I thought that it was AOL that was in the habit of sending out massive numbers of viruses through snail mail. You just have to be smart enough to use them as coaters (or for your microwaving pleasure) rather than sticking them into your computer.
Where is the logic in keeping the outside experts under NDA about what code is believed by SCO to have been copied into Linux?
From the sounds of the article, though, that's not what they're saying. They're saying that in order for somebody to look at their evidence, he'll have to look at SCO's codebase. Since they consider that codebase to be a signficant source of value, they want those people to sign NDAs before looking so that SCO will be sure that their trade secrets won't leak out. That seems like an inherently reasonable request, though it does mean that no Linux Kernel hacker is likely to get a look, since his contributions to the Kernel would then be suspect.
Don't conclude that the guy knows what he's doing based on one action. As the saying goes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. This is the same governor who paid for his favored highway construction projects by selling bonds secured by future federal highway funding. The result is that there's a big construction boom during his term but there will be no money for new construction for something like 20 years after he leaves office. That certainly doesn't sound like a brilliant forward thinker to me.
At least some of Kodak's cameras still take CF. The DX3500, 3600, 3900, and 4900 use CF, though the rest of their line has switched to SD. And, of course, their professional line uses CF because it's possible to get the really huge capacity cards (like IBM microdrive) in the TypeII package.
Re:Eastman-Kodak a good comparison?
on
RIAA vs The Economy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But how much is digital photography cutting into Kodak's business? It's not as though they're exclusively committed to the film business, you know. They have excellent lines of both amateur and professional digital cameras themselves. And while they don't make film sales on the cameras, the base price is enough higher that there's a significant short-term profit potential. They also sell inkjet photo paper, online printing services, and photoCD. They were not exactly caught off guard by the switch to digital.
Re:Forget it -This horse is long out of the barn
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I can take your last name, gender, a guess about your age within five years, a guess about what region of the US in which you live, and right here, from the very terminal from which I type this message, probably determine where you have lived for the past seven years, your neighbor's names, your family members' names, your social security number, your driver's license numbers, any public records (criminal, civil, real estate) in less time than it takes to reload slashdot on a busy saturday afternoon.
OK. Try to find me based just on this information:
Last name: Moore
Gender: Male
Age: 25-35
Residence: Southern California
No peeking at my publically presented information on Slashdot. I'm guessing that you'll have some trouble given the number of people named Moore in the region.
I'd suggest making sure that the list includes John Ashcroft, but it's unlikely to make much difference. The really high up people who could make the biggest difference don't fly commercial flights anyway; they fly private jets, charters, or government planes.
While infoUSA allows access to virtually anybody who logs onto its website, ChoicePoint screens subscribers.
I'm not sure which is scarier, the idea that these databases are being opened to anyone who has a credit card and a willingness to snoop on their neighbors, or the idea that they should be restricted so that only "legitimate" businesses like telemarketers can get it. One way you don't know what kind of lowlives are going to use the data to ruin other people's lives. The other way, many potentially legitimate users will be shut out but some slimy people will still have access because the companies selling the data don't have the same views as ordinary people about which businesses really ought to see it. I guess that's the general problem with data like this; it's tough to know who is going to misuse it until it's already too late, so it's almost impossible to make it available without it causing problems.
The problem with this approach is that it will encourage the spammer, which we don't really want. The $50 million dollars that you're planning on extracting from the mortgage company doesn't just evaporate, you know. It goes into the pocket of the unscrupulous slime who sent those messages, funding his operation and letting him send out even more spam. What you really need to do is to figure out a way of making the money flow into the pockets of the people who are suffering from the spam, not the people who are sending it.
A better analogy would be the front door on your house. If you leave it unlocked, well that's pretty stupid. It's not the lock manufacturer's fault you didn't lock it.
But that's a bad analogy, too. Failing to lock a lock is not the same thing as failing to patch a server. Failing to lock your lock (or, to use an automotive equivalent to keep things consistent, leaving your keys in the ignition) is like failing to change the default password on a server- a basic thing that's an inherent part of the job. Patching a server is more like taking your car in as part of a safety recall.
Both cars with safetly defects and servers with vulnerabilities represent errors on the part of the maker that put the user in danger, and you can draw some strong additional analogies about the process of getting the product fixed. In both cases, for instance, the process of getting everything fixed can take some time- time for the problem to come to light, for the maker to figure out a solution, for users to be notified of the problem, and for the fix to be applied. The balance of liability shifts between maker and user as you progress through the process. If a user gets hurt by a previously unknown problem, you have a strong case for the maker's liability for selling a defective product. The longer the fix has been available, though, the more it becomes the user's responsibility to have the problem corrected. If a Pinto was damaged by fire a year after Ford issued a safety recall, or a MS user is burned by a vulnerability six months after the patch was made public, it is the user's fault for failing to have a needed fix applied.
Your point 2 is not necessarily true. The EULA claims to disclaim certain types of liability, but that is necessarily subject to applicable law. If the law says that you can't give up your implied warrant of merchantability, you haven't given it up even if you sign a document purporting to do so. I don't know what Korean law says on this point, but it's entirely possible that some of the disclaimers in the Microsoft EULA are not legally valid there, in which case Microsoft could be liable. Companies continue to put this type of clause into their EULA both because there are some jurisdictions where it does apply (and they're obviously trying to change the law so that it applies in as many places as possible, see UCITA) and because they think that it will convince people that they don't have a case.
On Windows, once some executable content runs, it has free reign over the system.
That's only true of the Win95/98/ME series. WinNT/2K/XP has the capability to set permissions so that not every program has access to every piece of the system. In fact, Windows ACLs are much finer grained than traditional Unix rwx type permissions; it's easy for any user to set access to his files on a person-by-person basis. I don't think that they're usually used very well, but it's certainly possible for a competent admin to lock down a Windows system pretty tightly against abuse by ordinary users.
I know that Galeon has an automatic "recover session" option. If the program crashes, the next time you start it you're given the option of re-opening it in its previous state. I'm not sure if it actually keeps track of what you had typed into forms, but at least it means that if you had twelve different, hard to reach pages open at once you can get back to where you were.
Note that the post said that they used weed killer chemicals. That's a slap in the face of people wanting to use healthier and more organically grown food.
Read it again yourself. One of the points specifically made in the article is that the basic technology is adaptable to either conventional or organic methods. Note the following quotes from the article:
"The real winner from this project is the environment," said Giles, a fluids expert. "We'll be able to reduce chemical use and perhaps even eliminate weed problems for organic growers."
...
One of the major challenges has been engineering fluids to hit the weeds and spread over them without bouncing onto the crop. The tiny squirt guns might be filled with herbicides or with alternatives, such as cinnamon oil or superheated oil for organic growers.
It sounds very much to me as though they are at least thinking of possible uses in organic growing.
And even if they do use pesticides, consider the likely alternatives. Big agribusiness is currently suggesting that the solution to weeds is to create gentically engineered crops that are resistant to herbicides and then blasting the whole field with tons of weed killer. A technique that sprays the stuff only on weeds is almost certainly a win over that, by reducing total herbicide use, reducing herbicide that winds up on the crops, and eliminating the need for genetically engineered plants.
Farmers as a group have shown themselves to be very technology friendly. Just look at the equipment of an average farmer today vs. that of a farmer 100 years ago. Those massive combines aren't there to increase yield, per se; they're there to increase yield per input of labor. That's exactly what this robot aims to do- replace expensive hand weeding with an automated system. I'm not sure that the system will sell, but if it doesn't it's most likely to be because it doesn't work (or something else works even better) rather than kneejerk anti-technology beliefs on the part of the farmers.
I worked an an ISP where we had to make a couple of code tweaks to Apache. Worked great. Yeah Open Source. But then we all got into a debate about whether we had to go through the effort of making the whole thing available online since we were hosting some web sites for some local businesses.
Certainly not with Apache. It has its own license, not the GPL. The Apache License is very similar to the original (advertizing clause) BSD license. You're permitted to redistribute in binary only form if you want. The only restrictions are that you have to include the original copyright notice and disclaimer, can't call it Apache or claim endorsement by the Apache Foundation, and have to acknowledge the Apache Foundation in advertizing material.
Wow. These guys are not just evil, but their command of English is even worse than the Slashdot editors. Here's a direct quote from the article:
"We believe that just like in television, the creative you build is what gets shown, the technology should not get in the way," said Allie Savarino, senior vice president for global marketing, Unicast.
CmdrTaco is better than that on his worst day. I hope they can program better than they can write English, or there are going to be a lot of crashing web browsers when this thing comes out.
A lot of the innovation in Linux is under the hood, rather than in an obvious application. It's very impressive, for instance, that the Linux kernel can support- and support well- systems ranging from old 386 machines and handheld organizers to IBM mainframes and 64 processor NUMA boxes. Or that the NPTL lets Linux start and stop 100,000 simultaneous threads in 2 seconds. Those aren't "Gee Wow!" things that will make an average desktop user sit up an cheer, but they're very impressive technical accomplishments and since, AFAIK, no other system can manage those things it makes them quite innovative.
Their search engine is also considerably more advanced--it'll allow you to search proximity (x within 5 words of y), caps/lowercase, minimum number of occurrences of a term, etc., which Google doesn't do.
More significant, perhaps, is that Google's approach to searching is unlikely to work nearly as well for legal documents as it does for the web. The trick to Google is that web documents are frequently updated, so that two sites can each reference each other. That doesn't work for most other kinds of documents, which are set when first written and can't refer to anything published after they were. That means that Google's whole approach of recursively defining the importance of a document's links according the importance of the links coming to it won't necessarily work.
Re:Advent of html/http worse thing for online apps
on
Ten Years of Web Browsing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But as an application infrastructure, we've gone nowhere if not backwards.
No, we haven't, because there really wasn't any infrastructure for on-line applications before the web. Sure there were a handful of standard protocols like ftp and telnet, plus the ability to have remote X sessions, but there wasn't really anything beyond that. At least today it's possible to have an on-line application that has some prayer of working. The web is piss poor compared to what you could do with a really well designed on-line applications protocol, but it's a fair sight better than having to roll your own system any time you want to accomplish anything.
Sony makes stuff you like, so you don't mind buying Sony branded stuff. But Microsoft makes stuff you don't like, and when you have to buy MS branded stuff you get irritated because you don't want to give them money. Only then the word monopoly makes an appearance.
You miss the point. If I like Sony stuff, I'm free to buy it. If I don't like it (and I don't) I'm free to buy somebody else's. If it turns out that most people don't like paying extra to buy Sony's stuff that doesn't play nicely with other manufacturers' products, then Sony will lose market share and either change their strategy or leave the market. That's the way markets are supposed to work.
If I like Microsoft's products, I'm also free to buy them. If I don't like Microsoft's products, though, I don't necessarily have much choice not to buy them. It's all-but impossible to find a decent PC laptop that comes without Windows, so I may be stuck paying for a Microsoft product whether I want it or not. That's not the way markets are supposed to work, which is why you'll hear people complaining about Microsoft's monopoly.
Okay, find me a Sony brand Digital Camera that supports anything besides Memory Stick.
You mean like the CD Mavica that writes directly to 8cm CD-R disks? Or were you thinking of the FD Mavica that writes directly to floppies?
Actually, I agree with your general point that Sony likes using technology that doesn't always interoperate well, going back at least to the days of VHS vs. Beta. I'm not sure, though, that it's necessarily an issue of trying to lock users in. Sony just doesn't seem to get the idea that standardization can be more important than technical sophistication. They do seem to accept the idea of letting others use their technology. CDs are a great case in point; Sony and Philips developed the basic standards and let others make them too. But when there's not a universally accepted standard, Sony seems to be tenacious at sticking to their version of the technology over an emerging de facto standard than most manufacturers.
While the judge's reasoning in this case appears to be wrong, the outcome of the his decision is correct. Part of the anti-circumvention clause states that the Copyright Office was to hold hearings to decide on specific classes of work that should be exempt. They only picked two, which were:
Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or obsolescence.
Compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications
In other words, what the plaintiff wanted to do is not illegal, so he has no standing to challenge the law. You can read about it here. FWIW, that may not be true for long. The Copyright Office is holding another round of hearings, and one of the scheduled topics is whether this exemption should be continued.
You have to wonder how boring the world would be if we actually LEARNED from our mistakes.
Boring? You've got to be kidding. There's nothing as boring as watching people making the same mistake again and again. If people learned from their mistakes, the world would be full of the excitement of all of the new, never seen before mistakes that people would be making in an attempt not to make the old ones. I have no confidence that people would make any fewer mistakes, mind you, just newer, more interesting ones.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that it was AOL that was in the habit of sending out massive numbers of viruses through snail mail. You just have to be smart enough to use them as coaters (or for your microwaving pleasure) rather than sticking them into your computer.
From the sounds of the article, though, that's not what they're saying. They're saying that in order for somebody to look at their evidence, he'll have to look at SCO's codebase. Since they consider that codebase to be a signficant source of value, they want those people to sign NDAs before looking so that SCO will be sure that their trade secrets won't leak out. That seems like an inherently reasonable request, though it does mean that no Linux Kernel hacker is likely to get a look, since his contributions to the Kernel would then be suspect.
How about $=0, then?
Don't conclude that the guy knows what he's doing based on one action. As the saying goes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. This is the same governor who paid for his favored highway construction projects by selling bonds secured by future federal highway funding. The result is that there's a big construction boom during his term but there will be no money for new construction for something like 20 years after he leaves office. That certainly doesn't sound like a brilliant forward thinker to me.
At least some of Kodak's cameras still take CF. The DX3500, 3600, 3900, and 4900 use CF, though the rest of their line has switched to SD. And, of course, their professional line uses CF because it's possible to get the really huge capacity cards (like IBM microdrive) in the TypeII package.
But how much is digital photography cutting into Kodak's business? It's not as though they're exclusively committed to the film business, you know. They have excellent lines of both amateur and professional digital cameras themselves. And while they don't make film sales on the cameras, the base price is enough higher that there's a significant short-term profit potential. They also sell inkjet photo paper, online printing services, and photoCD. They were not exactly caught off guard by the switch to digital.
OK. Try to find me based just on this information:
No peeking at my publically presented information on Slashdot. I'm guessing that you'll have some trouble given the number of people named Moore in the region.
I'd suggest making sure that the list includes John Ashcroft, but it's unlikely to make much difference. The really high up people who could make the biggest difference don't fly commercial flights anyway; they fly private jets, charters, or government planes.
The problem with this approach is that it will encourage the spammer, which we don't really want. The $50 million dollars that you're planning on extracting from the mortgage company doesn't just evaporate, you know. It goes into the pocket of the unscrupulous slime who sent those messages, funding his operation and letting him send out even more spam. What you really need to do is to figure out a way of making the money flow into the pockets of the people who are suffering from the spam, not the people who are sending it.
But that's a bad analogy, too. Failing to lock a lock is not the same thing as failing to patch a server. Failing to lock your lock (or, to use an automotive equivalent to keep things consistent, leaving your keys in the ignition) is like failing to change the default password on a server- a basic thing that's an inherent part of the job. Patching a server is more like taking your car in as part of a safety recall.
Both cars with safetly defects and servers with vulnerabilities represent errors on the part of the maker that put the user in danger, and you can draw some strong additional analogies about the process of getting the product fixed. In both cases, for instance, the process of getting everything fixed can take some time- time for the problem to come to light, for the maker to figure out a solution, for users to be notified of the problem, and for the fix to be applied. The balance of liability shifts between maker and user as you progress through the process. If a user gets hurt by a previously unknown problem, you have a strong case for the maker's liability for selling a defective product. The longer the fix has been available, though, the more it becomes the user's responsibility to have the problem corrected. If a Pinto was damaged by fire a year after Ford issued a safety recall, or a MS user is burned by a vulnerability six months after the patch was made public, it is the user's fault for failing to have a needed fix applied.
Your point 2 is not necessarily true. The EULA claims to disclaim certain types of liability, but that is necessarily subject to applicable law. If the law says that you can't give up your implied warrant of merchantability, you haven't given it up even if you sign a document purporting to do so. I don't know what Korean law says on this point, but it's entirely possible that some of the disclaimers in the Microsoft EULA are not legally valid there, in which case Microsoft could be liable. Companies continue to put this type of clause into their EULA both because there are some jurisdictions where it does apply (and they're obviously trying to change the law so that it applies in as many places as possible, see UCITA) and because they think that it will convince people that they don't have a case.
That's only true of the Win95/98/ME series. WinNT/2K/XP has the capability to set permissions so that not every program has access to every piece of the system. In fact, Windows ACLs are much finer grained than traditional Unix rwx type permissions; it's easy for any user to set access to his files on a person-by-person basis. I don't think that they're usually used very well, but it's certainly possible for a competent admin to lock down a Windows system pretty tightly against abuse by ordinary users.
I know that Galeon has an automatic "recover session" option. If the program crashes, the next time you start it you're given the option of re-opening it in its previous state. I'm not sure if it actually keeps track of what you had typed into forms, but at least it means that if you had twelve different, hard to reach pages open at once you can get back to where you were.
Read it again yourself. One of the points specifically made in the article is that the basic technology is adaptable to either conventional or organic methods. Note the following quotes from the article:
It sounds very much to me as though they are at least thinking of possible uses in organic growing.
And even if they do use pesticides, consider the likely alternatives. Big agribusiness is currently suggesting that the solution to weeds is to create gentically engineered crops that are resistant to herbicides and then blasting the whole field with tons of weed killer. A technique that sprays the stuff only on weeds is almost certainly a win over that, by reducing total herbicide use, reducing herbicide that winds up on the crops, and eliminating the need for genetically engineered plants.
Farmers as a group have shown themselves to be very technology friendly. Just look at the equipment of an average farmer today vs. that of a farmer 100 years ago. Those massive combines aren't there to increase yield, per se; they're there to increase yield per input of labor. That's exactly what this robot aims to do- replace expensive hand weeding with an automated system. I'm not sure that the system will sell, but if it doesn't it's most likely to be because it doesn't work (or something else works even better) rather than kneejerk anti-technology beliefs on the part of the farmers.
Certainly not with Apache. It has its own license, not the GPL. The Apache License is very similar to the original (advertizing clause) BSD license. You're permitted to redistribute in binary only form if you want. The only restrictions are that you have to include the original copyright notice and disclaimer, can't call it Apache or claim endorsement by the Apache Foundation, and have to acknowledge the Apache Foundation in advertizing material.
Wow. These guys are not just evil, but their command of English is even worse than the Slashdot editors. Here's a direct quote from the article:
CmdrTaco is better than that on his worst day. I hope they can program better than they can write English, or there are going to be a lot of crashing web browsers when this thing comes out.
A lot of the innovation in Linux is under the hood, rather than in an obvious application. It's very impressive, for instance, that the Linux kernel can support- and support well- systems ranging from old 386 machines and handheld organizers to IBM mainframes and 64 processor NUMA boxes. Or that the NPTL lets Linux start and stop 100,000 simultaneous threads in 2 seconds. Those aren't "Gee Wow!" things that will make an average desktop user sit up an cheer, but they're very impressive technical accomplishments and since, AFAIK, no other system can manage those things it makes them quite innovative.
More significant, perhaps, is that Google's approach to searching is unlikely to work nearly as well for legal documents as it does for the web. The trick to Google is that web documents are frequently updated, so that two sites can each reference each other. That doesn't work for most other kinds of documents, which are set when first written and can't refer to anything published after they were. That means that Google's whole approach of recursively defining the importance of a document's links according the importance of the links coming to it won't necessarily work.
No, we haven't, because there really wasn't any infrastructure for on-line applications before the web. Sure there were a handful of standard protocols like ftp and telnet, plus the ability to have remote X sessions, but there wasn't really anything beyond that. At least today it's possible to have an on-line application that has some prayer of working. The web is piss poor compared to what you could do with a really well designed on-line applications protocol, but it's a fair sight better than having to roll your own system any time you want to accomplish anything.
You miss the point. If I like Sony stuff, I'm free to buy it. If I don't like it (and I don't) I'm free to buy somebody else's. If it turns out that most people don't like paying extra to buy Sony's stuff that doesn't play nicely with other manufacturers' products, then Sony will lose market share and either change their strategy or leave the market. That's the way markets are supposed to work.
If I like Microsoft's products, I'm also free to buy them. If I don't like Microsoft's products, though, I don't necessarily have much choice not to buy them. It's all-but impossible to find a decent PC laptop that comes without Windows, so I may be stuck paying for a Microsoft product whether I want it or not. That's not the way markets are supposed to work, which is why you'll hear people complaining about Microsoft's monopoly.
You mean like the CD Mavica that writes directly to 8cm CD-R disks? Or were you thinking of the FD Mavica that writes directly to floppies?
Actually, I agree with your general point that Sony likes using technology that doesn't always interoperate well, going back at least to the days of VHS vs. Beta. I'm not sure, though, that it's necessarily an issue of trying to lock users in. Sony just doesn't seem to get the idea that standardization can be more important than technical sophistication. They do seem to accept the idea of letting others use their technology. CDs are a great case in point; Sony and Philips developed the basic standards and let others make them too. But when there's not a universally accepted standard, Sony seems to be tenacious at sticking to their version of the technology over an emerging de facto standard than most manufacturers.
While the judge's reasoning in this case appears to be wrong, the outcome of the his decision is correct. Part of the anti-circumvention clause states that the Copyright Office was to hold hearings to decide on specific classes of work that should be exempt. They only picked two, which were:
In other words, what the plaintiff wanted to do is not illegal, so he has no standing to challenge the law. You can read about it here. FWIW, that may not be true for long. The Copyright Office is holding another round of hearings, and one of the scheduled topics is whether this exemption should be continued.
Boring? You've got to be kidding. There's nothing as boring as watching people making the same mistake again and again. If people learned from their mistakes, the world would be full of the excitement of all of the new, never seen before mistakes that people would be making in an attempt not to make the old ones. I have no confidence that people would make any fewer mistakes, mind you, just newer, more interesting ones.