So it sounds like Google needs to *shudder* have a user feedback system where humans with logins add moderation metadata to the search results and in return get results based on this moderation en-mass.
It sounds noble in theory, but in practice it doesn't work so well.
A bunch of phony moderations will boost the pages of ads. Only allowing users with logins to rate results won't save you; the spammers will simply create millions (yes, millions) of bogus accounts, farm them to improve their "karma" then, when an advertiser wants visibility, the accounts are used to boost pages.
It would withstand abuse since a massive amount of human inputed data would keep spambots from trying to exploit the moderation system.
Even if you have millions of people actively helping out, they still can't compete with millions of r00t3d Windows boxes.
So how is it that running as a "limited user" under Windows is an arcane, difficult process, whereas doing so under UNIX is nearly trivial?
I'm not saying UNIX is "better," since the primary issue here is social, not technical. If UNIX were in Windows' shoes, then third-party applications and slickly packaged malware would be popping up dialogs reading, "This application requires root priviliges to install. Please enter the root password: _____" So UNIX's user model doesn't really solve the base problem. However, I've been using Windows (mostly for gaming) for a while now, and I run with administrative privs all the time, because running as a limited user (in the UNIX sense) just doesn't work. Or, perhaps more precisely, it doesn't Just Work.
I'm also quite sure that a lot of game studios will support DX-X and nothing else, so if you want to play Halflife 3 and Duke Nu... (ok, no lame jokes, I promised), you have to get Vista.
Game publishers don't have a lot of flexibility in development (and pure development houses without a publishing arm have even less). Anything that sells less than 100K copies is considered an abject failure.
DX-X is going to have a very, very narrow market for at least a year, and probably much longer. Publishers would sooner develop for the Nintendo Revolution before committing to a Vista-only release, because the numbers simply aren't going to be there. Further, Microsoft is a direct competitor, and it is not at all hard to imagine them pulling the same Secret API tricks for their game developers that they (allegedly) pulled for their Office developers.
So, no. I think Vista will be treated with great trepidation for a long while after release.
Schwab
SIR: Statutory Invention Registration
on
Public Patents?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
SIRs are a sort of un-patent, also issued by the USPTO. This more or less officially registers your invention into the corpus of prior art, giving it a far better chance of being found by patent examiners. However, it grants you no rights of action against "infringers".
These registrations used to be used by government researchers, back when all publicly-funded research used to enter the public domain.
Seriously. Is there any kind of proper security infrastructure in place for this thing? And when I say, "Security," I don't mean the NewSpeak definition where it refers to copy protection. I mean the real definition where it refers to establishing and maintaining system integrity for the benefit of the system's owner.
It's simple. We say to the telecoms: If you want to run a cable franchise in our town then you need our permission. If you want out permission then you will agree to respect the tenets of Network Neutrality.
I wish you the very best of fortune in this endeavor, but fear that it won't be quite that simple.
First, if the CableCo does discriminate against packets, you'll have to prove it. This can be quite difficult, depending on how the CableCo decides to set up its routing tables (City Hall gets full bandwidth on all packets, 'cause that's where investigations would be launched).
Next, when you move to fine the CableCo or revoke their franchise, they'll hang you up in lawsuits for 12 years, arguing all the way to the Supreme Court that the Network Neutrality provision in the franchise contract was
unconscionable;
unenforceable because FCC regs trump any municipal aberrations;
only applies to packets travelling entirely within the franchising municipality -- everything originating or terminating outside it is subject to standard discriminatory pricing; or
And the FSF needs to shut up with their dilusional ideology, open source is a convenience, not some fundamental human right
You have not been paying attention.
In case you hadn't noticed, NTSC and PAL video encoders have a bunch of circuitry in them which, if programmed improperly, can be made to generate defective, non-standard video signals, which can cause some compliant video products to malfunction. This defective signalling is colloquially referred to as, "Macrovision."
For reasons that elude the powers of even the most sagacious people to divine, graphics driver engineers have been known to mis-program the chips and create these signalling defects. Most often, these defects appear when commercial DVDs are played back. But there is nothing to prevent the engineers from enabling it at other times, such as during play of your favorite game, thereby potentially preventing you from recording your game, or from displaying it on a large network of monitors (sometimes done at gaming tournaments).
However, if the drivers were Open Source, then you could remove these defects. You could fix your own driver and make it behave the way you want it to. And why shouldn't it behave the way you want it to? It's your graphics card.
So, no, we're not talking about some esoteric "convenience" for the sake of some rarified developers. We're talking about fixing real defects in real code that affects real people. And that should be good enough reason for anyone. (Oh, and fundamental civil rights. But that cause isn't as marketable these days.)
"There's third-party intellectual property that ATI has licensed that is required by law to be protected," said Matthew Tippett, ATI's Linux software engineering manager.
Actually, it's required by contract, not by law.
This is not semantic quibbling, it strongly affects the reader's impression. By claiming they're required by law to not disclose, they imply that they too are victims of the situation, that they are subject to the whims of forces beyond their control, etc. But that is not the case; the law does not mandate secrecy. The licensing contract with the technology provider does. This means that ATI walked into the situation with open eyes of their own free will, and entered into an agreement not to disclose.
It wasn't done to them. They did it to themselves. Whether or not they now regret this decision is anyone's guess.
This simplifies EULA terms in a consumer friendly way similar to care labels on clothing, nutrition facts on food and warnings on hazardous materials.
The only consumer-friendly shrinkwrap "license" is the one that isn't there at all. Anyone who would regard such a monsterously unethical instrument as valid deserves everything they get.
After 30 years of propoganda and misinformation, when only 1/3rd of consumers even bother to read your so-called "license", that should serve as a fairly strong indicator that your ruse isn't working.
Oh, please. The criminal fascists currently "in charge" of the US have violated about half the provisions of the Constitution, not to mention pissed off most of the military and intelligence communities, and destroyed its international and diplomatic reputation. Do you honestly think an obscure statute like the DMCA would slow them down for even an instant?
Schwab
Re:"Snarfed"
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I suggest we all start using "snarfed" as a synonym for "slashdotted". [... ]
Unfortunately, this is the kind of conspiracy nut drivel that flows from the mind of a 13 yar old, and a lot of 23, 33, 43 and 53 year olds.
As our Fearless Leader once sagely intoned: "Bring it on." It is trivially easy to prove these "conspiracy theories," as you call them, are without merit. Simply create a test procedure that measures the accuracy of the machines, then run the tests and publish the results. Then have an independent third party run the tests and publish results. If the results show that the machines indeed accurately count votes and report said counts, then you'll have a hard fact to back up your claim that the machines are trustworthy.
You obivously have never worked in an enteprise or had to deal with the issues.
There is only one issue here: Do the machines count votes and report those counts accurately? In other words, are they worthy of trust? Anything else is a carnival side-show. And, frankly, if the integrity of the voting process is being given short shrift in deference to The Chain of Command or The Process or some politician's ego, then The Chain of Command can take a flying fsck at a bouncing doughnut, because it's not working. I don't give a fetid, corn-addled shit if someone's precious feelings get hurt over this if it means the voting machines work and are reasonably secure against tampering.
What everyone is missing is that this clerk allowed unauthorized access to the machine, regardless of the intent. He went beyond the scope of his responsibility and did not follow the chain of command.
No, we're not missing that at all. It seems evident that the Chain of Command was either dazzled, baffled, or bribed into accepting these faulty machines from an ethically deficient corporation, and the only way the integrity of the voting process could be preserved was to solicit an independent examination into the machines' trustworthiness.
That the Chain of Command is now throwing a hissy fit about "warranty violations" serves only to illustrate that they are paying attention to the wrong things. Of course you independently test the machines. When you're dealing with something this important, you never believe the four-color glossies; you acquire your own facts and test stuff.
Am I the only one that sees this statement as a dangerous precedent? I mean, for all intents and purposes, RMS feels that 'stealing' copyrighted code is justifiable, if it's done with the intent to "liberate it".
It's not a "dangerous precedent," as you call it; merely the inevitable conclusion one reaches if you subscribe to the same axioms as RMS.
In the common (both senses of the word) world view, taking code written by someone else and redistributing it is considered bad; a violation of the rights of the code's creator. But in RMS's world view -- which, it is important to understand, has some very different basic principles -- writing code and failing to release it is bad; the redistribution of the code is therefore merely a correction to the selfish author's "crime" of not releasing it.
We've all seen the abuses that the monopoly of copyright has enabled, and it appears to be getting worse. So I personally tend to hew more closely to RMS's views. However, as stated, RMS's views certainly seem very extreme -- more extreme than many are willing to adopt wholesale -- and I wonder if there's any further nuance to RMS's views that aren't getting articulated well. Such as: If redistributing the code of another author is not unethical, what about redistributing the code of another author without any attribution to said author? What about claiming yourself as the author?
It seems to me that RMS's principle "copying is not theft" is part of a complete set of ethical principles which, taken together, may very well make good sense (the man is no dummy). But we're only shown but one of those principles and, taken alone, it causes people to go, "Wha...?" But this is entirely supposition on my part, and I would not presume to put words in the man's mouth...
Hard drives don't care if you run them upside down, taco.
Uh, no. Some drives actually do care about mounting orientation. It varies on a drive-by-drive basis. You need to look carefully at the spec sheet to see which orientations are acceptable.
All drives will run "right side up" (usually with the circuit board facing downward). Nearly all drives will also run mounted vertically (on either long edge). There are a few drives that expressly discourage running upside down. Nearly all drives discourage mounting at anything other than 90 degree angles.
The article mentions that XGL made some architectural decisions that some people disagree with, and that AIGLX is a more "incremental" design. Does this mean that AIGLX is Yet Another Extension Bolted On to X?
Unfortunately, although I've picked apart many XFree86 device drivers, I don't know very much about the architecture of X and X servers. Could someone give a thumbnail sketch of the issues at stake, and the tradeoffs?
Schwab
Re:If you replace enough files...
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm sorry, but one of your "fundamental truths" is nothing of the kind.
Sure, it's just bits on a plastic disc. You should be able to install it on your Mac, run over it with your car, do nothing with it, juggle it, wipe your ass with it, or even hack it and install it on your PC. Right? Sure, I'm with you. I understand the argument you're making. But, like it or not, this hurts Apple. *You* might not think it hurts Apple, but the only people in the position to *decide* that it hurts Apple - i.e., Apple - have decided that it *does* hurt Apple. Whether it's because of business model or arbitrary decision, that's their decision to make.
No, it's not their decision to make.
Ford doesn't get to say that you can only fill their cars with Chevron gas. Sony doesn't get to say you can only put CDs from Sony/Columbia Records into their CD players. SBC/Qwest/BellSouth don't get to say you can only connect Panasonic phones to their lines. Certainly, they can recommend those things, but they cannot force compliance with those wishes, since they lack standing to do so.
Likewise, once you've lawfully obtained a copy of MacOS-X, Apple loses all rights to dictate how that copy may be used. Certainly, they recommend you run it on Apple hardware. But if you can get it to run on something else, they have no legitimate right to complain about it (although they can refuse to support you).
They cannot demonstrate harm to their business (because there isn't any). But even if they could, it doesn't matter. The sustainability of Apple's business model is entirely Apple's responsibility, not the consumer's. It was transparently obvious to most people back in the Irrationally Exuberant Dot-Com days that offering free overnight shipping on all items was unsustainable. Was it therefore the responsibility of the customers to eschew the free shipping, since taking advantage of it would materially damage the businesses they professed to support? Of course not.
Apple was founded by hackers. They've been around long enough to know that people will do unusual things with their products. This is to be embraced and celebrated, not criminalized. If someone wants to take MacOS-X and get it to run on a boring beige box, that is manifestly their own business. This is reality, a reality that Apple was instrumental in creating. It is therefore Apple's responsbility to learn how to live in it.
Halo was an interesting game, with a good storyline (although I thought the gauntlet of Flood leading to the index key was fairly gratuitous). However, as a PC game, it sucked rather sharply. Despite having fairly simple geometry and not-at-all-strenuous texturing, the frame rate often slowed to deplorable levels. Since the XBox was a 700MHz Pentium machine, there was no reason why it should have been a slug on a 1GHz dual-Pentium desktop system with a GeForce FX5900.
So now we're told that Halo 2 -- a more complex beast -- will require an "upgrade" to Windows Vista. So I have to compound one performance disaster with another?
I hope to put together a completely new machine this year (my 1GHz dual Pentium is starting to show its age) and it will need Windows, since I play a fair number of games. However, I'm still running Win-2K at home, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it that makes me want to suffer a change to XP, let alone the disasterous copy-protection nightmare of Vista.
So, no sale. There's no reason to believe that Halo 2 for the PC won't suck at least as much as the original Halo PC sucked. And it's certainly not enough reason to cripple my machine with Vista.
Obviously Bill Gates works very hard, and deserves to be rewarded well for his good work. But, gosh, with all the rampant unsanctioned copying going on, it's a crying shame that he's only managed to become the wealthiest man on the planet.
Funnily enough, like the DMCA, the NET Act was also signed into law by the Clinton Administration. I only point that out to illustrate that selling out your rights to further rapacious corporate profits is not, and never has been, exclusively a Republican trait.
Slashdot Mirror
Schwab
(Five points if you get the reference.)
I had a subscription to COMPUTE! magazine, which did exactly that, only for multiple platforms. It was a wonderful resource for computer hobbyists.
Schwab
It sounds noble in theory, but in practice it doesn't work so well.
A bunch of phony moderations will boost the pages of ads. Only allowing users with logins to rate results won't save you; the spammers will simply create millions (yes, millions) of bogus accounts, farm them to improve their "karma" then, when an advertiser wants visibility, the accounts are used to boost pages.
Even if you have millions of people actively helping out, they still can't compete with millions of r00t3d Windows boxes.
Schwab
I'm not saying UNIX is "better," since the primary issue here is social, not technical. If UNIX were in Windows' shoes, then third-party applications and slickly packaged malware would be popping up dialogs reading, "This application requires root priviliges to install. Please enter the root password: _____" So UNIX's user model doesn't really solve the base problem. However, I've been using Windows (mostly for gaming) for a while now, and I run with administrative privs all the time, because running as a limited user (in the UNIX sense) just doesn't work. Or, perhaps more precisely, it doesn't Just Work.
So what's the deal?
Schwab
Game publishers don't have a lot of flexibility in development (and pure development houses without a publishing arm have even less). Anything that sells less than 100K copies is considered an abject failure.
DX-X is going to have a very, very narrow market for at least a year, and probably much longer. Publishers would sooner develop for the Nintendo Revolution before committing to a Vista-only release, because the numbers simply aren't going to be there. Further, Microsoft is a direct competitor, and it is not at all hard to imagine them pulling the same Secret API tricks for their game developers that they (allegedly) pulled for their Office developers.
So, no. I think Vista will be treated with great trepidation for a long while after release.
Schwab
These registrations used to be used by government researchers, back when all publicly-funded research used to enter the public domain.
Schwab
Schwab
I wish you the very best of fortune in this endeavor, but fear that it won't be quite that simple.
First, if the CableCo does discriminate against packets, you'll have to prove it. This can be quite difficult, depending on how the CableCo decides to set up its routing tables (City Hall gets full bandwidth on all packets, 'cause that's where investigations would be launched).
Next, when you move to fine the CableCo or revoke their franchise, they'll hang you up in lawsuits for 12 years, arguing all the way to the Supreme Court that the Network Neutrality provision in the franchise contract was
Schwab
You have not been paying attention.
In case you hadn't noticed, NTSC and PAL video encoders have a bunch of circuitry in them which, if programmed improperly, can be made to generate defective, non-standard video signals, which can cause some compliant video products to malfunction. This defective signalling is colloquially referred to as, "Macrovision."
For reasons that elude the powers of even the most sagacious people to divine, graphics driver engineers have been known to mis-program the chips and create these signalling defects. Most often, these defects appear when commercial DVDs are played back. But there is nothing to prevent the engineers from enabling it at other times, such as during play of your favorite game, thereby potentially preventing you from recording your game, or from displaying it on a large network of monitors (sometimes done at gaming tournaments).
However, if the drivers were Open Source, then you could remove these defects. You could fix your own driver and make it behave the way you want it to. And why shouldn't it behave the way you want it to? It's your graphics card.
So, no, we're not talking about some esoteric "convenience" for the sake of some rarified developers. We're talking about fixing real defects in real code that affects real people. And that should be good enough reason for anyone. (Oh, and fundamental civil rights. But that cause isn't as marketable these days.)
Schwab
Actually, it's required by contract, not by law.
This is not semantic quibbling, it strongly affects the reader's impression. By claiming they're required by law to not disclose, they imply that they too are victims of the situation, that they are subject to the whims of forces beyond their control, etc. But that is not the case; the law does not mandate secrecy. The licensing contract with the technology provider does. This means that ATI walked into the situation with open eyes of their own free will, and entered into an agreement not to disclose.
It wasn't done to them. They did it to themselves. Whether or not they now regret this decision is anyone's guess.
Schwab
The only consumer-friendly shrinkwrap "license" is the one that isn't there at all. Anyone who would regard such a monsterously unethical instrument as valid deserves everything they get.
After 30 years of propoganda and misinformation, when only 1/3rd of consumers even bother to read your so-called "license", that should serve as a fairly strong indicator that your ruse isn't working.
Schwab
Schwab
"Snarf" already has a definition.
Schwab
As our Fearless Leader once sagely intoned: "Bring it on." It is trivially easy to prove these "conspiracy theories," as you call them, are without merit. Simply create a test procedure that measures the accuracy of the machines, then run the tests and publish the results. Then have an independent third party run the tests and publish results. If the results show that the machines indeed accurately count votes and report said counts, then you'll have a hard fact to back up your claim that the machines are trustworthy.
There is only one issue here: Do the machines count votes and report those counts accurately? In other words, are they worthy of trust? Anything else is a carnival side-show. And, frankly, if the integrity of the voting process is being given short shrift in deference to The Chain of Command or The Process or some politician's ego, then The Chain of Command can take a flying fsck at a bouncing doughnut, because it's not working. I don't give a fetid, corn-addled shit if someone's precious feelings get hurt over this if it means the voting machines work and are reasonably secure against tampering.
Get your goddamned priorities straight.
Schwab
No, we're not missing that at all. It seems evident that the Chain of Command was either dazzled, baffled, or bribed into accepting these faulty machines from an ethically deficient corporation, and the only way the integrity of the voting process could be preserved was to solicit an independent examination into the machines' trustworthiness.
That the Chain of Command is now throwing a hissy fit about "warranty violations" serves only to illustrate that they are paying attention to the wrong things. Of course you independently test the machines. When you're dealing with something this important, you never believe the four-color glossies; you acquire your own facts and test stuff.
Schwab
BTW, here's Stanislaw Lem's Web Site.
Schwab
It's not a "dangerous precedent," as you call it; merely the inevitable conclusion one reaches if you subscribe to the same axioms as RMS.
In the common (both senses of the word) world view, taking code written by someone else and redistributing it is considered bad; a violation of the rights of the code's creator. But in RMS's world view -- which, it is important to understand, has some very different basic principles -- writing code and failing to release it is bad; the redistribution of the code is therefore merely a correction to the selfish author's "crime" of not releasing it.
We've all seen the abuses that the monopoly of copyright has enabled, and it appears to be getting worse. So I personally tend to hew more closely to RMS's views. However, as stated, RMS's views certainly seem very extreme -- more extreme than many are willing to adopt wholesale -- and I wonder if there's any further nuance to RMS's views that aren't getting articulated well. Such as: If redistributing the code of another author is not unethical, what about redistributing the code of another author without any attribution to said author? What about claiming yourself as the author?
It seems to me that RMS's principle "copying is not theft" is part of a complete set of ethical principles which, taken together, may very well make good sense (the man is no dummy). But we're only shown but one of those principles and, taken alone, it causes people to go, "Wha...?" But this is entirely supposition on my part, and I would not presume to put words in the man's mouth...
Schwab
Uh, no. Some drives actually do care about mounting orientation. It varies on a drive-by-drive basis. You need to look carefully at the spec sheet to see which orientations are acceptable.
All drives will run "right side up" (usually with the circuit board facing downward). Nearly all drives will also run mounted vertically (on either long edge). There are a few drives that expressly discourage running upside down. Nearly all drives discourage mounting at anything other than 90 degree angles.
Schwab
Unfortunately, although I've picked apart many XFree86 device drivers, I don't know very much about the architecture of X and X servers. Could someone give a thumbnail sketch of the issues at stake, and the tradeoffs?
Schwab
No, it's not their decision to make.
Ford doesn't get to say that you can only fill their cars with Chevron gas. Sony doesn't get to say you can only put CDs from Sony/Columbia Records into their CD players. SBC/Qwest/BellSouth don't get to say you can only connect Panasonic phones to their lines. Certainly, they can recommend those things, but they cannot force compliance with those wishes, since they lack standing to do so.
Likewise, once you've lawfully obtained a copy of MacOS-X, Apple loses all rights to dictate how that copy may be used. Certainly, they recommend you run it on Apple hardware. But if you can get it to run on something else, they have no legitimate right to complain about it (although they can refuse to support you).
They cannot demonstrate harm to their business (because there isn't any). But even if they could, it doesn't matter. The sustainability of Apple's business model is entirely Apple's responsibility, not the consumer's. It was transparently obvious to most people back in the Irrationally Exuberant Dot-Com days that offering free overnight shipping on all items was unsustainable. Was it therefore the responsibility of the customers to eschew the free shipping, since taking advantage of it would materially damage the businesses they professed to support? Of course not.
Apple was founded by hackers. They've been around long enough to know that people will do unusual things with their products. This is to be embraced and celebrated, not criminalized. If someone wants to take MacOS-X and get it to run on a boring beige box, that is manifestly their own business. This is reality, a reality that Apple was instrumental in creating. It is therefore Apple's responsbility to learn how to live in it.
Schwab
So now we're told that Halo 2 -- a more complex beast -- will require an "upgrade" to Windows Vista. So I have to compound one performance disaster with another?
I hope to put together a completely new machine this year (my 1GHz dual Pentium is starting to show its age) and it will need Windows, since I play a fair number of games. However, I'm still running Win-2K at home, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it that makes me want to suffer a change to XP, let alone the disasterous copy-protection nightmare of Vista.
So, no sale. There's no reason to believe that Halo 2 for the PC won't suck at least as much as the original Halo PC sucked. And it's certainly not enough reason to cripple my machine with Vista.
Schwab
At least he's a consistent d*ck.
Schwab
It's a valid assertion. "I was just following orders," has long been regarded as no defense. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Schwab
Schwab
Actually, that loophole was closed by the No Electronic Theft ("NET") Act, not the DMCA.
Funnily enough, like the DMCA, the NET Act was also signed into law by the Clinton Administration. I only point that out to illustrate that selling out your rights to further rapacious corporate profits is not, and never has been, exclusively a Republican trait.
Schwab