What the hell are you talking about? THIS IS JUST SOFTWARE. This is the chip DESIGN, not the ACTUAL PHYSICAL CHIP. This is just software like any other, except instead of you creating the hardware on your home computer by copying it into RAM, someone will have to physically manufacture it. And guess what, the open hardware works in many (most) industries. Look at the common couch. Do you think that there is a patent on it? Of course not. Yet plenty of businesses make money on furniture. You are totally misinformed. Try reading the article.
ecash is ridiculous. Credit cards have almost the same functionality, and are capable of adding what little capability they lack. (Debit cards if you can't get credit).
RIAA *IS* making less money due to mp3s, just not much money because most people have 56k modems that can't get that much music anyway (and that's just counting the minority who know how and where to get mp3s). But personally, I haven't bought an album since I got my cable modem. The same is true of pretty much everyone I know with decent bandwidth and a clue.
Personally, I think this is a great way to point out that mp3's do not actually stop the purchasing of CD's, but rather promote them in the sample-before-you-buy theory.
Oh gawd. You're in denial. Do you really need to make excuses in order to forgive yourself for "pirating"? If you have a problem with causing the RIAA to profit less, you really shouldn't be supporting mp3, because as little effect as it has, the effect certainly isn't good for them. And it'll only get worse for them when broadband gets popular.
CD's are cheaper than tapes to manufacture. Tapes have moving parts and are relatively complex.
You're paying that $$ for royalties. But as everyone knows, artists receive very little royalty for their music and make most of their money from performances. Unfortunately for the buyer, the musicians actually still do get payed royalties, in a capitalist sort of way, as in they have to sign away their rights before they can get a record deal in the first place (and thus, they spend their royalties on the record deal). So where's the money go? Investors in the music industry who don't actually record any music or manufacture any discs.
OK, looks like they DID change the text, but it's still inaccurate, just less inaccurate. The original read "neither has a graphical file manager. Instead of clicking on icons or menus to open and save documents, users must type file names into a command-line interface" and the newly modified version says "neither offers a completely graphical computing environment. Instead of always clicking on icons or menus, users must occasionally resort to typing commands into a command-line interface". But this still isn't true. It's simply not true that users *MUST* ever resort to typing commands in a command-line interface. What tasks require this? They list none--and with utils like "linuxconf" (which I personally would never use; it takes over your entire system. My friends call it meinconf. But for a Windows-type user it's perfect) there really are none. The entire article becomes pointless without the original mistake, though, and rather than yank the whole thing they just made their mistake more vague.
Also, the next line "Industry watchers consider this a gaping hole in the heart of any easy-to-use operating system" makes no sense in the new article. BAH! I still don't trust WIRED.
If someone (as big as WIRED) said this or a similar falsehood about Microsoft Windows 2000, there would be a law suit. This is actually quite despicable considering that Microsoft is an advertiser on WIRED and also that WIRED will almost certainly not print a retraction or correct the mistake, as they would have to do if KDE or GNOME were commercial products. I'm going to mail both the editor and the author about it though, just to see what happens, and I urge you to do the same. But my money still says there will be no retraction of any sort.
One wonders how WIRED can have any credibility at all after making such blatant mistakes avoidable through the most cursory research. (I say mistakes because it's common to many their articles, not just this. <sigh>)
...though it's considered experimental. From perlfaq3:
How can I compile my Perl program into byte code or C?
Malcolm Beattie has written a multifunction backend compiler, available from CPAN, that can do both these things. It is included in the perl5.005 release, but is still considered experimental. This means it's fun to play with if you're a programmer but not really for people looking for turn-key solutions.
Merely compiling into C does not in and of itself guarantee that your code will run very much faster. That's because except for lucky cases where a lot of native type inferencing is possible, the normal Perl run time system is still present and so your program will take just as long to run and be just as big. Most programs save little more than compilation time, leaving execution no more than 10-30% faster. A few rare programs actually benefit significantly (like several times faster), but this takes some tweaking of your code. You'll probably be astonished to learn that the current version of the compiler generates a compiled form of your script whose executable is just as big as the original perl executable, and then some. That's because as currently written, all programs are prepared for a full eval() statement. You can tremendously reduce this cost by building a shared libperl.so library and linking against that. See the INSTALL podfile in the perl source distribution for details. If you link your main perl binary with this, it will make it miniscule. For example, on one author's system,/usr/bin/perl is only 11k in size!
In general, the compiler will do nothing to make a Perl program smaller, faster, more portable, or more secure. In fact, it will usually hurt all of those. The executable will be bigger, your VM system may take longer to load the whole thing, the binary is fragile and hard to fix, and compilation never stopped software piracy in the form of crackers, viruses, or bootleggers. The real advantage of the compiler is merely packaging, and once you see the size of what it makes (well, unless you use a shared libperl.so), you'll probably want a complete Perl install anyway.
(back to me) I also noticed GNU/Hurd is now supported. Hmm.. mebbe it's time to try that (the Hurd) out.
No, that's not withdrawing the GPL from a program. The FSF can still do what you said, of course, even though there's no reason to believe it will, and if it did then it would no doubt loose all developer support, which would go to the (still GPL - and no doubt without any copyright assignment to the FSF) forks (and keep in mind there's only like 6 guys in the FSF).
I mean, you could also say that ESR might shoot RMS. You know he's armed; it's certainly within his power. But there's no reason to believe he will. Especially since he'd go to jail, just like the FSF would die.
Well copyright law won't let you get away with just adding whitespace. Your patch can be copyright you, of course, but it falls under the restrictions of derived works - that is you would need permission from the author of the work from which yours is derived to license it. The author grants you permission to do that under the GPL, of course, but only if you use the GPL too.
Keep in mind that some Libertarians (ie L Party) and Libertarian-sympathizers outright deny the notion of "intellectual property", holding that all peaceful use of information is just and any attempt to enforce "intellectual property" restrictions is extortion.
(Curiously enough, "libertarian" in Europe (and pre-LP USA) means near the opposite of "Libertarian" in USA. Unfortunately, the two words sound completely alike.)
That's a god damned classic!! I'm going to write that down! For your future reference:
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Confiscation \Con`fis*ca"tion\ (?), n. [L. confiscatio.] The act or process of taking property or condemning it to be taken, as forfeited to the public use. The confiscations following a subdued rebellion. --Hallam.
Opposition to the idea of "intellectual property", that is opposition to the outlaw of information on the basis of what Earthling first registered it, is NOT the idea that it should be confiscated. It is the idea that information should NOT be confiscated, ever, under any circumstance, EVEN WHEN THE PROCLAIMED "OWNER" WOULD HAVE IT CONFISCATED. The irrefutable basis for the idea being, of course, that the proclaimed "owner" need not lose his ability to use the information in question in order for the so-called "pirate" to use it.
The FSF cannot withdraw the GPL from a program. That is, anybody with a copy of a GPL'd program eternally has the legal right to copy it, modify it, and distribute it in the original or modified form.
The FSF *can* license a program out under different licenses, though there's no reason to believe it WILL. Your suggestion that because Castro abuses power the FSF will at some point in the future abuse power is absurd. The most the FSF can hope to do, if it ever wishes to withdraw GPL rights, is destroy every copy of a program, and obviously that is beyond their power. At least until they team up with the baby-eating communist evil atheist conspiracy and stage a global takeover.
Source code for GPL'd programs is available to everyone.
Source code for GPL'd programs is most certainly available to "people who don't want to make their source code available" -- they are included in "everyone". Name me one person on earth to whom the GNU Emacs source code is not available. Bill Gates doesn't want to make his source code available. Yet, the GNU Emacs source is still available to him. So name one person.
I found win95a to be very stable. Of course this is just my personal experience, but vs NT4SP2 and 3, win98, win98 osr1 (or whatever the new OEM win98 was called), and win95b, I got the fewest crashes out of win95a. It also requires very little RAM and hd space, relative to the other MS OS. Maybe it was just a freak of luck, but if I were to install Windows on a new computer in the future it would definitely be trusty ol' win95a (and back before I ditched Windows altogether I had "down"graded all my Windows computers to it.). There aren't really that many new features in the other ones anyway.
Now you might say that Debian is worse at tracking bugs than MS (ie a smaller ratio of Debian's bugs are known than of Windows's bugs) due to the number of full-time MS employees etc, or you might say that the bug tracking system in Debian is at least as good because of its openness to anyone who would submit.. But those are the numbers for anyone interested.
Also important to note is that this does not include kernel bugs. I would have included them, but I don't know where to find those... Someone please reply if you have them.
I think the point was to see whether people would be willing to buy it in spite of the bugs. Anyway when the polled group selects itself the poll is always biased.
The topic of legal right to use my persoanl property comes from a deep belief of the Liberterian ideals.
Listen, you may think you have a NATURAL right to use of your personal property, but the US LAW does not grant you that right. You have no LEGAL protection of that right, whether or not you should.
Read the constitution and the right to persue happiness.
You're thinking of the Declaration of Independence. But close 'nuff.
Take a look at the platform of the liberterian party. Good things for strong people.
I'm actually an anarchist. I used to be a Libertarian Party supporter, until I realized the hypocrisy of my position -- pro-civil disobedience, yet in support of institutions (LP, voting, US Constitution, etc) that champion the authority of majority. Of course that (authority of majority, or even authority itself) is an absurd enough concept that, looking back, I have no idea what I was thinking. Still, while I agree that consensual crimes aren't, the point remains that US LAW says otherwise. You have no LEGAL right, in the US, to use your own property how you see fit.
BTW, check out Lysander Spooner's "NO TREASON". It's on gutenberg books, and well worth the (quick) read.
It seems to me that this is the only real legal point to this whole situation - everything else seems redunant when you consider this. So, was the information obtained illegally? If not, it's legal to distribute it, I gather, and legal to use it
Unfortunately, as much sense as that would make, it isn't so. The digital millenium copyright act makes the information necessary to break copyrights illegal to distribute. But that has nothing at all to do with trade secrets. This is an IP issue, but the IP in question isn't the DeCSS code, or the key it uses - it's the DVD's (and their content).
(It is, though, legal to distribute information on how to efficiently kill cops, make bombs, etc. No lobbies against those things.)
Lots of BBS were raided, but I doubt as a result of any mass spy operation by the government. Just like lots of houses are raided, and it doesn't mean that all houses all bugged. They were more likely tipped off by someone or other, or were monitoring the phone use of a suspected individual, or etc. (Not that that would be any better, of course.)
I think "old days" meant USSR. The US government probably wouldn't have bothered with the internet back on those days (the ones in your post) the same reason they wouldn't bother with BBS's - not enough crime (thought or otherwise) to justify the funding. They'd probably be more successful tracking library checkouts and book sales (but who knows, maybe they've been doing that since the 50's and they're looking to expand).
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? THIS IS JUST SOFTWARE. This is the chip DESIGN, not the ACTUAL PHYSICAL CHIP. This is just software like any other, except instead of you creating the hardware on your home computer by copying it into RAM, someone will have to physically manufacture it. And guess what, the open hardware works in many (most) industries. Look at the common couch. Do you think that there is a patent on it? Of course not. Yet plenty of businesses make money on furniture. You are totally misinformed. Try reading the article.
The government should release the required info in some predefined easily parsable format, really.
ecash is ridiculous. Credit cards have almost the same functionality, and are capable of adding what little capability they lack. (Debit cards if you can't get credit).
Personally, I think this is a great way to point out that mp3's do not actually stop the purchasing of CD's, but rather promote them in the sample-before-you-buy theory.
Oh gawd. You're in denial. Do you really need to make excuses in order to forgive yourself for "pirating"? If you have a problem with causing the RIAA to profit less, you really shouldn't be supporting mp3, because as little effect as it has, the effect certainly isn't good for them. And it'll only get worse for them when broadband gets popular.
You're paying that $$ for royalties. But as everyone knows, artists receive very little royalty for their music and make most of their money from performances. Unfortunately for the buyer, the musicians actually still do get payed royalties, in a capitalist sort of way, as in they have to sign away their rights before they can get a record deal in the first place (and thus, they spend their royalties on the record deal). So where's the money go? Investors in the music industry who don't actually record any music or manufacture any discs.
Also, the next line "Industry watchers consider this a gaping hole in the heart of any easy-to-use operating system" makes no sense in the new article. BAH! I still don't trust WIRED.
One wonders how WIRED can have any credibility at all after making such blatant mistakes avoidable through the most cursory research. (I say mistakes because it's common to many their articles, not just this. <sigh>)
How can I compile my Perl program into byte code or C?
Malcolm Beattie has written a multifunction backend compiler, available from CPAN, that can do both these things. It is included in the perl5.005 release, but is still considered experimental. This means it's fun to play with if you're a programmer but not really for people looking for turn-key solutions.
Merely compiling into C does not in and of itself guarantee that your code will run very much faster. That's because except for lucky cases where a lot of native type inferencing is possible, the normal Perl run time system is still present and so your program will take just as long to run and be just as big. Most programs save little more than compilation time, leaving execution no more than 10-30% faster. A few rare programs actually benefit significantly (like several times faster), but this takes some tweaking of your code. You'll probably be astonished to learn that the current version of the compiler generates a compiled form of your script whose executable is just as big as the original perl executable, and then some. That's because as currently written, all programs are prepared for a full eval() statement. You can tremendously reduce this cost by building a shared libperl.so library and linking against that. See the INSTALL podfile in the perl source distribution for details. If you link your main perl binary with this, it will make it miniscule. For example, on one author's system, /usr/bin/perl is only 11k in size!
In general, the compiler will do nothing to make a Perl program smaller, faster, more portable, or more secure. In fact, it will usually hurt all of those. The executable will be bigger, your VM system may take longer to load the whole thing, the binary is fragile and hard to fix, and compilation never stopped software piracy in the form of crackers, viruses, or bootleggers. The real advantage of the compiler is merely packaging, and once you see the size of what it makes (well, unless you use a shared libperl.so), you'll probably want a complete Perl install anyway.
(back to me) I also noticed GNU/Hurd is now supported. Hmm.. mebbe it's time to try that (the Hurd) out.
I mean, you could also say that ESR might shoot RMS. You know he's armed; it's certainly within his power. But there's no reason to believe he will. Especially since he'd go to jail, just like the FSF would die.
Well copyright law won't let you get away with just adding whitespace. Your patch can be copyright you, of course, but it falls under the restrictions of derived works - that is you would need permission from the author of the work from which yours is derived to license it. The author grants you permission to do that under the GPL, of course, but only if you use the GPL too.
RMS did some publicity regarding England's new crypto policies in which he encouraged everyone to use GPG. It made it to slashdot.
(Curiously enough, "libertarian" in Europe (and pre-LP USA) means near the opposite of "Libertarian" in USA. Unfortunately, the two words sound completely alike.)
!!!!
That's a god damned classic!! I'm going to write that down! For your future reference:
Opposition to the idea of "intellectual property", that is opposition to the outlaw of information on the basis of what Earthling first registered it, is NOT the idea that it should be confiscated. It is the idea that information should NOT be confiscated, ever, under any circumstance, EVEN WHEN THE PROCLAIMED "OWNER" WOULD HAVE IT CONFISCATED. The irrefutable basis for the idea being, of course, that the proclaimed "owner" need not lose his ability to use the information in question in order for the so-called "pirate" to use it.The FSF *can* license a program out under different licenses, though there's no reason to believe it WILL. Your suggestion that because Castro abuses power the FSF will at some point in the future abuse power is absurd. The most the FSF can hope to do, if it ever wishes to withdraw GPL rights, is destroy every copy of a program, and obviously that is beyond their power. At least until they team up with the baby-eating communist evil atheist conspiracy and stage a global takeover.
Source code for GPL'd programs is most certainly available to "people who don't want to make their source code available" -- they are included in "everyone". Name me one person on earth to whom the GNU Emacs source code is not available. Bill Gates doesn't want to make his source code available. Yet, the GNU Emacs source is still available to him. So name one person.
nt=no text
I found win95a to be very stable. Of course this is just my personal experience, but vs NT4SP2 and 3, win98, win98 osr1 (or whatever the new OEM win98 was called), and win95b, I got the fewest crashes out of win95a. It also requires very little RAM and hd space, relative to the other MS OS. Maybe it was just a freak of luck, but if I were to install Windows on a new computer in the future it would definitely be trusty ol' win95a (and back before I ditched Windows altogether I had "down"graded all my Windows computers to it.). There aren't really that many new features in the other ones anyway.
Yeah they dropped Alpha too semi-recently. Of course you can't blame them... they just weren't getting business in that area.
Now you might say that Debian is worse at tracking bugs than MS (ie a smaller ratio of Debian's bugs are known than of Windows's bugs) due to the number of full-time MS employees etc, or you might say that the bug tracking system in Debian is at least as good because of its openness to anyone who would submit.. But those are the numbers for anyone interested.
Also important to note is that this does not include kernel bugs. I would have included them, but I don't know where to find those... Someone please reply if you have them.
I think the point was to see whether people would be willing to buy it in spite of the bugs. Anyway when the polled group selects itself the poll is always biased.
Dialpad was NOT written in JAVA, it was written in MS J++. That's why it won't run on Linux. At least, that's what the dialpad web site says.
The topic of legal right to use my persoanl property comes from a deep belief of the Liberterian ideals.
Listen, you may think you have a NATURAL right to use of your personal property, but the US LAW does not grant you that right. You have no LEGAL protection of that right, whether or not you should.
Read the constitution and the right to persue happiness.
You're thinking of the Declaration of Independence. But close 'nuff.
Take a look at the platform of the liberterian party. Good things for strong people.
I'm actually an anarchist. I used to be a Libertarian Party supporter, until I realized the hypocrisy of my position -- pro-civil disobedience, yet in support of institutions (LP, voting, US Constitution, etc) that champion the authority of majority. Of course that (authority of majority, or even authority itself) is an absurd enough concept that, looking back, I have no idea what I was thinking. Still, while I agree that consensual crimes aren't, the point remains that US LAW says otherwise. You have no LEGAL right, in the US, to use your own property how you see fit.
BTW, check out Lysander Spooner's "NO TREASON". It's on gutenberg books, and well worth the (quick) read.
It seems to me that this is the only real legal point to this whole situation - everything else seems redunant when you consider this. So, was the information obtained illegally? If not, it's legal to distribute it, I gather, and legal to use it
Unfortunately, as much sense as that would make, it isn't so. The digital millenium copyright act makes the information necessary to break copyrights illegal to distribute. But that has nothing at all to do with trade secrets. This is an IP issue, but the IP in question isn't the DeCSS code, or the key it uses - it's the DVD's (and their content).
(It is, though, legal to distribute information on how to efficiently kill cops, make bombs, etc. No lobbies against those things.)
Lots of BBS were raided, but I doubt as a result of any mass spy operation by the government. Just like lots of houses are raided, and it doesn't mean that all houses all bugged. They were more likely tipped off by someone or other, or were monitoring the phone use of a suspected individual, or etc. (Not that that would be any better, of course.)
I think "old days" meant USSR. The US government probably wouldn't have bothered with the internet back on those days (the ones in your post) the same reason they wouldn't bother with BBS's - not enough crime (thought or otherwise) to justify the funding. They'd probably be more successful tracking library checkouts and book sales (but who knows, maybe they've been doing that since the 50's and they're looking to expand).