A hack that would allow an earth orbiting satellite to somehow collide with the sun would be the mother of all hacks. Not only would the satellite's security system be violated, but so would known physical laws of the universe. Sounds cool!
Also, if someone managed to collide the satellite into the Sun using this super hack, the only outcome would be that the satellite would be destroyed (actually it would burn up long before it ever got close enough to actually collide with the Sun). Its not going to make the Sun supernova and kill us all or anything sci-fi-stupid like that.
Like it or not, this is really no different than the reaction most companies (note the lowercase c) would have in this same situation.
It is not too hard for me to imagine a company freaking out if an employee, without permission of IT or whoever, set up an IRC chat server within the company network to chat with coworkers.
I've dealt with (but not worked directly for) companies in that past that won't allow their employees to even run IM clients like AIM or ICQ due to fear of them wasting time and goofing off...Having an internal server running on a company system without permission just adds (in the PHB's mind) to the inappropriateness of that goofing-off action.
When I was a CS student, it was all UNIX..No Microsoft tools or OSes were used. Now, in my day to day programming, I write 90% of my code on Windows, for Windows. Once you understand the basics of programming, it is very easy to adapt to other enviornments.
There are plenty of O'Reilly books out there that can help you learn the details of Makefiles. Even in schools that use UNIX based systems for learning, you basically only get to know the very basics of Makefile usage (because that's all the instructor knows). So its always better to learn some things on your own.
According to both candidates of the aborted presidental election, it is now clear that all older people in this country are eating dog food and can't even afford the medicine they need to stay alive.
For $599, I'd guess they would be more open to hacking than i-opener.
In any case, of course the company is going to 'forbid' hacking, just to cover their ass on support issues. But for $599, they must be making money on the hardware alone (which iOpener wasn't, they were losing money). Yeah, the display probably sets them back a bit, but also consider it has no internal harddrive, etc.
No matter how you look at it, this thing seems very unlikely to be successful. $599 is an awful lot for a limited use 'appliance' when compared to full-blown low end PCs for sale these days.
Assuming it really is based on Linux, AOL/Gateway will have to release kernel modifications to the public, which might give a pretty good starting point in terms of hacking into this thing..
Of course, they are likely to try to put all of the interesting stuff in loadable modules to avoid this situation as much as possible...alas.
What you are seeing with the redraw problems is almost certainly a display driver problem.
I've seen this happen in the past on NT4.0 with shoddy display drivers, and for whatever reason it only happens with some applications.
I would bet that if you update your drivers, the problem will magically go away. In any case, many other millions of people use IE without any of these display problems.
I hope these people realize that if they go with micropayments (I'd be all for that), its a one time charge PER SONG.
If they try to implement a system that charges per-listen they are going to be as bitterly disappointed as the Divx people (Circuit City's DVD-ish format, not the codec)! Particularly since they are going to be competing with non-controlled open P2P networks.
It holds true for DVD too. In fact, you can find ripped DVD movies compressed to DivX and MPEG format (DVD is MPEG-2 to begin with) all over the net.
And this was happening BEFORE DeCSS. DeCSS makes it easier to transfer the DVD data to other formats but the pirates were already using other methods of ripping the data out (mostly of the type listed above where they would play the DVD through an analog line and recapture it to digital in a non-secure format).
In reality it doesn't matter...Your assement is correct.
The music industry blindly believes that as long as you can't make a perfect digital copy, their investment of millions into a protection scheme is a good one.
The music industry is wrong..Nobody seems to mind all the fairly crappy (compared to 'perfect digital copies') MP3 rips on Napster. Nobody will mind a protected song going to over high quality analog and being redigitized back into an unsecured format (Ogg or MP3).
It is all an exercise in futility and corporate self-ass-protecting.
I just read on CNN that Al Gore, if it turns out he has to concede, is switching from politics to digital music security.
In a quote from Mr Gore, he stated "These companies are going about the matter all wrong. Digital watermarking isn't going to work. What we need to do is take new music, and put it away in a lockbox, one to which only the President and the Speaker of the House have the key. With the music locked up tight in this lock box, it will be safe and piracy free for future generations."
Mr Gore went on to say "We want Britney Spears and other artists who could be hurt by music piracy to know that a promise made is a promised kept."
Editors Note: Mr Gore's previous technological experience includes inventing the Internet.
The 'golden ears' tests are what make me laugh the most. Haven't these people ever downloaded an MP3 from Napster? Even I can tell that the quality is fairly poor on many of the MP3s people host..Yet, it doesn't seem to deter the masses.
It is incredibly naive of them to consider a hack on SDMI unsuccessful because professional sound engineers could hear the difference in the watermark-hacked version!!! Especially in the case mentioned in the article where it was a 2-1 vote, meaning one of these professional sound engineers out of 3 didn't hear the distortion.
There's a lot of bugs to fix and features to create and only those programmers know what to do next.
I think a big part of the problem many people have with Mozilla is not simply that it is buggy or non-standards-compliant.... Most people's problem is that it is buggy and non-standards-compliant seemingly at the expense of all sorts of questionable features, like the skinning interface, the built in chat features, etc.
I understand the arguments about how you can't really heard Open Source developers into doing what you want them to, and most would rather work on glam features rather than dull bugs...But that's an issue that needs to be addressed in some way if Mozilla ever wants to compete again with IE. And it deserves to be criticized until that issue is addressed.
Performance isn't the only issue with Apple..Application compatibility plays a big role there, as well. (For Transmeta's sake, hopefully that's not true in their case).
IMDB has many things, including reviews. Its primarily, and started out, a large database of cross-referenced movie information.
Useful when you see someone in a movie and think 'where'd I see that guy before?'. Look up the movie, find the actor, click his link, see a list of other movies he's been in, etc.
In any case, IMDB should be safe, I've never heard of laws against collecting this sort of information, and they built the database themselves (the database as a whole work would be copyrighted by them, actually).
I'm sure that's partially to blame. What non-tech-savvy person is going to buy a laptop "with similar performance to a Pentium III 500 mhz!!" when they can buy a "laptop with a Pentium III 500 mhz".
Even worse is to hear "speeds up to 700 mHz". The 700 mhz Pentium chip, or AMD's chips don't have the "up to" tag that consumers, over the years, have equated to 'pie in the sky bullshit' speak. They are 700 mhz, period. Does this matter in real world applications? Maybe not, but it sure won't help it get sold.
There's already a big enough problem whereby Intel has, despite how evil you (or I) might think they are, built a really solid brand that consumers seem to trust (rightfully or not). But when you have to start telling them how the code morphing gizmos work it gets really confusing really fast, and the vast majority of people are going to stick with Intel..or at least get AMD processors where the mapping of performance is relatively straightforward (yes, I realize there are cache differences, differences in FPU performance, etc, but compared to the differences in Transmeta's chips vs Intel they are insignificant at this time).
The only way to get people over this confusion hump would be if the performance were FAR AND AWAY better or the power savings really made any kind of notable difference in the real world vs Intel's solutions (the certainly less geektastic power-stepping stuff they have in their new chips). I haven't seen a Transmeta powered system in real life that I could mess with, but from all reports of those who have, the chips offer neither of these benefits to any noticable degree. And they don't have the enormous price/power advantage that AMD started out with when they first started producing the Athlon.
A Slashdot story advocating the use of a Microsoft product??? Maybe one of those dooms-day asteroids is going to hit us after all. Surely this must be one of the seven signs???
Actually he has a point..If you look at the top seller list of PC games on any given month, you often find that many of the top entries are primarily 2D games (though they may have prerendered 3D CG, it's still a 2D engine/interface).
Diablo II...Age of Empires and all its related games..The Rollercoast Tycoon (and other Tycoon) series games, etc.
However, more and more the line between 2D and 3D is being blurred, with 2D games offering extra features when run on 3D-capable hardware (again, example: Diablo II).
A lot of people who program 2D titles are moving to using traditionally 3D APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL for rendering.
There are many reasons to do this, but the basic idea is that modern 3D hardware generally has features such as hardware assisted alpha blending, rotation, scaling, etc. You can snap a modern 3D API into an orthographic projection and then use textured quads for 2D tiles and sprites. Then you get all of those fancy features hardware accelerated. Often these features, even if available on the card, are not hardware accelerated through the 2D APIs (DirectDraw, DGA, whatever) and you fall back to slow software emulation modes.
Perhaps this is why they didn't include a 2D specific API...
As a matter of fact, DirectX 8 won't even have an updated DirectDraw. Only Direct3D. People writing for DirectX will have to use DX7's DirectDraw through COM interfaces or use Direct3D 8 for their 2D operations (Microsoft provides a library, D3DX, that makes it quite easy to use Direct3D as a 2D rendering system).
Of course, this doesn't always make sense...If you want your 2D title to run on low end video cards, you don't really want them doing it through Direct3D or OpenGL...But on a standardized platform with fast 3D, which describes Indrema, its not really as much of an issue.
Seriously though, other than a few classic games (For me, 'classic' refers to the Mega Man series, but for some it may be the Zelda series, the Ultima series, and who knows what else), will these games be missed? From my understanding, it's not like there is money being taken, because the only money that the companies would make is from royalties, and you can't make royalties off games that aren't sold anymore (used games shop don't pay royalties). So how is theft occuring?
You make a good argument, but it doesn't take into account reality. In reality, companies still make money off these old games. Many times in the past companies have rereleased old games, often on newer systems, usually in complilation format.
It is not hard to make an argument that they might lose sales in this situation when many of the classic game fans that might buy these titles can already easily download the games and play them via emulation.
Slashdot Mirror
A hack that would allow an earth orbiting satellite to somehow collide with the sun would be the mother of all hacks. Not only would the satellite's security system be violated, but so would known physical laws of the universe. Sounds cool!
Also, if someone managed to collide the satellite into the Sun using this super hack, the only outcome would be that the satellite would be destroyed (actually it would burn up long before it ever got close enough to actually collide with the Sun). Its not going to make the Sun supernova and kill us all or anything sci-fi-stupid like that.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html Note the URL. That's jwz's side of the story, with all the biases that implies.
It is not too hard for me to imagine a company freaking out if an employee, without permission of IT or whoever, set up an IRC chat server within the company network to chat with coworkers.
I've dealt with (but not worked directly for) companies in that past that won't allow their employees to even run IM clients like AIM or ICQ due to fear of them wasting time and goofing off...Having an internal server running on a company system without permission just adds (in the PHB's mind) to the inappropriateness of that goofing-off action.
There are plenty of O'Reilly books out there that can help you learn the details of Makefiles. Even in schools that use UNIX based systems for learning, you basically only get to know the very basics of Makefile usage (because that's all the instructor knows). So its always better to learn some things on your own.
According to both candidates of the aborted presidental election, it is now clear that all older people in this country are eating dog food and can't even afford the medicine they need to stay alive.
Oh well!
In any case, of course the company is going to 'forbid' hacking, just to cover their ass on support issues. But for $599, they must be making money on the hardware alone (which iOpener wasn't, they were losing money). Yeah, the display probably sets them back a bit, but also consider it has no internal harddrive, etc.
No matter how you look at it, this thing seems very unlikely to be successful. $599 is an awful lot for a limited use 'appliance' when compared to full-blown low end PCs for sale these days.
Of course, they are likely to try to put all of the interesting stuff in loadable modules to avoid this situation as much as possible...alas.
In any case, I haven't seen any indiciation that it would.
I've seen this happen in the past on NT4.0 with shoddy display drivers, and for whatever reason it only happens with some applications.
I would bet that if you update your drivers, the problem will magically go away. In any case, many other millions of people use IE without any of these display problems.
10 seconds eh? took you that long to close the window? Maybe you really wanted to watch !!!
If they try to implement a system that charges per-listen they are going to be as bitterly disappointed as the Divx people (Circuit City's DVD-ish format, not the codec)! Particularly since they are going to be competing with non-controlled open P2P networks.
And this was happening BEFORE DeCSS. DeCSS makes it easier to transfer the DVD data to other formats but the pirates were already using other methods of ripping the data out (mostly of the type listed above where they would play the DVD through an analog line and recapture it to digital in a non-secure format).
The music industry blindly believes that as long as you can't make a perfect digital copy, their investment of millions into a protection scheme is a good one.
The music industry is wrong..Nobody seems to mind all the fairly crappy (compared to 'perfect digital copies') MP3 rips on Napster. Nobody will mind a protected song going to over high quality analog and being redigitized back into an unsecured format (Ogg or MP3).
It is all an exercise in futility and corporate self-ass-protecting.
In a quote from Mr Gore, he stated "These companies are going about the matter all wrong. Digital watermarking isn't going to work. What we need to do is take new music, and put it away in a lockbox, one to which only the President and the Speaker of the House have the key. With the music locked up tight in this lock box, it will be safe and piracy free for future generations."
Mr Gore went on to say "We want Britney Spears and other artists who could be hurt by music piracy to know that a promise made is a promised kept."
Editors Note: Mr Gore's previous technological experience includes inventing the Internet.
It is incredibly naive of them to consider a hack on SDMI unsuccessful because professional sound engineers could hear the difference in the watermark-hacked version!!! Especially in the case mentioned in the article where it was a 2-1 vote, meaning one of these professional sound engineers out of 3 didn't hear the distortion.
I think a big part of the problem many people have with Mozilla is not simply that it is buggy or non-standards-compliant.... Most people's problem is that it is buggy and non-standards-compliant seemingly at the expense of all sorts of questionable features, like the skinning interface, the built in chat features, etc.
I understand the arguments about how you can't really heard Open Source developers into doing what you want them to, and most would rather work on glam features rather than dull bugs...But that's an issue that needs to be addressed in some way if Mozilla ever wants to compete again with IE. And it deserves to be criticized until that issue is addressed.
Performance isn't the only issue with Apple..Application compatibility plays a big role there, as well. (For Transmeta's sake, hopefully that's not true in their case).
Useful when you see someone in a movie and think 'where'd I see that guy before?'. Look up the movie, find the actor, click his link, see a list of other movies he's been in, etc.
In any case, IMDB should be safe, I've never heard of laws against collecting this sort of information, and they built the database themselves (the database as a whole work would be copyrighted by them, actually).
Even worse is to hear "speeds up to 700 mHz". The 700 mhz Pentium chip, or AMD's chips don't have the "up to" tag that consumers, over the years, have equated to 'pie in the sky bullshit' speak. They are 700 mhz, period. Does this matter in real world applications? Maybe not, but it sure won't help it get sold.
There's already a big enough problem whereby Intel has, despite how evil you (or I) might think they are, built a really solid brand that consumers seem to trust (rightfully or not). But when you have to start telling them how the code morphing gizmos work it gets really confusing really fast, and the vast majority of people are going to stick with Intel..or at least get AMD processors where the mapping of performance is relatively straightforward (yes, I realize there are cache differences, differences in FPU performance, etc, but compared to the differences in Transmeta's chips vs Intel they are insignificant at this time).
The only way to get people over this confusion hump would be if the performance were FAR AND AWAY better or the power savings really made any kind of notable difference in the real world vs Intel's solutions (the certainly less geektastic power-stepping stuff they have in their new chips). I haven't seen a Transmeta powered system in real life that I could mess with, but from all reports of those who have, the chips offer neither of these benefits to any noticable degree. And they don't have the enormous price/power advantage that AMD started out with when they first started producing the Athlon.
Britney Spears, N' Sync, Vanilla Ice.. All the greats are from America.
I can't really imagine a world in which one pays by the minute to read Jon Katz articles. It makes me shudder.
A Slashdot story advocating the use of a Microsoft product??? Maybe one of those dooms-day asteroids is going to hit us after all. Surely this must be one of the seven signs???
Diablo II...Age of Empires and all its related games..The Rollercoast Tycoon (and other Tycoon) series games, etc.
However, more and more the line between 2D and 3D is being blurred, with 2D games offering extra features when run on 3D-capable hardware (again, example: Diablo II).
There are many reasons to do this, but the basic idea is that modern 3D hardware generally has features such as hardware assisted alpha blending, rotation, scaling, etc. You can snap a modern 3D API into an orthographic projection and then use textured quads for 2D tiles and sprites. Then you get all of those fancy features hardware accelerated. Often these features, even if available on the card, are not hardware accelerated through the 2D APIs (DirectDraw, DGA, whatever) and you fall back to slow software emulation modes. Perhaps this is why they didn't include a 2D specific API...
As a matter of fact, DirectX 8 won't even have an updated DirectDraw. Only Direct3D. People writing for DirectX will have to use DX7's DirectDraw through COM interfaces or use Direct3D 8 for their 2D operations (Microsoft provides a library, D3DX, that makes it quite easy to use Direct3D as a 2D rendering system).
Of course, this doesn't always make sense...If you want your 2D title to run on low end video cards, you don't really want them doing it through Direct3D or OpenGL...But on a standardized platform with fast 3D, which describes Indrema, its not really as much of an issue.
You make a good argument, but it doesn't take into account reality. In reality, companies still make money off these old games. Many times in the past companies have rereleased old games, often on newer systems, usually in complilation format.
It is not hard to make an argument that they might lose sales in this situation when many of the classic game fans that might buy these titles can already easily download the games and play them via emulation.