You know, if you want a fair and decent way to do product activation, maybe the idea of tying the product to a single computer is taking the wrong approach...
How about using some sort of portable id storage device (like a USB keydrive or a Dallas Semiconductor Crypto I-Button) to store the activation. No more concerns about installing the software on hundreds of computers. Just tie the id storage device to the software somehow, and take the id device where-ever you need to run the software from.
That's because the SEC can't do something until there is an actual crime committed. When it comes to appearances and "guessing", the SEC is completely powerless to do anything.
And before anyone makes some noise about "their execs are dumping their stock holdings now", remember that the one exec who has been selling his stock had filed a plan with the SEC back in January to do so.
The best (and arguably only) place for us to file complaints with is the Federal Trade Commission. Even then, it takes more than "they might be doing something wrong" to get them to take notice. The federal entities can not act preemptively (except the millitary, but that's another story) so they can not stop SCO from being annoying.
Some have made noise asking why the courts don't stop SCO. Again, they can't until someone goes through the motions of filing a lawsuit asking the courts to do so. The courts cannot act preemptively.
Um... This one has played too long, time for some rebuttal here....
While I don't know about this "Chipotle" chain you mention (I haven't seen one around here in South East Michigan), I do have first hand knowledge that the POS (Point of Sale) system used in the Corporate owned stores of McDonalds is NOT based on SCO. They may have been some time (years) ago, but not today.
Today, the POS system at McDonalds corporate stores is Windows based, and has been for some time now. The terminals are semi-intelligent RS232 terminals with LCD touchscreens that talk to a Windows machine in the managers office.
Now I don't know what corporate (or the regional offices) are using, but at the store level, it's Windows.
While others are sitting in the wings, complaining about what SCO is doing, I finally got off my duff and The text of my complaint follows:
The SCO Group is claiming that it owns the licensing rights to and intellectual property contained within the Linux computer operating system. As such, the SCO group is claiming that all users of Linux owe it(SCO) $699 per computer processor for the rights to run Linux (ref: http://www.sco.com/scosource). It has been publically stated by the authors and the creator of Linux that the SCO group has no ownership stake in Linux, has no controlling interest in Linux, and is not authorized to collect any license fees for Linux.
Linux is made publically available to all members of the public at large under the terms of the GNU General Public License (ref: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html) - a license that specifically prohibits the actions that the SCO group is taking.
The SCO groups actions effectively are that it is collecting a license to a product it does not own or control and is offering "indemnification" against past and future legal action if a license is purchased. This sounds curiously similar to a "protection racket" where a store owner is "forced" to buy "protection" from a mobster to protect itself from the very same mobster.
While this may be beyond the scope of what the FTC is allowed to deal with, I believe that the FTC is indeed allowed to deal with companies that attempt to sell "licenses" to products that the company neither owns nor controls.
A good place to start for more information on what the SCO group is doing in it's attempt to "steal" Linux from the owner and the creators of Linux may be found at: http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/issues/sco-vs-linux
Thank you for your time and attention in this matter.
Ronald R. Gage
It's pretty darned ironic that your department has chosen to host a website on Microsoft Windows 2000 and Internet Information Services.
Was this a deliberate choice on your part to help demonstrate the monopoly power of Microsoft, or did you genuinely no know that you had several no-cost (acquisition wise) choices available to you?
I am making about $10k less a year than I was 2 years ago. It sucks too...
At least I am doing better than I was last year (was unemployed for 9 out of 12 months) so I guess I am doing better - in a fairly narrow perspective...
I've received sponsorship money from some prettybig companies for the development (or augmentation) of an open-source project I wrote.
Now, this wasn't a "here is some money, go write something useful" type of sponsorship, but more along the lines of "we like your work but need a certain feature added. Here is the money, add the feature".
It probably doesn't help you though, since they (the money) came to me...
Perhaps my perspective is wrong here, but isn't it a touch disingenious to in some way ask SCO to send me an invoice for the so-called Linux IP, then turn around and complain about fraud?
Asking them to send the invoice is just as good as ordering a product AFAIK.
In other words - Don't call them asking to be placed on their mailing list or anything else equally silly.
For those of you who don't know, this stuff has been around for quite some time, I'm thinking years...
First of all, a little company called Eventide has been making pitch shifters for literally decades. The H969 has been capable of using an external control voltage to vary the amount of shift since it was released to the market back in the late 80's. The newer H-3000's were MIDI capable, again allowing for remote control of how much to shift the pitch of the incoming signal. The H-3000's have been around since the early 90's.
Next, I don't remember if it was Synclavier, Emulator/EM-U Systems, or Fairlight systems (no longer in business) that came out with the first pitch-to-midi convertor - again back in the late 80's.
The point is that there were people doing this way back then, using pitch-tracking hardware and pitch shifting hardware in a way to create pitch corrected output of singers - and I am talking about in live concerts, not rebroadcasts, not recordings, but live.
Let's not even get into the issue of the number of live bands I've seen where the band used DAT for the group vocals in concert. I'm not talking bar bands either!
To me, the answer to why nobody within the developer community (including myself) is bothering to sue SCO for copyright infringement and GPL licensing violations is quite obvious.
As developers, we have barely enough time in our busy lives to deal with things like writting our next "killer app", let alone things like family and living. On top of this, to sue such a company requires fronting a fairly large amount of cash to a lawyer. Nevermind the level of trust and respect our profession seems to harbor towards lawyers in general.
We all would love to see "someone else" sue (and obviously win) a suit against SCO. The problem is that "we" don't have the time nor the money to defend what is effectively ours. Hence, we will loose our creation(s) because of our lack of willingness to go after the bully.
Like everyone else, if I had the time and the money, I would be all over SCO for violating my copyright and the GPL license. I just can't afford the risk financially right now...
Today, thousands of Radio Shack and other electronics stores were all raided by the US Marshalls service for selling and/or manufacturing "anti-circumvention" devices as prohibited by 17-USC-1201 - the DMCA.
Early reports indicate that the items that are causing these retail outlets such grief are commonly known as patch-cables.
According to Harvey Buttnut, well known computer geek, these patch cables can be used to pipe the analog audio from a CD player into the audio input of a computer - allowing the computer to make a recording of the CD with minimal quality loss and no more copy protection.
Lawyers for Sony Corp. at the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe confirmed that it was their investigation that led to the raids on these stores. Apparently, the lawyers' son had accidentily purchased a DRM protected CD from a music store and wanted to play the content on a portable MP3 player.
There are a LOT of out of work programmers and system admin/techie types out in the real world. These guys are hungry, and in many cases, have mouths at home to feed.
Don't overplay your being indispensible to the company as you are quite likely to find out how quickly you can be replaced. In other words, don't just walk off the job - that would be interpreted as a mass-quit.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it. If you want the protection of federal labor laws on your side, then unionizing is your only option. Only when you properly organize and are represented by a union do you get the benefit of the NRLB (National Labor Relations Board). It also becomes quite illegal to fire people for organizating efforts./P.
Assume you do go ahead and give a "yes sir" answer, against your own best judgement. Now assume that $5 million later, something blows up. When the finger pointing starts to happen (and it WILL happen), the phrase "the consultant said it was ok" will probably be uttered, and often.
Should the lawyers get ahold of this, you would be minced meat. ESPECIALLY if they find out that you thought your advice was wrong.
Stick to your guns, if you disagree with something the boss is doing, then say so (and preferably document both your disagreement and the reasoning). If you loose the account, so be it. Would you rather be sued for malpractice?
(c) To receive, disrupt, decrypt, transmit, retransmit, acquire, intercept, or facilitate the receipt, disruption, decryption, transmission, retransmission, acquisition, or interception of any telecommunications service without the express authority or actual consent of the telecommunications service provider.
This one looks interesting...
(iii) Any telecommunications access device that has been manufactured, assembled, altered, designed, modified, programmed, or reprogrammed, alone or in conjunction with another device, so as to be capable of facilitating the disruption, acquisition, interception, receipt, transmission, retransmission, or decryption of a telecommunications service without the actual consent or express authorization of the telecommunications service provider, including, but not limited to, any device, technology, product, service, equipment, computer software, or component or part, primarily (Think: Primary purpose of Cable/DSL Modem with NA
If I am reading this right, then radio's, TV's, radio scanners, and WiFi (think wardriving) are now illegal.
First of all, there will be the cost savings of not having to license an anti-virus suite for your email server.
Next, there is the per-seat licensing issue that will simply go away. No more $35,000 (or so) for licensing 1000 connections into an Exchange server.
Next, if you want to implement a decent campus-wide kiosk type Internet access system, there are plenty of NCD type terminals ($30.00 or so on ebay in quantity) that work remotely with XFree86. Our friends at the K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project can probably offer some advice on how to set this sort of system up.
If you need to maintain some sort of Windows compatibility (there will probably be 1 or 2 systems that must run Windows only software), our friends at the Samba Project offer an excellent Windows Networking compatibility layer.
You can also emphasize that without Windows, your computer investment won't become obsolete in 2 years.
I could probably come up with hundreds of other ideas, but this should help get things rolling.
The idea here is that they will establish lots of history here with winning case after case. Once they have a "winning track record" here by winning the last 20 or so cases, then they will start to go after the bigger fish.
The courts don't care how big the defendants were (or are) in the wins, just that they won.
Any court will consider the fact that the patent has been successful 20 or so times in previous courts as pretty overwhelming evidence of it's validity.
Let's not forget the battlecry of the armchair observers - IANAL
If you think playing video is bad under Linux, try setting up network printing in a usable manner.
Whoever thought that PostCrap was a good idea for a page defination language should be taken out back and shot - multiple times.
It's pretty bad when my network printer under Linux constantly is running out of page render memory, yet when I print the same document to the same printer using the same software (OpenOffice) under Windows, the document comes out looking fine (and is all there, not cut off at the bottom due to the printer running out of memory). And don't get me started on how slow printing is under Linux.
I used to buy "dead" hard drives from a local retailer. Drives he pulled from systems that were supposedly dead drives.
Most interesting find: A full copy of AutoCAD 12, with several part prints for automotive components for GM. Hard drive appeared to be pulled from a system belonging to Eaton Automotive. When I got it , it didn't spin up. One quick slam to the desk got it spinning (remember the old Conner 40 meg drives). It wasn't like I was concerned about breaking the drive - it was already "dead" when I got it.
;; ANSWER SECTION: news.bbc.co.uk. 86043 IN A 64.246.28.230 <br> ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: bbc.co.uk. 1787 IN NS ns1.thny.bbc.co.uk. bbc.co.uk. 1787 IN NS ns.bbc.co.uk. bbc.co.uk. 1787 IN NS ns.reith.bbc.co.uk. bbc.co.uk. 1787 IN NS ns1.bbc.co.uk. bbc.co.uk. 1787 IN NS ns1.thdo.bbc.co.uk. <br> ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns.bbc.co.uk. 1787 IN A 132.185.132.21 ns.reith.bbc.co.uk. 3587 IN A 132.185.134.10 ns1.bbc.co.uk. 1787 IN A 195.152.97.21 ns1.thdo.bbc.co.uk. 6387 IN A 212.58.224.21 ns1.thny.bbc.co.uk. 6387 IN A 38.160.150.21
The IP address isn't matching any of the networks for the.bbc.co.uk domain - at least on my dns host.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be sooooo easy to do, too...
Stipulation - both sides (plaintiff and defendant) agree to the following.
Motion - a request to the court regarding the case
Deft - defendant
So Ordered - the judge reviewed the "stipulated motion" and agreed with it. The changed Reply Brief (answer) due date is now 10/10/03...
Before anyone accuses me otherwise, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV...
You know, if you want a fair and decent way to do product activation, maybe the idea of tying the product to a single computer is taking the wrong approach...
How about using some sort of portable id storage device (like a USB keydrive or a Dallas Semiconductor Crypto I-Button) to store the activation. No more concerns about installing the software on hundreds of computers. Just tie the id storage device to the software somehow, and take the id device where-ever you need to run the software from.
How hard is that?
That's because the SEC can't do something until there is an actual crime committed. When it comes to appearances and "guessing", the SEC is completely powerless to do anything.
And before anyone makes some noise about "their execs are dumping their stock holdings now", remember that the one exec who has been selling his stock had filed a plan with the SEC back in January to do so.
The best (and arguably only) place for us to file complaints with is the Federal Trade Commission. Even then, it takes more than "they might be doing something wrong" to get them to take notice. The federal entities can not act preemptively (except the millitary, but that's another story) so they can not stop SCO from being annoying.
Some have made noise asking why the courts don't stop SCO. Again, they can't until someone goes through the motions of filing a lawsuit asking the courts to do so. The courts cannot act preemptively.
Damn - Not coming to Detroit. How can I take part in this once in a lifetime event if it's not even coming to my neighborhood???
Um... This one has played too long, time for some rebuttal here....
While I don't know about this "Chipotle" chain you mention (I haven't seen one around here in South East Michigan), I do have first hand knowledge that the POS (Point of Sale) system used in the Corporate owned stores of McDonalds is NOT based on SCO. They may have been some time (years) ago, but not today.
Today, the POS system at McDonalds corporate stores is Windows based, and has been for some time now. The terminals are semi-intelligent RS232 terminals with LCD touchscreens that talk to a Windows machine in the managers office.
Now I don't know what corporate (or the regional offices) are using, but at the store level, it's Windows.
While others are sitting in the wings, complaining about what SCO is doing, I finally got off my duff and The text of my complaint follows:
Go ahead and TRY to use cash to rent a car at an airport. No credit card, no car - period, end of the argument.
If you go to http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/contactus.asp you will find that they have a nice little web form for commentary to them.
For example, my comment to them...
I am making about $10k less a year than I was 2 years ago. It sucks too...
At least I am doing better than I was last year (was unemployed for 9 out of 12 months) so I guess I am doing better - in a fairly narrow perspective...
I've received sponsorship money from some pretty big companies for the development (or augmentation) of an open-source project I wrote.
Now, this wasn't a "here is some money, go write something useful" type of sponsorship, but more along the lines of "we like your work but need a certain feature added. Here is the money, add the feature".
It probably doesn't help you though, since they (the money) came to me...
Perhaps my perspective is wrong here, but isn't it a touch disingenious to in some way ask SCO to send me an invoice for the so-called Linux IP, then turn around and complain about fraud?
Asking them to send the invoice is just as good as ordering a product AFAIK.
In other words - Don't call them asking to be placed on their mailing list or anything else equally silly.
For those of you who don't know, this stuff has been around for quite some time, I'm thinking years...
First of all, a little company called Eventide has been making pitch shifters for literally decades. The H969 has been capable of using an external control voltage to vary the amount of shift since it was released to the market back in the late 80's. The newer H-3000's were MIDI capable, again allowing for remote control of how much to shift the pitch of the incoming signal. The H-3000's have been around since the early 90's.
Next, I don't remember if it was Synclavier, Emulator/EM-U Systems, or Fairlight systems (no longer in business) that came out with the first pitch-to-midi convertor - again back in the late 80's.
The point is that there were people doing this way back then, using pitch-tracking hardware and pitch shifting hardware in a way to create pitch corrected output of singers - and I am talking about in live concerts, not rebroadcasts, not recordings, but live.
Let's not even get into the issue of the number of live bands I've seen where the band used DAT for the group vocals in concert. I'm not talking bar bands either!
To me, the answer to why nobody within the developer community (including myself) is bothering to sue SCO for copyright infringement and GPL licensing violations is quite obvious.
As developers, we have barely enough time in our busy lives to deal with things like writting our next "killer app", let alone things like family and living. On top of this, to sue such a company requires fronting a fairly large amount of cash to a lawyer. Nevermind the level of trust and respect our profession seems to harbor towards lawyers in general.
We all would love to see "someone else" sue (and obviously win) a suit against SCO. The problem is that "we" don't have the time nor the money to defend what is effectively ours. Hence, we will loose our creation(s) because of our lack of willingness to go after the bully.
Like everyone else, if I had the time and the money, I would be all over SCO for violating my copyright and the GPL license. I just can't afford the risk financially right now...
Today, thousands of Radio Shack and other electronics stores were all raided by the US Marshalls service for selling and/or manufacturing "anti-circumvention" devices as prohibited by 17-USC-1201 - the DMCA.
Early reports indicate that the items that are causing these retail outlets such grief are commonly known as patch-cables.
According to Harvey Buttnut, well known computer geek, these patch cables can be used to pipe the analog audio from a CD player into the audio input of a computer - allowing the computer to make a recording of the CD with minimal quality loss and no more copy protection.
Lawyers for Sony Corp. at the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe confirmed that it was their investigation that led to the raids on these stores. Apparently, the lawyers' son had accidentily purchased a DRM protected CD from a music store and wanted to play the content on a portable MP3 player.
There are a LOT of out of work programmers and system admin/techie types out in the real world. These guys are hungry, and in many cases, have mouths at home to feed.
Don't overplay your being indispensible to the company as you are quite likely to find out how quickly you can be replaced. In other words, don't just walk off the job - that would be interpreted as a mass-quit.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it. If you want the protection of federal labor laws on your side, then unionizing is your only option. Only when you properly organize and are represented by a union do you get the benefit of the NRLB (National Labor Relations Board). It also becomes quite illegal to fire people for organizating efforts./P.
Malpractice isn't limited to the medical field, by any stretch of the imagination.
Malpractice can be generally be thought of as doing something that goes against the training you received in your profession.
IANAL
Well, keep in mind one fairly important thing...
Assume you do go ahead and give a "yes sir" answer, against your own best judgement. Now assume that $5 million later, something blows up. When the finger pointing starts to happen (and it WILL happen), the phrase "the consultant said it was ok" will probably be uttered, and often.
Should the lawyers get ahold of this, you would be minced meat. ESPECIALLY if they find out that you thought your advice was wrong.
Stick to your guns, if you disagree with something the boss is doing, then say so (and preferably document both your disagreement and the reasoning). If you loose the account, so be it. Would you rather be sued for malpractice?
Let me see....
(c) To receive, disrupt, decrypt, transmit, retransmit, acquire, intercept, or facilitate the receipt, disruption, decryption, transmission, retransmission, acquisition, or interception of any telecommunications service without the express authority or actual consent of the telecommunications service provider.
This one looks interesting... (iii) Any telecommunications access device that has been manufactured, assembled, altered, designed, modified, programmed, or reprogrammed, alone or in conjunction with another device, so as to be capable of facilitating the disruption, acquisition, interception, receipt, transmission, retransmission, or decryption of a telecommunications service without the actual consent or express authorization of the telecommunications service provider, including, but not limited to, any device, technology, product, service, equipment, computer software, or component or part, primarily (Think: Primary purpose of Cable/DSL Modem with NA
If I am reading this right, then radio's, TV's, radio scanners, and WiFi (think wardriving) are now illegal.
Need it be said - IANAL!
First of all, there will be the cost savings of not having to license an anti-virus suite for your email server.
Next, there is the per-seat licensing issue that will simply go away. No more $35,000 (or so) for licensing 1000 connections into an Exchange server.
Next, if you want to implement a decent campus-wide kiosk type Internet access system, there are plenty of NCD type terminals ($30.00 or so on ebay in quantity) that work remotely with XFree86. Our friends at the K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project can probably offer some advice on how to set this sort of system up.
If you need to maintain some sort of Windows compatibility (there will probably be 1 or 2 systems that must run Windows only software), our friends at the Samba Project offer an excellent Windows Networking compatibility layer.
You can also emphasize that without Windows, your computer investment won't become obsolete in 2 years.
I could probably come up with hundreds of other ideas, but this should help get things rolling.
If I remember from my College days (Broadcast Engineering major), NTSC == Never Twice the Same Color.
FCC == Friendly Candy Corporation
The idea here is that they will establish lots of history here with winning case after case. Once they have a "winning track record" here by winning the last 20 or so cases, then they will start to go after the bigger fish.
The courts don't care how big the defendants were (or are) in the wins, just that they won.
Any court will consider the fact that the patent has been successful 20 or so times in previous courts as pretty overwhelming evidence of it's validity.
Let's not forget the battlecry of the armchair observers - IANAL
If you think playing video is bad under Linux, try setting up network printing in a usable manner.
Whoever thought that PostCrap was a good idea for a page defination language should be taken out back and shot - multiple times.
It's pretty bad when my network printer under Linux constantly is running out of page render memory, yet when I print the same document to the same printer using the same software (OpenOffice) under Windows, the document comes out looking fine (and is all there, not cut off at the bottom due to the printer running out of memory). And don't get me started on how slow printing is under Linux.
I used to buy "dead" hard drives from a local retailer. Drives he pulled from systems that were supposedly dead drives.
Most interesting find: A full copy of AutoCAD 12, with several part prints for automotive components for GM. Hard drive appeared to be pulled from a system belonging to Eaton Automotive. When I got it , it didn't spin up. One quick slam to the desk got it spinning (remember the old Conner 40 meg drives). It wasn't like I was concerned about breaking the drive - it was already "dead" when I got it.
Am I the only one getting a page that doesn't belong to the BBC?
Doing a host -a on news.bbc.co.uk gives:
The IP address isn't matching any of the networks for the .bbc.co.uk domain - at least on my dns host.
Anyone else getting this problem?