SCO UNIX lost and so rather than admitting defeat or, God forbid, improving their product the CEO whines about Red Hat. The FSF license terms have always made it possible for a third party to sell distributions or support. It bothers me a bit that a lot of people who have contributed code to the Linux kernel, or to the nuts and bolts that makes a Linux operating system work (silly little things like command line utilities, compilers, windowing systems) don't get beans. It's almost like the distribution and support is valued over writing code.
SCO positioned itself to be a niche player though, they aimed at small businesses that may need a UNIX. Linux pretty solidly took away that niche by being free, but also by being a better product. Red Hat still makes their product, with source code no less, available free for the download. They have to, and this is also how they generated enough good will and recognition for their product. My first linux install was some version 1, slackware and was downloaded entirely via a flaky 2400 baud modem. Painful barely begins to describe the experience. Later on I upgraded to a Red Hat distribution and was very impressed with the install technology. It made the Windows install look like it was the product of not infinite monkeys banging away at a keyboard, but about 12. I still did it over a modem, this time a zippy 14.4K and it was still painful, but from that point on I was willing to pay a nominal fee for a distribution.
As an aside does anybody have numbers for Red Hat installations broken up by free distributions and commercial distributions?
That's not exactly what it says, but it is possibly the outcome. If a segment of code is flagged as potentially infringing a copyright than they have a few options which include yanking the code but also trying to reach an agreement. The US does tend to allow bogus patents, but since Apple is a US company they have to live by US law, not just the parts convenient to them. The judicial system wouldn't be very amicable towards Apple distributing technology patented in US based on it not being patented in the UK, or France or Belgium etc. Perhaps if Apple had servers in the UK and so on, but two or more code bases depending on the geographic location of the programmer in question seems pretty unworkable.
This battle could be won. Content publication tools don't support any format by default, other than a few build in ones. A few years ago PhotoShop didn't even support JPEG. Plug-ins were written which extended PhotoShop to support JPEG. JPEG caught on in a big way partly because lots of geek-underground content providers started using it. This isn't an exact parallel to the situation with a CODEC designed by geeks since JPEG was designed by a commitee, many 'geeks' were on it to be sure, but they were sponsored by the corporations they worked for. JPEG isn't open, but anybody can access the specification w/o owing royalties, or at least a segment of the specification.
The point is that you can guarantee the failure of the CODEC. Just refuse to port to non-open platforms. Thats why I said to use the LGPL so that the library could be linked into plug ins for PhotoShop, QuickTime, Premiere and other proprietary pieces of software, as well as Open Source software like the Gimp. Actually, the Gimp and PhotoShop are bad examples, but I don't know of an Open Source non-linear editing package.
Just generating a CODEC and plug-ins for every package on the face of the earth won't ensure its acceptance of course. Nothing will, but you can greatly increase it. It's up to the geek community to provide the initial content, and it has to be cool enough that more mainstream people will want to see it. A lot of hilarious spoofs on mainstream movies have been posted on Slashdot. If as new ones are created they were posted with this GPL/LGPL CODEC mainstream people would download the CODEC to view it in their favourite software package. This spreads the knowledge of the CODEC as well as increases the acceptance. It also spreads GPL/LGPL software to a whole lot more people, many who would never have heard of it otherwise. Some of these people will poke around with encoding video with the CODEC and so the knowledge and acceptance of the CODEC can spread like a virus.
There are a lot of CODECs out there now and nobody can seem to agree on which one to use. For that reason they're all vulnerable to a competitor. If that competitor came from the Open Source community it would be a boon for it in terms of credibility and mainstream acceptance.
A lot of the posts here are about the lack of free CODECs. It's a problem, but not insurmountable. There has to be a bunch of digital signal processing geeks on Slashdot, they just don't know each other exist. Create an LGPL'd CODEC and library that doesn't infringe on any patents. It won't be easy, but it is doable.
Start off by looking at ways of compressing down information in a single frame (discrete cosine transforms, wavelets, multiresolution etc) then move onto looking into motion estimation, correlation etc.
Apple doesn't actually own the CODECs. They license them from third parties such as Sorenson. Apple licensing out technology they don't own isn't a good idea.
Rotten.com didn't have a legal leg to stand on from what I saw. First of all they didn't do a parody of Dilbert, so that differentiates them from MAD magazine, who apparently did do a parody. Parodies are generally legal, but parody has a definition. Hence, not every form of humour is a parody. Second of all, MAD magazine didn't scan in the original strips, black out the copyright and scribble in their own humour. They actually inked their own version of Dilbert and worked from there.
Rotten.com did that most likely because they knew they'd get a nastygram from United Media's lawyers. They were dredging for publicity.
Parody would be finding a picture of Bill Gates and his laptop or computer and grafting in an image of Tux or something obviously Linux and publishing it. As long as you don't misrepresent it as real you'd probably be safe (not to say you wouldn't get a letter from Microsofts attourneys)
You can't even say they crossed a fine line in this case, they steamrolled over it. Even the original text that accompanied the cartoons said they were expecting them to be yanked.
Some of the information is alarming if its true, though I doubt its veracity. Custom sockets and RAM could easily kill this CPU. The development of a socket is a very non-trivial task and custom RAM requirments can be very pricey. As for this not being a cheap CPU there is almost no way that it could be. Intel may be a few times larger, but there volume will more than make up for it.
Upgradable microcode sounds more useful than it probably is. Sure, you can add new instructions to keep up with the competition but only for a short while. Eventually some architectural feature will stand in the way and while the microcode may due the feature it won't do it efficiently.
Intel has the bucks to do arbitrary architecture changes just to keep the competition on its toes.
This is a much bigger deal than the people who think they can get around it with more specific search terms realize.
Right now doing a search for specific chains of words will reduce the number of hits below the 100,000 hit threshold where they sell placings. For instance I just did a search on 'linux'. It returned about 1.2 million matching pages. If I were a neophyte Linux user this would probably be my first search choice. It's pretty safe to say that there would be greater than 100,000 other neophyte linux users who would do the same thing. Now suppose I'm a company who has a vested interest in spreading disinformation about Linux. Say one with deep pockets such as Microsoft. It would be worth my while to either find a web site biased against Linux or create one and pay for its placement in the first hits. A lot of those > 100,000 hits will search through each site on the first few pages. By placing sites which fit into my agenda in the first hits I can influence peoples perceptions about linux. I can also do it to any other topic.
This is only the beginning though, if selling placement in the search engine is succesful it will quite likely be expanded. Advertising that reaches a target audience as opposed to broad band broadcasting is more effective. That's why there are more commercials for toys during the daytime hours on network television than during prime time. So eventually it gets to the point that your more narrow searches are compromised as well.
This plan is more insidious than banner adds that just happen to match what you are searching for. These 'ads' according to AltaVista will just appear in the rankings. These adds don't even have to be blatant either. Rather than Microsoft buying the top spot and adding in a hit for the corporate web page they add in a hit to an anti-linux site, or even more underhanded they add in links to the typical blind advocacy site "Linux RUL3Z!!!, Microsoft SUCKS!"
All of this can subtly influence people. Linux was just used as an example since its near and dear to most of the hearts of Slashdot readers. Insert just about anything else from presidential campaigning to your favourite brand of feminine hygiene product.
No future with that piece of crap iMac mouse!!
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Motorola G4 Chip News
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You could always buy whatever mouse you want for about 20 bucks.
Wanting to be compensated for your work is not greed. While the definition of the "best art" for instance is completely subjective, Leonardo DaVinci, who many would say produced some of the "best art" did not work for free. He often did work on commision and other times was funded by a patron.
Labourers aren't expected to work for free, in fact many skilled labourers are very well compensated. For a labourer a tangible amount of effort was expended to produce a tangible piece of work and in return an amount of tangible money was exchanged. Creativity is a labour as well though albeit not as tangible. The time and effort spent however is very tangible and without some form of compensation that creative process won't continue. I've known a number of excellent musicians and artists for instance who had to give up their aspirations for gainful employment. Almost none of them were looking to get filthy rich but couldn't even manage to make out a meager existance.
IP law is a great deal older than you imagine. There have been patent or intellectual property disputes for hundreds of years, probably longer. It is my firm belief that most of the people who loudly scream for the abolishment of copyright and patents are the ones who would never have anything that needs protection anyway. Note, I said most, not all.
It's an interesting article and is fairly well thought out. I personally think that the trademark, copyright and patent law system needs a big shakeup. Abolishing it entirely would be detrimental though.
First consider a trademark. This is legal acknowledgement that your company has the exclusive rights to words and symbols to represent your product and/or company. Suppose that trademark law didn't exist. This would mean no laws would be violated if some company with a competing product copied the marketing appearance of some other product. So for instance, I could develop a soda drink which happens to be a cola and market it in a container similar or identical to that of Coca-Cola. Regardless of how you personally feel about Coca-Cola the consumer itself can't be guaranteed of getting what they thought they were purchasing. Maybe they got Coca-Cola, maybe they got some other cola flavoured caffeinated and carbonated sugar water. Some form of trademarking is required, at the very least to protect the consumer. In this case Coca-Cola should be trademarkable, but the generic type of product, Cola, shouldn't be.
The abolishment of copyright law would result in the silencing of a lot of sources of information or art and so on. Copyright protection enables information of these types to be marketed, which enables the holder of the copyright to put a value on the information and eventually the author of the information gets payed. The middleman between the author and money will rapidly disappear from the equation as more and more people become able to self publish and promote, but the copyright protection is still required. People like RMS provide a great deal of free information, but not all of it, or at least not all of it is instantly free. Some of it is held back long enough for them to earn a speakers fee at whatever event they were invited to speak at. If anybody could get hold of his notes prior to the event and freely publish them they could be seriously devalued. The end result is if this is the only thing he has as a source of income that source of income would be jeapordized. Time to look for new work.
Patent law protects innovation, or more accurately it protects companies who innovate. Real innovation is an expensive process, experts need to be hired at high salaries. During the course of the innovative process the innovators themselves are a drain on the financial resources of the company. This financial burden is only recompensed if the innovation works and proves marketable. For every profitable innovation there are many unprofitable ones. In order to recoup the spent capital (and make a tidy profit, since thats the purpose of companies) the right to exclusive ownership of the patented material is provided for some lenght of time. The costs involved in this type of innovation are why you don't see much of it in the OpenSource community. For instance streaming audio and video, image compression, architectural enhancements of computer systems for the most part are the results of commercial ventures. The people with the skills to innovate in these fields want to be paid.
The above laws need a lot of work, they were established when commerce moved a lot slower than it does presently and there are a few things that couldn't be perceived of at the time of their introduction. If they were totally abolished the present technological pace would be significantly dampened however.
The FSF is basically his, or at least he's the figure head for it. He's got the right to make statements, you've got the right to ignore them or choose some license that fits your needs. That's freedom.
Beta was a better technology than VHS. That it was only a Sony technology killed it. DVDs in general use MacroVision to introduce nastiness in the picture quality if you try to copy it. There are ways to defeat this however. Sima for instance makes a MacroVision scrubber.
Linux doesn't run on multiple processors Linux does run on 2 or 4 processors. That's basically the limit based on presently available motherboard technology. What Linux doesn't do is scale like say AIX or IRIX does, where you can run on dozens, hundreds or thousands of processors. I think this will be partially addressed in the coming months as the big iron vendors start adopting Linux as part of their road map. They will have to modify the kernel to work on a switch based architecture rather than a bus based architecture, which will take some time.
Linux doesn't have logging ability Again this is partially true. The contents of/var/log is good for some things but there really needs to be a database to collate information and allow you to browse through it, as opposed to discrete files as exists now.
Linux may be there in 4 years or so I think if the Linux community decides they want to address these concerns then it will take much less time. Linux moves fast on things the community wants.
Windows NT ranked higher than Linux I would have to think this is true, though it didn't have anything to do with the scalability or logging concerns. NT has application support which at the moment Linux lacks. I think the ranking conclusion was misleadingly tied in with the above statements. It may or may not have been done on purpose.
Anyway, somebody should post a response (a well written response, not "you're all morons and will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes!") that does a fair disection of the article.
Regardless of the privacy implications of GUID storage in Microsoft documents this story is fishy. There's a vast number of documents written with these products and thus a vast number of GUID's floating about on the internet. To be able to pull up an individual and point the finger at them this quickly is unrealistic, especially given that they say that they found the matching GUID on a web site. They would have to exhaustively search web sites for documents containing the GUID and perform a match on them in order to do this.
The size of the internet says that this isn't possible. If there is any truth to the story at all it means that this guy was under some other form of surveillance and for that reason his documents were specially selected to be matched. Or it could mean that some portion of this is a sham, maybe the guy was never caught, maybe it was a propoganda ploy by either Microsoft or somebody who boosts Microsoft.
Until this story is confirmed by a somewhat credible news site I'll chalk off the capture of the perpetrator as an urban legend.
A few comments here basically say that because the school said that the course was simple, just point and click, the case should immediately be awarded to the students. It's not that easy. The students 'allege' that the school made statements about the ease of the course. This still needs to be proven.
That said there are a lot of schools which do make statements like that. There is an entire industry comprised of 'schools' that take out late night TV adds which state point blank that if you take a simple course you'll make 50K per year.
Unfortunately people and corporations lie. If this didn't happen we'd need no courts, no patent law etc.
You can filter based on names. Take your mouse, click on 'user account' on the left hand side of the screen. Near the top of the screen click on 'preferences'. Scroll down for a while, there is a chunk of buttons underneath the heading 'Exclude Stories From the Homepage'. Click your mouse on 'JonKatz'. He will never again appear on your personal view of slashdot.
OK, I suppose I've sort of got a vested interest in this if you want to call it that. I do use Apple hardware for personal use. Boycotting is absolutely the wrong thing to do if you ever want to see mainstream companies start to embrace Open Source or GPL or any other similar license. I'm not saying that you've got to accept what their license offers, or contribute to it or sing songs of apple pie and motherhood about it. A few companies are taking their first baby steps towards free software. Yes, they are doing it because they see the possibility of some tangible benefit. They owe that to their employees, stock holders and customers.
Rather than boycott support the efforts of people like Bruce Perens in getting Apple (and other companies) to change the offensive parts of their license agreements. This is new to them, its new to the corporate lawyers. It's even new to the traditional Open Source community. Apple, Netscape, Sun, IBM and all the other companies that are taking their first steps towards open source face difficulties different from what a lone coder or an unassociated group of coders face. They can be sued by a variety of entities: stock holders; customers; competition.
The license will change and for the better. I'm sure of it. Or Apple's open source will fade away into obscurity. I'm sure of that too. The open source community needs examples of companies making a success at open source. It doesn't need examples of companies that either got out of open source because of boycotts or law suits or went under because they went open source. It will happen eventually of course, failures happen, but right now everybody needs some success stories.
Leave the boycotts for televangelists and their campaign against childrens TV shows or uneducated house wives and prime time TV.
It isn't a lack of equipment that makes MP3 less than desirable to audiophiles. MP3 is a lossy compression format. You get those small file sizes because a certain amount of the information is discarded. This is how image compression works like in JPEG or your DVD player as well. The lossy compression also isn't the problem necessarily. The problem comes in when people rip an MP3 for optimal file size and either don't listen to it or listen to it through cheap PC speakers.
As an aside, even a CD is a lossy compression format. You're compressing the audio information with two mechanisms:
1) You're taking an infinite number of analog singal levels and compressing it down to 2^16th discrete steps.
2) You're taking a signal with infinite resolution in the time domain and sampling it at discrete points.
As another aside record albums are lossy too:
Any signal can be represented by an infinite weighted sum of smaller signals. During the process of cutting the LP there is a finite limit to the maximum frequency that can be represented in the grooves of a record. During playback there's also a limit to how quickly your needle can track the grooves. Overall this frequency limits the sound.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that regardless of the technology involved in reproduction if your source information isn't adequately reproduced it still won't sound good. Garbage in, garbage out.
I haven't read through the whole document, but it scares me a lot less now and I can see the utility. There are a couple more needed items in the protocol to make it really useful, but OpenSource is pretty good at that:
1) Protocol translation, there needs to be a mechanism so that the transmitted document is translated to the appropriate language for the printer. For instance if you're sending a PostScript document to somebody with an Epson ink jet printer it should be able to figure out that running the document through GhostView will do the trick.
2) Colour matching, this protocol would be a blessing to the graphic design community but they need colour matching. An additional datatype has to be specified that sends along an optional colour map and applies a corresponding one to make the colour output match what was intended. GIMP also needs this if its to be a serious contender by the way, the last time I looked it didn't.
No, I don't think Theo should just roll over and play dead for these guys unless its in his best interest to do so. They never asked nicely, they offered him the cost of getting a new domain name and a threat to sue if he didn't comply. This is the same level of troglodyte behaviour as Archie Comics trying to force Veronica.org into giving over their domain name. The costs for a domain name is cheap. If you want to protect your trademarks its in your best interest to register them as soon as you even think of developing a company or product. It's the guys name, he didn't try and take over their trademark. I suppose that www.john.[org|com|net] should be disallowed because it might infringe on the trademarks of Taco John's restraunts and www.tony.[org|com|net] should be disallowed because it potentially infringes on Tony Roma's rib house.
You're right that this isn't the same as toysrus being a little miffed at all the *rus domains. In this case there is some truth that the sites are trying to make use of part of the image of Toys R Us ('Backwards R' Us) that is. I still basically think they can grin and bear it. For the most part its a poor attempt at satire and comedians have been making various jokes about *rus for years.
Potentially an even bigger problem than it seems
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Lycos Mp3 Lawsuit?
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This could be an even larger problem if the suit is successful. If Lycos is sued and loses the suit then precedence will be set. This would open the door to lawsuits by software vendors because services like AltaVista or Google can be used to search for pirated software. I can see a certain software company doing this.
Heck, maybe non network saavy people can get into the act too. In most larger cities you can look in the yellow pages and get prostitutes under the thinly disguised heading of Escort Services. I'm sure if the religious kooks otherwise known as TV evangelists come up with the idea it'll be tried.
I can understand that the record companies are incensed by the proliferation of illegaly distributed music on the internet. This is the wrong way to go about problem though, not that there really is a right way. It does eventually effect there bottom line and I'm not a believer that just because a company is profitable or is excessively profitable it deserves to be shafted.
I do think that fairly soon these large record labels and the organizations that protect them will be gone. I sense a paradigm shift coming. With the advent of virtually free web space its quickly becoming possible to become your own manager, promoter and advertising agency. The internet is going to become a global version of the local scene: instead of band members and friends pasting flyers for your latest gig on every available surface it'll be a posting to web sites that promote your particular style of music and links to your latest MP3 single (listen to it a few times for free folks, but if you like it send us dough)
This would cause me not to buy a companies printer unless I could disable it or control the access. Almost all of the features it describes now are already present: printer status; job status; etc. It adds some things that may be useful in a corporate environment: is the printer colour or black and white; how much paper is left; etc. All this is fine, I don't see a need for a whole new protocol for this but thats there perogative.
What I don't like is the idea being able to print to devices on the internet. I already get way to much spam emailed to me, I don't need it printed to my printer automatically. If I can securely control this feature it may be ok, but that wasn't specified in the article. I realize the article had zero technical content but quite frankly I wouldn't be at all suprised if this ends up being another 'feature' that can be invisibly turned on.
I suppose I'm in some luck, I use two operating systems for personal use, and neither of them is made by MicroSoft.
Thats what user preferences are for. Set your threshold to -1000000000 or so, if there isn't a button to ignore thresholds.
Journalistic integrity and objectivism
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Quickie Fu
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Journalistic integrity went out the window (no pun intended) a long time ago, if it ever really was. I remember when I was a kid and first started reading the paper how unimpressed I was with so called journalistic objectivism. Our local rag (Canadian city with a population of about 220000 at the time) would constantly insert editorial opinions inside of articles. This was probably 16 or 18 years ago. Now most of the paper is taken up by syndicated journalists, each with their own agenda or axe to grind. Online headline news for some reason seems to have less opinion inserted, so I tend to only read the local paper for local (but biased) stories and the comics (though since Calvin and Hobbes disappeared I don't even do that often). Online there are still the various wolves disguised as reporters, but headline stories on say ABC News does seem less biased than print publications.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO UNIX lost and so rather than admitting defeat or, God forbid, improving their product the CEO whines about Red Hat. The FSF license terms have always made it possible for a third party to sell distributions or support. It bothers me a bit that a lot of people who have contributed code to the Linux kernel, or to the nuts and bolts that makes a Linux operating system work (silly little things like command line utilities, compilers, windowing systems) don't get beans. It's almost like the distribution and support is valued over writing code.
SCO positioned itself to be a niche player though, they aimed at small businesses that may need a UNIX. Linux pretty solidly took away that niche by being free, but also by being a better product. Red Hat still makes their product, with source code no less, available free for the download. They have to, and this is also how they generated enough good will and recognition for their product. My first linux install was some version 1, slackware and was downloaded entirely via a flaky 2400 baud modem. Painful barely begins to describe the experience. Later on I upgraded to a Red Hat distribution and was very impressed with the install technology. It made the Windows install look like it was the product of not infinite monkeys banging away at a keyboard, but about 12. I still did it over a modem, this time a zippy 14.4K and it was still painful, but from that point on I was willing to pay a nominal fee for a distribution.
As an aside does anybody have numbers for Red Hat installations broken up by free distributions and commercial distributions?
That's not exactly what it says, but it is possibly the outcome. If a segment of code is flagged as potentially infringing a copyright than they have a few options which include yanking the code but also trying to reach an agreement. The US does tend to allow bogus patents, but since Apple is a US company they have to live by US law, not just the parts convenient to them. The judicial system wouldn't be very amicable towards Apple distributing technology patented in US based on it not being patented in the UK, or France or Belgium etc. Perhaps if Apple had servers in the UK and so on, but two or more code bases depending on the geographic location of the programmer in question seems pretty unworkable.
This battle could be won. Content publication tools don't support any format by default, other than a few build in ones. A few years ago PhotoShop didn't even support JPEG. Plug-ins were written which extended PhotoShop to support JPEG. JPEG caught on in a big way partly because lots of geek-underground content providers started using it. This isn't an exact parallel to the situation with a CODEC designed by geeks since JPEG was designed by a commitee, many 'geeks' were on it to be sure, but they were sponsored by the corporations they worked for. JPEG isn't open, but anybody can access the specification w/o owing royalties, or at least a segment of the specification.
The point is that you can guarantee the failure of the CODEC. Just refuse to port to non-open platforms. Thats why I said to use the LGPL so that the library could be linked into plug ins for PhotoShop, QuickTime, Premiere and other proprietary pieces of software, as well as Open Source software like the Gimp. Actually, the Gimp and PhotoShop are bad examples, but I don't know of an Open Source non-linear editing package.
Just generating a CODEC and plug-ins for every package on the face of the earth won't ensure its acceptance of course. Nothing will, but you can greatly increase it. It's up to the geek community to provide the initial content, and it has to be cool enough that more mainstream people will want to see it. A lot of hilarious spoofs on mainstream movies have been posted on Slashdot. If as new ones are created they were posted with this GPL/LGPL CODEC mainstream people would download the CODEC to view it in their favourite software package. This spreads the knowledge of the CODEC as well as increases the acceptance. It also spreads GPL/LGPL software to a whole lot more people, many who would never have heard of it otherwise. Some of these people will poke around with encoding video with the CODEC and so the knowledge and acceptance of the CODEC can spread like a virus.
There are a lot of CODECs out there now and nobody can seem to agree on which one to use. For that reason they're all vulnerable to a competitor. If that competitor came from the Open Source community it would be a boon for it in terms of credibility and mainstream acceptance.
A lot of the posts here are about the lack of free CODECs. It's a problem, but not insurmountable. There has to be a bunch of digital signal processing geeks on Slashdot, they just don't know each other exist. Create an LGPL'd CODEC and library that doesn't infringe on any patents. It won't be easy, but it is doable.
Start off by looking at ways of compressing down information in a single frame (discrete cosine transforms, wavelets, multiresolution etc) then move onto looking into motion estimation, correlation etc.
Apple doesn't actually own the CODECs. They license them from third parties such as Sorenson. Apple licensing out technology they don't own isn't a good idea.
Rotten.com didn't have a legal leg to stand on from what I saw. First of all they didn't do a parody of Dilbert, so that differentiates them from MAD magazine, who apparently did do a parody. Parodies are generally legal, but parody has a definition. Hence, not every form of humour is a parody. Second of all, MAD magazine didn't scan in the original strips, black out the copyright and scribble in their own humour. They actually inked their own version of Dilbert and worked from there.
Rotten.com did that most likely because they knew they'd get a nastygram from United Media's lawyers. They were dredging for publicity.
Parody would be finding a picture of Bill Gates and his laptop or computer and grafting in an image of Tux or something obviously Linux and publishing it. As long as you don't misrepresent it as real you'd probably be safe (not to say you wouldn't get a letter from Microsofts attourneys)
You can't even say they crossed a fine line in this case, they steamrolled over it. Even the original text that accompanied the cartoons said they were expecting them to be yanked.
Some of the information is alarming if its true, though I doubt its veracity. Custom sockets and RAM could easily kill this CPU. The development of a socket is a very non-trivial task and custom RAM requirments can be very pricey. As for this not being a cheap CPU there is almost no way that it could be. Intel may be a few times larger, but there volume will more than make up for it.
Upgradable microcode sounds more useful than it probably is. Sure, you can add new instructions to keep up with the competition but only for a short while. Eventually some architectural feature will stand in the way and while the microcode may due the feature it won't do it efficiently.
Intel has the bucks to do arbitrary architecture changes just to keep the competition on its toes.
This is a much bigger deal than the people who think they can get around it with more specific search terms realize.
Right now doing a search for specific chains of words will reduce the number of hits below the 100,000 hit threshold where they sell placings. For instance I just did a search on 'linux'. It returned about 1.2 million matching pages. If I were a neophyte Linux user this would probably be my first search choice. It's pretty safe to say that there would be greater than 100,000 other neophyte linux users who would do the same thing. Now suppose I'm a company who has a vested interest in spreading disinformation about Linux. Say one with deep pockets such as Microsoft. It would be worth my while to either find a web site biased against Linux or create one and pay for its placement in the first hits. A lot of those > 100,000 hits will search through each site on the first few pages. By placing sites which fit into my agenda in the first hits I can influence peoples perceptions about linux. I can also do it to any other topic.
This is only the beginning though, if selling placement in the search engine is succesful it will quite likely be expanded. Advertising that reaches a target audience as opposed to broad band broadcasting is more effective. That's why there are more commercials for toys during the daytime hours on network television than during prime time. So eventually it gets to the point that your more narrow searches are compromised as well.
This plan is more insidious than banner adds that just happen to match what you are searching for. These 'ads' according to AltaVista will just appear in the rankings. These adds don't even have to be blatant either. Rather than Microsoft buying the top spot and adding in a hit for the corporate web page they add in a hit to an anti-linux site, or even more underhanded they add in links to the typical blind advocacy site "Linux RUL3Z!!!, Microsoft SUCKS!"
All of this can subtly influence people. Linux was just used as an example since its near and dear to most of the hearts of Slashdot readers. Insert just about anything else from presidential campaigning to your favourite brand of feminine hygiene product.
You could always buy whatever mouse you want for about 20 bucks.
Wanting to be compensated for your work is not greed. While the definition of the "best art" for instance is completely subjective, Leonardo DaVinci, who many would say produced some of the "best art" did not work for free. He often did work on commision and other times was funded by a patron.
Labourers aren't expected to work for free, in fact many skilled labourers are very well compensated. For a labourer a tangible amount of effort was expended to produce a tangible piece of work and in return an amount of tangible money was exchanged. Creativity is a labour as well though albeit not as tangible. The time and effort spent however is very tangible and without some form of compensation that creative process won't continue. I've known a number of excellent musicians and artists for instance who had to give up their aspirations for gainful employment. Almost none of them were looking to get filthy rich but couldn't even manage to make out a meager existance.
IP law is a great deal older than you imagine. There have been patent or intellectual property disputes for hundreds of years, probably longer. It is my firm belief that most of the people who loudly scream for the abolishment of copyright and patents are the ones who would never have anything that needs protection anyway. Note, I said most, not all.
It's an interesting article and is fairly well thought out. I personally think that the trademark, copyright and patent law system needs a big shakeup. Abolishing it entirely would be detrimental though.
First consider a trademark. This is legal acknowledgement that your company has the exclusive rights to words and symbols to represent your product and/or company. Suppose that trademark law didn't exist. This would mean no laws would be violated if some company with a competing product copied the marketing appearance of some other product. So for instance, I could develop a soda drink which happens to be a cola and market it in a container similar or identical to that of Coca-Cola. Regardless of how you personally feel about Coca-Cola the consumer itself can't be guaranteed of getting what they thought they were purchasing. Maybe they got Coca-Cola, maybe they got some other cola flavoured caffeinated and carbonated sugar water. Some form of trademarking is required, at the very least to protect the consumer. In this case Coca-Cola should be trademarkable, but the generic type of product, Cola, shouldn't be.
The abolishment of copyright law would result in the silencing of a lot of sources of information or art and so on. Copyright protection enables information of these types to be marketed, which enables the holder of the copyright to put a value on the information and eventually the author of the information gets payed. The middleman between the author and money will rapidly disappear from the equation as more and more people become able to self publish and promote, but the copyright protection is still required. People like RMS provide a great deal of free information, but not all of it, or at least not all of it is instantly free. Some of it is held back long enough for them to earn a speakers fee at whatever event they were invited to speak at. If anybody could get hold of his notes prior to the event and freely publish them they could be seriously devalued. The end result is if this is the only thing he has as a source of income that source of income would be jeapordized. Time to look for new work.
Patent law protects innovation, or more accurately it protects companies who innovate. Real innovation is an expensive process, experts need to be hired at high salaries. During the course of the innovative process the innovators themselves are a drain on the financial resources of the company. This financial burden is only recompensed if the innovation works and proves marketable. For every profitable innovation there are many unprofitable ones. In order to recoup the spent capital (and make a tidy profit, since thats the purpose of companies) the right to exclusive ownership of the patented material is provided for some lenght of time. The costs involved in this type of innovation are why you don't see much of it in the OpenSource community. For instance streaming audio and video, image compression, architectural enhancements of computer systems for the most part are the results of commercial ventures. The people with the skills to innovate in these fields want to be paid.
The above laws need a lot of work, they were established when commerce moved a lot slower than it does presently and there are a few things that couldn't be perceived of at the time of their introduction. If they were totally abolished the present technological pace would be significantly dampened however.
The FSF is basically his, or at least he's the figure head for it. He's got the right to make statements, you've got the right to ignore them or choose some license that fits your needs. That's freedom.
Beta was a better technology than VHS. That it was only a Sony technology killed it. DVDs in general use MacroVision to introduce nastiness in the picture quality if you try to copy it. There are ways to defeat this however. Sima for instance makes a MacroVision scrubber.
Linux does run on 2 or 4 processors. That's basically the limit based on presently available motherboard technology. What Linux doesn't do is scale like say AIX or IRIX does, where you can run on dozens, hundreds or thousands of processors. I think this will be partially addressed in the coming months as the big iron vendors start adopting Linux as part of their road map. They will have to modify the kernel to work on a switch based architecture rather than a bus based architecture, which will take some time.
Again this is partially true. The contents of
I think if the Linux community decides they want to address these concerns then it will take much less time. Linux moves fast on things the community wants.
I would have to think this is true, though it didn't have anything to do with the scalability or logging concerns. NT has application support which at the moment Linux lacks. I think the ranking conclusion was misleadingly tied in with the above statements. It may or may not have been done on purpose.
Anyway, somebody should post a response (a well written response, not "you're all morons and will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes!") that does a fair disection of the article.
Regardless of the privacy implications of GUID storage in Microsoft documents this story is fishy. There's a vast number of documents written with these products and thus a vast number of GUID's floating about on the internet. To be able to pull up an individual and point the finger at them this quickly is unrealistic, especially given that they say that they found the matching GUID on a web site. They would have to exhaustively search web sites for documents containing the GUID and perform a match on them in order to do this.
The size of the internet says that this isn't possible. If there is any truth to the story at all it means that this guy was under some other form of surveillance and for that reason his documents were specially selected to be matched. Or it could mean that some portion of this is a sham, maybe the guy was never caught, maybe it was a propoganda ploy by either Microsoft or somebody who boosts Microsoft.
Until this story is confirmed by a somewhat credible news site I'll chalk off the capture of the perpetrator as an urban legend.
A few comments here basically say that because the school said that the course was simple, just point and click, the case should immediately be awarded to the students. It's not that easy. The students 'allege' that the school made statements about the ease of the course. This still needs to be proven.
That said there are a lot of schools which do make statements like that. There is an entire industry comprised of 'schools' that take out late night TV adds which state point blank that if you take a simple course you'll make 50K per year.
Unfortunately people and corporations lie. If this didn't happen we'd need no courts, no patent law etc.
You can filter based on names. Take your mouse, click on 'user account' on the left hand side of the screen. Near the top of the screen click on 'preferences'. Scroll down for a while, there is a chunk of buttons underneath the heading 'Exclude Stories From the Homepage'. Click your mouse on 'JonKatz'. He will never again appear on your personal view of slashdot.
OK, I suppose I've sort of got a vested interest in this if you want to call it that. I do use Apple hardware for personal use. Boycotting is absolutely the wrong thing to do if you ever want to see mainstream companies start to embrace Open Source or GPL or any other similar license. I'm not saying that you've got to accept what their license offers, or contribute to it or sing songs of apple pie and motherhood about it. A few companies are taking their first baby steps towards free software. Yes, they are doing it because they see the possibility of some tangible benefit. They owe that to their employees, stock holders and customers.
Rather than boycott support the efforts of people like Bruce Perens in getting Apple (and other companies) to change the offensive parts of their license agreements. This is new to them, its new to the corporate lawyers. It's even new to the traditional Open Source community. Apple, Netscape, Sun, IBM and all the other companies that are taking their first steps towards open source face difficulties different from what a lone coder or an unassociated group of coders face. They can be sued by a variety of entities: stock holders; customers; competition.
The license will change and for the better. I'm sure of it. Or Apple's open source will fade away into obscurity. I'm sure of that too. The open source community needs examples of companies making a success at open source. It doesn't need examples of companies that either got out of open source because of boycotts or law suits or went under because they went open source. It will happen eventually of course, failures happen, but right now everybody needs some success stories.
Leave the boycotts for televangelists and their campaign against childrens TV shows or uneducated house wives and prime time TV.
It isn't a lack of equipment that makes MP3 less than desirable to audiophiles. MP3 is a lossy compression format. You get those small file sizes because a certain amount of the information is discarded. This is how image compression works like in JPEG or your DVD player as well. The lossy compression also isn't the problem necessarily. The problem comes in when people rip an MP3 for optimal file size and either don't listen to it or listen to it through cheap PC speakers.
As an aside, even a CD is a lossy compression format. You're compressing the audio information with two mechanisms:
1) You're taking an infinite number of analog singal levels and compressing it down to 2^16th discrete steps.
2) You're taking a signal with infinite resolution in the time domain and sampling it at discrete points.
As another aside record albums are lossy too:
Any signal can be represented by an infinite weighted sum of smaller signals. During the process of cutting the LP there is a finite limit to the maximum frequency that can be represented in the grooves of a record. During playback there's also a limit to how quickly your needle can track the grooves. Overall this frequency limits the sound.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that regardless of the technology involved in reproduction if your source information isn't adequately reproduced it still won't sound good. Garbage in, garbage out.
I haven't read through the whole document, but it scares me a lot less now and I can see the utility. There are a couple more needed items in the protocol to make it really useful, but OpenSource is pretty good at that:
1) Protocol translation, there needs to be a mechanism so that the transmitted document is translated to the appropriate language for the printer. For instance if you're sending a PostScript document to somebody with an Epson ink jet printer it should be able to figure out that running the document through GhostView will do the trick.
2) Colour matching, this protocol would be a blessing to the graphic design community but they need colour matching. An additional datatype has to be specified that sends along an optional colour map and applies a corresponding one to make the colour output match what was intended. GIMP also needs this if its to be a serious contender by the way, the last time I looked it didn't.
No, I don't think Theo should just roll over and play dead for these guys unless its in his best interest to do so. They never asked nicely, they offered him the cost of getting a new domain name and a threat to sue if he didn't comply. This is the same level of troglodyte behaviour as Archie Comics trying to force Veronica.org into giving over their domain name. The costs for a domain name is cheap. If you want to protect your trademarks its in your best interest to register them as soon as you even think of developing a company or product. It's the guys name, he didn't try and take over their trademark. I suppose that www.john.[org|com|net] should be disallowed because it might infringe on the trademarks of Taco John's restraunts and www.tony.[org|com|net] should be disallowed because it potentially infringes on Tony Roma's rib house.
You're right that this isn't the same as toysrus being a little miffed at all the *rus domains. In this case there is some truth that the sites are trying to make use of part of the image of Toys R Us ('Backwards R' Us) that is. I still basically think they can grin and bear it. For the most part its a poor attempt at satire and comedians have been making various jokes about *rus for years.
This could be an even larger problem if the suit is successful. If Lycos is sued and loses the suit then precedence will be set. This would open the door to lawsuits by software vendors because services like AltaVista or Google can be used to search for pirated software. I can see a certain software company doing this.
Heck, maybe non network saavy people can get into the act too. In most larger cities you can look in the yellow pages and get prostitutes under the thinly disguised heading of Escort Services. I'm sure if the religious kooks otherwise known as TV evangelists come up with the idea it'll be tried.
I can understand that the record companies are incensed by the proliferation of illegaly distributed music on the internet. This is the wrong way to go about problem though, not that there really is a right way. It does eventually effect there bottom line and I'm not a believer that just because a company is profitable or is excessively profitable it deserves to be shafted.
I do think that fairly soon these large record labels and the organizations that protect them will be gone. I sense a paradigm shift coming. With the advent of virtually free web space its quickly becoming possible to become your own manager, promoter and advertising agency. The internet is going to become a global version of the local scene: instead of band members and friends pasting flyers for your latest gig on every available surface it'll be a posting to web sites that promote your particular style of music and links to your latest MP3 single (listen to it a few times for free folks, but if you like it send us dough)
This would cause me not to buy a companies printer unless I could disable it or control the access. Almost all of the features it describes now are already present: printer status; job status; etc. It adds some things that may be useful in a corporate environment: is the printer colour or black and white; how much paper is left; etc. All this is fine, I don't see a need for a whole new protocol for this but thats there perogative.
What I don't like is the idea being able to print to devices on the internet. I already get way to much spam emailed to me, I don't need it printed to my printer automatically. If I can securely control this feature it may be ok, but that wasn't specified in the article. I realize the article had zero technical content but quite frankly I wouldn't be at all suprised if this ends up being another 'feature' that can be invisibly turned on.
I suppose I'm in some luck, I use two operating systems for personal use, and neither of them is made by MicroSoft.
Thats what user preferences are for. Set your threshold to -1000000000 or so, if there isn't a button to ignore thresholds.
Journalistic integrity went out the window (no pun intended) a long time ago, if it ever really was. I remember when I was a kid and first started reading the paper how unimpressed I was with so called journalistic objectivism. Our local rag (Canadian city with a population of about 220000 at the time) would constantly insert editorial opinions inside of articles. This was probably 16 or 18 years ago. Now most of the paper is taken up by syndicated journalists, each with their own agenda or axe to grind. Online headline news for some reason seems to have less opinion inserted, so I tend to only read the local paper for local (but biased) stories and the comics (though since Calvin and Hobbes disappeared I don't even do that often). Online there are still the various wolves disguised as reporters, but headline stories on say ABC News does seem less biased than print publications.