Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton
Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton..... no, it's not working.
Did you mean "write to your MP and get the law changed?
Well, don't be so truthful! Give them made-up information instead. Ideally, you should have a different "Mother's maiden name" and "city of birth" for each service you use; that way, if any one gets compromised, all the others are safe.
One morning I woke up surrounded by empty beer cans, an ashtray full of roaches, my wallet out, my debit card out of my wallet, my laptop out of juice..... and a blinding headache. I was dimly aware of having ordered something online but couldn't for the life of me think either what it was, or where from. Though my browsing history had apparently survived the enforced fsck, there were still many things it could have been.
A few days later, a Palm Tungsten arrived at my place of work; and when my bank statement arrived, that turned out to have been the only purchase I had made during those lost hours. It could have been worse. A lot worse, judging by my the sites in my browser history!
Lesson: Don't order stuff online while pissed and/or stoned.
That is indeed a point. Google Clive Peachey for an example of what happens when someone's (IMHO, entirely reasonable) concern about being mistaken for a nonce takes over from their instinct to help their neighbour.
IMHO if you falsely accuse someone of a crime, you deserve the same sentence that they would have got if they had done it.
Falsely accusing a man of rape does not fuck up his life (and the lives of those around him..... wife, kids &c.) any less than raping a woman fucks up her life (and the lives of those around her..... including the boyfriend / husband who probably will never be able to have sex again).
No, it's not tricky at all. You just have to live in a country where the law states quite clearly that software cannot be patented. Then there are no patents to violate.
If such a country ever introduce software patents, the international prohibition against retroactive application of newly-passed laws will mean that the patent holders will have to apply for brand new patents on all their patented software -- and you'll be able to cite your own work as "prior art" to block them!
Telling it to identify as Googlebot is handy too, as it will sometimes get you into places you might otherwise have to pay for. Get the latest version of the Googlebot "browser" ident string from Wikipedia (or/var/log/apache2/access.log) and see!
VC-1 may be covered by patents, but those patents are null and void in places such as Europe and Britain. In addition, distributing the codec as Source Code (therefore, legally in kit form) probably would get around the letter (if not the spirit) of patent restrictions (since the user must perform some deliberate act to cause the thing to act in a way that is covered by a patent, and probably would satisfy the requirements for an exemption in any case).
The thing is, it shouldn't matter which Linux distribution you're using -- or, for that matter, if you're using Solaris, one of the BSDs or even -- the ultimate exercise in teaching a gerbil to bark -- Cygwin. When you type./configure, the magic pixies should sort everything out for you.
As long as the OS conforms (more or less) to the "Portable Operating Systems Interface (eXtended)" specification and includes an ANSI C compiler (with or without the GCC extensions, which are in themselves almost a de facto standard), any well-written C code should compile on it. And any code that doesn't is obviously badly-written:)
Given that there's an infinite (unproven; but certainly large) number of source programs that will compile to any given binary, there's the ghost of a possibility of issuing source code that could be compiled on any architecture -- yet wouldn't make any more sense to anyone trying to understand or modify it than a binary. That would make it truly cross-platform (meaning it would be for all Linux, not just x86 Linux)* and meet the letter, if not the spirit (the phrase "ride a coach and horses through" rather seems to spring to mind), of certain "restrictive" software licences. Absence of source code never stopped anyone from distributing binaries without authorisation, so there's no reason to suppose its presence will encourage further unauthorised distribution.
* Some of the source programs that compile to a given binary are in fact architecture dependent, since they rely on inserting a piece of data which is really an order code requiring extra data; then using the order code of the following instruction as the data for that instruction and its data, if any as another order code, and so on. This isn't at all portable and isn't what I mean. Mere obfuscation of function and variable names is insufficient; but you can write quite simple instructions in very roundabout ways and rely on redundant portions being optimised away (or the whole thing running on a fast processor!) As long as all the "pessimisations" you make are such that they will be optimised out by the compiler, and not the preprocessor.....
My personal experience suggests that 50% of whatever customers say is bull, and the other half is shit.
They only ever ring up for telephone support when they have actually broken something (admittedly not hard if they're running Windows); and when you ask them to do something, they outright lie to you that they have when they haven't. Best thing I ever did was advise a customer (who was having trouble with something simple -- like doing what they were told and typing their name, NOT their e-mail address, their NAME, into the box labelled "name") to pack their PC up in the original box, take it back to the store and get a refund because they were too bloody stupid to work a computer. If they were paying as much attention to that as they were to the rest of the call, though, they probably stuck the damn thing in a suitcase and took it to the railway station.
If Google buy up DoubleClick, eventually all the doubleclick URLs will change to google URLs. Then I will be able to take a line out of my Squid configuration file!
I already worked out how to subvert an election. First you need to know "who knows whom" and build up a picture of everyone's existing social networks (friends, neighbours, family). Then you "publish online" the election results including who voted for whom. You use restrictive DRM to "password-protect" the election results (everyone has a unique username and password), ensuring that nobody sees anybody else's personalised version of the election results (though ostensibly it's for some sort of security thing like allowing a cursory check but preventing blatant vote-buying..... you don't let it be even guessed that the results are personalised), that it can't be printed out, and that it can only be viewed for a limited time (just long enough to check your own vote, not long enough to read everyone's vote). And also to annoy penguin-shaggers:) In each person's copy of the results, you make sure that that person's vote, and the votes of their family and friends, are recorded correctly; but the votes of strangers are fair game for alteration to match the desired result.
So you look up your own vote and see it went the way you wanted. Good. Feeling curious, you use the remainder of your allotted time to check up on your ex-coal-miner uncle (Labour, check); your grandmother (Conservative, check); the dippy tart down the road with the blue hair (Green party, check) and the old bloke who goes out in his slippers and moans about kids and "too many d**kies" (BNP, check). All looks good so far. Since most of the electorate are strangers to you, you won't have a clue how they voted anyway and certainly wouldn't spot if their votes had been altered. Everyone sees their own vote, and those of their friends and family, rendered correctly; and if everyone sees that their own vote was recorded correctly, then nobody can complain!
The only way you can find out that there is anything afoot is to compare two mutual strangers' versions of the results side-by-side (so the "owner" of each list is likely to have their vote altered in the other). And that can be said to constitute a form of treason (since it's interfering with a democratic election) and so punishable by the death penalty. Also, how exactly do you go about asking a stranger for whom they voted?
Or, for that matter, have the Copyright Office themselves define the royalty payment; and then anyone is free to make a copy of the work, as long as they pay that amount of money to the copyright holder. (When monopoly vendors are allowed to determine their own selling prices, the public invariably suffer.) If you created a temporary exception where copyrighted works could be mortgaged and only the lender's nominated agents were permitted to make copies until the mortgage were discharged, this would mean every copyrighted work would get the chance to "pay for itself"; but also, there would be more of a competitive market in good music. (Imagine if supermarkets could manufacture their own CDs and DVDs instead of reselling the major labels' discs.)
I'd be for that, at least in the case of drugs used by National Health Services. As a (reasonably healthy) taxpayer, I am paying for sick people's drugs. I don't begrudge them a single penny of that money; I know that if (absit omen) I were to get sick, I would receive the treatment I needed without having to worry about paying for it.
What I do begrudge, however, is the money paid to drug companies for patent licences. The first obligation of the NHS should be to save lives, not create profits for fatcat drug barons. (I firmly believe that queue-jumping private patients should pay patent licence fees, and also private healthcare should be taxed and the money raised spent on the NHS.)
Sure, you can't get paid for every single person who reads your book. Just like the way you can't get paid by every single person who listens to your music as they walk past you on the street. The Internet has made everybody a street performer, whether they like it or not. The only way to stop that from happening is not to perform.
This is one of the most insightful things I've read on Slashdot in a long time. Thank you!
(Ironically, I think that the Amiga software that most influenced the game industry was a tool! Many computer artists had a passionate love affair with "Deluxe Paint II" pretty much right up until that pesky "Photoshop" took over. Hardened art department veterans will still wax nostalgic if you speak those magic words anywhere near them.
Oh, yes! Deluxe Paint II (and later, DPaint III; DPaint IV added AGA support but managed to lose the plot a little) was the graphics editor. I still miss it. I think its influence definitely lives on in a few places -- more than one modern graphics editor still refers to a "file requester". And the use of the right-hand mouse button for "paint with background colour" lives on (except in the GIMP, unless there's a setting I missed).
I'll be honest with you: I'm not sure being the first platform is the big deal you're making it out to be.
It's a big deal alright, but only for as long as you're the only one. As soon as you've a serious competitor -- and no competitor will ever be taken seriously unless they overtake you -- it ceases to be a big deal and you're just playing catch-up.
I'd have to say that the Amiga's greatest influence was in showing us what was possible.
Yes, exactly.
Now, if you wanted a machine that was really and truly ahead of its time, think of the original CDTV. This was in 1991 or 1992, remember. It was essentially a pre-AGA A500 with a (read-only; home-recordable CD would be another 4-5 years down the line) CD-ROM drive. The only thing wrong with it was that it was something so new, so ahead of its time, that nobody really knew what it was for! It cost much more than a games console or a CD player; and it didn't come with the keyboard, mouse and floppy drive that would have made it recognisable as a computer. It had the "WOW!" factor, and everyone who saw it was blown away; but it also had the "I've lived without one of these for so long I'm not sure I really need one, and anyway what the bloody hell am I going to do with it when I've got it?" factor. Every part of CDTV -- 640x512x4096 colour graphics (actually the PC only got 480 lines at first), multi-channel DAC sound, GUI, CD-ROM drive, and so forth -- eventually made it into "mainstream" PCs; but it had to happen incrementally, not all at once.
It's like those bizarre "concept vehicles" you see at the MotorShow -- when someone introduces an outrageous new car with many new features. The best bits do eventually make it into mainstream production cars, but they inevitably end up looking nothing like the prototype.
You do realise that anyone with a boot disk can just slip it in the CD-ROM drive, reboot, mount your old/ directory under (say)/mnt ; and then they only need to do # vi/mnt/etc/shadow and change the scrambled password for one they prepared earlier? If they are smart they will then change/bin/login for a hacked one which will accept a hardcoded default password, return your/etc/shadow to its former state, reboot from hard disk and come back later via the internet.
I never, ever bothered with wireless networking. My machine already needs to be tethered to the wall to get its power, so what difference does another piece of wire make, really? If I was bothered about having two separate cables, I'd tie-wrap them together. But I'm not, so I haven't. My house doesn't have nearly enough power sockets, so I have four-way extension leads all over the place anyway, and a CAT5 switch is smaller than one of them. I know I could and should set up something more permanent, but I also know I'll most probably want to re-arrange everything as soon as I do that (like when I get myself a flat-screen telly and mount it above the fireplace and then I'll need to move the sofa and get a new rug and by that time the laminate will probably be showing its age and I'll have to re-lay it.....)
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Because regardless of your intentions, it would still run afoul of the Misuse of Computers Act 1990.
Bob Laxton
..... no, it's not working.
Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton
Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton Bob Laxton
Did you mean "write to your MP and get the law changed?
..... which a virtuoso musician, especially a percussionist, ought to be able to copy.
Well, don't be so truthful! Give them made-up information instead. Ideally, you should have a different "Mother's maiden name" and "city of birth" for each service you use; that way, if any one gets compromised, all the others are safe.
One morning I woke up surrounded by empty beer cans, an ashtray full of roaches, my wallet out, my debit card out of my wallet, my laptop out of juice ..... and a blinding headache. I was dimly aware of having ordered something online but couldn't for the life of me think either what it was, or where from. Though my browsing history had apparently survived the enforced fsck, there were still many things it could have been.
A few days later, a Palm Tungsten arrived at my place of work; and when my bank statement arrived, that turned out to have been the only purchase I had made during those lost hours. It could have been worse. A lot worse, judging by my the sites in my browser history!
Lesson: Don't order stuff online while pissed and/or stoned.
In the UK at least, the mere act of checking your credit rating is, in and of itself, prejudicial to your credit rating.
That is indeed a point. Google Clive Peachey for an example of what happens when someone's (IMHO, entirely reasonable) concern about being mistaken for a nonce takes over from their instinct to help their neighbour.
IMHO if you falsely accuse someone of a crime, you deserve the same sentence that they would have got if they had done it.
..... wife, kids &c.) any less than raping a woman fucks up her life (and the lives of those around her ..... including the boyfriend / husband who probably will never be able to have sex again).
Falsely accusing a man of rape does not fuck up his life (and the lives of those around him
No, it's not tricky at all. You just have to live in a country where the law states quite clearly that software cannot be patented. Then there are no patents to violate.
If such a country ever introduce software patents, the international prohibition against retroactive application of newly-passed laws will mean that the patent holders will have to apply for brand new patents on all their patented software -- and you'll be able to cite your own work as "prior art" to block them!
Telling it to identify as Googlebot is handy too, as it will sometimes get you into places you might otherwise have to pay for. Get the latest version of the Googlebot "browser" ident string from Wikipedia (or /var/log/apache2/access.log) and see!
VC-1 may be covered by patents, but those patents are null and void in places such as Europe and Britain. In addition, distributing the codec as Source Code (therefore, legally in kit form) probably would get around the letter (if not the spirit) of patent restrictions (since the user must perform some deliberate act to cause the thing to act in a way that is covered by a patent, and probably would satisfy the requirements for an exemption in any case).
The thing is, it shouldn't matter which Linux distribution you're using -- or, for that matter, if you're using Solaris, one of the BSDs or even -- the ultimate exercise in teaching a gerbil to bark -- Cygwin. When you type ./configure, the magic pixies should sort everything out for you.
:)
As long as the OS conforms (more or less) to the "Portable Operating Systems Interface (eXtended)" specification and includes an ANSI C compiler (with or without the GCC extensions, which are in themselves almost a de facto standard), any well-written C code should compile on it. And any code that doesn't is obviously badly-written
Given that there's an infinite (unproven; but certainly large) number of source programs that will compile to any given binary, there's the ghost of a possibility of issuing source code that could be compiled on any architecture -- yet wouldn't make any more sense to anyone trying to understand or modify it than a binary. That would make it truly cross-platform (meaning it would be for all Linux, not just x86 Linux)* and meet the letter, if not the spirit (the phrase "ride a coach and horses through" rather seems to spring to mind), of certain "restrictive" software licences. Absence of source code never stopped anyone from distributing binaries without authorisation, so there's no reason to suppose its presence will encourage further unauthorised distribution.
.....
* Some of the source programs that compile to a given binary are in fact architecture dependent, since they rely on inserting a piece of data which is really an order code requiring extra data; then using the order code of the following instruction as the data for that instruction and its data, if any as another order code, and so on. This isn't at all portable and isn't what I mean. Mere obfuscation of function and variable names is insufficient; but you can write quite simple instructions in very roundabout ways and rely on redundant portions being optimised away (or the whole thing running on a fast processor!) As long as all the "pessimisations" you make are such that they will be optimised out by the compiler, and not the preprocessor
Hello? 2001 just called. They want their reason for not using Linux back.
My personal experience suggests that 50% of whatever customers say is bull, and the other half is shit.
They only ever ring up for telephone support when they have actually broken something (admittedly not hard if they're running Windows); and when you ask them to do something, they outright lie to you that they have when they haven't. Best thing I ever did was advise a customer (who was having trouble with something simple -- like doing what they were told and typing their name, NOT their e-mail address, their NAME, into the box labelled "name") to pack their PC up in the original box, take it back to the store and get a refund because they were too bloody stupid to work a computer. If they were paying as much attention to that as they were to the rest of the call, though, they probably stuck the damn thing in a suitcase and took it to the railway station.
It doesn't. What it does do, though, is ensure that even if the voters voted for a different party, the party that wants to get in, gets in.
Use DRM, of course!
..... you don't let it be even guessed that the results are personalised), that it can't be printed out, and that it can only be viewed for a limited time (just long enough to check your own vote, not long enough to read everyone's vote). And also to annoy penguin-shaggers :) In each person's copy of the results, you make sure that that person's vote, and the votes of their family and friends, are recorded correctly; but the votes of strangers are fair game for alteration to match the desired result.
I already worked out how to subvert an election. First you need to know "who knows whom" and build up a picture of everyone's existing social networks (friends, neighbours, family). Then you "publish online" the election results including who voted for whom. You use restrictive DRM to "password-protect" the election results (everyone has a unique username and password), ensuring that nobody sees anybody else's personalised version of the election results (though ostensibly it's for some sort of security thing like allowing a cursory check but preventing blatant vote-buying
So you look up your own vote and see it went the way you wanted. Good. Feeling curious, you use the remainder of your allotted time to check up on your ex-coal-miner uncle (Labour, check); your grandmother (Conservative, check); the dippy tart down the road with the blue hair (Green party, check) and the old bloke who goes out in his slippers and moans about kids and "too many d**kies" (BNP, check). All looks good so far. Since most of the electorate are strangers to you, you won't have a clue how they voted anyway and certainly wouldn't spot if their votes had been altered. Everyone sees their own vote, and those of their friends and family, rendered correctly; and if everyone sees that their own vote was recorded correctly, then nobody can complain!
The only way you can find out that there is anything afoot is to compare two mutual strangers' versions of the results side-by-side (so the "owner" of each list is likely to have their vote altered in the other). And that can be said to constitute a form of treason (since it's interfering with a democratic election) and so punishable by the death penalty. Also, how exactly do you go about asking a stranger for whom they voted?
Or, for that matter, have the Copyright Office themselves define the royalty payment; and then anyone is free to make a copy of the work, as long as they pay that amount of money to the copyright holder. (When monopoly vendors are allowed to determine their own selling prices, the public invariably suffer.) If you created a temporary exception where copyrighted works could be mortgaged and only the lender's nominated agents were permitted to make copies until the mortgage were discharged, this would mean every copyrighted work would get the chance to "pay for itself"; but also, there would be more of a competitive market in good music. (Imagine if supermarkets could manufacture their own CDs and DVDs instead of reselling the major labels' discs.)
I'd be for that, at least in the case of drugs used by National Health Services. As a (reasonably healthy) taxpayer, I am paying for sick people's drugs. I don't begrudge them a single penny of that money; I know that if (absit omen) I were to get sick, I would receive the treatment I needed without having to worry about paying for it.
What I do begrudge, however, is the money paid to drug companies for patent licences. The first obligation of the NHS should be to save lives, not create profits for fatcat drug barons. (I firmly believe that queue-jumping private patients should pay patent licence fees, and also private healthcare should be taxed and the money raised spent on the NHS.)
Now, if you wanted a machine that was really and truly ahead of its time, think of the original CDTV. This was in 1991 or 1992, remember. It was essentially a pre-AGA A500 with a (read-only; home-recordable CD would be another 4-5 years down the line) CD-ROM drive. The only thing wrong with it was that it was something so new, so ahead of its time, that nobody really knew what it was for! It cost much more than a games console or a CD player; and it didn't come with the keyboard, mouse and floppy drive that would have made it recognisable as a computer. It had the "WOW!" factor, and everyone who saw it was blown away; but it also had the "I've lived without one of these for so long I'm not sure I really need one, and anyway what the bloody hell am I going to do with it when I've got it?" factor. Every part of CDTV -- 640x512x4096 colour graphics (actually the PC only got 480 lines at first), multi-channel DAC sound, GUI, CD-ROM drive, and so forth -- eventually made it into "mainstream" PCs; but it had to happen incrementally, not all at once.
It's like those bizarre "concept vehicles" you see at the MotorShow -- when someone introduces an outrageous new car with many new features. The best bits do eventually make it into mainstream production cars, but they inevitably end up looking nothing like the prototype.
You do realise that anyone with a boot disk can just slip it in the CD-ROM drive, reboot, mount your old / directory under (say) /mnt ; and then they only need to do # vi /mnt/etc/shadow and change the scrambled password for one they prepared earlier? If they are smart they will then change /bin/login for a hacked one which will accept a hardcoded default password, return your /etc/shadow to its former state, reboot from hard disk and come back later via the internet.
I never, ever bothered with wireless networking. My machine already needs to be tethered to the wall to get its power, so what difference does another piece of wire make, really? If I was bothered about having two separate cables, I'd tie-wrap them together. But I'm not, so I haven't. My house doesn't have nearly enough power sockets, so I have four-way extension leads all over the place anyway, and a CAT5 switch is smaller than one of them. I know I could and should set up something more permanent, but I also know I'll most probably want to re-arrange everything as soon as I do that (like when I get myself a flat-screen telly and mount it above the fireplace and then I'll need to move the sofa and get a new rug and by that time the laminate will probably be showing its age and I'll have to re-lay it .....)