Yeah, it'll be nice to have ipv6 in place when we need it, but I think a higher priority would be to speed up X's abysmal performance when compared to most other modern windowing subsystems out there, including Aqua and Windows' GUI.
The guy up above noted that there would be discussions on X needing to be replaced. I don't think X needs to be replaced it just needs to be more efficient. <blatant lack of application engineering knowledge> If *everything* has to go through a tcp/ip stack before it goes to the monitor, there should at the very least be some speed improvedments.</blatant lack of application engineering knowledge>
The legal forces of the RIAA have been tasked with something impossible. Control everyone.
Every dictator who's ever tried to do this before has eventually fallen back on the same tactic: Terror. If you make people fear for their lives for doing what you don't want them to, you can control and them more easily.
Unlike fascist dictators, the RIAA doesn't quite have the power to randomly make people dissapear. They haven't quite bought those laws yet. They're working in it, however. This is just an interim step.
Dubbing does so much to suck the life and soul out of good writing. The fact that an entire network is dubbed by the same two dozen or so Canadian voice actors is just painful.
It's a bit difficult to think of distributed services being for anyone other than uber-geeks and people who desperately need processing power. We've been doing distributed number crunching for a few years now, so it's only a matter of time before distributed services take hold. Distributed downloading, which was started by the various P2P apps and has been almost perfected by BitTorrent is the next iteration of that. Imagine what the next iteration of this tech will bring. Imagine hosting your entire website off of your own computer, but as part of a 'distributed' web with a browser Torrent plugin to make bandwidth seem thicker and easier to come by.
Other distributed services are just around the corner.
Re:This is Slashdot worthy?
on
MIT Gnome Invasion
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is news for nerds. This is stuff that matters.
This was a truly beautiful hack, and it looks like the perpetrators, may they be snickering to themselves in their dormrooms, put a hell of a lot of effort into it.
It had class, beauty, and best of all, didn't hurt anybody.
As a nerd, I am truly glad that Slashdot brought this to my attention./salute the anonymous Gnomesters.
For short term and less important backups, DVD-RW media is fine. We actually already use it in a few places, but for critical stuff-- again, anything with account numbers-- it's just not up to snuff yet. Maybe in a few years.
As someone who works in IT in the financial industry, let me tell you a little bit of what kind of requirements we fulfill. First of all, every system is backed up on a regular basis. For critical systems (systems that handle account numbers in any way), that schedule is daily or even hourly.
All systems have live fail-overs. When not required by law, and they frequently are, such systems are required by the demands of profit. If financial transactions falter for a *second*, it means money lost.
Back-up media is triple redundant and incremental over 5 days. Backup irregularities of any kind are logged, investigated, and acted upon by at least 3 individuals.
Copies of backups are stored both on site and off-site in a secure location provided by our insurance provider. We make frequent trips to this secure location daily in order to deposit backups. These procedures are audited and reviewed on a regular basis by both internal auditors and regulatory board auditors.
Tape is just a little more reliable than IDE in this kind of situation. Tape is going to be more recoverable, even in case of a long drop or serious auto accident between point A and point B. If necessary, teap will also survive shipping better.
Sorry, guys. As reliable as IDE drives have become, they're just not as durable as a tape cartridge. With the sheer amount of backup we keep, it's also significantly cheaper.
EMI looks like it's the smart little rat running in and out between the toes of rapidly-starving dinosaurs.
The old dinosaur food-chain will dry up. It will look like it's getting more powerful, but it will be because all you can see are the major predators at the top who've eaten all the rest of the food-chain out of desperation.
Eventually, they too will starve and those who have evolved will eat their corpses.
Ever see one of those 'All you can Eat' Rib places? They work just like this. That first plate of ribs you order is out real quick. The ribs you get are meaty and juicy. The second plate is usually kinda fatty and takes a lot longer to get out of the kitchen.
You can fight back, though. Tell the waiter you want the meaty ribs, dammit! He'll bring them to you because he wants to get a tip.
Here, this guy is proposing something along the lines of eliminating car locks so that noone will be arrested for carrying burgulary tools.
No, it's more along the lines of advocating the elimination of car locks in favor of mandatory keyless entry with extra security safeguards so that no on will be arrested for carrying burglary tools.
Let me give you a good example. Say it's your job to convert documentation for your business. (It's part of mine from time to time.) A lot of that documentation comes to you in the form of PDFs that need to be converted to plain text, reformated, edited, and then reposted in HTML or XML format. Easy, right?
Well, not if the PDF is password protected. Despite the fact that the PDF may not contain any sensitive or proprietary information, many PDF authors leave the 'Security' options in Acrobat or other PDF authoring tools turned on rather than off by default. This means that no one else can edit that document without breaking that security.
Breaking the security on PDFs is trivial. Elcomsoft's been doing it for years. As we all know, however, Elcomsoft (and Dmitry Skylaroff) has been in deep trouble with the DOJ for daring to ignore the DMCA.
Despite the fact that I am presented with password-protected PDFs that orginated within my company on a regular basis, I am prohibited from using tools to break the passwords on those documents by company policy. More often than not, rather than trying to attempt to retrieve those passwords from the people who created the PDF, the people who want the document converted simply give up in the face of this policy.
Re:I must have lots of viruses....
on
The Virus Did It
·
· Score: 1
I wish I had mod points right now.
Seriously, this defangs just about every piece of computer crime law ever written. Virus writers are getting damp in their drawers at the thought of making viruses that do exactly these things.
Speak not of this Alita... Wherefore art thou, Gally?
Seriously, 'Alita' has already be pretty seriously corrupted by some of the same forces that mangled Macross into 'Robotech'. If Hollywood touches this, it's only going to stray further and further from the original plot and intent. Worse, it will be given a juvenile treatment and the dystopian story elements will be forgotten in favor of boobs and explosions.
Despite Apple's rampant efforts to protect their own IP, they've been remarkably free, say compared to Microsoft, in distributing technology that allows more liberal uses of information.
This could be very good or very bad.
Free giveaways out of Universal's catalouge could be an incredible boost to sale of music-related hardware like the iPod or software like iMovie. We all need soundtracks, right?
On the other hand, apple could be planning on using their new acquisition in order to further lock apple users into a single platform with costly upgrades. The idea that comes to mind is that they will start making 'Apple Only' music releases that can only be played on Jobs-approved hardware.
Personally, I hope that Apple will use this aquisition to free up music and maybe some more of their own IP and use it to further hardware sales.
What? You're implicating that Microsoft buys off federal judges?! No! Say it ain't so! It's not like they have $40,000,000,000 cash just sitting around or anything with which to pull off such a feat.
Man, I was so happy the day I bought an AMD-compatible mobo. AMD's are not, of course, pin-compatible with Intel. AMD is not a perfect angel, but they're a sight better than Intel, especially when you consider you can get the same power as an Intel chip in an AMD chip for typically half to one-third the price. It was a difficult choice to make since it meant forevermore sacrificing the resuability of intel processors motehrboards I already owned, but I'm glad I did.
My friends who retain Intel compatibility continue to pay top dollar for less power. If I think it's time for a cpu upgrade, I simply go to my local AMD redistributor and pay about the cost of two boxed games for a chip that is more than fast enough than anything I care to do with it.
That doesn't change the fact that the DN3D was an excellent game, had excellent levels, and an excellent level editor.
I see two or three possibilities here:
1. DN3D is ported to every conceivable platform so that original DN3D owners can play the levels they bought on Linux, OSX, Windows 2000/XP.
2. DN3D is updated so that your original game files can be used to position 3D models of Duke and the monsters in the original levels.
3. DN3D code will be used Mozilla style as a reference for an entirely new game engine that has the ability to play old Duke levels.
I read the message boards on 3drealms a little while back and saw a little of a guy who was trying to write a GPL engine to play DN3D levels on current platforms. Developers from 3DRealms smacked him around quite a bit and told him that he wouldn't be able to do it without the DN3D source.
Development in Phoenix has hardly stopped. They just haven't released a milestone in a while. Pick up one of the nightly builds and you will be *Amazed* at the advances over the.5 release. Not only is it quicker and lighter, it's vastly prettier and has some really good end-user functionality features such as collapsable preferences.
I've been using the April 1 build all day today... heavily... and it's been holding up like a champ. If I were going to compare this in terms of version numbers, I'd call it the.68 build. Damn, there's a lot of reasons to use Phoenix instead of Moz right now.
It's going to be interesting to see Jackson's interperetation of this. On one hand, I feel like King Kong's been done to death. On the other, I *know* there's no such thing as too much Godzilla. Perhaps Jackson will make it so there's no such thing as too much Kong.
While not having quite the range of people using services in violation of these statutes as say, people downloading mp3's, there are already so many people doing these things, and profiting on them, that it will be pointless to try to enforce this law.
Imagine for a second Bestbuy's reaction to the fact that it's popular cable-modem routers and wireless access points have all become illegal. I don't exactly see them pulling millions of dollars of hardware off the shelves without a legal fight. Nor do I see the manufacturers of those devices just giving up either.
I NAT and I'm proud of it!
Re:Tolerance For Piracy
on
Games on Demand
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
From comments of beta testers, it sounds like the games maintain a connection to the ISP offering the service. This is probably an encrypted stream of keep-alive responses. They games probably also distributed to the user in an encrypted install package.
The problem here is that at some point, the decryption information is in the hands of the user, even if he doesn't know it. All it takes is one guy to do adqueate packet sniffing or memory reading (ala ShowEQ) to intercept the key and then build an app that acts as a licensing server.
If you look at any of the high-end grphical apps (3dsmax, for example), this is the way they enfoce their licenses... with a manditory server connection. One of the 'cracks' for 3dsmax is an app that installs as a windows service and intercepts the app's request for authorization. It masquerades itself as the authorization server and tells 3dsmax to run. The crack comes as a windows installer, easy for a novice to install and run. (I've heard of more than one novice user opening themselves up to BO or other trojans in this manner.)
3dsmax is a fairly esoteric modelling application with a relatively small possible user-base, including those who are running illigitimate copies.
Games such as those listed in the artcle would be in *much* higher demand than a modelling application and subject to significantly more attention from crackers and warez distributors.
As complex as it is, I think this is a situation of 'infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards'. Sooner or later, probably sooner, someone's going to crack this. Unless the system is tolerant to having that take place, it won't survive.
Tolerance For Piracy
on
Games on Demand
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Unfortuneately, there has to be tolerance to piracy built into the policy or it won't work.
If you download a game, you have the install media. It's a simple matter of building a app or a device to circumvent the copy protection it has at that point. There are no hardware controls like broken CD specs built into this kind of system, so I can't see it depending on hardware copy protection either.
For online games, using an account tied to the download account will keep people from using piracy that way, but look at all the people who downloaded Warcraft3 and then never played online.
Long and short, there has to be a margin built into this business model that's tolerant of a certain level of underground distribution. If the system is not tolerant of this, and tries to depend on legislation, litigation, or user controls to keep users from distributing copies then it won't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it'll be nice to have ipv6 in place when we need it, but I think a higher priority would be to speed up X's abysmal performance when compared to most other modern windowing subsystems out there, including Aqua and Windows' GUI.
The guy up above noted that there would be discussions on X needing to be replaced. I don't think X needs to be replaced it just needs to be more efficient. <blatant lack of application engineering knowledge> If *everything* has to go through a tcp/ip stack before it goes to the monitor, there should at the very least be some speed improvedments.</blatant lack of application engineering knowledge>
Goal? Intimidation.
The legal forces of the RIAA have been tasked with something impossible. Control everyone.
Every dictator who's ever tried to do this before has eventually fallen back on the same tactic: Terror. If you make people fear for their lives for doing what you don't want them to, you can control and them more easily.
Unlike fascist dictators, the RIAA doesn't quite have the power to randomly make people dissapear. They haven't quite bought those laws yet. They're working in it, however. This is just an interim step.
Makes me wish I had mod points.
Dubbing does so much to suck the life and soul out of good writing. The fact that an entire network is dubbed by the same two dozen or so Canadian voice actors is just painful.
...Like BitTorrent.
It's a bit difficult to think of distributed services being for anyone other than uber-geeks and people who desperately need processing power. We've been doing distributed number crunching for a few years now, so it's only a matter of time before distributed services take hold. Distributed downloading, which was started by the various P2P apps and has been almost perfected by BitTorrent is the next iteration of that. Imagine what the next iteration of this tech will bring. Imagine hosting your entire website off of your own computer, but as part of a 'distributed' web with a browser Torrent plugin to make bandwidth seem thicker and easier to come by.
Other distributed services are just around the corner.
This is news for nerds. This is stuff that matters.
/salute the anonymous Gnomesters.
This was a truly beautiful hack, and it looks like the perpetrators, may they be snickering to themselves in their dormrooms, put a hell of a lot of effort into it.
It had class, beauty, and best of all, didn't hurt anybody.
As a nerd, I am truly glad that Slashdot brought this to my attention.
... a judge that couldn't be bought. I hope he has good bodyguards.
For short term and less important backups, DVD-RW media is fine. We actually already use it in a few places, but for critical stuff-- again, anything with account numbers-- it's just not up to snuff yet. Maybe in a few years.
As someone who works in IT in the financial industry, let me tell you a little bit of what kind of requirements we fulfill. First of all, every system is backed up on a regular basis. For critical systems (systems that handle account numbers in any way), that schedule is daily or even hourly.
All systems have live fail-overs. When not required by law, and they frequently are, such systems are required by the demands of profit. If financial transactions falter for a *second*, it means money lost.
Back-up media is triple redundant and incremental over 5 days. Backup irregularities of any kind are logged, investigated, and acted upon by at least 3 individuals.
Copies of backups are stored both on site and off-site in a secure location provided by our insurance provider. We make frequent trips to this secure location daily in order to deposit backups. These procedures are audited and reviewed on a regular basis by both internal auditors and regulatory board auditors.
Tape is just a little more reliable than IDE in this kind of situation. Tape is going to be more recoverable, even in case of a long drop or serious auto accident between point A and point B. If necessary, teap will also survive shipping better.
Sorry, guys. As reliable as IDE drives have become, they're just not as durable as a tape cartridge. With the sheer amount of backup we keep, it's also significantly cheaper.
Mod parent up Insightful.
EMI looks like it's the smart little rat running in and out between the toes of rapidly-starving dinosaurs.
The old dinosaur food-chain will dry up. It will look like it's getting more powerful, but it will be because all you can see are the major predators at the top who've eaten all the rest of the food-chain out of desperation.
Eventually, they too will starve and those who have evolved will eat their corpses.
Ever see one of those 'All you can Eat' Rib places? They work just like this. That first plate of ribs you order is out real quick. The ribs you get are meaty and juicy. The second plate is usually kinda fatty and takes a lot longer to get out of the kitchen.
You can fight back, though. Tell the waiter you want the meaty ribs, dammit! He'll bring them to you because he wants to get a tip.
Mmmm... ribs...
What were we talking about again?
Here, this guy is proposing something along the lines of eliminating car locks so that noone will be arrested for carrying burgulary tools.
No, it's more along the lines of advocating the elimination of car locks in favor of mandatory keyless entry with extra security safeguards so that no on will be arrested for carrying burglary tools.
Let me give you a good example. Say it's your job to convert documentation for your business. (It's part of mine from time to time.) A lot of that documentation comes to you in the form of PDFs that need to be converted to plain text, reformated, edited, and then reposted in HTML or XML format. Easy, right?
Well, not if the PDF is password protected. Despite the fact that the PDF may not contain any sensitive or proprietary information, many PDF authors leave the 'Security' options in Acrobat or other PDF authoring tools turned on rather than off by default. This means that no one else can edit that document without breaking that security.
Breaking the security on PDFs is trivial. Elcomsoft's been doing it for years. As we all know, however, Elcomsoft (and Dmitry Skylaroff) has been in deep trouble with the DOJ for daring to ignore the DMCA.
Despite the fact that I am presented with password-protected PDFs that orginated within my company on a regular basis, I am prohibited from using tools to break the passwords on those documents by company policy. More often than not, rather than trying to attempt to retrieve those passwords from the people who created the PDF, the people who want the document converted simply give up in the face of this policy.
I wish I had mod points right now.
Seriously, this defangs just about every piece of computer crime law ever written. Virus writers are getting damp in their drawers at the thought of making viruses that do exactly these things.
Speak not of this Alita... Wherefore art thou, Gally?
Seriously, 'Alita' has already be pretty seriously corrupted by some of the same forces that mangled Macross into 'Robotech'. If Hollywood touches this, it's only going to stray further and further from the original plot and intent. Worse, it will be given a juvenile treatment and the dystopian story elements will be forgotten in favor of boobs and explosions.
Despite Apple's rampant efforts to protect their own IP, they've been remarkably free, say compared to Microsoft, in distributing technology that allows more liberal uses of information.
This could be very good or very bad.
Free giveaways out of Universal's catalouge could be an incredible boost to sale of music-related hardware like the iPod or software like iMovie. We all need soundtracks, right?
On the other hand, apple could be planning on using their new acquisition in order to further lock apple users into a single platform with costly upgrades. The idea that comes to mind is that they will start making 'Apple Only' music releases that can only be played on Jobs-approved hardware.
Personally, I hope that Apple will use this aquisition to free up music and maybe some more of their own IP and use it to further hardware sales.
What? You're implicating that Microsoft buys off federal judges?! No! Say it ain't so! It's not like they have $40,000,000,000 cash just sitting around or anything with which to pull off such a feat.
Man, I was so happy the day I bought an AMD-compatible mobo. AMD's are not, of course, pin-compatible with Intel. AMD is not a perfect angel, but they're a sight better than Intel, especially when you consider you can get the same power as an Intel chip in an AMD chip for typically half to one-third the price. It was a difficult choice to make since it meant forevermore sacrificing the resuability of intel processors motehrboards I already owned, but I'm glad I did.
My friends who retain Intel compatibility continue to pay top dollar for less power. If I think it's time for a cpu upgrade, I simply go to my local AMD redistributor and pay about the cost of two boxed games for a chip that is more than fast enough than anything I care to do with it.
That doesn't change the fact that the DN3D was an excellent game, had excellent levels, and an excellent level editor.
I see two or three possibilities here:
1. DN3D is ported to every conceivable platform so that original DN3D owners can play the levels they bought on Linux, OSX, Windows 2000/XP.
2. DN3D is updated so that your original game files can be used to position 3D models of Duke and the monsters in the original levels.
3. DN3D code will be used Mozilla style as a reference for an entirely new game engine that has the ability to play old Duke levels.
I read the message boards on 3drealms a little while back and saw a little of a guy who was trying to write a GPL engine to play DN3D levels on current platforms. Developers from 3DRealms smacked him around quite a bit and told him that he wouldn't be able to do it without the DN3D source.
He has it now.
Development in Phoenix has hardly stopped. They just haven't released a milestone in a while. Pick up one of the nightly builds and you will be *Amazed* at the advances over the .5 release. Not only is it quicker and lighter, it's vastly prettier and has some really good end-user functionality features such as collapsable preferences.
.68 build. Damn, there's a lot of reasons to use Phoenix instead of Moz right now.
I've been using the April 1 build all day today... heavily... and it's been holding up like a champ. If I were going to compare this in terms of version numbers, I'd call it the
I love the new One Ring graphic too.
Yeah, a bunch of my buddies fell for this too. Frankly, I haven't taken anything I've seen today seriously at all... except maybe the SARS news.
Man, that's some scary shit right there...
From the Beeb:
5 249.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/290
It's going to be interesting to see Jackson's interperetation of this. On one hand, I feel like King Kong's been done to death. On the other, I *know* there's no such thing as too much Godzilla. Perhaps Jackson will make it so there's no such thing as too much Kong.
Yeah, enlightenment is still at its .16 release.
I'd much rather use Phoenix. I mean, really, what serious chatter uses an in-browser IRC client?
.6 milestone.
Moz may be good for the public, but I'm glad that I can get the same Gecko quality in a lite-sized package.
Now if only they'd release a
While not having quite the range of people using services in violation of these statutes as say, people downloading mp3's, there are already so many people doing these things, and profiting on them, that it will be pointless to try to enforce this law.
Imagine for a second Bestbuy's reaction to the fact that it's popular cable-modem routers and wireless access points have all become illegal. I don't exactly see them pulling millions of dollars of hardware off the shelves without a legal fight. Nor do I see the manufacturers of those devices just giving up either.
I NAT and I'm proud of it!
From comments of beta testers, it sounds like the games maintain a connection to the ISP offering the service. This is probably an encrypted stream of keep-alive responses. They games probably also distributed to the user in an encrypted install package.
The problem here is that at some point, the decryption information is in the hands of the user, even if he doesn't know it. All it takes is one guy to do adqueate packet sniffing or memory reading (ala ShowEQ) to intercept the key and then build an app that acts as a licensing server.
If you look at any of the high-end grphical apps (3dsmax, for example), this is the way they enfoce their licenses... with a manditory server connection. One of the 'cracks' for 3dsmax is an app that installs as a windows service and intercepts the app's request for authorization. It masquerades itself as the authorization server and tells 3dsmax to run. The crack comes as a windows installer, easy for a novice to install and run. (I've heard of more than one novice user opening themselves up to BO or other trojans in this manner.)
3dsmax is a fairly esoteric modelling application with a relatively small possible user-base, including those who are running illigitimate copies.
Games such as those listed in the artcle would be in *much* higher demand than a modelling application and subject to significantly more attention from crackers and warez distributors.
As complex as it is, I think this is a situation of 'infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards'. Sooner or later, probably sooner, someone's going to crack this. Unless the system is tolerant to having that take place, it won't survive.
Unfortuneately, there has to be tolerance to piracy built into the policy or it won't work.
If you download a game, you have the install media. It's a simple matter of building a app or a device to circumvent the copy protection it has at that point. There are no hardware controls like broken CD specs built into this kind of system, so I can't see it depending on hardware copy protection either.
For online games, using an account tied to the download account will keep people from using piracy that way, but look at all the people who downloaded Warcraft3 and then never played online.
Long and short, there has to be a margin built into this business model that's tolerant of a certain level of underground distribution. If the system is not tolerant of this, and tries to depend on legislation, litigation, or user controls to keep users from distributing copies then it won't work.