Re:Low end laptops are tough...
on
Low-end Laptops?
·
· Score: 1
The reality is that laptops aren't all that cheap. They have components (namely the battery) which tends to crap out fairly early in life.
I can confirm that. We have a stash of old Dell P75 laptops at work. I wouldn't trust any of them with any important work. All kinds of problems like dead batteries, dead CMOS batteries, loose or broken keys, faded screens, and hard drives with bad sectors. The big expense is probably the battery. They're only rated for a few hundred charging cycles, and they're $100 a pop if you can even still find them.
The reason they waste so much time is because everybody already knows how they're voting before they show up. The so called "debate" is just showboating for the cameras. Votes are not decided on persuasive arguments. They're traded and dealt behind the scenes. An undecided legislator in a close vote may give his vote to the side in the better position to return the favor in future when he calls in his marker.
Linux kernel hackers raised these fears last year. If there was any place to inject DRM into the hardware, ACPI is it. It's a huge and complex spec with its own programming language, ACPI Machine Language (AML). It requires an interpreter which runs with kernel privileges and executes closed source code provided by hardware manufacturers. Just to be fair, I'll also point you to this rebuttal of their concerns from a linux-acpi developer.
Here's a news flash to Mundie: If you want to commercialize software, write it yourself. This is no different from if you see cool features in another commercial product and want to copy it in your software, but then Microsoft would have no qualms about stealing that software *cough*Stacker*cough* too. GPL software is given away for free because the authors choose to do so. If he wants to take other people's code for free and use it in his own commercial software, I'm sure he'd find the BSD license more attractive.
"While the Act provides for royalty payments to compensate the music industry, it does not provide anybody with a license to copy copyrighted musical works."
Yes, it does make it legal. They don't call it a license. They call it immunity from prosecution for infringement, but it's the same thing. This comes straight from the RIAA:
The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA)
This 1992 legislation exempts consumers from lawsuits for copyright violations when they record music for private, noncommercial use; eases access to advanced digital audio recording technologies; provides for the payment of modest royalties to songwriters and recording artists and companies; and mandates the inclusion of serial copying management technology in all consumer digital audio recorders to limit multi-generation audio copying (i.e., making copies of copies).
Re:THE BIG FREAKING POINT.
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
"Mmm, I know. But all you're saying is that as long as you get away with it, it's no foul, no penalty. I don't believe that not getting caught is a substitute for not having the insane law in the first place."
I wasn't really saying don't worry about it. I know it sucks and it must be stopped, but there's no way to enforce it without turning this country into a police state (think War on Drugs against the entire population). And yes, I know that is very possible.
My point was even if watermarked content is mandated and every electronic device is sold with a UID that's embedded in the watermark, there still must be a way to set DRM permissions like "This is my home video. Copyright Joe Consumer. Anyone is allowed to watch for free on any playback device." This scenario also presents big problems for anonymous publishing and dissident speech. You could always pay cash for your camcorder or steal one, and they may counter that by making UIDs revokable. And that makes possible instant censorship of any publisher.
No SLA, business or residential, is ever going to pay for lost wages. You'll probably get a pro-rated service credit or if you bitch enough, a month of free service. Just rememnber to write down the time of every outage and the trouble ticket number when you call tech support. My friend got a few months of free DSL that way when his GTE DSL went down almost every night when everybody got online. They totally oversold their service and eventually they upgraded. Business service isn't any better. If the phones or T1 at the office go down (thankfully not often) no way they'll pay for lost business or lost wages. Service credit is all you'll get. If you're that worried, give yourself an out in your contract so you can be released from the long-term contract and cancel them for shitty service.
Re:There's alway a way to break copy protection
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
OK, so a general boycott won't get very far, but there is one way to hit them where it hurts. The major studios all use Linux, most of all in their special effects renderfarms. How about getting all Linux sysadmins to boycott the studios, and specifically the places that need us the most like Dreamworks and Pixar? How about if we post a list of all people and companies providing Linux service and support to the studios so we know who else to boycott? I'm sure the studios are familiar with blacklists. I believe their expression is "You'll never work in this town again!"
Re:THE BIG FREAKING POINT.
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
The DMCA already does this. There is no exception for circumventing protection of works that have passed into the public domain.
Re:THE BIG FREAKING POINT.
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
This is about controlling the printing presses of the digital age, but I can't see how they could ban ALL non-DRM file formats. There's still things like home videos on DV, office voice mail, demo tapes from garage bands, college professors recording lectures, etc. As long as unprotected file formats exist, all it takes is one offshore hacker to write the file converter, and it's game over for the copy protection. Even without that you could always point a DV camcorder at the monitor. The day may come when people need the MPAA's permission to record and play back their kids' graduations and piano recitals, but I *hope* the masses will understand how much that sucks by then.
$5000 is pocket change for these guys. That's less than 20hrs of lawyer time. If Asscroft was for sale for that little money, even *I* could buy him off.
Now let's see... when was the last time the Linux or BSD *kernel* was exploited by self-replicating malicious code? Oh yeah, NEVER. And when was the last significant incident of self-replicating malicious code on any Unix system? That's right, The Morris worm of 1988 when Reagan was still in the White House. The Ramen worm was a minor annoyance in comparison. Personally, I'd worry more about the ISC who writes BIND than the Linux or BSD kernels.
Although some substances are toxic because of their chemical composition, the big issue with electronics is the heavy metals from solder and other electronic components. Elements like lead and mercury are toxic regardless of their chemical composition.
Not that surprising considering Extremetech is Ziff Davis' attempt to cash in on the hardware scene. They are the 800lb gorilla of the tech publishing world. The independent hardware sites can be a little amateurish at times, but at least they don't sugar coat their reviews in corporate-speak.
That may be true, but sooner or later they'll monopolize themselves into a full consumer revolt. Some people will just forget about landlines.
My Verizon bill just went up to $27 for local service with no long distance and no extra features. They just raised the Interstate Subscriber Line Charge from $3.50 to $5. My cellphone bill (ironically also w/ Verizon) is $40 with free long distance, voicemail, call waiting, and more night and weekend minutes than I'll ever use. If I ever stop procrastinating and get the cable modem, these guys are outta here!
Switching to OpenOffice is always an option, but the real question is, will Sun keep it in active development or will it just be stranded in beta with only the volunteer developers to fix bugs and finish the features? The Windows binaries of build 0641 are very usable, but still beta. It would be a shame if it never got finished.
If Sun ends up forking the OpenOffice codebase permanently to proprietary StarOffice, they I would say yes, this was a scam.
That's true, to register as a buyer it requires a credit card if your address is at a free email provider, but their list is not complete. If you try one of the more obscure free webmail providers, it'll probably work.
I have 2 theories about how hotmail addresses get spam so fast. The day after I opened one address I got a blank message to about a 100 consecutive recipients: aa1001@hotmail.com, aa1002@hotmail.com, aa1003... etc. (not really "aa" but I used 2 initials). Immediately after that I was up to 10 spams a day. So the lesson is, don't use an easily guessed address. The other theory I have is some low-paid support drone is supplementing his income by selling addresses to spammers, but I'm not so sure of that now. One other hotmail address gets 0 spam, another gets 1 or 2 a day.
The question of whether Novell or Netscape were competent enough to execute their plans to compete with Microsoft is irrelevant to the legal question of whether they violated antitrust laws. If you get caught cheating, it's not a valid defense to say the other team sucked so you would have won anyway.
Maybe they didn't promote OS/2 well, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Back in the early 90s, those silly OS/2 Warp TV commercials (remember the one with the nuns?) outnumbered Microsoft commercials by a hefty margin.
"Of course, that still doesn't make the "copy" of said CD legal."
Well no, donating the money to the artist doesn't make it legal. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 makes noncommercial copying legal under some circumstances. All analog copying is allowed, and 1st generation digital copying is allowed with SCMS enabled devices. That means it's 100% legal for me to borrow a CD from a friend and copy onto a cassette tape or an audio CD-R (the kind with a $.50 royalty to the RIAA). If somebody donates to the artist it would only be out of the kindness of his heart.
If these firewalls are so good why do I get so much porn and get-rich-quick spam through Chinese open relays? If nothing else, the spam would be a good channel for steganographic messages to and from dissidents.
Slashdot Mirror
The reality is that laptops aren't all that cheap. They have components (namely the battery) which tends to crap out fairly early in life.
I can confirm that. We have a stash of old Dell P75 laptops at work. I wouldn't trust any of them with any important work. All kinds of problems like dead batteries, dead CMOS batteries, loose or broken keys, faded screens, and hard drives with bad sectors. The big expense is probably the battery. They're only rated for a few hundred charging cycles, and they're $100 a pop if you can even still find them.
Does anybody else want an application-proxy for the desktop?
One word: Proxomitron
The reason they waste so much time is because everybody already knows how they're voting before they show up. The so called "debate" is just showboating for the cameras. Votes are not decided on persuasive arguments. They're traded and dealt behind the scenes. An undecided legislator in a close vote may give his vote to the side in the better position to return the favor in future when he calls in his marker.
Linux kernel hackers raised these fears last year. If there was any place to inject DRM into the hardware, ACPI is it. It's a huge and complex spec with its own programming language, ACPI Machine Language (AML). It requires an interpreter which runs with kernel privileges and executes closed source code provided by hardware manufacturers.
Just to be fair, I'll also point you to this rebuttal of their concerns from a linux-acpi developer.
Here's a news flash to Mundie: If you want to commercialize software, write it yourself. This is no different from if you see cool features in another commercial product and want to copy it in your software, but then Microsoft would have no qualms about stealing that software *cough*Stacker*cough* too. GPL software is given away for free because the authors choose to do so. If he wants to take other people's code for free and use it in his own commercial software, I'm sure he'd find the BSD license more attractive.
"While the Act provides for royalty payments to compensate the music industry, it does not provide anybody with a license to copy copyrighted musical works."
Yes, it does make it legal. They don't call it a license. They call it immunity from prosecution for infringement, but it's the same thing. This comes straight from the RIAA:
The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA)
This 1992 legislation exempts consumers from lawsuits for copyright violations when they record music for private, noncommercial use; eases access to advanced digital audio recording technologies; provides for the payment of modest royalties to songwriters and recording artists and companies; and mandates the inclusion of serial copying management technology in all consumer digital audio recorders to limit multi-generation audio copying (i.e., making copies of copies).
"Mmm, I know. But all you're saying is that as long as you get away with it, it's no foul, no penalty. I don't believe that not getting caught is a substitute for not having the insane law in the first place."
I wasn't really saying don't worry about it. I know it sucks and it must be stopped, but there's no way to enforce it without turning this country into a police state (think War on Drugs against the entire population). And yes, I know that is very possible.
My point was even if watermarked content is mandated and every electronic device is sold with a UID that's embedded in the watermark, there still must be a way to set DRM permissions like "This is my home video. Copyright Joe Consumer. Anyone is allowed to watch for free on any playback device." This scenario also presents big problems for anonymous publishing and dissident speech. You could always pay cash for your camcorder or steal one, and they may counter that by making UIDs revokable. And that makes possible instant censorship of any publisher.
No SLA, business or residential, is ever going to pay for lost wages. You'll probably get a pro-rated service credit or if you bitch enough, a month of free service. Just rememnber to write down the time of every outage and the trouble ticket number when you call tech support. My friend got a few months of free DSL that way when his GTE DSL went down almost every night when everybody got online. They totally oversold their service and eventually they upgraded.
Business service isn't any better. If the phones or T1 at the office go down (thankfully not often) no way they'll pay for lost business or lost wages. Service credit is all you'll get. If you're that worried, give yourself an out in your contract so you can be released from the long-term contract and cancel them for shitty service.
OK, so a general boycott won't get very far, but there is one way to hit them where it hurts. The major studios all use Linux, most of all in their special effects renderfarms. How about getting all Linux sysadmins to boycott the studios, and specifically the places that need us the most like Dreamworks and Pixar? How about if we post a list of all people and companies providing Linux service and support to the studios so we know who else to boycott? I'm sure the studios are familiar with blacklists. I believe their expression is "You'll never work in this town again!"
The DMCA already does this. There is no exception for circumventing protection of works that have passed into the public domain.
This is about controlling the printing presses of the digital age, but I can't see how they could ban ALL non-DRM file formats. There's still things like home videos on DV, office voice mail, demo tapes from garage bands, college professors recording lectures, etc. As long as unprotected file formats exist, all it takes is one offshore hacker to write the file converter, and it's game over for the copy protection. Even without that you could always point a DV camcorder at the monitor. The day may come when people need the MPAA's permission to record and play back their kids' graduations and piano recitals, but I *hope* the masses will understand how much that sucks by then.
$5000 is pocket change for these guys. That's less than 20hrs of lawyer time. If Asscroft was for sale for that little money, even *I* could buy him off.
Now let's see... when was the last time the Linux or BSD *kernel* was exploited by self-replicating malicious code? Oh yeah, NEVER. And when was the last significant incident of self-replicating malicious code on any Unix system? That's right, The Morris worm of 1988 when Reagan was still in the White House. The Ramen worm was a minor annoyance in comparison. Personally, I'd worry more about the ISC who writes BIND than the Linux or BSD kernels.
I use unsubscribe@real.com
Although some substances are toxic because of their chemical composition, the big issue with electronics is the heavy metals from solder and other electronic components. Elements like lead and mercury are toxic regardless of their chemical composition.
Not that surprising considering Extremetech is Ziff Davis' attempt to cash in on the hardware scene. They are the 800lb gorilla of the tech publishing world. The independent hardware sites can be a little amateurish at times, but at least they don't sugar coat their reviews in corporate-speak.
That may be true, but sooner or later they'll monopolize themselves into a full consumer revolt. Some people will just forget about landlines.
My Verizon bill just went up to $27 for local service with no long distance and no extra features. They just raised the Interstate Subscriber Line Charge from $3.50 to $5. My cellphone bill (ironically also w/ Verizon) is $40 with free long distance, voicemail, call waiting, and more night and weekend minutes than I'll ever use. If I ever stop procrastinating and get the cable modem, these guys are outta here!
Switching to OpenOffice is always an option, but the real question is, will Sun keep it in active development or will it just be stranded in beta with only the volunteer developers to fix bugs and finish the features? The Windows binaries of build 0641 are very usable, but still beta. It would be a shame if it never got finished.
If Sun ends up forking the OpenOffice codebase permanently to proprietary StarOffice, they I would say yes, this was a scam.
That's true, to register as a buyer it requires a credit card if your address is at a free email provider, but their list is not complete. If you try one of the more obscure free webmail providers, it'll probably work.
I have 2 theories about how hotmail addresses get spam so fast. The day after I opened one address I got a blank message to about a 100 consecutive recipients: aa1001@hotmail.com, aa1002@hotmail.com, aa1003... etc. (not really "aa" but I used 2 initials). Immediately after that I was up to 10 spams a day. So the lesson is, don't use an easily guessed address.
The other theory I have is some low-paid support drone is supplementing his income by selling addresses to spammers, but I'm not so sure of that now. One other hotmail address gets 0 spam, another gets 1 or 2 a day.
Now that's a business model! Buy a bankrupt dot-bomb and you get the right to sue Microsoft. How much do you think to buy Quarterdeck from Symantec?
The question of whether Novell or Netscape were competent enough to execute their plans to compete with Microsoft is irrelevant to the legal question of whether they violated antitrust laws. If you get caught cheating, it's not a valid defense to say the other team sucked so you would have won anyway.
Maybe they didn't promote OS/2 well, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Back in the early 90s, those silly OS/2 Warp TV commercials (remember the one with the nuns?) outnumbered Microsoft commercials by a hefty margin.
"Of course, that still doesn't make the "copy" of said CD legal."
Well no, donating the money to the artist doesn't make it legal. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 makes noncommercial copying legal under some circumstances. All analog copying is allowed, and 1st generation digital copying is allowed with SCMS enabled devices. That means it's 100% legal for me to borrow a CD from a friend and copy onto a cassette tape or an audio CD-R (the kind with a $.50 royalty to the RIAA). If somebody donates to the artist it would only be out of the kindness of his heart.
If these firewalls are so good why do I get so much porn and get-rich-quick spam through Chinese open relays? If nothing else, the spam would be a good channel for steganographic messages to and from dissidents.