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.

10th planet

[brian0918]

It seems like the IAU could pin down a definition of what a "planet" is by setting some cutoff based on the object's gravitational effect on the Sun, which fall off as 1/r^2, so that even though the object is slightly larger than Pluto, it is so much farther away from the Sun than Pluto that its gravitational influence is below some arbitrary cutoff.

Re:10th planet

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, this would probably only affect your balls if they were farthe away than Pluto. If that's the case, then you have greater things to worry about than if they're listed as planets.

Re:10th planet

[brian0918]

"Don't worry, this would probably only affect your balls if they were farthe away than Pluto. If that's the case, then you have greater things to worry about than if they're listed as planets."

I can see the book now... "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, Women have sent Men's Balls into a Trans-Neptunian Orbit"

Re:10th planet

[Petrushka]

I figure if you take UB313 as having a density of 6 kg/m^3 (very dense) and diameter 340,000 (largest estimate), and take its minimum distance from the sun (37 AU), it exerts roundabout the same gravitational force on the sun as an object of about 7 x 10^14 kg at a distance of 1 AU from the sun.

So by your definition Phobos and Deimos - at a distance of 1.3 to 1.7 AU from the sun - would both be planets.

In case anyone isn't aware, Phobos and Deimos are really small ...

Re:10th planet

[CharlesDonHall]

I think we should just decide based on the name.

If the Romans named one of their Gods after it (e.g. Pluto), then it's a planet. If it's named after a person (Hale-Bopp) then it's a comet. If the name is just some random string of letters (UB313) then it's an asteroid.

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

Re:10th planet

[kfg]

How does Pluto compare to Phobos and Deimos?

How would you like to walk around an equator in less than an hour?

Don't walk too fast though, you might achieve orbital velocity, or even escape if you tried to jog.

KFG

Re:10th planet

[n54]

Interesting idea but as other replies have pointed out it would need more details and some sort of excuse for rogue planets.

Personally I'm not overly concerned about the classification debate but privately I view any object with large enough mass to compress itself by gravity into a spheroid shape as a planet unless it orbits another such planet in which case I see it as a moon. Yes that means Ceres is a planet imo and that Pluto/Charon is a double moon with two additional moons P1 & P2... lol at least the discussion should show people how diverse our solar system is :)

If one takes spheroid shape as the starting point one can still continue the debate to ones hearts delight by arguing over subgroups such as "miniature planets" and what should be the criteria for each subgroup.

Re:10th planet

[jonadab]

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

The problem here is that the number of known small iceballs out there past Neptune is growing fairly rapidly, and if we classify them all as planets, we'll no longer be able to teach elementary school children the list of planets.

Personally, I think Pluto should be grandfathered in just because it was classified as a planet before its size was known, but apart from Pluto anything with less than about 5% of Earth's mass should be considered a "minor planet" or "planetoid" if it's roughly spherical, a comet if it has a "tail" pointing away from the primary more than about twice its diameter in the other direction (at periapsis), or an asteroid (or meteoroid, or speck of dust if it's really small). This is all assuming that the bulk of its acceleration relative to the rest of the system is due to the gravitational pull of a primary; if a planet has a larger impact on its motion than the primary does, then it's a moon. (That leaves the definition of "primary" to be sorted out later, but for the purposes of the solar system the Sun is obviously the only primary.)

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

Re:10th planet

[cpt kangarooski]

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.

Well that's why we need the space program: so that someday we can get out there and move, alter, and demolish various bodies until the Solar System conforms to what we think it ought to be.

Re:10th planet

[sbaker]

Astronomers and their ilk simply need to abandon terms like 'planet', 'moon' and possibly even 'star' and invent new words with precise meanings. It's not uncommon to have to do this in science when the meaning of old words becomes impossibly difficult to deal with.

Non-scientists have words like 'butterfly' and 'moth' - which have no clear scientific distinction - we also make distinctions where there are none. In common parlance, we orbit a "Sun" - not a "Star". Stars are little dots in the sky - but a sun is a huge nearby thing. ...until we imagine ourselves ourselves are close by a distant star - when we'll want to call it a 'Sun' again. When we sit on a sunny day on some extrasolar planet, we'll still say "What a nice day it is, the sun is shining"...no matter how much the astronomers complain about it.

So scientific rigor can only be satisfied by making new words with rigerous definitions - rather than trying to pin down arbitary non-scientific historical usage of existing words.

If they allow new solar-orbiting bodies to be called planets then whatever cutoff they choose will be utterly arbitary. If they define Pluto to not be a planet then a few billion people will have learned the wrong thing in school and a similar number of books will now be *WRONG* for no other reason than we decided to make them wrong. You can't easily change what people believe to be a fact - and you certainly can't re-publish a billion text books.

So: Pluto is a "Planet" because it always was one. Astronomers should not care a damn about whether the 10th 'thing' is a planet or not because the word 'planet' and 'asteroid' carry about as much distinction as 'butterfly' and 'moth' or 'sun' and 'star'.

They just need new words.

We can do this - and it's easier than arguing about definitions of commonplace words that do not have (and never have had) a formal definition.

Re:10th planet

[jschrod]

Now you just have to answer the question if Xena (the originally proposed name) is a goddess, a person, or a random string of letters... There are arguments for each of them. :-)

Yes, where IS my flying car?

[ursabear]

I was promised a flying car, dangit!

It is a good thing, however that not all predictions come true.

If by 2008 we'll be finally using IPv6

[WillAffleckUW]

I guess I can quit holding my breath.

I remember last century wondering if IPv6 would ever get implemented.

Guess a few billion Chinese with email addresses and IP-enabled devices probably forced the issue, huh? That plus the fact that my fridge, toaster, TV, computers, and microwave oven all have IP addresses ...

Re:If by 2008 we'll be finally using IPv6

[Luban Doyle]

Actually the Chinese are using IPv6 in quite a few places already. We aren't because od CIDRing and keeping machines behind firewalls and routers which allow you to use addresses that aren't used/routable on the Internet (10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x to 172.32.x.x and 192.168.x.x)

IPv6

[wesw02]

I my self have not yet messed with IPv6, but I am curious if anyone knows of or works for a business that is currently using IPv6, if so what issues are you having with it?

Looking forward to the Year 2000 slashback

[WillAffleckUW]

I notice that they talk about how we'll all be using ISDN.

Maybe I should turn off the Gigapop Internet we use at the UW, huh?

Re:Looking forward to the Year 2000 slashback

[Detritus]

ISDN was a worthwhile technology, putting a low-latency multiplexed digital communications link on existing copper wiring. The problem, at least in the USA, was how it was marketed, priced, and promoted by the telephone companies. The telephone companies wanted to push centrex and the "intelligent" circuit-switched network. They had no interest in selling cheap packet-switched data links to individuals and small businesses. They hate the concept of the dumb network. There's no great profit to be made running a dumb network.

Wow. It did happen.

[Teresh]

"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."

I get custom RSS feeds, that pretty much counts as a custom newspaper for me. I've seen voice-controlled switches and HDTVs, wouldn't surprise me that some people have connected the two. American Express makes Blue, a credit card that is quite really a computer. I haven't seen the virtual world like described, but most MMORPGs would count if your monitor is big enough.

Wow. I never thought predictions of the new millennium would be accurate. Turns out they were mostly right. :O

2001: A web oddysey

[Spy der Mann]

The prediction guys aren't quite wrong. they just got some ideas 10 or 20 years ahead.

Voice recognition: Check.
E-paper on the wall: Kinda, but the technology's there.
3-D glasses: Well um...

Vast amounts of information: "With instant referencing of thousands of volumes of information, computing will be like working with an army of electronic elves, all ready to fetch in a flash any tidbit you like."

They got it half right... had they thought about the internet, they might have figured about Google and Wikipedia. No, Encarta doesn't count. It sucks :P

"It'll also allow you to store audio and video". DivX - check :)
""You'll be able to capture segments of a show you like, cut them out, and put them in a video report for school."
TiVo is here :) but companies' interests kinda screwed that up. However, Google video search is here, too :)

Hmmm. Pretty interesting.

Re:2001: A web oddysey

[Anonymous Coward]

>""You'll be able to capture segments of a show you like, cut them out, and put them in a video report for school."

Ha! And you'll get hit with an IP lawsuit the very next day... (if it takes then even *that* long).

Re:2001: A web oddysey

[mrchaotica]

Not mutinous; just stupid. Come to think of it, that would make a great tagline:

"Google Search: Like an army of elves -- just really, really stupid ones."

Re:2001: A web oddysey

[AoT]

That's Gnu/Gnomes to you!

Wait just a minute

[SeanTobin]

From TFA:

McBride, however, disagreed, saying litigation doesn't benefit artists.

"Litigation is not 'artist development,'" McBride said. "Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love. The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists' best interests."

So now I'm supposed to cheer for someone named McBride?

Uhhh, not quite so easy.

[jd]

It would mean they'd have to reclassify all of the planets without stars for the same reason. And nobody is going to seriously suggest that a gas ball 100s of times the size of Jupiter is an asteroid or a comet. For a start, the press would crucify them.

It would be reasonable to define a planet in terms of composition and structure (and I've argued that case before) - the problem with that is that you'd need to define something as an unknown until you actually did enough of a geological survey to determine those things. I'm not sure NASA or the ESA would object too loudly, provided they got the funding. Missions like that make for great photo ops, as well as good science. Astronomers would likely complain, though, as it would mean they couldn't prove anything (other than gas giants) were planets.

Actually, when you get right down to it, NASA and the ESA have more money and more political clout than the IAU, so maybe that would actually be practical to enforce.

Re:Uhhh, not quite so easy.

[Almost-Retired]

And nobody is going to seriously suggest that a gas ball 100s of times the size of Jupiter is an asteroid or a comet.

I suggest you analyze that statement better, a lot better. Jupiter is now large enough that one could say it missed being a star in its own right by only 3 or 4 of its masses. 100 times more massive and this system would have been a binary system visible from 5% of the way across the visible universe by the likes of Hubble. In fact I would expect, since that would still make it smaller than our own star, the sun, it would be a quite long lived binary and be lighting up our night sky after 5 billion years a heck of a lot brighter than its current albedo does...

I think the question then would have to be, would life have developed on this planet if it had a second, albeit dimmer, sun to impart energy to it in the varying amounts resulting from the interplay of orbits, or would that increased Jovian mass have perturbed the orbits of the rest of the planets such that most of them were eventually ejected long before a stable environment that lead to life had been achieved?

It would be an interesting whatif to work out by someone with experience in orbital mechanics, to simulate both the environment and the orbital effects of a 100 times more massive Jupiter that just happened to fire up its internal fusion fires on the rest of this system over the last 5 billion years.

Interesting indeed.

--
Cheers, Gene

OK, had to be said

[real gumby]

1989 is calling. They want their 2001 back.

Re:from the cnn article on pluto's successor

[Lithgon]

435 miles larger in uselessness.

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

[Guspaz]

They DID get a surprising amount correct, though. The big thing they missed out on is the internet (and the ubiquity of it). It supplants a lot of their other predictions.

Their pridictions about optical storage going up 50x in size from 656MB was a bit off. By 2001, I think we only had DVD-RW, a mere ~15x increase. By 2006, though, we've got 50GB BluRay rewritables, a 78x increase. So they were just off by a few years.

Another interesting thing they got right was CD-ROMs being able to store higher quality sound than audio CDs. A CD-ROM today can store 24-bit 96khz 5.1 audio with a greater playing time than a similar audio CD. So the quality increase is there too (~1.2 megabits is a LOT of bits to work with for compressed digital audio), and the technology to do so was around in 2001 (DVDs, for example, use compressed 24-bit audio).

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:NTP just lost a BIG one.

[SpaceLifeForm]

USDOJ gets involved, Stout promises reversal.

My problems aren't technical

[numbski]

My problem with IPv6 is fiscal. I go to ARIN and want to deploy a community wireless network using all IPv6. They want to charge me just as much for IPv6 addresses as they're charging for IPv4. What's worse, is that if I do use IPv6, I still have to pay for IPv4 addresses so that I can translate for the rest of the world, as IPv6 addresses can easily go to a IPv4 subnet, but the reverse is not true, I have to do some form of translation. :\

So basically ICANN is causing the slowed adoption themselves. It's either $1200/yr for IPv4, or $2400/yr for IPv6. Take a wild guess what I'll wind up doing despite wanting to use IPv6. :(

Re:My problems aren't technical

[schon]

I go to ARIN and want to deploy a community wireless network using all IPv6. They want to charge me just as much for IPv6 addresses as they're charging for IPv4.

I call bullshit.

From the link:

Organizations that are General Members in good standing prior to requesting an initial IPv6 allocation are not charged IPv6 registration fees. Annual renewal fees for IPv6 allocations are also waived for General Members in good standing. ARIN will continue to waive these fees as long as the organization remains a General Member in good standing at the time of renewal, up until Dec. 31, 2006.

Also, if you do have to pay, that page shows that IPV6 addresses are less expensive than IPV4, because the blocks are larger. An IPV4 /21 (2048 addresses) costs the same amount as an IPV6 /48 (1.2e24 addresses)

Sorry: if potato-shaped things can't be planets...

[tlambert]

Sorry: if potato-shaped things can't be planets...

Then we physicists are in a lot of trouble: the only thing we ever teach students to calculate moments of inertia on are rigid bodies. And, as any physicist knows, "a general rigid body is a potato-shaped object, able to undergo rotational and translational motion. It may be considered to be assembled out of a large number of point masses."

The only way any of these calculations make sense for planets is if we assume planets are also potato-shaped.

We can only thank God the Michelson-Morley experiment proved once and for all that the Earth was at the center of the universe by demonstrating that an Earth-based experment observed no drift through the luminiferous aether, or we'd all be in deep doo-doo...

-- Terry

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.

I don't believe it!

[saskboy]

I can't understand how Atari missed predicting Duke Nukem Forever!

And they said nothing about a 10th planet being on the faxed paper too.

eyedb

[lovebyte]

On the subject of open sourcing database management system, I would like to mention that eyedb, an OODBMS, has just been released under the LGPL. (I know the main author).