Anyone care to put forward some suggestions on how a musician can distribute their work, receive payment, hold copyright and get people to license their work? I have a close friend who has recently put some of his work closer into the spotlight online (but still very far from it, in a very targeted place) and his bandwisth limits loom if he were to actually promote his music whatsoever. He's considered dumping lower quality versions (the present audio is 256kbs mp3) into p2p apps but is unconvinced that it is a good thing to do. He's had a number of offers in the past few weeks for deals for 1 or 2 tracks (people haven't seen or heard much of his music but he's been writing for over a dozen years). I'm think he should charge a minimal worthwhile credit card charge for his work, allowing people who buy return for up to a year to download new audio he writes, offer standard deals for record labels where they can download lossless files and run with them. Of course I want him to use free codecs, and I think he might be convinced (on the possibility of hearing from fraunhoffer et al demanding cash). Any ideas the best way to go about price, bandwidth and the artists interests? What about "simpler" things like hooking up a shop to downloads securely (and simply for the end user) without having to go to your bank to setup a merchant account and without having to loose nearly all of a reasonable sized transaction in costs?
I don't know what sort of Laws the US would have to pass to allow a foreigner as president (but Demolitian Man suggested they would be changed to allow Arnie become president, what a beautiful future), but you should get them changed and then forget Steve Jobs Linus for President
He needs to rebuild the USA Government as he rebuilt the unix kernel. I'm not sure about the VP though?
I was wondering if you could hook these up to generate power at vents in the ocean floor using thermocouples to power them for another "free" power source (i.e. make the generator and take it from "renewable" natural resources)? Probably not worth it if you do the math but ???
Igneuity required to combine the two, nothing more. You mave an intake at the front of the vessel gobbling up all the water it can get, you have an engine using steam and bubbles, you throw some of the steam, or bubbles or whatever combination and delivery method works best back out of the front of the vessel so as to place the rest of the vessel from there on in a supercavity. To me this seems like it could only make things more efficient, as you can take the current drag of the supercavity away in return for this engine less however much of the efficiency of the engine your cavity generation feedback takes.
Looking at Irish Law I can't decide whether I can use mplayer or not! Guess what, IANAL! The relevant law (from bailii) is:
COPYRIGHT AND RELATED RIGHTS ACT 2000 - SECT 81
Lawful copies of computer programs.
81.- (1) It is not an infringement of the copyright in a computer
program for a lawful user-
(a) to make a permanent or temporary copy of the whole or a
part of the computer program by any means or in any
form, or
(b) to make a translation, adaptation, arrangement or any other
alteration of the computer program and to copy the
results thereof,
to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer
program with other programs where the following conditions are
complied with:
(i) those acts are performed by the lawful user or on his or her
behalf by a person authorised to do so;
(ii) the information necessary to achieve interoperability has
not previously been available to the person referred to in
subparagraph (i); and
(iii) those acts are confined to the parts of the original program
which are necessary to achieve interoperability.
(2) Subsection (1) shall not permit the information obtained
through its application-
(a) to be used other than to achieve the interoperability of the
independently created computer program,
(b) to be given to persons other than those referred to in that
subsection, except where necessary for the interoperability
of the independently created computer program, or
(c) to be used for the development, production or marketing of
a computer program substantially similar in its
expression, or for any other act which infringes copyright.
Now it all seems good up to 81.2.c which seems pretty damning! Hmmm time to read up some more on my "good?" legal system (I don't believe for a minute it is but figuring out how bad it is kills me)?
I think the most interesting thing about mplayer is going to be the next few months. They are realistically approaching a 1.0 release and at that point they will probably be able to sit back and look at some of the issues Debina might love to "fix". In the meantime, I think we will see mplayer charge forward in terms of stability and cleanliness. Everything points to the fact they've been concentrating on getting the codec count and just putting a minimal of effort into the UI. All in all the ui isn't too attrocious (when it compiles and works, debian source compiler here), though I think I would prefer it if there was a native toolkit option (but I suspect they could appear rapidly if mplayer manages to do a quarter decent job of stabilising things for a 1.0 tree). I actually wish the mplayer devleopers would find someone to setup their own apt-get.org archive for the "official mplayer" debian binaries. If they are building good binaries for debian, non-intrusively and that comply with debian standards, debian will release it. Instead of flaming the person who is unofficially packaging the player for debian who won't release it, they should produce packages, propose a maintainer and maintain the player (including security updates) until debian produce binaries they are happy with! If they want to protect how well their work appears, then they should really do this with binaries (and source of course) for all distros. It would help if dpkg ((gnome-)apt(itude)) supported singed packages and then you could let your machine run rampant on sources only allowing packages signed by trusted developers to be installed.
Quake 1 and 2 were sold as Windows games with downloadable Linux binaries. id didn't make a dime they could prove was from Linux sales.
During my many,many months scouring Ireland for Quake 3 for Linux to buy in any store (including ordering) I stumbled across Quake 1:The Offering for Linux which includes two add-ons! I bought it (£20 if I remember right and they gave me a free Quake 3 t-shirt). They sold 1, maybe only one,but I doubt it!
The way that Linux will get onto the development cycle is two-fold. Firstly people who look at the id Software methods and start to write cross-platform code from the outset so they can port onto Win, Lin, PS(2/3), GC, XBox, OSX. Secondly Linux will start to look attractive in a splitting marketplace, with maybe 5+ platforms possibly on the agenda as it is, you can pick one platform alone (then pick the best for your type of game), or pick one group of platforms that provide a common api set you can use or pick a cross platform approach and target them all. If you are going to do Win and XBox and anything, why not do all of them?
My biggest hopes are on Sony releasing the PS3 as a Linux based machine using OpenGL and SDL (for example). If you want to use any of their trademarks you have to pay them, if you want in on their promotional and official stuff you have to pay them. If you want to use any custom software they write for the platform that they want to sell to licencees, that's fair enough (nice if they didn't though). All they do then is charge the hardware price + expected development contribution for the console and use licensing money to promote it! If they do this, they'd probably coerce themselves into making most of the machine far more standard and make it an even more mainstream product. Maybe instead it could just be a Vaio derivative with PS compatibility (through linux as they use it for development right)? If that happened the choice would be Mac, Linux, Sony or MS. Some stuff would go to Windows, but as console games have become more prominent, I think more would go for the Sony, Mac, Linux branch of development (Linux being a by-product of getting PS(2/3), iBooks, iMacs, etc.) mainly for the ability in PS and Mac to have a far greater degree of hardware control. In Linux they would have none, but if they support it, they get some near free money, and support, and hackers who will do things they'd never thought of and open those opportunities for them. In Windows they have support. In Linux they can do no support if they do it right (it's free, lots Free, the rest unified with our main tree). I have no idea about Nintendo development hence I don't know which side of any divides they are on.
As for your issues of not paying for late ports, I think that it is only resolved by a unified code base, which can release simultaneously (at least as far as win/lin/osx is concerned, console release could be early/late, nobody complains (much) about having a different box for the PS and PC Tony Hawk). I think that they should all be primarily charging for the artistic content of their games and see a patching/os devlopment model on a PS as an amazing boon. MS has a warchest of $40 billion? Could they really smack down Sony's PS division in these circumstances? And if some other Sony companies joined them (hdtv, vaio, projectors, hd-recorders) they could create some real excitement in the marketplace (all the Sony stuff you get creates a Sony 802.11g network that you can let other devices into, your entire houses sony gear can bang it's data around on it, go online through it etc). I think someone needs to slap Sony around a bit and tell them to take MS to the cleaners. Get MS to use their warchest to promote against them, net effect is growing teir marketplace which they are and will win! If in the process they can encompass Free software, they can rewrite the marketplace as a competitive economy again, where they have a huge leg up that will give them a very strong long term position (as long as they don;t drop the ball). They will deepen their "monopoly" on the PS(2) into their other product lines and make licensing money from others who wish to buy into the PS3 (and if Sony can standardise on a few connection methods and protocols they could be making a fortune on licensing at very resaaonable rates, probably forcing MS to try to be Sony compatible!).
This post is rambling I've had enough, ask me for more if you want it!
Can we generate a a filter perhaps like the bayenisian filter from the spam work which discards all the music you don't like? Look at compression, ID3 or other format based headers to determine whether or not your radio station is trying to feed you junk music! If you had a multicard radio system which did delay play (a la video recorder) with this sort of a "spam" filter it would be very cool! You could listen to new music (or football or news), browse your radio archive (a wee lcd will do). Could we build properties which would help classify otherwise indeterminate audio? I think we could but I'm not sure. Here's one idea, speach recogintion software could be trained, by as many people as are willing collectively, to recognise and understand radio personalities (including duplicitous advertisers). Now we could even look at extending it out (and perhaps we should) into all media, including video and web content! Each have their headers and content. Each must leave encoding properties which can provide clues, each must have properties of it's raw content which can be examined. I think we are looking at some serious CPU power to do this as I think about it, but perhaps digital radio broadcasting will expedite matters.
implanted into everything from humans to milk cartons, recording and transmitting real-time medical data or serving as a form of inventory control. Sensors of every kind, including video cameras, should also become much smaller and cheaper. Forrester Research, a technology consultancy, predicts that 14 billion such devices will be connected to the internet by 2010.
Guess that means we'll have to have IP6 by 2010! That's to go with our 12GHz processors, Debian 5.0 and Linux 4.0!
Could the modded BIOS not report a spoofed MAC? That way it can be banned without you getting banned, you could even setup your network to drop outgoing traffic from the bad mac. Is it too much of a hack to get the bios to spoof the MAC (forgive me for knowing little about communications at this level).
Think Star-Trek, no really! The manual overides for the doors (well some) are levers that could operate a pump or similar. Now you just need to ensure your password entry system takes a sufficintly low amount of power and time that you can get it working (and so can anyone else who needs to). The question is how strong to make all the doors (and windows) as your going to have to break in when you forget your password, or a lightning strike fries everything!
Simple, it means all OpenSource development will be done outside of the U.S. and by people who will not travel to the U.S. It also means risking your country (in my case Ireland) becoming the next target for the War on Terror if I contribute but what the hell, you only die once and I'd rather die fighting!
To quote:
United States Patent 6,161,130
Horvitz , et al. December 12, 2000
Technique which utilizes a probabilistic classifier to detect "junk" e-mail by automatically updating a training and re-training the classifier based on the updated training set
Abstract
A technique, specifically a method and apparatus that implements the method, which through a probabilistic classifier (370) and, for a given recipient, detects electronic mail (e-mail) messages, in an incoming message stream, which that recipient is likely to consider "junk". Specifically, the invention discriminates message content for that recipient, through a probabilistic classifier (e.g., a support vector machine) trained on prior content classifications. Through a resulting quantitative probability measure, i.e., an output confidence level, produced by the classifier for each message and subsequently compared against a predefined threshold, that message is classified as either, e.g., spam or legitimate mail, and, e.g., then stored in a corresponding folder (223, 227) for subsequent retrieval by and display to the recipient. Based on the probability measure, the message can alternatively be classified into one of a number of different folders, depicted in a pre-defined visually distinctive manner or simply discarded in its entirety.
Inventors: Horvitz; Eric (Kirkland, WA); Heckerman; David E. (Bellevue, WA); Dumais; Susan T. (Kirkland, WA); Sahami; Mehran (Stanford, CA); Platt; John C. (Bellevue, WA)
Assignee: Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA)
Appl. No.: 102837
Filed: June 23, 1998
And then:
We claim:
1. A method of classifying an incoming electronic message, as a function of content of the message, into one of a plurality of predefined classes, the method comprising the steps of:
determining whether each one of a pre-defined set of N features (where N is a predefined integer) is present in the incoming message so as to yield feature data associated with the message;
applying the feature data to a probabilistic classifier so as to yield an output confidence level for the incoming message which specifies a probability that the incoming message belongs to said one class, wherein the classifier has been trained, on past classifications of message content for a plurality of messages that form a training set and belong to said one class, to recognize said N features in the training set;
classifying, in response to a magnitude of the output confidence level, the incoming message as a member of said one class of messages;
automatically updating the training set to include classification of message content for an incoming message which has been classified by a user in another one of the predefined classes other than said one class specified by the classifier so as to form an updated training set; and
automatically re-training the classifier based on the updated training set so as to adapt the operation of the classifier to changes in either message content that affect message classification or in user perceptions of the content of incoming messages.
Prior Art anyone? Or is the only way to fight this in the U.S. the obviousness defence? Applying a bunch of rules to an incoming email to give it a spam value seems obvious to me? Could they have stepped to far with their claims and made unix style small tools immune from the patent?
I would think the best place to send the letters is to the PCI manufacturers (and presumably members of PCI-SIG0, especially the ones who actively support FreeOSs and any who reference the database from their site. PCI-SIG are going to crawl back down if their members tell them to, but if a few thousand (or even 50000) people they can write off as a minority group mail bomb them for a few days then they are not going to be too inclined to change based on these facts. As others have pointed out this database isn't a tool for Joe Public so the targetting of our letters has to be to the people who will see the benfit to their own pockets for this site to remain in existance.
F*** you you d*** s*** do you f***ing not know what a f***ing * does to a f***ing word thats sprinkled with the little s***s? Or just because some f***ing piece of s*** digital systems use a c***ish * to represent multiple unknown little b****y letters that means that we all have to f***ing start to write the way some c*** wants us all to? Sorry I forgot, you just a typical f***ing/. c*** who likes to f*** with peoples heads by t****ing!
Do you have, or would you consider adding, a voluntary popularity rating system for the programs on your CD? I'm thinking of the likes of the debian popularity-contest which tracks which programs are installed (and how often they're used I think) to decide what programs should be included on which CD of their release. It would also help for the Linux (BSD, any other FreeOS you care to name) community as they could see which programs Windows people like and therefore can help most in bringing them across from Win to Lin.
Could you please provide some concrete details? Basically just tell us all which programs are affected and why (what copyrights or patents of SCOs are involved)? Unless and until you do I can only imagine you will end up modded as "Troll" and not "Informative" because what you are saying is not a popular idea and it is the sort of thing which will get people all heated up!
Presuming everything in your parents post is true:
These guys are rivals, they want to compete with each other, they want to use it on a range of items on an ongoing basis. They will HAVE to be open about everything they use that they don't each independently write in their own houses. The question is what sort of a range of products will they envisage, what Free Software will they contribute to? Presumably the arrangement will provide the core OS stability, power and reliability for cretain types of hardware, but what types? PS3, TV, VAIO, all of the above? I think that if companies that have the financial power to make MS worry form up to develop a range of products like these (everything these guys make that gets a computer) then MS could see themselves in big trouble very very very quickly. Imagine that ALL MSs so called opponents (Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Sun, IBM, HP, Apple, Palm, Compaq, Sharp (Hmmm, imagine a beowolf cluster of wallpaper made up of the computational LCD), Toshiba, care to add more) all grouped up to develop one reference software system MS would be dead five years after the launch! In a dual standard world right now where MS takes everything they can and the others consoladate everything they can into one and then duke it out, who wins? How many casualties? Who are they? Why am I still editing this comment without previewing it? Ok, time to post, sorry anyone who read this. How many other companies will join the pact? Think POS (that's point of sale, not piece of s***) vendors, think generic hardware manufacturers!!!!
As I was running it under cygwin at the time (don't ask) I don't think it'll let me run the resultant mp3! Just for fun though I did run it and it threw back the following (for Suse):
The slack version is identical except for addrloc: 0xbfff96f4.
Now the files it spits out are 2888 bytes and the strings output of the Suse and Slack versions are identical (1763 bytes) starting with a line containing "A" 1663 times followed by a 1 and then:
hort
ho abh-c thCTRLhs.. hcondh5 seh in hrf ~hrm -
hf ~Xhm -rh-cXrhAAAAhAAAAhAAAAhAAAAh/shCh/bin1
The actual Suse file contains (as displayed by less):
<FF><E5><EA>^@@<92><FF><BF> ;
Then the 1663 "A" and the "1" then :
<C0>1<DB>1<C9>1<D2><B0>;P1<C0>ho rt
ho abh-c thCTRLhs.. hcondh5 seh in hrf ~hrm -<B3>^B<89><E1><B2>)<B0>^D<CD><80>1&l t;C0>1<FF><B0>^E<89><C7>1<C0>1<DB>1<C9& ;
gt;1<D2>f<BA>pPR<B3>^B<89><E1>1<D2><B2&g t;^B<B0>^D<CD><80>1<C0>1<DB>1<C9>P@P<89&g t;<E3><B0><A2><CD><80>O1<C0>9<C7>u<D
1>1<C0>1<DB>1<C9>1<D2>h f ~Xhm -rh-cXrhAAAAhAAAAhAAAAh
AAAAh/shCh/bin1<C0><88>D$^G<88>D$^Z<88>D$#<89>d1&l
t;DB><8D>\$^X<89>\$^L1<DB><8D>\$ESC<89>\$^P<
89>D$^T1<DB><89><E3><8D>L1<D2><8D>T$^T&l t;B0>^K<CD><80>1<DB>1<C0>@<CD><80>^@<FC
><95><FF><BF><FC><95><FF><BF> ho abh
-c thCTRLhs.. hcondh5 seh in hrf ~hrm -<B3>^B<89><E1><B2>)<B0>^D<CD><80>1<C0>1<FF><B0>^E<89>& l
t;C7>1<C0>1<DB>1<C9>1<D2>f<BA>pPR<B3>^B& l
t;89><E1>1<D2><B2>^B<B0>^D<CD><80>1<C0
>1<DB>1<C9>P@P<89><E3><B0><A2><CD>& ;
lt;80>O1<C0>9<C7>u<D1>1<C0>1<DB>1<C9>1&l t;D2>hf ~Xhm -rh-cXrhAAAAhAAAAhAAAAhAAAAh/shCh/bin1<C0><88>D$^G <88>D$^Z<88>D$#<89>d1<DB><8D>\$^X<89>\$^L1<D
B><8D>\$ESC<89>\$^P<89>D$^T1<DB><89><E3>& ;
lt;8D>L1<D2><8D>T$^T<B0>^K<CD><80>1<DB>1& ;
lt;C0>@<CD><80>^@<FC><95><FF><BF><FC& g
t;<95><FF><BF>
This is followed by <FC><95><FF><BF> a mere 240 times! The Slack file is very similar, all I can see different is in the start the ^@@ becomes ^@ and then the repeated <FC><95><FF><BF> becomes <B4><9A><FF><BF>
While I was writing this the RIAA have confirmed (allegedly) that they have nothing to do with this and have only just heard of it as they forwarded the e-mail. I honestly think it was a hoax to try and discredit the RIAA, but it was the most pathetically handled hoax of all time. To have made this work to any effect, he should have setup a P2P client to distribute a "document" he sent to the RIAA confirming discussing the development and deployment. If he had just pushed out a few copies of this a day (using the deceptive filenames technique) you can be sure someone who got it would have leaked it soon enough. As long as he could actually write real english as oppossed to the crap he dribbled here, it probably would have taken quite a lot more effort for people to get to the bottom of it. However, no-one (well some of the more rabid/. readers excluded) was ever going to believe that someone hired by the RIAA would disclose this like this, slagging Theo and saying things like "We hope that you're as amused with our maturity as we are", "Don't fuck with the RIAA again, scriptkids", "We have our own private version of this hydra actively
infecting p2p users, and building one giant ddosnet" and the icing on the cake " Remember, Napster is Communism, so fight for the American
way of life."
Re:What kind of 30 mile range phone does his Dad h
on
1KM 802.11b @ 2MB
·
· Score: 2
Now I realise that any theoretical maximum is unlikely to be achieved, but by the same token a 10Mb ethernet connection is not going to get 10mbs! Just seemed strange to me to include 10bast-T anywhere, I know I haven't used it for about 4 Years anywhere!
Re:What kind of 30 mile range phone does his Dad h
on
1KM 802.11b @ 2MB
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Hmmm, guess what, this will take you to their damn ugly website where I'm sure you can find out more! I can't be bothered to read up on the phones, but did notice that they have a range of 802.11b hardware for up to 25kms that this guy would love to have, why? well they have lightning protection (surge arrester) aswell as being watertight and weatherproof with POWER over Ethernet (never heard of it before myself). He'd also have got a standard N-type connector, 273K-323K temperature range (he could still go to high though, just). The only wierd thing (is it not) is that it has a 10 Base T connector for the local network, so your 11Mbs suddenly gets chopped to a theoretical 10 before you even try to get anything out of it.
Are 3G phones crippled so that people can't go here and choose a wide variety of vendors for their "amusement"? Will the telcos really prevent a 3G phone from being able to access information not signed to a deal on their network? I know I won't buy a technology that is hampered like that (I can't see/. paying to allow Irish 3G users to access their site from their phone!). So why would porn companies be willing to pay 10s of billions just to give people easier access to their porn? Are the phone operators worried that a "common carrier" defense wouldn't stand up if they were found to have allowed a 15 year old to access "inappropriate" material via their phone?
The Irish Times had an article on this on Saturday. The basic outline of the (admitedly brief article) was that this guy had won the Young Scientist awards (a big annual competition for all Irish school children), he had written a web browser that increased browsing speed somewhere near 5x which even included a DVD player. It said that he had written 1,500,000 lines of code and that he had done it in 18 months! The main thing that they mentioned but I haven't seen on this story is that the judges were sceptical and took his software down to the Computer Labs in UCD (a Dublin University) and they verified the performance there! I still didn't believe the article, and suspect the judges have given inappropriate praise to someone, but perhaps there is something at the bottom of all of this that actually is worthwhile (but I suspect that the speed up is the only worthwhile thing he has done and that it is little if anything more than existing techniques). The one thing I am curious about is can this guy actually travel to the US safely or did he really write a DVD player and break the DMCA (there's no way he was liscensed to do it!)? The other thing they mentioned was that he had not patented anything but was going to! I wonder if he will be able to and I wonder how many other patents he violated to create the project.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone care to put forward some suggestions on how a musician can distribute their work, receive payment, hold copyright and get people to license their work? I have a close friend who has recently put some of his work closer into the spotlight online (but still very far from it, in a very targeted place) and his bandwisth limits loom if he were to actually promote his music whatsoever. He's considered dumping lower quality versions (the present audio is 256kbs mp3) into p2p apps but is unconvinced that it is a good thing to do. He's had a number of offers in the past few weeks for deals for 1 or 2 tracks (people haven't seen or heard much of his music but he's been writing for over a dozen years). I'm think he should charge a minimal worthwhile credit card charge for his work, allowing people who buy return for up to a year to download new audio he writes, offer standard deals for record labels where they can download lossless files and run with them. Of course I want him to use free codecs, and I think he might be convinced (on the possibility of hearing from fraunhoffer et al demanding cash). Any ideas the best way to go about price, bandwidth and the artists interests? What about "simpler" things like hooking up a shop to downloads securely (and simply for the end user) without having to go to your bank to setup a merchant account and without having to loose nearly all of a reasonable sized transaction in costs?
I don't know what sort of Laws the US would have to pass to allow a foreigner as president (but Demolitian Man suggested they would be changed to allow Arnie become president, what a beautiful future), but you should get them changed and then forget Steve Jobs
Linus for President
He needs to rebuild the USA Government as he rebuilt the unix kernel. I'm not sure about the VP though?
I was wondering if you could hook these up to generate power at vents in the ocean floor using thermocouples to power them for another "free" power source (i.e. make the generator and take it from "renewable" natural resources)? Probably not worth it if you do the math but ???
Igneuity required to combine the two, nothing more. You mave an intake at the front of the vessel gobbling up all the water it can get, you have an engine using steam and bubbles, you throw some of the steam, or bubbles or whatever combination and delivery method works best back out of the front of the vessel so as to place the rest of the vessel from there on in a supercavity. To me this seems like it could only make things more efficient, as you can take the current drag of the supercavity away in return for this engine less however much of the efficiency of the engine your cavity generation feedback takes.
I think the most interesting thing about mplayer is going to be the next few months. They are realistically approaching a 1.0 release and at that point they will probably be able to sit back and look at some of the issues Debina might love to "fix". In the meantime, I think we will see mplayer charge forward in terms of stability and cleanliness. Everything points to the fact they've been concentrating on getting the codec count and just putting a minimal of effort into the UI. All in all the ui isn't too attrocious (when it compiles and works, debian source compiler here), though I think I would prefer it if there was a native toolkit option (but I suspect they could appear rapidly if mplayer manages to do a quarter decent job of stabilising things for a 1.0 tree). I actually wish the mplayer devleopers would find someone to setup their own apt-get.org archive for the "official mplayer" debian binaries. If they are building good binaries for debian, non-intrusively and that comply with debian standards, debian will release it. Instead of flaming the person who is unofficially packaging the player for debian who won't release it, they should produce packages, propose a maintainer and maintain the player (including security updates) until debian produce binaries they are happy with! If they want to protect how well their work appears, then they should really do this with binaries (and source of course) for all distros. It would help if dpkg ((gnome-)apt(itude)) supported singed packages and then you could let your machine run rampant on sources only allowing packages signed by trusted developers to be installed.
During my many,many months scouring Ireland for Quake 3 for Linux to buy in any store (including ordering) I stumbled across Quake 1:The Offering for Linux which includes two add-ons! I bought it (£20 if I remember right and they gave me a free Quake 3 t-shirt). They sold 1, maybe only one,but I doubt it!
The way that Linux will get onto the development cycle is two-fold. Firstly people who look at the id Software methods and start to write cross-platform code from the outset so they can port onto Win, Lin, PS(2/3), GC, XBox, OSX. Secondly Linux will start to look attractive in a splitting marketplace, with maybe 5+ platforms possibly on the agenda as it is, you can pick one platform alone (then pick the best for your type of game), or pick one group of platforms that provide a common api set you can use or pick a cross platform approach and target them all. If you are going to do Win and XBox and anything, why not do all of them?
My biggest hopes are on Sony releasing the PS3 as a Linux based machine using OpenGL and SDL (for example). If you want to use any of their trademarks you have to pay them, if you want in on their promotional and official stuff you have to pay them. If you want to use any custom software they write for the platform that they want to sell to licencees, that's fair enough (nice if they didn't though). All they do then is charge the hardware price + expected development contribution for the console and use licensing money to promote it! If they do this, they'd probably coerce themselves into making most of the machine far more standard and make it an even more mainstream product. Maybe instead it could just be a Vaio derivative with PS compatibility (through linux as they use it for development right)? If that happened the choice would be Mac, Linux, Sony or MS. Some stuff would go to Windows, but as console games have become more prominent, I think more would go for the Sony, Mac, Linux branch of development (Linux being a by-product of getting PS(2/3), iBooks, iMacs, etc.) mainly for the ability in PS and Mac to have a far greater degree of hardware control. In Linux they would have none, but if they support it, they get some near free money, and support, and hackers who will do things they'd never thought of and open those opportunities for them. In Windows they have support. In Linux they can do no support if they do it right (it's free, lots Free, the rest unified with our main tree). I have no idea about Nintendo development hence I don't know which side of any divides they are on.
As for your issues of not paying for late ports, I think that it is only resolved by a unified code base, which can release simultaneously (at least as far as win/lin/osx is concerned, console release could be early/late, nobody complains (much) about having a different box for the PS and PC Tony Hawk). I think that they should all be primarily charging for the artistic content of their games and see a patching/os devlopment model on a PS as an amazing boon. MS has a warchest of $40 billion? Could they really smack down Sony's PS division in these circumstances? And if some other Sony companies joined them (hdtv, vaio, projectors, hd-recorders) they could create some real excitement in the marketplace (all the Sony stuff you get creates a Sony 802.11g network that you can let other devices into, your entire houses sony gear can bang it's data around on it, go online through it etc). I think someone needs to slap Sony around a bit and tell them to take MS to the cleaners. Get MS to use their warchest to promote against them, net effect is growing teir marketplace which they are and will win! If in the process they can encompass Free software, they can rewrite the marketplace as a competitive economy again, where they have a huge leg up that will give them a very strong long term position (as long as they don;t drop the ball). They will deepen their "monopoly" on the PS(2) into their other product lines and make licensing money from others who wish to buy into the PS3 (and if Sony can standardise on a few connection methods and protocols they could be making a fortune on licensing at very resaaonable rates, probably forcing MS to try to be Sony compatible!).
This post is rambling I've had enough, ask me for more if you want it!
Can we generate a a filter perhaps like the bayenisian filter from the spam work which discards all the music you don't like? Look at compression, ID3 or other format based headers to determine whether or not your radio station is trying to feed you junk music! If you had a multicard radio system which did delay play (a la video recorder) with this sort of a "spam" filter it would be very cool! You could listen to new music (or football or news), browse your radio archive (a wee lcd will do). Could we build properties which would help classify otherwise indeterminate audio? I think we could but I'm not sure. Here's one idea, speach recogintion software could be trained, by as many people as are willing collectively, to recognise and understand radio personalities (including duplicitous advertisers). Now we could even look at extending it out (and perhaps we should) into all media, including video and web content! Each have their headers and content. Each must leave encoding properties which can provide clues, each must have properties of it's raw content which can be examined. I think we are looking at some serious CPU power to do this as I think about it, but perhaps digital radio broadcasting will expedite matters.
Could the modded BIOS not report a spoofed MAC? That way it can be banned without you getting banned, you could even setup your network to drop outgoing traffic from the bad mac. Is it too much of a hack to get the bios to spoof the MAC (forgive me for knowing little about communications at this level).
Think Star-Trek, no really! The manual overides for the doors (well some) are levers that could operate a pump or similar. Now you just need to ensure your password entry system takes a sufficintly low amount of power and time that you can get it working (and so can anyone else who needs to). The question is how strong to make all the doors (and windows) as your going to have to break in when you forget your password, or a lightning strike fries everything!
IANAL RU
D) He felt that people might be interested in reading the comments on the original story!
I would think the best place to send the letters is to the PCI manufacturers (and presumably members of PCI-SIG0, especially the ones who actively support FreeOSs and any who reference the database from their site. PCI-SIG are going to crawl back down if their members tell them to, but if a few thousand (or even 50000) people they can write off as a minority group mail bomb them for a few days then they are not going to be too inclined to change based on these facts. As others have pointed out this database isn't a tool for Joe Public so the targetting of our letters has to be to the people who will see the benfit to their own pockets for this site to remain in existance.
F*** you you d*** s*** do you f***ing not know what a f***ing * does to a f***ing word thats sprinkled with the little s***s? Or just because some f***ing piece of s*** digital systems use a c***ish * to represent multiple unknown little b****y letters that means that we all have to f***ing start to write the way some c*** wants us all to? Sorry I forgot, you just a typical f***ing /. c*** who likes to f*** with peoples heads by t****ing!
Do you have, or would you consider adding, a voluntary popularity rating system for the programs on your CD? I'm thinking of the likes of the debian popularity-contest which tracks which programs are installed (and how often they're used I think) to decide what programs should be included on which CD of their release. It would also help for the Linux (BSD, any other FreeOS you care to name) community as they could see which programs Windows people like and therefore can help most in bringing them across from Win to Lin.
Could you please provide some concrete details? Basically just tell us all which programs are affected and why (what copyrights or patents of SCOs are involved)? Unless and until you do I can only imagine you will end up modded as "Troll" and not "Informative" because what you are saying is not a popular idea and it is the sort of thing which will get people all heated up!
Presuming everything in your parents post is true:
These guys are rivals, they want to compete with each other, they want to use it on a range of items on an ongoing basis. They will HAVE to be open about everything they use that they don't each independently write in their own houses. The question is what sort of a range of products will they envisage, what Free Software will they contribute to? Presumably the arrangement will provide the core OS stability, power and reliability for cretain types of hardware, but what types? PS3, TV, VAIO, all of the above? I think that if companies that have the financial power to make MS worry form up to develop a range of products like these (everything these guys make that gets a computer) then MS could see themselves in big trouble very very very quickly. Imagine that ALL MSs so called opponents (Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Sun, IBM, HP, Apple, Palm, Compaq, Sharp (Hmmm, imagine a beowolf cluster of wallpaper made up of the computational LCD), Toshiba, care to add more) all grouped up to develop one reference software system MS would be dead five years after the launch! In a dual standard world right now where MS takes everything they can and the others consoladate everything they can into one and then duke it out, who wins? How many casualties? Who are they? Why am I still editing this comment without previewing it? Ok, time to post, sorry anyone who read this. How many other companies will join the pact? Think POS (that's point of sale, not piece of s***) vendors, think generic hardware manufacturers!!!!
Yep I did, and it said:
As I was running it under cygwin at the time (don't ask) I don't think it'll let me run the resultant mp3! Just for fun though I did run it and it threw back the following (for Suse): The slack version is identical except for addrloc: 0xbfff96f4.Now the files it spits out are 2888 bytes and the strings output of the Suse and Slack versions are identical (1763 bytes) starting with a line containing "A" 1663 times followed by a 1 and then:
The actual Suse file contains (as displayed by less): Then the 1663 "A" and the "1" then : This is followed by <FC><95><FF><BF> a mere 240 times! The Slack file is very similar, all I can see different is in the start the ^@@ becomes ^@ and then the repeated <FC><95><FF><BF> becomes <B4><9A><FF><BF>While I was writing this the RIAA have confirmed (allegedly) that they have nothing to do with this and have only just heard of it as they forwarded the e-mail. I honestly think it was a hoax to try and discredit the RIAA, but it was the most pathetically handled hoax of all time. To have made this work to any effect, he should have setup a P2P client to distribute a "document" he sent to the RIAA confirming discussing the development and deployment. If he had just pushed out a few copies of this a day (using the deceptive filenames technique) you can be sure someone who got it would have leaked it soon enough. As long as he could actually write real english as oppossed to the crap he dribbled here, it probably would have taken quite a lot more effort for people to get to the bottom of it. However, no-one (well some of the more rabid /. readers excluded) was ever going to believe that someone hired by the RIAA would disclose this like this, slagging Theo and saying things like "We hope that you're as amused with our maturity as we are", "Don't fuck with the RIAA again, scriptkids", "We have our own private version of this hydra actively
infecting p2p users, and building one giant ddosnet" and the icing on the cake " Remember, Napster is Communism, so fight for the American
way of life."
Now I realise that any theoretical maximum is unlikely to be achieved, but by the same token a 10Mb ethernet connection is not going to get 10mbs! Just seemed strange to me to include 10bast-T anywhere, I know I haven't used it for about 4 Years anywhere!
Hmmm, guess what, this will take you to their damn ugly website where I'm sure you can find out more! I can't be bothered to read up on the phones, but did notice that they have a range of 802.11b hardware for up to 25kms that this guy would love to have, why? well they have lightning protection (surge arrester) aswell as being watertight and weatherproof with POWER over Ethernet (never heard of it before myself). He'd also have got a standard N-type connector, 273K-323K temperature range (he could still go to high though, just). The only wierd thing (is it not) is that it has a 10 Base T connector for the local network, so your 11Mbs suddenly gets chopped to a theoretical 10 before you even try to get anything out of it.
Are 3G phones crippled so that people can't go here and choose a wide variety of vendors for their "amusement"? Will the telcos really prevent a 3G phone from being able to access information not signed to a deal on their network? I know I won't buy a technology that is hampered like that (I can't see /. paying to allow Irish 3G users to access their site from their phone!). So why would porn companies be willing to pay 10s of billions just to give people easier access to their porn? Are the phone operators worried that a "common carrier" defense wouldn't stand up if they were found to have allowed a 15 year old to access "inappropriate" material via their phone?
The Irish Times had an article on this on Saturday. The basic outline of the (admitedly brief article) was that this guy had won the Young Scientist awards (a big annual competition for all Irish school children), he had written a web browser that increased browsing speed somewhere near 5x which even included a DVD player. It said that he had written 1,500,000 lines of code and that he had done it in 18 months! The main thing that they mentioned but I haven't seen on this story is that the judges were sceptical and took his software down to the Computer Labs in UCD (a Dublin University) and they verified the performance there! I still didn't believe the article, and suspect the judges have given inappropriate praise to someone, but perhaps there is something at the bottom of all of this that actually is worthwhile (but I suspect that the speed up is the only worthwhile thing he has done and that it is little if anything more than existing techniques). The one thing I am curious about is can this guy actually travel to the US safely or did he really write a DVD player and break the DMCA (there's no way he was liscensed to do it!)? The other thing they mentioned was that he had not patented anything but was going to! I wonder if he will be able to and I wonder how many other patents he violated to create the project.
And the only reason MS would release it is so that they could say their "DRM stuff is cross platform and we're playing fair, honestly guv'nor".