Slashback: OSS, Lawsuits, History

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including Record Label civil war, more big-business software getting tossed into open source, US Government says 2008 IPv6 still on track, EU Warned Microsoft source code not enough, RIM celebrates a victory in Germany, 10th planet a reality, and looking forward to the year 2001 -- Read on for details.

Record Label Supports Accused File-Sharer. arabagast writes "The Nettwerk Music Group has said it will pay for the defense of David Greubel. Greubel is the defendant in a complaint filed by the RIAA in a U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas accusing him of having 600 illegally downloaded music files on his home computer."

Qluster's OpenQRM goes OSS. Decibel writes "While Microsoft, Oracle and now IBM have made news by releasing free versions of their databases, other companies have gone one better and released versions of their products as OSS. Qlusters is one example, in that they just released OpenQRM. The CTO's previous company (Symbiot) also made a similar play, releasing OpenSIMS. Could this be the start of a change to where commercial software starts melding more and more into OSS?"

US Government says 2008 IPv6 still on track. DrkShadow writes to tell us that the Government is holding fast to their 2008 IPv6 switch commitment. From the article: "The White House Office of Management and Budget said it would issue a policy memorandum dictating full federal 'IPv6' compliance in an effort to spur its deployment throughout government agencies."

EU Warned Microsoft source code not enough. Joe Barr writes "According to WindowsITPro, the Wall Street Journal has obtained a copy of a confidential memo sent from the EU to Microsoft last month which warned Microsoft that an offer of the source code would not be enough to satisfy the EU's requirements for interoperability. Open source advocates have blasted the offer because it lacks the knowledge required to interoperate with Windows behind its IP licensing, thus making it unusable."

RIM celebrates a victory in Germany. PDG writes "Looks like not everything is going bad for RIM as they have recently won another patent based lawsuit, but this time in Germany. At least they don't have all their legal eggs in one basket."

10th planet a reality. smooth wombat writes "After measuring twice and cutting once, a team of German astrophysicists at the University of Bonn led by Frank Bertoldi have concluded that the object located beyond the orbit of Pluto and named 2003 UB313, is 435 miles larger in diameter than Pluto. As a result, there will be increasing pressure on the IAU (International Astronomical Union) to classify this object as the 10th planet. From the article: '"It is now increasingly hard to justify calling Pluto a planet if UB313 is not also given this status," Bertoldi said.'"

Looking forward to the year 2001. ChristianNerds writes "Atari Magazine is serving up an article written in 1989 concerning what the next century would be like. From the article: 'A typical morning in the year 2001: You wake up, scan the custom newspaper that's spilling from your fax, walk into the living room. There you speak to a giant screen on the wall, part of which instantly becomes a high-quality TV monitor. When you leave for work, you carry a smart wallet, a computer the size of a credit card. When you come home, you slip on special eyeglasses and stroll through a completely artificial world.' They got a great deal right, like the spread of optical disk usage, the internet (ISDN), and parallel processing."

Comments

Artificial World

[biocute]

stroll through a completely artificial world

Must be wOw, SecondLife or The Sims.

Re:Artificial World

[TubeSteak]

Or working in a cubicle for 8 hrs a day.

that's a fairly artifical world if you ask me.

Re:10th planet

[kfg]

Yes, this would work, if you, for some reason, wanted to arbitrarily limit the number of Heliocentric planets to nine.

KFG

2001, information, and IP

[lilmouse]

It's funny how so many of the things fortold in 1989 aren't around today - but not because of technological limitations! Consider these:

• Desktop libraries - sure, we've got wikipedia, but not in 2001, and there is still *vast* amounts of stuff out there we can't have today. Why not? IP.
• Remote controls that let you automatically record a set of TV shows. Sure, there's Tivo...but even Tivo doesn't want you to be able to watch this stuff whenever you want! You're expected to pay money for it.

So many people dreamed of unfettered access to vast amounts of knowledge thanks to the internet... And we do have vast amount of access - but no authoritative, complete libraries at our fingertips. Companies have managed to lay claim to information, and it's no longer shared with everyone, but kept in chains.

Welcome to the 21st century!

--LWM

Re:2001, information, and IP

[RedWizzard]

Remote controls that let you automatically record a set of TV shows. Sure, there's Tivo...but even Tivo doesn't want you to be able to watch this stuff whenever you want!

MythTV certainly lets you do whatever you want with your recordings. Or do only commercial solutions count?

And we do have vast amount of access - but no authoritative, complete libraries at our fingertips.

We're probably there in terms of what many people in 1989 were thinking of. If you need to find out about something you can do that online whereas back then you'd have had to go to a library. As for authoritative, well that's a debatable point about regular libraries too - just because you read something in a book doesn't make it automatically true.

What we don't have is online access to most specific works. I can't look something up in "The Art of Computer Programming" online, for example. But even that situation is slowly improving.

Re:2001, information, and IP

[sbaker]

Many of their predictions are wrong because we realised we didn't WANT these things.

I could certainly rather easily build a system to print me a custom newspaper from the web - but who actually wants that. Most people's reaction would be "What a waste of Fax paper". If we want news - on any conceivable topic - at any time of day or night - it's right there on the web.

We could have voice-operated devices - but most people either feel embarassed by them - or they realise that the damned things won't work when there is a lot of other noise around - or that you'd say: "I don't think much of the format of this web site"...only to find their laptop saying "Format started....Format complete". Voice commands only work in the human world because we maintain eye contact - or have a lot of personal context surrounding a command. In a busy 'cube farm' type of office, having everyone issuing voice commands would *suck*. We have pretty good voice recognition - but we USE it mostly only for automated telephone response services and such.

We do have large screen TV's - but we prefer to reserve that screen for entertainment because it's got a big comfey sofa in front of it - and use a smaller screen with an ergonomic office chair, a keyboard and mouse for doing computing stuff. If one part of the family is watching TV, they don't want an inset view of me buying stuff on eBay distracting them in one corner of the screen.

The problem wasn't that they misjudged the technological capabilities of the year 2001 - they basically applied Moores Law kinds of prediction and nailed that pretty accurately. It was that they failed to think through the consequences of those technologies in terms of what people actually WANT out of their lives.

Re:10th planet

[mrchaotica]

If the Romans named one of their Gods after it (e.g. Pluto)

(Note: Under this system, the asteroids Juno, Pallas, Vesta, etc. would be reclassified as planets.)

But Pluto still wouldn't be, because it wasn't the Romans who named it.

In fact, I can't recall -- did the Romans know about any planets beyond Jupiter? It would be kind of silly to re-classify Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune as asteroids!

Predictions for 2001

[jonwil]

They got some right and some wrong.

Optical disks DID take off in a big way.
Digital libraries DID arrive (although google and wikipedia and the like appeared instead of the vision of optical disks full of information, mostly thanks to the .com boom and the broadband revolution.
HDTV is here on the tech side but the content providers are holding it back by instisting on locking it up with copy protection.

ISDN as a protocol didnt really take off, it got replaced by Fibre Optic links, DSL, Cable and Wireless. But the idea of a global interconnected network did arrive.

We still dont have the vision of a true "multimedia" center yet (people dont want to use their computer, email, internet etc in the living room, they want to do it in the office). Although devices like the X-Box with XBMC or MCE, Tivo and others are moving towards the idea of being able to have ALL your media in one place (although again the media corps want to lock it up with copy protection and stop all this)

Best quote from the article "The personal computer as we know it will persist longer in the home than in business," he predicts. "But by 1996-1997, they'll start to disappear. They'll become a low-end commodity like the typewriter". Like thats gonna happen.

Also "Movies will probably be squirted into the home through the telecommunications lines and compressed into eight seconds on the erasable disk in your living room". Yeah right, like hollywood is going to allow THAT to happen :)

Voice Recognition has never really taken off, probobly because its such a pain in the ass to use. (plus, in order for it to be accurate, you have to spend a large amount of time training it to recognize your voice).

The VCR isnt dead yet but the Tivo and friends are clearly gaining. If they werent so expensive, I would buy one just so I could record all the stuff I cant watch because I have to go to work.

Home automation by computer never quite made it, no idea why though. (cost?)

The musings on portability reflect PDAs like palms and pocket PCs perfectly. They didnt get the whole "students at school and uni will be using computers instead of pen and paper" thing right though (probobly because portable computers still arent affordable enough to give to students to use)

Virtual worlds (including the idea of eyeglass-type HUDs) never really took off because science hasnt yet overcome the motion sicness & headache problems that VR machines cause.

Laser printers never became a fixture in the home when the Ink Jet printer became the affordable option (dot-matrix printers seem to have gone the way of the dodo so they got that bit right)

The prediction of hypertext encyclopedias is dead on (look at Wikipedia as well as the cd-rom encyclopedias from companies like britannica and world book)

Seems like the area where they made the most wrong guesses is in the area of the "digital home" where everything is connected and talking to each other and where your TV set can flash an icon in the corner to let you know that important email you were waiting for has just arrived or where your fridge can tell the supermarket computer that you are out of milk and to put it on the shopping list.

Re:10th planet

[kfg]

The problem here is that the number of known small iceballs out there past Neptune is growing fairly rapidly

No, not really. That assumed figure for individual members of the Ort Cloud is about a trillion and has been for quite some time.

. . .and if we classify them all as planets. . .

But we already classify these as comets, because they're small iceballs.

. . . we'll no longer be able to teach elementary school children the list of planets.

Why, ummmmmmmm, on Earth, do you feel this is an important issue?

Personally, I think Pluto should be grandfathered in just because it was classified as a planet before its size was known . . .

This is not science and would set a bad example for elemetary school children.

. . .a comet if it has a "tail" pointing away from the primary

So Halley's isn't a comet, but will suddenly become one in about 70 years, but then it won't be again, but then. . .

Most comets never have tails.

. . .if a planet has a larger impact on its motion than the primary does, then it's a moon.

But now the Gas Giants each have a godzillion moons. We'll never be able to name them all, let alone teach a list of their names to elementary school children.

Classification isn't always so easy, because, you see, the object itself keeps insisting that it, as it is, is the only reality, not its classification.

As Mark Twain pondered, it's all very well for a naturalist to classify a bug, but how does he then go about explaining it to the bug?

KFG