how can a push-pull amp be biased for Class A? Both drivers in the totem-pole would be on continuously.
That's true, the definition of Class A operation is that the stage passes current at all times. The 2 active devices of a push-pull amp operate 180 degrees out of phase to each other, but if the power supply is properly designed and regulated, they don't feel each other anywhere but at the output.
BTW, most "audiophile amps" that use a push-pull output stage tend to be biased for Class B operation (each device conducts for exactly 180 degrees of the cycle. This operation induces switching transients into the signal when the devices switch off and on at the zero crossing, but they are minor and rarely audible, and Class B operation is MUCH more efficient in terms of power out vs. power drawn from the supply.
The "B" for the plate voltage supply was the source of the name of the B "cell" battery, which produced 120 vdc. Sorry, in my book that's NOT low voltage because I've taken some pretty nasty shocks from a 12 volt battery in a car on a hot (sweaty) day.
Having read some of the other posts in this topic, I think this is a joke by the engineers at Aopen. I saw a reference to a 300 volt plate voltage in the writeup on their website. That sounds kind of high for a dual-section triode in a "miniature" envelope. 120-150 volts would be more reasonable, but it's STILL more voltage than I'd want on the same board as a $200 (or more) 1 GHz microprocessor.
It's common knowledge with audiophiles and professional musicians that vacuum tubes are better than solid state technologies at reproducing sound.
It's common knowledge (among audio engineers, because MOST "audiophiles and professional musicians" don't understand the electronics involved) that a vacuum tube power amplifier operated in a push-pull configuration and biased for Class A operation produces less distortion than the designs commonly used for solid-state power amps. HOWEVER, a solid-state PA operating under the same conditions will produce just as clean an output and waste just as much power and generate as much, if not MORE heat.
That being said, I read the tech specs on the board and find it a woefully inadequate attempt to cash in on the "coolness factor" alleged to apply to tube amps for audio.
The tube on the mobo is a dual triode. Since it's being fronted by a stereo sound circuit, push-pull design is out of the question. It's just a straight-up dual-channel, single-ended power amplifier. This coupled with the fact that (IIRC) most multi-section tubes are directly-heated (the filament IS the cathode instead of just a heat source), indicate that improvement in perceived audio quality will be minimal at best.
Without seeing the schematic for the amp, I can't give an opinion about it's stability, but triodes tend to be fairly susceptible to parasitic oscillations if they are operated at more than moderate power gain without HEAVY bypassing. This hefty use of capacitive filtering is what gives tube amps their reputation for "warmer sound". The fact is that a lot of the higher frequencies are bled off by the bypass capacitors.
Class A amps typically have a plate efficiency of 35 percent or less. This, coupled with the existence of the tube's filament (heater, for the Brits among us) indicate that the tube is going to produce PRODIGIOUS amounts of heat for a minimal improvement (if any) in true audio quality.
In short, I see it as a "gimmick" mobo.
In a world of risk-averse bosses ...
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 2
the default Unix solution is Solaris running on SPARC hardware. Once it is configured and put into production, it *normally* won't go down unless 1) there is a catestrophic hardware failure, or 2) the power goes out.
I think the Netra would be a pretty good choice for your application unless something (like a/. posting) caused a sudden spike in load, however, it's been my experience that a Sun-branded SPARC box will stagger rather than fall under a load spike.
If you manage to convince your boss to go the Sun route, however, I recommend that you increase your spending plans to allow for maxing out the RAM on the Netra. The UltraSPARC IIe is designed primarily for the imbedded systems market and is also used in the low-end SunBlade 100 workstation. It DEFINITELY benefits from having more RAM to play with, and in a production webserver, 2 GB of RAM is NOT too much.
Well, I am reasonably sure that a Linux distribution will be based on glibc, and that it will include bash, even if it does NOT include gcc, autoconf, automake, etc., etc.
The FSF HAS sued companies in the past that tried to take GPL'd code in violation of the license (NeXT tried to base Objective C on gcc and make it a proprietary product).
If RMS is hot enough about this situation and there really IS a GPL violation, I would expect litigation to follow.
They should have a general idea of how Bill Gates purchased MS-DOS from DEC
Actually, it was Digital Research... and I've never heard the story about Seymour Cray, although I SERIOUSLY doubt that the God of vector machines was interested in the PC market... TERMINALS for a Cray 1 cost more than a PC did, even when PCs cost $5K.
They should know that Penguins mean Linux.
To most of the world, penguins mean Antarctica, although I LOVE Tux.
Multics code was used to make UNIX v.7...
... eventually... but I think UNIX went through a few versions in the interim... UNIX v.7 was the LAST AT&T in-house version before development went to Berzerkeley, which IIRC, carried BSD up to 4.2 before AT&T snatched it back to make SysV, leading to worlds of litigation without end...
which was used to make XENIX (by SCO)
actually, XENIX was developed by Microsoft (shock and surprise) who licensed it to SCO, which lead to additional worlds of litigation without end...
... which was used to make both OS/2 and Windows NT.
I can't say much about OS/2... I've never even sat in front of an OS/2 box. The heritage of the NT kernel, however, is pure VMS... NOT Unix. Read the various historical docs available on the web.
"Where do you go for information when somebody drops something in your lap that you know NOTHING about?"
I answered "The man pages and O'Reilly Press" and got the job I have now (Unix admin at a major university) the interview panel shook their heads and said "Good answer"... had I seen the question coming, I would have added http://www.linuxdoc.org... the HOWTOs and FAQs are invaluable resources for problems like sendmail configuration, setting up an anonymous ftp server without compromising security, etc, etc, etc...
Okay... time to hit geocities with the/. effect...
I've never received a penny from the couple of hundred hits my personal website has gotten in the 5 years it's been up (updates are kinda spotty, though),... and since the "automatic copyright" has been in effect since 1978, I'd say, from personal experience, that the "non-paying download" percentage is closer to 100%.
<Proudly using Free (as in speech) Software (for everything but gaming, but we're working on that) since 1997>
Personally, I think this is a GREAT idea... let the labels, studios and the BSA pay their private cops to scan the 'net for bootleg (I REFUSE to call them "pirated") |\/|p3z, \/\/4r3z and |\/|0\/13z (damn, that last one looks like a regex I once typed)... let them pay for the bandwidth it wastes... let them pay for PRIVATE counsel to pursue CIVIL actions against infringers... I SUPPORT PRIVATE enforcement of copyright.
What REALLY pisses me off is when these multi-billion dollar corporate purveyors of crap content want the government to spend MY tax dollars to enforce THEIR private property rights!
I paid a total of US$20 (including popcorn and Coke) to see LOTR:Fellowship of the Rings. It was an entertaining flick, but I haven't seen anything since that has motivated me to go back to a movie theater. I DID spend $80 to take a date to LIVE theater, though... and I MIGHT go see Spider-Man when it hits the Dollar theater... as for Attack of the Clones? I have no desire to go see YAABGLTMTF (Yet Another Attempt By George Lucas To Milk The Franchise).
I have approximately 90% of a T-1 pipe available at home 24/7, on average. For a home connection, that's a damned fat pipe... yet... my math tells me that it would take about 7 HOURS to download a DVD... 1.5 hours to DL an iso of a vcd... I just don't see bootlegging of movies to be a reasonable activity. If I wanted a PARTICULAR movie, I might download it... but... pay for the bandwidth it would burn to share the DL'd copy out to a bunch of strangers??? Not a chance. I pay for the pipe for MY use and there aren't enough "coolness points" in the world to reimbuse me for what it would cost to share out bootleg movies on a Napster-like network.
I guess the upshot of this rant is that I don't CARE what the ??AA do, privately, to enforce their rights. When they start calling on the government to enforce their rights FOR them, my back goes up and my claws come out.
Besides... I'm behind a packet filter AND a TIGHT proxy server... all my content is legal and I'm prepared to prove it, but THEY have to come up with probable cause for a warrant before I have to furnish ANY proof.
The officer testifies he was tracking your vehicle, the officer testifies that the radar gun said 80mph; the officer testifies that radar gun was in good working order...
... and right there is where any decent criminal defense lawyer will attack the ability of the cop to determine the proper functioning of a hand-held radar gun.
Hand-held units are NOTORIOUSLY unstable... rarely handled with the proper degree of care... hells belles, they operate in the X band (3 cm wavelength), how much banging around in the trunk do you think they'll take before they lose calibration???
A buddy of mine who did a lot of misdemeanor defense work had a former Navy Radarman on tap to testify as an expert on the care, feeding and calibration of mobile radar equipment. I don't think he ever lost a ticket when the client was willing to pick up the expert's (extremely reasonable) fee.
I NEVER get spammed as a result of postings on usenet. I have my newsreader setup up to show my e-mail addy as phony_username@127.0.0.1.
I figure the spammers can clean the trash out of their OWN mailserver's queue, thank you very much.
The way I DO get spammed is from postings to mailing lists and groups on Yahoo, where I don't have any control over the information disclosed in a message's headers. I've stopped doing that. Additionally, I read my mail with KMail which allows me to "bounce" messages from spammers. That usually tells them my address is invalid, even though it's not.
Well, it may work with IE due to the webmaster using "stupid browser tricks" but I got javascript errors popping up faster than I could close them using the HTML site in Mozilla 0.9.9. I finally had to "killall -9 mozilla-bin" to get off the site. A search site has got to be browser-agnostic if it's going to succeed commercially.
If you ask me, the site's not ready for prime time, and it's damn sure not load-balanced well enough to withstand the/. effect.
... but there is something where the decisions found in one state may be legally binding in all others...
Well, actually, the term comes from the Constitution... "full faith and credit". And it's not "may be" binding. The judgments of the courts of one state are OWED full faith and credit by the courts of another state UNLESS that judgment violates the law of the state where enforcement is sought AND the law violated by the judgment is Constitutional under the federal Constitutional.
The reason for this principle was a feeling among the framers of the Constitution that a plaintiff should only have to win his suit one time.
Defamation is always a matter of state law, which the federal courts are required to follow. In every single state I'm aware of, the proper venue (as opposed to jurisdiction) for suits in defamation is the district where the plaintiff resides. The reason for this is that the damage to the plaintiff's reputation (if any) is presumed to have occurred where he lives.
Bad news for the plaintiff:
The courts where he lives may have jurisdiction over the subject matter of the suit, but may not be able to obtain jurisdiction over the person of the defendant (this is the issue of "minimum contacts" mentioned in the article). This is the reason why so many experienced lawyers will file suit in the jurisdiction where the defendant resides even though it is generally more convenient to litigate at home. Doing so also greatly simplifies collecting any judgment you may receive.
REALLY bad news for the plaintiff:
Unless something REALLY radical happened in this case, the merits are still governed by New York Times v, Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), which held that before a media defendant could be held liable in defamation, "The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with "actual malice"--that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." Sullivan, at 279-280. In short (and I only know of ONE case (Carol Burnett v. The National Enquirer) where "actual malice" was successfully shown (Sullivan applies to celebrities too)) when you sue a newspaper or news magazine in defamation, you lose.
... it would probably be considered a license/contract violation, which might be subject to punative damages and such...
Contrary to popular (and incorrect) opinion here on/., punitive damages are NOT available in actions for breach of contract. Since a software "license" is just a form of contract governing use of the program, they are not available there either.
Now, a tort claim for conversion is a different matter...
What this does is allow them to actually sue for the money the lost.
How do you figure that? You just ASSUME that someone who bought a pirate copy of Win2K Advanced Server would buy the "real thing" in the absence of pirate availability? There ARE alternatives, alternatives, and (one more time) alternatives.
The problem is that if they sell the pirated software cheaply, the damages will be relatively small,...
The measure of damages for copyright infringement is disgorgement of the revenue (not profit) wrongfully gained for a reason. It's the same reason that pirated software is cheaper than the "genuine article." The pirated product is regarded (with good reason) as what economists call an "inferior good."
When you install that "\/\/4r3z" copy of a program, you have no idea what ELSE you are getting (viruses, trojans, spyware).
Another reason that disgorgement is the remedy is because there is no way that a copyright holder can PROVE that the purchasers of "\/\/4r3z" would have bought the real "thing." After all, there ARE alternatives, alternatives, and (need I say it again?) alternatives.
even though it may have cost the company a much larger amount of money.
The bigger issue here is one of the cost of enforcing the copyrights. It is a law of economics that sellers will seek to externalize all of their costs that they possibly can. By criminalizing technologies that CAN be used to infringe copyrights, they push the cost of protecting their property onto the (vastly non-infringing) public. Frankly, I do NOT own or use pirated software. Hell, I RARELY use non-OSS software at ALL. Microsoft, et al, forcing me to pay taxes so the government will shield them from the cost of protecting their software from piracy is, in my case, nothing less than a transfer payment to a company I have chosen NOT to do business with since about 1998.
It also takes into account P2P system, where people aren't making money off of it, but they are still breaking the copyright.
If Microsoft, the MPAA and the RIAA want to shut down P2P, let them. Let them pursue every little pissant pirate they want to on their OWN nickel. I have (largely) opted out of their system. Let them stay the HELL out of my pocket and out of my PC.
Just remember, we may not have the economic muscle to BUY Congressmen and Senators, but WE can do something the MPAA CAN'T do. We can VOTE. Mybe we can't BUY them, but we DAMN sure can REPLACE them.
As my father always told me... "If you don't vote, you deserve the government you get."
If you breathe and are eligible, register and vote. Even if you are NOT eligible, volunteer to help in a campaign. Only by participating can we take back our government.
I have no experience in this area, but Mainframe customers often get complete OS source too, I believe. I've known several OpenVMS customers who had source licenses, also.
Back in the ancient days of IBM PC 1 motherboards (RAM expandable to 64K on the mobo), every PC came with a maroon 3-ring binder manual (just like the big iron) that included the Assembler source to the ROM-BIOS.
You got a similar green manual for PC-DOS 1.1 and a Programmer's Reference Manual for BASICA (IBM PC-DOS Advanced Basic, as opposed to ROM BASIC) if you bought a PC with one or more floppies installed. IIRC the Programmer's Refence Manual was also maroon.
... I think that if the good people working on the kernel would like to contribute in a huge, meaningful way to Linux AND to national security they could put their heads together and bang out an iron-clad version of Linux, contributing to the above project...
Actually, it works the other way 'round. The SELinux team attended the planning conference for the 2.5 kernel project and made quite an extensive presentation on their elimination of a "root" user, implementation of mandatory access controls and role-based permissions.
If I recall the articles I read on the presentation, it was quite well received. 'Twould seem the NSA is contributing to the kernel rather than the kernel team contributing to SELinux.
The third-party application was a divide-by-zero error in an Access application running in standalone mode (back in the Access 1.1/NT4 SP3 days... and yes, I agree, it SHOULDN'T have even been put into field testing without an error-handler for divide-by-zero, but it was).
The bug that actually disabled the ship was in vredir.dll (part of NT). Upon the occurrence of an untrapped divide-by-zero in Access, vredir caused NT to take the entire LAN down. I remember the details because I was adminning a small NT-based LAN at the time and had to install the patch for this because my employer was Access-dependent.
You say this isn't a problem in NT? I say that an OS that takes down a network over an application crash is nowhere NEAR robust enough for a mission-critical application! You say that it's ancient history? I say that later events definitively prove that MS hasn't learned ANYTHING from all the problems NT has had over the years. If they had, Code Red/Nimda would have never occurred and Allchin would not have testified, under oath, that releasing Windows source and middleware APIs could be a threat to national security.
Re:There ARE other ways
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
Well, as was stated in my original post, one who is not permitted to acquire and own property is perpetually in the position of a supplicant, dependent upon his or her "superiors".
In short, if I am allowed to own property, I am able to use that property to provide for my physical needs independent of any "liege lord" or other "higher ups".
Slashdot Mirror
how can a push-pull amp be biased for Class A? Both drivers in the totem-pole would be on continuously.
That's true, the definition of Class A operation is that the stage passes current at all times. The 2 active devices of a push-pull amp operate 180 degrees out of phase to each other, but if the power supply is properly designed and regulated, they don't feel each other anywhere but at the output.
BTW, most "audiophile amps" that use a push-pull output stage tend to be biased for Class B operation (each device conducts for exactly 180 degrees of the cycle. This operation induces switching transients into the signal when the devices switch off and on at the zero crossing, but they are minor and rarely audible, and Class B operation is MUCH more efficient in terms of power out vs. power drawn from the supply.
The "B" for the plate voltage supply was the source of the name of the B "cell" battery, which produced 120 vdc. Sorry, in my book that's NOT low voltage because I've taken some pretty nasty shocks from a 12 volt battery in a car on a hot (sweaty) day.
Having read some of the other posts in this topic, I think this is a joke by the engineers at Aopen. I saw a reference to a 300 volt plate voltage in the writeup on their website. That sounds kind of high for a dual-section triode in a "miniature" envelope. 120-150 volts would be more reasonable, but it's STILL more voltage than I'd want on the same board as a $200 (or more) 1 GHz microprocessor.
Quoth the poster:
It's common knowledge with audiophiles and professional musicians that vacuum tubes are better than solid state technologies at reproducing sound.
It's common knowledge (among audio engineers, because MOST "audiophiles and professional musicians" don't understand the electronics involved) that a vacuum tube power amplifier operated in a push-pull configuration and biased for Class A operation produces less distortion than the designs commonly used for solid-state power amps. HOWEVER, a solid-state PA operating under the same conditions will produce just as clean an output and waste just as much power and generate as much, if not MORE heat.
That being said, I read the tech specs on the board and find it a woefully inadequate attempt to cash in on the "coolness factor" alleged to apply to tube amps for audio.
The tube on the mobo is a dual triode. Since it's being fronted by a stereo sound circuit, push-pull design is out of the question. It's just a straight-up dual-channel, single-ended power amplifier. This coupled with the fact that (IIRC) most multi-section tubes are directly-heated (the filament IS the cathode instead of just a heat source), indicate that improvement in perceived audio quality will be minimal at best.
Without seeing the schematic for the amp, I can't give an opinion about it's stability, but triodes tend to be fairly susceptible to parasitic oscillations if they are operated at more than moderate power gain without HEAVY bypassing. This hefty use of capacitive filtering is what gives tube amps their reputation for "warmer sound". The fact is that a lot of the higher frequencies are bled off by the bypass capacitors.
Class A amps typically have a plate efficiency of 35 percent or less. This, coupled with the existence of the tube's filament (heater, for the Brits among us) indicate that the tube is going to produce PRODIGIOUS amounts of heat for a minimal improvement (if any) in true audio quality.
In short, I see it as a "gimmick" mobo.
the default Unix solution is Solaris running on SPARC hardware. Once it is configured and put into production, it *normally* won't go down unless 1) there is a catestrophic hardware failure, or 2) the power goes out.
/. posting) caused a sudden spike in load, however, it's been my experience that a Sun-branded SPARC box will stagger rather than fall under a load spike.
I think the Netra would be a pretty good choice for your application unless something (like a
If you manage to convince your boss to go the Sun route, however, I recommend that you increase your spending plans to allow for maxing out the RAM on the Netra. The UltraSPARC IIe is designed primarily for the imbedded systems market and is also used in the low-end SunBlade 100 workstation. It DEFINITELY benefits from having more RAM to play with, and in a production webserver, 2 GB of RAM is NOT too much.
Well, I am reasonably sure that a Linux distribution will be based on glibc, and that it will include bash, even if it does NOT include gcc, autoconf, automake, etc., etc.
The FSF HAS sued companies in the past that tried to take GPL'd code in violation of the license (NeXT tried to base Objective C on gcc and make it a proprietary product).
If RMS is hot enough about this situation and there really IS a GPL violation, I would expect litigation to follow.
They should have a general idea of how Bill Gates purchased MS-DOS from DEC
... and I've never heard the story about Seymour Cray, although I SERIOUSLY doubt that the God of vector machines was interested in the PC market ... TERMINALS for a Cray 1 cost more than a PC did, even when PCs cost $5K.
...
... eventually ... but I think UNIX went through a few versions in the interim ... UNIX v.7 was the LAST AT&T in-house version before development went to Berzerkeley, which IIRC, carried BSD up to 4.2 before AT&T snatched it back to make SysV, leading to worlds of litigation without end ...
...
... which was used to make both OS/2 and Windows NT.
... I've never even sat in front of an OS/2 box. The heritage of the NT kernel, however, is pure VMS ... NOT Unix. Read the various historical docs available on the web.
Actually, it was Digital Research
They should know that Penguins mean Linux.
To most of the world, penguins mean Antarctica, although I LOVE Tux.
Multics code was used to make UNIX v.7
which was used to make XENIX (by SCO)
actually, XENIX was developed by Microsoft (shock and surprise) who licensed it to SCO, which lead to additional worlds of litigation without end
I can't say much about OS/2
"Where do you go for information when somebody drops something in your lap that you know NOTHING about?"
... had I seen the question coming, I would have added http://www.linuxdoc.org ... the HOWTOs and FAQs are invaluable resources for problems like sendmail configuration, setting up an anonymous ftp server without compromising security, etc, etc, etc ...
I answered "The man pages and O'Reilly Press" and got the job I have now (Unix admin at a major university) the interview panel shook their heads and said "Good answer"
Okay ... time to hit geocities with the /. effect ...
... and since the "automatic copyright" has been in effect since 1978, I'd say, from personal experience, that the "non-paying download" percentage is closer to 100%.
I've never received a penny from the couple of hundred hits my personal website has gotten in the 5 years it's been up (updates are kinda spotty, though),
<Proudly using Free (as in speech) Software (for everything but gaming, but we're working on that) since 1997>
Personally, I think this is a GREAT idea ... let the labels, studios and the BSA pay their private cops to scan the 'net for bootleg (I REFUSE to call them "pirated") |\/|p3z, \/\/4r3z and |\/|0\/13z (damn, that last one looks like a regex I once typed) ... let them pay for the bandwidth it wastes ... let them pay for PRIVATE counsel to pursue CIVIL actions against infringers ... I SUPPORT PRIVATE enforcement of copyright.
... and I MIGHT go see Spider-Man when it hits the Dollar theater ... as for Attack of the Clones? I have no desire to go see YAABGLTMTF (Yet Another Attempt By George Lucas To Milk The Franchise).
... yet ... my math tells me that it would take about 7 HOURS to download a DVD ... 1.5 hours to DL an iso of a vcd ... I just don't see bootlegging of movies to be a reasonable activity. If I wanted a PARTICULAR movie, I might download it ... but ... pay for the bandwidth it would burn to share the DL'd copy out to a bunch of strangers??? Not a chance. I pay for the pipe for MY use and there aren't enough "coolness points" in the world to reimbuse me for what it would cost to share out bootleg movies on a Napster-like network.
... I'm behind a packet filter AND a TIGHT proxy server ... all my content is legal and I'm prepared to prove it, but THEY have to come up with probable cause for a warrant before I have to furnish ANY proof.
What REALLY pisses me off is when these multi-billion dollar corporate purveyors of crap content want the government to spend MY tax dollars to enforce THEIR private property rights!
I paid a total of US$20 (including popcorn and Coke) to see LOTR:Fellowship of the Rings. It was an entertaining flick, but I haven't seen anything since that has motivated me to go back to a movie theater. I DID spend $80 to take a date to LIVE theater, though
I have approximately 90% of a T-1 pipe available at home 24/7, on average. For a home connection, that's a damned fat pipe
I guess the upshot of this rant is that I don't CARE what the ??AA do, privately, to enforce their rights. When they start calling on the government to enforce their rights FOR them, my back goes up and my claws come out.
Besides
BTW, IAA (non-practicing) L
Hand-held units are NOTORIOUSLY unstable
A buddy of mine who did a lot of misdemeanor defense work had a former Navy Radarman on tap to testify as an expert on the care, feeding and calibration of mobile radar equipment. I don't think he ever lost a ticket when the client was willing to pick up the expert's (extremely reasonable) fee.
I agree completely. Nobody ever got a virus from merely opening a plain-text e-mail.
I NEVER get spammed as a result of postings on usenet. I have my newsreader setup up to show my e-mail addy as phony_username@127.0.0.1.
I figure the spammers can clean the trash out of their OWN mailserver's queue, thank you very much.
The way I DO get spammed is from postings to mailing lists and groups on Yahoo, where I don't have any control over the information disclosed in a message's headers. I've stopped doing that. Additionally, I read my mail with KMail which allows me to "bounce" messages from spammers. That usually tells them my address is invalid, even though it's not.
I'm not flame-baiting, but it NEVER ceases to amaze me the things people will find to piss away time on.
... why?
Cute trick, but
Well, it may work with IE due to the webmaster using "stupid browser tricks" but I got javascript errors popping up faster than I could close them using the HTML site in Mozilla 0.9.9. I finally had to "killall -9 mozilla-bin" to get off the site. A search site has got to be browser-agnostic if it's going to succeed commercially.
/. effect.
If you ask me, the site's not ready for prime time, and it's damn sure not load-balanced well enough to withstand the
Well, actually, the term comes from the Constitution
The reason for this principle was a feeling among the framers of the Constitution that a plaintiff should only have to win his suit one time.
Good news for the plaintiff:
Defamation is always a matter of state law, which the federal courts are required to follow. In every single state I'm aware of, the proper venue (as opposed to jurisdiction) for suits in defamation is the district where the plaintiff resides. The reason for this is that the damage to the plaintiff's reputation (if any) is presumed to have occurred where he lives.
Bad news for the plaintiff:
The courts where he lives may have jurisdiction over the subject matter of the suit, but may not be able to obtain jurisdiction over the person of the defendant (this is the issue of "minimum contacts" mentioned in the article). This is the reason why so many experienced lawyers will file suit in the jurisdiction where the defendant resides even though it is generally more convenient to litigate at home. Doing so also greatly simplifies collecting any judgment you may receive.
REALLY bad news for the plaintiff:
Unless something REALLY radical happened in this case, the merits are still governed by New York Times v, Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), which held that before a media defendant could be held liable in defamation, "The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with "actual malice"--that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." Sullivan, at 279-280. In short (and I only know of ONE case (Carol Burnett v. The National Enquirer) where "actual malice" was successfully shown (Sullivan applies to celebrities too)) when you sue a newspaper or news magazine in defamation, you lose.
Contrary to popular (and incorrect) opinion here on
Now, a tort claim for conversion is a different matter
BTW IAA (non-practicing) L
What this does is allow them to actually sue for the money the lost.
...
How do you figure that? You just ASSUME that someone who bought a pirate copy of Win2K Advanced Server would buy the "real thing" in the absence of pirate availability? There ARE alternatives, alternatives, and (one more time) alternatives.
The problem is that if they sell the pirated software cheaply, the damages will be relatively small,
The measure of damages for copyright infringement is disgorgement of the revenue (not profit) wrongfully gained for a reason. It's the same reason that pirated software is cheaper than the "genuine article." The pirated product is regarded (with good reason) as what economists call an "inferior good."
When you install that "\/\/4r3z" copy of a program, you have no idea what ELSE you are getting (viruses, trojans, spyware).
Another reason that disgorgement is the remedy is because there is no way that a copyright holder can PROVE that the purchasers of "\/\/4r3z" would have bought the real "thing." After all, there ARE alternatives, alternatives, and (need I say it again?) alternatives.
even though it may have cost the company a much larger amount of money.
The bigger issue here is one of the cost of enforcing the copyrights. It is a law of economics that sellers will seek to externalize all of their costs that they possibly can. By criminalizing technologies that CAN be used to infringe copyrights, they push the cost of protecting their property onto the (vastly non-infringing) public. Frankly, I do NOT own or use pirated software. Hell, I RARELY use non-OSS software at ALL. Microsoft, et al, forcing me to pay taxes so the government will shield them from the cost of protecting their software from piracy is, in my case, nothing less than a transfer payment to a company I have chosen NOT to do business with since about 1998.
It also takes into account P2P system, where people aren't making money off of it, but they are still breaking the copyright.
If Microsoft, the MPAA and the RIAA want to shut down P2P, let them. Let them pursue every little pissant pirate they want to on their OWN nickel. I have (largely) opted out of their system. Let them stay the HELL out of my pocket and out of my PC.
I just have an image of all the senators manning a fast food joint
... only it's a fantasy that the people will rise up and turn the scoundrels out of office for selling out like they have.
I have a similar vision
Just remember, we may not have the economic muscle to BUY Congressmen and Senators, but WE can do something the MPAA CAN'T do. We can VOTE. Mybe we can't BUY them, but we DAMN sure can REPLACE them.
... "If you don't vote, you deserve the government you get."
As my father always told me
If you breathe and are eligible, register and vote. Even if you are NOT eligible, volunteer to help in a campaign. Only by participating can we take back our government.
I have no experience in this area, but Mainframe customers often get complete OS source too, I believe. I've known several OpenVMS customers who had source licenses, also.
Back in the ancient days of IBM PC 1 motherboards (RAM expandable to 64K on the mobo), every PC came with a maroon 3-ring binder manual (just like the big iron) that included the Assembler source to the ROM-BIOS.
You got a similar green manual for PC-DOS 1.1 and a Programmer's Reference Manual for BASICA (IBM PC-DOS Advanced Basic, as opposed to ROM BASIC) if you bought a PC with one or more floppies installed. IIRC the Programmer's Refence Manual was also maroon.
Actually, they (the NSA) HAVE released the source code for their kernel modifications.
Actually, it works the other way 'round. The SELinux team attended the planning conference for the 2.5 kernel project and made quite an extensive presentation on their elimination of a "root" user, implementation of mandatory access controls and role-based permissions.
If I recall the articles I read on the presentation, it was quite well received. 'Twould seem the NSA is contributing to the kernel rather than the kernel team contributing to SELinux.
The third-party application was a divide-by-zero error in an Access application running in standalone mode (back in the Access 1.1/NT4 SP3 days ... and yes, I agree, it SHOULDN'T have even been put into field testing without an error-handler for divide-by-zero, but it was).
The bug that actually disabled the ship was in vredir.dll (part of NT). Upon the occurrence of an untrapped divide-by-zero in Access, vredir caused NT to take the entire LAN down. I remember the details because I was adminning a small NT-based LAN at the time and had to install the patch for this because my employer was Access-dependent.
You say this isn't a problem in NT? I say that an OS that takes down a network over an application crash is nowhere NEAR robust enough for a mission-critical application! You say that it's ancient history? I say that later events definitively prove that MS hasn't learned ANYTHING from all the problems NT has had over the years. If they had, Code Red/Nimda would have never occurred and Allchin would not have testified, under oath, that releasing Windows source and middleware APIs could be a threat to national security.
Well, as was stated in my original post, one who is not permitted to acquire and own property is perpetually in the position of a supplicant, dependent upon his or her "superiors".
In short, if I am allowed to own property, I am able to use that property to provide for my physical needs independent of any "liege lord" or other "higher ups".