if OpenOffice and MSOffice both were songs, OpenOffice would probably have to pay some kind of fee to MSOffice for using their intellectual property and we'd all consider that normal...
Actually, no, songs don't work that way.
The closest equivalent would be in film where the directory makes a temp track out of music they don't have the rights to. They then hire a composer to score the movie and give them the temp track for reference. The composer's job is to emulate the "function" of this music, and often the result is extremely close (for obvious examples compare Enya with the Titanic soundtrack, or Holst's Planets with the Star Wars soundtrack). So far this has not resulted in copyright violations.
Imaging end-user software that is able to call a compiler- the software could compile some arrangement/setup/instructions from the user into an extremely fast executing part and load it using dload and execute it. Everything would be invisible to the user but the result could be very fast execution of stuff (with an annoying start-up delay, admittedly). For instance imagine Photoshop where your custom brushes or filters are actually compiled code somehow.
This could be the killer app, actually!
In addition it makes it possible to do user-friendly installs of source code by having the installation program run the compiler, thus resulting in programs that are optimized for your machine, and installations that are cross-platform.
Qt, GTK, tcl/tk, Fox, FLTK, all run on Windows, and are being used to develop Windows applications. For some reason "joe" has not stopped using Windows because of this.
The cable is under tension, the counterweight (or just the end of the cable if no counterweight) is being swung around the earth at above orbital velocity. So even if you pull the counterweight in a bit, it will "fall" back out to put the cable under tension again. I don't pretend to understand the physics of how the energy is actually transferred, but it does come by slowing the entire earth+cable+counterweight rotation down slightly.
Of course you could try to raise so much weight that you pull the center of gravity of the cable+counterweight+payload below geosynchronous orbit, in which case the exact opposite happens and it all falls to earth (and earth's rotational speed increases slightly). Hopefully they are smart enough not to do this.
Um, I think that was a *JOKE*. It seems to me equally likely that the poster is right-wing as left-wing. The joke can easily be read as an insult of doomsaying by environmentalists.
If people are much more likely to download the version with ads (probably from the person/site that was paid to put the ad in) then the advertiser should not care.
If you strip the ads and post your version you would have to somehow make people aware of it and make the pain of finding your version less than the (quite tiny) pain of looking at ads.
I think this can work.
It will fail if the ads become more than a trivial nusciance, though. Such ads have completely killed shareware where there was *no* ad-free alternative.
There are plenty of Windows defenders here on Slashdot. I read the article and I'm sure if they said "all exploits are on Windows" than those articles would have been posted IMMEDIATELY!
Part of 1984 was changing history to suit current facts, and you are doing that.
We did not bomb Afghanistan on 9/12. We bombed them over 2 weeks later.
Also it is pretty certain Al-Qaeda did it, you even sort of say so. The most extreme conspiracy theories I have heard all claim that Bush (or whoever you want to be the real evil party) duped the Al-Qaeda terrorists into doing it.
Re:SCO is still benefiting from open source
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 1
You can easily do this (or any other rules you want) to code you write. However this is in violation of the GPL, so you could not apply such rules to any GPL parts of Linux without getting the permission of every single author of all the parts you use in your Linux distribution. This is of course impossible.
Re:"error in the Linux developer process"?
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 1
The error was the deletion of the BSD copyright.
Apparently the code was removed from Linux for other reasons so there is no need to reinsert the copyright.
Since the copyright was also deleted from SCO's version, they certainly cannot claim any victory there!
No, you are playing into the Microsoft anti-GPL FUD.
The worst that could happen is that SystemV would need to have the infringing code removed.
Now it is just barely possible that they would decide it would be easier to make the infringing code legal by just GPL'ing the entire program. But, unlike what Microsoft claims, they are under no obligation to.
Re:How can one steal lines of code?
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 1
This is slightly different than the usual argument about copying music not being "stealing".
If I copied a Metallica CD and then somehow was able to use that copy to claim that I wrote and performed and copyrighted that music and that anybody wanting copies must deal with me, then I have in fact "stolen" something.
How will encryption help? The client has to know the key in order to decrypt the data. And a bogus client can receive and use the key just as easily as a valid client.
The key is sent when the data is to be displayed to the user. Before the user can see it it is just blocks of garbage and no cheat program can use that for anything.
Yes, I am relying on security through obscurity. That is why you must allow new clients to be downloaded, so that you can update them faster than they are cracked.
In any case all your suggested uses involve 2-way communication between a client and a server and I think there are other solutions that do not infringe on your ability to do arbitrary things to the client and to the data on the client. The server can be assummed to be secure, that is a huge difference from the DRM situation.
How about an online auction site that only wants to let people use approved clients, to prevent "sniping" and other unfriendly bidding prqactices?
Download a client that uses encryption, and download a new one every now and then.
How about an online game site that doesn't want people to use cheating clients which allow them to see through walls, use auto-targetting and other features which are ruining so many online games?
Download a client that uses encryption, and download a new one every now and then. If you send model data, send it encrypted and send a decoding key at the very last moment.
How about a P2P system which wants to make sure people are running legitimate clients that report accurate hashes of the songs available, to prevent the RIAA from salting networks with bogus songs?
Doesn't this require some special "won't run if owned by a member of the RIAA" chip? I was not aware that was a feature of TCPA.
Run "$FILECHOOSER --prompt "File to open" olddir/oldfilename" and wait for it to exit. If it exits with 0, then stdout had the chosen filename printed on it. If it exits with non-zero then the user hit cancel.
If $FILECHOOSER does not exist then just pop up an input field and force the user to type a filename, as a failsafe fallback.
This would allow a huge amount of innovation in filechoosers, since they can be replaced. One big problem with current Linux solutions is that they do not allow efficient caching of information between multiple invocations.
PS: I would also like to see stand-along programs to pop up an alert message, pop up and ask a yes/no question, and pop up and let the user type in one or more text fields and hit ok or cancel.
This would go a LONG way toward making applications faster, smaller, and more consistent.
Re:One thing I'd love to see in KDE that was added
on
Gnome 2.4 Release(d)
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· Score: 1
I must say that I agree that it would make far more sense for ~ to be your desktop rather than ~/Desktop.
The only reason systems don't do this is that historically Unix has cluttered up ~ with all kinds of junk. But in recent years it has become standard to start that junk with a period (this was certainly K&R's original intention but it got broken when programs started needing more than one configuration file, but has been fixed as those programs started putting those files into a directory named with a dot instead).
I would very much like to see it use the home directory as the desktop if ~/Desktop does not exist, and them to modify the few remaining non-dot configuration things to have dots (just search for both names and complain if both exist, for back compatability).
This is actually an excellent idea. All programs already know how to read and write the data they handle from files, but often cannot handle stuff already in memory (how many times have you been frustrated by a library that needs an fd and cannot be convinced to read data you already have in memory?)
At one time the Windows clipboard design (and the unused X clipboard types, which are not really used) made sense, when you needed to share blocks of memory in order to convey anything more complex than text quickly. This is just not true now, in fact it is completely counter-productive, you cannot share the memory anyway due to security concerns.
We need a "clipboard" protocol that can convey only 2 things: UTF-8 strings and UTF-8 encoded URL's. Everything else is done with files identified by the URL's. If the user drags an image from application A to B, then A will write a file to/tmp and paste the URL for that file into B, which will then open and read the contents of the file and interpret it.
I suspect actually that the Linux systems are heading for this design, but it would help if people started thinking this way now. Windows could also use this, but does seem stuck in the idea that a URL must be "opened" rather than representing something to paste into a document.
Read up on Cairo and the various graphics libraries being developed and you will see that the future of Linux desktops is also scalable and vector based.
Oddly enough Linux may have an advantage here, in that the Xlib interface sucks so badly that everybody uses a wrapper around it, and those wrappers were somewhat written as vector and resolution-independent interfaces, and do not promise pixel-accurate replication of results. I was easily able to alter fltk's drawing library to be fully scalable without breaking any existing programs. And the same is probably true of all other toolkit drawing code.
Truth is that Microsoft had a 6-year advantage over Linux in anti-aliased fonts, and a 3-year advantage over Mac. In all this time they have failed to make antialiased shapes in a normal drawing interface. They have now lost to the Mac by at least a year, and it appears likely they will tie Linux for introducing this. Losing a 6-year advantage is not good.
It is ok to have both 'A' and 'B' produce the result 'C', even if there is no way to do 'A' and 'B' simultaneously. You can do 'A' and produce 'C' and then you can do 'B' and produce 'C', and there are no conflicts. Your examples are all in this catagory. Unix has been notoriously bad at this, for instance all the backspace/delete confusion would be avoided if *both* worked, but the stty interface was designed so you could not even specify this, and this sort of thinking still exists today.
It is not possible to have 'C' produce both the results 'A' and 'B' where 'A' and 'B' cannot be done simultaneously. Previous solutions were to have a "preference" so the user can pick whether 'A' or 'B' happens. I agree with the Gnome developers, and the Windows ones, (and disagree with perhaps the majority here) that this is a BAD idea. It only confuses the user, and it compliates the user interface code and produces bugs, especially where there are many preferences and the writer has not considered all possible combinations. New solutions are to say "it does 'A'". The advantage here is that you completely avoid the need to program the preference and you avoid the need to program option 'B'. This may sound like a bad thing but often it is very good. Often the result is that you soon figure out how to make 'A' have whatever advantage 'B' had, in a clean way.
I have also read those papers. Very carefully. Everything that is in there could be achieved with a chip that lets you read the keys. In fact it would be totally secure even if the remote attacker knew all the keys (thats how PK works).
The fact that you cannot read the key, and thus cannot simulate the TCPA machine on a different piece of hardware or with a software emulator, is only for DRM. I challenge you to come up with a single reason for this that is not equivalent to DRM.
IBM may be the "nice guys" in that they use Linux, and they are trying to make this even "nicer" by using Linux to run this TCPA code. But I fear this is an elaborate scam to try to fool the opponents of this into endorsing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey even the most simple examination of Slashdot posts would reveal that sendmail is held in at least as much contempt as Microsoft products.
SSH is a different story, however.
Actually, no, songs don't work that way.
The closest equivalent would be in film where the directory makes a temp track out of music they don't have the rights to. They then hire a composer to score the movie and give them the temp track for reference. The composer's job is to emulate the "function" of this music, and often the result is extremely close (for obvious examples compare Enya with the Titanic soundtrack, or Holst's Planets with the Star Wars soundtrack). So far this has not resulted in copyright violations.
Qt, FLTK, and probably the others I mentioned use the "straight Win32 API". What did you think they use? Magic?
Imaging end-user software that is able to call a compiler- the software could compile some arrangement/setup/instructions from the user into an extremely fast executing part and load it using dload and execute it. Everything would be invisible to the user but the result could be very fast execution of stuff (with an annoying start-up delay, admittedly). For instance imagine Photoshop where your custom brushes or filters are actually compiled code somehow.
This could be the killer app, actually!
In addition it makes it possible to do user-friendly installs of source code by having the installation program run the compiler, thus resulting in programs that are optimized for your machine, and installations that are cross-platform.
Qt, GTK, tcl/tk, Fox, FLTK, all run on Windows, and are being used to develop Windows applications. For some reason "joe" has not stopped using Windows because of this.
The cable is under tension, the counterweight (or just the end of the cable if no counterweight) is being swung around the earth at above orbital velocity. So even if you pull the counterweight in a bit, it will "fall" back out to put the cable under tension again. I don't pretend to understand the physics of how the energy is actually transferred, but it does come by slowing the entire earth+cable+counterweight rotation down slightly.
Of course you could try to raise so much weight that you pull the center of gravity of the cable+counterweight+payload below geosynchronous orbit, in which case the exact opposite happens and it all falls to earth (and earth's rotational speed increases slightly). Hopefully they are smart enough not to do this.
Yes, the earth will slow down it's rotational speed if the elevator is constructed (and made out of material here on earth, not from space).
And everything sent up the cable will slightly slow down the earth some more.
Now where does that energy that the earth lost from it's rotation go?
It goes into lifting the new object into orbit.
That's why the cable won't fall.
Fortunatly the earth has a *LOT* of rotational energy, so the losses will be immesuarably small.
Um, I think that was a *JOKE*. It seems to me equally likely that the poster is right-wing as left-wing. The joke can easily be read as an insult of doomsaying by environmentalists.
Ah but when these ads start playing sounds, the lack of soundcard support on your machine will be a *feature*!!!
If people are much more likely to download the version with ads (probably from the person/site that was paid to put the ad in) then the advertiser should not care.
If you strip the ads and post your version you would have to somehow make people aware of it and make the pain of finding your version less than the (quite tiny) pain of looking at ads.
I think this can work.
It will fail if the ads become more than a trivial nusciance, though. Such ads have completely killed shareware where there was *no* ad-free alternative.
But *YOU* would have posted that in that case!
There are plenty of Windows defenders here on Slashdot. I read the article and I'm sure if they said "all exploits are on Windows" than those articles would have been posted IMMEDIATELY!
Part of 1984 was changing history to suit current facts, and you are doing that.
We did not bomb Afghanistan on 9/12. We bombed them over 2 weeks later.
Also it is pretty certain Al-Qaeda did it, you even sort of say so. The most extreme conspiracy theories I have heard all claim that Bush (or whoever you want to be the real evil party) duped the Al-Qaeda terrorists into doing it.
You can easily do this (or any other rules you want) to code you write. However this is in violation of the GPL, so you could not apply such rules to any GPL parts of Linux without getting the permission of every single author of all the parts you use in your Linux distribution. This is of course impossible.
The error was the deletion of the BSD copyright.
Apparently the code was removed from Linux for other reasons so there is no need to reinsert the copyright.
Since the copyright was also deleted from SCO's version, they certainly cannot claim any victory there!
No, you are playing into the Microsoft anti-GPL FUD.
The worst that could happen is that SystemV would need to have the infringing code removed.
Now it is just barely possible that they would decide it would be easier to make the infringing code legal by just GPL'ing the entire program. But, unlike what Microsoft claims, they are under no obligation to.
This is slightly different than the usual argument about copying music not being "stealing".
If I copied a Metallica CD and then somehow was able to use that copy to claim that I wrote and performed and copyrighted that music and that anybody wanting copies must deal with me, then I have in fact "stolen" something.
The key is sent when the data is to be displayed to the user. Before the user can see it it is just blocks of garbage and no cheat program can use that for anything.
Yes, I am relying on security through obscurity. That is why you must allow new clients to be downloaded, so that you can update them faster than they are cracked.
In any case all your suggested uses involve 2-way communication between a client and a server and I think there are other solutions that do not infringe on your ability to do arbitrary things to the client and to the data on the client. The server can be assummed to be secure, that is a huge difference from the DRM situation.
Download a client that uses encryption, and download a new one every now and then.
How about an online game site that doesn't want people to use cheating clients which allow them to see through walls, use auto-targetting and other features which are ruining so many online games?
Download a client that uses encryption, and download a new one every now and then. If you send model data, send it encrypted and send a decoding key at the very last moment.
How about a P2P system which wants to make sure people are running legitimate clients that report accurate hashes of the songs available, to prevent the RIAA from salting networks with bogus songs?
Doesn't this require some special "won't run if owned by a member of the RIAA" chip? I was not aware that was a feature of TCPA.
Hey, why not make this be a seperate application?
Run "$FILECHOOSER --prompt "File to open" olddir/oldfilename" and wait for it to exit. If it exits with 0, then stdout had the chosen filename printed on it. If it exits with non-zero then the user hit cancel.
If $FILECHOOSER does not exist then just pop up an input field and force the user to type a filename, as a failsafe fallback.
This would allow a huge amount of innovation in filechoosers, since they can be replaced. One big problem with current Linux solutions is that they do not allow efficient caching of information between multiple invocations.
PS: I would also like to see stand-along programs to pop up an alert message, pop up and ask a yes/no question, and pop up and let the user type in one or more text fields and hit ok or cancel.
This would go a LONG way toward making applications faster, smaller, and more consistent.
I must say that I agree that it would make far more sense for ~ to be your desktop rather than ~/Desktop.
The only reason systems don't do this is that historically Unix has cluttered up ~ with all kinds of junk. But in recent years it has become standard to start that junk with a period (this was certainly K&R's original intention but it got broken when programs started needing more than one configuration file, but has been fixed as those programs started putting those files into a directory named with a dot instead).
I would very much like to see it use the home directory as the desktop if ~/Desktop does not exist, and them to modify the few remaining non-dot configuration things to have dots (just search for both names and complain if both exist, for back compatability).
This is actually an excellent idea. All programs already know how to read and write the data they handle from files, but often cannot handle stuff already in memory (how many times have you been frustrated by a library that needs an fd and cannot be convinced to read data you already have in memory?)
/tmp and paste the URL for that file into B, which will then open and read the contents of the file and interpret it.
At one time the Windows clipboard design (and the unused X clipboard types, which are not really used) made sense, when you needed to share blocks of memory in order to convey anything more complex than text quickly. This is just not true now, in fact it is completely counter-productive, you cannot share the memory anyway due to security concerns.
We need a "clipboard" protocol that can convey only 2 things: UTF-8 strings and UTF-8 encoded URL's. Everything else is done with files identified by the URL's. If the user drags an image from application A to B, then A will write a file to
I suspect actually that the Linux systems are heading for this design, but it would help if people started thinking this way now. Windows could also use this, but does seem stuck in the idea that a URL must be "opened" rather than representing something to paste into a document.
Read up on Cairo and the various graphics libraries being developed and you will see that the future of Linux desktops is also scalable and vector based.
Oddly enough Linux may have an advantage here, in that the Xlib interface sucks so badly that everybody uses a wrapper around it, and those wrappers were somewhat written as vector and resolution-independent interfaces, and do not promise pixel-accurate replication of results. I was easily able to alter fltk's drawing library to be fully scalable without breaking any existing programs. And the same is probably true of all other toolkit drawing code.
Truth is that Microsoft had a 6-year advantage over Linux in anti-aliased fonts, and a 3-year advantage over Mac. In all this time they have failed to make antialiased shapes in a normal drawing interface. They have now lost to the Mac by at least a year, and it appears likely they will tie Linux for introducing this. Losing a 6-year advantage is not good.
You seem to be confusing two different things.
It is ok to have both 'A' and 'B' produce the result 'C', even if there is no way to do 'A' and 'B' simultaneously. You can do 'A' and produce 'C' and then you can do 'B' and produce 'C', and there are no conflicts. Your examples are all in this catagory. Unix has been notoriously bad at this, for instance all the backspace/delete confusion would be avoided if *both* worked, but the stty interface was designed so you could not even specify this, and this sort of thinking still exists today.
It is not possible to have 'C' produce both the results 'A' and 'B' where 'A' and 'B' cannot be done simultaneously. Previous solutions were to have a "preference" so the user can pick whether 'A' or 'B' happens. I agree with the Gnome developers, and the Windows ones, (and disagree with perhaps the majority here) that this is a BAD idea. It only confuses the user, and it compliates the user interface code and produces bugs, especially where there are many preferences and the writer has not considered all possible combinations. New solutions are to say "it does 'A'". The advantage here is that you completely avoid the need to program the preference and you avoid the need to program option 'B'. This may sound like a bad thing but often it is very good. Often the result is that you soon figure out how to make 'A' have whatever advantage 'B' had, in a clean way.
When is somebody going to change libc so that open() (or at least fopen()) talks to the VFS? This is what is really needed.
I have also read those papers. Very carefully. Everything that is in there could be achieved with a chip that lets you read the keys. In fact it would be totally secure even if the remote attacker knew all the keys (thats how PK works).
The fact that you cannot read the key, and thus cannot simulate the TCPA machine on a different piece of hardware or with a software emulator, is only for DRM. I challenge you to come up with a single reason for this that is not equivalent to DRM.
IBM may be the "nice guys" in that they use Linux, and they are trying to make this even "nicer" by using Linux to run this TCPA code. But I fear this is an elaborate scam to try to fool the opponents of this into endorsing it.