Note that sometimes there is a good reason for pulling doors to get out: if the door opens on a frenquently circulated area then pushing it to get out might generate accidents.
If current IP laws applied when Microsoft sold a license to "their" OS to IBM, they would not have been able to do so.
In fact, if current IP laws applied then like they apply today, some of us would still be using VisiCalc on a CP/M computer, but most of us would only dream of what people are doing now in the digital world.
Microsoft success was built entirely upon the lack of laws and care to protect the lawyers^Winventors of common computing concepts such as the operating system, the graphical interface, the software spreadsheet and the word processor.
By calling IP system critics communists, Bill is demonstrating capitalism is not protecting freedom anymore. It is very close to communism propaganda. He should get blacklisted fast.
Charisma/attractiveness is indeed one way for an actor to get success. And part of this feature is somewhat related to their talent (eg: many comedians with astonishing physique leave a very short-lived success story).
However, I believe that one of the most underrated way to success in your point is the social networking in Hollywood. Many movie people are in fact successful because they know or are related to someone powerful in the industry. This acquaintance provides them with leveraging power inside studios.
This power sometimes turns into playing a part in blockbusters. Blockbusters success is very weakly related with objective quality, but is marketing dollars more than anything else. Once they are popularised by these, movie people can enjoy a successful life that has nothing to do with the precarious position that is the life of a doctor or a teacher.
As a frenchman who did not vote for Chirac (the French president) and who will not vote for him or his party in any of the foreseable elections, you awaken my curiosity.
Why exactly do "[The US citizens] (by and large) hate the French president"?
I, for one, care. Not that I would change my vote for it, but it still matters for me to understand your reasons.
I'm nit-picking, but then so are you. Non-programmers (ie the vast majority of computer users) simply cannot modify their applications at source-level. They lack the required skill, and most likely the time (and perhaps even ability) to acquire it, too.
Did it occur to you that opening the source code provided users with multiple alternatives when facing the need to modify/fix it?
Ask the developer to modify/fix it.
Fix/modify it themselves.
Ask someone else to fix/modify it.
Of these three options, only one is available in closed source software.
Years of email sit in my hard drive. I won't move them to Google, even though I work for an ISP and thus enjoy 100Mbps to our peering and transit neighbours.
In fact, the following did not produce a result until after a few minutes:
The BBC advertising budget is not at risk here. Google Adwords pricing lets you set a daily budget and a cost per click.
I also bet Google would be able to detect an automated hitting on those links and prevent it.
Commercial certificates can be found for much less nowdays (check this CA for example). Anti-spam organisations can put up their own free CA if need be: this would scale as well or better than a generalised DomainKeys.
When I read about Yahoo's anti-forgery solution, TLS striked me as a more standard compliant one as well as a more mature security measure. You do not need to review new code, it is already there for current MTAs.
SMTP transaction encryption is generally not regarded as a bad thing.
A long time ago, when Microsoft was but a small software company selling a variation of BASIC to OS developpers, UNIX vendors were already fighting each others with copyrights, patents and other IP stuff. I bet SCO is the only UNIX vendor (left?) still stuck in the eighties, that's all.
That makes them sort of the Austin Powers of UNIX, not James Bond.
I work for a medium-small ISP in FR. We host around 6500 domains and 150k mailboxes.
Our abuse department is manned by one person 365 days a year, a bunch of scripts, a largish database integrated with our customers database, and lots of red tape. This person calls our customers when they are the source of spam or other non UCE conforming use of our network (including running an open-relay). He explains the situation politely and asks the customer to conform to the policy written in the contract. If the customer does not comply after the first warning, he must look for another ISP to do business with, for we send him an official letter (with official receipt acknowledgement)each time we interact with him.
All in all, given our company size, a bit over 1% of our costs are burnt by our abuse department. Needless to say, we relay these costs to our customers, as do most of our competitors.
This is only half of the cost of spam from our point of view. Our mail servers farm is sized in order to perform well even with 40% of the mail being spam. These are larger human and hardware costs associated with spam as well (though more diluted and thus difficult to pinpoint).
Spam costs people and companies a lot of money, we feel the need for the Internet mail system to be reengineered in order for the cost of sending email to become high enough so that spammers don't get away with their offense.
For nitpickers, plasma image quality is not as good as most front projectors (things like color variation and snow comes up regularly for the trained eye).
You can get arguarbly the best picture quality with second hand 8" or 9" CRT projectors (Nec and Barcovision) which still cost less than 10 plasma displays. These are industrial-grade projectors built to last forever (you can experience a small degradation of the CRTs during their lifetime but nothing serious enough to imply an exchange if used properly). These projectors are designed to project on cinema-sized screens (20' and more, and yes we're talking feet here) in any resolution up-to 1600x1200 (thus including 1080p full HDTV resolution). Sure, installing a cinema sized screen is not in the same ballpark as getting a 42" Plasma screen but you can project to a 42" screen if you really want to.
You can get impressive contrast ratio with consumer priced DLP projectors and you won't need a totally black room.
Plasma technology is not quite tried and is known to degrade with time. Some have experienced failure a couple of years after being bought. The gas sometimes leak over the time, and the plasma cells can wear off totally. Check out the warranty, we're not exactly talking about buying a $500 bulb here. I won't risk being hosed for $10,000 myself.
My projector projects to a mere 100" wide (115" diagonal) 16:9 screen and I'm happy with the image displayed on the wall of my living room thank you very much. Last time I checked it was way better than anything displayed on a plasma (granted I only watch DVDs coming from my progressive scan DVD player and play video games from time to time -- I live in a country without access to HDTV broadcasts, yet).
Verant and Mythic just need to look at Turbine handling of Asheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2.
Integrating the map and the radar into the client answers most of SEQ and Excalibur users needs.
Moreover, Turbine handling of plugins clearly shows that they consider their player base mature enough to participate in the development of their world.
To **COPY** and **PIRATE** a DVD, you just duplicate it bit-by-bit. You **DO NOT** use DeCSS to decrypt it first, or it will not even work on many DVD players.
I suspect the MPAA and other proponents of CSS have not been pushing laws and technical protection schemes only to protect the content of DVD to be copied by industrial means. CSS was never intended to protect the studios from plain pirates (who have been copying vynils, tapes, VHS, CDs "bit-for-bit" since the creation of these media). The studios know everything about them, you can rest assured that they know CSS is not a solution to industrial piracy.
CSS was designed not to protect the studios from tens or hundreds of industrial pirates making thousands of copies. CSS was designed to protect them against millions of consumers broadcasting any digital media.
I assume they tried to foresee what could happen to their products in the future. They guessed that, maybe five years from now, every consumer could have an uncontrolled device with enough bandwidth and processing power to read Mpeg2 and AC-3 bitstreams over the net. They also believe that these very same consumers will have enough bandwidth to redistribute (echo) these bitstreams to tens of their friends (and I'm not even taking Usenet or P2P into account).
The nightmare of the studios is that the copyright could disapear, simply because the copy will disapear. In the future, you won't need to get a physical copy of some digital content to be able to watch or hear it. Everything will be broadcast, thus transient.
It makes sense then, to try and protect the ways the content of a DVD can be read. The CSS gives them the power to control which device (a DVD player, a HDTV, a cable decoder) can read a given bitstream and when and where in the world (by way of regioning) can one play a piece of digital content. This looks to them as a way to solve the possible future nightmare.
Yes, the studios are greedily buying their survival from corrupted democracies and anyone can guess that the next step will preclude us to produce our own content and broadcast it to our friends without their blessing, but frankly there is nothing illogical in this behavior.
The alternative (not protecting bitstreams DVDs from redistribution) would put Mickey Mouse royalties at stake.
Anti-spam law would improve on the security of Internet as a whole.
Spamming is not considered an offense in most US states, in federal law, as well as in most other countries.
However, the implication of spamming is that it can cripple a single Internet host today and could cripple the whole Internet tomorrow.
Not only is spamming content often dubious, but the act of spamming should be regarded as an attempt of denial of service.
United States attitude regarding spam is an example for other countries to follow. By making it an offense, and by convicting spammers, we can make the Internet a more secure place.
The hype is surely NetApp and EMC these days. For serious work you shouldn't forget looking at what Auspex has to offer, though.
My company is using two of their 4front NS2000 without a glitch since more than one year. The product was pretty young then, but we experienced zero service failure.
We only had to change one disk (which is expectable given the number of disks in the filers), with no impact on production and performance at all.
In fact, we only discovered the disk crashed because Auspex phoned to tell us (heck, they have better supervision than us:-)).
In our experience, for anything from web servers through mail systems serving around 100,000 busy accounts to Usenet spools even (all running on the same filer), Auspex 4front NS2000 are faster than anything else. And we tested a lot of directly attached hardware RAID arrays and other NAS.
The only problem with Auspex is their pricelist. They certainly aren't too cheap compared to their competitors (NetApp top of the line models, mainly). --
QMail is modular in its functionnality principle. That doesn't mean it's elegant. Read the source, go look after the non-existing comments. Try to add functionnality to it without losing your sanity.
If it works for you. Then QMail is your choice of MTA. If not, then there's (in my opinion) a better documented, more elegant and faster evolving MTA. It's called Postfix.
(I'm working at a major ISP, and we've been using both QMail and Postfix for years. I tend to prefer Postfix, but your mileage may vary). --
Back in the late eighties, UNIX was a spreaded bunch of various corporate OSes.
ATT & Sun joined together to create a so-called "standard" UNIX around System V release 4. They took the guts of NeWS out, and used the GUI to create a toolkit for X called OpenLook.
All other vendors, feeling threatened by this collaboration, created the Open Software Foundation. The OSF response to OpenLook was Motif.
All of this ended with lots and lots of incompatible OSes and produced nothing but developers disinterest in producing desktop applications either for OpenLook or Motif.
Now, I wonder what's the agenda of the so-called open source corporate backers. History is repeating guys. Aren't you seeing that, yet?!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh puhlease, it's Doctor James Evan Wilson!
Note that sometimes there is a good reason for pulling doors to get out: if the door opens on a frenquently circulated area then pushing it to get out might generate accidents.
FTA: "Download TIME's Auto-Tune Podcast from iTunes"
What about people who dislike iTunes?
Their current line of datacenter supercomputers is still based on Opteron rather than Xeon.
I wonder if they will move all their new products to Intel processors.
Agreed. Let's not judge them on their speech, but on what they contribute.
Let's see how much code Microsoft will be open sourcing (and pay attention to the specific license they choose), and to which projects.
And let's mind the free advertising that they earn in exchange.
Maybe the open source side should just point out that Microsoft is only the last of many corporate contributors, to relativize it.
So true! I also came to this page while searching for info about WindowMaker via AltaVista!
If current IP laws applied when Microsoft sold a license to "their" OS to IBM, they would not have been able to do so.
In fact, if current IP laws applied then like they apply today, some of us would still be using VisiCalc on a CP/M computer, but most of us would only dream of what people are doing now in the digital world.
Microsoft success was built entirely upon the lack of laws and care to protect the lawyers^Winventors of common computing concepts such as the operating system, the graphical interface, the software spreadsheet and the word processor.
By calling IP system critics communists, Bill is demonstrating capitalism is not protecting freedom anymore. It is very close to communism propaganda. He should get blacklisted fast.
Charisma/attractiveness is indeed one way for an actor to get success. And part of this feature is somewhat related to their talent (eg: many comedians with astonishing physique leave a very short-lived success story).
However, I believe that one of the most underrated way to success in your point is the social networking in Hollywood. Many movie people are in fact successful because they know or are related to someone powerful in the industry. This acquaintance provides them with leveraging power inside studios.
This power sometimes turns into playing a part in blockbusters. Blockbusters success is very weakly related with objective quality, but is marketing dollars more than anything else. Once they are popularised by these, movie people can enjoy a successful life that has nothing to do with the precarious position that is the life of a doctor or a teacher.
Why are proprietary protocols included in this list? Should Ericsson, Apple and al. start to feel unconfortable and protect their IP while it lasts?
As a frenchman who did not vote for Chirac (the French president) and who will not vote for him or his party in any of the foreseable elections, you awaken my curiosity.
Why exactly do "[The US citizens] (by and large) hate the French president"?
I, for one, care. Not that I would change my vote for it, but it still matters for me to understand your reasons.
Did it occur to you that opening the source code provided users with multiple alternatives when facing the need to modify/fix it?
- Ask the developer to modify/fix it.
- Fix/modify it themselves.
- Ask someone else to fix/modify it.
Of these three options, only one is available in closed source software.Years of email sit in my hard drive. I won't move them to Google, even though I work for an ISP and thus enjoy 100Mbps to our peering and transit neighbours.
In fact, the following did not produce a result until after a few minutes:
The BBC advertising budget is not at risk here. Google Adwords pricing lets you set a daily budget and a cost per click. I also bet Google would be able to detect an automated hitting on those links and prevent it.
Commercial certificates can be found for much less nowdays (check this CA for example). Anti-spam organisations can put up their own free CA if need be: this would scale as well or better than a generalised DomainKeys.
When I read about Yahoo's anti-forgery solution, TLS striked me as a more standard compliant one as well as a more mature security measure. You do not need to review new code, it is already there for current MTAs.
SMTP transaction encryption is generally not regarded as a bad thing.
A long time ago, when Microsoft was but a small software company selling a variation of BASIC to OS developpers, UNIX vendors were already fighting each others with copyrights, patents and other IP stuff. I bet SCO is the only UNIX vendor (left?) still stuck in the eighties, that's all.
That makes them sort of the Austin Powers of UNIX, not James Bond.
I work for a medium-small ISP in FR. We host around 6500 domains and 150k mailboxes.
Our abuse department is manned by one person 365 days a year, a bunch of scripts, a largish database integrated with our customers database, and lots of red tape. This person calls our customers when they are the source of spam or other non UCE conforming use of our network (including running an open-relay). He explains the situation politely and asks the customer to conform to the policy written in the contract. If the customer does not comply after the first warning, he must look for another ISP to do business with, for we send him an official letter (with official receipt acknowledgement)each time we interact with him.
All in all, given our company size, a bit over 1% of our costs are burnt by our abuse department. Needless to say, we relay these costs to our customers, as do most of our competitors.
This is only half of the cost of spam from our point of view. Our mail servers farm is sized in order to perform well even with 40% of the mail being spam. These are larger human and hardware costs associated with spam as well (though more diluted and thus difficult to pinpoint).
Spam costs people and companies a lot of money, we feel the need for the Internet mail system to be reengineered in order for the cost of sending email to become high enough so that spammers don't get away with their offense.
The Brightmail report is not a big surprise.
For nitpickers, plasma image quality is not as good as most front projectors (things like color variation and snow comes up regularly for the trained eye).
You can get arguarbly the best picture quality with second hand 8" or 9" CRT projectors (Nec and Barcovision) which still cost less than 10 plasma displays. These are industrial-grade projectors built to last forever (you can experience a small degradation of the CRTs during their lifetime but nothing serious enough to imply an exchange if used properly). These projectors are designed to project on cinema-sized screens (20' and more, and yes we're talking feet here) in any resolution up-to 1600x1200 (thus including 1080p full HDTV resolution). Sure, installing a cinema sized screen is not in the same ballpark as getting a 42" Plasma screen but you can project to a 42" screen if you really want to.
You can get impressive contrast ratio with consumer priced DLP projectors and you won't need a totally black room.
Plasma technology is not quite tried and is known to degrade with time. Some have experienced failure a couple of years after being bought. The gas sometimes leak over the time, and the plasma cells can wear off totally. Check out the warranty, we're not exactly talking about buying a $500 bulb here. I won't risk being hosed for $10,000 myself.
My projector projects to a mere 100" wide (115" diagonal) 16:9 screen and I'm happy with the image displayed on the wall of my living room thank you very much. Last time I checked it was way better than anything displayed on a plasma (granted I only watch DVDs coming from my progressive scan DVD player and play video games from time to time -- I live in a country without access to HDTV broadcasts, yet).
Verant and Mythic just need to look at Turbine handling of Asheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2.
Integrating the map and the radar into the client answers most of SEQ and Excalibur users needs.
Moreover, Turbine handling of plugins clearly shows that they consider their player base mature enough to participate in the development of their world.
Too bad that Turbine is part of MS, eh?
I hope people will choose this opportunity to provide many intelligent, comprehensive, and teaching answers to this FUD.
Really, debunking those paltry arguments is a great chance to answer every questions a decision-maker unaware of the benefits of opensource still has.
People who feel threatened by open source and GPL and wave terrorism threats and other mixed non-sense just help our cause.
The more they yell and cry and act childish like this, the more open source get attention and recognition.
Thanks guys. Really. I mean it.
I suspect the MPAA and other proponents of CSS have not been pushing laws and technical protection schemes only to protect the content of DVD to be copied by industrial means. CSS was never intended to protect the studios from plain pirates (who have been copying vynils, tapes, VHS, CDs "bit-for-bit" since the creation of these media). The studios know everything about them, you can rest assured that they know CSS is not a solution to industrial piracy.
CSS was designed not to protect the studios from tens or hundreds of industrial pirates making thousands of copies. CSS was designed to protect them against millions of consumers broadcasting any digital media.
I assume they tried to foresee what could happen to their products in the future. They guessed that, maybe five years from now, every consumer could have an uncontrolled device with enough bandwidth and processing power to read Mpeg2 and AC-3 bitstreams over the net. They also believe that these very same consumers will have enough bandwidth to redistribute (echo) these bitstreams to tens of their friends (and I'm not even taking Usenet or P2P into account).
The nightmare of the studios is that the copyright could disapear, simply because the copy will disapear. In the future, you won't need to get a physical copy of some digital content to be able to watch or hear it. Everything will be broadcast, thus transient.
It makes sense then, to try and protect the ways the content of a DVD can be read. The CSS gives them the power to control which device (a DVD player, a HDTV, a cable decoder) can read a given bitstream and when and where in the world (by way of regioning) can one play a piece of digital content. This looks to them as a way to solve the possible future nightmare.
Yes, the studios are greedily buying their survival from corrupted democracies and anyone can guess that the next step will preclude us to produce our own content and broadcast it to our friends without their blessing, but frankly there is nothing illogical in this behavior.
The alternative (not protecting bitstreams DVDs from redistribution) would put Mickey Mouse royalties at stake.
Anti-spam law would improve on the security of Internet as a whole.
Spamming is not considered an offense in most US states, in federal law, as well as in most other countries.
However, the implication of spamming is that it can cripple a single Internet host today and could cripple the whole Internet tomorrow.
Not only is spamming content often dubious, but the act of spamming should be regarded as an attempt of denial of service.
United States attitude regarding spam is an example for other countries to follow. By making it an offense, and by convicting spammers, we can make the Internet a more secure place.
The hype is surely NetApp and EMC these days. For serious work you shouldn't forget looking at what Auspex has to offer, though.
:-)).
My company is using two of their 4front NS2000 without a glitch since more than one year. The product was pretty young then, but we experienced zero service failure.
We only had to change one disk (which is expectable given the number of disks in the filers), with no impact on production and performance at all.
In fact, we only discovered the disk crashed because Auspex phoned to tell us (heck, they have better supervision than us
In our experience, for anything from web servers through mail systems serving around 100,000 busy accounts to Usenet spools even (all running on the same filer), Auspex 4front NS2000 are faster than anything else. And we tested a lot of directly attached hardware RAID arrays and other NAS.
The only problem with Auspex is their pricelist. They certainly aren't too cheap compared to their competitors (NetApp top of the line models, mainly).
--
sending over your resume.
We're a major independant european business oriented ISP, many positions are open today in all the countries, including France and Italy.
--
QMail is modular in its functionnality principle. That doesn't mean it's elegant. Read the source, go look after the non-existing comments. Try to add functionnality to it without losing your sanity.
If it works for you. Then QMail is your choice of MTA. If not, then there's (in my opinion) a better documented, more elegant and faster evolving MTA. It's called Postfix.
(I'm working at a major ISP, and we've been using both QMail and Postfix for years. I tend to prefer Postfix, but your mileage may vary).
--
Back in the late eighties, UNIX was a spreaded bunch of various corporate OSes.
ATT & Sun joined together to create a so-called "standard" UNIX around System V release 4. They took the guts of NeWS out, and used the GUI to create a toolkit for X called OpenLook.
All other vendors, feeling threatened by this collaboration, created the Open Software Foundation. The OSF response to OpenLook was Motif.
All of this ended with lots and lots of incompatible OSes and produced nothing but developers disinterest in producing desktop applications either for OpenLook or Motif.
Now, I wonder what's the agenda of the so-called open source corporate backers. History is repeating guys. Aren't you seeing that, yet?!
--