"game development will have to undergo some pretty radical changes before it will fit successfully into the OSS model and we continue to have the quality of games we have today."
Getting an OpenGl program working without having to spend two days trying to compile Mesa and GLU would help too.
Being able to run a game without having to edit your XFree86 config. And trying to compile DRI if it's not already installed.
Being able to hardware-accelerate by default, without having to worry about whether you have a Glide card, or the NVidia non-free drivers, or the nv free drivers. (yes I know OpenGL acceleration is just as much of a pain in Windows)
Being able to select "New OpenGL" project in KDevelop, just like you can in BloodshedDevC++ in Windows.
Or even not having to worry about how to solve "can't link: -lGLU not found" when that very same library is available for the application to run.
It's not a conspiracy, it's just bloody difficult to write games in GNU compared to Windows.
Re:Finally!
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"What bullshit. Just make up a fucking target, all it "evidence", and viola! Better than actually finding out, ain't it?"
Newspapers are already publishing their accusations, based on much slimmer evidence than that, that Free Software programmers were beind this virus.
Nope, it's not evidence, and we don't know who wrote the virus. We do know, however, that its primary purpose is to enable the sending of bulk email. We do know that this type of virus became popular after spammers became unable to purchase their own internet connectivity. We do know that this type of virus conveniently bypasses the IP-address based spamfilters that had been working so well to stop spam. We do know that the first instance of this type of virus was designed to attack anti-spam groups, which it did very successfully. We don't know exactly who wrote which virus, but we can make some guesses. It's possible that the usefulness of this type of virus for doing exactly what the spammers want to do may just be an inintended side-effect. It's possible that someone spent many hours perfecting their distributed spam-sending virus by accident, for a different purpose, or to give spammers a bad name (now that's a redundant idea if ever I heard one). But whatever their intentions, their creation is now being used to deliver bulk email.
When someone writes a virus, and that virus is designed to send spam, why should we not conclude that the virus-writer is a spammer? The best you could say about them is that they might only be an unintentional accessory to spammers
"It's hard to see how Microsoft can win. If they make software that can be used to censor internet access and sell it to China, then they're aiding in human rights violations. If they make it and don't sell it to China, then they get accused of discrimination. If their software can't censor internet access, then the majority of public schools and libraries can't use it."
What's your point? That very same argument can be applied to any sort of trade, and nobody is arguing that gun manufacturers are being discriminatory by not selling to known bad people (except of course, that they are)
If your latest "weaponry starter pack" doesn't include cattle-prods and antipersonnel mines, then it might be hard to sell it to the Burmese. Doesn't make it right to adapt your product so that such markets will be more likely to purchase.
In the end, it's a "manufacturer/user" argument, which has been discussed to death (hopefully not a pun) in the US where every shop will sell machine guns to anyone who wanders in, and claim "it's not my fault how they're used". I belive the conclusion was that legally, it didn't matter because the gun-manufacturers owned the government. But this case is in the UK, so those arguments don't apply the same way.
It's not just a case of developing multi-purpose tools is it though? Plenty of open-source tools too, are useful for censorship, from transparent proxies to password-guessers to network sniffers and analysers. But the problem is when companies such as Cisco are making special efforts to create features they know will be used to put people in prison for speaking their mind. "You want this proxy adapted to log all transactions from anyone sending a POST request to slashdot? sure, no problem, our engineers will spend a few months incorporating that into the product for you"
Re:Finally!
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"I wish it wouldn't happen. This virus is painting the Linux community as a bunch of petulant adolescents"
In case anyone still thinks this virus is related to linux people, let's put it as bluntly as we can:
Spammers have created yet another virus to send their emails, not caring about the cost to you, your computer, the law, or the internet in general
If you believed the spammer lies about how you've opted in to something, or how this is their freedom of speech, or how you can just press delete, then this should be the evidence you need: spammers are prepared to take down the entire internet for their own personal gain.
If anybody has bought anything advertised by email, or is considering doing so, or knows anybody who buys from email advertisements, then please be aware: you are supporting the criminals who are deliberately and maliciously attacking your computer, and the computers of your friends. Their programs are constantly bombarding your computer, where any mistake you make could lead to your computer becoming unusable by you, and being used to send illegal emails in vast quantities to the computers of others.
If any newspaper editor is reading this, and thinks "it's attacking SCO, it must be programmed by a Linux advocate", wake up and smell the misdirection. The DDOS in this virus was added as an afterthought. "Virus creation wizard step 6: you are nearly finished creating your virus. now type the name of a website you want it to attack"
"We don't want Little Johnny to have to ask his parents to upgrade before he can give GNU/linux a whirl."
I've got 128Mb memory here (134 "Mb" for the decimal counters), and Linux desktop seems to run every bit as fast as my Win2K machine at work with however many gigabytes of memory that thing has.
Of course, I don't run Visual Studio at home...
You can probably get a machine like mine for less than the cost of a Windows license now... so I don't think that should be any problem for your "little johnny" who probably has the latest and greatest "multimedia experience" from a Gateway advert in the Times anyway...
"In terms of user manuals. It's not like a lot of people read them anyway...that's like asking people to read the articles prior to reply here on slashdot."
When the user-manual consists of "put the batteries in, press play", accompanied by a large drawing of the battery compartment, and a large drawing of the play button, you can forgive people for not reading the manual
Maybe it's 80 pages long. But 75 of those pages are translations in obscure languages, one page is a picture of the product, another page is a list of things not to do (underwater camera: "do not attempt to change film or batteries whilst underwater"), and the last page is a troubleshooting guide ("Q: nothing happens. A: have you plugged it in?")
All in all, the "user guide" to consumer electronics is about as informative as the swing-tags. And as for the specifications sheet, well let's just say it comes from the "marketing" side of scientific measurement theory.
"If I could pick the lock or steal a key to the paper ballot box, I could tamper with the votes too."
Presumably these machines are inside a polling booth, giving you plenty of time to work on the locks and switch the memory cards.
Compared with ballot boxes, which are being constantly watched by at 2-3 people from the moment the election starts, until the box is opened at the vote-counting
I assume the electronic machines have tamper-detect switches?
"figure this: 1) Joe Schmoe votes electronically 2) Voting machine spits out receipt with a MD5 hash key of his vote record, it's one way, it can never be decrypted again to determine how user voted"
Yeah, that'll be real hard to search for hash collisions on...
Download the patch for internet explorer by typing in the following URL: http://download.com.com/3000-2356-10148260.h tml?ta g=lst-0-6
And for other common updates, such as blaster removal tools, simply type this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details. aspx?Fa milyID=e70a0d8b-fe98-493f-ad76-bf673a38b4cf&Displa yLang=en
"Just imagine going to: https://mmnwealthbank.com.au/ and getting a perfectly valid ssl session. With entirely the wrong people - but the user would only notice if they looked at the cert. Of course, you'd have to find a cert registrar dumb or unethical enough to give you a cert for the domain."
You can sign a certificate for that domain yourself if you have another Verisign-signed SSL certificate for your own domain, and Internet Explorer will display it as if the certificate itself was signed by verisign.
So Internet Explorer users are still vulnerable even if they check the SSL icon.
"The problem with legislating against this sort of thing is that its so tangled up in the issue of surveillance cameras. If you make videotaping an unknowing or unwilling person in a "public place" illegal, all surveillance cameras are then illegal. The problem is that drawing the line between useful surveillance and spying is so difficult."
"Is the same applied to AV software? Sell the AV company a lead, get X% of the profit?"
Isn't it more likely to be "do it because we can"?
Surely "antivirus" companies are putting these adverts in the fake bounce emails for the same reason that everyone else designs a "Help/About" screen with their name on, before they even think about designing the rest of a program. Hey, millions of people can know about our company!
In their case of course, it's not a very good advert. More like: "hey, we're supposed to be virus experts, and we don't even know which ones forge email addresses!"
Interestingly, I did get an executable file by email today telling me to run the program on all my computers. It was my boss, emailing a virus-scanner to everybody!
"Now I'll be able to listen to my 5 case fans that sound like an Harrier hovering above my house! That stupid power supply fan was screwing everything up...."
Question is, is it possible to get a non-crap graphics card which doesn't double as the sound system for your racing games? Looking at my case, it seems that the two fans I can replace (CPU and power supply) are fairly quiet, but the graphics card has a tiny little fan making a big noise. And worse, the heatsink has been epoxied onto the GPU by the manufacturer so I can't replace it with anything passive.
Take a look in kustompcs.co.uk for replacement graphics cards, and... yes, that's right, they're all renowned for the noise they make. Reviews of high-end graphics cards typically use phrases like "so long as you don't mind the noise", and the better the card, the worse the noise.
Is there anything good which can be passively cooled?
"Well.. 0dB would be ideal, but most people cannot hear sounds that low"
dB is not a measure of noise level, it's a comparaison of numbers.
0dB means "equal to"
So I'm a little confused how you say that people can't hear 0dB. On my stereo, 0dB is used to define the maximum possible power, and any noise level less than that is shown as (for example) -18dB relative to full power. Computer sound systems use the same measure, for example DirectX defines 0dB as the maximum power that your soundcard can produce. You'd have a hard time convincing anyone that my stereo set to 0dB was inaudible.
Now imagine if your captcha image came from a certain range of IP addresses, and you decided to return an advertisement instead of a captcha for certain requests...
"I think this part of the article is significant: One problem, he said, is that companies will tend to keep under wraps the results of commissioned studies that turn out unfavorably."
Lemme guess, the rest of the article was unfavourable, so you kept it under wraps?;-)
Any idea of the easiest way to upgrade Mandrake installation to use this?
I seem to remember investigating K* before, and their (Kmail's) approach was "go and ask whoever makes your distro". Has anyone done the install on the Drake without resorting to weird compiler options?
"Software that takes 6 months for one guy to slap together, isn't going to impress anybody who has an IT background. They'll see it's obviously only 6 man months of work"
Uhh, somebody with an IT background looking at 6 man-months of work, is going to think it's worth $60,000. Whether they pay or not depends on whether they need it, but that's what it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
"game development will have to undergo some pretty radical changes before it will fit successfully into the OSS model and we continue to have the quality of games we have today."
Getting an OpenGl program working without having to spend two days trying to compile Mesa and GLU would help too.
Being able to run a game without having to edit your XFree86 config. And trying to compile DRI if it's not already installed.
Being able to hardware-accelerate by default, without having to worry about whether you have a Glide card, or the NVidia non-free drivers, or the nv free drivers. (yes I know OpenGL acceleration is just as much of a pain in Windows)
Being able to select "New OpenGL" project in KDevelop, just like you can in BloodshedDevC++ in Windows.
Or even not having to worry about how to solve "can't link: -lGLU not found" when that very same library is available for the application to run.
It's not a conspiracy, it's just bloody difficult to write games in GNU compared to Windows.
"What bullshit. Just make up a fucking target, all it "evidence", and viola! Better than actually finding out, ain't it?"
Newspapers are already publishing their accusations, based on much slimmer evidence than that, that Free Software programmers were beind this virus.
Nope, it's not evidence, and we don't know who wrote the virus. We do know, however, that its primary purpose is to enable the sending of bulk email. We do know that this type of virus became popular after spammers became unable to purchase their own internet connectivity. We do know that this type of virus conveniently bypasses the IP-address based spamfilters that had been working so well to stop spam. We do know that the first instance of this type of virus was designed to attack anti-spam groups, which it did very successfully. We don't know exactly who wrote which virus, but we can make some guesses. It's possible that the usefulness of this type of virus for doing exactly what the spammers want to do may just be an inintended side-effect. It's possible that someone spent many hours perfecting their distributed spam-sending virus by accident, for a different purpose, or to give spammers a bad name (now that's a redundant idea if ever I heard one). But whatever their intentions, their creation is now being used to deliver bulk email.
When someone writes a virus, and that virus is designed to send spam, why should we not conclude that the virus-writer is a spammer? The best you could say about them is that they might only be an unintentional accessory to spammers
"It's hard to see how Microsoft can win. If they make software that can be used to censor internet access and sell it to China, then they're aiding in human rights violations. If they make it and don't sell it to China, then they get accused of discrimination. If their software can't censor internet access, then the majority of public schools and libraries can't use it."
What's your point? That very same argument can be applied to any sort of trade, and nobody is arguing that gun manufacturers are being discriminatory by not selling to known bad people (except of course, that they are)
If your latest "weaponry starter pack" doesn't include cattle-prods and antipersonnel mines, then it might be hard to sell it to the Burmese. Doesn't make it right to adapt your product so that such markets will be more likely to purchase.
In the end, it's a "manufacturer/user" argument, which has been discussed to death (hopefully not a pun) in the US where every shop will sell machine guns to anyone who wanders in, and claim "it's not my fault how they're used". I belive the conclusion was that legally, it didn't matter because the gun-manufacturers owned the government. But this case is in the UK, so those arguments don't apply the same way.
It's not just a case of developing multi-purpose tools is it though? Plenty of open-source tools too, are useful for censorship, from transparent proxies to password-guessers to network sniffers and analysers. But the problem is when companies such as Cisco are making special efforts to create features they know will be used to put people in prison for speaking their mind. "You want this proxy adapted to log all transactions from anyone sending a POST request to slashdot? sure, no problem, our engineers will spend a few months incorporating that into the product for you"
"I wish it wouldn't happen. This virus is painting the Linux community as a bunch of petulant adolescents"
In case anyone still thinks this virus is related to linux people, let's put it as bluntly as we can:
Spammers have created yet another virus to send their emails, not caring about the cost to you, your computer, the law, or the internet in general
If you believed the spammer lies about how you've opted in to something, or how this is their freedom of speech, or how you can just press delete, then this should be the evidence you need: spammers are prepared to take down the entire internet for their own personal gain.
If anybody has bought anything advertised by email, or is considering doing so, or knows anybody who buys from email advertisements, then please be aware: you are supporting the criminals who are deliberately and maliciously attacking your computer, and the computers of your friends. Their programs are constantly bombarding your computer, where any mistake you make could lead to your computer becoming unusable by you, and being used to send illegal emails in vast quantities to the computers of others.
If any newspaper editor is reading this, and thinks "it's attacking SCO, it must be programmed by a Linux advocate", wake up and smell the misdirection. The DDOS in this virus was added as an afterthought. "Virus creation wizard step 6: you are nearly finished creating your virus. now type the name of a website you want it to attack"
"We don't want Little Johnny to have to ask his parents to upgrade before he can give GNU/linux a whirl."
I've got 128Mb memory here (134 "Mb" for the decimal counters), and Linux desktop seems to run every bit as fast as my Win2K machine at work with however many gigabytes of memory that thing has.
Of course, I don't run Visual Studio at home...
You can probably get a machine like mine for less than the cost of a Windows license now... so I don't think that should be any problem for your "little johnny" who probably has the latest and greatest "multimedia experience" from a Gateway advert in the Times anyway...
"512MB is for grandma's E-machine. Give me 2 gigs for a dev box any day."
Nevermind the hard disk, how much memory does it need?
"In terms of user manuals. It's not like a lot of people read them anyway...that's like asking people to read the articles prior to reply here on slashdot."
When the user-manual consists of "put the batteries in, press play", accompanied by a large drawing of the battery compartment, and a large drawing of the play button, you can forgive people for not reading the manual
Maybe it's 80 pages long. But 75 of those pages are translations in obscure languages, one page is a picture of the product, another page is a list of things not to do (underwater camera: "do not attempt to change film or batteries whilst underwater"), and the last page is a troubleshooting guide ("Q: nothing happens. A: have you plugged it in?")
All in all, the "user guide" to consumer electronics is about as informative as the swing-tags. And as for the specifications sheet, well let's just say it comes from the "marketing" side of scientific measurement theory.
"If I could pick the lock or steal a key to the paper ballot box, I could tamper with the votes too."
Presumably these machines are inside a polling booth, giving you plenty of time to work on the locks and switch the memory cards.
Compared with ballot boxes, which are being constantly watched by at 2-3 people from the moment the election starts, until the box is opened at the vote-counting
I assume the electronic machines have tamper-detect switches?
"This isn't a troll, but seriously, why should it be GPL compatable?"
(*) So that people working on it can use code from other GPL-licensed projects
(*) So that people working on it can use GPL libraries
(*) So that people working on other GPL'd projects can reuse their code
(*) So that people working on other GPL'd projects can reuse their libraries
"figure this: 1) Joe Schmoe votes electronically
2) Voting machine spits out receipt with a MD5 hash key of his vote record, it's one way, it can never be decrypted again to determine how user voted"
Yeah, that'll be real hard to search for hash collisions on...
if(md5("joe schmoe: CandidateA") == $STORED_MD5)
print "Joe voted for candidate A"
if(md5("joe schmoe: CandidateB") == $STORED_MD5)
print "Joe voted for candidate B"
"just reminiscing of a time when British Telecom tried to patent the hyperlink.."
Maybe that's why Microsoft want you to type the URLs instead of clicking?
Download the patch for internet explorer by typing in the following URL:h tml?ta g=lst-0-6
. aspx?Fa milyID=e70a0d8b-fe98-493f-ad76-bf673a38b4cf&Displa yLang=en
http://download.com.com/3000-2356-10148260.
And for other common updates, such as blaster removal tools, simply type this:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details
"Just imagine going to: https://mmnwealthbank.com.au/ and getting a perfectly valid ssl session. With entirely the wrong people - but the user would only notice if they looked at the cert. Of course, you'd have to find a cert registrar dumb or unethical enough to give you a cert for the domain."
You can sign a certificate for that domain yourself if you have another Verisign-signed SSL certificate for your own domain, and Internet Explorer will display it as if the certificate itself was signed by verisign.
So Internet Explorer users are still vulnerable even if they check the SSL icon.
"Take a look in kustompcs.co.uk for replacement graphics cards, and... yes, that's right, they're all renowned for the noise they make"
Correction, about half of the graphics cards on the site I mention are passive, heatpipe, or water-cooled. Unfortunately it's the expensive half...
"The problem with legislating against this sort of thing is that its so tangled up in the issue of surveillance cameras. If you make videotaping an unknowing or unwilling person in a "public place" illegal, all surveillance cameras are then illegal. The problem is that drawing the line between useful surveillance and spying is so difficult."
Howabout a "minimum campaign contribution"?
"Is the same applied to AV software? Sell the AV company a lead, get X% of the profit?"
Isn't it more likely to be "do it because we can"?
Surely "antivirus" companies are putting these adverts in the fake bounce emails for the same reason that everyone else designs a "Help/About" screen with their name on, before they even think about designing the rest of a program. Hey, millions of people can know about our company!
In their case of course, it's not a very good advert. More like: "hey, we're supposed to be virus experts, and we don't even know which ones forge email addresses!"
Interestingly, I did get an executable file by email today telling me to run the program on all my computers. It was my boss, emailing a virus-scanner to everybody!
"Every time I receive one of those emails from postmaster@somewhere, I fire back a nasty email tell them to cut it out."
Next up, viruses which forge email from postmaster addresses...
"The virus that YOU SENT was successfully blocked by the infallible greatness of $PRODUCT. Please find attached a copy of the virus that YOU SENT"
"Now I'll be able to listen to my 5 case fans that sound like an Harrier hovering above my house! That stupid power supply fan was screwing everything up...."
Question is, is it possible to get a non-crap graphics card which doesn't double as the sound system for your racing games? Looking at my case, it seems that the two fans I can replace (CPU and power supply) are fairly quiet, but the graphics card has a tiny little fan making a big noise. And worse, the heatsink has been epoxied onto the GPU by the manufacturer so I can't replace it with anything passive.
Take a look in kustompcs.co.uk for replacement graphics cards, and... yes, that's right, they're all renowned for the noise they make. Reviews of high-end graphics cards typically use phrases like "so long as you don't mind the noise", and the better the card, the worse the noise.
Is there anything good which can be passively cooled?
"Well.. 0dB would be ideal, but most people cannot hear sounds that low"
dB is not a measure of noise level, it's a comparaison of numbers.
0dB means "equal to"
So I'm a little confused how you say that people can't hear 0dB. On my stereo, 0dB is used to define the maximum possible power, and any noise level less than that is shown as (for example) -18dB relative to full power. Computer sound systems use the same measure, for example DirectX defines 0dB as the maximum power that your soundcard can produce. You'd have a hard time convincing anyone that my stereo set to 0dB was inaudible.
Okay, it just gave me doc.{some-random-stuff}.filename%2Bpdf, and the default action was to "open it in links"
So what's that all about?
Now imagine if your captcha image came from a certain range of IP addresses, and you decided to return an advertisement instead of a captcha for certain requests...
Free banner ads on the porn sites...
"$125,000 for what will amount to most likely 4 years in jail?"
Would make her the best-paid person there, no?
"I think this part of the article is significant:
;-)
One problem, he said, is that companies will tend to keep under wraps the results of commissioned studies that turn out unfavorably."
Lemme guess, the rest of the article was unfavourable, so you kept it under wraps?
Any idea of the easiest way to upgrade Mandrake installation to use this?
I seem to remember investigating K* before, and their (Kmail's) approach was "go and ask whoever makes your distro". Has anyone done the install on the Drake without resorting to weird compiler options?
"Software that takes 6 months for one guy to slap together, isn't going to impress anybody who has an IT background. They'll see it's obviously only 6 man months of work"
Uhh, somebody with an IT background looking at 6 man-months of work, is going to think it's worth $60,000. Whether they pay or not depends on whether they need it, but that's what it's worth.