One example is the compression chip used in games like Street Fighter Alpha, which was emulated first in Snes9x, and is now in Zsnes because of that code. The idea of a rivalry between these emulators is amusing.
The Mozilla Organization announced today that Firefox will soon sport an innovative new feature, voice output. "This goes along with the other features Firefox invented such as tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and mouse gestures," Firefox's project leader said today.
When told Opera invented them before Mozilla or Firefox ever came along, the head programmer slapped this reporter and exclaimed, "Why don't you take your closed-source, pay-for-play, trademark-everything attitude and start an industry yourself!" When told that's how the software industry became successful in the first place, he promptly exploded.
After all, Java has no visual designers that are wrappers for the host widgets. Java programmers are so experienced that they don't need them--they write all their GUI code from scratch. Everyone carries their personally-written GUI libraries everywhere they go on special CDs in their backpockets, which they bring out on dates. It's like a giant penis in your pocket, and it drives the ladies wild.
I still won't be able to consider the GPL truly free, as it places restrictions and requirements, which is not free. The only truly free license is BSD. I still respect the GPL though (and laugh heartily when people bitch about "GPL source code theft" yet happily argue for copyright violation in an MPAA article).
As I understood it, and according to those involved with the film, the movie's core message is about the transition from childhood to adulthood, and not losing your nature along the way.
In 2000 during the Napster lawsuit, everybody--including CmdrTaco--was saying they should be suing the individual file traders, not the app itself (Napster). Now they're doing just that, and suddenly they're bad guys again. It's just demonization to distract from the issue of the inethics of illegal P2P.
When people were saying they should sue individual downloaders, it was a facade to suggest they leave piracy alone, because nobody thought they'd be able to enforce the networks and sue anybody. It was indirect protection of piracy because they were purposely suggesting something they thought was impossible. The copyright holders have shown that it is not.
Read any of the upmodded comments from that era and laugh to yourself at the change in positions. From "Go after the downloaders!" to "Going after the downloaders makes them 'scary'!"
Are content producers being hurt by torrents? Marginally.
When people say this, they're missing the point. It doesn't matter how much you think content producers may or may not be hurt. It is their content, and they have rights that are being violated under the law. If you were an artist, wouldn't you want to have permission over how your works are distributed?
Why does Lars Ulrich's position over how his music should be distributed not matter? I'll tell you exactly why--because people have grown so used to the convenience of the technology of illegal P2P that they've justified and created an entire belief system in their minds to make themselves not feel guilty over it. There are no actual noble positions on illegal P2P; they are all facades masking the protection of piracy so that person can continue to get free stuff. It all boils down to people just wanting stuff for free, and it amazes me how many people choose to disregard this basic human instinct.
Do you think it's okay to steal GPL source code? If not, then that contradicts the pro-piracy position.
Those who disregard the wishes of content owners while pretending to be "for the artists" are just towing a partyline that justifies piracy in their minds. It's up to them to decide what to do with their works. It's not like they create something, then there's a sudden magical flash of light where everyone else in the world has ownership and distribution rights to do whatever the hell they want with the content. If someone writes a song, they get to choose what to do with that song. Not pirates who insist they are not thieves.
Except in GPL "source code theft" articles, which Slashdot has posted its fair share of. The CherryOS situation involved "theft," and everyone referred to it that way.
I'm firmly convinced the "piracy isn't theft" mantra is a purposeful distraction used to prevent people from discussing the immorality of it.
Why does all this hoolah over what police should and shouldn't be doing, how it's "scary" that they arrest people, and so forth seem like little more than piracy justification to me?
I find it a sort of double standard that the morality of police actions are always brought up while completely ignoring the morality issues inherent in trading illegal P2P files. It just mysteriously disappears from the equation, because when you demonize the opposition, you don't have to address their argument as much.
"Foreign police arrest massive piracy rings? They're the BAD GUYS! Never mind the 'massive piracy rings' part. Let's start off the article by distracting and framing the issue with talk of how I'm scared of the foreign police, instead of letting people discuss a P2P ring being shut down."
It's a web server that mozilla.org directs you to.
It would be easy to hijack the browser in some way to redirect you on visiting mozilla.org.
If you're downloading Firefox, you need to trust mozilla.org. Likewise, if you're downloading Internet Explorer, you need to trust microsoft.com.
His point is that Internet Explorer is signed, so you can trust it. You're saying people need to trust Mozilla, just because.
There's also a two (three?) second timeout and this dialog only appears when either the site is whitelisted by default (only updates.mozilla.org is) or by the user, or if the user clicks the yellow bar at the top to specifically access this dialog.
That's not good enough.
Boo hoo. Authenticode isn't that big of a deal when ActiveX isn't turned on in the first place, considering that that's where 95% of Authenticode is used.
He's talking about Firefox, where there is no ActiveX and anything goes.
This one is just uneducated. Tools -> Extensions. Wait... that's, um, more obvious than IE. Oh well, someone wasn't wearing their glasses.
RTA. He did that. There is no way to disable an extension. A lot of your response sounds like reactive bashing to the fact that IE does more stuff to protect the user from unsigned executables and extensions.
There is an easy way to do that on IE as well. It's called clicking Run. Seriously, you're going to quibble over IE having one more warning than Firefox? Go develop a decent browser first and call me when you do.
See, now this is what I just talked about. Instead of acknowleding that, yes, IE does warn the user more than Firefox, you make some vague criticism about making "a decent browser first." Firefox can't even display Slashdot correctly, but that's irrelevant to the topic.
This statement is built upon previous assumptions that are false (such as Firefox being downloaded from a "random website", see above).Firefox is demonstrably more secure than IE and has far fewer vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer.
Firefox is also used by far fewer people, which is alarming considering the amount of vulnerabilities it has, including those secretly marked "confidential" that we don't know about--you know, the very thing Microsoft gets criticized for doing.
To the Microsoft employee who created the original article: Rather than trying to convince people that something they know is inferior that it is not, why don't you try to make it... not inferior? Innovation speaks louder than marketing. Surely you can do better than a bunch of geeks spread across the globe, right?
See? Instead of addressing the points, you degenerate into a bunch of random bashing about "geeks" and "innovation." Firefox isn't THAT great of a browser over IE. I know visiting Slashdot for years can shape your perception, but there is a software world outside of this place. You don't ever state what actually makes IE so inferior. A very huge lot of people use it. Firefox has a miniscule userbase in comparison, and sometimes I use IE instead of any other browser because I choose to.
What's really sad is that the guy's article is full of completely valid points. Imagine if Firefox was, overnight, suddenly given the marketshare that IE has. Every one of those security faults he mentions would be exploited, especially unsigned installers coming from numeric IP addresses.
With all the recent exploits Firefox has had, this is another point that hasn't even been considered. In the rabid drive to bash everything Microsoft, people are ignoring these very valid constructive criticisms. Why disregard good advice simply because it comes from someone you've fashioned as your arch-nemesis?
By the way, after SP2, my medium-sized corporate network has not had a single problem with IE and spyware/malware infections. That makes me happy. I think it should tell you something that I wouldn't install Firefox on all these computers, because of exploits that have been announced here on Slashdot recently. And to be quite honest, Firefox simply isn't as user-tested as IE is, being the dominant browser.
The 1% is almost purely commercial and/or closed source apps.
Those would be companies like Adobe. Presumably, they would provide their own libraries or compile them in directly.
Windows XP does it by letting apps provide DLLs if they want to, and if a DLL conflicts with one already installed on the system, versioning is used so the apps only use the DLL that belongs to them. Surely there is something we could develop for Linux. I've love to use a version of Dreamweaver MX under a Gnome "shell" on top of the unified desktop.
I am firmly convinced that Linux on the desktop will not break out of its niche until a binary installation/uninstallation API is developed that allows normal software developers like Adobe and Macromedia to write installers for their software. All you'd have to do is pop in a CD, autoplay would start, the thing would install, stick items into the "start menu" of the desktop environment, and provide an uninstall icon.
The API should remain sane so that you could install something from four years ago and still have it work. I can still run Windows 3.1 and 95 applications on my XP laptop. Try running a Linux binary from two years ago.
To really go all the way, there needs to be a unified framework, probably based on something like Mono, facilitating a desktop foundation and hopefully replacing X.org (Y-Windows looks promising if it would ever take off). That way, GNOME and KDE could just be seperate shells on top of the same desktop, and they would happily run each other's apps.
I know what you're thinking--GNOME can already run my KDE apps and vice versa! No, what's happening is all those massive KDE libraries get loaded into memory when you run that KDE app. You have to install two entire huge desktop environments just to run all the apps you need. It's ridiculous. If there was a standardized library and GUI framework, this could have been avoided. But the obsession with "choice" when these projects were began has splintered the effort.
First things first--give me a binary installation/uninstallation API. A real API like the non-amateur desktops have, not some package manager built out of shell scripts. I'd also request a kernel driver API that unties them from the kernel--recompiling an entire kernel to support a new scanner I just bought is ridiculous. I should just be able to go online and download a special binary driver, or, better yet--using the binary installation/uninstallation API, just pop in a CD in my desktop environment and have it do it for me.
Guess what, fool: Most people don't have that technology. They don't give a crap about watching their movies in "digital resolution." They watch VHS tapes on their tube TVs, and that's good enough for them.
Get some perspective. - Critics when DVDs came out.
Guess what, fool: Most people don't have that technology. They don't give a crap about listening to their music in "digital resolution." They listen to cassette tapes in their tape decks, and that's good enough for them.
Get some perspective. - Critics when CDs came out
I guess the growing prevalence of high-resolution monitors and HD TVs means nothing to you. Let's just stick with blurry compressed 512 forever.
Several top Nintendo people since changed their stance after the massive presales of the Nintendo DS were realized. The DS is now Nintendo's Gameboy successor. It's just not called the Gameboy, and I'm sure the next one will be.
Every once in a while, it seems someone posts saying how great DVDs are and how they're "everything we need." Maybe you enjoy your movies stuck at 8GB in size and in blurry resized 512 resolution, but I have a 1280 resolution monitor and would enjoy watching theater resolution movies compressed in the latest technologies (MPEG-4).
If you've seen the T2 Extreme DVD with the HD version of the film, you know what you're missing. Short answer--TONS OF VISUAL DETAIL.
Piracy is no more difficult on consoles than anything else. You just need the mod-chip and a DVD burner. There's quite a few sites out there that let you buy pre-modded consoles for relatively cheap.
If you believe acquiring a mod chip and taking apart your console to install it is somehow just as easy as clicking a link in eMule, there's really nothing else I can say.
As for HL2, if you have the game on your HD, you can play it. The crack to circumvent steam checks has been available for quite some time. You should know that. Unless the game itself streams from a company's server, there's no way you can block access to it.
You lose downloading patches and playing online, and Counter-Strike is a big part of the Half-Life 2 experience for a lot of people (if not most).
Actually, what's really happening is the numbers in this article are rather skewed--no mention of the massive sales of DVDs and even VHS, or the fact that movie tickets cost $8 while games are $50, nor syndication for television which means endless repeat viewing.
One could easily argue that piracy is hurting Hollywood, based on these numbers. Also, why do you think so many game companies are focusing on consoles now? Piracy is more difficult on the consoles.
Of those blockbuster titles mentioned, several were for consoles, and Half-Life 2 is Steam-based to circumvent piracy. Actually, it was the first game I can remember in a long time that legitimate customers got to play before the pirates did.
You seem to be arguing for piracy. Surely, that's not your implication, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
How could you forget Myst, probably the biggest seller for both PCs and Macs?
One example is the compression chip used in games like Street Fighter Alpha, which was emulated first in Snes9x, and is now in Zsnes because of that code. The idea of a rivalry between these emulators is amusing.
The Mozilla Organization announced today that Firefox will soon sport an innovative new feature, voice output. "This goes along with the other features Firefox invented such as tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and mouse gestures," Firefox's project leader said today.
When told Opera invented them before Mozilla or Firefox ever came along, the head programmer slapped this reporter and exclaimed, "Why don't you take your closed-source, pay-for-play, trademark-everything attitude and start an industry yourself!" When told that's how the software industry became successful in the first place, he promptly exploded.
After all, Java has no visual designers that are wrappers for the host widgets. Java programmers are so experienced that they don't need them--they write all their GUI code from scratch. Everyone carries their personally-written GUI libraries everywhere they go on special CDs in their backpockets, which they bring out on dates. It's like a giant penis in your pocket, and it drives the ladies wild.
Thank you for your information.
What's your point? You have the freedom to not use it.
My point is just that placing restrictions is less free than not placing restrictions.
What does it mean to have respect for a document?
It means I respect the GPL for the software movement it has spawned.
Why all the questions?
I still won't be able to consider the GPL truly free, as it places restrictions and requirements, which is not free. The only truly free license is BSD. I still respect the GPL though (and laugh heartily when people bitch about "GPL source code theft" yet happily argue for copyright violation in an MPAA article).
Article from Nov. 24th in Japan Times.
As I understood it, and according to those involved with the film, the movie's core message is about the transition from childhood to adulthood, and not losing your nature along the way.
Just one question, is it as good as "Spirited Away?"
In 2000 during the Napster lawsuit, everybody--including CmdrTaco--was saying they should be suing the individual file traders, not the app itself (Napster). Now they're doing just that, and suddenly they're bad guys again. It's just demonization to distract from the issue of the inethics of illegal P2P.
When people were saying they should sue individual downloaders, it was a facade to suggest they leave piracy alone, because nobody thought they'd be able to enforce the networks and sue anybody. It was indirect protection of piracy because they were purposely suggesting something they thought was impossible. The copyright holders have shown that it is not.
Read any of the upmodded comments from that era and laugh to yourself at the change in positions. From "Go after the downloaders!" to "Going after the downloaders makes them 'scary'!"
Are content producers being hurt by torrents? Marginally.
When people say this, they're missing the point. It doesn't matter how much you think content producers may or may not be hurt. It is their content, and they have rights that are being violated under the law. If you were an artist, wouldn't you want to have permission over how your works are distributed?
Why does Lars Ulrich's position over how his music should be distributed not matter? I'll tell you exactly why--because people have grown so used to the convenience of the technology of illegal P2P that they've justified and created an entire belief system in their minds to make themselves not feel guilty over it. There are no actual noble positions on illegal P2P; they are all facades masking the protection of piracy so that person can continue to get free stuff. It all boils down to people just wanting stuff for free, and it amazes me how many people choose to disregard this basic human instinct.
Do you think it's okay to steal GPL source code? If not, then that contradicts the pro-piracy position.
Those who disregard the wishes of content owners while pretending to be "for the artists" are just towing a partyline that justifies piracy in their minds. It's up to them to decide what to do with their works. It's not like they create something, then there's a sudden magical flash of light where everyone else in the world has ownership and distribution rights to do whatever the hell they want with the content. If someone writes a song, they get to choose what to do with that song. Not pirates who insist they are not thieves.
Except in GPL "source code theft" articles, which Slashdot has posted its fair share of. The CherryOS situation involved "theft," and everyone referred to it that way.
I'm firmly convinced the "piracy isn't theft" mantra is a purposeful distraction used to prevent people from discussing the immorality of it.
Why does all this hoolah over what police should and shouldn't be doing, how it's "scary" that they arrest people, and so forth seem like little more than piracy justification to me?
I find it a sort of double standard that the morality of police actions are always brought up while completely ignoring the morality issues inherent in trading illegal P2P files. It just mysteriously disappears from the equation, because when you demonize the opposition, you don't have to address their argument as much.
"Foreign police arrest massive piracy rings? They're the BAD GUYS! Never mind the 'massive piracy rings' part. Let's start off the article by distracting and framing the issue with talk of how I'm scared of the foreign police, instead of letting people discuss a P2P ring being shut down."
It's a web server that mozilla.org directs you to.
It would be easy to hijack the browser in some way to redirect you on visiting mozilla.org.
If you're downloading Firefox, you need to trust mozilla.org. Likewise, if you're downloading Internet Explorer, you need to trust microsoft.com.
His point is that Internet Explorer is signed, so you can trust it. You're saying people need to trust Mozilla, just because.
There's also a two (three?) second timeout and this dialog only appears when either the site is whitelisted by default (only updates.mozilla.org is) or by the user, or if the user clicks the yellow bar at the top to specifically access this dialog.
That's not good enough.
Boo hoo. Authenticode isn't that big of a deal when ActiveX isn't turned on in the first place, considering that that's where 95% of Authenticode is used.
He's talking about Firefox, where there is no ActiveX and anything goes.
This one is just uneducated. Tools -> Extensions. Wait... that's, um, more obvious than IE. Oh well, someone wasn't wearing their glasses.
RTA. He did that. There is no way to disable an extension. A lot of your response sounds like reactive bashing to the fact that IE does more stuff to protect the user from unsigned executables and extensions.
There is an easy way to do that on IE as well. It's called clicking Run. Seriously, you're going to quibble over IE having one more warning than Firefox? Go develop a decent browser first and call me when you do.
See, now this is what I just talked about. Instead of acknowleding that, yes, IE does warn the user more than Firefox, you make some vague criticism about making "a decent browser first." Firefox can't even display Slashdot correctly, but that's irrelevant to the topic.
This statement is built upon previous assumptions that are false (such as Firefox being downloaded from a "random website", see above).Firefox is demonstrably more secure than IE and has far fewer vulnerabilities than Internet Explorer.
Firefox is also used by far fewer people, which is alarming considering the amount of vulnerabilities it has, including those secretly marked "confidential" that we don't know about--you know, the very thing Microsoft gets criticized for doing.
To the Microsoft employee who created the original article: Rather than trying to convince people that something they know is inferior that it is not, why don't you try to make it... not inferior? Innovation speaks louder than marketing. Surely you can do better than a bunch of geeks spread across the globe, right?
See? Instead of addressing the points, you degenerate into a bunch of random bashing about "geeks" and "innovation." Firefox isn't THAT great of a browser over IE. I know visiting Slashdot for years can shape your perception, but there is a software world outside of this place. You don't ever state what actually makes IE so inferior. A very huge lot of people use it. Firefox has a miniscule userbase in comparison, and sometimes I use IE instead of any other browser because I choose to.
I use Opera most of the time, by the way.
What's really sad is that the guy's article is full of completely valid points. Imagine if Firefox was, overnight, suddenly given the marketshare that IE has. Every one of those security faults he mentions would be exploited, especially unsigned installers coming from numeric IP addresses.
With all the recent exploits Firefox has had, this is another point that hasn't even been considered. In the rabid drive to bash everything Microsoft, people are ignoring these very valid constructive criticisms. Why disregard good advice simply because it comes from someone you've fashioned as your arch-nemesis?
By the way, after SP2, my medium-sized corporate network has not had a single problem with IE and spyware/malware infections. That makes me happy. I think it should tell you something that I wouldn't install Firefox on all these computers, because of exploits that have been announced here on Slashdot recently. And to be quite honest, Firefox simply isn't as user-tested as IE is, being the dominant browser.
You simply can't touch Visual Studio's debugger.
The 1% is almost purely commercial and/or closed source apps.
Those would be companies like Adobe. Presumably, they would provide their own libraries or compile them in directly.
Windows XP does it by letting apps provide DLLs if they want to, and if a DLL conflicts with one already installed on the system, versioning is used so the apps only use the DLL that belongs to them. Surely there is something we could develop for Linux. I've love to use a version of Dreamweaver MX under a Gnome "shell" on top of the unified desktop.
I am firmly convinced that Linux on the desktop will not break out of its niche until a binary installation/uninstallation API is developed that allows normal software developers like Adobe and Macromedia to write installers for their software. All you'd have to do is pop in a CD, autoplay would start, the thing would install, stick items into the "start menu" of the desktop environment, and provide an uninstall icon.
The API should remain sane so that you could install something from four years ago and still have it work. I can still run Windows 3.1 and 95 applications on my XP laptop. Try running a Linux binary from two years ago.
To really go all the way, there needs to be a unified framework, probably based on something like Mono, facilitating a desktop foundation and hopefully replacing X.org (Y-Windows looks promising if it would ever take off). That way, GNOME and KDE could just be seperate shells on top of the same desktop, and they would happily run each other's apps.
I know what you're thinking--GNOME can already run my KDE apps and vice versa! No, what's happening is all those massive KDE libraries get loaded into memory when you run that KDE app. You have to install two entire huge desktop environments just to run all the apps you need. It's ridiculous. If there was a standardized library and GUI framework, this could have been avoided. But the obsession with "choice" when these projects were began has splintered the effort.
First things first--give me a binary installation/uninstallation API. A real API like the non-amateur desktops have, not some package manager built out of shell scripts. I'd also request a kernel driver API that unties them from the kernel--recompiling an entire kernel to support a new scanner I just bought is ridiculous. I should just be able to go online and download a special binary driver, or, better yet--using the binary installation/uninstallation API, just pop in a CD in my desktop environment and have it do it for me.
One can dream...
Guess what, fool: Most people don't have that technology. They don't give a crap about watching their movies in "digital resolution." They watch VHS tapes on their tube TVs, and that's good enough for them.
Get some perspective.
- Critics when DVDs came out.
Guess what, fool: Most people don't have that technology. They don't give a crap about listening to their music in "digital resolution." They listen to cassette tapes in their tape decks, and that's good enough for them.
Get some perspective.
- Critics when CDs came out
I guess the growing prevalence of high-resolution monitors and HD TVs means nothing to you. Let's just stick with blurry compressed 512 forever.
Several top Nintendo people since changed their stance after the massive presales of the Nintendo DS were realized. The DS is now Nintendo's Gameboy successor. It's just not called the Gameboy, and I'm sure the next one will be.
Don't you realize that moderation weeds out the first posts, and people always post mirrors of the article in the discussion comments?
Every once in a while, it seems someone posts saying how great DVDs are and how they're "everything we need." Maybe you enjoy your movies stuck at 8GB in size and in blurry resized 512 resolution, but I have a 1280 resolution monitor and would enjoy watching theater resolution movies compressed in the latest technologies (MPEG-4).
If you've seen the T2 Extreme DVD with the HD version of the film, you know what you're missing. Short answer--TONS OF VISUAL DETAIL.
Piracy is no more difficult on consoles than anything else. You just need the mod-chip and a DVD burner. There's quite a few sites out there that let you buy pre-modded consoles for relatively cheap.
If you believe acquiring a mod chip and taking apart your console to install it is somehow just as easy as clicking a link in eMule, there's really nothing else I can say.
As for HL2, if you have the game on your HD, you can play it. The crack to circumvent steam checks has been available for quite some time. You should know that. Unless the game itself streams from a company's server, there's no way you can block access to it.
You lose downloading patches and playing online, and Counter-Strike is a big part of the Half-Life 2 experience for a lot of people (if not most).
Actually, what's really happening is the numbers in this article are rather skewed--no mention of the massive sales of DVDs and even VHS, or the fact that movie tickets cost $8 while games are $50, nor syndication for television which means endless repeat viewing.
Well. Can't argue with that kind of research...
One could easily argue that piracy is hurting Hollywood, based on these numbers. Also, why do you think so many game companies are focusing on consoles now? Piracy is more difficult on the consoles.
Of those blockbuster titles mentioned, several were for consoles, and Half-Life 2 is Steam-based to circumvent piracy. Actually, it was the first game I can remember in a long time that legitimate customers got to play before the pirates did.
You seem to be arguing for piracy. Surely, that's not your implication, is it?