[...] "How do I create a new spreadsheet?" (why you don't think it's File>New in OSS I'm not sure) [...]
You're right. Bad example. I should have said: "How do I set my page margins and change my spacing settings to double globally?" That's not always in the same place.
Linux development might as well stop now then. [...] "How do I format a floppy?" or "Where's my D: drive?"
This is not a problem with linux; it's a problem with desktop GUI software. You're right in that most non-geeks are more comfortable with (and I would go so far as to say prefer) viewing data storage devices (cd-roms, floppies, hard drives, usb microstorage doodads, etc...) as separate icons representing separate hardware rather than all merged into one directory tree like linux does. However, the unix "all devices are files" and "every file that the system has access to can be found under/" philosophies have their merits and contribute to the extreme (and extremely useful) scriptability of nearly every action.
The solution? Have the desktop GUI software query the kernel as to what data storage devices the system has access to (devfs works great for this) and present icons representing them in a "My Computer" type interface. Then simply interpret any URIs starting with floppy: (such as floppy:images/picture.png) as/mnt/floppy/whatever.
Of course then you run up against the original problem I was talking about: more than one software package competing to perform the same task. What if the GNOME team decides that representing storage devices as above is a great idea (so much so that they change the standard file dialog boxes in gtk apps so that they represent data this way), but the KDE team thinks it's a silly idea? What is the user to do who really likes the change GNOME made, but needs (for example) the ability to browse tar files without unpacking them in her file manager? Use GNOME some of the time, and switch to KDE at others? Send emails begging the GNOME team to add tar browsing or pleading with the KDE team to change their minds about devices? Give up and go back to windows where she has the interface she wants and can look through tars with Easyzip?
I dont see the problem you are talking about. The number of office suites available is irrelevent. If they all adhere to open standard document formats You can use any office suite to open documents created in any other office suite.
If they all adhere to open standard document formats. The problem is they don't. Even if there were an open standard document format that every open source office product supported, all office suites would still need to read and write MS Office files. Sure, you could save your document in the open format and convert it using an office suite that does support MS formats, but that's more work than users are willing to do; besides, if the conversion were anything less than perfect, it wouldn't be an option for serious work. Documents can start to look pretty run down after multiple passes through an imperfect document converter.
That seems to make multiple office suites a good thing because people can pick the one that does things the way they are most comfortable with. There's no need for them to get confused trying to learn a new suite because theirs will open any standards compliant file.
What about people that are introduced to an open source office software suite at home and then switch to a different one at work because it's the new company-mandated standard? They have to re-learn basic skills. Multiple open source office software suites also fracture the support base. It's nice to be able to lean into the cubicle next to you and say, "Hey Dan, how do I do X?" You can't do this when Dan is using a different suite -- he won't be able to answer your question. Unless a company wants to double the training requirements for their support staff, the help desk won't be able to answer your question either. In addition, developer time is divided by multiple projects. If you have 4 talented developers that want to contribute to OSS and 4 office suites, each office suite gets fewer developers. With one office suite, that project can take on as many developers as it can use. I'm not saying that more developers always equals better software (sometimes the opposite is true), but it's better to be turning developers down than starving for volunteers.
On top of that, since they are all open source, if one develops a compelling feature the others need, the others can add that functionality to themselves. So again, no reason for people to switch office suites.
Just because two projects are OSS, there's no reason to think that code can be easily ported between them. OpenOffice and Productive may (and probably do) have radically different architectures.
I realize most people probably won't agree, but I'm incredibly thankful this thing didn't make it past the beta stage for linux and windows and might not be released under the gpl. I guess that might be considered a loss, as I'm sure it contains some great code that other OSS developers could use or draw from, but it will prevent anyone from finishing the port. In a software category like this (one that's so critical to broadened acceptance of linux on the desktop) I'm a firm believer that competition between products is actually a bad thing.
When all of the competitors in a market are OSS*, more product choice does not equal more freedom. That's kinda what the GPL is all about -- one person (or company) can't run off with the source and deprive the OSS community of the best piece of ______ software it ever had. On the contrary -- with the need normally satisfied by inter-product competition is taken resolved in another way, more product choice equals more confusion. Users like to get comfortable with a method for accomplishing a task and stick to it. "How do I create a new spreadsheet, again?" is not a question users want to have to ask more than once every five years; if they're forced to, they'll go back to what they were already comfortable with.
*The market I'm talking about is inclusion in linux distros. I'm well aware that MS Office is not OSS.;)
Gnutella servents can already get around port blocking - they can use random ports every time if the user enables the option (there's a field in gnet pong packets for the port number). As for getting past content screening, there's a simple solution: diffie-hellman key exchange before _any_ other network conversation, followed by data encrypted using the symmetric cypher du jour. ISPs _can't_ know what data is being transferred without executing a man in the middle attack. Since this has to be done at the beginning of the connection, the ISP has to modify the very first data sent by its customer, the ISP has two options:
1. Not know what data is being transferred. 2. Block or mutilate all traffic it can't identify.
If it decides it really doesn't want to know what's being said, great. It's none of their business. If it decides to block any traffic it can't identify, it will face customer backlash. Users may not be aware and active enough to fight monthly transfer caps, but they sure do complain when they can't connect. If it tries to execute man in the middle attacks, it will succeed if the traffic is p2p, but it can't know ahead of time whether or not that will happen. If it tries to snoop an arbitrary new connection that turns out to carry p2p data, the ISP will be able to see the data that's being transferred. If that connection ends up being something non-p2p, the first part of the connection will be garbled beyond recognition and the connection attempt will fail.
Of course, there's nothing you can do about transfer rate caps and monthly quotas, but if that becomes a problem it's really your own fault. If you not only continue to elect representatives that voted for deregulation and caused the gross lack of broadband competition we have today (or even allow them to be elected by not telling everyone you know how owned they are by special interests), but also stay with companies that implement monthly data tranfer caps, you really have nobody to blame but yourself.
You can make a difference. Being a vocal, informed advocate works. A polite but firm letter containing the word "constituent" works better. The same letter but with money works best. Enough money virtually guarantees you'll be heard and obeyed.
For the record, I turned 18 after the last election (but I put my voter registration card in the mail the day after my birthday), and I'm switching from Cox (max 2GB down per day or 30GB down per month, whichever is lower/max 1 GB up per day or 7.5 GB up per month, whichever is lower [Yes. They _just_ implemented this in my area.]) to DSL (no transfer limits, but mind-bogglingly incompetent tech support).
This is an awful idea! It's been asked over and over again: Who decides what is safe for kids? Since there are so many differing opinions on what is ok, it only makes sense to let the parents decide individually.
Specific metadata needs to be available for content which can then be filtered by policy. There's already a well defined system in place to support this: ICRA (formerly RSACi). A simple tag on each web page (or just the root for the site) tells what content the page or site contains. It can then be left up to parents to set access permissions, like no viewing of nudity except in an artistic context, or no graphic violence.
Labeling can't be mandated directly, but here's an easy way to make ICRA universal:
1. Give tax incentives to businesses that use ICRA labels, and make it a crime to misrepresent a site by placing incorrect ICRA labels in pages. There wouldn't be any legal suits (at least any with merit) over page misrepresentation as ICRA tags describe in very concrete terms what a page contains (e.g. full frontal nudity, descriptions of drug use, etc...) rather than value judgements (e.g. kid safe).
2. Wait until ICRA becomes mainstream, then ship browsers that default to blocking sites that don't rate themselves.
3. Remove the tax incentives.
Unlike creating a new.us domain (or tld, I've seen both reported), there are no ongoing costs. After the tax incentives are repealed, web page authors will be forced to rate their pages if they want to be seen.
I'm not saying anything new here. This has been around for a long time.
What an odd and disturbing trend. People publicly admitting that they are unable to perform tasks that tens of thousands of other people have performed with little or no trouble. [...] I used to get pissed off at people who would glibly and gleefully admit that "they did not understand math" or "computers confused them" as if math and computer skills were somehow optional in this world.
You're right. Math and computer skills are absolutely necessary for everyday life just like reading and writing, although perhaps not to the exact same degree. Similarly, and increasingly as time passes, they are essential skills to being an informed citizen (who votes with his or her rights) and consumer (who votes with his or her wallet). Anyone without a solid understanding of computers and digital information is set up to lose out big time.
Now I am going to have to make room in my big ass loser bag for people who are unable to install linux.
BZZT! Wrong. You need to make room in your big ass loser bag for yourself and anyone else who understands technology. When there is a widespread ignorance of and resistance to using Free software, everyone loses. The existance Palladium itself is not a threat to the survival of OSS and the freedom of information; however, the result of combining a cleverly devised public key crypography scheme, terrible legislation like the DMCA, and a bunch of ignorant, sheep-like users is that the universal perception of information is perverted into something false and harmful. You may see that, "If you can see it, you can copy it," is a basic principle of the physics of information, but with enough experience with commercial software and DRM "solutions", I can guarantee you the average consumer can be convinced otherwise.
There are two ways you can approach this problem: 1. People are too stupid and lazy to migrate en masse to free software. Since people won't switch, everyone's screwed.
2. Free software, on the whole, is not usable enough to tempt the average user or create large numbers of converts. Unless software gets easier to use in the near future, everyone's screwed.
If you go with #1, you give up all your power to correct our disasterous course towards unbeatable proprietary domination of the software market. You lose. Please step into the bag. If you go with #2, the opposite happens. You may not be able to change the way everyone thinks, but you sure can develop usable software. When you bitch and complain about how incredibly stupid people are, you pull yourself and everyone else away from a constructive solution to the very problem that irritates you. When you realize what you DO have the ability to accomplish, you are empowered.
Help make newbies comfortable. Help save your future.
I have three 40gb hard drives and am looking for a similar solution. Basicly, I want 20gb for NTFS (win2k), 20gb for ext3 (linux), and 80gb of shared fat32 (raid0) space. I'm gonna play around with this over the next few days. If I need info, can I send you an e-mail?
You can send me an email, but I can't guarantee I'll be able to respond right away. It's the end of the semester and I have finals coming up.
Two things you might want to keep in mind: -From the numbers you gave, it sounds like you want to split one 40gb disk between the two OSs and set up the other two in raid0 (just because everything divides up so nicely). It's more awkward with two OSs and three disks (I have two OSs and two disks), but if you can manage to involve all three disks in the array you'll get a significant performance boost. You won't quite max out a 32 bit 33MHz pci bus, but you'll come close (at least in sustained read transfers).
-Theoretically, you should be able to format partitions of up to 2TB with fat32; however, windows 2000 and xp will only let you format partitions of up to 32GB -- well below what you need. If you end up formatting it with ntfs, be aware that linux write support for ntfs can destroy your data, so don't enable it. Also, some distros (redhat at least) don't ship with ntfs support for legal reasons. You have to hunt around on the net for an add-in rpm or compile the kernel yourself.
Have you thought about drafting a howto?
Sorry, but I don't think there are enough people that want to share win/lin software raid setups to make it worthwhile.
Do you _need_ to boot from CD as a requirement? I am sure you know, but you could load from floppy or loadlin and even if loadlin doesn't work, you could install an older version (Win98?) of Windows and load it from there. In this extreme case, you could initially use the same partition you'd use for Linux for the Win98 install, and go on from there.
Not really. It's more a matter of convenience since I try every major distro every few releases.
Do you mean it woudn't boot the linux cds at all, or it would boot the kernel and then not mount the root, because the kernel didn't recognize the device[?]
It wouldn't boot the linux cds at all. The card's bios would not detect that the CD was bootable, that is it would totally miss the ElTorito-compatible 2.88MB floppy disk image on the cd if the CD was not a Windows 2000 Professional or XP install disc. Once I moved the DVD drive over onto a motherboard controller, redhat 7.3 installed perfectly. It even loaded linux's pdc202xx driver, detected my CD-RW (which was still on the controller with the buggy bios), and configured ide-scsi emulation so that cd burning would work.
Windows and Linux software RAID drivers
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IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm using IDE raid on my home desktop right now, but I'm using software raid as opposed to a hardware controller. I have two Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40GB hard drives hooked up as masters to my primary and secondary motherboard IDE ports. I also have a DVD-ROM hooked up as secondary slave, and a Promise Ultra133TX2 controller with a CD-RW hooked up to its first port. Both hard drives are sectioned into a 3GB primary 1st partition and a 34GB (yes, the drives are only 40GB when you're in marketing land) 2nd primary partition. Windows 2000 is installed on the first drive's 3GB partition, and redhat linux 7.3 is installed on the second drive in the same place. Both OSs share the combined 68GB RAID 0 set, which is formatted with NTFS, made from the combined second partitions. The only problem is that linux can't write to the array because NTFS write support under linux is currently "DANGEROUS" according to the driver's author and I keep important data on there. (Yes, I know about the dangers of using RAID0 and I back up regularly.) It'd sure work a whole lot better if that driver were finished, though. (hint hint, Legato Systems, Inc.);)
Getting the two OSs' software raid drivers to play nicely together was an "adventure", mostly due to Win2K's insistance on turning the disks into "dynamic disks" before letting me use its built-in RAID functionality, meaning it wanted to wipe out my old partition table, replace it with a single partition taking up the entire disk, and create a new system of partition organization inside the dummy standard partition. After a lot of reading, I found out that Windows NT 4.0 supported "stripe sets" using standard partitions, and that Windows 2000, when installed over an old copy of NT4, would support the "legacy" software RAID drive. Windows 2000 would not, however, allow me to create new legacy stripe sets for compatibility with other OSs. Stupid Micro$oft. So all I had to do was fake Win2K into thinking it had been installed over an old copy of NT4 which had been using its stripe set functionality.
The first thing I had to do was create partitions. I opened up linux fdisk and allocated 3GB on each disk to my OSs, one for linux and one for windows, and created two partitions, each one taking up the rest of the space on its disk, and set their types to 87h (NT stripe set [thanks to whoever put the L command in linux fdisk!]). After installing Windows 2000 on the first disk's first partition, I needed to get my hands on a couple of tools that didn't come with windows 2000: Windows NT 4 Disk Administrator and MS's fault tolerant disk set disaster recovery tool, FTEDIT. After spending about 6 hours searching online, I finally found a download site for FTEDIT - MS's web site says you can get it free from them, but it provides no download link. NTDA was a bit easier. Since MS service packs replace OS files, and somewhere in NT4's history a bug or problem had been found in NTDA, that file was in the service pack 6a for NT4. Service packs check to see if you're using the correct OS _after_ they decompress themselves, and they're nice enough to display an error message telling you this ("Whoops. You just wasted a whole bunch of time downloading a huge file you didn't need. Sorry!") before they delete the decompression directory. Figuring that out took a while, but snagging the executable during decompression was easy.
I ran NTDA, which populated the "missing" DISKS key in the windows registry (Win2K stores disk information in a different place from NT4), and told FTEDIT that, yes, I really did already have a software RAID 0 set on those drives, and that windows NT had died on me and I had to restore it. After a reboot, "Drive D" appeared in my computer. 68GB and unformatted. YAY!:D After a quick format with NTFS (the partiton was too big to format with FAT32), I was in business.
Getting linux to see the array was much easier. I added
to/etc/raidtab, ran raid0run/dev/md0, and added a line to/etc/fstab. (I read online that WinNT 4.0's software raid driver uses 64K chunks.)
Btw, yes, I know linux has support for MS's dynamic disk scheme. I enjoy tweaking and doing new things, even if it means days spend reading about Windows.;) As a bonus, I also get to keep my standard partition table as well as compatibility with non-M$ disk editing/management/recovery tools.
"So," you're probably wondering, "why did Erpo spend all that time setting up a RAID0 set (presumably for extra performance) and then go and do a stupid thing like put a DVD-ROM drive on the same ata cable as one of the disks when he has an extra ata port on his add-in controller that he's not using?" Thanks for asking. It's because Promise's bios on the Ultra133TX2 card was broken. The company "Promised" me it would allow me to boot from CD, but in reality it only will let me do so when I want to boot from a windows installation CD. Not just any windows installation CD, either. It had to be Windows 2000 Professional or XP, which I refuse to use.
It wouldn't recognize my Windows 98 SE cd, or any of my linux distros. I didn't have a choice about the DVD drive if I wanted to install linux. Just now, months after I got the card and sent promise and email, they released a bios update that claims to fix the issue. If it works I'll be moving my optical drives around. Even with the DVD drive, the performance isn't too bad - about 80MB/sec at the beginning of the disk, and it slowly drops to 50MB/sec at the end.
Ultra low sulfur diesel?
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239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
It's good to hear about new alternatives to gasoline-powered vehicles, but what we really need is a uniform (non-gasoline) fuel type for all mass market autos. It's going to be hard enough to make hydrogen (or biodiesel, or methanol, or ultra low sulfur diesel) pumps common enough to get people thinking seriously about alternative fuels, but the competition between these schemes is hurting adoption of environmentally friendly vehicles like the competition between desktop environments is hurting adoption of GNU/Linux. People want (and are comfortable with) uniformity. Asking Joe Average to make "the switch" is a big request, but when he has to ask "To which alternative?" the battle is pretty much over. When he learns it's all going to be different at his friend's house and at work, your chances are already dead, buried, reincarnated as a racoon, and run over by a semi (fueled by conventional diesel and running a Microsoft-powered cockpit GPS navigator).
<asbestos_suit>I suppose I'm just begging for flames by making the GNU/Linux analogy, but I think it's the best one considering the situation and the audience.</asbestos_suit>
What I got from your post was that you use ShowEQ as a real-time map to let you: -Avoid challenges your in-game character was not ready to meet. -Find people and things that would enhance the position of your in-game character or others.
You purchased a product for a fixed sum (the price of the game and whatever expansion packs were added) and are now paying for a service on a monthly basis (the maintenance of servers that allow you to play the game with others and access to those servers). What must be recognized is that you have decided that the product you purchased is inadequate, and that those who provide you with the service you are paying for are trying to stop you from changing your everquest experience.
Your use of ShowEQ is just as bad as a consumer's use of DeCSS to decrypt a dvd for backup purposes, but not for the reasons you think.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with getting full access to data that is sent to you or to a program being run on hardware that you own. In fact, it's impossible to prevent you from doing so. It's a terrible idea because the company that is providing the good or service is trying to stop you. The MPAA doesn't want you to be able to decrypt DVDs because that allows you to copy them at possible financial detriment to the MPAA. Sony doesn't want you to be able to decrypt (and read and use) everquest data...well...I can't know exactly what they're thinking, but I would guess it's either because:
1. It makes the game easier by eliminating artificial challenges they've introduced (which is all any game boils down to, artificial challenges) and thus possibly causing you to get bored and stop paying.
OR
2. It allows players to abuse the game and make it so difficult for other players that they become frustrated and stop playing (and so stop paying).
Anyway, for whatever reasons, Sony doesn't want you to do it and they're taking technological steps to make it harder. When you use any means to circumvent a limitation placed on a product or service rather than putting consumer pressure on the company to remove the limitation, you are anesthetizing yourself to the process that keeps companies from hurting consumers. The very idea that everquest should encrypt its data packets or the MPAA should encrypt dvds is totally unacceptable! The MPAA must understand that selling and renting plastic discs containing valuable data is not a valid business model in an environment that obeys the simple laws of the physics of information (i.e. if you can see it you can copy it). Sony should know that if it sends information to someone, that person can use it whatever way they choose. So what's the proper course of action in these situations, meaning the one that holds up the system that, when employed, keeps big corporations from virtually raping consumers and taking their rights?
DVDs: The MPAA _must_ find a new way of making money - this isn't as hard as it sounds. People are _very_ willing to pay for the movie experience of sitting in a huge theater with a big screen they could never hope to own themselves and a sound system that blows them away in an acoustically managed environment for two hours while they are told an amazing audio/visual story they've never heard before, at least not in that form. In other words, it's a glorified form of equipment rental. Sure, movies can be recorded with a crappy camcorder and put on the net, but a blurry, washed out, 320x240 picture with tinny sound and the occasional crunch of popcorn as the pirate enjoys the flick can't compare to the theater experience. As for post-theater revenue, video rental stores could be converted into high-speed online digital movie wherehouses. No DRM is necessary, as high quality movies take up quite a bit of space and consumers would be forced to delete old movies to make room for freshly downloaded ones. I would imagine a modest fee per download, and perhaps a monthly membership fee. For the technophobic or those not willing to wait for the download, the current model works fine. Media to hold copies still costs money.
EQ: Two very simple courses of action:
1. If it's not in the player's viewing frustum, don't send them information about it. That way there's no extra "EQ" information in the datastream to "Show". Perhaps characters with a special ability ("Sense Danger" maybe?) could be sent special precaching hints to make monster loads faster (it makes sense that those with a sense for danger would be able to more quickly react to it when it does become directly visable). I.e., "Game engine: preload huge_ugly_beatdown_montster.mdl, and tell the user that there's a huge_ugly_beatdown_monster 'somewhere close by'". This allows for the benefits of preloading still without giving away any extra information to a datastream tapping program. Also, since the datastream would not need to be encrypted, that's less work for the client and server cpus, possibly delaying an expensive server upgrade for verant.
2. Don't change the protocol and add the map feature you want.
Either way, it's a better solution than what they're doing now. No matter how good ShowEQ gets, if Sony goes with solution 1 there's absolutely nothing you can do - you can't see information that isn't being sent to you. If they go with solution 2, you'll get exactly what you want.
Please. Write to Sony. Organize a protest. Do whatever you can. I can't stop you from using ShowEQ, but I can guarantee you that you'll work harder for a progressive solution without it.
First there is all the licensing bullcrap which we have even now.
Do that many consumers read or even know (or care) what's in MS EULAs? They should, but do they?
But then throw in all the Palladium etc crap [...]
How many consumers know that "Trusted Computing" means that MS and the government can trust your computer to do what they tell it to, and not that you can trust your computer to do what you tell it to?
[...] and there will be mass converts no doubt
To what? Mac OSX which is fantastic but a very well kept secret or GNU/Linux which <asbestos_suit>just isn't ready for mass desktop adoption </asbestos_suit>?
At the risk of sounding like a troll, I think the "slow and steady" progress in the GNU/Linux community isn't going to win the race against MS - in order to encourage users to switch, it must offer something beyond what Windows does. In Erpo's-the-emperor-land, I would imagine these changes would be enough:
1. Reduce confusion and diluted developer effort through reducing choice. Pick the project in each category (i.e. desktop environment) that has the most promise and popular support, and kill off all the others. KDE alone, GNOME alone, or something else alone. One desktop environment = users that can get comfortable with GNU/Linux and stay comfortable with it. Choice is necessary in a capitalist marketplace to prevent one company from becoming dominant and hurting consumers with its monopoly powers by keeping prices high and slowing product improvement in order to lower expenses. KDE and GNOME are both free, and while it could be argued that friendly (and not so friendly) competition among developers spurs both sides to new levels of productivity, it's my opinion that the newbie confusion (when newbies are 99.9% of the population) is more harmful than slowed development due to a lack of interproject competition. Remeber, we're in Erpo's-the-emperor-land.
2. Innovate ahead of MS. GNU/Linux on the desktop needs to change the way people work for the better (e.g. through a metadata-rich filesystem built on a database) _before_ MS does and present an enticing work and play environment. People don't realize how much MS dominance in the OS market is hurting them (their freedom, not just their wallets) and how necessary a Free (as in speech) OS is. On the other hand, if GNU/Linux simply works better (and if this means moving toward interface compatibility with MS to lower the learning curve so be it) people will pick it up in a heartbeat.
In my opinion at least, the community needs to start moving in this direction right away. Why? Now there's a deadline. It's called Palladium and it's set for 2004.
You have a period of 30 days to watch the movie BUT, only 24 hours to watch it once you hit "play".
HELLO? The downloader/player program is software running on open hardware. All copy protection schemes for information are inherently crackable, but these kinds should be easy for a competent software engineer with access to good debugging tools. I can't wait for these to start appearing on the net, in ogg multimedia containers no less.
"Services" with a different meaning
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Cringely on P2P
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· Score: 2
They'll transition from Goods [...] to Services
I see your idea, and I like the concept of having live theater as a really popular part our culture, but I think they'll transition from "goods" to "services" in another way. The "goods" they produce now aren't valuable - that is they are only pieces of media. There's a big price gap between a $1 blank cd-r and a $25 music cd. The valuable part of what they sell is the information encoded on that media which can be infinitely copied and doesn't behave like a regular physical good because it isn't a physical good.
By finding talent, promoting it, channeling that talent into finding valuable combinations of ones and zeroes, recording those bits on compact discs, and distributing them all over the country, they're already providing a service. It's the recognition of this service as the core of the industry that will save them - people pay them for recording information onto CDs that can be bought, not for the CDs themselves. What they really need to do is work out a system of payment where they can produce a work and then hold it for "ransom" until consumers have paid a certain RIAA-specified total. If the total is met, the work is released. If the total is not met, the money is returned to those who paid it. The RIAA does not disappear, their economic position as promoter and risktaker stays intact, and everyone gets to keep their jobs.
What about the freeloaders, or those that don't contribute to the release of a certain work, but listen to it anyway? Well, if they like it enough to pay towards the release of the next work by the same author, that's an extra sale. If they don't like it, that's exactly the kind of person who wouldn't have bought a cd under the old model. What's to stop the RIAA from setting rediculously high "ransom" totals? Only the same thing that stops them from pricing CDs at $60.00 now. What's to stop consumers from repeatedly not meeting totals to drive down future ransom totals? Only the same thing that stops them from organizing boycotts of CDs to drive down prices today.
[...] Services, which (as of yet) are copy-proof.
"Production of new art" services will always be "copy-proof". The reason we're having this "problem" with piracy right now is that information must be un-copy-proof the same way that matter must react to the presence of other matter through the force of gravity. It's a fundamental fact of information physics. In the same way, generation of _new_ art is fundamentally "copy-proof". Yes, you can copy already-produced art, but the creation of new art can only happen when a (perhaps) talented individual puts forth a creative effort.
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene does a great job of explaining relativity, quantum mechanics, and how superstring theory makes them all play nicely. ISBN# 0-375-70811-1 if you're interested.
Materials (buildings, glass, etc) will react differently to the different frequencies but if this is not a limitation, there really is no reason not to move to shorter wavelengths (higher frequencies) as the band-width is somehow controled by the frequency (beyond the scope of this post)
But isn't the way materials react to light a limitation? Radio happens to be a great place in the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit and receive data because it can pass through some solid objects. Light bounces off of solid objects, which is how we are able to see them. It seems that these cell phones would need a direct line of sight (ugh...grammar check time, slashdot editors) to the cell towers to be able to work.
I've heard of "cloudbouncing", lighting up clouds with lasers to transmit data while another entity watches and receives, but you can't always count on there being a cloud around when you need one (that both you and the tower can see), and it seems like such a medium would be prone to congestion.
This is what puzzles me. It wasn't answered in the article, and I haven't read a post that explains what's going on.
Is this UWB? Are they confusing light with all EM?
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Optical Cellphones
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A different technology in widespread use employs a method called wavelength division multiplexing, in which each cell phone uses a different wavelength of light, according to the researchers. In contrast, optical CDMA would encode each pulse, or bit of information, across a segment of wavelengths. The receiver uses a key to decode the signal and re-create the original pulse.
This sounds a lot like Ultra Wideband to me. Also, I'm guessing from reading the article that the author is confusing visible light with radio EMR.
...there's a much cheaper option. nVidia provides drivers that will render scenes in full-color anaglyph so you can dig out your old red/cyan glasses and run the latest 3d (and oldest) 3d games in real 3d. The drivers work for any program that does the 3d math correctly in opengl or direct3d. I have yet to come across a program that doesn't work with them.
Sure, the image looks a little funky, and the framerate is half what it normally is, but you get this with any 3d scheme that uses a normal crt monitor. The glasses they talk about in this article also effectively halve the frame rate by halving the refresh rate per eye so you'll have to deal with quite a bit of flicker. Unless you can run your monitor at 1024x768 @ 120Hz vertical refresh, be prepared to run at lower resolutions. Oh yeah: page flipping 3d doesn't work very well with lcd monitors, so if you have a flat screen you're out of luck unless you want to go anaglyph.
The ENVIRONMENT??? hello, they're making these out of SAND for crying out loud!
Yeah, the environment.:)
Chips may be made out of silicon, but there are a whole host of other toxic chemicals that are used in the manufacturing process that you don't receive in the box when you buy your shiny new graphics accelerator.
Does this reduction in size really matter? I mean, it's great that graphics companies can use lower quantities of resources to feed consumer demand (the environment, remember?), but does this particular advance really matter? I'll get excited when price points for new high-end graphics cards get much lower, performance significantly exceeds the curve, or a switch is made to a _much_ smaller manufacturing process (e.g. two digit nanometers).
I guess it just has to do with how much you need to have a faster graphics card than all your friends?
Calling copyright violations theft _is_ a wordgame.
Anyway, I see your point - that the dictionary definition of "stealing" and the information age definition of stealing (the one that takes into account the difference between physical property and intellectual property) are not the same. I also realize that this is probably a troll, considering your vitriolic (hah! I'm going to make you look that one up yourself.:) ) language and unpopular (though more importantly poorly argued) opinion.
However, considering others could read my original post and come to the same conclusion you did, I think I should explain myself a little bit better. What I was getting at was this:
Information and physical objects have different properties and cannot be treated the same way. Here's an example using two statements. Someone who "sorta" gets the difference between information and physical objects would say something like the following:
If someone you know has a music cd that both of you enjoy, you can make a copy of that cd and get the benefits of ownership of that music without depriving your friend of the same. If someone you know has a car that you like, you cannot obtain ownership of it without depriving your friend of the same, assuming of course you can't go out and buy one.
Someone who really understands the difference between information and physical objects would say the following:
If someone you know has a music cd, a piece of digital media, which is arranged in such a way that a machine can read it and reproduce a song that both of you enjoy, you can make a copy of that information onto another piece of digital (or even analog) media and get the benefits of ownership of media arranged in such a way that it represents identical information without depriving your friend of the same. If someone you know has a car that you like, you cannot obtain ownership of it without depriving your friend of the same, assuming of course you can't go out and buy one.
Hear the difference? It's all about 1984. In 1984, those charged with the responsibility of creating newspeak (the language that everyone will eventually use) are primarily concerned with cutting down the number of words available and squishing meanings together such that it would be impossible to express certain ideas. For example, "good" means both "good" as we understand the word today, and "in keeping with the views of the goverment". Saying, "The government is good," would be like saying, "A cat is a cat." -- a pretty obvious statement. Conversely, saying "I am not in keeping with the views of the government," would mean, "I am bad," or in newspeak, "I am ungood." It would be impossible to verbalize disagreement with the government without expressing to others what a distasteful person you must be.
Notice how the example person that doesn't really understand, on a deep level, the difference between information and physical objects squishes the concept of information and the media that represents it by its internal arragement of matter together, while the example person who really understands is able to separate the two. This is what I was talking about. Melded meanings and incorrect inferences impede communication. In fact, you read my statement (First, there is no such thing as stealing a movie.) and took it to mean that it's my opinion that because copying a movie is not stealing a movie, copying a movie is not wrong.
Now, please. Don't try to rationalize [m-w.com] your actions with these egregious [m-w.com] claims, it's just ridiculous [m-w.com] and pedantic [m-w.com]. Just call a spade [m-w.com] a spade [m-w.com].
Rationalize my actions? Who ever said that I copy movies, anyway?
Whether or not copying a movie is wrong is a different and much larger debate. Whether or not information and physical objects can be treated the same way is not. It's a fundamental fact that they can't.
Slashdot Mirror
[...] "How do I create a new spreadsheet?" (why you don't think it's File>New in OSS I'm not sure) [...]
/" philosophies have their merits and contribute to the extreme (and extremely useful) scriptability of nearly every action.
/mnt/floppy/whatever.
You're right. Bad example. I should have said: "How do I set my page margins and change my spacing settings to double globally?" That's not always in the same place.
Linux development might as well stop now then. [...] "How do I format a floppy?" or "Where's my D: drive?"
This is not a problem with linux; it's a problem with desktop GUI software. You're right in that most non-geeks are more comfortable with (and I would go so far as to say prefer) viewing data storage devices (cd-roms, floppies, hard drives, usb microstorage doodads, etc...) as separate icons representing separate hardware rather than all merged into one directory tree like linux does. However, the unix "all devices are files" and "every file that the system has access to can be found under
The solution? Have the desktop GUI software query the kernel as to what data storage devices the system has access to (devfs works great for this) and present icons representing them in a "My Computer" type interface. Then simply interpret any URIs starting with floppy: (such as floppy:images/picture.png) as
Of course then you run up against the original problem I was talking about: more than one software package competing to perform the same task. What if the GNOME team decides that representing storage devices as above is a great idea (so much so that they change the standard file dialog boxes in gtk apps so that they represent data this way), but the KDE team thinks it's a silly idea? What is the user to do who really likes the change GNOME made, but needs (for example) the ability to browse tar files without unpacking them in her file manager? Use GNOME some of the time, and switch to KDE at others? Send emails begging the GNOME team to add tar browsing or pleading with the KDE team to change their minds about devices? Give up and go back to windows where she has the interface she wants and can look through tars with Easyzip?
Please look here.
I dont see the problem you are talking about. The number of office suites available is irrelevent. If they all adhere to open standard document formats You can use any office suite to open documents created in any other office suite.
If they all adhere to open standard document formats. The problem is they don't. Even if there were an open standard document format that every open source office product supported, all office suites would still need to read and write MS Office files. Sure, you could save your document in the open format and convert it using an office suite that does support MS formats, but that's more work than users are willing to do; besides, if the conversion were anything less than perfect, it wouldn't be an option for serious work. Documents can start to look pretty run down after multiple passes through an imperfect document converter.
That seems to make multiple office suites a good thing because people can pick the one that does things the way they are most comfortable with. There's no need for them to get confused trying to learn a new suite because theirs will open any standards compliant file.
What about people that are introduced to an open source office software suite at home and then switch to a different one at work because it's the new company-mandated standard? They have to re-learn basic skills. Multiple open source office software suites also fracture the support base. It's nice to be able to lean into the cubicle next to you and say, "Hey Dan, how do I do X?" You can't do this when Dan is using a different suite -- he won't be able to answer your question. Unless a company wants to double the training requirements for their support staff, the help desk won't be able to answer your question either. In addition, developer time is divided by multiple projects. If you have 4 talented developers that want to contribute to OSS and 4 office suites, each office suite gets fewer developers. With one office suite, that project can take on as many developers as it can use. I'm not saying that more developers always equals better software (sometimes the opposite is true), but it's better to be turning developers down than starving for volunteers.
On top of that, since they are all open source, if one develops a compelling feature the others need, the others can add that functionality to themselves. So again, no reason for people to switch office suites.
Just because two projects are OSS, there's no reason to think that code can be easily ported between them. OpenOffice and Productive may (and probably do) have radically different architectures.
I realize most people probably won't agree, but I'm incredibly thankful this thing didn't make it past the beta stage for linux and windows and might not be released under the gpl. I guess that might be considered a loss, as I'm sure it contains some great code that other OSS developers could use or draw from, but it will prevent anyone from finishing the port. In a software category like this (one that's so critical to broadened acceptance of linux on the desktop) I'm a firm believer that competition between products is actually a bad thing.
;)
When all of the competitors in a market are OSS*, more product choice does not equal more freedom. That's kinda what the GPL is all about -- one person (or company) can't run off with the source and deprive the OSS community of the best piece of ______ software it ever had. On the contrary -- with the need normally satisfied by inter-product competition is taken resolved in another way, more product choice equals more confusion. Users like to get comfortable with a method for accomplishing a task and stick to it. "How do I create a new spreadsheet, again?" is not a question users want to have to ask more than once every five years; if they're forced to, they'll go back to what they were already comfortable with.
*The market I'm talking about is inclusion in linux distros. I'm well aware that MS Office is not OSS.
Gnutella servents can already get around port blocking - they can use random ports every time if the user enables the option (there's a field in gnet pong packets for the port number). As for getting past content screening, there's a simple solution: diffie-hellman key exchange before _any_ other network conversation, followed by data encrypted using the symmetric cypher du jour. ISPs _can't_ know what data is being transferred without executing a man in the middle attack. Since this has to be done at the beginning of the connection, the ISP has to modify the very first data sent by its customer, the ISP has two options:
1. Not know what data is being transferred.
2. Block or mutilate all traffic it can't identify.
If it decides it really doesn't want to know what's being said, great. It's none of their business. If it decides to block any traffic it can't identify, it will face customer backlash. Users may not be aware and active enough to fight monthly transfer caps, but they sure do complain when they can't connect. If it tries to execute man in the middle attacks, it will succeed if the traffic is p2p, but it can't know ahead of time whether or not that will happen. If it tries to snoop an arbitrary new connection that turns out to carry p2p data, the ISP will be able to see the data that's being transferred. If that connection ends up being something non-p2p, the first part of the connection will be garbled beyond recognition and the connection attempt will fail.
Of course, there's nothing you can do about transfer rate caps and monthly quotas, but if that becomes a problem it's really your own fault. If you not only continue to elect representatives that voted for deregulation and caused the gross lack of broadband competition we have today (or even allow them to be elected by not telling everyone you know how owned they are by special interests), but also stay with companies that implement monthly data tranfer caps, you really have nobody to blame but yourself.
You can make a difference. Being a vocal, informed advocate works. A polite but firm letter containing the word "constituent" works better. The same letter but with money works best. Enough money virtually guarantees you'll be heard and obeyed.
For the record, I turned 18 after the last election (but I put my voter registration card in the mail the day after my birthday), and I'm switching from Cox (max 2GB down per day or 30GB down per month, whichever is lower/max 1 GB up per day or 7.5 GB up per month, whichever is lower [Yes. They _just_ implemented this in my area.]) to DSL (no transfer limits, but mind-bogglingly incompetent tech support).
This is an awful idea! It's been asked over and over again: Who decides what is safe for kids? Since there are so many differing opinions on what is ok, it only makes sense to let the parents decide individually.
.us domain (or tld, I've seen both reported), there are no ongoing costs. After the tax incentives are repealed, web page authors will be forced to rate their pages if they want to be seen.
Specific metadata needs to be available for content which can then be filtered by policy. There's already a well defined system in place to support this: ICRA (formerly RSACi). A simple tag on each web page (or just the root for the site) tells what content the page or site contains. It can then be left up to parents to set access permissions, like no viewing of nudity except in an artistic context, or no graphic violence.
Labeling can't be mandated directly, but here's an easy way to make ICRA universal:
1. Give tax incentives to businesses that use ICRA labels, and make it a crime to misrepresent a site by placing incorrect ICRA labels in pages. There wouldn't be any legal suits (at least any with merit) over page misrepresentation as ICRA tags describe in very concrete terms what a page contains (e.g. full frontal nudity, descriptions of drug use, etc...) rather than value judgements (e.g. kid safe).
2. Wait until ICRA becomes mainstream, then ship browsers that default to blocking sites that don't rate themselves.
3. Remove the tax incentives.
Unlike creating a new
I'm not saying anything new here. This has been around for a long time.
What an odd and disturbing trend. People publicly admitting that they are unable to perform tasks that tens of thousands of other people have performed with little or no trouble. [...] I used to get pissed off at people who would glibly and gleefully admit that "they did not understand math" or "computers confused them" as if math and computer skills were somehow optional in this world.
You're right. Math and computer skills are absolutely necessary for everyday life just like reading and writing, although perhaps not to the exact same degree. Similarly, and increasingly as time passes, they are essential skills to being an informed citizen (who votes with his or her rights) and consumer (who votes with his or her wallet). Anyone without a solid understanding of computers and digital information is set up to lose out big time.
Now I am going to have to make room in my big ass loser bag for people who are unable to install linux.
BZZT! Wrong. You need to make room in your big ass loser bag for yourself and anyone else who understands technology. When there is a widespread ignorance of and resistance to using Free software, everyone loses. The existance Palladium itself is not a threat to the survival of OSS and the freedom of information; however, the result of combining a cleverly devised public key crypography scheme, terrible legislation like the DMCA, and a bunch of ignorant, sheep-like users is that the universal perception of information is perverted into something false and harmful. You may see that, "If you can see it, you can copy it," is a basic principle of the physics of information, but with enough experience with commercial software and DRM "solutions", I can guarantee you the average consumer can be convinced otherwise.
There are two ways you can approach this problem:
1. People are too stupid and lazy to migrate en masse to free software. Since people won't switch, everyone's screwed.
2. Free software, on the whole, is not usable enough to tempt the average user or create large numbers of converts. Unless software gets easier to use in the near future, everyone's screwed.
If you go with #1, you give up all your power to correct our disasterous course towards unbeatable proprietary domination of the software market. You lose. Please step into the bag. If you go with #2, the opposite happens. You may not be able to change the way everyone thinks, but you sure can develop usable software. When you bitch and complain about how incredibly stupid people are, you pull yourself and everyone else away from a constructive solution to the very problem that irritates you. When you realize what you DO have the ability to accomplish, you are empowered.
Help make newbies comfortable. Help save your future.
I have three 40gb hard drives and am looking for a similar solution. Basicly, I want 20gb for NTFS (win2k), 20gb for ext3 (linux), and 80gb of shared fat32 (raid0) space. I'm gonna play around with this over the next few days. If I need info, can I send you an e-mail?
You can send me an email, but I can't guarantee I'll be able to respond right away. It's the end of the semester and I have finals coming up.
Two things you might want to keep in mind:
-From the numbers you gave, it sounds like you want to split one 40gb disk between the two OSs and set up the other two in raid0 (just because everything divides up so nicely). It's more awkward with two OSs and three disks (I have two OSs and two disks), but if you can manage to involve all three disks in the array you'll get a significant performance boost. You won't quite max out a 32 bit 33MHz pci bus, but you'll come close (at least in sustained read transfers).
-Theoretically, you should be able to format partitions of up to 2TB with fat32; however, windows 2000 and xp will only let you format partitions of up to 32GB -- well below what you need. If you end up formatting it with ntfs, be aware that linux write support for ntfs can destroy your data, so don't enable it. Also, some distros (redhat at least) don't ship with ntfs support for legal reasons. You have to hunt around on the net for an add-in rpm or compile the kernel yourself.
Have you thought about drafting a howto?
Sorry, but I don't think there are enough people that want to share win/lin software raid setups to make it worthwhile.
Do you _need_ to boot from CD as a requirement? I am sure you know, but you could load from floppy or loadlin and even if loadlin doesn't work, you could install an older version (Win98?) of Windows and load it from there. In this extreme case, you could initially use the same partition you'd use for Linux for the Win98 install, and go on from there.
Not really. It's more a matter of convenience since I try every major distro every few releases.
Do you know exactly what the problem is? I've never had a problem with my software raid setup.
Do you mean it woudn't boot the linux cds at all, or it would boot the kernel and then not mount the root, because the kernel didn't recognize the device[?]
It wouldn't boot the linux cds at all. The card's bios would not detect that the CD was bootable, that is it would totally miss the ElTorito-compatible 2.88MB floppy disk image on the cd if the CD was not a Windows 2000 Professional or XP install disc. Once I moved the DVD drive over onto a motherboard controller, redhat 7.3 installed perfectly. It even loaded linux's pdc202xx driver, detected my CD-RW (which was still on the controller with the buggy bios), and configured ide-scsi emulation so that cd burning would work.
I'm using IDE raid on my home desktop right now, but I'm using software raid as opposed to a hardware controller. I have two Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40GB hard drives hooked up as masters to my primary and secondary motherboard IDE ports. I also have a DVD-ROM hooked up as secondary slave, and a Promise Ultra133TX2 controller with a CD-RW hooked up to its first port. Both hard drives are sectioned into a 3GB primary 1st partition and a 34GB (yes, the drives are only 40GB when you're in marketing land) 2nd primary partition. Windows 2000 is installed on the first drive's 3GB partition, and redhat linux 7.3 is installed on the second drive in the same place. Both OSs share the combined 68GB RAID 0 set, which is formatted with NTFS, made from the combined second partitions. The only problem is that linux can't write to the array because NTFS write support under linux is currently "DANGEROUS" according to the driver's author and I keep important data on there. (Yes, I know about the dangers of using RAID0 and I back up regularly.) It'd sure work a whole lot better if that driver were finished, though. (hint hint, Legato Systems, Inc.) ;)
:D After a quick format with NTFS (the partiton was too big to format with FAT32), I was in business.
/dev/md0
/dev/hda2 /dev/hdc2
/etc/raidtab, ran raid0run /dev/md0, and added a line to /etc/fstab. (I read online that WinNT 4.0's software raid driver uses 64K chunks.)
;) As a bonus, I also get to keep my standard partition table as well as compatibility with non-M$ disk editing/management/recovery tools.
Getting the two OSs' software raid drivers to play nicely together was an "adventure", mostly due to Win2K's insistance on turning the disks into "dynamic disks" before letting me use its built-in RAID functionality, meaning it wanted to wipe out my old partition table, replace it with a single partition taking up the entire disk, and create a new system of partition organization inside the dummy standard partition. After a lot of reading, I found out that Windows NT 4.0 supported "stripe sets" using standard partitions, and that Windows 2000, when installed over an old copy of NT4, would support the "legacy" software RAID drive. Windows 2000 would not, however, allow me to create new legacy stripe sets for compatibility with other OSs. Stupid Micro$oft. So all I had to do was fake Win2K into thinking it had been installed over an old copy of NT4 which had been using its stripe set functionality.
The first thing I had to do was create partitions. I opened up linux fdisk and allocated 3GB on each disk to my OSs, one for linux and one for windows, and created two partitions, each one taking up the rest of the space on its disk, and set their types to 87h (NT stripe set [thanks to whoever put the L command in linux fdisk!]). After installing Windows 2000 on the first disk's first partition, I needed to get my hands on a couple of tools that didn't come with windows 2000: Windows NT 4 Disk Administrator and MS's fault tolerant disk set disaster recovery tool, FTEDIT. After spending about 6 hours searching online, I finally found a download site for FTEDIT - MS's web site says you can get it free from them, but it provides no download link. NTDA was a bit easier. Since MS service packs replace OS files, and somewhere in NT4's history a bug or problem had been found in NTDA, that file was in the service pack 6a for NT4. Service packs check to see if you're using the correct OS _after_ they decompress themselves, and they're nice enough to display an error message telling you this ("Whoops. You just wasted a whole bunch of time downloading a huge file you didn't need. Sorry!") before they delete the decompression directory. Figuring that out took a while, but snagging the executable during decompression was easy.
I ran NTDA, which populated the "missing" DISKS key in the windows registry (Win2K stores disk information in a different place from NT4), and told FTEDIT that, yes, I really did already have a software RAID 0 set on those drives, and that windows NT had died on me and I had to restore it. After a reboot, "Drive D" appeared in my computer. 68GB and unformatted. YAY!
Getting linux to see the array was much easier. I added
raiddev
raid-level 0
nr-raid-disks 2
persistent-superblock 0
chunk-size 64
device
raid-disk 0
device
raid-disk 1
to
Btw, yes, I know linux has support for MS's dynamic disk scheme. I enjoy tweaking and doing new things, even if it means days spend reading about Windows.
"So," you're probably wondering, "why did Erpo spend all that time setting up a RAID0 set (presumably for extra performance) and then go and do a stupid thing like put a DVD-ROM drive on the same ata cable as one of the disks when he has an extra ata port on his add-in controller that he's not using?" Thanks for asking. It's because Promise's bios on the Ultra133TX2 card was broken. The company "Promised" me it would allow me to boot from CD, but in reality it only will let me do so when I want to boot from a windows installation CD. Not just any windows installation CD, either. It had to be Windows 2000 Professional or XP, which I refuse to use.
It wouldn't recognize my Windows 98 SE cd, or any of my linux distros. I didn't have a choice about the DVD drive if I wanted to install linux. Just now, months after I got the card and sent promise and email, they released a bios update that claims to fix the issue. If it works I'll be moving my optical drives around. Even with the DVD drive, the performance isn't too bad - about 80MB/sec at the beginning of the disk, and it slowly drops to 50MB/sec at the end.
It's good to hear about new alternatives to gasoline-powered vehicles, but what we really need is a uniform (non-gasoline) fuel type for all mass market autos. It's going to be hard enough to make hydrogen (or biodiesel, or methanol, or ultra low sulfur diesel) pumps common enough to get people thinking seriously about alternative fuels, but the competition between these schemes is hurting adoption of environmentally friendly vehicles like the competition between desktop environments is hurting adoption of GNU/Linux. People want (and are comfortable with) uniformity. Asking Joe Average to make "the switch" is a big request, but when he has to ask "To which alternative?" the battle is pretty much over. When he learns it's all going to be different at his friend's house and at work, your chances are already dead, buried, reincarnated as a racoon, and run over by a semi (fueled by conventional diesel and running a Microsoft-powered cockpit GPS navigator).
<asbestos_suit>I suppose I'm just begging for flames by making the GNU/Linux analogy, but I think it's the best one considering the situation and the audience.</asbestos_suit>
What I got from your post was that you use ShowEQ as a real-time map to let you:
-Avoid challenges your in-game character was not ready to meet.
-Find people and things that would enhance the position of your in-game character or others.
You purchased a product for a fixed sum (the price of the game and whatever expansion packs were added) and are now paying for a service on a monthly basis (the maintenance of servers that allow you to play the game with others and access to those servers). What must be recognized is that you have decided that the product you purchased is inadequate, and that those who provide you with the service you are paying for are trying to stop you from changing your everquest experience.
Your use of ShowEQ is just as bad as a consumer's use of DeCSS to decrypt a dvd for backup purposes, but not for the reasons you think.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with getting full access to data that is sent to you or to a program being run on hardware that you own. In fact, it's impossible to prevent you from doing so. It's a terrible idea because the company that is providing the good or service is trying to stop you. The MPAA doesn't want you to be able to decrypt DVDs because that allows you to copy them at possible financial detriment to the MPAA. Sony doesn't want you to be able to decrypt (and read and use) everquest data...well...I can't know exactly what they're thinking, but I would guess it's either because:
1. It makes the game easier by eliminating artificial challenges they've introduced (which is all any game boils down to, artificial challenges) and thus possibly causing you to get bored and stop paying.
OR
2. It allows players to abuse the game and make it so difficult for other players that they become frustrated and stop playing (and so stop paying).
Anyway, for whatever reasons, Sony doesn't want you to do it and they're taking technological steps to make it harder. When you use any means to circumvent a limitation placed on a product or service rather than putting consumer pressure on the company to remove the limitation, you are anesthetizing yourself to the process that keeps companies from hurting consumers. The very idea that everquest should encrypt its data packets or the MPAA should encrypt dvds is totally unacceptable! The MPAA must understand that selling and renting plastic discs containing valuable data is not a valid business model in an environment that obeys the simple laws of the physics of information (i.e. if you can see it you can copy it). Sony should know that if it sends information to someone, that person can use it whatever way they choose. So what's the proper course of action in these situations, meaning the one that holds up the system that, when employed, keeps big corporations from virtually raping consumers and taking their rights?
DVDs:
The MPAA _must_ find a new way of making money - this isn't as hard as it sounds. People are _very_ willing to pay for the movie experience of sitting in a huge theater with a big screen they could never hope to own themselves and a sound system that blows them away in an acoustically managed environment for two hours while they are told an amazing audio/visual story they've never heard before, at least not in that form. In other words, it's a glorified form of equipment rental. Sure, movies can be recorded with a crappy camcorder and put on the net, but a blurry, washed out, 320x240 picture with tinny sound and the occasional crunch of popcorn as the pirate enjoys the flick can't compare to the theater experience. As for post-theater revenue, video rental stores could be converted into high-speed online digital movie wherehouses. No DRM is necessary, as high quality movies take up quite a bit of space and consumers would be forced to delete old movies to make room for freshly downloaded ones. I would imagine a modest fee per download, and perhaps a monthly membership fee. For the technophobic or those not willing to wait for the download, the current model works fine. Media to hold copies still costs money.
EQ:
Two very simple courses of action:
1. If it's not in the player's viewing frustum, don't send them information about it. That way there's no extra "EQ" information in the datastream to "Show". Perhaps characters with a special ability ("Sense Danger" maybe?) could be sent special precaching hints to make monster loads faster (it makes sense that those with a sense for danger would be able to more quickly react to it when it does become directly visable). I.e., "Game engine: preload huge_ugly_beatdown_montster.mdl, and tell the user that there's a huge_ugly_beatdown_monster 'somewhere close by'". This allows for the benefits of preloading still without giving away any extra information to a datastream tapping program. Also, since the datastream would not need to be encrypted, that's less work for the client and server cpus, possibly delaying an expensive server upgrade for verant.
2. Don't change the protocol and add the map feature you want.
Either way, it's a better solution than what they're doing now. No matter how good ShowEQ gets, if Sony goes with solution 1 there's absolutely nothing you can do - you can't see information that isn't being sent to you. If they go with solution 2, you'll get exactly what you want.
Please. Write to Sony. Organize a protest. Do whatever you can. I can't stop you from using ShowEQ, but I can guarantee you that you'll work harder for a progressive solution without it.
First there is all the licensing bullcrap which we have even now.
Do that many consumers read or even know (or care) what's in MS EULAs? They should, but do they?
But then throw in all the Palladium etc crap [...]
How many consumers know that "Trusted Computing" means that MS and the government can trust your computer to do what they tell it to, and not that you can trust your computer to do what you tell it to?
[...] and there will be mass converts no doubt
To what? Mac OSX which is fantastic but a very well kept secret or GNU/Linux which <asbestos_suit>just isn't ready for mass desktop adoption </asbestos_suit>?
At the risk of sounding like a troll, I think the "slow and steady" progress in the GNU/Linux community isn't going to win the race against MS - in order to encourage users to switch, it must offer something beyond what Windows does. In Erpo's-the-emperor-land, I would imagine these changes would be enough:
1. Reduce confusion and diluted developer effort through reducing choice. Pick the project in each category (i.e. desktop environment) that has the most promise and popular support, and kill off all the others. KDE alone, GNOME alone, or something else alone. One desktop environment = users that can get comfortable with GNU/Linux and stay comfortable with it. Choice is necessary in a capitalist marketplace to prevent one company from becoming dominant and hurting consumers with its monopoly powers by keeping prices high and slowing product improvement in order to lower expenses. KDE and GNOME are both free, and while it could be argued that friendly (and not so friendly) competition among developers spurs both sides to new levels of productivity, it's my opinion that the newbie confusion (when newbies are 99.9% of the population) is more harmful than slowed development due to a lack of interproject competition. Remeber, we're in Erpo's-the-emperor-land.
2. Innovate ahead of MS. GNU/Linux on the desktop needs to change the way people work for the better (e.g. through a metadata-rich filesystem built on a database) _before_ MS does and present an enticing work and play environment. People don't realize how much MS dominance in the OS market is hurting them (their freedom, not just their wallets) and how necessary a Free (as in speech) OS is. On the other hand, if GNU/Linux simply works better (and if this means moving toward interface compatibility with MS to lower the learning curve so be it) people will pick it up in a heartbeat.
In my opinion at least, the community needs to start moving in this direction right away. Why? Now there's a deadline. It's called Palladium and it's set for 2004.
You have a period of 30 days to watch the movie BUT, only 24 hours to watch it once you hit "play".
HELLO? The downloader/player program is software running on open hardware. All copy protection schemes for information are inherently crackable, but these kinds should be easy for a competent software engineer with access to good debugging tools. I can't wait for these to start appearing on the net, in ogg multimedia containers no less.
They'll transition from Goods [...] to Services
I see your idea, and I like the concept of having live theater as a really popular part our culture, but I think they'll transition from "goods" to "services" in another way. The "goods" they produce now aren't valuable - that is they are only pieces of media. There's a big price gap between a $1 blank cd-r and a $25 music cd. The valuable part of what they sell is the information encoded on that media which can be infinitely copied and doesn't behave like a regular physical good because it isn't a physical good.
By finding talent, promoting it, channeling that talent into finding valuable combinations of ones and zeroes, recording those bits on compact discs, and distributing them all over the country, they're already providing a service. It's the recognition of this service as the core of the industry that will save them - people pay them for recording information onto CDs that can be bought, not for the CDs themselves. What they really need to do is work out a system of payment where they can produce a work and then hold it for "ransom" until consumers have paid a certain RIAA-specified total. If the total is met, the work is released. If the total is not met, the money is returned to those who paid it. The RIAA does not disappear, their economic position as promoter and risktaker stays intact, and everyone gets to keep their jobs.
What about the freeloaders, or those that don't contribute to the release of a certain work, but listen to it anyway? Well, if they like it enough to pay towards the release of the next work by the same author, that's an extra sale. If they don't like it, that's exactly the kind of person who wouldn't have bought a cd under the old model. What's to stop the RIAA from setting rediculously high "ransom" totals? Only the same thing that stops them from pricing CDs at $60.00 now. What's to stop consumers from repeatedly not meeting totals to drive down future ransom totals? Only the same thing that stops them from organizing boycotts of CDs to drive down prices today.
[...] Services, which (as of yet) are copy-proof.
"Production of new art" services will always be "copy-proof". The reason we're having this "problem" with piracy right now is that information must be un-copy-proof the same way that matter must react to the presence of other matter through the force of gravity. It's a fundamental fact of information physics. In the same way, generation of _new_ art is fundamentally "copy-proof". Yes, you can copy already-produced art, but the creation of new art can only happen when a (perhaps) talented individual puts forth a creative effort.
Minipax unuse openful computerwrite. Refs uncommercialism. Doubleplus ungood.
--The grammar police.
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene does a great job of explaining relativity, quantum mechanics, and how superstring theory makes them all play nicely. ISBN# 0-375-70811-1 if you're interested.
Materials (buildings, glass, etc) will react differently to the different frequencies but if this is not a limitation, there really is no reason not to move to shorter wavelengths (higher frequencies) as the band-width is somehow controled by the frequency (beyond the scope of this post)
But isn't the way materials react to light a limitation? Radio happens to be a great place in the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit and receive data because it can pass through some solid objects. Light bounces off of solid objects, which is how we are able to see them. It seems that these cell phones would need a direct line of sight (ugh...grammar check time, slashdot editors) to the cell towers to be able to work.
I've heard of "cloudbouncing", lighting up clouds with lasers to transmit data while another entity watches and receives, but you can't always count on there being a cloud around when you need one (that both you and the tower can see), and it seems like such a medium would be prone to congestion.
This is what puzzles me. It wasn't answered in the article, and I haven't read a post that explains what's going on.
A different technology in widespread use employs a method called wavelength division multiplexing, in which each cell phone uses a different wavelength of light, according to the researchers. In contrast, optical CDMA would encode each pulse, or bit of information, across a segment of wavelengths. The receiver uses a key to decode the signal and re-create the original pulse.
This sounds a lot like Ultra Wideband to me. Also, I'm guessing from reading the article that the author is confusing visible light with radio EMR.
...there's a much cheaper option. nVidia provides drivers that will render scenes in full-color anaglyph so you can dig out your old red/cyan glasses and run the latest 3d (and oldest) 3d games in real 3d. The drivers work for any program that does the 3d math correctly in opengl or direct3d. I have yet to come across a program that doesn't work with them.
Sure, the image looks a little funky, and the framerate is half what it normally is, but you get this with any 3d scheme that uses a normal crt monitor. The glasses they talk about in this article also effectively halve the frame rate by halving the refresh rate per eye so you'll have to deal with quite a bit of flicker. Unless you can run your monitor at 1024x768 @ 120Hz vertical refresh, be prepared to run at lower resolutions. Oh yeah: page flipping 3d doesn't work very well with lcd monitors, so if you have a flat screen you're out of luck unless you want to go anaglyph.
The ENVIRONMENT??? hello, they're making these out of SAND for crying out loud!
:)
Yeah, the environment.
Chips may be made out of silicon, but there are a whole host of other toxic chemicals that are used in the manufacturing process that you don't receive in the box when you buy your shiny new graphics accelerator.
Does this reduction in size really matter? I mean, it's great that graphics companies can use lower quantities of resources to feed consumer demand (the environment, remember?), but does this particular advance really matter? I'll get excited when price points for new high-end graphics cards get much lower, performance significantly exceeds the curve, or a switch is made to a _much_ smaller manufacturing process (e.g. two digit nanometers).
I guess it just has to do with how much you need to have a faster graphics card than all your friends?
I think Znork said it best:
:) ) language and unpopular (though more importantly poorly argued) opinion.
Calling copyright violations theft _is_ a wordgame.
Anyway, I see your point - that the dictionary definition of "stealing" and the information age definition of stealing (the one that takes into account the difference between physical property and intellectual property) are not the same. I also realize that this is probably a troll, considering your vitriolic (hah! I'm going to make you look that one up yourself.
However, considering others could read my original post and come to the same conclusion you did, I think I should explain myself a little bit better. What I was getting at was this:
Information and physical objects have different properties and cannot be treated the same way. Here's an example using two statements. Someone who "sorta" gets the difference between information and physical objects would say something like the following:
If someone you know has a music cd that both of you enjoy, you can make a copy of that cd and get the benefits of ownership of that music without depriving your friend of the same. If someone you know has a car that you like, you cannot obtain ownership of it without depriving your friend of the same, assuming of course you can't go out and buy one.
Someone who really understands the difference between information and physical objects would say the following:
If someone you know has a music cd, a piece of digital media, which is arranged in such a way that a machine can read it and reproduce a song that both of you enjoy, you can make a copy of that information onto another piece of digital (or even analog) media and get the benefits of ownership of media arranged in such a way that it represents identical information without depriving your friend of the same. If someone you know has a car that you like, you cannot obtain ownership of it without depriving your friend of the same, assuming of course you can't go out and buy one.
Hear the difference? It's all about 1984. In 1984, those charged with the responsibility of creating newspeak (the language that everyone will eventually use) are primarily concerned with cutting down the number of words available and squishing meanings together such that it would be impossible to express certain ideas. For example, "good" means both "good" as we understand the word today, and "in keeping with the views of the goverment". Saying, "The government is good," would be like saying, "A cat is a cat." -- a pretty obvious statement. Conversely, saying "I am not in keeping with the views of the government," would mean, "I am bad," or in newspeak, "I am ungood." It would be impossible to verbalize disagreement with the government without expressing to others what a distasteful person you must be.
Notice how the example person that doesn't really understand, on a deep level, the difference between information and physical objects squishes the concept of information and the media that represents it by its internal arragement of matter together, while the example person who really understands is able to separate the two. This is what I was talking about. Melded meanings and incorrect inferences impede communication. In fact, you read my statement (First, there is no such thing as stealing a movie.) and took it to mean that it's my opinion that because copying a movie is not stealing a movie, copying a movie is not wrong.
Now, please. Don't try to rationalize [m-w.com] your actions with these egregious [m-w.com] claims, it's just ridiculous [m-w.com] and pedantic [m-w.com]. Just call a spade [m-w.com] a spade [m-w.com].
Rationalize my actions? Who ever said that I copy movies, anyway?
Whether or not copying a movie is wrong is a different and much larger debate. Whether or not information and physical objects can be treated the same way is not. It's a fundamental fact that they can't.