However, just because there was no license agreement doesn't mean the document is in the public domain. There's a difference between software licensing (which is contract law) and public domain (which is copyright law). Microsoft is effectively acting like a newspaper or a radio station here - they are publishing something to a lot of people, but that doesn't give their audience distribution rights as well. Try making photocopies of the New York Times and selling them for half price, and see how far you get. Or better yet, try rebroadcasting a major sporting event in your bar:)
Difference: NYT and TV broadcasts are copyrighted, this MS document, I've been told, is supposed to be a trade secret. If they claim its a trade secret they cannot copyright it. Since I am not under any license (as I did not see one, or agreed to one) about it being a trade secret, then I am an "innocent", and it is now public domain.
I wouldn't do that. It's still copyrighted, and if you are associated with any group that "reverse engineers" the specs, whatever prodcut you create could get tied up in court for a long time. Distributing MS's copyrighted info could also get you into legal hot water.
MS puts it on their page for everyone to DL, there was no agreement that I saw that said I couldn't give it out to anyone else, it's public domain.
I'm not associated with any such group, I'm just your average joe schmo who uses winzip instead of running self extracting archives for fear of viruses.:)
1. Download the evaluation copy of winzip if you don't already have it.
2. Download the dumb exe thing.
3. Open Winzip, and then open the exe WITH WINZIP.
4. Extract the PDF without agreeing to the license.
This is what I have done, I did NOT agree (nor did I even SEE) the license, and I now have access to the.pdf file. I will give copies of the.pdf file to anyone who asks, its public domain as far as I'm concerned.
SMARTDATA's objective is to design and develop a revolutionary architecture that will allow for multiple combinations of functionality within one device, and targeting the fast growing mobile Internet appliances market. A patent for this new architecture was applied for in August 1999 and is currently pending.
Buttet says his company has applied for a patent on "technology that enables the production of cost effective credit card sized modular pocket internet appliances."
I agree, this is scarey, credit card sized computers are quite an obvious way to go in the computer industry with the "smaller, faster, better" mantra. Not to mention some prior art in uCSIMM? Don't the european smartcards already have CPU's on them?
I don't know about this at all... If they only patent their own technology which allows them to make these, instead of the device itself, then I guess someone else can develop a similar device another way, but both these statements show different things being patented.
So instead of having just one dirty handed, predatory, monopolizing business, we're going to have two! What a great solution!
The feds are going about this entirely the wrong way, they're thinking that software is somehow like oil, when infact it isn't anything like it.
The product has different properties which make breaking up the company ineffective.
1. It costs virtually nothing to copy data 2. Source between these two companies can be shared in such a way that they can basically keep operating as one company 3. The two companies would have different products (OS / Everything Else) and therefore don't have to compete against eachother unlike the oil and phone company breakups!
It's just a bad decision, I've said it from the start, and I'll say it 'till the end.
A consumer sees "Celeron" and "Spitfire" chips and they sound competitive--remember that AMD needs John Q. Public to buy the chip, not just Slashdotters who know what they're buying beyond name. But, an average joe sees "Celeron" versus "Duron," and it's fairly obvious which one sounds better. Guys want fast, not just durable, and impressions count in selling any product.
I dunno, but when I hear "Celeron" I think of our favorite water based vegetable, then I think about that vegetable on a motherboard, and the water leaking out and shorting my board, then I just get mad, intel is trying to ruin my hardware! Damn intel! Damn you to hell!
Yes, but most ircd's (I think) report to you the filename before it's sent. Say you send something to johndoe on irc.madeup.net. Your irc client will send the initilization quest to irc.madeup.net and irc.madeup.net will send the request to JohnDoe. If JohnDoe accepts, then the Direct Client to Client connection is made...
1. This is true, however the ircd doesn't log it 2. The status of the connection (whether the file was actually transfered) is not sent through the irc server through CTCP.
Anyways, I tihnk it would be a waste to log it anyway... I'm a musician, I'd hate to have my work pirated, but hell... atleast then I'd have SOME fans:)
Then remove the economic incentive to pirate your music, sell them as mp3's for $0.50 a pop on your website, then get free advertizing by submitting an article to slashdot about it.:P
What is with the VB bigotry? In your review of competing products, do you dismiss out of hand the fact that VB is easily maintainable and readable, whereas Perl resembles abstract art drawn from the inner, inarticulate recesses of the mind that coded it?
Code is art to those who care, code is money to those from Microsoft.
Have you ever actually been on an mp3 channel on irc?
Yes.
Just have someone join one, and log the client activity. Most of the fileservers nowadays announce to the channel the files that they are transferring to whom...
Most actually don't, they however do report what mp3 the server's machine is currently playing. SpR I know does, and reports only on timeout what mp3 it was sending to a user, or if that user was the last user finished downloading. I haven't seen sdfind release any info like that, or that borg script.
This would all change overnight if there were even threats of this happening.
should Adobe and Microsoft and all those other companies try to shut down Internet Relay Chat? Should they sue the companies and individuals that make IRC clients? NO. They should go after the people distributing the copyrighted material. And yes, I'm sure it would be quite easy for lawyers to come in and shutdown the larger purveyors of the mp3's. I'll be there are server logs somewhere... hell, traceroute.
Last time I checked, the ircd's didn't log the actuall chat/ctcp traffic going through the servers, it would be a huge waste of disk space anyways. File transfers on IRC have no servers, they are established through DCC, Direct Client Connetcion, they don't go through the IRC server, enjoy trying to find logs for those.
It's not really all that great seeing as the driver ignores user defined monitor sync polarities and uses what it thinks is best. Because of this I've had to revert back to the old drivers.
Replying to my own comment, have I sunk this low? heh.
Well this was a classic case of user error, Nick at Nvidia helped me to determine that the problem was I didn't run the install.sh script for the Kernel Module which sets up the/dev files. It worked after that.
Let this be a lesson to you, don't wantonly ignore install.sh files!:P
Kudos to Nick at Nvidia who saw my comment and emailed me, this is certainly above and beyond the call of duty as I have NEVER had support like that from any other company.
Well, the linuxgames article said they had a blank screen using the new drivers with just a normal Riva TNT, the reviewer chalked it up to his configuration error.
I have a Riva TNT, also experienced the blank screen, and from examining XFree86.0.log I found this interesting tidbit:
(**) NVIDIA(0): VideoRAM: 0 kBytes
I, uh, have a 16 meg card, setting the VideoRam parameter in the device setup seems to have no effect, whatever happens there is always 0 KB of video ram detected. Er, Slight bug huh NVidia? Maybe if they were open source drivers we could fix it instead of having to wait for you.
western European nuclear soverign power who is a member of NATO
By western I meant as far as ideologies go, as opposed to eastern russia/asia ideologies.
I don't think anyone outside France thinks that France is as important as the USA in terms of international clout.
So what, you just take this time to toot your own capitalist horn? That wasn't part of the question, and it's irrelevant.
Not to mention it really stops being a factor once you become a nuclear power. A nuke is a nuke is a nuke. If France really wanted to push for something on the world stage, they could do it. Hell, little shit countries like Korea bully the US constantly for money, why? Because they've got nukes, and enjoy firing test ICBM's over Japan and the US is deathly afraid of the threat of nuclear war.
France has historically been a hassle to computer companies. First their bizarre (read: non-conformant with European norms) encryption laws, now this. Just how much clout do they think they have here, exactly?
They think they have as much clout as any other western nuclear soverign power who is a member of NATO, and they'd be right.
Well, I have to say that I agree that each and every poster has copyright over his or her own comments on slashdot, there is no doubt there.
The question about this being a public forum and therefore Andover can just take the comments, publish them into a book, and reap profits (even if these profits ultimately go to charity) makes absolutely no sense to me.
Fair use? Probably if they were just quotes and not whole duplication, but quotes also need to be credited back to the author, which isn't done here.
The comments belong to the individual poster, there is no doubt about that, and there is a pretty strong case for the posters if they didn't want their works published in any forum they didn't ask it to be published in.
This being said, I think we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture here. Just because you can sue doesn't necessarily mean you should. Where would the comments do more good? In the book which might get read or not in the book? Where would the money you sue for do more good? In the charity that it gets donated to or your pocket?
Yes, you own the comments, but wouldn't it be a better service to humanity if they were published and the money go to a deserving charity?
Actually, this is not true. This server only translates the field directly before the TLD extension. That is, only yahoo.com and marthastewart.com are served. The www part is supplied by yahoo and martha's respective root servers.
Not even that is served from the root servers. All the root servers serve is IP addresses of the nameservers for the domain of the host being looked up, its up to the domains nameservers to deal out any actual IP's, including for their own domain.
You look up marthastewart.com, your nameserver asks one of the root nameservers where the nameservers for marthastewart.com is, it then asks them for the IP to marthastewart.com.
Reuters Tokyo -- In a surprise move today Iraq citizens are flying to Japan in droves, each one buying one Sony Playstation 2, game consoles recently classified by the Japanse government as potential weapons development platforms, and returning immediately home to Iraq.
One Iraqi citizen, when asked why this was happening, told this reporter about how Saddam Hussien is paying for each round trip ticket and each game console. He also spoke of rumors about a massive underground bunker where these consoles were being collected and tied together in a "Baywolf Cloister".
Saddam Hussein is apparently taking this designation seriously. High level Japanese politicians claimed the designation was just made to help Sony raise the price of the units in foriegn markets: if it was harder to export then the massive electronics corporation could justify the extra cost to consumers.
A Sony spokesman remarked, "While the computing power of our Playstation 2 console is impressive, a normal desktop personal computer would aid better in weapons development unless you want to play Crash Bandicoot on your Tomahawk missile."
Former US General Schwartzkoph said, "That's something we need to be looking into. Our men and women get really bored out there on those ships, maybe if we had more entertainment it would raise morale. That's why we couldn't kill Saddam, he plays more games then us."
1. Just because its a library doesn't mean it has to be under the LGPL, I think this person has that confused. The LGPL is used for programs who want to be GPL'd but are linked to a closed source library.
2. If you derrive MaPlay, a GPL'd program into a Library with a simple API, its still under the GPL, and you have to release the source if you distribute it.
3. Any closed source programs that you make which reference the library do NOT have to be GPL'd and their source does NOT have to be open, but of course, it would be better for everyone if it were.
If your electrician fucks up and electrocutes your cat, you would make him pay.
Why should Free software be immune to this? Because system administrators can check the code themselves - that's due diligence.
Well, 2 reasons why free software should be immune.
1. Because its *free*, you paid your electrician. 2. Because its open source. 3. There is no intent to do damage, unlike with backdoors.
Now I belive there needs to be intent to do damage, or negligence on the coders part for them to be held accountable if its closed source. Open source should always be immune, you can look at what it does before you run it.
-- iCEBaLM
Re:I don't think this is a film about scientology.
on
Battlefield Earth
·
· Score: 2
I have gotten as far as 3/4 through Heinlein's "the cat who walks through walls" and dropped it. I have not to this day picked up another of his books. The same goes for Dean Koontz's "Dragon's Tears".. It sucked, and it tainted my view of the authors.
Well I don't know about Heinlein, but as for a good Koontz book, try "Lightning", its a really cool book about time travel.
Its one thing to moderate something down because its really a troll, and another thing to do it because they don't like what you're saying, and these moderators are doing the latter.
These moderators need to go back and read the moderation guidelines.
Slashdot Mirror
However, just because there was no license agreement doesn't mean the document is in the public domain. There's a difference between software licensing (which is contract law) and public domain (which is copyright law). Microsoft is effectively acting like a newspaper or a radio station here - they are publishing something to a lot of people, but that doesn't give their audience distribution rights as well. Try making photocopies of the New York Times and selling them for half price, and see how far you get. Or better yet, try rebroadcasting a major sporting event in your bar :)
Difference: NYT and TV broadcasts are copyrighted, this MS document, I've been told, is supposed to be a trade secret. If they claim its a trade secret they cannot copyright it. Since I am not under any license (as I did not see one, or agreed to one) about it being a trade secret, then I am an "innocent", and it is now public domain.
-- iCEBaLM
I wouldn't do that. It's still copyrighted, and if you are associated with any group that "reverse engineers" the specs, whatever prodcut you create could get tied up in court for a long time. Distributing MS's copyrighted info could also get you into legal hot water.
:)
MS puts it on their page for everyone to DL, there was no agreement that I saw that said I couldn't give it out to anyone else, it's public domain.
I'm not associated with any such group, I'm just your average joe schmo who uses winzip instead of running self extracting archives for fear of viruses.
-- iCEBaLM
1. Download the evaluation copy of winzip if you don't already have it.
.pdf file. I will give copies of the .pdf file to anyone who asks, its public domain as far as I'm concerned.
2. Download the dumb exe thing.
3. Open Winzip, and then open the exe WITH WINZIP.
4. Extract the PDF without agreeing to the license.
This is what I have done, I did NOT agree (nor did I even SEE) the license, and I now have access to the
-- iCEBaLM
From their website:
SMARTDATA's objective is to design and develop a revolutionary architecture that will allow for multiple combinations of functionality within one device, and targeting the fast growing mobile Internet appliances market. A patent for this new architecture was applied for in August 1999 and is currently pending.
From the linuxdevices.com article:
Buttet says his company has applied for a patent on "technology that enables the production of cost effective credit card sized modular pocket internet appliances."
I agree, this is scarey, credit card sized computers are quite an obvious way to go in the computer industry with the "smaller, faster, better" mantra. Not to mention some prior art in uCSIMM? Don't the european smartcards already have CPU's on them?
I don't know about this at all... If they only patent their own technology which allows them to make these, instead of the device itself, then I guess someone else can develop a similar device another way, but both these statements show different things being patented.
-- iCEBaLM
So instead of having just one dirty handed, predatory, monopolizing business, we're going to have two! What a great solution!
The feds are going about this entirely the wrong way, they're thinking that software is somehow like oil, when infact it isn't anything like it.
The product has different properties which make breaking up the company ineffective.
1. It costs virtually nothing to copy data
2. Source between these two companies can be shared in such a way that they can basically keep operating as one company
3. The two companies would have different products (OS / Everything Else) and therefore don't have to compete against eachother unlike the oil and phone company breakups!
It's just a bad decision, I've said it from the start, and I'll say it 'till the end.
-- iCEBaLM
From the petition list:
360.Bill Gates from Redmond, Washington, USA - Prefered Linux Distribution: MS Windows 3.1 and redhat
whoo!
(no I didn't put it there)
-- iCEBaLM
A consumer sees "Celeron" and "Spitfire" chips and they sound competitive--remember that AMD needs John Q. Public to buy the chip, not just Slashdotters who know what they're buying beyond name. But, an average joe sees "Celeron" versus "Duron," and it's fairly obvious which one sounds better. Guys want fast, not just durable, and impressions count in selling any product.
I dunno, but when I hear "Celeron" I think of our favorite water based vegetable, then I think about that vegetable on a motherboard, and the water leaking out and shorting my board, then I just get mad, intel is trying to ruin my hardware! Damn intel! Damn you to hell!
-- iCEBaLM
Yes, but most ircd's (I think) report to you the filename before it's sent. Say you send something to johndoe on irc.madeup.net. Your irc client will send the initilization quest to irc.madeup.net and irc.madeup.net will send the request to JohnDoe. If JohnDoe accepts, then the Direct Client to Client connection is made...
:)
:P
1. This is true, however the ircd doesn't log it
2. The status of the connection (whether the file was actually transfered) is not sent through the irc server through CTCP.
Anyways, I tihnk it would be a waste to log it anyway... I'm a musician, I'd hate to have my work pirated, but hell... atleast then I'd have SOME fans
Then remove the economic incentive to pirate your music, sell them as mp3's for $0.50 a pop on your website, then get free advertizing by submitting an article to slashdot about it.
-- iCEBaLM
What is with the VB bigotry? In your review of competing products, do you dismiss out of hand the fact that VB is easily maintainable and readable, whereas Perl resembles abstract art drawn from the inner, inarticulate recesses of the mind that coded it?
Code is art to those who care, code is money to those from Microsoft.
-- iCEBaLM
"Eu sou a lei!"
-- iCEBaLM
Have you ever actually been on an mp3 channel on irc?
Yes.
Just have someone join one, and log the client activity. Most of the fileservers nowadays announce to the channel the files that they are transferring to whom...
Most actually don't, they however do report what mp3 the server's machine is currently playing. SpR I know does, and reports only on timeout what mp3 it was sending to a user, or if that user was the last user finished downloading. I haven't seen sdfind release any info like that, or that borg script.
This would all change overnight if there were even threats of this happening.
-- iCEBaLM
should Adobe and Microsoft and all those other companies try to shut down Internet Relay Chat? Should they sue the companies and individuals that make IRC clients? NO. They should go after the people distributing the copyrighted material. And yes, I'm sure it would be quite easy for lawyers to come in and shutdown the larger purveyors of the mp3's. I'll be there are server logs somewhere... hell, traceroute.
Last time I checked, the ircd's didn't log the actuall chat/ctcp traffic going through the servers, it would be a huge waste of disk space anyways. File transfers on IRC have no servers, they are established through DCC, Direct Client Connetcion, they don't go through the IRC server, enjoy trying to find logs for those.
It's totally impossible to do, really.
-- iCEBaLM
It's not really all that great seeing as the driver ignores user defined monitor sync polarities and uses what it thinks is best. Because of this I've had to revert back to the old drivers.
-- iCEBaLM
Replying to my own comment, have I sunk this low? heh.
/dev files. It worked after that.
:P
Well this was a classic case of user error, Nick at Nvidia helped me to determine that the problem was I didn't run the install.sh script for the Kernel Module which sets up the
Let this be a lesson to you, don't wantonly ignore install.sh files!
Kudos to Nick at Nvidia who saw my comment and emailed me, this is certainly above and beyond the call of duty as I have NEVER had support like that from any other company.
-- iCEBaLM
Well, the linuxgames article said they had a blank screen using the new drivers with just a normal Riva TNT, the reviewer chalked it up to his configuration error.
I have a Riva TNT, also experienced the blank screen, and from examining XFree86.0.log I found this interesting tidbit:
(**) NVIDIA(0): VideoRAM: 0 kBytes
I, uh, have a 16 meg card, setting the VideoRam parameter in the device setup seems to have no effect, whatever happens there is always 0 KB of video ram detected. Er, Slight bug huh NVidia? Maybe if they were open source drivers we could fix it instead of having to wait for you.
-- iCEBaLM
western European nuclear soverign power who is a member of NATO
By western I meant as far as ideologies go, as opposed to eastern russia/asia ideologies.
I don't think anyone outside France thinks that France is as important as the USA in terms of international clout.
So what, you just take this time to toot your own capitalist horn? That wasn't part of the question, and it's irrelevant.
Not to mention it really stops being a factor once you become a nuclear power. A nuke is a nuke is a nuke. If France really wanted to push for something on the world stage, they could do it. Hell, little shit countries like Korea bully the US constantly for money, why? Because they've got nukes, and enjoy firing test ICBM's over Japan and the US is deathly afraid of the threat of nuclear war.
-- iCEBaLM
France has historically been a hassle to computer companies. First their bizarre (read: non-conformant with European norms) encryption laws, now this. Just how much clout do they think they have here, exactly?
They think they have as much clout as any other western nuclear soverign power who is a member of NATO, and they'd be right.
-- iCEBaLM
Well, I have to say that I agree that each and every poster has copyright over his or her own comments on slashdot, there is no doubt there.
The question about this being a public forum and therefore Andover can just take the comments, publish them into a book, and reap profits (even if these profits ultimately go to charity) makes absolutely no sense to me.
Fair use? Probably if they were just quotes and not whole duplication, but quotes also need to be credited back to the author, which isn't done here.
The comments belong to the individual poster, there is no doubt about that, and there is a pretty strong case for the posters if they didn't want their works published in any forum they didn't ask it to be published in.
This being said, I think we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture here. Just because you can sue doesn't necessarily mean you should. Where would the comments do more good? In the book which might get read or not in the book? Where would the money you sue for do more good? In the charity that it gets donated to or your pocket?
Yes, you own the comments, but wouldn't it be a better service to humanity if they were published and the money go to a deserving charity?
-- iCEBaLM
Actually, this is not true. This server only translates the field directly before the TLD extension. That is, only yahoo.com and marthastewart.com are served. The www part is supplied by yahoo and martha's respective root servers.
Not even that is served from the root servers. All the root servers serve is IP addresses of the nameservers for the domain of the host being looked up, its up to the domains nameservers to deal out any actual IP's, including for their own domain.
You look up marthastewart.com, your nameserver asks one of the root nameservers where the nameservers for marthastewart.com is, it then asks them for the IP to marthastewart.com.
-- iCEBaLM
Reuters Tokyo -- In a surprise move today Iraq citizens are flying to Japan in droves, each one buying one Sony Playstation 2, game consoles recently classified by the Japanse government as potential weapons development platforms, and returning immediately home to Iraq.
One Iraqi citizen, when asked why this was happening, told this reporter about how Saddam Hussien is paying for each round trip ticket and each game console. He also spoke of rumors about a massive underground bunker where these consoles were being collected and tied together in a "Baywolf Cloister".
Saddam Hussein is apparently taking this designation seriously. High level Japanese politicians claimed the designation was just made to help Sony raise the price of the units in foriegn markets: if it was harder to export then the massive electronics corporation could justify the extra cost to consumers.
A Sony spokesman remarked, "While the computing power of our Playstation 2 console is impressive, a normal desktop personal computer would aid better in weapons development unless you want to play Crash Bandicoot on your Tomahawk missile."
Former US General Schwartzkoph said, "That's something we need to be looking into. Our men and women get really bored out there on those ships, maybe if we had more entertainment it would raise morale. That's why we couldn't kill Saddam, he plays more games then us."
-- iCEBaLM
1. Just because its a library doesn't mean it has to be under the LGPL, I think this person has that confused. The LGPL is used for programs who want to be GPL'd but are linked to a closed source library.
2. If you derrive MaPlay, a GPL'd program into a Library with a simple API, its still under the GPL, and you have to release the source if you distribute it.
3. Any closed source programs that you make which reference the library do NOT have to be GPL'd and their source does NOT have to be open, but of course, it would be better for everyone if it were.
-- iCEBaLM
If your electrician fucks up and electrocutes your cat, you would make him pay.
Why should Free software be immune to this?
Because system administrators can check the code themselves - that's due diligence.
Well, 2 reasons why free software should be immune.
1. Because its *free*, you paid your electrician.
2. Because its open source.
3. There is no intent to do damage, unlike with backdoors.
Now I belive there needs to be intent to do damage, or negligence on the coders part for them to be held accountable if its closed source. Open source should always be immune, you can look at what it does before you run it.
-- iCEBaLM
I have gotten as far as 3/4 through Heinlein's "the cat who walks through walls" and dropped it. I have not to this day picked up another of his books. The same goes for Dean Koontz's "Dragon's Tears" .. It sucked, and it tainted my view of the authors.
Well I don't know about Heinlein, but as for a good Koontz book, try "Lightning", its a really cool book about time travel.
-- iCEBaLM
Its one thing to moderate something down because its really a troll, and another thing to do it because they don't like what you're saying, and these moderators are doing the latter.
These moderators need to go back and read the moderation guidelines.
-- iCEBaLM
This was not a troll, dumbass moderators. Same moderators who moderate up Jon Katz flames.
-- iCEBaLM