We have had this discussion. There is no legitimate use for DRM. It has no right to exist. I have told people this before. DRM does not improve the security of corporate networks. Thats not what it is meant to do. DRM has just one purpose. to deprive people of the right to use the computers they own as they see fit. Securing documents and sensitive company data is to use good security practices. IPSec, Kerberos, PKI, that kind of thing.
My home router is a Linux NAT Server. (I sorta have a pissant about the fact that those things to be called "Routers" I have a DI-704, and I couldn't get it to route between two actual subnets. It only would NAT.
Anyway, my point. What about things like the Linksys WRT54GL?
The thing is, it would be awesome if there was a flash drive driven Linux device with a Cisco Style com port that ran off flash, could be OpenLDAP Server, Samba DC, Kerberos KDC, NAT Server, or actual router WITH a Cisco style Console port that are cheap. Why does this not exist??
So lets have the Lincity project absorb this project. Lincity NG is graphically on par with Simcity 2000, but its playability is lower and it misses features. Simcity 2000 was just a graphically enhanced Sincity Classic with a few playability enhancements and more structures. I see no reason why the LinCity project can't just assimilate this project, call it Super Lincity, and use the nessessary areas from Metropolis to fill its deficencies.
There is but one Linux. But there are multiple forms of packaging. Mandriva and Fedora/RedHat/CentOS can be lumped into the category of having dependancy resolution problems too rigid. Mandriva specifically suffers a loss of redundacy when a source of RPMs fail. Yum keeps mirror catalogs. urpmi from Mandriva has the added ability of using SSH and Kerberos to "Mass Deploy" applications, and can centralize with LDAP. No other package Manager can do that.
But both urpmi and yum fail at handling source code package. You have to download them and compile with rpm --rebuild.
When it comes to Debs, I have no idea how to build Debs. Ubuntu and Debian lack the SSH/Kerberos mass deply ability and are even HARDER to recompile than RPMs.
Portage Handles source Code gracefully. Thats its strength.
I sorta wish that some of these projects would merge. I wish that urpmi handled mirror failures and did a better job than it does. I wish that urpmi could handle source code. Likewise, I wish that yum could use SSH/Kerberos
Now, Slackware tends to be problematic, no package dependancy can result in chaos.
I also take issues with things like Autopackage RPM and DEB are here to stay. get over it.
There have been alot of innovative, beautiful games to come out of F/OSS: Vega Strike Pingus FreeDroid RPG TrackBalls Nexuiz Open Arena Tremulous Torcs Scorched Earth 3D AssaultCube Lincity NG
Also, many DOS games have found new life as Linux games:
Quake 1, 2, and 3 Doom I, II, and Final Descent I and II (D2X-XL) Warcraft II * Duke Nukem 3D
Problems:
Some games get neglected that really should not have been: Heretic and Hexen - These are Doom Engine games, technically, there is one Engine that plays them, Vavoom, supposedly DoomsDay plays them, but in many cases their performance is really buggy. Strife - Only Vavoom plays this. I'd like to note that you can play Strife, Heretic, and Hexen under Wine with Randy Heit's ZDoom Engine for Windows. But thats not the same as a Native Linux Port. There used to be a Linux port of the massive multiplayer engine ZDaemon for Doom based games, but that guy announced that he hated Linux and closed off his source. He even put code in his program to prevent people using Wine to play the game, anmd said that Linux Users were responsible for DoS attacks against his servers.
Blood - This is a big one. Blood was one of the greatest games of all time. Yet there is no Engine replacement for it and it runs awful under DosEmu and DosBox. There exists a Total Remake of the Bloodbath levels called "Transfusion" but it is Quake based and is nothing like the original Blood. Star Command: Revolution - A game So obscure I found it for 3.95 in a Wal-Mart Bargain bin Mechwarrior 2: This game predates Direct 3D, You can't run this under Wine.
* Recently, Warcraft II support under Stratagus has suffered. Stratagus 2.1 was superior to Stratagus 2.2. Stratagus 2.1 had support for 16 players instead of the usual 8, and could do dual race computer forces. It had a level editor, and could read the native Warcraft II PUD Format.
There exists Linux Engines for:
Quake 4 Doom 3
I really think a great deal more effort should be pushed into making Windows and older Dos games accessible and updated under Linux, such as One Must Fall, and producing more original games, as it seems some Linux games that used to be full steam ahead are dying out. I'm shifting my focus in University towards programming just so I will have the technical programming knowledge to contribute to Open Source projects more than I am now. So many of the problems are things like bugs in network code, deprecated syntax, added support for additional games.
Games are where the Computer Industry goes. It was Doom that gave us the Windows Ecosystem, so it will have to be a killer Linux game that gives us the Linux ecosystem.
The Drive works, you just have to use sdparm to clear the idle flag so the drive won't spin down at all. But this is bad, its a deliberately defective product and I hope someone sues. Make that lots of people.
But isn't this how the Borg assimilate people? by injecting nano-robots into the jugular vein of your neck and then the machines attack your Renal glands, central nervous system and brain? How long before treating sickness becomes routine optimization? In general the machines believe they are doing the Humans they assimilate a favor by repairing damage and making enhancements to bodily organs.
eGroupware with Kontact. All F/OSS with outlook compatibility, LDAP Integration, MySQL Backend. Its just missing Kerberos then it would be perfect.
It uses XML-RPC to transfer Addresses, Calendaring, etc. It even talks to Outlook, It would be the perfect Exchange replacement except that for the love of god, it doesn't support Kerberos! God damn it!
Outlook may not support this, but some mail clients can use a SRV Record to determine Where its SMTP and POP or IMAP are. It can't affect authentication, but, it can affect redirection.
Why POP? Why not IMAP? and secondly, why are there not Mail SRV Records in their DNS Tables to automatically redirect the E-mail clients transparently?
I love Bind, but someone really should fix Bind-SDB so that it can accept Zone updates to LDAP Backends. That way, Zone transfers can travel encrypted in LDAPS. This is a failing of Bind.
You know how we do it at my house? 802.1X. 802.1X is Wifi's best kept secret. Your means of authentication are your OpenLDAP/Kerberos/Samba/FreeRadius credentials for PEAP, or a CA if you are one of our nodes with EAP_TLS.
Has anyone considered the following: I realize that the general consensus is that Americans are stupid. This seems to be the case. But both myself on FreeNode and several female friends and loved ones of mine will tell you that people from some Muslim countries are far worse than any AOL user ever was.
What I'm trying to get at, is that in his quest to stop idiocy, he will probably wind up blocking the entire Non-English speaking world and Non-White Cultures of the USA (Hispanics, Blacks) because those cultures tend to view the Anglo-Saxon English speaking culture with open hostility.
The point is it sounds an awful lot like Ethnic Cleansing since AOL as it existed in those days really doesn't exist anymore. Most of the non-technical denizens of the Internet are like AOL users were in those days.
A more closely relegated division in this time between the AOL Users and normal TCP/IP based users of today is Windows Users and Linux Users. Windows users tend to be poor, undereducated, in non-technical fields. Windows Piracy is rampant in third world countries. (Although OLPC is trying to change that.) Conversely Linux Users tend to be statistically white, male, of considerable wealth and highly educated (generally speaking) and from either the USA ore Europe.
If its DRM restricted its not free. In beer or in Speech. Windows DRM means you have to pay for Windows which means that somewhere MS Gets a cut. So yes, your paying for it. And yes, Apples's DRM is no Better. I maintain my stance DRM has no right to exist, and DRM should be resisted by any means necessary. I want to live in a DRM free future no matter the cost.
What makes me happy: Kerberos 1.6 ewith LDAP Backend! Hell yeah! OpenAFS 1.4, Fuck yeah! No more maintaining two databases for Kerberos and one for everything else: Win and God.
I think that media companies are going to fight until the bitter end to supress Linux users because so much of their DRM technology just doesn't work. Microsoft will play ball with DRM Media companies, Linux users are much more likely to fight.
I have a theory that even if Linux users outnumbered Windows users, Game companies and Media companies would continue to do whatever they could to make Games and Media incompatible making the majority of people criminals so that they could stay in control of their content no matter what.
Despite all the trolling that everyone says how horrible Linux is because companies produce broken hardware that don't support it, plays musical chairs with chip sets, Linux is turning into one of the greatest OSes the world has ever seen. Lets make sure 2008 is not the last year of Linux. Lets make sure Linux does not go quietly into the night,
Bull crap I've run stable Linux machines that pump iron, I've never recompiled my Kernel, and the only time I have had linking errors was in a project I was actively myself coding for, d2x-xl. I have a machine that survived upgrades 9.0, 9.2, 10.0, 10.2, 2006, 2007.0, 2007.1 and soon 2008.0
Will the hardware makers do what they have to to make sure the project fails by installing the worst software Linux has to offer and a broken configuration like they usually do?
Considering MS's war of extermination - I all Linux users do what we can to make Linux absolutely perfect hardware issues permitting. I mean, I want Linux distributions that are truly superior in every way possible to Windows. I want to make these people sorry they were every born. Mandriva is my distributor and my Linux of choice. While I support all things Linux and would never pose one Linux user against another, I am willing to learn C and C++ forwards and backwards. I will code solutions and drivers for Linux myself if I have too.
We should stop waiting around for others to do our work for us and stand on our own merits. Let me give an example.
We are closer to an Exchange solution than everyone thinks. If eGroupware and Kontact supported Kerberos over XML-RPC, Exchange would be finished. eGroupware and Kontact replicate all the features of Exchange and has a technologically superior advantage of funneling everything over HTTP. But it doesn't support Kerberos so it becomes a total nuisense to configure. The fact that Evolution does not support XMLRPC at all is just insane.
On the Open Office Front. Continue to support ODF, if changes need to be made to ODF to support more features, extend the features. Create versions of ODF backward and foreward compatible. And do whatever it takes to reverse engineer OOXML so that OO.org can read them, and resave them as ODF. Lets start really getting serious and making the bastards pay.
I wonder if this is XP Backsliding or Linux Uptake. The optimistic person in my says this helps Linux, but the pessimist in me says people are digging their heels in XP.
Slashdot Mirror
You still haven't been paying attention. DRM is not a part of computer security.
We have had this discussion. There is no legitimate use for DRM. It has no right to exist. I have told people this before. DRM does not improve the security of corporate networks. Thats not what it is meant to do. DRM has just one purpose. to deprive people of the right to use the computers they own as they see fit. Securing documents and sensitive company data is to use good security practices. IPSec, Kerberos, PKI, that kind of thing.
Point. Learn good computer security practices.
I want DRM to dissappear from this world forever/
My home router is a Linux NAT Server. (I sorta have a pissant about the fact that those things to be called "Routers" I have a DI-704, and I couldn't get it to route between two actual subnets. It only would NAT.
Anyway, my point. What about things like the Linksys WRT54GL?
The thing is, it would be awesome if there was a flash drive driven Linux device with a Cisco Style com port that ran off flash, could be OpenLDAP Server, Samba DC, Kerberos KDC, NAT Server, or actual router WITH a Cisco style Console port that are cheap. Why does this not exist??
So lets have the Lincity project absorb this project. Lincity NG is graphically on par with Simcity 2000, but its playability is lower and it misses features. Simcity 2000 was just a graphically enhanced Sincity Classic with a few playability enhancements and more structures. I see no reason why the LinCity project can't just assimilate this project, call it Super Lincity, and use the nessessary areas from Metropolis to fill its deficencies.
Let me claify. The game actually starts, but you can't type anything in the dialogue boxes, you can't click any of the buttons.
It builds, but you get to the loading screen and then you can't actually start a game. It Freezes.
There is but one Linux. But there are multiple forms of packaging. Mandriva and Fedora/RedHat/CentOS can be lumped into the category of having dependancy resolution problems too rigid. Mandriva specifically suffers a loss of redundacy when a source of RPMs fail. Yum keeps mirror catalogs. urpmi from Mandriva has the added ability of using SSH and Kerberos to "Mass Deploy" applications, and can centralize with LDAP. No other package Manager can do that.
But both urpmi and yum fail at handling source code package. You have to download them and compile with rpm --rebuild.
When it comes to Debs, I have no idea how to build Debs. Ubuntu and Debian lack the SSH/Kerberos mass deply ability and are even HARDER to recompile than RPMs.
Portage Handles source Code gracefully. Thats its strength.
I sorta wish that some of these projects would merge. I wish that urpmi handled mirror failures and did a better job than it does. I wish that urpmi could handle source code. Likewise, I wish that yum could use SSH/Kerberos
Now, Slackware tends to be problematic, no package dependancy can result in chaos.
I also take issues with things like Autopackage RPM and DEB are here to stay. get over it.
Too much stuff from the past gets neglected.
The Pros:
There have been alot of innovative, beautiful games to come out of F/OSS:
Vega Strike
Pingus
FreeDroid RPG
TrackBalls
Nexuiz
Open Arena
Tremulous
Torcs
Scorched Earth 3D
AssaultCube
Lincity NG
Also, many DOS games have found new life as Linux games:
Quake 1, 2, and 3
Doom I, II, and Final
Descent I and II (D2X-XL)
Warcraft II *
Duke Nukem 3D
Problems:
Some games get neglected that really should not have been:
Heretic and Hexen - These are Doom Engine games, technically, there is one Engine that plays them, Vavoom, supposedly DoomsDay plays them, but in many cases their performance is really buggy.
Strife - Only Vavoom plays this.
I'd like to note that you can play Strife, Heretic, and Hexen under Wine with Randy Heit's ZDoom Engine for Windows. But thats not the same as a Native Linux Port. There used to be a Linux port of the massive multiplayer engine ZDaemon for Doom based games, but that guy announced that he hated Linux and closed off his source. He even put code in his program to prevent people using Wine to play the game, anmd said that Linux Users were responsible for DoS attacks against his servers.
Blood - This is a big one. Blood was one of the greatest games of all time. Yet there is no Engine replacement for it and it runs awful under DosEmu and DosBox. There exists a Total Remake of the Bloodbath levels called "Transfusion" but it is Quake based and is nothing like the original Blood.
Star Command: Revolution - A game So obscure I found it for 3.95 in a Wal-Mart Bargain bin
Mechwarrior 2: This game predates Direct 3D, You can't run this under Wine.
* Recently, Warcraft II support under Stratagus has suffered. Stratagus 2.1 was superior to Stratagus 2.2. Stratagus 2.1 had support for 16 players instead of the usual 8, and could do dual race computer forces. It had a level editor, and could read the native Warcraft II PUD Format.
There exists Linux Engines for:
Quake 4
Doom 3
I really think a great deal more effort should be pushed into making Windows and older Dos games accessible and updated under Linux, such as One Must Fall, and producing more original games, as it seems some Linux games that used to be full steam ahead are dying out. I'm shifting my focus in University towards programming just so I will have the technical programming knowledge to contribute to Open Source projects more than I am now. So many of the problems are things like bugs in network code, deprecated syntax, added support for additional games.
Games are where the Computer Industry goes. It was Doom that gave us the Windows Ecosystem, so it will have to be a killer Linux game that gives us the Linux ecosystem.
The Drive works, you just have to use sdparm to clear the idle flag so the drive won't spin down at all. But this is bad, its a deliberately defective product and I hope someone sues. Make that lots of people.
But isn't this how the Borg assimilate people? by injecting nano-robots into the jugular vein of your neck and then the machines attack your Renal glands, central nervous system and brain? How long before treating sickness becomes routine optimization? In general the machines believe they are doing the Humans they assimilate a favor by repairing damage and making enhancements to bodily organs.
eGroupware with Kontact. All F/OSS with outlook compatibility, LDAP Integration, MySQL Backend. Its just missing Kerberos then it would be perfect.
It uses XML-RPC to transfer Addresses, Calendaring, etc. It even talks to Outlook, It would be the perfect Exchange replacement except that for the love of god, it doesn't support Kerberos! God damn it!
Outlook may not support this, but some mail clients can use a SRV Record to determine Where its SMTP and POP or IMAP are. It can't affect authentication, but, it can affect redirection.
$ORIGIN _tcp.domain.
_imap SRV 0 0 143 mail.domain.
_pop3 SRV 0 0 110 mail.domain.
_smtp SRV 0 0 25 mail.domain.
Like that.
Why POP? Why not IMAP? and secondly, why are there not Mail SRV Records in their DNS Tables to automatically redirect the E-mail clients transparently?
I love Bind, but someone really should fix Bind-SDB so that it can accept Zone updates to LDAP Backends. That way, Zone transfers can travel encrypted in LDAPS.
This is a failing of Bind.
Did they get this platform from a guy who lives in a Ford Taurus behind a Wal-Mart?
You know how we do it at my house? 802.1X. 802.1X is Wifi's best kept secret. Your means of authentication are your OpenLDAP/Kerberos/Samba/FreeRadius credentials for PEAP, or a CA if you are one of our nodes with EAP_TLS.
No complicated WEP/WPA strings, no bullshit.
Has anyone considered the following: I realize that the general consensus is that Americans are stupid. This seems to be the case. But both myself on FreeNode and several female friends and loved ones of mine will tell you that people from some Muslim countries are far worse than any AOL user ever was.
What I'm trying to get at, is that in his quest to stop idiocy, he will probably wind up blocking the entire Non-English speaking world and Non-White Cultures of the USA (Hispanics, Blacks) because those cultures tend to view the Anglo-Saxon English speaking culture with open hostility.
The point is it sounds an awful lot like Ethnic Cleansing since AOL as it existed in those days really doesn't exist anymore. Most of the non-technical denizens of the Internet are like AOL users were in those days.
A more closely relegated division in this time between the AOL Users and normal TCP/IP based users of today is Windows Users and Linux Users. Windows users tend to be poor, undereducated, in non-technical fields. Windows Piracy is rampant in third world countries. (Although OLPC is trying to change that.) Conversely Linux Users tend to be statistically white, male, of considerable wealth and highly educated (generally speaking) and from either the USA ore Europe.
Supporting other platforms means offering DRM Free media. Like the BBC iPlayer, there will never be sanctioned Linux playablity.
If its DRM restricted its not free. In beer or in Speech. Windows DRM means you have to pay for Windows which means that somewhere MS Gets a cut. So yes, your paying for it. And yes, Apples's DRM is no Better. I maintain my stance DRM has no right to exist, and DRM should be resisted by any means necessary. I want to live in a DRM free future no matter the cost.
What makes me happy: Kerberos 1.6 ewith LDAP Backend! Hell yeah! OpenAFS 1.4, Fuck yeah! No more maintaining two databases for Kerberos and one for everything else: Win and God.
I think that media companies are going to fight until the bitter end to supress Linux users because so much of their DRM technology just doesn't work. Microsoft will play ball with DRM Media companies, Linux users are much more likely to fight.
I have a theory that even if Linux users outnumbered Windows users, Game companies and Media companies would continue to do whatever they could to make Games and Media incompatible making the majority of people criminals so that they could stay in control of their content no matter what.
Despite all the trolling that everyone says how horrible Linux is because companies produce broken hardware that don't support it, plays musical chairs with chip sets, Linux is turning into one of the greatest OSes the world has ever seen. Lets make sure 2008 is not the last year of Linux. Lets make sure Linux does not go quietly into the night,
Bull crap I've run stable Linux machines that pump iron, I've never recompiled my Kernel, and the only time I have had linking errors was in a project I was actively myself coding for, d2x-xl. I have a machine that survived upgrades 9.0, 9.2, 10.0, 10.2, 2006, 2007.0, 2007.1 and soon 2008.0
Will the hardware makers do what they have to to make sure the project fails by installing the worst software Linux has to offer and a broken configuration like they usually do?
Considering MS's war of extermination - I all Linux users do what we can to make Linux absolutely perfect hardware issues permitting. I mean, I want Linux distributions that are truly superior in every way possible to Windows. I want to make these people sorry they were every born. Mandriva is my distributor and my Linux of choice. While I support all things Linux and would never pose one Linux user against another, I am willing to learn C and C++ forwards and backwards. I will code solutions and drivers for Linux myself if I have too.
We should stop waiting around for others to do our work for us and stand on our own merits. Let me give an example.
We are closer to an Exchange solution than everyone thinks. If eGroupware and Kontact supported Kerberos over XML-RPC, Exchange would be finished. eGroupware and Kontact replicate all the features of Exchange and has a technologically superior advantage of funneling everything over HTTP. But it doesn't support Kerberos so it becomes a total nuisense to configure. The fact that Evolution does not support XMLRPC at all is just insane.
On the Open Office Front. Continue to support ODF, if changes need to be made to ODF to support more features, extend the features. Create versions of ODF backward and foreward compatible. And do whatever it takes to reverse engineer OOXML so that OO.org can read them, and resave them as ODF. Lets start really getting serious and making the bastards pay.
I wonder if this is XP Backsliding or Linux Uptake. The optimistic person in my says this helps Linux, but the pessimist in me says people are digging their heels in XP.