Re:There's more of us than there are of you
on
DivX ;-) Deux Update
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· Score: 2
Most of the algorhythms I play with only use 8 bits, so they would have to be some pretty dumb terrorists.:)
My point is that one of these things (encryption) is really designed to enhance people's privacy while the other (the codec, at least at this point) is designed to take away intellectual property.
But that's exactly my point. What end user needs access to a massive disk array on the machine sitting in front of him. That kind of thing is sufficient for servers only.
And if I really wanted to play around with large clusters of disks, I could mess around with software RAID in Linux, or even make a minor Beowulf cluster. My point is that speed is relative to the applications you are running, not determined by the raw numbers a PR spits out.
See the book "The Hardware Software Interface" for more information.
My point is that you can't tell a machine's usefullness simply by looking at how many clock cycles it spits out, or its supposed advantages in RISC architecture (and by the looks of things, this AC doesn't even know what RISC architecture would do for him -- he's just spouting out stats).
Not to be hyper-critical, but as it kinda stated in the Slashdot article heading, isn't this just going to aid and abet DVD pirates?
I'm all for new algorhytms. Programming new crypto algorhythms can actually be quite enjoyable. But if my work entailed illegal copyright infringement, how could I feel good about it?
Most end users I know do NOT use Sparc stations. They use Windows machines, with support for far greater hardware and much more user friendliness.
Like I said, Sparc machines are good as servers only. If you think down to the most basic server-client metaphor, there will always be more clients than servers. In this case support of, and respect for, these clients is paramount.
You can do your little scientific calculations on your [supposedly fast] Sparc machines. I personally want a client with far greater graphic capability, better support for sound, better support for games and a user interface my mother can understand.
The system they have is primarily for installations. I chose to get my account disconnected approximately 7 days after the 30-day trial period.
At that point they charged me $300 for "breaking the good will contract" that came in the email. That, coupled with the $200 installation meant I spent $500 in a little over a month. I still haven't received my rebate for the installation as promised.
Personally, the install for Comcast was so much faster and less painless that I can't see why more people don't do it. The speed is always at a reasonable level, and I think the cable speed worries are a little unwarranted. I've had several of my friends on the same street get Comcast and the speed hasn't gone down whatsoever.
Besides, from a technical standpoint, can't they simply add more routers at the local stations as traffic grows?
The only people I've seen who own Sparc are professors (and only the true Unix zealots). The machines are just too expensive for the average user, and the cost-to-performance ratio is thus very high.
If MS is offering what appears to be a neat feature of change-of-address notification to actually target marketing at people without the sender's knowledge, doesn't this violate some law? Like maybe theft of computer services?
None that I know of. Again, it would be different if they made no mention of their intentions during the "change of address" process. But the subject line should pretty clearly tip you off that "Hey, I'm about to send some advertisements to people".
Generally, I stay away from any services or web sites that ask for friends' email addresses. I know that they will simply spam them under my name (think Pointcast a few years back) and I'll only succeed in making them extremely angry.
I had a huge customer-related service issue with Speakeasy. They apparently sent an email stating their terms of service to one of my Hotmail accounts. In this email was a contract I "didn't have to sign", saying if I wanted to quit their service they'd charge me close to $300.
Since I never saw the email, and they never had me sign or click OK on a contract, I was more than a little angry when I tried to disconnect a month later. I wrote them saying I doubted the legality of emailed contracts, and how did they know I approved of it? They shrugged me off so I wrote the Better Business Bureau.
Beware of Speakeasy. Their contracts are very dirty and the speed was nothing to write home about (350 kbps on a 608 connection).
To Microsoft's credit, you have to press a couple of buttons to "accidentally" send this spam (read: you are an idiot). The program even tells you the subject line of the spam right before you ok to send it ("Come try Explorer Preview" or something like that).
IMO, if you go through a few clicks and see something as blatant as that, you shouldn't click "OK" and complain about it afterward.
So lessee... for boxes that you might reasonably put on your desk right now, there are how many architecture choices? (And how many of them run Windows?)
I'd be willing to wager that my Athlon 1000 mhz, 768 MB RAM, 40 GB HD desktop machine running Windows 2000 would blow this thing out of the water...
Many of the algorhythms that follow your D(E(T)) = T scheme are roughly the same. I'm not saying there aren't holes to be found (DES S-boxes, for example, have been rumored to have holes for years). But what would prevent me from implementing a DES-like scheme with no S-boxes whatsoever?
The point is, while there is a great deal of math occasionally involved, anyone can put together an effective computer program. As long as you're not concerned with distributing it, and thus having the enemy learn its inner workings, you should be ok.
Also, I don't believe having the source wide-open is a good idea. I'd rather craft my program and not have the enemy know my scheme.
Re:A rant on licensing and open source
on
CueCat At It Again
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· Score: 2
When I got my Cue:Cat the person at Radio Shack handed it to me with no mention of any obligation. I even asked, "Is this really free? I can keep it?" and the clerk responded in the affirmative.
What if you asked "Does this come with any kind of license agreement?" Or you knew that it came with a license agreement prior to getting one -- you just chose to ignore it?
Don't forget the cardinal rule -- there's no such thing as a free lunch. When you received a "free" piece of hardware, a piece of hardware that was easily $5-10 to manufacture, you must have thought to yourself "what's the catch?"
The catch is you're supposed to use it to scan Radio Shack catalogs, go to their site and drive advertiser (and purchasing) traffic. Not break the damn thing apart and use it as a toy to scan bar codes for no reason.
There was a business plan here -- a business plan you chose to ignore but still applies. The company will lose money if all you do is play with the device scanning rogue bar codes and not use it to buy Radio Shack merchandise. This means they will stop giving them away, and we'll be the losers, because a couple of hackers couldn't swallow their pride and say "Gee, I got this thing to work with Linux. But the company gave it to me for free. Maybe I should buy a few products using it and its Windows program to return my gratitude."
What I find interesting is that governments (or people, or companies) have to rely on commercial solutions for encryption at all. It's fairly simple to write up an encyrption scheme using the available algorhythms (I wrote one for a computer science class last semester) and you can make it whatever bit strength you want. 1,000, 10,000 bits, whatever.
If every government wants perfect security, they should have their own classified programs with classified keys. That way, even if an opponent were to discover a key, they would still have to figure out the encryption scheme (one of the tacit assumptions of encryption is that the opponent already knows the scheme. It also is the most difficult part of an encryption program to discover through reverse engineering).
Re:A rant on licensing and open source
on
CueCat At It Again
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· Score: 2
So if I don't read the DMV's rules I don't have to follow them? I think you're little off, dude. Just because you threw away the EULA doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you. The license applies whether you trash the CD or not (and by the looks of things, that wasn't exactly their intention with the CD).
If I were to give you an item that you didn't ask for, I'm basically giving up all rights to tell you what to do with it.
Who said that? Cuecat has a pretty solid license agreement that you must agree to before taking the device. And it pretty much confirms what the cease-and-desist letters say more verbosely: the CueCat is licensed, not sold or given away.
Personally, I don't see a big deal about issues with licensing agreements. So what if the hardware maker wants to grant a license instead of giving you all the rights?
The DMV doesn't give you permission to kill people with your car, they give you a license to drive it. Tivo doesn't give you permission to break down their proprietary video encoding technology, just to hack the hard drive and other non-critical bits (this is how companies make money).
What open source zealots have to get in their heads is not everything can be free. There are certain precedents that set up a capitalist society, and for better or worse we must live in this society. Sure, I could devote my life to developing Linux and giving it away for free. I could also never marry and starve my future children to death.
Come on, even the poster boy of open source has taken a more realistic route. Wake up people. Some companies need to make money to survive.
I tried NFL2K1 on the Dreamcast, with its support up to eight players over the Internet, and it rocks the casba.
While I admit it has a bit of a strange menu system (basically, the player on the other end of the line can move the pointer around on your screen if he wishes. Eerie...) the game play itself is surprisingly smooth, even over a bad modem connection.
Point is, something doesn't need to be "massively" multiplayer to be fun. Sports like football, hockey and baseball are fun with only a few players.
Enough about the Cuecat. It's a bar code scanner, not a cure for AIDS. It was given away for free, so there's really no need to get so emotional about not cracking it (as opposed to something you pay for, like Tivo). Let's move on to more important topics.
What I find funny is that everything titled "Mickey Mouse" becomes enormously successful. There's the original mouse of course (and the media titan attached to it).
But there's also the New Jersey Devils who were initially titled a "Mickey Mouse team" by Wayne Gretsky, then proceeded to win 2 cups in a little over a decade.
Apple was called a "Mickey Mouse computer company" before they inflitrated schools everywhere and made millions.
If you believe in luck, calling something "Mickey Mouse" is probably the best suggestion of all.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that one of these things (encryption) is really designed to enhance people's privacy while the other (the codec, at least at this point) is designed to take away intellectual property.
And if I really wanted to play around with large clusters of disks, I could mess around with software RAID in Linux, or even make a minor Beowulf cluster. My point is that speed is relative to the applications you are running, not determined by the raw numbers a PR spits out.
See the book "The Hardware Software Interface" for more information.
My point is that you can't tell a machine's usefullness simply by looking at how many clock cycles it spits out, or its supposed advantages in RISC architecture (and by the looks of things, this AC doesn't even know what RISC architecture would do for him -- he's just spouting out stats).
Chill out. Didn't see the link. No need to jump down my throat, AC's.
I'm all for new algorhytms. Programming new crypto algorhythms can actually be quite enjoyable. But if my work entailed illegal copyright infringement, how could I feel good about it?
Like I said, Sparc machines are good as servers only. If you think down to the most basic server-client metaphor, there will always be more clients than servers. In this case support of, and respect for, these clients is paramount.
You can do your little scientific calculations on your [supposedly fast] Sparc machines. I personally want a client with far greater graphic capability, better support for sound, better support for games and a user interface my mother can understand.
At that point they charged me $300 for "breaking the good will contract" that came in the email. That, coupled with the $200 installation meant I spent $500 in a little over a month. I still haven't received my rebate for the installation as promised.
Personally, the install for Comcast was so much faster and less painless that I can't see why more people don't do it. The speed is always at a reasonable level, and I think the cable speed worries are a little unwarranted. I've had several of my friends on the same street get Comcast and the speed hasn't gone down whatsoever.
Besides, from a technical standpoint, can't they simply add more routers at the local stations as traffic grows?
The only people I've seen who own Sparc are professors (and only the true Unix zealots). The machines are just too expensive for the average user, and the cost-to-performance ratio is thus very high.
None that I know of. Again, it would be different if they made no mention of their intentions during the "change of address" process. But the subject line should pretty clearly tip you off that "Hey, I'm about to send some advertisements to people".
Generally, I stay away from any services or web sites that ask for friends' email addresses. I know that they will simply spam them under my name (think Pointcast a few years back) and I'll only succeed in making them extremely angry.
I bounced from them to Speakeasy (yuck) to Comcast and settled on their cable service. It's extremely fast and I'm quite happy.
Since I never saw the email, and they never had me sign or click OK on a contract, I was more than a little angry when I tried to disconnect a month later. I wrote them saying I doubted the legality of emailed contracts, and how did they know I approved of it? They shrugged me off so I wrote the Better Business Bureau.
Beware of Speakeasy. Their contracts are very dirty and the speed was nothing to write home about (350 kbps on a 608 connection).
That's exactly my point. As a server Solaris is pretty good. As a game machine it absolutely stinks.
I have my own priorities, and in this case my machine blows their's out of the water. (Further, does UT even run on Solaris? Stupid OS...)
IMO, if you go through a few clicks and see something as blatant as that, you shouldn't click "OK" and complain about it afterward.
I'd be willing to wager that my Athlon 1000 mhz, 768 MB RAM, 40 GB HD desktop machine running Windows 2000 would blow this thing out of the water...
Um, except noone uses tarballs anymore. :)
The point is, while there is a great deal of math occasionally involved, anyone can put together an effective computer program. As long as you're not concerned with distributing it, and thus having the enemy learn its inner workings, you should be ok.
Also, I don't believe having the source wide-open is a good idea. I'd rather craft my program and not have the enemy know my scheme.
What if you asked "Does this come with any kind of license agreement?" Or you knew that it came with a license agreement prior to getting one -- you just chose to ignore it?
Don't forget the cardinal rule -- there's no such thing as a free lunch. When you received a "free" piece of hardware, a piece of hardware that was easily $5-10 to manufacture, you must have thought to yourself "what's the catch?"
The catch is you're supposed to use it to scan Radio Shack catalogs, go to their site and drive advertiser (and purchasing) traffic. Not break the damn thing apart and use it as a toy to scan bar codes for no reason.
There was a business plan here -- a business plan you chose to ignore but still applies. The company will lose money if all you do is play with the device scanning rogue bar codes and not use it to buy Radio Shack merchandise. This means they will stop giving them away, and we'll be the losers, because a couple of hackers couldn't swallow their pride and say "Gee, I got this thing to work with Linux. But the company gave it to me for free. Maybe I should buy a few products using it and its Windows program to return my gratitude."
If every government wants perfect security, they should have their own classified programs with classified keys. That way, even if an opponent were to discover a key, they would still have to figure out the encryption scheme (one of the tacit assumptions of encryption is that the opponent already knows the scheme. It also is the most difficult part of an encryption program to discover through reverse engineering).
So if I don't read the DMV's rules I don't have to follow them? I think you're little off, dude. Just because you threw away the EULA doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you. The license applies whether you trash the CD or not (and by the looks of things, that wasn't exactly their intention with the CD).
Who said that? Cuecat has a pretty solid license agreement that you must agree to before taking the device. And it pretty much confirms what the cease-and-desist letters say more verbosely: the CueCat is licensed, not sold or given away.
Personally, I don't see a big deal about issues with licensing agreements. So what if the hardware maker wants to grant a license instead of giving you all the rights?
The DMV doesn't give you permission to kill people with your car, they give you a license to drive it. Tivo doesn't give you permission to break down their proprietary video encoding technology, just to hack the hard drive and other non-critical bits (this is how companies make money).
What open source zealots have to get in their heads is not everything can be free. There are certain precedents that set up a capitalist society, and for better or worse we must live in this society. Sure, I could devote my life to developing Linux and giving it away for free. I could also never marry and starve my future children to death.
Come on, even the poster boy of open source has taken a more realistic route. Wake up people. Some companies need to make money to survive.
While I admit it has a bit of a strange menu system (basically, the player on the other end of the line can move the pointer around on your screen if he wishes. Eerie...) the game play itself is surprisingly smooth, even over a bad modem connection.
Point is, something doesn't need to be "massively" multiplayer to be fun. Sports like football, hockey and baseball are fun with only a few players.
Enough about the Cuecat. It's a bar code scanner, not a cure for AIDS. It was given away for free, so there's really no need to get so emotional about not cracking it (as opposed to something you pay for, like Tivo). Let's move on to more important topics.
(From an old phone ad. :) )
But there's also the New Jersey Devils who were initially titled a "Mickey Mouse team" by Wayne Gretsky, then proceeded to win 2 cups in a little over a decade.
Apple was called a "Mickey Mouse computer company" before they inflitrated schools everywhere and made millions.
If you believe in luck, calling something "Mickey Mouse" is probably the best suggestion of all.