Of course, I have to wonder, if they've got all these other vectors covered, they clearly have a development process that supports multiple platforms. Would it be that hard to also have a linux client?
I can't imagine so. Doesn't anyone know why else they would be forgoing a linux client?
I would assume that it has something to do with satisfying the MPAA requirements for DRM. But that's just a guess.
I suspect there is a part of satisfying MPAA requirements that comes into play, but I'd wager the decision is much more based on the heterogeneity of the Linux ecosystem. With Windows and MacOS (or any of the other platforms listed), you're developing to a fairly standard API with a fairly well-known set of associated dependencies. One can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what libraries will be available on the target system.
Developing "for Linux" has none of this. Sure, one could specify the versions of various libraries that are required but when you start to discover that you're alienating the majority of the installed base with your reqs, and that trying to develop an app such that it includes the majority of said installed base is both time-consuming and cost prohibitive, the economics just don't add up. I see an installed base quoted at roughly 3% farther down, so you're talking about only being able to reach a subset of that base for roughly the same cost as developing to other platforms that enjoy 20% or 30% market share. From a business perspective, the economics just don't make sense.
I see a lot of this MPAA-boogeyman-won't-let-them talk in Slashdot comments and it's a little tiring. Generally speaking, the free market tends to iron out such inefficiencies, given enough time, and the lack of a Linux client for so many apps, across so many companies, should be a big clue to anyone that there are some real economic reasons why this isn't happening. Mind, and I say all of this as a guy who runs Linux as his primary desktop and is also a developer of Linux apps, so I've encountered the exact same issues I'm talking about in dealing with the randomness of available functionality in the installed Linux base.
Parent poster, I apologize if this comes across as being a rant directed at you - that certainly is not my intent here. I'm just a little frustrated by having seen years of the same "MPAA won't let them" comments in various threads any time talk of a Linux client for just about anything comes up. There is, in my mind, a pretty obvious explanation for this and it boggles me that we have to rehash this subject Every Frickin' Time.
If you had read it, you would know whether to use "he" or "she".
I/did/ read it, and I'm a little curious to know where you think this was specified. Other than making a general assumption, I see no mention of the author's gender.
So far, they haven't decreased the crime rate even a single %.
That's a very good point - this system is obviously a complete boondoggle and waste of money because it has had absolutely no impact whatsoever on crime rates in and around Atlanta.
Oh wait, it couldn't be that an explanation for that was given in the first line of the article, now could it?
"Plans [...] will move forward this week with the opening of a state-of-the-art video monitoring center."
The only way you could do what you want to do is to set up some kind of tunnel on a routable host. Both sides of the link would connect out to the proxy, and then the proxy would forward packets between the connections. It would work, but only with a lot of hacking. It would be difficult to use standard web tools and your aunt edna definitely couldn't connect to your home web server... It's really not that difficult to set up the tunnel you're describing - OpenVPN comes to mind.
And, yes, as you point out that still does nothing to allow public inbound connections to your home web server.
The house we (eventually) purchased had been tied up in a civil suit brought by an ex-wife against the seller. Of course, the seller kindly DIDN'T DISCLOSE that information until days before closing. After about a month of wrangling (and me telling my agent I was looking for another property), the seller got a judge to agree to allow him to put the proceeds from the house into an escrow account after the sale.
The mess was compounded by the fact that the plaintiff couldn't be reached - the defendant couldn't get in touch with her, his attorney couldn't get in touch with her, and even HER attorney couldn't contact her. So, instead of tying up the property any longer the judge allowed the escrow account option while the suit proceeded (and my wife and I finally completed the purchase).
In retrospect I should've walked away from this deal - I spent the first year or so finding all kinds of hidden problems in the property (and I'm sure there are a couple of others awaiting discovery).
But it was my first purchase and I'm chalking it up to Lessons Learned(tm). Next time I know to be more cautious.
Sheesh, I am getting so tired of hearing this "dead man" crap. It reminds me of the dirty hippie "the sky is falling - I mean, floating away - I mean, evaporating" environmentalists.
Yes, Ashcroft is a choad. Yes, it's a good thing he resigned (maybe - we'll have to wait and see if he ends up on the Supreme Court which would suck even harder). But please - there are FAR better reasons to call Ashcroft a nimwit other than this stupid whiny "but he lost to a DEAD MAN! *gasp*" nonsense.
For anyone who hasn't heard the full story - the dead man referenced above died shortly before the election. His wife said she was going to fill his seat but they couldn't replace his name on the ballot with her's because of a procedural holdup (apparently he died too close to the election). It was very well publicized that his wife was going to hold the seat and the governor went so far as to declare that he would appoint her to the seat if her recently deceased husband won the election and she was still, somehow, procedurally barred from filling his seat.
Jesus, get the story right - Ashcroft lost to a dead man's wife (w00t! Go Dead Man's Wife!).
it's the stupid puritanical chrisitans. that's the problem.
They're in it with the queers and the Martians, I swear to God. They're building landing strips to let the gay puritanical chrisitan [sic] Martians take over.
Porn thrives on the internet because adults can view porn anonymously. It really is one of the 'killer' apps of the internet. What I don't get about this thing is how come no one ever blames the parents? I don't have children yet, but when I do I know I won't let them surf the net unsupervised at home until they are at least teenagers. Of course they will probably go to their friends house and check out hotlatinasluts.com or whatever else.
Do any slashdotters here have children (haha Slashdot users reproduce?) and if so do you let them online?
I do, I do! That's right, I'm that rare breed of Slashdotter who has managed to have sex AND reproduce.
To answer your question (and lose mod privileges in the process; oh well) - my children are still too young to really "surf the 'Net" (4 and 2). However, I have no problem with them being online as they get older. In fact, I encourage and expect that they will spend a significant part of
their lives connected to a computer (just my general opinion on how much more commonplace computing will become as they get older).
Having said that, I absolutely do NOT believe COPA is a piece of legislation we need. I guess I'm one of those people who believes that a parent should, well, act like a parent. I don't turn the TV on to the Playboy channel while the kids are sitting there because that strikes me as being A Bad Idea(tm). It must have something to do with this strange sense of being a parent.
Sure, I want my kids to grow up being able to discern between wheat and chaff. But I also understand that they can't do that at the age of 8, or 10, or, hell, even 20 (I know I couldn't, even though I told myself I could). That's why they have parents - I'm the guy who tells them what they can and cannot do when they're younger (i.e. DON'T stick that fork in the outlet!) and I'm the guy who will give unsolicited advice when they get older (i.e. make sure you have that turned off at the box before you start trying to replace the light socket - *bzzzzt* - Yeah, I bet that hurt, didn't it?).
I see no difference when it comes to pr0n, hard or soft copy (hehe). Sure, there's gonna be some pr0n in their teenage lives. I expect it. And I'm sure they'll accidentally stumble into it when they're younger. And it's my job, as a parent, to be there when it happens, to show them how to close the pop-ups, to explain why they can't go there, etc. It's my job to act like a friggin parent and watch my kids and help them grow through life until I'm old and decrepit and headed out to pasture. That's what I do because I'm a parent.
But that's life. I expect that. And those details don't worry me. What worries me more, to paraphrase the infamous quote, is that my daughter will one day look at me and say "What were you doing while free speech was being restricted? Why did you let the government take away the rights you had?"
The only thing that scares me more than that is if she can't ask those questions for fear of being tossed in prison for seditious behavior. That's what worries me as a parent, that the world I'm leaving for my kids is far worse than the world we grew up in. That's why I oppose the DMCA, COPA, the CDA (remember that?), and the ever increasing power of corporations to strip rights from individuals. That's why I get so pissed off when I see Yet Another Example of power-mongering running loose, because I believe it is imperative that I stop this now or my kids will suffer the most.
Doh, didn't mean to break out the soapbox today. Sorry about that. And from work, too, nonetheless.
Now re-activating lurk mechanism...
IANAL
but I do seem to recall a decision or general consensus reached by the American Bar Association a few years ago that email was considered equivalent to telephone conversations for privacy considerations. To be more precise, email has the same expectation of not being read or intercepted as would a normal telephone conversation.
Now, having said that, I realize a couple of caveats are present:
1) The American Bar Association is not a part of the judicial branch and, as such, any decision on their part would not necessarily be considered as legally binding
2) The technology to intercept either (email or phone conversation) is readily available (I am not making a statement about which is easier, because, quite honestly, it doesn't matter). However, the understood expectation is that a telephone conversation (and, equivalently, email) is considered a private conversation and would only be intercepted under extraordinary circumstances.
I'm too lazy to spend more than 30 seconds looking for a cite to backup my claim. If some enterprising reader wants to follow up, I'd be curious to re-read the article. Otherwise, I may come back later and look it up personally.
Anyway, I agree with the spirit of the parent post - this is a short-sighted decision, in my opinion, by the legislature. Here's to hoping it will die a quick and dishonorable death. *clang*
Eh, that's just so Mr. Choad can claim he paid "more than 1.25 meeleeyun dollars" for his house.
Of course, he only makes that claim after the initial claim that he paid $3M for it, and someone investigates and counterclaims it was only $1.25M, and then he threatens to sue because the sale price was actually greater than $1.25M....
... was given to me this year by the wife - none other than a fifth of Canadian whisky. I have to say, I was impressed. A little annoyed, too, because we had just agreed a few days earlier not to buy gifts (so I had to scramble to find something). But, oh well.
She wound up giving it to me Friday night instead of Saturday - as I was getting my coat to head to the liquor store, she stopped me and made me open my Valentine's Day gift. Normally I'm a vodka kind of guy but she said she knew I drank that all the time and wanted to get something different for a change.
So I reciprocated by getting her some wine coolers (about the only alcohol she'll drink) and 10 pounds of chocolate (which I expect she will have eaten in about a week and a half - she LOVES chocolate).
I think that's the first time she's gotten me alcohol as a gift, but she's gotten damn good at picking out books and tools in the last couple of years. There's nothing like finding Ciscopress and Craftsman in a pile of loot...
In reply to this message and the comments below about fining a company out of business:
I think it would be easy to defend against this kind of an attack. Simply implement an automated logging system that tracks the details of bulk email sent. If fines were ever issued one could go back and prove what emails were sent when. A bonus to this approach would be to stick to a tight schedule. It almost forces self-regulation - you know you can't send anything incriminating if you plan on ever using those logs to defend yourself (neverminding the whole issue of altering logs, yada yada).
I see this leading to rogue spammers being hit the hardest with so-called commercial shops that try to play by the rules suffering the least damage.
Of course, IANAL... don't even pretend to play one on TV...
The guys from Bellsouth weren't just working the newsgroups on the side, posting responses in their free time. This was their job, customer interaction in several facets. One of those exposure points was DSLR.
And they weren't reprimanded, told to stop posting, whatever - these guys are no longer posting, as Andy Houtz said in one of the links, because of organizational changes. Bellsouth has gone through a lot of organizational changes lately (check the news) - TSG, the group handling the forum support, was apparently just one of the casualties.
Opinions, ideas expressed above are all mine - not my employer's.
I think this article is the one to which you're referring. This editorial was posted on January 29th of this year and appears to be from the Boucher in question. It basically says that he (Boucher) doesn't like the version of the DMCA that is in use and that it ignores the fair use rights consumers (and others) have had for a century and a half (his words).
To play devil's advocate here, Boucher supported that document in '98. What's to say he hasn't realized the error of his ways and turned his back on the Dark Side(tm)?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I have to wonder, if they've got all these other vectors covered, they clearly have a development process that supports multiple platforms. Would it be that hard to also have a linux client?
I can't imagine so. Doesn't anyone know why else they would be forgoing a linux client?
I would assume that it has something to do with satisfying the MPAA requirements for DRM. But that's just a guess.
I suspect there is a part of satisfying MPAA requirements that comes into play, but I'd wager the decision is much more based on the heterogeneity of the Linux ecosystem. With Windows and MacOS (or any of the other platforms listed), you're developing to a fairly standard API with a fairly well-known set of associated dependencies. One can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what libraries will be available on the target system.
Developing "for Linux" has none of this. Sure, one could specify the versions of various libraries that are required but when you start to discover that you're alienating the majority of the installed base with your reqs, and that trying to develop an app such that it includes the majority of said installed base is both time-consuming and cost prohibitive, the economics just don't add up. I see an installed base quoted at roughly 3% farther down, so you're talking about only being able to reach a subset of that base for roughly the same cost as developing to other platforms that enjoy 20% or 30% market share. From a business perspective, the economics just don't make sense.
I see a lot of this MPAA-boogeyman-won't-let-them talk in Slashdot comments and it's a little tiring. Generally speaking, the free market tends to iron out such inefficiencies, given enough time, and the lack of a Linux client for so many apps, across so many companies, should be a big clue to anyone that there are some real economic reasons why this isn't happening. Mind, and I say all of this as a guy who runs Linux as his primary desktop and is also a developer of Linux apps, so I've encountered the exact same issues I'm talking about in dealing with the randomness of available functionality in the installed Linux base.
Parent poster, I apologize if this comes across as being a rant directed at you - that certainly is not my intent here. I'm just a little frustrated by having seen years of the same "MPAA won't let them" comments in various threads any time talk of a Linux client for just about anything comes up. There is, in my mind, a pretty obvious explanation for this and it boggles me that we have to rehash this subject Every Frickin' Time.
But then again, I must be new here...
If you RTFA, you would know if s/he did.
If you had read it, you would know whether to use "he" or "she".
I /did/ read it, and I'm a little curious to know where you think this was specified. Other than making a general assumption, I see no mention of the author's gender.
So far, they haven't decreased the crime rate even a single %.
That's a very good point - this system is obviously a complete boondoggle and waste of money because it has had absolutely no impact whatsoever on crime rates in and around Atlanta.
Oh wait, it couldn't be that an explanation for that was given in the first line of the article, now could it?
"Plans [...] will move forward this week with the opening of a state-of-the-art video monitoring center."
And, yes, as you point out that still does nothing to allow public inbound connections to your home web server.
I've heard this oil company conspiracy theory quite a few times but I've never seen anything remotely credible to support it. Got a link?
And just how do *you* think he convinced a female to get naked? Genius, I tell you!
It's just what I've always wanted... the kludginess of Solaris combined with the user-friendliness of Debian.
Logs structures are suceptible to termites, carpenter ants, and various forms of rot.
Even worse, when many logs are added together, the problems multiply.
Naturally....
Often exponentially.
Hmm... sounds similar to this business plan I'm holding...
Regenerate, brought to you by the Umbrella Corporation.
God bless the Umbrella Corporation and God bless the eventual zombie apocalypse that will warm the muzzle of my shotgun.
Yep, been there, done that, got the hat.
The house we (eventually) purchased had been tied up in a civil suit brought by an ex-wife against the seller. Of course, the seller kindly DIDN'T DISCLOSE that information until days before closing. After about a month of wrangling (and me telling my agent I was looking for another property), the seller got a judge to agree to allow him to put the proceeds from the house into an escrow account after the sale.
The mess was compounded by the fact that the plaintiff couldn't be reached - the defendant couldn't get in touch with her, his attorney couldn't get in touch with her, and even HER attorney couldn't contact her. So, instead of tying up the property any longer the judge allowed the escrow account option while the suit proceeded (and my wife and I finally completed the purchase).
In retrospect I should've walked away from this deal - I spent the first year or so finding all kinds of hidden problems in the property (and I'm sure there are a couple of others awaiting discovery).
But it was my first purchase and I'm chalking it up to Lessons Learned(tm). Next time I know to be more cautious.
You forgot steps 3 and 4...
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Sheesh, I am getting so tired of hearing this "dead man" crap. It reminds me of the dirty hippie "the sky is falling - I mean, floating away - I mean, evaporating" environmentalists.
Yes, Ashcroft is a choad. Yes, it's a good thing he resigned (maybe - we'll have to wait and see if he ends up on the Supreme Court which would suck even harder). But please - there are FAR better reasons to call Ashcroft a nimwit other than this stupid whiny "but he lost to a DEAD MAN! *gasp*" nonsense.
For anyone who hasn't heard the full story - the dead man referenced above died shortly before the election. His wife said she was going to fill his seat but they couldn't replace his name on the ballot with her's because of a procedural holdup (apparently he died too close to the election). It was very well publicized that his wife was going to hold the seat and the governor went so far as to declare that he would appoint her to the seat if her recently deceased husband won the election and she was still, somehow, procedurally barred from filling his seat.
Jesus, get the story right - Ashcroft lost to a dead man's wife (w00t! Go Dead Man's Wife!).
Maybe it's the vodka talking, but I started to read the article and, about three paragraphs in, I realized just how much I didn't care.
They're in it with the queers and the Martians, I swear to God. They're building landing strips to let the gay puritanical chrisitan [sic] Martians take over.
(Apologies to the slashdotter with the sig)
I do, I do! That's right, I'm that rare breed of Slashdotter who has managed to have sex AND reproduce.
To answer your question (and lose mod privileges in the process; oh well) - my children are still too young to really "surf the 'Net" (4 and 2). However, I have no problem with them being online as they get older. In fact, I encourage and expect that they will spend a significant part of their lives connected to a computer (just my general opinion on how much more commonplace computing will become as they get older).
Having said that, I absolutely do NOT believe COPA is a piece of legislation we need. I guess I'm one of those people who believes that a parent should, well, act like a parent. I don't turn the TV on to the Playboy channel while the kids are sitting there because that strikes me as being A Bad Idea(tm). It must have something to do with this strange sense of being a parent.
Sure, I want my kids to grow up being able to discern between wheat and chaff. But I also understand that they can't do that at the age of 8, or 10, or, hell, even 20 (I know I couldn't, even though I told myself I could). That's why they have parents - I'm the guy who tells them what they can and cannot do when they're younger (i.e. DON'T stick that fork in the outlet!) and I'm the guy who will give unsolicited advice when they get older (i.e. make sure you have that turned off at the box before you start trying to replace the light socket - *bzzzzt* - Yeah, I bet that hurt, didn't it?).
I see no difference when it comes to pr0n, hard or soft copy (hehe). Sure, there's gonna be some pr0n in their teenage lives. I expect it. And I'm sure they'll accidentally stumble into it when they're younger. And it's my job, as a parent, to be there when it happens, to show them how to close the pop-ups, to explain why they can't go there, etc. It's my job to act like a friggin parent and watch my kids and help them grow through life until I'm old and decrepit and headed out to pasture. That's what I do because I'm a parent.
But that's life. I expect that. And those details don't worry me. What worries me more, to paraphrase the infamous quote, is that my daughter will one day look at me and say "What were you doing while free speech was being restricted? Why did you let the government take away the rights you had?"
The only thing that scares me more than that is if she can't ask those questions for fear of being tossed in prison for seditious behavior. That's what worries me as a parent, that the world I'm leaving for my kids is far worse than the world we grew up in. That's why I oppose the DMCA, COPA, the CDA (remember that?), and the ever increasing power of corporations to strip rights from individuals. That's why I get so pissed off when I see Yet Another Example of power-mongering running loose, because I believe it is imperative that I stop this now or my kids will suffer the most.
Doh, didn't mean to break out the soapbox today. Sorry about that. And from work, too, nonetheless.
Now re-activating lurk mechanism...
In regards to points 1 and 2...
IANAL
but I do seem to recall a decision or general consensus reached by the American Bar Association a few years ago that email was considered equivalent to telephone conversations for privacy considerations. To be more precise, email has the same expectation of not being read or intercepted as would a normal telephone conversation.
Now, having said that, I realize a couple of caveats are present:
1) The American Bar Association is not a part of the judicial branch and, as such, any decision on their part would not necessarily be considered as legally binding
2) The technology to intercept either (email or phone conversation) is readily available (I am not making a statement about which is easier, because, quite honestly, it doesn't matter). However, the understood expectation is that a telephone conversation (and, equivalently, email) is considered a private conversation and would only be intercepted under extraordinary circumstances.
I'm too lazy to spend more than 30 seconds looking for a cite to backup my claim. If some enterprising reader wants to follow up, I'd be curious to re-read the article. Otherwise, I may come back later and look it up personally.
Anyway, I agree with the spirit of the parent post - this is a short-sighted decision, in my opinion, by the legislature. Here's to hoping it will die a quick and dishonorable death. *clang*
Eh, that's just so Mr. Choad can claim he paid "more than 1.25 meeleeyun dollars" for his house.
Of course, he only makes that claim after the initial claim that he paid $3M for it, and someone investigates and counterclaims it was only $1.25M, and then he threatens to sue because the sale price was actually greater than $1.25M....
... was given to me this year by the wife - none other than a fifth of Canadian whisky. I have to say, I was impressed. A little annoyed, too, because we had just agreed a few days earlier not to buy gifts (so I had to scramble to find something). But, oh well.
She wound up giving it to me Friday night instead of Saturday - as I was getting my coat to head to the liquor store, she stopped me and made me open my Valentine's Day gift. Normally I'm a vodka kind of guy but she said she knew I drank that all the time and wanted to get something different for a change.
So I reciprocated by getting her some wine coolers (about the only alcohol she'll drink) and 10 pounds of chocolate (which I expect she will have eaten in about a week and a half - she LOVES chocolate).
I think that's the first time she's gotten me alcohol as a gift, but she's gotten damn good at picking out books and tools in the last couple of years. There's nothing like finding Ciscopress and Craftsman in a pile of loot...
In reply to this message and the comments below about fining a company out of business:
I think it would be easy to defend against this kind of an attack. Simply implement an automated logging system that tracks the details of bulk email sent. If fines were ever issued one could go back and prove what emails were sent when. A bonus to this approach would be to stick to a tight schedule. It almost forces self-regulation - you know you can't send anything incriminating if you plan on ever using those logs to defend yourself (neverminding the whole issue of altering logs, yada yada).
I see this leading to rogue spammers being hit the hardest with so-called commercial shops that try to play by the rules suffering the least damage.
Of course, IANAL... don't even pretend to play one on TV...
Atlanta doesn't seem to be affected, either.
FWIW, of course.
|-)
>So they hit "record" at the end of five minutes.
No, there is no "hitting record" here. Read the article - the recording starts when the lights go on.
The guys from Bellsouth weren't just working the newsgroups on the side, posting responses in their free time. This was their job, customer interaction in several facets. One of those exposure points was DSLR.
And they weren't reprimanded, told to stop posting, whatever - these guys are no longer posting, as Andy Houtz said in one of the links, because of organizational changes. Bellsouth has gone through a lot of organizational changes lately (check the news) - TSG, the group handling the forum support, was apparently just one of the casualties.
Opinions, ideas expressed above are all mine - not my employer's.
I think this article is the one to which you're referring. This editorial was posted on January 29th of this year and appears to be from the Boucher in question. It basically says that he (Boucher) doesn't like the version of the DMCA that is in use and that it ignores the fair use rights consumers (and others) have had for a century and a half (his words).
To play devil's advocate here, Boucher supported that document in '98. What's to say he hasn't realized the error of his ways and turned his back on the Dark Side(tm)?