Ordinary humans are sucked into a computer world inhabited by anthropomorphisized software programs that engage in videogames.
How is it different? This one is a comedy series, instead of an action movie. The Hollywood-pitch for "Game Over" is "Tron meets Married With Children".
Incidentally Hitler was chosen the person of the year by Time magazine in 1938.
The "Person of the Year" was supposed to be chosen on basis of importance or newsmaking. Selecting Adolf Hitler for the cover was an acknowledgement of his power, not an endorsement of it. It was an excellent choice, considering how much Hitler's policies dominated international events for the next eight years.
Of course, in 2001 Time broke their editorial policy in the name of patriotism, and selected a local politician who merely responded to events, instead of the international master-mind who initiated them.
Vermont has the lowest homicide rate in the country, and it's tough to argue with facts like that.
It's very easy to argue. Homicide rate is positively correlated to dense populations, high temperatures, and recent immigrants.
Those factors are lacking in Vermont, but prevalent in NY & CA, and even TX & MA.
Alternatively, I could argue the fact isn't even true. In 2001, both Vermont and New Hampshire suffered exactly two murders. But New Hampshire has a larger population. Depending on which year you look at, Maine and North Dakota may also beat Vermont. Obviously, all of those states are places of low population and immigration, so the effects of their gun laws is a poor predictor for the rest of the nation.
They already can spy quite easily on normal people without this system.
They can't. Not "easily". To spy on someone requires a big investment of personnel... both to hire the actual van-driving FBI agents, and to trust them. (Yes, government spooks are very loyal- to their country. But if they think they're pursuing an illegal or frivolous investigation, whistles will be blown).
Technological deployments to automate survelliance, however, can increase the scale massively. They can change the condition of being monitored 24/7 from an unusual exception to the normal state of affairs.
Today, if a member of the government wanted to place a certain hated citizen under survelliance, he'd have to justify it- not just to get the warrant from the Court, but also to convince his fellow spies to allocate the resources. But if spying on a person becomes as cheap and easy as toggling a checkbox next to an SSN in Echelon, they'll be able to track many, many people with little explanation.
The b option you mention only applies if I fail to provide source along with binaries.
The post I was responding to specifically used "option B". It described the scenario of a person selling a binary, and later wishing to only mail source code to people who paid a nominal fee, AND had gotten the software directly from him.
The post stated that a person can sell a GPLed binary, without including the source, and not be obligated to provide source code to people who recieved the binary indirectly. This is wrong.
relative immunity from surveillance because population density is too low to justify the expense.
In the Square States they don't need cameras on streetcorners to spy on citizens. With the low population and lack of dense urban areas, the satellites are able to keep track of you just fine.
(Really, they'll be switching to Global Hawks in the near future. Just one of those things can circuit over the whole of Illinois in a single day)
Do you mean that Microsoft might be at some kind of financial risk?
Why? Since the days of Windows3.0, we've all developed low expectations for Microsoft code. Nobody expects their software to even keep running for more than 4 hours at a stretch. If it works at all, we feel lucky.
If you go into court blaming Microsoft for losing your valuable data, the judge will laugh at you. Expecting a Microsoft product to be reliable? That's the negligence!
note that you are under no obligation to supply source code to anyone asking for it, you have to supply only to those who got the binary from you.
Please do not spread lies.
Here's a quote from the GPL: b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code
Here's a quote from the GPL FAQ: This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.
Lets say I use MySQL from ODBC..... Ok so now we have an exception to the GPL.
No, you have no exception. You have nothing at all. That argument is incoherent and meaningless (obviously English isn't your best language).
So you are using MySQL, so what? Did you intend to say "linked", which would have a specific meaning in terms of software development? If that's what you meant, then you are already violating the GPL and have no exception. Or if by "using" you just meant communicating over a network socket on a well defined interface (like ODBC), then you haven't created a derivative work, the GPL is irrelevant, and it's still not an exception.
The question for the courts is irrelevant to the GPL- it applies to any kind of copyright case. The question is: "Is my new work a derivative of the previous one?"
Obviously, if you copied parts of the old work into the new one (such as by linking together executable code), the new work is derivative, and you need permission from the previous copyright holder.
And just as obviously, if your work doesn't include the other one, but merely depends on the user having it installed, it is not a derivative product. So the GPL (or other copyright claims) mean nothing.
a license is only binding if you have signed a paper copy of it.
Not a problem. Print out the GPL and sign it then. You can even mail a copy to the author, if you like.
The GPL gives you permission to do things that are otherwise illegal (distributing modified version is a copyright violation). If you don't feel like doing those things, you have no reason to sign. You won't have to give up using software you've already recieved.
If EULAs turn out to be illegal under that principle, fine. They try to prohibit you from doing things which are your legal right as a customer, and they should be struck down.
If there is no technical reason, they will probably stop doing it shortly.
Maybe. I'm skeptical that authors of closed-source Linux programs will be eager to change to ALSA. Including it in 2.6 will encourage them, but ASLA's OSS compatibility will let them go on repeating "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
I can't find the ALSA FAQ online, so below I'll paste in their answer about why OSS emulation only allows as many simultaneous players as the hardware supports, and why they don't intend to change it:
Q: When I play something and I try to play something other the second attempt
will not fail but instead it hangs waiting for the completion of the first
sound. A: This is definitely the standard behaviour as described in many official
documents that now ALSA follows. There is no reasons to complain about that
for the following reasons:
- it's the right (standard) way
- the application that want a different behaviour can open the device in
O_NONBLOCK mode
- all modern OSS drivers in mainstream kernel (cmpci, es1370, es1371,
esssolo1, maestro, sonicvibes, vwsnd) works in the same ways and the
others have to be intended buggy
- we want you ask to broken applications author to fix them;-)
Re:News flash - Bill Gates downplays linux
on
Bill Gates On Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When quoted on things like "no one will need more then 640k" was pretty much an accurate statement in 1982 or so.
That is not a quote, and was never supposed to be. It was a joke invented 15 years ago, when its falsehood was self-evident to all listeners. It is apocrypha- an external summation of their business practices in designing MS-DOS, but not something Gates has even been alleged to have said.
Using the DSP wrapper programs, artsdsp or esddsp, you can allow programs to write to OSS-style/dev/dsp and still mix the waveforms in a userspace daemon. Some desktop environments (KDE3) start all programs in such a wrapper by default.
However, combining the overhead of those wrappers with the slowdown of waiting for a user process to mix audio means that even playback of a single mono stream can suffer a perceptible burbling. And if you really start to mix in more streams, it just gets worse.
I can rarely bear to run KDE for more than a few minutes without executing "killall artsd". I intend to get an emu10k card to alleviate the problem (it should let me mix 32+ streams in hardware before I notice the blockage)
Because running artsd along with a hefty application (a modern shooting game) will take up around 90% of the CPU. (This is on a AMD XP 1800) ESD is worse by a fraction of a percent.
Either makes the game completely unplayable... they make the difference between screen refreshes at 45 hertz and eight.
Even apart from games, blocking/dev/dsp makes a BIG difference. When mozilla can deadlock itself because multiple Flash plugins want to play sounds at the same time, it is a serious problem. ("Oh, your web browser has stopped responding? Well just run/usr/sbin/lsof|grep dsp and tell me what it prints...")
The only reason it's a problem is because ALSA, for "compatibility with the OSS standard", defaults to blocking audio. They have no technical reason to do this.
No... "misunderestimate" is a valid word. It's new, so you must embetter your language skills and learn it. It was created in 2002 by our extra-cool President G.W. Bush.
allow graphical apps running as root to display without any thought
That's something of a security hole. Any other program on that X11 display can sniff or modify your root-priviledge program.
Of course, that's not a major threat... running "su" is nearly as bad. Both create a small chance of escalating a compromised user-password into a root exploit.
(Also, there are multiple kinds of X11 access authority- one of them allows programs to display their own data, but not inspect other windows. This would help mitigate risk, if RedHat uses it. I haven't checked.)
buy a box regularly: the "big-bang" upgrades make this more or less compulsory, at least as long as downloading and burning cd-sized ISOs is still a pain.
That ended in May 2001, right? Is it actually bothersome to download an ISO anymore?
If for some reason your network can't pull down 2100 megabytes overnight, then just ask a friend with a cablemodem to send you some disks. The friendless can even order those CDs online, for between $2-3 per disk.
The tricky part is that "Red Hat" is a trademark, and the company has stopped ISO resellers from putting that label on their wares. To buy cheap R3dH@t discs, try CheapBytes or Edmunds. Or many others.
In other words, rpm (like deb) is a package format.
Not exactly. rpm is also a package installer program, like Debian's dpkg.
rpm : rpm : up2date deb : dpkg : apt
A statement comparing "apt vs rpm" is valid, if both are interpreted as software applications.
In fact, that comparison was once very important for Debian evaneglism. Until recently (and maybe still?), rpm was the primary tool for RedHat users to install packages. Before the introduction of RedHat's up2date, comparing "The primary command-line tools to install packages on RedHat and Debian" meant comparing the user-friendliness of rpm and apt-get. Naturally, apt-get won completely, because its featureset is far out of rpm's league.
That would be a cool feature to add to Slashcode, actually... imagine a button to show you the browser/OS histogram for any individual story. Analyze which platform correlates to interest in other topics, or predict future desktop software trends.
A more invasive version (but still cool) would be to get a browser history of a certain user. (Of course, that's easy to fake)
If there's a security hole, it doesn't just mean you need to patch... there's a time period before the patch arrives when you can be rooted. When that happens the number of redundant boxes doesn't matter- they're all 0wnz3d equally fast.
I hope the screen on the SL-5600 is better than that on the SL-5500, which was absolutely horrible.
No such luck. The screen is an identical part. 100% the same. I think the keyboard and front-panel buttons are identical too.
(no, IQNotes or DrawPad don't do the job)
My long dead Agenda VR3, underpowered as it was, at least had better freehand note-taking software than the Zaurus.
at least the character recognition got less sucky
Besides speed, the Zaurus character recognition could be improved with some simple UI enhancements- things to let the user focus his gaze at one place on the screen, instead of flipping back and forth from the application up top to the HWR area at the bottom. Simply printing the recognized ASCII character in the input area would help a little. Even better would be dispensing with the input area, and allowing HWR input to happen overlayed on the current application. Microsoft PocketPCs do this, and additionally recognize linked characters. But even the Agenda could accept block-letter HWR on the entire screen surface (they removed that feature in later software upgrades, because their CPU just couldn't handle the recognition fast enough to be reliable)
Huh? If by "hacks" you mean "an easy way to back up to CF" and "wireless connectivity when you plug in a wirless lan card" than I agree.
Requiring the user to buy a separate CF card and then manually backup his data is truely a hack. (Where "hack"=workaround for shortsighted design) The device includes onboard flash memory- you shouldn't have to take extra, costly steps just to protect your appointments from a RAM wipeout.
The (traditional) Palm stores everything in RAM, but it hardly ever crashes or expends the battery, so this doesn't bother most users. The SL-5500 will eat it's battery in 2 hours, and can freeze up fairly easily with the default software packages. In fact, the single simplest reason to switch to the OpenZaurus ROM is that PIM data is automatically stored on Flash memory, so application failures don't erase your schedule.
Also, wireless connectivity was incomplete when the SL-5500 was launched. Besides an irritating error in the network control panel (it ignored user-supplied DNS addresses), there was a major vendor of CF 802.11b cards that was totally unsupported. Downloadable drivers were available, but at least a year passed without them making it into the ROM image.
And of course, using the default wireless connectivity gave anybody within 15 meters complete root access to your PDA... closing that big design flaw required much hackage. (Sharp released a ROM upgrade to fix the problem, then de-recommended that ROM because it broke most of their PC sync software)
Slashdot Mirror
This show is like Tron? How?
Ordinary humans are sucked into a computer world inhabited by anthropomorphisized software programs that engage in videogames.
How is it different? This one is a comedy series, instead of an action movie. The Hollywood-pitch for "Game Over" is "Tron meets Married With Children".
That's a little out of date, isn't it?
No, the sequel isn't even out yet! Tron 2.0 is coming soon to a theater near you (flash site).
Incidentally Hitler was chosen the person of the year by Time magazine in 1938.
The "Person of the Year" was supposed to be chosen on basis of importance or newsmaking. Selecting Adolf Hitler for the cover was an acknowledgement of his power, not an endorsement of it. It was an excellent choice, considering how much Hitler's policies dominated international events for the next eight years.
Of course, in 2001 Time broke their editorial policy in the name of patriotism, and selected a local politician who merely responded to events, instead of the international master-mind who initiated them.
Vermont has the lowest homicide rate in the country, and it's tough to argue with facts like that.
It's very easy to argue. Homicide rate is positively correlated to dense populations, high temperatures, and recent immigrants.
Those factors are lacking in Vermont, but prevalent in NY & CA, and even TX & MA.
Alternatively, I could argue the fact isn't even true. In 2001, both Vermont and New Hampshire suffered exactly two murders. But New Hampshire has a larger population. Depending on which year you look at, Maine and North Dakota may also beat Vermont. Obviously, all of those states are places of low population and immigration, so the effects of their gun laws is a poor predictor for the rest of the nation.
They already can spy quite easily on normal people without this system.
They can't. Not "easily". To spy on someone requires a big investment of personnel... both to hire the actual van-driving FBI agents, and to trust them. (Yes, government spooks are very loyal- to their country. But if they think they're pursuing an illegal or frivolous investigation, whistles will be blown).
Technological deployments to automate survelliance, however, can increase the scale massively. They can change the condition of being monitored 24/7 from an unusual exception to the normal state of affairs.
Today, if a member of the government wanted to place a certain hated citizen under survelliance, he'd have to justify it- not just to get the warrant from the Court, but also to convince his fellow spies to allocate the resources. But if spying on a person becomes as cheap and easy as toggling a checkbox next to an SSN in Echelon, they'll be able to track many, many people with little explanation.
The b option you mention only applies if I fail to provide source along with binaries.
The post I was responding to specifically used "option B". It described the scenario of a person selling a binary, and later wishing to only mail source code to people who paid a nominal fee, AND had gotten the software directly from him.
The post stated that a person can sell a GPLed binary, without including the source, and not be obligated to provide source code to people who recieved the binary indirectly. This is wrong.
relative immunity from surveillance because population density is too low to justify the expense.
In the Square States they don't need cameras on streetcorners to spy on citizens. With the low population and lack of dense urban areas, the satellites are able to keep track of you just fine.
(Really, they'll be switching to Global Hawks in the near future. Just one of those things can circuit over the whole of Illinois in a single day)
After announcing that Linux was violating their IP, SCO continued to distribute Linux products for a while.
So they kept on agreeing to the GPL, even after they "knew" it contained their stuff.
Do you mean that Microsoft might be at some kind of financial risk?
Why? Since the days of Windows3.0, we've all developed low expectations for Microsoft code. Nobody expects their software to even keep running for more than 4 hours at a stretch. If it works at all, we feel lucky.
If you go into court blaming Microsoft for losing your valuable data, the judge will laugh at you. Expecting a Microsoft product to be reliable? That's the negligence!
note that you are under no obligation to supply source code to anyone asking for it, you have to supply only to those who got the binary from you.
Please do not spread lies.
Here's a quote from the GPL:
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code
Here's a quote from the GPL FAQ:
This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.
Lets say I use MySQL from ODBC. .... Ok so now we have an exception to the GPL.
No, you have no exception. You have nothing at all. That argument is incoherent and meaningless (obviously English isn't your best language).
So you are using MySQL, so what? Did you intend to say "linked", which would have a specific meaning in terms of software development? If that's what you meant, then you are already violating the GPL and have no exception. Or if by "using" you just meant communicating over a network socket on a well defined interface (like ODBC), then you haven't created a derivative work, the GPL is irrelevant, and it's still not an exception.
The question for the courts is irrelevant to the GPL- it applies to any kind of copyright case. The question is: "Is my new work a derivative of the previous one?"
Obviously, if you copied parts of the old work into the new one (such as by linking together executable code), the new work is derivative, and you need permission from the previous copyright holder.
And just as obviously, if your work doesn't include the other one, but merely depends on the user having it installed, it is not a derivative product. So the GPL (or other copyright claims) mean nothing.
a license is only binding if you have signed a paper copy of it.
Not a problem. Print out the GPL and sign it then. You can even mail a copy to the author, if you like.
The GPL gives you permission to do things that are otherwise illegal (distributing modified version is a copyright violation). If you don't feel like doing those things, you have no reason to sign. You won't have to give up using software you've already recieved.
If EULAs turn out to be illegal under that principle, fine. They try to prohibit you from doing things which are your legal right as a customer, and they should be struck down.
Maybe. I'm skeptical that authors of closed-source Linux programs will be eager to change to ALSA. Including it in 2.6 will encourage them, but ASLA's OSS compatibility will let them go on repeating "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
I can't find the ALSA FAQ online, so below I'll paste in their answer about why OSS emulation only allows as many simultaneous players as the hardware supports, and why they don't intend to change it:
will not fail but instead it hangs waiting for the completion of the first
sound.
A: This is definitely the standard behaviour as described in many official
documents that now ALSA follows. There is no reasons to complain about that
for the following reasons:
- it's the right (standard) way
- the application that want a different behaviour can open the device in
O_NONBLOCK mode
- all modern OSS drivers in mainstream kernel (cmpci, es1370, es1371,
esssolo1, maestro, sonicvibes, vwsnd) works in the same ways and the
others have to be intended buggy
- we want you ask to broken applications author to fix them
When quoted on things like "no one will need more then 640k" was pretty much an accurate statement in 1982 or so.
That is not a quote, and was never supposed to be. It was a joke invented 15 years ago, when its falsehood was self-evident to all listeners. It is apocrypha- an external summation of their business practices in designing MS-DOS, but not something Gates has even been alleged to have said.
Using the DSP wrapper programs, artsdsp or esddsp, you can allow programs to write to OSS-style /dev/dsp and still mix the waveforms in a userspace daemon. Some desktop environments (KDE3) start all programs in such a wrapper by default.
However, combining the overhead of those wrappers with the slowdown of waiting for a user process to mix audio means that even playback of a single mono stream can suffer a perceptible burbling. And if you really start to mix in more streams, it just gets worse.
I can rarely bear to run KDE for more than a few minutes without executing "killall artsd". I intend to get an emu10k card to alleviate the problem (it should let me mix 32+ streams in hardware before I notice the blockage)
Because running artsd along with a hefty application (a modern shooting game) will take up around 90% of the CPU. (This is on a AMD XP 1800) ESD is worse by a fraction of a percent.
/dev/dsp makes a BIG difference. When mozilla can deadlock itself because multiple Flash plugins want to play sounds at the same time, it is a serious problem. ("Oh, your web browser has stopped responding? Well just run /usr/sbin/lsof|grep dsp and tell me what it prints...")
Either makes the game completely unplayable... they make the difference between screen refreshes at 45 hertz and eight.
Even apart from games, blocking
The only reason it's a problem is because ALSA, for "compatibility with the OSS standard", defaults to blocking audio. They have no technical reason to do this.
No... "misunderestimate" is a valid word. It's new, so you must embetter your language skills and learn it. It was created in 2002 by our extra-cool President G.W. Bush.
allow graphical apps running as root to display without any thought
That's something of a security hole. Any other program on that X11 display can sniff or modify your root-priviledge program.
Of course, that's not a major threat... running "su" is nearly as bad. Both create a small chance of escalating a compromised user-password into a root exploit.
(Also, there are multiple kinds of X11 access authority- one of them allows programs to display their own data, but not inspect other windows. This would help mitigate risk, if RedHat uses it. I haven't checked.)
buy a box regularly: the "big-bang" upgrades make this more or less compulsory, at least as long as downloading and burning cd-sized ISOs is still a pain.
That ended in May 2001, right? Is it actually bothersome to download an ISO anymore?
If for some reason your network can't pull down 2100 megabytes overnight, then just ask a friend with a cablemodem to send you some disks. The friendless can even order those CDs online, for between $2-3 per disk.
The tricky part is that "Red Hat" is a trademark, and the company has stopped ISO resellers from putting that label on their wares. To buy cheap R3dH@t discs, try CheapBytes or Edmunds. Or many others.
In other words, rpm (like deb) is a package format.
Not exactly. rpm is also a package installer program, like Debian's dpkg.
rpm : rpm : up2date
deb : dpkg : apt
A statement comparing "apt vs rpm" is valid, if both are interpreted as software applications.
In fact, that comparison was once very important for Debian evaneglism. Until recently (and maybe still?), rpm was the primary tool for RedHat users to install packages. Before the introduction of RedHat's up2date, comparing "The primary command-line tools to install packages on RedHat and Debian" meant comparing the user-friendliness of rpm and apt-get. Naturally, apt-get won completely, because its featureset is far out of rpm's league.
That would be a cool feature to add to Slashcode, actually... imagine a button to show you the browser/OS histogram for any individual story. Analyze which platform correlates to interest in other topics, or predict future desktop software trends.
A more invasive version (but still cool) would be to get a browser history of a certain user. (Of course, that's easy to fake)
Really? I really want to accuse you of lying. :P
It's not proof, but check the "Display" row in this comparison from Sharp.
It shows all external components as being identical. Only the guts (CPU, ram, battery, speaker) are different. And a fatter case to hold 'em.
If there's a security hole, it doesn't just mean you need to patch... there's a time period before the patch arrives when you can be rooted. When that happens the number of redundant boxes doesn't matter- they're all 0wnz3d equally fast.
I hope the screen on the SL-5600 is better than that on the SL-5500, which was absolutely horrible.
No such luck. The screen is an identical part. 100% the same. I think the keyboard and front-panel buttons are identical too.
(no, IQNotes or DrawPad don't do the job)
My long dead Agenda VR3, underpowered as it was, at least had better freehand note-taking software than the Zaurus.
at least the character recognition got less sucky
Besides speed, the Zaurus character recognition could be improved with some simple UI enhancements- things to let the user focus his gaze at one place on the screen, instead of flipping back and forth from the application up top to the HWR area at the bottom. Simply printing the recognized ASCII character in the input area would help a little. Even better would be dispensing with the input area, and allowing HWR input to happen overlayed on the current application. Microsoft PocketPCs do this, and additionally recognize linked characters. But even the Agenda could accept block-letter HWR on the entire screen surface (they removed that feature in later software upgrades, because their CPU just couldn't handle the recognition fast enough to be reliable)
Huh? If by "hacks" you mean "an easy way to back up to CF" and "wireless connectivity when you plug in a wirless lan card" than I agree.
Requiring the user to buy a separate CF card and then manually backup his data is truely a hack. (Where "hack"=workaround for shortsighted design) The device includes onboard flash memory- you shouldn't have to take extra, costly steps just to protect your appointments from a RAM wipeout.
The (traditional) Palm stores everything in RAM, but it hardly ever crashes or expends the battery, so this doesn't bother most users. The SL-5500 will eat it's battery in 2 hours, and can freeze up fairly easily with the default software packages. In fact, the single simplest reason to switch to the OpenZaurus ROM is that PIM data is automatically stored on Flash memory, so application failures don't erase your schedule.
Also, wireless connectivity was incomplete when the SL-5500 was launched. Besides an irritating error in the network control panel (it ignored user-supplied DNS addresses), there was a major vendor of CF 802.11b cards that was totally unsupported. Downloadable drivers were available, but at least a year passed without them making it into the ROM image.
And of course, using the default wireless connectivity gave anybody within 15 meters complete root access to your PDA... closing that big design flaw required much hackage. (Sharp released a ROM upgrade to fix the problem, then de-recommended that ROM because it broke most of their PC sync software)