Absolutely not. I'm fine with them making money off it. I'm not fine with them taking it and not giving back. I absolutely hate the idea of that something I write might one day end up in a Tivo-like device, where nobody can improve it further.
For instance, IBM benefits from contributions to the Linux kernel. This is fine, IBM returns the favor by then releasing their own code. If I write say, a driver, then IBM finds a bug and fixes it, they'll have to release the source if they plan to distribute. This is how I like it.
On the other hand, I don't ever plan to contribute anything substantial to a BSD licensed project, unless I'm being paid for it. Did BSD ever see any improvements to the code used by MS? I bet they haven't.
Incidentally, one of the reasons of NetBSD's stagnation was exactly that, the license. If you don't believe it, there was an article on slashdot about it. Wasabi Systems, one company that uses NetBSD, hired NetBSD developers. Of course since under the BSD they have no obligation to open anything, from then on that developer started working on Wasabi's proprietary branch, and NetBSD never saw any of it. That sort of thing happening for long enough can easily drain a project of good developers.
Now look at Linux, does that happen there? Hell, no. There are plenty paid kernel developers, and their contributions still get into the main branch.
I especially love it how it pops up while you're working on something, can't be killed permanently, and gets focus.
So I'm doing something on my box, the darn thing pops up right when I'm about to press enter or click in the place where the reboot button appears, and the box reboots.
It's annoying enough with a personal computer, with a server it could be outright nasty.
More than lack of control, my annoyance with it in this particular case is that it tries to be too friendly. It's like a well meaning, but annoying child who wants to help but keeps getting in the way of people trying to get things done. My ideal computer is like any other simple device like a typewriter. If I press a key, the exact pressed character appears flawlessly on the paper. If I don't touch it, nothing happens, and it stays out of the way waiting for commands. That's how Linux works for me. If I want to update, I just 'apt-get update', or start Adept, it doesn't suddenly pop out in the middle of something else and asks if I want to.
Windows, on the other hand, with its attempt at friendliness means constant interruptions. Programs can't just start, they whine about wanting to be registered. Acrobat Reader, Java, Flash and whatever else offers to download a new version of itself at inconvenient moments. And so on. I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect that when asked to display a PDF file the computer would just display it, and get the hell out of my way, instead of interrupting me with a "would you like to download the latest update?" which often happens to be something I don't care about.
I swear, if I ever meet the moron who thought that popping up the Windows Update window without warning and giving it focus, resulting in what I was trying to type making the computer reboot, was a good idea, I'll punch him/her in the face.
Funny, for the same reason I have no Windows systems left at home.
Windows is annoying. Constant interruptions from the autoupdate mechanism (I can't even kill the darn thing, it comes back!), reboots, updates, a whole day needed to set it up. If it needs to be reinstalled it's a huge pain in the ass. It can't be easily moved to different hardware and has "features" like activation. It's got to the point that my surviving Windows installations run in vmware, because that's the only way I found of making sure I can reliably recover from a failure.
Using Windows on a daily basis means dealing with all sorts of crap. Every other application seems to demand attention, pop up messages, have its own autoupdate service, want to be registered, or add yet another icon to the systray. Downloading things often involves getting them from some website, with no assurance about its quality, lack of spyware and ability to uninstall it.
Usability-wise it's annoying. Many dialogs have a fixed size. Windows update obstinately insists on choosing the quick install option by default, and the descriptions of updates are always content-free anyway. Hardware support is better than Linux, but every other device comes with a 100MB driver package, which doesn't just install the driver, but also some horrible sort of control panel for it.
Windows is better regarding application availability, but when doing work, for me, it absolutely sucks. Why, for instance, people on slashdot often warn that they're linking to a PDF file? Because on Windows the default choice for it is Acrobat Reader, which is big, annoying to use, annoying to install, likes popping up windows about updates, and takes very long to startup. In comparison in KDE I don't have to put up with any of that crap. The PDF loads, displays, and that's it.
Yeah, I could hunt down the Windows program for reading PDFs that's not annoying. Only that'd take time and effort, because I'd have to google for it, make sure that it's the one I want and not somebody's repackaged spyware-filled version, download and install it.
But just like you are, I'm busy and have better things to do than that. In Ubuntu it's already installed by default, and if it wasn't it'd just be the matter of searching for "PDF" in Adept.
Example: Intel opens up FSB. Motherboard manufacturers tell AMD: making boards for multiple socket types is a pain and decreases profits. Why don't you make a CPU for the Intel socket instead? Intel of course will make sure to design it so that it's great for an Intel CPU and suboptimal for an AMD one.
The other companies probably don't worry Intel much. VIA might make something, but I highly doubt they could manage to make anything that'd take any significant market from Intel, given what they've been releasing.
The 'emerge sync' thing is somewhat understandable: What if you want to emerge a package called 'sync'? Debian's apt-get at least does it unambiguously, as you say "apt-get install package". In Gentoo it's weird because the action executed depends on whether it's an internal command or not. It also means that you can't add a new command to emerge with a name that clashes with an existing package name.
threads have to be started (or more likely pulled from a pool) to play a sound,
Threads have to be started too, and can also be pooled. So about the same in both cases.
the threads playing the sound have to check back periodically to see if they should stop
The parent process can simply send a signal (like SIGTERM). On startup the process can be told whether to stop abruptly, fade out, etc.
Also, aborting a thread is not very nice, in C# for instance it will throw an Exception at some random point of the code. In comparison, a SIGTERM will invoke a handler, set a variable, and then the code can deal with it wherever comfortable.
playing (or need to adjust their volume or other processing effects),
This is more complicated, granted. But so it is with threads.
they need to notify the originating thread when they have completed, etc.
Threads have all sorts of nasty issues and pitfalls on any platform. Meanwhile, fork() is beautifully simple, and fork + socketpair lacks pretty much all of them. The speed may be a bit lower, but there's the great benefit of simpler and much safer code.
LSL has no classes, and about the most furry thing about it is the ear attachment points. Tails go on the pelvis attachment point.
Makes me wonder where do the mature bits go when you have a tail, as there can be only one object attached to every point, but that's not something I intend to figure out.
Except that Eve must see the result, which is exactly what makes it unworkable.
Eve doesn't need to break the crypto. She can play it on a high quality screen and record with with a video camera (which I'm pretty sure can be done at a very acceptable quality with good equipment and effort). I would be surprised if an HD DVD couldn't be recorded with a quality similar to DivX-encoded DVDs this way, which people find more than acceptable.
Eve could also open the monitor, and read the cleartext output from the circuitry. After all, at some point it has to be transmitted to the TFT or the CRT, and both should be possible to capture with the right equipment. CRTs should be quite straightforward.
IIRC, there's a key per player model, maybe at best per manufacturing run, not per player instance.
Making a key per player copy is infeasible. How would you do that? Basically, every disk would need to have the data encrypted with each player's key. That number would be in the millions.
At some point in the digital playback device, the data becomes cleartext. Given enough effort, that data could be extracted. Especially if it's a CRT, as AFAIK, the method used by a CRT monitor to drive the CRTs is quite simple. A LCD is probably more complicated, but it'd give you a 100% precise result.
Besides, I am fairly sure that with the right equipment you could do a decent analog recording anyway. Use a big, good quality LCD monitor with a DVI connection, and a camera pointed precisely at it. Taking the output of a BluRay movie and encoding it into a DVD quality DivX should give very watchable results.
Only thing that could be done against that is watermarks, but that's defeatable too. Have a few people dump the same movie, compare the results, and flip bits randomly where it doesn't match.
And now, Koingo Software decided to capitalize on it:
In lieu of corrupt developers like those at reversecode.com, Koingo Software is proud to announce the release of a FREE screen capture program for March 2007. Please keep your eye on our site -- and never have to worry about applications like this here Display Eater randomly wiping out your home folder on purpose -- as seems to be the developer's new policy.
Sure it's free, but hey, they get free publicity from it, and surely they expect to get the user to buy a professional version, or something else they make.
Anyway, the point is, WHAT can the owner of the software do, that WON'T piss off a million people? Apart from just doing nothing obviously.
Call the BSA and let them handle it, or sue the infringer.
Those are the only legal actions. No, committing another crime as revenge is not legal and not an appropiate response. If the author believes law is a good thing (which he obviously does as he says it's illegal) then he should follow it himself, and deal with it within the legal framework.
If he deletes his software, the lawbreaker (dispite what we may think otherwise, the person who uses a pirated key is trying to gain illegal access to the software) faces no consequence.
This may sound new to you, but in most sane places there's a separation of powers, and punishing crime is reserved to the judicial branch. It's not the author's right to provide a punishment.
Ah, getting the info for the person to sue is not so easy? Well, you said it yourself:
But since you like them so much, I'll point that it's in fact illegal in many places to booby trap your property. So if you have any great ideas, like turrets that automatically shoot at intruders, or connecting AC to the window frame, you will find that if a thief gets hit with any of that they can sue you -- and win.
In your case, there's a crime being committed: trespassing, and breaking and entering. But that in fact gives you no right whatsoever to make a mechanism that pours boiling pitch on the intruder. Your right to shoot trespassers in most place applies only to *self defense* if you personally are present. In some places you're not allowed to kill the intruder if they're not threatening you personally, and I'm pretty sure no place allows attacking an intruder by any sort of automatic means.
In this case, there's a crime being committed: copyright infringement. But that also doesn't give the author the right to take revenge by deleting files.
So, mister smarty pants, what should he do? Just shrug and ignore it?
Yes.
Now if that seems weird, consider it: A pirate is not a customer, but it doesn't cost money (no, the lack of a gain is NOT a loss) still might be a potential customer. Say, there's a huge amount of pirates among teenagers, who don't have the cash to afford your stuff anyway. But if you create a good impression that might result in a sale later.
For example, I know a few people who at 13 were spending a lot of time messing with 3D Studio and Photoshop. Of course there was no way they could afford it, so they pirated it. Now guess what they use at work at that they paid for? Guess what they reply when they're asked "what photo editing software you think we should buy?"
Meanwhile, this stupid action not only is ineffective, but it turns off actual potential customers. People who were thinking "hmm, that sounds good" and changed their minds because they realized that if that goes wrong it might nuke something important.
Now the page shows it rated at the lowest value possible in all categories, and the comments are full of "don't buy this software" as well. I also noticed that searching for "Display Eater" on the site no longer returns anything, which seems to indicate they removed it from the listing.
Talk about a moronic idea -- if piracy was already a problem, the result of this will be much greater than the problems piracy ever created. And ironically enough, this will make pirating the product a safer proposition. Do you want to use a legal version, which has this file deleting "feature" that might one day go wrong and nuke something? O do you get the pirated version with the file deleting code removed from it?
This is a more extreme version of what happens with other sorts of copy prevention. There are games out there that run faster and more stable with the CD check disabled.
The drives in my case, which are in a cage right behind the intake fan, are at 39 and 41C right now. Looking at the graph, that's entirely within the safe area. Now, should I turn the fan off, I wouldn't surprised if it climbed past 45 C, which on the graph starts looking dangerous. I've seen temperatures a lot higher than that. A 7200RPM disk in a bad case could reach 55C quite easily, which isn't even on the graph. Of course, Google has a decent datacenter where they don't get temperatures like that, but that probably makes a decent part of the temperature they're subjected to by normal users.
Even with a fan blowing right on the disk, I don't remember seeing a drive temperature below 35C (with ambient at 25C or so). That seems to indicate that the low temperatures at which drives start failing are only achievable with air conditioning.
So, for normal people I'd say the old advice still holds: really hot drives are a bad thing. The low temperature data is interesting, but it's probably only relevant to datacenters, and seems to point that turning it into a freezer isn't necessarily a good idea.
Paper jams. Paper definitely doesn't come out exactly the same way it went in, and any handling of the output will probably make a jam a lot more likely.
Paper will probably cost an arm and a leg, so it would nullify savings anyway. This is a niche application, while normal paper is in really massive production.
Fading output is nasty - I really hate the thermal ticket paper that eventually fades so much as to render the output unreadable. I bet the shops love the reduced amount of returns though.
Regarding to "A", yep, completely true, especially for VB6.
Every VB book describes it as "system glue". You take ready made components that may have taken months to develop on their own, and then glue them together. For example, a VB6 developer would take an ActiveX control to get images from a webcam, another to do image processing, and yet another to do FTP uploads. Then use VB to write the interface and glue, totalling maybe a couple thousand lines at most.
Porting that to anything is impossible, as there's no actual webcam related, image processing or FTP code in the program.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely not. I'm fine with them making money off it. I'm not fine with them taking it and not giving back. I absolutely hate the idea of that something I write might one day end up in a Tivo-like device, where nobody can improve it further.
For instance, IBM benefits from contributions to the Linux kernel. This is fine, IBM returns the favor by then releasing their own code. If I write say, a driver, then IBM finds a bug and fixes it, they'll have to release the source if they plan to distribute. This is how I like it.
On the other hand, I don't ever plan to contribute anything substantial to a BSD licensed project, unless I'm being paid for it. Did BSD ever see any improvements to the code used by MS? I bet they haven't.
Incidentally, one of the reasons of NetBSD's stagnation was exactly that, the license. If you don't believe it, there was an article on slashdot about it. Wasabi Systems, one company that uses NetBSD, hired NetBSD developers. Of course since under the BSD they have no obligation to open anything, from then on that developer started working on Wasabi's proprietary branch, and NetBSD never saw any of it. That sort of thing happening for long enough can easily drain a project of good developers.
Now look at Linux, does that happen there? Hell, no. There are plenty paid kernel developers, and their contributions still get into the main branch.
No.
The BSD is nice and simple, but it's only of use if you're happy to basically work for free for some random corporation.
Look at NetBSD for example. It's stagnated to the point of irrelevance, while Linux keeps getting more and more polished and more and more popular.
If anything, the BSD will the one that will die, when people realize that corporations have no concept of playing nice or gratitude.
Tell me about it.
I especially love it how it pops up while you're working on something, can't be killed permanently, and gets focus.
So I'm doing something on my box, the darn thing pops up right when I'm about to press enter or click in the place where the reboot button appears, and the box reboots.
It's annoying enough with a personal computer, with a server it could be outright nasty.
More than lack of control, my annoyance with it in this particular case is that it tries to be too friendly. It's like a well meaning, but annoying child who wants to help but keeps getting in the way of people trying to get things done. My ideal computer is like any other simple device like a typewriter. If I press a key, the exact pressed character appears flawlessly on the paper. If I don't touch it, nothing happens, and it stays out of the way waiting for commands. That's how Linux works for me. If I want to update, I just 'apt-get update', or start Adept, it doesn't suddenly pop out in the middle of something else and asks if I want to.
Windows, on the other hand, with its attempt at friendliness means constant interruptions. Programs can't just start, they whine about wanting to be registered. Acrobat Reader, Java, Flash and whatever else offers to download a new version of itself at inconvenient moments. And so on. I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect that when asked to display a PDF file the computer would just display it, and get the hell out of my way, instead of interrupting me with a "would you like to download the latest update?" which often happens to be something I don't care about.
I swear, if I ever meet the moron who thought that popping up the Windows Update window without warning and giving it focus, resulting in what I was trying to type making the computer reboot, was a good idea, I'll punch him/her in the face.
Funny, for the same reason I have no Windows systems left at home.
Windows is annoying. Constant interruptions from the autoupdate mechanism (I can't even kill the darn thing, it comes back!), reboots, updates, a whole day needed to set it up. If it needs to be reinstalled it's a huge pain in the ass. It can't be easily moved to different hardware and has "features" like activation. It's got to the point that my surviving Windows installations run in vmware, because that's the only way I found of making sure I can reliably recover from a failure.
Using Windows on a daily basis means dealing with all sorts of crap. Every other application seems to demand attention, pop up messages, have its own autoupdate service, want to be registered, or add yet another icon to the systray. Downloading things often involves getting them from some website, with no assurance about its quality, lack of spyware and ability to uninstall it.
Usability-wise it's annoying. Many dialogs have a fixed size. Windows update obstinately insists on choosing the quick install option by default, and the descriptions of updates are always content-free anyway. Hardware support is better than Linux, but every other device comes with a 100MB driver package, which doesn't just install the driver, but also some horrible sort of control panel for it.
Windows is better regarding application availability, but when doing work, for me, it absolutely sucks. Why, for instance, people on slashdot often warn that they're linking to a PDF file? Because on Windows the default choice for it is Acrobat Reader, which is big, annoying to use, annoying to install, likes popping up windows about updates, and takes very long to startup. In comparison in KDE I don't have to put up with any of that crap. The PDF loads, displays, and that's it.
Yeah, I could hunt down the Windows program for reading PDFs that's not annoying. Only that'd take time and effort, because I'd have to google for it, make sure that it's the one I want and not somebody's repackaged spyware-filled version, download and install it.
But just like you are, I'm busy and have better things to do than that. In Ubuntu it's already installed by default, and if it wasn't it'd just be the matter of searching for "PDF" in Adept.
It sounds more like Delay line memory to me.
Example: Intel opens up FSB. Motherboard manufacturers tell AMD: making boards for multiple socket types is a pain and decreases profits. Why don't you make a CPU for the Intel socket instead? Intel of course will make sure to design it so that it's great for an Intel CPU and suboptimal for an AMD one.
The other companies probably don't worry Intel much. VIA might make something, but I highly doubt they could manage to make anything that'd take any significant market from Intel, given what they've been releasing.
The 'emerge sync' thing is somewhat understandable: What if you want to emerge a package called 'sync'? Debian's apt-get at least does it unambiguously, as you say "apt-get install package". In Gentoo it's weird because the action executed depends on whether it's an internal command or not. It also means that you can't add a new command to emerge with a name that clashes with an existing package name.
Threads have to be started too, and can also be pooled. So about the same in both cases.
The parent process can simply send a signal (like SIGTERM). On startup the process can be told whether to stop abruptly, fade out, etc.
Also, aborting a thread is not very nice, in C# for instance it will throw an Exception at some random point of the code. In comparison, a SIGTERM will invoke a handler, set a variable, and then the code can deal with it wherever comfortable.
This is more complicated, granted. But so it is with threads.
SIGCHLD
Here's the one thing Windows needs: fork()
Threads have all sorts of nasty issues and pitfalls on any platform. Meanwhile, fork() is beautifully simple, and fork + socketpair lacks pretty much all of them. The speed may be a bit lower, but there's the great benefit of simpler and much safer code.
If Knuth looks like a baby to you, then you've seen some really scary ones. My condolences.
LSL has no classes, and about the most furry thing about it is the ear attachment points. Tails go on the pelvis attachment point.
Makes me wonder where do the mature bits go when you have a tail, as there can be only one object attached to every point, but that's not something I intend to figure out.
it's not in the language, but it's on the website:
p hp
https://secure-web7.secondlife.com/currency/sell.
Except that Eve must see the result, which is exactly what makes it unworkable.
Eve doesn't need to break the crypto. She can play it on a high quality screen and record with with a video camera (which I'm pretty sure can be done at a very acceptable quality with good equipment and effort). I would be surprised if an HD DVD couldn't be recorded with a quality similar to DivX-encoded DVDs this way, which people find more than acceptable.
Eve could also open the monitor, and read the cleartext output from the circuitry. After all, at some point it has to be transmitted to the TFT or the CRT, and both should be possible to capture with the right equipment. CRTs should be quite straightforward.
IIRC, there's a key per player model, maybe at best per manufacturing run, not per player instance.
Making a key per player copy is infeasible. How would you do that? Basically, every disk would need to have the data encrypted with each player's key. That number would be in the millions.
That wouldn't work either.
At some point in the digital playback device, the data becomes cleartext. Given enough effort, that data could be extracted. Especially if it's a CRT, as AFAIK, the method used by a CRT monitor to drive the CRTs is quite simple. A LCD is probably more complicated, but it'd give you a 100% precise result.
Besides, I am fairly sure that with the right equipment you could do a decent analog recording anyway. Use a big, good quality LCD monitor with a DVI connection, and a camera pointed precisely at it. Taking the output of a BluRay movie and encoding it into a DVD quality DivX should give very watchable results.
Only thing that could be done against that is watermarks, but that's defeatable too. Have a few people dump the same movie, compare the results, and flip bits randomly where it doesn't match.
Sure it's free, but hey, they get free publicity from it, and surely they expect to get the user to buy a professional version, or something else they make.
Call the BSA and let them handle it, or sue the infringer.
Those are the only legal actions. No, committing another crime as revenge is not legal and not an appropiate response. If the author believes law is a good thing (which he obviously does as he says it's illegal) then he should follow it himself, and deal with it within the legal framework.
This may sound new to you, but in most sane places there's a separation of powers, and punishing crime is reserved to the judicial branch. It's not the author's right to provide a punishment.
Ah, getting the info for the person to sue is not so easy? Well, you said it yourself:
Oh great, it's the stupid analogies again.
But since you like them so much, I'll point that it's in fact illegal in many places to booby trap your property. So if you have any great ideas, like turrets that automatically shoot at intruders, or connecting AC to the window frame, you will find that if a thief gets hit with any of that they can sue you -- and win.
In your case, there's a crime being committed: trespassing, and breaking and entering. But that in fact gives you no right whatsoever to make a mechanism that pours boiling pitch on the intruder. Your right to shoot trespassers in most place applies only to *self defense* if you personally are present. In some places you're not allowed to kill the intruder if they're not threatening you personally, and I'm pretty sure no place allows attacking an intruder by any sort of automatic means.
In this case, there's a crime being committed: copyright infringement. But that also doesn't give the author the right to take revenge by deleting files.
Yes.
Now if that seems weird, consider it: A pirate is not a customer, but it doesn't cost money (no, the lack of a gain is NOT a loss) still might be a potential customer. Say, there's a huge amount of pirates among teenagers, who don't have the cash to afford your stuff anyway. But if you create a good impression that might result in a sale later.
For example, I know a few people who at 13 were spending a lot of time messing with 3D Studio and Photoshop. Of course there was no way they could afford it, so they pirated it. Now guess what they use at work at that they paid for? Guess what they reply when they're asked "what photo editing software you think we should buy?"
Meanwhile, this stupid action not only is ineffective, but it turns off actual potential customers. People who were thinking "hmm, that sounds good" and changed their minds because they realized that if that goes wrong it might nuke something important.
Now the page shows it rated at the lowest value possible in all categories, and the comments are full of "don't buy this software" as well. I also noticed that searching for "Display Eater" on the site no longer returns anything, which seems to indicate they removed it from the listing.
Talk about a moronic idea -- if piracy was already a problem, the result of this will be much greater than the problems piracy ever created. And ironically enough, this will make pirating the product a safer proposition. Do you want to use a legal version, which has this file deleting "feature" that might one day go wrong and nuke something? O do you get the pirated version with the file deleting code removed from it?
This is a more extreme version of what happens with other sorts of copy prevention. There are games out there that run faster and more stable with the CD check disabled.
The drives in my case, which are in a cage right behind the intake fan, are at 39 and 41C right now. Looking at the graph, that's entirely within the safe area. Now, should I turn the fan off, I wouldn't surprised if it climbed past 45 C, which on the graph starts looking dangerous. I've seen temperatures a lot higher than that. A 7200RPM disk in a bad case could reach 55C quite easily, which isn't even on the graph. Of course, Google has a decent datacenter where they don't get temperatures like that, but that probably makes a decent part of the temperature they're subjected to by normal users.
Even with a fan blowing right on the disk, I don't remember seeing a drive temperature below 35C (with ambient at 25C or so). That seems to indicate that the low temperatures at which drives start failing are only achievable with air conditioning.
So, for normal people I'd say the old advice still holds: really hot drives are a bad thing. The low temperature data is interesting, but it's probably only relevant to datacenters, and seems to point that turning it into a freezer isn't necessarily a good idea.
When running RAID-1, use disks of different brands for extra safety. Then they should be less likely to fail exactly at once.
Regarding to "A", yep, completely true, especially for VB6.
Every VB book describes it as "system glue". You take ready made components that may have taken months to develop on their own, and then glue them together. For example, a VB6 developer would take an ActiveX control to get images from a webcam, another to do image processing, and yet another to do FTP uploads. Then use VB to write the interface and glue, totalling maybe a couple thousand lines at most.
Porting that to anything is impossible, as there's no actual webcam related, image processing or FTP code in the program.
Here's an example of what sort of thing you'd drop into a VB program: http://xceed.com/Grid_WinForms_Intro.html