You should go ahead and point the domain to something funny and totally disgusting (I'm sure you can think of something.) Maybe after it's "tainted" they won't want it back quite as bad.
OK, so revenge is sweet (and juvenile). Seriously, though, was it Network Solutions who called you, or one of the staff of the web site? If its the web site owner, I'd ask them why they would let the domain fee go unpaid, and thus expire, if they really wanted to keep it.
I'd also tell them that, in the real world, with grown-ups and stuff, that if they don't pay their mortgage, for instance, that the bank then looks for other people who may be interested in owning a home. They even have a special word for it, called foreclosure. Neat, huh?
You didn't do anything wrong, the domain owners were just negligent in renewing their domain. You might be something of an opportunist, perhaps, but what you did was legal, as far as I know.
Anyways, good luck. Hopefully people will learn about maintaining their domains at some point.
I have a 675, and it's sweet! If anybody else out there is trying to decide between the two, take heed; despite it's non-descript, user-friendly look, the 675 is a platform-agnostic, fully configurable, booty-shakin' router.
I've had as many as 7 machines running on mine, with nary a glitch (after spending a few weeks earning the Cisco Broadband Operating System it is easy to configure.) It also allows you to route external port requests directly to an internal IP (or to a variety of IPs), giving you the ability (shhhh!) to offer different Interrnet services on discrete ports.
I'm sorry I can't offer any advice for the 605; the only one I configured had trouble running even on a Windows box. Hopefully somebody out there is busy reverse engineering the drivers for the *nixes.
So, you don't care that nVidia used code from an independant developer, made that code available to you, without telling you (or Ralph for that matter) that, now, you have a legal right to their code.
You don't care, because as long as you get your 100 frames per second in Q3A, who cares who else gets screwed, right?
If you don't see what's wrong with this picture, you're not looking hard enough. If Microsoft did this, there would have been a dozen or more lawsuits filed this morning, and you know it.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
So, if Ralph isn't responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties (e.g. nVidia) to the GPL, who is?!?
I am not saying that Ralph should demand "all sorts of concessions" from nVidia; however, they are under a legal obligation to follow the License, whether Ralph chooses to enforce it or not. The fact is, Ralph isn't the only person involved in this situation, and the License serves not only to protect the interests of the programmers, but to protect the interests of the users of the software.
You are right, the whole community has not been harmed by this; just those with nVidia cards. Anyone who downloaded those drivers have now been harmed by nVidia's carelessness. First, many of them bought cards based on the assumption that nVidia would continue to support Open Source. In retrospect, this was obviously a mistake.
Then, they were misled into thinking that these new binaries were closed-source, 100% nVidia-written drivers, which would have been just fine, except...this turns out to be patently false as well.
Finally, when the users went to the site for updated drivers, they were not informed, as the GPL requires, that they are at that point entitled to the source code to the software they are using on their own hardware! Therefore, the number of people harmed by this is far greater than a single programmer.
Now, whether or not Ralph chooses to pursue the misappropriation of his work, you are correct; it is his own choice. But it was also his choice to give up some of the control he has over his source code, when he released it under the GPL.
The License serves to protect software end users, not just Ralph. If the community doesn't care enough to enforce it, the GPL will just be the punchline to a stupid hippie joke. I don't want that to happen! Do you?
If nVidia persists in using this code, and therefore continue to profit from its usage, they should now be asked to make concessions of some kind.
"We'll fix it on the next release" is a nice sentiment, but they have been infringing on Ralph Metzler's rights, and are currently violating the GPL, and will continue to do so until the next release, whenever nVidia decides that will be.
If nVidia really wants to make this right, they should either
a. take down the offending drivers from their site today, and go back to the last revision or drivers without the offending code, or
b. they should be asked to make the appropriate royalty payments to either Ralph Metzler and/or the Open Source community.
If a large company is caught infringing on the patents of another large company, they are usually asked to pay a licensing fee. This situation should be no different.
If we, as the Open Source community, decide not to pursue nVidia's immediate resolution of this, and persist instead in being "polite" instead of protecting our rights, we will find it infinitely harder to enforce our licenses in the future.
It may have an IR port that connects to a USB docking station, that'd be my best guess at least.
Infrared seems like it will be a good enough technology for the smaller devices. I know it hasn't been getting much use in notebook computers, mainly because of the slow transfer rate (115kbps?), but for credit-card sized devices with small bandwidth requirements, IR might be key.
Does anyone know of any USB Infrared ports? That may be something worth checking out.
Wow, sounds like Blizzard is pulling out the big guns for this one. 100K users for the beta? lol...
A lot of software houses would be thrilled to see that many total users of their products...
On the other hand, I guess it serves as a good promo for those people who normally wouldn't care too much about the games ancient (in the gaming world at least) engine. If this is another 640X480 16-bit three-quarter-view masterpiece, they're gonna have a teensy bit harder time selling to those people with shiny new GeForce2s or Voodoo5s.
Now, I can see them trying to test the Diablo II code for stability with that many users, but I'd say it's been long enought that they should already have some statistics about whether or not Battle.net is stable. They've been supporting thousands of simultaneous connects with Starcraft, etc, for a long, long time. Anybody know why they'd do this?
Why do we necessarily need to have a journaling file system for flash memory? I had thought that journaling was used as a failsafe mechanism to safeguard against power outages or disk crashes.
I was never of the opinion that poor l'il Kevin was innocent as a spring daisy. He obviously was not.
However, I will say that a country that starts telling people, even convicted criminals, that they cannot speak in public is an order of magnitude closer to hell than it should be.
In short, this is the most bogus thing I've heard all week. The judge should crawl back into whatever stinkhole they grow fascists in these days, and keep her slimy little sadistic punishments for something useful...like, er... the DOJ vs Microsoft case.
True, most sites won't need that kind of capacity. But as soon as you start to talk about large site designs, you need to take into account the possibility that the design you implement may be in place for years, and may serve a much larger community than you had initially anticipated.
Do you think Taco thought he'd have 250,000+ users by mid-2000 when he built Slashdot? Maybe that's why the tarball took so long. =P
Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?
Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?
Phillip:
I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html .
The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).
The implication here is ominous to me, in that he seems to be implying that someone interested in building a community oriented site shouldn't even bother trying to use an Open Source RDBMS.
I know that what he says is true about MySQL (for lack of transaction support, and the fact that it isn't truly Free) and PostgreSQL isn't yet 100% SQL2-compliant, but is it possible that
a. One of these could be adapted to be more fitting for these types of applications? or,
b. Borland/Inprise Interbase 6.0 could be appropriate?
It is fully GPL'ed, fully SQL2-compliant, and very fully-featured compared to the alternatives. It is somewhat slower than PostgreSQL (and much slower than MySQL, of course) with more simultaneous connections, but if we could garner enough support from the Open Source community to build a decent threading mechanism, I think it could easily beat PostgreSQL in the long run. It woulde be incredibly useful to have an Open Source alternative to Oracle.
There are other features that would probably take some time to hack together to make Interbase 6.0 competitive with Oracle, but if everybody just takes Phillip's advice (no offense, Phillip, I agree with 95% of what you say) instead of helping to develop alternative tools, we will never have an option at all.
Sounds like a great idea! It would be cool if they would also put up ISO's of miscellaneous other Open Source/free speech/free beer discs.
For instance, the BeOS Personal Edition is great, but the downloads from Be are installable files meant for Linux or Windows machines. There is an ISO running around somewhere that lets you do a standalone install of BeOS on it's own drive, but I looked for it tonight and couldn't find it.
Anyways, if they can afford the server space and bandwidth, it'd be really helpful to have an ISO repository for not just Linux and *BSD distros, but some of the other items available to the Open Source community as well. I love the 'net, but sometimes I like to burn disks so I don't have to keep downloading the same 300 MB files each time. =P
True 'nuff; I didn't seee anything about THAT, but if it's true that sucks. They should leave indie programmers alone and stick to harassing other large companies. =P
I've always been curious what kind of horsepower you need to render OpenGL stuff quickly; I love the screenshots but the frame rates been really slow for me.
I'd love to see OpenGL kick Direct3d's ass, so hopefully it will be more commonly used now that the machines are getting good enough!
If I had to pick from the new crop of chips, I guess I'd choose the ones that stay crunchy longest.
Actually, I don't think I'd buy any of the new cards for a few months at the very least, just to see what shakes out when they actually ship. I think it's foolish to buy hardware based solely on a bunch of reviews/benchmarks of beta versions of the cards, and/or reality-impaired press releases.
For sheer geek factor, I'd pick the Voodoo5 6000, which needs its own external power supply.
If you were just shootin' for the best graphics, it looks like nVidia has the best choice, at least when the GeForce2 comes out.
Frankly, ATI would really shock me if their card turned out to be any good. I've seen their top-of-the-line cards before, and they just ain't that great.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, anybody know where I can get the parts to build one of these bad boys?
Actually, maybe I can convince my wife; "awww, honey, it's just so key-yoooot! Lookit the dainty li'l rubber feet!"
Er, maybe somebody should just point me to the parts before my head blows up.
OK, so revenge is sweet (and juvenile). Seriously, though, was it Network Solutions who called you, or one of the staff of the web site? If its the web site owner, I'd ask them why they would let the domain fee go unpaid, and thus expire, if they really wanted to keep it.
I'd also tell them that, in the real world, with grown-ups and stuff, that if they don't pay their mortgage, for instance, that the bank then looks for other people who may be interested in owning a home. They even have a special word for it, called foreclosure. Neat, huh?
You didn't do anything wrong, the domain owners were just negligent in renewing their domain. You might be something of an opportunist, perhaps, but what you did was legal, as far as I know.
Anyways, good luck. Hopefully people will learn about maintaining their domains at some point.
- It should be "its', not "it's"
Thank you.should be "learning", not "earning"
and by "Windows box", I actually meant, "Tux ROOLZ!"
I've had as many as 7 machines running on mine, with nary a glitch (after spending a few weeks earning the Cisco Broadband Operating System it is easy to configure.) It also allows you to route external port requests directly to an internal IP (or to a variety of IPs), giving you the ability (shhhh!) to offer different Interrnet services on discrete ports.
I'm sorry I can't offer any advice for the 605; the only one I configured had trouble running even on a Windows box. Hopefully somebody out there is busy reverse engineering the drivers for the *nixes.
You don't care, because as long as you get your 100 frames per second in Q3A, who cares who else gets screwed, right?
If you don't see what's wrong with this picture, you're not looking hard enough. If Microsoft did this, there would have been a dozen or more lawsuits filed this morning, and you know it.
So, if Ralph isn't responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties (e.g. nVidia) to the GPL, who is?!?
I am not saying that Ralph should demand "all sorts of concessions" from nVidia; however, they are under a legal obligation to follow the License, whether Ralph chooses to enforce it or not. The fact is, Ralph isn't the only person involved in this situation, and the License serves not only to protect the interests of the programmers, but to protect the interests of the users of the software.
You are right, the whole community has not been harmed by this; just those with nVidia cards. Anyone who downloaded those drivers have now been harmed by nVidia's carelessness. First, many of them bought cards based on the assumption that nVidia would continue to support Open Source. In retrospect, this was obviously a mistake.
Then, they were misled into thinking that these new binaries were closed-source, 100% nVidia-written drivers, which would have been just fine, except...this turns out to be patently false as well.
Finally, when the users went to the site for updated drivers, they were not informed, as the GPL requires, that they are at that point entitled to the source code to the software they are using on their own hardware! Therefore, the number of people harmed by this is far greater than a single programmer.
Now, whether or not Ralph chooses to pursue the misappropriation of his work, you are correct; it is his own choice. But it was also his choice to give up some of the control he has over his source code, when he released it under the GPL.
The License serves to protect software end users, not just Ralph. If the community doesn't care enough to enforce it, the GPL will just be the punchline to a stupid hippie joke. I don't want that to happen! Do you?
"We'll fix it on the next release" is a nice sentiment, but they have been infringing on Ralph Metzler's rights, and are currently violating the GPL, and will continue to do so until the next release, whenever nVidia decides that will be.
If nVidia really wants to make this right, they should either
- a. take down the offending drivers from their site today, and go back to the last revision or drivers without the offending code, or
If a large company is caught infringing on the patents of another large company, they are usually asked to pay a licensing fee. This situation should be no different.b. they should be asked to make the appropriate royalty payments to either Ralph Metzler and/or the Open Source community.
If we, as the Open Source community, decide not to pursue nVidia's immediate resolution of this, and persist instead in being "polite" instead of protecting our rights, we will find it infinitely harder to enforce our licenses in the future.
=P
Infrared seems like it will be a good enough technology for the smaller devices. I know it hasn't been getting much use in notebook computers, mainly because of the slow transfer rate (115kbps?), but for credit-card sized devices with small bandwidth requirements, IR might be key.
Does anyone know of any USB Infrared ports? That may be something worth checking out.
lol
Actually, that's kind of a good idea...hmmm...
Too bad nothing else Orson Scott Card did compares favorably to Ender's Game. Hopefully the new sequel will be different...
A lot of software houses would be thrilled to see that many total users of their products...
On the other hand, I guess it serves as a good promo for those people who normally wouldn't care too much about the games ancient (in the gaming world at least) engine. If this is another 640X480 16-bit three-quarter-view masterpiece, they're gonna have a teensy bit harder time selling to those people with shiny new GeForce2s or Voodoo5s.
Now, I can see them trying to test the Diablo II code for stability with that many users, but I'd say it's been long enought that they should already have some statistics about whether or not Battle.net is stable. They've been supporting thousands of simultaneous connects with Starcraft, etc, for a long, long time. Anybody know why they'd do this?
It's cool, I just don't know what it's for!
=P
Why do I care? Well, because, I don't see IBM being able to squeeze their 340 MB Microdrive into a Smartmedia form factor anytime soon.
Other than that, what a cool project! This is the stuff Slashdot outta have more of!
However, I will say that a country that starts telling people, even convicted criminals, that they cannot speak in public is an order of magnitude closer to hell than it should be.
In short, this is the most bogus thing I've heard all week. The judge should crawl back into whatever stinkhole they grow fascists in these days, and keep her slimy little sadistic punishments for something useful...like, er... the DOJ vs Microsoft case.
=P
Do you think Taco thought he'd have 250,000+ users by mid-2000 when he built Slashdot? Maybe that's why the tarball took so long. =P
Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?
Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?
Phillip:
I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html .
The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).
The implication here is ominous to me, in that he seems to be implying that someone interested in building a community oriented site shouldn't even bother trying to use an Open Source RDBMS.
I know that what he says is true about MySQL (for lack of transaction support, and the fact that it isn't truly Free) and PostgreSQL isn't yet 100% SQL2-compliant, but is it possible that
b. Borland/Inprise Interbase 6.0 could be appropriate?
It is fully GPL'ed, fully SQL2-compliant, and very fully-featured compared to the alternatives. It is somewhat slower than PostgreSQL (and much slower than MySQL, of course) with more simultaneous connections, but if we could garner enough support from the Open Source community to build a decent threading mechanism, I think it could easily beat PostgreSQL in the long run. It woulde be incredibly useful to have an Open Source alternative to Oracle.
There are other features that would probably take some time to hack together to make Interbase 6.0 competitive with Oracle, but if everybody just takes Phillip's advice (no offense, Phillip, I agree with 95% of what you say) instead of helping to develop alternative tools, we will never have an option at all.
Just my two cents.
For instance, the BeOS Personal Edition is great, but the downloads from Be are installable files meant for Linux or Windows machines. There is an ISO running around somewhere that lets you do a standalone install of BeOS on it's own drive, but I looked for it tonight and couldn't find it.
Anyways, if they can afford the server space and bandwidth, it'd be really helpful to have an ISO repository for not just Linux and *BSD distros, but some of the other items available to the Open Source community as well. I love the 'net, but sometimes I like to burn disks so I don't have to keep downloading the same 300 MB files each time. =P
Nice work, guys!
I've always been curious what kind of horsepower you need to render OpenGL stuff quickly; I love the screenshots but the frame rates been really slow for me.
I'd love to see OpenGL kick Direct3d's ass, so hopefully it will be more commonly used now that the machines are getting good enough!
Actually, I don't think I'd buy any of the new cards for a few months at the very least, just to see what shakes out when they actually ship. I think it's foolish to buy hardware based solely on a bunch of reviews/benchmarks of beta versions of the cards, and/or reality-impaired press releases.
For sheer geek factor, I'd pick the Voodoo5 6000, which needs its own external power supply.
If you were just shootin' for the best graphics, it looks like nVidia has the best choice, at least when the GeForce2 comes out.
Frankly, ATI would really shock me if their card turned out to be any good. I've seen their top-of-the-line cards before, and they just ain't that great.