Then I lose money, having bought it twice (assuming I go with non-piracy).
And you gain it back, presumably, by downloading a song you'd never heard before from the new service, one which wasn't on the old service. (Of course, you lose money if the new service has the same songs you've kept on CDs...)
It means google needs to try each salt for each site in the malware table.
You must be using a different concept of "salt".
If I send a hash, with randomly-generated salt on my own machine, they can't do anything with it, including tell me whether or not it's in their list. If I send a hash with some salt they provide me, so that it matches the salt that was used to generate that line in their table, they can simply do a 1:1 match of each line of the malware hash table vs the actual site that was used to generate it. True, if they threw away the original URL, they couldn't do that, but you're trusting them to throw that URL away.
I simply don't see a way to know that a hash is or isn't bad without also knowing which site it maps to. The only way I can see to prevent loss of privacy is sending a list -- someone else mentioned a partial list derived from a partial hash -- and letting the mapping be done locally.
It would be waste of time and bandwidth to re-download 100 GB of music, let alone figure out what music it is that you need to replace.
That's where "streaming" becomes helpful. Simply put, you know you need to replace something because you look for it and it's not there. It's not a waste of time, because with any decent interface, it would simply be downloaded as-needed. In fact, a decent interface might show the entire available collection as already imported.
What's more, all of them are going to have some music you want. You lose some tracks, gain others. It only really becomes a problem if you find a few songs aren't on the new service, and you've absolutely got to have them -- then you would start buying CDs, but you still wouldn't have to replace the entire collection.
Nevermind that no service is going to have the same selection anyways
Thus allowing you to explore a less limited range of musical interests.
lots of stuff is going to be obscure and/or eclectic (this also ignores that one's taste my change over time and they may not be interested in restoring the exact same music collection).
Obscure/eclectic, you get from other sources. And weren't you just describing how much of a waste of time it would be to try to figure out exactly what music to redownload, to get the exact same collection?
It is only more cost effective if it can be used for the vast majority of your music collection, and if that collection is relatively small.
I don't see how.
That's like saying "I refuse to eat cake at birthday parties, because free food is only cost-effective if it can be used for the vast majority of your food consumption..."
It doesn't even have to be a majority, or even a significant minority. It just has to be enough music that, taken alone, it is cost-effective -- that is, you get enough music through the service that it's cheaper than buying those songs as CDs or, say, iTunes singles.
It still might not be cost-effective, if you don't listen to enough stuff that they have available. But it has nothing to do with what proportion of their music you'd use, or what proportion of your collection it is.
and was in no danger of disappearing
Well, if it disappears, you've still gotten to listen to much more music at least once than you would have otherwise. But remember, Microsoft is behind PlaysForSure, so it probably isn't going anywhere, much as we might want it to. Thus, you might switch from the Napster store to the Zune store to something else, but ultimately, there will always be subscription music services.
That's the advantage, by the way -- that you don't have to worry about any one provider disappearing, because you can always switch to another one.
Firstly, there are other major commercial players. FileMaker, for instance -- which I have to work with occasionally.
Second, FileMaker (and Access) are object lessons in why you shouldn't do it this way. Like you said, the SQL engine has flaws, the scripting language is junk, and the GUI is quirky and weird, but you like the report stuff.
Were this done right, you could keep the reports, and replace everything else. This is how KOffice seems to be implementing this, or trying to -- Postgres or MySQL can be used, and maybe SQLite for some of these. You can then run Kexi to manage it and Kougar to print reports. But any of these can be run independently, and while I believe Kexi will let you plug Python into it, you can script it with all kinds of other things. Plus, there are about 5 other, similar GUIs which will all use Postgres as a backend (oddly, none seem to be MySQL-specific, but one is Postgres-specific).
I mean, you're right, it's almost a good idea, which is why there are so many clones. But all of them suck. I propose we do it in AJAX, but then we have to fight about what language to use on the server side, and thus still end up with five or so implementations -- still, I'm going to do that, at some point.
Yeah, if it would take much more than a "sort", a spreadsheet might make sense.
Then again, I so rarely have to do this kind of stuff one-off that it doesn't really make sense for me. I'm much more likely to have something that I need solved in a generic way. The 10 lines of Perl (or Ruby, etc) that it might take to model will be harder to write than a spreadsheet, for most people, although I'm not as comfortable with spreadsheets as I am with programming. But the 10 lines of code will be reusable, without modification, as long as I need it.
Seems to me, the spreadsheet is always needing to be tweaked, and not in generic ways. The tweaks I have to make for the new data won't work with the old data. Maybe I'm not good at spreadsheets, but this seems to be the default/natural way of doing things.
That and the data is in a portable compatible format (not just a static text file) that anyone can pick up and continue to use, look at my formulas etc.. without much trouble.
A format that gets the math wrong... oh, and text is pretty portable.
Oh, just curious, have you tried Google's spreadsheets? Or the KOffice version... KSpread, I think? What about GNUMeric? Or some of the older ones people keep listing as prior art for this python thing... a spreadsheet that runs LISP, or Smalltalk? Since I don't use spreadsheets much, I can't say whether any of these are more or less powerful than OOCalc (for what you want to do), but OpenOffice is not the only open Office clone.
At some point, an organization realizes that they either don't have the training to be able to keep working from a spreadsheet, or they need something more powerful anyway.
So they buy FileMaker Pro.
Which means, they essentially have a bunch of different, interesting views, with some (very) limited scripting, all ultimately centered around one flat table.
(Yes, I know there are later versions which actually function as relational databases, but most FileMaker stuff I've seen is around version 5 or 6. Most people don't want to upgrade past that, because it'd require upgrading every single computer at once. I know all about relations and "portals", etc -- almost unusable for linking more than two tables in the same query, and I hear reports of corruption, etc.)
From what I understand of spreadsheets, some make sense as spreadsheets, and some don't. Of the ones that make sense as spreadsheets, they could still use a more powerful spreadsheet program, and I don't mean Python.
Suppose, for instance, you just want to calculate a table of values -- compound interest, say. Some initial investment, an annual interest rate, and an additional annual value. You could do something like this:
=A4*(A$3/100+1)
And you could drag it down and across. But it's not necessarily an obvious formula, and if you ever have to make a change to it -- for example, extend it so it moves in increments of 5 years, or of n years -- you have to remember to drag the change (to the formula) over all the cells to update them. If you want the table to be bigger, you have to drag it some more, and fill in some more values, or write formulas for them.
But you don't really need much in the spreadsheet other than your table of values. You don't need it for a chart, and if you did, it might not be sufficient -- for instance, if you're modeling a mathematical function, you'd want a much bigger table, and you wouldn't be interested in the values so much as the graph.
Still, all of these could be modeled by a program very like a spreadsheet.
The other common use is to manage information, and to analyze and present it. Spreadsheets are really bad at this, Filemaker is somewhat better at analyzing and presenting it, but not much better at storing it -- the biggest improvement, really, is indexing. But the kind of information you store in a spreadsheet would probably map really well to a relational database.
So the trick, then, would be a GUI that's as easy as Filemaker, almost easier than a spreadsheet, but which maps to a real relational database. I'm not the first to think of this; there are several other projects, but most of them have considerable limitations, and it seems like a good target for a web app, anyway. But I've never found the time to do it right.
Considering that FileMaker is often used as a replacement for things like Act, QuickBooks, or other, similar software, and that other such replacements have been made online (but specific to the domain of the app), I think a generic GUI for building online, database-driven apps would be a good project.
But I haven't had the time to do it, much less do it right. Maybe soon, though.
If it gets fast enough, you may just want to use it as your main system memory, rather than swap. Then, suspend-to-RAM = hibernate, and your persistant storage could be something like tmpfs.
Actually, the best solution is a system with Orthogonal Persistence -- that is, remove the distinction between disk and RAM.
In an ideal situation, this means that no program ever actually closes. The closest it gets is the entire system being suspended to save power. All of the reasons this might not make sense to you are based on the way software works now, not on any limitations inherent in hardware or in the concept of software.
It's hard to explain abstractly, but maybe try an example: Google Documents. While it's not instantaneous, because it has to go over the Internet, Google Docs does autosave every document, along with a change history. You can still revert, not to the saved version, but to any version since it was created. If you want to play around with it without saving, you simply copy the document and work on the copy.
Or, consider the concept of a savegame -- for the most part, rather than explicitly saving your game and closing the program, you'd simply pause it, minimize it somehow, and move on to whatever else you were doing. After awhile of being paused, the game might automatically release the audio/video hardware, so it won't be using any resources except RAM. And when that RAM is needed, it'll get swapped out.
Does it have any advantages over a traditional savegame? Well, it's easier to program, but imagine the whole game is coded like that -- rather than having to "load" a level off the hard disk, you simply access what you need. No more "loading" screens.
So yes, probably the first thing that will happen is, someone puts a Windows swapfile on it. And probably, it will be a LONG time until legacy concepts of filesystems and virtual memory go away. But if you get something performing even close to RAM speeds, with persistant storage, you can go a LOT farther than simply emulating a spinning disk, and you could do a lot better than trying to store your swap on an emulation of a spinning disk that runs on something resembling RAM.
If we were talking a sane OS, yeah, just disable swap and it'll work. But after a fairly long discussion with a guy who sells the stuff, and plenty of name-calling by him, I finally got him to admit that it was really a limitation of Windows, that if you actually disable the pagefile, certain things don't work.
Of course, I've lost the thread, and it could be entirely wrong...
I believe you still can't chroot out without being root.
Thus, the only point of jail is if you are either running an app as root, or you are putting setuid binaries in the chroot (and you don't trust those setuid binaries to be secure).
We also have selinux, which is a much better solution overall, if a bit overly complex. (For example, does jail prevent that root process from being able to grab privileged ports?)
There's not likely to be anything really simple, depending on what kind of functionality you're offering.
You could do ssh access, without necessarily sftp (KDE's fish works with scp, I think), and deny them an actual login shell -- only allow sftp (or scp, or whatever). You could then block access to the rest of the filesystem with Unix file permissions or ACLs. Most things that they could access either aren't dangerous or are only visible to root (and maybe the file owner).
It's not easy, but consider: There are actually a few places online that offer free shell access. That is, you can actually ssh in and get a commandline on a Linux box. I'm assuming they have decent protection.
I believe FTP does encrypted authentication, and it may even be possible to run the entire session over SSL. I'm not sure how secure this is.
Speaking of SSL, another possibility is WebDAV. Linux has a driver, I believe (probably FUSE), and there's probably client software for others. Basically, strip out any http urls and replace with https. Bonus over ssh is, your public key is signed by a source they probably already trust -- but if you don't want to pay for that service, you can always self-sign.
Next on the list, and this is a big one: VPN. There are all kinds of ways to do this -- my favorite is OpenVPN. You can prevent client-to-client connections, and use any server-side firewall to deny them access to the rest of the network. The only trick is, you have to either guess a very unlikely-to-be-used private network (something like 10.0.1.0, maybe), or you would have to provide more than one instance of OpenVPN, on different private subnets. But it wouldn't be automatic -- they would have to select VPN A or VPN B.
Either way, once you have that VPN connection, you can use pretty much any old insecure protocol. Straight FTP, Samba, NFS, or all of the above. All you need is plain old password authentication, or even IP-based authentication (NFS), given OpenVPN allows you to guarantee that a given IP is only owned by / routable to a given client (with a given key).
And finally, you could always do some sort of secure system (GPG, encfs, TrueCrypt, etc) on top of an insecure system. Some lamer could always intercept your traffic and corrupt your files, but you'd know about it. However, this would force you to write software if you wanted to protect the system from abuse, and not just the data.
First, realize the feature is disabled by default, and can be enabled without sending your browsing history to Google. Also, it's fairly likely it will let you visit those sites, it'll just prompt you first.
Because the people who put it in FF are acting like idiots by assuming average users are dumb and won't learn a couple of simple instructions.
Actually, they are, intelligently, realizing that your average IT department doesn't have the resources to educate users properly, and some of those users are fundamentally un-educatable. You can either give them the invasive crap from Firefox, or you can figure the IT dept will standardize on IE to get the same invasive crap, because no IT dept in their right mind is going to let them just get exploited anyway.
Fact is, I don't have to, because a LOT of people already have -- the people responsible for developing and shipping Firefox, for example.
"May as well be closed"? Maybe, if no one outside the development team looks at it. But the difference is between a diverse development team, everyone paid by a different group, some not paid at all for their Firefox work, and a single, homogeneous team, working for one company, who may not even care what spyware goes in.
By the way, if you'd bothered to check, this feature is off by default. Do you honestly think Google could've gotten it in if the feature was enabled by default?
Salt helps for things like passwords, where two users with the same password will have it appear differently in the password file.
It makes no sense here. It would prevent a third-party from intercepting your browsing history -- but then, they can do that anyway, by simply being your ISP.
But if Google has the list of malware sites, obviously they know that foo.com resolves to a particular hash (with a particular salt). The only way this could possibly work is if Google stored a separate list for each user, each with its own salt, which would still require you trusting Google to be doing this and not to be keeping a mapping of hash+salt -> website.
There is no way hashes can solve this problem. The only solution is to either be smart, so you don't need a blacklist, or to download the entire blacklist periodically, which is an option, but not everyone likes it.
Well, that seals it, I guess, because I'll be working with Visual Studio to start. (Actually a mix of Visual Studio and some bastardized Eclipse, but don't quote me on that, I really am not sure exactly how it's going to look.)
Basically, they want me to start in their environment, and once I'm comfortable and know what I'm doing (I don't know HD-DVD yet), I can move to whatever environment I want. So, most likely, I'll be moving to Linux at work eventually.
I would say perl or python. Learn ruby to learn its elegance, but stay away, the performance is probably too high a price, and once you get to know it, it's just as quirky as the other two.
Or really anything...
Here's why PHP is for idiots: It started out as a language for people who knew HTML, and wanted to add a little server-side stuff, without learning a server-side programming language. So they learned to sprinkle things like this:
<ul> <?php for ($i=0; $i<10; $i++) { ?> <li> Value of i is <?php print $i ?>.</li> <?php } ?> </ul>
throughout their websites. All kinds of things -- hit counters, etc. Webcomics are another great target for PHP -- basically, you write an HTML template page, and just add a few little php tags for things like the img source, and if you're very clever, to pull a comment from a database.
Basically, PHP was meant to be embedded in HTML pages, not to be a full-fledged language in its own right. It also looks like it was meant to feel like Perl.
But, they added more and more features, and people, more and more, began to realize that separating logic from content from presentation is a good idea, so sprinkling PHP tags throughout your HTML isn't the way to go. So there are now plenty of.php files that contain almost no HTML, and are essentially one gigantic php tag. It's become more the other way around -- you can embed HTML in your PHP, if you need to.
That is the one strength of PHP. Well, one of several. Another, for example, is taking the results of a form submission and making them local variables -- which is a fucking huge security hazard, and no serious PHP programmers have that turned on anymore.
As a language, they basically took some Perl syntax and made a language that is otherwise somewhere between C and Java in terms of functionality. It has object-orientedness, but only in the most recent version, and it's broken as hell. I'm not sure if they even have function pointers, or pointers at all. It's all the functionality of Visual Basic, but with the clean, easy to use syntax of Perl!
It is possible to write amazingly good programs in PHP, but that's despite the language, not because of it. PHP offers absolutely no advantage over any other scripting language, except that it's installed by default. Even the ability to embed HTML in PHP (or vice versa) isn't new -- you can embed Perl in HTML with special server-side extensions, but even standard Perl makes it easy to print super-huge, free-form strings, so if you really want to, you can stick HTML into your Perl.
Which means the only advantage of PHP is its ubiquity. So it's kind of like Windows or Visual Basic in that respect, but if you have the freedom to choose your environment, you'd have to be an idiot to start with PHP. The only reason I can see choosing it is legacy -- for example, if you have a project that was always PHP, and you don't have the time to rewrite it, or if you want to start with Drupal or something.
Now, maybe I missed this from 98 to 2K, but I know we didn't have this problem 95-98-ME, and I know we didn't have this problem from 2K to XP.
Basically, hardware manufacturers realized that some people were eager to upgrade to the bleeding edge, or actually needed some feature of XP, and some people were happy with 2K and didn't want to touch XP, at least until Microsoft fixed it, and maybe never.
This is the point of non free drivers.
Again, not since day 1. Since day 1, the point of non free drivers is that it "protects trade secrets". Never mind that it doesn't, really, but it's a lot easier for a company to just throw an NDA and a restrictive license around everything they do than have to selectively say "This part can be open, but this part contains trade secrets."
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
I find it is actually possibly less secure. With sudo, I can selectively give different accounts different levels of access to root commands, without having to give any of them a root password. Also, it means the root account can't be attacked over the network, and the user account is more secure, if we're talking about a dictionary cracker / brute force attack -- with normal users, they have to guess your username and your password. With root, they only have to guess the password, but if you use sudo for everything, there is no root password.
Personally, I use passwords only for things I have to log into locally. I then use sudo and ssh keys for everything else.
I think my time and money are better spent on CDs that give me the freedom (technologically, no DRM) to do with as I please and that have top sound quality to begin with (sure, there are formats with better sound than CDs, but none with anywhere near as wide support).
I haven't used an actual CD player in years. Sometimes I have music on my laptop, but if I got a portable player, I'd put Rockbox on it, so I could play whatever format I wanted. That would likely include Apple's DRM-less stuff, if they ever make the iTunes Music Store available to people without iTunes.
Nevermind that sometimes I want to use my bandwidth for other things.
No, you don't, not if you're willing to accept a lossy format. Which, if they'll give you a good one (not just mp3), it's getting close to as good as CD-quality.
Think about movies -- every single DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray disc out there uses some form of lossy compression. Every digital cable or satellite transmission uses lossy compression. In fact, even video editing software often uses motion jpeg, so they can keep each frame lossily-compressed, even if they need to be able to move frames around -- and by the time you see it, it'll be in mpeg or h.264.
If you can stand to watch DVDs -- most people don't even know they're compressed anyway -- then you can probably stand to live off of lossy music. I keep flac files around because I have the disk space, and because I can then export to whatever lossy format I want, with no generational loss, but I don't shun an mp3 copy if the original CD/wav/flac is nowhere to be found.
And if we're talking about internet radio or music rental services, lossy is exactly what you get, and it's just fine.
Not having music stored locally makes no sense at all right now.
Then you missed the point.
Any of these services is going to have the bandwidth to stream when you want to. But every single song you download, or stream once, is going to be stored locally. My point of "streaming" is that you have the bandwidth not to care if your entire music collection has to go boom because you changed services -- you just start listening to the same stuff you always did, and it'll download it. I wasn't suggesting that you'd never have anything stored locally.
But even then, unless you can get all your music needs fulfilled from one source, it is undeniably a huge hassle.
I don't see why. Fulfill them from one source + CDs + an un-DRM'd source (magnatune, mindawn, etc) + piracy, if you're so inclined. Then install the codecs and play em all in Windows Media Player. Mix and match playlists of "rented" songs and songs you own, and burn a CD of all of those mixed. (Not sure if the last part works, but I bet it does.)
The only "hassle" is if you don't like Windows Media Player, or Windows at all, and that's a big reason I don't do it.
No, it's called irony. Hyperbole would be if you were misrepresenting a point by taking a true statement and exaggerating it -- for example, your point about having to stream everywhere is hyperbole, even though you don't (download it once, in one location, and it stays).
Your comment about 100 songs doesn't even make sense -- he gets more music than he could get if he didn't have this service, because he saves money on the music that he gets through the service, even if they don't have everything.
b) Ah yes, it makes total sense for me to stream my music collection everywhere I listen to it, in a lossless format.
For a lot of people, this does make sense -- that's why there are services to do that even with your own pure mp3 collections (or flac, possibly).
Regardless, you're most likely not going to get a lossless format out of one of these services. It's probably going to be WMA, DRM'd for a PlaysForSure device. That's why I won't use the service, but I can't argue against it on pure convenience issues -- you are actually getting a better service by giving up your freedom here. (The same is not true for DVDs, by the way.)
and I totally love the idea of downloading stuff every single time I want to put it on a CD or a portable player, my computer at work, my laptop, or lend it to a friend.
Yeah, that is hyperbole. Computer at work and laptop, yes, but let's be fair -- CDs and portable players will take music from any of the computers you'd use with that service, and once you've listened to a song once, it stays on your hard drive until the service dies, or you switch services.
And having to jump between different services and pay them all fees and use different technology that often won't be compatible
Much as the idea might turn my stomach, Microsoft has created a standard here: PlaysForSure. This means that pretty much any portable device except the iPod will play the same music. Paying them all fees is irrelevant when you are saving money, and jumping between services isn't something you'd do every day -- you'd just do it if one of the services became unusable, for some reason.
Don't get me wrong, I don't use such a service, and I absolutely see the value of flac where possible, original lossy formats where not. (I have a lot of mp3s, but only because that's the format I got them in -- I also have a few tracker files and some music in aac format, I think. Just happened to be the format I found it in.)
But this is one place I have to admit that I am losing something by insisting on freedom. Yes, I gain some more freedom to do what I want with music I bought, but it's not cost-effective at all, not unless I could easily strip the DRM. (And that, by the way, is what makes movie rentals effective for me -- rent, rip, return, watch on my own time, delete when I need space.)
It's just the Canadians aren't made criminals by doing the same activities as everyone else in the world.
Wasn't Canada the country which places a tax on blank optical media, based on the assumption that all of it (or some, at least) will be used for piracy? Thus, you may not be a criminal, but you're already being punished because something you're buying could be used to commit a crime??
If so, fuck them. They're as bad as the rest. Worse, even.
What, does that guy listen to like the same 100 songs on rotation?
Erm... 100 songs wouldn't be enough to be economical. Do the math before you run your mouth.
I don't see how it could possibly to be economical to download a several thousand album music collection over and over again.
Simple: Download them on demand (they'll stream). You probably weren't using the bandwidth anyway -- for streaming them, it's miniscule.
Nevermind that no one digital music store is going to necessarily even have half of such a collection in its libraries.
However, for his collection, it had plenty to count -- not the same 100 songs, dipshit, but actually enough that, at some $15/mo (I think, might've been $5/mo), it was going to take him over a decade before those monthly fees added up to the collection he currently had.
I guess whatever works for him. But I still can't see this as feasable for anyone remotely *interested* in music, and I'm not even talking about audiophiles. Just people who care about music instead of just listening to stuff 'cause they heard it on the radio and liked it.
Well, it doesn't prevent you from buying songs from other sources -- in fact, you can get them from anywhere except the iTunes Music Store. Question is not whether you can live exclusively off the service, but whether you can get your money's worth from it.
Now, to be fair, I thought of the guy as an MS fanboy, despite how much he claimed to try not to be -- like I said, he did try Linux, it just didn't work for him. Software aside, he also had somewhat exotic hardware.
A mentality of not wanting to learn a programming language, so you learn Excel, which really isn't any easier, and is, in fact, considerably harder when it comes to doing anything complex. But like the idiots who learn PHP, you stick with it because it's what you learned on, even once it's painfully obvious (even to you) that you've got an unmaintainable mess.
I start a new job on Wednesday, even though I got the official "Welcome Aboard" on Friday.
Why?
They have a laptop with Vista that I could use. Only problem is, I'm to be working on HD-DVD. Microsoft makes a free HD-DVD simulator for Windows, it even goes so far as to verify your WGA status before installing.
And the fuckers still haven't ported it to Vista.
Yes, even Microsoft doesn't feel like supporting their newest OS.
So, even though it's almost entirely an MS shop, I have to wait till Wednesday to get the XP downgrade for the thing. (My guess is, they're shipping a physical copy -- where's that "Windows Anytime Upgrade" now, huh?) And I can't do any work until then.
For anyone who actually follows my posts, yes, I'll be partitioning it with Ubuntu, and maybe the HD Sim will work under Wine. I will laugh my ass off if it does. If it doesn't, I'll dual boot, maybe try virtualizing, whatever works best -- of course, all of this on my own time.
Of course, I can't tell you if it's going to be like XP -- if by Service pack 2 (or 3, or 4), it'll be good enough that we'll all be telling everyone to upgrade. But I can't wait that long.
As far as I'm concerned, Vista is still Beta, and shame on Microsoft for making us pay for it before it's done.
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And you gain it back, presumably, by downloading a song you'd never heard before from the new service, one which wasn't on the old service. (Of course, you lose money if the new service has the same songs you've kept on CDs...)
You must be using a different concept of "salt".
If I send a hash, with randomly-generated salt on my own machine, they can't do anything with it, including tell me whether or not it's in their list. If I send a hash with some salt they provide me, so that it matches the salt that was used to generate that line in their table, they can simply do a 1:1 match of each line of the malware hash table vs the actual site that was used to generate it. True, if they threw away the original URL, they couldn't do that, but you're trusting them to throw that URL away.
I simply don't see a way to know that a hash is or isn't bad without also knowing which site it maps to. The only way I can see to prevent loss of privacy is sending a list -- someone else mentioned a partial list derived from a partial hash -- and letting the mapping be done locally.
That's where "streaming" becomes helpful. Simply put, you know you need to replace something because you look for it and it's not there. It's not a waste of time, because with any decent interface, it would simply be downloaded as-needed. In fact, a decent interface might show the entire available collection as already imported.
What's more, all of them are going to have some music you want. You lose some tracks, gain others. It only really becomes a problem if you find a few songs aren't on the new service, and you've absolutely got to have them -- then you would start buying CDs, but you still wouldn't have to replace the entire collection.
Thus allowing you to explore a less limited range of musical interests.
Obscure/eclectic, you get from other sources. And weren't you just describing how much of a waste of time it would be to try to figure out exactly what music to redownload, to get the exact same collection?
I don't see how.
That's like saying "I refuse to eat cake at birthday parties, because free food is only cost-effective if it can be used for the vast majority of your food consumption..."
It doesn't even have to be a majority, or even a significant minority. It just has to be enough music that, taken alone, it is cost-effective -- that is, you get enough music through the service that it's cheaper than buying those songs as CDs or, say, iTunes singles.
It still might not be cost-effective, if you don't listen to enough stuff that they have available. But it has nothing to do with what proportion of their music you'd use, or what proportion of your collection it is.
Well, if it disappears, you've still gotten to listen to much more music at least once than you would have otherwise. But remember, Microsoft is behind PlaysForSure, so it probably isn't going anywhere, much as we might want it to. Thus, you might switch from the Napster store to the Zune store to something else, but ultimately, there will always be subscription music services.
That's the advantage, by the way -- that you don't have to worry about any one provider disappearing, because you can always switch to another one.
Firstly, there are other major commercial players. FileMaker, for instance -- which I have to work with occasionally.
Second, FileMaker (and Access) are object lessons in why you shouldn't do it this way. Like you said, the SQL engine has flaws, the scripting language is junk, and the GUI is quirky and weird, but you like the report stuff.
Were this done right, you could keep the reports, and replace everything else. This is how KOffice seems to be implementing this, or trying to -- Postgres or MySQL can be used, and maybe SQLite for some of these. You can then run Kexi to manage it and Kougar to print reports. But any of these can be run independently, and while I believe Kexi will let you plug Python into it, you can script it with all kinds of other things. Plus, there are about 5 other, similar GUIs which will all use Postgres as a backend (oddly, none seem to be MySQL-specific, but one is Postgres-specific).
I mean, you're right, it's almost a good idea, which is why there are so many clones. But all of them suck. I propose we do it in AJAX, but then we have to fight about what language to use on the server side, and thus still end up with five or so implementations -- still, I'm going to do that, at some point.
Yeah, if it would take much more than a "sort", a spreadsheet might make sense.
Then again, I so rarely have to do this kind of stuff one-off that it doesn't really make sense for me. I'm much more likely to have something that I need solved in a generic way. The 10 lines of Perl (or Ruby, etc) that it might take to model will be harder to write than a spreadsheet, for most people, although I'm not as comfortable with spreadsheets as I am with programming. But the 10 lines of code will be reusable, without modification, as long as I need it.
Seems to me, the spreadsheet is always needing to be tweaked, and not in generic ways. The tweaks I have to make for the new data won't work with the old data. Maybe I'm not good at spreadsheets, but this seems to be the default/natural way of doing things.
A format that gets the math wrong... oh, and text is pretty portable.
Oh, just curious, have you tried Google's spreadsheets? Or the KOffice version... KSpread, I think? What about GNUMeric? Or some of the older ones people keep listing as prior art for this python thing... a spreadsheet that runs LISP, or Smalltalk? Since I don't use spreadsheets much, I can't say whether any of these are more or less powerful than OOCalc (for what you want to do), but OpenOffice is not the only open Office clone.
At some point, an organization realizes that they either don't have the training to be able to keep working from a spreadsheet, or they need something more powerful anyway.
So they buy FileMaker Pro.
Which means, they essentially have a bunch of different, interesting views, with some (very) limited scripting, all ultimately centered around one flat table.
(Yes, I know there are later versions which actually function as relational databases, but most FileMaker stuff I've seen is around version 5 or 6. Most people don't want to upgrade past that, because it'd require upgrading every single computer at once. I know all about relations and "portals", etc -- almost unusable for linking more than two tables in the same query, and I hear reports of corruption, etc.)
From what I understand of spreadsheets, some make sense as spreadsheets, and some don't. Of the ones that make sense as spreadsheets, they could still use a more powerful spreadsheet program, and I don't mean Python.
Suppose, for instance, you just want to calculate a table of values -- compound interest, say. Some initial investment, an annual interest rate, and an additional annual value. You could do something like this:
=A4*(A$3/100+1)
And you could drag it down and across. But it's not necessarily an obvious formula, and if you ever have to make a change to it -- for example, extend it so it moves in increments of 5 years, or of n years -- you have to remember to drag the change (to the formula) over all the cells to update them. If you want the table to be bigger, you have to drag it some more, and fill in some more values, or write formulas for them.
But you don't really need much in the spreadsheet other than your table of values. You don't need it for a chart, and if you did, it might not be sufficient -- for instance, if you're modeling a mathematical function, you'd want a much bigger table, and you wouldn't be interested in the values so much as the graph.
Still, all of these could be modeled by a program very like a spreadsheet.
The other common use is to manage information, and to analyze and present it. Spreadsheets are really bad at this, Filemaker is somewhat better at analyzing and presenting it, but not much better at storing it -- the biggest improvement, really, is indexing. But the kind of information you store in a spreadsheet would probably map really well to a relational database.
So the trick, then, would be a GUI that's as easy as Filemaker, almost easier than a spreadsheet, but which maps to a real relational database. I'm not the first to think of this; there are several other projects, but most of them have considerable limitations, and it seems like a good target for a web app, anyway. But I've never found the time to do it right.
Considering that FileMaker is often used as a replacement for things like Act, QuickBooks, or other, similar software, and that other such replacements have been made online (but specific to the domain of the app), I think a generic GUI for building online, database-driven apps would be a good project.
But I haven't had the time to do it, much less do it right. Maybe soon, though.
If it gets fast enough, you may just want to use it as your main system memory, rather than swap. Then, suspend-to-RAM = hibernate, and your persistant storage could be something like tmpfs.
Actually, the best solution is a system with Orthogonal Persistence -- that is, remove the distinction between disk and RAM.
In an ideal situation, this means that no program ever actually closes. The closest it gets is the entire system being suspended to save power. All of the reasons this might not make sense to you are based on the way software works now, not on any limitations inherent in hardware or in the concept of software.
It's hard to explain abstractly, but maybe try an example: Google Documents. While it's not instantaneous, because it has to go over the Internet, Google Docs does autosave every document, along with a change history. You can still revert, not to the saved version, but to any version since it was created. If you want to play around with it without saving, you simply copy the document and work on the copy.
Or, consider the concept of a savegame -- for the most part, rather than explicitly saving your game and closing the program, you'd simply pause it, minimize it somehow, and move on to whatever else you were doing. After awhile of being paused, the game might automatically release the audio/video hardware, so it won't be using any resources except RAM. And when that RAM is needed, it'll get swapped out.
Does it have any advantages over a traditional savegame? Well, it's easier to program, but imagine the whole game is coded like that -- rather than having to "load" a level off the hard disk, you simply access what you need. No more "loading" screens.
So yes, probably the first thing that will happen is, someone puts a Windows swapfile on it. And probably, it will be a LONG time until legacy concepts of filesystems and virtual memory go away. But if you get something performing even close to RAM speeds, with persistant storage, you can go a LOT farther than simply emulating a spinning disk, and you could do a lot better than trying to store your swap on an emulation of a spinning disk that runs on something resembling RAM.
If we were talking a sane OS, yeah, just disable swap and it'll work. But after a fairly long discussion with a guy who sells the stuff, and plenty of name-calling by him, I finally got him to admit that it was really a limitation of Windows, that if you actually disable the pagefile, certain things don't work.
Of course, I've lost the thread, and it could be entirely wrong...
Not likely, with that direct connection between them, right?
Well, maybe...
I believe you still can't chroot out without being root.
Thus, the only point of jail is if you are either running an app as root, or you are putting setuid binaries in the chroot (and you don't trust those setuid binaries to be secure).
We also have selinux, which is a much better solution overall, if a bit overly complex. (For example, does jail prevent that root process from being able to grab privileged ports?)
There's not likely to be anything really simple, depending on what kind of functionality you're offering.
You could do ssh access, without necessarily sftp (KDE's fish works with scp, I think), and deny them an actual login shell -- only allow sftp (or scp, or whatever). You could then block access to the rest of the filesystem with Unix file permissions or ACLs. Most things that they could access either aren't dangerous or are only visible to root (and maybe the file owner).
It's not easy, but consider: There are actually a few places online that offer free shell access. That is, you can actually ssh in and get a commandline on a Linux box. I'm assuming they have decent protection.
I believe FTP does encrypted authentication, and it may even be possible to run the entire session over SSL. I'm not sure how secure this is.
Speaking of SSL, another possibility is WebDAV. Linux has a driver, I believe (probably FUSE), and there's probably client software for others. Basically, strip out any http urls and replace with https. Bonus over ssh is, your public key is signed by a source they probably already trust -- but if you don't want to pay for that service, you can always self-sign.
Next on the list, and this is a big one: VPN. There are all kinds of ways to do this -- my favorite is OpenVPN. You can prevent client-to-client connections, and use any server-side firewall to deny them access to the rest of the network. The only trick is, you have to either guess a very unlikely-to-be-used private network (something like 10.0.1.0, maybe), or you would have to provide more than one instance of OpenVPN, on different private subnets. But it wouldn't be automatic -- they would have to select VPN A or VPN B.
Either way, once you have that VPN connection, you can use pretty much any old insecure protocol. Straight FTP, Samba, NFS, or all of the above. All you need is plain old password authentication, or even IP-based authentication (NFS), given OpenVPN allows you to guarantee that a given IP is only owned by / routable to a given client (with a given key).
And finally, you could always do some sort of secure system (GPG, encfs, TrueCrypt, etc) on top of an insecure system. Some lamer could always intercept your traffic and corrupt your files, but you'd know about it. However, this would force you to write software if you wanted to protect the system from abuse, and not just the data.
First, realize the feature is disabled by default, and can be enabled without sending your browsing history to Google. Also, it's fairly likely it will let you visit those sites, it'll just prompt you first.
Actually, they are, intelligently, realizing that your average IT department doesn't have the resources to educate users properly, and some of those users are fundamentally un-educatable. You can either give them the invasive crap from Firefox, or you can figure the IT dept will standardize on IE to get the same invasive crap, because no IT dept in their right mind is going to let them just get exploited anyway.
Fact is, I don't have to, because a LOT of people already have -- the people responsible for developing and shipping Firefox, for example.
"May as well be closed"? Maybe, if no one outside the development team looks at it. But the difference is between a diverse development team, everyone paid by a different group, some not paid at all for their Firefox work, and a single, homogeneous team, working for one company, who may not even care what spyware goes in.
By the way, if you'd bothered to check, this feature is off by default. Do you honestly think Google could've gotten it in if the feature was enabled by default?
Salt helps for things like passwords, where two users with the same password will have it appear differently in the password file.
It makes no sense here. It would prevent a third-party from intercepting your browsing history -- but then, they can do that anyway, by simply being your ISP.
But if Google has the list of malware sites, obviously they know that foo.com resolves to a particular hash (with a particular salt). The only way this could possibly work is if Google stored a separate list for each user, each with its own salt, which would still require you trusting Google to be doing this and not to be keeping a mapping of hash+salt -> website.
There is no way hashes can solve this problem. The only solution is to either be smart, so you don't need a blacklist, or to download the entire blacklist periodically, which is an option, but not everyone likes it.
Well, that seals it, I guess, because I'll be working with Visual Studio to start. (Actually a mix of Visual Studio and some bastardized Eclipse, but don't quote me on that, I really am not sure exactly how it's going to look.)
Basically, they want me to start in their environment, and once I'm comfortable and know what I'm doing (I don't know HD-DVD yet), I can move to whatever environment I want. So, most likely, I'll be moving to Linux at work eventually.
I would say perl or python. Learn ruby to learn its elegance, but stay away, the performance is probably too high a price, and once you get to know it, it's just as quirky as the other two.
.php files that contain almost no HTML, and are essentially one gigantic php tag. It's become more the other way around -- you can embed HTML in your PHP, if you need to.
Or really anything...
Here's why PHP is for idiots: It started out as a language for people who knew HTML, and wanted to add a little server-side stuff, without learning a server-side programming language. So they learned to sprinkle things like this:
<ul>
<?php for ($i=0; $i<10; $i++) { ?>
<li> Value of i is <?php print $i ?>.</li>
<?php } ?>
</ul>
throughout their websites. All kinds of things -- hit counters, etc. Webcomics are another great target for PHP -- basically, you write an HTML template page, and just add a few little php tags for things like the img source, and if you're very clever, to pull a comment from a database.
Basically, PHP was meant to be embedded in HTML pages, not to be a full-fledged language in its own right. It also looks like it was meant to feel like Perl.
But, they added more and more features, and people, more and more, began to realize that separating logic from content from presentation is a good idea, so sprinkling PHP tags throughout your HTML isn't the way to go. So there are now plenty of
That is the one strength of PHP. Well, one of several. Another, for example, is taking the results of a form submission and making them local variables -- which is a fucking huge security hazard, and no serious PHP programmers have that turned on anymore.
As a language, they basically took some Perl syntax and made a language that is otherwise somewhere between C and Java in terms of functionality. It has object-orientedness, but only in the most recent version, and it's broken as hell. I'm not sure if they even have function pointers, or pointers at all. It's all the functionality of Visual Basic, but with the clean, easy to use syntax of Perl!
It is possible to write amazingly good programs in PHP, but that's despite the language, not because of it. PHP offers absolutely no advantage over any other scripting language, except that it's installed by default. Even the ability to embed HTML in PHP (or vice versa) isn't new -- you can embed Perl in HTML with special server-side extensions, but even standard Perl makes it easy to print super-huge, free-form strings, so if you really want to, you can stick HTML into your Perl.
Which means the only advantage of PHP is its ubiquity. So it's kind of like Windows or Visual Basic in that respect, but if you have the freedom to choose your environment, you'd have to be an idiot to start with PHP. The only reason I can see choosing it is legacy -- for example, if you have a project that was always PHP, and you don't have the time to rewrite it, or if you want to start with Drupal or something.
Sorry, no.
Now, maybe I missed this from 98 to 2K, but I know we didn't have this problem 95-98-ME, and I know we didn't have this problem from 2K to XP.
Basically, hardware manufacturers realized that some people were eager to upgrade to the bleeding edge, or actually needed some feature of XP, and some people were happy with 2K and didn't want to touch XP, at least until Microsoft fixed it, and maybe never.
Again, not since day 1. Since day 1, the point of non free drivers is that it "protects trade secrets". Never mind that it doesn't, really, but it's a lot easier for a company to just throw an NDA and a restrictive license around everything they do than have to selectively say "This part can be open, but this part contains trade secrets."
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
I find it is actually possibly less secure. With sudo, I can selectively give different accounts different levels of access to root commands, without having to give any of them a root password. Also, it means the root account can't be attacked over the network, and the user account is more secure, if we're talking about a dictionary cracker / brute force attack -- with normal users, they have to guess your username and your password. With root, they only have to guess the password, but if you use sudo for everything, there is no root password.
Personally, I use passwords only for things I have to log into locally. I then use sudo and ssh keys for everything else.
I haven't used an actual CD player in years. Sometimes I have music on my laptop, but if I got a portable player, I'd put Rockbox on it, so I could play whatever format I wanted. That would likely include Apple's DRM-less stuff, if they ever make the iTunes Music Store available to people without iTunes.
No, you don't, not if you're willing to accept a lossy format. Which, if they'll give you a good one (not just mp3), it's getting close to as good as CD-quality.
Think about movies -- every single DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray disc out there uses some form of lossy compression. Every digital cable or satellite transmission uses lossy compression. In fact, even video editing software often uses motion jpeg, so they can keep each frame lossily-compressed, even if they need to be able to move frames around -- and by the time you see it, it'll be in mpeg or h.264.
If you can stand to watch DVDs -- most people don't even know they're compressed anyway -- then you can probably stand to live off of lossy music. I keep flac files around because I have the disk space, and because I can then export to whatever lossy format I want, with no generational loss, but I don't shun an mp3 copy if the original CD/wav/flac is nowhere to be found.
And if we're talking about internet radio or music rental services, lossy is exactly what you get, and it's just fine.
Then you missed the point.
Any of these services is going to have the bandwidth to stream when you want to. But every single song you download, or stream once, is going to be stored locally. My point of "streaming" is that you have the bandwidth not to care if your entire music collection has to go boom because you changed services -- you just start listening to the same stuff you always did, and it'll download it. I wasn't suggesting that you'd never have anything stored locally.
I don't see why. Fulfill them from one source + CDs + an un-DRM'd source (magnatune, mindawn, etc) + piracy, if you're so inclined. Then install the codecs and play em all in Windows Media Player. Mix and match playlists of "rented" songs and songs you own, and burn a CD of all of those mixed. (Not sure if the last part works, but I bet it does.)
The only "hassle" is if you don't like Windows Media Player, or Windows at all, and that's a big reason I don't do it.
No, it's called irony. Hyperbole would be if you were misrepresenting a point by taking a true statement and exaggerating it -- for example, your point about having to stream everywhere is hyperbole, even though you don't (download it once, in one location, and it stays).
Your comment about 100 songs doesn't even make sense -- he gets more music than he could get if he didn't have this service, because he saves money on the music that he gets through the service, even if they don't have everything.
For a lot of people, this does make sense -- that's why there are services to do that even with your own pure mp3 collections (or flac, possibly).
Regardless, you're most likely not going to get a lossless format out of one of these services. It's probably going to be WMA, DRM'd for a PlaysForSure device. That's why I won't use the service, but I can't argue against it on pure convenience issues -- you are actually getting a better service by giving up your freedom here. (The same is not true for DVDs, by the way.)
Yeah, that is hyperbole. Computer at work and laptop, yes, but let's be fair -- CDs and portable players will take music from any of the computers you'd use with that service, and once you've listened to a song once, it stays on your hard drive until the service dies, or you switch services.
Much as the idea might turn my stomach, Microsoft has created a standard here: PlaysForSure. This means that pretty much any portable device except the iPod will play the same music. Paying them all fees is irrelevant when you are saving money, and jumping between services isn't something you'd do every day -- you'd just do it if one of the services became unusable, for some reason.
Don't get me wrong, I don't use such a service, and I absolutely see the value of flac where possible, original lossy formats where not. (I have a lot of mp3s, but only because that's the format I got them in -- I also have a few tracker files and some music in aac format, I think. Just happened to be the format I found it in.)
But this is one place I have to admit that I am losing something by insisting on freedom. Yes, I gain some more freedom to do what I want with music I bought, but it's not cost-effective at all, not unless I could easily strip the DRM. (And that, by the way, is what makes movie rentals effective for me -- rent, rip, return, watch on my own time, delete when I need space.)
Wasn't Canada the country which places a tax on blank optical media, based on the assumption that all of it (or some, at least) will be used for piracy? Thus, you may not be a criminal, but you're already being punished because something you're buying could be used to commit a crime??
If so, fuck them. They're as bad as the rest. Worse, even.
Erm... 100 songs wouldn't be enough to be economical. Do the math before you run your mouth.
Simple: Download them on demand (they'll stream). You probably weren't using the bandwidth anyway -- for streaming them, it's miniscule.
However, for his collection, it had plenty to count -- not the same 100 songs, dipshit, but actually enough that, at some $15/mo (I think, might've been $5/mo), it was going to take him over a decade before those monthly fees added up to the collection he currently had.
Well, it doesn't prevent you from buying songs from other sources -- in fact, you can get them from anywhere except the iTunes Music Store. Question is not whether you can live exclusively off the service, but whether you can get your money's worth from it.
Now, to be fair, I thought of the guy as an MS fanboy, despite how much he claimed to try not to be -- like I said, he did try Linux, it just didn't work for him. Software aside, he also had somewhat exotic hardware.
That is a very Spreadsheet-like mentality.
A mentality of not wanting to learn a programming language, so you learn Excel, which really isn't any easier, and is, in fact, considerably harder when it comes to doing anything complex. But like the idiots who learn PHP, you stick with it because it's what you learned on, even once it's painfully obvious (even to you) that you've got an unmaintainable mess.
I start a new job on Wednesday, even though I got the official "Welcome Aboard" on Friday.
Why?
They have a laptop with Vista that I could use. Only problem is, I'm to be working on HD-DVD. Microsoft makes a free HD-DVD simulator for Windows, it even goes so far as to verify your WGA status before installing.
And the fuckers still haven't ported it to Vista.
Yes, even Microsoft doesn't feel like supporting their newest OS.
So, even though it's almost entirely an MS shop, I have to wait till Wednesday to get the XP downgrade for the thing. (My guess is, they're shipping a physical copy -- where's that "Windows Anytime Upgrade" now, huh?) And I can't do any work until then.
For anyone who actually follows my posts, yes, I'll be partitioning it with Ubuntu, and maybe the HD Sim will work under Wine. I will laugh my ass off if it does. If it doesn't, I'll dual boot, maybe try virtualizing, whatever works best -- of course, all of this on my own time.
Of course, I can't tell you if it's going to be like XP -- if by Service pack 2 (or 3, or 4), it'll be good enough that we'll all be telling everyone to upgrade. But I can't wait that long.
As far as I'm concerned, Vista is still Beta, and shame on Microsoft for making us pay for it before it's done.
Either they are outright lying, or they suck.
That, or they are selling some VERY unique laptops.