The first thing Apple shipped using rendez-vous was iChat. The iTunes demo refered to has yet to ship. (you can get the same fuctionnality using iCommune though).
Then, it's not that magical. It only works on one subnet, no way to manually add hosts to the resolver (at least not without serious hacking).
What's the deal with Safari helping you change your printer config? IF your printer advertises itself as a web serveur via Rendez-vous, AND you ask safari to display Rendez-vous-discovered bookmarks, then yes, you can directly access the printer's config pages. But the article does not make this clear at all. And this is different from auto-discovering printers, which I have yet to test since the old HPs we use are still go for a couple hundred thousand pages.
The wild guesses about distributed computing are still a pipe dream, Rendez-vous or not.
And at work, somehow, aliases of Rendez-vous-mountedd servers won't resolve after unmounting the server. Aliases made of servers mounted via AFP or Appletalk will resolve and mount the server.
Rendez-vous is cool, but it still has a long way to go before it is as polished (from a user POV) as the old Appletalk system.
Dear BSA, following your letter suggesting a self audit of our compagny, I am glad to inform you that we did indeed complete the required process.
As you suspected, it was impossible for us to account for every software package and updates/sidegrades we acquired over the last 10 years.
We carefully considered the cost of a complete research of archives and archeological search at the municipal dump, as well as the cost of re-acquiring the missing licences.
We therefore advise you that your audit letter prompted us to move to a mostly open source and free software environement. We thank you for being the catalyst in that switch, the proverbial "last straw".
The few worksations still running software from BSA members are fully licenced and these licences are available for your viewing pleasure if you so desire.
The connectivity issues are important inside the ENUM namespace: whether or not indivudial VoIP network are connected at the IP level is not the point. I see it more as an issue with private information management, not as a wiretapping/hacking issue.
I don't see myself as paranoid about ENUM. I really like the concept: it seems fairly coherent and forward looking to me. But unlike POTS and the early telecom industry, which were heavily regularized, the industry is now less accountable and policy-based regulation is less present. I think ENUM should be reviewed carefully in that context for possible abuses.
Before you go running in the streets naked yelling Eureka, consider the privacy implication of the said technology and other related issues. Google it. Thanks.
Well, I'm buying the "Apple does not want the RIAA on their back" argument.
Yet, if you have some testosterone to spare and are totally insolvent, you could try to argue that you are either
a) trying to interface with a hardware system that happens to talk the same language as iTunes and design/describe a software package for that purpose or
b) create an API to interface with a HW device with the SDK, and then write another program that ties into that program and provides the missing iCommune functions.
If everything fails, you could argue that you're interfacing with an ethernet card. But that's really a desperate argument, since it's not "your" device.
Not legal advice, not even reasonable advice, blah blah.
I would have been curious to see what would have happened if you had used the QTSS to make the sharing streaming-only. Maybe something working with all those Net-tune compatible devices?
Now you could announce you're done with iCommune and work on a movie sharing Commune working with iMovie. Sit and wait for the MPAA freakout.
Especially since Pudong airport is quite far from Downtown Shanghai... Cost me 180 Yuan, when I expected 18 yuan (my chinese numerals are not good, and the taxi guy had a non-beijing accent).... My bad, I should have checked a map.
And Air Canada/American Airlines slapped me a week-end fee on my ticket (had changed the date) so I had no more money for the Airport tax.. sigh...
At least they had ATMs.
Anyways. I'm glad to see those tracks are finally put to good use.
I saw Episode 2 for the first time last week, on Imax, so I can't comment on the library since that scene was edited out. (ok, second viewing, but the first one was on a crappy VCD on a crappy TV with very crappy sound in a otherwise very nice place in rural China).
It would be nice to include credit for the inspirations, if only to acknowledge that human creativity can positively benefit from past creations. Although it is definately not a legal requirement.
Don't.. feed... the...troll....
Can't do it!
If that's not a jurist's bio , I don't know what is.
Now I could agree that Lessig is not the best candidate for a supreme court appointment, but he is an excellent jurist and lawyer (to the limited extend of his practical experience).
Here's my experience while accessing the net through internet cafés, both officials and less official ones. Yeah, cnn.com is blocked. but money.cnn.com was not. It's not a very smart filter it seems. Some sites will just time out. In some places a proxy generated page will tell you about a breach of user agreement, both in english and chinese.
It does not prevent young chinese boys to access plenty of pr0n in plain view in some cafés.
Slashdot.org was accessible when I tried it. I even posted a comment on a similar story while a was there.
About the modem standards: Rockwell and USR both tried to anticipate the final text of the ITU recommendation.
Can't blame them: the working groups take a long long time and there was a definite market for faster modems at the time.
I guess they expected that by gaining a fothold in the marketplace first they might either influence the working group for V.90 or simply rip off consumers twice in the same year.
Most USR modems ended up being flashable to V.90 though. I don't know about modems based on the 56k flex chipset.
Anyways, this is not quite a good example for the 2nd point you're trying to make.
Interesting point of view. I tend to agree with you but if Microsoft bought Quark and cancelled XPress for Mac, for no reason other than to attract users to windows, then would it be fair game?
I think it would be by your arguments, but Mac users (and Apple) would still be hurting a lot.
Actually, you have a good point... If they were an International Organisation(Think the UN, WIPO, WTO, ITU, ISO, CERN, etc) they would have immunities against lawsuits in all the countries who ratified their constituting treaty. Now, as much as we like the IEEE, there's just a US based group subject to US laws. They don't really have a choice but to cover their butts comsidering the current trigger happy climate for intellectual property violations.
And you'll find that any other standardisation group (ANSI for example) is doing pretty much the same thing with their own standards right now.
It's not what I want. It's what the W3C wants to be. The royalty option is not heretic per se.
Having ones IPR included in a standard is a given monopoly. Traditionnaly, people who contributed to the standardisation process by giving away code and ideas considered that the expertise and the head start they had with the technology was a sufficient way to recover the costs of developing the technology. There was also the fact that the standardisation process tended to be a very collaborative one but is moving more and more toward a lobying effort to push one specific existing tech forward. Nowadays, especially with the copyright and patent hysteria surronding software in the US and elsewhere, organisations feel their creations should be on a (short) chain and bullet for ever. I guess they think they can make more money this way. In the short term, they are probably right.
In the long term however, if SDOs are becoming a rubber stamp on proprietary technology, they will start losing their usefulness: if a major market player can impose it's own technology, why bother with SDOs at all? You don't see MS trying to get the Office file format defined as a standard anywhere. They could not care less.
SDOs are big slow heavy boats, but they do have a very usefull role. However, in my opinion, they will fail if their role changes to that of a marketing tool or a simple certification label.
So RAND might be good in the short run. Some organisation might even try to encourage IPR encumbered recommendations and standards. it might encourage companies to get their products out to the world. Might be very good indeed for everyone. But there is also a need for free collaborative standards. It will be interesting to see what the W3C chooses.
It could be an excuse indeed for some companies to avoid using W3C as a standard defining organisation and try to go to different forums that offer seemingly better financial incentives.
The question now for the W3C (and any other SDO for that matters) is: what do they want their standards/recommendations to be?
Do they target wide adoption and compliance? Do they care about the development of the medium? Do they want to allow the possibility of occasionaly creating de facto monopolies and cash cows for people who manage to tie their intellectual property rights to some standard? Do they have enough confidence in the strengh and credibility of their organization to take a strong stance regarding IPR issues?
It's not an easy decision for the W3C, it is even harder for SDOs like the ISO, the ITU or others that rely on their members contribution (for standard development and financial contributions).
As a side note, the whole issue of patents on software is far from settled in many jurisdictions. W3C standards have an international appeal and there is a huge liability issue regarding the non enforceability of such patents on a worldwide basic. This issue can't be looked at with an american law background only.
I could not be happier about such a move.
I like my cable modem for the always on factor, and for the occasionnal big download. I have my little router and I just enjoy having my LAN connected to the net with no fuss.
I don't plan on running a gnutella node anytime soon and I'm not a big *insert favorite mean of file transfer here* user.
They could even get a mean bandwidth usage factor in there, so people streaming audio to their machines woudn't be penalisez for the constant trickle.
If I could get a cheaper high speed, low latency, connection for cheap, I could not be happier.
It's funny to see this described as a sensible ruling. Well, the ruling is not surprising, and I'm personnally quite happy with it. But it clashes big time with the rules US courts have developped regarding the application of US law abroad, especially when it comes to anything Internet or telecom related.
So far, american courts have used the most far fetched factual elements to tie any dispute to US jurisdictions and apply US law to them.
Now what? All national laws are equal, but some nationality are more equal than others?
Incorporating patented intellectual property in standards or norms is a tricky issue. Disclosure though is essential as the problem of submarine patents is real and scary (not to mention the fact that software patents are not a done deal in many jurisdictions)
There is another area which the W3C will have to adress soon though if they open the patents can of worm: copyrighted software.
Most software, if not all depending on the legislations, is copyrighted. Even open source/libre/free software is copyrighted. And to me the patent issue is only the tip of the problem, the main IP issue being the copyrights.
Software as long been used in IETF recommendations as reference implementations and they have a clear copyright policy for those programs. The recommendations themselves are always copyrights free, so far at least.
FOr most things like protocols and norms using tcp/ip technology, it is possible to describe the processes and operations using pseudo-code or other description technique, but there are situations where this is not practical. Audio and video codecs come to mind.
How does the W3C plan to adress the eventual inclusion of copyrighted software in the normative parts of standards?
Does the W3C plan to encourage during the darfting process the use of a BSD type licence (the GPL being unfortunately inaceptable here for obvious reasons) for software included as normative parts of standards?
How will the W3C adress the liability issues surrounding the attribution of licences to third parties? Or will the W3C leave users and implementers at the mercy of anyone claiming infringement?
Hey, just a couple questions I have to answer myself in real life:-)
Did you factor in purchase value at the end of the lease?
I think the price diff between the TDi and the GL model (on the Jetta) is pretty much compensated by the superior resale value of the car.
But there is no question that the more you drive with a diesel, the more you save.
A VW used just for a short commute might not save you much money, but you're not spending much on fuel anyways.
So just enjoy the quieter ride and the low end torque of the TDi for the time being!
Just get a fishing boat to rip off a cable. The article implies that this happens quite often. Especially since fiber cables are tiny compared to mammoth old style copper cables.
That must give the NSA or whoever a couple days to splice the cable at another point. Service goes back online, all looks normal.
Am I missing something obvious? You don't even need to be discreet. Just provide a decoy.
No no no... Canadians are paying a levy on every CD and basically magnetic media that can hold music. The levy is payed by the manufacturer or the importater. The stores care only if their profit margin is percentage based, which is doubtfull for such a comodity item.
The new levy was to come in effect in march if I am not mistaken. Anyways: check it out for yourself
Slashdot Mirror
This article is perfectible...
The first thing Apple shipped using rendez-vous was iChat. The iTunes demo refered to has yet to ship. (you can get the same fuctionnality using iCommune though).
Then, it's not that magical. It only works on one subnet, no way to manually add hosts to the resolver (at least not without serious hacking).
What's the deal with Safari helping you change your printer config? IF your printer advertises itself as a web serveur via Rendez-vous, AND you ask safari to display Rendez-vous-discovered bookmarks, then yes, you can directly access the printer's config pages. But the article does not make this clear at all. And this is different from auto-discovering printers, which I have yet to test since the old HPs we use are still go for a couple hundred thousand pages.
The wild guesses about distributed computing are still a pipe dream, Rendez-vous or not.
And at work, somehow, aliases of Rendez-vous-mountedd servers won't resolve after unmounting the server. Aliases made of servers mounted via AFP or Appletalk will resolve and mount the server.
Rendez-vous is cool, but it still has a long way to go before it is as polished (from a user POV) as the old Appletalk system.
Do like he did: go into academia. You'll have time and a decent salary to pursue a personal agenda.
Dear BSA, following your letter suggesting a self audit of our compagny, I am glad to inform you that we did indeed complete the required process.
As you suspected, it was impossible for us to account for every software package and updates/sidegrades we acquired over the last 10 years.
We carefully considered the cost of a complete research of archives and archeological search at the municipal dump, as well as the cost of re-acquiring the missing licences.
We therefore advise you that your audit letter prompted us to move to a mostly open source and free software environement. We thank you for being the catalyst in that switch, the proverbial "last straw".
The few worksations still running software from BSA members are fully licenced and these licences are available for your viewing pleasure if you so desire.
Yours trully,
me
The connectivity issues are important inside the ENUM namespace: whether or not indivudial VoIP network are connected at the IP level is not the point.
I see it more as an issue with private information management, not as a wiretapping/hacking issue.
I don't see myself as paranoid about ENUM. I really like the concept: it seems fairly coherent and forward looking to me.
But unlike POTS and the early telecom industry, which were heavily regularized, the industry is now less accountable and policy-based regulation is less present. I think ENUM should be reviewed carefully in that context for possible abuses.
Before you go running in the streets naked yelling Eureka, consider the privacy implication of the said technology and other related issues. Google it. Thanks.
Well, I'm buying the "Apple does not want the RIAA on their back" argument.
Yet, if you have some testosterone to spare and are totally insolvent, you could try to argue that you are either
a) trying to interface with a hardware system that happens to talk the same language as iTunes and design/describe a software package for that purpose or
b) create an API to interface with a HW device with the SDK, and then write another program that ties into that program and provides the missing iCommune functions.
If everything fails, you could argue that you're interfacing with an ethernet card. But that's really a desperate argument, since it's not "your" device.
Not legal advice, not even reasonable advice, blah blah.
I would have been curious to see what would have happened if you had used the QTSS to make the sharing streaming-only. Maybe something working with all those Net-tune compatible devices?
Now you could announce you're done with iCommune and work on a movie sharing Commune working with iMovie. Sit and wait for the MPAA freakout.
Especially since Pudong airport is quite far from Downtown Shanghai...
Cost me 180 Yuan, when I expected 18 yuan (my chinese numerals are not good, and the taxi guy had a non-beijing accent).... My bad, I should have checked a map.
And Air Canada/American Airlines slapped me a week-end fee on my ticket (had changed the date) so I had no more money for the Airport tax.. sigh...
At least they had ATMs.
Anyways. I'm glad to see those tracks are finally put to good use.
No no... Don't get all paranoid. It has to do with a licensing issue. Apple pays for some codec for iDVD by the number of DVD they ship in Macs.
If you want to use almosr any DVD burner on a Mac, get DVD studio pro and pay for your codec of the licence.
Anyways, in one scene (on Naboo?), there is a building that is very clearly inspired from the Plaza de Espana, in Sevilla, Spain.
It would be nice to include credit for the inspirations, if only to acknowledge that human creativity can positively benefit from past creations. Although it is definately not a legal requirement.
Don't.. feed... the.. .troll....
Can't do it!
If that's not a jurist's bio , I don't know what is.
Now I could agree that Lessig is not the best candidate for a supreme court appointment, but he is an excellent jurist and lawyer (to the limited extend of his practical experience).
Here's my experience while accessing the net through internet cafés, both officials and less official ones. Yeah, cnn.com is blocked. but money.cnn.com was not. It's not a very smart filter it seems.
Some sites will just time out. In some places a proxy generated page will tell you about a breach of user agreement, both in english and chinese.
It does not prevent young chinese boys to access plenty of pr0n in plain view in some cafés.
Slashdot.org was accessible when I tried it. I even posted a comment on a similar story while a was there.
You know, to me this whole things brings the same feeling as the debate on affirmative actions for minorities or disabled persons.
It's really touchy and there are always going to be people for and against, no matter how you turn the queston.
About the modem standards: Rockwell and USR both tried to anticipate the final text of the ITU recommendation.
Can't blame them: the working groups take a long long time and there was a definite market for faster modems at the time.
I guess they expected that by gaining a fothold in the marketplace first they might either influence the working group for V.90 or simply rip off consumers twice in the same year.
Most USR modems ended up being flashable to V.90 though. I don't know about modems based on the 56k flex chipset.
Anyways, this is not quite a good example for the 2nd point you're trying to make.
Interesting point of view. I tend to agree with you but if Microsoft bought Quark and cancelled XPress for Mac, for no reason other than to attract users to windows, then would it be fair game?
I think it would be by your arguments, but Mac users (and Apple) would still be hurting a lot.
Woah, now if Microsoft did something like that, Mac users would be screaming bloody murder!
Actually, you have a good point...
If they were an International Organisation(Think the UN, WIPO, WTO, ITU, ISO, CERN, etc) they would have immunities against lawsuits in all the countries who ratified their constituting treaty.
Now, as much as we like the IEEE, there's just a US based group subject to US laws. They don't really have a choice but to cover their butts comsidering the current trigger happy climate for intellectual property violations.
And you'll find that any other standardisation group (ANSI for example) is doing pretty much the same thing with their own standards right now.
It's not what I want. It's what the W3C wants to be. The royalty option is not heretic per se.
Having ones IPR included in a standard is a given monopoly. Traditionnaly, people who contributed to the standardisation process by giving away code and ideas considered that the expertise and the head start they had with the technology was a sufficient way to recover the costs of developing the technology. There was also the fact that the standardisation process tended to be a very collaborative one but is moving more and more toward a lobying effort to push one specific existing tech forward.
Nowadays, especially with the copyright and patent hysteria surronding software in the US and elsewhere, organisations feel their creations should be on a (short) chain and bullet for ever.
I guess they think they can make more money this way. In the short term, they are probably right.
In the long term however, if SDOs are becoming a rubber stamp on proprietary technology, they will start losing their usefulness: if a major market player can impose it's own technology, why bother with SDOs at all? You don't see MS trying to get the Office file format defined as a standard anywhere. They could not care less.
SDOs are big slow heavy boats, but they do have a very usefull role.
However, in my opinion, they will fail if their role changes to that of a marketing tool or a simple certification label.
So RAND might be good in the short run. Some organisation might even try to encourage IPR encumbered recommendations and standards. it might encourage companies to get their products out to the world. Might be very good indeed for everyone.
But there is also a need for free collaborative standards.
It will be interesting to see what the W3C chooses.
It could be an excuse indeed for some companies to avoid using W3C as a standard defining organisation and try to go to different forums that offer seemingly better financial incentives.
The question now for the W3C (and any other SDO for that matters) is: what do they want their standards/recommendations to be?
Do they target wide adoption and compliance? Do they care about the development of the medium? Do they want to allow the possibility of occasionaly creating de facto monopolies and cash cows for people who manage to tie their intellectual property rights to some standard? Do they have enough confidence in the strengh and credibility of their organization to take a strong stance regarding IPR issues?
It's not an easy decision for the W3C, it is even harder for SDOs like the ISO, the ITU or others that rely on their members contribution (for standard development and financial contributions).
As a side note, the whole issue of patents on software is far from settled in many jurisdictions. W3C standards have an international appeal and there is a huge liability issue regarding the non enforceability of such patents on a worldwide basic. This issue can't be looked at with an american law background only.
I could not be happier about such a move.
I like my cable modem for the always on factor, and for the occasionnal big download. I have my little router and I just enjoy having my LAN connected to the net with no fuss.
I don't plan on running a gnutella node anytime soon and I'm not a big *insert favorite mean of file transfer here* user.
They could even get a mean bandwidth usage factor in there, so people streaming audio to their machines woudn't be penalisez for the constant trickle.
If I could get a cheaper high speed, low latency, connection for cheap, I could not be happier.
Ohhhh... Now I understand why Jud moved his lists from boingo.com to letterip.com!
I hope you did a good deal in the sale, and keep up the good work: it is a appreciated.
It's funny to see this described as a sensible ruling. Well, the ruling is not surprising, and I'm personnally quite happy with it. But it clashes big time with the rules US courts have developped regarding the application of US law abroad, especially when it comes to anything Internet or telecom related.
So far, american courts have used the most far fetched factual elements to tie any dispute to US jurisdictions and apply US law to them.
Now what? All national laws are equal, but some nationality are more equal than others?
Incorporating patented intellectual property in standards or norms is a tricky issue. Disclosure though is essential as the problem of submarine patents is real and scary (not to mention the fact that software patents are not a done deal in many jurisdictions)
:-)
There is another area which the W3C will have to adress soon though if they open the patents can of worm: copyrighted software.
Most software, if not all depending on the legislations, is copyrighted. Even open source/libre/free software is copyrighted. And to me the patent issue is only the tip of the problem, the main IP issue being the copyrights.
Software as long been used in IETF recommendations as reference implementations and they have a clear copyright policy for those programs. The recommendations themselves are always copyrights free, so far at least.
FOr most things like protocols and norms using tcp/ip technology, it is possible to describe the processes and operations using pseudo-code or other description technique, but there are situations where this is not practical. Audio and video codecs come to mind.
How does the W3C plan to adress the eventual inclusion of copyrighted software in the normative parts of standards?
Does the W3C plan to encourage during the darfting process the use of a BSD type licence (the GPL being unfortunately inaceptable here for obvious reasons) for software included as normative parts of standards?
How will the W3C adress the liability issues surrounding the attribution of licences to third parties? Or will the W3C leave users and implementers at the mercy of anyone claiming infringement?
Hey, just a couple questions I have to answer myself in real life
Did you factor in purchase value at the end of the lease?
I think the price diff between the TDi and the GL model (on the Jetta) is pretty much compensated by the superior resale value of the car.
But there is no question that the more you drive with a diesel, the more you save.
A VW used just for a short commute might not save you much money, but you're not spending much on fuel anyways.
So just enjoy the quieter ride and the low end torque of the TDi for the time being!
Just get a fishing boat to rip off a cable. The article implies that this happens quite often. Especially since fiber cables are tiny compared to mammoth old style copper cables.
That must give the NSA or whoever a couple days to splice the cable at another point. Service goes back online, all looks normal.
Am I missing something obvious? You don't even need to be discreet. Just provide a decoy.
No no no... Canadians are paying a levy on every CD and basically magnetic media that can hold music. The levy is payed by the manufacturer or the importater. The stores care only if their profit margin is percentage based, which is doubtfull for such a comodity item. The new levy was to come in effect in march if I am not mistaken. Anyways: check it out for yourself