You've got a valid point, but don't forget Apple's clout in education. At my college over 90% of students who owned computers had PCs, but over 2/3 of the public lab computers were Macs. So this will be distorting Apple's figures too. The interesting part would be how many of Apple's installs come this way, relative to Linux and Windows. But I'm not sure how you could gather that statistic.
Cheats are just creative uses of bad loops, or algorythms in the code (for example the long jump in quake III if you had a fast video card).
No, those are exploits. Most cheats hook programs or key DLLs (like opengl.dll) and replace parts of the code, for example to aim for the player or make his walls transparent. If you're not that familiar with Windows, it's functionally identical to... I forget the exact environment variable name, it's LD_PRELOAD or something. It's not possible for programs to prevent this, as the replacement occurs at the level of the dynamic linker - the application has nothing to do with it.
The issue is that you can just as easily use this trick to bypass protection methods like CD and PB. And, much like antivirus software, even small changes of existing cheats/viruses will usually elude the fingerprint checks of countermeasures.
No. If the Wine folks look at the actual Windows source code, they aren't reverse engineering any more, they're copying, which is illegal. Even copying from memory and not wholesale code lifting can be against the law. If even one person were to do it, it might taint the entire project, undoing years of work. I very much hope that no MS-copyrighted code ever finds its way into an open source project, both for practical reasons like the above and for moral ones. The same copyright that keeps Windows secret keeps Microsoft (and others) from just stealing GPL'ed projects.
And I do. For those not in the know, Azureus is an open source Java BT client. It has its share of problems, most of them coming from its Java heritage, but it looks pretty and offers a lot more functionality than the vanilla BT client. If you want most of Azureus' features but don't care about the GUI, you may also want to try out Shadow's BT Client. It looks basically like the vanilla client.
They should hire him to program everything, not just Steam's peer-to-peer stuff. The guy's obviously a better coder than anyone at Valve. Anyone who's used Steam for more than 5 minutes - which is everyone who's used Steam, it takes longer than that for it to start - can see that much.
I don't much like BT's hideous GUI, but where it really matters Cohen knows his stuff. I hope he's able to improve Steam's disastrous track record, and not just in bandwidth utilization.
I suspect the cause of your confusion is that many people insist on referring to Intel's 32-bit instruction set architecture by the name of the first processor to support it. The proper term is "IA32" (for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit").
My campaign for IA32 Awareness continues. If only I could persuade some actual developers to use the right term.
I agree about Firefly being great, but its chances of being a box office smash (or even making it that far) are slim. I really hope I'll end up eating my words, but... It's not like Fox wants their shows to fail. The reality of the situation is that, for a big network like Fox, Firefly just didn't appeal to enough people.
The most common complaint about its cancelation is that Fox never gave it a chance. Well, if you listen to the bonus material on the DVDs (which I encourage everyone to buy), you'll see that Fox were definitely not enthusiastic about the show even before it started airing. They hated the pilot and made Whedon et al. rewrite it over a weekend. They still weren't happy with the result, but they decided to give it a shot and ran eight or nine episodes. Maybe they were out of order, maybe some like The Train Job were out of order, but the fact is, Fox thought they had a loser and they went with it anyway. And let's not forget that Fox gave Firefly a chance, which I very much doubt ABC, NBC, or CBS would be willing to do.
Maybe Fox could've done a better job of promoting Firefly, but I don't think you can fault them for doing as much as they did. At least we got 14 episodes out of it, and maybe - maybe! - a great movie.
And to drag myself painfully back on-topic, I'll probably buy the Star Wars DVDs. I'm not a hardcore fan, so I don't care who shoots first, and my DVD player has a "fast forward" button so I can skip the annoying scenes. I mean, if you don't want the "extended edition" DVDs, then don't buy them. If enough people do it, then eventually Lucas will give you what you want. But most nerds aren't that smart. They'll buy it anyway, because if it's got the "Star Wars" label attached they can't resist. (Note to self: Market "Star Wars Brand Latex Condoms" at 350% markup. They don't even have to work, nobody who would buy a Star Wars Brand Condom could possibly have a need for one.)
You are right, incidentally - the UK's economy is more liberal than ours. I guess it wasn't clear, but by "the industrialized countries" I was referring to the economic powerhouses, specifically the G7/G8. Hong Kong is a grey area, but for the sake of completeness, they are #1.
Not a very good analogy, and more than a little spin. Chuckle.
Hey, I never said I was completely unbiased. But the analogy is sound to the extent I used it: it's an example of one group forcing its own particular views - intentionally or not - on a much larger group. In the context of this article, it's the US using its economic might to force Australia into copyright extensions; in the context of my analogy, it's the MA Supreme Court using its Constitutional might to force other states into accepting gay marriages. To be honest, I thought Slashdotters would be more inclined to buy the comparison, as they see conspiracies in everything - I thought they'd have no problem believing the MA SC had a (not-so) hidden agenda. Considering the justified and continuing sniping here about how Bush is the Pres only because the US SC has more Democrats than Republicans. Seems pretty clear we've got the same deal here - politics determining judicial decisions.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, like that ever stops someone from theorizing on Slashdot.
Do I even have to ask why instead of Australia extending their copyrights (they were/are a life+50 nation), the US doesn't scale back US laws to match Australia's?
Because we're the world experts in free-market capitalism. We're the ones who made it work when everyone else failed. Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries. In those respects, at least, everyone in the world wants to be like us.
t's a crap trick that political and corporations play. Pass a law in one area, and then force other areas to pass similar laws to "harmonize". It's why other contries are getting their own versions of the DMCA
It's hardly particular to corporations. The courts in Massachusetts are trying to legalize gay marriage across the entire country. They aren't elected officials, they don't even have to pretend to care what the people think.
All that said, conformity to a certain extent is usually a good thing. Look at the programming world and the neverending search for standards. Once you reach a certain point it doesn't even matter if the standard is good or not. It just needs to set down a bunch of rules that everyone agrees to follow. Same sort of deal here. You can memorize the copyright rules for all fifty countries your business does work in, or you can try to get all fifty to adopt the same rule. Obviously you're going to want consistency. That could genuinely be the only motivation here.
There are so many things wrong with your post I don't even know where to start. The most glaring is your internally contradictory final question. Currently we have space missions for three reasons: military, scientific, and commercial. So clearly we have at least three reasons to go into space, and none of them have anything to do with tourism. (There have been a few such flights lately, but none by NASA.) The self-contradictory part, by the way, is where you, a human, clearly believe there is another reason to go into space than tourism. Remember: generalizations are your enemy, they reflect looseness in thinking.
I also strongly disagree with your opinion of tourism. If we manage to make space travel so reliable, affordable, and safe that people are doing it just for kicks...! Imagine a world like that! It doesn't mean we're going to stop having scientific missions. But it means that I can hop on a shuttle and go visit the moon, or another planet, or maybe even see another star. Not because I have any great reason, just because I want to. The freedom to go anywhere in the solar system for only a couple thousand bucks? Wow. I certainly think that's a noble goal, even if you don't.
Single-user in Linux usually isn't, so there's a pseudo-runlevel that doesn't touch the init scripts at all. If memory serves, it's boot -e[mergency]. What a mess. Linux is a little too eager to depart from Unix tradition at times.
The thing I like most about BSD-style scripts is that they don't insist on starting and killing daemons one at a time. They also allow for asymmetric scripts, sort of; Linux tends to kill every service individually on shutdown, which is really annoying because it takes forever. 99.9% of programs can handle kill -TERM -1 && sleep 5 && kill -KILL -1, which init does automatically when it changes runlevels. I guess it's nothing inherent in SysV-style scripts I dislike; it's the way they're used.
I don't think the lack of "/etc/init.d/daemon stop" is that big a disadvantage. "killall daemon" works just as well - in fact, that's all most stop scripts do. The only thing you lose is the pretty color graphics.
This is definitely prime material for a religious war, though, as neither approach offers any real benefit. You can easily make either approach do whatever you want. With SysV-style scripts, it's slightly easier to let packages say how they should be started; with BSD-style scripts, it's slightly easier to understand the "big picture."
Look at the diagram. The first stage is "Security." That's where DRM would go. Its purpose according to the diagram is to verify the next stages, which would be to eliminate boot viruses. Personally, I think you're paranoid. But hey, even paranoid people are right sometimes!
The biggest names in FPS and RPG games are going to be Quake III and Neverwinter Nights. There are many other games, but you probably won't have heard of them. Nobody makes much money off Mac games, so there's a lot of "indie games:" games without a big-name publisher, usually distributed as shareware or sold only online. Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing, you just need to get used to not being able to play the latest and greatest games on your Mac.
This shouldn't be a big deal, since if you were big into gaming you wouldn't have bought a Mac. You should definitely be able to find enough games to keep yourself entertained, though.
We humans entertain ourselves with falsehoods and fantasies all the time. It's what we do. Animals, they worry about survival. But we're so good at survival that we don't even have to think about it any more. Stuff we've done before is boring. New stuff, now that's interesting. We spend almost no time looking at obvious truths because, well, we've looked at them already. True or false, we've exhausted their entertainment value. Now this new crazy theory that comes down the pike, well! It's making us think in new and unexpected ways, so even if it's wrong, it's worth thinking about. In fact, it may make us look again at our core beliefs in a new light, which is doubly exciting because it gives us even more stuff to think about.
This is why conspiracy theories have their undeniable appeal. Most people think we really landed on the moon, but there will always be a fringe who think it was faked. They have no reason for believing as they do, but... wouldn't it be interesting if it did turn out to be faked? How many other "obvious truths" would turn out to be false?
What's really sad is that I devoted so much time to a reply that could've ended after the first sentence.
I mean gcc's strength has never been fast code (all though it is no slouch) it has been cross platform.
That's gcc's de facto status, but from the section of its info pages called "GCC and Portability:"
The main goal of GCC was to make a good, fast compiler for machines in the class that the GNU system aims to run on: 32-bit machines that
address 8-bit bytes and have several general registers. Elegance, theoretical power and simplicity are only secondary.
It's interesting to note how gcc has turned out. I wonder what caused the change; if it were market forces, or changing developer priorities, or just coincidence.
Right, and bullies pick on you because you're smarter and they feel insecure. It's soothing to hear, but there's not a lot of truth to it. Most cheaters are pretty good at these games. The ones who aren't usually suck even when cheating (in fact, it can be quite hilarious when they demonstrate they can't even cheat properly). Most players aren't looking for something to do all the work for them, they're looking for something to give them an edge. It's a lot like athletes who use corked bats or steroids. I'd certainly call it morally wrong, but on the other hand most people don't seem to care. Witness the lack of uproar over pro sports drug scandals, despite considerably hype by the press and several major (ex-)athletes. Most cheaters probably just don't think much of what they're doing. They aren't out to ruin the game or piss you off; they don't even consider that you might get upset. After all, they reason, it's just a game.
The difference is that, because my computer uses all the same standards as bleeding-edge 32-bit equipment, I can upgrade all the parts and make it un-obsolete. With Athlon64s, however, it's much less clear that you'll be able to do that. That's all we're saying. Even moreso than when buying a regular computer, be aware that your Athlon64-based one may become difficult, expensive, or simply impossible to upgrade. And it may happen very soon after you buy it.
If you're willing to live with the increased risk, fine, go for it. If I felt any need to upgrade my computer, I'd probably fall into the group that's willing to risk true obsolescence. But a lot of people want as much security as possible, and those people should probably stay in the Land of 32-bit Words.
Because most developing countries don't have the resources to deal with high-tech equipment like giant microwaves. Sometimes it's not just a matter of knowing how to do something, it's being capable, in terms of logistics, of getting it done. They would practically have to build the factory in the US and then ship it by boat. The skilled labor that's required simply isn't available elsewhere. And that's assuming it's possible to run and maintain the plant with unskilled native labor, or at least that you don't need to export (from the US) too many skilled jobs.
If you do all the math, I suspect it's cheaper to bite the bullet and do it here. Of course, the unions could help that along by agreeing to take a pay cut (or hell, forego raises for a few years), but that's never in a million years going to happen.
This is great news for US steelmakers. Like all other industries that rely on unskilled labor, steel manufacturers have been in a prolonged slump while business moves overseas. If this works out, we can implement it and become competitive again.
You see, free trade can do good things for the average worker. Though to be fair "good things" in this case means fewer steelworkers will lose their jobs instead of all of them. Still, it's improvement, and who knows? If our costs really drop by 50%, demand very well could increase enough to justify keeping all the old workers around.
(I didn't really have anything to say, but the only other posts with scores higher than zero were... Well, if you've been on Slashdot for more than five minutes, you know what they were like.)
If they didn't have redundancy, they wouldn't be able to do what they are now. For starters, the rover is still operating. It's waking up and going to sleep. Secondly, it was able to detect the error, although it couldn't correct it automatically. Thirdly, it was able to transmit to its bosses at NASA that it was having trouble. And finally, it's still able to receive signals and commands of sufficient complexity to re-bootstrap itself without using the defective hardware.
Seriously, you just shouldn't assume the people at NASA are stupid. If it's obvious to you, it was obvious to them. For all you know, there are five mirrored flash disks on the rover. And if there aren't, I'm willing to bet there's an incredibly good reason.
I don't understand why it scares you, or why it gives MS any more control than they have now. If you more or less eliminate the BIOS, it means the operating system needs to do more work itself. Big deal. All modern operating systems ignore 95% of the BIOS anyway. It wouldn't be a significant change from the current situation, and OSes are much smarter than BIOSes anyway. They do a far superior job of resource allocation.
Now consider the scenario where BIOSes get bigger. Remember that BIOSes are on a chip, which makes them damn hard for normal home users to replace or modify. If some DRM crap gets put in there, it's nearly impossible to remove. Now that's the part that's scary. The BIOS might refuse to boot unrecognized OSes, in which case you're SOL. But if it's the OS that's handling DRM, well, someone will have a crack for it a week before the OS comes out. Or you can uninstall the OS and run one without DRM, like Linux. Or you can install Linux and write some DRM software. Or whatever.
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You've got a valid point, but don't forget Apple's clout in education. At my college over 90% of students who owned computers had PCs, but over 2/3 of the public lab computers were Macs. So this will be distorting Apple's figures too. The interesting part would be how many of Apple's installs come this way, relative to Linux and Windows. But I'm not sure how you could gather that statistic.
The issue is that you can just as easily use this trick to bypass protection methods like CD and PB. And, much like antivirus software, even small changes of existing cheats/viruses will usually elude the fingerprint checks of countermeasures.
And I do. For those not in the know, Azureus is an open source Java BT client. It has its share of problems, most of them coming from its Java heritage, but it looks pretty and offers a lot more functionality than the vanilla BT client. If you want most of Azureus' features but don't care about the GUI, you may also want to try out Shadow's BT Client. It looks basically like the vanilla client.
I don't much like BT's hideous GUI, but where it really matters Cohen knows his stuff. I hope he's able to improve Steam's disastrous track record, and not just in bandwidth utilization.
My campaign for IA32 Awareness continues. If only I could persuade some actual developers to use the right term.
The most common complaint about its cancelation is that Fox never gave it a chance. Well, if you listen to the bonus material on the DVDs (which I encourage everyone to buy), you'll see that Fox were definitely not enthusiastic about the show even before it started airing. They hated the pilot and made Whedon et al. rewrite it over a weekend. They still weren't happy with the result, but they decided to give it a shot and ran eight or nine episodes. Maybe they were out of order, maybe some like The Train Job were out of order, but the fact is, Fox thought they had a loser and they went with it anyway. And let's not forget that Fox gave Firefly a chance, which I very much doubt ABC, NBC, or CBS would be willing to do.
Maybe Fox could've done a better job of promoting Firefly, but I don't think you can fault them for doing as much as they did. At least we got 14 episodes out of it, and maybe - maybe! - a great movie.
And to drag myself painfully back on-topic, I'll probably buy the Star Wars DVDs. I'm not a hardcore fan, so I don't care who shoots first, and my DVD player has a "fast forward" button so I can skip the annoying scenes. I mean, if you don't want the "extended edition" DVDs, then don't buy them. If enough people do it, then eventually Lucas will give you what you want. But most nerds aren't that smart. They'll buy it anyway, because if it's got the "Star Wars" label attached they can't resist. (Note to self: Market "Star Wars Brand Latex Condoms" at 350% markup. They don't even have to work, nobody who would buy a Star Wars Brand Condom could possibly have a need for one.)
You are right, incidentally - the UK's economy is more liberal than ours. I guess it wasn't clear, but by "the industrialized countries" I was referring to the economic powerhouses, specifically the G7/G8. Hong Kong is a grey area, but for the sake of completeness, they are #1.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, like that ever stops someone from theorizing on Slashdot.
Not according to the 2004 Index of Economic freedom. It goes NZ (#3), US (#10), AU (#11). But we weren't talking about NZ, or at least I wasn't.
All that said, conformity to a certain extent is usually a good thing. Look at the programming world and the neverending search for standards. Once you reach a certain point it doesn't even matter if the standard is good or not. It just needs to set down a bunch of rules that everyone agrees to follow. Same sort of deal here. You can memorize the copyright rules for all fifty countries your business does work in, or you can try to get all fifty to adopt the same rule. Obviously you're going to want consistency. That could genuinely be the only motivation here.
I also strongly disagree with your opinion of tourism. If we manage to make space travel so reliable, affordable, and safe that people are doing it just for kicks...! Imagine a world like that! It doesn't mean we're going to stop having scientific missions. But it means that I can hop on a shuttle and go visit the moon, or another planet, or maybe even see another star. Not because I have any great reason, just because I want to. The freedom to go anywhere in the solar system for only a couple thousand bucks? Wow. I certainly think that's a noble goal, even if you don't.
Single-user in Linux usually isn't, so there's a pseudo-runlevel that doesn't touch the init scripts at all. If memory serves, it's boot -e[mergency]. What a mess. Linux is a little too eager to depart from Unix tradition at times.
I don't think the lack of "/etc/init.d/daemon stop" is that big a disadvantage. "killall daemon" works just as well - in fact, that's all most stop scripts do. The only thing you lose is the pretty color graphics.
This is definitely prime material for a religious war, though, as neither approach offers any real benefit. You can easily make either approach do whatever you want. With SysV-style scripts, it's slightly easier to let packages say how they should be started; with BSD-style scripts, it's slightly easier to understand the "big picture."
Look at the diagram. The first stage is "Security." That's where DRM would go. Its purpose according to the diagram is to verify the next stages, which would be to eliminate boot viruses. Personally, I think you're paranoid. But hey, even paranoid people are right sometimes!
This shouldn't be a big deal, since if you were big into gaming you wouldn't have bought a Mac. You should definitely be able to find enough games to keep yourself entertained, though.
This is why conspiracy theories have their undeniable appeal. Most people think we really landed on the moon, but there will always be a fringe who think it was faked. They have no reason for believing as they do, but... wouldn't it be interesting if it did turn out to be faked? How many other "obvious truths" would turn out to be false?
What's really sad is that I devoted so much time to a reply that could've ended after the first sentence.
Right, and bullies pick on you because you're smarter and they feel insecure. It's soothing to hear, but there's not a lot of truth to it. Most cheaters are pretty good at these games. The ones who aren't usually suck even when cheating (in fact, it can be quite hilarious when they demonstrate they can't even cheat properly). Most players aren't looking for something to do all the work for them, they're looking for something to give them an edge. It's a lot like athletes who use corked bats or steroids. I'd certainly call it morally wrong, but on the other hand most people don't seem to care. Witness the lack of uproar over pro sports drug scandals, despite considerably hype by the press and several major (ex-)athletes. Most cheaters probably just don't think much of what they're doing. They aren't out to ruin the game or piss you off; they don't even consider that you might get upset. After all, they reason, it's just a game.
"No Windows questions on Slashdot?! Well, fine! I'll start my own website, with blackjack, and hookers! In fact, forget the website!"
If you're willing to live with the increased risk, fine, go for it. If I felt any need to upgrade my computer, I'd probably fall into the group that's willing to risk true obsolescence. But a lot of people want as much security as possible, and those people should probably stay in the Land of 32-bit Words.
If you do all the math, I suspect it's cheaper to bite the bullet and do it here. Of course, the unions could help that along by agreeing to take a pay cut (or hell, forego raises for a few years), but that's never in a million years going to happen.
You see, free trade can do good things for the average worker. Though to be fair "good things" in this case means fewer steelworkers will lose their jobs instead of all of them. Still, it's improvement, and who knows? If our costs really drop by 50%, demand very well could increase enough to justify keeping all the old workers around.
(I didn't really have anything to say, but the only other posts with scores higher than zero were... Well, if you've been on Slashdot for more than five minutes, you know what they were like.)
Seriously, you just shouldn't assume the people at NASA are stupid. If it's obvious to you, it was obvious to them. For all you know, there are five mirrored flash disks on the rover. And if there aren't, I'm willing to bet there's an incredibly good reason.
Now consider the scenario where BIOSes get bigger. Remember that BIOSes are on a chip, which makes them damn hard for normal home users to replace or modify. If some DRM crap gets put in there, it's nearly impossible to remove. Now that's the part that's scary. The BIOS might refuse to boot unrecognized OSes, in which case you're SOL. But if it's the OS that's handling DRM, well, someone will have a crack for it a week before the OS comes out. Or you can uninstall the OS and run one without DRM, like Linux. Or you can install Linux and write some DRM software. Or whatever.