That's better than what I thought -- I thought they were making a Washington, DC based MMO.
I mean, they have to set the Grand Theft Auto MMOG somewhere, right? Where better than our own little slice of Baghdad?
PS - I say this as a resident of the area. Personally I'd love to see a GTA-style shooter set here, because anything that brings more attention to the problem is good at this point.
Actually IBM is one of the more open companies when it comes to allowing blogging by its employees. A while back I came across their corporate guidelines and I thought they were pretty impressively open.
They're available here; this was one of the top results when I just Googled for "IBM Blogging Policy."
The summary of the policy is only 11 lines long...really it seems to boil down to "think about what you say, don't be a dick, and make sure people know you're not the Company."
Wish more places were that forward-thinking. (Big Blue... forward thinking? My, times have changed.)
Not to mention that a developer that kept a local snapshot of code for a project they were no longer working on could find themselves in hot water legally, or cause problems for their new project (accusations of copy-and-paste, etc.). Not to mention violating NDAs and general customer privacy.
I'm sure that IBM has a well-defined policy for how long code and documentation is supposed to be maintained, who's allowed to maintain it, and when you're supposed to delete local copies.
It would be foolish to trust any operating system that you acquired like that. In fact, if you were actually responsible for Really Important Stuff (where 'Really Important' means people die if your system does) you'd be a fool -- or at least in my mind, criminally negligent -- to run anything that you weren't intimately familiar with the inner workings of and had preferably compiled yourself.
But that said, a lot of people don't really care, or think about such things, and frankly if you're going to pirate software, the rather vaporous threat of 'some cracker who might have rootkitted this ISO' is a lot further from their minds than 'Microsoft, who might someday come and get me for pirating their software.' So in some ways, a cracked version that possibly sends your bank-account information to China might be preferable to one that reports your serial number to Redmond. (Add to this the fact that people who know of WGA, but don't really understand it, probably think it's sending all sorts of personal information to Microsoft as well.)
But you're right, you make a very good point. The question just boils down to 'who do you want to trust?' It should give some people at Microsoft pause to realize that in downloading those cracked ISOs, users (at least some of whom are probably not idiots) are basically saying that they trust the reputation of an Internet software-cracking ring more than they trust Microsoft itself.
By the way, the guy on the bus says he only runs cracked ISOs in virtual machines with the network-card disabled.
Whether having a gun would really do anything to stop the government when they come to black-bag you is an open question; on a person-by-person basis probably not. The police take down heavily armed gang members all the time, so it's not as if there's a whole lot of mystery to the process. You just move very quickly and with overwhelming numbers. And if you don't mind killing them in the process, you could just level the building with explosives, or use gas, or any number of other things.
The question isn't "will it stop them from getting me," but if every person has a gun, does it make the hypothetical tyrannical government's tactics any different? Certainly. It makes the process of rounding people up significantly more effort-intensive. (And probably public.) At the very least, it raises the ratio of 'government people with guns' you need for each group of captives.
But anyway, I don't know many gun owners who really have guns for that purpose. Even within the gun-owning community, at least where I live, someone who has a cache of guns because they think the government is going to go south and start rounding up people and shuffling them off to the ovens / killing fields / gas chambers / whatever, is really on the tinfoil-hat fringe. That doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate argument for the preservation of the right to keep and bear arms, but that it's not something that's really at the forefront of most people's minds.
I think the real reason a lot of people have guns -- and I know that I personally fall into this camp -- is not because I desire protection from the government, who will always be able to overwhelm me personally, but as protection from other people in the absence of government control.
I don't trust the government not to keep themselves in check, but to keep other people in check in times of crisis. Did you watch TV post-Katrina? Did you see the roving "Rape Gangs" on the streets in New Orleans? That was in a city that most of the people had deserted -- the situation would have been a thousand times worse if for some reason the majority of the residents hadn't left before control had been lost.
The only thing that keeps the average American city from looking like a deleted scene from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is a fairly effective police force, coupled with good infrastructure. Remove either of those, and the whole thing goes to hell. (It could be argued that 'police' are really a part of a city's infrastructure, actually.)
While most people are probably essentially good and moral, there are quite a few individuals out there whose baser impulses -- to rape and pillage, basically -- are only kept in check because of the knowledge that they'll face consequences for doing anything. Remove the framework that enforces those consequences, add in a little desparation and pandemonium, and you've got a place I wouldn't want to be in unarmed.
Get yourself a minimalist laptop and build yourself a white-box PC.
Your requirements are such that I don't think you'll ever be happy with any laptop. If you could find one that fits your specifications, it's going to weigh a ton, run hotter than a steam room in Hades, and probably have just enough battery life for you to lug it from one AC outlet to another, and that's only when it's new.
Also, it'll be obsolete almost as soon as you get it, and it's upgradeability will be severely limited.
I say this having gone through basically the same decisionmaking process a few years ago while I was in (not undergraduate) school. Trying to cram everything that you want to do into one machine is a mistake. You'll be much happier, I think, if you go with two machines, and you'll probably save money in the long run by having a slower upgrade cycle. You also get the benefits inherent in having two machines, like being able to make them sync to each other so you always have a backup of everything on your laptop.
Exactly which model notebook you'd want to go with is a very personal decision; I ended up going with a 12" iBook and it's worked out very well for me, despite being somewhat underpowered. I'd say stick with Apple or IBM (if you can get a real IBM-branded, pre-Lenovo one, all the better) because they seem to have the best reputation, but YMMV. With an Apple you can pretty reliably run your choice of MacOS, Windows, or Linux, which I think is a big benefit.
For the desktop you can toss together whatever you want -- get your video card for gaming, RAID array, DVD burner, all the rest of the goodies -- if portability is a concern, put it in a mini case. (It's not like you're really going to be playing that many games when you would be away from AC power anyway, with the power consumption on most laptops being what it is.) Or get a refurbished corporate-surplus unit if you don't need all the bleeding-edge stuff. (That's what I did for mine, I went through RetroBox.)
It seems like many people today that are looking for a computer that does everything, and that's just not possible. The best way to avoid having to make a lot of compromises that are just going to be obnoxious later is to just refuse to make them -- and realize that there in many cases isn't one product that's going to fill a multitude of roles well.
There's a saying appropriate to this situation: "Never assume malice for what stupidity can explain."
Before you get into the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories, I think it's worth fully considering the possibility that maybe their activation scheme just sucks.
Or maybe it's the best type of activation scheme you can do, in the situation they find themselves in; their software running on untold millions of different hardware configurations, and probably billions of software + hardware configurations. Like DRM, maybe it's always bound to fail.
Actually if you look on BitTorrent right now (at one of the bigger trackers, e.g. Pirate Bay) and just type in Windows XP, some of the most popular downloads aren't just straight ISOs of the Microsoft install discs, instead they're cracked versions of them.
In some cases you can get cracked versions of Windows that bypass all the serialization (it just drops in a corporate number), install faster than a legit disc, and have a lot of updates not in the MSFT discs slipstreamed in, so it reduces your update workload once you get the thing installed.
In many ways, the cracked products are superior to the legitimate ones from an ease-of-use standpoint.
Not that I'd know any of this from experience or anying... heard it from a guy, you know, on the bus.
Well, that's the extent of Thurrott's outrage, sure.
But this is a guy who's essentially made his career taking it up the rear from Microsoft and liking it. Or at least talking a lot about how much he likes it; one way or the other.
To somebody like him, who's completely sold to hell and back on MSFT's wares, this sort of thing is just completely inevitable. There aren't any alternatives. This is the future, so lie back and think of America, friends!
While it's true (and I'm damn glad) that Apple doesn't mess around with any "activation" crap per se, saying that they don't burden the user with any 'anti-piracy technologies' is a bit rich.
After all, I have a $1500 hardware dongle sitting under by desk to prove it.
Apple doesn't need any WGA-like stuff, because even if you pirate the OS (which, let's face it, happens all the time -- heck, you can dupe an OS X installation CD using tools provided with OS X), you can only run it on hardware purchased from Apple. Assuming they ratchet up the requirements accordingly every few years, they have a stream of income from you. Not as much as if you bought each version of the OS as it came out, but it's still something. Apparently, it's enough for them not to burden their users with onerous phone-home spyware.
The biggest reasons why I wish the OSX86 Project people would just crawl under a rock and disappear, is that if OS X ever gets severely cracked to the point where an average user can install it on commodity hardware, I can almost guarantee that Apple will go the activation route. Sure, I'm sure they'll be a lot friendlier about it than Microsoft has, and the whining will be suitably mild (and they'll have lines of pundits defending them), but it'll be obnoxious just the same.
Syncing audio and video isn't a trivial problem by any means...back when I was playing around with DVD ripping using tools that processed the audio and video independently, I had a lot of trouble getting things to sync back up at the end -- and that was using files that came from the exact same source material at the beginning (so you'd think it would be easy to do). The best method I ever found was, if you know they're supposed to be the same length, to paste the video on top of the audio track and have Quicktime scale the video's length to make it even. Even then, this was iffy.
These 'commentary tracks' are going to have to be careful to state pretty explicitly which version of the movie they're designed to work with, because they're not always the same. Even if two movies are listed as being the same, there can be subtle changes (say, the length of the black between the studio logo and the beginning of the film, etc.) that would cause an audio track to get desynced.
I think the best solution would be to produce audio tracks that had some kind of timecode awareness (the MPEG GOP timecode) and/or chapter markers to stay in sync. The easier method is simply to use elapsed time (which on a Mac can be grabbed with AppleScript), but I'm not sure how much I'd trust that.
Are there any good Open Source / Open Format audio formats that include support for metadata tracks running along with the audio? (So that you could easily transmit audio + timecode?) All the formats I can think of are proprietary studio stuff. I guess the poor man's way to do it would be to distribute an audio file (say an MP3) and then have a text file along with it, which cross-referenced the timecode inside the audio file -- the MPEG frames or something -- to the timecode of the video. A suitably designed player could take the audio, video, and metadata file, and keep everything together.
Or the really ugly way would just be to distribute a stereo audio file, with the commentary in mono on one channel, and regular SMPTE timecode in the other channel. If you can find a way to equate SMPTE timecode to the GOP timecode that's part of the DVD video stream, you're set.
Yep... which is exactly what people who know anything about information security have been saying for a while.
People think that biometrics is some sort of magic bullet, because for years they've seen retina scans and fingerprint scanners on TV in all sorts of "high security" situations. But in reality, a fingerprint scan is probably not that much better than a good password -- it's certainly better than a shitty password, and in combination with a password it's probably better, but alone it's terrible.
The fact that you can't change your fingerprints is a real problem if they start to use biometric systems for authentication. Particularly since there are biometric-ID systems used by children: in my area, they're currently testing and preparing to roll out a school-lunch system that uses fingerprints (it's a debit system -- no more stolen lunch money, and no way to tell who's on the subsidized lunch program or not). When you start using biometrics that young, you have a long time for them to possibly get compromised and spoofed.
The fingerprints you have, you own for life: so any system has to be built on the assumption that they will be compromised. In particular, future systems should be built knowing that people are going to come in who've already had all 10 fingerprints compromised already. The solution isn't to just come up with more biometric identifiers to use as secrets, the solution is to not use them as secrets at all.
In your comment about the "cut list" I think you must be referring to the 'cleaned DVDs' topic of a few days ago, and I think you're misunderstanding that ruling.
What was prohibited in that case was the reproduction that Clean Flicks was doing in order to produce the edited versions. They were taking a movie, editing it, and then selling the edited version -- yes, they were selling each edited version packaged along with an unedited version, but they were reproducing the film just the same. That's where they ran into copyright problems.
Other companies who took a different tactic towards the problem, and avoided the reproduction step (by delivering to the customer an EDL that would cause the player to fast forward through various 'offensive' parts) were allowed under the ruling.
There's a pretty good analysis of the verdict on FindLaw, which isn't too long and is worth reading. In particular: "The defendants also argued that they were protected by the so-called "first sale" doctrine... [they] failed to win on this affirmative defense, because they were not just dealing in the hard copy, but rather making copies of it." (Emphasis mine.)
If you're willing to spend some more time reading things actually written by folks who have law degrees, I recommend this substantial article from the Georgetown Law Journal, which was written in 2004 and examines the viability under copyright law of several video-censoring technologies, including old-school razorblade tape splicing, CleanFlicks-type digital editing, and EDL-based 'skip over' systems.
Although CleanFlicks no longer offers the edited copies of DVDs, another company, ClearPlay, still offers an EDL-based product (which IMO is a much more elegant solution to the problem anyway, since it lets you pick what types of smut you personally dislike), as can be seen on their website.
This type of on-the-fly editing is legal, and was clarifed as such by President Bush's passing of the "Family Movie Act of 2005," which specifically allows you to make changes to an authorized copy of a motion picture, as long as you don't create a fixed copy of the edited version. The best part of the law? It's not limited purely to obscenity edits; according to one Forbes article, it could be used just as easily to protect a fan's removal of the more obnoxious parts of Star Wars Episode 1 as it could the removal of Kate Winslet's nudity from Titanic. (Sadly, apparently the technology can't replace Jar Jar Binks with a naked Kate Winslet. Yet.)
So the next time you think that G.W. hasn't done anything for you, it seems that he may have let some good slip through after all.
Actually it's pretty trivial to do this with a recorded audio and video file in Quicktime Player. (Yes, yes...I know, the Slashdot hivemind hates QT Player.) I don't know whether you have to buy -- *cough*typeinserialnumber*cough* -- it in order to do this or not, but you just open your audio track in one player window, hit Cmd-A, Cmd-C to select and copy it, then go back to the video and paste it in. It's been a while since I've done this, but I think you can even do this so that it pastes the audio into a new layer rather than mixing it with the existing audio, so that you can turn it off and on at will.
You can also do the opposite and add the video to the audio, which is advantageous if you want to use the "paste and scale" option: Quicktime can paste in a video track and alter its timing so that it ends up being the same length as the track it's being pasted into, which is very helpful if you have two tracks that are supposed to be the same length and in sync, but they've gotten desynced during processing somehow. (This used to happen a lot in the bad pre-HandBrake days of DVD ripping on the Mac, when you had to process the audio and video tracks separately.)
The only problem with this method is that the resulting file is a Quicktime MOV (not an MP4) regardless of the format of the original video, which is sure to lead to bitching from PC users if you send it to them.
You can also do fun things like paste music overtop of video to see if it matches up (I recommend 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pink Floyd's Meddle, personally).
I don't know of any way to do this with incoming streams, save just playing one in the background in your streaming audio player application, while watching the video in front with its audio turned down.
While I agree with the point I think you're trying to make, I think pointing towards a space vehicle that was launched on top of a multi-billion-dollar (in todays dollars), single use, throwaway rocket booster as a counterpoint to "throw away culture" is probably a mistake.
After all, the Titan III which launched the Viking had a fueled pad weight of around (based on Wikipedia's mass figures) 384,241 kg; the scientific payload of the lander, which when you get right down to it is the sole purpose for the rest of the stuff existing, was 91 kg. That's 384,150 kg of disposable stuff in order to put a mass about equivalent to the average American couch potato on the surface of another planet. If that's not the ultimate throw-away, I don't know what is.
It's probably a good idea that the people designing garbage cans and dishwashers aren't giving the same checkwriting priviledges as the people designing space probes, or we'd all be in trouble.
You do know, I hope, that by burning that much oil, you're probably doing far more damage to the environment and to the health of other people around you than you would if you just drove a Hummer H1 that actually ran properly and cleanly...
2/3rds of a quart of oil per tank is way over the 1 qt per 1,000 miles that's considered acceptable by most standards; I'd be surprised if your car was even passing emissions standards, if it's been doing that for a while. (And the emissions standards in most places in the U.S. are so lax as to basically be a joke anyway -- you car has to be grossly polluting to fail, generally.)
There are lots of tricks you could probably do with an engine to boost its efficiency and power at the expense of cleanliness, if that was desired; however, there are good reasons why that tradeoff isn't often made, or allowed. And, it's older cars that are the most polluting; practically any new car, regardless of its gas milege, would probably be more environmentally friendly than one that's 20 years old, even when you factor in the 'pollution overhead' incurred by its manufacture.
Could people maliciously misuse that kind of mobile power source to zap people they don't like?
Uh... you think that this possibility is somehow more dangerous than the current situation, where everyone is driving around with a tank of explosives under them? Where anybody who doesn't like you could get a jerry can, a gallon of petrol, and a barbecue lighter, and melt your flesh off? Or burn your house down? Blow your car up?
Don't be ridiculous. Electric cars have enough problems without inventing inane ones for them.
I hadn't really thought too much about Asus, but I think you make a good point. They would probably be a good candidate to pick up the SGI name and run with it. Who knows -- they might even turn out some good stuff.
If I was a commodity PC maker, picking up the rights to a name like SGI at a fire-sale price would look like a pretty good investment. At least with that, if the margins on consumer equipment get too low, you have some room for expansion on the higher end, without worrying about alienating possible consumers by using your el-cheapo brand name.
When I was thinking of someone buying the SGI marque though, I was thinking more along the lines of HP/Compaq. They sell a lot of gear from consumer PCs right up into the very high end workstation/visualization market, but they really don't have a whole lot of brand differentiation. It's as though the consumer PCs sort of run right up into the small business line, which runs into x86 workstations, which price-wise gets pretty close to the bottom of the RISC workstations. Maybe this is the way they want it, but it makes things a little confusing to a consumer.
With a name like SGI (and maybe some technological gadgets; say an IRIX compatibility layer to grab all the remaining people on that OS) they could differentiate their very high-end visualization products from the rest of the pack; maybe even make some special products or configurations specifically for that marque. (Or put all the RISC stuff under it; whatever's left, plus the Itanium servers designed for clustering.)
The only thing that sticks out among SGIs products is that they have a nice sort of continuity between the desk-side workstations and the multi-megabuck supersystems; they all run the same software, just at different speeds. HP has enough products around that they could probably pick a few out and create a specialized lineup for people who want something like that, except do it all with x86 and Linux. Start off with one or two-way workstations, and then work up to scalable cluster systems, maintaining binary compatibility as you go.
It's not a huge market, but I think there's enough left to make the SGI name worth something to another company who is already manufacturing the hardware anyway; it's just not enough to keep a separate organization alive.
This is true; probably everyone has used themselves as a receiving antenna at some point, intentionally or not. (Particularly when you stand next to your radio and adjust it, getting it just right, and then move away and it goes all to hell.)
I was thinking more of a transmit antenna when I made my comment, since most intelligent folks don't intentionally do that very often, although I suspect whenever you hold a cell-phone close to your head, there's probably a certain amount of coupling between the antenna and your body, and some emission as a result.
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That's okay, because I'm going for cocoa.
That's better than what I thought -- I thought they were making a Washington, DC based MMO.
I mean, they have to set the Grand Theft Auto MMOG somewhere, right? Where better than our own little slice of Baghdad?
PS - I say this as a resident of the area. Personally I'd love to see a GTA-style shooter set here, because anything that brings more attention to the problem is good at this point.
He's compensating. Trust me.
Actually IBM is one of the more open companies when it comes to allowing blogging by its employees. A while back I came across their corporate guidelines and I thought they were pretty impressively open.
... forward thinking? My, times have changed.)
They're available here; this was one of the top results when I just Googled for "IBM Blogging Policy."
The summary of the policy is only 11 lines long...really it seems to boil down to "think about what you say, don't be a dick, and make sure people know you're not the Company."
Wish more places were that forward-thinking. (Big Blue
Not to mention that a developer that kept a local snapshot of code for a project they were no longer working on could find themselves in hot water legally, or cause problems for their new project (accusations of copy-and-paste, etc.). Not to mention violating NDAs and general customer privacy.
I'm sure that IBM has a well-defined policy for how long code and documentation is supposed to be maintained, who's allowed to maintain it, and when you're supposed to delete local copies.
Actually, the guy on the bus agrees with you.
It would be foolish to trust any operating system that you acquired like that. In fact, if you were actually responsible for Really Important Stuff (where 'Really Important' means people die if your system does) you'd be a fool -- or at least in my mind, criminally negligent -- to run anything that you weren't intimately familiar with the inner workings of and had preferably compiled yourself.
But that said, a lot of people don't really care, or think about such things, and frankly if you're going to pirate software, the rather vaporous threat of 'some cracker who might have rootkitted this ISO' is a lot further from their minds than 'Microsoft, who might someday come and get me for pirating their software.' So in some ways, a cracked version that possibly sends your bank-account information to China might be preferable to one that reports your serial number to Redmond. (Add to this the fact that people who know of WGA, but don't really understand it, probably think it's sending all sorts of personal information to Microsoft as well.)
But you're right, you make a very good point. The question just boils down to 'who do you want to trust?' It should give some people at Microsoft pause to realize that in downloading those cracked ISOs, users (at least some of whom are probably not idiots) are basically saying that they trust the reputation of an Internet software-cracking ring more than they trust Microsoft itself.
By the way, the guy on the bus says he only runs cracked ISOs in virtual machines with the network-card disabled.
Whether having a gun would really do anything to stop the government when they come to black-bag you is an open question; on a person-by-person basis probably not. The police take down heavily armed gang members all the time, so it's not as if there's a whole lot of mystery to the process. You just move very quickly and with overwhelming numbers. And if you don't mind killing them in the process, you could just level the building with explosives, or use gas, or any number of other things.
The question isn't "will it stop them from getting me," but if every person has a gun, does it make the hypothetical tyrannical government's tactics any different? Certainly. It makes the process of rounding people up significantly more effort-intensive. (And probably public.) At the very least, it raises the ratio of 'government people with guns' you need for each group of captives.
But anyway, I don't know many gun owners who really have guns for that purpose. Even within the gun-owning community, at least where I live, someone who has a cache of guns because they think the government is going to go south and start rounding up people and shuffling them off to the ovens / killing fields / gas chambers / whatever, is really on the tinfoil-hat fringe. That doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate argument for the preservation of the right to keep and bear arms, but that it's not something that's really at the forefront of most people's minds.
I think the real reason a lot of people have guns -- and I know that I personally fall into this camp -- is not because I desire protection from the government, who will always be able to overwhelm me personally, but as protection from other people in the absence of government control.
I don't trust the government not to keep themselves in check, but to keep other people in check in times of crisis. Did you watch TV post-Katrina? Did you see the roving "Rape Gangs" on the streets in New Orleans? That was in a city that most of the people had deserted -- the situation would have been a thousand times worse if for some reason the majority of the residents hadn't left before control had been lost.
The only thing that keeps the average American city from looking like a deleted scene from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is a fairly effective police force, coupled with good infrastructure. Remove either of those, and the whole thing goes to hell. (It could be argued that 'police' are really a part of a city's infrastructure, actually.)
While most people are probably essentially good and moral, there are quite a few individuals out there whose baser impulses -- to rape and pillage, basically -- are only kept in check because of the knowledge that they'll face consequences for doing anything. Remove the framework that enforces those consequences, add in a little desparation and pandemonium, and you've got a place I wouldn't want to be in unarmed.
Durh...
Get yourself a minimalist laptop and build yourself a white-box PC.
Your requirements are such that I don't think you'll ever be happy with any laptop. If you could find one that fits your specifications, it's going to weigh a ton, run hotter than a steam room in Hades, and probably have just enough battery life for you to lug it from one AC outlet to another, and that's only when it's new.
Also, it'll be obsolete almost as soon as you get it, and it's upgradeability will be severely limited.
I say this having gone through basically the same decisionmaking process a few years ago while I was in (not undergraduate) school. Trying to cram everything that you want to do into one machine is a mistake. You'll be much happier, I think, if you go with two machines, and you'll probably save money in the long run by having a slower upgrade cycle. You also get the benefits inherent in having two machines, like being able to make them sync to each other so you always have a backup of everything on your laptop.
Exactly which model notebook you'd want to go with is a very personal decision; I ended up going with a 12" iBook and it's worked out very well for me, despite being somewhat underpowered. I'd say stick with Apple or IBM (if you can get a real IBM-branded, pre-Lenovo one, all the better) because they seem to have the best reputation, but YMMV. With an Apple you can pretty reliably run your choice of MacOS, Windows, or Linux, which I think is a big benefit.
For the desktop you can toss together whatever you want -- get your video card for gaming, RAID array, DVD burner, all the rest of the goodies -- if portability is a concern, put it in a mini case. (It's not like you're really going to be playing that many games when you would be away from AC power anyway, with the power consumption on most laptops being what it is.) Or get a refurbished corporate-surplus unit if you don't need all the bleeding-edge stuff. (That's what I did for mine, I went through RetroBox.)
It seems like many people today that are looking for a computer that does everything, and that's just not possible. The best way to avoid having to make a lot of compromises that are just going to be obnoxious later is to just refuse to make them -- and realize that there in many cases isn't one product that's going to fill a multitude of roles well.
There's a saying appropriate to this situation: "Never assume malice for what stupidity can explain."
Before you get into the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories, I think it's worth fully considering the possibility that maybe their activation scheme just sucks.
Or maybe it's the best type of activation scheme you can do, in the situation they find themselves in; their software running on untold millions of different hardware configurations, and probably billions of software + hardware configurations. Like DRM, maybe it's always bound to fail.
Actually if you look on BitTorrent right now (at one of the bigger trackers, e.g. Pirate Bay) and just type in Windows XP, some of the most popular downloads aren't just straight ISOs of the Microsoft install discs, instead they're cracked versions of them.
... heard it from a guy, you know, on the bus.
In some cases you can get cracked versions of Windows that bypass all the serialization (it just drops in a corporate number), install faster than a legit disc, and have a lot of updates not in the MSFT discs slipstreamed in, so it reduces your update workload once you get the thing installed.
In many ways, the cracked products are superior to the legitimate ones from an ease-of-use standpoint.
Not that I'd know any of this from experience or anying
Well, that's the extent of Thurrott's outrage, sure.
But this is a guy who's essentially made his career taking it up the rear from Microsoft and liking it. Or at least talking a lot about how much he likes it; one way or the other.
To somebody like him, who's completely sold to hell and back on MSFT's wares, this sort of thing is just completely inevitable. There aren't any alternatives. This is the future, so lie back and think of America, friends!
Luckily, not everyone thinks that way.
Um ... no.
While it's true (and I'm damn glad) that Apple doesn't mess around with any "activation" crap per se, saying that they don't burden the user with any 'anti-piracy technologies' is a bit rich.
After all, I have a $1500 hardware dongle sitting under by desk to prove it.
Apple doesn't need any WGA-like stuff, because even if you pirate the OS (which, let's face it, happens all the time -- heck, you can dupe an OS X installation CD using tools provided with OS X), you can only run it on hardware purchased from Apple. Assuming they ratchet up the requirements accordingly every few years, they have a stream of income from you. Not as much as if you bought each version of the OS as it came out, but it's still something. Apparently, it's enough for them not to burden their users with onerous phone-home spyware.
The biggest reasons why I wish the OSX86 Project people would just crawl under a rock and disappear, is that if OS X ever gets severely cracked to the point where an average user can install it on commodity hardware, I can almost guarantee that Apple will go the activation route. Sure, I'm sure they'll be a lot friendlier about it than Microsoft has, and the whining will be suitably mild (and they'll have lines of pundits defending them), but it'll be obnoxious just the same.
Syncing audio and video isn't a trivial problem by any means...back when I was playing around with DVD ripping using tools that processed the audio and video independently, I had a lot of trouble getting things to sync back up at the end -- and that was using files that came from the exact same source material at the beginning (so you'd think it would be easy to do). The best method I ever found was, if you know they're supposed to be the same length, to paste the video on top of the audio track and have Quicktime scale the video's length to make it even. Even then, this was iffy.
These 'commentary tracks' are going to have to be careful to state pretty explicitly which version of the movie they're designed to work with, because they're not always the same. Even if two movies are listed as being the same, there can be subtle changes (say, the length of the black between the studio logo and the beginning of the film, etc.) that would cause an audio track to get desynced.
I think the best solution would be to produce audio tracks that had some kind of timecode awareness (the MPEG GOP timecode) and/or chapter markers to stay in sync. The easier method is simply to use elapsed time (which on a Mac can be grabbed with AppleScript), but I'm not sure how much I'd trust that.
Are there any good Open Source / Open Format audio formats that include support for metadata tracks running along with the audio? (So that you could easily transmit audio + timecode?) All the formats I can think of are proprietary studio stuff. I guess the poor man's way to do it would be to distribute an audio file (say an MP3) and then have a text file along with it, which cross-referenced the timecode inside the audio file -- the MPEG frames or something -- to the timecode of the video. A suitably designed player could take the audio, video, and metadata file, and keep everything together.
Or the really ugly way would just be to distribute a stereo audio file, with the commentary in mono on one channel, and regular SMPTE timecode in the other channel. If you can find a way to equate SMPTE timecode to the GOP timecode that's part of the DVD video stream, you're set.
Yep ... which is exactly what people who know anything about information security have been saying for a while.
People think that biometrics is some sort of magic bullet, because for years they've seen retina scans and fingerprint scanners on TV in all sorts of "high security" situations. But in reality, a fingerprint scan is probably not that much better than a good password -- it's certainly better than a shitty password, and in combination with a password it's probably better, but alone it's terrible.
The fact that you can't change your fingerprints is a real problem if they start to use biometric systems for authentication. Particularly since there are biometric-ID systems used by children: in my area, they're currently testing and preparing to roll out a school-lunch system that uses fingerprints (it's a debit system -- no more stolen lunch money, and no way to tell who's on the subsidized lunch program or not). When you start using biometrics that young, you have a long time for them to possibly get compromised and spoofed.
The fingerprints you have, you own for life: so any system has to be built on the assumption that they will be compromised. In particular, future systems should be built knowing that people are going to come in who've already had all 10 fingerprints compromised already. The solution isn't to just come up with more biometric identifiers to use as secrets, the solution is to not use them as secrets at all.
Well they said it's accessible to computer manufacturers ... not to you. You get the list right after you sign the NDA.
What? You don't trust them to do the right thing? What could ever go wrong with that plan?
Keep threatening it then... that seems to be the only way.
Why not just take it out back behind the shed? Do what needs to be done.
In your comment about the "cut list" I think you must be referring to the 'cleaned DVDs' topic of a few days ago, and I think you're misunderstanding that ruling.
... [they] failed to win on this affirmative defense, because they were not just dealing in the hard copy, but rather making copies of it." (Emphasis mine.)
What was prohibited in that case was the reproduction that Clean Flicks was doing in order to produce the edited versions. They were taking a movie, editing it, and then selling the edited version -- yes, they were selling each edited version packaged along with an unedited version, but they were reproducing the film just the same. That's where they ran into copyright problems.
Other companies who took a different tactic towards the problem, and avoided the reproduction step (by delivering to the customer an EDL that would cause the player to fast forward through various 'offensive' parts) were allowed under the ruling.
There's a pretty good analysis of the verdict on FindLaw, which isn't too long and is worth reading. In particular: "The defendants also argued that they were protected by the so-called "first sale" doctrine
If you're willing to spend some more time reading things actually written by folks who have law degrees, I recommend this substantial article from the Georgetown Law Journal, which was written in 2004 and examines the viability under copyright law of several video-censoring technologies, including old-school razorblade tape splicing, CleanFlicks-type digital editing, and EDL-based 'skip over' systems.
Although CleanFlicks no longer offers the edited copies of DVDs, another company, ClearPlay, still offers an EDL-based product (which IMO is a much more elegant solution to the problem anyway, since it lets you pick what types of smut you personally dislike), as can be seen on their website.
This type of on-the-fly editing is legal, and was clarifed as such by President Bush's passing of the "Family Movie Act of 2005," which specifically allows you to make changes to an authorized copy of a motion picture, as long as you don't create a fixed copy of the edited version. The best part of the law? It's not limited purely to obscenity edits; according to one Forbes article, it could be used just as easily to protect a fan's removal of the more obnoxious parts of Star Wars Episode 1 as it could the removal of Kate Winslet's nudity from Titanic. (Sadly, apparently the technology can't replace Jar Jar Binks with a naked Kate Winslet. Yet.)
So the next time you think that G.W. hasn't done anything for you, it seems that he may have let some good slip through after all.
Actually it's pretty trivial to do this with a recorded audio and video file in Quicktime Player. (Yes, yes...I know, the Slashdot hivemind hates QT Player.) I don't know whether you have to buy -- *cough*typeinserialnumber*cough* -- it in order to do this or not, but you just open your audio track in one player window, hit Cmd-A, Cmd-C to select and copy it, then go back to the video and paste it in. It's been a while since I've done this, but I think you can even do this so that it pastes the audio into a new layer rather than mixing it with the existing audio, so that you can turn it off and on at will.
You can also do the opposite and add the video to the audio, which is advantageous if you want to use the "paste and scale" option: Quicktime can paste in a video track and alter its timing so that it ends up being the same length as the track it's being pasted into, which is very helpful if you have two tracks that are supposed to be the same length and in sync, but they've gotten desynced during processing somehow. (This used to happen a lot in the bad pre-HandBrake days of DVD ripping on the Mac, when you had to process the audio and video tracks separately.)
The only problem with this method is that the resulting file is a Quicktime MOV (not an MP4) regardless of the format of the original video, which is sure to lead to bitching from PC users if you send it to them.
You can also do fun things like paste music overtop of video to see if it matches up (I recommend 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pink Floyd's Meddle, personally).
I don't know of any way to do this with incoming streams, save just playing one in the background in your streaming audio player application, while watching the video in front with its audio turned down.
While I agree with the point I think you're trying to make, I think pointing towards a space vehicle that was launched on top of a multi-billion-dollar (in todays dollars), single use, throwaway rocket booster as a counterpoint to "throw away culture" is probably a mistake.
After all, the Titan III which launched the Viking had a fueled pad weight of around (based on Wikipedia's mass figures) 384,241 kg; the scientific payload of the lander, which when you get right down to it is the sole purpose for the rest of the stuff existing, was 91 kg. That's 384,150 kg of disposable stuff in order to put a mass about equivalent to the average American couch potato on the surface of another planet. If that's not the ultimate throw-away, I don't know what is.
It's probably a good idea that the people designing garbage cans and dishwashers aren't giving the same checkwriting priviledges as the people designing space probes, or we'd all be in trouble.
Yeah but it would drive your dog crazy.
You do know, I hope, that by burning that much oil, you're probably doing far more damage to the environment and to the health of other people around you than you would if you just drove a Hummer H1 that actually ran properly and cleanly...
2/3rds of a quart of oil per tank is way over the 1 qt per 1,000 miles that's considered acceptable by most standards; I'd be surprised if your car was even passing emissions standards, if it's been doing that for a while. (And the emissions standards in most places in the U.S. are so lax as to basically be a joke anyway -- you car has to be grossly polluting to fail, generally.)
There are lots of tricks you could probably do with an engine to boost its efficiency and power at the expense of cleanliness, if that was desired; however, there are good reasons why that tradeoff isn't often made, or allowed. And, it's older cars that are the most polluting; practically any new car, regardless of its gas milege, would probably be more environmentally friendly than one that's 20 years old, even when you factor in the 'pollution overhead' incurred by its manufacture.
Could people maliciously misuse that kind of mobile power source to zap people they don't like?
... you think that this possibility is somehow more dangerous than the current situation, where everyone is driving around with a tank of explosives under them? Where anybody who doesn't like you could get a jerry can, a gallon of petrol, and a barbecue lighter, and melt your flesh off? Or burn your house down? Blow your car up?
Uh
Don't be ridiculous. Electric cars have enough problems without inventing inane ones for them.
I hadn't really thought too much about Asus, but I think you make a good point. They would probably be a good candidate to pick up the SGI name and run with it. Who knows -- they might even turn out some good stuff.
If I was a commodity PC maker, picking up the rights to a name like SGI at a fire-sale price would look like a pretty good investment. At least with that, if the margins on consumer equipment get too low, you have some room for expansion on the higher end, without worrying about alienating possible consumers by using your el-cheapo brand name.
When I was thinking of someone buying the SGI marque though, I was thinking more along the lines of HP/Compaq. They sell a lot of gear from consumer PCs right up into the very high end workstation/visualization market, but they really don't have a whole lot of brand differentiation. It's as though the consumer PCs sort of run right up into the small business line, which runs into x86 workstations, which price-wise gets pretty close to the bottom of the RISC workstations. Maybe this is the way they want it, but it makes things a little confusing to a consumer.
With a name like SGI (and maybe some technological gadgets; say an IRIX compatibility layer to grab all the remaining people on that OS) they could differentiate their very high-end visualization products from the rest of the pack; maybe even make some special products or configurations specifically for that marque. (Or put all the RISC stuff under it; whatever's left, plus the Itanium servers designed for clustering.)
The only thing that sticks out among SGIs products is that they have a nice sort of continuity between the desk-side workstations and the multi-megabuck supersystems; they all run the same software, just at different speeds. HP has enough products around that they could probably pick a few out and create a specialized lineup for people who want something like that, except do it all with x86 and Linux. Start off with one or two-way workstations, and then work up to scalable cluster systems, maintaining binary compatibility as you go.
It's not a huge market, but I think there's enough left to make the SGI name worth something to another company who is already manufacturing the hardware anyway; it's just not enough to keep a separate organization alive.
This is true; probably everyone has used themselves as a receiving antenna at some point, intentionally or not. (Particularly when you stand next to your radio and adjust it, getting it just right, and then move away and it goes all to hell.)
I was thinking more of a transmit antenna when I made my comment, since most intelligent folks don't intentionally do that very often, although I suspect whenever you hold a cell-phone close to your head, there's probably a certain amount of coupling between the antenna and your body, and some emission as a result.
Should have made that more clear.