Canada recently passed a funny law on that. Because of rather steep levies that the recording industry gets to collect on blank media, we get the right to make casual copies of ANYONE's copyrighted music to any media we choose. The only restriction is that copy may not be distributed. Because of this, I now have to pay a $0.20 levy on the price of blank CD-Rs, and closer to $0.70 on blank cassette tapes, and I have far less guilt about having MP3s from artists I have no purchased albums for, since they decided to get paid either way.
They apparently don't trust the movie industry, either. In order to produce a commercial DVD disc, you have to use a Macrovision authorized manufacturer who will then collect fees for enabling the bit on the DVD disc that puts the player into Macrovision encoding mode. They seem to try damn hard to make sure they always get paid every last dime they're owed for their technology.
The etoy/eToys thing was rather unique, in that eToys really had no right to make demands to etoy, an organization that existed long before they did, but used legal badgering to get what they wanted and then later give up when they started getting negative publicity. IMO, what's far worse is WIPO's standing on *sucks.com domains, which usually are handed back to the trademark owners, despite the fact a *sucks.com domain is unlikely to cause consumer confusion (don't know about anyone else, but I don't accidently add sucks to the end of URLs). As I said, WIPO's domain name dispute policy just plain sucks, and The Register seems to love pointing out how much it sucks. But what can you expect from an organization that's sole purpose is to make sure that companies can make as much money as possible.
Could it be that emails will be sifted to search for copyright hotwords like Coca Cola? Anyone using Coca Cola will automatically have a royalty charge applied to their account?
Coca Cola® is not a copyright -- it's a trademark. There's a huge difference. They can't prevent you from using their name except if you try to use that name on another product. Trademark exists to prevent people from creating new products with name clashes with yours, and is generally thought to be a good thing, since it prevents customer confusion. Of course, there's abuse of this form of intelectual property (especially by WIPO's domain name dispute policy).
Thank you for proudly waving the GNUflag in our faces. Pity we're not talking about PostgreSQL.
PostgreSQL isn't a GNU product. It's distributed under the UC Berkeley license instead. Besides, this thread started on the topic of how worthless MySQL is for complex databases, so someone had to pipe in with alternatives.
btw, if Oracle released a report stating that they had benchmarks proving that their DB was the best at everything, but you couldn't actually see those benchmarks, would you give the claim any credence? If not, why should we trust someone else's rumor? Just because it says good things about an OS application?
Both Oracle and Microsoft prohibit vendors from publishing benchmarks using their names without their prior approval. The original source does, however, show the benchmarks with Oracle and Microsoft's offerings marked as Proprietary 1 and Proprietary 2. However, on the section of how the benchmark was done, they list among other things, the version of the software the used, with "Proprietary 1" being at version 8.1.5 (probably Oracle), and "Proprietary 2" being at version 7.0 (probably Microsoft SQL Server). The amount of 'tuning' they did for PostgreSQL is quite a bit more than they did for any of the other vendors, so it's entirely possible they might've had slightly higher performance (especially on the TPC-C benchmark, where PostgreSQL, Proprietary 1 and 2 were neck and neck with the three products still tying at 100 users. The test probably would've been more interesting with 200 or 300 users, since they probably would've started to deviate a little).
Just about the only real features that are missing from PostgreSQL that it's competitors have is replication and full text indexing.
eh?
The 'bittiness' of the CPU rarely has anything do with floating point capabilities. The Intel x86 line all have the ability to use 80-bit floating point numbers (10 bytes). In fact, it was because of this the [in]famous FPU memory move was created for the Pentium processors -- it was faster to move memory into the FPU registers and then out back to memory than it was to use the usual movsd instructions to do the same, because via the FPU you moved 8 bytes (64 bits) at a time, whereas with movsd, you were only moving 4 bytes at a time. On the Pentium Pro and Pentium II, they finally fixed this by the use of write combining so that movsd'ing a block of memory was as fast or faster than doing it via the FPU. The numbers of bits generally refers to one of two features of the CPU -- either it's bus, or the size of the general purpose registers and address space. The Intel Pentium for example, had a 64-bit bus, but still only 32-bit registers and memory space. The Intel 80386SX had a 16-bit bus, and 32-bit registers.
Won't help if the ISP decides to be vindictive and place filters that prevent more than a single address from originating from a subscriber. Don't think it won't happen, and don't think that companies like Cisco won't be more than happy to help them out in doing this. It'll be an artificial limit, but a limit none-the-less.
SOAP and Corba are not opposites. In fact, SOAP can (and probably will) being used as a form of a transport for CORBA. SOAP is more a replacement for the IIOP protocol than for CORBA. In fact, it could work wonders for building bridges between Microsoft's rather proprietary DCOM and CORBA. And to say that SOAP has no benefits over CORBA is just plain wrong. Traditional RPC (DCE, ONC, IIOP and even XML-RPC) requires versioned interfaces if you want to modify or clarify the interfaces, whereas there's a strong possibility (provided the proper tools) that you could have depreciated parameters instead. Versioned interfaces tend to contribute to bloat as the legacy code gets more and more difficult to maintain and keep up to date (look at Windows -- if you think about it, the fact that Windows is even slightly stable is rather amazing given how many backward compatible interfaces exist that were broken by design that must be supported).
And if you change your parameters for your remote procedure call, what magic part of SOAP is going to re-write your code to make it understand the changed protocol? Repeat after me: "Strong typing is a GOOD thing."
Oh, what's that saying... "Strong typing is for those with weak minds." SOAP will likely do the same thing that CORBA or DCOM would do if the arguments didn't match the prototype -- return an error, unless the programmer decided to have it handled in another way. Protecting the programmer from making errors is good to a point, however constantly having the language second guess the programmer isn't.
SOAP is dumb. It is solving the same problem that CORBA does, only it does it using a more verbose protocol. Wait a sec; Microsoft is behind SOAP. Now this makes more sense. They're just bringing bloat to RPC calls;-)
Lets be honest. It's not like there's going to be tremendous network traffic incurred because of this. SOAP isn't going to replace either DCOM or CORBA -- they're too good at solving the problems they're made for. It'll probably just be used where CORBA or DCOM doesn't work well -- through stupid firewalls that can't understand CORBA or DCOM traffic, for instance. Most firewalls have much more mature support for HTTP and filtering on the contents of HTTP traffic than filtering DCOM (DCE-RPC), CORBA (IIOP), ONC RPC or any other RPC protocol.
The success of SOAP doesn't mean the death of CORBA. As I mentioned above, CORBA could easily operate over SOAP as it's transport, which means you could use IIOP over your LAN where you probably don't have any type of filtering, and SOAP where you might have to go through a braindead firewall.
And to make things worse, many contracts state that the record company gets ownership of all albums produced afterwards (either a number of albums or a number of years). If you TRY to get a better deal, they can sue you for breach of contract. The system is crooked and rotten to the core. Unless you have a lawyer on your side (which the record companies will, of course, try to discourage), and your music is extremely popular, you will probably get screwed.
free sites put up large advertisements
great, let's block those ads! it's my God-given right to have free Internet content!
Honestly, banner ads don't bother me much. But the reasons this IAB is citing for increasing the size of banners is completely bogus. To use click-throughs as a measure of the success of an advertising campaign is incorrect. Just about every other form of advertising relies on repetition and making people remember the name of the company/product you're trying to sell. However, internet advertisers seem to expect immediate feedback just because it's possible.
Larger ads will not increase people clicking on them, it'll only drive people to use blocking software more often.
CNet's new ads are noisy and intrusive. Because of them, I've actually started to avoid CNet. For companies that intend to do java, shockwave or pop-up advertising, I will do everything in my power to disable them because they interfere with my ability to use my computer. For banner advertising, I'm perfectly capable of ignoring them if I want, but some of these new advertising methods are too much.
secure music/content
rip it! crack it! (but only after it's in the marketplace). we have a right to free music and movies!
For me, it's not that I want free music and movies -- it's that I want the freedom to decide how, where and when I listen to or watch those movies. I completely oppose SDMI and friends because it would prevent me from burning audio tracks onto a standard CD-R to listen to in my truck , or from making MP3 discs to play on my laptop or DVD player. Or that I'll be able to listen to the music on my desktop computer, but not on my laptop, or vice versa. I'm also very concerned in the potential for this to make entertainment a completely pay-per-use world.
there are ways to properly fight the misuse of advertising, including ignoring advertising-sponsored content. but blocking that advertising is nothing but stealing. (and yes, it is stealing despite the fact that it's "digital." it's stealing bandwidth).
That's rather analogous to saying that channel surfing (or fast forwarding on a tape) during commercials on TV is stealing. I have a right to do whatever I please with the content that comes into my system so long as I don't infringe on someone's copyrights. The fact of the matter is that most people don't block and most people don't channel surf between ads, and that should be enough.
Microsoft's Windows Update feature doesn't use binary patches either, it's a download of compressed replacement files, exactly what you have to do with RPM, dpkg, slackware.tgz, etc. There are a number of good reasons for this, too. It's entirely possible for someone to miss an update or two or for an update to be reissued because of bugs. It's possible that shipping patches could end up being bigger than shipping the replacement.
I don't know. If they require all themes to be signed by Microsoft's cryptographic signature, it could be damn hard without patching critical system files (which of course would cause the system to crash everytime you upgraded to a new version of Internet Exploder, or used Windows Update).
Another work around would be to write a program that attaches itself to the napster client in the same way a debugger would and capture the unencrypted data before it hits the sound card. Or write a dummy audio driver that dumps the raw PCM data to a file (this can't be illegal under any sense of the DMCA). There's too many ways this could (will?) fail.
(if I take an MP3, turn it to wav and back again, do I lose info that survived the initial encoding into MP3?)
Definately. Even if you don't hear it, the decompression adds artifacts that the compresser will have to decide if it's audible or not. You'll end up taking away more and more correct sounds from the music and adding more and more artifacts.
Or if all else fails, move to Canada. Senator Orin Hatch doesn't work for our government. We don't have the DMCA or anything like it..... yet.
wxWindows is another C++ GUI framework API that has been ported to a wide variety of platforms. It currently compiles for Windows, MacOS, Motif, and GTK (Motif or GTK known to compile on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, SCO, DEC OSF/1 and OS/2) (a version for QT seems to be in-the-works, for all the KDE fans out there). wxWindows has been around since about 1992, although not exactly in it's current form. wxWindows is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License with a special allowance that allows you to link the wxWindows code to your executable despite what the LGPL says (it's reasonable for most/all purposes).
From what I can remember, wxWindows does most of the same things mentioned above, with the possible exception of 'single file database' support. wxWindows makes use of ODBC instead of using it's own database engine.
There's also support for virtual file systems, which allow you to use the wxFile to operate on http or ftp sources as if they were local. If that wasn't enough, you can also register your own virtual file systems at runtime. It supports a basic (very basic) HTML renderer, some IPC and printing classes, and an object for just about every widget or window type there is native support for on any platform.
The API seems fairly similar to MFC or QT, and chances are that programmers familiar with either of those would be fairly confortable using wxWindows.
I believe the problem was the use of the term "sole purpose", because as a member of the ACM admitted, nothing has a sole purpose. For anything, there are many secondary purposes that may not have even been thought of. Therefore, that 'exception' might as well not exist.
Besides, it's not like Judge Kaplan heard the case with an open mind -- it was pretty obvious that he either didn't like the defendant's lawyer or the defendants. His prior history with the MPAA should've been enough for him to step down, but, of course, he didn't. We can only hope that in the appeal that they'll get a fair shake -- they've already got the ACLU, ACM Law, librarians and reporter organizations supporting them via amicus curie. Not one of them likes the precident Kaplan set when he ruled. Some of them comment solely on his decision to hold 2600 responsible for their linking to CSS, while others reflect on the entire case.
I'm just glad Canada has not yet passed such a stupid law. However, I fear that if the movie studios are successful in defending it in court, they will turn and try to get it passed in all the countries they sell their product in.
According to a page on the MSDN site under the subheading 'A New Look', six paragraphs down:
At first glance, the potential for multiple Windows XP styles may look like the skin functionality in such applications as Window Media Player, but there are differences. Themes change the visual style of the operating system, but still provide a consistent UI with earlier versions of Windows. This is important since themes are applied system-wide. The changes applicable to an application skin, such as removal of buttons, are not appropriate at the operating system level. The theme file formats are not public; Microsoft retains the design control for themes, to allow a consistent user interface and the able to ensure design continuity. A theme developer's kit will not be available with Windows XP.
Indeed their concerns are valid -- many applications are not tolerant to widgets changing size or shape (or sometimes even colour, although that can be considered a bug). No FUD here, just geniune concern for compatibility. Many applications would become unusuable if a standard widget were to grow even by one pixel over the norm. Most of those same applications are broken if you use anything other than 'Small Fonts' (96dpi) instead of 'Large Fonts' (120dpi).
Actually, Microsoft has no plans to allow third party developers/users to create new themes for Windows XP. Microsoft fully intends on keeping the format proprietary to Microsoft to prevent this. The only themes you'll be able to get for Windows XP will be officially created ones from Microsoft. Too many people are getting excited about the ability to 'theme' Windows XP's GUI without reading the fine print that's attached. Pretty sad, though. Yes, ugly broken themes that crash applications or your computer will be created, but that's not really different from any other software out there, is it?
It's copyright, not copywrite. And software developed either under contract (e.g. not by government employees) are under no such requirement. Only software developed by government employees are limited by that. That's one of the reasons no code for carnivore (or whatever the new name of the system is) will ever be publically accessable.
Even more to that, back in the A2600 days, games that involved shooting enemies generally made it so that pressing the button and releasing rapidly fired one shot, but pressing and holding the button initiated a rapid fire. Now with the Nintendo and newer consoles and systems, pressing the button and holding it either has no effect or serves a secondary purpose, so gamers buy expensive replacement controllers that implement pseudo rapid fire via the chips in the controller rather than the software in the console.
No, I confuse nothing. Stalin wanted collective farms as part of doing away with private property. Tens of millions starved due to this experiment with communism. Similar things happened in China and other communist countries.
I'm sure millions have died because of unsafe workplaces and sweatshop like conditions in captialistic societies. And millions more have died because of unsafe products that were intentionally made unsafe by the use of inferrior materials in order to reduce costs and increase profits.
I'm not even talking about the totalitarian aspects of the USSR. But they do logically flow from a lot of Communist theology. How do you force people to give up their private property and give according to their skills and only take according to their means? A one-way trip to Siberia was the prime motivator, since the kindness of people's hearts wasn't working.
I can turn this back on you. After all, how do you prevent someone from stealing property from another in a capitalistic society -- throw them in a prison for a couple dozen years. For treason? I think a firing squad is still legally allowed. Our punishment for socially unacceptable behaviour is not that different, despite our best efforts to convince us otherwise.
Capitalism is not the moral high ground -- there is just as much potential for misery, suffering and death as the result of it. The only significant difference is capitalism tends to promote more effort since the desire to accumulate property is extremely strong. If it weren't for this greed factor, I'm sure socialism or communism would work extremely well. The problem with the governments of the United States and Canada is not that, however, it is the fact that corporations are using our government to protect themselves and maximize their profits instead of having the government protect individuals. Government corruption is just an artifact of such a capitalist system working on itself.
As I understand it, MIT Kerberos 5 CLIENTS are compatible with Windows 2000 SERVERS, but not the other way around since their LDAP Active Directory, DNS and Kerberos are so intertwined making use of a single technology is virtually impossible. Even BIND DNS servers only grudingly interoperate with Windows 2000 and only if you allow some very dangerous security holes related to dynamic DNS updates (which just don't happen with Windows 2000 DNS). Active Directory is virtually import only -- once it's in Active Directory, it's virtually impossible to export it back to an LDIF to import into another LDAP directory.
I don't, however, believe for a moment that the GPL would've prevented Microsoft from doing any of this -- if they didn't already, they would've just reimplemented the protocol from scratch, as they did with DCE RPC and DNS in previous versions of NT.
I'm sure either the Samba or Samba-TNG folks will make the first interoperability problem go away eventually, but it may be a few years before that happens.
How could they ever make it exclusively their own? That's an argument I just don't grasp by GPL supporters, as they pretend the earlier software simply disapeared.
This is at least partially possible with Microsoft's trademark 'embrance-and-extend' moto. As much as I dislike RMS's views, this is exactly what Microsoft is doing with Kerberos, although I dispute his assertion that it couldn't happen if the code was under the GNU GPL -- Microsoft would've just reimplemented the entire codebase (if they didn't already). While it may not remove the software, it can make it usless for most intents and purposes. MIT's Kerberos code is worthless when it comes to Windows 2000 machines, but Windows 2000 Servers will interoperate with MIT Kerberos clients.
The GPL is not without it's problems. For example, it seems to almost encourage developer laziness ('You have the source, fix it yourself!') and irresponsibility. The only problem I see with the GPL in terms of being a license alone is that it uses many programmer terms that are not properly defined in the license and may be open to legal dispute. However, as I said, unlike Microsoft's EULA's, it grants rights instead of revoking them. As such, no matter what legal actions are taken against it, I will never be prevented from using the software. On the other hand, Microsoft EULA's include termination phrases that allow Microsoft to decide that you can no longer use their software at their discretion.
As RMS said, he does not want any software to exist which is not under the FSF's terms as free, and is fighting for that. [...] The FSF is not fighting for 1776 ideals our forefathers faught for, or for the betterment of society.. they fight for one extreme view and want to force it, and force is probably by far a weak word here, on society.
You're right, of course. But at least he remains true to his beliefs, and I have to give him credit for that. Most people do not have the guts to continue advertising their beliefs in the face of constant criticism. Remember that any group is given at least a little validity by it's extremist members.
Well, I for one am glad that there are at least some hardliners on "our side" of the camp to offset those on the other side. You might argue that firebrands like RMS scare people away. I think American poltics disproves that -- people will keep there distance, sure, but in the end, he is still shifting the middle closer to our end of the field.
Sad, but you're probably right about this. It's easier to at least partially sympathize with a group if there's some extremeists that hold opinions that are unpopular with both the group they're assumed to be representing and the groups that are against them. As unpopular as they may be, the constant jabbering does eventually help to get the message out there, which is a net win for even those with a less extreme opinion.
Our world really is on the virge of change. On one side, we have media producers fighting hard to gain strict control over their product. Fighting hard by forging deals with manufacturers of the technology we use to prevent us from using the product in the ways we might like to. They're backed with mega-corporations and lots of money and lobbying groups on their side. They generate easy-to-use, complex solutions to otherwise simple problems in order to maintain the customer which appeal to managerial types.
On the other side, we have groups who believe in the Free Software or Open Source mantra, and are fighting hard to break down the barriers that have been built. They might not have the money the other side has, but they are noisy and they don't give up nearly as easily. They create solutions to problems with an elegant simplicity that appeals to the technically minded people using the work.
It should be a good battle unfolding in the next couple years... We'll have to see who wins.
The GPL only tells you what conditions you need to abide to in order to redistribute the software. Microsoft's EULA's tell you what conditions you need to abide to in order to use the software. There's an important difference. Under copyright law, you have no right to redistribute without direct prior consent of the author. The important part of that is, the GPL grants rights, whereas Microsoft EULA's revoke rights as allowed under the law. The BSD license is quite a bit more 'free', since it allows nearly unrestricted distribution in any form for any purpose. Each license has a purpose -- if you want something that will be adopted by nearly everyone everwhere, the BSD license might be for you, but if you want to make sure that no one company can take your work and make it exclusively their own, the GNU GPL-style licenses might be more appropriate.
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Canada recently passed a funny law on that. Because of rather steep levies that the recording industry gets to collect on blank media, we get the right to make casual copies of ANYONE's copyrighted music to any media we choose. The only restriction is that copy may not be distributed. Because of this, I now have to pay a $0.20 levy on the price of blank CD-Rs, and closer to $0.70 on blank cassette tapes, and I have far less guilt about having MP3s from artists I have no purchased albums for, since they decided to get paid either way.
They apparently don't trust the movie industry, either. In order to produce a commercial DVD disc, you have to use a Macrovision authorized manufacturer who will then collect fees for enabling the bit on the DVD disc that puts the player into Macrovision encoding mode. They seem to try damn hard to make sure they always get paid every last dime they're owed for their technology.
I just have to wonder if anyone will take this one step further and put Sith instead. After all, you can't have one without the other.
The etoy/eToys thing was rather unique, in that eToys really had no right to make demands to etoy, an organization that existed long before they did, but used legal badgering to get what they wanted and then later give up when they started getting negative publicity. IMO, what's far worse is WIPO's standing on *sucks.com domains, which usually are handed back to the trademark owners, despite the fact a *sucks.com domain is unlikely to cause consumer confusion (don't know about anyone else, but I don't accidently add sucks to the end of URLs). As I said, WIPO's domain name dispute policy just plain sucks, and The Register seems to love pointing out how much it sucks. But what can you expect from an organization that's sole purpose is to make sure that companies can make as much money as possible.
Coca Cola® is not a copyright -- it's a trademark. There's a huge difference. They can't prevent you from using their name except if you try to use that name on another product. Trademark exists to prevent people from creating new products with name clashes with yours, and is generally thought to be a good thing, since it prevents customer confusion. Of course, there's abuse of this form of intelectual property (especially by WIPO's domain name dispute policy).
PostgreSQL isn't a GNU product. It's distributed under the UC Berkeley license instead. Besides, this thread started on the topic of how worthless MySQL is for complex databases, so someone had to pipe in with alternatives.
Both Oracle and Microsoft prohibit vendors from publishing benchmarks using their names without their prior approval. The original source does, however, show the benchmarks with Oracle and Microsoft's offerings marked as Proprietary 1 and Proprietary 2. However, on the section of how the benchmark was done, they list among other things, the version of the software the used, with "Proprietary 1" being at version 8.1.5 (probably Oracle), and "Proprietary 2" being at version 7.0 (probably Microsoft SQL Server). The amount of 'tuning' they did for PostgreSQL is quite a bit more than they did for any of the other vendors, so it's entirely possible they might've had slightly higher performance (especially on the TPC-C benchmark, where PostgreSQL, Proprietary 1 and 2 were neck and neck with the three products still tying at 100 users. The test probably would've been more interesting with 200 or 300 users, since they probably would've started to deviate a little).
Just about the only real features that are missing from PostgreSQL that it's competitors have is replication and full text indexing.
eh? The 'bittiness' of the CPU rarely has anything do with floating point capabilities. The Intel x86 line all have the ability to use 80-bit floating point numbers (10 bytes). In fact, it was because of this the [in]famous FPU memory move was created for the Pentium processors -- it was faster to move memory into the FPU registers and then out back to memory than it was to use the usual movsd instructions to do the same, because via the FPU you moved 8 bytes (64 bits) at a time, whereas with movsd, you were only moving 4 bytes at a time. On the Pentium Pro and Pentium II, they finally fixed this by the use of write combining so that movsd'ing a block of memory was as fast or faster than doing it via the FPU. The numbers of bits generally refers to one of two features of the CPU -- either it's bus, or the size of the general purpose registers and address space. The Intel Pentium for example, had a 64-bit bus, but still only 32-bit registers and memory space. The Intel 80386SX had a 16-bit bus, and 32-bit registers.
Won't help if the ISP decides to be vindictive and place filters that prevent more than a single address from originating from a subscriber. Don't think it won't happen, and don't think that companies like Cisco won't be more than happy to help them out in doing this. It'll be an artificial limit, but a limit none-the-less.
Oh, what's that saying... "Strong typing is for those with weak minds." SOAP will likely do the same thing that CORBA or DCOM would do if the arguments didn't match the prototype -- return an error, unless the programmer decided to have it handled in another way. Protecting the programmer from making errors is good to a point, however constantly having the language second guess the programmer isn't.
Lets be honest. It's not like there's going to be tremendous network traffic incurred because of this. SOAP isn't going to replace either DCOM or CORBA -- they're too good at solving the problems they're made for. It'll probably just be used where CORBA or DCOM doesn't work well -- through stupid firewalls that can't understand CORBA or DCOM traffic, for instance. Most firewalls have much more mature support for HTTP and filtering on the contents of HTTP traffic than filtering DCOM (DCE-RPC), CORBA (IIOP), ONC RPC or any other RPC protocol.
The success of SOAP doesn't mean the death of CORBA. As I mentioned above, CORBA could easily operate over SOAP as it's transport, which means you could use IIOP over your LAN where you probably don't have any type of filtering, and SOAP where you might have to go through a braindead firewall.
And to make things worse, many contracts state that the record company gets ownership of all albums produced afterwards (either a number of albums or a number of years). If you TRY to get a better deal, they can sue you for breach of contract. The system is crooked and rotten to the core. Unless you have a lawyer on your side (which the record companies will, of course, try to discourage), and your music is extremely popular, you will probably get screwed.
CNet's new ads are noisy and intrusive. Because of them, I've actually started to avoid CNet. For companies that intend to do java, shockwave or pop-up advertising, I will do everything in my power to disable them because they interfere with my ability to use my computer. For banner advertising, I'm perfectly capable of ignoring them if I want, but some of these new advertising methods are too much.
For me, it's not that I want free music and movies -- it's that I want the freedom to decide how, where and when I listen to or watch those movies. I completely oppose SDMI and friends because it would prevent me from burning audio tracks onto a standard CD-R to listen to in my truck , or from making MP3 discs to play on my laptop or DVD player. Or that I'll be able to listen to the music on my desktop computer, but not on my laptop, or vice versa. I'm also very concerned in the potential for this to make entertainment a completely pay-per-use world. That's rather analogous to saying that channel surfing (or fast forwarding on a tape) during commercials on TV is stealing. I have a right to do whatever I please with the content that comes into my system so long as I don't infringe on someone's copyrights. The fact of the matter is that most people don't block and most people don't channel surf between ads, and that should be enough.Microsoft's Windows Update feature doesn't use binary patches either, it's a download of compressed replacement files, exactly what you have to do with RPM, dpkg, slackware .tgz, etc. There are a number of good reasons for this, too. It's entirely possible for someone to miss an update or two or for an update to be reissued because of bugs. It's possible that shipping patches could end up being bigger than shipping the replacement.
I don't know. If they require all themes to be signed by Microsoft's cryptographic signature, it could be damn hard without patching critical system files (which of course would cause the system to crash everytime you upgraded to a new version of Internet Exploder, or used Windows Update).
Or if all else fails, move to Canada. Senator Orin Hatch doesn't work for our government. We don't have the DMCA or anything like it..... yet.
From what I can remember, wxWindows does most of the same things mentioned above, with the possible exception of 'single file database' support. wxWindows makes use of ODBC instead of using it's own database engine.
There's also support for virtual file systems, which allow you to use the wxFile to operate on http or ftp sources as if they were local. If that wasn't enough, you can also register your own virtual file systems at runtime. It supports a basic (very basic) HTML renderer, some IPC and printing classes, and an object for just about every widget or window type there is native support for on any platform.
The API seems fairly similar to MFC or QT, and chances are that programmers familiar with either of those would be fairly confortable using wxWindows.
Besides, it's not like Judge Kaplan heard the case with an open mind -- it was pretty obvious that he either didn't like the defendant's lawyer or the defendants. His prior history with the MPAA should've been enough for him to step down, but, of course, he didn't. We can only hope that in the appeal that they'll get a fair shake -- they've already got the ACLU, ACM Law, librarians and reporter organizations supporting them via amicus curie. Not one of them likes the precident Kaplan set when he ruled. Some of them comment solely on his decision to hold 2600 responsible for their linking to CSS, while others reflect on the entire case.
I'm just glad Canada has not yet passed such a stupid law. However, I fear that if the movie studios are successful in defending it in court, they will turn and try to get it passed in all the countries they sell their product in.
Actually, Microsoft has no plans to allow third party developers/users to create new themes for Windows XP. Microsoft fully intends on keeping the format proprietary to Microsoft to prevent this. The only themes you'll be able to get for Windows XP will be officially created ones from Microsoft. Too many people are getting excited about the ability to 'theme' Windows XP's GUI without reading the fine print that's attached. Pretty sad, though. Yes, ugly broken themes that crash applications or your computer will be created, but that's not really different from any other software out there, is it?
It's copyright, not copywrite. And software developed either under contract (e.g. not by government employees) are under no such requirement. Only software developed by government employees are limited by that. That's one of the reasons no code for carnivore (or whatever the new name of the system is) will ever be publically accessable.
Even more to that, back in the A2600 days, games that involved shooting enemies generally made it so that pressing the button and releasing rapidly fired one shot, but pressing and holding the button initiated a rapid fire. Now with the Nintendo and newer consoles and systems, pressing the button and holding it either has no effect or serves a secondary purpose, so gamers buy expensive replacement controllers that implement pseudo rapid fire via the chips in the controller rather than the software in the console.
Capitalism is not the moral high ground -- there is just as much potential for misery, suffering and death as the result of it. The only significant difference is capitalism tends to promote more effort since the desire to accumulate property is extremely strong. If it weren't for this greed factor, I'm sure socialism or communism would work extremely well. The problem with the governments of the United States and Canada is not that, however, it is the fact that corporations are using our government to protect themselves and maximize their profits instead of having the government protect individuals. Government corruption is just an artifact of such a capitalist system working on itself.
I don't, however, believe for a moment that the GPL would've prevented Microsoft from doing any of this -- if they didn't already, they would've just reimplemented the protocol from scratch, as they did with DCE RPC and DNS in previous versions of NT.
I'm sure either the Samba or Samba-TNG folks will make the first interoperability problem go away eventually, but it may be a few years before that happens.
The GPL is not without it's problems. For example, it seems to almost encourage developer laziness ('You have the source, fix it yourself!') and irresponsibility. The only problem I see with the GPL in terms of being a license alone is that it uses many programmer terms that are not properly defined in the license and may be open to legal dispute. However, as I said, unlike Microsoft's EULA's, it grants rights instead of revoking them. As such, no matter what legal actions are taken against it, I will never be prevented from using the software. On the other hand, Microsoft EULA's include termination phrases that allow Microsoft to decide that you can no longer use their software at their discretion.
You're right, of course. But at least he remains true to his beliefs, and I have to give him credit for that. Most people do not have the guts to continue advertising their beliefs in the face of constant criticism. Remember that any group is given at least a little validity by it's extremist members.Our world really is on the virge of change. On one side, we have media producers fighting hard to gain strict control over their product. Fighting hard by forging deals with manufacturers of the technology we use to prevent us from using the product in the ways we might like to. They're backed with mega-corporations and lots of money and lobbying groups on their side. They generate easy-to-use, complex solutions to otherwise simple problems in order to maintain the customer which appeal to managerial types.
On the other side, we have groups who believe in the Free Software or Open Source mantra, and are fighting hard to break down the barriers that have been built. They might not have the money the other side has, but they are noisy and they don't give up nearly as easily. They create solutions to problems with an elegant simplicity that appeals to the technically minded people using the work.
It should be a good battle unfolding in the next couple years... We'll have to see who wins.
The GPL only tells you what conditions you need to abide to in order to redistribute the software. Microsoft's EULA's tell you what conditions you need to abide to in order to use the software. There's an important difference. Under copyright law, you have no right to redistribute without direct prior consent of the author. The important part of that is, the GPL grants rights, whereas Microsoft EULA's revoke rights as allowed under the law. The BSD license is quite a bit more 'free', since it allows nearly unrestricted distribution in any form for any purpose. Each license has a purpose -- if you want something that will be adopted by nearly everyone everwhere, the BSD license might be for you, but if you want to make sure that no one company can take your work and make it exclusively their own, the GNU GPL-style licenses might be more appropriate.