The argument is that computer programs must be expressive (and therefore covered by free speech laws) in order to be copyrightable. According to the Copyright Office 'Copyright protects "original works of authorship" that are fixed in a tangible form of expression'. That section also specifically mentions computer programs as falling into the "literary works" category. The argument concludes that since computer programs are clearly copyrightable they must be expressive and therefore protected as free speech.
I'm not entirely convinced about this argument, but then IANAL. In particular it seems a bit of a stretch from "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression" to "expressive". OTOH, the categories of copyrightable work are clearly all expressive so maybe "expressive work" is a good definition for "copyrightable work".
Still, I kind of like the guy giving away 50% of his fortune (wouldn't see old $Bill doing that!)
Actually that's exactly the sort of thing Gates would do. He already gives a lot of money away and I believe he's stated that he doesn't intend to leave much to his kids. Yes, his company is morally bankrupt but he really believes that he is doing right by his customers. He's a fanatic, he's not Satan.
But the one data point we have (humanity) is keen on exploration, isn't shy at all about interfering in the affairs of others, and is pretty bad at cleaning up after itself.
Of course on that scale of 1-10 million years to colonise the galaxy humanity is at 0. By the time we come to colonising another star (100 years from now?) we might have curbed our instincts somewhat. Or maybe not.
1) There should be a geographical notation TLD - sort of a business.city.state/province.country
This already exists:.us. Unfortunately it doesn't get much use.
People will adjust to the difference in nomenclature - and it isn't all that complicated. However, this system presents a problem for large multinationals. So, we need to address this. Perhaps a.mtl domain would work for them.
2) We need to have a business type TLD system - so that Bob's Car Market and Bob's soul kitchen and Bob's spandex emporium all can have a reasonable web address. So businessname.businesstype.country might work for them.
Multinationals should get.com. Infact IMNSHO a company should not get a.com address unless have a presence in a large number of countries or at least are prepared to deliver to a large number of countries. Everyone else should get an address in the geography specific heirarchy.
But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.
That's the interesting thing though. Look at the SYSMark2001 scores on Tom's Hardware and the SYSMark2001 scores on AnandTech. The Athlon scores about the same in both (145) but in Tom's review the P4 performs very poorly (115 @ 1.5GHz and 124 @ 1.7GHz) and in Anand's review it scores very well (154 @ 1.5GHz and 167 @ 1.7GHz). That's a 35% difference between the two sites. So what's the difference? Tom's using a Asus motherboard and Anand's using an Intel motherboard, other than that not much. But then Quake and UT show much the same results on both sites. The lesson is don't rely on one review site. Still it seems that you'd want to be very careful if you're buying a P4 for anything other than games. Get the wrong motherboard or maybe the wrong BIOS settings and you'll suffer.
unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.
Yep, and that's still the case. Even with the radical price cuts the 1.7GHz P$ is $350 which is still considerably more than the Athlon 1.33GHz. Of course if you're into games you're generally better of upgrading your graphics card anyway.
Re:Slashdot 101: NOBODY modded it up
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Review: The Dish
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· Score: 2
I agree that something that has been modded up to 2 is usually better than something that only got to 2 through the bonus. The problem is that there are a lot of people who can post at +2 and it doesn't cost anything to do it so they usually do. Very few moderators bother to mod a "natural" 2 post down unless it's a troll or flamebait. Since most 2 posts are noise and there aren't enough mod points to mod all the noise down why waste what points you do have?
I don't know about the rest of the non-redhat users out there, but I did not find very pleasant the fact that Eazel only supported Red Hat officially.... Maybe if they did something like Ximian, supporting a big bunch of linux distributions,they had more people following their work and got more venture capital to continue their work.
Far more likely they would have got the same or less money and it would have run out quicker due to then need for more people working on packaging. Look at it like this: it costs X to cover 60% of the market (RedHat). It costs 2X to cover 80% of the market (RedHat+whoever's next). And the returns diminish from there. The product's only just hit 1.0, this is the time when it makes sense to look at supporting extra distributions not during development. Besides Ximian are doing a fine job packaging for multiple distributions, why duplicate that work for no benefit?
IBM have played by the rules for a lot longer than they've been supporting Linux. They really seem to have reformed and IMO their Linux support is a sign that they get it rather than the under-handed attempt to deceive people you make it out to be. Corporations do change. It could even happen to MS, although not until Bill is dead and buried I expect.
What was the benefit to Jim Barksdale to give away Communicator? Why would he throw away years of engineering for free? Netscape was a very profitable company too.. at the beginning.
Netscape was never making much money off of Communicator (free for personal and academic use). Oracle OTOH had revenues of $10B last year, mostly from the DB product.
Here's the point: it just doesn't matter what Larry Ellison wants-- it's what he'll be forced to do. Mr. Barksdale discovered that people became unwilling to pay for his browser when an equivalent or better product could be had for free (IE3+).
There is a vast difference between the two cases. Firstly when IE really started to take market share (after 4.0 was released) it was arguably a better product. Anyone who thinks any of the free DBMS systems are competitive with Oracle are on crack. Performance might be similar in some situations, but for scalability, features, or support they're not even in the same ballpark. Which brings me to my second point which is that more than half Oracle's revenue is services. That means that one of the biggest reasons people go to Oracle is because they want support. That didn't apply in browser wars. MySQL and PostgreSQL don't just have to be better products, they also need a comparable level of support.
I'm not saying MySQL or PostgreSQL won't every be competitive with Oracle. I'm saying that they won't be for a long time yet. Even when they do become competitive it's doubtful whether Oracle would gain anything by opening their code.
Look how well that worked for IBM's PC business. They're basically a marginal player in the market they created.
Yet their "marginal" position in the market gave them $16B personal system (i.e. PC) sales in 2000. That's double Apple's $8B hardware sales. And you can be sure that a sizable chunk of IBM's other $21B hardware sales are servers for PC clients. Besides their piece of the market isn't that marginal; Dell's sales were only $25B and Compaq's personal system sales were $21B for 2000. The thing is you can't just look at market share because it's sales revenue that counts. IBM make more today off just direct PC hardware sales than they did as a closed hardware monopoly. The question is how much they'd make now if they still were. I suspect Apple's share would be much greater if that were the case, possibly 50% or higher.
That was a conservative figure since I couldn't remember the exact statistics. The basic fact is that those machines weren't making nearly as much money for Apple in Mac OS and Mac ROM sales as they were costing in lost Apple machine sales.
At the time it was hurting Apple, sure. The theory is that eventually the Mac (clone) market would have grown and Apple would have got a piece of that growth. Today the Mac market might have been 20 or 25% of the total market, with Apple's share still 5% or so of the total market (excuse me for pulling these numbers from my arse). They wouldn't have been making more on hardware but they would have been making more of software. Ultimately the pro-clone argument was that Apple didn't need hardware sales in the same way that Microsoft doesn't need hardware sales, and that cheaper hardware was the key to growing the market significantly. Given that 5 years on Apple has not managed to grow their market share significantly, even with the iMac, you've got to wonder if they made the right decision. Personally I believe they didn't; I think they should have waited a few more years at least. Of course I'm not in the company, I don't know if they could have survived those few years without massive restructuring; the indications are that maybe the couldn't.
Slashdot has continually said that the MPAA should got after individual copyright infrigers rather than services like Napster.
But they're not doing that. They're not sending letters to the alleged offenders saying "you've been sharing 'x' illegally, stop or we'll sue". They are sending letters to the ISPs saying "your user 'y' was illegally sharing 'x' if you don't stop them we'll sue you". They know the ISPs will cave becase the ISPs have everything to lose and nothing to gain in a suit.
It was while reading that article that I first realized what a loser Brin is. I think there was just a little bit of jealousy going on there, or perhaps he is a determined troll... (His Uplift War books are still just as good of course.)
I lost a lot of respect for Brin after that outburst.
Second, the first Star Wars was a cult classic. Meaning it bombed in the theater, but became a classic on video...
What the Hell are you smoking? The original Star Wars release was the highest grossing film of all time. It was passed by E.T. in 1982. When the Special Edition was rereleased in 1997 it regained the top spot.
You don't honestly think the clone market was doing anything other than cannibalizing the Mac market, do you? Most post-mortem analyses of the Mac clone market I've seen point to less than 10% of clones being purchased by people who had never owned a Mac before.
Three things: first the Mac clone market was in it's infancy and less than two years old (my memory may be off on this, I haven't checked) so it's natural that it would be Apple's market share that initially suffered. I bet IBM had the same experience in the early days of the PC market. Second that 10% of clone buyers being new buyers is more than Apple managed up till the iMac was released. Thirdly, there is no guarentee that those Mac owners who bought clones would have bought from Apple if the clones hadn't been available. Every time there a story here about OS X or Apple a whole bunch of people complain about the cost of Apple hardware.
If you read Motorola's website, it's quite clear that they don't care about the desktop market at all.... You'll find nary a mention of Apple as a successful customer. The fact is that Motorla doesn't give a damn about Apple.
Of course they don't now. Apple screwed them. First Apple dragged their feet over CHRP, then they dragged their feet over PPCP, and then they killed off any opportunity for Mototrola to sell the processors to anyone but Apple. Why should Motorola care? The documentation used to be there. IIRC, you could even get a reference motherboard layout from either IBM or Motorola. They were both committed to AIM, it was Apple who weren't.
As much as I like the technical merits of PowerPC processor family, I've been pushed over the past year into the firm belief that Apple should once again make the move to a different processor family or to begin designing a strategy that can continue to fund OS development without depending on hardware sales. I'm convinced that the failed AIM alliance is nothing but an albatross around Apple's neck. Maybe if Exponential's technology hadn't have been inferior to the PPC 750, we'd have a company dedicated to the Mac for survival right now that could keep Apple going.
Oh, I agree. Apple should definitely move elsewhere (which pratically means x86). Ideally they should just port to PC but they won't do that because they still believe they can make more money selling proprietary hardware. As for Exponential, well Apple killed them so they've no one to blaim but themselves for that.
Re:Once again, the submitter gets it wrong
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Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 5
Nice troll.
First of all, he is not saying that the primary purpose is to steal programming, he's saying that is going to be a future use similar to what is happening with MP3, and of course, he's right.
Second of all, the Betamax case has nothing to do with anything. The question is about whether anonymous mass distribution of copyrighted material qualifies as fair use, and the answer is again "no"
The Betamax case is relevant because it says that it does not matter if one of the uses of a device is copyright infringement so long as the primary use is legitimate. You already admitted that the primary use was not copyright infringement. Unless we see the widespread distribution of Tivo movie files across the Net in some organised way (a la Napster) you and Dvorak will have a hard time convincing anyone that these devices are anything other than a legitimate VCR variant.
That was before Jobs returned, was it not? At that time they were also interested in fostering a clone market, i.e. more open hardware. As soon as Jobs got back at the helm he shut Apple up tight.
Anyway this seems to be a trademark case, and those are somewhat scary, as Trademarks are required to be defended, or else they can be lost.
It ain't that cut and dried. First of all Apple wouldn't really have to defend this if it were a trademark issue because there is no way they will lose it to genericity (which is what they are required to defend against) as that requires that a majority of the public treat the trademark as generic. See this excellent summary of trademark law for details. But that's irrelevant because they aren't talking about trademarks they are talking about copyright. The story poster got confused. The big clue is the mention of contributory infringement. There is not contributory infringement of trademarks (AFAIK, IANAL); only copyrights.
Now, to the case in hand. Apple aren't accusing these people of direct infringement (i.e. copying their copyrighted material), they are accusing them of contributory infringement. They are saying that the theme editor allows others to infringe. This is essentially the same thing Napster is charged with. Here is an article hosted by the EFF that discusses contributory infringement. It focuses on the case of peer-to-peer applications, but is well worth a look.
I don't know much about Apple's themeing system but it seems that they are saying that using the theme editor involves copying proprietary Apple copyrighted code and/or images. That may well be true, and if so then Apple appear to have a case. But either way this is not an action that is justifiable but pointing to trademark law and waving hands. They are going after someone based on the idea that their code is closed and they want to make sure you have to pay to use it. That is quite at odds with their stance wrt Darwin where they clearly want to use "Open Source" as an advantage to them (either directly with code contributions or at least by taking advantage of the buzz word).
However, the thrice-damned Motorola was well into the swing of giving Moore's Law the finger, and they couldn't produce enough 500 MHz processors to meet the demand.
That's a little harsh. Apple (or rather Steve Jobs) brought this on themselves by killing the Mac clone market. When they did that IBM left the AIM alliance and Motorola lost any chance to sell it's processors to more than 5% of the market. Naturally they no longer have the sort of budget necessary to keep up top quality development on the processor. Frankly I'm suprised Motorola have bothered to keep the desktop PPC line going at all, it can't be making them much.
I don't know whose direct fault the G4 fiasco was. Either Motorola weren't straight with Apple or Apple weren't straight with everyone else. Either way it was Apple's subsequent actions that pissed everyone off, more than Motorola's inability to deliver a 500MHz part.
Id said that they needed to focus on the game engine before they worried about driver issues
Fine. That doesn't stop them releasing them both at the same time, it'd never hurt the Mac release to have a longer beta.
I just have to point out that if Sierra had released the game on the Mac first...
What? There's nothing to stop them using the Mac as the development platform. The decisions on what platforms to develop has little to do with it. Id used to use a NeXT development environment, for example. They aren't writing in assembly.
2 chipsets (Intel and AMD, from 300MHz to 1.5GHz)
150 video cards, with constantly-changing drivers
50 sound cards
5 OS'es (Win95, Win98, WinMe, WinNT, Win2K), not counting Linux
Various motherboards, RAM configurations, CD-ROM drives, and input devices.
90% of this is hidden from the program. They shouldn't need to directly access the CD-ROM drive or the BIOS, for example. The OSes and driver issues are the primary problems. Other stuff such as processor type affects performance and is pain during optimization, but should not have much if any impact on stability.
And thus they said they had to test over 75,000 different hardware configurations
Poor babies. Every other game company faces the same problems and most of them do ok. Sierra have rushed the product to market, all this other stuff is just excuses.
Everyone complains about web content they can't view without Windows IE but I never encounter any.
I don't come across much which requires IE and won't work at all with Netscape 4, but I do come across sites which won't work with Netscape 6/Moziila. Qantas has one.
Right now the cost of Office for a large portion of users is $0 because it's warezed. By increasing copy protection and lowering the entry cost (through rental), MS is betting that they can get more money by getting all the deadbeats to pay up.
The majority of Office users are either business or OEM. MS will not increase their sales in those segments by lowering prices. They may increase sales by reducing piracy, but the subscription model is quite separate from the anti-piracy (i.e. central authorization) features in the new products. Over here in Australia they've been trialling central authorization with Office 2000 for a least a year, without subscriptions.
I'm gonna have to agree for the first guy dude. For 90% of the people out there (prolly more really) a solid understanding of High School level math is all it really takes.
I agree, although I think that opportunities to use the likes of trig, geometry, statistics and calculus are there but people don't have the confidence in their knowledge and/or are too lazy to do it.
Your argument seems to be based on the premise that Microsoft is trying to make things cheaper for you. To that I'd say are you insane? Microsoft may be willing to make things easier for you, add features, whatever. The one thing they will never do is reduce the amount of money they think they can get from you.
Here in australia theres a law that says if an item is incorrectly marked they must give you one of that item for free and the rest for the marked price. I think thats it anyway, maybe u just get the first one at the marked price and the rest at normal, either way it'd still be a bargain.
That only applies to barcode scanner systems where the price the scanner produces doesn't match the price on the shelf. It doesn't apply to incorrect prices on the shelf.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not entirely convinced about this argument, but then IANAL. In particular it seems a bit of a stretch from "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression" to "expressive". OTOH, the categories of copyrightable work are clearly all expressive so maybe "expressive work" is a good definition for "copyrightable work".
I agree that something that has been modded up to 2 is usually better than something that only got to 2 through the bonus. The problem is that there are a lot of people who can post at +2 and it doesn't cost anything to do it so they usually do. Very few moderators bother to mod a "natural" 2 post down unless it's a troll or flamebait. Since most 2 posts are noise and there aren't enough mod points to mod all the noise down why waste what points you do have?
IBM have played by the rules for a lot longer than they've been supporting Linux. They really seem to have reformed and IMO their Linux support is a sign that they get it rather than the under-handed attempt to deceive people you make it out to be. Corporations do change. It could even happen to MS, although not until Bill is dead and buried I expect.
I'm not saying MySQL or PostgreSQL won't every be competitive with Oracle. I'm saying that they won't be for a long time yet. Even when they do become competitive it's doubtful whether Oracle would gain anything by opening their code.
Now, to the case in hand. Apple aren't accusing these people of direct infringement (i.e. copying their copyrighted material), they are accusing them of contributory infringement. They are saying that the theme editor allows others to infringe. This is essentially the same thing Napster is charged with. Here is an article hosted by the EFF that discusses contributory infringement. It focuses on the case of peer-to-peer applications, but is well worth a look.
I don't know much about Apple's themeing system but it seems that they are saying that using the theme editor involves copying proprietary Apple copyrighted code and/or images. That may well be true, and if so then Apple appear to have a case. But either way this is not an action that is justifiable but pointing to trademark law and waving hands. They are going after someone based on the idea that their code is closed and they want to make sure you have to pay to use it. That is quite at odds with their stance wrt Darwin where they clearly want to use "Open Source" as an advantage to them (either directly with code contributions or at least by taking advantage of the buzz word).
I don't know whose direct fault the G4 fiasco was. Either Motorola weren't straight with Apple or Apple weren't straight with everyone else. Either way it was Apple's subsequent actions that pissed everyone off, more than Motorola's inability to deliver a 500MHz part.
Your argument seems to be based on the premise that Microsoft is trying to make things cheaper for you. To that I'd say are you insane? Microsoft may be willing to make things easier for you, add features, whatever. The one thing they will never do is reduce the amount of money they think they can get from you.
Of course Stephenson and Sterling could hardly be post-cyberpunk without Gibson, could they?