Just sell it with the motherboard, I say. That's the only component that could strictly speaking be called the computer: "it's a dell" "it's a compaq" "it's an abit"
do you really want to keep that 2 yr old motherboard? Well I guess you might. I might. and I guess a new motherboard costs about as much as an ms os, give or take. But then figure, you get to increase the selling price because you're always including a mobo with it. And after that sale, the license no longer applies, am I right?
Add to this that it is strange that someone would make a personal judgment about PZ's own internal state - not "conspiracy" strange, but "unprofessional" strange. Unless there was a statement by PZ to the effect of his feelings of guilt, explicit or implicit, there's simply no reason even to imagine it's there.
I have not read the WP article. Has anyone read a quote in it which even implied feelings of guilt? I suspect there isn't any, particularly if PZ made an effort to keep his position clear. Hate mail isn't justified, but it certainly seems a major screw-up, especially since it has so suddenly become such a hot-button topic.
...why don't they just use a tool like Teleport and download the sites they want to use to a common server, and have their network use that server? Seems an easier thing to do than trying to tame the Bengal Tiger that is the Internet..
(I don't do this kind of thing for a living, so there's probably about 10 good reasons why not, but thought I'd toss it out there and see if anyone knew one.)
Comments like yours make it clear that Brett's gripe with the GPL is pretty much a personal one - if he doesn't have to use it, his opinion of it is his own personal ethical judgment, no more. Only where he can put his opinions in the frame of a larger issue, such as govt use of the GPL, which is what he _sort of_ did at the Silicon Valley discussion, does his ethical opinion take on a more social import. I find I must always remind myself of this after reading his bombastic verbiage.
Y'know, it's interesting. Brett likes to go on and on about RMS' ego, he likes to psychoanalyze RMS as having sublimated desires to dominate and so on.. And yet Brett is nothing if not the anti-RMS. He may have a good point or two, but he never _sounds_ simply reasonable; his criticisms always have the flavor of someone trying to save the universe from a horrible and unseen menace. It's quite clear that he takes his role as the anti-RMS very personally. If RMS has ego and desire to dominate, what does the personal attitude Brett takes toward RMS say about Brett?
Can anyone comment on the changes that are supposedly taking place in Cisco software to make the backbone less dumb?
While corporations' desire to take control of the internet is obviously nothing more than an attempt to stick big-guy costs to the little guy and create exploitable monopolistic apparatuses like Ameritech (aka "Fucking Ameritech") in Chicago (where I live, and do not own a land line), I'm wondering what are the actual concrete details to this alleged "end" and if there isn't some pre-spin reason behind any of the changes supposedly taking place.
How does one define a copyright protecting system?
Answer: badly.
It's not really a rhetorical question. The DMCA defines a technological protections measure, basically, as a process that applies information in order to gain access to the work in question. It is indeed THAT broad.
Not only is it ridiculously broad, it is of course a bad definition. Note: the Macrovision CD protection is the same type of "copy prevention technology" that CSS is: it does not in fact prevent copying, or even access to the work. It makes it difficult to read the work when it is used in a strictly controlled tech environment (ie, read in the environment of the copyright holder's choice). Both tpms do this, though, with "application of information in a process", so they count as tpms. But of course this isn't copy or access prevention, but access adulteration.
Only because the copyright holder is able to control the tech with which you read the work you have purchased or otherwise legally stolen, is - so far - any post-purchase access-adulteration "copy protection measure" even remotely conceivable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Note, the Inquirer article doesn't specify that the FBI bought the eBook cracking program, just that the FBI is a client of the Russian company's. Unless it states that they did in the original Russian, which I doubt since it wasn't translated for the article - it would have been if it were there.
This raises an interesting point though. There's a provision in the DMCA allowing circumvention of a tech protection measure for purposes of law enforcement. Let's say the FBI had bought the eBook cracking program. As there is a provision for law enforcement, the FBI would say that they bought it for those purposes, and it would fly probably. But this might show in a clear way how stupid it is to forbid third parties from creating/distributing anti-tpms; because if it is okay for an agency such as the FBI to buy it, but not for the third party to produce it, that seems contradictory, and horribly inefficient, esp. for law enforcement. Do all law enforcement agencies have to create their own R&D depts, strictly for anti-tpm making, because the media megacorps don't want the public to be able to do that? Law enforcement relies (I would guess) on the work of private individuals and private groups. Either way, if it's wrong for the FBI to buy such a program from a third party, or if it's okay but not okay for the third party to produce it, that seems like a small thorn in the DMCA's side.sd
They do not have the Right to know anything about him. The circumstances of payment may mean that he has to provide that info, but purchasing anything does not obligate him to divulge information about himself to the vendor. And MS DOESN'T have any right based on how CHEAPLY they provide ANYTHING.
Re: info on the check - IANAL but that info may be restricted for purposes of extracting payment. They can't use it for just anything, that's for sure. They can't legally sell it, I don't think.
But re: company address/phone - too true. I don't know why the bloke feels compelled to use his personal data.
then why not create an account for your Job Identity? This makes more sense than it being personal. Hate confusing business with play-zhure, after all.
"Italian taxpayers recently sent a petition to the government demanding it scale back spending on proprietary operating systems and desktop productivity suites when viable alternatives exist in the open source arena. The Chinese government is also very active in this space," Grabau said.
This whole story casts the MS attack on US govt support of GPL software in an interesting light. Leaving aside the fact that our US govt is throwing more of its weight behind open source (OSS if not FS),this shows the OSS/FS movements as international -which makes you start to think that MS' apparent aim in getting the US govt to disallow backing open source == "Dear Uncle Sam, won't you please bite shoot off your own foot? And don't forget to bite off your nose. Thank you."
That's individuals' data - non-business email and photos. Aren't we also, however, talking about business-critical data? Like, say, for a company that invests in and develops properties, investor lists, property data, performance data, budgets, occupancy data, rent data, earnings data, and then such things as investor distributions calculations and payment data? If you were running a business like this, would you consider putting all that data where you could not be its complete and total master?
Lest you forget, hotmail went down not so long ago, losing the email for a lot of customers. I have a friend who used hotmail for important personal email. He doesn't use hotmail anymore. He realizes now that he should have made a personal backup. But if you have to make your own backup to secure your data, that sort of defeats the purpose of network computing - particularly if that's how you run your business.
Keeping in mind that I have no idea what you do for a living or what your level of expertise is when you offer an opinion, I have to say, I love it when commenters drag out pseudo-statistics such as that one. Even if it's true, it's obviously not the right statistic to use. What 99% of the people in a given business want won't be what goes; what will go will be what the 1% with the expertise with running servers and backing up the data say. And that 1% will have 99% of the experience, if I may drag in a meaningless statistic. Just to add a little spice to the pot, I must point out that at least at some businesses, admins don't even like employees to keep data on their desktops, but only on servers - that way no one loses data when the random desktop goes blooey. I have a really hard time believing that any self-respecting admin (of which I am not one - an admin, that is, not self-respecting) would allow their company's data to reside on servers that they have zero control over. It's just the worst sense in the world
What I find really interesting about all this is what these attacks show about MS' estimation of GPL software.
One, that it's a threat. That obvious.
Two, which doesn't seem so obvious: MS takes the GPL as a sound legal document. Note well: they are attacking it in public based on the fact that it does what it sets out to do.
Think about this a second kids! Would MS do this if they thought they could just steal GPL software and use it at will? If they thought that the GPL posed no legal threat?
I consider all these attacks a great (not as in "great software!") affirmation of one question that has plagued the open source community for some time: would it stand up in court?
After reading at least a half-dozen posts about how companies want support that OSS doesn't offer, I thought I'd ask whether the support offered by the likes of MS is really worth the money. On my current job, for example, where I'm using MS Access (yeah, yeah..), every time I've called MS' support, I've ended up solving my own problem. EVERY time. Maybe I've solved it a little faster than I would have, but in almost every instance the people who are helping me have as little clue as I do what could be causing the problem. For my money, the people who offer the best support are going to be those who know not only the application, but also the use to which the app is put. The help desk at the other end of the phone have no way of knowing that. (I guess this might apply mainly to databases, which is what I do, but still.)
Well, actually, simply in terms of good vs evil, LOTR isn't much of a challenge. Creatures and actions are never portrayed as being possibly both; no one has to make hard moral decisions in the book, IIRC, obviously someone will correct me if necessary. Boromir's falling to temptation is something for which the plot mechanism immediately and ruthlessly punishes him, though on the way he is allowed to redeem himself by attempting to save Merry and Pippin. Saruman is corrupted, but his corruption is not morally grey; he just lusts after the Ring. The main source of moral challenge in the story, the Ring, is never portrayed as something even some good can come of. Only those with moral flaws such as greed or pride allow themselves to be even momentarily swayed by it. None of the wise touch it.
But you are pointing out something important, though I would put it differently: Tolkien deeply *humanizes* the story. While characters don't appear to make many difficult moral decisions, their decisions on a personal level are frequently devastating. In a certain way, they are more devastating because they are not morally challenging, that is, because they are good and not evil decisions. Frodo decides to bear the Ring to Mordor. Galadriel decides to let the Ring go. What Tolkien is pointing out is that noble decisions can lead to great suffering, and this is the great depth of the story. Frodo sacrifices the most, and is scarred forever. Everything changes. The Shire changes, the Elves pass away. It's about the pathos of Time, at the end.
a simple language issue.. I think JRRT wondered why we say -fs for certain words, when we use -ves for others (like shelf). And as a linguist (actually a philologist) he was probably in a position to recognize a linguistic white elephant.
When a copyright owner releases a work and grants a particular right to the public that the owner might normally reserve - such as right to distribute - you can't get that right back.
What I mean by this is, if you distibuted a work and explicitly allowed a specific right of use, you can't turn around and say "that wasn't what I meant". You can, legally, reserve the right on all future releases, for all the good it will do; but you can't sue someone for exercising a right you specifically allowed.
Furthermore, you can't claim that you "didn't understand". That way lies inability to enforce contracts.
It seems to me that if Reed wants to restrict his program, it's too late. I mean, at the very most, he can't restrict previous releases of ipf, since they were released contingent on the allowance of that right. Sure this could go to court and the judge could rule in favor of Reed, but my point is: isn't it really completely legal to continue to use ipf?
This is a VERY interesting point. Imagine, a war between the premier provider of business software in the world against another industry bad boy, the insurance companies. Now THAT would keep me on the edge of my seat. Of course the insurance companies would win, but it would still keep me on the edge of my seat.
At the same time, I do think that for a short time at least, this will lead to lax security in companies which do purchase these policies. Some of them will doubtless reason that simply because they have purchased this policy they have all the protection they need.
No - all of those policies will demand that the purchaser maintain stringent security. Note that the Wurzel is charging more because it is harder to maintain security when using NT; this itself directly indicates that lax security is not encouraged. If/when these policies become widespread, every time there is a break-in, the insurance provider will conduct a study to make sure that the providee measured up to the security standard outlined in the service contract. If they are found not to have been up to the standard, the provider won't cover the cost of the break-in. Any other policy and they'd soon find themselves bankrupt.
We'd like to "invita" you to our country, special party, very elite, BYOB, and don't forget your toothbrush.
Maybe "invita-tion" would make a good New Hacker's Dictionary term: getting invited to something that is going to be detrimental to your health/career/whathaveyou. Probably not in the hacker psyche deeply enough though.
Slashdot Mirror
Just sell it with the motherboard, I say. That's the only component that could strictly speaking be called the computer: "it's a dell" "it's a compaq" "it's an abit"
do you really want to keep that 2 yr old motherboard? Well I guess you might. I might. and I guess a new motherboard costs about as much as an ms os, give or take. But then figure, you get to increase the selling price because you're always including a mobo with it. And after that sale, the license no longer applies, am I right?
so the answer is increased mobo liquidity. There!
What does it mean that the SC didn't comment?
They believe their decision is practically self-evident, requiring no comment?
They don't want to get into this can-o-worms?
Other?
Add to this that it is strange that someone would make a personal judgment about PZ's own internal state - not "conspiracy" strange, but "unprofessional" strange. Unless there was a statement by PZ to the effect of his feelings of guilt, explicit or implicit, there's simply no reason even to imagine it's there.
I have not read the WP article. Has anyone read a quote in it which even implied feelings of guilt? I suspect there isn't any, particularly if PZ made an effort to keep his position clear. Hate mail isn't justified, but it certainly seems a major screw-up, especially since it has so suddenly become such a hot-button topic.
...why don't they just use a tool like Teleport and download the sites they want to use to a common server, and have their network use that server? Seems an easier thing to do than trying to tame the Bengal Tiger that is the Internet..
(I don't do this kind of thing for a living, so there's probably about 10 good reasons why not, but thought I'd toss it out there and see if anyone knew one.)
Comments like yours make it clear that Brett's gripe with the GPL is pretty much a personal one - if he doesn't have to use it, his opinion of it is his own personal ethical judgment, no more. Only where he can put his opinions in the frame of a larger issue, such as govt use of the GPL, which is what he _sort of_ did at the Silicon Valley discussion, does his ethical opinion take on a more social import. I find I must always remind myself of this after reading his bombastic verbiage.
Y'know, it's interesting. Brett likes to go on and on about RMS' ego, he likes to psychoanalyze RMS as having sublimated desires to dominate and so on.. And yet Brett is nothing if not the anti-RMS. He may have a good point or two, but he never _sounds_ simply reasonable; his criticisms always have the flavor of someone trying to save the universe from a horrible and unseen menace. It's quite clear that he takes his role as the anti-RMS very personally. If RMS has ego and desire to dominate, what does the personal attitude Brett takes toward RMS say about Brett?
Can anyone comment on the changes that are supposedly taking place in Cisco software to make the backbone less dumb?
While corporations' desire to take control of the internet is obviously nothing more than an attempt to stick big-guy costs to the little guy and create exploitable monopolistic apparatuses like Ameritech (aka "Fucking Ameritech") in Chicago (where I live, and do not own a land line), I'm wondering what are the actual concrete details to this alleged "end" and if there isn't some pre-spin reason behind any of the changes supposedly taking place.
How does one define a copyright protecting system?
Answer: badly.
It's not really a rhetorical question. The DMCA defines a technological protections measure, basically, as a process that applies information in order to gain access to the work in question. It is indeed THAT broad.
Not only is it ridiculously broad, it is of course a bad definition. Note: the Macrovision CD protection is the same type of "copy prevention technology" that CSS is: it does not in fact prevent copying, or even access to the work. It makes it difficult to read the work when it is used in a strictly controlled tech environment (ie, read in the environment of the copyright holder's choice). Both tpms do this, though, with "application of information in a process", so they count as tpms. But of course this isn't copy or access prevention, but access adulteration.
Only because the copyright holder is able to control the tech with which you read the work you have purchased or otherwise legally stolen, is - so far - any post-purchase access-adulteration "copy protection measure" even remotely conceivable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Note, the Inquirer article doesn't specify that the FBI bought the eBook cracking program, just that the FBI is a client of the Russian company's. Unless it states that they did in the original Russian, which I doubt since it wasn't translated for the article - it would have been if it were there.
This raises an interesting point though. There's a provision in the DMCA allowing circumvention of a tech protection measure for purposes of law enforcement. Let's say the FBI had bought the eBook cracking program. As there is a provision for law enforcement, the FBI would say that they bought it for those purposes, and it would fly probably. But this might show in a clear way how stupid it is to forbid third parties from creating/distributing anti-tpms; because if it is okay for an agency such as the FBI to buy it, but not for the third party to produce it, that seems contradictory, and horribly inefficient, esp. for law enforcement. Do all law enforcement agencies have to create their own R&D depts, strictly for anti-tpm making, because the media megacorps don't want the public to be able to do that? Law enforcement relies (I would guess) on the work of private individuals and private groups. Either way, if it's wrong for the FBI to buy such a program from a third party, or if it's okay but not okay for the third party to produce it, that seems like a small thorn in the DMCA's side.sd
Won't accept authority, insults others, won't accept responsibility, ..this is not a clinical definition!
"Both Microsoft and the BSA argue that they're interested in compliance, not enforcement."
Please.. won't you just comply?
I have no Passport account.= /library/en-us/win32/hh/portals/win32start_1n6t.as p
I did a search on Google.
Try this site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
Yeah, I don't see a download, you might be able to download the site to your desktop using Teleport or something.
They do not have the Right to know anything about him. The circumstances of payment may mean that he has to provide that info, but purchasing anything does not obligate him to divulge information about himself to the vendor. And MS DOESN'T have any right based on how CHEAPLY they provide ANYTHING.
Re: info on the check - IANAL but that info may be restricted for purposes of extracting payment. They can't use it for just anything, that's for sure. They can't legally sell it, I don't think.
But re: company address/phone - too true. I don't know why the bloke feels compelled to use his personal data.
then why not create an account for your Job Identity? This makes more sense than it being personal. Hate confusing business with play-zhure, after all.
"Italian taxpayers recently sent a petition to the government demanding it scale back spending on proprietary operating systems and desktop productivity suites when viable alternatives exist in the open source arena. The Chinese government is also very active in this space," Grabau said.
This whole story casts the MS attack on US govt support of GPL software in an interesting light. Leaving aside the fact that our US govt is throwing more of its weight behind open source (OSS if not FS),this shows the OSS/FS movements as international -which makes you start to think that MS' apparent aim in getting the US govt to disallow backing open source == "Dear Uncle Sam, won't you please bite shoot off your own foot? And don't forget to bite off your nose. Thank you."
That's individuals' data - non-business email and photos. Aren't we also, however, talking about business-critical data? Like, say, for a company that invests in and develops properties, investor lists, property data, performance data, budgets, occupancy data, rent data, earnings data, and then such things as investor distributions calculations and payment data? If you were running a business like this, would you consider putting all that data where you could not be its complete and total master?
Lest you forget, hotmail went down not so long ago, losing the email for a lot of customers. I have a friend who used hotmail for important personal email. He doesn't use hotmail anymore. He realizes now that he should have made a personal backup. But if you have to make your own backup to secure your data, that sort of defeats the purpose of network computing - particularly if that's how you run your business.
99% of people (joe consumer)
Keeping in mind that I have no idea what you do for a living or what your level of expertise is when you offer an opinion, I have to say, I love it when commenters drag out pseudo-statistics such as that one. Even if it's true, it's obviously not the right statistic to use. What 99% of the people in a given business want won't be what goes; what will go will be what the 1% with the expertise with running servers and backing up the data say. And that 1% will have 99% of the experience, if I may drag in a meaningless statistic. Just to add a little spice to the pot, I must point out that at least at some businesses, admins don't even like employees to keep data on their desktops, but only on servers - that way no one loses data when the random desktop goes blooey. I have a really hard time believing that any self-respecting admin (of which I am not one - an admin, that is, not self-respecting) would allow their company's data to reside on servers that they have zero control over. It's just the worst sense in the world
What I find really interesting about all this is what these attacks show about MS' estimation of GPL software.
One, that it's a threat. That obvious.
Two, which doesn't seem so obvious: MS takes the GPL as a sound legal document. Note well: they are attacking it in public based on the fact that it does what it sets out to do.
Think about this a second kids! Would MS do this if they thought they could just steal GPL software and use it at will? If they thought that the GPL posed no legal threat?
I consider all these attacks a great (not as in "great software!") affirmation of one question that has plagued the open source community for some time: would it stand up in court?
Apparently, MS thinks so.
After reading at least a half-dozen posts about how companies want support that OSS doesn't offer, I thought I'd ask whether the support offered by the likes of MS is really worth the money. On my current job, for example, where I'm using MS Access (yeah, yeah..), every time I've called MS' support, I've ended up solving my own problem. EVERY time. Maybe I've solved it a little faster than I would have, but in almost every instance the people who are helping me have as little clue as I do what could be causing the problem. For my money, the people who offer the best support are going to be those who know not only the application, but also the use to which the app is put. The help desk at the other end of the phone have no way of knowing that. (I guess this might apply mainly to databases, which is what I do, but still.)
Well, actually, simply in terms of good vs evil, LOTR isn't much of a challenge. Creatures and actions are never portrayed as being possibly both; no one has to make hard moral decisions in the book, IIRC, obviously someone will correct me if necessary. Boromir's falling to temptation is something for which the plot mechanism immediately and ruthlessly punishes him, though on the way he is allowed to redeem himself by attempting to save Merry and Pippin. Saruman is corrupted, but his corruption is not morally grey; he just lusts after the Ring. The main source of moral challenge in the story, the Ring, is never portrayed as something even some good can come of. Only those with moral flaws such as greed or pride allow themselves to be even momentarily swayed by it. None of the wise touch it.
But you are pointing out something important, though I would put it differently: Tolkien deeply *humanizes* the story. While characters don't appear to make many difficult moral decisions, their decisions on a personal level are frequently devastating. In a certain way, they are more devastating because they are not morally challenging, that is, because they are good and not evil decisions. Frodo decides to bear the Ring to Mordor. Galadriel decides to let the Ring go. What Tolkien is pointing out is that noble decisions can lead to great suffering, and this is the great depth of the story. Frodo sacrifices the most, and is scarred forever. Everything changes. The Shire changes, the Elves pass away. It's about the pathos of Time, at the end.
a simple language issue.. I think JRRT wondered why we say -fs for certain words, when we use -ves for others (like shelf). And as a linguist (actually a philologist) he was probably in a position to recognize a linguistic white elephant.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong:
When a copyright owner releases a work and grants a particular right to the public that the owner might normally reserve - such as right to distribute - you can't get that right back.
What I mean by this is, if you distibuted a work and explicitly allowed a specific right of use, you can't turn around and say "that wasn't what I meant". You can, legally, reserve the right on all future releases, for all the good it will do; but you can't sue someone for exercising a right you specifically allowed.
Furthermore, you can't claim that you "didn't understand". That way lies inability to enforce contracts.
It seems to me that if Reed wants to restrict his program, it's too late. I mean, at the very most, he can't restrict previous releases of ipf, since they were released contingent on the allowance of that right. Sure this could go to court and the judge could rule in favor of Reed, but my point is: isn't it really completely legal to continue to use ipf?
This is a VERY interesting point. Imagine, a war between the premier provider of business software in the world against another industry bad boy, the insurance companies. Now THAT would keep me on the edge of my seat. Of course the insurance companies would win, but it would still keep me on the edge of my seat.
At the same time, I do think that for a short time at least, this will lead to lax security in companies which do purchase these policies. Some of them will doubtless reason that simply because they have purchased this policy they have all the protection they need.
No - all of those policies will demand that the purchaser maintain stringent security. Note that the Wurzel is charging more because it is harder to maintain security when using NT; this itself directly indicates that lax security is not encouraged. If/when these policies become widespread, every time there is a break-in, the insurance provider will conduct a study to make sure that the providee measured up to the security standard outlined in the service contract. If they are found not to have been up to the standard, the provider won't cover the cost of the break-in. Any other policy and they'd soon find themselves bankrupt.
..as in:
We'd like to "invita" you to our country, special party, very elite, BYOB, and don't forget your toothbrush.
Maybe "invita-tion" would make a good New Hacker's Dictionary term: getting invited to something that is going to be detrimental to your health/career/whathaveyou. Probably not in the hacker psyche deeply enough though.
Good response