What about information that WANTS to be free?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't understand how it would be possible to differentiate between content that was once DRM-controlled but no longer is, and content that was never DRM-controlled.
What if I write a story and distribute it? Of course it isn't going to have an appropriate digital signature on it. What am I supposed to do, go to some kind of appropriate authority and somehow publish it through them? What if I can't afford whatever fees they charge? Heck, paying for the right to publish? Talk about a prior restraint on free speech.
But then again, I forget, I'm not supposed to want to publish anything, and even if I do I'm not supposed to be able to do it. After all, the Internet is supposed to be just like television, right?
If not, then let's face it, the DVD player will be so unreliable (from the user point of view - "it only plays 3 of my DVDs, the other ones break it!") that it would have been better not included.
If it does include DeCSS or a similar program, surely it would be a potential violation of the DMCA, as much so as 2600's distribution of the DeCSS code?
Of course, even if it did, somehow I suspect that the usual selective enforcement policies would apply - nobody would bring suit against them (at least, not YET). After all, the last thing the movie industry would want is to parade an example of DeCSS allowing fair use before a court of law. They'll choose their battles very carefully until precedent is tilted firmly in their favour.
She said she had still not decided whether to allow third parties, such as the states that have not settled, to make presentations at the settlement hearing. "If I did, it probably would be like a 10-minute hearing per party," Kollar-Kotelly said.
I guess even judges speak like Alicia Silverstone these days.
Remember that the GNU Object Model Environment was formed, and it's ultimate final goal still is, to provide a whole heap of things for the FSF's GNU project. Obviously, a GUI infrastructure; a component architecture, GUI applications and other such niceties also fall within it's domain.
When Stallman decided that he wanted a free operating system, and started up the whole GNU thing, he decided to clone one of the most popular hacking environments at the time: Unix. Remember that every working Unix was proprietary at the time. Now, it's up to GNOME to provide GNU with a whole bunch of "modern" features, so why not work off of.NET?
.NET is a lot more centrally controlled than Unix was, so I agree that there's a serious danger of GNOME being burnt horribly. But if they're willing to take that risk, and think they can surmount it, I don't think "We can't use.NET! We're all turning into Microsofties! Linux rules!" on it's own is a valid argument.
And if it doesn't work, there's always KDE. (Just think, as KDE and GNOME branch out further from each other in their goals and approach to things, they might start to get different enough that comparisons can be entirely free of religious arguments!:)
From a cursory glance, all the patent seems to say is:
A server communicates with a conduit, the client. Communications is done using HTTP over the internet; the underlying protocols are formulated in XML.
The client can send the server information regarding what content it wants synced. It can also send a request to "sync now," and the server's reply is a set of instructions to the conduit. I suspect "instructions" are similar to what I do with my own client/server conduit - generic actions like "open this database, add a record, alter this record, create a database..". This makes it easier to add functionality on the serverside without requiring end users to upgrade their clients.
The server will not sync a page if it has not changed. It "maintains state" ie has a database of information about user's past syncs. The state of a page (changed/the same) is determined by the comparison of a hash of it's content at different points in time.
It's a fundamental requirement that patents be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art. I really don't see how this is so.
And that was the answer.. so why take it any further?
I was considering setting up smoothwall for a friend, because they aren't Unix savvy and I liked the idea of it's web control panels (seemed a little better than freesco's). However, this person would be doing it with their existing hardware, and they had a winmodem. So I wandered into the IRC channel and asked whether smoothwall had any support for winmodems.
The answer was one you'd probably consider to be terse: "No." But it told me what I wanted to know.. I mean honestly, what did you want, an essay?
I really don't understand what you were trying to achieve by "Repeated inquiries." And I suspect the developer's attitude was "we've heard this thousands of times before, he's said it about 40 times so far tonight, we keep giving him the answer and he won't shut up!"
I'm pretty sure they'd make this impossible. While they could play legal games with regards to patents/copyrights on the protocol format itself, the really easy way to do it would be:
Require all queries to the cddb server to be signed by a key which ships with the client software. If it isn't correctly signed, just drop the query. The key would be copyrighted, so you couldn't just ship a copy of it with the cddb2->freedb proxy.
This smells very much like a business decision. I imagine that the choice to use freedb, although perhaps initiated by a coder with an interest in the principles, would have been made on the grounds of "this way we'd pay, wheras this way we wouldn't." And the settlement comes as the simplest, easiest, most profitable way out of it.
I very much doubt that Roxio's decision makers give a flying fuck about whether their actions are good, bad, or whatever as far as the principle of the thing is concerned.
Since freedb and Gracenote are essentially forks from the same base a while back (Gracenote wanted to start making money from it, and freedb wanted to walk the free path), I believe that their protocols are similar to a large extent (read: except for the odd whizbang addition made since the split). Shouldn't it be possible to just point the Gracenote domains to the freedb IPs in ones's/etc/hosts, c:\windows\hosts or equivalent to point all the Gracenote using programs to freedb?
I think it would serve these folks well to release a beta to developers, at somewhat less than $99. Why?
Many developers are the kind of people that want to try this because it's cool. If it only cost $50, it would be pretty easy to convince the boss that the new box we're getting anyway should run the Lindows beta instead of forking out for another Win2K license. And developers are the ones that you really want let loose on a beta for two reasons:
Application compatibility. Even if it isn't a required goal of a software project, having a Lindows box to test on will make it more likely to happen anyway.
Really good bug reports. An end user will likely submit bug reports like "my old copy of Microsoft Golf crashes when I try to load it." Developers will submit gems such as "I bring the system down when I call CreateWindowEx with parameter foo set to bar. Changing that parameter avoids the problem. Here's a small code fragment that replicates the problem. It works fine on Win2K and 98."
To those of you who are unaware, you can go to your config page (http://slashdot.org/~username), go into "Homepage" and select "light" to get a version of slashdot that's light on tables, images and such. Anyway, I don't see anything on the light pages analogous to the little icon the "heavy" pages are getting.
Adobe do not, however, make various patents which PDF uses / may use / can use (most of which aren't owned by Adobe anyway) freely available.
You mean "various US patents." Given that this report was published in the UK, in which (like almost everywhere else bar the US) there is no such thing as a "software patent," I don't see a need to worry about such things.
If laws in your country prevent you from freely viewing this report, made available in the UK, then perhaps you should petition your government to change those laws.
(The above notwithstanding, I think HTML would have been an appropriate presentation format)
Microsoft products tend to include a fair bit of online documentation - heck, they even used to ship printed manuals! The thing with documentation is that you need skill and motivation to write it in a way a "lay" end user will appreciate. The result of this is that people don't tend to write it for free.
Therefore: To the people who pick up Linux for free and stumble, may I suggest spending $30 on a book? Yeah, the whole thing's no longer free now.. but it's closer to it than $200 for Windows, and will probably save you from beating your head against a manpage or two.
There are patents on the technology, which means it is of no more use to the open source community than True Type font hinting and MP3.
You mean the US open source community, right?
Sorry to nitpick, but I feel that it's important to fight the idea that software patents are universal (since it tends to evolve into the idea that they are a natural right).
If this were a freeware/shareware/open source P2P web hosting program, I'd be thrilled.
My apologies if I'm reading you wrong but.... does this mean that you think it's wrong to illegitimately use unlicensed "boxed" software, but that to use shareware in the same way is okay?
I think this might have a lot to do with the age of people who work in IT. While it's certainly not closed to older people, as far as I've seen there are definitely a *lot* more younger people in IT, proportionally, than in most other areas.
Younger people are more likely to have existing social cliques from college/university/highschool. And I think these sorts of relationships will tend to endure for longer these days than they would have 20 years ago - communications technology is far more widespread and accessible, and people working in IT in particular will tend to make use of it. Cheap phonecalls and email (not to mention cheaper airflight!) mean that moving away from someone is far less likely to lead to drifting apart.
I feel that a lot of "workplace socialisation" is due to people spending significant proportions of their lives in a workplace environment, socially gravitating towards the people in it. But given that the "younger IT-worker demographic" is more likely to maintain preexisting relationships, and less likely to spend years and years working with the same people, I don't think it's all that surprising that it doesn't happen a lot in IT.
I'm finishing up the second year of my CS degree, and I also cut code parttime.
Uni is mundane and boring most of the time. Work on the other hand.. I get to play with things and solve problems that NEED solving. There aren't 100 other students working on the same problem either. And the stuff I get to do is just plain cool.
I think uni will get a lot better next year though; since I'll get to do a third year project.
Anyways, my advice: get the piece of paper, then enjoy doing stuff in the real world. You won't appreciate how much funner it can be than it is at uni.
(as for burnout.. i was a little burnt out earlier this year. there's only one solution: time away from what's burning you out. whether that takes the form of an hour less each day, or a week off every couple of months, depends upon the person...)
The only problem that i see with msn, that i dont like, is the 404 redirect. I'm looking into a way to change this. Other than that, I couldnt be happier with ie6.
I'm not sure which issue you're talking about here, so I'll address both:)
Error pages aren't the ones sent by the server, but instead the long IE custom doohickey is displayed.
If IE gets a page with an error code that's below a certain size, it substitutes it's own page. Instructions on how to disable it with a registry setting here (or it may be a preference these days..)
You type something wrong, and it actually goes to an MSN search page
There's definitely a preference for this. Uncheck something along the lines of "Search from the address bar" in the advanced settings.
I think there's a few suitable old boxes lying around at work, and I'd love to fire up OS X and give it a shot.
To the people who are already doing this - any idea what I'd be needing in terms of RAM and hard drive capacity, to run OS X in an almost-sane fashion? (read: I can bring the OS up and load a text editor without waiting 5 minutes for the text editor to load)
I'd go read the side of the OS X box, but given the CPU/system requirements are only half-true, the rest of it probably is as well..
WTC death toll: ~5200
US weekly deaths attributable to smoking: ~9000
US weekly deaths attributable to traffic accidents: ~3400
US weekly deaths attributable to drinking: ~2300
And maybe you should add to that all of the Americans that have sacrificed their lives fighting for their country, to protect the rights that are now being thrown away.
For starters, you'd better turn off/proc: anybody with a fractional brain who gets root can surely dig the password out of there. Oh, and turn off/dev/mem. Oh, and make sure that nobody can install a trojan ssh-agent...
If they've got root, they can just install a trojan ssh client as easily, and capture your pass(word|phrase|key) regardless of how you're storing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand how it would be possible to differentiate between content that was once DRM-controlled but no longer is, and content that was never DRM-controlled.
What if I write a story and distribute it? Of course it isn't going to have an appropriate digital signature on it. What am I supposed to do, go to some kind of appropriate authority and somehow publish it through them? What if I can't afford whatever fees they charge? Heck, paying for the right to publish? Talk about a prior restraint on free speech.
But then again, I forget, I'm not supposed to want to publish anything, and even if I do I'm not supposed to be able to do it. After all, the Internet is supposed to be just like television, right?
If not, then let's face it, the DVD player will be so unreliable (from the user point of view - "it only plays 3 of my DVDs, the other ones break it!") that it would have been better not included.
If it does include DeCSS or a similar program, surely it would be a potential violation of the DMCA, as much so as 2600's distribution of the DeCSS code?
Of course, even if it did, somehow I suspect that the usual selective enforcement policies would apply - nobody would bring suit against them (at least, not YET). After all, the last thing the movie industry would want is to parade an example of DeCSS allowing fair use before a court of law. They'll choose their battles very carefully until precedent is tilted firmly in their favour.
I guess even judges speak like Alicia Silverstone these days.
Remember that the GNU Object Model Environment was formed, and it's ultimate final goal still is, to provide a whole heap of things for the FSF's GNU project. Obviously, a GUI infrastructure; a component architecture, GUI applications and other such niceties also fall within it's domain.
When Stallman decided that he wanted a free operating system, and started up the whole GNU thing, he decided to clone one of the most popular hacking environments at the time: Unix. Remember that every working Unix was proprietary at the time. Now, it's up to GNOME to provide GNU with a whole bunch of "modern" features, so why not work off of .NET?
.NET is a lot more centrally controlled than Unix was, so I agree that there's a serious danger of GNOME being burnt horribly. But if they're willing to take that risk, and think they can surmount it, I don't think "We can't use .NET! We're all turning into Microsofties! Linux rules!" on it's own is a valid argument.
And if it doesn't work, there's always KDE. (Just think, as KDE and GNOME branch out further from each other in their goals and approach to things, they might start to get different enough that comparisons can be entirely free of religious arguments! :)
Does that come with wings to prevent memory leakage?
It's a fundamental requirement that patents be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art. I really don't see how this is so.
The response was pretty terse. "It's a firewall."
And that was the answer.. so why take it any further?
I was considering setting up smoothwall for a friend, because they aren't Unix savvy and I liked the idea of it's web control panels (seemed a little better than freesco's). However, this person would be doing it with their existing hardware, and they had a winmodem. So I wandered into the IRC channel and asked whether smoothwall had any support for winmodems.
The answer was one you'd probably consider to be terse: "No." But it told me what I wanted to know.. I mean honestly, what did you want, an essay?
I really don't understand what you were trying to achieve by "Repeated inquiries." And I suspect the developer's attitude was "we've heard this thousands of times before, he's said it about 40 times so far tonight, we keep giving him the answer and he won't shut up!"
I'm pretty sure they'd make this impossible. While they could play legal games with regards to patents/copyrights on the protocol format itself, the really easy way to do it would be:
Require all queries to the cddb server to be signed by a key which ships with the client software. If it isn't correctly signed, just drop the query. The key would be copyrighted, so you couldn't just ship a copy of it with the cddb2->freedb proxy.
This smells very much like a business decision. I imagine that the choice to use freedb, although perhaps initiated by a coder with an interest in the principles, would have been made on the grounds of "this way we'd pay, wheras this way we wouldn't." And the settlement comes as the simplest, easiest, most profitable way out of it.
I very much doubt that Roxio's decision makers give a flying fuck about whether their actions are good, bad, or whatever as far as the principle of the thing is concerned.
Since freedb and Gracenote are essentially forks from the same base a while back (Gracenote wanted to start making money from it, and freedb wanted to walk the free path), I believe that their protocols are similar to a large extent (read: except for the odd whizbang addition made since the split). Shouldn't it be possible to just point the Gracenote domains to the freedb IPs in ones's /etc/hosts, c:\windows\hosts or equivalent to point all the Gracenote using programs to freedb?
I think it would serve these folks well to release a beta to developers, at somewhat less than $99. Why?
Many developers are the kind of people that want to try this because it's cool. If it only cost $50, it would be pretty easy to convince the boss that the new box we're getting anyway should run the Lindows beta instead of forking out for another Win2K license. And developers are the ones that you really want let loose on a beta for two reasons:
To those of you who are unaware, you can go to your config page (http://slashdot.org/~username), go into "Homepage" and select "light" to get a version of slashdot that's light on tables, images and such. Anyway, I don't see anything on the light pages analogous to the little icon the "heavy" pages are getting.
If laws in your country prevent you from freely viewing this report, made available in the UK, then perhaps you should petition your government to change those laws.
(The above notwithstanding, I think HTML would have been an appropriate presentation format)
Microsoft products tend to include a fair bit of online documentation - heck, they even used to ship printed manuals! The thing with documentation is that you need skill and motivation to write it in a way a "lay" end user will appreciate. The result of this is that people don't tend to write it for free.
Therefore: To the people who pick up Linux for free and stumble, may I suggest spending $30 on a book? Yeah, the whole thing's no longer free now.. but it's closer to it than $200 for Windows, and will probably save you from beating your head against a manpage or two.
You mean the US open source community, right?
Sorry to nitpick, but I feel that it's important to fight the idea that software patents are universal (since it tends to evolve into the idea that they are a natural right).
If this were a freeware/shareware/open source P2P web hosting program, I'd be thrilled.
My apologies if I'm reading you wrong but.... does this mean that you think it's wrong to illegitimately use unlicensed "boxed" software, but that to use shareware in the same way is okay?
I think this might have a lot to do with the age of people who work in IT. While it's certainly not closed to older people, as far as I've seen there are definitely a *lot* more younger people in IT, proportionally, than in most other areas.
Younger people are more likely to have existing social cliques from college/university/highschool. And I think these sorts of relationships will tend to endure for longer these days than they would have 20 years ago - communications technology is far more widespread and accessible, and people working in IT in particular will tend to make use of it. Cheap phonecalls and email (not to mention cheaper airflight!) mean that moving away from someone is far less likely to lead to drifting apart.
I feel that a lot of "workplace socialisation" is due to people spending significant proportions of their lives in a workplace environment, socially gravitating towards the people in it. But given that the "younger IT-worker demographic" is more likely to maintain preexisting relationships, and less likely to spend years and years working with the same people, I don't think it's all that surprising that it doesn't happen a lot in IT.
Jump onto a FBSD system and "man jail"
Uni is mundane and boring most of the time. Work on the other hand.. I get to play with things and solve problems that NEED solving. There aren't 100 other students working on the same problem either. And the stuff I get to do is just plain cool.
I think uni will get a lot better next year though; since I'll get to do a third year project.
Anyways, my advice: get the piece of paper, then enjoy doing stuff in the real world. You won't appreciate how much funner it can be than it is at uni.
(as for burnout.. i was a little burnt out earlier this year. there's only one solution: time away from what's burning you out. whether that takes the form of an hour less each day, or a week off every couple of months, depends upon the person...)
I'm not sure which issue you're talking about here, so I'll address both :)
If IE gets a page with an error code that's below a certain size, it substitutes it's own page. Instructions on how to disable it with a registry setting here (or it may be a preference these days..)
There's definitely a preference for this. Uncheck something along the lines of "Search from the address bar" in the advanced settings.
I think there's a few suitable old boxes lying around at work, and I'd love to fire up OS X and give it a shot.
To the people who are already doing this - any idea what I'd be needing in terms of RAM and hard drive capacity, to run OS X in an almost-sane fashion? (read: I can bring the OS up and load a text editor without waiting 5 minutes for the text editor to load)
I'd go read the side of the OS X box, but given the CPU/system requirements are only half-true, the rest of it probably is as well..
I see this quote so often, but it's different every time, so perhaps "paraphrase" is more appropriate than "quote."
I don't suppose anyone has a link to the definitive quote in Jefferson's exact words, with a citation to the source?
WTC death toll: ~5200
US weekly deaths attributable to smoking: ~9000
US weekly deaths attributable to traffic accidents: ~3400
US weekly deaths attributable to drinking: ~2300
And maybe you should add to that all of the Americans that have sacrificed their lives fighting for their country, to protect the rights that are now being thrown away.
If they've got root, they can just install a trojan ssh client as easily, and capture your pass(word|phrase|key) regardless of how you're storing it.
Linux quite happily does raw sockets.