As computer games advance, they allow users to descend into a reality of their choosing and completely immerse themselves within it. Networked RPGs like Ultima Online were the first generation then games like Asheron's Call and progressivlely more advanced games, each involving the user at a deeper level. There are people who spend their lives playing such games. They have become the Dungeons and Dragons of the technology era. Thankfully, we have not heard of kids killing themselves over computer games yet though.
The newest generation of networked RPGs out there go for complete immersion where the player will recieve faes phone calls and emails from game characters, and the games will effectively encroach on everyday life.
In short, no, I'm not suprised that players are upset about the loss of virtual posessions from a game universe (although I can see where the argument could be made that they paid for those posessions and should have tem returned). It's kind of a sad comentary on the human condition though.
Maybe... I'm not sure. So far, Microsoft has expertly manipulated the system by exploiting the shifting sands of the technology world. First, they fight tooth and nail to keep IE integrated with windows because they's the only way they can win the browser war, then they seperate the two products because the browser war has become irelevent since web inspired technology integrated with such clients as media players and Instant Messaging clients (as well as set top boxes) allows for marketing channels which didn't previously exist.
Then when they come under fire for inappropriately restrictive OEM licensing, they shift their strategy from selling desktop space, to selling marketing links inside applications - a far more insideous advertising mechanism.
Recently microsoft has been charged with price gouging with regard to it's office applications. Interesting that this was shortly before Microsoft introduced Smart Tags for OfficeXP. At some point users will object to paying $89 every two years to upgrade their OS, and Microsoft will have to give it away for free - and they know this. At that point though, there will be so much insideous built-in advertising in the OS, it won't matter because Microsoft will have a residual revenue stream greater than the revenue stream from user purchases of the OS.
For these reasons, it's great to see that politicians are finally becoming aware of the issues surrounding this company's manipulation of an entire industry. As for weather or not an injunction against the sale of WindowsXP is the proper remedy, I really couldn't say. It's just good to see recognission of the issues by legislators that might be able to do something about the problem.
An earlier poster observed that the government shouldn't spend money on defending us from just one threat, but that's all most politicians (and the public) can concentrate on at once. This is not a slight tward politicians or the public. It's mere mob psychology. Some lobying group paid for the development of the scenerio, in order to (rightly or wrongly) convince the public and thereby politicians thar there is something more important to spend money on than ABM, and realistically, I would agree with them, although that doesn't take away from the fact that the thing was probably generated as a media and lobying ploy.
It's a sad comentary on the American condition that it takes demonstrations like this to get the attention of our elected leaders and the public (through the gigantic media machine that we've allowed to be created over the past 50 years).
What happens when some advancement or market condition makes memory super cheap or batteries last 5 months? The more powerful device will already support playing MP3s and movies, and Palm will be trying to catch up.
The poor unfortunate consumer finds that his existing device wether it's a WinCe or PalmOS deviee, won't support the longer lasting battery or the cheaper memory and he/she will have to upgrade anyway.
Most readers of/. are not so foolish as to subscribe to the falacy that this article is endevouring to correct. Most readers here realize the meaning of the phrase 'secutity through obscurity is bad' and recognize that obscurity doesn't harm your security at all (provided there is a more substancial mechanism than that obscurity), although it really doesn't add much either. It may slow your attacker down a little, it may make him more visable, possibly, but all in all it's a waste of time except in the cases one of the previous posters mentioned regarding non-prolifaration of information through or about your firewall.
Particularly entertaining in this article was the following:
At this point, is there any harm to hiding the name of the machine and the port number the server is running on? Really, stop and think about this.
Does it hurt your site security at all? No, it really doesn't. Your good access control, in the form of strong authentication, is still present. All we've done is made the server slightly harder to find! See, so long as you understand that the server location and port number can't serve as a method of authentication, you haven't harmed your security in the slightest.
Are there really people out there who would choose not to obscure something like the name of a server because they thought it would harm their security? You can't be serious...
Like I said./. is certainly not the intended audience of that article.
Personally I do winCE when I hear of people using Windows CE, however I have to pose this question. How valuable is it to emulate PalmOS on Windows CE. Doe oyu really expect to convert a WinCE user by convinceing him first to install the PalmOS emulator then having him install palm apps?
I personally like PalmOS because it's clean, efficient hand has low resource requirements, making the hardware it runs on relitively cheap. These are the primary reasons one might buy a PalmOS device, however if someone has already invested in a Windows CE device, there aren't many compelling reasons to change to PalmOS except for application availability. Now, it appears that's no longer an issue. What a shame.
It'll be interesting to see if this emulator will effect the upgrade cycle, in so far as when WinCE users find that their device becomes out of date, will they be more likely to buy a PalmOS device, having been exposed to it...
Having said all this, I do realize that the primary use of an emulator is to allow users some degree of flexibility, but I'm a big fan of PalmOS and wanted to examine the potential of this emulator in the conversion of WinCE users, to the [grin] extrordinary glory that is PalmOS [/grin]
It's conceptually interesting in that it integrates a great many technologies which deserved to be integrated but it certainly could use some refinements. Keep in mind that this is the first of it's kind (more or less) and we should expect competing (and likely superior) devices to appear on the market in the near future.
As for being a dodo, well it certainly missed it's window with regard to the web technology craze of the past two years, but reading their literature, it looks like they've repositioned the product reasonably. Only time will tell.
The tremendous lack of technical detail here (on the part of Verizon) makes it difficult to judge the validity of their actions. It sounds like they're simply closing open relays - a good thing - because they talk about people using their SNMP servers.
It is possible that in fact what they are actually doing is blocking port 25 (SNMP) trafic at their routers that does not originate from their SNMP servers. This is a popular move on the part of most ISPs which (in conjunction with header rewriting on their SNMP servers) prevents any spam from coming from IPs they own without having a valid return address.
I have not recieved the letter so I don't have the full detail, but it sounds like they're not doing port based filtering (yet). If they are in fact proposing such filtering, I can fully understand the objections. I use Verizon DSL (carrier side) but elected to use a small local ISP rather than (at the time) GTE.net specifically because smaller ISPs are generally less likely to risk pissing off their customers with stupidness like this.
Those using Verion's ISP service have my sympathy.
I have 6 of my domains registered with Verisign and I attempted to transfer them to my preferred registrar maybe a week before the registration expired. My preferred registrar didn't get the email to them more than 24 hours in advance of the expiry date. I only blame my preferred registrar somewhat for this. I should have allowed more time for the thansfer processbut now I'm still screwed, because these domains were not vary important to me and I could vary easily wait for them to be released by varasign and re-register them with my preferred registrar, but alas, they insist on screwing with us and not releasing expired domains in a timely fashion. This is truly outragous - and the latest turn of events makes their behavior inexcusable.
They're an open source outfit because they produce and release open source code. Granted not all the code they produce is Open Source but I define an 'Open Source Outfit' as one which releases some portion of their products under a recognized OSS license. I don't believe being an 'Open Source Outfit' and making money off of binaries is mutually exclusive - in fact, the general description is, software where the source code is made available to the user (read:customer). Nothing is said about not selling the binary, just that the source code is made available as well.
It's nice to see an Open Source Outfit with a workable business plan (read: Not nebulous). I have not problem with the mixing of OSS and closed source. This seems fair and reasonable provided it is handled with a certain degree of integrity which the Kompany seems to be doing.
I have not had the oportunity to use any of the Kompany's products but I'll certainlty look to them now if I have need of a product in a space the sell in.
I expect we'll see a lot more hybrid companies like this in the furture. I'd actually be kind of halfway interested in Microsoft's (Mundy's) take on their successful use of both OSS and closed source in combination...
Their usage does seem to throw a lot of cold water on Mundie's arguments.
GUI enviroments simply aren't all that intuitive, period. There may be ways to make them more intuitive however this study, while interesting, appears to be more a measure of how similar to MS Windows, Gnome is.
This is not to say the study is without value. Certainly it is valuable, but agronomic design just isn't at a level where a user can sit down and intuit the functions in such a complex devide as a computer operating system. It just isn't possible. This is not a reflection on Gnome so much as a reflection on the study of agronomics.
That said, the study was a good read and did make valid points in it's recommendations. It's just important to keep in mind what was actually being analized.
From the article it sounded like Goodhiew just doesn't inderstand the role of the ECMA. In it he says:
Goodhew said ECMA allows technology submitters to license their intellectual property, to retain control over implementation.
Whereas Jan van den Beld, ECMA secretary general, said:
the licence would cover only Microsoft's own implementation
Mr. Goodhew's problem here is a gramatical one. Hew substituted the article 'the' where he needed to use the pronoun 'their' indicating Microsoft's (in this case, refering to Microsoft's implementation). The true meaning being that Microsoft can license Microsoft's implementation only, rather than the (all of 'the') implementations by any vendor.
--CTH
--
Microsoft doesn't know the meaning of 'standard'
on
Mono Unimplementable?
·
· Score: 2
This pretty much says it all
Jan van den Beld, ECMA secretary general, said the licence would cover only Microsoft's own implementation, not the standard itself.
Miguel de Icaza is right that he should be able to architect a.NET compatible system without stomping on Microsoft patents or IP, however what Tony Goodhew is saying in the article is that Microsoft doesn't care weather their proposed method of the work of the Mono Project is legal or not. It may well be found to be baseless and the Mono Project will go forward but his comments had the ring of a threat, that Microsoft will litigate the project into the ground; after all Ximian doesn't have anyware near the capital that Microsoft does to throuw at lawyers.
This should be a vary interesting story to follow as it develops.
OK, so $5000 is a good price point but a terabyte really isn't enough space these days. There's more porn out there in the workd than that...
On the bright size, this machine just MIGHT have enough disk space to allow us to install thenext release of Windows (after XP).
Oh, wait, maybe it won't matter because by that point Windows will be a remotely hosted subscription service.
--
Discussing an entire marker/industry in one book..
on
Linux Game Programming
·
· Score: 2
What did the publishers expect. There is no way to discuss such a vast topic as game programming in a single volume. Perhaps if each chapter were it's own book...
there's no way this could have been a good book, really.
Sad though. it would be useful to have quality publications on this subject... I guess we'll have to wait a while longer...
--CTH
--
Just for web sites or web inspired technologies?
on
Posthumous Webbys
·
· Score: 2
Napster was (note the use of the past tense...) certainly more a web inspired technology than a website. But then again, who says the webby awards are not for web inspited technologies?
Look at all the protocols used on the net. HTTP is just one. Are the awards reserved for content distributed via HTTP? Why? would that be fair? Where do you draw the line
--CTH
--
Who Cares? - Legal Prescident is being set here
on
Napster Reprieve
·
· Score: 2
Legal prescident is interesting that way. Even if the company will never provide a usefuk service again, the legal prescidents set by the case will stand. IF it is allowed that the service be shut down for failure to completely filter the copyrighted music it is required to filter, then a dangerous prescident has been set.
IF instead, they made a good faith effort to comply with the court order, to the limits of modern technology, then that should be recognized by the court as a sufficient level of complience. It is a vary dangerous prescident to set that a court can order something which is not technically possible.
I'm sure we can handle that. I am mostly skeptical of his idea because I'm not sure how he thinks a young software company could possibly survive without building really good software in much less time
Perhaps it could be said that the customer expectations in the software industry have effectively closed the market to new companies in some areas.
Will there ever be a new commercially viable operating system (not saing Linux is bad, but just that it's market share is far too low to consider it at this point)? Can suchan effort exist if the company producing it needs seed capital for 10 years of operation before a quality product can be produced?
This seems actually to be a great opening for Open Source. OSS has the advantage of not requiring large capital outlays to continue development. Look at the number of OSS projects started in the past 5 years, and at the number of corporate software startups from the past 5 years. How many of the corporate software startups are still around? How many OSS projects are still around?
I recall a statistic someware that only 2% of companies ever really succeed, beyond 3 years. I wonder whatr that percentage is for OSS projects...
Based on the above comment, it seems to me that the only major competition in large scale software such as Operating Ststems, Enterprise quality databases and Perhaps Wordprocessor software will come from OSS, which is the only development model that could survive for the decvade nessecery for the products to reach maturity.
The alternative is to say that the only major software companies that will ever exist have already been established and that the bariers to entry into these markets are too high for any new startup. This is not something I would ever want to have to admit.
The previous poster proposes a solution which doesn't preserve the digital quality of the music.
In the alternative, I predict that CD Ripping will move from a highly software centric activity to a highly hardware centric activity. The Creative Labs Nomad MP3 Jukebox was one of the products in the first generation of this technology. I expect such products will disappear from the market as the manufacturers are sued into discontinuing production, then it will be left to electrical engineers in their basements in their spare time to produce CD ripping hardware capable of thwarting the distortion-based copy protection method discussed in the article as well as a whole host of the new generation of copy protection schemes. Such hardware would not be illegal to produce or sell, since it's intended purpose is for making copies of music for personal use - a legally protected activity.
This raises the question: It is illegal under the DMCA to crack encryption no matter how trivial, but it is legal to make coppies of music for personal use. Does this mean that I would be within my rights if I were to develop a mechanism to copy and store streamed music from subscription music services such as are being developed now? - this assuming I could play the music that I hace coppied off of the streaming service...
Slashdot Mirror
As computer games advance, they allow users to descend into a reality of their choosing and completely immerse themselves within it. Networked RPGs like Ultima Online were the first generation then games like Asheron's Call and progressivlely more advanced games, each involving the user at a deeper level. There are people who spend their lives playing such games. They have become the Dungeons and Dragons of the technology era. Thankfully, we have not heard of kids killing themselves over computer games yet though.
The newest generation of networked RPGs out there go for complete immersion where the player will recieve faes phone calls and emails from game characters, and the games will effectively encroach on everyday life.
In short, no, I'm not suprised that players are upset about the loss of virtual posessions from a game universe (although I can see where the argument could be made that they paid for those posessions and should have tem returned). It's kind of a sad comentary on the human condition though.
--CTH
--
I had a TI99/4A back in '81. Damn things were almost as durable as the TRS-80 laptops. Stamped steel expansion case - heavy duty.
The TRS-80 is the only <Grin> Laptop <Grin> that could survive military style repair procedures
In the event of error, first, Drop from at least 5 feet
If error persists, re-seat everything and call technical support
They were nice boxes, and given the pricing on modern heavy-duty laptops, they were a steal - for their time.
--CTH
--
Maybe... I'm not sure. So far, Microsoft has expertly manipulated the system by exploiting the shifting sands of the technology world. First, they fight tooth and nail to keep IE integrated with windows because they's the only way they can win the browser war, then they seperate the two products because the browser war has become irelevent since web inspired technology integrated with such clients as media players and Instant Messaging clients (as well as set top boxes) allows for marketing channels which didn't previously exist.
Then when they come under fire for inappropriately restrictive OEM licensing, they shift their strategy from selling desktop space, to selling marketing links inside applications - a far more insideous advertising mechanism.
Recently microsoft has been charged with price gouging with regard to it's office applications. Interesting that this was shortly before Microsoft introduced Smart Tags for OfficeXP. At some point users will object to paying $89 every two years to upgrade their OS, and Microsoft will have to give it away for free - and they know this. At that point though, there will be so much insideous built-in advertising in the OS, it won't matter because Microsoft will have a residual revenue stream greater than the revenue stream from user purchases of the OS.
For these reasons, it's great to see that politicians are finally becoming aware of the issues surrounding this company's manipulation of an entire industry. As for weather or not an injunction against the sale of WindowsXP is the proper remedy, I really couldn't say. It's just good to see recognission of the issues by legislators that might be able to do something about the problem.
--CTH
--
An earlier poster observed that the government shouldn't spend money on defending us from just one threat, but that's all most politicians (and the public) can concentrate on at once. This is not a slight tward politicians or the public. It's mere mob psychology. Some lobying group paid for the development of the scenerio, in order to (rightly or wrongly) convince the public and thereby politicians thar there is something more important to spend money on than ABM, and realistically, I would agree with them, although that doesn't take away from the fact that the thing was probably generated as a media and lobying ploy.
It's a sad comentary on the American condition that it takes demonstrations like this to get the attention of our elected leaders and the public (through the gigantic media machine that we've allowed to be created over the past 50 years).
--CTH
--
--
Particularly entertaining in this article was the following:Are there really people out there who would choose not to obscure something like the name of a server because they thought it would harm their security ? You can't be serious...
Like I said.
--CTH
--
Personally I do winCE when I hear of people using Windows CE, however I have to pose this question. How valuable is it to emulate PalmOS on Windows CE. Doe oyu really expect to convert a WinCE user by convinceing him first to install the PalmOS emulator then having him install palm apps?
I personally like PalmOS because it's clean, efficient hand has low resource requirements, making the hardware it runs on relitively cheap. These are the primary reasons one might buy a PalmOS device, however if someone has already invested in a Windows CE device, there aren't many compelling reasons to change to PalmOS except for application availability. Now, it appears that's no longer an issue. What a shame.
It'll be interesting to see if this emulator will effect the upgrade cycle, in so far as when WinCE users find that their device becomes out of date, will they be more likely to buy a PalmOS device, having been exposed to it...
Having said all this, I do realize that the primary use of an emulator is to allow users some degree of flexibility, but I'm a big fan of PalmOS and wanted to examine the potential of this emulator in the conversion of WinCE users, to the [grin] extrordinary glory that is PalmOS [/grin]
--CTH
--
Yah. oops. SMTP
It's saturday. I do enough thinking durring the week... why think on saturday...
--
So SSH is a protocol. I guess if I argue that it's a language then I can decode/translate messages recieved trough it into english...
I don't know man, sounds like kind of a streach to me...
--CTH
--
It's conceptually interesting in that it integrates a great many technologies which deserved to be integrated but it certainly could use some refinements. Keep in mind that this is the first of it's kind (more or less) and we should expect competing (and likely superior) devices to appear on the market in the near future.
As for being a dodo, well it certainly missed it's window with regard to the web technology craze of the past two years, but reading their literature, it looks like they've repositioned the product reasonably. Only time will tell.
--CTH
--
The tremendous lack of technical detail here (on the part of Verizon) makes it difficult to judge the validity of their actions. It sounds like they're simply closing open relays - a good thing - because they talk about people using their SNMP servers.
It is possible that in fact what they are actually doing is blocking port 25 (SNMP) trafic at their routers that does not originate from their SNMP servers. This is a popular move on the part of most ISPs which (in conjunction with header rewriting on their SNMP servers) prevents any spam from coming from IPs they own without having a valid return address.
I have not recieved the letter so I don't have the full detail, but it sounds like they're not doing port based filtering (yet). If they are in fact proposing such filtering, I can fully understand the objections. I use Verizon DSL (carrier side) but elected to use a small local ISP rather than (at the time) GTE.net specifically because smaller ISPs are generally less likely to risk pissing off their customers with stupidness like this.
Those using Verion's ISP service have my sympathy.
--CTH
--
I have 6 of my domains registered with Verisign and I attempted to transfer them to my preferred registrar maybe a week before the registration expired. My preferred registrar didn't get the email to them more than 24 hours in advance of the expiry date. I only blame my preferred registrar somewhat for this. I should have allowed more time for the thansfer processbut now I'm still screwed, because these domains were not vary important to me and I could vary easily wait for them to be released by varasign and re-register them with my preferred registrar, but alas, they insist on screwing with us and not releasing expired domains in a timely fashion. This is truly outragous - and the latest turn of events makes their behavior inexcusable.
--CTH
--
They're an open source outfit because they produce and release open source code. Granted not all the code they produce is Open Source but I define an 'Open Source Outfit' as one which releases some portion of their products under a recognized OSS license. I don't believe being an 'Open Source Outfit' and making money off of binaries is mutually exclusive - in fact, the general description is, software where the source code is made available to the user (read:customer). Nothing is said about not selling the binary, just that the source code is made available as well.
--CTH
--
It's nice to see an Open Source Outfit with a workable business plan (read: Not nebulous). I have not problem with the mixing of OSS and closed source. This seems fair and reasonable provided it is handled with a certain degree of integrity which the Kompany seems to be doing.
I have not had the oportunity to use any of the Kompany's products but I'll certainlty look to them now if I have need of a product in a space the sell in.
I expect we'll see a lot more hybrid companies like this in the furture. I'd actually be kind of halfway interested in Microsoft's (Mundy's) take on their successful use of both OSS and closed source in combination...
Their usage does seem to throw a lot of cold water on Mundie's arguments.
--CTH
--
None of the comments are all that suprising...
GUI enviroments simply aren't all that intuitive, period. There may be ways to make them more intuitive however this study, while interesting, appears to be more a measure of how similar to MS Windows, Gnome is.
This is not to say the study is without value. Certainly it is valuable, but agronomic design just isn't at a level where a user can sit down and intuit the functions in such a complex devide as a computer operating system. It just isn't possible. This is not a reflection on Gnome so much as a reflection on the study of agronomics.
That said, the study was a good read and did make valid points in it's recommendations. It's just important to keep in mind what was actually being analized.
--CTH
--
--CTH
--
This should be a vary interesting story to follow as it develops.
--CTH
--
We need all the disk space we can get for our spell checkers now that there are so many new words in the english language.
--
--CTH
--
OK, so $5000 is a good price point but a terabyte really isn't enough space these days. There's more porn out there in the workd than that...
On the bright size, this machine just MIGHT have enough disk space to allow us to install thenext release of Windows (after XP).
Oh, wait, maybe it won't matter because by that point Windows will be a remotely hosted subscription service.
--
What did the publishers expect. There is no way to discuss such a vast topic as game programming in a single volume. Perhaps if each chapter were it's own book...
there's no way this could have been a good book, really.
Sad though. it would be useful to have quality publications on this subject... I guess we'll have to wait a while longer...
--CTH
--
Napster was (note the use of the past tense...) certainly more a web inspired technology than a website. But then again, who says the webby awards are not for web inspited technologies?
Look at all the protocols used on the net. HTTP is just one. Are the awards reserved for content distributed via HTTP? Why? would that be fair? Where do you draw the line
--CTH
--
Legal prescident is interesting that way. Even if the company will never provide a usefuk service again, the legal prescidents set by the case will stand. IF it is allowed that the service be shut down for failure to completely filter the copyrighted music it is required to filter, then a dangerous prescident has been set.
IF instead, they made a good faith effort to comply with the court order, to the limits of modern technology, then that should be recognized by the court as a sufficient level of complience. It is a vary dangerous prescident to set that a court can order something which is not technically possible.
--CTH
--
Will there ever be a new commercially viable operating system (not saing Linux is bad, but just that it's market share is far too low to consider it at this point)? Can suchan effort exist if the company producing it needs seed capital for 10 years of operation before a quality product can be produced?
This seems actually to be a great opening for Open Source. OSS has the advantage of not requiring large capital outlays to continue development. Look at the number of OSS projects started in the past 5 years, and at the number of corporate software startups from the past 5 years. How many of the corporate software startups are still around? How many OSS projects are still around?
I recall a statistic someware that only 2% of companies ever really succeed, beyond 3 years. I wonder whatr that percentage is for OSS projects...
Based on the above comment, it seems to me that the only major competition in large scale software such as Operating Ststems, Enterprise quality databases and Perhaps Wordprocessor software will come from OSS, which is the only development model that could survive for the decvade nessecery for the products to reach maturity.
The alternative is to say that the only major software companies that will ever exist have already been established and that the bariers to entry into these markets are too high for any new startup. This is not something I would ever want to have to admit.
--CTH
--
The previous poster proposes a solution which doesn't preserve the digital quality of the music.
In the alternative, I predict that CD Ripping will move from a highly software centric activity to a highly hardware centric activity. The Creative Labs Nomad MP3 Jukebox was one of the products in the first generation of this technology. I expect such products will disappear from the market as the manufacturers are sued into discontinuing production, then it will be left to electrical engineers in their basements in their spare time to produce CD ripping hardware capable of thwarting the distortion-based copy protection method discussed in the article as well as a whole host of the new generation of copy protection schemes. Such hardware would not be illegal to produce or sell, since it's intended purpose is for making copies of music for personal use - a legally protected activity.
This raises the question:
It is illegal under the DMCA to crack encryption no matter how trivial, but it is legal to make coppies of music for personal use. Does this mean that I would be within my rights if I were to develop a mechanism to copy and store streamed music from subscription music services such as are being developed now? - this assuming I could play the music that I hace coppied off of the streaming service...
--CTH
--