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BitKeeper, back when I used it (2-3 years ago) had some nifty features, yes -- but was prone to corrupting the repository on a regular basis. What's more, Larry deliberately changed the license so that my then-current employer was no longer in compliance. Suffice to say that more than a few people there still consider him an asshole for that.

If Red Hat is going to put money into a better version control system, I'd hope that that would be either Subversion or arch. (The author is flat broke and has no web hosting unless someone gives him some, so that link may not work; also see here and here). Arch is brilliant, functional, much more reliable than BitKeeper (at least, much more reliable than BitKeeper was when I used it)... and for someone as utterly friggin' brilliant as Tom Lord to be utterly penniless (as in, unable to buy beer, much less pay rent) is just wrong.

Here's a good companion piece, from the second issue of the Linux Journal way back in 1994:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2750

Read the shocking truth about Patrick's Grateful Dead tape collection, and the possibility of a Slackware/Debian merger!

I don't know the group you mentioned, but here is a slightly related link.

Very interesting stuff.

It's good for AOL because they don't have to kowtow to Microsoft for placement on the desktop (though they shouldn't anyway, but MS frequently abuses it's monopoly power to prevent OEMs from making custom changes to the desktop). AOL can advance subscribership by promoting an easy to use Internet/Bulletin Board service on a low cost, easy to use computer. If they want custom modifications to better support their online service, they don't have to "ask permission," they can just make them on their own.

It's good for consumers because now they have a real choice for low cost computer systems. I'm not saying that Lindows is the high holy of operating systems, but it's geared toward ease of use for non-technical desktop users (people who don't want to recompile a kernel). Before, there never really was a choice for low cost systems -- you had to go with Windows. Sure you could buy a Mac, but you had to shell out an extra thousand bucks. While many people like how user friendly Macs are, they can't justify that much a price difference. Lindows gives consumers a low cost alternative.

It's good for Linux because it increases the Linux user base. Obviously, the people using these systems aren't going to go out and start coding custom kernel modules, but the software manufacturers are going to start noticing the increasing presence of Linux in the marketplace. This means there will start to be more consumer applications available for Linux as an untapped consumer market like this cannot be ignored. This means more games, more office software, more of the general desktop software that many people say is missing from Linux.

And lastly, this is good for technology (obviously). For the same reasons that Eric S. Raymond penned (or typed I guess ;) in his editorial on "Total World Domination." Total world domination by Linux means no domination by anyone. Linux can be modified by anyone, it can be modified to suit your purposes (whatever they may be) and you will always have the freedom to make those changes because no one can own Linux. No one can lock it up and keep you from looking inside. Coders will still be able to code and make custom changes to their system, and consumers can still click away not knowing what's going on behind the scenes. It's good for technology because by giving consumers a choice, it promotes consumer freedom.

As a supplimentary reading assignment, this months Linux Journal is running an similar, interesting article on Programming PHP with Security in Mind.

---
Jedimom.com, choo choo choosing you...

As a supplimentary reading assignment, this months Linux Journal is running an similar, interesting article on Programming PHP with Security in Mind.

---
Jedimom.com, choo choo choosing you...

I'm the editor of Linux Journal and vice-president of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group.

# Why should we burn all GIFs?

The Internet is a good thing because you don't need the permission of any one entity to publish. If you choose a patented format, you are throwing away the advantage of publishing on the Internet in the first place.

Many commonly used image editing programs come with a GIF license. However, GIF licenses on shrink-wrap software do not apply to GIFs that you may generate on the fly -- every site that does a dynamic map or chart in GIF format has to get a separate license.

# How do you burn something that is not tangible?

You print it out, and if you're holding your event in a place that prohibits public fires, you draw flames on it with a marker. It's not the burning that's important, it's freeing yourself from needing a license to publish.

# Greplaw still uses GIFs. What should we do instead?

Use PNG or JPEG images, depending on which gives you the best quality and image size. Almost all browsers in use today support both.

# Software patentability is entering Europe and European strong author's rights are entering the US. Why is this is a problem?

I'm not familiar with the strong author's rights issue.

Software patents are a big problem, though.

Best to start from first principles, since people argue the same issue from different points of view and never get anywhere. I'm going to be US-centric and look at our Constitution, which I think soundly expresses the point of view that patents are not a property right or a natural right.

Copyrights and patents appear in the Constitution in Article 1, Section 8, along with other miscellaneous economic powers of Congress. They're right next to "Post offices and post roads".

If patents are not a natural right or a property right, what are they? As you might guess by the post office and road connection, they're a government program to promote economic growth. Patents are intended to do two things: promote R&D investment by the private sector; and encourage the private sector to publish inventions. The Constitution makes this explicit in its stated reason for copyrights and patents: "to promote the progress of science and useful arts."

Patents reward these two economically desirable behaviors (doing research and publishing) with a temporary government-granted monopoly on a particular invention. Congress has full discretion on what kinds of content can get a patent and on how long a patent can last. (If patents were a "right" the Constitution would require them -- as it is, the Constitution only allows them.)

So, how should Congress decide which kinds of content get a patent and which don't? You have to strike a balance between, on one hand, the economic benefit of any R&D motivated by the prospect of a patent that would not have happened otherwise, and on the other hand, the transaction costs that are an inevitable result of the patent's existence.

You have to draw the line of what gets a patent and what doesn't somewhere. If you allow the patenting of rhyming words, sports plays, or musical notes, day-to-day life becomes an impossible mess of patent cross-licensing. And, as for these areas, there is no economic evidence that software patents help the economy or even encourage R&D. They may do the opposite -- see the Bessen and Maskin paper (PDF-format).

Software is a good thing because in software, a small investment can create and manage great complexity. When you impose the same transaction costs on software as on hardware, much useful software that could otherwise have been created does not exist. We are seeing this today in the field of video compression. The MPEG patent licensing mess is excluding everyone except for large, well-funded corporations from creating innovative new video-related software.

There may be increased R&D investment in a few areas, such as video compression, due to the prospect of a lucrative patent, but this economic gain is swamped by the loss of productive software later.

As a software patent opponent, I argue simply that patentability creep should be rolled back. The patent office should again exclude algorithms and business methods, as it already excludes ordinary mathematical theorems and their proofs. Forming a "GPL patent pool" might help to cut some of the transaction costs where GPL-covered software is concerned but cannot hope to ameliorate patents' harm to developers who use other licenses.

# Why should a lawyer be interested in Linux?

Why should a lawyer be interested in Cat 5 cable, or ATX power supplies, or USB keyboards? Linux is a generic, commodity item that does what you want it to do, as part of a larger system that you control.

# How will free software change society?

Free software won't so much change society as it will bring the computer business more in line with the rest of the economy. If you went shopping for any non-computer product, and got offered an End User License Agreement like those offered in the computer business, you'd laugh and walk out. Free software gives the customer the same rights of inspection and control that he or she has when buying non-computer products such as furniture (you can cut a hole for your cables in your desk) or cars (you can change your own oil.)

If you want to read a novel where software-like licensing is applied to a regular product with ludicrous results, read "Secrets of the Wholly Grill: A Novel about Cravings, Barbecue, and Software" by Lawrence G Townsend.

# Many countries consider public procurement policies where free software should be encouraged or even mandated. What is your take on a "Peru law"?

Governments have a responsibility to their citizens not to enter into unfair contracts. Most or all proprietary software licenses are unfair contracts, and subject the customer to lock-in and limit the customer's ability to fix problems.

Microsoft's lobbying against fair software purchase laws has been weak. They don't even put an End User License Agreement on their web site. If even the people who wrote it are ashamed of it, why should anyone else be willing to accept it?

# After September 11, 2001 you wrote an open letter to Michael Eisner, head of Disney, urging him not to go to Washington, D.C. to lobby for the SSSCA. Why did you do that?

I am on a mailing list based on a Linux server across the street from the World Trade Center. On September 11th, the traffic was about who's where, is everyone all right, which hospitals are open for blood donations, is a particular subway station open, what's going on. Stuff you can't get from TV. We can't let the media corporations seize control of hardware, lock out free software, and turn the net into a one-way medium like TV. Unless printing and postage get real cheap real fast, free speech in the USA needs the net.

# If major companies like IBM and Sun discontinue their support of free software, what will the effects be on the current movement?

Remember the question, "If the Linux startups fail, what will happen to free software?" There's enough customer pull that if customers can't get free software products and services from IBM and Sun, they'll get it someplace else.

# Declan McCullagh of News.com has stated: 'Trust me, a few--even a few thousand--peeved e-mail messages won't change vote totals that lopsided', hence geeks should focus on code, not on government. Do you agree?

Email spam was a "geek" issue until recently, and now, as it affects more and more people, the organizations that begain calling politicians' attention to it are involved in the mainstream political process. If you learn and understand the political process now, and begin making contacts, you will better be able to use the support you get as the anti-Net crackdown affects more and more people.

Declan is half-right in that focusing on code is good too. By all means, develop something that's questionable DMCA-wise but that everybody wants to use. You will motivate more people to be interested in DMCA reform.

# Finally - what is Pigdog and why?

Pigdog.org is the leading Internet news and content site. I am not an employee, just a satisfied reader.

Don Marti was interviewed by Mikael Pawlo.

This superworm for Linux is just a first attempt at an entire genre of zero-day exploit worms which create ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks as they spread.

There were a few times when Linus made it very clear what he wanted changed and ESR simply didn't fix it, it was as if he didn't even hear it; look at the threads in the kernel archive. I don't know what ESR's motivation was but he made it look a little corrupt.

I think I may have found the answer in the following excerpt from his World Domination guest editorial on Linux Journal:

Of course, articles like this are part of that game. We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger--especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.

I can't help wondering whether, in this case, Linus and Jeff are "the bosses"; indeed, stuff like pretty pictures and theorem provers and various other kitchen sinks associated with CML2 qualify (amply) as those "snazzy special effects" of which he is so fond.

Now, love him or hate him, Eric is not going anywhere, even after getting booed off a very important stage. And in light of his, um, staying power and in consideration of the CML2 affair, it should be of some comfort to his detractors that at least Eric the Rich Guy hasn't lost his hackitude and keeps producing worthwhile stuff. When Eric first threatened to quit politics, I looked forward to the return of Eric the Hacker and the retirement of Eric the Politician ; alas, half an Eric must, ipso facto, half not be, and I'll take a whole Eric over half an Eric any day, thank you very much.

A quick quote from linuxjournal

"LJ What has been your exposure to, or experience with, free software?

Villanueva I've kept up with the Free Software movement in Peru for several years. Both the philosophy that drives it and the fact that, for technical and economic reasons, this software allows the implementation of solutions for a range of organizations.

LJ There are a number of other countries considering proposals similar to 1609, from Asia to Europe to Latin America. Are you familiar with these? If so, are there parts of your proposed bill that make it unique?

Villanueva Bill number 1609 has now been improved and is currently in the committee stage with number 2485, which is also signed by Congressman Jacques Rodrich. Congressman Daniel Estrada has presented a similar bill that is based on the same free software spirit. Among other countries, the closest are Brazil and Argentina; for Europe, we know about the law passed by the German parliament, as well as the proposal in France and the study presented to the English parliament. In Asia, above all there are the actions of the Chinese Government. All these bills are essentially similar, but in ours, like the Argentinian one, we claim exclusivity in all state bodies. Obviously putting this exclusivity into practice will need a whole process, which will take some time, because there are state bodies that are working well with proprietary software and would only choose free software for their future requirements, assuming it's available on the market. That applies quite generally to any institution. I'm only mentioning it because I'm convinced of how critical migration is, the importance of careful planning, and the availability of the necessary resources to cover the time and the risks that you take.
"

The difference is that violating the GPL is violating copyright, because the GPL is an additional rights grant on top of your copyright rights, which are unchanged whereas Apples licence is a revocation of copyright rights that Judge Dean D. Pregerson says doesn't stand up.

This interview should help to enhance the questions.

One of the reasons I am so pro-Lycoris is that the distro takes that very stance. Why confuse the beginning Linux user with a myriad of apps, most of which are redundant, when you can provide the best email program, the best browser, the best Tetris clone game, etc. etc.? While I can question some of their choices, I can see where this approach is best for their target audience. And hey, the more expert users can ADD to the installed apps! What a concept!

Because it is a KDE-centric distro, Lycoris' ability to function on computers degrades with less powerful processors. The suggested minimum processor speed/type is a 300MHz Pentium II. I suspect that with a lot of the eyecandy turned off it should be fine on a 233MHz Pentium MMX or better.

This does nothing for older machines, though. What is needed is a lightweight graphical distro that can make low end Pentia and 486en useful. The recent issue of Linux Journal has an interesting article by Marcel Gagne suggesting the kind of apps that would work in such a lightweight distro.

I don't know the first thing about putting together a distribution, but I am looking to learn. I have been riding this particular hobbyhorse for years now but nobody's done anything about it. People are either compiling ultra-tight distros for bootdisks and whatnot or making monster distros for bleeding edge computers. No middle ground. It is this middle ground that can make the kind of machines hitting these landfills in China usable again.

There are kids in Pacoima and the South Bronx and the Southside of Chicago and Oaktown who could use these computers. The companies upgrading their boxen are throwing perfectly useful machines out or sending them to fly-by-night "Recyclers" who instead ship them to the 3rd world. When companies donate instead of recycling, MS gets on their case about licensing. The refurbishers get static from MS about licensing. The underpriveleged kids who need computers at home go without.

A good, lightweight Linux distro could change all this. It's time to create one.

I know it's not exactly what the poster asked for, but I was in the same boat about 6 months ago and you can at least step through my thought processes.

Article linked here.

Says who? I for one do not license commercial software, I buy it:

• It is sold in a retail store on a shelf like any other product.
• No conditions or terms of use were presented to me at the point of sale.
• I pay sales tax.
• If it gets stolen, who calls the police? Me or the software manufacturer?
• If it gets destroyed in a fire, who gets reimbursed by their insurance? Me or the software company?
• If I erase the CD and use it as a coaster, whose loss is it? Mine or the software company's?

Nearly every entity I can think of agrees that I own that copy of software: me, the cashier at the store, my state's Dept. of Revenue, the local police, my insurance company, etc. The only one making the bizarre assertion that my purchase was only a license is the software company itself. See the Softman v. Adobe decision for a compelling argument of why commercial software licensing is nothing more than a fairy tale.

Those who actually search for software can also look in freshmeat.net and newsgroup comp.os.linux.announce and linuxapps.com and a buyer's guide.

Going from "LWN is folding," to "open source is failing," is quite a stretch.

If kernel.org or even debian.org were about to fold, then you might have a point. But neither is in any danger of disappearing. LWN, while it's a wonderful site, is just a free news site. Plenty of non-linux/open-source news sites are in trouble or dead (including many that I worked with fairly recently). And so this merely goes to show that web-only news sites are probably not a reliable way to make money at this point in time. While I'm saddened to see LWN go, I still have my Debian system, and I still have my subscription to Linux Journal. I've had 'em for years, and expect to have 'em for years to come.

IBM, HP, even Sun, and thousands of smaller (and/or less computer-oriented) organizations all have a vested interest in keeping kernel.org up and running. HP and hundreds of other companies have a vested interest in keeping debian.org up. Those sites are in absolutely no danger.

Don't underestimate the power of cooperation as a competitive force.

Medusa http://medusa.fornax.sk/English/project.shtml
is a set of patches that help you secure your Tux kernel. I donot have an indepth knowledge of the workings, but there was an article in LinukJournal http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3811
I think this might help

A few years back, Linux Journal ran a story about a car, I believe in Italy, that was using Linux. I believe Linux did the steering as well.

For me, all the hype and PR have tended to obscure what's really in .NET. Also, many of the language interfaces to it (VB, ASP, C#) do not have open source implementations. (Maybe Miguel de Icaza will be done soon:)

That said, there are probably some really good sound technical ideas hidden in .NET after the surrounding marketing has been washed away.

Subversion lets you use different low level layers for actually storing files, pluggin things through an API.

That great idea is compounded by their objective of using WebDAV as a lower level layer.

I like the idea of having an XML description of actions that need to be taken for a version control system. Perhaps .NET has some good ways for doing this, but I'm fearful of a simple open source tool acquiring too much bloated overhead (much in way that SOAP bloats XML-RPC) that could slow it down and make it dependent on more network activity than is always necessary.

linux orbit
linux journal
OSNews.com
The Linux Game Tome

I mean, talking about the Alpha? Who the hell uses that. That has been dead for years!!

How about the third and fourth fastest supercomputers in the world? Including the fastest in Europe.

Not to forget that Titanic, by far the highest grossing motion picture of all time, was rendered with the help of an AlphaPC server farm running Red Hat Linux. Admittedly, that was five years ago. But it was still a 64 bit OS.

I must confess my bias, because I have two Alphas faithfully running Red Hat Linux at home. So far as performance is concerned, I'll be surprised if the Intel Itanium or even the AMD Hammer chips will compare favorably to comparable Alphas on floating point performance, which is very important in many high end applications.

Of course, I could be wrong....

Yeah, I know it's just a big list of links...

Apache and FW Performance Tips
Apache.org Performance Tuning
Apache Tuning Tips
Apache Tuning Directives
Tuning Your Apache Server
TUNING.txt
PHP-DEV: Database Connection Problems
PHP Everywhere: Tuning Apache and PHP for Speed
Tuning Apache Web Servers for Speed

and last, but not least, my favorite:

Web Server Tuning

I'd also recommend reading up on tuning the linux kernel.

-techwolf

I wish I had known about this site a couple weeks ago! I did some apache/php tuning for a client. This site has some good tips. And if you're planning on getting slashdotted, check here

It's quite easy to get around the "argument list too long" error

this linux journal article covers it quite nicely.

Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez's answer to Juan Alberto González's letter is the most brilliant text about free and proprietary software written by politician I've ever seen. (Juan Alberto González is a General Manager of Microsoft Perú. Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez is a Congressman of the Republic of Perú.)

I really wish we had such people among Polish politicians. I wish you, Ramsés, together with other people in Panamá to convince your politicians what's best for your citizens, even if it's not best for fraudulent megacorporations like Microsoft, and even if it means making the richest man on Earth slightly less rich.

See also the interviews with Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez on LinuxToday and Linux Journal, as well as other links from the Peruvian Activism website.

HP leant me one of these machines so that I could write a review of it for Linux Journal. You can read it here.

The gist of the article is that these can be great animatior workstations, with the maturity of Linux and high-end animation applications.

Now how do I get my commissioin :)

thad

When you buy a book, you're not necessarily spending your hard earned dollars on the physical representation of what you buy. It doesn't cost $8 to produce a paperback. You own the cover, the spine, the pages but you do not own the story contained there within.

No, you are buying exactly one copy of not just the physical book, but the story contained within. The only thing that copyright gives anyone is the exclusive right to distribute copies of that work. That's it! It does not magically confer ownership of ideas to anyone.

You may sell your book under the doctrine of First Sale without having to pay royalties (or 'liscense fees' if you will) to the content owners, for that has already been paid once.

As can I sell or give away a copy of any piece of software I have legally purchased.

EULA's by themselves have been found legal, its parts in the EULA's that have not been legally tested.

Really?

"The Court understands fully why licensing has many advantages for software publishers. However, this preference does not alter the Court's analysis that the substance of the transaction at issue here is a sale and not a license," Judge Pregerson writes. If you put your money down and walked away with a CD, you bought that copy, EULA or no EULA."

You do not purchase something, you liscense the use of it.

The above court decision would clearly disagree.

Don'y buy the propaganda. It doesn't matter how many 'education' campaigns are waged by software publishers, it doesn't change the fact that you are, in fact, purchasing an item and not a license.

I have not tried it myself, but I have heard very good words about subversion, a version control system which is in heavy development right now. The developers have looked at various existing version control systems, and found their pros and cons. Then they designed a sane system, something between CVS and Perforce. Then they started coding.

Subversion is not finished yet, but according to others, it is quite usable already, and the subversion developers are using it themselves.

There was an article in Linux Journal about subversion i February.

I believe you're referring to the case Softman Products Company, LLC v. Adobe. The decision basically states that software bundled with another product can be unbundled and sold separately if you haven't used it at all.

The ruling was made in November of last year, however - I'm not sure whether or not it's been appealed since then.

Here's a commentary recently run by Linux Journal on a comparison between monolithic kernels (e.g. Linux) and microkernels (e.g. Mach, Hurd).

Obviously it's biased towards monolithic, but it's an interesting read nontheless.

Mac OS X uses Mach, but its used differently from what GNU/Mach may use things.

IANAP, but some lackey on Linux Journal dared to write an article declaring the microkernel a dead technology in this article.

A ton of people slammed his lack of research and knowledge of microkernels, Mach, Mac OS X, or Darwin. The article is less than useful, but the responses from the irate readers explaining how Apple implements Mach (and its pretty damn clever--they take the Mach and BSD fusion to a monolithic state).

And stupid me, posting before I complete my research. It was Dela Croce, and a letter on this can be found here from November 1996. -Dennis Carr

I note this because it's the same thing. Basically, Delatorre (I think that was his name, correct me if I'm wrong) TM'd Linux, demanded royalties, etc - but in the end got his butt kicked. What will probably happen is that PanIP will possibly be countersued. In short, you can legally patent this, but it's like patenting water.

Just my random thoughts.

-Dennis Carr

This article was in linux journal about two years ago, but most of the discussion is still fairly interesting to read. He brings up a lot of very good points and has some interesting numbers to back him up.

This is very dangerous and misleading! There's much law which says you are NOT THE OWNER of the copy, and so you are not reading section 117 correctly. I know, it sounds wrong. I know, it sounds illogical. But that's the law. There's no gimmick, no magic.

What about this, which is a court finding that says that despite the EULA, the exchange of money for software is a sale. From the article in question:

"The Court understands fully why licensing has many advantages for software publishers. However, this preference does not alter the Court's analysis that the substance of the transaction at issue here is a sale and not a license," Judge Pregerson writes. If you put your money down and walked away with a CD, you bought that copy, EULA or no EULA.

Here's a link to the full text of the decision.

"Doing what I want" is not my point. Doing what I'm legally entitled to is. As long as software transactions take the form of a sale, you have equivalent fair use rights as you do with any other copyright material you purchase. You can't sell it or make a derivative work, but you can make personal copies for time and space shifting and you can reverse engineer it regardless of any alleged "license agreement". Nor can any such agreement grant them the authority to hack your computer any more than it can grant them the authority to place additional charges on your credit card or come in your house and take your firstborn child.

In your vision of the future, then yes, a contract would be possible, but how many people will actually register their eyeballs, or whatever else might be necessary, in order to have the ability to sign their rights away to a software vendor? We need to press our consumer rights until it's clear to software vendors that they do not have some "special" rights beyond that of traditional copyrights.

There was a Linux Journal article last August which discussed Dreamwork's transition to GNU/Linux. To answer your question about productivity, one animator claimed she was moving twice as fast as before the switch. I expect this is mostly because of updated hardware, and not some GNU/Linux-Zen thing.

You can find the article here.

-Paul Komarek

Oh for the love of! We are too lazy to copy and paste, please provide a link next time.

Thanks.

For the Lazy People Or maybe im _That_ Lazy

2002-04-20 06:27:35 [-0000] World (Fastest Super Computer) x 20: Japan 1, US (articles,news) (rejected)

The NY Times free reg.is reporting on Japan's thunderbolt in the supercomputing wars: ``Japanese laboratory has built the world's fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine.'' Quoting an American scientist on his schock at the news: `` `In some sense we have a Computenik on our hands,' said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist'' The piece is short on technical bits, but broaches on the _fad_(?) of American designers away from specialized CPUs and toward off-the-shelf versions. Hubris/complacent thinking, IOW. Heck, and I was feeling good about trying the new GNU/Linux beowulf distros out there just ten minuten ago. *yikees*

No, you don't. Someone may have to click "I agree", but it doesn't have to be you. It could be your minor child. Since minors have not authority to enter a contract, the EULA is void. If the vendor cannot prove that you clicked on it, you're not bound by it. Nor does it have to mean that you really agree.

Fight the meme! If you don't agree to something before you it's given to you, especially in over the counter software sales, it's not a contract, it's a sale. (I'd make the same argument even if that sale is a "free" download. If you don't agree prior to the transaction, your agreement is not required as part of the transaction.)

IANAL, just pissed off that this crap keeps going on and we keep taking it

Here's why.

Microsoft.com Running on Linux

Wired News reported today that Microsoft has outsourced their DNS to Akamai, and microsoft.com is now being served by name servers with a "networking implementation very similar to that of Linux". Akamai Technologies is a well-known Linux shop, but let's see.

I talked to some of these folks at LinuxWorld Expo, and it looked like they had things working. Somebody was even selling NICs and boot PROMs. They would be the logical starting point.

Unfortunately, I don't have my bag 'o swag with me here at work, or I might even be able to find the docs.

Also look at the Linux Journal article on LinuxBIOS

http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4888


http://ltsp.org Linux Terminal Server Project who were using NetBoot, if I remember correctly.


http://sourceforge.net/projects/netboot/

and not sure if you got the netboot howto

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/DisklessHOWTO.html
(netboot is linux based, etherboot is bsd based)

I thought they already did? Some Linux Journal article about Broadcast 2000 and aA list of supported video capture cards for Linux

Sure the hardware isn't quite Linux supported yet, but at least there are some lower-end cards out there that are supported. So it looks like for the home user the hardware and software is somewhat there. And what about for high-end? Well supposedly Linux is already being used for editing movies (including LOTR). I'm not sure how they get their video onto the computers though, but there must be some way to do it I guess.

So I guess this hardware is special because it is specifically targetted at Linux, but as far as breaking Linux into the video editing market...I think that already happened a little bit so far. And it's not going to get any better with a $3000 USD card.

Someone actually did attempt this with PostgreSQL, back in '97, but I think the project got shelved: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=1383

Maybe it's time to revive it...

...The latest issue of Linux Journal (remember that mag? ) has a good article on the various quicktime players available for Linux, and how to install/use them ...

Check them here : Linux Journal

Frowning on an act would indicate some remedial conscience or morals, and as we see everyday corporations have NONE.

While you and I may believe that, evidently others do not.

We allow corporations to donate soft money, thereby influencing the political process, probably more so than the votes. We even allow them to give favors to candidates and politicians. They have property rights, can invent, can author creative works, can be exempted from laws, can buy other laws, can be sued, and can even sue for wrongs done to it! In the meantime, we also award companies for being "good corporate citizens"!

For something that only exists on paper, and that has no morals, ethics, conscience, spirit or life...corporations sure do have a lot of corporate rights. As if a they were "...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...".

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.