Nothing wrong with fake files. That is a legitamate and legal way for the RIAA to fight P2P. Trying to argue that something is wrong with this leads people to think that perhaps you are more interested in getting free stuff than in freedom.
class FunnyName { public:
FunnyName() {}// does nothing
~FunnyName() {do_the_cleanup_I want();} };// Many lines later when we finally want it:
function() {
FunnyName funnyname;// make the cleanup happen.
do_stuff();// cleanup is done here because we fooled C++ into doing it. Too bad// nobody can figure this out by reading the source! }
I think explicitly stating what is wanted with finally is far better.
I think even better would be to somehow specify the "finally" back where the decision it was needed was written. Usually this was due to some action at the start of the function. Some syntax like this, maybe:
The result of the above, if no exceptions are thrown, is that do_A, do_B, do_other_stuff..., cleanup_B, and cleanup_A are done in that order. cleanup_B and cleanup_A are done if exceptions are thrown (unless do_A throws an exception in which case only cleanup_A is done).
The reason for this syntax is so that when I decide do_A is no longer necessary I can delete it by deleting (or commenting out) 2 adjacent lines of code.
It is perfectly legal to make a GPL game engine that plays copyrighted data.
You can put it on the same disk. There is no requirement that everything on a disk that contains some GPL program has to be GPL. If such a requirement exitsted then the Linux distributions could not exist.
Yes! Definately Kernighan and Ritchie! People may say that Unix and C are no big deal, but the ability to simplify things down to a useful and easy to understand core is extremely important and the real reason why they succeeded. And unfortunately this ability seems to be missing today. We should all be running Plan9 with 17 system calls, not Linux with hundreds of system calls.
Certainly he had some effect on the modern world but it is not clear if he did anything special. I think it is extremely likely there would be some monopoly right now and it is just coincidence that he is running it. Even if you think MicroSoft is special it is not really clear if the decisions that made them successful were from Bill or from others in the organization.
In a similar vein it is not clear if Linus is special either. There were dozens of Unix clones coming out at the same time and he was lucky it was his that won.
Possibly Bill Gates did do some innovation with the Basic interpreter before 1980. It seems that he pushed for using the same interpreter on different computers, while most manufacturers were attempting to make their own incompatable version. That could be considered quite important.
The chances that every single piece of data that Palladium will check in order to get to a working state will be correctly protected from change by a non-Palladium approved program is virtually zero. It would be easy to make a virus that can render any Palladium machine into a doorstop.
Re:DRM is not an evil technology!
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 2
No, if you assumme "anybody can look at them" then nothing stops the porn site from saying "do this to see naked children" and they will see the pictures.
If you assumme anything other than "anybody can look at them" then you are talking about an approved list of users. This can be trivially solved with a password (or SSL key or whatever you want to call it).
Re:DRM is not an evil technology!
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 2
You are talking about a "password". That has absolutely nothing to do with these DRM schemes.
I think the gist of this is that there are problems because overlapping windows and tabs work differently. Wasn't there some X window managers that made several windows into a set of "tabs"? For instance every xterm you ran would add a new tab to the xterm stack. If tabs are a good idea it seems like a solution like this where every program could take adavantage and there are well-defined ways to convert a "view" between a window and a tab is a good idea.
The name itself is trademarked. The GPL means that if you can't figure out how to write the string "SpamAssassin" to the screen, you are free to copy the code from this program in order to do so. It does not give you the right to call your new program "SpamAssassin", it just gives you the right to know how to display the string "SpamAssassin".
Not sure if that was too clear, but that is what I think is the story.
I agree that there would almost certainly be some software monopoly even if MicroSoft had not succeeded. Despite all the bitching about him, I suspect we are pretty lucky we got Bill Gates. Some other people (Steve Jobs, perhaps Scott McNealy of Sun) may have been much worse. Other ones that seemed likely were IBM or ATT (they may have been stopped by the previous monopoly convictions), Lotus, Digital Research (makers of CP/M), Borland (which once controlled the compilers). I also think the Unix market was sabotaged by other vendors that were fearful of Sun becoming the monopoly, and they did not realize the growing threat from MicroSoft.
That is why they are pushing for legislation to outlaw devices that can play unsigned content. They won't say this at first, but after enough "failures" of any other technique to stop piracy they will finally make the (true) claim that any machine that plays unsigned content enables piracy and thus voilates the DMCA.
Unfortunately their arguments will be mostly correct, probably 99.5% of the user-created disks will be pirated content and to the average person on the street and the average legislature outlawing that other.5% is a minor side effect compared to the overwhelming amount of piracy.
Nobody will realize that in fact that.5% represents all the free speech in the world. They will have outlawed free speech in a way that Stalin could only have dreamed of.
Unfortunately they certainly have the goal of actually outlawing all recording devices. This will be done through laws they will get passed as they fail to stop piracy with any of the proposed DRM schemes.
One way to "stop" piracy would be to have the players refuse to play "unsigned" content. This still won't stop any real pirates who have the resources to copy the entire contents of disks, however it will stop casual pirates who only have access to writable disks with a read-only portion burned into them. Players that play unsigned content will be illegal under US and other countries laws. They will then probably say "piracy is solved" even though this will have zero impact on Asian copying plants.
It will have the effect that nobody (other than members of the cartel) can produce content that will play on the devices that most people have. Yea you can play it on your old CD or DVD player until it breaks, but if the common consumer does not have a machine that plays it you might as well not be able to make it at all. How useful would it be today if all independent content had to be on super-8 film or on LaserDisk?
This, I believe, is the actual purpose of all this "piracy" talk, and explains why they do absolutely nothing to try to catch real pirates, or even casual pirates (there seems to be no BSA breaking down doors to find pirated disks, just legislation attempts).
No, the digital signature could depend on some data in the read-only portion of the CD/R. It is vital however that absense of the correct signature have no impact on the playability of the disk. Why? because that removes the incentive for the pirate to defeat it. And they will defeat it if they have any incentive.
For the same reason, watermarks would work great if they would just stop trying to make them cause the players to stop working. If the player refuses to play a copy of watermarked data, you have given the pirate both an incentive to try to remove the watermark, and more importantly you have given the pirate an easy and fast test to see if they suceeded in removing it! This completely defeats the purpose of watermarks for tracking the data and identifying pirated copies.
Pretty true. MicroSoft's monopoly is really why "extend" works to control the market. If there were a bunch of companies that took the government-generated code and made slightly different versions that were incompatable, I expect these incompatabilities would be treated as bugs and fixed over time, and most users would say "don't rely on that, it does not match the standard" and not use these bugs. In the cases where the "bug" is really a useful feature the original company has an incentive to release some form of code because other companies would copy the idea anyway and possibly do it slightly differently and incompatable, the version where the code is available would always end up being the standard in the end, not necessarily the best or first version.
However with MicroSoft it usually means that their "bugs" *become* the standard, making the original free code useless because it no longer is the standard.
I however have some problems with making rules that only apply to MicroSoft, or only apply to a "convicted monopoly". The next monopoly could easily use the same techniques until they get convicted. Also the monopoly is easily powerful enough to make shell companies or otherwise evade the rules. I would prefer global rules that are fair, allow competition, but prevent MicroSoft style lock in. It is hard to figure out such rules. One idea I like is that a requirement be made for all government purchases that all communication protocols and storage formats used by the purchased product must include sample public-domain source code provided to read/write/communicate with the product. Companies can still do clever things inside their products, or even have different (ie better & faster) secret implementations of the interface code, but this would avoid the lock-in problem. Notice that I think public domain is better than GPL in this case. It may be that even Linux will need a few parts changed to public domain for this, but it would all be for the best in the end.
The problem is that MicroSoft might "add value" by doing what everybody here calls "embrace and extend". I personally feel this is done accidentally more often than it is done for sinister purposes, but the end result is the same.
It could but that would be horrendous to implement so that it worked for everything any package might depend on (-v --version -version etc. etc. and then parsing the output!).
It could revert to the "check if this RPM is installed" if any other test is too difficult.
Checking directly to see if a new enough version of a shared library exists, rather than checking to see if it's RPM is installed, would be a huge win.
The fact that "compiling" usually requires the user to remember to do "more README" and then follow the instructions is a problem that must be solved. Instead the user should double-click the thing on the website and it should cause the program to be configured, compiled, and (after asking for the root password for sudo) installed.
But there is nothing wrong with "compiling" in itself. The average end-user probably hates "cp" and permission settings and running the registry editor on Windows, but does not see it. There is no reason compilation cannot be the same.
And just imagine the possibilities that compiling allows! It will be enormously more portable, no worrying about downloading the correct compilation for your system. And it will be optimized to your options if you go throught the trouble of specifying them. Also compilable packages is a major advantage that OSS has that proprietary code can never do.
Although I don't share some of the other poster's negative comments about OS/X, it really should not be hard to see that the reason Linux is not #2 right now is because OS/X occupies that slot and the original story writer is well aware of that fact.
I would agree. A legitimate excuse might be "our software does not work on Linux" or "our software writers know only Windows". Talking about "mainstream" and "drivers" for what is really specialized hardware sounds like they are parroting some bull they were fed by somebody who wanted to insult Linux.
If "IP Laws" worked then they *could* open the source, because the "laws" would prevent the source from being used in ways they don't want. In fact they are acting exactly like IP laws don't exist.
Re:My answer to what the record companies should d
on
Goodbye, Liquid Audio?
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· Score: 2
They could make it so if you know the contents of the cookie, you can download more songs no problem until all the time is used up. This will stop people from copying the cookies to their friends machines because doing so would allow their friends to steal their downloading time.
No, they would be violating copyright. They cannot do this because their own business model relies on copyright being upheld.
And there is no need. They can easily add closed-source add ons to Linux to make it into a system they control. The addons don't have to be parts of the kernel or even kernel modules. They don't have to make it *ALL* closed-source and they will get exactly the same benifits.
A trivial one that they could do in 1 minute: add their copyrighted fonts to a normal Linux distribution. Presto, they have added value that no other distribution can match! They could then make applications that only works if the fonts are installed. Yea, hackers might copy the fonts to their other distributions, but a business won't because it is against the license agreement with MicroSoft.
I worked with a Tandy machine that had Xenix in 1983. It was a typical Unix clone, I certainly did not know enough then to be able to tell if it was better or worse than other offerings.
A little known fact (because as far as I can tell MicroSoft is trying to rewrite history and hide any mention of this) is that after the success of MSDOS1, the engineers decided that the future would be a Unix system and that everything they could do would be aimed at making MSDOS2 Unix-like in the hope that MSDOS and Xenix would be merged (I think they even predicted the next major version would be such a merge). There was actually a huge number of imporovements to MSDOS in less than a year: it added Unix open/close/seek calls, a hierarchial filesystem (they made it take both forward and backward slashes), some ideas for installable drivers and using file descriptors to talk to all services. They even had switches (since removed) that made "prn" and "com" only work if prefixed with "/dev/" and that made all their applications accept '-' instead of '/' as the switch character.
As far as I can tell MicroSoft fired or demoted those people afterwards and has since then denied quite loudly that they ever intended to make MSDOS into a Unix.
I'm thinking animated billboards. Animated movie and music posters plastered over the walls around construction sites. Animated incentive posters put up by you boss at work. Animated beer + girl posters in dorm rooms. Animated "lost dog" and "lose weight fast" posters made by people in their office... Yike!
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Nothing wrong with fake files. That is a legitamate and legal way for the RIAA to fight P2P. Trying to argue that something is wrong with this leads people to think that perhaps you are more interested in getting free stuff than in freedom.
I see way too much code like this:
// does nothing // Many lines later when we finally want it:
// make the cleanup happen. // cleanup is done here because we fooled C++ into doing it. Too bad // nobody can figure this out by reading the source!
class FunnyName {
public:
FunnyName() {}
~FunnyName() {do_the_cleanup_I want();}
};
function() {
FunnyName funnyname;
do_stuff();
}
I think explicitly stating what is wanted with finally is far better.
I think even better would be to somehow specify the "finally" back where the decision it was needed was written. Usually this was due to some action at the start of the function. Some syntax like this, maybe:
function() {
finally {cleanup_A();}
do_A();
finally {cleanup_B();}
do_B();
do_other_stuff_that_might_throw_exception();
}
The result of the above, if no exceptions are thrown, is that do_A, do_B, do_other_stuff..., cleanup_B, and cleanup_A are done in that order. cleanup_B and cleanup_A are done if exceptions are thrown (unless do_A throws an exception in which case only cleanup_A is done).
The reason for this syntax is so that when I decide do_A is no longer necessary I can delete it by deleting (or commenting out) 2 adjacent lines of code.
It is perfectly legal to make a GPL game engine that plays copyrighted data.
You can put it on the same disk. There is no requirement that everything on a disk that contains some GPL program has to be GPL. If such a requirement exitsted then the Linux distributions could not exist.
Yes! Definately Kernighan and Ritchie! People may say that Unix and C are no big deal, but the ability to simplify things down to a useful and easy to understand core is extremely important and the real reason why they succeeded. And unfortunately this ability seems to be missing today. We should all be running Plan9 with 17 system calls, not Linux with hundreds of system calls.
In a similar vein it is not clear if Linus is special either. There were dozens of Unix clones coming out at the same time and he was lucky it was his that won.
Possibly Bill Gates did do some innovation with the Basic interpreter before 1980. It seems that he pushed for using the same interpreter on different computers, while most manufacturers were attempting to make their own incompatable version. That could be considered quite important.
The chances that every single piece of data that Palladium will check in order to get to a working state will be correctly protected from change by a non-Palladium approved program is virtually zero. It would be easy to make a virus that can render any Palladium machine into a doorstop.
If you assumme anything other than "anybody can look at them" then you are talking about an approved list of users. This can be trivially solved with a password (or SSL key or whatever you want to call it).
You are talking about a "password". That has absolutely nothing to do with these DRM schemes.
I think the gist of this is that there are problems because overlapping windows and tabs work differently. Wasn't there some X window managers that made several windows into a set of "tabs"? For instance every xterm you ran would add a new tab to the xterm stack. If tabs are a good idea it seems like a solution like this where every program could take adavantage and there are well-defined ways to convert a "view" between a window and a tab is a good idea.
Not sure if that was too clear, but that is what I think is the story.
I agree that there would almost certainly be some software monopoly even if MicroSoft had not succeeded. Despite all the bitching about him, I suspect we are pretty lucky we got Bill Gates. Some other people (Steve Jobs, perhaps Scott McNealy of Sun) may have been much worse. Other ones that seemed likely were IBM or ATT (they may have been stopped by the previous monopoly convictions), Lotus, Digital Research (makers of CP/M), Borland (which once controlled the compilers). I also think the Unix market was sabotaged by other vendors that were fearful of Sun becoming the monopoly, and they did not realize the growing threat from MicroSoft.
Unfortunately their arguments will be mostly correct, probably 99.5% of the user-created disks will be pirated content and to the average person on the street and the average legislature outlawing that other .5% is a minor side effect compared to the overwhelming amount of piracy.
Nobody will realize that in fact that .5% represents all the free speech in the world. They will have outlawed free speech in a way that Stalin could only have dreamed of.
One way to "stop" piracy would be to have the players refuse to play "unsigned" content. This still won't stop any real pirates who have the resources to copy the entire contents of disks, however it will stop casual pirates who only have access to writable disks with a read-only portion burned into them. Players that play unsigned content will be illegal under US and other countries laws. They will then probably say "piracy is solved" even though this will have zero impact on Asian copying plants.
It will have the effect that nobody (other than members of the cartel) can produce content that will play on the devices that most people have. Yea you can play it on your old CD or DVD player until it breaks, but if the common consumer does not have a machine that plays it you might as well not be able to make it at all. How useful would it be today if all independent content had to be on super-8 film or on LaserDisk?
This, I believe, is the actual purpose of all this "piracy" talk, and explains why they do absolutely nothing to try to catch real pirates, or even casual pirates (there seems to be no BSA breaking down doors to find pirated disks, just legislation attempts).
For the same reason, watermarks would work great if they would just stop trying to make them cause the players to stop working. If the player refuses to play a copy of watermarked data, you have given the pirate both an incentive to try to remove the watermark, and more importantly you have given the pirate an easy and fast test to see if they suceeded in removing it! This completely defeats the purpose of watermarks for tracking the data and identifying pirated copies.
However with MicroSoft it usually means that their "bugs" *become* the standard, making the original free code useless because it no longer is the standard.
I however have some problems with making rules that only apply to MicroSoft, or only apply to a "convicted monopoly". The next monopoly could easily use the same techniques until they get convicted. Also the monopoly is easily powerful enough to make shell companies or otherwise evade the rules. I would prefer global rules that are fair, allow competition, but prevent MicroSoft style lock in. It is hard to figure out such rules. One idea I like is that a requirement be made for all government purchases that all communication protocols and storage formats used by the purchased product must include sample public-domain source code provided to read/write/communicate with the product. Companies can still do clever things inside their products, or even have different (ie better & faster) secret implementations of the interface code, but this would avoid the lock-in problem. Notice that I think public domain is better than GPL in this case. It may be that even Linux will need a few parts changed to public domain for this, but it would all be for the best in the end.
The problem is that MicroSoft might "add value" by doing what everybody here calls "embrace and extend". I personally feel this is done accidentally more often than it is done for sinister purposes, but the end result is the same.
It could revert to the "check if this RPM is installed" if any other test is too difficult.
Checking directly to see if a new enough version of a shared library exists, rather than checking to see if it's RPM is installed, would be a huge win.
But there is nothing wrong with "compiling" in itself. The average end-user probably hates "cp" and permission settings and running the registry editor on Windows, but does not see it. There is no reason compilation cannot be the same.
And just imagine the possibilities that compiling allows! It will be enormously more portable, no worrying about downloading the correct compilation for your system. And it will be optimized to your options if you go throught the trouble of specifying them. Also compilable packages is a major advantage that OSS has that proprietary code can never do.
Although I don't share some of the other poster's negative comments about OS/X, it really should not be hard to see that the reason Linux is not #2 right now is because OS/X occupies that slot and the original story writer is well aware of that fact.
I would agree. A legitimate excuse might be "our software does not work on Linux" or "our software writers know only Windows". Talking about "mainstream" and "drivers" for what is really specialized hardware sounds like they are parroting some bull they were fed by somebody who wanted to insult Linux.
If "IP Laws" worked then they *could* open the source, because the "laws" would prevent the source from being used in ways they don't want. In fact they are acting exactly like IP laws don't exist.
They could make it so if you know the contents of the cookie, you can download more songs no problem until all the time is used up. This will stop people from copying the cookies to their friends machines because doing so would allow their friends to steal their downloading time.
And there is no need. They can easily add closed-source add ons to Linux to make it into a system they control. The addons don't have to be parts of the kernel or even kernel modules. They don't have to make it *ALL* closed-source and they will get exactly the same benifits.
A trivial one that they could do in 1 minute: add their copyrighted fonts to a normal Linux distribution. Presto, they have added value that no other distribution can match! They could then make applications that only works if the fonts are installed. Yea, hackers might copy the fonts to their other distributions, but a business won't because it is against the license agreement with MicroSoft.
A little known fact (because as far as I can tell MicroSoft is trying to rewrite history and hide any mention of this) is that after the success of MSDOS1, the engineers decided that the future would be a Unix system and that everything they could do would be aimed at making MSDOS2 Unix-like in the hope that MSDOS and Xenix would be merged (I think they even predicted the next major version would be such a merge). There was actually a huge number of imporovements to MSDOS in less than a year: it added Unix open/close/seek calls, a hierarchial filesystem (they made it take both forward and backward slashes), some ideas for installable drivers and using file descriptors to talk to all services. They even had switches (since removed) that made "prn" and "com" only work if prefixed with "/dev/" and that made all their applications accept '-' instead of '/' as the switch character.
As far as I can tell MicroSoft fired or demoted those people afterwards and has since then denied quite loudly that they ever intended to make MSDOS into a Unix.
I'm thinking animated billboards. Animated movie and music posters plastered over the walls around construction sites. Animated incentive posters put up by you boss at work. Animated beer + girl posters in dorm rooms. Animated "lost dog" and "lose weight fast" posters made by people in their office... Yike!