This is exactly what I mean by tell-tail. While it may indicate something's fishy, it doesn't prove much unless there's an awful lot or the violators are very careless (like forgetting to remove the original program's name). Heck, purely algorithmic code may have not have any strings at all.
Java decompilers are quite excellent at producing almost exactly the same source code as was there to begin with (minus comments).
Actually this is a pretty good argument for using a language like Java for GPL projects. One of the big arguments I often hear about the GPL is how can you really tell when someone's violating? A fully compiled program may only leave tell-tail and often deniable traces, but Java's much harder to hide.
Considering MP3.com never paid one dime of production costs and isn't specifically promoting any of the artists, I really doubt that's a relevant point.
The royalties are based only on how often the song is played and follows the same agreement MP3.com offered back when people first submitted their song. No one's going to make much off it I'm sure, but has no terms like you're referring to (where the producers give you money up front then deduct any costs from the proceeds).
Given the size of the catalog, I'd guess any particular artist will probably only get very limited play; but then again, since most of the stuff on MP3.com was usually just some 12 year old screaming "taco taco taco" into a microphone, I wonder how much is really useable.
I haven't used Gimp in awhile - so tell me is it still missing the ability to do connected line segments with the selection tool, or is it still just "freehand"? It's one of those simple, yet utterly useful features many casual users never notice; but for me at least, making a pixel-accurate selection with a mouse is impossible without it.
That's what struck me when I first used Gimp - while it had many of the features visible on Photoshop's menus, it missed many "hidden" options that only come into play, say, when you hold down a CTRL or ALT key. Unfortunately, stuff like that is what makes Photoshop really shine once you get beyond the novice level.
That's just the thing. NAT may of been originally to conserve IPs, but anymore it's become an important part of most firewalls. That may of been a side-effect, but I doubt people will want to give it up - especially on large LANs.
Of course actually having inbound connection access to each device in a LAN would be a security nightmare, so something will still have to firewall them off. I wonder how IP6 addresses are or will be allocated? I'd hope that you could get a large contiguous block with all the IP's you'll likely ever need. If not, firewalling countless random chunks of IP6 address space might be quite a pain without any sort of NAT.
Hm, is NAT not possible on IP6? Otherwise just because it's an option, I still don't think many places will give up their NAT firewalls. Who wants everything on the LAN directly accessible to the world? Even if you could still firewall inbound connections, just knowing the IPs reveals network layout hidden by NAT.
Yes the article points out you can get behind a firewall, but like the old saw goes - just because a burglar may pick a lock doesn't mean you should leave your doors wide open (or, to extend the analogy, bolt down every valuable you have instead).
No, you're missing the point completely. using GnuPG you *want* the person on the other end to decrypt it freely - just no one else. What the music industry wants is completely different. They want the person on the other end to only be able to decrypt it when, where, and how often they choose.
The problem is if you can decrypt it even once, you have an unencrypted copy. DRM counts on a closed client to restrict what you can do with it at that point.
Pointless - if an open source program like video lan can decrypt and play the file, it could just as easily be rigged to save it out in any unencrypted format you choose.
Also, any hardware tie-ins (as a few others mentioned) are null and void because that depends on the player actually bothering to check it.
It's why Open Source and DRM don't really mix. The end user has to be given everything needed to decrypt the file in order to ever play it. DRM just counts on closed client software to obscure the process - at least until MS gets their way and moves decryption into the PC's hardware itself.
Sadly, good news for trojan and virus writers
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Really, who actually calls Microsoft for support anymore? It's both expensive and usually an act of futility. Even the non-computer savvy usually call Dell or whoever they bought their PCs from instead.
The real problem is there will be no new patches and maybe old patches will no longer be available from windows update. The big reason it's a problem is people *won't* upgrade just because of this. Most hardly care about patches now, but may at least be coaxed into running windows update now and again.
This won't push the holdouts over to XP (which they probably don't even have a new enough computer to run well) - it'll just result in even *more* unpatched trojan-friendly PC out there.
So, how long will it be before suppliers decide not to do business with Dell? If they're really that bad then it can't be worth the cost no matter how big of a buyer they are. Letting them go to the competition and bleed them dry instead might be a good business strategy.
Well, if you want the FSF to defend GPL violations of your software then, essentially, yes - you've got to play by their rules. If you don't like their vision, you're welcome to keep the copyright and defend it yourself, but why would you expect *any* third party with claim of copyright on the infringing code to do it for you?
Just because you have an "unsubscribe" address doesn't mean your not a spammer - not by a long shot. If your "list" doesn't 1) only send to people who sign up and 2) send out a confirm email wait for their reply before sending anything else, then it's fair game to be blacklisted as spam.
Seriously, it doesn't take a genius to write a virus/worm that take advantage of the latest virus/worm-problem, patches the local system, spends 30 minutes attacking spammers and spreading to other infected systems, after which it just erases itself.
Actually why not just replace the open relay created by the virus to something that fires off an abuse report to the ISP of anyone that tries to send mail through it?
Well, capitalism at least plays to the greed angle. Companies battle it out with each other pitting one faction's greed against another's. Problem is, it only works as long as no one faction wins the battle.
It's one thing confuses me about this submission. How is the fact that less connections are coming from browsers indicative of IM replacing email? That's a different app altogether unless you're using webmail. I'd think you could make more of a case for IM replacing IRC or talk. Sure there's some overlap, but really I think email serves a differnet need.
At any rate, it's a "good thing" people are finding other uses for their net connections besides just web surfing. The more the fully all the features of TCP/IP are used the harder it becomes for ISPs to "AOL-ize" our connectivity. For example, if we had this earlier we might not be cursed with so many broadand accounts with no upstream bandwidth. The only reason it came about was because the current systems were designed around the notion that most people would just surf and download.
Has any country truly been communist? They all seem to become dictatorships in the end. It seems to be the fundimental flaw with communism - it sounds nice on paper, but forgets what selfish bastards we humans can be. Someone will always play the system to take power.
You know it's odd, but the thing that may protect bittorrent most may actually be that it's not anonymous.
One of the big complaints about Napster was that there was no good way to control what people shared - the only way to stop any particular song from being spread was to shut down the whole server.
On the other hand with BT all you need do is takedown the infringing torrent - it's easy to control on a file-by-file basis. In that way it's much more like traditional HTTP or FTP.
programmers are trying to develop other protocols which attempt to preserve IP anonymity. Bitttorrent is actually one of the few new technologies that does an excellent job of this, however it's being used more as P2P software, something it really wasn't designed do it.
BitTorrent makes no attempt to preserve IP anonymity. If anything, it's centralized tracker works more like napster. It's great for serving up large files on limited bandwidth, but was never intended to be anonymous.
People generally hate reading PDFs - and not without reason. I guess they're ok if you really do intend to print everything out (and the person making the PDF knew enough lay out the page properly), but they're one of the most all time user-unfriendly formats to read on a computer. Usually to see the font clearly, you have to zoom in close enough to need horizontal scrolling, and the page to page movement is rather distracting.
That being said, people sending documents love PDF because it's simple. Actually most of the time they'd be happier with HTML, except it often requires a group of multiple files which can be a pain to send easily as an attachment.
If you're developing for the Windows then I'd say sure - go with NET. Microsoft will welcome you.
However, if you think using NET on a non MS OS is a safe bet then think again. Without a solid guarantee that it will always be unencumbered and patent free, the open source community would be putting a noose around its neck and trusting Microsoft not to pull the lever.
It's not a trivial matter to just move years worth of code to a new language. You're of course free to take that risk if you choose, but didn't your parents warn you about taking candy from strangers?
This is always said in regard to the patent issue, but does being an "ISO standard" automatically mean there's no patent issues? Unless it's explicitly required to be unencumbered for standardization, I don't see why it's relevant to the patent issue.
In any case, Microsoft has no reason to crack down now as it would just hurt NET's adoption. However, they could just be waiting for enough people to depend on it before playing their patent card.
I've seen some NET proponents fall back on the rather shaky belief that "Microsoft doesn't have a history of abusing patents that way."
Relying on the "goodness" of any company in this way is a bit foolish - especially so after the recent FAT32 flack. Many a company has been burned by thinking they could trust Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually they both probally hire out from the same "Rent-a-Rally" service.
...and it was also denied by the makers of KiSS.
This is exactly what I mean by tell-tail. While it may indicate something's fishy, it doesn't prove much unless there's an awful lot or the violators are very careless (like forgetting to remove the original program's name). Heck, purely algorithmic code may have not have any strings at all.
Considering MP3.com never paid one dime of production costs and isn't specifically promoting any of the artists, I really doubt that's a relevant point.
The royalties are based only on how often the song is played and follows the same agreement MP3.com offered back when people first submitted their song. No one's going to make much off it I'm sure, but has no terms like you're referring to (where the producers give you money up front then deduct any costs from the proceeds).
Given the size of the catalog, I'd guess any particular artist will probably only get very limited play; but then again, since most of the stuff on MP3.com was usually just some 12 year old screaming "taco taco taco" into a microphone, I wonder how much is really useable.
I haven't used Gimp in awhile - so tell me is it still missing the ability to do connected line segments with the selection tool, or is it still just "freehand"? It's one of those simple, yet utterly useful features many casual users never notice; but for me at least, making a pixel-accurate selection with a mouse is impossible without it.
That's what struck me when I first used Gimp - while it had many of the features visible on Photoshop's menus, it missed many "hidden" options that only come into play, say, when you hold down a CTRL or ALT key. Unfortunately, stuff like that is what makes Photoshop really shine once you get beyond the novice level.
That's just the thing. NAT may of been originally to conserve IPs, but anymore it's become an important part of most firewalls. That may of been a side-effect, but I doubt people will want to give it up - especially on large LANs.
Of course actually having inbound connection access to each device in a LAN would be a security nightmare, so something will still have to firewall them off. I wonder how IP6 addresses are or will be allocated? I'd hope that you could get a large contiguous block with all the IP's you'll likely ever need. If not, firewalling countless random chunks of IP6 address space might be quite a pain without any sort of NAT.
Hm, is NAT not possible on IP6? Otherwise just because it's an option, I still don't think many places will give up their NAT firewalls. Who wants everything on the LAN directly accessible to the world? Even if you could still firewall inbound connections, just knowing the IPs reveals network layout hidden by NAT.
Yes the article points out you can get behind a firewall, but like the old saw goes - just because a burglar may pick a lock doesn't mean you should leave your doors wide open (or, to extend the analogy, bolt down every valuable you have instead).
No, you're missing the point completely. using GnuPG you *want* the person on the other end to decrypt it freely - just no one else. What the music industry wants is completely different. They want the person on the other end to only be able to decrypt it when, where, and how often they choose.
The problem is if you can decrypt it even once, you have an unencrypted copy. DRM counts on a closed client to restrict what you can do with it at that point.
Pointless - if an open source program like video lan can decrypt and play the file, it could just as easily be rigged to save it out in any unencrypted format you choose.
Also, any hardware tie-ins (as a few others mentioned) are null and void because that depends on the player actually bothering to check it.
It's why Open Source and DRM don't really mix. The end user has to be given everything needed to decrypt the file in order to ever play it. DRM just counts on closed client software to obscure the process - at least until MS gets their way and moves decryption into the PC's hardware itself.
Really, who actually calls Microsoft for support anymore? It's both expensive and usually an act of futility. Even the non-computer savvy usually call Dell or whoever they bought their PCs from instead.
The real problem is there will be no new patches and maybe old patches will no longer be available from windows update. The big reason it's a problem is people *won't* upgrade just because of this. Most hardly care about patches now, but may at least be coaxed into running windows update now and again.
This won't push the holdouts over to XP (which they probably don't even have a new enough computer to run well) - it'll just result in even *more* unpatched trojan-friendly PC out there.
So, how long will it be before suppliers decide not to do business with Dell? If they're really that bad then it can't be worth the cost no matter how big of a buyer they are. Letting them go to the competition and bleed them dry instead might be a good business strategy.
oops, make that "without claim"
Well, if you want the FSF to defend GPL violations of your software then, essentially, yes - you've got to play by their rules. If you don't like their vision, you're welcome to keep the copyright and defend it yourself, but why would you expect *any* third party with claim of copyright on the infringing code to do it for you?
Just because you have an "unsubscribe" address doesn't mean your not a spammer - not by a long shot. If your "list" doesn't 1) only send to people who sign up and 2) send out a confirm email wait for their reply before sending anything else, then it's fair game to be blacklisted as spam.
Yes are remember January 9th is national "take a mafioso to lunch" day. Let your local racketeer know you love him!
Actually why not just replace the open relay created by the virus to something that fires off an abuse report to the ISP of anyone that tries to send mail through it?
Well, capitalism at least plays to the greed angle. Companies battle it out with each other pitting one faction's greed against another's. Problem is, it only works as long as no one faction wins the battle.
It's one thing confuses me about this submission. How is the fact that less connections are coming from browsers indicative of IM replacing email? That's a different app altogether unless you're using webmail. I'd think you could make more of a case for IM replacing IRC or talk. Sure there's some overlap, but really I think email serves a differnet need.
At any rate, it's a "good thing" people are finding other uses for their net connections besides just web surfing. The more the fully all the features of TCP/IP are used the harder it becomes for ISPs to "AOL-ize" our connectivity. For example, if we had this earlier we might not be cursed with so many broadand accounts with no upstream bandwidth. The only reason it came about was because the current systems were designed around the notion that most people would just surf and download.
Has any country truly been communist? They all seem to become dictatorships in the end. It seems to be the fundimental flaw with communism - it sounds nice on paper, but forgets what selfish bastards we humans can be. Someone will always play the system to take power.
You know it's odd, but the thing that may protect bittorrent most may actually be that it's not anonymous.
One of the big complaints about Napster was that there was no good way to control what people shared - the only way to stop any particular song from being spread was to shut down the whole server.
On the other hand with BT all you need do is takedown the infringing torrent - it's easy to control on a file-by-file basis. In that way it's much more like traditional HTTP or FTP.
BitTorrent makes no attempt to preserve IP anonymity. If anything, it's centralized tracker works more like napster. It's great for serving up large files on limited bandwidth, but was never intended to be anonymous.
People generally hate reading PDFs - and not without reason. I guess they're ok if you really do intend to print everything out (and the person making the PDF knew enough lay out the page properly), but they're one of the most all time user-unfriendly formats to read on a computer. Usually to see the font clearly, you have to zoom in close enough to need horizontal scrolling, and the page to page movement is rather distracting.
That being said, people sending documents love PDF because it's simple. Actually most of the time they'd be happier with HTML, except it often requires a group of multiple files which can be a pain to send easily as an attachment.
It pan-handles the question - who's the father of "historic" computing then? Also, who's the second cousin on the mother's side?
If you're developing for the Windows then I'd say sure - go with NET. Microsoft will welcome you.
However, if you think using NET on a non MS OS is a safe bet then think again. Without a solid guarantee that it will always be unencumbered and patent free, the open source community would be putting a noose around its neck and trusting Microsoft not to pull the lever.
It's not a trivial matter to just move years worth of code to a new language. You're of course free to take that risk if you choose, but didn't your parents warn you about taking candy from strangers?
This is always said in regard to the patent issue, but does being an "ISO standard" automatically mean there's no patent issues? Unless it's explicitly required to be unencumbered for standardization, I don't see why it's relevant to the patent issue.
In any case, Microsoft has no reason to crack down now as it would just hurt NET's adoption. However, they could just be waiting for enough people to depend on it before playing their patent card.
I've seen some NET proponents fall back on the rather shaky belief that "Microsoft doesn't have a history of abusing patents that way."
Relying on the "goodness" of any company in this way is a bit foolish - especially so after the recent FAT32 flack. Many a company has been burned by thinking they could trust Microsoft.