Well when I think of Free [Speech], I think of something that I can do anything with. That's simply not the case with the GPL. I'm not making any value judgements about the license, but while it gives total freedom to users and GPL-developers, it does place restrictions on other people. I cannot, for example, take that software and charge people license-fees to use it.
It's a tradeoff, of course. The freedom to stay free versus the freedom to make it non-free. In this sense, the BSD license is more free. There aren't really any restrictions on what one does with BSD source code (esp. now that the advertising clause is gone). GPL, on the other hand, does place restrictions, although they are arguably for the good of all.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Damned good question: It sounds like he's saying that I can use GPL'ed code in a close-source program as long as I don't release the source code under any license but the GPL. So what if I didn't release the source code at all?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Exactly! If people don't want to use the GPL - fine; they can ignore it. But is has proven it's effectiveness.
Having said that, I will say the same about close-source software. Stallman can whine all he wants, but closed-source software is still a force to be reckoned with. If he doesn't like it - fine; he can ignore it too.
Can't we all just get along?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Very true. On the flipside, I've also never understood why people like Richard Stallman always bitch and moan about proprietary software. If they don't want to use it, no one is forcing them (well, their job might, but that's a different issue).
I think the ability to charge thousands of dollars for something I created is an inalienable right. If the product isn't worth that much, then it will fail -- The free market is great that way; it let's people vote with their feet (and their wallet).
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Well I think it's pretty obvious why people continuously get Stallman's meaning of the word "Free" confused. It's a confusing meaning, and he's right, the English language is partially to blame.
Stallman says that "Your freedom to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose" -- that's basically what the GPL does. It gives programmers the ability to swing their arms as far as they want, as long as they aren't hitting other people's noses (read: refusing to disclose their source).
But that's not really freedom in the traditional sense, is it? No, in the traditional sense, the BSD license is really much more "free" than the GPL (I don't want to get into a "which is better" argument though).
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Why Linux Supporters Should Be Excited About X-
on
More on the MS "X-Box"
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· Score: 2
So what are you saying? That a console is only good if it isn't tied down to a specific API? That's stupid. Most older consoles didn't even have an API; it was all direct video access. And yes, you can probably still do that if you want to.
Look, I'm all for diversity on the desktop, but consoles aren't the same thing. What if it only ran programs that used OpenGL? Would that be okay with you? I think -- no, I know -- that this is just about hating Microsoft. Grow up, they're a big company with a lot of clout and, moreover, whining about how evil and unfair they are isn't going to change that. If you don't want to use this system, fine - don't use it, no one is twisting your arm. But spare us all your rantings because, believe me, they're nothing new around here and frankly it's getting kind of -1: Redundant.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
That's really a matter of taste, isn't it? Autocompletion doesn't slow down my work at all (when I am, in fact, working on Win32 applications). It's a handy feature when I forget the exact spelling of an object's members, or they're long and I don't feel like typing them out. I'm not saying it's necessary, but I do like it.
As for MSDN, I don't think it's bloated at all. There's certainly a lot of information in it, but I'd hardly call that a bad thing, and the search/index functions work quite well. I would much rather have indexed documentation with embedded links to related topics, than to use a man page. There's nothing wrong with man-pages, but they could use a little improvement.
Why are you so against VS, anyway? Because it's a Microsoft product? It's really a very good IDE and their compiler is quite good too. Actually, I would say that VS is possibly the best MS product out there -- definitely worth paying for, anyway.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Why Linux Supporters Should Be Excited About X-
on
More on the MS "X-Box"
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· Score: 1
So, um... why? Why is VS ill-suited, as you say, to game development? What IDE is better suited for game development anyway? CodeWarrior? Emacs???
Certainly you can't create texture-maps in VS, but that's not a function of the IDE, and I wouldn't want it in mine.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Yeah, KDevelop is pretty damned nice -- I've been using that for my Linux development for about 3 months now, and it's by far the best one for Unix. However, I'd still take VS over it. The autocompletion and integrated MSDN are invaluable tools.
But KDevelop is getting there.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
And John Trimble's "Writing with Style" - I wish someone had given that to me when I was in 7th grade.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Why Linux Supporters Should Be Excited About X-
on
More on the MS "X-Box"
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· Score: 2
Are you on crack? It may not be as open as he says (we'll find out) but certainly not for the reasons you've cited.
DirectX is a great graphics library with a crapload of support from the industry. The only problem with it is that it's tied to Windows. But if this console runs it... Well that's fine by me.
And VisualStudio?? Hello, have you ever used VS?? It's possibly the nicest damned IDE out there. I would give a kidney to have a VS port for Linux that would work with EGCS. You're crazy to think that it's no good. And to say that it's poor for game development -- what do you think Carmack writes Quake in?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Sega's Dreamcast does not use WinCE. There is no WinCE in the dreamcast at all. *Some* of the games use an embedded WinCE system, but it's not a requirement and it's hardly the common practice right now.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This is a toughy - It's pretty obvious from past failures that, yes, the console market is ridiculously hard to break into. However, the key advantage here is with DirectX and the fact that this runs on an x86 processor.
Game makers can port console-like PC games to this system much easier than they could to, say, the PSXII (unless they had that in mind from the start) because none of the low-level routines need to be re-optimized for a different architechture and the graphics calls are exactly the same.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Well yeah:) If it's running a AMD K6-2 then it should work just dandy with Linux. Of course, we don't have X-support for the video card yet, and the machine may not ship with a keyboard (but it does have a USB port). Anyway, if/when this console comes out, it will more than likely run Linux, but why would you want to? It outputs to a TV.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I think it's interesting that this machine is rumoured to have a K2 in it. Microsoft working with AMD, Intel working with Linux... Is Wintel falling apart at the seams? Well it doesn't really matter. Either one of the companies can now pretty much continue without the other (if they wanted to).
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Sounds like a real good idea. Freshmeat's not really the place for it though. There's not enough structure at Freshmeat and, unless you know what you're looking for, it'd be hard to find a needed component.
A new site perhaps? GPLStuff.com?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Don't presume to tell me what I do and do not know -- That won't make it true. Yes, I do know quite a bit about cryptography. What I don't know much about is CSS. From the article I read, I was under the impression that it was a block cipher much like DES or Blowfish and that the way the hackers hacked it was because the original coders left the original key out in the open. Is that not the case?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I can't believe this got moderated up as Interesting.
You and what army? Unless you're sitting on a couple of billion dollars for equipments costs, it would never happen. On top of that, eavesdropping on private communications lines is ILLEGAL. And believe me, if you could get an operation like this moving, they'd see it happen.
Moreover, Distributed.net works on one piece of information, encrypted with one key, over a number of YEARS. If they used heavier encryption than RC5 (which they undoubtedly do) it would take you a couple of thousand (or million) years just to decrypt one of their messages.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Yeah, you could've said the same thing about CDRs in the early 90's. Now a blank CD costs under $1. Why shouldn't the industry expect DVD-RAM to go down in price?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Don't worry, pretty soon they're be a new DVD format, with new keys, and probably a new cipher, put together by a new company. And they won't forget to encrypt the key this time.
Maybe that will be cracked too... who knows. But this really wasn't a matter of closed standards or obfuscation. It was encrypted using a private key mechanism. Even if you had the specs for the decryption routine (which the hackers had) you'd still need the key.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Yes, that's true, it would. So, because it's possible for an encryption system to be flawed, all encryption systems are worthless? What about RSA -- it's been in use (and under scrutiny) for 19 years and no "glaring hole" has been found in it. The only way to break RSA would be to discover an incredibly easy method of factoring larg primes out of enormous numbers. Barring a mathematical discovery of enormous proportions, it's impossible.
There are a number of good encryption schemes out there and, in fact, CSS didn't have any problems with it. It was the fact that the coders left the key unencrypted that was the glaring hole. Don't blame the mathematicians for a coders mistake:)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
How would one have bazaar'ed this sort of thing? OpenSourced the encryption algorithm so that people could examine it?
Well that would've been nice, but the algorithm wasn't the problem -- it was the implementation of it. And of course, if the implementation was OpenSourced, then we wouldn't have to crack the key, because we'd have seen it already, embedded into the CSS routines.
The original poster was just spouting buzzwords, trying to get a stupid moderator to give him +1
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Future efforts? They would have to create a DVD-2 format, that used a different key or different cipher. All the old players wouldn't work with the new format, and that includes DVD-decoder cards that aren't flash-upgradable. Fortunately software-based DVD will probably not suffer much from this sort of turnover.
Anyway, with a 40-bit key, it would've been cracked eventually.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Does Enoch know something about Hemos that we don't?
Actually I think that the Slashdot would be right to take such posts down. In fact, I think that in one of the FAQs, Rob talks about occasionally deleting comments. It's his discussion board, after all, he can do that:)
Is it right? I think so, yes. It's definitely an abusable right, but it's one that needs to be wielded. If Slashdot became a heavily censored site and a large number of posts started getting squashed, then I'd just leave and take my discussions somewhere else. I think most other people would to.
But, no - I don't mind if they remove the occasional, damaging comment.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Slashdot Mirror
It's a tradeoff, of course. The freedom to stay free versus the freedom to make it non-free. In this sense, the BSD license is more free. There aren't really any restrictions on what one does with BSD source code (esp. now that the advertising clause is gone). GPL, on the other hand, does place restrictions, although they are arguably for the good of all.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Having said that, I will say the same about close-source software. Stallman can whine all he wants, but closed-source software is still a force to be reckoned with. If he doesn't like it - fine; he can ignore it too.
Can't we all just get along?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I think the ability to charge thousands of dollars for something I created is an inalienable right. If the product isn't worth that much, then it will fail -- The free market is great that way; it let's people vote with their feet (and their wallet).
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Stallman says that "Your freedom to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose" -- that's basically what the GPL does. It gives programmers the ability to swing their arms as far as they want, as long as they aren't hitting other people's noses (read: refusing to disclose their source).
But that's not really freedom in the traditional sense, is it? No, in the traditional sense, the BSD license is really much more "free" than the GPL (I don't want to get into a "which is better" argument though).
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Look, I'm all for diversity on the desktop, but consoles aren't the same thing. What if it only ran programs that used OpenGL? Would that be okay with you? I think -- no, I know -- that this is just about hating Microsoft. Grow up, they're a big company with a lot of clout and, moreover, whining about how evil and unfair they are isn't going to change that. If you don't want to use this system, fine - don't use it, no one is twisting your arm. But spare us all your rantings because, believe me, they're nothing new around here and frankly it's getting kind of -1: Redundant.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
As for MSDN, I don't think it's bloated at all. There's certainly a lot of information in it, but I'd hardly call that a bad thing, and the search/index functions work quite well.
I would much rather have indexed documentation with embedded links to related topics, than to use a man page. There's nothing wrong with man-pages, but they could use a little improvement.
Why are you so against VS, anyway? Because it's a Microsoft product? It's really a very good IDE and their compiler is quite good too. Actually, I would say that VS is possibly the best MS product out there -- definitely worth paying for, anyway.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Certainly you can't create texture-maps in VS, but that's not a function of the IDE, and I wouldn't want it in mine.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
But KDevelop is getting there.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
DirectX is a great graphics library with a crapload of support from the industry. The only problem with it is that it's tied to Windows. But if this console runs it... Well that's fine by me.
And VisualStudio?? Hello, have you ever used VS?? It's possibly the nicest damned IDE out there. I would give a kidney to have a VS port for Linux that would work with EGCS. You're crazy to think that it's no good. And to say that it's poor for game development -- what do you think Carmack writes Quake in?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Game makers can port console-like PC games to this system much easier than they could to, say, the PSXII (unless they had that in mind from the start) because none of the low-level routines need to be re-optimized for a different architechture and the graphics calls are exactly the same.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
A new site perhaps? GPLStuff.com?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You and what army? Unless you're sitting on a couple of billion dollars for equipments costs, it would never happen. On top of that, eavesdropping on private communications lines is ILLEGAL. And believe me, if you could get an operation like this moving, they'd see it happen.
Moreover, Distributed.net works on one piece of information, encrypted with one key, over a number of YEARS. If they used heavier encryption than RC5 (which they undoubtedly do) it would take you a couple of thousand (or million) years just to decrypt one of their messages.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Don't worry, pretty soon they're be a new DVD format, with new keys, and probably a new cipher, put together by a new company. And they won't forget to encrypt the key this time.
Maybe that will be cracked too... who knows. But this really wasn't a matter of closed standards or obfuscation. It was encrypted using a private key mechanism. Even if you had the specs for the decryption routine (which the hackers had) you'd still need the key.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
There are a number of good encryption schemes out there and, in fact, CSS didn't have any problems with it. It was the fact that the coders left the key unencrypted that was the glaring hole. Don't blame the mathematicians for a coders mistake :)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Well that would've been nice, but the algorithm wasn't the problem -- it was the implementation of it. And of course, if the implementation was OpenSourced, then we wouldn't have to crack the key, because we'd have seen it already, embedded into the CSS routines.
The original poster was just spouting buzzwords, trying to get a stupid moderator to give him +1
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Anyway, with a 40-bit key, it would've been cracked eventually.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Actually I think that the Slashdot would be right to take such posts down. In fact, I think that in one of the FAQs, Rob talks about occasionally deleting comments. It's his discussion board, after all, he can do that :)
Is it right? I think so, yes. It's definitely an abusable right, but it's one that needs to be wielded. If Slashdot became a heavily censored site and a large number of posts started getting squashed, then I'd just leave and take my discussions somewhere else. I think most other people would to.
But, no - I don't mind if they remove the occasional, damaging comment.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."