Why is it I can keep *shudder* Excel 4 macro tricks and have them at the ready at all times (=while(not(isblank(active.cell)))...why do I still remember this?) but I still struggle to assign values to a simple array in Perl?
I have no clue? You assign values to an array in Perl in pretty much the same way as in any other language: $array[1] = $value;
So presumably you're not interested in space.. Jeff Foust goes to just about every space conference there is and reports via twitter on what he sees there. You'll find stuff there that a wider audience might not appreciate. As I can't go to these conferences myself, it's invaluable, I don't have to wait for the winds to decide that something Jeff sees is worthy of turning into one of his fantastic articles.
I am, so I went and checked. I never really used twitter before, or followed anybody on it. So here you have my first impression:
It looks confusing and absolutely pointless. The thing that caught my attention are the parts of conversations with random people. Except I don't know what those people said, so I don't know what Jeff is replying to, and the link on the username leads to the user's main page, so I'd have to manually locate what the hell Jeff was referring to. By now it could be 5 pages back.
Ignoring the conversations doesn't make it much better. There are several kinds of useless entries:
Entries that document that something happened but say nothing useful about it. For instance:
Sat next to Bill Readdy on flight to BWI; talked a lot about comm'l space, investing, and hosted payloads.
Random observations nobody cares about:
At Logan Airport to catch flight home. Noticed recorded voice on shuttle from T stop identical to one on Dulles parking shuttles.
Revelations that don't reveal anything, because there's no explanation. This could be potentially interesting, but there's zero explanation or justification for it:
Former astronaut Bill Readdy: ISS not just a place for research but also for commerce. LEO is the domain of commerce.
Potentially interesting info, missing crucial details (constellations for what? what would the satellites do?)
Mark Sirangelo, SNC: expect 5-10 LEO constellations in next 5 years involving 100s of satellites.
Cryptic things I have no clue what they're supposed to mean.
Former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz: NASA is a "high-entropy" environment compared to commercial sector.
Overall I see no reason to keep reading. It's a weird mix of pointless, useless and incomplete stuff that doesn't even include a pointer to anywhere to find more info. Maybe there are useful posts ocassionally but there seems to be too much noise to bother digging it up, even from the page of somebody who definitely has a life a lot more interesting than that of the average person.
Now the articles look interesting, thanks for the link.
For me, "successful" in regards to my own code means it has benefited me in some way, and that is:
A. Getting paid for it B. Getting code contributions
Since I see it that way, I GPL my code. I consider it successful when somebody comes to me to pay for an improvement, or when somebody takes my code and improves it (since they have to release the changes).
Getting my code used by millions but not getting anything back is of no value to me.
Nokia 6210 Navigator. Looking to replace it with something better.
Leaves a lot to be desired, but works precisely the way I think these things are supposed to: If I install an unsigned application it still allows it to run, but it requires permission to do things like accessing the network.
Believe it or not, manufacturer of a Linux phone may also remove sync status in order to increase sales. They can also lock down the phone and install ability to yank applications.
They can do that, but I won't buy it unless I can reformat the whole thing and install whatever I want on it. Maemo phones and OpenMoko seem to fulfill this requirement: If there's anything objectionable about the phone as sold, it shouldn't take long for somebody to release a patch for that.
I don't really care much about what comes on the phone from the factory, so long I can rip all of it out and replace with something better.
Let's face it though, average users don't care about the flexibility so much
I don't care about "average users", I care about me.
I don't have to worry about all the extra customizations and the drawbacks they bring (like the computer style window manager - I hate pop-ups from different apps, especially while typing).
With a proper open phone it wouldn't take long to patch the OS to make the popups stop interferring
Ok, think of Windows Mobile like SE Linux. The operator is the administrator and you don't get the password.
Err, no? SELinux is simply a permissions mechanism. It's an OS feature, and I don't see why the operator's involvement is needed.
And that won't do. I'll take the password, thanks. I bought the phone after all. If I can't have it, I'll buy something else instead. Currently it seems I can get that with OpenMoko, a Pre, or a recent Nokia phone like the N900. Those are the ones I'm looking at.
If you want to use the operator's network, you have to follow their rules.
Not so much where I am, no. I can use any cell phone on any operator that's technically compatible, just got to insert a sim card.
And as far as blaming the OS, I don't think even SElinux has the ability to peek into connections and determine that your p2p file-sharing app is now relaying things for the netbot instead
That's a pretty difficult instance, but even here I think SELinux should be able to do something. A botnet has to do something to be useful. If it sends mail, then SELinux can control whether the P2P app can connect to port 25.
BTW, who the hell runs file sharing software on their phone?
when your phone syncs up with your mail/calendar server, it would be useful to know whether the sync succeeded or had errors, or even when the last successful sync occured. WinMobile had that feature but Blackberry did not.
Well, thanks for telling me. That's incredibly retarded. This alone guarantees I won't have a WinMobile or Blackberry ever now and will recommend against purchasing them to other people. I'll make sure to point at your post.
If Apache has a hole, that's Apache's fault. If the Linux kernel allows that to be exploited to compromise the rest of the system, yes, that's the kernel's fault. And SELinux exists precisely to make it so that even if Apache has a hole, nothing useful can be done with it. Note that SELinux has nothing to do with any vendor or operator enforcing anything, it's simply a mechanism that allows to specify exactly what an application is supposed to be doing, so that it can't do anything else if its original purpose is subverted.
Properly securing a desktop in this manner is currently very difficult due to usability issues. But on a device like a phone it seems a lot more doable, due to the reduced functionality, less interaction between applications, widely used sandboxes like the one provided by Java, and especially the fact that applications are coded specifically for phones, so if the phone runs the app in the sandbox, the app has to work in the sanbox, even if the developer thinks that's annoying to deal with.
Where I disagree is with that the operator has anything to do with security. Microsoft being able to uninstall stuff from phones is completely unhelpful, because that's the old and horribly broken antivirus system -- somebody must be screwed over first (probably quite a few people), the vendor/operator has to find out, create an update, and your phone has to notice that instruction to tell it to remove the application before you get hit by the problem. If it can, because the exploit may have well compromised the phone's ability to remove the application by then.
The much, MUCH better way is when the phone actually works to protect you without depending on a third party.
If you install a VoIP application integrated with your dialer, it has a security hole, makes the app dial 1900 number you blame.... the phone!
Well, of course. How did the VoIP application's hole get exploited? It may have had a hole, but the hole had to be accessed in some way. It certainly didn't dial the 1900 number on its own. I see several attack vectors:
Another application on the phone exploited it: Phone's fault for allowing one application to have such access to another The VoIP application was somehow accessed over the network and exploited: Phone's fault for allowing such access to happen, and for allowing the exploit to happen (lack of buffer overflow protection for instance) The VoIP application was accessed by breaking into the phone first over the network then accessing the application locally: Phone's fault for allowing it to happen.
As far as measuring power usage of applications, you are describing what you'd like to see from user perspective. Unfortunately it's a pipe dream. I would love to see something like this also, but it's not possible.
Yet powertop exists on Linux. And you're speaking a lot of nonsense.
Yes, applications can mess with the backlight, cause swapping, context switches and so on, but it's not the application what does that. The application must call to the OS to do it, and the OS is therefore perfectly capable of knowing which application asked the backlight to be turned on, how much CPU time it uses, how often it accesses various devices and transfers data... there's nothing that prevents the OS from keeping accurate stats of what each application does, and in fact modern OSes do already. Page swaps don't "belong to the OS", they happen because an application needs more memory than is available. The OS knows perfectly well which application needs data that's swapped to disk, or which application's data was sent to disk. Try iotop on Linux, or the task manager (you have to add columns) on Windows.
Would it consume some power? Like any other code that runs on the phone, but it doesn't need to consume much. Any time an application requests the backlight to be turned on, the CPU has to be executing code for it to happen, so it's already not sleeping. Increasing a counter, and appending a timestamp to a log of requests at that time would take a tiny amount of power. Then that data can be processed for instance every 5 minutes.
If your phone gets a virus which dials a toll number, you'll be happy to pay the bill.
Eh, not precisely happy, but I'd put the blame on the phone unless it was my own action that allowed it to happen.
In my view, the carrier has nothing to do with it in any case, even for a carrier owned phone.
I guarantee you that if having the GPS app simply installed on your phone would drain the battery in 3 hours, you would care, and want it gone.
Sure, but that doesn't require carrier control. All it needs is having the phone measure the power usage of every application. Then I'd like two things: a display that provides a complete breakdown of power usage, and if an application gets really out of line, a warning message that suggests disabling the misbehaving application.
If the app store provides a list of applications that were found to be badly coded, then that would be useful, but in no event I would want anything to be uninstalled without my consent.
The cell phones are supported by the operator, they have to support anything you can screw up with the phone.
No, in my case it isn't. I paid the full price for my phone precisely because I don't want to depend on the carrier. Any time I want to, I can swap the sim card.
If you install an application on your computer which slows it down you don't call your internet provider to fix it. With the cell phone you do
No, I don't, because the cell phone is fully mine, and the carrier had nothing to do with it.
What if the app has a bug which may erase the boot flash and bricks the phone?
I'd consider that a bug in the phone. There's no reason why an application should be able to do that.
There may be other reasons, what if the application is easily compromised and it then becomes a node in a netbot, ringing up customer's data bill (or do you believe that you are in fact liable for anything any application can do on your phone).
In my case, yes, I suppose that'd be problematic. But that would also be a bug in the phone. In mine, at least, unsigned applications require authorization to connect to the network. So there's no way for some random calculator app to start a botnet without me having allowed it to first.
It wouldn't be hard to make the phone keep detailed accounting of how much data each application uses, and put limits on it, either.
What about a less extreme example of an application which drains your phone's battery in 6hrs? The operator then sees a slew of phones being brought to the store, the reputation of the phone and indirectly Windows Mobile suffers.
This I absolutely don't care about. Screw Microsoft's reputation. If a badly written application is still useful for me, I want to be able to keep using it. The GPS drains my battery in 3 hours, but I definitely don't want it to be gone.
Fuck AT&T. I don't tether currently. I didn't cringe when I got charged $26 per line for "activation". I didn't cringe at signing a 2-year contract to get a phone for $300. I didn't even cringe at an "unlimited" data plan that limits downloads to 10MB files (which, coincidentally, is smaller than most of the apps on the "approved" app store).
And that's precisely why you got such a crappy deal, which just got even worse.
Complain. Threaten to quit. If not listened to, quit, and explain why you did. And don't buy stuff that locks you into one unique provider.
I bought an unlocked phone precisely so that I could switch freely between carriers if it became needed.
No furries? Who would star in the game, Chris Thorndyke and Princess Elise?
Hedgehogs are furry (and have actual fur on the belly), foxes and echidnas are too. And lizards, dragons, snakes and birds are included in the furry fandom even if they lack actual fur.
If they said what exactly was infringed, it could be countered. Prior art could be found for some, others could be worked around and made irrelevant, and so on.
By saying "we know you're infringing, but won't tell you on what patents" their intention is to create a vague threat that can't be countered. You don't know if you could end up in court over this some day or not, and for what reason.
Your argument is emotional, and I am not arguing the merits of DRM, so therefor I will not engage at the level..
No, it isn't. It's technical: DRM doesn't work, and can't work, and as such it's pointless.
In the digital age when content, even content obtained legitimately, can be distributed world wide on a mass basis within hours and in some cases minutes both against the content creator/owners wishes and in violations of the protections currently in place what recourse to content creators/owners have?
Absolutely none. And they'll never have one.
No matter how much DRM you wrap around a MP3, I'll always be possible to break it. Worst case, I can place a microphone next to my speakers. And once it's broken even once, it's trivial to create a non-DRMd file from that.
Think of any popular MP3 file or program. Look on file sharing networks. There's not a single that's not available, regardless of the amount of effort done by the author to prevent it.
Your argument that there are content creators that sell their content without any sort of digital rights management, implies that you believe that all content creators should do so. I submit that it is the choice of the content creator/owner to make that decision for themselves and as such it is your choice to purchase or not as both of you have that fundamental right.
In that case, you should know that I never buy DRMed content. It's a 100% guarantee I won't buy whatever you're selling.
I also submit that we, the DMR'd ( if you will ) are the original creators of DRM since those content creators were forced to attempt to control the distribution of their content when those of us with digital means undertook to distribute their content without their agreement, to the world en-mass. In this regard we are truly hoisted on our own petard.
I submit it's a pointless exercise. You can't make data not copyable any more than you can make water not wet. You may not like it, but the world doesn't adjust to your preferences just because you'd prefer it to work in some other way.
I think that if you don't like the situation, you should just give up, and earn money in some other way. You'll be happier that way; because no matter what protections you apply to your stuff, they're doomed to be broken if somebody cares enough to break them. And the stronger the protections you apply to your work, the more sales you'll lose to people who think they're too restrictive.
They propose solving the "problem" of files being copyable by encrypting them, and making a key that somehow can be moved but never copied.
How do they plan to do this key? Any time you decrypt the file to use it, you must have the key to it, and at that time you can make a copy of it. What ensures it'll be irrevocably lost when transmitting it to somebody else?
They can, and they have, at least to some extent in my understanding.
But if you have a contract with Hans where he promised to deliver specific functionality by a deadline, that volunteers are willing to maintain and improve things doesn't help you much.
Well, if you do that, what is the author's incentive to create anything?
Love of the art, contracts, money?
What DRM et. all, is really about, is about ensuring the content creator/owner gets paid whatever the market will bare, for the content, in whatever form it is published, for the lifetime of the protection.
Bullshit. DRM doesn't ensure anything because it doesn't work. It never has, and never will.
And if DRM is for some reason necessary, how come there is un-DRMed music for sale?
And are you saying that none of the artists on Amazon or Amie Street manage to sell anything? If you are, then why does anybody bother to try selling anything there? And if you aren't, well, there's your incentive.
You can argue that the protection should be limited and the consensus seems to fall into about 16 years and after that the protection is removed ( or possibly renewable once ) and then the work moves into the public domain.
I don't care about the consensus. You asked for my opinion, and that's what you got.
No DRM, no disconnection laws where some third party is judge, jury and executioner in one, fair use rights, tax on blank media, etc.
Basically I see anything that puts the creator in the first place, and the rest of the people in the position where many freedoms are sacrificed for the sake of ensuring the author gets paid, as the wrong way to go.
When Hans Reiser was sent to jail, the field of filesystems suffered because of it, and whatever clients he had got screwed. Yet I don't see anybody arguing that he should have been allowed to get away with murder, just to avoid damage to the people that depended on him.
The People first, the creators second, the owners third.
Copyright exists because society consents to existence, not for the gratification of the author, but to entice the authors to create for its benefit. Society comes first, then the creator. Perpetual copyright is an abomination, as the society doesn't benefit.
How long do they deserve this protection for?
As short as possible. If 1 year will do, then 1 year. A study suggested that 14 years.
Copyright was intended to encourage creation, so it should be just long enough to do that. Too short and it's not worth bothering, too long and the creator gets to sit on their ass the rest of their life after a lucky hit, which isn't in our interest.
Copyright should definitely last significantly less than a lifetime, to encourage creation of multiple works.
And should that protection be different for content creators then content owners ( except when they are the same entity) ?
Different. I'd have to think more on this, but for instance credit shouldn't be transferrable. A work should be always credited to its original authors. Author should retain the ability to use their own work.
Should this protection be and estate protection, in other words, is it inheritable? Could I as a content creator / owner leave that protection in my will to my heirs? If so how long should that protection last, or should it? Would that same estate protection be enjoyed by content owners?
Not inheritable. If the author wants to leave something, they could leave the profits if any, but the heirs should be heavily encouraged to produce something of their own. To avoid the temptation of killing the author, copyright shouldn't terminate upon death.
Owners IMO should never have any additional rights. Whatever deal they make with the copyright holder lasts at most as long as the copyright. Then it's in the public domain and anybody can do anything they want with the work.
What agreements should be legal? Should it be legal for a person, as an employee of a company who pays them a salary to create a specific content, to be bound by an agreement of employment to assign all protection to that company? And if so, does that company fall under the definition of creator, owner or both of that content?
It shouldn't be possible to assign all rights to somebody else. Authorship should be retained. Author should always retain the ability to use their own work. Singers shouldn't ever lose the ability to sing their own songs, book authors should never use the ability to transmit their creations to other people, programmers should retain the ability to read and use the code they wrote. All of those at least in a non-commercial manner.
There was one screen shot with a bunch of sticks on the screen (nothing like I would consider a stick figure ala xkcd) and nothing remotely resembling an avatar. Was that what happened?
Yep
I haven't ever done Second Life or OpenSims, so I'm just trying to understand the issue. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but is one of the key goals of the game to change/improve/customize your avatar's appearance? If that is the case, I retract my previous statement regarding "nerd rage".
Second Life by itself has no goal. It's software providing a "virtual world", whose users may have whatever goal they want to.
It's like for instance, a web forum, or IRC server. By itself it has no goal, it just provides a forum or a chat server. Its users may have a goal, which may be having a political discussion, or posting pictures of lolcats.
That said, most people in Second Life like looking good, where what is "good" depends on the person. If you wanted to look like a night elf, you could. Looking like a humanoid cat, executive in a suit, or a dragon are also possible. Most people would be upset if one day they logged in and found themselves to look bizarrely wrong.
For a presentation this would be undesirable in the same way that a projector that's not working, the audio system creating feedback, or the software being demonstrated crashing would.
Did you read the link you posted? The prank was in the SVN branch only, only the developers should be using it. Certainly no one should show it to clients/investors.
Yeah. However, there are several problems with that.
First, as far as I know, there's no really stable, production level opensim code yet. It's under constant development, and still incomplete. That means that if you're building on opensim, it's quite likely that you'll have to track the latest development, and that means tracking trunk. Stabilization would be done by deciding which revision of trunk to use.
Second, the problem was a breach of trust. It's not that trunk was buggy. It's that the programmers intentionally introduced a change that would break things in advance, set to trigger on a specific date. Which made it very hard to figure what was going on. Imagine that come April 1, the server suddenly starts behaving oddly, exhibiting a bug it never had before, and going back to the code from a week ago that worked perfectly fine yesterday still doesn't help.
Imagine yourself as a programmer on that team. Would you find it funny after you spent hours trying to figure it out? How would you explain to your boss what the problem was? How would you know that with a deadline getting closer, you wouldn't have to waste more time on dealing with another joke?
I don't like the ABI thing. ABI means more closed drivers.
I like how it is currently. Once a driver goes in the kernel, it remans there. So long anybody is interested, it remains maintained. My cheap, ancient Quickcam Pro remains supported in the latest Linux kernel. In comparison, support is inexistent in 64 bit Windows versions, and there's nothing to do but buying a new webcam.
This is again why I prefer the Linux way. In Linux the user's interest drives the development. In Windows, it's the manufacturer, who has an economic incentive not to support hardware from 10 years ago, so that you need to buy a new product.
Slashdot Mirror
qw and similar are there just to make assigning multiple values more comfortable. You can completely ignore its existence and not miss anything.
That leaves the '@array=("its","whale","guts")' form, which is also very similar to many other languages.
I have no clue? You assign values to an array in Perl in pretty much the same way as in any other language: $array[1] = $value;
I am, so I went and checked. I never really used twitter before, or followed anybody on it. So here you have my first impression:
It looks confusing and absolutely pointless. The thing that caught my attention are the parts of conversations with random people. Except I don't know what those people said, so I don't know what Jeff is replying to, and the link on the username leads to the user's main page, so I'd have to manually locate what the hell Jeff was referring to. By now it could be 5 pages back.
Ignoring the conversations doesn't make it much better. There are several kinds of useless entries:
Entries that document that something happened but say nothing useful about it. For instance:
Random observations nobody cares about:
Revelations that don't reveal anything, because there's no explanation. This could be potentially interesting, but there's zero explanation or justification for it:
Potentially interesting info, missing crucial details (constellations for what? what would the satellites do?)
Cryptic things I have no clue what they're supposed to mean.
Overall I see no reason to keep reading. It's a weird mix of pointless, useless and incomplete stuff that doesn't even include a pointer to anywhere to find more info. Maybe there are useful posts ocassionally but there seems to be too much noise to bother digging it up, even from the page of somebody who definitely has a life a lot more interesting than that of the average person.
Now the articles look interesting, thanks for the link.
No, it's very much alive. It seems to be still growing, just not as fast as before. But since it's about 6 years old that's not very surprising.
For me, "successful" in regards to my own code means it has benefited me in some way, and that is:
A. Getting paid for it
B. Getting code contributions
Since I see it that way, I GPL my code. I consider it successful when somebody comes to me to pay for an improvement, or when somebody takes my code and improves it (since they have to release the changes).
Getting my code used by millions but not getting anything back is of no value to me.
Nokia 6210 Navigator. Looking to replace it with something better.
Leaves a lot to be desired, but works precisely the way I think these things are supposed to: If I install an unsigned application it still allows it to run, but it requires permission to do things like accessing the network.
They can do that, but I won't buy it unless I can reformat the whole thing and install whatever I want on it. Maemo phones and OpenMoko seem to fulfill this requirement: If there's anything objectionable about the phone as sold, it shouldn't take long for somebody to release a patch for that.
I don't really care much about what comes on the phone from the factory, so long I can rip all of it out and replace with something better.
I don't care about "average users", I care about me.
With a proper open phone it wouldn't take long to patch the OS to make the popups stop interferring
Err, no? SELinux is simply a permissions mechanism. It's an OS feature, and I don't see why the operator's involvement is needed.
And that won't do. I'll take the password, thanks. I bought the phone after all. If I can't have it, I'll buy something else instead. Currently it seems I can get that with OpenMoko, a Pre, or a recent Nokia phone like the N900. Those are the ones I'm looking at.
Not so much where I am, no. I can use any cell phone on any operator that's technically compatible, just got to insert a sim card.
That's a pretty difficult instance, but even here I think SELinux should be able to do something. A botnet has to do something to be useful. If it sends mail, then SELinux can control whether the P2P app can connect to port 25.
BTW, who the hell runs file sharing software on their phone?
Well, thanks for telling me. That's incredibly retarded. This alone guarantees I won't have a WinMobile or Blackberry ever now and will recommend against purchasing them to other people. I'll make sure to point at your post.
BTW, would it kill you to use paragraphs?
If Apache has a hole, that's Apache's fault. If the Linux kernel allows that to be exploited to compromise the rest of the system, yes, that's the kernel's fault. And SELinux exists precisely to make it so that even if Apache has a hole, nothing useful can be done with it. Note that SELinux has nothing to do with any vendor or operator enforcing anything, it's simply a mechanism that allows to specify exactly what an application is supposed to be doing, so that it can't do anything else if its original purpose is subverted.
Properly securing a desktop in this manner is currently very difficult due to usability issues. But on a device like a phone it seems a lot more doable, due to the reduced functionality, less interaction between applications, widely used sandboxes like the one provided by Java, and especially the fact that applications are coded specifically for phones, so if the phone runs the app in the sandbox, the app has to work in the sanbox, even if the developer thinks that's annoying to deal with.
Where I disagree is with that the operator has anything to do with security. Microsoft being able to uninstall stuff from phones is completely unhelpful, because that's the old and horribly broken antivirus system -- somebody must be screwed over first (probably quite a few people), the vendor/operator has to find out, create an update, and your phone has to notice that instruction to tell it to remove the application before you get hit by the problem. If it can, because the exploit may have well compromised the phone's ability to remove the application by then.
The much, MUCH better way is when the phone actually works to protect you without depending on a third party.
Well, of course. How did the VoIP application's hole get exploited? It may have had a hole, but the hole had to be accessed in some way. It certainly didn't dial the 1900 number on its own. I see several attack vectors:
Another application on the phone exploited it: Phone's fault for allowing one application to have such access to another
The VoIP application was somehow accessed over the network and exploited: Phone's fault for allowing such access to happen, and for allowing the exploit to happen (lack of buffer overflow protection for instance)
The VoIP application was accessed by breaking into the phone first over the network then accessing the application locally: Phone's fault for allowing it to happen.
Yet powertop exists on Linux. And you're speaking a lot of nonsense.
Yes, applications can mess with the backlight, cause swapping, context switches and so on, but it's not the application what does that. The application must call to the OS to do it, and the OS is therefore perfectly capable of knowing which application asked the backlight to be turned on, how much CPU time it uses, how often it accesses various devices and transfers data... there's nothing that prevents the OS from keeping accurate stats of what each application does, and in fact modern OSes do already. Page swaps don't "belong to the OS", they happen because an application needs more memory than is available. The OS knows perfectly well which application needs data that's swapped to disk, or which application's data was sent to disk. Try iotop on Linux, or the task manager (you have to add columns) on Windows.
Would it consume some power? Like any other code that runs on the phone, but it doesn't need to consume much. Any time an application requests the backlight to be turned on, the CPU has to be executing code for it to happen, so it's already not sleeping. Increasing a counter, and appending a timestamp to a log of requests at that time would take a tiny amount of power. Then that data can be processed for instance every 5 minutes.
Eh, not precisely happy, but I'd put the blame on the phone unless it was my own action that allowed it to happen.
In my view, the carrier has nothing to do with it in any case, even for a carrier owned phone.
Sure, but that doesn't require carrier control. All it needs is having the phone measure the power usage of every application. Then I'd like two things: a display that provides a complete breakdown of power usage, and if an application gets really out of line, a warning message that suggests disabling the misbehaving application.
If the app store provides a list of applications that were found to be badly coded, then that would be useful, but in no event I would want anything to be uninstalled without my consent.
No, in my case it isn't. I paid the full price for my phone precisely because I don't want to depend on the carrier. Any time I want to, I can swap the sim card.
No, I don't, because the cell phone is fully mine, and the carrier had nothing to do with it.
I'd consider that a bug in the phone. There's no reason why an application should be able to do that.
In my case, yes, I suppose that'd be problematic. But that would also be a bug in the phone. In mine, at least, unsigned applications require authorization to connect to the network. So there's no way for some random calculator app to start a botnet without me having allowed it to first.
It wouldn't be hard to make the phone keep detailed accounting of how much data each application uses, and put limits on it, either.
This I absolutely don't care about. Screw Microsoft's reputation. If a badly written application is still useful for me, I want to be able to keep using it. The GPS drains my battery in 3 hours, but I definitely don't want it to be gone.
And that's precisely why you got such a crappy deal, which just got even worse.
Complain. Threaten to quit. If not listened to, quit, and explain why you did. And don't buy stuff that locks you into one unique provider.
I bought an unlocked phone precisely so that I could switch freely between carriers if it became needed.
No, seriously, who cares?
If you get 2 hours of battery time, this gains you about 2 minutes and half.
For 5 hours of battery time you get 6 minutes extra.
If you really want to extend battery time, turning down the screen brightness by a notch will probably have more effect.
No furries? Who would star in the game, Chris Thorndyke and Princess Elise?
Hedgehogs are furry (and have actual fur on the belly), foxes and echidnas are too. And lizards, dragons, snakes and birds are included in the furry fandom even if they lack actual fur.
Of course not, that's not the point of it.
If they said what exactly was infringed, it could be countered. Prior art could be found for some, others could be worked around and made irrelevant, and so on.
By saying "we know you're infringing, but won't tell you on what patents" their intention is to create a vague threat that can't be countered. You don't know if you could end up in court over this some day or not, and for what reason.
No, it isn't. It's technical: DRM doesn't work, and can't work, and as such it's pointless.
Absolutely none. And they'll never have one.
No matter how much DRM you wrap around a MP3, I'll always be possible to break it. Worst case, I can place a microphone next to my speakers. And once it's broken even once, it's trivial to create a non-DRMd file from that.
Think of any popular MP3 file or program. Look on file sharing networks. There's not a single that's not available, regardless of the amount of effort done by the author to prevent it.
In that case, you should know that I never buy DRMed content. It's a 100% guarantee I won't buy whatever you're selling.
I submit it's a pointless exercise. You can't make data not copyable any more than you can make water not wet. You may not like it, but the world doesn't adjust to your preferences just because you'd prefer it to work in some other way.
I think that if you don't like the situation, you should just give up, and earn money in some other way. You'll be happier that way; because no matter what protections you apply to your stuff, they're doomed to be broken if somebody cares enough to break them. And the stronger the protections you apply to your work, the more sales you'll lose to people who think they're too restrictive.
They propose solving the "problem" of files being copyable by encrypting them, and making a key that somehow can be moved but never copied.
How do they plan to do this key? Any time you decrypt the file to use it, you must have the key to it, and at that time you can make a copy of it. What ensures it'll be irrevocably lost when transmitting it to somebody else?
They can, and they have, at least to some extent in my understanding.
But if you have a contract with Hans where he promised to deliver specific functionality by a deadline, that volunteers are willing to maintain and improve things doesn't help you much.
Love of the art, contracts, money?
Bullshit. DRM doesn't ensure anything because it doesn't work. It never has, and never will.
And if DRM is for some reason necessary, how come there is un-DRMed music for sale?
And are you saying that none of the artists on Amazon or Amie Street manage to sell anything? If you are, then why does anybody bother to try selling anything there? And if you aren't, well, there's your incentive.
I don't care about the consensus. You asked for my opinion, and that's what you got.
No DRM, no disconnection laws where some third party is judge, jury and executioner in one, fair use rights, tax on blank media, etc.
Basically I see anything that puts the creator in the first place, and the rest of the people in the position where many freedoms are sacrificed for the sake of ensuring the author gets paid, as the wrong way to go.
So what about it?
When Hans Reiser was sent to jail, the field of filesystems suffered because of it, and whatever clients he had got screwed. Yet I don't see anybody arguing that he should have been allowed to get away with murder, just to avoid damage to the people that depended on him.
The People first, the creators second, the owners third.
Copyright exists because society consents to existence, not for the gratification of the author, but to entice the authors to create for its benefit. Society comes first, then the creator. Perpetual copyright is an abomination, as the society doesn't benefit.
As short as possible. If 1 year will do, then 1 year. A study suggested that 14 years.
Copyright was intended to encourage creation, so it should be just long enough to do that. Too short and it's not worth bothering, too long and the creator gets to sit on their ass the rest of their life after a lucky hit, which isn't in our interest.
Copyright should definitely last significantly less than a lifetime, to encourage creation of multiple works.
Different. I'd have to think more on this, but for instance credit shouldn't be transferrable. A work should be always credited to its original authors. Author should retain the ability to use their own work.
Not inheritable. If the author wants to leave something, they could leave the profits if any, but the heirs should be heavily encouraged to produce something of their own. To avoid the temptation of killing the author, copyright shouldn't terminate upon death.
Owners IMO should never have any additional rights. Whatever deal they make with the copyright holder lasts at most as long as the copyright. Then it's in the public domain and anybody can do anything they want with the work.
It shouldn't be possible to assign all rights to somebody else. Authorship should be retained. Author should always retain the ability to use their own work. Singers shouldn't ever lose the ability to sing their own songs, book authors should never use the ability to transmit their creations to other people, programmers should retain the ability to read and use the code they wrote. All of those at least in a non-commercial manner.
Yep
Second Life by itself has no goal. It's software providing a "virtual world", whose users may have whatever goal they want to.
It's like for instance, a web forum, or IRC server. By itself it has no goal, it just provides a forum or a chat server. Its users may have a goal, which may be having a political discussion, or posting pictures of lolcats.
That said, most people in Second Life like looking good, where what is "good" depends on the person. If you wanted to look like a night elf, you could. Looking like a humanoid cat, executive in a suit, or a dragon are also possible. Most people would be upset if one day they logged in and found themselves to look bizarrely wrong.
For a presentation this would be undesirable in the same way that a projector that's not working, the audio system creating feedback, or the software being demonstrated crashing would.
Yeah. However, there are several problems with that.
First, as far as I know, there's no really stable, production level opensim code yet. It's under constant development, and still incomplete. That means that if you're building on opensim, it's quite likely that you'll have to track the latest development, and that means tracking trunk. Stabilization would be done by deciding which revision of trunk to use.
Second, the problem was a breach of trust. It's not that trunk was buggy. It's that the programmers intentionally introduced a change that would break things in advance, set to trigger on a specific date. Which made it very hard to figure what was going on. Imagine that come April 1, the server suddenly starts behaving oddly, exhibiting a bug it never had before, and going back to the code from a week ago that worked perfectly fine yesterday still doesn't help.
Imagine yourself as a programmer on that team. Would you find it funny after you spent hours trying to figure it out? How would you explain to your boss what the problem was? How would you know that with a deadline getting closer, you wouldn't have to waste more time on dealing with another joke?
I don't like the ABI thing. ABI means more closed drivers.
I like how it is currently. Once a driver goes in the kernel, it remans there. So long anybody is interested, it remains maintained. My cheap, ancient Quickcam Pro remains supported in the latest Linux kernel. In comparison, support is inexistent in 64 bit Windows versions, and there's nothing to do but buying a new webcam.
This is again why I prefer the Linux way. In Linux the user's interest drives the development. In Windows, it's the manufacturer, who has an economic incentive not to support hardware from 10 years ago, so that you need to buy a new product.