Auctions are still an Internet service
on
eBay Beats DMCA
·
· Score: 1
EBay provides auctions, not internet service, so they are an "ASP", not an "ISP".
Yes, eBay is an application service provider. Here, the application is an auction venue, which still counts as an "Internet service," or a service provided over the Internet. The term "Internet service" includes services other than just an upstream.
If using the full features of MS Office spares you a total of 10 hours on 2 years (that's like 2-5% in productivity), then it is worth it.
Control, alt, delete. MS Office would be more likely to cost you when you lose productivity to reboots because the underlying operating system (Windows 9x) is so unstable, and the alternatives (Windows 2000 or a new computer with Mac OS X) are so much more expensive to deploy company-wide than Linux86, one of the supported OpenOffice platforms.
Big deal, people will simply examine the kernel files and then hack the kernel.
Not if (as I mentioned, and you snipped) the kernel won't boot if it doesn't match the digital signature.
They've even managed to crack dongle-protected applications without having a suitable dongle!
Not worthy of an exclamation point. Most dongle-based apps just call a function that checks for the dongle: if (!find_dongle()) {alert("no dongle"); exit(1);} and the cracker just replaces find_dongle() with {return TRUE;}. However, they have not yet been able to fully crack Capcom Suicide, which does the decryption in a dongle that forgets the key if the voltage to its key RAM is tampered with.
i was on a site that tried to protect the images with javascript, i just clicked on image and the toolbar popped up, clicked save picture...
As other users pointed out, right-click traps do not protect images from fair users or pirates. In fact, they hinder usability and accessibility (read more).
A word processor that doesn't crash and can read and write everybodies pretty docs quickly and easily.
wvware + emacs + either L^aTeX or mozilla?
An email application that doesn't crash that can read, write and query everybodies mail and attachments.
This has been solved (mozilla 0.9.x or even the command line mailers). Do you expect it to support SMTP/IMAP/POP3, or do you expect it to support every webmail service under the sun?
A database that doesn't crash that easily reads, writes and manipulates everybodies data formats.
Perl, talking to PostgreSQL. "Everybody's data format" is SQL; what popular relational database doesn't support SQL?
If you are a veteran "rank and file" clerical worker, you are probably intimately familiar with Word or Excel and changing office suites would cost you a lot of lost hours.
Enough hours to cost $500, the equivalent of an Office license? As geekoid mentions below, if an employee costs the company $50/hr (wages, payroll taxes, benefits, utilities, etc.) then a free(beer) program would have to need 10 hours to learn to make the program cost more than MS Office.
You don't need to use Microsoft Office or StarOffice just to present slideshows. I just use Emacs to write slides in HTML 4 and CSS and Mozilla to present them. They'll work on any machine with a browser that supports HTML 4 and CSS, no Microsoft bloatware required. And they zip up really tight, meaning a single floppy (or an equivalent 6 minute download) can go further provided you aren't using any big media files.
Want to make changes to the styles across the board? Tweak the stylesheet. Want to make deeper changes? Tweak the server-side included files. Want to pull slides from a database? Write the slideshow engine in PHP or Python.
It all boils down to your priorities. You can spend $500 on an Office license and $50 of your time to learn it, or you can spend $50 worth of your time learning basic HTML and CSS.
Note that on its Office pages, Microsoft doesn't claim to have a trademark on the word Office. However, it has registered "MICROSOFT OFFICE XP" as a trademark. I can't give you a link to the USPTO's trademark database query results because its URIs refer to states and not queries.
The plan was to transmit over air TV signals digitally because it is a more efficient use of spectrum than analog
Or so they say. It's much easier to encrypt digital signals than analog signals, and now that we have a DMCA passed by voice vote (the old "the ayes have it" style of anonymous voting, which is recorded as an essentially unanimous vote), it's illegal to make a device that restores fair-use rights that the architecture takes away. Watch as all your VCRs become useless when the DTV receiver box outputs Macrovision garbage all over its analog output.
and then retire the analog transmissions once there was sufficient penetration of TVs that could read and decode digital signals.
If the federal government thinks this will happen by 2006, it has something coming.
You just described DSL
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 1
How about removing the filter at the telephone box that limits the amount of wavelength you can use for a modem (see pots).
This idea is the basis for the Digital Subscriber Line technology, commonly known as DSL.
Encrypted everything, digitally signed kernel
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 1
* Some 16-year old somewhere in the world, who realizes that if the code can execute on the user's box, the user can save a copy
Not necessarily. If the operating system has tight memory protection (Windows XP feature) and requires all kernel-mode components to bear a digital signature by Microsoft Corporation [1] so that you can't run a debugger (XP is headed in that direction), how are you supposed to fetch the 128-bit decryption key?
Some hard-ass conservative judge decides that the best way to stop the piracy is to butcher the First Amendment
Are you predicting that the Supreme Court will have a majority of five "hard-ass" justices by the time they hear a case like this? I can see BSA, RIAA, and MPAA members buying off a district or circuit court judge, but the Supremes have shown a bit more integrity with respect to refusing bribes.
Why Sony hasn't released PS2 Linux in USA
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Software rental was made illegal in the US under the "Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990"... [which] is still on the books.
The citation is 17 USC 109(b). Note that section 109(b)(1)(B)(2) makes an explicit exception to allow software designed for video game consoles to be rented, defining video game console as "a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video
games and may be designed for other purposes."
This may have an adverse effect on rental for PlayStation 2 software, as Sony markets the PS2 console as a computer to get around several countries' import duties and other taxes. For instance, the Japanese PS2 can run a simple GNU/Linux system, and the European PS2 has a Basic interpreter. It could very well be the case that Sony has not released the PS2 Linux kit in the United States because it doesn't want the extra paperwork burden of licensing rental rights to all the game rental stores.
Protesting the DMCA: [play an out-of-region DVD or a protected eBook on a laptop in a public place and distribute the tools]. Protesting the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act: with the same hardware above, [play old Mickey Mouse films and put them on edonkey].
The entertainment industry appears able to get copyright protection extended as long as they wish... Is your organization making any efforts to convice congress to return copyright duration to a sane limit, and if so, is there much hope for success?
Or as sorehands put it:
What about rolling back the life of a copyright to 25 years instead of having it be the number of years since the creation of Mickey Mouse?
Good question. I feel that an intellectual monopoly term should last just long enough for the holder to make a return on the intellectual investment. I fail to see many copyrighted works being produced that don't produce the bulk of their revenues within the first 25 years.
konq/embedded runs on the qt ports to windows, macos, atheos, and beos.
None of the Qt ports you mentioned are free software or even free as in beer. If I want a decent browser on Windows, my choices are IE (predominance in server logs contributes to IE-only web design techniques such as VBScript), Opera (has problems with many sites), Mozilla (a few textarea glitches), and a Konq/E based browser (requires a $1200 Qt license to compile for Windows plus $500 for VC++ because Qt for Windows doesn't support mingw gcc or cygwin gcc). I'm happy with Mozilla 0.9.3 for the time being.
I suppose now you're going to use this as the reason why you're slipping the release date another quarter.
The Mozilla release date hasn't changed since M1: "1.0 will appear When It's Ready(tm)." Refusing to accept that dates can be expressed in terms of calendars other than Gregorian is an error.
"Just throw more hardware at it"? Not always.
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 1
Programmer time is usually much more important than machine time.
I see your point with respect to comments. However, unoptimized code and inefficient algorithms are unacceptable for many server-side tasks where adding more hardware to a large computing cluster would incur prohibitive costs. For instance, an optimized renderer may help an independent motion picture studio's render farm finish a movie in 2 years instead of 3.
I want to make a linked list in Java. Ooops, no pointers, sorry.
As Procrasti mentioned, every variable in the Java language not of primitive type (int, etc.) acts as a pointer. Just because you don't see a * doesn't mean it isn't a pointer.
I want to pass a variable to a function and have it modify it, oops, no pointers.
So pass a reference. If you're passing an object, don't clone() the object before you pass it. If you're passing a primitive, wrap it in an object (i.e. int foo;... Integer bar = new Integer(foo);).
I want to write a program that takes as little memory as possible, or reuse memory, or optimize it to use common options of the processor, oops, no memory management, no assembler.
Reuse memory by calling System.gc(). Write assembly language either with Jasmin (an assembler for JVM bytecode) or JNI (a way to link in unsafe native code).
Technically you could [write a JVM in the Java language], of course. But you'd have your JVM running on a JVM
Not necessarily. GCJ can compile Java language source code into a native binary using G++'s engine.
Damnit, I want a programming language that gives me access to the freeking carry flag! =). I've done math routines a lot, and the code is literally 10x faster when you can optimize it by hand in assembly.
Then design a language that does such a thing. GCC is free software; you can start from that. And if you don't like the quality of optimizations that GCC does on your code, contribute a better optimizer.
Microsoft's best product is Excel. Why? Because, unlike NT or Word or whatever, it's the main application used by the people who sign the cheques.
The Free Software Foundation's best product is Gnumeric. Why? Because, unlike GNU/Linux or GNOME or AbiWord or whatever, it's the main application used by the people who sign the cheques.
The KDE Team's best product is KSpread. Why? Because, unlike KDE or KWord or whatever, it's the main application used by the people who sign the cheques.
Sony PS2 uses a MIPS arch CPU
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 1
Is MIPS still around other than embedded systems?
Depends on whether or not you consider Sony's PlayStation line of game consoles to be embedded systems. PS1 used a MIPS R2K (or R3K?). PS2 uses a custom EMOTION ENGINE(tm) processor based on MIPS architecture. PS2 already runs Linux (if only in Japan at the moment); would it be hard to build a cluster to run Apache HTTP Server or a parallel CG renderer?
Apache development with Windows 9x
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 1
However, the fact that OS X has apache server built in makes it very desirable.
Apache HTTP Server is also available for Win32 machines (9x/me, nt/2k/xp). Here's a direct link to the Win32 binary/source distro (win95 needs Winsock 2; nt4, 95, and 98 need Windows Installer for nt or 9x). It's good for web development on machines that also have to run Office (say for students who can't afford to own several machines) and also good for file sharing.
Slashdot Mirror
EBay provides auctions, not internet service, so they are an "ASP", not an "ISP".
Yes, eBay is an application service provider. Here, the application is an auction venue, which still counts as an "Internet service," or a service provided over the Internet. The term "Internet service" includes services other than just an upstream.
If using the full features of MS Office spares you a total of 10 hours on 2 years (that's like 2-5% in productivity), then it is worth it.
Control, alt, delete. MS Office would be more likely to cost you when you lose productivity to reboots because the underlying operating system (Windows 9x) is so unstable, and the alternatives (Windows 2000 or a new computer with Mac OS X) are so much more expensive to deploy company-wide than Linux86, one of the supported OpenOffice platforms.
This posting describes a woman in California suing Fahrenheit Entertainment, Inc. and its label Music City Records
Hmmm.... Music City Records... Is it ironic that MusicCity is also a decentralized filesharing service based on the same technology as KaZaA?
Would it be further ironic if somebody figured out how to decrypt Circuit City DIVX movies and encode them with a DivX MPEG-4 codec?
Big deal, people will simply examine the kernel files and then hack the kernel.
Not if (as I mentioned, and you snipped) the kernel won't boot if it doesn't match the digital signature.
They've even managed to crack dongle-protected applications without having a suitable dongle!
Not worthy of an exclamation point. Most dongle-based apps just call a function that checks for the dongle: if (!find_dongle()) {alert("no dongle"); exit(1);} and the cracker just replaces find_dongle() with {return TRUE;}. However, they have not yet been able to fully crack Capcom Suicide, which does the decryption in a dongle that forgets the key if the voltage to its key RAM is tampered with.
heard of qt/noncommercial for windows?
heard of qt for windows requires ms visual c++ and not cygwin?
i was on a site that tried to protect the images with javascript, i just clicked on image and the toolbar popped up, clicked save picture...
As other users pointed out, right-click traps do not protect images from fair users or pirates. In fact, they hinder usability and accessibility (read more).
A word processor that doesn't crash and can read and write everybodies pretty docs quickly and easily.
wvware + emacs + either L^aTeX or mozilla?
An email application that doesn't crash that can read, write and query everybodies mail and attachments.
This has been solved (mozilla 0.9.x or even the command line mailers). Do you expect it to support SMTP/IMAP/POP3, or do you expect it to support every webmail service under the sun?
A database that doesn't crash that easily reads, writes and manipulates everybodies data formats.
Perl, talking to PostgreSQL. "Everybody's data format" is SQL; what popular relational database doesn't support SQL?
If you are a veteran "rank and file" clerical worker, you are probably intimately familiar with Word or Excel and changing office suites would cost you a lot of lost hours.
Enough hours to cost $500, the equivalent of an Office license? As geekoid mentions below, if an employee costs the company $50/hr (wages, payroll taxes, benefits, utilities, etc.) then a free(beer) program would have to need 10 hours to learn to make the program cost more than MS Office.
You don't need to use Microsoft Office or StarOffice just to present slideshows. I just use Emacs to write slides in HTML 4 and CSS and Mozilla to present them. They'll work on any machine with a browser that supports HTML 4 and CSS, no Microsoft bloatware required. And they zip up really tight, meaning a single floppy (or an equivalent 6 minute download) can go further provided you aren't using any big media files.
Want to make changes to the styles across the board? Tweak the stylesheet. Want to make deeper changes? Tweak the server-side included files. Want to pull slides from a database? Write the slideshow engine in PHP or Python.
It all boils down to your priorities. You can spend $500 on an Office license and $50 of your time to learn it, or you can spend $50 worth of your time learning basic HTML and CSS.
So now I have to check all converted documents in a copy of word on my laptop before sending them out to customers.
Or convert them to a PDF. A PDF will display and print the same on any computer with a PDF viewer such as Ghostscript or Acrobat Reader.
Note that on its Office pages, Microsoft doesn't claim to have a trademark on the word Office. However, it has registered "MICROSOFT OFFICE XP" as a trademark. I can't give you a link to the USPTO's trademark database query results because its URIs refer to states and not queries.
Yes, Office XP can still save files in the Office 95 format, which most free software WYSIAYG editors can interpret well.
The plan was to transmit over air TV signals digitally because it is a more efficient use of spectrum than analog
Or so they say. It's much easier to encrypt digital signals than analog signals, and now that we have a DMCA passed by voice vote (the old "the ayes have it" style of anonymous voting, which is recorded as an essentially unanimous vote), it's illegal to make a device that restores fair-use rights that the architecture takes away. Watch as all your VCRs become useless when the DTV receiver box outputs Macrovision garbage all over its analog output.
and then retire the analog transmissions once there was sufficient penetration of TVs that could read and decode digital signals.
If the federal government thinks this will happen by 2006, it has something coming.
How about removing the filter at the telephone box that limits the amount of wavelength you can use for a modem (see pots).
This idea is the basis for the Digital Subscriber Line technology, commonly known as DSL.
* Some 16-year old somewhere in the world, who realizes that if the code can execute on the user's box, the user can save a copy
Not necessarily. If the operating system has tight memory protection (Windows XP feature) and requires all kernel-mode components to bear a digital signature by Microsoft Corporation [1] so that you can't run a debugger (XP is headed in that direction), how are you supposed to fetch the 128-bit decryption key?
[1] Not "Microsoft Corporation" fraudists but MS's digital ID.
Some hard-ass conservative judge decides that the best way to stop the piracy is to butcher the First Amendment
Are you predicting that the Supreme Court will have a majority of five "hard-ass" justices by the time they hear a case like this? I can see BSA, RIAA, and MPAA members buying off a district or circuit court judge, but the Supremes have shown a bit more integrity with respect to refusing bribes.
Software rental was made illegal in the US under the "Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990" ... [which] is still on the books.
The citation is 17 USC 109(b). Note that section 109(b)(1)(B)(2) makes an explicit exception to allow software designed for video game consoles to be rented, defining video game console as "a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes."
This may have an adverse effect on rental for PlayStation 2 software, as Sony markets the PS2 console as a computer to get around several countries' import duties and other taxes. For instance, the Japanese PS2 can run a simple GNU/Linux system, and the European PS2 has a Basic interpreter. It could very well be the case that Sony has not released the PS2 Linux kit in the United States because it doesn't want the extra paperwork burden of licensing rental rights to all the game rental stores.
Protesting the DMCA: [play an out-of-region DVD or a protected eBook on a laptop in a public place and distribute the tools]. Protesting the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act: with the same hardware above, [play old Mickey Mouse films and put them on edonkey].
This is the kind of civil disobedience that the Barely Legal Project does.
The entertainment industry appears able to get copyright protection extended as long as they wish ... Is your organization making any efforts to convice congress to return copyright duration to a sane limit, and if so, is there much hope for success?
Or as sorehands put it:
What about rolling back the life of a copyright to 25 years instead of having it be the number of years since the creation of Mickey Mouse?
Good question. I feel that an intellectual monopoly term should last just long enough for the holder to make a return on the intellectual investment. I fail to see many copyrighted works being produced that don't produce the bulk of their revenues within the first 25 years.
For more explanation of Disney's lobbying for repeated copyright term extensions, read my essay about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It has some useful links to other information on the topic.
konq/embedded runs on the qt ports to windows, macos, atheos, and beos.
None of the Qt ports you mentioned are free software or even free as in beer. If I want a decent browser on Windows, my choices are IE (predominance in server logs contributes to IE-only web design techniques such as VBScript), Opera (has problems with many sites), Mozilla (a few textarea glitches), and a Konq/E based browser (requires a $1200 Qt license to compile for Windows plus $500 for VC++ because Qt for Windows doesn't support mingw gcc or cygwin gcc). I'm happy with Mozilla 0.9.3 for the time being.
I suppose now you're going to use this as the reason why you're slipping the release date another quarter.
The Mozilla release date hasn't changed since M1: "1.0 will appear When It's Ready(tm)." Refusing to accept that dates can be expressed in terms of calendars other than Gregorian is an error.
Programmer time is usually much more important than machine time.
I see your point with respect to comments. However, unoptimized code and inefficient algorithms are unacceptable for many server-side tasks where adding more hardware to a large computing cluster would incur prohibitive costs. For instance, an optimized renderer may help an independent motion picture studio's render farm finish a movie in 2 years instead of 3.
I want to make a linked list in Java. Ooops, no pointers, sorry.
As Procrasti mentioned, every variable in the Java language not of primitive type (int, etc.) acts as a pointer. Just because you don't see a * doesn't mean it isn't a pointer.
I want to pass a variable to a function and have it modify it, oops, no pointers.
So pass a reference. If you're passing an object, don't clone() the object before you pass it. If you're passing a primitive, wrap it in an object (i.e. int foo; ... Integer bar = new Integer(foo);).
I want to write a program that takes as little memory as possible, or reuse memory, or optimize it to use common options of the processor, oops, no memory management, no assembler.
Reuse memory by calling System.gc(). Write assembly language either with Jasmin (an assembler for JVM bytecode) or JNI (a way to link in unsafe native code).
Technically you could [write a JVM in the Java language], of course. But you'd have your JVM running on a JVM
Not necessarily. GCJ can compile Java language source code into a native binary using G++'s engine.
Damnit, I want a programming language that gives me access to the freeking carry flag! =). I've done math routines a lot, and the code is literally 10x faster when you can optimize it by hand in assembly.
Then design a language that does such a thing. GCC is free software; you can start from that. And if you don't like the quality of optimizations that GCC does on your code, contribute a better optimizer.
Microsoft's best product is Excel. Why? Because, unlike NT or Word or whatever, it's the main application used by the people who sign the cheques.
The Free Software Foundation's best product is Gnumeric. Why? Because, unlike GNU/Linux or GNOME or AbiWord or whatever, it's the main application used by the people who sign the cheques.
The KDE Team's best product is KSpread. Why? Because, unlike KDE or KWord or whatever, it's the main application used by the people who sign the cheques.
Is MIPS still around other than embedded systems?
Depends on whether or not you consider Sony's PlayStation line of game consoles to be embedded systems. PS1 used a MIPS R2K (or R3K?). PS2 uses a custom EMOTION ENGINE(tm) processor based on MIPS architecture. PS2 already runs Linux (if only in Japan at the moment); would it be hard to build a cluster to run Apache HTTP Server or a parallel CG renderer?
However, the fact that OS X has apache server built in makes it very desirable.
Apache HTTP Server is also available for Win32 machines (9x/me, nt/2k/xp). Here's a direct link to the Win32 binary/source distro (win95 needs Winsock 2; nt4, 95, and 98 need Windows Installer for nt or 9x). It's good for web development on machines that also have to run Office (say for students who can't afford to own several machines) and also good for file sharing.
Umm, how did you sell a car that you were leasing?
Many vehicle leases come with an option to purchase the vehicle at a drastically reduced price.