If you look up my name, you could find out about me, but I'll assume you'll read the post first.
The problem, as I saw when I was still active, was not that mop-wielders were editing, but that mop-wielders often forgot to act in bad faith, and were also overwhelmingly deletionist in almost every line of thinking and discussion. While there are many good admins, there are many more bad admins, and the systemic nature of the problem is such that many bad admins think they are seriously doing good work by simply deleting away the work of people who were not contributing in bad faith.
There was an entire essay I wrote at one point, but I don't remember where it is. At any rate, my point is: Administrators on Wikipedia should not actually be system administrators or moderators, they should be janitors. There is already an arbitration system set up to moderate community disputes, and there are administrators who control the backend. The mop is not a symbol of power, it's a symbol of dedication.
I'm on an Asus laptop. Excellent, although not as "rugged" as the Thinkpads. Also, since it's made by a Taiwanese MNC, you're not getting a Vista refund, period. (Of course, it's not much easier to get Windows refunds from MNCs here in the USA, either...)
Sorry, but this sounds like software. Hardware keyloggers cannot call home -- they have to be manually retrieved. It sounds like Mumbai's deployed keylogger calls home in realtime, which is definitely a software solution and not a piece of modified hardware. Knoppix or Slax would be just fine. More importantly, at many Internet cafes, the computers are typically locked down to the point where it's not possible to reboot into a different operating system.
A $15 CD is 3 hours of minimum wage work. Most of the people who do that work are high school and college students, an audience that spends nearly $200B of disposable cash according to marketing estimates thrown out in some of the magazines I've seen. Why is it too much to ask that if you like the CD, you pay the money? It's not like we're hurting for options on how to get it cheaper than a typical overpriced local store. See, the way markets work is that the market price is set by the equilibrium, the balancing point between supply and demand. At equilibrium, the price and supply being advertised by the providers is equal to the cost and demand desired by the buyers, so everybody goes home happy. The problems start when a provider, or worse, a consortium of all of the market's providers (a cartel) group together and decide to raise the equilibrium price. This is called price fixing. Price fixing is bad for buyers because it does not address demand. Usually, in response to raised prices, demand drops, and in a normal market this would cause a price drop from oversupply as the providers adjust their prices to fit reduced demand. (In other words, if prices go up, people stop buying, and prices fall again.) However, in a price-fixed market, since the price never falls, demand slakes off, and one of two things happen.
If people decide to just stop buying the good, than the market completely collapses. No demand and no buyers means that all of the providers go out of business.
However, if people decide that they need the good, then a second market will appear, providing lower prices and filling demand. The first market's providers get choked out from the undercuts, and die unless they stop fixing prices.
So, what we have in this case is a second market. It is a black market, a market that is not legally sanctioned. The cost of goods on this market is effectively zero, making it a free good. The RIAA can't possibly undercut or fairly compete with a free good like pirated music, so instead they resort to these lawsuits to try and scare people away from the black market. Does it work? Not really.
So, what should the RIAA do? They should stop fixing prices and let the market sort itself out. There are two types of participants in the black market: People who want the good, but don't want to pay for it; and people who would pay for the good if it were a bit less expensive. The former will never leave the black market, but the RIAA could court the latter if they would only stop fixing their goddamn prices.
Wine is already one of the highest-priority, work-intensive projects in the GNU/Linux world. They release every two weeks, and each release is a significant improvement over the last. While I can't argue that Wine is perfect (it's not;) I think that more work needs to be done in the kernel. There's dozens of regressions on amd64 and ppc that aren't caught because they work on x86. Also, we need an updated DRM interface for ATI Radeons and nVidia Geforces. (DRM in this case is Direct Rendering Manager, the kernel code that makes accelerated everything possible.)
No kidding. Down here in Eugene, we think the world would be better if people got together every Saturday and traded glass wares and smoked a bit, y'know? Just gotta chill, man.
I went back and looked at some statistics for my Subversion logs and bug tracker. I find that roughly 11% of bugs were "discovered;" that is, filed first, by me. That means a whopping 89% of programming errors went unnoticed by me, and were found by the community. Now, I may be a lone maintainer of code, but even in a team, bugs will still get past. The assumption that the public, or at a minimum, the black-hat community knows more about your bugs than you do is not unreasonable. It is just as valid in the context of SQL injections in PHP scripts as it does in the context of buffer overflows in hardware DVD players.
For example, read up on the ongoing attacks on AACS. The black hats (and yes, they are black hats) working on breaking AACS have exploited all kinds of software and hardware bugs and shortcomings in order to gather more information and cryptographic secrets. They have the upper hand because they are not fully disclosing their work. If they were to fully disclose the bugs in various tabletop HD-DVD players and software tools that they use to garner keys, you can bet that the problems would be fixed. As is, though, they are still ahead of the AACSLA.
So would you say that on Linux, SDL serves the same purpose as X11?
That's exactly the same argument you are making for Windows.
He is talking about exposed functionality. You can write a program using SDL and not have to worry about where it is being deployed, as long as the target platform has an SDL implementation. The beauty of it is that SDL uses native, fast interfaces for each platform it is written for, ensuring a high-quality, speedy implementation on all platforms. SDL is not the only library that does this; wxWidgets is another useful library that works the same on all platforms.
ATI will patch it?!? ATI has, in my opinion (and I am not alone,) the worst track record among companies who write their own drivers. The hardware is not bad by any means; grab an old Rage or Radeon before the X100 series, and you can play many modern games using the open-source drivers. Works excellently. Unfortunately, they write some of the shittiest code in existence, and their driver has needed constant fixes for years now. On Linux, ATI drivers are behind both nVidia and Intel, both of whom have made drivers available that expose all functionality of their cards.
...and I'll say it until I stop getting modded Insightful/Informative/Funny for it. Piracy is an economic indicator that you are not letting the market balance itself. Specifically, piracy is caused by artificially fixing prices too high. People refuse to buy the good since it is too expensive, but still demand the good, so they steal/copy it in order to obtain it. The only way to discourage piracy is to lower your price to the point that people would rather buy "the real deal" than a cheap knockoff. Perhaps if CDs were not pegged at $20 each, and were sold at the more reasonable $5 each, the public would find it more preferable to go to the music store instead of the torrent search engine.
Please do not abbreviate Oklahoma State University; it is commonly confused with Oregon State University, noteworthy on Slashdot because it hosts the biggest open-source data repository in the Americas, the OSUOSL, and because Linus lives nearby.
At risk of being too pedantic, mplayer is a poor example since many features like full WMP9 video decoding and SSA subtitles are not present in Debian and Fedora builds. Also, nice username.
I know I'm being pedantic, but Gentoo's patch-on-the-fly system and friendliness towards ebuilds of questionable legality does technically allow you to install an uncrippled VLC or FFMpeg or mplayer or LAME at any time. Just set "dvd ffmpeg mp3 lame" in your USE flags and your system will build libdvdcss into VLC and liblame into FFMpeg.
Of course, Gentoo is a very complex, advanced system, but for those who know what they're doing, it's a pleasant alternative to sitting on a Debian or Fedora box and searching third-party repos for uncrippled packages.
Git, at least, was designed with this in mind; every commit into a Git branch depends cryptographically on all prior commits, using a digital signature. Tampering with any one previous commit requires resigning that commit and all that follow; you could verify a branch's integrity with a copy of the list of commit hashes.
it was actually LueLinks that leaked them out. Sheesh, why must LLers always be anonymous outside of LL? Anyway, yes. The leak was originally from a user on www.luelinks.net, who obtained an advance copy from a friend working at a bookstore. He then proceeded to take photos of every single page and leaked them to LL. The LL community then introduced them to 4chan on/b/, and 4chan went ahead and attempted to frame Gaia Online and eBaum's World for the leak and subsequent spoilers.
Unfortunately, I'm still not buying one. I have an old iPod from a few years back, and it still runs wonderfully. I see no reason to go out and arbitrarily spend money on a toy (a Microsoft toy, no less) when I don't need it and my old hardware still works fine.
On the one hand, I see stupidity every single day, in all kinds of people. My life experience is that the only respect your elders automatically earn is respect for outliving you. If they want me to respect their decisions, they need to show me their reasoning and not act stupidly and thoughtlessly.
On the other hand, I got picked on a lot in school. Y'know, bowl cut, goofy glasses, dimples, kid in the back of the class who everybody picked on because they could get some kind of sadistic joy from it. I didn't crumple; I got stronger. (Or I numbed up, but that's between me and my shrink.) "Thinking of the children," in this case, only turns kids into soft jelly, easily molded into whatever their parents or the state thinks they should be. I may not have respected many of my teachers, but I sure as hell didn't harass them and report them for things that "made me feel uncomfortable."
No kidding. While I was in high school, I worked in the computer labs as an assistant administrator. I did in fact break the grading system, upon request of a teacher who lost her password (took maybe four hours of digging through hex dumps), and we did have incidents like computers being gutted when teachers didn't pay attention to kids in labs.
Giving kids freedom is one thing. Providing them with free usage of computers is another. Our budget was eternally stressed, and we locked down the machines so that we wouldn't have to be stretched as thin as the department's wallet...
Heh, that's sorta funny. See, at my day job, building embedded point-of-sale systems, we only use C, since so much of our legacy code (not to mention the GNU, Linux, and Debian tools we use for distribution and bootstrapping) is written in C. C++ is possible, but never seriously considered due to the fact that nobody really needs it.
My hobby is even more C-centric. I help with iPodLinux. We are on ARM7s, and with only 32MB of slow RAM on a 16-bit bus, trying to load the C++ standard library in conjunction with the kernel, libc, and GUI is just ridiculous. So, although we provide a libstdc++ for userspace authors, the GUI and modules are all written in C. There's simply nothing faster.
While C++ is better for massively object-oriented applications, a lot of embedded systems are simple, single-purpose tools, and procedural C is simply a better, lighter, and more optimized choice.
The one name missing from the great Japanese video game composer list is Nobuo Uematsu, who wrote pretty much everything ever created by Square. While I couldn't reasonably expect him to contribute anything to the game, since there are no Square characters in the game (and he retired a couple years ago), his name is still worth mentioning.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look up my name, you could find out about me, but I'll assume you'll read the post first.
The problem, as I saw when I was still active, was not that mop-wielders were editing, but that mop-wielders often forgot to act in bad faith, and were also overwhelmingly deletionist in almost every line of thinking and discussion. While there are many good admins, there are many more bad admins, and the systemic nature of the problem is such that many bad admins think they are seriously doing good work by simply deleting away the work of people who were not contributing in bad faith.
There was an entire essay I wrote at one point, but I don't remember where it is. At any rate, my point is: Administrators on Wikipedia should not actually be system administrators or moderators, they should be janitors. There is already an arbitration system set up to moderate community disputes, and there are administrators who control the backend. The mop is not a symbol of power, it's a symbol of dedication.
Both of 'em have it wrong; "nigger" shouldn't be capitalized.
I'm on an Asus laptop. Excellent, although not as "rugged" as the Thinkpads. Also, since it's made by a Taiwanese MNC, you're not getting a Vista refund, period. (Of course, it's not much easier to get Windows refunds from MNCs here in the USA, either...)
Come down and visit Oregon sometime. We call it "Washington State."
So this means that Microsoft is the fundamental flaw in the universe? ...Okay, I'm convinced.
Sorry, but this sounds like software. Hardware keyloggers cannot call home -- they have to be manually retrieved. It sounds like Mumbai's deployed keylogger calls home in realtime, which is definitely a software solution and not a piece of modified hardware. Knoppix or Slax would be just fine. More importantly, at many Internet cafes, the computers are typically locked down to the point where it's not possible to reboot into a different operating system.
- If people decide to just stop buying the good, than the market completely collapses. No demand and no buyers means that all of the providers go out of business.
- However, if people decide that they need the good, then a second market will appear, providing lower prices and filling demand. The first market's providers get choked out from the undercuts, and die unless they stop fixing prices.
So, what we have in this case is a second market. It is a black market, a market that is not legally sanctioned. The cost of goods on this market is effectively zero, making it a free good. The RIAA can't possibly undercut or fairly compete with a free good like pirated music, so instead they resort to these lawsuits to try and scare people away from the black market. Does it work? Not really.So, what should the RIAA do? They should stop fixing prices and let the market sort itself out. There are two types of participants in the black market: People who want the good, but don't want to pay for it; and people who would pay for the good if it were a bit less expensive. The former will never leave the black market, but the RIAA could court the latter if they would only stop fixing their goddamn prices.
That's the economics of it, anyway.
Wine is already one of the highest-priority, work-intensive projects in the GNU/Linux world. They release every two weeks, and each release is a significant improvement over the last. While I can't argue that Wine is perfect (it's not;) I think that more work needs to be done in the kernel. There's dozens of regressions on amd64 and ppc that aren't caught because they work on x86. Also, we need an updated DRM interface for ATI Radeons and nVidia Geforces. (DRM in this case is Direct Rendering Manager, the kernel code that makes accelerated everything possible.)
No kidding. Down here in Eugene, we think the world would be better if people got together every Saturday and traded glass wares and smoked a bit, y'know? Just gotta chill, man.
I went back and looked at some statistics for my Subversion logs and bug tracker. I find that roughly 11% of bugs were "discovered;" that is, filed first, by me. That means a whopping 89% of programming errors went unnoticed by me, and were found by the community. Now, I may be a lone maintainer of code, but even in a team, bugs will still get past. The assumption that the public, or at a minimum, the black-hat community knows more about your bugs than you do is not unreasonable. It is just as valid in the context of SQL injections in PHP scripts as it does in the context of buffer overflows in hardware DVD players.
For example, read up on the ongoing attacks on AACS. The black hats (and yes, they are black hats) working on breaking AACS have exploited all kinds of software and hardware bugs and shortcomings in order to gather more information and cryptographic secrets. They have the upper hand because they are not fully disclosing their work. If they were to fully disclose the bugs in various tabletop HD-DVD players and software tools that they use to garner keys, you can bet that the problems would be fixed. As is, though, they are still ahead of the AACSLA.
That's exactly the same argument you are making for Windows.
He is talking about exposed functionality. You can write a program using SDL and not have to worry about where it is being deployed, as long as the target platform has an SDL implementation. The beauty of it is that SDL uses native, fast interfaces for each platform it is written for, ensuring a high-quality, speedy implementation on all platforms. SDL is not the only library that does this; wxWidgets is another useful library that works the same on all platforms.ATI will patch it?!? ATI has, in my opinion (and I am not alone,) the worst track record among companies who write their own drivers. The hardware is not bad by any means; grab an old Rage or Radeon before the X100 series, and you can play many modern games using the open-source drivers. Works excellently. Unfortunately, they write some of the shittiest code in existence, and their driver has needed constant fixes for years now. On Linux, ATI drivers are behind both nVidia and Intel, both of whom have made drivers available that expose all functionality of their cards.
...and I'll say it until I stop getting modded Insightful/Informative/Funny for it. Piracy is an economic indicator that you are not letting the market balance itself. Specifically, piracy is caused by artificially fixing prices too high. People refuse to buy the good since it is too expensive, but still demand the good, so they steal/copy it in order to obtain it. The only way to discourage piracy is to lower your price to the point that people would rather buy "the real deal" than a cheap knockoff. Perhaps if CDs were not pegged at $20 each, and were sold at the more reasonable $5 each, the public would find it more preferable to go to the music store instead of the torrent search engine.
Please do not abbreviate Oklahoma State University; it is commonly confused with Oregon State University, noteworthy on Slashdot because it hosts the biggest open-source data repository in the Americas, the OSUOSL, and because Linus lives nearby.
At risk of being too pedantic, mplayer is a poor example since many features like full WMP9 video decoding and SSA subtitles are not present in Debian and Fedora builds. Also, nice username.
I know I'm being pedantic, but Gentoo's patch-on-the-fly system and friendliness towards ebuilds of questionable legality does technically allow you to install an uncrippled VLC or FFMpeg or mplayer or LAME at any time. Just set "dvd ffmpeg mp3 lame" in your USE flags and your system will build libdvdcss into VLC and liblame into FFMpeg.
Of course, Gentoo is a very complex, advanced system, but for those who know what they're doing, it's a pleasant alternative to sitting on a Debian or Fedora box and searching third-party repos for uncrippled packages.
Git, at least, was designed with this in mind; every commit into a Git branch depends cryptographically on all prior commits, using a digital signature. Tampering with any one previous commit requires resigning that commit and all that follow; you could verify a branch's integrity with a copy of the list of commit hashes.
Unfortunately, I'm still not buying one. I have an old iPod from a few years back, and it still runs wonderfully. I see no reason to go out and arbitrarily spend money on a toy (a Microsoft toy, no less) when I don't need it and my old hardware still works fine.
On the one hand, I see stupidity every single day, in all kinds of people. My life experience is that the only respect your elders automatically earn is respect for outliving you. If they want me to respect their decisions, they need to show me their reasoning and not act stupidly and thoughtlessly. On the other hand, I got picked on a lot in school. Y'know, bowl cut, goofy glasses, dimples, kid in the back of the class who everybody picked on because they could get some kind of sadistic joy from it. I didn't crumple; I got stronger. (Or I numbed up, but that's between me and my shrink.) "Thinking of the children," in this case, only turns kids into soft jelly, easily molded into whatever their parents or the state thinks they should be. I may not have respected many of my teachers, but I sure as hell didn't harass them and report them for things that "made me feel uncomfortable."
Well, I am posting this from a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, with 1 GB of RAM and 120 GB of hard drive space...
No kidding. While I was in high school, I worked in the computer labs as an assistant administrator. I did in fact break the grading system, upon request of a teacher who lost her password (took maybe four hours of digging through hex dumps), and we did have incidents like computers being gutted when teachers didn't pay attention to kids in labs. Giving kids freedom is one thing. Providing them with free usage of computers is another. Our budget was eternally stressed, and we locked down the machines so that we wouldn't have to be stretched as thin as the department's wallet...
'for some strange reason, the installed Gentoo doesn't allow normal users to run any administrative applications.'
Gentoo is set up the same way as older Unices for privilege escalation. You cannot su if you are not a member of the wheel group.
Heh, that's sorta funny. See, at my day job, building embedded point-of-sale systems, we only use C, since so much of our legacy code (not to mention the GNU, Linux, and Debian tools we use for distribution and bootstrapping) is written in C. C++ is possible, but never seriously considered due to the fact that nobody really needs it.
My hobby is even more C-centric. I help with iPodLinux. We are on ARM7s, and with only 32MB of slow RAM on a 16-bit bus, trying to load the C++ standard library in conjunction with the kernel, libc, and GUI is just ridiculous. So, although we provide a libstdc++ for userspace authors, the GUI and modules are all written in C. There's simply nothing faster.
While C++ is better for massively object-oriented applications, a lot of embedded systems are simple, single-purpose tools, and procedural C is simply a better, lighter, and more optimized choice.
The one name missing from the great Japanese video game composer list is Nobuo Uematsu, who wrote pretty much everything ever created by Square. While I couldn't reasonably expect him to contribute anything to the game, since there are no Square characters in the game (and he retired a couple years ago), his name is still worth mentioning.