So what exactly does that code do? Read an entire directory contents and store the results into an array? The code might look beautiful, but it's no wonder now why python's a memory hog if thats how people use it.
There was a google tech talk on orbital power I just saw yesterday on the subject. The basic idea is preparing for a global power system based on renewable energy. Their argument is that power generation from light at the surface is inefficient because the atmosphere is not transparent on most of the sun's spectrum (I guess this means the "visible spectrum" is evolved from this atmosphereic property). In contrast, there's much more light to be had in space. I guess they believe that aiming it can be done.
The tipping point is the design of military lasers. Massive Real Genius power style lasers. As is explained in the lecture briefly, lasers can direct more power through the atmosphere on a particular wavelength, and then tune the receiver for maximum efficiency. Recently a US defense contractor disclosed the development of a 10MWatt laser or something ridiculous for field use. Since last I knew, there's a UN ban on blinding lasers, I guess they intend to build laser tanks.
The places where this Palau satellite differs screams "military testbed technology" more than "usable power source". Orbital laser weapons? That's evil genius quality right there!
While the camera's pretty neat, but I can think of a few simple improvements: * It would have been nice to provide the raw camera data on request, unless it would cost more bandwidth than bluetooth has available. It's something of a happy accident that the Wiimote applies a blob tracker pretransmission (presumably to save bandwidth / power). * 8 bits is a bit small for a accelerometer. At 12 bits, you can quadruple the precision and the range. The chip they went with was probably chosen because it's cheap, and unlikely to dissapear as an option. 3g is such that most people will have a hard time maxing it, and most games will probably "dead pedal" some of that range. But the precion's important. Even assuming +/- 1g, there's only 256 possible values. Each step is more than half a degree under perfect linearity. At 3G, it's roughly 2 degrees per step up. * The accessory plug is strange. It would have been easier to figure out USB, and provide a ton of new options. USB headphones, etc. * Rechargable batteries. The GBA, DS and DS lite are all rechargeable. They know how to make handheld batteries. I'm hard pressed to come up with a reason not to. Cost? Using USB to recharge might have been a neat trick.
I guess what I'm saying is, it'd be cool to see what this guy could do if someone decided to make a more open Wiimote. I'm not sure if it's possible to make it compatible with the Wii, between bluetooth MAC filters and differing outputs. But clearly you can get a lot of functionality, for very little price. The wiimote already makes a pretty cool presentation device. I wonder how many patents the Wiimote uses / created -- it'd be sad to see such a set of good and now obvious ideas laid waste by software patents.
Using those same complaints, FTP should be discouraged: 1. "Most uses are illegitimate". At this point in the game we call the Internet, every new file transfer mechanism is likely to be adopted by pirates first. Yarr. But we both know they still use FTP where needed, and I'd wager there's more illegal FTP servs than legal.
2. "isn't exactly firewall friendly". That's right, FTP isn't firewall friendly. It has crazy rules for control connections vs data connections. The saving grace here is that FTP is not encrypted, so snoops can determine which port needs to be opened to which NAT'd device. Many people claim that Deluge is able to break through most any firewall, as it uses random ports and full stream encryption. If your corporation can firewall that, hats off; maybe ask your helpful IT staff what they can do to help you get your job done faster. That's what they're there for right?
3. "Makes a horrible method of distribution" I dare say this more sense for FTP than BT. FTP places a huge demand on the provider. Many popular but free download projects use BT to reduce the amount of bandwidth and pure CPU load from serving crowds of thousands or more. RedVSBlue used BT, Blizzard uses BT (a much larger use case than Linux ISOs), Valve's Steam updates use it, the SubPop music label (made famous after contracting Soundgarden and Nirvana) uses BT to distribute videos and promo music for their artists. If this is a terrible method, it's a terribly popular one.
If you need a legitimate use of this feature, consider Miro aka "Democracy player". As the original name suggests, it's supposed to allow unfettered access to information that might be suppressed in a authoritarian regime. A proxy is one more way to protect its users from oppression. Not a perfect one, but still an arrow in the quiver of resistance.
Of course, you are right that this really helps people who might live on say a campus, where they've given up on throttling BT itself and instead blacklist trackers. I happen to live right next to one, but I haven't lived on campus in years.
At least, a documentary on the History channel suggested that Hitler's view was that of races dominating others towards an end of history, and that the Germans were going to be inevitable racial victors.
Just because Vorbis claims Vorbis is patent free doesn't mean it's not infringing on someone else's patents. Moreover, the MP3 patents are going to be expiring soon. At which point Vorbis is in a strange place. Vorbis was essentially invented as DRMless and patentless MP3, but if MP3 patents are allowed to expire, I don't see them winning against an incumbent with only a marginal quality boost. Ogg itself is a nice container, but of those moving away from.avi, they've mostly picked.mkv.
(On the other hand Germany's kill ratio was pretty high; they probably could have wiped out any adversary of comparable population to themselves.) Besides which, they say that Hitler was worried that the American's level of Germanic ancestry would be problematic. I guess he was right to be worried.
But you can't claim you "never authorized anyone" to distribute the work. Plus you have to be a massive douche to use copyright as a tool to protect the things you've said in public from being repeated.
Want to use web forums for support? Now you have two problems: solving the original problem, and convincing someone to constantly watch the forum. Forums seem great from a user stand point: they're common enough that people know how to use them, they're searchable, and they're long lived (whereas, article withstanding, nobody reads IRC they werent present for). Users post a question on the forum, then wait for people to pounce. The problem is, forums are terrible from the standpoint of people who can answer your question: they're large in volume, have no particular features to support development or bugtracking, and generally require a developer to be constantly hitting refresh.
So probably some sort of specialized software can help. Mailing lists sound like a happy medium at first, but they require users to know how they work (for example, many lists allow messages from non subscribers, which works as long as you remind people to CC you) and for users to be happy with their mail client, and popular ones require someone to deal with spam. Bugzilla is terrible, its not easy to set up, and about as bad from usability as you can imagine. Plus people spam it too now.
Perhaps some sort of integrated hosting system can help. Launchpad has such a system, but it's not Free Software that you can download and run on your servers. Not every support question is a bug in the software, so it divides between "bugs" and "questions". Bugs have a workflow that results in a patch being applied a package and shipped. Questions generally stop at a solution. LP keeps separate states for each, such as "open", "answered", and "solved". SourceForge has a system as well, but nobody uses it because it's got everything out of the box (they should just kill the forums). Many intimidating forms just to ask a question. Google Code hosting has a support tracker, haven't seen it used much.
Then I suggest you get the fuck off of IRC, where the server by necessity needs to redistribute your "copyrighted material" in order to function as intended.
Apologies for a slight confusion I may have caused. I meant to type "not what the project site claims".
But yes, the LICENSE file may be incorrect. I've seen it happen. Someone decides to include code, leaves the copyright and license on the file alone, but clearly contradicting the LICENSE file. In fact, the LICENSE file should be treated as a legal include file. If the code says "See LICENSING" then see licensing, other wise, whats the file itself says is all you get. Mostly, copyright should be placed at the top of a source file.
Ohloh already automates the process of examining licenses somewhat. Lawyers aren't that much of the equation. If you're seriously worried about law, write the open source software library guy and request a written offer to the code under the terms of the GPL, or whatever you want. Maybe offer a couple hundred dollars for the time he takes to do so.
I think it speaks more to the skills of asus to market the concept to people. Nobody accuses openMoko of failing to disclose the source, because they did so from the start! Even if you wanted to hide your engineering from the world, the source code is part of the selling point to the eee. A more skilled Asus would have it available on day one, if not before, and be proudly trumpeting it.
Don't distribute your work, in source or binaries. You're free to modify as you deem fit. But if you distribute to others, you're supposed to do so under the license. That's the terms of the GPL deal, you're free to reject them but usually the only alternative is not using the software.
But is the source code work of a single man something to be hoarded so? The GPL was also designed to protect your clients, who perhaps you only ship binaries to. Because someday the author might be a client, and wishes to receive the rights as well.
In all claims, you should be looking at the header files on the individual source files, not what a project source claims. At any rate, all we've really found out thus far is that the code appears to be duplicated. It's possible that they both plagarized the same third source. But unlikely.
And lets write an entire website explaining what we mean! Because I mean, who needs lawyers when there's an FAQ ten times as long as the GPL itself, and even a quiz to test your in depth understanding of the GPL.
I believe the dude was asking questions, not declaring how things are in a country he doesn't live in. But then, I hear asking questions isn't good for your health in Putin's Russia ^)^
How about someone make a video describing how to use the GPL / kernel source correctly in your product, complete with overdubbable audio (no speaking people on screen). Then just translate and distribute as widely as possible. Maybe hit up English, German, Chinese and Japanese, and more as you find the resources. If you think it's merely a matter of misunderstanding, a public education plan is a good solution as I can think of.
Personally, I think the status quo is a great testament to the legal system and the FSF's work. The threat of a lawsuit makes it possible for a single person to force a large company to obey the license he set out to begin with. Despite having far fewer resources, if the truth is on their side they can win. Now, I can see your point about idiots on the internet calling for lawsuits. Copyright is a tricky thing -- as the blog author suggested, what if ASUS already negotiated permission with the two people listed in asus_acpi? It's probably a bit harder in the kernel's case, because it links with other objects and there is no central copyright holder (the blog author is simply incorrect on copyright assignment).
I think the bottom line is that if you discover a potential violation, share this with a few intelligent people, like the people listed in the source code, Eben Moglen's new group, and Greg K-H before writing something Slashdot can find and sentence in a court of public opinion. I hear Greg KH has lots of experience talking to vendors and finding ways to make them happy to comply. It might be a business ploy -- company infringes GPL, Greg knocks on your door demanding work in compensation for the violation, as he holds significant copyright. I imagine this would work much better now that his business card can say "Novell". But this is baseless speculation.
I hope Asus realizes that there are many purchases waiting for this cloud to clear out -- I'm not going to buy a device that only claims to have source code available. I want to see the real deal. And thats probably the best alternative to lawsuits: making it known that doing open source correctly sells, and doing it wrong does not.
Jesus. This sort of things makes you think that America's politics is playing checkers while Russia's playing chess. Nixon said the "cover-up is worse than the crime". But he didn't kill American citizens to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
So what exactly does that code do? Read an entire directory contents and store the results into an array? The code might look beautiful, but it's no wonder now why python's a memory hog if thats how people use it.
Just imagine what'll happen when they learn to send email!
;)
OLPC: Training the next generation of Nig 419 Scammers
There was a google tech talk on orbital power I just saw yesterday on the subject. The basic idea is preparing for a global power system based on renewable energy. Their argument is that power generation from light at the surface is inefficient because the atmosphere is not transparent on most of the sun's spectrum (I guess this means the "visible spectrum" is evolved from this atmosphereic property). In contrast, there's much more light to be had in space. I guess they believe that aiming it can be done.
The tipping point is the design of military lasers. Massive Real Genius power style lasers. As is explained in the lecture briefly, lasers can direct more power through the atmosphere on a particular wavelength, and then tune the receiver for maximum efficiency. Recently a US defense contractor disclosed the development of a 10MWatt laser or something ridiculous for field use. Since last I knew, there's a UN ban on blinding lasers, I guess they intend to build laser tanks.
The places where this Palau satellite differs screams "military testbed technology" more than "usable power source". Orbital laser weapons? That's evil genius quality right there!
While the camera's pretty neat, but I can think of a few simple improvements:
* It would have been nice to provide the raw camera data on request, unless it would cost more bandwidth than bluetooth has available. It's something of a happy accident that the Wiimote applies a blob tracker pretransmission (presumably to save bandwidth / power).
* 8 bits is a bit small for a accelerometer. At 12 bits, you can quadruple the precision and the range. The chip they went with was probably chosen because it's cheap, and unlikely to dissapear as an option. 3g is such that most people will have a hard time maxing it, and most games will probably "dead pedal" some of that range. But the precion's important. Even assuming +/- 1g, there's only 256 possible values. Each step is more than half a degree under perfect linearity. At 3G, it's roughly 2 degrees per step up.
* The accessory plug is strange. It would have been easier to figure out USB, and provide a ton of new options. USB headphones, etc.
* Rechargable batteries. The GBA, DS and DS lite are all rechargeable. They know how to make handheld batteries. I'm hard pressed to come up with a reason not to. Cost? Using USB to recharge might have been a neat trick.
I guess what I'm saying is, it'd be cool to see what this guy could do if someone decided to make a more open Wiimote. I'm not sure if it's possible to make it compatible with the Wii, between bluetooth MAC filters and differing outputs. But clearly you can get a lot of functionality, for very little price. The wiimote already makes a pretty cool presentation device. I wonder how many patents the Wiimote uses / created -- it'd be sad to see such a set of good and now obvious ideas laid waste by software patents.
Using those same complaints, FTP should be discouraged:
1. "Most uses are illegitimate". At this point in the game we call the Internet, every new file transfer mechanism is likely to be adopted by pirates first. Yarr. But we both know they still use FTP where needed, and I'd wager there's more illegal FTP servs than legal.
2. "isn't exactly firewall friendly". That's right, FTP isn't firewall friendly. It has crazy rules for control connections vs data connections. The saving grace here is that FTP is not encrypted, so snoops can determine which port needs to be opened to which NAT'd device. Many people claim that Deluge is able to break through most any firewall, as it uses random ports and full stream encryption. If your corporation can firewall that, hats off; maybe ask your helpful IT staff what they can do to help you get your job done faster. That's what they're there for right?
3. "Makes a horrible method of distribution" I dare say this more sense for FTP than BT. FTP places a huge demand on the provider. Many popular but free download projects use BT to reduce the amount of bandwidth and pure CPU load from serving crowds of thousands or more. RedVSBlue used BT, Blizzard uses BT (a much larger use case than Linux ISOs), Valve's Steam updates use it, the SubPop music label (made famous after contracting Soundgarden and Nirvana) uses BT to distribute videos and promo music for their artists. If this is a terrible method, it's a terribly popular one.
If you need a legitimate use of this feature, consider Miro aka "Democracy player". As the original name suggests, it's supposed to allow unfettered access to information that might be suppressed in a authoritarian regime. A proxy is one more way to protect its users from oppression. Not a perfect one, but still an arrow in the quiver of resistance.
Of course, you are right that this really helps people who might live on say a campus, where they've given up on throttling BT itself and instead blacklist trackers. I happen to live right next to one, but I haven't lived on campus in years.
I doubt retailers are willing to cut prices below what they paid for during the Holiday Shopping Bonanza.
It's not a price advantage if you can't actually ramp up production.
At least, a documentary on the History channel suggested that Hitler's view was that of races dominating others towards an end of history, and that the Germans were going to be inevitable racial victors.
Just because Vorbis claims Vorbis is patent free doesn't mean it's not infringing on someone else's patents. Moreover, the MP3 patents are going to be expiring soon. At which point Vorbis is in a strange place. Vorbis was essentially invented as DRMless and patentless MP3, but if MP3 patents are allowed to expire, I don't see them winning against an incumbent with only a marginal quality boost. Ogg itself is a nice container, but of those moving away from .avi, they've mostly picked .mkv.
Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a primary source. It's supposed to be a non point-of-view reference that cites primary sources.
More seriously though, why not point out some of the Sonic CD music, which was one of the first console games to feature CD quality music?
But you can't claim you "never authorized anyone" to distribute the work. Plus you have to be a massive douche to use copyright as a tool to protect the things you've said in public from being repeated.
Want to use web forums for support? Now you have two problems: solving the original problem, and convincing someone to constantly watch the forum. Forums seem great from a user stand point: they're common enough that people know how to use them, they're searchable, and they're long lived (whereas, article withstanding, nobody reads IRC they werent present for). Users post a question on the forum, then wait for people to pounce. The problem is, forums are terrible from the standpoint of people who can answer your question: they're large in volume, have no particular features to support development or bugtracking, and generally require a developer to be constantly hitting refresh.
So probably some sort of specialized software can help. Mailing lists sound like a happy medium at first, but they require users to know how they work (for example, many lists allow messages from non subscribers, which works as long as you remind people to CC you) and for users to be happy with their mail client, and popular ones require someone to deal with spam. Bugzilla is terrible, its not easy to set up, and about as bad from usability as you can imagine. Plus people spam it too now.
Perhaps some sort of integrated hosting system can help. Launchpad has such a system, but it's not Free Software that you can download and run on your servers. Not every support question is a bug in the software, so it divides between "bugs" and "questions". Bugs have a workflow that results in a patch being applied a package and shipped. Questions generally stop at a solution. LP keeps separate states for each, such as "open", "answered", and "solved". SourceForge has a system as well, but nobody uses it because it's got everything out of the box (they should just kill the forums). Many intimidating forms just to ask a question. Google Code hosting has a support tracker, haven't seen it used much.
Then I suggest you get the fuck off of IRC, where the server by necessity needs to redistribute your "copyrighted material" in order to function as intended.
Apologies for a slight confusion I may have caused. I meant to type "not what the project site claims".
But yes, the LICENSE file may be incorrect. I've seen it happen. Someone decides to include code, leaves the copyright and license on the file alone, but clearly contradicting the LICENSE file. In fact, the LICENSE file should be treated as a legal include file. If the code says "See LICENSING" then see licensing, other wise, whats the file itself says is all you get. Mostly, copyright should be placed at the top of a source file.
Ohloh already automates the process of examining licenses somewhat. Lawyers aren't that much of the equation. If you're seriously worried about law, write the open source software library guy and request a written offer to the code under the terms of the GPL, or whatever you want. Maybe offer a couple hundred dollars for the time he takes to do so.
I've been thinking of using a Bluetooth Wiimote and sensorbar to do that.
I think it speaks more to the skills of asus to market the concept to people. Nobody accuses openMoko of failing to disclose the source, because they did so from the start! Even if you wanted to hide your engineering from the world, the source code is part of the selling point to the eee. A more skilled Asus would have it available on day one, if not before, and be proudly trumpeting it.
Don't distribute your work, in source or binaries. You're free to modify as you deem fit. But if you distribute to others, you're supposed to do so under the license. That's the terms of the GPL deal, you're free to reject them but usually the only alternative is not using the software.
But is the source code work of a single man something to be hoarded so? The GPL was also designed to protect your clients, who perhaps you only ship binaries to. Because someday the author might be a client, and wishes to receive the rights as well.
In all claims, you should be looking at the header files on the individual source files, not what a project source claims. At any rate, all we've really found out thus far is that the code appears to be duplicated. It's possible that they both plagarized the same third source. But unlikely.
You know, it was formerly called the Library GPL because it was used in things like glibc...
And lets write an entire website explaining what we mean! Because I mean, who needs lawyers when there's an FAQ ten times as long as the GPL itself, and even a quiz to test your in depth understanding of the GPL.
I believe the dude was asking questions, not declaring how things are in a country he doesn't live in. But then, I hear asking questions isn't good for your health in Putin's Russia ^)^
How about someone make a video describing how to use the GPL / kernel source correctly in your product, complete with overdubbable audio (no speaking people on screen). Then just translate and distribute as widely as possible. Maybe hit up English, German, Chinese and Japanese, and more as you find the resources. If you think it's merely a matter of misunderstanding, a public education plan is a good solution as I can think of.
Personally, I think the status quo is a great testament to the legal system and the FSF's work. The threat of a lawsuit makes it possible for a single person to force a large company to obey the license he set out to begin with. Despite having far fewer resources, if the truth is on their side they can win. Now, I can see your point about idiots on the internet calling for lawsuits. Copyright is a tricky thing -- as the blog author suggested, what if ASUS already negotiated permission with the two people listed in asus_acpi? It's probably a bit harder in the kernel's case, because it links with other objects and there is no central copyright holder (the blog author is simply incorrect on copyright assignment).
I think the bottom line is that if you discover a potential violation, share this with a few intelligent people, like the people listed in the source code, Eben Moglen's new group, and Greg K-H before writing something Slashdot can find and sentence in a court of public opinion. I hear Greg KH has lots of experience talking to vendors and finding ways to make them happy to comply. It might be a business ploy -- company infringes GPL, Greg knocks on your door demanding work in compensation for the violation, as he holds significant copyright. I imagine this would work much better now that his business card can say "Novell". But this is baseless speculation.
I hope Asus realizes that there are many purchases waiting for this cloud to clear out -- I'm not going to buy a device that only claims to have source code available. I want to see the real deal. And thats probably the best alternative to lawsuits: making it known that doing open source correctly sells, and doing it wrong does not.
Jesus. This sort of things makes you think that America's politics is playing checkers while Russia's playing chess. Nixon said the "cover-up is worse than the crime". But he didn't kill American citizens to do it.