However, Sugar is just too steep a learning curve.
Really? From what I understand, it's a lot less of a learning curve than going from zero to XP.
After all...
our 3 and 5 year-old grandsons could get some real educational benefit from it.
Question: How long did it take them to figure it out? Did you let them try?
No, I think what they ran up against were manufacturing problems and lack of orders. It was meant to be the $100 laptop, not the $200 laptop, and certainly not the $400-for-two-but-you-only-keep-one laptop.
But I certainly don't think that an "XP facade" would help much in the little Peruvian villages they've tried, where this is the first computer anyone in the village has ever owned. The only thing it would do is prepare them to more easily adapt to something XP-like in the future -- but the whole point of the OLPC, as far as Linux advocacy goes, is to raise a whole generation of kids who are independent of the Microsoft monopoly, who would be free to innovate with systems that don't have to look anything like Windows.
I think your post says more about you than it does about Sugar.
It's possible I'm wrong, but given that you're about the only person I've ever heard complain about not being able to even understand Sugar, I doubt it.
That, and some kind of swappable keyboard with more normal Netbook-sized keys...
And that shows just how out of touch you are with the goals of the OLPC project...
Those are child-sized keys. And the priorities are durability, cost, absurdly low power requirements... I'd say the size of the keyboard is a pretty low priority, after those.
Probably a valid complaint, but I really doubt this was at all a factor in why the OLPC failed. I think a much greater factor was the amount of pure cash Microsoft could throw at various governments, and eventually the OLPC group itself, to get their way.
Yeah - and every user uses "color management devices professional photography". They can't live without it...
Doesn't have to be every user. Every user has something like that, and it's a different something for every user.
Linux is 99% of the way there for most users. That last 1% is both different and very necessary for each person who might switch.
For example, my last 1% is gaming, and I resolve it only by dual-booting -- Nexuiz is cool, and Wine runs a few games, but every now and then, I just need to play some Counter-Strike: Source without sacrificing 20% of my framerate and visual quality to Wine. Yet obviously, some are happy with Nexuiz, or even a few card games.
For many home users, it might be Quicken, or QuickBooks -- for my needs, Gnucash is fine, as is KMyMoney, but neither is a Quicken or a QuickBooks, and they might not be comfortable trusting financial data to Wine.
And we could go on down the list, even among developers. Many are fine with Eclipse, even prefer it. Many absolutely cannot live without Visual Studio. Many users are fine renting DVDs and watching YouTube and Hulu; some just have to have Blu-Ray (and can't or won't pirate), and some prefer things like Netflix Watch Now.
For people who can live without that last 1%, or can actually fill it with dual booting, VMs, or Wine, Linux becomes an option. Even then, it's an uphill battle to make a case that it's a good option. If Linux just did everything Windows did for them, then switching to Linux is a huge learning curve and still plenty of uncertainty for no real gain.
I post something like this every few months. And I'm a Linux user, and a Linux advocate.
If Linux is to compete, we have to stop trying to copy everyone, and instead start creating things that others want to copy. OS X is a good example of this.
- There is no common way to install and remove software.
Package manager.
How about Windows or OS X? There's no common way to install software there, actually. And only on Windows is there a common way to uninstall software.
- There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
Nvidia and ATI prove otherwise.
- There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Moreover, there really aren't that many distros that matter. Make it work on Ubuntu, for instance, and the Gentoo people will find a way. Make it work on Debian, and you've likely got Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edibuntu, Xandros, Knoppix, Linspire, Mepis, etc etc etc for free.
- Gimp is *not* Photoshop.
GP didn't claim that. Nice strawman, though.
The fact is, for most users, photoshop and Gimp are probably both too much. Gimp is fine for many tasks. Graphics professionals, obviously, will need Photoshop.
However, if the only people stuck on Windows are graphics professionals -- and even there, Photoshop works on Wine -- it seems possible that it would be ported. Adobe Reader works on Linux, as does Flash -- Adobe isn't exactly anti-Linux.
Only if Linux advocates and developers take a realistic look at their product offerings and their standing in the market.
If you'd like to provide that, and anything constructive, go ahead. But when you accuse Linux of lacking something that it alone seems to have gotten right (package management), don't be surprised if no one listens.
If not, then all candidates should do was campaign in New York and California.
As it is, they campaign in places like Iowa. Granted, I live in Iowa, and I enjoyed knowing I was a small reason for our current president being nominated, let alone elected.
But you're basically saying that it's OK for a Rhode Island vote to count more than a Californian vote. Why? Are the people who live in Rhode Island that much more capable of choosing a leader?
I mean, the USA could easily disregard the states down to region level, but then they really won't be the USA any more.
Unlikely. What many people seem to forget is that the President isn't supposed to have that much real power. State legislatures, and city legislatures, still do quite a lot on their own.
Gaming is also not like other sports where you stick to one game and then build an audience around that game around those rules. In the video game world everything is constantly changing.
In a word, bullshit. Quake still works. So does Doom, for that matter.
It would not be at all difficult to stick to one game and get hardcore at it. Nor would changing games present that huge of a challenge, I suspect.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently.
I don't know. I might like watching highlights -- things like Quake Done Quick, for instance -- but quite a lot of these games just wouldn't be fun to watch. Either it'd be all action, with Quake, or a lot of camping, with Counter-Strike.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently. Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match
"Spectator mode" was probably the best way, since unlike other sports, the entire match can be recorder in full 3D, in every detail. If you're right, and it has to do with camera work, those could always be done after the fact, though I suspect many users would greatly enjoy finding their own...
But in all honesty, I've never been one for spectator sports. Maybe it will gain an audience, but it continues to amaze me that other sports have an audience. Are geeks really the right people to ask about this?
Well, we do, in a few cases -- see Shigeru Myamoto, John Carmack, John Romero, Gabe Newell...
On the other hand, we also emphasize the actual studios responsible -- see Valve, Id, Ubisoft, Bungie, even *hiss* EA...
I can't really say whether either one is a good thing. For instance, Gabe Newell did pay a lot out of pocket to finance Half-Life 2, but to call it "his" game is to trivialize all the hard work put in by pretty much everyone at Valve. There's also a certain amount of accountability when we think of creators as studios and corporations -- for instance, the whole SecuROM debacle, and all that lashing out at EA, were directed at actual corporations, who were eventually held responsible and forced to do things our way.
Contrast that to other entertainment industries -- we focus on individual actors (Ben Affleck, Matt Daemon, etc etc), or individual TV shows (CSI, Battlestar Galactica, etc etc). We pay much less attention to the networks, until they do something stupid (fucking Syfy, remind me never to watch that again), and even less attention to the corporations responsible.
I'm not sure it matters, anyway. Everyone who plays CS knows it's by Valve, and it's not difficult to research those individual developers if they want to claim CS on their resume, for instance. If we're just talking about fame, I don't really care much -- and again, it's probably more fair to focus on the entire studio as a collective, rather than any one rockstar developer.
Some modders will release their stuff entirely free, forever, either because they buy the open source (or just free-as-in-beer) philosophy, or because they hope to impress a game company (and get hired).
Other modders will keep their code proprietary, either because they've never heard of FOSS, or in an effort to prevent cheating, or because the SDK forces them to -- but more likely, I think, it's because they hope their mod is eventually successful enough that they can sell it. The classic example is Counter-Strike; a more recent example is Gary's Mod.
Only occasionally do they cross over -- for instance, Tremulous, World of Padman, and various other Quake 3 mods have taken advantage of the Quake 3 engine going open source to provide their game stand-alone -- that is, without requiring any of the Quake 3 data. This means people don't have to own (or pirate) Quake 3 to download the mod, and it means they can dig deeper and tweak things a typical mod couldn't, but it also means (thanks to the GPL) that pretty much the entire mod has to be open source.
In order for this to work, you'd have to convince the majority of these modders at least of the philosophy that "Valve is going to see how much this kicks ass, and they're going to hire you." Except that the philosophy they're being sold on is, "Don't give away any source code, and you can sell it over Steam when it gets popular."
Quake3 was released under the GPL. That means no non-open-source games with it, ever, unless id changes their minds -- and even then, they'd have to get a release from every participant.
Not that it necessarily matters. As Loneowolf666 points out, Nexuiz is very playable (and fun) without needing a commercial game.
On the other hand, not all commercial games would be ruined by an open client -- for example, Second Life already has an open client, and their client arguably sucks performance-wise; something like this could help them quite a lot, if their license is compatible. (If not, their specs are open, so it's possible an XreaL-based client could be developed without the use of the original SL code.)
The real question, at the moment, is whether it's also something that would never see the light of day on android.
Otherwise, well, Android seems to be here, now, cheaper and better in every way except openness. And honestly, forcing everything to be written for a VM has advantages -- Openmoko is likely to be bound to ARM for some time, even if something better were to come along.
automated countermeasures are only very superficially effective against a very adaptable enemy.
That's true. Antivirus is not a very effective countermeasure at all.
That is why proper security updates and a little common sense (don't download random shit) is much more effective than any automated countermeasure.
There are many trojan infected PCs in large corporations that do run all sorts of automated counter-measures but do not perform periodic manual traffic analysis.
Who wants to bet that they also do not adequately train and motivate users to develop secure habits? Who wants to bet that, instead, users will go out of their way to avoid the security measures, so they can use iTunes, or Myspace, or whatever it is the mean old IT department won't let them do now?
Never mind the use of IE6 for intranet sites.
That is why many very highly paid consultancies exist that specialize in detection of threats not repelled by automated defences, of which there are many.
I think we've found your motivation. If end-users were to wise up, there'd be less demand for a highly paid consultancy to clean up their messes.
There are many compromised Linux systems out there.
And I have a sufficient level of paranoia.
No operating system is immune, there are simply systems harder to crack then others.
Which is precisely the point -- the majority uses the easiest system to crack.
The primary attack vector for Windows machines seem to be through known vulnerabilities -- in other words, if they only patched, they'd be safe from those -- and through user stupidity. That is, through users opening unsafe attachments, or downloading and executing unsafe programs, or otherwise clicking "Yes" at the big unsafe security prompt.
On a Linux system, software is almost never installed by running an executable file from a webpage. Furthermore, all software on the system is managed through a central package manager -- thus, it's possible to apply all critical patches in one place.
Thus, the package manager and just a tiny bit of advice -- "Don't install ANYTHING except through the package manager, and don't run any commands we don't tell you to" -- and you'd be fine. And that's for people who have local root -- no reason for them to on corporate desktops.
There's a tiny fraction which happens from actual, new, unknown vulnerabilities. But if that was the only attack vector, it'd be a better world.
since you do not run frequent, in-depth manual checks on your system, you do not even know if you are not already owned by a deep seated root-kit.
That is true. However, the same could be said for anyone -- the whole point of a rootkit is that it is supposed to survive those frequent, in-depth manual checks.
However, I do not open myself up in any significant way that would allow the rootkit to install itself. Since there are currently softer targets, and since most of these attacks are automated, I've just made it incredibly unprofitable to attack me, unless there's some specific reason to care about me. To date, I have nothing that valuable.
the whole idea of choosing where not to go on the Internet is the anathema of Internet use to them.
That isn't what I suggested. I suggested choosing what not to download from the Internet, and understanding that iTunes, Second Life, etc, are not part of the Internet.
A vast majority of Internet users do not have an IT department! They are home users.
Home users have their tech relative, or tech friend, or Geek Squad. They still don't see it as their problem -- it becomes very much like changing the oil on their car. Most people will go to Jiffy Lube, even if it'd be cheaper and faster to do it yourself.
And no, securing PCs air-tight is not a practical solution in a situation where average user will never attain sufficient know-how to defend himself/herself against a determined, resourceful and very knowledgeable attacker.
Are you sure? Most of us on Slashdot, I imagine, are not part of a botnet.
No, the reason users have not done this, to date, is that they have no incentive. Billions in charges to hapless consumers would be an incentive for consumers to start locking down their machines.
The pros have hard time defending themselves, never you mind the grandma.
I really don't. I run Linux. On Windows, I don't run antivirus, but I do keep up to date. On both, I don't download software from random untrusted sources -- I stick to known-good distribution channels -- and I keep anything related to browsing up-to-date.
And I do this simply enough that I really believe everyone could, if they put in just a little bit of effort to educate themselves.
Right now, they don't, because they see it as not their job -- let IT worry about it. And IT can't reasonably protect users from themselves -- but when they try, they generally cause as much harm as good.
No, the reason this won't work is that it will never be implemented. No matter how much spam goes through Gmail, it's unlikely that Gmail itself will ever become a purely pay service, or be completely blocked by everyone else. If Google somehow failed, another company would fill the gap.
That is, The Form applies here in that it requires immediate total cooperation from everyone all at once.
All except the money solution seem to rely on being able to pin an identity to a particular user (or bot). For example, GMail's rate limiting assumes that each bot has exactly one GMail address.
It falls apart when the bot registers a few hundred thousand GMail addresses.
What prevents bots from doing that now? CAPTCHAS.
I agree with the article that CAPTCHA is doomed and that other approaches are needed. I don't agree that either of those solutions work, by themselves.
For what it's worth, Ruby (and Rails) runs on it now, via JRuby.
But I'm not sure what you're suggesting -- would it be more fair if App Engine offered a C API? Are you wanting x86 (or x86_64) ASM?
Java is one of the more performant languages that isn't actually pre-compiled to binary. Every now and then, people find a benchmark of one little thing that Java actually does faster than C.
I don't know if you're joking, but that is a real thing, and I wouldn't be surprised.
What may actually surprise you is that JRuby works on this, and Ruby on Rails works on JRuby. And, yes, someone has put it all together and Rails works on App Engine.
Most people would much rather directly stream a fairly high quality video, than wait 3 hours for some pixelated piece of crap rared into 50 different password protected files.
I don't know where you've been pirating, but the worst case is 50 different non-protected rar files. Quality is generally very good, much better than Hulu. Additionally, I can play it wherever I want, without an Internet connection, without waiting through 15-30 seconds of ad at every seek, on any video player that can handle it -- which means my own keybindings, not Hulu's -- oh, and Flash sucks for video, compared to just about any standalone video player.
I stopped watching Naruto when it got picked up by Hulu -- and thus, Dattebayo stopped subbing it -- and thus, quality, both of the subs and of the encode, dropped massively. Additionally, in order to display the Hulu and Viz Network logos, the entire video was encoded at a 4:3 resolution with black bars. Thanks to being played through Flash, I couldn't do the usual mplayer trick to crop those out. That means there are ginormous black bars inside of ginormous black bars, making the video look tiny on my full HD monitor (widescreen, of course).
You've provided a good summary of Hulu's business model, but the simple truth is, piracy continues to provide better quality in just about every respect. The only advantage Hulu provides is that it streams out of the box on most systems -- no need to install a BitTorrent client, then PeerGuardian, then wait a half hour or so for whatever it is to download.
Not interested in looking at an agreement which Google is not bound to for the free version of the service. (Free = no monetary consideration = No contract).
Tell that to just about every TOS on the Internet.
Even supposing you're right, what does it change? The typical corporation, even a small one, is likely willing to pay.
If the user won't back up local outlook express data, they're not going to go to the trouble of setting up IMAP or export the Google data.
If they don't, their data still exists on Google's cloud, which is significantly more durable than your hard disk.
If they do back up in both cases, Gmail still has better availability -- if their entire machine explodes, they don't need to restore a backup to gain access to Gmail again.
Even if it were binding the odds are the average user that isn't bothered backing up their own data isn't going to sue Google if something goes wrong.
I think the average user would jump at free money from a class-action lawsuit.
1) Store it locally so that it can't be sold or stolen due to a 3rd party's negligence.
Unless that 3rd party is Microsoft, or Apple, or Canonical, or Samsung, or Dell, or...
2) Make local backups. Periodically make an archival remote backup.
In other words, point #1 is completely worthless, since your backups can now be stolen through a third party's negligence.
3) Encrypt anything of importance since it passes through servers you do not control and could be intercepted.
Goes without saying, at least for your connection to the service -- this can be done with gmail by simply using https://mail.google.com/ from the beginning.
If you're talking about PGP, gmail doesn't make that particularly easy, but it can be done -- however, you're still faced with the problem of building a web of trust. Unfortunately, a majority of people I communicate with can't be bothered.
4) Either learn how to do the above correctly or hire someone to do it.
That works for just about anything -- either learn to do it correctly, or hire someone to do it. Thus giving that someone enough access to steal, destroy, or fabricate data.
What makes your random hire more trustworthy than Google? Why do you more readily suspect Google of incompetence or malice than a local admin?
The only reason I trust a local admin more myself is that I am that local admin.
What I think you're actually trying to say (poorly) is that it's less of a pain relying on Google to backup your data than to do it yourself and that you prefer to have your fingers crossed hoping they won't stuff it up rather than to actually do it properly yourself.
...(ii) Google will provide Customer access to, and the ability to export, the Customer Data for a commercially reasonable period of time at Googleâ(TM)s then-current rates for the applicable Service; (iii) after a commercially reasonable period of time, Google will delete Customer Data pursuant to the Google Apps Privacy Notice;..
And you're assuming that there wouldn't be a backup. You can still do that with IMAP, it's just no longer as critical when Google is handling the availability for you. (Contrast to your own in-house RAID -- you're one failed RAID controller away from downtime, if not data loss.)
If you don't have a backup of your GMail somewhere else you're no better off than the Outlook user.
Compare the likelihood of Gmail shutting down and nuking all data without warning, or a very large number of Google servers (and the right Google servers) simultaneously dying, to the likelihood of a hard drive failure.
I really don't understand this mentality where people are scared their computer might crash, but have no fear that they've given up their data to a large company with no service agreement.
...except there is a service agreement. See above.
The one recent bit of discussion I remember is that GMail will unceremoniously just drop connections on people (not time out after 30 mins like expected).
Well, shame on Gmail for not implementing the spec properly -- but also shame on the spec. It is no longer a huge deal to open a new TCP connection -- it is much more overhead at both ends to keep a TCP connection open for 30 minutes doing nothing.
At least, so I assume. Maybe I'm wrong, and IMAP makes establishing a connection expensive?
GMail doesn't work so well when your company of 400k+ people cannot access it through the company firewall and frankly yes, that is Google's fault.
It's Google's fault the company firewall is misconfigured?
a provider that has free services should not share a network with proprietary data.
...why not?
It's google's fault that every hack that can make a gmail account now doesn't know anything better than to think their new account is the k-rad 31337.
Yeah, because I totally used l33tsp34k all over my post, and Google told me to. Oh wait...
Browsers should NOT be virtual machines.
Why not?
Fuck you, I'm not getting off your lawn.
If you want to write an application, write an application. If you want to navigate data and present it, you use *HTML.
And the two are not mutually exclusive. Much as you might not like to admit, applications have been built on such unlikely platforms as VBA. Frankly, given the choice between that and the Web, I'll choose Web every time -- Javascript is a much better language than VB anyhow.
You don't make a single substantial point.
Nor do you. You state a few opinions, without really giving any reasons why.
Browsers should not be virtual machines, and proprietary data should not be on the same network as a free service, because teknopurge says so!
Let's start with that very simplest of claims: Browsers should not be virtual machines. Why not? Why shouldn't the browser be a generic application platform?
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However, Sugar is just too steep a learning curve.
Really? From what I understand, it's a lot less of a learning curve than going from zero to XP.
After all...
our 3 and 5 year-old grandsons could get some real educational benefit from it.
Question: How long did it take them to figure it out? Did you let them try?
No, I think what they ran up against were manufacturing problems and lack of orders. It was meant to be the $100 laptop, not the $200 laptop, and certainly not the $400-for-two-but-you-only-keep-one laptop.
But I certainly don't think that an "XP facade" would help much in the little Peruvian villages they've tried, where this is the first computer anyone in the village has ever owned. The only thing it would do is prepare them to more easily adapt to something XP-like in the future -- but the whole point of the OLPC, as far as Linux advocacy goes, is to raise a whole generation of kids who are independent of the Microsoft monopoly, who would be free to innovate with systems that don't have to look anything like Windows.
I think your post says more about you than it does about Sugar.
It's possible I'm wrong, but given that you're about the only person I've ever heard complain about not being able to even understand Sugar, I doubt it.
That, and some kind of swappable keyboard with more normal Netbook-sized keys...
And that shows just how out of touch you are with the goals of the OLPC project...
Those are child-sized keys. And the priorities are durability, cost, absurdly low power requirements... I'd say the size of the keyboard is a pretty low priority, after those.
Probably a valid complaint, but I really doubt this was at all a factor in why the OLPC failed. I think a much greater factor was the amount of pure cash Microsoft could throw at various governments, and eventually the OLPC group itself, to get their way.
Yeah - and every user uses "color management devices professional photography". They can't live without it...
Doesn't have to be every user. Every user has something like that, and it's a different something for every user.
Linux is 99% of the way there for most users. That last 1% is both different and very necessary for each person who might switch.
For example, my last 1% is gaming, and I resolve it only by dual-booting -- Nexuiz is cool, and Wine runs a few games, but every now and then, I just need to play some Counter-Strike: Source without sacrificing 20% of my framerate and visual quality to Wine. Yet obviously, some are happy with Nexuiz, or even a few card games.
For many home users, it might be Quicken, or QuickBooks -- for my needs, Gnucash is fine, as is KMyMoney, but neither is a Quicken or a QuickBooks, and they might not be comfortable trusting financial data to Wine.
And we could go on down the list, even among developers. Many are fine with Eclipse, even prefer it. Many absolutely cannot live without Visual Studio. Many users are fine renting DVDs and watching YouTube and Hulu; some just have to have Blu-Ray (and can't or won't pirate), and some prefer things like Netflix Watch Now.
For people who can live without that last 1%, or can actually fill it with dual booting, VMs, or Wine, Linux becomes an option. Even then, it's an uphill battle to make a case that it's a good option. If Linux just did everything Windows did for them, then switching to Linux is a huge learning curve and still plenty of uncertainty for no real gain.
I post something like this every few months. And I'm a Linux user, and a Linux advocate.
If Linux is to compete, we have to stop trying to copy everyone, and instead start creating things that others want to copy. OS X is a good example of this.
My understanding is, the goal is that Wine should be able to run every Win32 program that doesn't actually rely on kernel-mode stuff.
More short-term goals are, of course, measured in specific applications.
- There is no common way to install and remove software.
Package manager.
How about Windows or OS X? There's no common way to install software there, actually. And only on Windows is there a common way to uninstall software.
- There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
Nvidia and ATI prove otherwise.
- There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Moreover, there really aren't that many distros that matter. Make it work on Ubuntu, for instance, and the Gentoo people will find a way. Make it work on Debian, and you've likely got Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edibuntu, Xandros, Knoppix, Linspire, Mepis, etc etc etc for free.
- Gimp is *not* Photoshop.
GP didn't claim that. Nice strawman, though.
The fact is, for most users, photoshop and Gimp are probably both too much. Gimp is fine for many tasks. Graphics professionals, obviously, will need Photoshop.
However, if the only people stuck on Windows are graphics professionals -- and even there, Photoshop works on Wine -- it seems possible that it would be ported. Adobe Reader works on Linux, as does Flash -- Adobe isn't exactly anti-Linux.
Only if Linux advocates and developers take a realistic look at their product offerings and their standing in the market.
If you'd like to provide that, and anything constructive, go ahead. But when you accuse Linux of lacking something that it alone seems to have gotten right (package management), don't be surprised if no one listens.
If not, then all candidates should do was campaign in New York and California.
As it is, they campaign in places like Iowa. Granted, I live in Iowa, and I enjoyed knowing I was a small reason for our current president being nominated, let alone elected.
But you're basically saying that it's OK for a Rhode Island vote to count more than a Californian vote. Why? Are the people who live in Rhode Island that much more capable of choosing a leader?
I mean, the USA could easily disregard the states down to region level, but then they really won't be the USA any more.
Unlikely. What many people seem to forget is that the President isn't supposed to have that much real power. State legislatures, and city legislatures, still do quite a lot on their own.
Gaming is also not like other sports where you stick to one game and then build an audience around that game around those rules. In the video game world everything is constantly changing.
In a word, bullshit. Quake still works. So does Doom, for that matter.
It would not be at all difficult to stick to one game and get hardcore at it. Nor would changing games present that huge of a challenge, I suspect.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently.
I don't know. I might like watching highlights -- things like Quake Done Quick, for instance -- but quite a lot of these games just wouldn't be fun to watch. Either it'd be all action, with Quake, or a lot of camping, with Counter-Strike.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently. Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match
"Spectator mode" was probably the best way, since unlike other sports, the entire match can be recorder in full 3D, in every detail. If you're right, and it has to do with camera work, those could always be done after the fact, though I suspect many users would greatly enjoy finding their own...
But in all honesty, I've never been one for spectator sports. Maybe it will gain an audience, but it continues to amaze me that other sports have an audience. Are geeks really the right people to ask about this?
I stand corrected.
I don't know how effective that would be, as it hasn't been tried beyond old games like Quake 3.
Well, we do, in a few cases -- see Shigeru Myamoto, John Carmack, John Romero, Gabe Newell...
On the other hand, we also emphasize the actual studios responsible -- see Valve, Id, Ubisoft, Bungie, even *hiss* EA...
I can't really say whether either one is a good thing. For instance, Gabe Newell did pay a lot out of pocket to finance Half-Life 2, but to call it "his" game is to trivialize all the hard work put in by pretty much everyone at Valve. There's also a certain amount of accountability when we think of creators as studios and corporations -- for instance, the whole SecuROM debacle, and all that lashing out at EA, were directed at actual corporations, who were eventually held responsible and forced to do things our way.
Contrast that to other entertainment industries -- we focus on individual actors (Ben Affleck, Matt Daemon, etc etc), or individual TV shows (CSI, Battlestar Galactica, etc etc). We pay much less attention to the networks, until they do something stupid (fucking Syfy, remind me never to watch that again), and even less attention to the corporations responsible.
I'm not sure it matters, anyway. Everyone who plays CS knows it's by Valve, and it's not difficult to research those individual developers if they want to claim CS on their resume, for instance. If we're just talking about fame, I don't really care much -- and again, it's probably more fair to focus on the entire studio as a collective, rather than any one rockstar developer.
Actually, I suspect it depends on the modders.
Some modders will release their stuff entirely free, forever, either because they buy the open source (or just free-as-in-beer) philosophy, or because they hope to impress a game company (and get hired).
Other modders will keep their code proprietary, either because they've never heard of FOSS, or in an effort to prevent cheating, or because the SDK forces them to -- but more likely, I think, it's because they hope their mod is eventually successful enough that they can sell it. The classic example is Counter-Strike; a more recent example is Gary's Mod.
Only occasionally do they cross over -- for instance, Tremulous, World of Padman, and various other Quake 3 mods have taken advantage of the Quake 3 engine going open source to provide their game stand-alone -- that is, without requiring any of the Quake 3 data. This means people don't have to own (or pirate) Quake 3 to download the mod, and it means they can dig deeper and tweak things a typical mod couldn't, but it also means (thanks to the GPL) that pretty much the entire mod has to be open source.
In order for this to work, you'd have to convince the majority of these modders at least of the philosophy that "Valve is going to see how much this kicks ass, and they're going to hire you." Except that the philosophy they're being sold on is, "Don't give away any source code, and you can sell it over Steam when it gets popular."
Quake3 was released under the GPL. That means no non-open-source games with it, ever, unless id changes their minds -- and even then, they'd have to get a release from every participant.
Not that it necessarily matters. As Loneowolf666 points out, Nexuiz is very playable (and fun) without needing a commercial game.
On the other hand, not all commercial games would be ruined by an open client -- for example, Second Life already has an open client, and their client arguably sucks performance-wise; something like this could help them quite a lot, if their license is compatible. (If not, their specs are open, so it's possible an XreaL-based client could be developed without the use of the original SL code.)
The real question, at the moment, is whether it's also something that would never see the light of day on android.
Otherwise, well, Android seems to be here, now, cheaper and better in every way except openness. And honestly, forcing everything to be written for a VM has advantages -- Openmoko is likely to be bound to ARM for some time, even if something better were to come along.
automated countermeasures are only very superficially effective against a very adaptable enemy.
That's true. Antivirus is not a very effective countermeasure at all.
That is why proper security updates and a little common sense (don't download random shit) is much more effective than any automated countermeasure.
There are many trojan infected PCs in large corporations that do run all sorts of automated counter-measures but do not perform periodic manual traffic analysis.
Who wants to bet that they also do not adequately train and motivate users to develop secure habits? Who wants to bet that, instead, users will go out of their way to avoid the security measures, so they can use iTunes, or Myspace, or whatever it is the mean old IT department won't let them do now?
Never mind the use of IE6 for intranet sites.
That is why many very highly paid consultancies exist that specialize in detection of threats not repelled by automated defences, of which there are many.
I think we've found your motivation. If end-users were to wise up, there'd be less demand for a highly paid consultancy to clean up their messes.
There are many compromised Linux systems out there.
And I have a sufficient level of paranoia.
No operating system is immune, there are simply systems harder to crack then others.
Which is precisely the point -- the majority uses the easiest system to crack.
The primary attack vector for Windows machines seem to be through known vulnerabilities -- in other words, if they only patched, they'd be safe from those -- and through user stupidity. That is, through users opening unsafe attachments, or downloading and executing unsafe programs, or otherwise clicking "Yes" at the big unsafe security prompt.
On a Linux system, software is almost never installed by running an executable file from a webpage. Furthermore, all software on the system is managed through a central package manager -- thus, it's possible to apply all critical patches in one place.
Thus, the package manager and just a tiny bit of advice -- "Don't install ANYTHING except through the package manager, and don't run any commands we don't tell you to" -- and you'd be fine. And that's for people who have local root -- no reason for them to on corporate desktops.
There's a tiny fraction which happens from actual, new, unknown vulnerabilities. But if that was the only attack vector, it'd be a better world.
since you do not run frequent, in-depth manual checks on your system, you do not even know if you are not already owned by a deep seated root-kit.
That is true. However, the same could be said for anyone -- the whole point of a rootkit is that it is supposed to survive those frequent, in-depth manual checks.
However, I do not open myself up in any significant way that would allow the rootkit to install itself. Since there are currently softer targets, and since most of these attacks are automated, I've just made it incredibly unprofitable to attack me, unless there's some specific reason to care about me. To date, I have nothing that valuable.
the whole idea of choosing where not to go on the Internet is the anathema of Internet use to them.
That isn't what I suggested. I suggested choosing what not to download from the Internet, and understanding that iTunes, Second Life, etc, are not part of the Internet.
A vast majority of Internet users do not have an IT department! They are home users.
Home users have their tech relative, or tech friend, or Geek Squad. They still don't see it as their problem -- it becomes very much like changing the oil on their car. Most people will go to Jiffy Lube, even if it'd be cheaper and faster to do it yourself.
The problem is, of course, that this is not ent
And no, securing PCs air-tight is not a practical solution in a situation where average user will never attain sufficient know-how to defend himself/herself against a determined, resourceful and very knowledgeable attacker.
Are you sure? Most of us on Slashdot, I imagine, are not part of a botnet.
No, the reason users have not done this, to date, is that they have no incentive. Billions in charges to hapless consumers would be an incentive for consumers to start locking down their machines.
The pros have hard time defending themselves, never you mind the grandma.
I really don't. I run Linux. On Windows, I don't run antivirus, but I do keep up to date. On both, I don't download software from random untrusted sources -- I stick to known-good distribution channels -- and I keep anything related to browsing up-to-date.
And I do this simply enough that I really believe everyone could, if they put in just a little bit of effort to educate themselves.
Right now, they don't, because they see it as not their job -- let IT worry about it. And IT can't reasonably protect users from themselves -- but when they try, they generally cause as much harm as good.
No, the reason this won't work is that it will never be implemented. No matter how much spam goes through Gmail, it's unlikely that Gmail itself will ever become a purely pay service, or be completely blocked by everyone else. If Google somehow failed, another company would fill the gap.
That is, The Form applies here in that it requires immediate total cooperation from everyone all at once.
All except the money solution seem to rely on being able to pin an identity to a particular user (or bot). For example, GMail's rate limiting assumes that each bot has exactly one GMail address.
It falls apart when the bot registers a few hundred thousand GMail addresses.
What prevents bots from doing that now? CAPTCHAS.
I agree with the article that CAPTCHA is doomed and that other approaches are needed. I don't agree that either of those solutions work, by themselves.
For what it's worth, Ruby (and Rails) runs on it now, via JRuby.
But I'm not sure what you're suggesting -- would it be more fair if App Engine offered a C API? Are you wanting x86 (or x86_64) ASM?
Java is one of the more performant languages that isn't actually pre-compiled to binary. Every now and then, people find a benchmark of one little thing that Java actually does faster than C.
There's also JRuby, which is much more complete than Jython (I believe). And yes, Rails runs on JRuby, and Rails+JRuby runs on App Engine.
Next step: Groovy on Grails?
I don't know if you're joking, but that is a real thing, and I wouldn't be surprised.
What may actually surprise you is that JRuby works on this, and Ruby on Rails works on JRuby. And, yes, someone has put it all together and Rails works on App Engine.
For that matter, Ruby 1.9 has real threads (but GIL'd) -- this puts its threading in exactly the same class as Python.
Still disappointing, once you know Erlang...
Is it still a Godwin if its relevant?
Yes.
I really can't imagine a more useless combination than h264/vorbis.
If you don't care about patents, h264 and aac+ should be fine. If you do, you'd probably want theora/vorbis, or dirac/vorbis.
And you're right, I hate Flash. Unfortunately, the alternative (if Sony did it) is much, much, worse.
Most people would much rather directly stream a fairly high quality video, than wait 3 hours for some pixelated piece of crap rared into 50 different password protected files.
I don't know where you've been pirating, but the worst case is 50 different non-protected rar files. Quality is generally very good, much better than Hulu. Additionally, I can play it wherever I want, without an Internet connection, without waiting through 15-30 seconds of ad at every seek, on any video player that can handle it -- which means my own keybindings, not Hulu's -- oh, and Flash sucks for video, compared to just about any standalone video player.
I stopped watching Naruto when it got picked up by Hulu -- and thus, Dattebayo stopped subbing it -- and thus, quality, both of the subs and of the encode, dropped massively. Additionally, in order to display the Hulu and Viz Network logos, the entire video was encoded at a 4:3 resolution with black bars. Thanks to being played through Flash, I couldn't do the usual mplayer trick to crop those out. That means there are ginormous black bars inside of ginormous black bars, making the video look tiny on my full HD monitor (widescreen, of course).
You've provided a good summary of Hulu's business model, but the simple truth is, piracy continues to provide better quality in just about every respect. The only advantage Hulu provides is that it streams out of the box on most systems -- no need to install a BitTorrent client, then PeerGuardian, then wait a half hour or so for whatever it is to download.
Not interested in looking at an agreement which Google is not bound to for the free version of the service. (Free = no monetary consideration = No contract).
Tell that to just about every TOS on the Internet.
Even supposing you're right, what does it change? The typical corporation, even a small one, is likely willing to pay.
If the user won't back up local outlook express data, they're not going to go to the trouble of setting up IMAP or export the Google data.
If they don't, their data still exists on Google's cloud, which is significantly more durable than your hard disk.
If they do back up in both cases, Gmail still has better availability -- if their entire machine explodes, they don't need to restore a backup to gain access to Gmail again.
Even if it were binding the odds are the average user that isn't bothered backing up their own data isn't going to sue Google if something goes wrong.
I think the average user would jump at free money from a class-action lawsuit.
1) Store it locally so that it can't be sold or stolen due to a 3rd party's negligence.
Unless that 3rd party is Microsoft, or Apple, or Canonical, or Samsung, or Dell, or...
2) Make local backups. Periodically make an archival remote backup.
In other words, point #1 is completely worthless, since your backups can now be stolen through a third party's negligence.
3) Encrypt anything of importance since it passes through servers you do not control and could be intercepted.
Goes without saying, at least for your connection to the service -- this can be done with gmail by simply using https://mail.google.com/ from the beginning.
If you're talking about PGP, gmail doesn't make that particularly easy, but it can be done -- however, you're still faced with the problem of building a web of trust. Unfortunately, a majority of people I communicate with can't be bothered.
4) Either learn how to do the above correctly or hire someone to do it.
That works for just about anything -- either learn to do it correctly, or hire someone to do it. Thus giving that someone enough access to steal, destroy, or fabricate data.
What makes your random hire more trustworthy than Google? Why do you more readily suspect Google of incompetence or malice than a local admin?
The only reason I trust a local admin more myself is that I am that local admin.
What I think you're actually trying to say (poorly) is that it's less of a pain relying on Google to backup your data than to do it yourself and that you prefer to have your fingers crossed hoping they won't stuff it up rather than to actually do it properly yourself.
Nope. Try again.
I actually don't use Gmail for anything critical.
You do realize that Google could just shut down the GMail service one day for whatever reason they chose, and you'd have no recourse.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html
In particular, look at 12.2:
...(ii) Google will provide Customer access to, and the ability to export, the Customer Data for a commercially reasonable period of time at Googleâ(TM)s then-current rates for the applicable Service; (iii) after a commercially reasonable period of time, Google will delete Customer Data pursuant to the Google Apps Privacy Notice;..
And you're assuming that there wouldn't be a backup. You can still do that with IMAP, it's just no longer as critical when Google is handling the availability for you. (Contrast to your own in-house RAID -- you're one failed RAID controller away from downtime, if not data loss.)
If you don't have a backup of your GMail somewhere else you're no better off than the Outlook user.
Compare the likelihood of Gmail shutting down and nuking all data without warning, or a very large number of Google servers (and the right Google servers) simultaneously dying, to the likelihood of a hard drive failure.
I really don't understand this mentality where people are scared their computer might crash, but have no fear that they've given up their data to a large company with no service agreement.
...except there is a service agreement. See above.
The one recent bit of discussion I remember is that GMail will unceremoniously just drop connections on people (not time out after 30 mins like expected).
Well, shame on Gmail for not implementing the spec properly -- but also shame on the spec. It is no longer a huge deal to open a new TCP connection -- it is much more overhead at both ends to keep a TCP connection open for 30 minutes doing nothing.
At least, so I assume. Maybe I'm wrong, and IMAP makes establishing a connection expensive?
GMail doesn't work so well when your company of 400k+ people cannot access it through the company firewall and frankly yes, that is Google's fault.
It's Google's fault the company firewall is misconfigured?
a provider that has free services should not share a network with proprietary data.
...why not?
It's google's fault that every hack that can make a gmail account now doesn't know anything better than to think their new account is the k-rad 31337.
Yeah, because I totally used l33tsp34k all over my post, and Google told me to. Oh wait...
Browsers should NOT be virtual machines.
Why not?
Fuck you, I'm not getting off your lawn.
If you want to write an application, write an application. If you want to navigate data and present it, you use *HTML.
And the two are not mutually exclusive. Much as you might not like to admit, applications have been built on such unlikely platforms as VBA. Frankly, given the choice between that and the Web, I'll choose Web every time -- Javascript is a much better language than VB anyhow.
You don't make a single substantial point.
Nor do you. You state a few opinions, without really giving any reasons why.
Browsers should not be virtual machines, and proprietary data should not be on the same network as a free service, because teknopurge says so!
Let's start with that very simplest of claims: Browsers should not be virtual machines. Why not? Why shouldn't the browser be a generic application platform?