Get rid of those hideous jaggies. Damn, it pisses me off everyone wants to release games for the system that makes everything the most ugly.
Shorter load times couldn't hurt either...
Seriously, I wonder what the heck they would do with distributed computing. Obviously, it's not going to give you any better graphics at all. Maybe in multiplayer games you could split up collision detection/physics work. Maybe this means they want to make p2p massively multiplayer games. Maybe they want to make insanely cool new AI systems.
This could really kick ass...but it's probably just hype.
You're totally right. I think people make the mistake of thinking of privacy as an all-or-nothing, absolute kind of thing, like freedom of speech. I have the absolute right to say whatever I want (well, almost...but that's how we like to think of it.) But using publicly available information any member of the public, given infinite time and resources, can probably figure out anything they want to figure out about me.
Does that mean I have no privacy? If privacy is all or nothing, yes. But instead we might think of the word "privacy" as refering to the amount of difficulty that people who aren't supposed have information about me have in getting said information about me.
Thinking of it that way, developments like this clearly reduce the privacy that we have, simply because they increase the convenience of accessing what is technically public information.
More power to you, I admire your dedication to your goal.
But you really can't complain that everyone else isn't doing the same thing. We want our consumer and fair use rights over media we purchase. So what's the point of having these rights if we aren't purchasing any media?
When you send an email, you can fake the headers, but if you have repeated two way communication, including quoted material, it's obvious you have a communication between two verifiable email addresses.
Verifiable to the two individuals sending and receiving the e-mail, not to any third party. Unless the third party checks servers that are in the headers, maybe. Without such a check either party could just make up all or part of the conversation.
Of course, if both sides agree that the e-mails were sent, I guess this isn't a problem. I consider it worrisome because the courts seem insistent on considering internet communication analogous to writing a letter, while people tend to regard it as speaking verbally.
I think that software companies should be legally liable if their product harms your system.
That's a much stronger law than the problem this article raises requires. The new.net program is modifying the OS intentionally. It's not a bug, it's an unadvertised feature that developers knew about. Holding developers responsible for what they don't know (bugs) may or may not be a good idea, but I can't see how it could be controversial to give damages to people who's computers have been intentionally sabotaged.
Wow, you actually read through all those typos and places where I forgot to keep typing what I was thinking? You are amazing!;)
This installer program sounds like a very good idea indeed.
I have a wacky extension proposal, though. If I understand this idea, this installer will prevent apps from writing over other. But if we give every resource/file a new group(!) we can even prevent them from reading/executing files that they shouldn't--only app-users that need a resource are added to the resource's group.
I must admit, in linux as it is today, this extension requires more paranoia than I can muster today. Maybe in the future if spyware became a problem with linux programs...
But from my ignorant perspective, your installer sounds like a really great idea. Maybe someone who wants to sell commercial software under Linux would want to implement it--as a free open source program that guarantees the validity of a commercial closed source program.
Assuming that most of us would like users to own their own computers, the name of the game would appear to be "minimize the number of people/companies you have to trust in order to efficiently use your computer." This is because once you've trusted Company A to supply your OS, trusting Company B to supply an application does not relieve vulnerabilities to A at all but adds vulnerabilities to B.
There are two paths we can take here:
A. Pick one company to put all of your trust in, and never install software from anyone else. This ideal company either develops the software almost in house or reads the source code that others have developed. Never install software created by anyone else unless you've read all of it's source code and compiled it yourself.
This means only companies large enough to do this can sell software, assuming a reasonably secure
B. Add the social and technical tools that this article and others suggest. Why the heck shouldn't it be illegal to INTENTIONALLY misrepresent what a piece of software is doing? Forget negligence--at least let's make false advertising illegal, huh? Why the heck should my operating system allow a video game to read my credit card number and modify my system?
Personally, I'd really like the ability to say "only let this program do X and Y and nothing else", where X might be (temporary) control of output devices and Y might be adding files to a particular directory. Yeah, I guess I could create a new user in Linux with just the permissions I want to give it for every program on my computer, then run the program with the appropriate user. But that would be a lot of work, even for me, and it wouldn't save every who uses computers whom I care about who happens to have better things to do in their life.
Actually, no, with the exception of games that sega has ported from Dreamcast because they couldn't sell any Dreamcasts (proof that capitalism doesn't work, BTW;) ), most of the games I would want to touch are for a single console only. All ten of PS2 games are PS2 only, all 4 of my gamecube games are gamecube only. Look at all the single console only games:
Super Smash Brothers, Rogue Leader, Super Monkey Ball, Pikmin
Halo, Dead or Alive 3, Jet Set Radio Future
Final Fantasy X, MGS 2, GTA3, Gran Turismo 3, Ico
In fact, the only game I can think of that's on all three current consoles that anyone actually wants is Tony Hawk. A game on 3 consoles can only use lowest common denominator hardware features.
Anyway, the reason for all of these "Wars" over consoles is the culture associated with each console. Nintendo's got the kids and nostaligia, Sony's got teenage boys, and X-Box has... uh, Microsoft. And everyone blames each other for games not being as good as they could be. Nostaligists (I confess this is my faction) blame teenagers and Sony for games not being as good they remember back in the day, teenagers blame kids for replacing blood and profanity with cuteness and Pokemon, and who doesn't hate Microsoft?
there are millions of lines of C, and they aren't going to go away just because you don't "like" the one language that allows a programmer to do just about anythign with their computers.
A. It's not THEIR computers we're talking about here. It's everyone's computer. Or if you're computer has a bug like this, the computer now belongs to Haxorz.
B. This type of error may be possible in any language, but real languages will throw a graceful exception or error when this error occurs, not give control of your entire system to the enemy.
I suppose open relay allows person A to send person B information they do NOT want to receive, while file sharing allows person B to get information that person A wants to share.
To block the first to indulge in privacy and common sense, to block the second is censorship (unless you're just blocking p2p because of bandwidth concerns).
But yeah, legality as always a different matter than truth...
...since characters are normally only rendered once each, and then cached...
I don't know a thing about anti-aliasing, but is that true? So a bitmap with alpha is just generated once for each character, and used over and over again everytime that character is used? Does this mean that anti-aliasing fails to let you draw characters at subpixel boundaries? I can't start drawing a bitmap at height 100.5, after all--I have to draw it at 100 or 101.
I've seen Flash games based on this idea...
I can't wait for the future, when you can just stick in a couple photographs of someone, let it generate the 3D model, THEN DO ILLEGAL THINGS TO DO THE 3D MODEL FOR EXTRA ILLEGAL ILLEGALITY!!!!
That's right, I'm praying for the day when ANY IDIOT can make games! Because idiots will sure offend the crap out of everyone, and isn't that Life's Highest Calling?
Because I will take pictures of YOU, then I will harrass the images of YOU, and YOU will not realize that you have been harassed! Harass! Harass! Harass!
What the heck? Are you talking about nerds violently taking over all the schools, and from there the world? Are you living in some kind of cartoon video game, or am I just totally misunderstanding you? Are these nerds planning to build DeathJustice Robots to Crush both Teacher and Bully once and for all?
Yeah, we all want to punch our teachers, but then we grow up and realize those guys are really poor, and we're not! (er...maybe later we grow and realize that's probably not something to take joy in...)
The problem is that so many people (probably not including you) who say "there is no absolute truth!" mean "I don't have to listen to any reasoned peaceful argument at all!"
When you state an opinion on an issue, you should be able to state your moral assumptions and how you came to that opinion from those assumptions. Moral assumptions are totally subjective, but the conclusions we draw from them are absolutely/objectively logically valid or logically invalid.
Once you have logically valid conclusions we can decide if I share your assumptions, or at least if the conclusions derived from my assumptions match the conclusions from yours.
News flash: Product fails because no one's buying it.
Anyways, PC's are a LUXURY, not a necessity. You can either afford the box or you can't. Plus, how much of that cost is actually Windows? No one knows, no one's talking.
The average consumer thinks Windows is "included" with their PC purchase. That means that in their mind it's free, not a major portion of the actual cost. As long as that price is hidden it won't be a factor in a purchasing decision.
Yes, logic is amazing, isn't it? The fact that so many consider it a luxury makes it all the more clear--if some offers them a CHEAPER box, they'll buy that one instead. They don't have to know or care how much of the cost goes towards Microsoft.
If all the average user wants to do is browse the web, read e-mail, and let their kids type their term papers (they probably don't even need to read *.DOC files) then either KDE or Gnome would give them all they need TODAY. So a vendor can install and set up one of those, and magically cut the price by $100 (or whatever). Which would mean a vast number of users running a computer without a Microsoft OS, a Microsoft browser, or any ability to read Microsoft formats.
At the very least, this will force Microsoft to ALWAYS sell (at least to OEM) a very low cost version of their OS. Maybe we'll see a low end Standard Home Edition and a high end Enhanced Home Edition?
Why should we breake one predatory company with two monopolies into two predatory companies with one monopoly each?
Because theoretically, each of the monopolies (OS, browser, office suite) bolsters the others. Breaking them apart would (we prayed) elminate this cross-monopoly effect.
1) Make voting for patently unconstitutional laws an impeachable offense. After all, the first thing a politician elected to office is required to do is to swear to defend the constitution.
2) Get private money out of electoral politics. Period. The system is so dirty right now it is positively gruesome. There is _no_ issue other than real campaign finance reform. Until that occurs, our govenment -- and hence our laws -- will remain totally insane.
Assuming you want to eliminate soft money issue ads (as even current imperfect campaign finance proposals suggest doing), anyone voting for proposal number 2 will be impeached under proposal number 1. Yes, a law making it illegal to express a point of view during campaign season on the airwaves would seem to violate any reasonable construction of the First Amendment...
So I suggest you change the order of your solutions.;)
Sheep in the Big City, is for people who couldn't tell a joke if they were beaten over the head with comedy. And who think "the far side" is too funny.
Sheep in the Big City is just Rocky and Bullwinkle. Really. I thought it was all right the one time I watched it.
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Get rid of those hideous jaggies. Damn, it pisses me off everyone wants to release games for the system that makes everything the most ugly.
Shorter load times couldn't hurt either...
Seriously, I wonder what the heck they would do with distributed computing. Obviously, it's not going to give you any better graphics at all. Maybe in multiplayer games you could split up collision detection/physics work. Maybe this means they want to make p2p massively multiplayer games. Maybe they want to make insanely cool new AI systems.
This could really kick ass...but it's probably just hype.
BUT FIX THE DAMN JAGGIES FIRST!!!! ; )
You're totally right. I think people make the mistake of thinking of privacy as an all-or-nothing, absolute kind of thing, like freedom of speech. I have the absolute right to say whatever I want (well, almost...but that's how we like to think of it.) But using publicly available information any member of the public, given infinite time and resources, can probably figure out anything they want to figure out about me.
Does that mean I have no privacy? If privacy is all or nothing, yes. But instead we might think of the word "privacy" as refering to the amount of difficulty that people who aren't supposed have information about me have in getting said information about me.
Thinking of it that way, developments like this clearly reduce the privacy that we have, simply because they increase the convenience of accessing what is technically public information.
More power to you, I admire your dedication to your goal.
But you really can't complain that everyone else isn't doing the same thing. We want our consumer and fair use rights over media we purchase. So what's the point of having these rights if we aren't purchasing any media?
Verifiable to the two individuals sending and receiving the e-mail, not to any third party. Unless the third party checks servers that are in the headers, maybe. Without such a check either party could just make up all or part of the conversation.
Of course, if both sides agree that the e-mails were sent, I guess this isn't a problem. I consider it worrisome because the courts seem insistent on considering internet communication analogous to writing a letter, while people tend to regard it as speaking verbally.
That's a much stronger law than the problem this article raises requires. The new.net program is modifying the OS intentionally. It's not a bug, it's an unadvertised feature that developers knew about. Holding developers responsible for what they don't know (bugs) may or may not be a good idea, but I can't see how it could be controversial to give damages to people who's computers have been intentionally sabotaged.
Wow, you actually read through all those typos and places where I forgot to keep typing what I was thinking? You are amazing! ;)
This installer program sounds like a very good idea indeed.
I have a wacky extension proposal, though. If I understand this idea, this installer will prevent apps from writing over other. But if we give every resource/file a new group(!) we can even prevent them from reading/executing files that they shouldn't--only app-users that need a resource are added to the resource's group.
I must admit, in linux as it is today, this extension requires more paranoia than I can muster today. Maybe in the future if spyware became a problem with linux programs...
But from my ignorant perspective, your installer sounds like a really great idea. Maybe someone who wants to sell commercial software under Linux would want to implement it--as a free open source program that guarantees the validity of a commercial closed source program.
I'd rather someone else sued them so I wouldn't have to worry about it messing my computer up in the first place.
Assuming that most of us would like users to own their own computers, the name of the game would appear to be "minimize the number of people/companies you have to trust in order to efficiently use your computer." This is because once you've trusted Company A to supply your OS, trusting Company B to supply an application does not relieve vulnerabilities to A at all but adds vulnerabilities to B.
There are two paths we can take here:
A. Pick one company to put all of your trust in, and never install software from anyone else. This ideal company either develops the software almost in house or reads the source code that others have developed. Never install software created by anyone else unless you've read all of it's source code and compiled it yourself.
This means only companies large enough to do this can sell software, assuming a reasonably secure
B. Add the social and technical tools that this article and others suggest. Why the heck shouldn't it be illegal to INTENTIONALLY misrepresent what a piece of software is doing? Forget negligence--at least let's make false advertising illegal, huh? Why the heck should my operating system allow a video game to read my credit card number and modify my system?
Personally, I'd really like the ability to say "only let this program do X and Y and nothing else", where X might be (temporary) control of output devices and Y might be adding files to a particular directory. Yeah, I guess I could create a new user in Linux with just the permissions I want to give it for every program on my computer, then run the program with the appropriate user. But that would be a lot of work, even for me, and it wouldn't save every who uses computers whom I care about who happens to have better things to do in their life.
Meaning the thing you are trying to contain is a good thing, that we'd like to have more of if only we had space for it.
yeah, those guys are so very good at making their work approachable to the common man. No elitism or arrogance in their fields.
Mr. opkool, from now on I will call you Dr. Aside, Master of the Parenthetical Clarification!
Garfield is a crazy half anime techno thriller now? Great Caesar's Ghost!
Actually, no, with the exception of games that sega has ported from Dreamcast because they couldn't sell any Dreamcasts (proof that capitalism doesn't work, BTW ;) ), most of the games I would want to touch are for a single console only. All ten of PS2 games are PS2 only, all 4 of my gamecube games are gamecube only. Look at all the single console only games:
... uh, Microsoft. And everyone blames each other for games not being as good as they could be. Nostaligists (I confess this is my faction) blame teenagers and Sony for games not being as good they remember back in the day, teenagers blame kids for replacing blood and profanity with cuteness and Pokemon, and who doesn't hate Microsoft?
Super Smash Brothers, Rogue Leader, Super Monkey Ball, Pikmin
Halo, Dead or Alive 3, Jet Set Radio Future
Final Fantasy X, MGS 2, GTA3, Gran Turismo 3, Ico
In fact, the only game I can think of that's on all three current consoles that anyone actually wants is Tony Hawk. A game on 3 consoles can only use lowest common denominator hardware features.
Anyway, the reason for all of these "Wars" over consoles is the culture associated with each console. Nintendo's got the kids and nostaligia, Sony's got teenage boys, and X-Box has
This, my friends, is a recipe for battle.
A. It's not THEIR computers we're talking about here. It's everyone's computer. Or if you're computer has a bug like this, the computer now belongs to Haxorz.
B. This type of error may be possible in any language, but real languages will throw a graceful exception or error when this error occurs, not give control of your entire system to the enemy.
I could be wrong, but I believe Java has protection against == vs. =. At least, if you do
if (a = 7) {
}
Java will complain because a = 7 is not boolean.
I suppose open relay allows person A to send person B information they do NOT want to receive, while file sharing allows person B to get information that person A wants to share.
To block the first to indulge in privacy and common sense, to block the second is censorship (unless you're just blocking p2p because of bandwidth concerns).
But yeah, legality as always a different matter than truth...
Gotta catch 'em all! Pokemon!
I don't know a thing about anti-aliasing, but is that true? So a bitmap with alpha is just generated once for each character, and used over and over again everytime that character is used?
Does this mean that anti-aliasing fails to let you draw characters at subpixel boundaries? I can't start drawing a bitmap at height 100.5, after all--I have to draw it at 100 or 101.
I've seen Flash games based on this idea... I can't wait for the future, when you can just stick in a couple photographs of someone, let it generate the 3D model, THEN DO ILLEGAL THINGS TO DO THE 3D MODEL FOR EXTRA ILLEGAL ILLEGALITY!!!! That's right, I'm praying for the day when ANY IDIOT can make games! Because idiots will sure offend the crap out of everyone, and isn't that Life's Highest Calling? Because I will take pictures of YOU, then I will harrass the images of YOU, and YOU will not realize that you have been harassed! Harass! Harass! Harass!
What the heck? Are you talking about nerds violently taking over all the schools, and from there the world? Are you living in some kind of cartoon video game, or am I just totally misunderstanding you? Are these nerds planning to build DeathJustice Robots to Crush both Teacher and Bully once and for all?
Yeah, we all want to punch our teachers, but then we grow up and realize those guys are really poor, and we're not! (er...maybe later we grow and realize that's probably not something to take joy in...)
The problem is that so many people (probably not including you) who say "there is no absolute truth!" mean "I don't have to listen to any reasoned peaceful argument at all!"
When you state an opinion on an issue, you should be able to state your moral assumptions and how you came to that opinion from those assumptions. Moral assumptions are totally subjective, but the conclusions we draw from them are absolutely/objectively logically valid or logically invalid.
Once you have logically valid conclusions we can decide if I share your assumptions, or at least if the conclusions derived from my assumptions match the conclusions from yours.
Anyways, PC's are a LUXURY, not a necessity. You can either afford the box or you can't. Plus, how much of that cost is actually Windows? No one knows, no one's talking.
The average consumer thinks Windows is "included" with their PC purchase. That means that in their mind it's free, not a major portion of the actual cost. As long as that price is hidden it won't be a factor in a purchasing decision.
Yes, logic is amazing, isn't it? The fact that so many consider it a luxury makes it all the more clear--if some offers them a CHEAPER box, they'll buy that one instead. They don't have to know or care how much of the cost goes towards Microsoft.
If all the average user wants to do is browse the web, read e-mail, and let their kids type their term papers (they probably don't even need to read *.DOC files) then either KDE or Gnome would give them all they need TODAY. So a vendor can install and set up one of those, and magically cut the price by $100 (or whatever). Which would mean a vast number of users running a computer without a Microsoft OS, a Microsoft browser, or any ability to read Microsoft formats.
At the very least, this will force Microsoft to ALWAYS sell (at least to OEM) a very low cost version of their OS. Maybe we'll see a low end Standard Home Edition and a high end Enhanced Home Edition?
Because theoretically, each of the monopolies (OS, browser, office suite) bolsters the others. Breaking them apart would (we prayed) elminate this cross-monopoly effect.
2) Get private money out of electoral politics. Period. The system is so dirty right now it is positively gruesome. There is _no_ issue other than real campaign finance reform. Until that occurs, our govenment -- and hence our laws -- will remain totally insane.
Assuming you want to eliminate soft money issue ads (as even current imperfect campaign finance proposals suggest doing), anyone voting for proposal number 2 will be impeached under proposal number 1. Yes, a law making it illegal to express a point of view during campaign season on the airwaves would seem to violate any reasonable construction of the First Amendment...
So I suggest you change the order of your solutions. ;)
Sheep in the Big City is just Rocky and Bullwinkle. Really. I thought it was all right the one time I watched it.