What I want to know is, why does free software have enemies in Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc.?
Nintendo I have no problem with (probably helps that I have an addiction to Zelda games and will probably buy a Gamecube as soon as it's out). Microsoft, well, they're competitors, and not paticularly likable ones, but whatever.
But Sony! Sony is, IMO, very much an enemy. Check this link. Specifically, this quote:
Jared Jussim of Sony Pictures talked at length about the "entrepreneurialism" of the movie business and how vigorous international copyright enforcement is needed to keep the movie business healthy. He said, "If we could have the Digital Millenium Copyright Act extended throughout the world, I would be ecstatic about it."
Not to mention CSS, and who knows what new varieties of copy protection. That is why I make a strong effort not to buy stuff from Sony, Intel, and a few other companies, that feel like screwing over me, and many other people, in an effort to squeeze even more profits for the media companies.
They're never going to kill free software, they never have tried and they aren't currently trying as well.
But Sony is. They don't want a bunch of "hackers" copying their DVDs and SDMI protected music. Or watching or listening to it, either.
This isn't a fight with a purpose or a good outcome. It's just to piss the ABS off. Whee.
I never said putting down Jedi makes sense.:) I just think it's stupid to threaten fines for doing it.
and it could actually improve the statistical robustness of the responses (greater sample size etc)
Sure (assuming they would have put something down besides Jedi, of course). But I doubt the number of people would might actually do it would actually have much of a statistical affect, given the total size of the population - even assuming that they all put down their actual religion instead.
if you can show that you try to live your life according to those precepts.
But I could put down "Christian", and not have to show that I follow any precepts of that religion? In my case, putting down "Christian" or "Jedi" would be equally un-truthful. But in only one case will the government check on whether or not I told the truth, and more likely than not fine me (not personally, as I don't live in AU, but you know what I mean).
The closest thing I have to a religion is Discordianism - does anyone know if AU or NZ have a problem with that on the census?
when all they're actually doing is screwing up funding for other people in their community.
How, exactly? I'm really confused about this. OK, so someone decides to put down Jedi as their religion. Who exactly is that hurting? It reduces to funding how? You say yourself Jedi is not a religion. So it's not like funding will be transfered from a new Church of XYZ to some Jedi meditation chamber. All they have to do is ignore any and all Jedi entries, just like they were blank. What's the big deal here? I really don't get this.
What everyone seems to have forgotten was that Clipper wouldn't have worked (at least, not as intended, and provided the "bad guys" were reasonably smart).
Well, what people suspected at the time (and, actually, what they were planning, according to some quotes in the article), was that after Clipper was widely deployed, legislation would be passed making all other forms of encryption illegal in the US.
Aside from that, it actually would have been pretty nice if all phones in the US were sold with encryption built in. I could go out and buy one of those nice ATT phones (they make non-key-escrowed versions too, basically the same stuff except with 3DES instead of Skipjack and no backdoors), but who would I talk to with it? I mean there are maybe a few tens of thousands of these phones in use in the US, mostly by government and large corporations (most of whom are govt contracters and required to have them).
connecting any system to the internet without looking at the services that run at startup time and applying errata/service packs is extrememly irresponsible and arrogant.
Why do you want to do this, why would someone prefer Linux to Solaris on SPARC? I'm genuinely curious
Well, personally, I just got a SPARCstation5 cheap. I'm actually going to put OpenBSD on it, but I would almost rather throw it away than put Solaris on it - it's not the speediest of OSes even on an Ultra5 - what do you think it will be like on a 110 Mhz SPARC? (And this is relatively high end, as old SPARCs go).
With the advent of extremely high quality video cards, sound cards, and control devices for PCs over the past decade, it would be reasonable to assume that customers might choose to purchase a PC (which can now be priced competitively wihth some game consoles - as amazing as that is, in and of itself)
The PS2 is ~$300. Let's pop that up to $500 considering the still-high demand. $500 will not buy a very high-end gaming rig. I just spec'ed (at mwave.com) a box which cost about $450 (w/o keyboard, mouse, monitor, modem, NIC, etc). The best I could do was a GeForce MX, a 750 Mhz Duron, 128 Mb RAM, SB Live Value, and a 15 Gb disk. That's a decent box (better than I have right now, actually), but not that great, IMHO.
Also, PCs have problems with multiplayer games - and I'm not talking about brining half a dozen PCs somewhere for a LAN party, I mean you have a few friends over and you can just say "Hey, how about a round of Smash Brothers?" and not worry about it.
I maintain that this is because the gaming customer seeks simplicity and ease of use that (as much as it pains me to say) linux doesn't yet provide at this point
Neither does Windows. I'm not trying to be flamebait here, but the simple fact is that a system - hardware, firmware, and software - designed exclusively for playing games, is going to be easier to use - for games, than a general purpose OS, end of story. Try to do anything else, and you're SOL, of course, but that's not the point here.
You will have my N64 (and my Gamecube, soon enough) when you pry them from my cold dead fingers.
Face it: the only companies that will make good money off of GPL software are the hardware companies. Large corporations backing Linux are all companies that either sell hardware, or closed-source software on top of Linux.
Well, yeah, I pretty much agree with you there. Fortunately, most big corporations in the industry ARE hardware and/or service companies: IBM, SGI, HP, and so on. Sun is a hardware company but still thinks it's a software company, which is why it hasn't been a big fan of Linux/OSS so far. Then there are pure software shops like MS, etc. They're screwed if OSS takes over, which is why they're fighting so hard. Oracle is in kind of the same boat, but I'm not sure what they're position is, besides that fact that I know you can get Oracle for Linux.
And, if you agree with "a penny saved is a penny earned", then a whole lot of companies can make a lot of money from OSS.
One thing I remember about this period is that this release was 9-12 months away for virtually the whole time.
Yeah, MS came to my university before Win2K came out to talk about whatever (an OpenBSD using friend of mine won a copy of Win2K Final RC in a drawing). Anyway, at one point someone asks if they're going to be meeting their (supposed) release dates. Response: "Don't believe everything you read on Slashdot, Win2k will ship on such-and-such a date". Of course it was actually released a couple months after that date (pretty much when everyone here thought it would be), but they seem to have toned this down for XP (same OpenBSD using friend won MS Flight Simulator at the MS XP talk, BTW). We (the Unix contingent at the talk) we amused, to say the least.
Back in the late 70s, Frank Herbert wrote a book called "The Dosadi Experiment" in which he made some keen observations about our legal system. Sadly, it is out of print.
Are you serious? Too bad, that was always one of his better ones IMHO.
The other two (OpenCL and AL) look a bit more dubious.
Thanks for the support (I'm the guy who wrote OpenCL and then was promptly contacted by SGI). The phrase the guy who contacted me used was "clearing out the namespace" for their products. I find it pretty ridiculous, you would have to be a real moron to confuse a C++ crypto library and a C graphics API.
I told them I would change it, mostly because I wasn't really in the mood to mess with even a small company. OTOH, I haven't changed my source tree yet, as I was waiting to see what would happen when the news eventually hit the community.
Except as pointed out above (in other thread) you can only have one of these cards in a Sun box so NOBODY HAS A BUNCH OF BOXES FULL OF THESE THINGS!
True. Though as other pointed out, it's probably just bad drivers.
If you like, s/big machine/a lot of Ultra5s/ in my previous comment.
In any case, it would be a pretty cool hack to be able to use both the normal CPU and an x86 chip at the same time (you could probably set it up in Linux to automatically run x86 executables there - x86 "emulation" in hardware on a SPARC)
Let us know when this actually works. I guarantee it will not.
Well obviously you can't just burn the image onto a CD. But you will defintely be able to extract the raw audio from it. I suspect it would not be too much of a challenge to write up some code with reads the TOC, figures out the offsets, and read the raw audio to files.
Assuming the $9.95/season gives you the rights to listen to every game, sans-ads, how is this "unethical", "criminal" or "immoral"?
It's not. But I think your assumptions may be overly optimistic. More likely than not, you'll get very poor audio/video, for a small number of games, and probably you can throw some ads into the mix as well. And in a few years you'll see MLB move entirely to internet based distribution, so you can't watch it any other way. Then after everyones switches they'll slowly raise prices.
Of course I could be wrong. Not like I care anyway, not being in any way a baseball fan.
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What I want to know is, why does free software have enemies in Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc.?
Nintendo I have no problem with (probably helps that I have an addiction to Zelda games and will probably buy a Gamecube as soon as it's out). Microsoft, well, they're competitors, and not paticularly likable ones, but whatever.
But Sony! Sony is, IMO, very much an enemy. Check this link. Specifically, this quote:
Jared Jussim of Sony Pictures talked at length about the "entrepreneurialism" of the movie business and how vigorous international copyright enforcement is needed to keep the movie business healthy. He said, "If we could have the Digital Millenium Copyright Act extended throughout the world, I would be ecstatic about it."
Not to mention CSS, and who knows what new varieties of copy protection. That is why I make a strong effort not to buy stuff from Sony, Intel, and a few other companies, that feel like screwing over me, and many other people, in an effort to squeeze even more profits for the media companies.
They're never going to kill free software, they never have tried and they aren't currently trying as well.
But Sony is. They don't want a bunch of "hackers" copying their DVDs and SDMI protected music. Or watching or listening to it, either.
This isn't a fight with a purpose or a good outcome. It's just to piss the ABS off. Whee.
:) I just think it's stupid to threaten fines for doing it.
I never said putting down Jedi makes sense.
and it could actually improve the statistical robustness of the responses (greater sample size etc)
Sure (assuming they would have put something down besides Jedi, of course). But I doubt the number of people would might actually do it would actually have much of a statistical affect, given the total size of the population - even assuming that they all put down their actual religion instead.
if you can show that you try to live your life according to those precepts.
But I could put down "Christian", and not have to show that I follow any precepts of that religion? In my case, putting down "Christian" or "Jedi" would be equally un-truthful. But in only one case will the government check on whether or not I told the truth, and more likely than not fine me (not personally, as I don't live in AU, but you know what I mean).
The closest thing I have to a religion is Discordianism - does anyone know if AU or NZ have a problem with that on the census?
when all they're actually doing is screwing up funding for other people in their community.
How, exactly? I'm really confused about this. OK, so someone decides to put down Jedi as their religion. Who exactly is that hurting? It reduces to funding how? You say yourself Jedi is not a religion. So it's not like funding will be transfered from a new Church of XYZ to some Jedi meditation chamber. All they have to do is ignore any and all Jedi entries, just like they were blank. What's the big deal here? I really don't get this.
What everyone seems to have forgotten was that Clipper wouldn't have worked (at least, not as intended, and provided the "bad guys" were reasonably smart).
Well, what people suspected at the time (and, actually, what they were planning, according to some quotes in the article), was that after Clipper was widely deployed, legislation would be passed making all other forms of encryption illegal in the US.
Aside from that, it actually would have been pretty nice if all phones in the US were sold with encryption built in. I could go out and buy one of those nice ATT phones (they make non-key-escrowed versions too, basically the same stuff except with 3DES instead of Skipjack and no backdoors), but who would I talk to with it? I mean there are maybe a few tens of thousands of these phones in use in the US, mostly by government and large corporations (most of whom are govt contracters and required to have them).
connecting any system to the internet without looking at the services that run at startup time and applying errata/service packs is extrememly irresponsible and arrogant.
You may find this amusing, then.
Why do you want to do this, why would someone prefer Linux to Solaris on SPARC? I'm genuinely curious
Well, personally, I just got a SPARCstation5 cheap. I'm actually going to put OpenBSD on it, but I would almost rather throw it away than put Solaris on it - it's not the speediest of OSes even on an Ultra5 - what do you think it will be like on a 110 Mhz SPARC? (And this is relatively high end, as old SPARCs go).
With the advent of extremely high quality video cards, sound cards, and control devices for PCs over the past decade, it would be reasonable to assume that customers might choose to purchase a PC (which can now be priced competitively wihth some game consoles - as amazing as that is, in and of itself)
The PS2 is ~$300. Let's pop that up to $500 considering the still-high demand. $500 will not buy a very high-end gaming rig. I just spec'ed (at mwave.com) a box which cost about $450 (w/o keyboard, mouse, monitor, modem, NIC, etc). The best I could do was a GeForce MX, a 750 Mhz Duron, 128 Mb RAM, SB Live Value, and a 15 Gb disk. That's a decent box (better than I have right now, actually), but not that great, IMHO.
Also, PCs have problems with multiplayer games - and I'm not talking about brining half a dozen PCs somewhere for a LAN party, I mean you have a few friends over and you can just say "Hey, how about a round of Smash Brothers?" and not worry about it.
I maintain that this is because the gaming customer seeks simplicity and ease of use that (as much as it pains me to say) linux doesn't yet provide at this point
Neither does Windows. I'm not trying to be flamebait here, but the simple fact is that a system - hardware, firmware, and software - designed exclusively for playing games, is going to be easier to use - for games, than a general purpose OS, end of story. Try to do anything else, and you're SOL, of course, but that's not the point here.
You will have my N64 (and my Gamecube, soon enough) when you pry them from my cold dead fingers.
Face it: the only companies that will make good money off of GPL software are the hardware companies. Large corporations backing Linux are all companies that either sell hardware, or closed-source software on top of Linux.
Well, yeah, I pretty much agree with you there. Fortunately, most big corporations in the industry ARE hardware and/or service companies: IBM, SGI, HP, and so on. Sun is a hardware company but still thinks it's a software company, which is why it hasn't been a big fan of Linux/OSS so far. Then there are pure software shops like MS, etc. They're screwed if OSS takes over, which is why they're fighting so hard. Oracle is in kind of the same boat, but I'm not sure what they're position is, besides that fact that I know you can get Oracle for Linux.
And, if you agree with "a penny saved is a penny earned", then a whole lot of companies can make a lot of money from OSS.
we will all be forced to communicate in a language that sounds like the characters from Zero Wing.
I already do most of the time.
Mario and Zelda shoudn't be the only reason to buy a console.
Zelda is the only reason I will buy Gamecube. I don't plan on buying PS2 as there are no Zelda games for it, so it's not worth my time or money.
One thing I remember about this period is that this release was 9-12 months away for virtually the whole time.
Yeah, MS came to my university before Win2K came out to talk about whatever (an OpenBSD using friend of mine won a copy of Win2K Final RC in a drawing). Anyway, at one point someone asks if they're going to be meeting their (supposed) release dates. Response: "Don't believe everything you read on Slashdot, Win2k will ship on such-and-such a date". Of course it was actually released a couple months after that date (pretty much when everyone here thought it would be), but they seem to have toned this down for XP (same OpenBSD using friend won MS Flight Simulator at the MS XP talk, BTW). We (the Unix contingent at the talk) we amused, to say the least.
Back in the late 70s, Frank Herbert wrote a book called "The Dosadi Experiment" in which he made some keen observations about our legal system. Sadly, it is out of print.
Are you serious? Too bad, that was always one of his better ones IMHO.
Also multitasking is totally useless in a PDA, just look at how slow they run when you have more than 1 app.
It's got a 66 Mhz MIPS processor, not some crappy 16-bit POS.
Use machines based on ARM, MIPS, or other low-power CPUs. More expensive, though.
Well, do you think people who buy SGI's nowadays really know the difference? :-)
;)
Nice one.
it is quite conceivable that people could confuse OpenGL and Open[ICA]L, esp. as all are graphics libraries
OpenCL is not a graphics library, it is a crypto library.
The other two (OpenCL and AL) look a bit more dubious.
Thanks for the support (I'm the guy who wrote OpenCL and then was promptly contacted by SGI). The phrase the guy who contacted me used was "clearing out the namespace" for their products. I find it pretty ridiculous, you would have to be a real moron to confuse a C++ crypto library and a C graphics API.
I told them I would change it, mostly because I wasn't really in the mood to mess with even a small company. OTOH, I haven't changed my source tree yet, as I was waiting to see what would happen when the news eventually hit the community.
The little elf on the other side of my mirror told me so.
He always told me "I'm going over to my other place", but he would never reveal were it was. Now I know...
Except as pointed out above (in other thread) you can only have one of these cards in a Sun box so NOBODY HAS A BUNCH OF BOXES FULL OF THESE THINGS!
True. Though as other pointed out, it's probably just bad drivers.
If you like, s/big machine/a lot of Ultra5s/ in my previous comment.
In any case, it would be a pretty cool hack to be able to use both the normal CPU and an x86 chip at the same time (you could probably set it up in Linux to automatically run x86 executables there - x86 "emulation" in hardware on a SPARC)
That's about as grammatically correct as "Somebody set up us the bomb."
:)
MOVE ALL 'GPL'. FOR GREAT FREEDOM.
Sorry, couldn't stop myself.
Why not just use something like VMWare on actual PCs? It would be cheaper.
Well, it would be pretty useful if you already had a big Sun box sitting around with a bunch of these cards.
Let us know when this actually works. I guarantee it will not.
Well obviously you can't just burn the image onto a CD. But you will defintely be able to extract the raw audio from it. I suspect it would not be too much of a challenge to write up some code with reads the TOC, figures out the offsets, and read the raw audio to files.
other programs can read bit for bit copies of these copy-protected CDs.
For the real Unix geeks:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=brokencd.img bs=512
Actually last season they had ALL the games available. I listened to every Red Sox game here in San Francisco, yes there were ads
:)
Well, I stand corrected then.
Assuming the $9.95/season gives you the rights to listen to every game, sans-ads, how is this "unethical", "criminal" or "immoral"?
It's not. But I think your assumptions may be overly optimistic. More likely than not, you'll get very poor audio/video, for a small number of games, and probably you can throw some ads into the mix as well. And in a few years you'll see MLB move entirely to internet based distribution, so you can't watch it any other way. Then after everyones switches they'll slowly raise prices.
Of course I could be wrong. Not like I care anyway, not being in any way a baseball fan.