I think the problem here is even more basic than that. When you are developing a software product for profit, you go to the largest paying market for the product first where you are most likely to make returns on your investment. Right now, except possibly in pro audio and graphics design, targetting the Windows PC gives you the best chance of making money on most products.
With that as a given #1, writing good maintainable multiplatform software is going to add at least 25% to 50% more effort to a large real-world project and double the testing requirements, especially in games where you have to deal with proprietary graphics and music subsystems like DirectX. Yes, OpenGL and similar technologies can alleviate some of this, but it is still a lot more work to make things run on multiple platforms. And no, Java would not solve this problem yet.
Adding this extra work onto your development team means they're spending less time fixing problems and improving the product for the initial platform's customers - so you really have to think you're going to do a lot more than just recoup your losses when adding support for another platform - you also have to think you are adding enough customers that you can pay less attention to the initial customer base or hire a larger team.
Right now, Macintosh has a pretty small market share, and I have yet to see a lot of shrink-wrapped Linux software really selling in computer stores outside of the distros like RedHat and SuSE. I've seen some games that tested the waters, but if they had sold really well I'd expect to see a Linux Games section at my local computer dealer...
At any rate, once Star Wars Galaxies has proven itself on the first platform, if they hear enough requests for other platforms that it looks more profitable to add in multiplatform support than to jump onto the next product, they'll likely do it.
I've met one of the lead coders on the project, and I can definitely say they've got more than enough talent and skill to go there, and the majority of the code was probably designed to be platform-neutral and easily portable from the beginning. But unless it looks profitable to spend the extra money to do a port, it ain't gonna happen. That's called business.
If I bought a truck, and the seatbelt linkage into the truck's frame was faulty and likely to fail in a crash, then I suspect I'd write a letter to Consumer Reports reporting it. I'd probably also write a letter to the company. The fact that I would have had to take apart a portion of the truck to find the fault would make NO difference. No one would say it was illegal, no one would complain that I was 'gray hat' or 'black hat'. I bought the truck, the truck had a problem, I told people. Big deal.
If I took apart someone else's truck without asking for permission, I suspect I'd just get my ass kicked. But, charges could of course be filed by the owner of the truck as well.
Why is it different with computers? Why are there people here saying that someone who looks at something they've legally purchased and find flaws with it are ethically in the wrong? And why should they not be able to speak up about it? The article is about a guy who reverse-engineered something on his own system. He didn't hack anyone else's system. What is wrong with that? I'm seeing tons of posts saying that all gray hats are black hats, or that ethically gray hat hacking is wrong although they do it anyway, and lots of garbage like that. What is gray at all about experimenting on your own machine when you've purchased the software?!? The whole gray/black/white hat stuff to me only applies (in any way, even if it is all b.s.) when you're poking into *other* people's computers.
Yes, if you find a hole, it's polite to everyone to give the company a chance to fix it before going public. But - that's a polite social thing to do. I see nothing wrong with telling an emporer or anyone else that they are butt naked. And if I feel like it, I should be able to tell everyone that the emporer is butt naked without asking his permission. That's called freedom of speech.
If you're gonna advertise it on slashdot....
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Cappuccino PC, Round 3
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· Score: 2, Funny
Why don't you have it on ThinkGeek yet? Still selling the old stale cappucino there.... Methinks the marketroids didn't plan this well, and instead are just annoying would-be-news-readers.
This would be a disaster, even for serious professional programmers. I remember, for example, when the LoveBug virus came out and hit the company I worked for - all the antivirus companies' websites were down from too much traffic, so to fix the machines at my company I had to get a copy (easy - most computers there had it) and write a cure (also easy, few reg fixes, a few file deletes, and a few greps). I also made a copy of the LoveBug virus in case I needed to make a more generic cure later if multiple variants came out.
At any rate, in about an hour I gave the local MIS guys a fix and had them running around the offices, and had it announced on the intercom NOT to click the stupid thing... The AV sites were still down.
So my actions described above should be ILLEGAL?!?! I procured a copy of a destructive piece of code, and worse, I kept it.
So, later, I wanted to check the security of my company, and got permission to do so from my boss. I downloaded L0phtCrack for checking the passwords on the NT server from a known hacker site that catered in programs this treaty would make ILLEGAL (www.l0pht.com, now legit, cleaned up, and charging higher prices at www.atstake.com). I also downloaded some random Unix password cracker for our unix server at another hacker site that MUST BE SHUTDOWN according to this treaty. And lo and behold, while my actions here *were* sanctioned by the treaty, the people I got the programs from would have been thrown in jail - for proving that about 20% of the people in my company used their girlfriend's or wives names as passwords and a strict password policy needed to be put in place.
So, I know, the US signing a treaty has very little bearing on whether the US actually ratifies it and creates the laws to support it. BUT... that's how the DMCA got started.... this one should be killed early. Write your congressman.
IMHO, either you need to ask to see a portfolio similar to artists, or you need to have them write code to a spec and spend some time looking at it. What you want is experience, attention to detail, and drive - quite a bit more than mastery of the rarely used constructs of a specific language.
The standard interview format doesn't work for programmers. The best interview I've been given was from Art & Logic, which is a coding test. It weeded out the weak pretty well, as well as the non-self motivated types (I made the cut, worked with them for a while, then got an offer I couldn't refuse elsewhere - but they're a great team of solid coders).
My only complaint with them is that I didn't get a peer code-review afterwards - I would have liked to have had more feedback on the code, even though they apparently liked it enough to hire me.
A lot of game companies do this as well - I know Acclaim's subsidiary Iguana software used to ask for you to write a Defender knockoff, and I've heard of others.
Re:Your attitude is part of the problem.
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Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 1
Some of us keep open minds, and do read and think rather than following whatever group-think be it Slashdot-think or Corporate-think, and therefore can benefit from intelligent debate. Woops, I just explained something.... guess you win...
Believe it or not, the Supreme court will think about it too. I just hope the arguments in front of them will be more persuasive to a centrist viewpoint, otherwise I suspect he will loose the case completely when it's quite possible to at least overturn the recent extensions.
Re:A little off target though...
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Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 1
The Aibo part was good (if geeky), and briefly focused on where the real dangers lie...
The Aristotle e-book was just showing an example of a lousy implementation though, which is given away for free.
Yes, it's an example of DRM in action, but you can also go out and buy the book or you can legally transcribe the book from the screen, since the content is in the public domain. The thing they are trying to protect and reap a profit off of is the time and money spent transcribing it so they have something to sell - feel free to transcribe Aristotle's works into an online version and give it away for free in your spare time. The copyright laws don't prevent that. As far as the rights to his own $24 e-book are concerned, well... kinda sounds like he should have negotiated better with his publisher if he wanted people to be able to copy it for free, eh? Or maybe just made a website with a free, printable.PDF and given it away.
In other words - graphic example, but not of the problems with copyright in as much as the problems of software written against the users' interests. It's perfectly legal to write software that you can print Aristotle's complete works from, or even that allows you to copy the whole thing to the clipboard. You just have to do a lot of typing and have happy people be your reward....
A little off target though...
on
Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 3, Interesting
After listening to the presentation, I think it's very well put together for targetting geeks that already agree with his premise. However, it does nothing to present and/or debunk other viewpoints, nor is it really more than a pep-talk IMHO. He presents it as an us vs. them thing when there are quite a few different stances. It's also somewhat misguided - it spends a lot of time attacking copyright as if it is a "Bad Thing", rather than just showing all the reasons why 100 years of legal protection for Mickey Mouse might be bad.
On patents, I think the most sensible argument against them was presented in a letter to the US Patent Office by Donald Knuth, where he points out that software and the algorithms used therein are mathematics, and mathematics have previously been exempted from patents.
Regarding copyrights, while I would be quite happy with a short limitation on the life of a copyright (5 years would suit me just fine... 10-15 would be ok, anything longer is ludicrous in the technology field), I think his presentation is quite a bit more radical than most professional programmers might agree with after putting some thought into it.
Some of us don't particularly like working as employees of companies which we do not own, but without the protection that copyright provides it would be impossible to make a living by creating consumer software products. Yes, you could write custom software under contract to a corporation for money, or write software as an employee of a company, but to write a product for consumers? Who would pay for that? The average person who'd want to use a word processor certainly isn't going to cough up enough money to pay my rent for the amount of time I'd need to write one...
Without copyright, if I write a cool app and want to sell it, I'd only sell it once before anyone who wanted it could just get it for free... This is absolutely great for code I write in my spare time for fun, or tools and libraries I write to help me do my work where they might be useful to others, but *something* has to put food on the table.
However, I do think that once you buy something, at least the copy you own should be able to be used by you in whatever manner you wish. So his speech seems misguided... The real threat is that with recent legislation, that is less and less true.
I support the EFF and donate.... but the presentation is off target. I hope his arguments before the Supreme Court are less radical and stay based on the fact that 100 years is way too long for a copyright, rather than implying that copyright is bad.
You can go here and get a pretty full explanation of what he said. It was very poorly phrased, and IMHO, attempted to gain credit for more than his efforts were worth. This is deadly for politicians when they are caught at it, worth poking fun at, and occasionally still funny. Kinda like ALL YOUR NEWS ARE BLONG TO US.
But you are right that he and other US congressmen funded US companies, universities, etc. to speed further development of the internet - which, if you'll notice, was also implied in my from-the-hip post. For example, the place one of the original posters was posting that the US has never done anything for the internet just happens to reside in - well, three guesses.
I don't think it was that much of a contradiction, actually. Very few programmers that think about it think that software patents are a good idea. Those of us who are politically active write our congressmen and the USPTO. So far, that hasn't changed a damned thing.
So, given that the freedom has already been taken from us and every time we write a program we walk through a minefield of stupid patents on obvious processes, what can we do to fight it? Well... we can get as many patents as possible that are free for open source use so that the masses remain free and have a defense at least... Then maybe, just maybe, if enough patents are held in the open source arena, we can use them to hold off attackers for a while... and if we're lucky, it'll piss off companies enough that they'll reverse their lobbies on software patents. If Microsoft's products, for example, are found in violation of several open-source patents, then perhaps they'll join the fight against software patents. Probably not, but there aren't a lot of alternatives here. Continue writing the USPTO and your congressmen - yes. But then sit idly by while they ignore you and the legal system kills the open source movement one patent violation at a time - that seems like a very bad idea to me.
It's not ideal. Ideally, Knuth's letter to the USPTO quite a while back would have brought them to their senses. The letters from many others since should have pointed out that Knuth was not a radical and that this was a bad idea, and should be repealed. But that simply didn't happen. The freedom is already gone - we need to fight on multiple levels to get it back.
could you fix one of the bugs in the old one? I tried to post an "Ask Slashdot" the other day about getting 3000+ emails from a misconfigured router that happened to get an ex-Kazaa DHCP address and thus was bombarded for several hours at a pretty impressive rate on port 1214. Any chance you could try to make the Circle route around dropped nodes a tad faster? I shudder to think what would happen to a poor 28.8k user if they had that happen to them....
Also, after that experience and sniffing port 1214 with netcat for a bit to see wtf was going on, I'd say you might want to do some traffic analysis of other P2P networks if you're gonna try to censor the kiddie porn - you might be biting off more than you can chew, assuming anyone did use it.
WDEF, NVIR.a, and NVIR.b are the only ones I've ever seen in the wild (ITW). I think NVIR said something out of the speakers if you had that damned talking moose around, and that would be, oh, about '92 or so I think when I disinfected a high-school computer lab (MacWareZ was bad news back then, I guess....).
and what it has that's not easy to come by is a comprehensive description of SSH from both a user's and an administrator's viewpoint that's really readable. Of course, the internet drafts are the primary source of hardcore information, but it's nice to scan the book for additional insight on some things.
I've found the book to be extremely useful, but then I'm working on a multiplatform GUI SSH2 client myself so my opinion may be a bit skewed.
Got a problem with corporate radio?
on
Homogenized Music
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· Score: 1
Support LPFM, or hell, just run a high-power pirate radio if you have the balls for it.
I can still breath air for free, and I'm damn well going to use it for radio as well if I want to. IMHO, regulating the airwaves the way they do in the US is worse than any RIAA crud. At least we can choose to buy music from alternative sources. Can we choose to use different air?
Check the WildList for this month's viruses found in the wild. These are the only ones that actually pose a threat. Looks to me like if you don't run Microsoft Office products, and don't run Microsoft Windows or Microsoft DOS, you're pretty damn safe.
For those of you unfamiliar with virus naming conventions, here's some basics:
Most of the ones w/o a prefix are going to be DOS executeable or MBR/Bootsector infectors.
Prefixes:
JS/- Javascript
VBS/ - Visual Basic Script
W32/ - Win32
W95/ - Windows 95
W97M/ - MS Word 97 Macro
WM/ - MS Word Macro
X97M/ - Excel 97 Macro
XM/ - Excel Macro
O97M/ - Office 97 Macro
Realize that Mac Classic OS's are just as vulnerable, and in fact there were viruses being written for them ~1990 or so and possibly before, but they just aren't widespread anymore (WDEF was pretty popular for a while though...). Obviously, with the file protections of *nix, OSX is a bit more resiliant to infection although still perfectly targettable.
If you don't make sure your system is locked down properly, and you run executeable code from untrusted sources, well, you're taking a risk. It's just not all that big right now (contrasted, of course, with the 5+.scr/.html and.exe/.html combo's I get in my mail box per day aimed at infecting windows...).
But why do they need to go to college to become programmers, especially if they are promising? What they need is a good base in logic, algorithms,
craftsmanship,
a language, and some hard earned experience.
I have no degree and no high-school diploma, but I own my own personal library devoted to programming , read and code regularly, and can still (yes, even after the.bombs) write my own ticket for jobs. Most people in the programming industries these days want to know what you can do and how you can do it - not where you when to school or what your GPA is, because quite honestly there is a huge influx of really poor but really heavily degreed and certified programmers and administrators. One of the hazards of being at the top of the "most desired profession" lists for too long I think....
In all the westerns I saw, the white hats and black hats both had guns. The white-hats were just more careful about who they shot. Betchya the Red-hats will be too.
And just how does this limit the free as in speech software? If anything, I'd say their promise will help protect it. Without holding patents, what would happen if, say, Linux happened to violate patent "US5930831: Partition manipulation architecture supporting multiple file systems" with it's partitioning tools? Or worse yet, if RPM happened to violate "US6381742: Software package management" held by Microsoft? You can read 'em at the US patent office , or Delphion if you register. At least with RedHat's patents and their promise, they might be able to discourage attacks with the threat of a counter-attack.
They should be applauded. The GPL license enforces the honesty of their promise where the two meet in code, and to me at least it seems like they are fully aware of that and did it intentionally to protect the open source community from likely attacks.
(f) You agree that your Product must output SWF files that can playback without Errors in the latest versions of the Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and Linux Macromedia Flash Players as listed at
http://www.macromedia.com/go/flashsource_platforms ("Macromedia Supported Platforms") as may be amended from time to time at Macromedia's sole discretion.
So... they can change their software at any point, any way they want, and you are in violation of their license agreement if your product doesn't overcome the backwards incompatibilities and bugs that they release? Sounds like it's putting the responsibility of creating a stable format and environment on the wrong side.
I'm all for developers actually debugging and testing their code - everyone knows that needs to happen quite a bit more often in our industry - but this license sounds like an attempt to shift blame away from the deserving target more than anything else.
If you write a plugin for a browser, you are operating in an environment that should be *secure*. Any third-party software should be forced into compliance or not executed. If a flash site can crash their plugin, a better crafted one could root the system. On a similar note, if content runs on Windows and not on Mac, then their plugin environment isn't suitably abstracted.
I say right on! Provide
Free Bandwidth for everyone! Help bring the masses online with the proliferation of WiFi hubs! Give Pringles
cans a new life and keep 'em out of the landfills!
By the way, are there any coffee shops within WiFi range of your new office? They wouldn't mind if I hung out, drank coffee, and read slashdot would they?
Did you happen to notice what site it came from? The People's Daily is the main voice of their government. That's the 'old guard' you're talking about, and that's why it's political.
They are being forced into most of the reforms they are implementing by the market and their own people - when the rice farmers that aren't allowed passports or even travel between cities inside China start becoming more educated and aware of the world outside, they get dangerous.
Eventually, they'll either have to become democratic, or face another revolution. Let's just hope that if the latter occurs, it's better than the last one.
I screwed up my hands early on from typing incorrectly way too much.. like to the point that for a month or two I couldn't really use my left hand for opening bottles / driving. I now have a Kinesis Essential, and while it took a month or so to get to where I could go at any reasonable speed, it's helped and I can now go at about the same speed as on a regular keyboard. What's helped more though has been making sure to take breaks and use better posture - take the keyboard OUT of your lap while typing...
I also use funky arm rests , which help considerably with mouse use and shoulder/back pain, and I got a fairly normal office chair, but spent some time finding one that actually fit my back right.
These days I do pretty well w/o pain, and that's 70+ work hours/week on the computer + any time I might spend doing my own stuff after work.
Bah, dont throw the "look muslim" bull out there. I'm 30, white, male, very short hair (shaved), and on EVERY flight since Sep 11 I've been pulled aside and my luggage checked.
Do you wear a hooded sweatjacket and dark sunglasses? Yup, that might explain it...
Totally agreed on the false positives problem. I've been falsely identified before when walking past a mall (past, mind you, not even in) as "the guy who gave an employee a sexually threatening letter". I was detained for hours and damn near ended up in a fight with the 20IQ 4$/hour security guard who was yelling at me calling me a rapist, liar, and a number of other wonderful things.
Finally, his supervisor came out, and I asked them to bring out the victim. The first time, they brought out someone else (not the alleged victim) who also identified me as "the guy". I have no idea who that was, wish I coulda spoken with him later.
About 30 minutes later, they brought out the victim. One look at me, and she said "nope, not the guy".
BTW - the description was "A guy in jeans w/long hair and a goatee". And while they were wasting time with this false positive, the real guy got away.
So, what happens when there's no victim there to clear your name? Worse, I'd imagine...
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem here is even more basic than that. When you are developing a software product for profit, you go to the largest paying market for the product first where you are most likely to make returns on your investment. Right now, except possibly in pro audio and graphics design, targetting the Windows PC gives you the best chance of making money on most products.
With that as a given #1, writing good maintainable multiplatform software is going to add at least 25% to 50% more effort to a large real-world project and double the testing requirements, especially in games where you have to deal with proprietary graphics and music subsystems like DirectX. Yes, OpenGL and similar technologies can alleviate some of this, but it is still a lot more work to make things run on multiple platforms. And no, Java would not solve this problem yet.
Adding this extra work onto your development team means they're spending less time fixing problems and improving the product for the initial platform's customers - so you really have to think you're going to do a lot more than just recoup your losses when adding support for another platform - you also have to think you are adding enough customers that you can pay less attention to the initial customer base or hire a larger team.
Right now, Macintosh has a pretty small market share, and I have yet to see a lot of shrink-wrapped Linux software really selling in computer stores outside of the distros like RedHat and SuSE. I've seen some games that tested the waters, but if they had sold really well I'd expect to see a Linux Games section at my local computer dealer...
At any rate, once Star Wars Galaxies has proven itself on the first platform, if they hear enough requests for other platforms that it looks more profitable to add in multiplatform support than to jump onto the next product, they'll likely do it.
I've met one of the lead coders on the project, and I can definitely say they've got more than enough talent and skill to go there, and the majority of the code was probably designed to be platform-neutral and easily portable from the beginning. But unless it looks profitable to spend the extra money to do a port, it ain't gonna happen. That's called business.
If I bought a truck, and the seatbelt linkage into the truck's frame was faulty and likely to fail in a crash, then I suspect I'd write a letter to Consumer Reports reporting it. I'd probably also write a letter to the company. The fact that I would have had to take apart a portion of the truck to find the fault would make NO difference. No one would say it was illegal, no one would complain that I was 'gray hat' or 'black hat'. I bought the truck, the truck had a problem, I told people. Big deal.
If I took apart someone else's truck without asking for permission, I suspect I'd just get my ass kicked. But, charges could of course be filed by the owner of the truck as well.
Why is it different with computers? Why are there people here saying that someone who looks at something they've legally purchased and find flaws with it are ethically in the wrong? And why should they not be able to speak up about it? The article is about a guy who reverse-engineered something on his own system. He didn't hack anyone else's system. What is wrong with that? I'm seeing tons of posts saying that all gray hats are black hats, or that ethically gray hat hacking is wrong although they do it anyway, and lots of garbage like that. What is gray at all about experimenting on your own machine when you've purchased the software?!? The whole gray/black/white hat stuff to me only applies (in any way, even if it is all b.s.) when you're poking into *other* people's computers.
Yes, if you find a hole, it's polite to everyone to give the company a chance to fix it before going public. But - that's a polite social thing to do. I see nothing wrong with telling an emporer or anyone else that they are butt naked. And if I feel like it, I should be able to tell everyone that the emporer is butt naked without asking his permission. That's called freedom of speech.
Why don't you have it on ThinkGeek yet? Still selling the old stale cappucino there.... Methinks the marketroids didn't plan this well, and instead are just annoying would-be-news-readers.
At any rate, in about an hour I gave the local MIS guys a fix and had them running around the offices, and had it announced on the intercom NOT to click the stupid thing... The AV sites were still down.
So my actions described above should be ILLEGAL?!?! I procured a copy of a destructive piece of code, and worse, I kept it.
So, later, I wanted to check the security of my company, and got permission to do so from my boss. I downloaded L0phtCrack for checking the passwords on the NT server from a known hacker site that catered in programs this treaty would make ILLEGAL (www.l0pht.com, now legit, cleaned up, and charging higher prices at www.atstake.com). I also downloaded some random Unix password cracker for our unix server at another hacker site that MUST BE SHUTDOWN according to this treaty. And lo and behold, while my actions here *were* sanctioned by the treaty, the people I got the programs from would have been thrown in jail - for proving that about 20% of the people in my company used their girlfriend's or wives names as passwords and a strict password policy needed to be put in place.
So, I know, the US signing a treaty has very little bearing on whether the US actually ratifies it and creates the laws to support it. BUT... that's how the DMCA got started.... this one should be killed early. Write your congressman.
The standard interview format doesn't work for programmers. The best interview I've been given was from Art & Logic, which is a coding test. It weeded out the weak pretty well, as well as the non-self motivated types (I made the cut, worked with them for a while, then got an offer I couldn't refuse elsewhere - but they're a great team of solid coders).
My only complaint with them is that I didn't get a peer code-review afterwards - I would have liked to have had more feedback on the code, even though they apparently liked it enough to hire me.
A lot of game companies do this as well - I know Acclaim's subsidiary Iguana software used to ask for you to write a Defender knockoff, and I've heard of others.
Believe it or not, the Supreme court will think about it too. I just hope the arguments in front of them will be more persuasive to a centrist viewpoint, otherwise I suspect he will loose the case completely when it's quite possible to at least overturn the recent extensions.
Yes, it's an example of DRM in action, but you can also go out and buy the book or you can legally transcribe the book from the screen, since the content is in the public domain. The thing they are trying to protect and reap a profit off of is the time and money spent transcribing it so they have something to sell - feel free to transcribe Aristotle's works into an online version and give it away for free in your spare time. The copyright laws don't prevent that. As far as the rights to his own $24 e-book are concerned, well... kinda sounds like he should have negotiated better with his publisher if he wanted people to be able to copy it for free, eh? Or maybe just made a website with a free, printable .PDF and given it away.
In other words - graphic example, but not of the problems with copyright in as much as the problems of software written against the users' interests. It's perfectly legal to write software that you can print Aristotle's complete works from, or even that allows you to copy the whole thing to the clipboard. You just have to do a lot of typing and have happy people be your reward....
On patents, I think the most sensible argument against them was presented in a letter to the US Patent Office by Donald Knuth, where he points out that software and the algorithms used therein are mathematics, and mathematics have previously been exempted from patents.
Regarding copyrights, while I would be quite happy with a short limitation on the life of a copyright (5 years would suit me just fine... 10-15 would be ok, anything longer is ludicrous in the technology field), I think his presentation is quite a bit more radical than most professional programmers might agree with after putting some thought into it.
Some of us don't particularly like working as employees of companies which we do not own, but without the protection that copyright provides it would be impossible to make a living by creating consumer software products. Yes, you could write custom software under contract to a corporation for money, or write software as an employee of a company, but to write a product for consumers? Who would pay for that? The average person who'd want to use a word processor certainly isn't going to cough up enough money to pay my rent for the amount of time I'd need to write one...
Without copyright, if I write a cool app and want to sell it, I'd only sell it once before anyone who wanted it could just get it for free... This is absolutely great for code I write in my spare time for fun, or tools and libraries I write to help me do my work where they might be useful to others, but *something* has to put food on the table.
However, I do think that once you buy something, at least the copy you own should be able to be used by you in whatever manner you wish. So his speech seems misguided... The real threat is that with recent legislation, that is less and less true.
I support the EFF and donate.... but the presentation is off target. I hope his arguments before the Supreme Court are less radical and stay based on the fact that 100 years is way too long for a copyright, rather than implying that copyright is bad.
Think he used a pirated copy of PowerPoint? ;)
But you are right that he and other US congressmen funded US companies, universities, etc. to speed further development of the internet - which, if you'll notice, was also implied in my from-the-hip post. For example, the place one of the original posters was posting that the US has never done anything for the internet just happens to reside in - well, three guesses.
Our ex-vice president created the whole thing over 10 years ago!
Or something like that....
I am curious where this person would go to for tech news w/o the US though....
So, given that the freedom has already been taken from us and every time we write a program we walk through a minefield of stupid patents on obvious processes, what can we do to fight it? Well... we can get as many patents as possible that are free for open source use so that the masses remain free and have a defense at least... Then maybe, just maybe, if enough patents are held in the open source arena, we can use them to hold off attackers for a while... and if we're lucky, it'll piss off companies enough that they'll reverse their lobbies on software patents. If Microsoft's products, for example, are found in violation of several open-source patents, then perhaps they'll join the fight against software patents. Probably not, but there aren't a lot of alternatives here. Continue writing the USPTO and your congressmen - yes. But then sit idly by while they ignore you and the legal system kills the open source movement one patent violation at a time - that seems like a very bad idea to me.
It's not ideal. Ideally, Knuth's letter to the USPTO quite a while back would have brought them to their senses. The letters from many others since should have pointed out that Knuth was not a radical and that this was a bad idea, and should be repealed. But that simply didn't happen. The freedom is already gone - we need to fight on multiple levels to get it back.
Also, after that experience and sniffing port 1214 with netcat for a bit to see wtf was going on, I'd say you might want to do some traffic analysis of other P2P networks if you're gonna try to censor the kiddie porn - you might be biting off more than you can chew, assuming anyone did use it.
WDEF, NVIR.a, and NVIR.b are the only ones I've ever seen in the wild (ITW). I think NVIR said something out of the speakers if you had that damned talking moose around, and that would be, oh, about '92 or so I think when I disinfected a high-school computer lab (MacWareZ was bad news back then, I guess....).
I've found the book to be extremely useful, but then I'm working on a multiplatform GUI SSH2 client myself so my opinion may be a bit skewed.
I can still breath air for free, and I'm damn well going to use it for radio as well if I want to. IMHO, regulating the airwaves the way they do in the US is worse than any RIAA crud. At least we can choose to buy music from alternative sources. Can we choose to use different air?
For those of you unfamiliar with virus naming conventions, here's some basics:
Most of the ones w/o a prefix are going to be DOS executeable or MBR/Bootsector infectors.
Prefixes:
JS/- Javascript VBS/ - Visual Basic Script
W32/ - Win32
W95/ - Windows 95
W97M/ - MS Word 97 Macro
WM/ - MS Word Macro
X97M/ - Excel 97 Macro
XM/ - Excel Macro
O97M/ - Office 97 Macro
Realize that Mac Classic OS's are just as vulnerable, and in fact there were viruses being written for them ~1990 or so and possibly before, but they just aren't widespread anymore (WDEF was pretty popular for a while though...). Obviously, with the file protections of *nix, OSX is a bit more resiliant to infection although still perfectly targettable.
If you don't make sure your system is locked down properly, and you run executeable code from untrusted sources, well, you're taking a risk. It's just not all that big right now (contrasted, of course, with the 5+ .scr/.html and .exe/.html combo's I get in my mail box per day aimed at infecting windows...).
But why do they need to go to college to become programmers, especially if they are promising? What they need is a good base in logic, algorithms, craftsmanship, a language, and some hard earned experience. I have no degree and no high-school diploma, but I own my own personal library devoted to programming , read and code regularly, and can still (yes, even after the .bombs) write my own ticket for jobs. Most people in the programming industries these days want to know what you can do and how you can do it - not where you when to school or what your GPA is, because quite honestly there is a huge influx of really poor but really heavily degreed and certified programmers and administrators. One of the hazards of being at the top of the "most desired profession" lists for too long I think....
In all the westerns I saw, the white hats and black hats both had guns. The white-hats were just more careful about who they shot. Betchya the Red-hats will be too.
They should be applauded. The GPL license enforces the honesty of their promise where the two meet in code, and to me at least it seems like they are fully aware of that and did it intentionally to protect the open source community from likely attacks.
So... they can change their software at any point, any way they want, and you are in violation of their license agreement if your product doesn't overcome the backwards incompatibilities and bugs that they release? Sounds like it's putting the responsibility of creating a stable format and environment on the wrong side.
I'm all for developers actually debugging and testing their code - everyone knows that needs to happen quite a bit more often in our industry - but this license sounds like an attempt to shift blame away from the deserving target more than anything else.
If you write a plugin for a browser, you are operating in an environment that should be *secure*. Any third-party software should be forced into compliance or not executed. If a flash site can crash their plugin, a better crafted one could root the system. On a similar note, if content runs on Windows and not on Mac, then their plugin environment isn't suitably abstracted.
By the way, are there any coffee shops within WiFi range of your new office? They wouldn't mind if I hung out, drank coffee, and read slashdot would they?
People's Daily is the main voice of their government. That's the 'old guard' you're talking about, and that's why it's political.
They are being forced into most of the reforms they are implementing by the market and their own people - when the rice farmers that aren't allowed passports or even travel between cities inside China start becoming more educated and aware of the world outside, they get dangerous.
Eventually, they'll either have to become democratic, or face another revolution. Let's just hope that if the latter occurs, it's better than the last one.
I screwed up my hands early on from typing incorrectly way too much.. like to the point that for a month or two I couldn't really use my left hand for opening bottles / driving. I now have a Kinesis Essential, and while it took a month or so to get to where I could go at any reasonable speed, it's helped and I can now go at about the same speed as on a regular keyboard. What's helped more though has been making sure to take breaks and use better posture - take the keyboard OUT of your lap while typing...
I also use funky arm rests , which help considerably with mouse use and shoulder/back pain, and I got a fairly normal office chair, but spent some time finding one that actually fit my back right.
These days I do pretty well w/o pain, and that's 70+ work hours/week on the computer + any time I might spend doing my own stuff after work.
Totally agreed on the false positives problem. I've been falsely identified before when walking past a mall (past, mind you, not even in) as "the guy who gave an employee a sexually threatening letter". I was detained for hours and damn near ended up in a fight with the 20IQ 4$/hour security guard who was yelling at me calling me a rapist, liar, and a number of other wonderful things.
Finally, his supervisor came out, and I asked them to bring out the victim. The first time, they brought out someone else (not the alleged victim) who also identified me as "the guy". I have no idea who that was, wish I coulda spoken with him later.
About 30 minutes later, they brought out the victim. One look at me, and she said "nope, not the guy".
BTW - the description was "A guy in jeans w/long hair and a goatee". And while they were wasting time with this false positive, the real guy got away.
So, what happens when there's no victim there to clear your name? Worse, I'd imagine...