The intended model for SDMI, presently, is that all music will have the same kind of watermarks for which all players will be screening.
Sigh. I can see only one advantage this scheme may have over the so-called "encryption" schemes. It should be much easier for concerned citizens to explain how painfully foolish this plan is to their favorite judge, senator, or congressman (or their local equivilant).
The case against DeCSS has the most unfortunate advantage of being able to use the entirely misleading black-magic-voodoo word "encryption". I, personally, often have a difficult time explaining why encryption can't possibly work to prevent piracy -- what I try to explain to people is that encryption is designed to create a secure channel with which to tranfer information from entity A to entity B, without the possibility of that information being intercepted along that channel. But encryption does nothing to restrict what entity A or entity B can do with that information once it is in their posession. Preventing people from sharing information once they have it is entirely a social engineering problem -- it is impossible to make it a technical problem. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I'm not very convincing when I tell people this, and I've seen more than a few eyes glaze over.
Happily, I think the idea that watermarking somehow "protects" music is going to be much harder for the recording labels to sell. But if the plan really is for all players to screen for watermarks, I look forward to much inconvenience, many more bad laws and many unfortunate court decisions in the coming years.
My workstation just mounts samba filesystems from NT or Linux based SMB servers as if they were any other filesystem.
Then, you are probably using smbfs. Until very recently, smbfs had absolutely nothing to do with Samba. Now, it seems to be maintained by one of the people who also works on Samba. But smbfs is not part of the Samba software suite -- you do not need to install Samba to run smbfs, and as far as I know, it does not depend on Samba in any way. Samba is primarily server (although it does include smbclient, an FTP-like utilty), while smbfs is an entirely seperate linux client.
Unfortunately, smbfs is hideously deficient. Like you, I use also use it and depend on it every day. Unlike you, I could never recommend it to anyone else -- smbfs is one of the perfect examples of where Linux is badly, badly broken.
I must profess complete ignorance with respect to watermarks. A handful of bits of additional information can be encoded in a sound file. So what? What advantage does the recording industry see in this?
Obviously, this is only useful if your software extracts this information, and is designed to do something with it. Will a players be built that will only play a song if it contains a watermark customized for that particular player? Or is a player somehow check the watermark against a list of songs it is licensed to play? Or are copyright enforcement teams going to systematically suck down every song they can find on napster, and then check the watermarks of those songs, in order to automate the discovery possible copyright infringement? Or is there some other possibility that I don't see?
Installing and depending on watermark-enforcement software in all available players seems questionable, at best. First, there is very little to stop anyone from either simply writing a player that ignores watermark, or hacking an existing player to ignore watermarks. Moreover, if the watermark-enforcement code gets included in commonly available software (like Windows Media Player), then everyone will have a very simple mechanism for testing the efficacy of de-watermarking software: download some de-watermarking software, use it on a sound file, and then try to play the sound file with your favorite copyright-enforcement software. If it doesn't play, download different de-watermarking software, and try it again. Repeat as often as necessary. Obviously, both the distribution of media players without watermark enforcement, and the distribution of de-watermarking softare, will face many legal challenges, but neither would face any great technical challenge. Indeed, using a watermark this way would appear to be about as useful as "encrypting" the file -- i.e., not really useful at all. I hope no-one tries to implement this -- its bound to only create ill will and bad law.
Instead, there are many advantages to keeping the watermark recognition software under lock and key, to be used only as part of a systematic process of scouring the net for copyright violations. Suddenly, it would be difficult to rip a song and then be absolutely certain the watermark was cleanly removed. If fact, the de-watermarking software itself may leave a signature, which could be searched for. If combined with a system of audio fingerprinting, this could be a very powerful tool to catch copyright infringement. Imagine if Metallica could systematically find people actually sharing Metallica songs, instead of simply finding people sharing files that have certain filenames. I am also much less hostile towards this use of watermarking -- in fact, I may even welcome it. I could still privately trade music among my friends, artists that wished to give away their music could be free to do so, no-one would have to deal with annoying copy protection schemes, and the record labels would have a mechanism to discover people trading copyright material on filesharing systems such as napster. This might be a win.
Linux creates new headaches if SAMBA is installed... It is likely being used as a workstation
Why would anyone install Samba on a workstation? Samba allows you to use a machine as an SMB Server, not as an SMB Client. On a workstation, you'd want an SMB client. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any usable SMB clients for Linux, but thats not what we're discussing here...
It looks like some of it may have been auto-generated. If so, then the starting files for the autogen process should have been distributed - not the output.
What for? This is an "open-source" project, in the sense of "Open VMS". I'm fairly damned certain it won't open in the sense that any of us would recognize.
According to their own white paper, all these bozos have managed to do is write a 32-bit virtual machine and a version of gcc that targets that virtual machine. Apparently, they've managed to get that virtual machine to run on top of "some" versions of Linux, and "some" versions of BSD, and soon, perhaps, they hope to get it running on top of "some" versions of Solaris.
I imagine this took a heck of a lot of work. Its kind of cool, in a geeky sort of way. But in the big picture of things, Whoop-de-freakin-doo.
The only libraries they claim to have abstracted out are Motif and X-Windows (which I don't recall being particularly system different on Linux and Solaris to start with). Which means that as long as you don't use any of the incompatible system libraries (such as sound, networking, process control, signals, or, umm, anything else), you can write a C++ application with an executable that runs on both Linux and Solaris! (Provided, of course, you have the virtual machine installed.)
It's hard to tell if these guys seriously think this is cool. I think they might be trolling the entire world -- I imagine it must take a few brains to write a new back end for gcc, and I can't imagine anyone smart enough to do that would seriously believe the ability to run the same executable on both Solaris and Linux has any real value any more. If so, they seem to have somehow totally missed where the real value of languages like Java (or Perl, or Python) lie.
Internet C++ shares with Java, Perl, and Python the ability to compile once, and run anywhere (slowly). But so what? If you don't use any libraries, you can already write a C++ program that will compile on Linux and Solaris anyhow. But it totally misses out on the huge portable standard libraries Java, Perl, and Python have developed. And it also totally misses one of the fundemental reasons for C++'s existence in the first place -- the ability to run "close to the metal" when needed.
So, its a new language that combines all the disadvantages of C++ with all the disadvantages of Java, plus all the disadvantages of being a silly little niche language written by a couple of hobbyists in their spare time. I'm certain that James Gosling is shaking in his boots.
I don't see it as unreasonable to let people choose what public school they want their kid to go to right now.
That's nice. It's unfortunate that most school boards would disagree with you, but we shouldn't let reality get in the way of our fantasies.
Public schools should be fixed.
Why?
They should all provide at least a minimum level of quality education.
How?
I'm not just going to give up and say, "Ok, we failed, sorry."
It depends on what you mean by "failed". If the goal is to have an educated population, then vouchers are the way to go. If the goal is to have a state run training centers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H schools, then vouchers are an admission of failure.
Unix is just a cheap knockoff of DOS anyways.
There are more differences than I can count between Unix and DOS:
For example, Unix copied the DOS "more" command, but called it "less", because it didn't do as much.
It doesn't matter if you type DOS commands all in capitals or not (so "MORE" and "more" do the same thing), but you have to be real careful not to hit the shift key when you type Unix commands, because the Unix guys couldn't figure out how to make it case insensitive.
DOS has much better video games. For example, one of the best video games of all time, Doom, only works on DOS. It would be impossible to program a game like Doom on Unix, because Unix has something called a "colonel", which is kind of like an army officer that prevents prevents video game programers from using the full power of the hardware.
DOS comes with a really great editor called "edlin", which was so powerful that most people weren't smart enough to figure out how to actually edit a file with it. In contrast, Unix had a really poor editor called "TeX". You need a special printer to use TeX, and it has to use special fonts. Its not user friendly at all.
All the commands in Unix are really short, like "cp" instead of "copy", and "rm" instead of "rename". They had to do this because Unix can only use 300 baud teletypes (teletypes are kind of like typewriters), which are really, really slow. Computers that use DOS are much, much faster than computers that use Unix, so DOS computers are able to use something called a "terminal", which is kind of like a television, but with words on it.
Unix computers are so unreliable that the people who made Unix constantly had to look at the directions. So, they put all the directions online, in something called "man" pages. On the other hand, DOS computers never break, so there was no reason to put any of the directions on the computer.
DOS computers are made by the same company that makes Microsoft Word, so all DOS computers come with Microsoft Word pre-installed. You can get Microsoft Word for Unix computers, but its really expensive, so most people don't bother. But, Microsoft Word is the international standard for the exchange of text documents through email, so most Unix users aren't able to read email sent to them by DOS users.
I hope that I have explained to everyone most of the really important differences between Unix and DOS.
Yeah, it sucks that it is so difficult to track downloads and demographic information on the web, but so painfully simple to get a list of all the people listening to your radio station at any given time. Umm... I think it works that way, anyhow...
You never know how they got your song.
Yeah -- the good thing about meat-space radio stations is that you always know where they got the songs. But people on the internet are thieves. They're all going straight to hell. Web-based radio stations will steal music.
Song quality. Web-casters rarely have enough money to replace damaged music.
Yeah, its a real shame that web-based businesses are having such a hard time getting venture capital nowdays. And I hate it when the songs on my hard drive gets scratches on them -- I have to go to all the trouble of ripping them again. This is hard, because I never know where I got them.
--
I respond to trolls because I like it. It feeds both our egos.
Add the butter milk and the vanilla and blend well.
Add the baking soda, one teaspoon at a time, sprinkling it in and beating until it is smooth.
Add the lemon juice all at once and blend into the mixture.
Scoop the mixture out of the bowl useing a spatula and spread onto a floured surface.
sift the flour and the sugar and work it into the mixture using your fingertips.
With a floured rolling pin, roll the dough out 1/32" thick, and with the tip of a sharp knife, cut out "angel" shapes and sprinkle on some sugar.
Brush with butter.
Place on ungreased baking sheet and bake for 12 minutes or until the edges curl up.
Let cool and serve.
For anyone who somehow managed to miss kitchen chemistry as a kid, these are going to blooey right around step 4. Fun.
Re:The RIAA's problem began 15 years ago...
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RIAA CEO Speaks
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You are PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT of the AHRA and its application to Napster. Digital copies, not analog copies, are stolen via Napster;
Obviously, you're trolling. Next time, try to restrain yourself from spewing nonsense like "stealing via Napster," and perhaps more people will respond, and help feed your desire for attention.
But I want to clarify one thing. You have the Audio Home Recording Act totally backwards -- the AHRA specifically covers digital copies, not just analog copies. The question of whether or not Napster can claim protection under the AHRA comes about because home computers may not be Digital Audio Recording Devices, as defined (fairly narrowly) by the AHRA.
The rest of your pablum could be refuted by anyone with a sixth grade education. Only the part about the AHRA not covering digital copies takes even the smallest amount of effort to refute.
Re:Where does consent fit in all this?
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RIAA CEO Speaks
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Sure, I'll agree I can't turn around and sell it without cutting you in.
Have you ever been to a store that sells used CD's? Turning around and selling your copy of the music without cutting anyone in on the profit is one of the rights you do currently have. You can also lend it to people, like they do at the library. Or you can just leave it next to your mailbox, so that some kid can come along and get a free copy of the music.
It should be pointed out that a lot of people would like to take these rights away. Are you willing to give them up?
Re:are copyrights necessary?
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RIAA CEO Speaks
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But today with copyrights, there are very few musicians around
I agree with most of what you say, but I can't agree with the idea that their are very few musicians around. For example, it's Thursday night, and I'm in Fargo ND -- a small city of about 80,000 people, and not exactly a cultural mecca on the American Landscape. But even here, there are at least seven clubs playing live music within walking distance right now, there are "real" DJ's spinning discs in two clubs downtown, and we even have a Fargo City Orchestra and a Fargo City Opera.
In other words, there are definitely musicians around today. You do have a choice. You are not forced to buy only what you find at Tower Records or Media Play. No-one puts a gun to your head to force you to go watch Metallica with 40,000 other people in a stadium, instead of listening to Butter Tongue with 400 other people in the room above the local bowling alley.
Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are losing. Very soon, they will seem as inconsequential as the Olympics. But remember what the RIAA sells -- they sell artists the chance to be famous. The artists sign over a huge chunk of their souls to the Record Companies in exchange for your ears and eyes. Stop giving your ears to the RIAA. Stop listening to their music. Stop buying the magazines that are used to market Britney Spears. Stop listening to that crappy radio top 40 station on the way home from work. Stop downloading the RIAA's pablum from Napster.
Take away the RIAA's most valuable asset -- your attention. Then, they will die.
hi. earlier today, i moderated my primary account with points earned by my secondary account. i can now use those points to troll unabashedly.
No, you can't. I have a patent on that -- a method for counterfeiting trust on a globally accessible message board through the use of multiple HTTP state maintenance tokens (cookies).
Your use of Slashdot infringes on my intellectual property. Please cease and disist from this practice at once, or I will be forced to take legal action.
And Guiness is pretty popular with unix sysadmins...
Only the younger ones. Once they hit about 25, they start to brew their own beer -- which, for the first few batches, is usually darker than guiness. By the time they hit thirty, they've generally mellowed out, and started to drink a whole range of interesting beer. Not Labatts, of course -- I said interesting beer.
In which industries are intellectual property and patent laws beneficial to the industry and consumers?
Two industries come immediately to mind -- pharamcutical companies may benefit from patent law, and publishers (of music, software, and books) may benefit from traditional copyright law. Both industries share a number of characteristics.
First, the initial development costs of both are relatively high. Pharamucital companies claim an initial cost of $500,000,000.00 to develop a new drug, and the development of a readable book, working software, or decent music requires a significant investment of time on the part of the author.
Second, the marginal costs of production are often relatively low. Once a drug has passed through the expensive approval process, the marginal cost of producing each individual dose is generally many times less than the sale price of the drug. Similarly, once a book has gone through the expensive process writting, editing, and typesetting, the marginal cost of printing is generally much less than the sale price of the book.
The third (and significant) similarity is that if the use of intellectual property were unrestricted, the majority of initial development costs would only be incurred once, by the original developers (I'm sure economists must have a word for this). Without intellectual property protections, once a drug has been developed and gained approval, no company producing the drug would have to go through that development cost again. Similarly, once a book has been published, no company copying that book would have to pay the cost of authoring, editing and typesetting again. Protecting the initial producer seems to be the primary justification for the existance intellectual property laws.
But there is a fourth similarity, and one which seems to usually go unnoticed. In both industries, it is possible to create a derived work without infringing on the intellectual property of the original work -- both have extremely liberal fair use laws (or very limited intellectual property protections, depending on how you look at it). For example, Visicalc had a copyright on their spreadsheet's code, but their intellectual property did not extend to preventing other people from creating a competing spreadsheet -- the idea of a spreadsheet is not, itself, intellectual property. I could not photocopy The Shining and then sell that copy, but I certainly could write a book about a crazy guy working as a hotel caretaker -- the idea of a book about a crazy guy is not, itself, intellectual property. I couldn't record "Blue Suede Shoes" and sell the album without paying royalties (and learning to sing), but nothing prevents me from singing a rock-n-roll song about shoes. And, of course, I could not start manufacturing and selling Viagra, but nothing prevents me from developing another vaso-dialator (sp?) with turgidity effects.
Unfortunately, the intellectual property gaffs we read about every day on Slashdot have no similarity to publishing or pharmacuticals at all, but escpecially to point four above -- the notion of "derived work" in software and hardware patents is being abused unfairly, and the patent office is allowing it to be abused. Many high-tech patents are far too broad, and are a deterent to innovative works. Or, in many cases (like one-click shopping) intellectual property protection has been granted for something with very low initial development costs, but very high marginal costs (the majority of the cost to innovate one-click was probably spent pushing through the legal paperwork for the patent application, and the development is probably far, far cheaper than building large and robust e-commerce site).
I think that intellectual property rules that allow RamBus to strong arm its competitors this was have a chilling effect on the entire industry, and have no reasonable benefit to anyone.
I think it so cool that the commercial media brings two people together like this to discuss the important issues. I am grateful that the people chosen for this type of point-counterpoint discussion never have an personal agendas that benefit by intentionally polalrizing the issues.
Indeed, I am glad the editors of this fine column picked two people who would not personally benefit by feeding the hacker mystique. Cleary, Emmanual Goldstien has not based his entire career on promoting the idea of a hacker as the dark shadow, a powerful and driven uber-genious lurking among us. Charles Palmer gains no social status or personal wealth by describing hackers as a bunch of felonious, psychologically twisted vandals and thiefs, only stoppable by paying huge sums of money to large, established firms that carefully screen their security teams for any psychological problems and hacker tendencies.
I am sure I join all my breathern when we thank you, Slashdot, for calling attention to this fine piece of informative journalism. In fact, you get special accolades for bringing it to us twice
Re:Sense of security good but...
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IRC Improvements
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Yeah, I never worry abou the "jumping through hoops" attacks. My approach to security is simple -- if its hard to do, its not worth doing. I assume everyone else uses the same approach. Oddly enough, the same philosophy works for backups, too.
You're smoking crack. Everyone I know calls it "GNU/Moon." Its pretty common knowledge that without the Gnu toolset, the Moon would just be a lifeless chunk of rock.
You know, I wish I could be absolutely, positively certain you are a troll. Unforunately, I've met far too many clueless morons in my life to have any idea what you are.
Salesman: What can I do for you today?
Customer: I'd like a screwdriver.
Salesman: Here is some vise-grips.
Customer: Umm... I kinda want a screwdriver....
Salesman: Well, these vise-grips can do anything a screwdriver can do! They're the superior tool!
Customer: [muttering] clueless moron!
Salesman: [muttering] idiot!
Until then, enjoy your bloated, featureless xterm-switcher.
Hahaha! It is obvious you have never used X! Because anyone who has ever used X knows that in addition to dozens of xterms, we also have xclock!
Real men understand that copy and insert (technically, X allows neither cut nor paste) of plain text is all any sane person would ever need. After all, every known text editor (emacs and vi) has implemented a perfectly servicable cut and paste of its own. And certainly only text needs to be copied -- why on earth would you try to paste an xclock into an xterm?
I like reading books in bed. Can't do that with computers.
Of course not! Everyone knows that a computer is as big as a basketball court, and when you turn it on every light on the east coast flickers! Sure, there are probably some ways to make them smaller or use less power, but I can't imagine why engineers would waste their time on it -- everyone knows there isn't a market for more than about five computers in the entire world.
people won't use them to read volumes - it strains the eye.
How the hell did this get all the way up to the top?
Digital books as they exist today suck. Reading lots of content from any output medium but printed paper really sucks. Batteries suck. Monitors suck. The software to read books sucks, bucause the software makes bookmarks and annotations suck. A lot of morons who couldn't get their crappy content published any other way put out digital books, and the content sucks. Digital content is guaranteed to make all existing copytright law obsolete. No matter what happens, the new copyright laws are going to have parts that suck. If some people have their way, the new copyright laws are going to suck a lot. A lot of content providers are going to see their world turned upside down, and through the gaps even more sucky content is going to flow. That sucks. The intangible nature of digital books is going to make stalinizing history just a little easier for some unscrupulous people, and every sucky little pisant on earth is going to try to rewrite the digital history. That sucks, too.
But guess what! Paper books suck too -- they suck really, really hard. If you can't think of 10 things wrong with paper books before you get to the end of this sentence, then your brain is calcified. I can't reformat a paper book when my eyesight is bad. I can't annotate a paper book (except by drawing on it!). Paper books are remarkably easy to destroy. Paper books are remarkably difficult to copy. Following footnotes or references in a paper book is hard. The index of paper books are a pain to use. Paper books are remarkably bad for the environment. Giving someone a copy of a paper book means you don't have the book anymore. When fold down the pages of a paper book from the library as a crude "bookmark", those bookmarks aren't there when you check out a different copy of that book from another library -- the same problem occurs with annotations. There isn't a lot of room for annotations in a paper book -- the margins are too small to prove x^n + y^n z^n for all n > 2. You can't give your annotations away to someone else. Paper books have substance and weight, and therefore take up a great deal of room, and are difficult to buy, sell, and store.
In short, paper books have major, unsolvable problems. Electronic books have many problems, too. Some of them are unsolvable. But the problem of being "difficult to read" is definately one of the solvable problems. In short, your arguement sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
The intended model for SDMI, presently, is that all music will have the same kind of watermarks for which all players will be screening.
Sigh. I can see only one advantage this scheme may have over the so-called "encryption" schemes. It should be much easier for concerned citizens to explain how painfully foolish this plan is to their favorite judge, senator, or congressman (or their local equivilant).
The case against DeCSS has the most unfortunate advantage of being able to use the entirely misleading black-magic-voodoo word "encryption". I, personally, often have a difficult time explaining why encryption can't possibly work to prevent piracy -- what I try to explain to people is that encryption is designed to create a secure channel with which to tranfer information from entity A to entity B, without the possibility of that information being intercepted along that channel. But encryption does nothing to restrict what entity A or entity B can do with that information once it is in their posession. Preventing people from sharing information once they have it is entirely a social engineering problem -- it is impossible to make it a technical problem. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I'm not very convincing when I tell people this, and I've seen more than a few eyes glaze over.
Happily, I think the idea that watermarking somehow "protects" music is going to be much harder for the recording labels to sell. But if the plan really is for all players to screen for watermarks, I look forward to much inconvenience, many more bad laws and many unfortunate court decisions in the coming years.
My workstation just mounts samba filesystems from NT or Linux based SMB servers as if they were any other filesystem.
Then, you are probably using smbfs. Until very recently, smbfs had absolutely nothing to do with Samba. Now, it seems to be maintained by one of the people who also works on Samba. But smbfs is not part of the Samba software suite -- you do not need to install Samba to run smbfs, and as far as I know, it does not depend on Samba in any way. Samba is primarily server (although it does include smbclient, an FTP-like utilty), while smbfs is an entirely seperate linux client.
Unfortunately, smbfs is hideously deficient. Like you, I use also use it and depend on it every day. Unlike you, I could never recommend it to anyone else -- smbfs is one of the perfect examples of where Linux is badly, badly broken.
I must profess complete ignorance with respect to watermarks. A handful of bits of additional information can be encoded in a sound file. So what? What advantage does the recording industry see in this?
Obviously, this is only useful if your software extracts this information, and is designed to do something with it. Will a players be built that will only play a song if it contains a watermark customized for that particular player? Or is a player somehow check the watermark against a list of songs it is licensed to play? Or are copyright enforcement teams going to systematically suck down every song they can find on napster, and then check the watermarks of those songs, in order to automate the discovery possible copyright infringement? Or is there some other possibility that I don't see?
Installing and depending on watermark-enforcement software in all available players seems questionable, at best. First, there is very little to stop anyone from either simply writing a player that ignores watermark, or hacking an existing player to ignore watermarks. Moreover, if the watermark-enforcement code gets included in commonly available software (like Windows Media Player), then everyone will have a very simple mechanism for testing the efficacy of de-watermarking software: download some de-watermarking software, use it on a sound file, and then try to play the sound file with your favorite copyright-enforcement software. If it doesn't play, download different de-watermarking software, and try it again. Repeat as often as necessary. Obviously, both the distribution of media players without watermark enforcement, and the distribution of de-watermarking softare, will face many legal challenges, but neither would face any great technical challenge. Indeed, using a watermark this way would appear to be about as useful as "encrypting" the file -- i.e., not really useful at all. I hope no-one tries to implement this -- its bound to only create ill will and bad law.
Instead, there are many advantages to keeping the watermark recognition software under lock and key, to be used only as part of a systematic process of scouring the net for copyright violations. Suddenly, it would be difficult to rip a song and then be absolutely certain the watermark was cleanly removed. If fact, the de-watermarking software itself may leave a signature, which could be searched for. If combined with a system of audio fingerprinting, this could be a very powerful tool to catch copyright infringement. Imagine if Metallica could systematically find people actually sharing Metallica songs, instead of simply finding people sharing files that have certain filenames. I am also much less hostile towards this use of watermarking -- in fact, I may even welcome it. I could still privately trade music among my friends, artists that wished to give away their music could be free to do so, no-one would have to deal with annoying copy protection schemes, and the record labels would have a mechanism to discover people trading copyright material on filesharing systems such as napster. This might be a win.
Linux creates new headaches if SAMBA is installed... It is likely being used as a workstation
Why would anyone install Samba on a workstation? Samba allows you to use a machine as an SMB Server, not as an SMB Client. On a workstation, you'd want an SMB client. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any usable SMB clients for Linux, but thats not what we're discussing here...
It looks like some of it may have been auto-generated. If so, then the starting files for the autogen process should have been distributed - not the output.
What for? This is an "open-source" project, in the sense of "Open VMS". I'm fairly damned certain it won't open in the sense that any of us would recognize.
According to their own white paper, all these bozos have managed to do is write a 32-bit virtual machine and a version of gcc that targets that virtual machine. Apparently, they've managed to get that virtual machine to run on top of "some" versions of Linux, and "some" versions of BSD, and soon, perhaps, they hope to get it running on top of "some" versions of Solaris.
I imagine this took a heck of a lot of work. Its kind of cool, in a geeky sort of way. But in the big picture of things, Whoop-de-freakin-doo.
The only libraries they claim to have abstracted out are Motif and X-Windows (which I don't recall being particularly system different on Linux and Solaris to start with). Which means that as long as you don't use any of the incompatible system libraries (such as sound, networking, process control, signals, or, umm, anything else), you can write a C++ application with an executable that runs on both Linux and Solaris! (Provided, of course, you have the virtual machine installed.)
It's hard to tell if these guys seriously think this is cool. I think they might be trolling the entire world -- I imagine it must take a few brains to write a new back end for gcc, and I can't imagine anyone smart enough to do that would seriously believe the ability to run the same executable on both Solaris and Linux has any real value any more. If so, they seem to have somehow totally missed where the real value of languages like Java (or Perl, or Python) lie.
Internet C++ shares with Java, Perl, and Python the ability to compile once, and run anywhere (slowly). But so what? If you don't use any libraries, you can already write a C++ program that will compile on Linux and Solaris anyhow. But it totally misses out on the huge portable standard libraries Java, Perl, and Python have developed. And it also totally misses one of the fundemental reasons for C++'s existence in the first place -- the ability to run "close to the metal" when needed.
So, its a new language that combines all the disadvantages of C++ with all the disadvantages of Java, plus all the disadvantages of being a silly little niche language written by a couple of hobbyists in their spare time. I'm certain that James Gosling is shaking in his boots.
I don't see it as unreasonable to let people choose what public school they want their kid to go to right now.
That's nice. It's unfortunate that most school boards would disagree with you, but we shouldn't let reality get in the way of our fantasies.
Public schools should be fixed.
Why?
They should all provide at least a minimum level of quality education.
How?
I'm not just going to give up and say, "Ok, we failed, sorry."
It depends on what you mean by "failed". If the goal is to have an educated population, then vouchers are the way to go. If the goal is to have a state run training centers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H schools, then vouchers are an admission of failure.
- For example, Unix copied the DOS "more" command, but called it "less", because it didn't do as much.
- It doesn't matter if you type DOS commands all in capitals or not (so "MORE" and "more" do the same thing), but you have to be real careful not to hit the shift key when you type Unix commands, because the Unix guys couldn't figure out how to make it case insensitive.
- DOS has much better video games. For example, one of the best video games of all time, Doom, only works on DOS. It would be impossible to program a game like Doom on Unix, because Unix has something called a "colonel", which is kind of like an army officer that prevents prevents video game programers from using the full power of the hardware.
- DOS comes with a really great editor called "edlin", which was so powerful that most people weren't smart enough to figure out how to actually edit a file with it. In contrast, Unix had a really poor editor called "TeX". You need a special printer to use TeX, and it has to use special fonts. Its not user friendly at all.
- All the commands in Unix are really short, like "cp" instead of "copy", and "rm" instead of "rename". They had to do this because Unix can only use 300 baud teletypes (teletypes are kind of like typewriters), which are really, really slow. Computers that use DOS are much, much faster than computers that use Unix, so DOS computers are able to use something called a "terminal", which is kind of like a television, but with words on it.
- Unix computers are so unreliable that the people who made Unix constantly had to look at the directions. So, they put all the directions online, in something called "man" pages. On the other hand, DOS computers never break, so there was no reason to put any of the directions on the computer.
- DOS computers are made by the same company that makes Microsoft Word, so all DOS computers come with Microsoft Word pre-installed. You can get Microsoft Word for Unix computers, but its really expensive, so most people don't bother. But, Microsoft Word is the international standard for the exchange of text documents through email, so most Unix users aren't able to read email sent to them by DOS users.
I hope that I have explained to everyone most of the really important differences between Unix and DOS.You never know who's playing your songs.
Yeah, it sucks that it is so difficult to track downloads and demographic information on the web, but so painfully simple to get a list of all the people listening to your radio station at any given time. Umm... I think it works that way, anyhow...
You never know how they got your song.
Yeah -- the good thing about meat-space radio stations is that you always know where they got the songs. But people on the internet are thieves. They're all going straight to hell. Web-based radio stations will steal music.
Song quality. Web-casters rarely have enough money to replace damaged music.
Yeah, its a real shame that web-based businesses are having such a hard time getting venture capital nowdays. And I hate it when the songs on my hard drive gets scratches on them -- I have to go to all the trouble of ripping them again. This is hard, because I never know where I got them.
--
I respond to trolls because I like it. It feeds both our egos.
- 1 egg
- 1/2 cup buttermilk
- 5 tsp. baking soda
- 1/2 tsp. vanilla
- 1 cup lemon juice
- 1 and 1/4 cups sugar
- 1 cup flour
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 8 tbs. melted butter
preheat oven to 375 degrees.- In a small bowl beat egg until foamy.
- Add the butter milk and the vanilla and blend well.
- Add the baking soda, one teaspoon at a time, sprinkling it in and beating until it is smooth.
- Add the lemon juice all at once and blend into the mixture.
- Scoop the mixture out of the bowl useing a spatula and spread onto a floured surface.
- sift the flour and the sugar and work it into the mixture using your fingertips.
- With a floured rolling pin, roll the dough out 1/32" thick, and with the tip of a sharp knife, cut out "angel" shapes and sprinkle on some sugar.
- Brush with butter.
- Place on ungreased baking sheet and bake for 12 minutes or until the edges curl up.
- Let cool and serve.
For anyone who somehow managed to miss kitchen chemistry as a kid, these are going to blooey right around step 4. Fun.You are PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT of the AHRA and its application to Napster. Digital copies, not analog copies, are stolen via Napster;
Obviously, you're trolling. Next time, try to restrain yourself from spewing nonsense like "stealing via Napster," and perhaps more people will respond, and help feed your desire for attention.
But I want to clarify one thing. You have the Audio Home Recording Act totally backwards -- the AHRA specifically covers digital copies, not just analog copies. The question of whether or not Napster can claim protection under the AHRA comes about because home computers may not be Digital Audio Recording Devices, as defined (fairly narrowly) by the AHRA.
The rest of your pablum could be refuted by anyone with a sixth grade education. Only the part about the AHRA not covering digital copies takes even the smallest amount of effort to refute.
Sure, I'll agree I can't turn around and sell it without cutting you in.
Have you ever been to a store that sells used CD's? Turning around and selling your copy of the music without cutting anyone in on the profit is one of the rights you do currently have. You can also lend it to people, like they do at the library. Or you can just leave it next to your mailbox, so that some kid can come along and get a free copy of the music.
It should be pointed out that a lot of people would like to take these rights away. Are you willing to give them up?
But today with copyrights, there are very few musicians around
I agree with most of what you say, but I can't agree with the idea that their are very few musicians around. For example, it's Thursday night, and I'm in Fargo ND -- a small city of about 80,000 people, and not exactly a cultural mecca on the American Landscape. But even here, there are at least seven clubs playing live music within walking distance right now, there are "real" DJ's spinning discs in two clubs downtown, and we even have a Fargo City Orchestra and a Fargo City Opera.
In other words, there are definitely musicians around today. You do have a choice. You are not forced to buy only what you find at Tower Records or Media Play. No-one puts a gun to your head to force you to go watch Metallica with 40,000 other people in a stadium, instead of listening to Butter Tongue with 400 other people in the room above the local bowling alley.
Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are losing. Very soon, they will seem as inconsequential as the Olympics. But remember what the RIAA sells -- they sell artists the chance to be famous. The artists sign over a huge chunk of their souls to the Record Companies in exchange for your ears and eyes. Stop giving your ears to the RIAA. Stop listening to their music. Stop buying the magazines that are used to market Britney Spears. Stop listening to that crappy radio top 40 station on the way home from work. Stop downloading the RIAA's pablum from Napster.
Take away the RIAA's most valuable asset -- your attention. Then, they will die.
If something is scientifically possible, then it should automatically be moral and good.
Damn it! Why doesn't slashdot have +1 troll?
hi. earlier today, i moderated my primary account with points earned by my secondary account. i can now use those points to troll unabashedly.
No, you can't. I have a patent on that -- a method for counterfeiting trust on a globally accessible message board through the use of multiple HTTP state maintenance tokens (cookies).
Your use of Slashdot infringes on my intellectual property. Please cease and disist from this practice at once, or I will be forced to take legal action.
And Guiness is pretty popular with unix sysadmins...
Only the younger ones. Once they hit about 25, they start to brew their own beer -- which, for the first few batches, is usually darker than guiness. By the time they hit thirty, they've generally mellowed out, and started to drink a whole range of interesting beer. Not Labatts, of course -- I said interesting beer.
In which industries are intellectual property and patent laws beneficial to the industry and consumers?
Two industries come immediately to mind -- pharamcutical companies may benefit from patent law, and publishers (of music, software, and books) may benefit from traditional copyright law. Both industries share a number of characteristics.
First, the initial development costs of both are relatively high. Pharamucital companies claim an initial cost of $500,000,000.00 to develop a new drug, and the development of a readable book, working software, or decent music requires a significant investment of time on the part of the author.
Second, the marginal costs of production are often relatively low. Once a drug has passed through the expensive approval process, the marginal cost of producing each individual dose is generally many times less than the sale price of the drug. Similarly, once a book has gone through the expensive process writting, editing, and typesetting, the marginal cost of printing is generally much less than the sale price of the book.
The third (and significant) similarity is that if the use of intellectual property were unrestricted, the majority of initial development costs would only be incurred once, by the original developers (I'm sure economists must have a word for this). Without intellectual property protections, once a drug has been developed and gained approval, no company producing the drug would have to go through that development cost again. Similarly, once a book has been published, no company copying that book would have to pay the cost of authoring, editing and typesetting again. Protecting the initial producer seems to be the primary justification for the existance intellectual property laws.
But there is a fourth similarity, and one which seems to usually go unnoticed. In both industries, it is possible to create a derived work without infringing on the intellectual property of the original work -- both have extremely liberal fair use laws (or very limited intellectual property protections, depending on how you look at it). For example, Visicalc had a copyright on their spreadsheet's code, but their intellectual property did not extend to preventing other people from creating a competing spreadsheet -- the idea of a spreadsheet is not, itself, intellectual property. I could not photocopy The Shining and then sell that copy, but I certainly could write a book about a crazy guy working as a hotel caretaker -- the idea of a book about a crazy guy is not, itself, intellectual property. I couldn't record "Blue Suede Shoes" and sell the album without paying royalties (and learning to sing), but nothing prevents me from singing a rock-n-roll song about shoes. And, of course, I could not start manufacturing and selling Viagra, but nothing prevents me from developing another vaso-dialator (sp?) with turgidity effects.
Unfortunately, the intellectual property gaffs we read about every day on Slashdot have no similarity to publishing or pharmacuticals at all, but escpecially to point four above -- the notion of "derived work" in software and hardware patents is being abused unfairly, and the patent office is allowing it to be abused. Many high-tech patents are far too broad, and are a deterent to innovative works. Or, in many cases (like one-click shopping) intellectual property protection has been granted for something with very low initial development costs, but very high marginal costs (the majority of the cost to innovate one-click was probably spent pushing through the legal paperwork for the patent application, and the development is probably far, far cheaper than building large and robust e-commerce site).
I think that intellectual property rules that allow RamBus to strong arm its competitors this was have a chilling effect on the entire industry, and have no reasonable benefit to anyone.
I think it so cool that the commercial media brings two people together like this to discuss the important issues. I am grateful that the people chosen for this type of point-counterpoint discussion never have an personal agendas that benefit by intentionally polalrizing the issues.
Indeed, I am glad the editors of this fine column picked two people who would not personally benefit by feeding the hacker mystique. Cleary, Emmanual Goldstien has not based his entire career on promoting the idea of a hacker as the dark shadow, a powerful and driven uber-genious lurking among us. Charles Palmer gains no social status or personal wealth by describing hackers as a bunch of felonious, psychologically twisted vandals and thiefs, only stoppable by paying huge sums of money to large, established firms that carefully screen their security teams for any psychological problems and hacker tendencies.
I am sure I join all my breathern when we thank you, Slashdot, for calling attention to this fine piece of informative journalism. In fact, you get special accolades for bringing it to us twice
Yeah, I never worry abou the "jumping through hoops" attacks. My approach to security is simple -- if its hard to do, its not worth doing. I assume everyone else uses the same approach. Oddly enough, the same philosophy works for backups, too.
I declare that you must call RF/Moon
You're smoking crack. Everyone I know calls it "GNU/Moon." Its pretty common knowledge that without the Gnu toolset, the Moon would just be a lifeless chunk of rock.
You know, I wish I could be absolutely, positively certain you are a troll. Unforunately, I've met far too many clueless morons in my life to have any idea what you are.
Salesman: What can I do for you today?
Customer: I'd like a screwdriver.
Salesman: Here is some vise-grips.
Customer: Umm... I kinda want a screwdriver....
Salesman: Well, these vise-grips can do anything a screwdriver can do! They're the superior tool!
Customer: [muttering] clueless moron!
Salesman: [muttering] idiot!
Until then, enjoy your bloated, featureless xterm-switcher.
Hahaha! It is obvious you have never used X! Because anyone who has ever used X knows that in addition to dozens of xterms, we also have xclock!
Real men understand that copy and insert (technically, X allows neither cut nor paste) of plain text is all any sane person would ever need. After all, every known text editor (emacs and vi) has implemented a perfectly servicable cut and paste of its own. And certainly only text needs to be copied -- why on earth would you try to paste an xclock into an xterm?
Hmm... I posted in haste -- thats too ugly. Why didn't I write:
/fbi|cia|atom-bomb|saddam hussien/i;
/fbi|cia|atom-bomb|saddam hussien/i' /dev/et0
#!/usr/bin/perl
while (<>) {
print if
}
or even better:
$ perl -ne 'print if
I like reading books in bed. Can't do that with computers.
Of course not! Everyone knows that a computer is as big as a basketball court, and when you turn it on every light on the east coast flickers! Sure, there are probably some ways to make them smaller or use less power, but I can't imagine why engineers would waste their time on it -- everyone knows there isn't a market for more than about five computers in the entire world.
The real future is in plastics!
people won't use them to read volumes - it strains the eye.
How the hell did this get all the way up to the top?
Digital books as they exist today suck. Reading lots of content from any output medium but printed paper really sucks. Batteries suck. Monitors suck. The software to read books sucks, bucause the software makes bookmarks and annotations suck. A lot of morons who couldn't get their crappy content published any other way put out digital books, and the content sucks. Digital content is guaranteed to make all existing copytright law obsolete. No matter what happens, the new copyright laws are going to have parts that suck. If some people have their way, the new copyright laws are going to suck a lot. A lot of content providers are going to see their world turned upside down, and through the gaps even more sucky content is going to flow. That sucks. The intangible nature of digital books is going to make stalinizing history just a little easier for some unscrupulous people, and every sucky little pisant on earth is going to try to rewrite the digital history. That sucks, too.
But guess what! Paper books suck too -- they suck really, really hard. If you can't think of 10 things wrong with paper books before you get to the end of this sentence, then your brain is calcified. I can't reformat a paper book when my eyesight is bad. I can't annotate a paper book (except by drawing on it!). Paper books are remarkably easy to destroy. Paper books are remarkably difficult to copy. Following footnotes or references in a paper book is hard. The index of paper books are a pain to use. Paper books are remarkably bad for the environment. Giving someone a copy of a paper book means you don't have the book anymore. When fold down the pages of a paper book from the library as a crude "bookmark", those bookmarks aren't there when you check out a different copy of that book from another library -- the same problem occurs with annotations. There isn't a lot of room for annotations in a paper book -- the margins are too small to prove x^n + y^n z^n for all n > 2. You can't give your annotations away to someone else. Paper books have substance and weight, and therefore take up a great deal of room, and are difficult to buy, sell, and store.
In short, paper books have major, unsolvable problems. Electronic books have many problems, too. Some of them are unsolvable. But the problem of being "difficult to read" is definately one of the solvable problems. In short, your arguement sucks.