Changing IMEIs = destruction of evidence. The only realistic way of identifying a phone is by it's IMEI. To identify a phone as stolen you need to check it's IMEI and match it to a stolen phone. The prosecution cannot gain a conviction of handling stolen goods unless they can prove that the phone being sold was stolen, the only way to identify the phone as stolen is if you can show that the IMEI of the phone matches a stolen one. The only alternative that comes to mind would be to set up sting operations which puts you on ethically unsound ground and would no doubt result in a/. thread decrying the use of sting operations by the police.
I'll try another analogy:
A car theif steals a car. They take it to a garage who respray it and remove the VIN and replace it with the VIN of a car of the same model that was involved in an accident. The car is then resold. Under British law the garge is equally culpable as the theif who stole the car.
A mugger steals a mobile phone and takes to to a shop who change the IMEI number. The phone is resold.
OK, it's not a perfect analogy as there is, in theory at least, a central register of VIN numbers so it should be possible to check that the VIN number on a car is valid and does not belong to a car that has been destroyed. It does, however, indicate that this law is simply putting those who faccilitate phone theft on a equal footing with those who faccilitate car theft. They are aiding and abetting a crime and should therefore be held responsible for their part in that crime.
Outside of the manufacturers and, possibly, a small number of researchers there isn't really any legal reason why you would want or need to change the IMEI of a phone. It makes for a far more effective and suitable system to make the act illegal ingeneral but make exceptions for those who do have a valid and legitimate reason to do it (like the situation with drugs such as Heroin and Cocaine, where in general they are illegal but they can legally be prescribed by suitably licensed doctors).
Your phone number and account is attached to the SIM card not the phone/IMEI, or at least that's how it is on all the systems I've seen in the UK. Changing the IMEI number of my phone will have precisely zero effect on where my calls go to, appear to come from or get charged to. If I take the SIM out of my phone it won't connect to a net work at all. If I put my SIM into another phone then I can make and recieve calls from that phone as me.
A very common thing for people to do these days when they upgrade thier phone is to buy a 'Pay-As-You-Go'/Prepay SIM to put into their old phone. They then sell the old phone, give it to their kid/partner or use it as a backup/spare. None of these require changing the IMEI. The only reason for changing the IMEI is to make it impossible for the phone to be identified as stolen.
As well as storing your pohone number and details of the network the SIM also stores other odds and sods (recent calls &c) and can also store your 'phone book', although the phone usually can store more numbers and more details (e.g. I have a Nokia 6210 the SIM can only store names and phone numbers, the phone can store business cards similar to.vcf files).
So in other words, the law intentionally does not do anything about violent criminals, but is instead going after 'reasonably legal' businesses?
Firstly I wouldn't describe the businesses doing this as 'Reasonably Legal', 'Apparently Legal Fronts to Illegal Activities' would be closer. Without the businesses changing the ID numbers the violent thugs who steal the phones wouldn't have a market so there would be no point them stealing phones and they'd have to find some other way to get money (hopefully some way that's more easy to track so they'll get caught quickly). Stealing a mobile phone is very easy, all it takes is a knife and a sociopathic attitude. Changing the IMEI requires equipment and some degree of technical know how. There are far more thugs stealing phones than people changing IMEIs so it is far more effective to target the latter group (in the same way as drug enforcement targets the relatively few importers and distributors rather than the many street dealers)
Well, I live in Birmingham and most, if not all of the people I know who have had mobile phones for more than a couple of years, have had one stolen. Theft of mobile phones, according to a report I saw in February of this year, is now the number one form of street crime. Phones are snatched out of peoples hands if they're in use, people have been held at knife or gun point if a thief suspects they may have a mobile phone and cars are frequently broken into if a thief thinks there might be a mobile in there. Mobile phones are high value and easily transportable, so therefore an attractive item for theives. Anything that makes them harder to fence has got to be good.
BTW we're not just talking about the cost and inconvenience to the victims of theft here, we're talking about people getting knives, screwdrivers and other sharp objects stuck in them because a theif knows that he/she can easily make a couple of hundred pounds ($300+) by strealing a mobile phone and selling it to someone who will change the IMEI.
I can't think of a legitimate reason for anyone other than a manufacturer/researcher wanting to change the IMEI of a phone. I've been reading the comments to this article and have yet to see anyone suggest a legitimate and realistic reason.
In that case I'd have to go for the "Thankyou for the coffee, you're a bunch of fuckwits." response. At least it would prove that I'm not afraid to challenge managers when I think they're doing something really stupid.
Or maybe the answer is to have a really long game of marbles whilst waiting for the mercs I hired to bust me out if such a situation arose to bust me out. I plan ahead, and lets face that's more likely than some country deciding on whether to execute foriegners based ont heir ability to pick the right color marble out fo a jar.
We'd like to cut the load on our web site servers in half without losing any revenue. What should we do?
Hang the entire marketing department. Get someone who actually understands the difference between a web page and a paper brochure to redesign the site to be clean and fast loading with standards compliant HTML, only necessary graphics (and those that are there have been sized correctly, e.g. don't have a 1024x768 graphic served that in the browser is rendered as 100x76) and no Flash.
It would be useful to have the 'official' correct answers available to check if you're on the right track. Tt's possible, probable even, that you could think of a perfectly reasonable solution that demonstrates good reasoning skills but which if you produced at interview the interviewer would reject you on the basis that it isn't the 'correct answer' written on the piece of paper in front of them, or there might be an "Ahhh, but.." clause.
I only had a quick glance at the first two relatively easy riddles (the "Jars of Marbles" and the "Sheik's Race"). Here's what I think:
Jars of Marbles
First remove all of the white marbles from their jar. Then put half of the black marbles in the empty jar so you have two jars half full of black marbles. Carefully top up each jar with white marbles so the bottom half of each jar is black marbles and the top white. when picking be sure to take a marble from the top. The maximum probability of surviving is 1, i.e. certain.
Sheik's Race
The advice to each son was to ride the other's camel over the finish line as it was which camel crossed the line last (or first depending on your point of view) not which son.
I'm fairly certain of the second one but suspect that it would result in an accusation of cheating.
I started out using Notepad for HTML editing, and vi on *nix, then moved on to using Programmers File Editor. That was fine whilst my personal site was small, a dozen pages or so with maybe half that number of graphics, and all on one server.
Now my personal site is something like 3,000 objects spread over 8 servers. Manual management just doesn't cut it. I use Macromedia Dreamweaver for the convenience and site management tools.
According to my web counter IE accounts for about 70% of my hits with about half the remainder being Netscape and a significant showing by Konqueror. I haven't had any complaints about the HTML (plenty about the content tho') so far. Feel free to drop by and tell me what's wrong.
I think that the operative phrase is "have been sold". PCs (of one form or another) have been around over 20 years. In that time I personally havre gotten through about 25 PCs (allowing for both home and office/school use) and I know people who have far exceeded that amount (18 of my 25 were in the last 8 years). With the long period of PCs availability and the tendancy for multiple ownership in both series and parrallel One billion isn't that impressive a figure.
Also what are they defining as a PC?
On the growth figures. Personally I'm with the idea of the Home PC being absorbed and integrated into other items to provide integrated home entertainment/net-access applicances. I can already send email and surf the web (in a limited fasion) from my TV. Add a word processor, telnet client and put a proper browser on it (to replace that Liberate pile of crap) and it'll do about 90% of what I use my home PC for. My Palm M100 will do the rest.
Since there is a potential for them to share mp3 files accross those networks, they must be illegal.
Many, many years ago RMS wrote "Right to read" about a dysutopian future where copyright was rigourously enforced through monitoring of computers and networks. One of the major points was that not only was breaching copyright illegal but also own or making anything that could be used to breach copyright or interfere with the states ability to monitor for breaches was illegal. A specific example given was owning a debugger, which could be used to isolate and remove copyright tracking code. The fact that such an item was not intended for that purpose was no defense; that fact that it could so be used constituted sufficient evidence.
Personally, I have purchased more music since buying a cd burner.
Same here.
At one point Liebowitz seems to be saying that the factor that's stopping mass duplication is people not wanting to be bothered in assembling the CDs from the MP3s. Personally that's the principle use I burn audio CDs for. I go out and buy a CD with, say, 12 tracks (probably dropping something like 14-20ukp ($19-$28) doing so). Of those 12 tracks I'll probably really like 2, like another 3 a bit and dislike 4. So the first thing I do when I get the CD home is to rip the songs I like on to my PC, put then into playlists with songs from other CDs I've bought then burn a CD of just songs I like. A mix 'tape' but digital.
Here's what I don't understand... the phone company comes to my house and hooks up a wire. The cable company comes to my house and hooks up another wire. Damn it! Why don't they just get together, stop duplicating each other's work, and run a single fiber line right to my doorstep!!
That's pretty much how it's done in the UK. Does this mean we're ahead of the US on something technical and pervasive?
On the more general point of the article. the key problem is thart end users tend to pay less per Mb/s for bandwidth than the broadband providors them selves do. This was a viable business model as it was assumed that users will only use the full bandwidth for small slices of time. For example, if you're surfing the web it might take you 5 minutes to read a page before you click the link to take you onto another page. Suppose on a modem link this page would take 10 seconds to download but on broadband would take 1 second then that means that the supplier either has to provide a small bandwidth for 10 seconds every 5 minutes or a much larger bandwidth for 1 second. In either case they can fit other users in during the times when you're just sitting there staring at your screen (or editing source files, buring ISOs to disk &c)and not using bandwidth. If, however, you're file sharing and you are sharing a lot of tiles that people want then you're going to be using your full bandwidth most if not all of the time so there's no free time slices for other users.
If anything the filesharers are stealing from the users who don't fileshare. Their activities are taking up the bandwidth that everyone else has paid for so everyone gets reduced or no service because a small proportion of users are soaking up more than their fair share of the available bandwidth.
At the end of the day the broadband suppliers have to pay their bills, they have to pay their staff. No-one can survive in business selling a product for less than it costs them unless they can make up the shortfall elsewhere (use one product as a loss leader to sell a profitable one).
Being serious for a moment. Does anyone happen to know if a description of the particular problems they're having is available anywhere. I've never had a problem moving documents from StarOffice to M$-Word in Word97 format. I have had problems moving documents from Word 2000 to Word97 tho'.
Whilst concentrating on local issues will limit the audience that audience could still be quite large. I've worked with a number of local/regional sites and we've always found that the readers we get from outside that area are always far more than the local population.
On the content side I'd reccomend tempering purely local issues with issues/slant that whilst local are likely to be of interest to people outside the immediate area. I guess the Berkeley is going to have a big interest from people who have attended the university or who wish to do so.
I don't really know enough about Slashcode to comment on it's suitablility. LiveJournal might be worth considering?
Does this remind anyone else of the war-room scene from Toys or Ender's Game?"
More so of "The Last Starfighter". Given the increasing prevalence of online capabilities in games machines and in-box data storage (Microsoft reckon that they have enough space on the internal HDD of the X-Box to store every detail of every game a gamer will play in the entire life of the machine) how long before a really good high score results in a vist from the feds?
The books I tend to use most and am happiest buying are the small pocket guides. 90%+ of the time I'm looking a book because I already know the command I want to use but need to remind myself of the syntax or check on a rarely used option. I don't need an indepth discussion of how the command works, I just need a brief reminder.
For example, back in version 7 of the RDBMS Oracle supplied as part of the documentation set a little 70 odd page A5 book entitled "SQL Quick Reference" that just gave you a brief diagramatic explanation of the syntax of each command and a brief listing of the built in functions and the datadictionary tables and what they were contained. 6 years down the line it's the only book that lives permanently on my desk. If there was an 8i/9i equivelent I'd be first in the queue to buy it.
For anything over about 100 pages, ring/spiral bind it so it will lie flat.
Plenty of white space! I like to annotate.
Tie in web site for code examples and errata and a tie in mailing list/discussion board where I can post questions, comments and error reports. It doesn't matter if the author doesn't read the mailing list, although obviously it would be nice if someone from the publishers did to pick up error reports and identify possible improvments for the next edition (or even see what other books might be worthwhile publishing).
For the more 'Teach yourself' rather than quick reference type books, anecdotes. If I'm learning something then I want to know how it works in the real world, not just spurious academic examples.
It comes down to cost. Others have given detailed breakdowns elsewhere so I won't bother. The end user is typically paying far less per Mbit/s than the ISP is. This can be done as it's assumed that most users will be using the full bandwidth (or a large proportion there of) only for very short periods, fractions of a second or a few seconds at most, eg it might take a second for you to download a web page at full bandwidth but 2-3 minutes for you to read it and click on a link for the next page so for most of the time your link is essentially idle and the bandwidth from the internet to your ISP can be used by another user.
Now imagine you've got someone who is constantly moving multi megabyte files around, perhaps they've setup something like Morpheus and are sharing their entire video and MP3 collection with the world. That means that they're soaking up bandwidth that cannot be used by other users because although their peak is just as high, they are using their peak pretty much all the time. This also means that if you are a normal broadband user they are taking up your bandwidth.
If by 'free dialup' you mean ISPs where there's no monthly fee then I agree that there seems to have been a drop off in availability. However for much of the country there still plenty of unmetered call access. Both Telewest and NTL offer low monthy rate services with unmetered dial up, in the case of Telewest they even throw in a tenners worth of free voice calls a month.
So Microsoft said that they needed the email addresses so that they could show that some Lindows subscribers were in the WA area and therefore the action could proceed there. Surely that question could have been answered by asking Lindows how many subscribers had addresses in WA. If Microsoft didn't trust Lindows to give an honest answer then both parties should agree on an independant auditor who would, at Microsofts expense, go through the list of names and addresses to find the answer.
Of late I've been doing a lot of work that relates to the Data Protection Act here in the UK. Based on what I've done and have read here, what actually happened would be a major breach had it happened in the UK. To the extent that both companies could face very serious penalties.
My co-workers and I were discussing this yesterday and we all feel that Microsoft themselves are guilty of at least some sort of infringement everytime that they use the word "Windows" to describe their product. Essentially they are infringing onthe rights of everyone who makes those glass things stuck in the walls. If they specidied "Microsoft Windows" or "The Microsoft Windowing Operating Environment" they'd be OK. But by failing to specify suffiently what they are refering to they must be infringing someone. Anyone got the phone number for Pilkington?
For that matter doesn't the term "Microsoft" predate the company use of that name? It is commonly used in cyberpunk literature to refer to plug in chips used to gain skills or for entertainment purposes (ie "chipin' in").
It's October 1st according to a recent presentation I went to. Certain industries (European public sector and LGOs being the major ones) have different cut off dates for certain options.
As I recall as of October 1st you will no longer be able to buy upgrade licenses and most of the world won't be able to buy Upgrade Advantage, this is the launch date for Software Assurance. In the UK many LGOs will continue to buy Upgrade Advantage until 31st March 2002, after that date only new licenses will be available and you will be able to buy Software assurance with that license (I think you have a 30 day grace period to buy SA after buying the license).
Check with your Microsoft sales rep for details and confirmation.
Personally, I *hate* libraries. Then again, I'm running RedHat on x86 using "standard" apps.
My problem is that I *never* have whatever library the program I'm trying to install requires, and all too often, I have no idea where I might *find* the library. And I've had libaries that can't be installed due to other library dependencies... *grrr*
I guess my problem isn't with the actual use of libraries, but with their implementations. Why don't developers offer a version of their packages *with* every libary you may need? Personally, I'd be soooo much happier if I could just run a script to install all the libraries.
Of course, then you have to worry about how well that script works, and if it'll overwrite my libraries with older / non-working libraries. But you get the idea...:)
Here you're getting into the sort of terratory that is usually inhabited by, mostly propietry, paid for software. With very few exceptions
I've found that paid license software will have the extra touches like libraries included with the install media (and usually an installer clever enough to only install a library if you need it and it won't break your system by over writing a later version of the same library) or at least the URLs of where to get the libraries or patches to bring you system to the required level to run the software. I rarely see a free/open source package that has that. You do get what you pay for, usually.
My interpretation of the post was that the coder should put as much functionality into libraries or functions rather than the main executable(s) to aid modularisation and (probably) improve code sharing amongst modules of the app. Rather than relying on external libraries over which they have no control. Those liobraries I woulde expect to definately be in the install media.
My thoughts on backwards compatabiity are to try to avoid changes to things like file formats and APIs unless absolutely necessary. With file formats try to support as many older versions as you can, ideally for both save and load but as a compromise you could make it such that it will load all previous versions but only save current and last 2 versions or something like that. With APIs, if the way it is called changes, where possible provide a wrapper/interpreter for the old API call that translates it to and from your new functionality. Anything that changes file formats or API calls in a non-transparent way incrememnts the major version number. Provide a migration path and utilities to aid migration.
Also document, document, document. I'm deathly serious. Document everything. When you make a change to the source code put in a comment saying what you did, why you did it and how to undo it (eg if you make a change to a line, copy the line, commnent out the original and change the copy -- Although this is really only advisable for a few single line changes, anything bigger and you'd probably want to use something like RCS or SCCS to maintain your change history, which is another advantage of modularising your code as that way the number of changes per file will be small so you only have to rollback and reimplement a small part of your code to reverse a change), it makes it a heck of a lot easier to maintain your code later. Document all changes in the Release Notes, Migration guide, Installation documentation and the User Guide, odds are that users will read at least one of these, if they don't you can at least tell them to RTFM with some moral justification.
Slashdot Mirror
If they think that the terrain is tough in Afghanistan, wait till they see the outback.
Stephen
Changing IMEIs = destruction of evidence. The only realistic way of identifying a phone is by it's IMEI. To identify a phone as stolen you need to check it's IMEI and match it to a stolen phone. The prosecution cannot gain a conviction of handling stolen goods unless they can prove that the phone being sold was stolen, the only way to identify the phone as stolen is if you can show that the IMEI of the phone matches a stolen one. The only alternative that comes to mind would be to set up sting operations which puts you on ethically unsound ground and would no doubt result in a /. thread decrying the use of sting operations by the police.
I'll try another analogy:
A car theif steals a car. They take it to a garage who respray it and remove the VIN and replace it with the VIN of a car of the same model that was involved in an accident. The car is then resold. Under British law the garge is equally culpable as the theif who stole the car.
A mugger steals a mobile phone and takes to to a shop who change the IMEI number. The phone is resold.
OK, it's not a perfect analogy as there is, in theory at least, a central register of VIN numbers so it should be possible to check that the VIN number on a car is valid and does not belong to a car that has been destroyed. It does, however, indicate that this law is simply putting those who faccilitate phone theft on a equal footing with those who faccilitate car theft. They are aiding and abetting a crime and should therefore be held responsible for their part in that crime.
Outside of the manufacturers and, possibly, a small number of researchers there isn't really any legal reason why you would want or need to change the IMEI of a phone. It makes for a far more effective and suitable system to make the act illegal ingeneral but make exceptions for those who do have a valid and legitimate reason to do it (like the situation with drugs such as Heroin and Cocaine, where in general they are illegal but they can legally be prescribed by suitably licensed doctors).
Stephen
Your phone number and account is attached to the SIM card not the phone/IMEI, or at least that's how it is on all the systems I've seen in the UK. Changing the IMEI number of my phone will have precisely zero effect on where my calls go to, appear to come from or get charged to. If I take the SIM out of my phone it won't connect to a net work at all. If I put my SIM into another phone then I can make and recieve calls from that phone as me.
A very common thing for people to do these days when they upgrade thier phone is to buy a 'Pay-As-You-Go'/Prepay SIM to put into their old phone. They then sell the old phone, give it to their kid/partner or use it as a backup/spare. None of these require changing the IMEI. The only reason for changing the IMEI is to make it impossible for the phone to be identified as stolen.
As well as storing your pohone number and details of the network the SIM also stores other odds and sods (recent calls &c) and can also store your 'phone book', although the phone usually can store more numbers and more details (e.g. I have a Nokia 6210 the SIM can only store names and phone numbers, the phone can store business cards similar to .vcf files).
Stephen
So in other words, the law intentionally does not do anything about violent criminals, but is instead going after 'reasonably legal' businesses?
Firstly I wouldn't describe the businesses doing this as 'Reasonably Legal', 'Apparently Legal Fronts to Illegal Activities' would be closer. Without the businesses changing the ID numbers the violent thugs who steal the phones wouldn't have a market so there would be no point them stealing phones and they'd have to find some other way to get money (hopefully some way that's more easy to track so they'll get caught quickly). Stealing a mobile phone is very easy, all it takes is a knife and a sociopathic attitude. Changing the IMEI requires equipment and some degree of technical know how. There are far more thugs stealing phones than people changing IMEIs so it is far more effective to target the latter group (in the same way as drug enforcement targets the relatively few importers and distributors rather than the many street dealers)
Stephen
Well, I live in Birmingham and most, if not all of the people I know who have had mobile phones for more than a couple of years, have had one stolen. Theft of mobile phones, according to a report I saw in February of this year, is now the number one form of street crime. Phones are snatched out of peoples hands if they're in use, people have been held at knife or gun point if a thief suspects they may have a mobile phone and cars are frequently broken into if a thief thinks there might be a mobile in there. Mobile phones are high value and easily transportable, so therefore an attractive item for theives. Anything that makes them harder to fence has got to be good.
BTW we're not just talking about the cost and inconvenience to the victims of theft here, we're talking about people getting knives, screwdrivers and other sharp objects stuck in them because a theif knows that he/she can easily make a couple of hundred pounds ($300+) by strealing a mobile phone and selling it to someone who will change the IMEI.
I can't think of a legitimate reason for anyone other than a manufacturer/researcher wanting to change the IMEI of a phone. I've been reading the comments to this article and have yet to see anyone suggest a legitimate and realistic reason.
Stephen
In that case I'd have to go for the "Thankyou for the coffee, you're a bunch of fuckwits." response. At least it would prove that I'm not afraid to challenge managers when I think they're doing something really stupid.
Or maybe the answer is to have a really long game of marbles whilst waiting for the mercs I hired to bust me out if such a situation arose to bust me out. I plan ahead, and lets face that's more likely than some country deciding on whether to execute foriegners based ont heir ability to pick the right color marble out fo a jar.
Stephen
From the page:
I took this to mean that one jar is filled with white marbles and the other with black
Stephen
We'd like to cut the load on our web site servers in half without losing any revenue. What should we do?
Hang the entire marketing department. Get someone who actually understands the difference between a web page and a paper brochure to redesign the site to be clean and fast loading with standards compliant HTML, only necessary graphics (and those that are there have been sized correctly, e.g. don't have a 1024x768 graphic served that in the browser is rendered as 100x76) and no Flash.
See, easy.
Stephen
It would be useful to have the 'official' correct answers available to check if you're on the right track. Tt's possible, probable even, that you could think of a perfectly reasonable solution that demonstrates good reasoning skills but which if you produced at interview the interviewer would reject you on the basis that it isn't the 'correct answer' written on the piece of paper in front of them, or there might be an "Ahhh, but.." clause.
I only had a quick glance at the first two relatively easy riddles (the "Jars of Marbles" and the "Sheik's Race"). Here's what I think:
Jars of Marbles
Sheik's Race
I'm fairly certain of the second one but suspect that it would result in an accusation of cheating.
Stephen
I started out using Notepad for HTML editing, and vi on *nix, then moved on to using Programmers File Editor. That was fine whilst my personal site was small, a dozen pages or so with maybe half that number of graphics, and all on one server.
Now my personal site is something like 3,000 objects spread over 8 servers. Manual management just doesn't cut it. I use Macromedia Dreamweaver for the convenience and site management tools.
According to my web counter IE accounts for about 70% of my hits with about half the remainder being Netscape and a significant showing by Konqueror. I haven't had any complaints about the HTML (plenty about the content tho') so far. Feel free to drop by and tell me what's wrong.
Stephen
I think that the operative phrase is "have been sold". PCs (of one form or another) have been around over 20 years. In that time I personally havre gotten through about 25 PCs (allowing for both home and office/school use) and I know people who have far exceeded that amount (18 of my 25 were in the last 8 years). With the long period of PCs availability and the tendancy for multiple ownership in both series and parrallel One billion isn't that impressive a figure.
Also what are they defining as a PC?
On the growth figures. Personally I'm with the idea of the Home PC being absorbed and integrated into other items to provide integrated home entertainment/net-access applicances. I can already send email and surf the web (in a limited fasion) from my TV. Add a word processor, telnet client and put a proper browser on it (to replace that Liberate pile of crap) and it'll do about 90% of what I use my home PC for. My Palm M100 will do the rest.
Stephen
I tend to only use apropos in the negative, e.g. "apropos nothing". Just a personal trait. I'd never heard of the gnu.org link.
Stephen
Many, many years ago RMS wrote "Right to read" about a dysutopian future where copyright was rigourously enforced through monitoring of computers and networks. One of the major points was that not only was breaching copyright illegal but also own or making anything that could be used to breach copyright or interfere with the states ability to monitor for breaches was illegal. A specific example given was owning a debugger, which could be used to isolate and remove copyright tracking code. The fact that such an item was not intended for that purpose was no defense; that fact that it could so be used constituted sufficient evidence.
Seemed apposite.
Stephen
Same here.
At one point Liebowitz seems to be saying that the factor that's stopping mass duplication is people not wanting to be bothered in assembling the CDs from the MP3s. Personally that's the principle use I burn audio CDs for. I go out and buy a CD with, say, 12 tracks (probably dropping something like 14-20ukp ($19-$28) doing so). Of those 12 tracks I'll probably really like 2, like another 3 a bit and dislike 4. So the first thing I do when I get the CD home is to rip the songs I like on to my PC, put then into playlists with songs from other CDs I've bought then burn a CD of just songs I like. A mix 'tape' but digital.
Stephen
That's pretty much how it's done in the UK. Does this mean we're ahead of the US on something technical and pervasive?
On the more general point of the article. the key problem is thart end users tend to pay less per Mb/s for bandwidth than the broadband providors them selves do. This was a viable business model as it was assumed that users will only use the full bandwidth for small slices of time. For example, if you're surfing the web it might take you 5 minutes to read a page before you click the link to take you onto another page. Suppose on a modem link this page would take 10 seconds to download but on broadband would take 1 second then that means that the supplier either has to provide a small bandwidth for 10 seconds every 5 minutes or a much larger bandwidth for 1 second. In either case they can fit other users in during the times when you're just sitting there staring at your screen (or editing source files, buring ISOs to disk &c)and not using bandwidth. If, however, you're file sharing and you are sharing a lot of tiles that people want then you're going to be using your full bandwidth most if not all of the time so there's no free time slices for other users.
If anything the filesharers are stealing from the users who don't fileshare. Their activities are taking up the bandwidth that everyone else has paid for so everyone gets reduced or no service because a small proportion of users are soaking up more than their fair share of the available bandwidth.
At the end of the day the broadband suppliers have to pay their bills, they have to pay their staff. No-one can survive in business selling a product for less than it costs them unless they can make up the shortfall elsewhere (use one product as a loss leader to sell a profitable one).
StephenBeing serious for a moment. Does anyone happen to know if a description of the particular problems they're having is available anywhere. I've never had a problem moving documents from StarOffice to M$-Word in Word97 format. I have had problems moving documents from Word 2000 to Word97 tho'.
Stephen
Whilst concentrating on local issues will limit the audience that audience could still be quite large. I've worked with a number of local/regional sites and we've always found that the readers we get from outside that area are always far more than the local population.
On the content side I'd reccomend tempering purely local issues with issues/slant that whilst local are likely to be of interest to people outside the immediate area. I guess the Berkeley is going to have a big interest from people who have attended the university or who wish to do so.
I don't really know enough about Slashcode to comment on it's suitablility. LiveJournal might be worth considering?
StephenDoes this remind anyone else of the war-room scene from Toys or Ender's Game?"
More so of "The Last Starfighter". Given the increasing prevalence of online capabilities in games machines and in-box data storage (Microsoft reckon that they have enough space on the internal HDD of the X-Box to store every detail of every game a gamer will play in the entire life of the machine) how long before a really good high score results in a vist from the feds?
Stephen
And whilst you're at it read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html.
Stephen
The books I tend to use most and am happiest buying are the small pocket guides. 90%+ of the time I'm looking a book because I already know the command I want to use but need to remind myself of the syntax or check on a rarely used option. I don't need an indepth discussion of how the command works, I just need a brief reminder.
For example, back in version 7 of the RDBMS Oracle supplied as part of the documentation set a little 70 odd page A5 book entitled "SQL Quick Reference" that just gave you a brief diagramatic explanation of the syntax of each command and a brief listing of the built in functions and the datadictionary tables and what they were contained. 6 years down the line it's the only book that lives permanently on my desk. If there was an 8i/9i equivelent I'd be first in the queue to buy it.
For anything over about 100 pages, ring/spiral bind it so it will lie flat.
Plenty of white space! I like to annotate.
Tie in web site for code examples and errata and a tie in mailing list/discussion board where I can post questions, comments and error reports. It doesn't matter if the author doesn't read the mailing list, although obviously it would be nice if someone from the publishers did to pick up error reports and identify possible improvments for the next edition (or even see what other books might be worthwhile publishing).
For the more 'Teach yourself' rather than quick reference type books, anecdotes. If I'm learning something then I want to know how it works in the real world, not just spurious academic examples.
Stephen
It comes down to cost. Others have given detailed breakdowns elsewhere so I won't bother. The end user is typically paying far less per Mbit/s than the ISP is. This can be done as it's assumed that most users will be using the full bandwidth (or a large proportion there of) only for very short periods, fractions of a second or a few seconds at most, eg it might take a second for you to download a web page at full bandwidth but 2-3 minutes for you to read it and click on a link for the next page so for most of the time your link is essentially idle and the bandwidth from the internet to your ISP can be used by another user.
Now imagine you've got someone who is constantly moving multi megabyte files around, perhaps they've setup something like Morpheus and are sharing their entire video and MP3 collection with the world. That means that they're soaking up bandwidth that cannot be used by other users because although their peak is just as high, they are using their peak pretty much all the time. This also means that if you are a normal broadband user they are taking up your bandwidth.
On a related note I read today on The Register that it seems that most home users won't consider broad band until it drops below 20 pounds (about $34-$35) a month.
If by 'free dialup' you mean ISPs where there's no monthly fee then I agree that there seems to have been a drop off in availability. However for much of the country there still plenty of unmetered call access. Both Telewest and NTL offer low monthy rate services with unmetered dial up, in the case of Telewest they even throw in a tenners worth of free voice calls a month.
Stephen
So Microsoft said that they needed the email addresses so that they could show that some Lindows subscribers were in the WA area and therefore the action could proceed there. Surely that question could have been answered by asking Lindows how many subscribers had addresses in WA. If Microsoft didn't trust Lindows to give an honest answer then both parties should agree on an independant auditor who would, at Microsofts expense, go through the list of names and addresses to find the answer.
Of late I've been doing a lot of work that relates to the Data Protection Act here in the UK. Based on what I've done and have read here, what actually happened would be a major breach had it happened in the UK. To the extent that both companies could face very serious penalties.
Stephen
My co-workers and I were discussing this yesterday and we all feel that Microsoft themselves are guilty of at least some sort of infringement everytime that they use the word "Windows" to describe their product. Essentially they are infringing onthe rights of everyone who makes those glass things stuck in the walls. If they specidied "Microsoft Windows" or "The Microsoft Windowing Operating Environment" they'd be OK. But by failing to specify suffiently what they are refering to they must be infringing someone. Anyone got the phone number for Pilkington?
For that matter doesn't the term "Microsoft" predate the company use of that name? It is commonly used in cyberpunk literature to refer to plug in chips used to gain skills or for entertainment purposes (ie "chipin' in").
Stephen
It's October 1st according to a recent presentation I went to. Certain industries (European public sector and LGOs being the major ones) have different cut off dates for certain options.
As I recall as of October 1st you will no longer be able to buy upgrade licenses and most of the world won't be able to buy Upgrade Advantage, this is the launch date for Software Assurance. In the UK many LGOs will continue to buy Upgrade Advantage until 31st March 2002, after that date only new licenses will be available and you will be able to buy Software assurance with that license (I think you have a 30 day grace period to buy SA after buying the license).
Check with your Microsoft sales rep for details and confirmation.
Here you're getting into the sort of terratory that is usually inhabited by, mostly propietry, paid for software. With very few exceptions I've found that paid license software will have the extra touches like libraries included with the install media (and usually an installer clever enough to only install a library if you need it and it won't break your system by over writing a later version of the same library) or at least the URLs of where to get the libraries or patches to bring you system to the required level to run the software. I rarely see a free/open source package that has that. You do get what you pay for, usually.
My interpretation of the post was that the coder should put as much functionality into libraries or functions rather than the main executable(s) to aid modularisation and (probably) improve code sharing amongst modules of the app. Rather than relying on external libraries over which they have no control. Those liobraries I woulde expect to definately be in the install media.
My thoughts on backwards compatabiity are to try to avoid changes to things like file formats and APIs unless absolutely necessary. With file formats try to support as many older versions as you can, ideally for both save and load but as a compromise you could make it such that it will load all previous versions but only save current and last 2 versions or something like that. With APIs, if the way it is called changes, where possible provide a wrapper/interpreter for the old API call that translates it to and from your new functionality. Anything that changes file formats or API calls in a non-transparent way incrememnts the major version number. Provide a migration path and utilities to aid migration.
Also document, document, document. I'm deathly serious. Document everything. When you make a change to the source code put in a comment saying what you did, why you did it and how to undo it (eg if you make a change to a line, copy the line, commnent out the original and change the copy -- Although this is really only advisable for a few single line changes, anything bigger and you'd probably want to use something like RCS or SCCS to maintain your change history, which is another advantage of modularising your code as that way the number of changes per file will be small so you only have to rollback and reimplement a small part of your code to reverse a change), it makes it a heck of a lot easier to maintain your code later. Document all changes in the Release Notes, Migration guide, Installation documentation and the User Guide, odds are that users will read at least one of these, if they don't you can at least tell them to RTFM with some moral justification.