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Slashback: Ascent, Patents, Transferability
Your ruse, your clever trick. On August 22nd, we reported that OpenOffice.org's OS X version had been delayed for two years.
However, bluethundr writes "Hold the phone! Is it delayed or isn't it? Well, according to this story in the register, it AIN'T DELAYED...just undermanned. Apparently there are only TWO (count 'em! one...aw heck, where was I?) developers working on the OS X development team. Dan Williams (who is one of the two in question) says that 'the Mac version is in a Catch-22: with only two developers, it desperately needs man power. But no one will join the porting effort until they see momentum behind the Aqua port.' Maybe some of the coders among us could lend them a hand?"
Too late for the colonies, help save the mothership. leif.singer writes "While there still is some time left, please consider signing Eurolinux' petition against software patents in Europe." You'll be in good company: vinsci writes "In their news section, FFII has posted a more detailed story: "Within a few days, the petition calling the European Parliament to reject software patentability accumulated 50,000 new signatures.""
Free as in FreeDOS Jim Hall writes "I thought I'd submit this before the news item fell too far down our web page. If you remember about a year ago, Dell was to offer Windows-less PC's, instead pre-installing FreeDOS. You can now order a Dell with FreeDOS (or Linux) ... and have been for a while now. They are pretty nice machines, too (3.06GHz). We have the news item (with links to Dell) at the FreeDOS Project web site."
Nasty worms ought to at least produce spice. The NRC released an alert about worm infections and nuclear power plants. This is a reaction after the SQL-Slammer attacked the shut-down Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January.
Tomorrow is another year. RoadKillian writes "New Scientist reports thats the QinetiQ 1, the record-breaking balloon which was supposed to rise to an altitude of 40km (131,000ft) has ripped during inflation. The weather is unlikely to permit another attempt this year."
When EULAs collide. Yesterday's story about selling a song downloaded from iTunes seems to have an unhappy ending: sideswipe76 writes "As I was watching this auction today, it approached $16,600! Now, if you try and check this link from eBay you get 'invalid item.' Is eBay wussing out just to avoid any legal snafus that _might_ occur? Or did he violate some ebay policy? Thoughts?"
This may just be a crazy theory, but maybe the RIAA "told" eBay to close the auction. After all, if the auction had gone through and people were allowed to resell songs (as long as they gave up their own -only- copy) then the RIAA would have a new set of legal arguments on hand.
For $120 a year, I can buy ~8 CD's, which contain ~120 songs. I can also sell these CD's to various stores, or trade these CD's with my friends (for permanent or temporary use). After 10 years, I'll have 1200 songs, and you'll still only have 60. Sounds great.
on their Downloadable Media Policy page?
Or was that secretly added after this song was listed?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Anyone brave enough to question the distilled coolade that is Apple and anything they touch since coming out with OSX ("ooh, ooh, pretty and Unix, ooh, OOH, AAaahhhh..") might find this spoof of iTunes to be an amuzing antidote.
Wouldn't you like to pay $120 per year and be able to "rent" any 60 songs at any time for as long as you want???
nahh I'll stick with the 6000 I permanently will have access to and OWN.
how about the 6 albums a week I encode.... no not lame CD's Those strange black plastic things...
I collect rare records, and in order to enjoy them I play them ONCE in order to rip them to mp3's..
many of them I can LEGALLY share on the internet as they are no longer copyrighted.
nahh, there's no legitimate use for P2P music sharing and unrestricted portable music formats...
enjoy your restricted life... I'll stay with my unrestricted music access and the car stereo, home stereo, boom box and portables that all play this unrestricted mp3 format.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> Wouldn't you like to pay $120 per year and be able
> to "rent" any 60 songs at any time for as long as
> you want???
No I wouldn't. So assuming I am not completely braindead and I pick on average mostly songs that I like, then on average I am going to be paying $2 dollars a year for a single song. Which given that I still listen to music I bought 10 years ago (along with all the music I have bought between then and now) on a regular basis that means if I buy the sweet alubum under this plan that has ten songs, it will cost me $200 dollars in order to listen to it for 10 years. That sounds like a totally Bad Idea[tm] from my point of view.
I think the only way I would use something like this is if I could pay 10 dollars for a single month then go through as many songs as I could, to try and find cool new music (since as we all know most 'preview' clips kind of suck and it would be nice to hear the whole song in all it's hifi glory before making a decision) then just buy the albums of what I really liked.
Yar!
My point was simply that FreeDOS is a small OS that Dell can put on the machine to give it minimal functionality while at the same time letting them ship a PC without paying a license fee to Microsoft. Remember that if you get a PC that has Windows pre-installed, then the PC maker has paid a license fee to Microsoft for that copy of Windows regardless of whether or not you use it. And no matter what the marketers may say, that license fee does get passed on to the buyer in the form of a slightly higher price for the PC. So by putting FreeDOS (or Linux, or FreeBSD, etc) on the machine instead of Windows, Microsoft is cut out of the picture.
(At least in principle. Microsoft used to make PC makers pay a fee per shipped CPU, regardless of whether or not Windows was installed. This was supposed to have been stopped by the consent agreement from a few years ago, IIRC, but things may have changed again.)
A friendly reminder about it's and its:
itsits.gif (safe for work)
Laugh at my Lisp and I keeell you.
It's actually pro-capitalism and pro-innovation. Capitalism works so well because it always encourages companies to come up with a better mousetrap, or in this case a better music distribution system.
Whew, for a minute I thought your post was serious!
The further it is from Napster, the less successful it will be. Apple is doing it pretty much right. Or as right as they can, considering.
The first thing I'd do with this MS BS system is convert it to an .AIFF file and store it on a CDR.
What if my walkman isn't compatible with MS BS?
He said the music was to be donated to the EFF. I suspect the people participating in the auction knew full well the track wasn't "worth" anything at all. It's "worth" was in this auction's value as a test case, and that $16,000 would, no doubt, be well used defending this sale (should it have passed) in court.
According to Tech Bargains You can get a DELL 400SC 2GHz server without an OS for $299. (3.2GHz just $622)
Not too hard to imagine a cluster of these.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
The investigation also found plant computer engineering personnel were unaware of a security patch that prevented the worm from working.
Now I hate to deride any of my fellow IT workers but does Davis-Besse employ trained monkeys to run their network? Seriously. In addition to being plastered all over Slashdot and every IT news site in the known universe, it was covered extensively on all the major news networks. That's incompetence folks, plain and simple.
News like this (not to mention the actions of SCO, the RIAA/MPAA keiretsu, and the degredation of freedom in the US through the DMCA, PATRIOT I/II acts, et al.) makes me want to move to the most remote tropical island in the world and set up a benevolent technocracy. Who's with me? :-)