I also have MediaOne service in Cambridge, MA that I've been quite happy with. They do have a 1.5Mbit limit downstream and a ~350kbit limit upstream, however. (The links are capable of sustaining about 10MBit/s). These limits give me performance that is almost always fast and reasonable with very low latencies. By putting these limits in place they make the cable modem performance highly consistent. Rather than performing like the shared bus that it is, it performs as a dedicated point-to-point link. The only time it gets frustrating is when I'm transferring images or files from my computer to machines at my office at school. It also keeps me from using AFS from home, just because the upstream bandwidth limit can get annoying then. (However, with round trip times of about 6 ms from home to my office, I'm not normally complaining...;-)
I just got one of the internal SCSI AIWA Travan NS20 drives for $300. I'm having problems with my on-board AIC-7890 SCSI controller having time-outs on my Ultra2 hard disk and hanging the machine. As such, I'm waiting for a second SCSI controller I ordered to show up before I really try running it through its paces. The drive holds 10GB uncompressed and does internal hardware compression and can also read the 4GB Travan NS8 media, supposedly. For home use, this seems like a cost-effective solution. As keeping off-machine and off-site backups is important to me, just having another hard disk doesn't make terribly much sense.
You're confused. This is a problem of software patents, not copyrights. They are very different creatures. Problems with GIF, MP3, and so on are all due to patents and not copyrights.
Remember: copyrights are what allow Open Source to work.
Although eliminating (or reducing the duration of) software patents makes total sense, the copyright laws seem to work quite well. Copyright protections provide an effective barrier to prevent the wholesale copying of works without providing credit, but provide a level of protection that allows Open Source to work. Without copyright protection, we'd see far more use of trade secrets and protected binary-only distributions.
As an example, the GPL only works because of copyright laws. If there were no copyright laws, Microsoft would be free to take GPLed code, change it, and incorporate it into binary-only distributions that only ran under Windows.
Software vendors would also resort increasingly to technical means of preventing copying (dongles, license servers, etc). Artists and writers would also be discouraged from making their works available electronically in an easy-to-copy format. Copyright provides a simple and not overly-constrained legal framework to enforce something that social convention alone is not strong enough to enforce.
I received the following response from Creative Labs:
From: Developer Support (
devsup@creativelabs.com)
At this time Creative is not in a position to release the materials that it has received under NDA from our chipset suppliers or the DVD consortium.
Creative is actively working on Linux drivers for our audio and graphics products, and will do what we can within our legal rights to provide drivers to the Linux community.
This is an unfortunate position that quite a few hardware vendors seem to be getting stuck in. Hopefully companies will start to see the value in releasing specifications without NDAs, as the availability of high-quality drivers and other software supporting their hardware can only improve their product sales.
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I also have MediaOne service in Cambridge, MA that I've been quite happy with. They do have a 1.5Mbit limit downstream and a ~350kbit limit upstream, however. (The links are capable of sustaining about 10MBit/s). These limits give me performance that is almost always fast and reasonable with very low latencies. By putting these limits in place they make the cable modem performance highly consistent. Rather than performing like the shared bus that it is, it performs as a dedicated point-to-point link. The only time it gets frustrating is when I'm transferring images or files from my computer to machines at my office at school. It also keeps me from using AFS from home, just because the upstream bandwidth limit can get annoying then. (However, with round trip times of about 6 ms from home to my office, I'm not normally complaining... ;-)
I just got one of the internal SCSI AIWA Travan NS20 drives for $300. I'm having problems with my on-board AIC-7890 SCSI controller having time-outs on my Ultra2 hard disk and hanging the machine. As such, I'm waiting for a second SCSI controller I ordered to show up before I really try running it through its paces. The drive holds 10GB uncompressed and does internal hardware compression and can also read the 4GB Travan NS8 media, supposedly. For home use, this seems like a cost-effective solution. As keeping off-machine and off-site backups is important to me, just having another hard disk doesn't make terribly much sense.
Remember: copyrights are what allow Open Source to work.
As an example, the GPL only works because of copyright laws. If there were no copyright laws, Microsoft would be free to take GPLed code, change it, and incorporate it into binary-only distributions that only ran under Windows.
Software vendors would also resort increasingly to technical means of preventing copying (dongles, license servers, etc). Artists and writers would also be discouraged from making their works available electronically in an easy-to-copy format. Copyright provides a simple and not overly-constrained legal framework to enforce something that social convention alone is not strong enough to enforce.