Residential networks make it easy to set up services that students need without the hassle of diving out VPN software and having to troubleshoot that all day.
From experience, it seems that every university is going to have a bit of its own software to distribute anyway. From SSH clients to Kerberos-enabled printers...
Furthermore, your average college student won't even know what VPN means let alone how to install, run, and use one.
Your average college student knows how to use WoW, and P2P, and many other things that operate on the same principle -- start this program, (possibly) type a password, then you have access to these services.
Now, granted, the simpler and smarter solution is to provide all network services over something which can be secured -- most of it as HTTPS web services. Anyone have any idea how good support for IPP over SSL is?
There's a side benefit to this, also -- the school is no longer in the role of an ISP, and no longer has to support those students who don't even know how to open a web browser.
If by "fingerprint" you mean something giving you access, you're talking about DRM, which is unacceptable.
If by "fingerprint" you mean a watermark, to identify people who share songs, that might work, but it generally means either adding a bit of metadata (which is easily stripped out), or some sort of stenography (which may decrease quality and impact compressibility).
And a watermark wouldn't actually work with P2P, since if it's metadata applied by the client, it's that much easier to realize it's happening (and how to strip it out), and if it's not applied by the client, the main benefits of P2P are gone -- a torrent results in everyone getting the exact same file, and you want to give everyone a different file.
So you can either use P2P, or an effective watermark, but not both.
It's a good question -- I know that DMCA takedown notices generally must be acted on immediately, whether actually valid or not, and the burden then falls on the accused to fire a counter-notice.
One of the more disgusting parts is that the takedown notice doesn't carry any kind of penalty, while the counter-notice requires the accused to claim "under penalty of perjury" that they do, in fact, have the right to do that.
So, does this require said notices to actually be proven valid? If so, I'd suggest universities continue to not cooperate until there is actual proof of their validity -- and that will be very difficult to prove without help from the university.
On the other hand, if the only requirement is that the notices be properly filled out, but not that they are actually true, it's worth mentioning that it only takes one person to send enough notices to all schools to force them to comply. The question is whether such an act would actually be noticed and heard, and have an effect on the law.
Thanks for that reference... though at first glance, it seems like that distinction is actually pretty meaningless.
For example: Works of opinion may well be of practical use. I would often rather read something opinionated about a particular piece of software than an impartial list of features -- the features help when I know that domain well, but the opinion (especially a negative one) can have more information, like where that particular model breaks down.
Works of art may also be of practical use -- imagine if the cursor arrow had somehow been trademarked? Certainly, it's of practical use to have such a recognizable icon, and it would be extremely awkward to use, say, a bullseye or a crosshairs instead.
The definition of "is required to do a job" doesn't really help, either. Were it not for works of opinion, I would be much less effective at finding information and making decisions -- and certainly, for those writing such works, the works are a necessary part of their job. Were it not for works of art, I would be using a commandline interface -- and as I do web development, that would actually render me pretty ineffective.
And, conversely, works of practical use may be very opinionated and very entertaining -- I hope that's easier to demonstrate. After all, Stallman certainly believes all software should be free -- so what about game software? Particularly AI software, or quest scripts, which are arguably creative works which exist for no purpose other than to be artistic, and to entertain?
What about things like MegaTexture -- arguably, the image used to generate your terrain is a very limited programming language. It may even be Turing-complete. So is this image a work of art, or is it a piece of software? If it can be counted as a work of art, then that implies that not all software needs to be free. Since it seems hard (at least to me) to clearly define what goes in each of Stallman's categories, I would extend that to imply that either no software is required to be free, or all software and all other works must be free.
I actually have neither of these installed. Whatever it is seems to be somewhat native to Konqueror.
Looking at my package manager, I do see OpenJDK, but not much else Java-related -- I see IcedTea and gcj, but neither are installed. Perhaps it's something native to Konqueror?
Again -- I have no idea which applets are working and which aren't, but at least some are.
For what it's worth, I do see an IcedTea plugin which depends on OpenJDK, but not on GCJ. And if that ends up being what works best, I don't really see how it changes the argument -- Java is 64-bit capable now, Flash is just catching up.
My understanding is, they probably did harmlessly disappear -- matter/antimatter annihilation turns matter directly into photons. Intuitively, I assumed a positron and an electron will turn into two photons -- Wikipedia confirms that this is what usually happens, though there can be more.
So, billions of particles means probably billions of photons.
Now, Google the number of photons put out by a simple 100-watt light bulb...
The point is, well, look at how many atoms are in a thimble -- and each of those atoms is going to have more than one electron. Take just the electrons in a thimble-full of matter, convert them to antimatter, and you have a much bigger boom.
So, weaponizing this would definitely be more dangerous than weaponizing nukes. I always thought it would look cool to see a planet cracked in half, but I also kind of want to live...
I'm fairly sure I have a working 64-bit Java plugin, via OpenJDK. At least a few simple applets work, and I'm fairly sure I don't have a 32-bit Java on this machine.
One inconvenient little fact that people like Stallman fail to understand is that consulting is no way to support a business that **makes** things.
Why not?
I doubt RedHat would be successful compared to Microsoft if they had to shoulder most of the R&D costs themselves.
The fact that they don't should give you a clue.
They are some of the cheapest, most short-term thinking businesses in this country.
Sounds to me that's a problem with the culture, or with the particular firm that you're with. Is there something about the consulting business model which necessarily favors cheap, short-term thinking?
Video card manufacturers for instance may not want to reveal the underlying structure of their hardware through the driver code.
And why shouldn't they? It seems to me that any argument which would allow a video card manufacturer to hide the physical structure of a card, would also allow anyone to hide the structure of their software.
Conversely, when Stallman argues that software should be free, I don't see why the same argument wouldn't apply to hardware.
I fail to see how this is morally wrong.
He does have a rant where he explains that. This isn't it.
It's actually a pretty thorough and convincing argument. I don't agree with it, but it's still worth reading.
What about the business world and the wide variety of custom made software tailored to specific business segments?
Don't confuse "paid" with "proprietary". When I've done contract work for businesses, they've all expressed roughly the same sentiment: It really doesn't matter who has access to the source code, so long as the software works.
In fact, the smarter niche companies will insist that they at least have access to the source code themselves, so that they can hire another contractor.
What about gaming?
What about it?
The tricky part is cheating in a multiplayer game. An open source Counter-Strike or Halo client would mean no end to aimbotting. An open source WoW client would mean no end to Glider and friends.
These are real problems -- understand that nothing I'm about to say completely resolves them.
The first consideration is, not all games automatically get a significant advantage out of giving players AI help. In fact, it might be interesting to have a game in which part of the challenge is writing/obtaining the perfect set of mods to be able to cheat the best you can.
But I would be saddened to see the death of first-person shooters.
Another consideration is, single-player games aren't really affected by this. To anyone who's ever suggested that no DRM would work better than DRM on games, well, once you have no DRM, there really isn't much advantage to keeping the source closed on a single-player game. In fact, there may be some advantage -- if the open source community does what it does best, and ports your game to their own pet platform, that means more sales for you without more work.
But I would miss multiplayer games, and multiplayer games are also part of how you address the problem of DRM. WoW doesn't need anti-piracy measures, because the only way to "pirate" the game and not pay a monthly fee is to set up your own pirate server -- and then, who are you going to play with?
Stallman has conceded one interesting point -- that he sees value in a game for which the software is open, but the artwork and design is not. This has since happened -- Quake 3 Arena is entirely open source, but the artwork, levels, etc are all still copyrighted. So you can use the software for whatever you want -- there are some amazing mods (more accurately, Total Conversions) using the Quake 3 engine, which can be downloaded entirely for free, because they don't use any of the Quake 3 data. But you still have to buy the game if you want to play Quake 3 Arena, and not OpenArena (which is horrible) or World of Padman (which is completely different).
It's also interesting in its inconsistency -- Stallman has no problem with copyright, or with any work of art being regarded as proprietary -- except in the case of software.
Oh, so to answer your question: There could indeed be a lot of gaming still going on. But we would be giving some things up. Gaming seems to be about the only place where the proprietary-ness of the software benefits the end-user, though.
Oh, and I myself act trough boycotting Gnome. Their philosophy is "Make it as easy as possible, and do not care if the user wants to confgure it differently or have a choice".
So, in other words, kind of like KDE4? Especially Kubuntu Intrepid?
To any KDE people reading this: I know what you're trying to do, and I respect that. There's a lot of cool things about KDE4, and a lot of old problems solved.
But at the end of the day, it felt like "upgrading" to Vista.
And I think that the Internet is also going to make that distinction irrelevant -- I don't actually have a TV in my house anymore.
But again, 90% of everything is crap, but there's still the 10% that's not. Firefly was canceled, but if reality was as bad as you imply, it would never have been made. I never saw the second season of Heros, but the first season was good. Fox News is atrocious, but there are other networks. And there's always PBS.
The essential problem is finding the signal in the noise, and TV is notoriously bad for that, compared to the Internet. But I don't think it's actually going to push out good content -- if anything, it'll give us nudity instead of reality TV, or nudity in our reality TV, and I think that can only be an improvement.
But to answer that question: There are at least a few obvious cases where it would be very nice to prove that this is an actual executive order which actually came from the President.
In other situations, yes, it might be very nice to prove what you (or some other politician) said on a given date at a given time -- even if it's only useful against a politician, that's still a kind of MAD that, ultimately, would tend to keep them more honest.
But I'm thinking situations like "I said on September 10th, 2001, that we were likely to be attacked in the near future. But did anyone listen to me?"
A bit contrived, but not that uncommon -- and not all of it is already in the public record.
You seem blisfully unaware that the number one selling game console of all time
The Playstation 2? Yeah, if you were willing to pay some $200 for the "Linux Kit", you could run a crippled version of Linux, to which you didn't have all the source, and weren't allowed to redistribute the binary blobs -- and which used a hard drive format incompatible with that used by PS2 games, so you'd have to buy yet another PS2 hard drive if you wanted to play Final Fantasy XI.
When you actually play a game, it's not running Linux at all.
Are you honestly suggesting that a significant number of games were sold for the PS2 because people bought it to run Linux on?
and it's healthy decendent both ran GNU/Linux.
The Playstation 3? Requires partitioning, in a few limited ways, in order to share the hard disk between Linux and games. Runs in a hypervisor -- basically, a virtual machine -- so that the PS3 can prevent you from accessing the video hardware directly, meaning that 3D performance is severely limited -- you get a 2D framebuffer.
So, while you can run a completely open source operating system, you're running it in an environment more restrictive than PS2 Linux, which would at least let you develop 3D games. I doubt GNU would be proud.
And, again, when you are actually running games, Linux is nowhere to be found. What's more, the Xbox 360 has shipped quite a few more units than the Playstation 3, and as far as I know, there isn't even an unauthorized (and likely illegal) way of running Linux on the 360 yet.
Windows has got.... Zune.... Xbox.... Windows all of it is the same broken suck because Ballmer's got his greedy palms on it.
Ballmer's greedy palms didn't stop the Halo series from being incredible enough that people buy the console for it. I still frequently push the "eject" button on an Xbox (or a 360) and find some Halo game in there -- people think of it as the Halo Machine.
Nor did those palms stop Xbox Live from delivering well ahead what the PC experience has been. Ubiquitous voice chat, automatic matchmaking combined with global ranking, achievements... The closest thing to it is Steam (which runs on -- guess what -- Windows), which has been following Xbox Live more and more lately, rather than the other way around.
I'm certainly not an MS zealot. You read my other post, and I'm typing this from an Ubuntu laptop. I don't have to touch Windows all day -- my co-workers all use Macs, and the software I develop runs on Amazon EC2 Linux instances.
Net neutrality would be an irrelevant issue if we'd just deregulate the spectrum, giving people access to a plethora of competitive wireless carriers
What about interference? Seems to me Comcast might have an interest in simply jamming as much wireless as they can, to force people to use wired (cable) connections.
The basic issue with Net Neutrality is not how the service should be offered, or anything to do with the technology. It's fundamentally just an issue of who pays.
Who pays is certainly relevant, but the technology is important. Consider...
Telecoms would like to collect subscriber revenue from their customers, then turn around and collect more revenue from content providers as well.
And, in the process, also destroy any protocol or network which can't pay -- like, say, BitTorrent.
It would also considerably reverse the democratization of the Internet -- as you say:
Larger providers, incidentally, will have some leverage in this model
And smaller providers will have less leverage. It'll increase the barrier of entry, and effectively kill real innovation on the Internet.
"Who pays" can't be separated from the issue, and price is the reason this is being made such an issue -- Google's support certainly helps the net neutrality campaign. But "who pays" is not the core issue.
Immunize, don't insulate. Raise a child who, when exposed to the garbage of the world, will make the right choice.
Not swearing out in public in front of children is common adult decency.
Why? Children will hear these words anyway, and they will grow up to swear.
Maybe even call the cops.
And if the cops can put me away for swearing, I am fucking done with this so-called "land of the free". If you insist on protecting your child from me, take your child away from me, and tell them to stay away -- because it is ultimately your responsibility, not mine.
I have 4 of the best behaved kids... So I know about, parent responsibility.
And you should take the credit for that. I had nothing to do with it.
And you know what will happen? Ratings will skyrocket, resulting in 3 dozen copycat stations - and virtually none for those people who don't want to see nudity and violence all the time
It's an interesting idea, but ultimately wrong -- look at the Internet.
Certainly, there is a ton of sex out there. There is also a ton of stuff out there that is not sex.
Signal-to-noise ratio with spam vs email is pretty bad -- but there is still more legitimate, interesting email than any one person could ever read, even if we only count public mailing lists.
90% of everything is crap -- but 10% of everything still adds up to a huge amount of stuff that isn't crap.
If you were right, I'd say, bring it on -- we'll get exactly the TV we deserve, not necessarily the TV we want.
This is an API that accesses a proprietary feature of a specific video card. Nobody was asking for one.
Yes, they were. I certainly was.
It sucks to watch HD h.264 video lag, and be forced to use 720p -- even re-encode 1080p videos down to 720p, to help the issue -- knowing that there's a proprietary feature of a specific video card which I happen to own which would solve the whole issue.
Now, if nVidia proposed an open standard video playback API, and implemented it in their video driver, and released the source - then I could see Linux devs using it.
Unless they've somehow patented or restricted the API, I'm not really sure what's stopping their competitors from implementing it.
And it seems inevitable that support for this will find its way into mplayer, gstreamer, maybe even xine -- especially considering that if I recall, mplayer can use gstreamer plugins, and gstreamer can use ffmpeg. Maybe, if we're really lucky, Flash will support it, too.
I mention these things because any one of them could have been the API. It seems the most coherent effort is gstreamer -- but that seems to be failing so miserably that KDE4 even has a meta-API called Phonon, which wraps gstreamer, xine, or whatever's available.
Since the situation is so chaotic, it really doesn't seem to matter which they chose. So they wrote their own. Doesn't matter -- the result is the same.
usually takes hours of time I don't want to spend.
But at least you have the option of spending that time.
My personal example, from quite awhile ago -- Linux Kernel 2.4, which didn't have native support for AGP 3.0 / AGP 8x. No matter what I did, I couldn't force it back to an older standard, and I wouldn't have wanted to, anyway. Which was all fine -- ATI implemented AGP in their drivers to compensate, but it was broken -- detected my card as AGP2 instead of 3. So AGP didn't work -- I don't remember if this meant no hardware acceleration, or no X at all, but it did suck.
So I cracked open the source -- that AGP stuff was in the open part, at the time -- found the detection algorithm, commented the whole block out, and hardcoded it to AGP3.
Now, granted, there's no reason I should have to dig into the source for that. The detection should just work, and failing that, it should be possible to override that autodetection without recompiling your kernel.
But either way, I was able to work around the issue in a way which would have been impossible if it was closed source. My only alternative was to either buy new hardware (and hope it was compatible this time), or go back to Windows.
I was 16 at the time. I'm paid more now, but still not enough to keep buying new hardware until something works. I always lean towards open source, unless there's a compelling reason not to.
That said, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't mention -- I'm typing this on a Dell which came preloaded with Ubuntu. It's got an nVidia chip in it, which actually works fairly well. I do use Skype to talk to my brother in Taiwan.
But for things like that to happen, the proprietary version has to be sufficiently better that I'm willing to give up the ability to fix things myself. I'd be very wary of buying a car with the hood welded shut -- but if it's, say, an affordable Porche, it might bother me less.
What the hell was wrong with Vista that it could not do translucency on Intel chip sets?
A lot of things.
E16 has been doing translucency in 2D land for a decade
M$ killed Intel's ambitious drive to produce graphics chipsets because Intel had released the drivers as free software.
And this is getting to the pure hyperbole.
PC gaming is not doing well. Mac and Linux are a tiny portion of that, and if anyone's taking a bite out of Windows gaming, it's the Mac -- much as I don't want to admit it, Linux isn't going to make much of a dent.
The only place where this would actually have a chance of taking a bite out of Microsoft is high-end design work -- the kind of stuff you'd buy a Quadro for, and never even consider Intel -- and the kind of stuff that a non-free driver wouldn't stop. In fact, this is probably the reason nVidia bothers to make Linux drivers in the first place.
Never ascribe to malice... Think about it. This is the same Microsoft that leaves known vulnerabilities unpatched for the better part of a decade. And this is the same Vista that, at some point, would run out of RAM trying to search-as-you-type (with the index disabled).
Is it really so implausible that they simply fucked it up? That they required so much hardware, not because they hate Intel, but because they have a bloated OS?
There are plenty of rational reasons to hate Microsoft. You don't need to dream up irrational ones.
Should the same apply to, say, net neutrality?... but I'll leave the Libertarian debate for later.
The more relevant fact here is, the market is deciding -- people like the GP have decided SecuROM and others simply aren't worth the time. The industry is stubbornly unwilling to see this for what it is, and instead make up excuses like piracy.
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Residential networks make it easy to set up services that students need without the hassle of diving out VPN software and having to troubleshoot that all day.
From experience, it seems that every university is going to have a bit of its own software to distribute anyway. From SSH clients to Kerberos-enabled printers...
Furthermore, your average college student won't even know what VPN means let alone how to install, run, and use one.
Your average college student knows how to use WoW, and P2P, and many other things that operate on the same principle -- start this program, (possibly) type a password, then you have access to these services.
Now, granted, the simpler and smarter solution is to provide all network services over something which can be secured -- most of it as HTTPS web services. Anyone have any idea how good support for IPP over SSL is?
There's a side benefit to this, also -- the school is no longer in the role of an ISP, and no longer has to support those students who don't even know how to open a web browser.
I wouldn't call that "democratic", I'd call it "plutocratic".
I'd rather live in a democracy than a plutocracy... too late?
If by "fingerprint" you mean something giving you access, you're talking about DRM, which is unacceptable.
If by "fingerprint" you mean a watermark, to identify people who share songs, that might work, but it generally means either adding a bit of metadata (which is easily stripped out), or some sort of stenography (which may decrease quality and impact compressibility).
And a watermark wouldn't actually work with P2P, since if it's metadata applied by the client, it's that much easier to realize it's happening (and how to strip it out), and if it's not applied by the client, the main benefits of P2P are gone -- a torrent results in everyone getting the exact same file, and you want to give everyone a different file.
So you can either use P2P, or an effective watermark, but not both.
It's a good question -- I know that DMCA takedown notices generally must be acted on immediately, whether actually valid or not, and the burden then falls on the accused to fire a counter-notice.
One of the more disgusting parts is that the takedown notice doesn't carry any kind of penalty, while the counter-notice requires the accused to claim "under penalty of perjury" that they do, in fact, have the right to do that.
So, does this require said notices to actually be proven valid? If so, I'd suggest universities continue to not cooperate until there is actual proof of their validity -- and that will be very difficult to prove without help from the university.
On the other hand, if the only requirement is that the notices be properly filled out, but not that they are actually true, it's worth mentioning that it only takes one person to send enough notices to all schools to force them to comply. The question is whether such an act would actually be noticed and heard, and have an effect on the law.
Thanks for that reference... though at first glance, it seems like that distinction is actually pretty meaningless.
For example: Works of opinion may well be of practical use. I would often rather read something opinionated about a particular piece of software than an impartial list of features -- the features help when I know that domain well, but the opinion (especially a negative one) can have more information, like where that particular model breaks down.
Works of art may also be of practical use -- imagine if the cursor arrow had somehow been trademarked? Certainly, it's of practical use to have such a recognizable icon, and it would be extremely awkward to use, say, a bullseye or a crosshairs instead.
The definition of "is required to do a job" doesn't really help, either. Were it not for works of opinion, I would be much less effective at finding information and making decisions -- and certainly, for those writing such works, the works are a necessary part of their job. Were it not for works of art, I would be using a commandline interface -- and as I do web development, that would actually render me pretty ineffective.
And, conversely, works of practical use may be very opinionated and very entertaining -- I hope that's easier to demonstrate. After all, Stallman certainly believes all software should be free -- so what about game software? Particularly AI software, or quest scripts, which are arguably creative works which exist for no purpose other than to be artistic, and to entertain?
What about things like MegaTexture -- arguably, the image used to generate your terrain is a very limited programming language. It may even be Turing-complete. So is this image a work of art, or is it a piece of software? If it can be counted as a work of art, then that implies that not all software needs to be free. Since it seems hard (at least to me) to clearly define what goes in each of Stallman's categories, I would extend that to imply that either no software is required to be free, or all software and all other works must be free.
I actually have neither of these installed. Whatever it is seems to be somewhat native to Konqueror.
Looking at my package manager, I do see OpenJDK, but not much else Java-related -- I see IcedTea and gcj, but neither are installed. Perhaps it's something native to Konqueror?
Again -- I have no idea which applets are working and which aren't, but at least some are.
For what it's worth, I do see an IcedTea plugin which depends on OpenJDK, but not on GCJ. And if that ends up being what works best, I don't really see how it changes the argument -- Java is 64-bit capable now, Flash is just catching up.
My understanding is, they probably did harmlessly disappear -- matter/antimatter annihilation turns matter directly into photons. Intuitively, I assumed a positron and an electron will turn into two photons -- Wikipedia confirms that this is what usually happens, though there can be more.
So, billions of particles means probably billions of photons.
Now, Google the number of photons put out by a simple 100-watt light bulb...
The point is, well, look at how many atoms are in a thimble -- and each of those atoms is going to have more than one electron. Take just the electrons in a thimble-full of matter, convert them to antimatter, and you have a much bigger boom.
So, weaponizing this would definitely be more dangerous than weaponizing nukes. I always thought it would look cool to see a planet cracked in half, but I also kind of want to live...
I'm fairly sure I have a working 64-bit Java plugin, via OpenJDK. At least a few simple applets work, and I'm fairly sure I don't have a 32-bit Java on this machine.
One inconvenient little fact that people like Stallman fail to understand is that consulting is no way to support a business that **makes** things.
Why not?
I doubt RedHat would be successful compared to Microsoft if they had to shoulder most of the R&D costs themselves.
The fact that they don't should give you a clue.
They are some of the cheapest, most short-term thinking businesses in this country.
Sounds to me that's a problem with the culture, or with the particular firm that you're with. Is there something about the consulting business model which necessarily favors cheap, short-term thinking?
Video card manufacturers for instance may not want to reveal the underlying structure of their hardware through the driver code.
And why shouldn't they? It seems to me that any argument which would allow a video card manufacturer to hide the physical structure of a card, would also allow anyone to hide the structure of their software.
Conversely, when Stallman argues that software should be free, I don't see why the same argument wouldn't apply to hardware.
I fail to see how this is morally wrong.
He does have a rant where he explains that. This isn't it.
It's actually a pretty thorough and convincing argument. I don't agree with it, but it's still worth reading.
What about the business world and the wide variety of custom made software tailored to specific business segments?
Don't confuse "paid" with "proprietary". When I've done contract work for businesses, they've all expressed roughly the same sentiment: It really doesn't matter who has access to the source code, so long as the software works.
In fact, the smarter niche companies will insist that they at least have access to the source code themselves, so that they can hire another contractor.
What about gaming?
What about it?
The tricky part is cheating in a multiplayer game. An open source Counter-Strike or Halo client would mean no end to aimbotting. An open source WoW client would mean no end to Glider and friends.
These are real problems -- understand that nothing I'm about to say completely resolves them.
The first consideration is, not all games automatically get a significant advantage out of giving players AI help. In fact, it might be interesting to have a game in which part of the challenge is writing/obtaining the perfect set of mods to be able to cheat the best you can.
But I would be saddened to see the death of first-person shooters.
Another consideration is, single-player games aren't really affected by this. To anyone who's ever suggested that no DRM would work better than DRM on games, well, once you have no DRM, there really isn't much advantage to keeping the source closed on a single-player game. In fact, there may be some advantage -- if the open source community does what it does best, and ports your game to their own pet platform, that means more sales for you without more work.
But I would miss multiplayer games, and multiplayer games are also part of how you address the problem of DRM. WoW doesn't need anti-piracy measures, because the only way to "pirate" the game and not pay a monthly fee is to set up your own pirate server -- and then, who are you going to play with?
Stallman has conceded one interesting point -- that he sees value in a game for which the software is open, but the artwork and design is not. This has since happened -- Quake 3 Arena is entirely open source, but the artwork, levels, etc are all still copyrighted. So you can use the software for whatever you want -- there are some amazing mods (more accurately, Total Conversions) using the Quake 3 engine, which can be downloaded entirely for free, because they don't use any of the Quake 3 data. But you still have to buy the game if you want to play Quake 3 Arena, and not OpenArena (which is horrible) or World of Padman (which is completely different).
It's also interesting in its inconsistency -- Stallman has no problem with copyright, or with any work of art being regarded as proprietary -- except in the case of software.
Oh, so to answer your question: There could indeed be a lot of gaming still going on. But we would be giving some things up. Gaming seems to be about the only place where the proprietary-ness of the software benefits the end-user, though.
Oh, and I myself act trough boycotting Gnome. Their philosophy is "Make it as easy as possible, and do not care if the user wants to confgure it differently or have a choice".
So, in other words, kind of like KDE4? Especially Kubuntu Intrepid?
To any KDE people reading this: I know what you're trying to do, and I respect that. There's a lot of cool things about KDE4, and a lot of old problems solved.
But at the end of the day, it felt like "upgrading" to Vista.
And I think that the Internet is also going to make that distinction irrelevant -- I don't actually have a TV in my house anymore.
But again, 90% of everything is crap, but there's still the 10% that's not. Firefly was canceled, but if reality was as bad as you imply, it would never have been made. I never saw the second season of Heros, but the first season was good. Fox News is atrocious, but there are other networks. And there's always PBS.
The essential problem is finding the signal in the noise, and TV is notoriously bad for that, compared to the Internet. But I don't think it's actually going to push out good content -- if anything, it'll give us nudity instead of reality TV, or nudity in our reality TV, and I think that can only be an improvement.
Since you know that, why would you even comment?
But to answer that question: There are at least a few obvious cases where it would be very nice to prove that this is an actual executive order which actually came from the President.
In other situations, yes, it might be very nice to prove what you (or some other politician) said on a given date at a given time -- even if it's only useful against a politician, that's still a kind of MAD that, ultimately, would tend to keep them more honest.
But I'm thinking situations like "I said on September 10th, 2001, that we were likely to be attacked in the near future. But did anyone listen to me?"
A bit contrived, but not that uncommon -- and not all of it is already in the public record.
Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace.
"The only course of action..." very Bush.
"Cyberspace" -- really?!
And PGP did exist in 2000, didn't it?
You seem blisfully unaware that the number one selling game console of all time
The Playstation 2? Yeah, if you were willing to pay some $200 for the "Linux Kit", you could run a crippled version of Linux, to which you didn't have all the source, and weren't allowed to redistribute the binary blobs -- and which used a hard drive format incompatible with that used by PS2 games, so you'd have to buy yet another PS2 hard drive if you wanted to play Final Fantasy XI.
When you actually play a game, it's not running Linux at all.
Are you honestly suggesting that a significant number of games were sold for the PS2 because people bought it to run Linux on?
and it's healthy decendent both ran GNU/Linux.
The Playstation 3? Requires partitioning, in a few limited ways, in order to share the hard disk between Linux and games. Runs in a hypervisor -- basically, a virtual machine -- so that the PS3 can prevent you from accessing the video hardware directly, meaning that 3D performance is severely limited -- you get a 2D framebuffer.
So, while you can run a completely open source operating system, you're running it in an environment more restrictive than PS2 Linux, which would at least let you develop 3D games. I doubt GNU would be proud.
And, again, when you are actually running games, Linux is nowhere to be found. What's more, the Xbox 360 has shipped quite a few more units than the Playstation 3, and as far as I know, there isn't even an unauthorized (and likely illegal) way of running Linux on the 360 yet.
Windows has got .... Zune .... Xbox .... Windows all of it is the same broken suck because Ballmer's got his greedy palms on it.
Ballmer's greedy palms didn't stop the Halo series from being incredible enough that people buy the console for it. I still frequently push the "eject" button on an Xbox (or a 360) and find some Halo game in there -- people think of it as the Halo Machine.
Nor did those palms stop Xbox Live from delivering well ahead what the PC experience has been. Ubiquitous voice chat, automatic matchmaking combined with global ranking, achievements... The closest thing to it is Steam (which runs on -- guess what -- Windows), which has been following Xbox Live more and more lately, rather than the other way around.
I'm certainly not an MS zealot. You read my other post, and I'm typing this from an Ubuntu laptop. I don't have to touch Windows all day -- my co-workers all use Macs, and the software I develop runs on Amazon EC2 Linux instances.
Can you guess when I have to boot Windows?
When I want to play a game.
Net neutrality would be an irrelevant issue if we'd just deregulate the spectrum, giving people access to a plethora of competitive wireless carriers
What about interference? Seems to me Comcast might have an interest in simply jamming as much wireless as they can, to force people to use wired (cable) connections.
The basic issue with Net Neutrality is not how the service should be offered, or anything to do with the technology. It's fundamentally just an issue of who pays.
Who pays is certainly relevant, but the technology is important. Consider...
Telecoms would like to collect subscriber revenue from their customers, then turn around and collect more revenue from content providers as well.
And, in the process, also destroy any protocol or network which can't pay -- like, say, BitTorrent.
It would also considerably reverse the democratization of the Internet -- as you say:
Larger providers, incidentally, will have some leverage in this model
And smaller providers will have less leverage. It'll increase the barrier of entry, and effectively kill real innovation on the Internet.
"Who pays" can't be separated from the issue, and price is the reason this is being made such an issue -- Google's support certainly helps the net neutrality campaign. But "who pays" is not the core issue.
Parents can't be everywhere all the time.
Nor can the government.
Immunize, don't insulate. Raise a child who, when exposed to the garbage of the world, will make the right choice.
Not swearing out in public in front of children is common adult decency.
Why? Children will hear these words anyway, and they will grow up to swear.
Maybe even call the cops.
And if the cops can put me away for swearing, I am fucking done with this so-called "land of the free". If you insist on protecting your child from me, take your child away from me, and tell them to stay away -- because it is ultimately your responsibility, not mine.
I have 4 of the best behaved kids... So I know about, parent responsibility.
And you should take the credit for that. I had nothing to do with it.
And you know what will happen? Ratings will skyrocket, resulting in 3 dozen copycat stations - and virtually none for those people who don't want to see nudity and violence all the time
It's an interesting idea, but ultimately wrong -- look at the Internet.
Certainly, there is a ton of sex out there. There is also a ton of stuff out there that is not sex.
Signal-to-noise ratio with spam vs email is pretty bad -- but there is still more legitimate, interesting email than any one person could ever read, even if we only count public mailing lists.
90% of everything is crap -- but 10% of everything still adds up to a huge amount of stuff that isn't crap.
If you were right, I'd say, bring it on -- we'll get exactly the TV we deserve, not necessarily the TV we want.
This is an API that accesses a proprietary feature of a specific video card. Nobody was asking for one.
Yes, they were. I certainly was.
It sucks to watch HD h.264 video lag, and be forced to use 720p -- even re-encode 1080p videos down to 720p, to help the issue -- knowing that there's a proprietary feature of a specific video card which I happen to own which would solve the whole issue.
Now, if nVidia proposed an open standard video playback API, and implemented it in their video driver, and released the source - then I could see Linux devs using it.
Unless they've somehow patented or restricted the API, I'm not really sure what's stopping their competitors from implementing it.
And it seems inevitable that support for this will find its way into mplayer, gstreamer, maybe even xine -- especially considering that if I recall, mplayer can use gstreamer plugins, and gstreamer can use ffmpeg. Maybe, if we're really lucky, Flash will support it, too.
I mention these things because any one of them could have been the API. It seems the most coherent effort is gstreamer -- but that seems to be failing so miserably that KDE4 even has a meta-API called Phonon, which wraps gstreamer, xine, or whatever's available.
Since the situation is so chaotic, it really doesn't seem to matter which they chose. So they wrote their own. Doesn't matter -- the result is the same.
No. But they will suck less.
Depending on what you're doing, they already suck less than the competition.
usually takes hours of time I don't want to spend.
But at least you have the option of spending that time.
My personal example, from quite awhile ago -- Linux Kernel 2.4, which didn't have native support for AGP 3.0 / AGP 8x. No matter what I did, I couldn't force it back to an older standard, and I wouldn't have wanted to, anyway. Which was all fine -- ATI implemented AGP in their drivers to compensate, but it was broken -- detected my card as AGP2 instead of 3. So AGP didn't work -- I don't remember if this meant no hardware acceleration, or no X at all, but it did suck.
So I cracked open the source -- that AGP stuff was in the open part, at the time -- found the detection algorithm, commented the whole block out, and hardcoded it to AGP3.
Now, granted, there's no reason I should have to dig into the source for that. The detection should just work, and failing that, it should be possible to override that autodetection without recompiling your kernel.
But either way, I was able to work around the issue in a way which would have been impossible if it was closed source. My only alternative was to either buy new hardware (and hope it was compatible this time), or go back to Windows.
I was 16 at the time. I'm paid more now, but still not enough to keep buying new hardware until something works. I always lean towards open source, unless there's a compelling reason not to.
That said, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't mention -- I'm typing this on a Dell which came preloaded with Ubuntu. It's got an nVidia chip in it, which actually works fairly well. I do use Skype to talk to my brother in Taiwan.
But for things like that to happen, the proprietary version has to be sufficiently better that I'm willing to give up the ability to fix things myself. I'd be very wary of buying a car with the hood welded shut -- but if it's, say, an affordable Porche, it might bother me less.
What the hell was wrong with Vista that it could not do translucency on Intel chip sets?
A lot of things.
E16 has been doing translucency in 2D land for a decade
M$ killed Intel's ambitious drive to produce graphics chipsets because Intel had released the drivers as free software.
And this is getting to the pure hyperbole.
PC gaming is not doing well. Mac and Linux are a tiny portion of that, and if anyone's taking a bite out of Windows gaming, it's the Mac -- much as I don't want to admit it, Linux isn't going to make much of a dent.
The only place where this would actually have a chance of taking a bite out of Microsoft is high-end design work -- the kind of stuff you'd buy a Quadro for, and never even consider Intel -- and the kind of stuff that a non-free driver wouldn't stop. In fact, this is probably the reason nVidia bothers to make Linux drivers in the first place.
Never ascribe to malice... Think about it. This is the same Microsoft that leaves known vulnerabilities unpatched for the better part of a decade. And this is the same Vista that, at some point, would run out of RAM trying to search-as-you-type (with the index disabled).
Is it really so implausible that they simply fucked it up? That they required so much hardware, not because they hate Intel, but because they have a bloated OS?
There are plenty of rational reasons to hate Microsoft. You don't need to dream up irrational ones.
Let the market decide.
Should the same apply to, say, net neutrality?... but I'll leave the Libertarian debate for later.
The more relevant fact here is, the market is deciding -- people like the GP have decided SecuROM and others simply aren't worth the time. The industry is stubbornly unwilling to see this for what it is, and instead make up excuses like piracy.