A case where MS re-used Novell's GPL'd code would be very interesting though - and I don't think they would be brave enough to do it at the moment (just think of the problems it could cause them with their current case settlement "so Microsoft, it appears you have learned nothing from this case...").
I agree that the market for NDS on Linux isn't particularly interested in the concepts of open source - or at least those holding the budget strings aren't - but likewise they often are interested in using what makes sense rather than what has the biggest marketing budget. Any directory system is surely only as useful as the hardware and os platforms it supports - it's not good having THE solution to everyone's directory needs if it only runs on one platform. This is an area where an os-neutral company (which Novell seems to be moving towards) has a huge advantage over an os-evangelistic one (I name no names).
This has got to be good for Linux - NDS could well prove to be a key technology, particularly as by most reports it not only beat MS's offering to market, but also is the better of the two. It also serves Novell well to have NDS on all available platforms - theres little point having a global directory for your organisation if it's specific to only a few systems.
I don't think the license matters - this is a business product aimed at IT departments, who are quiet happy to pay for serious products - but it should help legitimise the use of Linux for other purposes (why can't we use it as a web server, it's already used for NDS...)
Thankfully we don't have it that bad yet! I think most burglary occurs early afternoon, or when people are away, for the reasons you have, but I think your last comment at least in part supports my argument - the gun culture in the US encourages violence against victims, sure there will always be some who will carry guns anyway, but in general at least our "petty criminals" aren't packing.
In that case, perhaps you could explain why our murder rate per head of population, and gun death by head of population is so much lower than in the states?
We have approximately 1/5th the population you do, but I think we had something like 20 deaths from guns last year, how many thousand were there in the USA? I think your death:population ratio is something like 50 times ours. Guns are not that popular with criminals here - the guy breaking into your house, doesn't need a gun, neither does the guy asking nicely for your wallet. As a result you might lose your video or wallet just the same, but not your life as well.
Answer me this - if the guy breaking into your house is armed, and suspects you are too, who is going to shoot first when he sees you asleep in bed? Now re-run the situation with the following assumptions. You don't have a gun. The guy breaking in knows this. If he carries one there is a fair chance he will find himself in a siege with an armed police unit, so he doesn't carry one. What now is your chance of being shot while you sleep?
Your maths is WAY off. If the DNA sample has a 1 in 37 million chance of being repeated, and there are 660,000 items in the database, that does NOT give 660,000 : 37,000,000 any way you slice it. What it DOES give is a 660,000 : 37,000,000 chance that they have the sample on file, so:
1 : 37,000,000 chance the DNA could be duplicated
1 : 56 chance a similar sample will be on file
1 : (56 * 37,000,000) the sample matches AND a previous criminal has that DNA on file
1 : 2,072,000,000 chance - you can understand why they considered it to be final. Population of Britain approx 58 million
Did you read the article - they re-tested with 10 points of reference, which supposedly has a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of a mismatch, so it was more a case of not using the most reliable test they could. Also, apparently in the US they use 13 points of reference, which presumably has a stupidly large number for it's mismatch chance. I guess it'll just change the procedure so they use the 1 in 37,000,000 and re-test with a higher level if it matches to confirm it.
Are there any figures for finger print testing? How truly unique is a single finger print, and whats the chance of mismatch with 2 finger prints? DNA testing is still pretty accurate!
Sure, radio stations are broadcasting and there is no way of knowing who already has paid for the music, but the radio statio pays for the RIGHT to do this, irrespective of whether the listener has the right to the music. MP3.com is transmitting to a single user, but it is still a transmission, and I guess the argument is, does the RIAA have the right to determine whether third parties (MP3.com) can provide the means and method to listen to licensed music. I would hope not.
I would persume the argument is, you might have the right to listen to the music, but that doesn't give MP3.com the right to distribute it. And they do have a point - radio stations and libraries have to pay for the right to distribute copyright works, even temporarily. It doesn't matter if you have a copy at home or not. The counter argument must surely be that MP3.com is not distributing the music, but simply providing (part of) the conversion process that supplies the end product to your ears.
Now consider if I have a juke box rigged up to a telephone such that I can dial into it and listen to music. Can the RIAA sue the jukebox for distribution?
At least slashdot allows you to retain copyright for the words your write - most commercial magazines don't!
I think you hit the nail on the head though - copyright serves a purpose when it encourages people to be creative (and who would bother if they felt anyone could 'steal' the result of their effort and claim it as their own), but it should prevent the work being used. If a publisher refsues to reissue a book, surely they should not be allowed to retain the copyright - after all copyright is the right to make copies, if the publisher is not exercising that right, why should they be able to withold it from others.
In general I must say I consider copyright to be a good thing, it allows limited control over your own work, but in general doesn't stop others from using your ideas for themselves.
Part of the problem surely, is the habit of publishers and broadcasters of claiming copyright for anything they put out. I have always had a problem with the traditional magazine clause that claims copyright for anything you send in to them, and it sounds like in the Buffy case, if the writer had not assigned his copyright to Fox then there would not have been a problem. Time to insist that copyright remains with the originator NOT the publisher.
More interestingly, of these 63% who are against Microsoft being broken up, approximately 5% say they are following the trial very closely. So the other 95% are either not following it or "somewhat closely" (the lack of options would seem to put anyone who has heard of the trial into "somewhat closely". Seems an awful lot of people said they were against the break up without understanding what they were being asked.
The average person probably isn't bothered about whether or not microsoft has a monopoly. Not at the moment anyway, and they probably believe that Microsoft is responsible for the technology they use, and a great innovater. It's amazing what the marketing dollar can achieve.
By my understanding of it, the regioning (is there such a word?) of disks has nothing to do with piracy. It simply allows phased erleases across the world, thereby extending the media coverage. Look at it this way, if a movie can be successfully hyped for 3 months before release, you get 3 months hype. If you split the world into 4 regions, none of which can play the movie from other regions, you can stage the releases to get 3 x 4 months hype = a whole year!
Using regions actually encourages piracy - witness The Phantom Menace: there were pirate versions of the film going around in the UK (crap quality, camcorder in the theatre type) before it film was even released here. Why? Because there was a long delay between the US release and the UK release, giving people a chance to produce dodgy copies. If they had been released at the same time, this would NOT have happened. The same happens with VHS/DVD regions. Bring out a hyped product in the US and tell the UK they have wait 6 months gives people who would not normally buy didgy copies the motivation to do so.
Thats exactly why software is no longer sold. If you check the license agreement, you have NOT bought the software. You have bought a license to use the software, so you don't own it, and can't do what you like with it.
Did you never wonder why its a license agreement not a sales agreement?
But web servers DO exist in a single country of origin. As do web-users. Certainly in the UK a precedent was set for downloading of porn, where it was decided that when web pages are downloaded to a PC, they are effectively being published on that PC, and therefore are bound by the UK's obscene publications act. OK, in this case it's the MPAA and USA, but similar arguments might be made. Personally I wish organisations like this would spend their time and money either chasing large scale pirating operations, or reducing the costs of DVD's etc in the first place so there was less incentive to copy.
Actually the document says that one of your parents must be a british citizen, european citizen, commonwealth citizen or US citizen. A pretty wide net. Oh yes, and residence in the UK for 10 years is basically required. That's still a LOT of foreign people though!
And remember all you boredom craving USian geeks - you have to be UKian to work at GCHQ. Not true at all. Anyone can work for GCHQ, but if you are a foreign national you're background is going to be inspected more closely. I'm pretty sure there's a page on the site explaining foreigners can work there.
Just try and use the phrase "Windows" regarding a product name - do you thing "RedHat Windows" or "IBM Windows" would be ignored by Microsoft? Yes, you can use the trademarked name, as long as you acknowledge it, but you can't use it as part of your own product name. So you might be able to have "Uruguyan Software Xunil - Compatible with LinuxTech Linux(tm)"
The majority of oil companies don't own or run their own fleets of tankers - Mobil used to (I don't know if it still does), and was unusual. It makes better financial sense to pay someone else. And of course, then it's not your fault if something goes wrong. That being said Mobil were pretty careful with theirs - the new tankers they ordered all had double-hulls, and they spent something like $1,000,000 per tanker per year on refits etc.
No, the point is that it COULD happen. The original poster said that AMD could never surpass Intel - I was setting out a scenario (that has already happened) that could lead to AMD surpassing Intel. The issue wasn't who is the big name in processors, but whether AMD could ever take that title from Intel. It may not be likely over the next few years, but it is possible.
Yes, but at the time of the Pentium bug, the Pentium was a seriously expensive processor, and thus (in the UK at least) only really available to Corporates, and even then only for serious workstations and servers. The sort of people who were very clued up about things, and the bug was big news. If there had been a serious alternative, it could well have been used. Or to look at it another way, suppose a large proportion of games didn't work on the P3 due to an FPU/MMX bug, and it was proven to be intels fault, are you sure your average consumer wouldn't know? It would almost definately get big-time news coverage.
Which lifetime do you mean? Yours? Look at how quickly the current dominant forces rose to power - are you STILL sure that someone else can't take their position over the same timespan? Things move very quickly, and if AMD had been in their current position during the Intel Pentium Bug episode, we could be witnessing a VERY different market.
Might be a while, I suspect AMD are aiming most of their current R&D at their biggest money-making target market: mainly game players, who these days are usually pretty technically adept, and welcome the best price/performance. Network managers are usually fairly conservative, and probably not likely to buy Athlon's, and thats (in my experience) the biggest market for dual and quad processor machines.
Not all updated systems were very modern though. Quite a few of the new systems wouldn't have looked out of place in the 70's.
It's not really a case of being "modern" though, it's more that they are still conservative (with a small C) and traditionalist - you don't stay in business over the long term by taking unnecessary risks, and that includes going with the latest trends for the sake of it.
As an example, Samba is quite often used within banks to integrate Sun workstations with NT, however Linux is frowned upon. The argument against Linux is the usual "no-one owns it, it's free, it's not to be trusted". Strangely this isn't applied to Samba - presumably because they need it!
Slashdot Mirror
A case where MS re-used Novell's GPL'd code would be very interesting though - and I don't think they would be brave enough to do it at the moment (just think of the problems it could cause them with their current case settlement "so Microsoft, it appears you have learned nothing from this case...").
I agree that the market for NDS on Linux isn't particularly interested in the concepts of open source - or at least those holding the budget strings aren't - but likewise they often are interested in using what makes sense rather than what has the biggest marketing budget. Any directory system is surely only as useful as the hardware and os platforms it supports - it's not good having THE solution to everyone's directory needs if it only runs on one platform. This is an area where an os-neutral company (which Novell seems to be moving towards) has a huge advantage over an os-evangelistic one (I name no names).
This has got to be good for Linux - NDS could well prove to be a key technology, particularly as by most reports it not only beat MS's offering to market, but also is the better of the two. It also serves Novell well to have NDS on all available platforms - theres little point having a global directory for your organisation if it's specific to only a few systems.
I don't think the license matters - this is a business product aimed at IT departments, who are quiet happy to pay for serious products - but it should help legitimise the use of Linux for other purposes (why can't we use it as a web server, it's already used for NDS...)
Thankfully we don't have it that bad yet! I think most burglary occurs early afternoon, or when people are away, for the reasons you have, but I think your last comment at least in part supports my argument - the gun culture in the US encourages violence against victims, sure there will always be some who will carry guns anyway, but in general at least our "petty criminals" aren't packing.
In that case, perhaps you could explain why our murder rate per head of population, and gun death by head of population is so much lower than in the states?
We have approximately 1/5th the population you do, but I think we had something like 20 deaths from guns last year, how many thousand were there in the USA? I think your death:population ratio is something like 50 times ours. Guns are not that popular with criminals here - the guy breaking into your house, doesn't need a gun, neither does the guy asking nicely for your wallet. As a result you might lose your video or wallet just the same, but not your life as well.
Answer me this - if the guy breaking into your house is armed, and suspects you are too, who is going to shoot first when he sees you asleep in bed? Now re-run the situation with the following assumptions. You don't have a gun. The guy breaking in knows this. If he carries one there is a fair chance he will find himself in a siege with an armed police unit, so he doesn't carry one. What now is your chance of being shot while you sleep?
Your maths is WAY off. If the DNA sample has a 1 in 37 million chance of being repeated, and there are 660,000 items in the database, that does NOT give 660,000 : 37,000,000 any way you slice it. What it DOES give is a 660,000 : 37,000,000 chance that they have the sample on file, so:
1 : 37,000,000 chance the DNA could be duplicated
1 : 56 chance a similar sample will be on file
1 : (56 * 37,000,000) the sample matches AND a previous criminal has that DNA on file
1 : 2,072,000,000 chance - you can understand why they considered it to be final. Population of Britain approx 58 million
Did you read the article - they re-tested with 10 points of reference, which supposedly has a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of a mismatch, so it was more a case of not using the most reliable test they could. Also, apparently in the US they use 13 points of reference, which presumably has a stupidly large number for it's mismatch chance. I guess it'll just change the procedure so they use the 1 in 37,000,000 and re-test with a higher level if it matches to confirm it.
Are there any figures for finger print testing? How truly unique is a single finger print, and whats the chance of mismatch with 2 finger prints? DNA testing is still pretty accurate!
Sure, radio stations are broadcasting and there is no way of knowing who already has paid for the music, but the radio statio pays for the RIGHT to do this, irrespective of whether the listener has the right to the music. MP3.com is transmitting to a single user, but it is still a transmission, and I guess the argument is, does the RIAA have the right to determine whether third parties (MP3.com) can provide the means and method to listen to licensed music. I would hope not.
I would persume the argument is, you might have the right to listen to the music, but that doesn't give MP3.com the right to distribute it. And they do have a point - radio stations and libraries have to pay for the right to distribute copyright works, even temporarily. It doesn't matter if you have a copy at home or not. The counter argument must surely be that MP3.com is not distributing the music, but simply providing (part of) the conversion process that supplies the end product to your ears.
Now consider if I have a juke box rigged up to a telephone such that I can dial into it and listen to music. Can the RIAA sue the jukebox for distribution?
At least slashdot allows you to retain copyright for the words your write - most commercial magazines don't!
I think you hit the nail on the head though - copyright serves a purpose when it encourages people to be creative (and who would bother if they felt anyone could 'steal' the result of their effort and claim it as their own), but it should prevent the work being used. If a publisher refsues to reissue a book, surely they should not be allowed to retain the copyright - after all copyright is the right to make copies, if the publisher is not exercising that right, why should they be able to withold it from others.
In general I must say I consider copyright to be a good thing, it allows limited control over your own work, but in general doesn't stop others from using your ideas for themselves.
Part of the problem surely, is the habit of publishers and broadcasters of claiming copyright for anything they put out. I have always had a problem with the traditional magazine clause that claims copyright for anything you send in to them, and it sounds like in the Buffy case, if the writer had not assigned his copyright to Fox then there would not have been a problem. Time to insist that copyright remains with the originator NOT the publisher.
More interestingly, of these 63% who are against Microsoft being broken up, approximately 5% say they are following the trial very closely. So the other 95% are either not following it or "somewhat closely" (the lack of options would seem to put anyone who has heard of the trial into "somewhat closely". Seems an awful lot of people said they were against the break up without understanding what they were being asked.
The average person probably isn't bothered about whether or not microsoft has a monopoly. Not at the moment anyway, and they probably believe that Microsoft is responsible for the technology they use, and a great innovater. It's amazing what the marketing dollar can achieve.
By my understanding of it, the regioning (is there such a word?) of disks has nothing to do with piracy. It simply allows phased erleases across the world, thereby extending the media coverage. Look at it this way, if a movie can be successfully hyped for 3 months before release, you get 3 months hype. If you split the world into 4 regions, none of which can play the movie from other regions, you can stage the releases to get 3 x 4 months hype = a whole year!
Using regions actually encourages piracy - witness The Phantom Menace: there were pirate versions of the film going around in the UK (crap quality, camcorder in the theatre type) before it film was even released here. Why? Because there was a long delay between the US release and the UK release, giving people a chance to produce dodgy copies. If they had been released at the same time, this would NOT have happened. The same happens with VHS/DVD regions. Bring out a hyped product in the US and tell the UK they have wait 6 months gives people who would not normally buy didgy copies the motivation to do so.
Thats exactly why software is no longer sold. If you check the license agreement, you have NOT bought the software. You have bought a license to use the software, so you don't own it, and can't do what you like with it.
Did you never wonder why its a license agreement not a sales agreement?
But web servers DO exist in a single country of origin. As do web-users. Certainly in the UK a precedent was set for downloading of porn, where it was decided that when web pages are downloaded to a PC, they are effectively being published on that PC, and therefore are bound by the UK's obscene publications act. OK, in this case it's the MPAA and USA, but similar arguments might be made. Personally I wish organisations like this would spend their time and money either chasing large scale pirating operations, or reducing the costs of DVD's etc in the first place so there was less incentive to copy.
Actually the document says that one of your parents must be a british citizen, european citizen, commonwealth citizen or US citizen. A pretty wide net. Oh yes, and residence in the UK for 10 years is basically required. That's still a LOT of foreign people though!
Many thanks. I'll go off and investigate it now, it could be exactly what I'm looking for!
And remember all you boredom craving USian geeks - you have to be UKian to work at GCHQ. Not true at all. Anyone can work for GCHQ, but if you are a foreign national you're background is going to be inspected more closely. I'm pretty sure there's a page on the site explaining foreigners can work there.
IANAL etc
Just try and use the phrase "Windows" regarding a product name - do you thing "RedHat Windows" or "IBM Windows" would be ignored by Microsoft? Yes, you can use the trademarked name, as long as you acknowledge it, but you can't use it as part of your own product name. So you might be able to have "Uruguyan Software Xunil - Compatible with LinuxTech Linux(tm)"
The majority of oil companies don't own or run their own fleets of tankers - Mobil used to (I don't know if it still does), and was unusual. It makes better financial sense to pay someone else. And of course, then it's not your fault if something goes wrong. That being said Mobil were pretty careful with theirs - the new tankers they ordered all had double-hulls, and they spent something like $1,000,000 per tanker per year on refits etc.
No, the point is that it COULD happen. The original poster said that AMD could never surpass Intel - I was setting out a scenario (that has already happened) that could lead to AMD surpassing Intel. The issue wasn't who is the big name in processors, but whether AMD could ever take that title from Intel. It may not be likely over the next few years, but it is possible.
Yes, but at the time of the Pentium bug, the Pentium was a seriously expensive processor, and thus (in the UK at least) only really available to Corporates, and even then only for serious workstations and servers. The sort of people who were very clued up about things, and the bug was big news. If there had been a serious alternative, it could well have been used. Or to look at it another way, suppose a large proportion of games didn't work on the P3 due to an FPU/MMX bug, and it was proven to be intels fault, are you sure your average consumer wouldn't know? It would almost definately get big-time news coverage.
Which lifetime do you mean? Yours? Look at how quickly the current dominant forces rose to power - are you STILL sure that someone else can't take their position over the same timespan? Things move very quickly, and if AMD had been in their current position during the Intel Pentium Bug episode, we could be witnessing a VERY different market.
Might be a while, I suspect AMD are aiming most of their current R&D at their biggest money-making target market: mainly game players, who these days are usually pretty technically adept, and welcome the best price/performance. Network managers are usually fairly conservative, and probably not likely to buy Athlon's, and thats (in my experience) the biggest market for dual and quad processor machines.
Not all updated systems were very modern though. Quite a few of the new systems wouldn't have looked out of place in the 70's.
It's not really a case of being "modern" though, it's more that they are still conservative (with a small C) and traditionalist - you don't stay in business over the long term by taking unnecessary risks, and that includes going with the latest trends for the sake of it.
As an example, Samba is quite often used within banks to integrate Sun workstations with NT, however Linux is frowned upon. The argument against Linux is the usual "no-one owns it, it's free, it's not to be trusted". Strangely this isn't applied to Samba - presumably because they need it!