Slashdot Mirror

This story immediately reminded me of some of the RIAA plans to hack your home machines (also mentioned here). I can't wait for the day when the big virus/trojan du jour hammering corporate networks and bringing down servers right and left turns out to be from the RIAA or MPAA.

"We were just protecting our copyrights, it's not our fault that your payroll files were lost!"

Well,

I was nervous at first, but I thought hey, I'll install linux anyway, so what does it matter?

And guess what... I am *very* happy with it. It happily runs Debian for almost 6 (really!) hours before running out of power, it is totally quiet (no fan), it's slick, the airport card antenna is invisible, and stand-by and reactivation are almost instantaneous. And yes, the price is comparable to, even cheaper than 'comparable' Intel laptops.

Look into it, it's the first machine I love to carry around. There's is review here

Or, if you'd like to dive in and use the terminal if you're uninitiated, head over to this article on O'reilly.net for a tutorial on crontab, etc.

Triv

Try streamripper for capturing streams to your HDD. Here's a excellent Oreilly article that details how to set this up on MacOS X.

Ummm...the camel...I have this sneaking suspicion that O'Reilly is going to pick the camel as the animal for their perl books.

As it turns out, autonomous computing is one of the trends we're following closely at O'Reilly. It's one of the major themes at our emerging technology conference (Building the Internet Operating System) in Santa Clara May 13-16. Robert Morris of IBM is giving a keynote on the subject, and we've got a whole subtrack on biological models for computation. "Emergence" is also the theme of Steven Johnson's keynote.

Overall, if you look at some of what's been happening in the peer-to-peer space (with decentralization@yahoogroups.com being a great place to do that), you'll see how all these themes are coming together with the emergence of new internet-scale operating system models.

O'Reilly has a good article here with some code as well in both Java and Perl.

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1283

> Now if we could just run Linux in it... We can. Check out the article at O'Reilly:
Opening Up the PlayStation 2 with Linux

On Debian & iBook

I mean c'mon. We get tons of mentions of .NET around here, talk about how Microsoft is only into closed source, etc. Now Microsoft actually releases 1.9 million lines of source code spread among almost 10,000 files that people can compile to get .NET up and running on their FreeBSD boxes, and Slashdot suddenly clams up about it?

Who can honestly say that this isn't a story of interest to a large amount of people here, whether they hate .NET or not? There's a lot of discussion to be had about it. Comparisons to Mono/DotGnu? The licensing details? The performance? Comparisons to Java on FreeBSD? To pretend it doesn't exist is just silly and does seem to call Slashdot's motives into question.

Well, for FreeBSD users who might be interested, I'll go ahead and post a link to a few articles about it myself, from O'Reilly's site who's been doing a pretty decent job of breaking it down: http://www.oreillynet.com/dotnet/. Discuss amongst yourselves. ;)

A quick scan of the web for more info on this summit unfortunately did not turn up a whole lot of information. Most of what I found was information about what they will be speaking about (written before the conference took place); the best I could come up with was this column, by one of the panelists, but even that doesn't really have much information about what was said. Anyone know anywhere with a more thorough summary of the panel discussion?

Eben Moglen, general counsel to the FSF, gave the DotGNU project his opinion on the Shared Source license and tainting.

- Brian

> If you want to do real open source,
> do not look at the poison.

Eben Moglen, General Counsel to the Free Software Foundation, told the DotGNU project that programmers will not be tainted by reading the source, so long as they don't copy any of the code.

- Brian

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.

For those wondering about Mac OS X solutions for secure email, refer to: GPGMail and Secure Mail Reading on Mac OS X

• An Architectural Tour of Rotor
• Get Your Rotor Running
• Microsoft's Shared Source Record

• An Architectural Tour of Rotor
• Get Your Rotor Running
• Microsoft's Shared Source Record

• An Architectural Tour of Rotor
• Get Your Rotor Running
• Microsoft's Shared Source Record

I believe that IMAP can be used over SSL. See Secure Mail reading with Mac OS X

And everyone developing plug-ins for iPhoto, it will just add to the functionality.

And here's a good article on digital photo goodies for Mac OS X.

And everyone developing plug-ins for iPhoto, it will just add to the functionality.

And here's a good article on digital photo goodies for Mac OS X.

The really interesting bit was here, though;

"Not only was Apple helpful with the technology issues," Graham said, "but they even changed the QuickTime license to accommodate CrossOver. The previous license stated that the QuickTime plug-ins could only run on the native platform they were designed for. That wouldn't work for CrossOver because we're using the Windows QT plug-in on the Linux platform. Apple changed the license so we could do that."

EE-yow! Apple really are copping-on. Not exactly open-source or even public-source but it's a step in the right direction.

The O'Reilly network already has a pretty good resource for news from multiple sites in the Meerkat Wire Service

Brian Jepson who's merited his very own Slashdot story worked with Josh (the creator of the bizzaro music referenced earlier) to help create the original AS220 web presence.

Josh, Brian & I went to South Kingstown High School together where we made horrible git-fiddle noises until I moved away & they found an outlet @ AS220. My Dad still lives on the East Coast & he's read poetry there at the invitation of Buddy C. in some wierd kinda "Yeah! Providence" thing.

There's more of Josh's stuff at AS220.org including a nice rant against NT, in favor of open source stuff.

If Josh was still with us, I think he'd be making serious contributions to the OSS movement. He's still the smartest guy I've ever met. I've met Marvin Minsky and Zack Settel, but didn't get to know 'em enough to compare.

You ever read the comic strip Steven? The old ones were Providence-centric. My favorite was when Brock & Steven went to jail, escaped by climbing into the toilet & through the sewer & came out at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel. We used to by acid there from Bruce Springsteen on a skateboard.

"Providence. Where it rains Where Friendship is a one-way street. Rich folks live on Power St. but most of us live off Hope.Providence. Where it snows four months out of the year, and the rest of the time rains like a bitch. Where Friendship is a one-way street. Where the rich folks live off of Power, and the rest of us live off of Hope."

Reminiscing....

It does make sense to me for there to be a connection between underground tech and underground culture. JWZ's DNA club sounds cool (I'm only 2 hours away, but a new father, so no time). I'm working with a guy at Grape Stake Studios on an anti DMCA/SSSCA musical work. There is common ground rich for exploitation here. Getting the message out about the threat of things like "trusted" operating systems using forms other than the written word and protests has merit.

Ray Noorda must be kicking himself for letting Caldera settle so soon, and at mere pennies on the dollar for just a couple hundred million. The DRDOS case was the most solid of all the anti-MS efforts; they could have really cleaned up.

Here is Andrew Shulman's summary of the Caldera versus Microsoft suit.

I too have speculated on why Noorda stopped short of delivering a more crushing blow, when he had the chance. It was a solid case.

You've suggested it was a mistake, or a failure of nerve. Let me suggest another possibility. Noorda too is a member of the billionaires club. Is it possible that Noorda's goal was to teach a younger, more aggressive, billionaire a lesson? Microsoft not only handed over hundreds of millions (the amount was not made public) of dollars, but Gates resigned the Presidency of Microsoft within days of the settlement. I've read speculation that Gates resignation was one of the conditions Noorda insisted on. I'd like to believe that it was.

For technical books/articles on MacOS X, see

DevDepot
MacTech
O'Reilly
Stepwise

Bullmer said: The proposal ... would not be a decree that I would know how to comply with...

The degree to which it requires
documentation of internal interfaces...

...the degree to which it requires -- what do they call that stuff where, you know, you can't degrade the performance of anybody else at any time ... there's simply no way to do that for the existing -- the existing product set.

DRDOS (Digital Research DOS) was an alternative to MSDOS. Like MSDOS, DRDOSes roots lay in Digital Research's CP/m, a primitive operating system to 8080 machines. DRDOS was a better DOS than DOS. It always lead MSDOS in features. It used high memory before MSDOS, it had a compressed volumes facility, like doublespace, before MSDOS. The suit against Microsoft in the DRDOS case was whether MS Windows 3.x was written to detect whether it was being invoked on a machine running DRDOS, and if so, it would fail, with an error message that said that DRDOS had failed. Damning evidence was introduced in this case. Microsoft announed that they had settled in early January 2000. While the terms of the settlement are confidential all reports are that the monetary portion of the settlement was nine figures. Some commentators suggest that a confidential clause in the settlement was that Bill Gates would have to resign the presidency of Microsoft. He did, in fact, resign within a couple of days of the announcement of the settlement.

I think the big problem with your theory is that you can't copy toothbrushes.

Give that 10 years and we will see when digital fabbers become affordable. Might as well keep these inevitable challenges in mind...

I wrote a story at xmlhack on the new draft this morning. It's got some extra details and links to background information. The exception handling process looks like it'll be the area to watch.

I don't suppose you could make an "emergency allocation" for bandwidth? =)

I'm eating pringles as fast as I can!

There used to be a mock Tarot deck called Morgan's Tarot, which had a card that said, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." Dealing with lawyers is like that. -- Tim O'Reilly's patent article

Morgan's Tarot, copyright 1970. Lord of the Rings, completed in 1948.

Geez, you'd think he'd know better. Or maybe O'Reilly only deals with Unix wizards? (Who, from my experience may be subtle but are generally nice ....)

Jesus, Sun's PR corps must have flipped their collective shit when they read Karen Tegan's remark. While in general I find that kind of bluntness refreshing, a director of Platform Compatibility spouting off and essentially saying, "Well, that sucks for you, but we make money off of compatibility testing. We give everything else away for free, so cut us a break." is really a testament to the Sun Micro (brutally) plain-talking attitude.

Deeper, though, I think, is the need to rein in Java a bit....It has achieved ubiquitousness, and I think Sun knows it. Watch. If .NET takes off, they will loosen up to benefit from a little more old-fashioned agrarian innovation and buzz.

How do you explain Microsoft funding the development of a FreeBSD port of the .NET runtime and compiler?

Some details are here

- Steve

There are plenty of C# intros out on the web (I especially liked the Ask Dr. GUI.NET series at MS, but they are being rewritten to reflect the release version of VS.NET), but O'Reilly recently
posted one that gives instructions on using the compiler/debugger that you can download from MS.

With those tools, one can begin to learn to program with C# without needing to fork over the big green for the new visual studio.

Just thought someone might be interested.

See: this or this I'm not sure about the current status though.

There's already a similar project, WorldForge. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to join that project rather than starting your own.

Although, if this article at O'Reilly's site is accurate, the idea hasn't exactly taken of like wildfire. All the more reason to throw your efforts in with them rather than dividing the development effort to start a new game.

Yes, Heidi is.

Check out all the pics on the page, including our beloved/despised CmdrTaco.

Yes, Heidi is.

Check out all the pics on the page, including our beloved/despised CmdrTaco.

Yes, Heidi is.

Check out all the pics on the page, including our beloved/despised CmdrTaco.

Craig: "But look: we're a business, okay? We're in the business of licensing intellectual property. So if it turns out that in the future that business says, "Okay, we should license the patents to people who use that in order to be compensated for the development of intellectual property," maybe we'll do that. You're always welcome to come and ask us to license anything from sources to patents. But I mean, we are a business. We're not --

...

Craig: Well, at the end of the day, if you have a patent, you enforce the patent if it's valuable to you. And so I think that Microsoft and other people who have patents will ultimately decide to enforce those patents.

Brian: Are there any patents that apply or that will apply to implementers of .Net or Hailstorm?

Craig: I expect there certainly will be. I mean, the patent process takes a long time.

You may see more success in the neighbourhood ftp server access via WiLans out there before this is anything more than an idea.

Of course, the military has already been looking into this. Albeit not for "mp3s".

O'Reilly did a conference on this, "Using Two-way Pagers as Peer-to-peer Devices"
, done by previously reported about "brian d foy". The link is here. I wasn't able to attend, but it sounds like just what this article is talking about. Mayhap brian has notes posted somewhere.

• My understanding (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that Apple's original intention was to make Carbon a transitional technology, and Cocoa the ultimate goal. That's changed because developers don't want to think about rewriting their Mac apps from the ground up.
• If you're just starting out and don't need OS 9 support, Cocoa might be an easier route. Its tools and objects for building UIs, document-based apps, etc., are easy to use and extensive, allowing you to pull an app together fast. Check out Oreilly's Mac Dev center Cocoa in a Nutshell book.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

thiz iz already the 4th account i am roasting karma under.

Please follow the first aol.com link!

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

thiz iz already the 4th account i am roasting karma under.

Please follow the first aol.com link!

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

thiz iz already the 4th account i am roasting karma under.

Please follow the first aol.com link!

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.

But bring your own lube!

Valuable information about the FreeSoftware/OpenSource/Linux movements and their excellent, superior software can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Examples of the excellent community spirit within that movement that will help us bring down the evil, illegal Microsoft monopoly: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Support Free Software! Buy a mug or t-shirt today! This is how open source morons earn their money, you know! By being beggars!

Michael Sims is a liar and void of ethics.