I can remember the days when logging someone's IP address was *never* used as a means of determining unique individuals because people who wrote this software actually understood how computers actually worked, and thus understood that one computer is not the same thing as one user. I used to run Netscape off of a server onto X-terminal software, along with several office-mates at the same time. It used to work just fine, until sites started assuming one IP == one user, and got their cookies horribly confused when we'd both hit the same site. I remember once getting the shopping cart for someone else popping up on my screen at a computer parts seller website - sure enough it thought I was him because we had the same IP. We would also have problems trying to reply to online surveys, which would falsely accuse us of being one person trying to double-vote.
But now that most people browse via Windows sites have started assuming that it's just plain impossible for two different people to have the same IP address.
Again, as always, I blame Microsoft for dumbing-down the computer industry and removing functionality by making their crippled system the only standard people have to bother supporting.
And the truly sad thing is that the main reason users fear the command line is that MICROSOFT'S command line (COMMAND.COM) was so crippled, and they've never seen how useful a command line can really be when designed by someone other than Microsoft. So in the end MS's own incompetence ends up being a boon to them. They now have hordes of users who fear the command line, which is just how MS likes it.
Technically speaking, any employee-owned company is communist, as in the workers own the company. There's plenty of those sorts of companies that do just fine in a capitalist society. The notion that the GOVERNMENT should run all business is not communist. It's socialist, and *that* I agree is highly evil, but it has nothing to do with what Marx described as communism. The notion that communism and capitalism have to be at odds is a myth. Take the orginal Amana colony as an example of communism existing peacefully within capitalism.
What relevance do your words have for us here in the real world, where Linux is defending against the attack Microsoft started, rather than choosing to attack Microsoft?
"Simple: After two years the malingerers will have jobs and all the others will have starved."
I'm not a "leftie", but even I have to say that that comment is bollocks because at having a small percentage of people unemployed is a necessary part of capitalism. If unemployment is 0%, then there's no room left for companies to grow in size, and things stagnate. There has to be a ready pool of people to hire on a moment's notice. Now that doesn't mean there have to be a *lot* of people unemployed, but it does mean that at any given time there will have to exist at least a few people who don't currently have a job yet are not "Maligners".
But I don't think this situation is using technology to get around copy protection....
Since when has that ever stopped the DMCA? DeCSS is not for getting around copy protection either. It's for getting around other types of restrictions, like the region encoding, and the restriction that only officially approved DVD players are allowed to play DVDs.
The DMCA is the back door the "big guys" are using to gain total content control all the way up the supply chain - from content production to consumer use of said content. Normally it would be a violation of anti-monopoly laws for a single company to grab total control of both the production and the distribution channels of a type of product. But with the DMCA they get to do it in a back-door way, by only releasing the details of their copy protection scheme to those manufacturers that agree to enforce their market control schemes. For example if you don't put region encoding or fast-forward suppression into your DVD player, and agree to keep the code secret, you don't get the legal right to the copy protection decrypter. In the past such efforts would have been laughed at by the open-source crowd, who have some pretty good reverse-engineers among them. But now with the DMCA, it doesn't matter that you are smart enough to decrypt the content without the help of the content provider - it's illegal to do so or tell anyone else how they can do it.
So they get control of the consumer's products for content viewing without actually having to own the companies that make the consumer's products, and thereby not triggering anti-monoply laws.
What started with DvDs is now happening with eBooks, then - to force the adaption of a new technology with evil side effects, just make sure it's the only format available.
The media middlemen, such as publishing firms, want to keep themselves firmly entrenched in a world where their middleman position is becoming less useful to the consumer. They're doing a good job of it so far. The technique they are using is to use patent and copyright to control not just the content, but the way in which you are allowed to view it. But they've got to give those of us who give a damn about fair use a reason to ignore our convictions and accept the middleman's control.
The way they seem to be doing it is to force their control over all new forms of technology, thus leaving those who care about fair use with the awful choice of "stay obsolete, or accept our control - your choice". E-books and DVDs are both doing this. Since the new technology is also the restrictive technology, when people start adapting the new technology because it's really cool and neat, they end up giving up their control unwittingly. Eventually the old technology stops being supported. Movies start being available ONLY on DVD and not on tape anymore. Books start being available ONLY on E-book and not on paper anymore. Soon even those who are willing to stick with old technology to avoid the hedgemony don't even have that option anymore. The choice becomes one of "accept the hedgemony, or totally forego every work of culture and entertainment being put out and stay out of the loop."
This sucks. What do I do about the upcoming 4-hour director's cut of Fellowship of the Ring on DVD? I want very much to have it, and I don't mind one bit giving the money in the form or royalyties to those who created it, and to New Line studio for having the guts to put their necks out on the line financing it. But how do I do this without simultaneously supporting their part in the engineered the DeCSS slander, er, I mean "trial"?
And that's just the way they want it. They want to make sure that I cannot seperate the two. And thus, an obsolete system of middlemen who aren't needed anymore in today's economy get job security by forcing me to pick between giving up on fair use, versus giving up on participation in modern culture.
And of course, as a side effect of this, open source software *also* has to give up on participation in modern culture, and I think that's what irks me the most, actually. I don't think the media execs are really interested one way or another in open source. But they are interested in preserving the hedgemony through content control, and as a side effect that ends up meaning there can't be open source methods to access the content they put out.
What if the original image is already small enough to be a thumbnail? For example, what if you paste a copyrighted icon of a stop sign, or a left-arrow, from someone else's site?
Would that be a legal inclusion, or would you have to shrink it down even further into an incomprehensable dot to make it legal?
What implications might this have on Google's image searching feature? They give a thumbnail, but they also let you see the whole picture as an remote paste into their page. This is a case where they *are* pasting the remote image into their own HTML page without the surrounding context, so in that sense it seems like it would violate the ruling made. But on the other hand they do it in a way that makes it obvious that this *is* an image from a remote site and they aren't trying to pass it off as their own work.
You need to normalize with regards to remote usability. I would think that remote root exploits are a bit easier on systems that have more remote
usefulness. (If your machine won't let *anyone* have a remote shell, legit or otherwise, then it's more "secure", but only in a trivial irrelevant way.
In that regard, I would expect Linux to actually have more remote exploits, but this is because it also has more remote usefulness. Windows is probably more "secure" than linux against remote users, but only in the same sense that a computer that is unplugged is infinitely more secure than one that is turned on.
Have you ever *seen* these lists of bugs found in Linux and published publicy? While the occasional real bad humdinger is found, most are of the form, "I read the source and found out that someone could in theory do such-and-such, but I don't know if anyone has actually done this yet."
In linux, the white-hat hackers and the black-hat hackers operate on equal footing with regards to
access to the information. That's the key difference.
The only difference between linux kernel design debates and closed-source ones is that linux debates are carried out in the public. Slow-witted people assume that just because you get to *witness* the linux developers have debates that this means there is more confusion and disagreement between them than between developers in a closed source project. Bull. Whatever disagreement there is in a closed project will not occur where the public can witness it.
A parallel can be drawn about security problems too.
Shortcuts are a main cause of headaches for you when you use Windows? Uh...
Not the existance of shortcuts, but the decision to NOT implement actual links and implement shortcuts instead is the problem.
It means I cannot trick programs into thinking a file is in two different places, which then means I don't have liberty to manage my own directory structure without having to re-install software every time I move it.
Will they be fixing their design flaws as well? Those are the real problem, and can't be fixed in a month. They can't be fixed without just starting over from scratch. I'm talking about things like making it standard practice to encourage users to integrate everything automatically without user intervention (which is where all those e-mail viruses come from.) Also, there's the decisions to put too much functionality in the high level shell (explorer.exe) and not enough into the low level bits that other programs can use. (For example choosing to implement shortcuts instead of filesystem links.) Then there's the DLL hell of not being able to have both a new and an old version of a DLL accessable to programs at the same time when the interface changes. These are not "bugs", and they are the main cause of headaches for me when I'm using Windows.
Read the letter. It explicitly states that the view source option is gone in the most recent version.
I won't wait unless I know there's a port coming
on
Last Word on Loki
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· Score: 2
The problem with asking people to not buy the windows version and instead wait for the port is that there's never any clue that a port is on the way. It's unreasonable to ask consumers to wait indefinately for every single game when there's only a small chance the game you're insterested in will be one of the ones ported.
The only Loki game I ever got was Civ:CTP, and it's no coincidence that this is also the only one where there was good information ahead of time that a port was coming, so I *knew* there was a reason to wait. Plus they used channels that got the game physically present on store shelves instead of trying to rely on on-line sales.
My concern with that is this: Let's say something buggy is making the system crash. Then if the persistant OS does it's job with perfect accuracy, it's just going to end up re-creating the conditions that caused the crash, and Boom - crash again. The only way to avoid this is to NOT succeed at the goal of re-creating the conditions before the crash.
But VMware is typically running things twice as slow as native, so you gain nothing at all by running the project under vmware. Consider: Without a way to checkpoint the program, what happens if you have to start over near the end of the run because you had to kill it? You end up taking twice as long overall - the first aborted run plus the full run time again from scratch a second time. So in the worst case scenario, where the program is killed *just as* it was about to finish, you get performance as bad as running under VMware without a crash.
It only is worth it if you expect to have to halt the program more than once. Assuming only one halt and restart, VMware is still slower.
Re:This sucks, and it's the fault of Linux users.
on
Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2
If charity is what you want to support, then by all means do so. But don't try to disguise it as a normal businesss transaction. If I had chosen to buy a Loki version of a game I already owned and already cold play, then that would be charity plain and simple. I think that donations to sourceforge and the like are better ways to support the linux community than charity disguised as a business transaction.
And gaming on Linux isn't dead. Loki was just the first attempt.
Slashdot Mirror
Speed of loading the program into memory is irrelevant. Opera is faster at rendering the pages, and that's what was being talked about.
I can remember the days when logging someone's IP address was *never* used as a means of determining unique individuals because people who wrote this software actually understood how computers actually worked, and thus understood that one computer is not the same thing as one user. I used to run Netscape off of a server onto X-terminal
software, along with several office-mates at the same time. It used to work just fine, until sites started assuming one IP == one user, and got their cookies horribly confused when we'd both hit the same site. I remember once getting the shopping cart for someone else popping up on my screen at a computer parts seller website - sure enough it thought I was him because we had the same IP.
We would also have problems trying to reply to online surveys, which would falsely accuse us of being one person trying to double-vote.
But now that most people browse via Windows sites have started assuming that it's just plain impossible for two different people to have the same IP address.
Again, as always, I blame Microsoft for dumbing-down the computer industry and removing functionality by making their crippled system the only standard people have to bother supporting.
What is this talk of "default" products?
And the truly sad thing is that the main reason users fear the command line is that MICROSOFT'S command line (COMMAND.COM) was so crippled, and they've never seen how useful a command line can really be when designed by someone other than Microsoft. So in the end MS's own incompetence ends up being a boon to them. They now have hordes of users who fear the command line, which is just how MS likes it.
Technically speaking, any employee-owned company is communist, as in the workers own the company. There's plenty of those sorts of companies that do just fine in a capitalist society. The notion that the GOVERNMENT should run all business is not communist. It's socialist, and *that* I agree is highly evil, but it has nothing to do with what Marx described as communism. The notion that communism and capitalism have to be at odds is a myth. Take the orginal Amana colony as an example of communism existing peacefully within capitalism.
What relevance do your words have for us here in the real world, where Linux is defending against the attack Microsoft started, rather than choosing to attack Microsoft?
Who do you contact if your own local senators aren't on the committee?
I'm not a "leftie", but even I have to say that that comment is bollocks because at having a small percentage of people unemployed is a necessary part of capitalism. If unemployment is 0%, then there's no room left for companies to grow in size, and things stagnate. There has to be a ready pool of people to hire on a moment's notice. Now that doesn't mean there have to be a *lot* of people unemployed, but it does mean that at any given time there will have to exist at least a few people who don't currently have a job yet are not "Maligners".
When the right to bitch at your representative doesn't end up translating into actual action, it's a hollow irrelevant thing.
The DMCA is the back door the "big guys" are using to gain total content control all the way up the supply chain - from content production to consumer use of said content. Normally it would be a violation of anti-monopoly laws for a single company to grab total control of both the production and the distribution channels of a type of product. But with the DMCA they get to do it in a back-door way, by only releasing the details of their copy protection scheme to those manufacturers that agree to enforce their market control schemes. For example if you don't put region encoding or fast-forward suppression into your DVD player, and agree to keep the code secret, you don't get the legal right to the copy protection decrypter. In the past such efforts would have been laughed at by the open-source crowd, who have some pretty good reverse-engineers among them. But now with the DMCA, it doesn't matter that you are smart enough to decrypt the content without the help of the content provider - it's illegal to do so or tell anyone else how they can do it.
So they get control of the consumer's products for content viewing without actually having to own the companies that make the consumer's products, and thereby not triggering anti-monoply laws.
The media middlemen, such as publishing firms, want to keep themselves firmly entrenched in a world where their middleman position is becoming less useful to the consumer. They're doing a good job of it so far. The technique they are using is to use patent and copyright to control not just the content, but the way in which you are allowed to view it. But they've got to give those of us who give a damn about fair use a reason to ignore our convictions and accept the middleman's control.
The way they seem to be doing it is to force their control over all new forms of technology, thus leaving those who care about fair use with the awful choice of "stay obsolete, or accept our control - your choice". E-books and DVDs are both doing this. Since the new technology is also the restrictive technology, when people start adapting the new technology because it's really cool and neat, they end up giving up their control unwittingly. Eventually the old technology stops being supported. Movies start being available ONLY on DVD and not on tape anymore. Books start being available ONLY on E-book and not on paper anymore. Soon even those who are willing to stick with old technology to avoid the hedgemony don't even have that option anymore. The choice becomes one of "accept the hedgemony, or totally forego every work of culture and entertainment being put out and stay out of the loop."
This sucks. What do I do about the upcoming 4-hour director's cut of Fellowship of the Ring on DVD? I want very much to have it, and I don't mind one bit giving the money in the form or royalyties to those who created it, and to New Line studio for having the guts to put their necks out on the line financing it. But how do I do this without simultaneously supporting their part in the engineered the DeCSS slander, er, I mean "trial"?
And that's just the way they want it. They want to make sure that I cannot seperate the two. And thus, an obsolete system of middlemen who aren't needed anymore in today's economy get job security by forcing me to pick between giving up on fair use, versus giving up on participation in modern culture.
And of course, as a side effect of this, open source software *also* has to give up on participation in modern culture, and I think that's what irks me the most, actually. I don't think the media execs are really interested one way or another in open source. But they are interested in preserving the hedgemony through content control, and as a side effect that ends up meaning there can't be open source methods to access the content they put out.
What if the original image is already small enough to be a thumbnail? For example, what if you paste a copyrighted icon of a stop sign, or a left-arrow, from someone else's site? Would that be a legal inclusion, or would you have to shrink it down even further into an incomprehensable dot to make it legal?
What implications might this have on Google's image searching feature? They give a thumbnail, but they also let you see the whole picture as an remote paste into their page. This is a case where they *are* pasting the remote image into their own HTML page without the surrounding context, so in that sense it seems like it would violate the ruling made. But on the other hand they do it in a way that makes it obvious that this *is* an image from a remote site and they aren't trying to pass it off as their own work.
How would the ruling affect this case?
You need to normalize with regards to remote usability. I would think that remote root exploits are a bit easier on systems that have more remote
usefulness. (If your machine won't let *anyone* have a remote shell, legit or otherwise, then it's more "secure", but only in a trivial irrelevant way.
In that regard, I would expect Linux to actually have more remote exploits, but this is because it also has more remote usefulness. Windows is probably more "secure" than linux against remote users, but only in the same sense that a computer that is unplugged is infinitely more secure than one that is turned on.
Have you ever *seen* these lists of bugs found in Linux and published publicy? While the occasional real bad humdinger is found, most are of the form, "I read the source and found out that someone could in theory do such-and-such, but I don't know if anyone has actually done this yet."
In linux, the white-hat hackers and the black-hat hackers operate on equal footing with regards to
access to the information. That's the key difference.
The only difference between linux kernel design debates and closed-source ones is that linux debates are carried out in the public. Slow-witted people assume that just because you get to *witness* the linux developers have debates that this means there is more confusion and disagreement between them than between developers in a closed source project. Bull. Whatever disagreement there is in a closed project will not occur where the public can witness it.
A parallel can be drawn about security problems too.
Will they be fixing their design flaws as well? Those are the real problem, and can't be fixed in a month. They can't be fixed without just starting over from scratch. I'm talking about things like making it standard practice to encourage users to integrate everything automatically without user intervention (which is where all those e-mail viruses come from.) Also, there's the decisions to put too much functionality in the high level shell (explorer.exe) and not enough into the low level bits that other programs can use. (For example choosing to implement shortcuts instead of filesystem links.) Then there's the DLL hell of not being able to have both a new and an old version of a DLL accessable to programs at the same time when the interface changes. These are not "bugs", and they are the main cause of headaches for me when I'm using Windows.
Outlook Express != Outlook
Read the letter. It explicitly states that the view source option is gone in the most recent version.
The only Loki game I ever got was Civ:CTP, and it's no coincidence that this is also the only one where there was good information ahead of time that a port was coming, so I *knew* there was a reason to wait. Plus they used channels that got the game physically present on store shelves instead of trying to rely on on-line sales.
My concern with that is this: Let's say something buggy is making the system crash. Then if the persistant OS does it's job with perfect accuracy, it's just going to end up re-creating the conditions that caused the crash, and Boom - crash again. The only way to avoid this is to NOT succeed at the goal of re-creating the conditions before the crash.
It only is worth it if you expect to have to halt the program more than once. Assuming only one halt and restart, VMware is still slower.
If charity is what you want to support, then by all means do so. But don't try to disguise it as a normal businesss transaction. If I had chosen to buy a Loki version of a game I already owned and already cold play, then that would be charity plain and simple. I think that donations to sourceforge and the like are better ways to support the linux community than charity disguised as a business transaction.
And gaming on Linux isn't dead. Loki was just the first attempt.