MP3 is about the only format that might be agreeable to this, since I imagine its reasonably common for people to fix ID3's and then share the modified file. I just don't see it happening for other formats (.avi,.zip,.rar).
There's at least a few other places I can see it happening: quite often people will make a zip/rar out of a bunch of files with no compression, just for the sake of bunching them together. And if someone corrects the subtitles on a video file which has been "softsubbed", it would be useful if I could download the new version taking advantage of sources which were sharing the old version.
On a separate note, if I build a programmable keyboard that has the ability to macro complex keystrokes would that be an issue?
How bout if I could macro the mouse as well?
What if I also incorporated a capture device and pointed a video camera at the monitor, thus building an artificial player?
Don't bother with all that, just hire some cheap Indian labour.
No, the crap that they had to go through was to proove they had reverse engineered it (and not just copied the ones they were producing under license from Intel). Reverse engineering is and should be perfectly legal.
Seriously, though, is the decreased diversity in bot "heritage" a good thing -- does it mean that bot infections are easier to detect and treat?
I wouldn't think so. You can usually tell pretty easily (heck, just look at the lights on the network card), and removing an unknown bot once you know it's there isn't (in my limited experience) really any harder than one you've dealt with before. I suppose it does make automated removal tools more effective, but personally I don't use the things.
If I participate in a real-world discussion, whether in a social or academic context, and just start behaving disrespectfully (or present an extreme view and don't make a good case for it, or whatever), there are repercussions, which can range from mild social disapproval to being dragged outside and getting my ass kicked.
But you won't be just for disagreeing. By all means ban anyone who's rude or incomprehensible. But far too often someone will give a well-reasoned, polite disagreement and get modded town for it, where in real life you'd shrug, conclude that you disagreed on the subject and move on.
Microsoft might agree with you there. They have the infrastructure and the enforcement muscle to use Trade Secret protection to keep their revenue stream coming in. And they'd love for there to be no mechanism whatsoever for the GPL to be enforced.
Bollocks. Explain to me just how they would get people to pay for Office using Trade Secret law?
Imagine the utter destruction they could have caused if they had *enhanced* the firmware downloads with some sort of (probably boot-sector) virus, or simply modified them to destroy the motherboard... *Shudder*
Why wouldn't they?
There's no money in utter destruction. They want the infected machines alive and well and sending out spam - and doing that from the bios code is too much effort.
Bear in mind that quite often that has been deliberately "compressed" (by renaming variables etc.) so it downloads faster, compared to the copy that is actually worked on.
I don't. I'd much prefer to see an almost-instant-on OS that didn't depend on special hardware tricks but rather because the architects actually designed the bloody thing for a change.
If you want instant-on switch to DOS. You'll quickly realise why people don't. Much as you mock "glass windows", the cycles aren't being wasted - there are good reasons for most of what a modern OS does when booting.
Or Apple could just license their DRMed AAC to other companies - making money (Real has already offered to pay) - so everyone could sell music for the ipod. But no, they want to gain an anticompetitive advantage for their online store from their dominance of the portable player market.
The trouble is that X sucks at it; it requires far too many round trips to do anything useful (seriously, try running mozilla on another machine over the internet. It's not pretty). I honestly think a better X-like protocol for applications would be the best thing that could happen.
Bah, do it manually with iptables. My firewall is a 100mhz P1 running stock debian with some handwritten iptables rules and it's as responsive as any machine I've seen.
I decided to actually try this, though the worst (best?) I could find was a 486. I even used distcc. 2 months on I was still waiting for the stage 1 gcc to compile.
I had to pirate a (second) copy of civ 3 to be able to play it under wine. I read in the interview here that they were sticking with safedisc for civ 4 regardless of how many problems it caused for legitimate users. Whoops, looks like you just lost my sale.
But again they're actually good things on the whole - at least windows speaks tcp/ip, and can view gifs, rather than everyone else having to try and reverse engineer weird windows networking and image formats.
OpenOffice works, but it just feels clunky - it feels like the versino of word I used on win 3.1 so long ago.
Try koffice. It isn't as functional, but it does feel a lot better.
MPlayer will start and randomly not play sound. Sound is still a big kludgy wtf-is-goin-on type thing. Should I be using ALSA, or ESD or/dev/dsp or what? What the fuck? I think ESD is what I want to use, but now all sound is delayed by a half second.
Agreed, but it's getting there. On any current system I've seen you can use any of the three and it'll work, and ESD is officially deprecated - sure, it's not gone yet, but progress is certainly being made.
What about all the piles of graphics libraries
Ignore them, pick the one you like and stick with the applications that go with it. I'm running a pure KDE system here - just because other graphics libraries exist doesn't mean you have to pay any attention to them.
what's a game developer supposed to work with? DirectX may be kludgy in a lot of ways, but it's a HUGE asset for Windows.
SDL. And again, yes, it's still behind directx, but you can't deny that progress has been made.
I dunno, it's usable, but it was usable in the early 90s. I know that things have improved, but it still feels like the same experience I had back then - right down to fucking around with monitor frequencies by hand?
I could say the same thing about windows, right down to rebooting four times to upgrade my video drivers. What are the ways you feel windows has improved?
The big difference is that file is called xorg.conf now. What the fuck is up with that? Are people still using monitors without EDID? Even if a handful are, why are we still designing for that outside case? Why cant I just have " Section Montior / EDID True / End Section" or something like that?
Actually the nvidia drivers do that now - you still have to specify a frequency range, but it gets ignored.
JVM: most portable VM for taking to userspace and scripting languages.
Not really. It's too hard to interface the JVM with native code, and far too hard to embed it in other programs..net will beat it in this regard - while it's not much better on the second, it's a lot easier to interface with C libraries from.net, and with mono it is actually more portable in practice than Java is.
Wrong. As far as current knowledge goes, a quantum computer is not a big help for cracking symmetric ciphers such as Triple DES or AES.
Erm, yes they are. You can try all possible keys in parallel, so you just need a small bit of known plaintext to be able to figure out which is the right one.
Slashdot Mirror
There's at least a few other places I can see it happening: quite often people will make a zip/rar out of a bunch of files with no compression, just for the sake of bunching them together. And if someone corrects the subtitles on a video file which has been "softsubbed", it would be useful if I could download the new version taking advantage of sources which were sharing the old version.
Don't bother with all that, just hire some cheap Indian labour.
No, the crap that they had to go through was to proove they had reverse engineered it (and not just copied the ones they were producing under license from Intel). Reverse engineering is and should be perfectly legal.
I wouldn't think so. You can usually tell pretty easily (heck, just look at the lights on the network card), and removing an unknown bot once you know it's there isn't (in my limited experience) really any harder than one you've dealt with before. I suppose it does make automated removal tools more effective, but personally I don't use the things.
But you won't be just for disagreeing. By all means ban anyone who's rude or incomprehensible. But far too often someone will give a well-reasoned, polite disagreement and get modded town for it, where in real life you'd shrug, conclude that you disagreed on the subject and move on.
That's a feature. It means it takes more effort to game.
Bollocks. Explain to me just how they would get people to pay for Office using Trade Secret law?
Why wouldn't they?
There's no money in utter destruction. They want the infected machines alive and well and sending out spam - and doing that from the bios code is too much effort.
Bear in mind that quite often that has been deliberately "compressed" (by renaming variables etc.) so it downloads faster, compared to the copy that is actually worked on.
If you want instant-on switch to DOS. You'll quickly realise why people don't. Much as you mock "glass windows", the cycles aren't being wasted - there are good reasons for most of what a modern OS does when booting.
Or Apple could just license their DRMed AAC to other companies - making money (Real has already offered to pay) - so everyone could sell music for the ipod. But no, they want to gain an anticompetitive advantage for their online store from their dominance of the portable player market.
It should be mentioned at every point since he seems to be trying to cover it up.
The point is that this greater competition is there because of net neutrality.
The trouble is that X sucks at it; it requires far too many round trips to do anything useful (seriously, try running mozilla on another machine over the internet. It's not pretty). I honestly think a better X-like protocol for applications would be the best thing that could happen.
Bah, do it manually with iptables. My firewall is a 100mhz P1 running stock debian with some handwritten iptables rules and it's as responsive as any machine I've seen.
/happy gentoo user
I had to pirate a (second) copy of civ 3 to be able to play it under wine. I read in the interview here that they were sticking with safedisc for civ 4 regardless of how many problems it caused for legitimate users. Whoops, looks like you just lost my sale.
This is why you should use encryption for everything. Sadly the last I checked https://slashdot.org/ just redirects to the cleartext site.
I have those keys; it still takes about 20s to log in to my sparcstation 10 via ssh. Also, why not streaming video over ssh?
But again they're actually good things on the whole - at least windows speaks tcp/ip, and can view gifs, rather than everyone else having to try and reverse engineer weird windows networking and image formats.
Try koffice. It isn't as functional, but it does feel a lot better.
MPlayer will start and randomly not play sound. Sound is still a big kludgy wtf-is-goin-on type thing. Should I be using ALSA, or ESD or /dev/dsp or what? What the fuck? I think ESD is what I want to use, but now all sound is delayed by a half second.
Agreed, but it's getting there. On any current system I've seen you can use any of the three and it'll work, and ESD is officially deprecated - sure, it's not gone yet, but progress is certainly being made.
What about all the piles of graphics libraries
Ignore them, pick the one you like and stick with the applications that go with it. I'm running a pure KDE system here - just because other graphics libraries exist doesn't mean you have to pay any attention to them.
what's a game developer supposed to work with? DirectX may be kludgy in a lot of ways, but it's a HUGE asset for Windows.
SDL. And again, yes, it's still behind directx, but you can't deny that progress has been made.
I dunno, it's usable, but it was usable in the early 90s. I know that things have improved, but it still feels like the same experience I had back then - right down to fucking around with monitor frequencies by hand?
I could say the same thing about windows, right down to rebooting four times to upgrade my video drivers. What are the ways you feel windows has improved?
The big difference is that file is called xorg.conf now. What the fuck is up with that? Are people still using monitors without EDID? Even if a handful are, why are we still designing for that outside case? Why cant I just have " Section Montior / EDID True / End Section" or something like that?
Actually the nvidia drivers do that now - you still have to specify a frequency range, but it gets ignored.
Not really. It's too hard to interface the JVM with native code, and far too hard to embed it in other programs. .net will beat it in this regard - while it's not much better on the second, it's a lot easier to interface with C libraries from .net, and with mono it is actually more portable in practice than Java is.
Erm, yes they are. You can try all possible keys in parallel, so you just need a small bit of known plaintext to be able to figure out which is the right one.
Because a few years ago you would have been saying that about Yahoo.
256mb stick, 8mb stick, 1mb stick. Easy enough.