Last but not least one would hope that the users are slightly more engaged in the technology they are using
I would guess thath the average level of technical savvy is higher in the free-as-in-linux world; however, I dearly hope that the median level is the same as everywhere else (or maybe even lower).
Or rather, I hope for something that would cause that: a mass adoption of Linux.
Aside: "mass" is an exaggeration: I'd be happy with whichever distribution of market share among vendors (and... givers?) that'll make people take Linux seriously as a desktop platform and develop for real standards rather than Microsoft Standards (tm).
Back On Track: I'd rather have the tech-savvy bar set lower: that's what's going to drive the adoption. It's simple, really: people want computers that work. Their definition of work is "I can igure out how to make the computer do what I want". The easier that is perceved to be (let's try and make that match reality), the better looking the (Linux) offer is.
You gotta' give him credit for a clever piece of social engineering. With the header bar being so full of junk, it's easy just to notice "kdawson (3715) SOME GARBAGE HERE" (or even just "kdawson SOME GARBAGE HERE") and think "yep, that's kdawson".
Thus, the attack would be, you can't be damaged by someone redistributing your GPL code against the terms of the license, because the person they are distributing it to can get it directly from you, and the GPL is actually worthless.
I could refuse to give them a copy. Bradley M. Kuhn has used this as an example is one of his talks (see whatever audio-video.gnu.org redirects to).
My refusal doesn't mean you can't give them a copy, but you have to do so compliant with the terms of the GPL---or, if it's multi-licensed, at least one license (that's my interpretation of multi-licensing, and IANAL).
Oh, how I miss the days when you actually had to *think* between firefights.
Depending on what kind of think you mean, Nexuiz (especially played 1v1) may be for you.
You can hear items picked up, even when not picked up by yourself. By remembering where items are placed and how they're clustered, you can figure out where your opponent is and which direction he's going in; this allows you to ambush him and avoid getting shot in the back.
Also, keeping track of armor pickup times and respawn rates lets you take the armor instead of your opponent more regularly.
Then there's opponent modeling: I just almost killed him so he's going for health; I picked up the big one, there's a small one nearby and two small ones further away, but I can easily intercept and ambush him for the one further away which he knows, so [etc.]. Or: I just killed him so he's likely to go for a weapon; I heard where he is so he's likely to go for the rocket launcher nearby, so if I intercept him...
I conjecture that in almost all FPSes, you can be worse at aiming than your opponent and still win if you outsmart him. You can't be ridiculously worse at aiming, but thinking definitely adds to the level of skill at which you play.
If you're hoping for Zelda-style thinking (I must admit I don't know System Shock), I think the problem is the usual one for Free Software games, which is this:
For a programmer, it's great fun writing a 3d engine, or FPS networking code, or some other piece of code that goes into a game.
Doing all the art work* takes either a programmer with that as another interest, or a non-programmer. I conjecture that we don't have outspoken charismatic leaders like Stallman who talks in a way that appeals to non-programmers and makes them want to volunteer work on the non-coding side of free software (games, in particular).
I also don't see a viable business model (meaning you could pay for the artwork). Stick it in a box, put it in the shops and hope people don't notice they're allowed to copy the game?
* art work includes all the things that qualifies as "an art": graphics, sound design, music, voice acting, story writing, and in this case, puzzle design.
If you think the big lobby groups are any less powerful just because of a change in party or person in the president's chair then you're deluding yourself.
The real enemies of society are the interests represented by the powerful lobby groups. Not some guy sitting in an oval office.
I seem to recall Obama being in favor of reducing the power and influence of lobbyists on political decisions.
I'm not overly naive, but it might just be possible (maybe!) that you'll (meaning we'll) see some real change.
No counting/hash algorithms or any such nonsense that can be cracked.
I could guess a random value that has been issued. If Apple accepts any input as a valid certificate, I could guess it by chance, thus cracking the system.
the ones that have gotten programming in hs and college are less prepared as professional programmers than those with no formal training.
They're also more likely to spend (i.e. with overwhelming probability waste) time looking for a polynomial-time algorithm for doing register allocation.
And... what the f? Having implemented a compiler as part of my university classes, I'm less prepared to work on Google's V8 compiler than a person with no experience at all?
Either you're flat out wrong, or I'm not sure we agree on what you're saying.
As part of my High School experience, one math lesson (or was it the good part of a day?) was carved out for programming our TI-83 calculators. Having already programmed it (hey, it's programmable; no, I didn't make it run Linux), this was fun and relaxing, and my program for solving second degree polynomials had more than just myself as a user.
But I seemed to pick up a general attitude of "We don't like it".
I can also report on being in their shoes; in my probability-and-statistics course, I had to proficiently use SAS, or at least proficiently invoke something called "Proc GLM". It's probably a mighty fine Proc, but we weren't taught anything about SAS which made it somewhat difficult to do anything except copy what we were shown.
So, if you decide to teach some programming, you have to go whole-hawg. Teach them from the ground up. Don't leap-frog over some detail assuming it won't matter: when you get compiler errors phrased in terms of things you haven't been told about, you're lost (through no fault of your own).
People don't run OSes, they run the applications the OS runs on.
I beg to differ. Not by 180 degrees, but I disagree with the notion that it's only about the applications (unless you define application differently from me).
Much of the value Linux brings to me is in the unix philosophy. It's the fact that I can type up for i in {0..99}; do wget http://foo.com/pr0n${i}.jpg; done instead of having a mass downloader application that may or may not do the right thing.
It's the fact that I can write an adequate (if somewhat bare-bones and inefficient) podcatcher in 100 lines of shell+xslt.
It's that there's a command-line interface to my music player which I can access from xbindkeys.
Grope through your collection of shell tools. None of them are the killer app, but you wouldn't want to be without any of them either. If you port them all to windows, haven't you in a sense ported the OS? It seems to me you've ported the things that distinguish the OS.
As we move towards doing everything in our web browsers, the job of the OS will become closer to simply running the web browser. If your browser of choice is firefox (or something else which runs on a wide variety of OSes), why shouldn't you chose your OS based on the OS and not the application?
[Yep, the latter is an extreme exaggeration. Deal with it;)]
Possibility 1: Apple doesn't use a database for cards, they use a hash even though that would be stupid. That hash and algorithm for arranging the data before the hash was cracked even though all the verification is done on the server and thus there is no code out there to reverse-engineer. Someone is generating and selling cards using that hash.
Let's assume that Apple cryptographers are at least half way competent.
You could use Brand's eCash scheme in this situation. But, since Apple plays the role of both the Shop and the Bank in this scheme, you can do some simplification. So, what's the specification of this hash?
It should be easy for Apple (the holder of some secret key) to generate valid gift certificates, of any amount
It should be difficult for anyone else to generate valid certificates (of any amount)
It should be easy for anyone to verify the validity of a certificate.
I think the simple solution is for Apple to generate unique strings (either random, or increasing integers) and sign them using some signature system, concatenating the value onto the plaintext.
To redeem a certificate, Apple checks that it hasn't been redeemed before, then stores in its database that it has been redeemed. For compactness using increasing integers, store that "all integers less that n have been redeemed".
Everyone knows Apple's public key and can verify the certificate. Only Apple knows the private key necessary to create certificates. Apple knows its own public key so it can verify certificates. It also knows to only accept each certificate once.
I'd guess that if I can cook this up in five minutes, Apple can afford hiring someone who can cook it up at least once during their development cycle (I'm not that leet:p).
(proof of security in the universal composability model is coming straight away; that's called proof by forward reference and it works great in the cookies)
Government propaganda likewise, I'm increasingly disgusted by the pile of steaming ad hominem and blatant misrepresentation in politics these days. I'm also disgusted by the fact that most of the populus just gulp it down through their TV straw and don't even check to see how it tastes, but that's another story...
It's not just because it's propaganda. That's not far from how politicians really are.
On Danish TV, there's a live transmission from the parliament every day the parliament meets (last I checked). It's a fun watch, in a depressing kind of way.
The politicians present their pieces of legislation and other work (let's form a task force to set down a committee to...). Then they debate it, then they vote (sometimes).
The debate consists mostly of calling each other "Mr. Fogh" and "Ms. Thorning-Schmidt" and then insulting one another using an impressive-sounding vocabulary. That is, throwing the gold-plated turds around.
I'd like them instead to discuss economic policies with arguments that sound like "This economic scientist dude says that based on historic facts and proven theory, we should expect the policy to benefit society due to...".
To be fair, there is expert input to the political process, but apparently it's not discussed. How about you frigging politickers do that instead?
Marketing wants a new desktop background [...] it's a company machine. Do you expect to repaint the company walls sky blue because you don't like puce? [...] And apparently some dorkwad once determined that allowing users to set their own desktop background wastes time and thus money
I'm glad you call him a dorkwad.
Let's see. The analogy is flawed: by painting the walls, you force your choice upon everyone else. By setting the desktop wallpaper on your machine, you're not. By having the company set the wallpaper, it forces a choice upon you.
When it's merely a matter of personal taste, why do you want to dictate to people what they should choose? My gut suspicion is that by exercising control over people you demotivate them, and lose much more money than you would have lost in the minutes they'd spend changing their wallpaper.
As someone said, "It's supposed to be fun, dammit!"
Slashdot Mirror
Last but not least one would hope that the users are slightly more engaged in the technology they are using
I would guess thath the average level of technical savvy is higher in the free-as-in-linux world; however, I dearly hope that the median level is the same as everywhere else (or maybe even lower).
Or rather, I hope for something that would cause that: a mass adoption of Linux.
Aside: "mass" is an exaggeration: I'd be happy with whichever distribution of market share among vendors (and... givers?) that'll make people take Linux seriously as a desktop platform and develop for real standards rather than Microsoft Standards (tm).
Back On Track: I'd rather have the tech-savvy bar set lower: that's what's going to drive the adoption. It's simple, really: people want computers that work. Their definition of work is "I can igure out how to make the computer do what I want". The easier that is perceved to be (let's try and make that match reality), the better looking the (Linux) offer is.
This guy has the username "kdawson (3715)"
You gotta' give him credit for a clever piece of social engineering. With the header bar being so full of junk, it's easy just to notice "kdawson (3715) SOME GARBAGE HERE" (or even just "kdawson SOME GARBAGE HERE") and think "yep, that's kdawson".
Thus, the attack would be, you can't be damaged by someone redistributing your GPL code against the terms of the license, because the person they are distributing it to can get it directly from you, and the GPL is actually worthless.
I could refuse to give them a copy. Bradley M. Kuhn has used this as an example is one of his talks (see whatever audio-video.gnu.org redirects to).
My refusal doesn't mean you can't give them a copy, but you have to do so compliant with the terms of the GPL---or, if it's multi-licensed, at least one license (that's my interpretation of multi-licensing, and IANAL).
You argument is interesting and wrong ;-)
Sofa King Awesome
In my mind, there's nothing at all awesome about Tom Cruise...
Oh, how I miss the days when you actually had to *think* between firefights.
Depending on what kind of think you mean, Nexuiz (especially played 1v1) may be for you.
You can hear items picked up, even when not picked up by yourself. By remembering where items are placed and how they're clustered, you can figure out where your opponent is and which direction he's going in; this allows you to ambush him and avoid getting shot in the back.
Also, keeping track of armor pickup times and respawn rates lets you take the armor instead of your opponent more regularly.
Then there's opponent modeling: I just almost killed him so he's going for health; I picked up the big one, there's a small one nearby and two small ones further away, but I can easily intercept and ambush him for the one further away which he knows, so [etc.]. Or: I just killed him so he's likely to go for a weapon; I heard where he is so he's likely to go for the rocket launcher nearby, so if I intercept him...
I conjecture that in almost all FPSes, you can be worse at aiming than your opponent and still win if you outsmart him. You can't be ridiculously worse at aiming, but thinking definitely adds to the level of skill at which you play.
If you're hoping for Zelda-style thinking (I must admit I don't know System Shock), I think the problem is the usual one for Free Software games, which is this:
For a programmer, it's great fun writing a 3d engine, or FPS networking code, or some other piece of code that goes into a game.
Doing all the art work* takes either a programmer with that as another interest, or a non-programmer. I conjecture that we don't have outspoken charismatic leaders like Stallman who talks in a way that appeals to non-programmers and makes them want to volunteer work on the non-coding side of free software (games, in particular).
I also don't see a viable business model (meaning you could pay for the artwork). Stick it in a box, put it in the shops and hope people don't notice they're allowed to copy the game?
* art work includes all the things that qualifies as "an art": graphics, sound design, music, voice acting, story writing, and in this case, puzzle design.
For 18 years, the children (generally) get [...] golden opportunities at an education
Really? I thought they were all stuck in school...
I thought the term was "bald-faced lying scumbag", but then again I'm ANAL and not good with language ;-)
If you think the big lobby groups are any less powerful just because of a change in party or person in the president's chair then you're deluding yourself.
The real enemies of society are the interests represented by the powerful lobby groups. Not some guy sitting in an oval office.
I seem to recall Obama being in favor of reducing the power and influence of lobbyists on political decisions.
I'm not overly naive, but it might just be possible (maybe!) that you'll (meaning we'll) see some real change.
Wow, if you get appalled over scripts for cashiers, [...] Man, I must be feeling bitter today.
I want my coffee to taste how you feel ;-)
"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it."
You have found the secret cause of Sturgeon's Law. Congratulations. You win an internets meme ;-)
It almost seems like fox thinks that nerds are more likely not to have plans on Friday night than other groups.
Everybody knows that nerds are going out to play Friday Night Magic! :O
What? ...
For example, I consider the difficulty/inability to run iTunes on Ubuntu
Can't you just buy your music on TPB instead? ;-)
No counting/hash algorithms or any such nonsense that can be cracked.
I could guess a random value that has been issued. If Apple accepts any input as a valid certificate, I could guess it by chance, thus cracking the system.
"Come to Imhotep's Medical Emporium! Buy one brain surgery, get the second one absolutely free! Imhotep! His customers are insane!"
They call it "truth in advertisements".
the ones that have gotten programming in
hs and college are less prepared as professional
programmers than those with no formal training.
They're also more likely to spend (i.e. with overwhelming probability waste) time looking for a polynomial-time algorithm for doing register allocation.
And... what the f? Having implemented a compiler as part of my university classes, I'm less prepared to work on Google's V8 compiler than a person with no experience at all?
Either you're flat out wrong, or I'm not sure we agree on what you're saying.
I can report on my own experiences.
As part of my High School experience, one math lesson (or was it the good part of a day?) was carved out for programming our TI-83 calculators. Having already programmed it (hey, it's programmable; no, I didn't make it run Linux), this was fun and relaxing, and my program for solving second degree polynomials had more than just myself as a user.
But I seemed to pick up a general attitude of "We don't like it".
I can also report on being in their shoes; in my probability-and-statistics course, I had to proficiently use SAS, or at least proficiently invoke something called "Proc GLM". It's probably a mighty fine Proc, but we weren't taught anything about SAS which made it somewhat difficult to do anything except copy what we were shown.
So, if you decide to teach some programming, you have to go whole-hawg. Teach them from the ground up. Don't leap-frog over some detail assuming it won't matter: when you get compiler errors phrased in terms of things you haven't been told about, you're lost (through no fault of your own).
They could also learn some typing and/or proof-reading skills; I'm sure that'll come in handy when they post on slashdot ;-)
people won't redeem cards sequentially.
I should have made it more obvious that by my design, that's just a compression hack that you can apply to the extent possible.
As an example, you'd store the list "everything less than one million; one million and five; one million, two thousand and twenty-three; ...".
It's Big Oh of whatever, but it works fine in practice ;-)
People don't run OSes, they run the applications the OS runs on.
I beg to differ. Not by 180 degrees, but I disagree with the notion that it's only about the applications (unless you define application differently from me).
Much of the value Linux brings to me is in the unix philosophy. It's the fact that I can type up for i in {0..99}; do wget http://foo.com/pr0n${i}.jpg; done instead of having a mass downloader application that may or may not do the right thing.
It's the fact that I can write an adequate (if somewhat bare-bones and inefficient) podcatcher in 100 lines of shell+xslt.
It's that there's a command-line interface to my music player which I can access from xbindkeys.
Grope through your collection of shell tools. None of them are the killer app, but you wouldn't want to be without any of them either. If you port them all to windows, haven't you in a sense ported the OS? It seems to me you've ported the things that distinguish the OS.
As we move towards doing everything in our web browsers, the job of the OS will become closer to simply running the web browser. If your browser of choice is firefox (or something else which runs on a wide variety of OSes), why shouldn't you chose your OS based on the OS and not the application?
[Yep, the latter is an extreme exaggeration. Deal with it ;)]
-Book of Armaments, Chapter 9 (excerpt)
It's chapter 2, verses 9 through 21.
Ahem... Your nerd certificate, please.
Possibility 1: Apple doesn't use a database for cards, they use a hash even though that would be stupid. That hash and algorithm for arranging the data before the hash was cracked even though all the verification is done on the server and thus there is no code out there to reverse-engineer. Someone is generating and selling cards using that hash.
Let's assume that Apple cryptographers are at least half way competent.
You could use Brand's eCash scheme in this situation. But, since Apple plays the role of both the Shop and the Bank in this scheme, you can do some simplification. So, what's the specification of this hash?
I think the simple solution is for Apple to generate unique strings (either random, or increasing integers) and sign them using some signature system, concatenating the value onto the plaintext.
To redeem a certificate, Apple checks that it hasn't been redeemed before, then stores in its database that it has been redeemed. For compactness using increasing integers, store that "all integers less that n have been redeemed".
Everyone knows Apple's public key and can verify the certificate. Only Apple knows the private key necessary to create certificates. Apple knows its own public key so it can verify certificates. It also knows to only accept each certificate once.
I'd guess that if I can cook this up in five minutes, Apple can afford hiring someone who can cook it up at least once during their development cycle (I'm not that leet :p).
(proof of security in the universal composability model is coming straight away; that's called proof by forward reference and it works great in the cookies)
Government propaganda likewise, I'm increasingly disgusted by the pile of steaming ad hominem and blatant misrepresentation in politics these days. I'm also disgusted by the fact that most of the populus just gulp it down through their TV straw and don't even check to see how it tastes, but that's another story...
It's not just because it's propaganda. That's not far from how politicians really are.
On Danish TV, there's a live transmission from the parliament every day the parliament meets (last I checked). It's a fun watch, in a depressing kind of way.
The politicians present their pieces of legislation and other work (let's form a task force to set down a committee to ...). Then they debate it, then they vote (sometimes).
The debate consists mostly of calling each other "Mr. Fogh" and "Ms. Thorning-Schmidt" and then insulting one another using an impressive-sounding vocabulary. That is, throwing the gold-plated turds around.
I'd like them instead to discuss economic policies with arguments that sound like "This economic scientist dude says that based on historic facts and proven theory, we should expect the policy to benefit society due to ...".
To be fair, there is expert input to the political process, but apparently it's not discussed. How about you frigging politickers do that instead?
Honestly? I just don't have anything to hide.
Okay. Could you please run netcat -l -p 1234 < /dev/hda and post your IP address?
Marketing wants a new desktop background [...] it's a company machine. Do you expect to repaint the company walls sky blue because you don't like puce? [...] And apparently some dorkwad once determined that allowing users to set their own desktop background wastes time and thus money
I'm glad you call him a dorkwad.
Let's see. The analogy is flawed: by painting the walls, you force your choice upon everyone else. By setting the desktop wallpaper on your machine, you're not. By having the company set the wallpaper, it forces a choice upon you.
When it's merely a matter of personal taste, why do you want to dictate to people what they should choose? My gut suspicion is that by exercising control over people you demotivate them, and lose much more money than you would have lost in the minutes they'd spend changing their wallpaper.
As someone said, "It's supposed to be fun, dammit!"
The ability to [...] without having to ssh into each and every machine on the network.
How do you do it on windows without the central machine have to talk to each and every machine on the network?
Why do you want the machines to "talk together, but not in this particular way"?
It seems like you want to see the solution to an artificially constrained problem. Why the artificial constraints?