If I ever get this game I'm supposedly working on off the ground, it will be primarily Linux. The Windows and Mac versions will come with big fat "unsupported" warnings. But that's because I'm just stubborn enough to do it that way, not because I think it'll make me rich.
However, since I've joined the workforce, I've had less time for playing games, and I've decided that there are enough good games that I can make work on Cedega, or natively on Linux, that I can afford to refuse to buy anything that forces me to boot Windows. In a couple of years, when most other gamers (even the cautious ones) will be running Vista, I'll probably be nuking my (legit) XP partition and using Linux entirely.
If the limited selection ever really starts to bug me, I'll buy a Wii. But I will not buy Vista.
I should probably reply to the documentation, but I just wanted to make something clear.
I can't speak to the other person you're replying to, but I never said it was a tinfoil hat conspiracy. I just think this is an odd place to fight for it. The other parts of Trusted Computing do not in any way require a hard drive implementing crypto in hardware. Nor does said hard drive in any way make said Trusted Computing more difficult to break.
Reacting this way strikes me as kind of like abstaining from using PGP because cryptographic signatures could be used to implement DRM -- or, conversely, refusing to use the GPLv3 because you think it'll prevent you from using PGP signatures as an optional security check on your software's integrity. Rest assured, I have no intention of using such a hard drive unless I can, given the password, dump the entire contents of the drive, unencrypted, to another similarly-sized disk.
In a way, you're right -- I suppose I shouldn't have assumed that capability.
Pipelining is: You send a bunch of requests, the server sends a bunch of responses. This is good because it reduces round-trips -- you can send requests without waiting for the replies, making it very useful over high-latency connections. It must send the responses in exactly the order you requested them.
This is potentially bad, because it means a 5k gif can be queued behind a 200k SWF, and there's nothing anyone can do about it once they're queued up like that. The right approach is to use multiple connections -- there may be a bunch of round trips, but most likely, at least one of your connections will be busy, so your pipe stays saturated, and more importantly, things appear to load faster that way -- the smaller parts of the page will all be done quickly, even if someone sticks a 2 meg jpeg in the middle.
The downside of multiple connections is the overhead in opening them -- but if BitTorrent can work, so can this. It might be a harder hit on the server side, though. The other nice thing about pipelining is persistence -- you send your huge batch'o'requests through the same pipe, instead of sending a request, getting a reply, then opening a brand new connection for a new request. But, you can do persistence without pipelining -- open a connection for every file you need (up to your arbitrary browser-defined limits), then as files finish downloading, re-use the existing connections, only closing them when you don't need any more files.
Now, it's possible that some web servers might do better with pipelining, and certainly there are servers that won't do persistence any other way. Pipelining a single connection is easier on the server than handling a dozen connections. But if you both can handle it, disabling pipelining is the way to go.
I wish I could find the place I read this (last night), but I can't. I believe it's linked to off of Opera's explanation page, but I don't remember what that is, either.
I pay for Cedega, or will again, once I get some financial issues sorted out. (My own incompetence when it comes to managing my finances -- I can certainly afford it, if I can make my damned PayPal account work.)
I was actually being generous, as much as I hope Cedega can at least be cheaper. I strongly suspect it will cost MUCH more than it would for a copy of Windows, and there's no way they can keep up with Vista. Vista has DirectX 10; Cedega is only mostly compatible with DirectX 9. Vista has 64-bit; while Cedega can run on amd64, it does not run 64-bit Windows executables, and is itself a 32-bit Linux executable. I, personally, will be rebooting to a legit copy of XP for some years to come, until I get sick of all the Windows games I own -- I'm not buying any more unless they run on Linux.
But I play games like Nexus TK, which runs quite nicely in a Cedeega window. I love the windowed mode -- my 1024x768 Nexus window leaves some room on my 1600x1200 desktop for things like IM, notes, even a web browser.
RTFA. It's new because it is a specific attack that's just been discovered. If you still don't think it's new, look up the word "specific" in a dictionary and see if you can figure it out. Hint: No one is claiming that it's a new kind of attack.
Any attack worth its salt disables the firewall first thing.
The hell it does. Are you sure you know what a firewall is?
Most attacks these days would completely ignore the firewall, and look for a way around it. Once inside, the only point to disabling the firewall would be to send spam, I guess, and the smarter ones would, again, attempt to go around it, so that a sneaky admin would still see their firewall supposedly working, and wouldn't see any suspicious rules to allow that particular app to connect.
In fact, I can't really think of any firewall-disabling attacks that make any sense. Even if we're talking about a big, corporate firewall, disabling it would be downright retarded -- the admin will be onto you in a heartbeat, and if it's any kind of decent firewall and you have the kind of access it takes to disable it, you almost certainly already have a tunnel as far in as you can go.
(Note: Almost. I can imagine some strange networks and situations where you'd be right, but you're still wrong, because we're talking about a single attack on a single Windows computer.)
Now, this attack is actually new and of a somewhat rare kind -- it disables the Windows firewall, which means it could potentially allow other attacks. It's amazing how stupid it is -- this attack should not work -- but it is not, by itself, a real danger.
Saying this is news is like telling people AIDs is linked to death.
I think you meant to say "AIDS". AIDS is not the plural of AID. AIDS stands for Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS is singular.
Also, AIDS does not necessarily cause death. It just weakens your immune system ridiculously. Think of it like playing Halo without a shield, if such a thing was possible. People with AIDS have to be insanely cautious in order to simply stay alive, and to prevent spreading the virus to others, but it's entirely possible to live with AIDS.
So, basically, you're entirely wrong in every single thing you said. That's impressive! That's an accomplishment!
Please, try to understand the difference between "encryption" and "DRM" before you post. I agree with you absolutely, but hard drive crypto is a good thing which has been around for years, and trusted computing does not need a Seagate drive in order to work.
If this works the way I think it does, it'll be entirely OS-agnostic. That means you can run a fully open Linux or BSD on it. If not, oh well -- Linux already has drive encryption in software.
There's Cedega. Remains to be seen whether Cedega is actually significantly more expenisve than a decent copy of Vista.
There's also the fact that Microsoft generates lots of noise for DirectX 10, but there's no marketing engine driving OpenGL. Maybe because when OpenGL 2.0 is properly implemented by Nvidia/ATI, we'll just quietly do an "apt-get dist-upgrade" and be on our way.
As far as I can tell, the only parts of DirectX 9.0c that aren't covered by OpenGL (on the same hardware) are things like sound, keyboard, etc -- you know, the kind of things that are handled by SDL.
What bugs the hell out of me is that we're even still having this discussion. OpenGL has been around for years. It's been able to do everything DirectX has -- for years. Why do people still even write a fucking Hello World for DirectX, let alone a game?
MPEG2 and MPEG4 are not usable for the reasons I mentioned before: users can't/won't download the software to play them;
I know mpeg4 is supported by QuickTime. I believe it's also supported by recent versions of Windows Media Player, and I'm sure mpeg2 would be.
and software patents prevent free software implementation of players from being usable.
I believe mencoder can create mpeg2 streams.
Now you have the correct solution. Unfortunately, extra efford = extra expense, and no PHB will see the additional expense as justified given the incredibly small fraction of the market that we represent.
YouTube is itself a hell of a lot of extra effort. So is Google Video. All that's needed is a script to encode to both WMV and QuickTime, or whatever two formats you pick. Or just one, if you only need Windows users to have the convenience.
So can I, but only because I use i386. This solution is useless for everyone else.
Probably most people, true. I use amd64, and I hate having to switch to a 32-bit browser so Flash will work, but Java won't, and fonts look like crap. (Even if Java is incredibly unstable on amd64 Firefox.) However, when there's an embedded WMV, I can download it easily (DownloadEmbedded extension) and play it with a 32-bit mplayer -- if and only if my 64-bit mplayer won't work (due to ffmpeg issues you mentioned).
So in summary, it is not annoying at all for Windows users; I can't speak for Mac users, but anyone who uses Firefox(tm) will get the plugin downloaded for them automatically.
Only on Windows. I don't know about OS X, but I believe it just uses the version that came preloaded, which already works in Safari.
So in summary, it is not annoying at all for Windows users;
You missed my point. It's annoying as hell that Adobe is in bed with everyone and Flash is absolutely everywhere, but the actual standards -- even mpeg2 (used in DVDs, right?) -- aren't everywhere. It's annoying as hell that I have to sit through nonstandard Flash crap because people can't get their standard stuff together -- or because major OS vendors would rather play nice with Adobe than use an established standard. This is not what the Internet is supposed to be about. If it was, we wouldn't be browsing HTML pages, we'd be browsing Word docs.
You are missing my point. The fact is that content producers see this as a feature of Flash, not a defect!
It's a feature of Flash that your content will be pirated, but only by experts? That this will limit its distribution (no one's allowed to watch it on a set top box, etc), that users won't be able to go fullscreen, or even get close and have decent antialiasing, just to make it so Average Joe can't pirate, when he wouldn't be able to anyway? (DownloadEmbedded isn't for everyone.) That only the REALLY determined people, who feel like spending $20 on something to unpack the Flash files, will be able to pirate Ask a Ninja?
My point is, I know content producers see this as a feature, and they're shortsighted and stupid for doing so. DRM is a feature only when it is done so unobtrusively that people forget it's there -- and even then, it's ineffective and stupid. Here, it makes it a real pain, but not at all impossible, to extract the video stream -- especially when the only reason I want to extract it is to play it fullscreen, at a reasonable level of quality, in mplayer, xine, or VLC.
As it is, Flash is absolutely the worst at absolutely everything it does, except for the nagging little fact that it's well supported everywhere. But to me, that's "well supported" in roughly the same way that IE is "well supported" -- IE is preinstalled most everywhere, so just support IE and you're done, who cares about web standards?
So make it mpeg2 or mpeg4. Duh. By the way: Flash also looks like crap, but it also performs like crap, and makes things difficult (and crappy-looking and performing) to try to view the video fullscreen.
If it is in a Microsoft format, people who aren't on Windows can't view it.
I can view any WMV format on my Linux, it's just a question of whether or not I need the DLL. I only need the DLL for WMV9. OS X users have a nifty program called Flip4Mac, but ffmpeg has had support for older WMV formats for a long time.
If it is in a Real Player or Quicktime format, people who aren't on Windows or the Mac OS can't view it.
Real Player sucks, always, of coures. But Quicktime has been well supported by various opensource libraries for as long as I can remember trying, so it works just fine on Linux. Bonus for OS X users -- they already have QuickTime.
Additionally, Real and Quicktime require your users to go to the effort of finding and installing the appropriate player software. Most can't be bothered.
This is just annoying as hell, because the same thing would be true for Flash if Microsoft hadn't included it recently. But seriously, if YouTube was all simple AVIs or MOVs encoded in h.264? Everyone would be rushing to download VLC, QuickTime, and the like.
In any case, you could always do what people have always done: Host two versions of the file, one Windows Media, one QuickTime. That way, everyone on a "user friendly" OS has a player installed by default that can handle it. And you can always use mpeg anyway.
Also, all the above formats are patent-encumbered.
I believe you can find free software to create files readable as most, if not all, of the above formats.
In addition it makes it impossible for non-experts to keep a copy of the movie, which makes it attractive to content publishers.
And what, pray tell, is the point of that? Anyone can save the SWF and upload it to another site, even if it still says "YouTube" on it. As for restricting piracy to experts only, we know how well that's worked in the past -- that's why only experts pirate movies -- oh wait.
In their eyes, the fact that those who don't use 32 bit Windows, the 32 bit Mac OS, or i386 GNU/Linux, can't view the content is but a small price to pay.
I can always view the content, and it's always a pain in the ass. Even if I was exclusively 32-bit Windows, I'd prefer a format that I can save a copy of, play fullscreen, etc. And of course, there's this:
On another note: anyone read the EULA for this Flash player?
There are so many formats that don't come with EULAs.
For one thing, it can just as easily use rsync to transfer files as its own protocol.
You may be right, but the fact that I don't see any mention of it except in Slashdot comments suggests that they didn't know about it, or dismissed it out of hand, not that they were attempting to write a replacement for it (even if they did). In fact, I'd imagine that if they were going to roll their own stuff anyway, it might be easier to write a cfengine wrapper than an rsync wrapper.
Yes, good ones do. Bad ones cost less than game-graphic cinematics. Just use whatever hi-res models you made for box art anyway, or even use the in-game graphics, but since you have an "ass-full" of space, there's no reason to use the game graphics. In fact, it makes it easier, since you no longer have to watch your polygon count.
But more relevantly, I wonder what issues people really are running into with respect to load time? Last I checked, no one will wait longer to load a scene than it takes to play it, barring a few hideous monstorsities like Enter the Matrix. In fact, most load times are ludicrously fast compared to play time, especially on my desktop computer.
So, to what extent could you avoid this problem by doing progressive loading? (And not duplicating your shared resources.) Basically, have your unskippable branding cinematics at the beginning also load your initial game scene, so you should be able to get right into the game. Maybe wait a bit more when first starting. But not as long as it would take to load a full "level", even without seeking, and no more loading screens the rest of the game.
The PS2 was fast enough to do this for some of the best looking games it had. The attention to detail in games like Prince of Persia was fantastic, and Jak 3 didn't look too bad, either. Both of them could be played through, from beginning to end, with a grand total of maybe two loading screens. Is the PS3 drive fast enough to do the same thing for games with piles of HD content?
"I see nothing wrong with having non-interactive, full HD sequences as part of the game," he said. "That's all part of the production value and the experience that you get when you buy the game. I don't see that as a weakness at all."
I have no problem with them filling up the disc with HD content, unless we're talking about games that would've fit into 8 gigs without prerendered cutscenes. Then: Problem.
I keep coming back to Jak 2 and 3 for the PS2 -- beautifully rendered cutscenes, but not a single one prerendered.
What they're describing there is like Debian's apt-get, or BSD's portage (also incorporated in Gentoo).
Gentoo is not Ports. Ports is not Gentoo. Gentoo is inspired by BSD's ports, which is why the Gentoo package manager is named portage. But there are huge differences.
Last I checked, Ports was primarily a distribution system. Portage is a full-fledged package manager that happens to use source packages, and happens to have a file called "make.conf".
Each of those technologies I listed are most commonly used to install packages from a common central repository over the internet (per distro). But, each of them can be configured to retrieve and install packages from a localized server.
True, and they mention this. Gentoo's probably the closest, but their main motivation for rolling their own is to be able to go into a filesystem and tweak it, instead of having to tweak, build an RPM (or Deb, or whatever), download that to the target machine, etc etc.
It's also simultaneously a like cfengine, which is used to manage configurations. That is, it's not just for packages, but also for app configurations. That is, if your webserver goes down, hard, you can bring a new one up in an hour, 100% automated, and it will be configured the exact same way as the old one. If you need to add a new webserver to the cluster, same process. Want to change the config on a webserver? Test it on a local machine, then put the new httpd.conf on the Slack server, and watch all the frontend machines download it.
Personally, I think they should've at least looked into cfengine, but APT alone is not enough. Saying APT could do it is like saying you can write a webserver in assembly -- yes, you can, but why would you want to?
Have you? GPLv3 restricts specific loopholes in GPLv2. That's all.
Er, yeah. Which is exactly the point. You're just defining it as 'restricting loopholes' rather than accepting the changes as indications of exactly what the OP is discussing.
The only changes I'm aware of that are controversial at all are the tivoization clause. Now, many people are claiming that tivoization should be allowed, and that the GPLv2 is perfectly fine as it stands. There is also a group of people who believes that the BSD license is fine as it stands. But tivoization is rightly a loophole, because the spirit of the GPL, as expressed by the FSF, has always been that users should be able to do whatever they want to their software.
Source code was not simply seen as something to learn from -- look, but don't touch -- but as something to work with, to improve upon. The whole free software movement starts with Stallman being pissed at a broken printer driver. He could've easily fixed it, he'd done it before with the last printer, but this time, they refused to give him the source code.
Stallman would've been equally as pissed if he was trying to fix printer firmware and there was no way to flash a modified version from anywhere except the manufacturer, or if there was no way to flash it, period.
You may disagree with these motivations, but if you (or OP) think this is a new thing, you need to read some history. These are loopholes. To not see them as such means you should be looking for a license other than GPLv2. GPLv2 was always designed to do what GPLv3 is attempting, they just didn't anticipate the tivoisation loophole, or the web services loophole.
If someone writes a suicide note and it is only a draft, is it magically 'irrelevant' in determining whether or not the person is suicidal? No.
That's a whole other issue. Most people I know have had suicidal thoughts at one point in their life.
The GPLv3 is relevant because the current draft indicates exactly what the OP is discussing (in particular, the intentions/philosophy of the FSF et al.). So it is irrelevant that it is still only a draft.
So why does Microsoft get a free pass with Vista? "But it's only a beta!!!!!one" No.
Most sane discussions I've seen about the GPLv3 suggest that nobody minds forcing Tivo to allow people to flash their DVRs. What people really care about is some usage they see as legitimate, which the GPLv3, as written, might restrict. I'd suggest that these people get in on the discussion -- since it is just a draft after all -- and see if it can be changed to allow that, or if it really is being intentionally left out.
For instance: One of the most common misconceptions is that Ubuntu could no longer sign its packages. This may have been an unintentional side effect of some early drafts, but now it's clear -- Ubuntu can do this, because you, as a user, are allowed to ignore the signature, or sign it yourself and force your Ubuntu install to recognize your signature. The signature is still good for security, because you may decide to accept it, but it's not forced down your throat, the way it is on most proprietary systems.
As far as I'm concerned, it's far too easy to give up on the GPL. If you care that much about it, go join the lists, discuss it, improve it.
Yes, good. Will anybody know anything about OD in 200 years' time?
Probably. Every aspect of it, including zip (used as a container), is documented in plaintext and HTML. I don't know about HTML, but I suspect ASCII (or UTF-8) will still be around in 200 years. And while language does change over time, civil war buffs and ren-fairs are living proof that there will be historians who learn enough historical context to grok technical documentation.
We'll need format migration as well (keeping the original datastreams too).
So here, are we talking about, for instance, from WordPerfect to Word? Again, that's the purpose of OpenDocument.
We run into the same problems with HTML, with some websites which only work with IE 4 or Netscape 3.5 or somesuch. Because HTML is an open standard, and because it's somewhat human-readable, and because of a number of decisions made at launch, you may not be able to perfectly preserve the look'n'feel of a poorly designed website, but you can usually preserve the content. A well-designed website might simply continue to work.
So while I'm sure HTML will have changed a lot over 100 years, if it's even still around at all, I fully expect the content itself to survive. If I can read it in lynx, I should be able to read it in 100 years.
How do you trigger and handle media migration?
I'm not sure quite what you mean here, I was following you up to this point. At first glance I read that as "medium migration", but that can't be right.
Do you intend to deliver the object with the same 'look and feel' as it was originally intended (think applications).
Maybe, probably not. I recognize that there's historical value in this, but my primary concern would be selecting what we wish to archive and preserve. So, think library, not museum. Thus, I have no problem with allowing updated widgets, for instance -- if I'm preserving an app, it's likely because I need it to access some content that hasn't been migrated. (If the app is still useful, I'd rather maintain it, not preserve it.)
Do you have the right to preserve any enviroment which may be necessary to access the datastream at all? Will they even work if you do have the right?
Often, yes and yes. Not always. For instance, if I wanted to preserve a copy of Windows, exactly as it is today, I could put it on a virtual machine and take a snapshot -- except in the case of Vista, I believe this is legal, and I know it will work so long as an x86 emulator is maintained.
However, it becomes fuzzy if we're talking about something like SNES games. There are plenty of SNES emulators, the trouble is getting the ROMs in some legal way. But as far as I can tell, the environment is almost always legal to preserve.
Anyway, I'm just speculating here, you've probably thought about this in a lot more depth.
What about DRM?
I circumvent it when I can, boycott when I can't. I consider the DMCA to be invalid, and this is a form of civil disobedience for me. We, as a society, will lose a huge chunk of history unless we learn our lesson here.
But again, my concern is always to preserve what people want preserved. The movie studios apparently don't care, so fuck 'em, they can handle their own archives. Same with games -- as sad as it is, Half-Life 2 will probably no longer work in 200 years, even if the original Half-Life might, but Doom and Quake are likely to live forever, as id has GPL'd all the old versions, so DRM is no longer an issue.
I don't think you're being arrogant - Digital Preservation isn't a major issue for most people, but it should be for us all.
I know I'm being arrogant, not that I often apologize for it. Saying it's not a major issue for me is one thing, borderline accusing it of being a bogus field is quite another.
You appear to believe that keeping the bits alive is all there is to digital preservation. Your bits are meaningless without the means to access the content expressed by those bits.
Standard formats. OpenDocument is a good thing, too.
Hmm - yes, all these information professionals and computer scientists can now throw in the towel and say "oh, yes, keep more than one copy on a bunch of different servers! That's all there is to it! Thank goodness for SanityInAnarchy, his statue shall adorn the Library of Congress".
Yes, that's the usual response I get for making arrogant statements like that. I used to think that database design was easy, and I still do, but I eventually learned why there are some database design professionals who actually are justified for their insanely high paychecks, because of their ability to denormalize just enough to squeeze enough performance out of a database to make it scale to where it's needed. Any idiot can normalize completely, any idiot can denormalize badly, but it takes a genius to balance perfect normalization against performance and sanity, especially given the kind of scale they work at.
On the other hand, I'm still convinced that GeekSquad has no reason for existing anymore, and I think you'll agree with me that any idiot could do what GeekSquad does for people, and it might actually be less risky to teach people to use their own antispyware/antivirus than to drop it at Best Buy. In any case, Geek Squad is overpriced at the very least.
You haven't bothered to say much to convince me that your field is of the first type, and not the second. Certainly, even in the case of database professionals, you don't always need to hire a database genius, depending on the scale of you're project. I'll freely admit that I could be entirely wrong, and of course, this is just some random Slashdot post, so you should feel no obligation to spend much time setting me right. But that is why I'm being arrogant here.
Common misconception. If anything, Reiser3 has more problems with this than ext3, they just aren't called "inodes".
The difference is, you can run out of whatever-they're-called -- and it is a truly technical distinction -- without ANY advance warning. At least with ext3, you can plan for it, and add more inodes if needed.
I've actually had VERY good luck recovering data from a Reiser4 filesystem. There's even a decent undelete feature, enabling me to recover from the equivalent of "rm -rf/" (don't ask), so that's not such a huge deal for me. But as far as the inode issue goes, you'll be much better off with Reiser4 -- as far as I know, it actually is designed the way you suggest -- it will run out of disk space before it runs out of potential files ("inodes" or whatever it calls them).
While we're playing the ancedote game, I've had at least as many fscks under ext3 (yes 3, not 2) as under reiser4, not counting my overclocked system. But my overclocked system isn't stable anyway.
...is that if people want to add clickwraps, they're going to whether the GPL allows it or not.
Question: What can we do to them if the GPL does not allow it?
but from what I've read recently, Stallman's position on commercial software in any form seems to have changed to one of opposition.
Source?
If the GPL was really a license all developers wanted,
then it would be the fucking Grail. Are we through here?
When did anyone ever claim the GPL is what all developers want? I certainly never claimed Firefox is what every thinking web user should want. Konqueror and Opera are doing pretty well.
This is yet another logical inconsistency inherent in referring to this license as free.
In what way is the language not free?
I am not interested in hearing a regurgitation of Stallman's "total freedom devolves into feudalism," line...primarily because said line is utter bullshit.
Care to explain BSD?
This can be proven by the number of projects which have managed to survive and function well with non-copyleft licenses
You know, I can't think of one. Honestly, I can't. All of the major open source projects I can think of are under something that at least attempts copyleft -- if they do allow people to close up the software, they only allow a single organization that privilege.
Or are you referring to software that is more restrictive?
or did until some of them caved to pressure from Stallman to "harmonise" their own licenses with the GPL
I'm curious about this one. But certainly, if they "caved", wouldn't that imply it was something the develpers wanted? Or does Stallman wield some sort of pressure against small projects that I don't know about?
The bottom line is that for as long as the GPL legislates downstream use, it will continue to be violated, because legislation of downstream use (for good *or* bad) is not in accordance with the greater balance of human desire. It might be something which a certain number of people are willing to tolerate, and which a Marxist minority actively want, but it isn't something that the majority want.
Oh, do tell, what does the majority want?
Of course, believe otherwise if you want...but you might notice contrary evidence continues piling up.
Out of curiosity, what evidence? Gentoo seems to have 15,144 packages distributed under the GPL, which would seem very much to suggest that this is something that the majority of open source developers want. In fact, I checked -- 61% of Gentoo packages are GPLv2. I can run a check on other licenses, but I'd guess at around 70 or 80% are copyleft-inspired.
Do the FSF currently endorse that which you really want?
Yes. Or at least, close enough.
Besides, it never had to. RMS was always of the opinion that all software should be free and GPL'd. When someone mentioned games, he said that it made sense for the game data to be under a very stringent license, so long as the code itself was open. I would agree somewhat -- I would very much like to see this happen with singleplayer games, and more older games. But I believe at least keeping the code closed provides a stumbling block for would-be cheaters. Not much more, but a stumbling block is really all we need, because how many people want to cheat badly enough to actually do the code? Most cheaters are by nature lazy assholes. So, in a multiplayer game, the code must be kept closed if it is possible to cheat on the client side -- it may yet be possible to make an MMO for which this is not true.
I feel pretty strongly about that, and about the right of anyone to close their source if they want. But I don't have to agree with Stallman personally, or with gnu.org. I
Actually, this is one huge benefit of well-known licenses like the GPL: They are well-known. Gentoo keeps a repository of all licenses for all packages in/usr/portage/licenses, which, as of yesterday, has 859 files. That's kind of insane, really, but I imagine the Windows world is worse -- anyway, a significant number of packages are GPL, LGPL, or BSD. If, for some strange reason, Gentoo ran into a problem of requiring a lot more people clicking "yes" (right now we only have to do this for certain binary packages, like doom3), adding an "agree always" button would be very helpful. So, for instance, "Always accept GPLv2" means that from then on, the system would not bother to ask.
So, this means that you can actually reasonably expect a user to read through the entire license, without requiring a laywer on call for simple installation/updates.
This can really only work in the opensource world, however. We give our licenses names, and they stay the same -- there's no "subject to change without notice" clause. Most proprietary stuff has its own unique license, which is almost never good. The only exception I've found is the ut2004 demo license, which is less than two pages on an 80x24 terminal, and appears to have been written by a programmer and verified by a lawyer, not the other way around -- it's actually human-readable, even teenager-readable. Compare that to the common corporate world -- every program has its own license, even if they're all derived from the same source, each one has its own subtle differences.
In fact, I wouldn't consider actually attempting to read one without keeping a CVS repository of them, and reading through diffs instead of trying to read a whole license.
But really, I'd like to put meaning back to the "I agree" button. Cut down on the sheer number of licenses, have an agree once/always button, and throw in some summaries in the style of Creative Commons.
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Anyone care to give me a quick summary of what the "shared source" license means in this case? MS has never used particularly liberal licenses.
If I ever get this game I'm supposedly working on off the ground, it will be primarily Linux. The Windows and Mac versions will come with big fat "unsupported" warnings. But that's because I'm just stubborn enough to do it that way, not because I think it'll make me rich.
Still, it's nice to hear.
However, since I've joined the workforce, I've had less time for playing games, and I've decided that there are enough good games that I can make work on Cedega, or natively on Linux, that I can afford to refuse to buy anything that forces me to boot Windows. In a couple of years, when most other gamers (even the cautious ones) will be running Vista, I'll probably be nuking my (legit) XP partition and using Linux entirely.
If the limited selection ever really starts to bug me, I'll buy a Wii. But I will not buy Vista.
I should probably reply to the documentation, but I just wanted to make something clear.
I can't speak to the other person you're replying to, but I never said it was a tinfoil hat conspiracy. I just think this is an odd place to fight for it. The other parts of Trusted Computing do not in any way require a hard drive implementing crypto in hardware. Nor does said hard drive in any way make said Trusted Computing more difficult to break.
Reacting this way strikes me as kind of like abstaining from using PGP because cryptographic signatures could be used to implement DRM -- or, conversely, refusing to use the GPLv3 because you think it'll prevent you from using PGP signatures as an optional security check on your software's integrity. Rest assured, I have no intention of using such a hard drive unless I can, given the password, dump the entire contents of the drive, unencrypted, to another similarly-sized disk.
In a way, you're right -- I suppose I shouldn't have assumed that capability.
Pipelining is: You send a bunch of requests, the server sends a bunch of responses. This is good because it reduces round-trips -- you can send requests without waiting for the replies, making it very useful over high-latency connections. It must send the responses in exactly the order you requested them.
This is potentially bad, because it means a 5k gif can be queued behind a 200k SWF, and there's nothing anyone can do about it once they're queued up like that. The right approach is to use multiple connections -- there may be a bunch of round trips, but most likely, at least one of your connections will be busy, so your pipe stays saturated, and more importantly, things appear to load faster that way -- the smaller parts of the page will all be done quickly, even if someone sticks a 2 meg jpeg in the middle.
The downside of multiple connections is the overhead in opening them -- but if BitTorrent can work, so can this. It might be a harder hit on the server side, though. The other nice thing about pipelining is persistence -- you send your huge batch'o'requests through the same pipe, instead of sending a request, getting a reply, then opening a brand new connection for a new request. But, you can do persistence without pipelining -- open a connection for every file you need (up to your arbitrary browser-defined limits), then as files finish downloading, re-use the existing connections, only closing them when you don't need any more files.
Now, it's possible that some web servers might do better with pipelining, and certainly there are servers that won't do persistence any other way. Pipelining a single connection is easier on the server than handling a dozen connections. But if you both can handle it, disabling pipelining is the way to go.
I wish I could find the place I read this (last night), but I can't. I believe it's linked to off of Opera's explanation page, but I don't remember what that is, either.
I pay for Cedega, or will again, once I get some financial issues sorted out. (My own incompetence when it comes to managing my finances -- I can certainly afford it, if I can make my damned PayPal account work.)
I was actually being generous, as much as I hope Cedega can at least be cheaper. I strongly suspect it will cost MUCH more than it would for a copy of Windows, and there's no way they can keep up with Vista. Vista has DirectX 10; Cedega is only mostly compatible with DirectX 9. Vista has 64-bit; while Cedega can run on amd64, it does not run 64-bit Windows executables, and is itself a 32-bit Linux executable. I, personally, will be rebooting to a legit copy of XP for some years to come, until I get sick of all the Windows games I own -- I'm not buying any more unless they run on Linux.
But I play games like Nexus TK, which runs quite nicely in a Cedeega window. I love the windowed mode -- my 1024x768 Nexus window leaves some room on my 1600x1200 desktop for things like IM, notes, even a web browser.
RTFA. It's new because it is a specific attack that's just been discovered. If you still don't think it's new, look up the word "specific" in a dictionary and see if you can figure it out. Hint: No one is claiming that it's a new kind of attack.
The hell it does. Are you sure you know what a firewall is?
Most attacks these days would completely ignore the firewall, and look for a way around it. Once inside, the only point to disabling the firewall would be to send spam, I guess, and the smarter ones would, again, attempt to go around it, so that a sneaky admin would still see their firewall supposedly working, and wouldn't see any suspicious rules to allow that particular app to connect.
In fact, I can't really think of any firewall-disabling attacks that make any sense. Even if we're talking about a big, corporate firewall, disabling it would be downright retarded -- the admin will be onto you in a heartbeat, and if it's any kind of decent firewall and you have the kind of access it takes to disable it, you almost certainly already have a tunnel as far in as you can go.
(Note: Almost. I can imagine some strange networks and situations where you'd be right, but you're still wrong, because we're talking about a single attack on a single Windows computer.)
Now, this attack is actually new and of a somewhat rare kind -- it disables the Windows firewall, which means it could potentially allow other attacks. It's amazing how stupid it is -- this attack should not work -- but it is not, by itself, a real danger.
I think you meant to say "AIDS". AIDS is not the plural of AID. AIDS stands for Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS is singular.
Also, AIDS does not necessarily cause death. It just weakens your immune system ridiculously. Think of it like playing Halo without a shield, if such a thing was possible. People with AIDS have to be insanely cautious in order to simply stay alive, and to prevent spreading the virus to others, but it's entirely possible to live with AIDS.
So, basically, you're entirely wrong in every single thing you said. That's impressive! That's an accomplishment!
Please, try to understand the difference between "encryption" and "DRM" before you post. I agree with you absolutely, but hard drive crypto is a good thing which has been around for years, and trusted computing does not need a Seagate drive in order to work.
If this works the way I think it does, it'll be entirely OS-agnostic. That means you can run a fully open Linux or BSD on it. If not, oh well -- Linux already has drive encryption in software.
There's Cedega. Remains to be seen whether Cedega is actually significantly more expenisve than a decent copy of Vista.
There's also the fact that Microsoft generates lots of noise for DirectX 10, but there's no marketing engine driving OpenGL. Maybe because when OpenGL 2.0 is properly implemented by Nvidia/ATI, we'll just quietly do an "apt-get dist-upgrade" and be on our way.
As far as I can tell, the only parts of DirectX 9.0c that aren't covered by OpenGL (on the same hardware) are things like sound, keyboard, etc -- you know, the kind of things that are handled by SDL.
What bugs the hell out of me is that we're even still having this discussion. OpenGL has been around for years. It's been able to do everything DirectX has -- for years. Why do people still even write a fucking Hello World for DirectX, let alone a game?
I always wonder why it's off by default. IE I can understand -- they still don't support XHTML -- but Firefox?
I know mpeg4 is supported by QuickTime. I believe it's also supported by recent versions of Windows Media Player, and I'm sure mpeg2 would be.
I believe mencoder can create mpeg2 streams.
YouTube is itself a hell of a lot of extra effort. So is Google Video. All that's needed is a script to encode to both WMV and QuickTime, or whatever two formats you pick. Or just one, if you only need Windows users to have the convenience.
Probably most people, true. I use amd64, and I hate having to switch to a 32-bit browser so Flash will work, but Java won't, and fonts look like crap. (Even if Java is incredibly unstable on amd64 Firefox.) However, when there's an embedded WMV, I can download it easily (DownloadEmbedded extension) and play it with a 32-bit mplayer -- if and only if my 64-bit mplayer won't work (due to ffmpeg issues you mentioned).
Only on Windows. I don't know about OS X, but I believe it just uses the version that came preloaded, which already works in Safari.
You missed my point. It's annoying as hell that Adobe is in bed with everyone and Flash is absolutely everywhere, but the actual standards -- even mpeg2 (used in DVDs, right?) -- aren't everywhere. It's annoying as hell that I have to sit through nonstandard Flash crap because people can't get their standard stuff together -- or because major OS vendors would rather play nice with Adobe than use an established standard. This is not what the Internet is supposed to be about. If it was, we wouldn't be browsing HTML pages, we'd be browsing Word docs.
It's a feature of Flash that your content will be pirated, but only by experts? That this will limit its distribution (no one's allowed to watch it on a set top box, etc), that users won't be able to go fullscreen, or even get close and have decent antialiasing, just to make it so Average Joe can't pirate, when he wouldn't be able to anyway? (DownloadEmbedded isn't for everyone.) That only the REALLY determined people, who feel like spending $20 on something to unpack the Flash files, will be able to pirate Ask a Ninja?
My point is, I know content producers see this as a feature, and they're shortsighted and stupid for doing so. DRM is a feature only when it is done so unobtrusively that people forget it's there -- and even then, it's ineffective and stupid. Here, it makes it a real pain, but not at all impossible, to extract the video stream -- especially when the only reason I want to extract it is to play it fullscreen, at a reasonable level of quality, in mplayer, xine, or VLC.
As it is, Flash is absolutely the worst at absolutely everything it does, except for the nagging little fact that it's well supported everywhere. But to me, that's "well supported" in roughly the same way that IE is "well supported" -- IE is preinstalled most everywhere, so just support IE and you're done, who cares about web standards?
Bastards. Google, too.
So make it mpeg2 or mpeg4. Duh. By the way: Flash also looks like crap, but it also performs like crap, and makes things difficult (and crappy-looking and performing) to try to view the video fullscreen.
I can view any WMV format on my Linux, it's just a question of whether or not I need the DLL. I only need the DLL for WMV9. OS X users have a nifty program called Flip4Mac, but ffmpeg has had support for older WMV formats for a long time.
Real Player sucks, always, of coures. But Quicktime has been well supported by various opensource libraries for as long as I can remember trying, so it works just fine on Linux. Bonus for OS X users -- they already have QuickTime.
This is just annoying as hell, because the same thing would be true for Flash if Microsoft hadn't included it recently. But seriously, if YouTube was all simple AVIs or MOVs encoded in h.264? Everyone would be rushing to download VLC, QuickTime, and the like.
In any case, you could always do what people have always done: Host two versions of the file, one Windows Media, one QuickTime. That way, everyone on a "user friendly" OS has a player installed by default that can handle it. And you can always use mpeg anyway.
I believe you can find free software to create files readable as most, if not all, of the above formats.
And what, pray tell, is the point of that? Anyone can save the SWF and upload it to another site, even if it still says "YouTube" on it. As for restricting piracy to experts only, we know how well that's worked in the past -- that's why only experts pirate movies -- oh wait.
I can always view the content, and it's always a pain in the ass. Even if I was exclusively 32-bit Windows, I'd prefer a format that I can save a copy of, play fullscreen, etc. And of course, there's this:
There are so many formats that don't come with EULAs.
I actually wouldn't mind an older Flash version, if it meant I didn't have to constantly be closing 64-bit Firefox and opening a 32-bit one.
Maybe. It didn't look that hard to me.
For one thing, it can just as easily use rsync to transfer files as its own protocol.
You may be right, but the fact that I don't see any mention of it except in Slashdot comments suggests that they didn't know about it, or dismissed it out of hand, not that they were attempting to write a replacement for it (even if they did). In fact, I'd imagine that if they were going to roll their own stuff anyway, it might be easier to write a cfengine wrapper than an rsync wrapper.
First of all:
Yes, good ones do. Bad ones cost less than game-graphic cinematics. Just use whatever hi-res models you made for box art anyway, or even use the in-game graphics, but since you have an "ass-full" of space, there's no reason to use the game graphics. In fact, it makes it easier, since you no longer have to watch your polygon count.
But more relevantly, I wonder what issues people really are running into with respect to load time? Last I checked, no one will wait longer to load a scene than it takes to play it, barring a few hideous monstorsities like Enter the Matrix. In fact, most load times are ludicrously fast compared to play time, especially on my desktop computer.
So, to what extent could you avoid this problem by doing progressive loading? (And not duplicating your shared resources.) Basically, have your unskippable branding cinematics at the beginning also load your initial game scene, so you should be able to get right into the game. Maybe wait a bit more when first starting. But not as long as it would take to load a full "level", even without seeking, and no more loading screens the rest of the game.
The PS2 was fast enough to do this for some of the best looking games it had. The attention to detail in games like Prince of Persia was fantastic, and Jak 3 didn't look too bad, either. Both of them could be played through, from beginning to end, with a grand total of maybe two loading screens. Is the PS3 drive fast enough to do the same thing for games with piles of HD content?
Of course:
I have no problem with them filling up the disc with HD content, unless we're talking about games that would've fit into 8 gigs without prerendered cutscenes. Then: Problem.
I keep coming back to Jak 2 and 3 for the PS2 -- beautifully rendered cutscenes, but not a single one prerendered.
Gentoo is not Ports. Ports is not Gentoo. Gentoo is inspired by BSD's ports, which is why the Gentoo package manager is named portage. But there are huge differences.
Last I checked, Ports was primarily a distribution system. Portage is a full-fledged package manager that happens to use source packages, and happens to have a file called "make.conf".
True, and they mention this. Gentoo's probably the closest, but their main motivation for rolling their own is to be able to go into a filesystem and tweak it, instead of having to tweak, build an RPM (or Deb, or whatever), download that to the target machine, etc etc.
It's also simultaneously a like cfengine, which is used to manage configurations. That is, it's not just for packages, but also for app configurations. That is, if your webserver goes down, hard, you can bring a new one up in an hour, 100% automated, and it will be configured the exact same way as the old one. If you need to add a new webserver to the cluster, same process. Want to change the config on a webserver? Test it on a local machine, then put the new httpd.conf on the Slack server, and watch all the frontend machines download it.
Personally, I think they should've at least looked into cfengine, but APT alone is not enough. Saying APT could do it is like saying you can write a webserver in assembly -- yes, you can, but why would you want to?
The only changes I'm aware of that are controversial at all are the tivoization clause. Now, many people are claiming that tivoization should be allowed, and that the GPLv2 is perfectly fine as it stands. There is also a group of people who believes that the BSD license is fine as it stands. But tivoization is rightly a loophole, because the spirit of the GPL, as expressed by the FSF, has always been that users should be able to do whatever they want to their software.
Source code was not simply seen as something to learn from -- look, but don't touch -- but as something to work with, to improve upon. The whole free software movement starts with Stallman being pissed at a broken printer driver. He could've easily fixed it, he'd done it before with the last printer, but this time, they refused to give him the source code.
Stallman would've been equally as pissed if he was trying to fix printer firmware and there was no way to flash a modified version from anywhere except the manufacturer, or if there was no way to flash it, period.
You may disagree with these motivations, but if you (or OP) think this is a new thing, you need to read some history. These are loopholes. To not see them as such means you should be looking for a license other than GPLv2. GPLv2 was always designed to do what GPLv3 is attempting, they just didn't anticipate the tivoisation loophole, or the web services loophole.
That's a whole other issue. Most people I know have had suicidal thoughts at one point in their life.
So why does Microsoft get a free pass with Vista? "But it's only a beta!!!!!one" No.
Most sane discussions I've seen about the GPLv3 suggest that nobody minds forcing Tivo to allow people to flash their DVRs. What people really care about is some usage they see as legitimate, which the GPLv3, as written, might restrict. I'd suggest that these people get in on the discussion -- since it is just a draft after all -- and see if it can be changed to allow that, or if it really is being intentionally left out.
For instance: One of the most common misconceptions is that Ubuntu could no longer sign its packages. This may have been an unintentional side effect of some early drafts, but now it's clear -- Ubuntu can do this, because you, as a user, are allowed to ignore the signature, or sign it yourself and force your Ubuntu install to recognize your signature. The signature is still good for security, because you may decide to accept it, but it's not forced down your throat, the way it is on most proprietary systems.
As far as I'm concerned, it's far too easy to give up on the GPL. If you care that much about it, go join the lists, discuss it, improve it.
Probably. Every aspect of it, including zip (used as a container), is documented in plaintext and HTML. I don't know about HTML, but I suspect ASCII (or UTF-8) will still be around in 200 years. And while language does change over time, civil war buffs and ren-fairs are living proof that there will be historians who learn enough historical context to grok technical documentation.
So here, are we talking about, for instance, from WordPerfect to Word? Again, that's the purpose of OpenDocument.
We run into the same problems with HTML, with some websites which only work with IE 4 or Netscape 3.5 or somesuch. Because HTML is an open standard, and because it's somewhat human-readable, and because of a number of decisions made at launch, you may not be able to perfectly preserve the look'n'feel of a poorly designed website, but you can usually preserve the content. A well-designed website might simply continue to work.
So while I'm sure HTML will have changed a lot over 100 years, if it's even still around at all, I fully expect the content itself to survive. If I can read it in lynx, I should be able to read it in 100 years.
I'm not sure quite what you mean here, I was following you up to this point. At first glance I read that as "medium migration", but that can't be right.
Maybe, probably not. I recognize that there's historical value in this, but my primary concern would be selecting what we wish to archive and preserve. So, think library, not museum. Thus, I have no problem with allowing updated widgets, for instance -- if I'm preserving an app, it's likely because I need it to access some content that hasn't been migrated. (If the app is still useful, I'd rather maintain it, not preserve it.)
Often, yes and yes. Not always. For instance, if I wanted to preserve a copy of Windows, exactly as it is today, I could put it on a virtual machine and take a snapshot -- except in the case of Vista, I believe this is legal, and I know it will work so long as an x86 emulator is maintained.
However, it becomes fuzzy if we're talking about something like SNES games. There are plenty of SNES emulators, the trouble is getting the ROMs in some legal way. But as far as I can tell, the environment is almost always legal to preserve.
Anyway, I'm just speculating here, you've probably thought about this in a lot more depth.
I circumvent it when I can, boycott when I can't. I consider the DMCA to be invalid, and this is a form of civil disobedience for me. We, as a society, will lose a huge chunk of history unless we learn our lesson here.
But again, my concern is always to preserve what people want preserved. The movie studios apparently don't care, so fuck 'em, they can handle their own archives. Same with games -- as sad as it is, Half-Life 2 will probably no longer work in 200 years, even if the original Half-Life might, but Doom and Quake are likely to live forever, as id has GPL'd all the old versions, so DRM is no longer an issue.
I know I'm being arrogant, not that I often apologize for it. Saying it's not a major issue for me is one thing, borderline accusing it of being a bogus field is quite another.
Standard formats. OpenDocument is a good thing, too.
Yes, that's the usual response I get for making arrogant statements like that. I used to think that database design was easy, and I still do, but I eventually learned why there are some database design professionals who actually are justified for their insanely high paychecks, because of their ability to denormalize just enough to squeeze enough performance out of a database to make it scale to where it's needed. Any idiot can normalize completely, any idiot can denormalize badly, but it takes a genius to balance perfect normalization against performance and sanity, especially given the kind of scale they work at.
On the other hand, I'm still convinced that GeekSquad has no reason for existing anymore, and I think you'll agree with me that any idiot could do what GeekSquad does for people, and it might actually be less risky to teach people to use their own antispyware/antivirus than to drop it at Best Buy. In any case, Geek Squad is overpriced at the very least.
You haven't bothered to say much to convince me that your field is of the first type, and not the second. Certainly, even in the case of database professionals, you don't always need to hire a database genius, depending on the scale of you're project. I'll freely admit that I could be entirely wrong, and of course, this is just some random Slashdot post, so you should feel no obligation to spend much time setting me right. But that is why I'm being arrogant here.
Common misconception. If anything, Reiser3 has more problems with this than ext3, they just aren't called "inodes".
The difference is, you can run out of whatever-they're-called -- and it is a truly technical distinction -- without ANY advance warning. At least with ext3, you can plan for it, and add more inodes if needed.
I've actually had VERY good luck recovering data from a Reiser4 filesystem. There's even a decent undelete feature, enabling me to recover from the equivalent of "rm -rf /" (don't ask), so that's not such a huge deal for me. But as far as the inode issue goes, you'll be much better off with Reiser4 -- as far as I know, it actually is designed the way you suggest -- it will run out of disk space before it runs out of potential files ("inodes" or whatever it calls them).
While we're playing the ancedote game, I've had at least as many fscks under ext3 (yes 3, not 2) as under reiser4, not counting my overclocked system. But my overclocked system isn't stable anyway.
Question: What can we do to them if the GPL does not allow it?
Source?
then it would be the fucking Grail. Are we through here?
When did anyone ever claim the GPL is what all developers want? I certainly never claimed Firefox is what every thinking web user should want. Konqueror and Opera are doing pretty well.
In what way is the language not free?
Care to explain BSD?
You know, I can't think of one. Honestly, I can't. All of the major open source projects I can think of are under something that at least attempts copyleft -- if they do allow people to close up the software, they only allow a single organization that privilege.
Or are you referring to software that is more restrictive?
I'm curious about this one. But certainly, if they "caved", wouldn't that imply it was something the develpers wanted? Or does Stallman wield some sort of pressure against small projects that I don't know about?
Oh, do tell, what does the majority want?
Out of curiosity, what evidence? Gentoo seems to have 15,144 packages distributed under the GPL, which would seem very much to suggest that this is something that the majority of open source developers want. In fact, I checked -- 61% of Gentoo packages are GPLv2. I can run a check on other licenses, but I'd guess at around 70 or 80% are copyleft-inspired.
Yes. Or at least, close enough.
Besides, it never had to. RMS was always of the opinion that all software should be free and GPL'd. When someone mentioned games, he said that it made sense for the game data to be under a very stringent license, so long as the code itself was open. I would agree somewhat -- I would very much like to see this happen with singleplayer games, and more older games. But I believe at least keeping the code closed provides a stumbling block for would-be cheaters. Not much more, but a stumbling block is really all we need, because how many people want to cheat badly enough to actually do the code? Most cheaters are by nature lazy assholes. So, in a multiplayer game, the code must be kept closed if it is possible to cheat on the client side -- it may yet be possible to make an MMO for which this is not true.
I feel pretty strongly about that, and about the right of anyone to close their source if they want. But I don't have to agree with Stallman personally, or with gnu.org. I
Have you? GPLv3 restricts specific loopholes in GPLv2. That's all.
In any case, it's as irrelevant as Vista right now. Neither of them exist. There is no GPLv3, there is only a GPLv3 draft.
Actually, this is one huge benefit of well-known licenses like the GPL: They are well-known. Gentoo keeps a repository of all licenses for all packages in /usr/portage/licenses, which, as of yesterday, has 859 files. That's kind of insane, really, but I imagine the Windows world is worse -- anyway, a significant number of packages are GPL, LGPL, or BSD. If, for some strange reason, Gentoo ran into a problem of requiring a lot more people clicking "yes" (right now we only have to do this for certain binary packages, like doom3), adding an "agree always" button would be very helpful. So, for instance, "Always accept GPLv2" means that from then on, the system would not bother to ask.
So, this means that you can actually reasonably expect a user to read through the entire license, without requiring a laywer on call for simple installation/updates.
This can really only work in the opensource world, however. We give our licenses names, and they stay the same -- there's no "subject to change without notice" clause. Most proprietary stuff has its own unique license, which is almost never good. The only exception I've found is the ut2004 demo license, which is less than two pages on an 80x24 terminal, and appears to have been written by a programmer and verified by a lawyer, not the other way around -- it's actually human-readable, even teenager-readable. Compare that to the common corporate world -- every program has its own license, even if they're all derived from the same source, each one has its own subtle differences.
In fact, I wouldn't consider actually attempting to read one without keeping a CVS repository of them, and reading through diffs instead of trying to read a whole license.
But really, I'd like to put meaning back to the "I agree" button. Cut down on the sheer number of licenses, have an agree once/always button, and throw in some summaries in the style of Creative Commons.