There are *several* differences between ogg and betamax.
The first being that ogg is a free codec and ogg software is Free Software.
Another is that ogg is already accepted by people who will continue to use it and improve it whether or not everyone else does. Further acceptance isn't necessary to keep it alive.
Furthermore the betamax format was tied to hardware. If you wanted to use it you had to buy specific hardware. With ogg all you need is just about any general use microprocessor.
I believe the guy who posted the headline didn't understand what was meant by the Microsoft impending lawsuits. Here's the entire paragraph from the letter:
"In a world where there are $500 million dollar patent infringement lawsuits imposed on OS companies (although this is not completely settled yet), how would somebody like Red Hat compete when 6 months ago they only had $80-$90 million in cash? At that point they could not even afford to settle a fraction of a single judgment without devastating their shareholders. I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies. Red Hat did recently raise several hundred million which certainly gives them more staying power. Ultimately, I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space."
Then the headline says:
"Among the highlights is a prediction by Mr. Anderer that Microsoft has many more disruptive lawsuits planned up their sleeves."
My interpretation of this paragraph is that Microsoft always has tons of people suing them, and that redhat or whomever else wishes to make a living as an OS vendor needs to have lots of cash to pay out on some of them. Of course I disagree with that, but he does not come out and say that Microsoft has 50 more SCO-type suits in the works.
No offense, but without reading any further I call a big dose of bullshit on those rankings.
I have lived in three of those countries for long periods of time and those rankings in no way resemble the realities which you discern only when fully immersed in the cultures.
Most anthropologists I have met, are left in the dust by multinational, multicultured, multilingual individuals who don't even call themselves anthropologists.
Maybe the problem is, that you have a predetermined cultural notion of how the countries should rank. And you are ranking countries based on subjective categories concieved fully immersed in a particular cultural environment. Almost like begging the question.
But what the hell do I know. I'm posting to slashdot and don't have the time or energy to RTFA.
their offer reads "Evidence of Ocean Water on Mars;
If Found by Feb. 29, America Gets Free Giant Shrimp on March 15"
Well, the news may not have been announced by feb 29, but the evidence may have been found by feb 29.
If they're going to make locks this sophisticated.
on
Optical Lock Foils Thieves
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Why not use the public/private key model.
Have the lock generate a message encrypted with the physical key's private crypt key, then have they physical key decode it and retransmit to the lock...
Now if only this discussion were populated with people like you who know wtf they're talking about, instead of all these people making wild and unsubstantiated comments. Sigh.
Well, you posed that question like a statement and then debunked it.
You should check the LKML they are much more well-versed than I am on the subject. Look at my other reply to someone who said I was making this stuff up, it annoyed me enough to go find some links to the LKML archives.
As far as SCO goes, who knows? They haven't quite layed everything out yet and I don't know the parentage of the code in question.
exhibit two. Linus speaking about this exact topic.
Unless I *really do* have a reading comprehension problem, I interpret the part where he says "It is very clear: a kernel
module is a derived work of the kernel by default. End of story.
" as 'It is very clear: a kernel
module is a derived work of the kernel by default. End of story.' but I could be wrong... not.
There is distinction because the proprietary licenses usually say something on the order of: "by using this software you agree to this license"
The gpl says *no* such thing. It just says here is a license you can use, if not then you better have another license if you're going to copy and distribute.
"This is part of the problem with linux and linux acceptance. There are always zealots who are not happy with what they get. Intel is offering these people linux drivers and their response is to say they're not legal?"
There is no problem with linux acceptance. I defy you to show me one, or to even prove that such acceptance is necessary to me.
It's funny how to me, it is you who come off sounding like a zealot. Calling people names and stuff does that.
We are not bound to be grateful to intel for releasing half-assed binary-only drivers. And even if we had something to be grateful for, it would not alter the fact that the legality of these drivers is important.
"I can't imagine any court upholding that writing a driver for an operating system must comply with the OS's licenses."
That's fine, but you havent read the LKML so I'm not sure how you can possibly disagree without even reading the argument for the other side of which you seem totally ingnorant.
"Pick your battles folks. Pissing off potential allies is never a good practice even if you're right."
Picking your battles is good advice. However pissing off people or not is way way down on the list of concerns for most of us then actually making sure that our system of free software stands on firm legal ground and is protected. Ignore licensing issues at your own peril, they are important and they matter. The law, the courts and therefore law inforcement says so.
Wow! thank you lord, now we can go back to our padded rooms and put this whole debate to bed. What were we thinking?! *smacks forehead*.
"It would be trivial to make Linux not load them if they were not wanted.
Ooook, and this has to do with them being a derrived work because... bueler... bueler... bueler...
"The NVidea driver was written specifically for Linux. Of course it contains blocks of code that are in the Windows one (this is easily proven because the same bugs exist in both of them!) but not doing that would be pretty stupid and wasteful of them."
No sir, it is you who are wrong. Talk to any of the nvidia developers. The nvidia video card driver is the same one written for windows and that is the part that's binary only. They then took this windows-intended driver code and wrapped it in a gpl-compatible wrapping to make it work with the linux kernel.
As I mentioned this seemed to be the only way that binary drivers were considered legal on the LKML. Because:
The derrivative work = the wrapper which is gpl
The non-gpl binary only code was written specifically for windows and thus cannot be considered a derrivative work from the linux kernel.
What the fuck. How does this get modded up at all?
"Never heard anything so stupid."
Nice ad-hominem to start off with.
"You mean all software written for a particular OS is a derivative work of that OS?"
Don't fucking tell me what I mean and what I don't mean, I will do that myself and it looks like you're setting up a straw man.
"Nonsense."
There we go, nice straw man.
"This is like trying to ban reverse engineering."
Er.. no it is not. This is *like you know man* trying to define what a software license allows and does not allow. Don't come with invalid similies.
The rest of your shitty post just goes nonsensically into trying to argue against something I did not define. I did not define why the kernel developers were considering the modules derrivative works. If you want to find out go read the list and read their own words about it.
From what I understand, if you set out to write a linux kernel device driver module they see this as a derrivative work of the linux kernel. But I encourage reading of the kernel mailing list.
Ok, what I would like to know is: are these binary drivers even legal?
I did some reading on the linux kernel mailing list and the general concensus between the developers seems to be that binary-only drivers as modules for the linux kernel are not legal.
The only case they sited as a legal binary only module so far was the nvidia video card driver because the driver was not written for linux, it was written for windows and merely repackaged into linux.
The concensus seemed to be that a driver written specifically *for* linux is a derrivative work and therefore must be GPL'd.
Once and for all wake the fuck up. It's NOT a GPL infringement/violation. It's COPYRIGHT infringement/violation.
I can't believe people are still submitting news posts to slashdot like that. Scroll up and re-read the post.
Don't be so black and white. Free speech does not involve causing havoc by calling in false bomb threats or yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. Neither does free speech involve spam or stalking etc etc ad nauseum.
We cannot forget that while we need to aspire to freedom of speech as much as possible, it should not encroach on the freedom of others in society.
If you're sleeping in your house and I start yelling at you through the window like a fucking moron, let's see how you like that.
If someone is doing brainsurgery on you with a speech-controlled robot and I run past the O.R. purposefully yelling "LABOTOMY LABOTOMY LABOTOMY" that's not free speech at work and should not be protected.
When free speech is only a cover for destroying the essential FREEDOMS of others, it is not free speech at all, but the cry of a coward to cover up a crime.
And yes, child pornography is an example of just that. Freedom of speech cannot be used to defend this because you've severely curtailed the Freedom of the child. Directly or indirectly don't try to fool yourself.
What's even worse, is in your black&white world, you don't even consider the case of when an individual exercising his right to 'free speech' prevents another individual from exercising his right to 'free speech'.
This can happen in a room, out on a street, online, in print and many other situations.
Now it is not my intention to set up a straw man, so I will quote you directly: So, which is it?
(a) Tool X can be used for illegal things and therefore should be banned.
(b) Tool X can be used for illegal things. It does, however, serve useful, legitimate purposes. Keep it legal.
How about we include many other options.
(c) We keep Tool X legal, but regulate it's uses and take action against individuals who we deem misuse it like we've done with other things in the past.
or
(d) We keep Tool X legal, but reshape it so it becomes impossible to do illegal things with it while still retaining the benefits of the legal aspects.
Freenet is not a solution to our problems. It's designed to treat a symptom of curtailed freedom of speech, but it comes with side-effects(like yes child porn).
Why don't we instead concentrate on treating the disease so that we can avoid having our freedom of speech curtailed and also avoid the side-effect of letting people commit crimes.
By the way, I actually think freenet is a really cool project and am in no way against it's development. I'm just trying to show you that the debate you think is old hat, is in no way settled and should be encouraged, not discouraged like you're doing.
This shows, that keith Packard and all of the other xfree86 developers that were involved in that minor altercation last year were right.
This license change can only mean one thing:
The people in charge of the xfree86 project are totally out of touch with the users AND the developers of the project they purport to run.
Oh well, now we can smack our foreheads, realize we should just have thrown all our support behind the guys who were voicing this opinion and do it now. Hopefully the new license for the alternative xfree86 version we will all start using will be gpl.
Not only this, but I suspect they reneged on a deal they had going with AMD's CEO (hector ruiz?). Ruiz testified in M$'s favour during the antitrust trials and M$ was supposed to come out strong supporting AMD64.
It turns out M$ weasled their way by being in bed with intel and AMD at the same time.
They launch win64bit development like they promised AMD and hector ruiz but!, Then they go to intel and tell them they're going ahead and subsequently agree to delay it or drag their feet. I wonder what they got from intel in return? Palladium hardware commitments? I think they got those from AMD on the original deal.
Either way M$ made deals with intel and AMD which nullified each other while at the same time getting *very* big favours in return from them both.
This is just my theory, but I would lay money that it's true and someone's face is turning pale or blushing as they read this.
Just replying to my own post in order to add for sake of disclosure that I have no relationship whatsoever with consumer reports other than having read some of their reviews and having made better choices because of it.
well, I've owned several american cars and every one of them was crap. I was recently looking at new cars and what surprised me the most is some of the american cars I took out for test drives, either had problems from the factory, or broke during the test drive. That's pretty bad even for an american car. How many times was the ford focus recalled again?
Not to mention the american cars I've owned that have almost killed me. I find out later they've had high incidents of the fault which nearly killed me, but are hushing them up because they've worked out it's cheaper than recalling. For example, cruise control going crazy on my mercury and flooring the car while I was trying to park.
I don't believe you can find fault with consumer reports methodologies. They are very thorough and are the only place which actually uses scientifically sound experiments in addition to their surveys and test drives. If you really believe you've found obvious problems feel free to point them out to them, so they can correct those, and to me because I'm curious. (I am a scientist and always like to see badly designed experiments, it helps me avoid errors when I design mine)
You could for example point out which sample group you were reffering to as too small, and mathematically prove it conclusively.
As for their impartiality due to not recieving money from the same companies they evaluate:
If any review site recieves money/free products from the same companies they review, they become servants of the companies. Receiving money from consumers alone means they are the servants of the consumers barring any other major influences.
I never trust a car/hardware/software/game/etc reviewer who receives money or goods in any way from companies who they review. Period.
Thankfully consumer reports is not one of these, which while not guaranteeing impartiality, at least makes it possible.
Why does everyone talk about audis as if they are the shit?
If you look at the reliability reports at consumerreports.org you'll see that while audis and jaguars are expensive they are not reliable. And while audi and VW are german, they are not reliable.
Reliability by brand goes:
Acura
Lexus
Toyota
Honda
audi is way down near the middle with VW. All of the american makes are middle to low and jaguar is one of the worst, together with cadilac..
Price doesn't mean shit. You don't "get what you pay for"... ever.
You either research and reap the fruits of your research or you get lucky or you get ripped off.
Buying an audi or jaguar or cadilac without being absolutely clear that they will break and be expensive to fix is stupid. You are delusional if you think just because you paid a lot they are good cars.
The same goes for any other purchase, so stop this bullshit about how apple computers are better because they are more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
The first being that ogg is a free codec and ogg software is Free Software.
Another is that ogg is already accepted by people who will continue to use it and improve it whether or not everyone else does. Further acceptance isn't necessary to keep it alive.
Furthermore the betamax format was tied to hardware. If you wanted to use it you had to buy specific hardware. With ogg all you need is just about any general use microprocessor.
Yeah... Tell that to your employees and coworkers after M$ pulls out it's patents on .NET and puts you all out of a job.
"In a world where there are $500 million dollar patent infringement lawsuits imposed on OS companies (although this is not completely settled yet), how would somebody like Red Hat compete when 6 months ago they only had $80-$90 million in cash? At that point they could not even afford to settle a fraction of a single judgment without devastating their shareholders. I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies. Red Hat did recently raise several hundred million which certainly gives them more staying power. Ultimately, I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space."
Then the headline says:
"Among the highlights is a prediction by Mr. Anderer that Microsoft has many more disruptive lawsuits planned up their sleeves."
My interpretation of this paragraph is that Microsoft always has tons of people suing them, and that redhat or whomever else wishes to make a living as an OS vendor needs to have lots of cash to pay out on some of them. Of course I disagree with that, but he does not come out and say that Microsoft has 50 more SCO-type suits in the works.
Hey if everyone could go to wikipedia and contribute as much as possible about this topic that would be great! thanks.
I have lived in three of those countries for long periods of time and those rankings in no way resemble the realities which you discern only when fully immersed in the cultures.
Most anthropologists I have met, are left in the dust by multinational, multicultured, multilingual individuals who don't even call themselves anthropologists.
Maybe the problem is, that you have a predetermined cultural notion of how the countries should rank. And you are ranking countries based on subjective categories concieved fully immersed in a particular cultural environment. Almost like begging the question.
But what the hell do I know. I'm posting to slashdot and don't have the time or energy to RTFA.
Well, the news may not have been announced by feb 29, but the evidence may have been found by feb 29.
Why not use the public/private key model. Have the lock generate a message encrypted with the physical key's private crypt key, then have they physical key decode it and retransmit to the lock...
That was funny. As the linked story slooowly loaded I thought to myself: "omg, we've /.'ed CNN!"
Then I realized it was crn.com not cnn.com doh.
er... I run kde 3.2 on my p3-650 and it just FLIES.
I wouldn't call a p3-500 a slow machine to run kde on.
Now if only this discussion were populated with people like you who know wtf they're talking about, instead of all these people making wild and unsubstantiated comments. Sigh.
You totally ignored the comment you were replying to, then proceded to make up unsubstantiated statistics.
That's such a joke.
You should check the LKML they are much more well-versed than I am on the subject. Look at my other reply to someone who said I was making this stuff up, it annoyed me enough to go find some links to the LKML archives.
As far as SCO goes, who knows? They haven't quite layed everything out yet and I don't know the parentage of the code in question.
Unless I *really do* have a reading comprehension problem, I interpret the part where he says "It is very clear: a kernel module is a derived work of the kernel by default. End of story. " as 'It is very clear: a kernel module is a derived work of the kernel by default. End of story.'
but I could be wrong... not.
Oh yeah, I got one more thing to add:
BOO YAAA motherfucker.
Next time you step up to me, you better come correct.
"by using this software you agree to this license"
The gpl says *no* such thing. It just says here is a license you can use, if not then you better have another license if you're going to copy and distribute.
Legally, very different.
"I can't imagine any court upholding that writing a driver for an operating system must comply with the OS's licenses."
That's fine, but you havent read the LKML so I'm not sure how you can possibly disagree without even reading the argument for the other side of which you seem totally ingnorant.
"Pick your battles folks. Pissing off potential allies is never a good practice even if you're right."
Picking your battles is good advice. However pissing off people or not is way way down on the list of concerns for most of us then actually making sure that our system of free software stands on firm legal ground and is protected. Ignore licensing issues at your own peril, they are important and they matter. The law, the courts and therefore law inforcement says so.
Wow! thank you lord, now we can go back to our padded rooms and put this whole debate to bed. What were we thinking?! *smacks forehead*.
"It would be trivial to make Linux not load them if they were not wanted.
Ooook, and this has to do with them being a derrived work because...
bueler... bueler... bueler...
"The NVidea driver was written specifically for Linux. Of course it contains blocks of code that are in the Windows one (this is easily proven because the same bugs exist in both of them!) but not doing that would be pretty stupid and wasteful of them."
No sir, it is you who are wrong. Talk to any of the nvidia developers. The nvidia video card driver is the same one written for windows and that is the part that's binary only. They then took this windows-intended driver code and wrapped it in a gpl-compatible wrapping to make it work with the linux kernel.
As I mentioned this seemed to be the only way that binary drivers were considered legal on the LKML. Because:
"Never heard anything so stupid."
Nice ad-hominem to start off with.
"You mean all software written for a particular OS is a derivative work of that OS?"
Don't fucking tell me what I mean and what I don't mean, I will do that myself and it looks like you're setting up a straw man.
"Nonsense."
There we go, nice straw man.
"This is like trying to ban reverse engineering."
Er.. no it is not. This is *like you know man* trying to define what a software license allows and does not allow. Don't come with invalid similies.
The rest of your shitty post just goes nonsensically into trying to argue against something I did not define. I did not define why the kernel developers were considering the modules derrivative works. If you want to find out go read the list and read their own words about it.
From what I understand, if you set out to write a linux kernel device driver module they see this as a derrivative work of the linux kernel. But I encourage reading of the kernel mailing list.
I did some reading on the linux kernel mailing list and the general concensus between the developers seems to be that binary-only drivers as modules for the linux kernel are not legal.
The only case they sited as a legal binary only module so far was the nvidia video card driver because the driver was not written for linux, it was written for windows and merely repackaged into linux.
The concensus seemed to be that a driver written specifically *for* linux is a derrivative work and therefore must be GPL'd.
Once and for all wake the fuck up. It's NOT a GPL infringement/violation. It's COPYRIGHT infringement/violation.
I can't believe people are still submitting news posts to slashdot like that. Scroll up and re-read the post.
We cannot forget that while we need to aspire to freedom of speech as much as possible, it should not encroach on the freedom of others in society.
If you're sleeping in your house and I start yelling at you through the window like a fucking moron, let's see how you like that.
If someone is doing brainsurgery on you with a speech-controlled robot and I run past the O.R. purposefully yelling "LABOTOMY LABOTOMY LABOTOMY" that's not free speech at work and should not be protected.
When free speech is only a cover for destroying the essential FREEDOMS of others, it is not free speech at all, but the cry of a coward to cover up a crime.
And yes, child pornography is an example of just that. Freedom of speech cannot be used to defend this because you've severely curtailed the Freedom of the child. Directly or indirectly don't try to fool yourself.
What's even worse, is in your black&white world, you don't even consider the case of when an individual exercising his right to 'free speech' prevents another individual from exercising his right to 'free speech'.
This can happen in a room, out on a street, online, in print and many other situations.
Now it is not my intention to set up a straw man, so I will quote you directly:
So, which is it?
(a) Tool X can be used for illegal things and therefore should be banned.
(b) Tool X can be used for illegal things. It does, however, serve useful, legitimate purposes. Keep it legal.
How about we include many other options.
(c) We keep Tool X legal, but regulate it's uses and take action against individuals who we deem misuse it like we've done with other things in the past.
or
(d) We keep Tool X legal, but reshape it so it becomes impossible to do illegal things with it while still retaining the benefits of the legal aspects.
Freenet is not a solution to our problems. It's designed to treat a symptom of curtailed freedom of speech, but it comes with side-effects(like yes child porn).
Why don't we instead concentrate on treating the disease so that we can avoid having our freedom of speech curtailed and also avoid the side-effect of letting people commit crimes.
By the way, I actually think freenet is a really cool project and am in no way against it's development. I'm just trying to show you that the debate you think is old hat, is in no way settled and should be encouraged, not discouraged like you're doing.
This license change can only mean one thing:
The people in charge of the xfree86 project are totally out of touch with the users AND the developers of the project they purport to run.
Oh well, now we can smack our foreheads, realize we should just have thrown all our support behind the guys who were voicing this opinion and do it now. Hopefully the new license for the alternative xfree86 version we will all start using will be gpl.
It turns out M$ weasled their way by being in bed with intel and AMD at the same time.
They launch win64bit development like they promised AMD and hector ruiz but!, Then they go to intel and tell them they're going ahead and subsequently agree to delay it or drag their feet. I wonder what they got from intel in return? Palladium hardware commitments? I think they got those from AMD on the original deal.
Either way M$ made deals with intel and AMD which nullified each other while at the same time getting *very* big favours in return from them both.
This is just my theory, but I would lay money that it's true and someone's face is turning pale or blushing as they read this.
Just replying to my own post in order to add for sake of disclosure that I have no relationship whatsoever with consumer reports other than having read some of their reviews and having made better choices because of it.
Not to mention the american cars I've owned that have almost killed me. I find out later they've had high incidents of the fault which nearly killed me, but are hushing them up because they've worked out it's cheaper than recalling. For example, cruise control going crazy on my mercury and flooring the car while I was trying to park.
I don't believe you can find fault with consumer reports methodologies. They are very thorough and are the only place which actually uses scientifically sound experiments in addition to their surveys and test drives. If you really believe you've found obvious problems feel free to point them out to them, so they can correct those, and to me because I'm curious. (I am a scientist and always like to see badly designed experiments, it helps me avoid errors when I design mine)
You could for example point out which sample group you were reffering to as too small, and mathematically prove it conclusively.
As for their impartiality due to not recieving money from the same companies they evaluate: If any review site recieves money/free products from the same companies they review, they become servants of the companies. Receiving money from consumers alone means they are the servants of the consumers barring any other major influences.
I never trust a car/hardware/software/game/etc reviewer who receives money or goods in any way from companies who they review. Period.
Thankfully consumer reports is not one of these, which while not guaranteeing impartiality, at least makes it possible.
If you look at the reliability reports at consumerreports.org you'll see that while audis and jaguars are expensive they are not reliable. And while audi and VW are german, they are not reliable.
Reliability by brand goes:
audi is way down near the middle with VW. All of the american makes are middle to low and jaguar is one of the worst, together with cadilac.. ... ever.
Price doesn't mean shit. You don't "get what you pay for"
You either research and reap the fruits of your research or you get lucky or you get ripped off.
Buying an audi or jaguar or cadilac without being absolutely clear that they will break and be expensive to fix is stupid. You are delusional if you think just because you paid a lot they are good cars.
The same goes for any other purchase, so stop this bullshit about how apple computers are better because they are more expensive.