat the question, which, we suspect, they don't always entirely understand; there follows another five seconds defusing, followed by more minutes of sales patter. Total whitewash; I'm surprised companies are queuing up to have their products 'savaged' by the BBC. In the case of XP, what do you think they were grilling the guy about? A few total mongs who'd queued up outside PC World at midnight to pick up their copies of XP suddenly couldn't connect to the internet after installing it and had to install some extra software to get their computers working like they used to. Well if they liked their computer so much as it was, and relied on them so much for their vital work, why risk the upgrade? Seriously, it's common fucking sense that most of the Watchdog complainants lack, and Microsoft took full advantage of the opportunity these moaners had provided to sell their product; you'd think the Beeb would have brief their presenters on what a Windows XP actually was:-)
Look, in case you haven't got the gist of this show, bear with me here. They had an item last week as well where a few people were complaining about British Gas putting their prices up for the second time in the year. Now the situation with gas suppliers in the UK is that British Gas used to supply everybody, and now the government split the people that supply the gas and pipe it to people's houses from the people that actually charge for, send you the bills and do all the admin. They compete on that part, right? Everybody gets the same gas, from the same company, no matter who bills them, and the billing companies can compete on special offers with similarly deregulated electricity deals. British Gas used to have everyone in the country as their customers, so they had their prices capped at a minimum during the initial couple of years to compensate for their unfair advantage. This minimum was recently lifted, they presumably still have a fair proportion of people that haven't switched from them, so they raise their prices because they're allowed to. Many many people were interviewed on the programme and said that this was a problem, that they couldn't afford to keep the heating on for more than 10 seconds a day etc. etc. Nicki Campbell, hard hitting as ever, asks the head of the independent gas regulation department whether they're being 'totally ineffectual'. The head of the gas regulation department points out that people can switch gas companies with just a phonecall, and that this has been well advertised. Nicki Campbell hits back with "well what about all those people we interviewed who like things the way they are?" Huzzah, the British consumer psyche in a nutshell. Total waste of time, and proof that a prime piece of television that claims to be helping consumers is just the Brits' favourite pastime (moaning loudly about things without wanting them to change) rearranged into a telly program with some goofy presenters and a catchy beat.
Sorry. I'm sorry for this rant. But to get back to the point: I think what Watchdog shows about the CD protection thing is that the vast majority of people just don't give a shit about the wider issues involved, and won't do until knackered, or WMF-encoded CDs are the norm and suddenly nobody can remember what the 'old' technology was like. But as you might have gathered it bugs me that such a good opportunity for a consumer affairs programme on UK television has been wasted so badly, and badly shakes my faith in people wanting to change these things (says Matthew, posting his detailed moan on Slashdot, a site much-read by BBC programme producers, before going for another beer and a few games of Crazy Taxi.)
Of course, the problem with overclocking something like a speccy or C64 is that you're likely to speed up the gameplay of anything you're running!
The best game this ever happened to was Wipeout 2097-- I think it came out in 1996 or something so they should really have known better, but when playing it on my Celeron 400 with a Voodoo 3 graphics card, it went at about three times the normal speed which is already pretty fringging quickly, as anybody who's played it will testify:-)
This could be a dastardly test-bed for keeping track of pepople using their voiceprints, since that technology, linked up to a global GPS satellite network, might just be "the end of privacy" as people are tracked down as soon as they speak on any telephone on the planet. Quick, call in Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz to foil them:)
From this essay we can see that RMS holds a more fundemental view that everyone is skirting around but not really attacking directly. It is a particular view on what Freedom is, this is implicit in his being so it's hardly worth moaning on about sneaky redefinition on his part, actually no he wants to be our bearded master etc. etc. He is stating that the FSF reject the notion that software authors should be allowed to choose their own license for software. He makes no apologies that the FSF is a radical group, and the GPL is the most vocal expression, under current copyright law, of their ideals, and a bridge for authors to place their software into that world of quite specific ideals. But the ideals that the GPL represents are not best served by copyright law, and this essay reaches beyond copyright to an even more overtly political stance: that computer software is too important to be protected by copyright, which makes it "too" easy for authors to restrict what people do with their code. This is based on Lessig's maxim that "code is law"; as I understand it, he means that computer software regulates the pace and rules of modern living to such a degree that it thoroughly regulates our lives in many of the same ways that the government and police force would. Lessig concludes his book with a suggestion that the Y2K fears might have been allayed if software was treated as fundamentally as law, and at least deposited with a government agency in case of crisis; I think this is the direction that Stallman is leaning in. That is to say the very act of creating a piece of software that anybody, anywhere might use carries a public responsibility for its effects, and part of this responsibility must involve people who use it not being helpless to change it if the circumstances require: whether this be fixing a bug or removing an unneeded piece of functionality.
I've certainly formed some new conclusions as a result of this essay; but in general I agree that he's making his position more extreme by explicitly rejecting the current structure of (C) law with regard to software.
Slashdot didn't cover the last few months of Bleem's existence when their web site detailed the news that Sony were trying to shaft them by threatening stores stocking their products with withholding of PS2 stocks (this was last Christmas). This was after they had successfully defended an attempted injunction by Sony to stop them selling Bleem! for PCs; so after failing to stop Bleem by legal means, they semi-successfully hurt them by traditional strongarm tactics.
However I don't think they made the most of their martyr situation with regard to the Dreamcast Bleem port they had. Firstly, I think the whole idea of selling it as 'Bleempaks' rather than a warts-and-all 'complete' emulator was flawed; if you don't know, they decided that they wanted to sell the emulator on several separate CDs costing a few dollars, each of which would pay 20-odd Playstation games that were guaranteed to work perfectly. Their line was that customers would know exactly what they were getting and wouldn't be disappointed when a game they hadn't tested didn't work. What it looked like was a short-sighted attempt to boost sales by potentially splitting somebody's PSX library across all these Bleempaks, and making them pay more for it. I sent them an email to this effect at the end of last year, and had no response.
But I've since been convinced otherwise; from what I've heard, despite the fact that it was impressive at what it did, PC Bleem was never particularly reliable or compatible, even with the latest update which they stated would be the last. And this might explain why Sega weren't more supportive at the time when the Dreamcast was in its death-throes; sure a Playstation compatibility CD would give the console a shot in the arm, and if Bleem could successfully take on Sony's lawyers, surely Sega could, and then some? It seems likely that the same quality control problems which the PC Bleem! owners have witnessed would explain why they've only been able to release two single-game compatibility products for the Dreamcast so far, let alone a complete emulator or even a single 20-game Bleempak that they had planned.
Obviously this is total speculation, as nobody ever saw any other games working under Bleem!cast. Even if it were true, I wouldn't blame the single Bleem programmer for not being able to get the whole product done & tested, start-to-finish, while simultaneously fending off Sony's lawyers, working (apparently) from home and still trying to have a life. I'd even heard it was written in 100% assembler which makes the job even more fearsome.
Ah well, I guess that means the PS2 stays on my Christmas wishlist:-)
I'm part-responsible for a bunch of fairly basic Redhat servers (single CPU, 256MB etc.) that spend their time crawling the web, keeping their 100Mb nework connections saturated, at around a load of 17 quite reliably, and have even worked at around 50, though accepting ssh connections becomes impossible after a certain level:-) But they still get all their work done eventually; I'm not sure what the relative efficiency of each server was relative to their load average, whether they get any more work done, but if all they're doing is using a lot of CPU, you can reliably push the load average very high without ill effect.
But a high load average is only a potential symptom of a problem, not a problem in itself. It might mean (as it has done with our machines in the past) that so many processes are running that memory happens to be low as well, and reliability goes down as processes don't cope with being killed or running out of memory. But if that's not happening, the only reason to worry is if the people using the machine complain: slow mail deliveries, POP3 pickups, DNS resolutions or whatever other 'work' the server is up to. If you want to roll your own benchmarks to test these things, you can then decide on how slow is too slow, and upgrade accordingly.
Shouldn't the phenomenon more fairly be called engine-suck rather than bird-strike? I mean it's not as if flocks of kamikaze birds don their helmets and goggles, and tear towards engine #1 screaming BANZAI! is it?
There's a good reason you don't want to refer to the next version of Enlightenment as E17 (at least if you were cringing at the music charts in the UK 6-7 years ago).
So it's a repeat but if you've read down this far, check out the surreal Pencil Whipped, a 3D shooter whose graphics were all done by a man with a pencil and a fevered mind.
Just ask Terrence McGuckin of 2600 magazine who was arrested last year after protesting at the Republican convention; hardened terrorist that he no doubt was, he was bailed for a mere $100,000. It wasn't returned after he was cleared of all charges, and only after two appeals did the judge decide to return it, minus $750 admin costs. If it hasn't sunk in, this was somebody who had been declared innocent.
DirecTV can afford the bandwidth to digitally mark a section of time as "no fast forward." Defeat it, and they will have you prosecuted under the DMCA.
I can hardly see the TV networks marking their adverts digitally; otherwise easily-hacked digital devices could recognise them with no effort at all-- DMCA or not, making ads stand out from normal broadcasts would be enough of an incentive for somebody to invent technology to filter them with 100% effectiveness.
Obviously people are going for Kernighan, Knuth and various dry tomes on algorithms, but I'd suggest Mr. Bunny's Big Cup O' Java, a snip at $12. It's not instructive in a technical sense, but its purpose is to warn the reader off buzzwords and bullshit computer manuals through satire and nonsense. Tim Lindhom (JVM spec. co-author): Mr. CE III does have a way of capturing the industry patois and spewing it back as absurdity. Well, at least it made me snigger loudly in a crowded bookshop, so make of it what you will.
from the maybe-rents-are-cheap-in-England- dept.
Jon, you should see the rents here. F**king extortionate. Everywhere. Like, a million pounds a month. Plus there's foot and mouth (which can and does infect humans, and makes people illiterate), high taxes, a totalitarian government who, errmm, demonises smart kids and puts them into padded cells for being too brainy. And we blame everything on the fact that guns are banned and really think that Bush is something special. Plus, up here in Yorkshire the internet is banned because teachers are paedophiles.scared it'll turn computer-game playing secondary-school students into
Seriously, you'd hate it here. Stay at home, you'll like it better. Please.
Yes, sit on your arse some more, that'll help
on
Adobe Backs Down
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· Score: 2
We must make an example of Adobe. We should continue to boycott Adobe, the music industry and every company that supported the DMCA until they make an about face and the DMCA is repealed. Otherwise we loose.
Sheesh, this is Insightful? Only on Slashdot and in student union open meetings is the idea of sitting on your arse doing less considered an effective form of political protest. If you want to do something about this, and haven't yet boycotted your own bodily functions, why not head over to the EFF donations page and drop a few dollars in the hats of the people who are doing something about these injustices? You don't have to give much, but a buck for every lazy bleeding-heart post like yours would go a long way torwards furthering the guy's defence.
Has the general computer using population been brainwashed into thinking they have to buy a new PC to run a new operating system?
Well, yes, but this is because most PC buyers don't get what an OS actually is, nor what to do when they've fucked up their Windows installation for one reason or another-- the simplest solution for many is just to start afresh with a new PC. Particulaly virulent is the meme that computers somehow get `arthritis' become intrinsically slower at time goes on, hence need replacing. I'm not sure which marketroid started that one, but I'm sure his company rewarded him with a small Caribbean island for his troubles:-)
I've just about beaten my own Dad out of the mentality that when his P133-based computer gets `bogged down', the solution is to delete all the gaudy, ad-laden cover-CD software he's installed to run on startup, or (once) reinstall the OS, not replace the whole machine:-) And I've got another friend who'd (reasonably enough, but naively) wanted to get rid of a Netware client on his Win98 machine, and just deleted the Netware directory. Windows never started after that, and reasoned that it would never have happened if he'd gone with a branded PC rather than taking my advice & building one from parts. I nearly throttled him & left him to reinstall the OS for himself:-)
So yes, basically, there's no money in tech. support for the masses of home users out there: properly qualified people will cost 30-40 quid an hour, and economics dictates that if you've got an older machine but don't know a friendly wizard who'll help out with a serious problem, it's going to be a better investment just to get a new one. If the PC market wasn't so cut-throat, maybe PC makers could charge for and compete on quality of technical support rather than how much they've skimped on it.
Matthew, very relieved at the fact he's graduated and no longer playing tech. support to all and sundry around college:-)
[Sorry to give the moderators a dilemma, I don't do this often, but don't you hate it when a more interesting story than the one you're reading gets rejected?:-) ]
Sony are trying to squash Bleem for the Dreamcast by any means necessary. Bleem is a Playstation emulator which will allow the huge catalogue of Playstation games to run on a Sega Dreamcast; sony ship a similar product with their Playstation 2 in order to preserve backwards-compatibility, but evidently don't want there to be an alternative `upgrade' path for Playstation owners. The courts have overturned three injunctions from Sony, but the Bleem guys are owing $1m in legal fees, and there's an appeal on their web site for Dreamcast owners who want Bleem to contact the major retailers to tell them that they want Bleem! Sony are currently telling its retailers that they will withhold lucractive Playstation 2 shipments from retailers that stock Bleem, and retailers have buckled. Let them know they don't need to stand for it.
The last couple of versions of EasyCD have apparently being irrevocably trashing people's Windows installations-- the Register has been covering it blow-by-blow, including the patches that don't solve the problem, the revelation that connecting a USB device suddenly triggers it etc. etc. So my impression is that they're taken some seriously bad press of late, and could be in trouble; could be that EMI are throwing them a line?
Of course people are seizing onto the GPL's slippery definition of linking-- to add to the melting pot of opinions, the MySQL folk specify that you must pay them for a special GPL exception license if You have a commercial application that ONLY works with MySQL and ships the application with the MySQL server. This is because we view this as linking even if it is done over the network. e.g. any kind of reliance == linking. I'm not sure whether this makes the case weaker or stronger against dynamic linking as GPL-covered linking.
Read the licenses of djbdns and qmail, and you'll see why we can't ship them: If a hole is discovered, we're not allowed to distribute a fixed version in binary form.
And the chances of qmail or djbdns having holes in is...? Anybody...? Approximately zero, I'd say. For people that don't know, the author guarantees cash rewards to anybody finding exploitable code in his software. The code is very very easy to audit, since most of the programs he writes are as small as they possibly can be (and split up into separate, mutually distrusting binaries), and use none of the standard I/O or string handling functions because djb doesn't trust them. Okay, so I'm biased, I love both programs, but this is someone who knows how to write secure code.
I think the reason most distros find djb's license so restrictive (not that I necessarily disagree) is his stance on distros not being allowed to shift files around to suit their view of the filesystem hierarchy-- e.g. no binary packages of qmail are allowed unless they put their binaries into/var/qmail/bin without exception. This of course irks most distros who have their own idea of where the mailer binaries go, and means they go towards similarly functional (though less secure) mailers with less restrictive licenses.
If it makes for better games and a less stressful development schedule, I think most development studios or publishers will sell a texture here and there. All you ever hear about games development is how hard & deadline-obsessed it is, and that this is very often the ruin of what might have been a good game if only they'd had a bit more cash to finish it properly. In-game ads can easily be done to a tasteful degree, without wrecking any atmosphere, as most people have pointed out, and indeed can save artists a lot of time-- can't imagine how many more backgrounds the Zool people would have painted if all those delicious Chupa Chups weren't floating around in the backdrops:-) For games where ads are intrusive, or people dislike them on principle, most PC games are easily patchable, but most people really won't care. So, ermm, yes. Hurrah for adverts if it makes for more good games.
Even the guys at the Register are wise to this-- ISTR Kieran writing to say that Slashdot thought they were `too tabloidy or something'; not sure where this impression came from, but they've noticed a grudge. Would be nice if the Slashdot staff would occasionally step forward and engage with their readership a bit; seems like they take themselves way too seriously these days.
If ICANN really is as corrupt and mismanaged as all that, I can well believe in a scenerio that The Register put forward a while ago: an alternative and fair(er) root DNS system set up by a consortium of the larger ISPs. Alternate DNS systems aren't a new idea, what with Alternic and all that, but the idea that a hacker-led initiative such as this could ever gain the support of the rest of the world (because this is a diplomatic rather than technical challenge) is fairly remote. No, think about it... how many representatives of the enormous backbone carriers would need to gather in a room to agree on such a solution, and give the finger to ICANN? Not a great deal, I'd imagine-- they'd have the money and motivation to set up the necessary committees, registration systems and technical infrastructure, and if they did it fairly, any ISP's involvement in such a `fixing' of the DNS system would gain them brownie points with the community. Heck, even if they didn't do it fairly, it's not as if it could be much worse than the current setup.
It might sound like pie-in-the-sky language, but given the outrageous conduct we're witnessing, it seems increasingly possible.
I'm pretty sure all that's practically necessary is that you put all your work onto a CD / floppy, post it to yourself by registered delivery and leave the envelope unopened. You can even lodge it with a bank if you're feeling paranoid. But then if you need to prove you wrote it first, you've got a sealed package with a stamp from the Post Office which you can open in court, and this is cross-checkable with the PO's records.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, if Blockbuster buys a new DVD for $20 and rents it 15 times at $4/rent, that is Blockbuster walking away with a 300% return on the investment.
For new movies, Blockbuster are more likely paying $120-200 per disc. I remember trying to order a movie that hadn't quite been released on video to buy yet (can't remember which one) and the people in tBlockbuster said I could have it if I paid the 'rental store' price for it, which was about £80 at the time! They only drop the price once they've advertised a consumer release for purchase.
Anyone want to take bets on how long it'll take before some "news" show does an "investigative report" on "broken CDs" and tells the average consumer to look for the CD-DA logo to ensure that the disc will work in their car, DVD player, and CD-compatible game console?
:-)
Yes, it happened last week but unfortunately it was BBC fucking Watchdog, the most ineffectual consumer affairs programme in the entire universe because they're more concerned with doing witty set pieces and puns than any research. The presenter, Nicki Campbell is a goon who just spouts the scripts he's given without any kind of insight into what he's actually saying, and his fearsome band of reporters look and talk like they're from a teeny-bopper tribute band. The whole experience is broadcast live, a completely crazy decision because none of the presenters are up to much more than following their autocues. Okay, so I enjoy sitting and getting apoplectic at the television once a week, my girlfriend loves it, but this was symptomatic of the approach of the whole program: they spent a good 3-4 minutes of prime-time television asking consumers in London whether they could tell the difference between copy-protected versions of Natalie Imbruglia, and the 'real McCoy', and concluded their report by saying that, well, the record company will replace copy-protected CDs with 'proper' copies if anyone has any complaints. Hoorah. Did they mention the issues raised by MP3 ripping? Fair use? The dilution of the CD standard? Hardly, it was mainly just a few minutes of moaning how the latest pop won't play on laptop CD players, but as with every issue they cover, they never like to rock the boat too much, or attempt any insight into what these complaints might be a symptom of.
Seriously, you guys (who weren't in the UK) should have seen the piece they did on Windows XP. That half-hour weekly slot has so much potential to become a fearsome adversary to corporations, but what they always do when somebody complains about a product to them is to show the product's advert in full, as they did with XP, and then invite some rep from the company to come on to answer some previously-scripted 'hard-hitting' questions about the product. What usually happens is that the smart company rep defuses the question in about the first five seconds, then proceeds to use the prime time television slot to gush about the product's benefits. As happened, expertly, with the Microsoft rep. The presenter occasionally interrupts to repeat the question, which, we suspect, they don't always entirely understand; there follows another five seconds defusing, followed by more minutes of sales patter. Total whitewash; I'm surprised companies are queuing up to have their products 'savaged' by the BBC. In the case of XP, what do you think they were grilling the guy about? A few total mongs who'd queued up outside PC World at midnight to pick up their copies of XP suddenly couldn't connect to the internet after installing it and had to install some extra software to get their computers working like they used to. Well if they liked their computer so much as it was, and relied on them so much for their vital work, why risk the upgrade? Seriously, it's common fucking sense that most of the Watchdog complainants lack, and Microsoft took full advantage of the opportunity these moaners had provided to sell their product; you'd think the Beeb would have brief their presenters on what a Windows XP actually was
Look, in case you haven't got the gist of this show, bear with me here. They had an item last week as well where a few people were complaining about British Gas putting their prices up for the second time in the year. Now the situation with gas suppliers in the UK is that British Gas used to supply everybody, and now the government split the people that supply the gas and pipe it to people's houses from the people that actually charge for, send you the bills and do all the admin. They compete on that part, right? Everybody gets the same gas, from the same company, no matter who bills them, and the billing companies can compete on special offers with similarly deregulated electricity deals. British Gas used to have everyone in the country as their customers, so they had their prices capped at a minimum during the initial couple of years to compensate for their unfair advantage. This minimum was recently lifted, they presumably still have a fair proportion of people that haven't switched from them, so they raise their prices because they're allowed to. Many many people were interviewed on the programme and said that this was a problem, that they couldn't afford to keep the heating on for more than 10 seconds a day etc. etc. Nicki Campbell, hard hitting as ever, asks the head of the independent gas regulation department whether they're being 'totally ineffectual'. The head of the gas regulation department points out that people can switch gas companies with just a phonecall, and that this has been well advertised. Nicki Campbell hits back with "well what about all those people we interviewed who like things the way they are?" Huzzah, the British consumer psyche in a nutshell. Total waste of time, and proof that a prime piece of television that claims to be helping consumers is just the Brits' favourite pastime (moaning loudly about things without wanting them to change) rearranged into a telly program with some goofy presenters and a catchy beat.
Sorry. I'm sorry for this rant. But to get back to the point: I think what Watchdog shows about the CD protection thing is that the vast majority of people just don't give a shit about the wider issues involved, and won't do until knackered, or WMF-encoded CDs are the norm and suddenly nobody can remember what the 'old' technology was like. But as you might have gathered it bugs me that such a good opportunity for a consumer affairs programme on UK television has been wasted so badly, and badly shakes my faith in people wanting to change these things (says Matthew, posting his detailed moan on Slashdot, a site much-read by BBC programme producers, before going for another beer and a few games of Crazy Taxi.)
Of course, the problem with overclocking something like a speccy or C64 is that you're likely to speed up the gameplay of anything you're running!
:-)
The best game this ever happened to was Wipeout 2097-- I think it came out in 1996 or something so they should really have known better, but when playing it on my Celeron 400 with a Voodoo 3 graphics card, it went at about three times the normal speed which is already pretty fringging quickly, as anybody who's played it will testify
This could be a dastardly test-bed for keeping track of pepople using their voiceprints, since that technology, linked up to a global GPS satellite network, might just be "the end of privacy" as people are tracked down as soon as they speak on any telephone on the planet. Quick, call in Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz to foil them :)
From this essay we can see that RMS holds a more fundemental view that everyone is skirting around but not really attacking directly. It is a particular view on what Freedom is, this is implicit in his being so it's hardly worth moaning on about sneaky redefinition on his part, actually no he wants to be our bearded master etc. etc. He is stating that the FSF reject the notion that software authors should be allowed to choose their own license for software. He makes no apologies that the FSF is a radical group, and the GPL is the most vocal expression, under current copyright law, of their ideals, and a bridge for authors to place their software into that world of quite specific ideals. But the ideals that the GPL represents are not best served by copyright law, and this essay reaches beyond copyright to an even more overtly political stance: that computer software is too important to be protected by copyright, which makes it "too" easy for authors to restrict what people do with their code. This is based on Lessig's maxim that "code is law"; as I understand it, he means that computer software regulates the pace and rules of modern living to such a degree that it thoroughly regulates our lives in many of the same ways that the government and police force would. Lessig concludes his book with a suggestion that the Y2K fears might have been allayed if software was treated as fundamentally as law, and at least deposited with a government agency in case of crisis; I think this is the direction that Stallman is leaning in. That is to say the very act of creating a piece of software that anybody, anywhere might use carries a public responsibility for its effects, and part of this responsibility must involve people who use it not being helpless to change it if the circumstances require: whether this be fixing a bug or removing an unneeded piece of functionality.
I've certainly formed some new conclusions as a result of this essay; but in general I agree that he's making his position more extreme by explicitly rejecting the current structure of (C) law with regard to software.
Slashdot didn't cover the last few months of Bleem's existence when their web site detailed the news that Sony were trying to shaft them by threatening stores stocking their products with withholding of PS2 stocks (this was last Christmas). This was after they had successfully defended an attempted injunction by Sony to stop them selling Bleem! for PCs; so after failing to stop Bleem by legal means, they semi-successfully hurt them by traditional strongarm tactics.
:-)
However I don't think they made the most of their martyr situation with regard to the Dreamcast Bleem port they had. Firstly, I think the whole idea of selling it as 'Bleempaks' rather than a warts-and-all 'complete' emulator was flawed; if you don't know, they decided that they wanted to sell the emulator on several separate CDs costing a few dollars, each of which would pay 20-odd Playstation games that were guaranteed to work perfectly. Their line was that customers would know exactly what they were getting and wouldn't be disappointed when a game they hadn't tested didn't work. What it looked like was a short-sighted attempt to boost sales by potentially splitting somebody's PSX library across all these Bleempaks, and making them pay more for it. I sent them an email to this effect at the end of last year, and had no response.
But I've since been convinced otherwise; from what I've heard, despite the fact that it was impressive at what it did, PC Bleem was never particularly reliable or compatible, even with the latest update which they stated would be the last. And this might explain why Sega weren't more supportive at the time when the Dreamcast was in its death-throes; sure a Playstation compatibility CD would give the console a shot in the arm, and if Bleem could successfully take on Sony's lawyers, surely Sega could, and then some? It seems likely that the same quality control problems which the PC Bleem! owners have witnessed would explain why they've only been able to release two single-game compatibility products for the Dreamcast so far, let alone a complete emulator or even a single 20-game Bleempak that they had planned.
Obviously this is total speculation, as nobody ever saw any other games working under Bleem!cast. Even if it were true, I wouldn't blame the single Bleem programmer for not being able to get the whole product done & tested, start-to-finish, while simultaneously fending off Sony's lawyers, working (apparently) from home and still trying to have a life. I'd even heard it was written in 100% assembler which makes the job even more fearsome.
Ah well, I guess that means the PS2 stays on my Christmas wishlist
I'm part-responsible for a bunch of fairly basic Redhat servers (single CPU, 256MB etc.) that spend their time crawling the web, keeping their 100Mb nework connections saturated, at around a load of 17 quite reliably, and have even worked at around 50, though accepting ssh connections becomes impossible after a certain level :-) But they still get all their work done eventually; I'm not sure what the relative efficiency of each server was relative to their load average, whether they get any more work done, but if all they're doing is using a lot of CPU, you can reliably push the load average very high without ill effect.
But a high load average is only a potential symptom of a problem, not a problem in itself. It might mean (as it has done with our machines in the past) that so many processes are running that memory happens to be low as well, and reliability goes down as processes don't cope with being killed or running out of memory. But if that's not happening, the only reason to worry is if the people using the machine complain: slow mail deliveries, POP3 pickups, DNS resolutions or whatever other 'work' the server is up to. If you want to roll your own benchmarks to test these things, you can then decide on how slow is too slow, and upgrade accordingly.
Shouldn't the phenomenon more fairly be called engine-suck rather than bird-strike? I mean it's not as if flocks of kamikaze birds don their helmets and goggles, and tear towards engine #1 screaming BANZAI! is it?
There's a good reason you don't want to refer to the next version of Enlightenment as E17 (at least if you were cringing at the music charts in the UK 6-7 years ago).
So it's a repeat but if you've read down this far, check out the surreal Pencil Whipped, a 3D shooter whose graphics were all done by a man with a pencil and a fevered mind.
Just ask Terrence McGuckin of 2600 magazine who was arrested last year after protesting at the Republican convention; hardened terrorist that he no doubt was, he was bailed for a mere $100,000. It wasn't returned after he was cleared of all charges, and only after two appeals did the judge decide to return it, minus $750 admin costs. If it hasn't sunk in, this was somebody who had been declared innocent.
DirecTV can afford the bandwidth to digitally mark a section of time as "no fast forward." Defeat it, and they will have you prosecuted under the DMCA.
I can hardly see the TV networks marking their adverts digitally; otherwise easily-hacked digital devices could recognise them with no effort at all-- DMCA or not, making ads stand out from normal broadcasts would be enough of an incentive for somebody to invent technology to filter them with 100% effectiveness.
--
Matthew
Obviously people are going for Kernighan, Knuth and various dry tomes on algorithms, but I'd suggest Mr. Bunny's Big Cup O' Java, a snip at $12. It's not instructive in a technical sense, but its purpose is to warn the reader off buzzwords and bullshit computer manuals through satire and nonsense. Tim Lindhom (JVM spec. co-author): Mr. CE III does have a way of capturing the industry patois and spewing it back as absurdity. Well, at least it made me snigger loudly in a crowded bookshop, so make of it what you will.
from the maybe-rents-are-cheap-in-England- dept. Jon, you should see the rents here. F**king extortionate. Everywhere. Like, a million pounds a month. Plus there's foot and mouth (which can and does infect humans, and makes people illiterate), high taxes, a totalitarian government who, errmm, demonises smart kids and puts them into padded cells for being too brainy. And we blame everything on the fact that guns are banned and really think that Bush is something special. Plus, up here in Yorkshire the internet is banned because teachers are paedophiles.scared it'll turn computer-game playing secondary-school students into Seriously, you'd hate it here. Stay at home, you'll like it better. Please.
We must make an example of Adobe. We should continue to boycott Adobe, the music industry and every company that supported the DMCA until they make an about face and the DMCA is repealed. Otherwise we loose.
Sheesh, this is Insightful? Only on Slashdot and in student union open meetings is the idea of sitting on your arse doing less considered an effective form of political protest. If you want to do something about this, and haven't yet boycotted your own bodily functions, why not head over to the EFF donations page and drop a few dollars in the hats of the people who are doing something about these injustices? You don't have to give much, but a buck for every lazy bleeding-heart post like yours would go a long way torwards furthering the guy's defence.
Has the general computer using population been brainwashed into thinking they have to buy a new PC to run a new operating system?
:-)
:-) And I've got another friend who'd (reasonably enough, but naively) wanted to get rid of a Netware client on his Win98 machine, and just deleted the Netware directory. Windows never started after that, and reasoned that it would never have happened if he'd gone with a branded PC rather than taking my advice & building one from parts. I nearly throttled him & left him to reinstall the OS for himself :-)
:-)
Well, yes, but this is because most PC buyers don't get what an OS actually is, nor what to do when they've fucked up their Windows installation for one reason or another-- the simplest solution for many is just to start afresh with a new PC. Particulaly virulent is the meme that computers somehow get `arthritis' become intrinsically slower at time goes on, hence need replacing. I'm not sure which marketroid started that one, but I'm sure his company rewarded him with a small Caribbean island for his troubles
I've just about beaten my own Dad out of the mentality that when his P133-based computer gets `bogged down', the solution is to delete all the gaudy, ad-laden cover-CD software he's installed to run on startup, or (once) reinstall the OS, not replace the whole machine
So yes, basically, there's no money in tech. support for the masses of home users out there: properly qualified people will cost 30-40 quid an hour, and economics dictates that if you've got an older machine but don't know a friendly wizard who'll help out with a serious problem, it's going to be a better investment just to get a new one. If the PC market wasn't so cut-throat, maybe PC makers could charge for and compete on quality of technical support rather than how much they've skimped on it.
Matthew, very relieved at the fact he's graduated and no longer playing tech. support to all and sundry around college
[Sorry to give the moderators a dilemma, I don't do this often, but don't you hate it when a more interesting story than the one you're reading gets rejected? :-) ]
Sony are trying to squash Bleem for the Dreamcast by any means necessary. Bleem is a Playstation emulator which will allow the huge catalogue of Playstation games to run on a Sega Dreamcast; sony ship a similar product with their Playstation 2 in order to preserve backwards-compatibility, but evidently don't want there to be an alternative `upgrade' path for Playstation owners. The courts have overturned three injunctions from Sony, but the Bleem guys are owing $1m in legal fees, and there's an appeal on their web site for Dreamcast owners who want Bleem to contact the major retailers to tell them that they want Bleem! Sony are currently telling its retailers that they will withhold lucractive Playstation 2 shipments from retailers that stock Bleem, and retailers have buckled. Let them know they don't need to stand for it.
The last couple of versions of EasyCD have apparently being irrevocably trashing people's Windows installations-- the Register has been covering it blow-by-blow, including the patches that don't solve the problem, the revelation that connecting a USB device suddenly triggers it etc. etc. So my impression is that they're taken some seriously bad press of late, and could be in trouble; could be that EMI are throwing them a line?
Of course people are seizing onto the GPL's slippery definition of linking-- to add to the melting pot of opinions, the MySQL folk specify that you must pay them for a special GPL exception license if You have a commercial application that ONLY works with MySQL and ships the application with the MySQL server. This is because we view this as linking even if it is done over the network. e.g. any kind of reliance == linking. I'm not sure whether this makes the case weaker or stronger against dynamic linking as GPL-covered linking.
Read the licenses of djbdns and qmail, and you'll see why we can't ship them: If a hole is discovered, we're not allowed to distribute a fixed version in binary form.
/var/qmail/bin without exception. This of course irks most distros who have their own idea of where the mailer binaries go, and means they go towards similarly functional (though less secure) mailers with less restrictive licenses.
And the chances of qmail or djbdns having holes in is...? Anybody...? Approximately zero, I'd say. For people that don't know, the author guarantees cash rewards to anybody finding exploitable code in his software. The code is very very easy to audit, since most of the programs he writes are as small as they possibly can be (and split up into separate, mutually distrusting binaries), and use none of the standard I/O or string handling functions because djb doesn't trust them. Okay, so I'm biased, I love both programs, but this is someone who knows how to write secure code.
I think the reason most distros find djb's license so restrictive (not that I necessarily disagree) is his stance on distros not being allowed to shift files around to suit their view of the filesystem hierarchy-- e.g. no binary packages of qmail are allowed unless they put their binaries into
So I was drunk, but still...l
http://www.soup-kitchen.net/soapbox/hackers.htm
If it makes for better games and a less stressful development schedule, I think most development studios or publishers will sell a texture here and there. All you ever hear about games development is how hard & deadline-obsessed it is, and that this is very often the ruin of what might have been a good game if only they'd had a bit more cash to finish it properly. In-game ads can easily be done to a tasteful degree, without wrecking any atmosphere, as most people have pointed out, and indeed can save artists a lot of time-- can't imagine how many more backgrounds the Zool people would have painted if all those delicious Chupa Chups weren't floating around in the backdrops :-) For games where ads are intrusive, or people dislike them on principle, most PC games are easily patchable, but most people really won't care. So, ermm, yes. Hurrah for adverts if it makes for more good games.
Even the guys at the Register are wise to this-- ISTR Kieran writing to say that Slashdot thought they were `too tabloidy or something'; not sure where this impression came from, but they've noticed a grudge. Would be nice if the Slashdot staff would occasionally step forward and engage with their readership a bit; seems like they take themselves way too seriously these days.
If ICANN really is as corrupt and mismanaged as all that, I can well believe in a scenerio that The Register put forward a while ago: an alternative and fair(er) root DNS system set up by a consortium of the larger ISPs. Alternate DNS systems aren't a new idea, what with Alternic and all that, but the idea that a hacker-led initiative such as this could ever gain the support of the rest of the world (because this is a diplomatic rather than technical challenge) is fairly remote. No, think about it... how many representatives of the enormous backbone carriers would need to gather in a room to agree on such a solution, and give the finger to ICANN? Not a great deal, I'd imagine-- they'd have the money and motivation to set up the necessary committees, registration systems and technical infrastructure, and if they did it fairly, any ISP's involvement in such a `fixing' of the DNS system would gain them brownie points with the community. Heck, even if they didn't do it fairly, it's not as if it could be much worse than the current setup.
It might sound like pie-in-the-sky language, but given the outrageous conduct we're witnessing, it seems increasingly possible.
I'm pretty sure all that's practically necessary is that you put all your work onto a CD / floppy, post it to yourself by registered delivery and leave the envelope unopened. You can even lodge it with a bank if you're feeling paranoid. But then if you need to prove you wrote it first, you've got a sealed package with a stamp from the Post Office which you can open in court, and this is cross-checkable with the PO's records.