Maybe because if it's legal to copy CD's, and becomes even easier form a technical standpoint (which is already the case), they'll make significantly fewer sales, because many more people will be happy with copies (which are bit-for-bit identical to the original...). Fewer sales mean they need to increase the price, which means fewer sales again. It's a vicious circle, where you end up with the first guy paying the entire price for one CD.
Yes, that's a bit of an exaggeration. And yes, I know the labels don't pay artists enough, etc., etc... The destruction of copyright won't solve that problem though, it'll only make it worse. It would probably make it worse for consumers too, because what they can't do via copyright, they can always do via contract.
The fact is, content-creators need to be compensated for the work they do. Copyright helps to ensure that that happens. Unfortunately, middle-men like the record labels, RIAA, MPAA, etc., muddy the waters by collecting the money from consumers, but not giving nearly enough to the artists who originally produced the works. Removing copyright won't fix this, but altering copyright might. If it was impossible for artists to lose their copyright, even by contract, then the middle-men would make sure they treat their artists fairly, or the artists would take their work and go elsewhere. But we would still need copyright. Perhaps people like you would also be less cavalier about flouting copyrights, because then you'd be directly hurting the artist in the process.
Let me ask you this: if you bought the CD directly from the artist, and the artist asked you not to distribute copies, would you have a problem with that? Why or why not?
Every corporation is eminently predictable. The guiding force of every corporation, Napster included, is the desire to make money.
That's an over generalization. First, the obvious counterexample: non-profit corporations. There are also "for-profit" corporations that don't put profit first and only. They tend to be smaller businesses though, and are always (or almost always) private (ie: not on the stock market).
What you say is probably true for most publicly traded for-profit corporations though.
And how do VCs compare to "Angel Investors". Supposably Angels are supposed to be nicer, but why?
VCs invest in start-ups because that's their business. Angels do it because they feel like it. Angels are typically guys who made a lot of money, and want to get involved with some hot start-ups for kicks. VCs, on the other hand, are concerned with profit alone, so they want as big a percentage as possible, for as little money as possible.
In other words, Angels don't have profit as their only motivation, so they tend to be a bit nicer.
In other words, Google does not cache images. They do however modify the HTML, so that (provided the images are still there) the images will show up in the cached page. This is similar to the way mediators (like this one) will often still show the correct images, but the images aren't going through their server. Your browser is still getting it from the original source.
Incidently, that's why when a site gets removed from the original server, but is still in Google's cache, the images are often busted in the cached page.
GoogIe.com is also taken... watch out for them fake searches. (actually, it looks nothing like Google, and the name is probably just a coincidence... but WTF is a "googie"?)
X has a nice built-in software installer. When you install it leaves a receipt you can click on to uninstall or just compress some software. ... However, they didn't build it on X and you'll probably have to buy a Mac to get it for now.
Tip: don't use "X" to refer to MacOS X. Especially when you also talk about X (aka, The X Window System) in the same post. Call it MacOS X, or OS X if you're feeling especially lazy. There are numerous other problems too, like no antialiasing of fonts, no alpha transparency, and the horribly bad idea of "mechanism, not policy". (which Miguel touches on) Personally, I think "mechanism, not policy" is fine for an OS, but it sucks for a user interface. 'nuff said.
That said, not building it on X is a plus. X sucks. Hard. The network transparency is moderately cool, but it adds way too much overheard. And most serious graphical apps these days need the SHM extension, which doesn't work over a network, so the network transparency is lost.
MacOS X does have lots of nifty aspects, but it's also got lots of dorky things too. I hate animated Windows. By there very nature, it means more time for me to wait for things to be in the state I want them to be in. I really hope they have an option to turn off things like animated dialog pop-ups, and the animated "slurping" into the dock-bar. I've also never found the Mac UI to be particularly easy to use though, to be honest. Disconnecting the menus from the windows makes things more confusing (and to think I used to be an Amiga user...). It also seems that multi-tasking was never properly integrated into the OS. Switching from one app to another always seemed like a big ordeal. Of course, this might only be in older versions of Mac OS. I haven't used it for over 3 years. And don't even get me started about the idiotic interface for ejecting the disk. Do Macs finally have a real eject button on their removable media drives?
Yeah, but they don't cache anything but HTML, and perhaps a few text formats. They certainly don't cache (or even crawl) any audio or video formats, so the RIAA and MPAA wouldn't ever have any reason to bug them. Now if illegally distributing large amounts of copyrighted text (like say, books) was common, maybe they'd have to worry about some publishing association coming after them. But somehow, I doubt it. There's way more text on the web that's being distributed legally than illegally, while exactly the opposite is true for MP3's.
Some explanation of the "Will Google be next?" bit would be nice. How is Google like Scour or Napster? It seems like it would be more appropriate to say "Will IRC/FTPD/HTTPD be next?", since these are things that can actually be used for "file sharing". Google only finds stuff. It isn't involved in the transfer.
Networked games shouldn't trust the client. The client shouldn't have any information that the user shouldn't be aware of. If you send some data to the client, you have to assume that that user is going to be aware of that data. This includes things like the location of enemies or objects that are out of sight, as well as any other attributes that the user shouldn't know about (like say, how much ammo your enemy has, or his health).
This would prevent cheating with these drivers. That, in combination with an RSA "blessed client" scheme, like that used with Netrek, you can drastically reduce the types of cheats that are possible.
This adds some complexity to software, of course. The server has to determine what information to give to the clients. That means it needs to do basic line-of-sight determination, for example. That can be tricky though. Just because the guy's toe is sticking around a doorway, it doesn't mean I can "see" him -- I might not notice him.
A simpler solution would be for the game developers to do more clipping on their own, rather than relying on the hardware. Of course, that could potentially slow things down significantly. It also doesn't deal with other kinds of cheats that involve modifying the client itself. (particularly a problem if the client's source is available, but even binary clients can be "tweaked") Not trusting the client is the most general solution.
I don't want the paper clip to be hidden! Who knows what horrible things it'll be doing while it's out of sight? As long as it's alive, I want to know what it's up to.
Hopefully a future release of Word will have a kill option in that menu.
On my own personal system, where I'm the only user and I'm also root, I don't think it's very useful to prevent "normal users" from running programs like ifconfig, eject or userhelper. If my normal password is easy to crack, then my root password is probably just as easy to crack.
The idea is that if an outsider cracker manages to compromise a user account (which is much easier than getting root directly) you want to prevent them from then using internal exploits to gain root.
Why would it be easier to compromise a user account? The only thing I can think of is the "you can't telnet in as root" thing, but I've completely disabled telnetd.
Slashdot.org would actually be s.l.a.s.h.d.o.t.o.r.g which the user could still type as slashdot.org or slash.dot.org or slahsdotorg, they'd all be equivalent once broken down into single letter domains.
I installe Bastille a few days ago. It's a great idea... a security "hardener" for Linux. There are a few things about it that kind of bugged me though.
On thing that bugged me is the fact that it doesn't make it easy for you to choose what kind of security you're really looking for. For example, all I'm really concerned with on my home machine is network security. I don't want people connecting from a remote location and doing nasty things. On the other hand, I don't care about people who have physical access to the machine, because I have physical security to prevent that. Bastille ended up chmod'ing a bunch of executables so only root could use them. This ended up breaking numerous things, including the Helix updater. I couldn't even run ifconfig as a normal user after running Bastille. At least it generates pretty thorough logs, so I was able to undo the "damage".
The other thing is that it doesn't do any checks of what's turned on in your kernel. I was pretty sure I didn't have the firewall support compiled in, so I was pretty surprised that Bastille didn't complain. Some investigation showed that the scripts it installed to secure the network connection were all failing because of this. This is especially dangerous, because without actively checking, some users will think their system has been secured when it really isn't.
Over time, I'm sure Bastille will get better. In the meantime there are some quirks though, so be careful.
That's very nice... did they sniff the browser to ensure that the code would only run on browsers it's compatible with, and provide an alternative for others?
If I really cared, I'd download the HTML with various User-Agent values and compare it... but I don't.
de facto standards happen because people(the market) like them and use them. At the end of the day, it is the market that determines the standards, if the de jure standards don't meet the market needs, what's the point?
When you have monopoly power, like MS does, you can choose for the market, by squashing any alternatives. Yes, captialism works great as long as there is competition. Monopolies present too great an entry for competition though, so they shouldn't be allowed to dictate standards.
...and LaTeX can be turned into HTML quite easily.
Actually, because LaTeX can contain embedded TeX (it's really just a set of TeX macros, after all), and TeX is Turing complete, you simply can't convert arbitrary LaTeX documents into HTML. It's an uncomputable problem. Yes, there are LaTeX to HTML converters, but they only work with restricted subsets of LaTeX. Try and do any fancy TeX stuff and they either ignore you, or fail. Because of the nature of this problem, it isn't something that can ever be solved by writing more code.
If you want format independence, you should start with a non-Turing complete markup language, like SGML, XML or HTML. That could optionally be translated into LaTeX or TeX, posibly as an intermediate step to producing hardcopies, PostScript, PDFs or DVIs.
As long as they use the same ads repeatedly, just find the MP3 audio of the ad in one file, and search for that exact byte sequence in other MP3's.
It's unliekly that this would work. The same set of sounds can be encoded in numerous ways, and still be virtually indistinguishable from eachother. There's also other issues like frame boundaries, etc., that would change the bits, without actually changing the sound.
And what makes you think they'll just use the same ad over and over? Each song would probably have its own ad.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because if it's legal to copy CD's, and becomes even easier form a technical standpoint (which is already the case), they'll make significantly fewer sales, because many more people will be happy with copies (which are bit-for-bit identical to the original...). Fewer sales mean they need to increase the price, which means fewer sales again. It's a vicious circle, where you end up with the first guy paying the entire price for one CD.
Yes, that's a bit of an exaggeration. And yes, I know the labels don't pay artists enough, etc., etc... The destruction of copyright won't solve that problem though, it'll only make it worse. It would probably make it worse for consumers too, because what they can't do via copyright, they can always do via contract.
The fact is, content-creators need to be compensated for the work they do. Copyright helps to ensure that that happens. Unfortunately, middle-men like the record labels, RIAA, MPAA, etc., muddy the waters by collecting the money from consumers, but not giving nearly enough to the artists who originally produced the works. Removing copyright won't fix this, but altering copyright might. If it was impossible for artists to lose their copyright, even by contract, then the middle-men would make sure they treat their artists fairly, or the artists would take their work and go elsewhere. But we would still need copyright. Perhaps people like you would also be less cavalier about flouting copyrights, because then you'd be directly hurting the artist in the process.
Let me ask you this: if you bought the CD directly from the artist, and the artist asked you not to distribute copies, would you have a problem with that? Why or why not?
Every corporation is eminently predictable. The guiding force of every corporation, Napster included, is the desire to make money.
That's an over generalization. First, the obvious counterexample: non-profit corporations. There are also "for-profit" corporations that don't put profit first and only. They tend to be smaller businesses though, and are always (or almost always) private (ie: not on the stock market).
What you say is probably true for most publicly traded for-profit corporations though.
And how do VCs compare to "Angel Investors". Supposably Angels are supposed to be nicer, but why?
VCs invest in start-ups because that's their business. Angels do it because they feel like it. Angels are typically guys who made a lot of money, and want to get involved with some hot start-ups for kicks. VCs, on the other hand, are concerned with profit alone, so they want as big a percentage as possible, for as little money as possible.
In other words, Angels don't have profit as their only motivation, so they tend to be a bit nicer.
- Search for Linux
- Click on Show matches (Cache) for ww.linux.com
- Look at the Linux.com logo that comes up on that page. Look at the source, or even just go to "View Image" in the image's context menu (in Netscape).
In other words, Google does not cache images. They do however modify the HTML, so that (provided the images are still there) the images will show up in the cached page. This is similar to the way mediators (like this one) will often still show the correct images, but the images aren't going through their server. Your browser is still getting it from the original source.The URL is: http://198.186.203.57/i mg/template/linux.com-dropscreen.gif
Incidently, that's why when a site gets removed from the original server, but is still in Google's cache, the images are often busted in the cached page.
Well, seiing as how plugins for Netscape on UNIX almost never worked in the first place, I don't see that as being a big deal.
GoogIe.com is also taken... watch out for them fake searches. (actually, it looks nothing like Google, and the name is probably just a coincidence... but WTF is a "googie"?)
X has a nice built-in software installer. When you install it leaves a receipt you can click on to uninstall or just compress some software.
...
However, they didn't build it on X and you'll probably have to buy a Mac to get it for now.
Tip: don't use "X" to refer to MacOS X. Especially when you also talk about X (aka, The X Window System) in the same post. Call it MacOS X, or OS X if you're feeling especially lazy. There are numerous other problems too, like no antialiasing of fonts, no alpha transparency, and the horribly bad idea of "mechanism, not policy". (which Miguel touches on) Personally, I think "mechanism, not policy" is fine for an OS, but it sucks for a user interface. 'nuff said.
That said, not building it on X is a plus. X sucks. Hard. The network transparency is moderately cool, but it adds way too much overheard. And most serious graphical apps these days need the SHM extension, which doesn't work over a network, so the network transparency is lost.
MacOS X does have lots of nifty aspects, but it's also got lots of dorky things too. I hate animated Windows. By there very nature, it means more time for me to wait for things to be in the state I want them to be in. I really hope they have an option to turn off things like animated dialog pop-ups, and the animated "slurping" into the dock-bar. I've also never found the Mac UI to be particularly easy to use though, to be honest. Disconnecting the menus from the windows makes things more confusing (and to think I used to be an Amiga user...). It also seems that multi-tasking was never properly integrated into the OS. Switching from one app to another always seemed like a big ordeal. Of course, this might only be in older versions of Mac OS. I haven't used it for over 3 years. And don't even get me started about the idiotic interface for ejecting the disk. Do Macs finally have a real eject button on their removable media drives?
Yeah, but they don't cache anything but HTML, and perhaps a few text formats. They certainly don't cache (or even crawl) any audio or video formats, so the RIAA and MPAA wouldn't ever have any reason to bug them. Now if illegally distributing large amounts of copyrighted text (like say, books) was common, maybe they'd have to worry about some publishing association coming after them. But somehow, I doubt it. There's way more text on the web that's being distributed legally than illegally, while exactly the opposite is true for MP3's.
I thought it was some new protocol... "Internet Hyper-Text File Protocol"... oh well.
Some explanation of the "Will Google be next?" bit would be nice. How is Google like Scour or Napster? It seems like it would be more appropriate to say "Will IRC/FTPD/HTTPD be next?", since these are things that can actually be used for "file sharing". Google only finds stuff. It isn't involved in the transfer.
Networked games shouldn't trust the client. The client shouldn't have any information that the user shouldn't be aware of. If you send some data to the client, you have to assume that that user is going to be aware of that data. This includes things like the location of enemies or objects that are out of sight, as well as any other attributes that the user shouldn't know about (like say, how much ammo your enemy has, or his health).
This would prevent cheating with these drivers. That, in combination with an RSA "blessed client" scheme, like that used with Netrek, you can drastically reduce the types of cheats that are possible.
This adds some complexity to software, of course. The server has to determine what information to give to the clients. That means it needs to do basic line-of-sight determination, for example. That can be tricky though. Just because the guy's toe is sticking around a doorway, it doesn't mean I can "see" him -- I might not notice him.
A simpler solution would be for the game developers to do more clipping on their own, rather than relying on the hardware. Of course, that could potentially slow things down significantly. It also doesn't deal with other kinds of cheats that involve modifying the client itself. (particularly a problem if the client's source is available, but even binary clients can be "tweaked") Not trusting the client is the most general solution.
umm, right click then choose hide....
I don't want the paper clip to be hidden ! Who knows what horrible things it'll be doing while it's out of sight? As long as it's alive, I want to know what it's up to.
Hopefully a future release of Word will have a kill option in that menu.
On my own personal system, where I'm the only user and I'm also root, I don't think it's very useful to prevent "normal users" from running programs like ifconfig, eject or userhelper. If my normal password is easy to crack, then my root password is probably just as easy to crack.
The idea is that if an outsider cracker manages to compromise a user account (which is much easier than getting root directly) you want to prevent them from then using internal exploits to gain root.
Why would it be easier to compromise a user account? The only thing I can think of is the "you can't telnet in as root" thing, but I've completely disabled telnetd.
Slashdot.org would actually be s.l.a.s.h.d.o.t.o.r.g which the user could still type as slashdot.org or slash.dot.org or slahsdotorg, they'd all be equivalent once broken down into single letter domains.
The DNS servers will correct typos too?
I installe Bastille a few days ago. It's a great idea... a security "hardener" for Linux. There are a few things about it that kind of bugged me though.
On thing that bugged me is the fact that it doesn't make it easy for you to choose what kind of security you're really looking for. For example, all I'm really concerned with on my home machine is network security. I don't want people connecting from a remote location and doing nasty things. On the other hand, I don't care about people who have physical access to the machine, because I have physical security to prevent that. Bastille ended up chmod'ing a bunch of executables so only root could use them. This ended up breaking numerous things, including the Helix updater. I couldn't even run ifconfig as a normal user after running Bastille. At least it generates pretty thorough logs, so I was able to undo the "damage".
The other thing is that it doesn't do any checks of what's turned on in your kernel. I was pretty sure I didn't have the firewall support compiled in, so I was pretty surprised that Bastille didn't complain. Some investigation showed that the scripts it installed to secure the network connection were all failing because of this. This is especially dangerous, because without actively checking, some users will think their system has been secured when it really isn't.
Over time, I'm sure Bastille will get better. In the meantime there are some quirks though, so be careful.
That's very nice... did they sniff the browser to ensure that the code would only run on browsers it's compatible with, and provide an alternative for others?
If I really cared, I'd download the HTML with various User-Agent values and compare it... but I don't.
What browser is that supposed to work on?
That's JavaScript 1.3. "===" is the new "strict equality operator". I think JavaScript 1.3 is used by the later 4.x Netscape browsers.
de facto standards happen because people(the market) like them and use them. At the end of the day, it is the market that determines the standards, if the de jure standards don't meet the market needs, what's the point?
When you have monopoly power, like MS does, you can choose for the market, by squashing any alternatives. Yes, captialism works great as long as there is competition. Monopolies present too great an entry for competition though, so they shouldn't be allowed to dictate standards.
...and LaTeX can be turned into HTML quite easily.
Actually, because LaTeX can contain embedded TeX (it's really just a set of TeX macros, after all), and TeX is Turing complete, you simply can't convert arbitrary LaTeX documents into HTML. It's an uncomputable problem. Yes, there are LaTeX to HTML converters, but they only work with restricted subsets of LaTeX. Try and do any fancy TeX stuff and they either ignore you, or fail. Because of the nature of this problem, it isn't something that can ever be solved by writing more code.
If you want format independence, you should start with a non-Turing complete markup language, like SGML, XML or HTML. That could optionally be translated into LaTeX or TeX, posibly as an intermediate step to producing hardcopies, PostScript, PDFs or DVIs.
Everyone knows that "vi" is pronounced "six".
As long as they use the same ads repeatedly, just find the MP3 audio of the ad in one file, and search for that exact byte sequence in other MP3's.
It's unliekly that this would work. The same set of sounds can be encoded in numerous ways, and still be virtually indistinguishable from eachother. There's also other issues like frame boundaries, etc., that would change the bits, without actually changing the sound.
And what makes you think they'll just use the same ad over and over? Each song would probably have its own ad.
The senator seems impressed with Metallica's music after downloading it off the net.
There isn't anything in that article that says he downloaded the music off the net.
**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
_
Can you make a shirt with FIRST POST! in huge bold letters on the back...
This one has it on the front.