Perl looks like it followed more or less the same pattern. Perl 1.000 was released in December '87, Perl 5.000 in October '94, and by December '97 it was up to 5.004_56.
If you look at the "selected release sizes" table, there was a big jump in "core + lib + ext" from 4.036 (798K) to 5.000 (1504K), and a big jump in the documentation size from 5.003_07 (976K) to 5.004 (1587K).
Does anyone have the Camel Book sales figures from 1991 (when it was first published) to the present? --
It's part of the 'going to hell in a handbasket' problem we've got going in this society.
The people who say "you owe me" today have the same character flaw as the people who, a hundred years ago, said "the lower classes owe us". The outward forms of disrespect are the same, but has the proportion of disrespectful people changed? --
Yes, a rot13-based encryption scheme is mentioned in Skylarov's talk, is covered by his decryption software, and is mentioned in the court papers. But the main reason he's being arrested is because Adobe filed a complaint about their own PDF-locking software being defeated, and Adobe's system is more sophisticated than rot13.
If the only complaint against Skylarov was from the rot13 system's vendor, that would be another matter entirely. --
If Microsoft holds only the desktop, their stock will go down. Investors are bidding up MSFT so high because they expect it to grow -- now that they have ninety-mumble percent of the desktop market, the only way they can grow is by expanding their share in other markets. --
He offers the opinion that if the cost of settlement goes as high as 2 Billion Dollars
that MS will just use the money to buy an island somewhere and move offshore instead.
Even if MS moves offshore, they'll still be selling products to US customers, they'll still need to maintain some offices in the US, they'll still have to hold some assets in US banks, and they can't make money in the US without the protection of US copyright laws.
When I added a MAPS filter to my mail configuration, the amount of spam I got seemed to drop by about two-thirds. --
Re:Don't worry, it's pirate proof!
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 2
Don't worry guys, since the files are designated ONLY for printing, we know they'll never be pirated...
because they're designated after all. How long do you think that will last?
Since the machine costs $30K, only bookstores, copy shops, and other businesses could buy it; as long as the machine owner plays nice with the publisher, everyone profits.
I suppose a bookstore clerk could try to defeat whatever auditing system is built into the machine and either run off ten free copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover or convert the book image to an unlocked PDF... but if the machine's designers put a little effort into tamper-proofing the equipment, I don't think the publishers would lose much to this kind of copyright violation. --
But how much of the math that even well-educated people actually know and use in everyday life has
changed in the past 100 years?
The math that well-educated people use hasn't changed much, but...
The field of math education has developed; more is known about how students develop their knowledge of math, and therefore, how to most effectively teach it. (Not all practicing teachers are keeping up with this research, but that's a separate problem....) The Algebra Project, for example, has done some interesting work in techniques for teaching algebra to inner-city students.
The proportion of students needing to know math has grown. A hundred years ago, most people left formal education before high school and went off to work in the farms or factories. Today, if you don't have at least a degree from a two-year college, you can't get a job that will pay enough to support a family. Therefore, if a student isn't doing well in math, it's more important for the teacher to say "hmm, what can I do to help this kid understand?" than to simply write the student off as a failure.
...quoted in the article who said, Oh, yeah, we violated Microsoft's copyright, but we're a poor school district, blah blah blah. I'm no libertarian, but there's a difference between setting aside private-property rights for the public good (e.g., Brazil's cheap AIDS drugs) and putting an altruistic spin on one's individual violations of the law (this case). --
Even if root has access to all of the finer-grained capabilities, the access doesn't work in the other direction. For example, imagine a mail daemon with the capabilities to (a) listen on port 25; (b) write to any subdirectory of/var/spool/mail. In traditional Un*x, that daemon has to run as root, and therefore subverting that daemon lets you do anything root can do. In a system with finer-grained control, subverting the mail daemon might allow an attacker to wipe/var/spool/mail and broadcast spam through port 25, but the rest of the system remains safe, because there's no way for the process formerly serving as the mailer daemon to acquire full root privileges.
I've heard of a trusted Unix variant where the only way to log in as the "security administrator", that system's moral equivalent of root, was to boot the machine in single-user mode. I don't know if TrustedBSD can be configured to work the same way, but if you have a system set up like this, it obviously makes attacks over the network a bit more complicated.
At the moment DNA gets broken up into small segments and fired at a device that can decode each of thease segments
It's worse than that -- the segments are thousands of base pairs long (I forget how many), but the process for reading them can only do a few hundred base pairs at a time, so it only reads the beginning and end of each segment. So you have to get segments with enough overlap that the beginning of each sequence that is actually read matches up with the end of some other sequence. --
Before the antitrust trial, Microsoft used its muscle against its suppliers and distributors (who need Microsoft's favor in order to stay afloat) and small high-tech companies (who didn't have the resources to take Microsoft on).
But now, many "old economy" companies, like Kodak, want to get their fingers into Net services. These companies can afford their own antitrust lawyers, they have their own image of respectability, and they don't depend on Microsoft's goodwill for short-term revenue or stock price. Therefore, they have more to gain by playing hardball with Microsoft than by meekly cooperating with Microsoft's business plans.
The 800-pound gorrilla has to start playing with the 1500-pound tigers. --
Suppose you run a small development shop that produces Windows products. Your company's success depends on maintaining a good working relationship with Microsoft. You can't afford to spend a lot on legal fees. Even if the license they're pushing on you is legally non-binding, do you want to be the first one to test it in court? --
the most interesting thing to me in the continued ms vs linux debate is that linux isn't a threat (yet).
Linux is not yet a threat to MS on the desktop. However, in order to keep its revenue growing fast enough to justify its stock price, MS must expand its market share beyond the desktop, and Linux is thwarting that expansion. --
Summary of the summary: Almost all of the findings of fact, and the most damning conclusions of law, stand. The remedy is thrown out. All of the unresolved issues go to a lower court. Have a nice day.
The court is not buying the argument that antitrust laws are less relevant in the "new economy". (11-13)
It upheld the finding that Microsoft is a monopoly -- you may think this is obvious, but Microsoft's lawyers tried very hard to redefine "monopoly" in a way that excluded Microsoft, and the appeals court didn't buy it. (19-25)
It upheld the findings that Microsoft tried to illegitimately maintain its monopoly through its exclusionary contracts with OEMs. The court said that one of Microsoft's arguments in its defense -- that it is merely exercising its rights as the copyright-holder to Windows -- "borders upon the frivolous". However, the court said that Microsoft did have the right to require OEMs to make their machines display the Windows desktop when first booting up a Windows machine. (25-35)
Microsoft's removal of IE from the "Add/Remove Progams" utility and its commingling of IE code with non-IE code in the same DLL were anticompetitive. However, Microsoft provided a valid technical justification for causing Windows to use IE instead of the user's preferred browser for certain browsing-related tasks, and since the plaintiffs did not try to rebut those justifications, that aspect of Windows/IE integration was OK. (35-40)
It was OK for Microsoft to offer the "Internet Explorer Access Kit" to ISPs to induce them to support IE. However, its exclusive deals with ISPs that required them to support only IE were not OK. (40-47)
Microsoft's exclusive contracts with third-party software developers that tied them to IE were anticompetitive, and Microsoft did not give any justification for the contracts that outweighed their anticompetitive effect. The same is true for its deal with Apple, in which Apple supported IE and Microsoft continued to provide Office for the Mac. (47-51)
Microsoft's promotion of its incompatible-with-Sun JVM was OK. Its deals with developers requiring them to exclusively promote Microsoft's JVM was not OK. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) Likewise, Microsoft's attempt to deceive developers about how using their Java development tools would create applications that only ran on Windows was not OK. And its threats that led Intel to stop developing its own JVM were not OK. (52-58)
The district court found that aside from these specific acts, Microsoft's "course of conduct" violated the antitrust laws. The appeals court thought that the district court didn't provide enough evidence to support this claim, and overturned it. (58-59)
Even though we can't prove that Microsoft's actions were the only things preventing Netscape and Java from becoming serious competitors to Microsoft's monopoly, the appeals court said, we don't need to meet such a standard of proof to impose liability on Microsoft. (59-62)
For the same anticompetitive behavior, the district court tried to make Microsoft liable for both illegally maintaining a monopoly (on the x86 PC OS market) and illegally trying to obtain a monopoly (on the browser market). However, the district court never proved that one company could monopolize the browser market, because they neither defined the market for browsers nor proved that barriers to entry would allow a monopoly browser to maintain its position. Therefore, the appeals court completely reversed the district court's verdict on this aspect of the judgement. (62-68)
After a long discussion of "tying" in antitrust law, the appeals court decided that a lower court should analyze the question of whether bundling Windows with IE was illegal, and gave instructions for what the lower court should take into consideration when making its judgement on this issue. (68-90)
Microsoft had complained on appeal regarding both the speed of the trial and the lack of any evidentiary hearings between the finding of guilt and the determination of Microsoft's penalty. The appeals court said the first complaint was groundless, but the second complaint was valid. Furthermore, the appeals court said, the district court hadn't explained how breaking up Microsoft would actually restore competition to the market. The appeals court provided guidlines for a lower court to use in deciding an appropriate remedy; it didn't flat out say "you can't break up the company", but it pointed out that divestiture is usually not the appropriate remedy for this kind of antitrust violation. (90-106)
Judge Jackson said things in interviews that made him appear biased against Microsoft. He embargoed these interviews until after his judgement was entered, so that Microsoft's lawyers couldn't have challenged them in court at the time they were made -- but at the time he entered his judgement, he was still talking about a pending legal case. Because of this impropriety, the appeals court disqualified Judge Jackson retroactively to the point where he entered his breakup order, but the court did not throw out his earlier findings of fact or conclusions of law (except where the appeals court specifically found an erroneous finding or incorrect conclusion). Microsoft had wanted to throw out the entire decision and start a new trial from scratch. (106-125)
For example, why did Microsoft become involved in a highly public argument with the Justice
Department? Was that really necessary for profit?
Joel Spolsky explains that Microsoft is projecting an "antitrust laws? what antitrust laws?" attitude as a way to prevent competitors from outflanking Microsoft the way Microsoft outflanked IBM. --
I think I understand Mundie's/Microsoft's argument re: GPL software. It basically comes down to their view of what
they call the "ecosystem" of software. In their view, government and universities (funded by taxes and philanthropy)
should do fundamental research, which should then be placed in the public domain where commercial interests are
free to exploit it. In this view, the GPL (at least if used by these groups) is indeed a threat, for it prevents the
commercialization (at least in the Microsoft way) or this research.
First, remember that Mundie is not speaking to geeks, and he's not speaking to political policy-makers, either. His audience is composed of people who are authorized to spend tens of thousands of dollars at a pop on Microsoft software... or on a Red Hat support contract.
Mundie doesn't really care about government-sponsored GPL work. He doesn't want to say it directly, but he wants his audience to think that the GPLed software that threatens Microsoft's growth (i.e., Linux) was primarily developed with government funds, and therefore (a) there's something unfair about that software being under GPL; (b) if Linux is better than Windows at some things, that can be chalked up to the government's investment in it.
More importantly: He has to put some kind of wrapper around the "GPL is bad" idea so that his audience will pay attention long enough to swallow the FUD. After all, if he tried to argue that it's unfair for private intellectual property owners to place the software that they wrote under the GPL, people would just scratch their heads and say "huh?" --
I have this image of an IBM middle-manager, formerly working on OS/2, now part of their Linux group, rubbing his hands together, cackling: "Revenge!" --
the history books clearly show... gold has retained it's basic value for
thousands of years.
You need to find better history books.
According to this Paul Krugman column, between 1971 and 1996, the price of gold has increased by about 1,000%, while the Consumer Price Index increased by about 250%, and the Dow rose by about 700%.
So if the country had maintained a gold standard over that period of time, then the price of gold would have remained stable, but the price of everything else would have dropped -- and the last time we had such a price deflation was the Great Depression. --
The constitution is nothing more than whatever five of
nine old men in Washington think it is at the given moment. I know saying things like that makes some people
uncomfortable, but I don't know how people can accept this institution as legitimate in the first place.
In the words of the late Justice Robert Jackson: "We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final."
When there's a dispute over interpretation of the law or the Constitution, the buck has to stop somewhere. As much as I disagree with some of the decisions that the Supremes have handed down, I'd rather give the final authority to people who are somewhat insulated from the political process, rather than people who need to worry about re-election in six (or fewer) years.
However, I think the Court would be better off if justices had staggered thirty-five-year terms, instead of being appointed for life. Right now, if several justices happen to die or retire while the same party is in power, then that party can use the nomination process to (attempt to) stamp its ideology on the Court for decades after. If at least one seat on the Supreme had to turn over every four years, then political trends would influence judicial trends in a more controlled fashion. --
One must not look far to see examples of the RIAA disrespecting
its customers. Case in point: $15 CDs. Back when CDs came out, the RIAA promised that the only reason that
they were so expensive was because of the new technology involved, and that they would soon become less
expensive. Did this happen? No it didn't.
There are many good arguments against the RIAA, but this isn't one of them.
CDs first appeared on the market in 1983, and since then, the Consumer Price Index (a US benchmark of inflation) has risen by two-thirds. If the price of a CD had kept pace with inflation, an album that cost $15 in 1983 would cost $25 now. So the real (inflation-adjusted) cost of a CD has come down.
--
Remember that Microsoft's product managers are catering to the corporate types who buy hundreds of Office and Windows licenses at a time. Any time they invest programmer-hours in adding features to Windows or Office, they're betting that the features they add will induce those organizations to upgrade (and eventually the smaller companies and home users will be forced to catch up). So why does Microsoft think those customers would want Internet Explorer to have SmartTags?
My first guess would be SmartTags' usefulness, from a suit's point of view, within corporate intranets. A company could add a SmartTags extension to all of the workstations on its intranet, so that, for example, whenever the phrase "health insurance" appeared on a Web page or an MS Word document, the user could follow the squiggly purple link to the health-insurance page on the company's benefits site. This would make the suits feel like have some control over their company's internal Web sites, even when they aren't personally signing off on the content of every page.
The DMCA includes both civil and criminal penalties. If anyone were charged with violating the criminal parts, the US Attorney General would be responsible for prosecuting the case. Since the plaintiffs want to prevent that from happening, Ashcroft, the current US Attorney General, is named in the suit. It's nothing personal. --
You've missed paragraph 3 of the plaintiffs' complaint, where they quote Japan Gas Lighter Ass'n v. Ronson Corp., 257 F.Supp. 219, 237 (D.N.J. 1966):
The Declaratory Judgment Act was designed to relieve potential defendants from the
Damoclean threat of impending litigation which a harassing adversary might
brandish, while initiating suit at his leisure -- or never. The Act permits parties so
situated to forestall the accrual of potential damages by suing for a declaratory
judgment, once the adverse positions have crystallized and the conflict of interests is
real and immediate.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the "selected release sizes" table, there was a big jump in "core + lib + ext" from 4.036 (798K) to 5.000 (1504K), and a big jump in the documentation size from 5.003_07 (976K) to 5.004 (1587K).
Does anyone have the Camel Book sales figures from 1991 (when it was first published) to the present?
--
--
If the only complaint against Skylarov was from the rot13 system's vendor, that would be another matter entirely.
--
If Microsoft holds only the desktop, their stock will go down. Investors are bidding up MSFT so high because they expect it to grow -- now that they have ninety-mumble percent of the desktop market, the only way they can grow is by expanding their share in other markets.
--
They can run, but they can't hide.
--
When I added a MAPS filter to my mail configuration, the amount of spam I got seemed to drop by about two-thirds.
--
I suppose a bookstore clerk could try to defeat whatever auditing system is built into the machine and either run off ten free copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover or convert the book image to an unlocked PDF ... but if the machine's designers put a little effort into tamper-proofing the equipment, I don't think the publishers would lose much to this kind of copyright violation.
--
--
...quoted in the article who said, Oh, yeah, we violated Microsoft's copyright, but we're a poor school district, blah blah blah. I'm no libertarian, but there's a difference between setting aside private-property rights for the public good (e.g., Brazil's cheap AIDS drugs) and putting an altruistic spin on one's individual violations of the law (this case).
--
--
--
But now, many "old economy" companies, like Kodak, want to get their fingers into Net services. These companies can afford their own antitrust lawyers, they have their own image of respectability, and they don't depend on Microsoft's goodwill for short-term revenue or stock price. Therefore, they have more to gain by playing hardball with Microsoft than by meekly cooperating with Microsoft's business plans.
The 800-pound gorrilla has to start playing with the 1500-pound tigers.
--
Suppose you run a small development shop that produces Windows products. Your company's success depends on maintaining a good working relationship with Microsoft. You can't afford to spend a lot on legal fees. Even if the license they're pushing on you is legally non-binding, do you want to be the first one to test it in court?
--
--
--
--
Mundie doesn't really care about government-sponsored GPL work. He doesn't want to say it directly, but he wants his audience to think that the GPLed software that threatens Microsoft's growth (i.e., Linux) was primarily developed with government funds, and therefore (a) there's something unfair about that software being under GPL; (b) if Linux is better than Windows at some things, that can be chalked up to the government's investment in it.
More importantly: He has to put some kind of wrapper around the "GPL is bad" idea so that his audience will pay attention long enough to swallow the FUD. After all, if he tried to argue that it's unfair for private intellectual property owners to place the software that they wrote under the GPL, people would just scratch their heads and say "huh?"
--
I have this image of an IBM middle-manager, formerly working on OS/2, now part of their Linux group, rubbing his hands together, cackling: "Revenge!"
--
According to this Paul Krugman column, between 1971 and 1996, the price of gold has increased by about 1,000%, while the Consumer Price Index increased by about 250%, and the Dow rose by about 700%.
So if the country had maintained a gold standard over that period of time, then the price of gold would have remained stable, but the price of everything else would have dropped -- and the last time we had such a price deflation was the Great Depression.
--
When there's a dispute over interpretation of the law or the Constitution, the buck has to stop somewhere. As much as I disagree with some of the decisions that the Supremes have handed down, I'd rather give the final authority to people who are somewhat insulated from the political process, rather than people who need to worry about re-election in six (or fewer) years.
However, I think the Court would be better off if justices had staggered thirty-five-year terms, instead of being appointed for life. Right now, if several justices happen to die or retire while the same party is in power, then that party can use the nomination process to (attempt to) stamp its ideology on the Court for decades after. If at least one seat on the Supreme had to turn over every four years, then political trends would influence judicial trends in a more controlled fashion.
--
CDs first appeared on the market in 1983, and since then, the Consumer Price Index (a US benchmark of inflation) has risen by two-thirds. If the price of a CD had kept pace with inflation, an album that cost $15 in 1983 would cost $25 now. So the real (inflation-adjusted) cost of a CD has come down.
--
My first guess would be SmartTags' usefulness, from a suit's point of view, within corporate intranets. A company could add a SmartTags extension to all of the workstations on its intranet, so that, for example, whenever the phrase "health insurance" appeared on a Web page or an MS Word document, the user could follow the squiggly purple link to the health-insurance page on the company's benefits site. This would make the suits feel like have some control over their company's internal Web sites, even when they aren't personally signing off on the content of every page.
Any other ideas?
--
--
The DMCA includes both civil and criminal penalties. If anyone were charged with violating the criminal parts, the US Attorney General would be responsible for prosecuting the case. Since the plaintiffs want to prevent that from happening, Ashcroft, the current US Attorney General, is named in the suit. It's nothing personal.
--
--