At this point, the moderation code has been released into the wild, and any attempts to patent will be thwarted by "prior art". It'll be up to us to make sure that the patent office knows about it, though.
This is the perfect oppirtunity to make a clean-room version of the DeCSS code.
Someone not involved with the current project should go through the code from the court documents, and write up a detailed explanation of how it works, without using any actual code. i.e. "the stream is XOR'ed with the Manufacturer Key for X bytes, and then..."
Someone else (again, not involved with any of the current projects) takes the explanation and write code that follows the explanation.
There aren't that many manufacturer keys, so just start brute-forcing keys until all of the working (or "sort-of-working") keys are found.
Refine and repeat.
Suddenly, there's a version of DeCSS developed without stealing any trade secrets. The person who's explaining the code is merely offering commentary and explanation for a legal document, while the people writing the code are putting that non-copyrighted, non-trade-secret explanation into practice.
Attacking the moderators as a group will never get you very far. The moderators are pulled from the general slashdot readership. Like the readers and posters, some of them are really good, and others are total idiots.
That's what the meta-moderation is for. Go there often, and weed out the idiots. It works.
I'll confess that I'd like to see a different system, but I don't have any better ideas. Selecting meta-moderators the same way that moderators are selected is getting into a recursive trap of silliness.
Re:Stop being an asshole....
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 1
slashdot-terminal said: I have had to take classes where they used some form of proprietary software that was employed in the class where it was not necessarily needed. This required money but could have been replaced with another application that was totally free but had a different syntax or implimentation of the same idea. These products usually cost $100-$400+. Now you tell me is this not forcing me to pay money for something?
Actually, you just said so. Nobody forced you to take the class. Nobody forced the professor to choose an expensive software package. It's part of going to college. The professor's job is to choose the most effective tool to impart knowledge. In this case, he chose the tool that he knew (and could teach from) most effectively. Would you also argue that you are forced to buy textbooks, and that all textbook authors should give up all revenue and release their work for free for your convenience?
Nobody owes you any software. Nobody forces you to buy software. They choose to make it, they choose how to license it, and you choose whether or not to accept that license.
Most people learn at a fairly young age that "I want it" doesn't always equate to "I'll get it." For some open-source "advocates", it takes a little longer, and they only hurt the cause until then.
If you want something to be open source, get off your ass and write something that's open source. Criticizing other people for what they choose to do with their own software does nothing but annoy people.
If you think that you can write a better slashdot, then go out and do it. I wish you well. The folks that run this site are under no obligation to release anything that they do. The author is the one who ultimately has the rights to the software that he writes, no matter how much you demand otherwise.
While some of SETI's algorithms may be inefficient, they still have problems with cheating, and they have far more computing power than they expected. They'll probably finish with their data backlog by the end of the year, which'll mean that they'll have to come up with new types of analysis or more data, as there won't be anything for the machines to do.
I sent a friendly note to abuse@hotmail.com mentioning that ps84@hotmail.com was using his email address for business, and pointed them at the Power Source web page where it's listed.
For those that don't know, using a Hotmail address for business is a violation of the Hotmail Terms of Service.
I got a note back from abuse@hotmail.com yesterday. They've cancelled the account. So, at this point, Power Source doesn't even have an email address.
This, perhaps, is why Microsoft has gone to a year-based numbering system. Everyone knows that any Microsoft product with a version number equal to or less tha 3 sucks much worse than anything that's made it into a forth revision (well, except for DOS).
After tomorrow, we'll be able to go back to using 2 digit years, because it won't be a problem for another hundred years, and we'll be dead then -- or we'll be sitting in our retirement homes laughing our asses off.
While saving a few bucks is admirable, the simple truth is that the wavelan access points were already designed to solve all of these problems and more.
If you're doing something that's non-profit (or otherwise capable of generating good PR for Lucent), give them a call and see if you can get a discount.
Otherwise, you're going to end up spending more money in the long-term on maintainence and replacement (like someone said, PCs on a phone pole would be a tempting theft target) that you would on the more expensive equipment.
The biggest problem with software RAID is that it often relies on fallable humans to brush and feed it.
When you're a sysadmin, and your big machine has a disk crash, life gets hectic. The last thing you want to be thinking about is which device name and partition you want to restore to and from -- and you sure as hell don't want to mix them up. Hardware RAID handles all of this for you.
In large organizations, too, there are sometimes separate hardware and software people. Life's a whole lot simpler if you don't have to coordinate each step between groups. With hardware RAID, operations hears the beeping RAID box (or the sysadmin calls operations), operations grabs a spare, tells the sysadmin, then swaps the disks. With software RAID, the sysadmin gets a warning (if he has things set up correctly), tells operations to swap disks (if there's hot-swappable hardware) or power the machine down (if there isn't), has operations swap the disks, then the sysadmin manually restores the disks.
Carry your passwords in your wallet, on a piece of paper.
I think that random people on the internet are a far greater threat than the people who have access to my wallet. I generate random passwords and I carry 2 of them with me: one for my account on one of my machines, and another as the password for the encrypted file on that machine that has all of my other passwords. This piece of paper doesn't list the machine or give any hints about what the words are. I have another copy in a desk drawer at home.
If I lose the paper for any reason, I use my backup copy (if I need it) and change all of my passwords immediately.
I think that this is far better than coming up with passwords that are easy to remember and using them for months before changing them.
This guy's presenting insufficient data for his case, he's acting like there's a great conspiracy to keep him quiet, and most importantly, everybody else does it. This isn't a Microsoft issue. Doonesbury's been lampooning the tech industry for this for a while.
There was an article in Boardwatch magazine a few years ago that went into this very nicely. The author compared the situation to a game of musical chairs. People know that there are too many competitors in the industry, and that it can't sustain its current level of investment for too long without having something to show for it. So, everybody's burning money at a prodigious rate in an attempt to gain "mindshare". The goal is simple: be in front when the venture capital stops. It's reached a level of insanity where it's hard for small businesses with sound expansion plans to get venture capital because "they're not agressive enough."
It's kind of like the cold war, in a way. The US "won", not on any ideological or technological superiority, but because we were able to keep spending for longer than the Soviets. The tech industry seems to be emulating that model.
This disaster scenario won't happen. The reason: filters. As information multiplies around us, it's easy to be overwhelmed if you keep trying to access it like you did before. If you change your access methods, it becomes much more managable. The 3 or 4 books on my desk aren't sorted at all because I can look at every book and figure out which ones I need in a few seconds. At home, I organize my bookcases by category: Technical books, nontechnical nonfiction, and fiction. This is sufficient for me to find any book within a few minutes. At a library, though, I go to the card catalog, because it's faster to find things with that intermediary level of data. We'll see this happening with more and more aspects of life.
My VCR has hundreds of options, but on the front of the machine, there's a big red "One Touch Recording" button that records 30 minutes for each press of the button. I think we'll start seeing this on more and more devices. Your computer-controlled washing machine might let you set the temperature of the water and the speed of rotation, but there'll be a big "Wash" button that you can press and expect reasonable results. We'll have more options, but the real challenge will be to build devices that don't force us to become experts with each device that we use.
Finally, as we live more and more online, we'll find ourselves communicating with much larger numbers of like-minded people. Rather than relying on one trusted friend for recommendations on news, books, etc., we'll go through meta-sites like slashdot and moviecritc to prune the non-interesting stuff.
The ability to selectively ignore information may become an individuals biggest asset. The guy who remembers everything he ever sees or hears will overload at an early age, while the absent-minded type who forgets the data but remembers where to find it will be better able to cope.
The percentage of the public who's online is still pretty small. The media salivates over us because we're still mostly young and wealthy, i.e. a perfect advertiser demographic. In raw numbers, though, the folks who've never played with "that new-fangled internet-thingee" outnumber us substantially.
Rather than being a positive, leading force, I think that the internet has great potential for the sort of garbage that reporters like best: digging up skeletons in candidates' closets. I suspect that we'll see some "internet scandals" that make their way to the mainstream media. There just aren't enough people to lead a charge from the internet, though.
Given that the media's been on this like a starving dog on a T-bone, I think the public deserves one last picture -- John-John after 5 days underwater.
Considering that a 386 is far less powerful than a current top-of-the-line machine, but uses only a little bit less power, a point will quickly come where it's cheaper to buy a new machine than to pay for the electricity for a bunch of older machines.
Not to mention heat. At my former workplace, they got 10 rack-mounted quad-processor Xeons with the intention of clustering them. They were planning on testing the cluster in a small room in the basement before moving them to the main machine room. Plans had to be changed because of the amount of heat that 10 machines put out. The heat produced by 10000 machines would be truly phenominal.
Life's more complicated than that. Here are some very rough guesses for costs that you haven't accounted for:
Record store profit: $4
Distributor profit: $3
Physical media costs (CD + jewel case + fancy label + assembly + shrink wrap + warehousing): $2
Advertising and promotions: $1
Musician profit: $1
Subsidising "loser" bands that don't turn a profit for the record company: $2
Production costs for the musician (studio time, mixing, etc.) are often taken from their "profit" from album sales. Far more bands fail than succeed, so record companies have to make up the loss on other record sales.
The record companies are still turning a tidy profit, but reducing costs to the consumer will have to involve reducing the number of steps between musician and consumer.
Whether you like 'em or not, there are intellectual property laws. Sure, the RIAA and the major labels are a bunch of greedy idiots who deserve to fall, but they have the law on their side, and, believe it or not, we don't want to change that.
The laws were put in place for the musicians. If I'm a professional songwriter, I'd like to be paid for my work. Without the copyright laws, I don't get paid, and I end up flipping burgers for a living. If I'm a musician, I'd like to at least choose whether or not to get a cut of the money that others make from my work. If a musician wants to give away CDs but charge for radio play (a bad idea, IMO), they should be allowed to try. Some people seem to be proposing that all music be free, regardless of the wishes of the author or performer. This seems shortsighted to me.
As I see it, these are the major problems with the current situation:
Most musicians don't want to deal with business crap, and the record companies offer a "package deal": we take care of everything, in exchange for most of your profits.
When you're busting your ass playing dive bars for gas money, an advance of several thousand dollars sounds really, really good, even if the per-album profit is disgustingly small.
While there are indie labels that treat bands with more respect, they don't have the international reach of the major labels, and $.50 each on 10,000 records is still more money than $5 each on 100 records.
At the moment, I have about 10G of MP3s on my home computer. NONE of them are illegal. Most are from my CD collection, but I also have a bunch of stuff from mp3.com & other sites that allow downloads, some stuff from goodnoise, er, emusic, and some stuff from a local band that gave me permission to record some of their stuff.
Like anyone else with a fat net feed, I could get this stuff for free, but I don't. There's a lot of music out there that I'd really like to have, but if the only legal way to get it is to buy the CD, I buy it or do without. The musicians deserve a cut of my money, in whatever method they choose (traditional CD sales, pay-per-listen, or mp3 sales). If I don't like it, I don't listen.
I've never really considered 2600 to be a magazine in the traditional sense of the word. Maybe a large scale zine, but it's always had that "straight outta the basement" feel to it, despite the glossy covers.
Besides, if I want cheezy BASIC programs to do XOR encryption and obsolete VMS hacks, I can find 'em faster on the internet. Like any magazine, publishing lag is a killer, but they seem to throw in stuff that's been useless for years. Reading articles by 15 year olds who argue about great crackers of the 70s is mildly entertaining, but I certainly wouldn't call most of what the magazine presents a vision of the future.
In a strange way, the 2600 crowd (yes, I'm throwing the magazine readers, alt.2600, and #2600 into the same boat -- damn me to hell) seems to have a lot in common with the SCA. They spend a lot of time and energy romanticizing a version of the past that never really existed. They enjoy it, but the rest of the world looks at them with a mixture of amusement and pity.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't Sun have a patent on hardware that can run java bytecode natively?
I wonder where transmeta-ish devices fall. I'd call it software, but would sun's lawyers?
I chose to abstain simply because all of the interfaces suck.
Asking people to choose the best designed interface in a unix app is a bit like asking which festering wound hurts least.
And yes, I use (and like) unix. I just think that the app UIs in general have serious shortcomings.
At this point, the moderation code has been released into the wild, and any attempts to patent will be thwarted by "prior art". It'll be up to us to make sure that the patent office knows about it, though.
- Someone not involved with the current project should go through the code from the court documents, and write up a detailed explanation of how it works, without using any actual code. i.e. "the stream is XOR'ed with the Manufacturer Key for X bytes, and then..."
- Someone else (again, not involved with any of the current projects) takes the explanation and write code that follows the explanation.
- There aren't that many manufacturer keys, so just start brute-forcing keys until all of the working (or "sort-of-working") keys are found.
- Refine and repeat.
Suddenly, there's a version of DeCSS developed without stealing any trade secrets. The person who's explaining the code is merely offering commentary and explanation for a legal document, while the people writing the code are putting that non-copyrighted, non-trade-secret explanation into practice.Yeah!
We should trademark the word open so that nobody else can use it without a license.
</sarcasm>
Attacking the moderators as a group will never get you very far. The moderators are pulled from the general slashdot readership. Like the readers and posters, some of them are really good, and others are total idiots.
That's what the meta-moderation is for. Go there often, and weed out the idiots. It works.
I'll confess that I'd like to see a different system, but I don't have any better ideas. Selecting meta-moderators the same way that moderators are selected is getting into a recursive trap of silliness.
slashdot-terminal said:
I have had to take classes where they used some form of proprietary software that was employed in the class where it was not necessarily needed. This required money but could have been replaced with another application that was totally free but had a different syntax or implimentation of the same idea. These products usually cost $100-$400+. Now you tell me is this not forcing me to pay money for something?
Actually, you just said so. Nobody forced you to take the class. Nobody forced the professor to choose an expensive software package. It's part of going to college. The professor's job is to choose the most effective tool to impart knowledge. In this case, he chose the tool that he knew (and could teach from) most effectively. Would you also argue that you are forced to buy textbooks, and that all textbook authors should give up all revenue and release their work for free for your convenience?
Nobody owes you any software. Nobody forces you to buy software. They choose to make it, they choose how to license it, and you choose whether or not to accept that license.
Most people learn at a fairly young age that "I want it" doesn't always equate to "I'll get it." For some open-source "advocates", it takes a little longer, and they only hurt the cause until then.
If you want something to be open source, get off your ass and write something that's open source. Criticizing other people for what they choose to do with their own software does nothing but annoy people.
If you think that you can write a better slashdot, then go out and do it. I wish you well. The folks that run this site are under no obligation to release anything that they do. The author is the one who ultimately has the rights to the software that he writes, no matter how much you demand otherwise.
While some of SETI's algorithms may be inefficient, they still have problems with cheating, and they have far more computing power than they expected. They'll probably finish with their data backlog by the end of the year, which'll mean that they'll have to come up with new types of analysis or more data, as there won't be anything for the machines to do.
Once, the voice of reason and common sense. Now, the stereotypical new-age flake.
What they've done with her depresses me.
...and a little sweater...
I sent a friendly note to abuse@hotmail.com mentioning that ps84@hotmail.com was using his email address for business, and pointed them at the Power Source web page where it's listed.
For those that don't know, using a Hotmail address for business is a violation of the Hotmail Terms of Service.
I got a note back from abuse@hotmail.com yesterday. They've cancelled the account. So, at this point, Power Source doesn't even have an email address.
Oh, come on.
After tomorrow, we'll be able to go back to using 2 digit years, because it won't be a problem for another hundred years, and we'll be dead then -- or we'll be sitting in our retirement homes laughing our asses off.
;)
While saving a few bucks is admirable, the simple truth is that the wavelan access points were already designed to solve all of these problems and more.
If you're doing something that's non-profit (or otherwise capable of generating good PR for Lucent), give them a call and see if you can get a discount.
Otherwise, you're going to end up spending more money in the long-term on maintainence and replacement (like someone said, PCs on a phone pole would be a tempting theft target) that you would on the more expensive equipment.
The biggest problem with software RAID is that it often relies on fallable humans to brush and feed it.
When you're a sysadmin, and your big machine has a disk crash, life gets hectic. The last thing you want to be thinking about is which device name and partition you want to restore to and from -- and you sure as hell don't want to mix them up. Hardware RAID handles all of this for you.
In large organizations, too, there are sometimes separate hardware and software people. Life's a whole lot simpler if you don't have to coordinate each step between groups. With hardware RAID, operations hears the beeping RAID box (or the sysadmin calls operations), operations grabs a spare, tells the sysadmin, then swaps the disks. With software RAID, the sysadmin gets a warning (if he has things set up correctly), tells operations to swap disks (if there's hot-swappable hardware) or power the machine down (if there isn't), has operations swap the disks, then the sysadmin manually restores the disks.
Carry your passwords in your wallet, on a piece of paper.
I think that random people on the internet are a far greater threat than the people who have access to my wallet. I generate random passwords and I carry 2 of them with me: one for my account on one of my machines, and another as the password for the encrypted file on that machine that has all of my other passwords. This piece of paper doesn't list the machine or give any hints about what the words are. I have another copy in a desk drawer at home.
If I lose the paper for any reason, I use my backup copy (if I need it) and change all of my passwords immediately.
I think that this is far better than coming up with passwords that are easy to remember and using them for months before changing them.
There was an article in Boardwatch magazine a few years ago that went into this very nicely. The author compared the situation to a game of musical chairs. People know that there are too many competitors in the industry, and that it can't sustain its current level of investment for too long without having something to show for it. So, everybody's burning money at a prodigious rate in an attempt to gain "mindshare". The goal is simple: be in front when the venture capital stops. It's reached a level of insanity where it's hard for small businesses with sound expansion plans to get venture capital because "they're not agressive enough."
It's kind of like the cold war, in a way. The US "won", not on any ideological or technological superiority, but because we were able to keep spending for longer than the Soviets. The tech industry seems to be emulating that model.
My VCR has hundreds of options, but on the front of the machine, there's a big red "One Touch Recording" button that records 30 minutes for each press of the button. I think we'll start seeing this on more and more devices. Your computer-controlled washing machine might let you set the temperature of the water and the speed of rotation, but there'll be a big "Wash" button that you can press and expect reasonable results. We'll have more options, but the real challenge will be to build devices that don't force us to become experts with each device that we use.
Finally, as we live more and more online, we'll find ourselves communicating with much larger numbers of like-minded people. Rather than relying on one trusted friend for recommendations on news, books, etc., we'll go through meta-sites like slashdot and moviecritc to prune the non-interesting stuff.
The ability to selectively ignore information may become an individuals biggest asset. The guy who remembers everything he ever sees or hears will overload at an early age, while the absent-minded type who forgets the data but remembers where to find it will be better able to cope.
The percentage of the public who's online is still pretty small. The media salivates over us because we're still mostly young and wealthy, i.e. a perfect advertiser demographic. In raw numbers, though, the folks who've never played with "that new-fangled internet-thingee" outnumber us substantially.
Rather than being a positive, leading force, I think that the internet has great potential for the sort of garbage that reporters like best: digging up skeletons in candidates' closets. I suspect that we'll see some "internet scandals" that make their way to the mainstream media. There just aren't enough people to lead a charge from the internet, though.
Given that the media's been on this like a starving dog on a T-bone, I think the public deserves one last picture -- John-John after 5 days underwater.
Go to http://bitch.shutdown.com/kennedy.html and crank up the music.
Considering that a 386 is far less powerful than a current top-of-the-line machine, but uses only a little bit less power, a point will quickly come where it's cheaper to buy a new machine than to pay for the electricity for a bunch of older machines.
Not to mention heat. At my former workplace, they got 10 rack-mounted quad-processor Xeons with the intention of clustering them. They were planning on testing the cluster in a small room in the basement before moving them to the main machine room. Plans had to be changed because of the amount of heat that 10 machines put out. The heat produced by 10000 machines would be truly phenominal.
Production costs for the musician (studio time, mixing, etc.) are often taken from their "profit" from album sales. Far more bands fail than succeed, so record companies have to make up the loss on other record sales.
The record companies are still turning a tidy profit, but reducing costs to the consumer will have to involve reducing the number of steps between musician and consumer.
The laws were put in place for the musicians. If I'm a professional songwriter, I'd like to be paid for my work. Without the copyright laws, I don't get paid, and I end up flipping burgers for a living. If I'm a musician, I'd like to at least choose whether or not to get a cut of the money that others make from my work. If a musician wants to give away CDs but charge for radio play (a bad idea, IMO), they should be allowed to try. Some people seem to be proposing that all music be free, regardless of the wishes of the author or performer. This seems shortsighted to me.
As I see it, these are the major problems with the current situation:
- Most musicians don't want to deal with business crap, and the record companies offer a "package deal": we take care of everything, in exchange for most of your profits.
- When you're busting your ass playing dive bars for gas money, an advance of several thousand dollars sounds really, really good, even if the per-album profit is disgustingly small.
- While there are indie labels that treat bands with more respect, they don't have the international reach of the major labels, and $.50 each on 10,000 records is still more money than $5 each on 100 records.
At the moment, I have about 10G of MP3s on my home computer. NONE of them are illegal. Most are from my CD collection, but I also have a bunch of stuff from mp3.com & other sites that allow downloads, some stuff from goodnoise, er, emusic, and some stuff from a local band that gave me permission to record some of their stuff.Like anyone else with a fat net feed, I could get this stuff for free, but I don't. There's a lot of music out there that I'd really like to have, but if the only legal way to get it is to buy the CD, I buy it or do without. The musicians deserve a cut of my money, in whatever method they choose (traditional CD sales, pay-per-listen, or mp3 sales). If I don't like it, I don't listen.
I've never really considered 2600 to be a magazine in the traditional sense of the word. Maybe a large scale zine, but it's always had that "straight outta the basement" feel to it, despite the glossy covers.
Besides, if I want cheezy BASIC programs to do XOR encryption and obsolete VMS hacks, I can find 'em faster on the internet. Like any magazine, publishing lag is a killer, but they seem to throw in stuff that's been useless for years. Reading articles by 15 year olds who argue about great crackers of the 70s is mildly entertaining, but I certainly wouldn't call most of what the magazine presents a vision of the future.
In a strange way, the 2600 crowd (yes, I'm throwing the magazine readers, alt.2600, and #2600 into the same boat -- damn me to hell) seems to have a lot in common with the SCA. They spend a lot of time and energy romanticizing a version of the past that never really existed. They enjoy it, but the rest of the world looks at them with a mixture of amusement and pity.