Sun gets to define what compliant is, just as Microsoft gets to define what compliance with its "standards" are.
People who write to and use these platforms get what they deserve, and, presumably, what they want.
One thing I don't understand, but I'm sure that many people in the \. community do:
Is there any point to non-certified but highly compliant implementations? I'm sure the lack of certification would scare away commercial users, but what about others? Are they worth the trouble? Would they even want to use the stuff?
Before I read the list of responses, I thought I knew more or less what spyware is.
I thought it was something that delivered information about me without my permission.
Much as my fingers burn typing anything kindly towards Microsoft (I still haven't used up all the anger from corrupted PowerPoint files working on a past job), I don't see that here.
This stuff seems to be potential, not actual, spyware, although Microsoft's reaction would give me the heebie-jeebies if I used the stuff.
True, the software generates information that could be very interesting to some people and that would royally piss me off if it were being sent out to anybody.
But that's true of damned near everything I do or use on my computer (Linux, not Windows).
The sending's the thing, not the collecting. As at least one poster points out, the cache actually improves your privacy by reducing the number of times you go to the original database.
So long as the info stays on your machine, it ain't spyware.
Lately, I've been on a soapbox about company politics to every young techie I can find.
It's not the rant you think.
When I was young, I looked down on politics, figured I didn't need to deal with it, etc.
By the time I finally started to understand it, most of my working life was gone.
The thing to know is that politics is more than a game: it is the essence of working with and through other people to get things done. You don't have to become Machiavelli and you don't have to stab backs. Learning what people -- even managers -- cherish, and understanding the real power subordinates have over their bosses will lead to a lot more "wins" and a lot more sensible decisions than doing the typical "I don't care about politics" schtick.
What's sad is that we don't have to be as good at it as the managers are, though some of us do have tremendous potential.
We just have to be smart enough to listen and get listened to.
Techies will never win them all, or even all of the ones we should. Nice to win some, though.
The interesting part of the article to me is that Google is aggressively looking for ways to make money (like good little capitalists are supposed to be doing) without compromising their integrity (which good little capitalists are supposed to do, but many seem to grow tired of reading the book before they reach that part).
It's sadly quaint to work on the proposition that high integrity is an asset to a money-making company. Google appears to understand this with their refusal to dilute the value of their search results.
Here's hoping that they prove to the world that making money hand over fist is consistant with that attitude, maybe even derived from it.
>That's not a gun. That's a mutual agreement between two consenting private parties.
Sorry, but that's carrying your faux libertarianism too far. You could make the same statement about someone agreeing to turn their car over to an armed carjacker. After all, nobody makes you drive a car.
Somebody in the desktop computer business -- including someone who started out by selling Atari and Commodore machines, has little choice but to sell Windows machines.
Ummm... I don't know how to break this to you, but this case was prosecuted by the Clinton DOJ and it was the Clinton folks who screwed the pooch on this issue.
>No, the DOJ blundered miserably by not making >this THE element of the case
Well, yes. Your statement is stronger than mine, and, as a result, your statement is more correct than mine. I remain amazed that the DOJ could know about this (and they did) and decide to pass it up.
It's so amazing to me that I have to fight a tendency to perpetuate my own tin-foil hat conspiracy theory: that the DOJ didn't really mean to win their case.
Actually, Microsoft did put a gun to the heads of OEMs and the DOJ blundered miserably in not making it one of the elements of their case.
Microsoft's agreements with OEMs (the agreements themselves were trade secrets, by the way) forbad creating multiple-boot machines. Be's business strategy was to be a "helper OS": used for things that Be did best without losing access to Microsoft Apps. It's pretty much the same strategy Microsoft used in weaning people from DOS to Windows 3.0. Microsoft's OEM agreements prevented this kind of arrangement. Realistically, given the amount of software on the market, it also prevented desktop competition.
For an OEM, on a thin margin, that's pretty much like putting a gun to your head. It's also illegal as Hell for a monopolist to do.
Be is in a pretty good position, here, I think. Microsoft has already been established as a monopolist and the OEM agreements very clearly represented an illegal abuse of their monopoly power.
If I'm not mistaken, and I may be, this suit will be in a class of Federal suit whereby the loser pays. If so, Microsoft will be responsible for all legal fees if they lose.
I wouldn't be completly surprised if some enterprising law firm adds up the merits of this case and agrees to go for a big score here, matching MS blow for blow.
There must be something that's a little bit special about this. When I read that one of these efforts is taking place just a few miles down the road from me (in Glen Ellyn, IL), I got excited. So did my kids.
It seems like such an audacious thing to do: and it's audacious times four.
Makes what all those boys were doing around the turn of the 20th century seem that much more amazing. Hats off to all.
The real message is not necessarily to work Wal-Mart, thought working Wal-Mart certainly could make a big impact.
The real message is to identify those businesses in the supply chain that have incentives to cut costs and have some ability to ripple down the supply chain.
One great example is automotive manufacturers.
Don't know how interested they are, but they have the power, the resources and the skills to implement Open Source solutions if it suits them. They also have huge chains of suppliers who must integrate or go out of business.
Other potentials are any company that must compete with Wal-Mart. These outfits must be desperately looking for ways to streamline. If a compelling case can be made for Open Source, someone out there will bit.
Seems like a powerful argument against campaign finance reform as currently envisioned.
Even if someone could get drunk enough to pretent that proposed campaign finance reforms didn't violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, one would have to ponder letting Congress control the terms of campaign finance.
Encumbants are virtually unbeatable now. The new laws might remove the virtually.
Yes.
This rant, though I'm sure it's full of truth, does manage to excuse the founders of responsibility.
It sounds like their company was doing well enough to fund its own growth, albeit at a slower pace.
They could get richer faster, just not as richer as faster as they'd like.
Of course, they might now still be around as the economy recovers. Might still be in a position to make big scores that are available in the wake of all the companies that joined them in the merry rush to VC money and are not longer around to compete.
>I agree with others that say, "Don't put copyrighted material on the web"
That's fine so far as it goes, except that copyright holders have a right to display their works and to control their use.
If you don't like that fact, work to get the law changed to take those rights away. Of course, the web might be less useful and less entertaining if there is no copyrighted material left to surf.
All the linking page did was include an reference to a work.
Not exactly. The offending site included more than a reference to his work. It included a reference that automatically caused the image to be displayed by a browser.
Remember that copyright covers more than the mere copying of things. It also protects the copyright holder's right to display a work.
Arriba used Kelly's original work and displayed it on an Arriba site.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a good analogy in the non-web world. The closest thing I can think of is counterfeiting tickets to an event.
Ya know, that's actually a pretty good argument in light of this decision.
The real issue, however, isn't whether one is as good as the other, but whether they can serve the same purpose or compete for the same niche.
The rules do tend to get a little funny when you cross over to different kinds of copyrighted objects.
A court might be more inclined to ask how much of the song you recorded, not how well you recorded it.
Why, in this context, is Kelly, who produced the pictures and who hosts them and whose bandwidth was serving the pictures up, a money-grubber, but Arriba, which was trying to make a buck off of Kelly's work without paying a dime or even paying to host the pictures, isn't?
The ruling was against linking directly to images. More specifically, it was for linking directly to and displaying images without any of their original context.
People could see Kelly's images without knowing they came from Kelly's site, or without any of the information he might wish to have associated with them.
To add insult to injury, they'd use his bandwidth to serve them up!
I wonder if that's sufficient to get around the ruling.
Probably not. If you read the Court's discussion, you would have seen that thumbnails were ok, in part, because they had been sufficiently transformed from the originals to be unsuitable to serve the same purpose as the originals.
I would be that most 99% thumbnails could substitute pretty well for the original pictures.
The net evolves, matures and disappears
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As the net ceases to be an exclusive club, it becomes a universe and disappears. As in the rest of our lives, we know that we have a place in the universe, but we're most aware of our home and our community.
That's a good thing, I think. The net is mapping to the world at large, not the exclusive domain of the cogniscenti, or the young or the hardcore geeks.
All of those communities can find places to thrive and even to interact, but they will do so in the company of other communities using the web in ways that suit them.
>By the way... I was sued in a Federal court, not State court
Oops! Gotta get those glasses fixed.;0)
Like you, I was pleased by the Court's decision. Web Access may be worldwide, but the Web itself is as local as it is global.
Following a snowstorm the other day, I hoped onto the local high school web site to see if my daughter's driver's ed class would be cancelled. My local library publishes it's schedule on the web. My neighbor across the street advertises his local heating and cooling business on the web.
People in California or Timbuktu can look at these sites, but the intended audience is right here in St. Charles, IL. Well, Tony's happy to service customers in the surrounding towns, but not Calfornia.
Reasonable standards of contact are required to activate long-arm statutes and I'm glad to see the Courts making sense when applying those standards to this case.
Side note. Putting the check in the mail this week to renew my law license.
I may not do much with it, but at least I'll be able to reply to any nastygrams as "Attorney at Law"
The way things are going these days, that can only be a good thing.
This decision, though good for Chip, does not address the merits of the case, only the question of whether a California Court has jurisdiction to hear it. Presumably, the plaintiffs could got to a Federal Court somewhere and get the case heard (disclaimer: I don't know all of the facts, so that is merely a presumption on my part)
That doesn't mean the decision isn't interesting. The judge includes a nice discussion of purposeful availment and standards used to decide when the operator of a web site has or has not made him/herself subject to a jurisdiction's laws. Very good to see that mere presence doesn't trip the wire.
Slashdot Mirror
People who write to and use these platforms get what they deserve, and, presumably, what they want.
One thing I don't understand, but I'm sure that many people in the \. community do:
Is there any point to non-certified but highly compliant implementations? I'm sure the lack of certification would scare away commercial users, but what about others? Are they worth the trouble? Would they even want to use the stuff?
Before I read the list of responses, I thought I knew more or less what spyware is.
I thought it was something that delivered information about me without my permission.
Much as my fingers burn typing anything kindly towards Microsoft (I still haven't used up all the anger from corrupted PowerPoint files working on a past job), I don't see that here.
This stuff seems to be potential, not actual, spyware, although Microsoft's reaction would give me the heebie-jeebies if I used the stuff.
True, the software generates information that could be very interesting to some people and that would royally piss me off if it were being sent out to anybody.
But that's true of damned near everything I do or use on my computer (Linux, not Windows).
The sending's the thing, not the collecting. As at least one poster points out, the cache actually improves your privacy by reducing the number of times you go to the original database.
So long as the info stays on your machine, it ain't spyware.
Check back tomorrow, though.
>Machiavelli has nothing to do with stabbing backs or being an asshole.
You are correct.
Looks like I wasn't very clear. A better way to put it:
We don't need to be as insightful as Machiavelli nor as ruthless as the back-stabbers.
It's not the rant you think.
When I was young, I looked down on politics, figured I didn't need to deal with it, etc.
By the time I finally started to understand it, most of my working life was gone.
The thing to know is that politics is more than a game: it is the essence of working with and through other people to get things done. You don't have to become Machiavelli and you don't have to stab backs. Learning what people -- even managers -- cherish, and understanding the real power subordinates have over their bosses will lead to a lot more "wins" and a lot more sensible decisions than doing the typical "I don't care about politics" schtick.
What's sad is that we don't have to be as good at it as the managers are, though some of us do have tremendous potential.
We just have to be smart enough to listen and get listened to.
Techies will never win them all, or even all of the ones we should. Nice to win some, though.
It's sadly quaint to work on the proposition that high integrity is an asset to a money-making company. Google appears to understand this with their refusal to dilute the value of their search results.
Here's hoping that they prove to the world that making money hand over fist is consistant with that attitude, maybe even derived from it.
>That's not a gun. That's a mutual agreement between two consenting private parties.
Sorry, but that's carrying your faux libertarianism too far. You could make the same statement about someone agreeing to turn their car over to an armed carjacker. After all, nobody makes you drive a car.
Somebody in the desktop computer business -- including someone who started out by selling Atari and Commodore machines, has little choice but to sell Windows machines.
Ummm...
I don't know how to break this to you, but this case was prosecuted by the Clinton DOJ and it was the Clinton folks who screwed the pooch on this issue.
Well, yes. Your statement is stronger than mine, and, as a result, your statement is more correct than mine. I remain amazed that the DOJ could know about this (and they did) and decide to pass it up.
It's so amazing to me that I have to fight a tendency to perpetuate my own tin-foil hat conspiracy theory: that the DOJ didn't really mean to win their case.
Deep down, I know that's ridiculous. Still, ...
Microsoft's agreements with OEMs (the agreements themselves were trade secrets, by the way) forbad creating multiple-boot machines. Be's business strategy was to be a "helper OS": used for things that Be did best without losing access to Microsoft Apps. It's pretty much the same strategy Microsoft used in weaning people from DOS to Windows 3.0. Microsoft's OEM agreements prevented this kind of arrangement. Realistically, given the amount of software on the market, it also prevented desktop competition.
For an OEM, on a thin margin, that's pretty much like putting a gun to your head. It's also illegal as Hell for a monopolist to do.
Be is in a pretty good position, here, I think. Microsoft has already been established as a monopolist and the OEM agreements very clearly represented an illegal abuse of their monopoly power.
If I'm not mistaken, and I may be, this suit will be in a class of Federal suit whereby the loser pays. If so, Microsoft will be responsible for all legal fees if they lose.
I wouldn't be completly surprised if some enterprising law firm adds up the merits of this case and agrees to go for a big score here, matching MS blow for blow.
There must be something that's a little bit special about this. When I read that one of these efforts is taking place just a few miles down the road from me (in Glen Ellyn, IL), I got excited. So did my kids.
It seems like such an audacious thing to do: and it's audacious times four.
Makes what all those boys were doing around the turn of the 20th century seem that much more amazing. Hats off to all.
The real message is to identify those businesses in the supply chain that have incentives to cut costs and have some ability to ripple down the supply chain.
One great example is automotive manufacturers.
Don't know how interested they are, but they have the power, the resources and the skills to implement Open Source solutions if it suits them. They also have huge chains of suppliers who must integrate or go out of business.
Other potentials are any company that must compete with Wal-Mart. These outfits must be desperately looking for ways to streamline. If a compelling case can be made for Open Source, someone out there will bit.
And so on and so forth.
Seems like a powerful argument against campaign finance reform as currently envisioned.
Even if someone could get drunk enough to pretent that proposed campaign finance reforms didn't violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, one would have to ponder letting Congress control the terms of campaign finance.
Encumbants are virtually unbeatable now. The new laws might remove the virtually.
Loved both LOTR and Moulin Rouge, but...
Gandalf( or however it's spelled) for best supporting actor? Enjoyed the performance, for sure, but fine acting? Maybe a bit of spell somewhere.
Nicole was a joy to watch in Moulin Rouge, but not because of her acting. She wasn't bad, but shouldn't it take more than that?
Yes.
This rant, though I'm sure it's full of truth, does manage to excuse the founders of responsibility.
It sounds like their company was doing well enough to fund its own growth, albeit at a slower pace.
They could get richer faster, just not as richer as faster as they'd like.
Of course, they might now still be around as the economy recovers. Might still be in a position to make big scores that are available in the wake of all the companies that joined them in the merry rush to VC money and are not longer around to compete.
But no.
>I agree with others that say, "Don't put copyrighted material on the web"
That's fine so far as it goes, except that copyright holders have a right to display their works and to control their use.
If you don't like that fact, work to get the law changed to take those rights away. Of course, the web might be less useful and less entertaining if there is no copyrighted material left to surf.
The lawsuit was not frivolous.
Arriba violated the law.
Kelly won his suit.
Arriba infringed his rights.
Kelly had no obligation to settle.
He had been done wrong and Arriba did not offer a settlement satisfactory to him.
He was fully within his rights to protect his rights in court.
Why are you blaming the victim here?
All the linking page did was include an reference to a work.
Not exactly. The offending site included more than a reference to his work. It included a reference that automatically caused the image to be displayed by a browser.
Remember that copyright covers more than the mere copying of things. It also protects the copyright holder's right to display a work.
Arriba used Kelly's original work and displayed it on an Arriba site.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a good analogy in the non-web world. The closest thing I can think of is counterfeiting tickets to an event.
Ya know, that's actually a pretty good argument in light of this decision.
The real issue, however, isn't whether one is as good as the other, but whether they can serve the same purpose or compete for the same niche.
The rules do tend to get a little funny when you cross over to different kinds of copyrighted objects.
A court might be more inclined to ask how much of the song you recorded, not how well you recorded it.
One question:
Why, in this context, is Kelly, who produced the pictures and who hosts them and whose bandwidth was serving the pictures up, a money-grubber, but Arriba, which was trying to make a buck off of Kelly's work without paying a dime or even paying to host the pictures, isn't?
The ruling was not against providing links.
The ruling was against linking directly to images. More specifically, it was for linking directly to and displaying images without any of their original context.
People could see Kelly's images without knowing they came from Kelly's site, or without any of the information he might wish to have associated with them.
To add insult to injury, they'd use his bandwidth to serve them up!
Probably not. If you read the Court's discussion, you would have seen that thumbnails were ok, in part, because they had been sufficiently transformed from the originals to be unsuitable to serve the same purpose as the originals.
I would be that most 99% thumbnails could substitute pretty well for the original pictures.
That's a good thing, I think. The net is mapping to the world at large, not the exclusive domain of the cogniscenti, or the young or the hardcore geeks.
All of those communities can find places to thrive and even to interact, but they will do so in the company of other communities using the web in ways that suit them.
It's a wonderful grown-up kind of thing.
Oops! Gotta get those glasses fixed. ;0)
Like you, I was pleased by the Court's decision. Web Access may be worldwide, but the Web itself is as local as it is global.
Following a snowstorm the other day, I hoped onto the local high school web site to see if my daughter's driver's ed class would be cancelled. My local library publishes it's schedule on the web. My neighbor across the street advertises his local heating and cooling business on the web.
People in California or Timbuktu can look at these sites, but the intended audience is right here in St. Charles, IL. Well, Tony's happy to service customers in the surrounding towns, but not Calfornia.
Reasonable standards of contact are required to activate long-arm statutes and I'm glad to see the Courts making sense when applying those standards to this case.
Side note. Putting the check in the mail this week to renew my law license.
I may not do much with it, but at least I'll be able to reply to any nastygrams as "Attorney at Law"
The way things are going these days, that can only be a good thing.
This decision, though good for Chip, does not address the merits of the case, only the question of whether a California Court has jurisdiction to hear it. Presumably, the plaintiffs could got to a Federal Court somewhere and get the case heard (disclaimer: I don't know all of the facts, so that is merely a presumption on my part)
That doesn't mean the decision isn't interesting. The judge includes a nice discussion of purposeful availment and standards used to decide when the operator of a web site has or has not made him/herself subject to a jurisdiction's laws. Very good to see that mere presence doesn't trip the wire.
Oops!
Thanks for the catch.