If they were.exe's in the.jar file then the JVM should make the data available to OS security inspection with an OS specific security call... Java should ask for permission to create an OS native executable which is way beyond the permission we intended to give to access files on the OS disk!
I'm not overly familiar with the "exploit" you're talking about, but I can think of several ways around this suggested fix.
Probably the simplest problem is how does the JVM know if there are exe's embedded in the jar file? Now, if there were some standard "exe in jar" packaging scheme then yes, the JVM could look at the.jar file and warn the user about the contents. However (even in this case), what stops someone simply cutting-and-pasting the entire compiled code for the.exe into a string, then having their java code write this string to a file on disk? Bingo, instant executable file.
Even if the JVM used some kind of heuristics (with the inevitable performance hit) What happens if you do something as simple as XOR the compiled code with a key stored in the file? I can't think of any practical way to determine if there's native-executable code in a.jar file that can't be easily circumvented with even simple encryption.
The only way I can think of is to totally prevent all code in any jar file from creating or modifying binary files - restrict them to creating text-only files and (IIRC) they can't drop native executables (or at least, the file won't execute properly under windows). However, I have the feeling there are plenty of situations where you'd want to write a binary file that has nothing to do with executable code (can't bring one to mind, but exercise left to the reader), and this would be prevented by blocking all binary file access.
IIRC there's nothing magical about executable files - they're just strings of characters like anything else. If you can write one type of file, you can pretty much write any kind of file to disk, so there's no way to stop this kind of thing fro mthe JVM...
"Open source versions are forked. Therefore, if it had been open source there would be no forks"?
Not quite - the different versions black-box reverse-engineered from the proprietary product aren't all perfectly compatible. The products which are open-source (and so can be intimately inspected by all) haven't forked at all.
There's a big difference between multiple re-inventions and forking a codebase - if you can't see how something works but try to copy it, you're going to make mistakes or have to make assumptions at some point, and those can introduce (unintentional) incompatibilities.
It think the grandparent was trying to show that if it's open-source (ie, you can inspect every line of code form the get-go), the evidence is that it's pretty very rare for anyone to intentionally fork the codebase.
The plot is dire, lacking even quality Dr Who campness. The acting is awful (and Christopher Eccleston at least should have been capable of better). The dialogue is stilted and largely irrelevant to the actual plot (such as it is), and to top it all off the entire episode looks like it was made on a budget of about £12.50.
And apart from all the generically dire aspects of it, it looks like they've tried to make it so "English" that it just ends up being a caricature of itself. London bus? Check. Thick regional accents? Check. Prominent london landmarks every five seonds? Check. Jesus...
I never, ever thought I'd find myself saying this, but I actually enjoyed the dire americanised Dr Who "Special" (special... in the same way a turd in the bed isn't mundane) more. Sure, it completely dispensed with the Dr Who universe almost in its entirety, the Doctor is half-human, and even snogs his assistant, but at least by pretending it wasn't Dr Who you could derive some vague enjoyment out of it.
If this was on at 16:00 on after-school kids TV, it'd be fantastic. As anything else, it dies on its Gallifreyan arse.
You know it's weird - we completely disagree yet you demonstrate practically every point I have against Flash.
1) Flash is proprietary, and hence you're willingly putting yourself at the mercy of one (now proven clueless) company. If Microsoft owned Flash everyone would be shitting themselves about vendor lock-in - what's different about Macromedia? Especially after this debacle?
2) We already have solutions for things like GUIs. Ever hear of HTML? Javascript? DHTML? AJaX? These are all open standards, accessible to all, gracefully degrading back to plain ASCII text, uncontrolled by any one corporation or entity. As one poster already indicated, if there's something you can't do with AJaX/DHTML, the answer is to improve AJaX/DHTML - don't replace them with a closed, proprietary, inaccessible, non-degrading (at all!) format that wasn't even originally designed to do what it does now.
3) Flash fans are primarily designers, not people with good/varied development experience: "Most of us have moved away from plain ASCII stuff a while ago and moved into the wide-world of GUIs". HTML/AJaX are likely all the GUI you'll ever need (and see point 2 if not). In fact, in my experience Flash is one of the worst languages to develop a GUI in, certainly in the set "languages any vaguely sane person would ever consider using".
3) Flash fans tend not to "get" the web - the idea of the WWW is to make information available. Not pretty, not animated, but accessible. Prettiness is a bonus, but only once you can see the content. Flash started as an animated movie format, and as that it excells. The problem was when someone decided it should get all interactive, because it does that very, very badly, certainly in the context of a web browser. Flash is a binary, compiled, proprietary and closed format. It is the antithesis of practically everything the web is supposed to be - textual, human-readable, uncontrolled by a single entity and open to all.
Don't get me wrong - Flash has its place, but that place is the same as "images" - a discrete, minimally-interactive (play controls and nothing else) role where it can convey information that's hard or impossible to convey another way (an animated diagram, web cartoon - hell, even a rotating company logo if you want). The second flash starts encroaching into "text" or "browser" territory it should be beaten back with a stick, since it can't do them as well as the solutions we already have. It can do them prettier, but that only sucks in the naive, emotive magpie-users who confuse "shiny things" with The Right Way To Do It.
4) Tied-in with the above is the complaint that Flash breaks almost all the most important functionality of web browsers - back/forward, bookmarks, cut-and-paste links, statelessness, non-blind navigation... (I can't even be bothered to complete the list it's so long). Practically the only thing that Flash doesn't break is the point-and-click link selection. Oh yes, and what's another major reason everything seems to be given a web-interface these days? Consistency of interface. Flash comes in and forces designers to re-invent the interface practically from scratch any time they want interactivity, throwing out X decades of refinement and evolution. How is that in any way a good idea?
5) And finally, look at the two "Flash is good" examples you offer: web cartoons and five-minute throwaway games. How in any way are these representative of the vast majority of the web? They're not - they're silly useless glittery things that can't be done any other way, and that's where Flash should stay.
IIRC, Google completely ignores Flash animations (apart from possibly indexing the URL of the top-level SWF file itself).
This may no longer be the case, but the last time I looked into it no major search engine supported searching within flash files - they're opaque, compiled (alright, byte-code or whatever), binary files, so it's practically impossible to find links within them (certainly without some form of decompiling, which is hard for search engines to automate), and they're also stateful (unlike the web) and prohibit deep-linking (so there's not much point in extracting deep links from them anyway).
I had the job of advising a customer on elementary SEO techniques recently, and the first one was basically "you'll probably have to scrap your entire site and re-do it from scratch - the whole thing's done in Flash, so there's no way to optimise it, and no way for Google to even see anything other than your front page". Didn't like pissing on his bonfire, but at least now he knows not to mistake "pretty" for "good" again...
Because the broadcast flag is still a very clear and present danger to your "fair use" rights, the EFF have plenty of valid targets to campaign against and don't need to drum up fake issues to get support, and "Funny" is more charitable than "Troll".
(Disclosure: IANAL) The courts haven't in the least "slowed/stopped the fcc from mandating anything like this". IIRC the madate has been issued by the FCC - it comes into force on the 1st July, but it's a rule now.
Additionally, although one (single!) Judge agrees with the EFF's motion, they may well be disqualified from even bringing it due to a technicality. (And as an aside, how the hell are you supposed to empirically demonstrate material harm caused by something that hasn't happened yet anyway?)
As many other posters have noted, this is a very minor setback in a long and easily-manipulable-by-special-interest-groups-with -deep-pockets legal process, and there are many, many, many ways this could (I predict probably will) come into force.
The issue of private action against drunk drivers is completely irrelevent - the key point here is that, if a drunk driver crashed and killed someone, neither MADD nor the casualty's next of kin would be able to sue the car maker[1] or the distillery[2] for "allowing" or "encouraging" it to happen.[4]
The key point I was trying to make is that, if you produce a tool which has many, many uses, and one of those can be used to break the law (or violate copyright), you should be able to hang, draw and quarter the perpetrator, but in no way are you justified in going after the manufacturer of the tool itself.
If you don't like the drunk driving analogy, how about guns? A gun only has one use - to maim or kill another human being. While you might be able to get away with it in very select circumstances, this is basically totally illegal (assault, grevious bodily harm, murder, manslaughter, etc, etc, etc).
Now someone buys a gun and shoots me in the leg with it. I can sue them, but should I be able to sue the gun manufacturer for not building-in "only shoot people who really, really definitely deserve it" technology? Of course not.
Footnotes:
[1] For "neglecting to build drunk-detecting measures into every car they produce".
[2] For "neglecting to build 'anti-driving-after-imbibing' technology into every bottle of whisky[3]".
[3] Beyond the obvious, ineffective kind;-)
[4] Unless, obviously, they were giving away a free gallon of petrol and printing something like "Drink me and drive about at excessive speeds" on the freaking bottle, but they clearly aren't. P2P apps are neither encouraging nor discouraging copyright violation, but because they aren't expending all their time fighting this losing battle, MGM et all are trying to imply that they're tacitly approving of it.
Granted, but this is a technical distinction that may well subsequently be lost when future judges look to this for precendents. Grokster is being attacked because people are using it to trade copyrighted material, but short of the *AA implanting everyone with DRM-enabled brainchips, to a certain degree this is/will be true of any P2P system, ever.
Given this state of affairs, a decision against Grokster ("a P2P client which is used to trade copyrighted works") could well set a precedent that is used to take down any P2P system (given they'll all be used to trade copyrighted works some some degree).
Additionally, the *AA has been pretty indiscriminate about attacking P2P wherever it arises - even BitTorrent is being attacked at its weakest link (the peer/file discovery process - Suprnova, Lokitorrent, etc). It seems pretty clear (to me, at least) that, given all P2P systems will invariably be used to share copyrighted works, the *AA are against P2P as a concept.
The essence of P2P is that users can share what they like, how they like. If the *AA are against this unfettered use of P2P, they are against P2P.
"There must be something in the iTMS that's public domain that would make a better example."
I think the sheer ridiculousness of the target is the point of the attempt - most non-p2pers mental processes go like this:
Copying copyrighted music is bad
The opposite of bad is good
The DMCA stops people copying copyrighted works
Therefore the DMCA is good
If this guy gets in trouble by "copying" something as worthless as 1'3" of silence, the sheer ridiculousness of the story shows the problem with the DMCA - you get in trouble for merely openening the lock, regardless of what's inside it or whether it should even be locked in the first place.
Had he cracked the DRM on anything with any value whatsoever he's be a pirate/copyright infringer, and many people would agree that he should get in trouble for it. This way he's flagrantly violating the DMCA, but even at the uninformed emotional level that most peopel enguage in the p2p debate from, it's really really hard to argue that he should be punished for it.
"What then is a hypothesis? It's a belief, one that will either be proved or disproved."
Exactly - "hypothesis" implies verifiability. "God exists" is a belief, because it can't be proved or disproved. "General Relativity" is a hypothesis, because it can (or at least, we can attempt to prove it).
"Science is far from untouchable. 100 years ago science said that it wasn't possible for mankind to visit the moon. Science is in a state of flux, it is always changing."
Funny thing, I've never heard a (proper) scientist seriously claim anything was impossible. "Unlikely", yes, "impossible with our current knowledge", yes, but just "impossible"? Never.
As the old saying goes, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" - a true scientist should and will always keep in mind that he or she could be wrong, and that (outside of pure mathematics) no evidence is perfectly conclusive.
As an aside (and contrary to popular opinion), "Science" never said the bumblebee couldn't fly - merely that the equations we used (for fixed-wing aircraft!) didn't explain how it could. Since bumblebees clearly don't have fixed-wings, "Science" never said a thing about them.
"Science named the atom. A the prefix meaning "not" and tom meaning "cut", science said that it wasn't possible to cut the atom. In the 1940s science evolved when it was shown that we can split atoms."
Ok, first up, Science didn't "name" anything, any more than Religion ever did. People name things, and even thinking of any given person as belonging to either group (religion XOR science) is stupid, since every person on the planet has irrational beliefs and simultaneously uses scientific method (observe, hypothesise, test - it's simply how we learn things).
Aside from that, this shows the benefits of science - "Science" may well be proven wrong, but when new information comes to light, science re-organises itself to accommodate it, thereby moving closer to universal Truth (to skirt the edge of philosophy for a moment).
Religion has its central precepts fixed, and as such can only respond to new information by:
Rejecting it entirely - self-evidently stupid, when you reject anything that can be proven (ok, "beyond any reasonable doubt") correct.
Ignoring it (stupid, because you can't claim to embrace universal Truth when you ignore bits of it), or
Selectively dropping (unofficially or officially) parts of the religion that contradict it. The key point here is that while "bits of religion" get dropped the whole time (women priests, gay rights, not shaving off the hair on your temples, etc, etc), new testaments (or entire offshoots of religions) happen only very, very rarely.
Hence, science moves closer to universal truth by incorporating new facts, striving to remain relevant and acknowledging it doesn't have the whole picture.
Religion moves further away by ignoring or contradicting inconvenient facts, becoming increasingly irrelevant and simultaneously claiming to embody Truth in its entirety.
Science is phlegmatic, Religion is dogmatic.
And please don't take this as an attack on religion - I have no strong religious beliefs either way, but I respect those of others. What I have no respect for is people erecting strawman arguments to "disprove" science, or insisting that religion and science are in any way connected.
Oh, and as an aside...
Atoms can well be considered indivisible - an atom is the smallest unit of an element. If you split the atom you no longer have any of that element, just some protons, neutrons and electrons. An atom is indivisible, it's just "the smallest indivisible unit of any given element", not "the smallest indivisible unit of anything at all".;-p
I thought it might be, but wasn't certain enough to assert it to the whole of Slashdot;-)
Either way, a technology that has been introduced, used and abandoned by the majority of major games consoles out there hardly qualifies as "the future of gaming"...:-\
"The XaviX cartridge houses the dedicated game functions, and it is inserted into the XaviXPort to play... At the heart of the XaviX system is a custom multiprocessor chip deployed in each game cartridge. Thus, the XaviXPort never has to be upgraded--the game itself is the upgrade."
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't that how cartridge-based systems have worked since the year dot? I certainly remember Nintendo making a fuss about ugrade chips in the first Starfox game, and that came out as far back as the mid-90s...
Yeah, I do the same - IIRC any word in the english language that begins "X..." is supposed to be pronounced "Z...", so when I encounter "XOR" (or "Xor", or "xor") I always automatically think "Zor" (it's a word, so it should follow the usual rules for words, right?).
To my mind, if we want to pronounce it "ksor" it should be written "X-Or" (obviously an abbreviation, not a word)... Although this does also suggest "Ex-Or" as a pronunciation.
Of course, I also think the plural of house should be "hice", and support the idea of precedence brackets for the English language, so maybe I'm just an anal-retentive kook...;-)
"The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women..."
I'm assuming this is an attempt at sarcasm, but apart from the "wonderful climate" I wouldn't have realised. Sure we have a reputation for crap food, but then Americans have a reputation as ignorant redneck fuckwits, and we all know that's true, right?
Read TFA again(?) - if Wine's set to emulate XP it works fine. The only time the validator falls over is if Wine is set to emulate an operating system Microsoft themselves don't support, or if it's set to Win2K, which in the Wine developer's own opinion may be "may be a bug in wine".
As to why it sometimes doesn't work if you have Wine installed on a Windows machine, that I can't say (but why would you have it installed anyway?). However, the fact that it works if Wine's set to emulate XP suggests Wine might be fooling the validator as to the Windows version, rather that the validator refusing to work merely because Wine is on the machine.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but as I see it:
Microsoft are specifically checking to see if you're running Wine. I'd guess it's not specifically necessary (unless MS decided to unofficialy support Wine users, but that's pretty unlikely), but there's nothing bad going on yet.
If your version of Wine is emulating a Windows version Microsoft doesn't support (or, like Win98, wouldn't support unless paying consumers force them to), it returns an error. That strikes me as sensible and fair - if that version of Windows isn't supported by Windows Update, it should return an error so you don't mistakenly install the wrong versions of software/patches/DLLs. It even helpfully tells you why - "because you're
running an unsupported operating system.". Again, nothing bad yet - just some sensible precautions.
"If you set winver to win2000, you'll get a validation code that doesn't
work, this may be a bug in wine, or in the
validation program." (My emphasis)
Ok, so emu'ing Win2K generates a bad validation number. But this may be Wine's fault, or a simple bug in the validator. Still nothing definitely bad there...
If you set Wine to emulate XP, everything works fine. Still failing to see the evil here...
Let's be honest, if MS wanted to discriminate against Wine users they could quite easily have the validator reject anyone who had it installed, simply for running their software on an unsupported operating system.
So people are complaining that:
Windows doesn't support "versions" of Wine that are equivalent to versions of it's own operating system that it no longer supports. Wooo.
Either the validator or Wine may have a bug. Wooo.
Of course, this entire thing has clearly been whipped up by the asshat developer (Ivan Leo) who baselessly speculates that "even if this is only an initial attempt, they appear to want to discriminate wine users". No, they don't. They refuse to support versions of your software that they won't support of their own, and one of you has a single bug in your software. Pull your head out of your arse and strap down that jerking knee before your hurt somebody. And you might want to take something for that paranoia, too.
Look, I dislike MS as much as the next slashdotter, they have done evil things in the past and they will do them again in the future. I'm not an apologist, and I sincerely hope they eventually get what's coming to them. However, this kind of baseless accusation and knee-jerk reactionary idiocy isn't going to convince anyone that there is a valid, adult, mature alternative out there. For fuck's sake sort it out.
P.S. Good job exacerbating the problem, editors. You know, I used to defend you against the slagging off you get around here, but you honestly seem to be getting worse and worse. Try reading the article, then thinking about it for two seconds before approving. Might do wonders, y'know...
Yeah, very similar stories here... Got to "high school" aged 13 (weird school system where I grew up), and within a year a friend and I had admin accounts on the RM Nimbus (RMNet) Win3.1 network. Within another six months we were actually maintaining the network, (after we watched the "Head of IT" sit and stare at an autoexec.bat file for over half an hour, then solved the problem for him in thirty seconds from another terminal). Eventually we were just solving problems before the IT guy even noticed them (all, of course, unofficially - the Powers That Be would have had the screaming hairy ab-dabs at the thought of the access we had, and did, whenever they found out).
Highlights included:
When they discovered two students insulting each other by e-mail (nothing stronger than "arsehole"), and decided to take e-mail away from everybody. That night I went home and wrote a simple (file-based) e-mail server in C, and a friend wrote a simple client in VB, the next day half the students secretly had "e-mail" again. They eventually relented and turned e-mail back on when they dicovered ten different people using our system during a single IT lesson (heh).
A one-page "school newsletter" that was written featuring the headline "Mr Brown Takes the Boys Hockey Team to Victory in the Inter-Schools Cup"... but printed out and distributed with the story "Mr Brown Takes the Boys Hockey Team in the Showers" (hey, we were all 14 - it was funny at the time). Amusing statistics from this incident:
Number of newsletters printed: 300
Hours between distribution and horrified emergency recall: 4
Number of newsletters successfully recalled: 14
When the Head of IT removed the admin (superuser) account a friend had been using to do essential network administration (that the HoIT didn't know to do!), so we removed admin privileges from the "admin" account for a day. It never, ever got mentioned... but funnily enough he stopped looking for unauthorised superusers after that.
And finally, the best of the lot:
The Head of IT had a deal with RMNet (the Nimbus ISP that offered cheap rates to educational insitutions) - in return for cheap hosting, he had to look for and report any porn sites he could access so they could be added to the blacklist (still a bit suspicious about that...).
Anyway, the Head of IT used to sit on the only machine with a modem (for hour or two every morning before school), surfing for porn/credit card/warez sites sites, recording the URLs and reporting them to RMNet. The only problem was... he'd never heard of a browser cache.
We actually had friends who'd come in at lunchtime, copy the cache full of porn onto disk and sell it to the other kids for a couple of pounds a time.
Admin accounts on the school network: A small investment of time.
Occasionally getting caught with an admin account: A quick telling-off
Being regularly supplied with porn by the guy supposed to stop you seeing it, and making a tidy profit into the bargain: Priceless
Even if it does (I haven't got a licence agreement to hand, but don't recall ever reading a clause like that), is it really enforceable in law? How does one define "in possession of", or "lost"?
For example, I (practically uniquely amongst people I know) own a Windows XP Home licence (that came OEM with my machine, but I still paid for it). Now, a couple of years ago I lost the actual licence (and CD) shortly after moving house. I know the licence and CD are somewhere on my property, and I know I own(ed) a licence to use the software. However, am I morally a pirate because I don't know exactly where the licence/CD are right now?
Ok then, how about once I go through the garage and find it again? Am I now not a pirate? Was I ever one, or is it retroactively expunged from my past? Were I sued/fined in the interim, could I ask for my money back?
I don't mean to throw up strawman arguments here, but I honestly can't see a valid interpretation of this kind of clause that wouldn't disolve into a mess of absurd contradictions...
Except that if you cant prove that you have the license to use it, then no, technically you dont have the right to use it.
That's a very interesting philosophocal assertion, and I for one would love to hear some corroboration.
As I understand it, you're stating that unless one can prove incontrovertibly they're in possession of a paper licence agreement, they have no moral right to use the item to which the licence applies?
I'd disagree with you there. IANAL, but to my mind a "licence" is an abstract concept - a "right to perform an action" (eg, to use some software). The piece of paper you get is merely the proof you have a licence - the licence itself is the intangible permission given by the licenser).
For example, if you've lost your paper licence agreement but can otherwise prove you owned one, I doubt you'll find many companies that won't re-issue the bit of paper stating it in printed text.
Your argument is even more problematic when it's only a licence key we're talking about. If you register for many things on-line (for example when registering shareware or unlocking demo software), your "licence" (according to your definition) consists of just data (a registration code/e-mail), since that's all you're given by the licenser (or whatever the opposite of "licensee" is). By your argument anyone in possession of the key would legally be entitled to use the product, but this clearly isn't the case.
If you've lost your proof of your licence agreement I'd argue you still have a perfect right to use the software. If you were challenged on your right you wouldn't be able to defend yourself in court, but that's merely because the burden of proof rests on you to prove your innocence, not because the second you mislay your paper agreement you're instantly a pirate.
What the world would really need is a gaming API which could compete with (or be better than) DirectX in every respect, and which is cross-platform. Ideally, you would have a collaboration between Red Hat, SuSE, Apple and Sony. An API supporting Windows and Linux and Apple and the PS2 would certainly be a DirectX-killer. You could develop for four platforms for the price of one.
This is a lovely idea, but I think it'll forever be a pipe dream, simply because of economics.
First off, Sony are (IMO) highly unlikely to buy into any kind of cross-platform collaboration, at least in the near future - the only attraction of consoles are the games produced for it. Consoles are also manufactured at a loss, which game-sales recoup.
If you can get the latest "console" game on the platform of your choice, bang goes the impetus to buy the console. Without you buying the console there's no vendor lock-in, and Sony are reduced to the status of game developer for other people's platforms, a big step down (and loss of power) for the company. This power (and vendor lock-in) is the reason why a console company makes the hardware, as opposed to just banging out games for third-party hardware.
Any game SDK on Windows will have to out-perform DirectX in every way, many, many times over. Like it or not, DirectX is now the "default" platform for windows programming, and the one with all the big bucks spent on advertising and promotion. It's also Microsoft, and therefore perceived as "safe", at least from the point of view of Windows-compatibility.
IIRC (which I may not), when OpenGL first came out it was technically superior to the then-current DirectX version. However, because DirectX was such a "safe" option (see above), most games at least included a DirectX mode. Third-party non-Microsoft SDKs don't have this going for them, so there is absolutely no reason for game developers to include the option, unless it's already widespread. Catch-22.
Apple don't seem very interested (at all?) in chasing the gamers demographic, so they're unlikely to pitch in with any work on a cross-platform SDK. This attitude does seem odd to me, because they do pitch (almost exclusively!) to the early-adopter, technology-as-lifestyle-choice crowd, and there's a hefty crossover between them and gamers. There's also a potential upside for them, in that a cross-platform SDK would free people to choose any platform they wanted for gaming, and for a less-than-50%-market-share platform, that's good news. All in all, it would probably be A Good Thing good for Apple to pitch in with such an effort, but the will just seems to be lacking.
Red Hat and SuSE could well make such an effort, but the money is in large-scale enterprise computing, not in making Linux a better games platform. Even if they did decide to pitch in, they're facing unseating an entrenched DirectX on the Win32 platform, and without Win32 (or Sony) the whole project is dead in the water.
Even in the best-case scenario (Red Hat/SuSE decide it's worth it and Apple wakes up and joins the dots), you're still looking at a vanishingly small percentage of the games-software market. Without a majority from the get-go, you're never going to unseat DirectX on Win32, and without Win32 or Sony you're in trouble. And I can't see anyone convincing Sony to adopt an open SDK, unless it's forced on them by technology change (eg, cell processors) that make it too expensive to implement a new closed one from scratch.
So, the only hope for this seems to be convincing Sony to use an open SDK for the PS3. If this happens the SDK has a shot, but it's still doubtful you'll ever get Sony on-board because of the degree of control they'd have to voluntarily give up.
It's starring skinny annoying actor Chris Evans who's famous for Not Another Teen Movie, not the UK's fat, alcoholic ex-DJ Chris Evans, who's famous for being ginger. And a twat.
Hope this clears up any confusion, but since I've seen at least three "celebrity" databases that confuse the two while looking for links for this posting, somehow I doubt it... <:-/
Slashdot Mirror
If they were .exe's in the .jar file then the JVM should make the data available to OS security inspection with an OS specific security call... Java should ask for permission to create an OS native executable which is way beyond the permission we intended to give to access files on the OS disk!
.jar file and warn the user about the contents. However (even in this case), what stops someone simply cutting-and-pasting the entire compiled code for the .exe into a string, then having their java code write this string to a file on disk? Bingo, instant executable file.
.jar file that can't be easily circumvented with even simple encryption.
I'm not overly familiar with the "exploit" you're talking about, but I can think of several ways around this suggested fix.
Probably the simplest problem is how does the JVM know if there are exe's embedded in the jar file? Now, if there were some standard "exe in jar" packaging scheme then yes, the JVM could look at the
Even if the JVM used some kind of heuristics (with the inevitable performance hit) What happens if you do something as simple as XOR the compiled code with a key stored in the file? I can't think of any practical way to determine if there's native-executable code in a
The only way I can think of is to totally prevent all code in any jar file from creating or modifying binary files - restrict them to creating text-only files and (IIRC) they can't drop native executables (or at least, the file won't execute properly under windows). However, I have the feeling there are plenty of situations where you'd want to write a binary file that has nothing to do with executable code (can't bring one to mind, but exercise left to the reader), and this would be prevented by blocking all binary file access.
IIRC there's nothing magical about executable files - they're just strings of characters like anything else. If you can write one type of file, you can pretty much write any kind of file to disk, so there's no way to stop this kind of thing fro mthe JVM...
"Open source versions are forked. Therefore, if it had been open source there would be no forks"?
Not quite - the different versions black-box reverse-engineered from the proprietary product aren't all perfectly compatible. The products which are open-source (and so can be intimately inspected by all) haven't forked at all.
There's a big difference between multiple re-inventions and forking a codebase - if you can't see how something works but try to copy it, you're going to make mistakes or have to make assumptions at some point, and those can introduce (unintentional) incompatibilities.
It think the grandparent was trying to show that if it's open-source (ie, you can inspect every line of code form the get-go), the evidence is that it's pretty very rare for anyone to intentionally fork the codebase.
Oh, so you've seen it, then?
Crap. Utter crap.
The plot is dire, lacking even quality Dr Who campness. The acting is awful (and Christopher Eccleston at least should have been capable of better). The dialogue is stilted and largely irrelevant to the actual plot (such as it is), and to top it all off the entire episode looks like it was made on a budget of about £12.50.
And apart from all the generically dire aspects of it, it looks like they've tried to make it so "English" that it just ends up being a caricature of itself. London bus? Check. Thick regional accents? Check. Prominent london landmarks every five seonds? Check. Jesus...
I never, ever thought I'd find myself saying this, but I actually enjoyed the dire americanised Dr Who "Special" (special... in the same way a turd in the bed isn't mundane) more. Sure, it completely dispensed with the Dr Who universe almost in its entirety, the Doctor is half-human, and even snogs his assistant, but at least by pretending it wasn't Dr Who you could derive some vague enjoyment out of it.
If this was on at 16:00 on after-school kids TV, it'd be fantastic. As anything else, it dies on its Gallifreyan arse.
You know it's weird - we completely disagree yet you demonstrate practically every point I have against Flash.
1) Flash is proprietary, and hence you're willingly putting yourself at the mercy of one (now proven clueless) company. If Microsoft owned Flash everyone would be shitting themselves about vendor lock-in - what's different about Macromedia? Especially after this debacle?
2) We already have solutions for things like GUIs. Ever hear of HTML? Javascript? DHTML? AJaX? These are all open standards, accessible to all, gracefully degrading back to plain ASCII text, uncontrolled by any one corporation or entity. As one poster already indicated, if there's something you can't do with AJaX/DHTML, the answer is to improve AJaX/DHTML - don't replace them with a closed, proprietary, inaccessible, non-degrading (at all!) format that wasn't even originally designed to do what it does now.
3) Flash fans are primarily designers, not people with good/varied development experience: "Most of us have moved away from plain ASCII stuff a while ago and moved into the wide-world of GUIs". HTML/AJaX are likely all the GUI you'll ever need (and see point 2 if not). In fact, in my experience Flash is one of the worst languages to develop a GUI in, certainly in the set "languages any vaguely sane person would ever consider using".
3) Flash fans tend not to "get" the web - the idea of the WWW is to make information available. Not pretty, not animated, but accessible. Prettiness is a bonus, but only once you can see the content. Flash started as an animated movie format, and as that it excells. The problem was when someone decided it should get all interactive, because it does that very, very badly, certainly in the context of a web browser. Flash is a binary, compiled, proprietary and closed format. It is the antithesis of practically everything the web is supposed to be - textual, human-readable, uncontrolled by a single entity and open to all.
Don't get me wrong - Flash has its place, but that place is the same as "images" - a discrete, minimally-interactive (play controls and nothing else) role where it can convey information that's hard or impossible to convey another way (an animated diagram, web cartoon - hell, even a rotating company logo if you want). The second flash starts encroaching into "text" or "browser" territory it should be beaten back with a stick, since it can't do them as well as the solutions we already have. It can do them prettier, but that only sucks in the naive, emotive magpie-users who confuse "shiny things" with The Right Way To Do It.
4) Tied-in with the above is the complaint that Flash breaks almost all the most important functionality of web browsers - back/forward, bookmarks, cut-and-paste links, statelessness, non-blind navigation... (I can't even be bothered to complete the list it's so long). Practically the only thing that Flash doesn't break is the point-and-click link selection. Oh yes, and what's another major reason everything seems to be given a web-interface these days? Consistency of interface. Flash comes in and forces designers to re-invent the interface practically from scratch any time they want interactivity, throwing out X decades of refinement and evolution. How is that in any way a good idea?
5) And finally, look at the two "Flash is good" examples you offer: web cartoons and five-minute throwaway games. How in any way are these representative of the vast majority of the web? They're not - they're silly useless glittery things that can't be done any other way, and that's where Flash should stay.
IIRC, Google completely ignores Flash animations (apart from possibly indexing the URL of the top-level SWF file itself).
This may no longer be the case, but the last time I looked into it no major search engine supported searching within flash files - they're opaque, compiled (alright, byte-code or whatever), binary files, so it's practically impossible to find links within them (certainly without some form of decompiling, which is hard for search engines to automate), and they're also stateful (unlike the web) and prohibit deep-linking (so there's not much point in extracting deep links from them anyway).
I had the job of advising a customer on elementary SEO techniques recently, and the first one was basically "you'll probably have to scrap your entire site and re-do it from scratch - the whole thing's done in Flash, so there's no way to optimise it, and no way for Google to even see anything other than your front page". Didn't like pissing on his bonfire, but at least now he knows not to mistake "pretty" for "good" again...
Because the broadcast flag is still a very clear and present danger to your "fair use" rights, the EFF have plenty of valid targets to campaign against and don't need to drum up fake issues to get support, and "Funny" is more charitable than "Troll" .
h -deep-pockets legal process, and there are many, many, many ways this could (I predict probably will) come into force.
(Disclosure: IANAL) The courts haven't in the least "slowed/stopped the fcc from mandating anything like this". IIRC the madate has been issued by the FCC - it comes into force on the 1st July, but it's a rule now.
Additionally, although one (single!) Judge agrees with the EFF's motion, they may well be disqualified from even bringing it due to a technicality. (And as an aside, how the hell are you supposed to empirically demonstrate material harm caused by something that hasn't happened yet anyway?)
As many other posters have noted, this is a very minor setback in a long and easily-manipulable-by-special-interest-groups-wit
The key point I was trying to make is that, if you produce a tool which has many, many uses, and one of those can be used to break the law (or violate copyright), you should be able to hang, draw and quarter the perpetrator, but in no way are you justified in going after the manufacturer of the tool itself.
If you don't like the drunk driving analogy, how about guns? A gun only has one use - to maim or kill another human being. While you might be able to get away with it in very select circumstances, this is basically totally illegal (assault, grevious bodily harm, murder, manslaughter, etc, etc, etc).
Now someone buys a gun and shoots me in the leg with it. I can sue them, but should I be able to sue the gun manufacturer for not building-in "only shoot people who really, really definitely deserve it" technology? Of course not.
Footnotes:
- [1] For "neglecting to build drunk-detecting measures into every car they produce".
- [2] For "neglecting to build 'anti-driving-after-imbibing' technology into every bottle of whisky[3]".
- [3] Beyond the obvious, ineffective kind
;-)
- [4] Unless, obviously, they were giving away a free gallon of petrol and printing something like "Drink me and drive about at excessive speeds" on the freaking bottle, but they clearly aren't. P2P apps are neither encouraging nor discouraging copyright violation, but because they aren't expending all their time fighting this losing battle, MGM et all are trying to imply that they're tacitly approving of it.
Absence of prevention is not permission.Granted, but this is a technical distinction that may well subsequently be lost when future judges look to this for precendents. Grokster is being attacked because people are using it to trade copyrighted material, but short of the *AA implanting everyone with DRM-enabled brainchips, to a certain degree this is/will be true of any P2P system, ever.
Given this state of affairs, a decision against Grokster ("a P2P client which is used to trade copyrighted works") could well set a precedent that is used to take down any P2P system (given they'll all be used to trade copyrighted works some some degree).
Additionally, the *AA has been pretty indiscriminate about attacking P2P wherever it arises - even BitTorrent is being attacked at its weakest link (the peer/file discovery process - Suprnova, Lokitorrent, etc). It seems pretty clear (to me, at least) that, given all P2P systems will invariably be used to share copyrighted works, the *AA are against P2P as a concept.
The essence of P2P is that users can share what they like, how they like. If the *AA are against this unfettered use of P2P, they are against P2P.
Or just, you know, download the correct codec (divx) like they advise at the top of the page...
I think the sheer ridiculousness of the target is the point of the attempt - most non-p2pers mental processes go like this:
If this guy gets in trouble by "copying" something as worthless as 1'3" of silence, the sheer ridiculousness of the story shows the problem with the DMCA - you get in trouble for merely openening the lock, regardless of what's inside it or whether it should even be locked in the first place.
Had he cracked the DRM on anything with any value whatsoever he's be a pirate/copyright infringer, and many people would agree that he should get in trouble for it. This way he's flagrantly violating the DMCA, but even at the uninformed emotional level that most peopel enguage in the p2p debate from, it's really really hard to argue that he should be punished for it.
Exactly - "hypothesis" implies verifiability. "God exists" is a belief, because it can't be proved or disproved. "General Relativity" is a hypothesis, because it can (or at least, we can attempt to prove it).
"Science is far from untouchable. 100 years ago science said that it wasn't possible for mankind to visit the moon. Science is in a state of flux, it is always changing."
Funny thing, I've never heard a (proper) scientist seriously claim anything was impossible. "Unlikely", yes, "impossible with our current knowledge", yes, but just "impossible"? Never.
As the old saying goes, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" - a true scientist should and will always keep in mind that he or she could be wrong, and that (outside of pure mathematics) no evidence is perfectly conclusive.
As an aside (and contrary to popular opinion), "Science" never said the bumblebee couldn't fly - merely that the equations we used (for fixed-wing aircraft!) didn't explain how it could. Since bumblebees clearly don't have fixed-wings, "Science" never said a thing about them.
"Science named the atom. A the prefix meaning "not" and tom meaning "cut", science said that it wasn't possible to cut the atom. In the 1940s science evolved when it was shown that we can split atoms."
Ok, first up, Science didn't "name" anything, any more than Religion ever did. People name things, and even thinking of any given person as belonging to either group (religion XOR science) is stupid, since every person on the planet has irrational beliefs and simultaneously uses scientific method (observe, hypothesise, test - it's simply how we learn things).
Aside from that, this shows the benefits of science - "Science" may well be proven wrong, but when new information comes to light, science re-organises itself to accommodate it, thereby moving closer to universal Truth (to skirt the edge of philosophy for a moment).
Religion has its central precepts fixed, and as such can only respond to new information by:
Hence, science moves closer to universal truth by incorporating new facts, striving to remain relevant and acknowledging it doesn't have the whole picture.
Religion moves further away by ignoring or contradicting inconvenient facts, becoming increasingly irrelevant and simultaneously claiming to embody Truth in its entirety.
Science is phlegmatic, Religion is dogmatic.
And please don't take this as an attack on religion - I have no strong religious beliefs either way, but I respect those of others. What I have no respect for is people erecting strawman arguments to "disprove" science, or insisting that religion and science are in any way connected.
Oh, and as an aside...
Atoms can well be considered indivisible - an atom is the smallest unit of an element. If you split the atom you no longer have any of that element, just some protons, neutrons and electrons. An atom is indivisible, it's just "the smallest indivisible unit of any given element", not "the smallest indivisible unit of anything at all".
I thought it might be, but wasn't certain enough to assert it to the whole of Slashdot ;-)
:-\
Either way, a technology that has been introduced, used and abandoned by the majority of major games consoles out there hardly qualifies as "the future of gaming"...
"The XaviX cartridge houses the dedicated game functions, and it is inserted into the XaviXPort to play... At the heart of the XaviX system is a custom multiprocessor chip deployed in each game cartridge. Thus, the XaviXPort never has to be upgraded--the game itself is the upgrade."
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't that how cartridge-based systems have worked since the year dot? I certainly remember Nintendo making a fuss about ugrade chips in the first Starfox game, and that came out as far back as the mid-90s...
Games Machines of the Future, eh?
Yeah, I do the same - IIRC any word in the english language that begins "X..." is supposed to be pronounced "Z...", so when I encounter "XOR" (or "Xor", or "xor") I always automatically think "Zor" (it's a word, so it should follow the usual rules for words, right?).
;-)
To my mind, if we want to pronounce it "ksor" it should be written "X-Or" (obviously an abbreviation, not a word)... Although this does also suggest "Ex-Or" as a pronunciation.
Of course, I also think the plural of house should be "hice", and support the idea of precedence brackets for the English language, so maybe I'm just an anal-retentive kook...
Christ almighty, it's the Star Wars kid all over again, but without the charisma.
Oh, and doing a fair impression of Jabba the Hutt, rather than a Jedi...
"The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women..."
I'm assuming this is an attempt at sarcasm, but apart from the "wonderful climate" I wouldn't have realised. Sure we have a reputation for crap food, but then Americans have a reputation as ignorant redneck fuckwits, and we all know that's true, right?
Hmmm, someone has a problem with Brits, no?
Read TFA again(?) - if Wine's set to emulate XP it works fine. The only time the validator falls over is if Wine is set to emulate an operating system Microsoft themselves don't support, or if it's set to Win2K, which in the Wine developer's own opinion may be "may be a bug in wine".
As to why it sometimes doesn't work if you have Wine installed on a Windows machine, that I can't say (but why would you have it installed anyway?). However, the fact that it works if Wine's set to emulate XP suggests Wine might be fooling the validator as to the Windows version, rather that the validator refusing to work merely because Wine is on the machine.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but as I see it:
Microsoft are specifically checking to see if you're running Wine. I'd guess it's not specifically necessary (unless MS decided to unofficialy support Wine users, but that's pretty unlikely), but there's nothing bad going on yet.
If your version of Wine is emulating a Windows version Microsoft doesn't support (or, like Win98, wouldn't support unless paying consumers force them to), it returns an error. That strikes me as sensible and fair - if that version of Windows isn't supported by Windows Update, it should return an error so you don't mistakenly install the wrong versions of software/patches/DLLs. It even helpfully tells you why - "because you're running an unsupported operating system.". Again, nothing bad yet - just some sensible precautions.
"If you set winver to win2000, you'll get a validation code that doesn't work, this may be a bug in wine, or in the validation program."
(My emphasis)
Ok, so emu'ing Win2K generates a bad validation number. But this may be Wine's fault, or a simple bug in the validator. Still nothing definitely bad there...
If you set Wine to emulate XP, everything works fine. Still failing to see the evil here...
Let's be honest, if MS wanted to discriminate against Wine users they could quite easily have the validator reject anyone who had it installed, simply for running their software on an unsupported operating system.
So people are complaining that:
Of course, this entire thing has clearly been whipped up by the asshat developer (Ivan Leo) who baselessly speculates that "even if this is only an initial attempt, they appear to want to discriminate wine users". No, they don't. They refuse to support versions of your software that they won't support of their own, and one of you has a single bug in your software. Pull your head out of your arse and strap down that jerking knee before your hurt somebody. And you might want to take something for that paranoia, too.
Look, I dislike MS as much as the next slashdotter, they have done evil things in the past and they will do them again in the future. I'm not an apologist, and I sincerely hope they eventually get what's coming to them. However, this kind of baseless accusation and knee-jerk reactionary idiocy isn't going to convince anyone that there is a valid, adult, mature alternative out there. For fuck's sake sort it out.
P.S. Good job exacerbating the problem, editors. You know, I used to defend you against the slagging off you get around here, but you honestly seem to be getting worse and worse. Try reading the article, then thinking about it for two seconds before approving. Might do wonders, y'know...
Man, I've totally haddock with the awful puns around here.
Jeez, gotta love the quality of jokes in this plaice...
Yeah, very similar stories here... Got to "high school" aged 13 (weird school system where I grew up), and within a year a friend and I had admin accounts on the RM Nimbus (RMNet) Win3.1 network. Within another six months we were actually maintaining the network, (after we watched the "Head of IT" sit and stare at an autoexec.bat file for over half an hour, then solved the problem for him in thirty seconds from another terminal). Eventually we were just solving problems before the IT guy even noticed them (all, of course, unofficially - the Powers That Be would have had the screaming hairy ab-dabs at the thought of the access we had, and did, whenever they found out).
Highlights included:
The Head of IT had a deal with RMNet (the Nimbus ISP that offered cheap rates to educational insitutions) - in return for cheap hosting, he had to look for and report any porn sites he could access so they could be added to the blacklist (still a bit suspicious about that...).
Anyway, the Head of IT used to sit on the only machine with a modem (for hour or two every morning before school), surfing for porn/credit card/warez sites sites, recording the URLs and reporting them to RMNet. The only problem was... he'd never heard of a browser cache.
We actually had friends who'd come in at lunchtime, copy the cache full of porn onto disk and sell it to the other kids for a couple of pounds a time.
Even if it does (I haven't got a licence agreement to hand, but don't recall ever reading a clause like that), is it really enforceable in law? How does one define "in possession of", or "lost"?
For example, I (practically uniquely amongst people I know) own a Windows XP Home licence (that came OEM with my machine, but I still paid for it). Now, a couple of years ago I lost the actual licence (and CD) shortly after moving house. I know the licence and CD are somewhere on my property, and I know I own(ed) a licence to use the software. However, am I morally a pirate because I don't know exactly where the licence/CD are right now?
Ok then, how about once I go through the garage and find it again? Am I now not a pirate? Was I ever one, or is it retroactively expunged from my past? Were I sued/fined in the interim, could I ask for my money back?
I don't mean to throw up strawman arguments here, but I honestly can't see a valid interpretation of this kind of clause that wouldn't disolve into a mess of absurd contradictions...
That's a very interesting philosophocal assertion, and I for one would love to hear some corroboration.
As I understand it, you're stating that unless one can prove incontrovertibly they're in possession of a paper licence agreement, they have no moral right to use the item to which the licence applies?
I'd disagree with you there. IANAL, but to my mind a "licence" is an abstract concept - a "right to perform an action" (eg, to use some software). The piece of paper you get is merely the proof you have a licence - the licence itself is the intangible permission given by the licenser).
For example, if you've lost your paper licence agreement but can otherwise prove you owned one, I doubt you'll find many companies that won't re-issue the bit of paper stating it in printed text.
Your argument is even more problematic when it's only a licence key we're talking about. If you register for many things on-line (for example when registering shareware or unlocking demo software), your "licence" (according to your definition) consists of just data (a registration code/e-mail), since that's all you're given by the licenser (or whatever the opposite of "licensee" is). By your argument anyone in possession of the key would legally be entitled to use the product, but this clearly isn't the case.
If you've lost your proof of your licence agreement I'd argue you still have a perfect right to use the software. If you were challenged on your right you wouldn't be able to defend yourself in court, but that's merely because the burden of proof rests on you to prove your innocence, not because the second you mislay your paper agreement you're instantly a pirate.
This is a lovely idea, but I think it'll forever be a pipe dream, simply because of economics.
First off, Sony are (IMO) highly unlikely to buy into any kind of cross-platform collaboration, at least in the near future - the only attraction of consoles are the games produced for it. Consoles are also manufactured at a loss, which game-sales recoup.
If you can get the latest "console" game on the platform of your choice, bang goes the impetus to buy the console. Without you buying the console there's no vendor lock-in, and Sony are reduced to the status of game developer for other people's platforms, a big step down (and loss of power) for the company. This power (and vendor lock-in) is the reason why a console company makes the hardware, as opposed to just banging out games for third-party hardware.
Any game SDK on Windows will have to out-perform DirectX in every way, many, many times over. Like it or not, DirectX is now the "default" platform for windows programming, and the one with all the big bucks spent on advertising and promotion. It's also Microsoft, and therefore perceived as "safe", at least from the point of view of Windows-compatibility.
IIRC (which I may not), when OpenGL first came out it was technically superior to the then-current DirectX version. However, because DirectX was such a "safe" option (see above), most games at least included a DirectX mode. Third-party non-Microsoft SDKs don't have this going for them, so there is absolutely no reason for game developers to include the option, unless it's already widespread. Catch-22.
Apple don't seem very interested (at all?) in chasing the gamers demographic, so they're unlikely to pitch in with any work on a cross-platform SDK. This attitude does seem odd to me, because they do pitch (almost exclusively!) to the early-adopter, technology-as-lifestyle-choice crowd, and there's a hefty crossover between them and gamers. There's also a potential upside for them, in that a cross-platform SDK would free people to choose any platform they wanted for gaming, and for a less-than-50%-market-share platform, that's good news. All in all, it would probably be A Good Thing good for Apple to pitch in with such an effort, but the will just seems to be lacking.
Red Hat and SuSE could well make such an effort, but the money is in large-scale enterprise computing, not in making Linux a better games platform. Even if they did decide to pitch in, they're facing unseating an entrenched DirectX on the Win32 platform, and without Win32 (or Sony) the whole project is dead in the water.
Even in the best-case scenario (Red Hat/SuSE decide it's worth it and Apple wakes up and joins the dots), you're still looking at a vanishingly small percentage of the games-software market. Without a majority from the get-go, you're never going to unseat DirectX on Win32, and without Win32 or Sony you're in trouble. And I can't see anyone convincing Sony to adopt an open SDK, unless it's forced on them by technology change (eg, cell processors) that make it too expensive to implement a new closed one from scratch.
So, the only hope for this seems to be convincing Sony to use an open SDK for the PS3. If this happens the SDK has a shot, but it's still doubtful you'll ever get Sony on-board because of the degree of control they'd have to voluntarily give up.
Just my (utterly unsubstantiated) $0.02...
It's starring skinny annoying actor Chris Evans who's famous for Not Another Teen Movie, not the UK's fat, alcoholic ex-DJ Chris Evans, who's famous for being ginger. And a twat. Hope this clears up any confusion, but since I've seen at least three "celebrity" databases that confuse the two while looking for links for this posting, somehow I doubt it... <:-/