Slashdot Mirror

I can't see how his behavior helps Mr. Tennenbaum.

I pondered this as well. Perhaps by hosting audio of the court case and distributing it, he was hoping the RIAA would complain and consider it copyrighted material--which they did. He then would hope the judge would rule in favor of Nesson and deny the RIAA the "motion to compel" or whatever they used to try to make him take it down--the judge did not, of course. But had the judge ruled in favor of Nesson regarding that motion, Nesson might have the judge in a very unusual position where the judge must now find Tenenbaum free of all charges on the exact same principle as the court audio that the RIAA said was copyrighted. It would be similar enough to get your foot in the door.

This tactic, as we now see, unfortunately failed. That's about as much as I could see in that move but I'm not a lawyer.

He's just dancing around on the stage like a really old Ziggy Stardust.

Well, great, now you've put this in my head: Charles Nesson + Ziggy Stardust = Donald Pleasence in The Puma Man

Is this suppose to be like http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2009/04/google-releases-3d-graphics-plugin-for-browsers.ars

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/

Take a look at these two screenshots:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Snow_Leopard_Desktop.png
http://static.arstechnica.com//ubnutu_light_2.jpg

'nuff said...

Gasp - you might even buy PDFs from a competitor!

Yes, you might. And then you can load them directly through USB. Onto your Kindle, without paying Amazon a penny for the privilege. Funny how that works.

May I also point out this and this. The first is a more responsibly done metastudy, the second focuses on what I've been speaking of: there are multiple possible reactions to "violent" games (in this case, Quake II) dependent on preexisting personality conditions.

May I also point out this and this. The first is a more responsibly done metastudy, the second focuses on what I've been speaking of: there are multiple possible reactions to "violent" games (in this case, Quake II) dependent on preexisting personality conditions.

Your GPS position is just a number.

GPS is just a number to you or me, but it's a real location someone or some company with a the ability to use those numbers (if my cell phone can show me where I am on a map someone's servers can too). What's to prevent a wireless carrier from selling that location data just like a company tracking license plates can?

Government and law enforcement don't need a warrant to get the info on where you've been. Some wireless carriers even have internet portals to make it as easy as possible.

Sure GPS is just a number - it's the combination to the history of your movements.

As a user of Linux, OS X and Windows, Windows is still the worst. Unfortunately a lot of Linux flavours take their queue from Windows where they should be taking them from OS X.

I believe the word you are looking for is "cue." That said:

The latest client OS webstats from Net Applications, W3Schools, and others, should be out early next week. There have been some surprises posted already: Windows 7 eclipses Vista on Steam, 64-bit dominating 32-bit 1 in 5 Windows PC gamers running 64 Bit Win 7.

The one certainty is that Linux will be bringing up the rear.

The Apple OSX model is a tightly integrated - tightly controlled - bundle of OS, UI, hardware, apps and marketing. That targets a profitable upscale niche market little changed in 33 years.

It's not a comfortable fit for a geek.

Windows is shamelessly middle class and commercial.

It is good, serviceable, tech that is available in every form factor and at every price point. The "protected path" is there for the user who thinks Netflix and Blu-Ray offer something of value.

Windows doesn't compell you to buy Corel Draw and MS Publisher when Inkscape and Scribus are available. But neither does it give the GIMP a free ride because of its ideological purity or political correctness.

That seems to be what most folks want.

Not yet, but it's just a matter of time. It's already been ruled that illicit traffic going to your IP is probable cause for a search, whether or not you have an open AP.

In particular, they didn't buy Perez's arguments that a "mere association between an IP address and a physical address is insufficient to establish probable cause"...

"In this case it is clear that there was a substantial basis to conclude that evidence of criminal activity would be found at 7608 Scenic Brook Drive," wrote the Court. "[T]hough it was possible that the transmissions originated outside of the residence to which the IP address was assigned, it remained likely that the source of the transmissions was inside that residence."

Now I don't know about you, but having a search warrant against me, having my computers confiscated, and being in the news as a suspected child pornographer is pretty damn bad, even if I'm never charged. The chances of that are very small, but the consequences so bad that it adds up to a considerable risk.

How can someone create something for the web and choose a Windows-only technology instead of OpenGL?

Because Windows is the dominant PC gaming platform? Because the move to Win 7 is already well-advanced? Windows usage on Steam

Cause SQL doesnt scale proper.
Check out Ars Technica's feature about NoSQL :

http://arstechnica.com/business/data-centers/2010/02/-since-the-rise-of.ars

Nooo... we're talking about consistency (you quoted me, remember?). Tossing your whole OS in the crapper after 15 years is (back to food) like McDonald's going vegan and changing to "The Magenta Arches".

Mac stats are often "qualified" or "adjusted" but this graph shows the 1999 transition as well as anything I've seen. There are about ten more pages preceding it... but the light doesn't get better. Even if Macs 2005 share doubled it comes no where near the percentage (i.e "share") of "the faithful" back in 1995.

1999 was not a turning point for Apple or the MacOS. There was already a steady downward slope before 1999 which wasn't the desktop release - that was 2001. And 2001 on that chart is a miniscule change.

So let's go back before 1999 in your chart. There's an entire 12 years timeline of classic MacOS there. And no market dominance. This during a time that the Mac was touted for being a stable product versus the WinTel chaos of screwdriver shop machines. It didn't give them the market though.

Coming back today - the same sales pitch is given with Apple products using the Machead-dreaded OSX; consistency of an insanely great user experience. Magenta Arches or not - people aren't buying it in droves (BTW - McDonald's did some pretty aggressive re-working of their menu in recent years and that includes some occasional restyling of their classic "M" logo).

Consistency is not the end-all and be-all of the market.

Consistency sells, and it garners referral sales.

YOU

And if that was the end-all and be-all of market success, Apple and MacOS would be on top.

ME

EVERY real Mac head I knew bailed out when it was no longer Mac. You do remember the transition to UNIX, right?

YOU

Moot point. We're not talking about the Mac faithful. We're talking market share.

Nooo... we're talking about consistency (you quoted me, remember?). Tossing your whole OS in the crapper after 15 years is (back to food) like McDonald's going vegan and changing to "The Magenta Arches".

Mac stats are often "qualified" or "adjusted" but this graph shows the 1999 transition as well as anything I've seen. There are about ten more pages preceding it... but the light doesn't get better. Even if Macs 2005 share doubled it comes no where near the percentage (i.e "share") of "the faithful" back in 1995.

I agree but defining or limiting it to one codec is a fail.

Web browsers support a variety of open image formats. There's no particular reason why they can't support a variety of open video formats. Theora is ready for use now, Dirac will be ready in the future. If Google releases VP8 as an open format (as many expect they will) then at some point there will be at least three open video formats to choose from.

Theora I doubt will ever get hardware support. I could be wrong but I don't see it. Google's codec could if they created their own chip and made it part of Android but odds are they will not do that because they will have to support it on YouTube or look like fools if they don't. YouTube has already spent how much money support H.264 for the iPhone?

Accelerated playback of Theora is already available:

http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/

Millions of devices already have the capability to accelerate Theora playback. They just need the software. Fennec (Firefox for mobile) supports Theora playback on the Nokia N810 and N900:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/

And Fennec is coming to Android:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/02/hands-on-and-under-the-hood-ars-tests-firefox-on-android.ars

Mozilla will happily support VP8 in Firefox if Google releases it as an open format.

Tnen you have Microsoft. They have not said they will support the video tag at all! My guess is that fantasize that SilverLight will be the new standard.

IE is always a problem. Fortunately you can work around it with Cortado, a Java based Theora player:

http://www.theora.org/cortado/

Or with a Silverlight based Theora player:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/nuanti-brings-html5-and-ogg-theora-video-to-silverlight.ars

Neither is ideal, but for the time being it's the best you can do in IE. I think IE will support HTML5 video eventually. It's more a question of "when" than "if".

I agree but defining or limiting it to one codec is a fail.

Web browsers support a variety of open image formats. There's no particular reason why they can't support a variety of open video formats. Theora is ready for use now, Dirac will be ready in the future. If Google releases VP8 as an open format (as many expect they will) then at some point there will be at least three open video formats to choose from.

Theora I doubt will ever get hardware support. I could be wrong but I don't see it. Google's codec could if they created their own chip and made it part of Android but odds are they will not do that because they will have to support it on YouTube or look like fools if they don't. YouTube has already spent how much money support H.264 for the iPhone?

Accelerated playback of Theora is already available:

http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/

Millions of devices already have the capability to accelerate Theora playback. They just need the software. Fennec (Firefox for mobile) supports Theora playback on the Nokia N810 and N900:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/

And Fennec is coming to Android:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/02/hands-on-and-under-the-hood-ars-tests-firefox-on-android.ars

Mozilla will happily support VP8 in Firefox if Google releases it as an open format.

Tnen you have Microsoft. They have not said they will support the video tag at all! My guess is that fantasize that SilverLight will be the new standard.

IE is always a problem. Fortunately you can work around it with Cortado, a Java based Theora player:

http://www.theora.org/cortado/

Or with a Silverlight based Theora player:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/nuanti-brings-html5-and-ogg-theora-video-to-silverlight.ars

Neither is ideal, but for the time being it's the best you can do in IE. I think IE will support HTML5 video eventually. It's more a question of "when" than "if".

What's this? Yet another Infoworld writer using their blogs to advance their personal agenda? When is Slashdot going to stop being a lackey for IDG?

I don't entirely agree with the concept that businesses are entities in the view of the law, but you're making a strong case why they should be. If going out of your way to make your neighbor lose money or sanity via harassment, assault, theft, stalking, or just by criminal negligence , is illegal--and well it ought to be--then doing so to a business is equally heinous, irrespective of whether you are a direct competitor or just an average Joe.

Ermmm? Businesses go out of their way to make one another lose money all the time, and I might do so by, for example, advocating a boycott. Businesses aren't people (don't particularly care what the Supreme Court said), and they are not entitled to the human rights that my neighbor is. That being said, it's not illegal for me to modify property I purchase from my neighbor, either. What you're suggesting is an even higher standard for businesses, that has nothing to do with assault, theft, criminal negligence (really?) or any other crime.

That doesn't by any means suggest that they should be allowed to harass, assault, steal from, stalk, or be negligent to you, either.

I'm sure millions of Windows users will be glad to hear that they will no longer need to deal with the forced installation of "genuine advantage" (or whatever they call it these days). Forced phoning home, harassment of the user (in many cases inaccurately), even the ability to remotely kill the system? Sounds like harassment to me. Of course, because of crap like that, I make them lose money-I don't use their operating system at all. Send the cops, I use an operating system no one at all gets paid for!

That doesn't make any sense, for one specific reason: any modification, and in particular reverse engineering, has the potential to amount to industrial espionage in a way that there is no feasible way to contractually forbid (except by EULA). They spent millions of dollars making a system like that--when nobody else would have or could have--gathered the people necessary to create a market, found exactly the right combination of everything involved, and then someone with your mindset comes in, provides the plans that took millions of dollars to produce, and churns it out with a couple hundred bucks of R&D in total, maybe a few thousand if you count lost hours of productivity. You are technically capable of distributing these plans to the lowest bidder or even for free, at which point equivalent but significantly cheaper hardware could undercut the company. If this were a person instead of a company, they'd have you in chains, because you just stole millions of dollars from them.

You've every right to try to make money. You've no right to succeed at it. If what you're selling is essentially a commodity, that can be easily replicated by anyone, you'd best factor that into your business plan. Your failure to do so is not "theft" on my part, it's poor planning on yours. And in fact, reverse engineering to make compatible equipment is actually one of the very few things the US DMCA did have the sense to allow. That's actually been upheld many times.

The Chamberlain case there is one that's easily on point for this, as is Lexmark. It does not matter a bit that your business model is to sell these garage door openers which can be circumvented, or that it's to sell printers cheap and gouge for ink. In both cases, someone can make something that interoperates with your item, even if it undercuts that model. Failure to plan for inevitabilities on your part should lead to a smack to the back of the head, not legal protection. And, yes, in a capitalist system, someone competing with you and trying to undercut you is an inevitability. To try and have that not happen is not capitalism, it's effectively c

Unless I misunderstand, you can already play with people who bought all 3 campaigns even if you have bought only one.

Unless they patch the earlier games to include units added in later games - and they have said they're going to add units in later games - then no, that won't be possible.

Historically, no Blizzard game has been compatible in multiplayer with their expansion packs, so that would be rather unprecedented.

I understand your concern over principles and what not, but it's not like Blizzard took out single-player completely or something radical like that.

Yeah, it could be worse.

> What is your angle?

Hard to tell, Ray. But if he's Thaetetus, does that make you Socrates? :]

Seriously, though, there are about a zillion Dan Roses out there. Mostly he appears to spend his time making random legal comments on Slashdot among a handful of others. Seems like he *might* be at UNC School of Law. The email has an extra dot, but I think Gmail ignores those. If that's true, he's part of the Lambda Law Students Association (a legal association for homosexuals), which doesn't really explain his interest in the RIAA & copyrights. That said, Google is giving some very strange results, so who knows?

That said, this exchange was pretty ugly for Tenenbaum. I assume it's what he's talking about. Of course, I see nothing in there admitting specifically to violating the distribution right. And I don't have a court transcript, either, which I trust more than random internet reports about the case.

I say that because there are other things out there like this story which claims that "Harvard Law School Professor Charles Nesson has conceded in a letter to the US Department of Justice that his client, accused peer-to-peer infringer Joel Tenenbaum, "downloaded music for [his] own enjoyment."" which points to this letter on your website. The problem is that I've read the letter three times and I can't find that "quote" in it anywhere, unless they got it by cutting out the phrase "is alleged to have," which would make their quote the same kind of dishonesty that led to $312,000 in sanctions recently.

Ars Technica did a story about a month ago, have a link to a decent video on it.

You don't actually need to DDOS their servers. Just let the pirates ALL attempt to login/authenticate at the same time: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/04/demigod-hit-by-massive-piracy-review-scores-take-beating.ars Probably after this they'd have learnt that lesson though.

Link

GIMP is going nowhere? They are switching the graphics engine to support bigger color spaces and finally shutting up the massive amounts of people complaining about the multi-window interface (unfortunately since most of them had no intention to use GIMP in the first place they'll just jump on some other minor "problem").

Your post boils down to the usual complaint that application XYZ isn't available on Linux. It's true, many aren't. For many of them, there are alternatives that are at least good enough for most people. For many others, particularly custom and specialised software there are no alternatives apart from running them in Wine.

There isn't any easy way to change this, and there is no way at all for Canonical to change this; it's not even their job to try, IMO. It's also not that big of a deal. Your graphics designer friends are probably the very last people who'd be willing to drop Photoshop in favor of the GIMP, for a variety of reasons, simple UI entrenchment among them. Most people aren't graphic designers, and the GIMP's feature set far exceeds what most people need. And while the interface might need some work -- and is, in fact, being worked on -- you're deluding yourself if you think Photoshop's interface was that much more intuitive. To a novice user, both applications are cryptic.

As for you, well, you only allude to your workflow. There are applications that cover MS Office, most of what Adobe's CS does; I don't know about Sound Forge. If you think they don't cover everything you do with them, maybe Linux isn't for you as of yet. I'm not sure what Canonical can do about that, short of financing development of a whole bunch of professional applications, which really isn't within their abilities.

Google uses on Mobo 12v batteries.
Of course that would mean switching out all of the current servers.

Mozilla, for good reasons (IMHO), is not willing to support H.264, but that seems to be the direction YouTube is heading. But as good and open as Theora is, I think don't believe there is any hardware with a Theora accelerator (yet?).

You can make use of the DSP that's used for H.264 acceleration and use it for Theora acceleration or any other similar workload. That's what's been done here:

http://www.schleef.org/blog/20...-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/

As mentioned in the post, that work is broadly applicable to Nokia's N series of phones, the Motorola Droid, and the Palm Pre. There are millions of devices in the field today which are capable of accelerated Theora playback. All they need is the software.

See also Christopher Blizzard's post on the importance of open formats to the future of the web:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/webl...anding-with-the-web/

In the comments Christopher Montgomery from Xiph.org, the foundation behind Theora, says:

"As for the chicken/egg problem of hardware support, several big commercial groups are already scrambling to get over it, partly because full Theora support in hardware is so much simpler than full h264 support. It’s a tiny fraction of the complexity. You practically get that many transistors for free in the today’s average cardboard cereal box. Can’t say more– NDAs. But that’s OK, it will be reality or not soon enough."

As you say, Microsoft's lack of HTML5 support will probably be a problem for some time. Fortunately, it can be worked around with Cortado or Highgate media suite's Theora for Silverlight

Learn your history. Apple NEVER announced ZFS for OS X.

if so, they sure fooled the media to think they did at the time.. ZDNET: "Apple announces ZFS on Snow Leopard". http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=335&tag=col1;post-584

and even Apples own web site editors where apparently fooled to think so.. from ars technica "Up until Monday's WWDC keynote, the preview page for Snow Leopard Server specifically referred to ZFS support as one of its key features!" (as per story this web site info purged by Apple) http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/06/apple-dashes-hopes-for-zfs-support-in-snow-leopard.ars

I don't know, what can you do with Win7 and Office 2010 that you couldn't do with WinXP and Office 2000? What new improvements in productivity do you gain from them? How did they lower your other costs (e.g. hardware)?

There has been a dramatic shift to the 64 bit OS in Win 7:

Windows 7 eclipses Vista on Steam, 64-bit dominating 32-bit

If you shop Walmart.com - every desktop $300 and over is 64 bit Windows Home Premium, every laptop over $350. That's about 150 systems, only ten of which are priced over $1000.

The geek's ten year old office suite probably isn't going to integrate well with SharePoint.

It won't be off-loading tasks to the GPU.

Incremental improvements in productivity do matter when you have 1500 full and part time clerical workers on staff.

That is why it is worthwhile for Microsoft to invest time and money in improving something as basic as cut & paste: How does usage data improve the Office User Experience?

I think you're full of it. Microsoft is a key committed member of the CSS WG and continue to work in good faith helping the group. Things like test suites, specifications, standards discussions represent some of the output from Microsoft's involvement.

One of the main goals for IE8 was to have full CSS2 compliance and to improve performance over IE7. Compared to previous versions of IE, IE8 largely accomplished these goals. Moving forward for IE9, the goal will be increased standards compliance around CSS3, competative JavaScript performance against competeing browsers, improved rendering performance, and *throwing it some marketing* making it the best browsing experience for ANYONE who uses Windows, dev, designer, consumer, it pro.

Since you're big on the whole standards thing, you might like to know that IE8 is the only fully CSS 2.1 standards compliant browser at the moment. Neither Firefox or Chrome fully implement the entire spec yet.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support?uas=IE6-IE7-IE8-FX2-FX3-OP9#css

With regard to ECMAScript4, Microsoft had some fundamental differences with whether it was worth expanding the language considering the legacy baggage and the need to add modern scripting features. We haven't derailed anything, we voiced a disagreement, one that was shared by Yahoo at the time. Microsoft and Yahoo didn't agree on much back then either.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2007/11/major-stakeholders-argue-about-the-future-of-web-scripting.ars

It's easy to have a casual knowledge of the issues when it comes to standards discussions, but when it comes down to creating a quality specification, the issues are a lot more complex and there are numerous viewpoints from people a lot smarter than you or I about the matter. Your accusations and assertions about Microsoft don't produce any productive outcomes in the debate, and all you really end up doing is vent anger online.

Does any of this genuinely change your opinion in the slightest, or am I wasting my time?

from ars: Users in the thread have tracked down a fix, though it requires using a copy of the Windows disc (or for netbook users without an optical drive, a bootable USB drive with Windows on it): Boot from your Windows XP CD or DVD and start the recovery console (see KB307654 for help with this step) Type this command: CHDIR $NtUninstallKB977165 $\spuninst Type this command: BATCH spuninst.txt Type this command: systemroot Good luck. When complete, type this command: exit

Get spare box (or VM, or even your own machine if it's beefy enough), install WSUS (Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Small Business Server 2003), point clients at WSUS either with a GPO or in local policy (gpedit.msc), decline KB71033 (if it even gets pushed through WSUS, which it probably won't; WGA didn't), sit back and relax.

This is also handy for any other "critical" updates that you might want to avoid, or any updates that are incompatible with your system, or may cause errors (Like KB977165), especially in environments where other people have administrator access to your machine and like to click things without reading them or you're managing several machines (friends, family, housemates, girlfriends, etc).

Windows 7 is just Microsoft playing catchup with Apple

OSX 10.6 has 2% of the market. Win 7 8%. [and in daily tracking a tad under 10%] Vista and Win 7 combined have 25% of the market. Top Operating System Share Trend

Ars Technica posted this interesting chart of Windows usage on Steam:

19% of Steam users are running 64 bit Windows 7. "There are more users on Windows 7 64-bit than any other flavor of Windows, except for Windows XP 32-bit."

Mules, long noted for stubbornness, would seem to have nothing on either the music labels or Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Both sides have dug in deep and are prepared, almost unbelievably, to have a third trial on the question of whether Thomas-Rasset was a dirty P2P pirate... and of what she should pay if she was.

At the second trial, in 2009, Thomas-Rasset was again found liable, but the jury this time fined her $1.92 million. Last week, federal judge Michael Davis decided that this was "monstrous" in its disproportionality and slashed the damages to $54,000. The recording industry could either accept his decision or request a third trial.

The RIAA then sent a letter to Thomas-Rasset's lawyers with an alternate offer. Thomas-Rasset could settle for only $25,000 ("We are willing to negotiate a payment schedule for this sum," said a copy of the letter seen by Ars), and she wouldn't even need to pay the labels--all cash could go to a charity benefiting musicians. The entire settlement would be conditioned on the judge vacating his recent remittitur order.

"We do not believe embarking on a third trial is in anyone's interest," said the letter. "Continuing to use scarce judicial resources as well as spend our respective clients' time and money strikes as unwise and pointless."

It does not strike Thomas-Rasset that way. While the RIAA asked for an answer by Friday, January 29, Thomas-Rasset's lawyers have already responded: no deal.

I checked in with Kiwi Camara, one of Thomas-Rasset's lawyers. who confirmed that the settlement was ruled out. He added that Thomas-Rasset would likewise rule out any settlement asking her to pay damages, and that the Camara & Sibley law firm was ready to represent her pro bono once more.

It's hard to see how this will play out, but a few things are clear: Judge Davis, despite strong criticism of the damage award, had no kind words for Thomas-Rasset. He noted that "ThomasRasset's refusal to accept responsibility for her actions and her decision to concoct a new theory of the infringement casting possible blame on her children and exboyfriend for her actions demonstrate a refusal to accept responsibility and raise the need for strong deterrence." The judge even concluded that she "lied on the witness stand by denying responsibility for her infringing acts and, instead, blamed others, including her children, for her actions."

Given the facts in the case, which after two trials don't appear to be in dispute, it's hard to see how Thomas-Rasset hopes to prevail without paying a dime, but that appears to be the plan.

  If she had been willing to pay something, she would have done so long ago, when the RIAA offered her a settlement of a few thousand dollars. Instead, Thomas-Rasset has spent years of her life working with two law firms on two federal trials, and she's willing to risk a third.

The stubbornness isn't just on one side of the aisle, however. The RIAA is completely unwilling to abide Judge Davis' ruling that the jury's damage award was excessive. Accepting the ruling would set an unacceptable precedent for judges to alter jury awards in copyright cases at their whim. It's not the amount, but the principle--something shown by the fact that the trade group is willing to drop roughly a bazillion dollars more on the Denver law firm that has been prosecuting the case in order to do it all again. In addition, conversations with industry lawyers and executives over the years have also revealed a strong sense that Thomas-Rasset needs to take responsibility and pay something; there's a very real sense that, apart from issue of statutory damage law, Thomas-Rasset is thumbing her nose at the industry and hoping to get away with no penalty.

Thus--a third trial.

Thomas-Rasset vows to pay nothing, so third trial inevitable [Jan 28]

I'm inclined to agree with you, but it sucks that innovative companies like Google will have to deal with this.

Notice that prior to laying down the fiber network, they took the town to court to prevent competition:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars

I should not assume bad things (like ignorance or lack of intelligence), so I assume lack of information, which is no shame. :)

Let me formalize your statements (commas used as logic element separators):
1. There is a form of downloading, that is illegal. — Paradigm (Assumption)
2. “Putting out” (in this case) means “freely offered on the Internet“ — Paradigm (Agreed)
3. The game was put out, a week before. — Paradigm (Agreed. Based on TFA)
4. Putting out that game, a week before, surely, counted a lot of illegal downloading. — Paradigm (With “surely” as a weasel word and a stand-in for an actual basis.)
5. Putting out that game, a week before, surely, counted people not buying the game. — Ditto
6. People not buying the game and/or illegally downloading it, causes actual damages to companies. — Paradigm (Assumption)
7. Actual damages result in lost money for those companies. — Paradigm (Agreed)
8. One can sue for damages / lost money, caused by someone else. — Paradigm (Generally accepted in out community. I do not agree on a physical level, but I will follow community rules as I am not a part of this.)
9. So there’s nothing wrong to be found, with them suing him. — Conclusion (Following)

I disagree with every single of your paradigms where I wrote “(Assumption)”, and especially the “surely” ones.

1) Accepted when assuming that those laws itself are legal, with which I strongly disagree, since they are based on the faulty assumption, that information/ideas/data would be treatable like real physical/meatspace objects, when they are virtual/bitspace objects. And following from that, that one could own/possess and control such data, that by definition, is out of one’s control and can’t be owned.
4) Putting out something does not necessarily result in actual download. But because of its very high likelyness, let’s assume actual download happened. With the limitation, of not being able to make any assumptions about the actual number.
5) Putting out something has no relation to actual buying behavior or even has a positive effect, as was conclusively shown by [1], [2], amongst others.
6) Offering something for sale does not in any way guarantee a sale. So not buying it does never equal damage, but is the natural default situation. Just like walking past a sausage stand, and not buying one, does not equal damage to the sausage seller. And just like buying a replica of something, does not equal damage to the original producer. One can just as well not buy something, when no other alternative is available. Imagine someone who wants to buy it, but does not have the money to buy it. He would not have bought it (for that price) anyway. So your logic is strongly faulty here.
Conclusion: Since there was no damage and loss of anything, that can even remotely be proven, it is, in our community, not acceptable to sue that person.

I'm talking their own tool. They had to remove it: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/11/microsoft-pulls-windows-7-tool-after-gpl-violation-claims.ars

Were you not around when Microsoft bribed and stacked the ISO meetings when voting for OOXML as a "standard"? Not only that, but it doesn't pass any kind of rigorous review as a standard... it is all but an XML representation of the original .doc format, just re-jiggered around, and is so convoluted that nobody but Microsoft has a hope of actually interoperating with it properly. And by the time someone might do so, they've got the next version out.

Seriously, just google around a bit:

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/norwegian-standards-body-implodes-over-ooxml-controversy.ars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML

So, you already running a 2.x release. 3.0 is not supported on 10.2/10.3.

10.x releases of OS X are not minor updates. If in doubt look at Ars Technica's reviews (linked on is for 10.6, it liks to the ones for previous versions of OS X). Since 10.2 OS X has migrated to 64 bit, introduced Core Image/Data/Video/Audio/Animation, switched from gcc 3.3 (which barely understands C++) to 4.2, introduced FSEvents, introduced Application signing, and process sandboxing.

I hope they get rid of 10.5 real soon, so they can use Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL (perhaps finally making Firefox as fast as Safari and Chrome).

Well, I remember something recently that I'm pretty sure was covered here before.

I have a hard time arguing with physical laws though.

You know what? I don't know a damn thing about any of this, especially at the molecular level. I'll just take the latest theories for what they are... Theories. Keep up the good work though. I'm glad when someone can reply and argue with some knowledge.

Flash is PC software, it has system requirements of a P4 or better, 2GHz or better, there is no such thing as a mobile that can run it.

I've been watching Flash videos on YouTube on a 300-megahertz ARM-powered Nokia N800 for years.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/07/n800-tablet-os-release-includes-maemo-3-2-flash-9-and-skype.ars

I'm looking at you, Mozilla: I paid for a license to decode h.264 - why won't you let me use it to decode HTML5 videos in the video tag?

They don't want to enable you to use H.264 in any way, directly or indirectly, for political reasons.

As for Mozilla, the stated reason for not using gstreamer/quicktime/directplay is the potential for security exploits in those frameworks

Not really. They made that argument specifically for DirectShow, but it remains a very weak one. Meanwhile, they've added GStreamer support to Fennec, but still refuse to add it to the desktop version, and the reason explicitly given for this is purely political in nature:

A solution that seems logical on the surface is to simply expose each platform's underlying media playback engine through the HTML 5 video element—DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux, and QTKit on Mac OS X. This would make it possible for the browser to play any video formats that are supported natively on the user's computer.

From a purely technical perspective, this is not an impossible problem to solve as there are already existing libraries that do this and provide a cohesive abstraction layer on top. One prominent option is Nokia's Phonon library. It could also possibly be done by using the Quicktime and DirectShow plugins for GStreamer.

Mozilla strongly opposes this approach because it would heighten the risk of fragmentation. Allowing content providers to use any codec that is available on the user's computer might undermine the advantages of the HTML 5 media element because there would be no consistency guarantee and content would not be able to work everywhere. That is, however, arguably the situation that already exists as a result of the impasse in the codec debate.

I'm sick of the dumbasses still playing Chess 2009. When will they upgrade their crappy hardware? HDTV has been available for years now. There's no excuse for playing old games on SDTV.

Intel does have a FAB in China FAB 68

The graphene FETs in this work were tested up to 30GHz and, extrapolating those results, the authors showed that the FETs would operate, albeit poorly, up to 100GHz. Similarly sized Si devices are limited to 30GHz operation.[...]The 100GHz speed touted in the article's title is an extrapolation—no such properties were actually measured.

Although they've long relied upon fair use protections for educational use, the Association for Information Media and Equipment has made claims that they're copyright infringers, even though the videos are only available on campus and the students are allowed to watch the videos in the Instructional Media Lab.

That may be the case now but according to the article, that was the specific problem. That they were using Video Furnace to post videos online so students could view the videos outside of the IML which has horrible hours like being closed on weekends. From one of the students:

"If we want students to write a paper on the film over the weekend, it’s more convenient for the student to rewatch the movie online over the weekend. (The ban) makes teaching cinema more difficult (because) Video Furnace was extremely useful," Gans said. "I very much hope (the university) will reach some kind of agreement."

It seems they licensed Video Furnace for use of its technology only on campus and only on campus machines. But the ease of use means that if you post a Video Furnace movie on your course website then students -- or maybe even anyone -- could access it using a browser from anywhere. The summary link says that this may work but is not recommended due to possible latency from the server.

The ACLU backed down because, well, the university is probably violating its licensing agreement with Video Furnace. The professors don't do licensing so they didn't understand that what they were doing was wrong. The solution is to threaten to leave Video Furnace unless they amend their licensing contract or give you a way to convert to an open format that the professors can post where ever they want -- once you have the raw video, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. It's been shown that free online courses don't hurt enrollment anyway.

ATT routes all (yes all) their traffic thru the NSA
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/11/ex-att-employee-nsa-snooping-internet-traffic-too.ars

This move from Google is more political the security oriented.

DRAM cache mostly helps with reading - not writing. I guess that's where the SSD comes in. Our filesystems just aren't set up to allow writing huge swathes of tiny files sequentially, so when random write speeds are important the SSD is king.

Although I suppose ZFS might be set up for exactly that... but few of the others are.

An HDD with a huge cache would be interesting. One company tried it a few years back.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/09/coming-soon-hard-drives-with-1gb-ddr-ram-cache.ars

Based on this 5400RPM drive's performance, I imagine a WD Black(7200RPM with dual heads) would come close to maxing out SATA2 if it had a gigabyte or two of cache.

Your naivete is cute!

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/01/ea-shuts-down-25-game-servers-including-madden-09.ars

Actually, even your negative synopsis of the piece flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which is that attacks of Chinese origin are all a carefully orchestrated by the ruthless and scheming Chinese government.

Security researchers have identified the attacks against Google to be largely from the Chinese government, as were the politically motivated attacks against the Dala Lama and other Tibetan exiles. There is almost no doubt that the majority of the hacking that goes on in China (and elsewhere) is of the sort that TFA reports on, but linking it to the recent attacks on Google and other US government contractors is disingenuous.