I don't think there's a problem in trying to enable any parent to have a easy way to include filtering
software on a family PC, and if you put that cost into the cost of a computer...and
include software with the computer, all the better.
Sure! And while we're at it, let's require all guns to come with trigger locks, in case there are children in the house (so what if there aren't and you made the gun owner buy a lock they won't use). And let's require all cars to have airbags (so what if there are people who actually wear their more-effective safety belts and don't like carcinogins in their face). And while we're at it, let's put a chip in each TV so the government can decide what's suitable for children of parents who can't or won't parent (who cares if what the government-of-the-day finds acceptable I find offensive, and visa-versa).
I can't wait until computer vision techology advances to the point that cameras won't take pictures of offensive scenes, like at the nude beach or presidential news conferences. Things will be so much better when we no longer have to think for ourselves.
5.It's not really worth fighting this sort of thing in court. The right response to Scientology is
just to overwhelm them with the volume of criticism.
Close. The right response to Scientology is to know your facts, educate your children and anyone you discuss COS with (but, in general, I advise not rasing the subject in polite company), and -- most importantly of all -- ignore the Scientologists. Don't legitimize them. Debating them legitimizes them. And if one darkens your door, call the cops and arrest them for tresspassing (it's what they'd do to you:-)
Oh, and boycott their stupid films. I don't care what actors do in private, but if they promote idol worship (the Scientologists don't have a god, but if they did it would be money) they won't get my money. I don't care how many Battlefield Earth references I miss, I'll never watch it.
Finally, when you write your elected representatives, ask them why the IRS suddenly reversed their policy and blessed the COS as a legitmate religion. Then ask why the IRS has sealed their reasoning and won't tell anyone. I want to know because whatever arguements the COS made must surely apply to my beliefs, and I want tax-exempt status, too. Don't you? The only way to get such tax-exempt status for a transparantly non-religion is to do whatever the COS did to the IRS, but the IRS isn't talking. I guess worshiping money is something the IRS understands...
Good point, and I'm sure the Linux numbers are small. My point was that you cannot judge OS penetration by hardware sales alone in a market where the OS is bundled with the hardware and the hardware has useful value without the OS. Indeed, it's arguably worth _more_ without the factory installed OS!:-)
Not a fair comparison. I, for example, plan to replace Wince with Linux as soon as I can get my hands on an iPaq 3600. That means Microsoft will get another sale, making them look good compared to Palm when in fact I'd rather buy the iPaq empty. Does anyone know how the iPaq sells vs the Jornada? Important question because no Palm or Jornada sales are to Linux buffs, but quite a few iPaq sales are. Any way to estimate the pro-Microsoft skew in the data by the number of downloads from handhelds.org?
If I have to buy an OS license I'll never use, I'd rather my money go to Palm, but of course I'd rather not waste my money that way at all.
A 'certain other company' ahem.. has spent years ensuring incompatibility between products to tie
you into theirs, then make you upgrade regularly. It's very nice to see this policy backfiring on
them in a high-visibility market space I'm sure they'd like to 'own' too.
I don't know about that. We've seen thisbefore. In that story it wasn't the 'certain other company' putting their proprietary incompatible computers into space, but rather some other nut, and with NASA's blessing, so it doesn't look like their policy's backfired yet.
Sales pitch-BFHD-The real news is at the bottom
on
64 Bits in Space
·
· Score: 1
This is a PR piece from MIPS and Toshiba. Big Deal.
The real fun is at the bottom of the page:
Huntsville - Jan. 27, 2001
It's a mission where failure will be
success -- and that's exactly what NASA
engineers are hoping for. They anticipate
failures in six experiments on the NASA Space
Radiation Electronics Testbed, a payload now orbiting
Earth aboard the Space Technology Research
Vehicle-1-d. The satellite was launched Nov. 15 on an
Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana.
According to the article, "a Microsoft spokesman assured [the author]" that mundane upgrades
wouldn't cause a problem. Whew! We can all rest easy, because we know a Microsoft
spokesman would never mislead a member of the press....
You're right, they would never mislead the press. You just have to understand Microspeak: In this case "mundane upgrades" includes swapping PC cards, plugging and unplugging USB devices, etc. You know, the stuff that Windows plug-and-pray currently autodetects and autoloads drivers for (which they now do quite well, I must admit). Replacing a hard drive (or video card, or anything else where plug-and-pray fails) is not a "mundane upgrade" -- and that's exactly the sort of upgrade where you're better off buying a new OS license than dealing with the Activation Code. You know, a new OS license like that GPL license or one of the BSD licenses.
If nothing else, it would tweak appropriate noses in Redmond
Hardly. Despite Compaq's continued support for Linux on the iPaq (welcome but sorta strange, considering their Presario group's slavish devotion to Mr. Bill -- putting Linux on my 1230 wasn't hard, but Compaq was zero help), they still won't sell you one without Wince (that's not a typo). Mr. Bill gets his cut from every iPaq sale, so why would you discarding Wince tweak Redmondian noses? Their greatest loss is that you probably won't buy the Wince Entertainment Pack. BFHD
This has nothing to do with killing DeCSS and everything to do with saving the DMCA. Think Pay-Per-View, as in "trivially encrypted and easily pirated Pay-Per-View", the decrypting of which is illegal under the DMCA. I'm surprised all the cable companies haven't jumped on this bandwagon.
there is
no reason to supress the rights of free individuals in a free country to
honestly and independently evaluate your product.
You missed the point. They cannot and do not suppress anyone's right to "honestly and independently evaluate" their products. They just suppress your free speach rights to tell anyone what you found. You're free to say "We evaluated MS SQL and Oracle and chose Oracle because we feel it blows MS off the map", you just can't say how much it blows.
Oh, great. Several of us post that/. made an error, and all our posts are modded to zero. Then I complain that those posts were modded down, and that post is called flamebait and modded down as well -- but the original posts are modded back up!
So which is it,/.: Were the original posts crap deserving of modding down, in which case the above complaint may indeed qualify as "flamebait", Or was the original modding down wrong (as indicated by their being modded back up), in which case my complaint is not flamebait and should not have been modded down? Which is it -- you can't have it both ways (at least, not without getting called on it:-)
By the way, this is not flamebait. When I bait a flame, you'll know it!
Finally, on October 2, 2000, NIST released their final decision, that Rijndael was to be the AES selection. Simultaneously, NIST released a paper detailing their rationale for the selection. In sum, this paper says that any of the finalists could have been selected (an opinion echoed by many in the industry), but that Rijndael proved to have the proper balance necessary between speed in hardware, speed in software, and security. To quote from NIST's statement:
Rijndael appears to be consistently a very good performer in both hardware and software across a wide range of computing environments regardless of its use in feedback or non-feedback modes. Its key setup time is excellent, and its key agility is good. Rijndael's very l ow memory requirements make it very well suited for restricted-space environ environments, in which it also demonstrates excellent performance. Rijndael's operations ons are among the easiest to defend against power and timing attacks. Additionally y, it appears that some defense can be provided against such attacks without significantly impacting Rijndael's performance. Rijndael is designed with th some flexibility in terms of block and key sizes, and the algorithm can accommodate alterations in the number of rounds, although these features would require e further study and are not being considered at this time. Finally, Rijndael's internal round structure appears to have good potential to benefit from instruction-level parallelism.
At this point, it's all over but the shouting. At some point later this year, the Secretary of Commerce will officially designate Rijndael the Advanced Encryption Standard, and a new era will have begun. AES was specified (and is expected) to remain a standard for at least as long as DES, and to protect data for even longer, and barring a major development (such as faster-than-forseen developments in quantum computing), this standard will likely be met. No one expects research into new algorithms to die, however. There will continue to be parallel algorithms developed and used, just as there are today. Thanks to be combined efforts of NIST and the community, however, there will always be the bedrock of AES available.
In conclusion, I'd like to point out the positive role that the U.S. Government, as represented by NIST, has played in this process. The Free Software/Open Source community has taken its share of shots at the government over patents, copyright and crypto export over the past several years, and deservedly so. The AES process, however, was lauded throughout the encryption community as a fair and open process that brought together the best minds available to select the algorithm for the next century (as NIST likes to say). Making an algorithm a FIPS standard gives it a legitimacy that cannot be obtained in any other way, especially given the way that this standard was arrived at. The algorithm is completely free of any IP hurdles, as was specified at the beginning of the process, and since the code is open, it can be downloaded by anyone in the world (and since it was designed outside of the U.S., any attempt to regulate its export from the U.S. would be silly). It is reasonable to criticize when a situation is bad, but it is only fair to praise when something is good.
Bibliography
I used a great number of sources from print and the web, so it's only fair to list them here. I also put many links in the body itself, most of which go into much more detail than I did.
NIST's main AES site is the place to start. It links to most of the technical information I linked to above.
All that missed due to one stinking quotation mark! Geeze, guys, learn to Preview!
To measure the effect of piracy on its
business, Steinberg, based in Hamburg, Germany, once offered an amnesty whereby any holder
of a pirated version of Cubase, which retails for $350 to $800, could trade it in for a legal
version. The number of pirated versions turned in equaled 25 percent of the company's sales that
year.
So they said "If you pirate our software we'll give you a free copy" and then were amazed at the amount of piracy? I'm suprised it was only 25% -- every legitimate owner of their app probably gave it away to all their friends in the business: "Hey, Phil, can I copy your Cubase so I can get a free licensed version?" "Sure, and here's a copy for Frank, too."
Reminds me of the time Dilbert's company decided to improve quality by paying the programmers $10 for every bug they fixed. Wally wrote himself a new car that afternoon.
If we are to be honest, we must impose terms of limitation on physical property too, such as the
holdings a company or person owns. Of course, this is unfair and unworkable.
Why do you say this is "unfair and unworkable"? I own a mirror made by an artist. It has a wooden frame that has the image of a tree cut into it such that the mirror shows through where the bits of wood were cut away to make the tree. This mirror is physical, and it's copyrighted. I can sell it, give it away, or destroy it without the artist's permission, but I may not copy it. 50 (now 70) years after the artist dies, I am free to make copies of it. This is workable and fair.
Unforuntately having to state the obvious, the whole point of having an URL named slashdot is
negated by putting www in front of it.
Unfortunately having to state the obvious, if it was such a big deal then "putting www in front of it" wouldn't work. But it does work, so the people who run this place apparantly don't mind (or don't care as much as some users).
Heh.. once upon a time, the URL http://slashdot.org was so frequently misquoted as http://www.slashdot.org, that the editors had an acronym for the offence - TCWWW, "the cursed WWW". Now, we get that mistake popping up on Slashdot itself.:-)
Careful -- the last guy to point this out was modded down and called a troll. Don't apologise for your mistakes, cover them up! Yeah, that's the ticket! Worked for Nixon, right?
Now go to a digital world where you can duplicate content with a few presses of a button and
suddenly a library no longer needs 30 copies of the most recent Harry Potter book, they just get 1
and copy it. There needs to be a ballence here.
There is a ballence here. If the library copies that Harry Potter book they are no longer a library, they just became a publisher. The ballence is that libraries that become publishers are copyright violators who should be prosecuted, while libraries that remain libraries are just libraries and should be protected.
Trademarks
protect identity, product names and differentiate companies and they are viciously defended to
increase revenue. They don't give a hoot about citizen protection as long as the citizens are
shopping with them.
Yes, and that protects the consumer. How? Well, how would you, the consumer, feel if you bought a tube of "Crest" toothpaste and found out it wasn't made by the Crest you expected, and this "other-Crest" made your teeth fall out?
What if you bought some "Ford" brake parts for your Windstar or Mustang and found out later, when your car failed to stop and killed someone, that they were not actually Ford parts?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure! And while we're at it, let's require all guns to come with trigger locks, in case there are children in the house (so what if there aren't and you made the gun owner buy a lock they won't use). And let's require all cars to have airbags (so what if there are people who actually wear their more-effective safety belts and don't like carcinogins in their face). And while we're at it, let's put a chip in each TV so the government can decide what's suitable for children of parents who can't or won't parent (who cares if what the government-of-the-day finds acceptable I find offensive, and visa-versa).
I can't wait until computer vision techology advances to the point that cameras won't take pictures of offensive scenes, like at the nude beach or presidential news conferences. Things will be so much better when we no longer have to think for ourselves.
Close. The right response to Scientology is to know your facts, educate your children and anyone you discuss COS with (but, in general, I advise not rasing the subject in polite company), and -- most importantly of all -- ignore the Scientologists. Don't legitimize them. Debating them legitimizes them. And if one darkens your door, call the cops and arrest them for tresspassing (it's what they'd do to you :-)
Oh, and boycott their stupid films. I don't care what actors do in private, but if they promote idol worship (the Scientologists don't have a god, but if they did it would be money) they won't get my money. I don't care how many Battlefield Earth references I miss, I'll never watch it.
Finally, when you write your elected representatives, ask them why the IRS suddenly reversed their policy and blessed the COS as a legitmate religion. Then ask why the IRS has sealed their reasoning and won't tell anyone. I want to know because whatever arguements the COS made must surely apply to my beliefs, and I want tax-exempt status, too. Don't you? The only way to get such tax-exempt status for a transparantly non-religion is to do whatever the COS did to the IRS, but the IRS isn't talking. I guess worshiping money is something the IRS understands...
If I have to buy an OS license I'll never use, I'd rather my money go to Palm, but of course I'd rather not waste my money that way at all.
I don't know about that. We've seen this before. In that story it wasn't the 'certain other company' putting their proprietary incompatible computers into space, but rather some other nut, and with NASA's blessing, so it doesn't look like their policy's backfired yet.
The real fun is at the bottom of the page:
Ariane lauched a NASA satellite? That's news!
You're right, they would never mislead the press. You just have to understand Microspeak: In this case "mundane upgrades" includes swapping PC cards, plugging and unplugging USB devices, etc. You know, the stuff that Windows plug-and-pray currently autodetects and autoloads drivers for (which they now do quite well, I must admit). Replacing a hard drive (or video card, or anything else where plug-and-pray fails) is not a "mundane upgrade" -- and that's exactly the sort of upgrade where you're better off buying a new OS license than dealing with the Activation Code. You know, a new OS license like that GPL license or one of the BSD licenses.
That implies this is a journalistic site. It's not. It's Geek Rumor Central -- always has been, always will be. Get over it.
Hardly. Despite Compaq's continued support for Linux on the iPaq (welcome but sorta strange, considering their Presario group's slavish devotion to Mr. Bill -- putting Linux on my 1230 wasn't hard, but Compaq was zero help), they still won't sell you one without Wince (that's not a typo). Mr. Bill gets his cut from every iPaq sale, so why would you discarding Wince tweak Redmondian noses? Their greatest loss is that you probably won't buy the Wince Entertainment Pack. BFHD
You missed the point. They cannot and do not suppress anyone's right to "honestly and independently evaluate" their products. They just suppress your free speach rights to tell anyone what you found. You're free to say "We evaluated MS SQL and Oracle and chose Oracle because we feel it blows MS off the map", you just can't say how much it blows.
If you want more disk space, you open the case and add another hard disk.
So if you want an extra 33-200MHz, why not open the case and toss in a spare 486 or two? I've got an old Dell 486 at home if you're interested...
So which is it, /.: Were the original posts crap deserving of modding down, in which case the above complaint may indeed qualify as "flamebait", Or was the original modding down wrong (as indicated by their being modded back up), in which case my complaint is not flamebait and should not have been modded down? Which is it -- you can't have it both ways (at least, not without getting called on it :-)
By the way, this is not flamebait. When I bait a flame, you'll know it!
is supposed to read thusly:
Finally, on October 2, 2000, NIST released their final decision, that Rijndael was to be the AES selection. Simultaneously, NIST released a paper detailing their rationale for the selection. In sum, this paper says that any of the finalists could have been selected (an opinion echoed by many in the industry), but that Rijndael proved to have the proper balance necessary between speed in hardware, speed in software, and security. To quote from NIST's statement:
At this point, it's all over but the shouting. At some point later this year, the Secretary of Commerce will officially designate Rijndael the Advanced Encryption Standard, and a new era will have begun. AES was specified (and is expected) to remain a standard for at least as long as DES, and to protect data for even longer, and barring a major development (such as faster-than-forseen developments in quantum computing), this standard will likely be met. No one expects research into new algorithms to die, however. There will continue to be parallel algorithms developed and used, just as there are today. Thanks to be combined efforts of NIST and the community, however, there will always be the bedrock of AES available.
In conclusion, I'd like to point out the positive role that the U.S. Government, as represented by NIST, has played in this process. The Free Software/Open Source community has taken its share of shots at the government over patents, copyright and crypto export over the past several years, and deservedly so. The AES process, however, was lauded throughout the encryption community as a fair and open process that brought together the best minds available to select the algorithm for the next century (as NIST likes to say). Making an algorithm a FIPS standard gives it a legitimacy that cannot be obtained in any other way, especially given the way that this standard was arrived at. The algorithm is completely free of any IP hurdles, as was specified at the beginning of the process, and since the code is open, it can be downloaded by anyone in the world (and since it was designed outside of the U.S., any attempt to regulate its export from the U.S. would be silly). It is reasonable to criticize when a situation is bad, but it is only fair to praise when something is good.
BibliographyI used a great number of sources from print and the web, so it's only fair to list them here. I also put many links in the body itself, most of which go into much more detail than I did.
All that missed due to one stinking quotation mark! Geeze, guys, learn to Preview!
So they said "If you pirate our software we'll give you a free copy" and then were amazed at the amount of piracy? I'm suprised it was only 25% -- every legitimate owner of their app probably gave it away to all their friends in the business: "Hey, Phil, can I copy your Cubase so I can get a free licensed version?" "Sure, and here's a copy for Frank, too."
Reminds me of the time Dilbert's company decided to improve quality by paying the programmers $10 for every bug they fixed. Wally wrote himself a new car that afternoon.
Why do you say this is "unfair and unworkable"? I own a mirror made by an artist. It has a wooden frame that has the image of a tree cut into it such that the mirror shows through where the bits of wood were cut away to make the tree. This mirror is physical, and it's copyrighted. I can sell it, give it away, or destroy it without the artist's permission, but I may not copy it. 50 (now 70) years after the artist dies, I am free to make copies of it. This is workable and fair.
Hmmm... It doesn't take me to Never-Never Land, it takes me here. Makes me wonder if they want anyone to play their game...
Unfortunately having to state the obvious, if it was such a big deal then "putting www in front of it" wouldn't work. But it does work, so the people who run this place apparantly don't mind (or don't care as much as some users).
Huh? What "mistake"? The reference to "www.slashdot.org"? That link works, so where's the mistake? Indeed, these links all work just fine, and take you to the same story: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/13/168218 , http://www.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/13/16 8218, http://www.slashdot.com/article.pl?sid=01/02/13/16 8218.
I think /. fsck'd up big time on this one!
There is a ballence here. If the library copies that Harry Potter book they are no longer a library, they just became a publisher. The ballence is that libraries that become publishers are copyright violators who should be prosecuted, while libraries that remain libraries are just libraries and should be protected.
Yes, and that protects the consumer. How? Well, how would you, the consumer, feel if you bought a tube of "Crest" toothpaste and found out it wasn't made by the Crest you expected, and this "other-Crest" made your teeth fall out?
What if you bought some "Ford" brake parts for your Windstar or Mustang and found out later, when your car failed to stop and killed someone, that they were not actually Ford parts?