And yet, it seems like this Jones chap actually did claim to be a "radical Communist", which to my mind is a bit like claiming to be a big admirer of Hitler. It is hardly a spurious accusation or a McCarthyist witch hunt based on fabricated evidence and leading questions. Jones openly advocated extreme politics of a sort that killed hundreds of millions during the 20th century. It is only right that voters should take that into account when considering his abilities as a politician.
In Britain, we have a politician called Nick Griffin who claims not to be a Nazi, and claims his "British National Party" is interested only in freedom, democracy and national independence. And yet there are photos of him as a young man, standing under banners saying "White Pride". There's a video of him with the leader of the KKK explaining his election strategy. There's a picture of the former BNP leader wearing a Nazi uniform and standing beside a swastika. Has Griffin really changed? I doubt it.
Because of his past, Jones should be treated with equal suspicion.
icculus is trying to do too much at once. An intermediate step is required to introduce FatELF.
In his FAQ, icculus explains that a shell script could be used to select the correct architecture and launch the right binary. He says that this would be equivalent to FatELF in some respects, but not such a good solution, firstly because it adds unnecessary overhead, and secondly because it is not guaranteed to work correctly on all future architectures, even those that are backwards-compatible to current architectures: "If you didn't know to check for "x86_64" in 1998, your otherwise-functional i386 version won't be run, and the script fails."
Despite that disadvantage, an intermediate temporary solution of this sort is needed as a stop-gap to encourage the adoption of FatELF binaries. It would allow them to be used on systems that lack the necessary kernel support. If such binaries are widely used, then the kernel patches to support them directly will (eventually) be accepted.
Apple's bad behaviour does matter, at least to me, and it is important that I say so, and say why. Even if my laptop actually was inferior to a Mac, even if the Linux software it runs actually was inferior to OS X, and even if somehow it cost more, then it would still be worth buying to avoid supporting a litigious monopoly-abusing corporation which everyone else will inexplicably defend to the death.
Why does it have to boot OS X, though? The company that sells OS X puts lots of silly monopolist conditions on how you can use it. They don't care about the "first sale" thing you mention in another post. They use DRM to lock the software to their hardware, you have to hack it to make it work.
Seems to me that any of these by itself would be a pretty good reason to refuse to support that company. Even if you pirate OS X, you're still helping to promote it, and thus still supporting the behaviour of the company that sells it.
Actually the core parts of ARM's ISA were designed for maximising performance, not minimising energy. None of the 16-bit CISC designs circa 1982 could run Acorn's BBC BASIC runtime as efficiently as the 8-bit 6502. So Acorn's technical staff designed a new CPU; a fully-pipelined design based on the new idea of "RISC". It would go into desktop machines, like the Archimedes. Performance per watt was of no importance at this stage; this was the early 1980s, after all. It was only in the 90s that ARM started to focus on low power as a selling point, and by then (like Intel) they were stuck with an unchangeable core ISA...
That's true - but I think this means that RIPA is useless against systems like SSH that destroy the keys at the end of the session. No law can compel you to reveal your SSH session keys, because it's impossible for you to do so.
The only way for Big Brother to deal with this is to either outlaw SSH, or insist that SSH includes a back door for key recovery. Such changes would be resisted by every user of SSH, and if not for civil liberties reasons, then at least because of the cost and security risk.
They can try, but I don't believe they will get very far, because encryption is so deeply entrenched into everyday technology. It's no longer just a matter of banning PGP. Now, they would have to come up with some way to add escrow features to (at least) SSL and WPA, as well as banning all other non-approved forms of encryption such as SSH... which is very widely used.
Any attempt to enforce escrow would impact a huge number of businesses, universities and individuals. They could expect widespread protests at the expense of replacing perfectly good software and hardware, not just from supporters of civil liberties, but from major corporations and institutions.
You're expecting the end user to have everything installed that he or she will need to build your application. End users probably don't have GCC and libc6-dev installed, not to mention the dozens of packages that are needed to compile a C++ program or a GUI program. Why should the end user have to install these things? He or she should just be able to install the libraries that are required, not the libraries and the headers and the C compiler and whatever else. And preferably, the library installation should be automated by the package manager.
It's always good to get the news from sources outside your own country, as it is less likely to be influenced by your own politicians. This applies to Brits just as much as it applies to Americans.
If Android phones don't step up to the plate app-wise, AND touch-wise, accelerometer-wise, GPS-wise, compass-wise, iTunes-wise... then you're just going to have a lot of companies betting on the wrong horse.
But other handset manufacturers can't make iphones. They have to make phones with an OS that somebody is willing to licence to them. In itself, this guarantees that plenty of non-Apple phones will be manufactured and sold. Manufacturers have no choice but to compete.
It's just like how Mac can't kill the PC platform. Thousands of companies make PCs. One company makes Macs. If you want to build computers, they have to be PCs.
Oh I agree, Apple has a very poor sense of ethics, perhaps because it is never held to account for bad behaviour because the fanboy army is always ready to defend any action. DRM in Apple products? Blame the RIAA. iPhone app store? Blame AT&T. Proprietary hardware? A necessary evil. Suing anyone using an apple as a logo? Any company would do the same. Et cetera.
The fanboys have made a big financial commitment to Apple products. They've made a mental commitment to justify the expense. This is why they will always defend whatever Apple does. Better that, than admit they wasted the money on nerd fashion.
They also believe that they are a besieged minority, even though they also believe in Apple's success (and never shut up about it). This is why they are so aggressive, why they are blind to Apple's bad behaviour, and also why they are always trying to persuade people to join their creepy cult.
At least we hear about the bad things Apple does, even if it is only because anti-Apple stories provoke nerd rage. Because I have the facts about Apple, I vote with my wallet and never, ever, ever give them anything. I'm sure you do the same. There are lots of us out there.
Apple is often in the news and often for doing bad things. However, we are hearing about the bad things. Apple regularly gets negative press here.
That might be because the editors don't like Apple.
But more likely it's because of the reaction it provokes. Discussions about Apple are rapidly Godwinned by fanboys and haters, engaging in the 21st century version of "vi versus emacs" or "Protestants versus Catholics". This time, Emacs is fashionable, shiny, massively overpriced, sold by an evil version of Microsoft, and ubiquitous in all media. And yet, inexplicably, it's still really popular with nerds.
When you pay a premium for something, you make a mental commitment to justifying the expense.
Thanks for replying. I think this is the source of my confusion:
3 - With EMV (the UK scheme) no PIN is used in a magnetic transaction. Signature is used and the fraud liability is with the merchant. There is NO way to do a stripe'n'PIN transaction.
It did appear to me that this is what they were doing: reading the mag stripe, then asking for a PIN. Glad to hear that this is not possible, since I do think that if it were possible, you'd be able to effectively clone a card just by copying the mag stripe - there would be no need to copy the chip.
I don't like the Tesco way. I want the entire transaction to be managed by the card reader, not the card reader plus another machine. That's because magnetic stripes are easy to clone. We can be pretty sure that Tesco aren't going to try to copy our cards, but other shops might: and they have a much better chance of getting away with it if customers are still expect their cards to be swiped.
All of the security measures that you mention are great, but they don't prevent social engineering attacks. A dodgy shopkeeper could easily swipe the card to clone it, and then record the customer entering the associated PIN (a video camera could be used). Then that dodgy shopkeeper could use the cloned card for anything. He could even use it to shop at Tesco, as he would know that they wouldn't be checking the chip. He'd only need to provide the correct PIN for that particular magnetic strip.
This scenario would be prevented entirely if magnetic strips were not used. Customers would be very suspicious if anyone wanted to swipe their cards: and rightly so! I think it's very odd that Tesco still do.
Linux is being used as a research tool because Linux is a great research tool. It really is that simple. There's no conspiracy. They're using free software because it's more flexible than closed source software, and therefore better for research purposes.
I completely forgot about that until reading this article. I'm not sure how many companies did it, but I remember this on some Sierra Online games I played (Police Quest, for one)
The Infocom method required the user to possess certain physical items that came packaged with the game. You'd have to examine these items for clues in order to progress within the game. This method was really clever, as it integrates the copy-protection scheme into the game itself, while also making the game extend outside of the computer! I reckon that this is easily the best kind of copy protection from the pre-Internet era: it's not just effective, it adds to the game.
I find it somewhat ironic that Capitalism is the cancer of Democracy.
Do you think so? I think that capitalism is how democracy works.
You have a choice about where you spend your money, and so does everyone else. This "free market" provides the essence of freedom, because economic power is not centralised - it is shared by you, and everyone else with money.
If you remove the money from democracy, you must replace it with another mechanism for decentralising economic power, or the result will be dictatorship. Unfortunately, no-one has come up with a substitute for money.
Of course, some constraints need to be applied to pure capitalism: if this was not done, then all the money would be in the hands of gangsters. One could argue that today's capitalism has become a bit like that: although MegaCorp isn't allowed to go around murdering people, it can buy politicians. But that's a problem with today's government, not capitalism itself.
Then after the capture, the file is stored on a computer running a server applet that will emulate the download service for the PS3. The PS3, oblivious to the fact that it's downloading files from the user's LAN rather than the live internet, installs the software. Later, that same file on the PC will be uploaded using bittorrent or some other means for others to share. In the end, doing almost nothing to thwart piracy.
That's a man-in-the-middle attack. Sony could prevent that by having the server authenticate itself to the PS3, using a mechanism similar to that used for SSL and SSH, in which the server has a secret key.
Well, in terms of "number of people killed", Stalin did beat Hitler's record. I believe that Stalin managed around 25 million, through his concentration camps and engineered famines.
Communists do not attempt to eliminate particular ethnic groups - in that, you are correct. However, they do eliminate alternative political ideologies. Communism requires everyone to act in the interest of the state (in other words, to be slaves). Thus, alternative ideologies must be stamped out, lest the people begin to think that they want to be able to own property, choose their occupation, and speak freely. It's still genocide, but it's not directed at an ethnic group, it's directed at social classes (e.g. Bolsheviks, to pick an example from Lenin's time). This is equally bad.
After 70 years of communism in the Soviet Union, uncountable millions of "political enemies" had died in labour camps, starved to death, or were eliminated by the KGB. Fact: communism has killed many more people than fascism.
My statement seems to be "Perl encourages bad programming practice". I think that Perl encourages bad programming practice in the same way that C does - this is not surprising, as Perl has a C-like syntax. However, Perl is worse than C. Perl is a language of special cases, with seemingly thousands of built-in functions. Is it not true that the specification for Perl 5 is the Perl 5 interpreter?
Perl reminds me of BASIC, because BASIC is another language of special cases. BASIC dialects from the 1980s involved hundreds of built-in functions: DIM, PRINT, and GOTO to name a few. That's a lot like Perl. You don't want that, because it's not orthogonal. You want to be able to define functions that behave in exactly the same way as built-in functions. You want the high-level features in your high-level language to be extensible.
However, it's really just a matter of taste. Python works for me, Perl works for you. Have fun. But please don't encourage beginners to start with Perl.
Yeah, I always found Perl was good for writing short programs. The problem is that it never seemed to scale to large ones. My programs would outgrow Perl, and then I'd have to rewrite them. There were two main problems - firstly it was difficult to use complex data structures (Perl's good at the simple ones, but when you want to use objects...), and secondly it was hard to read the code! That made it hard to make improvements and fix bugs later. These two problems don't exist in Python.
Now, obviously, what language you use is a matter of taste, and no language suits everyone. But I've found that Python saves a lot of time. The real reason why you'd write a game in Perl or Python is nothing to do with portability - it's because it's easier to write in those languages! Of the two, Python is easier. Honestly. Time spent learning it will not be wasted.
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And yet, it seems like this Jones chap actually did claim to be a "radical Communist", which to my mind is a bit like claiming to be a big admirer of Hitler. It is hardly a spurious accusation or a McCarthyist witch hunt based on fabricated evidence and leading questions. Jones openly advocated extreme politics of a sort that killed hundreds of millions during the 20th century. It is only right that voters should take that into account when considering his abilities as a politician.
In Britain, we have a politician called Nick Griffin who claims not to be a Nazi, and claims his "British National Party" is interested only in freedom, democracy and national independence. And yet there are photos of him as a young man, standing under banners saying "White Pride". There's a video of him with the leader of the KKK explaining his election strategy. There's a picture of the former BNP leader wearing a Nazi uniform and standing beside a swastika. Has Griffin really changed? I doubt it.
Because of his past, Jones should be treated with equal suspicion.
What CPU are you going to be running in 2019?
I don't know, but I can tell you this: it will be x86 and x86_64 compatible.
icculus is trying to do too much at once. An intermediate step is required to introduce FatELF.
In his FAQ, icculus explains that a shell script could be used to select the correct architecture and launch the right binary. He says that this would be equivalent to FatELF in some respects, but not such a good solution, firstly because it adds unnecessary overhead, and secondly because it is not guaranteed to work correctly on all future architectures, even those that are backwards-compatible to current architectures: "If you didn't know to check for "x86_64" in 1998, your otherwise-functional i386 version won't be run, and the script fails."
Despite that disadvantage, an intermediate temporary solution of this sort is needed as a stop-gap to encourage the adoption of FatELF binaries. It would allow them to be used on systems that lack the necessary kernel support. If such binaries are widely used, then the kernel patches to support them directly will (eventually) be accepted.
Apple's bad behaviour does matter, at least to me, and it is important that I say so, and say why. Even if my laptop actually was inferior to a Mac, even if the Linux software it runs actually was inferior to OS X, and even if somehow it cost more, then it would still be worth buying to avoid supporting a litigious monopoly-abusing corporation which everyone else will inexplicably defend to the death.
Why does it have to boot OS X, though? The company that sells OS X puts lots of silly monopolist conditions on how you can use it. They don't care about the "first sale" thing you mention in another post. They use DRM to lock the software to their hardware, you have to hack it to make it work.
Seems to me that any of these by itself would be a pretty good reason to refuse to support that company. Even if you pirate OS X, you're still helping to promote it, and thus still supporting the behaviour of the company that sells it.
Actually the core parts of ARM's ISA were designed for maximising performance, not minimising energy. None of the 16-bit CISC designs circa 1982 could run Acorn's BBC BASIC runtime as efficiently as the 8-bit 6502. So Acorn's technical staff designed a new CPU; a fully-pipelined design based on the new idea of "RISC". It would go into desktop machines, like the Archimedes. Performance per watt was of no importance at this stage; this was the early 1980s, after all. It was only in the 90s that ARM started to focus on low power as a selling point, and by then (like Intel) they were stuck with an unchangeable core ISA...
That's true - but I think this means that RIPA is useless against systems like SSH that destroy the keys at the end of the session. No law can compel you to reveal your SSH session keys, because it's impossible for you to do so.
The only way for Big Brother to deal with this is to either outlaw SSH, or insist that SSH includes a back door for key recovery. Such changes would be resisted by every user of SSH, and if not for civil liberties reasons, then at least because of the cost and security risk.
They can try, but I don't believe they will get very far, because encryption is so deeply entrenched into everyday technology. It's no longer just a matter of banning PGP. Now, they would have to come up with some way to add escrow features to (at least) SSL and WPA, as well as banning all other non-approved forms of encryption such as SSH... which is very widely used.
Any attempt to enforce escrow would impact a huge number of businesses, universities and individuals. They could expect widespread protests at the expense of replacing perfectly good software and hardware, not just from supporters of civil liberties, but from major corporations and institutions.
You're expecting the end user to have everything installed that he or she will need to build your application. End users probably don't have GCC and libc6-dev installed, not to mention the dozens of packages that are needed to compile a C++ program or a GUI program. Why should the end user have to install these things? He or she should just be able to install the libraries that are required, not the libraries and the headers and the C compiler and whatever else. And preferably, the library installation should be automated by the package manager.
It's always good to get the news from sources outside your own country, as it is less likely to be influenced by your own politicians. This applies to Brits just as much as it applies to Americans.
And Linux is most definitely supported.
http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/download_programmes/desktop_linux
Since December 2008, apparently.
If Android phones don't step up to the plate app-wise, AND touch-wise, accelerometer-wise, GPS-wise, compass-wise, iTunes-wise... then you're just going to have a lot of companies betting on the wrong horse.
But other handset manufacturers can't make iphones. They have to make phones with an OS that somebody is willing to licence to them. In itself, this guarantees that plenty of non-Apple phones will be manufactured and sold. Manufacturers have no choice but to compete.
It's just like how Mac can't kill the PC platform. Thousands of companies make PCs. One company makes Macs. If you want to build computers, they have to be PCs.
Oh I agree, Apple has a very poor sense of ethics, perhaps because it is never held to account for bad behaviour because the fanboy army is always ready to defend any action. DRM in Apple products? Blame the RIAA. iPhone app store? Blame AT&T. Proprietary hardware? A necessary evil. Suing anyone using an apple as a logo? Any company would do the same. Et cetera.
The fanboys have made a big financial commitment to Apple products. They've made a mental commitment to justify the expense. This is why they will always defend whatever Apple does. Better that, than admit they wasted the money on nerd fashion.
They also believe that they are a besieged minority, even though they also believe in Apple's success (and never shut up about it). This is why they are so aggressive, why they are blind to Apple's bad behaviour, and also why they are always trying to persuade people to join their creepy cult.
At least we hear about the bad things Apple does, even if it is only because anti-Apple stories provoke nerd rage. Because I have the facts about Apple, I vote with my wallet and never, ever, ever give them anything. I'm sure you do the same. There are lots of us out there.
That might be because the editors don't like Apple.
But more likely it's because of the reaction it provokes. Discussions about Apple are rapidly Godwinned by fanboys and haters, engaging in the 21st century version of "vi versus emacs" or "Protestants versus Catholics". This time, Emacs is fashionable, shiny, massively overpriced, sold by an evil version of Microsoft, and ubiquitous in all media. And yet, inexplicably, it's still really popular with nerds.
When you pay a premium for something, you make a mental commitment to justifying the expense.
3 - With EMV (the UK scheme) no PIN is used in a magnetic transaction. Signature is used and the fraud liability is with the merchant. There is NO way to do a stripe'n'PIN transaction.
It did appear to me that this is what they were doing: reading the mag stripe, then asking for a PIN. Glad to hear that this is not possible, since I do think that if it were possible, you'd be able to effectively clone a card just by copying the mag stripe - there would be no need to copy the chip.
All of the security measures that you mention are great, but they don't prevent social engineering attacks. A dodgy shopkeeper could easily swipe the card to clone it, and then record the customer entering the associated PIN (a video camera could be used). Then that dodgy shopkeeper could use the cloned card for anything. He could even use it to shop at Tesco, as he would know that they wouldn't be checking the chip. He'd only need to provide the correct PIN for that particular magnetic strip.
This scenario would be prevented entirely if magnetic strips were not used. Customers would be very suspicious if anyone wanted to swipe their cards: and rightly so! I think it's very odd that Tesco still do.
Linux is being used as a research tool because Linux is a great research tool. It really is that simple. There's no conspiracy. They're using free software because it's more flexible than closed source software, and therefore better for research purposes.
The Infocom method required the user to possess certain physical items that came packaged with the game. You'd have to examine these items for clues in order to progress within the game. This method was really clever, as it integrates the copy-protection scheme into the game itself, while also making the game extend outside of the computer! I reckon that this is easily the best kind of copy protection from the pre-Internet era: it's not just effective, it adds to the game.
Do you think so? I think that capitalism is how democracy works.
You have a choice about where you spend your money, and so does everyone else. This "free market" provides the essence of freedom, because economic power is not centralised - it is shared by you, and everyone else with money.
If you remove the money from democracy, you must replace it with another mechanism for decentralising economic power, or the result will be dictatorship. Unfortunately, no-one has come up with a substitute for money.
Of course, some constraints need to be applied to pure capitalism: if this was not done, then all the money would be in the hands of gangsters. One could argue that today's capitalism has become a bit like that: although MegaCorp isn't allowed to go around murdering people, it can buy politicians. But that's a problem with today's government, not capitalism itself.
That's a man-in-the-middle attack. Sony could prevent that by having the server authenticate itself to the PS3, using a mechanism similar to that used for SSL and SSH, in which the server has a secret key.
Communists do not attempt to eliminate particular ethnic groups - in that, you are correct. However, they do eliminate alternative political ideologies. Communism requires everyone to act in the interest of the state (in other words, to be slaves). Thus, alternative ideologies must be stamped out, lest the people begin to think that they want to be able to own property, choose their occupation, and speak freely. It's still genocide, but it's not directed at an ethnic group, it's directed at social classes (e.g. Bolsheviks, to pick an example from Lenin's time). This is equally bad.
After 70 years of communism in the Soviet Union, uncountable millions of "political enemies" had died in labour camps, starved to death, or were eliminated by the KGB. Fact: communism has killed many more people than fascism.
Will this affect Magic Online, the casino that pays out cards instead of cash?
Perl reminds me of BASIC, because BASIC is another language of special cases. BASIC dialects from the 1980s involved hundreds of built-in functions: DIM, PRINT, and GOTO to name a few. That's a lot like Perl. You don't want that, because it's not orthogonal. You want to be able to define functions that behave in exactly the same way as built-in functions. You want the high-level features in your high-level language to be extensible.
However, it's really just a matter of taste. Python works for me, Perl works for you. Have fun. But please don't encourage beginners to start with Perl.
Now, obviously, what language you use is a matter of taste, and no language suits everyone. But I've found that Python saves a lot of time. The real reason why you'd write a game in Perl or Python is nothing to do with portability - it's because it's easier to write in those languages! Of the two, Python is easier. Honestly. Time spent learning it will not be wasted.
p.s. Don't write anything in Perl.