One point that it seems many people miss is that at the hypothetical end of a copyright term, you don't lose the ability to profit from your work. You just lose the exclusive ability to profit. That recognizes the fact that intellectual property, such as music, ideas, stories, etc. becomes part of the fabric of society - you can't "un-influence" a work of art on you.
The Founding Fathers recognized this - that's why they wrote a limited copyright term into the Constitution. They realized that once an idea gets out into the public, you can't hope to stop its flow. A limited copyright term balances the rights of an author to have exclusive control over their work for a limited time, against the rights of the people to use that idea in an unfettered way. I'm shocked that the current copyright abuse hasn't been ruled unconstitutional - only the most tortured logic could reconcile "life of the author + 70 years" with the "for a limited time" clause in the Constitution. Under this system, the copyrights on things produced today may outlive my children or grandchildren (I'm 26), and I have no reason to believe that Congress won't try to up it to "life + 80" or "life +100" next time Mickey Mouse's copyright comes due.
Unfortunately, copyright has now become more of a tool of corporate profits than of public progress, thanks to desire for eternal control. The copyright system that you support will eventually lead us into a system where there is no work in the public domain, and every time you do something, you pass around payment to whichever corporate entity holds the long-dead author's copyright. Land of the free, indeed. Authors and musicians were able to make a living and create lasting works before the copyright system got bastardized.
As for losing control over how your work is used, boo hoo. By keeping that tampon company from using your symphony, you're also keeping another composer from weaving parts of it into an even better symphony. Them's the breaks for publishing something - neither the ad exec or the other composer can "forget" that the work exists, so why should they be constrained in perpetuity?
I swear, the greed gets worse and worse every year.
I ran into this problem when I bought my first DVD player a couple of years back. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was wrong. Eventually the guy at Radio Shack told me about Macrovision, and sold me an RF converter that I could use to block it.
The problem is that the RIAA companies are getting paid royalties on every piece of blank media, regardless of how it's used, in exchange for allowing consumers to make legitimate copies of music, etc. Now, they want to keep getting their filthy lucre on all blank media, while at the same time reniging on their part of the bargain by blocking legitimate home copying.
That's the problem, and I'm glad Rep. Boucher is making some sort of stand on this issue!
Of course, if people buy the hardware as a cheap PC console to hack on, and never buy games, Microsoft will also be able to take those numbers to the game writers and say "Look how large the installed base of the X-Box is. You should write your games for us, not the PS2 or GameCube."
In that case, taking the loss on the console won't hurt Microsoft in the long run, as it will increase their dominance in the gaming market.
I got a B.S. in C.S. degree (William & Mary, '97) from a fairly programming-intensive department. I hate programming. It's just not my thing. But I found that I really liked the systems work that I did, and gravitated toward the SysAdmin side of things, and have been happily working in that field since graduation. Well, as happy as any SysAdmin can be.
In my CS program, we got exposed to (in addition to coding), OS design, system administration, databases, chip design, and robotics. If you can't find one thing in that to hold your interest, you probably have the wrong major.
So my advice would be to find the parts of the CS curriculum that you enjoy, and try to work in those areas. There is such a wide variety of work that you should be able to find something to specialize in, while using the stuff you learned in your CS program.
My own personal experience was using pico during college. When I got my first SysAdmin job out in the "real world", though (NASA Goddard, DAAC), working in a mostly-SGI shop, I found out very quickly that you need to know vi (or, to a lesser degree, emacs), because pico won't be installed on most systems you work on.
Been using vi since then.:-) While pico was a nice, simple text editor, Linux is one of the few systems where you can expect to find it on a default install.
One thing that always amused me about Mandrake (don't know if it's still like this, I haven't used it in a while), was the "Linux By The Pound" installer. Instead of choosing packages, it just put up a slider bar, allowing you to choose how many megabytes of Linux you wanted. That just struck me as really funny for some reason.
"How much Linux would you like, sir?"
"I'm feeling pretty full, so only 213MB for me."
"And you, ma'am?"
"I'll take 800MB of Linux, thank you."
Hm, it looks like PRZ is saying that while NAI owns the trademark on PGP, since OpenPGP is the name of an internet standard, other people can use it to describe their projects.
Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but I wonder how that plays with the whole "SSH the Product" vs. "SSH the Protocol" debate?
C'mon, Slashdot, you know it'll only take a couple of stories like this for the government to reclassify the PS2 as munitions and make you go through tons of red tape to get one. Then there'll be the "export-grade" PS2 for selling outside the US and Canada (Code Name: "Pong").
From what I've been able to tell, Plex86 requires a disk image to boot its guest OS, instead of being able to boot from a floppy or CD and go through the normal install process. However, I haven't found any good documentation on how to do this. Is there any good reference for using the supported OS's under Plex86?
I just got the 2.2.18 kernel - quite nice. The Win4Lin kernel patches for 2.2.17 apply just fine, and apparently my USB scanner (UMAX Astra 1220U) is supported by the USB drivers.
However, apparently the sane backend doesn't support the scanner. Does anyone have any tips/ideas/etc. on getting the Astra 1220U working?
The main disadvantage of Win4Lin compared to VMWare seems to be that it is not a real virtual machine, which makes it impossible to run anything else than Windows. Since VMWare is capable or running Linux on Linux, it can be used for kernel development and other dangerous stuff. It can also run other OS's such as Solaris or OS2.
However, there are times when you don't want to have an entire virtual ix86 machine running under Linux just to fire up Office or IE or whatnot. While Win4Lin doesn't have all the extra features that VMWare provides, it gives you in return for that tradeoff what appears to be a faster virtual Windows system. While I like being able to install FreeBSD or any other intel-compatible OS under VMWare, the fact is that, at least for me, I don't use that feature enough to justify the high overhead. I just want to be able to quickly run the few Windows apps I use on occasion. The last time I ran VMWare, the install of Win98 took several hours. The install on Win4Lin 1.0 didn't take any longer than a "normal" one.
$.02
(Disclaimer: I work for NeTraverse, but these opinons are my own, etc., etc.)
There's precidence in this in antitrust law - the old United States Football League (USFL) sued the National Football League (NFL) back in the 80s and the NFL was found guilty of having a monopoly on pro football in the US and using their monopoly power to squeeze the USFL out of TV contracts. The monetary verdict was $1, and was even tripled, for a grand total of $3.
You gotta wonder what juries are thinking - they'll award $1 in damages for anticompetive business practices, but millions and millions in cases like the (yes, overused) McDonald's Hot Coffee incident.
YaST makes it very easy to do all the system administration you need and SaX does a really good job of configuring your X server for you.
I used SuSE exclusively at my last job (disclaimer - I work at Red Hat now), and have to say that I wasn't terribly impressed with it. The most annoying part, IMHO, was YAST. It seemed like I'd go make a manual change to a config file, then the next time YAST would run (often when I was least expecting it), it would overwrite my manual changes with the YAST defaults. Kind of like a more invasive version of linuxconf, from what I can tell.
Also, if I'm remembering correctly, they don't have the version numbers on their RPMS, which makes it hard to do a quick eyeball of your version numbers with an rpm -qa or whatnot.
SaX, however, kicked a lot of ass, and I was highly impressed with it. It was also nice to have all those apps on CD, but I had a hard time finding which app was on which CD without using the little installer tool.
It was a decent distro, but I personally doubt if I use them again anytime in the near future. YMMV. They're certainly worth checking out.
$.02
These opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer - but you knew that.
The partitionless install means that you don't have to partition your system for ext2 - it installs to a big file in a FAT partition via loopback. It's mostly for people who want to try Linux without the risk of repartitioning their system.
Slashdot Mirror
One point that it seems many people miss is that at the hypothetical end of a copyright term, you don't lose the ability to profit from your work. You just lose the exclusive ability to profit. That recognizes the fact that intellectual property, such as music, ideas, stories, etc. becomes part of the fabric of society - you can't "un-influence" a work of art on you.
The Founding Fathers recognized this - that's why they wrote a limited copyright term into the Constitution. They realized that once an idea gets out into the public, you can't hope to stop its flow. A limited copyright term balances the rights of an author to have exclusive control over their work for a limited time, against the rights of the people to use that idea in an unfettered way. I'm shocked that the current copyright abuse hasn't been ruled unconstitutional - only the most tortured logic could reconcile "life of the author + 70 years" with the "for a limited time" clause in the Constitution. Under this system, the copyrights on things produced today may outlive my children or grandchildren (I'm 26), and I have no reason to believe that Congress won't try to up it to "life + 80" or "life +100" next time Mickey Mouse's copyright comes due.
Unfortunately, copyright has now become more of a tool of corporate profits than of public progress, thanks to desire for eternal control. The copyright system that you support will eventually lead us into a system where there is no work in the public domain, and every time you do something, you pass around payment to whichever corporate entity holds the long-dead author's copyright. Land of the free, indeed. Authors and musicians were able to make a living and create lasting works before the copyright system got bastardized.
As for losing control over how your work is used, boo hoo. By keeping that tampon company from using your symphony, you're also keeping another composer from weaving parts of it into an even better symphony. Them's the breaks for publishing something - neither the ad exec or the other composer can "forget" that the work exists, so why should they be constrained in perpetuity?
I swear, the greed gets worse and worse every year.
I ran into this problem when I bought my first DVD player a couple of years back. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was wrong. Eventually the guy at Radio Shack told me about Macrovision, and sold me an RF converter that I could use to block it.
Bastards.
The problem is that the RIAA companies are getting paid royalties on every piece of blank media, regardless of how it's used, in exchange for allowing consumers to make legitimate copies of music, etc. Now, they want to keep getting their filthy lucre on all blank media, while at the same time reniging on their part of the bargain by blocking legitimate home copying.
That's the problem, and I'm glad Rep. Boucher is making some sort of stand on this issue!
Of course, if people buy the hardware as a cheap PC console to hack on, and never buy games, Microsoft will also be able to take those numbers to the game writers and say "Look how large the installed base of the X-Box is. You should write your games for us, not the PS2 or GameCube."
In that case, taking the loss on the console won't hurt Microsoft in the long run, as it will increase their dominance in the gaming market.
I got a B.S. in C.S. degree (William & Mary, '97) from a fairly programming-intensive department. I hate programming. It's just not my thing. But I found that I really liked the systems work that I did, and gravitated toward the SysAdmin side of things, and have been happily working in that field since graduation. Well, as happy as any SysAdmin can be.
In my CS program, we got exposed to (in addition to coding), OS design, system administration, databases, chip design, and robotics. If you can't find one thing in that to hold your interest, you probably have the wrong major.
So my advice would be to find the parts of the CS curriculum that you enjoy, and try to work in those areas. There is such a wide variety of work that you should be able to find something to specialize in, while using the stuff you learned in your CS program.
This article is only four days old!
It takes a tough man to make a tender Semiconductor.
My own personal experience was using pico during college. When I got my first SysAdmin job out in the "real world", though (NASA Goddard, DAAC), working in a mostly-SGI shop, I found out very quickly that you need to know vi (or, to a lesser degree, emacs), because pico won't be installed on most systems you work on.
:-) While pico was a nice, simple text editor, Linux is one of the few systems where you can expect to find it on a default install.
Been using vi since then.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm making mix CDs as favors for my upcoming wedding. Still have about 30 more to burn, too.
Oops, shouldn't have said anything. Now the RIAA is going to infiltrate my wedding.
"If anyone has any reason why this man and this woman should not be married, let them speak now or forever hold their peace."
"I object! They're MUSIC PIRATES!! Cuff 'em, boys!"
One thing that always amused me about Mandrake (don't know if it's still like this, I haven't used it in a while), was the "Linux By The Pound" installer. Instead of choosing packages, it just put up a slider bar, allowing you to choose how many megabytes of Linux you wanted. That just struck me as really funny for some reason.
"How much Linux would you like, sir?"
"I'm feeling pretty full, so only 213MB for me."
"And you, ma'am?"
"I'll take 800MB of Linux, thank you."
Hm, it looks like PRZ is saying that while NAI owns the trademark on PGP, since OpenPGP is the name of an internet standard, other people can use it to describe their projects.
Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but I wonder how that plays with the whole "SSH the Product" vs. "SSH the Protocol" debate?
They were the first to start this madness, charging people for a "License to Ill".
Alleycat was classic. Luv dem mousies!
Thank God for dosemu - I can play The Cat whenever I want to now!
C'mon, Slashdot, you know it'll only take a couple of stories like this for the government to reclassify the PS2 as munitions and make you go through tons of red tape to get one. Then there'll be the "export-grade" PS2 for selling outside the US and Canada (Code Name: "Pong").
From what I've been able to tell, Plex86 requires a disk image to boot its guest OS, instead of being able to boot from a floppy or CD and go through the normal install process. However, I haven't found any good documentation on how to do this. Is there any good reference for using the supported OS's under Plex86?
I just got the 2.2.18 kernel - quite nice. The Win4Lin kernel patches for 2.2.17 apply just fine, and apparently my USB scanner (UMAX Astra 1220U) is supported by the USB drivers.
However, apparently the sane backend doesn't support the scanner. Does anyone have any tips/ideas/etc. on getting the Astra 1220U working?
The main disadvantage of Win4Lin compared to VMWare seems to be that it is not a real virtual machine, which makes it impossible to run anything else than Windows. Since VMWare is capable or running Linux on Linux, it can be used for kernel development and other dangerous stuff. It can also run other OS's such as Solaris or OS2.
However, there are times when you don't want to have an entire virtual ix86 machine running under Linux just to fire up Office or IE or whatnot. While Win4Lin doesn't have all the extra features that VMWare provides, it gives you in return for that tradeoff what appears to be a faster virtual Windows system. While I like being able to install FreeBSD or any other intel-compatible OS under VMWare, the fact is that, at least for me, I don't use that feature enough to justify the high overhead. I just want to be able to quickly run the few Windows apps I use on occasion. The last time I ran VMWare, the install of Win98 took several hours. The install on Win4Lin 1.0 didn't take any longer than a "normal" one.
$.02
(Disclaimer: I work for NeTraverse, but these opinons are my own, etc., etc.)
There's precidence in this in antitrust law - the old United States Football League (USFL) sued the National Football League (NFL) back in the 80s and the NFL was found guilty of having a monopoly on pro football in the US and using their monopoly power to squeeze the USFL out of TV contracts. The monetary verdict was $1, and was even tripled, for a grand total of $3.
/NFL/stats/history/usfl.html
You gotta wonder what juries are thinking - they'll award $1 in damages for anticompetive business practices, but millions and millions in cases like the (yes, overused) McDonald's Hot Coffee incident.
Reference: http://www.todayssports.com
I'd be interested in seeing the documentation of that, even if it's just a high-level overview of the kind of tools you'd need, etc.
I used SuSE exclusively at my last job (disclaimer - I work at Red Hat now), and have to say that I wasn't terribly impressed with it. The most annoying part, IMHO, was YAST. It seemed like I'd go make a manual change to a config file, then the next time YAST would run (often when I was least expecting it), it would overwrite my manual changes with the YAST defaults. Kind of like a more invasive version of linuxconf, from what I can tell.
Also, if I'm remembering correctly, they don't have the version numbers on their RPMS, which makes it hard to do a quick eyeball of your version numbers with an rpm -qa or whatnot.
SaX, however, kicked a lot of ass, and I was highly impressed with it. It was also nice to have all those apps on CD, but I had a hard time finding which app was on which CD without using the little installer tool.
It was a decent distro, but I personally doubt if I use them again anytime in the near future. YMMV. They're certainly worth checking out.
$.02
These opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer - but you knew that.
The partitionless install means that you don't have to partition your system for ext2 - it installs to a big file in a FAT partition via loopback. It's mostly for people who want to try Linux without the risk of repartitioning their system.
BOF stands for "Birds Of a Feather" - small, common-interest groups that meet at conferences.