What you say is surely true for bigger OSS projects with lots of involvement. It'd be hard to slip a backdoor into the linux kernel without someone noticing, or Samba or Apache.
But what about the thousands upon millions of little OSS apps? Ones that may have less end users than you can count on one hand? It could be something as simple as some guys script for traffic control. Or he says it's an awesome script for traffic control. How many newbies would recognize a line like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1" jammed in there? Especially if they have no clue what dd or/dev/hda1 is?
In those cases, that source isn't any safer than any binary, unless you assume that I'm going to audit all that code myself.
Let's imagine linux had a large base of clueless users (IMO it does but that's another discussion). You could easily set up a really cool sounding sourceforge project, and just write some malware in the code.
At least trojanned binaries can be picked up by a virus scanner. What takes on this role in the sourcecode driven world? There's no "source code" virus scanners, and you cant reliably identify based on the executables..
Hell, when I do "emerge -u samba" in Gentoo, I pretty much trust that whatever gentoo mirror I'm leeching from has untainted good code. No different than if I downloaded some windows app off of TUCOWS.. I'm trusting the source.
Because Slashdot has told you that Apple are the Good Guys and Real (and everyone else) are Evil.
Notice this article is titles "Real Cuts Prices for DRM-Restricted Music". Since we're talking about Real here, we must mention in the headline that this stuff is DRM restricted. Nevermind that Apples is too.. In fact, it's pretty much the same format with very similar DRM wrappers.. That's a technicality, and we don't get technical about such things on slashdot. Apple is Good, Real is Bad, the end.
If iTunes announced a price cut, the headline would read "Apple Cuts Prices for iTunes Customers", or something like that. It would be a good thing. When Apple locks shit down so tight that buying an iPod perpetually locks you in to iTunes, a direction they're certainly going in, and a goal I can't see them avoiding if they want to truly prevent competition - it'll be announced here as some great thing. Noone will mention DRM or crappy battery life or any of that such stuff.
It's just so transparent and lame. Real cuts prices in half, and slashdot has to stretch and strain to somehow report it as some sort of evil, underhanded move to strip us all of our rights.
Sheesh. And I'm the troll because I think you should be able to play your music from whatever branded source on whatever branded device you want, just like we've always done. (Ie; I didn't need a special Apple branded LP player to play a certain collection of records)
Apple has said their Music Store is not meant as a profit center
Heh, that's dopey marketting drivel and you fell for it. Of course it's meant as a profit center, at least eventually. Why else would they invest to set it up? Companies always say stuff like this, so dopey people will take the comment at face value, ie; "Apple set up iTunes to do a public service to the world out of the goodness of their hearts!"
iTunes is a business. Real wants to compete head to head with them. Apple doesn't want to see it happen. Apple doesn't like to compete head to head with anyone, because they will lose. Apple is a brand like Nike. An iPod will always cost more than comparable competitors products, Macs will always cost more than comparable PCs, and iTunes will always cost more than comparable services. They dont want it to be open. They don't want you to be able to use your status-symbol iPod to give money to someone other than them.
Not only that, people's tastes change over time. When I was a little kid, I could sit in front of the TV and watch sit-coms for hours on end. I can't stand sit-coms today.
Did TV get worse? Is Will and Grace a "worse" show than "Perfect Strangers" was? Probably not, it's probably a lot more intelligent. I just don't like that kind of stuff anymore.
It means a product was delayed. Imagine that. They wanted to release it by years end, now looks like it'll come out next year.
It's not the end of the world. Pretty much all products get delayed. Hell, every major CPU architecture from Intel has been delayed somewhat. I was reading about Centrino years ago, for instance.
Thats fine, but who's going to write the software? The personnel of the umpteen million "linux consultantcy" firms that will appear? Do the coders get compensated at all under this model, or do they perpetually beg for handouts?
I don't see how OSS can push the bleeding edge of software without some real financial motive for the developers.
Oh, sure, my awesome new internet app will be the killer app of tomorrow, and all kinds of consultants will get richer than Jesus supporting it.. But what about me, the poor chump who wrote it?
Know who's making money on OSS? IBM, SCO, Sun, Apple.. Watch MS reinvent itself somewhat as a service provider, and they'll rake in some of those bucks too.
I want to know that too. I know corporations bankroll a lot of OSS stuff, especially big ticket projects like Samba or ReiserFS, etc..
How much does Andrew make to work on Samba full time? How much, on average, do "paid" OSS coders make?
Ie; Is contributing to OSS a good "career move"? Is there any incentive to do so beyond a warm fuzzy I-helped feeling, or bragging rights?
Say I thought up a really slick distributed filesystem. Should I dual license like mysql? Release it under the GPL and shmooze for some financial backing? Sell it outright to the highest bidder?
dd if=(my mp3) of=(sample file) bs=(mp3 frame size, or size of "one second" of audio) skip=(start from) count=(duration)
There you go. Write some script to make up the values in parentheses.
On to tackle the next great engineering mystery of computer science. Maybe I'll solve some of those NP-complete problems, or install one of those really sweet case fans that light up when the music plays!
Meh, whatever, you get my point. You specify the frame size in the bs= parameter, the id3,etc, offset in the "where to start" parameter, and go from there.
Or just use one of the metric assload of utilities out there that already do this.
Seriously. Ok, you want to trim little samples out of mp3 files. There are only about a jillion and one products that do just that.
If you want to be the l337 hack0r and write some esoteric script to do it, go ahead. I'm sure you could massage dd and/dev/random to grab little sections of files.
In short, why don't you roll up your sleeves and do your own friggin job?
The causes of poverty and hunger in the world aren't so simply solved.
Imagine this man can't grow avocados, or anything, because he lives on nutrient-less sand, and has no source of fresh water. He's trying to scrape out a living on inhospitable, inhabitable land, because some tin-hat dictator took over his country, and he happens to be in the wrong ethnic gene pool.
Look at all the displaced refugee's of various wars. Look at the Kurds in (Saddam ruled) Iraq. Sorry, computers aren't going to do much for them. They'd download pictures of hamburgers the same way I download pictures of girl-on-girl hardcore action.
The man needs a well and bags and bags of fertilizers. The man needs to be taught techniques to make something grow. To rotate crops to stop soil depletion, etc.
Failing all that, he needs a new place to live. He needs food to eat and a roof to sleep under.
Yeah, I'm sure the guy could save a nickel on tillers by finding one on eBay. Mapquest can even save him a quarter days journey to market. That's fine.
The "set-top box" is a white elephant. Not just because of technical hurdles, but the very fact that people don't want it.
I have a seperate DVD player and XBox. The fact that the XBox can play DVDs didn't stop me from getting the DVD player. Why? Because I want to watch a movie upstairs while my kids play Soul Calibur II. Simple, huh? Why should I buy two $500 devices when a $40 DVD player and $120 Xbox do what I need?
And hey, when my XBox breaks, I can still watch DVDs, play CDs, pay my bills online, keep my milk cold and fresh, and make delicious toaster pastries.
All-in-one devices are single points of failure.
Not to mention the "jack of all trades, master of none" angle. Sure the XBox can play DVDs. But not in 640p (ok after modding and hacking it can). Even a $40 DVD player has progressive scan these days. It's a specific example, but of a general trend.
Just like instead of a reliable phone with good battery life, manufacturers think we "really want" is a shitty phone, grainy camera, buggy PDA, and laughingly unplayable games.
Hell, a clie is small enough that I can duct-tape it to the phone myself, if that's what I need.
I can see niche markets for some of this convergance stuff. The rich guy who did a 100,000 dollar remodel of his living room, and an a/v rack with room for a DVD player, TiVo and PS2 just aren't in the budget. Fine, he can pay the premium.
Guess what? Not everybody in the world needs to own their own PC. Not even every family. A village with 250 families could each kick in a buck, and share it.
Frankly, if you look at the impoverished, tribal, un-industrialized parts of the world, they have very little need for videophones or email. I doubt, given the choice, that many of these destitute tribes/villages would take the computer over say, a well or access to penicillin or hunting/farming supplies.
Why don't we get them some agriculture and other basic infrastructures in place?
Are eggheads really so self-absorbed that they think the biggest problem these people face is how to get their e-mail?
Ever seen a sheep herding dog? Or any of the "beasts of burden"? Horses, donkeys, oxen, elephants.
Ever seen a seeing eye monkey?
Plenty of animals work 8+ hours a day. In fact, the entire waking adult life of most animals is spent "working" (foraging for food, building nests, etc). Hell, laying in the shade and panting is "work", since the only "job" the animals have is to stay alive.
I know what it installed by default. It installed your ethernet, brought it up, installed telnet, brought it up, and left you to log in with NO ROOT PASSWORD. Thats the uber-secure linux of the past.
Install that old slackware while connected to broadband, and if you decide to take a coffee break before logging in and setting the password (or if you forget to do it, or miss that line item in the install instructions) and you're fucked.
Hell, those were my Uni days. We'd have a ball in the computer lab watching the one TA (total stereotype smelly bearded hippy geek with a bad attitude) install some new linux terms, and we'd race him (and beat him!) every time to log in as root and do various stupid things.
Hell, I'd wager on 7 out of 10 student machines on the campus net never did get a root password set.
I have an m515, and a kyocera smartphone with whats basically equivalent built in.. I've read some ebooks, and found that it annoyed my eyes, too muchh of it gives me a headach. It's just a little bit too small. Guess I'm getting too old.
It's convenient to have on site, I got a bunch of relevent technical manuals, but dead tree is still much easier on my eyes. Maybe a device about the size of a paperback, maybe one the size of a hardback too for when my vision deteriorates a little more.
Stop it with the reality. This is slashdot, and we're trying to get upset and figure out just how to blame Bush for it. (nothing personal just that hes the sitting president and most of us arent old enough to vote)
Anyways..
People don't realize that this system isn't a completely computerized network written by geeks. There are humans in the loop. Dispite the mistakes they make, many of them have some things computers dont, common sense and skepticism.
So long as enough of them have enough common sense, or skepticism, they'd recognize a hoax or mistake up the chain. Exactly like the NORAD incident. Most sensible people would wait for some confirmation before panicking the community.
Anyways.. Back to my own little world where I imagine that its simple (hell even possible) to broadcast whatever I want on every TV in the nation with my C64 and 1200 baud modem.
They cant prove if you've injected it artificially, or if it's a natural disorder.
Andre the Giant had it, people who suffer from it get those facial features, pronounced brow and nose, etc.
I watched some documentary about it, they showed lots of photos of russian athletes from the cold war era, most of whom shared striking facial similarities with Andre. Beating americans at all costs was the mantra of the Soviet athletic program.
In soviet russia, hormones produce you!
Who cares about the olympics anyways. The IOC is so frigging corrupt it's a joke. They openly accept bribes (hell, demand them!) when chosing cities to host the games.
Its all a corporate jack-fest, like so much these days. McDonalds, the official hamburger of the american olympic team. Come on, how many finely tuned athletes eat Big Macs on a regular basis?
I keep hearing how dangerous SUVs and vans are because of the height of the bumpers.
Why cant you raise the bumper on a compact car? Put it over the grille? Because it would look unconventional and "silly"? Seems like a stupid reason to die.
I'm dissapointed in the hybrids. They had to look just like a regular car, which meant shoehorning all that high voltage wiring wherever it fit. Which means in an accident, the rescuers may not be able to safely use the jaws of life to extract you.
Screw that. If it's a choice between the safety of myself and my family, and the environment, well its time to (metaphorically) piss in the lakes.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say is surely true for bigger OSS projects with lots of involvement. It'd be hard to slip a backdoor into the linux kernel without someone noticing, or Samba or Apache.
/dev/hda1 is?
But what about the thousands upon millions of little OSS apps? Ones that may have less end users than you can count on one hand? It could be something as simple as some guys script for traffic control. Or he says it's an awesome script for traffic control. How many newbies would recognize a line like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1" jammed in there? Especially if they have no clue what dd or
In those cases, that source isn't any safer than any binary, unless you assume that I'm going to audit all that code myself.
Let's imagine linux had a large base of clueless users (IMO it does but that's another discussion). You could easily set up a really cool sounding sourceforge project, and just write some malware in the code.
At least trojanned binaries can be picked up by a virus scanner. What takes on this role in the sourcecode driven world? There's no "source code" virus scanners, and you cant reliably identify based on the executables..
Hell, when I do "emerge -u samba" in Gentoo, I pretty much trust that whatever gentoo mirror I'm leeching from has untainted good code. No different than if I downloaded some windows app off of TUCOWS.. I'm trusting the source.
Japanese GPP, a la "I am pleased to accept your waste!"
Optimus is just the tractor part, not the trailer. He's the red semi, the trailer is just a mobile command center he would lug about with him.
Buying all this GPS gear *IS* asking for directions. What's worse, it's like asking prematurely.
Merely downloading this is an admission, now and forever, that one does not know where he is, where he is going, or how to get there.
I've already patented my process for calculating the total electron content of the ionosphere. It's very simple and ingenious. Count them.
Sure hope this doesn't infringe. I'd really hate to have to charge you all $699 to use it.
Because Slashdot has told you that Apple are the Good Guys and Real (and everyone else) are Evil.
Notice this article is titles "Real Cuts Prices for DRM-Restricted Music". Since we're talking about Real here, we must mention in the headline that this stuff is DRM restricted. Nevermind that Apples is too.. In fact, it's pretty much the same format with very similar DRM wrappers.. That's a technicality, and we don't get technical about such things on slashdot. Apple is Good, Real is Bad, the end.
If iTunes announced a price cut, the headline would read "Apple Cuts Prices for iTunes Customers", or something like that. It would be a good thing. When Apple locks shit down so tight that buying an iPod perpetually locks you in to iTunes, a direction they're certainly going in, and a goal I can't see them avoiding if they want to truly prevent competition - it'll be announced here as some great thing. Noone will mention DRM or crappy battery life or any of that such stuff.
It's just so transparent and lame. Real cuts prices in half, and slashdot has to stretch and strain to somehow report it as some sort of evil, underhanded move to strip us all of our rights.
Sheesh. And I'm the troll because I think you should be able to play your music from whatever branded source on whatever branded device you want, just like we've always done. (Ie; I didn't need a special Apple branded LP player to play a certain collection of records)
Umm, its competition, and Apple doesn't want any?
Apple has said their Music Store is not meant as a profit center
Heh, that's dopey marketting drivel and you fell for it. Of course it's meant as a profit center, at least eventually. Why else would they invest to set it up? Companies always say stuff like this, so dopey people will take the comment at face value, ie; "Apple set up iTunes to do a public service to the world out of the goodness of their hearts!"
iTunes is a business. Real wants to compete head to head with them. Apple doesn't want to see it happen. Apple doesn't like to compete head to head with anyone, because they will lose. Apple is a brand like Nike. An iPod will always cost more than comparable competitors products, Macs will always cost more than comparable PCs, and iTunes will always cost more than comparable services. They dont want it to be open. They don't want you to be able to use your status-symbol iPod to give money to someone other than them.
It really is as simple as that.
Not only that, people's tastes change over time. When I was a little kid, I could sit in front of the TV and watch sit-coms for hours on end. I can't stand sit-coms today.
Did TV get worse? Is Will and Grace a "worse" show than "Perfect Strangers" was? Probably not, it's probably a lot more intelligent. I just don't like that kind of stuff anymore.
It means a product was delayed. Imagine that. They wanted to release it by years end, now looks like it'll come out next year.
It's not the end of the world. Pretty much all products get delayed. Hell, every major CPU architecture from Intel has been delayed somewhat. I was reading about Centrino years ago, for instance.
Thats fine, but who's going to write the software? The personnel of the umpteen million "linux consultantcy" firms that will appear? Do the coders get compensated at all under this model, or do they perpetually beg for handouts?
I don't see how OSS can push the bleeding edge of software without some real financial motive for the developers.
Oh, sure, my awesome new internet app will be the killer app of tomorrow, and all kinds of consultants will get richer than Jesus supporting it.. But what about me, the poor chump who wrote it?
Know who's making money on OSS? IBM, SCO, Sun, Apple.. Watch MS reinvent itself somewhat as a service provider, and they'll rake in some of those bucks too.
I want to know that too. I know corporations bankroll a lot of OSS stuff, especially big ticket projects like Samba or ReiserFS, etc..
How much does Andrew make to work on Samba full time? How much, on average, do "paid" OSS coders make?
Ie; Is contributing to OSS a good "career move"? Is there any incentive to do so beyond a warm fuzzy I-helped feeling, or bragging rights?
Say I thought up a really slick distributed filesystem. Should I dual license like mysql? Release it under the GPL and shmooze for some financial backing? Sell it outright to the highest bidder?
dd if=(my mp3) of=(sample file) bs=(mp3 frame size, or size of "one second" of audio) skip=(start from) count=(duration)
There you go. Write some script to make up the values in parentheses.
On to tackle the next great engineering mystery of computer science. Maybe I'll solve some of those NP-complete problems, or install one of those really sweet case fans that light up when the music plays!
it's just a stream. You should be able to use dd, like
dd if=/home/britney/oops.mp3 of=/home/kazaa/sample.mp3 bs=(not sure?) count=(duration)
Meh, whatever, you get my point. You specify the frame size in the bs= parameter, the id3,etc, offset in the "where to start" parameter, and go from there.
Or just use one of the metric assload of utilities out there that already do this.
Seriously. Ok, you want to trim little samples out of mp3 files. There are only about a jillion and one products that do just that.
/dev/random to grab little sections of files.
If you want to be the l337 hack0r and write some esoteric script to do it, go ahead. I'm sure you could massage dd and
In short, why don't you roll up your sleeves and do your own friggin job?
The causes of poverty and hunger in the world aren't so simply solved.
Imagine this man can't grow avocados, or anything, because he lives on nutrient-less sand, and has no source of fresh water. He's trying to scrape out a living on inhospitable, inhabitable land, because some tin-hat dictator took over his country, and he happens to be in the wrong ethnic gene pool.
Look at all the displaced refugee's of various wars. Look at the Kurds in (Saddam ruled) Iraq. Sorry, computers aren't going to do much for them. They'd download pictures of hamburgers the same way I download pictures of girl-on-girl hardcore action.
The man needs a well and bags and bags of fertilizers. The man needs to be taught techniques to make something grow. To rotate crops to stop soil depletion, etc.
Failing all that, he needs a new place to live. He needs food to eat and a roof to sleep under.
Yeah, I'm sure the guy could save a nickel on tillers by finding one on eBay. Mapquest can even save him a quarter days journey to market. That's fine.
It's a niche product, and will never see "overwhelming sales".
The math shouldnt be:
PS2 + TiVo + DVD-R >= PSX
But it should be:
PS2 + TiVo + DVD-R + Fits the elegant design of my half million dollar game room >= PSX
You buy this because you only want one box next to the TV, and money isn't a concern.
The "set-top box" is a white elephant. Not just because of technical hurdles, but the very fact that people don't want it.
I have a seperate DVD player and XBox. The fact that the XBox can play DVDs didn't stop me from getting the DVD player. Why? Because I want to watch a movie upstairs while my kids play Soul Calibur II. Simple, huh? Why should I buy two $500 devices when a $40 DVD player and $120 Xbox do what I need?
And hey, when my XBox breaks, I can still watch DVDs, play CDs, pay my bills online, keep my milk cold and fresh, and make delicious toaster pastries.
All-in-one devices are single points of failure.
Not to mention the "jack of all trades, master of none" angle. Sure the XBox can play DVDs. But not in 640p (ok after modding and hacking it can). Even a $40 DVD player has progressive scan these days. It's a specific example, but of a general trend.
Just like instead of a reliable phone with good battery life, manufacturers think we "really want" is a shitty phone, grainy camera, buggy PDA, and laughingly unplayable games.
Hell, a clie is small enough that I can duct-tape it to the phone myself, if that's what I need.
I can see niche markets for some of this convergance stuff. The rich guy who did a 100,000 dollar remodel of his living room, and an a/v rack with room for a DVD player, TiVo and PS2 just aren't in the budget. Fine, he can pay the premium.
Guess what? Not everybody in the world needs to own their own PC. Not even every family. A village with 250 families could each kick in a buck, and share it.
Frankly, if you look at the impoverished, tribal, un-industrialized parts of the world, they have very little need for videophones or email. I doubt, given the choice, that many of these destitute tribes/villages would take the computer over say, a well or access to penicillin or hunting/farming supplies.
Why don't we get them some agriculture and other basic infrastructures in place?
Are eggheads really so self-absorbed that they think the biggest problem these people face is how to get their e-mail?
Ever seen a sheep herding dog? Or any of the "beasts of burden"? Horses, donkeys, oxen, elephants.
Ever seen a seeing eye monkey?
Plenty of animals work 8+ hours a day. In fact, the entire waking adult life of most animals is spent "working" (foraging for food, building nests, etc). Hell, laying in the shade and panting is "work", since the only "job" the animals have is to stay alive.
I know what it installed by default. It installed your ethernet, brought it up, installed telnet, brought it up, and left you to log in with NO ROOT PASSWORD. Thats the uber-secure linux of the past.
Install that old slackware while connected to broadband, and if you decide to take a coffee break before logging in and setting the password (or if you forget to do it, or miss that line item in the install instructions) and you're fucked.
Hell, those were my Uni days. We'd have a ball in the computer lab watching the one TA (total stereotype smelly bearded hippy geek with a bad attitude) install some new linux terms, and we'd race him (and beat him!) every time to log in as root and do various stupid things.
Hell, I'd wager on 7 out of 10 student machines on the campus net never did get a root password set.
I have an m515, and a kyocera smartphone with whats basically equivalent built in.. I've read some ebooks, and found that it annoyed my eyes, too muchh of it gives me a headach. It's just a little bit too small. Guess I'm getting too old.
It's convenient to have on site, I got a bunch of relevent technical manuals, but dead tree is still much easier on my eyes. Maybe a device about the size of a paperback, maybe one the size of a hardback too for when my vision deteriorates a little more.
Stupid CRTs.
Stop it with the reality. This is slashdot, and we're trying to get upset and figure out just how to blame Bush for it. (nothing personal just that hes the sitting president and most of us arent old enough to vote)
Anyways..
People don't realize that this system isn't a completely computerized network written by geeks. There are humans in the loop. Dispite the mistakes they make, many of them have some things computers dont, common sense and skepticism.
So long as enough of them have enough common sense, or skepticism, they'd recognize a hoax or mistake up the chain. Exactly like the NORAD incident. Most sensible people would wait for some confirmation before panicking the community.
Anyways.. Back to my own little world where I imagine that its simple (hell even possible) to broadcast whatever I want on every TV in the nation with my C64 and 1200 baud modem.
There's no L in spooge.
They cant prove if you've injected it artificially, or if it's a natural disorder.
Andre the Giant had it, people who suffer from it get those facial features, pronounced brow and nose, etc.
I watched some documentary about it, they showed lots of photos of russian athletes from the cold war era, most of whom shared striking facial similarities with Andre. Beating americans at all costs was the mantra of the Soviet athletic program.
In soviet russia, hormones produce you!
Who cares about the olympics anyways. The IOC is so frigging corrupt it's a joke. They openly accept bribes (hell, demand them!) when chosing cities to host the games.
Its all a corporate jack-fest, like so much these days. McDonalds, the official hamburger of the american olympic team. Come on, how many finely tuned athletes eat Big Macs on a regular basis?
I keep hearing how dangerous SUVs and vans are because of the height of the bumpers.
Why cant you raise the bumper on a compact car? Put it over the grille? Because it would look unconventional and "silly"? Seems like a stupid reason to die.
I'm dissapointed in the hybrids. They had to look just like a regular car, which meant shoehorning all that high voltage wiring wherever it fit. Which means in an accident, the rescuers may not be able to safely use the jaws of life to extract you.
Screw that. If it's a choice between the safety of myself and my family, and the environment, well its time to (metaphorically) piss in the lakes.