And why did I spend time removing protection systems? Funny that part is: I owned an MSD floppy drive which was completely incompatible at a machine-language level with the 1541 drives everyone else owned and that all the game-makers wrote their protection systems for. So my floppy drive would load any of the software of the day. I literally bought a game, had to hack away the protection, and then I could play it on my computer. Of course no one will believe me when I say this but damnit, its the truth! Now get off my lawn.
One of the most comprehensive protections at that time was called "V-Max!" which stood for Verify Maximum. What were called "nibblers" for disc copy software couldn't touch it even though those nibblers represented the ultimate in disk copy technology at the time. There were two ways to copy V-Max, the first was to get a dedicated hardware copying unit. The second was to apply a bit of knowledge with a debugger cartridge: the V-Max protection was a turn-key system you gave them files and they wrapped the protection around it and provided a fast-loader at the same time. So what you would do is fill all of memory (the whole 64K) with a value you knew say: $AF. Then you would load a V-Max file from the disc, it's loader would automatically take over and while it was loading you would enter your debugger cartridge and change it's exit point to point to itself. So instead of $0800: RTS you would make it $0800: JMP $0800. Then you would wait for the V-Max loader to fully load the file. Then a quick button press on your debugger cartridge and use the memory monitor to find where the file loaded by seeing what memory was NOT $AF. Then from the debugger cartridge save that memory block out again. Completely de-protected file. Since V-Max used standard kernel-load vectors the program itself needed no further modification, the protection was completely gone you just lost the fast-loader function. Which you then re-added yourself into a chunk of memory wherever the game didn't use it. Relocatable code was best for that. Later versions of V-Max also did on-the-fly decompression of files so occasionally while stripping the protection you would run into a situation where your destination disk ran out of space versus the original protected disk. Again, that was worked around by inserting your own custom loader into the kernel load-vectors which also did decompression. V-Max was impossible for copy software of the day to copy but with a little bit of knowledge and a debugger cartridge it was absolutely trivial to defeat.
I started on a Commodore 64 (well a Commodore 128 that ran exclusively in 64 mode..) and learned machine language by breaking protections of the day. Many of the things that were legal back then such as copying software for DRM'd games are now gone the way of the dodo. I honestly see that in twenty years from now a debugger in itself will be seen as a "tool of crime" or whatever wordage they use to keep them out of the general public's hands just like lock-picks today. Hope you like high-level because the day is coming that it will be illegal to be low-level without a government (or more likely Apple) license.
What are we going to do once we move all of our manufacturing and service sectors over to robots? There won't be much work left for humans to do. We will either enter a ghetto like state where everyone lives on the street and the people who own the robots live well or we will enter some sort of communist utopia where all human needs are automatically fulfilled as needed. Its not that unimaginable, the Star Trek future is a communist utopia which is also a military dictatorship albeit a benevolent one.
We should flood China with hacking manuals. Spread encryption and other tools of Freedom far and wide. This would go against sensibilities in Washington but in the end it is all about making them more like us. Do you not think that China's government is laughing at our apparent schizophrenia when it comes to dealing with them? The schizophrenia stems from our freedoms but I think it also makes us arguably stronger in the exact same way diversity is stronger for disease. There is no reason we should freely hand over the efficiencies of computerization to China, it makes that nation - not the people - more difficult to make like us. If we were in China this discussion would not even exist: half the thoughts we take for granted would be censored. Slashdot and other discussion forums would have a very difficult time there - the flow of this conversation would no doubt be ruined as we would have to wait hours between posts for them to be approved. Unless we self-censored, which is even worse.
By making it barely tolerable you lengthen the time the current regime is in power. How many suffer? Over a shorter time now or forever into the future? We are in an ideological war with China, it is unacceptable that we even let ourselves get into this position but now that we are it is equally repugnant to take actions that prop up an obviously Evil, from my cultures training, abomination.
From an inferior provider? GOOD. Let their country fall behind in information services while we surge ahead. I don't want a dictatorship having access to anything before we have fully deployed it. Hopefully with the theory that they do not remain competitive, when their people overthrow the Evil that is the Chinese government then license everything to them because they will deserve their seat at the table. Before then they are simply a bunch of thugs and I don't think we should be giving thugs brass-knuckles. Of course I have the freedom to say that here which is a major point for me.
Popular will always survive, the little things perhaps not. Also, perhaps the Library of Congress with their copy (are those unencumbered?) should hold a "Cultural Event Day" every week where they select something from their archive and distribute it without restrictions. Or further to this issue: where is the line between preservation, teaching, and culture vs making money.
In those days history was lost because of issues with physically duplicating things. Nowadays, it is being lost because we don't own the keys to the digital locks. Perhaps in twenty years we'll come to our senses and retroactively permit the breaking of today's encryption then - for what survived.
How big of a barrier to entry are software patents to innovators? You and I come up with a great idea but to implement it requires three other patents (which we would argue two of them are obvious but have been granted anyway) - which large players conveniently hold and cross-license with each other because well, they can afford it. How twisted away from the original purpose of promoting innovation by individuals will US Patent law become? The Futurama vision of Momcorp springs to mind.
From an outside perspective to the US it appears that anything a corporation wants done the government will bend over and give to them. Citzens however? Second-class to the corporates. The root of the issue from my opinion is that money has becomed valued over what is right. Right is such a subjective term, much easier just to value money.
FOSS grows as long as people contribute. Contribution can be something as simple as filing a bug report. With so many different system configurations out there that really does help developers too. I'm satisfied with F/OSS, it's hardly ever the prettiest tool but they get the job done. I've saved so much money too with a trade off in hitting Google here and there for issues. To me it's worth it, I'm helping it grow.
Your little bit of charity gets you a whole operating system and ecosystem of applications back for Free. Selfish does not begin to describe your statement.
I am not an economist and I'm recollecting information over a decade ago in my experience. It's a good enough fit that it prompted you to refine the issue further.
Point: driver support on Linux could be much better. Although with no help from the manufacturers of the machinery reverse-engineering efforts are doing quite well. I view it as an education issue, yes RMS is extreme: I also agree with him in a lot of places but what device manufacturers should realize as well is that they are selling the machine not the software. The software is of little value: it is just to make the machine you make money off of go. Some manufacturers such as Canon have even been approached by the Linux Driver Project and offered to have drivers written for free for them under NDA and they have declined. Manufacturers think that maybe contributing to the software pot will devalue their effectiveness in competition but what they don't realize is that if as a group they released their specs at a minimum or just contributed code that it would level the playing field: they'd be back to competing on the quality of their actual machines. It will take a breakthrough in thought to fix this situation, some examples are encouraging such as Ati's support for writing open drivers for their graphics cards. As more efforts such as this accumulate someday we will see the issues of drivers be much lessened or go away entirely. It is part of the history of Linux: it's been an uphill battle the entire way but progress is being made.
If the application you need is broken you're supposed to fix it. Either by doing it yourself or supporting those who are doing it somehow. If it doesn't exist you are supposed to create it. Everyone doing this and letting evolution winnow the different visions is messy but arguably better.
It's not that Windows shouldn't exist its just that overall it is unhealthy for the market to have such a dominant player. Great for making money but not great for following what customers actually want instead of given.
Obviously in the short-term you get what you need right now by buying. In the long-run however Free software is much cheaper in cost. Support and tech's you'd have anyway: the transition is the biggest cost after that your maintenence and upfront costs are much better with Free. Stone-soup wise you shore up your little corner if you have to and the totality of everyone doing that means it all gets taken to the next level.
Actually what I was referring to was: Sub-Optimal Solutions. Up to the '90s it was a great matter of debate in economics. Many "learned" professors denied that it existed and that a market would always find the optimal solution. With the introduction of "lock-in" as a concept it is recognized that while markets will find optimal solutions they can become "stuck" with sub-optimal ones for a while. The time-scales are what matter, a market may view a few decades as a blip while to you and I that is quite a while.
Cathedral and Bazaar time. What you trade off in speed of development with the bazaar you gain in robustness from Cathedral top-down error. It takes longer but you are less likely to run into an evolutionary dead-end from well-intentioned global decisions. Which is why it is good that FreeBSD kernels exist in addtion to Linux ones and perhaps when Hurd becomes reality that will be genetic diversity as well. No single cause can kill them all.
Economists until very recently denied that the factor called "lock-in" even existed. Yes, a bunch of old stuffies insisting that what they say is the way the world works even when they miss some big pieces. I wish I could find the quote which showed that attitude however Google is now polluted so much with the phrase "lock-in" that it's all noise searching for when it wasn't that way. Left field: My operating system is Free, if everyone saw that obvious value and weren't tied to existing applications and data they'd all jump ship immediately and by doing so would also immediately raise my operating system's quality of code to amazing levels: just because of the weight of bug reports and new blood of code.
High-level: Save your differences from day to day, bittorrent those differences to others, merge back in differences from others. Low-level: OMG, we used different table-names.
The best outcome of this in light of Microsoft's monopoly position is that it breaks how they got there: many people use Internet Explorer simply because they are unaware of alternatives. This puts that front-and-center. No longer will a more experienced user get strange looks when they mention another browser with a funny name. Instead quite a few people will have seen the ballot screen and especially initially it will raise the talk about them. Long-term it is good as well, once people become aware they have a choice in browsers they may also as well begin to wonder if they have choices elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
...would not load any of the software of the day...
And why did I spend time removing protection systems? Funny that part is: I owned an MSD floppy drive which was completely incompatible at a machine-language level with the 1541 drives everyone else owned and that all the game-makers wrote their protection systems for. So my floppy drive would load any of the software of the day. I literally bought a game, had to hack away the protection, and then I could play it on my computer. Of course no one will believe me when I say this but damnit, its the truth! Now get off my lawn.
One of the most comprehensive protections at that time was called "V-Max!" which stood for Verify Maximum. What were called "nibblers" for disc copy software couldn't touch it even though those nibblers represented the ultimate in disk copy technology at the time. There were two ways to copy V-Max, the first was to get a dedicated hardware copying unit. The second was to apply a bit of knowledge with a debugger cartridge: the V-Max protection was a turn-key system you gave them files and they wrapped the protection around it and provided a fast-loader at the same time. So what you would do is fill all of memory (the whole 64K) with a value you knew say: $AF. Then you would load a V-Max file from the disc, it's loader would automatically take over and while it was loading you would enter your debugger cartridge and change it's exit point to point to itself. So instead of $0800: RTS you would make it $0800: JMP $0800. Then you would wait for the V-Max loader to fully load the file. Then a quick button press on your debugger cartridge and use the memory monitor to find where the file loaded by seeing what memory was NOT $AF. Then from the debugger cartridge save that memory block out again. Completely de-protected file. Since V-Max used standard kernel-load vectors the program itself needed no further modification, the protection was completely gone you just lost the fast-loader function. Which you then re-added yourself into a chunk of memory wherever the game didn't use it. Relocatable code was best for that. Later versions of V-Max also did on-the-fly decompression of files so occasionally while stripping the protection you would run into a situation where your destination disk ran out of space versus the original protected disk. Again, that was worked around by inserting your own custom loader into the kernel load-vectors which also did decompression. V-Max was impossible for copy software of the day to copy but with a little bit of knowledge and a debugger cartridge it was absolutely trivial to defeat.
I started on a Commodore 64 (well a Commodore 128 that ran exclusively in 64 mode..) and learned machine language by breaking protections of the day. Many of the things that were legal back then such as copying software for DRM'd games are now gone the way of the dodo. I honestly see that in twenty years from now a debugger in itself will be seen as a "tool of crime" or whatever wordage they use to keep them out of the general public's hands just like lock-picks today. Hope you like high-level because the day is coming that it will be illegal to be low-level without a government (or more likely Apple) license.
It's a guess but a solid one: competition.
What are we going to do once we move all of our manufacturing and service sectors over to robots? There won't be much work left for humans to do. We will either enter a ghetto like state where everyone lives on the street and the people who own the robots live well or we will enter some sort of communist utopia where all human needs are automatically fulfilled as needed. Its not that unimaginable, the Star Trek future is a communist utopia which is also a military dictatorship albeit a benevolent one.
We should flood China with hacking manuals. Spread encryption and other tools of Freedom far and wide. This would go against sensibilities in Washington but in the end it is all about making them more like us. Do you not think that China's government is laughing at our apparent schizophrenia when it comes to dealing with them? The schizophrenia stems from our freedoms but I think it also makes us arguably stronger in the exact same way diversity is stronger for disease. There is no reason we should freely hand over the efficiencies of computerization to China, it makes that nation - not the people - more difficult to make like us. If we were in China this discussion would not even exist: half the thoughts we take for granted would be censored. Slashdot and other discussion forums would have a very difficult time there - the flow of this conversation would no doubt be ruined as we would have to wait hours between posts for them to be approved. Unless we self-censored, which is even worse.
By making it barely tolerable you lengthen the time the current regime is in power. How many suffer? Over a shorter time now or forever into the future? We are in an ideological war with China, it is unacceptable that we even let ourselves get into this position but now that we are it is equally repugnant to take actions that prop up an obviously Evil, from my cultures training, abomination.
From an inferior provider? GOOD. Let their country fall behind in information services while we surge ahead. I don't want a dictatorship having access to anything before we have fully deployed it. Hopefully with the theory that they do not remain competitive, when their people overthrow the Evil that is the Chinese government then license everything to them because they will deserve their seat at the table. Before then they are simply a bunch of thugs and I don't think we should be giving thugs brass-knuckles. Of course I have the freedom to say that here which is a major point for me.
Popular will always survive, the little things perhaps not. Also, perhaps the Library of Congress with their copy (are those unencumbered?) should hold a "Cultural Event Day" every week where they select something from their archive and distribute it without restrictions. Or further to this issue: where is the line between preservation, teaching, and culture vs making money.
In those days history was lost because of issues with physically duplicating things. Nowadays, it is being lost because we don't own the keys to the digital locks. Perhaps in twenty years we'll come to our senses and retroactively permit the breaking of today's encryption then - for what survived.
How big of a barrier to entry are software patents to innovators? You and I come up with a great idea but to implement it requires three other patents (which we would argue two of them are obvious but have been granted anyway) - which large players conveniently hold and cross-license with each other because well, they can afford it. How twisted away from the original purpose of promoting innovation by individuals will US Patent law become? The Futurama vision of Momcorp springs to mind.
From an outside perspective to the US it appears that anything a corporation wants done the government will bend over and give to them. Citzens however? Second-class to the corporates. The root of the issue from my opinion is that money has becomed valued over what is right. Right is such a subjective term, much easier just to value money.
FOSS grows as long as people contribute. Contribution can be something as simple as filing a bug report. With so many different system configurations out there that really does help developers too. I'm satisfied with F/OSS, it's hardly ever the prettiest tool but they get the job done. I've saved so much money too with a trade off in hitting Google here and there for issues. To me it's worth it, I'm helping it grow.
Your little bit of charity gets you a whole operating system and ecosystem of applications back for Free. Selfish does not begin to describe your statement.
I am not an economist and I'm recollecting information over a decade ago in my experience. It's a good enough fit that it prompted you to refine the issue further.
Point: driver support on Linux could be much better. Although with no help from the manufacturers of the machinery reverse-engineering efforts are doing quite well. I view it as an education issue, yes RMS is extreme: I also agree with him in a lot of places but what device manufacturers should realize as well is that they are selling the machine not the software. The software is of little value: it is just to make the machine you make money off of go. Some manufacturers such as Canon have even been approached by the Linux Driver Project and offered to have drivers written for free for them under NDA and they have declined. Manufacturers think that maybe contributing to the software pot will devalue their effectiveness in competition but what they don't realize is that if as a group they released their specs at a minimum or just contributed code that it would level the playing field: they'd be back to competing on the quality of their actual machines. It will take a breakthrough in thought to fix this situation, some examples are encouraging such as Ati's support for writing open drivers for their graphics cards. As more efforts such as this accumulate someday we will see the issues of drivers be much lessened or go away entirely. It is part of the history of Linux: it's been an uphill battle the entire way but progress is being made.
If the application you need is broken you're supposed to fix it. Either by doing it yourself or supporting those who are doing it somehow. If it doesn't exist you are supposed to create it. Everyone doing this and letting evolution winnow the different visions is messy but arguably better.
It's not that Windows shouldn't exist its just that overall it is unhealthy for the market to have such a dominant player. Great for making money but not great for following what customers actually want instead of given.
Obviously in the short-term you get what you need right now by buying. In the long-run however Free software is much cheaper in cost. Support and tech's you'd have anyway: the transition is the biggest cost after that your maintenence and upfront costs are much better with Free. Stone-soup wise you shore up your little corner if you have to and the totality of everyone doing that means it all gets taken to the next level.
Actually what I was referring to was: Sub-Optimal Solutions. Up to the '90s it was a great matter of debate in economics. Many "learned" professors denied that it existed and that a market would always find the optimal solution. With the introduction of "lock-in" as a concept it is recognized that while markets will find optimal solutions they can become "stuck" with sub-optimal ones for a while. The time-scales are what matter, a market may view a few decades as a blip while to you and I that is quite a while.
Cathedral and Bazaar time. What you trade off in speed of development with the bazaar you gain in robustness from Cathedral top-down error. It takes longer but you are less likely to run into an evolutionary dead-end from well-intentioned global decisions. Which is why it is good that FreeBSD kernels exist in addtion to Linux ones and perhaps when Hurd becomes reality that will be genetic diversity as well. No single cause can kill them all.
Economists until very recently denied that the factor called "lock-in" even existed. Yes, a bunch of old stuffies insisting that what they say is the way the world works even when they miss some big pieces. I wish I could find the quote which showed that attitude however Google is now polluted so much with the phrase "lock-in" that it's all noise searching for when it wasn't that way. Left field: My operating system is Free, if everyone saw that obvious value and weren't tied to existing applications and data they'd all jump ship immediately and by doing so would also immediately raise my operating system's quality of code to amazing levels: just because of the weight of bug reports and new blood of code.
High-level: Save your differences from day to day, bittorrent those differences to others, merge back in differences from others. Low-level: OMG, we used different table-names.
The best outcome of this in light of Microsoft's monopoly position is that it breaks how they got there: many people use Internet Explorer simply because they are unaware of alternatives. This puts that front-and-center. No longer will a more experienced user get strange looks when they mention another browser with a funny name. Instead quite a few people will have seen the ballot screen and especially initially it will raise the talk about them. Long-term it is good as well, once people become aware they have a choice in browsers they may also as well begin to wonder if they have choices elsewhere.