even if they were never registered with the copyright office
Actually, there are a few restrictions. Up until 1980-something, unless you put "Copyright 1993 Foobar" or "[copyright symbol] 1993 Foobar" on a work, it didn't get copyright protection.
FastTrack -- the protocol is barely an improvement over the original gnutella, and with some additions from the LimeWire people, there are no improvements. It's also closed.
DC -- totally different, and from a technical perspective, much less impressive. Little more than IRC+DCC with a non-idiotic interface.
Pr0n priority levels have been a concern of many P2P network users for some time. While the collection of protocol updates in gnutella2 has many general performance enhancements, it does (rather glaringly) lack any improvements specifically addressing the pr0n issue. A good deal of user upset has been produced by this -- however, fortunately much of the furor is undeserved.
Improvements to improve your pr0n viewing experience are well underway in many *clients*, rather than in the protocol itself -- protocol changes would produce compatibility issues. A number of proposed improvements include changes to the routing system to use dictionary-based priority changing. Query and result packets containing entries with phrases such as "tits", "ass", or "CowboyNeal nude" will be given an elevated priority in sending, improving latency for those users who really need pr0n. There has been some debate over whether this is entirely appropriate -- it reduces fairness -- but when it comes right now to it, pr0n-obtaining is a task with hard realtime constraints. The Gnutella developers and GDF members recognize that the goal of P2P software should be to best serve the community as a whole -- and so some unfairness will be allowed.
Preliminary dictionaries for the new routing prioritization may be downloaded from various of the GDF developers -- links have been posted in relevant discussion on the GDF board. The proposed dictionary format allows granting of variable priority -- "tits" matching a packet might increase the routing class by 1, but "teen lesbian slut" would increase it by 3, giving it priority over merely "tits" packets.
There is some concern over abuse -- that users hungry for low latency may simply include terms like these in their filenames. Indeed, a few users have already begun doing so. A second solution, perhaps blacklisting, may have to be used later on if this becomes a severe issue.
Because of the real-time nature of Gnutella, there are limits that can be placed on how much latency alteration that can be made. Queues are never massive at a single node, since most clients allow only relatively small send buffers. Early tests show 10% to 40% improvement on high-priority pr0n-containing packets. This is somewhat variable depending upon the network traffic -- if background traffic is composed mostly of smaller "ping" packets (instead of result packets), latency improvements tend toward the latter number.
There are a few other improvements on the table. Those of you that follow my work know that I'm interested in distributed trust used to rank the users. This trust network can be adapted to rank users based on the quality of the pr0n they serve, and give higher priority to users that give really top-notch pr0n -- unfortunately, this requires a client UI (and effort on the part of the user) to do manual ranking.
One more controversial proposal includes a Freenet-like network-wide caching system. Pr0n that is being frequently downloaded will be mirrored to as many systems as possible. This will improve download speed (and end-user experience, as people will be able to view locally-cached pr0n, and thus be introduced to new and interesting forms of pr0n). The p-cache (as it's already being called) even goes Freenet one better -- it is being designed to support speculative caching based on past searches. If your client catches even a hint, based on the searches that you've done, that you might be remotely interested in "cuties in French maid outfits on the beach", say, it will search and download all the related files it can find on the Gnutellanet. Aside from the massive cache of pr0n that builds up (if the user chooses to browse it), this is mostly user-transparent, yielding only low latency, high-availability pr0n searches tailored to your tastes.
Also notable is the support (for pr0n only, I'm afraid -- scarce network resources must be conserved) for multicast, introduced with the new UDP support. When you request a download of a large file, a remote server can give you a time offset until the file will be sent -- usually, an hour or two -- and will establish you as a "subscriber" of this file. When the time expires, the server will multicast-stream the pr0n file to all people that have subscribed to the broadcast. Now, an "hour or two" may seem like a long time, but it's far better than simply waiting in a unicast queue, possibly for days. You will need to be on the MBONE for this -- some college users or business users with videoconferencing may already have this handled, but the rest will need to request "MBONE support" from their ISP.
Correct. That is why the software is pirated. Now, not all of it is -- somewhere, *someone* had to buy a copy of Chinese Microsoft Windows to get the original copy, but the piracy rates are overwhelming in developing nations.
You want to know *why* people don't try looking for 15K RPM drives on IDE? Most IDE drives are built to be as cheap as possible. People look for the following, in order (I suspect that a lot of them wish in retrospect that they had put reliability first).
* Cost * Size * Reliability (unfortunately, hard to measure...MBTF is kind of BS) * Noise * Speed * Heat
I tend to move Heat higher up, given the impact it has on Noise and Reliability.
And, you know what? For most applications (workstation) hard drive speed is completely a non-issue. HD transfer rates improve over time *anyway*. If you increase aureal density but keep rotational speed the simple, you're increasing peak non-cache data transfer rate. So you get a faster hard drive now than you used to. Second, for the vast majority of workstation applications, hard drive time is simply not important. It's almost never the bottleneck for critical applications. If you're paging, yes, but RAM is cheap and does such a far better job that you're better adding another 512MB of RAM to your system. File copies are rarely a problem -- you don't need to remove a hard drive, so you can just background the copy and forget about it, unlike in the days of floppies. If it's a copy to/from removable media, it's almost always the removeable media that's the bottleneck, not the drive, so more drive speed will give you basically nothing.
The other thing to remember is that RAM caching is far better than it once was (partly based on sheer amount of memory). Most of the time, your working data set will fit into memory just fine, and be cached. Linux has very good disk caching. Windows less so, but still much better than the dark days of 9x. And a silly little difference like a 5200 RPM drive being 25% slower than a 7200 RPM drive pales in comparison to the thousand or so times faster that your memory is. You're almost always better off getting more solid-state storage and not trying to work the bejeezus out of the mechanical parts of your hard drive.
I would never recommend anything but a 5400 RPM IDE drive to anyone. 7200 and above will buy you heat issues, reliability issues, and noise issues. Tack on a fan and you help a bit with heat (of course, having "hot spots" in your drive and then heavily cooled spots isn't great either), but then you get more dust, and more noise. Of all the people I know, all the drives in the past three years that failed have been 7200 RPM, not 5400 RPM. That speed difference isn't huge to you, and is far nicer to the cheap, fragile mechanism in the hard drive.
In conclusion -- buy 5400 RPM. You'll be a lot happier.
I was sure that this was going to happen for years. Email is perfect for this -- high barrier to change. Get 'em hooked, then milk 'em.
However, I expected that Yahoo was going to offer better service. I would assume that IMAP support, Yahoo not selling your information, etc. would come with this.
There are better email providers, if you're planning on paying money. Take a look at the links on this page, ofr instance.
I expect MS will collect a lot more users on Hotmail from this...
If you have to constantly interact with their browser-based interface, this *is* an issue. I can quite reasonably see choosing a bank (at least the one to do your CC business) based on whether or not it supports your computing environment, if you do any significant amount of e-purchasing.
You know, there are a lot of well-founded complaints you can make about the X-Box, but Halo not having excellent graphics is definitely not one of them. Halo has phenomonal graphics.
Finally, Xbox Live is going to be $10/month after the first year?
Yes. The grandparent post is correct. $50 for the first year (plus the kit), $10/month after that.
It looks like the idea is to get people to sign on with a flat-rate purchase (the $49.95 first-year price) and then start milking them when they're comfortable with it.
What, you thought MS was going to simply pay for something like this and provide service for perpetuity?
...that Bungie, which used to be held up as the anti-Microsoft by Mac fans, is now the *only* thing holding MS's console in place. "Well, there's Halo..."
Okay, your first point is valid. $200M lost is definitely something to consider, but they can afford to do it for a long time. If they think gaming is a vital strategic win, they might even lose money net on the thing and be happy.
On the other hand:
Your point about the popularity of the X-Box...I don't buy it. The X-Box is more popular than many people predicting its complete nonacceptance had thought, but it's still third of the three systems out there.
As for upheaval in the console market...doesn't happen. The console market is actually pretty stable, except when a new generation of consoles come out. MS is in third place, and they're going to stay in third place for this generation. Maybe next generation things will be different (I think Sony is being a little ballsy with thinking about distributed computing in the PS III, but I suppose they know best).
Maybe, but another console doesn't produce competition among video game producers -- just console manufacturers. It actually wastes a tremendous amount of development resources, because of all the time and effort porting and designing around portability.
Halo is fun, but the multiplayer competitive mode doesn't even begin to compare to multiplayer on the PC.
By far the best thing about Halo is Bungie's traditional strength -- multiplayer cooperative. Going through the levels with a second man to provide cover fire or snipe or drive is a *ton* of fun.
I can't figure out *why* there's such a massive aversion among Europeans to genetically enhanced food, food from animals that were given antibiotics, food that pesticide was applied to, even (to some degree) non-free-range meat.
What's the big deal? Health organizations were all over this, have scrutinized it, and I can guarantee you (I know people that work in the medical industry) that the FDA is unbelivably uptight about letting *anything* past them if there's even the remotest unfounded possibility that something might have some risk to it. The only reason *not* to eat improved food is because of some irrational gut emotional response.
Because some of us don't feel that your approach of blocking chunks of information from your kids under the mistaken assumption that doing so will make them "better people" is valid, and don't agree with these standards.
If some person feels that their kids are totally incompetent to handle hate speech or pornography until they hit 18, at which point they suddenly magically develop the ability to do so, you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
The only way you learn to deal with people is by interacting with them -- a common complaint about home schooling. "Shielding" your kids from something doesn't help them in the least -- it retards growth.
Take "American History X". I'd consider this one of the best movies I've ever watched. It definitely contains content that lots of people would like to "shield" their children from -- anal rape in prison, racially-motived murder, Nazi propaganda, children using guns...but it's one of the most helpful resources I've ever seen for eliminating racial issues. Why? Because it *isn't* pussyfooting around and trying to say "You shouldn't do/believe/feel X because it's *bad*"...it demonstrates exactly the issues that are at hand, and lets you come to your own conclusions (which, I think, are likely to be pretty sensible given that you're looking at the uncomfortable, true state of affairs). That's what people should be given. Don't tell people they should do or think something -- give them all the information, and let them decide for themselves. That is the *only* way to build informed, competent, responsible citizens. As a child, one of the major reasons I respected the decisions of my parents is that they were more than willing to justify advice they gave me. I wasn't *told* that they were right -- I could *see* it for myself.
The whole idea of "making the Internet safe for children" smacks of ideological brainwashing. I suppose Satanism isn't "safe for children", but the Bible is, right? And Wicca is clean out as well, right? Nothing like nationally-endored religion...
I still can't get over the fact that pornography is considered "inappropriate" for children, but movies containing people being killed are -- see the TV. Where, *where* is the logic here?
I don't have the problem with voluntary censorship. If a person wants to undergo censorship *themselves*, that should be their choice. If people at a church want their free-access computer to block porn so that they don't have to see it, that's certainly fine with me. But when you start doing nationwide stuff, then you start looking at schools forcing kids to stay within such a domain, and the thing becomes unpleasantly nasty.
Okay, you're concerned about Constitutional issues? The Constitution has given us a rich tradition of not taking away our abilities to do something unless it's explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. Goes for me, goes for people that work at AOL. If they want to block things on their own network, I don't care. If I set up a network of my own, I think I should be able to do whatever I want to with it. Heck, I even think I should be able to prevent people from using my network via 802.11b when walking by, even though that prevents them from viewing web sites.
Remember, these companies don't have to obey the constitution
You're still circumventing the copy protection device.
No, you are not. You are not allowing a single copy to be made that the device was intended to prevent. This is why you don't see the DMCA applied against region-free players (granted, the DVD Consortium attacks these in other ways, but it isn't through the DMCA).
What if Sony decides to add copying features, could Philips add those same copying features?
Hasn't been hashed out in court yet. No one knows, though I doubt a judge would accept a claim made by Sony against Phillips on those grounds.
Why should the government mandate the limit our industry's innovation to protect one that's becoming increasing irrelevant?
Let me prefix this by saying that I have major issues with the DMCA, and don't want to defend the thing entire in its current form. That being said, the DMCA hardly protects solely the traditional music distributors. An e-distributor, the primary "new competition" benefits from the same protections.
DeCSS was the source code used to decrypt a DVD, WHO'S PURPOSE was to play DVD's on Linux.
No. It was/is a Windows program designed to rip movies. It may certainly have *helped* the Linux DVD movement, but the original DeCSS authors weren't A'rpi types.
As for the eBook issues, my concern was with the intent behind what the program was going to be used for. If someone had written a to-Braille converter, not only would I have probably not said anything, and I doubt Adobe would have either. That doesn't mean I think the authors should have been prosecuted -- I just get pissed off when they start getting portrayed as stainless heroes advancing Knowledge, Truth, and Justice after enough retellings of the story on Slashdot.
Perhaps I'm a bit biased toward the intent of Russian software companies (though given the history of Russia and software, I don't think I'm *that* far off the mark).
There is an Objective-C binding for Qt/KDE, it's just not finished, so it's not in the list. These bindings don't appear out of thin air, they need developers who use those languages to make them. If you have a favorite obscure language that needs Qt/KDE bindings, then get your ass on the ball and write some!
I'm already pretty comfortable using gtk+ -- I have a friend that likes KDE (and hence likes using Qt based apps), though. A number of times he's complained about no Qt bindings for a language, citing that as the reason for not wanting to donate code to a project. He isn't really interested in writing a set of bindings -- he wants to write application code.
This is taking it to the extreme. Some of those languages are obscure. Others are inappropriate lanaguages for GUI application development.
Some of them, yes. PHP and JavaScript is more cute than useful, and I have zero knowledge of Erlang, TOM and XBase, so I can't say anything about them. I suspect that the bindings don't conform beautifully to the Haskell language (though I expect there are a number of grateful Haskell programmers out there).
However, Ada, C++, Common Lisp, Eiffel (I've gotten interested in eiffel myself recently, as it has a tremendous number of attractive features, and can produce very fast compiled code), Guile, Java, Objective-C, Objective-Caml, Objective-Label, and Pascal are full-blown programming languages, and overlooking them is, it seems, not to be sneezed at. My friend likes Objective Camel more than any other language, and he cannot develop Qt apps with it. (Take a look at MLDonkey if you want an example of what can be done with gtk and ocaml.)
As for the classes I mentioned, I still feel that a large amount of Qt code is unnecessary in a modern toolkit, and makes interoperability with other libraries more frusterating. I realize that at the time they were added, there was a reason, but now they're a lot of baggage that gtk has avoided. And what really matters is what the developer gets today, not whether Trolltech was justified in their original decision.
The "small parts" philosophy of UNIX applies to applications, programs and utilities. It does not apply to libraries. Go check out libc for an example of another library that includes everything but the kitchen sink.
Libc is a special case -- minimizing dependencies and possible things to break in the runtime for the fundamental language for a platform has a significant amount of value. Too many basic utilities depend upon libc to make mix-n-matching with it safe.
Qt is a crossplatform application framework. It was written with a completely different set of goals than GTK+, which aimed to be just a widget toolkit.
That may certainly be true -- but at least for me (and apparently others -- Windows users using GIMP), gtk is quite cross platform, and more attractive. And that's really what matters, compred to the original design plans.
Now, Qt has a nice embedded target, but I'm not sure how useful crossplatformability is between a palmtop and my desktop, given the other limitations between the apps and the liklihood of a necessary UI redesign anyway.
Maybe you should get off the FSF bandwagon and join the Free Beer Foundation instead.
Am I on the FSF bandwagon? (Especially since I'm complaining about a company using the GPL instead of the LGPL here.) I have major issues with lots of Stallman proposals. I certainly don't approve of having him on the GNOME Foundation Board, for instance. But I don't really think having a private company control a core library is a great idea. If people want control over important aspects of modern UNIX systems, I think limiting that to apps and secondary libraries is reasonable. Qt is intended to be a core library, *the* widget set, by Trolltech -- and that's too much power for them to have.
Where does this rumor come from that C++ == Windows?
I didn't say that. However, the percentage of development done on Windows in C++ (relative to other languages germane to our discussion -- Visual Basic doesn't apply, since neither gtk nor Qt support it) versus the percentage done on UNIX in C++ is far higher. When you come out with a library that caters to one development community or another, you have to decide what market is most important to you. Trolltech emphasized C++, which is most popular on Windows. [shrug]
Slashdot Mirror
Impossible, eh?
even if they were never registered with the copyright office
Actually, there are a few restrictions. Up until 1980-something, unless you put "Copyright 1993 Foobar" or "[copyright symbol] 1993 Foobar" on a work, it didn't get copyright protection.
I'm pretty sure that that particular transfer is okay, but the fact that Person 1 is offering the thing for public download is not.
Huh?
All of them are different, but let's take a look:
FastTrack -- the protocol is barely an improvement over the original gnutella, and with some additions from the LimeWire people, there are no improvements. It's also closed.
DC -- totally different, and from a technical perspective, much less impressive. Little more than IRC+DCC with a non-idiotic interface.
Pr0n priority levels have been a concern of many P2P network users for some time. While the collection of protocol updates in gnutella2 has many general performance enhancements, it does (rather glaringly) lack any improvements specifically addressing the pr0n issue. A good deal of user upset has been produced by this -- however, fortunately much of the furor is undeserved.
Improvements to improve your pr0n viewing experience are well underway in many *clients*, rather than in the protocol itself -- protocol changes would produce compatibility issues. A number of proposed improvements include changes to the routing system to use dictionary-based priority changing. Query and result packets containing entries with phrases such as "tits", "ass", or "CowboyNeal nude" will be given an elevated priority in sending, improving latency for those users who really need pr0n. There has been some debate over whether this is entirely appropriate -- it reduces fairness -- but when it comes right now to it, pr0n-obtaining is a task with hard realtime constraints. The Gnutella developers and GDF members recognize that the goal of P2P software should be to best serve the community as a whole -- and so some unfairness will be allowed.
Preliminary dictionaries for the new routing prioritization may be downloaded from various of the GDF developers -- links have been posted in relevant discussion on the GDF board. The proposed dictionary format allows granting of variable priority -- "tits" matching a packet might increase the routing class by 1, but "teen lesbian slut" would increase it by 3, giving it priority over merely "tits" packets.
There is some concern over abuse -- that users hungry for low latency may simply include terms like these in their filenames. Indeed, a few users have already begun doing so. A second solution, perhaps blacklisting, may have to be used later on if this becomes a severe issue.
Because of the real-time nature of Gnutella, there are limits that can be placed on how much latency alteration that can be made. Queues are never massive at a single node, since most clients allow only relatively small send buffers. Early tests show 10% to 40% improvement on high-priority pr0n-containing packets. This is somewhat variable depending upon the network traffic -- if background traffic is composed mostly of smaller "ping" packets (instead of result packets), latency improvements tend toward the latter number.
There are a few other improvements on the table. Those of you that follow my work know that I'm interested in distributed trust used to rank the users. This trust network can be adapted to rank users based on the quality of the pr0n they serve, and give higher priority to users that give really top-notch pr0n -- unfortunately, this requires a client UI (and effort on the part of the user) to do manual ranking.
One more controversial proposal includes a Freenet-like network-wide caching system. Pr0n that is being frequently downloaded will be mirrored to as many systems as possible. This will improve download speed (and end-user experience, as people will be able to view locally-cached pr0n, and thus be introduced to new and interesting forms of pr0n). The p-cache (as it's already being called) even goes Freenet one better -- it is being designed to support speculative caching based on past searches. If your client catches even a hint, based on the searches that you've done, that you might be remotely interested in "cuties in French maid outfits on the beach", say, it will search and download all the related files it can find on the Gnutellanet. Aside from the massive cache of pr0n that builds up (if the user chooses to browse it), this is mostly user-transparent, yielding only low latency, high-availability pr0n searches tailored to your tastes.
Also notable is the support (for pr0n only, I'm afraid -- scarce network resources must be conserved) for multicast, introduced with the new UDP support. When you request a download of a large file, a remote server can give you a time offset until the file will be sent -- usually, an hour or two -- and will establish you as a "subscriber" of this file. When the time expires, the server will multicast-stream the pr0n file to all people that have subscribed to the broadcast. Now, an "hour or two" may seem like a long time, but it's far better than simply waiting in a unicast queue, possibly for days. You will need to be on the MBONE for this -- some college users or business users with videoconferencing may already have this handled, but the rest will need to request "MBONE support" from their ISP.
True, but I was talking about consumer IDE drives vs same. If you throw more money at the mechanism, you can reasonably jack up the rotational speed.
You'd notice that the respectable Prof. Collins is one of the more sophisticated trolls. He generally garners quite a few responses.
Correct. That is why the software is pirated. Now, not all of it is -- somewhere, *someone* had to buy a copy of Chinese Microsoft Windows to get the original copy, but the piracy rates are overwhelming in developing nations.
Don't be an idiot.
Even aside from the paranoia there, MS is not going to have people doing things that they could be legally accountable for.
You want to know *why* people don't try looking for 15K RPM drives on IDE? Most IDE drives are built to be as cheap as possible. People look for the following, in order (I suspect that a lot of them wish in retrospect that they had put reliability first).
* Cost
* Size
* Reliability (unfortunately, hard to measure...MBTF is kind of BS)
* Noise
* Speed
* Heat
I tend to move Heat higher up, given the impact it has on Noise and Reliability.
And, you know what? For most applications (workstation) hard drive speed is completely a non-issue. HD transfer rates improve over time *anyway*. If you increase aureal density but keep rotational speed the simple, you're increasing peak non-cache data transfer rate. So you get a faster hard drive now than you used to. Second, for the vast majority of workstation applications, hard drive time is simply not important. It's almost never the bottleneck for critical applications. If you're paging, yes, but RAM is cheap and does such a far better job that you're better adding another 512MB of RAM to your system. File copies are rarely a problem -- you don't need to remove a hard drive, so you can just background the copy and forget about it, unlike in the days of floppies. If it's a copy to/from removable media, it's almost always the removeable media that's the bottleneck, not the drive, so more drive speed will give you basically nothing.
The other thing to remember is that RAM caching is far better than it once was (partly based on sheer amount of memory). Most of the time, your working data set will fit into memory just fine, and be cached. Linux has very good disk caching. Windows less so, but still much better than the dark days of 9x. And a silly little difference like a 5200 RPM drive being 25% slower than a 7200 RPM drive pales in comparison to the thousand or so times faster that your memory is. You're almost always better off getting more solid-state storage and not trying to work the bejeezus out of the mechanical parts of your hard drive.
I would never recommend anything but a 5400 RPM IDE drive to anyone. 7200 and above will buy you heat issues, reliability issues, and noise issues. Tack on a fan and you help a bit with heat (of course, having "hot spots" in your drive and then heavily cooled spots isn't great either), but then you get more dust, and more noise. Of all the people I know, all the drives in the past three years that failed have been 7200 RPM, not 5400 RPM. That speed difference isn't huge to you, and is far nicer to the cheap, fragile mechanism in the hard drive.
In conclusion -- buy 5400 RPM. You'll be a lot happier.
I was sure that this was going to happen for years. Email is perfect for this -- high barrier to change. Get 'em hooked, then milk 'em.
However, I expected that Yahoo was going to offer better service. I would assume that IMAP support, Yahoo not selling your information, etc. would come with this.
There are better email providers, if you're planning on paying money. Take a look at the links on this page, ofr instance.
I expect MS will collect a lot more users on Hotmail from this...
It would be even nicer if there were Linux graphic editors that could export SVG...
If you have to constantly interact with their browser-based interface, this *is* an issue. I can quite reasonably see choosing a bank (at least the one to do your CC business) based on whether or not it supports your computing environment, if you do any significant amount of e-purchasing.
You know, there are a lot of well-founded complaints you can make about the X-Box, but Halo not having excellent graphics is definitely not one of them. Halo has phenomonal graphics.
Finally, Xbox Live is going to be $10/month after the first year?
Yes. The grandparent post is correct. $50 for the first year (plus the kit), $10/month after that.
It looks like the idea is to get people to sign on with a flat-rate purchase (the $49.95 first-year price) and then start milking them when they're comfortable with it.
What, you thought MS was going to simply pay for something like this and provide service for perpetuity?
...that Bungie, which used to be held up as the anti-Microsoft by Mac fans, is now the *only* thing holding MS's console in place. "Well, there's Halo..."
Okay, your first point is valid. $200M lost is definitely something to consider, but they can afford to do it for a long time. If they think gaming is a vital strategic win, they might even lose money net on the thing and be happy.
On the other hand:
Your point about the popularity of the X-Box...I don't buy it. The X-Box is more popular than many people predicting its complete nonacceptance had thought, but it's still third of the three systems out there.
As for upheaval in the console market...doesn't happen. The console market is actually pretty stable, except when a new generation of consoles come out. MS is in third place, and they're going to stay in third place for this generation. Maybe next generation things will be different (I think Sony is being a little ballsy with thinking about distributed computing in the PS III, but I suppose they know best).
Maybe, but another console doesn't produce competition among video game producers -- just console manufacturers. It actually wastes a tremendous amount of development resources, because of all the time and effort porting and designing around portability.
Another consideration is how many games people buy per console.
Most people with an X-Box that I've seen get Halo, and maybe two or three other games, and that's it.
Halo is fun, but the multiplayer competitive mode doesn't even begin to compare to multiplayer on the PC.
By far the best thing about Halo is Bungie's traditional strength -- multiplayer cooperative. Going through the levels with a second man to provide cover fire or snipe or drive is a *ton* of fun.
I can't figure out *why* there's such a massive aversion among Europeans to genetically enhanced food, food from animals that were given antibiotics, food that pesticide was applied to, even (to some degree) non-free-range meat.
What's the big deal? Health organizations were all over this, have scrutinized it, and I can guarantee you (I know people that work in the medical industry) that the FDA is unbelivably uptight about letting *anything* past them if there's even the remotest unfounded possibility that something might have some risk to it. The only reason *not* to eat improved food is because of some irrational gut emotional response.
Making the net safe for kids...
Because some of us don't feel that your approach of blocking chunks of information from your kids under the mistaken assumption that doing so will make them "better people" is valid, and don't agree with these standards.
If some person feels that their kids are totally incompetent to handle hate speech or pornography until they hit 18, at which point they suddenly magically develop the ability to do so, you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
The only way you learn to deal with people is by interacting with them -- a common complaint about home schooling. "Shielding" your kids from something doesn't help them in the least -- it retards growth.
Take "American History X". I'd consider this one of the best movies I've ever watched. It definitely contains content that lots of people would like to "shield" their children from -- anal rape in prison, racially-motived murder, Nazi propaganda, children using guns...but it's one of the most helpful resources I've ever seen for eliminating racial issues. Why? Because it *isn't* pussyfooting around and trying to say "You shouldn't do/believe/feel X because it's *bad*"...it demonstrates exactly the issues that are at hand, and lets you come to your own conclusions (which, I think, are likely to be pretty sensible given that you're looking at the uncomfortable, true state of affairs). That's what people should be given. Don't tell people they should do or think something -- give them all the information, and let them decide for themselves. That is the *only* way to build informed, competent, responsible citizens. As a child, one of the major reasons I respected the decisions of my parents is that they were more than willing to justify advice they gave me. I wasn't *told* that they were right -- I could *see* it for myself.
The whole idea of "making the Internet safe for children" smacks of ideological brainwashing. I suppose Satanism isn't "safe for children", but the Bible is, right? And Wicca is clean out as well, right? Nothing like nationally-endored religion...
I still can't get over the fact that pornography is considered "inappropriate" for children, but movies containing people being killed are -- see the TV. Where, *where* is the logic here?
I don't have the problem with voluntary censorship. If a person wants to undergo censorship *themselves*, that should be their choice. If people at a church want their free-access computer to block porn so that they don't have to see it, that's certainly fine with me. But when you start doing nationwide stuff, then you start looking at schools forcing kids to stay within such a domain, and the thing becomes unpleasantly nasty.
Okay, you're concerned about Constitutional issues? The Constitution has given us a rich tradition of not taking away our abilities to do something unless it's explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. Goes for me, goes for people that work at AOL. If they want to block things on their own network, I don't care. If I set up a network of my own, I think I should be able to do whatever I want to with it. Heck, I even think I should be able to prevent people from using my network via 802.11b when walking by, even though that prevents them from viewing web sites.
Remember, these companies don't have to obey the constitution
Sure they do.
You're still circumventing the copy protection device.
No, you are not. You are not allowing a single copy to be made that the device was intended to prevent. This is why you don't see the DMCA applied against region-free players (granted, the DVD Consortium attacks these in other ways, but it isn't through the DMCA).
What if Sony decides to add copying features, could Philips add those same copying features?
Hasn't been hashed out in court yet. No one knows, though I doubt a judge would accept a claim made by Sony against Phillips on those grounds.
Why should the government mandate the limit our industry's innovation to protect one that's becoming increasing irrelevant?
Let me prefix this by saying that I have major issues with the DMCA, and don't want to defend the thing entire in its current form. That being said, the DMCA hardly protects solely the traditional music distributors. An e-distributor, the primary "new competition" benefits from the same protections.
DeCSS was the source code used to decrypt a DVD, WHO'S PURPOSE was to play DVD's on Linux.
No. It was/is a Windows program designed to rip movies. It may certainly have *helped* the Linux DVD movement, but the original DeCSS authors weren't A'rpi types.
As for the eBook issues, my concern was with the intent behind what the program was going to be used for. If someone had written a to-Braille converter, not only would I have probably not said anything, and I doubt Adobe would have either. That doesn't mean I think the authors should have been prosecuted -- I just get pissed off when they start getting portrayed as stainless heroes advancing Knowledge, Truth, and Justice after enough retellings of the story on Slashdot.
Perhaps I'm a bit biased toward the intent of Russian software companies (though given the history of Russia and software, I don't think I'm *that* far off the mark).
There is an Objective-C binding for Qt/KDE, it's just not finished, so it's not in the list. These bindings don't appear out of thin air, they need developers who use those languages to make them. If you have a favorite obscure language that needs Qt/KDE bindings, then get your ass on the ball and write some!
I'm already pretty comfortable using gtk+ -- I have a friend that likes KDE (and hence likes using Qt based apps), though. A number of times he's complained about no Qt bindings for a language, citing that as the reason for not wanting to donate code to a project. He isn't really interested in writing a set of bindings -- he wants to write application code.
This is taking it to the extreme. Some of those languages are obscure. Others are inappropriate lanaguages for GUI application development.
Some of them, yes. PHP and JavaScript is more cute than useful, and I have zero knowledge of Erlang, TOM and XBase, so I can't say anything about them. I suspect that the bindings don't conform beautifully to the Haskell language (though I expect there are a number of grateful Haskell programmers out there).
However, Ada, C++, Common Lisp, Eiffel (I've gotten interested in eiffel myself recently, as it has a tremendous number of attractive features, and can produce very fast compiled code), Guile, Java, Objective-C, Objective-Caml, Objective-Label, and Pascal are full-blown programming languages, and overlooking them is, it seems, not to be sneezed at. My friend likes Objective Camel more than any other language, and he cannot develop Qt apps with it. (Take a look at MLDonkey if you want an example of what can be done with gtk and ocaml.)
As for the classes I mentioned, I still feel that a large amount of Qt code is unnecessary in a modern toolkit, and makes interoperability with other libraries more frusterating. I realize that at the time they were added, there was a reason, but now they're a lot of baggage that gtk has avoided. And what really matters is what the developer gets today, not whether Trolltech was justified in their original decision.
The "small parts" philosophy of UNIX applies to applications, programs and utilities. It does not apply to libraries. Go check out libc for an example of another library that includes everything but the kitchen sink.
Libc is a special case -- minimizing dependencies and possible things to break in the runtime for the fundamental language for a platform has a significant amount of value. Too many basic utilities depend upon libc to make mix-n-matching with it safe.
Qt is a crossplatform application framework. It was written with a completely different set of goals than GTK+, which aimed to be just a widget toolkit.
That may certainly be true -- but at least for me (and apparently others -- Windows users using GIMP), gtk is quite cross platform, and more attractive. And that's really what matters, compred to the original design plans.
Now, Qt has a nice embedded target, but I'm not sure how useful crossplatformability is between a palmtop and my desktop, given the other limitations between the apps and the liklihood of a necessary UI redesign anyway.
Maybe you should get off the FSF bandwagon and join the Free Beer Foundation instead.
Am I on the FSF bandwagon? (Especially since I'm complaining about a company using the GPL instead of the LGPL here.) I have major issues with lots of Stallman proposals. I certainly don't approve of having him on the GNOME Foundation Board, for instance. But I don't really think having a private company control a core library is a great idea. If people want control over important aspects of modern UNIX systems, I think limiting that to apps and secondary libraries is reasonable. Qt is intended to be a core library, *the* widget set, by Trolltech -- and that's too much power for them to have.
Where does this rumor come from that C++ == Windows?
I didn't say that. However, the percentage of development done on Windows in C++ (relative to other languages germane to our discussion -- Visual Basic doesn't apply, since neither gtk nor Qt support it) versus the percentage done on UNIX in C++ is far higher. When you come out with a library that caters to one development community or another, you have to decide what market is most important to you. Trolltech emphasized C++, which is most popular on Windows. [shrug]