Executive summary: Watermarking combined with Copyright Law is an effect copy control measure
How does watermarking allow effective copyright control? It's completely ineffective against people who are prepared to lie in court (e.g., "Oh, I'm sorry, I lost a CD with those files on it a while back, I thought it was in my house somewhere, but maybe I dropped it outside..." or "My local computer expert tells me I have something called a trojan horse on my computer, and that people could have been copying my files through it.").
Please stop repeating that canard that Steve Jobs has a "preference for getting rid of DRM." That is absolutely false. Almost all independent music labels (the labels not owned nor controlled by the four majors) have been licensing their content for resale in the mp3 format for several years.
The independent labels are largely irrelevant. Most of what Apple sells is from a major label. The major labels require DRM.
If Jobs wanted to sell such mp3s, he could do so today.
Yes, but there's little point in setting up the infrastructure to do so, when you can only do it for a small minority of the products you sell, and the advantage is relatively small (you can't sell the MP3 for a higher price, for instance, because nobody would pay it; you may find a small minority of customers refuse to shop at a site that uses a DRM format... but these will probably be put off using iTunes by the fact that most of its tracks are DRM'd anyway).
Firefox 3 will only support 2000/cp or better. There are quit a few people still using 98 and I have no plans on upgrading my computers because of firefox.
Frankly, I've found that almost any computer capable of running Firefox is more than capable of handling Win2K, if not XP. You can acquire second hand copies of Win2K for not very much cash, too.
Why is it that when something new is described on slashdot, a load of people frequently start talking about it as if it was something old that happens to have a similar (or identical) name?
I'm running the Ubuntu Feisty Beta with OO2.2 and I exchange fairly complex Word docs with others, including legal pleadings and other hairy stuff, and I'm having no problems whatsoever.
Legal documents aren't exactly what I'd call "hairy", to be honest. Try exchanging documents with someone who's using MS Word as a desktop publishing package to put together a community newsletter, complete with absolutely-positioned photographs with text wrap around and multi column formatting. That's where 2.0 fails for me -- although admittedly my copy of Office 97 frequently fails in this regard also.
The link above explains the Coriolis force. Among other things, this is the force that causes water to spiral down the drain in different directions on different sides of the equator.
Erm, yes. But the Coriolis force (actually not a force at all, but an effect of inertia in an accelerating reference frame) is (a) perfectly consistent with newton's second law, (b) not what the author of the paper, which you clearly didn't even look at the abstract of, was talking about and (c) doesn't cause water to spiral down the drain in different directions in different hemispheres, unless you can somehow produce a bowl of water with virtually zero angular momentum to start with (hint: you can't).
So even when a point on the Earth surface is not accelerating in the Sun's coordinate system, it still does in the galaxy's coordinate system.
While movement on a galactic scale is quite rapid (in the galaxy's frame of reference), I believe the acceleration of any individual body is rather small, and can probably be ignored for any short timescale purpose.
Right, but that seems to be because of the characteristics of FAT, not because TrueCrypt needs to parse the filesystem.
No, it does actually parse the file system to determine which clusters are in use. Of course, this is incredibly easy for FAT. I believe NTFS also doesn't touch the end of the disk unless you need it for storage, although it's much more likely to stick a file out there to reduce fragmentation.
I really wonder if that's truly enforceable if push came to shove.
All I know is that if you pushed my university, they *always* caved in and gave you a transfer of the copyright back to you. Whether this is just because they didn't care or because they knew it was unenforceable I don't know.
I think the parent is objecting more to the conclusion drawn by the summary here ("virtualizing cuts web app performance 43%") which should have been stated something more along the lines of "virtualizing with one of vmware's free products cuts web app performance by 43%". And even that's missing the critical factor that we're talking about serving static files, which is likely to take a larger hit than anything dynamic (which is kind of implied by the rather ambiguous term 'web app').
Paravirtualization also requires a free software OS kernel, and IIS-only web applications are do not yet run on any free software kernel.
Not strictly true. MS are willing to license their kernel source under a shared source agreement, and the Xen people have done so and have made XP run under paravirtualization. The resulting OS isn't commercially distributable, but that doesn't mean you couldn't license MS's source and Xen's patches to it and get your own paravirtualized Windows kernel.
Any virtualization also requires more OS licenses and higher-class, more expensive OS licenses.
Standard Windows volume licensing terms allow you to run 4 instances of each licensed copy of Windows in VMs if you wish. This is, of course, substantially cheaper than buying 4 licenses to run those instances on separate hardware.
If you have a real need to run 100 separate Apache instances, then you'll want something much higher-level than VMWare. For us, that would be a FreeBSD jail, where each instance would get its own chrooted home directory and IP address. That way, you're not allocating resources to 100 little-used OS images; each shares from the same memory and hard drive pool. Jails are slightly limited in that I'd like a way to limit CPU and memory allocation, but in practical application this really works very well today.
Speaking as a former user of such an application and current user of an equivalent virtualised system, the latter works much better. The chroot-jail based hosting system I used had a number of problematic limitations: I couldn't install any software that needed to run as root (e.g. to open ports below 1024), I couldn't change configuration of a variety of services that would open security problems for the hosting provider (e.g. the mail server, I think they were using exim), users running processes on the same server that consumed too much CPU and or memory had too much negative impact on my server's performance. I switched to a provider that uses virtualization, and all of these issues are gone.
Speaking as an administrator of virtual servers, I'd like to point out that one of your assumptions is wrong: VMWare ESX server *can* share memory and free disk space between instances. Multiple instances can even have the same page of physical memory mapped into them, so running multiple identical servers doesn't actually take more memory than it does on a single instance (although there are overheads).
X11 has and always has had two clipboards, short term (highlight/middle click) and long term (^C/^V). The "gnome" clipboard as you call is is just the X11 long term clipboard. And guess what? Firefox supports it, so you can ^C, ^V in to the address bar if you wish. I guess you never tried that SINCE IT WORKS FINE.
Except for the fact that many programs (notably, xterm) that don't support copying to it. Which makes that trick kind of useless in many applications.
On the other hand, if you are interested in commercial development, like myself, you need to look at pricing as well. If you only want to develop for Windows, then the "SDK" is free and the "IDE" can range from free to a couple of grand with a premium MSDN subscription.
1) Last time I tried to download the Windows SDK, I found it was tied to having a valid license for Windows XP or something more recent. That's not free, it's bundled. 2) I don't know if you've tried using Visual Studio Express, but it lacks features that are a basic requirement for developing Windows software IMO -- including basic resource editors like the ability to add an icon to your program. There are hacks, but they rely on you knowing how to use the resource scripting language, which AFAICT is no longer documented by MS.
I have had many users ask "Why can't I just see everything in one place" I tell them, you can just put shortcuts on your desktop.
The problem with this approach is that the desktop isn't accessible if windows are covering it. Which is almost all of the time.
My favourite organisation method these days is to create a folder on my desktop, then link it into the (classic) start menu. But Program Manager was useful in this respect too, because it wasn't constrained to the background like the desktop is.
But under U.S. law you can't claim statutory damages for copyright infringement unless you had previously registered the work that is being infringed.
Previously to issuing the suit. You have (IIRC) 6 months from date of first publication (which date has arguably not even occurred in this case) to register before you lose the right to the additional damages. Unless that deadline has expired, you do not have to register prior to the infringment taking place.
I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever.
My University's regulations, which you were require to agree to before you could begin studying, contained a prominent notice that any work performed at the University's request (e.g. assignments, etc.) would be the University's copyright due to it being a work for hire. That was in 1994, so this is hardly a new trend.
Like so many others here, IANAL. However, I do have one thing to add that seems to have been missed: the legal actions so far have occurred in the UK. UK copyright law is different to US copyright law in that we don't have statutory damages. The insanely high demands are not legal in the UK: if you could have licensed the images for $800, $800 is the highest award a UK court will make to them. Plus their lawyers fees.
What you do right now is talk to a *UK* lawyer, and mention this idea to them, asking for their opinion of it:
Write a letter back, headed "WITHOUT PRIVELEGE, SAVE AS TO COSTS". Offer to make a payment of $800 in settlement, stating that you believe this is the true market price of the material you used, and are more than happy to pay it.
If they accept your offer, you pay up, and that's the end of it. If they don't accept, you go (or send a lawyer to) a UK court, and when an award, probably in the region of $800, is made to them, you (or your lawyer) shows the judge a copy of that letter, which should ensure that no costs award is made against you.
The problem is, there are a huge number of writers out there who think, "My writing's great! If only I could get my book in front of a few more people, I'd be selling thousands of copies..."
Yes, they're deceiving themselves. But taking advantage of that is just downright rude.
But they're more into reconfiguring the connections, not the processors themselves...
Really, this doesn't sound any different than loadable microcode, which nobody's cared much about for the last 20 years.
That's not what it sounds like at all. The article described the devices as an containing 6 processors and a reconfigurable "computational array". Sounds to me like a hybrid approach where standard processors are connected to each other through a device somewhat like an FPGA that can be configured to perform front end processing and communication tasks. Which sounds to me like "reconfiguring the connections". They're just doing it on-chip with a multicore processor, not in external circuitry, which is what it sounds like SRC are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Executive summary: Watermarking combined with Copyright Law is an effect copy control measure
How does watermarking allow effective copyright control? It's completely ineffective against people who are prepared to lie in court (e.g., "Oh, I'm sorry, I lost a CD with those files on it a while back, I thought it was in my house somewhere, but maybe I dropped it outside..." or "My local computer expert tells me I have something called a trojan horse on my computer, and that people could have been copying my files through it.").
Please stop repeating that canard that Steve Jobs has a "preference for getting rid of DRM." That is absolutely false. Almost all independent music labels (the labels not owned nor controlled by the four majors) have been licensing their content for resale in the mp3 format for several years.
The independent labels are largely irrelevant. Most of what Apple sells is from a major label. The major labels require DRM.
If Jobs wanted to sell such mp3s, he could do so today.
Yes, but there's little point in setting up the infrastructure to do so, when you can only do it for a small minority of the products you sell, and the advantage is relatively small (you can't sell the MP3 for a higher price, for instance, because nobody would pay it; you may find a small minority of customers refuse to shop at a site that uses a DRM format... but these will probably be put off using iTunes by the fact that most of its tracks are DRM'd anyway).
Firefox 3 will only support 2000/cp or better. There are quit a few people still using 98 and I have no plans on upgrading my computers because of firefox.
Frankly, I've found that almost any computer capable of running Firefox is more than capable of handling Win2K, if not XP. You can acquire second hand copies of Win2K for not very much cash, too.
Why is it that when something new is described on slashdot, a load of people frequently start talking about it as if it was something old that happens to have a similar (or identical) name?
I'm running the Ubuntu Feisty Beta with OO2.2 and I exchange fairly complex Word docs with others, including legal pleadings and other hairy stuff, and I'm having no problems whatsoever.
Legal documents aren't exactly what I'd call "hairy", to be honest. Try exchanging documents with someone who's using MS Word as a desktop publishing package to put together a community newsletter, complete with absolutely-positioned photographs with text wrap around and multi column formatting. That's where 2.0 fails for me -- although admittedly my copy of Office 97 frequently fails in this regard also.
The link above explains the Coriolis force. Among other things, this is the force that causes water to spiral down the drain in different directions on different sides of the equator.
Erm, yes. But the Coriolis force (actually not a force at all, but an effect of inertia in an accelerating reference frame) is (a) perfectly consistent with newton's second law, (b) not what the author of the paper, which you clearly didn't even look at the abstract of, was talking about and (c) doesn't cause water to spiral down the drain in different directions in different hemispheres, unless you can somehow produce a bowl of water with virtually zero angular momentum to start with (hint: you can't).
So even when a point on the Earth surface is not accelerating in the Sun's coordinate system, it still does in the galaxy's coordinate system.
While movement on a galactic scale is quite rapid (in the galaxy's frame of reference), I believe the acceleration of any individual body is rather small, and can probably be ignored for any short timescale purpose.
Now if this new guy is not joking (Russian timezones, April 1st, bit early..etc)
The paper was published in December. That's a lot early.
Right, but that seems to be because of the characteristics of FAT, not because TrueCrypt needs to parse the filesystem.
No, it does actually parse the file system to determine which clusters are in use. Of course, this is incredibly easy for FAT. I believe NTFS also doesn't touch the end of the disk unless you need it for storage, although it's much more likely to stick a file out there to reduce fragmentation.
I really wonder if that's truly enforceable if push came to shove.
All I know is that if you pushed my university, they *always* caved in and gave you a transfer of the copyright back to you. Whether this is just because they didn't care or because they knew it was unenforceable I don't know.
I think the parent is objecting more to the conclusion drawn by the summary here ("virtualizing cuts web app performance 43%") which should have been stated something more along the lines of "virtualizing with one of vmware's free products cuts web app performance by 43%". And even that's missing the critical factor that we're talking about serving static files, which is likely to take a larger hit than anything dynamic (which is kind of implied by the rather ambiguous term 'web app').
By the way d00d, the VMware license prohibits posting benchmarking results.
Such prohibitions in EULAs are probably totally unenforceable due to free speech issues. IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc, etc, etc.
Since when are you allowed to post benchmarks of MS software?
Since the enactment of whichever law in your jurisdiction grants you the right to free expression.
Paravirtualization also requires a free software OS kernel, and IIS-only web applications are do not yet run on any free software kernel.
Not strictly true. MS are willing to license their kernel source under a shared source agreement, and the Xen people have done so and have made XP run under paravirtualization. The resulting OS isn't commercially distributable, but that doesn't mean you couldn't license MS's source and Xen's patches to it and get your own paravirtualized Windows kernel.
Any virtualization also requires more OS licenses and higher-class, more expensive OS licenses.
Standard Windows volume licensing terms allow you to run 4 instances of each licensed copy of Windows in VMs if you wish. This is, of course, substantially cheaper than buying 4 licenses to run those instances on separate hardware.
If you have a real need to run 100 separate Apache instances, then you'll want something much higher-level than VMWare. For us, that would be a FreeBSD jail, where each instance would get its own chrooted home directory and IP address. That way, you're not allocating resources to 100 little-used OS images; each shares from the same memory and hard drive pool. Jails are slightly limited in that I'd like a way to limit CPU and memory allocation, but in practical application this really works very well today.
Speaking as a former user of such an application and current user of an equivalent virtualised system, the latter works much better. The chroot-jail based hosting system I used had a number of problematic limitations: I couldn't install any software that needed to run as root (e.g. to open ports below 1024), I couldn't change configuration of a variety of services that would open security problems for the hosting provider (e.g. the mail server, I think they were using exim), users running processes on the same server that consumed too much CPU and or memory had too much negative impact on my server's performance. I switched to a provider that uses virtualization, and all of these issues are gone.
Speaking as an administrator of virtual servers, I'd like to point out that one of your assumptions is wrong: VMWare ESX server *can* share memory and free disk space between instances. Multiple instances can even have the same page of physical memory mapped into them, so running multiple identical servers doesn't actually take more memory than it does on a single instance (although there are overheads).
X11 has and always has had two clipboards, short term (highlight/middle click) and long term (^C/^V). The "gnome" clipboard as you call is is just the X11 long term clipboard. And guess what? Firefox supports it, so you can ^C, ^V in to the address bar if you wish. I guess you never tried that SINCE IT WORKS FINE.
Except for the fact that many programs (notably, xterm) that don't support copying to it. Which makes that trick kind of useless in many applications.
QT 3 isn't available under GPL for Windows
Ahem.
On the other hand, if you are interested in commercial development, like myself, you need to look at pricing as well. If you only want to develop for Windows, then the "SDK" is free and the "IDE" can range from free to a couple of grand with a premium MSDN subscription.
1) Last time I tried to download the Windows SDK, I found it was tied to having a valid license for Windows XP or something more recent. That's not free, it's bundled.
2) I don't know if you've tried using Visual Studio Express, but it lacks features that are a basic requirement for developing Windows software IMO -- including basic resource editors like the ability to add an icon to your program. There are hacks, but they rely on you knowing how to use the resource scripting language, which AFAICT is no longer documented by MS.
I have had many users ask "Why can't I just see everything in one place"
I tell them, you can just put shortcuts on your desktop.
The problem with this approach is that the desktop isn't accessible if windows are covering it. Which is almost all of the time.
My favourite organisation method these days is to create a folder on my desktop, then link it into the (classic) start menu. But Program Manager was useful in this respect too, because it wasn't constrained to the background like the desktop is.
But under U.S. law you can't claim statutory damages for copyright infringement unless you had previously registered the work that is being infringed.
Previously to issuing the suit. You have (IIRC) 6 months from date of first publication (which date has arguably not even occurred in this case) to register before you lose the right to the additional damages. Unless that deadline has expired, you do not have to register prior to the infringment taking place.
I don't think it'll be very long before, when you apply to a college or university, you also sign away all rights to everything you think, say, or do while you're there, in perpetuity, in any medium whatsoever.
My University's regulations, which you were require to agree to before you could begin studying, contained a prominent notice that any work performed at the University's request (e.g. assignments, etc.) would be the University's copyright due to it being a work for hire. That was in 1994, so this is hardly a new trend.
I wrote: headed "WITHOUT PRIVELEGE, SAVE AS TO COSTS"
I meant to write: headed "WITHOUT PREJUDICE, SAVE AS TO COSTS". That's an important difference. Doh!
Like so many others here, IANAL. However, I do have one thing to add that seems to have been missed: the legal actions so far have occurred in the UK. UK copyright law is different to US copyright law in that we don't have statutory damages. The insanely high demands are not legal in the UK: if you could have licensed the images for $800, $800 is the highest award a UK court will make to them. Plus their lawyers fees.
What you do right now is talk to a *UK* lawyer, and mention this idea to them, asking for their opinion of it:
Write a letter back, headed "WITHOUT PRIVELEGE, SAVE AS TO COSTS". Offer to make a payment of $800 in settlement, stating that you believe this is the true market price of the material you used, and are more than happy to pay it.
If they accept your offer, you pay up, and that's the end of it.
If they don't accept, you go (or send a lawyer to) a UK court, and when an award, probably in the region of $800, is made to them, you (or your lawyer) shows the judge a copy of that letter, which should ensure that no costs award is made against you.
The problem is, there are a huge number of writers out there who think, "My writing's great! If only I could get my book in front of a few more people, I'd be selling thousands of copies..."
Yes, they're deceiving themselves. But taking advantage of that is just downright rude.
But they're more into reconfiguring the connections, not the processors themselves...
Really, this doesn't sound any different than loadable microcode, which nobody's cared much about for the last 20 years.
That's not what it sounds like at all. The article described the devices as an containing 6 processors and a reconfigurable "computational array". Sounds to me like a hybrid approach where standard processors are connected to each other through a device somewhat like an FPGA that can be configured to perform front end processing and communication tasks. Which sounds to me like "reconfiguring the connections". They're just doing it on-chip with a multicore processor, not in external circuitry, which is what it sounds like SRC are doing.