I always hear that playing in my head when I read things like that.
Went to school and I was very nervous No one knew me, no one knew me Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson Look right through me, look right through me And I find it kind of funny I find it kind of sad The dreams in which I'm dying Are the best I've ever had
Yes, I realize it is what made the "Asynchronous" part possible. But I'm talking about the rest of it -- the DOM, the CSS, the XML, even the basic HTML.
You could punch someone hard enough, and in the right place -- I believe you can drive a bone from their nose up into their brain.
You could stab them in the throat. Doesn't even have to be a knife -- you could probably do it with a ballpoint pen.
You could run over them with a car. You could light their house on fire.
You could hit them with a blunt object. A baseball bat would probably be the simplest.
There are so many ways to kill people, or inflict violence in general.
The ability to inflict violence does not make you violent.
Seriously, if a minor quarrel could turn into a block-wide shootout, why don't they already turn into a block-wide bar fight? (And before you tell me it isn't as dangerous, go read over the above list. As far as I know, you don't need any kind of a license to learn a martial art...)
I know it's an old line, but guns don't kill. People do, and they don't need a gun to do it. And for that matter, you'll notice how in this instance, the guy systematically killed some 20-30 people -- he couldn't exactly have been shaking with anger if he was shooting that effectively.
Why do they pay people to come up with top 10 lists?
Why does Slashdot link to them?
I don't know, but I don't think I'd be as annoyed by them if I could get a cut. C'mon, people! I can write top 10 lists in my sleep! Hire me to do nothing all day... please?
Take for example the "Nappy headed Ho's" off the cuff remark by Imus.
So what?
Nothing is stopping Imus from, say, writing a book or making a DVD about how they really are all a bunch of nappy headed ho's, and whoever fired him is a fag, or whatever he wants to say.
It's still very much racist, moronic, and slanderous. So, he's allowed to say it, and they're certainly allowed to fire him for it.
It's quite different from someone calling for the deaths of Jews -- but on his own time, on his own website, not on CBS. See the difference?
Let me make it simple for you, then: Government censorship is NEVER acceptable. Censorship within an organization is a different matter entirely, especially when you are representing said organization.
People, there are serious NUTJOBS running around, not only in Oz, but all over the world.
You appear to be one of them.
In any case, why don't we define "nutjob"? And what does any of this have to do with these videos?
Why should we as a community fan the flames of their insanity by providing them with inflammatory video material?
No one is asking you. I don't provide such material either.
There's a fine line, however, between simply not providing such material, and actively banning it.
I see absolutely no redeeming qualities in any pro-terrorist video or book.
Even if you're right, when did it become your job, or the government's, to remove useless videos or books?
I see absolutely no redeeming qualities in yet another Madonna song, ever. But it is Madonna's choice to create this crap, and other people's choice to consume it. It doesn't affect me, and I see no reason I should be stopping it.
If somebody, anybody, wants to study this garbage for some obscure reason, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be difficult to import a copy or whatever.
Why search for obscure reasons? What if I'm just morbidly curious about their insanity? (Incidentally, I wouldn't even be thinking about this if I hadn't heard of the censorship. So, in censoring these videos, they've actually made me curious about them, and I have the means to get them.)
Unless I'm misunderstanding, these are censorship laws, which would make that illegal. No one would be stopping me from catching a plane to somewhere else and watching it there, but why should I have to?
Free speech is all fine and dandy in the abstract, but when that extends to exhorting terrorism or violence or jihad, well, fuck off, I prefer that it is not allowed.
Wait, what?
That's a bit like saying, "Nonviolence is all fine and dandy in the abstract, but when it comes to real life, sometimes you just gotta kill someone."
Alright, you have a better justification -- you want to stop terror. But have the balls to say what you want to say:
You are against freedom of speech.
If not, you had better take back your whole post right now. I am serious.
Now that we've cleared that up, maybe we can really talk.
You see, I don't agree with you, and I don't think you should say what you're saying. I really wish you would shut the fuck up, because someone might believe you.
But my ideals won't let me say that I wish someone would shut you up, or even that your post should be deleted from Slashdot. My ideals include free speech, which means that you have the right to say what you want to say, even if I don't agree with you.
That is what Free Speech means. Terrorists get to say what they want to say, even if you don't agree with them.
This is based on a fundamental faith in human intelligence. (Cue jokes about stupid people now...) It's also based on a fundamental faith in right and wrong. Essentially, my faith is that given two opinions, equally well expressed, an intelligent person will choose a right opinion over a wrong one.
It's not always so black and white, true, but you seem to believe it is, so this should work for you: A reasonably intelligent person, given the choice between terrorism or peace. Do you really, honestly think they would choose terrorism?
And if they would, then why are you so convinced that you're right?
Now: What about the stupid people? What about the nutjobs?
Well, you're right, there are insane people out there. Do you really think you will stop them from being insane by removing terrorist propaganda? Do you really think that terrorist propaganda is enough to turn a sane person into a crazy one?
Let me give you a more concrete example: My father would not let me see The Matrix when it came out. H
I care because for the most part, people do not use IE/Windows out of choice, they use it by default, even when there are better alternatives available.
I care because enough people do this that IE/Windows become a defacto standard. Before Firefox started gaining ground, many websites were coded to IE, not to standards -- and IE broke the standards. This affected me directly, because when I was using Mozilla (and early Phoenix builds, which was later renamed to Firefox), I would often run into websites designed only for IE, which would not work properly on other browsers, even when they followed the standards, assuming they let me in the door in the first place.
There are still entirely too many websites, even non-ActiveX ones, which will use browser detection and block you at the door if you're not using IE.
So, if you use IE, you're directly responsible for parts of the Web sucking for Firefox users, and that is one reason I look down on you.
Even now, websites designed for standards, which work flawlessly in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and many other browsers, continue to fail in IE, because IE does not support the standards properly. But since so many use IE, the standard user response is, "This website is broken." The standard way to deal with this is to spend several times as long developing your website (or web app) in order to ensure that it also works on IE.
Go talk to any serious web developer about the problems of supporting IE. When they tell you, understand that they are not exaggerating at all. It really is at least that bad. And that's just with existing standards; IE has been the most resistant when it comes to supporting actual new standards. (Adding their own does not count; Microsoft does not (or should not) dictate Web standards, that's what the w3c is for.
(And if they are using a toolkit, like Dojo or Google Web Toolkit, that just means the toolkit is doing the work for them. It also means that a very large portion of that toolkit had to be written to fix the problems Microsoft introduces with IE.)
Windows is another problem for another rant. But let me just give you one: Anti-virus software would not have to exist, were it not for Windows. Also, hardware manufacturers tend to write their drivers for Windows only, meaning Windows gets the credit for working on just about any hardware, without having to do any of the work. It also means that they tend to not release specifications, meaning Linux has to reverse-engineer these things.
So, you, as a Windows user, are directly contributing to my problems -- things like my wireless card not working, and the difficulty of finding a wireless card known to work with Linux.
That is why we look down on you. You are making the computing world a hell for anyone who doesn't make the same choices you do (Windows/IE). Microsoft may have made Windows/IE hell to work with, but you, without even realizing it, are making it more and more difficult to choose anything else.
Even if IE is crumbling, it's still big enough to hurt. Even 25% is still enough that a website would be stupid to block IE users at the door.
And as long as we can't just block IE users at the door, it makes it very hard to show you any of the cool stuff we might have done, had the Internet not been so crippled.
However, I will point to AJAX -- if Microsoft had its way, this would not have worked, or would have been IE-only. If you understand what's going on under the hood (CSS, the DOM, etc), you will understand that AJAX works in spite of the IE monopoly. It's not that MS didn't try to kill things like AJAX, it's that they tried and failed, largely due to the existence of things like Firefox.
Open source also reduces the risk of needing this kind of thing in the first place. And that is true regardless of whatever the current state of Linux vulnerabilities vs Windows vulnerabilities.
In closed source, for whatever reason, MS can't seem to release zero-day patches. That is, they discover the vulnerability, or someone reports it to them, and the patch still has to wait till Patch Tuesday. Only exception to this is if it becomes public in a big way, such as an exploit in the wild, and even then, you don't really know what they'll do.
So, once an exploit has been discovered, your suggestion is to distract the crackers until the fix itself is in the wild, and perhaps a good deal past that. (Remember, there are quite a few groups which simply grab the latest patches, figure out what they do, and go exploit everyone who hasn't patched themselves yet.)
In open source, we do generally keep ourselves up to date. Or at least, anyone who is technically-minded enough to be using Linux in the first place will be able to tell their distro to update. The package manager helps here, too, as everything is automatically updated, not just whatever happened to be included in Microsoft Update or bothered to write their own update system.
So, the only question becomes, how fast can it be fixed, not what you do afterwards. One argument is that "many eyes make all bugs shallow" or however that's said -- once a vulnerability is known, there will be tons of people looking for the solution. But it goes deeper than that.
You'd probably be discovering the vulnerability by looking at the source code, meaning that whoever discovers the vulnerability should be able to see a solution right away. Buffer overflows are a great example here: If you can see a buffer overflow in the code, you can almost certainly see the solution right away. Send in a tiny patch, and it's fixed before anyone had a chance to know there was something wrong.
And it goes farther than that, too: What about that person who initially discovers the bug? Suppose it's me, and suppose that I also know how to fix it, given the source. What do I do with it?
Well, with Windows, I can tell Microsoft about it, and it may be fixed, someday. Or I can try to fix it myself -- not easy without source code, perhaps entirely beyond my abilities. And if I do fix it myself, what's my incentive to release it to the world? I don't particularly like Microsoft anyway, but why am I doing their work for them?
At this point, it would make much more sense to me to simply exploit it. Start my own botnet, get rich off of it, etc.
Now, suppose it's a problem with Linux. I can report it, but the instant I do, my report is fairly public -- this means they cannot just sit on it and hope the problem goes away. It also means that all kinds of other people are now in the same situation I am -- we know about the problem, and we have the source, so we may be able to fix it.
Or, I could sit on it till I have a patch. This is something that's really impossible to do with closed source, unless you happen to work at Microsoft (or whichever company has said source). In this case, I am the only person who knows about the vulnerability until there's already a patch available.
It seems to me that, unless I'm already a "black hat", I'm much less likely to become one if I can actually do something about a security flaw other than exploit it. After all, don't I want my own systems to be secure, at least?
What if it takes me some time to come up with a fix? What about backwards compatibility? If this is even close to being an issue, I do have one fairly large advantage here -- most software on Linux is already open source. So even if I break a huge number of programs, I can fix them again. For example: Microsoft cannot release a patch that would break Photoshop (for example; I know that's a stupid one), or if they do, they look like assholes. They would h
Most labels own the rights to their artists' music, which cuts down on the work you'd have to do significantly. Even where that isn't the case, it would seem like the existing venues for publishing music (magnatune, mindawn, jamendo, emusic, etc) could offer each artist the option to allow broadcasting.
Or, as others have said, nothing is stopping us from simply creating some massive library of music, which artists upload to and sign the appropriate contracts, to allow their stuff broadcast free over the Internet.
Let's not forget that most indie bands would LOVE to be famous via Internet radio, and would HATE to see it killed off by the greed of a few executives who they have no relation to at all.
So yes, Internet Radio will live, it will just become exclusively indie.
if the Sony DVD players perform according to the DVD standards and specs, not even Sony should recall their DVD players
However, they have claimed that they do not intend to change their copy protection scheme. So they either have to eat those words or be willing to refund their own DVD players.
With the current trend, I strongly suspect that they will try to have their cake and eat it, meaning they won't change those DVDs. The question is, what could a court force them to do?
What seems likely is that they will release a firmware update soon, and get away with this entirely. (Customers expect this kind of shit now.) As far as I'm concerned, if you're fixing a deliberate design flaw with a firmware update, you should be required to offer a refund, as well. I consider it to be a deliberate design flaw of either the DVDs or the players, and I'd like to give Sony a choice between offering refunds on all those DVDs and offering refunds on all the players -- not simply sending out a firmware update.
Get some friends to play, and add them to your friends list (if that's ever been fixed -- fscking Valve). Set up your own server, or find one which is typically filled with decent players who don't act like pre-teens, and bookmark that.
Or play games like Natural Selection, where the OMGSNIPERFAGZ do not stand a chance at actually learning the game, and get a mic (because you really do need a mic to play NS well).
Why should the DVD player makers take the DVD players back ? They work perfectly, after all; it's not their fault that Sony releases disks containing malformed data.
You'll recall that Sony makes some of these DVD players.
I'll let that sink in: Sony made the DVD players, and Sony made the DVDs. The DVDs do NOT work in the DVD players.
(If you've realized your mistake, you can stop reading here; the rest is just silly car analogies.)
Here's the key, here's the car. The car has public-key crypto in its lock system -- you must have a key with a microchip inside to turn it on -- and the particular kind of key you need hasn't shipped yet.
To continue the car analogies: if your local service station decides to fill the gas pumps with tap water to "prevent criminal use of the car" or some nonsense like that, should your cars manufacturer recall the car when it fails to work with a tank full of water ?
The analogy is going to break down here. It's going to be brutal and ugly, but here we go:
Let's say Ford owns my local gas station. Let's say they try to fuel me up with, say, hydrogen, because we're all supposed to be driving fuel-cell cars by now -- in fact, it's not just my car, but they've replaced ALL their pumps with hydrogen. And they tell me that I should have gotten an upgrade, should have replaced my internal combustion engine with a fuel cell and an electric motor.
So, of course, I ask them where I can get an upgrade. They tell me they don't have any working fuel cells, and, in fact, no one does, at least not for my car.
So tell me how this is not Ford's fault, again? Or, how is this not Sony's fault?
This is exactly what is meant by the term "Defective by Design."
I'm no GNU fanboy, and I do even like certain limited contexts of DRM (Steam), but this, right here, is fucking unacceptible. I don't care that it's two parts from two different places, they are selling a product which DOES NOT WORK.
Everyone seems to hate automotive analogies, but I do have to love them sometimes... Suppose you bought a car, and found the key didn't fit in the ignition? Isn't that fraud on their part? Never mind that they "might" give you a new key in a few months.
This is a case where there needs to be a recall. No fucking firmware update, you take their DVD players back, and you give them their money back.
At least half of them will probably say "Why would I want to do that?".
That depends.
First, the obvious ones. They own iPods, some own video iPods. Explain to them how DRM makes it illegal to put a DVD they bought onto their iPod. (Or PSP. Or cell phone.) Explain how this chip will make it not only illegal, but impossible.
Next, point to one DRM annoyance that everyone has experienced, at some point or another: You pop in a DVD, it immediately starts playing some previews, you hit "fastforward" or "next" or "menu", and it tells you "This button has been disabled by the disc."
The simplest way to demonstrate that is to put it on a computer -- on a Windows PC or a Mac -- and show VLC next to real DVD players. Show how with VLC, if you don't like the ad (especially those "you filthy pirate you" ads), you push "next", and it doesn't even ask if you're sure, it simply ignores what the disc wants you to do.
Now they're listening. So, now you can explain about region codes, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD blacklisting, this new anti-screenshot bullshit, and the Sony Rootkit."
Blacklisting is especially fun. Explain to them how, for no apparent reason, they might one day pop in a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD that would cause their player to self-destruct, or at least disable itself till you get an update. This will be hard for them to believe, but they will be listening now.
So, to the first approach, you might get a few "Why would I want to do that?" responses. To the second, they're going to get pissed, and they're going to care. And they're probably still going to buy exactly what they wanted to buy, but at least now they know about it, so when you have a reasonable alternative, they'll listen (emusic/mindawn/magnatune and un-DRM'd iTunes vs iTunes/napster/Zune)
Not blame MS? Heresy! (But seriously...)
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AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 2, Informative
How can the Blu-Ray consortium possibly hope to threaten Microsoft here?
I can understand PC manufacturers wanting this -- as someone else puts it, a nightmare for (say) HP might be "Only Dell computers can play Blu-Ray!"
And thus, if AMD supports it, and Intel doesn't, Dell will either buy AMD chips exclusively, or advertise their AMD offerings as being Blu-Ray compatible, while their Intel offerings aren't. Meaning that, in this sense, AMD has to support it for the same reason Dell does, except they don't even have to directly market this to consumers.
So, I can see hardware manufacturers rushing to support this, because they actually have competition. They could form a somewhat-illegal oligopoly by deciding to not support it -- neither Intel nor AMD -- but that buys them nothing. Whereas, if AMD supports this, and Intel/nVidia doesn't -- which seems likely -- then AMD could indirectly make money (through Dell selling AMD stuff as "Blu-Ray compatible").
I don't like it. Many here on Slashdot are fond of saying "Businesses exist to make money," as if that's an excuse here. AMD could certainly take a risk and simply develop the tech, but never sell it on a single chip until Intel does something similar.
But what does this have to do with Microsoft? With no competition, can't they just deliver a big "FUCK YOU" to the record labels and refuse to support this shit in their OS? At this point, it becomes irrelevant for AMD or any hardware manufacturer to try anything, as Windows won't support it. Without cooperation from Microsoft, it seems like it would be a lot harder to build a hardware/software platform on top of Windows designed to lock anything in.
So, what are they afraid of? "Fine, only MACS will support Blu-Ray!" Is that actually a threat? Linux would be even more laughable, here...
I mean, I can understand why they did it -- they cooperate with corporations, not individuals. Oh, and they want to make sure they get stuff for the Zune store, and there's really no reason for them not to...
Still, notice how Steve Jobs has managed to get EMI's stuff DRM-free. I'm sure if Microsoft even tried here... "Remove your DRM if you want this stuff to work on Windows."
The reason the distinction is gone is things switch too easily between them. NASA is an abbreviation that we've figured out that we can pronounce. WoW is similar -- the game patches are named WoW-someversion.exe, I believe -- and I never really thought of it as "wow" until people started pronouncing it everywhere.
My Calculus professor in college told me a story about this. I believe the story is about his father, but I'm not entirely sure about the details...
He worked on a railroad, doing something with boxcars. I believe the idea was to unscrew the doors and remove them... something like that. Anyway, one day, he figures out a new way of working, and does a day's worth of work in a few minutes. He takes it to his boss.
Boss: So how many of these can you do per day now? Foreman: How many do you need? Boss: Um... 10, 15?
I still don't remember what they were doing, except that it had something to do with boxcars. Point is, the boss was absolutely getting a good deal -- an order of magnitude more work done. At the same time, all of the workers get to do maybe an hour of work a day, and slack off the rest of the time.
I think there's a real trick here, though. You definitely want to reward those who work better, and most of the time, I'll happily trade a bonus or a raise for more leisure time. At the same time, you have to consider that we are accomplishing ridiculously more than we did before. Figuring out a clever way to work less and accomplish more is great, but if you let this continue, eventually you'll have a job where you walk in to work, push a button, get paid, and go home.
Every 5 developers needs a team leader, every couple of team leaders need analysts and project managers...
Or you could be like Google, and pretty much just say, "Here's your project, go." Or you could be like open source -- here's the projects you can be working on, just make sure you do some work while you're clocked in, and be on the mailing list with others in the same project.
It does not take a beaurocracy to manage a software project.
You just described Desktop Linux in maybe 1998. Maybe.
Linux is perfectly capable of doing everything I've seen a PalmOS device do. The ability to compile stuff yourself does not mean you have to.
You're trolling, and the only reason I've bothered to respond is, it is possible to have the situation you've described -- I've got a fairly customized Linux on my Jornada that is actually that bad. But things are MUCH better on the desktop now, and you won't even notice when the vendor supports it on a handheld, if they do it right.
Re:Nowhere else for Palm to go...
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Palm to go Linux
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· Score: 1
Or because Windows made x86 popular (rather than the other way around)?
Because Windows made x86 standard. Because the deal with IBM was that DOS and Windows could be sold separately, and could be run on "IBM compatible" machines.
Just look at Apple or Solaris for alternatives: You buy the computer and the OS as a unit, because each computer manufacturer is only going to bother to support their own OS (and vice versa, if there was even a difference). And you can't legally build an Apple-compatible machine and run Mac OS on it.
Whereas with IBM compatible, the hardware became a commodity. Any manufacturer could roll out an IBM-compatible PC, and it would run Windows. So we trade one monopoly (IBM, or whoever else would be there) for another (Microsoft).
Or, it could have gone another way -- just look at embedded devices today. You actually have some real competition here -- you've got Windows Mobile, Apple (iPod), Palm, Symbian (and various proprietary phones), and so on. What this means is some decent competition -- notice how Windows Mobile does not suck? Windows CE not only had to survive an environment where it had to run 24/7 (other than suspend) without crashing (in the Windows 98 era, I think?), but it actually had to compete with Palm and others.
The huge negative here is, there's a ludicrous amount of incompatible hardware -- you can't just load Linux on any of these, only on specific ones that people have ported it to, and God help you if you want Windows Mobile on anything not designed for it.
Which means that, say you want a third-party app -- you're going to get one designed for your specific phone, and probably through your phone's vendor or through your wireless service, and it's going to cost more than it should -- or they'll nickel and dime you to death, for $1-3 for the equivalent of a Flash game.
Compare this to the PC -- I don't have to worry about what will work on my PC, I just go buy a CPU, motherboard, bunch of hardware, slap it together into a computer, and when I'm done, Linux works, and Windows works. I can then go buy Linux/x86 software, or Windows/x86 software, and be sure it will work. Even Windows Mobile -- I can just go buy whatever Windows Mobile device has the interface I want, and then go download (or buy) a generic Windows Mobile app, and be confident it will work.
It's not even about processor architecture, and I think this proves that. There are ARM processors all over the place, but only the Windows Mobile stuff is at the point where you don't even have to think beyond "Oh, it's Windows Mobile, I can download VLC and it will work on that." Compare that with, say, a Video iPod -- "Hmm, I suppose it _might_ work, if someone's ported Linux to it, and compiled a VLC for it..."
See the difference?
I am sure that Linux would have happened, no matter what. I am also sure that Microsoft was directly responsible for the commoditizing of PC hardware (if that's even a word). It's pure speculation and wishful thinking to wonder if anyone else might've done it. I do wish it had been Linux, somehow, or something similarly open, because then we'd have open drivers for everything, and the platform would be fairly irrelevant, beyond (maybe) needing an x86 CPU. And, hell, I could wish we had LISP or SmallTalk everywhere, with apps so ludicrously portable that "cross-platform" or "portability" is the default at every level -- application, OS, driver, hardware.
But that didn't happen, and I don't really have any reason to believe it would have, if not for Microsoft.
It does not excuse the other things Microsoft did, and it's worth noting that even in doing something good for us, they're screwing someone else over -- in this case, IBM -- and for no motive other than their own profit. So understand, I have not suddenly become a drooling Microsoft fanboy.
But I have two machines now that cost less together than my last one did alone, each of which is somewhere between 2 and 25 times
Since when is it free? CS 1.6 may be free if you already have Half-Life, but it's far from free. Similarly, Source isn't even necessarily included in Half-Life 2, unless you get a decent bundle.
You should never have anything in your code that just keeps growing every time you run the code, unless you're keeping time or something...
Or you're simulating something which has the ability to just keep growing. It's not necessarily a memory leak if it's actually using that.
And by the way, if you are keeping time, note that we won't run into trouble for at least a few decades, by which point we'll all be on 64-bit, and it should be trivial to switch to a 64-bit integer for timekeeping.
It's saving this crap on the hard drive somewhere, and that's just damn sloppy.
Yeah, it's called saving a game. Notice how some shooters let you save the game whenever you want -- take Half-Life, you can save anytime you want, load up your game, and everything will be where you left it. You can walk back five levels and still find the bloodstains and bodies you left there.
What's damned sloppy is not that they have something growing, or that they are saving it. What's damned sloppy is that they don't seem to have a plan for when it gets too big. For instance, most shooters follow a general rule that anywhere you have something that respawns, all visual effects of that something should disappear either after a fixed amount of time, or there should be a maximum number of them.
Examples: Bullet holes where you have potentially infinite ammo. Crowbar in Half-Life 2 -- you can bang away on a wall and make interesting designs, but eventually, you'll make a new mark and the oldest one you made will disappear. Antlions -- just about any other monster will stay where you left it, but antlions do tend to fade after awhile, just play "Antlion Troopers" for a very graphic example of this.
But, I don't think they were sloppy to let that grow quite a lot -- even to the limit of, say, a 32-bit integer for the ids. I think that's actually a design feature, and a good one -- if they had a plan to keep it sane, as in, not running out of RAM, and what do you do when you actually run out of ids?
Slashdot Mirror
I always hear that playing in my head when I read things like that.
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
XHR != AJAX.
Yes, I realize it is what made the "Asynchronous" part possible. But I'm talking about the rest of it -- the DOM, the CSS, the XML, even the basic HTML.
You could punch someone hard enough, and in the right place -- I believe you can drive a bone from their nose up into their brain.
You could stab them in the throat. Doesn't even have to be a knife -- you could probably do it with a ballpoint pen.
You could run over them with a car. You could light their house on fire.
You could hit them with a blunt object. A baseball bat would probably be the simplest.
There are so many ways to kill people, or inflict violence in general.
The ability to inflict violence does not make you violent.
Seriously, if a minor quarrel could turn into a block-wide shootout, why don't they already turn into a block-wide bar fight? (And before you tell me it isn't as dangerous, go read over the above list. As far as I know, you don't need any kind of a license to learn a martial art...)
I know it's an old line, but guns don't kill. People do, and they don't need a gun to do it. And for that matter, you'll notice how in this instance, the guy systematically killed some 20-30 people -- he couldn't exactly have been shaking with anger if he was shooting that effectively.
Why do they pay people to come up with top 10 lists?
Why does Slashdot link to them?
I don't know, but I don't think I'd be as annoyed by them if I could get a cut. C'mon, people! I can write top 10 lists in my sleep! Hire me to do nothing all day... please?
So what?
Nothing is stopping Imus from, say, writing a book or making a DVD about how they really are all a bunch of nappy headed ho's, and whoever fired him is a fag, or whatever he wants to say.
It's still very much racist, moronic, and slanderous. So, he's allowed to say it, and they're certainly allowed to fire him for it.
It's quite different from someone calling for the deaths of Jews -- but on his own time, on his own website, not on CBS. See the difference?
Let me make it simple for you, then: Government censorship is NEVER acceptable. Censorship within an organization is a different matter entirely, especially when you are representing said organization.
You appear to be one of them.
In any case, why don't we define "nutjob"? And what does any of this have to do with these videos?
No one is asking you. I don't provide such material either.
There's a fine line, however, between simply not providing such material, and actively banning it.
Even if you're right, when did it become your job, or the government's, to remove useless videos or books?
I see absolutely no redeeming qualities in yet another Madonna song, ever. But it is Madonna's choice to create this crap, and other people's choice to consume it. It doesn't affect me, and I see no reason I should be stopping it.
Why search for obscure reasons? What if I'm just morbidly curious about their insanity? (Incidentally, I wouldn't even be thinking about this if I hadn't heard of the censorship. So, in censoring these videos, they've actually made me curious about them, and I have the means to get them.)
Unless I'm misunderstanding, these are censorship laws, which would make that illegal. No one would be stopping me from catching a plane to somewhere else and watching it there, but why should I have to?
Wait, what?
That's a bit like saying, "Nonviolence is all fine and dandy in the abstract, but when it comes to real life, sometimes you just gotta kill someone."
Alright, you have a better justification -- you want to stop terror. But have the balls to say what you want to say:
You are against freedom of speech.
If not, you had better take back your whole post right now. I am serious.
Now that we've cleared that up, maybe we can really talk.
You see, I don't agree with you, and I don't think you should say what you're saying. I really wish you would shut the fuck up, because someone might believe you.
But my ideals won't let me say that I wish someone would shut you up, or even that your post should be deleted from Slashdot. My ideals include free speech, which means that you have the right to say what you want to say, even if I don't agree with you.
That is what Free Speech means. Terrorists get to say what they want to say, even if you don't agree with them.
This is based on a fundamental faith in human intelligence. (Cue jokes about stupid people now...) It's also based on a fundamental faith in right and wrong. Essentially, my faith is that given two opinions, equally well expressed, an intelligent person will choose a right opinion over a wrong one.
It's not always so black and white, true, but you seem to believe it is, so this should work for you: A reasonably intelligent person, given the choice between terrorism or peace. Do you really, honestly think they would choose terrorism?
And if they would, then why are you so convinced that you're right?
Now: What about the stupid people? What about the nutjobs?
Well, you're right, there are insane people out there. Do you really think you will stop them from being insane by removing terrorist propaganda? Do you really think that terrorist propaganda is enough to turn a sane person into a crazy one?
Let me give you a more concrete example: My father would not let me see The Matrix when it came out. H
I care because for the most part, people do not use IE/Windows out of choice, they use it by default, even when there are better alternatives available.
I care because enough people do this that IE/Windows become a defacto standard. Before Firefox started gaining ground, many websites were coded to IE, not to standards -- and IE broke the standards. This affected me directly, because when I was using Mozilla (and early Phoenix builds, which was later renamed to Firefox), I would often run into websites designed only for IE, which would not work properly on other browsers, even when they followed the standards, assuming they let me in the door in the first place.
There are still entirely too many websites, even non-ActiveX ones, which will use browser detection and block you at the door if you're not using IE.
So, if you use IE, you're directly responsible for parts of the Web sucking for Firefox users, and that is one reason I look down on you.
Even now, websites designed for standards, which work flawlessly in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and many other browsers, continue to fail in IE, because IE does not support the standards properly. But since so many use IE, the standard user response is, "This website is broken." The standard way to deal with this is to spend several times as long developing your website (or web app) in order to ensure that it also works on IE.
Go talk to any serious web developer about the problems of supporting IE. When they tell you, understand that they are not exaggerating at all. It really is at least that bad. And that's just with existing standards; IE has been the most resistant when it comes to supporting actual new standards. (Adding their own does not count; Microsoft does not (or should not) dictate Web standards, that's what the w3c is for.
(And if they are using a toolkit, like Dojo or Google Web Toolkit, that just means the toolkit is doing the work for them. It also means that a very large portion of that toolkit had to be written to fix the problems Microsoft introduces with IE.)
Windows is another problem for another rant. But let me just give you one: Anti-virus software would not have to exist, were it not for Windows. Also, hardware manufacturers tend to write their drivers for Windows only, meaning Windows gets the credit for working on just about any hardware, without having to do any of the work. It also means that they tend to not release specifications, meaning Linux has to reverse-engineer these things.
So, you, as a Windows user, are directly contributing to my problems -- things like my wireless card not working, and the difficulty of finding a wireless card known to work with Linux.
That is why we look down on you. You are making the computing world a hell for anyone who doesn't make the same choices you do (Windows/IE). Microsoft may have made Windows/IE hell to work with, but you, without even realizing it, are making it more and more difficult to choose anything else.
Even if IE is crumbling, it's still big enough to hurt. Even 25% is still enough that a website would be stupid to block IE users at the door.
And as long as we can't just block IE users at the door, it makes it very hard to show you any of the cool stuff we might have done, had the Internet not been so crippled.
However, I will point to AJAX -- if Microsoft had its way, this would not have worked, or would have been IE-only. If you understand what's going on under the hood (CSS, the DOM, etc), you will understand that AJAX works in spite of the IE monopoly. It's not that MS didn't try to kill things like AJAX, it's that they tried and failed, largely due to the existence of things like Firefox.
Even if you're right (and you're not; see other posters), we shouldn't give up on America, and we shouldn't give up on China.
Because, if nothing else, it'll mean others may simply follow, as they've done before. America still does have some muscle in the international world.
Open source also reduces the risk of needing this kind of thing in the first place. And that is true regardless of whatever the current state of Linux vulnerabilities vs Windows vulnerabilities.
In closed source, for whatever reason, MS can't seem to release zero-day patches. That is, they discover the vulnerability, or someone reports it to them, and the patch still has to wait till Patch Tuesday. Only exception to this is if it becomes public in a big way, such as an exploit in the wild, and even then, you don't really know what they'll do.
So, once an exploit has been discovered, your suggestion is to distract the crackers until the fix itself is in the wild, and perhaps a good deal past that. (Remember, there are quite a few groups which simply grab the latest patches, figure out what they do, and go exploit everyone who hasn't patched themselves yet.)
In open source, we do generally keep ourselves up to date. Or at least, anyone who is technically-minded enough to be using Linux in the first place will be able to tell their distro to update. The package manager helps here, too, as everything is automatically updated, not just whatever happened to be included in Microsoft Update or bothered to write their own update system.
So, the only question becomes, how fast can it be fixed, not what you do afterwards. One argument is that "many eyes make all bugs shallow" or however that's said -- once a vulnerability is known, there will be tons of people looking for the solution. But it goes deeper than that.
You'd probably be discovering the vulnerability by looking at the source code, meaning that whoever discovers the vulnerability should be able to see a solution right away. Buffer overflows are a great example here: If you can see a buffer overflow in the code, you can almost certainly see the solution right away. Send in a tiny patch, and it's fixed before anyone had a chance to know there was something wrong.
And it goes farther than that, too: What about that person who initially discovers the bug? Suppose it's me, and suppose that I also know how to fix it, given the source. What do I do with it?
Well, with Windows, I can tell Microsoft about it, and it may be fixed, someday. Or I can try to fix it myself -- not easy without source code, perhaps entirely beyond my abilities. And if I do fix it myself, what's my incentive to release it to the world? I don't particularly like Microsoft anyway, but why am I doing their work for them?
At this point, it would make much more sense to me to simply exploit it. Start my own botnet, get rich off of it, etc.
Now, suppose it's a problem with Linux. I can report it, but the instant I do, my report is fairly public -- this means they cannot just sit on it and hope the problem goes away. It also means that all kinds of other people are now in the same situation I am -- we know about the problem, and we have the source, so we may be able to fix it.
Or, I could sit on it till I have a patch. This is something that's really impossible to do with closed source, unless you happen to work at Microsoft (or whichever company has said source). In this case, I am the only person who knows about the vulnerability until there's already a patch available.
It seems to me that, unless I'm already a "black hat", I'm much less likely to become one if I can actually do something about a security flaw other than exploit it. After all, don't I want my own systems to be secure, at least?
What if it takes me some time to come up with a fix? What about backwards compatibility? If this is even close to being an issue, I do have one fairly large advantage here -- most software on Linux is already open source. So even if I break a huge number of programs, I can fix them again. For example: Microsoft cannot release a patch that would break Photoshop (for example; I know that's a stupid one), or if they do, they look like assholes. They would h
Most labels own the rights to their artists' music, which cuts down on the work you'd have to do significantly. Even where that isn't the case, it would seem like the existing venues for publishing music (magnatune, mindawn, jamendo, emusic, etc) could offer each artist the option to allow broadcasting.
Or, as others have said, nothing is stopping us from simply creating some massive library of music, which artists upload to and sign the appropriate contracts, to allow their stuff broadcast free over the Internet.
Let's not forget that most indie bands would LOVE to be famous via Internet radio, and would HATE to see it killed off by the greed of a few executives who they have no relation to at all.
So yes, Internet Radio will live, it will just become exclusively indie.
However, they have claimed that they do not intend to change their copy protection scheme. So they either have to eat those words or be willing to refund their own DVD players.
With the current trend, I strongly suspect that they will try to have their cake and eat it, meaning they won't change those DVDs. The question is, what could a court force them to do?
What seems likely is that they will release a firmware update soon, and get away with this entirely. (Customers expect this kind of shit now.) As far as I'm concerned, if you're fixing a deliberate design flaw with a firmware update, you should be required to offer a refund, as well. I consider it to be a deliberate design flaw of either the DVDs or the players, and I'd like to give Sony a choice between offering refunds on all those DVDs and offering refunds on all the players -- not simply sending out a firmware update.
Get some friends to play, and add them to your friends list (if that's ever been fixed -- fscking Valve). Set up your own server, or find one which is typically filled with decent players who don't act like pre-teens, and bookmark that.
Or play games like Natural Selection, where the OMGSNIPERFAGZ do not stand a chance at actually learning the game, and get a mic (because you really do need a mic to play NS well).
You'll recall that Sony makes some of these DVD players.
I'll let that sink in: Sony made the DVD players, and Sony made the DVDs. The DVDs do NOT work in the DVD players.
(If you've realized your mistake, you can stop reading here; the rest is just silly car analogies.)
Here's the key, here's the car. The car has public-key crypto in its lock system -- you must have a key with a microchip inside to turn it on -- and the particular kind of key you need hasn't shipped yet.
The analogy is going to break down here. It's going to be brutal and ugly, but here we go:
Let's say Ford owns my local gas station. Let's say they try to fuel me up with, say, hydrogen, because we're all supposed to be driving fuel-cell cars by now -- in fact, it's not just my car, but they've replaced ALL their pumps with hydrogen. And they tell me that I should have gotten an upgrade, should have replaced my internal combustion engine with a fuel cell and an electric motor.
So, of course, I ask them where I can get an upgrade. They tell me they don't have any working fuel cells, and, in fact, no one does, at least not for my car.
So tell me how this is not Ford's fault, again? Or, how is this not Sony's fault?
This is exactly what is meant by the term "Defective by Design."
I'm no GNU fanboy, and I do even like certain limited contexts of DRM (Steam), but this, right here, is fucking unacceptible. I don't care that it's two parts from two different places, they are selling a product which DOES NOT WORK.
Everyone seems to hate automotive analogies, but I do have to love them sometimes... Suppose you bought a car, and found the key didn't fit in the ignition? Isn't that fraud on their part? Never mind that they "might" give you a new key in a few months.
This is a case where there needs to be a recall. No fucking firmware update, you take their DVD players back, and you give them their money back.
Or yes, sue them. Class-action...
I'm dreaming, I know, but I'm also pissed.
WE SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWING THIS TO HAPPEN.
That depends.
First, the obvious ones. They own iPods, some own video iPods. Explain to them how DRM makes it illegal to put a DVD they bought onto their iPod. (Or PSP. Or cell phone.) Explain how this chip will make it not only illegal, but impossible.
Next, point to one DRM annoyance that everyone has experienced, at some point or another: You pop in a DVD, it immediately starts playing some previews, you hit "fastforward" or "next" or "menu", and it tells you "This button has been disabled by the disc."
The simplest way to demonstrate that is to put it on a computer -- on a Windows PC or a Mac -- and show VLC next to real DVD players. Show how with VLC, if you don't like the ad (especially those "you filthy pirate you" ads), you push "next", and it doesn't even ask if you're sure, it simply ignores what the disc wants you to do.
Now they're listening. So, now you can explain about region codes, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD blacklisting, this new anti-screenshot bullshit, and the Sony Rootkit."
Blacklisting is especially fun. Explain to them how, for no apparent reason, they might one day pop in a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD that would cause their player to self-destruct, or at least disable itself till you get an update. This will be hard for them to believe, but they will be listening now.
So, to the first approach, you might get a few "Why would I want to do that?" responses. To the second, they're going to get pissed, and they're going to care. And they're probably still going to buy exactly what they wanted to buy, but at least now they know about it, so when you have a reasonable alternative, they'll listen (emusic/mindawn/magnatune and un-DRM'd iTunes vs iTunes/napster/Zune)
How can the Blu-Ray consortium possibly hope to threaten Microsoft here?
I can understand PC manufacturers wanting this -- as someone else puts it, a nightmare for (say) HP might be "Only Dell computers can play Blu-Ray!"
And thus, if AMD supports it, and Intel doesn't, Dell will either buy AMD chips exclusively, or advertise their AMD offerings as being Blu-Ray compatible, while their Intel offerings aren't. Meaning that, in this sense, AMD has to support it for the same reason Dell does, except they don't even have to directly market this to consumers.
So, I can see hardware manufacturers rushing to support this, because they actually have competition. They could form a somewhat-illegal oligopoly by deciding to not support it -- neither Intel nor AMD -- but that buys them nothing. Whereas, if AMD supports this, and Intel/nVidia doesn't -- which seems likely -- then AMD could indirectly make money (through Dell selling AMD stuff as "Blu-Ray compatible").
I don't like it. Many here on Slashdot are fond of saying "Businesses exist to make money," as if that's an excuse here. AMD could certainly take a risk and simply develop the tech, but never sell it on a single chip until Intel does something similar.
But what does this have to do with Microsoft? With no competition, can't they just deliver a big "FUCK YOU" to the record labels and refuse to support this shit in their OS? At this point, it becomes irrelevant for AMD or any hardware manufacturer to try anything, as Windows won't support it. Without cooperation from Microsoft, it seems like it would be a lot harder to build a hardware/software platform on top of Windows designed to lock anything in.
So, what are they afraid of? "Fine, only MACS will support Blu-Ray!" Is that actually a threat? Linux would be even more laughable, here...
I mean, I can understand why they did it -- they cooperate with corporations, not individuals. Oh, and they want to make sure they get stuff for the Zune store, and there's really no reason for them not to...
Still, notice how Steve Jobs has managed to get EMI's stuff DRM-free. I'm sure if Microsoft even tried here... "Remove your DRM if you want this stuff to work on Windows."
The reason the distinction is gone is things switch too easily between them. NASA is an abbreviation that we've figured out that we can pronounce. WoW is similar -- the game patches are named WoW-someversion.exe, I believe -- and I never really thought of it as "wow" until people started pronouncing it everywhere.
My Calculus professor in college told me a story about this. I believe the story is about his father, but I'm not entirely sure about the details...
He worked on a railroad, doing something with boxcars. I believe the idea was to unscrew the doors and remove them... something like that. Anyway, one day, he figures out a new way of working, and does a day's worth of work in a few minutes. He takes it to his boss.
Boss: So how many of these can you do per day now?
Foreman: How many do you need?
Boss: Um... 10, 15?
I still don't remember what they were doing, except that it had something to do with boxcars. Point is, the boss was absolutely getting a good deal -- an order of magnitude more work done. At the same time, all of the workers get to do maybe an hour of work a day, and slack off the rest of the time.
I think there's a real trick here, though. You definitely want to reward those who work better, and most of the time, I'll happily trade a bonus or a raise for more leisure time. At the same time, you have to consider that we are accomplishing ridiculously more than we did before. Figuring out a clever way to work less and accomplish more is great, but if you let this continue, eventually you'll have a job where you walk in to work, push a button, get paid, and go home.
Or you could be like Google, and pretty much just say, "Here's your project, go." Or you could be like open source -- here's the projects you can be working on, just make sure you do some work while you're clocked in, and be on the mailing list with others in the same project.
It does not take a beaurocracy to manage a software project.
You just described Desktop Linux in maybe 1998. Maybe.
Linux is perfectly capable of doing everything I've seen a PalmOS device do. The ability to compile stuff yourself does not mean you have to.
You're trolling, and the only reason I've bothered to respond is, it is possible to have the situation you've described -- I've got a fairly customized Linux on my Jornada that is actually that bad. But things are MUCH better on the desktop now, and you won't even notice when the vendor supports it on a handheld, if they do it right.
Because Windows made x86 standard. Because the deal with IBM was that DOS and Windows could be sold separately, and could be run on "IBM compatible" machines.
Just look at Apple or Solaris for alternatives: You buy the computer and the OS as a unit, because each computer manufacturer is only going to bother to support their own OS (and vice versa, if there was even a difference). And you can't legally build an Apple-compatible machine and run Mac OS on it.
Whereas with IBM compatible, the hardware became a commodity. Any manufacturer could roll out an IBM-compatible PC, and it would run Windows. So we trade one monopoly (IBM, or whoever else would be there) for another (Microsoft).
Or, it could have gone another way -- just look at embedded devices today. You actually have some real competition here -- you've got Windows Mobile, Apple (iPod), Palm, Symbian (and various proprietary phones), and so on. What this means is some decent competition -- notice how Windows Mobile does not suck? Windows CE not only had to survive an environment where it had to run 24/7 (other than suspend) without crashing (in the Windows 98 era, I think?), but it actually had to compete with Palm and others.
The huge negative here is, there's a ludicrous amount of incompatible hardware -- you can't just load Linux on any of these, only on specific ones that people have ported it to, and God help you if you want Windows Mobile on anything not designed for it.
Which means that, say you want a third-party app -- you're going to get one designed for your specific phone, and probably through your phone's vendor or through your wireless service, and it's going to cost more than it should -- or they'll nickel and dime you to death, for $1-3 for the equivalent of a Flash game.
Compare this to the PC -- I don't have to worry about what will work on my PC, I just go buy a CPU, motherboard, bunch of hardware, slap it together into a computer, and when I'm done, Linux works, and Windows works. I can then go buy Linux/x86 software, or Windows/x86 software, and be sure it will work. Even Windows Mobile -- I can just go buy whatever Windows Mobile device has the interface I want, and then go download (or buy) a generic Windows Mobile app, and be confident it will work.
It's not even about processor architecture, and I think this proves that. There are ARM processors all over the place, but only the Windows Mobile stuff is at the point where you don't even have to think beyond "Oh, it's Windows Mobile, I can download VLC and it will work on that." Compare that with, say, a Video iPod -- "Hmm, I suppose it _might_ work, if someone's ported Linux to it, and compiled a VLC for it..."
See the difference?
I am sure that Linux would have happened, no matter what. I am also sure that Microsoft was directly responsible for the commoditizing of PC hardware (if that's even a word). It's pure speculation and wishful thinking to wonder if anyone else might've done it. I do wish it had been Linux, somehow, or something similarly open, because then we'd have open drivers for everything, and the platform would be fairly irrelevant, beyond (maybe) needing an x86 CPU. And, hell, I could wish we had LISP or SmallTalk everywhere, with apps so ludicrously portable that "cross-platform" or "portability" is the default at every level -- application, OS, driver, hardware.
But that didn't happen, and I don't really have any reason to believe it would have, if not for Microsoft.
It does not excuse the other things Microsoft did, and it's worth noting that even in doing something good for us, they're screwing someone else over -- in this case, IBM -- and for no motive other than their own profit. So understand, I have not suddenly become a drooling Microsoft fanboy.
But I have two machines now that cost less together than my last one did alone, each of which is somewhere between 2 and 25 times
Since when is it free? CS 1.6 may be free if you already have Half-Life, but it's far from free. Similarly, Source isn't even necessarily included in Half-Life 2, unless you get a decent bundle.
Or you're simulating something which has the ability to just keep growing. It's not necessarily a memory leak if it's actually using that.
And by the way, if you are keeping time, note that we won't run into trouble for at least a few decades, by which point we'll all be on 64-bit, and it should be trivial to switch to a 64-bit integer for timekeeping.
Yeah, it's called saving a game. Notice how some shooters let you save the game whenever you want -- take Half-Life, you can save anytime you want, load up your game, and everything will be where you left it. You can walk back five levels and still find the bloodstains and bodies you left there.
What's damned sloppy is not that they have something growing, or that they are saving it. What's damned sloppy is that they don't seem to have a plan for when it gets too big. For instance, most shooters follow a general rule that anywhere you have something that respawns, all visual effects of that something should disappear either after a fixed amount of time, or there should be a maximum number of them.
Examples: Bullet holes where you have potentially infinite ammo. Crowbar in Half-Life 2 -- you can bang away on a wall and make interesting designs, but eventually, you'll make a new mark and the oldest one you made will disappear. Antlions -- just about any other monster will stay where you left it, but antlions do tend to fade after awhile, just play "Antlion Troopers" for a very graphic example of this.
But, I don't think they were sloppy to let that grow quite a lot -- even to the limit of, say, a 32-bit integer for the ids. I think that's actually a design feature, and a good one -- if they had a plan to keep it sane, as in, not running out of RAM, and what do you do when you actually run out of ids?
There are plenty of ways to implement DRM, with or without OS support, with or without hardware support. Or you could turn off DRM altogether.
In fact, why doesn't Microsoft do that? They're certainly in more a position to deliver a big "fuck you" to the recording industry than Steve Jobs is.