The only reason Apache has grown so fast, is that it's just one of the best webservers on the market. Linux on the desktop isn't really the best. OpenOffice just isn't ready and mplayer and gnome also need some time to get there. But they will get there. And they're free and require a lot less expensive administration than windows does. You're only looking at the present, but fail to notice the huge progress that Linux has made in the past 1 or 2 years. All of the sudden we have a state of the art browser, near state of the art OpenOffice, nearly totally useable mplayer. It's just a matter of time before those products will be able to evolve faster than MS does. And then we'll catch up FAST. It's just a matter of years and that's about the time it takes to get a masters degree and that was after all what we were talking about.
DRM functionality on a CPU does not cripple anything. It's the encryption of the media that may cripple the functionality you may have with regard to data from others. And it's the software/OS that has the option to use it.
DRM only adds functionality like controlling what recipients are to allow to do with emails - just disable any functionality to forward emails which contain confidential data. Don't want others to use your picture for other purposes than viewing it on your website? Possible. Lost your Palm with those rather private pictures on it? No problem. And ofcourse digital media will no longer be copyable directly... but digital media will become a lot cheaper sometime in the future - the price is mainly due to the expensive technology used to create them; expensive studios, 3D-software, special-fx-software, videocamera's etc. are expensive but get cheaper and cheaper. This will not only drive the price of the media down (which will definately raise the volume) but bring a lot more on the market since it'll become a lot cheaper to make things for everyone. Especially with bandwith getting cheaper.
Now the things that you DO have to fear:
DRM incompatibilities between different systems - you may need a lot of different plugins in that case... this may happen if e.g. Real first starts adding DRM to their realmedia, MS then comes up with their own passport-based shit and then finally some standards committee comes up with an open standard which is way too late
Closed standards - if Real of MS or whoever comes up with a closed standard which will only be available by using their software, us Linux users will be fucked. This may well happen since most average windows-using internetuser won't hesitate to install all this software and therefore market-penetraion won't be a problem as long as the software is free.
Patents on DRM-systems - Open Source would be locked out then. At least in the USA.
DRM becoming a requirement before about everybody has the hardware. And then still your old PC won't be able to open DRM-protected media since it a secure data-path has to be built into just about everything from the memory and the CPU all the way to the last peripherals.
DRM forcing no-fast-forward on you so you have to watch all the commercials.
Data-recovery not being though about - losing data due to a lost key or something would be bad. Something to solve this problem should be implemented. With regard to history in the future this will also be really important; without it the 21st century will be a very dark age in history!
The government or some large company having master-keys.
Expensive audits required to check for leaks driving the price of hardware (which will get a lot more complex anyway) up.
The first DRM-hardware like speakers and LCD-monitors not using wireless transmission by default:) For a really safe data-path, the DRM-decription hardware will have to be in your speakers and monitor so let's hope a wireless receiver will be built on the DRM-chip by default so we'll get cheap wireless peripherals and won't need all those cables anymore:) (everyhing will have to be powered, though. At least it'll safe CPU-cycles:)
And then offcourse one can still record the analog output of the tv, monitor or speakers but for many applications it'd be really usefull, however.
(At least with LILO) a boot disk is usually not required; just hold shift, press tab, choose image, enter image-name, append init=/bin/bash. Done. And nothing gets logged so when you're done just shut off the machine and nobody will even know you were there (unless they check when patyitions were last mounted).
The quality of the test doesn't matter at all - if MS passed, it could have been better. But that doesn't make it any less interesting to have Linux pass the test to show those who really (have to) use such certifications in decision-making that Linux is an option.
People that have to make such decisions are also a lot safer by choosing certified products; if something goes terribly wrong, you can always say that the product you choose was has some "official" certification upon which you based your decision and you're pretty safe. If it goes wrong and you don't have any such paperwork to fall back on, you're definately in a much weaker position explaining why you didn't choose the "safer" product to someone that doesn't know the difference between product A and product B and only sees "product A is certified, product B isn't". It's just that maybe you and I know that Linux is often a better choice but an incredible lot of other people don't.
Um. We did:) Now we just need someone with intelligence _AND_ the marketing-budget required to be chosen president of the mediacracy called the USA...
Re:Another example of WHY the US Patent office suc
on
NCR Patents the Internet
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Simple: make software-patents illegal. They're really plain stupid stupid stupid. Software is NOT a device but merely a list of commands which controls a device. Such a list of commands is sometimes called a recipe - a list of actions which you should perform to reach a certain goal. Recipes should not be patentable, otherwise the way I move my hand when jerking of can also be patented (good luck trying to proof prior art:P). Or the way you move your mouth when saying "Anarchy". All actions:) What kind of agent (me, you or a computer) performs those actions should not matter of course. Patents are meant for fysical things. It's just the retardedness of the patent office that causes them to consider computers and software some sort of magical thing. Their way of thinking has become a bit like that the inquisition - driven by utter ignorance and FUD. Someone should either educate them or just kill them for stupidity.
I sounds to me like all the facts are based on the red-shift seen in remote objects. Red-shift can also be caused by the decay of the speed of light. I don't know if it's true or anything, but at least it's interesting with regard to this matter - it's a theory that the speed of light in vacuum is not constant but is slowly decaying.
I can do over 1GB/day easily just browsing. I guess I generate about 5-10gb http-traffic per month. That's without apt-get, movies, P2P and webcam... So 4GB is not quite that much. And even if they want to watch porno, isn't that normal legitimate use?
Here in the Netherlands a lot of people totally ignore valentines day. It was introduced here by shops and such and now everybody that can get a bit of money of it (TV, *shops, magazins, blah) acts like half our country does something to celebrate valentines day while we don't:) It's a bit the same with christmas - until TV was invented nobody had thought of the possibility of putting presents under a tree in the living room (we did have the tree though). Instead we put presents under the chimney with Sinterklaas (5 december) but since everybody got a TV and TV got controlled by money more and more people don't celebrate Sinterklaas anymore and have all started to put presents under a tree to celebrate a religious holiday from a religion nobody even remotely believes in anymore. Though many people think "Valentines day? One big commercial" and totally ignore it. The same for christmaspresents.
As he loved you 3 or 4 years ago when you did this on Solaris: mkdir/tmp/hehe, cd/tmp/hehe, vi/tmp/hehe, suspend with ^Z, cd.., rm -rf hehe, fg, *hang*. So what can we conclude from this? Never call a directory hehe. Apart from that - making/tmp a swap fs is just asking for problems on multi-user systems. And those that ask should get what they've asked for - we don't want to be impolite do we?:) So go ahead and install gnome in/tmp please.
That's the case right now - at most providers you can only run a few preselected scripts. For custom scripts and php you have to pay more. And it's not that insecure either since it'll probably just work with https.
Re:It's all about the money
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's even worse - this isn't about intellectual property as we know it. This is about IP bought by large companies from small artists. So it's not intellectual property since it didn't come from their intellect but from their wallet. It's all just about money and stupid artists that really believe those large companies are going to do them any good while they only do a lot of good to a few and about nothing for the rest. Their marketing-machine (which is paid by the CD-buyers - the price of a CD is mainly for funding the marketing machine) is waaaaaay louder than that of smaller artists trying to do it by themselves and therefore these companies have by now replaced music with top40 and artists with stars. So I'll say it once again: don't buy CDs, don't watch MTV and if you're an artist: don't go to the big boys. They're crippling their own market.
Real artists don't mind if their work gets "stolen". They're proud it is so good people want to "steal" it.
Those labels have "pluggers" (that's what we call them in the Netherlands) running around talking to those radio-guys "oh please play this album and this and that". And that's what I consider marketing.
So then why should they sign with them? Produce the first album yourself, try to make a profit and invest that in the rest. The costs for the RIAA are only in marketing - something we pay for since that includes playing albums on the radio... and somehow radio has become nothing but a marketing-machine playing only the top100 or something. All that is payed for by us. A situation by the RIAA for the RIAA and impossible to stop without telling all artists at once to stay away from the RIAA... but then a new RIAA will emerge if there are no proper laws to prevent that from happening.
1000 cds kost about $800 to produce, booklet included. 7 days in your own studio costs nothing. Bandwidth for 1 average MP3 costs $0.03. CDs for $2.00 should already have been reality something like 35973 years ago. The same for MP3s for $0.10 a piece and $1.00 per album. Sell 50K albums and you get about $25. I think that's about the same for artists in the current system. The system in which we all have to pay for way too expensive studios with way too much way too expensive managers which usually also produce a way too expensive videoclip and have a way too expensive team to think about what the next single from this or that album should be. All payed for by us. Well then we all have to pay for things like MTV, RIAA-tax, normal tax and the rest is income to artists. Some make multizillions a year but newcomers can hardly get on the market because of the marketing-machine all CD-buyers invest in. So I say once again: don't buy CD's from the big labels, don't record your album at the big labels. ANY band with a bit of a studio at home (cheap multitrackers work just) can record an album in a few days. Invest $800 in the first 1000 CD's and sell them online. Just send them out yourself - when the volume goes up, let somebody else do it for you.....but you'll never get through the marketing-wall the big labels have put up with the money of CD-buyers. The same wall that helped the region-code (or whatever it is) on the DVD, will help DRM to your PC and will help your money in their hands.
It's probably just about the trademark and the logo - they're pretty clear in their letter that they don't like the site in it's PRESENT form. Probably they don't mind about this site at all but they're obliged to take action against it when trademark infringement occurs, and it does since this guy uses the logo. If they wouldn't do that everybody would be able to use the PCI logo without the probably obligatory quality-assurance and we'd get really shitty hardware. For the rest of it all information on that site is probably publicly available and the use of the term PCI is also not a problem - you can always talk about things and call them by their name.
The way this all was explained to us is full of FUD about lawyers and stuff. It was just a letter, not a verdict. And according to the law this letter just had to be sent. And if they want to take it down because somehow they consider collecting PCI-ID's a DMCA-violation then it's time to emigrate from the US. Or start a revolution or something. But for now: nothing to see here. Move along. (iANAL)
So? Just do the show in a free country. Or let the contestants tape themselves and communicate over a free network like freenet in which everybody is anonymous and everybody can put things online. And fix that law.
Computer-readable instructions are just as much instructions as human-readable ones. That they're pretty hard to read doesn't make them any less instructions - foreign languages may also be hard to read but they're not suddenly treated differently even if there isn't a single person that might be able to read them. And bits are also pretty hard to read - you use a tool to make them readable (your computer). How did you think this text was spread over the internet? I wouldn't be able to read it without using the right tools. Binaries can also be made understandable using the right tools. So I still think free speech should apply to binaries. Those who don't agree should ask themselves if they'd want to live in a world in which data which can only be understood by very intelligent people is not protected as free speech. The precedent you're talking about was btw set by exactly the same legal system that has pulled this crap and should therefore be considered just as crappy as this crap until proven otherwise.
Most slashdot readers aren't part of the problem, I know that and didn't mean to offend you. But everybody can do their share by simply educating people that software is absolutely nothing more than a list of instructions which should be protected and regulated in the same way as recipes for hamburgers and all other free speech: by copyright and only by copyright. It's just lack of education that makes people believe software is something big and scary which has caused this witch-hunt of the past few years.
My point is that it should be the same for software; software is also only a list of instructions which should be protected by free speech and should be treated accordingly.
I just put online these instructions on how to make a joint. Something that's illegal in the US - I live in the Netherlands. This is exactly the same as what Kazaa does, only their instructions are for your computer and they tell them to you from Australia. I kindly ask all of you that live in California to perform these instructions, as Kazaa asks you to let your computer perform their instructions.
This decision by your judges has now made it possible for anyone in your country that does not like my instructions (which should be protected as Free Speech, something which your country is supposedly so proud of) to sue me. Not that I'd be responding or something but it's just stupid. I urge you all to actively do something about this aggresive act of world-domination which should even be illegal under in your constitution. You guys aren't making any friends this way.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason Apache has grown so fast, is that it's just one of the best webservers on the market. Linux on the desktop isn't really the best. OpenOffice just isn't ready and mplayer and gnome also need some time to get there. But they will get there. And they're free and require a lot less expensive administration than windows does. You're only looking at the present, but fail to notice the huge progress that Linux has made in the past 1 or 2 years. All of the sudden we have a state of the art browser, near state of the art OpenOffice, nearly totally useable mplayer. It's just a matter of time before those products will be able to evolve faster than MS does. And then we'll catch up FAST. It's just a matter of years and that's about the time it takes to get a masters degree and that was after all what we were talking about.
DRM only adds functionality like controlling what recipients are to allow to do with emails - just disable any functionality to forward emails which contain confidential data. Don't want others to use your picture for other purposes than viewing it on your website? Possible. Lost your Palm with those rather private pictures on it? No problem. And ofcourse digital media will no longer be copyable directly... but digital media will become a lot cheaper sometime in the future - the price is mainly due to the expensive technology used to create them; expensive studios, 3D-software, special-fx-software, videocamera's etc. are expensive but get cheaper and cheaper. This will not only drive the price of the media down (which will definately raise the volume) but bring a lot more on the market since it'll become a lot cheaper to make things for everyone. Especially with bandwith getting cheaper.
Now the things that you DO have to fear:
And then offcourse one can still record the analog output of the tv, monitor or speakers but for many applications it'd be really usefull, however.
... forcing OpenGLs shaders in the US back into the dark ages.
(At least with LILO) a boot disk is usually not required; just hold shift, press tab, choose image, enter image-name, append init=/bin/bash. Done. And nothing gets logged so when you're done just shut off the machine and nobody will even know you were there (unless they check when patyitions were last mounted).
The quality of the test doesn't matter at all - if MS passed, it could have been better. But that doesn't make it any less interesting to have Linux pass the test to show those who really (have to) use such certifications in decision-making that Linux is an option.
People that have to make such decisions are also a lot safer by choosing certified products; if something goes terribly wrong, you can always say that the product you choose was has some "official" certification upon which you based your decision and you're pretty safe. If it goes wrong and you don't have any such paperwork to fall back on, you're definately in a much weaker position explaining why you didn't choose the "safer" product to someone that doesn't know the difference between product A and product B and only sees "product A is certified, product B isn't". It's just that maybe you and I know that Linux is often a better choice but an incredible lot of other people don't.
Um. We did:) Now we just need someone with intelligence _AND_ the marketing-budget required to be chosen president of the mediacracy called the USA...
Simple: make software-patents illegal. They're really plain stupid stupid stupid. Software is NOT a device but merely a list of commands which controls a device. Such a list of commands is sometimes called a recipe - a list of actions which you should perform to reach a certain goal. Recipes should not be patentable, otherwise the way I move my hand when jerking of can also be patented (good luck trying to proof prior art:P). Or the way you move your mouth when saying "Anarchy". All actions:) What kind of agent (me, you or a computer) performs those actions should not matter of course. Patents are meant for fysical things. It's just the retardedness of the patent office that causes them to consider computers and software some sort of magical thing. Their way of thinking has become a bit like that the inquisition - driven by utter ignorance and FUD. Someone should either educate them or just kill them for stupidity.
I sounds to me like all the facts are based on the red-shift seen in remote objects. Red-shift can also be caused by the decay of the speed of light. I don't know if it's true or anything, but at least it's interesting with regard to this matter - it's a theory that the speed of light in vacuum is not constant but is slowly decaying.
I can do over 1GB/day easily just browsing. I guess I generate about 5-10gb http-traffic per month. That's without apt-get, movies, P2P and webcam... So 4GB is not quite that much. And even if they want to watch porno, isn't that normal legitimate use?
Here in the Netherlands a lot of people totally ignore valentines day. It was introduced here by shops and such and now everybody that can get a bit of money of it (TV, *shops, magazins, blah) acts like half our country does something to celebrate valentines day while we don't:) It's a bit the same with christmas - until TV was invented nobody had thought of the possibility of putting presents under a tree in the living room (we did have the tree though). Instead we put presents under the chimney with Sinterklaas (5 december) but since everybody got a TV and TV got controlled by money more and more people don't celebrate Sinterklaas anymore and have all started to put presents under a tree to celebrate a religious holiday from a religion nobody even remotely believes in anymore. Though many people think "Valentines day? One big commercial" and totally ignore it. The same for christmaspresents.
Water is corrosive. A small leak might not immediately be noticed but water will destroy everything on its path over the mobo if it gets the time.
As he loved you 3 or 4 years ago when you did this on Solaris: mkdir /tmp/hehe, cd /tmp/hehe, vi /tmp/hehe, suspend with ^Z, cd .., rm -rf hehe, fg, *hang*. So what can we conclude from this? Never call a directory hehe. Apart from that - making /tmp a swap fs is just asking for problems on multi-user systems. And those that ask should get what they've asked for - we don't want to be impolite do we?:) So go ahead and install gnome in /tmp please.
If there's enough space available in /tmp, just ln -s it to there and keep a backup.tgz in your homedir for when it gets deleted:)
That's the case right now - at most providers you can only run a few preselected scripts. For custom scripts and php you have to pay more. And it's not that insecure either since it'll probably just work with https.
It's even worse - this isn't about intellectual property as we know it. This is about IP bought by large companies from small artists. So it's not intellectual property since it didn't come from their intellect but from their wallet. It's all just about money and stupid artists that really believe those large companies are going to do them any good while they only do a lot of good to a few and about nothing for the rest. Their marketing-machine (which is paid by the CD-buyers - the price of a CD is mainly for funding the marketing machine) is waaaaaay louder than that of smaller artists trying to do it by themselves and therefore these companies have by now replaced music with top40 and artists with stars. So I'll say it once again: don't buy CDs, don't watch MTV and if you're an artist: don't go to the big boys. They're crippling their own market.
Real artists don't mind if their work gets "stolen". They're proud it is so good people want to "steal" it.
Those labels have "pluggers" (that's what we call them in the Netherlands) running around talking to those radio-guys "oh please play this album and this and that". And that's what I consider marketing.
So then why should they sign with them? Produce the first album yourself, try to make a profit and invest that in the rest. The costs for the RIAA are only in marketing - something we pay for since that includes playing albums on the radio... and somehow radio has become nothing but a marketing-machine playing only the top100 or something. All that is payed for by us. A situation by the RIAA for the RIAA and impossible to stop without telling all artists at once to stay away from the RIAA... but then a new RIAA will emerge if there are no proper laws to prevent that from happening.
1000 cds kost about $800 to produce, booklet included. 7 days in your own studio costs nothing. Bandwidth for 1 average MP3 costs $0.03. CDs for $2.00 should already have been reality something like 35973 years ago. The same for MP3s for $0.10 a piece and $1.00 per album. Sell 50K albums and you get about $25. I think that's about the same for artists in the current system. ...but you'll never get through the marketing-wall the big labels have put up with the money of CD-buyers. The same wall that helped the region-code (or whatever it is) on the DVD, will help DRM to your PC and will help your money in their hands.
The system in which we all have to pay for way too expensive studios with way too much way too expensive managers which usually also produce a way too expensive videoclip and have a way too expensive team to think about what the next single from this or that album should be. All payed for by us. Well then we all have to pay for things like MTV, RIAA-tax, normal tax and the rest is income to artists. Some make multizillions a year but newcomers can hardly get on the market because of the marketing-machine all CD-buyers invest in. So I say once again: don't buy CD's from the big labels, don't record your album at the big labels. ANY band with a bit of a studio at home (cheap multitrackers work just) can record an album in a few days. Invest $800 in the first 1000 CD's and sell them online. Just send them out yourself - when the volume goes up, let somebody else do it for you..
The way this all was explained to us is full of FUD about lawyers and stuff. It was just a letter, not a verdict. And according to the law this letter just had to be sent. And if they want to take it down because somehow they consider collecting PCI-ID's a DMCA-violation then it's time to emigrate from the US. Or start a revolution or something. But for now: nothing to see here. Move along. (iANAL)
So? Just do the show in a free country. Or let the contestants tape themselves and communicate over a free network like freenet in which everybody is anonymous and everybody can put things online. And fix that law.
Computer-readable instructions are just as much instructions as human-readable ones. That they're pretty hard to read doesn't make them any less instructions - foreign languages may also be hard to read but they're not suddenly treated differently even if there isn't a single person that might be able to read them. And bits are also pretty hard to read - you use a tool to make them readable (your computer). How did you think this text was spread over the internet? I wouldn't be able to read it without using the right tools. Binaries can also be made understandable using the right tools. So I still think free speech should apply to binaries. Those who don't agree should ask themselves if they'd want to live in a world in which data which can only be understood by very intelligent people is not protected as free speech. The precedent you're talking about was btw set by exactly the same legal system that has pulled this crap and should therefore be considered just as crappy as this crap until proven otherwise.
Most slashdot readers aren't part of the problem, I know that and didn't mean to offend you. But everybody can do their share by simply educating people that software is absolutely nothing more than a list of instructions which should be protected and regulated in the same way as recipes for hamburgers and all other free speech: by copyright and only by copyright. It's just lack of education that makes people believe software is something big and scary which has caused this witch-hunt of the past few years.
Thanks. Feel free to contact your local authorities to inform them of my crime:)
My point is that it should be the same for software; software is also only a list of instructions which should be protected by free speech and should be treated accordingly.
This decision by your judges has now made it possible for anyone in your country that does not like my instructions (which should be protected as Free Speech, something which your country is supposedly so proud of) to sue me. Not that I'd be responding or something but it's just stupid. I urge you all to actively do something about this aggresive act of world-domination which should even be illegal under in your constitution. You guys aren't making any friends this way.