You don't use the public key to encrypt the logs, you randomly generate a session key, encrypt the logs with that, then use the public key to encrypt the session key. Rotate keys every few minutes and don't leave them sitting around. Ditto with the logs. Have a seperate machine which only accepts one incoming connection, that which dumps logs onto it. Then the log holding machine has *no* idea of the way the log was encrypted, nor, if the logs are removed (via console) to another machine, preferably laptop, for examination, would it know how to decrypt the logs.
Because the public key only encrypts a 128 bit (or whatever) session key every ten minutes or so, it's fairly quick, and two-way crypto is very quick, easily enough to dump logs through.
If you ever implement a log system and don't want them modified, keep an ID # in each packet of logs, along with a MD5 hash of the previous packet of logs (including the previous-packet hash of the log file before it.) This way if a log is modified, the attacked has to change all logs after that point.
Ideally you'd also have the log catcher dumping logs to a write-only media, like CDs. Preferably in a session-based way, so it didn't have to wait too long between getting logs and writing them.
Napster is in the business of letting people find a file and download it. If you rename a crap file and send it out as a different file, you're disrupting the service. Napster doesn't care about the copyright (or more accurately, the license) status of the works it delivers. It believes, rightly, that those issues are the business of the person offering the file and the person accepting the file.
Think of it this way... The telephone company doesn't care what you say to other people on the phone, as long as the police aren't involved, but if you started calling up people you thought were lawbreakers and playing loud annoying sounds, they'd turn off your service. They don't care how you're disrupting legitimate users, just that you are. They also don't care that some legitimate users are breaking the law, that's a matter for the police.
In any legal climate before stupid laws like the DMCA etc. passed, and without a multi-billion dollar industry buying up judges, the law would obviously be on their side, especially as they do crack down on users who are demonstrably pirating.
Just goes to show, the OJ method of legal dispute resolution works. Buy some high-priced lawyers, toss a few million in bribe money around, get a new law written, and you have total legal immunity.
A better idea would be to use some reserved area in the MP3 to append the payment info (and maybe some tetx about the artist, etc) into standard MP3s. Regular players that follow the standard would see the reserved bits used and ignore it, new players that support the format would display the new information.
It's not a big deal to require the user to download a pluggin because anyone willing to cough up some cash will likely download a small pluggin to allow this to happen. And if the pluggin allows more info, where 'liner notes' could go, everyone (paying user or not) would have an incentive to download the pluggin. Then they'd have the option to pay in the future, if they suddenly got the urge.
The security seems like it'd be fairly easy. You'd sort of CRC the music... strip out a lot of detail from the wave such that any two song rips (of the whole song) will have the same signature. Then the signature of the song is sent in with the payment ID. If the signture isn't listed for the artist (ie, payment for a song they haven't registered) then they don't get paid. And if someone shows up with the same song signature as Metallica, you investigate...
The whole problem is authenticating the song, some sort of fingerprint that works over lossy channels. (If someone rips a Metallica song off of CD and wants to pay for it, the system should try to match the song signature in the database to find the creator...) And ideally it'd work with existing non-watermarked media.
Then you could napster to you heart's content, sampling everything and paying what you want to keep.
The author finished telling us that people will buy CDs because they like physical things. So how does Napster hurt him?
If people don't know he exists, he sells no CDs. Until ten minutes ago, I didn't know he existed. How would I find out? By going to a store and seeing what's on shelves or watching MTV or Much Music. Assuming he's indie, that's not going to help. So even if I did feel like buying a CD, he still wouldn't get any money.
MP3.com and other sites may help, but they lack the draw of full albums of something you like. Napster provides this.
And while searching for one thing (with Napsters lousy search capability) you always get other results. I may see BDR in there and decide to listen to it, and upon listening, get more. Then, and only then, if I want to buy a CD does BDR have any chance of getting that sale.
Metallica doesn't need this advertising, they have a label doing it for them and tons of fans for word-of-mouth. Baptist Death Ray doesn't have a million dollar propoganda machine and needs whatever help it can get.
I think the benefit of being discovered would outweigh the drawbacks of being pirated a bit.
Think of it like the software world... If I (broke) pirate Photoshop, can Adobe honestly claim to have LOST money? No. They have lost a potential sale, that's all. And if you do it correctly and multiply the cost by the likelihood of me coughing up $1200 or whatever for the full version, you're at like $0.13 oportunity cost lost. Not a lot. If anyone loses out, it's Jasc Software, makers of Paint Shop Pro who sell their software for around $100 (I'm guessing) and have a realistic chance of selling me a copy. Not only this, but being that they sell direct, they make more. Adobe sells through retail channels and can't make as high a fraction of their purchase price in profit.
So, apply this to MP3s and CDs. The traditional view is that BDR loses the purchase if I pirate their album. The 'new' view is that BDR loses nothing if I pirate their album. I suggest that unless I knew about them anyways and was willing to buy their album, they don't lose anything and potentially gain a new fan.
And I'm not saying that Napster is a service. People don't use Napster to help musicians, they just want something for nothing. But I don't think Napster hurts the musicians all that much because broke teens (the biggest Napster demographic, IMHO) don't buy many CDs.
Then what you should do is test on the 2GB machine in both OSes, compare results, then test on the 4GB machine for the OSes that support it, showing how much performance is gained at that configuration.
An example would be, if computer A couldn't use AGP video with the current bios, but computer B could, you could benchmark both with a Voodoo 3 PCI card, then benchmark computer B with a Voodoo 3 AGP card, and say "We can't test directly, but we suspect computer A is missing out on n% performance by not properly supporting AGP." where n% is the difference on computer B. It still shows computer B kicking ass in the default config, but instead of making the whole machine look superior, it narrows the results down to the problem areas.
I realize this is a troll, but it brings up a topic I've heard a bit about.
It's likely illegal for the store to void the warranty on the computer if you open it, even if you agreed to it when purchasing it. Consumer protection laws usually prevent the warranty from being voided by self repairs on hardware that contains user-servicable parts. That's why a lot of hardware (air conditioners, VCRs, etc) are labelled as not containing any user-servicable parts.
So if they try to void the warranty because you opened the case, tell them you'll take it to a competitor to be fixed and bill them, and back the bill up with small claims court if they get fussy. It'll stick and you'll have made a stand against the assholes of the world.
(This has nothing to do with overclocking. Running a CPU past its rated speed, regardless of if it will do it, will void the warranty on the CPU and mobo, unless it's a mobo from an OC-friendly company like ASUS or ABit who serve the hardware hacker community.)
For the record, my new 600E is a happy 800EB with an Alpha PEP66T cooler. A $35 cooler, but one I can keep for years. A good investment versus spending $250 more for the faster CPU. And my ASUS P3V4X is an overclocker's dream.
Likely though, this could be compressed to 1.76Mbit (CD datarate) and sound a *lot* better than CDs do, without extra storage.
320kbit MP3s done with a good compressor sound very close to CDs except for some artifacts introduced by the MP3 format, such as poor reproduction in certain frequencies, no matter the compression level. So, that's.32Mbit, going to five times that would likely result in a very high quality signal, especially if MP3s were updated (Is there a successor yet, in an official sense?) to avoid the problems we've noticed in the current version.
96/24/5.1 is 2.18_*1.5*3 (using your numbers) larger than 44/16/2, which is 9.81_... 17.319Mbit. So we're looking at about the same 10:1 compression that we get from MP3s at 128, except that we've got a *lot* more quality to start with, 75% of CD is so-so, because CDs aren't all that, to an audio-phile. But, 75% of 96/24/5.1 would likely be *much* better than any consumer-level format available. (No, vinyl isn't better, it has an annoying hiss and degrades. Playing a new record, once, on a new needle, in perfect conditions, is not a fair comparrison to a medium and player that doesn't degrade.)
I'd like the ability to use a DVD for *more* audio, not just 'better' audio, most of which will be lost on the ears of audiophiles, let alone everyone else.
But you need to switch focus, the benefit of the 'internet keys' is that they do this, enter the command, then return focus to the last application.
You could probably hack something up that used those keys modified (alt-shift or something), but it wouldn't be as easy... And almost all new keyboards have those, why not use them?
I know this'll get lost in this old thread, but I had an idea earlier about how to make a decent standalone MP3 player...
Provide an ethernet plug to interface to a PC, if desired. But also a CD drive to rip from. That way you could store a huge collection of CDs on the drive without having to download them all. A device that could justify a claim of not promoting piracy.
A nice way to edit playlists is needed though, maybe via a video out that you could hook up to the television. And as a plus, it could display the artist/track/disk while playing...
The CDDB thing would be handy, but a modem is way too clunky for this, dialing out every time you entered a disk and taking 45 seconds, minimum, plus the fact you'd need a dedicated service or the ability to enter your dialup info into the device. That is somethat that should be done via the ethernet... Or, buy a CDDB-type list from MP3.com, they recently ripped a few hundred thousand disks or something, they might have it available for sale (they'd probably love to make *some* money.) The list would be big, but it might justify another $150 for a bigger HD, if the device would recognize any CD inserted. Then you could download monthly updates, or perhaps bi-yearly CD updates, or something.
You can let people copy your copyrighted works for years, then specifically attack certain ones only and still have a strong case.
It's trademarks that force you to attack everyone you notice in order to set the precedent of defending your trademark, or else it becomes legal for other people to use it.
Re:You've gotta be kidding...
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Napster Wars
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The public pays for the enforcement of the copyright laws. It's not free to send the FBI to kick down someone's door you know.
This enforcement of a monopoly on that bit of copyrighted material is balanced out by the value to society when that work becomes available for all to use. If a work is popular and costs more to protect, likely it'll be worth more to the people.
Why on earth should we the people foot the bill to protect something we'll never benefit from? That's like if Microsoft or the old AT&T billed us for a mandatory donation to the Monopoly Protection Fund.
Monopolies are bad, having one entity control all of something slows down innovation. In some cases though, a temporary monopoly is good because it lets the developer shamelessly rake in the profits, for a period of time. It's a trade... "You develop stuff for us that's cool and we'll make sure you're the first one to profit from it." Without the give and take the laws don't benefit both parties.
See as how to public (That's you and me) are one of the parties to this, if it doesn't benefit us (we protect Disney's copyrights all our life and they never go to the public domain) then we have absolutely no incentive to help protect these copyrights.
I can sort of see that the siblings will have reason to compete, but I can't imagine MS-AP porting anything to another OS, ever. They probably see each other as enemies, but everyone else as much worse enemies.
imho they'll likely try to act like one company (in strategy) as much as possible. Maybe MS-OS can't write secret APIs, but what's to stop them from writing the PaperClip API, that any application can use if it wants to animated a paperclip on the screen. And that API would be open to everyone, just, because of trademark issues, unusable to anyone except MS-AP, etc.
Thus, you can't get the magic cookie that PaperClipAPI returns and you can't use SpellCheck or any other nice fast useful (for word processor) APIs built into the system. It'd be just like now with hidden APIs except that trademark law would prevent the use.
And if they couldn't do that, they'll try something else. And if everything they try involved them being dragged into court for a minimum of six months to force them to change, we'll be in the same stagnant situation we are now, where MS-AP and MS-OS help each other by killing any competition.
Quite right on the AGP. And even if we could push data across it fast enough, it's not much of an issue. With 32MB and texture compression on most cards, they rarely have texture bottlenecks where they're swapping out textures all the time. A decent PCI Gefore 2 would probably only score 10% (tops) slower than an AGP 4x card.
And, I think you're wrong on the Firewire issue... stuff like that will never get adopted until it's on chipsets. And it's good for a lot, it's basically serial scsi, great for digital video, external harddrives, etc.
USB is aimed at mice and other low bandwidth or temporary devices (scanners). USB2 is fatally flawed and even if working perfectly, not terribly exciting seeing as how it requires CPU interaction on all transfers (device -> cpu -> device) which limits it to maximum of half its rated speed. Then you get all the old USB1 devices (like mice) slowing the whole bus while they transfer data, not to mention that the handshaking between fast devices must be done at slow speeds... Ugh. Not only does the handshaking eat bandwidth, but it eats essentially 10* as much because it's slower.
Firewire is an essential connector for the future, leave USB where it belongs, as a replacement for serial, and let firewire take over the high performance niche.
Not only is DeCSS not illegal in most of the world, but including a quote from an illegal copy of a copyrighted work isn't illegal. The legality of the physical media you read the information on is irrelevant. The copyright is on the information, not the paper. Thus quoting a copyrighted work is always governed by the fair use clause, no matter if the book/tape/etc you read was illegally copied.
And online retailers can afford to offer a full cover shot of everything they sell. Ain't that handy.
And yes, a lot of books are impulse buys, mainly because they're near the cashier. But that's unlikely to be the market our questioner is trying to break into. For the most part that's just cheesy romances and the odd books by a big name like King.
For most authors they publish the only thing the publisher does is provide cover art and distribution, maybe accompanied by a blurb in the companies promotional literature.
There's nothing there you couldn't do on your own by setting up a webpage, hiring an artist from the net, and sending links to appropriate news sites (Slashdot if it's a techo-thriller, Blue's News if it's about a space marine, etc)
The problem is in selling the book. I think the best way is digital coins, small e-cash. If you use a 'secure' format hundreds of people will crack it and pirate it just to prove that your secure program isn't. And there is *no* way to provide content and completely protect it from being stripped from the viewer.
If I downloaded an e-book and someone asked for $5 for it... well, maybe, if it was good and I wanted to read it again. But then with the cost of an international money order and a stamp to get it to their country... Then my time to do all this. Not worth it for anything short of one of my all-time favorites.
But, if they could suggest a decent price like $1, plus $.50 for every time I though I might reread it in the next two years (2-3 for a really good book) and there was a nice secure way for me to just click a button and pay them... Hell yeah.
And if the book had a link to their site, you could distribute the book to others and they would have the same trivially easy option of tossing a buck or two the author's way.
The reason I don't register more shareware is the same, I don't use it enough for the $15 they want, or if I do, I don't feel it's worth the hassle and/or I don't want to use my CC on the net. If I could just toss them $5 or whatever nice and easy, I would.
And before you scoff at $2 or so for downloading a book, think of the cut the author gets, 100%. Sure they have to pay for webspace and all, but if it's not part of a contract, they get to shop around for the best deal instead of simply getting 10% and being told it's really a good deal.
Actually, Kevin and Adrian aren't management, they're part owners (thirds, with JC). Management is under them. id's CEO was a later hire when they realized a bunch of geeks should do geek stuff, not push paper. id's management could counsel on a certain decision, but being as how it's the owners who were disagreeing, management wouldn't have a say in it.
This was owner vs owners, not management / employees. Some employees did get caught up in it, but it was a higher level fight.
Exactly. I don't think coders are more important than artists or designers, or vice versa, without any group the game flops (if it ever gets made). But JC is world class talent and not only that, he's one of the best inovators out there. He's the guy who wrote the book, in many ways. Sure Adrian and Kevin are usefull, and so is the rest of id, but I'd say that of any one person, Carmack is the most talented. And the one most likely to still be the most talented in five or ten years. He hasn't gone the way of the dodo, insisiting we don't need 3d cards just because he's great at ASM optimization or anything, he's instead updated his skill set until he's not only a great coder in the new area but also an expert in the hardware accelerators.
Rarely can someone make the shift in focus so smoothly and he's done a wonderful job of it. He's also the identity of the company. Even after the egos of Romero, Hook, and Steed, he's what people identify with id, and with successful game developers, quiet unassuming guys who pull successes out of the hat, one after another. If he leaves, he might as well take the name, 'cause he *is* id.
I haven't seen any Quake source, actual engine stuff, but I agree with your opinion of the.qc files and the q2 source, both seem like they should have been planned better from the start and then that the writing of the actual code changes from genius to barely capable from one routine to the next...
My guess is that JC wrote some of the more complex routines, especially where things have to use engine features (traces and such) in complex ways, then left everything else to the other programmers. No need to waste the engine coder on writing movement code for some stupid monster.
Well, I can personally testify that PS was an asshole, in any circumstance I had to correspond with him he ended up being rude. No idea if he was always that way or the job stress did it, but yes, he was very rude.
But an idiot? Nah, that must have been some other guy. I'm not gonna testify that PS was some incredible genius who left everyone except Carmack in the dust or anything, but he was plenty bright, enough to make good leaps of intuition... he wasn't the type who had to show his work to be able to get from A to B, and being hacker-ish myself, that's the kind of intelligence I respect.
I wouldn't want him to marry my sister, but I don't think he's at all stupid.
This is definately the easiest way in terms of coding, and because the moderator only intended to boost the post by one (or drop it by one) it is likely to be the most accurate.
The problem is that if the moderator takes a long time to read the post and two people moderate it up, from a starting point of 1, to 3, and this moderator had selected to mod it down to 0, the cgi needs to be smart enough to use that as a relative -1, instead of moving the post to an absolute score of zero.
Otherwise someone could start reading immediately, mark one of Signal11's (for an example of someone with a +5 in nearly every thread) posts as a -1 (to 1) comment, then wait till he's been modded to 5 in the initial rush (by viewing the thread from a non-logged in browser) and then submitting, effectively making their -1 worth -4....
But, otherwise, your method seems the easiest and the least error prone.
The only problem is that without overlapping simultaneous moderation, the scores likely wouldn't be so high anymore, so people browsing at +4 and +5 would see less messages... But I always browse at 0 anyways, so it wouldn't bother me.
They know they've got the support this sort of thing or MS will simply use the UCITA/DMCA to kill all other OSes.
Until now we've been able to reverse engineer file systems and protocols, products like SAMBA are examples of what "we" have done with this.
But if the UCITA and DMCA are used to prevent reverse engineering, products like that won't just be impossible to write, but if we did, they'd be illegal. The only hope of any other OS vendor is to squash those laws before they become too broadly applied.
All MS needs to do under the DMCA is put a routine in the networking to check for valid serial numbers, then it becomes copy protection and even if we were able to get around UCITA restrictions (by doing it out of the USA) on reverse engineering, a compatible network protocol would break their copy protection and thus be illegal similar to DeCSS. (Or what the MPAA says about DeCSS.)
Yup. The first clue. And maybe one or two others. And after that, enough clues to describe it to a consultant who specializes in that sort of thing.
I was writing some complex recursive code using DJGPP a few years back, it was doing really odd stuff, and it was debugger dependant, breakpoints and stuff, or running it in the debugger would change how it worked. I eventually tracked it down to alloca() which I had been using because its features seemed handy. Turns out it had 'features', that undocumented kind. I grabbed the code and narrowed down the likely offending library code to a small segment, then contacted someone involved in the project. Turns out my 'bug' was halfway between a bug and a feature and just undocumented. But yes, I did manage to track down what to me was a compiler bug.
And had I had to fix it, I either could have dove into the library code, or I could have gotten someone else to do it. Were this a business situation, I could have hired someone to do it, at a cost of a few thousand dollars. Much better than submitted a bug report to MS or Borland and waiting a few weeks, possibly only to be told that it's a feature and I'm SOL...
Had this little web project ever seen the light as a business project, 150 people at the company I was working for at the time would have all benefitted from open source even if most of them couldn't identifiy a compiler let alone debug one.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't use the public key to encrypt the logs, you randomly generate a session key, encrypt the logs with that, then use the public key to encrypt the session key. Rotate keys every few minutes and don't leave them sitting around. Ditto with the logs. Have a seperate machine which only accepts one incoming connection, that which dumps logs onto it. Then the log holding machine has *no* idea of the way the log was encrypted, nor, if the logs are removed (via console) to another machine, preferably laptop, for examination, would it know how to decrypt the logs.
Because the public key only encrypts a 128 bit (or whatever) session key every ten minutes or so, it's fairly quick, and two-way crypto is very quick, easily enough to dump logs through.
If you ever implement a log system and don't want them modified, keep an ID # in each packet of logs, along with a MD5 hash of the previous packet of logs (including the previous-packet hash of the log file before it.) This way if a log is modified, the attacked has to change all logs after that point.
Ideally you'd also have the log catcher dumping logs to a write-only media, like CDs. Preferably in a session-based way, so it didn't have to wait too long between getting logs and writing them.
Napster is in the business of letting people find a file and download it. If you rename a crap file and send it out as a different file, you're disrupting the service. Napster doesn't care about the copyright (or more accurately, the license) status of the works it delivers. It believes, rightly, that those issues are the business of the person offering the file and the person accepting the file.
Think of it this way... The telephone company doesn't care what you say to other people on the phone, as long as the police aren't involved, but if you started calling up people you thought were lawbreakers and playing loud annoying sounds, they'd turn off your service. They don't care how you're disrupting legitimate users, just that you are. They also don't care that some legitimate users are breaking the law, that's a matter for the police.
In any legal climate before stupid laws like the DMCA etc. passed, and without a multi-billion dollar industry buying up judges, the law would obviously be on their side, especially as they do crack down on users who are demonstrably pirating.
Just goes to show, the OJ method of legal dispute resolution works. Buy some high-priced lawyers, toss a few million in bribe money around, get a new law written, and you have total legal immunity.
Rarely is 1/3rd of a work, presented in a large piece, without any explanatory context, considered fair use.
You may feel free to read 'rarely' as 'never'.
A better idea would be to use some reserved area in the MP3 to append the payment info (and maybe some tetx about the artist, etc) into standard MP3s. Regular players that follow the standard would see the reserved bits used and ignore it, new players that support the format would display the new information.
It's not a big deal to require the user to download a pluggin because anyone willing to cough up some cash will likely download a small pluggin to allow this to happen. And if the pluggin allows more info, where 'liner notes' could go, everyone (paying user or not) would have an incentive to download the pluggin. Then they'd have the option to pay in the future, if they suddenly got the urge.
The security seems like it'd be fairly easy. You'd sort of CRC the music... strip out a lot of detail from the wave such that any two song rips (of the whole song) will have the same signature. Then the signature of the song is sent in with the payment ID. If the signture isn't listed for the artist (ie, payment for a song they haven't registered) then they don't get paid. And if someone shows up with the same song signature as Metallica, you investigate...
The whole problem is authenticating the song, some sort of fingerprint that works over lossy channels. (If someone rips a Metallica song off of CD and wants to pay for it, the system should try to match the song signature in the database to find the creator...) And ideally it'd work with existing non-watermarked media.
Then you could napster to you heart's content, sampling everything and paying what you want to keep.
The author finished telling us that people will buy CDs because they like physical things. So how does Napster hurt him?
If people don't know he exists, he sells no CDs. Until ten minutes ago, I didn't know he existed. How would I find out? By going to a store and seeing what's on shelves or watching MTV or Much Music. Assuming he's indie, that's not going to help. So even if I did feel like buying a CD, he still wouldn't get any money.
MP3.com and other sites may help, but they lack the draw of full albums of something you like. Napster provides this.
And while searching for one thing (with Napsters lousy search capability) you always get other results. I may see BDR in there and decide to listen to it, and upon listening, get more. Then, and only then, if I want to buy a CD does BDR have any chance of getting that sale.
Metallica doesn't need this advertising, they have a label doing it for them and tons of fans for word-of-mouth. Baptist Death Ray doesn't have a million dollar propoganda machine and needs whatever help it can get.
I think the benefit of being discovered would outweigh the drawbacks of being pirated a bit.
Think of it like the software world... If I (broke) pirate Photoshop, can Adobe honestly claim to have LOST money? No. They have lost a potential sale, that's all. And if you do it correctly and multiply the cost by the likelihood of me coughing up $1200 or whatever for the full version, you're at like $0.13 oportunity cost lost. Not a lot. If anyone loses out, it's Jasc Software, makers of Paint Shop Pro who sell their software for around $100 (I'm guessing) and have a realistic chance of selling me a copy. Not only this, but being that they sell direct, they make more. Adobe sells through retail channels and can't make as high a fraction of their purchase price in profit.
So, apply this to MP3s and CDs. The traditional view is that BDR loses the purchase if I pirate their album. The 'new' view is that BDR loses nothing if I pirate their album. I suggest that unless I knew about them anyways and was willing to buy their album, they don't lose anything and potentially gain a new fan.
And I'm not saying that Napster is a service. People don't use Napster to help musicians, they just want something for nothing. But I don't think Napster hurts the musicians all that much because broke teens (the biggest Napster demographic, IMHO) don't buy many CDs.
> /msg visionary N4RQ!!!
ROFL!
That's worth the whole price of admission.
Is there anyone else out there who remembers this? I think Slashdot must contain a bunch of ex-1337 people.
Then what you should do is test on the 2GB machine in both OSes, compare results, then test on the 4GB machine for the OSes that support it, showing how much performance is gained at that configuration.
An example would be, if computer A couldn't use AGP video with the current bios, but computer B could, you could benchmark both with a Voodoo 3 PCI card, then benchmark computer B with a Voodoo 3 AGP card, and say "We can't test directly, but we suspect computer A is missing out on n% performance by not properly supporting AGP." where n% is the difference on computer B. It still shows computer B kicking ass in the default config, but instead of making the whole machine look superior, it narrows the results down to the problem areas.
I realize this is a troll, but it brings up a topic I've heard a bit about.
It's likely illegal for the store to void the warranty on the computer if you open it, even if you agreed to it when purchasing it. Consumer protection laws usually prevent the warranty from being voided by self repairs on hardware that contains user-servicable parts. That's why a lot of hardware (air conditioners, VCRs, etc) are labelled as not containing any user-servicable parts.
So if they try to void the warranty because you opened the case, tell them you'll take it to a competitor to be fixed and bill them, and back the bill up with small claims court if they get fussy. It'll stick and you'll have made a stand against the assholes of the world.
(This has nothing to do with overclocking. Running a CPU past its rated speed, regardless of if it will do it, will void the warranty on the CPU and mobo, unless it's a mobo from an OC-friendly company like ASUS or ABit who serve the hardware hacker community.)
For the record, my new 600E is a happy 800EB with an Alpha PEP66T cooler. A $35 cooler, but one I can keep for years. A good investment versus spending $250 more for the faster CPU. And my ASUS P3V4X is an overclocker's dream.
Likely though, this could be compressed to 1.76Mbit (CD datarate) and sound a *lot* better than CDs do, without extra storage.
.32Mbit, going to five times that would likely result in a very high quality signal, especially if MP3s were updated (Is there a successor yet, in an official sense?) to avoid the problems we've noticed in the current version.
... 17.319Mbit. So we're looking at about the same 10:1 compression that we get from MP3s at 128, except that we've got a *lot* more quality to start with, 75% of CD is so-so, because CDs aren't all that, to an audio-phile. But, 75% of 96/24/5.1 would likely be *much* better than any consumer-level format available. (No, vinyl isn't better, it has an annoying hiss and degrades. Playing a new record, once, on a new needle, in perfect conditions, is not a fair comparrison to a medium and player that doesn't degrade.)
320kbit MP3s done with a good compressor sound very close to CDs except for some artifacts introduced by the MP3 format, such as poor reproduction in certain frequencies, no matter the compression level. So, that's
96/24/5.1 is 2.18_*1.5*3 (using your numbers) larger than 44/16/2, which is 9.81_
I'd like the ability to use a DVD for *more* audio, not just 'better' audio, most of which will be lost on the ears of audiophiles, let alone everyone else.
But you need to switch focus, the benefit of the 'internet keys' is that they do this, enter the command, then return focus to the last application.
You could probably hack something up that used those keys modified (alt-shift or something), but it wouldn't be as easy... And almost all new keyboards have those, why not use them?
I know this'll get lost in this old thread, but I had an idea earlier about how to make a decent standalone MP3 player...
Provide an ethernet plug to interface to a PC, if desired. But also a CD drive to rip from. That way you could store a huge collection of CDs on the drive without having to download them all. A device that could justify a claim of not promoting piracy.
A nice way to edit playlists is needed though, maybe via a video out that you could hook up to the television. And as a plus, it could display the artist/track/disk while playing...
The CDDB thing would be handy, but a modem is way too clunky for this, dialing out every time you entered a disk and taking 45 seconds, minimum, plus the fact you'd need a dedicated service or the ability to enter your dialup info into the device. That is somethat that should be done via the ethernet... Or, buy a CDDB-type list from MP3.com, they recently ripped a few hundred thousand disks or something, they might have it available for sale (they'd probably love to make *some* money.) The list would be big, but it might justify another $150 for a bigger HD, if the device would recognize any CD inserted. Then you could download monthly updates, or perhaps bi-yearly CD updates, or something.
Nah, that costs more and entails getting to listen to some other lucky bastard getting some. :)
Nope, that's trademarks.
You can let people copy your copyrighted works for years, then specifically attack certain ones only and still have a strong case.
It's trademarks that force you to attack everyone you notice in order to set the precedent of defending your trademark, or else it becomes legal for other people to use it.
The public pays for the enforcement of the copyright laws. It's not free to send the FBI to kick down someone's door you know.
This enforcement of a monopoly on that bit of copyrighted material is balanced out by the value to society when that work becomes available for all to use. If a work is popular and costs more to protect, likely it'll be worth more to the people.
Why on earth should we the people foot the bill to protect something we'll never benefit from? That's like if Microsoft or the old AT&T billed us for a mandatory donation to the Monopoly Protection Fund.
Monopolies are bad, having one entity control all of something slows down innovation. In some cases though, a temporary monopoly is good because it lets the developer shamelessly rake in the profits, for a period of time. It's a trade... "You develop stuff for us that's cool and we'll make sure you're the first one to profit from it." Without the give and take the laws don't benefit both parties.
See as how to public (That's you and me) are one of the parties to this, if it doesn't benefit us (we protect Disney's copyrights all our life and they never go to the public domain) then we have absolutely no incentive to help protect these copyrights.
I can sort of see that the siblings will have reason to compete, but I can't imagine MS-AP porting anything to another OS, ever. They probably see each other as enemies, but everyone else as much worse enemies.
imho they'll likely try to act like one company (in strategy) as much as possible. Maybe MS-OS can't write secret APIs, but what's to stop them from writing the PaperClip API, that any application can use if it wants to animated a paperclip on the screen. And that API would be open to everyone, just, because of trademark issues, unusable to anyone except MS-AP, etc.
Thus, you can't get the magic cookie that PaperClipAPI returns and you can't use SpellCheck or any other nice fast useful (for word processor) APIs built into the system. It'd be just like now with hidden APIs except that trademark law would prevent the use.
And if they couldn't do that, they'll try something else. And if everything they try involved them being dragged into court for a minimum of six months to force them to change, we'll be in the same stagnant situation we are now, where MS-AP and MS-OS help each other by killing any competition.
Quite right on the AGP. And even if we could push data across it fast enough, it's not much of an issue. With 32MB and texture compression on most cards, they rarely have texture bottlenecks where they're swapping out textures all the time. A decent PCI Gefore 2 would probably only score 10% (tops) slower than an AGP 4x card.
And, I think you're wrong on the Firewire issue... stuff like that will never get adopted until it's on chipsets. And it's good for a lot, it's basically serial scsi, great for digital video, external harddrives, etc.
USB is aimed at mice and other low bandwidth or temporary devices (scanners). USB2 is fatally flawed and even if working perfectly, not terribly exciting seeing as how it requires CPU interaction on all transfers (device -> cpu -> device) which limits it to maximum of half its rated speed. Then you get all the old USB1 devices (like mice) slowing the whole bus while they transfer data, not to mention that the handshaking between fast devices must be done at slow speeds... Ugh. Not only does the handshaking eat bandwidth, but it eats essentially 10* as much because it's slower.
Firewire is an essential connector for the future, leave USB where it belongs, as a replacement for serial, and let firewire take over the high performance niche.
Not only is DeCSS not illegal in most of the world, but including a quote from an illegal copy of a copyrighted work isn't illegal. The legality of the physical media you read the information on is irrelevant. The copyright is on the information, not the paper. Thus quoting a copyrighted work is always governed by the fair use clause, no matter if the book/tape/etc you read was illegally copied.
And online retailers can afford to offer a full cover shot of everything they sell. Ain't that handy.
And yes, a lot of books are impulse buys, mainly because they're near the cashier. But that's unlikely to be the market our questioner is trying to break into. For the most part that's just cheesy romances and the odd books by a big name like King.
For most authors they publish the only thing the publisher does is provide cover art and distribution, maybe accompanied by a blurb in the companies promotional literature.
There's nothing there you couldn't do on your own by setting up a webpage, hiring an artist from the net, and sending links to appropriate news sites (Slashdot if it's a techo-thriller, Blue's News if it's about a space marine, etc)
The problem is in selling the book. I think the best way is digital coins, small e-cash. If you use a 'secure' format hundreds of people will crack it and pirate it just to prove that your secure program isn't. And there is *no* way to provide content and completely protect it from being stripped from the viewer.
If I downloaded an e-book and someone asked for $5 for it... well, maybe, if it was good and I wanted to read it again. But then with the cost of an international money order and a stamp to get it to their country... Then my time to do all this. Not worth it for anything short of one of my all-time favorites.
But, if they could suggest a decent price like $1, plus $.50 for every time I though I might reread it in the next two years (2-3 for a really good book) and there was a nice secure way for me to just click a button and pay them... Hell yeah.
And if the book had a link to their site, you could distribute the book to others and they would have the same trivially easy option of tossing a buck or two the author's way.
The reason I don't register more shareware is the same, I don't use it enough for the $15 they want, or if I do, I don't feel it's worth the hassle and/or I don't want to use my CC on the net. If I could just toss them $5 or whatever nice and easy, I would.
And before you scoff at $2 or so for downloading a book, think of the cut the author gets, 100%. Sure they have to pay for webspace and all, but if it's not part of a contract, they get to shop around for the best deal instead of simply getting 10% and being told it's really a good deal.
Actually, Kevin and Adrian aren't management, they're part owners (thirds, with JC). Management is under them. id's CEO was a later hire when they realized a bunch of geeks should do geek stuff, not push paper. id's management could counsel on a certain decision, but being as how it's the owners who were disagreeing, management wouldn't have a say in it.
This was owner vs owners, not management / employees. Some employees did get caught up in it, but it was a higher level fight.
Exactly. I don't think coders are more important than artists or designers, or vice versa, without any group the game flops (if it ever gets made). But JC is world class talent and not only that, he's one of the best inovators out there. He's the guy who wrote the book, in many ways. Sure Adrian and Kevin are usefull, and so is the rest of id, but I'd say that of any one person, Carmack is the most talented. And the one most likely to still be the most talented in five or ten years. He hasn't gone the way of the dodo, insisiting we don't need 3d cards just because he's great at ASM optimization or anything, he's instead updated his skill set until he's not only a great coder in the new area but also an expert in the hardware accelerators.
Rarely can someone make the shift in focus so smoothly and he's done a wonderful job of it. He's also the identity of the company. Even after the egos of Romero, Hook, and Steed, he's what people identify with id, and with successful game developers, quiet unassuming guys who pull successes out of the hat, one after another. If he leaves, he might as well take the name, 'cause he *is* id.
I haven't seen any Quake source, actual engine stuff, but I agree with your opinion of the .qc files and the q2 source, both seem like they should have been planned better from the start and then that the writing of the actual code changes from genius to barely capable from one routine to the next...
My guess is that JC wrote some of the more complex routines, especially where things have to use engine features (traces and such) in complex ways, then left everything else to the other programmers. No need to waste the engine coder on writing movement code for some stupid monster.
Well, I can personally testify that PS was an asshole, in any circumstance I had to correspond with him he ended up being rude. No idea if he was always that way or the job stress did it, but yes, he was very rude.
But an idiot? Nah, that must have been some other guy. I'm not gonna testify that PS was some incredible genius who left everyone except Carmack in the dust or anything, but he was plenty bright, enough to make good leaps of intuition... he wasn't the type who had to show his work to be able to get from A to B, and being hacker-ish myself, that's the kind of intelligence I respect.
I wouldn't want him to marry my sister, but I don't think he's at all stupid.
This is definately the easiest way in terms of coding, and because the moderator only intended to boost the post by one (or drop it by one) it is likely to be the most accurate.
The problem is that if the moderator takes a long time to read the post and two people moderate it up, from a starting point of 1, to 3, and this moderator had selected to mod it down to 0, the cgi needs to be smart enough to use that as a relative -1, instead of moving the post to an absolute score of zero.
Otherwise someone could start reading immediately, mark one of Signal11's (for an example of someone with a +5 in nearly every thread) posts as a -1 (to 1) comment, then wait till he's been modded to 5 in the initial rush (by viewing the thread from a non-logged in browser) and then submitting, effectively making their -1 worth -4....
But, otherwise, your method seems the easiest and the least error prone.
The only problem is that without overlapping simultaneous moderation, the scores likely wouldn't be so high anymore, so people browsing at +4 and +5 would see less messages... But I always browse at 0 anyways, so it wouldn't bother me.
They know they've got the support this sort of thing or MS will simply use the UCITA/DMCA to kill all other OSes.
Until now we've been able to reverse engineer file systems and protocols, products like SAMBA are examples of what "we" have done with this.
But if the UCITA and DMCA are used to prevent reverse engineering, products like that won't just be impossible to write, but if we did, they'd be illegal. The only hope of any other OS vendor is to squash those laws before they become too broadly applied.
All MS needs to do under the DMCA is put a routine in the networking to check for valid serial numbers, then it becomes copy protection and even if we were able to get around UCITA restrictions (by doing it out of the USA) on reverse engineering, a compatible network protocol would break their copy protection and thus be illegal similar to DeCSS. (Or what the MPAA says about DeCSS.)
It's good to see RedHat join the fight.
Yup. The first clue. And maybe one or two others. And after that, enough clues to describe it to a consultant who specializes in that sort of thing.
I was writing some complex recursive code using DJGPP a few years back, it was doing really odd stuff, and it was debugger dependant, breakpoints and stuff, or running it in the debugger would change how it worked. I eventually tracked it down to alloca() which I had been using because its features seemed handy. Turns out it had 'features', that undocumented kind. I grabbed the code and narrowed down the likely offending library code to a small segment, then contacted someone involved in the project. Turns out my 'bug' was halfway between a bug and a feature and just undocumented. But yes, I did manage to track down what to me was a compiler bug.
And had I had to fix it, I either could have dove into the library code, or I could have gotten someone else to do it. Were this a business situation, I could have hired someone to do it, at a cost of a few thousand dollars. Much better than submitted a bug report to MS or Borland and waiting a few weeks, possibly only to be told that it's a feature and I'm SOL...
Had this little web project ever seen the light as a business project, 150 people at the company I was working for at the time would have all benefitted from open source even if most of them couldn't identifiy a compiler let alone debug one.