That is so true. While reading the post, I was just thinking "sh*t, now that we got ntfsresize, they come up with this". Because what they are doing is forcing vendors sell PCs with the software preinstalled and no possibility of reinstalling it in a smaller partition (I have a HP Pavilion I have now ntfsresized).
I totally agree. The big problem is not that they hide the extensions, but that they hide the extensions WHILE USING THE EXTENSIONS TO DECIDE HOW TO HANDLE THE FILE. I mean, if you can't see the last bit of the name of a file, that's fair enough. But if you just don't know what will happen if you click on it (execute it), then the whole technology that suposedly allows to "execute data files" becomes either useless or dangerous.
> RSA will probably be cracked on some level in the future, but it realistically it won't be cracked in this decade or two or five, which is good close enough for most applications.
You are missing the possibility of someone discovering some mathematical property, theorem, or whatever that makes it possible to attack RSA, triple DES or whatever in a completely different manner. This possibility always exists, always, and it is the reason why encryption standards have to be revised quite often.
> Cracking Hardware isn't like cracking Software.
Yes it is. And very often it is a lot easier. I've often thought about it, and I think that the reason has to do with the fact that there are a lot less good electronics engineers than there are software engineers. Nowadays "everybody" has a PC at home, but not many of us have a complete electronic development lab (oscilloscope, logic analyzer, power supplies, PCB manufacturing..) I get the impression that software security has evolved quite a lot more because of lots more people trying to crack it.
Next generation P2P networks / clients will need some sort of distributed "moderation" in order to overcome this. It doesn't sound too technically challeging to me, to be honest.
My understanding is that this is about free software. This may not be a distribution for every user, but it is a good move.
For instance, my off-line HOME PC is better served by a concept like Windows than Linux. I don't need nor like to have all that functionality I wouldn't use at home, so it is a nightmare for me to configure a Linux system so it doesn't do all the stuff I don't want while overloading my CPU and hard disk.
Other people use Windows instead of Linux simply because it came preinstalled (together with driver and some application support for all the hardware and peripherals).
Complementing those applications with other free ones is a great possibility (there's nothing wrong with MS paint, but I prefer the Gimp). Switching to Linux would be way more difficult.
> People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
Well, even if I wouldn't care about piracy, I wouldn't learn how to use some software that may not be available to me in the future (because I copied it from some friend instead of downloading it, and then I had to patch it with a crack specificaly made for that version blah blah). It is the same reason why I wouldn't learn a programming language unless it is ANSI or ISO or very widely used.
> Even if a an open source software was clearly superior to a windows equivalent (zope, apache, postgres etc) why make it so that it runs on windows.
Because (I hate to admit this since I hate MS with a passion) I like Windows.
You may remember this great C poem (hint here) from IOCCC. It compiles, produces topic related output, and even makes lint say some funny stuff about it.
He he, what these guys did is just demonstrating what I suspected: Ambient music is just low bandwidth crap. One could do a Realplayer plugin that does the same stretching automatically in the destination machine, and then this "music" could be streamed in realtime over a 300 bps modem. Weee!!
The good thing about the kind of software they used is that the pitch remains the same when you compress or expand the duration. The maths of it are quite interesting and in fact this can be done since quite recently only. The opposite application (i.e. change a pitch without affecting the duration) is being very useful in music studios nowadays.
Anyway, I have to agree with you: It would be better compressed to 24 seconds..
May I point out that programming languages can be used to develop things other that software (although related) nowadays.
Probably, the thing I find most interesting is hardware, which can be described using Verilog or VHDL, both Hardware Description Languages. That, together with technologies like FPGA, enables a programmer to design his own microprocessor if he wishes to do so, I find that revolutionary.
"Tens of thousands of USD is blown up in the air and converted into a couple of movies which can be shown on Slashdot so that we can make insightful comments like this?"
Well, not even that. Since apparently they didn't converted enough USD into bandwidth, the site is "temporarily unavailable", i.e. slashdotted!
"You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer"
I don't think that approach is very smart. When I read something, I better have the optimum learning / content transfer scenario. As, by definition, in most of the cases you don't know what you will be reading when you read it, you cannot decide on the optimum layout for you to understand or learn the information that someone is presenting to you. On the other hand, that someone knows well that information, to the point that he or she has (even) written it.
I for one prefer the formatting and that done by the other part and just choose the nice-to-me, not-confusing-to-me documents. And when I write things, I try to make them look nice (to make the particular content easy to understand).
An easy example: Let's say that I draw a circuit diagram. Most of them fit better landscape but it just happens that mine fits better portrait. So I format the sheet to be portrait. Then your configuration changes that to landscape because that's the way you LIKE your schematics. As a consequence, you get crap for not relying on the author criterion. No, that's not very smart..
I fully agree. What is difficult to understand is why PS didn't become the defacto standard for a doc sharing format instead of PDF: It is open, it is as good as PDF for doing what you said, and was available probably 10 years ago (and even implemented in different hardware, like computers and lasers printers).
I am not familiar with these technologies, but BREW looks to me like the american competitor to the european Symbian OS (also open and targeting C++ and Java, and with ARM based terminals already available). I say that because current Symbian phones include the Sony-Ericsson P800 (coming soon) and the Nokia 7650, although these both have a built in camera. You can download the SDK for each of these phones from each manufacturer site too, but I haven't checked if a compiler is included.
"Many important people have been assassinated, numerous bombs have been planted, injuring innocent bystanders."
Hey! There's not such thing as "important" and "unimportant" people (unless like ETA, you're interested in "eliminating" "important" people).
By the way, ETA has actually KILLED a whole lot of innocent bystanders with their bombs and shit for years (I lived in Spain for 27 years and they're always in the news, which is anyway what they want).
If they were, the "ETA problem" would have been resolved long ago.
The situation is far more complex. I've been living in Spain for 27 years and, although in Madrid you're not so much involved with the political issues, you get lots of information on this daily.
1. Open a Hotmail account 2. Wait a couple of days 3. From all the junk mail you surely will have in your inbox by then, choose one whose subject line reads something similar to that of this post. 4. Follow the advice there.
Best regards,
Alex
(I mean, you obviously don't NEED a degree, it looks to me as you already have the knowledge you really NEED..)
Slashdot Mirror
That is so true. While reading the post, I was just thinking "sh*t, now that we got ntfsresize, they come up with this". Because what they are doing is forcing vendors sell PCs with the software preinstalled and no possibility of reinstalling it in a smaller partition (I have a HP Pavilion I have now ntfsresized).
I totally agree. The big problem is not that they hide the extensions, but that they hide the extensions WHILE USING THE EXTENSIONS TO DECIDE HOW TO HANDLE THE FILE. I mean, if you can't see the last bit of the name of a file, that's fair enough. But if you just don't know what will happen if you click on it (execute it), then the whole technology that suposedly allows to "execute data files" becomes either useless or dangerous.
1. Start a commercial software project
2. Paste some Linux code into it
3. Sue
4.
5. Profit!
The only (non-obsolete) OS that supports my sound card is Linux.
The only OS that supports one of my graphics cards is Linux.
I understand what you say, but the situation has been changing.
> RSA will probably be cracked on some level in the future, but it realistically it won't be cracked in this decade or two or five, which is good close enough for most applications.
You are missing the possibility of someone discovering some mathematical property, theorem, or whatever that makes it possible to attack RSA, triple DES or whatever in a completely different manner. This possibility always exists, always, and it is the reason why encryption standards have to be revised quite often.
> Cracking Hardware isn't like cracking Software.
Yes it is. And very often it is a lot easier. I've often thought about it, and I think that the reason has to do with the fact that there are a lot less good electronics engineers than there are software engineers. Nowadays "everybody" has a PC at home, but not many of us have a complete electronic development lab (oscilloscope, logic analyzer, power supplies, PCB manufacturing..) I get the impression that software security has evolved quite a lot more because of lots more people trying to crack it.
"competition works!"
Not competition.. but COOPERATION. It is free software what we are talking about here.
Next generation P2P networks / clients will need some sort of distributed "moderation" in order to overcome this. It doesn't sound too technically challeging to me, to be honest.
My understanding is that this is about free software. This may not be a distribution for every user, but it is a good move.
For instance, my off-line HOME PC is better served by a concept like Windows than Linux. I don't need nor like to have all that functionality I wouldn't use at home, so it is a nightmare for me to configure a Linux system so it doesn't do all the stuff I don't want while overloading my CPU and hard disk.
Other people use Windows instead of Linux simply because it came preinstalled (together with driver and some application support for all the hardware and peripherals).
Complementing those applications with other free ones is a great possibility (there's nothing wrong with MS paint, but I prefer the Gimp). Switching to Linux would be way more difficult.
> People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
Well, even if I wouldn't care about piracy, I wouldn't learn how to use some software that may not be available to me in the future (because I copied it from some friend instead of downloading it, and then I had to patch it with a crack specificaly made for that version blah blah). It is the same reason why I wouldn't learn a programming language unless it is ANSI or ISO or very widely used.
> Even if a an open source software was clearly superior to a windows equivalent (zope, apache, postgres etc) why make it so that it runs on windows.
Because (I hate to admit this since I hate MS with a passion) I like Windows.
Alex
You may remember this great C poem (hint here) from IOCCC. It compiles, produces topic related output, and even makes lint say some funny stuff about it.
He he, what these guys did is just demonstrating what I suspected: Ambient music is just low bandwidth crap. One could do a Realplayer plugin that does the same stretching automatically in the destination machine, and then this "music" could be streamed in realtime over a 300 bps modem. Weee!!
The good thing about the kind of software they used is that the pitch remains the same when you compress or expand the duration. The maths of it are quite interesting and in fact this can be done since quite recently only. The opposite application (i.e. change a pitch without affecting the duration) is being very useful in music studios nowadays.
Anyway, I have to agree with you: It would be better compressed to 24 seconds..
Well, WHY NOT???
May I point out that programming languages can be used to develop things other that software (although related) nowadays.
Probably, the thing I find most interesting is hardware, which can be described using Verilog or VHDL, both Hardware Description Languages. That, together with technologies like FPGA, enables a programmer to design his own microprocessor if he wishes to do so, I find that revolutionary.
"Hint: if you don't have IE handy, you might not find this service very friendly."
If I need to have IE handy, I might not find this service very friendly.
Isn't that a virus by definition?
"Tens of thousands of USD is blown up in the air and converted into a couple of movies which can be shown on Slashdot so that we can make insightful comments like this?" Well, not even that. Since apparently they didn't converted enough USD into bandwidth, the site is "temporarily unavailable", i.e. slashdotted!
>you have to prove you're an actual person (e.g. identify a word in an image)
1. Do a simple OCR routine to identify that "word in an image".
2. Sell it to lots of spammers.
3. Profit!!
"You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer"
I don't think that approach is very smart. When I read something, I better have the optimum learning / content transfer scenario. As, by definition, in most of the cases you don't know what you will be reading when you read it, you cannot decide on the optimum layout for you to understand or learn the information that someone is presenting to you. On the other hand, that someone knows well that information, to the point that he or she has (even) written it.
I for one prefer the formatting and that done by the other part and just choose the nice-to-me, not-confusing-to-me documents. And when I write things, I try to make them look nice (to make the particular content easy to understand).
An easy example: Let's say that I draw a circuit diagram. Most of them fit better landscape but it just happens that mine fits better portrait. So I format the sheet to be portrait. Then your configuration changes that to landscape because that's the way you LIKE your schematics. As a consequence, you get crap for not relying on the author criterion. No, that's not very smart..
I fully agree. What is difficult to understand is why PS didn't become the defacto standard for a doc sharing format instead of PDF: It is open, it is as good as PDF for doing what you said, and was available probably 10 years ago (and even implemented in different hardware, like computers and lasers printers).
I am not familiar with these technologies, but BREW looks to me like the american competitor to the european Symbian OS (also open and targeting C++ and Java, and with ARM based terminals already available). I say that because current Symbian phones include the Sony-Ericsson P800 (coming soon) and the Nokia 7650, although these both have a built in camera. You can download the SDK for each of these phones from each manufacturer site too, but I haven't checked if a compiler is included.
Alex
"Many important people have been assassinated, numerous bombs have been planted, injuring innocent bystanders."
Hey! There's not such thing as "important" and "unimportant" people (unless like ETA, you're interested in "eliminating" "important" people).
By the way, ETA has actually KILLED a whole lot of innocent bystanders with their bombs and shit for years (I lived in Spain for 27 years and they're always in the news, which is anyway what they want).
I liked very much your post, anyway.
Cheers,
Alex
If they were, the "ETA problem" would have been resolved long ago.
The situation is far more complex. I've been living in Spain for 27 years and, although in Madrid you're not so much involved with the political issues, you get lots of information on this daily.
Alex
First it was modchips for better performance of my GTI, then modchips to be able to play pirate games on the PS2 and now..
Please follow these simple step instead.
1. Open a Hotmail account
2. Wait a couple of days
3. From all the junk mail you surely will have in your inbox by then, choose one whose subject line reads something similar to that of this post.
4. Follow the advice there.
Best regards,
Alex
(I mean, you obviously don't NEED a degree, it looks to me as you already have the knowledge you really NEED..)
For the same price you get that fantastic piece of technology, I will get one hundred thousand of cassettes.
-I'll be able to play my music in the same way (car, home, bla bla bla), I get the same "revolutionary" benefits.
-Ageing of tapes is quite bad but what's the point when comparing to 96 Mb of storage.
-The quality is crap for both. If you're happy with the overall quality of MP3s you don't demand much anyway.
What a piece of shit.