Input of a password for these operations can be avoided by operating your player in Administrator mode. You also get the benefits of wireless administration from any other Microsoft music player within wifi range.
Are you purposely being an idiot? (possibly, I believe there are plenty of people posting really stupid comments to try to make the people they disagree with look stupid).
In any case the original poster is quite able to "liberate his DRM-encrusted apple content" by exactly what he is asking, by making a CD using iTunes and then ripping the result back in.
The question, which is perfectly legitimate, is whether this Microsoft device will allow the same thing to happen. I suspect not, so does the original poster. And you have completely shown your ignorance.
Damn right about the hardware. I hate M$ as much as anybody else here, but I have got an older Natural keyboard (the ones with the upside-down T arrows and no "internet" keys) on every computer I use, and a Microsoft optical mouse on every system.
Unfortunatly as soon as there is software in there they go downhill. Also it seems that when their software people do dictate to the hardware people, it goes to crap, such as the many modifications to the natural keyboard to add stupid useless keys without even making them at least be a usefully shaped like the other keys.
Doesn't this mean that if you already have an iPod, and you buy one of these machines, you can get music that plays on both by buying the iTunes version? While if you buy the Microsoft one, it only plays on one machine?
You don't have to "dismiss a Microsoft solution". Microsoft just has to write an import/export code for ODF. It will probably take them just one day. Everybody here admits that MSWord is probably the most capable and powerful program and Microsoft would probably lose nothing by doing this except for lock-in.
Your own post says "I've never had a problem getting other document formats to work in Word or any other MS application". Despite this, Microsoft is trying their hardest to make sure you have a "problem" when that other document format is ODF. Maybe you want to think a little bit about exactly why this is true, and come back and say something a little more sensible.
Wouldn't that really be "Compulsory Sale"? It's the one selling the property that is being forced, the government could change their mind and not buy it, so the purchaser is not being compulsed. Then again, maybe I'm not reading the grammer right.
This is an intesting point, as you are right that this is a newspeak/doublespeak term. However it is an "old" one, like from last century or something, right? Does "newspeak" become "oldspeak" when it gets old enough, or does it remain "newspeak" forever?
That's just a load of nonsense. The GPL cannot enforce anything that copyright cannot do, as it is not a contract or anything other than a paper saying "you MAY violate the copyright on this if you follow these rules".
The person violating the copyright is the person making the distribution and they are ONLY liable to the coypright holder, nobody else, no matter what, becasue copyright law does not make them liable to anybody else. Trying to claim the GPL is somehow more powerful than copyright is a classic piece of FUD, the GPL is an *EXCEPTION* to copyright and thus by definition is somewhere *between* it and public domain.
No you are wrong. The original poster is correct, only the copyright holder can sue you. The person you distributed to could complain to the copyright holder and try to get them to sue you, but that is about all.
No. This exception means you *don't* have to include the GNU Classpath source or anything else from it.
The line you are confused by is probably "provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and condition sof the license of that module". It takes a bit of re-reading to realize that this is talking about the *other* modules, not GNU Classpath. Ie if you link GNU Classpath with the Linux kernel, the GNU Classpath exception does not allow you to violate the GPL on the resulting Linux kernel. Of course, this should be obvious (NOTHING in GNU Classpath could have any effect on the copyright for unrelated software!), so it would be nice if they didn't bloat the license with extra clauses that have no effect like this and confuse the readers.
The original poster was talking about making portable GUI code. You cannot use Cocoa, because that basically means you are using a Mac-only toolkit (GNUStep(?) is the only attempt to fix this I know of, and it isn't anywhere close yet). You instead use the interface to some portable toolkit, all the ones that are Linux+Windows have or are working on OS/X versions. As far as I can tell they *all* use the Carbon API. You would think Cocoa could be used, at least to create a blank Cocoa window and draw the tookit's widgets inside it, but there seems to be significant overhead and complexity in using Cocoa, and excessive differences from X/Windows, so that Carbon is preferred.
So the original poster was exactly correct, you use Carbon if you want to port your program.
I think he is talking about supporting multiple versions of Linux, other systems, and maybe more than one version of Windows on the same disk. All Linux distros will work with and preserve a single Windows partition, but I would not be suprised if they assummed there was only one Windows boot and that all other partitions not marked as Windows belonged to them.
Certainly people run factor automation and all kinds of other things on Windows. However I really question the orignal poster's premise that compatability with these is a problem. Nobody upgrades the copy of *Windows* on these machines either, that would be incredibly unsafe for exactly the reason he states.
Actually firefox is using the clipboard correctly, only Emacs is broken. I've never been able to figure it out, sometimes it will paste the mouse selection, but often it will paste it's own internal selection, and I cannot change it's mind except by cutting something in Emacs, then reselecting the text in the other program. This is all probably historical from when Emacs was written to run by itself on a terminal.
Besides -p, I would like cp by default to do -R (recursive) and -d (copy symbolic links unchanged). The gnu version has -a which supposedly stands for "archive" and does all this. It would be really nice if this was changed to the default, but I suspect that back-compatability paranoia will prevent anybody from doing this.
There is no excuse for the gui tools not doing this, however.
The worry is not about the server's end of the pipe, but the customer's end. An organization can buy plenty of equipment and wires to speed up their connection to the net, but it is unlikely they are going to buy all their customers the equipment and wires to speed up the customer's end.
Everybody knows that OO is slow and bloated. Yet Microsoft is willing to completely abandon an obvious and true comparison because they are so scared and desperate to do something about ODF.
Basically they are saying "OpenOffice software is *just as good as Word*, everything you see wrong with it is due to it using ODF". They are literally lying in saying that a competitor is better than it really is, because they are so desperate to fud ODF.
What they are scared of is *real* competion, in the form of word processors (quite possibley closed source and/or Windows-only) which are so obviously better and faster than Word that it is blatently obvious even to casual observers. ODF will allow this.
Also, really, somebody should just time Open Office opening an ODF and a doc file. This comparison would be more valid, as at least it is really a timing of the file formats. Of course if the.doc is not slower, I recommend that OO add some code to the translater so that it is, this technique has worked for Microsoft.
Text files have nothing to do with "interpretation of ^Z", unless your mind has been completely polluted by DOS. Yes, Windows still suffers from 1950-teletype back-compatability in that there are ^M characters in the file, but even these are optional when reading (except for Notepad, which they purposely broke so that double-clicking on a Unix text file looks crappy, note that *EVERY* other MS program can read a "text" file with no ^M bytes in it). I don't think any programs stop on ^Z anymore, though a lot will ignore it or treat it as whitespace.
What "text" means is that the bytes are arranged in an encoding that turns directly into human-readable strings and from there into the internal data. For instance the ODF file is compressed by zip, so the bytes certainly are not ascii letters, but you run them through a process that turns them into letters, called unzip, and this process is unaware of the XML parser that is the next step. You can even imbed binary data in a "text" file (I mean really, as ascii letter is an 8-bit piece of binary data, and UTF-8 is a multibyte-piece of binary data), but I think the rules are that the location, length, and type of that binary block must be determinable from the text data that surrounds it, one binary blob cannot indicate the length and content of another binary blob.
If you use GPL software you have to accept the GPL licence don't you? Or am I missing something obvious?
Yes, indeed, you are missing something obvious.
The GPL explicitly says it does not prevent use of the program.
There are also some legal arguments that it could not prevent use even if it wanted to, because that would make it into a contract rather than a license. The same arguements are why some believe EULA's are not enforcable either.
The worry is that the players will play only copy-protected disks, thus making it impossible to be an independent producer without a license from them.
Watch out, this is coming. They want piracy to happen. So they can say "99% of all the non-copy-protected disks are pirated copies, we should make them illegal". And they will probably be correct about that 99% number. Then they can mandate that machines that play these pirated disks are illegal.
Grandpa and grandma will be able to watch their children's movies over the internet only while the camera that took the movies is connected to the other end. This will satisfy the mindless hordes, who will think this is perfectly normal and logical and probably forget there was any other way.
And there will still be pirates. Bit-for-bit copies will still work just great. That is irrelevant, of course, they will not care because the loss due to piracy is negligable. The goal is to make independent production illegal, just like the original poster said.
Don't be an idiot. All that "trusted computing" will do is mark the executables with exploits as being "trusted" so that you cannot avoid them or patch them.
What you are basically asking for is "don't run an executable that is in a directory the user can write". This has certainly been done on Linux (disable turning on the executable bit, or ignoring it, on a file system) and I think this can be done on Windows too. It's done with software.
It has nothing to do with "trusted computing" and it is rather sad, and alarming, that the forces behind it have brainwashed people so much that even Slashdot posters seem to be unable to distinguish computer security from "trusted computing". Quite effective protections, like user with different permissions, or programs with permissions, or acl's or capabilities, and tons of other very useful stuff has been created without any "trusted computing" hardware, in fact it would be quite impossible to develop this stuff if some necessary functions were prevented in the hardware.
That said, the basic idea you have is probably what needs to happen. Without some sort of sudo action that cannot be automated, anything the user downloads, or is created by a downloaded program, cannot run. You could even remove the sudo so the user can't make any changes to the set of things they can run. A more tricky idea would be to run these in a sandbox where they can't do anything harmful, such as change any files (however this is likely to be useless, they could only display in a window, and could not send messages over the internetl, making it impossible to retrieve info from the web)
You could get the effect of your "trusted computing" by pk signing by Microsoft of safe executables. You don't need hardware to check this signature, just some code in the os that does not run anything that is not signed or marked as ok by the sudo step. I would be careful of this idea however, it is obvious that some of the forces behind spyware have the power and connections to get their stuff signed, or to aquire a copy of the signing program. Because of this I certainly would never want the signature checking in hardware I could not alter.
Slashdot Mirror
Input of a password for these operations can be avoided by operating your player in Administrator mode. You also get the benefits of wireless administration from any other Microsoft music player within wifi range.
Are you purposely being an idiot? (possibly, I believe there are plenty of people posting really stupid comments to try to make the people they disagree with look stupid).
In any case the original poster is quite able to "liberate his DRM-encrusted apple content" by exactly what he is asking, by making a CD using iTunes and then ripping the result back in.
The question, which is perfectly legitimate, is whether this Microsoft device will allow the same thing to happen. I suspect not, so does the original poster. And you have completely shown your ignorance.
Damn right about the hardware. I hate M$ as much as anybody else here, but I have got an older Natural keyboard (the ones with the upside-down T arrows and no "internet" keys) on every computer I use, and a Microsoft optical mouse on every system.
Unfortunatly as soon as there is software in there they go downhill. Also it seems that when their software people do dictate to the hardware people, it goes to crap, such as the many modifications to the natural keyboard to add stupid useless keys without even making them at least be a usefully shaped like the other keys.
Doesn't this mean that if you already have an iPod, and you buy one of these machines, you can get music that plays on both by buying the iTunes version? While if you buy the Microsoft one, it only plays on one machine?
You don't have to "dismiss a Microsoft solution". Microsoft just has to write an import/export code for ODF. It will probably take them just one day. Everybody here admits that MSWord is probably the most capable and powerful program and Microsoft would probably lose nothing by doing this except for lock-in.
Your own post says "I've never had a problem getting other document formats to work in Word or any other MS application". Despite this, Microsoft is trying their hardest to make sure you have a "problem" when that other document format is ODF. Maybe you want to think a little bit about exactly why this is true, and come back and say something a little more sensible.
Wouldn't that really be "Compulsory Sale"? It's the one selling the property that is being forced, the government could change their mind and not buy it, so the purchaser is not being compulsed. Then again, maybe I'm not reading the grammer right.
This is an intesting point, as you are right that this is a newspeak/doublespeak term. However it is an "old" one, like from last century or something, right? Does "newspeak" become "oldspeak" when it gets old enough, or does it remain "newspeak" forever?
That's just a load of nonsense. The GPL cannot enforce anything that copyright cannot do, as it is not a contract or anything other than a paper saying "you MAY violate the copyright on this if you follow these rules".
The person violating the copyright is the person making the distribution and they are ONLY liable to the coypright holder, nobody else, no matter what, becasue copyright law does not make them liable to anybody else. Trying to claim the GPL is somehow more powerful than copyright is a classic piece of FUD, the GPL is an *EXCEPTION* to copyright and thus by definition is somewhere *between* it and public domain.
The stores are not lobbying the government for a tax on houses or apartment rent because people use those to store the stuff they shoplift.
They also remove that shoplifting tag when you buy the item, rather than require you to wear it from then, so those gates are not like DRM.
Come back again when you find an argument that makes sense.
No you are wrong. The original poster is correct, only the copyright holder can sue you. The person you distributed to could complain to the copyright holder and try to get them to sue you, but that is about all.
No. This exception means you *don't* have to include the GNU Classpath source or anything else from it.
The line you are confused by is probably "provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and condition sof the license of that module". It takes a bit of re-reading to realize that this is talking about the *other* modules, not GNU Classpath. Ie if you link GNU Classpath with the Linux kernel, the GNU Classpath exception does not allow you to violate the GPL on the resulting Linux kernel. Of course, this should be obvious (NOTHING in GNU Classpath could have any effect on the copyright for unrelated software!), so it would be nice if they didn't bloat the license with extra clauses that have no effect like this and confuse the readers.
The original poster was talking about making portable GUI code. You cannot use Cocoa, because that basically means you are using a Mac-only toolkit (GNUStep(?) is the only attempt to fix this I know of, and it isn't anywhere close yet). You instead use the interface to some portable toolkit, all the ones that are Linux+Windows have or are working on OS/X versions. As far as I can tell they *all* use the Carbon API. You would think Cocoa could be used, at least to create a blank Cocoa window and draw the tookit's widgets inside it, but there seems to be significant overhead and complexity in using Cocoa, and excessive differences from X/Windows, so that Carbon is preferred.
So the original poster was exactly correct, you use Carbon if you want to port your program.
I think he is talking about supporting multiple versions of Linux, other systems, and maybe more than one version of Windows on the same disk. All Linux distros will work with and preserve a single Windows partition, but I would not be suprised if they assummed there was only one Windows boot and that all other partitions not marked as Windows belonged to them.
Certainly people run factor automation and all kinds of other things on Windows. However I really question the orignal poster's premise that compatability with these is a problem. Nobody upgrades the copy of *Windows* on these machines either, that would be incredibly unsafe for exactly the reason he states.
Actually firefox is using the clipboard correctly, only Emacs is broken. I've never been able to figure it out, sometimes it will paste the mouse selection, but often it will paste it's own internal selection, and I cannot change it's mind except by cutting something in Emacs, then reselecting the text in the other program. This is all probably historical from when Emacs was written to run by itself on a terminal.
Besides -p, I would like cp by default to do -R (recursive) and -d (copy symbolic links unchanged). The gnu version has -a which supposedly stands for "archive" and does all this. It would be really nice if this was changed to the default, but I suspect that back-compatability paranoia will prevent anybody from doing this.
There is no excuse for the gui tools not doing this, however.
They said "do no evil" but privately added "instead, build something that will do evil for us".
And non-Linux users are easily identified by their complete inability to detect sarcasm in a post.
According to this post, MSDOS did not use a command line:
... command-line interfaces.
Bill Gates got where his is by targeting "the average user", who didn't care about
The worry is not about the server's end of the pipe, but the customer's end. An organization can buy plenty of equipment and wires to speed up their connection to the net, but it is unlikely they are going to buy all their customers the equipment and wires to speed up the customer's end.
Everybody knows that OO is slow and bloated. Yet Microsoft is willing to completely abandon an obvious and true comparison because they are so scared and desperate to do something about ODF.
.doc is not slower, I recommend that OO add some code to the translater so that it is, this technique has worked for Microsoft.
Basically they are saying "OpenOffice software is *just as good as Word*, everything you see wrong with it is due to it using ODF". They are literally lying in saying that a competitor is better than it really is, because they are so desperate to fud ODF.
What they are scared of is *real* competion, in the form of word processors (quite possibley closed source and/or Windows-only) which are so obviously better and faster than Word that it is blatently obvious even to casual observers. ODF will allow this.
Also, really, somebody should just time Open Office opening an ODF and a doc file. This comparison would be more valid, as at least it is really a timing of the file formats. Of course if the
Text files have nothing to do with "interpretation of ^Z", unless your mind has been completely polluted by DOS. Yes, Windows still suffers from 1950-teletype back-compatability in that there are ^M characters in the file, but even these are optional when reading (except for Notepad, which they purposely broke so that double-clicking on a Unix text file looks crappy, note that *EVERY* other MS program can read a "text" file with no ^M bytes in it). I don't think any programs stop on ^Z anymore, though a lot will ignore it or treat it as whitespace.
What "text" means is that the bytes are arranged in an encoding that turns directly into human-readable strings and from there into the internal data. For instance the ODF file is compressed by zip, so the bytes certainly are not ascii letters, but you run them through a process that turns them into letters, called unzip, and this process is unaware of the XML parser that is the next step. You can even imbed binary data in a "text" file (I mean really, as ascii letter is an 8-bit piece of binary data, and UTF-8 is a multibyte-piece of binary data), but I think the rules are that the location, length, and type of that binary block must be determinable from the text data that surrounds it, one binary blob cannot indicate the length and content of another binary blob.
If you use GPL software you have to accept the GPL licence don't you?
Or am I missing something obvious?
Yes, indeed, you are missing something obvious.
The GPL explicitly says it does not prevent use of the program.
There are also some legal arguments that it could not prevent use even if it wanted to, because that would make it into a contract rather than a license. The same arguements are why some believe EULA's are not enforcable either.
Wow! You think "use" and "copy" are the same thing? Fascinating!
The worry is that the players will play only copy-protected disks, thus making it impossible to be an independent producer without a license from them.
Watch out, this is coming. They want piracy to happen. So they can say "99% of all the non-copy-protected disks are pirated copies, we should make them illegal". And they will probably be correct about that 99% number. Then they can mandate that machines that play these pirated disks are illegal.
Grandpa and grandma will be able to watch their children's movies over the internet only while the camera that took the movies is connected to the other end. This will satisfy the mindless hordes, who will think this is perfectly normal and logical and probably forget there was any other way.
And there will still be pirates. Bit-for-bit copies will still work just great. That is irrelevant, of course, they will not care because the loss due to piracy is negligable. The goal is to make independent production illegal, just like the original poster said.
Don't be an idiot. All that "trusted computing" will do is mark the executables with exploits as being "trusted" so that you cannot avoid them or patch them.
What you are basically asking for is "don't run an executable that is in a directory the user can write". This has certainly been done on Linux (disable turning on the executable bit, or ignoring it, on a file system) and I think this can be done on Windows too. It's done with software.
It has nothing to do with "trusted computing" and it is rather sad, and alarming, that the forces behind it have brainwashed people so much that even Slashdot posters seem to be unable to distinguish computer security from "trusted computing". Quite effective protections, like user with different permissions, or programs with permissions, or acl's or capabilities, and tons of other very useful stuff has been created without any "trusted computing" hardware, in fact it would be quite impossible to develop this stuff if some necessary functions were prevented in the hardware.
That said, the basic idea you have is probably what needs to happen. Without some sort of sudo action that cannot be automated, anything the user downloads, or is created by a downloaded program, cannot run. You could even remove the sudo so the user can't make any changes to the set of things they can run. A more tricky idea would be to run these in a sandbox where they can't do anything harmful, such as change any files (however this is likely to be useless, they could only display in a window, and could not send messages over the internetl, making it impossible to retrieve info from the web)
You could get the effect of your "trusted computing" by pk signing by Microsoft of safe executables. You don't need hardware to check this signature, just some code in the os that does not run anything that is not signed or marked as ok by the sudo step. I would be careful of this idea however, it is obvious that some of the forces behind spyware have the power and connections to get their stuff signed, or to aquire a copy of the signing program. Because of this I certainly would never want the signature checking in hardware I could not alter.