Comments like these modded up leave me wondering what the average age on/. is. I think it's gradually decreasing and I am willing to guess currently it's at 14.
Are you talking about Windows NT 4.0 server here? Or workstation? Because you cannot be seriously comparing the NT 4 server to an XP workstation, especially recommending the upgrade path like that. Windows XP is limited to not provide many server-like functionalities so you have to purchase a more expensive Windows 2003.Net small business/data center/whatever edition.
In either case whatever you are comparing, have you tried running Windows XP on a 266 Mhz, 2GB HD, 32 MB RAM box? Good luck with that. Moreover, unlike Windows XP, Windows NT was never meant to be a home consumer OS - MS had Windows 95 and 98 for that purpose.
I've seen a lot of standalone applications like this, but this one is one step forward in that it tries to integrate with an IDE. I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know how easily it allows you to create common XML schema rules and XSLT. XML is easy - there is no reason why a newbie has to type a single line of XML in a text editor; so are many common XSLT transformations. I just saw that they are polling users to pick what they'd like most in the next versions and one of the options is visual schema editor - so I guess it's not possible yet.
Anyway, what I meant by integration is not to simply create a plugin that works mostly on its own inside an IDE, but to provide a mini-framework that will allow newbies to get from point "from scratch" to a generic simple starting point where they can start doing their things right away - similar to application wizards for language-specific IDEs. For example, a newbie would click a menu option that says - Start a new XML/XSLT Database application - then the "wizard" asks few questions and maybe creates a simple one-page one-function hello world type functional application (including XML, XSLT, CSS, Java/PHP/Perl/whatever server script/app, sample database connection if requested, etc.). Once you have the basic framework set up, then you start digging directly into your application specific stuff and you don't have to think about how the framework itself should be set up - this works wonders when you are a newbie.
After that newbies can extend their application by modifying existing pages, adding new XML files through a GUI (or editor), visually modifying/adding new XSLT, modifying server behavior, etc., etc. I would say that 70-80% of common tasks that newbies do can be in some type of GUI or WYSIWYG editors.
It should be relatively easy to do this - Borland and Microsoft have done things that are at least 100 times more complex with their [*]Builder/Kylix, Visual Studio and other products. I don't know why nobody has created anything like this so far . . . Or maybe someone did and I haven't heard about it.
Many people don't think straight. They choose some language and platform-specific and/or some proprietary templating engines and systems that are limited, do not separate application tiers, are hard to port and hard to improve.
That being said, I still have to see an all-purpose GUI application that will allow newbie developers to create basic and common XML schema and XSLT (maybe there is one and I don't know); couple that with the Gecko engine for rendering and you've got a full presentation layer development suite that is extensible and portable. Imagine now, if you take this and integrate it with an IDE like Eclipse, KDevelop, Quanta, Jbuilder, etc. why would anyone use any other templating engines at all?
5) PC hardware and most related software is an open platform. i.e., if something is feasible, someone can do it, and offer it on the market; the cost of entry is low and number of participants is extremely high. Consumers can dictate and get what they are looking for. With many geographical monopolies or oligopolies of broadband providers offering limited services, consumers will never be in the driver's seat. Providers will offer restricted services, extremely restricted support for only handful of common applications. What's more the services will never be standardized between providers and the "platform" will never be made open for everyone (because there's no money in that). Also providers will increase the cost of entry into the market for the privilege to provide software to their clients. Providers will be the drivers. It will never catch on - open platforms will always have an advantage of choice over closed, limited pay-as-you-go systems.
Bittorrent makes it easy for the RIAA to sue the torrent providers, whereas Kazaa has been constructed to make it easy for everybody to stay hidden.
Kazaa is not constructed to allow "everybody to stay hidden." In fact, RIAA has filed hundreds (if not 1000s already) of lawsuits and sent out subpoenas to ISPs to identify individuals who they believe are grossly infringing on their members' copyrights. All sharers on Kazaa are very easily identified and have their identity revealed with a simple subpoena.
There is no P2P technology, including freenet, that will keep you completely "hidden" or anonymous. Although some do make it harder to find sources, Kazaa was never one of them. It was just the most popular. In that sense, both Bittorrent and Kazaa are similar. So, suing Sharman Networks is similar to suing to Bittorrent application developers.
And one unrelated point with respect to Bittorrent: by saying "provider" you either mean a link provider or an infringing content provider. Because there must be a difference between a person who only gives you a map of "piracy" shops in your area/city/state and the person who actually distributes or willingly and knowingly copies the said infringing content without permission. If you take that and blow it over other areas of the law - there must be a difference between a person giving you a map of celebrity houses in Hollywood and a person who uses that information for malicious purposes such as breaking and entering, sending threats, trespassing, damaging property, etc.
If you like public domain music and speeches. You should also applaud them:)
You bet I do! As I said, during just last couple of weeks, I downloaded 2 CDs worth of public domain music off of P2P and I play them in my car all the time. So, where I am coming from is that I don't want to allow a greedy and influential entertainment cartel be in full control of types of information that are exchanged and methods of their transfer between individuals.
RIAA is not filing legal charges against bittorrent as a program.
I don't know where you have been all this time but they are suing Sharman Networks for making Kazaa the program. They are bribing congressmen to enact laws like the INDUCE Act which would make most information distributing tools, including P2P, illegal. Sure, they are also suing the sharers, but that doesn't negate the former.
The effort, it seems to me, is to show lawmakers and courts for their reference that the technology should not be banned outright because it does have legitimate uses. I have used P2P to download public domain music and speeches that I like. I couldn't care less about the mainstream music like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and I don't want ??AA to declare they have monopoly on every type of information and content out there, and help outlaw information transfer between individuals.
So everything is based on estimates. Now, you know and I know that the Linux kernel has less bugs... but this is a tentative (at best, shoddy at worst) way of presenting that idea.
The way I see it is that the research itself compares bug frequency in Linux vs. other commercial closed source projects that they have analyzed in the past. Windows XP, OS X, 40 million lines, "new bugs found on a frequent basis" are garnishings brought to you by CNet and/. for their respective readers' flamebaiting experience.
when you get a new PC, it's probably going to have a little icon on the desktop saying 'sign up to AOL'. How do you think that icon gets there? Does AOL have a separate deal with every OEM
Yes. They have deals with some of the biggest ones like Dell.
or does it get this sweet bit of marketing straight from MS? (hint: it's the second one)
It's both. But the "deal" with Microsoft is not for the icon, but that MS will leave OEMs alone if AOL makes a deal with them. They have a separate deal with Microsoft that also includes an agreement that AOL will continue to use IE rendering engine for several (five?) more years. I am going to guess that it also included AOL letting Mozilla development go.
hence the reluctance to dump IE, lest AOL be dumped from the OEM desktop.
MS could try to pressure OEMs to do so - that's why they need an agreement with MS; but that doesn't mean that AOL doesn't need to have deals with OEMs themselves.
With the advent of OpenOffice 1.x the race for a world class Open Source Office app to replace MS Office is over.
Similar to my experience, except the main app I used to use from their suite was Paradox. Since Corel acquired Paradox (why?) from Borland, they didn't improve it at all, but they kept including it in the pro version of the suite. It's an extremely nice tool if you are doing any amount of complex DB applications, for development and test data manipulation, easily manageable complex cross DB source queries, writing , etc.. Nothing else I have used comes close.
I believe Borland still includes an extremely stripped down version of Paradox called Database Desktop with its development tools, but it's obviously not the same thing. I still run Paradox via WINE and don't like it.
I don't know about Safari, but Secunia is full of FUD about Konqueror. Unlike Firefox 1.0 and IE, this "vulnerability" test doesn't succeed on Konqueror 3.3.1 (even if I try doing your Safari-related suggestion), and yes, I made sure I tried the Konqueror specific test page. It just displays the Citibank customer alert page as I would expect in the popup. Therefore, it doesn't affect Konqueror versions 3.x as stated in the report. The Konqueror specific page says:
The vulnerability has been confirmed in Konqueror version 3.2.2-6. Other versions may also be affected.
So? Why didn't they test it with the latest version? 3.2.2 was ages ago! And the "solution" status shouldn't say "unpatched" - it should say - upgrade to newer version where it has been fixed.
Is it in the interest of Secunia to spread panic rather than research and report? I'll take any of their reports with a huge grain of salt from now on - their reports on Konqueror in the past have been less than accurate as well.
Well, it's called mklinux. They developed it, released it as an open source distribution, and did the critical part of writing the drivers for the previously undocumented hardware.
Fill in the gaps: they developed several releases in the mid-to-late 90s, they provided partial information and partial implementation of their hardware. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that - it's just what it is. Since then they have dropped doing anything with MkLinux.
Honestly, what more could they have done than that to promote linux on their platform? I don't understand your attitude about it.
I don't know what they could have done - that's not the point. The point is not to overblow what they did and give Steve Jobs a blowjob for it. At most they are on par with other hardware manufacturers in this regard - you can boot Linux on PPC, you can boot it also on Playstation, iPaq, and a wide range or hardware and gadgets. There is no attitude.
KHTML is licensed under LGPL - anyone who receives the Safari binaries has a right to ask for the modified KHTML source. Apple is contributing their bug fixes and additions that they are required to disclose under LGPL.
But they don't have to contribute them; they just have to reveal them. Merging someone's fork can be very hard, and Apple could make it much harder just by making a few changes to make the code fit Apple's coding standards, like changing variable names and code indention. The fact that Apple is actively working with KDE developers is above and beyond the call of duty.
But I didn't dispute that point. In fact, I made one along the same lines in the next sentence after what you quoted. What I was correcting is the parent poster's statement that Apple rewrote KHTML and gave it "all" back to KDE team as a part of their generosity. Well, that's not exactly what they did.
Apple has given a lot back to the OSS, but you misrepresent several points:
Yes, Apple used to be very unfriendly to open source, but now it's just as easy to dual boot a Mac with Mac OS X and Linux as it is with a PC.
And what, exactly, did they give out as open source with that? Yes, you can boot Linux on a Mac; you can also do it on a mainframe, Sparcstation, and everybody's microwave. i.e., at the most they are on par with everyone else - not hindering != being generous and giving, unless that's your definition of the word.
Apple basically re-wrote KHTML for Safari, and then gave it all back to KDE.
They didn't rewrite anything. Apple chose KHTML as their rendering engine for their new Safari web browser and contributed their fixes and modifications back. Yes, they could have chosen Gecko, or written another one from scratch, but they chose KHTML because they liked it better. KHTML is licensed under LGPL - anyone who receives the Safari binaries has a right to ask for the modified KHTML source. Apple is contributing their bug fixes and additions that they are required to disclose under LGPL.
Presumably, they are being very nice and collaborative about it and I am not in any way trying to portray them in a bad light for the way they are doing this. But it's nowhere close to what you claim about rewriting the whole engine and giving back out of generosity.
And don't even get me started on user interface. Apple might not have contributed to this directly, but have you ever stopped to think how much of Gnome and GTK+ is influenced by the Mac OS?
I don't know how this relates to generosity - would they start suing GNOME developers or users if they were not acting "generous?" MS Windows has also influenced KDE and GNOME and various application GUIs - you could then argue that MS has been just as, or even more generous with the OSS in this regard.
So, yes, Apple has contributed Darwin and Rendevouz when they didn't have to, they are being helpful with providing fixes in KHTML (which they would eventually have to), but you don't want to blow some things out of proportion.
Lossy audio compression is "guessing and reconstructing the sound".
Well, you can use whatever definition you want but lossy audio compression for the most part - MP3, Vorbis, AAC - is to drop the information that's outside of the audible range or less audible and compress the more important parts in an efficient manner. What is "lost" is never reconstructed. If you use SBR, on the other hand, you can compress half (lower spectrum?) of the audio, and guess what the other half would have been. In theory, this could give you 50% of the file size for only marginal loss of quality - sometimes people say it sounds "cooler" but is less like the original. SBR has been used with MP3 (MP3 Pro), AAC, and potentially other codecs. Remember when they advertised MP3 Pro? They were touting half size files.
Plus if its not backwards compatible it wont be adopted.
Said an immediately modde up 5-digit/. poster without having read as much as a second sentence of the blurb which says:
They claim that MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats while maintaining backwards compatibility.
That's the second sentence for crying out loud. The article itself, which nobody could ever be asked to read before commenting or moderating, says:
At the same time, the new format offers complete backward compatibility to any existing mp3 software and hardware devices.
For the audio codec impaired, MP3 Pro that's mentioned in the blurb is MP3 + SBR. If you want to use SBR, which has more to do with guessing and reconstruting the sound rather than compression, then you are probably much better off using AAC + SBR. That's one of the reasons, as far as I can tell, why the MP3 Pro never "took off."
Or maybe they just want access to all the linux apps available. It doesn't necessarily mean a change of heart regarding linux;
Here's what they said before:
The Linux operating system is developed by an open source process - a cooperative effort by a loose association of software developers from all over the world. With the knowledge that Linux is going to control our most advanced defense systems, foreign intelligence agencies and terrorists can easily infiltrate the Linux community to contribute subversive software.
etc., etc.
They made the argument that since Linux is open source it is subjected to the terrorists infiltrating it and injecting their malicious code. So now, you are saying they would like the applications developed with similar methods to run on their platform? Unless you argue that they are only targeting closed source applications for Linux that they believe are inherently more secure then you cannot justify both arguments. What makes those open source applications any different or any more protected from terrorists than Linux itself?
The problem with your analysis is that your contract is with the store, not with Valve. You never actually gave money directly to Valve, nor did you recieve anything directly from Valve. You have no legal relationship with Valve. You can sue the store if they did not uphold their end of the contract.
I don't quite understand your point. If you as a buyer don't have any contract with Valve, but only with the retailer - what rights does Valve have to impose these terms on top of your contract with the retailer? Still - they'd surely have to provide consideration on top of the original product purchased: e.g. if they didn't originally advertise their online playing capability, but enabled it if you agree to these extra terms and license.
IANAL, but I just read that link. The judge ruled that basically since it's too cumbersome for sellers to disclose their imposed contract terms at the time of purchase, the contract can remain hidden until later after the purchase has been made. The defendant argued that license should have been outside of the box, not inside, to which the judge said - well, the license would have been several pages and would not have fit on the outside, so there!
One of these cases has to go to the Supreme Court at some point. In no other case can you get away with "awww, sorry - my contract terms are too long to fit in this space - why don't I let you know what they are after you've purchased my bike? Be aware though, by using the bike, you agree to those terms I am going to forward you later."
Look at it this way: the judge compares the software shrink-wrap licenses to these services:
- airline tickets: heavily regulated - most of what's contained in the agreement is actually federal law or regulated by the FAA; - insurance purchase: also heavily regulated by the states (auto, health, etc.) - does not allow corporations to take advantage of purchasers by undisclosed tactics; all other insurance types (those which are not heavily regulated) always disclose their terms and the contract at the time of purchase; - concert tickets: not regulated but customer implicitly agrees to follow the reasonable rules of the venue where he/she will attend an event; i.e. the agreement with the ticket is that customer has the right to attend the event for which the ticket was purchased but there's always a reasonable expectation on how to conduct yourself on someone else's private property; IANAL, but this, I presume, is not the same as purchasing a product and taking it home.
The judge then goes on to compare that with consumer goods:
Consumer goods work the same way. Someone who wants to buy a radio set visits a store, pays, and walks out with a box. Inside the box is a leaflet containing some terms, the most important of which usually is the war- ranty, read for the first time in the comfort of home.
What terms? If there was an additional license agreement inside, would it really be valid? Would it be fair to bundle an EULA-type junk with a radio and attempt to enforce it? What if the license told you you cannot re-sell the radio set, and you cannot let your friends and neighbors listen to it - would that be OK with the judge in question?
Further, warranty does not obligate the buyer to give up something else without consideration - it specifies how the manufacturer will handle the cases if the product is defective. Warranties don't prevent customers from listening to their radio sets!
Drugs come with a list of in- gredients on the outside and an elaborate package insert on the inside. The package insert describes drug interac- tions, contraindications, and other vital information--but, if Zeidenberg is right, the purchaser need not read the package insert, because it is not part of the contract.
That's plain bullshit now - what does this have to do with a contract between a buyer and a seller? List of possible interactions and other medical facts are probably required by law to be disclosed in the leaflet and they by no means obligate the consumer to agree to any additional conditions to use the purchased product. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Next consider the software industry itself. Only a minor- ity of sales take place over the counter, where there are boxes to peruse. A customer pay place an order by phone in response to a line item in a catalog or a review in a magazine. Much software is ordered over the Internet by purchasers who have never seen a box. Increasingly soft- ware arrives by wire. There is no box; there is only a stream of electrons, a collection of information that in- cludes data, an application program, instructions, many limitations ("MegaPixel 3.14159 cannot be u
Err... one more thing - in your analogy if you paid for and bought a car from a seller, and the car was in good condition and completely operational, but next day the seller calls you and tells you that you cannot keep driving that car unless you agree to lend it to the seller's sister on weekends that would not be a valid agreement and you'd be able to say "no" and go on with your life. The idea is that additional conditions cannot be imposed to you single-handedly after the sales transaction.
Similarly, if any seller activation scheme requires the buyer to give up something (money, rights, whatever) and doesn't give anything in return, and doesn't have an option for the buyer to reject it, then that cannot be a valid contract either.
This all is assuming that you agree that you are actually buying a copy of the game at the store. Alternatively, you can argue that you are just buying a coaster in a box when you buy software - I don't know how realistic that argument would be, however.
The point I was making is not about what you said here, but about the contracts involved and made during the sales transaction. If you want to make your car analogy, fine - then you cannot buy a used car and at a later point the seller tells you (via the "EULA") that you cannot use your newly purchased car unless you agree to give a ride to the seller's sister to and from work twice a day. Well, unless you expressly agreed to do so during the purchase, it cannot be imposed on you afterwards.
Indeed if the seller wanted to impose additional restrictions or a new agreement after the sales transaction they would also have to offer new consideration in return; while the buyer would have to have an option to decline the new consideration and simply be stuck with what they agreed to purchase originally.
i.e. if you wanted to drive the seller's sister twice a day out of goodness of your heart - you could do so but it would not be a legal contract between you and the seller. If you additionally agreed with the seller to drive the seller's sister to work for $35 a day (payable to you) - then that's a consideration from the seller that will likely constitute to a valid contract. But by no means does the seller have an authority to single-handedly impose on you that you have to drive his sister or you cannot use the car you just purchased. The contract law doesn't work that way.
Regarding what you said - of course, Valve or anyone is free to require and include any activation or copy protection they want in their products - nobody is arguing that - it's just that it cannot be a violation of any EULA if some buyers did not follow those activation rules; simply because unless that EULA provided any additional consideration it cannot be considered a valid contract.
1. Valve were selling empty boxes. 2. Valve hadn't made it abundantly clear LONG before the game came out that you would have to activate it.
+5 insightful (at the time I started replying)? More like -1: No contract law knowledge.
Sale of an item is a contract between a seller and a buyer. If you accept that you are buying a game software at the store, then that's the whole agreement between you, the buyer, and the seller. If the seller wants to impose additional restrictions onto the buyer which were not agreed upon during the sale (EULA wasn't agreed upon or signed during the transaction), then the seller has to provide additional consideration in return. If the seller provides no additional consideration, then there can be no lawful contract. And buyer refusing that additional consideration cannot be denied the original purchase item either.
So, what does NOT constitute an agreement? - printing some website URL on the back of the box does not consitute a buyer agreeing to it if the contract is not expressly agreed upon during the actual sale; - some "common" knowledge or a suspicion that some kind of EULA text probably or possibly exists somewhere does not constitute to a buyer agreeing to it; - anything else to which you, the buyer, did not expressly agree to at the time of purchase cannot be considered as a part of the sales transaction.
Now, to argue that the required additional consideration provided to you by the seller after the purchase is to let you actually play the game, then you have to admit that you didn't really purchase a copy of the game at the store, but rather a coaster and possibly a copy of a manual. In that case, the almost empty can of pears analogy is more appropriate, but of course not perfect.
It would be more like - buy this can of pears from IPFruit, Inc., having a small print that you need to activate the can before you can use those pears. When you go home you find out that "activation" involves agreeing to additional restrictions in an EULA that says you can only use IPFruit approved forks for handling pears, you cannot re-sell directly or any food item that contains the pears, and you cannot share them with your friends or neighbors either by any means.
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Comments like these modded up leave me wondering what the average age on /. is. I think it's gradually decreasing and I am willing to guess currently it's at 14.
.Net small business/data center/whatever edition.
Are you talking about Windows NT 4.0 server here? Or workstation? Because you cannot be seriously comparing the NT 4 server to an XP workstation, especially recommending the upgrade path like that. Windows XP is limited to not provide many server-like functionalities so you have to purchase a more expensive Windows 2003
In either case whatever you are comparing, have you tried running Windows XP on a 266 Mhz, 2GB HD, 32 MB RAM box? Good luck with that. Moreover, unlike Windows XP, Windows NT was never meant to be a home consumer OS - MS had Windows 95 and 98 for that purpose.
Too bad - the only OS which Microsoft designed to be truly portable is being phased out. It has at least some historical meaning.
I've seen a lot of standalone applications like this, but this one is one step forward in that it tries to integrate with an IDE. I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know how easily it allows you to create common XML schema rules and XSLT. XML is easy - there is no reason why a newbie has to type a single line of XML in a text editor; so are many common XSLT transformations. I just saw that they are polling users to pick what they'd like most in the next versions and one of the options is visual schema editor - so I guess it's not possible yet.
Anyway, what I meant by integration is not to simply create a plugin that works mostly on its own inside an IDE, but to provide a mini-framework that will allow newbies to get from point "from scratch" to a generic simple starting point where they can start doing their things right away - similar to application wizards for language-specific IDEs. For example, a newbie would click a menu option that says - Start a new XML/XSLT Database application - then the "wizard" asks few questions and maybe creates a simple one-page one-function hello world type functional application (including XML, XSLT, CSS, Java/PHP/Perl/whatever server script/app, sample database connection if requested, etc.). Once you have the basic framework set up, then you start digging directly into your application specific stuff and you don't have to think about how the framework itself should be set up - this works wonders when you are a newbie.
After that newbies can extend their application by modifying existing pages, adding new XML files through a GUI (or editor), visually modifying/adding new XSLT, modifying server behavior, etc., etc. I would say that 70-80% of common tasks that newbies do can be in some type of GUI or WYSIWYG editors.
It should be relatively easy to do this - Borland and Microsoft have done things that are at least 100 times more complex with their [*]Builder/Kylix, Visual Studio and other products. I don't know why nobody has created anything like this so far . . . Or maybe someone did and I haven't heard about it.
Many people don't think straight. They choose some language and platform-specific and/or some proprietary templating engines and systems that are limited, do not separate application tiers, are hard to port and hard to improve.
That being said, I still have to see an all-purpose GUI application that will allow newbie developers to create basic and common XML schema and XSLT (maybe there is one and I don't know); couple that with the Gecko engine for rendering and you've got a full presentation layer development suite that is extensible and portable. Imagine now, if you take this and integrate it with an IDE like Eclipse, KDevelop, Quanta, Jbuilder, etc. why would anyone use any other templating engines at all?
5) PC hardware and most related software is an open platform. i.e., if something is feasible, someone can do it, and offer it on the market; the cost of entry is low and number of participants is extremely high. Consumers can dictate and get what they are looking for. With many geographical monopolies or oligopolies of broadband providers offering limited services, consumers will never be in the driver's seat. Providers will offer restricted services, extremely restricted support for only handful of common applications. What's more the services will never be standardized between providers and the "platform" will never be made open for everyone (because there's no money in that). Also providers will increase the cost of entry into the market for the privilege to provide software to their clients. Providers will be the drivers. It will never catch on - open platforms will always have an advantage of choice over closed, limited pay-as-you-go systems.
Kazaa is not constructed to allow "everybody to stay hidden." In fact, RIAA has filed hundreds (if not 1000s already) of lawsuits and sent out subpoenas to ISPs to identify individuals who they believe are grossly infringing on their members' copyrights. All sharers on Kazaa are very easily identified and have their identity revealed with a simple subpoena.
There is no P2P technology, including freenet, that will keep you completely "hidden" or anonymous. Although some do make it harder to find sources, Kazaa was never one of them. It was just the most popular. In that sense, both Bittorrent and Kazaa are similar. So, suing Sharman Networks is similar to suing to Bittorrent application developers.
And one unrelated point with respect to Bittorrent: by saying "provider" you either mean a link provider or an infringing content provider. Because there must be a difference between a person who only gives you a map of "piracy" shops in your area/city/state and the person who actually distributes or willingly and knowingly copies the said infringing content without permission. If you take that and blow it over other areas of the law - there must be a difference between a person giving you a map of celebrity houses in Hollywood and a person who uses that information for malicious purposes such as breaking and entering, sending threats, trespassing, damaging property, etc.
You bet I do! As I said, during just last couple of weeks, I downloaded 2 CDs worth of public domain music off of P2P and I play them in my car all the time. So, where I am coming from is that I don't want to allow a greedy and influential entertainment cartel be in full control of types of information that are exchanged and methods of their transfer between individuals.
I don't know where you have been all this time but they are suing Sharman Networks for making Kazaa the program. They are bribing congressmen to enact laws like the INDUCE Act which would make most information distributing tools, including P2P, illegal. Sure, they are also suing the sharers, but that doesn't negate the former.
The effort, it seems to me, is to show lawmakers and courts for their reference that the technology should not be banned outright because it does have legitimate uses. I have used P2P to download public domain music and speeches that I like. I couldn't care less about the mainstream music like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and I don't want ??AA to declare they have monopoly on every type of information and content out there, and help outlaw information transfer between individuals.
The way I see it is that the research itself compares bug frequency in Linux vs. other commercial closed source projects that they have analyzed in the past. Windows XP, OS X, 40 million lines, "new bugs found on a frequent basis" are garnishings brought to you by CNet and
Yes. They have deals with some of the biggest ones like Dell.
It's both. But the "deal" with Microsoft is not for the icon, but that MS will leave OEMs alone if AOL makes a deal with them. They have a separate deal with Microsoft that also includes an agreement that AOL will continue to use IE rendering engine for several (five?) more years. I am going to guess that it also included AOL letting Mozilla development go.
MS could try to pressure OEMs to do so - that's why they need an agreement with MS; but that doesn't mean that AOL doesn't need to have deals with OEMs themselves.
Similar to my experience, except the main app I used to use from their suite was Paradox. Since Corel acquired Paradox (why?) from Borland, they didn't improve it at all, but they kept including it in the pro version of the suite. It's an extremely nice tool if you are doing any amount of complex DB applications, for development and test data manipulation, easily manageable complex cross DB source queries, writing , etc.. Nothing else I have used comes close.
I believe Borland still includes an extremely stripped down version of Paradox called Database Desktop with its development tools, but it's obviously not the same thing. I still run Paradox via WINE and don't like it.
I don't know about Safari, but Secunia is full of FUD about Konqueror. Unlike Firefox 1.0 and IE, this "vulnerability" test doesn't succeed on Konqueror 3.3.1 (even if I try doing your Safari-related suggestion), and yes, I made sure I tried the Konqueror specific test page. It just displays the Citibank customer alert page as I would expect in the popup. Therefore, it doesn't affect Konqueror versions 3.x as stated in the report. The Konqueror specific page says:
The vulnerability has been confirmed in Konqueror version 3.2.2-6. Other versions may also be affected.
So? Why didn't they test it with the latest version? 3.2.2 was ages ago! And the "solution" status shouldn't say "unpatched" - it should say - upgrade to newer version where it has been fixed.
Is it in the interest of Secunia to spread panic rather than research and report? I'll take any of their reports with a huge grain of salt from now on - their reports on Konqueror in the past have been less than accurate as well.
That wouldn't really help because you can't moderate your own posts.
You sound very convincing in your argument.
Fill in the gaps: they developed several releases in the mid-to-late 90s, they provided partial information and partial implementation of their hardware. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that - it's just what it is. Since then they have dropped doing anything with MkLinux.
I don't know what they could have done - that's not the point. The point is not to overblow what they did and give Steve Jobs a blowjob for it. At most they are on par with other hardware manufacturers in this regard - you can boot Linux on PPC, you can boot it also on Playstation, iPaq, and a wide range or hardware and gadgets. There is no attitude.
But I didn't dispute that point. In fact, I made one along the same lines in the next sentence after what you quoted. What I was correcting is the parent poster's statement that Apple rewrote KHTML and gave it "all" back to KDE team as a part of their generosity. Well, that's not exactly what they did.
And what, exactly, did they give out as open source with that? Yes, you can boot Linux on a Mac; you can also do it on a mainframe, Sparcstation, and everybody's microwave. i.e., at the most they are on par with everyone else - not hindering != being generous and giving, unless that's your definition of the word.
They didn't rewrite anything. Apple chose KHTML as their rendering engine for their new Safari web browser and contributed their fixes and modifications back. Yes, they could have chosen Gecko, or written another one from scratch, but they chose KHTML because they liked it better. KHTML is licensed under LGPL - anyone who receives the Safari binaries has a right to ask for the modified KHTML source. Apple is contributing their bug fixes and additions that they are required to disclose under LGPL.
Presumably, they are being very nice and collaborative about it and I am not in any way trying to portray them in a bad light for the way they are doing this. But it's nowhere close to what you claim about rewriting the whole engine and giving back out of generosity.
I don't know how this relates to generosity - would they start suing GNOME developers or users if they were not acting "generous?" MS Windows has also influenced KDE and GNOME and various application GUIs - you could then argue that MS has been just as, or even more generous with the OSS in this regard.
So, yes, Apple has contributed Darwin and Rendevouz when they didn't have to, they are being helpful with providing fixes in KHTML (which they would eventually have to), but you don't want to blow some things out of proportion.
Well, you can use whatever definition you want but lossy audio compression for the most part - MP3, Vorbis, AAC - is to drop the information that's outside of the audible range or less audible and compress the more important parts in an efficient manner. What is "lost" is never reconstructed. If you use SBR, on the other hand, you can compress half (lower spectrum?) of the audio, and guess what the other half would have been. In theory, this could give you 50% of the file size for only marginal loss of quality - sometimes people say it sounds "cooler" but is less like the original. SBR has been used with MP3 (MP3 Pro), AAC, and potentially other codecs. Remember when they advertised MP3 Pro? They were touting half size files.
Said an immediately modde up 5-digit
They claim that MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats while maintaining backwards compatibility.
That's the second sentence for crying out loud. The article itself, which nobody could ever be asked to read before commenting or moderating, says:
At the same time, the new format offers complete backward compatibility to any existing mp3 software and hardware devices.
For the audio codec impaired, MP3 Pro that's mentioned in the blurb is MP3 + SBR. If you want to use SBR, which has more to do with guessing and reconstruting the sound rather than compression, then you are probably much better off using AAC + SBR. That's one of the reasons, as far as I can tell, why the MP3 Pro never "took off."
Here's what they said before:
The Linux operating system is developed by an open source process - a cooperative effort by a loose association of software developers from all over the world. With the knowledge that Linux is going to control our most advanced defense systems, foreign intelligence agencies and terrorists can easily infiltrate the Linux community to contribute subversive software.
etc., etc.
They made the argument that since Linux is open source it is subjected to the terrorists infiltrating it and injecting their malicious code. So now, you are saying they would like the applications developed with similar methods to run on their platform? Unless you argue that they are only targeting closed source applications for Linux that they believe are inherently more secure then you cannot justify both arguments. What makes those open source applications any different or any more protected from terrorists than Linux itself?
Is it based on I Sing the Body Electric? Is it any good?
I don't quite understand your point. If you as a buyer don't have any contract with Valve, but only with the retailer - what rights does Valve have to impose these terms on top of your contract with the retailer? Still - they'd surely have to provide consideration on top of the original product purchased: e.g. if they didn't originally advertise their online playing capability, but enabled it if you agree to these extra terms and license.
IANAL, but I just read that link. The judge ruled that basically since it's too cumbersome for sellers to disclose their imposed contract terms at the time of purchase, the contract can remain hidden until later after the purchase has been made. The defendant argued that license should have been outside of the box, not inside, to which the judge said - well, the license would have been several pages and would not have fit on the outside, so there!
One of these cases has to go to the Supreme Court at some point. In no other case can you get away with "awww, sorry - my contract terms are too long to fit in this space - why don't I let you know what they are after you've purchased my bike? Be aware though, by using the bike, you agree to those terms I am going to forward you later."
Look at it this way: the judge compares the software shrink-wrap licenses to these services:
- airline tickets: heavily regulated - most of what's contained in the agreement is actually federal law or regulated by the FAA;
- insurance purchase: also heavily regulated by the states (auto, health, etc.) - does not allow corporations to take advantage of purchasers by undisclosed tactics; all other insurance types (those which are not heavily regulated) always disclose their terms and the contract at the time of purchase;
- concert tickets: not regulated but customer implicitly agrees to follow the reasonable rules of the venue where he/she will attend an event; i.e. the agreement with the ticket is that customer has the right to attend the event for which the ticket was purchased but there's always a reasonable expectation on how to conduct yourself on someone else's private property; IANAL, but this, I presume, is not the same as purchasing a product and taking it home.
The judge then goes on to compare that with consumer goods:
Consumer goods work the same way. Someone who
wants to buy a radio set visits a store, pays, and walks
out with a box. Inside the box is a leaflet containing some
terms, the most important of which usually is the war-
ranty, read for the first time in the comfort of home.
What terms? If there was an additional license agreement inside, would it really be valid? Would it be fair to bundle an EULA-type junk with a radio and attempt to enforce it? What if the license told you you cannot re-sell the radio set, and you cannot let your friends and neighbors listen to it - would that be OK with the judge in question?
Further, warranty does not obligate the buyer to give up something else without consideration - it specifies how the manufacturer will handle the cases if the product is defective. Warranties don't prevent customers from listening to their radio sets!
Drugs come with a list of in-
gredients on the outside and an elaborate package insert
on the inside. The package insert describes drug interac-
tions, contraindications, and other vital information--but,
if Zeidenberg is right, the purchaser need not read the
package insert, because it is not part of the contract.
That's plain bullshit now - what does this have to do with a contract between a buyer and a seller? List of possible interactions and other medical facts are probably required by law to be disclosed in the leaflet and they by no means obligate the consumer to agree to any additional conditions to use the purchased product. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Next consider the software industry itself. Only a minor-
ity of sales take place over the counter, where there are
boxes to peruse. A customer pay place an order by phone
in response to a line item in a catalog or a review in a
magazine. Much software is ordered over the Internet by
purchasers who have never seen a box. Increasingly soft-
ware arrives by wire. There is no box; there is only a
stream of electrons, a collection of information that in-
cludes data, an application program, instructions, many
limitations ("MegaPixel 3.14159 cannot be u
Err... one more thing - in your analogy if you paid for and bought a car from a seller, and the car was in good condition and completely operational, but next day the seller calls you and tells you that you cannot keep driving that car unless you agree to lend it to the seller's sister on weekends that would not be a valid agreement and you'd be able to say "no" and go on with your life. The idea is that additional conditions cannot be imposed to you single-handedly after the sales transaction.
Similarly, if any seller activation scheme requires the buyer to give up something (money, rights, whatever) and doesn't give anything in return, and doesn't have an option for the buyer to reject it, then that cannot be a valid contract either.
This all is assuming that you agree that you are actually buying a copy of the game at the store. Alternatively, you can argue that you are just buying a coaster in a box when you buy software - I don't know how realistic that argument would be, however.
The point I was making is not about what you said here, but about the contracts involved and made during the sales transaction. If you want to make your car analogy, fine - then you cannot buy a used car and at a later point the seller tells you (via the "EULA") that you cannot use your newly purchased car unless you agree to give a ride to the seller's sister to and from work twice a day. Well, unless you expressly agreed to do so during the purchase, it cannot be imposed on you afterwards.
Indeed if the seller wanted to impose additional restrictions or a new agreement after the sales transaction they would also have to offer new consideration in return; while the buyer would have to have an option to decline the new consideration and simply be stuck with what they agreed to purchase originally.
i.e. if you wanted to drive the seller's sister twice a day out of goodness of your heart - you could do so but it would not be a legal contract between you and the seller. If you additionally agreed with the seller to drive the seller's sister to work for $35 a day (payable to you) - then that's a consideration from the seller that will likely constitute to a valid contract. But by no means does the seller have an authority to single-handedly impose on you that you have to drive his sister or you cannot use the car you just purchased. The contract law doesn't work that way.
Regarding what you said - of course, Valve or anyone is free to require and include any activation or copy protection they want in their products - nobody is arguing that - it's just that it cannot be a violation of any EULA if some buyers did not follow those activation rules; simply because unless that EULA provided any additional consideration it cannot be considered a valid contract.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
+5 insightful (at the time I started replying)? More like -1: No contract law knowledge.
Sale of an item is a contract between a seller and a buyer. If you accept that you are buying a game software at the store, then that's the whole agreement between you, the buyer, and the seller. If the seller wants to impose additional restrictions onto the buyer which were not agreed upon during the sale (EULA wasn't agreed upon or signed during the transaction), then the seller has to provide additional consideration in return. If the seller provides no additional consideration, then there can be no lawful contract. And buyer refusing that additional consideration cannot be denied the original purchase item either.
So, what does NOT constitute an agreement?
- printing some website URL on the back of the box does not consitute a buyer agreeing to it if the contract is not expressly agreed upon during the actual sale;
- some "common" knowledge or a suspicion that some kind of EULA text probably or possibly exists somewhere does not constitute to a buyer agreeing to it;
- anything else to which you, the buyer, did not expressly agree to at the time of purchase cannot be considered as a part of the sales transaction.
Now, to argue that the required additional consideration provided to you by the seller after the purchase is to let you actually play the game, then you have to admit that you didn't really purchase a copy of the game at the store, but rather a coaster and possibly a copy of a manual. In that case, the almost empty can of pears analogy is more appropriate, but of course not perfect.
It would be more like - buy this can of pears from IPFruit, Inc., having a small print that you need to activate the can before you can use those pears. When you go home you find out that "activation" involves agreeing to additional restrictions in an EULA that says you can only use IPFruit approved forks for handling pears, you cannot re-sell directly or any food item that contains the pears, and you cannot share them with your friends or neighbors either by any means.
Disclaimer: IANAL.