So the GPL is good because it keeps Microsoft from adopting open standards? No, it is good because if you improve GPL software, like M$ did with the BSD TCP stack, you must give the improvements back to the community. M$ kept their improvements to themselves, legally and according to the BSD license. M$ weren't stealing. They just want to take and not give back.
Copyright clearly doesn't work because the software industry is populated by fly-by-night companies that don't produce anything new, they just pump out the same old crap, brand it and play marketting games to get consumers to buy it.
But (1) the copyright is not created to ensure that everything produced is of high quality. Neither is Software, literary or music.
(2) It is not because of copyright that low quality stuff is produced.
(3) Removing copyright protection would not help increasing software quality. Not even if you do other things as well. Or do you think that removing copyright protection for music would make Britney Spears disappear? (And is that really a worthwile goal?)
I think you should be less concerned with low-quality software and small companies. If they are no good, ignore them. Write some good software instead.
Even if it were the case that introducing patents would kill off amature programmers (beats me how, but ok), who cares? It just means customers in the software industry will finally be able to license software that has some chance of being backed by a major company. Yes, we won't have the 3.6 million bullshit little software companies that we have now, but hey, that's a small price to pay for maturing an industry into something actually reliable.
You sound exactly like the Pro-SW patent lobby. How would you like this?
Even if it were the case that introducing patents would kill off amature authors (beats me how, but ok), who cares? It just means customers in the culture industry will finally be able to license culture and art that has some chance of being backed by a major company. Yes, we won't have the 3.6 million bullshit little authors and artists that we have now, but hey, that's a small price to pay for maturing an industry into something actually $$$.
The only argument Stallman makes is that patents should not be overly broad. No, he argues why authors (of text or software) are not helped by patents. And why patents (monopolies) hinders development for authors.
This does not mean the amature programmer has to suffer. Free and Open Source Software can continue to produce new and innovative things, just like amatures do in automobile, aerospace, radio and other industries already covered by international patents.
FOSS authors have already been threatened by patent holders even when the FOSS authors fully own the copyright on their own code and has not pirated any code. By allowing software patents, software authors lose the right to their own work. And unlike "mature" industries, the software author can reach a large audience on the internet, competing with big business. Of course big business will use their patent monopolies to censor independent authors if they threaten their bottom lines.
Personally, I'd like to see the copyright system not be applied to software. So that everyone could pirate any software they liked? Windows, Photoshop, etc? Or so that M$ could rip off any independent developer and include their code in Windows without having to pay any royalties? Please explain.
The kind of argument Stallman makes about patents not being a good fit for literature can also be made for why copyright is not a good fit for automobiles or planes.
Well, copyright is not appropriate for automobiles and planes. What is your point?
I've got one, because it was the only player I could find with (1) OGG (2) UMS (for Linux support) and (3) user-replacable batteries. There are many other players that support OGG (especially disk-based players), but I really couldn't find any other that had the combination I required. Strange, really.
And you must upgrade the player to have UMS. I had to borrow a Windows machine from a friend to do that, so be warned.
The OGG support is good but you must stay within the 96kbps to 225 kbps range. Encode your files like this:
$ oggenc -q 6 -m 96 -M 225 song.wav
The player don't have any support for playlists. And it doesn't sort the files in a directory. I name all my songs with a tracknumber first, so if I play the songs in alphabetical order, I get them in the track order on the album. But when you save files on the iRiver, they are stored in inode (!) order, and are not sorted. So to preserve ordering I transfer directories (albums) to the iRiver like this:
$ mount/mnt/fp #mount the player $ cd mp3/Britney $ mkdir/mnt/fp/Britney $ find . -type f|sort|xargs -i cp -v {}/mnt/fp/Britney/
The transfer speed with UMS is somewhat slow. Also, with the UMS upgrade, the maximum recording rate is 96kbps. But since I don't use the device for recording I don't care.
The battery life is excellent. I use the same battery for weeks! With OGG, the battery life is reduced somewhat but is still very good.
And the most important thing: The sound is very good. Especially if you get a better headset.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. The video (in TFA) did not use "two-tone" signalling, but straight single-tone morse code keyed with an ordinary bug. I have certainly heard morse code faster that in the Leno show, but I have not heard any two-tone morse signalling being used anywhere.
What you seem to propose (?) is some kind of frequency modulation. This is more complex than the simple CW mode that morse code uses and seems to defeat the purpose of using morse code as you correctly described in your original article.
Have you seen an "advanced dual-tone key" being used anywhere?
You need only a very simple transmitter, and since it can be done in a binary fashion (just tones and silence, they were using a more advanced dual-tone key which allows for faster transmission) it can be transmitted successfully even with extremely poor signal-noise ratios.
The "simple transmitter" is normally just sending a carrier wave at a fixed frequency. So you don't send "tones" as such. You just switch the transmitter on or off. Since the resulting bandwith is very narrow, the receiver can have a very narrow bandpass filter (300Hz?) so that anything else is filtered out.
And I don't think anyone uses an "advanced dual tone key" system. What they used on the show was a bug (and not a morse key which is pictured on the web link). Press the paddle right, and it will send continuous dashes. Press it left and it will send dots. With some training, timing and fine tuning you can send morse quite quickly without much hand movement.
if you tell me that it is because the Gimp is part of the OS, let me tell you that it is NOT, and you CAN install it on Windows too, so no, there is no point comparing them!
Of course you can install stuff on a plain Windows XP installation to make it usable. Just look here.
It's bollocks though because a movie is not technical. It cannot provide any technical contribution.
This is the standard patent lawyer answer to this story. But then, I have to ask, what does "technical contribution" have to do with what's patentable under the EPC? That term is not to be found anywhere in the laws that governs patentability. It is something the patent lawyers have invented themselves.
Can you show me a law (not a praxis written by the patent lawyers) that define patentability relative the term "technical contribution"?
Since the current law forbids the pateting on both software, books and films, but the lawyers and EPO bend the rules to allow the patents anyway, can you now patent your film?
As with most laws, the devil is in the detail. Law-writers have dealt with this kind of problems before and can do it with computers too.
What I mean is that a PC, a server and a PDA is a computer. A device meant to accept programs written by other people.
Anyway, you can state that the act of authoring, publishing and downloading software is never a patent infringement without defining a "Computer". Only (perhaps) the act of executing software needs such a definition. And by mentioning examples of common computers, running software on these devices could come out clear and be legal.
So I think you can get quite far with this approach.
They just have to word the laws right. Something along the lines of under no circumstances whatsoever shall patents be granted software, algorithms, business methods, or mathematical expressions, techniques or constructs.
The law already pretty much says that (barring the words "circumstances", "whatsoever"). But the patent lawyers and the EPO bend the rules anyway. See here.
What about one-click? That could be a business process. Are those patentable in the EU?
According to the European patent convention, neither software nor business methods can be patented. But the patent lawyers work with the Patent Office to bend the rules and grant the patents anyway. So this is an established praxis. Now they want the politicians to turn this praxis into law so that the patents that are already granted gets a firmer foundation.
Well, the software patenting lobby never uses the phrase "software patents". No, they merely want "computer implemented inventions" to have the same protections as other inventions in the industry. Most inventions produced by industry today have software in it. Like car braking systems. If they can't patent software, they can't innovate in (for example) car braking systems, they say.
The solution of course is to allow patents on the car breaking system. If something novel is happening there (outside of the software) then it should be allowed. It shouldn't matter whether the system is controlled by software or a black box full of small midgets.
Another solution: Allow the patents, but make it absolutely clear that no patent can be infringed on by writing, publishing, downloading or using software on a normal computer.
I'm not from the US and now I have to get this explained. I'm not trolling. I can't really understand how SSNs are supposed to work.
The SSN seems to be a number identifying a person. (We have that where I live too.) But somehow, this number is assumed to be secret, like a password. If yout can learn the number you can access anything about the person and you also seem to be able to hurt the person financially. Withdraw funds? The security seems to revolve around the fact that the number (the identity of the person) is secret! Because everyone here seems to be upset that these kids expose all those numbers!?!? This boggles my mind.
Are there no other attempts at authentication? IDs? If your SSN is your password, how do you change it? (I would like to have it changed several times a year, no matter what if there is no other security than secrecy.) Can someone explain?
She did however (bless her) advise me to remove the hard drive because upon receipt, and debugging, as soon as the technicians would see the dual boot she could not guarantee me they wouldn't immediately re-image the disk.
Last time I bought a laptop with Windows preinstalled, I immediately replaced the hard disk when I received it. When the keyboard needed a replacement some 18 months later, I just swapped the old HD back in before sending the machine to guarantee repair. This procedure allowed me to:
- Replace the orignal 6GB HD with a 30GB one (this was a couple of years ago).
- Avoid fuss about me running Linux. The repair shop would see my virgin Windows HD.
- Have my data safe when sending the machine away.
The could look at VMS which has the command SET PASSWORD/GENERATE. It works like this:
$ set pass/gen Old password:
marboake lumining olverag etreate
detiteck
Choose a password from this list, or press RETURN to get a new list New password:
This has been in VMS since the mid 80-ies. The sysadmin can also mandate SET PASS/GEN and set a maximum password lifetime (after which the user has to set a new password before logging in).
This concept could be easily modernized with non-alphabetical characters and longer passwords.
Linux works on all sorts of hardware, and a huge part of the development effort for Linux has been writing and testing thousands of device drivers. Solaris doesn't have nearly as much support, especially for oddball devices.
So Solaris runs best on machines configured and sold by Sun-the-hardware-manufacturer? Instead of cheap oddball machines? I'm afraid Sun might think this is a feature and not a bug.:-(
There is a Swedish on-line shop that has an excellent product landscape viewer here.
This is a Java applet that lets you turn a number of knobs to find out which screen matches your need. Very nice! And don't be intimidated by the Swedish on the site, it's not that hard to understand!;-)
Do you remember the three-pound Epson HX-20 from 1982
Yes! That was a neat machine. A built-in printer! And a BASIC interpreter in ROM. I developed some programs on that computer for a biotech company. But I quickly ran out of memory for the BASIC programs. To save memory, you could stack several BASIC commands on one line and use one or two-letter variable names. Ugh!
So I wrote a program translator on the VAX/VMS system that the company had. (The VAX had a gigantic 2 megabytes of main memory!) The translator took my readable BASIC programs and compressed them to barely readable but compact programs for the HX-20. Computing was much more interesting in those days!
Slashdot Mirror
So the GPL is good because it keeps Microsoft from adopting open standards?
No, it is good because if you improve GPL software, like M$ did with the BSD TCP stack, you must give the improvements back to the community. M$ kept their improvements to themselves, legally and according to the BSD license. M$ weren't stealing. They just want to take and not give back.
Copyright clearly doesn't work because the software industry is populated by fly-by-night companies that don't produce anything new, they just pump out the same old crap, brand it and play marketting games to get consumers to buy it.
But (1) the copyright is not created to ensure that everything produced is of high quality. Neither is Software, literary or music.
(2) It is not because of copyright that low quality stuff is produced.
(3) Removing copyright protection would not help increasing software quality. Not even if you do other things as well. Or do you think that removing copyright protection for music would make Britney Spears disappear? (And is that really a worthwile goal?)
I think you should be less concerned with low-quality software and small companies. If they are no good, ignore them. Write some good software instead.
Why must all software have high quality?
Even if it were the case that introducing patents would kill off amature programmers (beats me how, but ok), who cares? It just means customers in the software industry will finally be able to license software that has some chance of being backed by a major company. Yes, we won't have the 3.6 million bullshit little software companies that we have now, but hey, that's a small price to pay for maturing an industry into something actually reliable.
You sound exactly like the Pro-SW patent lobby.
How would you like this?
Even if it were the case that introducing patents would kill off amature authors (beats me how, but ok), who cares? It just means customers in the culture industry will finally be able to license culture and art that has some chance of being backed by a major company. Yes, we won't have the 3.6 million bullshit little authors and artists that we have now, but hey, that's a small price to pay for maturing an industry into something actually $$$.
I think you are a troll.
Copyright clearly doesn't work.
Why?
I think Copyrights work fine. What you write is automatically protected at no cost. It works the same for everyone, small and big.
Enforcement can be difficult, but patents would not solve that. And the continuous extending of the rights after the author has died needs to stop.
The only argument Stallman makes is that patents should not be overly broad.
No, he argues why authors (of text or software) are not helped by patents. And why patents (monopolies) hinders development for authors.
This does not mean the amature programmer has to suffer. Free and Open Source Software can continue to produce new and innovative things, just like amatures do in automobile, aerospace, radio and other industries already covered by international patents.
FOSS authors have already been threatened by patent holders even when the FOSS authors fully own the copyright on their own code and has not pirated any code. By allowing software patents, software authors lose the right to their own work. And unlike "mature" industries, the software author can reach a large audience on the internet, competing with big business. Of course big business will use their patent monopolies to censor independent authors if they threaten their bottom lines.
Personally, I'd like to see the copyright system not be applied to software.
So that everyone could pirate any software they liked? Windows, Photoshop, etc?
Or so that M$ could rip off any independent developer and include their code in Windows without having to pay any royalties? Please explain.
The kind of argument Stallman makes about patents not being a good fit for literature can also be made for why copyright is not a good fit for automobiles or planes.
Well, copyright is not appropriate for automobiles and planes. What is your point?
And you must upgrade the player to have UMS. I had to borrow a Windows machine from a friend to do that, so be warned.
The OGG support is good but you must stay within the 96kbps to 225 kbps range. Encode your files like this:The player don't have any support for playlists. And it doesn't sort the files in a directory. I name all my songs with a tracknumber first, so if I play the songs in alphabetical order, I get them in the track order on the album. But when you save files on the iRiver, they are stored in inode (!) order, and are not sorted. So to preserve ordering I transfer directories (albums) to the iRiver like this:The transfer speed with UMS is somewhat slow. Also, with the UMS upgrade, the maximum recording rate is 96kbps. But since I don't use the device for recording I don't care.
The battery life is excellent. I use the same battery for weeks! With OGG, the battery life is reduced somewhat but is still very good.
And the most important thing: The sound is very good. Especially if you get a better headset.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. The video (in TFA) did not use "two-tone" signalling, but straight single-tone morse code keyed with an ordinary bug. I have certainly heard morse code faster that in the Leno show, but I have not heard any two-tone morse signalling being used anywhere.
What you seem to propose (?) is some kind of frequency modulation. This is more complex than the simple CW mode that morse code uses and seems to defeat the purpose of using morse code as you correctly described in your original article.
Have you seen an "advanced dual-tone key" being used anywhere?
You need only a very simple transmitter, and since it can be done in a binary fashion (just tones and silence, they were using a more advanced dual-tone key which allows for faster transmission) it can be transmitted successfully even with extremely poor signal-noise ratios.
The "simple transmitter" is normally just sending a carrier wave at a fixed frequency. So you don't send "tones" as such. You just switch the transmitter on or off. Since the resulting bandwith is very narrow, the receiver can have a very narrow bandpass filter (300Hz?) so that anything else is filtered out.
And I don't think anyone uses an "advanced dual tone key" system. What they used on the show was a bug (and not a morse key which is pictured on the web link). Press the paddle right, and it will send continuous dashes. Press it left and it will send dots. With some training, timing and fine tuning you can send morse quite quickly without much hand movement.
Letting the icons show the contents of the file...
Renaming the My Documents folder to just Documents...
KDE has had all of this for years, and MS is just copying as usual. What's next? Will they ship with a bash console?
if you tell me that it is because the Gimp is part of the OS, let me tell you that it is NOT, and you CAN install it on Windows too, so no, there is no point comparing them!
Of course you can install stuff on a plain Windows XP installation to make it usable. Just look here.
It's bollocks though because a movie is not technical. It cannot provide any technical contribution.
This is the standard patent lawyer answer to this story. But then, I have to ask, what does "technical contribution" have to do with what's patentable under the EPC? That term is not to be found anywhere in the laws that governs patentability. It is something the patent lawyers have invented themselves.
Can you show me a law (not a praxis written by the patent lawyers) that define patentability relative the term "technical contribution"?
Since the current law forbids the pateting on both software, books and films, but the lawyers and EPO bend the rules to allow the patents anyway, can you now patent your film?
This text is a bit old, but a good read anyway.
Enjoy!
What's a normal computer?
As with most laws, the devil is in the detail. Law-writers have dealt with this kind of problems before and can do it with computers too.
What I mean is that a PC, a server and a PDA is a computer. A device meant to accept programs written by other people.
Anyway, you can state that the act of authoring, publishing and downloading software is never a patent infringement without defining a "Computer". Only (perhaps) the act of executing software needs such a definition. And by mentioning examples of common computers, running software on these devices could come out clear and be legal.
So I think you can get quite far with this approach.
They just have to word the laws right. Something along the lines of under no circumstances whatsoever shall patents be granted software, algorithms, business methods, or mathematical expressions, techniques or constructs.
The law already pretty much says that (barring the words "circumstances", "whatsoever"). But the patent lawyers and the EPO bend the rules anyway. See here.
What about one-click? That could be a business process. Are those patentable in the EU?
According to the European patent convention, neither software nor business methods can be patented. But the patent lawyers work with the Patent Office to bend the rules and grant the patents anyway. So this is an established praxis. Now they want the politicians to turn this praxis into law so that the patents that are already granted gets a firmer foundation.
About the Amazon patents in Europe
About the EPC (European Patent Convention)
Well, the software patenting lobby never uses the phrase "software patents". No, they merely want "computer implemented inventions" to have the same protections as other inventions in the industry. Most inventions produced by industry today have software in it. Like car braking systems. If they can't patent software, they can't innovate in (for example) car braking systems, they say.
The solution of course is to allow patents on the car breaking system. If something novel is happening there (outside of the software) then it should be allowed. It shouldn't matter whether the system is controlled by software or a black box full of small midgets.
Another solution: Allow the patents, but make it absolutely clear that no patent can be infringed on by writing, publishing, downloading or using software on a normal computer.
I'm not from the US and now I have to get this explained. I'm not trolling. I can't really understand how SSNs are supposed to work.
The SSN seems to be a number identifying a person. (We have that where I live too.) But somehow, this number is assumed to be secret, like a password. If yout can learn the number you can access anything about the person and you also seem to be able to hurt the person financially. Withdraw funds? The security seems to revolve around the fact that the number (the identity of the person) is secret! Because everyone here seems to be upset that these kids expose all those numbers!?!? This boggles my mind.
Are there no other attempts at authentication? IDs? If your SSN is your password, how do you change it? (I would like to have it changed several times a year, no matter what if there is no other security than secrecy.) Can someone explain?
Last time I bought a laptop with Windows preinstalled, I immediately replaced the hard disk when I received it. When the keyboard needed a replacement some 18 months later, I just swapped the old HD back in before sending the machine to guarantee repair. This procedure allowed me to:
- Replace the orignal 6GB HD with a 30GB one (this was a couple of years ago).
- Avoid fuss about me running Linux. The repair shop would see my virgin Windows HD.
- Have my data safe when sending the machine away.
I, for one, welcome our new thought master.
It works like this:This has been in VMS since the mid 80-ies. The sysadmin can also mandate SET PASS/GEN and set a maximum password lifetime (after which the user has to set a new password before logging in).
This concept could be easily modernized with non-alphabetical characters and longer passwords.
Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors.
And by releasing Solaris under CDDL which is not GPL compatible, they cannot use the thousands of GPL-based drivers included in Linux.
Why are they limiting themselves in this fashion?
Linux works on all sorts of hardware, and a huge part of the development effort for Linux has been writing and testing thousands of device drivers. Solaris doesn't have nearly as much support, especially for oddball devices.
:-(
So Solaris runs best on machines configured and sold by Sun-the-hardware-manufacturer? Instead of cheap oddball machines? I'm afraid Sun might think this is a feature and not a bug.
Here is why using a stronger crypto or longer keys is not always the answer. The design of the system around it matters too.
There is a Swedish on-line shop that has an excellent product landscape viewer here.
;-)
This is a Java applet that lets you turn a number of knobs to find out which screen matches your need. Very nice! And don't be intimidated by the Swedish on the site, it's not that hard to understand!
Do you remember the three-pound Epson HX-20 from 1982
Yes! That was a neat machine. A built-in printer! And a BASIC interpreter in ROM. I developed some programs on that computer for a biotech company. But I quickly ran out of memory for the BASIC programs. To save memory, you could stack several BASIC commands on one line and use one or two-letter variable names. Ugh!
So I wrote a program translator on the VAX/VMS system that the company had. (The VAX had a gigantic 2 megabytes of main memory!) The translator took my readable BASIC programs and compressed them to barely readable but compact programs for the HX-20. Computing was much more interesting in those days!