The "every clone card works with the NE2K driver" thing was more of an accidental thing than a deliberate effort to provide a standard fallback.
In the early years of Ethernet, NICs made by 3COM, IBM etc were very expensive. Novell, which was pushing NetWare hard at the time saw that they would benefit from having cheap ether cards out there. So they made their own card and sold it essentially at cost. Novell was not in the business of making a profit selling NICs, they were in the business of selling NetWare and client licenses. For each NIC out there, Novell gained a potential NW customer.
The combination of cheap NICs (about 1/4 of what 3COM et al were charging) and guaranteed support in NetWare meant that a lot of the cards were sold. And drivers for pretty much every OS out there were written. Which resulted in many companies wanting to make their own ethernet chips cloned / made them sufficiently close to NE2K that the generic drivers would work - instant universal support instead of having to roll their own drivers for every OS.
Far from all cheap ether chips were NE2K clones and it never became an official standard unlike f.ex. UHCI for USB controllers. But if you have an old no-name eth card from the far east, trying the Linux NE2K(-pci) driver might get you up and running.
Anyway, later on the DEC tulip (21[01]4x) became a favourite among cloners. Mostly because NE2K provided pretty much only the bare minimum to run ethernet, and speed/CPU usage suffered.
ATTEMPTS is the key word, is it not? The corrupted vote is null and void,
You're referring to the situation in Sweden, right? There's a lot more suspicious going on than just that one incident.
12 new countries joined the ISO OOXML committee this year. 10 of those voted yes.
Lots of new participants in the national standards boards. Most of which contributed little to the national reviews of the proposed standard and voted 'yes with no comments'.
I'll not claim outright fraud on MS' part, but if the 'if it quacks like a duck' test is applied it looks deceptively similar to ballot stuffing.
and now Microsoft will have every action on that standard scrutinized heavily. So I don't really see what good adding an ungodly layer of bureaucracy will do. Standards take quite a while to move from proposal to final spec, there is ample process.
The thing is, this was not submitted to ISO as a regular proposal. It was submitted to the ISO Fast Track process. This process is intended for non-controversial standards that most people agree on and that are assumed to be properly reviewed and polished already. The reason OOXML qualified for Fast Track is that it is already an ECMA standard.
If the just finished vote had gotten a majority 'yes', the game would have been over and OOXML would have become an ISO standard. Not exactly "ample process".
The current vote was undecided (not positive enough to become a standard outright, and not negative enough to reject it and force MS to take OOXML through the slow way as a regular ISO proposal where there *is* ample process).
What happens now, is that ECMA/MS will look at the comments and make a set of proposed revisions. On Feb 25-29 there is a vote and if there are enough 'yes' then OOXML is an ISO standard.
I've seen lots of stuff that focuses on the cost of the parts. These people seem to act like it was inevitable that if you dumped enough of the specified parts into a vat together that they'd eventually inevitably produce an iPhone.
True, looking at the Bill Of Material doesn't give the exact true cost per handset produced (the BOM does include estimates on manufacturing, cost of 3rd party software/IP licensing and the OS. So it is not the physical parts only). But it does provide a useful yardstick to compare the likely profit margins. That is, if one compares the BOM vs MSRP on a Nokia/SE/Motorola and on the iPhone one sees that at $600 Apple had a much larger margin than other cell phone manufacturers.
It's also possible that high price helped them recover development costs, and with that done, they're free to drop the price.
Using the same logic, the price tag on the first version of OSX should have been very high. I'm not saying that iPhOSX wasn't expensive to develop, but like the first version of OSX it is an investment in a new platform. iPhOSX is going to power an entire family of Apple gadgets (first of which is the iPod Touch). In terms of accounting it should be treated as a long term investment to be written off over at least a year or two, not over two months.
Also, look at the likely BOM on the $400 Touch; an iPhone minus GSM/Camera plus 8GB Flash. In terms of parts cost that comes out at about even. So same hardware cost, and the Touch doesn't give Apple 10% kickback from a carrier. That's probably the reason they set the iPhone to the same price; anyone doing a comparison would see that they are essentially the same device, only differences are in easily priced hardware (no need to guesstimate the OS and touch display cost). Apple would be hard pressed to explain the $200 premium, it would at least make it painfully obvious that the margin on the iPhone was ridiculous.
people who want one so badly they're willing to overlook some Rev A problems.
Two words: Nano. Scratches. The Apple early adopters are not known for overlooking problems in their much vaunted devices, so I kinda doubt that one.
It's also possible the price itself was intended as a quality/caché signal.
I think you have hit upon the main cause for the blogstorm that forced Jobs to do damage control in order to bring the faithful back in line.
The important difference is that off-in-a-group-on-a-website hecklers are easier to avoid than in-your-physical-face hecklers. As long as they're not pestering you directly by spamming your wall/blog/whatever, it is a lot easier to avoid the online kind of numbnuts.
And if you have some social need to provide said numbnuts with some clue, joining the group and working from the inside is usually more effective than ZOMG-must-ban!
Did you even bother to read the wikipedia article? Yes, in 1989. Although when it comes to the Berne moral rights, the US is only compliant in name only.
What he said about cell phones is true. Most include a J2ME runtime by now. As far as platform penetration goes in the cell world, J2ME is the closest thing to a lingua franca there is.
In terms of hardware, "the basic cell stack" and pretty much everything else except the touch screen are regular components. Getting a pretty accurate estimate on cost of those components - including any necessary firmware licenses isn't rocket science.
Which leaves iPhOSX and multitouch. Remember, the post I was replying to was making the claim that Apple were selling the phones at a loss, and they needed the 10% kickback on the 2year contract to make a profit. Even using high estimates on the OS, display and any other costs, ISTM that Apple is making a profit even before the AT&T kickback.
But is that 25%-35% on retail or retail+10% of the carrier contract?
The comment I was responding to was claiming that Apple was essentially selling the iPhones at a loss, and that they had to do the 2 year lock and 10% profit sharing with AT&T to make some money back. Even with a higher BOM and adding a reasonable per-unit cost for writing off the software dev, design, etc costs it still seems to me that they should make a profit on the current retail cost.
You are not the only one to give that $250-ish estimate for the parts, but apparently that figure does not include software, which you yourself point out, is the most important feature of the iPhone.
True, but the cost of the software and related stuff like design etc can be spread over all the units sold. And the multitouch and iPod software that was developed for the iPhone is rather likely to be reused in future products; iPhonev2, multitouch video iPod.. So at least a bit of the cost should be thought of as investment in a software platform (might I coin the name iPhOSX?) that will be used by future Apple handheld devices.
Think of it as the first version of OSX. It cost a chunk to make. But it it would be silly of Apple to look at the number of OSX licenses sold in the first half year and go 'omg, we didn't make our money back!, we should have sold each license at $1000'. That's the kind of investment you'd typically write down over several years. Same thing, albeit on a smaller scale, for iPhOSX.
Remember, the post I was replying to was claiming that Apple would have to sell the phones at about $1000 to make a profit, and that without the AT&T exclusive contract (where Apple gets a share of the phone bill). The BOM shows that that simply isn't the case.
The Bill Of Materials + putting the thing together and shipping/handling is the incremental cost per unit. Which should give us the lowest price that Apple can make a profit at selling *that* *particular* *unit*.
Design, the software etc can be amortized over all the units sold. Given the number of units Apple has sold - and expect to sell, the static cost per unit won't be very high.
They're a glimpse into how expensive the iPhone really is.
Are you a key employee at Apple and know how much they cost to build? Because the rest of us out here have to depend on tearing the phone apart and pricing the components - which at current best guess is at something like $250-$300. Except for the display, the components are pretty much standard off the shelf type stuff which is easy to price. So fess up, are the estimates on the display price way way low?
Thing is, the iPhone didn't happen before just because it's expensive
The iPhone happened because someone at Apple (Jobs, perhaps?) saw a market opportunity in the fact that most cell phones have a sucky UI. What makes the iPhone is a nifty multi-touch display and a lot of software development.
Traditional phone makers like Nokia don't have the same kind of incentive to sink a lot of cost in 'reinventing the UI'. Their current models are selling quite well, so why spend a lot of money on something that might or might not work. Not to mention legacy concerns - S60 has a thriving 3rd party software market, radical changes in the UI cause compatibility problems. Which is why you often see these huge jumps not from established players but from companies seeking entry to the market.
One of the requirements in Berne is that copyright is automatic (no formalities required). Pretty much the entire world are Berne signatories by now.
Even though copyright is automatic on fixation, you get some benefits by registering it (in US, statutory damages, prima facie proof that it is your work).
While I have great respect for Pournelle as a writer, he should have read Doctorow's piece more closely.
Ignoring the obvious ad hominem, let's look at Jerry's arguments:
"I can say this: Scribd.com which Doctorow defends has the complete text of a number of works. One of them is Sheffield and Pournelle, Higher Education. I guarantee you that neither I nor Charlie's widow has given this outfit any permission to do this. They used to have more of my books, and Niven's, and many others. They also had a series of hoops one had to jump through to get those taken down. The procedure was onerous, and they didn't answer my emails."
Doctorow doesn't defend scribd, and he also voice no objection to authors (or their agents) sending DMCA notices in order to remove truly infringing content. His problem is with SFWA sending fraudulent notices (which of all things wasn't even in a proper format) that resulted in non-infringing material being removed. And those 'series of hoops' are what's required by the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. It is the law, not some arbitrary attempt on scribd's part in order to make the process more difficult than necessary. If he has a problem with the law he should take his complaints to Congress.
"SFWA will have an answer to Doctorow. Doctorow does not seem to have done his homework regarding DMCA, but that too is hardly astonishing. DMCA has a number of legal requirements for both those asserting their rights under it and those asserting a right to post copies of works without the permission of the copyright owners. I am no expert on those matters, but SFWA has such experts among its membership and supporters."
I find it incredibly hard to respond to that in a non-ridiculing manner. Cory has been working with the Internet and copyright for so long that he should be able to quote the entire DMCA by heart by now (well, maybe not the rider bill concerning the sui generis protection of boat hull designs). If there is someone that doesn't understand the DMCA it is Burt, he didn't even manage to send a proper DMCA notification to scribd. If that's the level of "experts" that SFWA has available, I'd strongly advise them to get outside counsel post haste. Especially now that Burt has exposed the SFWA to liability due to perjury under DMCA 512(f).
And let me repeat; noone has said that sending notices in order to get infringing material removed is wrong. The entire issue is with SFWA sending notices that resulted in non-infringing content, and content from authors that have explicitly allowed for distribution being taken down.
"They made it difficult for writers to ask that their works be taken off: we had to find them and request one at a time and provide them other materials."
That's the way the DMCA works. If he doesn't like, Congress is over there.
"[..] or that the right of Doctorow to have his work displayed on a site that uses piracy to get net traffic is far more important than mine to have a writers organization try to act in my behalf."
The real issue here is what requirements there should be on services that provide 3rd parties the ability to publish stuff. The notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA isn't without it's flaws but it is certainly better than nothing. Copyright holders might feel that the current law is too lax or onerous, so I'd be really interested in seeing what kind of system Pournelle would like to replace it with.
And it might also be educational for him to think through the consequences of his proposed system. For starters: What would be the impact on services ranging from MySpace and YouTube down to blogs which allows comments on posts? Could unscrupulous organizations like the Church of Scientology abuse his system to silence online criticism?
Smart people have thought about these questions, and notice-and-takedown and a similar procedure called notice-and-notice are at the top of the pile when it comes to striking a balance between protecting creators, not stifling the creation of new services and avoiding abuse of the system.
A poster on the LJ SFWA group explained the situation much better than I could ever hope to do:
"Just to clarify. This letter, sent by Andrew Burt, seems not to be a DMCA notice as a DMCA notice requires some specific statements as to the agent's representation of a copyright holder, which this letter lacks. Indeed, this letter is obviously written as part of a longer back and forth correspondence between Burt and someone at Scribd.
However, in this subsequent letter, Burt falsely claims that the first letter linked was in fact not an "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."
Since the criticism of these letters emerged, we have been told that, in fact, SFWA never sent Scribd a DMCA takedown notice. This is correct.
In other news, I just got a tin deputy badge from a box of Crackerjacks and will be placing some parking tickets I just printed out on my home computer on the windshields of cars on my block. If anyone receiving the ticket asks, yes I am authorized to hand out these tickets and they are real tickets, the fines from which I will collect. If these real tickets get me into trouble, then they are not real tickets and anyone suckered by them is to blame for his own foolishness.
Ouch. Never used one, but according to forum chatter that one was a lemon. On paper a great device, but way too slow CPU and gimped battery.
It has gotten better, though. The latest batch of 3rd ed phones are quite good (E90, N81, N95*).
* Make sure you get the second edition of the N95 (the soon-to-be-released US or the just released 8GB one), the first ed is a bit short on RAM and battery. I got one of the 1st ed myself, and it is almost a small laptop in my pocket; the functionality is mainly gimped by Nokia skimping on the RAM.
As has now become tradition, nokia will require that every single piece of software be signed before installation
Still, the process for signing is too cumbersome for most freeware / FOSS devs to be bothered with. It's unfortunately a sad state, because smartphones really need a good open platform for 3rd party devs and Nokia seems to be going in the wrong direction here. And it is likely that we'll have to wait a long time for Apple to release an iPhone SDK, too. Once you unjail the thing there doesn't seem to be any sort of security at all; at the very least, Apple needs to sort out a security model first. WinMobile? Oh, don't get me started...
The only other ray of hope is Linux, it will be interesting to see if efforts like OpenMoko are successful. I really hope so, because as I said we need a good open platform for small mobile devices. Even a moderate success might cause Nokia and others to open up their platforms a bit more (just like the iPhone is causing them to revisit their UIs).
And when you have read the manual, go and read the Nokia S60 dev documentation. Things changed in S60 3rd ed. The security model in 3rd will not let unsigned applications access many of the phone capabilities. http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/platforms/s60/secu rity.html
I know that's a typo, but this is too good to pass up. You did remember to get SP2, right? Any news on Duke Nukem Forever?
Anyhow, I'm a bit surprised that so few have mentioned Lotus Notes. I know it is often called Bloatus, with good reason, but when it comes to keeping stuff in sync it is quite excellent.
First, the article has so many grammatical errors, that it's laughable.
F-Secure is from Finland. You try writing Finnish some time.
My "Windows API" as this article calls Explorer, is already set to view hidden folders.
Turn in your geek card at the door when you leave.
This is a driver that patches the Windows APIs in order to hide a directory. It will not show in Explorer or in any other program for that matter, even if Explorer is set to show 'hidden files'. Rootkit hunters like Blacklight and Rootkit Revealer do not flag regular 'hidden directories'. They read and parse the raw on-disk directory structure (that is, they have their own NTFS parser) and compare that to what the Windows FS API reports.
Slashdot Mirror
The "every clone card works with the NE2K driver" thing was more of an accidental thing than a deliberate effort to provide a standard fallback.
In the early years of Ethernet, NICs made by 3COM, IBM etc were very expensive. Novell, which was pushing NetWare hard at the time saw that they would benefit from having cheap ether cards out there. So they made their own card and sold it essentially at cost. Novell was not in the business of making a profit selling NICs, they were in the business of selling NetWare and client licenses. For each NIC out there, Novell gained a potential NW customer.
The combination of cheap NICs (about 1/4 of what 3COM et al were charging) and guaranteed support in NetWare meant that a lot of the cards were sold. And drivers for pretty much every OS out there were written. Which resulted in many companies wanting to make their own ethernet chips cloned / made them sufficiently close to NE2K that the generic drivers would work - instant universal support instead of having to roll their own drivers for every OS.
Far from all cheap ether chips were NE2K clones and it never became an official standard unlike f.ex. UHCI for USB controllers. But if you have an old no-name eth card from the far east, trying the Linux NE2K(-pci) driver might get you up and running.
Anyway, later on the DEC tulip (21[01]4x) became a favourite among cloners. Mostly because NE2K provided pretty much only the bare minimum to run ethernet, and speed/CPU usage suffered.
"It looks like you're attempting to avoid roaming charges. Would you like help?"
Apple has once again made the paperclip a critical part of every Machead's toolbox. Pop the SIM out.
ATTEMPTS is the key word, is it not? The corrupted vote is null and void,
You're referring to the situation in Sweden, right? There's a lot more suspicious going on than just that one incident.
12 new countries joined the ISO OOXML committee this year. 10 of those voted yes.
Lots of new participants in the national standards boards. Most of which contributed little to the national reviews of the proposed standard and voted 'yes with no comments'.
I'll not claim outright fraud on MS' part, but if the 'if it quacks like a duck' test is applied it looks deceptively similar to ballot stuffing.
and now Microsoft will have every action on that standard scrutinized heavily. So I don't really see what good adding an ungodly layer of bureaucracy will do. Standards take quite a while to move from proposal to final spec, there is ample process.
The thing is, this was not submitted to ISO as a regular proposal. It was submitted to the ISO Fast Track process. This process is intended for non-controversial standards that most people agree on and that are assumed to be properly reviewed and polished already. The reason OOXML qualified for Fast Track is that it is already an ECMA standard.
If the just finished vote had gotten a majority 'yes', the game would have been over and OOXML would have become an ISO standard. Not exactly "ample process".
The current vote was undecided (not positive enough to become a standard outright, and not negative enough to reject it and force MS to take OOXML through the slow way as a regular ISO proposal where there *is* ample process).
What happens now, is that ECMA/MS will look at the comments and make a set of proposed revisions. On Feb 25-29 there is a vote and if there are enough 'yes' then OOXML is an ISO standard.
I've seen lots of stuff that focuses on the cost of the parts. These people seem to act like it was inevitable that if you dumped enough of the specified parts into a vat together that they'd eventually inevitably produce an iPhone.
True, looking at the Bill Of Material doesn't give the exact true cost per handset produced (the BOM does include estimates on manufacturing, cost of 3rd party software/IP licensing and the OS. So it is not the physical parts only). But it does provide a useful yardstick to compare the likely profit margins. That is, if one compares the BOM vs MSRP on a Nokia/SE/Motorola and on the iPhone one sees that at $600 Apple had a much larger margin than other cell phone manufacturers.
It's also possible that high price helped them recover development costs, and with that done, they're free to drop the price.
Using the same logic, the price tag on the first version of OSX should have been very high. I'm not saying that iPhOSX wasn't expensive to develop, but like the first version of OSX it is an investment in a new platform. iPhOSX is going to power an entire family of Apple gadgets (first of which is the iPod Touch). In terms of accounting it should be treated as a long term investment to be written off over at least a year or two, not over two months.
Also, look at the likely BOM on the $400 Touch; an iPhone minus GSM/Camera plus 8GB Flash. In terms of parts cost that comes out at about even. So same hardware cost, and the Touch doesn't give Apple 10% kickback from a carrier. That's probably the reason they set the iPhone to the same price; anyone doing a comparison would see that they are essentially the same device, only differences are in easily priced hardware (no need to guesstimate the OS and touch display cost). Apple would be hard pressed to explain the $200 premium, it would at least make it painfully obvious that the margin on the iPhone was ridiculous.
people who want one so badly they're willing to overlook some Rev A problems.
Two words: Nano. Scratches. The Apple early adopters are not known for overlooking problems in their much vaunted devices, so I kinda doubt that one.
It's also possible the price itself was intended as a quality/caché signal.
I think you have hit upon the main cause for the blogstorm that forced Jobs to do damage control in order to bring the faithful back in line.
They're a glimpse into how expensive the iPhone really is.
Yes, today we finally got a glimpse of how expensive it truly is.
The important difference is that off-in-a-group-on-a-website hecklers are easier to avoid than in-your-physical-face hecklers. As long as they're not pestering you directly by spamming your wall/blog/whatever, it is a lot easier to avoid the online kind of numbnuts.
And if you have some social need to provide said numbnuts with some clue, joining the group and working from the inside is usually more effective than ZOMG-must-ban!
Did you even bother to read the wikipedia article? Yes, in 1989. Although when it comes to the Berne moral rights, the US is only compliant in name only.
What he said about cell phones is true. Most include a J2ME runtime by now. As far as platform penetration goes in the cell world, J2ME is the closest thing to a lingua franca there is.
How 'bout reading the entire thread first?
In terms of hardware, "the basic cell stack" and pretty much everything else except the touch screen are regular components. Getting a pretty accurate estimate on cost of those components - including any necessary firmware licenses isn't rocket science.
Which leaves iPhOSX and multitouch. Remember, the post I was replying to was making the claim that Apple were selling the phones at a loss, and they needed the 10% kickback on the 2year contract to make a profit. Even using high estimates on the OS, display and any other costs, ISTM that Apple is making a profit even before the AT&T kickback.
But is that 25%-35% on retail or retail+10% of the carrier contract?
The comment I was responding to was claiming that Apple was essentially selling the iPhones at a loss, and that they had to do the 2 year lock and 10% profit sharing with AT&T to make some money back. Even with a higher BOM and adding a reasonable per-unit cost for writing off the software dev, design, etc costs it still seems to me that they should make a profit on the current retail cost.
You are not the only one to give that $250-ish estimate for the parts, but apparently that figure does not include software, which you yourself point out, is the most important feature of the iPhone.
True, but the cost of the software and related stuff like design etc can be spread over all the units sold. And the multitouch and iPod software that was developed for the iPhone is rather likely to be reused in future products; iPhonev2, multitouch video iPod.. So at least a bit of the cost should be thought of as investment in a software platform (might I coin the name iPhOSX?) that will be used by future Apple handheld devices.
Think of it as the first version of OSX. It cost a chunk to make. But it it would be silly of Apple to look at the number of OSX licenses sold in the first half year and go 'omg, we didn't make our money back!, we should have sold each license at $1000'. That's the kind of investment you'd typically write down over several years. Same thing, albeit on a smaller scale, for iPhOSX.
Remember, the post I was replying to was claiming that Apple would have to sell the phones at about $1000 to make a profit, and that without the AT&T exclusive contract (where Apple gets a share of the phone bill). The BOM shows that that simply isn't the case.
The Bill Of Materials + putting the thing together and shipping/handling is the incremental cost per unit. Which should give us the lowest price that Apple can make a profit at selling *that* *particular* *unit*.
Design, the software etc can be amortized over all the units sold. Given the number of units Apple has sold - and expect to sell, the static cost per unit won't be very high.
They're a glimpse into how expensive the iPhone really is.
Are you a key employee at Apple and know how much they cost to build? Because the rest of us out here have to depend on tearing the phone apart and pricing the components - which at current best guess is at something like $250-$300. Except for the display, the components are pretty much standard off the shelf type stuff which is easy to price. So fess up, are the estimates on the display price way way low?
Thing is, the iPhone didn't happen before just because it's expensive
The iPhone happened because someone at Apple (Jobs, perhaps?) saw a market opportunity in the fact that most cell phones have a sucky UI. What makes the iPhone is a nifty multi-touch display and a lot of software development.
Traditional phone makers like Nokia don't have the same kind of incentive to sink a lot of cost in 'reinventing the UI'. Their current models are selling quite well, so why spend a lot of money on something that might or might not work. Not to mention legacy concerns - S60 has a thriving 3rd party software market, radical changes in the UI cause compatibility problems. Which is why you often see these huge jumps not from established players but from companies seeking entry to the market.
And how many average Joes knows that?
Telling the whole world about it might not be the smartest thing to do.
EFF seems to think it is the smartest thing to do.
One of the requirements in Berne is that copyright is automatic (no formalities required). Pretty much the entire world are Berne signatories by now.
Even though copyright is automatic on fixation, you get some benefits by registering it (in US, statutory damages, prima facie proof that it is your work).
While I have great respect for Pournelle as a writer, he should have read Doctorow's piece more closely.
Ignoring the obvious ad hominem, let's look at Jerry's arguments:
"I can say this: Scribd.com which Doctorow defends has the complete text of a number of works. One of them is Sheffield and Pournelle, Higher Education. I guarantee you that neither I nor Charlie's widow has given this outfit any permission to do this. They used to have more of my books, and Niven's, and many others. They also had a series of hoops one had to jump through to get those taken down. The procedure was onerous, and they didn't answer my emails."
Doctorow doesn't defend scribd, and he also voice no objection to authors (or their agents) sending DMCA notices in order to remove truly infringing content. His problem is with SFWA sending fraudulent notices (which of all things wasn't even in a proper format) that resulted in non-infringing material being removed. And those 'series of hoops' are what's required by the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. It is the law, not some arbitrary attempt on scribd's part in order to make the process more difficult than necessary. If he has a problem with the law he should take his complaints to Congress.
"SFWA will have an answer to Doctorow. Doctorow does not seem to have done his homework regarding DMCA, but that too is hardly astonishing. DMCA has a number of legal requirements for both those asserting their rights under it and those asserting a right to post copies of works without the permission of the copyright owners. I am no expert on those matters, but SFWA has such experts among its membership and supporters."
I find it incredibly hard to respond to that in a non-ridiculing manner. Cory has been working with the Internet and copyright for so long that he should be able to quote the entire DMCA by heart by now (well, maybe not the rider bill concerning the sui generis protection of boat hull designs). If there is someone that doesn't understand the DMCA it is Burt, he didn't even manage to send a proper DMCA notification to scribd. If that's the level of "experts" that SFWA has available, I'd strongly advise them to get outside counsel post haste. Especially now that Burt has exposed the SFWA to liability due to perjury under DMCA 512(f).
And let me repeat; noone has said that sending notices in order to get infringing material removed is wrong. The entire issue is with SFWA sending notices that resulted in non-infringing content, and content from authors that have explicitly allowed for distribution being taken down.
"They made it difficult for writers to ask that their works be taken off: we had to find them and request one at a time and provide them other materials."
That's the way the DMCA works. If he doesn't like, Congress is over there.
"[..] or that the right of Doctorow to have his work displayed on a site that uses piracy to get net traffic is far more important than mine to have a writers organization try to act in my behalf."
The real issue here is what requirements there should be on services that provide 3rd parties the ability to publish stuff. The notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA isn't without it's flaws but it is certainly better than nothing. Copyright holders might feel that the current law is too lax or onerous, so I'd be really interested in seeing what kind of system Pournelle would like to replace it with.
And it might also be educational for him to think through the consequences of his proposed system. For starters: What would be the impact on services ranging from MySpace and YouTube down to blogs which allows comments on posts? Could unscrupulous organizations like the Church of Scientology abuse his system to silence online criticism?
Smart people have thought about these questions, and notice-and-takedown and a similar procedure called notice-and-notice are at the top of the pile when it comes to striking a balance between protecting creators, not stifling the creation of new services and avoiding abuse of the system.
A poster on the LJ SFWA group explained the situation much better than I could ever hope to do:
"Just to clarify. This letter, sent by Andrew Burt, seems not to be a DMCA notice as a DMCA notice requires some specific statements as to the agent's representation of a copyright holder, which this letter lacks. Indeed, this letter is obviously written as part of a longer back and forth correspondence between Burt and someone at Scribd.
However, in this subsequent letter, Burt falsely claims that the first letter linked was in fact not an "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."
Since the criticism of these letters emerged, we have been told that, in fact, SFWA never sent Scribd a DMCA takedown notice. This is correct.
In other news, I just got a tin deputy badge from a box of Crackerjacks and will be placing some parking tickets I just printed out on my home computer on the windshields of cars on my block. If anyone receiving the ticket asks, yes I am authorized to hand out these tickets and they are real tickets, the fines from which I will collect. If these real tickets get me into trouble, then they are not real tickets and anyone suckered by them is to blame for his own foolishness.
Is that all clear now?"
more than 500 heinlein.
I had always been of the impression that irate is measured ellison.
though I stopped with the N80
s /testing/cap_granting.html
Ouch. Never used one, but according to forum chatter that one was a lemon. On paper a great device, but way too slow CPU and gimped battery.
It has gotten better, though. The latest batch of 3rd ed phones are quite good (E90, N81, N95*).
* Make sure you get the second edition of the N95 (the soon-to-be-released US or the just released 8GB one), the first ed is a bit short on RAM and battery. I got one of the 1st ed myself, and it is almost a small laptop in my pocket; the functionality is mainly gimped by Nokia skimping on the RAM.
As has now become tradition, nokia will require that every single piece of software be signed before installation
It isn't quite that bad. "Please notice that Symbian Signed is not mandatory, if your application uses only unrestricted APIs or user-grantable capabilities." http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/technical_service
Still, the process for signing is too cumbersome for most freeware / FOSS devs to be bothered with. It's unfortunately a sad state, because smartphones really need a good open platform for 3rd party devs and Nokia seems to be going in the wrong direction here. And it is likely that we'll have to wait a long time for Apple to release an iPhone SDK, too. Once you unjail the thing there doesn't seem to be any sort of security at all; at the very least, Apple needs to sort out a security model first. WinMobile? Oh, don't get me started...
The only other ray of hope is Linux, it will be interesting to see if efforts like OpenMoko are successful. I really hope so, because as I said we need a good open platform for small mobile devices. Even a moderate success might cause Nokia and others to open up their platforms a bit more (just like the iPhone is causing them to revisit their UIs).
And when you have read the manual, go and read the Nokia S60 dev documentation. Things changed in S60 3rd ed. The security model in 3rd will not let unsigned applications access many of the phone capabilities. http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/platforms/s60/secu rity.html
v ersy-over-symbian-signed/
This is especially a problem for freeware / FOSS because many of them need their applications signed. It is supposed to be a quick and non-painful process, but many devs are frustrated at the moment. http://mobile.antonypranata.com/2007/08/09/contro
Gaah. Note to self: Remember to actually read comment you are replying to before clicking Submit. Never mind. :-)
You had four Deathstars? They still alive?
and Win3k3 for the server.
I know that's a typo, but this is too good to pass up. You did remember to get SP2, right? Any news on Duke Nukem Forever?
Anyhow, I'm a bit surprised that so few have mentioned Lotus Notes. I know it is often called Bloatus, with good reason, but when it comes to keeping stuff in sync it is quite excellent.
First, the article has so many grammatical errors, that it's laughable.
F-Secure is from Finland. You try writing Finnish some time.
My "Windows API" as this article calls Explorer, is already set to view hidden folders.
Turn in your geek card at the door when you leave.
This is a driver that patches the Windows APIs in order to hide a directory. It will not show in Explorer or in any other program for that matter, even if Explorer is set to show 'hidden files'. Rootkit hunters like Blacklight and Rootkit Revealer do not flag regular 'hidden directories'. They read and parse the raw on-disk directory structure (that is, they have their own NTFS parser) and compare that to what the Windows FS API reports.