An RF module was one of it's major features upon release. It's a Korean console that most people don't know about...don't expect to find one on your street, but if you got together with a good buddy and learned some Korean, maybe some magic will happy.:-)
(p.s. What did that have to do with my post?)
I think revenue through advertising will be more profitable than charging. Current users expect it to be free, and I imagine MOST are young people who can't pay and don't have parents that are willing to.
If we're just going to circumvent it, why do companies even bother to try and engineer their product to prevent people from USING IT [in a way they don't want]. It just makes the PSP less appealing as a platform (we buy gadgets because of what they can do for us).
Take a handheld console like the GP32. Excellent design and capability, open firmware and open development. Gamepark has made a console for consumers and has basically said, "Here, it's yours. Have fun!"
As a nerd, I find the GP32 much more attractive than any more powerful console on the market (I drool every time I see one). This is what consumer electronics are supposed to be. What Sony and their ilk do is a huge turnoff, and I hope they know I have no intentions of buying their overpriced gadgetry!
In the end, isn't it smarter to do it this way? You win the esteem of your customers if you treat them like you value them, and if you treat them with nothing but suspicion and contempt is no way to do business; every time they push against us, we push right back (and we win every time).
Really, why WYSIWYG? True, that's what the poster is asking for, but there are easier ways to do things.
For example, one can write HTML. Perhaps the author is just spoiled, but it's a really easy language to master; he's a CS major and should have no trouble with that. Also, there's always TeX.
Am I simply misunderstanding what he's asking for?
Are you sure that is the case? I was under the impression that AOL had software licensing that allowed companies to run some local AIM service in-house.
The game looks and feels good, but I couldn't get hardware acceleration to work out of the box, so it ran too slow for me to actually play it.
From what I did see, however, it doesn't look like you can reload. Personally, I think half the fun of a good FPS is reloading.;)
As it stands, Cube is my favorite open source 3D FPS. It's very entertaining, and multiplayer can be a blast with the right people. The game is simple, but the graphics are gorgeous in spite of this. It has a sort of surreal and cartoonish feel...very arcade-like, but that's one thing I like about it. It's not as dark and dismal as many other FPS games, and doesn't seem to take itself too seriously.
This picture is a little bit different, but this concept reminds me of the depiction of large scale computer networks given in William Gibson's Neuromancer.
From what I remembered, he depicted computer networks as having visual representation, describing how colors changed based on the level and types of network activity.
What is given in the novel is more of a virtual reality type thing, though. I thought that was nifty. Now, if only we could get some diagrams like the one in the article done in 3D and rendered in real time as variables changed.
Since a lot of true randomness comes from I/O--the way users interact with the computer and whatnot--I always thought that it would be a good idea to hand the task of generating random numbers over to the operating system.
User interaction is random, be it keystrokes, program calls, etc. Other forms of input could also be monitered, such as mouse movements, or even network traffic. Just stick in a little daemon or kernel code that moniters I/O like that and then harvests randomness from it, storing it somewhere to be called upon later by software.
I think it would be interesting if this works out.
With a system based on incentive, the kids are going to have to buy certain foods in order to earn a nice toy. This can a child's eating habits on the basis of one or two meals a day, but that does nothing to preven them from filling up on junk at other times. Many overweight people who diet fail for this reason: they eat healthy foods IN ADDITION to extra junk on the side.
Eating healthy has lots of incentives that aren't obvious. People have a hard time realizing some key benefits of eating right, such as better health, more energy, and a thinner body, which is why these incentives tend not to work.
Substituting those for something like an iPod or XBox could give kids more drive, but only to earn the prize; the real benefits may only come as side effects, if at all.
We can only hope that such a program will help kids to develop a taste for healthy foods. I know from personal experience that eating something you find unappealing enough times will not only build tolerance, but actually lead to preference if done enough.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month.
Good. We consumers have made it quite clear we're not interested in doing business with you; we've chosen our own method of distribution, and we don't need to pay you to do it for us.
If you don't like that people JUST obey the license, then change the license!
i.e. If a company decides to launch a similar product based on this source code, they're obligued to keep a revision history in a previously agreed format (i.e. CVS, SVN, etc) so that the authors can track down their improvements.
Well, a license needs to fall within the bounds of reason.
For example, for free open source software it's very important that the source code be kept open and free. This requires that a) the code and derivatives of it need to be guaranteed to be open, and b) the code has to be free. As free software advocates will always tell you, free doesn't just mean without charge--it also implies what you can do with the code. For code to be free, we need to be able to do whatever we want with it. In licenses like the GPL, just about the only thing we can't do is close it. The software is less free because of that, but in a sense the freedom taken from the [me] developer is freedom gained by the [other] developer, so it's a concession we make when we use GPL'd code.
This raises an excellent point: free open source is about doing what's best for everyone. How that can be properly done is something that we can all argue about until we're blue in the face.
Example: developer A thinks his software is best and that everyone who works on it needs to use method X. Developer B, however, thinks he can make better software if he uses method Y.
What sense is there in creating a license that says that the code must be handled with method X? Perhaps we should modify the GPL to say that the code may only be compiled with GCC, or software application J needs to have a license that says users of the code must use a certain build or patch system, or that they must be wearing fuzzy pink slippers while modifying the code.
As tempting as it is to grab power, I think we should avoid your solution of creating a more restrictive license. Remember, we want to emphasise freedom. As people, it's our software, therefore developer B has as much of a right to say "mine" as developer A.
It's true that Apple may have lead on a false pretense that they would cooperate better with KHTML, or maybe KHTML expected too much, but that's a dispute that must be left to them to work out between themselves. I can agree that perhaps Apple should be a little more considerate, but I have to stand up to their right of "my project, my method."
It's not nice if a company is trying to obfuscate their open source project in order to discourage others from using their code, but who are any of us to judge whether or not that is their motive? Maybe they just decided that for the sake of the project or their developers that what they were doing is easier/more efficient/better, which is highly possible.
Unfortunately, licenses need to be very exact. You can't modify a license to say something like "be considerate of others" or "please respect your project's founder." The developer has prerogative to decide whether or not to do these things.
However tempting it is, I don't think creating a license to force a certain build system is a great idea.
True. However, I offer qualification because satements like that promote the idea of, "It has exploits, therefore it is insecure." That's backwards logic: it should be "It it is insecure, therefore it has exploits." The reason why former doesn't work is because a program may have possible exploits and still be considered secure.
Yes, firefox will be hacked more as its popularity grows. More than what? Popular firefox gets hacked more than unpopular firefox, which wasn't hacked at all. In this case, "more" is not necessarily a lot. Not even the additional "and more" has much effect.;)
What popular firefox doesn't get hacked more than is internet explorer; due to firefox's more secure nature, it most likely will never suffer the number of exploits that IE did/does. It's just inherently more secure.
Yes, popularity makes software a bigger target, and yes, it's going to take some hits. Even so, people like to use this argument to imply that their insecure software X is just as secure as unpopular software Y. Examining a comparison like that, is there any real logic?
It's the same argument in the linux vs. Windows vs. MacOS debate. linux has less viruses than it could if it were just as popular as Windows, but there's no denying the fact that linux is produced by a software culture that adheres to much more effective security models. Windows had its birth among a software culture that adhered to no security model.
Windows is slowly becoming more stable and secure. Windows is slowly becoming more like unix. linux was made with unix in mind right from the beginning.
Going back to web browsers, I expect future versions of IE to be more stable and secure. I expect future versions of IE to be more like firefox.
I agree with you there, but wouldn't you also agree that Billy Bob family would do what most home users do and resort to collectively using a single user account?
Yeah, it's definitely a good idea...I myself have individual user accounts set up for each family member on the computer we've got running in the kitchen, but I don't think this is common practice.
In addition, even I don't maintain guest accounts for those occasional visitors--not even on my linux system. Usually I let them load up the web browser from my own account, though I am there to sit and moniter their usage personally (I'd feel very uncomfortable leaving someone alone with the machine).
Well, what is spyware? In my mind, it's a piece of software that harvests data from your computer and sends it to someone else for their own personal uses without your explicit knowledge or consent.
By my definition, that makes the program in the article spyware.
You're right in suggesting that Symantec may have an ulterior motive, but there exists (what appears to me) the unfortunate fact that the software actually is spyware. It may be a coincidence, or Symantec may have checked specifically on competing software, but they aren't misreporting anything.
Black (because I like the color red and black seems more appropriate) flags would go up if a) Symantec lied about the software being spyware, or b) Symantec held a policy that only classified that software as spyware because it was competing with them, letting similar, non-competing programs go by unchecked.
The guy has a point, and it's important to remember that the target user for his Linspire system (as mentioned in other posts) is someone who is used to running Windows as a single user with Admin priveleges.
The strength of security levels that is provided by file permissions and non-root access shine forth in heavily multi-user environments for which unix was designed.
When many people use the same system, we usually want to give them means to protect themsleves from each other, and the system administrator wants to protect the base system from the users. The idea is to make your environment safe from other users with legitimate access to the system.
Single user machines found in most homes need only protect the user's data. As mentioned in other posts, the system really isn't all that importart--it's not a server system whose uptime is critical; if it breaks, pop in the install disk and fix it. What's really important are the person's files, which they themselves already have unrestricted access to. When security for their account is compromised by sneaky means, the data is vulnerable whether they are root or not.
In any case the user always has the risk of contracting spyware or file damage, but non-root usage helps ensure that one user compromising himself has the least potential for leading to the compromise of other user accounts. If Billy Bob runs the wrong script, he may have to suffer data loss or theft, but the other users can breath easy because he is not root.
On a home system, however, there is only Billy Bob, and there is nobody else for him to be protecting. If he runs as root, he seems no worse off than he was before.
"You are not a computer! Humans don't write 0's that way."
I'm a bit surprised by such a technophobic remark. Putting slashes through zeros probably predates computers by a long shot; it prevents them from looking like the letter O. I have written this way for most of my life, and I also dash my Z's so that they are not mistaken for 2's.
I suppose mixing up letters and numbers is not much of a concern in standard language, but in mathematical formulae it becomes almost a necessity to write this way. A chemist (of all people!) should understand this.
In case anyone hasn't noticed, the moon's surface is just riddled with craters. With no atmosphere, there seems to be little to no protection from any large, fast moving objects that decide to go careening towards our moon base.
Even if it were subterranean (or, seeing that it's not earth, sublunarean?), how much force are we talking, and how can it be accomodated?
Yeah, I can see how compatibility can break very easily in terms of scripting exercises. I've noticed that sometimes it's hard to find the proper resources in the online documentation for figuring out little scripting quirks. Maybe it'd be easier for them to utilize a different shell if more help were available in that area.
If your college is teaching classes on shell scripting, I can understand the availability of bash courses because of its popularity in the ever growing linux world, but you make it sound like what is mainly being taught here is how to interact with the shell (ie "use it").
Because of scripting, even the slightest difference between shells becomes very important, but for interactive use the differences often become trivial. Anyone who is familiar with any sort of unix shell can "handle" bash, even if they aren't aware of all of its nifty features.
I started learning the unix shell with bash, and later I made the decision to switch over to tcsh, which is now the stock shell I choose for login. The basics I learned in bash carried right over, and what difference I had encountered only took a few minutes to learn and adjust to. I imagine it would have worked the same way if the migration went the other direction.
Different shells have a lot to offer, but basic intercompatibility allows us not to be totally stumped by one shell or another.
I personally would like to know the details of that study you mentioned. Is it possible that rather than not being able to handle bash at the universities, the students simply choose not to use it because they prefer something else? After all, we tend to stick with what we know, and students who don't learn bash first probably continue with their original shell at the university.
Are you sure it's accurate to judge a person's intelligence by the presence of a typo? I know grammar fairly well myself, and even I type out some horrendous things from time to time--[near] homophones (such as "than" and "then") are more likely to cause problems than anything else; sometimes I type "your" instead of "you're", but I know the difference well enough if you were to ask me.
Why not just overlook such a simple thing and judge the article by its subject matter? No need to go off on a rant and put some poor person down. =)
I don't think this qualifies as "jargon," but I found it interesting when asking a Chinese friend of mine to teach me some Mandarin that the term for computer translates literally to mean "electronic brain." That's a lot cooler than the English etymology.
I used to have a classmate in middle school who was originally from Uganda. The next year he moved back, and we mainly kept in touch by writing eachother e-mail. Back then I was all into the whole QBASIC thing, and I wrote and compiled a pretty neat VGA program that showed a graphical chess board with fun sprites that I had drawn. We'd take turns moving and then e-mail the data file back and forth between one another. That was lots of fun.:)
Well, I am not an expert on it, but my gut feeling tells me that it's linked with the concept of portability. We know that it's portable because it's been proven so many times, and I think portability implies an above-average deal of cleanliness. In order to port your software, you need a system that is very logically and uniformly structured. So, your design goals are focused on creating an implementation that contains the least amount of messy or inextricable code. Also, the pressure for portability helps promote the deprecation of code that might otherwise cling.
In this sense we can think of cleanliness and portability as things that imply the other, though it would be quite a different thing to interpret this particular kind of cleanliness as anything but that; it wouldn't be safe to assume on those grounds alone that the code would be faster/more efficient or be more feature rich/powerful, which I'm thinking some people might want to extrapolate. It's not beyond reason, however, and, as the author points out, there are speed records involved, so its possible that these things are related somehow (but not necessarily).
Slashdot Mirror
An RF module was one of it's major features upon release. It's a Korean console that most people don't know about...don't expect to find one on your street, but if you got together with a good buddy and learned some Korean, maybe some magic will happy. :-)
(p.s. What did that have to do with my post?)
I think revenue through advertising will be more profitable than charging. Current users expect it to be free, and I imagine MOST are young people who can't pay and don't have parents that are willing to.
Take a handheld console like the GP32. Excellent design and capability, open firmware and open development. Gamepark has made a console for consumers and has basically said, "Here, it's yours. Have fun!"
As a nerd, I find the GP32 much more attractive than any more powerful console on the market (I drool every time I see one). This is what consumer electronics are supposed to be. What Sony and their ilk do is a huge turnoff, and I hope they know I have no intentions of buying their overpriced gadgetry!
In the end, isn't it smarter to do it this way? You win the esteem of your customers if you treat them like you value them, and if you treat them with nothing but suspicion and contempt is no way to do business; every time they push against us, we push right back (and we win every time).
Really, why WYSIWYG? True, that's what the poster is asking for, but there are easier ways to do things. For example, one can write HTML. Perhaps the author is just spoiled, but it's a really easy language to master; he's a CS major and should have no trouble with that. Also, there's always TeX. Am I simply misunderstanding what he's asking for?
Where is the discussion? Where moderators see insight, I see trolling.
Are you sure that is the case? I was under the impression that AOL had software licensing that allowed companies to run some local AIM service in-house.
From what I did see, however, it doesn't look like you can reload. Personally, I think half the fun of a good FPS is reloading. ;)
As it stands, Cube is my favorite open source 3D FPS. It's very entertaining, and multiplayer can be a blast with the right people. The game is simple, but the graphics are gorgeous in spite of this. It has a sort of surreal and cartoonish feel...very arcade-like, but that's one thing I like about it. It's not as dark and dismal as many other FPS games, and doesn't seem to take itself too seriously.
From what I remembered, he depicted computer networks as having visual representation, describing how colors changed based on the level and types of network activity.
What is given in the novel is more of a virtual reality type thing, though. I thought that was nifty. Now, if only we could get some diagrams like the one in the article done in 3D and rendered in real time as variables changed.
User interaction is random, be it keystrokes, program calls, etc. Other forms of input could also be monitered, such as mouse movements, or even network traffic. Just stick in a little daemon or kernel code that moniters I/O like that and then harvests randomness from it, storing it somewhere to be called upon later by software.
With a system based on incentive, the kids are going to have to buy certain foods in order to earn a nice toy. This can a child's eating habits on the basis of one or two meals a day, but that does nothing to preven them from filling up on junk at other times. Many overweight people who diet fail for this reason: they eat healthy foods IN ADDITION to extra junk on the side.
Eating healthy has lots of incentives that aren't obvious. People have a hard time realizing some key benefits of eating right, such as better health, more energy, and a thinner body, which is why these incentives tend not to work.
Substituting those for something like an iPod or XBox could give kids more drive, but only to earn the prize; the real benefits may only come as side effects, if at all.
We can only hope that such a program will help kids to develop a taste for healthy foods. I know from personal experience that eating something you find unappealing enough times will not only build tolerance, but actually lead to preference if done enough.
I support China's decision, and so do you! I also support them for the same reasons as you do.
Where is the problem, exactly?
Good. We consumers have made it quite clear we're not interested in doing business with you; we've chosen our own method of distribution, and we don't need to pay you to do it for us.
For example, for free open source software it's very important that the source code be kept open and free. This requires that a) the code and derivatives of it need to be guaranteed to be open, and b) the code has to be free. As free software advocates will always tell you, free doesn't just mean without charge--it also implies what you can do with the code. For code to be free, we need to be able to do whatever we want with it. In licenses like the GPL, just about the only thing we can't do is close it. The software is less free because of that, but in a sense the freedom taken from the [me] developer is freedom gained by the [other] developer, so it's a concession we make when we use GPL'd code.
This raises an excellent point: free open source is about doing what's best for everyone. How that can be properly done is something that we can all argue about until we're blue in the face.
Example: developer A thinks his software is best and that everyone who works on it needs to use method X. Developer B, however, thinks he can make better software if he uses method Y.
What sense is there in creating a license that says that the code must be handled with method X? Perhaps we should modify the GPL to say that the code may only be compiled with GCC, or software application J needs to have a license that says users of the code must use a certain build or patch system, or that they must be wearing fuzzy pink slippers while modifying the code.
As tempting as it is to grab power, I think we should avoid your solution of creating a more restrictive license. Remember, we want to emphasise freedom. As people, it's our software, therefore developer B has as much of a right to say "mine" as developer A.
It's true that Apple may have lead on a false pretense that they would cooperate better with KHTML, or maybe KHTML expected too much, but that's a dispute that must be left to them to work out between themselves. I can agree that perhaps Apple should be a little more considerate, but I have to stand up to their right of "my project, my method."
It's not nice if a company is trying to obfuscate their open source project in order to discourage others from using their code, but who are any of us to judge whether or not that is their motive? Maybe they just decided that for the sake of the project or their developers that what they were doing is easier/more efficient/better, which is highly possible.
Unfortunately, licenses need to be very exact. You can't modify a license to say something like "be considerate of others" or "please respect your project's founder." The developer has prerogative to decide whether or not to do these things.
However tempting it is, I don't think creating a license to force a certain build system is a great idea.
Yes, firefox will be hacked more as its popularity grows. More than what? Popular firefox gets hacked more than unpopular firefox, which wasn't hacked at all. In this case, "more" is not necessarily a lot. Not even the additional "and more" has much effect. ;)
What popular firefox doesn't get hacked more than is internet explorer; due to firefox's more secure nature, it most likely will never suffer the number of exploits that IE did/does. It's just inherently more secure.
Yes, popularity makes software a bigger target, and yes, it's going to take some hits. Even so, people like to use this argument to imply that their insecure software X is just as secure as unpopular software Y. Examining a comparison like that, is there any real logic?
It's the same argument in the linux vs. Windows vs. MacOS debate. linux has less viruses than it could if it were just as popular as Windows, but there's no denying the fact that linux is produced by a software culture that adheres to much more effective security models. Windows had its birth among a software culture that adhered to no security model.
Windows is slowly becoming more stable and secure. Windows is slowly becoming more like unix. linux was made with unix in mind right from the beginning.
Going back to web browsers, I expect future versions of IE to be more stable and secure. I expect future versions of IE to be more like firefox.
Yeah, it's definitely a good idea...I myself have individual user accounts set up for each family member on the computer we've got running in the kitchen, but I don't think this is common practice.
In addition, even I don't maintain guest accounts for those occasional visitors--not even on my linux system. Usually I let them load up the web browser from my own account, though I am there to sit and moniter their usage personally (I'd feel very uncomfortable leaving someone alone with the machine).
By my definition, that makes the program in the article spyware.
You're right in suggesting that Symantec may have an ulterior motive, but there exists (what appears to me) the unfortunate fact that the software actually is spyware. It may be a coincidence, or Symantec may have checked specifically on competing software, but they aren't misreporting anything.
Black (because I like the color red and black seems more appropriate) flags would go up if a) Symantec lied about the software being spyware, or b) Symantec held a policy that only classified that software as spyware because it was competing with them, letting similar, non-competing programs go by unchecked.
The strength of security levels that is provided by file permissions and non-root access shine forth in heavily multi-user environments for which unix was designed.
When many people use the same system, we usually want to give them means to protect themsleves from each other, and the system administrator wants to protect the base system from the users. The idea is to make your environment safe from other users with legitimate access to the system.
Single user machines found in most homes need only protect the user's data. As mentioned in other posts, the system really isn't all that importart--it's not a server system whose uptime is critical; if it breaks, pop in the install disk and fix it. What's really important are the person's files, which they themselves already have unrestricted access to. When security for their account is compromised by sneaky means, the data is vulnerable whether they are root or not.
In any case the user always has the risk of contracting spyware or file damage, but non-root usage helps ensure that one user compromising himself has the least potential for leading to the compromise of other user accounts. If Billy Bob runs the wrong script, he may have to suffer data loss or theft, but the other users can breath easy because he is not root.
On a home system, however, there is only Billy Bob, and there is nobody else for him to be protecting. If he runs as root, he seems no worse off than he was before.
I'm a bit surprised by such a technophobic remark. Putting slashes through zeros probably predates computers by a long shot; it prevents them from looking like the letter O. I have written this way for most of my life, and I also dash my Z's so that they are not mistaken for 2's.
I suppose mixing up letters and numbers is not much of a concern in standard language, but in mathematical formulae it becomes almost a necessity to write this way. A chemist (of all people!) should understand this.
Even if it were subterranean (or, seeing that it's not earth, sublunarean?), how much force are we talking, and how can it be accomodated?
Yeah, I can see how compatibility can break very easily in terms of scripting exercises. I've noticed that sometimes it's hard to find the proper resources in the online documentation for figuring out little scripting quirks. Maybe it'd be easier for them to utilize a different shell if more help were available in that area.
Because of scripting, even the slightest difference between shells becomes very important, but for interactive use the differences often become trivial. Anyone who is familiar with any sort of unix shell can "handle" bash, even if they aren't aware of all of its nifty features.
I started learning the unix shell with bash, and later I made the decision to switch over to tcsh, which is now the stock shell I choose for login. The basics I learned in bash carried right over, and what difference I had encountered only took a few minutes to learn and adjust to. I imagine it would have worked the same way if the migration went the other direction.
Different shells have a lot to offer, but basic intercompatibility allows us not to be totally stumped by one shell or another.
I personally would like to know the details of that study you mentioned. Is it possible that rather than not being able to handle bash at the universities, the students simply choose not to use it because they prefer something else? After all, we tend to stick with what we know, and students who don't learn bash first probably continue with their original shell at the university.
Why not just overlook such a simple thing and judge the article by its subject matter? No need to go off on a rant and put some poor person down. =)
Don't you think it's an interesting chip?
I don't think this qualifies as "jargon," but I found it interesting when asking a Chinese friend of mine to teach me some Mandarin that the term for computer translates literally to mean "electronic brain." That's a lot cooler than the English etymology.
I used to have a classmate in middle school who was originally from Uganda. The next year he moved back, and we mainly kept in touch by writing eachother e-mail. Back then I was all into the whole QBASIC thing, and I wrote and compiled a pretty neat VGA program that showed a graphical chess board with fun sprites that I had drawn. We'd take turns moving and then e-mail the data file back and forth between one another. That was lots of fun. :)
In this sense we can think of cleanliness and portability as things that imply the other, though it would be quite a different thing to interpret this particular kind of cleanliness as anything but that; it wouldn't be safe to assume on those grounds alone that the code would be faster/more efficient or be more feature rich/powerful, which I'm thinking some people might want to extrapolate. It's not beyond reason, however, and, as the author points out, there are speed records involved, so its possible that these things are related somehow (but not necessarily).