Yep, it's a form letter. I got one the day after the Slashdot article went up, which inspired me to fire off a few thoughts in Auntie Beeb's direction.
Talk about dodging the issue--the Beeb's stateside and home business staff could be Bush press officials. We call Evans on his blanket accusation, and it gets justified by "analysis! analysis!". I've seen better "analysis" pieces on Indymedia sites, places not known for their objectivity or editorial oversight of the open wire.[0]
[0] I contribute on occasion, so I know firsthand.:-)
There's no proof, of course, but it must be one of the theories at the top of any investigator's list.
And this is from a organization which allegedly deals in "news" ?
You'd think after the Hutton report, the entire editorial hierarchy would be overcorrecting for any possible hint of an unsupported accusation.[0]
Although this article reads like an opinion column, and has the lack of sources and facts tolerated in such pieces, there is no indication that Stephan Evans submitted this column as opinion. This needs to be cleared up, as Evans spends much of the article chalking up the worm to angry Linux users despite the lack of evidence in anyone's possession at the moment. MyDoom may very well be the work of a disgruntled Linux geek, but Evans seems to be attacking the entire community by association.
Toss me in the "me t001!!1!!" category, with one caveat.
PII 266, Red Hat 9, vanilla 2.6.1 kernel source, been running the 2.6 branch since the.0-testx released, and for the most part I've been pretty happy with performance, especially considering how I've watched faster machines chug along running Windows and the bloatware it seems to attract. However, I've noticed that gnome-terminal's output is noticeably slower than in 2.4. Does this have to do with the new scheduler? Output seems to come in chunks, where before the lines scrolled smoothly. I also encounter skipping in mp3 playback when I access certain webpages in Galeon, and again, I suspect it's something funny with the new scheduler. However, I'm not going back to 2.4.x any time soon, as I'm happy with this version, and building a kernel seems to have become much, much easier for newbies and grizzled kernel hackers alike.
The name of the startup is Strangeberry Just because of their job-titles they must be building something cool Chief Hackberry, Chief Wiseberry, Chief Smartberry. [...] Anybody got anymore ideas on what this could be?
I do a news-commentary-wild half-baked rant show on a community station in Toronto twice a week. A few months ago, the station's transmitter burned out on a Sunday night. My first show is early Monday morning.
Upon arriving at the control room, I found a note on the console informing the next hosts that the station had been silent since at least 9:30 pm the previous night. Naturally, the paid staff generally don't work on the weekend, especially on a Sunday evening, so no one actually called the Monday morning hosts, myself included. Since I wasn't sure if we were broadcasting again[0], I went through with the show I planned anyway, even after a couple people called wondering where the hell the signal was. I did this, despite the probability that no one could listen, because there was no way for me to be sure that we had no audience at all. A prof with decades of experience in radio taught us to never say anything near a mic that we would not want anyone to hear on-air[1] [2], and I've taken this to heart.
ObOnTopicComment: Not only am I straight about where I'm broadcasting from, I'm quite open about the editorial slant that will be broadcast[3] and encourage the listeners to confirm what I spew with other, probably more reputable sources.
[0] The low-power backup came online before the next show, and we finally got back to full power a couple weeks later once repairs were completed.
[1] And provided some graphic examples of what happens when on-air people don't watch their mouths.
[2] I've made this mistake a couple times, once with the mic on. Nothing major or offensive, just dumb. Still, I learned my lesson.
[3] "Libertarian socialist", if it matters. I figure it's better to be open about my political views and admit I'm as biased as the next person, than to claim objectivity and get called on it when my personal bias creeps in anyway. I don't fudge the facts, and I correct my mistakes on-air. I'm not a journalist, but I know better than to fake things I can be called on, which apparently this station did not.
I don't want to feel left out, what if I wanted to use photoshop to make some fake Canadian money?:D
I have a good friend who recently shopped around some television scripts. As a joke, he wanted to include a fake $20 with each script. We tried my ancient, clunky parallel Plustek scanner first, through GIMP, which worked fine at ultra-low res but crapped itself at anything higher. That said, obviously GIMP had no problems with toilet paper (aka Canadian money).
Kinko's won't let you scan and print money. Never mind that real counterfeiters wouldn't fuck around with a pansy little copy machine at the local corner shop, and anyone who works in retail has probably seen a real counterfeit*+. Nevertheless, the poor guy had to break down, go there, and practically demand his obviously fake copies after the attendants got scared.
First thing, I think it's time for me to get a USB scanner. Second thing, if I'm going to be stupid and commit an illegal act, a little thing like new money-detecting code won't stop me. As others have said, I'll either go to an older version of the same software, which apparently works fine for millions of people, or find software that lets me do similar things without the code.
I predict that this won't do anything but tick off legitimate users. Counterfeiters will just laugh and get around this restriction.
* Yes, I said "real counterfeiters". Har har har.
+ If you've worked in retail and never seen a counterfeit bill, you're either lucky, or didn't check those $50s, $100s, and even $20s close enough. The store I work at caught a couple last year, some really obvious, some damn near perfect but for watermarks.
If you are young enough to be mentally scarred by a video game, no matter how graphic or violent, then parents should know better than to buy it for their young children.
Thing is, parents can't know everything. Hence, the ratings--but even then, more than a few parents aren't even aware video games have ratings now.
On more than one occasion, I've wrecked the day of a kid far below the age of puberty (never mind age of majority!) trying to pull a fast one on their unsuspecting parents. Usually, the little one will say how much they want this GTA game, they bring it to me, and I ask the parent if they've noticed the game's rating. The parent will take one look, ask what the "M" means, and I explain to them.
I've received a few dirty looks from ten-year-olds for this stunt.
I'm not telling the parent they're not allowed to buy the game for their child. I'm simply making them aware of things in the game they may find inappropriate for their kids. Once or twice, a parent has gone ahead and bought the game for their young teenager, and I respect that decision; after all, it is their offspring, not mine. However, I think an informed parent is better than a sale, and I think it's part of my job to inform people about the products they intend to purchase, seeing as no one is omniscient.
I think the word I'm looking for is "responsibility," and a lot of people have responsibility in a situation like this. The parent has a responsibility to make a decision they think is best for the development of their kid (I've run across at least one person who thinks it best not to hide harsh reality from her kids--smart mom), and I have a responsibility to make sure Mom and Dad know what they're getting into.
I get the feeling the world will move on to the next major jump in burning capacity, and probably another format war, rather than actually settle on +R or -R. Unless the industry as a whole decides on one format or the other, and decides to leave a whole section of consumers out in the cold, neither format will "win."
Obviously from your last couple of paragraphs you don't care to ever watch TV and also you have obviously never seen something in true HDTV.
I have, actually, and I'm still bewildered by the suicide rush by electronics manufacturers and the FCC to cram HDTV signals down everyone's throat by 2006. It won't happen, because very few people can even afford an HDTV. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that, unless the prices of HDTVs nosedive 90% over the next year, a lot of people will be purchasing converters in 2006.
If your fine with crappy "I can see the dots" TV than fine stay with crappy TV I would rather have a much better picture so STFU about not liking HDTV.
I don't think anyone is denying it looks spectacular compared to craptacular NTSC. The problem is that the sets have barely any installed base, the wide number of formats appears to be making it a PITA for anyone to understand and develop for, and the "invisible hand" has done jack-all to drive the format*.
You might be able to afford an HDTV. A lot of people, possibly even most people, can't. Are you going to jam your nose up in the air because they have to buy converters, or will you come down to Earth and realize the whole thing has been FUBAR since the FCC decided to shift everything over by a hard date without anyone actually settling on a standard or making a serious push to bring HD sets into the affordable range? Out of the hundreds of people I know and hear about from friends and family, no one has purchased an HD-capable TV.
I remember speaking with a TV engineer some time ago. He admitted that HD looks good, but will go nowhere because no one--not the electronics industry, not the gubmint--has gotten their act together or their heads out of their asses about the lack of HD penetration.
What percentage of your games/music CD's from say 6 years ago isn't scratched?
100.
If you keep them in their cases, don't let them lie around to get scratched up by piling other objects on top of them, and grip them properly along the edges (it's not difficult, you only need three fingers, two if you don't jam one in the center hole!) instead of carrying the readable side with your sticky, dirty fingers, your CDs and DVDs can last for a long, long time.
Considering how many pristine and near-pristine used games the store I work at receives used, I'm not the only one who knows how to properly handle and store a disc.
Unless Chinese can offer good copyright protection scheme "studio executive" won't do that.
Correction: unless the Chinese can offer what looks like a good so-called copyright protection scheme, studio executives won't do it.
The copy of libdvdcss on my drive, and the prevalence of crap like DVD X Copy, indicates that CSS wasn't even good as an access control, never mind a copy control. Sure, 98% of consumers will never use a computer that requires libdvdcss to view movies they own, and 90% of consumers likely don't rip movies from DVDs anyway, and 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot, but both activities are easy enough now that anyone who claims CSS is an effective copy-control measure is either a tool or a studio exec desperately trying to justify the bass-ackwards encryption-and-region-coding system.
Seriously, the entire system seems to have done nothing more than to make watching legally-purchased movies from other countries a (minor) pain in the ass, for those with little technical inclination.
As far as I know, ATI does not provide a version of their software suite for linux.
Correct.
However, these folks work on drivers that service the ATI video capture hardware, and links to software.
I have a 4MB All-in-Wonder, the granddaddy of them all[0]. Works fine, though the XFree86 4.3.0 version of their drivers don't seem to support TV antialiasing without an XVideo port available, which in my particular case means making sure the IRQ jumper on my card is set to enable. Previous versions of the drivers didn't rely on/dev/video0 existing, so this means one extra step for me and my ancient (but working!) card. I haven't gone into the case to do this yet, so the frames aren't properly drawn (or, more specifically, each frame seems to be drawn too quickly--not fun with fast horizontal movement), but I intend to this evening. Wish me luck.
Why is the judge letting SCO get away with this coy "they infringed, but we're not going to show you how yet" stuff? Why hasn't he said, "Put the infringing source code in a brief and hand it over tomorrow, or I'm tossing this"?
Well, a pretrial judge pretty much did. SCO has to cough up their evidence, "with specificity", by January fifth. It's not exactly the next morning, but from what I gather, thirty days might as well be the next morning in the legal world. After this month of bullshit, I don't think they will get off easy come the fifth of January.
If, as SCO claims, they're being horrifically damaged, shouldn't they in fact be eager to get the offending code removed, which IBM could do, once it knows what the problem is?...and that's kind of what IBM, the judge, and 99.99% of Slashdot, Groklaw, and Yahoo! SCOX forum posters have been getting at. Heck, maybe Kevin McBride will pull a rabbit out of his hat.
And maybe I'll pull the next version of Windows out of my ass.
Either way, in two weeks, this case is finally going somewhere, either to trial, or into the dustbin of history. Of course, this does nothing to stop IBM's countersuit, or Red Hat's lawsuit, and if Novell weighs in, well, Darl might want to actually use those lawyers he just spent $9 million on last quarter.
Someone at Groklaw pointed out that the MS Word version, hosted at LWN, still has the good ol' properties saved. Kevin McBride apparently created the document, with the last modification being made by "bstowell"--presumably, Blake Stowell.
Nice to see that $9 million in legal fees is going to great use.
The Internet has been banned by the ultra-Orthodox leadership in Israel. They don't like TV, either. (The extreme Muslims, the extreme Christians, and the extreme Jews have rather similar positions on this.)
I'd ask what they all do for fun and enlightenment, but I don't think I want the answer.
On another "I can't believe it's banned there!" note, I heard from a visiting Israeli last summer that WiFi and Bluetooth were banned in Israel until last September, because the 2.4 GHz range was being used by the military.
I would think AT&T, which IIRC held the Unix copyrights at the time, would have complained long ago were they to find this file infringing on anything. It's also likely it would have been changed if necessary following USL/BSD, just to get Linux clear of any potential legal fallout.
The cute thing is that while in 2.4.x the errno.h files are separate, if very similar, in 2.6 many of them simply call asm-generic/errno.h. Now it sounds like SCO is claiming people can't even write Unix-likes that conform to a Unix standard (I assume this is pretty much POSIX?). Meanwhile, this still has little to no bearing on the IBM lawsuit, unless SCO wants to claim that IBM's involvement with Linux over the past couple of years taints a file that appears to have been last copyrighted in 1992, the signal calls, input/output controls for various architectures, and error numbers.
This is not "millions of lines", unless SCO considers the entire kernel--every last line--infringing by virtue of being compiled into the same monolithic file as the headers in question. I imagine the BSD folks will have something to say about this, since it could potentially affect them as well, especially in light of an SCO threat to go after BSDs as well.
I'd ask if a bunch of lawyers and execuhacks can be this incompetent, but it seems pretty clear to me that SCO is making a pathetic attempt to raise quick cash, and they can't keep their story straight from one day to the next. Did Laura DiDio, and anyone else who signed the NDA, seriously spend hours looking at copies of errno.h and ioctl.h? The files containing code that SCO showed at their last major conference aren't listed in this letter, despite being passed off as rock-solid examples of copyright infringement at the time to investors.
Except for lib/ctype.c, the entire list (1, 2 -- must be something with Yahoo's forums that limits post length.) is header files, including errno.h, signal.h, and some other rather heavily-used headers. SCO is apparently now claiming that several common header files, and a couple not-so-common ones (solerrno.h probably wouldn't be used outside Sparcs) could only have been derived from either SysV or BSD, and are thus infringing.
I think the term is called "doctrine of laches", where the plaintiff must take what actions they can to limit their liability--for example, informing the defending party what parts of the work in question are potentially infringing. SCO has clearly done nothing of the sort. Indeed, they've tried to bury IBM and the court in a mountain of paperwork when a couple burned CDs would do, an action that I don't think the judge looked kindly upon.
Not quite. SCO (in their actual lawsuit against IBM, rather than their press FUD) are claiming that the terms of their license with IBM mean that any code that IBM develops which is a 'derivative work' of Unix can not be redistributed.
More specifically, IBM managed to score a clause in their contract with AT&T that allows Big Blue to keep copyright and control over any additions to and derivative works it creates from SysV. It has been noted, however, that the technologies in question were created by Sequent, which did not have such a clause in their Unix licence. IBM purchased Sequent, and the dynix/ptx-related SMP code. It was theorized, on/. and elsewhere, that SCO's case may ultimately hinge on whether IBM's exemption applies to code purchased from, or as part of, other companies, or if they're stuck with the code's original licence. In other words, does IBM's SysV contract override the contract provisions under which code the company purchases was developed? Do Sequent's contracts still exist, or are they now simply historical footnotes? And would IBM's legion of legal attack dogs manage to overlook this minor point, or was it discussed and cleared when the sale took place?
Although this seems like a potential avenue of victory for SCO, their total lack of cooperation so far with the discovery process and the court indicates they may not even have solid footing on these grounds. They could not cough up anything useful for discovery, in a lawsuit they initiated, and still haven't done so. Yet, the company has time to draft threatening letters with a list of filenames, which presumably have code they could present as part of their case.
Barring a surprise twist, I think SCO's shareholders are in for a sick surprise when the execs take the money and run.
How much do you want to bet that the letters are written with legalese that prohibits recipients from republishing or leaking the letter? Maybe I'm reaching, but I wouldn't put it past SCO's legal crackheads to try and prevent even the names of certain files from falling into the hands of people who can actually investigate the claims and publicly confirm or refute them.
Then again, the court case vs. IBM is about breaches of contract, as opposed to copyright infringement. This BSA-like jackboot job is a sleazy sideshow that, so far, has proven to have even less basis than the contract breach lawsuit. It may freak out PHBs, it may garner publicity, but it also has the potential to blow up in their faces.
IBM's countersuit, OTOH (IIRC), deals specifically with these tactics, the attacks on the GPL, and the claims of copyright infringement. I wonder if these letters could be claimed by IBM as part of discovery in the SCO-instigated suit, or as part of the counter-suit.
Jeez micheal, I don't have any personal gripes against you or want to see SCO win on any level, but I'm a little put off that you would consider "slashdotters" potential puppets for your political regime!
Jeez anon, I don't have any personal gripes with you or think michael doesn't deserve a public smacking once in a while, but I'm a little put off you would attribute a quote to michael that was clearly written by isn't my name!
You're not the only one to make this error. Mind you, asking michael to replace the phrasing you find provocative with more subtle phrasing might be a reasonable request, but quite frankly what isn't my name called for is not much different from what slashdotters and Linux supporters did with pictures of the PowerPoint slideshow from an SCO conference some months back. They took what SCO called evidence, looked into it, and exposed it as a pile of fluff--in some cases, such as the Berkeley Packet Filter, someone else's code entirely.
If SCO go bankrupt before the case gets tested in court it will leave a smear on the good name of linux.
Huh?
SCO is the one leaving a smear on the good name of Linux by making accusations of wholesale copyright infringement and theft. There are indications that SCO is involved in a pump-and-dump scheme, or at least a last-ditch attempt at grabbing as much easy cash as possible before the bottom falls out. If you haven't noticed, SCO hasn't exactly been forthcoming about what they claim Linux coders stole, something which may wipe out their case since it becomes obvious the legal action is not about legitimately correcting an injustice, but extortion.
If SCO ever comes clean with the kernel hackers about what specific code and other IP they claim is infringing, and if the kernel hackers fail to deal with what legitimate issues exist (if any, which at the moment does not appear likely), then it would smear the good name of the Linux community. Until then, the party acting in bad faith here appears to be SCO, while the Linux community, and the companies investing time and money in it, seem to be the ones that want to legitimately deal with copyright concerns--real copyright concerns, not vague claims of infringement that somehow keep turning out to be crap.
If I wrote a program that allowed users to put a CD into their CD-ROM drive and allow other users to rip a copy of that CD over the Internet, would that be legal? It looks to me like it might be.
Nope.
For every downloader, there must be an uploader. Someone made the data being downloaded available for access. Someone set up the machine that hosts said data. Someone arranged for a network connection to be set up for that machine. Someone controls the machine that is sending the data stream, and that person, or people, would likely be considered the uploader in any legal situation. It's a dinky distinction, but I've heard about the gaping loophole in Canadian law that allows this to take place. I'm tempted to investigate the legalese myself just to see if that loophole really does exist.
That said, CRIA is a bunch of money-grubbing goons, the exact equivalent of the RIAA. I haven't bought a CD in years, due to my own personal lack of disposable income available for frills like CDs, but even saying that there are very few new discs I would purchase, and not many old discs I have the time and money to hunt down. I have some news for CRIA--the economy's sucked as of late, one of the largest markets is still crawling out of a very bad summer (did you idiots forget SARSstock???), and music that gets radio play has become, for the most part, so derivative it hurts to listen. Thank goodness for community radio and bars with live music.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, it's a form letter. I got one the day after the Slashdot article went up, which inspired me to fire off a few thoughts in Auntie Beeb's direction.
Talk about dodging the issue--the Beeb's stateside and home business staff could be Bush press officials. We call Evans on his blanket accusation, and it gets justified by "analysis! analysis!". I've seen better "analysis" pieces on Indymedia sites, places not known for their objectivity or editorial oversight of the open wire.[0]
[0] I contribute on occasion, so I know firsthand.:-)
There's no proof, of course, but it must be one of the theories at the top of any investigator's list.
And this is from a organization which allegedly deals in "news" ?
You'd think after the Hutton report, the entire editorial hierarchy would be overcorrecting for any possible hint of an unsupported accusation.[0]
Although this article reads like an opinion column, and has the lack of sources and facts tolerated in such pieces, there is no indication that Stephan Evans submitted this column as opinion. This needs to be cleared up, as Evans spends much of the article chalking up the worm to angry Linux users despite the lack of evidence in anyone's possession at the moment. MyDoom may very well be the work of a disgruntled Linux geek, but Evans seems to be attacking the entire community by association.
[...] the easiest to install for Windows users [...]
I don't know if "easiest to install" is the best way to describe how most people get IE on their computers.
"Found it slapped on with spit and duct tape" may be more accurate.
Toss me in the "me t001!!1!!" category, with one caveat.
.0-testx released, and for the most part I've been pretty happy with performance, especially considering how I've watched faster machines chug along running Windows and the bloatware it seems to attract. However, I've noticed that gnome-terminal's output is noticeably slower than in 2.4. Does this have to do with the new scheduler? Output seems to come in chunks, where before the lines scrolled smoothly. I also encounter skipping in mp3 playback when I access certain webpages in Galeon, and again, I suspect it's something funny with the new scheduler. However, I'm not going back to 2.4.x any time soon, as I'm happy with this version, and building a kernel seems to have become much, much easier for newbies and grizzled kernel hackers alike.
PII 266, Red Hat 9, vanilla 2.6.1 kernel source, been running the 2.6 branch since the
The name of the startup is Strangeberry Just because of their job-titles they must be building something cool Chief Hackberry, Chief Wiseberry, Chief Smartberry. [...] Anybody got anymore ideas on what this could be?
The makings of another fucked company?
I do a news-commentary-wild half-baked rant show on a community station in Toronto twice a week. A few months ago, the station's transmitter burned out on a Sunday night. My first show is early Monday morning.
Upon arriving at the control room, I found a note on the console informing the next hosts that the station had been silent since at least 9:30 pm the previous night. Naturally, the paid staff generally don't work on the weekend, especially on a Sunday evening, so no one actually called the Monday morning hosts, myself included. Since I wasn't sure if we were broadcasting again[0], I went through with the show I planned anyway, even after a couple people called wondering where the hell the signal was. I did this, despite the probability that no one could listen, because there was no way for me to be sure that we had no audience at all. A prof with decades of experience in radio taught us to never say anything near a mic that we would not want anyone to hear on-air[1] [2], and I've taken this to heart.
ObOnTopicComment: Not only am I straight about where I'm broadcasting from, I'm quite open about the editorial slant that will be broadcast[3] and encourage the listeners to confirm what I spew with other, probably more reputable sources.
[0] The low-power backup came online before the next show, and we finally got back to full power a couple weeks later once repairs were completed.
[1] And provided some graphic examples of what happens when on-air people don't watch their mouths.
[2] I've made this mistake a couple times, once with the mic on. Nothing major or offensive, just dumb. Still, I learned my lesson.
[3] "Libertarian socialist", if it matters. I figure it's better to be open about my political views and admit I'm as biased as the next person, than to claim objectivity and get called on it when my personal bias creeps in anyway. I don't fudge the facts, and I correct my mistakes on-air. I'm not a journalist, but I know better than to fake things I can be called on, which apparently this station did not.
It will be more of an XBox with a harddrive then.
Never used an XBox, have you?
I don't want to feel left out, what if I wanted to use photoshop to make some fake Canadian money? :D
I have a good friend who recently shopped around some television scripts. As a joke, he wanted to include a fake $20 with each script. We tried my ancient, clunky parallel Plustek scanner first, through GIMP, which worked fine at ultra-low res but crapped itself at anything higher. That said, obviously GIMP had no problems with toilet paper (aka Canadian money).
Kinko's won't let you scan and print money. Never mind that real counterfeiters wouldn't fuck around with a pansy little copy machine at the local corner shop, and anyone who works in retail has probably seen a real counterfeit*+. Nevertheless, the poor guy had to break down, go there, and practically demand his obviously fake copies after the attendants got scared.
First thing, I think it's time for me to get a USB scanner. Second thing, if I'm going to be stupid and commit an illegal act, a little thing like new money-detecting code won't stop me. As others have said, I'll either go to an older version of the same software, which apparently works fine for millions of people, or find software that lets me do similar things without the code.
I predict that this won't do anything but tick off legitimate users. Counterfeiters will just laugh and get around this restriction.
* Yes, I said "real counterfeiters". Har har har.
+ If you've worked in retail and never seen a counterfeit bill, you're either lucky, or didn't check those $50s, $100s, and even $20s close enough. The store I work at caught a couple last year, some really obvious, some damn near perfect but for watermarks.
If you are young enough to be mentally scarred by a video game, no matter how graphic or violent, then parents should know better than to buy it for their young children.
Thing is, parents can't know everything. Hence, the ratings--but even then, more than a few parents aren't even aware video games have ratings now.
On more than one occasion, I've wrecked the day of a kid far below the age of puberty (never mind age of majority!) trying to pull a fast one on their unsuspecting parents. Usually, the little one will say how much they want this GTA game, they bring it to me, and I ask the parent if they've noticed the game's rating. The parent will take one look, ask what the "M" means, and I explain to them.
I've received a few dirty looks from ten-year-olds for this stunt.
I'm not telling the parent they're not allowed to buy the game for their child. I'm simply making them aware of things in the game they may find inappropriate for their kids. Once or twice, a parent has gone ahead and bought the game for their young teenager, and I respect that decision; after all, it is their offspring, not mine. However, I think an informed parent is better than a sale, and I think it's part of my job to inform people about the products they intend to purchase, seeing as no one is omniscient.
I think the word I'm looking for is "responsibility," and a lot of people have responsibility in a situation like this. The parent has a responsibility to make a decision they think is best for the development of their kid (I've run across at least one person who thinks it best not to hide harsh reality from her kids--smart mom), and I have a responsibility to make sure Mom and Dad know what they're getting into.
I get the feeling the world will move on to the next major jump in burning capacity, and probably another format war, rather than actually settle on +R or -R. Unless the industry as a whole decides on one format or the other, and decides to leave a whole section of consumers out in the cold, neither format will "win."
Obviously from your last couple of paragraphs you don't care to ever watch TV and also you have obviously never seen something in true HDTV.
I have, actually, and I'm still bewildered by the suicide rush by electronics manufacturers and the FCC to cram HDTV signals down everyone's throat by 2006. It won't happen, because very few people can even afford an HDTV. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that, unless the prices of HDTVs nosedive 90% over the next year, a lot of people will be purchasing converters in 2006.
If your fine with crappy "I can see the dots" TV than fine stay with crappy TV I would rather have a much better picture so STFU about not liking HDTV.
I don't think anyone is denying it looks spectacular compared to craptacular NTSC. The problem is that the sets have barely any installed base, the wide number of formats appears to be making it a PITA for anyone to understand and develop for, and the "invisible hand" has done jack-all to drive the format*.
You might be able to afford an HDTV. A lot of people, possibly even most people, can't. Are you going to jam your nose up in the air because they have to buy converters, or will you come down to Earth and realize the whole thing has been FUBAR since the FCC decided to shift everything over by a hard date without anyone actually settling on a standard or making a serious push to bring HD sets into the affordable range? Out of the hundreds of people I know and hear about from friends and family, no one has purchased an HD-capable TV.
I remember speaking with a TV engineer some time ago. He admitted that HD looks good, but will go nowhere because no one--not the electronics industry, not the gubmint--has gotten their act together or their heads out of their asses about the lack of HD penetration.
What percentage of your games/music CD's from say 6 years ago isn't scratched?
100.
If you keep them in their cases, don't let them lie around to get scratched up by piling other objects on top of them, and grip them properly along the edges (it's not difficult, you only need three fingers, two if you don't jam one in the center hole!) instead of carrying the readable side with your sticky, dirty fingers, your CDs and DVDs can last for a long, long time.
Considering how many pristine and near-pristine used games the store I work at receives used, I'm not the only one who knows how to properly handle and store a disc.
You may want to learn:-)
Unless Chinese can offer good copyright protection scheme "studio executive" won't do that.
Correction: unless the Chinese can offer what looks like a good so-called copyright protection scheme, studio executives won't do it.
The copy of libdvdcss on my drive, and the prevalence of crap like DVD X Copy, indicates that CSS wasn't even good as an access control, never mind a copy control. Sure, 98% of consumers will never use a computer that requires libdvdcss to view movies they own, and 90% of consumers likely don't rip movies from DVDs anyway, and 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot, but both activities are easy enough now that anyone who claims CSS is an effective copy-control measure is either a tool or a studio exec desperately trying to justify the bass-ackwards encryption-and-region-coding system.
Seriously, the entire system seems to have done nothing more than to make watching legally-purchased movies from other countries a (minor) pain in the ass, for those with little technical inclination.
As far as I know, ATI does not provide a version of their software suite for linux.
/dev/video0 existing, so this means one extra step for me and my ancient (but working!) card. I haven't gone into the case to do this yet, so the frames aren't properly drawn (or, more specifically, each frame seems to be drawn too quickly--not fun with fast horizontal movement), but I intend to this evening. Wish me luck.
Correct.
However, these folks work on drivers that service the ATI video capture hardware, and links to software.
I have a 4MB All-in-Wonder, the granddaddy of them all[0]. Works fine, though the XFree86 4.3.0 version of their drivers don't seem to support TV antialiasing without an XVideo port available, which in my particular case means making sure the IRQ jumper on my card is set to enable. Previous versions of the drivers didn't rely on
Why is the judge letting SCO get away with this coy "they infringed, but we're not going to show you how yet" stuff? Why hasn't he said, "Put the infringing source code in a brief and hand it over tomorrow, or I'm tossing this"?
...and that's kind of what IBM, the judge, and 99.99% of Slashdot, Groklaw, and Yahoo! SCOX forum posters have been getting at. Heck, maybe Kevin McBride will pull a rabbit out of his hat.
Well, a pretrial judge pretty much did. SCO has to cough up their evidence, "with specificity", by January fifth. It's not exactly the next morning, but from what I gather, thirty days might as well be the next morning in the legal world. After this month of bullshit, I don't think they will get off easy come the fifth of January.
If, as SCO claims, they're being horrifically damaged, shouldn't they in fact be eager to get the offending code removed, which IBM could do, once it knows what the problem is?
And maybe I'll pull the next version of Windows out of my ass.
Either way, in two weeks, this case is finally going somewhere, either to trial, or into the dustbin of history. Of course, this does nothing to stop IBM's countersuit, or Red Hat's lawsuit, and if Novell weighs in, well, Darl might want to actually use those lawyers he just spent $9 million on last quarter.
Someone at Groklaw pointed out that the MS Word version, hosted at LWN, still has the good ol' properties saved. Kevin McBride apparently created the document, with the last modification being made by "bstowell"--presumably, Blake Stowell.
Nice to see that $9 million in legal fees is going to great use.
The Internet has been banned by the ultra-Orthodox leadership in Israel. They don't like TV, either. (The extreme Muslims, the extreme Christians, and the extreme Jews have rather similar positions on this.)
I'd ask what they all do for fun and enlightenment, but I don't think I want the answer.
On another "I can't believe it's banned there!" note, I heard from a visiting Israeli last summer that WiFi and Bluetooth were banned in Israel until last September, because the 2.4 GHz range was being used by the military.
lib/ctype.c
/*
Considering this:
* linux/lib/ctype.c
*
* Copyright (C) 1991, 1992 Linus Torvalds
*/
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
I would think AT&T, which IIRC held the Unix copyrights at the time, would have complained long ago were they to find this file infringing on anything. It's also likely it would have been changed if necessary following USL/BSD, just to get Linux clear of any potential legal fallout.
The cute thing is that while in 2.4.x the errno.h files are separate, if very similar, in 2.6 many of them simply call asm-generic/errno.h. Now it sounds like SCO is claiming people can't even write Unix-likes that conform to a Unix standard (I assume this is pretty much POSIX?). Meanwhile, this still has little to no bearing on the IBM lawsuit, unless SCO wants to claim that IBM's involvement with Linux over the past couple of years taints a file that appears to have been last copyrighted in 1992, the signal calls, input/output controls for various architectures, and error numbers.
This is not "millions of lines", unless SCO considers the entire kernel--every last line--infringing by virtue of being compiled into the same monolithic file as the headers in question. I imagine the BSD folks will have something to say about this, since it could potentially affect them as well, especially in light of an SCO threat to go after BSDs as well.
I'd ask if a bunch of lawyers and execuhacks can be this incompetent, but it seems pretty clear to me that SCO is making a pathetic attempt to raise quick cash, and they can't keep their story straight from one day to the next. Did Laura DiDio, and anyone else who signed the NDA, seriously spend hours looking at copies of errno.h and ioctl.h? The files containing code that SCO showed at their last major conference aren't listed in this letter, despite being passed off as rock-solid examples of copyright infringement at the time to investors.
Pathetic, unless I'm missing something here.
Someone on the Yahoo! Finance SCOX board posted a copy of the letter, apparently pulled from LWN.
Except for lib/ctype.c, the entire list (1, 2 -- must be something with Yahoo's forums that limits post length.) is header files, including errno.h, signal.h, and some other rather heavily-used headers. SCO is apparently now claiming that several common header files, and a couple not-so-common ones (solerrno.h probably wouldn't be used outside Sparcs) could only have been derived from either SysV or BSD, and are thus infringing.
Thoughts?
I think the term is called "doctrine of laches", where the plaintiff must take what actions they can to limit their liability--for example, informing the defending party what parts of the work in question are potentially infringing. SCO has clearly done nothing of the sort. Indeed, they've tried to bury IBM and the court in a mountain of paperwork when a couple burned CDs would do, an action that I don't think the judge looked kindly upon.
Not quite. SCO (in their actual lawsuit against IBM, rather than their press FUD) are claiming that the terms of their license with IBM mean that any code that IBM develops which is a 'derivative work' of Unix can not be redistributed.
/. and elsewhere, that SCO's case may ultimately hinge on whether IBM's exemption applies to code purchased from, or as part of, other companies, or if they're stuck with the code's original licence. In other words, does IBM's SysV contract override the contract provisions under which code the company purchases was developed? Do Sequent's contracts still exist, or are they now simply historical footnotes? And would IBM's legion of legal attack dogs manage to overlook this minor point, or was it discussed and cleared when the sale took place?
More specifically, IBM managed to score a clause in their contract with AT&T that allows Big Blue to keep copyright and control over any additions to and derivative works it creates from SysV. It has been noted, however, that the technologies in question were created by Sequent, which did not have such a clause in their Unix licence. IBM purchased Sequent, and the dynix/ptx-related SMP code. It was theorized, on
Although this seems like a potential avenue of victory for SCO, their total lack of cooperation so far with the discovery process and the court indicates they may not even have solid footing on these grounds. They could not cough up anything useful for discovery, in a lawsuit they initiated, and still haven't done so. Yet, the company has time to draft threatening letters with a list of filenames, which presumably have code they could present as part of their case.
Barring a surprise twist, I think SCO's shareholders are in for a sick surprise when the execs take the money and run.
How much do you want to bet that the letters are written with legalese that prohibits recipients from republishing or leaking the letter? Maybe I'm reaching, but I wouldn't put it past SCO's legal crackheads to try and prevent even the names of certain files from falling into the hands of people who can actually investigate the claims and publicly confirm or refute them.
Then again, the court case vs. IBM is about breaches of contract, as opposed to copyright infringement. This BSA-like jackboot job is a sleazy sideshow that, so far, has proven to have even less basis than the contract breach lawsuit. It may freak out PHBs, it may garner publicity, but it also has the potential to blow up in their faces.
IBM's countersuit, OTOH (IIRC), deals specifically with these tactics, the attacks on the GPL, and the claims of copyright infringement. I wonder if these letters could be claimed by IBM as part of discovery in the SCO-instigated suit, or as part of the counter-suit.
Jeez micheal,
I don't have any personal gripes against you or want to see SCO win on any level, but I'm a little put off that you would consider "slashdotters" potential puppets for your political regime!
Jeez anon,
I don't have any personal gripes with you or think michael doesn't deserve a public smacking once in a while, but I'm a little put off you would attribute a quote to michael that was clearly written by isn't my name!
You're not the only one to make this error. Mind you, asking michael to replace the phrasing you find provocative with more subtle phrasing might be a reasonable request, but quite frankly what isn't my name called for is not much different from what slashdotters and Linux supporters did with pictures of the PowerPoint slideshow from an SCO conference some months back. They took what SCO called evidence, looked into it, and exposed it as a pile of fluff--in some cases, such as the Berkeley Packet Filter, someone else's code entirely.
If SCO go bankrupt before the case gets tested in court it will leave a smear on the good name of linux.
Huh?
SCO is the one leaving a smear on the good name of Linux by making accusations of wholesale copyright infringement and theft. There are indications that SCO is involved in a pump-and-dump scheme, or at least a last-ditch attempt at grabbing as much easy cash as possible before the bottom falls out. If you haven't noticed, SCO hasn't exactly been forthcoming about what they claim Linux coders stole, something which may wipe out their case since it becomes obvious the legal action is not about legitimately correcting an injustice, but extortion.
If SCO ever comes clean with the kernel hackers about what specific code and other IP they claim is infringing, and if the kernel hackers fail to deal with what legitimate issues exist (if any, which at the moment does not appear likely), then it would smear the good name of the Linux community. Until then, the party acting in bad faith here appears to be SCO, while the Linux community, and the companies investing time and money in it, seem to be the ones that want to legitimately deal with copyright concerns--real copyright concerns, not vague claims of infringement that somehow keep turning out to be crap.
If I wrote a program that allowed users to put a CD into their CD-ROM drive and allow other users to rip a copy of that CD over the Internet, would that be legal? It looks to me like it might be.
Nope.
For every downloader, there must be an uploader. Someone made the data being downloaded available for access. Someone set up the machine that hosts said data. Someone arranged for a network connection to be set up for that machine. Someone controls the machine that is sending the data stream, and that person, or people, would likely be considered the uploader in any legal situation. It's a dinky distinction, but I've heard about the gaping loophole in Canadian law that allows this to take place. I'm tempted to investigate the legalese myself just to see if that loophole really does exist.
That said, CRIA is a bunch of money-grubbing goons, the exact equivalent of the RIAA. I haven't bought a CD in years, due to my own personal lack of disposable income available for frills like CDs, but even saying that there are very few new discs I would purchase, and not many old discs I have the time and money to hunt down. I have some news for CRIA--the economy's sucked as of late, one of the largest markets is still crawling out of a very bad summer (did you idiots forget SARSstock???), and music that gets radio play has become, for the most part, so derivative it hurts to listen. Thank goodness for community radio and bars with live music.