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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?"
..I think right now I'd rather have a window without PC's..
air and light and time and space
According to News.com, the reason they scrubbed the iTunes auction was because he violated one of eBay's rules, which states that "eBay prohibits the listing of items or products to be delivered electronically through the Internet", aka the "You can't sell it if it doesn't physically exist" policy. Such as transfer may still be legal, but it looks like eBay isn't the place to do it.
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.
The fact that the auction has been pulled should convince anyone who has wondered that DRM is the only way for companies to profitably sell music on the internet.
Incidentally, it is also a testament to the likely success of Microsoft's upcoming music download service, where you pay an annual fee and may download any 60 songs for playback on a handful of certified devices that are digitally tied to your account. If you get tired of some of the songs, you can turn them in and exchange them for new ones.
When you think about it, this plan makes a lot of sense, since it ushers in the new era of portable digital storage, which you can plug into your car, your expensive Harmon Karden system, or your walkman. It also makes sense in that it will probably make record companies more money than they make today, while making consumers happier.
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???
Right now, you could buy 8 or 9 CDs, or 120 iTunes songs, which for most people wouldn't be enough to really establish a satisfactory music library.
I know this post sounds pro-Microsoft, but 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.
Amazing magic tricks
It's for all those Debian users who can't stand buying a computer with Redhat preloaded...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Just a thought, but I have a feeling that when bidding gets to the thousands of dollars for something worth virtually nothing, Ebay starts to get a little weary.
I know that I once had the great experience of falling for a new TiBook 1GHZ for only $1500. Bidding went well above that, and Ebay then pulled. Turned out it actually was a scam.
My guess is that Ebay would happily risk stopping a real auction for the small chance it might be a hoax(instead of vica versa). In this case on the chance the bidders won't back their wagers.
tilTrue.info contechtext.info prettypowerful.info twitter.com/frets fb.com/prosody
As I said, they enforce that rule when it helps them, and lets it slide when it doesn't.
One of the national news broadcasts just had a couple people talking about 'computer problems' as a factor in the East Coast blackout. A transcript of the first few minutes of the outage had technicians complaining that their computers were acting strangely and that they couldn't diagnose the problem because of that.
The CEO of the company that had the 'original' problem asserted that there must have been systems failures at other sites in order to bring down the entire grid. He said his company alone could not have caused the problems that occurred.
I wonder if any of the MS worms that were circulating at the time actually were to blame for the outage as has been speculated here before?
The webcast of the hearing will be available here when it's ready.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
E-bay is a nice place for the exposure if you can't get it anywhere else and don't mind the fees, but what's stopping him from firing up a site and taking bids via e-mail? He's certainly got plenty of attention.
Considering a 99 million dollar bid was placed it'd also be handy to list all the bids placed allowing people to bid in between in case higher bids fall through. It was also aliviate false inflation.
No point in putting in a fake high bid if anyone can bid lower.
It would then also be possible to contact the losing bidders at the end and ask them to donate their bid to the EFF or whatever even though they won't get a crappy song for it.
Using e-bay doesn't test the legality of anything relevant. It simply tests E-Bay's TOS. Selling it himself would test the legality of selling the iTune.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I would applaud Apple if they kicked more of the cash to artists, but that's like asking Best Buy to pay a share of their profits to the artist. The distribution channel is not responsible to the artist, the record company is. That's where we should look for reform.
Dan
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
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It misstates the relationship of artists to iTunes. You do NOT have to be an RIAA-member published artist to get your music onto iTunes, and there's at least one company, CD Baby, that makes this a piece of cake with the bulk of the
.99 going to the artist. iTunes insists on a middleman, it doesn't insist that Hilary Rosen be that "man".
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It suggests that artists are ripped off by this system but somehow are not by Kazaa and their ilk. How? Not explained. Just repeated, ad-nausium, like some kind of Hanzo-San.
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It suggests that making artists maintain the hardware and infrastructure for distributing music would, in some way, be preferable to Apple doing it and charging their 30c. Again, no explanation.
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Ultimately the agenda is revealed in the same paragraph - apparently 99c per song is too high! It should be 50c! And the artists should foot the bill (as above)
Downhillbattle is going to have an uphill battle unless it recognizes a few realities. Not paying artists is ripping them off - the music publishers may not be perfect, but if you buy a CD, you do ultimately transfer money in the direction of the artists, something you do not do if you download it from Kazaa. Rather than this mindless boycott campaign, if DHB really is serious and is concerned about artists (as with the rhetoric but as unsupported by every actual suggestion they make) rather than cheap music, they should be supporting the efforts to create infrastructures for the easy exchange of music (to the listeners) and money (to the artists.) I'd no more boycott CDs to help artists than I'd napalm Ethiopia to help the hungry.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
OpenOffice already runs on OS X. What they are talking about is a Quartz/Aqua port. But, frankly, why bother? Even if people use Quartz/Aqua APIs, OpenOffice still won't look or behave exactly like a Cocoa-native application, so it really won't be any more "native" than the existing X11 port. Furthermore, Apple's X11 server for OS X is just fine for running software like OpenOffice, it's free, and it's easy to install.
.NET, Gtk+, wxWindows, and FLTK applications to it. OpenOffice on X11 is just another toolkit. What people could spend time more profitably on is cleaning up the few remaining glitches in the integration of X11 with the OS X desktop. Most of those can be done fairly easily, but Apple might consider adding a small X11 extension that would allow people to add OS X-specific features to their X11 applications without a complete rewrite.
There probably isn't much interest in the Quartz/Aqua port because there doesn't seem to be much point to it: it's a lot of work and won't behave much differently.
As OS X becomes more mainstream, the "purity" of its user interface (if you can call the mix of Cocoa and Carbon "pure") will increasingly go away: people will port MFC, Swing,
The buyer is protected (ostensibly) because the listing says that you will get the item when you tell them the password, thus if this is not true, you are guilty of fraud. And you comply with the letter of ebay's law. I'm guessing they feel the laws are clear on physical objects and claims but not on virtual ones, so they're bringing all the virtual things into the real world.
Makes me wanna go watch Lain.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"