Destroying Microsoft shouldn't be a goal. Like it or not they have done a lot (both good and bad) to shape the computing landsape into what you see today. Microsoft didn't usually innovate anywhere but they've had an uncanny ability to time the introduction of their version of various innovations at a point when the market would embrace it. Some of their tactics were predatory and anticompetitive and that is what was on trial and is under consideration.
If Microsoft dissolves tomorrow where would the millions of people who's productivity depend on Microsofts products be? There are no realistic alternatives in a lot of cases, either because their market share has been eroded (usually due to Microsoft) or because a solution in that area isn't available.
I actually don't use any Microsoft products, other than MS Word and MS Exel at work but I've seen how much easier interoperating in a large company has become over the last decade because of standardization.
Maybe someday there will be an Open Source competitor (or even platform agnostic closed source, I'm not a zealot, I just want solutions that work) but right now there isn't any well integrated package.
As others have noticed these won't be the penalties, only the judges findings. Still, they'll provide insight into how severe the judge feels about Microsofts transgressions, if any. This won't tell you what the penalties will be but may indicate which way he'll lean. My personal predictions are: require Microsoft to bundle third party applications such as Netscape Communicator and break Microsoft into seperate Systems and Software divisions. I'm not sure if the licensing fee requirements by anybody who builds systems that could run Microsoft products is still around, if it is I hope its killed.
When the penalities come out expect Microsoft to appeal the decision (unless its a slap on the wrist) so don't expect any final resolution for a few years.
Mesa would not presently pass OpenGL certification, check out their homepage and click on the CONFORM link there. Mesa is more feature rich than the MiniGL drivers but its still not a feature complete or even 100% accurate in the features it does support. Mesa != OpenGL, in fact presently Mesa OpenGL. This isn't a flame against you or Mesa, but is just a statement of the facts as they presently stand.
Well, its a press release on the hardware, its not a press release on OpenGL so its not too suprising. If they're going to have real OpenGL for Linux I doubt very much that it will be Open Source. It isn't there property to release as Open Source. There's also the fact that the terms for calling yourself OpenGL require your driver to pas a slew of compatibility tests so any derivative works would need to pass these in order to remain OpenGL.
Not a terribly good article, but there was one point in particular that was well, pointless. The statement was this this is the second time that computers had enabled the piracy of copyrighted material. First of all its untrue, computer enabled piracy was there as soon as commercial software was available. Scan the alt.sex.binaries.all.things.great.and.small newsgroups and you'll find many gigabytes of computer enabled content piracy.
What really bothered me was that it didn't mention that copyright violation is common even without the computer. I've got friends who've probably never bought a CD (or tape or LP going back a few years) in their lives yet have large music collections on readily available magnetic tape.
Despite this the music industry obviously still has made an enormous amount of money. I'm not trying to condone piracy at all. I'm trying to put the problem in perspective. The DVD industry can continue on, business as usual, and make billions for themselves and the movie studios. They can also sink millions into a new and improved encryption format and still make billions for themselves and the movie studios. If they do a good job they might be secure for quite some time but eventually the format will be cracked again. It'd be interesting if when one of the small players in DVD based decoders goes bankrupt an OpenSource friendly entity buys the IP.
The industry would be better off ignoring casual copying (much like is the case in the music industry now) but get legally hostile with anybody who tries to make money off of piracy.
You don't need a lot of skill to forge a signature in reality. It's far easier to set up your business in an ignored inner city area and rip off the poor since few people give a damn about it. This happens frequently, either by outright deeds such as those who are ripped off by heating contractors every year for heating systems that are never installed, misrepresentation such as concealing the true nature of the legally binding contract you just signed or by falsifying signatures which has happened with numerous shady financial services. Most times the person being victimized doesn't realize it, they're just suddenly faced with an unexpected bill. Even if they do its an uphill battle getting anything done about it. If they're lucky the local news will take an interest.
A few people have yelled free speech here. There's a bit more to it than that. In the past disgruntled employees have posted things ranging from plans for future products to confidential information relating to the bidders for portions of companies undergoing a spin-off. Yahoo has been subpoenaed and released the information to the black guard of the companies in question. Employees have been hauled in and layed off among other less draconian things.
This isn't about free speech because the information divulged was under non-disclosure agreements. The employees agreed that for that particular information they would relenquish their free speech rights. They signed a legally binding contract. It would be more accurate to call the moderation or removal of lame "First post" posts a supression of free speech. The information is sometimes of a serious enough nature that the company and its employees could get into trouble with the SEC for attempting to manipulate the stock price.
Suppose that Yahoo had brass balls in these situations and refused to a) divulge account holder information and b) refused to remove the post. Yahoo would be held liable for the information.
I don't know the details of what has been supressed nor do I fully trust news sources (many of whom are owned by companies that consider Yahoo 'the competition') for those details. I just know a little tiny bit about certain happenings within my company.
Eventually slashdot is guaranteed to run into this problem. It'll be interesting to see how it will be handled.
Contract law is the protection against this. The person amending the contract (which is essentially creating a new contract) has to make a reasonable effort to ensure that the target of the contract knows of it. Thats why rate increases normally come on seperate slips of paper in your mailings whether its credit cards, your insurance or your utilities. If they buried it on a four colour glossy piece of propoganda consumers could realistically expect to be able to have the contract nullified in court.
I think there is a need for legally binding digital signatures, but its something I wouldn't want to see rushed through the legislature to make some withered old republicans look digitally saavy. This could have disastorous effects.
Any legislation has to be written realizing that protocol or key length requirements need to change with time. A given protocol and keylength may be fine for early November 1999 but may be cryptographically weak in early November 2009. This brings up another point. The protocol and key length requirements need to be strict enough that the chances of them being compromised before the signature on the document no longer protects anything is vanishingly small. In other words the strength behind the signature is directly proportional to the lifetime of the document.
Consider an earnings report for a company for a given quarter. It only requires a years worth of strength in its digital signature. If a third party were to release an October 1998 earnings report in an attempt to manipulate the stock price it would be quickly caught and discredited.
Consider an individual taking out a 30 year mortgage on their home. If the digital signature can be forged in under 30 years this puts the consumer who took out the mortgage at risk. A malignant mortgage company could change interest rates or terms of the agreement to profit at the expense of the consumer. Things like this happen now with pen and paper signatures.
The security requirements for taking out a second thirty year mortgage after the first could be different than those for the first. Technology has increased, computers are faster and maybe new hiccups like quantum computation are a reality.
Digital signatures have the capability of being many orders of magnitude safer than pen and ink signatures if and only if people aren't legistated into weak signatures.
I agree with you somewhat in theory but disagree with you strongly in practice. In a fair world ideas would propogate based on trust. I come up with an idea, most likely while being payed by my employer and they make use of it to build some product which is differentiated from the products of other similar companies. It runs faster, uses less power, is more reliable or some other metric as a result of the innovation. I trust that my employer will compensate me for innovation, if not I change jobs. My employer trusts that the rest of the market will come up with their own innovations, maybe even similar ones and build their own product. Consumers choose whichever product meets their needs the best and most efficiently. I'm most familiar with intellectual property with regards to integrated circuits.
In reality other companies find it cheaper to steal information rather than innovate it. They do it by contracting services that reverse engineer ASICs by basically disassembling them among other means including espionage. Without some mechanism for protecting intellectual property innovative companies would be completely at the mercy of companies that take the more cost effective method of stealing ideas.
This is where patents come in. A patent is (or at least should be) a notarized very in depth and accurate documentation of an innovation and how it is innovative. Patents shouldn't preclude competition since its perfectly applicable to patent an improvement over a preceding patent.
Where the problem comes in, especially with software patents, are loosely worded patents. An example of this is patenting clicking a mouse to reach an advertiser or embedded banner adds.
Forcing all knowledge to be placed in a common pool for the good of all is no more right or wrong than placing all property in a common pool for the good of mankind. This has been a political system in the past and still is in many places. Unfortunately corruption usually destroys what is otherwise a good idea.
There's some 200 years of evidence that the protection of intellectual property has helped society but little if any to prove the other side of the coin. Without protection most companies would find little benefit in innovating since its difficult to value what others can freely take.
Contrast the length of time it took to create a really free operating system to the commercial competitors.
I think some information already is distributed this way although it may not specifically be done under the GPL. You post a question to a newsgroup and among the flames calling you a clueless newbie you sometimes get an answer. For as long as the thread is archived that question answer pair is accessable to the general public. I think this is pretty fair though I'd like to see some way for permanance to be added to this mechanism.
Its very unlikely that this will become a major movement in the future. Everybody has a unique set of skills which require varying degrees of effort to aquire and maintain. People in general are compensated in some (non linear) proportion to their skills, the value of those skills and their desire to be compensated. A brick layer who gets tired after laying bricks poorly for an hour is going to be less valuable than a skilled brick layer who can easily work 8 hours a day. Not many people would argue that the two brick layers should get payed an average rate based on their combined output.
Some peoples skills are such that they are good at producing new information. That's what they do for a living, they need to be compensated for it. The degree of compensation will be proportional to how valuable that information is to somebody. The people who use that information are consumers, the information is the good or service. The information might be a means to overcome certain technology constraints in a CMOS process which in turn enables a CPU to consume less power or it might be a means to greatly reduce the redundancy in a stream of data while not introducing significant artifacts which in turn allows more data to be transferred per dollar spent on servers.
It's up to the person who comes up with the information on how to disperse it. Maybe they do feel altruistic and donate it to the general public or maybe they develop the information under contract with a company. As soon as you force all 'information to be free' you devalue the worth of being an innovator as a profession. Innovators then become second class citizens compared to the people who make use of the innovation.
I can't think of any innovator who has made the entire body of their knowledge available for free in a timely fashion. I may be wrong but I don't see evidence of it. Linus made the Linux kernel freely available (though he made use of innovations prior to this to do it, he didn't invent protected memory etc) but used other information to earn a degree and now uses yet other very confidential information to earn money at TransMeta.
I'll agree that IP has gotten out of hand but making all intellectual property into intellectual communism isn't the way to go. I don't know what the solution is or will be (not in my job description or my skills) but without compensation there will be as many innovators as there would be doctors if they were forced to work for fifteen dollars an hour since the medical profession is for the community's well being.
If you don't agree that people have the right to do with information as they please then by all means out innovate them, GPL it and beat them to the punch.
I apologize. I didn't see the "T30" when I glossed over the C-net post. This is a bit confusing. There is no "T30" product. It might mean a "T3E" but those use DEC Alpha processors and run a UNICOS variant. It's possible but highly unlikely that Cray is building a follow on to the T3E based on IA-64 and Linux. I consider it highly unlikely because they'd have to have started the hardware development cycle long ago to make 2001. The Cray division was supplying me with a paycheck and I didn't hear any rumors about Intel based T3E follow up products. Cray is developing interesting things, but I don't think there's anything T3E-like in the pipeline. Cray won't be moving to Linux.
There's not enough information to try and figure out what the reporter heard. i.e. we don't know what was fact and what is conjecture. SGI has said that Linux is going to play a large roll in the future. SGI is going to make Linux scale beyond simple bus based 2 or 4 processor systems. Linux will be running on CC-NUMA machines.
Conjecture 1: A T3 class machine is being bid. The reporter remembered that SGI made a commitment to Linux and mixed and matched.
Conjecture 2: A CC-NUMA machine is being bid, "T30" doesn't mean anything. The machine will be running IA-64. Linux will be the operating system.
Since I don't even have a press release in my work mailbox I can't guess as to the real scenario. I'll ask for some information next week.
Unicos runs on the Cray family of supercomputers such as the T90 and SV1 families of vector processing supercomputers (which use custom designed vector processors) or the T3E family of massively parallel supercomputers (which use DEC Alpha processors). SGI is spinning off Cray or something effectively similar to that. SGI won't be releasing any Unicos running computers in the future.
Right now SGI is developing CC-NUMA computers (the same multiprocessing technology behind the Origin 2000 computers) using Intel IA-64 processors. Rather than attempting to port IRIX to an Intel processor or pretending that Windows NT will scale SGI is relying on Linux. Right now Linux can't do it, but SGI is working on improving that aspect of Linux. This is all stuff thats been posted to slashdot before. Here's a blurb to that effect.
What the article refers to are the many sites that require you to click on banner adds, usually pornographic but not always, in order to piece together a password to access 3l33t w4r3z and MP3. It wasn't exactly hidden in the article seeing as it was mentioned in the second paragraph. The article should've stopped there unfortunately.
The British Phonographic Industry then did a few hits of acid and through some unmentioned convolution of logic blames music piracy on organized crime.
The commentary by the BPI is sensationalistic, its designed to influence Joe Luddite consumer into buying into their party line. Its trying to convince them that piracy isn't just illegal, its backed by evil groups.
They'd have been better off using a different angle: Illegally distributing copies of our music is illegal, but not only are these people doing that they're also making money off of it.
I'm going to LASIK surgery done eventually, probably in Windsor Ontario (my hometown) since one of the leading surgeons happens to operate from there (Dr. Tafour at the Windsor Laser Eye Institute). He was doing LASIK surgery long before the US approved it, the laws on experimental techniques are more conducive to research and development in Canada. Click here if you're interested. There are actually real statistics on this page broken down by type of problem and frequency.
If you're in or near a metropolitan area you will be approached by laser centers offering really good deals on the procedure. The reason this is usually done is that this is a new center, they're trying to establish a large number of operations early on to instill confidence in future customers. I'm not saying this to discourage anybody from accepting the offer. Every doctor practicing LASIK had to start somewhere. I just believe in disclosure.
Decide if you really want the procedure. It's not going to make you an instant sex symbol. My personal reasons are that I can't wear contacts, I don't tear enough. I've got a very wide field of vision, regardless of the size of the glasses frame I've got an annoying field of uncorrected vision around me, this is distracting to me and potentially dangerous.
The SEC might have something to say about this. Spinoffs, mergers and other events between companies are scrutinzed pretty carefully. I'd imagine that a transaction like that between a company and its privately owned holding would be very much the same.
Cable modems only provide the given bandwidth up to a certain point. You've basically got XXX megabits per second up to the first router. After that its shared bandwidth. I'm not sure about DSL.
Latency also seems to be absolutely horrid on a cable modem especially for incoming traffic. Sure, theoretically there is more bandwidth depending on your provider and how much you pay but you can usually only use a portion of that bandwidth.
For a lot of people a cable modem is fine, its fine for me, but its nowhere near just as good as a T1.
This might work. Remember that the law suit hasn't been filed, hasn't been one and Amiga isn't bankrupt yet. Not only that but the intellectual property would go to the highest bidder.
I think some thought needs to be put into what the Amiga was: powerful for the time, tight integration of audio and video, user friendliness. With modern hardware such as fast 3D acceleration, frame grabbers, firewire and so on it should be possible to build the audio/video around a Linux infrastructure. There's still a lack of software to make use of these features. A trust to foster development in this area might be more helpful to the community.
Filing for bankruptcy doesn't nullify all your debts. If Amiga is successfuly sued and they don't have the cash they can file for bankruptcy. In this event all the intellectual property and physical assets will be sold and the money generated used to pay debts off according to some scheme agreed upon in court.
From the tone of the linked article the author seems to feel that this lawsuit jeapordizes the future of the Amiga. From the various news items on the Amiga this past summer its pretty clear that Amiga doesn't intend to build a device called the Amiga that Amiga owners would want to buy. Hence the lawsuit. Perhaps the patents would be bought by somebody willing to actually do something interesting with them. In other words the probability of a new Amiga being built goes from vanishingly small to... vanishingly small.
Maybe the best thing that would come out of bankruptcy would be for some third party to buy the source code to the Amiga and declare it Open Source. There would be no new hardware but some of the concepts might be preserved.
Why does there need to be a point to anything? It was an interesting hack as well as an interesting abuse of hardware. At a point in time when every script kiddie is referred to as a 'hacker' I think its refreshing to have brief articles on real hackers.
As always you're free to not read anything you don't feel is fit.
This is a really annoying form of profiteering. It's capitalizing on peoples interest in space and space exploration. There's technically nothing wrong with of course. I find it sad however that no good will come from this for space exploration. People are going to hand over money for a useless certificate.
I'd much rather see people donate money to the Planetary Society. Sure, you don't get a nifty laser printed certificate you can pretend entitles you to interplanetary real estate but maybe you'll fund some useful research.
I'd actually submit this to Ask Slashdot but I'm not sure would get posted since this is more just me feeling around a bit.
Right now consumer digital cameras are probably good enough to do a pretty admirable job of creating a movie, or at least a short movie. I'm not at all sure of what is available for manipulating the data under Linux.
Question 1: What is the status of FireWire under Linux? Could I download data from say a Sony Digital Camcorder to my Linux box?
Question 2: Are there any tools available under Linux, either free or low cost, for manipulating digital movie data?
Question 3: What choices do I have for storing the data in a format available to consumers? I'd be interested in streaming formats as well as data file type formats. Is MPEG all we have, do we even have MPEG video encoders? How slow is the encoding process without accelerator boards? Do we have any low cost ones?
Question 4: What low cost options are available for creating animation?
Question 5: How can real life video and animation be combined?
Ideally the end product would be pervasively platform agnostic. It should be playable under Linux on any flavour of processor. It should be playable under Windows, the MacOS and any other machine that is at least presently sold.
When I was a kid my parents had HBO (illicitly, since HBO didn't feel that the Canadian market was worth the bother, not even the Canadian market that was all of 5 minutes from Detroit freely receiving their signals) and for the most part I didn't see the point. You could watch 'first run' movies that were over a year old and had already been out in the newish videocassete rental market for quite a while.
What I did occasionaly find entertaining were the shorts between movies. These were short films, most of them only a few minutes long, made by independant film makers. There was animation, claymation, puppetry, live action and probably others that I don't remember or didn't recognize. A lot of it didn't entertain me at all, but some of them were very entertaining. I've seen a couple of them rebroadcast on the Cartoon Network, unfortunately I don't remember titles, though one may have been called "The Cat is Back".
The reason that they were entertaining was that they took advantage of the short and relatively cheap format to experiment with things that you could never get financial backing for in any other media. I would hope that rather than trying to make mini-Star Wars that SKG would try and do something unique, something that they could never do in a larger format.
I don't know that the time is quite right for this venture. To keep the publics interest you're going to need a decent frame rate and resolution and I'm not sure that the bandwidth available to the average internet-connected public is available.
If it were, and if cheap content creation tools were available I'd love to see what the more artistic element of the general public could do. There would be a lot of crap and a lot of stuff done just for the shock value but my bet is that this is where the next ground breaking work would come from.
Who knows, maybe one of us could be the next Stanley Kubrick.
Somebody please moderate the post I'm responding to upwards. I think its a very insightful twist on the line of thought most of us have been following.
DNA and genes are way beyond my area of expertise, but to me the genes themselves already exist and so aren't patentable. The techniques involved in the gene therapy may very well be patentable though. Again, I know nothing about what is involved. I imagine some molecular machine counting down the rungs of the DNA, doing a snip and inserting a benign segment of DNA. The molecular machine should be patentable for that application.
Slashdot Mirror
Destroying Microsoft shouldn't be a goal. Like it or not they have done a lot (both good and bad) to shape the computing landsape into what you see today. Microsoft didn't usually innovate anywhere but they've had an uncanny ability to time the introduction of their version of various innovations at a point when the market would embrace it. Some of their tactics were predatory and anticompetitive and that is what was on trial and is under consideration.
If Microsoft dissolves tomorrow where would the millions of people who's productivity depend on Microsofts products be? There are no realistic alternatives in a lot of cases, either because their market share has been eroded (usually due to Microsoft) or because a solution in that area isn't available.
I actually don't use any Microsoft products, other than MS Word and MS Exel at work but I've seen how much easier interoperating in a large company has become over the last decade because of standardization.
Maybe someday there will be an Open Source competitor (or even platform agnostic closed source, I'm not a zealot, I just want solutions that work) but right now there isn't any well integrated package.
As others have noticed these won't be the penalties, only the judges findings. Still, they'll provide insight into how severe the judge feels about Microsofts transgressions, if any. This won't tell you what the penalties will be but may indicate which way he'll lean. My personal predictions are: require Microsoft to bundle third party applications such as Netscape Communicator and break Microsoft into seperate Systems and Software divisions. I'm not sure if the licensing fee requirements by anybody who builds systems that could run Microsoft products is still around, if it is I hope its killed.
When the penalities come out expect Microsoft to appeal the decision (unless its a slap on the wrist) so don't expect any final resolution for a few years.
Mesa would not presently pass OpenGL certification, check out their homepage and click on the CONFORM link there. Mesa is more feature rich than the MiniGL drivers but its still not a feature complete or even 100% accurate in the features it does support. Mesa != OpenGL, in fact presently Mesa OpenGL. This isn't a flame against you or Mesa, but is just a statement of the facts as they presently stand.
Well, its a press release on the hardware, its not a press release on OpenGL so its not too suprising. If they're going to have real OpenGL for Linux I doubt very much that it will be Open Source. It isn't there property to release as Open Source. There's also the fact that the terms for calling yourself OpenGL require your driver to pas a slew of compatibility tests so any derivative works would need to pass these in order to remain OpenGL.
Not a terribly good article, but there was one point in particular that was well, pointless. The statement was this this is the second time that computers had enabled the piracy of copyrighted material. First of all its untrue, computer enabled piracy was there as soon as commercial software was available. Scan the alt.sex.binaries.all.things.great.and.small newsgroups and you'll find many gigabytes of computer enabled content piracy.
What really bothered me was that it didn't mention that copyright violation is common even without the computer. I've got friends who've probably never bought a CD (or tape or LP going back a few years) in their lives yet have large music collections on readily available magnetic tape.
Despite this the music industry obviously still has made an enormous amount of money. I'm not trying to condone piracy at all. I'm trying to put the problem in perspective. The DVD industry can continue on, business as usual, and make billions for themselves and the movie studios. They can also sink millions into a new and improved encryption format and still make billions for themselves and the movie studios. If they do a good job they might be secure for quite some time but eventually the format will be cracked again. It'd be interesting if when one of the small players in DVD based decoders goes bankrupt an OpenSource friendly entity buys the IP.
The industry would be better off ignoring casual copying (much like is the case in the music industry now) but get legally hostile with anybody who tries to make money off of piracy.
You don't need a lot of skill to forge a signature in reality. It's far easier to set up your business in an ignored inner city area and rip off the poor since few people give a damn about it. This happens frequently, either by outright deeds such as those who are ripped off by heating contractors every year for heating systems that are never installed, misrepresentation such as concealing the true nature of the legally binding contract you just signed or by falsifying signatures which has happened with numerous shady financial services. Most times the person being victimized doesn't realize it, they're just suddenly faced with an unexpected bill. Even if they do its an uphill battle getting anything done about it. If they're lucky the local news will take an interest.
A few people have yelled free speech here. There's a bit more to it than that. In the past disgruntled employees have posted things ranging from plans for future products to confidential information relating to the bidders for portions of companies undergoing a spin-off. Yahoo has been subpoenaed and released the information to the black guard of the companies in question. Employees have been hauled in and layed off among other less draconian things.
This isn't about free speech because the information divulged was under non-disclosure agreements. The employees agreed that for that particular information they would relenquish their free speech rights. They signed a legally binding contract. It would be more accurate to call the moderation or removal of lame "First post" posts a supression of free speech. The information is sometimes of a serious enough nature that the company and its employees could get into trouble with the SEC for attempting to manipulate the stock price.
Suppose that Yahoo had brass balls in these situations and refused to a) divulge account holder information and b) refused to remove the post. Yahoo would be held liable for the information.
I don't know the details of what has been supressed nor do I fully trust news sources (many of whom are owned by companies that consider Yahoo 'the competition') for those details. I just know a little tiny bit about certain happenings within my company.
Eventually slashdot is guaranteed to run into this problem. It'll be interesting to see how it will be handled.
Contract law is the protection against this. The person amending the contract (which is essentially creating a new contract) has to make a reasonable effort to ensure that the target of the contract knows of it. Thats why rate increases normally come on seperate slips of paper in your mailings whether its credit cards, your insurance or your utilities. If they buried it on a four colour glossy piece of propoganda consumers could realistically expect to be able to have the contract nullified in court.
I think there is a need for legally binding digital signatures, but its something I wouldn't want to see rushed through the legislature to make some withered old republicans look digitally saavy. This could have disastorous effects.
Any legislation has to be written realizing that protocol or key length requirements need to change with time. A given protocol and keylength may be fine for early November 1999 but may be cryptographically weak in early November 2009. This brings up another point. The protocol and key length requirements need to be strict enough that the chances of them being compromised before the signature on the document no longer protects anything is vanishingly small. In other words the strength behind the signature is directly proportional to the lifetime of the document.
Consider an earnings report for a company for a given quarter. It only requires a years worth of strength in its digital signature. If a third party were to release an October 1998 earnings report in an attempt to manipulate the stock price it would be quickly caught and discredited.
Consider an individual taking out a 30 year mortgage on their home. If the digital signature can be forged in under 30 years this puts the consumer who took out the mortgage at risk. A malignant mortgage company could change interest rates or terms of the agreement to profit at the expense of the consumer. Things like this happen now with pen and paper signatures.
The security requirements for taking out a second thirty year mortgage after the first could be different than those for the first. Technology has increased, computers are faster and maybe new hiccups like quantum computation are a reality.
Digital signatures have the capability of being many orders of magnitude safer than pen and ink signatures if and only if people aren't legistated into weak signatures.
I agree with you somewhat in theory but disagree with you strongly in practice. In a fair world ideas would propogate based on trust. I come up with an idea, most likely while being payed by my employer and they make use of it to build some product which is differentiated from the products of other similar companies. It runs faster, uses less power, is more reliable or some other metric as a result of the innovation. I trust that my employer will compensate me for innovation, if not I change jobs. My employer trusts that the rest of the market will come up with their own innovations, maybe even similar ones and build their own product. Consumers choose whichever product meets their needs the best and most efficiently. I'm most familiar with intellectual property with regards to integrated circuits.
In reality other companies find it cheaper to steal information rather than innovate it. They do it by contracting services that reverse engineer ASICs by basically disassembling them among other means including espionage. Without some mechanism for protecting intellectual property innovative companies would be completely at the mercy of companies that take the more cost effective method of stealing ideas.
This is where patents come in. A patent is (or at least should be) a notarized very in depth and accurate documentation of an innovation and how it is innovative. Patents shouldn't preclude competition since its perfectly applicable to patent an improvement over a preceding patent.
Where the problem comes in, especially with software patents, are loosely worded patents. An example of this is patenting clicking a mouse to reach an advertiser or embedded banner adds.
Forcing all knowledge to be placed in a common pool for the good of all is no more right or wrong than placing all property in a common pool for the good of mankind. This has been a political system in the past and still is in many places. Unfortunately corruption usually destroys what is otherwise a good idea.
There's some 200 years of evidence that the protection of intellectual property has helped society but little if any to prove the other side of the coin. Without protection most companies would find little benefit in innovating since its difficult to value what others can freely take.
Contrast the length of time it took to create a really free operating system to the commercial competitors.
I think some information already is distributed this way although it may not specifically be done under the GPL. You post a question to a newsgroup and among the flames calling you a clueless newbie you sometimes get an answer. For as long as the thread is archived that question answer pair is accessable to the general public. I think this is pretty fair though I'd like to see some way for permanance to be added to this mechanism.
Its very unlikely that this will become a major movement in the future. Everybody has a unique set of skills which require varying degrees of effort to aquire and maintain. People in general are compensated in some (non linear) proportion to their skills, the value of those skills and their desire to be compensated. A brick layer who gets tired after laying bricks poorly for an hour is going to be less valuable than a skilled brick layer who can easily work 8 hours a day. Not many people would argue that the two brick layers should get payed an average rate based on their combined output.
Some peoples skills are such that they are good at producing new information. That's what they do for a living, they need to be compensated for it. The degree of compensation will be proportional to how valuable that information is to somebody. The people who use that information are consumers, the information is the good or service. The information might be a means to overcome certain technology constraints in a CMOS process which in turn enables a CPU to consume less power or it might be a means to greatly reduce the redundancy in a stream of data while not introducing significant artifacts which in turn allows more data to be transferred per dollar spent on servers.
It's up to the person who comes up with the information on how to disperse it. Maybe they do feel altruistic and donate it to the general public or maybe they develop the information under contract with a company. As soon as you force all 'information to be free' you devalue the worth of being an innovator as a profession. Innovators then become second class citizens compared to the people who make use of the innovation.
I can't think of any innovator who has made the entire body of their knowledge available for free in a timely fashion. I may be wrong but I don't see evidence of it. Linus made the Linux kernel freely available (though he made use of innovations prior to this to do it, he didn't invent protected memory etc) but used other information to earn a degree and now uses yet other very confidential information to earn money at TransMeta.
I'll agree that IP has gotten out of hand but making all intellectual property into intellectual communism isn't the way to go. I don't know what the solution is or will be (not in my job description or my skills) but without compensation there will be as many innovators as there would be doctors if they were forced to work for fifteen dollars an hour since the medical profession is for the community's well being.
If you don't agree that people have the right to do with information as they please then by all means out innovate them, GPL it and beat them to the punch.
Sorry, following up to myself.
Conjecture 3: Hybrid system based on vector processors such as the SV1 and CC-NUMA like the O2000.
I apologize. I didn't see the "T30" when I glossed over the C-net post. This is a bit confusing. There is no "T30" product. It might mean a "T3E" but those use DEC Alpha processors and run a UNICOS variant. It's possible but highly unlikely that Cray is building a follow on to the T3E based on IA-64 and Linux. I consider it highly unlikely because they'd have to have started the hardware development cycle long ago to make 2001. The Cray division was supplying me with a paycheck and I didn't hear any rumors about Intel based T3E follow up products. Cray is developing interesting things, but I don't think there's anything T3E-like in the pipeline. Cray won't be moving to Linux.
There's not enough information to try and figure out what the reporter heard. i.e. we don't know what was fact and what is conjecture. SGI has said that Linux is going to play a large roll in the future. SGI is going to make Linux scale beyond simple bus based 2 or 4 processor systems. Linux will be running on CC-NUMA machines.
Conjecture 1: A T3 class machine is being bid. The reporter remembered that SGI made a commitment to Linux and mixed and matched.
Conjecture 2: A CC-NUMA machine is being bid, "T30" doesn't mean anything. The machine will be running IA-64. Linux will be the operating system.
Since I don't even have a press release in my work mailbox I can't guess as to the real scenario. I'll ask for some information next week.
Unicos runs on the Cray family of supercomputers such as the T90 and SV1 families of vector processing supercomputers (which use custom designed vector processors) or the T3E family of massively parallel supercomputers (which use DEC Alpha processors). SGI is spinning off Cray or something effectively similar to that. SGI won't be releasing any Unicos running computers in the future.
SGI also makes massively parallel computers, which if properly configured (read lots and lots of processors) are supercomputer class machines. These machines presently run, hold on to your hats, IRIX. These machines presently use MIPS processors. One of these machines is part of the ASCI contract (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) and is based on an Origin 2000 system.
Right now SGI is developing CC-NUMA computers (the same multiprocessing technology behind the Origin 2000 computers) using Intel IA-64 processors. Rather than attempting to port IRIX to an Intel processor or pretending that Windows NT will scale SGI is relying on Linux. Right now Linux can't do it, but SGI is working on improving that aspect of Linux. This is all stuff thats been posted to slashdot before. Here's a blurb to that effect.
What the article refers to are the many sites that require you to click on banner adds, usually pornographic but not always, in order to piece together a password to access 3l33t w4r3z and MP3. It wasn't exactly hidden in the article seeing as it was mentioned in the second paragraph. The article should've stopped there unfortunately.
The British Phonographic Industry then did a few hits of acid and through some unmentioned convolution of logic blames music piracy on organized crime.
The commentary by the BPI is sensationalistic, its designed to influence Joe Luddite consumer into buying into their party line. Its trying to convince them that piracy isn't just illegal, its backed by evil groups.
They'd have been better off using a different angle: Illegally distributing copies of our music is illegal, but not only are these people doing that they're also making money off of it.
I'm going to LASIK surgery done eventually, probably in Windsor Ontario (my hometown) since one of the leading surgeons happens to operate from there (Dr. Tafour at the Windsor Laser Eye Institute). He was doing LASIK surgery long before the US approved it, the laws on experimental techniques are more conducive to research and development in Canada. Click here if you're interested. There are actually real statistics on this page broken down by type of problem and frequency.
If you're in or near a metropolitan area you will be approached by laser centers offering really good deals on the procedure. The reason this is usually done is that this is a new center, they're trying to establish a large number of operations early on to instill confidence in future customers. I'm not saying this to discourage anybody from accepting the offer. Every doctor practicing LASIK had to start somewhere. I just believe in disclosure.
Decide if you really want the procedure. It's not going to make you an instant sex symbol. My personal reasons are that I can't wear contacts, I don't tear enough. I've got a very wide field of vision, regardless of the size of the glasses frame I've got an annoying field of uncorrected vision around me, this is distracting to me and potentially dangerous.
The SEC might have something to say about this. Spinoffs, mergers and other events between companies are scrutinzed pretty carefully. I'd imagine that a transaction like that between a company and its privately owned holding would be very much the same.
Cable modems only provide the given bandwidth up to a certain point. You've basically got XXX megabits per second up to the first router. After that its shared bandwidth. I'm not sure about DSL.
Latency also seems to be absolutely horrid on a cable modem especially for incoming traffic. Sure, theoretically there is more bandwidth depending on your provider and how much you pay but you can usually only use a portion of that bandwidth.
For a lot of people a cable modem is fine, its fine for me, but its nowhere near just as good as a T1.
This might work. Remember that the law suit hasn't been filed, hasn't been one and Amiga isn't bankrupt yet. Not only that but the intellectual property would go to the highest bidder.
I think some thought needs to be put into what the Amiga was: powerful for the time, tight integration of audio and video, user friendliness. With modern hardware such as fast 3D acceleration, frame grabbers, firewire and so on it should be possible to build the audio/video around a Linux infrastructure. There's still a lack of software to make use of these features. A trust to foster development in this area might be more helpful to the community.
Filing for bankruptcy doesn't nullify all your debts. If Amiga is successfuly sued and they don't have the cash they can file for bankruptcy. In this event all the intellectual property and physical assets will be sold and the money generated used to pay debts off according to some scheme agreed upon in court.
From the tone of the linked article the author seems to feel that this lawsuit jeapordizes the future of the Amiga. From the various news items on the Amiga this past summer its pretty clear that Amiga doesn't intend to build a device called the Amiga that Amiga owners would want to buy. Hence the lawsuit. Perhaps the patents would be bought by somebody willing to actually do something interesting with them. In other words the probability of a new Amiga being built goes from vanishingly small to... vanishingly small.
Maybe the best thing that would come out of bankruptcy would be for some third party to buy the source code to the Amiga and declare it Open Source. There would be no new hardware but some of the concepts might be preserved.
Why does there need to be a point to anything? It was an interesting hack as well as an interesting abuse of hardware. At a point in time when every script kiddie is referred to as a 'hacker' I think its refreshing to have brief articles on real hackers.
As always you're free to not read anything you don't feel is fit.
This is a really annoying form of profiteering. It's capitalizing on peoples interest in space and space exploration. There's technically nothing wrong with of course. I find it sad however that no good will come from this for space exploration. People are going to hand over money for a useless certificate.
I'd much rather see people donate money to the Planetary Society. Sure, you don't get a nifty laser printed certificate you can pretend entitles you to interplanetary real estate but maybe you'll fund some useful research.
I'd actually submit this to Ask Slashdot but I'm not sure would get posted since this is more just me feeling around a bit.
Right now consumer digital cameras are probably good enough to do a pretty admirable job of creating a movie, or at least a short movie. I'm not at all sure of what is available for manipulating the data under Linux.
Question 1: What is the status of FireWire under Linux? Could I download data from say a Sony Digital Camcorder to my Linux box?
Question 2: Are there any tools available under Linux, either free or low cost, for manipulating digital movie data?
Question 3: What choices do I have for storing the data in a format available to consumers? I'd be interested in streaming formats as well as data file type formats. Is MPEG all we have, do we even have MPEG video encoders? How slow is the encoding process without accelerator boards? Do we have any low cost ones?
Question 4: What low cost options are available for creating animation?
Question 5: How can real life video and animation be combined?
Ideally the end product would be pervasively platform agnostic. It should be playable under Linux on any flavour of processor. It should be playable under Windows, the MacOS and any other machine that is at least presently sold.
When I was a kid my parents had HBO (illicitly, since HBO didn't feel that the Canadian market was worth the bother, not even the Canadian market that was all of 5 minutes from Detroit freely receiving their signals) and for the most part I didn't see the point. You could watch 'first run' movies that were over a year old and had already been out in the newish videocassete rental market for quite a while.
What I did occasionaly find entertaining were the shorts between movies. These were short films, most of them only a few minutes long, made by independant film makers. There was animation, claymation, puppetry, live action and probably others that I don't remember or didn't recognize. A lot of it didn't entertain me at all, but some of them were very entertaining. I've seen a couple of them rebroadcast on the Cartoon Network, unfortunately I don't remember titles, though one may have been called "The Cat is Back".
The reason that they were entertaining was that they took advantage of the short and relatively cheap format to experiment with things that you could never get financial backing for in any other media. I would hope that rather than trying to make mini-Star Wars that SKG would try and do something unique, something that they could never do in a larger format.
I don't know that the time is quite right for this venture. To keep the publics interest you're going to need a decent frame rate and resolution and I'm not sure that the bandwidth available to the average internet-connected public is available.
If it were, and if cheap content creation tools were available I'd love to see what the more artistic element of the general public could do. There would be a lot of crap and a lot of stuff done just for the shock value but my bet is that this is where the next ground breaking work would come from.
Who knows, maybe one of us could be the next Stanley Kubrick.
Somebody please moderate the post I'm responding to upwards. I think its a very insightful twist on the line of thought most of us have been following.
DNA and genes are way beyond my area of expertise, but to me the genes themselves already exist and so aren't patentable. The techniques involved in the gene therapy may very well be patentable though. Again, I know nothing about what is involved. I imagine some molecular machine counting down the rungs of the DNA, doing a snip and inserting a benign segment of DNA. The molecular machine should be patentable for that application.