I could easily imagine some situation where a "TiVO" app all in.NET on their servers gets "pulled" if it starts to take away from one of their commercial offerings. To my knowledge, this has not happened on SF yet.
That's mainly because OSDN doesn't have a real product that anyone can clone. There's nothing that can threaten OSDN's bottom line more than OSDN itself.
It is NOT a prerequisite of a P2P network to exchange illegally copyrighted works. I can have a P2P network that exchanges legal copies of files. I cannot have a warez network that distributed legal copies of files, unless you redefine what we know warez to mean.
It is also NOT a prerequisite of a lawnmower to actually cut grass, but that doesn't make it any less of a tool designed for, especially well suited for, and pretty much exclusively used for cutting grass. Despite any post facto attempts to justify the utility of P2P as one that's legal, two glaring facts remain:
Napster, which really kicked off the P2P bandwagon, was written by Shawn Fanning to make it easier to trade (illegal) MP3s among his friends. The other players in the P2P arena that came later were trying to ride on the success of Napster, whose popularity was due to the fact that it was amazingly efficient at doing what its creator had intended it to do. None of these P2P networks were designed for the purpose of sharing legal files, and you're not convincing anyone with silly handwaving by simply saying the opposite because of the other fact:
No one can seem to name one piece of software whose authors say "just download a copy off Kazaa". Legal downloads have their own more reliable distribution venues. There has, as of yet, been no demonstration of significant non-infringing uses of the major P2P networks (meaning both a use that was not invented solely to provide a counterexample to the statement that P2P networks are primarily for sharing illegal material, and that there are not already sufficient and easier other methods of doing such file distribution).
Actualy, according to the artical, a few people who run blogs seem to think that google has been degraded, while google itself has not seen a higher number of actual complaints.
I'm not a blogger and I've noticed more and more crap results on the first pages of my google searches in the past month or so. Unfortunately for Google, I haven't really stopped to think about why my search results have been crappy (and thus, complained to Google about it), but I have noticed I've been getting better results from alltheweb.com.
The silent majority aren't going to complain about bad search results, they'll just move to another site that does better. How do you think Google managed to steal the crown from Altavista, et al. in the first place?
Why not make Copyright function similar to Trademarks (in that they have a given term, can be renewed indefinately for a price, but once they lapse to Public Domain, there's no going back.
Since the plaintiffs state that they're more concerned with all the other works being held up by Copyright extension, they don't care about Mickey Mouse at all, but at the same time Disney does care about Mickey Mouse, who is still a marketable commodity -- the works that aren't being promoted by their authors anymore (and as such, are violating the reason for Copyright as given in the Constitution) lapse, while those who are still actively using and promoting their work can pay to keep it.
If you consider that over 5 years, the average keyrate is 105.5 GKeys/sec, and the latest day averages were somewhere around 180 GKeys/sec, it means the same thing could have been finished in almost half the time, if it was started now with today's computers.
And the fact that now we know the key would speed up another attempt considerably. I'd go so far as to say it'd take even less than half the amount of time if we started again today!
the fact that UT2003 has a Linux version in the box doesn't seem *that* significant to me.
Well, at least it'll let Slashbots look at the overall sales figures for UT2003, incorrently assume that a much larger percentage of it than actually is was due to Linux support, and use that as their reasoning that the Linux Gaming market is healthy and that any game company would be out of their mind not to support it.
For example, suppose UT2003 sells 200,000 units. Dumbass_Slashposter (User #713910 Info | http://billg-borg.mssucks.net) assumes that at least 50% of that was due to Linux support out of the box and all of a sudden, a Linux gaming market of 100,000 becomes a popular fallacy. You might disagree that people won't latch on to misinterpreted figures, but hey, 640K oughta be enough for anybody!
I remember that I had a patient and no matter what I did he didn't seem to be doing better. I recognized all the medical terms except one so I tried it. I selected Lumbar Puncture and man did his vitals ever drop fast! He was the only patient that died under my care.
So the sources are bad but the binaries are good? Is today bizarro-world day or something?
This is yet another example of why everyone should use proprietary closed source software! I bet nobody's ever been compromised through a trojan horse in the build process of Microsoft Word!
Re:Rename it, it isn't Perl anymore
on
Perl 6 Synopsis 5
·
· Score: 2
Same with Turbo Pascal when Borland heavily changed it they changed the name to Delphi.
Their compiler is still referred to all over their documentation as Object Pascal. Delphi is the name of the IDE, not the compiler; just as Visual Studio is the name of Microsoft's IDE, but not their compiler.
They have a protection mechnisim in place that goes like this. Each card is "born" when a deck is opened, it has a unique identifier to that specific card on the server and using that they keep track of all transactions the card has been in. Thus, if a card was duped, they could follow all the transactions back to the original duper and >ONLY ban their account.
Ultima Online had unique ID numbers for items and they still had their fair share of dupe bugs, regardless. History has shown that this is not a trivial problem and that there isn't a silver bullet to fix it. You have a large programming project that's unavoidably filled with bugs, both known and unknown, and the ratio of bug-exploiters to bug-fixers is mammoth.
The best they can realistically do is take steps to limit potential damage as much as they can.
I remember some weeks back that someone had posted a script pointing to an auto-EULA remover for microsoft installers. Can that person please post their link again?
I have a script that strips any mention of the GPL from several major pieces of software, including Linux. Perhaps you'd like a copy of that too?
What do most people who design for IE do to avoid this silliness? Is there any 24 bit graphic format that supports an alpha layer in IE? No, really, I'd like to know.
Yes. There is. PNG.
You just can't use it straight in an IMG tag, you need to instance a DirectX blending filter. It's not complicated at all, but granted, it is platform-specific.
Sure, Napster has gone bankrupt because the efforts of a typically greedy industry, but don't side with their "moral" argument and accuse me or Napster of stealing MP3s. I never stole anything. I copied someone else's zeroes and ones, and zeroes and ones are not music until you interpret them. In fact, I could interpret them in any way I want to.... If you allow people to copyright digital approximations of a song, you effectively allow people to own numbers, which are a natural phenomenon.
I take it then you don't mind when people take GPL'd code and incorporate it into their own software without releasing the source? They're not stealing, they're just making a copy that doesn't hurt anybody, so they shouldn't be forced to follow the licensing, right? And after all, can't the latest Linux kernel be boiled down to just one really big number? It's a natural phenomenon -- it can't possibly be copyrighted or bound to a license!
This is impressive bit of database manipulation. Somehow I didn't think that all of the datatypes, etc would be so easily parsed.
Although I do recall telephone directories that used to give you results for a specified radius for certain types of businesses
That's just a standard spatial query. It's easy to implement an R-Tree to be able to do (relatively) quick "give me points within x meters of this one" type of searches on a database. There's nothing extremely revolutionary about Daniel's project, anyone with some basic geometry knowledge and the patience to download the 33GB of TIGER data could have done it within the course of a few weeks. (Ironically enough I've been doing the same thing with 1.2 million addresses against TIGER data for the past month.)
But that's the true genius and beauty of it. Now that it's been said, it's such a mindbogglingly obvious and useful application of web search and spatial search technology that it's hard to believe nobody thought of it before.
I'd be honestly surprised if Google doesn't run with the ball and fold it into their main search engine. The only thing standing in the way is the storage space and CPU time to do it.
What are you allowed to do with MS's shared source?: Pretty much anything except make money. You can teach it, write books about it, and experiment with it, but you can't sell any program you write with it. Fine if you're a hobbyist, but some of us have families and stomachs and houses and cars to support. MS is trying to subsume Open Source and the GPL. The GPL allows you to sell the fruits of your labor. Maybe you aren't good enough of a programmer to ever consider selling anything you write. The rest of us, who make a living writing software, can't afford to do it for free.
Go ahead and name five companies that are profitable by selling GPL'd software. Profitable enough to pay all their developers. And I don't mean by Enron Accounting Tricks, I mean honestly profitable.
Woah! You'd think something like Microsoft releasing over a million lines of source code for one of the current crown jewels of their marketing efforts would have made at least some news mention on Slashdot.
Wait... nevermind, that'd make Microsoft look good. I forgot what site this was for a moment.
People who are offended at Blizzard attacking its fans and customers may want to consider Warlords Battlecry 1 and 2 instead of Warcraft 3.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.... you mean you actually expect people to put their money where their mouth is? You [i]do[/i] know what website this is, right? This is the same website that on one hand, blasts Disney for owning a Senator to push through absurd copyright laws, and on the other hand drools over the new CGI trailer for Disney Interactive's new project.
That's the reason these companies [b]do[/b] this sort of stuff. [i]Because we'll still buy their crap regardless.[/i] Even here at Slashdot, which is viewed by the rest of the world as a mecca of righteous zealotry, the editors and most of the readers can't keep their principles about them when Hated Enemy Number One (or two, or three...) comes out with a new shiny toy for us.
The only good part of the text is his questions to ask about Kazza. The rest is hot air.
And not to mention a heaping helping of FUD.... gloom and doom predictions based on nothing but conjecture. The exact same stuff we jump down MS and other companies' throats about; it's trolling from them, but from this guy its supposed to be insightful?
I wonder why he didn't point to up2date or any of the other various Linux updating utilities as examples of single points of failure? The impression I got was that he simply has an axe to grind, and picked his favorite enemies (Microsoft's mentioned, natch) as targets.
Kodak saying no one else can make a set of chemicals that develop their film if they plan to give them away for free?
This is like Kodak giving someone the recipe for the official Kodak set of chemicals, then telling them that they can't give that recipe to other people.
Microsoft is well within their rights under Copyright law here. Microsoft is giving people the opportunity to implement the CIFS specs, but not to redistribute them in a form which makes sublicensing compulsory.
The hole in the situation is that someone could implement the spec and release it to the Public Domain, since MS isn't forbidding ALL redistribution, only direct redistribution with compulsory sublicensing. That code could then be folded into a GPL'd product by a third party since they received the original code as PD, not under Microsoft's agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
I could easily imagine some situation where a "TiVO" app all in .NET on their servers gets "pulled" if it starts to take away from one of their commercial offerings. To my knowledge, this has not happened on SF yet.
That's mainly because OSDN doesn't have a real product that anyone can clone. There's nothing that can threaten OSDN's bottom line more than OSDN itself.
It is also NOT a prerequisite of a lawnmower to actually cut grass, but that doesn't make it any less of a tool designed for, especially well suited for, and pretty much exclusively used for cutting grass. Despite any post facto attempts to justify the utility of P2P as one that's legal, two glaring facts remain:
Actualy, according to the artical, a few people who run blogs seem to think that google has been degraded, while google itself has not seen a higher number of actual complaints.
I'm not a blogger and I've noticed more and more crap results on the first pages of my google searches in the past month or so. Unfortunately for Google, I haven't really stopped to think about why my search results have been crappy (and thus, complained to Google about it), but I have noticed I've been getting better results from alltheweb.com.
The silent majority aren't going to complain about bad search results, they'll just move to another site that does better. How do you think Google managed to steal the crown from Altavista, et al. in the first place?
Patents suck Patents suck Patents suck... er... hello what's this?
Yahoo! Launch headline suggests that Bon Jovi album might be delayed because of the lawsuit."
Yay for patents! Yay for patents! Yay for patents!
Why not make Copyright function similar to Trademarks (in that they have a given term, can be renewed indefinately for a price, but once they lapse to Public Domain, there's no going back.
Since the plaintiffs state that they're more concerned with all the other works being held up by Copyright extension, they don't care about Mickey Mouse at all, but at the same time Disney does care about Mickey Mouse, who is still a marketable commodity -- the works that aren't being promoted by their authors anymore (and as such, are violating the reason for Copyright as given in the Constitution) lapse, while those who are still actively using and promoting their work can pay to keep it.
Seems like a win-win situation to me.
If you consider that over 5 years, the average keyrate is 105.5 GKeys/sec, and the latest day averages were somewhere around 180 GKeys/sec, it means the same thing could have been finished in almost half the time, if it was started now with today's computers.
And the fact that now we know the key would speed up another attempt considerably. I'd go so far as to say it'd take even less than half the amount of time if we started again today!
the fact that UT2003 has a Linux version in the box doesn't seem *that* significant to me.
Well, at least it'll let Slashbots look at the overall sales figures for UT2003, incorrently assume that a much larger percentage of it than actually is was due to Linux support, and use that as their reasoning that the Linux Gaming market is healthy and that any game company would be out of their mind not to support it.
For example, suppose UT2003 sells 200,000 units. Dumbass_Slashposter (User #713910 Info | http://billg-borg.mssucks.net) assumes that at least 50% of that was due to Linux support out of the box and all of a sudden, a Linux gaming market of 100,000 becomes a popular fallacy. You might disagree that people won't latch on to misinterpreted figures, but hey, 640K oughta be enough for anybody!
I remember that I had a patient and no matter what I did he didn't seem to be doing better. I recognized all the medical terms except one so I tried it. I selected Lumbar Puncture and man did his vitals ever drop fast! He was the only patient that died under my care.
If I had a dime for every time that happened...
--
Dr. Chester J. Karma, M.D.
Diamonds - Are They Really Worth the Cost?
Do you love her? If so, then they're worth the cost.
So the sources are bad but the binaries are good? Is today bizarro-world day or something?
This is yet another example of why everyone should use proprietary closed source software! I bet nobody's ever been compromised through a trojan horse in the build process of Microsoft Word!
Same with Turbo Pascal when Borland heavily changed it they changed the name to Delphi.
Their compiler is still referred to all over their documentation as Object Pascal. Delphi is the name of the IDE, not the compiler; just as Visual Studio is the name of Microsoft's IDE, but not their compiler.
They have a protection mechnisim in place that goes like this. Each card is "born" when a deck is opened, it has a unique identifier to that specific card on the server and using that they keep track of all transactions the card has been in. Thus, if a card was duped, they could follow all the transactions back to the original duper and >ONLY ban their account.
Ultima Online had unique ID numbers for items and they still had their fair share of dupe bugs, regardless. History has shown that this is not a trivial problem and that there isn't a silver bullet to fix it. You have a large programming project that's unavoidably filled with bugs, both known and unknown, and the ratio of bug-exploiters to bug-fixers is mammoth.
The best they can realistically do is take steps to limit potential damage as much as they can.
I remember some weeks back that someone had posted a script pointing to an auto-EULA remover for microsoft installers. Can that person please post their link again?
I have a script that strips any mention of the GPL from several major pieces of software, including Linux. Perhaps you'd like a copy of that too?
What do most people who design for IE do to avoid this silliness? Is there any 24 bit graphic format that supports an alpha layer in IE? No, really, I'd like to know.
Yes. There is. PNG.
You just can't use it straight in an IMG tag, you need to instance a DirectX blending filter. It's not complicated at all, but granted, it is platform-specific.
Sure, Napster has gone bankrupt because the efforts of a typically greedy industry, but don't side with their "moral" argument and accuse me or Napster of stealing MP3s. I never stole anything. I copied someone else's zeroes and ones, and zeroes and ones are not music until you interpret them. In fact, I could interpret them in any way I want to. ... If you allow people to copyright digital approximations of a song, you effectively allow people to own numbers, which are a natural phenomenon.
I take it then you don't mind when people take GPL'd code and incorporate it into their own software without releasing the source? They're not stealing, they're just making a copy that doesn't hurt anybody, so they shouldn't be forced to follow the licensing, right? And after all, can't the latest Linux kernel be boiled down to just one really big number? It's a natural phenomenon -- it can't possibly be copyrighted or bound to a license!
Everyone should be using browser that can selectively block cookies!
Why?
This is impressive bit of database manipulation. Somehow I didn't think that all of the datatypes, etc would be so easily parsed.
Although I do recall telephone directories that used to give you results for a specified radius for certain types of businesses
That's just a standard spatial query. It's easy to implement an R-Tree to be able to do (relatively) quick "give me points within x meters of this one" type of searches on a database. There's nothing extremely revolutionary about Daniel's project, anyone with some basic geometry knowledge and the patience to download the 33GB of TIGER data could have done it within the course of a few weeks. (Ironically enough I've been doing the same thing with 1.2 million addresses against TIGER data for the past month.)
But that's the true genius and beauty of it. Now that it's been said, it's such a mindbogglingly obvious and useful application of web search and spatial search technology that it's hard to believe nobody thought of it before.
I'd be honestly surprised if Google doesn't run with the ball and fold it into their main search engine. The only thing standing in the way is the storage space and CPU time to do it.
What are you allowed to do with MS's shared source?: Pretty much anything except make money. You can teach it, write books about it, and experiment with it, but you can't sell any program you write with it. Fine if you're a hobbyist, but some of us have families and stomachs and houses and cars to support. MS is trying to subsume Open Source and the GPL. The GPL allows you to sell the fruits of your labor. Maybe you aren't good enough of a programmer to ever consider selling anything you write. The rest of us, who make a living writing software, can't afford to do it for free.
Go ahead and name five companies that are profitable by selling GPL'd software. Profitable enough to pay all their developers. And I don't mean by Enron Accounting Tricks, I mean honestly profitable.
I'll wait.
Rather than bashing them, why not download the CLR and C# source for FreeBSD and have a play with that?
Woah! You'd think something like Microsoft releasing over a million lines of source code for one of the current crown jewels of their marketing efforts would have made at least some news mention on Slashdot.
Wait... nevermind, that'd make Microsoft look good. I forgot what site this was for a moment.
Good show, Microsoft.
How is this going to happen in anything but a stripped down version?
The PS2 version of EQ will not be connected to the PC version of EQ in any way other than name and background fiction.
It's a completely seperate game that happens to have the same style of gameplay.
Damn. I should have used the Preview button. :p
People who are offended at Blizzard attacking its fans and customers may want to consider Warlords Battlecry 1 and 2 instead of Warcraft 3.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.... you mean you actually expect people to put their money where their mouth is? You [i]do[/i] know what website this is, right? This is the same website that on one hand, blasts Disney for owning a Senator to push through absurd copyright laws, and on the other hand drools over the new CGI trailer for Disney Interactive's new project.
That's the reason these companies [b]do[/b] this sort of stuff. [i]Because we'll still buy their crap regardless.[/i] Even here at Slashdot, which is viewed by the rest of the world as a mecca of righteous zealotry, the editors and most of the readers can't keep their principles about them when Hated Enemy Number One (or two, or three...) comes out with a new shiny toy for us.
as transparent as recompiling libjpeg
Read that part again. I hope you understand how silly you sound.
The only good part of the text is his questions to ask about Kazza. The rest is hot air.
And not to mention a heaping helping of FUD.... gloom and doom predictions based on nothing but conjecture. The exact same stuff we jump down MS and other companies' throats about; it's trolling from them, but from this guy its supposed to be insightful?
I wonder why he didn't point to up2date or any of the other various Linux updating utilities as examples of single points of failure? The impression I got was that he simply has an axe to grind, and picked his favorite enemies (Microsoft's mentioned, natch) as targets.
Kodak saying no one else can make a set of chemicals that develop their film if they plan to give them away for free?
This is like Kodak giving someone the recipe for the official Kodak set of chemicals, then telling them that they can't give that recipe to other people.
Microsoft is well within their rights under Copyright law here. Microsoft is giving people the opportunity to implement the CIFS specs, but not to redistribute them in a form which makes sublicensing compulsory.
The hole in the situation is that someone could implement the spec and release it to the Public Domain, since MS isn't forbidding ALL redistribution, only direct redistribution with compulsory sublicensing. That code could then be folded into a GPL'd product by a third party since they received the original code as PD, not under Microsoft's agreement.