Why should you? Common decency, perhaps. The government doesn't care because politicians are soulless monsters:). Companies don't care because their sole ("sociopathic", to use the word in the blog entry back again, for better or for worse) goal is to make profit. As for this guy, he was just being an immature asshole out for glory at the expense of generally innocent, trusting people.
I'm not arguing that he was legally (or whatever) wrong to post these things, just that it was a stupid, immature prank and it just makes him look like an asshole, which he most certainly is. As I said in the first point, I'm not gonna argue about whether this should be a legal issue. That's not something I particularly care about.
Spot on post there. The issue as I see it isn't so much about breaking laws, or the fact that some of the people were married, but more to do with the fact that the guy in question was clearly just being a complete asshole.
It's just immature nonsense, and the fact that so many people seem to find the action admirable in some way annoys the hell out of me. This is a high school-level prank with far more serious repercussions for people's lives, and not just for the ones who were "doing something wrong" (the married ones), at best. It's immature, it's not funny, and it just shows that the prankster has no respect for people in general. Which is summed up perfectly in the linked blog entries characterisation of the act as "sociopathic".
Thinking more in terms of the people who, through this "scandalous" nonsense may lose their jobs or standing within the society they are surrouded with because of ignorant disapproval of their lifestyle choices makes this more clear-cut, I feel. The married guys were (unless they're polyamorous, in which case only the previous section is relevant) clearly doing something wrong, but a lot of people were not.
This childish "HA HA LOOK AT TEH BONDAGE FREAKS LOL" posting could mess with people's lives for no good reason, to the end of providing some ignorant, immature people on the internet a little giggle that amounts to little more than appeasing their lack of understanding of alternative sexual practices.
So, in short, I think people are placing too much emphasis on the assholes who were cheating on their wives. What about the sexually-adventurous people who for whatever reason chose to keep their habits out of the eyes of the people they associate with daily?
Should this be against the law, etc., is another matter altogether, but let's not forget there are perfectly innocent people having their privacy violated here, whether you believe the common man has a right to it or not.
For me, personally, I'd take your opinion 9 times out of 10. However, for Microsoft's business customers, breaking functionality breaks their business, and for most home users breaking functionality breaks their system for reasons that they can't and won't understand. It's unfortunately a function of Microsoft and their customer's requirements that things just cannot be broken, at least until a major version.
So far as I can tell, most of the most glaring design flaws in Windows are to be fixed, or at least addressed, in Vista. This is part of the reason many people have reported that they don't see much of a difference — a lot of the changes are "under the hood". Microsoft's position means that they can afford to make breaking changes less often than most companies, and are forced to think harder about it. It's unfortunate, but not unexpected.
I do agree with you, though, but I think it's regrettable rather than avoidable. On the plus side, the "line in the sand" has effectively been drawn at "NT-based software" (very little 9x-specific software still works or is supported), and NT, despite the problems that we've had with XP and the like (which have largely been to do with bad client software — IE, I'm looking at you — exacerbated by poor judgement like default Administrator privileges), is a relatively solid base for an OS. So although MS are forced to "drag their feet", they are making some progress here.
I see your argument, but as far as security goes, it looks to me that they're already doing as much as they can. Breaking changes cannot be embarked upon lightly, and even security patches can take days or weeks to properly QA. Microsoft, and other companies, have a responsibility to their customers to try as hard as they can to ensure that security fixes do not cock up existing functionality. MS in particular has a very wide product base, and to ensure that patches are of high enough quality, they will always take a reasonably large period of time to properly implement. Fixes that come out from third-parties rarely, if ever, cleanly fix problems, they usually just disable the functionality which is at fault, which can and will break existing systems.
The point here is that a system like this can prevent (some, if not all) new, exploitative code from reaching the system while the patch (which, as I said, necessarily takes time) is being built. The real issues with this system, in my opinion, are that you need to trust Microsoft's exploit signatures and that it breaks the "correct" functionality of the network by altering the data. But those don't strike me as huge losses, although I know they'll strike a lot of people exactly like huge losses.
As for making new, better systems, this is something else that most companies are doing. But learning from mistakes often means breaking changes, and although there have been breaking security updates to IE (Service Pack 2, in particular), they cannot do that especially often.
I don't know of a single piece of significantly-sized software that was completely bug-free on its first revision. While software is still being written by humans, systems to mitigate the effects security problems before they are properly fixed are more than welcome, provided they work well.
You sound like you're talking about IE Protected Mode in Vista, rather than the technology here. This technology uses heuristics to filter out malicious code while the company work on a patch, because patches take a long time to do in a non-breaking way.
The method described in the article is something akin to a band-aid on the problem, which stops it being exploited, while it's being fixed.
Well, the issue here is whether or not DRM will ever become mandatory, rather than optional. Hardware enforcement of DRM doesn't enforce the non-loading of non-DRMed content, and unless frivolous lawmakers (which are the real troublemakers here, not Microsoft — they merely provide implementations of what the market wants) pass a law forcing this to happen, it just won't. There's just no way that such a restriction will ever be accepted by the largest number of users. There's a world of difference between copy protection on some files and enforced copy protection on all files, which is where this would actually become an issue.
There's obviously always the case where a DRM provider can censor any publication distributed using that DRM, but I've little sympathy for people attempting to use DRM schemes to "protect" their works anyway. At worst, they can simply redistribute the content themselves with the protection removed.
I wish it were that simple, I really do. But the strongarming tactics of many countries, particularly the US, on the world stage simply makes it impossible. If we were to "just say no", we'd be "just saying no" to our economy.
I'm not particularly opposed to the large globalisation of issues. It's a natural consequence of the extra interconnectedness of the world. The growing natural convergence of laws and cultures is not a bad thing, but it does lead to the inevitable fact that isolationist views do not hold as much water.
Regardless of the influence of the UN, the world will converge on its own. It doesn't need the UN to make this happen.
I'm not so convinced about that — most sensible people are savvy enough to get their own news these days, and at the very least news across Europe in general seems as unbiased as American sources. There's a degree of nationalism in most localised presses, though, and it can be hard to filter this out. On the other hand, the internet has made doing that a hell of a lot easier, of late.
I'm not one of the "US-hater" crowd, but I think I should at least point out why so many people take America's politics so seriously when, to a US citizen, it probably seems like none of their business.
Basically, this all comes back to us. If the RIAA/PATRIOT act/name your favourite anti-American act seemingly supported by the federal goverment here prevail in the US, international pressure appears for our countries to adopt similar ("compatible") measures. I get very much up in arms about these things happening on my doorstep (I live in the UK, and we have a lot of equivalent situations, as you point out), but all the while, in order to be conscientious, I have to keep an eye on the goings-on in the US, and I feel the right to speak on them, even though it is not my government, because the decision made will come back to me.
Of course, the extreme incarnation of this nonsense is people gaining a large resentment of the US, which on the whole it does not deserve. The US is a country whose base principles are those of freedom, and even if it didn't affect the rest of us, the perversion of these principles would be a tragedy to behold for those of us with "more traditional" societal backgrounds.
But, yeah, don't feed the trolls and so on.
Re:No, we're not gaming. We're doing real work.
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OpenGL Distilled
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· Score: 1
Vista has OpenGL support now, you just need Vista-compatible drivers. If you don't have compatible drivers it'll just turn off the glitzy desktop effects when using OpenGL apps, but presumably most graphics cards providers will just give you the new drivers.
To be fair, you've paid for DRMed content, and presumably agreed to obey its rules. As good as things like this are at proving that DRM will always be circumvented, it's no excuse for being so bloody stupid as to actually pay good money for crippled content.
For the record, I don't know about desktop application development, but for mobile devices (.NET Compact Framework development), VS2005 and.NET CF 2.0 are huge improvements, and fix a great deal of the problems which existed in earlier versions.
I find that a lot of people have problems with Java desktop apps simply because the UI toolkits are undeniably kinda clunky, along with the fact that there was a time (before the HotSpot VM got on the scene and running quick) where Java apps did run Real Slow. There is native toolkits for Java (see Eclipse's SWT), but I think that the JNI (Java Native Interface) things required for that may slow it down a little. Sun is making great headway with Swing though (check out the Java 6 version if you have the chance, might require some knowledge of Java to make old apps use it correctly), with much better "stuff" coming in the new version.
Desktop apps can often give Java a pretty bad name; I myself had problems believing that Java was fast until I started developing server apps with it, when its high performance becomes very apparent. Another problem, of course, is that a lot of Java desktop apps (Azureus etc.) are extremely complex pieces of software. A C++ Bittorrent client doing much the same as Azureus would have to be specifically written for speed to appear at around the same speed. There's just not enough examples of speedy Java desktop apps, but that doesn't mean they're not possible or don't exist. Gnutella client Cabos is written in Java, and is lightweight, quick, and I believe it has won an award for its interface. There's just not enough examples like that, though.
Of course, the other "problem" with Java performance is people staring at top or Task Manager or whatever and assuming that all of the memory that is listed is being used by the app and therefore not by other programs, but it looks like you're past that assumption:)
However, in the interim period before the goal of Free Software norm is achieved, don't you think the battle against oppression is a much more potent and tangible motivating force?
I just think it shifts the focus away from the merits of Free Software, and towards the shortfallings of other people. It also characterises Free Software as a fringe element, and a bitter one at that. I just don't think it's a useful goal.
Re:"officially Microsoft-branded 'Games For Window
on
RIP CGW
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· Score: 1
Console hardware clearly isn't an area Microsoft has any competence in.
With the competitor PS3 weighing in at a far higher price and looking as though it won't actually be capable of a hell of a lot more than the 360, I'd say that hardware isn't Microsoft's problem. Marketing is a more likely candidate.
On an idealistic "free software" note: This is a battle for freedom, not against oppression. The objective is not to kill MS or Apple (that would benefit no-one), it's to get them to accept Free Software, and embrace and produce it themselves. When Free Software surpasses them and if they don't change, they will die, that's just the way it goes. But the idea behind Free Software is not to "kill" anyone, it's just to be better. A genuine victory would be for Free Software to just become "how it's done", and for market leaders to all embrace these techniques.
Victory is Free Software as the norm, not the killing of other companies. That's a hollow goal.
The report on the click-fraud investigation around Google (PDF, I'm afraid) has a lot of good information regarding this. It goes into the different payment models possible for online advertising, and makes a good case for the usefulness of each of them — as it points out, Pay-Per-Click is a good model for many advertisers provided it works, which is why there's an onus on cracking down on fraud.
If advertisers think that the ads working, they will pay the right price for them — if fraud is prevalent, it reduces demand and makes price (and value) of ads go down. So in a way, the advertisers are determining what the ads are worth to them and paying accordingly, in as practical a way as possible without just letting them name their price after-the-fact ("zero dollars, please!").
Actually, the OpenGL in Vista has been set up so that vendors can provide full OpenGL acceleration. This story on the OpenGL site has shown that the previous concerns about GL support in Vista have since been addressed. As for emulating through DX, I'm fairly sure it's up to the 3D card vendor (in the Windows model) to provide a DirectX- and OpenGL-compliant driver, so if they support DX and not GL that's as much their fault as it is anyone's.
But it is capable of running OpenGL apps, which considering it doesn't include competent drivers for any 3D cards (even for Direct3D) seems enough, to me.
I'm sure there's an interactive demo (of at least one of the features, from reading some of the blurb it looks like it might just be part of it) kicking around somewhere. It's a neat little program in any case, but I'm really not sure if it's even designed to handle non man-made things with any real degree of accuracy.
I'm not sure that's what it's really designed for, but you're right that it would be interesting. I'm not sure how automatic the system is in creating its scenes (although to be honest I didn't read a lot of the article, I've just played with the online demo thing for a while).
Slashdot Mirror
Why should you? Common decency, perhaps. The government doesn't care because politicians are soulless monsters :). Companies don't care because their sole ("sociopathic", to use the word in the blog entry back again, for better or for worse) goal is to make profit. As for this guy, he was just being an immature asshole out for glory at the expense of generally innocent, trusting people.
I'm not arguing that he was legally (or whatever) wrong to post these things, just that it was a stupid, immature prank and it just makes him look like an asshole, which he most certainly is. As I said in the first point, I'm not gonna argue about whether this should be a legal issue. That's not something I particularly care about.
Spot on post there. The issue as I see it isn't so much about breaking laws, or the fact that some of the people were married, but more to do with the fact that the guy in question was clearly just being a complete asshole.
It's just immature nonsense, and the fact that so many people seem to find the action admirable in some way annoys the hell out of me. This is a high school-level prank with far more serious repercussions for people's lives, and not just for the ones who were "doing something wrong" (the married ones), at best. It's immature, it's not funny, and it just shows that the prankster has no respect for people in general. Which is summed up perfectly in the linked blog entries characterisation of the act as "sociopathic".
Thinking more in terms of the people who, through this "scandalous" nonsense may lose their jobs or standing within the society they are surrouded with because of ignorant disapproval of their lifestyle choices makes this more clear-cut, I feel. The married guys were (unless they're polyamorous, in which case only the previous section is relevant) clearly doing something wrong, but a lot of people were not.
This childish "HA HA LOOK AT TEH BONDAGE FREAKS LOL" posting could mess with people's lives for no good reason, to the end of providing some ignorant, immature people on the internet a little giggle that amounts to little more than appeasing their lack of understanding of alternative sexual practices.
So, in short, I think people are placing too much emphasis on the assholes who were cheating on their wives. What about the sexually-adventurous people who for whatever reason chose to keep their habits out of the eyes of the people they associate with daily?
Should this be against the law, etc., is another matter altogether, but let's not forget there are perfectly innocent people having their privacy violated here, whether you believe the common man has a right to it or not.
If your book searches and displays results all on its own, yeah. That's a hell of a book, by the way.
For me, personally, I'd take your opinion 9 times out of 10. However, for Microsoft's business customers, breaking functionality breaks their business, and for most home users breaking functionality breaks their system for reasons that they can't and won't understand. It's unfortunately a function of Microsoft and their customer's requirements that things just cannot be broken, at least until a major version.
So far as I can tell, most of the most glaring design flaws in Windows are to be fixed, or at least addressed, in Vista. This is part of the reason many people have reported that they don't see much of a difference — a lot of the changes are "under the hood". Microsoft's position means that they can afford to make breaking changes less often than most companies, and are forced to think harder about it. It's unfortunate, but not unexpected.
I do agree with you, though, but I think it's regrettable rather than avoidable. On the plus side, the "line in the sand" has effectively been drawn at "NT-based software" (very little 9x-specific software still works or is supported), and NT, despite the problems that we've had with XP and the like (which have largely been to do with bad client software — IE, I'm looking at you — exacerbated by poor judgement like default Administrator privileges), is a relatively solid base for an OS. So although MS are forced to "drag their feet", they are making some progress here.
I see your argument, but as far as security goes, it looks to me that they're already doing as much as they can. Breaking changes cannot be embarked upon lightly, and even security patches can take days or weeks to properly QA. Microsoft, and other companies, have a responsibility to their customers to try as hard as they can to ensure that security fixes do not cock up existing functionality. MS in particular has a very wide product base, and to ensure that patches are of high enough quality, they will always take a reasonably large period of time to properly implement. Fixes that come out from third-parties rarely, if ever, cleanly fix problems, they usually just disable the functionality which is at fault, which can and will break existing systems.
The point here is that a system like this can prevent (some, if not all) new, exploitative code from reaching the system while the patch (which, as I said, necessarily takes time) is being built. The real issues with this system, in my opinion, are that you need to trust Microsoft's exploit signatures and that it breaks the "correct" functionality of the network by altering the data. But those don't strike me as huge losses, although I know they'll strike a lot of people exactly like huge losses.
As for making new, better systems, this is something else that most companies are doing. But learning from mistakes often means breaking changes, and although there have been breaking security updates to IE (Service Pack 2, in particular), they cannot do that especially often.
I don't know of a single piece of significantly-sized software that was completely bug-free on its first revision. While software is still being written by humans, systems to mitigate the effects security problems before they are properly fixed are more than welcome, provided they work well.
You sound like you're talking about IE Protected Mode in Vista, rather than the technology here. This technology uses heuristics to filter out malicious code while the company work on a patch, because patches take a long time to do in a non-breaking way.
The method described in the article is something akin to a band-aid on the problem, which stops it being exploited, while it's being fixed.
Well, the issue here is whether or not DRM will ever become mandatory, rather than optional. Hardware enforcement of DRM doesn't enforce the non-loading of non-DRMed content, and unless frivolous lawmakers (which are the real troublemakers here, not Microsoft — they merely provide implementations of what the market wants) pass a law forcing this to happen, it just won't. There's just no way that such a restriction will ever be accepted by the largest number of users. There's a world of difference between copy protection on some files and enforced copy protection on all files, which is where this would actually become an issue.
There's obviously always the case where a DRM provider can censor any publication distributed using that DRM, but I've little sympathy for people attempting to use DRM schemes to "protect" their works anyway. At worst, they can simply redistribute the content themselves with the protection removed.
I wish it were that simple, I really do. But the strongarming tactics of many countries, particularly the US, on the world stage simply makes it impossible. If we were to "just say no", we'd be "just saying no" to our economy.
I'm not particularly opposed to the large globalisation of issues. It's a natural consequence of the extra interconnectedness of the world. The growing natural convergence of laws and cultures is not a bad thing, but it does lead to the inevitable fact that isolationist views do not hold as much water.
Regardless of the influence of the UN, the world will converge on its own. It doesn't need the UN to make this happen.
Again my faith in humankind has made me look like a fool. I should get more cynical ;)
I'm not so convinced about that — most sensible people are savvy enough to get their own news these days, and at the very least news across Europe in general seems as unbiased as American sources. There's a degree of nationalism in most localised presses, though, and it can be hard to filter this out. On the other hand, the internet has made doing that a hell of a lot easier, of late.
I'm not one of the "US-hater" crowd, but I think I should at least point out why so many people take America's politics so seriously when, to a US citizen, it probably seems like none of their business.
Basically, this all comes back to us. If the RIAA/PATRIOT act/name your favourite anti-American act seemingly supported by the federal goverment here prevail in the US, international pressure appears for our countries to adopt similar ("compatible") measures. I get very much up in arms about these things happening on my doorstep (I live in the UK, and we have a lot of equivalent situations, as you point out), but all the while, in order to be conscientious, I have to keep an eye on the goings-on in the US, and I feel the right to speak on them, even though it is not my government, because the decision made will come back to me.
Of course, the extreme incarnation of this nonsense is people gaining a large resentment of the US, which on the whole it does not deserve. The US is a country whose base principles are those of freedom, and even if it didn't affect the rest of us, the perversion of these principles would be a tragedy to behold for those of us with "more traditional" societal backgrounds.
But, yeah, don't feed the trolls and so on.
Vista has OpenGL support now, you just need Vista-compatible drivers. If you don't have compatible drivers it'll just turn off the glitzy desktop effects when using OpenGL apps, but presumably most graphics cards providers will just give you the new drivers.
It was a bit strange for a while though, yes.
To be fair, you've paid for DRMed content, and presumably agreed to obey its rules. As good as things like this are at proving that DRM will always be circumvented, it's no excuse for being so bloody stupid as to actually pay good money for crippled content.
For the record, I don't know about desktop application development, but for mobile devices (.NET Compact Framework development), VS2005 and .NET CF 2.0 are huge improvements, and fix a great deal of the problems which existed in earlier versions.
I find that a lot of people have problems with Java desktop apps simply because the UI toolkits are undeniably kinda clunky, along with the fact that there was a time (before the HotSpot VM got on the scene and running quick) where Java apps did run Real Slow. There is native toolkits for Java (see Eclipse's SWT), but I think that the JNI (Java Native Interface) things required for that may slow it down a little. Sun is making great headway with Swing though (check out the Java 6 version if you have the chance, might require some knowledge of Java to make old apps use it correctly), with much better "stuff" coming in the new version.
Desktop apps can often give Java a pretty bad name; I myself had problems believing that Java was fast until I started developing server apps with it, when its high performance becomes very apparent. Another problem, of course, is that a lot of Java desktop apps (Azureus etc.) are extremely complex pieces of software. A C++ Bittorrent client doing much the same as Azureus would have to be specifically written for speed to appear at around the same speed. There's just not enough examples of speedy Java desktop apps, but that doesn't mean they're not possible or don't exist. Gnutella client Cabos is written in Java, and is lightweight, quick, and I believe it has won an award for its interface. There's just not enough examples like that, though.
Of course, the other "problem" with Java performance is people staring at top or Task Manager or whatever and assuming that all of the memory that is listed is being used by the app and therefore not by other programs, but it looks like you're past that assumption :)
I just think it shifts the focus away from the merits of Free Software, and towards the shortfallings of other people. It also characterises Free Software as a fringe element, and a bitter one at that. I just don't think it's a useful goal.
With the competitor PS3 weighing in at a far higher price and looking as though it won't actually be capable of a hell of a lot more than the 360, I'd say that hardware isn't Microsoft's problem. Marketing is a more likely candidate.
On an idealistic "free software" note: This is a battle for freedom, not against oppression. The objective is not to kill MS or Apple (that would benefit no-one), it's to get them to accept Free Software, and embrace and produce it themselves. When Free Software surpasses them and if they don't change, they will die, that's just the way it goes. But the idea behind Free Software is not to "kill" anyone, it's just to be better. A genuine victory would be for Free Software to just become "how it's done", and for market leaders to all embrace these techniques.
Victory is Free Software as the norm, not the killing of other companies. That's a hollow goal.
The report on the click-fraud investigation around Google (PDF, I'm afraid) has a lot of good information regarding this. It goes into the different payment models possible for online advertising, and makes a good case for the usefulness of each of them — as it points out, Pay-Per-Click is a good model for many advertisers provided it works, which is why there's an onus on cracking down on fraud.
If advertisers think that the ads working, they will pay the right price for them — if fraud is prevalent, it reduces demand and makes price (and value) of ads go down. So in a way, the advertisers are determining what the ads are worth to them and paying accordingly, in as practical a way as possible without just letting them name their price after-the-fact ("zero dollars, please!").
Actually, the OpenGL in Vista has been set up so that vendors can provide full OpenGL acceleration. This story on the OpenGL site has shown that the previous concerns about GL support in Vista have since been addressed. As for emulating through DX, I'm fairly sure it's up to the 3D card vendor (in the Windows model) to provide a DirectX- and OpenGL-compliant driver, so if they support DX and not GL that's as much their fault as it is anyone's.
But it is capable of running OpenGL apps, which considering it doesn't include competent drivers for any 3D cards (even for Direct3D) seems enough, to me.
I'm sure there's an interactive demo (of at least one of the features, from reading some of the blurb it looks like it might just be part of it) kicking around somewhere. It's a neat little program in any case, but I'm really not sure if it's even designed to handle non man-made things with any real degree of accuracy.
I'm not sure that's what it's really designed for, but you're right that it would be interesting. I'm not sure how automatic the system is in creating its scenes (although to be honest I didn't read a lot of the article, I've just played with the online demo thing for a while).