I think putting copy protection on CDs (something that companies have been doing with game CD-ROMs for years, yet no one seems to complain about that) is a far cry from "forc(ing) everyone at gunpoint to buy hundreds of their CDs". Copyright is backed by the Constitution, and music companies have as much right to defend their copyright as software companies.
Hackers, until now, have received nothing but bad press. They have been vilified and alienated ever since personal computing took off in the mid-80's. This negative portrayal was one of the major reasons the MPAA was able to win their case against 2600 and DeCSS: by painting the defendants as "hackers", the case instantly became upper-class versus no-class, a battle the upper class always wins.
It looks like this can change. If we hackers take up the United States' call for help, it will help garner the positive attention we need to get our views heard. While fighting terrorism, we will also be fighting the image of the "evil" hacker that has been ingrained in the public psyche. I urge you to take this major step. Once hackers become heroes, we will finally be able to stand up against Corporate Interest. Remember, image is everything.
It is the record companies' right to protect their investment in finding, recording and promoting artists. Studio time and advertisements aren't cheap, you know. The record companies spend millions trying to find selling artists, and they need to make that money back in order to keep music coming.
Now, obviously the Slashdot vibe is that this is a flawed model for making music, and I'm inclined to agree. That is why you should be supporting independent artists who don't pull this copy-protection bullshit on their listeners. The media cartel only exists because people keep fueling it and voting with their dollars; if we want to beat it, we need to make our own content. Support independent films, musicians, and other artists who do their work for the love of it. Hell, make your own music and give it away on the Internet; there's bound to be somebody who likes it, no matter what it is. Hell, there are people who like listening to white noise.
As long as you continue to buy mainstream CDs and DVDs, you are going to have to take whatever copy-protection measures the publishers decide to incorporate. If you don't like their terms, take your money elsewhere. That's how our society works.
This has probably already been said, but the SDL library is probably our best bet. It has been in development for the past two years or so, and has progressed immensely into a stable and feature-rich development platform. It is a complete cross-platform solution for high-performance game graphics, sound, and input on an insane amount of platforms, including the requisite Windows, Mac (both Classic and OS X) and *nix. Ports are also available or in the works for QNX, BeOS, Amiga, and a number of other OSes, I'm sure. I have used it for some of my projects, and I must say it is far superior to any other API I have ever tried, including DirectX (which it encapsulates nicely:-). Sam Latinga, the founder and main coordinator of SDL, is not only a great programmer and API engineer, but a nice guy as well.
Think, for example, of a technologically-adept person (much like the majority of Slashdot readership) has a job on a high-profile e-commerce site. He gets a large salary of say $80,000/yr, but also has a wife and several children to support. If his business were to be disrupted by a hacker employing a DDoS on his site, his lifeblood, then that so-called "pointless video game" could cost him his job as people are laid off to make up for the enormous losses accrued by the DDoS action. He can no longer feed his family, and with the economy in his current state, his chances of finding another job sufficient to pay the bills are slim at best. The hacker who initiated the attack effectively ended the life of this man and his family, by dooming them to trailer parks and welfare for the rest of their life. If you were this victim, would you be so willing to defend these hackers? I think not.
No, it is your ignorance that shines through your terribly misinformed comment. Dismissing IIS or any software simply because it is not "open-source" is a terribly closed-minded thing to do. IIS, especially the new version included in the Windows.NET servers, is a great platform; its elegance lies in its industry-standard ASP web application platform and its ease of maintenance. It is most certainly secure when administered properly.
Veering back on-topic, hackers shouldn't hack server software because, by doing so, they cost their victims untold millions of dollars, as patches need to be developed and deployed and damage needs to be assessed. Think of all the new features that developers could add to Apache if they weren't constantly swamped with the incessant flow of exploits waiting to be patched; it would be a far better server platform.
Dismissing me as a troll only proves that you are small-minded and petty. It is apparently easier for you to dismiss differing opinions as a "troll" (whatever that is) than it is to have an open mind and understand other people's feeling.
As for your highway argument, keep in mind that bad drivers account for 300 deaths yearly in Florida alone, due precisely to lenient driving laws. While a few hundred may seem petty, keep in mind that if you proportion that number to the entire population of the United States, nearly 10,000 people die yearly from poor driving. Perhaps stricter laws would help, after all.
The Internet has become the circulatory system of our nation's economy. We depend on the security of the sites we visit in order to enjoy the benefits of the Web. When the performance of the Internet is disturbed by DDoS attacks on high-profile sites such as Yahoo, eBay, or Windows Update, or by outbreaks of worms such as Code Red and Nimda, everyone suffers. The only way to stifle the motivation of hackers is to impose harsh sentences on hacking, and make sure that hackers realize the severity of their actions. When a person only receives 8 months of jailtime for a DDoS, or is even given a job for exploiting a hole in some software, it only encourages more hackers to come into the fray and ruin the Internet for us all.
While some of you may blithely blame Microsoft, Red Hat, or other software vendors for producing buggy software in the first place, it is a fallacy to do so. I doubt any of you could work on a piece of software as complex and elegant as IIS without letting a few bugs slip through QA once in a while. It should not even be necessary to check for exploits in software; hackers shouldn't be trying to hack server software in the first place. The people who do this must be tracked down and brought to justice before they can wreak havoc on the Internet. Holding our software vendors, the heart of the new economy beholden to such unnecessarily high software quality standards, only decreases their productivity and cause time that could be better spent innovating to be wasted on fixing problems that are only there because of hackers. Eliminate the hackers, and software technology will be able to progress much faster than ever before.
We should call out for vengeance upon the hackers who disrupt the Internet just as much as we call out for vengeance on real terrorist. Deterrence is the only way to keep the Internet safe for businesses and people to use. John Ashcroft and the entire Bush administration are clearly working in the best interests of Americans now and in the future with this new legislation. Instead of complaining, we should be celebrating the eve of a hacker-free Internet.
Now, Athlons may be fine for gaming and other unsubstantial desktop usage. But for the workout my Fortune 500 company gives their computers, AMD's products cannot compare to Intel for one simple reason - Reliability. This is where the value of the Pentium 4 comes in. In my experience, Athlon processors, while maybe a few percent faster than their Intel counterparts, die at least three times more frequently. When you have to buy the same AMD processor thrice as often as the comparable Intel one, the cost difference becomes negligible.
There are a number of other reasons the Pentium 4 platform is a better value than the Athlon:
Rambus memory. Despite the common anti-Rambus sentiment here at Slashdot, RDRAM is of consistently higher quality and better performance than SDRAM, especially in quad-processor situations where memory bandwidth is everything and even DDR SDRAM becomes a bottleneck. Not so with RDRAM.
SSE support. SSE2-enabled code beats the pants off the Athlon in performance. My company's heavy data processing algorithms depend heavily on SSE2 optimizations in order to process gigabytes of data in real time.
Commitment to open source. Linux serves an important rôle in our work, and it's good to know that Intel has continued to support Linux and open source, and that part of our purchases goes to fund that support. Meanwhile, AMD jumps on the "XP" bandwagon with their new, specially-designed-for-Windows chips. That sort of behavior is detrimental to both our business and the entire tech economy.
So, I urge you all to transcend the Slashbot stereotype and realize that Intel truly provides the best value for business and home use. Just because they are the big player in the market don't make them bad.
Slashdot Mirror
$ strings WordFile.doc > WordFile.txt
$ less WordFile.txt
I think putting copy protection on CDs (something that companies have been doing with game CD-ROMs for years, yet no one seems to complain about that) is a far cry from "forc(ing) everyone at gunpoint to buy hundreds of their CDs". Copyright is backed by the Constitution, and music companies have as much right to defend their copyright as software companies.
It looks like this can change. If we hackers take up the United States' call for help, it will help garner the positive attention we need to get our views heard. While fighting terrorism, we will also be fighting the image of the "evil" hacker that has been ingrained in the public psyche. I urge you to take this major step. Once hackers become heroes, we will finally be able to stand up against Corporate Interest. Remember, image is everything.
Now, obviously the Slashdot vibe is that this is a flawed model for making music, and I'm inclined to agree. That is why you should be supporting independent artists who don't pull this copy-protection bullshit on their listeners. The media cartel only exists because people keep fueling it and voting with their dollars; if we want to beat it, we need to make our own content. Support independent films, musicians, and other artists who do their work for the love of it. Hell, make your own music and give it away on the Internet; there's bound to be somebody who likes it, no matter what it is. Hell, there are people who like listening to white noise.
As long as you continue to buy mainstream CDs and DVDs, you are going to have to take whatever copy-protection measures the publishers decide to incorporate. If you don't like their terms, take your money elsewhere. That's how our society works.
Don't you mean the GNU/Asus A7V/Duron/700/Mandrake 8.0/KDE that sits next to it?
This has probably already been said, but the SDL library is probably our best bet. It has been in development for the past two years or so, and has progressed immensely into a stable and feature-rich development platform. It is a complete cross-platform solution for high-performance game graphics, sound, and input on an insane amount of platforms, including the requisite Windows, Mac (both Classic and OS X) and *nix. Ports are also available or in the works for QNX, BeOS, Amiga, and a number of other OSes, I'm sure. I have used it for some of my projects, and I must say it is far superior to any other API I have ever tried, including DirectX (which it encapsulates nicely :-). Sam Latinga, the founder and main coordinator of SDL, is not only a great programmer and API engineer, but a nice guy as well.
Think, for example, of a technologically-adept person (much like the majority of Slashdot readership) has a job on a high-profile e-commerce site. He gets a large salary of say $80,000/yr, but also has a wife and several children to support. If his business were to be disrupted by a hacker employing a DDoS on his site, his lifeblood, then that so-called "pointless video game" could cost him his job as people are laid off to make up for the enormous losses accrued by the DDoS action. He can no longer feed his family, and with the economy in his current state, his chances of finding another job sufficient to pay the bills are slim at best. The hacker who initiated the attack effectively ended the life of this man and his family, by dooming them to trailer parks and welfare for the rest of their life. If you were this victim, would you be so willing to defend these hackers? I think not.
Veering back on-topic, hackers shouldn't hack server software because, by doing so, they cost their victims untold millions of dollars, as patches need to be developed and deployed and damage needs to be assessed. Think of all the new features that developers could add to Apache if they weren't constantly swamped with the incessant flow of exploits waiting to be patched; it would be a far better server platform.
As for your highway argument, keep in mind that bad drivers account for 300 deaths yearly in Florida alone, due precisely to lenient driving laws. While a few hundred may seem petty, keep in mind that if you proportion that number to the entire population of the United States, nearly 10,000 people die yearly from poor driving. Perhaps stricter laws would help, after all.
While some of you may blithely blame Microsoft, Red Hat, or other software vendors for producing buggy software in the first place, it is a fallacy to do so. I doubt any of you could work on a piece of software as complex and elegant as IIS without letting a few bugs slip through QA once in a while. It should not even be necessary to check for exploits in software; hackers shouldn't be trying to hack server software in the first place. The people who do this must be tracked down and brought to justice before they can wreak havoc on the Internet. Holding our software vendors, the heart of the new economy beholden to such unnecessarily high software quality standards, only decreases their productivity and cause time that could be better spent innovating to be wasted on fixing problems that are only there because of hackers. Eliminate the hackers, and software technology will be able to progress much faster than ever before.
We should call out for vengeance upon the hackers who disrupt the Internet just as much as we call out for vengeance on real terrorist. Deterrence is the only way to keep the Internet safe for businesses and people to use. John Ashcroft and the entire Bush administration are clearly working in the best interests of Americans now and in the future with this new legislation. Instead of complaining, we should be celebrating the eve of a hacker-free Internet.
There are a number of other reasons the Pentium 4 platform is a better value than the Athlon:
- Rambus memory. Despite the common anti-Rambus sentiment here at Slashdot, RDRAM is of consistently higher quality and better performance than SDRAM, especially in quad-processor situations where memory bandwidth is everything and even DDR SDRAM becomes a bottleneck. Not so with RDRAM.
- SSE support. SSE2-enabled code beats the pants off the Athlon in performance. My company's heavy data processing algorithms depend heavily on SSE2 optimizations in order to process gigabytes of data in real time.
- Commitment to open source. Linux serves an important rôle in our work, and it's good to know that Intel has continued to support Linux and open source, and that part of our purchases goes to fund that support. Meanwhile, AMD jumps on the "XP" bandwagon with their new, specially-designed-for-Windows chips. That sort of behavior is detrimental to both our business and the entire tech economy.
So, I urge you all to transcend the Slashbot stereotype and realize that Intel truly provides the best value for business and home use. Just because they are the big player in the market don't make them bad.