I work with consumers and a good 85-90% of the time you walk into a customer's house and sitting there is a Lexmark all in one.
Have you ever tried getting one of those bastards working in Linux?
Mythologians claim there was an age when Lexmark printers actually printed something, but rational people dismiss such superstitions as highly unlikely. Most people who own one seem to be saying "oh, the printer side died, I'm just using the scanner". =)
I've just told people to buy HP lasers instead if they want something that's compatible with many OSes/different OS versions, and not have problems all the time. (And for what it's worth, the one time I tried using a Lexmark all-in-one scanner in Ubuntu, it worked pretty fine in SANE. I think.)
Considering it took 16 years for it to become widely available in its original form, I'm not sure I'd exactly call that ineffective.
But considering the better-than-original no-obnoxious-copy-protection-whatsoever edition was published in no time flat and everyone was happy with it all these years, I would guess that people who want the "original form" are in minority... =)
An unexpected development! A Creative Commons -licensed book about copyright and licensing! I would have never expected them to-... okay, I expected them to do this.
Just a small suggestion to people: Creative Commons was founded in 2001, and as such, there's been just a little bit of discussion about copyright and licensing (and consequently why CC rocks) since then. Can we finally move away from meta-stuff and start to celebrate the real-world use of Creative Commons licenses? Please???
I'd really love it if Slashdot would post more about Creative Commons -licensed (and other free-culture) stuff that interests geeks, but I'd also love it if we would step away from discussion about copyrights and licensing in itself and touting CC as the main selling point. Can we get away from the mechanism and move on to the substance?
... of incorporating DRM into any product with "Grand Theft" in the title somehow escapes me.
Hmm, and here I'm playing Thief II: The Metal Age off of a directly dumped.iso (I have the actual CDs right here, but still)... Though this is Linux/Wine and secdrv.sys doesn't do damn. =)
This does nothing to stop determined piracy - we know it, and they know it. What it _does_ do is deter casual copying.
Well, that's how the usual explanation goes. I don't understand what this means today, much less what it did years ago: Determined pirates crack the game, and casual pirates got to $insert_random_bittorrent_site and grab a determinedly cracked copy. The copy protections get cracked by various cracking groups, and the word tends to spread. There's no conceivable gulf between "amateur" cracking groups and professional pirates (I haven't ever heard of copy-protected cracks - have you?), and today's P2P software being what it is (both easily available and easily understood), there's no gulf between pirates of any kind and the casual copiers.
For companies like EA, this offers one really compelling feature - it kills the resale market.
Great, so I get to buy an used copy and get pissed off at a company that tramples on consumer rights and go download a crack. In other words, while it probably doesn't decrease sales or used copy sales, it generates ill will toward the company. Why do companies pay real money if the only effect is that it pisses people off?
If the Half-Life engine source isn't available, it's likely due to it being a pre-GPL fork of the Quake engine (or something like that).
Yup, Half-Life was released (eh) 10 years ago, while Quake engine source was released December 21, 1999. Plus, I believe it didn't affect any of the licensing deals; id Software still licenses their past engines for non-GPL use if anyone's still paying for them, and GPL source releases hasn't stopped them from using their original source (as is full within their rights as the copyright holder) - like how they're now releasing Quake Live, which is based on Q3A code.
Seriously, NASA's gotta come up with financing somehow... add some hokey 1920's ragtime music to the it, speed it up just unnaturally fast and they just might be sitting on a viral video here!
I'm afraid he's going to have a lot of trouble finding printer cartridges for that thing.
Eh, I know you're kidding, but if it's anything like many other old printing calculators, it's probably just got an ink pad or ribbon or something other good ol' well-understood stone age technology.
I've often wondered about our fancy new printer cartridges - how did these bloody things become so complex. But then again, I'm old enough to remember an age when thingies were actually user-serviceable. Back in the day, my father could fix everything, and now he's just as puzzled about some of these newfangled things as I am. =)
Is it just me, or does Amarok appear to be damn ugly?
In short, the beta is ugly, the final version won't be. =) Amarok 2.0 is still just a beta - I imagine the polish will come eventually...
I was just surprised that they want to woo Apple users and then they pick the ugliest imaginable rendering as a representative screenshot, when they have already demonstrated long before that the future default theme isn't all that bad and you can even customise it.
Once personal data is centralized, it has a nasty tendency to stay that way. That kind of accurate, self-managing, neatly profiled data is a marketer's wet dream.
Except that OpenID doesn't say where the data is centralised. OpenID pretty much doesn't care who does the actual authentication and how. Without your help, the marketing profilers would have to turn to the individual sites and beg for their assistance. Again.
The only thing how OpenID helps the lives of marketing profilers is that it establishes that "according to publicly available information, user A on site X is also appearing on site Y". And OpenID doesn't require the sites to expose the user's OpenID URLs, either, so we're still in the realm of massive frigging guesswork.
Having "accurate, self-managing, neatly profiled data" is sure handy for marketers. They just get annoyed if, despite this wondrous central gathering of information, they still have to do it themselves, because you can elect to not cooperate.
Just what sort of risk is involved in maintaining a database that links tediously formatted names with a 32-bit number?
Proliferation of phishing and social engineering, primarily - and let's not forget the various technical risks that DNS system as a whole has had over time.
I believe the money as a risk avoidance is to be understood as "your average small-time conman or a parents'-basement script kiddie can't afford the registration costs, and it would be prohibitively expensive even for big-time criminals to spend and immediately lose an investment that big".
Yeah, and if you want to look at the most useful and biggest-impact mods, you have to look at things like NWN1's Community Expansion Pack... this list doesn't do justice to many great single-player mods either, for any game. NWN had plenty of really amazing SP modules.
(And Arabel's still up? Cool, maybe I should revisit it one of these days...)
Well, good that some companies dare to try this. Most others are just encouraging modding but don't dare to distribute mods because they're too afraid of someone pulling a Limbo of the Lost on them (and modders have been, in rare cases, ripping off content from other games, so the fear is at least minimally justified). I hope they can just enact and enforce a strong enough policy that makes the whole thing work...
If memory serves me right, the disks you're thinking of were from Mastertronic or possibly Epyx (specifically, World Championship Karate, the only game by Epyx I had on floppy). There's a chance that it could have been one of Datasoft's games as well.
World Karate Championship, a/k/a International Karate (System 3/Epyx)? Nope, at least my copy had Atari version on Side A and Commodore 64 version on Side B.
However, I have to say I don't have my copy at hand, but I remember trying the Atari side on my C64 and predictably not getting it to work =)
Am I the only one that noticed Hey, they can only have one baby, but we'll give them 3 IP addresses? Sounds like the Chinese government is getting liberal or something
Yeah, and US Department of Defense has reserved (unless I miscalculated somewhere, could be just my uncoffeed brain speaking) 134,217,712 IP addresses for itself, which is nowhere near enough for everyone in the United States, in case there'll be a global termonuclear war and they'll need them for emergency use... =) =) Yeah, these allocation policies are so weird, all things considered!
When your WHOLE COUNTRY is behind a firewall? NAT the hell out of that! Flatten it to a/8 network in 10.0.0.0 and put it all behind one public IP. Problem solved!
Let's be overly optimistic and say China suddenly decides "whoops, we're wrong, democracy, free speech and free flow of information are good things". Then they notice their entire infrastructure has been refitted, at great frigging cost, to serve the old ideology.
Of course, if they did firewall the rest of the world in truest sense, they could probably say "yeah, we like free speech too - but who's going to pay the transition to free speech when we just NATted the whole country? Implementing free speech would be too expensive!"...
I don't suspect you'll even be able to find a FULLY compliant SMTP or HTTP client or server.
Oh, SMTP and HTTP protocols are easy as pie. But you'll need to make difference between the communications protocols and the data that they move around.
It's the presentation and interpretation of data that's spotty - and there's a good reason for that. It's not feasible to support all of those features in all situations. The protocols are designed that way, just to move the data: even if your client doesn't support, say, displaying images in the web, you can still damn well download them.
In other words, the protocols don't need to care if you don't support "ASP.NET headers" in the client, in order to be fully compliant with the HTTP specification. People use the protocols for funny purposes, it's not the fault of the HTTP protocol designers...
They're distributing it on their website. They're using Flash Video to distribute the movie in a fashion that prevents the recipient from re-distributing it. That means they're imposing illegal technological measures to prevent redistribution, which means they waived their right to distribute the work by failing to honour one of the covenents of the license.
If YouTube used DRM to protect the video so that a downloaded video could not be viewed without their authorisation, this would be an issue, but they don't - they just allow the video to be streamed and don't allow the video to be downloaded directly. You notice how the license speaks of "distributing copies" and "performing/displaying publicly"; streaming video is just one of the ways of distributing copies. You can fairly easily save the.flv or.f4v stream from YouTube and YouTube isn't doing anything in particular to stop those tools from working (aside of not giving guarantees that the internal structure of the site stays the same, which means the programs need to be updated).
What next? If website that previously hosted the video decides to take it down while keeping the file still around (just undownloadable), do you think it's a technological measure to prevent distribution, too? There's a practical limit on how far you can stretch the definitions of the licenses, you know...
How did youtube manage to convert it into a proprietary format when it is released under the Attribution-No-Derivative-Works 3.0 License?
Because transcoding process isn't creating a new derived work in the way copyright law understands it. The CC license in question, however, grants the right to "distribute copies or phonorecords of, display publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by means of a digital audio transmission the Work including as incorporated in Collective Works." The only clause in the CC license that has any bearing is the DRM clause, "When You distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work, You may not impose any technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise of the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License", and that says nothing about proprietary formats per se. I don't think anyone in CC is arguing that proprietary formats are evil as long as they don't impede with distribution.
The way I strain my logic is this: If you want to make good use of screen real estate, the tab bar has to disappear when there's only one page open in the window. This effectively dictates that you can't put the tab bar above the other page navigational controls, because no one likes it when the controls are randomly in random parts of the screen depending on the current usage situation.
Navigational features are something that every browser window needs, but the amount and very existence of tabs is something that depends on what pages you have open.
In other words, browser window (or any application window) should be divided into areas that show how you do things and what you are doing now; URL bars and buttons and bookmark bars are former, the tabs and the page content are latter.
It gets even better if some schmuck decided to use different delimiters... s!foo!bar!
What about it? Which is more readable,
$line =~ s/<(\/?)b>/<$1strong>/gi;
or:
$line =~ s!<(/?)b>!<$1strong>!gi;
And this is a non-pathological case. Please don't ask me to match URLs, it gets a bit uglier.
In my opinion, LTS is one of the worst things that kills code readability, and allowing people to pick string delimiters that fit the situation is the best possible way to make the code is legible.
Perl is ugly in many ways, but what comes to the string delimiters, it's much more elegant than many other languages, and I wish other languages would let people to pick their string delimiters too. The reason people say that Perl is a good language for regex stuff is that in other languages you get megatons of unreadable quote-character mess, while Perl lets you write regexes in clear way that you can actually make sense of later on - and same goes for other string literals.
Look up msttcorefonts, and if you're old enough, remember what what Linux desktops used to look like before 2003.
Oh, you mean that! Uh, we used to have the same fonts as Mac folks: Times and Helvetica and stuff. You know, the GPL URW++ PostScript fonts. You know, the ones that come with the GIMP in, what, 1998 or even before that?
Don't tell me people actually kept using the ugly bitmap renditions that shipped with X11? Those went first out of door!
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I work with consumers and a good 85-90% of the time you walk into a customer's house and sitting there is a Lexmark all in one. Have you ever tried getting one of those bastards working in Linux?
Mythologians claim there was an age when Lexmark printers actually printed something, but rational people dismiss such superstitions as highly unlikely. Most people who own one seem to be saying "oh, the printer side died, I'm just using the scanner". =)
I've just told people to buy HP lasers instead if they want something that's compatible with many OSes/different OS versions, and not have problems all the time. (And for what it's worth, the one time I tried using a Lexmark all-in-one scanner in Ubuntu, it worked pretty fine in SANE. I think.)
Considering it took 16 years for it to become widely available in its original form, I'm not sure I'd exactly call that ineffective.
But considering the better-than-original no-obnoxious-copy-protection-whatsoever edition was published in no time flat and everyone was happy with it all these years, I would guess that people who want the "original form" are in minority... =)
As it often happens, life imitates art, huh?
An unexpected development! A Creative Commons -licensed book about copyright and licensing! I would have never expected them to- ... okay, I expected them to do this.
Just a small suggestion to people: Creative Commons was founded in 2001, and as such, there's been just a little bit of discussion about copyright and licensing (and consequently why CC rocks) since then. Can we finally move away from meta-stuff and start to celebrate the real-world use of Creative Commons licenses? Please???
I'd really love it if Slashdot would post more about Creative Commons -licensed (and other free-culture) stuff that interests geeks, but I'd also love it if we would step away from discussion about copyrights and licensing in itself and touting CC as the main selling point. Can we get away from the mechanism and move on to the substance?
... of incorporating DRM into any product with "Grand Theft" in the title somehow escapes me.
Hmm, and here I'm playing Thief II: The Metal Age off of a directly dumped .iso (I have the actual CDs right here, but still)... Though this is Linux/Wine and secdrv.sys doesn't do damn. =)
This does nothing to stop determined piracy - we know it, and they know it. What it _does_ do is deter casual copying.
Well, that's how the usual explanation goes. I don't understand what this means today, much less what it did years ago: Determined pirates crack the game, and casual pirates got to $insert_random_bittorrent_site and grab a determinedly cracked copy. The copy protections get cracked by various cracking groups, and the word tends to spread. There's no conceivable gulf between "amateur" cracking groups and professional pirates (I haven't ever heard of copy-protected cracks - have you?), and today's P2P software being what it is (both easily available and easily understood), there's no gulf between pirates of any kind and the casual copiers.
For companies like EA, this offers one really compelling feature - it kills the resale market.
Great, so I get to buy an used copy and get pissed off at a company that tramples on consumer rights and go download a crack. In other words, while it probably doesn't decrease sales or used copy sales, it generates ill will toward the company. Why do companies pay real money if the only effect is that it pisses people off?
Actually, is it me or does it kind of look like the queen mother from the Aliens movie? Argh.
Well, to me it looked more like the final phase of Metroid Prime. Except, um, longer tentacles and floating in water, not air.
If the Half-Life engine source isn't available, it's likely due to it being a pre-GPL fork of the Quake engine (or something like that).
Yup, Half-Life was released (eh) 10 years ago, while Quake engine source was released December 21, 1999. Plus, I believe it didn't affect any of the licensing deals; id Software still licenses their past engines for non-GPL use if anyone's still paying for them, and GPL source releases hasn't stopped them from using their original source (as is full within their rights as the copyright holder) - like how they're now releasing Quake Live, which is based on Q3A code.
Seriously, NASA's gotta come up with financing somehow ... add some hokey 1920's ragtime music to the it, speed it up just unnaturally fast and they just might be sitting on a viral video here!
Yeah, I've been wondering why they don't do "NASA Presents: Space Comedy". I mean, they have plenty of hilarious material already...
I'm confused, hasn't Sam Fisher been using this for years? http://splintercell.wikia.com/wiki/Sticky_Camera
...and he stole it from Garrett, damn it! =)
I'm afraid he's going to have a lot of trouble finding printer cartridges for that thing.
Eh, I know you're kidding, but if it's anything like many other old printing calculators, it's probably just got an ink pad or ribbon or something other good ol' well-understood stone age technology.
I've often wondered about our fancy new printer cartridges - how did these bloody things become so complex. But then again, I'm old enough to remember an age when thingies were actually user-serviceable. Back in the day, my father could fix everything, and now he's just as puzzled about some of these newfangled things as I am. =)
Is it just me, or does Amarok appear to be damn ugly?
In short, the beta is ugly, the final version won't be. =) Amarok 2.0 is still just a beta - I imagine the polish will come eventually...
I was just surprised that they want to woo Apple users and then they pick the ugliest imaginable rendering as a representative screenshot, when they have already demonstrated long before that the future default theme isn't all that bad and you can even customise it.
Once personal data is centralized, it has a nasty tendency to stay that way. That kind of accurate, self-managing, neatly profiled data is a marketer's wet dream.
Except that OpenID doesn't say where the data is centralised. OpenID pretty much doesn't care who does the actual authentication and how. Without your help, the marketing profilers would have to turn to the individual sites and beg for their assistance. Again.
The only thing how OpenID helps the lives of marketing profilers is that it establishes that "according to publicly available information, user A on site X is also appearing on site Y". And OpenID doesn't require the sites to expose the user's OpenID URLs, either, so we're still in the realm of massive frigging guesswork.
Having "accurate, self-managing, neatly profiled data" is sure handy for marketers. They just get annoyed if, despite this wondrous central gathering of information, they still have to do it themselves, because you can elect to not cooperate.
Just what sort of risk is involved in maintaining a database that links tediously formatted names with a 32-bit number?
Proliferation of phishing and social engineering, primarily - and let's not forget the various technical risks that DNS system as a whole has had over time.
I believe the money as a risk avoidance is to be understood as "your average small-time conman or a parents'-basement script kiddie can't afford the registration costs, and it would be prohibitively expensive even for big-time criminals to spend and immediately lose an investment that big".
Yeah, and if you want to look at the most useful and biggest-impact mods, you have to look at things like NWN1's Community Expansion Pack... this list doesn't do justice to many great single-player mods either, for any game. NWN had plenty of really amazing SP modules.
(And Arabel's still up? Cool, maybe I should revisit it one of these days...)
Well, good that some companies dare to try this. Most others are just encouraging modding but don't dare to distribute mods because they're too afraid of someone pulling a Limbo of the Lost on them (and modders have been, in rare cases, ripping off content from other games, so the fear is at least minimally justified). I hope they can just enact and enforce a strong enough policy that makes the whole thing work...
If memory serves me right, the disks you're thinking of were from Mastertronic or possibly Epyx (specifically, World Championship Karate, the only game by Epyx I had on floppy). There's a chance that it could have been one of Datasoft's games as well.
World Karate Championship, a/k/a International Karate (System 3/Epyx)? Nope, at least my copy had Atari version on Side A and Commodore 64 version on Side B.
However, I have to say I don't have my copy at hand, but I remember trying the Atari side on my C64 and predictably not getting it to work =)
Am I the only one that noticed Hey, they can only have one baby, but we'll give them 3 IP addresses? Sounds like the Chinese government is getting liberal or something
Yeah, and US Department of Defense has reserved (unless I miscalculated somewhere, could be just my uncoffeed brain speaking) 134,217,712 IP addresses for itself, which is nowhere near enough for everyone in the United States, in case there'll be a global termonuclear war and they'll need them for emergency use... =) =) Yeah, these allocation policies are so weird, all things considered!
When your WHOLE COUNTRY is behind a firewall? NAT the hell out of that! Flatten it to a /8 network in 10.0.0.0 and put it all behind one public IP. Problem solved!
Let's be overly optimistic and say China suddenly decides "whoops, we're wrong, democracy, free speech and free flow of information are good things". Then they notice their entire infrastructure has been refitted, at great frigging cost, to serve the old ideology.
Of course, if they did firewall the rest of the world in truest sense, they could probably say "yeah, we like free speech too - but who's going to pay the transition to free speech when we just NATted the whole country? Implementing free speech would be too expensive!"...
A fascinating article, but it focuses too much on graphics and ignores the true point of the game series.
What software was used to write and manage revisions of the voice script? How was voice recorded, processed and stored?
=)
I don't suspect you'll even be able to find a FULLY compliant SMTP or HTTP client or server.
Oh, SMTP and HTTP protocols are easy as pie. But you'll need to make difference between the communications protocols and the data that they move around.
It's the presentation and interpretation of data that's spotty - and there's a good reason for that. It's not feasible to support all of those features in all situations. The protocols are designed that way, just to move the data: even if your client doesn't support, say, displaying images in the web, you can still damn well download them.
In other words, the protocols don't need to care if you don't support "ASP.NET headers" in the client, in order to be fully compliant with the HTTP specification. People use the protocols for funny purposes, it's not the fault of the HTTP protocol designers...
They're distributing it on their website. They're using Flash Video to distribute the movie in a fashion that prevents the recipient from re-distributing it. That means they're imposing illegal technological measures to prevent redistribution, which means they waived their right to distribute the work by failing to honour one of the covenents of the license.
If YouTube used DRM to protect the video so that a downloaded video could not be viewed without their authorisation, this would be an issue, but they don't - they just allow the video to be streamed and don't allow the video to be downloaded directly. You notice how the license speaks of "distributing copies" and "performing/displaying publicly"; streaming video is just one of the ways of distributing copies. You can fairly easily save the .flv or .f4v stream from YouTube and YouTube isn't doing anything in particular to stop those tools from working (aside of not giving guarantees that the internal structure of the site stays the same, which means the programs need to be updated).
What next? If website that previously hosted the video decides to take it down while keeping the file still around (just undownloadable), do you think it's a technological measure to prevent distribution, too? There's a practical limit on how far you can stretch the definitions of the licenses, you know...
How did youtube manage to convert it into a proprietary format when it is released under the Attribution-No-Derivative-Works 3.0 License?
Because transcoding process isn't creating a new derived work in the way copyright law understands it. The CC license in question, however, grants the right to "distribute copies or phonorecords of, display publicly, perform publicly, and perform publicly by means of a digital audio transmission the Work including as incorporated in Collective Works." The only clause in the CC license that has any bearing is the DRM clause, "When You distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work, You may not impose any technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise of the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License", and that says nothing about proprietary formats per se. I don't think anyone in CC is arguing that proprietary formats are evil as long as they don't impede with distribution.
The address is a property of the current page.
The way I strain my logic is this: If you want to make good use of screen real estate, the tab bar has to disappear when there's only one page open in the window. This effectively dictates that you can't put the tab bar above the other page navigational controls, because no one likes it when the controls are randomly in random parts of the screen depending on the current usage situation.
Navigational features are something that every browser window needs, but the amount and very existence of tabs is something that depends on what pages you have open.
In other words, browser window (or any application window) should be divided into areas that show how you do things and what you are doing now; URL bars and buttons and bookmark bars are former, the tabs and the page content are latter.
It gets even better if some schmuck decided to use different delimiters... s!foo!bar!
What about it? Which is more readable,
or:
And this is a non-pathological case. Please don't ask me to match URLs, it gets a bit uglier.
In my opinion, LTS is one of the worst things that kills code readability, and allowing people to pick string delimiters that fit the situation is the best possible way to make the code is legible.
Perl is ugly in many ways, but what comes to the string delimiters, it's much more elegant than many other languages, and I wish other languages would let people to pick their string delimiters too. The reason people say that Perl is a good language for regex stuff is that in other languages you get megatons of unreadable quote-character mess, while Perl lets you write regexes in clear way that you can actually make sense of later on - and same goes for other string literals.
Look up msttcorefonts, and if you're old enough, remember what what Linux desktops used to look like before 2003.
Oh, you mean that! Uh, we used to have the same fonts as Mac folks: Times and Helvetica and stuff. You know, the GPL URW++ PostScript fonts. You know, the ones that come with the GIMP in, what, 1998 or even before that?
Don't tell me people actually kept using the ugly bitmap renditions that shipped with X11? Those went first out of door!