At first it may seem like opening up the source has made the software insecure, since anyone could have found this hole ages ago and exploited it. However, by realistic reasoning this will actually make the software MORE secure since the hole will be plugged. Who knows who the author of the backdoor has shared his information to? Just another example of the benefits of using Open Source software, gratis or licensed. Nothing more to see here, move on..
Interesting. For me it doesn't really matter. It's the same universe, regardless of what we discover about it. The universe is not changing because of our discoveries, our thought patterns are. Also, I'm trying to get past the notion of expecting the universe to behave on my whims. (I only get disappointed.) Therefore I, and many others, see absolutely nothing to be frightened about. Even if the rest of the universe is completely dead.
Money, a new gadget, a new species, nothing of this can make you truly happy. It's only a diversion, a chase away from yourself. Only you can satisfy yourself.
On a more technical note: We discover planets from the wobbling of the suns. Wouldn't this imply that the results we find depend on the method we use? How much does our own sun wobble, and can we detect how many planets our sun has because of it? If we can't even classify our own sun correctly using the same technique, there's no reason to draw any final conclusion in the first place.
It all depends on what hardware-drivers, software and service packs you have. Even if you have good experiences, doesn't mean that other people share them. Also, if you use your computer for simple things, it'll almost never crash on you. Try using it for low-level development, that's a good benchmark on how stable an OS is. Hint: An OS SHOULDN'T crash whatsoever.
Btw, the former poster didn't really say that Win2K was unstable (he tried though). He said the applications crashed on him..
Because there might be a bug in the program or the specification of the program might be incompatible with the standard? The XML file could also have been edited by a person. However, the main use of DTDs is to limit the ways you can express an XML-format and in that way you can make assumptions on what structure is expressed and not. For example, it is possible to make a DTD to make XML into HTML and check for correctness. Having a standard way of doing this is always beneficial, because it's something everyone agrees on. If not, you need to extend or create new and better standards. I know too little about XML and DTD to know how universal they are though.
If you're interested in a language that simply is the best I've found out there, check out Ruby.
Here's some nifty features cut'n pasted from the website:
Ruby has simple syntax, partially inspired by Eiffel and Ada.
Ruby has exception handling features, like Java or Python, to make it easy to handle errors.
Ruby's operators are syntax sugar for the methods. You can redefine them easily.
Ruby is a complete, full, pure object oriented language: OOL. This means all data in Ruby is an object, not in the sense of Python or Perl, but in the sense of Smalltalk: no exceptions. Example: In Ruby, the number 1 is an instance of class Fixnum.
Ruby's OO is carefully designed to be both complete and open for improvements. Example: Ruby has the ability to add methods to a class, or even to an instance during runtime. So, if needed, an instance of one class *can* behave differently from other instances of the same class.
Ruby features single inheritance only, *on purpose*. But Ruby knows the concept of modules (called Categories in Objective-C). Modules are collections of methods. Every class can import a module and so gets all its methods for free. Some of us think that this is a much clearer way than multiple inheritance, which is complex, and not used very often compared with single inheritance (don't count C++ here, as it has often no other choice due to strong type checking!).
Ruby features true closures. Not just unnamed function, but with present variable bindings.
Ruby features blocks in its syntax (code surrounded by '{'... '}' or 'do'... 'end'). These blocks can be passed to methods, or converted into closures.
Ruby features a true mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It works with all Ruby objects. You don't have to care about maintaining reference counts in extension libraries. This is better for your health.;-)
Writing C extensions in Ruby is easier than in Perl or Python, due partly to the garbage collector, and partly to the fine extension API. SWIG interface is also available.
Integers in Ruby can (and should) be used without counting their internal representation. There *are* small integers (instances of class Fixnum) and large integers (Bignum), but you need not worry over which one is used currently. If a value is small enough, an integer is a Fixnum, otherwise it is a Bignum. Conversion occurs automatically.
Ruby needs no variable declarations. It uses simple naming conventions to denote the scope of variables. Examples: simple 'var' = local variable, '@var' = instance variable, '$var' = global variable. So it is also not necessary to use a tiresome 'self.' prepended to every instance member.
Ruby can load extension libraries dynamically if an OS allows.
Ruby features OS independent threading. Thus, for all platforms on which Ruby runs, you also have multithreading, regardless of if the OS supports it or not, even on MS-DOS!;-)
Ruby is highly portable: it is developed mostly on Linux, but works on many types of UNIX, DOS, Windows 95/98/NT, Mac, BeOS, OS/2, etc.
All in all, a language that IMHO should replace Python and Perl.
If I have understood correctly, the customer is allowed to turn the CPRM-feature on and off. However, is this something that can be done software-wise like the Pentium III ID? Exploitable by a trojan program perhaps?
To my understanding, CPRM is going to be implemented mainly on removable media, namely flash memory. Are there plans in the workings for other types of removable media and why doesn't anybody protest against this? (I do!;-)
Hi. I get pretty "spirited" from issues like these, even though I shouldn't always be like that. It's just so against my own personal agenda, sometimes it's hard to find good reasons to explain too. I somehow know it's no good before I even know why.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue this, because ultimately you might stumble onto something unique, good or bad.:-)
Anyways, I personally believe online transactions is a better way to handle online trading. For anonymity you could have trusted proxies at your credit card company.
Trying to force down a huge monolith system down on people's throats is not going to solve piracy or make it easier for.com's to succeed in this harsh world. I believe such a system would become an "Internet-tax": Another inefficient, unfair and draconian system to support the old ways of the world. Beneficient only to those who are interested in milking the cow and trickstering the commons.
However, scrambling the tags should be considered hacking. You could scramble it into a tag for your own hoax company, send out thousands of spam mails with megabytes of attachments and get paid money. Believe me, even for just a little money there are people out there ready to do it. Consider mail-virii, or just fooling people into doing the wrong decisions and downloading alot of junk with your tag. How about "Update"-features on all your applications?
Your comment about "someone will complain" just isn't sufficient, because everyone will be following the new rules. And the new rules means that you got to publish by the Gigabytes, yes, you heard me, want Windows? Download Gigs of useless garbage of your favourite Blue Screen OS, including ads. IMHO, this system is just crap. It even rewards sloppiness. "Oups, we forgot to actually compress the zip-files!" Any centralized system are, because they fail to innovate (to use an ugly MS word) and IMPROVE.
A decrypted tag would be rendered useless, should the system rejects such packets? Where did issues like privacy and freedom go?
Also, I fail to see the fairness in this system at all. Start-ups wouldn't receive anything worthwhile from this centralized system, and where's the freedom in naming your own prices? That's what free competition is all about, and a centralized distribution channel is far from free competition.
If I were the person who came up with the brilliant idea to value information by amount of it, I'd hide in a very dark corner and hope noone recognizes me.
Also the idea to stop pirating with schemes like these is NOTHING new. The gaming industry had the whole 80's and to the mid of the 90's, 15 years!, until they realized it just isn't feasible. You'd basically had to put in content-control into everything, PCs, LAN, _AND_ a tamper-proof explosive charge that would punish hackers and crackers alike.
I'm sorry if I ranted your ears off, time to go..:-)
I fail to see the legal rights the ISPs would have to charge for copyrighted (but otherwise free) content not belonging to them. Nor do I see any moral right in forcing every "consumer" and web-page authors into such a scheme. Where's the free market then? If some major body decides this is the way for all ISPs to go, then we got an anti-trust case on our hands since free competition has once again been centralized into one big churning money-factory. It's easy to come up with final "solutions" by conquering the world, but they never work out the way intended and never will.
I do however, see the logical flawness in their reasoning: Curing incentive to hack/crack through once again putting limitation and control over the distribution media/channels. This is exactly what the Internet is NOT supposed to be, and why it is valuable in the first place! It is also flawed on technical merits: If you pay to play regardless, only big companies would really get paid for their content. So, the bigger companies would of course think this is a great idea. What an effective way to kill competition!
I fail to see you giving any valid reasons for your arguments though. Hence, quite sadly, your opinion also goes to waste.
IMHO, XML is a step forward. With the DTD you can prove for correctness in the format, which is a plus. It supports recursive blocks, which is a plus. Unicode, which may also be a plus (not sure how it's implemented). Basically, it supports a whole lot of what you would've expected from a general-purpose text-format. No, I don't think it's human readable either (depends), but it's alot easier and more open than binary or comma-separated list.
As with all standards, XML needs to be implemented following its standards. Where XML fails, is that there are no meta-info dictating what the data is that you put in. So XML is a skeleton we must fill with flesh, and not be fooled it'll solve all our data problems automagically.
By your logic, archeologists and museums are the biggest thieves of this world.
What you fail to recognize is that the words "crime", "thief" and "property" are all arbitrary. We don't all put the same meaning into them, nor should we. So your intolerance to other interpretations than your own makes you blind as a bat in a hat!
- Steeltoe
An argumentative mind can't hold any wisdom, so wise men leave them alone.
You obviously haven't any experience with this. They aren't gonna release anything that requires these copyprotection mechanisms now. What they're gonna do is sell these devices, until everyone's got them. Just like 8-bit Soundblaster gets outdated, our current HDDs becomes outdated. Then watch them turn on option by option as a required default in their software.
Of course it won't fly if customers don't want it. However, it will if they are ignorant consumers accepting this to go into their hardware now even though it doesn't change how they can operate their hardware. This is just Macrovision all over again. However, why should we pay for their schemes times over and over again?
"Err...the last one. I'm can't be a karma-whore anymore because I'm over 50..."
You're my hero! 50, wow. Guess it shows how much you've spouted in the last couple of years. Me, my best postings usually gets unnoticed. Now THAT's quality, you should really consider some goatse.cx-links, to keep you score down. =)
"...and trolling is gay."
But if you were gay I guess you would've had reasons to write what you wrote, right, RIGHT?!?!:-))
"The problem here, is that people take everything too seriously. Relax, guy -- look over there."
I'm mellow dude, going with the flow. Oh wow, I just saw an UFO over there! Thanks!
I'm unsure wether you're karma-whoring, trolling or just plain ignorant, but there's more to crop-circles than meets the eye. Please study these two links:
The complexity and amount of cropcircles are increasing each year. They are really amazing, I believe, the greatest mysteries of our time. Of course, you are free to think otherwise. I just wish people could take an extra look before opening up their mouth.
In my opinion LZW should not be defendable when they let everybody adopt it for free as standard without anybody knowing it was patented. Such tricks are just too cheap that we should be bothered with them. Of course, it was a teaching lesson too. There are now plenty of alternatives.
Here's a link to Unisys' information about the license. Notice how LZW compromises alot of standards: GIF, TIFF-LZW, PDF, Postscript-2 and V.42bis. To use them you have to pay Unisys outrageous license fees. Those using Windows, are already indirectly paying license fees for Microsoft products. This does not give you any rights though, and you must make sure you are licensed yourself.
This is why I, and many others donate to the Electric Frontier Foundation. The money raised are used in cases like these, not restricted to the US. I do not know about this particular case, but I'm willing to bet my socks on the first test for GPL will be sponsored by the EFF. However, the best solution for all parties is usually to settle out of court. Unless you want to scare people away from you.
"Hell, one could argue that any publicly traded company is, in fact, legally bound to break the law, if it will result in increased profits after all is said and done."
So does this mean I can make my own public company, murder you during work hours and steal all your possessions and get away with it? It's not like I'm gonna get in trouble if I don't get caught right? Therefore my shareholders demand this of me, or else they will sue my sorry ***. Where do you live btw?
Your comment makes me wonder if you're willing to put commerce and legality above morality and ethics (which differs from person to person of course). I can assure you it is a huge mistake if you do.
Or maybe you believe law has no foundation in morality and ethics, and therefore one should break them whenever profitable? I'm sorry to say that this is also wrong, even if you don't share the morality and ethics included in the law. However, there's only one way to find out, and that's to live what you preach.
But then you have just put a fairly static price tag on your GPLed code, GPLed software and your GPL license. You have effectively sold out, and for what? The company might still get to settle, and I doubt any judge would support outrageous money claims. So now information wants to be free, but not if companies can make money otherwise?
You do have an impact, we all do. Of course you can throw away your principles, but don't come back in a year or two and complain and bitch about it.
If the X-Box is sold at a loss, it'd only be "fair" to only buy the console right? Except for the EULA of course, barring you from using any other but Microsoft software. I think this time they'll REALLY MEAN it...
- Steeltoe
The world is getting more evil every day. Do you have a meaningful life? What do you do about it?
Slashdot Mirror
At first it may seem like opening up the source has made the software insecure, since anyone could have found this hole ages ago and exploited it. However, by realistic reasoning this will actually make the software MORE secure since the hole will be plugged. Who knows who the author of the backdoor has shared his information to? Just another example of the benefits of using Open Source software, gratis or licensed. Nothing more to see here, move on..
- Steeltoe
Interesting. For me it doesn't really matter. It's the same universe, regardless of what we discover about it. The universe is not changing because of our discoveries, our thought patterns are. Also, I'm trying to get past the notion of expecting the universe to behave on my whims. (I only get disappointed.) Therefore I, and many others, see absolutely nothing to be frightened about. Even if the rest of the universe is completely dead.
Money, a new gadget, a new species, nothing of this can make you truly happy. It's only a diversion, a chase away from yourself. Only you can satisfy yourself.
On a more technical note: We discover planets from the wobbling of the suns. Wouldn't this imply that the results we find depend on the method we use? How much does our own sun wobble, and can we detect how many planets our sun has because of it? If we can't even classify our own sun correctly using the same technique, there's no reason to draw any final conclusion in the first place.
- Steeltoe
It all depends on what hardware-drivers, software and service packs you have. Even if you have good experiences, doesn't mean that other people share them. Also, if you use your computer for simple things, it'll almost never crash on you. Try using it for low-level development, that's a good benchmark on how stable an OS is. Hint: An OS SHOULDN'T crash whatsoever.
Btw, the former poster didn't really say that Win2K was unstable (he tried though). He said the applications crashed on him..
- Steeltoe
Because there might be a bug in the program or the specification of the program might be incompatible with the standard? The XML file could also have been edited by a person. However, the main use of DTDs is to limit the ways you can express an XML-format and in that way you can make assumptions on what structure is expressed and not. For example, it is possible to make a DTD to make XML into HTML and check for correctness. Having a standard way of doing this is always beneficial, because it's something everyone agrees on. If not, you need to extend or create new and better standards. I know too little about XML and DTD to know how universal they are though.
- Steeltoe
- Steeltoe
If I have understood correctly, the customer is allowed to turn the CPRM-feature on and off. However, is this something that can be done software-wise like the Pentium III ID? Exploitable by a trojan program perhaps?
- Steeltoe
To my understanding, CPRM is going to be implemented mainly on removable media, namely flash memory. Are there plans in the workings for other types of removable media and why doesn't anybody protest against this? (I do! ;-)
- Steeltoe
Hi. I get pretty "spirited" from issues like these, even though I shouldn't always be like that. It's just so against my own personal agenda, sometimes it's hard to find good reasons to explain too. I somehow know it's no good before I even know why.
:-)
.com's to succeed in this harsh world. I believe such a system would become an "Internet-tax": Another inefficient, unfair and draconian system to support the old ways of the world. Beneficient only to those who are interested in milking the cow and trickstering the commons.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue this, because ultimately you might stumble onto something unique, good or bad.
Anyways, I personally believe online transactions is a better way to handle online trading. For anonymity you could have trusted proxies at your credit card company.
Trying to force down a huge monolith system down on people's throats is not going to solve piracy or make it easier for
- Steeltoe
However, scrambling the tags should be considered hacking. You could scramble it into a tag for your own hoax company, send out thousands of spam mails with megabytes of attachments and get paid money. Believe me, even for just a little money there are people out there ready to do it. Consider mail-virii, or just fooling people into doing the wrong decisions and downloading alot of junk with your tag. How about "Update"-features on all your applications?
:-)
Your comment about "someone will complain" just isn't sufficient, because everyone will be following the new rules. And the new rules means that you got to publish by the Gigabytes, yes, you heard me, want Windows? Download Gigs of useless garbage of your favourite Blue Screen OS, including ads. IMHO, this system is just crap. It even rewards sloppiness. "Oups, we forgot to actually compress the zip-files!" Any centralized system are, because they fail to innovate (to use an ugly MS word) and IMPROVE.
A decrypted tag would be rendered useless, should the system rejects such packets? Where did issues like privacy and freedom go?
Also, I fail to see the fairness in this system at all. Start-ups wouldn't receive anything worthwhile from this centralized system, and where's the freedom in naming your own prices? That's what free competition is all about, and a centralized distribution channel is far from free competition.
If I were the person who came up with the brilliant idea to value information by amount of it, I'd hide in a very dark corner and hope noone recognizes me.
Also the idea to stop pirating with schemes like these is NOTHING new. The gaming industry had the whole 80's and to the mid of the 90's, 15 years!, until they realized it just isn't feasible. You'd basically had to put in content-control into everything, PCs, LAN, _AND_ a tamper-proof explosive charge that would punish hackers and crackers alike.
I'm sorry if I ranted your ears off, time to go..
- Steeltoe
I fail to see the legal rights the ISPs would have to charge for copyrighted (but otherwise free) content not belonging to them. Nor do I see any moral right in forcing every "consumer" and web-page authors into such a scheme. Where's the free market then? If some major body decides this is the way for all ISPs to go, then we got an anti-trust case on our hands since free competition has once again been centralized into one big churning money-factory. It's easy to come up with final "solutions" by conquering the world, but they never work out the way intended and never will.
I do however, see the logical flawness in their reasoning: Curing incentive to hack/crack through once again putting limitation and control over the distribution media/channels. This is exactly what the Internet is NOT supposed to be, and why it is valuable in the first place! It is also flawed on technical merits: If you pay to play regardless, only big companies would really get paid for their content. So, the bigger companies would of course think this is a great idea. What an effective way to kill competition!
- Steeltoe
I fail to see you giving any valid reasons for your arguments though. Hence, quite sadly, your opinion also goes to waste.
IMHO, XML is a step forward. With the DTD you can prove for correctness in the format, which is a plus. It supports recursive blocks, which is a plus. Unicode, which may also be a plus (not sure how it's implemented). Basically, it supports a whole lot of what you would've expected from a general-purpose text-format. No, I don't think it's human readable either (depends), but it's alot easier and more open than binary or comma-separated list.
As with all standards, XML needs to be implemented following its standards. Where XML fails, is that there are no meta-info dictating what the data is that you put in. So XML is a skeleton we must fill with flesh, and not be fooled it'll solve all our data problems automagically.
- Steeltoe
By your logic, archeologists and museums are the biggest thieves of this world.
What you fail to recognize is that the words "crime", "thief" and "property" are all arbitrary. We don't all put the same meaning into them, nor should we. So your intolerance to other interpretations than your own makes you blind as a bat in a hat!
- Steeltoe
An argumentative mind can't hold any wisdom, so wise men leave them alone.
So, how come we have an outcry for this technology to be implemented on our harddrives but it's okay for removable media like flash memory?
- Steeltoe
You obviously haven't any experience with this. They aren't gonna release anything that requires these copyprotection mechanisms now. What they're gonna do is sell these devices, until everyone's got them. Just like 8-bit Soundblaster gets outdated, our current HDDs becomes outdated. Then watch them turn on option by option as a required default in their software.
Of course it won't fly if customers don't want it. However, it will if they are ignorant consumers accepting this to go into their hardware now even though it doesn't change how they can operate their hardware. This is just Macrovision all over again. However, why should we pay for their schemes times over and over again?
Cheers!
- Steeltoe
HAL-9000: Dave, give-me-some-sugar-baby.
Dave: NOOOOO00000ooooooooooooooo.............
- Steeltoe
"Err...the last one. I'm can't be a karma-whore anymore because I'm over 50 ..."
:-))
You're my hero! 50, wow. Guess it shows how much you've spouted in the last couple of years. Me, my best postings usually gets unnoticed. Now THAT's quality, you should really consider some goatse.cx-links, to keep you score down. =)
"...and trolling is gay."
But if you were gay I guess you would've had reasons to write what you wrote, right, RIGHT?!?!
"The problem here, is that people take everything too seriously. Relax, guy -- look over there."
I'm mellow dude, going with the flow. Oh wow, I just saw an UFO over there! Thanks!
- Steeltoe
http://cropcircleconnector.com/2000/2000.html
http://www.cropcircleradius.com/
The complexity and amount of cropcircles are increasing each year. They are really amazing, I believe, the greatest mysteries of our time. Of course, you are free to think otherwise. I just wish people could take an extra look before opening up their mouth.
- Steeltoe
Here's a link to Unisys' information about the license. Notice how LZW compromises alot of standards: GIF, TIFF-LZW, PDF, Postscript-2 and V.42bis. To use them you have to pay Unisys outrageous license fees. Those using Windows, are already indirectly paying license fees for Microsoft products. This does not give you any rights though, and you must make sure you are licensed yourself.
- Steeltoe
Can anyone think of a more effective trojan-attack than to release your infected binary kernel on your website?
- Steeltoe
My God. If Jesus was alive today, I guess he'd spend time with them.
- Steeltoe
"Hummmm let's think about this one. How brilliant can someone be who would easily and openly admit to such a thing?"
So when did it become illegal, warrant surveillance or whatnot just because you admit you have the ability to commit a crime?
- Steeltoe
- Steeltoe
"Hell, one could argue that any publicly traded company is, in fact, legally bound to break the law, if it will result in increased profits after all is said and done."
So does this mean I can make my own public company, murder you during work hours and steal all your possessions and get away with it? It's not like I'm gonna get in trouble if I don't get caught right? Therefore my shareholders demand this of me, or else they will sue my sorry ***. Where do you live btw?
Your comment makes me wonder if you're willing to put commerce and legality above morality and ethics (which differs from person to person of course). I can assure you it is a huge mistake if you do.
Or maybe you believe law has no foundation in morality and ethics, and therefore one should break them whenever profitable? I'm sorry to say that this is also wrong, even if you don't share the morality and ethics included in the law. However, there's only one way to find out, and that's to live what you preach.
- Steeltoe
But then you have just put a fairly static price tag on your GPLed code, GPLed software and your GPL license. You have effectively sold out, and for what? The company might still get to settle, and I doubt any judge would support outrageous money claims. So now information wants to be free, but not if companies can make money otherwise?
- Steeltoe
You do have an impact, we all do. Of course you can throw away your principles, but don't come back in a year or two and complain and bitch about it.
If the X-Box is sold at a loss, it'd only be "fair" to only buy the console right? Except for the EULA of course, barring you from using any other but Microsoft software. I think this time they'll REALLY MEAN it...
- Steeltoe
The world is getting more evil every day. Do you have a meaningful life? What do you do about it?