"as a developer, I find it hard to believe that legions of folks giving away their labor helps enhance my bottom line."
It's quite simple really.
Less than 2% of software development is for packaged sofware.
The other 98% is custom software.
It was bound to happen really. Look at how the bar is being raised with time and operating systems today include software that would have never made it 3 years ago.
In the 1970s a licence for a database for an IBM mainframe would cost thousands of dollars per month. Nowadays you can get one free. It goes beyond a matter of cost; it's that the knowledge behind this software itself becomes commoditized.
And yet, you think that writing packaged software today is more difficult than in previous times? In previous times, before the internet, these markets didn't even EXIST, so what point would writing software have if you couldn't get anyone to buy it? Not to mention that there were many kinds of software that either were not thought of or were computationally impossible to have around.
Seriously, if you write packaged software you know that you're up against competition, and your product might be gone today just as much by a FOSS project than by a competitor that made a better product at a better price. You play the game by the rules; I won't be sorry for you if you lost everything because you gambled against the free market.
Does Apple have 95% share of the desktop operating system market? Did they get there through ethically questionable means?
The rules are different for monopolies. They should be.
You seem to be "for Microsoft" simply because the software lobbyists in question make crappy software, in your opinion.
Well, let me say I'm not the greatest fan of Symantec or Adobe, but the truth of the matter is that, as the illegal monopoly that it is, Microsoft should not be redistributing the kinds of software it wants to distribute with Vista. Of course Adobe's not exactly in need of charity here, but thousands of ISVs just might not considering developing on a platform which, while proprietary and limiting, is the de facto option for 90% of the users.
The most important matter in this is that Microsoft will never make any efforts towards making open standards out of whatever files, protocols and procedures their software will make. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish indeed. And that hurts the entire software ecosystem.
Lastly, this will only help to kill whatever motivations there were for Microsoft to develop adquate interfaces for integrating with other products. Once you have your "Microsoft API of shiny stuff" you can forget about using it outside the context of.NET or whatever technology du jour MS wants to impose.
There is absolutely no reason, for example, to clamp down Vista's security module. Or have you not heard the Unix world's Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM), Java's SecurityModule class, or hundreds of other modular examples that suffer none of Windows's vulnerabilities?
It seems that lately, with the Cell processor, dual core, and now the use of processors optimized for matrix operations as general purpose units that there's a craze for improving the computation of highly parallelizable tasks. What about the other tasks where dependencies abound and the only way to improve them is through decreased cache latency and more processor cycles
Or are there not as many of those tasks as we were led to believe?
I cannot say that is entirely true. The reality falls somewhere in-between.
Any digital format will trounce analog as far as noise floor goes. That's a given. The question is whether that's the most important attribute you want in your music. After having owned a turntable for about 6 months and properly calibrating it, I claim it is not.
But, as I said previously, neither medium can effectively reproduce the entire frequency range. The PCM format on CDs need to recurr to several filters for effective reproduction of the music, and you still won't be able to draw a square wave. This is not to say vinyl is superior, but it's not a point that can be touted as an absolute advantage.
The problem with these comparisons is that they depend on your personal listening experience, and from there on everything from the brand of you stylus to record wear on LPs and the DAC quality of a CD player can affect sound.
In my case, whether it's an artifact or not I do not know, however the stereo separation in LPs seems a lot more realistic to me, and the presentation of the music too. My personal experience was with A "Ballads of the Beatles" LP, which featured "Yesterday". I can tell you that the vinyl version, in an ABX test with a friend, absolutely wiped the floor with the compared FLAC file from the corresponding CD rip.
Is that an absolute determination that vinyl is superior? Certainly not. But like Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it IS good". If the stereo separation and the perceived higher fidelity of the guitars and citars in a Beatles album on LP is better than its other versions, it IS better. TO ME. That's the key.
But like I said, record wear and inconvenience don't cut it for new releases, so it's FLACs and CDs for me now.
Wait a minute. The fact that vinyl has many disadvantages does not imply that it is a completely inferior format. Problem is, a lot of "audiophile" airheads have no idea what they're talking about because they don't understand anything except "I paid $2000 for this turntable, therefore it must be better".
Subsonics is a big point for me. If you have a decent setup or truly high quality headphones this does not go unnoticed and gives a certain atmosphere to records which I have not, to date, been able to reproduce with CDs. This is notable in the Dark Side of the Moon LP, as well as any jazz record with contrabass.
And while people go all around claiming that a vinyl record is unable to reproduce many shapes of frequencies, the PCM encoding used in CDs is unable to either (neither can reproduce a square or sawtooth wave), so we can call it a toss-up.
What matters most to me is the fact that the mastering of the time of vinyl is of much, MUCH higher quality than today's. Despite the higher noise floor of the vinyl medium, audio engineers of today feel the need to compress an entire album to a range of a only a fraction of the potential of PCM. My god, there's CLIPPING in modern records, for God's sake. The loudness war on CDs is taking a toll on the quality of modern music.
That being said, there is absolutely no reason for vinyl to come back. While it is my perception (this cannot be objectively measured) that vinyl sounds more pleasing to the ears, it is too much of a hassle to maintain it in a proper condition, and the inevitable degradation of the medium and the scratching make it too inconvenient, not to mention that if the mastering of a record is done digitally, the analog conversion loses any advantage it might have had.
Conclusion: records from before the use of digital mastering == good. After that == waste of your time and money.
I work in a company that does system administration for several clients. Having an important installed base of Windows, UNIX, AS/400 and Mainframe, and looking at the security and reliability of each, you can easily reach a conclusion:
If Windows is not safer or more reliable it's simply because it's not profitable for Microsoft.
Case in point: MVS/zOS is at the very core the same thing it was 40 years ago, and has uptimes measured in decades and clients measured in the thousands per second. Nothing would be gained by making a microkernel for high-reliability and high-availability. Undispitably great for embedded and the like, but unnecessary in the server room, where monolythic is as stable as it gets.
Is this the Week of the Geek or what?
Seriously, how long before this is absorbed by some oil giant or some "mysterious accident" occurs to the researchers?
You could easily have 3rd party software which adds sufficient noise to a music file to kill the psychoacoustic model, but through the same software you can take it away once you've finished downloading.
You could also have some sort of public key in the ID3 tag so that you download an encrypted file and the decrypt it with that key.
You could make the first 5 seconds of music unrecognizable to the program, and then cut out those seconds with an MP3 editor or splitter.
The ways to ignore this POS legislation are just limitless.
According to the reply: "What this person did was more than reverse engineer two of our products, RogerWilco and GameSpy3D -- he was describing our backend services and publishing CDkey generation information without letting us know. At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file."
I don't believe there's anything wrong with that.
"But then we found out he was also publishing how to brute force our RogerWilco CDkeys and had published hacks on other game CDkeys as well. He was doing more than reporting bugs; he was publishing game pirating techniques. He published how to attack our network. This is not the way ethical security researchers operate. It was at this point that we stopped our communication with him and asked him to remove the materials in question. When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work. When we brought this to the software security company's attention, they disavowed their relationship with that person and removed him from their servers"
People, I'm all against security through obscurity, but if you've played any multiplayer game you know that every damn script kiddie will be taking advantage of everything they get their hands on, ESPECIALLY cd keygens.
And you , offering a "consulting fee" sounds damn close to extortion. This wasn't good-faith bug reporting; it was "show me the goods or else".
Don't believe me? Go play Counter-strike and see how long you can stand the wallhacks and lag tricks. Multiplaying code isn't exactly secure. The last thing we need is people takng over your machine after a round of UT.
And oppose to closed software all you want, but the guy DID reverse-engineer an algortihm for VERY questionable purposes.
I AM sad that the DMCA has to be used. It's a POS piece of legislation. However if it is the way gamespy says, then this "researcher" isn't doing too much good for the gaming community either.
It seems to me like this is a continuation of Systems to attempt to concentrate all the information infrastructure for the sake of all these technological benefits, not to mention the organizational advantages (concentrating phone services with IP is excellent synergy).
But like all concentration efforts, the more you centralize operations, the more vulnerable they are to other flaws. Electricty's already been pointed out, but what about handling calls with computer servers that are also handling packet data? You lose one and you lose the other; and I think we're all far more used to losing the internet than the phone (at least that's the way for me).
Perhaps they should utilize a simlar protocol but keep the whole thing away from the packet data handling stuff so as to make it all less vulnerable.
Slashdot Mirror
It's quite simple really.
Less than 2% of software development is for packaged sofware.
The other 98% is custom software.
It was bound to happen really. Look at how the bar is being raised with time and operating systems today include software that would have never made it 3 years ago.
In the 1970s a licence for a database for an IBM mainframe would cost thousands of dollars per month. Nowadays you can get one free. It goes beyond a matter of cost; it's that the knowledge behind this software itself becomes commoditized.
And yet, you think that writing packaged software today is more difficult than in previous times? In previous times, before the internet, these markets didn't even EXIST, so what point would writing software have if you couldn't get anyone to buy it? Not to mention that there were many kinds of software that either were not thought of or were computationally impossible to have around.
Seriously, if you write packaged software you know that you're up against competition, and your product might be gone today just as much by a FOSS project than by a competitor that made a better product at a better price. You play the game by the rules; I won't be sorry for you if you lost everything because you gambled against the free market.
You should wonder the level of desperation this measure reeks of.
Does Apple have 95% share of the desktop operating system market? Did they get there through ethically questionable means? The rules are different for monopolies. They should be.
Well, let me say I'm not the greatest fan of Symantec or Adobe, but the truth of the matter is that, as the illegal monopoly that it is, Microsoft should not be redistributing the kinds of software it wants to distribute with Vista. Of course Adobe's not exactly in need of charity here, but thousands of ISVs just might not considering developing on a platform which, while proprietary and limiting, is the de facto option for 90% of the users.
The most important matter in this is that Microsoft will never make any efforts towards making open standards out of whatever files, protocols and procedures their software will make. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish indeed. And that hurts the entire software ecosystem.
Lastly, this will only help to kill whatever motivations there were for Microsoft to develop adquate interfaces for integrating with other products. Once you have your "Microsoft API of shiny stuff" you can forget about using it outside the context of .NET or whatever technology du jour MS wants to impose.
There is absolutely no reason, for example, to clamp down Vista's security module. Or have you not heard the Unix world's Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM), Java's SecurityModule class, or hundreds of other modular examples that suffer none of Windows's vulnerabilities?
Or are there not as many of those tasks as we were led to believe?
Any digital format will trounce analog as far as noise floor goes. That's a given. The question is whether that's the most important attribute you want in your music. After having owned a turntable for about 6 months and properly calibrating it, I claim it is not.
But, as I said previously, neither medium can effectively reproduce the entire frequency range. The PCM format on CDs need to recurr to several filters for effective reproduction of the music, and you still won't be able to draw a square wave. This is not to say vinyl is superior, but it's not a point that can be touted as an absolute advantage.
The problem with these comparisons is that they depend on your personal listening experience, and from there on everything from the brand of you stylus to record wear on LPs and the DAC quality of a CD player can affect sound.
In my case, whether it's an artifact or not I do not know, however the stereo separation in LPs seems a lot more realistic to me, and the presentation of the music too. My personal experience was with A "Ballads of the Beatles" LP, which featured "Yesterday". I can tell you that the vinyl version, in an ABX test with a friend, absolutely wiped the floor with the compared FLAC file from the corresponding CD rip.
Is that an absolute determination that vinyl is superior? Certainly not. But like Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it IS good". If the stereo separation and the perceived higher fidelity of the guitars and citars in a Beatles album on LP is better than its other versions, it IS better. TO ME. That's the key.
But like I said, record wear and inconvenience don't cut it for new releases, so it's FLACs and CDs for me now.
Wait a minute. The fact that vinyl has many disadvantages does not imply that it is a completely inferior format. Problem is, a lot of "audiophile" airheads have no idea what they're talking about because they don't understand anything except "I paid $2000 for this turntable, therefore it must be better". Subsonics is a big point for me. If you have a decent setup or truly high quality headphones this does not go unnoticed and gives a certain atmosphere to records which I have not, to date, been able to reproduce with CDs. This is notable in the Dark Side of the Moon LP, as well as any jazz record with contrabass. And while people go all around claiming that a vinyl record is unable to reproduce many shapes of frequencies, the PCM encoding used in CDs is unable to either (neither can reproduce a square or sawtooth wave), so we can call it a toss-up. What matters most to me is the fact that the mastering of the time of vinyl is of much, MUCH higher quality than today's. Despite the higher noise floor of the vinyl medium, audio engineers of today feel the need to compress an entire album to a range of a only a fraction of the potential of PCM. My god, there's CLIPPING in modern records, for God's sake. The loudness war on CDs is taking a toll on the quality of modern music. That being said, there is absolutely no reason for vinyl to come back. While it is my perception (this cannot be objectively measured) that vinyl sounds more pleasing to the ears, it is too much of a hassle to maintain it in a proper condition, and the inevitable degradation of the medium and the scratching make it too inconvenient, not to mention that if the mastering of a record is done digitally, the analog conversion loses any advantage it might have had. Conclusion: records from before the use of digital mastering == good. After that == waste of your time and money.
Look up BioAPI on www.thinkwiki.org. Works flawlessly as a PAM module.
I work in a company that does system administration for several clients. Having an important installed base of Windows, UNIX, AS/400 and Mainframe, and looking at the security and reliability of each, you can easily reach a conclusion: If Windows is not safer or more reliable it's simply because it's not profitable for Microsoft.
Case in point: MVS/zOS is at the very core the same thing it was 40 years ago, and has uptimes measured in decades and clients measured in the thousands per second. Nothing would be gained by making a microkernel for high-reliability and high-availability. Undispitably great for embedded and the like, but unnecessary in the server room, where monolythic is as stable as it gets.
Is this the Week of the Geek or what? Seriously, how long before this is absorbed by some oil giant or some "mysterious accident" occurs to the researchers?
How long has it been since we have seen any progress in this case? Finally IBM has stood up and started getting real evidence.
Normally I have no favoritisms towards corporations, but let's hope IBM crushes SCO once and for all with this move.
You could easily have 3rd party software which adds sufficient noise to a music file to kill the psychoacoustic model, but through the same software you can take it away once you've finished downloading.
You could also have some sort of public key in the ID3 tag so that you download an encrypted file and the decrypt it with that key.
You could make the first 5 seconds of music unrecognizable to the program, and then cut out those seconds with an MP3 editor or splitter.
The ways to ignore this POS legislation are just limitless.
According to the reply:
"What this person did was more than reverse engineer two of our products, RogerWilco and GameSpy3D -- he was describing our backend services and publishing CDkey generation information without letting us know. At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file."
I don't believe there's anything wrong with that.
"But then we found out he was also publishing how to brute force our RogerWilco CDkeys and had published hacks on other game CDkeys as well. He was doing more than reporting bugs; he was publishing game pirating techniques. He published how to attack our network. This is not the way ethical security researchers operate. It was at this point that we stopped our communication with him and asked him to remove the materials in question.
When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work. When we brought this to the software security company's attention, they disavowed their relationship with that person and removed him from their servers"
People, I'm all against security through obscurity, but if you've played any multiplayer game you know that every damn script kiddie will be taking advantage of everything they get their hands on, ESPECIALLY cd keygens.
And you , offering a "consulting fee" sounds damn close to extortion. This wasn't good-faith bug reporting; it was "show me the goods or else".
Don't believe me? Go play Counter-strike and see how long you can stand the wallhacks and lag tricks. Multiplaying code isn't exactly secure. The last thing we need is people takng over your machine after a round of UT.
And oppose to closed software all you want, but the guy DID reverse-engineer an algortihm for VERY questionable purposes.
I AM sad that the DMCA has to be used. It's a POS piece of legislation. However if it is the way gamespy says, then this "researcher" isn't doing too much good for the gaming community either.
e-mail. Hypersnap DX and an OCR scanning program. that's that.
It seems to me like this is a continuation of Systems to attempt to concentrate all the information infrastructure for the sake of all these technological benefits, not to mention the organizational advantages (concentrating phone services with IP is excellent synergy). But like all concentration efforts, the more you centralize operations, the more vulnerable they are to other flaws. Electricty's already been pointed out, but what about handling calls with computer servers that are also handling packet data? You lose one and you lose the other; and I think we're all far more used to losing the internet than the phone (at least that's the way for me). Perhaps they should utilize a simlar protocol but keep the whole thing away from the packet data handling stuff so as to make it all less vulnerable.