Ed Foster blogged about the EULA a while back. Strange that the software needs a unique EULA at all.
What I can't figure out is why MS needs to monitor the legitimacy of your copy of Windows XP in real time. Is a valid copy suddenly going to become illegitimate for some obscure reason?
The Senate still needs to vote on a comparable bill, so it's time to write your Senators. For now I'll hold out the small hope that it might do some good.
Maybe the tax will just migrate into one of those unavoidable company fees that they don't quote in the rates. I just got this from AT&T today:
Effective July 1, 2006, AT&T's Carrier Cost Recovery Fee will increase to $1.99 (was $1.49). This fee helps AT&T recover costs assoicated with providing state-to-state and international long-distance service including expenses for national regulatory fees and programs, connection and account servicing charges and expenses for regulatory compliance. It is not a tax or charge required by the government....
That's OK AT&T as I will be dumping your service shortly....
I'll have to investigate lossless PNGs...I didn't think about those. A quick test in Photoshop CS on a 22MB TIFF goes to 16MB as a lossless JP2 file, and 15MB as a lossless PNG. I need to try it on more photos to see how they hold up.
Plus, I think that JPEG 2000 is still under the threat of patent litigation. Too bad, because lossless JPEG 2000 files are a lot smaller than similar TIFFs.
My neighbors and I have had our share of underground utility outages while a new sewer line was installed. Cable, telephone, electricity and water were all out at some point during that period. To fix the problem, the companies just lay a new line and bury it, leaving the old. If you dig and find a broken wire, there's no telling if it's needed unless somethings stops working in your house (or your neighbor's).
I think there should be a standard for burying utilities. At least have a marked pathway where everything goes. Or how about a fixed conduit from the street utilities to your house? Make it easy to get to and hard to damage. Phone and cable wires could be lumped together, and the electricity could be nearby but obviously guarded from people accidentally touching it.
Sure a conduit box could be expensive, but given the number of times these guys have had to come out to our neighborhood to fix damage, it might pay for itself. Something has to be better than the present situation.
From my experience in maintaining the computers of family and friends for several years, I can say that almost none of them ever renew the "trial" anti-virus software that comes with the computer. Putting those trials on new PCs is just another way for companies to try to make a buck. They're not actually trying to protect their customers. They should instead pre-install AVG or tell a user how to get a free A/V program when they start up the computer for the first time. Overall computer security would improve, but it'll never happen because OEMs would be lighter in the pocket.
Re:my amazon horror
on
Amazon Goes Wiki
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Why not dispute the charges with your CC company? That'll get Amazon's attention in a hurry.
Microsoft is releasing this spec under a Creative Commons license. So perhaps it's not evil, or at least they're doing a better job of hiding the evil part!
Then the splog people would just get connected with the phishing people (if they haven't already). They'll clean out someone's Paypal account and post a few hundred splogs.:(
You're right, phpPgAdmin has a lot to do. I just find it cumbersome to work with, especially when it comes to browsing and editing data. phpMyAdmin has a really nice interface for this.
So far I've stuck with MySQL for most of my projects since phpMyAdmin is so much better than phpPgAdmin. I can almost always get a web-based database tool running on the platform I'm developing for.
If there's a better web interface for Postgres than phpPgAdmin, let me know so I can try it.
Public domain is just on hold for a while. Hey, we only have to wait until 2019 to get our hands on that hot 1923 copyrighted material.
Congress wouldn't extend copyright again, would they?
Of course, new stuff locked down by DRM won't know when it's supposed to expire, so 90+ years when it's supposed to expire, no one will know what to do with the scrambled bits.:(
A year ago I was looking at search engine software and search query parsers. I didn't want to mess with setting up Lucene on Java. I found another tool called Xapian which compiles on Linux from C and has bindings for PHP, Perl, and other languages. I've found it to be fast and stable. The documentation is sort of spotty but the guys on the mailing list are great.
I'm a baseball fan. I think you could come up with some simplistic algorithms for determining the exciting moments. The easiest thing to work off of would be the score differential, and whether or not the tying run is at the plate, on deck, etc. Or if the bases are loaded (heck I remember Hard Ball on the C64 would recognize that moment with added music). You could also key off of overall batter and pitcher stats, and game stats like if the batter could hit for the cycle on the next at-bat or the pitcher was getting close to a no-hitter.
Steve Noble, who oversees regulatory affairs at the Photo Marketers Association, believes the situation will remain hazy unless copyright laws that were written in a different technological era are altered to reflect the possibilities of digital dissemination.
Great, a call for more copyright laws!:(
They'll probably want to mandate an expensive DRM scheme by which you can prove an image came from your camera. Or maybe they'll require that you be a card-carrying member of a photo association in order to print your "professional" image.
I guess I wrote that inaccurately. From what I understand, you supposedly can't publish any night Eiffel tower image without permission. That would include throwing them up on a personal website, thought it remains to be seen how much effort they'd put forth to remove a picture from your European vacation.
Slashdot Mirror
Ed Foster blogged about the EULA a while back. Strange that the software needs a unique EULA at all.
What I can't figure out is why MS needs to monitor the legitimacy of your copy of Windows XP in real time. Is a valid copy suddenly going to become illegitimate for some obscure reason?
The Senate still needs to vote on a comparable bill, so it's time to write your Senators. For now I'll hold out the small hope that it might do some good.
Maybe the tax will just migrate into one of those unavoidable company fees that they don't quote in the rates. I just got this from AT&T today:
That's OK AT&T as I will be dumping your service shortly....
If the kind souls have modded my speculation about the patent up to 5, surely they should mod up the response that the patent litigation is over!
I'll have to investigate lossless PNGs...I didn't think about those. A quick test in Photoshop CS on a 22MB TIFF goes to 16MB as a lossless JP2 file, and 15MB as a lossless PNG. I need to try it on more photos to see how they hold up.
Excellent. Let's see some software support then! Here is a Photoshop Plugin.
Plus, I think that JPEG 2000 is still under the threat of patent litigation. Too bad, because lossless JPEG 2000 files are a lot smaller than similar TIFFs.
My neighbors and I have had our share of underground utility outages while a new sewer line was installed. Cable, telephone, electricity and water were all out at some point during that period. To fix the problem, the companies just lay a new line and bury it, leaving the old. If you dig and find a broken wire, there's no telling if it's needed unless somethings stops working in your house (or your neighbor's).
I think there should be a standard for burying utilities. At least have a marked pathway where everything goes. Or how about a fixed conduit from the street utilities to your house? Make it easy to get to and hard to damage. Phone and cable wires could be lumped together, and the electricity could be nearby but obviously guarded from people accidentally touching it.
Sure a conduit box could be expensive, but given the number of times these guys have had to come out to our neighborhood to fix damage, it might pay for itself. Something has to be better than the present situation.
From my experience in maintaining the computers of family and friends for several years, I can say that almost none of them ever renew the "trial" anti-virus software that comes with the computer. Putting those trials on new PCs is just another way for companies to try to make a buck. They're not actually trying to protect their customers. They should instead pre-install AVG or tell a user how to get a free A/V program when they start up the computer for the first time. Overall computer security would improve, but it'll never happen because OEMs would be lighter in the pocket.
Why not dispute the charges with your CC company? That'll get Amazon's attention in a hurry.
Microsoft is releasing this spec under a Creative Commons license. So perhaps it's not evil, or at least they're doing a better job of hiding the evil part!
Then the splog people would just get connected with the phishing people (if they haven't already). They'll clean out someone's Paypal account and post a few hundred splogs. :(
You're right, phpPgAdmin has a lot to do. I just find it cumbersome to work with, especially when it comes to browsing and editing data. phpMyAdmin has a really nice interface for this.
So far I've stuck with MySQL for most of my projects since phpMyAdmin is so much better than phpPgAdmin. I can almost always get a web-based database tool running on the platform I'm developing for.
If there's a better web interface for Postgres than phpPgAdmin, let me know so I can try it.
Public domain is just on hold for a while. Hey, we only have to wait until 2019 to get our hands on that hot 1923 copyrighted material.
:(
Congress wouldn't extend copyright again, would they?
Of course, new stuff locked down by DRM won't know when it's supposed to expire, so 90+ years when it's supposed to expire, no one will know what to do with the scrambled bits.
Anyone know what happened to blackholes.us? I haven't been able to access it for a while now.
I did find a similar blacklist for China/Korea okean.com, but they don't have a DNSBL, just a list.
A year ago I was looking at search engine software and search query parsers. I didn't want to mess with setting up Lucene on Java. I found another tool called Xapian which compiles on Linux from C and has bindings for PHP, Perl, and other languages. I've found it to be fast and stable. The documentation is sort of spotty but the guys on the mailing list are great.
I'm a baseball fan. I think you could come up with some simplistic algorithms for determining the exciting moments. The easiest thing to work off of would be the score differential, and whether or not the tying run is at the plate, on deck, etc. Or if the bases are loaded (heck I remember Hard Ball on the C64 would recognize that moment with added music). You could also key off of overall batter and pitcher stats, and game stats like if the batter could hit for the cycle on the next at-bat or the pitcher was getting close to a no-hitter.
Now where are my patent royalties?
If we're going to have NINE months of daylight savings time, why even have it at all? Just move the clocks ahead forever.
Well said. I like DST, so I say we just keep it year-round.
Steve Noble, who oversees regulatory affairs at the Photo Marketers Association, believes the situation will remain hazy unless copyright laws that were written in a different technological era are altered to reflect the possibilities of digital dissemination.
:(
Great, a call for more copyright laws!
They'll probably want to mandate an expensive DRM scheme by which you can prove an image came from your camera. Or maybe they'll require that you be a card-carrying member of a photo association in order to print your "professional" image.
Their slogan was honest. I remember the commercials:
"The end of late fees. The beginning of more."
I jokingly said to myself that they meant the beginning of more fees, but I guess they weren't joking and instead were being honest.
FYI, Fritz Hollings is no longer in the Senate. I'm not sure what has become of the SSSCA stuff, hopefully it's dead.
I guess I wrote that inaccurately. From what I understand, you supposedly can't publish any night Eiffel tower image without permission. That would include throwing them up on a personal website, thought it remains to be seen how much effort they'd put forth to remove a picture from your European vacation.
Maybe not in the U.S., but in France you can't sell photos of the Eiffel Tower taken at night.
Pretty sad when everything around you has to be copyrighted by someone.
He didn't even have to come to the USA...nobody's heard from him since last summer. :(