Actually, IMHO one of the main uses of text messages is to get messages from people you've never spoken to.
For example, when I'm visiting a city I might send email to friends of mine in that city asking them to send me a text message with their phone number in it, so I can just hit the "respond" button to call them back rather than entering in the number myself. It's basically a way for other people to send their contact info directly to my phone.
That option would be better than nothing, I suppose, but it'd remove whole categories of usage for me.
Without some sort of coping mechanism, if spam rises to 5 or 10% of my message traffic on my phone, I'll just get that feature removed from my calling plan. I've already disabled call waiting and other features other folks seem to take for granted.
Imagine: Disney pays the fee for "Steamboat Willie", but not for any other Mickey Mouse cartoons -- and then argues that all other Mickey Mouse cartoons are derivative works of "Steamboat Willie", and are naturally covered by the copyright on that work.
That's not in fact true. I'm even a "dot mac" subscriber. Heck, here's my "dot mac homepage" if you want to see pictures of my iPod, taken with iPhoto, published to dotmac, for example.
Everyone should benchmark with the actual compiler that most developers are really going to use. If that's the same between platforms, so be it. If that's different between platforms, so be it.
Sure, nothing else but using the same compiler will factor out the compiler when comparing hardware platforms. But who cares? Actual raw hardware speed is not what users care about at all. The actually speed that people are going to get out of the whole platform in real life is what people care about. And the fact is, nobody who seriously cares about performance uses GCC on x86.
The benchmarks were downright deceptive, period. And that's even without taking into account the fact that there's no such thing as a mac with more than 2 processors, while there are x86 boxes with more than 2 processors.
Here's the way I look at it:
With the benchmark results that were reported, it basically amounts to "if things were fair, we'd be almost but not quite as fast as the Intel chip -- we've almost caught up, if you ignore the high-end x86 boxes that have more than 2 CPUs".
Then on top of that, they said that they'll be at 3GHz in a year. That's a 50% speed increase in 12 months. Notice something? That's slower than Moore's law. So, what this amounts to is "we're slower than x86, and over the next year that gap will widen".
They should have just left raw computational speed out of the keynote entirely. They'd have looked less silly.
Mind you, I'm typing this on my 1GHz TiBook running OS X 10.2.6. I am a mac user myself. There's no way you'd get me to use x86 hardware for my desktop system, whether you're talking about Windows or Linux or BeOS or whatever. None the less, Apple has almost no credibility with me when they talk about system performance now.
Tons of artists in the store right now have links to their web sites.
If none of the artists with small labels are going to have links to their web sites, then they're just not getting "the same basic deal" as the big labels.
They're not getting a bad deal, just not the same deal. It's just a case of something Apple is doing being overstated again.
Are they getting a very good deal? Probably. I don't mean to say otherwise. I'm just annoyed by the overstatement.
(Just like the claim that the 12" G4 PowerBook is a "full-featured laptop" -- "good enough for most users", sure, no doubt, but "full-featured"? Not without some sort of expansion slot, PCMCIA or CF or MMC or whatever. Or: how do I add 802.11a support to it, since that's already in use by my employer?)
Ah, in other words, "you won't in fact be getting the same deal that the big labels are getting".
I'm sorry, when they said small labels would get exactly the same deal as big labels, for a moment there I believed them. Guess I should have known better.
If an indie label wants to make their own songs available in MP3 format without DRM, the logical way to handle it is to use the "Artist's Website" feature of the music store to provide a link to an external site from which DRM-free MP3s can be downloaded.
That'd work, wouldn't it? Personally, I'd love to see this for things like the Greatful Dead's concert recordings, which are largely available for free anyway.
I agree that that's one of the reasons we have a judicial system. I don't agree with you regarding the conclusion they'd make in this case.
Remember, it's very much been made clear that "ignorance of the law is no excuse", in many contexts, again and again. That tells me that intent to comply with the law just doesn't actually have much to do with how accountable you are if you actually break the law.
I guess we'll have to watch to see how all this pans out. But, my personal opinion is that the dumpster divers are in fact doing something wrong here, whether they knew that or not.
If the dump allows dump picking, then the person did not make a reasonable effort to comply with the law.
Even if they did, that's not relevant. It doesn't matter if you made a reasonable effort to comply with the law. What matters is if you actually did comply with the law. What has effort got to do with it?
The people throwing away the CDs either put them where someone else had the right to take them away, or they didn't.
The people throwing away the CDs did not have the right to put them where someone else had the right to take them away.
So, if they did that, then the people throwing away the CDs broke the law.
If they did not do that, then that means that people took them away from a location where they did not have the right to remove them.
If that's the case, then the people picking up the CDs broke the law.
One or the other of these must have happened, in the listed scenario. As things stand, there's no way around it. People can disagree which happened, but one or the other must have.
The patterns they threw away were discontinued. Your analogy doesn't take that into account.
Is there some resaon that's relevant? If so, I actually don't see it. Okay, throw in the extra condition "oh, and also the CDs in question are out of print now". Does that help?
Some people believe that taking things out of other people's garbage is stealing.
If placing things in the garbage is, from a legal standpoint, a valid way to destroy them, then removing things from someone's garbage has to be illegal in at least some cases -- you are "un-destroying" something that has been legally destroyed. Cause a segmentation violation in the law's view of reality, go to jail.
And, if placing things in the garbage is, from a legal standpoint, a valid way to destroy them, then many operations become cheaper to execute (eg. the "take the cover off the book and throw the rest away" maneuver that bookstores go through).
So, there are real economic reasons for this to be the way things are set up from the standpoint of the law, even though it artificially creates a situation where rooting through random garbage can actually be labeled as stealing or piracy.
The cost to society of having the law work this way may actually be lower than the cost to society of having the law be "sane". (Not saying that that's actually the case. Just pointing out that it might be the case -- it's at the very least not clear-cut.)
Your analogy assumes that someone (monsterpattern) is selling digital copies of the patterns.
No, it does not. Really.
What it assumes is that the store whose dumpsters are being dived into has "sold" the patterns, and the entity who now owns them has directed them to destroy them. Then, someone steals them from the "destroy this stuff" queue (ie. the dumpster) and sells them -- but they were not entitled to acquire them to begin with!
We've got basically two choices as I see it. Either we could put the burden on the merchant to actually physically destroy them -- which would drive up prices and reduce the total amount of commerce. Or, we can say it's just illegal to dumpster-dive.
The second one sounds more reasonable to a lot of people (particularly eg. book store owners).
a better analogy would be if you threw away your cd collection and somebody picked it up and sold it.
Now let's make the analogy more precise. You sell me your CD collection. I've paid for it. But then I say, "instead of shipping it to me, email me the MP3s you ripped, but as far as the physical media, just set fire to it and piss on the ashes -- I've got the MP3s, I don't need the physical media, I just need to ensure that nobody else but me, anywhere, ever, uses that physical media, which can easily be ensured by just destroying the media entirely".
And so you throw your CDs in a recycle bin, trusting that they'll be destroyed. But then some college students dig through your recycle bin and salvage the CDs, the CDs that someone else already paid for, the CDs that you have made a comittment to destroy.
That is piracy, at that point.
And that's how far you have to take tha analogy to make it accurate.
Re:The problem: Improving programmer productivity
on
Preview of Java 1.5
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· Score: 4, Informative
Java doesn't really have a kick-ass companion scripting language.
Have you looked at BeanShell? I haven't started using it yet, but it looks like it has the potential to really empower scripting.
Has anyone seen any reference to any patent they might be talking about? What current patents to they claim exist that might fall into this category?
First, remember that basic patents on core Unix functionality are things like the setuid patent. Dennis Ritchie filed for the setuid patent in 1973, got it in 1979, and when he got it explicitly put it essentially into the public domain. SCO can't sue over that sort of thing.
Second, remember how old the core of Unix is. The patent mentioned above is from 1973! It was granted in 1979! What's the lifespan of a patent? Less than 20 years. If it were 20 years from the date on which it was granted, it would still have expired in 1999, a few years ago.
So, what the hell are they talking about? Can anyone give one example of a Unix patent that Linux might be violating? I haven't seen any, anywhere.
What on earth ever made you think I thought otherwise?
This is a good thing.
on
Ogg Now An RFC
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· Score: 1, Redundant
I see this as extremely likely to increase the odds that Apple will put Ogg support into iTunes and the iPod, that hardware MP3 player manufacturers will add support for Ogg, that the TiVo will be able to play it, that the PS2 media player will be able to play it, et cetera, et cetera...
This would be great. My wife and I try to listen to the Capitol Steps show whenever it's on (two or three times per year), and sometimes we miss it. A "set it and forget it" radio TiVo system like this would get use in our house, for this and for other scheduled radio shows.
Heck, if it could be integrated with an iPod download mechanism... I think the number of geeks I know who would set up a cron job to download "Car Talk" into their iPods every week is probably significant.
We need a big revamping of the concept of derivative works in general.
Because of that, samples should not be made free in isolation. Doing so would remove some fairly significant pressure on the commercial world to look at the "derivative works" issue as a coherent whole, and come up with sensible new general solutions.
Re:It's more complicated than that.
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
It does not say that the executable must be guaranteed to run after installation, but I don't think it needs to. I think it's obvious.
If "secret.txt" is needed in order to make the program actually run, then from a logical standpoint it is part of the script, in the same sense that the script itself is part of the source code. Or at least, anyone who thinks otherwise better be prepared to seriously back up their position in court.
I've suggested that the FSF have their lawyers clarify what the GPL actually requires in this regard. Hopefully they'll do so.
Re:It's more complicated than that.
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
The university had one copy of the kernel. They made many copies, and carried them to various computers around campus. That is undeniably "distribution" in the simplest sense- the material has been spread out.
I agree with you. I should have been more clear, and said "distributed to anyone else".
In the case of this University, then by GPL section 2b, they must license it at no charge to any third parties. If a student using the computer dumps a boot-image to CD, and then wants a copy of the modified source, he is entitled to it for the nominal fee for shipping and handling.
But, the University can simply forbid students from dumping a boot-image to CD, if the computer in question belongs to the university and isn't distributed to the student.
If I break into your office and copy some version of a GPLed binary that you've got in a vault, that does not compel you to provide the source to me. The situation of someone sitting down and using a computer that someone else owns is fundamentally similar. In the case where the computer is a server, that's even more true -- the user never sits at the server.
Re:It's more complicated than that.
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
The question is sufficiently vague that the skills and endurance of the opposing legal teams will really come into play (biasing the results in favor of whichever wealthy corp pays the fattest retainers)
The argument you're talking about was something I posted before pulling out the exact definition of "source code" from the GPL. I now know that this argument isn't even neccesary. The term "source code" explicitly includes all the scripts/tools you need to install a modified version of the executable. If such tools are neccesary once you've got the updated source code, then you are obliged to provide them (technical documentation doesn't fall into this category becuase it's used to either produce the source code or use the resulting executable).
Several videogames (Quake, etc) have been released under the GPL. That only covers the source code, though. Additional copyrighted materials (graphic and audio files) are needed to make it actually run. Yet one has objected to that practice. GPL programs are often dependent on an external resource that is non-GPL.
There are two things to consider here. The main one is very important, and many people forget it: the original author is never bound by the provisions of their own GPL. I can release something under GPL, and then I can release another version in closed-source form, with absolutely no trouble. This is how GhostScript has worked for years.
The other thing is that the GPL is intended to protect the ability of the end-user to which the original binary was distributed, to make sure they can modify their own copy of the executable, and share their changes with everyone else. GPLed games with non-free content don't interfere with that at all. Can the end-user tweak the bejezis out of the GPLed portion? Yes. Can they share their changes with everyone else using the GPLed portion? Yes. There really isn't a problem here.
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Actually, IMHO one of the main uses of text messages is to get messages from people you've never spoken to.
For example, when I'm visiting a city I might send email to friends of mine in that city asking them to send me a text message with their phone number in it, so I can just hit the "respond" button to call them back rather than entering in the number myself. It's basically a way for other people to send their contact info directly to my phone.
That option would be better than nothing, I suppose, but it'd remove whole categories of usage for me.
Without some sort of coping mechanism, if spam rises to 5 or 10% of my message traffic on my phone, I'll just get that feature removed from my calling plan. I've already disabled call waiting and other features other folks seem to take for granted.
Imagine: Disney pays the fee for "Steamboat Willie", but not for any other Mickey Mouse cartoons -- and then argues that all other Mickey Mouse cartoons are derivative works of "Steamboat Willie", and are naturally covered by the copyright on that work.
Is there a reason that can't happen?
That's not in fact true. I'm even a "dot mac" subscriber. Heck, here's my "dot mac homepage" if you want to see pictures of my iPod, taken with iPhoto, published to dotmac, for example.
Nonsense.
Everyone should benchmark with the actual compiler that most developers are really going to use. If that's the same between platforms, so be it. If that's different between platforms, so be it.
Sure, nothing else but using the same compiler will factor out the compiler when comparing hardware platforms. But who cares? Actual raw hardware speed is not what users care about at all. The actually speed that people are going to get out of the whole platform in real life is what people care about. And the fact is, nobody who seriously cares about performance uses GCC on x86.
The benchmarks were downright deceptive, period. And that's even without taking into account the fact that there's no such thing as a mac with more than 2 processors, while there are x86 boxes with more than 2 processors.
Here's the way I look at it:
With the benchmark results that were reported, it basically amounts to "if things were fair, we'd be almost but not quite as fast as the Intel chip -- we've almost caught up, if you ignore the high-end x86 boxes that have more than 2 CPUs".
Then on top of that, they said that they'll be at 3GHz in a year. That's a 50% speed increase in 12 months. Notice something? That's slower than Moore's law. So, what this amounts to is "we're slower than x86, and over the next year that gap will widen".
They should have just left raw computational speed out of the keynote entirely. They'd have looked less silly.
Mind you, I'm typing this on my 1GHz TiBook running OS X 10.2.6. I am a mac user myself. There's no way you'd get me to use x86 hardware for my desktop system, whether you're talking about Windows or Linux or BeOS or whatever. None the less, Apple has almost no credibility with me when they talk about system performance now.
Tons of artists in the store right now have links to their web sites.
If none of the artists with small labels are going to have links to their web sites, then they're just not getting "the same basic deal" as the big labels.
They're not getting a bad deal, just not the same deal. It's just a case of something Apple is doing being overstated again.
Are they getting a very good deal? Probably. I don't mean to say otherwise. I'm just annoyed by the overstatement.
(Just like the claim that the 12" G4 PowerBook is a "full-featured laptop" -- "good enough for most users", sure, no doubt, but "full-featured"? Not without some sort of expansion slot, PCMCIA or CF or MMC or whatever. Or: how do I add 802.11a support to it, since that's already in use by my employer?)
Ah, in other words, "you won't in fact be getting the same deal that the big labels are getting".
I'm sorry, when they said small labels would get exactly the same deal as big labels, for a moment there I believed them. Guess I should have known better.
If an indie label wants to make their own songs available in MP3 format without DRM, the logical way to handle it is to use the "Artist's Website" feature of the music store to provide a link to an external site from which DRM-free MP3s can be downloaded.
That'd work, wouldn't it? Personally, I'd love to see this for things like the Greatful Dead's concert recordings, which are largely available for free anyway.
I agree that that's one of the reasons we have a judicial system. I don't agree with you regarding the conclusion they'd make in this case.
Remember, it's very much been made clear that "ignorance of the law is no excuse", in many contexts, again and again. That tells me that intent to comply with the law just doesn't actually have much to do with how accountable you are if you actually break the law.
I guess we'll have to watch to see how all this pans out. But, my personal opinion is that the dumpster divers are in fact doing something wrong here, whether they knew that or not.
If the dump allows dump picking, then the person did not make a reasonable effort to comply with the law.
Even if they did, that's not relevant. It doesn't matter if you made a reasonable effort to comply with the law. What matters is if you actually did comply with the law. What has effort got to do with it?
Someone broke the law.
Let me present this in the simplest form I can.
The people throwing away the CDs either put them where someone else had the right to take them away, or they didn't.
The people throwing away the CDs did not have the right to put them where someone else had the right to take them away.
So, if they did that, then the people throwing away the CDs broke the law.
If they did not do that, then that means that people took them away from a location where they did not have the right to remove them.
If that's the case, then the people picking up the CDs broke the law.
One or the other of these must have happened, in the listed scenario. As things stand, there's no way around it. People can disagree which happened, but one or the other must have.
Some people believe that taking things out of other people's garbage is stealing.
If placing things in the garbage is, from a legal standpoint, a valid way to destroy them, then removing things from someone's garbage has to be illegal in at least some cases -- you are "un-destroying" something that has been legally destroyed. Cause a segmentation violation in the law's view of reality, go to jail.
And, if placing things in the garbage is, from a legal standpoint, a valid way to destroy them, then many operations become cheaper to execute (eg. the "take the cover off the book and throw the rest away" maneuver that bookstores go through).
So, there are real economic reasons for this to be the way things are set up from the standpoint of the law, even though it artificially creates a situation where rooting through random garbage can actually be labeled as stealing or piracy.
The cost to society of having the law work this way may actually be lower than the cost to society of having the law be "sane". (Not saying that that's actually the case. Just pointing out that it might be the case -- it's at the very least not clear-cut.)
What it assumes is that the store whose dumpsters are being dived into has "sold" the patterns, and the entity who now owns them has directed them to destroy them. Then, someone steals them from the "destroy this stuff" queue (ie. the dumpster) and sells them -- but they were not entitled to acquire them to begin with!
We've got basically two choices as I see it. Either we could put the burden on the merchant to actually physically destroy them -- which would drive up prices and reduce the total amount of commerce. Or, we can say it's just illegal to dumpster-dive.
The second one sounds more reasonable to a lot of people (particularly eg. book store owners).
And so you throw your CDs in a recycle bin, trusting that they'll be destroyed. But then some college students dig through your recycle bin and salvage the CDs, the CDs that someone else already paid for, the CDs that you have made a comittment to destroy.
That is piracy, at that point.
And that's how far you have to take tha analogy to make it accurate.
Has anyone seen any reference to any patent they might be talking about? What current patents to they claim exist that might fall into this category?
First, remember that basic patents on core Unix functionality are things like the setuid patent. Dennis Ritchie filed for the setuid patent in 1973, got it in 1979, and when he got it explicitly put it essentially into the public domain. SCO can't sue over that sort of thing.
Second, remember how old the core of Unix is. The patent mentioned above is from 1973! It was granted in 1979! What's the lifespan of a patent? Less than 20 years. If it were 20 years from the date on which it was granted, it would still have expired in 1999, a few years ago.
So, what the hell are they talking about? Can anyone give one example of a Unix patent that Linux might be violating? I haven't seen any, anywhere.
What on earth ever made you think I thought otherwise?
I see this as extremely likely to increase the odds that Apple will put Ogg support into iTunes and the iPod, that hardware MP3 player manufacturers will add support for Ogg, that the TiVo will be able to play it, that the PS2 media player will be able to play it, et cetera, et cetera...
This would be great. My wife and I try to listen to the Capitol Steps show whenever it's on (two or three times per year), and sometimes we miss it. A "set it and forget it" radio TiVo system like this would get use in our house, for this and for other scheduled radio shows.
Heck, if it could be integrated with an iPod download mechanism... I think the number of geeks I know who would set up a cron job to download "Car Talk" into their iPods every week is probably significant.
We need a big revamping of the concept of derivative works in general.
Because of that, samples should not be made free in isolation. Doing so would remove some fairly significant pressure on the commercial world to look at the "derivative works" issue as a coherent whole, and come up with sensible new general solutions.
35, now.
I've bought 30 tracks so far.
It does not say that the executable must be guaranteed to run after installation, but I don't think it needs to. I think it's obvious.
If "secret.txt" is needed in order to make the program actually run, then from a logical standpoint it is part of the script, in the same sense that the script itself is part of the source code. Or at least, anyone who thinks otherwise better be prepared to seriously back up their position in court.
I've suggested that the FSF have their lawyers clarify what the GPL actually requires in this regard. Hopefully they'll do so.
If I break into your office and copy some version of a GPLed binary that you've got in a vault, that does not compel you to provide the source to me. The situation of someone sitting down and using a computer that someone else owns is fundamentally similar. In the case where the computer is a server, that's even more true -- the user never sits at the server.
The other thing is that the GPL is intended to protect the ability of the end-user to which the original binary was distributed, to make sure they can modify their own copy of the executable, and share their changes with everyone else. GPLed games with non-free content don't interfere with that at all. Can the end-user tweak the bejezis out of the GPLed portion? Yes. Can they share their changes with everyone else using the GPLed portion? Yes. There really isn't a problem here.