An upgrade is a change or refresh of a product you already own. If you sell the original product, you no longer have the right to install the upgrade. It's been that way in the PC market since 1978 (well before M$ became dominant) and in the commercial software market long before that. Why would anyone think otherwise?
Well put - but the article in question isn't dealing with upgrades in that sense - it doesn't even contain the word "upgrade." Take a look.
What you say would be true if a user bought the WindowsXP "upgrade" edition, then sold the OEM copy of Win9x that came with his box. But we're not supposed to sell the OEM copies of Windows even when "upgrading" by buying the full-blown-standalone-retail version of a new OS (MS or otherwise), which we'd have every right to use even if we'd never had the OEM copy in the first place. The OEM copy is something we were virtually forced to pay for, but which becomes legally worthless in this situation.
This policy of Microsoft's isn't designed to prevent piracy or ensure they get paid what they're due - it's designed to extract maximum cash from their victims, like everything else they do. MS realized some time ago that they are incapable of "innovating" as quickly or as dramatically as the hardware makers, so they found a way to boost sales by tying their licenses to the oft-upgraded hardware.
Sony Music Entertainment recently said the CD of Michael Jackson's new single "You Rock My World" was distributed to European radio stations with protection software after the song started showing up on the Internet.
I think it's funny that the author of the story chose to point out the absurdity of this sequence of events in this subtle way.
What were the record execs thinking? "Hey, everyone who wanted to pirate a copy of this Michael Jackson song already has. In retaliation, let's hurt our paying customers! That will show 'em!"
That's not closing the barn door after the horse has gone - that's setting fire to the barn to teach it a lesson.
According to the story, the experienced lag was about 200ms, which equates to a sucky dialup Quake ping. They also mentioned that the maximum acceptable lag for the job was about 330ms - a nearly unplayable Quake ping.
The obvious conclusion is that surgery is easier than Quake, right?:-)
Interesting link. But I've read elsewhere that the WTC and other skyscrapers are, in fact, designed to withstand the impact of large aircraft, that it was only the fire that posed any significant threat to the building as a whole. Odd that the reports should differ on a point that should have a very definite yes/no answer.
Re:space imaging nyc image 09/12/2001
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
What radar image? The images the previous posters mention are not radar images, they are photographs. The cloud of dust extended out over the ocean for many miles, and eventually was as visible a feature of the landscape as Manhattan itself. It was visible with the naked eye (and cam-corder) from the international space station. Some pictures are available at the link given above, although I've seen better ones (don't have the link right now, sorry).
These machines could concievably duplicate something you don't have the right to - time for massive government controls!
Of course, one day, when we all have 3d printers that can build things out metal, plastic, glass, etc, we'll all be able to build machine guns, tanks, artillery pieces, bombs, ICBMs, invisible psycho-killer robot fish, and what have you.
It's just possible that the odd regulation or two in this area could be beneficial. Just possible.
As far as the IP problem: we'll probably end up with both not-free and free/open-source mechanical designs, just like we have not-free and free/open-source software designs now.
In fact, free/open-source material might meet with a lot more success in the "real world" of physical products than it has in the software realm, because the benefits would be obvious, the drawbacks negligible, and the audience larger. Everyone could see the appeal in free, print-your-own bicycles, wristwatches, tires, vinyl siding, etc. There's a definite limit on the level of excitement a new version of "grep" is going to stir up, though.
`(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Doesn't this seem terribly broad? I mean, doesn't reading material printed on dead trees require the application of information (like information about the alphabet and vocabulary of a language) and a process or treatment (like assigning definitions to the words one has extracted from the encoding)?
Is there any copyrightable material that *doesn't* qualify as "protected by a technological measure" by this definition?
Now we have so many more possibilities than back in the days of Galaga and PacMan, yet the games during that time used the available resources much more creatively. Now, we're just getting the nth 3d shooter, rpg or strategy game which are all based upon each other.
Back in the 80s, video games could be written in a few weeks or months by a single person, even when the person was only working on it part-time. There were a lot more games, and a lot of them were very odd/creative/different.
Now, games have multi-million dollar budgets and take man-decades of effort. With such large amounts of capital and time at stake, I'm not surprised that the games themselves tend to be a lot less experimental.
This is proof...that Intel is slowly backing away from the Pentium IV.
Why in the world would a bellweather tech company that is having severely difficult financial times all of a sudden dedicate a whirlwind of time and energy to a previous-generation processor?
Well, this move might be interpreted that way, but there's really nothing "all of a sudden" about this.
Intel had announced plans to release PIIIs at this speed and beyond more than a year ago, but manufacturing problems have held them up. Now they're seeing some light at the end of the manufacturing-problem tunnel, and a chance to wring some more cycles out of a by-now-venerable design (P6 core is circa 1995, I believe).
It's pretty much an established trend that, as CPUs continue to get larger and more expensive to design and develop, the lifespan of each generation has to be extended by cranking the clock speed. If memory serves, Intel's version of the '386 debuted at 16MHz and retired at just 33MHz, a 2x increase. The '486 grew from 25 to 100 MHz, a 4x increase. The Pentium went from 60 to 300 or so (in laptops, at least), a 6x increase. The P6 core at the heart of the Pentium Pro, II, and III chips started life at 150Mhz, and is now closing in on 10x that. Before the Pentium IV was released, Intel had announced it's intention to push the design to at least 10x the debut speed.
The most surprising thing might be that this is considered such big news.
Mass is used to measure the emission gasses because the volume doesn't tell you anything if there's no pressure figure. It's easier to just use mass, one number which tells you everything you need to know. If you were actually doing the chemistry/math related to this stuff, the first thing you'd probably do with volume/pressure figures would be to convert them to masses anway.
The emission gasses can certainly have greater mass than the fuel that was burned, since the emission gasses include the atmospheric oxygen used to burn the fuel. In terms of mass, far more oxygen is consumed than gasoline. You're right that what goes in should have the same mass as what comes out, but you forgot that the gasoline isn't the only thing going in.
How long will it take for the Bush administration (both the President and Vice President are former oil executives are heavily indebted to Big Oil for getting elected) to put a stop to this? Will the Grand Oil Party sit back and watch this without trying to do something about it? Somehow I doubt it.
But they're working on fuel-cell systems that will run on gasoline. Surely the oil companies would be for such a thing? Such a development could actually expand the the fuel-oil market as new applications are developed. Kerosone-powered laptop, anyone? 50 hours run-time on one tank...
It seems people really need a lesson in correlation and causation. Just because two things are correlated (ie they have some link, whether casual or otherwise) doesn't imply causation (that one caused the other).
That's an excellent point, but in some respects, causation may be unimportant in this case. Whatever the causal link (if any), the survey lends weight to the conclusion that by fighting Napster, the RIAA is pissing off their own best customers. That's no surprise to the average Napster user (or the average Slashdotter, for that matter) but maybe the RIAA can eventually be prodded into realizing this.
If you'll recall, 720 KB floppies were eventually supplanted by the hugely popular 1.44 MB floppies, which edged out their predecessors despite "only" doubling capacity.
I'd argue that no 3.5" floppies were *really* popular in the IBM-compatible sphere until the 1.44MB format came along. The older 720k disks were more expensive, slower, less universal, less reliable (in my experience), and smaller (in terms of capacity) than the 5.25" 1.2MB disks that were common at the time. The 720k disks were never the best format around, and perhaps not surprisingly, were never a smashing success, so it was a lot easier to supplant them.
The CD, on the other hand, is one of the most successful data-storage formats in history. I think it will be a lot harder to unseat the CD as the reigning standard.
Then again, maybe I'm just dreading the constant equipment upgrades that will be needed to keep up with the ever-changing disc formats. I'd rather wait for a solid, universally adopted, cheap DVD-R system.
I don't think consumers will be dumb enough to allow the record and movie industries to move from selling copies to selling licenses. Nor will they allow themselves to be duped into high-costing service contracts.
Divx (which essentially sold consumers movie-watching licenses) ultimately died a well-deserved death, but quite a few Divx players were sold. I wish I could agree that the consumers are too smart for this sort of thing, but I see little evidence of it.
Heck, even now, DVDs come with something perilously close to a license agreement when you start them up - all those warnings about when, where, and how you're allowed to play the thing (home use, no public screenings, etc). And DVDs are definitely here to stay; I live in a technological backwater, but even my local Blockbuster has nearly as many DVDs as VHS tapes now.
The speed of sound does vary with the medium. But if it varies proportionally with the density of the medium, then surely you mean it gets *slower* at higher altitudes and temperatures.
I thought that was part of the reason those high-flying spook planes (SR-71, The XB-70 Valkyrie, etc) post such impressive Mach numbers. At those altitudes, sound goes slower - so a speed that might be Mach 2.9 at sea level *is* Mach 3+ at altitude.
Actually, the SR-71 used turbine jets, not ram jets.
They were augmented with some extremely large afterburners and some very clever intake design, however.
All in all, a really remarkable piece of engineering.
And no, just saying they're dumb doesn't settle the case.
Why on Earth not? History is littered with the fatal folly of the stupid - from individual stupidity right on up to national stupidity. It's everywhere. It's the truth behind so much.
Isn't there some rule that says you can't copyright information? That is, doesn't copyright actually protect the presentation of information? You can't copyright, say, a phone number, but you're not supposed to distribute Xeroxes of the phone book.
If I'm right, BugTraq will just have to do a lot of paraphrasing.
Slashdot Mirror
I just had a "conversation" with ALICE and I think my toaster is smarter.
Yeah, a toaster knows the old saying: "It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
Does anyone have a link to a more complete transcript of a conversation with ALICE than the teaser snippets in the article?
Digital audio production and Macs are virtually synonomous; what does this guy have against macs?
An upgrade is a change or refresh of a product you already own. If you sell the original product, you no longer have the right to install the upgrade. It's been that way in the PC market since 1978 (well before M$ became dominant) and in the commercial software market long before that. Why would anyone think otherwise?
Well put - but the article in question isn't dealing with upgrades in that sense - it doesn't even contain the word "upgrade." Take a look.
What you say would be true if a user bought the WindowsXP "upgrade" edition, then sold the OEM copy of Win9x that came with his box. But we're not supposed to sell the OEM copies of Windows even when "upgrading" by buying the full-blown-standalone-retail version of a new OS (MS or otherwise), which we'd have every right to use even if we'd never had the OEM copy in the first place. The OEM copy is something we were virtually forced to pay for, but which becomes legally worthless in this situation.
This policy of Microsoft's isn't designed to prevent piracy or ensure they get paid what they're due - it's designed to extract maximum cash from their victims, like everything else they do. MS realized some time ago that they are incapable of "innovating" as quickly or as dramatically as the hardware makers, so they found a way to boost sales by tying their licenses to the oft-upgraded hardware.
Sony Music Entertainment recently said the CD of Michael Jackson's new single "You Rock My World" was distributed to European radio stations with protection software after the song started showing up on the Internet.
I think it's funny that the author of the story chose to point out the absurdity of this sequence of events in this subtle way.
What were the record execs thinking? "Hey, everyone who wanted to pirate a copy of this Michael Jackson song already has. In retaliation, let's hurt our paying customers! That will show 'em!"
That's not closing the barn door after the horse has gone - that's setting fire to the barn to teach it a lesson.
According to the story, the experienced lag was about 200ms, which equates to a sucky dialup Quake ping. They also mentioned that the maximum acceptable lag for the job was about 330ms - a nearly unplayable Quake ping.
:-)
The obvious conclusion is that surgery is easier than Quake, right?
Is any representative of the FBI or of Congress presenting any evidence at all that the Internet was an indispensible part of the attack on Tuesday?
Interesting link. But I've read elsewhere that the WTC and other skyscrapers are, in fact, designed to withstand the impact of large aircraft, that it was only the fire that posed any significant threat to the building as a whole. Odd that the reports should differ on a point that should have a very definite yes/no answer.
What radar image? The images the previous posters mention are not radar images, they are photographs. The cloud of dust extended out over the ocean for many miles, and eventually was as visible a feature of the landscape as Manhattan itself. It was visible with the naked eye (and cam-corder) from the international space station. Some pictures are available at the link given above, although I've seen better ones (don't have the link right now, sorry).
These machines could concievably duplicate something you don't have the right to - time for massive government controls!
Of course, one day, when we all have 3d printers that can build things out metal, plastic, glass, etc, we'll all be able to build machine guns, tanks, artillery pieces, bombs, ICBMs, invisible psycho-killer robot fish, and what have you.
It's just possible that the odd regulation or two in this area could be beneficial. Just possible.
As far as the IP problem: we'll probably end up with both not-free and free/open-source mechanical designs, just like we have not-free and free/open-source software designs now.
In fact, free/open-source material might meet with a lot more success in the "real world" of physical products than it has in the software realm, because the benefits would be obvious, the drawbacks negligible, and the audience larger. Everyone could see the appeal in free, print-your-own bicycles, wristwatches, tires, vinyl siding, etc. There's a definite limit on the level of excitement a new version of "grep" is going to stir up, though.
`(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Doesn't this seem terribly broad? I mean, doesn't reading material printed on dead trees require the application of information (like information about the alphabet and vocabulary of a language) and a process or treatment (like assigning definitions to the words one has extracted from the encoding)?
Is there any copyrightable material that *doesn't* qualify as "protected by a technological measure" by this definition?
Now we have so many more possibilities than back in the days of Galaga and PacMan, yet the games during that time used the available resources much more creatively. Now, we're just getting the nth 3d shooter, rpg or strategy game which are all based upon each other.
Back in the 80s, video games could be written in a few weeks or months by a single person, even when the person was only working on it part-time. There were a lot more games, and a lot of them were very odd/creative/different.
Now, games have multi-million dollar budgets and take man-decades of effort. With such large amounts of capital and time at stake, I'm not surprised that the games themselves tend to be a lot less experimental.
And I agree, it's a shame.
This is proof...that Intel is slowly backing away from the Pentium IV.
Why in the world would a bellweather tech company that is having severely difficult financial times all of a sudden dedicate a whirlwind of time and energy to a previous-generation processor?
Well, this move might be interpreted that way, but there's really nothing "all of a sudden" about this.
Intel had announced plans to release PIIIs at this speed and beyond more than a year ago, but manufacturing problems have held them up. Now they're seeing some light at the end of the manufacturing-problem tunnel, and a chance to wring some more cycles out of a by-now-venerable design (P6 core is circa 1995, I believe).
It's pretty much an established trend that, as CPUs continue to get larger and more expensive to design and develop, the lifespan of each generation has to be extended by cranking the clock speed. If memory serves, Intel's version of the '386 debuted at 16MHz and retired at just 33MHz, a 2x increase. The '486 grew from 25 to 100 MHz, a 4x increase. The Pentium went from 60 to 300 or so (in laptops, at least), a 6x increase. The P6 core at the heart of the Pentium Pro, II, and III chips started life at 150Mhz, and is now closing in on 10x that. Before the Pentium IV was released, Intel had announced it's intention to push the design to at least 10x the debut speed.
The most surprising thing might be that this is considered such big news.
Mass is used to measure the emission gasses because the volume doesn't tell you anything if there's no pressure figure. It's easier to just use mass, one number which tells you everything you need to know. If you were actually doing the chemistry/math related to this stuff, the first thing you'd probably do with volume/pressure figures would be to convert them to masses anway.
The emission gasses can certainly have greater mass than the fuel that was burned, since the emission gasses include the atmospheric oxygen used to burn the fuel. In terms of mass, far more oxygen is consumed than gasoline. You're right that what goes in should have the same mass as what comes out, but you forgot that the gasoline isn't the only thing going in.
How long will it take for the Bush administration (both the President and Vice President are former oil executives are heavily indebted to Big Oil for getting elected) to put a stop to this? Will the Grand Oil Party sit back and watch this without trying to do something about it? Somehow I doubt it.
But they're working on fuel-cell systems that will run on gasoline. Surely the oil companies would be for such a thing? Such a development could actually expand the the fuel-oil market as new applications are developed. Kerosone-powered laptop, anyone? 50 hours run-time on one tank...
It seems people really need a lesson in correlation and causation. Just because two things are correlated (ie they have some link, whether casual or otherwise) doesn't imply causation (that one caused the other).
That's an excellent point, but in some respects, causation may be unimportant in this case. Whatever the causal link (if any), the survey lends weight to the conclusion that by fighting Napster, the RIAA is pissing off their own best customers. That's no surprise to the average Napster user (or the average Slashdotter, for that matter) but maybe the RIAA can eventually be prodded into realizing this.
Not that I'm holding my breath.
If you'll recall, 720 KB floppies were eventually supplanted by the hugely popular 1.44 MB floppies, which edged out their predecessors despite "only" doubling capacity.
I'd argue that no 3.5" floppies were *really* popular in the IBM-compatible sphere until the 1.44MB format came along. The older 720k disks were more expensive, slower, less universal, less reliable (in my experience), and smaller (in terms of capacity) than the 5.25" 1.2MB disks that were common at the time. The 720k disks were never the best format around, and perhaps not surprisingly, were never a smashing success, so it was a lot easier to supplant them.
The CD, on the other hand, is one of the most successful data-storage formats in history. I think it will be a lot harder to unseat the CD as the reigning standard.
Then again, maybe I'm just dreading the constant equipment upgrades that will be needed to keep up with the ever-changing disc formats. I'd rather wait for a solid, universally adopted, cheap DVD-R system.
I don't think consumers will be dumb enough to allow the record and movie industries to move from selling copies to selling licenses. Nor will they allow themselves to be duped into high-costing service contracts.
Divx (which essentially sold consumers movie-watching licenses) ultimately died a well-deserved death, but quite a few Divx players were sold. I wish I could agree that the consumers are too smart for this sort of thing, but I see little evidence of it.
Heck, even now, DVDs come with something perilously close to a license agreement when you start them up - all those warnings about when, where, and how you're allowed to play the thing (home use, no public screenings, etc). And DVDs are definitely here to stay; I live in a technological backwater, but even my local Blockbuster has nearly as many DVDs as VHS tapes now.
The speed of sound does vary with the medium. But if it varies proportionally with the density of the medium, then surely you mean it gets *slower* at higher altitudes and temperatures.
I thought that was part of the reason those high-flying spook planes (SR-71, The XB-70 Valkyrie, etc) post such impressive Mach numbers. At those altitudes, sound goes slower - so a speed that might be Mach 2.9 at sea level *is* Mach 3+ at altitude.
Actually, the SR-71 used turbine jets, not ram jets. They were augmented with some extremely large afterburners and some very clever intake design, however. All in all, a really remarkable piece of engineering.
And no, just saying they're dumb doesn't settle the case.
Why on Earth not? History is littered with the fatal folly of the stupid - from individual stupidity right on up to national stupidity. It's everywhere. It's the truth behind so much.
Isn't there some rule that says you can't copyright information? That is, doesn't copyright actually protect the presentation of information? You can't copyright, say, a phone number, but you're not supposed to distribute Xeroxes of the phone book. If I'm right, BugTraq will just have to do a lot of paraphrasing.
Weren't you supposed to be on vacation, impostor?
You have no peeps, you vicious backstabbing yellow-bellied impostor. Beware, for the wrath of the One True Baba Abhui is upon you!
Beware, Slashdot denizens! There is an impostor among you! Yes, that's right: Bob Abooey is an impostor! I am the One True Baba Abhui!