Well theoretically that the way it is supposed to work, but in practice what happens is that one applies for a vague patent for "a device which does x" and all the technical details about how you actually managed to get the device to do x are treated as trade secrets.
It's been said, but if they want their DVD encryption to be impenetrable (and hence popular with the MPAA) they should actually try to make it tough to crack instead of hiding behind a flimsy law that has apparently been dismissed in this particular case.
Except, that is theoretically impossible, which is the whole point of the DCMA. Since bullet proof DRM impossible, just make it illegal to create device that doesn't honor DRM, then the average user will never be able to break it, and the minority of people that do, will be small enough to ignore or sue. Well that was the theory until p2p showed that it was possible for the minority to anonymously distribute their cracked works to the majority.
Of course, all this DRM is completely unnecissary, just look at the software industry's experiance with it.
And I know that money talks and bullshit walks. Unless we get some thick-walleted lobbyists on our side, the souless corporations will continue to turn innovation and invention into commodities - and Open Source and Free Software will remain terms that no one but the choir ever hears.
And the other souless corporations will continue to use the most cost effective solution, which is increasingly becoming open source.
This is what I love about the GPL. I think everyone can agree, given that a peice of software has been created, it is better for society if everyone to has access to it. The only issue at question is whether by limiting access to the software, we can provide necisarry means and motivation for more software to be written. I look at the GPL as an experiment - if copyright really does provide necissarry means and incentive to produce software then GPL'd software will never be as good as proprietary software, and will reamain on the sidelines. However if GPL'ed software does surpass and surplant proprietary software, then it is proof that there is enough means and motivation to produce software without the burden of copyright. This is increasingly showing itself to be the case.
The FSF focuses on the first issue, and think that the negative societal aspects of proprietary software are so bad that it doesn't matter whether copyright adds incentive or not, proprietary software is still intolerable.
The OSI focuses on the second issue, and think that the only important thing about free software is that it is better than proprietary software, and have provided usefull theories which help explain why this is the case.
But the real clincher is that both issues are true - that not only is software copyright harmfull, it is also unecissarry. It is for this reason that I agree with the FSF in treating it as an ethical situation, because while I am willing to put up with some "necissary evil", there is no reason to put up with proprietary software in the long run.
Oh man I remember those. I would read them once picking my own choices, and then would have to go through and do (what i would now call) a depth-first traversal of all the possibile choices. I don't know why I was so obsessed with making sure that I hadn't missed any of the possible segments, but I was. Perhaps it is the same thing that made me want to understand every aspect of how my computer worked, or the thing that abored wasting anything, and caused me to save all scrap parts, and eat everything I was given whether I liked it or not.
(BTW, What does one normally do when a bulldozer is going to knock down one's house? Still can't figure it out? Rot13 Solution: Whfg yvr qbja, va gur zhq, va sebag bs gur ohyyqbmre, naq jnvg sbe Sbeq gb pbzr svk guvatf hc.)
Most MP3 players use a dedicated MP3 chip for decoding the music stream. A standard audio controller just doesn't have the processing power, and main processors have to be pretty fast for a portable before they become fast enough for realtime vbr decoding.
Yes, but as hadheld games get bigger, with better audio, it becomes natural to want to use compressed audio for the soundtrack of the games, just like most console and PC games do. I would argue that the PSP would have the audio decomression chipsets regardless of whether it doubled as an mp3 player or not. Err, is that what you were saying in this next paragraph?
Personally, I think they should be using MP3 as the music format of choice for these portables, and should include a chip for such purposes.
As long as the extra features don't significantly increase the manufacturing costs of the system, I don't see why it would be a bad idea to include them. The N-Gage was a mistake for so many reasons, none of which are shared with the PSP.
The most fundemental mistake was that merging a game system and a phone doesn't make sense. Adding mp3 capabilities to a gamming system does. It fits the needs of the target demographics, and all the hardware to do so is already there - memory sticks, audio chipset, headphone jack. The only thing needed is software, and that costs nothing to manufacture, and nearly nothing to develop.
Perhaps the title should have been "for Wannabee Geeks" instead.:-)
The truth is that every geek is a "Wannabee Geek" in some sense. By friend is great at electronics and cars but knows nothing about computer programming. Whereas there are alot of projects that I would like to do, but know too little about (analog)electronics to do so. Furthermore, I would think that there are alot of people like me since you can learn alot about the software aspects of computers by exploration, but electronics isn't so accessable in the everyday home. This book seems like a great way to learn about the basic of EE and end up with a cool project in the process.
Does anyone have first hand experience with batteries on the Rio Karma? I have been seriously concidering getting that as it has many features (Ogg Vorbis/FLAC support, gapless playing, syncs from any OS) that the iPod doesn't, and IMHO even looks nicer than the iPod.
But the battery issue concerns me. Like the iPod it is an internal battery, but unlike Apple they dont have any program to refurbish them. The official company line is that they battery is supposed to last the life of the product, which according to them is 5 years. However, ogg uses 2x the batterys compared to mp3, so I am looking at paying nearly $300 for a device which I am supposed to throw away in less than 3 years.
Does anyone have any real world experience with the Rio Karma battery life? Has anyone hacked / replaced the battery in their Karma?
What is slashdot? Although it is obvious to you, I think it would be worth pointing out in your post that it is a website covering "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Or we could just use the grade school skill of reading in context.
Someone less technically-inclined wouldn't want or need to be updating their kernal by hand. They would simply wait for their distro to get it packaged and tested and then upgrade that way. When was the last time you updated your windows kernal by hand?
Every time a new creative utility popped up, the would make their own version which was bundled into the OS. Every time the third party vendors would be pissed. But on the flip side when all was said and done, bundling the functionality really did improve things for the user.
Bundling is a interesting issue. There really are legitimate reasons why it is better to provide one integrated package, but from a market point of view it just reaks of anti-competitive behavior. Which is another reason why open source software is so interesting in the grand scheme of things - because an open source operating environment (OS + stuff) could have all the benifits of bundling, with none of the detriments of a monopoly.
IIRC, the verification takes place on the card. The ATM passes the PIN entered to the card, which simply responds pass|fail. No keys pass between reader and card, and the real PIN is held on-card with a sensible level of encryption.
I hope not, because this would be trivial to defraud by making a smart card that responded "pass" everytime regardless of the PIN entered.
That's really stretching it. I don't know a single person who doesn't think that we should utilize the resources here on earth. I don't know anything about James Watt, but I don't consider that statement by itself in anyway incriminating. Furthermore, all the Christians I have known argue that they have the resources they have been given. Their opinions just differ on where the line between using and squandering is, and how much enjoyment of nature should factor into that.
Why preserve nature when Jesus is just going to come back and desroy it anyway? And since they have no idea when Jesus is going to come back, they'd better not use it up to soon. You are just making a strawman argument.
This is exactly why Universities should have the senior or junior CS design-project be to add some significant functionality to an existing large project. There simply isn't enough time to build something that large from scratch in that short amount of time, and the things you learn from working with a large codebase are invaluable. Furthermore, in the real world you will spend much more time improving other people's code then you will writing from scratch anyway.
Nope. The "perfect" desktop distro would be a more up-to-date version of debian, with something as nice as YaST. Perhaps User Linux will provide the funding necisarry for this. Here is what I have found for the current distros:
For the desktop SuSE is king - it has great hardware support and YaST is much better than what Mandrake and Redhat have to offer (if only they would release it under a better licence). One edge that RedHat Linux had over SuSE, wast that there were more third party packages made for it, however now that RHL does not exist this is not a factor. Like any other RPM based distro though, after a year or two you will get to the point where it is easier to just do a clean install of the newest version rather than continue to update.
For the server, debian is great - it is rock solid, and the easiest distro to keep up-to-date without any down-time. However, if your employer really wants support then RedHat enterprise would be the best way to go.
Slackware was my first distro, and is wonderfull in its simplicity of design. I still recomend it to anyone who wants to learn linux, not just have a windows replacement. Like RPM distros, you will likely want to wipe and start over every couple years. Once I learned linux fairly well, the day-to-day convienence of other distros moved me off slackware.
Fedora stands alone as being the most up-to-date distro due to it's short release cycle, so it is the obvious choice for those who want to be on the cutting edge. It actually seems to be quite stable despite it's cutting edgeness. But when you release every couple months you can't expect to be able to support a release for any length of time. IMHO, the only advantage that Gentoo has is that it is more up-to-date than debian. The package manager seems nicer than rpm, but not as convienent as apt. I have never had the desire to use it myself. Knoppix is great for trying out linux, troubleshooting, and installing a desktop debian system. I keep a couple burned copies on hand at all times. And of course there are dozens of distros that are usefull for cool niche projects.
No, I would be going after my ex-wife or banker, not complaining about freenet.
Except since freenet is anonymous you wouldn't know it was you ex-wife or banker who put it up. Those are the digs. If you are providing anonymous speech to everyone that includes criminals and jerks. But the truth of the matter is that there is nothing to stop criminals from using strong encryption anyway, so freenet really doesn't make the problem worse.
This is a case of License Holy Wars. This is a case of RMS getting his knickers in a twist because someone has the audacity to release a useful and popular open-source program without the Holy GPL.
Bull. If RMS was so inflexible about using licenses other than the GPL we wouldn't even be hearing about these licence compatibilities issues from the FSF. They would simply say "If you don't use the GPL then we won't deal with you. End of story". Instead they put a great deal of effort into working with projects that use other licenses to make sure that they are compatible. They do this for the sole purpose of enabling people with different licences to work together and preventing free software from fracturing off into incompatible code bases. Exactly the opposite of what you and the original poster are claiming they do.
Furthermore, most of the time we hear about compatibility issues it is not a dispute but rather simply that the FSF's lawyers have noticed something that the authors of the other license didn't. Which is good to know. It would be a bad thing for developers to combine code released under two different licenses, thinking they were compatible, only to find out in a court room that they were wrong. Lastly, the only times the FSF has been inflexible about changing the GPL to deal with incompatibilities, it was because doing so would end up weakening the defensibility of the GPL in court.
Apart from the GNU/Linux thing, everything that the FSF has done has been extremely reasonable. The only difference between them and the majority of free software programers is that they have been bitten by laywers before and realise that unless you dot your i's and cross your t's it will happen again. Unfortunately, most geeks hate lawyers and formality, so this tends to rub them the wrong way, but it is necisarry. Considering all this junk with SCO, I for one am glad that the FSF has been so rigorous.
Slashdot Mirror
Well theoretically that the way it is supposed to work, but in practice what happens is that one applies for a vague patent for "a device which does x" and all the technical details about how you actually managed to get the device to do x are treated as trade secrets.
It's been said, but if they want their DVD encryption to be impenetrable (and hence popular with the MPAA) they should actually try to make it tough to crack instead of hiding behind a flimsy law that has apparently been dismissed in this particular case.
Except, that is theoretically impossible, which is the whole point of the DCMA. Since bullet proof DRM impossible, just make it illegal to create device that doesn't honor DRM, then the average user will never be able to break it, and the minority of people that do, will be small enough to ignore or sue. Well that was the theory until p2p showed that it was possible for the minority to anonymously distribute their cracked works to the majority.
Of course, all this DRM is completely unnecissary, just look at the software industry's experiance with it.
Okay, I did not get the point of that story at all. Obviously some people did because it is moderated up so high, so could someone please explain it.
And I know that money talks and bullshit walks. Unless we get some thick-walleted lobbyists on our side, the souless corporations will continue to turn innovation and invention into commodities - and Open Source and Free Software will remain terms that no one but the choir ever hears.
And the other souless corporations will continue to use the most cost effective solution, which is increasingly becoming open source.
This is what I love about the GPL. I think everyone can agree, given that a peice of software has been created, it is better for society if everyone to has access to it. The only issue at question is whether by limiting access to the software, we can provide necisarry means and motivation for more software to be written. I look at the GPL as an experiment - if copyright really does provide necissarry means and incentive to produce software then GPL'd software will never be as good as proprietary software, and will reamain on the sidelines. However if GPL'ed software does surpass and surplant proprietary software, then it is proof that there is enough means and motivation to produce software without the burden of copyright. This is increasingly showing itself to be the case.
The FSF focuses on the first issue, and think that the negative societal aspects of proprietary software are so bad that it doesn't matter whether copyright adds incentive or not, proprietary software is still intolerable.
The OSI focuses on the second issue, and think that the only important thing about free software is that it is better than proprietary software, and have provided usefull theories which help explain why this is the case.
But the real clincher is that both issues are true - that not only is software copyright harmfull, it is also unecissarry. It is for this reason that I agree with the FSF in treating it as an ethical situation, because while I am willing to put up with some "necissary evil", there is no reason to put up with proprietary software in the long run.
Oh man I remember those. I would read them once picking my own choices, and then would have to go through and do (what i would now call) a depth-first traversal of all the possibile choices. I don't know why I was so obsessed with making sure that I hadn't missed any of the possible segments, but I was. Perhaps it is the same thing that made me want to understand every aspect of how my computer worked, or the thing that abored wasting anything, and caused me to save all scrap parts, and eat everything I was given whether I liked it or not.
(BTW, What does one normally do when a bulldozer is going to knock down one's house? Still can't figure it out? Rot13 Solution: Whfg yvr qbja, va gur zhq, va sebag bs gur ohyyqbmre, naq jnvg sbe Sbeq gb pbzr svk guvatf hc.)
Most MP3 players use a dedicated MP3 chip for decoding the music stream. A standard audio controller just doesn't have the processing power, and main processors have to be pretty fast for a portable before they become fast enough for realtime vbr decoding.
Yes, but as hadheld games get bigger, with better audio, it becomes natural to want to use compressed audio for the soundtrack of the games, just like most console and PC games do. I would argue that the PSP would have the audio decomression chipsets regardless of whether it doubled as an mp3 player or not. Err, is that what you were saying in this next paragraph?
Personally, I think they should be using MP3 as the music format of choice for these portables, and should include a chip for such purposes.
As long as the extra features don't significantly increase the manufacturing costs of the system, I don't see why it would be a bad idea to include them. The N-Gage was a mistake for so many reasons, none of which are shared with the PSP.
The most fundemental mistake was that merging a game system and a phone doesn't make sense. Adding mp3 capabilities to a gamming system does. It fits the needs of the target demographics, and all the hardware to do so is already there - memory sticks, audio chipset, headphone jack. The only thing needed is software, and that costs nothing to manufacture, and nearly nothing to develop.
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt -- Abraham Lincoln
hehe, I think one needs to read his own sig. That is exactly what the new gimp does.
Absolutely. And I want to comment on this line:
:-)
Perhaps the title should have been "for Wannabee Geeks" instead.
The truth is that every geek is a "Wannabee Geek" in some sense. By friend is great at electronics and cars but knows nothing about computer programming. Whereas there are alot of projects that I would like to do, but know too little about (analog)electronics to do so. Furthermore, I would think that there are alot of people like me since you can learn alot about the software aspects of computers by exploration, but electronics isn't so accessable in the everyday home. This book seems like a great way to learn about the basic of EE and end up with a cool project in the process.
Does anyone have first hand experience with batteries on the Rio Karma? I have been seriously concidering getting that as it has many features (Ogg Vorbis/FLAC support, gapless playing, syncs from any OS) that the iPod doesn't, and IMHO even looks nicer than the iPod.
But the battery issue concerns me. Like the iPod it is an internal battery, but unlike Apple they dont have any program to refurbish them. The official company line is that they battery is supposed to last the life of the product, which according to them is 5 years. However, ogg uses 2x the batterys compared to mp3, so I am looking at paying nearly $300 for a device which I am supposed to throw away in less than 3 years.
Does anyone have any real world experience with the Rio Karma battery life? Has anyone hacked / replaced the battery in their Karma?
What is slashdot? Although it is obvious to you, I think it would be worth pointing out in your post that it is a website covering "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Or we could just use the grade school skill of reading in context.
Someone less technically-inclined wouldn't want or need to be updating their kernal by hand. They would simply wait for their distro to get it packaged and tested and then upgrade that way. When was the last time you updated your windows kernal by hand?
Every time a new creative utility popped up, the would make their own version which was bundled into the OS. Every time the third party vendors would be pissed. But on the flip side when all was said and done, bundling the functionality really did improve things for the user.
Bundling is a interesting issue. There really are legitimate reasons why it is better to provide one integrated package, but from a market point of view it just reaks of anti-competitive behavior. Which is another reason why open source software is so interesting in the grand scheme of things - because an open source operating environment (OS + stuff) could have all the benifits of bundling, with none of the detriments of a monopoly.
IIRC, the verification takes place on the card. The ATM passes the PIN entered to the card, which simply responds pass|fail. No keys pass between reader and card, and the real PIN is held on-card with a sensible level of encryption.
I hope not, because this would be trivial to defraud by making a smart card that responded "pass" everytime regardless of the PIN entered.
Does this question strike anybody; how much, alchohol/time/delirium must a person have to mix hamsters, small rodent aminamals, and MIDI.......
Yes and I am jealous:) If only I had more more alchohol, time and delirium, then just maybe I too could be cool as hell.
It would create a horrible precedent: citizens would be obliged to take instruction from people they can't authenticate.
I think you read that backwards it was the citizen who would not show his ID to the cop, not vice versa.
That is the most awesome emoticon ever!
That's really stretching it. I don't know a single person who doesn't think that we should utilize the resources here on earth. I don't know anything about James Watt, but I don't consider that statement by itself in anyway incriminating. Furthermore, all the Christians I have known argue that they have the resources they have been given. Their opinions just differ on where the line between using and squandering is, and how much enjoyment of nature should factor into that.
Why preserve nature when Jesus is just going to come back and desroy it anyway?
And since they have no idea when Jesus is going to come back, they'd better not use it up to soon. You are just making a strawman argument.
Well, There's An Obvious Explanation: There are a lot more voting bible-belters than there are scientists.
Well considering that only one of the examples had anything to do with christian moral issues, I don't think it is fair to jump to that conclusion.
This is exactly why Universities should have the senior or junior CS design-project be to add some significant functionality to an existing large project. There simply isn't enough time to build something that large from scratch in that short amount of time, and the things you learn from working with a large codebase are invaluable. Furthermore, in the real world you will spend much more time improving other people's code then you will writing from scratch anyway.
Nope. The "perfect" desktop distro would be a more up-to-date version of debian, with something as nice as YaST. Perhaps User Linux will provide the funding necisarry for this. Here is what I have found for the current distros:
For the desktop SuSE is king - it has great hardware support and YaST is much better than what Mandrake and Redhat have to offer (if only they would release it under a better licence). One edge that RedHat Linux had over SuSE, wast that there were more third party packages made for it, however now that RHL does not exist this is not a factor. Like any other RPM based distro though, after a year or two you will get to the point where it is easier to just do a clean install of the newest version rather than continue to update.
For the server, debian is great - it is rock solid, and the easiest distro to keep up-to-date without any down-time. However, if your employer really wants support then RedHat enterprise would be the best way to go.
Slackware was my first distro, and is wonderfull in its simplicity of design. I still recomend it to anyone who wants to learn linux, not just have a windows replacement. Like RPM distros, you will likely want to wipe and start over every couple years. Once I learned linux fairly well, the day-to-day convienence of other distros moved me off slackware.
Fedora stands alone as being the most up-to-date distro due to it's short release cycle, so it is the obvious choice for those who want to be on the cutting edge. It actually seems to be quite stable despite it's cutting edgeness. But when you release every couple months you can't expect to be able to support a release for any length of time. IMHO, the only advantage that Gentoo has is that it is more up-to-date than debian. The package manager seems nicer than rpm, but not as convienent as apt. I have never had the desire to use it myself. Knoppix is great for trying out linux, troubleshooting, and installing a desktop debian system. I keep a couple burned copies on hand at all times. And of course there are dozens of distros that are usefull for cool niche projects.
No, I would be going after my ex-wife or banker, not complaining about freenet.
Except since freenet is anonymous you wouldn't know it was you ex-wife or banker who put it up. Those are the digs. If you are providing anonymous speech to everyone that includes criminals and jerks. But the truth of the matter is that there is nothing to stop criminals from using strong encryption anyway, so freenet really doesn't make the problem worse.
Seriously, where is the foot? This article totally deserves the foot.
This is a case of License Holy Wars. This is a case of RMS getting his knickers in a twist because someone has the audacity to release a useful and popular open-source program without the Holy GPL.
Bull. If RMS was so inflexible about using licenses other than the GPL we wouldn't even be hearing about these licence compatibilities issues from the FSF. They would simply say "If you don't use the GPL then we won't deal with you. End of story". Instead they put a great deal of effort into working with projects that use other licenses to make sure that they are compatible. They do this for the sole purpose of enabling people with different licences to work together and preventing free software from fracturing off into incompatible code bases. Exactly the opposite of what you and the original poster are claiming they do.
Furthermore, most of the time we hear about compatibility issues it is not a dispute but rather simply that the FSF's lawyers have noticed something that the authors of the other license didn't. Which is good to know. It would be a bad thing for developers to combine code released under two different licenses, thinking they were compatible, only to find out in a court room that they were wrong. Lastly, the only times the FSF has been inflexible about changing the GPL to deal with incompatibilities, it was because doing so would end up weakening the defensibility of the GPL in court.
Apart from the GNU/Linux thing, everything that the FSF has done has been extremely reasonable. The only difference between them and the majority of free software programers is that they have been bitten by laywers before and realise that unless you dot your i's and cross your t's it will happen again. Unfortunately, most geeks hate lawyers and formality, so this tends to rub them the wrong way, but it is necisarry. Considering all this junk with SCO, I for one am glad that the FSF has been so rigorous.
The former is easy to parse at a glance, for a human, the latter you have to drill your eyeballs into to see through the XML clutter
:)
Exactly my point. I think you read my (chopped up) sentance backwards