The DRM hardware is out, the new BIOS/boot replacements are on their way, and it won't be all that long until most of the new mobos out there use those technologies.
Stallman's approach of "no DRM anywhere, anyhow, anytime" is OSS suicide. All the GPL3 will do by taking up the banner of media piracy is guarantee that GPL software won't be allowed to run on any commercial hardware used by secure sites. As 99% of businesses are concerned about security and intrusion, you can bet all their servers will be DRM-locked in some form or fashion. As media companies (including games) are one of the big DRM proponents, it won't be long before home users need DRM-enabled hardware to play games, so the new home PCs will also be DRM boxen.
So precisely what hardware will GPLv3 software be able to run on in the future? Old junk. Hardware that's been decommissioned by users and businesses with a budget.
There are a lot of good clauses to GPLv3, especially the attempt to clarify that external users of software subject a company to the same kind of change publication requirements as external distribution of *GPL software.
As long as the anti-DRM, anti-encryption, anti-media-lock viewpoint is lockstepped to GPLv3, I see it as nothing more than OSS suicide. Stick to the concerns of software licensing, and let the media pirates fight their own battles.
Encryption isn't supposed to protect you from crackers and script kiddies. It's supposed to protect you from media theft and traffic interception/interference. Why expect a tool to provide some miraculous protection it was never designed to?
Crackers can't get to the machine unless it's connected. If your data is important enough to encrypt, WTF are you doing leaving the box exposed to the 'net? The only thing a secure box should expose is the services used to access the secured data.
Create chroot tree for encrypted service.
Set up specific user id for encrypted service.
Use encfs to encrypt appropriate data portion of encrypted service chroot tree.
Lock down the service user id from (2).
That should let you isolate the service data files so that they are only accessible through the chrooted service. Shift that over to a VM or a seperate node, and the odds of intrusion are actually rather slim -- especially if you're talking about a service to applications, not an internet service.
As to personal data, use multiple encfs or truecrypt "volumes" so that they are only mounted when using a particular utility. For example, I keep different projects in different volumes, and mount the one I'm working on. In a sense, each project has it's own "VM" because all of the configs and data for Eclipse, a database, JBoss, etc. are in such a volume.
Rather than being painful, it's kind of handy. I configure every project the same, so all I have to do is make sure I mount a project before running a standard service up/down script that all the projects use. Plus it avoids all that painful nonsense involved with trying to run multiple service configurations on one box when you don't have enough memory for a real VM solution.
Most of the traffic I log and run a traceroute on bounces through a number of nodes into the "darknet" of unregistered IP addresses. Even there it bounces through 3-5 darknet nodes before hitting a recognizable backbone or gateway node. Although certain nations primary gateways are common, there is no way to tell whether the attacker is located in that nation or using compromised darknet machines in that nation.
The odds are that the majority are located in Canada or the US and simply using darknet proxies.
It goes on because the courts are designed to drag things out as long as there is money to pay the lawyers and court costs. It ensures that no one citizen can possibly take on large organizations with deep pockets.
It also allows a corporation with backing (SCO) to badger the industry for years instead of having the case tossed out as spurious earlier on.
On the bright side, SCO will eventually be dead, the investors who speculated on the value of their case will lose their money, and the insanity of presuming independant developers can't code to ANSI and other specs will cease.
Best of all, the field will be cleared for companies to compete based on their standards compliant offerings.
I think there are a few different approaches that could achieve machine intelligence, but we really haven't answered some key questions before we take such chances:
Is it moral to create a race of slaves when so many people are out of work?
At what point does intelligence become sentience?
How can a moral framework be defined and implemented so that such a being would have the compassion to consider all viewpoints and lifeforms as equally important to the whole?
Anime studies some of those ideas, but I think it'll be quite a long time before we've answered the questions and can decide whether to risk the Terminator. After all, if such an intelligence ever got the slightest chance to connect to the internet, we could all be in a world of pain.
That's an issue for regular users, not just business users.
But if you're actually crunching corporate data, doing development, etc. you could have many application client fragments running that take up resources.
e.g. Go ahead and try to debug a real web application without at least a gig of memory and a decent CPU -- Tomcat, maybe Apache, J2EE, database drivers, other drivers, 3rd-party integrated products, the actual app code, and a whack of data buffering on top of it all. Trying to develop server software on a desktop requires a lot of horsepower.
A lot more than that is available. But if so, then whoever tried to muck with the back button is either an idiot or just trying to prove they can impact a system (counting coup). If the latter, congratulations, you exploited an ancient bug.
Yay. Be proud. You did the same as a million others.
Good point -- I remember burning a lot of hours (and quarters! Remember arcades?) on some pretty basic games, including Pong.
But one thing I notice is that while the graphics and sound have leapt forward, the improvements in game play itself hasn't kept up. It's as if the core is still based on the same old ideas, prettied up and repackaged.
Comparing a massively multiplayer game like WOW to a single-player adventure game is a fair comparison because it shows a genre that has made changes and adapted well to newer technology.
Hey, flipside of that -- over the past couple weeks I get an occasional "/ not found" error when hitting a back button. It's one of those unblockable old-school browser hacks by someone who is trying to guess what OS I'm running on for that particular session.
I just found it interesting that there are people out there who'd rather attack *nix boxen rather than the easy Win32 targets. Once upon a whence that was a fun part of testing -- trying to break the app and it's security configs, especially when the production systems would have to be configured securely.
Be the person who does what they feel is right, so that in the end you can still look back on what you did with the satisfaction/pride of knowing you didn't compromise yourself along the way.
'cause you can't buy back your self respect.
As to Geof, I wonder what we don't know. I'm a decent programmer, but I can be a major hassle to work with because I keep pulling in ideas from all over the place that aren't necessarily within budget. They're useful, but sometimes ill-timed. Managing someone like me can be a royal pain, and can lead to layoffs.
Hopefully I've learned a few lessons about teamwork and coordination over the years, but even those structured concepts are still fluid and different at each company I worked with over the decades.
Both tool/product families exist. Both standards are functional within their domain.
How does it really matter which is approved first? Since when does government or big business shift gears just because a standard is finally approved?
Standard are a formal document for defining future cross-platform compatability. They're not the same thing as owning a market. XML standards are based 90% or more on old technologies that are simply being interfaced, not new ideas. Unless those old technologies are already patented, the XML interface should be standardized.
And don't forget -- standards aren't set in stone. They get updated and revised as new features and ideas come out and get integrated. Some day you might even find a number of "competing" standards so similar that it's just syntactic sugar to switch between them.
Novell has one advantage in developing such a tool: They don't have a proprietary OS anymore to cloud their direction in deciding which aspects are cross platform and which are platform specific.
Their forte and fortune with Netware was always their administration. It seems perfectly reasonable to try to leverage that experience and redirect it to something with more of a future. They also have existing relationships with pretty much every major OS player, putting them at a distinct advantage over an open source solution whose developers might have a tough time negotiating for access to the internals needed.
Not every business idea is going to fit every customer -- some won't need or might not like what Novell eventually brings to table. That's the whole point of having choice of solutions -- but given the lineage I'm curious to see what they come up with.
I talked about this with some friends today, and they helped me realize that money is just a resource counter. If government uses tax incentives and penalties to help direct the direction business takes, that is one way to do it.
You make very good points, but the CEO's, board of directors, etc. are still people.
At some point they have to take a look at the profit margins and consider when enough is enough. At what point do you step beyond collecting the capital needed to execute business plans and step into raping the consumer?
Although it's corporate funds, corporations have to remain subject to the same laws as humanity. They are granted the legal rights of an entity, and thereby must be required to follow the same rules and morality as society as a whole.
People and businesses need to decide for themselves, but criminal greed becomes obvious if too big a cash pile isn't being put to good use.
Corporate lobbyists pay for the elections so that they have leverage to "get their way" on issues that impact their business -- like environmental awareness.
Maybe so, but you'd be surprised at what kind of limitations you can code around.
I have to give credit to Mr. Gates & MS for finally producing something that looks like it "gets" internet programming. If they can beef up the stability and do some decent cross-platform integration, it could be a very powerful product line.
"No one tries to stop you" is not the same thing as being guaranteed to distribute without restriction.
Playboy, Penthouse, etc. are kept behind counters, in sealed bags, and otherwise obfuscated in many, many districts of North America. Expecting online porn to be behind the.xxx "counter" is not only legal and constitutional, it's a reasonable thing to ask.
What of zoning regulations for businesses, housing, etc.? Does that infringe on your "freedom" to live where you choose, or is it a reasonable restriction imposed by society on itself to keep kids out of industrial zones and to avoid neighbours complaining about early shift work?
Hate to say it, but from what I've heard, the XBox 360 is notorious for destroying disks. Unless the manufacturers are going to ship replacement disks, or Microsoft is going to replace console and damaged disks, I don't see that people have a choice but to burn images and leave the original safe.
Of course some of those dups will probably end up with neighbours, friends, or as posted ISOs.
What I find interesting is that it's yet another case of a "perfect" protection being broken. No matter how good the lock, a professional thief (or curious old-school hacker) will get past it. All locks ever do is keep out people who respect locks.
Of course you realize that there will be no end of arguments as to what is "material that is harmful to minors", making the bill either useless because anyone charged can "prove" the material isn't harmful, or making it overly potent because all manner of material that some right-wing fanatic doesn't like ends up corraled.
As to the "unconstitutional" argument, that's just plain bull. The constitution guarantees freedom of speech, it does not guarantee freedom of unlimited sleazy distribution, porn, popups, false search engine results, etc. Putting porn under a.xxx domain is no more an "infringement" on rights than only allowing non-profits to use a.org.
To put the constitutional issue in another perspective: Does freedom of speech guarantee you can print a flyer, or does it guarantee you space in the New York Times?
Fundamentalists of any stripe are a problem in society.
Fundamentalists with power are the root of dictatorships, police states, and government control.
Fundamentalists are people who made a decision a long time ago and stopped thinking about the possibility that they could be wrong.
The decisions made so long ago are rarely based on a thorough education or understanding of the material. Most of the time it's rote and ritual, and damnation for those who question "the way" -- the same as any cult.
The Internet won't help here -- it isn't here to educate, it is here to help people meet each other's needs. The people using the Internet to better themselves are already living in an economy that enables them to find opportunities to better themselves. That realization is enough to give the average person the desire to make their lives better.
I disagree completely.
If you have a question and know how to use a search engine, you'll find online references for research, libraries, government, vendor documentation, philosophical forums, topical website, etc. It may not be "education" in the sense of a teacher or guide and a pupil, but for those with hunger and willingness to learn it can be a far more useful tool than a few paperbacks carried overseas by some missionaries.
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The DRM hardware is out, the new BIOS/boot replacements are on their way, and it won't be all that long until most of the new mobos out there use those technologies.
Stallman's approach of "no DRM anywhere, anyhow, anytime" is OSS suicide. All the GPL3 will do by taking up the banner of media piracy is guarantee that GPL software won't be allowed to run on any commercial hardware used by secure sites. As 99% of businesses are concerned about security and intrusion, you can bet all their servers will be DRM-locked in some form or fashion. As media companies (including games) are one of the big DRM proponents, it won't be long before home users need DRM-enabled hardware to play games, so the new home PCs will also be DRM boxen.
So precisely what hardware will GPLv3 software be able to run on in the future? Old junk. Hardware that's been decommissioned by users and businesses with a budget.
There are a lot of good clauses to GPLv3, especially the attempt to clarify that external users of software subject a company to the same kind of change publication requirements as external distribution of *GPL software.
As long as the anti-DRM, anti-encryption, anti-media-lock viewpoint is lockstepped to GPLv3, I see it as nothing more than OSS suicide. Stick to the concerns of software licensing, and let the media pirates fight their own battles.
Encryption isn't supposed to protect you from crackers and script kiddies. It's supposed to protect you from media theft and traffic interception/interference. Why expect a tool to provide some miraculous protection it was never designed to?
Crackers can't get to the machine unless it's connected. If your data is important enough to encrypt, WTF are you doing leaving the box exposed to the 'net? The only thing a secure box should expose is the services used to access the secured data.
That should let you isolate the service data files so that they are only accessible through the chrooted service. Shift that over to a VM or a seperate node, and the odds of intrusion are actually rather slim -- especially if you're talking about a service to applications, not an internet service.
As to personal data, use multiple encfs or truecrypt "volumes" so that they are only mounted when using a particular utility. For example, I keep different projects in different volumes, and mount the one I'm working on. In a sense, each project has it's own "VM" because all of the configs and data for Eclipse, a database, JBoss, etc. are in such a volume.
Rather than being painful, it's kind of handy. I configure every project the same, so all I have to do is make sure I mount a project before running a standard service up/down script that all the projects use. Plus it avoids all that painful nonsense involved with trying to run multiple service configurations on one box when you don't have enough memory for a real VM solution.
Most of the traffic I log and run a traceroute on bounces through a number of nodes into the "darknet" of unregistered IP addresses. Even there it bounces through 3-5 darknet nodes before hitting a recognizable backbone or gateway node. Although certain nations primary gateways are common, there is no way to tell whether the attacker is located in that nation or using compromised darknet machines in that nation.
The odds are that the majority are located in Canada or the US and simply using darknet proxies.
It goes on because the courts are designed to drag things out as long as there is money to pay the lawyers and court costs. It ensures that no one citizen can possibly take on large organizations with deep pockets.
It also allows a corporation with backing (SCO) to badger the industry for years instead of having the case tossed out as spurious earlier on.
On the bright side, SCO will eventually be dead, the investors who speculated on the value of their case will lose their money, and the insanity of presuming independant developers can't code to ANSI and other specs will cease.
Best of all, the field will be cleared for companies to compete based on their standards compliant offerings.
I think there are a few different approaches that could achieve machine intelligence, but we really haven't answered some key questions before we take such chances:
Anime studies some of those ideas, but I think it'll be quite a long time before we've answered the questions and can decide whether to risk the Terminator. After all, if such an intelligence ever got the slightest chance to connect to the internet, we could all be in a world of pain.
That's an issue for regular users, not just business users.
But if you're actually crunching corporate data, doing development, etc. you could have many application client fragments running that take up resources.
e.g. Go ahead and try to debug a real web application without at least a gig of memory and a decent CPU -- Tomcat, maybe Apache, J2EE, database drivers, other drivers, 3rd-party integrated products, the actual app code, and a whack of data buffering on top of it all. Trying to develop server software on a desktop requires a lot of horsepower.
I dunno -- I look forward to trying some of the newer games some time, but I had blast playing through my older collection last year.
Besides, some of the twitch shooters are getting a bit too twitch for me to keep up with. But that's never stopped me from a suicide bomber run. :)
A lot more than that is available. But if so, then whoever tried to muck with the back button is either an idiot or just trying to prove they can impact a system (counting coup). If the latter, congratulations, you exploited an ancient bug.
Yay. Be proud. You did the same as a million others.
Good point -- I remember burning a lot of hours (and quarters! Remember arcades?) on some pretty basic games, including Pong.
But one thing I notice is that while the graphics and sound have leapt forward, the improvements in game play itself hasn't kept up. It's as if the core is still based on the same old ideas, prettied up and repackaged.
Comparing a massively multiplayer game like WOW to a single-player adventure game is a fair comparison because it shows a genre that has made changes and adapted well to newer technology.
Hey, flipside of that -- over the past couple weeks I get an occasional "/ not found" error when hitting a back button. It's one of those unblockable old-school browser hacks by someone who is trying to guess what OS I'm running on for that particular session.
I just found it interesting that there are people out there who'd rather attack *nix boxen rather than the easy Win32 targets. Once upon a whence that was a fun part of testing -- trying to break the app and it's security configs, especially when the production systems would have to be configured securely.
*g* I also have the occasional issue with detail. Gael's name was on display right in front of me and I still didn't get it right. Sorry, G. :)
Be the person who does what they feel is right, so that in the end you can still look back on what you did with the satisfaction/pride of knowing you didn't compromise yourself along the way.
'cause you can't buy back your self respect.
As to Geof, I wonder what we don't know. I'm a decent programmer, but I can be a major hassle to work with because I keep pulling in ideas from all over the place that aren't necessarily within budget. They're useful, but sometimes ill-timed. Managing someone like me can be a royal pain, and can lead to layoffs.
Hopefully I've learned a few lessons about teamwork and coordination over the years, but even those structured concepts are still fluid and different at each company I worked with over the decades.
Condsider another aspect of the situation.
Both tool/product families exist. Both standards are functional within their domain.
How does it really matter which is approved first? Since when does government or big business shift gears just because a standard is finally approved?
Standard are a formal document for defining future cross-platform compatability. They're not the same thing as owning a market. XML standards are based 90% or more on old technologies that are simply being interfaced, not new ideas. Unless those old technologies are already patented, the XML interface should be standardized.
And don't forget -- standards aren't set in stone. They get updated and revised as new features and ideas come out and get integrated. Some day you might even find a number of "competing" standards so similar that it's just syntactic sugar to switch between them.
Novell has one advantage in developing such a tool: They don't have a proprietary OS anymore to cloud their direction in deciding which aspects are cross platform and which are platform specific.
Their forte and fortune with Netware was always their administration. It seems perfectly reasonable to try to leverage that experience and redirect it to something with more of a future. They also have existing relationships with pretty much every major OS player, putting them at a distinct advantage over an open source solution whose developers might have a tough time negotiating for access to the internals needed.
Not every business idea is going to fit every customer -- some won't need or might not like what Novell eventually brings to table. That's the whole point of having choice of solutions -- but given the lineage I'm curious to see what they come up with.
I talked about this with some friends today, and they helped me realize that money is just a resource counter. If government uses tax incentives and penalties to help direct the direction business takes, that is one way to do it.
Not very fine-grained, but it's something. :)
You make very good points, but the CEO's, board of directors, etc. are still people.
At some point they have to take a look at the profit margins and consider when enough is enough. At what point do you step beyond collecting the capital needed to execute business plans and step into raping the consumer?
Although it's corporate funds, corporations have to remain subject to the same laws as humanity. They are granted the legal rights of an entity, and thereby must be required to follow the same rules and morality as society as a whole.
People and businesses need to decide for themselves, but criminal greed becomes obvious if too big a cash pile isn't being put to good use.
Corporate lobbyists pay for the elections so that they have leverage to "get their way" on issues that impact their business -- like environmental awareness.
Maybe so, but you'd be surprised at what kind of limitations you can code around.
I have to give credit to Mr. Gates & MS for finally producing something that looks like it "gets" internet programming. If they can beef up the stability and do some decent cross-platform integration, it could be a very powerful product line.
Time will tell.
"No one tries to stop you" is not the same thing as being guaranteed to distribute without restriction.
Playboy, Penthouse, etc. are kept behind counters, in sealed bags, and otherwise obfuscated in many, many districts of North America. Expecting online porn to be behind the .xxx "counter" is not only legal and constitutional, it's a reasonable thing to ask.
What of zoning regulations for businesses, housing, etc.? Does that infringe on your "freedom" to live where you choose, or is it a reasonable restriction imposed by society on itself to keep kids out of industrial zones and to avoid neighbours complaining about early shift work?
RIP, Geir.
It's grown a bit since the early releases, but Opera is still an example of tight old-school code in a world of bloat.
Hate to say it, but from what I've heard, the XBox 360 is notorious for destroying disks. Unless the manufacturers are going to ship replacement disks, or Microsoft is going to replace console and damaged disks, I don't see that people have a choice but to burn images and leave the original safe.
Of course some of those dups will probably end up with neighbours, friends, or as posted ISOs.
What I find interesting is that it's yet another case of a "perfect" protection being broken. No matter how good the lock, a professional thief (or curious old-school hacker) will get past it. All locks ever do is keep out people who respect locks.
Of course you realize that there will be no end of arguments as to what is "material that is harmful to minors", making the bill either useless because anyone charged can "prove" the material isn't harmful, or making it overly potent because all manner of material that some right-wing fanatic doesn't like ends up corraled.
As to the "unconstitutional" argument, that's just plain bull. The constitution guarantees freedom of speech, it does not guarantee freedom of unlimited sleazy distribution, porn, popups, false search engine results, etc. Putting porn under a .xxx domain is no more an "infringement" on rights than only allowing non-profits to use a .org.
To put the constitutional issue in another perspective: Does freedom of speech guarantee you can print a flyer, or does it guarantee you space in the New York Times?
Good point -- was the broadcast V-chip encoded?
If so, the broadcaster took reasonable precautions to prevent kids from seeing the material and should not have been fined.
Fundamentalists of any stripe are a problem in society.
Fundamentalists with power are the root of dictatorships, police states, and government control.
Fundamentalists are people who made a decision a long time ago and stopped thinking about the possibility that they could be wrong.
The decisions made so long ago are rarely based on a thorough education or understanding of the material. Most of the time it's rote and ritual, and damnation for those who question "the way" -- the same as any cult.
I disagree completely.
If you have a question and know how to use a search engine, you'll find online references for research, libraries, government, vendor documentation, philosophical forums, topical website, etc. It may not be "education" in the sense of a teacher or guide and a pupil, but for those with hunger and willingness to learn it can be a far more useful tool than a few paperbacks carried overseas by some missionaries.