It's a little ironic that it's being done with a Beastie Boys album. Historically the primary "copyright", or "theft" issue with songs is sampling.
They were hit in the past for sampling from AC/DC's song "Back in Black" for their 1985 single "Rock Hard", which was supposed to appear in their "best of" anthology release, but couldn't because AC/DC refused them permission to sample. It seems a little incongruous for them to be shipping out DRM also.
the problem here isn't the videocard industry - it's capitalism. no industry can survive without sales, and effort spent on getting sales is more directly relevant to the company's survival than hunting down the last few bugs. as long as the showstopper bugs ("Bug No. 4523: customer PC combusts when card is inserted") are resolved, they will ship it.
it's arguable that with more work, enough support would have been plunked in the OS to support more of the common OSS tools, where "beos" would be a target in many Makefiles (it's been a long while since I've seen a Makefile that *didn't* have apple/mac/darwin as a target, for example. it's not impossible that beos would never have reached this stage).
anyways, what i'm curious about though is this. Remember the old (and now forgotten?) RIAA attempt to watermark song files, that Edward Felten (and friends) conclusively defeated? In their paper, the screenshots they had, the windows looked suspiciously like they were from the BeOS GUI. Can anyone confirm if they WERE in fact using BeOS (or if it's just a window manager)? if that were the case, a bigger debt is owed to BeOS than many people realise....
I loved BeOS. I truly, truly loved it. I think, purely in terms of technology, Apple made a mistake in choosing NeXT over Be. (*)
But, ultimately, it was the right choice - it's hard to imagine where Apple would be now if there had not been the iMac, and everything that led on subsequently from that (right up to the iPod). Apple may still be a niche player in the eyes of the analysts, but it's a much bigger niche than it would have been, and considering the disappearing use of "beleaguered" in relation to Apple, it's a niche most people are willing to accept Apple can continue in for a while at least. all this i believe really did arise via the Hand of Jobs (and Ives).
(*): I feel the oft-repeated lack of printer support in BeOS is overstated - OS X printer support is CUPS based anyways - it's not a "NeXT" thing - and there's no fundamental reason why Be couldn't have gone down the same route. As for the much-touted rapid/easy application development aspects of OpenStep/NeXT, well, arguably the sheer allure of the underlying non-cruftiness of the BeOS would have drawn as much development support. Xcode with Objective C traces it's lineage from NeXT, but at least as of now there does not seem to be noticeable success in forestalling the application gap.
IBM has actually been rather magnanimous to SCO, allowing them lots of extra time (in a few past motions), not quibbling about the small details (several things they could have objected to, they have overlooked)
actually this could be strategic. this way, when SCO finally gets the smackdown coming to them, SCO won't be able to point to htings like "look, they refused us 'X', if we'd had that we wouldn't have lost the lawsuit", etc.
Joe Sixpacks don't get invitations to gay weddings. Hence this situation doesn't happen with them. Simple as that.
what if the invite is a spam and it gets flagged for ads? unless automated spam detection improves to 100%, how can any automated system possibly know which mails are "safe" to parse for ad-content delivery, and which mails are not?
Imagine what will happen if the Terrans start building Protoss cannons that can strike ground and air targets
The Protoss guns ARE already capable of hitting ground-and-air targets....
Actually, IIRC if you look carefully at the box-cover picture of the original release of Starcraft, you can see that the terran tanks *could* hit air targets as well, instead of only ground-only, which must have really messed up the game balance:-)
Wouldn't it be interesting if, upon SCO's claims etc. getting tossed out, Microsoft turns around and sues SCO/Canopy for a return of the licensing fees they'd paid, in the sense that "since you guys didn't own the licence anyway - and there's that recent judgement that says so - we've given you money for nothing, you cheating liars, you told us you had a valid enforceable license that everybody needed to get! We wants our money back"?
Microsoft would have every right to do so (assuming their contract with SCO/Canopy doesn't have any clauses saying "once the money's handed over it's ours for good")?
Assuming there's no secret (and enforceable) agreement between MS & SCO to play nice after, assuming the "SCO is doing this on MS's behalf" conspiracy theories are true, there's really nothing to stop MS from abandoning their flunky running-dog after they've outlived their usefulness, is there? And, if there isn't a secret conspiracy and MS is just buying the licence (if only on an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-a-friend basis), once the judgement comes, won't MS have a *fiduciary duty* to their shareholders to claw back the money they've paid out to SCO since, heck, they got nothing for it?
Come to think of it, are there any minority shareholders within SCO/Canopy who can sue SCO/Canopy management for messing up their ongoing line of business (back in the Caldera days, OpenLinux was regarded quite well, wasn't it?) in a series of decisions that antagonised everybody and (will almost certainly?) lead to the collapse of their remaining business?
EV1 net has now publicly regretted getting their licence - if SCO loses their case, who on earth is going to want to buy SCO licences (or OpenLinux, for that matter) for any reason other than "maintenance while we quickly look for something else to migrate to" purposes?
mean, I could think of a 1/2 dozen ways to wipe out a whole country's internet access completely for a day or two (no, I'm not going into details here, but if use BGP in your work life, you can probably think of a few also
There's a difference between doing something, and doing something and not getting caught. Are your ideas the kind that will end up you being in a federal prison (i.e. quite pointless) or the kind where you cannot get traced (i.e. you are then in fact quite dangerous)?
there's a difference between going to the bank with a shotgun and getting a lot of money, right before being either shot dead or hauled off to prison, and figuring out some way to siphon off bank funds into your account in a way where nobody ever detects it (or only does long after you're gone).
Seems like they are saying they are going to sue someone who has already licensed Unixware or some other SCO-sold Unix OS
That's what I thought too. But that seems really short-sighted. Who on earth would, from this point on, ever want to buy anything from SCO? You'd have thought that their customers are the ones they'd be MOST friendly to.
Then again, maybe the way they see it, nobody's ever going to want to buy anything from SCO ever again anyway, so might as well do it.
Maybe they can find some contractual basis for the lawsuit due to the licensing terms the licensees had had to sign - like how they sued IBM and not Red Hat etc. because they had a contract with IBM that they thought they could use.
Whatever the case, this seems very much like "eating the seed corn", or "eating your young" - the final act before the end. Suing your paying customers? Good grief.
Hrm, but are they making any money? There's no point being 2nd or 3rd (or 1st, for that matter) if you lose $$ every unit and have no way to recoup it through some other means....
I have a question. Part of the rationale for the Xbox is IIRC that with a fixed hardware base, testing/etc. can be done more comprehensively without any "unknowns" and therefore no crashes/freezes/etc. with bugs. In your experience with the Xbox, is this true? (And any other readers, please chime in). You've NEVER had any bugs/crashes/etc. on your Xbox?
It's not cheap to do it when you need to manage and monitor the systems. It's not cheap to install WiFi in a lot of geographically diverse locations. And it's really not cheap to provide backhaul for them
But in that case you then basically have a business where potential customers aren't willing to pay for the service amounts that would make up what it costs you to provide it, i.e. a non-sustainable one?
Maybe I'm selfish, but I don't go around thinking "hrm, this is an expensive service to provide, I'll pay lots more money for it then", as opposed to "$20 an hour? Do I really need it that much? Guess not" and walk away.
You might want to keep an eye out for a different job, then....
Therefore building on top of Free Software and then turning around and patenting the things you've discovered smells bad in my world
What you're saying is that it's against the "spirit" of the GPL if not the exact "word"... . They ought to be using BSD then, with the BSD licence being philosophically more compatible with this. And yet they chose linux... how/why?
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It's a little ironic that it's being done with a Beastie Boys album. Historically the primary "copyright", or "theft" issue with songs is sampling.
They were hit in the past for sampling from AC/DC's song "Back in Black" for their 1985 single "Rock Hard", which was supposed to appear in their "best of" anthology release, but couldn't because AC/DC refused them permission to sample. It seems a little incongruous for them to be shipping out DRM also.
the problem here isn't the videocard industry - it's capitalism. no industry can survive without sales, and effort spent on getting sales is more directly relevant to the company's survival than hunting down the last few bugs. as long as the showstopper bugs ("Bug No. 4523: customer PC combusts when card is inserted") are resolved, they will ship it.
it's arguable that with more work, enough support would have been plunked in the OS to support more of the common OSS tools, where "beos" would be a target in many Makefiles (it's been a long while since I've seen a Makefile that *didn't* have apple/mac/darwin as a target, for example. it's not impossible that beos would never have reached this stage).
.
anyways, what i'm curious about though is this. Remember the old (and now forgotten?) RIAA attempt to watermark song files, that Edward Felten (and friends) conclusively defeated? In their paper, the screenshots they had, the windows looked suspiciously like they were from the BeOS GUI. Can anyone confirm if they WERE in fact using BeOS (or if it's just a window manager)? if that were the case, a bigger debt is owed to BeOS than many people realise...
I second that.
I loved BeOS. I truly, truly loved it. I think, purely in terms of technology, Apple made a mistake in choosing NeXT over Be. (*)
But, ultimately, it was the right choice - it's hard to imagine where Apple would be now if there had not been the iMac, and everything that led on subsequently from that (right up to the iPod). Apple may still be a niche player in the eyes of the analysts, but it's a much bigger niche than it would have been, and considering the disappearing use of "beleaguered" in relation to Apple, it's a niche most people are willing to accept Apple can continue in for a while at least. all this i believe really did arise via the Hand of Jobs (and Ives).
(*): I feel the oft-repeated lack of printer support in BeOS is overstated - OS X printer support is CUPS based anyways - it's not a "NeXT" thing - and there's no fundamental reason why Be couldn't have gone down the same route. As for the much-touted rapid/easy application development aspects of OpenStep/NeXT, well, arguably the sheer allure of the underlying non-cruftiness of the BeOS would have drawn as much development support. Xcode with Objective C traces it's lineage from NeXT, but at least as of now there does not seem to be noticeable success in forestalling the application gap.
well i'm one of the poor sods who bought a HP Jornada before the merger, and watched HP decide to keep compaq's iPaq and jettison jornada... .
abandonment of customers happens all the time in this industry
IBM has actually been rather magnanimous to SCO, allowing them lots of extra time (in a few past motions), not quibbling about the small details (several things they could have objected to, they have overlooked)
actually this could be strategic. this way, when SCO finally gets the smackdown coming to them, SCO won't be able to point to htings like "look, they refused us 'X', if we'd had that we wouldn't have lost the lawsuit", etc.
What happens when (not if, someday it will happen) Microsoft ceases to exist as a company
I'd always wondered when/how they'd turn into Weyland-Yutani.
Richard M. Stalman, not Richard StalMan
Which leads me to believe that they probably have some categories for which they won't serve any ads in the email
that may be the case now. but what about in the future?
when, let's say, google gets new management, but with all of your email, and with a terms of agreement that does not explicitly prevent this?
Joe Sixpacks don't get invitations to gay weddings. Hence this situation doesn't happen with them. Simple as that.
what if the invite is a spam and it gets flagged for ads? unless automated spam detection improves to 100%, how can any automated system possibly know which mails are "safe" to parse for ad-content delivery, and which mails are not?
There needs to be a +1, Polite mod option.
Well done.
They cannot comprehend how the Mac JDK runs faster than a Windows JDK.
Is this true?
Are there any benchmarks/evals online anywhere?
Imagine what will happen if the Terrans start building Protoss cannons that can strike ground and air targets
.
:-)
The Protoss guns ARE already capable of hitting ground-and-air targets...
Actually, IIRC if you look carefully at the box-cover picture of the original release of Starcraft, you can see that the terran tanks *could* hit air targets as well, instead of only ground-only, which must have really messed up the game balance
Wouldn't it be interesting if, upon SCO's claims etc. getting tossed out, Microsoft turns around and sues SCO/Canopy for a return of the licensing fees they'd paid, in the sense that "since you guys didn't own the licence anyway - and there's that recent judgement that says so - we've given you money for nothing, you cheating liars, you told us you had a valid enforceable license that everybody needed to get! We wants our money back"?
Microsoft would have every right to do so (assuming their contract with SCO/Canopy doesn't have any clauses saying "once the money's handed over it's ours for good")?
Assuming there's no secret (and enforceable) agreement between MS & SCO to play nice after, assuming the "SCO is doing this on MS's behalf" conspiracy theories are true, there's really nothing to stop MS from abandoning their flunky running-dog after they've outlived their usefulness, is there? And, if there isn't a secret conspiracy and MS is just buying the licence (if only on an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-a-friend basis), once the judgement comes, won't MS have a *fiduciary duty* to their shareholders to claw back the money they've paid out to SCO since, heck, they got nothing for it?
Come to think of it, are there any minority shareholders within SCO/Canopy who can sue SCO/Canopy management for messing up their ongoing line of business (back in the Caldera days, OpenLinux was regarded quite well, wasn't it?) in a series of decisions that antagonised everybody and (will almost certainly?) lead to the collapse of their remaining business?
EV1 net has now publicly regretted getting their licence - if SCO loses their case, who on earth is going to want to buy SCO licences (or OpenLinux, for that matter) for any reason other than "maintenance while we quickly look for something else to migrate to" purposes?
mean, I could think of a 1/2 dozen ways to wipe out a whole country's internet access completely for a day or two (no, I'm not going into details here, but if use BGP in your work life, you can probably think of a few also
There's a difference between doing something, and doing something and not getting caught. Are your ideas the kind that will end up you being in a federal prison (i.e. quite pointless) or the kind where you cannot get traced (i.e. you are then in fact quite dangerous)?
there's a difference between going to the bank with a shotgun and getting a lot of money, right before being either shot dead or hauled off to prison, and figuring out some way to siphon off bank funds into your account in a way where nobody ever detects it (or only does long after you're gone).
you're assuming they don't pull a Disney. thanks to lobbying this sort of thing keeps getting extended.
Seems like they are saying they are going to sue someone who has already licensed Unixware or some other SCO-sold Unix OS
That's what I thought too. But that seems really short-sighted. Who on earth would, from this point on, ever want to buy anything from SCO? You'd have thought that their customers are the ones they'd be MOST friendly to.
Then again, maybe the way they see it, nobody's ever going to want to buy anything from SCO ever again anyway, so might as well do it.
Maybe they can find some contractual basis for the lawsuit due to the licensing terms the licensees had had to sign - like how they sued IBM and not Red Hat etc. because they had a contract with IBM that they thought they could use.
Whatever the case, this seems very much like "eating the seed corn", or "eating your young" - the final act before the end. Suing your paying customers? Good grief.
is there any chance you ended up with a corrupted installer? (md5sums match?)
Hrm, but are they making any money? There's no point being 2nd or 3rd (or 1st, for that matter) if you lose $$ every unit and have no way to recoup it through some other means... .
I have a question. Part of the rationale for the Xbox is IIRC that with a fixed hardware base, testing/etc. can be done more comprehensively without any "unknowns" and therefore no crashes/freezes/etc. with bugs. In your experience with the Xbox, is this true? (And any other readers, please chime in). You've NEVER had any bugs/crashes/etc. on your Xbox?
grovelling "yes man"
:-)
You know, I'd be pretty amused if I got a resume application where the cover letter states "yes I'm ready to be your grovelling yes-man!".
Heck, I might hire him
Actually, very often, you'll have ads (at least once on MS's own website!) where the machines being used aree actually Macs.
I take these as examples of the marketing departments being either staffed by insurgents, or need-cluestick-beating types.
It's not cheap to do it when you need to manage and monitor the systems. It's not cheap to install WiFi in a lot of geographically diverse locations. And it's really not cheap to provide backhaul for them
.
But in that case you then basically have a business where potential customers aren't willing to pay for the service amounts that would make up what it costs you to provide it, i.e. a non-sustainable one?
Maybe I'm selfish, but I don't go around thinking "hrm, this is an expensive service to provide, I'll pay lots more money for it then", as opposed to "$20 an hour? Do I really need it that much? Guess not" and walk away.
You might want to keep an eye out for a different job, then...
Err.. there's no BSD-equivalent of GCC
I see, I see... Hrm. BSD pre-dated Linux quite a while, right? So what compiler did they use for what they did? Has it always been GCC?
Therefore building on top of Free Software and then turning around and patenting the things you've discovered smells bad in my world
What you're saying is that it's against the "spirit" of the GPL if not the exact "word"... . They ought to be using BSD then, with the BSD licence being philosophically more compatible with this. And yet they chose linux... how/why?