I haven't read the story. I don't really have any feelings or opinion as to what the kids did.
But I can't help but notice that the debate is largely over how bad what the kids did was.
I just wanted to remind all that Apple exists because Jobs and Wozniak got seed money by building and selling blue boxes on campus (which probably can be argued to be significantly more criminal than whatever these kids did). Nobody criticizes these people today, or considers them failures -- they're used as icons of what people should do correctly.
I doubt that there are many serious computer security workers out there that hasn't, at some point, poked about in things that they shouldn't really be poking about in.
That doesn't mean that society shouldn't have any consequences for kids messing about with computers, but somehow it managed to function fine for decades and a lot of luminaries got produced from yesterday's fringe characters.
For all I know, it doesn't apply well to these kids, but I'm sure it does apply to some others.
It's 5MB after it's been compressed into a zip. As you may or may not know, zip compresses text really well.
Just to be a dick, I'm going to point out that zip, as any other compression algorithm, is only going to necessarily be able to knock 1/8 of the space required by some text. (For large amounts of text).
Now if the text has an uneven, pattern-containing distribution, as English text or C source does, it'll probably compress a lot better, but just because something is text doesn't mean that it has to compress very well.
Unless you use GNU and other quality free tools instead of the traditional overpriced Windows developer toolchain (some Rational products, a high-end Visual Studio package from MS, maybe a commercial debugger, maybe something like Visual Slickedit...) Then your cost of development tools is $0.
Carmack also rocks for working on XFree's 3d drivers, releasing Linux versions of his games (probably at a loss) to jumpstart the Linux game market, pushing for OpenGL usage, open sourcing many of his other games...
It's also really cool that id stayed independent. In a day and age when the normal lifecycle of a game developer looks something like "release, release, release HIT, get purchased by EA", it's refreshing.
Perhaps religion was merely used as a tool to promote the avoidance of these risks?
Do you have any evidence that religion today is anything other than a simple pragmatic organization that uses what irrational hooks it can to sell itself to people?
Unless pornography containing people below a particular age line deemed to be illegal magically works differently than other porn, it probably is theraputic (study demonstrating that pornography is correlated with a significant decrease in sex-related crimes).
Why? Construction workers don't get apologies, nor do landscape painters. Veterans aren't any different. If your recruiter told you different, he was selling you a line of shit. You worked a job, and maybe that job doesn't get the respect you'd like it to do, but nobody made you take that job either.
And the "protect your country" line is bullshit. That might fly somewhere in Central America or Eastern Europe, but the US hasn't been in danger that could be solved by conventional military force for a long time.
Because it's the bosses job to make you do your job, and often people don't like to be made to do their jobs. There's your answer.
I'm always impressed by the amount of griping and conspiracy-selling regarding cops that goes around. People don't like being made to drive the speed limit either...
Yeah, seriously. I had the same thought. "Becoming?"
They had (have?) a telnet server that dumps out data as well.
I looked into writing a METAR-parsing library at one point.
The US government is pretty good about providing electronic information. Heck, GNU's timezone data was (is?) maintained by some guy at NIST or something. The NWS is one of the better government agencies, too.
Accuweather can go to hell. There is a *huge* functional difference to having information free versus inexpensive. Free means that I can just write an open-source client and include it with GNOME to display the current weather on the desktop. Inexpensive means that I pretty much can't.
If Accuweather can't manage to find a single bloody thing that they can do beyond what the NWS is doing (like, oh, throwing effort into forecasting research and selling forecast data), they definitely should not be in the business.
So Santorum is the guy opposing free weather data, huh? And he's the guy who hates gays?
Damn, I really wish that I still lived in Pennsylvania. There's one vote that sure would have been useful.
Everyone loses, as a whole, if the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet goes away. We get slow and ugly things like VPN tunnels over HTTP everywhere, the inability of some computers to talk, centralized control (which eliminated the free-for-all of invention that allowed the rapid advancement of the Internet).
However, for any individual, it may well be in their interest to move to NAT (cheaper, the illusion of security, a greater feeling of control over users).
Yeah, that's the taste I got too. Seriously, either (a) the security information industry is still too immature to have competed fluff out and too many of the people there have watched too many bad tech movies or (b) the marketers involved are right and their *customers* are just plain stupid.
Unfortunately that's just bullshit. Smartcars have their issues (with a top speed on 135kph, and poor acceleration they aren't exactly ideal for highway driving) but safety is not amongst them.
Wouldn't you accelerate *less* on the highway, resulting in the higher "highway" MPG rating?
I'm hoping that widespread use of English by many people who do not have English as their native language will force certain rules (such as those regarding possession) to change. The current ones are awful. The "it's" exception is particularly galling.
Another pet peeve of mine is the American English (not British English) method for quoting an entire sentence. In American English, you'd write:
He said, "She died."
In American English, the period always goes inside the quotes.
In every other English-speaking country, the period goes *outside* the quotes.
He said, "She died".
The American method is stupid and horrible for dealing with technical speech, where periods in quotes may matter.
Oh, and MLA mechanisms for citing URLs don't surround the URL with angle brackets, which was most certainly the standard in use at the time the MLA was doing up their URL-citing guidelines and works nicely as a metacharacter that cannot appear in an URL.
His technocrat.net site is pretty on-the-spot, and I'd say better than Slashdot.
He avoids ESR-style broad proclamations and claiming that he's speaking for the entire open source community.
I'm not saying that Perens is perfect, but relative to the other highly-visible members of the OSS community, I find him a lot more acceptable than I find, say, ESR. And unlike RMS, he isn't a fanatic (not that we don't all need an RMS somewhere, but...) and is reasonably personable.
You may not like UserLinux, but Perens is out doing work to try to produce social change. RMS did the same thing, and had plenty of bumps along the way before, after decades of work, getting some recognition. He's one of the people that's actually out trying to *do* something about what most Slashdotters just gripe about.
The GPL gives the FSF relicensing control over your code -- they can produce new revisions of the GPL.
Now, I use the GPL on almost all the hobbyist work I do, but you'd have to be pretty dumb not to consider this if you're IBM and considering sticking decades of IP under the thing. You're handing control of your primary asset over to another organization -- specifically, one that's more than a little bit radical.
Personally, I understand the concerns with compatibility with the GPL -- fewer licenses == good from an engineering standpoint. I do think that we *could* have far fewer licenses. I think that the requirements of Sun/IBM/what-have-you are probably pretty similar and could be met by a similar license. There are major benefits to having a small number of licenses and well-understood and documented interactions between them -- people have enough trouble understanding the GPL and LGPL alone. But there are significant issues that people can raise the the GPL, and it's silly to assume that the GPL is one-size-fits-all. (Heck, the GPL itself has fragmented into a number of variants even among FSF adherents, such as Linus's GPL-v2-only, the Guile license, the LGPL, and so forth.)
Slashdot Mirror
The free tools are available on Windows as well.
I know. I wasn't suggesting developing on Linux.
If you can buy a computer, a hundred bucks for some random software product isn't going to put you in the poorhouse.
No, but it may still be enough to discourage you from starting work on a game.
I haven't read the story. I don't really have any feelings or opinion as to what the kids did.
But I can't help but notice that the debate is largely over how bad what the kids did was.
I just wanted to remind all that Apple exists because Jobs and Wozniak got seed money by building and selling blue boxes on campus (which probably can be argued to be significantly more criminal than whatever these kids did). Nobody criticizes these people today, or considers them failures -- they're used as icons of what people should do correctly.
I doubt that there are many serious computer security workers out there that hasn't, at some point, poked about in things that they shouldn't really be poking about in.
That doesn't mean that society shouldn't have any consequences for kids messing about with computers, but somehow it managed to function fine for decades and a lot of luminaries got produced from yesterday's fringe characters.
For all I know, it doesn't apply well to these kids, but I'm sure it does apply to some others.
It's 5MB after it's been compressed into a zip. As you may or may not know, zip compresses text really well.
Just to be a dick, I'm going to point out that zip, as any other compression algorithm, is only going to necessarily be able to knock 1/8 of the space required by some text. (For large amounts of text).
Now if the text has an uneven, pattern-containing distribution, as English text or C source does, it'll probably compress a lot better, but just because something is text doesn't mean that it has to compress very well.
I wonder what the most bizarre platform this can be ported to now is?
QuakeC.
Unless you use GNU and other quality free tools instead of the traditional overpriced Windows developer toolchain (some Rational products, a high-end Visual Studio package from MS, maybe a commercial debugger, maybe something like Visual Slickedit...) Then your cost of development tools is $0.
Carmack also rocks for working on XFree's 3d drivers, releasing Linux versions of his games (probably at a loss) to jumpstart the Linux game market, pushing for OpenGL usage, open sourcing many of his other games...
It's also really cool that id stayed independent. In a day and age when the normal lifecycle of a game developer looks something like "release, release, release HIT, get purchased by EA", it's refreshing.
9. Note: Unix CR/LF in *.dsw/*.dsp fucks up MSVC++.
Yeah, I hate that. Stupid Microsoft.
Perhaps religion was merely used as a tool to promote the avoidance of these risks?
Do you have any evidence that religion today is anything other than a simple pragmatic organization that uses what irrational hooks it can to sell itself to people?
Unless pornography containing people below a particular age line deemed to be illegal magically works differently than other porn, it probably is theraputic (study demonstrating that pornography is correlated with a significant decrease in sex-related crimes).
Why? Construction workers don't get apologies, nor do landscape painters. Veterans aren't any different. If your recruiter told you different, he was selling you a line of shit. You worked a job, and maybe that job doesn't get the respect you'd like it to do, but nobody made you take that job either.
And the "protect your country" line is bullshit. That might fly somewhere in Central America or Eastern Europe, but the US hasn't been in danger that could be solved by conventional military force for a long time.
I bought the game, and I'd like to run it open-sourced, even without improvements, FWIW.
Because it's the bosses job to make you do your job, and often people don't like to be made to do their jobs. There's your answer.
I'm always impressed by the amount of griping and conspiracy-selling regarding cops that goes around. People don't like being made to drive the speed limit either...
Thanks; I wanted to do a C one, though, since most folks writing C software didn't want to call external programs just to parse a string of text.
Yeah, seriously. I had the same thought. "Becoming?"
They had (have?) a telnet server that dumps out data as well.
I looked into writing a METAR-parsing library at one point.
The US government is pretty good about providing electronic information. Heck, GNU's timezone data was (is?) maintained by some guy at NIST or something. The NWS is one of the better government agencies, too.
Accuweather can go to hell. There is a *huge* functional difference to having information free versus inexpensive. Free means that I can just write an open-source client and include it with GNOME to display the current weather on the desktop. Inexpensive means that I pretty much can't.
If Accuweather can't manage to find a single bloody thing that they can do beyond what the NWS is doing (like, oh, throwing effort into forecasting research and selling forecast data), they definitely should not be in the business.
So Santorum is the guy opposing free weather data, huh? And he's the guy who hates gays?
Damn, I really wish that I still lived in Pennsylvania. There's one vote that sure would have been useful.
It's called mod_gzip. Maybe you've heard of it.
Looking other places than the Web, Usenet still lacks standard compressed connection support. This is sad.
Or Vatican City.
NAT is an instance of a public-good problem.
Everyone loses, as a whole, if the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet goes away. We get slow and ugly things like VPN tunnels over HTTP everywhere, the inability of some computers to talk, centralized control (which eliminated the free-for-all of invention that allowed the rapid advancement of the Internet).
However, for any individual, it may well be in their interest to move to NAT (cheaper, the illusion of security, a greater feeling of control over users).
Working for an ISP has its advantages ... I just ran a distance check between a remote I know of and the central office it's deployed out of: 11km.
www.telcodata.us
which unfortunately is not particularly sustainable to a rational viewpoint.
It might not be optimal, but why would it not be sustainable?
Yeah, that's the taste I got too. Seriously, either (a) the security information industry is still too immature to have competed fluff out and too many of the people there have watched too many bad tech movies or (b) the marketers involved are right and their *customers* are just plain stupid.
Unfortunately that's just bullshit. Smartcars have their issues (with a top speed on 135kph, and poor acceleration they aren't exactly ideal for highway driving) but safety is not amongst them.
Wouldn't you accelerate *less* on the highway, resulting in the higher "highway" MPG rating?
I'm hoping that widespread use of English by many people who do not have English as their native language will force certain rules (such as those regarding possession) to change. The current ones are awful. The "it's" exception is particularly galling.
Another pet peeve of mine is the American English (not British English) method for quoting an entire sentence. In American English, you'd write:
He said, "She died."
In American English, the period always goes inside the quotes.
In every other English-speaking country, the period goes *outside* the quotes.
He said, "She died".
The American method is stupid and horrible for dealing with technical speech, where periods in quotes may matter.
Oh, and MLA mechanisms for citing URLs don't surround the URL with angle brackets, which was most certainly the standard in use at the time the MLA was doing up their URL-citing guidelines and works nicely as a metacharacter that cannot appear in an URL.
You must be joking. Slashdot stories are regularly loaded with grammatical errors.
I think that his writings are pretty on-the-spot.
His technocrat.net site is pretty on-the-spot, and I'd say better than Slashdot.
He avoids ESR-style broad proclamations and claiming that he's speaking for the entire open source community.
I'm not saying that Perens is perfect, but relative to the other highly-visible members of the OSS community, I find him a lot more acceptable than I find, say, ESR. And unlike RMS, he isn't a fanatic (not that we don't all need an RMS somewhere, but...) and is reasonably personable.
You may not like UserLinux, but Perens is out doing work to try to produce social change. RMS did the same thing, and had plenty of bumps along the way before, after decades of work, getting some recognition. He's one of the people that's actually out trying to *do* something about what most Slashdotters just gripe about.
No, I think Perens is pretty decent.
The GPL gives the FSF relicensing control over your code -- they can produce new revisions of the GPL.
Now, I use the GPL on almost all the hobbyist work I do, but you'd have to be pretty dumb not to consider this if you're IBM and considering sticking decades of IP under the thing. You're handing control of your primary asset over to another organization -- specifically, one that's more than a little bit radical.
Personally, I understand the concerns with compatibility with the GPL -- fewer licenses == good from an engineering standpoint. I do think that we *could* have far fewer licenses. I think that the requirements of Sun/IBM/what-have-you are probably pretty similar and could be met by a similar license. There are major benefits to having a small number of licenses and well-understood and documented interactions between them -- people have enough trouble understanding the GPL and LGPL alone. But there are significant issues that people can raise the the GPL, and it's silly to assume that the GPL is one-size-fits-all. (Heck, the GPL itself has fragmented into a number of variants even among FSF adherents, such as Linus's GPL-v2-only, the Guile license, the LGPL, and so forth.)