Microsoft understands that it needs to sell something that users are willing to pay $10 or $20 a month for
You know, I'm not entirely sure that they haven't already done it. I'm running XP as a games OS just now, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before I get the Popup of Death, the one that says (translated into Weasel Speak) "Give us $10 or the kernel gets it".
You think that's insane? Why? We know Microsoft are going to ship software-as-a-service, and eventually they'll push the boat out and ship an OS-as-a-service. When that happens, when they finally commit to that, it'll do two things. First, it'll generate them a revenue stream for life from the tech clueless (aka 95% of the population) and businesses with poor arithmetic skills and pattern recognition. Second, it will drive everyone else away, for life. People like me (and probably you, dear reader) will just give up on MS altogether.
Think that through. There will then be two kinds of people in the world (from MS's point of view): those who feel that they have to use MS, and those who won't use MS.
At that point, what does it matter how much they piss off the second group? They're already lost the revenue from them. They've nothing to lose by saying "Hey! Remember this OS you 'bought'? Didja actually read the license? It's our OS, buddy. You want to keep playing, you have to start paying."
I'm sure that when it happens, it'll be worded in a much more slippery fashion, and it'll probably follow a series of XP downloads and service packs, one of which contains a clickthrough EULA that says "You are now running the XP+ OS. This is a new OS that supercedes the XP OS that you bought a license for. You explicitely agree that at some point we can charge you money to continue using XP+".
Dumb idea? People will just roll back to virgin XP or an older Microsoft OS? They'll move to another OS? OK, but why would MS care? When they start shipping OS-as-a-service, anybody who doesn't sign up to that model is already lost business.
They get sued? The Dubyament will step in? Gee, how much effect has that had so far? It'll be five years before a final decision is made, by which point MS will be able (I fear) to point out that they run the Dubyament mandated DRM system, and it would topple the Free World if their business model was screwed with.
Sure, this is all paranoid speculation, but try and think like MS. At some point, everyone is either going to be their bitches, or they're going to be the enemy. It loses them nothing to bitchslap the enemy; if even a few of them find they like the comforting feel of it, then MS makes a few more converts for life. They've really got nothing to lose. And XP already has the potential to turn itself into OS-as-a-service. It's only a matter of time.
I would wager that it would be easier to buy a bill than it would be stop some companies like Kaaza or Morpheus
Easier and cheaper. Hollings has only received ~$250,000 in the past couple of years from the *AA. A sufficiently large and hungry pack of lawyers could blow that on a billable lunch.
use a double knot to stop the string coming undone and use only cotton string!
These are the sorts of instructions I don't like to see in a mod!
Uh, I stopped taking it seriously after the "You can buy a hammer in any DIY store", and the use of rubber bands instead of, ooh, what's those things you use to clamp hoses...? Hose clamps! (aka jubilee clips). It's an interesting little hack, but if you need to be told where to buy a hammer or soldering iron, you're probably better off not mixing water and electricity.
using thread to attach a waterblock to the cpu is ghetto as hell
You say that as though it's a bad thing...
If you are going to take the time to make your own watercooling, also take the time to make sure its engineered right.
I hear you, but bear in mind this is written for people who need to be told that "You can purchase a hammer in any DIY shop". Besides, there's that whole "guts beats hard work" mentality that's infested our psyche. How do you know who the Bad Guy is in a film? Easy, he's the one working out. The Good Guy is out partying, but it's OK, he'll beat the Bad Guy in the fist fight because, shucks, he's got guts.
Uh, back on topic, that's pretty much the same attitude we're seeing here. Not "how you can do it right," but "here's how little you can do". Hacking for slackers. I like hacking (in all senses), but I prefer to see people hacking new toys, not just making shoddy replicas of commercial kit. I'd rather read about an innovative hack that's too hard for me to replicate than a shoddy hack that there's no point in me replicating, because it's inferior to a stock commercial product in every way.:(
The authors are complaining they are not receiving money for the sale of used books? Are they forgeting they have already received that money when those were sold the first time.
Sigh. But they didn't receive the money. What they are complaining about is Amazon provoking large scale remaindering.
Example. Amazon agrees with a publisher to take, say, 10,000 books at $5 a book. However, they only sell 5,000 of them. The publisher gets $50,000 and Amazon are out $25,000, right?
Wrong. Amazon are out $0, because they only actually pay for the number of books that they sell. The rest are "remaindered". This effectively means that the publisher writes them off and either takes them back and pulps them, or - the least hassle for them - sells them for pennies direct to Amazon.
The issue here is what Amazon is doing at this point. They have actually purchased the books, so the books are technically used. It appears that they are then selling them as such (and remember, they bought them for pennies, and I do mean pennies), or selling them on to retail partners, who then immediately advertise them back through Amazon.
Authors get no royalties for remaindered books, and it really hurts publishers, who put in the investment to print the books in the first place. Amazon can't lose off of this; the only cost to them is to warehouse the books, and Amazon are very efficient at warehousing. The publishers could take them back and pulp them to stop Amazon selling them on, but this costs them money and publishers really aren't set up to do this; they are set up to order books from printers that go direct to resellers. I think the real issue is that they're angry that Amazon is deliberately over-ordering in the first place.
A bunch of legal scholars spearheaded a counter-essay competition to reflect less sanguine views (http://www.wipout.net/essays.html) It will be interesting to compare the results.
WIPEOUT closed three weeks ago, after attracting fifty-some essays (two of which are mine). Considering that there were articles on it on Slashdot, The Register and elsewhere, that's pretty damn disappointing. Incidentally, Slashdot rejected two submissions from me recently, a reminder that the competition was closing and hadn't got many entries yet, then a "What happened to all your WIPEOUT essays?" post mortem.
Based on that, I'm inclined to think that we're simply too apathetic and disorganised to be able to do anything about the slide into being corporate beeyatches. I keep hearing talk of a Great Consumer Backlash that's going to kick off Real Soon Now, but given the crap that the Disney Congress has passed recently, I'm at a loss to understand exactly when this great popular revolt is going to start, or what single event is going to trigger it. Answers on a postcard please..
I then used KRPM (?) or something like that which promised to take care of dependencies and all. So, I "installed" (don't know if that's the right term or not) all the RPMS, and boom! Crash.
Not just hard on the noobs. I'm an applications developer who builds my own machines and has been using *nix in one form or another for 12 years, and I still had problems moving to KDE3 (on SuSE 7.3 as well).
For example: there's no README in the mirror that I got my SuSE rpms from that explains about the WINDOWMANAGER or KDEDIR settings, although in fact for SuSE, it's actually the default DISPLAYMANAGER in/etc/init.d/xdm that needs changed (yes, I know, this is SuSE's responsibility to tell me, not kde). No/opt/kde3/shared/config/xdm directory was installed and I had to copy over the kde2 version, and no ~/.kde3 directory was created or populated. I got it all sorted eventually, except that my menu bar is missing some icons, and the menu items shown under kmenuedit bear no relationship to the ones actually shown on the desktop menu.
Because I'm a developer, I won't make the mistake of wailing "Why can't someone make it better?", because I hate it when lusers say that about my software. I'll just gently point out that I don't ship apps, under Windows or Linux, to external customers or internal ones, that require any more than a double click or a single command to install. And I do this out of pure pragmatism, because I hate dealing with support issues. Hint, hint, SuSE et al.
I signed up for internet access with a quota [...] Cry "wolf!" all you want
"Big bad doggie!" cry the poor saps using BigPond cable in Australia, with their 3GB per month caps. Note that you can pull down over four times that per month using a 56k diallup.
Perhaps you'd care to share with us what your quota is, and who you're with.
can someone explain to me in layman's terms why bandwidth is so expensive
Step 1: I pay hard cash for hardware, then pay a bunch of people money to lay cables and plug in routers, then I continue to pay money to service and maintain this hardware.
Step 2: Jane Investor buys a bunch of cables and routers and plugs one of her cables into one of my routers. We are now The Internet.
Step 3: Jane wants to send a packet through her cable over my router.
Now, pop quiz. Do I:
A: Let her do it for nothing, because there's no direct cost to me other than creating a tiny electrical pulse in my router?
B: Charge her a small amount, to recoup my investment and defray my flat rate expenses.
If you answered A, you are either a Star Trek character or a.com venture capitalist. If you answered B, you are an actual member of the human race.
I'm puzzled... Mandrake are saying that it's an innovative idea to offer more stuff in return for more money.
Before you get the troll stick out, go and read their statement. That's exactly what they say. That people were buying the box set (instead of downloading) just to give them funds, and this is a better method than that "charity purchase" because it gives more benefits to the purchaser.
You ever see that Dilbert strip where Dogbert is explaining the basics of economics to a.com startup?
Startup Guy: Wait... you're saying we need revenue to make profit?
Startup Gal: Ouch. I have a headache on one side.
Sounds to me like Mandrake has just discovered the basics. Sell stuff. Offer more stuff the more money you pay. Tell your customers that they're partners, because that way they're more inclined to pay (in this case, it's actually true, but the point it that it's still standard marketing spin, and business types are comforted by familiar mantras).
Hurrah for Mandrake. I've been thinking for a while now that we could do with fewer commercial Linux distros, and better concentration of funds. I'm a SuSE user (and purchaser), but really, I don't mind who gets the money, as long as we get a few sustainable businesses out of it that we can all donate to/buy from - and get our employers to buy from - with a degree of confidence that they'll still be there next year to offer support.
I've had my Ford(tm) serviced at a Ford(tm) franchise since I got it, because that's part of the warranty terms.
But why stop there? After all, the engine control computer contains copyrightable data. Why should a third party be allowed to make a Tune-A-Ford computer that accesses that data to tune the engine? That's FORD(tm)'s data! And the name is their trademark! You shouldn't be allowed to use the Ford(tm) name to refer to devices that talk to Ford(tm) engine control computers, because that might confuse people.
Further, if I tune my Ford(tm) myself, and screw it up so that it spews smoke, that makes Ford(tm) look bad. It damages their image and brand. I really shouldn't be allowed to do that. And isn't it likely that if I'm tuning my own Ford(tm), it's probably stolen? I mean, it's not that Ford(tm) garages are open at inconvenient times, or take hours to tune Fords(tm), or sometimes lose bits of your Ford(tm), or are understaffed, or are full of morons screaming "N E 1 WANT TRADE SOJ??????" over and over and over again until you just want to rip their lungs out. No siree. Thieves, that's who tunes their own Ford(tm).
Nor should I be allowed to host a website that tells people how to tune their Fords(tm) (especially if it mentions the word "Ford"). That's just downright subversive. And don't get me started on the criminality of trying to reverse engineer the engine control computer.
In fact, nobody except Ford(tm) franchises should be allowed to even open the bonnets on Fords(tm), because then they might fit shoddy third party parts, and that would cut off Ford(tm)'s revenue stream. And non-Ford(tm) petrol might not be ideal, and if it's not ideal, it's evil. Not to mention that some of those oil companies might be tempted to make trademark infringing claims like "Works with Fords(tm)"
We really need to ban this sort of maverick behaviour, and protect Ford(tm)'s intellectual propery and branding. It's really to protect us in the long term from, from the evil of competition, because that will guarantee Ford(tm)'s revenue stream, and then they can keep developing new Ford(tm) approved features to sell us on their new line of Fords(tm). Well, lease, really. I mean, if they actually sold Fords(tm), then we'd be able to do what we wanted to with them. Yeah, better if they sell the Ford(tm) hardware, but license the use of it. That sounds fair, right?
Bertelsmann has already loaned Napster an estimated $80 million and has the option to acquire a large stake in the company. Buying Napster outright will reportedly cost Bertelsmann $15 million to $30 million.
Oh yeah,.com economics. I'd almost forgotten. Actually, this looks a lot like a sort of weird poker game:
Bertelsman: We've already bet $80 million and still not seen a red cent back. What the hell did you do with it?
Napster: Haha, it'll cost you another $15 million to find out. You haven't got the balls.
The one thing that I would bet on will be that the first thing Bertelsman does is to have a good hard look at Napster's accounts and figure out what the hell did happen to that $80 million. They can't have spend it all on lawyers and a crackpot crippleware scheme, surely? Surely!
What can we realistically do in order to force a bit more honesty in software providers?
Root their distribution server, zombie all the machines, and pop up a message box saying "Your machine has been compromised by software installed with your consent but not your knowledge by [Insert home details of Brilliant and Kazaa directors]. If you would like to protest against private companies taking control of your machine, please click HERE.". Then you email Kazaa, Brilliant, the NDA, the FBI, the FTC, the Whitehouse and the real target, Oprah. She'll kick their pasty white butts.
basically they've extended RDP (which was available in W2K Server) onto the desktop
Yeah, and they failed the laugh test on that one too. Did you see the open ports on the IIS machine that Microsoft belatedy moved their We Have The Way Out *nix bashing site to? Port 5900 was open and exposed to the outside world. That's vnc, a freeware open source remote desktop viewing system that does everything that RDA does... only without the encryption. It's recommended to run it over ssl or similar, but apparently that's a bit complicated for the bulging brains at Microsoft.
That shows that Microsoft don't use their own products, that they happy to use "insecure" open source products when it suits them, and (once again) that they neither know nor care about security. But at least they set a good precedent: the first thing I did to my WinXP box was to make sure that RDA was off, and to download and compile VNC (checking that there's no back doors) - but only after I'd set up zebedee, an ssl tunnel, for it to run on. Sigh.
Where have we already seen these groundbreaking developments?
Handheld cameras?
Straight to video releases?
Online releases?
Mock-amateur participant observers (aka gonzo filmaking), as used in the "innovative" Blair Witch?
Multiple POV scenes on DVD?
Porn, that's where. Where the porn industry (and niche market filmmakers in general) innovates, Hollywood trails along, years afterwards.
Want the know the Next Big Thing? Real time audience generated scripts. I'm thinking ho cams chat sessions, I'm thinking Troma and their script contests, especially the one where each scene was written by a different fan. Throw some budget at it, put a film crew and some Semi Big Names in a shiny van with a satellite uplink, webcast the filming and solicit "what happens next?" in real time from viewers. Zoom around Hollywood (or Toronto, more likely) with a lawyer and a light meter, spending bushels of money to shoot a quick scene in this cafe or that warehouse among real honest Joe Public, then edit it up and release a movie/DVD of the final version, complete with various alternative scenes, "the making of" documentary, and some stuff about the scene submitters. Cinema verite on steroids: "Yeah, my aunt's boyfriend's dog walker wrote this scene! Look, that's him in the credits, telling Harvey Keitel what to say!"
until it became apparent that my new "movie" was nothing more than Natalie Portman footage and light saber duels
Hate to burst your bubble, but half of the fondly remembered Natalie scenes were actually Keira Knightley, who also re-dubbed half of Natalie's lines when George realised that the whole thing wasn't confusing enough...
But yeah, the light sabre stuff rocked. At least you could make a decent trailer out of it.;-)
any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license
The GPL requires you do all those things [...] [This] license [only bans] the GPL
You're right, but for the wrong reason. (As an aside, the GPL does not require you to distribute "software" for no charge, only to provide access (or information about how to get access, for non commercial binary distributions) to the source (not the "software") at no more than cost-of-distribution). But the issue is actually the "other software distributed with" part. There is no open source-ish license that covers anything "distributed with". That's pure Microsoft FUD. The GPL explicitely extends to software linked with GPL source to produce a derivative product, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
You're absolutely right that this is an attack on the GPL, but it's the LGPL prohibition that's the real eye opener. Consider that the Mozilla license is functionally equivelant to the LGPL, and it's not prohibited, whereas the LGPL is.
This isn't an attack on open source, nor even on "viral" licenses. It's a direct attack solely on the GPL and LGPL, and by extension the FSF. Battle on.
Microsoft seems to have just banned any open source or even free (as in beer) CIFS implementations.
Oh no, quite the opposite. Read it carefully. It prohibits any license that "requires [...] other software distributed with" [to supply source, open ended licenses or no-charge distrubutions]
The thing is, there are no open source licenses that do this, because none of them effect software "distributed with". The only license that comes close is the GPL, that has to be extended to source linked to the GPL source to form a derivative piece of software. But that's not "other software".
And note that this doesn't prohibit (e.g.) the Mozilla license, but it does explicitely prohibit the functionally equivelent LGPL license. The only two licenses that this clause bans are the explicitely listed GPL and LGPL.
This is a (poorly) obfuscated attack aimed squarely at the FSF. If they'd stuck to the GPL and the list of prohibitions (which no other open source license even comes close to matching) then they might have been able to deny it. But to explicitely ban the LGPL when it's no "worse" (or better) than Mozilla makes is clear what this is: a declaration of war on the FSF. Oh my.
Let's examine the choice of words, and their implications:
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and [not "or"] any license that requires [not "allows"] in any instance that other software distributed with [not "other software linked to"] software subject to such license subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge
Well well. Note that there are no open source-ish licenses that attempt to impose terms on software "distributed with" the licensed software. In fact, the only such license I can think of off the top of my head that attempts to impose restrictions on related (not linked) software is... this one.
The LGPL doesn't do this. The full GPL doesn't do it. That's why there's an "and", not an "or" after the GPL/LGPL prohibition, as these licenses are not representative of the following prohibitions.
They don't mention the word, but they like to refer to the GPL as "viral" because it effects source linked to (not "distributed with") it. But the LGPL has no such effect. It's substantially similar to the Mozilla or Artistic licenses, neither of which are prohibited by this Microsoft license.
I think this is clear. This isn't about "viral" licenses like the GPL, because it covers the LGPL specifically as well. It's not about open source licenses in general (because none of them - including the LGPL and GPL - meet the "other software distributed with" condition). This is an open declaration of war only on the GPL and LGPL, and therefore on the FSF itself. Well, well, well.
I want all my fair rights use of anything sent into my home as I do today with analog. Vote with your wallets folks.
Just checking... you don't own a DVD player, a post-Macrovision VCR, or any software with an EULA that says that you can't make backups or reverse engineer it, right? If so, how many other people do you know who are as adamant about "fair use or nothing" purchases?
I keep hearing about consumer backlashes, but all I'm seeing is that the majority of consumers pull out their wallets and vote a resounding "yes!" to compromised, restricted systems. Doesn't that mean that crippleware is fully santioned according to the democratic process?
Not a troll, an observation. The majority might be morons, but (in a capitalist democracy) we either have to accept their decision, or think about changing the system.
I don't know where this will all end, but there's going to be some serious backlash if this keeps up. Consumers will NOT tolerate this kind of abuse
Damn right! We'll never buy system with increased quality at the cost of built in encryption targetted at squarely at stopping fair use casual home copying (because it's trivial for commercial pirates to crack but just hard enough to flummox Joe Sixpack).
Yes, it's a good thing that white elephants like CSS encrypted DVD's will never take off, right?
</sarcarm> aside, what's your basis for thinking that there'll be any kind of "backlash"? What's the single action that's going to spark this huge wave of protest, and what's going to sustain it for days, weeks and months?
I rather fear that we're going to keep going right on with this DRM crap, a little nibble here, a tweak there, a watered down bill, a few arrests, nibbling and cutting a tiny bit at a time, adding a couple of dollars a month to the bills of the average citizen (not consumer, dammit). A little carrot here, a little stick there, all done so gradually that only us reactionary geeks notice or care. And who listens to us? We're all pirates and (evil) hackers, right? To paraphrase a Salon cartoon:
Citizen: I have some reservations about this bill in the Senate.
Government: Why do you hate America so much?
I can see your fingers hovering over the "troll"/"flamebait" buttons, but instead of that, I really would like to hear what the one single event is that will actually effect enough Joe Citizens at the same time to wake them up. I thought it would be DVD region coding, but it wasn't, because Region 1 gets all the goodies. Then a lot of us thought it would be the DMCA passing, but that barely registered on the mainstream radar. The DeCSS case passed the people by: nobody cares that you can tell people how to make bombs, but you can't link to DeCSS code. When I wore my "Free Dmitri Sklyrov" shirt at work last Friday, one coworker - one - knew what it was about. In a software development house. CDBpthhhhpptpp... see, I can't even remember the name, post SSSCA (let's just call it the Hollywood Retirement Fund Bill). Even if that monster passes, it'll be years before the effects are seen at retail level, and (I'm sure) there will be enough compromises that it won't force everyone to go out and buy new (crippled) hardware all at once, it'll be a little carrot, a little stick.
So - and this is a 100% genuine question - what on earth is the trigger going to be for this "backlash" that I keep hearing about?
Without regulations on it, would it not be (significantly) more difficult for them to make it mandatory?
Hardly. Who exactly is going to object if (for example) judicial decides to start implanting these in offenders? It's on the FDA's "not our problem" list, so they won't block it.
Still, the original poster mentioned a link to a site which is publishing said information. You'll probably prove me wrong again, but I dont know of any precedent in the UK which equates publishing a link to publishing the information contained on the linked page
British (by which I mean both Scottish and English/Welsh) case law on linking is still very vague. The few cases that have reached court have dealt with deep linking as a copyright violation (i.e. passing off another site's content as your own by framing it) and they have gone against the linker, but there's been nothing comparable with the US ban on links to DeCSS. Yet.
In fact, the DCPA hasn't seen too many tests, until it hit the news recently when Sony used it to prevent the sale of a PS2 mod chip in the UK. What was particularly interesting about the ruling was that the judge ruled that despite the non-infringing use of making a backup copy (explicitely allowed by the DCPA, unlike the DMCA), simply because people could give backups to each other, that invalidated that defence (consider the implications of that - it seems to say that just because the DCPA says you can make legal backups, it doesn't really mean it, because you can use a legal backup illegally!). Also, on the matter of removing the region code to allow people to play imported games and DVD's, he expressed the opinion that regional licensing was binding, so there was no expressed or implied right to import discs, or even to purchase discs in one region, then to take them with you to another region. We can only hope that these sweeping and over broad judgements fail the laugh test in a higher court.
My bet is they'll throw away any part the book which doesn't relate to combat action, and botch that by throwing away the suits.
Or they could have a lot of glum people staring at the stars and making psuedo-profound statements about the futility of war. Think "Space: Above and Beyond", and think how quickly that got canned.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it's a perfectly proper usage, according to both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com.
No, I don't like it either, and use "sharing" by preference. But the usage has changed right under our noses.
You know, I'm not entirely sure that they haven't already done it. I'm running XP as a games OS just now, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before I get the Popup of Death, the one that says (translated into Weasel Speak) "Give us $10 or the kernel gets it".
You think that's insane? Why? We know Microsoft are going to ship software-as-a-service, and eventually they'll push the boat out and ship an OS-as-a-service. When that happens, when they finally commit to that, it'll do two things. First, it'll generate them a revenue stream for life from the tech clueless (aka 95% of the population) and businesses with poor arithmetic skills and pattern recognition. Second, it will drive everyone else away, for life. People like me (and probably you, dear reader) will just give up on MS altogether.
Think that through. There will then be two kinds of people in the world (from MS's point of view): those who feel that they have to use MS, and those who won't use MS.
At that point, what does it matter how much they piss off the second group? They're already lost the revenue from them. They've nothing to lose by saying "Hey! Remember this OS you 'bought'? Didja actually read the license? It's our OS, buddy. You want to keep playing, you have to start paying."
I'm sure that when it happens, it'll be worded in a much more slippery fashion, and it'll probably follow a series of XP downloads and service packs, one of which contains a clickthrough EULA that says "You are now running the XP+ OS. This is a new OS that supercedes the XP OS that you bought a license for. You explicitely agree that at some point we can charge you money to continue using XP+".
Dumb idea? People will just roll back to virgin XP or an older Microsoft OS? They'll move to another OS? OK, but why would MS care? When they start shipping OS-as-a-service, anybody who doesn't sign up to that model is already lost business.
They get sued? The Dubyament will step in? Gee, how much effect has that had so far? It'll be five years before a final decision is made, by which point MS will be able (I fear) to point out that they run the Dubyament mandated DRM system, and it would topple the Free World if their business model was screwed with.
Sure, this is all paranoid speculation, but try and think like MS. At some point, everyone is either going to be their bitches, or they're going to be the enemy. It loses them nothing to bitchslap the enemy; if even a few of them find they like the comforting feel of it, then MS makes a few more converts for life. They've really got nothing to lose. And XP already has the potential to turn itself into OS-as-a-service. It's only a matter of time.
Easier and cheaper. Hollings has only received ~$250,000 in the past couple of years from the *AA. A sufficiently large and hungry pack of lawyers could blow that on a billable lunch.
- use a double knot to stop the string coming undone and use only cotton string!
These are the sorts of instructions I don't like to see in a mod!Uh, I stopped taking it seriously after the "You can buy a hammer in any DIY store", and the use of rubber bands instead of, ooh, what's those things you use to clamp hoses...? Hose clamps! (aka jubilee clips). It's an interesting little hack, but if you need to be told where to buy a hammer or soldering iron, you're probably better off not mixing water and electricity.
You say that as though it's a bad thing...
I hear you, but bear in mind this is written for people who need to be told that "You can purchase a hammer in any DIY shop". Besides, there's that whole "guts beats hard work" mentality that's infested our psyche. How do you know who the Bad Guy is in a film? Easy, he's the one working out. The Good Guy is out partying, but it's OK, he'll beat the Bad Guy in the fist fight because, shucks, he's got guts.
Uh, back on topic, that's pretty much the same attitude we're seeing here. Not "how you can do it right," but "here's how little you can do". Hacking for slackers. I like hacking (in all senses), but I prefer to see people hacking new toys, not just making shoddy replicas of commercial kit. I'd rather read about an innovative hack that's too hard for me to replicate than a shoddy hack that there's no point in me replicating, because it's inferior to a stock commercial product in every way. :(
Sigh. But they didn't receive the money. What they are complaining about is Amazon provoking large scale remaindering.
Example. Amazon agrees with a publisher to take, say, 10,000 books at $5 a book. However, they only sell 5,000 of them. The publisher gets $50,000 and Amazon are out $25,000, right?
Wrong. Amazon are out $0, because they only actually pay for the number of books that they sell. The rest are "remaindered". This effectively means that the publisher writes them off and either takes them back and pulps them, or - the least hassle for them - sells them for pennies direct to Amazon.
The issue here is what Amazon is doing at this point. They have actually purchased the books, so the books are technically used. It appears that they are then selling them as such (and remember, they bought them for pennies, and I do mean pennies), or selling them on to retail partners, who then immediately advertise them back through Amazon.
Authors get no royalties for remaindered books, and it really hurts publishers, who put in the investment to print the books in the first place. Amazon can't lose off of this; the only cost to them is to warehouse the books, and Amazon are very efficient at warehousing. The publishers could take them back and pulp them to stop Amazon selling them on, but this costs them money and publishers really aren't set up to do this; they are set up to order books from printers that go direct to resellers. I think the real issue is that they're angry that Amazon is deliberately over-ordering in the first place.
WIPEOUT closed three weeks ago, after attracting fifty-some essays (two of which are mine). Considering that there were articles on it on Slashdot, The Register and elsewhere, that's pretty damn disappointing. Incidentally, Slashdot rejected two submissions from me recently, a reminder that the competition was closing and hadn't got many entries yet, then a "What happened to all your WIPEOUT essays?" post mortem.
Based on that, I'm inclined to think that we're simply too apathetic and disorganised to be able to do anything about the slide into being corporate beeyatches. I keep hearing talk of a Great Consumer Backlash that's going to kick off Real Soon Now, but given the crap that the Disney Congress has passed recently, I'm at a loss to understand exactly when this great popular revolt is going to start, or what single event is going to trigger it. Answers on a postcard please..
Not just hard on the noobs. I'm an applications developer who builds my own machines and has been using *nix in one form or another for 12 years, and I still had problems moving to KDE3 (on SuSE 7.3 as well).
For example: there's no README in the mirror that I got my SuSE rpms from that explains about the WINDOWMANAGER or KDEDIR settings, although in fact for SuSE, it's actually the default DISPLAYMANAGER in /etc/init.d/xdm that needs changed (yes, I know, this is SuSE's responsibility to tell me, not kde). No /opt/kde3/shared/config/xdm directory was installed and I had to copy over the kde2 version, and no ~/.kde3 directory was created or populated. I got it all sorted eventually, except that my menu bar is missing some icons, and the menu items shown under kmenuedit bear no relationship to the ones actually shown on the desktop menu.
Because I'm a developer, I won't make the mistake of wailing "Why can't someone make it better?", because I hate it when lusers say that about my software. I'll just gently point out that I don't ship apps, under Windows or Linux, to external customers or internal ones, that require any more than a double click or a single command to install. And I do this out of pure pragmatism, because I hate dealing with support issues. Hint, hint, SuSE et al.
"Big bad doggie!" cry the poor saps using BigPond cable in Australia, with their 3GB per month caps. Note that you can pull down over four times that per month using a 56k diallup.
Perhaps you'd care to share with us what your quota is, and who you're with.
Now, pop quiz. Do I:
If you answered A, you are either a Star Trek character or a .com venture capitalist. If you answered B, you are an actual member of the human race.
I'm puzzled... Mandrake are saying that it's an innovative idea to offer more stuff in return for more money.
Before you get the troll stick out, go and read their statement. That's exactly what they say. That people were buying the box set (instead of downloading) just to give them funds, and this is a better method than that "charity purchase" because it gives more benefits to the purchaser.
You ever see that Dilbert strip where Dogbert is explaining the basics of economics to a .com startup?
Sounds to me like Mandrake has just discovered the basics. Sell stuff. Offer more stuff the more money you pay. Tell your customers that they're partners, because that way they're more inclined to pay (in this case, it's actually true, but the point it that it's still standard marketing spin, and business types are comforted by familiar mantras).
Hurrah for Mandrake. I've been thinking for a while now that we could do with fewer commercial Linux distros, and better concentration of funds. I'm a SuSE user (and purchaser), but really, I don't mind who gets the money, as long as we get a few sustainable businesses out of it that we can all donate to/buy from - and get our employers to buy from - with a degree of confidence that they'll still be there next year to offer support.
I've had my Ford(tm) serviced at a Ford(tm) franchise since I got it, because that's part of the warranty terms.
But why stop there? After all, the engine control computer contains copyrightable data. Why should a third party be allowed to make a Tune-A-Ford computer that accesses that data to tune the engine? That's FORD(tm)'s data! And the name is their trademark! You shouldn't be allowed to use the Ford(tm) name to refer to devices that talk to Ford(tm) engine control computers, because that might confuse people.
Further, if I tune my Ford(tm) myself, and screw it up so that it spews smoke, that makes Ford(tm) look bad. It damages their image and brand. I really shouldn't be allowed to do that. And isn't it likely that if I'm tuning my own Ford(tm), it's probably stolen? I mean, it's not that Ford(tm) garages are open at inconvenient times, or take hours to tune Fords(tm), or sometimes lose bits of your Ford(tm), or are understaffed, or are full of morons screaming "N E 1 WANT TRADE SOJ??????" over and over and over again until you just want to rip their lungs out. No siree. Thieves, that's who tunes their own Ford(tm).
Nor should I be allowed to host a website that tells people how to tune their Fords(tm) (especially if it mentions the word "Ford"). That's just downright subversive. And don't get me started on the criminality of trying to reverse engineer the engine control computer.
In fact, nobody except Ford(tm) franchises should be allowed to even open the bonnets on Fords(tm), because then they might fit shoddy third party parts, and that would cut off Ford(tm)'s revenue stream. And non-Ford(tm) petrol might not be ideal, and if it's not ideal, it's evil. Not to mention that some of those oil companies might be tempted to make trademark infringing claims like "Works with Fords(tm)"
We really need to ban this sort of maverick behaviour, and protect Ford(tm)'s intellectual propery and branding. It's really to protect us in the long term from, from the evil of competition, because that will guarantee Ford(tm)'s revenue stream, and then they can keep developing new Ford(tm) approved features to sell us on their new line of Fords(tm). Well, lease, really. I mean, if they actually sold Fords(tm), then we'd be able to do what we wanted to with them. Yeah, better if they sell the Ford(tm) hardware, but license the use of it. That sounds fair, right?
Oh yeah, .com economics. I'd almost forgotten. Actually, this looks a lot like a sort of weird poker game:
The one thing that I would bet on will be that the first thing Bertelsman does is to have a good hard look at Napster's accounts and figure out what the hell did happen to that $80 million. They can't have spend it all on lawyers and a crackpot crippleware scheme, surely? Surely!
Root their distribution server, zombie all the machines, and pop up a message box saying "Your machine has been compromised by software installed with your consent but not your knowledge by [Insert home details of Brilliant and Kazaa directors]. If you would like to protest against private companies taking control of your machine, please click HERE.". Then you email Kazaa, Brilliant, the NDA, the FBI, the FTC, the Whitehouse and the real target, Oprah. She'll kick their pasty white butts.
Yeah, and they failed the laugh test on that one too. Did you see the open ports on the IIS machine that Microsoft belatedy moved their We Have The Way Out *nix bashing site to? Port 5900 was open and exposed to the outside world. That's vnc, a freeware open source remote desktop viewing system that does everything that RDA does... only without the encryption. It's recommended to run it over ssl or similar, but apparently that's a bit complicated for the bulging brains at Microsoft.
That shows that Microsoft don't use their own products, that they happy to use "insecure" open source products when it suits them, and (once again) that they neither know nor care about security. But at least they set a good precedent: the first thing I did to my WinXP box was to make sure that RDA was off, and to download and compile VNC (checking that there's no back doors) - but only after I'd set up zebedee, an ssl tunnel, for it to run on. Sigh.
Where have we already seen these groundbreaking developments?
Porn, that's where. Where the porn industry (and niche market filmmakers in general) innovates, Hollywood trails along, years afterwards.
Want the know the Next Big Thing? Real time audience generated scripts. I'm thinking ho cams chat sessions, I'm thinking Troma and their script contests, especially the one where each scene was written by a different fan. Throw some budget at it, put a film crew and some Semi Big Names in a shiny van with a satellite uplink, webcast the filming and solicit "what happens next?" in real time from viewers. Zoom around Hollywood (or Toronto, more likely) with a lawyer and a light meter, spending bushels of money to shoot a quick scene in this cafe or that warehouse among real honest Joe Public, then edit it up and release a movie/DVD of the final version, complete with various alternative scenes, "the making of" documentary, and some stuff about the scene submitters. Cinema verite on steroids: "Yeah, my aunt's boyfriend's dog walker wrote this scene! Look, that's him in the credits, telling Harvey Keitel what to say!"
Hate to burst your bubble, but half of the fondly remembered Natalie scenes were actually Keira Knightley, who also re-dubbed half of Natalie's lines when George realised that the whole thing wasn't confusing enough...
But yeah, the light sabre stuff rocked. At least you could make a decent trailer out of it. ;-)
- any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license
The GPL requires you do all those things [...] [This] license [only bans] the GPLYou're right, but for the wrong reason. (As an aside, the GPL does not require you to distribute "software" for no charge, only to provide access (or information about how to get access, for non commercial binary distributions) to the source (not the "software") at no more than cost-of-distribution). But the issue is actually the "other software distributed with" part. There is no open source-ish license that covers anything "distributed with". That's pure Microsoft FUD. The GPL explicitely extends to software linked with GPL source to produce a derivative product, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
You're absolutely right that this is an attack on the GPL, but it's the LGPL prohibition that's the real eye opener. Consider that the Mozilla license is functionally equivelant to the LGPL, and it's not prohibited, whereas the LGPL is.
This isn't an attack on open source, nor even on "viral" licenses. It's a direct attack solely on the GPL and LGPL, and by extension the FSF. Battle on.
Oh no, quite the opposite. Read it carefully. It prohibits any license that "requires [...] other software distributed with" [to supply source, open ended licenses or no-charge distrubutions]
The thing is, there are no open source licenses that do this, because none of them effect software "distributed with". The only license that comes close is the GPL, that has to be extended to source linked to the GPL source to form a derivative piece of software. But that's not "other software".
And note that this doesn't prohibit (e.g.) the Mozilla license, but it does explicitely prohibit the functionally equivelent LGPL license. The only two licenses that this clause bans are the explicitely listed GPL and LGPL.
This is a (poorly) obfuscated attack aimed squarely at the FSF. If they'd stuck to the GPL and the list of prohibitions (which no other open source license even comes close to matching) then they might have been able to deny it. But to explicitely ban the LGPL when it's no "worse" (or better) than Mozilla makes is clear what this is: a declaration of war on the FSF. Oh my.
Let's examine the choice of words, and their implications:
Well well. Note that there are no open source-ish licenses that attempt to impose terms on software "distributed with" the licensed software. In fact, the only such license I can think of off the top of my head that attempts to impose restrictions on related (not linked) software is... this one.
The LGPL doesn't do this. The full GPL doesn't do it. That's why there's an "and", not an "or" after the GPL/LGPL prohibition, as these licenses are not representative of the following prohibitions.
They don't mention the word, but they like to refer to the GPL as "viral" because it effects source linked to (not "distributed with") it. But the LGPL has no such effect. It's substantially similar to the Mozilla or Artistic licenses, neither of which are prohibited by this Microsoft license.
I think this is clear. This isn't about "viral" licenses like the GPL, because it covers the LGPL specifically as well. It's not about open source licenses in general (because none of them - including the LGPL and GPL - meet the "other software distributed with" condition). This is an open declaration of war only on the GPL and LGPL, and therefore on the FSF itself. Well, well, well.
Just checking... you don't own a DVD player, a post-Macrovision VCR, or any software with an EULA that says that you can't make backups or reverse engineer it, right? If so, how many other people do you know who are as adamant about "fair use or nothing" purchases?
I keep hearing about consumer backlashes, but all I'm seeing is that the majority of consumers pull out their wallets and vote a resounding "yes!" to compromised, restricted systems. Doesn't that mean that crippleware is fully santioned according to the democratic process?
Not a troll, an observation. The majority might be morons, but (in a capitalist democracy) we either have to accept their decision, or think about changing the system.
Damn right! We'll never buy system with increased quality at the cost of built in encryption targetted at squarely at stopping fair use casual home copying (because it's trivial for commercial pirates to crack but just hard enough to flummox Joe Sixpack).
Yes, it's a good thing that white elephants like CSS encrypted DVD's will never take off, right?
</sarcarm> aside, what's your basis for thinking that there'll be any kind of "backlash"? What's the single action that's going to spark this huge wave of protest, and what's going to sustain it for days, weeks and months?
I rather fear that we're going to keep going right on with this DRM crap, a little nibble here, a tweak there, a watered down bill, a few arrests, nibbling and cutting a tiny bit at a time, adding a couple of dollars a month to the bills of the average citizen (not consumer, dammit). A little carrot here, a little stick there, all done so gradually that only us reactionary geeks notice or care. And who listens to us? We're all pirates and (evil) hackers, right? To paraphrase a Salon cartoon:
I can see your fingers hovering over the "troll"/"flamebait" buttons, but instead of that, I really would like to hear what the one single event is that will actually effect enough Joe Citizens at the same time to wake them up. I thought it would be DVD region coding, but it wasn't, because Region 1 gets all the goodies. Then a lot of us thought it would be the DMCA passing, but that barely registered on the mainstream radar. The DeCSS case passed the people by: nobody cares that you can tell people how to make bombs, but you can't link to DeCSS code. When I wore my "Free Dmitri Sklyrov" shirt at work last Friday, one coworker - one - knew what it was about. In a software development house. CDBpthhhhpptpp... see, I can't even remember the name, post SSSCA (let's just call it the Hollywood Retirement Fund Bill). Even if that monster passes, it'll be years before the effects are seen at retail level, and (I'm sure) there will be enough compromises that it won't force everyone to go out and buy new (crippled) hardware all at once, it'll be a little carrot, a little stick.
So - and this is a 100% genuine question - what on earth is the trigger going to be for this "backlash" that I keep hearing about?
Hardly. Who exactly is going to object if (for example) judicial decides to start implanting these in offenders? It's on the FDA's "not our problem" list, so they won't block it.
British (by which I mean both Scottish and English/Welsh) case law on linking is still very vague. The few cases that have reached court have dealt with deep linking as a copyright violation (i.e. passing off another site's content as your own by framing it) and they have gone against the linker, but there's been nothing comparable with the US ban on links to DeCSS. Yet.
In fact, the DCPA hasn't seen too many tests, until it hit the news recently when Sony used it to prevent the sale of a PS2 mod chip in the UK. What was particularly interesting about the ruling was that the judge ruled that despite the non-infringing use of making a backup copy (explicitely allowed by the DCPA, unlike the DMCA), simply because people could give backups to each other, that invalidated that defence (consider the implications of that - it seems to say that just because the DCPA says you can make legal backups, it doesn't really mean it, because you can use a legal backup illegally!). Also, on the matter of removing the region code to allow people to play imported games and DVD's, he expressed the opinion that regional licensing was binding, so there was no expressed or implied right to import discs, or even to purchase discs in one region, then to take them with you to another region. We can only hope that these sweeping and over broad judgements fail the laugh test in a higher court.
Or they could have a lot of glum people staring at the stars and making psuedo-profound statements about the futility of war. Think "Space: Above and Beyond", and think how quickly that got canned.