Your studens' problem is that they are not careful at all. That's a problem that no amount of software will solve.
If I were looking for OpenOffice, I'd try www.openoffice.org. Failing that, I'd google for "OpenOffice". Then, I'd click on the first link, which is bound to be the correct one for every non-trivial software project.
Posts like this lead to another, very important point. The reason we don't have a (good) free software antivirus program* is because that's a hard problem that the free software community does not have a large need to solve. The reason why there is no large need to solve the virus problem is, you guessed it, Linux. Every free software developer, given the choice of dedicating their free time on on antivirus or [insert cool project here], will certainly choose [insert cool project here].
Good, but you sound like a knowledgeable user who would know what to scan, and would actually remember to scan. Now, what's the least obtrusive app for the average idiot that will do things automatically?
In an open-source project, to put such a "fix" would require to fool everyone responsible for getting that patch accepted upsream, including explaining to them why that patch is necessary in the first place, and to hide it so well that nobody in the future will ever notice it. Practically impossible.
Of course Apple is like Microsoft - they are both proprietary OS vendors. I question them almost as much, the almost coming from the fact that at least their foundation, Darwin, is somewhat open.
All three - ugly, inconsistent, and uncommented - make understanding the code more difficult. They do not make it impossible to go over.
Having spent a large amount of time looking into (the lowest layer of) OpenSSH, I can say it is very secure. Ugly, inconsistent, and uncommented together do not imply that the code is bad - that's your logical fallacy. (Besides, ugly and inconsistent are subjective.)
That does not change the fact that anyone (even me!) can look at OpenSSH, find problems in it, and fix it. Microsoft's code is secret, may or may not have glaring bugs in it, and nobody else can fix a problem even if it's known.
The link you posted is a testament to this. The problem was found and fixed extremely quickly. I can't trust Microsoft with the same response, and nobody else should trust them either.
Human error can happen to every code. But the open source ones we can fix.
It's a bit ugly, not very consistent, almost completely undocumented, but it's very secure by design. Please don't take my word for it. Read this and then look at the source code.
Now have you looked at the Windows SMB server source code? I rest my case.
The fact that your government is as corrupt as their government (what government isn't?) doesn't make the problem go away. It's ok to critisize others when you have that problem too, as long as you acknowledge it. My 2 eurocents.
To be fair to myself, I did think of looking at the source, but searching the source for that snippet was too much work - I got lazy.
With that said, another poster mentioned I should just quote the parent to see their source code. Now that's something I wish I'd come up with right away:)
You can, but only if you have the key. Which was my whole point - the hard part (for DRM) is guarding the key. DRM is not about isLicenseValid() checks; there's always encryption involved. I guess I wasn't clear enough on my point.
Well holy shit, brilliant argument. Shit, I suppose a construction worker can go build porches on people's houses for free then hope they pay him some pittance! Maybe Adobe or Apple should follow this path to riches and make all their software free with "Donate Here" buttons, I'm sure they'll recoup the cost of development.
The construction worker expends resources for every porch built. Thus every porch needs to be payed for. The artist does not expend resources (bandwidth notwithstanding) for every copy distributed to every fan. Thus not every copy needs to be payed for. There will be enough people who will donate*, assuming the guy is any good, to make up for the costs. An artist who's not in it for the money, but rather for the love of doing it, will not care about getting every cent that could possibly be made under RIAA-style accounting**
Your repetition of Slashdot's tired propaganda and your overall indistinguishability from a puckered asshole make you a douchebag.
Too bad there is no douchebag moderation then.
Seriously, did you just use the "they shouldn't be in it for the money if they're any good anyway" argument? What a jackass.
Not quite, compare our wordings very carefully. Take a really good artist. He makes art because he loves to make art. If he does not make a load of money, he will continue to make art. As long as he has enough money to live off of his art, he will keep on doing it, and he'll get better. If you love what you're doing, chances are you're good at it.
Now take an artist who wants to make money more than to make good art. He makes the art that will sell. He is only as good as necessary to make money. No matter how much money he gts paid, he'll likely never get as good as the artist who loves the art first.
What if an artist loves the art first, but also wants to make a lot of money? Well, if he doesn't get rich, he'll still do art because he loves it. So he falls right into the first cathegory.
I swear I can't make it any more simple than that. And hey, don't be mad about getting modded down, it happens to the best of us.
* If you don't believe that, then you see art as a product and nothing else. Good art makes a strong impression on people who are not shallow. People who are not shallow will willingly do enough to keep the artist around, because of how the art influenced them. Not everyone is after "maximum financial efficiency", you know.
**RIAA-style accounting goes like this: "Every copy that somebody took illegally is a lost sale." That misses the important argument that somebody who took the copy in question may not have taken it if there were no way to take it for free.
Duh. Good engineers with no PHB supervision will tend to to great things. Even the ones at Microsoft.
What makes Microsoft Microsoft is the fact that engineers are very rarely left under little or no PHB control. When they are, news like that will follow.
From what I can see this is not open-source DRM, because such a beast cannot exist. It's probaly a license-free DRM, so that any manufacturer can implement it without having to ask permission from anyone else. Other than that, it's exactly the same as all other DRM.
How about the fact that an artist can release their album in FLAC format on their website, put a PayPal "donate" link there, and make ends meet? They probably won't get rich anytime soon, but if they are any good, they probably weren't in it for the money in the first place.
Your repetition of the RIAA's propaganda and your unrelated rant on completely unrelated topics makes you a troll.
The point is that the content is encrypted, and if you purchased the key you can get the data. Otherwise there's nothing you could do short of breaking the cipher, open source or not.
The whole thing about DRM is how to restrict the key to the people who have legal right to it. That's where having control over the platform begins to help, because you can hack it to not hide the key from you. Which is where Trusted (Trecherous) Computing comes into play: it holds the key in hardware, and tries to ensure that the software has not been tampered with before giving it away.
Because TC cannot know whether a modification is a hack to circumvent DRM or a genuine improvement, it stays on the "safe" side by diassallowing all modification. Hence hardware DRM is incompatible with free software, and software DRM is undefined in the context of free software. Which is why the term "open-source DRM" is an oxymoron.
Who cares about speed on a storage device? Show me some reliability data instead. Nobody that I know bases their purchasing decisions on speed. It's always relibability or cost/gigabyte or both.
I had the exact same problem on Gentoo. Turned out the combination of the just-released Flash 10 and the latest Flashblock was driving Firefox insane. I disabled Flashblock and it's fine now. Give it a try. Flash 10 is much faster^H^H^H^H^H^H less slow than Flash 9, so Flashblock isn't quite as necessary anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Barely Original Recordings Group?
A Twitter analogy? This guy is totally getting popular.
Your studens' problem is that they are not careful at all. That's a problem that no amount of software will solve.
If I were looking for OpenOffice, I'd try www.openoffice.org. Failing that, I'd google for "OpenOffice". Then, I'd click on the first link, which is bound to be the correct one for every non-trivial software project.
Seriously, how can one get that wrong?
3 shorter and clearer ways to say exacly what I tried to express.
Posts like this lead to another, very important point. The reason we don't have a (good) free software antivirus program* is because that's a hard problem that the free software community does not have a large need to solve. The reason why there is no large need to solve the virus problem is, you guessed it, Linux. Every free software developer, given the choice of dedicating their free time on on antivirus or [insert cool project here], will certainly choose [insert cool project here].
Good, but you sound like a knowledgeable user who would know what to scan, and would actually remember to scan. Now, what's the least obtrusive app for the average idiot that will do things automatically?
In an open-source project, to put such a "fix" would require to fool everyone responsible for getting that patch accepted upsream, including explaining to them why that patch is necessary in the first place, and to hide it so well that nobody in the future will ever notice it. Practically impossible.
Of course Apple is like Microsoft - they are both proprietary OS vendors. I question them almost as much, the almost coming from the fact that at least their foundation, Darwin, is somewhat open.
All three - ugly, inconsistent, and uncommented - make understanding the code more difficult. They do not make it impossible to go over.
Having spent a large amount of time looking into (the lowest layer of) OpenSSH, I can say it is very secure. Ugly, inconsistent, and uncommented together do not imply that the code is bad - that's your logical fallacy. (Besides, ugly and inconsistent are subjective.)
That does not change the fact that anyone (even me!) can look at OpenSSH, find problems in it, and fix it. Microsoft's code is secret, may or may not have glaring bugs in it, and nobody else can fix a problem even if it's known.
The link you posted is a testament to this. The problem was found and fixed extremely quickly. I can't trust Microsoft with the same response, and nobody else should trust them either.
Human error can happen to every code. But the open source ones we can fix.
Have you even looked at the OpenSSH source code?
It's a bit ugly, not very consistent, almost completely undocumented, but it's very secure by design. Please don't take my word for it. Read this and then look at the source code.
Now have you looked at the Windows SMB server source code? I rest my case.
The fact that your government is as corrupt as their government (what government isn't?) doesn't make the problem go away. It's ok to critisize others when you have that problem too, as long as you acknowledge it. My 2 eurocents.
To be fair to myself, I did think of looking at the source, but searching the source for that snippet was too much work - I got lazy.
:)
With that said, another poster mentioned I should just quote the parent to see their source code. Now that's something I wish I'd come up with right away
Thanks for the ecode trick and no offense taken.
You can, but only if you have the key. Which was my whole point - the hard part (for DRM) is guarding the key. DRM is not about isLicenseValid() checks; there's always encryption involved. I guess I wasn't clear enough on my point.
Well holy shit, brilliant argument. Shit, I suppose a construction worker can go build porches on people's houses for free then hope they pay him some pittance! Maybe Adobe or Apple should follow this path to riches and make all their software free with "Donate Here" buttons, I'm sure they'll recoup the cost of development.
The construction worker expends resources for every porch built. Thus every porch needs to be payed for. The artist does not expend resources (bandwidth notwithstanding) for every copy distributed to every fan. Thus not every copy needs to be payed for. There will be enough people who will donate*, assuming the guy is any good, to make up for the costs. An artist who's not in it for the money, but rather for the love of doing it, will not care about getting every cent that could possibly be made under RIAA-style accounting**
Your repetition of Slashdot's tired propaganda and your overall indistinguishability from a puckered asshole make you a douchebag.
Too bad there is no douchebag moderation then.
Seriously, did you just use the "they shouldn't be in it for the money if they're any good anyway" argument? What a jackass.
Not quite, compare our wordings very carefully. Take a really good artist. He makes art because he loves to make art. If he does not make a load of money, he will continue to make art. As long as he has enough money to live off of his art, he will keep on doing it, and he'll get better. If you love what you're doing, chances are you're good at it.
Now take an artist who wants to make money more than to make good art. He makes the art that will sell. He is only as good as necessary to make money. No matter how much money he gts paid, he'll likely never get as good as the artist who loves the art first.
What if an artist loves the art first, but also wants to make a lot of money? Well, if he doesn't get rich, he'll still do art because he loves it. So he falls right into the first cathegory.
I swear I can't make it any more simple than that. And hey, don't be mad about getting modded down, it happens to the best of us.
* If you don't believe that, then you see art as a product and nothing else. Good art makes a strong impression on people who are not shallow. People who are not shallow will willingly do enough to keep the artist around, because of how the art influenced them. Not everyone is after "maximum financial efficiency", you know.
**RIAA-style accounting goes like this: "Every copy that somebody took illegally is a lost sale." That misses the important argument that somebody who took the copy in question may not have taken it if there were no way to take it for free.
Duh. Good engineers with no PHB supervision will tend to to great things. Even the ones at Microsoft.
What makes Microsoft Microsoft is the fact that engineers are very rarely left under little or no PHB control. When they are, news like that will follow.
From what I can see this is not open-source DRM, because such a beast cannot exist. It's probaly a license-free DRM, so that any manufacturer can implement it without having to ask permission from anyone else. Other than that, it's exactly the same as all other DRM.
How about the fact that an artist can release their album in FLAC format on their website, put a PayPal "donate" link there, and make ends meet? They probably won't get rich anytime soon, but if they are any good, they probably weren't in it for the money in the first place.
Your repetition of the RIAA's propaganda and your unrelated rant on completely unrelated topics makes you a troll.
Almost but not quite. More like:
... ) {
Original source:
char* getData(
char* encryptedData = getDataFromSomewhere();
char* key = getKeyFromSomewhere();
if( key == NULL ) {
return NULL;
}
return decrypt( encryptedData, key );
}
The point is that the content is encrypted, and if you purchased the key you can get the data. Otherwise there's nothing you could do short of breaking the cipher, open source or not.
The whole thing about DRM is how to restrict the key to the people who have legal right to it. That's where having control over the platform begins to help, because you can hack it to not hide the key from you. Which is where Trusted (Trecherous) Computing comes into play: it holds the key in hardware, and tries to ensure that the software has not been tampered with before giving it away.
Because TC cannot know whether a modification is a hack to circumvent DRM or a genuine improvement, it stays on the "safe" side by diassallowing all modification. Hence hardware DRM is incompatible with free software, and software DRM is undefined in the context of free software. Which is why the term "open-source DRM" is an oxymoron.
P.S. How did you indent your code on Slashdot?
Never.
Next!
Your question contains the answer. What would happen is a blue screen of, you know, death.
Seriously though, even if the software were written to be somehow provably correct, hardware can always fail. So can the surgeon.
Who cares about speed on a storage device? Show me some reliability data instead. Nobody that I know bases their purchasing decisions on speed. It's always relibability or cost/gigabyte or both.
Wait, weren't there wall sockets in the fifties? And besides, calling an airplane a flying car is a bit of a stretch.
Just RTFM
What does real-time frequency modulation have anything to do with power?
"Do no evil!" for the right definition of evil.
I still don't understand why you / tjstork think MS neglect their C/C++ compilers though.
I don't. I was only responding to
when have major OSS projects "changed compilers" to respond
If by that you mean "changed the compiler itself, not change to a different compiler", yes, they do it all the time.
I had the exact same problem on Gentoo. Turned out the combination of the just-released Flash 10 and the latest Flashblock was driving Firefox insane. I disabled Flashblock and it's fine now. Give it a try. Flash 10 is much faster^H^H^H^H^H^H less slow than Flash 9, so Flashblock isn't quite as necessary anymore.