Paranoia doesn't successfully rip Natalie Imbruglia's 'White Lillies Island', which is a
CDS disc. The TOC is mangled in some interesting way as well as the data, so it can't
recognise the last five tracks.
If you mean proprietary as in fully
documented (you probably want to start in the API
section) and open you'd be correct. In fact, there are several projects started that will
play Quicktime movies fine under Linux.*
Perhaps you meant the proprietary and closed Sorenson codec?
You quoted half of my sentence.
The whole sentence is:
I agree with everything
you said, however
we're talking about
EULAs, i.e. the end user license agreements,
and few things need clarification.
The most important thing here, is that
the end user does not even have to accept the
GNU GPL to use the software.
0. (...)
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are
outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is
covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made
by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants
you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited
by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any
work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and
conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
The end user license agreements restrict the
rights of the end user of the software,
"if you click here/run the software,
you agree with the license..."
etc.
You can however use software under the GNU GPL,
when you haven't read or don't agree with the
GPL, as the end user.
You don't have to even read the license, unless
you want to redistrubute the software,
but then you're no longer an end user.
So, my point is, that in the discussion about
end user license agreements --
when we start talking about GPL
restrictions or protected rights,
and what does it mean to the user --
it should be stated at the beginning,
that the GNU General Public License
means exactly nothing to the end user.
Its going to revoultionize the MMORPG
genre, with the most complex infrastructure(youll have land, you can hire NPC , you
can create towns. If youre really good at making blasters you could open a store(and
hire a npc to sell em..) etc etc etc)
The screenshots
look impressive.
It would be cool if I could play that on
my platform.
And however I realize, that I belong
to the minority of gamers
(which is good, like Mark Twain has already said,
"Whenever you find yourself on the
side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."), I still think that when they
would wisely program this game for
manydifferentgamingplatforms and
fewdesktopones,
it'd be a piece of cake to release
other version.
But I'm affraid that they would prefer us to
useotheroptions,
unfortunately...
err... the best format for photos was NEVER GIF. IFF, TGA and TIFF all predate it.
You're right, I used IFF on Amiga and TIFF on PC
for very important high quality pictures.
Now I use PNG for that.
What I was saying about was a way to
save pictures with enough (not best) quality,
taking minimum of disk space.
And back then space was
much important than now.
No one is ever going to use Ogg anything except for uber-geek OSS zealots. I know I
sure as hell am not converting 1000 MP3s into.oggs anytime soon. Nor am I going to
use their slow-ass encoder to encode new music.
The standard response is "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because it's not popular enough" or "I
won't use Ogg Vorbis, because I have already so many MP3s". People seem to forget that
they can have MP3 files
and Ogg Vorbis files.
I remember when the best file format for photos available was GIF. That time when I
digitalized a photo I stored it as a GIF file. But when I first heard about
JPEG, I didn't say
"it's nice but not popular". I didn't also say that "I have lots of GIFs and I don't want to
convert them". I just started saving
the new pictures
in JPEG format, leaving the old
GIFs alone. Now I have converted those old files to PNG, because of
problems with Unisys, but I didn't have to do it, I had been using old GIFs and new JPEGs for many years.
But it's totally off-topic.
We're not talking here about which
audio format do
you want to store your ripped CDs in.
We're not even talking about which
video codec do the
corporations and artists want to
use to publish their movies and streaming video
(which by the way, is a matter of saving
milions of dollars).
I'm not talking about
Ogg Vorbis vs.
MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 --
I'm talking about Ogg Tarkin vs.
MPEG-4, in the terms of license
and in the context of free software.
Maybe read what
I said:
Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free
software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it,
will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?
All I was talking about is
free software.
I thought I was clear enough.
Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free
software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it,
will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?
If free like free beer, you're right.
If free like free speech, you're not.
If the program is gratis (like free beer)
but it's not a free software,
it can be possible to
control how many people are using it, so
you can control
how much money you have to pay to
MPEG people.
But if it's a free software, you can't control
how many people are using it.
So I suppose, you wanted to say:
If free like free speech, you're right.
If free like free beer, you're not.
which is exaclty right.
We already have
proprietary
Quicktime
or Windows Media
players to download for free.
Apple and Microsoft can pay $2M/year for MPEG-4
but if they don't want to, they can always offer
a fixed number of copies to download,
forcing you ro gegister.
But people making a
free
software movie player,
can't force such restrictions.
You know, I don't really have a problem with them charging $.25 per codec.
Remember that
even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it
impossible to implement as free software.
If you write a free software encoder
and ten milions of people will start using it,
will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys,
begging people to stop using it in more copies?
CDS works by purposely introducing errors into the audio data on the disc. Audio CD
players are supposed to interpolate across the errors such that there is supposed to be
no difference in sound quality. But CD-ROMs--being designed to read data CDs
where every bit has to be correct--don't do this interpolation, and thus they see the
disc as having lots of errors and crap out.
Take a look at
CDDA Paranoia.
I use it to rip old CDs, full of scratches,
which are unplayable
on any CD audio player I have.
But after I rip them with Paranoia, I can't
hear any defects.
One of the answers on Paranoia FAQ
nicely explains all of the problems with
ripping CDs,
and generally
all of the differences between playing CD
on audio CD player, and reading audio CD as
a stream of bits with a computer.
These differences are exactly what
is addressed by all of those
so called "copy-protection" techniques.
The "copy-protected""CDs"
have to be played by audio CD players
(otherwise no one would buy them),
but not
ripped with computers
(like it made any problem with copying them,
even if it's possible to make CDs
completely unplayable on CD-ROM drives...
When will they learn?)
so all they can do, is to address the
differences between them.
It's very good to know, how it really works.
The legend of characters on Paranoia progress meter
gives a good introduction to what Paranoia can
and what it can't fix (yet):
A hyphen indicates that two blocks overlapped properly, but they were
skewed (frame jitter).
This case is completely corrected by Paranoia
and is not a cause for concern.
A plus indicates not only frame jitter, but an unreported, uncorrected
loss of streaming in the middle of an atomic read operation. That is,
the drive lost its place while reading data, and restarted in some
random incorrect location without alerting the kernel. This case is also
corrected by Paranoia.
An 'e' indicates that a transport level SCSI or ATAPI error was
caught and corrected.
Paranoia will completely repair such an error
without audible defects.
An "X" indicates a scratch was caught and corrected.
Cdparanoia will interpolate over any missing/corrupt samples.
An asterisk indicates a scratch and jitter both occurred in this general
area of the read.
Cdparanoia will interpolate over any missing/corrupt samples.
A ! indicates that a read error got through the stage one of error
correction and was caught by stage two. Many '!' are a cause for
concern; it means that the drive is making continuous silent errors that
look identical on each re-read, a condition that can't always be
detected. Although the presence of a '!' means the error was corrected,
it also means that similar errors are probably passing by unnoticed.
Upcoming releases of cdparanoia will address this issue.
A V indicates a skip that could not be repaired or a sector totally
obliterated on the medium (hard read error).
A 'V' marker generally
results in some audible defect in the sample.
So,
however the next
copy-protection of the week which this time
really works!(tm) will work,
I'm quite sure that it will be no problem
to Paranoia,
maybe after few days, because Paranoia
simply interpolates over any
missing/corrupt samples,
like audio players do.
No need to say, thay
it will always be no problem
to audio input on my Sound Blaster...
Mod this up! Indeed, this is a HORRIBLE script, stupid idea, lame lame lame.
Poeple, can't you see that
it was a joke?
In fact, quite a good one, for anyone who knows
anything about Perl and CGI.
And about ";rm -rf/;" as a query,
I hope you don't run your CGI scripts with
write privileges to your whole filesystem!
Don't get me wrong, I always use taint mode
and I always tell people to use it as well.
It's just that this example
can be quite misleading.
If the CGI script can possibly remove the root
directory, than you have
a much more serious problem than
the script itself.
By the way, nice moderation:
someone posts
a script as an obvious joke
-- it's Score:3, Informative.
Then, someone
says it's a horrible script
-- again, it's Score:3, Informative.
I wonder if people who moderated this thread,
have ever read it,
not to say about understanding the subject...
Ok, I can understand that someone didn't get
the joke and it's not moderated as Funny...
But Informative?!
That script doesn't even work for God's sake!
The standard response is
"I won't use Ogg Vorbis,
because it's not popular enough"
or "I won't use Ogg Vorbis,
because I have already so many MP3s".
People seem to forget that they can have MP3
files and Ogg Vorbis files.
I remember when the best file format for
photos available was GIF.
That time when I digitalized a photo I stored
it as a GIF file.
But when I first heard about JPEG, I didn't say
"it's nice but not popular".
I didn't also say that "I have lots of GIFs
and I don't want to convert them".
I just started saving the new pictures
in JPEG format, leaving the old GIFs alone.
Now I have converted those old files to
PNG,
because of
problems with Unisys, but I didn't have to do
it, I had been using old GIFs and new JPEGs
for many years.
So your response is quite unique, in the sense
that you're talking about technical aspects.
But the lack of FPU is not so hard problem.
When I had 386SX I was writing programs with
floating point operations,
but I didn't have FPU.
At that time, I didn't think about it.
Later I found out that my C compiler was
emulating the floating point instructions
using the standard, integer-only 80386 CPU.
There are generally two ways of using
real numbers without FPU:
Emulate the floating point arithmetic, or
use the fixed point arithmetic.
There were time, not so long time ago,
when almost no one had a FPU.
Still, in some areas, integers resolution
was not good enough.
This really galls me. A simple Google search will reveal a massive number of
references to "open source" prior to March 1998. This stinks of revisionism.
The "open source" label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd
1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris
Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John "maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin (both
of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and
Eric Raymond.
(...)
We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been
associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same
pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about
tactics and a new label. "Open source," contributed by Chris Peterson, was the
best thing we came up with.
I quoted from both sides,
FSF
and OSI,
to be truely objective,
but I see you still think
that I'm not fair, even when I quote from people,
to whom I'm supposedly not fair...
Next time please do a little research before you state
that something
"stinks of revisionism",
because if this what you comment are the
exact words of people who you advocate,
it can look really stupid.
You may dislike the person of
Richard Stallman
or you may not agree with the
GNU philosophy --
this is your personal choice --
but please don't spread the misinformation.
So open source rejects your ideals of freedom, and has done since its foundation?
Someone better notify the press:)
The first priority of the
Free Software Foundation since the beginning
in 1985 was always the freedom.
Open Source Initiative
came to existence in 1998 mosltly because
the freedom related
to the term "free software"
was not very convenient. The
OSI
has chosen to use term "open source" instead of
"free software", because it's easier to persuade corporations to use
"open source software" than "free software",
focusing on technical rather than ethical
aspects.
But the main priority of FSF
was not to make the GNU more popular, but to make
people aware of
the freedom they should have, while the GNU sotfware was only a tool for that purpose.
[common; also adj. `open-source'] Term coined in March 1998
following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in
source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use,
modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell
the hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream
by avoiding the negative connotations (to suits) of the term "free
software". For discussion of the follow-on tactics and their
consequences, see the Open Source Initiative site.
In 1998, some of the people in the free software community began using the term "open source
software" instead of "free software" to describe what they do.
While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference
which name we use: different words convey different ideas. The term "open source" quickly became
associated with a different approach, a different philosophy, different values, and even a different
criterion for which licenses are acceptable. The Free Software movement and the Open Source
movement are today effectively separate movements, although we can and do work together on practical
projects.
This article describes why using the term ``open source'' does not solve any problems, and in fact creates
some. These are the reasons why it is better to stick with "free software."
Other riposte:
Gee, there's two interpretations of your post, one of which is purely
subjective but has nothing to do with C# or word files, the other based on implications one
might make from this purely subjective idea into how C#, Java or.doc files should be
designed. I guess I'll assume you're not a moron and consider it the latter.
I think you strongly overestimate
my deep insight
when I said: It's a good practice to not agree for anything you don't understand... When you don't know
if you should say yes - just say no.
In fact, however deep and full of genius
that might have sounded
(considering all of those deep references to
C# and Java linguistic design,
together with
Microsoft Office file formats
and the security model of software
from Sun Microsystems
and Microsoft), the shameful truth is,
I was just trying to get some attention
saying something funny and, well, I got
more attention than ever.
But thanks for
assuming that I'm not a moron.
And however I realize that it was just a
sociotechnical trick
(to force my reaction
"oh, I can't disagree because
that would mean I'm a moron!"),
I still think that was really sweet.:)
It depends.
If I'm in the paranoid mood, I block
remote connections to my ephemeral ports
and kindly ask my users to use passive
ftp sessions.
If I'm in more careless and indulgent mood,
than I'm generally cool if that's a tcp
connection from port 21, when there is
open socket from 1024-4999 on my host to 21
on that remote host, but I do check if it's
a trusted ftp client listening on my 4999.
But my firewall doesn't pop up a dialog box
with "[Yes] [No]" for every suspicious packet.
If it's suspicious, it just ignores the syn packet,
usually not even sending a rst.
But sometimes when I'm bored, I send syn ack
and see what is sent later...
I often listen to suspicious connections
on port 23, those are the most fun.
Once I've written a fake telnet client
giving access to anyone for any user/pass
and running bash in a chroot jail.
Quite a few people thought they got root
and it was quite funny looking at how they
were trying to open different backdoors.
And the fake file system in my chroot jail
was such a mess that they often didn't know
what OS actually was it!
Man, those where the days!:)
Attention, please.
I just said:
"It's the same as a rental of DVDs
but you don't have to return them"
which could have violated the intellectual
property of Flexplay Technologies, Inc.
DISCLAIMER: No Return Rental is a registered trademark of Flexplay Technologies, Inc.
Thank you for your attention.
By the way,
I was trying to be funny in
my previous post,
but now, after I've read
Flexplay FAQ, I see
that my comment was not funny
at all,
they're seriously advertising their technology
pretty much in the same way...
Now, that's funny!
The positive aspect of their success would
be fact,
thatsomepeople
would have more garbage to collect, I guess.
I'm not sure if there are any official numbers attesting to this, but the few people I
know of that actually spend money on pay-per-view (and I do mean "few," since it
tends to cost more than a 3- or 5-day VHS rental) videotape the PPV broadcast.
But, thank God, now we'll have a revolutionary
idea!
It's the same as a rental of DVDs but you don't
have to return them!
Sure, it's more expensive and makes lots of
garbage,
but hey, you don't have to return the discs
after you rent them!
And it finally means the end to situations
like this:
You watch a movie, and you don't get a joke.
What are you doing?
You watch that joke once again! That's right!
You paid for once but you see it twice!
It's a theft of intellectual property!
Now it is going to end!
You won't steal from poor artists ever again!
Finally, it's going to end that illegal madness
of piracy!
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I like
to understand decisions which I make.
That was fine when we were only effected by decisions we make on our own.
So you suggest that I should not like
to understand decisions which I make?
I don't understand what is your point.
I just stated my personal, subjective
opinion. I said
what I like and I will not
stop liking that,
because other people don't like the same.
That's a matter of taste.
I like to know what I'm doing.
Therefore, I don't say yes, when
being asked questions I don't understand.
And however controversial it may seem to be,
it's just my opinion, so the only
reasonable riposte would be:
"That's funny, I don't like
to understand decisions which I make.
You probably really are old-fashioned."
or "Me too!"
Slashdot Mirror
It suprises me, however, that my post was modded down, while yours was modded up...
GNU General Public License, Section 3, Paragraph 0:
GNU General Public License, Section 3, Paragraph 5: The end user license agreements restrict the rights of the end user of the software, "if you click here/run the software, you agree with the license..." etc. You can however use software under the GNU GPL, when you haven't read or don't agree with the GPL, as the end user. You don't have to even read the license, unless you want to redistrubute the software, but then you're no longer an end user.So, my point is, that in the discussion about end user license agreements -- when we start talking about GPL restrictions or protected rights, and what does it mean to the user -- it should be stated at the beginning, that the GNU General Public License means exactly nothing to the end user.
The screenshots look impressive. It would be cool if I could play that on my platform. And however I realize, that I belong to the minority of gamers (which is good, like Mark Twain has already said, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."), I still think that when they would wisely program this game for many different gaming platforms and few desktop ones, it'd be a piece of cake to release other version. But I'm affraid that they would prefer us to use other options, unfortunately...
Oh, well, I gues I'll just have to wait for Mason, or Warewolf, or Sands of Syllus, or Archipelago, or Catacombs, or Belchfire, or Acid Tempest, or Phoenix...
See the #futurama IRC channel on Dalnet.
We're not talking here about which audio format do you want to store your ripped CDs in. We're not even talking about which video codec do the corporations and artists want to use to publish their movies and streaming video (which by the way, is a matter of saving milions of dollars). I'm not talking about Ogg Vorbis vs. MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 -- I'm talking about Ogg Tarkin vs. MPEG-4, in the terms of license and in the context of free software. Maybe read what I said:
All I was talking about is free software. I thought I was clear enough.If the program is gratis (like free beer) but it's not a free software, it can be possible to control how many people are using it, so you can control how much money you have to pay to MPEG people. But if it's a free software, you can't control how many people are using it.
So I suppose, you wanted to say:
which is exaclty right. We already have proprietary Quicktime or Windows Media players to download for free. Apple and Microsoft can pay $2M/year for MPEG-4 but if they don't want to, they can always offer a fixed number of copies to download, forcing you ro gegister. But people making a free software movie player, can't force such restrictions.I think I'll just wait for Ogg Tarkin.
One of the answers on Paranoia FAQ nicely explains all of the problems with ripping CDs, and generally all of the differences between playing CD on audio CD player, and reading audio CD as a stream of bits with a computer. These differences are exactly what is addressed by all of those so called "copy-protection" techniques.
The "copy-protected" "CDs" have to be played by audio CD players (otherwise no one would buy them), but not ripped with computers (like it made any problem with copying them, even if it's possible to make CDs completely unplayable on CD-ROM drives... When will they learn?) so all they can do, is to address the differences between them. It's very good to know, how it really works.
The legend of characters on Paranoia progress meter gives a good introduction to what Paranoia can and what it can't fix (yet):
-
A hyphen indicates that two blocks overlapped properly, but they were
skewed (frame jitter).
This case is completely corrected by Paranoia
and is not a cause for concern.
-
A plus indicates not only frame jitter, but an unreported, uncorrected
loss of streaming in the middle of an atomic read operation. That is,
the drive lost its place while reading data, and restarted in some
random incorrect location without alerting the kernel. This case is also
corrected by Paranoia.
-
An 'e' indicates that a transport level SCSI or ATAPI error was
caught and corrected.
Paranoia will completely repair such an error
without audible defects.
-
An "X" indicates a scratch was caught and corrected.
Cdparanoia will interpolate over any missing/corrupt samples.
-
An asterisk indicates a scratch and jitter both occurred in this general
area of the read.
Cdparanoia will interpolate over any missing/corrupt samples.
-
A ! indicates that a read error got through the stage one of error
correction and was caught by stage two. Many '!' are a cause for
concern; it means that the drive is making continuous silent errors that
look identical on each re-read, a condition that can't always be
detected. Although the presence of a '!' means the error was corrected,
it also means that similar errors are probably passing by unnoticed.
Upcoming releases of cdparanoia will address this issue.
-
A V indicates a skip that could not be repaired or a sector totally
obliterated on the medium (hard read error).
A 'V' marker generally
results in some audible defect in the sample.
So, however the next copy-protection of the week which this time really works!(tm) will work, I'm quite sure that it will be no problem to Paranoia, maybe after few days, because Paranoia simply interpolates over any missing/corrupt samples, like audio players do. No need to say, thay it will always be no problem to audio input on my Sound Blaster...Read Larry's Apocalypses -- 1, 2, 3 and 4 -- to see what I mean.
And about ";rm -rf /;" as a query,
I hope you don't run your CGI scripts with
write privileges to your whole filesystem!
Don't get me wrong, I always use taint mode
and I always tell people to use it as well.
It's just that this example
can be quite misleading.
If the CGI script can possibly remove the root
directory, than you have
a much more serious problem than
the script itself.
By the way, nice moderation: someone posts a script as an obvious joke -- it's Score:3, Informative. Then, someone says it's a horrible script -- again, it's Score:3, Informative. I wonder if people who moderated this thread, have ever read it, not to say about understanding the subject... Ok, I can understand that someone didn't get the joke and it's not moderated as Funny... But Informative?! That script doesn't even work for God's sake!
-
No, and there also aren't any that support MIDI. What's your point? Unpopular
technology doesn't tend to be supported by vendors and idealism is utterly meaningless
when it throws money away -- welcome to the real world.
-
I can't understand why you think a company
would spend money on adding support for that format unless it would be a selling point.
(...) The vast majority of my
linux using friends still use mp3, and you can bet almost no one in the windows world uses
ogg.
-
I don't use Ogg Vorbis. I think I looked into it a while back, but I spent too
long ripping all my CDs to switch. That's the real issue.
-
Ogg is _NOT_ better then MP3 from a market standpoint. Every 6 months there will be
some new format that improves the compression and sound quality. (...) MP3 is
good enough, and it is here to stay.
The standard response is "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because it's not popular enough" or "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because I have already so many MP3s". People seem to forget that they can have MP3 files and Ogg Vorbis files.I remember when the best file format for photos available was GIF. That time when I digitalized a photo I stored it as a GIF file. But when I first heard about JPEG, I didn't say "it's nice but not popular". I didn't also say that "I have lots of GIFs and I don't want to convert them". I just started saving the new pictures in JPEG format, leaving the old GIFs alone. Now I have converted those old files to PNG, because of problems with Unisys, but I didn't have to do it, I had been using old GIFs and new JPEGs for many years.
So your response is quite unique, in the sense that you're talking about technical aspects. But the lack of FPU is not so hard problem.
When I had 386SX I was writing programs with floating point operations, but I didn't have FPU. At that time, I didn't think about it. Later I found out that my C compiler was emulating the floating point instructions using the standard, integer-only 80386 CPU.
There are generally two ways of using real numbers without FPU:
- Emulate the floating point arithmetic, or
- use the fixed point arithmetic.
There were time, not so long time ago, when almost no one had a FPU. Still, in some areas, integers resolution was not good enough.Read the History of the OSI:
I quoted from both sides, FSF and OSI, to be truely objective, but I see you still think that I'm not fair, even when I quote from people, to whom I'm supposedly not fair...Next time please do a little research before you state that something "stinks of revisionism", because if this what you comment are the exact words of people who you advocate, it can look really stupid.
In my post, I haven't said anything which the Open Source Initiative doesn't agree with. The text you commented was written by one of the OSI creators and advocates. Still, you're not satisfied.
I hope you get the point now. What else can I say... To paraphrase your words, This stinks of ignorance.
Please, think about it.
Have you seen any hardware player of Ogg Vorbis format?
Remember that the free software in FSF sense is not only GNU software or not even only software under the GNU General Public License, but also software under X11, Expat, BSD, W3C, Python, Artistic, Zope, Arphic, xinetd, LaTeX, Mozilla and lots of other licenses. The license doesn't even have to be compatible with the GNU GPL for the software to be considered a free software by the Free Software Foundation.
You may dislike the person of Richard Stallman or you may not agree with the GNU philosophy -- this is your personal choice -- but please don't spread the misinformation.
The Jargon Lexicon open source definition:
From Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source":
...than I really think we should go for it.
It depends. If I'm in the paranoid mood, I block remote connections to my ephemeral ports and kindly ask my users to use passive ftp sessions. If I'm in more careless and indulgent mood, than I'm generally cool if that's a tcp connection from port 21, when there is open socket from 1024-4999 on my host to 21 on that remote host, but I do check if it's a trusted ftp client listening on my 4999. But my firewall doesn't pop up a dialog box with "[Yes] [No]" for every suspicious packet. If it's suspicious, it just ignores the syn packet, usually not even sending a rst. But sometimes when I'm bored, I send syn ack and see what is sent later... I often listen to suspicious connections on port 23, those are the most fun. Once I've written a fake telnet client giving access to anyone for any user/pass and running bash in a chroot jail. Quite a few people thought they got root and it was quite funny looking at how they were trying to open different backdoors. And the fake file system in my chroot jail was such a mess that they often didn't know what OS actually was it! Man, those where the days! :)
DISCLAIMER:
No Return Rental is a registered trademark of Flexplay Technologies, Inc.
Thank you for your attention.
By the way, I was trying to be funny in my previous post, but now, after I've read Flexplay FAQ, I see that my comment was not funny at all, they're seriously advertising their technology pretty much in the same way... Now, that's funny!
The positive aspect of their success would be fact, that some people would have more garbage to collect, I guess.
I don't understand what is your point. I just stated my personal, subjective opinion. I said what I like and I will not stop liking that, because other people don't like the same. That's a matter of taste. I like to know what I'm doing. Therefore, I don't say yes, when being asked questions I don't understand. And however controversial it may seem to be, it's just my opinion, so the only reasonable riposte would be: "That's funny, I don't like to understand decisions which I make. You probably really are old-fashioned." or "Me too!"