"...who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device, and choice in software...... oh, wait."
Like hell the MS offering will let you burn to a CD either anyway.
In other news, 50% of your children scored below average in a national literacy exam! OMG! (Yes I actually saw something like this being used to hawk some crappy home education system on TV once)
Damn it, stop and think about exactly what an 'average' is eh?
Stack grows downward, buffers on stack grow upward. Overflow a buffer and sooner or later you run into a return pointer on the buffer. Now, if you overflow it in such a way that the function corresponding to that stackgrame doesn't cause a segfault before it returns, the CPU will read in a return address you supplied, which could point to the buffer. CPU then executes the code you put in the buffer. I believe it's traditional to execve/bin/sh at this point.
Google for "Smashing the stack for fun and profit". I don't know too much of the specifics -- I'm not a script kiddie.
I've had some hands-on experience with this. Sure enough it's easy to, say, make a smallish website with a community forum. Most people are willing to actually pay money to be visible; the motivations for this are a discussion in and of itself. Something like $10/mo is the norm; after all this is the cost of a few quick meals. Not something you'd miss too much.
But then supposing your site gets really massive and begins to outstrip that seemingly infinite 10Gb/mo transfer limit (or however much it is). So many sites either start charging or put bloody huge and popup type ads in place, the logic there being "the more annoying and inescapable you make it, the more people will be interested" -- at least, this is what passes for logic in your average marketing department anyway.
That's where the problem lies. I've actually found a system that does seem to work quite well and will continue to work if a lot of people use it -- reselling. At the moment I'm in the process of scaling up the operation to a $100/mo dedicated server with 700GB/mo of bandwidth. Of that I only use about 150 but let's say we allocate 350 of that for me as room to grow. Now you take the other 350 and divide it by ten. 35GB each. Similarly, split the 40GB hard disk into two; 20GB for the OS and your main site and then ten 2GB pieces. Now resell these resources and hey presto you've got a sustainable model that makes everyone happy (and even lets you get away with being hosted for free, at the expense of acting as tech support for ten people -- I make it clear that while I'll reset passwords and set up POP3 boxes and domains etc I'm not going to teach people how to write HTML or use an FTP client. But then again neither does any other hosting provider)
I have a fair bit of confidence in this method. That it works for me is no small part of that, but also it's a lot more psychologically acceptable way of asking for support. If people pay $10/mo to support your site they're going to become extremely picky about whether or not they're getting their bang for their buck. If you offer hosting though, many people want to run blogs and the like. $10/mo may get you 3GB of disk from a commercial provider or maybe an extra 5GB of traffic due to the economies of their operation's scale but considering a lot of people aren't going to go right up to their limit anyway they're not going to mind if they're helping their favourite site out. Of course, they'll expect good service from you as far as webhosting goes but that's a much more mechanical and predictable procedure than keeping the site interesting. That and considering you're probably not running your operation for profit, your reseller slices will quite likely have a very competitive price too.
Sorry if this isn't too coherent, it's coming up to 1am here. Does anyone else agree with me? Like I said it works for me but I dunno if it's a viable model in general or I just got lucky with the people at my site (well ok not mine, I help run it)
That's actually a common Russian saying.
on
The Innovators' Ball
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Nye poyman, nye vorr". In English: "Not caught, not a thief". This is pretty much the core principle of Russian 'business' these days. Funny how much we have in common with those communist pigdogs these days isn't it.
Unfettered connectivity between all Internet nodes? I'll remember that next time I try to connect to someone with an ISP-level NAT and dynamic IP. The internet isn't becoming read-only, it's already largely BECOME read-only. Just as the corp wants it I'm afraid.
I dunno, I'd take that with a cubic metre of NaCl. Biggest stock market drop in history? I dunno, sure doesn't FEEL like a second Great Depression to me...
Jabber moves slower than continents. About two years ago I used Jabber primarily. Call me picky but a service that doesn't even let you BLOCK people doesn't strike me as particularly useable. Nevermind the fact that it doesn't have other rudimentary stuff like filesending. Two years on this still hasn't changed.
The Jabber guys have their hearts in the right place. An open IM protocol is a laudable goal. However if they took the time they spent on bureaucracy (IETF submissions and JEPs and all that) and used it to actually create CODE then we would actually have a serious competitor in the IM marketplace. Unfortunately even the ability to interconnect to different services can't topple the almighty network effect but it could still make serious inroads.
Well, that and they could at least concentrate on delivering a simple, rigid, instant messaging service as opposed to a complicated, 'extensible' (ie XML-ridden) IM-cum-RPC-cum-kitchen-sink. These guys are UNIX developers, not Sun commitees for god's sake. Whatever happened to the KISS principle?
Give her website a cursory glance, specifically some of the press releases and the more... extraneous merchandise items on sale. The first thing I have to ask is "Is this for real!?"
But then again we do have Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor so I suppose anything is possible. Look, don't get me wrong I like this lady and her opinions. But do you REALLY want someone this green running probably the most influential and progressive state in the US? Granted if I was registered in California I would vote for her anyway because I'm sure as hell not voting for some manufactured gimmick candidate or yet another geriatric self^H^H^H^Hspecial-interest whore, to paraphrase her response.
But then again I don't even live in the US, much less Cali so what good does that do
Aah it is rare to see something truly funny on Slashdot these days (as opposed to someone thinking a pun on yet another Taco mispelling or putting a $ in Microsoft is cute)
- ACPI doesn't work. I'll check 2.6.0-testX's capability to sleep but frankly I'm not holding my breath. Bloody hell even FreeBSD can do this, and that's more geared towards SERVERS - Firewire install. I have a Vaio with a Firewire CDRW/DVD drive. It's neat but it's also a total bitch to install from. Gentoo manages, I don't think any other dist does.
There's more but those are my pet hates at the moment
Those lawsuits did absolutely stupendous damage to the BSD community. Were it not for those, Linux would be little more than a hobby project. And now we're seeing it all over again and if it plays out as it did before it'll be MS' biggest wet dream come true.
Stop sitting around and acting smug already. Frivolous or not this is _NOT_ something we can afford to ignore. Those that don't learn from history...
I dunno why I'm posting this seeing as I've missed the "prime time" for this story as it were, but arguing that DRM is inherently evil is a bit like arguing that DSL inherently sucks because your IP is dynamic and you pay by the megabyte (ok I have an enlightened provider where neither is true but then I'm a Brit) -- just because the current implementation is greedy doesn't mean the idea itself is useless.
I see a future that works along these sorts of lines: Firstly, record companies will be a lot smaller and less wealthy. This is of course the real reason why they oppose internet distribution but I think we all realise that however hard they fight this will eventually be the case. Secondly, I see them providing a two-level service from their website. A modest, flat subscription fee lets you download your favourite music from their own well connected server network, in whatever format (OGG, FLAC, MP3, AAC...) you want, capped at, say, 1GB of downloads per month. I've got a dedicated server where I get 200GB for $100/mo, so a $10/mo subscription fee would cut them a handsome profit of about $9.50, by that pricing scale. These files would be encrypted.
The second layer service is free to all comers; no email address required, no ad profiling information, just a username and password registration. This level doesn't supply any music, just keys for each song. You go on Kazaa or whatever, download whatever form is available (keys are issued on a per-song basis, not per-encoding), then decrypt it with a key that your player acquires by means of a web service API.
This depends on copyright law being made more sane; specifically, that it is illegal to redistribute copyrighted content FOR PROFIT. Also, the other big problem is that most of the record companies' revenue comes from teenagers, and you have to be over 18 to have a credit card and hence participate in transactions over the internet (I'm not quite 18 yet and I can attest that running said dedicated server is a real pain in the ass at present). Though if it's a subscription service I suppose they could get their parents to pay for it, the important thing is this has to be straightforward and easy to pay for above all else.
Given this scenario though, I think that artists and labels could continue to turn quite a handsome profit. People resent being bullied and ripped off, so music companies probably are losing out on a lot of revenue to the filesharing networks at the moment. However, stack these two options against each other. What would you rather have; an unreliable, hard to use filesharing network with its associated boat load of scumware? Or a clean ad-free page where you can download an entire album in just the format you like it at the click of a button and at maximum speed? Heck I'd pay more than $10/mo for that. I still buy CDs because I like stuff in 64kbit OGG (I'm not an audiophile and I can cram an immense amount of stuff onto my 128MB P800 mobile phone at that bitrate)
Or, if you do want to download something off Kazaa, then the act of getting a song key tells the record company that someone is listening to this song, and that will help them reimburse the artists accordingly. Yes of course this DRM can be broken, and yes some people will break it by stream hijacking or whatever but then _there is no point in doing so anymore_. The downloader contacts a record company server to get the key and by doing so they establish that this is the correct file, that it is of good quality and that the artist benefits from their download, and the recording company can build a good profile of just who's popular at the moment, and maybe the media player can discreetly ask where you got the file from so they can see which distribution channels work best. Go up to a friend of yours, tell them about this great new band you just heard and give them a crypted disk of some of their best tracks. Legal and beneficial to all, same spirit as the open source systems everyone's so enamoured of over here.
To hell with that. I'd hate Microsoft even if they were as secure as OpenBSD. Simple reason being that they're like Bell was (wait... is) -- a corporation which is in a position where you have to pay them to use basic infrastructure (eg the.DOC stranglehold, that UK government site requiring MSIE, and now this).
When you have to pay for a particular product to go about your participation in society (as it's heading with Microsoft) then you're not purchasing a service, you're paying a tax. I pay taxes to my government, not to some fucking bloated private leech that serves a different nation to my own. This is for a very simple reason -- I'm paying tax to an entity that is not accountable to ME. I'm not an American, but wasn't one of the major reasons for the foundation of your state a little something called "No taxation without representation"? Then put your money where your mouth is eh
Perl as of 5.8.0 has a stable and complete threading system. Well... almost. Perl doesn't have a global lock but you can't share objects across threads (you can share the underlying hash/whatever, but the blessing on the reference is lost)
Then again I hate Perl. @_ and $_ ??? gimme a break, those have got to be the ugliest variable names I've ever seen and they're a core part of the language. Yep, great language that Perl: parameter pass by reference? pass by value? Nope, pass by bog roll!
Agh, look I love Python but the Global Interpreter Lock's got to go. Threading is severely crippled as long as it's still there... I mean, failing that can't we at least have independent interpreters?
Please? I've looked around for efforts to sort this out but the last of them seems to have died around 1997...
Nah, I got it to rip. Must be a problem with the Linux 2.5 firewire code. False alarm =) (For those of you who think I'm exporting this to a P2P client, here's a hint; my P800 doesn't have a hole big enough to shove a CD into)
In the 80s Mobile phones were dismissed as 'too clunky'. Shut up, lie down and let the gentleman take the measurements for your coffin already you cretin.
(I've got a sneaking suspicion that this CD I've just bought has some sort of "protection" on it, seeing as I've spent the past few hours booting cdparanoia in the head. I'm a wee bit fucked off. Can you tell?)
Slashdot Mirror
"...who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device, and choice in software... ... oh, wait."
Like hell the MS offering will let you burn to a CD either anyway.
I think there's something called kexec in 2.6 which kinda does that. I haven't checked much though
In other news, 50% of your children scored below average in a national literacy exam! OMG! (Yes I actually saw something like this being used to hawk some crappy home education system on TV once)
Damn it, stop and think about exactly what an 'average' is eh?
But then on that thread no-one's ever explained what an ass hat is to me anyway.
Seriously
Stack grows downward, buffers on stack grow upward. Overflow a buffer and sooner or later you run into a return pointer on the buffer. Now, if you overflow it in such a way that the function corresponding to that stackgrame doesn't cause a segfault before it returns, the CPU will read in a return address you supplied, which could point to the buffer. CPU then executes the code you put in the buffer. I believe it's traditional to execve /bin/sh at this point.
Google for "Smashing the stack for fun and profit". I don't know too much of the specifics -- I'm not a script kiddie.
Um... PROFIT!
... wait, wrong sequence.
Or is it "???"
I've had some hands-on experience with this. Sure enough it's easy to, say, make a smallish website with a community forum. Most people are willing to actually pay money to be visible; the motivations for this are a discussion in and of itself. Something like $10/mo is the norm; after all this is the cost of a few quick meals. Not something you'd miss too much.
But then supposing your site gets really massive and begins to outstrip that seemingly infinite 10Gb/mo transfer limit (or however much it is). So many sites either start charging or put bloody huge and popup type ads in place, the logic there being "the more annoying and inescapable you make it, the more people will be interested" -- at least, this is what passes for logic in your average marketing department anyway.
That's where the problem lies. I've actually found a system that does seem to work quite well and will continue to work if a lot of people use it -- reselling. At the moment I'm in the process of scaling up the operation to a $100/mo dedicated server with 700GB/mo of bandwidth. Of that I only use about 150 but let's say we allocate 350 of that for me as room to grow. Now you take the other 350 and divide it by ten. 35GB each. Similarly, split the 40GB hard disk into two; 20GB for the OS and your main site and then ten 2GB pieces. Now resell these resources and hey presto you've got a sustainable model that makes everyone happy (and even lets you get away with being hosted for free, at the expense of acting as tech support for ten people -- I make it clear that while I'll reset passwords and set up POP3 boxes and domains etc I'm not going to teach people how to write HTML or use an FTP client. But then again neither does any other hosting provider)
I have a fair bit of confidence in this method. That it works for me is no small part of that, but also it's a lot more psychologically acceptable way of asking for support. If people pay $10/mo to support your site they're going to become extremely picky about whether or not they're getting their bang for their buck. If you offer hosting though, many people want to run blogs and the like. $10/mo may get you 3GB of disk from a commercial provider or maybe an extra 5GB of traffic due to the economies of their operation's scale but considering a lot of people aren't going to go right up to their limit anyway they're not going to mind if they're helping their favourite site out. Of course, they'll expect good service from you as far as webhosting goes but that's a much more mechanical and predictable procedure than keeping the site interesting. That and considering you're probably not running your operation for profit, your reseller slices will quite likely have a very competitive price too.
Sorry if this isn't too coherent, it's coming up to 1am here. Does anyone else agree with me? Like I said it works for me but I dunno if it's a viable model in general or I just got lucky with the people at my site (well ok not mine, I help run it)
nt
"Nye poyman, nye vorr". In English: "Not caught, not a thief". This is pretty much the core principle of Russian 'business' these days. Funny how much we have in common with those communist pigdogs these days isn't it.
Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. *ducks*
Unfettered connectivity between all Internet nodes? I'll remember that next time I try to connect to someone with an ISP-level NAT and dynamic IP. The internet isn't becoming read-only, it's already largely BECOME read-only. Just as the corp wants it I'm afraid.
I dunno, I'd take that with a cubic metre of NaCl. Biggest stock market drop in history? I dunno, sure doesn't FEEL like a second Great Depression to me...
Jabber moves slower than continents. About two years ago I used Jabber primarily. Call me picky but a service that doesn't even let you BLOCK people doesn't strike me as particularly useable. Nevermind the fact that it doesn't have other rudimentary stuff like filesending. Two years on this still hasn't changed.
The Jabber guys have their hearts in the right place. An open IM protocol is a laudable goal. However if they took the time they spent on bureaucracy (IETF submissions and JEPs and all that) and used it to actually create CODE then we would actually have a serious competitor in the IM marketplace. Unfortunately even the ability to interconnect to different services can't topple the almighty network effect but it could still make serious inroads.
Well, that and they could at least concentrate on delivering a simple, rigid, instant messaging service as opposed to a complicated, 'extensible' (ie XML-ridden) IM-cum-RPC-cum-kitchen-sink. These guys are UNIX developers, not Sun commitees for god's sake. Whatever happened to the KISS principle?
Give her website a cursory glance, specifically some of the press releases and the more ... extraneous merchandise items on sale. The first thing I have to ask is "Is this for real!?"
But then again we do have Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor so I suppose anything is possible. Look, don't get me wrong I like this lady and her opinions. But do you REALLY want someone this green running probably the most influential and progressive state in the US? Granted if I was registered in California I would vote for her anyway because I'm sure as hell not voting for some manufactured gimmick candidate or yet another geriatric self^H^H^H^Hspecial-interest whore, to paraphrase her response.
But then again I don't even live in the US, much less Cali so what good does that do
Aah it is rare to see something truly funny on Slashdot these days (as opposed to someone thinking a pun on yet another Taco mispelling or putting a $ in Microsoft is cute)
And yes before you say it I do know about the ACPI patches
- ACPI doesn't work. I'll check 2.6.0-testX's capability to sleep but frankly I'm not holding my breath. Bloody hell even FreeBSD can do this, and that's more geared towards SERVERS
- Firewire install. I have a Vaio with a Firewire CDRW/DVD drive. It's neat but it's also a total bitch to install from. Gentoo manages, I don't think any other dist does.
There's more but those are my pet hates at the moment
...the 90's BSD lawsuits. All over again.
Those lawsuits did absolutely stupendous damage to the BSD community. Were it not for those, Linux would be little more than a hobby project. And now we're seeing it all over again and if it plays out as it did before it'll be MS' biggest wet dream come true.
Stop sitting around and acting smug already. Frivolous or not this is _NOT_ something we can afford to ignore. Those that don't learn from history...
I dunno why I'm posting this seeing as I've missed the "prime time" for this story as it were, but arguing that DRM is inherently evil is a bit like arguing that DSL inherently sucks because your IP is dynamic and you pay by the megabyte (ok I have an enlightened provider where neither is true but then I'm a Brit) -- just because the current implementation is greedy doesn't mean the idea itself is useless.
I see a future that works along these sorts of lines: Firstly, record companies will be a lot smaller and less wealthy. This is of course the real reason why they oppose internet distribution but I think we all realise that however hard they fight this will eventually be the case. Secondly, I see them providing a two-level service from their website. A modest, flat subscription fee lets you download your favourite music from their own well connected server network, in whatever format (OGG, FLAC, MP3, AAC...) you want, capped at, say, 1GB of downloads per month. I've got a dedicated server where I get 200GB for $100/mo, so a $10/mo subscription fee would cut them a handsome profit of about $9.50, by that pricing scale. These files would be encrypted.
The second layer service is free to all comers; no email address required, no ad profiling information, just a username and password registration. This level doesn't supply any music, just keys for each song. You go on Kazaa or whatever, download whatever form is available (keys are issued on a per-song basis, not per-encoding), then decrypt it with a key that your player acquires by means of a web service API.
This depends on copyright law being made more sane; specifically, that it is illegal to redistribute copyrighted content FOR PROFIT. Also, the other big problem is that most of the record companies' revenue comes from teenagers, and you have to be over 18 to have a credit card and hence participate in transactions over the internet (I'm not quite 18 yet and I can attest that running said dedicated server is a real pain in the ass at present). Though if it's a subscription service I suppose they could get their parents to pay for it, the important thing is this has to be straightforward and easy to pay for above all else.
Given this scenario though, I think that artists and labels could continue to turn quite a handsome profit. People resent being bullied and ripped off, so music companies probably are losing out on a lot of revenue to the filesharing networks at the moment. However, stack these two options against each other. What would you rather have; an unreliable, hard to use filesharing network with its associated boat load of scumware? Or a clean ad-free page where you can download an entire album in just the format you like it at the click of a button and at maximum speed? Heck I'd pay more than $10/mo for that. I still buy CDs because I like stuff in 64kbit OGG (I'm not an audiophile and I can cram an immense amount of stuff onto my 128MB P800 mobile phone at that bitrate)
Or, if you do want to download something off Kazaa, then the act of getting a song key tells the record company that someone is listening to this song, and that will help them reimburse the artists accordingly. Yes of course this DRM can be broken, and yes some people will break it by stream hijacking or whatever but then _there is no point in doing so anymore_. The downloader contacts a record company server to get the key and by doing so they establish that this is the correct file, that it is of good quality and that the artist benefits from their download, and the recording company can build a good profile of just who's popular at the moment, and maybe the media player can discreetly ask where you got the file from so they can see which distribution channels work best. Go up to a friend of yours, tell them about this great new band you just heard and give them a crypted disk of some of their best tracks. Legal and beneficial to all, same spirit as the open source systems everyone's so enamoured of over here.
And, if you acknowledge that pe
To hell with that. I'd hate Microsoft even if they were as secure as OpenBSD. Simple reason being that they're like Bell was (wait... is) -- a corporation which is in a position where you have to pay them to use basic infrastructure (eg the .DOC stranglehold, that UK government site requiring MSIE, and now this).
When you have to pay for a particular product to go about your participation in society (as it's heading with Microsoft) then you're not purchasing a service, you're paying a tax. I pay taxes to my government, not to some fucking bloated private leech that serves a different nation to my own. This is for a very simple reason -- I'm paying tax to an entity that is not accountable to ME. I'm not an American, but wasn't one of the major reasons for the foundation of your state a little something called "No taxation without representation"? Then put your money where your mouth is eh
Perl as of 5.8.0 has a stable and complete threading system. Well... almost. Perl doesn't have a global lock but you can't share objects across threads (you can share the underlying hash/whatever, but the blessing on the reference is lost)
Then again I hate Perl. @_ and $_ ??? gimme a break, those have got to be the ugliest variable names I've ever seen and they're a core part of the language. Yep, great language that Perl: parameter pass by reference? pass by value? Nope, pass by bog roll!
Agh, look I love Python but the Global Interpreter Lock's got to go. Threading is severely crippled as long as it's still there... I mean, failing that can't we at least have independent interpreters?
Please? I've looked around for efforts to sort this out but the last of them seems to have died around 1997...
Nah, I got it to rip. Must be a problem with the Linux 2.5 firewire code. False alarm =) (For those of you who think I'm exporting this to a P2P client, here's a hint; my P800 doesn't have a hole big enough to shove a CD into)
In the 80s Mobile phones were dismissed as 'too clunky'. Shut up, lie down and let the gentleman take the measurements for your coffin already you cretin.
(I've got a sneaking suspicion that this CD I've just bought has some sort of "protection" on it, seeing as I've spent the past few hours booting cdparanoia in the head. I'm a wee bit fucked off. Can you tell?)
No, but mine use the + trick, so I dread the day some prick figures it out (as I'm not the only one who uses that tactic) to get at my 'root' address.
I've never had to sinkhole any address though.