I demand my right to shift materials that I've rightfully purchased onto other media... I have my entire music collection, not to mention a mass of recorded video
Assuming you actually own the recording, I agree with you, but that is often not the case. For instance, if you recorded a TV show off the air with your MythTV, you do not own the recording. Broadcast is intended to be a one-time "performance" and the broadcasters can and do reserve the right to sell recordings via other means.
Sure, I use a DVR too, but if we're gonna use legal hair-splitting to justify doing away with DRM, let's be clear about what we're advocating. "Honest, officer, that bicycle was just laying there unlocked so I assumed it was OK to take it..."
I demand my right to shift materials that I've rightfully purchased onto other media... I have my entire music collection, not to mention a mass of recorded video
Assuming you actually own the recording, I agree with, but that is often not the case. For instance, if you recorded a TV show off the air with your MythTV, you do not own the recording. Broadcast is intended to be a one-time "performance" and the broadcasters can and do reserve the right to sell recordings via other means.
Sure, I use a DVR too, but if we're gonna use legal hair-splitting to justify doing away with DRM, let's be clear about what we're advocating. "Honest, officer, that bicycle was just laying there unlocked so I assumed it was OK to take it..."
DragonFly can't be 4-clause free unless the contacted every developer that committed code to FreeBSD before they forked it and asked for releases. I'm pretty certain this didn't happen, because I was never contacted for my tiny little contributions to libc. NetBSD is probably closer to this than anyone in the BSD world, due to the creation of the NetBSD Foundation and their copyright assignment, and the due diligence that followed the Foundation.
Maybe because those other manufacturers are sacrificing too much weight for durability.
Most of those ultra-light "executive jewelry" machines are lightly built and lightly used. The boss uses it to mangle his email on the road, and mostly carries it around to show others he's important enough for the company to blow three grand on a useless piece of junk for him to tote around.
Apple and IBM build laptops designed to last, and so they weigh an extra pound over the ultralights. If you're footing the bill yourself, and can make do with a machine that's not the hottest thing going for a couple of years, they are the only way to go. If the company is footing the bill or you think you can't live with a CPU that's two years old, buy the dell junk du jour and convince yourself you're happy.
My employer makes an appliance product that includes quite a bit of open source software, including FreeBSD, Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, all the usual networking stuff. We contribute code, testing, and bug fixes to several projects related to our business, and donate hardware and sometimes travel money to conferences and other efforts.
How do we make money on that? We sell an appliance, and it comes with a subscription for services and data. We sell the hardware a price point that doesn't pay for the software development effort plus the cost of the hardware, but we make a profit on the subscription. It's sort of like the 'sell the support' model plus the data subscription. The product is a web filter, but similar models work for email filters, intrusion detection/prevention, etc.
...the quality of the average American IT worker is far better than those from India.
I've been involved in a few outsourcing projects now, which have ranged from "disappointing" to "disaster." While I can agree that the quality of the code we received back was universally "not very good," the bigger problems were on our own management side.
Like most American product companies, where our products are software or have significant software in them, our processes range from bad to nonexistant. Product managers, engineering managers, even the VP of Sales feels free to walk right into engineering cubes and ask for features willy-nilly, and they usually get them. While you can rail this isn't the right way to do software development, it has managed to create a multi-trillion dollar industry and everyone does it.
Moving to a cheaper offshoring location, or even to one with "better" programmers won't change the failure rate significantly because the failures are built into the process.
Means if we enter in to a treaty, it is a law up there on the same level as the Constitution itself and has to be obeyed as such.
Er, no. Welcome to Civics 101. All laws and treaties in the USA are legal only in that they do not conflict with the Constitution, as amended. Plus the US Govt has never been particularly good at sticking to treaties, except when it suits the fancy of the current administration, so words like "binding" and "obey" have a pretty dubious application here.
That said, there is nothing in this proposed law that would be unconstitutional, it's just the usual corporate greed legislated on a worldwide rather than national scale. But hey, multinationalism is good, right? That's how Europe is teaching the unwashed heathens in America how to be patricians to the rest of the world, right?
I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life
Why settle for mundane utility languages? Learn Navajo or Swahili or Inuit, then design a programming language based on the linguistic concepts and world view you've now acquired. A Navajo-based computing language would be interesting, it would perhaps specialize in calculating only that which is actually worth calculating. Of course such a language would completely eliminiate Slashdot from existence.
Grab the cash, stuff it somewhere profitable and safe, and get the hell outta the computer business as soon as you can. Or stick around in your old age and be able to share your wealth of knowlege at your pace, secure in the knowlege your nest-egg is there if the morons of the world start weighing you down.
You can't do that if you bearly break even your whole working life.
However, they're missing the boat on a lot of people that would love to install OS X hassle-free on their own choice of hardware.
Haha, you almost got the point then it slipped away from you. How many of those installations "on their own hardware" will be "hassle free" when Joe Sixpack is attempting to install OS X86 on his P233MMX with VirgeDX video card? Or his whopping new Hexatron x64 with Nvidia 43000 that Apple has never even heard of, let alone attempted to support?
Apple doesn't have the resources to embrace the wild abandon of the PC world, and they don't particularly want to. A lot of their success is tied up in Macs "just working" to a greater extent than PCs do, and a lot of this is due to their known working combinations of software and hardware.
Fortunately, we have a choice. If a Mac won't do what you need, a PC probably will, with a higher pain threshold for making it work. Good luck to ya, you'll probably need it.
Your analysis seems close. The basics of this technique are not really all that new, a company named Clyde Digital produced several system monitoring tools for VAX/VMS back in the late 80s that loaded VMS system patches. The code for the patches was encrypted uniquely for each customer; the customer's license key was used to decrypt the code as it was loaded into the VMS kernel. This would certainly qualify as an obfuscation, if not the on-the-fly obfuscation mentioned in the patent.
Creating a chip to sit on a memory bus and decrypt instructions as they are fetched from memory, which is what this really sounds like, is sick and wrong. One question that leaps immediately to mind is what kinds of hoops you have to jump through to get your operating system 'keyed' so it will boot on the iMax86.
Jeers to Apple for attempting to create a system we won't be able to run open source operating systems on, if that's what they're shooting for.
I think that there will be an embedded Linux kernel running on a chip on the motherboard.
Yeah, go right on thinking that, then take a look at how OS X is actually laid out. Can you say microkernel? Apparently you don't grok microkernel, but that doesn't mean it's not in there.
Yeah, right, linux buried inside Mac OS X. Hahahahahahahaha...
I'm pretty certain the 'Type R' next to me at the stoplight this morning has one of these LRADs installed, too. Problem is, the kid that owns it is too stupid to properly employ the high frequency sound needed to really kill, so the booms and thumps coming from his car just annoy me instead.
I can't wait for the inevitable Slashdot article on how to make your own LRAD from a Pringles can.
Re:Am i the only one...
on
Slacker or Sick
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Symantec must be about to release a new edition of Mac OS X tools; they've been bad-mouthing OS X security for months now. As the old saw goes, there's more money to be made in extending the problem than in fixing it.
Or perhaps it's just the curious fact that every time Symantec says something, Bill Gates' lips move...
Microsoft didn't call open source software a cancer, it called the GPL a cancer. As opposed to the other half of the open source world, which considers it viral.
Some remote control submarines are wildly expensive, others are not. See HobbyTron for the $20 "zip zap" of radio control submarines, for instance.
A quick google for "remote control submarine" will get you a lot of relevant links. A scale model may not be what you're looking for, but it will get you a lot of useful information on what you can do, and where to start.
This was already done way back in the early 80's, in the USA at least. The B1-B bomber used a keypad where each key was a small plasma display that could be reprogrammed for new menus. I believe the design and patent were done by GTE, but I'm not sure.
Some anonymous coward reports there may have been more to the legendary aspect of code being copied from AIX into Linux; see the follow-up on Grokster at http://tinyurl.com/do5d5.
What approach is that? Sticking his name on the FreeBSD ports and calling it "portage"? The part that is so laughable is that anyone ever saw Gentoo as "revolutionary".
I hope Microsoft pays him well.
It's not clear to me when the BSD license originated.
With the first Berkeley Software Distribution, March 9, 1978.
When I was running Berkeley Unix in 1981, I think just before 4BSD came out, they required that you show them your ATT Unix license before they would send a tape.
If you asked for the full tape that included the entire system sources, you had to have a UNIX license to get the UNIX source code parts. Some of the programs developed entirely at Berkeley, such as curses and vi, were available on tape or via Usenet with the Berkeley copyright and license without a UNIX license.
The rationale behind the BSD license was that since the taxpayer had already paid for the work, he should have maximal usage of that work.
Precisely, and thank you for noting this point. I think taxpayer funded software development, including from university research programs, should be licensed under terms like the Berkeley or MIT license rather than the GPL because (in the USA at least) corporations pay taxes and should therefore be allowed to benefit from the research they have paid for.
For software developed by individuals or teams, the license should reflect the wishes of the authors. If you wish to keep your software free, use the GPL.
A couple of years ago I bought a cheap "MicroTel" machine from WalMart to use as a crash-test dummy. When I was done I gave it to my sister who is still using it with some variant of Winders. WalMart.com has a 1.6 GHz Duron machine with WinXP for $298, if you're looking for cheap. That's only about $120 more than the full-up fee for WinXP, in case you want that. *shudder*
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using rsync to back up 3 macs (g4 mini, g4 ibook, macbook) to the same firewire drive for years, on 10.4.
Perhaps in your father's case PEBKAC?
I demand my right to shift materials that I've rightfully purchased onto other media... I have my entire music collection, not to mention a mass of recorded video
Assuming you actually own the recording, I agree with you, but that is often not the case. For instance, if you recorded a TV show off the air with your MythTV, you do not own the recording. Broadcast is intended to be a one-time "performance" and the broadcasters can and do reserve the right to sell recordings via other means.
Sure, I use a DVR too, but if we're gonna use legal hair-splitting to justify doing away with DRM, let's be clear about what we're advocating. "Honest, officer, that bicycle was just laying there unlocked so I assumed it was OK to take it..."
Assuming you actually own the recording, I agree with, but that is often not the case. For instance, if you recorded a TV show off the air with your MythTV, you do not own the recording. Broadcast is intended to be a one-time "performance" and the broadcasters can and do reserve the right to sell recordings via other means.
Sure, I use a DVR too, but if we're gonna use legal hair-splitting to justify doing away with DRM, let's be clear about what we're advocating. "Honest, officer, that bicycle was just laying there unlocked so I assumed it was OK to take it..."
DragonFly can't be 4-clause free unless the contacted every developer that committed code to FreeBSD before they forked it and asked for releases. I'm pretty certain this didn't happen, because I was never contacted for my tiny little contributions to libc. NetBSD is probably closer to this than anyone in the BSD world, due to the creation of the NetBSD Foundation and their copyright assignment, and the due diligence that followed the Foundation.
Most of those ultra-light "executive jewelry" machines are lightly built and lightly used. The boss uses it to mangle his email on the road, and mostly carries it around to show others he's important enough for the company to blow three grand on a useless piece of junk for him to tote around. Apple and IBM build laptops designed to last, and so they weigh an extra pound over the ultralights. If you're footing the bill yourself, and can make do with a machine that's not the hottest thing going for a couple of years, they are the only way to go. If the company is footing the bill or you think you can't live with a CPU that's two years old, buy the dell junk du jour and convince yourself you're happy.
My employer makes an appliance product that includes quite a bit of open source software, including FreeBSD, Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, all the usual networking stuff. We contribute code, testing, and bug fixes to several projects related to our business, and donate hardware and sometimes travel money to conferences and other efforts.
How do we make money on that? We sell an appliance, and it comes with a subscription for services and data. We sell the hardware a price point that doesn't pay for the software development effort plus the cost of the hardware, but we make a profit on the subscription. It's sort of like the 'sell the support' model plus the data subscription. The product is a web filter, but similar models work for email filters, intrusion detection/prevention, etc.
I've been involved in a few outsourcing projects now, which have ranged from "disappointing" to "disaster." While I can agree that the quality of the code we received back was universally "not very good," the bigger problems were on our own management side.
Like most American product companies, where our products are software or have significant software in them, our processes range from bad to nonexistant. Product managers, engineering managers, even the VP of Sales feels free to walk right into engineering cubes and ask for features willy-nilly, and they usually get them. While you can rail this isn't the right way to do software development, it has managed to create a multi-trillion dollar industry and everyone does it.
Moving to a cheaper offshoring location, or even to one with "better" programmers won't change the failure rate significantly because the failures are built into the process.
Er, no. Welcome to Civics 101. All laws and treaties in the USA are legal only in that they do not conflict with the Constitution, as amended. Plus the US Govt has never been particularly good at sticking to treaties, except when it suits the fancy of the current administration, so words like "binding" and "obey" have a pretty dubious application here.
That said, there is nothing in this proposed law that would be unconstitutional, it's just the usual corporate greed legislated on a worldwide rather than national scale. But hey, multinationalism is good, right? That's how Europe is teaching the unwashed heathens in America how to be patricians to the rest of the world, right?
Would the poopy paper be a "derivative work" or a "work that uses the GPL'd work?"
Why settle for mundane utility languages? Learn Navajo or Swahili or Inuit, then design a programming language based on the linguistic concepts and world view you've now acquired. A Navajo-based computing language would be interesting, it would perhaps specialize in calculating only that which is actually worth calculating. Of course such a language would completely eliminiate Slashdot from existence.
You can't do that if you bearly break even your whole working life.
Haha, you almost got the point then it slipped away from you. How many of those installations "on their own hardware" will be "hassle free" when Joe Sixpack is attempting to install OS X86 on his P233MMX with VirgeDX video card? Or his whopping new Hexatron x64 with Nvidia 43000 that Apple has never even heard of, let alone attempted to support?
Apple doesn't have the resources to embrace the wild abandon of the PC world, and they don't particularly want to. A lot of their success is tied up in Macs "just working" to a greater extent than PCs do, and a lot of this is due to their known working combinations of software and hardware.
Fortunately, we have a choice. If a Mac won't do what you need, a PC probably will, with a higher pain threshold for making it work. Good luck to ya, you'll probably need it.
Creating a chip to sit on a memory bus and decrypt instructions as they are fetched from memory, which is what this really sounds like, is sick and wrong. One question that leaps immediately to mind is what kinds of hoops you have to jump through to get your operating system 'keyed' so it will boot on the iMax86.
Jeers to Apple for attempting to create a system we won't be able to run open source operating systems on, if that's what they're shooting for.
Yeah, go right on thinking that, then take a look at how OS X is actually laid out. Can you say microkernel? Apparently you don't grok microkernel, but that doesn't mean it's not in there.
Yeah, right, linux buried inside Mac OS X. Hahahahahahahaha...
I can't wait for the inevitable Slashdot article on how to make your own LRAD from a Pringles can.
who felt just like the rats?
Or perhaps it's just the curious fact that every time Symantec says something, Bill Gates' lips move...
Microsoft didn't call open source software a cancer, it called the GPL a cancer. As opposed to the other half of the open source world, which considers it viral.
A quick google for "remote control submarine" will get you a lot of relevant links. A scale model may not be what you're looking for, but it will get you a lot of useful information on what you can do, and where to start.
This was already done way back in the early 80's, in the USA at least. The B1-B bomber used a keypad where each key was a small plasma display that could be reprogrammed for new menus. I believe the design and patent were done by GTE, but I'm not sure.
Some anonymous coward reports there may have been more to the legendary aspect of code being copied from AIX into Linux; see the follow-up on Grokster at http://tinyurl.com/do5d5.
BSD. Duh.
What approach is that? Sticking his name on the FreeBSD ports and calling it "portage"? The part that is so laughable is that anyone ever saw Gentoo as "revolutionary". I hope Microsoft pays him well.
With the first Berkeley Software Distribution, March 9, 1978.
When I was running Berkeley Unix in 1981, I think just before 4BSD came out, they required that you show them your ATT Unix license before they would send a tape.
If you asked for the full tape that included the entire system sources, you had to have a UNIX license to get the UNIX source code parts. Some of the programs developed entirely at Berkeley, such as curses and vi, were available on tape or via Usenet with the Berkeley copyright and license without a UNIX license.
The rationale behind the BSD license was that since the taxpayer had already paid for the work, he should have maximal usage of that work.
Precisely, and thank you for noting this point. I think taxpayer funded software development, including from university research programs, should be licensed under terms like the Berkeley or MIT license rather than the GPL because (in the USA at least) corporations pay taxes and should therefore be allowed to benefit from the research they have paid for.
For software developed by individuals or teams, the license should reflect the wishes of the authors. If you wish to keep your software free, use the GPL.
A couple of years ago I bought a cheap "MicroTel" machine from WalMart to use as a crash-test dummy. When I was done I gave it to my sister who is still using it with some variant of Winders. WalMart.com has a 1.6 GHz Duron machine with WinXP for $298, if you're looking for cheap. That's only about $120 more than the full-up fee for WinXP, in case you want that. *shudder*