If any of you think this is a problem then you should try building a large database yourself and see just how much work goes into all that data collection.
Been there done that. Many times as a matter of fact.
But adequate security and copyrighting the result as put out in the publishing medium (the web, right) can already provide the level of legal protection you need, correct? In other words, my assertion is that companies with large databases are pushing this legislation to protect their data investments, against who? Crackers? no. News organizations? no. Current competitors, only marginally, I think. Smaller web publishers? Most likely, because this is where the major innovations and future competitors will come from.
So I see this as another example of corporate America trying to hijack and control the web.
Databases are NOT software. Copying the contents of your/var/log/mysql directory is NOT protected by software law; likewise if I wget your website and mirror it, the software you use to maintain your database is irrelevant.
Excuse my ignorance on this subject, but does that mean you can mirror my site even without my permission?
For example, if you compiled a list of Thai food restaurants in all the cities in the US, should you be able to copyright that list? You can't copyright any individual item on that list, because the information isn't yours, but should somebody else be allowed to simply copy your work?
I think you are agreeing with me here. The fact is, the server with your site on it is private property, and someone cracking into your server can be prosecuted. Other than that, the single source for taking your data is the web. And the courts have ruled that info as published on the web can be copyrighted already.
(about disallowing queries) But in a lot of situations that's not valid But legally it is a valid one -- witness the successful suit against deep linking. If the originating site had coded their pages so that they couldn't be deep linked, there wouldn't have been opportunity for the ripoff. So it was possible technically to do something so that no legislation was needed.
Most of the new laws are pretty clear on this: you don't get a monopoly on the information, but nobody else can simply copy the entire set of information from you. In other words, if I go out and compile the same information, I'm free to publish it. But I can't simply copy your list. Agreed. But what if you claim that my compilation is just a ripoff of yours, and you're a major company with the resources to legally bury me?
I guess what I'm saying is that in this case, I think competition, adequate security, and the courts are in a better position to protect the rights of the individual than our current special-interest-dominated legislative processes.
Quoting from the article: Database manufacturers base their call for a new right on purely economic grounds, unlike existing forms of intellectual property that are grounded philosophically on the promotion of creativity, or "moral rights" in the European tradition.
Hmmm. Rights based on economics. If this ever made it into law, I can't see how it would be constitutional. [I have serious issues with the Digital Millenium copyright act here as well.]
Off the top of my head, it's like saying "my economic interest in protecting my database(d) information is more important than your right to
freedom of the press,
the Freedom of Information act which keeps most governmental documents accessible to the general public,
free flow of medical research information
to name a few.
I don't see how any more laws are needed. It's already against the law to pirate software (which is what virtually all databases are anyway). So for the database manufacturers to refer to the "data collections" as copyrightable seems disingenious to me.
Of course, there is the obligatory "we'll protect the public interest" clauses... "regulators and courts should balance database protection with an insistence on fair licensing and other promotion for competition." Except for one set of problems, I would say, "okee dokee fine." Regulators are noted for protecting the public interest, fair licences, or promoting competition.
The major points I think we should rally behind are that
"...no one convincingly demonstrates that it is harmed by the lack of special laws." ,
We may be entering an age when, as law professor Lawrence Lessig claims, "copyright is more effectively protected than at any time since Gutenberg...In such an age--in a time when the [technical] protections are being perfected--the real question for law is not, how can law aid in that protection? but rather, is the protection too great?"... and finally,
"Privatizing information through contract, encryption, and similar devices may carry greater individual and social costs than would a copyright system."
BTW, in case anyone thinks I didn't read the whole article, I do understand the idea that a lot of work goes into the collection of "facts" that goes into a database, and that the work can be "freeloaded" via the web. There are other protections: I can put copyright notices on my web pages, disallow queries that do not originate from within a given site structure, etc. that do not require any new legislation to be effective.
So IMHO the databases of facts do not require protection. The right to copyright "database facts" would seem to imply that if I create and a database of scientific facts, for example, I am somehow entitled to enforce my right to be the whole source of publishing that information -- just because I collected it first and got a copyright.
Let's hope (and contact your congressperson!!) that we can head this off before it starts another fight that the Internet community cannot afford to lose.
Hello. As a past and very satisfied user of Kiplinger's tax cut software, I would like to encourage you to release your package under the Linux operating system as well as for the other platforms.
I am currently converting my home and home office machines to Linux, and will not be able to use your product in the future unless a Linux version is released.
Please feel free to forward this to the appropriate parties within your company
Signed...
(BTW, no response yet. I will post it as a reply to this message if/when one comes in)
Refer to this/. post. I put all the contact email addresses I could find in it. Then send the zuits a polite email explaining our side and requesting that they back out of their support for the DVD CCA.
...but I'd have to check if being a state is a crime or not...:)
Seriously though -- and recognizing that the discussion which follows is slightly off the main thread topic --IIRC the limiting issue isn't whether or not you can pass a law that has retroactive effects, it's what those retroactive effects can be.
For example, if I live in a community that requires 200 hours of training for some type of job, and there is no state requirement. So I get my training and am legally licensed in the community which is in the state. Then the state passes a ruling that says I have to have 500 hours in order to be licensed. The laws are usually written with a date cut off, e.g. this law will go into effect on xx/xx/xxxx date and anyone wanting to be licensed thereafter must have the requisite number of hours. Those licensed previously are "grandfathered in" by the prohibition against ex-post-facto prosecutions. (which may include on-going education requirements, etc. that still force me to get more training, etc.) because they can't prosecute me for legally practicing my profession in the community, so I am in effect legal anyway in the state.
Now then, I am still not a lawyer, so if anyone out there is, step in and correct me if my understanding is wrong on this.
You blew the URL, buddy, even though there's a reminder right under the box. (you forgot the http:// in the HREF). So I'll fix it for you, and then ask my question. The contest is called the Obfuscated DeCSS contest, and what the site author seems to be starting with is a request for us to send ideas for a good set of ground rules, then kick off the contest around the middle of February.
In a different vein, I have what I think is an important question related to the public documentation part 'though: If we downloaded the "exhibit a", part of the document while it was "open" (which is the DeCSS source in question), and then they seal it, what is the legal status of those copies we downloaded?
The closest analogy I can think of is this: if I went to the courthouse and made xerox copies of a public document which was later "sealed" by the court, would I somehow be in violation of the law? If so, it seems like it would be an "ex post facto" law (a law passed making a crime out of an act which had not previously been legislated against). At least in the US of A, "ex post facto" prosecution is against our constitutional rights. IANAL and this has me very very concerned.
Okay, I'd forgotten about beta users. I'd be interested to know your background and opinion of Win2k vs. any other NOS's you might have tech experience with. In my book hearing from a real world user/administrator counts more than tech reports any day.
Silly me. I forgot to mention that the most telling statistic isn't RH Linux.: it's the fact that a) Netware and b) Other both rate higher than Windows NT. And that 1462 people say that their favorite NOS is Win2K.
Ummmm... folks, as far as I know, Win2k hasn't been released yet, so those votes are bogus, yes?? So other than SCO, Windows NOS's are in last place in the poll.
Actually, here's how they made MS come out on top.
on
Red Hat Finishes Last
·
· Score: 2
It all has to do with how they weighted the various categories. Looking straight up between Win2k and Novell where there was an edge to one or the other, here's how they biased it:
Rate File services as only 15%, and the network benchmark at only 10%. Bias: against Novell which whipped Win2K
Rate the areas of Scalability (20%) Security(10%)and fault tolerance (10%) which were only discussed in a theoretical construct, and not fully thrash tested by security experts, etc.) where Netware has been. Bias: towards Win2K
Install (5%) bias towards Win2K.
Okay follow me here:
I only install a Novell network once, and perhaps it's not quite as peachy-keen easy as Win2k. But it rates 50% better in performance (9.3 vs. 5.6 rating). So why the hell is the install given a value equal to 1/2 of the performance?
Scalability doesn't necessarily come into play until extremely high loads are encountered. You can buy and install a second Netware server and still have a lower overall cost less than the price of the top-end MS servers (You wouldn't believe the license prices for Enterprise NT (required for "highly available" systems with RAID disks, etc.) Or a half a dozen midrange RH Linux servers.
The security, Stability and fault tolerance figures are only in the lab, not in the real world like Novell, Linux, and SCO have already been.
So there you have it. Win2k does come out on top. But only if you cheat.
Measure real world performance, proven stability, security, etc., and the score comes out more like #1 Novell for the biggest installations, #2 RH Linux for small and midrange, and a tie for #3 between SCO and Win2k. SCO for people who know better, and Win2k for PHB's who don't.
P.S. I changed the scalability figure to 10% and upped the value of the file/network portion of the test...Novell wins in a Landslide. RH still third, but Win2K is not much better, and the difference is 90% in the docs and utilities.;)
Win 2k can't be the best unless IDG's been paid:
on
Red Hat Finishes Last
·
· Score: 1
The only place Win2k gained a performance edge was in the long tcp/ip transaction test. In every other area, it was either beaten/and or matched. The only usability area mentioned was in "the best tools for storage management", but as I continued to read, I am totally unconvinced. Basically they said that one part of Novell's storage managment tools for RAID drives was a little more obscure, but once they figured it out, it worked great.
So then how at the end do they come up with this next quote:
If you want a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable, then Windows 2000 is the strongest contender.
??? The only true statement about the true king(s) of the NOS hill is what came next:...for high performance, enterprise file and print services, our tests show that Novell leads the pack....
IMHO, the only good thing about IDG's article is that their benchmark points the way to areas in which Linux needs to improve. By the way, look at the results of their quick poll:
Which network operating system do you prefer?
Windows 200017%1462 votes
Windows NT10%875 votes
Netware 13%1106 votes
Red Hat Linux 46%3948 votes
SCO UnixWare2%170 votes
Other 12%1040 votes
Total: 8601 votes
So how is Win 2K number #1? In terms of marketing $ spent on IDG magazines, etc. perhaps?
But in all objectivity, I should also note that IE4.0-5.0 under NT 4.0 has crashed on me once,/ever/.
Lucky you, I guess. I work with a number of sophisticated sites and IE 5.0 with NT 4.0 and the latest service pack crashes an average of three times a week to as often as three times a day. [Just a guess, but the commonality seems to be that the Microsoft JVM gets confused if you have more than one java enabled page open in a window at the same time.]
Not that Netscape 4.7 is any better in terms of crash frequency, but Explorer doesn't win any extra points at all in my experience.
Allow me to play devil's advocate here though with your capitalism = bad equation.
Never said it was bad. I said that the excesses of the capitalistic system are bad.
...its a little pretentious to blame it all on a system that prizes efficiency instead of the actual demands of people.
Perhaps so. But if you look at most of the excesses of capitalism, you usually find someone at the top willing to say "f--k everyone else", whether that be in the form of enviromnmental abuse, anti-union and/or anti-strike violence, illegal monopolistic prices, company towns, etc.
When only money matters, everyone else suffers. When worker's rights, the environment, etc. are included in the company's bottom line equations along with money, we find that some very good companies count both. Unfortunately, and this is my own very jaded opinion -- in terms of large companies, most don't.
It's not quite as menacing when you think about what's really going on.
Hmmm. Environmental destruction, influence peddling, legalistic means of trying to control the Internet -- did I miss anything? If these aren't menacing to us as individuals, then what is?
Well, AFAICT the only "open source DVD playback technology" I know of has a preliminary injunction against it.
I am also only interested in watching legitimately produced DVD's. On my Linux machine, of course. And with the idea if I move to a different area, I should still be able to watch the movie, since I already paid for it.
For me, the bottom line is that because the DVD-CCA is trying to re-centralize the distribution process, it should be fought. Also, my personal opinion is that because the way that the companies chose to employ their encryption (region locking) is wrong, I'm willing to sacrifice the ability to buy/watch a new movie on DVD by waiting until there is an open version. By waiting I deprive the companies in question of revenue until they play nice.
Darkness is always driven back by light. That is, exposure of corruption usually manages to destroy it. IF you know of influence peddling that goes counter to the freedom of the 'Net, bring them to the attention of as many people as possible say, by posting it to the Internet?
Stop using the products/services of the offending companies.Like Jon Katz and others (me too) have taken a stand against Amazon by refusing to buy books until the patent is dropped. And let those companies know why -- the easiest way to end a war is to show your adversary the benefit of co-operation over competition.
Similarly, move any investments you may have away from companies which are heavily involved in governmental lobbying towards controlling the 'Net. These companies lose power profoundly as the lifeblood of their investment goes elsewhere. AOL would not remain in a position to buy Time/Warner if their stock value suddenly got gutted by a mass movement away from both companies. Sony, Paramount, etc. wouldn't be in much of a position to fight DeCSS if suddenly no-one was buying their products.
Practice civil disobedience as a group. In the DeCSS case, this means making sure that the source code remains published on the web outside the court's reach.
Talk to your elected officials. Who like it nice and quiet so that they can go on (excuse the language here) sucking at the corporate tit. Who know if they get tossed out, the power and bucks dry up. Let them know that if they don't take a stand, they won't have a job.
Ooh, brain flash. Let me add one more item to this list: remove all links to sites controlled by companies involved in the fight, and don't browse those sites at all. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think a total "link boycott" would have quite a dramatic and traumatic effect on those company's Internet related advertising rates?
Thank you for bringing this up so lucidly -- I've been trying to figure out how to put this into words ever since the decision came out.
Put this together with another context. CBS recently used digital technology to filter out a competitor's logo (NBC) from appearing in a broadcast. What's to stop AO(Hell)/Time Warner from essentially saying, "well, because this court decision essentially made the ISP a content provider, we don't want to be sued, so we will filter out anything we don't want to appear as being part of 'our content' from being transmitted via our wires..."
Poof, instant corporate censorship of free speech, aided and abetted by the court(s). At least in this one area, I think the DeCSS case may end up in the Supreme Court unless it is modified or struck down before it gets there. So once again, thanks for highlighting this for the rest of the/. community to read, understand, and fight against.
the fact that at some point in history, some person found a natural resource, declared "this is mine," and proceeded, along with his descendants, to profit off of it.
Wrong!!
Capitalism, with all of it's terrible warts, exists simply because (for example) a person who is better at growing food than I am (aka, a farmer) trades with what he does best for what another entity does best -- perhaps building things like tractors, etc. As long as the "balance of trade" is equitable, capitalism works extremely well because it's sort of like an escalator that anybody (that is willing to work) can get on. It's when the balance gets upset that things turn bad, which is what Katz is talking about here.
The problem is that rampant capitalism (money as the sole medium of value) has no innate morality with which to do things like protecting the environment, people's rights, etc. All has been subjugated to the almighty bottom line.
C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer admired by alot of folks said it best, and I hope someone can find the exact quote and post it here. Paraphrasing, he said something like "more evil is done by men behind closed doors than in all the wars ever fought." The thing I find interesting is that this statement was made many years ago in a context of how corporations usually turn against the "common man" by seeking to exploit.
they tend to dissipate considerably less heat than (conventional) electronic devices. It may also turn out that it is easier to build three-dimensional optical devices than it is to build three-dimensional integrated circuits (both have been done; ICs are just very difficult with current processes).
Both of these are the exact reason (if my understanding of the technology is correct from the white papers I have read) why optical chips should be faster:
The lowered heat dissipation would allow smaller gate sizes without crosstalk/circuit failure becoming serious problem, and
the ability to go three dimensional shortens the actual circuit pathways.
An optical circuit based bus in the computer would remove the bandwidth of the bus as a major bottleneck/expense.
By the way, in order to consider the ramifications of three dimensional circuitry/density consider this: today's best CPU's have circuit densities that are orders of magnitude greater than the human brain. But the human brain still has a higher level of interconnectivity by those same orders of magnitude. And while the "biochemical" computer in our heads is not as fast, it seems to be the most reprogrammible, flexible concept processor in our currently known universe.
IIRC, there was a/. article on Nanovation about 8 months ago -- this is the company that was working on creating logic gates (circuits) that function on the quantum level, the so called "light-zister" which would essentially change computers as we know them from electricity based systems to light-wave based systems.
The ramification of those circuits is that we could essentially have CPU's 10-50x faster than current chips, with much lower energy consumption as well.
Anyway, this announcement strikes me as good karma for both Nanovation and MIT. One of the aspects which struck me as being highly positive is that MIT researchers will be free to publish their findings, although Nanovation will have the right to patent the devices.
The question I haven't answered for myself from the press release is whether or not the publishing of those results would allow others to develop technology without breaking the patents... Comments anyone?
Just so you know, I will not be buying any DVD products from your company until such time as the MPAA, etc. drop all actions against websites carrying the DeCSS code. In addition, I will not be investing (or further investing) any amount of money in your companies for the same reasons.
Thank you.
Note to Slashdot Readers:
All of the above URLs are active as either email addresses or contact form pages. I would suggest that now would be a good time to exercise the/. effect and your brains (don't just copy my message) on behalf of the websites targeted by the MPAA.
P.S. If any of the URL's don't work, please fix them. I felt like it was more important to get this posted than to triplecheck all the links.
Late to the commentary, but I hope this adds something to it.
way Way WAY back in micro-processor terms (1984-1985), I developed a white paper that attempted to extrapolate where PC's would develop by Y2K. (I'll put it up on my website if I can find which 5-1/4" floppy I saved it on, and re-hook a 5-1/4" drive to my PC).
Hopefully it doesn't seem self-congratulatory (because a number of my other conclusions stunk) or redundant to this thread to mention that three or four of the paper's conclusions fit the idea of developing a Crusoe type "beowulf in a box" exactly:
High speed, low power CPU cores would be required ( 200 Mhz speed). Why? Because even if I had the ability to write programs that could keep all the Crusoe processors running at full tilt 100% of the time, I could conceivably power 50 Crusoe Processors or so on the same power supply that used to supply two Athlons (68 Watts),
The CPU units would perform on-chip instruction decoding so that chip and system architectures could be developed more flexibly,
Each CPU would have an abundant amount of cache memory in which to put commonly executed code units, and finally that no matter what,
for performance, massively parallel execution was more important than raw speed in terms of overall CPU speeds, etc.
Now then, programming for massively parallel system is a b----, and I couldn't do a Beowulf cluster if I tried, but these chips and the StrongArm series are the first ones which met all of the specs in a fifteen year old paper.
When used in conjunction with Transmeta's x86 Code Morphing software, the Crusoe Processor provides x86-compatible software execution without requiring code recompilation.
Systems based on this solution are capable of executing all standard x86-compatible operating systems and applications, including Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, and Linux.
No Listing for Win3.1.1 or DOS--perhaps because those OS's aren't really out there for most of us anymore. So IMHO -- and I assume you'd agree --Transmeta really needs to clarify this issue better.
Like everyone else, here I am tossing in my 2 cents worth about Transmeta's press conference...
Reference machines...
What this means is that Transmeta does the R&D for a device (such as the web pad which they displayed), then provides the specs to manufacturers, who can then produce them without requiring startup R&D to design and build Crusoe based machines. Smart move.
The Code Morphing piece -- raves here!! It received a brief mention at the end, but if Intel, etc. add an instruction to the x86 set, Transmeta can use the CodeMorphing piece without requiring a new fab mask to be redesigned into the chip.
Full x86 compatibility, with two different models. The more expensive, faster chip will support all x86 apps including 16 bit ones, the less expensive one dumps the 16 bit because (as Transmeta made clear) there really isn't a set of legacy apps out there.
I like this alot -- if I'm really committed to Linux, why would I want to be stuck with the overhead from what was originally a fairly bad chip design (8088,8086 up to 80386)?
The LongRun design -- which automatically sets the chip(s) to use power maximally well.
Showing Transmeta chips running both the Windows version and the Linux version of Quake concurrently. 'Course, Linus coulda used a bit more practice before the demo, but at least he mentioned that when he lost, it reflected his skill and not that of the OS...;)
I expect this chip to succeed big for reasons mentioned in a previous post.
Corel's Belair says that one component of Wine -- its compatibility libraries used for porting applications from Windows to Linux -- are near ready for prime time, and that Corel plans to beta-test production-quality versions of those libraries within a few weeks.
For me as a developer, this is the holy grail. When I need full speed performance, I have a full non-MFC C++ foundation class library that I use to create my Windows apps, and I haven't had the time (read: I gotta make a living too...) to port it to Linux. If I can use these libraries to port my libraries to Linux even semi-effectively, I no longer have any reason to code for the Windows GUI.
Slashdot Mirror
Been there done that. Many times as a matter of fact.
But adequate security and copyrighting the result as put out in the publishing medium (the web, right) can already provide the level of legal protection you need, correct? In other words, my assertion is that companies with large databases are pushing this legislation to protect their data investments, against who? Crackers? no. News organizations? no. Current competitors, only marginally, I think. Smaller web publishers? Most likely, because this is where the major innovations and future competitors will come from.
So I see this as another example of corporate America trying to hijack and control the web.
Excuse my ignorance on this subject, but does that mean you can mirror my site even without my permission?
For example, if you compiled a list of Thai food restaurants in all the cities in the US, should you be able to copyright that list? You can't copyright any individual item on that list, because the information isn't yours, but should somebody else be allowed to simply copy your work?
I think you are agreeing with me here. The fact is, the server with your site on it is private property, and someone cracking into your server can be prosecuted. Other than that, the single source for taking your data is the web. And the courts have ruled that info as published on the web can be copyrighted already.
(about disallowing queries) But in a lot of situations that's not valid But legally it is a valid one -- witness the successful suit against deep linking. If the originating site had coded their pages so that they couldn't be deep linked, there wouldn't have been opportunity for the ripoff. So it was possible technically to do something so that no legislation was needed.
Most of the new laws are pretty clear on this: you don't get a monopoly on the information, but nobody else can simply copy the entire set of information from you. In other words, if I go out and compile the same information, I'm free to publish it. But I can't simply copy your list. Agreed. But what if you claim that my compilation is just a ripoff of yours, and you're a major company with the resources to legally bury me?
I guess what I'm saying is that in this case, I think competition, adequate security, and the courts are in a better position to protect the rights of the individual than our current special-interest-dominated legislative processes.
Hmmm. Rights based on economics. If this ever made it into law, I can't see how it would be constitutional. [I have serious issues with the Digital Millenium copyright act here as well.]
Off the top of my head, it's like saying "my economic interest in protecting my database(d) information is more important than your right to
- freedom of the press,
- the Freedom of Information act which keeps most governmental documents accessible to the general public,
- free flow of medical research information
to name a few.I don't see how any more laws are needed. It's already against the law to pirate software (which is what virtually all databases are anyway). So for the database manufacturers to refer to the "data collections" as copyrightable seems disingenious to me.
Of course, there is the obligatory "we'll protect the public interest" clauses... "regulators and courts should balance database protection with an insistence on fair licensing and other promotion for competition." Except for one set of problems, I would say, "okee dokee fine." Regulators are noted for protecting the public interest, fair licences, or promoting competition.
The major points I think we should rally behind are that
- "...no one convincingly demonstrates that it is harmed by the lack of special laws." ,
- We may be entering an age when, as law professor Lawrence Lessig claims, "copyright is more effectively protected than at any time since Gutenberg...In such an age--in a time when the [technical] protections are being perfected--the real question for law is not, how can law aid in that protection? but rather, is the protection too great?"... and finally,
- "Privatizing information through contract, encryption, and similar devices may carry greater individual and social costs than would a copyright system."
BTW, in case anyone thinks I didn't read the whole article, I do understand the idea that a lot of work goes into the collection of "facts" that goes into a database, and that the work can be "freeloaded" via the web. There are other protections: I can put copyright notices on my web pages, disallow queries that do not originate from within a given site structure, etc. that do not require any new legislation to be effective.So IMHO the databases of facts do not require protection. The right to copyright "database facts" would seem to imply that if I create and a database of scientific facts, for example, I am somehow entitled to enforce my right to be the whole source of publishing that information -- just because I collected it first and got a copyright.
Let's hope (and contact your congressperson!!) that we can head this off before it starts another fight that the Internet community cannot afford to lose.
- Hello. As a past and very satisfied user of Kiplinger's tax cut software, I would like to encourage you to release your package under the Linux operating system as well as for the other platforms.
(BTW, no response yet. I will post it as a reply to this message if/when one comes in)I am currently converting my home and home office machines to Linux, and will not be able to use your product in the future unless a Linux version is released.
Please feel free to forward this to the appropriate parties within your company
Signed...
Refer to this /. post. I put all the contact email addresses I could find in it. Then send the zuits a polite email explaining our side and requesting that they back out of their support for the DVD CCA.
Seriously though -- and recognizing that the discussion which follows is slightly off the main thread topic --IIRC the limiting issue isn't whether or not you can pass a law that has retroactive effects, it's what those retroactive effects can be.
For example, if I live in a community that requires 200 hours of training for some type of job, and there is no state requirement. So I get my training and am legally licensed in the community which is in the state. Then the state passes a ruling that says I have to have 500 hours in order to be licensed. The laws are usually written with a date cut off, e.g. this law will go into effect on xx/xx/xxxx date and anyone wanting to be licensed thereafter must have the requisite number of hours. Those licensed previously are "grandfathered in" by the prohibition against ex-post-facto prosecutions. (which may include on-going education requirements, etc. that still force me to get more training, etc.) because they can't prosecute me for legally practicing my profession in the community, so I am in effect legal anyway in the state.
Now then, I am still not a lawyer, so if anyone out there is, step in and correct me if my understanding is wrong on this.
ewwwww, gross...I think. ;) 'Course, we'd just find someone who could probably make a washable body tatoo of the code.
Judge: Young man, you can't wear that shirt in here, it's got the source code on it.
Young Man: Okay Judge, I'll take off the shirt...
or alternatively (in the interest of fair representation of the fair sex)
Judge: Young Woman, you can't wear...
Say what was the address of that court room again?
In a different vein, I have what I think is an important question related to the public documentation part 'though: If we downloaded the "exhibit a", part of the document while it was "open" (which is the DeCSS source in question), and then they seal it, what is the legal status of those copies we downloaded?
The closest analogy I can think of is this: if I went to the courthouse and made xerox copies of a public document which was later "sealed" by the court, would I somehow be in violation of the law? If so, it seems like it would be an "ex post facto" law (a law passed making a crime out of an act which had not previously been legislated against). At least in the US of A, "ex post facto" prosecution is against our constitutional rights. IANAL and this has me very very concerned.
Okay, I'd forgotten about beta users. I'd be interested to know your background and opinion of Win2k vs. any other NOS's you might have tech experience with. In my book hearing from a real world user/administrator counts more than tech reports any day.
Ummmm... folks, as far as I know, Win2k hasn't been released yet, so those votes are bogus, yes?? So other than SCO, Windows NOS's are in last place in the poll.
- Rate File services as only 15%, and the network benchmark at only 10%. Bias: against Novell which whipped Win2K
- Rate the areas of Scalability (20%) Security(10%)and fault tolerance (10%) which were only discussed in a theoretical construct, and not fully thrash tested by security experts, etc.) where Netware has been. Bias: towards Win2K
- Install (5%) bias towards Win2K.
Okay follow me here:- I only install a Novell network once, and perhaps it's not quite as peachy-keen easy as Win2k. But it rates 50% better in performance (9.3 vs. 5.6 rating). So why the hell is the install given a value equal to 1/2 of the performance?
- Scalability doesn't necessarily come into play until extremely high loads are encountered. You can buy and install a second Netware server and still have a lower overall cost less than the price of the top-end MS servers (You wouldn't believe the license prices for Enterprise NT (required for "highly available" systems with RAID disks, etc.) Or a half a dozen midrange RH Linux servers.
- The security, Stability and fault tolerance figures are only in the lab, not in the real world like Novell, Linux, and SCO have already been.
So there you have it. Win2k does come out on top. But only if you cheat.Measure real world performance, proven stability, security, etc., and the score comes out more like #1 Novell for the biggest installations, #2 RH Linux for small and midrange, and a tie for #3 between SCO and Win2k. SCO for people who know better, and Win2k for PHB's who don't.
P.S. I changed the scalability figure to 10% and upped the value of the file/network portion of the test...Novell wins in a Landslide. RH still third, but Win2K is not much better, and the difference is 90% in the docs and utilities. ;)
So then how at the end do they come up with this next quote:
- If you want a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable, then Windows 2000 is the strongest contender.
??? The only true statement about the true king(s) of the NOS hill is what came next:IMHO, the only good thing about IDG's article is that their benchmark points the way to areas in which Linux needs to improve. By the way, look at the results of their quick poll:
Total: 8601 votes
So how is Win 2K number #1? In terms of marketing $ spent on IDG magazines, etc. perhaps?
Lucky you, I guess. I work with a number of sophisticated sites and IE 5.0 with NT 4.0 and the latest service pack crashes an average of three times a week to as often as three times a day. [Just a guess, but the commonality seems to be that the Microsoft JVM gets confused if you have more than one java enabled page open in a window at the same time.]
Not that Netscape 4.7 is any better in terms of crash frequency, but Explorer doesn't win any extra points at all in my experience.
Never said it was bad. I said that the excesses of the capitalistic system are bad.
Perhaps so. But if you look at most of the excesses of capitalism, you usually find someone at the top willing to say "f--k everyone else", whether that be in the form of enviromnmental abuse, anti-union and/or anti-strike violence, illegal monopolistic prices, company towns, etc.
When only money matters, everyone else suffers. When worker's rights, the environment, etc. are included in the company's bottom line equations along with money, we find that some very good companies count both. Unfortunately, and this is my own very jaded opinion -- in terms of large companies, most don't.
It's not quite as menacing when you think about what's really going on.
Hmmm. Environmental destruction, influence peddling, legalistic means of trying to control the Internet -- did I miss anything? If these aren't menacing to us as individuals, then what is?
I am also only interested in watching legitimately produced DVD's. On my Linux machine, of course. And with the idea if I move to a different area, I should still be able to watch the movie, since I already paid for it.
For me, the bottom line is that because the DVD-CCA is trying to re-centralize the distribution process, it should be fought. Also, my personal opinion is that because the way that the companies chose to employ their encryption (region locking) is wrong, I'm willing to sacrifice the ability to buy/watch a new movie on DVD by waiting until there is an open version. By waiting I deprive the companies in question of revenue until they play nice.
- Darkness is always driven back by light. That is, exposure of corruption usually manages to destroy it. IF you know of influence peddling that goes counter to the freedom of the 'Net, bring them to the attention of as many people as possible say, by posting it to the Internet?
- Stop using the products/services of the offending companies.Like Jon Katz and others (me too) have taken a stand against Amazon by refusing to buy books until the patent is dropped. And let those companies know why -- the easiest way to end a war is to show your adversary the benefit of co-operation over competition.
- Similarly, move any investments you may have away from companies which are heavily involved in governmental lobbying towards controlling the 'Net. These companies lose power profoundly as the lifeblood of their investment goes elsewhere. AOL would not remain in a position to buy Time/Warner if their stock value suddenly got gutted by a mass movement away from both companies. Sony, Paramount, etc. wouldn't be in much of a position to fight DeCSS if suddenly no-one was buying their products.
- Practice civil disobedience as a group. In the DeCSS case, this means making sure that the source code remains published on the web outside the court's reach.
- Talk to your elected officials. Who like it nice and quiet so that they can go on (excuse the language here) sucking at the corporate tit. Who know if they get tossed out, the power and bucks dry up. Let them know that if they don't take a stand, they won't have a job.
Ooh, brain flash. Let me add one more item to this list: remove all links to sites controlled by companies involved in the fight, and don't browse those sites at all. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think a total "link boycott" would have quite a dramatic and traumatic effect on those company's Internet related advertising rates?Put this together with another context. CBS recently used digital technology to filter out a competitor's logo (NBC) from appearing in a broadcast. What's to stop AO(Hell)/Time Warner from essentially saying, "well, because this court decision essentially made the ISP a content provider, we don't want to be sued, so we will filter out anything we don't want to appear as being part of 'our content' from being transmitted via our wires..."
Poof, instant corporate censorship of free speech, aided and abetted by the court(s). At least in this one area, I think the DeCSS case may end up in the Supreme Court unless it is modified or struck down before it gets there. So once again, thanks for highlighting this for the rest of the /. community to read, understand, and fight against.
Wrong!!
Capitalism, with all of it's terrible warts, exists simply because (for example) a person who is better at growing food than I am (aka, a farmer) trades with what he does best for what another entity does best -- perhaps building things like tractors, etc. As long as the "balance of trade" is equitable, capitalism works extremely well because it's sort of like an escalator that anybody (that is willing to work) can get on. It's when the balance gets upset that things turn bad, which is what Katz is talking about here.
The problem is that rampant capitalism (money as the sole medium of value) has no innate morality with which to do things like protecting the environment, people's rights, etc. All has been subjugated to the almighty bottom line.
C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer admired by alot of folks said it best, and I hope someone can find the exact quote and post it here. Paraphrasing, he said something like "more evil is done by men behind closed doors than in all the wars ever fought." The thing I find interesting is that this statement was made many years ago in a context of how corporations usually turn against the "common man" by seeking to exploit.
Both of these are the exact reason (if my understanding of the technology is correct from the white papers I have read) why optical chips should be faster:
- The lowered heat dissipation would allow smaller gate sizes without crosstalk/circuit failure becoming serious problem, and
- the ability to go three dimensional shortens the actual circuit pathways.
- An optical circuit based bus in the computer would remove the bandwidth of the bus as a major bottleneck/expense.
By the way, in order to consider the ramifications of three dimensional circuitry/density consider this: today's best CPU's have circuit densities that are orders of magnitude greater than the human brain. But the human brain still has a higher level of interconnectivity by those same orders of magnitude. And while the "biochemical" computer in our heads is not as fast, it seems to be the most reprogrammible, flexible concept processor in our currently known universe.The ramification of those circuits is that we could essentially have CPU's 10-50x faster than current chips, with much lower energy consumption as well.
Anyway, this announcement strikes me as good karma for both Nanovation and MIT. One of the aspects which struck me as being highly positive is that MIT researchers will be free to publish their findings, although Nanovation will have the right to patent the devices.
The question I haven't answered for myself from the press release is whether or not the publishing of those results would allow others to develop technology without breaking the patents... Comments anyone?
- MPAA.ORG
Department of Investor Relations and SalesMCA.Com
Paramount
MGM
Sony
Disney
Fox
Dear Sirs:
Just so you know, I will not be buying any DVD products from your company until such time as the MPAA, etc. drop all actions against websites carrying the DeCSS code. In addition, I will not be investing (or further investing) any amount of money in your companies for the same reasons.
Thank you.
Note to Slashdot Readers:
All of the above URLs are active as either email addresses or contact form pages. I would suggest that now would be a good time to exercise the /. effect and your brains (don't just copy my message) on behalf of the websites targeted by the MPAA.
P.S. If any of the URL's don't work, please fix them. I felt like it was more important to get this posted than to triplecheck all the links.
way Way WAY back in micro-processor terms (1984-1985), I developed a white paper that attempted to extrapolate where PC's would develop by Y2K. (I'll put it up on my website if I can find which 5-1/4" floppy I saved it on, and re-hook a 5-1/4" drive to my PC).
Hopefully it doesn't seem self-congratulatory (because a number of my other conclusions stunk) or redundant to this thread to mention that three or four of the paper's conclusions fit the idea of developing a Crusoe type "beowulf in a box" exactly:
- High speed, low power CPU cores would be required ( 200 Mhz speed). Why? Because even if I had the ability to write programs that could keep all the Crusoe processors running at full tilt 100% of the time, I could conceivably power 50 Crusoe Processors or so on the same power supply that used to supply two Athlons (68 Watts),
- The CPU units would perform on-chip instruction decoding so that chip and system architectures could be developed more flexibly,
- Each CPU would have an abundant amount of cache memory in which to put commonly executed code units, and finally that no matter what,
- for performance, massively parallel execution was more important than raw speed in terms of overall CPU speeds, etc.
Now then, programming for massively parallel system is a b----, and I couldn't do a Beowulf cluster if I tried, but these chips and the StrongArm series are the first ones which met all of the specs in a fifteen year old paper.Just in time for Y2K. Interesting, eh?
- When used in conjunction with Transmeta's x86 Code Morphing software, the Crusoe Processor provides x86-compatible software execution without requiring code recompilation.
No Listing for Win3.1.1 or DOS--perhaps because those OS's aren't really out there for most of us anymore. So IMHO -- and I assume you'd agree --Transmeta really needs to clarify this issue better.Systems based on this solution are capable of executing all standard x86-compatible operating systems and applications, including Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, and Linux.
- Reference machines...
- The Code Morphing piece -- raves here!! It received a brief mention at the end, but if Intel, etc. add an instruction to the x86 set, Transmeta can use the CodeMorphing piece without requiring a new fab mask to be redesigned into the chip.
- Full x86 compatibility, with two different models. The more expensive, faster chip will support all x86 apps including 16 bit ones, the less expensive one dumps the 16 bit because (as Transmeta made clear) there really isn't a set of legacy apps out there.
- The LongRun design -- which automatically sets the chip(s) to use power maximally well.
- Showing Transmeta chips running both the Windows version and the Linux version of Quake concurrently. 'Course, Linus coulda used a bit more practice before the demo, but at least he mentioned that when he lost, it reflected his skill and not that of the OS...
;)
I expect this chip to succeed big for reasons mentioned in a previous post.What this means is that Transmeta does the R&D for a device (such as the web pad which they displayed), then provides the specs to manufacturers, who can then produce them without requiring startup R&D to design and build Crusoe based machines. Smart move.
I like this alot -- if I'm really committed to Linux, why would I want to be stuck with the overhead from what was originally a fairly bad chip design (8088,8086 up to 80386)?
Corel's Belair says that one component of Wine -- its compatibility libraries used for porting applications from Windows to Linux -- are near ready for prime time, and that Corel plans to beta-test production-quality versions of those libraries within a few weeks.
For me as a developer, this is the holy grail. When I need full speed performance, I have a full non-MFC C++ foundation class library that I use to create my Windows apps, and I haven't had the time (read: I gotta make a living too...) to port it to Linux. If I can use these libraries to port my libraries to Linux even semi-effectively, I no longer have any reason to code for the Windows GUI.