I was about to start into an "AMD is a one trick pony" spiel, but that would explain a lot. It seemed like AMD got into a good position with the inital Athlon, but since then have been struggling. I'm wondering if the 64 bit systems are going to give them another jump on the game or it's going to continue to be a neck and neck race.
It says you can't use it for commercial purposes. So, if I write GPL'd software and sell it, then I'd be violating the license as I understand it. If that's not what they mean, then why say it at all, the GPL implies what you've said.
To say that the product is GPL and to say that it cannot be used for commercial purposes are mutually exclusive statements. If it's GPL'd, they can't add additional restrictions.
Wrong, there's a big difference here. Dmitri, etc, are not criminals because they were offering tools to decrypt paid for copies so that they could be used for legitimate fair use purposes. It had the side-effect that it could be used to avoid payment in the first place so that was not the clear primary purpose. In this case, I can pay a satellite company money, and get a box that will totally decrypt the signal which I can do what I want with. I don't need decryption gear unless I'm planning to not pay for the program.
Fine, decrypt it as an intellectual excercise. It's only when you distribute equipment to other people that you cross the line.
They are sending radio signals. Do you have a right to determine what it is? No. What makes you think you do. The FCC controls wireless networks, if you had a right to do what you wanted with radio waves, then the FCC would be illegal.
If you give out some kinds of information that's treason. Other kinds of information may get you in civil court for violation of intellectual property agreements. Giving out false information can be fraud. This is not such a novel concept.
Frankly this is the only application of the DMCA that I've seen to date that I think is reasonable. You've got people creating devices to decrypt copyrighted material that people could legitimately pay for and play in any manner they wanted to. I've got DirecTV, and I can certainly record the shows, and excerpt them for commentary, etc. There's no reason that you need to decrypt these signals, save for not having to pay for them.
What kind of impact will such a law have on statistical surveys? I mean, I don't want people trying to sell me stuff but I'm always happy to answer a survey. The problem I can see with this is that large groups of people are now going to be eliminated from the statistical sampling pool. Up until now, random phone sampling was the best way to get a statistically significant sample, but this could harm that. If a relatively even distribution of people get on these lists, then maybe it won't be a problem. Heck, it might even save time and money for survey companies since they don't have to call people who don't want to talk.
There was already some suggestion that in this past election, statistical projections were skewed because of people using call blocking technology, etc. This would just make that sort of skewing worse. It also makes one wonder if that support for the war right now is not what it appears to be. It may be that the statistics skew that number higher or lower because people aren't putting up with the surveyors.
At the conference, the Bush Administration is expected to seek support for a pre-emptive strike against the Universe. Administration sources were quoted as saying, "The Universe has a long history of unpredictable agression and deterrance of its threats is simply not an option." Donald Rumsfeld went on to state that the US military strategy would bring about a swift and clean victory over the Universe.
The thign with the GPL is that it is assigning rights to you that you would otherwise not have. Notably these rights include redistribution, modification, etc. Microsoft licenses take your basic rights under copyright and restrict them further. So the GPL is granting you rights you'd otherwise not have, not restricting rights you otherwise should have.
Yeah but it could be read the other way too. Hence my original question:). I figure the FSF lawyer is probably the most qualified to answer this question.
However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.
So, the issue that I'm not clear on here, is how "at arms length" this situation is. I mean I could distribute my code without the requisite JAR, and it wouldn't work, but I could then tell my customers to download the JAR, or I could offer it as a seperate installation. So would that work around the GPL issues, or would that still be a violation? It would certainly make clear what part of the system was GPL'd and what wasn't, but is this still breaking the rules?
E-mailed the guy, and got no response:). In the end I just ended up using other software to accomplish the task since i wasn't sure about how the GPL would apply in this case and figured I'd be better off erring on the side of caution.
In this specific case, it was not LGPL. If it were LGPL, it would be very clear. In this case, it becomes a matter of confusion because it's not clear to me that his product is being incorporated into mine or that I'm somehow modifying it.
One issue that I know has come up for me is how the GPL applies in situations where I'm using GPL software but I'm not actually modifying it. For example, I write a Java application, and it is reliant on a JAR that is GPL'd. Do I then need to GPL my software? I haven't changed the JAR in anyway, I'm just redistributing it with my software. The end user could just as easily download the JAR themselves, it's just a convenience for me to offer it in my package.
This memo is clearly indicating that the problem isn't a fundamental flaw in the JVM, but rather a flaw in Sun's development process for the Solaris platform. It sounds like what's happening here is that Sun's Java people, realizing how many more people are using Java on Linux and Windows, aren't putting as much effort into support for Solaris. Since upgrades of Java are released simultaneously accross all platforms, there's no opportunity to make minor bug fixes for OS specific problems.
My read of this suggests that they have a very simple solution to their problem. Release their iron grip of the product and open source it. They could reduce their internal development costs and people could support patches for the multiple OS versions that are out there. Let anybody develop JVM's, and then they could make money off a certification process. They could develop new versions of the API, hand those to the community, and then certify the implementations when complete. That process would still allow for each implementation to do it's own bug fixes without substantially disturbing the consistentce between JVM's.
Okay, the odds that this legislation would get passed right now is really slim. I mean, without the pressing fear of imminent terrorism, there's no motivation for it. So, I'm wondering if the DOJ's intent in drafting this was to keep it on the shelf until the next terrorist attack happens. Then they would come out and explain that they couldn't stop it because they didn't have all the powers they need, and conveniently they'd have legislation ready to roll.
I'm very glad this has come out at a time when our heads are mostly screwed on straight so we can shoot it down in the light of day.
The thing is that the original Star Trek series was something fresh and new. The Next Generation was a well done revival of the Star Trek universe that allowed things to play out for more than just a handful of seasons. But then they tried to take a good thing and exploit it.
So DS9 comes around and that was pretty good, and at it's peak, it was better than ST:TNG IMHO. But then, comes voyager, and that had its moments but really went down the tubes. Now we've got Enterprise which had great premise, but not nearly as well executed as it could be.
The other thing is that Star Trek has tended to be somewhat saccarine. It's in this future where humanity has made the utopian society and there's just enough bad guys around to give the good guys somebody to fight with. It's a very black and white universe and after a point, that gets pretty dull.
Compare this to something like Babylon 5. There you've got a head of security who's an alcoholic, and his alcoholism actually becomes a serious problem. You've got the good guys and the bad guys but then you find out the good guys are actually just as bad as the bad guys, they just dress better.
Okay, I'll be the first to bash Microsoft and say that their security sucks. I'll be the first to say that their initative to improve security is marketing smoke and mirrors. But let's give them a real chance to prove this to us. The vunerability that caused the Slammer worm is one that they actually found and fixed a long time ago. This is admins not doing a good job of keeping up to date and fixing problem.
Furthermore, the product that was compromised is legacy from before their big embracing of security. Let's see what happens with its next major release. If that still had big gaping problems, then we can hang them from the tallest tree.
These people didn't die because the government didn't buy them a new ship. Freak accidents happen, especially when you are trying to do the rather extreme act of sending people into space. Current estimates are that the odds of any particular manned space flight ending in disaster is 1 in 100. Hell, unmanned ones fail four times as often.
The space shuttle is an old system, but this also means that it's very well tested and understood. It's probably safer than anything new would have been because they've got a hell of a lot of practice with them. Now, if they come back and reveal that the accident was caused because the shuttle was too old, then that's one thing. But let's not go attacking the government until there's a reasonable justification for it.
I'm confident that nobody at NASA would allow that shuttle to go up if they weren't completely confident that it would come back in one piece. Generally speaking they are overly cautious most of the time.
The Infinium game console is doomed before it gets started. Given the current game console market, you have to make the hardware cheaper than what it cost to manufacture it. The only way to make money is to pump enough cash into manufacturing the systems and marketing them up front and make the money back later on licensing.
They are going to be VERY hard pressed to make a console in the $200-300 price range that has a decent amount of power. Furthermore, even if they manage to pull off that magical feat, people have to actually buy them which comes down to marketing. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo already have a natural momentum in marketing because of both their history and their war chests.
I'd love to see a console come onto the market that uses some of the ideas these guys are throwing out, but unless a big corporation backs it, it isn't going to happen.
Kazaa is out there, and sure, a lot of people aren't buying some CD's because they use Kazaa to either:
a) discover that the CD's suck b) get the one song that's actually good and save the money they would have spent
Kazaa isn't what's cutting into CD sales though. If you look at the stats, the amount of new music being produced by the big record labels is down. Thus, less people are feeling compelled to buy new CD's. Furthermore, any market that existed for people upgrading from tapes, etc, has been thoroughly exploited by now.
Also, the record industry is undergoing a significant fragmentation because the mass marketing of radio is driving people to find more obscure alternatives amongst local bands and on the Internet. Since the record labels offer no significant alternative on the Internet, they lose a lot of their power to control the market. Instead of having to listen to the 40 most popular songs get played to death I can go find whatever I want and play it as much or little as I want.
Basically when you get down to it, these record companies are aging dinosaurs who have a business models engineered for an environment that has ceased to exist. Evolve or die.
The UNU team found that to make every one of the millions manufactured each year requires:
32 kg of water Okay, and what happens to this water? I'm presuming it's released as waste water back into the environment where it eventually gets recycled by mother nature. So it's not really used as such.
1.6 kg of fossil fuels
So it requires the energy equivalent of 1.6 KG of fossil fuel. So they could use environmentally friendly energy sources for this if they were available and cheap.
700 grams of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen)
That's easy to come by given that whole atmosphere thing:)
and 72 grams of chemicals
It'd be nice to have a little more details on what chemicals were involved. Sure they use some highly toxic chemicals here, but what portion of that 72 grams is the really nasty stuff? What happens to those chemicals after the process is the more important question.
A few thoughts this brings to my mind:
With every generation of computers, the capacities of the system increase, but do the resources requirements involved increase? Not to my knowledge. So it's really pretty impressive that for the same inputs we can get increasingly powerful devices.
What is the impact on our ability to more efficiently manage the resource we have because we have computers with these memory chips in them?
Basically this information lacks any useful context to measure its real impact on the environment as a whole. It's an interesting statistic, but relatively meaningless for figuring out the practical impact of computers on the environment around us.
Do they read Slashdot? If so, why do they think there is such a strong anti-microsoft sentiment on Slashdot? What do they think Microsoft can do to change that sentiment?
You know, a nice easy question for them to handle:)
Slashdot Mirror
I was about to start into an "AMD is a one trick pony" spiel, but that would explain a lot. It seemed like AMD got into a good position with the inital Athlon, but since then have been struggling. I'm wondering if the 64 bit systems are going to give them another jump on the game or it's going to continue to be a neck and neck race.
It's GPL then :). Why do they have to go confusing the matter. Just say, "it's GPL", and maybe even clarify, "not LGPL", and then it all makes sense.
It says you can't use it for commercial purposes. So, if I write GPL'd software and sell it, then I'd be violating the license as I understand it. If that's not what they mean, then why say it at all, the GPL implies what you've said.
To say that the product is GPL and to say that it cannot be used for commercial purposes are mutually exclusive statements. If it's GPL'd, they can't add additional restrictions.
Wrong, there's a big difference here. Dmitri, etc, are not criminals because they were offering tools to decrypt paid for copies so that they could be used for legitimate fair use purposes. It had the side-effect that it could be used to avoid payment in the first place so that was not the clear primary purpose. In this case, I can pay a satellite company money, and get a box that will totally decrypt the signal which I can do what I want with. I don't need decryption gear unless I'm planning to not pay for the program.
Fine, decrypt it as an intellectual excercise. It's only when you distribute equipment to other people that you cross the line.
They are sending radio signals. Do you have a right to determine what it is? No. What makes you think you do. The FCC controls wireless networks, if you had a right to do what you wanted with radio waves, then the FCC would be illegal.
If you give out some kinds of information that's treason. Other kinds of information may get you in civil court for violation of intellectual property agreements. Giving out false information can be fraud. This is not such a novel concept.
Frankly this is the only application of the DMCA that I've seen to date that I think is reasonable. You've got people creating devices to decrypt copyrighted material that people could legitimately pay for and play in any manner they wanted to. I've got DirecTV, and I can certainly record the shows, and excerpt them for commentary, etc. There's no reason that you need to decrypt these signals, save for not having to pay for them.
What kind of impact will such a law have on statistical surveys? I mean, I don't want people trying to sell me stuff but I'm always happy to answer a survey. The problem I can see with this is that large groups of people are now going to be eliminated from the statistical sampling pool. Up until now, random phone sampling was the best way to get a statistically significant sample, but this could harm that. If a relatively even distribution of people get on these lists, then maybe it won't be a problem. Heck, it might even save time and money for survey companies since they don't have to call people who don't want to talk.
There was already some suggestion that in this past election, statistical projections were skewed because of people using call blocking technology, etc. This would just make that sort of skewing worse. It also makes one wonder if that support for the war right now is not what it appears to be. It may be that the statistics skew that number higher or lower because people aren't putting up with the surveyors.
At the conference, the Bush Administration is expected to seek support for a pre-emptive strike against the Universe. Administration sources were quoted as saying, "The Universe has a long history of unpredictable agression and deterrance of its threats is simply not an option." Donald Rumsfeld went on to state that the US military strategy would bring about a swift and clean victory over the Universe.
The human species will have wiped itself long before either of those eventualities come to pass, so no worries :)
The thign with the GPL is that it is assigning rights to you that you would otherwise not have. Notably these rights include redistribution, modification, etc. Microsoft licenses take your basic rights under copyright and restrict them further. So the GPL is granting you rights you'd otherwise not have, not restricting rights you otherwise should have.
Yeah but it could be read the other way too. Hence my original question :). I figure the FSF lawyer is probably the most qualified to answer this question.
From the FAQ:
However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.
So, the issue that I'm not clear on here, is how "at arms length" this situation is. I mean I could distribute my code without the requisite JAR, and it wouldn't work, but I could then tell my customers to download the JAR, or I could offer it as a seperate installation. So would that work around the GPL issues, or would that still be a violation? It would certainly make clear what part of the system was GPL'd and what wasn't, but is this still breaking the rules?
E-mailed the guy, and got no response :). In the end I just ended up using other software to accomplish the task since i wasn't sure about how the GPL would apply in this case and figured I'd be better off erring on the side of caution.
In this specific case, it was not LGPL. If it were LGPL, it would be very clear. In this case, it becomes a matter of confusion because it's not clear to me that his product is being incorporated into mine or that I'm somehow modifying it.
One issue that I know has come up for me is how the GPL applies in situations where I'm using GPL software but I'm not actually modifying it. For example, I write a Java application, and it is reliant on a JAR that is GPL'd. Do I then need to GPL my software? I haven't changed the JAR in anyway, I'm just redistributing it with my software. The end user could just as easily download the JAR themselves, it's just a convenience for me to offer it in my package.
This memo is clearly indicating that the problem isn't a fundamental flaw in the JVM, but rather a flaw in Sun's development process for the Solaris platform. It sounds like what's happening here is that Sun's Java people, realizing how many more people are using Java on Linux and Windows, aren't putting as much effort into support for Solaris. Since upgrades of Java are released simultaneously accross all platforms, there's no opportunity to make minor bug fixes for OS specific problems.
My read of this suggests that they have a very simple solution to their problem. Release their iron grip of the product and open source it. They could reduce their internal development costs and people could support patches for the multiple OS versions that are out there. Let anybody develop JVM's, and then they could make money off a certification process. They could develop new versions of the API, hand those to the community, and then certify the implementations when complete. That process would still allow for each implementation to do it's own bug fixes without substantially disturbing the consistentce between JVM's.
Okay, the odds that this legislation would get passed right now is really slim. I mean, without the pressing fear of imminent terrorism, there's no motivation for it. So, I'm wondering if the DOJ's intent in drafting this was to keep it on the shelf until the next terrorist attack happens. Then they would come out and explain that they couldn't stop it because they didn't have all the powers they need, and conveniently they'd have legislation ready to roll.
I'm very glad this has come out at a time when our heads are mostly screwed on straight so we can shoot it down in the light of day.
The thing is that the original Star Trek series was something fresh and new. The Next Generation was a well done revival of the Star Trek universe that allowed things to play out for more than just a handful of seasons. But then they tried to take a good thing and exploit it.
So DS9 comes around and that was pretty good, and at it's peak, it was better than ST:TNG IMHO. But then, comes voyager, and that had its moments but really went down the tubes. Now we've got Enterprise which had great premise, but not nearly as well executed as it could be.
The other thing is that Star Trek has tended to be somewhat saccarine. It's in this future where humanity has made the utopian society and there's just enough bad guys around to give the good guys somebody to fight with. It's a very black and white universe and after a point, that gets pretty dull.
Compare this to something like Babylon 5. There you've got a head of security who's an alcoholic, and his alcoholism actually becomes a serious problem. You've got the good guys and the bad guys but then you find out the good guys are actually just as bad as the bad guys, they just dress better.
Okay, I'll be the first to bash Microsoft and say that their security sucks. I'll be the first to say that their initative to improve security is marketing smoke and mirrors. But let's give them a real chance to prove this to us. The vunerability that caused the Slammer worm is one that they actually found and fixed a long time ago. This is admins not doing a good job of keeping up to date and fixing problem.
Furthermore, the product that was compromised is legacy from before their big embracing of security. Let's see what happens with its next major release. If that still had big gaping problems, then we can hang them from the tallest tree.
These people didn't die because the government didn't buy them a new ship. Freak accidents happen, especially when you are trying to do the rather extreme act of sending people into space. Current estimates are that the odds of any particular manned space flight ending in disaster is 1 in 100. Hell, unmanned ones fail four times as often.
The space shuttle is an old system, but this also means that it's very well tested and understood. It's probably safer than anything new would have been because they've got a hell of a lot of practice with them. Now, if they come back and reveal that the accident was caused because the shuttle was too old, then that's one thing. But let's not go attacking the government until there's a reasonable justification for it.
I'm confident that nobody at NASA would allow that shuttle to go up if they weren't completely confident that it would come back in one piece. Generally speaking they are overly cautious most of the time.
The Infinium game console is doomed before it gets started. Given the current game console market, you have to make the hardware cheaper than what it cost to manufacture it. The only way to make money is to pump enough cash into manufacturing the systems and marketing them up front and make the money back later on licensing.
They are going to be VERY hard pressed to make a console in the $200-300 price range that has a decent amount of power. Furthermore, even if they manage to pull off that magical feat, people have to actually buy them which comes down to marketing. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo already have a natural momentum in marketing because of both their history and their war chests.
I'd love to see a console come onto the market that uses some of the ideas these guys are throwing out, but unless a big corporation backs it, it isn't going to happen.
Kazaa is out there, and sure, a lot of people aren't buying some CD's because they use Kazaa to either:
a) discover that the CD's suck
b) get the one song that's actually good and save the money they would have spent
Kazaa isn't what's cutting into CD sales though. If you look at the stats, the amount of new music being produced by the big record labels is down. Thus, less people are feeling compelled to buy new CD's. Furthermore, any market that existed for people upgrading from tapes, etc, has been thoroughly exploited by now.
Also, the record industry is undergoing a significant fragmentation because the mass marketing of radio is driving people to find more obscure alternatives amongst local bands and on the Internet. Since the record labels offer no significant alternative on the Internet, they lose a lot of their power to control the market. Instead of having to listen to the 40 most popular songs get played to death I can go find whatever I want and play it as much or little as I want.
Basically when you get down to it, these record companies are aging dinosaurs who have a business models engineered for an environment that has ceased to exist. Evolve or die.
The UNU team found that to make every one of the millions manufactured each year requires:
:)
32 kg of water
Okay, and what happens to this water? I'm presuming it's released as waste water back into the environment where it eventually gets recycled by mother nature. So it's not really used as such.
1.6 kg of fossil fuels
So it requires the energy equivalent of 1.6 KG of fossil fuel. So they could use environmentally friendly energy sources for this if they were available and cheap.
700 grams of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen)
That's easy to come by given that whole atmosphere thing
and 72 grams of chemicals
It'd be nice to have a little more details on what chemicals were involved. Sure they use some highly toxic chemicals here, but what portion of that 72 grams is the really nasty stuff? What happens to those chemicals after the process is the more important question.
A few thoughts this brings to my mind:
With every generation of computers, the capacities of the system increase, but do the resources requirements involved increase? Not to my knowledge. So it's really pretty impressive that for the same inputs we can get increasingly powerful devices.
What is the impact on our ability to more efficiently manage the resource we have because we have computers with these memory chips in them?
Basically this information lacks any useful context to measure its real impact on the environment as a whole. It's an interesting statistic, but relatively meaningless for figuring out the practical impact of computers on the environment around us.
Do they read Slashdot? If so, why do they think there is such a strong anti-microsoft sentiment on Slashdot? What do they think Microsoft can do to change that sentiment?
:)
You know, a nice easy question for them to handle