What really gets me is their claim that this diversion of cash doesn't hurt the customer. Sure, it doesn't cost the customer any more money, but most of the sites that have funds diverted away from them are small, special-interest sites that provide their content for free, and use that income to pay for their bandwidth. If that money dissappears, then the sites dissappear as well, and voila, the customer is now hurt. I certainly don't want *my* favorite sites dissappearing just because some amoral jackass decided he needs the money more than they do.
As I'm told, Palladium is hard to break because it works as follows:
Every Palladium chip has its own private and public key. It'll tell anyone the public key, but it never outputs the private key. When you download a program or a movie or something from the internet, you send your public key to the server, and it uses that to encrypt it.
The encrypted file is then sent to your computer. Now that it's been encrypted with your chip's public key, the only way to decrypt it is with the private key, which is inside the chip itself and not available to anyone, even the user.
Thus, unless there's a serious design flaw (like with some DVD players), it'd be very hard to crack the protection, because said protection involves strong encryption with a key you can't access. People have been trying unsuccessfully to break strong encryption for a long time now.
First off, the odds, according to today's poll, are about 30%.
That said, this affects everyone. Mind you, I'm told that Palladium will always be able to be shut off via the BIOS, so you can always buy a Palladium-enabled processor and make it act as if it isn't. That's not the problem, really.
The problem is that Palladium is hardware-embedded Digital Rights Denial. It's paving the way for music and movies that won't play at all unless you have a Palladium-enabled processor. And if you do enable Palladium, you'll be subject to the same restrictive crap that the media cartels have been trying unsuccessfully to push over the last several years. Movies that you can't move to other computers, and that only work as long as you remain subscribed to MovieConglomerate.com or wherever your got them.
Will this all work out in the long run? Well, it depends on how people react. If they continue to reject hightly restricted content, we should be fine. If not, well, say goodbye to the Open Internet. It was fun while it lasted.
...or the Ulysseses ($50), but that doesn't have that cool ring to it.
Your average consumer doesn't want to cough up fifty bucks for broadband. I'm not an expert on bandwidth costs, but I'm willing to bet that they'd find bandwidth a lot less expensive if they ever really had to compete for customers.
My guess is that in a few years, it's theoretically possible for people to have cable modem speeds for $20 a month -- what the average person is willing to pay. The problem is, with broadband costs still ridiculously high, there's little incentive for average folks to jump on the (brace yourself for a bad pun) "band" wagon. Hell, I don't like paying fifty a month for my cable modem.
Go into your slashdot preferences, and set it up so that it highlights all messages (-1 and above), then go to a Your Rights Online rant, preferably one with 500 or more comments, and save the resulting html to the Dasher "source" file.
Once you've done that, fire up Dasher and let the mouse sit in one place. You'll get a bunch of randomly generated Slashdot-esque gibberish.
I've always thought that I'd very enthusiastically pay for music if it were sold at $0.25 a track. The music companies don't want to do this, because presumably it devalues the music that they've tried so hard do inflate to over five times that value.
What I'd like to know is, if they did start selling tracks at a quarter apiece, how much more music would people have to buy to make up for the drop in price? (Not taking production or bandwidth costs into account, it people would need to download about 60 songs for every CD they purchase now). Is it plausiable that you'd buy five times as much music if it were a fifth the price? I probably would myself, but I very rarely buy CDs.
The document mentions a little ways down that multiple document interfaces have "inherent useability problems" and shouldn't be used.
To the contrary, one of the most annoying "features" of, say, Word 2000 is that it's got a single document interface that opens up multiple windows, cluttering your taskbar. Now, I understand why they did this--they probably got a lot of tech support calls from inexperienced users who believed they had lost their documents... but it would have been nice of them to include something in the preferences menu to allow you to turn MDI back on.
By the same token, it would be nice if some of these single document applications were only single document by default, and could be changed into multi-document mode in the preferences menu. For experienced users, a tabbed interface is often a lot more convenient.
On the other hand, a waste basket should not be used for anything other than holding discarded files. It should not be used, for example, to eject a removable disk such as a floppy or CD.
I never liked that... I was always worried that, when I put a floppy in the trash, it would reformat it or something. I'd be curious to find out who came up with that, and what exactly they were thinking. Tossing something in the garbage does imply that you're not ging to use it anymore, ever.
"regular users" can make educated decisions about their ability to use the software, but in general, they cannot make educated decisions about the technical merits and defficiencies of the software.
Engineers can't make educated decisions about a regular user's ability to use the software, but they can make educated decisions about the technical merits of the software, IF they have the source code.
And this is precisely why both sets of opinions need to be taken into account. Also, as an engineer myself, I can attest that, given reasonable documentation and input from people who have used a certain program, I'm quite capable of making technical decisions on whether or not it's good to use it whether I have the source or not. (Wow, that's a horrible run-on sentence:)
I'm not sure if you're a Linux user, but if you are, be honest... did you wade through the kernel source before deciding to use it? If you did, you're in a tiny minority. I myself just read about it and heard about it from other people. I don't have the time to poke through millions of lines of code.
The person who likes using Windows isn't being a zealot. They've just gotten to the point that they're comfortable using Windows, and they're trying to do their job.
This doesn't imply that the software needs to be free in the FSF sense, but it implies that the code can be examined by any interested party. It doesn't mean that you should be allowed to modify it, though it is certainly an advantage to society.
I'm not certain of whether or not this is true in actuality, but I'm guessing that Microsoft's response to this would be that they have a Shared Source program which does allow people to view their code.
Mind you, most of the security-critical parts of Windows are still closed "for security reasons," which doesn't instill a lot of trust, considering that Linux is at least as secure as Windows despite the code being open.
But that's the whole point. In this intelligent decision-making process, this is just one of many factors that need to be taken into account.
One other thing to bear in mind: When the government becomes less productive, it comes out of your pocket. If government employees are having trouble wading through an arguably less intuitive desktop trying to get their work done, then the government has to either hire more people (which diverts money from other programs that could be beneficial to citizens) or deal with the change and become less efficient (imagine waiting longer for your tax return).
Absolute accountability for software would be pleasant, but in reality, there are a lot of other factors that come into play. Some branches of our government are already staggering under the weight of their own bureaucracy. The last thing they need is to be hobbled further by blanket legislation that tells them how they should do their jobs.
One fundamental problem with open-source zealotry is the assumption that in every possible case, open-source software is better than any proprietary alternative. This has a nasty tendency to piss off regular users ("Why are you forcing this on me? I liked my Windows just fine.") and less zealous OSS advocates (who are trying very hard to convince people that we Free Software types are capable of being reasonable).
What the government needs to do is a detailed cost-benefit analysis for each major software purchase. Linux is cheaper to run in some cases, but the fact is, you need to retrain people to use new software, and they can often get bogged down if said software isn't of as high quality as the commercial software they were originally using. Microsoft Office has its annoyances, but is still (in my experience) generally a better office suite than Open/StarOffice.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. They decision shouldn't be made for government organizations. It should just be an educated decision made by engineers and regular users, as opposed to managers who have just been impressed by salesmen.
I've seen this news story floating around for the past several days... sadly, nobody links back to the site with the original, high-resolution images (suitable for, say, printing out or making into a desktop background).
The idea, of course, is to get people used to it, so when it does come time to shove it down people's throats, there won't be much resistance.
I don't know about you, but I find that the phrase "Protect My Music" is a bit deceptive. Admittedly, "Make it so my music will only play on this computer" is a bit of a mouthful, but at least it's not misleading.
If someone like my little sister (who is a fairly average computer user) sees that checkbox, they don't know what it means, but they generally leave it checked because it sounds positive. A power user (who has some experience with recent commercial software) may be more inclined to be a bit suspicious about the vague and somewhat ominous "Protect My Music." Sadly, most users are the average kind and not the power kind... so what looks fair on the outside is actually pretty sneaky and deceptive.
If they can do eyes, which I would have (apprently wrongly) assumed would have been the most complicated, when will they be able to wire up people to take electronic input from the other four senses?
And what about the other direction? Taking signals for muscle movements directly out of the brain?
I heard at one point that there was speculation about injecting cell-sized machines into the blood stream that would find their way to the brain and interface themselves with the host's neurons, without any surgery. Obviously, there's a long way to go before anything like this, but it might actually be possible 50 years from now.
The "Matrix Experience" would be a lot more attractive if it didn't involve someone opening your skull up and poking around inside your brain.
Re:moving Sourceforge to DB2?!?!
on
Linuxworld Fun
·
· Score: 2
what's wrong with MySQL again?
Perhaps this is fixed in a version later than the one I'm using at work (although their website would seem to indicate otherwise), but the MySQL I'm using can't even handle a simple sub-select. It also lacks triggers and the like.
MySQL is a nice, fast database for doing simple queries, but if you want to do anything remotely complicated in pure SQL, you need to use something a bit more robust, feature-wise.
This means that eventually they'll be able to place a large infrared light out in a public place and be able to identify everyone who walks through using minimal computer power.
Attempts at face recognition so far have been encouragingly laughable. If this is everything it's cracked up to be, it may eventually be able to fill the niche that face recognition was supposed to.
Of course, it sounds like right now the light has to be very close to the skin for it to work. Perhaps there are inherent limitations in the system that will prevent it from working over large areas.
What these directors (and most likely the MPAA) would like to do is make it so people can only watch their material without making any changes to it, even for personal use.
This is like a book publisher trying to make it illegal for you to tear pages out of a book that you purchased. Mind you, reselling a book in that condition would be wrong, unless you informed the buyer that the pages were missing. However, it looks as if, in this case, there's no deception going on. Everyone purchasing these edited movies is totally aware that the scenes have been removed.
Whether or not you think censorship is stupid or senseless has absolutely no bearing on what other people, with their own opinions, should be able to do to their own property. I am vehemently opposed to mandatory censorship enforced by the government, but I am completely in favor of people being able to use their own property in the way that they want.
If the federal government wants to file the tits off the Statue of Liberty, it's their perogative. They own it.
It should be pointed out that if extraterrestrials are visiting earth, it is highly probable that they have some means of travel that exceeds the speed of light (wormholes or something?). I won't speculate on how this is done, since I'm not a physicist.
However, if they do have the resources to do this, then it would be reasonable for them to be able to set up monitoring stations all over the galaxy (in the space of a few million years) to listen for the radio signature of a new intelligent civilization popping into existance (ours, sadly, was Adolf Hitler). Said monitoring station would use whatever technology allows them to exceed the speed of light, and send a message back to their home base letting them know that somebody just invented television.
After that, the aliens hop into their little flying saucers, head for earth, abduct people, and probe their nether regions.
At any rate, the article is bunk, because the assumptions it takes are a bit too selective, and it fails to explore some very obvious possibilities.
By watching TV you are entering into a Hobbesian contract.
Excellent use of obscure terminology. The phrase Hobbesian contract makes you appear smart, because most readers don't know what a Hobbesian contract is. (Namely, an agreement to obey an authority as long as said authority does its duty.)
They agree to show a show, you agree to watch the commercials. It's a concept as old as the Magna Carta.
Citing historical documents. Excellent.
I can't wait until these self-delusional pirates are given the smackdown by a clueful judge.
Here's where you lose me. A skilled troll would have omitted this sentence, or at least softened the wording a bit. Referring to people who want to skip commercials (at last count, almost everyone) as "self-delusional pirates" is an obvious attempt at ruffling feathers.
One other note: you probably should have written a few paragraphs and explained your ridiculous opinion in more detail. It's far more effective to progressively piss people off than hit them with one insult four sentences into your post.
If you have a small company with, say, fifty people, and you educate and assist all fifty of those people, a significant fraction will still say "there's no way my account would be cracked" and use set their password to "PASSWORD" or somesuch.
The fact is, you do need to force users to enter cryptic passwords, or there will always be lazy, irresponsible types who just don't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
What really gets me is their claim that this diversion of cash doesn't hurt the customer. Sure, it doesn't cost the customer any more money, but most of the sites that have funds diverted away from them are small, special-interest sites that provide their content for free, and use that income to pay for their bandwidth. If that money dissappears, then the sites dissappear as well, and voila, the customer is now hurt. I certainly don't want *my* favorite sites dissappearing just because some amoral jackass decided he needs the money more than they do.
Sure, if you just want to remove FFXI. For some of the other bundled crap, though, you either need to reformat or get a priest.
Your best bet is to borrow an OS install disc from one of your friends and install the OS again from scratch.
...for allowing people to use their mod points on articles.
As I'm told, Palladium is hard to break because it works as follows:
Every Palladium chip has its own private and public key. It'll tell anyone the public key, but it never outputs the private key. When you download a program or a movie or something from the internet, you send your public key to the server, and it uses that to encrypt it.
The encrypted file is then sent to your computer. Now that it's been encrypted with your chip's public key, the only way to decrypt it is with the private key, which is inside the chip itself and not available to anyone, even the user.
Thus, unless there's a serious design flaw (like with some DVD players), it'd be very hard to crack the protection, because said protection involves strong encryption with a key you can't access. People have been trying unsuccessfully to break strong encryption for a long time now.
First off, the odds, according to today's poll, are about 30%.
That said, this affects everyone. Mind you, I'm told that Palladium will always be able to be shut off via the BIOS, so you can always buy a Palladium-enabled processor and make it act as if it isn't. That's not the problem, really.
The problem is that Palladium is hardware-embedded Digital Rights Denial. It's paving the way for music and movies that won't play at all unless you have a Palladium-enabled processor. And if you do enable Palladium, you'll be subject to the same restrictive crap that the media cartels have been trying unsuccessfully to push over the last several years. Movies that you can't move to other computers, and that only work as long as you remain subscribed to MovieConglomerate.com or wherever your got them.
Will this all work out in the long run? Well, it depends on how people react. If they continue to reject hightly restricted content, we should be fine. If not, well, say goodbye to the Open Internet. It was fun while it lasted.
...or the Ulysseses ($50), but that doesn't have that cool ring to it.
Your average consumer doesn't want to cough up fifty bucks for broadband. I'm not an expert on bandwidth costs, but I'm willing to bet that they'd find bandwidth a lot less expensive if they ever really had to compete for customers.
My guess is that in a few years, it's theoretically possible for people to have cable modem speeds for $20 a month -- what the average person is willing to pay. The problem is, with broadband costs still ridiculously high, there's little incentive for average folks to jump on the (brace yourself for a bad pun) "band" wagon. Hell, I don't like paying fifty a month for my cable modem.
Go into your slashdot preferences, and set it up so that it highlights all messages (-1 and above), then go to a Your Rights Online rant, preferably one with 500 or more comments, and save the resulting html to the Dasher "source" file.
Once you've done that, fire up Dasher and let the mouse sit in one place. You'll get a bunch of randomly generated Slashdot-esque gibberish.
Fun stuff.
I've always thought that I'd very enthusiastically pay for music if it were sold at $0.25 a track. The music companies don't want to do this, because presumably it devalues the music that they've tried so hard do inflate to over five times that value.
What I'd like to know is, if they did start selling tracks at a quarter apiece, how much more music would people have to buy to make up for the drop in price? (Not taking production or bandwidth costs into account, it people would need to download about 60 songs for every CD they purchase now). Is it plausiable that you'd buy five times as much music if it were a fifth the price? I probably would myself, but I very rarely buy CDs.
The document mentions a little ways down that multiple document interfaces have "inherent useability problems" and shouldn't be used.
... but it would have been nice of them to include something in the preferences menu to allow you to turn MDI back on.
To the contrary, one of the most annoying "features" of, say, Word 2000 is that it's got a single document interface that opens up multiple windows, cluttering your taskbar. Now, I understand why they did this--they probably got a lot of tech support calls from inexperienced users who believed they had lost their documents
By the same token, it would be nice if some of these single document applications were only single document by default, and could be changed into multi-document mode in the preferences menu. For experienced users, a tabbed interface is often a lot more convenient.
I like the little dig they take at the Mac UI:
On the other hand, a waste basket should not be used for anything other than holding discarded files. It should not be used, for example, to eject a removable disk such as a floppy or CD.
I never liked that... I was always worried that, when I put a floppy in the trash, it would reformat it or something. I'd be curious to find out who came up with that, and what exactly they were thinking. Tossing something in the garbage does imply that you're not ging to use it anymore, ever.
"regular users" can make educated decisions about their ability to use the software, but in general, they cannot make educated decisions about the technical merits and defficiencies of the software.
:)
Engineers can't make educated decisions about a regular user's ability to use the software, but they can make educated decisions about the technical merits of the software, IF they have the source code.
And this is precisely why both sets of opinions need to be taken into account. Also, as an engineer myself, I can attest that, given reasonable documentation and input from people who have used a certain program, I'm quite capable of making technical decisions on whether or not it's good to use it whether I have the source or not. (Wow, that's a horrible run-on sentence
I'm not sure if you're a Linux user, but if you are, be honest... did you wade through the kernel source before deciding to use it? If you did, you're in a tiny minority. I myself just read about it and heard about it from other people. I don't have the time to poke through millions of lines of code.
The person who likes using Windows isn't being a zealot. They've just gotten to the point that they're comfortable using Windows, and they're trying to do their job.
This doesn't imply that the software needs to be free in the FSF sense, but it implies that the code can be examined by any interested party. It doesn't mean that you should be allowed to modify it, though it is certainly an advantage to society.
I'm not certain of whether or not this is true in actuality, but I'm guessing that Microsoft's response to this would be that they have a Shared Source program which does allow people to view their code.
Mind you, most of the security-critical parts of Windows are still closed "for security reasons," which doesn't instill a lot of trust, considering that Linux is at least as secure as Windows despite the code being open.
But that's the whole point. In this intelligent decision-making process, this is just one of many factors that need to be taken into account.
One other thing to bear in mind: When the government becomes less productive, it comes out of your pocket. If government employees are having trouble wading through an arguably less intuitive desktop trying to get their work done, then the government has to either hire more people (which diverts money from other programs that could be beneficial to citizens) or deal with the change and become less efficient (imagine waiting longer for your tax return).
Absolute accountability for software would be pleasant, but in reality, there are a lot of other factors that come into play. Some branches of our government are already staggering under the weight of their own bureaucracy. The last thing they need is to be hobbled further by blanket legislation that tells them how they should do their jobs.
One fundamental problem with open-source zealotry is the assumption that in every possible case, open-source software is better than any proprietary alternative. This has a nasty tendency to piss off regular users ("Why are you forcing this on me? I liked my Windows just fine.") and less zealous OSS advocates (who are trying very hard to convince people that we Free Software types are capable of being reasonable).
What the government needs to do is a detailed cost-benefit analysis for each major software purchase. Linux is cheaper to run in some cases, but the fact is, you need to retrain people to use new software, and they can often get bogged down if said software isn't of as high quality as the commercial software they were originally using. Microsoft Office has its annoyances, but is still (in my experience) generally a better office suite than Open/StarOffice.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. They decision shouldn't be made for government organizations. It should just be an educated decision made by engineers and regular users, as opposed to managers who have just been impressed by salesmen.
I've seen this news story floating around for the past several days... sadly, nobody links back to the site with the original, high-resolution images (suitable for, say, printing out or making into a desktop background).
The originals can be found here.
The idea, of course, is to get people used to it, so when it does come time to shove it down people's throats, there won't be much resistance.
... so what looks fair on the outside is actually pretty sneaky and deceptive.
I don't know about you, but I find that the phrase "Protect My Music" is a bit deceptive. Admittedly, "Make it so my music will only play on this computer" is a bit of a mouthful, but at least it's not misleading.
If someone like my little sister (who is a fairly average computer user) sees that checkbox, they don't know what it means, but they generally leave it checked because it sounds positive. A power user (who has some experience with recent commercial software) may be more inclined to be a bit suspicious about the vague and somewhat ominous "Protect My Music." Sadly, most users are the average kind and not the power kind
If they can do eyes, which I would have (apprently wrongly) assumed would have been the most complicated, when will they be able to wire up people to take electronic input from the other four senses?
And what about the other direction? Taking signals for muscle movements directly out of the brain?
I heard at one point that there was speculation about injecting cell-sized machines into the blood stream that would find their way to the brain and interface themselves with the host's neurons, without any surgery. Obviously, there's a long way to go before anything like this, but it might actually be possible 50 years from now.
The "Matrix Experience" would be a lot more attractive if it didn't involve someone opening your skull up and poking around inside your brain.
what's wrong with MySQL again?
Perhaps this is fixed in a version later than the one I'm using at work (although their website would seem to indicate otherwise), but the MySQL I'm using can't even handle a simple sub-select. It also lacks triggers and the like.
MySQL is a nice, fast database for doing simple queries, but if you want to do anything remotely complicated in pure SQL, you need to use something a bit more robust, feature-wise.
Lendrick
This means that eventually they'll be able to place a large infrared light out in a public place and be able to identify everyone who walks through using minimal computer power.
Attempts at face recognition so far have been encouragingly laughable. If this is everything it's cracked up to be, it may eventually be able to fill the niche that face recognition was supposed to.
Of course, it sounds like right now the light has to be very close to the skin for it to work. Perhaps there are inherent limitations in the system that will prevent it from working over large areas.
What these directors (and most likely the MPAA) would like to do is make it so people can only watch their material without making any changes to it, even for personal use.
This is like a book publisher trying to make it illegal for you to tear pages out of a book that you purchased. Mind you, reselling a book in that condition would be wrong, unless you informed the buyer that the pages were missing. However, it looks as if, in this case, there's no deception going on. Everyone purchasing these edited movies is totally aware that the scenes have been removed.
Whether or not you think censorship is stupid or senseless has absolutely no bearing on what other people, with their own opinions, should be able to do to their own property. I am vehemently opposed to mandatory censorship enforced by the government, but I am completely in favor of people being able to use their own property in the way that they want.
If the federal government wants to file the tits off the Statue of Liberty, it's their perogative. They own it.
The games used in the study are as follows:
Doom
Mortal Combat
Fear Effect
The Resident of Evil Creek
It should be pointed out that if extraterrestrials are visiting earth, it is highly probable that they have some means of travel that exceeds the speed of light (wormholes or something?). I won't speculate on how this is done, since I'm not a physicist.
However, if they do have the resources to do this, then it would be reasonable for them to be able to set up monitoring stations all over the galaxy (in the space of a few million years) to listen for the radio signature of a new intelligent civilization popping into existance (ours, sadly, was Adolf Hitler). Said monitoring station would use whatever technology allows them to exceed the speed of light, and send a message back to their home base letting them know that somebody just invented television.
After that, the aliens hop into their little flying saucers, head for earth, abduct people, and probe their nether regions.
At any rate, the article is bunk, because the assumptions it takes are a bit too selective, and it fails to explore some very obvious possibilities.
That's right. We're all idiots. Oh, except for you.
:)
Naah. My guess is that you can probably do a Google search on a Hobbesian contract too.
By watching TV you are entering into a Hobbesian contract.
Excellent use of obscure terminology. The phrase Hobbesian contract makes you appear smart, because most readers don't know what a Hobbesian contract is. (Namely, an agreement to obey an authority as long as said authority does its duty.)
They agree to show a show, you agree to watch the commercials. It's a concept as old as the Magna Carta.
Citing historical documents. Excellent.
I can't wait until these self-delusional pirates are given the smackdown by a clueful judge.
Here's where you lose me. A skilled troll would have omitted this sentence, or at least softened the wording a bit. Referring to people who want to skip commercials (at last count, almost everyone) as "self-delusional pirates" is an obvious attempt at ruffling feathers.
One other note: you probably should have written a few paragraphs and explained your ridiculous opinion in more detail. It's far more effective to progressively piss people off than hit them with one insult four sentences into your post.
Final Grade: C
Keep at it. You'll get there eventually.
Users are lazy.
If you have a small company with, say, fifty people, and you educate and assist all fifty of those people, a significant fraction will still say "there's no way my account would be cracked" and use set their password to "PASSWORD" or somesuch.
The fact is, you do need to force users to enter cryptic passwords, or there will always be lazy, irresponsible types who just don't do it.