The EU has some rather stupid rules about who can sell something into the EU from outside if its not already sold there. (and of course a US and EU CD are never *quite* identical products right)
The UK has been trying to get this moronity fixed for some time but the EU itself only likes listening to corporations (it says something that the EU unelected commission is currently sueing the democratically elected EU finance ministers for voting to wave a euro borrowing rule)
The bank and currency people know its only one small item in the arsenal, but until they get rfid in money with digital authentication and biometrics in passports it raises the barriers when its in a printer.
In software its plain dangerous. If you are going to rob a bank remember to wear $20 notes blown up in various sizes all over your shirt, and be happy law enforcement can't open the footage 8)
One of the problems with using google is the student themselves can put their paper fragments on the net either to mask other searches or to wind up the lecturer, or even to drop the university into a nice juicy lawsuit so they can get a degree, their fees paid and a bonus.
You actually need snapshots from before the paper existed to do anything meaningful.
The second problem is that lots of little businesses sell people guaranteed *new* papers.
There are things that can be done more constructively to deal with such problems, and at least verify the student knows some of the subject - one of the most obvious being to randomly pick a few students each submission and invite them to a 30 minute defence of their essay.
Not a lot at the moment. It wil run xfce just about but its time has gone I think. The sad thing is there is no usable PC smaller than the PC110 since it came out in 1994..
That sounds more to me like they understand the license and don't intend to violate it. They think its bad commercial business but the market will sort out whether their proprietary player is better than open source.
The Linux community have dealt with KISS before, and KISS are providing the linux kernel sources and busybox. People are building NFS support into their players and other fun stuff.
Reactionary readings of stuff, especially translated stuff that has also been through the radio system and journalists (who like a good story so tend to turn things up 8)) is never a good idea.
One of the first things I'd say reading this is that his reaction looks a lot like several other vendors I dealt with whose CEO simply could not believe that either their employees or their subcontractors would steal code.
Some of the confusion also comes from the speaker. If the translation is accurate the speaker asks
"As he said, there are no big economical options for dragging the case to court. Instead they hope that the Open Source community will put so much pressure on Kiss Techonology that they will be forced to release all its software."
The speaker doesn't say anything about software stolen by employees or contractors, or software in dispute, just about "all software". So the reply is that KISS won't release their player app - which the company guy clearly doesn't think contains mplayer code so he doesn't have to release.
At that point he's already denied stealing any code, but confirmed he is having the matter checked.
Now it may be that code was stolen and he doesn't know about it. It may be it was stolen and he systematically was involved. I find the latter hard to believe - if it had been done by someone smart and with foreplanning they would a) have an instant cover story b) done the hiding job a lot better.
So the way I read this it says "We havent copied anything but we will check" "We wont be releasing all our code, including our proprietary stuff containing only our code" "We do release all the open source stuff" "We have fixed minor errors in the past" "You are picking on the wrong people"
Put that way it's not quite the same as the mplayer view. Lets just see how the evidence pans out. If the KISS guys find someone stole code then we will see how they handle it. If the mplayer guys are right it won't be too long before the KISS folks will be apologising.
Alan
BTW: Larg e scale commercial copyright violation in parts of the EU (Denmark I believe included) is a violation of criminal not just civil law.
Whenever the guy in the shop offers you an extensive warranty ask him why. Then whey he talks about accidents point out you have insurance for that. He'll next talk about the product maybe failing, at which point you ask him if he's telling you the product is unreliable and crap.
In the UK the household insurers have taken to offering equivalent insurance to the shops but at much better prices for product failure.
I used "no more nails" on the crack on my palmax. Im not sure it was the right kind of glue for the job, but it sticks anything to anything. It doesn't actually look too bad.
Unfortunately now the battery has died, and that one is *way* trickier to find. Ironically my old 486SX IBM PC110 Palmtop PC uses standard batteries that I can replace at any DV camera shop.
Thats not the way to do it. The KISS folks have been one of the people who seem to have got the Linux DVD player thing right with regard to the source modules. Secondly the mplayer people need to find out who that code came from - the kiss player if I remember rightly is based on a kit from Sigma designs.
So firstly its quite possibly not their fault Secondly its quite possible they are all still on their christmas holiday
Someone at mplayer might want to look at the other sigma based players firmware files.
And finally.. ranting and raving isn't how you solve problems because you make it hard for an accidental offender to correct a problem without losing face, which sometimes means they'll try and tough it out rather than sort it out.
There are lots of GPL infringements that get sorted out politely. Mostly involving large companies who regardless of what people like Microsoft may claim about Open v Closed most definitely DO NOT do any checking on what their contractors shipped them. They get sorted because the company can add a footnote to the manuals or put the tar source files up on the support page without embarrasment.
Nothing is or was going to keep a lot of the jobs moving once WIPO and GATT existed.
IMHO Unions do serve a very useful role, but if you look at least at UK history that role has been best served not when there have been strikes but the rest of the time, when they've been able to work with employers on safety, and quality of life while at the same time helping to ensure a company runs well and everyone is happy.
The notion that India is somehow special is laughable. Similarly India is already outsourcing work to other cheaper countries. Not just companies picking cheaper alternatives to India for outsourcing (and for plenty of products language is not a barrier) but Indian companies themselves taking on entire IT projects internal to India or external to it and then outsourcing bits of the work.
There are a lot of countries with good education systems, relatively little corruption and the infrastructure to support IT businesses. most even have well developed health care systems too - most of eastern europe for example fits the bill very nicely, as do countries like Brazil.
India also has problems some of the other countries don't - very high loss of hours to industrial disputes, extremely inflexible labour laws in some situations and the ever simmering border disputes with Pakistan.
The Indian governments own models are in part based on assumptions about call centres being a temporary not a long term phase of Indian business that will either move on or be automated out of existance by speech techology.
I would disagree. The bigger companies do think about such costs. Thats why you get a 25-50% saving when the salary difference is way higher. Similarly they are careful what and how they use very cheap but possibly lower quality resources. So for example who you get for a long distance phone billing problem depends on how much you spend a month.
Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well. The experience and infrastructure is now there. Much of the really low grade work now goes elsewhere.
Find minor bands that illustrate the needed points who either post music free to the internet or sell music on the the internet or through small recording companies.
Unlike the big names a school can easily negotiate with such groups and most of them will be delighted to help other people appreciate music and become musicians - because they've not forgotten what music is about..
There is two reasons to license software developers in the USA. Neither are good. The first is so that you can forbid compilers, debuggers and other "dangerous" tools to the RIAA/MPAA being in the hands of the masses. The second is to stop the all the computing jobs leaving the US by having a US certification required but inaccessible to the competition.
I'm all for formal open standards for security. And I am very much for formal accredited qualifications in safety critical systems. I'd love to see an MSC in computer security and similar university qualifications - but it has to be a proper and open thing, not some goverment office of computer programmer licensing.
As to accountability - there is a simple solution. Do something about the ability of companies to use software licensing as a get around for liability for product in most countries. Make it like other product. If its sold then it should be suitable for purpose. (Note here sold - paid money for. I see no reason why *paying* for open or closed source ought to be different).
It will also improve computer security no end the day a company gets sued for harming others by being negligent in applying security patches to its systems.
The authentication and verification side of that would be interesting, as would avoiding updates going stale. Visions of keyword.en.wikipedia.org and ddns from hell 8)
It would certainly be a fascinating project for someone to take up as an MSC type project.
Its a pain in the arse - you cause everyone else more pollution for your own ends. Fortunately like a lot of people I now have TMDA confirmations in the "absolutely 100% spam, dispose of now" category
It isnt the control panel that you need. No matter how much junk you reject you get too much useful email. In a business there is a cure for it. You make it *painful* to write too much email. Simple supply/demand economics. Give people a limited number of emails per day based on actual work need, and the ability to request more, and guess what happens... Email goes relevant.
Its an experiment done multiple times with the same results, and similar effects are achieved by charging per email received between departments in bigger businesses.
It isnt just patches. Some very large companies release some very large pieces of software open source. Computing heavyweights like Sun for example have contributed vast amounts of stuff.
Outside the computing world you might be suprised just who has opened software. How about large banks ? - Yep - take a look at http://www.aplusdev.org for one example.
Quite a few. Its actually rather easy to tell in several cases. Try running any linux 2.2.1x remote DoS attacks against your wireless routers for example. Lots of them will fall over - and some of them from suprisingly major brands, most of whom bought in a 3rd party solution and didn't do their IPR homework. (And yes all the other holes apply too - is your wireless network vulnerable ?)
One of the side effects of the music industry attempts to stomp out music piracy at any cost however is more and more criminalisation of copyright violations. That will help the smaller free software people no end because it will be the police busting down corporate doors for them (at least so the theory goes 8))
I would suggest starting with a rough power budget and working from both that and the monetary budget to figure the best trade off. Firstly do you really need a 1.4GHz athlon worth of power - no laptop today that is low power really has that.
For the VIA EPIA type desktop systems with the right LCD displays you can get the power down to about 55W including monitor (thats a real configuration EPIA M6000, Keycorp K57H + 12.1" TFT display, 256Mb, and a disk)
Laptops take you a little bit lower and you get the benefit of the battery being pre-fitted of course. That means looking for real low power laptops - crusoe, anataur, maybe PIII-M as well as making sure they have good power control in your favourite OS and preferably suspend to disk so you can kill the drain entirely when its off.
The CPU is critical, you can get "micro" P4 boxes but they still burn the same power, just in a smaller space. Large boxes can actually use less power because you need less fans!
If the IT world had better organisation it wouldn't consist of people being trodden underfoot because they think they are "elite" "indespensible" and "able to stand alone". As a rule of thumb your CEO is smarter than your average 21 year old programmer, and believe me *his* interests don't match yours, however much he swears they do.
India has much much stronger labour laws than the USA on most issues (although enforcement has problems sometimes). Indian IT workers sometimes do belong to unions or labour groups. Interestingly some of them chose not to use the word "union" because they wanted a labour group but didn't want the conflict the word union implies in some parts of the world, but to imply constructive working together
The jobs that went from the USA and EU have something much more important in common. They are low skilled, highly manpower intensive and not subsidized. It has a lot to do with wage costs and very little to do with unions. Software is manpower intensive, not subsidized and the skills are being developed rapidly to a high level in other countries. The rest follows logically enough.
Welcome to globalization of production. Unfortunately globalisation of buying is a different matter (eg DVD prices in europe , US text book costs, US v Canadian medicine prices).
"eople with special needs have to pay more, because special needs cost more."
Except that disabilities often make it hard for them to pay at all. Think of it as an investment instead. If you make something accessible to the disabled it means they can contribute more to society and you won't be paying their unemployment instead. It means they'll be productive and more importantly happier and more empowered.
A lot of disabled access tools are also the same tools people that you often don't think of as disabled need - older people tend to lose their ability to focus well and benefit from maginfiers and chunky displays. People with arthtritis benefit from some of the other control features and so on.
And for the totally selfish: Its always worth remembering that by the time you are 70 you too will probably have poor eyesight, poor mobility and poor motion control.
Because accessibility tools exist there are a lot of productive people out there, including people writing Linux kernel code that most of the world doesn't even know are blind or otherwise disabled.
There is plenty of time between now and when FC2 is released for that kernel to stabilize further and old drivers get tidied up (if anyone actually uses them any more). The core stuff is looking very solid and passes test suites that killed early 2.4.x
Businesses will adapt to the profit making models available to them. Innovation and manufacturing are no longer profit making models in the USA, but sueing each other out of existance is, even though its bad for the nation as a whole.
Blame the politicians, they created the economic incentive to move out of the USA, to manufacture outside of the USA and to do nothing but sue people in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
The EU has some rather stupid rules about who can sell something into the EU from outside if its not already sold there. (and of course a US and EU CD are never *quite* identical products right)
The UK has been trying to get this moronity fixed for some time but the EU itself only likes listening to corporations (it says something that the EU unelected commission is currently sueing the democratically elected EU finance ministers for voting to wave a euro borrowing rule)
The bank and currency people know its only one small item in the arsenal, but until they get rfid in money with digital authentication and biometrics in passports it raises the barriers when its in a printer.
In software its plain dangerous. If you are going to rob a bank remember to wear $20 notes blown up in various sizes all over your shirt, and be happy law enforcement can't open the footage 8)
One of the problems with using google is the student themselves can put their paper fragments on the net either to mask other searches or to wind up the lecturer, or even to drop the university into a nice juicy lawsuit so they can get a degree, their fees paid and a bonus.
You actually need snapshots from before the paper existed to do anything meaningful.
The second problem is that lots of little businesses sell people guaranteed *new* papers.
There are things that can be done more constructively to deal with such problems, and at least verify the student knows some of the subject - one of the most obvious being to randomly pick a few students each submission and invite them to a 30 minute defence of their essay.
Not a lot at the moment. It wil run xfce just about but its time has gone I think. The sad thing is there is no usable PC smaller than the PC110 since it came out in 1994..
That sounds more to me like they understand the license and don't intend to violate it. They think its bad commercial business but the market will sort out whether their proprietary player is better than open source.
The Linux community have dealt with KISS before, and KISS are providing the linux kernel sources and busybox. People are building NFS support into their players and other fun stuff.
Reactionary readings of stuff, especially translated stuff that has also been through the radio system and journalists (who like a good story so tend to turn things up 8)) is never a good idea.
One of the first things I'd say reading this is that his reaction looks a lot like several other vendors I dealt with whose CEO simply could not believe that either their employees or their subcontractors would steal code.
Some of the confusion also comes from the speaker. If the translation is accurate the speaker asks
"As he said, there are no big economical options for dragging the case to court. Instead they hope that the Open Source community will put so much pressure on Kiss Techonology that they will be forced to release all its software."
The speaker doesn't say anything about software stolen by employees or contractors, or software in dispute, just about "all software". So the reply is that KISS won't release their player app - which the company guy clearly doesn't think contains mplayer code so he doesn't have to release.
At that point he's already denied stealing any code, but confirmed he is having the matter checked.
Now it may be that code was stolen and he doesn't know about it. It may be it was stolen and he systematically was involved. I find the latter hard to believe - if it had been done by someone smart and with foreplanning they would a) have an instant cover story b) done the hiding job a lot better.
So the way I read this it says
"We havent copied anything but we will check"
"We wont be releasing all our code, including our proprietary stuff containing only our code"
"We do release all the open source stuff"
"We have fixed minor errors in the past"
"You are picking on the wrong people"
Put that way it's not quite the same as the mplayer view. Lets just see how the evidence pans out. If the KISS guys find someone stole code then we will see how they handle it. If the mplayer guys are right it won't be too long before the KISS folks will be apologising.
Alan
BTW: Larg e scale commercial copyright violation in parts of the EU (Denmark I believe included) is a violation of criminal not just civil law.
Whenever the guy in the shop offers you an extensive warranty ask him why. Then whey he talks about accidents point out you have insurance for that. He'll next talk about the product maybe failing, at which point you ask him if he's telling you the product is unreliable and crap.
In the UK the household insurers have taken to offering equivalent insurance to the shops but at much better prices for product failure.
I used "no more nails" on the crack on my palmax. Im not sure it was the right kind of glue for the job, but it sticks anything to anything. It doesn't actually look too bad.
Unfortunately now the battery has died, and that one is *way* trickier to find. Ironically my old 486SX IBM PC110 Palmtop PC uses standard batteries that I can replace at any DV camera shop.
Thats not the way to do it. The KISS folks have been one of the people who seem to have got the Linux DVD player thing right with regard to the source modules. Secondly the mplayer people need to find out who that code came from - the kiss player if I remember rightly is based on a kit from Sigma designs.
.. ranting and raving isn't how you solve problems because you make it hard for an accidental offender to correct a problem without losing face, which sometimes means they'll try and tough it out rather than sort it out.
So firstly its quite possibly not their fault
Secondly its quite possible they are all still on their christmas holiday
Someone at mplayer might want to look at the other sigma based players firmware files.
And finally
There are lots of GPL infringements that get sorted out politely. Mostly involving large companies who regardless of what people like Microsoft may claim about Open v Closed most definitely DO NOT do any checking on what their contractors shipped them. They get sorted because the company can add a footnote to the manuals or put the tar source files up on the support page without embarrasment.
Nothing is or was going to keep a lot of the jobs moving once WIPO and GATT existed.
IMHO Unions do serve a very useful role, but if you look at least at UK history that role has been best served not when there have been strikes but the rest of the time, when they've been able to work with employers on safety, and quality of life while at the same time helping to ensure a company runs well and everyone is happy.
The notion that India is somehow special is laughable. Similarly India is already outsourcing work to other cheaper countries. Not just companies picking cheaper alternatives to India for outsourcing (and for plenty of products language is not a barrier) but Indian companies themselves taking on entire IT projects internal to India or external to it and then outsourcing bits of the work.
There are a lot of countries with good education systems, relatively little corruption and the infrastructure to support IT businesses. most even have well developed health care systems too - most of eastern europe for example fits the bill very nicely, as do countries like Brazil.
India also has problems some of the other countries don't - very high loss of hours to industrial disputes, extremely inflexible labour laws in some situations and the ever simmering border disputes with Pakistan.
The Indian governments own models are in part based on assumptions about call centres being a temporary not a long term phase of Indian business that will either move on or be automated out of existance by speech techology.
I would disagree. The bigger companies do think about such costs. Thats why you get a 25-50% saving when the salary difference is way higher. Similarly they are careful what and how they use very cheap but possibly lower quality resources. So for example who you get for a long distance phone billing problem depends on how much you spend a month.
Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well. The experience and infrastructure is now there. Much of the really low grade work now goes elsewhere.
Find minor bands that illustrate the needed points who either post music free to the internet or sell music on the the internet or through small recording companies.
Unlike the big names a school can easily negotiate with such groups and most of them will be delighted to help other people appreciate music and become musicians - because they've not forgotten what music is about..
Only in the USA. You should price text book imports.
There is two reasons to license software developers in the USA. Neither are good. The first is so that you can forbid compilers, debuggers and other "dangerous" tools to the RIAA/MPAA being in the hands of the masses. The second is to stop the all the computing jobs leaving the US by having a US certification required but inaccessible to the competition.
I'm all for formal open standards for security. And I am very much for formal accredited qualifications in safety critical systems. I'd love to see an MSC in computer security and similar university qualifications - but it has to be a proper and open thing, not some goverment office of computer programmer licensing.
As to accountability - there is a simple solution. Do something about the ability of companies to use software licensing as a get around for liability for product in most countries. Make it like other product. If its sold then it should be suitable for purpose. (Note here sold - paid money for. I see no reason why *paying* for open or closed source ought to be different).
It will also improve computer security no end the day a company gets sued for harming others by being negligent in applying security patches to its systems.
The authentication and verification side of that would be interesting, as would avoiding updates going stale. Visions of keyword.en.wikipedia.org and ddns from hell 8)
It would certainly be a fascinating project for someone to take up as an MSC type project.
Its a pain in the arse - you cause everyone else more pollution for your own ends. Fortunately like a lot of people I now have TMDA confirmations in the "absolutely 100% spam, dispose of now" category
It isnt the control panel that you need. No matter how much junk you reject you get too much useful email. In a business there is a cure for it. You make it *painful* to write too much email. Simple supply/demand economics. Give people a limited number of emails per day based on actual work need, and the ability to request more, and guess what happens. .. Email goes relevant.
Its an experiment done multiple times with the same results, and similar effects are achieved by charging per email received between departments in bigger businesses.
It isnt just patches. Some very large companies release some very large pieces of software open source. Computing heavyweights like Sun for example have contributed vast amounts of stuff.
Outside the computing world you might be suprised just who has opened software. How about large banks ? - Yep - take a look at http://www.aplusdev.org for one example.
Quite a few. Its actually rather easy to tell in several cases. Try running any linux 2.2.1x remote DoS attacks against your wireless routers for example. Lots of them will fall over - and some of them from suprisingly major brands, most of whom bought in a 3rd party solution and didn't do their IPR homework. (And yes all the other holes apply too - is your wireless network vulnerable ?)
One of the side effects of the music industry attempts to stomp out music piracy at any cost however is more and more criminalisation of copyright violations. That will help the smaller free software people no end because it will be the police busting down corporate doors for them (at least so the theory goes 8))
I would suggest starting with a rough power budget and working from both that and the monetary budget to figure the best trade off. Firstly do you really need a 1.4GHz athlon worth of power - no laptop today that is low power really has that.
For the VIA EPIA type desktop systems with the right LCD displays you can get the power down to about 55W including monitor (thats a real configuration EPIA M6000, Keycorp K57H + 12.1" TFT display, 256Mb, and a disk)
Laptops take you a little bit lower and you get the benefit of the battery being pre-fitted of course. That means looking for real low power laptops - crusoe, anataur, maybe PIII-M as well as making sure they have good power control in your favourite OS and preferably suspend to disk so you can kill the drain entirely when its off.
The CPU is critical, you can get "micro" P4 boxes but they still burn the same power, just in a smaller space. Large boxes can actually use less power because you need less fans!
If the IT world had better organisation it wouldn't consist of people being trodden underfoot because they think they are "elite" "indespensible" and "able to stand alone". As a rule of thumb your CEO is smarter than your average 21 year old programmer, and believe me *his* interests don't match yours, however much he swears they do.
India has much much stronger labour laws than the USA on most issues (although enforcement has problems sometimes). Indian IT workers sometimes do belong to unions or labour groups. Interestingly some of them chose not to use the word "union" because they wanted a labour group but didn't want the conflict the word union implies in some parts of the world, but to imply constructive working together
The jobs that went from the USA and EU have something much more important in common. They are low skilled, highly manpower intensive and not subsidized. It has a lot to do with wage costs and very little to do with unions.
Software is manpower intensive, not subsidized and the skills are being developed rapidly to a high level in other countries. The rest follows logically enough.
Welcome to globalization of production. Unfortunately globalisation of buying is a different matter (eg DVD prices in europe , US text book costs, US v Canadian medicine prices).
"eople with special needs have to pay more, because special needs cost more."
Except that disabilities often make it hard for them to pay at all. Think of it as an investment instead. If you make something accessible to the disabled it means they can contribute more to society and you won't be paying their unemployment instead. It means they'll be productive and more importantly happier and more empowered.
A lot of disabled access tools are also the same tools people that you often don't think of as disabled need - older people tend to lose their ability to focus well and benefit from maginfiers and chunky displays. People with arthtritis benefit from some of the other control features and so on.
And for the totally selfish: Its always worth remembering that by the time you are 70 you too will probably have poor eyesight, poor mobility and poor motion control.
Because accessibility tools exist there are a lot of productive people out there, including people writing Linux kernel code that most of the world doesn't even know are blind or otherwise disabled.
There is plenty of time between now and when FC2 is released for that kernel to stabilize further and old drivers get tidied up (if anyone actually uses them any more). The core stuff is looking very solid and passes test suites that killed early 2.4.x
Businesses will adapt to the profit making models available to them. Innovation and manufacturing are no longer profit making models in the USA, but sueing each other out of existance is, even though its bad for the nation as a whole.
Blame the politicians, they created the economic incentive to move out of the USA, to manufacture outside of the USA and to do nothing but sue people in the USA.
Better yet get them to fix it.