My point was that with if linux wasn't so damn picky about running precompiled binaries then someone would have made a closed source dvd player for linux.
Since the original poster seemed unconcered with the licensing of such a player then this would be perfectly acceptable.
Legally the lawyers hope the CSS is a closed algorithm and as such they want any implementation of it to be closed source.
Linux unfortunately doesn't cater for people who want to release closed source software at all well.
The internet was originally designed to be peer to peer but large corporations have pretty much forced it into a starlike formation where end users have tiny little pipes and upstream there are vast backbones.
The problem with giving end users 100mbit connections is that large corporations would need terabit ones and they just plain dont exist (not over any long distance).
Also think how chunky a server you'd need to serve out DVD quality video to a few hundred users.
However the peer-to-peer model decentralises file distribution which is exactly what's needed.
However in an attempt to block this you 100mbit connection will probably still have a 128kbit upstream (since that's all anyone needs).
Anyway web surfing will not be that fast down a 100mbit line since the protocol is inherantly latent. I've surfed the web from a machine on a 100mbit connection to the UK's academic network and it's still no faster than my 512kbit cable modem.
However you haven't traded mp3s until you've shifted an album in under a minute to someone on the otherside of the country;)
1. I have a computer
2. I do have a DVD drive
3. I run windows
Now for the kicker:
I will not run linux until I can use it for DVDs
So the MPAA is cutting out part of linux's marketshare. What a fscking stupid argument.
Perhaps if linux would get it's act together and get binary compatability sorted so we could run non-opensourced (shock horror) code on it, then things like this would be more likely to exist.
Ok just for the reference I have both a linux and a windows machine, and neither do have dvd drives but maybe my point still stands
Ummm you already can run napster over this. Just connect your windoze box (or vmware) to your linux box and have linux do some NAT routing over the virtual device.
Anyway why dont u just run napster on the machine that you were going to run your fake nameserver on and be done with it?
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 2
But it still requires that we have a server and its yet one more seperate site for users to check and login to.
We really would like to have it integrated to the existing/. so we dont have to worry about each country putting it's own server up with it's own code and username/passwords.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 2
I'm aware that it had been mentioned however it seems to be in comparatively low doses.
By the earlier posts the full implications of the unpassed rip act were comparatively unknown.
Then in the run up to it being passed by parliament when lobbying would have been most effective my stories were all killed.
Then the day after it got passed they put a story roughly saying "Someone should have done something about this"
The US bias here does seem a little strong and I dont really see any reason why we cant have a few more stories posted to cater for more diverse countries and interests.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
Nice idea, but on the whole I dont reside in my home constituancy. But throwing him off balance does sound good especially since i've never liked the man and didn't vote for him:)
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 2
I know how you feel about that. There was very little said in the uk about RiP before it passed through parliament.
What really pisses me off is that here on slashdot I attempted to get them to run three stories about the RiP bill. Alerting ppl and point to the stand website and yet I was kicked out in favour of robot dogs running linux and playing GPL football
There are too few ppl on here that care and more that would just rather download gigabytes of mp3s and claim it's thier action.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 3
Did you read the article? Wake up and smell the roses, pal. The corps and lawyers don't think they rule the 'Net, but they're taking steps to make sure that they will do.
Oh i'm sorry I forgot when the lawyers stand up there and argue their cases that that isn't what they really believe... my mistake.
Napster does piss me off a bit too but i'm not really bothered by the copyright issues and couldn't give a flying f**K if napster go out of business - I do care about the issue that service providers and software engineers can be held liable for what their product is used for.
DeCSS is a particularly good example since the work to complete it was done in norway - which should be out of the reach of greedy american lawyers... wrong again.
And then there's the mdma anti-proliferation bill in the us - trying to make it illegal to spread information about ecstasy. It's not about drugs it's about control, and yet the media aren't having a big outcry about free speech because this government mock war on drugs is more important.
As for the RIP act in my own country. I'm nothing short of appalled. I've written to my member of parliament but to no avail - didn't even acknowledge me. The problem is of course that one individual or even 50 individuals make no difference. If the entire UK readership of/. had faxed their mps then we would quite like have got a far better deal out of RIP. But we didn't.
The lesson we need to learn is that we should stand up and make ourselves and our opinions known.
It's a very nice langauge for developing little scripts in but any big project i've attempted just becomes a mess. Perhaps it doesn't lend itself to my rather random and unplanned programming style.
As for trying to interpret a script you wrote 3 weeks ago, thats hard. But someone elses.... you must be joking:)
Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
The american corporations and legal system that seem to think they reign supreme over the internet.
Perhaps this is an unfair parallel to draw but american lawyers seem to be coming in and tearing down our world. Perhaps like the european 'pioneers' did to the native americans.
All you have to do is intercept that polygon data at the level where the driver sends it to the graphics card and translate it into opengl.
You dont need to figure out how the card works... only the interface to it.
The other approach is to register a new DirectX device which translates the calls into OpenGL calls. DirectX is an fairly open platform in that it would be unusable if MS wouldn't say which functions were needed.
RSA today announced that they have recruited some of the lawyers involved in defending the MPAA's CSS scheme.
They hope that with legal backing they can extend the patent on their algorithm indefinitely. Also they have found (looking back at their patent) that they own all public key cryptography patents and anyone infringing on them will be forced to pay up. Anyone refusing will be struck down - i'm told adi shamir is quite hot with a minigun:)
Is anyone else concerned about just how much heat this will kick out into your system.
A week or two back I put a Voodoo5 V5500 into my system along with a second 7200rpm drive, and now despite having extra fans having those two along with my Celeron300@464mhz i need to run with the case off.
Now i'm not much of a gamer - the v5500 was about the only card around the £140 (uk pounds) price tag that had decent win2k drivers - but if it takes about an hour of normal windows usage to have my motherboard temp hit 50C (120-something F) surely anyone playing games on it would toast it.
Now imagine twice the Gpus and twice the heat...
I think soon we'll find graphics subsystems coming in a seperate box and at this rate it'll soon be bigger than your pc and require its own 3 phase power feed from a deadicated nukelea-r generator (homer's running mine:).
But for something like VMWARE to support DirectX for 3d is not anywhere near as difficult as you would like to make out.
VMWare emulates at hardware level. That means that what they have to emulate is something like a TNT or Voodoo chipset.
That way you install Win98 on your vmware machine and it promptly detects that you have a TNT2, and starts sending polygon data to it - which linux's OpenGL then renders.
That still requires that DirectX works in the MS os too tho.
I have fairly regularly used Realproducer and Realplayer since version 5. Never had any particualrly serious crashes from them.
I can easily get 3 or 4 days uptime from my Win2k system which is permanantly connected to the net, handling email, icq, my own custom written webcam software, quite often realproducer streaming audio and video (which it's also capturing).
I've got two usb webcams, usb scanner, usb printer, bt848 based videocapture, a celeron clocked to within an inch of it's life. My memory is running at over 100mhz which is it's max rating.
I'm running software raid, I burn cds, *constantly* decode mp3s (usually from network volumes or shoutcast servers), surf the web, develop websites, program in delphi, design stuff in flash.
I change my hardware round regularly - adding or upgrading peripherals at least monthly if not weekly.
I've never had a workstation as stable as mine is now doing as much as mine does now, and if any one out there can suggest a better platform for me then go for it!!!
(i run solaris at work and linux at home too though - i'm just not keen on them as workstation os's)
Given that there is all this typical argument for and against operating systems I just thought i'd shed a little light on my first perceptions of operating systems.
I first came into contact with MacOS in 1986 (aged 6) and found it a dream to use and everything fell easily into place. Certainly it was missing multitasking (and still to some extent is) but for me it set my definition of what easy to use should be.
I came into contact with dos about 2 years later and despite having to learn a few simple commands on the whole it was pretty damn easy.
Until Win95 came along I largely avoided windows (mainly cos of the hefty boot up times). I did use Win31 to do some programming in Delphi but that was about it.
Win95 however really did impress me. It felt fast, responsive, crashed less than 3.1 did and had an impeccable user interface. Against all my expectations it did detect all my hardware (except for my EEProm burner but that was no surprise).
Then in early 1996 I encountered linux. Slackware. It was nothing short of appaling.
The installation process was difficult and obscure, the hardware support was miserable. The documentation was crap.
I gave up.
It was another 3 years before I got linux functioning to any real extend and only now do I feel comfortable configuring it.
My experience with it is that it is pretty damn easy to break. When it comes to installing new hardware in Win2k I plug it in, turn on, and in most cases it's there and working on the first boot. With linux I seem to have to mess about recompiling the kernel (especially if it's for anything strange like sound, videocapture or usb support). And linux seems to be a lot less forgiving than windows of crap drivers.
Incidentally I have never seen any software that can take down win2k. One or two programs do appear to have memory and resource holes that drain the systems power away slowly but if you restart those apps then it springs back.
Equally to be fair to linux it very rarely crashes. When we stepped back down to a single cpu our uptimes went from about 2 hours -> 2 months which is pretty impressive. However Win2k supports dual cpu arrangements out of the box... no problems there (unless u have an aureal vortex:)
Curiously as testament to Windows 95 I have a laptop here running winroute (didn't have time to set linux up on it) and that has only crashed once in 17 weeks now. That's running a stock Win95 Original Release, Netgear FA410 Drivers and Webgear Aviator 2.4 drivers (along with the usual graphics ones), and Winroute as well... and it is stable as a rock.
Perhaps this really does give credit to the fact that Win95 itself is pretty stable and that applications and drivers drag it down.
And why doesn't windows execute things with the same level of protection that linux does.... because most users would rather the speed of windows to the stability of linux.
Put the flamethrowers down tho:) I know linux is fast at a lot of things... but when it comes to graphics it generally sucks. Try scrolling down a web page with a couple of java applets and maybe some dhtml animation... it's slow on linux - then try it in IE5.5 and you really will feel the difference.
And i'm not running win2k on any dream machine - just a celeron 300 cranked to 464mhz, 128 mb ram, 40gb disk and a v5500.
And running linux on a pii450, 192mb ram, 90gb disk and a tnt.
It looks cool to appear as graha.ms@graha.ms and clearly identifies who I am to people who know me. It instills a far greater level of trust that I am who I claim to be than if i appear as ~graham@modem13813.uranium.pol.co.uk or any other freeserve like address.
4. Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public, or downloading a sound recording from an Internet site, even if the recording isn't resold. Online piracy may now also include certain uses of 'streaming' technologies from the Internet.
First of all they make the distinction between uploading, downloading and streaming. In pure TCP/IP terms all these acts are the same... a uni-directional flow of data yet they single out these three practises. However gnutella is a lot more focussed on 'transferring' - seems fine to me.
4. Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public
So if for example I upload a file to a site... that's fine. So provided it isn't me that makes the file I upload publically available then its perfectly ok. So now when I upload a file to geocities i do nothing wrong, and similarly when geocities ftpd sets the file world readable it does nothing wrong.... no piracy there.
downloading a sound recording from an Internet site
The word 'site' typically only descibes passive services like websites & ftp sites. Napster on the other hand is more interactive and typically you would say "Napseter Server" or "Napster User" and not "Napster Site". If someone talked about a napster site I would immediately think of this one.
Online piracy may now also include certain uses of 'streaming' technologies from the Internet.
It may now!!!. Sounds to me like "Streaming didn't used to be a crime but we are going to pretend it is one now" or perhaps they mean "We dont really know whether it is or not".
Really if those are the definitions we are up against i find it hard to believe the lawyers, who are much scorned for bending the words of legislation against the spirit that legislation was created in, cant come up with a half decent defence.
Well the main use is if you want to IRC from a certain hostname. IRCd checks when u connect that your forward and reverse dns match so that means if you want a custom hostname - you need your own ip.
Also as a demon customer (although i use blueyonder hi-speed at my flat, BT at my parents and Lineone on my mobile) actually we just keep demon for email:) i'd like to see them improve the webmail service since it's been in testing for about 3 years now and should be nearing maturity.
The problem is that it doesn't work. I would reckon about 60% of dvd players sold in the UK are either zoneless or have easy hacks to make them so. Some will even resample NTSC dvds to give proper PAL output.
Films in the UK sometimes take a VERY VERY long time to get out. I'm pretty sure I saw EdTV on cabletv in canda over 6 months before it's uk theatre release (that was only 3 or 4 months ago).
The zoning system allows studios to release to a sample audience (typically the us and canada) and if the film fails then they haven't wasted the expense of promoting it globally.
The problem is that UK DVDs are generally of quite poor standards. It is not unusual to see mpeg encoding defects in them. They frequently lack the extended features found in US discs. They often lack multilingual soundtracks. It is not at all easy to buy a disc in the uk with a DTS encoded soundtrack for high end 5.1 speaker systems.
I prefer US DVDs for these reasons alone. Add to that the fact that they are typically released a few months earlier and cost quite a bit less and you can see the problems.
Perhaps the worst UK dvd I came across was that of the film 'Human Traffic'. I thought they had come up with some ultra cunning way of defeating DeCSS only to find that the disc wasn't even CSS'd in the first place:)
Interestly enough i'm not sure if that film was ever released in the USA since it came from a uk studio (afaik) and was banned in several other countries because of recreational drug use in it.
The MPAA dont want to adapt. They dont want to face a world where they have to do a simultaneous worldwide launch to films. They dont want the profit loss they would have by selling dvds at US prices the world over. Just like the RIAA dont want a world where artist dont need to be signed to make money.
What I fail to see though, as other users have commented, is what a US judgement would do to UK consumers. Perhaps it might set a precedent but we dont have a DCMA. We do however have a right to disassemble software, and also to free speech.
Why dont the UK arm of 2600 take over decss distribution?
Then again they manage to arrest johansen in norway... bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that with if linux wasn't so damn picky about running precompiled binaries then someone would have made a closed source dvd player for linux.
Since the original poster seemed unconcered with the licensing of such a player then this would be perfectly acceptable.
Legally the lawyers hope the CSS is a closed algorithm and as such they want any implementation of it to be closed source.
Linux unfortunately doesn't cater for people who want to release closed source software at all well.
The internet was originally designed to be peer to peer but large corporations have pretty much forced it into a starlike formation where end users have tiny little pipes and upstream there are vast backbones.
;)
The problem with giving end users 100mbit connections is that large corporations would need terabit ones and they just plain dont exist (not over any long distance).
Also think how chunky a server you'd need to serve out DVD quality video to a few hundred users.
However the peer-to-peer model decentralises file distribution which is exactly what's needed.
However in an attempt to block this you 100mbit connection will probably still have a 128kbit upstream (since that's all anyone needs).
Anyway web surfing will not be that fast down a 100mbit line since the protocol is inherantly latent. I've surfed the web from a machine on a 100mbit connection to the UK's academic network and it's still no faster than my 512kbit cable modem.
However you haven't traded mp3s until you've shifted an album in under a minute to someone on the otherside of the country
A few more facts:
1. I have a computer
2. I do have a DVD drive
3. I run windows
Now for the kicker:
I will not run linux until I can use it for DVDs
So the MPAA is cutting out part of linux's marketshare. What a fscking stupid argument.
Perhaps if linux would get it's act together and get binary compatability sorted so we could run non-opensourced (shock horror) code on it, then things like this would be more likely to exist.
Ok just for the reference I have both a linux and a windows machine, and neither do have dvd drives but maybe my point still stands
Ummm you already can run napster over this. Just connect your windoze box (or vmware) to your linux box and have linux do some NAT routing over the virtual device.
Anyway why dont u just run napster on the machine that you were going to run your fake nameserver on and be done with it?
But it still requires that we have a server and its yet one more seperate site for users to check and login to.
/. so we dont have to worry about each country putting it's own server up with it's own code and username/passwords.
We really would like to have it integrated to the existing
I'm aware that it had been mentioned however it seems to be in comparatively low doses.
By the earlier posts the full implications of the unpassed rip act were comparatively unknown.
Then in the run up to it being passed by parliament when lobbying would have been most effective my stories were all killed.
Then the day after it got passed they put a story roughly saying "Someone should have done something about this"
The US bias here does seem a little strong and I dont really see any reason why we cant have a few more stories posted to cater for more diverse countries and interests.
Nice idea, but on the whole I dont reside in my home constituancy. But throwing him off balance does sound good especially since i've never liked the man and didn't vote for him :)
I know how you feel about that. There was very little said in the uk about RiP before it passed through parliament.
What really pisses me off is that here on slashdot I attempted to get them to run three stories about the RiP bill. Alerting ppl and point to the stand website and yet I was kicked out in favour of robot dogs running linux and playing GPL football
There are too few ppl on here that care and more that would just rather download gigabytes of mp3s and claim it's thier action.
Did you read the article? Wake up and smell the roses, pal. The corps and lawyers don't think they rule the 'Net, but they're taking steps to make sure that they will do.
/. had faxed their mps then we would quite like have got a far better deal out of RIP. But we didn't.
Oh i'm sorry I forgot when the lawyers stand up there and argue their cases that that isn't what they really believe... my mistake.
Napster does piss me off a bit too but i'm not really bothered by the copyright issues and couldn't give a flying f**K if napster go out of business - I do care about the issue that service providers and software engineers can be held liable for what their product is used for.
DeCSS is a particularly good example since the work to complete it was done in norway - which should be out of the reach of greedy american lawyers... wrong again.
And then there's the mdma anti-proliferation bill in the us - trying to make it illegal to spread information about ecstasy. It's not about drugs it's about control, and yet the media aren't having a big outcry about free speech because this government mock war on drugs is more important.
As for the RIP act in my own country. I'm nothing short of appalled. I've written to my member of parliament but to no avail - didn't even acknowledge me. The problem is of course that one individual or even 50 individuals make no difference. If the entire UK readership of
The lesson we need to learn is that we should stand up and make ourselves and our opinions known.
I usually find that the lack of strong typing means that function interfaces are prone to going wrong in discreet and subtle ways.
Then once you've built a whole pile of code on top something somewhere breaks something else and it's often not easy to chase out the bugs.
Yeah i'd second that.
:)
It's a very nice langauge for developing little scripts in but any big project i've attempted just becomes a mess. Perhaps it doesn't lend itself to my rather random and unplanned programming style.
As for trying to interpret a script you wrote 3 weeks ago, thats hard. But someone elses.... you must be joking
The american corporations and legal system that seem to think they reign supreme over the internet.
Perhaps this is an unfair parallel to draw but american lawyers seem to be coming in and tearing down our world. Perhaps like the european 'pioneers' did to the native americans.
"Oh my god it's falling apart at the seams"
"Only mozzila can save us now"
[Cue big green monster]
Hmmm but you dont need to emulate their hardware... why cant anyone see that.
Normally you have
DirectX -> (Polygon data) -> Driver -> (Polygon data) -> Graphics Card -> (Rasterized data) -> Monitor
All you have to do is intercept that polygon data at the level where the driver sends it to the graphics card and translate it into opengl.
You dont need to figure out how the card works... only the interface to it.
The other approach is to register a new DirectX device which translates the calls into OpenGL calls. DirectX is an fairly open platform in that it would be unusable if MS wouldn't say which functions were needed.
There is some quite cool work going on in Edinburgh Uni making very small very high definition colour screens which we could see in products soon.
RSA today announced that they have recruited some of the lawyers involved in defending the MPAA's CSS scheme.
:)
They hope that with legal backing they can extend the patent on their algorithm indefinitely. Also they have found (looking back at their patent) that they own all public key cryptography patents and anyone infringing on them will be forced to pay up. Anyone refusing will be struck down - i'm told adi shamir is quite hot with a minigun
Despite the fact that we were given it to analyse and devise methods of breaking when we were in high school maths.
:)
Second year univeristy maths touched on it and it came into my computing course as well.
It's not like they are releasing the worlds best kept secret.
On the other hand they should be applauded for not behaving like complete twats with their algorithm, ala MPAA
Is anyone else concerned about just how much heat this will kick out into your system.
:).
A week or two back I put a Voodoo5 V5500 into my system along with a second 7200rpm drive, and now despite having extra fans having those two along with my Celeron300@464mhz i need to run with the case off.
Now i'm not much of a gamer - the v5500 was about the only card around the £140 (uk pounds) price tag that had decent win2k drivers - but if it takes about an hour of normal windows usage to have my motherboard temp hit 50C (120-something F) surely anyone playing games on it would toast it.
Now imagine twice the Gpus and twice the heat...
I think soon we'll find graphics subsystems coming in a seperate box and at this rate it'll soon be bigger than your pc and require its own 3 phase power feed from a deadicated nukelea-r generator (homer's running mine
But for something like VMWARE to support DirectX for 3d is not anywhere near as difficult as you would like to make out.
VMWare emulates at hardware level. That means that what they have to emulate is something like a TNT or Voodoo chipset.
That way you install Win98 on your vmware machine and it promptly detects that you have a TNT2, and starts sending polygon data to it - which linux's OpenGL then renders.
That still requires that DirectX works in the MS os too tho.
I have fairly regularly used Realproducer and Realplayer since version 5. Never had any particualrly serious crashes from them.
I can easily get 3 or 4 days uptime from my Win2k system which is permanantly connected to the net, handling email, icq, my own custom written webcam software, quite often realproducer streaming audio and video (which it's also capturing).
I've got two usb webcams, usb scanner, usb printer, bt848 based videocapture, a celeron clocked to within an inch of it's life. My memory is running at over 100mhz which is it's max rating.
I'm running software raid, I burn cds, *constantly* decode mp3s (usually from network volumes or shoutcast servers), surf the web, develop websites, program in delphi, design stuff in flash.
I change my hardware round regularly - adding or upgrading peripherals at least monthly if not weekly.
I've never had a workstation as stable as mine is now doing as much as mine does now, and if any one out there can suggest a better platform for me then go for it!!!
(i run solaris at work and linux at home too though - i'm just not keen on them as workstation os's)
Given that there is all this typical argument for and against operating systems I just thought i'd shed a little light on my first perceptions of operating systems.
:)
:) I know linux is fast at a lot of things... but when it comes to graphics it generally sucks. Try scrolling down a web page with a couple of java applets and maybe some dhtml animation... it's slow on linux - then try it in IE5.5 and you really will feel the difference.
I first came into contact with MacOS in 1986 (aged 6) and found it a dream to use and everything fell easily into place. Certainly it was missing multitasking (and still to some extent is) but for me it set my definition of what easy to use should be.
I came into contact with dos about 2 years later and despite having to learn a few simple commands on the whole it was pretty damn easy.
Until Win95 came along I largely avoided windows (mainly cos of the hefty boot up times). I did use Win31 to do some programming in Delphi but that was about it.
Win95 however really did impress me. It felt fast, responsive, crashed less than 3.1 did and had an impeccable user interface. Against all my expectations it did detect all my hardware (except for my EEProm burner but that was no surprise).
Then in early 1996 I encountered linux. Slackware. It was nothing short of appaling.
The installation process was difficult and obscure, the hardware support was miserable. The documentation was crap.
I gave up.
It was another 3 years before I got linux functioning to any real extend and only now do I feel comfortable configuring it.
My experience with it is that it is pretty damn easy to break. When it comes to installing new hardware in Win2k I plug it in, turn on, and in most cases it's there and working on the first boot. With linux I seem to have to mess about recompiling the kernel (especially if it's for anything strange like sound, videocapture or usb support). And linux seems to be a lot less forgiving than windows of crap drivers.
Incidentally I have never seen any software that can take down win2k. One or two programs do appear to have memory and resource holes that drain the systems power away slowly but if you restart those apps then it springs back.
Equally to be fair to linux it very rarely crashes. When we stepped back down to a single cpu our uptimes went from about 2 hours -> 2 months which is pretty impressive. However Win2k supports dual cpu arrangements out of the box... no problems there (unless u have an aureal vortex
Curiously as testament to Windows 95 I have a laptop here running winroute (didn't have time to set linux up on it) and that has only crashed once in 17 weeks now. That's running a stock Win95 Original Release, Netgear FA410 Drivers and Webgear Aviator 2.4 drivers (along with the usual graphics ones), and Winroute as well... and it is stable as a rock.
Perhaps this really does give credit to the fact that Win95 itself is pretty stable and that applications and drivers drag it down.
And why doesn't windows execute things with the same level of protection that linux does.... because most users would rather the speed of windows to the stability of linux.
Put the flamethrowers down tho
And i'm not running win2k on any dream machine - just a celeron 300 cranked to 464mhz, 128 mb ram, 40gb disk and a v5500.
And running linux on a pii450, 192mb ram, 90gb disk and a tnt.
Seems like a pretty fair test to me.
It looks cool to appear as graha.ms@graha.ms and clearly identifies who I am to people who know me. It instills a far greater level of trust that I am who I claim to be than if i appear as ~graham@modem13813.uranium.pol.co.uk or any other freeserve like address.
4. Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public, or downloading a sound recording from an Internet site, even if the recording isn't resold. Online piracy may now also include certain uses of 'streaming' technologies from the Internet.
First of all they make the distinction between uploading, downloading and streaming. In pure TCP/IP terms all these acts are the same... a uni-directional flow of data yet they single out these three practises. However gnutella is a lot more focussed on 'transferring' - seems fine to me.
4. Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public
So if for example I upload a file to a site... that's fine. So provided it isn't me that makes the file I upload publically available then its perfectly ok. So now when I upload a file to geocities i do nothing wrong, and similarly when geocities ftpd sets the file world readable it does nothing wrong.... no piracy there.
downloading a sound recording from an Internet site
The word 'site' typically only descibes passive services like websites & ftp sites. Napster on the other hand is more interactive and typically you would say "Napseter Server" or "Napster User" and not "Napster Site". If someone talked about a napster site I would immediately think of this one.
Online piracy may now also include certain uses of 'streaming' technologies from the Internet.
It may now!!!. Sounds to me like "Streaming didn't used to be a crime but we are going to pretend it is one now" or perhaps they mean "We dont really know whether it is or not".
Really if those are the definitions we are up against i find it hard to believe the lawyers, who are much scorned for bending the words of legislation against the spirit that legislation was created in, cant come up with a half decent defence.
Well the main use is if you want to IRC from a certain hostname. IRCd checks when u connect that your forward and reverse dns match so that means if you want a custom hostname - you need your own ip.
:) i'd like to see them improve the webmail service since it's been in testing for about 3 years now and should be nearing maturity.
Also as a demon customer (although i use blueyonder hi-speed at my flat, BT at my parents and Lineone on my mobile) actually we just keep demon for email
Well yeah that is the concept behind zoning.
:)
The problem is that it doesn't work. I would reckon about 60% of dvd players sold in the UK are either zoneless or have easy hacks to make them so. Some will even resample NTSC dvds to give proper PAL output.
Films in the UK sometimes take a VERY VERY long time to get out. I'm pretty sure I saw EdTV on cabletv in canda over 6 months before it's uk theatre release (that was only 3 or 4 months ago).
The zoning system allows studios to release to a sample audience (typically the us and canada) and if the film fails then they haven't wasted the expense of promoting it globally.
The problem is that UK DVDs are generally of quite poor standards. It is not unusual to see mpeg encoding defects in them. They frequently lack the extended features found in US discs. They often lack multilingual soundtracks. It is not at all easy to buy a disc in the uk with a DTS encoded soundtrack for high end 5.1 speaker systems.
I prefer US DVDs for these reasons alone. Add to that the fact that they are typically released a few months earlier and cost quite a bit less and you can see the problems.
Perhaps the worst UK dvd I came across was that of the film 'Human Traffic'. I thought they had come up with some ultra cunning way of defeating DeCSS only to find that the disc wasn't even CSS'd in the first place
Interestly enough i'm not sure if that film was ever released in the USA since it came from a uk studio (afaik) and was banned in several other countries because of recreational drug use in it.
The MPAA dont want to adapt. They dont want to face a world where they have to do a simultaneous worldwide launch to films. They dont want the profit loss they would have by selling dvds at US prices the world over. Just like the RIAA dont want a world where artist dont need to be signed to make money.
What I fail to see though, as other users have commented, is what a US judgement would do to UK consumers. Perhaps it might set a precedent but we dont have a DCMA. We do however have a right to disassemble software, and also to free speech.
Why dont the UK arm of 2600 take over decss distribution?
Then again they manage to arrest johansen in norway... bastards.