I don't know about the legal issues as far as MS goes, but I think that they'd have a heck of a time getting 20K people to move to Canada. Any kind of major corporate move usually entains big losses in personel - can even the MS monolith afford to lose a big chunk of their engineering staff? Big companies that have done major moves even within the US have major losses - how much bigger will they be when you talk about moving to another nation? And what about immigration laws in Canada - are you going to try to get 20K engineers to become Canadians? Or are you going to try to replace them?
As part of my job, I handle networking and connectivity for my office (I'm a software engineer by trade, but I like to play with servers and we don't have enought people to justify a full time IS person).
A little while back, we got a DSL link for the office (previous connectivity was via a 56k dial up link that we kept up all the time.) My service is provided through my ISP (Netaxs). When I have a problem, I call them and they yell at Covad. If it's a wire problem, Covad yells at Bell.
After about a month of having the DSL link, it flaked out. We spent 2 weeks with the link down while Covad kept running the same 3 first-level diagnostics (unplug the router. Plug the router back in. Line check on the DSLAM. Reset the DSLAM. Rinse and Repeat). After a while, we got bored with this routine and I got my ISP to set my dialup account back up so that I can use it for a fallback internet connection (lesson 1: have the fallback plan in place from the get go). My ISP at this point also stopped letting Covad go through the first level diagnostic procedures. After a few more weeks of messing around (and of course refusing to pay anyone anything until the problem was resolved) we finally got back on line. No one was EVER able to tell me what went wrong. They just kept beating on it until it started working. At one point, I got so annoyed that I tried to call Covad directly. They REFUSED to talk to me. Their customer service line told me that I had to go through my ISP.
Since then, I've installed MRTG, and I keep graphs of the packet loss on the DSL link. When it gets too high or people complain, I fall back the dialup until it gets better and have accounting knock the downtime off the next bill. I end up using the DSL link about 50% of the time. I also told accounting to not pay the bills for next month's service, only for the previous month. Needless to say, no one likes this, but I'm NOT giving them money for service that I can't trust.
I've been told by the folks at my ISP that the only possible cure for my ills at this point is to get bell to give me a new pair back to the CO. But since the company is moving in a month, it isn't worth our trying to force Bell to do that right now.
I've also talked to some other folks in the field and have been told that the reason DSL is so service-poor is that Bell isn't making any money on the deal. They apparently get about $15 a month for the line. At that rate, one Bell service call could easily erase any profits for a year or more. And frankly, they'd rather sell you a 56K line for a couple hundred a month. This makes Bell less than totally responsive. Covad is trying to install DSL everywhere all at once, and I suspec they are spread just a little too thin.
The basic problem (according to the folks I've talked to) is that DSL is UNDERPRICED if anything goes wrong.
Disclaimer: I know I'm being a bit paranoid, but I think this should be brought up, at least for purposes of discussion. There is probably less to worry about here than in other places, but it still should, I think, be in the back of the mind of anyone trying to solve this problem.
One thing I believe was missed in the original article is intentional change to the historical record. In addition to having to store old information, and worry about how we're going to get to it later, I think we need to pay at least half a though to intentional modification of the historical record.
With paper and ink, it's rather time consuming and expensive to alter historical documents, even assuming you can get near them. With digital media, the situation may be different - it may become very simple to alter historical documents, especially if you're the guy who's in charge of copying them to the newest form of media.
Aside from the obvious political reasons someone might want to do this (can you think of a fundamentalist movement of any sort that wouldn't modify old documents to read they way they would like, given the chance?), I can also see where money might come into play.
For instance, suppose MassiveDrugCo, Inc. is introducing a new drug which prevents newly detected disease Y. Now, in order to sell a lot of this drug, you have show that Y harms enough people to worry about. Unfortuately, the historical record being used for retrospective studies doesn't show that. So, instead of going back to the drawing board and finding something else to cure, MassiveDrugCo instead feeds a modified copy of the historical data to unsuspecting independant researchers. These honest and unbribable researchers draw the conclusion desired by MassiveDrugCo - in spite of the reality of the situation.
Sadly Rob, I don't think it will help you too much to have VA keep their hands out of things (although I'm glad to hear they will keep their hands off). The problem is that now, even though you don't have any bias, you have an APPEARANCE of bias. And (as this posting of yours proves) you now have to think twice about everything - first you have to think 'do we want to post this' and then 'does posting this make us look biased?'. Even if you aren't biased (and so far I don't see you being biased), your editorial outlook has just been permanently altered, whether you like it or not.
Of course, I'm going to continue reading, but it won't be the same. Now in addition to deciding how I feel about your editorial stances, I will be analyzing them for bias. I suspect I won't find any, but that doesn't free me from having to look for them.
It's great that you posted this - it's best to get these things out in the open, rather than let people assume the worst.
There will always be those who want to copy a copyrighted work. They fall into two categories: 1) Individuals who would only buy a fraction of this stuff, but by copying are able expand their library of whatever. Warez kiddies and the guy down the block who copies every movie he rents fall into this category. They don't need the stuff, they'd never pay for the stuff anyway, and the quality of the copy really doesn't matter that much to them. After all, they don't use most of the stuff anyway.
2) Pirates who want to make near perfect copies and sell them to legitimate buyers in order to get rich.
When you implement copy protection, you need to think about who you are protecting against - The first bunch or the second. The first bunch aren't worth having too much protection against, because you aren't losing much money on them anyway. The second bunch is worth some effort, because they are stealing your profits. The problem is that the second bunch also has the will and probably the money to break anything you do.
So what's the outcome? As another poster noted, it used to be that every software vendor was trying to copy protect their stuff. Mostly they've given up doing so, having figured out that it wasn't worth the expense. I think we'll see the same thing in other fields - they'll all figure out that if they put the money they were spending on copy protection into marketing and promotion, they'll make more money than they lose to piracy.
I find it interesting that out of the original questions, only really one (question #12) of them wasn't negative or antagonistic in nature or tone. And these were the BEST that surfaced. I'm surprised that there weren't more questions that were at framed in a less negative manner.
Of course, I'm also surprised that John chose to not answer some questions that were directly posed.
I'm saddened, however, that John chose to answer questions that were not asked. The questions that were sent were pre-selected to eliminate the REALLY stupid ones. (Although the Anti-Anti-Anti question wouldn't have been on my list, I trust that the moderators had a good reason for putting it in). The fact that John chose to answer 'Does it bother you that everyone hates you' thing is PR work on his part, and has no place in a moderated Q&A like this.
Unfortunately, I don't think John has done his image any good by answering a direct (if somewhat negative) set of questions in an indirect and incomplete manner.
I think we need to spend some time figuring out why these school shootings keep happening. It's important that we gain an understanding. I'm just gonna give my thoughts and then come what may:
As a little background, I'm a 30 year old software engineer (a programmer who thinks about it first), I'm married, and I do plan to have children. My wife is a school teacher in a school district on the edge of Philadelphia. Her district has a very wide range of income levels, so I hear about the whole range of wierd student and parent behaviours that teachers have to deal with.
When I refer to 'our parents' I'm refering to those folks in their 50's and 60's like my parents. When I refer to 'kids' I'm talking about anyone under 18.
Speed of change: These kids are growing up in a world that's changing on an almost daily basis. If you are a little slow learning how to fit in, then by the time you get a clue, the rules have changed.
Over-stimulation: The way kids play today is a LOT different from when our parents grew up. TV provides a rapidly changing series of loud, attention-grabbing scenes. The stories behind much of what's on TV revolve around someone beating someone else up for some reason. Games for dedicated game machines and computers are mostly about violence in one way or another, and like TV they provide rapid, loud stimulation, and everything is resolved by violence.
Parental over-work - The TV and Game machines probably wouldn't be so bad, but many parents are working longer and longer days. They don't get home until late, so the kids watch TV till mom and dad come home, and when they do come home, they don't want to yell at the kids, so they let the kids do whatever they want (I've seen this with my cousin's children). Alternately, they don't want to be bothered with the kids, so they plop them down in front of the TV. Either way, the kid is getting more TV time than parent time, so where do you think they are going to pick up their outlook on life? And if a parent is over-worked, how are they going to notice that little Bobby seems depressed?
Responsibility - Many parents simply don't want to be responsible for raising their children. They don't discipline the children at home, so by the time the kids get to school, they have no respect for authority of any kind. Or they put so much pressure on the kids to do well and get into honors programs that the kids break down when they don't make it. Or when the kid gets a bad grade, instead of working on making sure Johnny does his homework, they call and yell at the teacher!
I'm not saying that any of these things have to do with the latest shooting (I don't know that much about the families involved). But I will say that NONE of these things ALONE would be enough to send someone over the deep edge. But taken in combination with a hundred different things I haven't mentioned...
If I'm not mistaken the Dead always allowed people to record, and to TRADE or GIVEAWAY recordings. That is, you were allowed to record at Dead shows, and you were allowed to trade or give copies to other people. You were NOT allowed to sell or make profits off of such recordings.
This is (I suspect) where Deadbase got into trouble - I checked their site and they have ads on it. I suspect that the Dead's lawyers interpreted this as Deadbase making money on the Dead's recordings. Thus, the action.
Hmm. Perhaps you are correct, and I just don't see it, but the Dilbert Hole seems to me to have been designed for the purpose of provoking a response from the copyright holders.
Perhaps my objection is one of intent - I don't think that rotten.com was intending parody, I think they were intending to get told to take the dilbert hole down.
I think rotten.com won't fight, because I don't think they have a leg to stand on. Fair use DOES cover the right to parody - and putting other words in the mouths of someone else's characters could reasonably be construed as parody.
BUT: What rotten.com put into the character's mouths was just profanity. It wasn't a jab at some pompus windbag. It wasn't a commentary on some social or economic trend. It wasn't a commentary on the original characters. It didn't even have a POINT! In short, I don't think that it has any standing as parody.
While I don't think that The Dilbert Hole was really much of a threat to the 'Dilbert Marks', I also sympatize with the owners of those marks - I wouldn't want my trademarks abused without reason!
I can understand how, if you were able to determine what you wanted out of your FPGAs fast enough, you could build a VERY fast machine. My problems are:
1) How the heck is he reloading the FPGAs fast enough to be all that hot? I've not worked with Xilinx parts lately, but the Altera (one of Xilinx's competitors in the FPGA market) stuff I have used takes many milliseconds to reload. Mabey this is a feature of the Xilinx architecture, but that leads to my second problem:
2) How the heck did he get enough information out of Xilinx to write his own compiler? Again, I've never tried, but when I asked Altera for information about the internal structure of their parts, I was told that was proprietary. Since the structure of the chips is the thing these companies are trading on, they are usually pretty closed mouth about this sort of thing.
3) Why isn't there an announcement on the Xilinx web site? If I were Xilinx and someone used my gear to beat Pacific Blue, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops, and trying to drum up buisness with it.
I wonder if they are busy signing up investors as we type?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the legal issues as far as MS goes, but I think that they'd have a heck of a time getting 20K people to move to Canada. Any kind of major corporate move usually entains big losses in personel - can even the MS monolith afford to lose a big chunk of their engineering staff? Big companies that have done major moves even within the US have major losses - how much bigger will they be when you talk about moving to another nation? And what about immigration laws in Canada - are you going to try to get 20K engineers to become Canadians? Or are you going to try to replace them?
No, this won't happen.
As part of my job, I handle networking and connectivity for my office (I'm a software engineer by trade, but I like to play with servers and we don't have enought people to justify a full time IS person).
A little while back, we got a DSL link for the office (previous connectivity was via a 56k dial up link that we kept up all the time.) My service is provided through my ISP (Netaxs). When I have a problem, I call them and they yell at Covad. If it's a wire problem, Covad yells at Bell.
After about a month of having the DSL link, it flaked out. We spent 2 weeks with the link down while Covad kept running the same 3 first-level diagnostics (unplug the router. Plug the router back in. Line check on the DSLAM. Reset the DSLAM. Rinse and Repeat). After a while, we got bored with this routine and I got my ISP to set my dialup account back up so that I can use it for a fallback internet connection (lesson 1: have the fallback plan in place from the get go). My ISP at this point also stopped letting Covad go through the first level diagnostic procedures. After a few more weeks of messing around (and of course refusing to pay anyone anything until the problem was resolved) we finally got back on line. No one was EVER able to tell me what went wrong. They just kept beating on it until it started working. At one point, I got so annoyed that I tried to call Covad directly. They REFUSED to talk to me. Their customer service line told me that I had to go through my ISP.
Since then, I've installed MRTG, and I keep graphs of the packet loss on the DSL link. When it gets too high or people complain, I fall back the dialup until it gets better and have accounting knock the downtime off the next bill. I end up using the DSL link about 50% of the time. I also told accounting to not pay the bills for next month's service, only for the previous month. Needless to say, no one likes this, but I'm NOT giving them money for service that I can't trust.
I've been told by the folks at my ISP that the only possible cure for my ills at this point is to get bell to give me a new pair back to the CO. But since the company is moving in a month, it isn't worth our trying to force Bell to do that right now.
I've also talked to some other folks in the field and have been told that the reason DSL is so service-poor is that Bell isn't making any money on the deal. They apparently get about $15 a month for the line. At that rate, one Bell service call could easily erase any profits for a year or more. And frankly, they'd rather sell you a 56K line for a couple hundred a month. This makes Bell less than totally responsive. Covad is trying to install DSL everywhere all at once, and I suspec they are spread just a little too thin.
The basic problem (according to the folks I've talked to) is that DSL is UNDERPRICED if anything goes wrong.
Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: I know I'm being a bit paranoid, but I think this should be brought up, at least for purposes of discussion. There is probably less to worry about here than in other places, but it still should, I think, be in the back of the mind of anyone trying to solve this problem.
One thing I believe was missed in the original article is intentional change to the historical record. In addition to having to store old information, and worry about how we're going to get to it later, I think we need to pay at least half a though to intentional modification of the historical record.
With paper and ink, it's rather time consuming and expensive to alter historical documents, even assuming you can get near them. With digital media, the situation may be different - it may become very simple to alter historical documents, especially if you're the guy who's in charge of copying them to the newest form of media.
Aside from the obvious political reasons someone might want to do this (can you think of a fundamentalist movement of any sort that wouldn't modify old documents to read they way they would like, given the chance?), I can also see where money might come into play.
For instance, suppose MassiveDrugCo, Inc. is introducing a new drug which prevents newly detected disease Y. Now, in order to sell a lot of this drug, you have show that Y harms enough people to worry about. Unfortuately, the historical record being used for retrospective studies doesn't show that. So, instead of going back to the drawing board and finding something else to cure, MassiveDrugCo instead feeds a modified copy of the historical data to unsuspecting independant researchers. These honest and unbribable researchers draw the conclusion desired by MassiveDrugCo - in spite of the reality of the situation.
Sadly Rob, I don't think it will help you too much to have VA keep their hands out of things (although I'm glad to hear they will keep their hands off). The problem is that now, even though you don't have any bias, you have an APPEARANCE of bias. And (as this posting of yours proves) you now have to think twice about everything - first you have to think 'do we want to post this' and then 'does posting this make us look biased?'. Even if you aren't biased (and so far I don't see you being biased), your editorial outlook has just been permanently altered, whether you like it or not.
Of course, I'm going to continue reading, but it won't be the same. Now in addition to deciding how I feel about your editorial stances, I will be analyzing them for bias. I suspect I won't find any, but that doesn't free me from having to look for them.
It's great that you posted this - it's best to get these things out in the open, rather than let people assume the worst.
There will always be those who want to copy a copyrighted work. They fall into two categories:
1) Individuals who would only buy a fraction of this stuff, but by copying are able expand their library of whatever. Warez kiddies and the guy down the block who copies every movie he rents fall into this category. They don't need the stuff, they'd never pay for the stuff anyway, and the quality of the copy really doesn't matter that much to them. After all, they don't use most of the stuff anyway.
2) Pirates who want to make near perfect copies and sell them to legitimate buyers in order to get rich.
When you implement copy protection, you need to think about who you are protecting against - The first bunch or the second. The first bunch aren't worth having too much protection against, because you aren't losing much money on them anyway. The second bunch is worth some effort, because they are stealing your profits. The problem is that the second bunch also has the will and probably the money to break anything you do.
So what's the outcome? As another poster noted, it used to be that every software vendor was trying to copy protect their stuff. Mostly they've given up doing so, having figured out that it wasn't worth the expense. I think we'll see the same thing in other fields - they'll all figure out that if they put the money they were spending on copy protection into marketing and promotion, they'll make more money than they lose to piracy.
Just my opinion...
I find it interesting that out of the original questions, only really one (question #12) of them wasn't negative or antagonistic in nature or tone. And these were the BEST that surfaced. I'm surprised that there weren't more questions that were at framed in a less negative manner.
Of course, I'm also surprised that John chose to not answer some questions that were directly posed.
I'm saddened, however, that John chose to answer questions that were not asked. The questions that were sent were pre-selected to eliminate the REALLY stupid ones. (Although the Anti-Anti-Anti question wouldn't have been on my list, I trust that the moderators had a good reason for putting it in). The fact that John chose to answer 'Does it bother you that everyone hates you' thing is PR work on his part, and has no place in a moderated Q&A like this.
Unfortunately, I don't think John has done his image any good by answering a direct (if somewhat negative) set of questions in an indirect and incomplete manner.
I think we need to spend some time figuring out why these school shootings keep happening. It's important that we gain an understanding. I'm just gonna give my thoughts and then come what may:
As a little background, I'm a 30 year old software engineer (a programmer who thinks about it first), I'm married, and I do plan to have children. My wife is a school teacher in a school district on the edge of Philadelphia. Her district has a very wide range of income levels, so I hear about the whole range of wierd student and parent behaviours that teachers have to deal with.
When I refer to 'our parents' I'm refering to those folks in their 50's and 60's like my parents. When I refer to 'kids' I'm talking about anyone under 18.
Speed of change: These kids are growing up in a world that's changing on an almost daily basis. If you are a little slow learning how to fit in, then by the time you get a clue, the rules have changed.
Over-stimulation: The way kids play today is a LOT different from when our parents grew up. TV provides a rapidly changing series of loud, attention-grabbing scenes. The stories behind much of what's on TV revolve around someone beating someone else up for some reason. Games for dedicated game machines and computers are mostly about violence in one way or another, and like TV they provide rapid, loud stimulation, and everything is resolved by violence.
Parental over-work - The TV and Game machines probably wouldn't be so bad, but many parents are working longer and longer days. They don't get home until late, so the kids watch TV till mom and dad come home, and when they do come home, they don't want to yell at the kids, so they let the kids do whatever they want (I've seen this with my cousin's children). Alternately, they don't want to be bothered with the kids, so they plop them down in front of the TV. Either way, the kid is getting more TV time than parent time, so where do you think they are going to pick up their outlook on life? And if a parent is over-worked, how are they going to notice that little Bobby seems depressed?
Responsibility - Many parents simply don't want to be responsible for raising their children. They don't discipline the children at home, so by the time the kids get to school, they have no respect for authority of any kind. Or they put so much pressure on the kids to do well and get into honors programs that the kids break down when they don't make it. Or when the kid gets a bad grade, instead of working on making sure Johnny does his homework, they call and yell at the teacher!
I'm not saying that any of these things have to do with the latest shooting (I don't know that much about the families involved). But I will say that NONE of these things ALONE would be enough to send someone over the deep edge. But taken in combination with a hundred different things I haven't mentioned...
Thanks for reading.
If I'm not mistaken the Dead always allowed people to record, and to TRADE or GIVEAWAY recordings. That is, you were allowed to record at Dead shows, and you were allowed to trade or give copies to other people. You were NOT allowed to sell or make profits off of such recordings.
This is (I suspect) where Deadbase got into trouble - I checked their site and they have ads on it. I suspect that the Dead's lawyers interpreted this as Deadbase making money on the Dead's recordings. Thus, the action.
Hmm. Perhaps you are correct, and I just don't see it, but the Dilbert Hole seems to me to have been designed for the purpose of provoking a response from the copyright holders.
Perhaps my objection is one of intent - I don't think that rotten.com was intending parody, I think they were intending to get told to take the dilbert hole down.
Thanks!
I think rotten.com won't fight, because I don't think they have a leg to stand on. Fair use DOES cover the right to parody - and putting other words in the mouths of someone else's characters could reasonably be construed as parody.
BUT:
What rotten.com put into the character's mouths was just profanity. It wasn't a jab at some pompus windbag. It wasn't a commentary on some social or economic trend. It wasn't a commentary on the original characters. It didn't even have a POINT! In short, I don't think that it has any standing as parody.
While I don't think that The Dilbert Hole was really much of a threat to the 'Dilbert Marks', I also sympatize with the owners of those marks - I wouldn't want my trademarks abused without reason!
I can understand how, if you were able to determine what you wanted out of your FPGAs fast enough, you could build a VERY fast machine. My problems are:
1) How the heck is he reloading the FPGAs fast enough to be all that hot? I've not worked with Xilinx parts lately, but the Altera (one of Xilinx's competitors in the FPGA market) stuff I have used takes many milliseconds to reload. Mabey this is a feature of the Xilinx architecture, but that leads to my second problem:
2) How the heck did he get enough information out of Xilinx to write his own compiler? Again, I've never tried, but when I asked Altera for information about the internal structure of their parts, I was told that was proprietary. Since the structure of the chips is the thing these companies are trading on, they are usually pretty closed mouth about this sort of thing.
3) Why isn't there an announcement on the Xilinx web site? If I were Xilinx and someone used my gear to beat Pacific Blue, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops, and trying to drum up buisness with it.
I wonder if they are busy signing up investors as we type?
Michael Kohne
mhkohne@discordia.org