And most of the posters arn't complaining about the.75 fee in itself,
US$15,000 per year minimum license fee payment. So if you produce MP3 software and sell two copies this year, the license fee due is $15,000, not $1.50.
Nowadays, Dell advertises how easy their cases are to open up and install things into (and it's true). Pretty much any computer you can buy has *some* upgrade capability, and it doesn't void your warranty.
There is such a thing as too easy when it comes to access to hardware internals, though.
I remember old full-size XT cases that had a "suitcase lid", where you just pushed a button on each side of the case and the top of the case raised on a hinge at the back, just like a suitcase. Wonderful for repairs and so on. Not so wonderful when someone's kid with his sticky peanut butter sandwich decided to see what's inside of the box.
I would expect at least the download editions to get the decoders restored.
Why would RedHat make their free-to-download version more full-featured than the version that they are trying to sell for money? Seems to be weighting the wrong side, from their point of view.
Even if RH doesn't want to include mp3 support in their boxed distro for fear of legal reprisal, what's to stop them from making it available for download?
Business sense, most likely.
Buy our product and give us money! Or download it for free and get more features than you would if you actually bought the product that we're trying to sell."
That's just exactly backward to the way their business model works.
The "something" that there is to this is that RedHat wants to sell their boxed sets. And if they include MP3 player software in their distribution then they will have to pay the license fee to Thompson.
They could still include MP3 players in their "free to download" iso's and such, but from their point of view it would make little sense to have the downloadable version more "full-featured" than the retail version.
We do it - there's no tunneling, there's no autoupdating...it works.
And tomorrow "windowsupdate2.microsoft.com" and "updatewindows.ms.com" come online for whatever reason and your firewalling is providing exactly how much security, did you say, again?
Doesn't this mean that bit-by-bit burners would copy it fine?
There used to be a copy protection scheme for floppy disks that used an extremely weak sector (just barely magnetized) on the disk. When the drive read that sector, it would get a value but when it read the same sector again it would get a different value because the field was so weak and could barely be read at all. Copying the disk verbatim didn't work because you would end up with a copy that had a sector that would always read the same value. BLAMMO! "Sorry, Mac, this is a copy."
This is one way to get around the "if it can be read it can be copied" problem; have a sector that changes its value.
The discs are made with intentional bad sectors in specific areas.
That was the original copy protection scheme used on the Commodore 64. Write an error to a known sector on the "original" floppy disk. Seek to that sector on load and if the error is not present then die.
The firmware in the 1541 drive would assume that the read head was mis-aligned when it hit the error and try to re-align itself by seeking back to track 0 where it would hit a physical stop bar. Then try seeking back to the bad sector, then back to the stop bar then the bad sector and.... This caused that hammering the 1541 drive was famous for when trying to load a copy-protected disk and caused a lot of 1541 drives to go out of alignment. The read head was held in place on a rod by a little set screw and enough hammering would loosen the screw and mis-align the read head.
The Commodore 1571 drive (made for the C128) tried to address this problem by using an optical doodad to detect when the head was at track 0 instead of a physical stop. So instead of the 1541 "hammer", you just heard a "zip zip zip" when the drive hit a bad sector.
The point of this post is just to say that this is an old idea. Been there, done that, got the disk-copying software to prove it. *tee hee* I don't imagine it will be long before the modern equivalent of "Fast-Hack-Em" or "Copy2-64" will be floating around.
If some pimply faces theiving bastard tried to diskcopy it, the disk drive would sequntially read the disk, dropping the head into the hole and destroying both the disk and the drive.
And if your drive's read head just happened to be at that location when you inserted the disk into the drive, then goodbye Martha as well.
How do you figure $15,000 a year minimum? The original poster stated that he has a collection of MP3s and wants a player/decoder to access them. Such a player/ decoder would cost 75 cents.
Read the license fee page. Each player must pay a fee of 75 cents per player, with a $15,000 minimum per licensee. It says that right on the page that spells out the fee schedule.
The converters won't be available for long, I'd think, due to the fact that they will likely be subjec to the 75cents/($15,000 per year minimum) license fees too.
The future of the Internet is hanging in the balance
In the USA only, thanks.
While a great deal of the current content on the Internet is indeed US-based at the moment, there is a whole big world out there that these "strategists" seem to ignore with great success. Nothing says that "Hollywood" has to stay in Hollywood (witness the spate of movies and television programs that film in Toronto and Vancouver) and Internet content-creation is even more portable. Given enough (regulatory) reason to move, much-that-matters will move.
how can you tell someone else about the page in meatspace oir over the telephone? xyz is much shorter and to the point.
How do you tell someone what your snail-mail address is now?
You don't think anything of saying, "Apartment 123, West Home Building, 223 Rainier Drive, Rinky-dink Township, Mass. 001728-0013.
It's all in what you are used to. You are used to www.abc.org, but you don't expect to be able to tell your mother to mail your Christmas present to "joe's house".
Releasing the affected code under the GPL is lip service?
Releasing the affected code under the GPL only after being caught and soundly spanked in public is not what is supposed to happen.
I'll attempt to conceal this pair of pants under my other clothing and attempt to remove it from the store. If the security guard catches me then I'll pay for them at that time.
design ballot papers which can easily be counted either by machine or manually
I remember taking tests in school where you had to fill in the circles with a pencil. And that's gotta be 30 years ago at least. The technology to do that has been around for a long time.
they advise you to contact Sigma Designs, who will be legally required to give you a copy
But they aren't legally required to give you a copy. They are required to give you the source code and the right to re-sell or give it away if you got the product from them. If you didn't get the product from them they are under no obligation to provide it to you.
If you're working on a GPL project you don't have to give the source code to all and sundry (though that is indeed the common practice). You just have to give it to those who have obtained the binary from you.
Yes they may/will get the big guys, but for every big guy there is a couple of dozen slightly smaller guys that will take his place.
There may not be.
After taking some of the "big guys" and tossing them in jail for many years as an example to everyone, how many folks will be willing to step forward and say "Take me next"? I'm thinking not too many.
However, the thing that always gets missed in these arguments is that US laws do not apply worldwide, much as the American government and corporations would like us to believe that they do. They can (and do) pass the most draconian laws imaginable in the Land of the Free, but there is still not much they can do to someone who does not live in the USA.
Sadly, the USA is becoming less and less "free" every day. Government by the people seems to have been replaced by government by the almighty dollar, and government for the people has been replaced by for the corporations and large American and trans-national business interests. Sad, really.
Does anyone else have this problem? I downloaded Opera 6.03 rpm yesterday and put it on my Red Hat 7.3 box. Run Opera and I get a segmentation fault. Opera 6.02 works perfectly on the same box. Opera Software has a ghawd-awful system for reporting bugs (in my opinion) but I did go through the pain of reporting this and haven't seen anything yet. My report doesn't even show on the list of reports yet.
If they have had their assets seized by their creditors, then that is when the bailiffs showed up and padlocked the doors. It's easier to do that when nobody (or "less-body's") are around than it is to do that in the middle of a workday. The theory is that it is easier to keep you out than it is to throw you out. They can keep better track of the movable assets and insure that nothing gets "accidentally" carried off by an employee or manager/owner who's headed out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
And most of the posters arn't complaining about the .75 fee in itself,
US$15,000 per year minimum license fee payment. So if you produce MP3 software and sell two copies this year, the license fee due is $15,000, not $1.50.
Nowadays, Dell advertises how easy their cases are to open up and install things into (and it's true). Pretty much any computer you can buy has *some* upgrade capability, and it doesn't void your warranty.
There is such a thing as too easy when it comes to access to hardware internals, though.
I remember old full-size XT cases that had a "suitcase lid", where you just pushed a button on each side of the case and the top of the case raised on a hinge at the back, just like a suitcase. Wonderful for repairs and so on. Not so wonderful when someone's kid with his sticky peanut butter sandwich decided to see what's inside of the box.
I would expect at least the download editions to get the decoders restored.
Why would RedHat make their free-to-download version more full-featured than the version that they are trying to sell for money? Seems to be weighting the wrong side, from their point of view.
Even if RH doesn't want to include mp3 support in their boxed distro for fear of legal reprisal, what's to stop them from making it available for download?
Business sense, most likely.
Buy our product and give us money! Or download it for free and get more features than you would if you actually bought the product that we're trying to sell."
That's just exactly backward to the way their business model works.
The "something" that there is to this is that RedHat wants to sell their boxed sets. And if they include MP3 player software in their distribution then they will have to pay the license fee to Thompson.
They could still include MP3 players in their "free to download" iso's and such, but from their point of view it would make little sense to have the downloadable version more "full-featured" than the retail version.
At least, that's how I see it.
Ask Slashdot might give you better/more questions to ask, though. "Hey, I never thought of that angle!" Then go and check it out.
Slashdot is a truly amazing pool of odd facts, opinions, and astounding (and sometimes asinine) insights.
We do it - there's no tunneling, there's no autoupdating...it works.
And tomorrow "windowsupdate2.microsoft.com" and "updatewindows.ms.com" come online for whatever reason and your firewalling is providing exactly how much security, did you say, again?
Doesn't this mean that bit-by-bit burners would copy it fine?
There used to be a copy protection scheme for floppy disks that used an extremely weak sector (just barely magnetized) on the disk. When the drive read that sector, it would get a value but when it read the same sector again it would get a different value because the field was so weak and could barely be read at all. Copying the disk verbatim didn't work because you would end up with a copy that had a sector that would always read the same value. BLAMMO! "Sorry, Mac, this is a copy."
This is one way to get around the "if it can be read it can be copied" problem; have a sector that changes its value.
The discs are made with intentional bad sectors in specific areas.
That was the original copy protection scheme used on the Commodore 64. Write an error to a known sector on the "original" floppy disk. Seek to that sector on load and if the error is not present then die.
The firmware in the 1541 drive would assume that the read head was mis-aligned when it hit the error and try to re-align itself by seeking back to track 0 where it would hit a physical stop bar. Then try seeking back to the bad sector, then back to the stop bar then the bad sector and.... This caused that hammering the 1541 drive was famous for when trying to load a copy-protected disk and caused a lot of 1541 drives to go out of alignment. The read head was held in place on a rod by a little set screw and enough hammering would loosen the screw and mis-align the read head.
The Commodore 1571 drive (made for the C128) tried to address this problem by using an optical doodad to detect when the head was at track 0 instead of a physical stop. So instead of the 1541 "hammer", you just heard a "zip zip zip" when the drive hit a bad sector.
The point of this post is just to say that this is an old idea. Been there, done that, got the disk-copying software to prove it. *tee hee* I don't imagine it will be long before the modern equivalent of "Fast-Hack-Em" or "Copy2-64" will be floating around.
If some pimply faces theiving bastard tried to diskcopy it, the disk drive would sequntially read the disk, dropping the head into the hole and destroying both the disk and the drive.
And if your drive's read head just happened to be at that location when you inserted the disk into the drive, then goodbye Martha as well.
So much for that idea.
How do you figure $15,000 a year minimum? The original poster stated that he has a collection of MP3s and wants a player/decoder to access them. Such a player/ decoder would cost 75 cents.
Read the license fee page. Each player must pay a fee of 75 cents per player, with a $15,000 minimum per licensee. It says that right on the page that spells out the fee schedule.
Think about it, they only have a licencing fee of $0.75 for a peice of software.
And US$15,000/year minimum fee
That's $0.75!
That's a lot of $0.75, indeed!
Come on, are people saying they couldn't afford paying $0.75 to use a program?
And US$15,000/year to write one....
Have you considered actually spending 75 cents for a MP3 decoder?
How about US$15,000/year minimum?
Its what I pay for a can of Coke!
Quite a few trailer-loads of Coke...
You mean low cost like 75 cents?
US$15,000/year minimum.
That's a bit more than 75 cents, and a bit more than a stamp too!
The converters won't be available for long, I'd think, due to the fact that they will likely be subjec to the 75cents/($15,000 per year minimum) license fees too.
The future of the Internet is hanging in the balance
In the USA only, thanks.
While a great deal of the current content on the Internet is indeed US-based at the moment, there is a whole big world out there that these "strategists" seem to ignore with great success. Nothing says that "Hollywood" has to stay in Hollywood (witness the spate of movies and television programs that film in Toronto and Vancouver) and Internet content-creation is even more portable. Given enough (regulatory) reason to move, much-that-matters will move.
non-profit according to who's laws? the US? EU? Russian?
Any of the above, I'd imagine, as long as they can prove it and so on.
Why not?
how can you tell someone else about the page in meatspace oir over the telephone? xyz is much shorter and to the point.
How do you tell someone what your snail-mail address is now?
You don't think anything of saying, "Apartment 123, West Home Building, 223 Rainier Drive, Rinky-dink Township, Mass. 001728-0013.
It's all in what you are used to. You are used to www.abc.org, but you don't expect to be able to tell your mother to mail your Christmas present to "joe's house".
Releasing the affected code under the GPL is lip service?
Releasing the affected code under the GPL only after being caught and soundly spanked in public is not what is supposed to happen.
I'll attempt to conceal this pair of pants under my other clothing and attempt to remove it from the store. If the security guard catches me then I'll pay for them at that time.
design ballot papers which can easily be counted either by machine or manually
I remember taking tests in school where you had to fill in the circles with a pencil. And that's gotta be 30 years ago at least. The technology to do that has been around for a long time.
the ability to print a copy of your vote to take with you
"If you don't show me the printout that verifies that you voted for DA BOSS, den I'm a-gonna break your kneecaps and kill your wife."
That's a feature we don't need, thanks.
they advise you to contact Sigma Designs, who will be legally required to give you a copy
But they aren't legally required to give you a copy. They are required to give you the source code and the right to re-sell or give it away if you got the product from them. If you didn't get the product from them they are under no obligation to provide it to you.
If you're working on a GPL project you don't have to give the source code to all and sundry (though that is indeed the common practice). You just have to give it to those who have obtained the binary from you.
Yes they may/will get the big guys, but for every big guy there is a couple of dozen slightly smaller guys that will take his place.
There may not be.
After taking some of the "big guys" and tossing them in jail for many years as an example to everyone, how many folks will be willing to step forward and say "Take me next"? I'm thinking not too many.
However, the thing that always gets missed in these arguments is that US laws do not apply worldwide, much as the American government and corporations would like us to believe that they do. They can (and do) pass the most draconian laws imaginable in the Land of the Free, but there is still not much they can do to someone who does not live in the USA.
Sadly, the USA is becoming less and less "free" every day. Government by the people seems to have been replaced by government by the almighty dollar, and government for the people has been replaced by for the corporations and large American and trans-national business interests. Sad, really.
Does anyone else have this problem? I downloaded Opera 6.03 rpm yesterday and put it on my Red Hat 7.3 box. Run Opera and I get a segmentation fault. Opera 6.02 works perfectly on the same box. Opera Software has a ghawd-awful system for reporting bugs (in my opinion) but I did go through the pain of reporting this and haven't seen anything yet. My report doesn't even show on the list of reports yet.
If they have had their assets seized by their creditors, then that is when the bailiffs showed up and padlocked the doors. It's easier to do that when nobody (or "less-body's") are around than it is to do that in the middle of a workday. The theory is that it is easier to keep you out than it is to throw you out. They can keep better track of the movable assets and insure that nothing gets "accidentally" carried off by an employee or manager/owner who's headed out the door.